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It is a known fact in human nature, that [as] aman is more
attached to his family than to hisneighbourhood, to his
neighbourhood than to thecommunity at large, [so] the people of
each Statewould be apt to feel a stronger bias towards theirlocal
governments than towards the governmentof the Union.
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, XVII
1. Nationalism and cosmopolitism: rival or compatible ideas?
Globalization is changing the daily life of billions of people
and com-pels social scientists to revise their theories. A key
topic of this culturalrenewal concerns the relationships between
nationalism and cosmopoli-tanism, a very old problem, today at the
core of the debate concerning thefuture of the international order.
For instance political scientists support-ing the project of a
cosmopolitan democracy1 come up against the obsta-cle of
nationalism, which sometimes is considered a rival ideology to
cos-mopolitanism and sometimes the necessary intermediary step.
Before proposing a new approach to this old problem, it can be
use-ful to reconstruct its history briefly. The shortest and most
effectiveway to illustrate the role played by nationalism in the
cosmopolitan vi-sion of history of the 18th Century is to recall
the intellectual evolution
IL POLITICO (Univ. Pavia, Italy)2012, anno LXXVII, n. 3, pp.
68-90
HUMAN NATURE, NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITISM
by Guido Montani
Professor of International Political Economy at the Faculty of
Economics of the Uni-versity of Pavia (Italy).
1 See G. W. BROWN, D. HELD (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader,
Cambridge, Poli-ty Press, 2010; and especially the essay by
Kok-Chor Tan, Nationalism and Cosmpoli-tanism, pp. 176-90.
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2 F. MEINECKE, Weltbrgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur
Genesis des deutschenNationalstaates, Mnchen und Berlin, Verlag von
R. Oldenbourg, 1928, p. 308.
3 F. MEINECKE, Die Idee der Staatsrson, Munich, Oldenbourg
Verlag, 1924; Englishtranslation Machiavellism. The Doctrine of
Raison dEtat and its Place in Modern Histo-ry, London, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 1.
4 F. MEINECKE, Machiavellism, cit., pp. 4-5.
of Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), the great German historian
who,during his lifetime, observed the rise and fall of the German
Reich pas-sionately. In his first great work, Cosmopolitanism and
the NationalState, published in 1907, Meinecke shows how the roots
of the Ger-man state were well grounded in the cosmopolitan culture
of the En-lightenment philosophical and political movement. But
during the 19thCentury it was necessary to abandon these generous
and romanticideals in order to seize the historical occasion for
national unity. Theend result was that the humanistic nation,
imagined by Schiller, pro-duced Bismarcks nation state2.
Nevertheless Meinecke did not thinkthat the original cosmopolitan
project had been abandoned. In a Pref-ace to the new 1915 edition
he says that the war was shaping a uni-versal people: Germany was
going to embrace the double ideal of cos-mopolitanism and nation
state.
The outcome of WWI persuaded Meinecke to look for the pro-found
reasons behind power politics: what position and future did
Ger-many have in the European concert of nation states? And how
couldGerman cosmopolitan values be reconciled with power politics?
In DieIdee der Staatsrson, published in 1924, he says: For each
state ateach particular moment there exists one ideal course of
action, one ide-al raison dtat3. Therefore the government of a
nation state must fol-low a policy line, in internal and external
affairs, which is not dictatedby some ideal of morality and
justice, but by the inner necessities ofthe state. The politician
wanting to acquire power and to maintain itshould not follow
personal inclinations and values but only the courseof action
dictated by the raison dtat. The relations between moral lawand
power are obscure and problematic because: Kratos and Ethos
to-gether build the state and fashion history. The virtue of the
politicalleader is to follow the complex path between these two
great historicalshores: Between Kratos and Ethos, between behaviour
prompted bythe power-impulse and behaviour prompted by moral
responsibility,there exists at the summit of the state a bridge,
namely raison dtat4.If we apply this general observation to the
world system of states we
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should also admit that, since a world government does not exist,
peacecan endure only in a situation of equilibrium among the great
powers,but when this equilibrium is shattered, as happens when a
great poweraims at hegemony and the other powers object to that,
war becomes in-evitable. After a scholarly excursus of the theory
of the raison dtat,from Machiavelli to Treitschke, Meinecke
concludes observing thatthe League of Nations, the only bulwark
against power politics in in-ternational affairs, was doomed to
fail. International anarchy can bebrought to an end not by the
League of Nations, but by the world-hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon
powers, in whose hands the strongestphysical powers of the globe
are already concentrated5. This realisticobservation also explains
the German refusal of Anglo-Saxon hege-mony.
During Hitlers regime Meinecke fell into disgrace due to his
lib-eral positions. After the German catastrophe, in one of his
speeches,Meinecke admitted that the old European system of great
powers need-ed to be completely reformed: it was now necessary to
build the Unit-ed States of Europe. The old nation states had to
accept to integratetheir own raison dtat into a collective European
raison dtat. NowGermany had to follow this new course of action in
foreign policy6.
This short summary of Meineckes anguished historical journeyfrom
the cosmopolitan ideas of the Enlightenment to German powerpolitics
and to European Unity shows that the present experience ofEuropean
integration should be examined carefully by every scholar
ofinternational relations: Europe is at a crossroads between
nationalismand cosmopolitanism. In the following pages we try to
show that Eu-rope, after WWII, thanks to supranational
institutions, was able toovercome the main contradictions between
nationalism and cos-mopolitanism paving the way for a supranational
community of na-tional peoples. In order to base our argument on
solid theoretical foun-dations we first take into consideration the
notion of human nature, be-cause as Alexander Hamilton remarked it
seems reasonable to as-sume that people feel more sympathy for
their neighbours than forsome distant and unknown person, but this
sympathy does not preventthem from belonging to a wider political
community. This behaviouris the basis for a federal system of
government of national peoples.
5 F. MEINECKE, Machiavellism, cit., p. 431.6 S. PISTONE,
Federico Meinecke e la crisi dello stato nazionale tedesco, Torino,
Giap-
pichelli, 1969, pp. 480-81.
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7 E. O. WILSON, Consilience. The Unity of Knowledge, London,
Abacus, 2006, p. 203and p. 208.
8 C. DARWIN, The Descent of Man, London, J. Murray, 1871, pp.
100-101.
