Cosmopolitan Democracy and Democratic Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the close connection between the principles of democracy and the cosmopolitan nature of international human rights. It constitutes a philosophical exploration. The word 'cosmopolitan' refers to the existence of an ethic that transcends national, communal, cultural, and civilizational boundaries. Literally it refers to citizens, not of any localized polity, but of the world. Globalization is not only economic. It is also ethical. Unlike many aspects of unfettered economic globalization, ethical globalization is a positive development in human history. It constitutes moral progress and serves as a counter-balancing agent to both economic globalization and ethnic tribalism (Ignatieff, 2001). The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of this ethic as it has emerged in terms of the articulation and institutionalization of international human rights. In principle, international human rights are not only consistent with the core ideals of democracy but they expand the scope of the egalitarian logic of democracy transnationally. This expansion, in turn, necessitates the development of a cosmopolitan theory of democratic education. Democracy is a system of rights premised upon the logic of equality (Dahl, 2000). At its core is a fundamental belief in moral equality, a belief that all human beings possess an equal inherent dignity or worth. Its logic runs as follows: if we are morally equal, then we also possess rights, inviolable claims to the actual enjoyment of particular social goods guaranteed by the society (Dahl, 2000; Shue, 1980). The two basic rights of a democracy are: the freedom to conceive and pursue one's own conception of the good life (consistent with the equal rights of others) and political self-determination. The right to self-determination entails the basic notion of government by consent, which involves the right to political and legal equality (including the right to representation) and concomitant rights such as rights to freedom of expression, association, due process, etc. As moral equals, all citizens of a liberal democracy have an inviolable claim to have their interests represented in the political process. In a world that has become highly interdependent, the boundaries of the nation-state have become very porous, rendering many fundamental decisions beyond the control of national governments and thus beyond the consent of the governed (Held, 1995). The underlying presupposition of this paper is that democracy can no longer be conceived as exclusively a national phenomenon but must be thought of as a cosmopolitan. It will be argued that this cosmopolitan conception is consistent with democracy as a moral and political ideal premised upon the logic of equality and that it demands a moral education whose fundamental purpose is the cultivation of authentic self-awareness.