Given the antagonism between claims to sovereignty and democratic self-determination based on the rights of groups of people and claims to human rights also based on human rights, can Habermas's proposal The theory of cosmopolitan law offer a solution that does not compromise the construction of a political community that self-regulates through the control of relations between inside and outside? Jürgen Habermas's notion of cosmopolitan democracy conceptualizes a legalized regulation of global politics through the formulation of a collective system of mediated institutions, transnational organizations, and regional economics in ways that promote the individualistic and cosmopolitan rights of the individual as well as the strengthening of democratic processes within the State itself. This article will, however, attempt to show that such a framework fails largely because it is incapable of legitimizing the internal and external democratic structure through the creation of a shared political and social culture. This seems to depend, in large part, on the nature of the democratic ideals to which the cosmopolitan order should lend itself. Democracy seems to require the constitution of the person as part of a demos; that is to say, as an individual within a meta-community whose functional capacities are governed by identifiable rules establishing the relational modes that exist between those inside and those outside, this which represents for Habermas the construction of a system of exclusion. on the other (reference). This system of exclusion, which can be understood with reference to the rule of law - that which governs the relations of all parties in a demos - is written, ...... middle of article... ...its implementation is problematic. Works cited Fine, R. & Smith, W. (2003) Jürgen Habermas' theory of cosmopolitanism, Constellations, 10(4), pp. 469-487. Habermas, J. (1989) The new conservatism: cultural criticism and historians Debate, Trans. S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Habermas, J. (2001) The Postnational Constellation, Ed. & Trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Habermas, J. (2002) The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization, pp. 217-234 in P. De Grief and C. Cronin (Eds) Global Justice and Transnational Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the World Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press). Lupel, A. (2005) Tasks of a global civil society: Held, Habermas and democratic legitimacy beyond the nation-state, Mondialisations, 2(1), pp. 117-133.