One hundred sixty thousand. That’s how many refugees Sweden welcomed in 2015, more per capita than any other country in Europe. And for many Swedes, this was a point of pride.
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven declared, “My Europe doesn’t build walls. ” But it wasn’t long before the welcome soured. There wasn’t enough housing.
And with the unemployment rate three times higher among immigrants than Swedish-born residents, many worried about a strain on the country’s resources. By 2022, less than half of Swedes thought immigration made their country a better place to live. I remember watching this play out, and it made me wonder.
What do we owe each other? And do our obligations extend only to those geographically close to us? Or do they extend to everyone, everywhere?
I'm Ellie Anderson and this is Crash Course Political Theory. [THEME MUSIC] I like to think of myself as a “global citizen. ” I care about what’s going on in the world; I check world news every day, and advocate for international coalitions like the UN.
Oh, and I watch every international version of the Ultimatum: Marry or Move On. What, that doesn’t count? At the same time, I try to buy local products and support my local communities.
And I grew up with this slogan imprinted on my brain. But as I follow the news, I’ve seen a pattern emerge. This contrast between paying attention to global crises versus what’s going on close to home seems to be at the core of a lot of political strain today.
It turns out, this tension between local and global is nothing new. Back in ancient Greece, where you lived was who you were. To be Spartan or Athenian was as defining as, say, living in Brooklyn is today.
Socrates thought the worst punishment wasn’t death or prison, but exile. That started to shift in the fourth century BCE, when the philosopher Diogenes described himself as a “citizen of the world,” not beholden to the authority of any specific place. Basically, Diogenes ran around Athens saying ‘you’re not the boss of me,’ even telling Alexander the Great “You’re blocking my sun.
” Bold to talk to a king that way, but okay. A few centuries later, followers of Roman stoic philosophy put their own spin on this idea that the “cosmos” — or the world — was their “polis” — or city-state. Being “cosmopolitan” meant being obligated to help people everywhere, simply because… they’re people.
If you study political philosophy in the West, you’ll learn that this idea was crystallized by eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. To Kant, cosmopolitanism meant that every rational person was part of a single, global community. He called it a “universal brotherhood.
” But I learned that, from around 1046 to 256 BCE, the Chinese practiced this idea under a different name: tianxia, which roughly translates to “all under heaven. ” Tied to Confucianism, this concept emphasizes hospitality over hostility and relationships with others over the individual. But while the idea of caring about each other in a “we are the world” kind of way sounds pretty great, the applications of cosmopolitanism are often less about morality and more about political interests.
To go back to Kant for a sec, he thought of humans as mostly imperfect creatures who act in our own selfish interests. And because we know that, we can be wary of others, which can create conflict and make us what he called “unsociable by nature. ” At the same time, we seek out other people’s company, form bonds with them — so we’re also deeply social by nature.
Kant called this unsocial sociability which: let’s be honest, deeply relatable. But Kant argued we don’t overcome our unsociability by being social. We’re social precisely because it advances our selfish interests.
Sort of like being forced to interact with a bunch of other women at a Malibu mansion so you can ultimately vie for a future fiancé. In other words, sociability is the key to peace, and peace is the key to doing our own thing. Oh yeah, we’re getting into the capital-B Big stuff.
World peace. I’m gonna need some caffeination for this one. [whispers] Thank you.
[Heavenly choir] So take unsocial sociability from the individual to the societal level, and you get Kant’s idea for world peace, which he thought was only possible through something called a “league of nations. ” If all nations agreed to respect the rights of each others’ citizens, Kant thought, this could bring us to the cosmopolitan condition— guaranteeing security and justice for all. From this idea, political cosmopolitanism was born— agreements between sovereign nation-states that, hopefully, make them a little less likely to go to war with each other, or at least more likely to play fair when war happens.
An actual League of Nations formed after World War I, as a forum for resolving international disputes. And later a whole slew of international alliances emerged, too. So I’m like, case closed, right?
We solved world peace! [Blows party kazoo] Obviously… not. War, conflict, genocide, and humanitarian crises persist.
We sociables keep doing unsociable things. So, what’s the deal? Well, think through this with me.
There are some practical challenges with global coalitions. Like, in a world of sovereign nations, who calls the shots? And what happens when the shot-callers go rogue?
Take the UN, for instance. Their fifteen-member Security Council has a lot of power. They can impose economic sanctions and authorize military intervention, all in the name of international peace.
