Review of International Studies (1998), 24, 387–398 Copyright © British International Studies Association

Realism vs cosmopolitanism*
A D E B AT E B E T W E E N B A R RY B U Z A N A N D DAV I D H E L D,
CONDUCTED BY ANTHONY MCGREW

A.Mc. A common preoccupation of much contemporary writing about world

politics concerns the dynamic interrelation between continuity and change. The end
of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization and the ‘postmodern turn’ have
delivered powerful challenges to the orthodoxy of realism. Among the most
significant of these challenges is the cosmopolitan approach advocated by David
Held, Andrew Linklater and others. In contradistinction to realism, which assumes a
strict analytical separation between politics within and amongst states, the
cosmopolitan approach proffers a more unified conception of political life. In this
discussion Barry Buzan, a prominent advocate of realism, and David Held debate
the merits of their respective positions and assess the strengths and limits of both
realism and cosmopolitanism as frameworks for understanding contemporary global
politics and its potential for transformation. I began by asking Barry to explain the
fundamentals of contemporary realism. What are its constituent elements?
B.B. The key thing about realism is that it is a political theory and you need to
understand that first and foremost. The titles of the two best-known realist texts
make this very clear: Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations and Waltz’s Theory of
International Politics. Realism gives you a particular angle on the world system, but
it is a limited angle, focused on power politics. Now there is, of course, a problem
about how we define ‘power’ and there are lots of different approaches to that, most
of which can be comfortably contained within realism in one way or another. Power
might be about the capabilities of units to do things, or about the relative strengths
of different units compared to each other, or about, to some extent, the interests of
these units and the way they define them; it might also be about structural power,
the way in which the system itself—that is, the arrangement of the system—actually
shapes the behaviour of units within it. Power can be located in the structure of the
system. But realism for the most part is interested in the units; even when it thinks
about system structure it does so in terms of the units. And it is very much fixated
on the state because the state is, of course, the key political unit in the international
system. Hence, realism is a political theory; it is a theory of the state.
Realism is a theory that divides the globe into two different domains. There is the
domain inside the state which is often seen as progressive, where politics operates
and where society can evolve; and there is a domain outside the state or between
states—the international relations domain—which is not seen as progressive but as

* This discussion was recorded in December 1996 by the BBC for the Open University course,
D316, Democracy: From Classical Times to the Present. It has been adapted and extended for
publication.

387
388 Barry Buzan et al.

static. This is the domain in which power politics works, has always worked and, in
the view of a very committed realist, will always work. So that as long as the inter-
national system is divided into states, the relations between states will have this
characteristic of being about power politics.
A.Mc. When you talk about power politics, what are you talking about exactly?
B.B. I am emphasizing a conflictual view of the international system. Realism
assumes that states are all locked into their own survival and into the pursuit of
their own interests, that those interests will clash at various times and places and for
various reasons, and that because there is no overarching government in the system,
then the use of force is always a possibility in the conduct of states toward each
other. Power in the realist view, therefore, does have a strong military component. I
do not think realism is necessarily wedded to this, but traditionally power and the
military have been closely associated in realism because the international system is
unmediated by any kind of global authority. In pursuit of their own interests, or in
defence of their own interests, states may resort to force in relation to each other,
and force is a kind of ultimate test of power.
A.Mc. Is this why sovereignty is so central to the realist view of the world?
B.B. Sovereignty is central because it defines what the state is. The idea of
sovereignty, as I understand it, is the claim to exclusive self-government, which
means that the state is defined in terms of its ability to exert absolute political
authority over a given territory and people. This is not the way in which the inter-
national system has always been organized; it is the modern European way of
organizing politically which was imposed on the rest of the world as a condition of
decolonization. The European powers left behind them a world remade in their own
political image in terms of sovereign states. Thus, sovereignty is what makes a very
hard and sharp political distinction between the domestic domain inside states, and
the domain of relations between states.

