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There are a number of narratives about China that feed anti-Asian racism. Attracting the greatest amount of attention is former President Trump’s use of phrases such as “Chinese virus” or “Kung flu.” This was part of a broader narrative strategy to scapegoat China for the pandemic and to displace blame for Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of this public health crisis. The point was not only to claim that COVID-19 came from China, but also that China should take all the blame for its impacts on the US. This contributed to many people in the US blaming anyone in the US who is of Chinese descent, or who “looks Chinese.” A significant proportion of incidents of anti-Asian racism have included language from the perpetrators that assign blame for the pandemic on the victims, or otherwise identify the victims as sources of disease.³ There are also a number of other narratives that, in different ways, identify China as a threat to the US and to ordinary Americans, and thereby feed racism. In addition to blaming China for the pandemic, leaders in US politics and media speak about China as an economic threat and/or a national security threat (through military power, espionage, or so-called “influence” campaigns), and accuse China of “cheating” the US. These narratives are not limited to Republicans or figures on the right like Trump, but are also popular among many Democratic and liberal figures. When these “China threat” narratives are repeated by leaders here in the US, it creates an environment in which many Americans feel encouraged to imagine that these threats are emanating not only from China (as in the country or the government) but also from individual people who are of Chinese descent, or who are perceived to be so. And it creates a sense of license for people to express these racist sentiments in both words and actions. Why is it so easy for people to hear these narratives about the country or the government of China and translate them into racist sentiments against individuals? First, it is a long standing feature of racism against people of Chinese descent (as well as people of many other Asian ethnicities) that they are imagined as being part of a single homogeneous collective, lacking in individuality. This implies that if the collective (“China”) is a threat, then any individual member of that collective is also a threat. In addition, connecting individuals of Asian descent in the US to a threat posed by China is sometimes an explicit feature of these narratives. For example, narratives about the supposed threat of espionage or “influence” from the Chinese government consistently portray individuals of Chinese descent in the US as part of the threat. For example, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in a 2018 Senate hearing that the espionage threat from China is “not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat.” He named students and academics from China as part of this “whole-of-society threat,” language that casts anyone of Chinese descent as a potential national security threat. Wray was severely criticized by Asian American civil rights organizations but has continued to make similar sweeping claims.4 Originally appointed by President Trump, Wray was kept in place by President Biden.

The concept of the "China threat” is not new; its history in the West is more than a century long. Initially, the implications of the term China threat were primarily cultural and social: the Chinese people and their traditions were portrayed by popular Western writers as malevolent, alien, and threatening to the Western culture. This depiction remained in the Western imagination and later expanded to include the political realm, in which China was represented as brutal and belligerent, especially during the heyday of McCarthyism or the “Second Red Scare” following China’s regime change in 1949. In recent decades, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the so-called China threat has become a topical issue within contemporary international relations (IR). The concept has taken on a more prominent role in Western political discourse – especially, but not exclusively, in the United States – over the past two decades. It not only has been introduced into the public sphere by journalists and other opinion leaders, but has entered the domain of policy through the work of policy analysts and politicians. Those concerned by the China threat argue in essence that a rising China poses an increasing, imminent, and real threat both to its neighbors and to far-distant countries. Moreover, this threat is perceived to be comprehensive, with security-related, military, economic, and environmental implications. Naturally, this hotly debated topic has also received scholarly attention. Most researchers have taken either a positivist or a normative approach to the issue of the “China threat.” Positivist studies emphasize causal factors whereas the aim of normative research is to refute or support a given thesis from a historical and ideological perspective. Both positivist and normative researchers provide theoretical and practical insights into the study of the alleged “China threat,” together with recommendations for dealing with it. Roy, only of the first scholars to address the issue of the China threat from an IR perspective, provides a survey of the major arguments on both sides of the debate, including a literature review of neorealist and neoclassical-realist theories of the threat posed by China and policy recommendations for Western governments. Notable original research on the China threat topic has continued to emerge over the years. Taking a more liberal approach, Li argues that the challenge posed by a fast-growing China to stability in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region depends on the expectations of Chinese policy makers, who operate in a highly economically interdependent environment. They are more likely to use peaceful means to settle disputes with neighbors and others if they perceive economic benefits to arise from such a strategy. Other scholars use realist-IR theory (particularly power-transition theory) to contend that the so-called China threat has emerged in the political discourse of the United States and other Western countries in response to the rise of China. In another review article, Jeffery argues thought-provokingly for the danger of creating a real China threat through "historical analogies" with previous challenger states. For instance, power-transition theorists in the realist-IR school compare China's threat with that of 19th-century Germany, and adherents of the successor state image theory draw analogies with the Soviet Union.

The populist revolt of our day reflects the deep rift that has opened between the worldview of the global intellectual and professional elites, and that of ordinary citizens. These two groups now live in parallel social worlds and orient themselves using different cognitive maps. Yet the intellectual consensus that brought us to this chasm remains intact. Proposed remedies among mainstream thought leaders rarely go beyond an invocation of the problem of inequality, and a bit more focus on compensating the losers.

But the problem lies deeper, in elites’ attachment to a globalist mindset that underplays and weakens the nation-state. Without a shift, we might find not only our open global economy, but also our liberal, democratic order swept away by the backlash wrought by the blind spots and excesses of this mindset.

Robust nation-states are actually beneficial to the world economy. The multiplicity of nation-states adds rather than subtracts value.