They have five permanent members — all the victors of World War II — and those members can veto any measure. That means those five nations can all stop the security council from intervening in their own conflicts, like Russia’s war on Ukraine, or when the US and UK invaded Iraq in the 2000s. And think about this question: who gets a seat at the table when every single voice in the world can’t be represented?
I mean, is a world-governing body like the UN really representative when only 24% of the delegates are women? And what do we do about nation-states that benefit from agreements without doing their part? Countries that don’t sign a nuclear disarmament treaty get to watch their adversaries disarm while hanging on to their own weapons.
And by sitting it out, they can discourage other countries from signing, too. Like, “If they have nuclear weapons, I’m not giving up mine. ” Then there’s the question of actually enforcing things.
For the most part, global alliances only have the power of persuasion and influence— they can’t mete out consequences. That’s why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is merely a “Declaration. ” It doesn’t include consequences for breaking the rules.
Beyond the practical challenges, cosmopolitanism raises a whole host of moral and philosophical concerns. Just the idea of a world-governing body might make some suspicious of secretive factions, out to achieve a New World Order where some have dangerous power over others. There’s a reason “take over the world” is basically every movie villain’s end goal.
But most political theorists don’t think of cosmopolitanism in terms of creating an actual global government. It’s not a world-state start-up guide; it’s more like a lens for examining politics in an interconnected world. And that’s a useful lens to have, with the rise of globalization— the increased flow of trade, technology, people, and information that makes countries more interdependent.
Because of globalization, I can buy bananas in the dead of winter, or get the latest viral Korean sunscreen shipped to my door. But globalization also intensifies inequality, as companies lean on cheap labor in countries with weaker economies to maximize their profits. There’s much more on this in Crash Course Economics.
And since globalization also revs up the flow of ideas, it makes sense to wonder if it could expand human rights, too. Like, could globalization make the lives of women and migrants better? But even though expanding human rights seems like a no-brainer, it actually leads to one of the biggest critiques of cosmopolitanism.
What if enforcing a standard blueprint of human rights makes us lose what’s rich and particular about local communities? For instance, Saudi Arabia’s Muslim-majority government may disagree with what counts as violating human rights versus protecting cultural and religious practices. They could argue that the human rights promoted by international organizations like the UN were devised by primarily Western nations, who don’t have a full understanding of the cultures they’re regulating.
Defenders of cosmopolitanism would say that the goal isn’t global sameness. Instead, it’s taking one central idea— the equal worth of all humans —and using it as the starting point. So, I returned to that question about improving the lives of women and migrants.
Political scientist Niamh Reilly and other thinkers behind cosmopolitan feminism argue that we can achieve equality only if we critically engage with gender and race, and include the voices of people who hold less power. Even if a law is designed to promote the equality of women or migrants, it may not be effective if nobody asked them about their needs and experiences. And even if world-governing bodies have potential to do some good on a global scale, they still have to do it in a way that respects the local.
That’s the central tension: to keep peace and defend human rights everywhere, but still respect a culture’s freedom to do things their own way. To philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, cosmopolitanism really means “universality plus difference. ” He thinks being a citizen of the world means viewing cultural differences as a source of value, not conflict.
But it also means accepting the moral obligation to help people everywhere, simply because they’re people. Take this example from philosopher Peter Singer. If you saw a child drowning, you'd have an immediate moral duty to help them.
Right? So why isn't it the same with a child who’s starving on the other side of the world? Why is distance morally relevant, especially with modern technology?
This all led me to the big question: what would it look like to go all-in on cosmopolitanism? To view humans’ equal value as truth, and national borders as inventions? And after lots of research and thinking and enormous cups of coffee, I came to this conclusion: We don’t really know.
I know, that’s never the answer we want. But there are lots of different perspectives on how a cosmopolitan viewpoint should influence modern policy, including immigration, where we began this episode. Scholar Chandran Kukathas argues that freedom of movement is a human right.
When we deny people the freedom to move, we deny their ability to escape tyranny or injustice, to seek economic opportunity, or simply to live with the people they love. But he argues that it’s a neglected right in the modern world, where nation-states can grant rights and protections to people within their borders, and limit access to anyone outside them. At the end of the day, I learned that there are ways of being a “citizen of the world” that the Greeks and the Stoics and Kant never dreamed of.
But taking on that role requires us to ask ourselves, again and again, in new ways and under new circumstances, where do the boundaries of community lie? And what do I owe my fellow humans? Even without clear answers, these are questions worth asking.
Next time, we’ll talk about what the world might look like without prisons. See you then. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Political Theory which was filmed at the Basteel Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people.
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