The Right to Contact Foreign Nations: On the Nature and Scope of Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right

Abstract Kant published no more than a couple of pages on cosmopolitan right. Some Kant scholars argue that the treatment of cosmopolitan right is incomplete and that Kant omitted to infer cosmopolitan right from the innate right to the surface of the Earth, the right he mentions in connection with cosmopolitan right. In this article, I question this omission thesis. A more charitable reading, I argue, is that cosmopolitan right is the formulation in public right of the private right to the surface of the Earth. In this reading the two rights are equivalent. An inference is not required and hence not omitted by Kant. In the second part of the article, I specify this equivalence reading against the background of the persistent disagreement in the literature about the scope of cosmopolitan right.