A principled defence of the nation-state would start from the proposition that markets require rules. Markets are not self-creating, self-regulating, self-stabilising or self-legitimising, so they depend on non-market institutions. Anything beyond a simple exchange between neighbours requires investments in transportation, communications and logistics; enforcement of contracts, provision of information, and prevention of cheating; a stable and reliable medium of exchange; arrangements to bring distributional outcomes into conformity with social norms; and so on. Behind every functioning, sustainable market stands a wide range of institutions providing critical functions of regulation, redistribution, monetary and fiscal stability, and conflict management. These institutional functions have so far been provided largely by the nation-state.

In a word, yes. In fact, nation-states may even become more important, not despite but because of globalisation. Anything else would lead to chaos.

The most compelling argument for nation-states is the mounting number of those that fail. They create ‘black holes’ in the global order of ungovernable places that affect the survival and wellbeing of tens of millions of people and tend to destabilise entire regions. Virtually all armed conflicts in the world are now within failing nation-states. They have become a global security problem.

On the other side of the debate, the anti-cosmopolitan position is bolstered by two sets of concerns: criticisms regarding the desirability and feasibility of a global state and concerns regarding the moral universalism that subtends the cosmopolitan position. The first set is overcome by either pointing to global structures of governance which while not as thorough going as a global state, nonetheless establish enough institutionalization to count as a context of justice, or limiting cosmopolitanism to moral articulations, abandoning political versions of the doctrine. However, the second category of objections, those pitted against moral universalism are more persistent. These objections fall into four categories: arguments regarding, our moral orientation to others far and near, an affinity between universalism and imperialism, distributive versions of global justice and the abstract individualism that subtends theories moral universalism. Concerning our moral orientation, critics argue that moral universalism problematically ignores the special responsibility we properly owe to compatriots (Morgenthau 1951; Walzer 1996). More generally, on this point, anti-cosmopolitans argue that cosmopolitanism inverts the priority of our obligations by ignoring the significance of more particular memberships and attachments. The central idea here is that proximate relationships bear a unique obligation and operate as essential sources of our moral capacity. Detractors of cosmopolitanism criticize moral universalism in a second way, arguing that moral universalism devolves into imperialism. As both Butler (1996) argue every conception of universality is always, necessarily, culturally specific. This means that any effort to reify a single ideal as universal will involve at the very least a problematic undermining of important cultural difference. More perniciously, it will become a coercive quest for hegemony. The third set of arguments against moral universalism expresses specific concern over distributive versions of global justice. Aiming for global equality, distributive global justice faces an insurmountable metric problem that applies both to efforts to equalize natural resources and to the goal of establishing an equality of opportunity. In both cases, there is no way to measure value that is not culturally specific because the value of natural resources is not set by nature but is defined by human decision. Here, Miller (2007, 59) offers the example of an oilfield, pointing out that the oilfield would be valuable only in a human society that allows the oil to be extracted and sold. Likewise, opportunity lacks objective measure in a culturally plural world where different societies define and rank goods in distinct ways. This metric problem means that any attempt to develop an equal distribution of goods and opportunities would be complicit in a denunciation of pluralism, ethnocentrically exporting one conception of value and thereby perpetrating a neo-imperialism. Furthermore, critics argue that distributive global justice problematically undermines national self-determination and political autonomy. Here, Miller argues that a meaningful conception of national self-determination requires that nations be held responsible for the outcome of their choices. The sort of international intervention needed to establish global equality would mitigate the consequences of such choices, thereby rendering national responsibility effectively meaningless: what could national responsibility mean in a world where no matter what a nation does, the outcome is the effectively the same? A related concern is that a distributive approach to global justice tends to understand persons in terms of production and distribution, resulting in a depoliticized perspective in which the significance of political participation and political autonomy is not recognized. This is problematic insofar as it belies the political agency of nations, a result which further impoverishes national responsibility. Finally, fourth, though directly related to the concerns regarding moral universalism, there is a group of objections based on a challenge to the abstract individualism on which moral universalism depends. Cosmopolitan morality argues that the single individual is the primary unit of concern; this position requires that the single individual is itself a meaningful concept. However, critics argue, it is not. More specifically, they maintain that the attempt to conceptualize humankind as a collection of discreet individuals fails to appreciate the highly significant ways in which human beings are shaped by the specificities of their lives, by the particular places they live in and the particular people they live with. In other words, critics contend that cosmopolitanism fails to understand a defining situatedness of people. Moreover, this failure leads to further problems, such as an inability to recognize the patterned and systemic character of injustice, and the fact of pluralism (Sandel 1984, 90). In this respect, the shortcoming of moral universalism is that it is too vague. In contrast, a perspective that appreciates the specific embeddedness of human beings is capable of offering a more powerful account of this injustice.

The question that concerns us here is how the cosmopolitan legitimation of humanitarian intervention assists in the maintenance of Western hegemony. Realists have long argued that the claim to be acting in defence of universal morality usually turns out to obscure the pursuit of very particular interests. Carl Schmitt’s observation that ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’ is frequently cited in this regard,33 as is E. H. Carr’s evisceration of the tendency of dominant groups to conflate their interests with those of the community as a whole and to proclaim them as such.34 In the context of Kosovo, for example, Danilo Zolo has suggested that lurking beneath the cosmopolitan moral justifications for the intervention were a host of power-political considerations—an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate its indispensability in the maintenance of European security, to obtain access to the resources of the Caspian Sea and the Caucuses, to establish new raisons d’eˆtre for NATO given the end of the Cold War, and so on.35 Critics on the left have made analogous arguments in respect of virtually every humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era.

