Political Community Beyond the Sovereign State, Supranational Federalism, and Transnational Minorities

Abstract

Abstract A cosmopolitan perspective needs not only a conception of global identities and global governance, but also of forms of political community beyond state borders. We can imagine the relations between political communities within a larger supranational context in four different ways: as separate, nested, multilevel or overlapping. The Hobbesian paradigm in international relations imagines sovereign states as separate communities; Kant’s vision of eternal peace promoted a confederation of free republics; the EU moves towards a regional model of multi-level governance and citizenship. These three ways of constructing a political community beyond the state, use existing state-based polities as building blocks for the larger structure. This is different from the transnational minorities whose political membership or aspirations for self-government cut across the boundaries of state-based communities. I discuss three types of such groups: trans border national minorities, indigenous minorities and immigrant minorities.