There is a crucial difference between internationalism and
federalism.In a system of sovereign nation states nationalism and
cosmopoli-tanism are necessarily rivals, though in a federal system
national iden-tity is compatible with a cosmopolitan identity: a
German citizencan also be a European citizen and a citizen of the
world.
The notion of human nature is the basis for our research. Thanks
tothe impressive advancement of the studies on the origin of the
humanspecies carried out by paleo-archeologists, anthropologists,
biologistsand evolutionary psychologists, Edward Wilson criticizes
social scien-tists who have paid little attention to the
foundations of human nature,and they have had almost no interest in
its deep origins. He prods so-cial scientists to answer the
question: what unites humanity? Realprogress in social sciences is
possible only on the basis of a commonaccepted theoretical basis.
Wilson says: social sciences are intrinsical-ly compatible with the
natural sciences. The two great branches oflearning will benefit to
the extent that their modes of causal explanationare made
consistent7. Here we try to contribute to a more comprehen-sive
social sciences methodology examining the relationships
betweenhuman nature and the ideas of nationalism and
cosmopolitanism.
2. Human nature, cooperation and conflictCharles Darwin
observed: As man advances in civilisation, and
small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest
reasonwould tell each individual that he ought to extend his social
instinctsand sympathies to all members of the same nation, though
personallyunknown to him. This point being once reached, there is
only an arti-ficial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to
the men of all na-tions and races. And, later on, Darwin says:
Sympathy beyond theconfines of man, that is humanity to the lower
animals, seems to be oneof the latest moral acquisitions8. Here we
try to show that advances incivilisation become possible when human
beings overcome artificialbarriers created by themselves from tribe
to national allegiance.
We start our inquiry recalling the notion of human
universalselaborated by Donald Brown who says: Human universals of
which
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hundreds have been identified consist of those features of
culture, so-ciety, language, behaviour, and mind that, so far as
the record has beenexamined, are found among all peoples known to
ethnography and his-tory9. Human universals outline the main
features of a world people.Among these human universals Brown lists
cooperation and con-flict, two aspects of human behaviour, which
are crucial for social sci-ences. Here we propose to study the
evolution of cooperation and con-flict in human societies up to the
creation of the state. There is some rea-son to think that the
state is a human artefact not dissimilar from thefamily, the
tribes, the village; it is a product of cultural human evolu-tion.
Marvin Harris10 aptly observes that, even before the first
millen-nium B.C., in the Mesopotamian region, in the Nile valley,
and after-wards on the Mediterranean shores, in China and the
Americas, someinstitutions were created, which we now consider
states: territorial com-munities monopolizing legitimate force,
according to Max Weber. Theweberian definition can be applied both
to the modern and the archaicstate. The birth of the archaic state
can be considered a spontaneous out-come of independent
evolutionary processes11. The population whichmoved from the
Behring Strait into theAmericas about twelve thousandyears ago
created the Maya, Aztec and Incas empires autonomously. Itis a rare
case of a social experiment, as happens in a laboratory when itis
possible to repeat the chemical analysis of a certain
substance.
Genetic evolution and cultural evolution follow different
patterns.Cultural evolution is based on the functioning of the
human brain,which we can assume is the same in the Cro-Magnon man
of 40thousand years ago and in modern humans12. The real difficulty
the so-cial scientist has to face is to understand how the archaic
societies atthe end of the Palaeolithic era and the beginning of
the Neolithic eraworked, since we have at our disposal only
skeletons, tools, ornamentsand dwelling ruins. Notwithstanding
this, some rough idea of the prim-itive societies can be traced
thanks to the anthropological studies ofsurviving societies of
foragers, nomads, hunters and gatherers, etc. Of
9 D. BROWN, Human Universals, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1991; the
quotation istaken from D. BROWN, Human Universals, Human Nature and
Human Culture, inDaedalus, vol. 133, n. 4, Fall 2004, p. 47.
10 M. HARRIS, Our Kind: Who we are, Where we came from, Where we
are going, NewYork, Harper Collins, 1990, Chapters 96-99.
11 Brown considers institutions and not specifically the state
as a human universal.12 I. TATTERSALL, Becoming Human: Evolution
and Human Uniqueness, New York,
Harcourt Brace, 1998; see especially the last chapter.
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13 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human Societies.
From ForagingGroup to Agrarian State, Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 2006, p. 245.
14 K. POPPER, The Poverty of Historicism, London, Lowe and
Brydone, 1957. Recentresearches on the origins of humans enlighten
also the old debate on the Marxian theoryof economic determinism,
or the evolution of different modes of production, from huntersand
gatherers to capitalist societies. The transition from foraging
groups to agrarian soci-eties was much more complex than the simple
marxian deterministic model can explain.For instance N. WADE
(Before the Dawn. Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors,New
York, Penguin Press, 2006, chapter 7) explains that it is not true
that agriculture ledto settlement or stationary societies; on the
contrary, the settlement way of life led to agri-culture (for a
similar point of view see I. TATTERSALL, The World from Beginnings
to 4000BCE, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; chapter 7).
Relating to the same issue, J.Cauvins research (Naissance des
divinits. Naissance de lagriculture. La rvolution dessymboles au
nolitique, Paris, Flammarion, 1997) provides extensive
documentation ofthe cultural revolution of religious symbols which
precede agriculture in village commu-nities of the Middle East.
According to Cauvin it was the symbolic revolution that
broughtabout the transition from nomadic societies of hunters and
gatherers to the domesticationof plants and animals.
course, our aim is not to provide details of the vast findings
accumu-lated by anthropologists in over a century of research, but
only to ex-ploit their main findings.
Johnson and Earl identified the following levels of cultural
evo-lution: the family, the local group, the Big Man collectivity,
the chief-dom, the archaic state, and the nation state. These
labels they say do not signify perfectly discrete levels or
plateaus, to one or another ofwhich all known cultures must be
assigned; rather, they designate sta-tions along a continuum at
which it is convenient to stop and makecomparisons with previous
stations13. We have now a comprehensiveframework in which we can
discuss the notion of cooperation and con-flict. But first we need
to specify that these different stations do not rep-resent stages
of an imaginary course of history: there is not a singlecause
explaining the transition from one station to another, but a
plu-rality of causes. Karl Popper14 rightly says that there is not
a law (or atheory) of historical development of human societies
which allows usto predict their future.