Liberal proponents of intervention have urged that motivation ought not to be considered a defining test for the humanitarian credentials of an intervention. Wheeler suggests that this treats the intervening states as the referent object for analysis rather than the victims.36 Michael Ignatieff advances a pragmatic consequentialist argument for ignoring motivation: ‘if good results had to wait for good intentions, we would have to wait forever’.37 While a great deal of the moral argument around humanitarian intervention has focused on the issue of motives, an obsession with the nature of motivations for particular interventions misses the ways in which intervention as a persistent practice in international society has assisted in the consolidation of Western hegemony. Recall that hegemony rests, to a significant extent, on the acquiescence of lesser actors in the international system in their own domination. In the context of humanitarian intervention, this acquiescence has been elicited, first, by creating a broad consensus on the need for international intervention, and second, by insisting on satisfying the demand for intervention in ways that maintain and reinforce a distribution of power in the international system that grossly favours the West in general and the United States in particular.

Introductions to edited collections carry with them the risk of squeezing complicated and rich accounts into particular conceptual boxes and thus drawing attention away from other possibilities for reflection and analysis (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2008). But it is important to identify two interconnected themes of this theme issue. First, several of the papers are concerned with how dominant political actors, such as the state, business interests, and political parties, deploy notions of cosmopolitanism to reproduce and legitimate their power. The manner in which cosmopolitanism may be entwined in the efforts of governments, corporations, educators, media organizations, and political parties to justify and extend their dominance is a theme richly present inmany other geographical and anthropological studies (eg Brennan, 2001; Ferguson,2006; Mitchell, 2007). According to Brennan (2001), the most powerful global cosmopolitan movement in the contemporary era is the small coterie of financiers and policymakers working to elaborate a neoliberal economic project. As England and Ward(2007) have recently noted, one of the most distinctive aspects of this dominant set of agents is their ability to move rapidly and smoothly across cultural and national boundaries (see also Sparke, 2005). It is not only that powerful governments, political movements, and media organizations have the means to develop complex assemblages of bodies, politics, and technologies that move across the world, but also that many of these organizations are engaged in producing discourses of cosmopolitanism and cultural openness that support their claims to power. In dramaturgical terms, transnational networking is both the context of the drama and the theme of the play (see alsoBebbington and Kothari, 2006; McFarlane, 2006). Thus, for example, the current emphasis of the US governments to promote cultural awareness, language learning, and empathy in schools is often grounded in a narrow and chauvinist concern with geopolitical security and aggrandizing projects of rule, and this is the sense in which Mitchell (2007) writes of ``strategic cosmopolitanism''. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. European empires often deployed cultural awareness as a means of governing populations, and the formation of area studies in the US during the Cold War was tiedto the geopolitical imperative of gaining knowledge of other cultures and languages (Miyoshi, 2002).

The first worry is that, absent a global political culture, a cosmopolitan ideal of social justice would require unrealistic levels of altruism. As Pettit writes in his “Republican Law of Peoples,” the cosmopolitan ideal would be utopian in the sense that states, in particular the richer representative states, would have to be saintly—in effect, they would have to be controlled by saintly peoples—in order to provide robustly for the satisfaction of the ideal. The world in which states operated like that would be a more perfect world than ours but psychological and institutional realities make it into a scenario we can hardly rely on being able to attain.*

Pettit does not specify here why cosmopolitan justice, but not social jus- tice within the state, would require unrealistic levels of altruism. In more re- cently published work, however, there are some clues that, importantly, point in the direction of the PMA. First, Pettit sees state sovereignty as a necessary condition for non-domination, as it reflects the self-determination of a demo- cratic people. Since trust is in short supply across cultural divides, there will be “less likelihood of establishing those important unelected authorities . . . who could credibly claim to make decisions in line with shared standards,” and thus “the cause of democracy, articulated in terms of freedom, argues for a world of many states.”® Following this thought, Pettit argues that states are obliged not to use their citizens’ tax revenue towards the needs of other people “except when those citizens explicitly or implicitly demand this, or support it as an implication of a separate demand.”' Given the motivational limits on social justice, the cosmopolitan ideal is realizable only if people become more other- regarding than they currently are—in other words, assuming away the stability problem—or if political institutions act against their people’s expressed will.

The European sovereign debt crisis has underlined the political relevance and the fragile foundation of public support for international redistribution in the European Union (EU). Amid unprecedented economic downturn, several member states have received financial assistance from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (European Commission 2014). European policy makers are currently pushing for further social integration and risk sharing, as highlighted in the Five Presidents’ Report (European Commission 2015).

However, international redistribution is highly contentious, and sceptical public opinion makes it difficult to legitimize such actions (Hobolt 2015). Citizens do not necessarily adapt their allegiances to the transnationalization of society. Globalization also triggers counter-reactions such as ethnocentrism and parochialism. West European democracies are witnessing the emergence of a new political divide that pits the proponents of globalization against its opponents (Hooghe and Marks 2017; Kriesi et al. 2008). The most salient issues of this conflict are immigration and European integration, and they are predominantly discussed in cultural rather than economic terms (Hooghe and Marks 2017; Teney et al. 2014; Van der Brug and Van Spanje 2009). Teney et al. (2014) show that this conflict is related to cosmopolitan and communitarian ideological dispositions. While cosmopolitans favour opening national boundaries and welcome immigration and European integration, communitarians oppose these developments.

