Cosmopolitanism and the doctrine of human rights have different origins and historical paths. At the same time, they show a fundamental common trait: the constant reference to Universalist orientations of value tailored to the absolute value of the individual. Human rights represent the orientation compass of cosmopolitanism: they are just or legally valid on an ethical-rational level for everyone and in general, and therefore, they can be applied all over the world. However, the debate seems to have focussed on two opposing one-sidednesses: on the one hand, the antistatist cosmopolitans, according to whom states, and the civic-political obligations they are based on, must be considered almost irrelevant from a regulatory point of view. On the other hand, many political leaders believe that the defense of human rights does not justify the violation of the principle of sovereignty, considered that the denial of peoples’ principle of self-determination organized into nation states indeed represents a first and serious violation of human rights.

The thesis of the following pages is that in order to reply to the objections and promote a vision of moral cosmopolitanism not automatically arousing the suspicion that it is only the new version of an old imperial nomos, re-examination of the question of moral universalism —the essential component of any reasonable cosmopolitan position— is needed. With the discussion on the universalism of human rights on the background, you can distinguish between descriptive universalism and epistemological universalism on the one hand, and on the other a normative universalism capable of activating a “bottom-up” look, ex parte populi. The distinction may prove useful to detach the individualistic-egalitarian universalism of human rights from the ideological rhetoric that uses it to ensure better coverage of one’s external sovereignty and to draw the attention on an additional form of universalism. One capable of catalysing the political struggles that use them both as a protective resource against the continuous cycle factories of evil machines, and as a tool that can be used to allow citizens to decide how to live their lives autonomously.

Instead of elaborating an ideal framework to put the relevant general normative principles into practice, “bottom-up” cosmopolitanism is inscribed within the framework of a “real” progression of universality: an effective universalization of universalistic discourses. Since every exclusion is exposed to the criticism of those who turn its own principles against it, universal values or principles acquire real strength when the struggle against false universalisms is waged by those whose oppression or subordination finds legitimacy precisely in the simulacra of universalism. The universality of a value or principle thus proceeds through the denial of its negations, through peculiar struggles against particular instances through which it has been co-opted or betrayed. This does not mean that struggles and demands are always crowned with success, nor that they manage to ensure that the transformation of political institutions is consistent with cosmopolitan principles. But it is precisely in the course of these struggles that oppressed and marginalized individuals and groups acquire the experience and knowledge that contribute to making regulatory instruments more effective and gain the political resources capable of transforming moral principles into political obligations.