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This article argues that institutional cosmopolitanism and liberal nationalism can be reconciled as compatible, at least when considering various normative prescriptions for institutional and political relationships. The main claim is that liberal nationalism and the theory of national responsibility present a cosmopolitan argument maintaining that political institutional bodies should be held responsible for catering to their people. So conceived, liberal nationalism provides a significant contribution to contemporary cosmopolitan theory. Three arguments are provided. First, it is argued that liberal nationalists shares fundamental values with institutional cosmopolitans, as Pogge suggests, and especially that they agree on the relevance of shared responsibility supplementing individual responsibility. Second, national responsibility is endorsed as a productive way of determining responsibility for the political distribution of goods and benefits for a group of people that supplements responsibilities at the global level. Yet a premise for this reading of national responsibility is the disputing of the cultural assumptions which are often attributed to the theory of national responsibility. Hence, thirdly, by disentangling the cultural assumptions from the concept of national responsibility, the article suggests a concept of national responsibility based on political institutional capacity rather than culture. Adapted from the source document.

The European Union is currently challenged by right-wing populism and economic stress. To understand the nature of these challenges, we need to take an interdisciplinary approach in which empirical studies of politics are combined with studies of the normative implications of European policy-making. To this end, I draw attention to the right to free movement, which is pivotal both for European politics and liberal political philosophy. I show that even though transnational rights, such as the free movement for people, products and money, are normatively sound and desirable, enhancement of free movement may challenge the heterogeneity among the national models of rights and societal commitments. The risk is that the national institutions as a political arena face difficulties in coping with current political challenges such as right-wing radicalism, social inequality, environmental regulation, immigration and financial insecurity. On the other hand, I argue that we should be aware that the transnational rights might in some countries enhance human rights, which national parliaments have not been able to accommodate.