Th e discussion above illustrates a larger problem in cosmopolitan theorizing more generally – namely, its account of moral motivation is deeply want- ing. In arguing that moral principles might well motivate in the absence of feeling, Caney fails to offer an account of what it means to motivate in the first place. How do individuals come to be motivated to act according to their principles? How do moral principles motivate individuals to carry them out? It seems clear enough that any story about how it is that individuals become motivated to act according to moral principles requires that individuals inter- nalize them in some sense – it is insufficient to suggest that they ought to motivate, when in many instances they fail to do so. In other words, in order to motivate individuals moral principles must have some purchase with normal, human psychology.32 On the other hand, nationalists offer a compelling story of moral motiva- tion, one that seems to capture the true moral psychology of modern indi- viduals – it is from within the special relations that co-nationals share that their obligations to each other emerge. This way of interpreting the special obligations that characterize the relations among co-nationals (as distinct from the general obligations that all individuals owe to all other individuals) is typically defended from within a theory of associative duties. Associative duties are defined as those that ‘provide positive benefits for one’s associa- tions, duties that go beyond whatever positive duties we may have toward people in general’.33 Th ese duties hold among ‘members of significant social groups’ which are characterized by ‘socially salient characteristics’, and their source is the relationships themselves.34 For defenders of associative duties, that certain kinds of relationships give near-immediate rise to moral obliga- tions is a matter of common-sense morality. 35 In other words, the obligations we have to others derive from the relationships we have with them: ‘we account for special responsibilities...by citing the nature of our relation- ships to that person. We have special duties, we may say, because she is our sister, or our friend, or our neighbour’.36 Obligations are inherent in the notion of familial relation, of friendship, of neighborliness: even if we cannot defi nitively list which specific obligations are incumbent on us as members of any of these relations, it is clear that to be a member of any one of them means, in large part, to be willing to carry out the obligations to which they give rise.37 As David Miller writes, ‘the duties in question must be integral to the relationship, in the sense that the relationship could not exist in the form that it does unless the duties were generally acknowledged’.38 It may seem clear enough that we have special obligations towards those who are close to us – our friends, family members and so forth. In these kinds of cases, it seems straightforward to claim that our personal relations generate obligations that we need to take seriously in order for the relationship to con- tinue as that kind of relationship. But what may seem less clear is whether special obligations attend relationships that are not as clearly personal.39 Nationalists, however, argue that nations are sufficiently like these other forms of relations that they too generate special obligations among members. Nations are, crucially, communities that their members value, and the special obligations that pertain among co-nationals derive in large part from the value that the members see in their relations to each other. The nation – in order to defi ne itself, and in part to account for the worry that the family/friend–nation analogy fails to justify, on its face, the special duties that obtain among co- nationals – relies heavily on what David Miller terms a ‘shared public culture’, i.e., a shared ethos that manifests itself in overlapping values, norms and expectations among members of a community.40 In other words, national boundaries identify a group of people who, based on the existence of a shared public culture, have ethical duties towards each other that take priority over those they have towards others more generally.

A common reading of civic republicanism is as an alternative to liberal po- litical morality.** Against the liberal focus on liberty as non-interference, civic republicans have placed their emphasis on liberty as freedom from domination by an arbitrary power, both public and private. This conception of liberty as non-domination as a primary good has led republicans to prefer constitutional institutions and a more engaged mode of citizenship as an antidote to the abuse of political power by corrupt elites. While the liberal conception of the citizen is thought of as a nexus of rights, which are construed in a negative manner, republican citizenship is a status that carries with it more stringent positive duties. It is thus more demanding of the individual citizen—it requires that people not only avoid harm to others and obey the law, but willingly share in practices of social cooperation and make considerable compromises and sacri- fices for the sake of the common good of being not dominated.

Accordingly, civic republicanism demands strong ties of obligation and solidarity among citizens who maintain each other’s freedom from domina- tion. Yet unlike the liberal nationalist version, these strong ties are not the result of pre-political identification with other members of the community. Rather, this is an allegiance to a certain political way of life, or a “love of coun- try,” a sense of “belonging to a polity,” in which citizens see the flourishing of institutions and practices as linked to their own political freedom.* Citizens in a republican polity are linked by sense of collegiality, and are perceived as sharing a common political good of non-domination.’

