55 CHAPTER 3 Kant’s Subaltern Period: The Birth of Cosmopolitanism from the Spirit of Occupation Alexander Etkind Is cosmopolitanism ideological or utopian in character? Was it created by the winners or the losers of history? 1 These issues have preoccupied and divided scholarship for decades. Sympathetic interpreters have empha- sized the prophetic and progressive character of cosmopolitan projects such as Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace. 2 For the postcolonial critics © The Author(s) 2018 D. Gusejnova (ed.), Cosmopolitanism in Conlict, https://doi.org/ 10.1057/978-1-349-95275-5_3 A. Etkind (*) European University Institute, Florence, Italy e-mail: Alexander.Etkind@eui.eu 1 I am using here Karl Mannheim’s classical deinitions of ideology and utopia, combin- ing them with Walter Benjamin’s tragic contrast between the winners and losers of the historical process; see Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Harvest, 1955); Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 253–265. 2 See Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideas, eds. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, eds. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gerald Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David Held, Cosmopolitanism. Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity,