Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies [2 ed.] 1138493112, 9781138493117

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of tables
Notes on contributors
Preface to the second edition
Introduction: the field of cosmopolitanism studies
PART I Cosmopolitan theory, history and approaches
1 Kant and cosmopolitan legacies
2 Radical cosmopolitanism and the tradition of insurgent universality
3 There is no cosmopolitanism without universalism
4 Alt-histories of cosmopolitanism: rewriting the past in the service of the future
5 World history and cosmopolitanism
6 Cosmopolitan thought in Weimar Germany
7 The modern cognitive order, cosmopolitanism and conflicting models of world openness: towards a critique of contemporary social relations
8 The idea of critical cosmopolitanism
9 Border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism: overcoming colonial/imperial differences
10 Cosmopolitanism and social research: some methodological issues of an emerging research agenda
11 Performing cosmopolitanism. The context and object framing of cosmopolitan openness
PART II Cosmopolitan cultures
12 Anthropology and the new ethical cosmopolitanism
13 Cosmopolitanism and ‘civilization’: social theory and political programmes
14 Cosmopolitanism and translation
15 Third Culture Kids and paradoxical cosmopolitanism
16 Festivals, museums, exhibitions: aesthetic cosmopolitanism in the cultural public sphere
17 Aesthetic cosmopolitanism
18 The cosmopolitanism of the sacred
19 Imagining cosmopolitan sexualities for the twenty-first century
20 Themes in cosmopolitan education
21 Media cultures and cosmopolitan connections
22 Interspecies cosmopolitanism
23 Making heritage cosmopolitan
24 Bordering and connectivity: thinking about cosmopolitan borders
25 Cosmopolitan public space(s)
26 Cosmopolitanism in cities and beyond
PART III Cosmopolitics
27 Seeking global justice: what kind of equality should guide cosmopolitans?
28 Cosmocitizens?
29 Global civil society and the cosmopolitan ideal
30 The commons and cosmopolitanism
31 The idea of cosmopolitan solidarity
32 Humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism
33 A deeper framework of cosmopolitan justice: addressing inequalities in the era of the Anthropocene
34 Cosmopolitan care
35 The Internet and cosmopolitanism
36 Cosmopolitanism and migrant protests
37 Cosmopolitan diplomacy
PART IV World varieties of cosmopolitanism
38 Cosmopolitanism in Latin America: political practices, critiques, and imaginaries
39 Caribbean cosmopolitanism: the view from ethnography
40 Americans and others: historical identity formation in the United States
41 Cosmopolitanism in Asia
42 Benedict Anderson’s cosmopolitan leanings and the question of Southeast Asian subjectivity
43 Unity in diversity: the Indian idea of cosmopolitanism
44 Between tianxia and postsocialism: contemporary Chinese cosmopolitanism
45 Kyōsei: Japan’s cosmopolitanism
46 Immigration, indigeneity and identity: cosmopolitanism in Australia and New Zealand
47 Cosmopolitanism in a European context: reflections on cosmopolitan order in Europe and the EU
48 Cosmopolitan Europe: postcolonial interventions and global transitions
49 Afropolitanism and the end of Black nationalism
50 Jews and cosmopolitanism from the early modern age to the global era
Index

Citation preview

Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies

Cosmopolitanism is about the extension of the moral and political horizons of people, societies, organizations and institutions. Over the past 25 years there has been considerable interest in cosmopolitan thought across the human social sciences. The second edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies is an enlarged, revised and updated version of the first edition. It consists of 50 chapters across a broader range of topics in the social and human sciences. Eighteen entirely new chapters cover topics that have become increasingly prominent in cosmopolitan scholarship in recent years, such as sexualities, public space, the Kantian legacy, the commons, internet, generations, care and heritage. This Second Edition aims to showcase some of the most innovative and promising developments in recent writing in the human and social sciences on cosmopolitanism. Both comprehensive and innovative in the topics covered, the Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies is divided into four sections. • • • •

Cosmopolitan theory and history with a focus on the classical and contemporary approaches, The cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism, The politics of cosmopolitanism, World varieties of cosmopolitanism.

There is a strong emphasis in interdisciplinarity, with chapters covering contributions in philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, media studies, international relations. The Handbook’s clear and comprehensive style will appeal to a wide undergraduate and postgraduate audience across the social and human sciences. Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His books include The Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge University Press 2009), Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe, 2nd edition (Palgrave 2018), The European Heritage: A Critical Re-interpretation (Routledge 2018) and Community, 3rd edition (Routledge 2018).

Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies Second Edition

Edited by Gerard Delanty

Second edition published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Gerard Delanty The right of Gerard Delanty to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2012 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Delanty, Gerard editor. Title: Routledge international handbook of cosmopolitanism studies / edited by Gerard Delanty. Other titles: Routledge handbook of cosmopolitanism studies Description: Second Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Previous edition: 2012. Identifiers: LCCN 2018005282 | ISBN 9781138493117 (Hardcover) | ISBN 9781351028905 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Cosmopolitanism. | International relations—Philosophy. Classification: LCC JZ1308 .R69 2018 | DDC 327.101—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005282 ISBN: 978-1-138-49311-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-02890-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Ulrick Beck (1944–2015) and Chris Rumford (1958–2016).

Contents

List of tables Notes on contributors Preface to the second edition Introduction: the field of cosmopolitanism studies Gerard Delanty

xii xiii xxii 1

PART I

Cosmopolitan theory, history and approaches

9

1 Kant and cosmopolitan legacies Garrett W. Brown

11

2 Radical cosmopolitanism and the tradition of insurgent universality James D. Ingram

21

3 There is no cosmopolitanism without universalism Daniel Chernilo

30

4 Alt-histories of cosmopolitanism: rewriting the past in the service of the future David Inglis

42

5 World history and cosmopolitanism Bo Stråth

56

6 Cosmopolitan thought in Weimar Germany Austin Harrington

69

vii

Contents

7 The modern cognitive order, cosmopolitanism and conflicting models of world openness: towards a critique of contemporary social relations Piet Strydom 8 The idea of critical cosmopolitanism Gerard Delanty and Neal Harris 9 Border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism: overcoming colonial/imperial differences Walter D. Mignolo

78

91

101

10 Cosmopolitanism and social research: some methodological issues of an emerging research agenda Victor Roudometof

117

11 Performing cosmopolitanism. The context and object framing of cosmopolitan openness Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbiš

129

PART II

Cosmopolitan cultures

141

12 Anthropology and the new ethical cosmopolitanism Pnina Werbner

143

13 Cosmopolitanism and ‘civilization’: social theory and political programmes Humeira Iqtidar

157

14 Cosmopolitanism and translation Esperança Bielsa

167

15 Third Culture Kids and paradoxical cosmopolitanism Rachel Cason

177

16 Festivals, museums, exhibitions: aesthetic cosmopolitanism in the cultural public sphere Monica Sassatelli 17 Aesthetic cosmopolitanism Nikos Papastergiadis

viii

186

198

Contents

18 The cosmopolitanism of the sacred Bryan S. Turner

211

19 Imagining cosmopolitan sexualities for the twenty-first century Ken Plummer

224

20 Themes in cosmopolitan education Matthew J. Hayden

234

21 Media cultures and cosmopolitan connections Alexa Robertson

245

22 Interspecies cosmopolitanism Eduardo Mendieta

254

23 Making heritage cosmopolitan Jasper Chalcraft

267

24 Bordering and connectivity: thinking about cosmopolitan borders Chris Rumford and Anthony Cooper

277

25 Cosmopolitan public space(s) Daniel Innerarity and Ander Errasti

287

26 Cosmopolitanism in cities and beyond Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin

299

PART III

Cosmopolitics

313

27 Seeking global justice: what kind of equality should guide cosmopolitans? Gillian Brock

315

28 Cosmocitizens? Richard Vernon

326

29 Global civil society and the cosmopolitan ideal Alexander Hensby and Darren J. O’Byrne

336

30 The commons and cosmopolitanism Nick Stevenson

351

ix

Contents

31 The idea of cosmopolitan solidarity Robert Fine

362

32 Humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism Iain Wilkinson

372

33 A deeper framework of cosmopolitan justice: addressing inequalities in the era of the Anthropocene Tracey Skillington

383

34 Cosmopolitan care Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

395

35 The Internet and cosmopolitanism Oliver Hall

406

36 Cosmopolitanism and migrant protests Tamara Caraus and Camil-Alexandru Parvu

419

37 Cosmopolitan diplomacy Seckin Baris Gulmez

430

PART IV

World varieties of cosmopolitanism

441

38 Cosmopolitanism in Latin America: political practices, critiques, and imaginaries Aurea Mota

443

39 Caribbean cosmopolitanism: the view from ethnography Huon Wardle 40 Americans and others: historical identity formation in the United States Andrew Hartman 41 Cosmopolitanism in Asia Baogang He and Kevin Brown 42 Benedict Anderson’s cosmopolitan leanings and the question of Southeast Asian subjectivity Pheng Cheah

x

455

467

480

494

Contents

43 Unity in diversity: the Indian idea of cosmopolitanism Sudarsan Padmanabhan 44 Between tianxia and postsocialism: contemporary Chinese cosmopolitanism Lisa Rofel 45 Kyōsei: Japan’s cosmopolitanism Yoshio Sugimoto

505

517

526

46 Immigration, indigeneity and identity: cosmopolitanism in Australia and New Zealand Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas

541

47 Cosmopolitanism in a European context: reflections on cosmopolitan order in Europe and the EU Maurice Roche

552

48 Cosmopolitan Europe: postcolonial interventions and global transitions Sandra Ponzanesi

564

49 Afropolitanism and the end of Black nationalism Sarah Balakrishnan

575

50 Jews and cosmopolitanism from the early modern age to the global era Michael L. Miller and Scott Ury

586

Index

601

xi

Tables

41.1 45.1 45.2

xii

Percentage of sample in ‘high’ category of selected measures by country (rank ordered by IC score) Journal articles by Japanese sociologists by language Books translated in the world in all disciplines, 1979–2016

486 534 535

Notes on contributors

Sarah Balakrishnan is a doctoral candidate in History at Harvard University. Her dissertation

examines the creation of a ‘colonial public’ in 19th century Ghana and the spatial organization of the colony according to a public/private divide. Previous essays of hers have also featured in Transition: An International Review and History Compass. Esperança Bielsa is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her

research is in the areas of cultural sociology, social theory and the sociology of translation. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Translation. Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign (Routledge 2016) and The Latin American Urban Crónica. Between Literature and Mass Culture (Lexington Books 2006); co-author, with Susan Bassnett, of Translation in Global News (Routledge 2009) and co-editor, with Christopher Hughes, of Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Gillian Brock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Some

of her publications relevant to cosmopolitanism include Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford University Press 2009), also translated into Chinese (2014); Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration? (Oxford University Press 2015, with Michael Blake); Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press 2013, edited); The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge University Press 2005, edited with Harry Brighouse); Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge University Press 2011, edited with Solomon Benatar) and Current Debates in Global Justice (Springer 2005, edited with Darrel Moellendorf). Garrett W. Brown is Professor in Political Theory and Global Health Policy in the School of Pol-

itics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. His research includes work on cosmopolitanism, globalization theory, global justice, international law and global health policy. His recent cosmopolitan publications include Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution (Edinburgh University Press 2009); The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Polity 2010) and The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities (Oxford University Press 2018). Kevin Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Deakin University. He has researched and published in the areas of community association, the third sector and social capital. He has given keynote addresses to conferences and research groups in Australia, Malaysia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia and the UK. He has held visiting fellows at the Universities of CaliforniaBerkeley, Hull, La Trobe, Stockholm and the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow).

xiii

Notes on contributors

Tamara Caraus is Researcher at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest. Her area of

research includes cosmopolitanism and continental political theory. She contributed with articles to various academic journals and volumes, published four books and edited Cosmopolitanism and the Legacy of Dissent (with C. Parvu, Routledge 2014); Cosmopolitanism without Foundations (with D. Lazea, Zeta Books 2014); Re-Grounding Cosmopolitanism. Towards a Post-Foundational Cosmopolitanism (with E. Paris, Routledge 2015); Cosmopolitanism and Global Protests: Special Issue of Globalizations Journal (with C. Parvu, 2017) and Migration, Protest Movements and the Politics of Resistance: A Radical Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Routledge 2018, forthcoming). Rachel Cason, a UK citizen, was raised by missionary parents in Niger, West Africa. Her aca-

demic career has been spent seeking and recording life stories, exploring the intersections of marginality and belonging, and Third Culture Kid identity. Rachel’s doctorate was awarded in 2015 by Keele University, England, and was titled, Third Culture Kids: Migration Narratives on Belonging, Identity and Place. That same year, she founded Life Story (www.explorelifestory.com) to offer life story work as a therapeutic tool to adult Third Culture Kids. Rachel’s personal career has been spent practising the elusive art of settling, and constructing home in a global landscape. Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Center of Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1999. He has published widely on the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism. He is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press 2003); Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard University Press 2006) and most recently, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Duke University Press 2016). His co-edited books include Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press 1998); Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge 2003) and Derrida and the Time of the Political (Duke University Press 2009). Daniel Chernilo is Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and a Visiting Professor of Social and Political Thought at Loughborough University in the UK. He has written widely on nationalism, cosmopolitanism and the history of social and political thought. His latest book is Debating Humanity. Towards a Philosophical Sociology (Cambridge University Press 2017). Anthony Cooper is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Queens University Belfast focusing

on the ‘visible spatiality’ of the Irish border in the context of contemporary Europeanization (and, at the time of writing, Brexit). His principle research interest focuses on how to empirically capture the multiplicity and multidimensionality of borders that accounts for the diversity of actors, practices, objects and representations that all contribute to (and are influenced by) the (re)production of borders. This focus is further framed by examining the relationship between contemporary bordering and social/cultural/political processes attributed to globalization. Anthony has published widely on the broad subject of borders and he is currently working on a substantial book project looking at the intersection between general border studies and traditional/contemporary philosophy. Mihaela Czobor-Lupp is Associate Professor at Carleton College (USA). Her research focuses on the ambiguous role that imagination can play in politics. Her most recent book is Imagination in Politics: Freedom or Domination? (Lexington Books, Lanham 2014) and her most recent article xiv

Notes on contributors

is ‘Herder on the Emancipatory Power of Religion and Religious Education’, (Review of Politics, Spring 79(2), 2017). Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought, Sussex University,

Brighton, UK. He is the author of various books, which include Inventing Europe (Macmillan 1995); Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (Palgrave 2013); The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge University Press 2009) and The European Heritage: A Critical Re-Interpretation (Routledge 2018). Ander Errasti has a PhD in Ethics and Political Philosophy from the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. His research is focused on the impact of globalization on nations and nationalism. He has been a visiting doctoral student at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University and visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh. He is a researcher in Globernance: Institute for Democratic Governance. Robert Fine is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, where he was

founding director of the Social Theory Centre and convenor of the MA in Social and Political Thought. He is author of Cosmopolitanism (Routledge 2007) and a number of articles and chapters on cosmopolitanism. Seckin Baris Gulmez is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Izmir Katip Çelebi University, Turkey. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the EU-funded project FEUTURE at Koc University and as a teaching fellow at University of Warwick. He received his PhD in politics from Royal Holloway University of London and his MSc and BSc degrees in IR from Middle East Technical University. Oliver Hall is a doctoral candidate in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex. From a critical cosmopolitan framework, his doctoral thesis focuses on examining the affective content of virtual solidarity networks and how such networks, by organizing around subpolitical issues of global justice, can inform a cosmopolitan conception of a global ethics as emerging out of the sociocognitive processes of intercultural discourse. Austin Harrington is Reader in Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author most

recently of German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge University Press 2016). Neil Harris is completing a PhD at Sussex University, Brighton, UK. His thesis concerns social

pathology analysis and critical theory. He is the author of ‘Recovering the Critical Potential of Social Pathology Diagnosis’, European Journal of Social Theory. vol 22, no 1, 2019. Andrew Hartman is Professor of History at Illinois State University. He is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) and A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press 2015). Matthew J. Hayden is an Assistant Professor of Education at Drake University (USA) and the coordinator for International Programs for the School of Education. He earned his PhD from Columbia University and received the 2012 Kuhmerker Dissertation Award from the Association for Moral Education for his dissertation, ‘Cosmopolitan Education and Moral xv

Notes on contributors

Education: Forging Moral Beings Under Conditions of Uncertainty’. Publications include ‘The Process Matters: Moral Constraints on Cosmopolitan Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education. Baogang He is Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University. He graduated with a PhD in Political Science from Australian National University in 1994. Professor He has become widely known for his work in Chinese democratization and politics, in particular the deliberative politics in China as well as in Asian politics covering Asian regionalism, Asian federalism and Asian multiculturalism. Alexander Hensby is Research Associate at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social

Research at the University of Kent, UK. His research and teaching interests include political socialization, social networks, globalization and higher education. He is the author of Participation and Non-Participation in Student Activism (Palgrave, 2017) and Theorizing Global Studies (Palgrave, 2011, with Darren O’Byrne). David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He was previously professor

of Sociology at the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen. He writes in the areas of cultural sociology, the sociology of globalization, historical sociology, the sociology of food and drink, and social theory, both modern and classical. He has written and edited various books in these areas, most recently The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology. He is founding editor of the Sage/BSA journal Cultural Sociology. His current research concerns the sociological analysis of the global wine industry. Daniel Innerarity is Professor in Social and Political Philosophy, IKERBASQUE Researcher at the University of the Basque Country and Director of Globernance: Institute for Democratic Governance. He is a Visiting Professor at the European University Institute’s Center on Transnational Governance. He has published several volumes and articles, including a book in 2006 on the concept of public space in later modernity. Humeira Iqtidar is Senior Lecturer in Politics at King’s College London. She is the author of Secularizing Islamists? Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Urban Pakistan (University of Chicago Press 2011). Her research engages with Islamic thought and practice, postcolonial theory and comparative political theory. Her current research focuses on non-liberal forms of tolerance. Keith Jacobs is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tas-

mania. His recent books are Experience and Representation: Contemporary Perspectives on Migration in Australia (Routledge 2011); Ocean to Outback: Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Australia (University of Western Australia Publishing 2011), co-edited with Jeff Malpas and House Home and Society (Palgrave 2016) authored with Rowland Atkinson. Weiqiang Lin is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, NUS. His work straddles

between social-cultural approaches and geopolitical ones around air transport, logistics and infrastructures. Weiqiang was a recipient of the UK Commonwealth Scholarship from 2011 to 2014, and was an NUS Overseas Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Toronto) in 2015.

xvi

Notes on contributors

Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Honorary Distinguished Professor at La Trobe University, and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and essays on a wide range of topics. A new edition of his Place and Experience will appear with Routledge in 2018. Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy, associate director of the Rock Ethics Institute, affiliated faculty at the School of International Affairs, and the Bioethics Program at Penn State University. He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield 2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press 2007). He is also co-editor with Jonathan VanAntwerpen of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press 2011), and with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen of Habermas and Religion (Polity 2013) and with Stuart Elden of Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press 2011). He recently finished a book titled The Philosophical Animal, which will be published by SUNY Press in 2018. He is 2017 the recipient of the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Achievements Award. Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor in the Program of Literature, Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology. Among his recent publications are The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, Second Edition (The University of Michigan Press 2003) and The Dark Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press 2011). Michael L. Miller is Associate Professor in the Nationalism Studies program at Central European

University in Budapest. His publications include Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford University Press 2015). Aurea Mota holds a PhD in Sociology from The Institute of Political and Social Studies (IESP/ UERJ) in Rio de Janeiro. She is especially interested in Latin American social thought, history of colonial and modern America, human displacements, social theory and historical sociology. She is currently based at the University of Barcelona. She is a member of the Latin American Council of Social Science’s Political Philosophy Working Group. Recent papers have appeared in the Journal of Classical Sociology, Social Imaginaries, European Journal of Social Theory and in Kriterion. Spaces of Experience: Displacement and Knowledge in Modernity (Routledge, forthcoming) is her first book in English. Darren J. O’Byrne is Reader in Sociology and Human Rights, and Director of the Crucible Centre for Human Rights Research, at the University of Roehampton, UK. He has written extensively on globalization, social theory and human rights. His recent books include Human Rights in a Globalizing World (Palgrave 2016), Theorizing Global Studies (Palgrave 2011, with Alexander Hensby) and Introducing Sociological Theory (Routledge 2010), while his recent articles apply the perspective of critical globalization studies to a variety of contemporary concerns from the commodification of higher education to ecocide. Sudarsan Padmanabhan is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social

Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He specializes in social and political philosophy, Indian philosophy and culture. He has co-edited The Democratic Predicament: Cultural Diversity in Europe and India, published by Routledge in 2013 and Becoming Minority, by Sage in 2015 both

xvii

Notes on contributors

with Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Politics in the Global Age: Critical Reflections on Sovereignty, Citizenship, Territory and Nationalism by Routledge in 2015 with Sonika Gupta. Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993); Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998); The Turbulence of Migration (2000); Metaphor and Tension (2004); Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006); Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012); Ambient Perspectives (2013). Camil-Alexandru Parvu is Associate Professor at the University of Bucharest, and an Invited Researcher at the College d’Etudes Mondiales, Paris – Initiative ‘Social Movements in the Global Age’. His recent research focuses on contentious politics and cosmopolitanism, as well as the contemporary reconfiguration of the political meaning and social practices of solidarity. He edited Cosmopolitanism and the Legacy of Dissent (with T. Caraus, Routledge 2014) and ‘Cosmopolitanism and Global Protests’ – Special Issue of Globalizations Journal (with T. Caraus, 2017). His forthcoming book is Welfare and Solidarity. A Cosmopolitan Perspective (Bucharest 2018). Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He was the founder

editor of the journal Sexualities. He has published over 150 articles and some 15 books, most recently: Sociology: The Basics, (2016) 2nd ed. and Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Hope and the Humanist Imagination (2015). Forthcoming works include: Narrative Power (due 2018) and Flourishing Lives (due 2019). Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media

and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has published widely in the field of postcolonial theory, Europe, cinema and digital migration. Among her publications are: The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave 2014); Gender, Globalisation and Violence (Routledge 2014) and Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny 2004). She has co-edited several volumes, among which Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International forthcoming); Postcolonial Transitions in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International 2016); Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge 2012) and Migrant Cartographies (2005). Alexa Robertson is Professor of Media and Communication at the Department of Media Studies (IMS), Stockholm University and Director of the Screening Protest project, funded by the Swedish Research Council (screeningprotest.com). Her research foci are global news, cosmopolitanism and the media, comparative television analysis and narrative. Her books include Media and Politics in a Globalized World (Polity 2015); Global News: Reporting Conflicts and Cosmopolitanism (Peter Lang 2015); Mediated Cosmopolitanism: The World of Television News (Polity 2010) and Screening Protest.Visual Narratives of Dissent across Time, Space and Genre (Routledge forthcoming 2018). Maurice Roche is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Sheffield University. His main interests are

in the sociology of popular culture particularly ‘mega-events’, and the sociology of European society. Among other books he is the author of Exploring the Sociology of Europe (2010 Sage) and Mega-Events and Social Change (2017 Manchester University Press). Lisa Rofel is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (University of California Press); Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture (Duke University Press); co-editor (with Chris Berry and Lü Xinyu) of The New Chinese Documentary xviii

Notes on contributors

Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong University Press) and co-editor (with Petrus Liu) of ‘Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Chinese Queer Politics’ (special issue of positions). Victor Roudometof has held positions at Princeton University, Washington University, Lee University and Miami University as well as the University of Cyprus. His main research interests include globalization, glocalization, culture and religion. His latest book is Glocalization: A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2016). Chris Rumford (1958–2016) was Professor of Political Sociology and Global Politics in the

department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of several books including The European Union: A Political Sociology (Blackwell 2002); Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (with Gerard Delanty) (Routledge 2005); Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory (Routledge 2008); winner of the Association of Borderland Studies Gold Award 2010 (Cambridge Scholars 2010); The Sage Handbook of European Studies (Sage 2009); Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe (Routledge 2009) and Cosmopolitanism and Europe (Liverpool University Press 2007). Monica Sassatelli is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University

of London. She has published in the sociology of culture, Europe, as well as classical and contemporary social theory. She is the author of Becoming Europeans. Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies (Palgrave 2009) and co-editor of Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere (with L. Giorgi and G. Delanty, Routledge 2011). Tracey Skillington is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork, Ireland. Recent publications include Climate Justice & Human Rights (Palgrave 2016) and special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory, ‘Perspectives on Climate Change’ (2015) 18(3). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice for Routledge (2018). Zlatko Skrbiš is Professor of Sociology and the Senior Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Monash University, Australia. He is a sociologist working in the fields of cosmopolitanism, social theory, life-course studies and migration. His earlier research focused on issues of nationalism, migration and transnationalism. Representative works include Long-Distance Nationalism: Diasporas, Homelands and Identities and Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation Building Project (Sage, with Barr). Skrbiš has also worked extensively on social theory related to the concept of cosmopolitanism. This has resulted in publications including the book Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea (Sage, with Ian Woodward). Nick Stevenson is Reader in Cultural Sociology at the University of Nottingham. He is the

author of Human Rights and the Reinvention of Freedom (Routledge 2017) and is currently working on a range of papers that reinvestigate the legacy of Cultural Marxism. Bo Stråth was 2007–2014 Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor in Nordic, European and World History at Helsinki University. He was 1997–2007 Professor of Contemporary History at the European University Institute in Florence and 1990–1996 Professor of History at the Gothenburg University. He has researched and published widely in the fields of European modernity in a global context. xix

Notes on contributors

Piet Strydom retired from the Department of Sociology, School of Sociology and Philosophy,

University College Cork, Ireland, in 2011. His most recent publication is Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology (Routledge 2011). Yoshio Sugimoto is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Australia. A graduate from Kyoto University with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, he was Dean of Social Sciences at La Trobe from 1988 to 1991. Since 1988, he has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and published many books and articles both in English and Japanese. His recent publications include An Introduction to Japanese Society, fourth edition (Cambridge University Press 2014), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, edited, 2009) and Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, co-edited with Kaori Okano, 2018). He is currently Executive Director of Trans Pacific Press, Melbourne. Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Institute for Religion Politics and Society at the

Australian Catholic University (Melbourne); Honorary Professor of Sociology at Potsdam University Germany and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center City University of New York. He won the Max Planck Award in 2015 and is the editor of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2017). Scott Ury is Senior Lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Jewish History where he is also Director of the Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism. Published by Stanford University Press, his monograph Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry was awarded the 2013 Reginald Zelnik Prize for outstanding book in the field of history by the ASEEES. He is also co-editor of Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe and of Jews and Their Neighbors in Eastern Europe since 1750. Richard Vernon is Distinguished University Professor at The University of Western Ontario,

where he teaches the history of political thought and contemporary political philosophy. His publications include Cosmopolitan Regard (2010), and a book on intergenerational issues, Justice Back and Forth (2016). Huon Wardle is the Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (2000) and, with Paloma Gay y Blasco of How to Read Ethnography (2007). He is the editor with Nigel Rapport of A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?, with Moises Lino e Silva of Freedom in Practice (2017) and with Justin Shaffner of Cosmopolitics (2017). He was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J.B. Donne Essay Prize in 2014. Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University. She is author of

The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of Botswana (Pluto Press 2014) and of ‘The Manchester Migration Trilogy’ – The Migration Process (1990/2002), Imagined Diasporas (2002) and Pilgrims of Love (2003). She has edited several theoretical collections on hybridity, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, migration and citizenship, including Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism (Berg 2008) and The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: Beyond the Arab Spring (Edinburgh 2014). She currently holds a Leverhulme Emeritus fellowship on ‘The Changing Kgotla: The Transformation of Customary Courts in Village Botswana’. xx

Notes on contributors

Iain Wilkinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, UK. His research addresses

problems of social suffering, modern humanitarianism and issues related to the cultural politics of compassion. His publications include Anxiety in a Risk Society (2001 Routledge); Suffering: A Sociological Introduction (2005 Polity); Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life (2010 Routledge) and (co-authored with Arthur Kleinman) A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering (2016 University of California Press). Ian Woodward is Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management of the Uni-

versity of Southern Denmark. He researches in the sociology of consumption and material culture, and in the cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism. He is co-author of The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave 2009, with Kendall and Skrbiš) and with Zlatko Skrbiš he published Cosmopolitanism, Uses of the Idea (Sage/TCS, 2013). Most recently he published Vinyl, The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2015, with Bartmanski) and co-edited The Festivalization of Culture (Ashgate 2014). Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair) in the Department of Geography as well as

Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalizing universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants.

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Preface to the second edition

The second edition is an enlarged, revised and updated version of the first edition, which was published in 2012 and comprised of 45 chapters. The new edition consists of 50 chapters across a broader range of topics in the social and human sciences. There are 18 entirely new chapters that cover topics that have become increasingly prominent in cosmopolitan scholarship in recent years, such as sexualities, public space, the Kantian legacy, the commons, internet, generations, care, heritage. The chapter on borders by the late Chris Rumford has been updated by Anthony Cooper. The volume retains the four-fold structure of the first editions, cosmopolitan theory and history with a focus on the classic approaches, the cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism, ‘cosmopolitics’, and world varieties of cosmopolitanism. Gerard Delanty January 2018

xxii

Introduction The field of cosmopolitanism studies Gerard Delanty

Over the past two decades there has been very wide interest in cosmopolitanism across the human and social sciences. Where earlier it had been largely a term associated with moral and political philosophy, cosmopolitanism has now become a widely used term in the social sciences and possibly rivals globalization and transnationalism as a focus for research. In many ways cosmopolitanism constitutes an interdisciplinary area for the human and social sciences. As invoked in this volume, the idea of cosmopolitanism studies – or cosmopolitan studies – does not proclaim anything more than the recognition of interdisciplinarity arising from common research questions and theoretical lineages. Cosmopolitanism has been taken up by most disciplinary traditions, though its usage various often quite considerably. Cosmopolitanism in anthropology, for instance, is quite different from cosmopolitanism in sociology and in political philosophy. While the diverse literature often appeals to some classic texts, there is nonetheless considerable variety of interpretations and applications. In general, these vary from highly normative approaches as in political philosophy to more empirical applications in sociology and anthropology. There is much to be gained by greater dialogue between the various disciplines that have taken up the idea of cosmopolitanism. It is in this somewhat limited sense of interdisciplinarity that the notion of cosmopolitanism studies can be uncontroversially used. This volume is a contribution to interdisciplinary cosmopolitanism. As several chapters demonstrate, philosophical debate about the normative characteristics of cosmopolitanism needs to engage with the anthropological and sociological literature on actual cosmopolitanism. However, disciplinarity presupposes disciplinarity. There is perhaps a second and stronger sense of idea of cosmopolitanism studies, namely an emerging post-disciplinary studies area more or less beyond disciplinary traditions. Whether or not cosmopolitanism studies today constitutes such a domain of inquiry that goes beyond the assumptions of interdisciplinarity cannot be so easily concluded. For adherents to disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, there will be some resistance to such moves, which will be judged to lead to a loss of theoretical and methodological rigour. Yet, in whatever sense the term cosmopolitan studies is used, there is justification for it in that cosmopolitanism, despite the absence of theoretical and methodological agreement, is certainly an object of research and reflection across a very wide range of disciplines. For the time being it will probably remain an interdisciplinary field and thus a contrast to, for instance, the related domain of global studies where the post-disciplinary moment is more pronounced. 1

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Cosmopolitanism, it could be argued, is but an aspect of global studies and thus does not justify being designated a distinct domain of inquiry. However, such a charge is not warranted for cosmopolitanism has a different focus and background. Global studies, as the study of globalization, is a relatively recent development while cosmopolitanism has a long history as a concept and a literature that goes back to ancient Greek thought. While it lacks the scope of global studies, its historical and philosophical background, diverse as it is, arguably provides greater focus. One of the defining aspects of cosmopolitanism is its normative orientation and it is this that distinguishes it from globalization, which is not a normative concept. It is difficult to use the term cosmopolitanism without a normative stance. It is precisely this normative orientation that will meet with opposition from those who would rather separate social and historical analysis from philosophically grounded concepts. But the attraction that cosmopolitanism has today is not unconnected with the implicit tension between cosmopolitanism and globalization, with cosmopolitanism suggesting a critique of globalization. The world may becoming more and more linked by powerful global forces, but this does not make the world more cosmopolitan. If the normative underpinnings of cosmopolitanism are taken seriously, it must be apparent that it is not reducible to the condition of globalization. In the broadest sense possible, cosmopolitanism is about the extension of the moral and political horizons of people, societies, organizations and institutions. It implies an attitude of openness as opposed to closure. For Eduardo Mendieta, in his chapter in this volume, it is now a challenge to the anthropocentric and zoomorphic assumptions that ground human exceptionalism. The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has always up-held the spirit of openness and a perspective on the world that emphasized the extension of the bonds of inclusivity. Cosmopolitanism is therefore a condition that is more likely than not to be exemplified in opposition to prevailing conditions and thus signalling in some sense the exploration of alternatives to the status quo. This tension between the status quo and the imaginary of an alternative has often been taken to mean that cosmopolitanism is a purely ideal aspiration not rooted in reality. The opposite is the case, for such projections are themselves real and products of concrete experiences. The growth of cosmopolitanism today is undoubtedly due to considerable disquiet about the impact of globalization, on the one side, and, on the other, the recognition that a globally connected world must find solutions that take into account the perspectives of others beyond one’s own immediate context. Aspirations to improve social justice and find solutions for global environmental challenges are not simply unrealistic ideals unlinked to political practice, but in many ways have become a part of the social imaginaries of almost all societies in the present day. For this reason, then, as Chris Rumford and Anthony Cooper have argued in their chapter, cosmopolitan opportunities do not appear ready formed as the antidote to the ‘iron cage’ of nationalism, but should be seen as potentials within the present. In similar terms, Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbiš argue that cosmopolitanism is never an absolute or fixed category that resides simply within some individuals more than others, but a dimension of social life that must be actively constructed through practices of meaning-making in social situations. But normative visions of alternative ways of organizing societies persist and these are discussed in the chapters by Gillian Brock and Richard Vernon who look at some of the debates within political philosophy on global justice. It is often argued that cosmopolitanism reflects a disdain for the local and is an elite preoccupation. In this view, cosmopolitanism is simply a global ideology or an embracing of the world of the mobile global elite. The nature of cosmopolitan thought in recent years contradicts this criticism. As reflected in many chapters in this volume, we find a strong emphasis on cosmopolitanism as rooted as opposed to being a rejection of real communities. The notion of a rooted cosmopolitanism has been variously defended by theorists as different as the moral philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah and the sociologist Ulrich Beck and was also advocated 2

Introduction

by Hannah Arendt. The reception of cosmopolitanism in the social sciences as well as in postcolonial thought, whereby cosmopolitanism becomes linked with empirical social phenomena, makes it difficult to claim that cosmopolitanism is only an elite phenomenon. It is increasingly associated with the claims to rights of groups previously excluded from political community and is very much bound up with dissent and protest. Thus, for instance, in the chapters by Hensby and O’Byrne, Plummer, and Caraus and Parvu, it is associated with marginal groups and in the chapter by Walter D. Mignolo cosmopolitanism is produced by de-colonialism in the global south. It is also worth recalling that in its classical origins in Ancient Greece the cosmopolitan current represented by the Cynics gave expression to anti-elite and anti-institutional notions of belonging and citizenship, a contrast to the Stoic tradition that fit more easily into the new Hellenistic empire of Alexander and the nascent Roman empire. The tension between popular and elite conceptions of cosmopolitanism has persisted in the subsequent history of the idea and can also be found in the discord between moral individualist positions and aspirations for new cosmopolitan world institutions. But cosmopolitanism is always a defence of the autonomy of the individual. Thus education, as Matthew J. Hayden argues, provides one of the best arenas for examining the articulation of actually existing cosmopolitanisms with cosmopolitanism as a normative moral and/or political ideal. Schools are, after all, places where educators struggle daily to impart, inscribe and actualize various visions of the moral individual and the good society. Schools are a natural site for the exploration of tensions where students from different cultures meet and expose the need for new ways of living together. The popularity of cosmopolitan today, it might be suggested, lies in its relevance to an understanding of major social change throughout the world (see the contributions in Part I by Gerard Delanty and Neal Harris, David Inglis, Bo Stråth and Piet Strydom and, in Part IV, by Maurice Roche on Europe). It is particularly relevant to an understanding of shifts in the social imaginaries of societies and the emergence of ethical and political responses to global challenges. Related concepts, such as internationalism, globalization and transnationalism do not quite offer a framework of interpretation and not all aspects of major social change can be understood with reference to these concepts (see Victor Roudometof ’s chapter). Cosmopolitanism concerns ways of imagining the world and thus it is more than a condition of mobility or transnational movement. It is particularly bound up with the expansion of democracy and the extension of the space of the political. The revival of cosmopolitan thought today has much to do with the tremendous changes that occurred in the 1990s in the aftermath of the end of communism in USSR and central and eastern Europe. In this period, which also saw the end of Apartheid, the Tiananmen Square movement, and, extending into the present day, the movements towards democratization of the Arab world, cosmopolitanism in all these arenas has wide appeal as framework of interpretation. The two hundredth anniversary of Kant’s 1795 work Perpetual Peace in 1995 was an important movement in revival of cosmopolitanism since this work was the defining text in modern cosmopolitan thought with its central notion of a principle of hospitality as the basis of a cosmopolitan political community. See Garrett W. Brown’s chapter on the Kantian legacy of cosmopolitanism and the more recent controversies that have arisen around it. The 1990s were marked not only by such major political events of global significance, but in addition by the arrival of the internet and an epochal revolution in communication technologies which led not only to the transformation of everyday life and politics but too of capitalism. The sense of epochal change was enhanced with a sense of a new millennium. As with previous periods of major social and political transformation, the new millennium began with cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan movements colliding. From 11th September 2001 with the emergence of the ‘war on terror’ to the global crisis of capitalism that began on 14th September 2008, with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, anti-cosmopolitan tendencies emerged to re-shape the world according to new doctrines of security and capitalist crisis. The 3

Gerard Delanty

rise of right-wing xenophobic nationalism in central and Eastern Europe, the Trump presidency and Brexit, the trend towards authoritarian democracy in many parts of the world are further reminders that global change does not lead only to cosmopolitan outcomes. However, one should not see cosmopolitanism in terms of a zero sum game of a choice between atavistic nationalism and religious fundamentalism, one the one side, and on the other cosmopolitan ideals. Both are part of the contemporary world. Cosmopolitanism is expressed in degrees as opposed to being a condition that is either present or absent; elements of cosmopolitanism can be variously found in all societies. It may be suggested that every political community contains both cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan orientations; or, in other words orientations towards openness and closure are part of the make-up of all collective entities. Viewed in such light, the political cultures of societies, both in the past and in the present, are never entirely cosmopolitan in much the same way that they are never entirely democratic. For the same reasons it is a mistake to see cosmopolitanism in terms of a model of decline. It is arguably the case that despite widespread anti-cosmopolitan trends, there has been a world-wide increase in cosmopolitanism and the carriers of it may be oppositional movements or movements in the direction of global democratizations, as discussed in the chapters by Richard Vernon and James D. Ingram, as well as the chapter by Alexander Hensby and Darren J. O’Byrne and the chapter by Tamara Caraus and Camil Alexandru Parvu. This has also been very well documented by Austin Harrington in the case of Weimar Germany where cosmopolitan thought remained strong, in contrast to the conventional image of its decline in the first half of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitanism is thus best seen in light of a larger framework of analysis than something that can be accounted for only in terms of attitudes. While the term cosmopolitanism goes back to the Stoics, and earlier, it is best understood as part of the social imaginary of the modern world. In this volume, Piet Strydom situates cosmopolitanism in the context of an account of the learning potentials within modernity. This cognitive approach is reflected in the general association of cosmopolitanism with post-Kantian conceptions of political community and modernity. This tie between modernity and cosmopolitanism all immediately raises a different question, namely the relation between cosmopolitanism and different models of modernity, since modernity is not only Western, as in the Kantian tradition of European political modernity or its various liberal alternatives. A problem for cosmopolitan studies is the term itself and its Western genealogy. Most conceptions of cosmopolitanism emanating from the Kantian idea, which in turn derives from the original Stoic philosophy, presuppose a largely Western approach to history and modernity. Is cosmopolitanism therefore uncosmopolitan in being a product of the West? Unfortunately there has been insufficient attention given to this in the existing literature, which on the whole tends to ignore the historical experience of non-Western parts of the world. In this volume the problem of translating cosmopolitanism is specifically addressed in the contributions by Walter D. Mignolo and Bo Stråth, as well as in the chapters that constitute Part IV, on world varieties of cosmopolitanism, such as Yoshio Sugimoto’s chapter on Japan where he makes the argument that the concept of ‘Kyōsei’ translates the Western notion of cosmopolitanism or Lisa Rofel’s discussion of the Chinese notion of ‘tianxia’. In view of the diverse interpretations of cosmopolitanism, a starting point is to recognize that cosmopolitanism is an open-ended approach and not based on a fixed standard of values. It is also plausible to suggest the term is no longer confined to its Western genealogy, but should be related to the experiences that roughly correspond to it in the histories of other world cultures. This is where cultural translation becomes a consideration for a genuinely cosmopolitan approach, which must embrace global history and where the most promising and innovative developments can be made in cosmopolitan inquiry in the future. In this volume, for instance, Lisa Rofel, explores the Chinese equivalent of the Western concept of cosmopolitanism and Sudarsan Padmanabhan undertakes a similar analysis 4