With its estimable footprint, however, how the welfare state actually affects antiglobalization nationalism turns out to be a matter of considerable debate and uncertainty. On the one hand, the welfare state may dampen anti-globalization nationalism. Rooted in the tradition of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944), many scholars articulate how the welfare state’s insurance, social rights, redistributive and/or compensatory functions can ease economic pain and insecurities related to political and economic globalization. John Ruggie famously dubbed “embedded liberalism” as the post-War system of mutually reinforcing multilateral economic openness with safeguards to protect national societies (Ruggie 1982). Scholars in this tradition not only find that economic openness might strongly spur welfare state development (Cameron 1978; Katzenstein 1985; Garrett 1998), but that ex ante welfare state effort might deepen commitments to economic and political openness. The welfare state’s fostering of globalization, here, can involve social policies directly dampening nationalist backlash (Hays 2009), but also how social policy moderates, dampens the tendency of economic suffering to spur anti-globalization nationalism (Burgoon 2009, 2013). These studies clarify such claims with respect to individual, party, or policy outcomes, and different faces of globalization – ranging from trade openness (Ehrlich and Hearn 2014; Rickard 2015), immigration (Crepaz and Damron 2009), capital investment (Bordo et al. 1999), and European integration (McNamara 2015). In line with this is the view that a stalling or rolling-back of social policy may be spurring rising nationalism (Milner 2019; Snyder 2019; Trubowitz and Burgoon 2020). Buttressing this focus on welfare-policy origins of global interconnectedness, finally, are studies suggesting that social policy’s lowering of economic insecurities may stem voter support for radical populist parties (Swank and Betz 2003). All told, this thicket of 6 insights provides good reasons to expect welfare states to have an “embedded liberalism” effect that diminishes anti-globalization nationalism.

National exercise of monetary sovereignty is thus not necessarily incompatible with Held's economic cosmopolitanism. If certain requirements are fulfilled, the state may be even the most appropriate body to exercise control in macroeconomic issues. In Held’s (Citation2010, 167) vision, cosmopolitan social democratic policies should be pursued “while ensuring, on the one hand, that different countries have the freedom they need to experiment with their own investment strategies and resources and, on the other, that domestic policy choices uphold basic universal standards” (my emphasis).

Held thus seems to embrace the autonomy of states in macroeconomic policy with some crucial caveats – he insists on a sort of (what I call) cosmopolitan condition on legitimate national exercise of economic policy. In order to meet this condition specifically with respect to the rights and capacities associated with monetary sovereignty, the national issuance of currency and the related conduct of monetary and fiscal policy would have to be at least compatible with the policy goals and strategies of other states as well as with certain universal standards.

Cosmopolitanism requires people to risk the disapproval of their own groups, and to try and act as bridges between groups, even though they risk being misunderstood on both sides with resulting exile or violence. This is a lot to ask. The solidity of the social categories in play may need to be challenged as, in reality, there may be considerable fuzziness, overlap, intermarriage and so on, which may weaken desired social categories if recognised. This is again difficult to do without offence, as it may challenge ingroup status and relationships. In a company you might break the silos, as Tett states (2015, pp. 246ff.), by moving people between them, but that is difficult in a democratic society, with no recognised neutral actors, and may be interpreted as an attack on culture, which it could well be. Similarly, it will be difficult to set up any information coordination between groups, or to keep boundaries between groups permeable and flexible, if groups have been busy separating.

Peckham implies (1979) that some of these problems can be overcome by people working together on a material project. Material nature and consequences can force people to check whether their intended meaning has been received, and to learn how to correct misunderstandings. Relative equality, so counter information is not penalised, may also help. Perhaps, as suggested by Sloman & Fernbach (2017) it can be useful to ask people to explain how various policy ideas would actually work as this helps open people to their relative ignorance, and can soften political extremism and certainty. It might also be useful to deliberately explore the unintended consequences of policies and actions. An understanding of complexity may also prove useful in stopping expectations that there will be an end to the processes of communication, action, change and cosmopolitan action.

How does the concept of protecting the vulnerable at home help motivate cosmopolitan duties? I propose an argument from analogy, namely that between the socio-economically weakest members of society and the globally worst off. Members of both groups share some fundamental characteristics beyond the obvious one of their socio-economic weakness: Neither group has much bargaining leverage in the context of public policy deliberations — little on the national and even less on the global level. And second, members of both groups are also most in need of solidary actions on the part of the better off — they both share, I would argue, a basic vulnerability to the actions of others. If we accept the argument that concern for vulnerability is at the basis of anti-poverty measures in the welfare state, then it is not clear why these duties should end at the watershed of the nation. Note that this is not to say that a theory of global justice based on the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity would be open to the standard criticism by social liberals that it would not allow for specific duties arising from sharing in the institutions of the nation-state — what we can refer to as associative duties. I accept that the institutional set-up of the nation-state may facilitate the implementation and carrying out of duties of justice. Moreover, it seems uncontroversial that those with whom we share in the institutional make-up of the nation-state will be most immediately vulnerable to our actions and that this vulnerability may warrant specific duties that are based on our political association. To accept associative duties genuine to the national community, however, is not tantamount to calling into question the shared motivational basis of solidary actions at home and abroad. It is not to say that there is something special in our attachment to our fellow nationals that makes us understand their vulnerability and their needs better than our understanding of the needs of distant others. Neither is it the same as to say that there is indeed a conceptual difference between motivations for solidarity at home and solidarity abroad. The simple point I wish to make here is that the motivation to address vulnerability is at the basis of solidary actions everywhere. What remains to be worked out are the institutional details that would allow for the implementation of cosmopolitan solidarity along the lines of the social welfare state at home.