A.Mc. Let me come to you now, David. In the cosmopolitan account the separa-
tion of the domestic and external spheres no longer seems sacrosanct, especially so
in an age of intense globalization. Is this your view?
D.H. I think ‘the division’ is certainly called into question. But I am in agree-
ment with a great deal of what Barry has said. The realist focus on political power
has been extremely important in illuminating the dynamic relations between states,
the nature of the growth in relations among states, and the centrality of war in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After all, the twentieth century, despite all its
claims to civilization, has been one of the most violent of all centuries, if not the
most violent. But the perspective I take, the ‘cosmopolitan perspective’ for the
purposes of the discussion, highlights a number of key things. One is that the single-
minded focus on political power and the state, which is so much at the centre of
realism, is insufficient to examine the complexity of the world in which we live. What
the cosmopolitan perspective says is that if power is important, and it indeed is, it is
to be found not just in relations within states and among states, but across other
dimensions of social life as well. So I would say that an account of the structure of
power must be a multidimensional account, looking at economic phenomena, poli-
tical phenomena, social phenomena, technological phenomena, cultural phenomena,
and so on. One finds power, power systems and power conflicts in all these realms.
Contra realism, I would argue that state power is but one (albeit important)
 Realism vs cosmopolitanism 389

dimension of power; and that aspects of all of these dimensions need to be

understood if the nature and prospects of state politics are themselves to be grasped
satisfactorily.
A.Mc. How does this multidimensional account of power relate to the
importance cosmopolitans, like yourself, attach to globalization. Is globalization
transforming the state and state power?
D.H. The issue of globalization does raise particular questions about political
power and nation-states. On the one hand, many people claim we live in a global
world. I call these the ‘hyperglobalizers’, who assert that the nation-state is no longer
central to the modern world: it is displaced; it is locked into a variety of complex
processes; its power is denuded by world markets, by the growth of regions, by
changing structures of international law, by environmental processes, and so on. I
think this view exaggerates the nature of the global changes with which we live. We
live at a moment that can indeed be characterized as ‘a global age’, but the hyper-
globalizers have misunderstood the nature of this age. On the other hand, there are
those who think that nothing fundamentally has changed for the last hundred years,
that the world is no more international than it was, for example, during the gold
standard era, and that the relations between states are, in some senses, less complex
than they were during the British Empire. After all, the British Empire was an
extraordinary political system which stretched across many regions and territories of
the world. I think this sceptical view is also wrong, but, in order to tell you why, I
ought to say something briefly about what globalization is and about the view that I
take of it.
For me globalization involves a shift in the spatial form of human organization
and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction and
the exercise of power. It is not a case of saying there was no globalization, there is
now. Rather, it is a case of saying we can examine and distinguish different historical
forms of globalization in terms of the extensity of networks of social relations and
connections, the intensity of the flows and links within these networks, and the
impact of these phenomena on particular communities. (In making these dis-
tinctions I am deploying concepts colleagues and I have been developing in research
on globalization for some time.)1 I believe if you trace out within this framework the
changing structure of trade, finance and multinational corporations, to take just
three phenomena, you can show how in the late twentieth century we live in a world
in which states are more enmeshed in global processes and flows than they have ever
been before. Political power, in other words, is being repositioned, recontextualized
and, to a degree, transformed by the growing importance of other (less territorially
based) power systems.

A.Mc. Does this cosmopolitan account deliver a fundamental challenge to realist

notions of political power and the centrality of the sovereign state in world politics?
B.B. Well, it raises very interesting questions and I think it goes back to the
initial caveat that I made when talking about realism: that it is a political theory.
Being a purely political theory it is stuck inside a relatively narrow domain. Accord-
ingly, much of what David has said I can agree with, because if you are thinking in

1
See David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformation: Politics, Economics and Culture,
(Cambridge, 1998).
390 Barry Buzan et al.