Introduction

in the case of the cosmopolitan cultures of India, as does Yoshio Sugimoto with respect to Japanese cosmopolitanism. This approach is not without its risks. It would not be helpful if the universalistic impulse within cosmopolitanism were pluralized to a point that we end up with a diversity of cosmopolitan cultures or a counter-Western cosmopolitanism. As Daniel Chernilo argues in his contribution to this volume, cosmopolitanism necessarily requires a certain degree of universalism, though such a universalism must be differentiated and qualified. There is no genuine cosmopolitan position, he argues, without a universalistic orientation that upholds the idea of humanity. There is also the separate question whether normative or descriptive claims are being made. A possible way forward that will avoid the pitfalls of relativism and universalism is to locate the cosmopolitan imaginary as an orientation or self-understanding that exists within all world cultures and while taking a diversity of historical forms is always a response to the widening of human experience and the broadening of political community. In her chapter on cosmopolitanism in Africa, Sarah Balakrishnan avoids any discussion of a civilizational particularness and concentrates on a new kind of civic cosmopolitanism among activists. This is an interesting contrast to Andrew Hartman’s characterization of American cosmopolitanism in terms of a model of decline arising out of a pluralism which has not in fact led to greater cosmopolitanism. Whether or not such a sense of a decline in the fortunes of American cosmopolitanism is warranted, his chapter is a reminder that cultural pluralization is not always a basis for cosmopolitanism. In much the same terms, Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas claim that in the case of Australia and New Zealand both societies have been led, not towards more inclusive social and political formations, but instead to policies that have encouraged increased insularity, individualization and exclusion. From a different theoretical framework, Maurice Roche writing on Europe suggests that it is necessary to maintain a clear distinction between the concept’s normative and analytic meanings, and to focus on the latter. His argument is that the concept of ‘cosmopolitan order’ can be useful in addressing the social context of cosmopolitanism in terms of cultural mixtures, social openness and common power regimes rather than focusing on attitudes and values. He claims that deep and long-term trends in Europe and the EU have operated to promote cosmopolitanism in the form of cosmopolitan social orders. As is apparent from the above mentioned chapters in Part IV, it is possible to find a way to conceive of varieties of cosmopolitanism in ways that do not entail the negation of universality and it is possible to do this in both historical and contemporary perspective. The key to this is the identification of alternative conceptions of what constitutes community as co-existence and as a broadening of horizons whether on national or transnational levels. This at least is a starting point for a basic definition of cosmopolitanism, which must be seen as extending into more complex levels of critical awareness and different orientations. And as several chapters argue, cosmopolitanism is not an historically invariable condition, but has shifted several times in history, as is vividly clear in the case of South America, China and India. The interrelation of European and non-European cosmopolitanism cultures should also be considered, a theme that is more present in Aurea Mota’s account of Latin American expressions of cosmopolitanism as well as in Huon Wardle’s discussion of ethnographies of cosmopolitanism in the Caribbean. Wardle, for instance, points out how widespread horror at Caribbean slavery played an important role in the emergence of European Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. Aurea Mota argues for the global relevance of the adoption of the liberal project in early nineteenth century South American after independence and the idea of a Latin American cosmopolitanism that can only be seen as part of a wider world phenomenon of which it was a part. This corrects a major Eurocentric view of world history that liberal democracy was primarily a European development when, in fact, one of the most extensive experiments with democracy occurred in Latin America in the nineteenth century. According to Humeira 5

Gerard Delanty

Iqtidar, if cosmopolitanism is understood as a distancing of the self, the ability to re-evaluate one’s own norms and practices, then it can be found in many instances of Islamic culture where the groups in question have developed those capabilities. In this view, Bryan S. Turner argues that cosmopolitanism is neither new nor necessarily secular. Stoicism, for instance, contributed significantly to the origins of cosmopolitanism, but its real driving force was religious. This is, too, a reminder that cosmopolitanism should not be equated with diverse and transnationally mobile urban population, including in global cities, as Yeoh and Weiqiang argue, for cosmopolitanism is about engaging with others and is to be found in locations that are not necessarily global spaces. In light of the above considerations a cosmopolitan approach does offer an alternative way to view major social change today from some of the dominant approaches, of which there are essentially three. One view is that as a result of global transformations there is increased homogenization in the world today. This thesis of homogenization has been reflected in diverse views ranging from implausible notions of the ‘end of history’ as a condition in which liberal democracy has become the dominant political system to more convincing arguments about societal convergences or the increasing importance of a ‘world culture’ or a dominant global culture eroding national or local cultures. Contrary to this is an approach that would see less convergence than greater divergence and, eventually but not inevitably, polarization. In the extreme it amounts to a notion of a clash of civilizations. Clearly both processes of convergence and divergence are in evidence in almost every part of the world and any account of social change will need to account for both. However, it is out of dissatisfaction with these accounts that alternative accounts have been put forward which see as the distinctive feature a process of hybridization in which cultures merge in a continuous creation of new forms. Cultures do not collide, but borrow from each other and adapt in different ways without an overall convergence being the result. This is often taken to be a case for cosmopolitanism. However, cosmopolitanism properly defined is not a condition of hybridization, but one of the creative interaction of cultures and the exploration of shared worlds. As such, it suggests heightened reflexivity. While it can be argued that all cultures are in some way the product of cultural mixing, a point is generally reached whereby the cultural form ceases to be conscious of its hybridity and with the passage of time it takes on a more solidified character. At this point, the cultural entity in question will take on another character and the result may be surrender to a global culture, or itself become a global culture, or a process of polarization sets in. Distinct from the aforementioned processes, a fourth scenario is thus possible and can be termed a unity in diversity. In this case the distinctive development is less a mixing of cultures and the production of new hybrid forms, than a reflexive inter-relation of cultures whereby the cultures undergo some change as a result of exchange. Diversity is not eradicated by mixing but also does not result in polarization. While diversity is preserved, there is a also a degree of unity between the elements but without a dominant culture taking over. So, instead of a single culture emerging, the cultures co-exist through the creation of frameworks of solidarity and integration. This is essentially what cosmopolitanism seeks to identify and, as I argue, with Neal Harris, in our contribution to this volume, the approach that describes it a critical cosmopolitanism. Does this mean that cosmopolitanism no longer has any relation with the political tradition that it is most commonly associated with it, namely the liberal legacy? In modern political philosophy cosmopolitanism has been in part allied with liberalism in that the moral and political values associated with cosmopolitanism are an extension of the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, respect for the individual, egalitarianism, etc. It has been mostly the case that cosmopolitan virtues have been espoused within the context of a broader embracing of liberal values. Despite the turn to cultural context today and the recognition of a multiplicity of cosmopolitan projects, one should not conclude that liberalism and cosmopolitanism have entirely decoupled, as Aurea 6

Introduction

Mota has argued in her chapter on Latin American cosmopolitanism. The liberal legacy itself has been diverse and like cosmopolitanism it is open to different interpretations. The chapters written for this volume reflect the broad reception of cosmopolitan thought in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, literary theory and history to international relations, anthropology, communications studies and sociology. Part I presents generally theoretical approaches in which some of the major developments in recent theorizing are discussed. Given the wide literature that currently exists on the history of cosmopolitanism and the aspiration to present in this volume new thinking on cosmopolitanism, the chapters concentrate on recent developments, including the relationship between cosmopolitan theory and empirical social research, as in the two chapters by Victor Roudometof and Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbis. David Inglis’s chapter offers a succinct account of how much of the classical legacy can be reclaimed. The next two sections contain chapters respectively on the cultural and political conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Despite the arbitrariness of the distinction, it is in line with what is still a significant division within the literature on cosmopolitanism, which on the whole tends to be divided between largely cultural approaches and those that derive from normative political theory. The chapters by Sassatelli and Papastergiadis are good examples of attempts to link normative and empirical approaches with respect to cultural analysis. Of all the social sciences, anthropology has been at the forefront in advocating cosmopolitan interpretations and in the chapter on this topic by Pnina Werbner there is a strong emphasis on the ethical significance of cosmopolitanism. Other topics include communications, religion, cities, aesthetics, education and memory. The chapters in Part III on cosmopolitics typically address aspects of political community such as citizenship, human rights, democracy, equality and justice, solidarity, humanitarianism and global civil society. Finally, Part IV, as discussed above, offers wide-ranging accounts of world varieties of cosmopolitanism. The rationale here is that cosmopolitanism today must be taken out of its exclusive Western context and related to the historical experiences of other world cultures. In this vein, there are chapters on cosmopolitanism in the Caribbean, Latin America, China, Japan and Africa as well as in major parts of the Western world, such as Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Another chapter by He and Brown deals specifically with more general Asian perspectives on cosmopolitanism that go beyond specific civilizational and national forms. Indeed, in their account normative transnationalism is one of the most important expressions of Asian cosmopolitanism. Pheng Cheah’s chapter reconstructs and offers a critical assessment of Benedict Anderson’s unexpected turn to cosmopolitanism from the latter half of the 2000s to his posthumous memoir. It compares Anderson’s account of a normative Southeast Asian cosmopolitanism that arose during the colonial period to earlier arguments about Southeast Asian cultural identity and the recent attempt of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) states to foster a socio-cultural identity for the region. Although not a regionally based cosmopolitanism, the final chapter by Michael L. Miller and Scott Ury looks at Jewish cosmopolitanism as a major world variety. Given the diversity of approaches and applications an overall synthesis or summary is difficult. As I suggested in my own contribution, co-authored with Neal Harris, cosmopolitanism can be characterized as comprising three dimensions. Firstly, cosmopolitanism concerns empirical phenomena which can be best described as forms of experience. In this sense, cosmopolitanism can be said to be real in that it concerns real experiences. Secondly, cosmopolitan concerns particular kinds of experience that entail their own interpretation. In this second sense, the normative component of cosmopolitanism is an empirically grounded one. It is on this level that the social imaginary of cosmopolitanism can be located. Thirdly, it is possible to speak of a higher level of interpretation that goes beyond those that are rooted in people’s experiences of the world, namely evaluations, by which are intended philosophical and social scientific reflections 7

Gerard Delanty

on cosmopolitanism. In other words, cosmopolitanism is both a reality as well as a moral and political interpretation, but it is also an approach to the analysis of the social world. The second edition of the International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies aims to showcase some of the most innovative and promising developments in recent writing in the human and social sciences on cosmopolitanism.

Bibliography Apel, K.-O. 2000. ‘Globalization and the Need for Universal Ethics: The Problem in Light of Discourse Ethics’, European Journal of Social Theory, 3(2): 137–55. Appiah, K. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Beck, U. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Outlook. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. and Grande, E. 2007. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benhabib, S. 2008. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bohman, J. and Lutz-Bachmann, M. (eds.) 1997. Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Breckenridge, C.A. et al. (eds.) 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NJ: Duke University Press. Brenan, T. 1997. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (eds.) 2005. The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds.) 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press. Delanty, G. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. and He, B. 2008. ‘Comparative Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism: Assessing European and Asia Perspectives’, International Sociology, 23(3): 323–44. Delanty, G. and Inglis, D. (eds.) 2010. Cosmopolitanism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. 4 vols. London: Routledge. Fine, R. 2007. Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge. Hannerz, U. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harrington, A. 2004. ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s Concept of Europe’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7: 479–98. Held, D. 2010. Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ingram, J.D. 2013. Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kendall, G., Woodward, I. and Skrbis, Z. 2009. The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism. London: Palgrave. Kurasawa, F. 2007. The Work of Global Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linklater, A 1998. The Transformation of Political Community. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nussbaum, M. 1996. ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Cohen, J. (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robbins, B. and Horta, P.L. (eds.) 2017. Cosmopolitanisms. New York: New York University Press. Rumford, C. (ed.) 2006. Cosmopolitanism and Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rumford, C. 2008. Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory. London: Routledge. Schlereth, T. 1977. The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame University Press. Stevenson, N. 2002. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tan, K.-C. 2004. Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toulmin, S. 1992. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, B.S. 2001. ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: On Religion in a Global Age’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4(2): 131–52. Turner, B.S. 2002. ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: Globalization and Patriotism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19(1): 45–63. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (eds.) 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Werbner, P. (ed.) 2008. Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Berg. 8

Part I

Cosmopolitan theory, history and approaches

1 Kant and cosmopolitan legacies Garrett W. Brown

The legacy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) on cosmopolitan thought is profound. This is because it would be near impossible to find a discussion within contemporary cosmopolitanism that did not make protracted and direct references to the political philosophy of Kant. Whether one is in agreement with Kant’s cosmopolitan vision or not, his works have undoubtedly had a lasting and deeply penetrating influence on cosmopolitans and anti-cosmopolitans alike. Moreover, the Kantian cosmopolitan legacy has continued to transcend the confines of traditional political philosophy, inspiring scholars in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, development, economics, geography, international relations, law, political science, and sociology. In light of Kant’s importance within cosmopolitan thought it is fitting that the International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies has a dedicated chapter entirely to Kant’s cosmopolitan vision. Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to present some of the key features of Kantian cosmopolitanism as well as to advance and clarify a number of Kant’s positions as they relate to ongoing cosmopolitan criticisms. To do so the chapter is divided into four sections. ‘Kantian cosmopolitanism’ will outline the general moral and legal elements that underwrite Kant’s cosmopolitanism. From this basic vision the section ‘Kant’s anti-imperialist cosmopolitanism’ examines, and then refutes, the claim that Kant’s cosmopolitanism should be understood as promoting a form of imperialism. Building upon this discussion ‘Kantian laws of hospitality and the broadening of public right’ will examine Kant’s laws of hospitality in further detail, illustrating how Kant demands clear protections against imperialism as well as for the protection of visiting strangers, whether as refugees or in attempts to establish mutual relations. Lastly, the chapter ends by reflecting on Kant’s place within contemporary thinking, suggesting that Kantian cosmopolitanism continues to offer meaningful insights, thus remaining heuristically salient for ongoing debates concerning species life and global cohabitation.

Kantian cosmopolitanism Although the history of cosmopolitan thought has been argued to date as far back as the philosopher Anhnaton in 1526BC (Harris 1927) there is considerable consensus that history’s most formidable influence upon cosmopolitan thought came from the political philosophy of Kant (Nussbaum 1997). This is because, unlike his predecessors, Kant offered a more nuanced, 11

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extended, and practically oriented form of cosmopolitanism, which reached far beyond the existing ethical, religious, and legal ideas of his time. In its most basic form Kant’s cosmopolitanism concerns itself with delineating the moral, legal, and political conditions required to establish a condition of cosmopolitan right (a condition of justice – mutually consistent external freedom) between all global inhabitants. As Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason, what is required to ground this condition is ‘a constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws which ensure that the freedom of each can coexist with the freedom of all the others’. Establishing a condition of public right, according to Kant, ‘is at all events a necessary idea which must be made the basis of not only the first outline of a political constitution but all laws as well’ (Kant 1900 [3:247]: Appendix). What Kant is suggesting is that external freedom (independence from being constrained solely by another’s choice) is only fully possible if it is also grounded and mutually recognized under a universal system of law, where one’s freedom ‘can coexist with the freedom of every other’ (Kant 1981 [4:421]: 30). It is only under such a condition of public right that the ‘choice of one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with the universal law of freedom’ (Kant 1996 [6:230]: 24). The moral foundations underpinning Kant’s concern with establishing this condition of external freedom and public right derive from two of his more notable contributions to moral philosophy. The first of these Kantian contributions begins with deployment of his transcendental deduction and the assumption that humans have the ability for freewill. According to Kant it is impossible to empirically prove whether or not freewill truly exists. For Kant, what is more important is whether freewill can be understood to exist transcendentally. Through a method of deduction, Kant suggests that humans often make judgments claiming that someone ought to have acted in a certain way, or, that someone should have behaved differently. By making such demands in our everyday practice, humans already make a series of assumptions about people having the ability to have done something otherwise, thus, that they have a level of freewill available to them to make or not to make a moral decision. As Kant furthers, if humans are not free to determine the imperative force behind moral values (as a world without freewill would intimate), then morality no longer represents a self-imposed moral duty, but a coerced determinant that no longer requires appeals to morality. This is troubling for Kant, since the capacity to self-legislate is a priori the power to be a moral being and, as a result, must be understood to represent the ultimate source of human dignity. As Kant argues, by acting in accordance with moral principles prescribed by one’s own reason, humans assert their independence from an empirically determined world of coercion and, in doing so, establish what is distinctively human and unique about our nature. However, Kant also understands that if moral choice is what makes us distinctively human, then those moral choices will also stand in relation to the free choices of other humans. If this is so, argues Kant, then to uphold freewill as the ultimate source of human dignity will also require that one’s freedom is also universally valid in relation to the external freedom of all others. This is true both internally in regards to a condition of domestic public right, but also in regards to relations between states and peoples (international and cosmopolitan public right). In understanding that humans should not submit to a morality outside them, Kant demands that humans must always be understood as co-legislating members of a universal kingdom of ends. To state differently, since everyone has the capacity to be moral lawgivers, it is therefore rational to treat others with basic moral respect, to understand their capacity for freewill, and to behave with a corresponding awareness of our universal human dignity. It is from this underwriting notion of universal validity that Kant posits his categorical imperative, which insists that we should ‘act only according to the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant 1981 [4:421]: 30). In respect for the dignity of moral choice, 12

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Kant further derives from this maxim that we should ‘act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never only as a means’ (Kant 1981 [4:429]: 36). Kant stresses the importance of this imperative as the foundation of law and politics when he argues that it represents ‘an original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity’ (Kant 1981 [4:421]: 30). It is because external freedom requires co-legislation within a universal kingdom of ends that Kant thus maintains the judicial need for a cosmopolitan constitution that can allow ‘the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws which ensure that the freedom of each can coexist with the freedom of all the others’. As stated previously, Kant holds that establishing this condition of public right ‘is at all events a necessary idea which must be made the basis of not only the first outline of a political constitution but all laws as well’ (Kant 1900 [3:247]: Appendix). Although Kant provides the moral groundings for why a condition of cosmopolitan right is ‘necessary’, he also suggests that establishing this cosmopolitan condition does not need to rely on these ‘motives of morality’ alone, since there are also persistent rational and practical incentives embedded within existing global relations (Kant 1970d [8:368]: 114). For Kant, the motivational basis for cosmopolitan right is premised on many of the similar empirical justifications commonly highlighted by contemporary cosmopolitans as they pertain to globalization. Like many contemporary cosmopolitans, Kant argues that the world has become increasingly interconnected where human interaction is no longer unavoidable and where a ‘violation of right in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (Kant 1970d [8:360]: 107). Kant suggests that due to the profound empirical and moral implications of global interconnectedness and interdependency, and its potential to harm mutually consistent public right, the ‘greatest problem for the human species . . . is that of attaining a civil society, which can administer justice universally’ (Kant 1970a [8:28]: 51). What is required in the immediate sense, according to Kant, is the creation of mutually consistent international and cosmopolitan principles ‘which may eventually be regulated by public laws, thus bringing the human race nearer and nearer to a cosmopolitan constitution’ (Kant 1970d [8:360–1]: 108). As a transitional mechanism Kant claims that the legal grounding for cosmopolitan public right should to be applied through a tripartite system of interlocking and mutually reinforcing laws (Brown 2009). In the first instance this was to be fostered and expanded through a voluntary pacific federation (foedus pacificum) of like-minded republican states and peoples who are dedicated to the establishment of a more rightful condition under cosmopolitan law. This tripartite matrix of cosmopolitan law would codify public right into domestic law/domestic right (laws between citizens), international law/international right (laws between states and other political units), and the creation of cosmopolitan law/cosmopolitan right (laws between states and individuals, especially non-citizens, including laws between private individuals). As a means for cosmopolitical expansion Kant suggests that this cosmopolitan legal matrix might develop from ‘one powerful and enlightened nation . . . a republic’ [of public right] . . . and that this could ‘provide a focal point for federal association among other states’ (Kant 1970d [8:356]: 104). Kant goes on to suggest that other states could ‘join up with the first one, thus securing the freedom of each state in accordance with the idea of international right, and the whole will gradually spread further and further by a series of alliances of this kind’ (ibid.). Moreover, the empirical dynamics of globalization, which are rooted within the political and economic structures of the international system, furnish opportunities for normative reflectivity that provides the impetus for states, even against their immediate self-interest, toward producing this potential ‘concord among men’ (Kant 1970d [8:360–1]: 108; Brown 2009). As Kant suggests, this reflective logic can rely solely on practical realities of mutual interest in trade and security, which if not addressed, can ‘provide the occasion for troubles in one place on the globe to be felt all over’ (Kant 1996 [6:352]: 121). 13

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It is in relation to minimizing the costs of these potential harms that Kant believes that ‘the first articles of alliance’ will be those associated with trade and security and it is from this impetus that cosmopolitanism is not only motivationally possible, but also empirically and normatively necessary. In other words, what Kant is suggesting is that any state constitution and civil order, no matter how internally coherent and stable, cannot be fully secure unless its external relationships with other states are also mutually secure and that this can only be done through meaningful political cooperation and the acceptance of a genuine system of public right between states and peoples. Therefore, for Kant, international stability and the health of a state’s own civil order is inextricably interconnected. Because of this Kant puts forward ‘wherever in the world there is a threat . . . [states] will be motivated to prevent it by mediation’ (Kant 1970d [8:368]: 114). It is through this mediation, and the continued promotion of a tripartite system public right, from which Kant suggests states will increasingly reduce wars of insecurity, moving ever slowly, incrementally, toward what he famously labeled a condition of perpetual peace (Doyle 1983).

Kant’s anti-imperialist cosmopolitanism At first glance Kant’s cosmopolitan vision seems rather ideal. This is because it is hard to intuitively argue against its most basic premise, namely, the creation of a copasetic world of mutually respectful cohabitation. However, critics of Kant and cosmopolitanism do not share this view. They have often suggested that Kant’s vision actually obscures an insidious form of power and dominance by dressing it up in universalist clothes. According to critics, Kant’s cosmopolitanism actually gives license to an authoritarian ‘nightmarish hegemony’ associated with the eventual establishment of a world government (Wight 1987: 226), which is inherently racist (Bernasconi 2011), and which is implicitly Eurocentric, culturally insensitive, and fundamentally imperialist in nature (Tully 2008). In many ways these critiques have not done justice to Kant’s more mature articulation of cosmopolitanism nor do they offer him any leeway to have changed his position in the later years of his life. Yet, there are explanations for why confusion and contention exist. This is because many of Kant’s ideas are at times in opposition to each other and there are a number of cases where Kant’s ideas remain underdeveloped or ambiguous in comparison to other aspects of his work. This is compounded by the fact that Kant’s cosmopolitan writings came toward the very end of his life, with Kant himself proclaiming that he was unable to fully complete his thoughts, while also encouraging his readers to finish his cosmopolitan project for him (Kant 1970d [8:385]: 128). It is in this spirit that it is useful to respond to three of Kant’s most serious criticisms. Doing so not only helps to refute these charges against him, but also helps to refine and explore the complexities of Kant’s broader cosmopolitan vision. As briefly outlined above, a lasting critique of Kant’s legacy argues that a cosmopolitan condition of public right would ultimately require enforcement from a state-like entity with the final authority to mitigate any violations of public right. If instituted along these lines, this legal structure would eliminate our existing understanding of state sovereignty and national self-determination, thus creating a homogeneous and hegemonic world-state from which there would be no escape from its unifying tyranny. As Hedley Bull has written, Kantian ‘imperatives enjoin not coexistence and cooperation among states but rather the overthrow of the system of states and its replacement by a cosmopolitan society’ (Bull 1977: 25). Some Kantian scholars have also endorsed a similar interpretation, maintaining that the Kantian ideal theory requires individuals to live under common civil laws of a cosmopolitan republic and that Kant’s final idea of federation was merely his second best ideal (Laberge 1998). 14

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Although Kant scholars remain divided on whether Kant should or should not have advocated for a world-state, there is general consensus that Kant ultimately argues against the formation of a world-state, opting instead for what he called a foedus pacificum (pacific federation). Furthermore, Kant is clear that the federation is to be a voluntary, progressively expanding association of free and independent states (Kant 1970d [8:354]: 102). As the exegetical evidence supports, Kant also dismissed a world-state as dangerous to external freedom and expressed concerns about its unbridled despotism. As Kant proclaimed, such a [world] state is in turn even more dangerous to freedom, for it may lead to fearful despotism . . . distrust must force men to form an order which is not a cosmopolitan commonwealth under a single ruler, but a lawful federation under a commonly accepted international right. (Kant 1970c [8:310–11]: 90) Kant adds, ‘this federation does not aim to acquire any power like that of a state, but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the other confederated states’ (Kant 1970d [8:356]: 104). The most plausible interpretation of these statements is that Kant did indeed favor a federation for practical and empirical reasons, but also believed that something more than a basic federation was needed to fulfill the ultimate cosmopolitan ideal of public right. In this way it might be best to argue that Kant saw a global federation as an evolutionary stage towards a more robust form of future global governance (Cavallar 1999). Yet, unlike the world-state reading, Kant did not advocate for a world-state, but was only optimistic about a future movement towards a broader cosmopolitan political order of some kind yet to be determined. The most persuasive aspect of this interpretation is that it is able to maintain Kant’s firm stance that any movement toward transnational or global institutions would be voluntary and unforced. Thus, it is possible to understand that Kant had profound concerns about the formation of a world republic, while also understanding that given the right conditions, the establishment of voluntary transnational cosmopolitan institutions is not ruled out. Importantly, however, this political order would have to be consistent with Kantian principles of external freedom and public right. For it is clear that the establishment of these institutions could only be justified on Kantian grounds if there were also guarantees that individual freedoms would not be threatened by a possible despotic world order. A second criticism of Kant focuses on his works prior to 1790 and his explicitly racist defenses of the white race, its superiority over other races, his clear distain for racial mixing, and his ambivalent support for slavery. As a leading voice against Kant, Robert Bernasconi (2001, 2011) has argued that Kant’s early views on race taint and implicitly pollute his political philosophy more generally, thus undermining the sincerity in which Kant assigns universal dignity to human beings. The immediate implication for Kant, argues Bernasconi, is questioning the sincerity of Kant’s cosmopolitanism. It would be hard for any cosmopolitan to defend the racial arguments of Kant or to convincingly justify Kant’s scientific racism as located in writings such as Determination of the Concept of a Human Race. Nevertheless, it is important to observe that Kant seemingly had a change of mind sometime shortly after 1790. Like with his change of mind away from his earlier advocacy for a world-state, Kant’s position on race also notably changed after 1790. As Pauline Kleingeld (2014: 45) has convincingly argued, Kant’s ‘texts display a chronological pattern indicating that Kant radically changed his views on colonialism in the mid-1790s’ and that this ‘closely related to his changing views of race’. If this holds, which the evidence supports, then the question becomes in what way did Kant become anti-imperialist and in what ways is this manifest in his outlines for 15

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cosmopolitan public right? This question will be addressed in the ‘Kant and the future of collective action problems’ section, yet there is still more to be said on the matter here. Related to the above concern, a third critique of Kant argues that his teleological assumptions about inevitable human progress equates to nothing more than a European civilizing mission where the success of human progress becomes measured solely against European and Enlightenment ideas regarding what constitutes the most legitimate form of culture, politics, and law. As James Tully has argued, Kant’s vision presents an overly ‘Eurocentric narrative of historical development . . . as the universally necessary and irresistible path of development and modernization’ (Tully 2008: 148). As with Kant’s views on race and culture, there is sizable exegetical evidence to suggest that Kant’s early views on imperialism were at best ambivalent and that he often posited teleological theory that presupposed a hierarchy of culture, politics, and law, with Europe sitting firmly atop this pyramid. In addition, there are also a number of passages in Kant’s early works to suggest that his idea of history with a cosmopolitan purpose would be one in which European Enlightenment signaled an end of history. Yet again, like his views on race, the need for a world-state, and his views on European teleological exceptionalism, Kant demonstrably counters his earlier positions after 1790, particularly when developing his political philosophy and cosmopolitanism. In terms of his anti-imperialism, in both the Metaphysics of Morals and Perpetual Peace Kant presents a clear assault on the commercial exploits of the large trading nations. Kant proclaims that these European nations have ‘led to oppression of the natives, incitement of various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race’ (Kant 1970d [8:358–9]: 106). Kant furthers his critique on imperialism, stating that the ‘inhospitable conduct of the civilized states of our continent, especially the commercial states, the injustices which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great’ (Kant 1970d [8:358–9]: 106). It was because of the ‘evils’ of European imperial practice that Kant endorsed China’s and Japan’s attempt to limit European contact as a reasonable precaution against European hostilities (Kant 1970d [8:359]: 107). In this light, Kant’s hospitality cannot be seen as a clear endorsement of imperialism. As will be outlined in detail below, this condemnation of imperialism fits nicely with his overall demand to create a mutually consistent condition of public right. What is necessary, argues Kant, are laws of hospitality that ‘make it possible for [individuals] to enter into relations’ with each other. For it is only through a base level of mutual consistency that it then becomes possible for ‘continents distant from each other’ to ‘enter into peaceful mutual relations which may eventually be regulated by public laws, thus bringing the human race nearer and nearer to a cosmopolitan constitution’ (Kant 1970d [8:358]: 106).

Kantian laws of hospitality and the broadening of public right Although a full discussion of Kant’s cosmopolitan public right cannot be fully developed here, it is useful to outline five laws of hospitality that can be derived from Kant’s wider discussions on cosmopolitan law (see Brown 2009: 59–79). In its basic form, the laws of hospitality concern the ‘right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory’ (Kant 1970d [8:358]: 106). However, this principle of hospitality goes beyond the protection of basic freedoms as is often claimed (Derrida 2001; Brown 2010). This is because Kant subtly elaborates on what a commitment to cosmopolitan hospitality demands by alluding to additional principles of cosmopolitan hospitality that should affect all global interactions between peoples and which generate a series of positive duties to all humans. 16

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First, all human beings have a right to exit, enter and travel. As Kant suggests, there is a right of citizens of the world to try to establish community with all, and to that end, to visit all regions of the earth (Kant 1970d [8:358]: 106). Secondly, all human beings should have a freedom from hostility and from negligence that would result in imminent harm to body or property. This is an important measure of hospitality that will be discussed further below, for it protects individuals not only from direct harm, but also stipulates that a host community cannot turn individuals away if there is a possibility that this action will result in death or immediate harm to person and property. Thirdly, all human beings should have the freedom of communication and to engage in debates of public reason. This represents the Kantian belief that it is only through dialogue, exchange, and ‘the freedom to make public use of one’s reason’ that broader social change and global civil advancement can hope to be achieved over time (Kant 1970b [8:36–7]: 55). Fourthly, all humans should have the freedom to engage in commerce and the use of the world in common. As Kant suggests, ‘[humans] stand in a community of possible interaction, that is, in a thoroughgoing relation of each to all the others of offering to engage in commerce with any other, and each has the right to make this attempt’ (Kant 1970d [8:358–9]: 106). Lastly, all humans should have freedom from false, misrepresented, extorted or fraudulent contracts. As Kant states, in relation to international business dealings, settlement, and legal contract, the law of hospitality demands that these interactions ‘may not take place by force but only by contract, and indeed by a contract that does not take advantage of the ignorance of those inhabitants’ (Kant 1996 [6:353]: 122). What is interesting about Kant’s final two laws are the explicitly anti-imperialist positioning, in that they demand that all dealings with peoples, regardless of affiliation, must be negotiated in good faith and in such a way that resulting conditions are seen as mutually consistent. Although this represents a very minimal form of cosmopolitan right, a strong commitment to these final laws would go some way to correct the inequalities involved in the global market, while also creating a greater sense of fairness, cooperation, mutual right, and evenhandedness at the global level. This outline above sits much easier with Kant’s notion of public right since hospitality can be seen to represent those conditions which make it possible for people to enter into peaceful relations with each other so that this may eventually bring ‘the human race nearer and nearer to a cosmopolitan constitution’ (Kant 1970d [8:358–9]: 106). These laws represent the basic legal mechanisms for humans peaceably to trade, associate, communicate, exchange ideas without mistreatment, and engage commercially with one another under a mutually consistent concept of hospitality. In line with Kant’s broader idea of freewill and self-lawgiving, the laws of hospitality do not immediately create a full condition of global justice, as many contemporary cosmopolitans would wish, but a minimal condition of external freedom so that individuals have the opportunity to ‘engage in the use of public reason’ and to relate ethically toward one another to the point where critical distinctions and tensions would disintegrate over time (Kant 1970b [8:36–7]: 55). In addition, this reading of hospitality also fits nicely with Kant’s idea of both personal and communal enlightenment. For the laws of hospitality not only ‘provide important guarantees for the security and property of persons, but more importantly it creates sufficient safety for them to proceed to perfect their moral lives’ (Linklater 1990: 9). As Kant maintains, these exchanges must be guaranteed and fostered at the global level because it will only be through public reason and global deliberation that a future cosmopolitan condition might be obtained through selflegislation in relation to others (Willkür). For this reason, Kant demands that ‘these rights must be held sacred . . . there are no half measures here . . . for all politics must bend the knee before right, [if] politics may hope to return to arrive, however slowly, at a stage of lasting brilliance’ (Kant 1970d [8:380]: 125). Nevertheless, Kant’s laws of hospitality should be seen as multidirectional, in that they apply not only to foreign relations as visiting agents, but also in relation to when one is visited. In 17

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particular, Kant offers detailed discussion of what is involved in having a cosmopolitan right to asylum. For Kant clearly states within Perpetual Peace that an individual cannot be ‘turned away’ if this could not ‘be done without causing his death’ (Kant 1970d [8: 358]: 106). In addition, Kant broadens the possible parameters involved with asylum by arguing that individuals should be free from ‘inhospitable conduct’ that would result in imminent harm to body or property. This inhospitable conduct includes the ‘enslaving of stranded seafarers’, the ‘plundering of property’, slavery for repayment of debt, causing starvation or ‘famine’, ‘treachery’, ‘physical violence’, and/ or allowing actions that would immediately cause significant harm to body and property (Kant 1996 [6:353]: 121–2). In this regard, Kant has broadened the reasons that one could claim a right to asylum, which include cases where an individual will suffer imminent harm as a result of their deportation or refoulement. In this case, xenophobic claims regarding the possible rejection of asylum seekers under Kantian hospitality are not as evident as critics like Derrida suggest (Derrida 2000: 75; Brown 2010), since Kantian hospitality strictly forbids rejection if death or imminent harm to body or property would be the result of such expulsion. Since in many cases asylum seekers and refugees face torture, starvation, and death if deported, it could be argued that these deportations and refoulements would be tantamount to ‘inhospitable conduct’. Therefore, contemporaneously, failures of the refugee crisis can be seen under Kantian cosmopolitanism as a negligent violation of the laws of hospitality and thus remains available to recent debates about collective responsibilities for those who wash onto our shores.

Kant and the future of collective action problems It is hard to overstate the influence Kant has had on cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan thought. Rightly or wrongly, Kant has often been credited with positively grounding our modern conception of universal human rights (Follesdal and Maliks 2014), for providing a political blueprint for the establishment of the European Union (Delanty 2005; Brown 2014), with promoting modern liberal conceptions of democratic legitimacy (Held 1995), and for highlighting how ‘properly constituted’ democratic states create a condition of democratic peace between nations (Doyle 1983). Negatively, Kant has also been simultaneously blamed for singlehandedly inventing the concept of race and its negative outcomes (Bernasconi 2001), for philosophically underwriting an unyielding globalization of exploitation (Harvey 2009), and for providing the philosophical firepower necessary for Enlightenment’s aim toward ‘world conquest’ (Wight 1987). Although some of these critiques are unfair – because they lump Kant’s philosophy in with a whole host of sins associated with Enlightenment thinking and its more negative aftereffects – it would also be churlish to ignore these critiques without offering a thoroughgoing response. Unfortunately the space available in this chapter did not provide such an opportunity. Nevertheless, the hope is that it at least provided some insights to make sense of Kant’s more contradictory aspects while also providing a holistic overview of a defensible reading of Kantian cosmopolitanism. Having understood the practical limitations of moving his universal moral theory to universal practice, Kant consciously pursued a more humble and moderate course than his critics give him credit. As Kant states, a cosmopolitan condition will be the result of international norm building and a continued enthusiasm so that these narrowest of ethical conditions will ‘gradually spread further and further’. In this regard, Kant seemingly wished to avoid making predictions as to the final institutional complexion of a cosmopolitan condition. For Kant, what is first needed, and what is critical for any advancement of institutional cosmopolitanism are basic laws of hospitality 18

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that can help cultivate a broad sense of shared community, where everyone is considered as if they could be mutual citizens of the world. Although Kant was aware that current political hindrances often restrict relations between peoples, he also insisted that ‘this possible abuse cannot annul the right of citizens of the world to try and establish community with all’ (Kant 1996 [6:353]: 121). As Kant forcefully proclaimed, hospitable treatment is not merely a philanthropic principle, but a ‘principle having to do with public right’ (Kant 1996 [6:352]: 121). And this is, according to Kant, ‘a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity’ (Kant 1970d [8:360]: 108). It is arguable that the need to establish this cosmopolitan universal right of humanity has become more urgent today than it was in 1795. This reflection becomes particularly salient in the face of increasing global collective actions problems and the potential calamitous effects of climate change, nuclear proliferation, global disease risk, growing global inequalities, resource depletion, global financial crises, the ongoing refugee crisis, and a resurgent national parochialism that is seemingly moving global relations in the opposite direction.

References Bernasconi, R. (2001) ‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in R. Bernasconi (ed.) Race, Oxford: Blackwell: pp. 11–36. Bernasconi, R. (2011) ‘Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race’, in E. Stuart and E. Mendiata (eds.) Reading Kant’s Geography, Albany: SUNY Press: pp. 291–318. Brown, G.W. (2009) Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brown, G.W. (2010) ‘The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right: A Kantian Response to Jacques Derrida’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9(3): 1–20. Brown, G.W. (2014) ‘The European Union and Kant’s Theory of Cosmopolitan Right: Why the EU Is Not Cosmopolitan’, European Journal of International Relations, 20(3): 671–93. Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society, New York: Columbia University Press. Cavallar, G. (1999) Kant and Theory and Practice of International Right, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Delanty, G. (2005) ‘The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe’, International Relations Sociology, 15(3): 405–21. Derrida, J. (2000) Step of Hospitality: No Hospitality, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2001) ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, in S. Critchley and R. Kearney (eds.) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London: Routledge: pp. 25–6. Doyle, M. (1983) ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12(3): 204–35 and 12(4): 323–53. Follesdal, A. and Maliks, R. (2014) Kantian Theory and Human Rights, Abingdon: Routledge. Harris, H. (1927) ‘The Greek Origins of the Idea of Cosmopolitanism’, The International Journal of Ethics, 38(1): 1–10. Harvey, D. (2009) Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, New York: Columbia University Press. Held, D. (1995) ‘Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Global Order: Reflections on the 200th Anniversary of Kant’s Perpetual Peace’, Alternatives, 20(4): 415–30. Kant, I. (1900) Appendix, ‘Transcendental Logic II, Dialectic, I, Ideas in General’, in J.M.D. Meiklejohn (trans.) The Critique of Pure Reason, New York: The Colonial Press. Kant, I. (1970a) ‘The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in H. Reiss (ed.) Kant’s Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1970b) ‘An Answer to the Question “What Is Enlightenment?”’, in H. Reiss (ed.) Kant’s Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1970c) ‘On the Common Saying: This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice’, in H. Reiss (ed.) Kant’s Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1970d) ‘Perpetual Peace’, in H. Reiss (ed.) Kant’s Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1981) Grounding for the Metaphysic of Morals, J. Ellington (trans.), Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. 19

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Kant, I. (1996) The Metaphysics of Morals, M. Gregor (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kleingeld, P. (2014) ‘Kant’s Second Thoughts on Colonialism’, in K. Flikschuh and L. Ypi (eds.) Kant and Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press: pp. 43–67. Laberge, P. (1998) ‘Kant on Justice and the Law of Nations’, in D. Maple and T. Nardin (eds) International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, Princeton: Princeton University Press: pp. 82–102. Linklater, A. (1990) Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Nussbaum, M. (1997) ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds.) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, Cambridge: MIT Press: pp. 25–51. Tully, J. (2008) ‘The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, in J. Tully (ed.) Public Philosophy in a New Key Volume II: Imperialism and Civic Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: pp. 15–42. Wight, M. (1987) ‘An Anatomy of International Thought’, Review of International Studies, 13(1): 221–7.

