A Cosmopolitan Nation?: Kant, Burke and the Question of Borders

Abstract

In his influential Nationalism (1960) Elie Kedourie casts Kant as the philosopher of nineteenth-century nationalism; in his equally influential Nations and Nationalism (1983), Ernest Gellner casts him, by contrast, as an eighteenth-century internationalist.¹ This divergence provides a useful frame for thinking about the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism at a crucial historical moment in modern European history. For both Kedourie and Gellner, Kant functions as a sort of shorthand for a number of ideas associated with eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, but the role he plays in each in relation to nationalism points to the instability of the idea of cosmopolitanism itself. Considered alternately as representative of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and as precursor to Romantic nationalism, Kant’s political philosophy has remained pivotal in recent attempts to theorize the nation: not only does he summarize much of eighteenth-century debate about cosmopolitanism in his work but his political thought also combines the cosmopolitan and the national to create a non-unified model of nation confounding those critical formulations that map the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in strictly oppositional terms.