realist terms the problem is that the boundary around the state—that which
separates the inside from the outside—has been cut through by a whole load of
things, by communication, by trade, and by finance in particular. These are things
which realists are not all that well equipped to think about. So what you find is that
the political/military sector, as I would call it, which realist theory largely focuses
upon, has become a bit less important in relation to what is going on in the world, at
least for some states. I’ll have more to say about that later. In relation to the
emergence of a world economy, and to some extent the development of a world
society, and even in terms of transportation and communication systems, it is clearly
naive now to think of a world made up of sovereign states which ‘contain’
everything.
In traditional realist thinking, and also historically, there was some validity to the
view that the state did contain an economy and society. The idea of a nation-state
presupposes that the state embraces a particular society and a particular culture.
Mercantilism presupposed that a society contained more or less its own economy,
although there may be some trade. Now, all of these assumptions are rather falling
away because the economy is clearly becoming globalized. Very few, if any, states
now have any pretence at all to autarky or a self-contained economy. And although
many societies still wish to preserve their own identity and use the state to do this,
there is more exchange, more migration, more ‘multiculturalism’ in some senses, and
elements of an emergent world society. There are questions to be asked about all of
these things, and the problem is they fall a little outside realist theory because realist
theory focuses on the state, and all of these other things are happening, as it were,
elsewhere. To put the point somewhat differently: it is not so much that I think that
realism is wrong; it is a mistake to assume that the state is disappearing. The state is
still there, and to some extent, therefore, the realist logic still applies. But other
things have become more important and one has to judge realism in relation to the
importance of these other areas.
A.Mc. Can realism accommodate this changing world?
B.B. Yes and no. I think that in those parts of the world where the old model of
the relatively closed, sealed state has faded away, a good part of realist theory no
longer tells us very much. I mean if states have become as interconnected as, say, the
members of the European Union, just what is the boundary between the ‘domestic’
and ‘international’? A lot of EU politics feels more like domestic than international
politics, and in that sense the whole realist model is hard put to deal with that kind
of development. Where states have become very open and interdependent, then
some of the realist theorizing about the balance of power (and all that) is clearly less
relevant. In such circumstances, thinking about states in terms of traditional power
politics is unhelpful. But my sense is that the whole world is not going that way.
There are plenty of parts of the world in which the realist rules of the game still
apply. If you look at, say, relations in East Asia, if you think about the way in which
China and Taiwan relate, or North and South Korea, or indeed Japan to both China
and the Koreas, this has an awful lot still of the flavour of realism about it.
Accordingly, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the whole world has
reformed itself in the same way that the most advanced parts of the world have. My
view is that the world is really divided into two or three spheres in which the rules of
the game are quite different because the level of globalization is very differently
distributed.
 Realism vs cosmopolitanism 391

