Conclusion: Parliament of the Cosmonation

Abstract

The development of the cosmonational parliament as a model of global governance has been in the making for many years, a result of the dispersion of the national population through colonialism, migration, and the establishment of diasporic communities. Until World War II, the appropriate conditions for its rise as a formal and constitutional organ of the state were yet to be set in place. The imperial parliament as a model of global governance, however, was restricted in its activities to territories under its jurisdiction.¹ Although the imperial parliament expanded its sphere of influence beyond locality to reach people in faraway lands, and despite its crossfrontier territorial deployment, this model does not meet the characteristics of the cosmonational parliament, which also entails the governance of groups of people living outside the boundaries of territories of the state. The imperial parliament model was not cosmonational because its legislative activities were confined to the homeland and territorial colonies, and the relations between the former and the latter were set to be unequal by design. The cosmonational parliament is a different kind of a cross-border institution.