Cosmopolitan democracy and its critics: a review

The victory of Western liberal states ending the Cold War inspired the hope that international relations could be guided by the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. In the early 1990s, a group of thinkers developed the political project of cosmopolitan democracy with the aim of providing intellectual arguments in favour of an expansion of democracy, both within states and at the global level. While some significant successes have been achieved in terms of democratization within states, much less has been attained in democratizing the global system. The aim of this review article is twofold — on the one hand, to reassert the basic concepts of cosmopolitan democracy; on the other, to address the criticisms coming from Realist, Marxist, Communitarian and Multicultural perspectives.