The augmented capacity in terms of cooperation and coordination between countries, and also a different kind of political legitimacy and collective subjectivity that a cosmopolitan world involves, are powerful answers to the problems posed by nation-states entrenched in nationalism. This became even more evident in the pandemic, when, during the initial phase of contagion, a lack of cooperation and coordination between countries delayed important countermeasures that would have saved lives. In addition, priority to the nation, which is one of the main features of nationalism (Posocco and Watson, 2022), made rich nation-states race to buy their way out of the crisis before poor ones by gaining for themselves the first doses of vaccines.2 It isn't difficult to imagine what will happen when catastrophic events such as climate change will hit with more intensity than they already do now—when vast regions will be uninhabitable, extreme weather events will be more common, fires will destroy more forests, and droughts will jeopardize food supply (Chomsky and Pollin, 2020). Migration waves will possibly move entire populations from one region to another with consequences that, in a world dominated by national priority, can only be disastrous. Hence the need for a post-national society (Kendall et al., 2009). In the post-national society, national identity, traditions, and values need to be reinterpreted vis-à-vis the increasingly globalized world, resulting in the intensification of worldwide social relations which link previously disparate and isolated communities on this planet and unite them into mutual dependance and unity of one world (Richter, 2017). In recent years, interregional flows of people and goods grew and reached such a speed that the local and global stopped being two distinctive and different realities. New technologies such as social media made people hyperconnected, 24–7, and any event occurring in the world can be seen anywhere exactly when it happens. Faster internet connection, better software, artificial intelligence, robotization, 3D viewers, virtual reality and other technologies gave rise to what Baldwin (2016) called telemigration, the widespread new form of existence that allows people to sit in one nation and interact (Balwin's focus was on work, but the same is true for many other activities) with people in another, or more than one nation-states at the same time. From this perspective, a larger circle of the “we” (Alexander, 2016) is already here. What is lacking is nation-state constitutions that embrace our increasingly multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural societies and depart from the introverted nation-centric bubbles in which nationals have priority, society is divided between class A and class B citizens, the “other,” the “different,” etc. So far, nation-states have not re-modernized (Beck, 2010) enough into better versions of themselves and this has created innumerable problems, the consequences of which are very visible—one among many is the way our societies deal with immigration. Masses of migrants and refugees fleeing from hunger and poverty, children and elderly included, begging for food in rich Western societies. Others do not even make it and stop at the frontiers of states, where “walls” have been erected, protected by armed police, and others perish en route (with thousands dying in the Mediterranean sea each year). Implementing cosmopolitan constitutions does not mean flattening cultural differences—“there can be no cosmopolitans without locals” (Hannerz, 1990, p. 239). It is fundamental to ensure that the political and juridical fields keep pace with a world that is radically changed, and will keep changing. Not to do so would maintain the status of global hysteresis (Bourdieu, 2015), a disconnect between the imagined world of nations and the reality of the global village we live in Goldin (2021). That is to say, the required shift from national exceptionalism to universalism must be a shift involving the field of law. This is very much in line with Taraborelli's reading of Kantian cosmopolitanism, where it is clear that the inclusion of “cosmopolitan right” in states' constitutions is a fundamental step in making states more cosmopolitan and less national (Taraborrelli, 2019, p. 23). Nation-states' constitutions entrenched in nationalism legitimize and protect the status quo, hindering our increasingly multicultural, multilingual, and multi-ethnic societies from taking their place as protagonists of nation-states' constitutions. To do so, a shift toward constitutional cosmopolitanism would be instrumental. The radical change that cosmopolitan constitutions would bring is evident in the fact that they entail a legal order where the fundamental rights of every person within their jurisdiction are granted “without respect to nationality or citizenship” (Stone Sweet, 2012, p. 53). Unlike most nation-states' constitutions, cosmopolitan constitutions would ensure the Kantian emphasis on individuals as human beings rather than nationals or citizens (Kleingeld, 1998). It is a fundamental shift that doesn't require the disappearance of the “nation-state” nor the category of “national,” but it would legally empty them of their national exclusivism: a generator of inequality between nationals and non-nationals. This would have a strong impact on cultural and everyday nationalism, thus on the importance that nationals give to national tropes. Constitutional cosmopolitanism would enforce, and contribute to spreading the idea of, equality vis-à-vis the most important common denominator between all human beings: humanity. It is not surprising that cosmopolitan constitutionalism has a bad name in law and “its tenets are routinely dismissed as naïve, sloppy, or even disingenuous” (Perju, 2013, p. 711), and why it remains relegated to the realm of “dreams,” a utopia (Kennedy, 2007). Our world is a world of nation-states driven by nationalism, and nationalism is a boundary-building phenomenon. “It locks up nation-states in themselves, making them principally worry about matters of internal security, domestic homogeneity and national growth and less about global issues and other nations' troubles” (Posocco and Watson, 2022, p. 2). Cosmopolitanism is the opposite phenomenon, it opens nation-states up, it puts national solidarity at the same level as global solidarity, and it involves a shift in terms of collective subjectivity. Cosmopolitanism assumes that nation-states and their people have obligations toward one another across, and irrespective of, national borders or nationality, while nationalism posits that nation-states have obligations, first and foremost, to the nation. It is not difficult to see how all this entails a radical change in terms of ideology that shakes the very foundations of the nation-state system as we know it, and results in a rejection of cosmopolitan constitutionalism as a utopia. Indeed, cosmopolitan constitutionalism is a necessary update to nationalism vis-à-vis the great transformations that our world went through in the last 200 years; it would provide solutions to its most problematic features. It would render nation-states less nationalist while keeping them alive and functioning. Cosmopolitanism and its constitutionalism entail the possibility of breaking with a singular political particularity. In such a system one can be Irish, Italian, Indian or American and a “citizen of the world” at the same time, as Beck (2002, p. 19) “cosmopolitanism means: rooted cosmopolitanism, having ‘roots' and ‘wings' at the same time.” Cosmopolitanism doesn't require the rejection of one's nationality but the addition of another wider identity with potentially enormous positives for everybody. World citizenship rights would ensure every person's right and duty to participate in the authority structures and public life of any state regardless of their “historical or cultural ties to that community” (Soysal, 1994, p. 3). The introduction of such rights within cosmopolitan constitutions would have profound implications on issues of global importance such as immigration and the job market, not to mention improving a sense of belonging and solidarity that go beyond the nation. Finally, a world driven by cosmopolitan constitutionalism coupled with world citizenship rights increases the possibility of comfort and a feeling of patriotism everywhere in the world.

