In this article, I argue that Kant’s real reason for rejecting a world state in practice is that a world state would be in greater danger of despotism than individual states. Kant hopes that public participation and self-enlightenment of the people in the public sphere could counter the despotic danger in individual states. However, in a world state, state affairs are too distant from the lives of individuals, making it difficult for individuals to maintain enthusiasm for public discourse and political enlightenment. Moreover, the absence of external competition and the risk of war would eliminate the incentive of the ruler to preserve freedom for the development of industry and commerce and, consequently, for the enlightenment of the people. These defects make it more difficult for a world state to resist despotic danger.

Jean L Cohen’s impressive new volume argues that the existing global order’s own internal attributes point the way to the possibility of attractive as well as realistic institutional reforms. Global dualism, she argues, suggests the advantages of constructing non-statist global federations, in which sovereign states would cooperate in far-reaching ways to tackle common problems, in conjunction with a ‘low-intensity’ – yet potentially path-breaking – constitutionalization of global governance. If properly achieved, such reforms could produce a global order better able to preserve legality, protect rights, and allow for far-reaching political autonomy. This review chiefly focuses on the author’s attempt to link her normative and political ideas, and especially her ideas about constitutional pluralism and global federations, to her analysis of the existing global order. Despite the many virtues of her reform ideas, they sometimes embody unfairly hostile views of cosmopolitan political and legal aims. Unfortunately, Cohen has not sufficiently responded to political and institutional cosmopolitans who seek potentially more far-reaching alterations to our global order than she deems desirable.

Most Realists today oppose far-reaching global reform on the grounds that it represents unrealistic and potentially irresponsible ‘utopianism’. An earlier generation of mid-century Realists, however, not only supported serious efforts at radical international reform but also developed a theoretically impressive model for how to bring it about. They considered the possibility of post-national political orders and ultimately a world state as desirable long-term goals, but only if reformers could simultaneously generate the thick societal background (or what they called ‘supranational society’) required by any viable order ‘beyond the nation state’. As they fail to engage constructively with proposals for global reform, present-day Realists betray their own intellectual tradition. By reconsidering the subterranean legacy of Realist reformism as advanced by mid-century international thinkers (e.g. E.H. Carr, John Herz, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Frederick Schuman), the essay provides a revisionist reading of the history of twentieth-century international theory, while also highlighting its significance for ongoing debates about global reform.

The received wisdom of the times is that a wide gulf has opened up between ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ – or at least has finally become visible. A commitment to a certain vision of international law is presented as a European trait that divides Europe from the United States. ‘European’ international law premises perpetual peace on rules that protect state sovereignty and sustain a world divided into territorial states, and it is at odds with the US preparedness to wage ‘total war’ in the name of some purportedly universal ideal, such as ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’. This conception of ‘European’, territorially based international law versus US (or Anglo-Saxon) universalism is articulated most forcefully by the extreme-right legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt in his 1950 work, Der Nomos der Erde, and related essays; Schmitt, realizing that the state had met its demise with the fall of the Nazi project that he supported, now conceived of a world divided into Grossraume rather than states. Schmitt's conception was challenged by the Marxist-Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, both in correspondence with Schmitt and in a public lecture that Kojève gave in Düsseldorf at Schmitt's invitation in the 1950s. Kojève articulated an alternative view of global order and Europe's place in it – a view that accepted global Anglo-American military supremacy while advocating a distinctive place for Latin or continental Europe in the building of global justice and prosperity through economic and legal integration and the construction of a just relationship in trade and finance with the developing world. This essay evaluates the debate between Schmitt and Kojève and draws lessons for contemporary discussion of the place of Europe in a one-superpower world.