“The world truly shares a common fate.” These words seem to resonate with Immanuel Kant's famous statement that “a violation of right on one place of the earth is felt in all.” Yet, they are not from his Toward Perpetual Peace but from the UN Millennium Project report. What makes our world one of “overlapping communities of fate” are first and foremost the “interconnected threats and challenges” we face in our globalizing age. During the last fifty years we witnessed an enormous growth of transboundary problems – climate change, migration, terrorism, infectious diseases, violent conflicts etc.

Within contemporary legal and political philosophy there is nothing more unpopular than defending a world state. It seems food for thought for writers like Huxley or Wells, but not a topic that deserves serious philosophical reflection. Fortunately, there are exceptions to this general rule. Theorists such as Höffe, Cabrera, Deudney and Yunker defend a version of a multilayered minimal world state – a model based on the dual principles of federalism and subsidiarity. The focus of this article is on the very fragile balance that proponents of this model have to keep between a simultaneous need for centralization and decentralization. On the basis of a critical analysis of the work of these theorists, it is argued in this article that the safeguards these authors defend to prevent a bloating of government themselves contain a tendency to hierarchical centralization. While some form of world state might be necessary to cope with the challenges posed by globalization, it is essential to discuss the shape and competences of the world state much more critically and in more detail than has been the case in the past.

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To respond to globalization-related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation-state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positionsFglobal democracy and nationalismFseem to contradict each other. We do not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay.

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