No link – cosmopolitanism rejects the idea that the nation is the sole basis of political solidarity – it does not eliminate all identification along national lines

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.