The more republicanism and with it cosmopolitan ideas and rights spread throughout the globe, the more potentially are the doors opened for the greater migration of individuals and peoples. This, of course, is a hotly contested phenomenon that is by no means modern or new. The right of individuals and peoples to move to any place they choose is, in principle, a rational right to a better life. In principle, it can only be restricted by the equally rational claims of maintaining the economic, political, and cultural stability of the desired target country. And thus, not surprisingly, in between these two rational claims unfold the oftentimes heated political debates in modern industrialized countries (which may or may not be always fully democratic, think Singapore or Malaysia here).
Thus, perhaps unknowingly, Kant had opened the door to the idea that democratization may lead (although not necessarily) to greater levels of global integration based on ever widening definitions of cosmopolitanism and its concomitant rights of hospitality. If every place on earth becomes rationally organized into republican spaces, what is to prevent a rational individual who aims equally with these communities at peace to situating him or herself within a particular chosen space? Or is the future of the global movement of peoples something else?
For instance it is conceivable that if the world becomes politically and economically homogenized, as Fukuyama once famously suggested, it would, then, perhaps, lessen the incentive for greater flows of peoples between borders. As Steven Pinker might put it, the world through a process of greater democratization will have fostered a stage of globalization that would necessarily decrease the need for economic/political migration ("Peak Migration") and would eventually leave a less urgent reason for departing ones land of origin, perhaps even just an aesthetic one (the preference for a particular landscape or culture for example).
Thus, one could say that the speed and spread of democratization fuels globalization and therefore it is not surprising that the fear of globalization expresses itself, as often as not, in anti-democratic, illiberal political movements. But now to dabble here in the dangerous arts of prophecy: this will be a temporary political reaction as long as the democratization process will continue to spread to those lands (such as sub-Saharan Africa) where it is needed most. And according to Steven Pinker's rather Kantian bestseller Enlightenment Now historical odds/data trends are that it will.
In this way, we can say that the modern Western democracies are, at the moment, showing themselves true to Kantian anthropology. They wish to remain alone, in a world that wants to join them. Here we can see that Globalization, in a sense, is also the greater release of the principle of individual desire and the broadening of the possibilities of the individual imagination. A closer world means that I can come closer to you, not just as a foreigner, but as a potential co-national, a friend, a lover. Globalization means that the bounds of potential intimacy with the other increase dramatically. And it is this fact that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
The forces of reaction in the West cannot ultimately win unless they are willing to reject the process of democratization. True Globalization is predicated on it. Without it, Globalization will cease to exist or will become dangerously unstable as it was in the nineteenth century where exuberant commerce was mistakenly considered sufficient for world peace. As Norman Angell once wrote, this was indeed a "great illusion" but ironically not as Angell meant it.
In conclusion, we might offer the not altogether original insight that it is democratization and not the spread of "gentle commerce" that offers the more secure form of peaceful globalization and along with it the general resolution of the movement of peoples with either greater cosmopolitan rights or the gradual, necessary dissolution of their reasons for their moving in the first place.
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