One of the features of these different kinds of societies is
that theycan be listed according to their relative size. The family
group is thesimplest organization model of cooperation and likely
the oldestknown. It comprises around twenty-five members, that is,
five fami-lies living mainly by foraging. There is a division of
labour betweenmen and women, but the group does not have a chief.
Families main-tain relationships with other groups of the region.
The Kung people,
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who nowadays live in Botswana, Namibia and Angola, do not live
asisolated families but are organized into camps of several
families andjoined by personal networks of exchange that
interconnect families andtheir camps across broad regions. The
importance of these suprafami-ly organizations in handling the
daily risks of hunting and the long-range risks of an unpredictable
resource base shows clearly the limitsto family independence15.
We cannot examine in detail all the aforementioned societies.
Weneed only to show that the division of labour in the family, its
autonomyand the hierarchy among its members are related to a
suprafamily or-ganisation, which becomes more complex as the
society expands. Thelocal group could include roughly from one
hundred to five hundredmembers at the time of the Neolithic
revolution. The cohesion of this so-ciety, producing a small
surplus, required a strong combination of cere-monial activities
and leadership. The Big Man did not have coercivepowers but he
organized the local group and represented it in
intergroupceremonies. In the following stages, the chiefdom
organized thousandsor several thousand people. The development of
intensive agricultureproduced a substantial surplus, the
stratification of society into classesand lite groups became
inevitable: land property and precise social lawsregulated the
distribution of the surplus. In chiefdoms coercive powerwas
necessary to organise production and to reduce violence among
in-dividuals and families. The autonomy of the family was reduced
and itsorganisation was embedded in a wider social framework.
Regional poli-ties, or chiefdoms, constitute the world of law and
legal force that guar-antees order among communities within the
polity, as well as a coordi-nated response to the outside world of
competing and cooperativestates16. In short, chiefdom societies
announce the creation of the ar-chaic state, when a permanent
bureaucracy was set up. The archaic stateorganised populations of
about hundreds of thousands or millions of dif-ferent ethnic
groups; it created roads, canals and long distance trade. Itsmost
important achievement was the pacification of a number of
warlikechiefdoms. This result was possible when the chiefs
understood that itwas more convenient to integrate the vanquished
people instead ofkilling them. Integration on a massive regional or
interregional scale isa defining characteristic of states17.
15 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human Societies,
cit. p. 67.16 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution of Human
Societies, cit., p. 247.17 A. W. JOHNSON, T. EARLE, The Evolution
of Human Societies, cit., pp. 327-8.
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18 S. PINKER, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Why Violence has
Declined, New York,Penguin Book, p. 52.
19 M. TOMASELLO, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition,
Cambridge Mass., Har-vard University Press, 1999.
Cooperation and especially increased cooperation among
humanbeings is the angelic face of human nature. Lets now give a
look at itssatanic face. Anthropological research on violence in
ancient societieshas definitively proved the groundlessness of the
Noble Savage myth.In his extensive study on violence in history,
Steven Pinker shows thatprimitive non-state societies were much
more violent than modernstates. In prehistoric times violence was
fairly common among men forthe conquest of women, among tribes and
chiefdoms and among fam-ilies of the same tribe. Revenge for theft,
adultery, vandalism and rapesfrequently ended in massacres, because
it was the most secure way toavoid further revenge. Taking into
account a great number of anthro-pological researches Pinker
states: The average annual rate of deathin warfare for the
non-state societies is 524 per100,000, about half of1 percent.
Among states, the Aztec empire of central Mexico, whichwas often at
war, had a rate about half of that. If we examine con-temporary
history, the 20th Century, which is sometimes considered
thebloodiest era in the history of humankind, is by far less
violent than thetimes of the ancient societies. The annual rate of
death for Germany,Japan and Russia/USSR was 144, 27 and 135 per
100,000 respec-tively. Pinkers conclusion is: states are far less
violent than tradi-tional bands and tribes. Modern Western
countries, even in their mostwar-torn centuries, suffered no more
than around a quarter of the av-erage death rate of non-state
societies and less than a tenth of that forthe most violent
one18.
Here, we are not trying to give a comprehensive answer to the
prob-lem of the origin of the state for instance we do not take
into accountpopulation growth, the environment, technological
changes, religion,etc. but our aim is simply to shed some light on
the evolution of co-operative behaviour. So far we have only shown
that there is a nega-tive correlation between more cooperation
among individuals and lessviolence. But an empirical correlation is
not an explanation. The fol-lowing three observations can provide
some ground for an explanation.
A first basis for cooperative behaviour is given by
MichaelTomasello19 who compares the skills of human beings and
those of oth-er primates, such as chimpanzees. Many animals have a
social life, but
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only human beings are able to create artefacts and develop
skills thataccumulate improvements across generations. Tomasello
studies thecognitive development in human infants finding out that
even in thepre-linguistic stage of communication they acquire the
capacity to un-derstand others as intentional agents. Human infants
are able to col-laborate with adults in joint activities. We need
to recognize that evenyoung children already have some sense of
shared intentionality Inshared cooperative activities, my
individual rationality is trans-formed into a rationality of
interdependence The universality of so-cial norms, and their
critical role in human evolution, is apparent20.This human
behaviour has a very old origin, it probably dates back towhen the
practice of monogamous relationships between females andmales in
foraging groups created a propitious environment. There wassome
initial step in human evolution away from great apes,
saysTomasello, involving the emotional and motivational side of
experi-ence, that propelled humans into a new adaptive space in
which com-plex skills and motivations for collaborative activities
and shared in-tentionality could be selected21. Cooperation
probably developed inlittle family groups.
The second condition for the creation of the state and a high
degreeof cooperation is the domestication of plants and animals, in
short theagricultural mode of production, the exploitation of the
surplus and thestratification of society.
The third fact at the basis of the archaic state is that it was
built byhumans who were not only able to speak but also to write.
The devel-opment of writing was the necessary tool to organize a
bureaucracy andsend instructions from the metropolitan centre to
the periphery of em-pires. The invention of writing happened
independently in different re-gions of the ancient world during the
process of state building: inSumerian and Egyptian civilizations,
in Greece, in China, in India andin theAmericas. Human mind says
Godart reacted in the same wayto the problems created by
accountability needs of palaces where theriches of the region were
gathered together22. The writing techniquewas a cognitive skill
crucial for the administration of the state.