What David Held (Citation2010, 143) calls “the paradox of our times” nicely captures some of the main motivations for cosmopolitanism: “the collective issues we must grapple with are increasingly global and, yet, the means for addressing these are national and local, weak and incomplete”. As a basic premise, most cosmopolitans share a version of the view that diverse globalisation-related processes have eroded the policy capacity of contemporary nation-states in a wide range of important issues and / or that the range of intrinsically global challenges is widening. Cosmopolitanism is therefore often defended, in part, on the practical grounds of policy efficacy.

Simultaneously, globalisation seems to have undermined the legitimacy basis of national representative politics. The standard democratic all-affected principle (in Held's terminology, the criterion of all-inclusiveness), according to which the group of decision-makers should coincide with the group of “decision-takers”, underlies this judgment and encourages calls for cosmopolitan democracy (Held Citation2010, 173; see also Lagerspetz Citation2015; Näsström Citation2011). The principle seems to capture a core motivation for democracy – people should be free to decide about precisely those affairs that affect themselves (ideally to the extent that they are affected). Because the present organisation of politics around nation-states often fails to serve all-inclusiveness, the cosmopolitans call for supranational democratic governance structures also on the normative grounds of policy legitimacy (on legitimacy in global governance, see Tallberg, Bäckstrand, and Scholte Citation2018).

It is in this context of worldwide fear and concern that an unprecedented number of solidarity initiatives originated, within civil society, to help those in need. Initiatives involving religious and non-religious charities, non-governmental institutions, micro-initiatives at the family or individual level, professional associations, sport associations, foundations, social movement associations, activist groups, trade unions, etc. Non-governmental organizations such as the World Economic Forum acknowledged that incredible efforts have been made to raise unprecedented amounts of money (WEF, 2020). The same is true for the World Health Organizations, which launched the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund to raise money from individuals, the private sector, as well as financial and other foundations. “10 days after its March 13 launch, it had raised US$71 million from 170,000 individuals and organizations, including Facebook, Google, and FIFA” (The Lancet, 2020). It was the first time that WHO attempted to raise funding from private people, which denotes the gravity of the situation and the special measures undertaken to face a special emergency. Following WHO, UN, UNDP, OECD (see Figure 1), all the larger humanitarian organizations that were already in operation and could count on an extensive network of agencies worldwide—UNICEF (see Figure 2), Action Against Hunger, Amref, Health Communications Resources, ActionAid, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, Phase Worldwide, Relief International, The Freedom Fund, Save the Children (see Figure 3), etc.—amplified their solidarity efforts during the pandemic. All of them started specific fundraising for tackling the consequences of the pandemic, and they did it beyond nationality, gender, language, or ethnicity. This is in line with the Habermassian idea of “postnational” or Beck's “cosmopolitanization,” potentially enlarging that “circle of we” Alexander (2012) wrote about. Indeed, the fact that the efforts of these organizations resonated through social media, journals, and televisions, increased the message of a world that needs to come together and overcome all barriers, including national and ethnic ones. NGOs such as the Focolare Movement, a Catholic-born cross-religious, cross-cultural, and international association, is another example of an organization that prioritized the groups most affected by the pandemic, namely the poor, the “different,” and the immigrant. Founded in 1943, after the tragedies of WW2, and being present in 180 countries, it facilitated a prompt and effective action to fight the many side effects of the pandemic. Silvina Chemen, the director of Bet El, an Argentinian NGO devoted to help the poor and needy, summarized well the general sentiment among people around grassroot solidarity: These small gestures of humanity give me hope that once the pandemic is over not only those of us who are actively engaged, but also many others, will understand how interdependent we all are. The longer we are at home alone, the more we realize we cannot do without each other [...] I renew my commitment to continue building a healed community where caring for others is our first commandment (Focolare, 2020). Another show of solidarity that was widely broadcast by the media, but took place within the borders of a country, is the one that saw 750,000 people answering the call by the National Health System in the UK. Volunteers would undertake tasks such as delivering medication from pharmacies, driving patients to appointments, or making regular phone calls to isolated individuals (Tierney and Mahtani, 2020). According to Tierney and Mahtani's study, similar expressions of solidarity increase people's sense that they matter and their sense of participation, and have been recorded in most countries hit by the pandemic. Also the phenomenon of private donors, wealthy philanthropists who donated to alleviate the suffering caused by the pandemic, came to the forefront of the media. The list of benefactors is long and includes, among others, celebrities such as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey who put almost a third of his 3.6 billion dollar fortune into a fund that will tackle coronavirus relief, Bill and Melinda Gates donated $100 million through their foundation for what they defined a “once in a century pandemic,” Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $25 million, and Ali Baba founder Jack Ma donated $14 million to develop a vaccine against the COVID-19. Besides donors and NGOs, science came to the rescue with academies and research centers in search of a treatment and a vaccine against COVID-19. Scientists from all disciplines came together to tackle the consequences of the pandemic, and carry out research aimed to prevent it from happening again. The Solidarity Clinical Trial, the largest international clinical study to find an effective COVID-19 disease treatment, is one example of cooperation and coordination at the global level that is making a difference. The necessity of this study came from the lack of coordination between scientists in different countries, which led them to experiment with many individual treatments rather than join forces and come up with one valid for all. Instead, the Solidarity Clinical Trial enrolled patients in one single randomized trial that generated the strong evidence needed to determine the relative effectiveness of potential treatments (WHO Clinical Trial, 2020). A great number of medical facilities and research centers from all over the world took part in the study, and a recent investigation by Bondio and Marloth (2020) proves that this was highly beneficial, in particular by cutting the time for critical trials by 80% and providing open access data to scientists worldwide. On the wave of the Clinical Trial, many other institutions joined forces. The InterAcademy Partnership (see Figure 4) is another example, including 140 medical, scientific and engineering academies from around the world, calling on the scientific and policymaking communities to come together (Interacademies, 2020). Similar cooperation initiatives occurred also at the micro-level, where professionals invested their time and skills to help people in need. One notable event involved a small group of engineers who, acknowledging the lack of valves for life-saving coronavirus treatment, used 3D printers to build the valves themselves, which they distributed to medical facilities (BBC, 2020). Others focused on the environment, trying to cope with the ecological consequences of the pandemic. Although reduced transport resulted in significant reduction in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development underlined that due to the fact that environmental protection workers were at home in lockdown, illegal deforestation, fishing and wildlife hunting increased (UNCTAD, 2020). In addition, the volume of non-recyclable waste has risen. Stay-at-home policies have increased people's consumption of take-away food delivered with single-use packaging. Also throwaway protective masks are now used daily. At a time when recycling activities have been suspended due to coronavirus, many organizations mobilized to come to the rescue of the environment. To conclude, it seems that there's overwhelming evidence that the civil society does not wait for official institutions to mobilize, but takes the lead with the goal of lessening the suffering of fellow human beings, beyond color, gender, and nationality, and preserving life in all its forms. In this regard, and specifically in relation to the pandemic, civil society may represent a model for the political world, which is entangled in nation-centric dynamics that render the nation-state, as it is, unfit to deal successfully with, let alone prevent, global catastrophes, thus cope with the challenges of the global risk society.

