Globalism vs Cosmopolitanism:
Two Conflicting Visions of Legal Globalization
The news media tell us that the pandemic and nationalist populist movements are leading to “deglobalization”. Just as businesses are re-nationalizing their supply chains, states, supposedly, are re-nationalizing their laws. People can debate whether these developments are good or bad; the problem is that the deglobalization narrative misunderstands what is actually happening.
In reality, we are seeing not a retreat from globalization, but a shift between two different visions of globalization, which have coexisted since the first age of globalization in the late 19th century. While all globalized law is fundamentally a reaction to globalized society, these two visions of legal globalization, “globalism” and “cosmopolitanism”, are motivated by different mentalities, employ different methods, and yield different kinds of laws.
Understanding the interactions between these conflicting visions of legal globalization is crucial to understanding the future development of law. Globalism is a totalizing and sometimes utopian movement that sees national boundaries as always a hindrance. It is associated with legal harmonization and unification. It employs treaties, model laws, and other such “hard law” enactments, all of which depend on state legal systems for their legitimacy. Cosmopolitanism also yields globalized rules, but it celebrates and seeks to maintain differences among national, cultural, and industry-specific traditions. Cosmopolitan rulemaking does not blend various approaches into a single authoritative code, but rather selects the best rules for each instance. It is pluralistic and particularistic, characterized by an interplay between soft and hard law, public and private institutions, and local, regional, and global legal orders.