20 M. TOMASELLO, Why we Cooperate, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press,
2009, pp. 39-42.21 M. TOMASELLO, Why we Cooperate, cit., p. 85.22
L. GODART, Linvenzione della scrittura. Dal Nilo alla Grecia,
Torino, Einaudi,
1992, p. 118.
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23 S. MENNEL, The Globalization of Human Society as a Very
Long-Term SocialProcess. Eliass Theory in Global Culture.
Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity(ed. M. Featherstone),
London, Sage, 1990; It was in reaction to a prevalent overempha-sis
on economics that [Elias] tried to show the equal centrality of
violence and its control,intermeshing with economic development and
with the development of knowledge, in theoverall development of
human society (p. 369).
3. The nation state, nationalism and national integration
In the last paragraph we saw how the archaic state favoured a
highdegree of cooperation, integrating different chiefdoms. Now we
ex-plore the same problem for modern societies, where social
cooperationis organised by the nation state. We will see that the
nation state, a po-litical artefact, integrates individuals,
removing feudal barriers and in-creasing the degree of cooperation,
but it also causes divisions andwars among national peoples.
National integration we try to show is nothing but a station of
human cultural evolution. Here we explorehow cooperation evolved
emphasizing three features of modern soci-eties: the civilizing
process, the development of institutions, the nationstate and
nationalism.
The civilizing process. Several studies on the transition from
Euro-pean feudalism to the modern era drew attention to the
cultural, polit-ical or economic aspects of this great
transformation. A new culture ofindividual liberties was the
hallmark of the Renaissance in literature,figurative arts, science,
technology and philosophy, which reached itspeak in the
Enlightenment. Other historians emphasize the revolution-ary
changes in trade, especially in long distance trade, and in
urban-ization, where a new bourgeois class challenged the
aristocratic pow-er. Other historians emphasize the political
revolution in state buildingand in political thought, with the
foundations of the great modern ide-ologies of liberalism,
democracy, socialism and nationalism.
Here we focus our attention on the birth of the modern state.
Thiswork was masterly carried out by Norbert Elias in his study of
the civi-lizing process, where the cultural, political, economic
and social aspectsare examined in their close mutual
relationship23. Elias shows how in thecourse of the transformation
individual behaviour concerning the dailyhabits of sanitation and
decency changed radically, becoming more civ-ilized among the upper
classes and the lower classes. The integrationprocess demolished
the barriers of the closed manor and increasingly
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larger political communities were built under the rule of some
powerfulbaron, prince or king. The modern state is not the outcome
of a preciseplan but the result of endless struggles among feudal
chiefdoms. Eliassays that the main features of the transformation
process can be de-scribed as follows: the territorial property of
one warrior family, its con-trol of certain lands and its claim to
tithes or services of various kindsfrom the people living on this
land, is transformed with the advancingdivision of functions and in
the course of numerous struggles, into a cen-tralized control of
military power and of regular duties or taxes over afar larger
area. Within this area no one may now use weapons and
forti-fication or physical violence of any kind without the central
rulers per-mission24. Under the pressure of competition social
functions becomemore and more differentiated; moreover the
centralization of politicalpower and the enlargement of the
territorial community were the crucialfactor allowing for a more
accurate and efficient organisation of socialfunctions: individuals
learnt to control, from their earliest years, their be-haviour in a
more autonomous and automatic way.
It was this social, cultural and political transformation that
pavedthe way for the industrial revolution, which originated in
England butsoon spread across continental Europe and the world. A
new higher de-gree of cooperation was now possible, because civil
society and themarket became two aspects of human behaviour
relatively independ-ent of political power. Adam Smith was able to
state: the division oflabour is limited by the extent of the
market, one of the fundamentallaws of a new social science,
political economy. Since then, social sci-entists and philosophers
developed theories and models explaining thecomplex and many-sided
mechanisms of human society.
The development of institutions. Institutions keep modern
societytogether: the family, the firm, the market, the sports club,
the church,the state, etc. are institutions. The philosopher John
Searle producedthe most convincing explanation of this clue
concerning human so-cieties. Language is the basis of all
institutions. You can have a so-ciety that has language says Searle
but does not have governments,private property, or money. But you
cannot have a society that hasgovernment, private property, and
money, but does not have a lan-
24 N. ELIAS, ber den Prozess der Zivilisation, vol. II,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 19802;Engl. transl. The Civilizing Process.
State Formation and Civilization, Oxford, Blackwell,1982, p.
202.
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25 J. R. SEARLE, Making the Social World. The Structure of Human
Civilization, Ox-ford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 62.
26 J. R. SEARLE, Making the Social World, cit., p. 86.27 G. M.
HODGSON, What are Institutions?, in Journal of Economic Issues,
vol. XL,
n. 1, March 2006, p. 18.
guage25. This distinctive quality of language to create
institutions ispossible because individuals communicate intentional
states, which arealways about, or refer to, something: intentional
states are about realityand a certain statement can be true or
false. Therefore we can say that in-dividuals communicate in order
to describe the world as it is or to makecommitments. An essential
feature of language, says Searle, is that itnecessarily involves
social commitments, and that the necessity of thesesocial
commitments derives from the social character of the communi-cation
situation. To be more precise, language has a deontological pow-er:
it can create obligations when these obligations are socially
recog-nized. In such a case we have an institution. If during a
public ceremo-ny somebody says: you Mrs X and Mr Y are married new
mutual ob-ligations are created. A certain piece of paper counts as
50 in the Eu-ropean Union because the European Union has the power
to issue papermoney and the European citizens believe that with
this piece of moneythey can buy a certain amount of goods and
services. In human lan-guages says Searle we have the capacity not
only to represent reali-ty, both how it is and how we want to make
it be, but we also have thecapacity to create a new reality by
representing that reality as existing.We create private property,
money, government, marriage, and a thou-sand other phenomena by
representing them as existing26.