A.Mc. Can I return to you, David? In the light of Barry’s defence of realism,
should globalization be understood primarily as a Western phenomenon?
D.H. Well, I think there is little doubt that the development of global relations
and the growing enmeshment of states in economic, cultural and social flows
received an enormous impetus from the expansion of Europe from the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. And, indeed, if we think for a moment of the British
Empire, it was a tremendous impetus to the extension of certain Western ideas and
practices. The idea of sovereignty itself, secular conceptions of law, the notion of
individual rights and duties, the concept of the nation-state itself, as Barry has
already indicated, were all ideas which followed in the wake of Western power, as it
expanded and pushed around the world. There is little doubt that one can think of
elements of the processes of globalization as part of an essentially Western
development. However, having said this, one would want to qualify this remark.
Globalization is essentially contested. It is contested in diverse regions of the world.
I do not think the West has ever been in a position simply to ‘run’ the world
according to its own terms of reference—its ‘rules of the game’. These rules have
been contested in parts of Africa, they’ve been contested in Latin America and Asia;
and they remain contested in many regions today. The issue has always been to some
extent what form global relations should take and what forms of accountability and
law might govern relations among states. This is a fundamental matter, and I think it
is a more pressing one perhaps than Barry does; I’d be interested in his reflections on
this.
The urgency of the problem today can be highlighted if we return to something
raised earlier: the whole question of what is a domestic affair and what is a foreign
issue. This is, I believe, a more chronic problem than it used to be. In the era in
which states were being forged, it was understandable for them to think that there
was a clear division between the domestic and the international, the internal and the
external. But now that we have relatively settled nation-states with dense and
complex relations with each other, the issue of what is and what isn’t a domestic
issue is problematic. Let me just give you a few examples. The BSE crisis today. Is
that an English issue? A British issue? A European issue? An international issue? A
global issue? It clearly has implications the world over. What is the proper realm of
jurisdiction for resolving this problem? Another example at the heart of our future
health as well is AIDS. Is AIDS something to be dealt with within states? Clearly, it
can’t be dealt with within individual states alone, because AIDS has ramifications
for populations around the world. Or, take the issue of energy usage. The use of
energy in the heavily concentrated industrialized areas of the West has direct
implications for the nature of the weather, agriculture, industrial development in,
say, Zimbabwe. Is that a Zimbabwean issue? Take one last example: the question of
British paedophiles meeting in Prague or Bangkok to abuse children. Is this a
British, Czech or Thai problem? Or is it a question with global implications? These
types of questions involve complex ramifications with implications for the very
notion of what is now a proper, legitimate subject for sovereign states to deal with.
And I think this is because there has been, as it were, a ‘global shift’. States have
become enmeshed in more complex relations, in denser patterns of inter-
connectedness. In this sense, I think Barry’s formulation, that the ‘realist’ part of the
world is now sandwiched in more complex power systems that have become more
important relative to state power, is absolutely right.
392 Barry Buzan et al.

A.Mc. But would not a realist response be that the very issues David seeks to
highlight are largely marginal to the central dilemmas of world politics? The critical
issues of war and peace, life and death.
B.B. Again, that is a difficult question for realism because in traditional realism
there was a rather clear distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, high politics
being about diplomacy and war, and low politics being about economics and
society and many issues like the weather and disease. And because of the change in
the importance of the different sectors that I mentioned earlier, this becomes prob-
lematic for realism. But the realists have been fairly agile. The realist line of defence
would be that in most areas of world politics—again the emphasis on politics—
states are still the principal authorities. And there is nothing that stops them from
cooperating with each other. Thus, realists, or at least a good proportion of realists,
can live quite comfortably with the idea of international regimes in which states, as
the basic holders of political authority in the system, get together sometimes with
other actors, sometimes just with other states, to discuss issues of joint concern,
and sometimes they can hammer out of a set of policies, a set of rules of the game,
which enable them to coordinate their behaviour. Now, this certainly does not feel
like traditional power politics realism. You can think of it to some extent in terms
of power politics by looking at issue power. Who are the big players in relation to
any big issue? Who are the people who have any kind of control? Who loses out?
etc. There is, therefore, an element of power politics in this whole notion of
regimes, and it does retain a strong element of state-centrism. I think the realist
would say: if you discount the state, where is politics? Where is it located? You
cannot eliminate politics, as some liberals sometimes seem to do. To wish the state
away, to wish politics away, is not going to generate results. The good dyed-in-the-
wool realist would argue that power politics is a permanent condition of human
existence. It will come in one form or another, in one domain or another, in relation
to one issue or another, but it will always be there. It will be politics and it will be
about relative power. And at the moment, the state is still an important player in
the game.
A.Mc. This brings us to one of the defining differences between realism and
cosmopolitanism. Surely, for realists the centrality of state power and power politics
implies that, normatively speaking, democratic politics and practices have no place
in the management of world order, whereas for cosmopolitans the democratization
of world order is a central ideal? Does not realism assume that regimes and struc-
tures of global governance can never be effectively democratized, precisely because
they are dominated by states, state interests and power politics?
B.B. Yes. But what do we mean by democratization in this context—the famous
‘define your terms’ question! I can answer this in two ways. If you are thinking about
democracy as something based on individual rights—the right to vote and to
determine the shape of the political universe—then the whole realist approach is
very problematic in this regard because, for realists, the proper political domain in
which individuals sit is the state. There is a problem about how this notion gets
translated upward, and there is also a problem, to the extent that David is right, that
as the state loses control over aspects of its economy and of its society, then
elements of democracy become irrelevant; the state is no longer controlling those
aspects of life for which the people installed democratic control. In this context,
there is a problem about the efficacy and relevance of democracy.
 Realism vs cosmopolitanism 393