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2 Radical cosmopolitanism and the tradition of insurgent universality James D. Ingram

Cosmopolitanism is radical in the most common, political-ideological sense when it pushes the principle of world citizenship to extremes, setting this principle against the status quo. Cosmopolitanism is radical in the etymological sense when it goes to the root, core, or essence of the idea. In this chapter, I will argue that the best candidate for a radical cosmopolitanism in both senses is a tradition of revolutionary politics that first emerged in modern Europe but quickly moved beyond it. I make no claim to an exhaustive treatment of the subject. Many other forms of cosmopolitanism can claim to be radical, from artistic practices to ways of life to ethical theories or comportments. But none can lay as strong a claim to radicalness as this particular form of politics, which combines a desire to transform the social-political order with a return to the root of an idea whose origins were political. Locating the origins of radical cosmopolitanism in the West is apt to rouse suspicions with which cosmopolitanism is often greeted. In radical political as well as cultural and philosophical quarters, cosmopolitanism is often identified not only with an elitism that is by turns aloof and overweening, but more specifically with Eurocentrism and imperialism. In recent years, such accusations have come especially from anti-, post-, and decolonial critics who see a continuity from cosmopolitanism’s imagined classical origins through the period of high European imperialism to its more recent use to justify the unification and homogenization of the world along Western lines, with the universalization of capitalism and the nation-state understood as the spread of modernity and progress. For such critics, nothing could be more cosmopolitan than to claim universality for a Western particular that finds itself in a position of dominance. The radical cosmopolitanism I sketch in the following pages is indeed born of this hegemonic Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, but it is an insubordinate, rebellious offspring. It arose out of Western modernity, but in reaction to and in opposition against it. In this, as I will explain, it was in fact honoring its ancient ancestor. No sooner was this radical cosmopolitanism born, moreover, than it fled its metropolitan home, reemerging at the farthest reaches of the global system. Radical cosmopolitanism’s contentiousness and restlessness, its propensity to challenge the dominant and to favor the margins, are among its defining traits. In the end, we will see that this minor tradition of cosmopolitanism troubles not only the more familiar, Eurocentric current of cosmopolitanism, but also the latter’s anti-, post-, and decolonial opponents. As I will show by tracing its path from 21

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classical Greece to revolutionary France to late-colonial Haiti, radical cosmopolitanism overlaps and shares elements with both of these perspectives, but coincides with neither. Radical cosmopolitanism is universalistic, but it expresses the universal as insurgent, as challenging what is taken for universal in a particular time and place. This radical tradition is never more universalistic than when it seeks to throw off or transform the very powers that brought it into being. It is those who fight the dominant powers in the name of the subaltern, the oppressed and excluded, the colonized and the global South, who are the true cosmopolitans, the agents of the universalization of the universal. Insurgent radical cosmopolitanism can thus denote the agent and author of a process of universalization that is destined to oppose dominant forms of universalism again and again. This unruly process continually produces ambiguities and reversals that displace and recast that very universality without ever coming to rest, sparing neither cosmopolitanism nor postcolonialism. But to see the roots of this, we must first return to cosmopolitanism’s birthplace, to Greece.

A Cynic provocation Cosmopolitanism was born radical. When Diogenes the Cynic pronounced himself a kosmopolitēs, a citizen of the world or cosmos, he was being radical in the familiar sense of immoderate or extreme insofar as he rejected the prevailing cultural, social, and political order. If he did not explicitly call for its overthrow, his coinage gestured towards a new kind of citizenship and membership that could only have struck his interlocutors as inconceivable. What made his intervention so provocative was its radicalness in the second, etymological sense: it went to the very root or fundament of Greek life. Any civilized Greek knew that one could not be a citizen of the cosmos, of nature itself, and that to insist on being one was to place oneself outside society and even humanity, among Aristotle’s gods and beasts. The idea of a citizen of the world violated the generally shared understanding not only of citizenship, identity, and belonging, but of social and political order itself. The real shock in the notion of cosmopolitanism is that it opens a gap between nature and the city that it then expresses in political terms. By articulating this gap in terms of citizenship – membership, belonging, identity, allegiance – Diogenes turned it into a question of which laws one should recognize, with and against whom one should identify, cooperate, and struggle, what one should seek and what means one might employ in doing so. His gesture of siding politically against the polis, its laws, customs, and roles, thus posed an immense challenge for anyone willing to take it seriously. For if, as even more temperate philosophers agreed, nature is greater, truer, more encompassing and permanent than laws or conventions, which are various and mutable, then justice and wisdom must be on the side of nature. And if the two are at odds, was the friend of nature, truth, and the universal not bound to take the Cynic’s side? To be sure, there were ways out of this difficulty, notably philosophy and theology. By identifying the universal with truth or transcendence, they situated it at a safe distance from politics, allowing one to ally oneself with nature within the delimited sphere of contemplation or worship. One could even go so far as to devote oneself to the universal entirely, as a sage or hermit – provided one gave up the local, earthly concerns of politics. Diogenes blocked this escape route, however. By declaring his political allegiance to nature, he claimed citizenship in a universal community that is not (yet) a community – unless, that is, it already includes everyone, unawares, contrary to where they believed their belonging and allegiance lay. And because cosmopolitanism suspends this politics between asymmetrical poles, with the negative pole marked as the particular community and the positive one left indeterminate, defined only by its universality, Diogenes’s challenge seems unlikely to lose its explosive charge in anything but a utopian future. 22

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In politics, one way to defuse this charge was to claim that the gap between nature and politics was not, in the end, so large. This was most notably accomplished by means of the idea of natural law, attributed to Cynicism’s immediate inheritor, Stoicism. By finding the existing human order or some project that could be built out of it sufficiently in line with the commands of nature (or God or reason), Stoicism assured contemporaries that they need not worry overmuch about the gap between them. Rome’s affairs with the Barbarians, or Europe’s with the world opened by the Age of Discovery, could be governed by this natural law without any drastic changes to the status quo. Small wonder, then, that natural lawyers were perceived by certain cosmopolitans as ‘sorry comforters’ (Kant). And small wonder, too, that self-proclaimed cosmopolitans ever since, often following in Kant’s footsteps, have acquired a similar reputation among their radical contemporaries. This is root of moderate cosmopolitanism, which calls for the reform of the existing or emerging global order even as it, by the same stroke, naturalizes and justifies that order. Radical cosmopolitans, in contrast, insist with Diogenes that a just order, one in accordance with reason, morality, or nature, requires the transformation, even the overthrow, of the existing one. And they further radicalize his provocation by insisting that this must be done politically. Rather than try, as some have, to find in Diogenes a positive vision for such a politics, I will accept the standard interpretation, namely that his own path was that of the politico-philosophical hermit, agitating for nature (as he saw it) against the city even in the city’s midst. Let us then leave the Greeks to consider some of those who have tried to give concrete political expression to his radical cosmopolitan demand. This demand, as I understand it, is that no one should be denied universal justice, and that no one should be allowed to determine for them what it is.

Radical cosmopolitanism as insurgent universality As cosmopolitan studies has flourished, it has discovered a rich variety of cosmopolitanisms throughout history and the world’s many traditions. Some of these cosmopolitanisms have been activist or even militant, from spiritual or artistic movements to chiliastic sects to conquering civilizations. There are nevertheless good reasons for privileging modernity as the field for radical cosmopolitanism. The first is geographical, a matter not simply of space but of how it is imagined. It was only after the globe was compassed and mapped, so not long after 1492, that it became possible to imagine, and to imagine oneself acting in, a world that is unified, concretely universal. The universal, not just as an aspiration but as a field of action, reciprocal relations, and potential solidarities, only became actual – current and real – with the emergence of a single world system (Wallerstein 1995). The second reason is temporal. Universalist radicalism became possible only with the emergence of a new experience of history, one that made it possible for human beings to imagine, through their own activity, stepping outside the cycles of history and initiating a novum, an unprecedented social, political, and moral order (Koselleck 2004). It requires, in other words, not only a global field of action, but also a conception of action that can aspire to radical social transformation towards universal goals. These two factors came together, constituting a new political imaginary, in the Age of Revolution, and more specifically in the wake of 1789. As if to confirm this, we find the word ‘radical’ first used in a political sense in English in 1797, with reference to movements stirred up by events across the Channel. (It entered French some decades later.) Only with the rise of modern, revolutionary politics does radical cosmopolitanism assume a properly political form, becoming a movement, a party, a project, or a cause. What was it about the French Revolution that effected this shift in conception? How can an event that concerns a particular people be claimed as the birthdate of a radical politics that aspires to universality? For skeptics, the historical course of the Revolution already belies its imputably 23

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cosmopolitan vocation. For did the universalistic passions that inspired it not also inspire the conquering armies that, marching under the tricolor, sought to conquer their neighbors in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity? If so, did they really differ from the Stoic-inspired Romans or religiously inspired Christians or Muslims who likewise sought to extend civilization or the one true faith? Rather than grant the French Revolution some kind of special status, we might suspect that its true lesson is that any universalism, including and perhaps especially the most ‘radical,’ is inherently ambivalent and reversible, becoming a virulent imperialism as soon as it seeks to press its claim to universality (Balibar 2002). The case for the French Revolution as an opening onto a new kind of cosmopolitanism rests not only on the revolutionaries’ desire to spread the liberty, equality, and solidarity they had declared, but on the fact that they did so not, in the first instance, by force of arms, but by extending republican citizenship to all (or, in the event, to those who had spent a year on French soil – an astonishingly inclusive standard then as now). The capstone of this emancipatory universalism would be the Convention’s 1794 decision, during what proved to be the Revolution’s most radical phase, to abolish colonial slavery. To be sure, neither measure took full effect and both were soon reversed. Even so, the germ of radical cosmopolitanism in the French Revolution is its unconditional demand for the universalization of freedom, equality, and solidarity by those who would be its beneficiaries. Unlike imperial universalisms or proselytizing religions, the mark of radical cosmopolitanism is its insistence that emancipation can only be the work of the emancipated, and that this can and should include everyone. Massimiliano Tomba (2015) refers to this radicalism that invites everyone to participate in their own emancipation as insurgent universality. He develops this notion by setting the French Revolution’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the model for innumerable later declarations up to and beyond the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, against its much less familiar 1793 sequel. The latter was approved by the Convention and in a referendum, but suspended just months later. Where the 1789 Declaration sought to elevate the ‘men’ of the Third Estate to the status of ‘citizens,’ the 1793 version proclaimed the rights of all human beings. Where the former circumscribed the rights it declared within boundaries set by law, the latter declared these rights outright, without limitation or qualification. And where the former recognized a carefully hedged right of ‘resistance to oppression,’ the latter proclaimed ‘insurrection’ not only ‘the most sacred of rights’ but ‘the most indispensable of duties’ (p. 4). The 1793 Declaration thus invited not just the Third Estate or the ‘nation’ but an indeterminate community of ‘human beings’ to press their claims, not just within the existing legal framework, but against and potentially beyond it. For Tomba, the difference between the juridical universalism (a fixed doctrine) of the earlier Declaration and the radical, insurgent universality (an open-ended claim) of the later one reflected their respective political circumstances. Whereas the first voiced the ambitions of citizens taking control of their own state, the second was written under the pressure of a vast mobilization outside the representative system. This mobilization included not only the revolutionary sections, where radical populists known as enragés agitated on behalf of the poor, but also women (Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman appeared in 1791) and even slaves throwing off their chains in the distant colony of Saint-Domingue (the Haitian Revolution began the same year). By placing priority on the initiatives of civil society, the 1793 Declaration was intrinsically openended, enabling claims from those outside the political community (the poor, women, slaves). In so doing, it encouraged the politicization of domains beyond those recognized as belonging to the political realm, from the household to the workplace to the marketplace to the colonies. And by opening up domestic, economic, and extraterritorial relations to contestation, these insurgent actors challenged not only the scope of the community, but the nature of politics itself. 24

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The Revolution’s insurgent universality marked the emergence of a political tradition of radical cosmopolitanism. Universalistic demands like the ‘rights of man’ were taken up by those for whom they were not originally intended, who had no better claim to these rights than their bare humanity. For this to occur, two things were necessary. First, the demand – for rights, dignity, equality, voice – had to be universal in the sense of non-exclusive, open to anyone. Here, as on Alain Badiou’s conception, the ‘universal’ designates not simply the sum of all already recognized and ordered elements (subjects, identities), but an opening through which those that fall outside the existing order can reorder the whole. But a second component was no less essential: these demands had to become the basis for practices of self-organization and contestation among the excluded and oppressed. In this way, the universal was set to work as what Jacques Rancière calls an ‘operator’ (1992: 60) to challenge the limits of the existing order. There was no guarantee that this would happen, even less that it would succeed. Then as since, the immediate stakes of such claims were typically local, but their basis was implicitly and often explicitly universal: the denial of a right or status that in principle belongs to everyone came to seem intolerable. This logic of political universalization, then, is the radical cosmopolitan heritage of the French Revolution. It reactivated Diogenes’s legacy by setting the claims of the universal and natural ‘human’ community against all merely conventional political communities. At the same time, like Diogenes’s gesture, it left the content and implications of these radical claims to those who took them up. It thereby triggered an indefinitely expansive logic of politicization that formed a matrix for the global movements that made up radical politics over much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from socialism, communism, and anarchism to feminism, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism. Each of these involved politicizing the human against and beyond the limits of established politics: those who lacked full access to the law or citizenship enacted their cosmopolitan citizenship by pressing their universal claims. Far from being an instance of Eurocentric universal history spreading from an imperial center, in the case of insurgent universality the engine of universalization was the energy and imagination of the subaltern, who, finding themselves excluded from the universal, seized and reinvented it.

The fate of the universal: reversals and reterritorializations There is no better illustration of the explosive logic of radical cosmopolitanism, and its tendency to exceed existing Western universalisms, than the Haitian Revolution. Haiti’s place in universal history came to be generally appreciated only two centuries after the event. Resistance to recognizing the self-liberation of the Haitians, the only successful revolution against slavery, was so pervasive that in 1995 Michel-Rolph Trouillot made the oblivion to which the Revolution had been consigned a model for how even scrupulous historiography can silence the past. In the decades since Trouillot’s lament, however, a chorus of historians has not simply inscribed Haiti within the universal history from which it had been banished, but made it the seal of that history’s universality. In a veritable flood of publications, scholars argued that the universality of the French Revolution’s promise of emancipation was best demonstrated when it was taken up by slaves on the other side of the Atlantic. As Susan Buck-Morss put it in a path-breaking essay: For almost a decade, before the violent elimination of whites signaled their deliberate retreat from universalist principles, the black Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty, seeming to give proof that the French Revolution was not simply a European phenomenon but world-historical in its implications. (2000: 835–6) 25

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This belated enthusiasm for the Haitian Revolution brought together a number of hot academic themes: globalization, imperialism, the ‘dark side’ of modernity, and, not least, cosmopolitanism. These attempts to enlist this long-neglected episode into what Kant called ‘history with a cosmopolitan intent’ illuminate both the specificity and the ambivalences of radical cosmopolitanism. One concern was the danger that particular historical events would be co-opted. As Adom Getachew argues, the inscription of Haiti into a ‘realization narrative’ (2016: 826) on which the Haitians merely appropriated a truth invented in Europe renders their initiative derivative – a case of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the logic of ‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ (2000). Treating the Haitian events as an echo of a French original obscures their singularity and originality. In fact, Getachew notes, the Haitian Revolution was a revolt against slavery and ultimately imperialism, not, as in France, against absolutism and privileges. Moreover, as Marxist historians like C.L.R. James pointed out long ago, to the extent that the profits of the slave trade flowed to the French bourgeoisie, it was in a sense a revolt against the French Revolution, or at least many of its leaders. And the Haitian revolt owed at least as much to African and creole traditions as it did to the Enlightenment and the rights of man. Another ambivalence concerns the Revolution’s political fate. Not only Buck-Morss but also James, whose seminal 1938 Black Jacobins made the first robust case for the Haitian Revolution’s global significance, tend to identify its universality with its hero, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and his 1801 Constitution. L’Ouverture himself saw Haiti as the French Revolution’s natural successor, but his gambit failed: he was captured during Napoleon’s brutal retaking of the island in 1802 and died in a French prison the following year. The Haitian Revolution was in fact only saved by his successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a rougher leader who drove out the French army, ordered the massacre of the white population, and declared Haitian independence in 1804. For BuckMorss, this successful defense of the Revolution marked a ‘retreat from universalist principles’ not just because of its violence, but also because Haiti’s 1805 Constitution prohibited white land ownership and declared all Haitians ‘black’ (including Europeans who had joined the revolt). Thus, Haiti’s freedom was secured not by the cosmopolitan L’Ouverture, a Jacobin and proponent of the universal rights of man, but by the fierce Dessalines, who did so not in the name of universal humanity but of a particularistic new nationality. These developments cast doubt on efforts to claim the Haitian Revolution for cosmopolitanism in two ways. The first concerns politics. While the sparks that lit the Haitian revolt may have been universalistic in many respects, its denouement was not. For some, this reflects the general lesson that while principles and demands may be universal, political communities are particular, and always define themselves in opposition to others. This is especially the case with anti-colonial and other subaltern movements, since they cannot hope to survive without securing for themselves a material basis such as the sanctuary of a state. Thus, while another great Caribbean revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, took the title of what would become the most influential book in the anti-colonial canon, The Wretched of the Earth, from the Internationale, the anthem of the international workers’ movement, he never imagined that the liberation he aimed at could be anything other than national. As Balibar explains, this is because politics cannot consist only of insurrection, but must also lead to constitution, the construction of new identities and institutions, which are necessarily particular. A second source of doubt for inscribing the Haitian Revolution in a cosmopolitan narrative is based not on the resolution of its universality into particularity, but on the limits of that universality. Here the concern is that, although the revolutionaries may have succeeded in freeing themselves first from slavery and then from French domination, their liberation quickly ran up against hard limits. Yet the fact that L’Ouverture made himself Governor-General-for-life of the French dominion of Haiti while Dessalines proclaimed himself Emperor and Haiti an Empire 26

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may reflect not so much their own limitations as the fact that even a liberated Haiti had to gird itself against a world of hostile empires. Likewise, the fact that both of them found it necessary to dragoon the newly freed slaves from their small plots and put them to back to work on plantations reflected not so much the Revolution’s betrayal or hypocrisy as Haiti’s desperate need for export crops in a competitive world market. For the Haitians had freed themselves into a world of unequal states and market relations, so that even after emancipation Haiti remained subject to a capitalist and imperialist international order that profoundly restricted its options, and indeed remains in this condition today. There are limits, then, to the extent to which the Haitian Revolution can be placed in a cosmopolitan narrative. The lesson of such considerations should not be to discount the Revolution’s universal significance, however, but to draw it with greater attention to the event’s specificity. Getachew reminds us that, despite its precarious situation, Haiti became a beacon and sanctuary for thousands of escaped slaves from elsewhere in the region, where the slave trade intensified in the decades after Haiti achieved independence (2016: 36). It did this in part by extending the right of asylum to blacks and indigenous people seeking their freedom, conferring citizenship on the same generous terms as the earlier French revolutionaries had done, after just a year of residency. Haiti also pursued abolition as a foreign policy, intercepting slave ships and offering sanctuary and assistance to Simón Bolívar on the condition that he commit himself to ending slavery. And we should not fail to recognize that emancipating hundreds of thousands of Haitians and their descendants from the dehumanizing, often deadly fate of bondage was itself not a negligible achievement. Despite its limitations, then, the cosmopolitanism of the Haitian Revolution reached places, people, and domains beyond the imagining of the European ‘inventors’ of the rights of man. Identifying the idea of universal emancipation not with the French inventors of the rights of man but with their New World re-inventors, who put the claim to equal freedom to unanticipated uses, shifts the locus of radical cosmopolitanism from modernity’s centers to its margins. Rather than seeing such values and practices as freedom, equality, democracy, and human rights as being first actualized in the North Atlantic core and then radiating out through the rest of the world, a radical cosmopolitan perspective would emphasize that this center’s centrality rested, even during the French Revolution, on its domination and exploitation of expanding swathes of the rest of the planet. This does not negate the emancipatory significance of the Revolution’s principles, however, since they were re-activated and re-invented at diverse points on the periphery as those subject to domination and exploitation fought for and sometimes won their freedom. From this perspective, the true cosmopolitans were the insurgent anti-colonialists, defenders of universal emancipation who turned it against the false universalism of the center.

Beyond universalism? Let me finally consider a further and in a sense deeper objection to the tradition of radical, insurgent cosmopolitanism I have outlined here. This objection does not simply question the Western roots and biases of this tradition, and so the validity of its universalism, but rather the very idea of universality itself. Those who make this objection argue that because today’s hegemonic universalisms are identified with a particular project, that of Western techno-capitalist-statistimperialist modernity, our aim should be to refuse not only this project, but also the very idea of cosmopolitanism, universality, and modernity. At least in the modern period, within what the decolonial school calls ‘modernity/coloniality’ (Mignolo 2007), such ideas are at the root of the problem. Indeed, from this perspective the fact that the logic of universality has seduced the resistance against modernity/coloniality is why even the latter’s triumphs have almost invariably led 27

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to disaster, from totalitarian ‘workers’ democracies’ to corrupt and tyrannical postcolonial states and societies. For this reason, such critics suggest, we should abandon any aspiration to radical or insurgent universality, which remains too close to the bad universalism of the status quo, and instead embrace ‘pluriversalism,’ a defense of cultures and ways of life that remain at least partly outside the orbit of modernity/coloniality (Grosfoguel 2012). I have some sympathy with this argument, even as I worry that the dichotomy toward which it tends may be reductive and misleading. Aspects of modernity have been emancipatory and salutary, after all, while aspects of tradition, localism, and so on have been the opposite. All the same, there are good reasons to remain attached to the ideas of cosmopolitanism and universality, even after taking full measure of the distance of the radical, insurgent version I have outlined here from more dominant varieties. One reason is strategic. It concerns the fact that, even if the modern world is more variegated than the formula ‘modernity/coloniality’ suggests, the object to which this formula points is a system, a highly complex totality sustained by vast resources and power. It was this system, as a massive empirical fact on a world scale, and not simply the hegemony of modern/colonial thinking, that compromised or derailed Haiti’s emancipation. And because it is a system, the experiences of oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and exclusion it generates often have commonalities. Resistance to this system, even when it is local and organized around particular concerns, can draw strength and insight from understanding the system as a system, and also itself as engaged in a common struggle toward common aims. This will be true even if this commonality involves translation and reinvention, as when a European struggle against absolutism and privileges helps inspire a colonial one against slavery and colonialism. It is when we consider politics itself, however, that the origin of the radical cosmopolitan tradition in the West appears most limited and suspect. For beyond its sense of universality and forward-looking political action, what connects this tradition back to the French Revolution is a specific conception of politics, linked to a particular configuration of power, the state, and society. This may be what accounts for the politicalness of radical cosmopolitanism, but it is also what accounts for its historical record of disaster. Postcolonial critics, from Partha Chatterjee (1986) to David Scott (2004), have produced rich studies of what they see as the tragedy of anti-colonial movements, arguing that these movements’ failure to escape the snares of statist politics is what led them to convert emancipation into new forms of domination. The cosmopolitan element of modern radicalism has always strained against the limits of this statist conception of politics. As the case of Haiti and others around the postcolonial world demonstrate, it is a challenge radicals have neither solved nor transcended. Could decolonial thought, which seeks alternatives beyond the horizon of modern politics – perhaps aided by anarchism, ecology, indigenous thought, and other unrealized traditions outside the main current of modern political history – help radical politics invent new possibilities beyond these tragic impasses? Radicals and cosmopolitans can only hope so. Optimism would seem premature, but I will close with grounds for cautious hope. It is an intrinsic property of the radical cosmopolitan tradition of insurgent universality, as I have argued, not only to open politics to new actors, subjects, and concerns, but in so doing to spur the transformation of politics itself. Such transformations have happened before, albeit in what now seem to be all-too-limited ways, in such cases as the social question, the colonial question, the woman question, and others besides. Could this happen again with the nature question, the settler-indigenous question, the technology question, and others we do not yet know how to name? If it does, I would hazard, it will only be because insurgent radical cosmopolitans succeed in finding new ways to politicize these questions by insisting, in a Cynic spirit, on the demands of the universal beyond the current limits of our political imagination.

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References Balibar, É. (2002) ‘Ambiguous Universality’, in Politics and the Other Scene, tr. J. Swenson, New York and London: Verso, pp 146–76. Buck-Morss, S. (2000) ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry, 26(4): 821–65. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, London: Zed Books. Getachew, A. (2016) ‘Universalism after the Post-Colonial Turn: Interpreting the Haitian Revolution’, Political Theory, 44(6): 821–45. Grosfoguel, R. (2012) ‘Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism From Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas’, Transmodernity, 1(3): 88–104. James, C.L.R. (1938) Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Secker & Warburg. Koselleck, R. (2004) ‘Historical Criteria of the Concept of Revolution’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. K. Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press, pp 43–57. Mignolo, W. (2007) ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality’, Cultural Studies, 21(2): 449–514. Rancière, J. (1992) ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, October, 61: 58–64. Scott, D. (2004) Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham: Duke University Press. Tomba, M. (2015) ‘1793: The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality’, History of the Present, 5(2): 109–36. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press. Wallerstein, I. (1995) Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, London: Verso.

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3 There is no cosmopolitanism without universalism* Daniel Chernilo

The cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences over the past twenty years has been an exciting and welcome move. Exciting, because it was able within a reasonably short period of time to bring together a variety of scholarly traditions and focus them on the conceptual and normative challenges of our current global modernity. Welcome, because some despite excesses and shortcomings, it has decidedly contributed to the critique of different essentialist, chauvinist and indeed nationalistic ways of thinking that have been present throughout the history of the social sciences (Chernilo 2007; Delanty 2009; Fine 2007; Turner 2006). Cosmopolitanism is now a common term within a number of different scholarly communities and intellectual traditions – look no further than this very compendium that now celebrates the publication of a second edition. One note of caution is needed, however. Recent sociopolitical events – Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the so-called ‘alt-right’, etc. – offer a clear warning that this is no time for complacency. The last thing we want is a repetition of ‘the rise and fall’ of globalisation theories of the turn of the century; that the excitement and critical spirit of cosmopolitanism fades well before it was able to ascertain more fully its intellectual agenda. My goal in this paper is to offer a reassessment of what I consider is cosmopolitanism’s most vexing issue: its interconnections with the question of universalism. Its key argument is that the core of the cosmopolitanism project lies in its claim to universalism. Whether we understand cosmopolitan developments as constitutive elements of our contemporary sociohistorical landscape, or we see them more as regulative ideas that are needed in order to defend certain principles that by definition will never be fully actualised, it is my contention that thinking in cosmopolitan terms compels us to favour a universalistic orientation. In doing this, we will have to criticise they ways in which previous universalistic arguments have been deployed and justified. But these criticisms shall ultimately turn into forms of self-criticism at the core of cosmopolitanism as an intellectual project lies in the redefinition and refinement, rather than the abandonment, of its universalistic orientation: there is no genuine cosmopolitan position without a universalistic orientation that upholds an all-encompassing idea of humanity (Archer 2000; Arendt 1998; Chernilo 2017).1 In what follows, I will discuss four of the most common charges against cosmopolitan universalism: the problem of its ‘original locale’, of ‘stability’, of ‘reification’ and of ‘idealism’. After exploring this ‘problematic centrality’ of universalism in cosmopolitan thinking in the opening section of the paper, the second section, ‘Early cosmopolitan thinking: the problems of particular 30

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origins and stability’, deals with the first two of these charges. The argument there is that, right from their inception, universalistic arguments had to engage with questions about their own origins as well as their ability to account for sociohistorical variation and normative disagreement. The next section, ‘The rise of modern cosmopolitanism: Immanuel Kant and the charges of reification and idealism’, then deals with the questions of reification and idealism and addresses them by looking at Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan and moral thinking. It is in Kant’s decided proceduralisation of universalism, on the one hand, and his view of how moral universalism is compatible with the all too real egotistic motivations of individuals, on the other, that a universalistic orientation renews itself and remains a fundamental resource for contemporary cosmopolitan thinking.

The problematic centrality of universalism in cosmopolitan thinking The claim that universalism has been a central tenet of the contemporary social sciences is most commonly used as an indictment on their current shortcomings and the lessons they have missed. Take, for instance, Richard Rorty’s (2009: 97) view that, through its commitment to universalism, the ‘Plato-Kant canon’ that lies at the centre of modern thought has been hugely damaging both intellectually and politically. More closely related to the specific concerns of this article, Raewyn Connell identified universalism as one of the major shortcomings of ‘grand social theory’ that has led to an absolute neglect of colonialism in mainstream sociology. More poignantly, and in startling reversal of Kant’s ideas of universal hospitality to be discussed below, she argues that the idea of terra nullius [a land belonging to nobody], which stood at the centre of ‘the coloniser’s dream, is a sinister presupposition for social science’ (Connell 2007: 47). In postmodernism and postcolonialism alike, then, universalism is seen as wholly problematic (it can never be adequately justified), mistaken (it is to be rejected everywhere and in any shape or form) and pernicious (it is a wolf dressed up as a sheep from which nothing good comes out).2 Philosopher Leo Strauss, a critic of developments in American social science during the twentieth century, offers what is perhaps a more insightful comment on the question of universalism. His argument is that a fundamental aporia inheres in American social science because whereas on the one hand the problem of universalism is indeed central to it, on the other hand a positivistic self-conception distorts what is genuinely at stake. Strauss (2004: 111) put the question thus: However much the science of all cultures may protest its innocence of all preferences or evaluations, it fosters a specific moral posture. Since it requires openness to all cultures, it fosters universal tolerance and the exhilaration deriving from the beholding of diversity; it necessarily affects all cultures that it can still affect by contributing to their transformation in one and the same direction; it willy-nilly brings about a shift of emphasis from the particular to the universal: by asserting, if only implicitly, the rightness of pluralism, it asserts that pluralism is the right way; it asserts the monism of universal tolerance and respect for diversity; for by virtue of being an ism, pluralism is a monism. Strauss wrote this commentary as an indictment on the social sciences’ recent developments. For him, it constitutes a definitive demonstration of the futility of the modern and empirical study of social life because of its restrictive views of what constitutes genuine knowledge of human affairs (Strauss 1974). Strauss’s regressive solution of seeking to go back to the ancient texts of philosophy (Western and non-Western) as the repository of true knowledge is not the path I should like to follow, but I do think that we need to take seriously his twofold insight: (a) that a universalistic orientation is built into the ways in which our social scientific concepts actually 31

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operate and (b) that the justification of universalistic arguments shall remain tentative and problematic (Chernilo 2013). As soon as we suspend the inevitability Strauss attaches to his critique of twentieth century social science, his reflections become more instructive with regards to the significance of universalism in contemporary cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan approaches require a strongly universalistic conception of humanity that cannot be justified in terms that are acceptable for conventional scientific claims: they must bring together scientific and philosophical knowledge claims (Chernilo 2014, 2017). If that is the case, therefore, the problem faced by cosmopolitan thinking is that its very universalism challenges some of the shortcomings that are constitutive of the same social scientific programme it now seeks to embrace. If I am correct in this assessment, then these are the four main arguments that are raised against a universalistic as orientation: •

•

•

•

Argument 1: The question of its original locale. The historical roots of universalistic ideas lie in the particular geographical and sociocultural context of Ancient Greece and this ‘Western’ origin can never be transcended. Argument 2: The question of stability. Universalistic ideas emphasise unity, homogeneity and necessity over difference, heterogeneity and contingency; therefore, they are fundamentally unable to account for historical change and sociocultural variation. Argument 3: The question of reification. Universalism is always the generalisation of a Western particular. Rather than being neutral, it systematically reifies those values, institutions and forms of life that are closer to its original experiences. Argument 4: The question of idealism. Universalism is a lofty ideal nowhere to be found in empirical reality. It is therefore unable to account for such hard facts of life as people’s egotistic motivations, their individual preferences or even the power politics of states.

I argue that these four criticisms do not capture what universalism is, and the role it plays in current understandings of cosmopolitanism. But they are surely worth revisiting. In what follows, I address each one of them by sketching a different trajectory of the relationships between universalism and cosmopolitanism.

Early cosmopolitan thinking: the problems of particular origins and stability The standard narrative has it that cosmopolitanism is a long-standing intellectual tradition that, from the time of Stoic philosophy, has defended ideas of universal belonging. At the centre of cosmopolitanism’s belief is the notion that our human membership takes precedence over the more particular aspect of our identities and/or sociopolitical affiliations. Argument 1 above, the question of the ‘Western’ roots of cosmopolitanism, is then a good starting point. A first argument that I should like to make, however, is to question whether, and to what extent, is this labelling of ancient philosophy as ‘Western’ adequate: the Stoic philosophical tradition we are talking about here predates the rise of the West itself. Although some of the texts that lie at its centre – Diogenes’s and Cicero’s works – have taken a relevant role in what later became the Western philosophical canon, we still seem to be imposing retrospectively a sense of cultural mission that the texts themselves did not have. A politics of canon making, rather than of intellectual history, seems to be at stake here – and for that it matters little whether the putative link between Greek philosophy, cosmopolitanism and ‘the West’ is made in celebratory or denunciative mode. But the issue goes beyond the underlying logic of cosmopolitanism’s putative origins; the actual implications of this standard view can also be questioned. We now know that whatever 32

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that can be termed as particularly ‘Western’ in early cosmopolitan thinking, its universalistic orientation was not one of such elements. A full account of this trajectory is beyond what I can offer, but historian of political ideas Eric Voegelin has systematically argued that a strong universalistic orientation was in fact central to all known world religions. Building on Karl Jaspers’s idea of an Axial Age ‘from c. 800 to 200 B.C., with a concentration about 500 when Confucius, the Buddha, and Heraclitus were contemporaries’, ideas of universal humanity developed independently and were already in place in different cultural settings (Voegelin 2000a: 382). The core of Voegelin’s argument is that a universalistic orientation was already being imported to ‘the West’: ‘the idea of a universal God, for instance, achieved its specific purity through the mystic philosophers, but its existence, imbedded in a compact cosmological myth, is attested by Egyptian inscriptions for about 3000B.C.’ (Voegelin 2000b: 215). Quite crucially, as this is something that will reappear below in my argument, Voegelin suggests that a universalistic orientation has always been difficult to separate from imperial aspirations: All the early empires, near Eastern as well as Far Eastern, understood themselves as representatives of a transcendent order, of the order of the cosmos; and some of them even understood this order as a ‘truth’. . . . The empire is a cosmic analogue, a little world reflecting the order of the great, comprehensive world. (Voegelin 2000b: 130–1) The validity of argument 1 depends, therefore, on an anachronistic, self-conscious and endogenous idea of ‘Western philosophy’ that had to be in place before the rise of the very idea of the West. Rather the opposite, the uniqueness and originality of what has later become ‘Greek philosophy’ needs to be explained in the context of the various intellectual and religious influences it received. The alleged validity of argument 1 becomes turns out to be the combination between a ‘certain fallacy of origins’ (universalism’s origins accounts for its inability to deal with non-Western phenomena) and a ‘methodological territorialism’ in the sense that intellectual influences can be adequately delimited as uniquely belonging to self-contained geographical areas or sociopolitical units. But neither proposition really holds. Argument 2 focuses on the accusation that a universalistic orientation exaggerates notions of social stability. Crucially, the validity of this critique remains even if argument 1 on its origins proves to be less ethnocentric than previously assumed. If universalism requires ideas of unity and homogeneity, then this raises legitimate doubts over its potential for understanding current social processes. Unpacking argument 2 requires us to interrogate whether, and how, a universalistic orientation is able to handle such issues as historical change, sociocultural variation and normative disagreement. The counterargument that I should like to make here is that, however dogmatic an early universalistic orientation may have been, it was still based on the empirical recognition that human life is only lived through its multiple variations and particularities. This is how German sociologist and theologian Ernst Troeltsch put it at the beginning of the twentieth century: The Stoic legal and social philosophy is, like the entire Stoic ethic, a product of the disintegration of the ancient polis and the world-kingdom of a created cosmopolitan horizon. In place of positive law and morality emerges the ethic derived from a universal, law-abiding reason. In place of the national interests of his native country (Heimat), the individual is fulfilled by God’s reason; in place of the single political connection is the idea of humanity that lacks differentiation in terms of state and place, race and colour. From this human ideal comes a fully free Gemeinschaft or community. (Troeltsch 2005: 118, my italics) 33

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Troeltsch’s argument is twofold here. On the one side, he emphasises that a sense of universality in early cosmopolitan thinking was made possible because of the acute sense of diversity, change and disagreement that came as a result of the actual ‘disintegration of the ancient polis’. On the other side, he asserts that this new way of looking at human affairs has a certain self-propelling capacity: the more it recognised difference the more it sought to foster a new sense of unity. The key point seems to be that there is a real gap between the actual historical conditions of crises that made the appearance of universalism possible and the explicit admission that universalistic ideas must work at the level of ideal projections. In terms of rejecting argument 2 on stability, then, it is my contention that rather than stability, universalistic ideas emerge out an acute awareness of diversity and conflict. The significance of a universalistic orientation may be assessed differently in normative terms, but its relevance lies neither in some ideal conception of ‘human nature’ nor in that actual sociohistorical conditions correspond with a somehow definitive sense of cultural unity. Universalism is a way of ‘imagining’ a strong sense of unity because current conditions precisely emphasise, on the contrary, difference, conflict and change (Arendt 1978). Reinhart Koselleck has also reflected on relationships between universalistic ideas and the problem of stability. As he looked into the historical experiences of ancient Greece, Koselleck noted the gap between newly born universalistic ideals and the clear consciousness that these ideals are impossible to realise in the actual organisation of sociopolitical life. Koselleck argues that the central innovation of Stoic philosophy was that of universalism taking a sharper conceptual character. The early cosmopolitan programme did not focus on an idea of a world state or single political community; rather, at stake was a philosophical principle that sought to rearrange theoretically our understanding of who we are as human beings – the idea of a singular human species that is constituted through its diversity. Such a rearrangement, moreover, was still wholly embedded in a strict separation between ambits of human action that were susceptible of human intervention and design (not least among them political life itself) and those that are organised on transcendental or natural conditions: The Stoics considered the cosmos, governed by logos, as their home in which all humankind – freeman and slave, Hellene and Oriental, just as much as the gods and the stars – had a part. Political agencies were built into the cosmopolis, although the Stoics could never have identified the supervening with the empirical order. . . . We do not have here mutually exclusive concepts but rather supplementary concepts of varying magnitude, which are intended to mediate between the political tasks of the day and the general philosophical apprehension of the world. (Koselleck 2004: 167, my italics) Against the idea of stability that underpins argument 2, a universalistic orientation emerged whilst seeking to understand particular crises. This early universalism emerged with a sense of mission that surely favoured the rearrangement and overcoming of differences among social groupings at a ‘higher level’ – i.e. not in actual political life but in the realm of thinking. As particularities were up to that point being conceived of as naturally or divinely construed, the connections between universalism and particularism still remained unmediated: First, because the particular belonged in actual sociopolitical life while the universal only inhabited in the realm of ideals; second, because proposals for making particularities compatible with a sense of universal human belonging could only be justified in hierarchical (i.e. in natural or divine) terms. To that extent, therefore, it has been suggested that when writers like Cicero

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talked about ‘the common society of the human race’, he may have meant little more than this: that there is a kind of mutual recognition between men which differs from the relationship between men and the rest of the natural world. (Tuck 1999: 38) Equally importantly, although this ‘thin’ universalism distinguished between a human and a natural world, it nonetheless seems to have tentatively associated the notion of human society with that of natural slavery . . . writers of the Hellenistic and Roman period were unhappy with the fully fledged Aristotelian account of the natural slave, but they were quite prepared to argue for the forcible enslavement of those who ‘violated the common code of mankind’. (Tuck 1999: 40) The argument is illustrative of the ambivalent yet persistent connection between philosophical arguments about universalism and their political implications in terms of slavery and empires. These linkages are of course central to postcolonial criticisms; they have remained a recurring problem, but they need not be seen as a necessary condition for cosmopolitan universalism. If anything, what transpires here is that a universalistic orientation goes against any axiomatic limitation of general ideas of human nature (i.e. everyone is a human being) even if such limitations can then be reintroduced for political gain (i.e. the punishment of certain actions places some groups outside the human family). In other words, a key modernising move of this early cosmopolitan tradition is accomplished when universalism is no longer able to uphold transcendental or naturalistic hierarchies between individuals and groups of peoples. Particular forms of life and identities, indeed all kinds of differences, need now to be seen as the result of human action and human action alone: from this time on, universalism becomes as a fully immanent frame of reference. It is treated as a social fact rather than as the result of natural differences or divine indictments. Koselleck shows that it was Diogenes, rather early on, who ‘coined the universalistic “cosmopolite” with the object of transcending the usual dualism’ between Hellenes and Barbarians. Yet things are never simple and also within this new unity this dualism was then recast, without relinquishing the continued division of all humanity into Hellenes and Barbarians. . . . The distinction that had formerly been made spatially came to be deployed horizontally as a universal criterion of differentiation: ‘Hellene’ was a person with sufficient education, whether Greek or non-Greek, who merely had to be able to speak proper Greek; the remainder were Barbarian. Thus, this new antithesis, which was organized around education, no longer derived from natural qualities: to this extent, the counterconcepts were denaturalized and stripped of all spatial connections. (2004: 165) The boundaries between those who qualify and those who do not qualify as humans being is now re-attempted horizontally; that is, they are drawn through human means and human means alone. In turn, this means that new exclusions can only be created and overcome by the same route; politics and education being the two most relevant vehicles for reshaping the cultural status of particular groups. Conversely, cosmological justifications no longer do, as the distinction between who is and who isn’t a human being can no longer be based on an individual’s natural features, and the question of peoples’ geographical location also becomes increasingly superfluous.

