Il passaporto del cittadino globale: prolusione per l'apertura dell'Anno Accademico 2019-2020, Luiss "Guido Carli"

This paper is the inaugural speech for the opening the Luiss academic year 2019-2020. It aims to discuss some critical issues in the globalisation of law in the wider context of cosmopolitanism. The paper aims to understand who the global citizen is today, emphasising that individuals hold rights and obligations in the framework of multiple legal orders that exist beyond States. These rights and obligations confer on single individuals a kind of administrative citizenship of the world; a sort of passport that leaves aside the indispensable contents of national citizenship (i.e., the right to vote and the duty to pay taxes), while fostering the cosmopolitan ideal of the universalism of rights. Yet, in the globalised world, the expansion of rights is not the outcome of a progressive process of dissemination and recognition of tolerance -as cosmopolitanism would require- but it is often the result of the settlement of conflicts among global players. The paper thus identifies three main interpreters of these conflicts and their possible mediation: courts; administrations; and politics. Hence, it critically analyses their (in-)ability to respond to global challenges embedded in the process of expansion of rights. Access to courts, the use of soft law as a means of administrative cooperation and the gaps in the EU citizenship regime are investigated as key examples of such problematic process.