One hundred sixty thousand.

That’s how many refugees Sweden welcomed in 2015, more per capita than any other country in Europe. And for many Swedes, this was a point of pride.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven declared, “My Europe doesn’t build walls.” But it wasn’t long before the welcome soured. There wasn’t enough housing. And with the unemployment rate three times higher among immigrants than Swedish-born residents, many worried about a strain  on the country’s resources.

By 2022, less than half of  Swedes thought immigration  made their country a better place to live. I remember watching this play  out, and it made me wonder. What do we owe each other?

And do our obligations extend only  to those geographically close to us? Or do they extend to everyone, everywhere? I'm Ellie Anderson and this is  Crash Course Political Theory. [THEME MUSIC] I like to think of myself as a “global citizen.” I care about what’s going on in the world; I check world news every day, and advocate for international  coalitions like the UN.

Oh, and I watch every international version of the Ultimatum: Marry or Move On. What, that doesn’t count? At the same time, I try to buy local  products and support my local communities.

And I grew up with this  slogan imprinted on my brain. But as I follow the news,  I’ve seen a pattern emerge. This contrast between paying  attention to global crises  versus what’s going on close to home seems to be at the core of a  lot of political strain today.

It turns out, this tension between  local and global is nothing new. Back in ancient Greece, where  you lived was who you were. To be Spartan or Athenian was as defining as, say, living in Brooklyn is today.

Socrates thought the worst punishment  wasn’t death or prison, but exile. That started to shift in the fourth century BCE, when the philosopher Diogenes described  himself as a “citizen of the world,” not beholden to the authority  of any specific place. Basically, Diogenes ran around Athens saying ‘you’re not the boss of me,’ even telling Alexander the  Great “You’re blocking my sun.” Bold to talk to a king that way, but okay.

A few centuries later, followers  of Roman stoic philosophy  put their own spin on this idea  that the “cosmos” — or the world — was their “polis” — or city-state. Being “cosmopolitan” meant being obligated to help people everywhere, simply because… they’re people. If you study political philosophy in the West, you’ll learn that this idea was crystallized by eighteenth-century German  philosopher Immanuel Kant.

To Kant, cosmopolitanism meant  that every rational person  was part of a single, global community. He called it a “universal brotherhood.” But I learned that, from around 1046 to 256 BCE,  the Chinese practiced this  idea under a different name: tianxia, which roughly  translates to “all under heaven.” Tied to Confucianism, this  concept emphasizes hospitality  over hostility and relationships  with others over the individual. But while the idea of caring about each other in a  “we are the world” kind of  way sounds pretty great, the applications of cosmopolitanism are often less about morality and more about political interests.

To go back to Kant for a sec,  he thought of humans as mostly  imperfect creatures who act  in our own selfish interests. And because we know that,  we can be wary of others, which can create conflict and make us  what he called “unsociable by nature.” At the same time, we seek  out other people’s company,  form bonds with them — so we’re  also deeply social by nature. Kant called this unsocial sociability  which: let’s be honest, deeply relatable.

But Kant argued we don’t overcome  our unsociability by being social. We’re social precisely because it  advances our selfish interests.  Sort of like being forced to  interact with a bunch of other women  at a Malibu mansion so you can  ultimately vie for a future fiancé. In other words, sociability is the key to peace, and peace is the key to doing our own thing.

Oh yeah, we’re getting into  the capital-B Big stuff. World peace. I’m gonna need some caffeination for this one. [whispers] Thank you. [Heavenly choir] So take unsocial sociability from the individual to the societal level, and you get Kant’s idea for world peace, which he thought was only possible through something called a “league of nations.” If all nations agreed to respect  the rights of each others’ citizens,  Kant thought, this could bring  us to the cosmopolitan condition— guaranteeing security and justice for all.

From this idea, political  cosmopolitanism was born— agreements between sovereign  nation-states that, hopefully,  make them a little less likely  to go to war with each other, or at least more likely to  play fair when war happens. An actual League of Nations  formed after World War I,  as a forum for resolving international disputes. And later a whole slew of  international alliances emerged, too.

So I’m like, case closed, right? We solved world peace! [Blows party kazoo] Obviously… not. War, conflict, genocide, and  humanitarian crises persist.

We sociables keep doing unsociable things. So, what’s the deal? Well, think through this with me.

There are some practical  challenges with global coalitions. Like, in a world of sovereign  nations, who calls the shots? And what happens when the shot-callers go rogue?

Take the UN, for instance. Their fifteen-member Security  Council has a lot of power. They can impose economic sanctions  and authorize military intervention, all in the name of international peace.

They have five permanent members — all the victors of World War II — and those members can veto any measure. That means those five nations  can all stop the security council  from intervening in their own conflicts, like Russia’s war on Ukraine, or when the US and UK invaded Iraq in the 2000s. And think about this question:  who gets a seat at the table  when every single voice in the  world can’t be represented?