Concerning the topic of this paper, we need to distinguish
twokinds of institutions. There are institutions such as money, the
market,common law, the village, etc., which allow for better
coordination ofhuman action without a specific authority with
organisational power:the rules can derive from tradition or from an
external power, such asthe government. But there are other
institutions for instance tradeunions, firms, political parties,
the state which can work properly on-ly with a specific
organisation. Organizations says Hodgson arespecial institutions
that involve (a) criteria to establish their boundariesand to
distinguish their members from non-members, (b) principles
ofsovereignty concerning who is in charge, and (c) chains of
commanddelineating responsibilities within the organization27. Let
us now seehow the nation state differs from other
organisations.
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The nation state and nationalism. The nation state is an
organisa-tion, but it is an organisation with peculiar features. A
firm, a tennisclub, a political party have some power over their
members, but thispower is limited by their statute and external
laws. On the contrary, thenation state has some power over their
subjects or citizens limited bythe constitution or by internal
legislation, but towards other nationstates it has unlimited
sovereign power to employ military force todecide international
controversies.
A comparison with the archaic state can help to explain the
featuresof the modern state. Francis Fukuyama, in his careful
reconstruction ofthe origins of the archaic states, says: The
founding myths of the Greek,Roman, Hindu, and Chinese states all
trace the regimes ancestry backto a divinity; or at least to a
semidivine hero. Political power in earlystates cannot be
understood apart from the religious rituals that the
rulercontrolled and used to legitimate his power28. The same
statement istrue for the Incas, Maya and Aztec empires. Religion
legitimated a su-perhuman power of the ruler over the life and
death of their subjects. Butthe archaic states in actual fact had
no international problems: for in-stance no significant relations
existed between the Roman and the Chi-nese empires. The archaic
state was by and large a global state.
Very different is the cultural context in which the nation state
wasbuilt. The transition to the modern state was characterized by
the sec-ularization of political culture. Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Locke, Mon-tesquieu and all the philosophers of the Enlightenment
worked outdoctrines and theories to explain that the state is a
human institutionand that its power cannot be based on divine
right, but on the will ofthe people. Over these centuries the great
modern ideologies of libe-ralism, democracy and, later on, of
socialism were shaped. At a certainpoint and very likely the
turning point was the French Revolution the legitimating principle
of the Monarchy by divine right was substi-tuted by the principle
of the sovereignty of the people. Sieys, inQuest-ce que le Tiers
Etat? says: The Third State constitutes a com-plete nation. The
historian Nora states: At the very beginning of theRevolution the
Ancien Rgime was refused and replaced by the nation,a new kind of
state was born29.
28 F. FUKUYAMA, The Origins of Political Order. From Prehuman
Times to the FrenchRevolution, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011, p. 88.
29 P. NORA, Nation, in F. FURET, M. OZOUF, Dictionnaire critique
de la RvolutionFranaise, Paris, Flammarion, pp. 801-12, p. 803. In
the same page Nora says: Ds le
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moment o les Etats gnraux rejettent lappelation qui le dsigne
depuis des sicles etdbordent les raisons limites qui avaient motiv
leur convocation, la rupture est faite avecce quon allait appeler
dans lt lAncien Rgime, et la Nation est ne.
30 T. H. ERIKSEN, Ethnicity and Nationalism. Anthropological
Perspectives, London,Pluto Press, 1993, says: A nationalist
ideology is an ethnic ideology which demands astate on behalf of
the ethnic group. However, in practice the distinction can be
highly prob-lematic (p. 118). And he concludes: ethnicity does not
necessarily arise from moderni-ty, and it is not necessarily an end
product. (p. 158).
31 Saying quoted in W. CONNOR, A Nation is a Nation, is a State,
is an Ethnic Group,is a, in J. HUTCHINSON & A. D. SMITH (eds),
Nationalism, pp. 36-46.
The amazing success of the nation state formula is not an
excusefor not examining critically a political thinking according
to which anational people and a state should coincide. If we
consider the mem-bers of the UN it is difficult to find a pure
example of nation state. Ifone of the tenets of a nation state is
the sharing of the same languagewe see that some states, like
Switzerland, Canada, India, are multilin-gual; on the other hand
the same language, such as English or Germanis spoken in different
nation states. A national people sharing the sameculture can be
considered an ethnic group; but as Elias showed dur-ing the process
of civilization a certain king subjugated several feudallords
building a multiethnic kingdom, not a nation. The French case isa
good example of a specific local culture and language, which
wereimposed to conquered populations. Though someone may
maintainthat ethnicity is always at the root of a nation30, the
real problem is toexplain why a certain culture becomes the
dominant culture. The oth-er criteria identifying the nation, such
as a common history and a com-mon race are more groundless; in fact
they are founded on myths. Anold European saying states: A nation
is a group of people united by acommon error about their ancestry
and a common dislike of theirneighbours31.
In effect, the task of the social scientist is to understand why
agroup of people shares a common error. It is impossible to explain
whatis a nation state without taking into account the concept of
ideology,not only as a political thinking, but also as a political
thinking includ-ing some false statements. Mario Albertini defines
nationalism as theideology of the sovereign, bureaucratic and
centralized state. The na-tion state has the power to demand
supreme loyalty from its subjects.Indeed the national value holds
the first place along the scale of peo-ples values the nation state
is an organisation which demands itsmembers to kill and to die (and
therefore it cannot survive without an
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ideology which places the interest of the group above the life
of its in-dividual members)32. There is a religious aspect of
nationalism asthe symbol of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier shows
which de-picts the nation as a sacred community.
As an organisation based on peoples sovereignty, the nation
statehad to conflate with liberalism, democracy and socialism.
Indeed thenation state was the institutional container which
facilitated the devel-opment of human rights, universal suffrage
and the welfare state.Forced to incorporate these values, political
power was domesticatedwithin the nation state. But political power
remained savage outside.The nation state is the champion of state
sovereignty and of the in-ternational system founded on the
Westphalia paradigm. According tonationalism, humans are by nature
divided into nations and the contro-versies among them, in the last
resort, are settled by war. Indeed it is inthe international arena
that the raison dtat shows the feral nature ofhuman beings. As
Meinecke observes: Striving for power is an abo-riginal human
impulse, perhaps even an animal impulse, which blindlysnatches at
everything around until it comes up against some
externalbarriers33. When, during the 19th century, the national
market becametoo small for the development of national economic and
military pow-er, the nation state looked for extra-national spaces,
in Europe and inother continents. Colonialism, imperialism and two
world wars werethe methods utilized by the European nation states
to integrate otherpeoples. Is nationalism a human universal? Being
a modern ideology34it was not a human universal. Today as each
people wants to become anation and to have a state, it is a human
universal35. For the future, itwill remain a human universal only
if it agrees to settle internationalcontroversies through
cosmopolitan laws and not by military force.
