Cosmopolitanisms in Enlightenment Europe and Beyond

This collection of essays expands the focus of historical studies of international public law in modernity to include the novel insight of the cosmopolitan imagination's past and present force. Featuring a line-up of leading international scholars it argues that Europe has recurrently implemented legal cosmopolitanism at home and exported it abroad.

This volume offers critical, historical and theoretical perspectives on cosmopolitanism, paying attention to its implications and manifestations both within and outside Europe. It also explores the links between cosmopolitanism and teleological understandings of Europe: there is an idea of «progress» not far below the surface of the concept, but what does it mean and what is its ultimate aim? Through this analysis, the authors uncover several cosmopolitanisms originating and playing out in different periods of European history, most notably during Antiquity and during the European Enlightenment. The book shows that some of the languages of cosmopolitanism did not originate in or locate themselves exclusively in Europe, but that they nonetheless spread through connections with that continent, most commonly through the colonial encounter. The study contains valuable historical analyses of cosmopolitanism in context, in Europe, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Africa. The book is based on papers presented at the conference «Revisiting the Imaginations of Europe and the World: Coming to Terms with Teleologies and Assessing Cosmopolitanism», held at the University of Helsinki in 2010.

Autorentext

Monica Garcia-Salmones (Dr. Juris from the University of Helsinki, 2012) is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki, within the Academy of Finland project Intellectual History of International Law: Empire and Religion. Her research interests include international legal theories, positivism, economic positivism and legal philosophy. She addresses these in her forthcoming book The Project of Positivism in International Law (2013). Pamela Slotte (Dr. Theol. from Abo Akademi University, 2005) is Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Senior Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki, and Adjunct Professor of Theological Ethics with Philosophy of Religion at Abo Akademi University. Her current research focuses on the concept of religious freedom and the management of the sacred in international human rights law.

Inhalt

Contents: Martti Koskenniemi: Cosmopolitanism - Jan Schroeder: Is there a European Law of the Early Modern Period? - Gabriella Silvestrini: Universalistic but not discriminatory. Rousseau's Principles of the rights of war - Demin Duan: When Liberalism Meets the World. A Lesson from Alexis de Tocqueville - Francisco A. Ortega: We either Invent or We Err. Post-Colonial Critical Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth Century? - Adrian Brisku: Empires without Cosmopolitanism? Locating Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman and Russian Empires - Markus J. Prutsch: Napoleonic Constitutionalism. Legal Universalism or Political Particularism? - Liliana Obregon: Haiti and the Cosmopolitan Imagination - Adedokun Olatokunbo Ogunfolu: How British Colonialism Underdeveloped Nigeria - Bo Strath: The Cosmopolitical and the National. An Uneasy Relationship