L’idea di stato globale nella filosofia politica democratico-repubblicana: distopia o possibilità teorica?

Many republican scholars reject the idea of a global state because they think that, even in an ideal scenario, it could not be democratic. This point, allegedly, is due either to the fact that in a global state there cannot be exit options, or to the fact that the possibility to identify the demos requires the existence of a plurality of legal subjects capable to recognize each other, or to the fact that a global polity would be “too big to be democratic”. In this work, I propose a deconstruction of these arguments and, more generally, of the republican scepticism towards the cosmopolitan ideal. In particular, I claim that the function of exit options in democratic polities is overestimated; that the identification of the demos does not require an external other; and that, due to the complex relationship between sizes and democracy, deducing that a global state could not be democratic from its dimensions is simplistic. Thus, I conclude that the sole possible republican argument against the global state is the so-called “no-global demos argument”, which, nonetheless, is in ambiguous relationships with nationalists positions. For republicans, the alternative to accepting this argument is taking the cosmopolitan ideal more seriously.