I mean, is a world-governing  body like the UN really  representative when only 24%  of the delegates are women? And what do we do about nation-states that benefit from agreements without doing their part?   Countries that don’t sign a  nuclear disarmament treaty  get to watch their adversaries disarm while hanging on to their own weapons. And by sitting it out, they can discourage  other countries from signing, too.

Like, “If they have nuclear  weapons, I’m not giving up mine.” Then there’s the question of  actually enforcing things. For the most part, global alliances only have the power of persuasion and influence— they can’t mete out consequences. That’s why the Universal Declaration of  Human Rights is merely a “Declaration.” It doesn’t include consequences  for breaking the rules.

Beyond the practical challenges, cosmopolitanism  raises a whole host of moral  and philosophical concerns. Just the idea of a world-governing body might make some suspicious of secretive factions, out to achieve a New World Order where some have dangerous power over others. There’s a reason “take over the world” is  basically every movie villain’s end goal.

But most political theorists  don’t think of cosmopolitanism  in terms of creating an actual global government. It’s not a world-state start-up guide; it’s more like a lens for examining  politics in an interconnected world. And that’s a useful lens to have,  with the rise of globalization—  the increased flow of trade,  technology, people, and information that makes countries more interdependent.

Because of globalization, I can  buy bananas in the dead of winter,  or get the latest viral Korean  sunscreen shipped to my door. But globalization also intensifies inequality, as companies lean on cheap labor in countries with weaker economies to maximize their profits. There’s much more on this  in Crash Course Economics.

And since globalization also  revs up the flow of ideas,  it makes sense to wonder if it  could expand human rights, too. Like, could globalization make the  lives of women and migrants better? But even though expanding human  rights seems like a no-brainer,  it actually leads to one of the  biggest critiques of cosmopolitanism.

What if enforcing a standard  blueprint of human rights  makes us lose what’s rich and  particular about local communities? For instance, Saudi Arabia’s  Muslim-majority government  may disagree with what counts  as violating human rights versus protecting cultural  and religious practices. They could argue that the human rights promoted by international organizations like the UN were devised by primarily  Western nations, who don’t  have a full understanding of  the cultures they’re regulating.

Defenders of cosmopolitanism would say that the goal isn’t global sameness. Instead, it’s taking one central idea— the equal worth of all humans —and using it as the starting point. So, I returned to that question about  improving the lives of women and migrants.

Political scientist Niamh  Reilly and other thinkers behind  cosmopolitan feminism argue  that we can achieve equality only if we critically engage with gender and race,  and include the voices of  people who hold less power. Even if a law is designed to promote  the equality of women or migrants, it may not be effective if nobody asked them about their needs and experiences. And even if world-governing bodies have potential to do some good on a global scale, they still have to do it in a  way that respects the local.

That’s the central tension: to keep peace and defend human rights everywhere, but still respect a culture’s  freedom to do things their own way. To philosopher Kwame Anthony  Appiah, cosmopolitanism  really means “universality plus difference.” He thinks being a citizen  of the world means viewing  cultural differences as a  source of value, not conflict. But it also means accepting the moral obligation  to help people everywhere,  simply because they’re people.

Take this example from philosopher Peter Singer. If you saw a child drowning, you'd have an immediate moral duty to help them. Right?

So why isn't it the same with a child who’s starving on the other side of the world? Why is distance morally relevant,  especially with modern technology? This all led me to the big question:  what would it look like to  go all-in on cosmopolitanism?

To view humans’ equal value as truth,  and national borders as inventions?  And after lots of research  and thinking and enormous  cups of coffee, I came to this conclusion: We don’t really know. I know, that’s never the answer we want. But there are lots of different perspectives on how a cosmopolitan viewpoint should influence modern policy, including immigration, where we began this episode.

Scholar Chandran Kukathas argues that  freedom of movement is a human right. When we deny people the freedom to move, we deny their ability to escape tyranny or injustice, to seek economic opportunity, or simply  to live with the people they love. But he argues that it’s a neglected  right in the modern world, where nation-states can grant rights and protections to people within their borders, and limit access to anyone outside them.

At the end of the day, I learned that there are ways of being a “citizen of the world” that the Greeks and the Stoics  and Kant never dreamed of. But taking on that role  requires us to ask ourselves,  again and again, in new ways  and under new circumstances, where do the boundaries of community lie? And what do I owe my fellow humans?

Even without clear answers,  these are questions worth asking. Next time, we’ll talk about what the world might look like without prisons. See you then.

Thanks for watching this episode  of Crash Course Political Theory  which was filmed at the Basteel Studio and was made with the help  of all these nice people. And, hey! If you like this t-shirt,  you can get it now at complexly.store.

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