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The critical threshold that has been overcome, and the key argument to reject argument 2, is that while emphasising particularities remains central to the construction of universalistic arguments, there is now a clear awareness that they both are actually grounded on social relations themselves. To that extent, they may still be able to provide justification for unfair institutions such as slavery or imperialism, but the threshold itself of universal human belonging is now fully social and historical. Equally crucially, universalism now integrates a principle of inclusivity that depends on education, values and institutions that are themselves made by human beings. The critique of argument 3 on reification remains (why does it have to be Greek education and language?), and in order to address this we still have to consider Kant’s procedural turn. But universalism’s self-propelling openness has been firmly established: the human species can now genuinely commence to conceive itself as one. Let me recapitulate my arguments so far. Against argument 1, I questioned that Greek classical philosophy is regarded as unproblematically Western and also that the rise of universalism be explicated as an endogenous ‘Western’ development. Against argument 2, moreover, I showed that early concerns with universalism were not dismissive or antithetical to sociohistorical transformations; instead, they actually emerged from the recognition of the difficulties that develop over sustained periods of crisis. The universalistic orientation of early cosmopolitanism was built on the notion that conflicts and disagreements were ubiquitous in actual political life and that differences among groups were naturally rather than socioculturally construed. Eventually, however, universalism becomes more and more immanent as it begins to understand the particularities of human beings, they themselves being human-made. These universalistic ideas are attempts to think of the solutions to social crises by redefining the terms within which we are able to think our common membership to the human species: how humans are able to imagine an increasingly wider, and potentially universal, sense of belonging. In terms of the four arguments I am interesting in criticising, then, we have seen that neither an original locale (argument 1) nor the problem of stability (argument 2) constitutes a necessary element of cosmopolitanism’s universalism. Both can be overcome even within a relatively conventional narrative of what are the main features of a cosmopolitan outlook. But argument 3 on reification has not been addressed yet because, although universalism is now fully immanent, its contents are fixated on particular kinds of education (e.g. the ability to speak a particular language or master a particular intellectual canon). A fundamental tension is set thus: there are some socially and culturally specific features that reinforce the discrimination against those who do not possess the right credentials but, because they are defined in social and cultural terms (rather than in natural ones), these hierarchies can now potentially be overcome even from within. In the next section, then, I discuss how Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan approach redefines this universalistic orientation as he sought to deal with the challenges that remain.

The rise of modern cosmopolitanism: Immanuel Kant and the charges of reification and idealism The significance of Kant for this exploration lies in that his work is explicitly concerned with the interconnections between universalism and cosmopolitanism. My goal in this brief piece cannot be to offer an exhaustive account of Kant’s arguments on these issues; rather, I should like to use his writings in order to reconsider the two charges of reification and idealism. Kant’s (1991: 45–6) idea of cosmopolitanism centres on the idea of ‘a civil society which can administer justice universally’, and he treats this challenge as ‘the most difficult and the last’ question to be solved by human beings. Following a long-standing tradition of political thinking that thought that domestic and international levels are mutually and fundamentally interrelated 36

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(Tuck 1999), Kant’s notion of universal justice applies to increasingly global developments that he thought would favour peaceful and lawful relations at the domestic, inter-state and global or cosmopolitan levels (Bottici 2003; Fine 2007). Contrary to Connell’s crude argument I mentioned in the openings, and in direct connection to the questions of imperialism and slavery, Kant (1991: 105) locates hospitality at the centre of its cosmopolitan programme. He defines hospitality as ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory’. Crucially, this is a principle of hospitality that establishes limits to what people can and cannot do as they arrive in a foreign land: they ought to be treated peacefully by the locals, but visitors have no right to stay indefinitely nor are they allowed to pillage or force the county into submission. Rather the opposite, Kant’s commitment to a principle of hospitality is a way of making all individuals the fundamental bearer of rights irrespective of their nationality within as much as beyond Europe. He justifies the universal application of these principles also on empirical grounds because ‘since the earth is a globe’ human beings ‘cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company. And no-one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth’ (Kant 1991: 106). Kant’s cosmopolitan programme offers an explicit criticism to the behaviour of European colonisers at the time (Muthu 2003). Kant then brings his idea of universal justice down to earth, as it were, through the notion of perpetual peace. He offers the following provisional articles (Kant 1991: 93–6): peace treaties shall not include secret clauses that may lead to future wars (article 1); states cannot be purchased, inherited or exchanged by other states (article 2); standing armies are to be gradually abolished (article 3); states shall not incur into debts to fund wars (article 4); states should not intervene in the constitution of other states (article 5); and actions during wartime should not prevent trust to re-emerge in future times of peace (article 6). To these, Kant adds three definitive articles that interrelate closely to the domestic, international and cosmopolitan levels. These articles seek to secure, first, the rational organisation of states at the domestic level;3 second, that international alliances be voluntary and will not lead to the rise of a despotic world state;4 and third, that there are some human rights to be upheld and respected by all states and irrespective of the individuals’ nationality.5 Much has been said about Kant’s cosmopolitan writings, but this much is now clear: in relation to the questions of empire and slavery, he makes a cosmopolitan outlook a key element of their critique. The universalistic orientation of Kant’s thought makes individuals bearers of rights irrespective of their state affiliation, and claims to occupy lands or to enslave peoples become morally unjustifiable. As I shall seek to demonstrate below, moreover, it is the procedural logic of Kant’s categorical imperative, in the sense of treating human beings as ends rather than means, that is crucial for this transformation. There is a self-propelling logic of inclusivity that underwrites Kant’s universalistic orientation. Kant’s idea of universal justice finds an additional expression in his attempt at the radical reformulation of philosophy as being based exclusively on immanent grounds: an idea of justice that is the human-made recognition of rights that humans grant to each other as humans. Universal justice has now to do with the rules through which we decide about the morality of laws and actions so that they are based on rational grounds. What Kant has made here, then, is to focus on how this universalistic orientation reinforces a fully immanent account of human knowledge and morality. But it is also worth mentioning that Kant’s views on the need for a universalistic orientation was already unpopular among his contemporaries. He was well aware of that that fact: ‘if votes were collected as to which is to be preferred – pure rational cognition separated from anything empirical, hence metaphysics of morals, or popular practical philosophy – one can guess at once on which side the preponderance would fall’ (Kant 1997: 21). The reasons behind this lack of sympathy towards universalism have less to do with its non-religious connotations and more with arguments 3 (on reification) and 4 (on idealism). And we need to address these directly now. 37

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Being formulated at the dawn of modernity, the categorical imperative of morality is central to Kant’s explicit engagement with universalism: it already reflects an enhanced sense of historical, religious and sociocultural diversity. Kant was aware that attempts to determine positively the definitive or substantive contents of the good life were hugely problematic – if not outright impossible. The epoch-making importance of the categorical imperative, therefore, lies precisely in the fact that it is a decisive innovation towards the radical proceduralisation of previous universalistic arguments; namely, the idea that morality cannot and will not be defined through positive commands to act in a particular way but through the justifications of certain maxims or actions as valid for everyone. A general procedure that allows us to reflect on how we arrive at specific moral or even legal justifications, the categorical imperative replaces the use of specific concerns with the reasons and rules that allow us to arrive at particular moral decisions. In its classical formulation, then, the categorical imperative states: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (Kant 1991: 31). As he expands on it, Kant adds two further dimensions to it: the regulative role of the idea of humanity and the notion that human beings be treated always as ends in themselves and never as means. Kant (1997: 38) then reformulates the categorical imperative thus: ‘act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’. The universalistic standpoint of Kant’s moral philosophy becomes fully apparent when, in this rejection of the idea of standing armies, his views went beyond the fact more professional soldiers made wars more likely. The most crucial factor for Kant is instead the fundamentally dehumanising, indeed immoral, rationale for the creation of professional armies: the hiring of men to kill or to be killed seems to mean using them as mere machines and instruments in the hand of someone else (the state) which cannot be easily be reconciled with the right of man in one’s own person. (Kant 1991: 95) Kant’s proposals are not free of problems. The charge of formalism is possibly the most notable one, as it concentrates on the fact that its a priori foundation, and somewhat solipsistic formulation, obtain in a restrictive view of what constitutes adequate moral reasons (Hegel 1975).6 But its long-lasting contribution lies in that its procedural dimension allows for its dialogic underpinnings to be unpacked from within, as it were: the very possibility of thinking about the generalisation of moral maxims implies that different individual views and social positions have to be taken into account.7 Furthermore, the categorical imperative offers a way of thinking about moral issues that accepts the universalistic potential of particular cultural contents always provisionally. In other words, it is the open-ended nature of the procedure that may require us to revise the grounds on which we justify some cultural contents as potentially valid for humanity as a whole: freedom of association is universally valid whilst discrimination on religious grounds is not. Crucially, criticisms of specific institutions or practices are not raised on behalf of abstract principles; much more often, they emerge from very concrete concerns: the end of slavery, equal pay for men and women, the widening of the political franchise, asylum laws, etc. In so doing, the categorical imperative connects our individual concerns with the widest possible sense of human belonging. In relation to argument 3, therefore, Kant has found in the proceduralisation of universalism the key with which to unlock the problem of reification. It is this universalistic orientation that favours an ever-wider sense of inclusion for all human beings. In relation to argument 4 on idealism, finally, we can see how Kant addressed it through his discussion of current ideas of human nature. He was unmoved by projects that sought to 38

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positively define human nature as the necessary step for understanding morality. Too much had already been said about human nature and too little had been agreed on what it actually was: One will find now the special determination of human nature . . ., now perfection, now happiness, here moral feeling, there fear of God, a bit of this and also a bit of that in a marvellous mixture, without its occurring to them to ask whether the principles of morality are to be sought at all in acquaintance with human nature. (Kant 1997: 22) In fact, Kant thought that the project of positively determining the content of universal human nature was systematically flawed. It was just foolish to look for definite conceptions of human nature with a view to univocally deriving moral commands from it. Kant saw two different problems here. On the one hand, such attempts would reintroduce the kind of substantive considerations that the categorical imperative sought to undermine. The idea that there is such a thing as a definitive notion of human nature still has not quite understood that the categorical imperative ‘has to do not with the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form and the principle from which the action itself follows’ (Kant 1997: 27, my italics). On the other hand, he argued that we should never take people’s views about the morality of their own actions as the real measure of their motivations. Human beings are neither angels nor purely rational beings. Ironically, he contends that we like to flatter ourselves by falsely attributing to ourselves a nobler motive, whereas in fact we can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind our covert incentives, since, when moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of actions that one does not see. (Kant 1997: 19–20) In relation to argument 4 on idealism, therefore, this contradicts the view that there is no room in moral universalism for the real passions, minutiae or ugliness of everyday life: the fact that moral universalism remains distinct from empirical motivations and urges does not make it any less real. Kant’s (1991: 44) idea of human beings’ ‘unsocial sociability’, is in fact an attempt to acknowledge both the selfish and individualistic side of our life alongside its co-operative and collaborative one: they pull our actions in different directions but are equally real. It is just not the case that, in order to work, universalism needs a wholly unrealistic or essentialist conception of human nature; one that sees human beings as fully devoid of conflicting needs and motivational complications. Nor does a notion of ‘abstract morality’ underpin the psychological motivations that are needed for moral actions to take place. Rather the opposite, Kant’s argument is that a universalistic orientation is built into the very possibility of moral thinking as it actually happens among real people: we are not purely moral beings but our moral sensibility and imagination is a fundamental aspect of our life as a human species. Universalism lies at the centre of our real ability to think of ourselves beyond ourselves and as members of a single humanity; it combines rather than opposes people’s sense of duty with the motivations that come from their particular needs and interests and, last but not least, it puts forward a conception of justice in which human beings are bearer of inalienable rights and ought to be treated with dignity irrespective of their national or other particular affiliations. The world can of course work and be experienced beyond such moral grounds, but our understanding of it is incomplete if we lack the universalistic sense that is offered by a cosmopolitan orientation. 39

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Closing remarks In the little space I have left, I should like to spell out some of the main implications of my argument. (1) Contemporary cosmopolitanism has no ritual debt to pay to its predecessors, nor does it necessarily have to engage with its long and far from unproblematic history. But if we miss some of their more important insights we end up arguing from below the critical standards that have actually been achieved in terms of understanding the ways in which human beings have become able to see each other as bearers of inalienable rights (Fine 2011). There is still much to learn on past understandings of cosmopolitanism and universalism remains its most fundamental insight. (2) Favouring a universalistic orientation has never been the people’s choice. Serious difficulties are to be confronted when seeking to deploy universalistic arguments, and here I identified four of them: original locale, stability, reification and idealism. They pose a real challenge, there is no definitive way of overcoming them and yet they are best confronted from within. Stating that universalism is intrinsically Western is both anachronistic and inaccurate; that it is essentially homogenising denies its internal connection with experiences of crises and social change; that it is bound to favour certain cultural contents obviates the radical implications of Kant’s procedural turn; and that it is idealistic negates the reality of moral intuitions in the very definition of what we are as human beings. (3) The solutions we find to these challenges are not static and new questions constantly emerge. It is inscribed in the self-propelling dynamic of universalism that, as better justifications and arguments are found, new questions, problems and exclusions make themselves visible. Universalism remains a key intellectual resource which, far from being opposed to the identification of specificities and particularities, it creates the very framework within which recognition and acceptance becomes possible. Like it or not, there is just no cosmopolitanism without universalism.

Notes  My thanks to Robert Fine and Aldo Mascareño for extremely useful comments to earlier versions of this article. 1 A cosmopolitan project is not best served by those who speak explicitly in its favour but by those who are actually committed to a universalistic conception of humanity. This is what to my mind makes Ulrich Beck’s (2006) cosmopolitan project a contradiction in terms: the disassociation of cosmopolitanism from universalism ends up reproducing precisely the Eurocentrism it criticises (Chernilo 2011). 2 See Braidotti, Hanafin and Blaagaard (2012) for a critique of cosmopolitanism along these lines. 3 ‘The civil constitution of every state shall be republican’ (Kant 1991: 99). 4 ‘The right of nations shall be based on a federation of free states’ (Kant 1991: 102). 5 ‘Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality’ (Kant 1991: 105). 6 I have discussed the strengths and weaknesses of these criticisms in Chernilo (2013: 121–45). 7 This proceduralism is what marks the ‘neo-Kantian’ outlook of such contemporary philosophers as Jürgen Habermas (1990) and John Rawls (1999).

References Archer, M.S. (2000) Being human: The problem of agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, H. (1978) The life of the mind, New York: Harcourt. Arendt, H. (1998) The human condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Beck, U. (2006) Cosmopolitan vision, Cambridge: Polity Press. 40

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Bottici, C. (2003) ‘The domestic analogy and the Kantian project of Perpetual Peace’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 11(4): 392–410. Braidotti, R., Hanafin, P., and Blaagaard, B. (eds.) (2012) After cosmopolitanism, London: Routledge. Chernilo, D. (2007) A social theory of the nation-state, London: Routledge. Chernilo, D. (2011) ‘Cosmopolitanism in social theory: An ambivalent defence’, in Krossa, A. and Robertson, R. (eds.) European cosmopolitanism: Between universalism and particularism’, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chernilo, D. (2013) The natural law foundations of modern social theory: A quest for universalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chernilo, D. (2014) ‘The idea of philosophical sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 65(2): 338–57. Chernilo, D. (2017) Debating humanity: Towards a philosophical sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connell, R. (2007) Southern theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Delanty, G. (2009) The cosmopolitan imagination: The renewal of critical social theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fine, R. (2007) Cosmopolitanism, London: Routledge. Fine, R. (2011) ‘Enlightenment cosmopolitanism: Western or universal?’, in Adams, D. and Tihanov, G. (eds.) Studies in enlightenment cosmopolitanism, London: Legenda. Habermas, J. (1990) Moral consciousness and communicative action, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hegel, G. (1975) Natural law, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kant, I. (1991) Political writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1997) Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures past: On the semantics of historical time, New York: Columbia University Press. Muthu, S. (2003) Enlightenment against empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (1999) A theory of justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, R. (2009) Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, L. (1974) Natural right and history, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Strauss, L. (2004) ‘Jerusalem and Athens: Some preliminary reflections’, in Emberley, P. and Cooper, B. (eds.) Faith and political philosophy: The correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Troeltsch, E. (2005) ‘Stoic-Christian natural law and modern profane natural law’, in Adair-Toteff, C. (ed.) Sociological beginnings: The first conference of the German society for sociology, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Tuck, R. (1999) The rights of war and peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, B. (2006) ‘Classical sociology and cosmopolitanism: A critical defence of the social’, British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 133–55. Voegelin, E. (2000a) ‘The ecumenic age’, in Franz, M. (ed.) The collected works of Eric Voegelin:Vol. 17, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Voegelin, E. (2000b) ‘The new science of politics’, in Henningsen, M. (ed.) The collected works of Eric Voegelin: Vol. 5, Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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4 Alt-histories of cosmopolitanism Rewriting the past in the service of the future David Inglis

The intellectual field of cosmopolitanism studies has developed tremendously over the last twenty years. Like every intellectual field, it has narrated its own origins, with the growth of such fields in part stimulated by debates and disputes as to what those origins may be (Alexander, 1987). There are now readily available histories which endeavour to trace out the genealogy of cosmopolitan concerns from the ancient Greeks, generally taken as the original source of cosmopolitical reflections in the ‘West’, down until the present day (see e.g. Toulmin, 1990; Heater, 1996; Lu, 2000; Mignolo, 2000; Breckenridge et al., 2002; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002; Cheah, 2006; Delanty, 2009; Holton, 2009). Such synoptic histories allow scholars in the field, to come to forms of self-understanding vis-à-vis both valued intellectual inheritances and also legacies from the past to be rejected or avoided. But as with all such genealogies, after a while certain orthodoxies in narration can arise, with subsequent authors reproducing, rather than interrogating, the histories offered by earlier contributors. The history of a field can become frozen, reproducing unquestioned verities, instead of interrogating standard narrations (Somers, 1996). When standard narrations overly dominate more heterodox understandings of the roots and branches of the field, this threatens to close off opportunities for developing fresh foci and forms of thinking figures (Fine, 2003b). The standard narration of the historical development of cosmopolitanism in the ‘West’ exhibits such risks. The standard narration (e.g. Heater, 1996) that has become an orthodox one identifies the beginnings of cosmopolitanism in Greek Cynicism and Stoicism (Nussbaum, 1997); examines the Roman adaptation of these ideas (Pollock, 2002); jumps to the 18th century, where the name of Kant is above all invoked as the greatest of all Enlightenment philosophers of cosmopolitanism (Schlereth, 1977); identifies a decline in the 19th century of cosmopolitical concerns, as European thought succumbs to the siren songs of nationalism (Meinecke, 1970); sees a rejuvenation of cosmopolitical concerns after World War II, as political theorists and others identify postwar, putatively global institutions like the United Nations as embodiments of Kantian concerns (Friedrich, 1947); with the story ending with the remarkable flourishing and diversification of the cosmopolitan intellectual field in recent times (Delanty and Inglis, 2010). All of this is not untrue. Just as something called ‘classical sociology’ operates as a useful constructed canon of works and authors that allows sociologists to narrate their (apparent) past, construe their present and future and teach students (what are taken to be) the elementary building blocks of 42

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the discipline, so too does the standard narration allow for such achievements to be possible in the new field called ‘cosmopolitan studies’. But the narration of Greece/Rome/Enlightenment/1945/now, while useful as a ground-setting fable, threatens to turn into unexamined ‘truth’. There is in fact much more to be said about cosmopolitanism and its histories (in the plural). There is a ‘long, rich, and varied history’ of cosmopolitical ideas about the ‘whole world’ that remains relatively untapped by the standard narration (Niezen, 2004: 11). The Eurocentric bias of that standard narration is obvious, and has not gone unchallenged (Pieterse, 2006; Benhabib, 2008), with alternative locations and genealogies of cosmopolitical thought and action being offered (Zubaida, 1999), partly meeting Delanty’s (2006: 57) injunction for scholars to integrate into the history of the field cosmopolitan theories which ‘cannot be explained in terms of a single, Western notion of modernity’. Cosmopolitan cultural dynamics can also be discerned in various forms of ‘European’ encounters with non-European others. Revisionist historians can narrate the ‘European Renaissance’ of the 15th and 16th centuries not as a series of developments endogenous to ‘Europe’, but rather the emergent property of shifting relations between Christendom and different wings of the Islamic world (Inglis and Robertson, 2006). Even within what is conventionally called ‘European’ thought, a critical genealogist can discern forms of thinking that are important for the retelling of the history of cosmopolitanisms in the plural. This involves two dimensions. First, offering alternative accounts of the nature and significance of ideas and authors already consecrated by the standard narration; and second, the identification of ideas and thinkers not conventionally designated as ‘cosmopolitan’, but inclusion of which in the history of cosmopolitanisms can both enrich the existing canon and help to recalibrate our views of what it is and can do. In what follows, I will indicate certain forms of thought which merit inclusion within a broadened understanding of precursors of contemporary cosmopolitical concerns. Most of these are ‘Western’ in provenance, but I also include the anti-Western-colonial thinking of Frantz Fanon. I also want to indicate certain neglected or occluded dimensions of canonical schools of thought, notably Greco-Roman Stoicism and Kantian political philosophy; I assert that there is a neglected but important historiographical and sociological dimension to these forms of cosmopolitan thinking, involving endeavours to root more abstract political-philosophical and metaphysical concerns in empirical historical conditions. On this view, even the most apparently abstract and utopian aspects of ‘classical’ cosmopolitan thought – features which it is today routinely criticised for (e.g. Pollock, 2002) – are rooted to some extent in ‘empirical’ concerns as to how cosmopolitan norms and imperatives will or could be brought into tangible existence. These forms of classical cosmopolitanism cannot just be written off as abstract utopianism, for they endeavoured to think through how normative dispositions could be empirically realised. This seems an important focus for retelling the history of cosmopolitanism in a period when multiple endeavours are afoot to conceive of how cosmopolitical concerns at the level of thought can be brought more fully into the level of practice (Nowicka and Rovisco, 2009).

Between normative and empirical: ancient thought Any treatise on the history of cosmopolitan thought contains depictions of its beginnings in ancient Greece and its Cynic and Stoic origins (Heater, 1996). Diogenes, founding figure of the Cynic school ‘declared himself a-polis (without a city), a-oikos (homeless) and kosmopolites (a citizen of the universe)’ (Goulet-Cazé, 2000: 329). The Greek Stoics argued that government (politeia) should be coextensive with the whole inhabited world (oikoumene) or the whole universe (kosmos), rather than being limited to a particular city-state (Romm, 1992). All people, regardless of race or religion or place of origin, were to be understood as members of one human 43

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brotherhood (Baldry, 1965). Roman Stoics, notably Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, further developed these within the multi-ethnic conditions of the Roman Empire (Revell, 2009). For Marcus Aurelius (1995: 19), ‘there is a world-law, which in turn means that we are all fellow-citizens and share a common citizenship, and that the world is a single city’. According to Cicero (1972: 155, 189), the gods treat the world ‘as though it were a single state or city’, and thus have ‘have care for all men [sic] everywhere, on every shore and in every country of the earth, however far from our own homeland’. The history of ancient cosmopolitanism is generally narrated in such a way that it concentrates on metaphysical and political-theoretical ideas. This has been reinforced in the present day by the fact that it has been political philosophers, especially Nussbaum (1997), who have been primarily responsible for bringing ancient cosmopolitanism into contemporary debates. As a result, there is today an overly narrow appreciation of ancient cosmopolitanism as wholly political-theoretical in nature. It follows that ancient cosmopolitanism seems to involve the abstract and utopian schemes of a tiny group of philosophers, either socially marginal as in the Greek case, or occupying positions of power but mouthing empty platitudes about universal brotherly love, as in the Roman context. The standard narration ignores at least two issues. First, the fact that cosmopolitan notions were rooted in, and helped to develop, broader visions of the world as a complex, increasingly interconnected whole that were common in Hellenistic Greece and the Roman empire, not just among the philosophical minority but among varied social strata (Inglis and Robertson, 2004, 2005; Robertson and Inglis, 2004). Second, the standard narration omits mention of a different stream of thought that draws upon, but is irreducible to, Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitical notions. This alternative current adapted cosmopolitical philosophy for historiographical purposes. A new kind of historiography, called ‘Universal History’ by its practitioners, grew out of the social conditions of the Hellenistic age. This was a genre for its time. It provided a view of history which was capable of giving an account of the entire new world opened up by the conquests of Alexander [the Great], of incorporating the experiences of the barbaroi as something less than exotic, and of providing . . . a sense of unity within diversity. The guiding aim was ‘to acquaint people with the . . . meaning of the international experience which they were living out’ (Mortley, 1996: 1). Universal History took as its subject matter not particular political entities such as city-states or empires, as previous historiography had, but rather the whole ‘inhabited world’ (oikoumene), endeavouring to narrate the intermeshed affairs of the whole world, not just parts of it. For Diodorus of Sicily in the 1st century BCE, historiography regarded the ‘affairs of the entire world . . . as if they were the affairs of some single city’ (Diodorus, 1968: 17). The most ambitious and sophisticated of the Universal Historians was Polybius, writing in the middle of the 2nd century BCE. Tracing the history of Roman overseas expansion, he described the shift from an oikoumene made up of relatively disconnected places and nations, towards one characterised by increasingly interpenetrating forces: [I]n earlier times the world’s history had consisted . . . of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of each being as widely separated as their localities, but then [after the Roman expansion had begun] history becomes an organic whole [somatoeides]: the affairs of Italy and Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end. (Polybius, 1979: 43) 44

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As a later interpreter noted, Polybius’s vision held that ‘the differences between different states and different cities disappears . . . the world increasingly resembles a single place’ (Fustel de Coulanges, 1893: 161 [author’s translation]). While he drew upon Stoic political-theoretical and metaphysical conceptions of the ‘whole world’, part of the common intellectual currency of the time, he moved beyond its understanding of that world being constituted of naturally and eternally separate places and polities, towards a focus on the historical construction of the somatoeides oikoumene, the whole world being characterised by increasingly dense connectivity, a condition of complex globality (Inglis and Robertson, 2004). Here, then, is a very significant move beyond Stoic metaphysics and political theory, where the world is merely like one single state, but empirically made up of multiple polities, and where universal human brotherhood is just theoretical abstraction. For Polybius and other Universal Historians, the empirical world is moving in concrete directions towards making it really a single polity and all the people within it citizens of one state. Of course, this is in part propaganda for Polybius’s patrons, the Roman elite. But it still signifies a major empirical shift in Stoic-influenced thought, a shift ignored by the standard narration. Such a shift can also be seen in the Roman historian Plutarch, another figure not usually included in the cosmopolitical canon. In his account of Alexander the Great, Plutarch (1936: 327) depicts standard, abstract Stoic themes of universal brotherhood: ‘we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity’. But to these considerations is added a strongly empirical dimension. Alexander is represented as that apparent anomaly, an activist Stoic, who endeavoured to relinquish hitherto unbridgeable divides between Greeks and non-Greeks, bringing into actual existence the world-state that had previously existed only in abstract potential: he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing . . . men’s lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade them all consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth . . . [and] as akin to them all good men, and as foreigners only the wicked. (ibid.: 329) Alexander created at the level of empirical socio-political affairs the hitherto purely metaphysical cosmopolitical condition. As Stoic political philosophy is transformed into – and through – historiography, the focus radically shifts from potentials to actualities. It is wrong to regard ancient Stoicism as a purely abstract, non-empirical affair, as the standard narration alleges (Pollock, 2002), for when we broaden the horizon to include Stoic-influenced historiography as well as political theory, we see that the normative and empirical could be fused together and not always wholly separated.

Between empirical and normative: Kant’s philosophy Regarded in this light, later thinkers who took up the mantle of ancient cosmopolitanism cannot be regarded as simply prisoners of a tradition which was thoroughly non-empirical in nature. This point applies to Kant’s famous appropriation of Stoic themes. In recent debates, stimulated by interventions like Nussbaum (1989, 1997) and Habermas (1997), Kant has generally been portrayed as operating at a primarily political-theoretical level, just like – indeed implicitly because of his indebtedness to – his ancient antecedents. That has meant that the historiographical, anthropological and sociological dimensions of his cosmopolitical vision have been seriously underplayed. 45

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As is well known, Kant’s (1963b) endeavours to reground political philosophy on a cosmopolitan basis tried to avoid the utopianism of previous world-state plans, such as that of the Abbé Saint Pierre, instead looking to a league of sovereign states which would respect the law of ‘universal hospitality’, allowing individuals to travel and trade as they wish and not to be subjected to arbitrary uses of power. Kant (1963a, 1963b) claimed that this situation was eminently practicable, for human history was inexorably moving in that direction. The end-point of human societal evolution was a condition where different human communities had learned to live together without conflict arising between them. Against a Hobbesian view of the eternal nature of inter-individual and inter-state strife, Kant contended that it was conflict itself which drove historical development towards its eventual permanently peaceful outcome. Humans learn over time from the experience of incessant warfare that the best means of meeting their interests, individual and collective, was to engage in peaceful association, not just within states but between them too. One important empirical reason why this cosmopolitical condition eventually appears concerns the geographical limits of the planet. All humans have ‘common possession of the surface of earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other’ (1963b: 103). Literally world history involves initial human dispersal across the planet, followed by increasing interconnection between geographically disparate parts. It was warfare between groups which pushed some of them into even the most inhospitable icy and desert regions of the planet (1963b: 110). The next stage is that Nature, by placing ‘each people near another which presses upon it’, compels each group to ‘form itself into a state in order to defend itself ’ (1963b: 111). Two cultural factors further provoke inter-state hostility: ‘differences of language and of religion . . . involve a tendency to mutual hatred and pretexts for war’ (ibid.). Eventually each group becomes so sickened by war that it wants to enter into the pacific league of states. In addition, international trade develops over time, and different states ‘unite because of mutual interest. The spirit of commerce, which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state . . . states see themselves forced, without any moral urge, to promote honourable peace’ (1963b: 114). The tendency of world-level trading relations is that ‘understanding, conventions and peaceable relations [are] established among the most distant peoples’ (1963b: 110). In sum, the unintended consequences of geographical dispersal, warfare and trade all combine as mechanisms generating ‘a universal cosmopolitan condition’ (1963a: 23). These are the empirical means by which a world-level moral community is beginning to appear, within which ‘a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world’ (1963b: 105). Regardless of where violations occur, the condemnation that follows is literally global, in that it is the moral response of the whole world itself, understood as a single moral entity (1963b: 103). Such a position, simultaneously normative and empirical, allows Kant the grounds to condemn European states which failed to observe the evolving world-level moral codes in their empire-building activities. Some European powers have gone to ‘terrifying lengths’ (1963b: 103) to subjugate other peoples and steal their lands. The downsides of international trade are also criticised from this vantage point. In Hindustan under the pretence of establishing economic undertakings, [the British] brought in foreign soldiers and used them to oppress the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion and perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind. (1963b: 104) If colonialism is a facet of what we today call globalisation, so too is the very world-spanning moral culture that provides grounds for colonialism’s condemnation. Globalisation simultaneously 46

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produces both imperialism and the moral norms and means (e.g. newspapers of global reach) that condemn it. Here Kant anticipates contemporary notions, themselves both empirical and normative, of the opinion-forming capacities of ‘global civil society’ (Keane, 2003). The broader point here is that in Kant there is a combination of the abstract cosmopolitical claims of Stoicism, together with a historiographical attempt (that in fact owes something to ancient historians, especially Polybius) to ground these in emergent world-level historical developments. Kant is both cosmopolitan philosopher and early theorist of globalisation. Cosmopolitan political and moral conditions are not abstract ideas but the emerging expression of an ever more densely connected world-condition. This aspect of Kant’s theorising needs to become much more acknowledged in the standard histories of cosmopolitanism than it is currently. In this regard it is worth noting recent endeavours to present Hegel – apparently an anti-cosmopolitan thinker because of his alleged fetishisation of the national sate as the ground of morality – as offering a more substantially empirically grounded cosmopolitanism than does Kant (Fine, 2003a). While the recuperation of Hegel exemplifies very useful rethinking of the cosmopolitical canon, it should not do so through the means of caricaturing Kant as an abstract political thinker devoid of empirical orientations and sensitivities.

Early modern cosmopolitics Having re-narrated two dimensions of canonised cosmopolitanism, ancient philosophies and Kantianism, I will now turn to areas less recognised by the standard narration. A fertile ground for re-narrating cosmopolitanism is early modern Europe, even though at first glance it may seem unlikely. The early modern movement towards centralised states is well known, involving as it did the centralisation of wealth and military might by states increasingly defined as ‘national’. The territorially bounded state was well on the way to becoming the dominant type of polity in Western Europe by the mid-17th century (Tilly, 1975). Political theory became ever more concerned with state sovereignty and the nature of relations between sovereign political entities. For this imaginary, embodied most forcefully in Hobbes (1968), warfare between sovereign states was inevitable, and the inter-state system is a perpetually violent state of nature. Given that each state was absolutely sovereign, there could be no legitimate international authority which would guide or control inter-state relations. But for some contemporary thinkers, appalled by the bloody warfare of the times, it was imperative that some sense of balance be struck between state autonomy and means of achieving peace. Jurists began to work out means by which relations between states could be established on some sort of at least minimal legal and ethical basis (Pound, 1925). In the treatise of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez De Legibus, Ac Deo Legislatore (Treatise on Law and God the Legislator) of 1619, it is admitted that ‘a human legislative power of universal character and world-wide extent does not exist and has never existed’ (Murphy, 1982: 496). But even in a system of sovereign states, there could exist a minimal sort of ‘society’ between states which regulated their interactions. Each state was part of a ‘universal community’, the human race, considered both as an animal species and as a moral entity, joined together by natural ties of love and mercy. State sovereignty cannot be absolute, for all human beings rely on each other, and each state is ‘a member of that universal society’ called humanity. Minimal ethical obligations between states – such as not killing other states’ ambassadors – thus rest on, and express, a sense of common humanity. Suarez thus resuscitates the older Christian concept of ‘universal humanity’ within a context of state sovereignty, taming the latter through the former. At a more empirical level, he also insists on how all states need each other’s assistance in one way or another: each state requires ‘some mutual assistance, association and intercourse, at times for [its] own greater welfare 47

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and advantage, but at other times because also of some moral necessity or need’ (Murphy, 1982: 479). Suarez thus provides an embryonic account of an inter-state division of labour, which itself is seen as necessarily regulating states’ behaviour towards each other. Jurists were also concerned with what might constitute a ‘just war’. The late 16th century thinker Alberico Gentili drew explicitly upon Stoic notions of universal brotherhood amongst all people, to argue that if a sovereign monarch was treating his subjects excessively unjustly, it was right for another state to intervene. For Gentili, the subjects of others [are not] outside of that kinship of nature and the society formed by the whole world. And if you abolish that society, you will also destroy the union of the human race. . . . [T]here must . . . be someone to remind [rulers] of their duty and hold them in restraint. (Meron, 1991: 115) Here are the beginnings of a legal justification of international humanitarian intervention, grounded on explicitly Stoic cosmopolitical principles. Another important figure here is the early 16th century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria. He is perhaps the first Western legal thinker systematically and explicitly to have thematised the ‘whole world’ (totus orbis) as an object of concern (Ortega, 1996: 100). Vitoria wrote about the legal and ethical aftermath of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, which, along with Portuguese imperial expansion east to Asia, had profound effects on contemporary understandings of the ‘world as a whole’ as an increasingly interconnected entity (Inglis, 2011). Vitoria was concerned with relations pertaining between all peoples on the earth, not just within Christendom as had been the focus of earlier thinkers. Horrified by the brutal treatment meted out by the conquistadors to native peoples, Vitoria stressed the Stoic theme that, because they were possessed of reason, the ‘Indians’ were fully as human as Europeans, and thus entitled to retain their land and properties. Vitoria’s vision was of peaceful coexistence between different peoples across the planet, regulated by natural law. Peaceful coexistence was possible through communication between different groups: the ius communicationis involved the freedom of all people to ‘travel over the world’s land and sea, freedom of trade, freedom of entry and settlement for foreigners, and . . . the duty of rulers to respect these rights’. All of these were rules that Vitoria was painfully aware had been ignored by the Spanish in the Americas (Ortega, 1996: 105). Although Vitoria’s was an isolated voice at the time, he is noteworthy because of his novel analytical focus on the notion of the totus orbis which he takes from Stoic political theory and historiography, his understanding of this as a legal entity in itself, and his prefiguring of later visions of a world-condition characterised by open trade and other forms of free intercourse among all people. In the case of Vitoria, we see how the dynamics of early modern globalisation, especially in terms of burgeoning trading networks, both impacted upon, and were understood through, reconfigured notions of the world-as-a-whole that were inherited from Stoic theoretical and historiographical cosmopolitanism (Inglis and Robertson, 2006). Vitoria’s vision also explicitly connects cosmopolitan concern to the depredations of European colonialism, a theme returned to by Frantz Fanon in the 20th century, as we will see below.

Economic and social cosmopolitanism If the emerging realities of embryonic world-level commerce – and imperial plunder – informed appropriations of Stoicism by early modern jurists, so too would the increasing importance of cross-planet trade be reflected in the cosmopolitical visions of the 18th century, as we have 48

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already seen in the case of Kant. It is wrong to limit the history of cosmopolitan thought only to the canonised 18th century political-theoretical writers. The cosmopolitical responses by other sorts of authors to what were viewed as the increasingly cosmopolitan conditions of global trade should also be mentioned. Tom Paine – not usually included as part of the cosmopolitan canon – echoed much radical and liberal thought of the time when he argued that ‘if commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent to which it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of governments’ (Schlereth, 1977: 103). Likewise, a more obviously cosmopolitan figure, Voltaire, discerned in the workings of the bourse the dynamics of inter-state, inter-cultural and even inter-religious cooperation and harmony: In the stock-exchanges of Amsterdam, London, Surat or Basra, the Gheber, the Barian, the Jew, the Mohametan, the Chinese Deist, the Brahmin, the Greek Christian, the Roman Christian, the Protestant Christian, the Quaker Christian, trade with one another; they don’t raise their daggers against each other to gain the souls for their religion. (Schlereth, 1977: 102) In this vision, burgeoning world trade greatly facilitates international peace and religious tolerance. Commercial self-interest is distinctly cosmopolitan in nature because it leads to peaceful interaction between different states, cultures and religious groups. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted that the development of the wealth of a particular country should for people in all other countries be a matter for ‘emulation, not of national prejudice or envy . . . each nation ought not only to endeavour itself to excel, but from the love of mankind, to promote, instead of obstructing the excellence of its neighbours’ (1976 [1776]: iv.iii.9). Such benefits of free trade are regarded from a cosmopolitan point of view in Smith, even though he retained the hard-headed position that in empirical situations, what should be the case need not actually be so: the wealth of a particular nation can excite jealousy and antagonism among those abroad, leading to war and imperialist expropriation. The complicated relationship of Karl Marx to cosmopolitan thinking and practice has already been laid out extensively (e.g. Cheah, 2006). But it is also noteworthy that 19th century liberal ideas as to free trade can be construed as particular sorts of cosmopolitan thinking. Richard Cobden, leader of the British Anti-Corn Law League, remarked ‘Free Trade! What is it? Why breaking down the barriers that separate nations; those barriers, behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred and jealousy’ (Kauppi and Viotti, 1998: 208). For Cobden and many others, free trade would come over time to be seen by governmental leaders the world over as a more efficient way of generating national wealth than warfare. Military organisations would be made redundant in a commercially integrated world, as the main dynamic of world-level interactions shifted from politics to commerce. The liberal vision of a global future marked by peaceful relations between states characterised the nascent discipline of sociology as much as it did political economy. As sociology reconfigured economic ideas about the division of labour, a specifically sociological set of cosmopolitan dispositions were formed from the early 19th century onwards. We can see this in the work of Herbert Spencer, who predicted a universal movement from ‘military society’ to ‘industrial society’, a condition where economic and political autarky were laid aside in the universal evolution towards world-level economic interdependence (Sztompka, 1993: 103). Just as much as economic liberalism, utopian socialism – another important influence on embryonic sociology – also espoused such a vision. Saint-Simon and his followers argued that the end-point of human history ‘is universal association . . . the association of all men [sic] on the 49

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entire surface of the globe in all spheres of their relationships’ (Iggers, 1958: 58). The Stoic idea of ‘humanity as a whole’ is here recalibrated to become a product of the emerging global division of labour, such that over time ‘the various nations, scattered over the face of the earth, shall appear only as members of one vast workshop, working under a common law for the accomplishment of one and the same destiny’ (ibid.: 85). The same sentiments were echoed by Comte and his school. The analytic object of Comtean sociology is an explicitly cosmopolitan one, again indebted to Stoicism: the mass of the human species, whether in the present, the past or even the future . . . [which] increasingly constitut[es] in every respect, both in space and in time, an immense and eternal social unity, whose diverse individual or national organs, which are continually united by a close and universal solidarity, inevitably cooperate . . . in the fundamental evolution of humanity. (Pickering, 1989: 457–8) Here we see very clearly one of the most explicitly cosmopolitan dimensions of classical sociology, before the sociological imaginary was sequestrated into the ‘methodological nationalism’ characteristic of the thinking of 20th century ‘national sociologies’ (Chernilo, 2007). Comte’s sociology also involved the development of the ‘religion of humanity’, a new secular religion which was to provide the newly industrialised nations with a common cultural bond akin to that which Catholicism had provided in medieval Europe. As Boas (1928: 151–2) summarises: [Comte] believed that human beings could be educated into acting with the same pacific motives toward other nationalities that they seem to have towards their fellowcitizens . . . nations would learn to gather for mutual support. A by-product of this arrangement would be universal peace, for war can be organized only for one’s country, whereas labour becomes an instrument for humanity as a whole. The industrial state makes all nations spontaneously converge by assigning to each an end which can become universal because it always remains external to any one nation. The exploitation of the natural resources common to all nations involves a division of labour equivalent to what one sees within separate societies. Such exploitation would be impossible without international cooperation. Such Comtean sentiments are found in another key sociological work, Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society (1964 [1893]), which can be viewed as that author’s first attempt to propound a specifically sociological – as opposed to an economic or political-theoretical – cosmopolitanism, attuned to the socio-economic-political conditions of the day. In the famous account of burgeoning social complexity (‘organic solidarity’), Durkheim (1964 [1893]: 369) notes that within one (national) society under conditions of organic solidarity, ‘the fusion of the different segments [of production] draws [hitherto separate] markets together into one which embraces almost all [of national] society’. He then notes that this process even extends beyond [national frontiers] . . . and tends to become universal, for the frontiers which separate peoples break down at the same time as those [boundaries disappear] which separate the segments of each of them [within each polity]. The result is that each industry produces for consumers spread over the whole surface of the country or even of the entire world. 50

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Thus ‘national-level’ organic solidarity develops at the same time as ‘international-level’ organic solidarity, leading to an ever more complex web of world-wide socio-economic integration. Although generally unremarked upon until recently (Turner, 2006), it is clear that Durkheim’s mature socio-political project was to formulate a brand of cosmopolitanism which would develop Saint-Simonian, Comtean and Kantian ethical dispositions, grounding these empirically in the emerging tendencies of world-level socio-political order. His position is summarised in an address given at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900: Doubtless, we have towards the country in its present form, and of which we in fact form part, obligations that we do not have the right to cast off. But beyond this country, there is another in the process of formation, enveloping our national country: that of Europe, or humanity. (Lukes, 1973: 350) This view was elaborated in lectures Durkheim (1992) first gave in Bordeaux between 1890 and 1900, where he considers the apparently contradictory notion of ‘world patriotism’, endeavouring to take into account the apparently rigid realities of the contemporary international system, while trying to raise this system to a certain ethical level, a la the efforts of the early modern jurists and Kant. World patriotism does not involve modes of affiliation to a putative ‘worldstate’, which he admits could only arise in the very distant future (1992: 74). Instead, it refers to a situation where each state encourages the highest moral sentiments among its citizens. Each national government endeavours ‘not to expand, or to lengthen its borders, but to set its own house in order and to make the widest appeal to its members for a moral life on an ever higher level. . . . Civic duties would be only a particular form of the general obligations of humanity’ (ibid.). Durkheim points toward a ‘world culture’, constituted of certain general moral codes, which is contributed to by particular states and which is observed by all of them, with specific national colourings, as regards the education of their citizens. Turner (2006: 141) claims that ‘in equating what he called “true patriotism” with cosmopolitanism, Durkheim anticipated the modern debate about republicanism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism by almost a century’. He seems to anticipate Appiah’s (1996) argument that a sense of belonging to a particular national community is necessary for actors to achieve more cosmopolitan political goals, and Habermas’s (2001) idea of ‘constitutional patriotism’ as a way of reconciling actors’ orientations and responsibilities towards ‘cosmopolitical’ institutions like the UN with their feelings of national identity. Durkheim, like Kant before him, wished to root his political-philosophical position in empirical world-level social conditions, this involving a move from political philosophy alone to historiography and sociology. This is what the late masterwork The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (2001 [1912]) set out to achieve (Inglis and Robertson, 2008), with an embryonic theory of globalisation underpinning the account of world moral culture and political cosmopolitanism he had outlined elsewhere. In the book’s later chapters, there is an account of the sociological reasons whereby a world-spanning cosmopolitan moral culture has developed at the present time. Durkheim argues that the case of the emergence of inter-tribal ‘international life’ in aboriginal Australia mirrors the emergence of a global moral culture in his own time. As different tribes (or nation-states) interact ever more closely in conditions of organic solidarity, they create shared moral forms – such as commonly held divinities, totems and taboos – to which they all become obligated. Those who break the rules of this emergent global moral order are shunned, just as the civilised nations condemned the aggressive imperialism of Germany during the Great War (Durkheim, 1915). It is particularly through common rituals and shared ceremonies that this moral culture is created, developed and reinforced. The inter-tribal social dynamics discernible 51

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in the aboriginal case are mirrored in the inter-national dynamics of the present day, with new senses of cosmopolitan morality being created through, for example, the participation of multiple nationalities at international expositions and congresses. The upshot is that today there is no people, no state, that is not involved with another society that is more or less unlimited and includes all peoples. . . . There is no national life that is not dominated by an inherently international collective life. As we go forward in history, these international groupings take on greater importance and scope. (2001 [1912]: 322) Here again can be discerned a concern not just to unite the normative and the empirical realms, but to ground the former upon tendencies in the latter, in order to avoid accusations of abstraction and utopianism. In this sense, Durkheim was more profoundly Kantian than he has often been given credit for, when we regard the Kantian project in the manners proposed above.