32 M. ALBERTINI, Lo stato nazionale, Milano, Giuffr, 1960, p.
132; now in Tutti gliscritti, (ed. N. Mosconi), vol. III, Bologna,
Il Mulino, p. 260. Unfortunately Albertinisbook was never published
in English and so the English speaking scholars are more fa-miliar
with the analysis of nationalism worked out by E. Gellner, B.
Anderson, A. Smithand E. Hobsbawn, though M. Albertini was the
first scholar to provide a scientific analy-sis of nationalism as
the ideology of the nation state.
33 F. MEINECKE, Machiavelism, cit., p. 4.34 A. H. BIRCH,
Nationalism and National Integration (London, Unwin, 1989)
says:
Humanity is not naturally divided into nations nations are
relatively recent and rela-tively artificial creations (p. 8).
35 E. WILSON, Consilience, cit., says: Territorial expansion and
defense by tribes andtheir modern equivalents the nation state is a
cultural universal, p. 188.
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36 J. MONNET, Les Etats-Unis dEurope ont commenc, Paris, Robert
Laffont, 1955,p. 53.
Now we should see how it is possible to build external barriers
tonation state power and reconcile Ethos and Kratos.
4. European integration, the supranational state and
cosmopolitism
European integration sheds some light on the previous question.
Na-tional integration creates the so-called national affinity, i.e.
a citizen-ship based on exclusive loyalty to national government
and rules, thanksto the adoption of a national language, compulsory
(up to a few decadesago) military service, a national system of
education, etc. European inte-gration is the effort to integrate
different national peoples, without sub-merging their national
identity into a new national European identity. TheEuropean
treaties state: citizenship of the Union shall be additional toand
not replace a national citizenship. European citizenship is a
multi-level and non-exclusive form of political loyalty. The
European Union isan organisation of states and citizens endowed
with the power necessaryto achieve some common goals, such as a
peaceful coexistence, an inter-nal market, a monetary union, a
common foreign and security policy, etc.
The European Union is a supranational organisation. A
comparisonwith an international organisation, the United Nations,
can be useful.The main goal of the UN is to increase international
cooperation in or-der to preserve peace, to prevent aggression, to
encourage the respectof human rights, of international justice,
etc. The functioning of the UNorganisation is based on the
principle of the sovereign equality of allits members. But this
principle was infringed by the creation of a Se-curity Council,
with five permanent members endowed with a vetoright. The five
members of the Security Council are obviously moreimportant than
the others. Strictly speaking the sovereign of the UNis a group of
five countries: in the last resort, international cooperationwithin
the UN is based on the hegemonic principle and military force.
On the contrary, the EU achieves its ends by means of limited,
buteffective power, which the member states confer to the Union:
the EUis not based on the hegemonic principle and military force.
In 1955Jean Monnet so explained the functioning of the European
Coal andSteel Community: The sovereign powers are conferred to
common in-stitutions which set up the first federal organisation of
Europe36.
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The first competences conferred to the ECSC were limited to the
or-ganisation of the coal and steel market, and the Haute Autorit
had thepower to fix prices, to tax, to manage a budget: it was a
supranationalexecutive accountable to a Parliamentary Assembly and
a Council ofnational ministers. A Court of Justice assured the
compliance of Euro-pean law by member states. Since then, the
competences of the Euro-pean Union have greatly increased: now
there is an internal market for27 states, a monetary union for 17
states, a small European budgetwhich finances the agricultural
policy, the regional policy, the researchand development policy,
etc. Briefly the supranational methods allowfor more efficient
cooperation among the member states because, whenthe competences
are conferred to the EU, the Commission can becomea government of
the Union and the two chambers the EuropeanParliament and the
Council co-legislate. According to European jar-gon this
decision-making method is called communitarian. JeanMonnet would
probably have called it federal.
The real and confusing problem is that there is a second
Europeworking alongside the core federal Europe. Concerning the
compe-tences not conferred to the Union, such as taxation and
defence poli-cies, the decision-making method is (almost)
intergovernmental: everynational government maintains a veto right.
There is a supranationalEurope and an international Europe which
sometimes conflict.
Now lets see how, thanks to supranational institutions, it was
pos-sible to provide some crucial European public goods to the
citizens ofthe European Union. The first major public good provided
was the in-ternal market, whose construction started with the Rome
Treaties(1957), when a custom union was set up and the tariffs on
inter-Euro-pean trade were abolished. The second stage was
performed with theSingle European Act (1986) when all physical
barriers to the free cir-culation of persons, commodities, services
and capitals were removed.This process is is still going on,
because some important sectors, suchas energy, are under the
control of national governments, but one cansay that Europeans
lived through some dangerous dysfunctional equi-libria37 that
existed in pre-war Europe. The first dysfunctional equilib-
37 F. Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order, cit.,
describes a dysfunctional equi-librium as an institution or a
system of institutions which cannot evolve towards a moreefficient
institutional set up. The ability of societies to innovate
institutionally saysFukuyama depends on whether they can neutralize
existing political stakeholders ve-toes over reform (p. 456).
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rium was the warlike mood of European nation states. The
creation ofthe internal market thanks to the regulating power of
the Commis-sion and of the enforcing power of the Court of Justice
was substan-tial not only for the stimulation of growth and
welfare, but also to per-suade citizens and politicians that a new
war among Europeans wasnonsense. Peace in Europe is a by-product of
economic integration.
