Rethinking Cosmopolitanism. A critique of Mouffe Paper for panel Rethinking Radical Democracy; Section 5 on Critical Theory & Radical Politics PSA 21 – 23. March 2016 in Brighton Allan Dreyer Hansen, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark adh@ruc.dk Draft – Please, etc... Abstract: In a series of publications Chantal Mouffe (2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2008, 2009, 2013) has criticized cosmopolitanism for its lack of conceptualization of power, conflict and struggle, in short of politics. Even though this critique is largely well placed, the conclusions drawn from the analysis by Mouffe are flawed. As she puts it, if a cosmopolitan democracy “was ever realized, it could only signify the world hegemony of a dominant power that would have been able to impose its conception of the world on the entire planet and which, identifying its interests with those of humanity, would treat any disagreement as an illegitimate challenge to its ‘rational’ leadership”. (Mouffe 2005a 106–7). I argue that Mouffe paradoxically seems to be using a traditional 'realist' conceptualization of hegemony, signifying simply domination. Against this I argue that a post- structuralist understanding of hegemony – as developed by herself and Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe,1985), precisely allows us to see the distance between universal values, such as freedom and equality for all, and their actual interpretation and use. The fact that the West is using democracy and human rights as legitimating devises for non-democratic goals, should not make us (radical democrats) abandon these values as the political goals on the global scale. If anything, ideas such as multipolarity or alternatives to human rights might be considered as strategic means 'on the way'. But even so, they need to be articulated into an overall strategy, the goal of which should be the implementation everywhere of the principles of freedom and equality for all – including some form of cosmopolitanism at a global scale.