But, if you focus on the principle of democratic voting and think about the way in
which the United Nations and most other international agencies are actually
organized, then it becomes important to recognize that they were formed by demo-
cratic states and they do reflect democratic principles. Up to a point in most of these
agencies, there are rules of voting which bear very close resemblance to democratic
rules of procedure. There is, if you like, a kind of international democracy amongst
states which is based on the notion of sovereignty which sees all states as legally
equal, even if they are not equal powers. One might object to this as a fudge, but
there is in some sense an element of democracy available within the realist vision of
the international system, in the way that states relate to each other as legal equals.

A.Mc. So, the world order is in some sense already partially democratized. Do you
agree?
D.H. Certainly the world order has significant elements of democracy in it. The
late twentieth century has seen a phase of massive democratization around the
world; more states are democratic than ever before. In the mid-1970s, over two-thirds
of all states could reasonably be called authoritarian. This percentage has fallen
dramatically; less than a third of all states are now authoritarian, and the number of
democracies is growing rapidly. Further, the emergence of regional blocs, parti-
cularly the European Union, signals the beginnings of the development of
democratic relations among states which is unprecedented in the history of state
relations. The United Nations, in addition, is a remarkable organization insofar as it
brings together, at least in principle, states on equal terms. These and related
developments (such as human rights regimes) have in some respects altered the
balance and the nature of relations among states and the way in which the
representatives of peoples of the world negotiate and treat each other. To that extent
they are very important. But I think, at the same time, they are partial achievements
and have some strong drawbacks and clear limits. They are all, as it were,
organizational systems based by and large on states, and they give priority to
particular state interests. Moreover, they build the hierarchy of state relations and of
existing geopolitical interests into their very structures. Thus, the United Nations
might in principle be a democratic forum, but in practice it is run on a wide range of
issues by dominant US and British interests, with significant contributions, of
course, from other powerful nation-states. Certainly, the procedures of the Security
Council have built into them the veto power of the ‘big five’ states.
But there is something more important to stress than this. In a world which has
undergone a certain shift away from the sovereign nation-state—marked by the
internationalization of the economy, the development of global financial markets,
new infrastructures of communication (the Internet, for example), the elaboration of
human rights law, and the development of important transborder problems such as
global warming—the plurality of democratic interests can be represented systematic-
ally only in a fundamentally different kind of world order. This can be built on some
of the strengths of existing institutions: the democratization of the nation-state, the
collaborative relations of some regions, and institutions like the UN. But the process
of democratization has a long way to go. We should not be despondent about this!
Democracy is not simply one fixed notion. It was first elaborated in antiquity
in relation to city-states. It was re-elaborated during the Renaissance in relation
to some of the leading cities of Renaissance Italy. It was reinvented with the
394 Barry Buzan et al.

development of nation-states, as liberal representative democracy. And, today, we

are on the edge of a new fundamental democratic transformation. Historians may
look back in a hundred years’ time and say liberal representative democracy was that
form of government that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
only to become somewhat of an anachronism in the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries as, more and more, the world’s fundamental resources and activities were
organized across nation-states boundaries. Some people think that democracy is
fundamentally dysfunctional in a world dominated by regional and global processes
and structures (for instance, the German social theorist, Niklas Luhmann).
However, I believe the contemporary world is one in which we need to reinvent the
idea of democracy, not surrender it. The project of cosmopolitan democracy,
involving the deepening of democracy within nation-states and extending it across
political borders, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic with respect to these
developments. It is a position of advocacy.