It is particularly marked in the social sciences of France (Taguieff 1991: 46) and Germany, where the sociologist Otto Hondrich (1992) felt moved to deliver a public nostra culpa for having neglected nationalism as an object of social theory (see Radtke 1996). In the Anglo-Saxon world, the early works on nationalism by Deutsch, Kedouri, Gellner and Smith and others developed, from the 1980s onwards, into a well-established research tradition, especially in the field of historical sociology (cf. Thompson and Fevre 2001), without, however, having much influence on mainstream social theory. More fundamentally, however, this silence about the continuing importance of national principles stemmed from a methodological problem, as Anthony Smith suggested two decades ago (A. D. Smith 1983: 26). That nationalist forms of inclusion and exclusion bind our societies together served as an invisible background even to the most sophisticated theorizing about the modern condition. The social sciences were captured by the apparent naturalness and givenness of a world divided into societies along the lines of nation-states (Berlin 1998). What Billig (1995) has shown for everyday discourse and practice holds true for grand theory’s encounters with the social world as well: because they were structured according to nation-state principles, these became so routinely assumed and ‘banal’, that they vanished from sight altogether. Methodological nationalism has thus inhibited a true understanding of the nature and limits of the modern project. It has produced a systematic blindness towards the paradox that modernization has led to the creation of national communities amidst a modern society supposedly dominated by the principles of achievement. Whether Parsons and Merton or Bourdieu, Habermas and Luhmann, none of these authors discusses in any systematic fashion the national framing of states and societies in the modern age. Interestingly enough, such nation-blind theories of modernity were formulated in an environment of rapidly nationalizing societies and states, sometimes, as was the case with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, on the eve or in the aftermath of nationalist wars. Ignoring the national framing of modernity, however, is just one form of methodological nationalism A second variant, typical of more empirically oriented social science practices, is taking national discourses, agendas, loyalties and histories for granted, without problematizing them or making them an object of an analysis in its own right. Instead, nationally bounded societies are taken to be the naturally given entities to study. Here are some illustrative examples of the naturalization of the nation-state from different disciplinary traditions. International relations assume that nation-states are the adequate entities for studying the international world. While the anarchical nature of this interstate system and the changing dynamics of hegemony and polycentrism have been discussed at length, almost no research was done on why this international system has become an international one (one exception is Mayall 1990). Similarly, scholarship after the Second World War on the newly independent states thought of nation building as a necessary, although somewhat messy, aspect of the decolonization process (see for example Wallerstein 1961). The task of building a viable national culture was seen as an evident corollary to the other tasks of modernization, projecting as a model a vision of Western nation-state building. Nation building and state formation made natural bedfellows in the works of modernization theorists such as Lerner or Rostow, since the nation-state model represented the only thinkable way of organizing politics.