Beyond the UN: a world federal government?

This chapter defends the case for a global extension of democracy by deploying a cosmopolitan argument. As a response to the current international political fragmentation, which generates political exclusion, the alternative political project offered here envisages a cosmo-federal system. In this, all world citizens are included within a scheme of direct representative participation under a federal authority that governs the process of democratising world affairs. The pursuit of the democratic ideal in terms of scope is thus implemented in this proposal through a reworked notion of citizenship as global, multilayered and all-inclusive. In essence, this entails an expansion of the domestic model of democracy to the international level, structured on several layers and coordinated through an overarching world system. Only through the radical project of stretching the paradigm of democratic inclusion to the extreme limits, encompassing the whole of mankind, as well as recognising the legitimacy of multiple political allegiances and not simply those of state governments, can the illegitimate mechanism of inclusion as exclusiongenerator be avoided. If the phenomenon of political exclusion is to be escaped, the crucial authority to define jurisdictional boundaries needs to be reallocated from groups with a circumscribed scope to a public democratic mechanism that is all-inclusive and global in kind. Hence, universal inclusion and multiple allegiances constitute key components of this project.