A.Mc. I would like to come back to the essence of the cosmopolitan ideal later.
Barry, I just wondered how you would respond to the cosmopolitan notion of the
deepening of democracy between and within states, or perhaps how a more ortho-
dox realist might respond to this cosmopolitan argument?
B.B. I am glad you make that distinction! In a variety of ways I think there is
clearly a problem, and it is not just a problem for realists, about how the world is
structured politically. As I would see it, globalization is primarily an economic
phenomenon. It is also in part a logistical phenomenon to do with transportation
and communication and the ability to move goods, peoples, ideas, etc., around the
world much faster and much more easily than before. But it is not clear what the
alternative political structure to the state is, or how indeed we would make the
transition from the current order to another. So it may be that the state is in crisis
because of globalization, but there is not yet a very clear alternative available. Even
in the place where one might plausibly look for a model of the future, and I’m
thinking here of the European Union, it is still very problematic as a political
construct. We do not know what the political relationship is when you try and dis-
aggregate sovereignty into different levels. It seems like a good idea, but quite how
it’s going to be made to work is very problematic, and, of course, one of the key
themes of that is the so-called ‘democratic deficit’.
How do you move ‘representation’ upwards and downwards to different levels,
while still keeping some notion of sovereignty which can remain the foundation of
the legal and political order internationally? I think it is fair to say that the inter-
national system or the global system is certainly more pluralist than it has ever been.
I do not have any problem with that. But whether it is more democratic, or can be
so, I am not sure. I would agree that to the extent that more states become demo-
cratic, then there will be a spill-over effect and that will have some democratizing
consequences for the world system, but this is not necessarily or always a good
thing. A realist would look at the foreign policy consequences of democracy and say,
well, quite a bit of the time democracies do not behave very well in terms of their
foreign policies. If you look at the United States there is a great problem with
inconsistency and isolationism; democratic polities can take a rather inward-looking,
self-centred view and may reject concerns with managing the rest of the inter-
national system. Realists see this as a problem at the moment. I am thinking here of
 Realism vs cosmopolitanism 395

North America, Europe and Japan. They are all rather inward-looking. They do not
like casualties, they do not like spending money on foreign issues. There is a sense in
which, in order to win an American election, candidates now have to say, ‘I’m not
going to be a foreign policy president’, because if they indicate that kind of interest,
they would probably lose the election. How you actually rejig the global political
structure away from the state, whether democratically or in any other form, is a
problem that simply has not been solved. We may be stuck with states per se.
A.Mc. So the essence, then, of a realist position might be that there is no
alternative, to use that phrase – TINA – if you remember the Thatcher era!
D.H. I think there are at least two things I would want to say about that. One is
that, of course, democracies are not necessarily simply noble or wise. They are
fallible sets of processes and institutions. But the counterfactual of what Barry was
suggesting could be taken to imply that the non-democracies of the world would be
more noble or wise under some circumstances and, accordingly, could be considered
a legitimate alternative. The issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that we
do not have an alternative principle of legitimacy for political affairs other than that
of the principle of democracy. It is the principle of legitimate authority and has
rapidly become the only one that is generally, if not universally, accepted, although,
of course, there are great debates about what exactly this means in theory and in
practice.
But the second thing I would stress is this. At the moment in which the idea of the
secular state was first elaborated, by Bodin, Hobbes and others, it was largely against
the background of a very unpromising set of historical circumstances. And yet two
hundred years later, it became the dominant element in the organization of nation-
states. If we accept, by contrast and extension, that we live now in a world in which
the state has become somewhat decentred and fragmented, locked into complex
transnational processes of cultural, political, economic, legal and technological
power, and so on, then we must begin to consider the political meaning of this, of
living at another fundamental point of transition. And the question it seems to me is
this: how can the idea of the modern state, so fundamentally important to law,
democracy, accountability and so on, be best nurtured and rearticulated in a more
transnational world? In response, the argument I would want to make is that this
can be achieved only through a cosmopolitan account of democracy, which seeks to
develop the idea of the modern state into a conception of governance, shaped and
circumscribed by ‘democratic law’, and adapted to the diverse conditions and
interconnections of different peoples and nations.
The notion of cosmopolitan democracy recognizes our complex, interconnected
world. It recognizes, of course, certain problems and policies as appropriate for local
governments and national states; but it also recognizes others as appropriate for
specific regions, and still others, such as elements of the environment, global security
concerns, world health questions and economic regulation, that need new institu-
tions to address them. Deliberative and political decision-making centres beyond
national territories are justified when cross-border or transnational groups are
affected significantly by a public matter, when ‘lower’ levels of decision-making
cannot resolve the issues in question and when the issue of the accountability of a
matter in hand can only itself be understood and redeemed in a transnational, cross-
border context. New, innovative political arrangements are not only a necessity but
also, in my view, a possibility in the light of the changing organization of regional
396 Barry Buzan et al.

