The Right to Visit (II)

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter addresses the permissive aspect of cosmopolitan right, which is concerned with global mobility. I argue that individuals have a right to roam the earth’s surface in their capacity as earth dwellers. As cosmopolitan agents ‘on the move’, they create the conditions for lawful peace among the entire cosmopolitan plurality, including both states and non-state peoples. Earth dwellership thus limits exclusive claims to land or territory to the conditions of global mobility, which is a fundamental precondition for transforming the disjunctive community of original common possession into a juridical community of legal subjects. Both dimensions of the cosmopolitan right to visit are integrated in that they spell out the conditions for realising a cosmopolitan political order in the future under conditions where such an order can neither be brought about nor maintained by force.