Cosmopolitanism and Liberal Universalism in International Relations Theory: Moralising Politics or Politicising Ethics?

Abstract

Mapping out the constellation between liberal universalism, cosmopolitanism and International Relations (IR) theory, the following works explicitly politicise the ethics of contemporary cosmopolitanism, thereby responding to the criticism that cosmopolitan theory offers little more than a moralisation of politics. In a series of sustained engagements with IR�s major theoretical perspectives, the following books explore the ways in which conventional and alternative perspectives explain the origins, prospects and limits of a modern cosmopolitan view of world politics. Through an examination of recent work by Richard Beardsworth, Gideon Baker and John M. Hobson, this review highlights an emerging dialogue between cosmopolitanism and IR. In different ways, and with different implications for IR, the following works develop a theoretically rigorous account of and response to three distinct yet interrelated criticisms against modern cosmopolitanism: the critique of liberal universalism; the charge of impractical idealism; and lastly, the alleged Eurocentric and imperialist legacy of modern cosmopolitanism. Taken as a whole, these books thus pose an interesting challenge, both to mainstream and critical IR: to what extent can mainstream and peripheral perspectives account for and respond to the specifically modern framing of �the cosmopolitical?�1 To be sure, IR and cosmopolitanism may seem like odd bedfellows; these terms seem incompatible if not antonymous. At first, a discipline so fixated with the tragic realities of world politics would seem to offer little to an ethics of cosmopolitanism. However, directly or indirectly, the discipline of IR has been in conversation with (or in a backlash against) a cosmopolitan worldview since its inception in the early 20th century. Richard Beardsworth�s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (2011), a profound exploration of the relation between cosmopolitanism and IR, argues that despite �constituting distinct ways of theorizing the world, cosmopolitanism and IR are necessarily talking to each other because they are �