and global processes, evolving political decision-making centres such as the

European Union, and growing political demands for new forms of political delibera-
tion, conflict resolution and decision-making. In this emerging world, cities, national
parliaments, regional assemblies and global authorities could all have distinctive but
interlinked roles within a framework of democratic accountability and public
decision-making.
If many contemporary forms of power are to become accountable and if many of
the complex issues that affect us all—locally, nationally, regionally and globally—are
to be democratically regulated, people must have access to, and membership in,
diverse political communities. Put differently, democracy for the new millennium
should describe a world where citizens enjoy multiple citizenships. They should be
citizens of their own communities, of the wider regions in which they live, and of a
cosmopolitan global community. We need to develop institutions that reflect the
multiple issues, questions and problems that link people together regardless of the
particular nation-states in which they were born or brought up.
Now, you could immediately object to this as utopian. But I would say to you that
it is no more utopian than the idea of the modern state was in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; the latter was (and is) an idea with short-term and long-term
implications. So is cosmopolitan democracy. It is not an issue of all or nothing. For
example, at the global level there are certain small incremental things that would
make a difference now: the reform of the Security Council, enhancing the capacity
of human rights law to be enforced, the creation of a UN peace-keeping and
peacemaking force that would be less dependent on the concerns of existing
geopolitical interests. A commitment to a programme of cosmopolitan democracy is
a commitment to the extension and adaption of the idea of the modern democratic
state and of the idea of democratic accountability to the new global circumstances
in which we live.

A.Mc. Barry, I detected in your argument about globalization and the

democratization of world order that it is not only a question of feasibility, but there
are also very important normative issues at stake. Cosmopolitan or global
democracy, even if it was feasible, may not be the best way to proceed in terms of
human political organization. Would that be an adequate representation of your
position?
B.B. That is a difficult question. I think that David is right that posing the
counterfactual requires me to sharpen the implications of my argument. I am not
advocating a world of fascist states or totalitarians or whatever; of course not! I am
merely pointing out that democratization should not be seen as some kind of
universal good; it also carries with it a set of problems. I do not claim to have the
answers to these problems, but I would like to comment a little on the kind of
picture that David is painting. It does seem to me (and I am taking my realist hat off
here, because at this point I am leaving behind the great bulk of realists) that there
are two things to say. First, as the process of globalization unfolds, deepens and
strengthens—and I don’t dispute that this is the world we are living in and therefore
that this is a time of transformation—this is going to raise serious questions for
political structure. I think these questions are going to be answered in different ways
in different parts of the global system. My sense is that in the most developed and
most democratic parts of the system, like Western Europe and North America, there
 Realism vs cosmopolitanism 397

