The Limits of Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of how to assess the trend towards increasing prominence for individual rights in the international sphere and the restricted interpretation of traditional rights of sovereign independence and self-government. Over the last decade, many leading international relations theorists have developed a cosmopolitan perspective, which sees current trends as benign or potentially positive.² Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan democracy and global governance, in which for the first time there is the possibility of global issues being addressed on the basis of new forms of democracy, derived from the universal rights of global citizens. They suggest that, rather than focus attention on the territorially-limited rights of the citizen at the level of the nationstate, more emphasis should be placed on extending democracy and human rights to the international sphere.