The Troubled Cosmopolitan Present

Abstract

As Chapter One suggests, the last two decades have been an important period for the translation of cosmopolitan ethical commitments into the practice of foreign policy. Debates on humanitarian intervention, the R2P and human security have provided openings for practical expressions of transborder moral solidarity. Despite this apparent cosmopolitan moment, cosmopolitan ethics and ideas about human security have experienced a difficult encounter with liberal interventionism and the War on Terror in the early 21st century. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2011 Libya Intervention, illustrated the ways in which ethical discourses, similar in tone to cosmopolitanism, were deployed to support a trend of armed intervention by Western states. Cosmopolitanism, offensive liberalism and the War on Terror project are not a ‘joint enterprise’. However, emancipation, transborder moral solidarity, human rights protection and the language of human security, which are all significant concerns for cosmopolitans, have been invoked repeatedly as justification for warfighting operations and counterinsur-gency programmes. Both practices sit awkwardly with cosmopolitan security commitments.