is probably going to be a layering of power so that there will be, if you like, an
unpacking or disaggregation of sovereignty. Political authority will move upwards
and downwards, and will exist simultaneously on several different levels. Hedley Bull
once referred to this as neo-medievalism and that is not a bad metaphor in some
ways. This, however, only accounts for those most developed parts of the system,
because what you are looking at here is the interplay between the political units of
the system and the system itself. And what globalization is telling us is that the
system is becoming stronger and stronger in relation to the old political units within
it. Now, the strong political units within the system may survive by adapting and
adopting some kind of neo-medieval framework, but what about the rest? There are
a lot of weak states in the international system and these are going to have much
more difficulty dealing with life in the strong system. Some of them are already
falling to pieces and it would not surprise me, putting on a futurist hat, if a number
of quite substantial unstable zones opened up and became semi-permanent features
of the system: perhaps one centring on Afghanistan, one in West Africa, and one in
Central Africa. One could imagine there being no effective state structures, indeed
no effective political structures at all in such places except for some kind of reversion
to warlordism, tribalism or gangsterism, or combinations thereof. In some places
this is already the case, and it would not surprise me to see this phenomenon spread
so that one had a part of the world which was very highly organized, postmodern
perhaps; parts of the world which had politically collapsed; and then bits in between
like China, India, the so-called modern developing world. It is not quite clear to me
what is going to happen to these latter states. They have a really tough game to play.
Looking ahead a bit further and trying to wear David’s hat a bit more, I can
imagine a world in which there might be no states at all in the sense that we now
understand them. However, one could still wear a realist hat and say well, all right,
we might be in the post-state world, but there will still be plenty of power politics
around. It may be pluralist, it may be democratic, it may be structured in all kinds of
odd ways, but the logic of power politics will go on and to that extent the realist
tradition will remain intact.
A.Mc. So the circumstances for cosmopolitan democracy are not terribly
propitious.
D.H. Well, I do not think that would be an entirely accurate summary of what
has just been said! In any case, I think what has been said is reasonably cautious;
and who could disagree with an element of caution? One might perhaps be even
more cautious than has been suggested so far. It seems to me extremely important to
bear in mind that the West itself nearly destroyed democracy just fifty years ago.
Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism almost destroyed this ‘democratizing civilization’.
The contingency and unpredictability of politics is with us at all times; accordingly,
one cannot be complacent about the continued democratization either of the West
or of other parts of the world. Against this background, one can anticipate other
fundamental threats, not simply threats from nation-states that are fragile such as
those in sub-Saharan Africa, but again from the West itself. One of the most
fundamental challenges that might arise in the next century may well follow from the
attempt by many parts of the world to emulate Western systems of lifestyle, resource
use, consumption patterns and so on. There will be fundamental environmental
obstacles to their extension. There may come a point where the West’s interest in
defending its conditions of life may bring it into sharp conflict with other parts of
398 Barry Buzan et al.

the world. The environmental costs of Western lifestyles may well make the pursuit
of them elsewhere unsustainable. The West may well not think that the rising
demand for raw materials and new energy sources, the extension of industrialization
and environmental degradation, and the unmanaged growth of population in many
parts of the world is necessarily in its own interests, and serious conflict could
follow.
We live in a moment of transition. Many of the old political ideologies are
fraught with difficulty. Liberalism has no conception of how one might regulate
markets in order to build environmental concerns systematically into market forces.
State socialist theories are worn thin if not dead. Many of our political ideologies
are at the point of bankruptcy. The task of the political theorist, then, is to rethink
our political concepts and to create new conceptual resources which can be
reflexively applied in the contemporary world. The idea of state sovereignty, as it
were, was elaborated by political theorists and reflexively applied to the new state
structures of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think ideas such as
cosmopolitan democracy—but there are many other parallel ideas as well—are
contributions to new debates about what these structures will look like, and to the
extent that these debates are open it becomes possible to lay down new normative
resources, new normative conceptions, which might have some bite when people
come to think about how a more multilayered system of authority, in a
multidimensional world, can begin to cohere in a way which is consistent with the
principle of democratic legitimacy.