Noting that it has once again become fashionable to advance ideas of world citizenship, April Carter seeks to trace the historical evolution of the concept and outline its current manifestations in world politics, as well as explore its philosophical foundations and challenges. Divided into three parts, this ambitious book militates against coherent summarization as it engages an extraordinarily wide range of issues, ideas, and practices. The first part traces the development of cosmopolitanism as moral universalism from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the end of the nineteenth century. The second part explores various transnational practices in the twentieth century, focusing on the development of a global civil society, issues of migration, and the European Union. The third part assesses conceptions of citizenship in political thought, and explores the compatibility of notions of global citizenship with liberal, socialist, republican, communitarian, feminist, and postmodern theoretical perspectives. The great range of issues and literatures addressed is at once the book's strength and weakness. While it identifies the multiple arenas, disciplines, concepts, and practices that need to be reevaluated through the lens of global citizenship, it is uneven and tends to describe the debates and issues somewhat superficially. Still, one cannot help but be impressed by the expanse of empirical and theoretical research that was required to produce The Political Theory of Global Citizenship.

Carter does a thorough job of defending the notion of global citizenship against various critiques. She denies, contra theorists like Michael Walzer and David Miller, that the concept of citizenship is necessarily wedded to the concept of the nation-state. If citizenship denotes a set of moral and legal rights and responsibilities derived from membership in a political community, the concept faces two challenges. First, the development of cosmopolitan morality and its entrenchment in international law means that it is has become intelligible to talk about moral and legal entitlements and duties that are not necessarily tied to membership in a state. Second, migration, forced or voluntary, and the hetereogeneity of political communities make intelligible notions from multinational and transnational to postnational and global citizenship. Her book is most cogent in revealing the multiple layers of belonging, rights and obligations that must inform any contemporary theory of citizenship.

While Carter rejects the conventional link between citizenship and the nation-state, she also challenges the posited link between global citizenship and the political project of world government. Instead, she prefers to locate global citizenship in an emergent global civil society. This is where her arguments go awry. To Carter, the typical global citizen is an activist, involved in transnational social movements, who is committed to “social justice, diversity, sustainable economic development respecting the environment, and to a peaceful world” (p. 98). Acting globally is not enough to make one a global citizen or member of a global civil society. For example, business elites who trot the globe making corporate deals that exploit the poor and destroy the environment are not global citizens but global oppressors. Her definition of global citizenship is thus not primarily descriptive but highly evaluative, and is ultimately predicated on a moral theory of cosmopolitanism.

Although Carter does not formulate her own moral/political theory of cosmopolitanism, she understands cosmopolitan ethical commitments to stress human equality, peace or nonviolence, cultural and religious tolerance, social justice, and environmental protection. Because she conflates the status of citizenship with the duties of citizenship, it is not possible under her theory to be a global citizen and a global oppressor. Yet if we cannot call the movers of multinational corporations a kind of global citizen, then what are they? How would the ethical and legal responsibilities derived from some conception of cosmopolitan law and morality be applied to them?

Limiting the status of “global citizen” to cosmopolitan activists makes the term vulnerable to rhetorical abuse and renders it unuseful as an analytical concept. At the domestic level, those who transgress community laws or fail to perform their civic duties are not generally stripped of their status as citizens, but in many ways, it is by virtue of their citizenship that they can be held accountable for their civic failures and transgressions. We can be citizens of a morally decent state with just laws, but it is intelligible to talk about morally indecent or unjust citizens. By analogy, at the international level, identifying multinational corporations as global citizens would thus be a prerequisite to holding them accountable for transgressions of cosmopolitan morality and law. It is only because they are global citizens that they can be held accountable for being bad ones.

Carter's move to sever global bad apples from global civil society and citizenship leaves those agents in a legal and moral black hole, a comfortable place to be for those who seek to act with impunity. Ironically, her restrictive definition of a global citizen undermines her attempts to extend accountability of global agents beyond the nation-state. Most fatally, her argument makes it difficult to establish accountability through law, rather than through the uneven pressures of global social protest movements. Indeed, the problem of accountability of global social movements or nongovernmental organizations themselves is also one that eludes Carter's book, but one that requires urgent analysis given the growing significant resources at their disposal.

Despite these flaws, Carter offers a compelling and hopeful, if somewhat unwieldy, portrayal of the many possible avenues of reconciliation between moral universalism and particularism, between global and national citizenship, between being human and being a citizen.