Claudio Guillén and the Ethics of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

More than a decade ago, I by chance came across a ‘Letter to the Editor’ by Claudio Guillen in the Spanish newspaper El Pais. It was neither about literature nor about higher education, but about compulsory military service and the dangers of its elimination. At a time when Spain saw a transition from a conscript army to the volunteer professional army that we now have (and in which few are willing to serve), Guillen intervened in the public debate merely as a citizen, in order to remind us that the lack of commitment to the defence of collective interests implies an abandonment of responsibility to the state which makes it easier for politicians to make decisions against the will of the people: any government can go to war with less resistance if those who must fight represent a minority of the population, have a lower economic and educational status, and often do not have full citizenship rights. Guillen wrote from the experience and authority of someone who enlisted as a volunteer in the Free French Forces in the Second World War because, as the son of a Spanish exile and a French mother of Jewish background, he considered that war to be also his own, a continuation of the Civil War that expelled his family from his country, and that a cause was at stake that was worth fighting for. The central idea in Guillen’s letter to El Pais was that there is a time when one must respond as a member of