Popular Sovereignty or Cosmopolitan Democracy?

Abstract

Liberals have long disagreed about the nature and purposes of international reform. This article juxtaposes two recent research programmes that are premised on typically liberal assumptions and goals — democratic peace theory and the cosmopolitan democracy model. Two central claims are advanced. First, both of these liberal approaches are premised upon radically different depictions of Immanuel Kant's legacy — or at least what his legacy ought to mean to us today. These different conceptions of Kant's relevance suggest that his ambiguous status as a so-called `liberal' supports remarkably different forms of this ideology. Thus, Kant's legacy is not a neutral ground, but is rather a way in which older conflicts within liberalism are becoming reproduced in the post-Cold War era. The second argument is that the cosmopolitan democracy model is a superior vision of international reform because it transcends an anachronistic conception of `popular sovereignty' as the sole liberal means through which to produce freedom and peace.