Cosmopolitanism and colonial encounters One major objection to the theorising of Durkheim on inter-group dynamics and the cosmopolitan conditions they can create is that they gloss over issues to do with colonialism and imperialism. Durkheim was writing in the metropolitan centre of a large European empire, where relations between colonisers and colonised were far from being like the level playing field that he imagined as characterising inter-group relations in aboriginal Australia. Durkheim’s imagining of the global conditions creating cosmopolitanism is a far cry from contemporaneous analyses of world-level dynamics, such as Lenin’s caustic diagnosis of the nature and consequences of imperialism, where certain groups exploit and control others on a massive scale. For contemporary post-colonial critics, Durkheim’s position seems far less convincing as an understanding of how the world actually works than does that of Vitoria several centuries before (Krishna, 2008). This raises the issue of how to account for the roles of colonialism in the history of social and political theory. As Go (2013: 209) has argued, there has been a tendency in cosmopolitanism studies to treat colonialism ‘as a temporary deviation in an otherwise linear narrative towards present-day cosmopolitanism or as a purely negative force’ working against cosmopolitan tendencies in the empirical domain. Go suggests that while of course this is true in a general way, we can also usefully consider how, at least sometimes and in certain contexts, colonialism may have been partly generative of cosmopolitan theory and possibly practice too. Go cites the case of the Martinique-born thinker Frantz Fanon, nowadays usually presented either as an advocate of violent anti-colonial political struggle, or as an early instance of a postcolonial theorist. Go (2013: 209) however proposes to read Fanon’s work as involving ‘the colonial production of a particular form of cosmopolitanism . . . [that produced] a postcolonial cosmopolitanism’. This can be situated as part of a much wider set of processes in the ‘de-colonising’ period stretching from 1945 to the 1970s, whereby intellectuals living in the countries of the crumbling European empires sought to think through the contradictions of the colonial and emerging post-colonial conditions. Fanon’s thought displays a deep ambivalence to the Enlightenment claims of the French state and its intellectual spokespeople. On the one hand, claims of universal fraternity were deeply clearly hypocritical, mouthed by the same white officialdom who were engaged in the most egregious acts against subject non-white populations (Fanon, 1968). On the other hand, such ideals could not be rejected wholesale, as to do so would be to jettison the ideal of all of humanity cooperating with and caring for each other. Without such a 52

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cosmopolitan ideal, the newly autonomous states of Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere would fall into the trap of state-building centred around callous ethno-nationalism, which might eventually pit them against each other in bloody conflict. The challenge therefore was to purge cosmopolitan sentiments of universal fraternity of the Eurocentric baggage that had built up around them throughout the era of the European empires. The French – and more broadly European – concept of ‘humanity’ had to be understood as a particularism, which nonetheless contained within it seeds of a more genuinely universal and non-racist conception of the human species and the ethics by which different groups should treat each other. This new conception had to be forged by the hitherto colonised, not taken up wholesale from the erstwhile colonisers. In so doing, a new sense of the ‘mass of all humanity’ would be created, ‘whose connections must be increased [and] whose channels must be diversified’ (Fanon, 1968: 314). Guided by a rejuvenated sense of cosmopolitan connections among all social groups, the formerly colonised may be able to reach out to the former colonisers, such that the latter’s ‘rigid culture, now liberated, opens at last to the people who have really become brothers. . . . The two cultures can finally . . . enrich each other’ (Fanon, 1970: 53). In many ways, the cosmopolitan hopes of Fanon in the 1960s for reconciliation between colonisers and colonised did not come to pass. This is seen both in the ethnic tensions of contemporary France and the rise of the National Front to political prominence on the basis of such tensions, and the dramatic replacement of cosmopolitan national liberation discourses by militant Islam in some of France’s ex-colonies. Instead of the increased cosmopolitisation of reality hoped for by Fanon, societies around the world seem to be moving in ever more de-cosmopolitising directions. Nonetheless, Fanon’s message remains an important one. He saw the necessity of tempering nationalism – here the nationalism of newly emerging nations onto the world stage – with cosmopolitan dispositions. In this sense he was not so very far from Durkheim. Nationalism can under certain circumstances work ‘as a basis for its own supersession’ (Go, 2013: 218). This is surely a pertinent message for the secessionist nationalist movements, such as the Scottish and Catalan, in the former colonising countries like Spain and the UK. In seeking to escape from what nationalists regard as a colonial condition of political subjugation, Europe itself will be helped to re-cosmopolitise if these new nation-states firmly place their nationalist discourses at the service of broader cosmopolitan ideals. The Scottish case in particular possibly gives some cause for hope in that regard.

Conclusion The case of Fanon illustrates well the point of re-narrating the history of cosmopolitanism thinking. He has not usually been considered as a major cosmopolitan thinker, and his contributions are not (yet) integrated into mainstream debates in the field. The same can also be said for numerous other figures examined above. Many of these figures, despite their other differences, can be seen as trying to integrate thoroughly the normative and empirical aspects of cosmopolitanism. It is important in our ongoing interpretations of the history of the field to place emphasis on the continuing theme of normative/empirical integration in cosmopolitical thought, because otherwise the latter can be represented in too narrow a fashion, understood as the preserve of an elite of political philosophers engaged in abstract discussions devoid of empirical affordances. Previous attempts to think about and instantiate cosmopolitan conditions prove to be more interesting and perhaps more useful and relevant for us today, once we have both widened and deepened our retrospective visions of them. The field of cosmopolitanism studies must continually think in as open and creative ways as possible about the historical materials from which it can be (re)constructed. 53

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——— (2008) ‘The Elementary Forms of Globality: Durkheim and the Emergence and Nature of Global Life’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 8(1): 5–25. Iggers, G. (1958) The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition, Boston: Beacon. Kant, I. (1963a) ‘Idea for a Universal History From a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in On History, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 11–26. ——— (1963b) ‘Perpetual Peace’, in On History, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 85–135. Kauppi, M. and Viotti, P. (1998) The Global Philosophers, New York: Lexington. Keane, J. (2003) Global Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Krishna, S. (2008) Globalization and Postcolonialism, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Lu, C. (2000) ‘The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 8(2): 244–67. Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Survey, London: Allen Lane. Marcus Aurelius (1995) Meditations, Penguin: Harmondsworth. Meinecke, F. (1970) Cosmopolitanism and the National State, Princeton: Princeton UP. Meron, T. (1991) ‘Common Rights of Mankind in Gentili, Grotius and Suarez’, American Journal of International Law, 85(1): 110–16. Mignolo, W. (2000) ‘The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3): 721–48. Mortley, R. (1996) The Idea of Universal History from Hellenistic Philosophy to Early Christian Historiography, Lewiston: Mellen. Murphy, C.F., Jr. (1982) ‘The Grotian Vision of World Order’, American Journal of International Law, 76(3): 477–98. Niezen, R. (2004) A World Beyond Difference, Oxford: Blackwell. Nowicka, M. and Rovisco, M. (eds.) (2009) Cosmopolitanism in Practice, Farnham: Ashgate. Nussbaum, M. (1989) ‘Recoiling from Reason’, New York Review of Books, 36(19): 36–41. ——— (1997) ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’. Journal of Political Philosophy, 5(1): 1–25. Ortega, M.C. (1996) ‘Vitoria and the Universalist Conception of International Relations’, in Clark, I. and Neumann, I.B. (eds.) Classical Theories of International Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Pickering, M. (1989) ‘New Evidence of the Link between Comte and German Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50(3): 443–63. Pieterse, J.N. (2006) ‘Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda’, Development and Change, 37(6): 1247–57. Plutarch (1936) Moralia, Vol. III, Cambridge, MA: Loeb. Pollock, S. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, in Carol A. Breckenridge et al. (eds.) Cosmopolitanism, Durham: Duke UP, pp. 15–53. Pound, R. (1925) ‘Grotius in the Science of Law’, American Journal of International Law, 19(4): 685–8. Polybius (1979) The Rise of the Roman Empire, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Revell, L. (2009) Roman Imperialism and Local Identities, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Robertson, R. and Inglis, D. (2004) ‘The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World-Consciousness’, Globalizations, 1(1): 38–49. Romm, J.S. (1992) The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, Princeton: Princeton UP. Schlereth, T. (1977) The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP. Smith, A. (1976) The Wealth of Nations, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Somers, M. (1996) ‘Where Is Sociology after the Historic Turn?’, in T.J. McDonald (ed.) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, Ann Arbor: Michigan State UP, pp. 53–89. Sztompka, P. (1993) The Sociology of Social Change, Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (ed.) (1975) The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton: Princeton UP. Toulmin, S. (1990) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Turner, B.S. (2006) ‘Classical Sociology and Cosmopolitanism: A Critical Defence of the Social’, British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 133–51. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (eds.) (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Oxford UP. Zubaida, S. (1999) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East’, in R. Meijer (ed.) Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 15–34.

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5 World history and cosmopolitanism Bo Stråth

Etymologically the term cosmopolitan is derived from the Greek words cosmos and polis. Cosmos refers to the whole world, yes, indeed, the whole universe, although in practice the reference is to the world as the globe. Polis is the label of a bounded political community, normally a small city state. From there comes the term politics. The unification of the unbounded world and the bounded polity means a contradiction and the question in this chapter is how it has been addressed historically. The contradiction has been present in the historical discourses on cosmopolitanism since the eighteenth century. The cosmopolite has been seen as a citizen of the world transcending political territorial borders such as nation states and living in a vaguely discerned world state. The cosmopolite was imagined as standing above or between all bounded polities. At the same time the term had a local demarcation. Global went hand in hand with local. In the nineteenthcentury German debate, for instance, the cosmopolitan imagination was based on the idea of the nation state.

The historiography of the world of nations and the social issue Immanuel Kant’s idea that world government was a world federation of states rather than transcending them was ever more transformed into the idea of the nation as carrier of the universal. The discourse on Weltbürgertum was a point of reference in the Völkerrecht project of international law where the relationships between states was regulated. Global transnational society and interstate were two sides of the same coin that mutually constituted one another. The emphasis on the world as interstate or -national incessantly counteracted attempts to transcend political borders. The major crisis in Europe at the beginning of the 1870s around the German-French conflict and extensive economic stagnation transformed the liberal dream and national as well as international politics during the following decades up to World War I. The emergence of protectionism in response to the economic depression clashed with the idea of establishing a common political and peaceful United States of Europe. Such ideas had been developed in the 1820s and 1830s in particular by Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. The general trend towards internationalism since the 1820s was carried by movements for peace, temperance, social progress, penal reforms, health, etc. It was a broad middle class movement for peace and social progress based 56

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on the theories of Saint-Simon, Comte and others. It was obviously an alternative trend to the speculative philosophy on the nation as carrier of the universal in the wake of Hegel and Fichte. In the 1870s, the trend narrowed down from large congresses and transnational activism to single issue movements, constrained thematically, nationally, politically, religiously or in the scope of specific social or practical sciences (Müller 2014; Herren 2009; Murphy 1994). This development was an important factor for the decline of the prospects of cosmopolitanism. Like Minerva’s owl a cadre of legal philosophers and professional lawyers launched against the backdrop of the violent German unification a project on international law in the early 1870s. Their liberal positivist ambition and pretension was to formulate laws in order to prevent wars or at least make them more humane. Their framework was the perception of a European civilisation ordering the world in legal terms. Their cosmopolitan approach carried on the European bias developed by Hegel. International law was an instrument of colonialism (Koskenniemi 2001). The international lawyers fought against the emergence of narrow nationalism. From the 1870s, the international/transnational trend since the 1820s faced an ever stronger nationalist language driven by campaigns for protectionism and the stronger attention to a social problem in the wake of economic deflationary pressures and unemployment. The talk was more about social protection – in parallel to the economic protectionism – than about social progression. The social issue never managed to take off from its national anchorage as Marx had hoped, but became one of the major factors behind nation building and nationalist language during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Marx’s identification of the state as an instrument of oppression of the workers, and the social reformers’ identification of it as an instrument of change drove the language everywhere towards a national focus irrespective of the rhetoric about a transcending internationalism. The class struggle language clashed with romanticist as well as empirical conservative ideas of socially integrated nations based on the language of state socialism (Bismarck) or national socialism (Kjellén). The overall impact of the clash was the cementation of the European nation states. It is true that states made warfare and warfare made states (Tilly 1990) during the decades preceding 1914. However, it is also true, although paid less attention to, that during the same period states also made welfare and welfare made states. National welfare hand in hand with nationalistic warfare in mutual reinforcement paved the road to 1914 (Stråth 2016). The social issue blocked the road towards internationalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, and its connection to the ethnic and military issues made nationalism explosive. This was obvious at the latest in 1914 when the European working class movements with few exceptions were nationalised after the outbreak of the war in support of the war efforts of their respective governments. Friedrich Meinecke was a leading German historian who during the years before World War I wrestled with the romanticist-conservative nation state idea in confrontation with the cosmopolitan tradition. He built on the German debate between Weltbürgertum and Nationalstaat since the late eighteenth century (Meinecke 1911 [1907]). The nation state was in the view of Meinecke, created by great personages, a view which well connected to thoughts formulated by Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt about the nation states as supra-personal configurations. In that view Bismarck appears in Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat as a successful synthesis of power and spirit, national unification and universal divinity (Meinecke 1911: 24). Meinecke tapped onto a centenary philosophical and historical debate about German greatness through grosse Staatsmänner who were the tool of God or Reason. On the eve of World War I, when Meinecke wrote his book, the destructive potential of this view was not yet clear, but seen in retrospect the attempts to combine the cosmopolitan and the national had by then begun to take on grotesque proportions. 57

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The tensions and the contradictions in the term cosmopolitanism developed in new directions in the mass migration societies of the second half of the twentieth century with a focus on the practices rather than the idea of the concept. Self-imaginations of being a cosmopolitan city, for instance, referred in the 1990s to world-openness and tolerance, exotic way of life in these cities, and intermingling of many nationalities and races under cultural adjustment. Being a cosmopolite connoted in the same vein better-off intellectuals or business men moving independently all over the world without restricting ties, exploring, exploiting and explaining it. Multiculturalism emerged in the 1990s as a concept to reinforce the cosmopolitan imagery, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War became a core dimension of the new neoliberal globalisation narrative based on the vision of the unbounded global market. However, ‘multicultural’ came in the 2000s ever more to connote the opposite of cosmopolitanism: immigrant ghettos, marginalisation, exclusion and poverty. In many big European cities today one third or more of the inhabitants are immigrants of non-European origin. In the 1990s, the binary language of cosmopolitan and multicultural escaped the social question. From the 2000s onwards the term multicultural came ever more to draw attention to this escape and shifted to become a negative counter concept of cosmopolitan. The negative connotation affected also the term cosmopolitan in the negative direction of socially irresponsible economic elites. The social question, and the attempts to circumvent it, was the catalyst in this conceptual transformation in the 2010s.

Global history or world history? The journal World History (since 1990), the competing journal Global History (since 2006) as well as a growing number of edited volumes, monographs and journal articles testify to the new historiographic trend after the end of the Cold War to analyse history in its global context with ambitions to transcend methodological nationalism which ever since the nineteenth century had been the standard approach in the discipline. Since Kant world history was synonymous with universal history, which in the nineteenth-century discourses began to interpret the world as a process towards ever higher stages of development driven by some intrinsic logic. Europe was the origin, the standard and the goal of this process. The European nation states became the carriers of the universal. At the latest with World War II this narrative became problematic. However, substantially it continued in the 1950s and 1960s under the name of modernisation and from the 1990s through the change of name to globalisation. When globalisation became a catchword, ‘world history’ lost profile. Its connection to universal history proceeding through some kind of natural law got lost and it began to connote a general thematically unspecific interest in the past of the world. World history was in the 1990s more or less a curiosity in events and facts about the past in the non-Western world without any particular efforts to organise them in an overall narrative. The term global history took over as an instrument to establish that global pattern of past coherence. The language of the economists and sociologists who began to talk about the global village and glocalisation got its historical underpinning. Here is not the place to go deeper into this transformation, which occurred in the framework of a major semantic shift in social sciences after 1990: government to governance, state to market, hierarchy to network, etc. (cf. Stråth [ed.] 2000). There is in this outline of global history an echo of the economistic globalisation narrative about the evolution of global markets, which in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War rapidly appropriated a hegemonic priority of interpretation. Global history underpinned the new emerging master narrative through the argument that the globalisation was much older than the 1990s. Global history gave the globalisation narrative a historical dimension. Global history was 58

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in this outline version 2.0 of Hegel’s (and Marx’s) project (below) where History itself became the main agent of change. The growing references to global history or world history after 1990 hardly meant a general agreement on the substance of the terms or its distinction from world history. Many did not see any difference at all. For some global history was a demarcation to the historical ballast of world history connoting universal history, where Europe represented the universal. For many the globalisation narrative, against the backdrop of the digital revolution, with its unknown possibilities of new kinds of knowledge production, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, with its promises of a new world, just meant a growing interest in the world beyond Europe based on the insights that Europe/the West and its nation states was too narrow a viewpoint. These insights did not necessarily assume a universal master plan (‘globalisation’) but built often on curiosity as to various parts and aspects of the world beyond the West. The globalisation language rapidly lost legitimising power after September, 2008, when the global financial markets crashed. The ever more evident problem of the globalisation language is its teleology which confirms imaginations of a Western standard where everything is measured in terms of progressive or backward. The globalisation narrative is the updated version of the modernisation narrative that emerged in the 1950s. The Western economic performance and road to modernity is the point of reference for the rest of the world. The challenge of global and world history is to confront this bias and develop a truly global perspective through micro as well as macro historical inquiries. The argument here is that a new world history must have a much more polycentric approach than being just a matter of Europe or the West and the rest. Eurasian or Eurafrican entanglements rather than comparisons are important in a new kind of world history, but we should not forget about Sino-Japanese transfers in both directions independent of Europe, or complex EuroIndian-African or Asian-African interrelationships and mutual influences. The crucial question is how to relativise the European or Western view. Dipesh Chakrabarty in his postcolonial critique reflects on this question (Chakrabarty 2001). It is easy to agree with Chakrabarty’s view that colonialism produced a world image where it became ‘normal’ to think of England as a rich country and India as a poor country. Although he recognises the enlightenment values as a European achievement for the world, and that no Indian history can be written without integrating the colonial experience, the key issue in Provincialising Europe is to what extent a history that recognises the enlightenment heritage can merge with indigenous histories into a truly cosmopolitan narrative. This question must inform any world-historical approach worth the name. An approach that both avoids universalising tendencies from a Western point of departure and prevents empirical collapse into world history as anything that happened in the world in the past is key to a new kind of world history. Such a world history must look for perspectives where the study of the particular reflects more general patterns. It is probably empirically inductive rather than theoretically deductive in the work on heuristic frameworks. Cosmopolitanism, for instance, could in a new world history be approached through a focus on the encounters between diverse peoples such as in the late nineteenth century when demands for recognition of ‘common human rights’ were made by Chinese colonists in Australia (Lake 2010). As Chinese imperial subjects and Australian immigrants, they argued their claims in the name of ‘cosmopolitan friendship and sympathy’ and the Confucian precept of ‘reciprocity in opposition to emergent race-based nationalism’, a formulation that draws on Ulf Hannertz’s distinction: cosmopolitans attempting to engage with the locals (Hannerz 1990: 239). Such a view confronts the dominant Eurocentric narrative of human rights that sees linear progression from the North Atlantic declarations of the ‘rights of man’ in the late eighteenth century to 59

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their extension, following the Holocaust, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (Lake 2010). The focus is on the multi-causal origins of values like international human rights, and complex political, cultural and social contexts in which conceptions of human rights have emerged and been deployed. Micro studies of cosmopolitan cities in the world is another example of a fruitful field for the development of new approaches in world history. There individuals and groups of different origins are mixed together, often most intensely among the socioeconomic disadvantaged as opposed to cosmopolitan individuals whose level of sophistication, tolerance and adaptability is usually associated with a privileged elite (Coller 2010). Rather than trying to disentangle them in order to highlight the one or the other, one might look at the entanglement between them and develop a view on cosmopolitanism as a complex genealogy. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Istanbul, for instance, ideas about cosmopolitanism coming out of enlightenment Europe intersected with cosmopolitan practices at the boundaries of Europe and the Muslim world, drawing new lines and boundaries of identity and difference, which at the end cleared the ground for new exclusively European philosophical articulations of cosmopolitanism. The French merchants of eighteenth-century Istanbul existed at the intersection between two worlds in transformation. Their lived ‘vernacular’ Eurasian cosmopolitanism became at the end estranged from the philosophical and intellectual development of enlightenment cosmopolitanism, which came to be defined as both elite and exclusively European. Seen from Istanbul, the story of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism is that of neither cosmopolitanism’s triumph nor of its downfall, but of the gradual displacement and substitution of one version by another (Coller 2010). More generally, a focus on borders in concepts like cosmopolitanism, argued to be borderless, would be a fruitful approach in a new world history: the making and unmaking of borders, social, political and economic borders as supplement and relativisation of the obsession with ethnic and religious borders during recent decades.

World history and cultural difference In the nineteenth century the terms culture and civilisation were used for demarcation between Us and Them. There is no place here to go into the interesting differences between these two concepts, but they became together with nation and class key terms of demarcation. Culture and civilisation were in particular key concepts in academic ethnology and anthropology. The concepts radiated European superiority. Against the backdrop of de-colonialisation after World War II critical anthropology and postcolonial studies operated with the term cultural relativism where each culture or civilisation should be analysed and evaluated according to its own gauges. This attempt to find an exit out from the colonial power discourse proved to be illusive, however (Höfert 2007). The putative objective categories of knowledge which continued to be the norm of European academic reflection carried on the European-Western hegemony. In particular postcolonial studies criticised the conceptual apparatus of the Western cultural sciences, which used terms like modernity, modernisation, religion, nation, democracy and time conceptualisations of linear progress universally without questioning whether these categories were applicable in the non-Western world. The term religion, for instance, has since the nineteenth century emerged as a key term in the narratives on an occidental Sonderweg in all its variety. The European project of modernity as it emerged in the enlightenment philosophy proclaimed itself as the opposite pole of religion. The accomplished secularisation, the domestication of religion was and is in this vein seen as an outstanding marker of the modern Europe. Non-European cultures were and are confronted with the Gretchenfrage of how they then had and have it with religion, and this question 60

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was and is linked to the question of how modern they really were and are. This situation is fully visible in the ongoing master narrative on Islam (Höfert 2007). The postcolonial critique has rejected the use of universal concepts in the study of nonWestern societies. Edward Saïd was a portal figure in the development of this critique with his book on Orientalism (Saïd 1978). On this point it is interesting to listen to the Syrian scholar Aziz al-Azmeh who opposes the postulation a priori of a principle cultural difference between European and non-European societies. Al-Azmeh argues here with the concept of ‘postmodern obscurantism’ (al-Azmeh 2007). He is one of the sharpest critiques of an academic proceeding, which particularises and isolates the multiple phenomena of one well-demarcated world religion called Islam. The instrument thereby is the postulated instead of empirically demonstrated cohesion and unity of this religion, which is also called the Islamic world or the Islamic civilisation, and its sharp demarcation to other civilisations, which are less defined in religious terms. The postulation of cultural difference encloses and ‘over-islamises’ the Islamic history. One could here ask why we use a religious category of analysis instead of geographical and historical. Chinese history is not called Buddhist history and Indian history not Hindu history. The distinction between European and Christian history is also clear since the seventeenth century. The method of over-islamisation is culturalistic and essentialising, and has in that respect connections to racism, according to al-Azmeh. A conclusion of the critical arguments is that transcultural comparison must avoid the two pitfalls of universalism and particularism and integrate both dimensions: on the one hand a generalising perspective with general historical categories like the economic, the social and the political and with a view on similarities, a perspective which confronts postulates of demarcations between civilisations, and on the other hand an individualising perspective, which critically reflects on the hegemonic genesis of modern Western categories of classification and on the idea of an occidental Sonderweg. The issue of Eurocentrism is thus a crucial problem in any world history. The estimation of the possibilities and the necessity to respond to this problem varies a lot. Arif Dirlik, for instance, has argued that world-historical outlooks need to be basically understood as privileged, centric perspectives of the past (Dirlik 2006). The purported desire to develop multi-angled worldhistorical versions cannot overcome this situation since Eurocentrism can rather be described in terms of inclusiveness than exclusiveness, expansive inclusion one could add, where ‘inclusion’ gets a colonial dimension. According to Dirlik, the effort to fit different societies or regions into an overarching narrative is impossible without ranking and filing them according to allegedly universal standards. For example, world histories tend to operate with Western categories such as ‘nation’, ‘culture’, ‘civilisation’ or religion, which are implicitly or explicitly presented as the subjects and not the products of history. The argument here is that the task of a new world history is to develop a more polycentric and less teleological perspective on the world in the past and at the same time discern general patterns and avoid that the history collapses into everything that happened in the world in the past. Such a new world history must necessarily also be different than the nineteenth-century writing about cosmopolitanism within the framework of what was called universal history. The connection between cosmopolitanism and universal history will be discussed in the next section.

Kant and Hegel, Fichte and Smith, Darwin and Spencer Immanuel Kant, in his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, tried to reconcile the fact that human beings do not behave in a human way with the hopes of human progress (Kant 1784). One cannot suppress a certain indignation, Kant stated, when one sees men’s action 61

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on the great world stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there among individuals, everything in the large woven together from folly, childish vanity, malice and destructiveness. In the end, one does not know what to think of the human race, so conceited in its gifts. It was difficult to see any purpose in the chaos of individual human action. The task of the philosophers was to see if one could find a natural purpose in this ‘idiotic course of things human’. It remains strange, Kant argued, that earlier generations appear to carry through their toilsome labour only for the sake of the later, to prepare for them a foundation on which the later generations could erect the higher edifice which was Nature’s goal, and that only the latest of the generations should have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a long line of ancestors had unintentionally laboured without being permitted to partake of the fortune they had prepared. However puzzling it might be, this human condition was necessary in order to fulfil the assumption of mankind as a whole as ‘a class of rational beings’, not as individuals but taken together. Each human being is bound to die while the species is immortal. Like a colony of bees (the metaphor was not Kant’s) they developed their individual capacities to the long-term perfection of society but died before they could enjoy the perfection. The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men exposed their antagonism in society (Fourth Proposition). Kant referred to the social antagonism as the unsocial sociability, by which he meant their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatened to break up the society. Human beings have an inclination to associate with others, because in society they felt themselves to be more than individuals. Without the human unsociability based on individual selfishness all talents would remain hidden, ‘unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection’ (Fourth Proposition). Men, ‘good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts’. Thanks to Nature, Kant said, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule. Without these features all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. ‘Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord.’ Kant’s problem of the unsocial unsociability was an echo of Hobbes’s question about how to prevent civil war, but the solution went in another direction. The highest purpose of Nature was attainable only in societies with the greatest freedom meaning that there was mutual opposition among the members. In order to make each individual’s freedom consistent with the freedom of others a ‘perfectly just civil constitution’ was required. However, this was not sufficient, and on this point Kant played off his cosmopolitan argument (Seventh Proposition). A perfect civic constitution was dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states: Through war, through the taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even in peacetime, must suffer internally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nation even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations. (Kant 1784: Seventh Proposition) At the end war itself would be seen not only as artificial and uncertain in outcome for both sides. Together with the painful after-effects in the form of an ever-growing war debt (‘a new 62

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invention’, Kant noted) that could not be met the result would be that war disappeared. The impact of any revolution on all states in Europe, so closely knit together through commerce, would be so obvious that the other states, driven by their own danger but without any legal basis, would offer themselves as arbiters and prepare the way for a distant international government without precedence in world history. Although Kant’s world government in his own words existed only as a rough outline, it gave hope that ‘finally after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop’. However, there was a clear utopian dimension of this statement. When Kant talked about international law, for instance, he emphasised that it could only function under certain specific conditions. Such a condition was the existence of an international court of justice to which the governments were prepared to submit. There was no such ultimate instance of justice and therefore the situation among the states was lawless and anarchical. Neither did Kant develop closer thoughts on how such an instance could be established. Kant was keen to emphasise that he did not build his scenario on the work of empirically oriented historians but on philosophical speculation. Only philosophy could emancipate mankind. However, the point here is that he did not envisage his cosmopolitan order as separated from the states or transcending them in a unified world. His world government was a confederative body. Cosmopolitanism went hand in hand with national solidarity and republican virtues at the state level. Cosmopolitanism was not an alternative but a final goal within not without the existing constitutional states. Another German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel cemented the founding stone of Kant in a European cosmopolitan genealogy with a somewhat different terminology: Reason as opposed to Nature, Weltgeschichte, world history instead of Universalgeschichte and with a more developed philosophy of history with a major role for the states and the peoples as the prime movers of world history. The states were not eternal but like human beings they had a rise, a time of prosperity and a decline. From a world-historical viewpoint one particular state or people’s spirit (Volksgeist) in each historical moment constituted the link in the chain of world history as the carrier of Reason (Weltgeist). World history was the history of the states in terms of progressiveness. The relevant states were distinguished through the degree of consciousness about freedom. The realisation of freedom was the purposes of the states and of world history. The undulating pattern of rise and decline of the individual cultures and at the same time progression towards ever higher stages of civilisation for the world as a totality moved from the East towards the West beginning with the oriental despotism and proceeding via Greek democracy and Roman aristocracy towards Christian European monarchies. These four realms constituted the junctions in the motion of History towards ever higher stages of freedom and rule of reason in the philosophy of Hegel. The constellation of states in each conjuncture was based on their sovereignty, i.e. on their independence from each other. The recognition of the sovereignty of another state as well as the conclusion and keeping of treaties depended on the sovereign state itself. There was as opposed to the relations between individuals within a state no imperative worldly legal authority superior to the states. World history alone was the world court of justice (Hegel 1830–31). This was a simplistic answer to Kant’s problem and even more utopian. Hegel’s teleology was more pronounced than Kant’s. His view contained an idea of the end of history. This did not mean a situation where nothing will ever happen again or that there will not be any political turmoil any more. The end of history meant that history had reached its predestined goal. Hegel theorised this idea by describing the constitution of a social order which guarantees full liberty to everyone. This order was liberal democracy. Karl Marx later took up this idea and elaborated upon it, although for him the end goal was not liberal democracy, the democratic 63

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abstraction as he called it, but the socialist society without classes. Hegel’s idea about the end of history came as we know back in the early 1990s after the end of the Cold War, although the content of a much debated book disseminating this message was much more nuanced than the title (‘The End of History’) suggests (Fukuyama 1992; cf. Fukuyama 2011 and 2014). Another German early nineteenth-century philosopher wrestling with the connections between the cosmopolitan and the national was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. A point of departure when he after the Napoleonic occupation of the German-speaking territories tried to mobilise a German nation was tolerance and respect of other nations. The nations emerge through education which would unify all citizens of a state and at the end all citizens of the world without the abolishment of the national borders and specific characteristics. On this basis he condemned Napoleon whose unilateral domination of all other peoples resulted in the destruction of any germ of the human in humanity. Fichte’s immediate agenda was to create a German nation that did not yet exist and to use Napoleon as a pivot in this undertaking. However, he wanted to see the German nation in a long-term harmonious world order. The merger of all nations into a world republic would lead to the emergence of a republic of the nations where the relationships between the nations would correspond to those between the citizens in a nation state based on the rule of law (Fichte 2008 [1807–1808]; cf. Radrizzani 1990). However, the concepts of Kosmoplitanismus and Weltbürgertum did not play a central role in Fichte’s work. He refers to a Weltbürgerrecht in the vein of Kant as an international law which the states, ruled by republican constitutions, submitted to. He restricted this law to the guarantee of universal hospitality, i.e. the free movement of persons under condition of submission to the rules of law in the foreign state. More important is his view on cosmopolitanism as a personal ethical attitude where the individual citizen regarded him- or herself not only as a citizen of a nation but also as a citizen of a world order which in a political sense did not (yet) exist. The cosmopolite behaves open to the world, is hospitable, travels and learns foreign languages. He or she feels at home in the whole world and does not develop any discriminating national pride. This individual pursues the general goal of humanity: to promote human dignity. With a point of departure in this cosmopolitan view Fichte developed in Der Patriotismus und sein Gegenteil (1806–1807) the connection between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. He did not see these two categories as opposite. Patriotism was just a dimension of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolite could despite a world-open mentality only act in her or his near context and therefore in practice had to restrict patriotism to the nation. Cosmopolitan seems to have been more of a normative dimension and a long-term final goal. The hidden assumption of this view was that the nations and the humans pursue the same goal and by doing so do not create any conflicts (Brandt 2010: 60–2). Adam Smith’s cosmopolitanism did not emphasise the role of reason as much as the German philosophers in his analysis of the preconditions of cosmopolitanism. His ideal of a world community was not based on the common possession of reason and the beneficent workings of sympathy, but on mutual enablement and the desire for and satisfaction of exponentially growing material enrichment. Trade and division of labour would preclude conflict and territorial rivalry. Patriotism would not disappear, but would be domesticated by a pacific desire for enrichment by means of trade rather than conquest. Fierce nationalistic sentiments and intense alliances between security allies would become increasingly less important than the rapidly proliferating forms of amicable strangership necessary for commercial cosmopolitanism (Hill 2007; cf. Forman-Barzilai 2010). However, cosmopolitanism based on free trade was as little as in the German debate thought of as a substitute of the nations. The title of Adam Smith’s main work is The Wealth of Nations. Cosmopolitan ideals went hand in hand with the imagination of the nation. Before Napoleon there was a transnational dimension of the conceptualisation of the world order, although it never transcended the states. It was obvious in the British debates on commerce 64

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and free trade and in Kant’s writings. However, there were differences between the British moral philosophers and political economists and Kant, who emphasised the role of reason and looked down on commerce that only fostered selfishness. The transnational dimension was also visible in the French enlightenment debate, for instance in Voltaire’s Essai sur les meurs (1753–56). This work included material on the French colonies in America; the Jesuits in South America; the Anabaptists; the treatment of captured Christians by the Moors; and comparable material. Napoleon triggered the German liberation wars and Fichte’s, Hegel’s and others’ outlines of a new interpretative framework of universal history as progression from East to West, from despotism to democracy and monarchy, with a kind of culmination in the German nation. The project of universal history ended as German history. In British discourses since the 1860s – the decade when the German unification project left the imageries of the philosophers and became martial conquest politics directed by Bismarck − the universal was ever more conceptualised in a framework where the theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the main points of reference. The humans were seen as a species under evolutionary adjustment or in a continuous fight for survival. This language with a clear universal dimension, but hardly universal in the sense of cosmopolitan, had a tremendous impact all over Europe. In particular the imagined fight for survival became the heuristic point of departure for growing rivalry and conflict among nations. Through social Darwinism – which more properly should be called social Spencerism since it was Spencer who talked about fight for survival whereas Darwin referred to evolution through adaptation – national populations were mobilised for competition on world markets with other national populations. Colonialism and imperialism underpinned this development, where the key actors not seldom hypocritically made use of the term civilisation and the imagination of a civilising mission, a ‘white man’s burden’ (Kipling). The Spencerian language went hand in hand with a parallel paradigmatic shift in political economy. The language of free trade had played a major role in cosmopolitan thoughts drawing on the idea of global distribution of labour and commerce since Adam Smith. However, the rhetoric often ignored the theoretical limitation and precondition emphasised by Smith, the precondition of everything equal as a basis for perfect competition on which the whole model rested. The problem was that ‘everything equal’ never existed. Therefore, the free trade rhetoric and its reference to cosmopolitan ideas was seldom or never implemented in political practice. Only during a very brief period in the wake of the British anti-corn laws in 1846 (the Anti-Corn Law League founded in 1838) steps were taken in the direction of international free trade through the use of most favoured nation clauses, but the system was far from universal when the cracks of the façade became visible at the end of the 1860s. A few years later the rhetoric collapsed in the wake of the lengthy international economic stagnation from 1873 due to hardening competition and deflationary pressures on wages and profits. In a few years protectionism became the new key word which reinforced national borders and played down the role of transnational movements.