The second dysfunctional equilibrium removed by the
EuropeanUnion was the monetary division of Europe. The success of
the Com-mon Market was based on the Bretton Woods agreements
establishingfixed rates of exchange among the European currencies
and the dollar.After the break down of the monetary system, in
1971, the project ofthe Common Market the industrial and the
agricultural markets wasseriously endangered: floating currencies
caused the fall of intra-Eu-ropean trade, unemployment, inflation
and huge public debts. In 1979,the European governments attempted
to stop the threat of floating cur-rencies by creating the European
Monetary System, an island of sta-bility within an instable world
currency system. This imperfect device,after the fall of the Berlin
Wall and German unity, was replaced by astraightforward Monetary
Union. In 2002 European citizens were ableto utilize a continental
currency, without frontiers. But the MaastrichtTreaty (1991) was a
clumsy compromise: the Monetary Union was setup without an Economic
Union, a Fiscal Union and a federal govern-ment. It was very easy
to foretell that the construction was too weak toface the new
global economic and political challenges.
The financial crisis erupted in the USA and hit Europe in 2008.
TheEU, owing to its small budget, was unable to launch a recovery
plan, asthe US federal government did. National governments were
obliged toincrease their debts to save the banking system and to
provide nationalrecovery plans. This was only the first part of the
European tragedy. Thesecond act started with the Greek crisis,
caused by an accountabilityfraud and an exorbitant indebtedness.
The German government reactedharshly threatening the expulsion of
Greece from the Monetary Union.At that point, international finance
understood that the unity of the eu-ro-zone was at risk and that
every country was responsible for the re-imbursement of its own
debt. Other states excessively indebted, such asIreland, Spain,
Portugal and Italy were obliged to pay increasing andunsustainable
rates of interest. In 2011, the survival of the MonetaryUnion was
in doubt. At last, in December 2011, a fiscal compact wasagreed
among 25 governments of the Union: a Fund to help memberstates in
financial distress was provided on condition that severe rules
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for restraining national deficits and excessive debt are
observed. Europeis perhaps getting over the third dysfunctional
equilibrium.
EU is a work in progress. Even if a Fiscal Union is on the
assem-bly line two other dysfunctional equlibria loom on the
horizon of Eu-ropean politics: European democracy and European
foreign and secu-rity policy. European democracy is a problem that
cannot be side-stepped any longer. In 1979, the European Parliament
was directlyelected by the citizens, but it was not able to become
the engine of EUpolicies and institutional reforms: the European
parties have little cloutand the Commission is more accountable to
national governments thanto the European Parliament. However the
creation of a Fiscal Union which implies severe EU intrusions on
national budgets is not possi-ble without involving the citizens in
the democratic control of the EU:a federal government accountable
to the European Parliament and theCouncil should be set up. This
step will be carried out with great diffi-culties, owing to the
lack of bold pro-Europeans politicians.
It will be much more difficult to find a clear response to the
prob-lem of where Europe will stand in the new multipolar world.
What willbe the basic idea the EU will propose to other people in
order to or-ganise a peaceful and cooperative world?
The answer to this question is included in the supranational
featureof European institutions. As Jean Monnet said, the model of
the fede-ral state inspired the creation of European institutions.
Since then theEuropean nation states were obliged to support the
European projectand more and more competences were removed from the
nation statesand entrusted to the EU. Now, one can uphold that the
European Unionis a kind of supranational state38. The concept of
state adopted herehas a more general meaning than Webers definition
of the state as amonopoly of the legitimate use of force. Security
is a public good and,like every public good, it can be provided by
a coercive power (a le-gitimate government). By state we mean a
legitimate government co-operating peacefully with other
governments and endowed with the co-ercive power necessary to
provide certain public goods. Someonecould say that the internal
market, the monetary union and the fiscalunion are European public
goods, but that the most important publicgood, security, is still
in the hands of national governments which con-trol police and
military force. This observation is correct, but it should
38 I discussed this point of view in G. MONTANI, Lo stato
sovranazionale. Ordine coo-perativo e ordine coercitivo
nellesperienza europea, in Il Politico, n. 2, 2010, pp. 27-52.
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be noticed that we are now trying out a further phase of the
civilizingprocess studied by Elias. The modern state was based on a
peacefulcivil society: the coercive military force at the disposal
of a legitimategovernment was crucial for the provision of other
public goods, suchas property rights, free speech, etc. Europe was
able to achieve a peace-ful coexistence among its member states
with other means. Historicalcircumstances compelled Europe to
follow this path. Social scientistsshould accept that the way to
build a supranational state may differfrom the way followed in the
past to build the nation state.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break down of the USSR,
thedownsizing of the USA as a superpower caused by the emergence
ofnew global players, such as China, India and Brazil, the history
of Eu-ropean integration has taken on a new meaning. During the
Cold War,European integration was considered nothing but a device
for coordi-nating national policies within the US hegemonic area.
Today a newmultipolar world is developing at a brisk pace. Citizens
and govern-ments must face new challenges: global financial and
economic insta-bility, international migrations, regional wars,
nuclear proliferation,terrorism and, last but not least, a global
environmental disaster thatmight end the life of the human species
on Earth. The process of Eu-ropean integration, with its
supranational features, is becoming a mod-el that can be followed
for the solution of global problems as well. Thefuture of a
multipolar system can be either the clash of civilizations andgreat
powers or a world cooperative system, with institutions provid-ing
global public goods, such as peace, international justice and
eco-logically sustainable development. In a few words, European
integra-tion can be considered a workshop for the reforming of the
worlds in-stitutions of cooperation, created at the end of WWII.
Humankind isbecoming a community of fate and the European Union can
be lookedupon as a regional experiment for the democratic
organization of thefuture cosmopolitan community of nation
states.
5. Cosmopolitan federalismUnfortunately the debate on the
relationship between European in-
tegration and cosmopolitanism is blurred by the uncertain status
of theEU, which is not a League of Nations and not yet a
federation. Philoso-phers and political scientists can therefore
maintain that, as Will Kym-licka says: Many of our most important
moral principles should be
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cosmopolitan in scope e.g., principles of human rights,
democracy,and environmental protection and we should seek to
promote theseideals internationally. But our democratic citizenship
is, and will re-main for the foreseeable future, national in
scope39. We have seen thatdemocratic citizenship and other ideals
cannot be trapped withinthe nation state borders because all human
beings can share the idealsof political equality, human rights and
environmental protection. Theseideals cannot be promoted only by
international institutions. The fed-eral state is the appropriate
institutional model to realize them, withinthe nation state and
among the nation states. In our century we can andmust develop a
policy to build a cosmopolitan democracy inhabited bycitizens of
the world (kosmopolits).
