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the historical contingency of the nation as the organising principle of political communities,
the death of nationalism as a normative principle of social integration, and the necessity of
cosmopolitan justice occasioned by new social and economic conditions. Against a seemingly
intransigent faith in the nation state, Habermas affirms the rationality of cosmopolitan
solidarity as a fulfilment of the enlightenment project. He declares his belief that, although the
universalistic elements of right were once swamped by the particularistic self-assertion of one
nation against another, they are nonetheless ‘best suited to the identity of world citizens, not
to that of citizens of a particular state that has to maintain itself against other states’. He
presents cosmopolitanism as the logical culmination of the principles of right on which
enlightenment was founded.
There is, however, another kind of response to be found in Habermas’ writings – one that is
perhaps closer to the mainstreams of contemporary cosmopolitanism. In this mode he argues
that the tension between national and cosmopolitan right is overstated and that respect for
constitutionally regulated processes of national politics can be reconciled with respect for the
authority of supra-national institutions. This outcome is possible if the rational content of a
nationally constituted political community enjoys substantial overlap with the rational content
of the cosmopolitan project, that is, if cosmopolitan institutions enforce the same principles of
justice as those that regulate politics at a national level. Only if cosmopolitan institutions
express radically different principles of justice from those that regulate politics at a national
level – if for example a nation state is based on ethnic principles and authorises major human
rights violations against a section of its own subjects – only then will the conditions for
conflict be acute. Habermas’ strategy is thus to look for reconciliation between national and
cosmopolitan institutions, supplemented by a justification of cosmopolitan violence where the
possibility of reconciliation is absent.
In the first argument Habermas presents cosmopolitanism as a successor to nationalism. He
concedes that nationalism might have had value in the past, for example, in the pursuit of
Convention