Towards a cosmopolitanism without a European centrism Cosmopolitanism as a concept for the twenty-first century must obviously go beyond its historical European focus if it is going to have any viability. Interesting steps are being taken in this direction. One resource to draw on would be postcolonial theories, which, as Rochona Majumdar recently and convincingly has demonstrated, is not the same as binary confrontation between colonialism and anti-colonialism, but the lay out of a more fluid pattern of encounters, overlappings, mutual benefits as much as oppositions and exploitations. Colonisers and colonised were and are entangled in complex and often contradictory patterns. Nineteenth-century European imperialism was far from a seamless continuation of eighteenth-century enlightenment 65

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philosophy. The West is not a cohesive entity driven only by colonialist motives. The historical experiences of the colonies are more than just exploitation (Majumdar 2010). Having said this, it is important not to forget the social dimension of the relations between centres and peripheries. One example of new genealogies for cosmopolitan thinking by urging that these histories be sought not only in the pasts of the West is Sheldon Pollock. He charts new ways of thinking in his work on the Sanskrit cosmopolis, whose circulating networks covered vast swaths of the world from Central Asia to the South China Sea. He refers to linguistic cosmopolitanism as ‘literary communication that travels far, indeed without obstruction from any boundaries . . . and more important, that thinks of itself as unbounded, unobstructed’ (Pollock 2002: 22; cf. Majumdar 2010: 3–4). The fact that the lower classes of non-Europeans in European cities are referred to as multicultural provokes critical questions. The question is whether ‘from colonialism to post-colonialism’, with the emergence of the language of multiculturalism, does not, as a matter of fact, mean the transformation of one version of colonialism to another, where the new version takes shape in the immigrant ghettos at the core of Europe and other ‘Western’ societies. Cosmopolitan representatives of a global order based on the financing and banking industry, who are truly transcending national and cultural borders, displace the social issue from a matter of human dignity and rights to a local problem of multiculturalism. The term emerged as we saw in the 1990s as part of the globalisation semantics as an argument for letting various immigrant communities develop their own cultures free from interventions by the host states, but also in crucial respects excluded from social welfare schemes. Less integration politics as it had been established in the 1960s and 1970s meant also less costs and appealed to governments under financial pressures. Less costs in the short run, one might add. The social question is still at the core of the cosmopolitan dilemma as it was during the nineteenth-century construction of the nation states. The fact that the dilemma is labelled multiculturalism does not change this fact. The social question recurred after 2000 in the wake of the erosion of the political capacity to manage global flows of capital, commodities and labour. The flows were connected under strong mutual tensions. The language of ethnic nationalism that plays off native residents against immigrants confronted cosmopolitanism and became explosive. Populism and authoritarianism began to threaten what was believed to be stable democracies having overcome historical vices. Cosmopolitanism was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century seen as a concept in a rather unproblematic way linked to nationalism (Mazzini 2009; Bayly and Biagini [eds.] 2008). By the end of the nineteenth century it had become a counter concept to nationalism, although authors like Meinecke did what they could to keep them together. The term has in recent years begun to connote an ever greater revolt by the elites against the low culture of the masses stuck in local experiences without perspectives or horizons. On this point exactly the social issue is at stake. Cosmopolitanism is by many suspected of escaping or circumventing the bounded social problems in the wake of transnational financial operations. Cosmopolitanism is suspected of fleeing social responsibility. There is a historical irony here, since cosmopolitan used to be an insult used by the national establishments against the international working class, meaning more or less vaterlandslose Gesellen whereas it was a label to be proud of in the early working class language before the movement had been nationalised in 1914. In the Soviet language cosmopolite was an honorary concept. This is hardly a point of departure for a reconstruction of the term today. However, an integration of the social question in the concept would be important in order to give viability and mobilising capacity to the term. As a viable concept cosmopolitan would have to respond to the question that the term multicultural provokes. Etymologically cosmopolitan and multicultural are in many respects overlapping concepts but in social practices over the last decades they have 66

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become counter-concepts. The problem is how to unify them. The solution to this problem deals with the social issue. What set out at the end of the eighteenth century as a problem of how to unify the cosmopolitan and the national has become a problem of how to unify the cosmopolitan and the social. The problem of the genealogy of the concept of cosmopolitan is from a world-historical perspective not only its failure to address the social question, however, but also its European centrism. One could argue that this problem has been solved by the fact that the cosmopolites of today all follow a Western pattern of behaviour in their jet-setting across the world irrespectively whether they come from rich countries or poor. However, this is an argument that locks out the social question. A sustainable reconstruction of the term must much more integrate global social protest and activist movements for environment, health and a fair distribution of wealth, like Attac, Social Forum, Doctors Without Borders, etc. Etienne Balibar has in this vein remarked that what truly unified the planet was not just colonial expansion, but the revolts, the liberation struggles that put into question the notion of ‘different natures’ that separate peoples of the ‘metropoli’ from those of the colonies, producing a dialectic between these two demographic groups that results in a reversal of roles, a ‘particularising’ of the old metropolis and a ‘universalisation’ of the former colonies. By universalisation of the former colonies, Balibar refers to the large and visible presence in contemporary Europe of groups from the ex-colonies (Balibar 2003 and 2004; cf. for the unifying role of social protest Wagner 2015; Stråth and Wagner 2017). Balibar contributes to give the term cosmopolitan the social dimension that it has been lacking from the beginning and therefore made it fail as a viable alternative to nationalism. Twenty years of hegemonic globalisation rhetoric has made this task of integrating the social more difficult but not less urgent.

References Al-Azmeh, A. (2007) ‘Epilogue. Romancing the Prose of the World’, in B. Stråth and H.-Å. Persson (eds.), Reflections on Europe: Defining a Political Order in Time and Space. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, pp. 349–376. Balibar, E. (2003) ‘Europe: An “Unimagined” Frontier of Democracy’, Diacritics, 33(3/4): 36–44. Balibar, E. (2004) We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Bayly, C.A. and E.F. Biagini (eds.) (2008) Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920. Oxford: Oxford UP. Brandt, A. (2010) ‘Weltbürgertum und Nationalidee in Fichtes Bildungskonzept’, in J. Stolzenberg and L.-T. Ulrichs (eds.), Bildung als Kunst: Fichte, Schiller, Humboldt, Nietzsche. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 59–68. Chakrabarty, D. (2001) Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP. Coller, I. (2010) ‘East of Enlightenment: Regulating Cosmopolitanism between Istanbul and Paris in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History, 21(3): 447–69. de Pascale, C. (2003) ‘Fichte und die Gesellschaft’, in H. Grindt and H. Traub (eds.), Praktische und angewandte Philosophie II. Fichte-Studien. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Systematik der Tranzendentalphilosophie. Bd 24. Amsterdam: Atlanta/Rodopi. Dirlik, A. (2006) Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Fichte, J.G. (2008 [1807–1808]) Reden an die deutsche Nation. Edited by Alexander Aichele. Hamburg: Meiner. Forman-Barzilai, F. (2010) Adam Smith and the Circles of Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Fukuyama, F. (2011) The Origin of Political Order. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fukuyama, F. (2014) Political Order and Political Decay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hannerz, U. (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage. Hegel, G.W.F. (1995 [1830–1831]) ‘Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Einleitung’, in W. Jaeschke (ed.), G W F Hegel. Gesammelte Werke. Bd 18 Vorlesungsmanuskripte II (1816–1831). Hamburg: Meiner. 67

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Herren, M. (2009) Internationale Organisationen. Eine Globalgeschichte der internationalen Ordnung seit 1865. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Hill, L. (2007) ‘The New Strangership: Adam Smith’s Commercial Cosmopolitanism’. Unpublished Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association Chicago, August 30. Höfert, A. (2007) ‘“Europe” and “Religion” in the Framework of Sixteenth-century Relations Between Christian Powers and the Ottoman Empire’, in B. Stråth and H.-Å. Persson (eds.), Reflections on Europe: Defining a Political Order in Time and Space. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Kant, I. (1784) ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ [‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’] in Berlinische Monatsschrift 4(1784): 385–411. Koskenniemi, M. (2001) The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870 –1960. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lake, M. (2010) ‘Chinese Colonists Assert Their “Common Human Rights”: Cosmopolitanism as Subject and Method of History’, Journal of World History, 21(3): 375–92. Majumdar, R. (2010) Writing Postcolonial History. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Mazzini, G. (2009) A Cosmopolitanism of Nations. Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations. Recchia, S. and N. Urbinati (eds.) Princeton: Princeton UP. Meinecke, F. (1911 2nd rev ed [1907]) Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates. München and Berlin: Oldenbourg. Müller, C. (2014) ‘The Politics of Expertise. The Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales. Democratic Peace Movements and International Law Networks in Europe 1858–1875’, in D. Rodogno, B. Struck and J. Vogel (eds.), Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues From the 1840s to the 1930s. New York: Berghahn. Murphy, C.N. (1994) International Organizations and Industrial Change: Global Governance Since 1850. Oxford: Oxford UP. Pollock, S. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, in C. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. Bhabha and D. Chakrabarty (eds.), Cosmopolitanis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Radrizzani, I. (1990) ‘Ist Fichte’s Modell des Kosmopolitismus pluralistisch?’, in Fichte-Studien. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Systematik der Tranzendentalphilosophie. Bd 2. Amsterdam: Atlanta/Rodopi. Saïd, E. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge. Stråth, B. (ed.) (2000) After Full Employment: European Discourses on Work and Flexibility. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Stråth, B. (2016) Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951. London: Bloomsbury. Stråth, B. and P. Wagner (2017) European Modernity: A Global Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Tilly, C. (1990) Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wagner, P. (2015) Progress: A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Polity.

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6 Cosmopolitan thought in Weimar Germany Austin Harrington

The years of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) were, as is well-known, a period of immense intellectual and artistic ferment in German history, and the spread of cosmopolitan styles of thought and life at this time can be seen as characterising in many ways the very spirit of Weimar Germany. Despite the many powerful currents of nationalist ressentiment unleashed by German defeat in the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, cosmopolitan thinking played a significant part in the shaping of German political and intellectual life in the period; and though widely understood as an anti-Semitic code word for “rootless” intellectual and financial elites, cosmopolitanism (Weltbürgertum or Kosmopolitismus) in German discourse of the period gained increasing traction as a marker of some essential tendencies of the age, reinforcing and reactivating German intellectual advances from the age of the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern German national identity in the late eighteenth century – the age of Kant, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and Frederick the Great. Today in social theory and research, Weimar German cosmopolitan thought can be seen as bearing on four main relevant areas of debate, which will be briefly surveyed in this chapter.1 Firstly, Weimar German cosmopolitan writers suggest ways today in which critical relationships to “the West” or to North-Atlantic Euro-American power in global relations can in principle be expressed in ways that need not necessarily reflect merely reactionary political forms that break with universalistic institutional orientations. In their public statements, numerous German intellectuals of the period indicate how forms of partisanship for different national, cultural and cognitive styles of institutional modernity can underpin and nourish universalistic norms of political life, without needing directly to copy or incorporate features of the specific cultural trajectories taken by paradigmatically Western nation-states such as France, Britain or the USA. Far from countries having to follow mere paths of “deviance” from modernity in consequence of differences or disagreements with Western models, these writers make clear how countries can in principle follow alternative cultural pathways toward modern structures of liberalism and democracy – even if, under contingent historical circumstances, they may fail to do so in the face of significant socio-economic challenges, such as those suffered by Germany in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the onset of the global economic crisis of the 1930s. Secondly, German intellectuals of the Weimar years typically challenge any assumption today that cosmopolitan thinking stands necessarily in some relationship of remoteness or estrangement 69

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from everyday popular social experiences of material hardship. Though a link unquestionably exists historically between cosmopolitan intellect and privileged leisured ways of life, and certainly in the case of German nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history can be chronicled to a quite significant extent, Weimar writers nonetheless show us in their material lives that this structure should not in general be overstated. At times of marked structural upheaval and transformation such as the 1920s, cosmopolitan discourse begins to lose its tie of exclusivity to cultural elites and is not intrinsically impugned or undermined in its cognitive validity and generalisability by any historical vestige of this tie. Thirdly, Weimar writers shed valuable light today on questions of identities of the national and supranational in global relations. Although compromised by nationalist outbursts from the early stages of the war, numerous German authors of the Weimar years propound rich concepts of nationhood as constructs of global interaction and exchange, while at the same insisting on an important conception of the nation as concrete frame and container of processes of reflective learning in the civic sphere. And correlatively, at the supranational level, these authors also articulate concepts of trans-regional civilisational “circles” or “nexuses” of social life – or Kulturkreise as they were then known – which remain of interest to comparative historical-sociological research today and are not reducible merely to ideological or essentialising constructs and commonplaces of their time. Fourthly, many German authors of the Weimar and late Wilhelmine era retain a key importance in social research today for their insight into questions of the relative place of Western trajectories of social development and modernity on the stage of world history. Committed to standpoints of universalistic analysis in the spirit of eighteenth-century German enlightenment ideas of “universal history” (Universalgeschichte), these authors at the same time make a thoroughgoing attempt – arguably more penetrating than any other national arena of thought at this time – to subject Western presumptions of universality in concepts of modernity and social change to reflexive scrutiny. Sensitive to patterns of fundamental difference, divergence and indeterminacy in cognitive pathways of social change, they arguably falsify any picture of classical European social thought as marred intrinsically by short-sightedly “Eurocentric” categories of perception.

Political modernity and “the West” in Weimar thought It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in 1914 many German intellectuals excoriated Britain, France and by extension the United States in the name of a crusade for authentic German national Kultur against a decadent individualistic world of Western European Zivilisation (Böhme 1975: 47–9; Lepenies 2006: 6–26; Harrington 2016: 16–28). At the end of the war, this same discourse reignited against the background of the emerging terms of the Treaty of Versailles in statements of numerous voices, including famously Thomas Mann in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1919) and Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1918). For a long time after 1945, these and many other aspects of German history since the eighteenth century were seen by historians as evidence of a notorious German historical “special path” (Sonderweg) towards Nazism, divergent from the putatively “successful” pathways of modernisation taken by Britain, France and the USA (Kocka 1988). In the wake of more than three decades of more qualified historical scholarship since the 1980s, however, it has become possible to think again about German intellectual life from the early twentieth century and to consider alternative understandings of German national particularity in discourse of the period that do not imply simply nationalist or illiberal readings of criticism of “the West” in social thought. These understandings can be shown to carry relevance for debate today about multiple culturally distinctive routes to liberal-democratic structures of modern political life; and it is this possibility 70

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that seems evident in numerous German academic authors of the period, including the two brothers Max and Alfred Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Scheler, Ferdinand Tönnies, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Robert Curtius and (until his death shortly before the end of the war in September 1918) Georg Simmel. One among several significant interventions in this regard can be seen as the influential address, “Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics”, given by the liberal Protestant theologian and member of the newly formed DDP or German Democratic Party, Ernst Troeltsch (1923).2 Here Troeltsch argued that Western European French and British traditions of political life and thought, based on contractarian principles of individual natural rights, needed to be re-accommodated into German political ideas of the expression of community in the state. They were not to be spurned by Germans, as they had been in the wake of the romantic age and most especially during the war. On the plane of international law, it was essential to accept, Troeltsch wrote, that “at the heart of all the current ideas about a League of Nations, the organisation of the world, and the limitation of egoisms and forces of destruction”, there existed “an indestructible moral core” that Germans could not “in its essence reject, even if we are painfully aware, at the moment, of the difficulties which it presents and the abuse to which it is liable” (Troeltsch 1923: 510/220). In a key sentence, Troeltsch affirmed: the theory of the rights of man – rights which are not the gift of the state, but the ideal postulates of the state, and indeed of society itself, in all its forms – is a theory which contains so much of the truth, and satisfies so many of the requirements of a true European ethos, that we cannot afford to neglect it; on the contrary, we must incorporate it into our own ideas. (Troeltsch 1923: 510/220) This intervention by Troeltsch can be read as a stance of cosmopolitanism in German selfunderstanding, yet not in any sense of a purely abstract universalistic programme, indifferent to national-cultural peculiarities of German history. Very aware of the frailties inherent in humanitarian ideas of natural law, Troeltsch’s was an attempt to indicate that universalistic orientations can emerge as immanent elaborations of concretely particular situations of ethical life, rather than solely as perceived alien interpositions on lived practices of the community. In this sense, his lecture can be seen as marking a bridge between two conflicting positions taken up by Thomas and Heinrich Mann during the war – the latter polemically championing the cause of French revolutionary ideas against Germany – and was subsequently explicitly endorsed by Thomas Mann after December 1923, himself withdrawing by this time from much of the belligerent tone of his earlier Reflections of an Unpolitical Man from 1919 (Lützeler 1998: 296–301, 337–44; Harrington 2016: 19, 24, 75–7, 115). A similar stance was taken by Simmel during the war. Despite succumbing to nationalist enthusiasm in the opening months, Simmel in his essay “The Idea of Europe” from April 1915 (republished in slightly amended form in 1917) sought to distinguish between an empty form of global normative order which he called “internationalism” and a more concrete form of transnational solidarity which he called “Europeanism”. Although Simmel here denounced “cosmopolitanism” as the cousin of the internationalism he saw instantiated in Woodrow Wilson’s emerging plan for a League of Nations, the thrust of Simmel’s essay sought to express a commitment to German national self-overcoming in cooperation and exchange (Wechselwirkung) with other nations, in ways which can only in reality be described as cosmopolitan in intent. Whereas internationalism, Simmel underlined, negated nationalism only by substituting an abstract sameness, Europeanism mediated national-cultural individuality in a more coherent and more meaningful manner with a sense of the moral-legal universal order. The former represented “an altogether secondary phenomenon, arising from a simple process 71

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of either addition or subtraction”; it stood, at least “in its grotesquely heightened form”, for “mere globetrotting . . . – a hotchpotch, a characterless, indiscriminate mêlée of interests and ideas, at most something abstracted from many nations by disregarding their particular individual values” (Simmel 1915: 55–6/268–9). The idea of Europe, on the other hand, subsumed “the subtlest essence of what is intellectually mature without cutting it off from its national roots”. It allowed nationality to be “an inalienable possession without being a blinkering limitation” (Simmel 1915: 55–6/268–9).

Cosmopolitanism and “free-floating intellectuals“ in Weimar thought Generally speaking, Weimar cosmopolitan intellectuals do not present a major exception to long-observed patterns of correlation between cosmopolitan discourse and elite socio-economic groups – patterns that seem inscribed in the origins of cosmopolitanism as an ethos of life taken up by Stoic outsider philosophers of the late Greek and Roman age (cf. Schofield 1991). However, some important qualifications need to be made to this observation, with relevance to debates today about cosmopolitanism in its relationship to cultural “elites” in the present. A first key qualification bears on the claim that one significant reason for the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis has to do with a uniquely German nineteenth- and early twentieth-century syndrome of uncoupling of cosmopolitan intellectual culture from immediate “real” politics in the parliamentary arena of the state. After the Second World War, historians tended to hold repeatedly that in contrast to their counterparts in other national arenas, numerous German intellectuals lacked a developed understanding of the material realities of political conduct and, as a consequence, failed to grasp sufficiently urgently the causes of the disarray mounting before them over the course of the 1920s. This thesis, long familiar from the work of figures such as Norbert Elias (1989 [1961–1985]), Peter Gay (1968), Fritz Stern (1961), Fritz Ringer (1969) and others, is not entirely false. Nevertheless, it is in many ways over-stylised and, methodologically, tends to suffer from a problem of gratuitously underplaying the kinds of genuine political efficacy that can be released through discursive voice in the public sphere – in principle in any given context of national social life. It deserves underlining that a predominant preoccupation with matters of culture, ideas, philosophy, literature or art in intellectual spokesmanship need in no way be seen as implying necessarily a failure to engage with, influence or guide immediate political exigencies. While cosmopolitan intellectuals cannot be seen as political actors in any direct institutional sense, neither can they be viewed as figures of merely marginal political relevance; and whatever their standing on the social stage as members of numerical minorities, their agency and sociological “representativeness” in a given arena cannot be defined and measured in the same terms or by the same criteria as forms of mass communication such as radio, television or mass print media (Harrington 2016: 26). A second qualification is that at a time of unprecedented socio-economic turbulence such as the 1920s in Germany, much of the conventional meaning of “elites” and other class demarcations comes to be scrambled – in a way that also applies mutatis mutandis to many other environments of rapid socio-structural upheaval. As Karl Mannheim first famously observed in his influential conception of “free-floating intellectuals” (freischwebende Intelligenz), the social carriers of cosmopolitan intellectual outlooks in advanced industrial societies tend to cease to derive exclusively from the traditional educated middle class – the Bildungsbürgertum – and increasingly include more diverse types of actors, reflective of experiences of both upward and downward socio-economic mobility and migrant displacement, with no clear affiliation to any one predominant cultural and political identity (Mannheim 1929: 135/139; Kettler and Meja 1995; Harrington 2016: 125–33, 271–88). In the case of Weimar, roles of the “insider” could be taken almost overnight by actors previously occupying positions of the “outsider”, and vice versa. Jewish or socialist intellectuals 72

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and political actors with cosmopolitan orientations could exist as new “insiders” to a political scene and nevertheless continue in other respects to languish on the “outside”.3

The national and the supranational in Weimar thought A third aspect of relevance for contemporary research in Weimar thought relates to the meaning of national and supranational frameworks of identity. Valuable in many of these sources today is a range of insights relevant to questions in comparative social science about cultures and civilisations as complex large-scale regional units of historical ontology – notably in the paradigms of “civilisational analysis” and “multiple modernities” (Nelson 1981; Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004; Arnason 2003; Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock 2005; Eisenstadt 2000; Eisenstadt, Schluchter and Wittrock 2001). The concept of the Kulturkreis or “civilisational circle” (a term usually believed to have been first coined by the German ethnologist, Leo Frobenius, in the 1890s) denoted for many Weimar writers a nexus of interactions in European history covering legacies of religious and wider secular political and cultural heritage, and spanning always multiple ethnic groups and nationalities (Harrington 2016: 180–227). At its core for these writers lay the idea of a distinctive complex of interpenetration between “Romanic” and “Germanic” sources of cognitive and institutional tradition, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Reformation to the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century onwards to the post-war order of 1918. Admittedly, numerous precedents exist for tendencies to ethnicising essentialism in German writing since the eighteenth century about the “spirit”, “soul” or “character” or “common mind” of particular individual nations, after Herder, Hegel and the early romantic era, down to Leopold von Ranke’s famous mid-nineteenth-century historicist statement of “every age” being fundamentally “next to God”, in the sense of reposing on definite national historical communities, each distinct in identity and – like human persons – “equal before God” (cf. Sternhell 2009).4 However, it must be stressed that a particular concern of German Weimar-period authors – writing on the basis of an already highly advanced level of discussion on such matters in Germany since the turn of the century – was to demonstrate that national intellectual traditions or national constellations of Geist had to be seen as referring not to any collective psychical state or mentality of the nation but to contents of national cognitive self-reflection, transmitted through canons of national education and literature and reflected in foundationally significant political events, laws, documents, acts of statesmen and legacies of exemplary personalities in the arts and sciences. National Geist therefore inhered not in putative ethnic attributes but first and foremost in externalised products of shared thought and experience – in works, structures and orders of public communication and selfrepresentation, open always to ongoing uninhibited reconsideration and re-examination over time (Harrington 2016: 141–79). This meant most crucially for several key writers during and after the Great War that national history could constitute a concrete site, medium or vehicle of collective moral education, involving constructive conversation with other nations and national arenas of reflectively shared mind. The decisive matter for many was that a nation could be criticised and held to account by reference to an always higher national self that transcended each actually existent nation’s always limited condition at any one moment. Every nation contained an intrinsic capacity for universalistic cognitive self-articulation and self-overcoming, and all nations therefore entered of necessity into an order of the supranational or transnational (übernational), with a sense analogous in these authors’ texts to the sense of Nietzsche’s figure of the Übermensch as the always higher, more genuinely sovereign self that every actual self aspires to be, open to others and able to relate to others on a basis of trust, mutuality and reciprocity. Always the possibility existed that 73

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a defence of national historical particularity could be reflectively woven back into the search for accountability under universal law – global law, international law – even as each such insistence on particularity might recurrently dwindle into forms of myopic inwardness and self-closure. Similarly, a commitment of many writers was to recognise that any given civilisational totality or circle typically overlapped and interacted with others over time and shifted in socio-spatial reference in light of definite material struggles between social parties – and therefore could be considered no ideally self-evident entity. Though it is true that ethnological uses of the locution by Frobenius, in a context of studies of the customs of north African tribal peoples, often tended to retain a marked ethnicising connotation and to blur or artificially create distinctions between geohistorical spaces, the term circulated widely in academic contexts at the time with a semantic field that was not condemned from the outset to obfuscating or unscientific deployments, any more than it still is today. Very different in implication today from, say, Samuel Huntingdon’s notion of some worldwide “clash” of definite civilisational blocs, or from twentieth-century fascist notions of the war of world races, the term retained a capacity for high critical precision and clarity. It differed greatly, for example, from Carl Schmitt’s post-Nazi era notion of the Großraum or “panregion”, and is unjustly treated as evoking merely some “kind of ideological geography” – in Fritz Ringer’s derisory phrase (Huntingdon 1996; Schmitt 1950; Ringer 1969: 186).

Eurocentrism versus Europeanism in Weimar thought A final unifying aspect of salience in Weimar cosmopolitan thought for contemporary concern centres on questions of the meaning of “Eurocentrism” in Western social science. By the close of the nineteenth century through to the revolutionary years of the First World War and the Weimar Republic, intellectual life in Germany sees the genesis of movements with an unparalleled alertness to facts of relativity, contingency and fragility of knowledge-claims in European world-pictures. Arguably more penetratingly than elsewhere in the Western world at this time, German currents, ranging from historicism to phenomenology to Lebensphilosophie to the sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie) and the sociology of civilisations (Kultursoziologie), impart a recognition that Western scientific culture and Western claims to universal validity stand challenged by a multitude of diverse total standpoints of thought and knowledge across global social-historical space. Differently from any purely ideological and obscurantist mood of anti-Westernist cultural nationalism prominent in popular books of the age such as Spengler’s The Decline of the West or Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, sophisticated sources of German thought at this time express a profound consciousness of difficulties of evolutionistic, positivistic and rationalistic constructs of mind still dominant in French, British and American scholarly traditions that untruthfully tend to place Western experiences at the head of events of world history (Harrington 2016: 228–70). It can be appreciated in this light that a European standpoint of understanding is not always necessarily a Eurocentric one. If the term “Eurocentrism” is to be a term of criticism and not purely a descriptive term, it cannot be understood as referring solely to habits of investigating more frequently Western than non-Western items of empirical subject matter. It must, in essence, be understood as referring to more fundamental problems of epistemic distortion or truncation: to a typical recurring pattern of defective Western self-reflection, whereby a claim is made about a state of affairs holding universally on the global stage that in fact only holds for limited European circumstances. But many German authors of the Weimar and late Wilhelmine years simply do not fall prey to this kind of myopia. This notably has to be the conclusion in any fair consideration of Max Weber’s influential studies in comparative historical sociology from the final years of his life. 74

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Crucial for Weber in any question of explaining some apparent fact of universal significance and validity in recent Western capitalist development was a more epistemological challenge for Westerners of indicating how scholars might set about arguing for this universal significance and validity even as the content of the claim remained something Westerners themselves characteristically “like to think” (Weber 1920a: 1/13). The importance of this parenthetic clause in Weber’s opening sentence of the Preface to Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion – “at least as we like to think” (wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen) – cannot be overstated. Always, it needs to be stressed, it was with an acute sense of epistemic cognitive relativity and perspectivity that Weber raised the issue of universality in modern Western societal development. The ultimate framework of Weber’s project in this and other texts was no more than, and no less than, a work of Western philosophical self-reckoning in the face of other rival cosmological systems of ethical value and belief that surrounded, relativised and contested Western civilisational claims to preeminent knowledge on the stage of world history. An insistence on diversity of social-historical developmental paths and realms of cultural value was the central precept behind Weber’s sympathy for the German historical school of economics led by Gustav Schmoller, and the same thinking underpinned Weber’s disagreements with Marxian historical materialism’s appeal to universally valid laws of historical change driven by class struggle and by regular conflicts of class interest. Diverse ancient religious sources had to be seen as shaping diverse cognitive developmental paths taken by different cultures, societies and economies. World history in this sense formed a thoroughly open-ended totality, shot through with contingency, plurality and indeterminacy. It was in this sense that Weber underlined, famously, in his “Introduction” to “The Social Psychology of the World Religions”, that while “interests” rather than “ideas” directly governed human societal conduct, still “very frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest” (Weber 1920b: 252/280). Similar concerns can be followed in the commentaries of numerous authors of the period on the concept of multiple civilisational “worldviews” or Weltanschauungen in global historical change and notably also in the historical theological thought of Ernst Troeltsch. In an important closing section of his last major opus of 1922 Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Troeltsch explicitly took aim at what he called problems of “European arrogance” in the human sciences and the philosophy of history, including problems of “overextensions of the European feeling of self ” and – in Troeltsch’s words – European peoples’ “naïve” and “ubiquitous” tendencies to “selfabsolutization” (Troeltsch 1922: 1020, 1022). Throughout Der Historismus and other last writings, Troeltsch urged that while the attempt to find generally valid ethical meanings in historical flux had to be continuously undertaken, any philosophy of history in the present day could mean no “systematics of historical development” or “teleological construction of gradually achieved goals” (Troeltsch 1922: 298, 959). No pretension could be made to all-inclusive interpretation, integration and closure of the unending and unbounded historical continuum or to any simple encyclopaedic aggregation or “book binder’s synthesis” (Troeltsch 1922: 1028). Very often, he cautioned, a European interest in diverse other civilisations of the world had extended only so far as this diversity could be stretched onto the Procrustean bed of a developmental theory that put Europe at its head. Generalising evolutionary constructs based on notions of law-like “steps” and “stages”, Troeltsch insisted, rested on little more than projections of specifically European traits of mind. Behind them, he added, lurked “always a presence of the conqueror, the colonizer and the missionary” (Troeltsch 1922: 1024). “The modern world” could not be equated with “the conception of modern civilization as developed in Europe and America”; for this was an equation that “extends unduly the sphere of our own existence” (Troeltsch 1906: 9). 75

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In sum, Weimar cosmopolitan writers in social thought can be read today as seeking to reclaim positions of universal validity, of “universal history” (Universalgeschichte), from the starting-point of an always intensely reflective awareness of epistemic particularity and relativity (Harrington 2016: 265–70). In each of these four main thematic areas – those of multiple pathways to liberal political modernity, of intellectual voice in the public sphere, of national and supranational identities, and of European self-understanding in world history – Weimar writers thought of universal history as at once a vice and a virtue for inquiry. Universal history both potentially endangered scholars in hubristic pretension and nevertheless awakened them to ever more insistently self-questioning perceptions of their own position in the totality of historical forms. It stood as the medium in which European consciousness aspired to an ever more honest sense of its essential relativity on the world stage and thereby reached an ever more credible platform from which to seek potentially universally valid propositions about humanity and its moral ends. Universal history therefore persisted as an ideal to which European thought could strive to respond ever more profoundly, even and precisely as previous claims over it fell short of its true challenges.

Notes 1 This contribution is a very condensed statement of my more detailed study in Harrington (2016). 2 Lecture held on 24 October 1922 on the second anniversary of the foundation of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in October 1922, attended by Friedrich Ebert and other leading members of the Weimar Coalition, published posthumously in April 1923; later cited by Thomas Mann, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Robert Curtius and Leo Strauss, among others (Harrington 2016: 115–6, 160–2; Joas 2005; Hübinger 2002: 29). 3 Peter Gay’s 1968 book on Weimar culture carried the subtitle ‘the outsider as insider’: a significant subtitle in this respect, despite the thrust of the book lying essentially within the paradigm of the German Sonderweg thesis. 4 The phrase appears in Ranke’s Weltgeschichte, Part 9, section 2 (1883).

References Arjomand, Said A. and Edward A. Tiryakian (eds.) (2004) Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Arnason, Johann (2003) Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions, Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.) (2005) Axial Civilizations and World History, Leiden: Brill. Böhme, Klaus. (ed.) (1975) Aufrufe und Reden deutscher Professoren in Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart: Reclam. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.) (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., Wolfgang Schluchter and Bjorn Wittrock (2001) Public Spheres and Collective Identities, New Brunswick: Transaction. Elias, Norbert (1989) Studien über die Deutschen: Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp [1961–1985]/On the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, tr. E. Dunning and S. Mennell, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Gay, Peter (1968) Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, New York: Harper & Row. Harrington, Austin (2016) German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hübinger, Gangolf (2002) ‘Einleitung’, in Ernst Troeltsch Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 1–42. Huntingdon, Samuel (1996) The Clash of Civilizations, New York: Simon & Schuster. Joas, Hans (2005) ‘The Charisma of Human Rights’, in C. Camic, P. Gorski, and D. Trubek (eds.), Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kettler, David and Volker Meja (1995) Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism, New Brunswick: Transaction. Kocka, Jürgen (1988) ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23: 3–16.

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Lepenies, Wolf (2006) The Seduction of Culture in German History, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lützeler, Paul Michael (1998) Die Schriftsteller und Europa:Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, Baden-Baden: Nomos (2nd edn.). Mann, Thomas (1919) Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983/Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, tr. W.D. Morris, New York: F. Ungar, 1983. Mannheim, Karl (1929) Ideologie und Utopie, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann/Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, tr. L. Wirth and E. Shils, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936. Nelson, Benjamin (1981) On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilizations: Selected Writings, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Ringer, Fritz (1969) The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmitt, Carl (1950) Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, Berlin: Dunker & Humblot/The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G.L. Ulmen, New York: Telos Press, 2003. Schofield, Malcolm (1991) The Stoic Idea of the City, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, Georg (1915) Die Idee Europa, in Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen, GSG vol. 16, pp. 54–8/ The Idea of Europe, tr. & ed. P.A. Lawrence, Georg Simmel: Sociologist and European, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976, pp. 267–71. Spengler (1918) Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1959 [extended edition, 1922)]/The Decline of the West, tr. C.F. Atkinson, New York: Knopf, 1962 [1926]. Stern, Fritz (1961) The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Sternhell, Zeev (2009) The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, New Haven: Yale University Press. Troeltsch, Ernst (1906) Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt, in Ernst Troeltsch Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 199–316/Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, tr. W. Montgomery, London: Williams & Norgate, 1912. Troeltsch, Ernst (1922) Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Ernst Troeltsch Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, Berlin: de Gruyter. Troeltsch, Ernst (1923) ‘Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik’, in Ernst Troeltsch Kritische Gesamtausgabe vol. 15, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 493–512/‘The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics’, in Otto von Gierke: Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500–1800 (Appendix 1), tr. E. Barker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934, pp. 201–22. Weber, Max (1920a) ‘Vorbemerkung’, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 1–17/‘Author’s Introduction’, in idem, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. T. Parsons, London: Routledge, 1930, pp. 13–31/‘“Prefatory Remarks” to Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion’, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. S. Kalberg, Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002, pp. 149–64. Weber, Max (1920b) ‘Einleitung: Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen’, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 237–75/‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr. & ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge, 1948, pp. 267–301.

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7 The modern cognitive order, cosmopolitanism and conflicting models of world openness Towards a critique of contemporary social relations Piet Strydom

The current wave of concern with cosmopolitanism goes back most immediately to 1995. Preceded by the European Revolution of 1989, this was the year of the multiple anniversaries of Immanuel Kant’s proposal for perpetual peace, the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations’ Charter. These anniversaries were organised, moreover, within the timeframe of the UN ‘decade of international law’ presided over by the International Law Commission (1997) who promoted the cosmopolitan prospects of the new millennium. Reinvigorated by renewed meaning and enthusiasm, it is against this background that cosmopolitanism obtained contemporary significance and became the burning issue it is today in the conflict over its practical realisation. The reference to these anniversaries is by no means fortuitous, however, since they invoke the unprecedented early modern cultural development to which cosmopolitanism can be traced, on the one hand, and later concerted attempts at least to begin to organise society in accordance with the principles established in the wake of that cultural advance, on the other. This implies that the homage to Kant by no means implies a purely literary or philosophical reference. On the contrary, Kant stands out as the classic he is since he codified the emergence of the meta-cultural principles which marked the arrival of modern culture. Indeed, he canonically formulated the formal properties which would henceforth cognitively delimit the autonomous intellectual, moral and aesthetic domains of modern culture. The contemporary idea of cosmopolitanism of course has its modern roots in one of the domains formalised by Kant, namely practical reason. But to obtain a critical social-theoretical grasp of cosmopolitanism approaching adequacy it is advisable to consider it in the wider context of the cognitive order of modernity and the social practices reproducing it. This is what I propose to do in this chapter. The first step is to reconstruct the modern cognitive order in order to locate the idea of cosmopolitanism in its proper place. This reconstruction provides the opportunity, second, to clarify the necessary theoretical basis for the sociological analysis of cosmopolitanism which presupposes a clear distinction between the cognitive and normative dimensions. The analysis itself, third, requires consideration of the relations among the competing, contested and 78

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even conflicting uses made of the cognitive cultural model of cosmopolitanism in the process of divergent attempts to realise its socio-practically relevant rational potential. This approach allows identification of the most important collective actors operative in the cosmopolitan field and their respective cognitive cosmopolitan frames or models of world openness which generate, regulate and guide their efforts toward realising their competing images of an open or cosmopolitan society. Once this stage is reached, a critical social-theoretical evaluation – more precisely, a socio-cognitive critique – of contemporary manifestations of cosmopolitanism becomes possible, since the interrelation of the different positions through conflict, discourse and learning provides a reference to possible cosmopolitan relations against which both the visions and corresponding actions of the actors can be normatively tested.

The cognitive order of modernity: cosmopolitanism in its place In its original modern form, cosmopolitanism arose in the context of modern culture against the background of long-term processes of development which led to the establishment of modern society’s core institutional components. In the early modern period, the process of political formation culminated in the emergence of the modern state. The appearance of romantic love and the marriage politics accompanying it played no small role in this process. The initial city states were followed by monarchical territorial states which in turn had to make way for the constitutional states of the late eighteenth century. The closely interrelated process of economic development which took off in northern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries culminated in mercantilism. The potential of both the political and economic processes were heightened by the fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury shifts of attention to the problem-solving potential of technology, the mathematisation and scientisation of nature, and the significance of knowledge for the mastery of nature and society. For its part, the early modern form of state-regulated economic organisation was transformed into a deregulated liberal form of capitalism in the wake of the revolutionary events of the eighteenth century. Under the new conditions created by these processes, the characteristic modern phenomenon of civil society arose. Its tentative appearance in the seventeenth century was first stimulated by economic development, but opposition to the absolutist state became decisive for its establishment in the eighteenth. These political, economic and social processes were both facilitated and constrained by the parallel process of legal transformation and development which has its most significant roots in Roman law and its elaboration in the medieval period and under the conditions of the absolutist state. In the course of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century convulsions and shortly after, this legal development culminated in the constitutional innovations of the time and in the system of positive law which started taking effect in the early nineteenth century. The political, erotic, economic, scientific-technological, social and legal developments and their institutional outcomes – the modern state, intimate relations, capitalist economy, science and technology, civil society and modern legal system – were accompanied by the complementary phenomenon of modern culture. The orientations, forms of action and social practices, the level of moral consciousness and moral sensibilities, and finally the visions, motivations and enthusiasms of those individuals and groups who had been engaged and implicated in the various processes which brought modern society into being, found expression in the concurrent consolidation of modern culture. It is on this socio-structural and socio-cultural basis that over a period of approximately three centuries the cognitive order of modernity arose which would henceforth, in interaction with the prevailing social practices, constitute, generate, guide and regulate the formation of modernity and the actualisation, realisation and expansion of its multilevel potentialities. 79

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The cognitive order of modernity consists of the whole range of second-order, synthetic or reflexive principles which emerged from the social orientations and activities of the different social groups and collective actors who had made an input into the processes of formation of the state, intimate relations, capitalism, science and technology, civil society, modern law and corresponding cultural forms. Since then, these meta-cultural principles have been sustained and modified in keeping with changing circumstances by successive generations who continued to participate in the reproduction of these various societal forms. The contemporary groups of actors obviously will be of particular interest later when we turn to the current form of cosmopolitanism. At the time of the original emergence of these principles, however, their cognitive codification was achieved in the course of Europe-wide conflicts and discourses to which scores of different categories of participants – from state officials and economic actors, through clerics, lawyers, historians, mathematicians and philosophers, to activists – contributed but which eventually came to be represented by a small number of outstanding names who attained classical status. In the sixteenth century, Bodin wrote his Six Books of the Commonwealth in which he registered the emergence of the concept of the state and its standard of sovereignty. Smith followed in the eighteenth with the cognitive codification of the concept of the economic system with its standard of efficiency in his The Wealth of Nations. These achievements assumed a wide variety of very different presuppositions, including: Capellanus’s codification of romantic love in twelfthcentury court culture; Machiavelli’s fifteenth-century systematisation of the nature of political power; Bayle’s late seventeenth-century formulation of the concept of critique; Brunelleschi’s fifteenth-century focus on problem-solving and its principle of effectiveness; both Galileo and Newton’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century establishment of science as mathematical, experimental and mechanical; and finally Bacon’s seventeenth-century isolation of the potential instrumentality of knowledge. As regards social reality, Locke in the seventeenth century already registered the pre-political economic self-regulative dimension of civil society, while later Montesquieu singled out its political dimension of self-organisation – both of which were intellectually brought together in 1767 by Ferguson, and then was made into a reality in which freedom and equality in principle prevail by the revolutionary separation of civil society from the state in France. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes formulated the nature of modern coercive law, while in the eighteenth documents such as the American ‘Declaration of Independence’ and the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, implicating Paine and Sieyès, marked the codification of the complementary, freedom-creating and -guaranteeing constitutional side of modern law without which legitimacy remains an illusion. Finally, in the late eighteenth century in the space of less than a decade, Kant canonically captured in his three critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement, the respective constitutive meta-cultural principles of truth, right and authenticity which had emerged in the by then autonomous intellectual, moral and aesthetic domains. Together, all these reflexive principles – from sovereignty and efficiency, through power, love and critique as well as freedom, equality, legality and legitimacy, to truth, right and authenticity – form the taken-for-granted and, therefore, commonly presupposed cognitive order of modernity. While figuring everywhere at different levels as constitutive principles of modern society, they are sufficiently abstract and general to allow a plurality of interpretations and even an emerging post-Western, global civilisation embracing multiple modernities. The meta-cultural principles at issue here have been a topic of increasing interest during the twentieth century, especially among social theorists and related thinkers who are inspired by insights deriving from the cognitive revolution. To develop a clear understanding of the nature of cosmopolitanism as a component of the cognitive order of modernity, it may be helpful to dwell briefly on these principles. 80

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Piaget, a contributor to the cognitive revolution, was acutely aware of these cognitive structures. In his early sociological research on the development of moral judgement, he identified the meta-cultural principles, what he called the ‘ideal norms immanent in the human spirit’ which are ‘at the back of all rules’ (1968: 285) – that is, of first-order rules resting on interpretation or convention. These principles emerge when a general awareness of all the different points of view develops through the interrelation of those points of view, so that a classification and a corresponding ideal standard making judgement possible become established. According to him, such a cognitive structure does not demand identification in the sense of everyone having to internalise the same content, but obliges reciprocity in the sense of everyone having to take each other into account via it without allowing the obliteration of their own points of view. This is precisely the cognitive sense in which Mead about the same time used the concept of the ‘generalized other’ and its more abstract forms such as ‘universal discourse’ and a ‘universal human society’ (1974: 90, 310, 327). With reference to Mead, Honneth suggests speaking of synthetic principles when he writes that the individual in the course of socialisation acquires the ability to orient its action according to a ‘rule’ (Regel) which is won through ‘a synthesis of the perspectives of all those involved’ (1992: 125). With reference to Habermas who himself drew on both Piaget and Mead, Bohman speaks of ‘second-order [or] reflexive rules’ which emerge in discourses, including rules about public debate itself. As ‘necessary and universal’, such structures function as ‘non-local regulative ideals’ which are ‘neither conventional nor interpretative’, but rather ‘cognitive’ in the sense of unavoidable structures forming the general basis of rationality and therefore of ‘the cognitive ability to judge and assess reasons’ (1991: 99). The first sociologists who participated in the cognitive revolution and the concurrent cognitive turn in sociology, Garfinkel (1967), Cicourel (1973) and Goffman (1983, 1986), respectively conceived of these rules as the ‘rational properties’ of social activities, ‘interpretive rules’ and the ‘interaction order’ plus ‘frames’ through which it is actualised. While they tended to regard these rules as fleeting structures instantiated from moment to moment, Bourdieu, who emphasised the significance of this cognitive dimension, saw them as being more durable ‘historically constituted and acquired categories [and] classificatory schemes’ which are fundamental in that they ‘organize the idea of the social world in the minds of all the subjects belonging to that world and shaped by it’ (1986: 469). Despite the fact that Bourdieu’s successors, Boltanski and Thévenot, transposed his critical sociology into a sociology of critique, they nevertheless adopt a similar formal position. Their èconomies de la grandeur or ‘orders of worth’ (1991) are historically more precisely specified sets of cognitive structures or classification schemes which provide the basis for justification in cases of conflicting points of view. Touraine, finally, saw the ‘cultural models’ which orient and guide social action as being located at ‘the deepest level’ and thus as ‘shared by social actors who fight over their control’ (1988: 8). He stressed that they become disengaged from social practices through ‘reflexivity’ (55), on the one hand, and are in turn actualised and ‘turn[ed] into social practices through conflicts’ (67) between opposing social actors, on the other. But let us return to Kant and cosmopolitanism from these reflections on meta-cultural principles and, hence, the nature of the cognitive order of modernity. For Kant, cosmopolitanism was one of the principles which had emerged from the conflicts and debates associated with the voyages of discovery and European colonialism, the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, the Peace of Westphalia and subsequent struggles against absolutism. His specific reference point was the debate of the time about natural law, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, concurrent social, political and constitutional developments, and the post-revolutionary wars. Drawing on and developing Abbé de St. Pierre and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s earlier reflections on perpetual peace, Kant placed his idea of ius cosmopoliticum based on the rights of world citizens, which he regarded as providing the vehicle for a global legal and 81

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political order, in the context of practical reason. The latter concerns that part of the cognitive order which embraces normatively significant cognitive principles having a bearing on morality and extending to law and politics. He thus presented cosmopolitanism in ‘The Doctrine of Right’ in the Metaphysics of Morals (1996), the important final elaboration of his moral theory. Taking cues from the historical developments of his time which both gave reality to political organisation based on a constitution and opened a global perspective, he conceived of cosmopolitanism in terms of a global constitutional arrangement which would abolish war and once and for all transform the spontaneous lawless relations between states into civil relations. Once he had clarified the reflexive cognitive structure or ‘eternal norm’ (1963: 150) of cosmopolitanism from the moral point of view, Kant was in a position to present a synthetic vision in the 1795 essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1957) in which he wove together the moral with political and historical strands into a doctrine of cosmopolitanism specifying the goal of perpetual peace, the legal form of a federation of states, and finally a philosophy of history laying out how this project could be gradually realised. Habermas exposed the inadequacies of Kant’s endeavour to solve the conceptual problem of clarifying cosmopolitanism. Yet he found nevertheless that ‘the moral universalism that guided Kant’s proposals remains the structuring normative intuition’ even today still (1997: 135). For his part, Karl-Otto Apel (1997) critically analysed the contradictory claim in Kant’s philosophy of history that the bringing about of a cosmopolitan order is a moral duty and task, on the one hand, and a guaranteed outcome of the teleology of a natural mechanism, on the other. In his assessment, Kant’s concern could be retrieved if his dualistic architectonic were replaced with a more appropriate intersubjectivist dialectical approach. The point is, however, that both Habermas and Apel thus confirm the specific nature of the idea of cosmopolitanism as a meta-cultural principle forming an inherent part of the cognitive order of modernity – the former seeing it as a normatively structuring moral universal, and the latter as a transcendental-pragmatic presupposition.

