Brexit, we’re told, is a crime against cosmopolitanism. It’s a revenge of ‘exclusionary tribalism’ against the ‘universal ethics, cosmopolitanism [and] solidarity’ embodied in the European Union. Where the EU and its cheerleaders are universally minded, thinking in broad, human terms, the EU’s critics, the Brexiteers, apparently represent ‘crabbed, cowed racism and xenophobia’; they represent the ‘populism and nativism that’s uniting the have-nots of Europe and America against the political establishment’. Brexit is a ‘primal scream’, says a writer for Newsweek; it is a victory of ‘nationalism over internationalism’, of ‘the less educated over the educated’. It is now the centrepiece, says the New Yorker, in a ‘worldwide revolt against cosmopolitan modernity’.
This has become the defining narrative of Brexit: that it represents, not simply a retreat into the nation state, which would apparently be bad enough, but a blow to the very Enlightenment ideals of universalism and global brotherhood. Even sympathetic accounts, which seek to understand rather than simply condemn this ‘primal scream’, accept the narrative of put-upon ‘provincial’ people striking against global institutions and cultures they do not understand. As one critic of the Remain campaign’s caricatures puts it, we’re expected to believe Brexiteers are ‘lumpen, ageing… socially excluded provincials’ — the ‘left behind’, as many call them — and that Remainers are ‘young, optimistic, educated supporters of progressive politics’.
This narrative must be challenged. Not simply for what it gets wrong about Brexiteers — many writers have done a good job of taking down the fact-lite, hate-heavy snobbery of leading Remainers — but also for its warping of the idea of cosmopolitanism; for its denigration of what it means to be universal. For far from representing the Enlightenment value of cosmopolitanism, the EU and those who support it embody a counter-Enlightenment outlook that has no understanding of the true nature or import of the universal. Indeed, their worldview runs explicitly counter to Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism. To Kant, cosmopolitanism was about recognising that all humans share a common capacity to reason, both to understand and to order the world, to govern history itself. To the new ‘cosmopolitans’, by stark contrast, globalised institutions and structures such as the EU are necessary precisely because the world is incomprehensible, and precisely because the citizen of the nation state lacks both the expertise and resources to withstand its pressures. That is, because the forces of history, separate from man apparently, sentient and strange, overpower us. The so-called cosmopolitanism of the new Euro-elites turns the ideal of universalism on its head through emptying it of its key component: common human subjectivity, and its capacity for knowing and ordering its surroundings.
Kant would not have recognised the cosmopolitanism of the Remain lobby and the Brussels elite. In his 1784 essay ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in which he proposed the idea of a ‘league of nations’, he emphasised the individual’s capacity for reason, and the power that might grow from the combined reason of mankind.
As ‘the only rational creatures on Earth’, men behave ‘not just instinctively’, he said; they also possess the capacity to be ‘rational citizens of the world’. His ideal of cosmopolitanism was one which both attested to and sought to expand the capacity of mankind to use his reason. He believed man’s ‘use of his reason’ could be ‘fully developed only in the race, not in the individual’. Where an individual human, unlike any other creature on Earth, has the capacity to go ‘beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and… partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason’, Kant believed that individuals acting on their reason together, across both generations and nations, could potentially create a ‘universal civic society’ that would allow for an even greater use of reason. Reason ‘requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another’, he said, and ‘therefore a single man would have to live excessively long in order to learn to make full use of all his natural capacities’. However, through the exercise of reason at the level of the race, both in terms of generations, ‘each of which passes its own enlightenment to its successor’, and of universal engagement, we might get closer to a form of social organisation in which ‘the capacities of mankind can be fully developed’, Kant wrote.
The so-called cosmopolitanism of the new Euro-elites turns the ideal of universalism on its head by emptying it of its key component: common human subjectivity
So at the very heart of Kant’s Enlightened view of cosmopolitanism, at the heart of his internationalism, was reason. What mankind ultimately shares, across borders, across classes, across generations, is a capacity for reason, he said, and the role of any kind of cosmopolitan society worth its name should be to create the conditions in which the use of this reason might be encouraged and further developed. That society would have to be a free one, said Kant, since it is only in choosing, trying and erring that men’s capacity for reason is revealed and improved upon. Kant’s view of a ‘universal civic society’ was a liberal one, since ‘the development of all the capacities which can be achieved by mankind is attainable only in society, and more specifically in the society with the greatest freedom’.
Contrast this to the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of those who support the EU, who juxtapose themselves to the ‘left behind’, who denounce Brexit as the ‘revenge of the nation’ and a declaration of war against the ideal of universalism. Their cosmopolitanism is built on the idea that man, at least ordinary man, lacks the capacity for reason, and that the world is beyond reasoned order anyway. And thus we require expert and global structures to shield us from the worst excesses of history and international circumstance. It is directly counter to Enlightened cosmopolitanism.
From Brussels itself down to the pro-EU political and media elites in nation states, the key justification made for the EU is that it acts as an institutional shield or mediator in disordered times. As one theorist says, global structures like the EU are necessary as a means of ‘preventing and reducing the negative and destabilising effects that globalisation and liberalisation inevitably entail’ (1). The authors of Global Democracy: Normative and Empirical Perspectives justify new global bodies as key contributors to ‘damage limitation’. Since ‘domestic issues are directly impacted upon by global forces or conditions’, it is necessary to have ‘institutional frameworks’ through which to mediate these forces and conditions. And, tellingly, they see the role of ‘local actors’ — that is, domestic national citizens — as one where they ‘participate in [this] regulation’: that is, they may administratively contribute to the mediation of global menace (2).
The European Commissioner for International Cooperation captures well what is meant by ‘internationalism’ today. ‘We live in a fragile world’, she says. ‘Through force of conflict, nature or economic meltdown, emergencies are becoming more frequent… Contagion can tear through the markets… Natural disasters are striking with greater frequency and severity… Population growth and urbanisation are compounding existing fragilities.’ (3) And the only way to deal with such powerful forces is through ‘new institutional architecture, new legal bases and new instruments’, pooled in global bodies like the EU. This allows us to ‘mobilise our collective assets’, she says. This is a favoured term of the Brussels elite: mobilising assets. Where once cosmopolitans called on man to use his reason to order, or reorder, the world, the new cosmopolitans demand the mobilisation of administration and expertise to offset the world’s existing and inevitable disorder. This depressing worldview is further emphasised in the 2008 European Security Strategy. This document captures well how the new elites view globalisation both as an opportunity — primarily in the economic realm — and a threat. Globalisation has ‘made threats more complicated and interconnected’, it says. It tellingly uses a biological metaphor to describe the threats facing man: the ‘arteries of our society’ are ‘vulnerable’ to various threats, including terrorism, it says (4). From this standpoint, individuals, far from being Kantian creatures capable of moving beyond ‘the mechanical ordering of [their] animal existence’, are effectively cells in a social body, requiring the doctor that is the Brussels oligarchy to protect them from harm, from ‘contagions’.
