Oliviero Angeli’s Cosmopolitanism, Self-determination and Territory is an intelligent and thoughtful contribution to the recent burgeoning literature on territory from what he describes as a cosmopolitan perspective.

This book does not offer a complete theory of territory in the sense that it does not discuss all aspects of territory—it does not discuss either boundary-drawing or secession, for example. But it offers a theory of territorial right, grounded in the interests of collective or democratic self-determination, and links this with rights over territory, understood as proprietary control over immigration (the right to exclude from the territory) and control over natural resources. The addressees of the former right are the individuals within the territory, and the addressees of the second type of right (rights over territory) are people outside the territory. The terminology of territorial rights and rights over territory is unique to Angeli, though many theorists employ similar kinds of distinctions to make similar points about the separability of these different elements. (Simmons 2003 and Miller 2012).

The central argument of the book is that there is a fundamental right to self-determination, which is grounded in a general interest in participating in democratic practices and institutions to settle disagreements, which is further based on the value of individual autonomy. To realize the right to collective or democratic self-determination, Angeli argues, it is necessary to allocate membership on a territorial basis. The link between democratic self-determination and territorial right is established in two different ways in the first two chapters. The first is methodological: Angeli claims to be adopting the lens of nonideal theory “in that it presupposes the existing international framework of territorial states. It starts from where we are, in the ‘here and now’” (p. 6). But second, and somewhat in tension with the first, Angeli endorses a Kantian framework, against the Lockean and Grotian alternatives, whereby “territorial rights are the very condition of legal coherence within single communities” (p. 52), and this argument about the conditions for the possibility of a civil state suggests that Angeli’s endorsement of territoriality is not simply a response to the nonideal circumstances that we find ourselves in, but is located at a deeper level, in the conditions of civil order.

Critics could press on a number of different elements in the autonomy, democratic self-determination, territory nexus. First, there is the relationship between individual autonomy and democratic self-determination within states. Since territorial rights are, in the first instance, rights of jurisdiction, more needs to be said about the kind of entity that is self-determining and the relationship of that entity to individual autonomy. It is hard to see how a majority voting principle (or a plurality of votes system) enhances the individual autonomy of the person who has been out-voted.

Then there is the relationship between democratic self-determination and territory. Angeli’s argument seems to confer territorial rights only on democratic states. This suggests that many non-democratic states, which claim to have rights to territory, do not in fact have such rights. The same is true for the many non-democratic political entities (states) in the past, which claimed that their territorial rights were violated by the imposition of imperial authority. Angeli is coy about whether he endorses these more radical implications of is own argument; however, if he does accept it, then it’s hard to see how it can be reconciled with his claimed reason for focusing on non-ideal theory.

The justification of territorial right in terms of a general value of collective self-determination gives rise, Angeli claims, to at least two (proprietory) rights over territory: rights to exclude and rights over natural resources. The main interlocutors in these chapters are open border theorists on the one hand, and resource cosmopolitans on the other. Angeli argues that the lives of people who reside within a territory are coerced by a dense network of territorial laws in a way that outsiders and temporary visitors are not, and that that these individuals have special rights as residents to participate in shaping the laws by which they are coerced and over which there is democratic disagreement. On this argument, all residents (including resident aliens) should be given democratic rights, but there is no requirement to justify a regime of border control to people outside the border (prospective or potential migrants). In this way, Angeli justifies the standard “coconut” view of immigration, with a hard outer shell, but a soft center, where immigration policies are properly subject to democratic decision-making (even if wrong), but that all people who are subject to the territorially organized legal system ought to have democratic rights extended to them.

In the chapter on natural resources, the main interlocutors are resource-egalitarians. In Angeli’s view, property-like entitlements over natural resources are necessary to safeguard political agency in democratic states, since people have an important interest in control over their environment; and he distinguishes control rights from income rights, arguing that taxing income is less central to self-determination than controlling resources. I do not disagree with this argument—in fact, I have made a similar argument myself (Moore 2012)—but I thought it was a somewhat anti-cosmopolitan argument.

This raises the question: In what sense is Angeli’s argument cosmopolitan? First, Angeli seems to conceive of his argument as flowing from a Kantian tradition: In Chapter one, he has a very interesting exploration of three genealogies of territory—drawing on Grotius, Locke and Kant—and he argues that the Kantian account is superior. Consistent with this Kantian provenance, Angeli sometimes focuses on justice, as where, he claims, the “primary function” of territorial rights is that of “establishing justice” (p. 62). However, the nods to Kant are ultimately confusing, since they suggest that his argument is more justice-oriented than it actually is: A right of self-determination suggests a permission to do something, even if this is contrary to justice.

Second, Angeli claims to be a cosmopolitan in the sense that he “defends a moral version of cosmopolitanism” according to which “human beings are ultimate units of moral concern” (p. 4). Institutions are required to treat the human beings affected by them as having equal moral status, and to give priority to important human interests over other considerations such as social utility (p. 9). To some extent, I think Angeli’s book is testimony to Blake’s argument in “We are All Cosmopolitans Now” (Blake 2013). The mere affirmation that human beings are the ultimate units of moral concern fails to distinguish so-called cosmopolitans from so-called non-cosmopolitans like David Miller, who endorse the idea of human rights, but who draw the line between the global and civil order differently than perhaps Pogge or Abizadeh, for example.

Perhaps the main distinguishing feature of Angeli’s theory, in comparison to those writers who are identified as, or who self-identify as non-cosmopolitans, is that Angeli follows Kant and Waldron in arguing that membership in these self-determining democratic institutions is determined by a principle of proximity, according to which people living in a situation of physical proximity ought to be subject to a common law, rather than on ethnic or cultural criteria. But what of people who seek not simply to be in a civil and political order, but in a specific political order? Angeli is aware of the problem that the obligation to enter into civil relations is indeterminate in a number of cases—e.g.: when people might be living equidistant to two different groups (the As and the Bs) and it’s not clear whether the principle of proximity requires that they join the As, join the Bs, or have their own group form a state. Moreover, physical proximity, Angeli argues (p. 45), may not track relationships and interactions that are likely to give rise to conflict and require resolution by subjection to an omnilateral will. Nor does it track people’s own sentiments and proclivities with respect to the kinds of people to associate with, in these democratic and self-determining entities, which may be a problem for an argument that is intent on privileging autonomy. To avoid these problems, Angeli draws on Kant’s Physical Geography to suggest that intelligible relations are constructed by human beings, and that we need an intelligible map of social and natural events to determine who is proximate to whom (p. 45). However this hardly helps, since it could be that the intelligible map of the As is different from that of the Bs or the Cs; so Angeli’s appeal to the proximity principle (suitably understood to include an intellectual map of proximity) cannot properly solve the question of where a state’s territorial rights are located. Perhaps it is unfair to raise this question, since Angeli’s argument does not deal directly with boundary-drawing and secession, but they are certainly raised by the structure of his argument.