Intermediate theoretical reflections: consensus and conflict From the above, it is evident that cosmopolitanism is in the first instance a meta-cultural principle forming part of the cognitive order of modernity. As such, it is a taken-for-granted and therefore shared modern idea which from the outset had an ordering effect on social orientations, practices and relations. Being internal to the processes of formation of modernity yet simultaneously transcending it, it captured and helped give form to the widely experienced sense of the opening up of the world and the expansion and qualitative change in relations within and among different population groups around the globe. That this was the case throughout the early modern period is attested by authors from Penn via St. Pierre and Rousseau to Kant, even if it was a matter of an as yet low exploitation of its potential. Kant summarised this sense by introducing, over and above the state and international order as forms of ‘rightful condition’, the projected all-encompassing and qualitatively different cosmopolitan condition covering the ‘multitude of peoples [on] the earth’s surface’ (1996: 89). As a commonly presupposed cognitive structure, however, the idea also encountered opposition. From the moment the nation state emerged right up to the founding of the United Nations and the promulgation of ‘crimes against humanity’, it consequently survived in a largely latent form. The only signs of life during the intervening period were the various peace organisations established between the 1820s and 1860s in Geneva on the initiative of de Sellon and Dunant and, later, the founding of the League of Nations. It was only after World War II and especially in the wake of the European Revolution of 1989 which ended the Cold War that appreciation for the potential of the idea really started to grow. These events, supported by globalisation, defined 82

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the situation in which the idea took on significance. Today, we are more than two decades away from this sudden proliferation of different interpretations and uses of the idea – from closed national or cultural worlds opposed to an open cosmopolitan world, to competing and even conflicting positions on cosmopolitanism itself. The wide range of the idea allowing such ambiguity is a matter of theoretical importance which should be understood in principle. Forming part of the cognitive order, cosmopolitanism is a structural element of that dimension of modern culture which is fundamental to moral classification. It is not itself a classification, but rather a set of essential distinctions forming a categorical framework making classification possible. As such it takes the specific form of a cognitive cultural structure which enables a substantive cultural model of reality. Having been generated by a certain range of social orientations, practices and relations, this structure has both a generative and a regulative function in respect of the continued exercise, organisation, development and expansion of those very orientations, practices and relations. The emergence and establishment of this cultural structure implies that it represents a historically accumulated rational potential which became fixed for the time being through evolution and socialisation in a flexible cognitive cultural schema opening a space of possibilities. This cognitively secured, reflexively accessible, rational potential possesses normative significance in so far as it implies an obligation or moral concept. This quality allows not only the rational justification of the normative content of the orientations, practices and relations falling under it, but also points toward a possible transformative transcendence of the status quo. Simultaneously, this cultural schema of course also has an emotional-motivational significance to the extent that all categorical distinctions are permeated by emotive energy as soon as they are called upon in problematic situations of disagreement and conflict. For some, the emotive impact is negative, for others positive in a variety of different interpretations. From a critical social-theoretical viewpoint, cosmopolitanism’s cognitive nature and normative significance must be clearly distinguished from one another. Their separation is of the utmost importance for an adequate understanding of the contemporary manifestations of cosmopolitanism. It more specifically makes possible accounting for two things. The first concerns the predominant tendency exhibited by the interdisciplinary conceptualisation and study of cosmopolitanism and the related animus of the cosmopolitan movement of our time, and the second is the possibility and necessity of the sociological analysis of contemporary cosmopolitanism. As regards the predominant cosmomorphic tendency of contemporary cosmopolitan thinking, it is evident that it is strongly under the impression of the rationalistic trend in social theory which, starting with Kant himself,1 does not make an adequate distinction between the cognitive and the normative. Inspired by the image of an interpersonally well-ordered, socially integrated, peaceful society, it rather interprets the cognitive in a strong, unitary, normative sense, thus conflating it with the normative. Accordingly, cosmopolitanism is taken to be a counterfactual idealisation which plays a central role not only in generating and regulating social orientations, practices and relations, but also in giving direction and guidance to the very process by means of which the goal state encapsulated by the idea is approached – the problematic aspect being the lack of observance of the tension between the ideal and the real and, hence, the misleading assumption that it involves a relatively unproblematic linear process. The overemphasis on pure reason is the source of the unmistakable penumbra of idealism surrounding much of what has been written on cosmopolitanism since the 1990s. The second matter concerns the need for sociological analysis to capture the impurity of reason. Opposed to the conflation of the cognitive and normative, which is well known in social theory from theories prioritising the role of consensus in the achievement of social order or social integration, such as those of Durkheim and Parsons but also Habermas, are theories stressing competition, contestation and conflict instead. Rational choice theory operates with a reduced 83

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notion of the competition of rational actors according to their preferences, while Bourdieu and Touraine more plausibly regard contestation and conflict as central to social life. Bourdieu attacks ‘intellectualist and anti-genetic idealism’ which celebrates ‘a system of universal forms and categories’ at the expense of the competing ‘act(s) of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression’ in which ‘antagonistic groups’ in ‘all class-divided social formations’ engage in the course of their ‘classification struggles’ (1986: 467, 470, 477, 479). The system of classification or ‘cognitive structures’ representing the ‘object of struggle’ are ‘common to all the agents of the society and make possible the production of a common, meaningful world’ (480, 468). Forming a ‘matrix’ of ‘principles of division’, they underlie, inform and energise social division (468). Touraine touches on the same problem of the relation between the cognitive and normative in dealing with the question of how to make sense of the fact that society is simultaneously unified and divided. For him, it is vital to avoid the widespread confusion about the nature of culture as ‘the unity principle’ by drawing a sharp distinction between ‘cultural orientations’ and ‘social norms’ (1988: 54–5). Whereas the reflexive cultural model located at the deepest level constitutes society and thus is both shared by opposed social actors and the stake in their conflicts, social norms are different conflicting interpretations and practical embodiments of cultural models. Although social conflict is impossible without a deep agreement, the contending parties do not appeal to the same norms and values. Touraine insists, therefore, that far from continuous, cultural models and social norms are separated by relations of domination like ‘a splitting wedge’ (55). The emphasis on ‘classification systems’ or ‘cultural models’ imply that, while it is crucial for the analysis of cosmopolitanism to introduce conflict, the shift from consensus to conflict does not necessarily entail the surrender of the reflexive dimension in favour of, say, either practice theory or an empiricist position. On the contrary, both cosmopolitanism as part of the cognitive order possessing normative significance, on the one hand, and the plurality of interpretations and uses by contending social actors guided by distinct norms and values, on the other, must be included. Only by studying the context-immanent action orientations, practices and relations and the context-transcendent, reflexive, meta-cultural structure in their tension-laden, dynamic, temporally unfolding interrelationship can an adequate analysis of cosmopolitanism be approached. This is the case since cosmopolitanism is not simply a matter of a shared metacultural principle allowing integration, but rather acquires significance only once this shared idea is questioned, becomes fractured, raises the emotional and motivational temperature, gives rise to disagreement and conflict, and consequently requires justification, reorganisation and reaffirmation.2 The critical analysis of cosmopolitanism, then, starts from the assumption that the social actors involved are oriented toward and by their shared cognitive order, but that in their respective orientations they follow different value interpretations and norms which lead them, at least to begin with, into competition, contestation and perhaps even conflict. Competition, contestation and conflict do not necessarily have the last word, however, since they could and often do stimulate learning which, in turn, enables coordination, mutual recognition, understanding, cooperation and sometimes even agreement.

Analysis of contemporary cosmopolitanism: toward a socio-cognitive critique In the same sense that cosmopolitanism in its original form arose in the context of the multilevel process of development which brought modern society into being, contemporary cosmopolitanism must be seen in relation to what is today conventionally called globalisation – the current continuation of that very same process. The different dimensions of this multilevel process are today still reproducing the cognitive order of modernity, including cosmopolitanism, but now 84

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under changed conditions allowing the opening up of the different societal forms at the global level. Under these new conditions, therefore, the cognitive order is as relevant as ever, particularly cosmopolitanism which is in the grip of a strong forward and ascendant thrust, but its situational sense and significance become apparent only to the extent that it is related to the variety of competing and even conflicting selections the actors make from the repertoire of cognitive principles in the practical context. An adequate grasp of cosmopolitanism requires, however, more than just observing and describing these cultural and practice dimensions from an external perspective.3 Simultaneously, it has to be internally understood with reference to those involved in the process. What is necessary, therefore, is the appreciation that the objective dimension at most only lays down the necessary conditions in the form of opening up a social field or structural framework within which different social actors take up positions in a struggle over the construction, structuration and direction of development of society in the medium of which learning becomes possible. This social field represents both facilitating structural opportunities and constraining structural effects, but these are such only for the social actors in the potentially cosmopolitan globalising field. Since their taking of opportunities and experiencing of effects are mediated by the cognitive order, cosmopolitanism must be understood in terms of their different orientations toward and uses of the cultural structures defining the goal state of the process – that is, whatever world openness means to each of them. This implies that to grasp cosmopolitanism is tantamount to understanding globalisation from the inside. In the context of the latter as the vehicle of the opening up of the different forms of society, cosmopolitanism concerns the very sense and vision of the openness of the world. It is vital, therefore, to obtain an understanding of the cosmopolitan orientations, frames or models of world openness the different social actors construct in the field, their conflictual and discursive interrelations, especially the learning processes they undergo in the course of such mediation, and finally the outcomes of such learning – or non-learning, for that matter. Rather than caused by globalisation, therefore, the contemporary multilevel cosmopolitan culture of world openness has roots through learning processes going back at least to the early modern period which themselves are an internal driving factor in the process of selftransformation and societal development.4 A plurality of social actors simultaneously generates the process of globalisation and reproduces the cognitive order of modernity, including the idea of cosmopolitanism. Each one is guided by its own interpretation, values and norms and hence its own characteristic cognitive model according to which it seeks to realise its distinct vision of a cosmopolitan world. The actors become increasingly aware of the scope and limitations of their particular positions through their relations with each other, and this developing and changing awareness in turn reflexively shapes the unfolding set of social relations. Taking cues from the current process of the emergence of a global society, they include major actors5 such as corporations, states, international organisations, civil society actors, including non-governmental organisations and social movements who, through third cultures cutting across national societies, act both locally and globally. Theoretically, these various actors can be regarded as representing two major contending forces – the corporations, states and organisations committed to advancing functional globalisation, on the one hand, and those organisations and civil society actors who seek to counter functional globalisation and its negative consequences by working toward communicative globalisation or mondialisation instead. Through competition, contestation and conflict, but also inter-group, inter-cultural and inter-civilisational communication and cooperation, the actors are embroiled in historically situated, materially conditioned, intersubjective communicative and discursive contexts in which a variety of learning processes take place. The realisation of cosmopolitanism under historically specific conditions depends on these processes and their outcomes, 85

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as does the formation of the emerging society. Conditioned by historical circumstances and associated pressures, such learning processes are guided and directed by different combinations of evaluative, normative and functional interpretations of the cognitive cultural model of cosmopolitanism and, thus, by distinct actor-relative cognitive models of world openness. This variety of generative mechanisms gives rise to distinct types of cosmopolitanism, each of which is open to critical scrutiny from the perspective of the normative significance of the meta-cultural principle of cosmopolitanism.6 As regards learning processes, the internal cognitive mediation mechanism of the process of cosmopolitisation, five distinct types (Trenz and Eder 2004; Strydom 2009) are relevant from the viewpoint of a critical analysis of cosmopolitanism – aggregative, institutional, associational, double contingency and, finally, triple contingency learning. Aggregative learning, first, enables individuals (e.g. business executives, bureaucrats, lawyers) and legal personalities (e.g. corporations, states, international organisations, law firms) to pursue their own interests more effectively. Institutional learning, secondly, allows institutions or organisations to fulfil their particular missions to their clients, customers or the citizens. Associational learning, third, makes possible the formation of voluntary groupings and social movements as collective actors. In the fourth place, the more complex double contingency learning is a type through which, for example, corporations and/or states on the one hand conflict with social movements on the other, leading to accommodation between the parties. Finally, the most complex type, triple contingency learning, is a discursive form of societal learning made possible by the emergence of discourses, public spheres and publics capable of observation, evaluation, judgement, opinion formation and commentary as well as by the concomitant formation of personality structures capable of intercultural and inter-civilisational communication. Since it allows full sway to the threefold structure of communication involving ego, alter and the Other or third point of view embodied virtually by the public, triple contingency learning differs fundamentally from the previous types. All of the latter take place in intersubjective contexts below the level of a full-fledged public communicative or discursive situation and thus exclude the third point of view7 – for instance, by way of corporate strategic behaviour, executive secrecy or raison d’état, NGO protective self-interest, social movement exclusivity and so forth. In discursive learning, by contrast, the competing protagonists are compelled to take account of each other, but only via a reference to the Other who, by making the cognitive order immanently effective, has constitutive significance for the emergent, collectively constructed, social reality. It is due to the particular structure of its intersubjective context that in this type of learning transformative and self-transformative moments of discovery and transcendence – truly ‘cosmopolitan moment[s]’ (Delanty 2006: 38; Miller 2010) – occur through the unforeseeable and unexpected, creative, discursive combination of cognitive structures, symbolic forms and objective forces and pressures. Despite the fact that this is certainly the most improbable and rarest kind of learning, which is what makes also it the most promising and interesting, many examples of it are nevertheless available (see below). Fuelled by the actors’ cognitive structures, learning processes and emergent socio-cultural cognitive frames, all mediated by interaction and discourse, a number of different forms of actualisation of the cognitive cultural model of cosmopolitanism can be distinguished today. Each of these contemporary types of cosmopolitanism exhibits its own selective emphasis on the remaining principles of the cognitive order – for instance, some more liberal stressing freedom and efficiency, others more radical stressing legitimacy and solidarity and still others more conservative stressing sovereignty and power. Some of these types of cosmopolitanism have already palpably begun to take on reality, while others retain varying margins of potentiality. 86

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(1) Through aggregative learning borne by business executives, bureaucrats, lawyers, corporations, states, international organisations and law firms, a corporate, bureaucratic and professional type of elitist cosmopolitanism has become prevalent. Irrespective of whether taking an economic, political, legal, corporate, statist or organisational form, it typically follows models of freedom based on the assumption of self-interest or the unencumbered self, but constructed in terms of cosmopolitan citizenship. The contemporary phenomenon of ‘the class consciousness of frequent travellers’ (Calhoun 2003; Featherstone 2002) may well be the best example of this really existing – albeit rather one-sided – type of contemporary cosmopolitanism. (2) In the case of institutional learning, second, which often goes hand in glove with aggregative learning, a form of corporate, organisational or institutional cosmopolitanism prevails which is articulated on different levels through a variety of models and corresponding uses of the principle of cosmopolitanism. •

•

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Economically, a form of global cosmopolitanism is propagated on the basis of a claim to corporate citizenship which is directed and guided by such models as the free market, free trade, mobile production facilities, globally recognised brands, freedom of choice, consumerism and, lately, corporate responsibility. In the wake of the current financial, economic and social crisis, this type of cosmopolitanism is coming into increasingly shaper critical focus. Politically, the focus on collective goods is oriented by a number of contradictory and even conflicting variants of cosmopolitanism, among which the most prominent are a world state or world government, global governance and cosmopolitan democracy or a ‘politically constituted world society without world government’ (Habermas 2005: 329). The mutual contestation among these different positions is one of the most characteristic features of the debate about political cosmopolitisation of our time. Legally, the concern with constitutional regimes is pursued today according to conflicting models, one being ‘legal pluralism’ (Teubner 1997) which rejects all cosmomorphic connotations associated with the idea of cosmopolitanism and is closely related to the neo-liberal capitalist imaginary, and another cosmopolitan law in the sense of a global legal order. Thus a global or ‘universal code of legality’ (Günther 2001) is defended against legal pluralism. The global legal order, however, is itself subject to conflicting interpretations – for instance, as being either an authoritarian (Zolo 1997) or a democratic (Habermas 2001) form of cosmopolitanism.

(3) The civic cosmopolitanism related to associational learning takes a variety of contradictory or even conflicting forms, judging by the models of a cosmopolitan civil society constructed at this level. •

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In the leading organisations representing the human rights, ecology, peace and alterglobalisation movements, for instance, the model of global civil society is prominent. It is interpreted as made up of global institutions such as a reformed United Nations, international governmental organisations, international non-governmental organisations, social movements and citizens’ groups or, by contrast, as communicatively constituted and spanned by a public sphere, yet remaining rooted in civic communities (Delanty 2000). Opposed to these proposals are those on the neo-liberal and legal pluralist side who are working toward giving reality to the model of an open global private law society instead (Teubner 1997). 87

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Both in the case of some of the political and legal models mentioned under (2) and civil societal models mentioned under (3), assumptions associated with moral cosmopolitanism stressing the universal human community, including the normative idea of cosmopolitan justice, are at work. They are obviously opposed by the currently ascending model of a closed national or theocratic community. (4) To dual processes of learning through confrontation corresponds what may be called syncretic cosmopolitanism. Much discussed contemporary phenomena at different levels such as social pluralisation, networks, hybridity and multiple modernities (Neederveen Pieterse 2004) all contain suggestive pointers toward the cognitive structures and related visions of cosmopolitan relations emerging from double contingency learning. Obviously, different, contradictory and even conflicting modes of organisation can or have to be entertained by two interrelated parties, such as coordination, accommodation, complementarity, mutual advantage, dependency, cooperation and so forth. (5) By contrast, discursive cosmopolitanism generated by triple contingency learning involves cognitive structure formation at a higher level or, more specifically, the macro-level realisation of the normative import of the cognitive cultural model of cosmopolitanism. Accordingly, it typically involves models of world openness framing norms which are effective in regulation at the global level. Norms securing ecosystems (environmental accords, sustainability), guaranteeing respect and protection for the individual (human rights) and securing the protection of the human species (global population and health norms) are the most conspicuous ones today (Held et al. 1999; Therborn 2000; Habermas 2001). These different models of cosmopolitan world openness exist only in relation to one another, which in turn is possible only in the social context constituted and generatively regulated by the presupposed cognitive order. Despite differences, they are all oriented toward and by cosmopolitanism as a cognitive meta-cultural principle. It is this principle which is reflexively shared and thus transcends all that also provides a basis for a critique of the different models. As a cognitive structure that is rooted in everyday orientations and practices and forms part of the culture of modernity yet simultaneously points beyond Western modernity, it is fit to make available such a basis. As a foothold for critique, it is won through thoroughgoing reconstructive analysis. It has a normative significance implying a moral obligation which demands of all those involved to place themselves in reciprocal relation to each other. Thus all-sided reciprocity, which is also implied by the highest form of – discursive – learning, is the normative standard according to which critical judgement is exercised. The critical focus is on the tension or gap between the immanently rooted yet transcendent idea of cosmopolitanism and the degree of actual realisation of its rational, situation-transcendent potential. Each of the models can be taken to task for the biases, illusions, stereotypes, distortions and blind spots it entertains. Similarly, the orientation toward creating a cosmopolitan society by supporting either functional globalisation or communicative globalisation is open to a critique of being one-sided. The former has the vision of a functionally self-regulative society, while ignoring the social costs. The latter assumes a communicatively self-organising society, while overlooking the fact that systemic regulation is as much a matter of necessary cognitive codification of activities as is normative organisation. Both give rise to unintended consequences and irreversible side effects which can be as fateful as it is necessary to subject them to critical analysis. A critique worthy of the name cannot content itself with being a purely normative critique, of course, since its socio-cognitive thrust requires furthermore an explanation of the biases, illusions, stereotypes, distortions, blind spots, one-sidedness, tensions and gaps, and unjust and social pathological consequences with reference to causal mechanisms of a socio-cultural and/or socio-structural kind. 88

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Conclusion In this chapter, I considered contemporary cosmopolitanism from the viewpoint of critical social theory. In distinction to the predominant approaches, it operates with a cognitive perspective which allows a basic distinction between the usually conflated or ignored cognitive and normative orders. It was argued that cosmopolitanism is a meta-cultural principle that emerges from social practices and the development of society to form part of the cognitive order of modernity which, in turn, has the incursive and recursive effect of generating and regulating the continuation of social practices and the further development of society. Whereas the development of society is the objective multilevel process of the opening up and globalisation of the economic, political, social, legal and cultural forms of society, cosmopolitanism is the internally experienced sense and vision of the openness of social relations and society which is carried by social learning processes. However, learning depends on competition, contestation and conflict between social actors who take for granted the presupposed cognitive order, including the idea of cosmopolitanism, but interpret it according to different values, act upon it in terms of different norms and therefore try to realise it in contrary ways. An adequate analysis thus requires understanding, first, cosmopolitanism as part of the taken-for-granted cognitive order which is the stake over which social actors are conflicting; second, the distinct cognitive cosmopolitan frames or models of world openness of each the actors; and, third, the learning processes the actors undergo as their frames or models are mediated through conflict and communication. Such analysis provides the basis for a critique of contemporary social relations in terms of the inadequate registering and realisation of the rational potential and normative obligation of the idea of cosmopolitanism, and the consequent unjust and social pathological conditions which require explanatory reference to socio-structural and/or socio-cultural causal mechanisms. The crucial question, then, is: what form are social relations and world society taking, what form can we expect them to take and what constructive contribution can critical social theory make to this formative process of cosmopolitisation?

Notes 1 Although Kant was aware of antagonism and anticipated the class relation in modern society, he did not see dissent and conflict as relevant to the way reason becomes practical. 2 Miller (1986, 1992, 2010) pursued this general point in critical extension of Habermas, while Eder (1999) applied it. 3 In this respect, ‘cosmopolitan realism’ (Beck 2006: 21) and a ‘relational’ approach (Delanty 2009: 6, 12) should be handled with caution. 4 Limitations of space preclude a differentiated development of the suggested analysis. For somewhat more detail, see Strydom (2009). 5 Beck (2005) offers a useful analysis of these actors. 6 Whereas Honneth (2009: 182–3) rejects the renewal of critical theory in terms of cosmopolitanism, both Beck’s (2006) and Delanty’s (2009) proposals suggest that a potentially fruitful connection is possible. 7 Strydom (1999) originally introduced the concept of ‘triple contingency’, while Trenz and Eder (2004) linked it to learning.

References Apel, Karl-Otto (1997) ‘Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace” as Historical Prognosis From the Point of View of Moral Duty’, in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds.) Perpetual Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 79–112. Beck, Ulrich. (2005) Power in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. Beck, Ulrich. (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. 89

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Bohman, James (1991) New Philosophy of Social Science. Cambridge: Polity. Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent (1991) De la Justification. Paris: Gallimard. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Calhoun, Craig (2003) ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in D. Archibugi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics. London: Verso. Cicourel, Aaron V. (1973) Cognitive Sociology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Delanty, Gerard (2000) Citizenship in a Global Age. Buckingham: Open University Press. Delanty, Gerard (2006) ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 25–47. Delanty, Gerard (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eder, Klaus (1999) ‘Integration durch Kultur?’, in R. Viehoff and R.T. Segers (eds.) Kultur, Identität, Europe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 147–79. Featherstone, Mike (2002) ‘Cosmopolis: An Introduction’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(1/2): 1–16. Garfinkel, Harold (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Prentice Hall. Goffman, Erving (1983) ‘The Interaction Order’, American Sociological Review, 48: 1–17. Goffman, Erving (1986 [1974]) Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Günther, Klaus (2001) ‘Rechtspluralismus und universaler Code der Legalität’, in L. Wingert and K. Günther (eds.) Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 539–67. Habermas, Jürgen (1997) ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight’, in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds.) Perpetual Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 113–54. Habermas, Jürgen (2001) The Postnational Constellation. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, Jürgen (2005) Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Held, David, McGrew, Anthony, Goldblatt, David and Perraton, Jonathan (1999) Global Transformations. Cambridge: Polity. Honneth, Axel (1992) Kampf um Anerkennung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel (2009) ‘Stationen auf dem Weg zu einer Kritischen Theorie der Anerkennung’, in M. Basaure, J.P. Reemstma and R. Willig (eds.) Erneuerung der Kritik: Axel Honneth im Gespräch. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 175–84. International Law Commission, ed. (1997) International Law on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century. New York: United Nations. Kant, Immanuel (1957 [1795]) Perpetual Peace. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Kant, Immanuel (1963 [1798]) On History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Kant, Immanuel (1996 [1797]) The Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mead, George Herbert (1974 [1934]) Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Max (1986) Kollektive Lernprozesse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Miller, Max (1992) ‘Rationaler Dissens’, in H.J. Giegel (ed.) Kommunikation und Konsens in modernen Gesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 31–58. Miller, Max (2010) Discourse Learning and Social Evolution. London: Routledge. Neederveen Pieterse, Jan (2004) Globalization and Culture. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Piaget, Jean (1968 [1932]) The Moral Judgement of the Child. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Strydom, Piet (1999) ‘Triple Contingency: The Theoretical Problem of the Public in Communication Societies’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25(1): 1–25. Strydom, Piet (2009) New Horizons of Critical Theory: Collective Learning and Triple Contingency. New Delhi: Shipra. Teubner, Gunter, ed. (1997) Global Law Without a State. Dartmouth: Ashgate. Therborn, Göran (2000) ‘Globalizations’, International Sociology, 15(1): 151–79. Touraine, Alain (1988) Return of the Actor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Trenz, Hans-Jørg and Eder, Klaus (2004) ‘The Democratizing Dynamics of a European Public Sphere’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(1): 5–25. Zolo, Danilo (1997) Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government. Cambridge: Polity.

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8 The idea of critical cosmopolitanism Gerard Delanty and Neal Harris

This chapter aims to set out the case for the idea of critical cosmopolitanism as a distinctive kind of cosmopolitanism. The notion of critical cosmopolitanism suggests a particular approach to cosmopolitanism that highlights its primarily critical characteristics. The critical thrust of cosmopolitanism has not always been emphasised by theorists of cosmopolitanism who have instead stressed its normative aspirations. Cosmopolitanism is certainly an approach to social and political analysis that is strongly normative and while views differ as to the scope and nature of its normativity, a cosmopolitan approach will inevitably tend towards a critical as opposed to an affirmative view of current realities. In contrast to recent post-colonialist scholarship, we argue that cosmopolitanism suggests a critical attitude, one which can be contrasted to an interpretive or descriptive approach to the social world and which is also more than normative critique. The conception of critical cosmopolitanism presented here aims to retain the notion of normative critique, but to extend it in the direction of a deeper notion of critique as world-disclosure. We thus hope to elucidate the critical presuppositions of cosmopolitanism. However, our aim is to go beyond an account of the critical nature of cosmopolitanism in general to a defence of the idea of a critical cosmopolitanism, as a particular kind of cosmopolitanism. As we shall attempt to demonstrate, this can be understood in two senses. A case could be made for critical cosmopolitanism simply as a critique of other conceptions of cosmopolitanism. While we argue this is an important aspect to critical cosmopolitanism, one can make a stronger claim for critical cosmopolitanism as an account of social and political reality that seeks to identify transformational possibilities within the present. In the first section we discuss some of the key defining features of critique, focusing on the conception of critique associated with the Hegelian-Marxist and critical theory heritage as the most relevant tradition. Against this background of a critical theory of society, we discuss in the second section how cosmopolitanism can be understood as a critical approach, broadly compatible with critical social theory. The third section develops this tie between critical theory and cosmopolitanism in terms of a more specific notion of critical cosmopolitanism. This can be seen as a contrast to the claims of liberal cosmopolitanism and some other schools of cosmopolitan thought. The fourth, final section, engages with contemporary post-colonial critiques of cosmopolitanism. We submit that such scholarship further undergirds the need for a critical 91

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cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitanism that is aware of the subject’s located nature within power relations, and thus closely attuned to the potential for immanent transcendence.

Critique and critical theory Since Horkheimer’s 1937 essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, and Marcuse’s 1941 Reason and Revolution, the Frankfurt School’s programme of critical theory has been the most systematic attempt to re-establish the Hegelian-Marxist critical tradition by linking that tradition with insights drawn from Freud and social psychology.1 Critical theory as associated with the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse was a form of critique that was primarily normative and can be termed normative critique in that it was constructed on the basis of a vision of an alternative – even if it could not be precisely named – to the prevailing social and political order. As in Horkheimer’s signal essay, it concerned social transformation and the elimination of social injustice. Their version of critical theory was normative in its concern with human emancipation and diagnostic in the recognition that existing social relations contain within them the means for their own overcoming. Critique is thus more than opposition to oppression or the pursuit of emancipation. In line with the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical method, the Frankfurt School theorists held that social reality was contradictory. The normative ideas of modern society were not realised or only partly actualised. These ideas, which can be termed regulative ideas of Reason, represent both future potential and at the same time a false consciousness in that they do not appear to members of society as normative ideas of society that take only an ideological form. Understood in these terms, normative critique was based on the central idea of immanent transcendence, namely the notion that society can transcend the given through a re-working and re-appropriation of its own self-understanding. Normative critique, understood in these terms, required a diagnostic approach to modern society in order to interpret the immanent signs of transcendence. Normative diagnostic critique, as a form of transcendence, proceeds immanently, as opposed to being an external perspective or an attitude that sees political transformation as deriving from outside the horizons of a given society.2 Critical theory thus gave expression to a moral vision of the future possibilities of society as deriving from a process of social transformation driven forward by its internal dynamics. The Frankfurt School theorists stressed that this included the transformation of the individual’s psyche as well as institutional change. Critique was the key to this and a critical sociology was defined methodologically as one that sought to identify possibilities for critical thinking. The kind of critical sociology that the later Frankfurt School fostered was essentially one of ideology critique. Sociology’s main purpose was the critical diagnostic analysis of ideology in order to demonstrate false consciousness. In line with the methodology of immanent transcendence, truth had to be dialectically demonstrated as a way of understanding social phenomena that were capable of expressing contradictions and thus contained unresolved tensions and possibilities. Immanent transcendence signals a form of critique based on the internal transformation of society through processes of self-reflection, and is a contrast to both immanent critique and transcendent critique. This tradition of critique can be contrasted to other approaches, such as those of Foucault or Bourdieu. Foucauldian critique is primarily an exercise in demonstrating how a subject is discursively constituted in power relations, while Bourdieu’s notion of critique is a reflexive methodology by which social science detaches itself from the social world in order to understand it. Neither are concerned with the identification of immanent possibilities for transformation within the present. The Frankfurt School are now best remembered as anti-positivist social theorists and critics of mass culture, but their programme originally was an empirical sociology grounded in a political 92

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conception of society; their endeavour represented the theoretically most sophisticated alternative to what Horkheimer termed ‘traditional theory’, namely all forms of inquiry that take the given as the only form of reality. Honneth has argued that the conception of critique at work here is that of a ‘disclosing critique’. Critique proceeds by means of a disclosure of the social world whereby new interpretations are possible and which endeavour to alter our way of seeing the world: A disclosing critique of society that attempts to change our value beliefs by evoking new ways of seeing cannot simply use a vocabulary of argumentative justification; rather, it can achieve its effects only if it employs its resources that, by condensing or shifting meanings, show facts hitherto unperceived in social reality. (Honneth, 2000: 123; see also Bonacker, 2006) With Habermas, critical sociology had the precise goal of locating transcendence within the immanent structures of communication. From his early work on the public sphere to his theory of communicative action and the later discourse theory of democracy, Habermas has brought about a major reorientation of critique. In line with the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, the defining feature of critical sociology is the task of illustrating how the regulative ideas of Reason are articulated by social actors in situations of crisis and conflict where contrary political positions force deeper discursively achieved results. Normative critique thus becomes linked to a critical cognitive theory of developmental change in societal learning. Critique is thus forward-looking and concerned with shifts in self-understanding. Situations of major crisis – capitalist crisis or the wider conflict of system and life-world – give rise to social struggles. Habermas’s critical theory directs empirical analysis to those sites of contestation where cognitive changes for a better world are likely to be codified. In essence, critique as a methodology for social science is addressed to a critical problem and seeks to explain the specific form normative or regulative ideas take as a result of competing positions and the identification of pathologies. Critique proceeds from a critical issue or crisis to an account of the normative ideas that are involved to an analysis of how social actors position themselves with respect to the problem. In this way, macro issues are translated into the micro level of analysis. Now, in the critical theory tradition the cosmopolitan implications were at best undeveloped and much of the focus was on Western society and on issues that were not specifically cosmopolitan. Habermas’s political philosophy, while often invoking cosmopolitanism, is primarily a product of the republican tradition (Habermas, 2003). Indeed, much of his work is based on what he has referred to as an ‘occidental understanding of the world’ (see Delanty, 1997). Yet, despite these limits the theoretical framework of the critical theory tradition offers an important basis for a critical cosmopolitanism. In Habermas’s work the idea of the progressive expansion of communicative rationality is particularly pertinent to the cosmopolitan view of the world in terms of a communicatively grounded orientation towards understanding and agreement. The notion of the overcoming of differences through deliberation and the critical scrutiny of assumptions can be directly related to the widening of moral and political horizons in cosmopolitan thought. However, the significance of Habermas’s work for cosmopolitanism resides less in his political theory than in his communication theory and, more generally, his critical hermeneutics, that is an interpretative approach that would see the Gadamerian ‘fusion of horizons’ in the spirit of a critical engagement and self-problematisation of what had been previously taken for granted. In the encounter with the Other, one’s horizons are broadened to take into account the perspective of the Other. This has been relatively neglected in his later work which has focused on a political philosophy addressed largely to Europe and to the emergence of an internal European cosmopolitanism. 93

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The idea, developed by Honneth of a disclosing critique in which new ways of seeing the world emerge out of the critical encounter of different viewpoints is of major significance when it comes to the analysis of cosmopolitan phenomena. The notion of ‘world-disclosure’ – or a ‘disclosing critique’ to use Axel Honneth’s formulation – can be taken to be the core defining tenet of the epistemological framework of cosmopolitanism.3 This notion of critique very closely resonates with the cosmopolitan character of world-openness, which as discussed above is a defining feature of the cosmopolitan condition. It can be additionally noted that cosmopolitanism suggests a critical direction in social analysis in the assumption that social reality is imbued with normative counter-factuals, such as notions of social justice, the universality of rights.4 Drawing on what Habermas termed the ‘unforced force of the argument’ (Habermas, 1991: 123), Forst’s critical theory of justification shares many of the normative and critical objectives of cosmopolitanism (Forst, 2007, 2014). To Forst, the normative basis of critique lies in the fundamental question of justification: individuals must only be subjected to commands, structures and norms which can be justified (Forst, 2007). There is an explicit normative universalism here, and, while Forst does not directly invoke the language of cosmopolitanism, he writes of a critical theory of transnational justice. Forst’s principle of reciprocal-universal justification, much like cosmopolitanism, emphasises the importance of toleration, discussion and egalitarianism. This finds praxis in the veto-right of the subject to decry conduct and discourse that cannot be justified (Forst, 2007). Equitable inclusion in the global political community necessitates ‘being an equal member in the realm of subjects and authorities to justification’ (Forst, 2014: 101). Forst represents the latest development of the so-called ‘fourth generation of Critical Theory’; his work thus illustrates the increasing centrality of cosmopolitan concerns to the critical theoretical endeavour. The next section will explore more specifically this confluence of critique and cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitanism as critique As Delanty argues in The Cosmopolitan Imagination, cosmopolitanism offers critical social theory with a means to address new challenges (Delanty, 2009). It offers a solution to the neglect of globalisation and a more general concern with global issues than was typical of the older critical theory tradition, which in many ways was confined to the analysis of modern European civilisation. The idea of a critical cosmopolitanism is relevant to the renewal of critical social theory in its traditional concern with the critique of social reality and the search for immanent transcendence. It also offers a route out of the critique of domination and a general notion of emancipation that has so far constrained critical theory. It provides a promising approach to connect normative critique with empirically based analysis focused on exploring new ways of seeing the world. Such forms of world-disclosure have become an unavoidable part of social reality today in terms of people’s experiences, identities, solidarities and values. These dimensions represent the foundations for a new conception of immanent transcendence. The notion of immanent transcendence constitutes, as argued by Piet Strydom (2011a), the core of the cosmopolitan imagination in so far as this is a way of viewing the social world in terms of its immanent possibilities for self-transformation and which can be realised only by taking the cosmopolitan perspective of Other as well as global principles of justice. The general characteristics of cosmopolitanism include: the centrality of openness and overcoming of divisions, the interaction, the logic of exchange, the encounter and dialogue, deliberative communication, self and societal transformation (transformational) and critical evaluation. Despite the Western genealogy of the word cosmopolitanism, the term is used today in a ‘postWestern’ register of meaning. In this sense it is a ‘post-Western’ orientation that is located neither 94