Lets consider the climax of the nationalist age, the decades
beforethe outburst of WWI. The national governments of the Great
EuropeanPowers were engaged in imperial wars, fighting over a piece
of landoutside Europe. In Europe they incited their people to hate
their neigh-bours. The good national citizen had to be first of all
a good soldier.Now look at Europe today: the same national peoples
have electedtheir representatives in the European parliament, where
they can de-bate common problems, decide common policies and take
part, withtheir national governments, in the improvement of
European institu-tions. They discuss these problems in a common
language, usuallyEnglish, and their stance and resolutions have a
real impact on the dai-ly life of their countrymen. The EU does not
yet have a federal gov-ernment, but the European democratic deficit
can be overcome by theincoming institutional reforms.
The substitution, among European peoples, of wars, trenches
anddeath camps with a common Parliament is not an exclusive
Europeanvirtue. Every people can do the same. An interesting
empirical researchcarried out by a team of evolutionary
psychologists on the role of cul-ture in early social cognition, in
Peru, India and Canada, reaches thefollowing conclusions: Organisms
inherit their environments as muchas they inherit their genes. In
the case of humans, the genomes ofindividuals cannot expect any
particular constructed environment.Human beings must be equipped
with whatever skills are necessary forbecoming competent members of
whatever culture they are born into. basic social-cognitive skills
as imitation, joint attention, and com-
39 W. KYMLICKA, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization, in G. W.
BROWN, D. HELD(eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, cit., p. 443.
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40 T. CALLAGHAN, H. MOLL, H. RAKOCZY, F. WARNEKEN, U. LISZWOSKI,
T. BEHNE, M.TOMASELLO, Early Social Cognition in Three Cultural
Contexts, Monographs of the Soci-ety for Reasearch in Child
Development, Serial n. 2999, vol. 76, n. 2, 2011, p. 114.
munication by pointing are things that humans do in unique ways
andthat, generalizing from the current data, they begin to do at
roughly thesame developmental period universally across cultural
contexts. Theyare skills that humans have evolved for functioning
in their self-builtcultural worlds40. If these findings are
correct, the difference betweenan ethnic culture and a national
culture is only the degree of complex-ity due to the different
history of the peoples, including of course thecreation of the
nation state, which was able to impose a dominant cul-ture.
However, in Europe, the integration process among nation
statesshows not only that some competences were transferred from
the na-tional government to the EU, but also that a few
competences, espe-cially regional customs, finance, welfare
services and sometimes languages, are claimed by local governments.
Briefly, a multi levelkind of government, the federal model, is the
proper answer for amultinational and multicultural society.
What is possible in Europe today can become a reality in the
worldof tomorrow. Humanity is becoming a community of fate.
Dramaticglobal challenges are shaping a global society: the
instability of the fi-nancial and monetary global system, the gap
between poor and wealthypeoples, the proliferation of mass
destruction weapons, national ter-rorism and the risk of an
irreversible ecological crisis. International re-alism tries to
answer these problems with the so-called state-centric ap-proach:
intergovernmental cooperation, when possible and war, if thelatter
fails. Yet there is a more effective alternative: building
suprana-tional institutions. This point of view is usually ignored
by social sci-entists when they propose plans to policy-makers for
the reform of theinternational political and economic order because
it is necessary toabandon the fetish of national sovereignty. This
is an error. Lets con-sider the crucial idea of peoples
sovereignty, before it was confusedwith national sovereignty. John
Locke in The Second Treatise of Gov-ernment says that political
power: is that power which every man,having in the state of Nature,
has given up into the hands of the socie-ty, and therein to the
governours to the preservation of himself andthe rest of mankind (
171). The state so constituted is nothing butthe consent of any
number of freemen capable of a majority to uniteand incorporate
into such a society. ( 99). Therefore any reasonable
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individual can freely decide to take part in the political
community; nonational identity is required. If one of the fathers
of modern politicaltheory upheld that the scope of the government
is the preservation ofthe lives, liberties and possessions of all
humans, why is it so diffi-cult nowdays to imagine a plan to
transfer some power from nationalto supranational institutions? The
answer is certainly not plain and sim-ple, since in some countries
nation building is the prevailing issue, notsupranational
integration. But in many continents Africa, LatinAmerica and Asia
regional supranational integration is a chance andin the world
society the industrialized countries have the duty, not on-ly the
possibility, to reform and democratize the institutions already
inexistence, first of all the UN institutions41. Therefore the
simplest an-swer to our problem is that the fetish of national
sovereignty is todaythe ideological fig leaf for the conservation
of privileges and rents ofnational rulers. Today the citizens of
many nation states elect parlia-ments and governments, which do not
have the power to face globalproblems, including the fundamental
problem of preserving the livesof their citizens. The nation state
is the Procustean bed of democracy.
To conclude, national democracy is in crisis because more
andmore problems are global and require a global solution. Global
supra-national institutions are the appropriate answer. But this
new phase ofthe civilizing process can be covered only if
cosmopolitan federalismand cosmopolitan democracy go along pari
passu.
41 Some supranational proposals are worked out in R. FIORENTINI,
G. MONTANI, TheNew Global Political Economy. From Crisis to
Supranational Integration, Cheltenham,Edward Elgar, 2012.
Abstract - One key issue bound up withthe cultural changes
prompted by globaliza-tion is the relationship between
nationalismand cosmopolitism. This paper explores thenotion of
human nature to look at why, thoughpeople feel more sympathy for
their neigh-bours, this sympathy does not prevent themfrom
belonging to a wider political communi-ty. Scholars of
international relations shouldconsider the present experience of
Europeanintegration carefully. After WWII, thanks tosupranational
institutions, Europe managed toovercome the main contradictions
betweennationalism and cosmopolitism. National sov-
ereignties can and must be pooled in com-mon supranational
institutions. In a system ofsovereign nation states nationalism and
cos-mopolitism are necessarily at odds; in a feder-al system
national identity is compatible witha cosmopolitan identity. The
essay concludesthat national democracy and the nation stateare in
crisis because more and more problemsare now global, and require a
global solution.Global supranational institutions are the an-swer.
This new phase of civilization can onlybe achieved if cosmopolitan
federalism andcosmopolitan democracy proceed pari passu.Human
nature is not an obstacle.