today's world is between those who are willing to see culture (and especially religion) privatized in this way, and those who insist that government policy should be based on their preferred cultural values World government in the literal sense must be distinguished from the much more modest proposal, favoured by among others the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that states should enter into a permanent agreement with one another to renounce the use of force; there should be a confederation to ensure what Kant called "perpetual peace. We can see this foreshadowed in the relations between liberal democracies today, which involve a sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit agreement to settle their differences by negotiation or by reference to international bodies such as the European Union or the United Nations. Agreements of this kind, it is important to emphasize, stabilize relations between states, but leave states themselves as the main sources of political authority. And Kant himself favoured this: a single world government, he thought, would be a universal despotism which saps all man's energies and ends in the graveyard offreedom Cosmopolitanism in its most literal sense is both implausible and unattractive. But political philosophers sometimes interpret the idea of world citizenship differently, not as a form of government, but as a proposal about how individuals should think and behave. what is being suggested is that we should overcome our narrow national and other attachments and think of ourselves as ifwe were citizens of the world, in other words as people who have equal responsibilities to our fellow human beings everywhere. From this perspective, national boundaries are simply arbitrary dividing lines to which no moral significance should be attached. In particular we should cease to think of justice as something to be pursued primarily within the limits ofthe city or the nation; we should give equal weight to the claims of every human being, regardless of race, creed, or nationality. So even if political authority remains localized in particular nation-states, we should use it to promote global