I In search of perpetual peace In the final decades of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant set forth his now paradigmatic vision of what he called a ‘universal cosmopolitan condition’ among states, ‘a peaceful, if not yet friendly and universal community of all peoples on the earth who can come into active relations with one another’ (Kant, 2006: 146). Kant pointed out that all human beings share ‘the right of common possession of the surface of the earth’. Since humans ‘cannot scatter themselves on it without limit’, he reasoned, ‘they must . . . ultimately tolerate one another as neighbors’ (2006: 82). As a political project, then, Kant’s cosmopolitanism anticipates a kind of world citizenship within a federation of free and sovereign states, the first step toward the possibility of a ‘perpetual peace’ (see Linklater, 2002; Brock and Brighouse, 2005; Pojman, 2005). But Kant’s call to ‘tolerate one another as neighbors’ also suggests an ethical stance. From this perspective, cosmopolitanism would indicate a wider, spatially extensive sense of responsibility toward others, recognizing, as Kant did, that ‘the growing prevalence of a (narrower or wider) community among the peoples of the earth has reached a point at which the violation of right at any one place on the earth is felt in all places’ (Kant, 2006: 84). If Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal still resonates today, this is perhaps because Kant’s era was witness to the emergence, in nascent form, of the political and economic relationships that have come to characterize our own global modernity. Writing at the apogee of the mercantile trading system and on the cusp of the industrial revolution, Kant was able to capture both the challenges and the opportunities posed by a truly global community of nations, and to articulate the need thereby to rethink the grounds for political and ethical thought. To be sure, the challenges of developing such a global ethics are formidable. Writing in 1784, Kant lamented that ‘one cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men’s actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, even from childish malice and destructiveness’ (Kant, 1986: 250). If we reflect for a moment on our own contemporary condition, it is not difficult to identify sufficient folly, vanity and malice to wonder how far we have progressed over the past 200 years. Progress reports