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on the national nor global level, but at the interface of the local and the global. These characteristics are empirical in the sense of being expressed in social reality as particular kinds of experience, but they are also forms of experience that entail their own interpretation as well as being the reference points for more reflexive forms of evaluation. Taken together, these dimensions and characteristics of cosmopolitanism suggest a broad definition of cosmopolitanism as a condition of openness to the world and entailing self and societal transformation in light of the encounter with the Other. Central to such transformation is pluralisation and the possibility of deliberation. It is evident, too, and it follows from the above that cosmopolitanism is not the same as internationalism, globalisation, internationalism or transnationalism. Thus cosmopolitanism is better seen more in terms of a normative critique of globalisation and as an alternative to internationalism. Transnationalism is more a non-necessary precondition of cosmopolitanism and one should resist the equation of cosmopolitanism with mobility per se. The term critical cosmopolitanism signals the critical and transformative nature of cosmopolitanism. This is what distinguishes it from other uses of the term, which are often unclarified. The term was probably first used by Rabinow (1986) and has been invoked by Mignolo (2000) and also Rumford (2008). For Mignolo critical cosmopolitanism is a post-colonial critique of the Eurocentric presuppositions of cosmopolitan thought. In the sense we are using the term as it draws attention to the transformative potential within the present. Cosmopolitanism as a normative critique refers to phenomena that are generally in tension with their social context, which they seek to transform. This is what makes it particularly difficult to specify since it is a discourse or phenomenon that is expressed in its effects on social contexts and in its response to social problems that are experienced by people in different contexts. Cosmopolitanism is thus both a normative theory (which makes cognitive claims) and also a particular kind of social phenomenon. One of the problems with cosmopolitanism is that it is both an empirical and a normative concept, that is, as it is increasingly recognised now in the expanding literature, it is both an experience or reality – in the sense of a lived experience and a measurable empirical condition – and an interpretation of the experience of the encounter. In so far as it is an interpretation normative aspects enter into it. The difficulty, then, is that cosmopolitanism belongs to those phenomena that are both empirical and normative. In so far as it entails interpretative elements, it can in addition be characterised as having an evaluative dimension. In this latter sense cosmopolitanism can be held to be a critical attitude and, from the perspective of social science, a particular kind of analysis. This is an analysis that is essentially critical in that it is an approach to social reality that views social reality not only as an empirical phenomenon, but also as given formed by counter-factuals. It is the nature of these counter-factuals that they involve normative ideas. Cosmopolitanism can thus be said to concern empirical phenomena or reality, interpretations (which are also empirical but normatively guided) and evaluations (which are on a higher order and require explanations, and which is where social science comes in). One of the features of cosmopolitanism as a process of self-transformation is its communicative dimension. As a dialogic condition cosmopolitanism can be understood in terms of critical dialogue or deliberation. A deliberative conception of culture and politics captures the cosmopolitan spirit of engaging with the perspective of the Other as opposed to rejecting it. This is where the tie between cosmopolitanism and critical theory is strong. Habermas’s reorientation of critical theory towards communication and deliberative democracy still remains one of the more important resources for a theory of critical cosmopolitanism, though this has not received much attention (Habermas 2006). In this chapter we are emphasising the critical logic of cosmopolitanism in opening up new horizons. This is a condition in which cultures undergo transformation in light of the encounter with the Other. It can take different forms. Ranging from the soft forms of 95

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multiculturalism to major re-orientations in self-understanding in light of global principles or re-evaluations of cultural heritage and identity as a result of inter-cultural encounters. What is noteworthy is the interactive dimension to the fusion of horizons, which is not a condition of external agency or a self-transcending subjectivity, but an orientation that develops out of the interplay of Self, Other and World relations. This is essentially a dialogic relation. The cosmopolitan condition emerges out of the logic of the encounter, exchange and dialogue and the emergence of universalistic rules rather than by the assertion of a higher order of truths. It has been recognised in classical sociological theory in the interactionist tradition (G.H. Mead) and in genetic psychology (Piaget) that processes of universalisation, such as generalisation and abstraction, emerge from the inter-relation of different points of view and in turn to the formation of second-order reflexive or cognitive meta-rules (see Aboulafa, 2006; Strydom, 2011a, 2011b). It is in this sense, then, of a relativatisation of universalism that the epistemological framework of cosmopolitanism is a post-universalism since it stands for a universalism that does not demand universal assent or that everyone identifies with a single interpretation. Depending on the social context or historical situation social actors will interpret universal rules differently and put them to different uses. It is this feature of cosmopolitanism that distinguishes it from older conceptions of universalism in the sense of a universal order of values. Cosmopolitanism, properly understood, is rather characterised by a ‘post-universalistic’ conception of truth. By this is simply meant that statements of truth and justice, etc. are not absolute, immutable or derivable from an objective order of universal values, but nonetheless it is still possible to make judgements and evaluations. Universalist claims on science are stronger than claims in the domain of cultural and morality (see Chernilo in this volume). For cosmopolitanism, then, universalism is best understood as differentiated. This understanding of universalism has been variously recognised by philosophers as different as Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas or Martha Nussbaum, and virtually all of the analytical tradition. In other words, cosmopolitanism entails a weak universalism that is compatible with relativism, understood as, in Sahlins’s formulation, ‘the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible’ (Sahlins, 2000: 21). As discussed above, a methodological feature of critical theory is its concern with the objectivity of a problem: critique is driven by the fact that the social world produces problems which social actors and social science respond to in their different ways. Social sciences seeks to offer explanations which have the critical function of assisting social actors and the wider society in finding solutions and in understanding the nature of the problem. This concern with societal problems is also what animates the cosmopolitan imagination and gives to cosmopolitanism a critical edge. For cosmopolitan thought social problems are the primary challenge and are the context in which the broadening of moral and political horizons occurs. While the kind of problems that critical theory has been traditionally concerned with are those associated with the ‘critique of domination’, the cosmopolitan re-constitution of critical theory would rather focus on those societal problems that are global in scope. Both the history of cosmopolitanism and critical theory share a concern with war and violence. The background to much of the critical theory tradition before Habermas was the centrality of the holocaust as the culmination of modernity. Cosmopolitanism, too, has been a response to the experience of war and violence in the twentieth century. The emergence of cosmopolitanism after 1945 – as reflected in developments such as crimes against humanity, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the general movements towards world-wide democratisation, the project of European integration – was in many ways shaped by the widely felt need to find global solutions based on dialogue rather than on violence. 96

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The theoretical framework of critical cosmopolitanism As argued above, cosmopolitanism refers to a specific kind of reality and is not merely a normative or interpretative approach that can be conducted without reference to social reality. The framework we are proposing for cosmopolitan analysis assumes a relational conception of the social, broadly defined. This is not the place to consider the competing relational approaches, for example Actor Network Theory is one such contender (and one hostile to critical and normative theory), as is the sociological analysis of Charles Tilly, and various schools of network analysis, Elias’s figurational sociology, and more broadly relational sociology (see Emirbayer, 1997). For present purposes we would like simply to assert the primary ontological focus of cosmopolitan analysis as relational and to highlight in particular cosmopolitanism as comprised of different kinds of relationships. The kinds of relationships in question are those between Self and Other and World. Self and Other relationships are worked out in the context of engagements with the wider context of the World. There are four main kinds of cosmopolitan relationships which can be said to constitute the ontological framework of cosmopolitan analysis.5 In this account, dispositional and systemic considerations are subordinated to a relational conception of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan dispositions/attitudes or orientations and values should be seen in the context of particular kinds of relationships which are the focus of analysis rather than specific social actors. They are embodied in cultural forms, such as frames, socio-cognitive structures, cultural repertoires, discourses, quasi-objective cultural phenomena. In these cultural forms universalistic meta-rules are present to varying degrees. All involve different levels of reflexivity. The first is the relativisation of one’s own identity. This is a type of relationship in which a reinterpretation of culture occurs as a result of the encounter of one culture with another. The use of the other to reinterpret one’s own culture has been a feature of many forms of everyday cosmopolitanism, such as what is often called ‘cultural omnivorousness’ based on consumption, but also includes ‘soft’ kinds of cosmopolitanism around curiosity/appreciation of other cultures, and which are often found in educational programmes. In terms of dispositions, it is characterised by an orientation towards tolerance of diversity, recognition of interconnectedness and a general disposition of openness to others. The second is the positive recognition of the other. This is a type of relationship in which self and other encounters take a stronger form involving political and ethical commitments. In this instance a step in the direction of cosmopolitan citizenship occurs whereby universalistic metarules play a greater role. It is a stronger reflexive relationship entailing the inclusion of the other, not just awareness as in the previous type of relationship. Such types of relationship can be found in the so-called politics of recognition, as in liberal multiculturalism, the awareness of vulnerability, ethical and political consciousness and responsibility for others. One major expression of cosmopolitanism on this level is in the internationalisation of law. The third type of relationship concerns the mutual evaluation of cultures or identities, both one’s own and that of the other. This is a self-reflexive mode of relationship that is based on cultural distance, scepticism and critique and makes it possible for people to mediate between cultures. It will typically be found in dialogic encounters and is sustained by deliberative style communication. Such kinds of relationships make possible the critique of cultures. Expressions of reflexivity can be found in varieties of post-nationalism and what are often referred to as rooted, or embedded forms of cosmopolitanism. The fourth type of cosmopolitan relationships is a shared normative culture in which self and other relations are mediated through an orientation towards world consciousness. In this case global issues are predominant. This kind of cosmopolitanism entails the formation of a moral 97

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consciousness rooted in emotional responses to global issues, concern with global ethics based on shared values, putting the non-national interest before the national interest. One of the main expressions of such kinds of relationship is in new forms of civil society, such as global or cosmopolitan civil society. This, then, is a yet stronger expression of cosmopolitanism relating mostly to legal, institutional arrangements and major societal transformation whereby cosmopolitanism becomes constitutive of a new politics, global civil society, etc. It should be noted that these four levels are not necessarily pre-conditions of each other, for they can be combined in different ways and one level may not presuppose another. It has also been noted in research on cosmopolitanism that people (or social units) are not cosmopolitan equally in all levels. However, as ‘ideal typifications’ of cosmopolitanism – the sense of Weber’s ‘empirical science of concrete reality’ – they represent generic forms of relationships and varying degrees of ‘thin’ and ‘thickness’ (Weber, 1949). The relational ontology of cosmopolitanism discussed in the foregoing can be linked with the critical theory tradition, in particular with the critical hermeneutic turn initiated by Habermas. As argued above, this resides in a view of the nature of interpretation as process of selfproblematisation and reflexivity in which critique is integral to, or immanent in, social relations and the self-understanding of social actors. We have stressed the processual nature of this in terms of degrees of reflexivity. In this view, then, cosmopolitanism is not a zero-sum condition, present or absent, but is always a matter of degree. Viewed in this light, the question then is not whether or not cosmopolitanism exists, but to what degree is it present in a given social phenomenon.

Buttressing the impetus for a critical cosmopolitanism Recent post-colonial scholarship presents a renewed assault on the emancipatory, critical potential of traditional forms of cosmopolitanism (Dhawan, 2013; Rao, 2012). Dhawan argues that liberal cosmopolitanism is guilty of ‘erasing the continuities between cosmopolitanism, neocolonialism, and economic globalization’ and can indeed be ‘mobilized in service . . . [of ] . . . predatory global capitalism’ (Dhawan, 2013: 140). Pagden (2000) draws attention to cosmopolitanism’s, often post hoc, complicity in the discursive construction of empire, and of interventionist foreign policy. Rao goes as far to ask whether the ‘subaltern outsider’ can even constitute a cosmopolitan subject; in a world of Kissinger and structural adjustment, can the Other conscionably ‘be expected to be cosmopolitan too?’ (Rao, 2012: 168). Yet, despite these acute criticisms, an engagement with post-colonial scholarship does not lead us inexorably to renege on the possibilities of critical cosmopolitanism, as outlined above. Indeed, Dhawan, drawing on Spivak (2012) argues powerfully against a retreat to ‘nativist denunciations of the legacies of the Enlightenment’ and ‘ethnocentric searches for “pure” non-Western knowledge systems’ (Dhawan, 2013: 156). The project of decolonisation must not be about discarding ‘the “master’s tools”’ (Dhawan, 2013: 157). Rather, Dhawan’s critique furthers the essential requirement for a critical cosmopolitanism as a framework attuned to the complicities of othering discourse in global social-structural modalities of power (Dhawan, 2013: 157). We submit that a critical cosmopolitanism, as outlined above, offers the analytical tools to respond to the post-colonial critique of liberal cosmopolitanism. For Spivak, such an exercise entails investment in ‘epistemic change’ at ‘both ends of transnationality’ (Spivak 2012; Dhawan, 2013: 141). The dialectic of self-other-world, central to the critical cosmopolitan understanding of subjectivation and world-disclosure, offers precisely such possibilities for new forms of constituting the self and of knowing the Other. An essential capacity of this dialectic is that the occidental is placed in the position of Other when the self is non-occidental. We submit that a critical cosmopolitanism offers the theoretical infrastructure to disclose, and critique, its own imbrication in power relations. The work 98

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of the critical theorist, as for the critical cosmopolitan, is to render visible cognitive and institutional complicity in structures of power. Through a committed application of the dialectic of self-otherworld, critical cosmopolitanism promises normatively girded, world-disclosing critique. Ultimately, the post-colonial critique of cosmopolitanism must be read as an attack on liberal cosmopolitanism, which further underscores the need for a critical cosmopolitanism.

Conclusion The contemporary relevance of cosmopolitanism consists of its critical significance as both an analysis of social and political problems and as an account of the social world in terms of immanent possibilities for transcendence. Critical cosmopolitanism views the social world’s transformative possibilities that are located within the present but are future oriented. In view of the overwhelming significance of globalisation and global challenges for contemporary societies, critical cosmopolitanism can be seen as a normatively based critique of globalisation. It is undoubtedly the case that the widespread appeal of cosmopolitanism in the human and social sciences is connected with the fact that globalisation, in the sense of a globally connected world, does not in itself offer a normative account of a just world or a better life. Critical cosmopolitanism is addressed to the problems of a globalised world. The position we have argued for in this chapter is that critical cosmopolitanism is not simply normative critique, but is grounded in the very constitution of social relations. Critical cosmopolitanism thus represents more than a reformatting of the post-colonialist critique of liberal cosmopolitanism; instead it furthers both the normative and critical ideals. It is in this sense that critical cosmopolitanism could be seen in somewhat stronger terms than a re-description of cosmopolitanism more generally or a term that highlights the critical component of cosmopolitanism. The key point here is that a critical cosmopolitan approach refers to immanent possibilities for transcendence such as those that might be related to concrete social struggles, global dialogue, inter-cultural encounters, etc. For these reasons critical cosmopolitanism is perfectly compatible with notions of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ and generally with conceptions of cosmopolitanism that seek to relate cosmopolitanism to socially contextualised situations. However, where it differs from such approaches is in its concern with the identification of moments of self-transformation in contexts in which there is an expansion in reflexive capacities and ultimately in those situations in which something undergoes normative transformation from the encounter with the Other. This is why cosmopolitanism, as a mode of critique, is not simply manifest in the fact of hybridity or transnationalism.

Notes 1 For diverse perspectives, see Calhoun (1995) and Geuss (1981). 2 We are drawing in part in this section from (Delanty, 2011). 3 The terms ‘world-disclosure’ and a ‘disclosing critique’ have been variously used by Habermas and Honneth. 4 This has been reflected in much of recent cosmopolitan scholarship: Beck (2006), Benhabib (2008), Delanty (2009). 5 In an earlier publication Delanty (2009) referred to these as capacities, but he now thinks they need to be considered as relationships.

References Aboulafa, M. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and the Continental Philosophy. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 99

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Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Outlook. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benhabib, S. (2008) Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonacker, T. (2006) ‘Disclosing Critique: The Contingency of Understanding in Adorno’s Interpretative Social Theory’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(3): 363–83. Calhoun, C. (1995) Critical Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Delanty, G. (1997) ‘Habermas and Occidental Rationalism: The Politics of Identity, Social Learning and the Cultural Limits of Moral Universalism’, Sociological Theory, 15(3): 30–59. Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2011) ‘Varieties of Critique in Sociological Theory and their Methodological Implications for Social Research’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 19(1): 68–92. Dhawan, N. (2013) ‘Coercive Cosmopolitanism and Impossible Solidarities’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 22(1): 139–66. Emirbayer, M. (1997) ‘A Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 281–317. Forst, R. (2007) Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Elemente einer konstruktivistischer Theorie der Gerechtigkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Forst, R. (2014) Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics. Trans. C. Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press. Geuss, R. (1981) The Idea of a Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1991) Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (2003) ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Europe’, Journal of Democracy, 14(4): 86–100. Habermas, J. (2006) ‘Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research’, Communication Theory, 16: 411–26. Honneth, A. (2000) ‘The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debate in Social Criticism’, Constellations, 7(1): 116–27. Mignolo, W. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pagden, A. (2000) ‘Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism’, Constellations, 7(1): 3–22. Rabinow, P. (1986) ‘Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Postmodernity in Anthropology’. In Writing Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnology, eds. J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus. Berkley: University of California Press. Rao, R. (2012) ‘Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism: Making Place for Nationalism’. In Democratic Predicament: Cultural Diversity in Europe and India, eds. J. Tripathy and S. Padmanabhan. New Delhi: Routledge. Rumford, C. (2008) Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization Theory. London: Routledge. Sahlins, M. (2000) Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books. Spivak, G. (2012) An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strydom, P. (2011a) Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology. London: Routledge. Strydon, P. (2011b) ‘The Cognitive and Metacognitive Dimension of Social and Political Theory’. In Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, eds. G. Delanty and S. Turner. London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1949) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: The Free Press.

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9 Border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism Overcoming colonial/imperial differences Walter D. Mignolo

When invited to send a contribution to the International Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies I was surprised by the title. I never thought that “cosmopolitanism” was a field of study. Although I do not follow Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan legacies, I do take seriously the fact that for Kant “cosmopolitanism” was not an object or something to be studied but a project to be realized, although with the clear idea that what counts is the process, the orientation, and not the point of arrival. For we do now know in what direction we are going but do not know where we going to arrive. Cosmopolitanism, as I analyzed here, was since Kant and during its revival in the nineties a disputed political project. I argue here for decolonial cosmopolitanism as an option parallel in friendship sometimes and contention in others, with other co-existing options: liberal cosmopolitanism, Marxist cosmopolitanism, and postmodern cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitanism and Eurocentrism Cosmopolitanism is Eurocentered from its inception. How to turn it into decolonial cosmopolitanism is the question my argument addresses. To overcome Eurocentered cosmopolitanism and turn it into cosmopolitan localism (e.g., decolonial), we need to understand Eurocentered cosmopolitanism. The goal is not just to understand it or to propose a “new” interpretation. On the contrary, to understand how Eurocentered cosmopolitanism works is not an end in itself, but the first step toward overcoming it. Unless you are happy with Eurocentered cosmopolitanism and decide to “study” it to show how good for humanity at large it could be. Simultaneously, any cosmopolitan thoughts today have to take into account two basic components of the world order: dependency (developed and underdeveloped countries, emerging and fully fledged economies, the memories of the First/Second/Third World division and, last but not least, the clash/ dialogues of civilizations) and power differentials. A cosmopolitan world order that is dictated from above has all the features of global imperial designs where a set of institutions or countries determines the rules to be followed for the rest of them. Decolonial cosmopolitanism proposes another vision and has other ambitions. By describing cosmopolitanism as Eurocentered I mean what Carl Schmitt meant by the use of the word in reference to the second nomos of the earth, which began to be put in place by 1500 and brought together “global linear thinking” (his expression) and the Jus Publicum 101

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Europaeum (that is, international law), an expression that is part of Schmitt’s book title. The image of the Orbis Terrarum Christianus was a consequence of the second nomos and the ambition and the vision of Christian theology (Schmitt 2003).1 Thus, if cosmopolitanism is a Eurocentered project backed up and supported by “global linear thinking,” decolonial cosmopolitanism would be pluriversal and dissenting, backed up and supported by border thinking. Now, to understand how border thinking goes hand in hand with decolonial cosmopolitanism (e.g. cosmopolitan localism), we need to take a detour and explore some aspects of the present world order, which is not so cosmopolitan. It would be necessary to understand how Eurocentered cosmopolitanism operated by inventing, transforming, and maintaining imperial and colonial differences. Border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism requires histories others than the one we have, histories that re-inscribe in the present the silence of imperial histories. It is through border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism that it would be possible to delink from Kantian Eurocentered legacies. For cosmopolitanism cannot be a homogeneous world order (which is precisely what neo-liberal globalization attempted to do and now we are witnessing its failure) but heterogeneous: cosmopolitan localisms.

Cosmopolitanism and globalism/cosmopolitanization and globalization In the last quarter of the twentieth century scholarly books and monthly magazines devoted a great deal of attention to nationalism. Nationalism was indeed a cover term to explore specific and interrelated issues such as citizenship, ethnicity, the state and religious fundamentalism, among others. By the late nineties and the first decade of the twenty-first century, nationalism no longer occupied center stage. Two new words moved in to occupy its place and received the attention of the media, the scholarly world, Davos, and the UN: globalization and cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism was more common in the scholarship while globalization crossed the academy with institutional politics and international organisms. Now, beyond the audiences that each word attracted, there is something interesting in the popularity of both words. Why was globalization and not globalism established as a reality? And why was cosmopolitanism and not cosmopolitanization (which Microsoft’s thesaurus does not accept) established? The most obvious, and perhaps unconscious, meaning of globalization is that the word refers to a stage in history that is just happening although what is just happening has its roots in global linear thinking since the sixteenth century. And since that is the way the world was believed to be, social scientists and humanists “study” what it is. You can be against or for it, you can support it or try to stop it, but you accept it as a matter of fact. It appears as if there is no agency behind globalization; globalization is its own agency. But globalization hides that it is not an entity but a project of homogenizing the world under the will and desires of Western civilization. It is indeed globalism. Kantian cosmopolitanism is part of that genealogy of thought, from liberalism to neo-liberalism. On the contrary, the word cosmopolitanism declares from the beginning that it is a project (like Liberalism, Marxism, Islamism). Christianism is not admitted by Microsoft Word’s thesaurus, which indicates that it is taken not as a project but as an entity. Cosmopolitanism names a project rather than an entity. Someone has to make it happen. Now, we can understand why it was globalization, and not globalism, as the key word in the global vocabulary: to describe it as globalism would have made it evident that there was some agency behind globalism and that agency would soon became clear. Was the agency neo-liberalism, as advanced and advocated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, following up on the first experiment in Chile under Augusto Pinochet with the support of Washington (and the visit of Milton Friedman) to spread the neo-liberal doctrine after the fall of Salvador Allende?2 102

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In that regard, cosmopolitanism also re-emerged in political and intellectual conversations in the nineties with a double, although most of the time non-explicit, task: to denounce the shortcomings of nationalism and to promote a convivial global order. The first attempted to revive cosmopolitanism by engaging Immanuel Kant’s legacies and displacing “internationalism,” a term preferred by people of Marxist leaning, although the word was also relevant to the liberal rhetoric of development and modernization in the fifties and sixties. Instead, globalization in the eighties was the new neo-liberal face of liberal internationalism in the sixties. Both had development and modernization in common. Basically then, if globalization/globalism was a neo-liberal project, cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitanization was basically a secular, (honest) liberals and Marxists (and sometimes those in between both) type of project. If globalization kept globalist projects hidden, cosmopolitanism (in its Kantian and current liberal version) hides that there is a project (liberal project confronting neo-liberal globalism), while it assumes that there is a natural course of history (without agency other than history itself) that has to be pushed to the forefront. Christians did not engage with the cosmo-political conversation. Christian’s designs are geared towards the Christianization of the planet. Cosmopolitanism is a Western secular project. Or, if you wish, cosmopolitanism is the secularization of Christianization. For its part, Muslim cosmopolitanism has entered the debate recently (e.g. Lawrence and Cook 2005; Ernst and Martin 2010). We have at least three contending cosmo-political designs. Each of them had their own and equivalent project. Before Kant aimed at secular cosmopolitanism Christians had their own goals: Christianization. Wasn’t Christianization a project that intended to cover, if not the cosmos, at least the globe? By this I mean that Kant’s cosmopolitanism did not travel directly from Greece to Germany. It took a detour from Italy to the Iberian Peninsula and to the New World when Western Christians saw in this unexpected event the possibility of Christianizing the world. Kant’s cosmopolitanism was its secular version. The detour shows us something that has been missing in liberal and Marxist debates on the topic. And it is this: when Kant re-introduced the Greek word cosmo-polis to Europe in the eighteenth century, he severed the links between the polis and the cosmos, which had been crucial for the Greeks as well as for Ancient Civilizations in the Andes (from Tiwanaku to the Incas), as well as for the Mayans and ancient China. One of the tasks of decolonial cosmopolitanism is to re-introduce the links between the cosmos and the polis through the reinscription of Spirituality in socio-economic organization. The proposal is neither going back to Greece nor to any particular God. It is first and foremost to reinscribe in the present and toward the future categories of thought, ways of living and believing, the human respect for life that Westerners labeled “nature” and which became detached from the “human and culture.” Before Kant, in the sixteenth century, global projects were initiatives of what we today call “the West.” Carl Schmitt (2003) called it “global linear thinking” in the making of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Global linear thinking coupled with the origination of international law (de Vitoria, Grotius), was the first attempt at making the world an orbe Christianus, which Kant translated into a secular global cosmo-polis. As a consequence, the Islamization of the world which may have been a potential ideal since the sixth century of the Christian, by the mid-eighteenth century began to depend on the West. The “Chinafication” of the world, on the other hand, was not a project that can be detected, as far as I know, in China until recently and as a consequence of the Opium War, 1848, that forced China to be in relation with the West (perhaps it was the moment in which the West was opening up its own demise). In a nutshell then, globalization and cosmopolitanism (and their counterpart, globalism and cosmopolitanization), were names for particular projects, by particular actors, that emerged at the end of the twentieth century to overcome the limits that nation/states presented to any project of 103

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globalizing the markets and to have “corporates without borders” like we have “doctors without borders.” On the other hand, liberal and Marxist intellectuals, independent media and the like, found in the remapping of “cosmopolitanism” a way to announce their project to overcome the limits of the nation/state and to confront globalization. However, globalization and cosmopolitanism, fighting against each other, had a common enemy: the nation/state. The common enemy placed both projects in the same camp, pursuing their efforts to build a global world without frontiers that, apparently for some, was much better than a world divided by nation-states. China did not buy into that rhetoric. Neither did several South American countries (Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador) who saw that there are no frontiers to the movement of capital and armies to the South, and that there are big walls to stop people from the South coming into North America. NAFTA’s role was, among others, to facilitate movements of armies and money to the South and stop people wanting to move to the North. Border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism are also responses to this particular structure of the imperial equation. But a new player enters the “cosmo-polis” game toward the end of the twentieth century: “dialogue among civilizations.”

Cosmopolitanism between the clash and dialogue among civilizations Dialogue among Civilizations is a project not to be studied but to be enacted. You could of course “study” it. But if you do it, you should ask what project is the one you engage in when you “study” projects such as Dialogue among Civilizations, or Cosmopolitanism as the case may be. If you study Dialogue among Civilizations or Cosmopolitanism you do not engage in those projects but in something else. Academic projects, for example, consist in studying other projects. Whether your project is contributing to the project you are studying is a question that cannot go ignored. What is the politics of scholarship when you study cosmopolitanism and dialogue among civilizations? Mohammad Khatami responded to Samuel Huntington’s “clash” with “dialogues of civilizations” (Khatami 2000).3 Khatami did it explicitly as a political project. The difference between them is that, assumedly, Huntington’s was not promoting clash of civilizations; he was apparently “studying” it. He presented his work as a social scientist, explaining and prognosticating. Or was Huntington disguising a project under the code of social sciences, whose goal is to explain and forecast, but not to enact given project? However, Khatami’s response was clearly and loudly a project, not an explanation or a forecast. But perhaps Khatami guessed or interpreted that indeed Huntington’s was not only an explanation by a political scientist but was mainly a proposal by someone who used to work for the US government. What was already becoming apparent in the nineties with the rapid economic growth and global impact of Chinese economy was accentuated by the collapse of the physical building of the World Trade Center (attributed to Islamic extremists), and its global symbolic effect and impact. It was becoming apparent at the time that behind China’s economic growth there was a long lasting civilization that was directly interfered by the Opium War in the process of the expansion of Western civilization. Non-believers discarded Confucianism as a viable argument for China, although the same non-believers did not question the viable argument that Christianity continues to offer to the West; even behind France’s famous “laicité” the shadows of Calvin loom large. Concomitantly, the collapse of the Twin Towers, and the alleged interference of Islam into Western civilization, was a forgotten historical episode. It became apparent in 9/11 that the Middle East, in the imagery of the West since the eighteenth century, was an Arabic region all of a sudden turned into an Islamic region. Islam, as religion, overcame the secular ethnicity of Arabic identity. 104

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Efficacious dialogue among people of distinct civilizational background presupposes a common understanding of what civilizations are. As a matter of fact it was in and during the Spanish and British Empires and the enactment of global linear thinking that the idea of civilization was construed. What would civilization be if not Western? The US? The well-kept secret is that the historical foundation of Western civilization is capitalist economy. But Western historiography on Western history (that is, the historiography that created the idea of Western Civilization) had been written mainly after the Enlightenment based on two principles: the historical origin of modernity and the historical origin of capitalism (Wallerstein 1995; Goody 2004), silencing two centuries of Western expansion since the Renaissance. Efficacious dialogues among people and States grounded on distinct civilizational histories shall be clear and explicit of the fact that the Western is the newest of all civilizations. And that is also the Civilization that in the process of its formation and expansion came to impose itself over co-existing Civilizations. The historical foundation of international law (which did not exist before 1500) was the determinant factor in both the formation of Western Civilization and of its imperial triumph. There was no international law before 1500. Greece and Rome are only part of the history of Western Civilization after 1500. Not before. Greek life was looking east, toward Persia, not toward the West and Rome. The Roman Empire was split between Constantinople and Rome. Confusions about this historical ordering are common, even among distinguished scholars. For example, Fred Dallmayr states: Ever since the demise of the Cold War, the world finds itself in a situation that is unprecedented in human history, in which the entire globe is under the sway of one hegemonic framework: that of Western civilization, with its economic, technological, and intellectual corollaries. None of the previous empires in history – neither the Roman, Spanish, and British empires nor the Chinese Middle Kingdom – had been able to extend their ‘civilizing mission’ to the entire globe or humankind as a whole. Today all the countries and peoples in the world stand under a universal mandate or directive: to ‘develop’ or to ‘modernize’ and hence catch up with the civilizational standards established and exemplified by the West. ‘Globalization’ involves to a large extent the spreading or dissemination of modern Western forms of life around the globe. (Dallmayr 1998: 1)4 The expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula that reached its peak in 1492, established one of the pillars of the modern/colonial world, imperial cosmopolitanism (e.g. the Orbis Terrarum Christianus) and the first wave of Western expansion (e.g. the Renaissance). All this was paralleled with the appropriation of lands in what would become America, the exploitation of labor that would result in the new form of slavery (equating slavery with Blacks) and the production of commodity for a global market, establishing the other pillar. The second wave of Western disruptions (e.g. the Enlightenment and its aftermath) into the regions of the world largely populated by Muslims was enacted, firstly, at the moment in which capitalism was rising (the initial presence of the British in India and relations with the Mughal Sultanate were commercial) and, secondly, at the moment in which capitalism was already well established. As a matter of fact, the “mandates” by which France and England were able to detach Iran and Iraq from the Safavid and Ottoman Sultanate was related to the industrial revolution and to the fact of recent discovery of oil in the region. I am reminding you of this often forgotten history (in the West of course) to emphatically assert that dialogues among civilizations and cosmopolitan dreams in today’s global capitalist 105

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economy may not go too far, unless one of the explicit goals of both projects would be moving away from a capitalist and competitive economy and toward an economy that administers scarcity, promotes communal organizations of societies and re-orients future global horizons. Thus, as far as “development” is still accepted as the road to freedom, and the “success” of Wall Street remains to be seen as a deviation of the norm, rather than of what the norm promotes (the norm doesn’t promote corruption of course, but it promotes “success” at all cost), the agony of the planet remains at the mercy of “successful” industrial and technological production, and human life at the mercy of successful bankers who work hard to make sure that all US Americans have their own house and their own social security and health insurance. Till today global commodities demand buyers in such a way that when all existing civilizations are capitalist, like it or not (Bolivia may be the example closest to the exception), they need both colonies (of developing countries) and consumers, institutional and individual, of artificially made products (out of the industrial or the technological revolutions). Artificial commodities place a heavy burden on the extraction of natural resources and on the dumping of artificial waste. In this scenario, recycling overcomes regeneration. The cart is put in front of the horse: life at the service of dead artificial commodities. One of the goals of decolonial cosmopolitanism, as we will see below, and of decolonial dialogue among civilizations, will be to reverse the process: for the good will of the recycler the economy shall be redirected to regeneration; life (in general, and of human beings also) shall be the only main concern of all existing civilizations, except capitalist civilizations that are no longer Western but global and cut across cultures and civilizations. Decolonial always means an analytic take on the past, unveiling the strategies of imperial management and the rhetoric of modernity justifying imperial management, and it also means a horizon for the future. The decolonial is an option added to the liberal option, democracy, and the Marxist option (socialism), or Christianity (salvation in the afterlife). In this regard, the decolonial is also a transmodern option. Decolonial cosmopolitanism is, in a nutshell, transmodern cosmopolitanism.

Decolonial cosmopolitanism and dialogues among civilizations How then does decolonial cosmopolitanism relate to the project of dialogue among civilizations? And what might decolonial cosmopolitanism and decolonial conversations among actors and institutions of different civilizations look like as options to current debates on cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and on dialogue among civilizations on the other? To answer these questions it would be helpful to make a detour and to remind the reader of the basics of both projects. Cosmopolitanism as a project of global conviviality in the modern/colonial world increasing disorder, is attributed, as we know, to Immanuel Kant.5 In his view, cosmopolitanism was both a need for and a consequence of perpetual peace. At the same time it was Eurocentered and imperial. For Kant all non-European civilizations (even the South of Europe) were deficient in relation to the standards set by France, England, and Germany. That was the world order in which Kant ambitioned cosmopolitan conviviality and perpetual peace. Today, that brand of cosmopolitanism is being updated by honest liberals (in John Rowles’s expression) although it is becoming obvious also for Euro-American scholars and intellectuals that a monocultural cosmopolitanism is today unthinkable. The main problem with Kantian legacies is that cosmopolitanism is, and continues to be, a European-based issue and vision, even if we can find scholars and intellectuals in the United States or beyond Europe who may be interested in cosmopolitanism, while dialogue among civilizations is a project that emerges from the perspective of the Islamic world. This is a problem for one simple reason: cosmopolitanism requires a vision of the entire planet and an imperial interest 106

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and perspective. The question is then how are imperial cosmopolitan legacies taken up in the non-European regions of the planet? Does dialogue among civilizations proposed by Mohammad Khatami in 2000 or the Alliance of Civilizations proposed by José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2005, contribute to building convivial futures? Now Zapatero is no longer President and Erdogan seem to have taken a different route, more consistent with the increasing inter-state tension in West Asia (also known as Middle East) and US/EU ambitions. The questions are prompted because unless we believe that cosmopolitanism is an abstract entity that just happened to be, and everybody can pitch in to make it possible, we have to accept that the main obstacle of moving toward cosmopolitan ideals is the power differential between countries and, subsequently, among individuals who are nationals of dependent, underdeveloped, and poor countries. That differential has not been established by ethical rules or by natural inadequacies of intelligence, but by the coming into being of a kind of economy (liberals and Marxists agree in naming it as “capitalism”) that in order to function as such needs to establish economic differentials, of individuals and countries, with all its consequences. Capitalist civilization is based on competition and success, it needs and encourages possession, appropriation and exploitation, to be number one, to lead under the belief that what is good for the leader is good for the world. In order to achieve these goals it has to control knowledge and to sell the idea of one’s superiority and the other’s inferiority, for it is difficult to exploit an equal. The differential in economic wealth goes hand in hand with the racialization of differences, and both are foundational for Western capitalist civilization and it carries over to non-Western Civilization that has become capitalist lately. With this scenario in mind, the first problem any cosmopolitan project has to solve today is, on the one hand, to overcome the colonial and imperial differences and, on the other, to nurture an economy at the service of life and not life (and death) at the service of the economy, as is the case more than ever before, at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Paradoxically, colonial and imperial differences were both inventions of and needed by Western Civilization’s actors and institutions in the process of defining itself as such. The rhetoric continues today. One of the places one encounters it is in the definition of evil government (at the levels of the state) and of poverty (at the level of society at large, e.g. the relationship the colonial difference establishes or presupposes between poverty and inferior human beings). It is not by chance that it was Mohammad Khatami and not any president or influential personality in the United States or Western Europe that made such a proposal. What are the lines tracing colonial differences? They are the lines separating humanitas from the anthropos. The anthropos is an inferior human being and therefore less rational than the representatives of the humanitas.6 This is a philosophical and anthropological distinction. But it is based on the lines (global linear thinking) traced to divide the earth between Western European monarchies that support the philosophical and the anthropological. Carl Schmitt provides us with one answer that he describes as “global linear thinking.” Global linear thinking (or for him “the second nomos of the earth”) was put in place starting in 15007 when European Castilians and Portuguese received, from the Pope, the authorization to appropriate and expropriate vast amounts of lands divided by the line of Tratado de Tordesillas. That was for the Indias Occidentales (then named America). This basic information should be remembered because it has been out of the view of most Western historians, from Europe (except historians from Spain and Portugal who have regional currency). Schmitt is one remarkable exception. Perhaps his Catholicism encouraged him to pay attention to the history of the Iberian Peninsula and realize that what changed the world order up to that point and initiated a new world order was global linear thinking, and that was the Iberian moment in turning around world history. Global linear thinking runs parallel with global racial thinking: it was in the Iberian Peninsula that the modern racial 107

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matrix was established: Jews and Moors were expelled from Christian territories. Africans, the sons of Sham, entered in modern history and inaugurated a new chapter of slavery: enslaved Africans naturalized the idea that slavery and blackness were one and the same historical phenomena, making us forget that before 1500 slavery came in several colors and from many regions. Border thinking is the thinking of the anthropos who knows that he/she is anthropos only in the eyes of humanitas, and has to respond from categories of thoughts, memories that are alien to the limited range of the humanitas and the pretense to its universality. The anthropos who doesn’t want to become and be accepted by humanitas (for who would like to be part of the unhuman nature of humanitas that affirmed itself by inventing the anthropos) resorts to border thinking: thinking between humanitas and anthropos from the perspective, needs, sensibilities, and visions toward the future of the anthropos. Decolonial cosmopolitanism is then the cosmopolitanism of the anthropos to which humanitas has to bend and accept if truly humanitas could accept decolonial rather than imperial/universal cosmopolitanism. Because anthropos have many and several local histories and their/our histories, since 1500 every non-Western history was increasingly intervened-in by Western histories (and the humanitas). Border thinking once again is the thinking of the anthropos who by becoming him/herself again has to re-cast his/her memories with the memories of the humanitas that are not his/her own, at the same time that humanitas is aliened to the memories of the anthropos. The magic spectacle of Eurocentered modernity has been so successful in building epistemic walls and epistemic borders (without apparent violence, just by ignoring certain narcotizing events and blowing up others), that even an insightful and alert US critical historian such as Marshall G. S. Hodgson could escape the mirage (and only reading my argument may be able to point out my own blindness). Hodgson summarizes the recent history of humanitas (which I am dating back to 1500, after all Hodgson’s history and sensibility is different to mine for whom 1500 and not 1600 is a key date) as follows: Between 1600 and 1800 there took place in Western Europe a general cultural transformation. This transformation culminated in two more or less simultaneous events: the Industrial Revolution when specialized technical development decisively transformed the presuppositions of human production, and the French Revolution, when a kindred spirit established likewise unprecedented norms in human social relations. These events did not constitute the transformation I am speaking of: they were its most obvious early consequences. . . . From the point of view of the world at large, however, and particularly of the Muslim peoples, there was a more immediate consequence which will concern us here. This was that, by about 1800, the Occidental peoples (together with the Russians) found themselves in a position to dominate overwhelmingly most of the rest of the word – and in particular, to dominate the lands of Islamdom. The same generation that saw the Industrial and French Revolution saw a third and almost equally unprecedented event: the European world hegemony. (Hodgson 1993: 43) It is true that by 1800 and during the nineteenth century, when European hegemony was established, the foundational conditions were not the Industrial and the French Revolution but the Colonial Revolution (known also as “conquest and colonization”). Without the Colonial Revolution, in the 1500s, neither the French nor the Industrial Revolutions could have been possible. Beyond the fact that in this common picture the American Revolution that precedes both the Industrial and the French Revolutions is left out, it would have been difficult for Europe, with 300 years of colonial exploitation, to have both. The French Revolution, as before with the Glorious Revolution in England, was possible because of a growing and wealthy bourgeoisie 108

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benefiting from the colonies (Williams 1944; Bagu 1949);8 and the Industrial Revolution was possible because of the growing markets that have been opened up by the type of economy (e.g. capitalism) that emerged out of the colonial revolution: for the first time in the history of humankind, the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in the Atlantic initiated the production of commodities (from extractive commodities such as gold to regenerative commodities like sugar and cotton) for a global market. Furthermore, the attacks of the land of Islamdom that Hodgson mentions have been preceded by the landmark historical event, foundational also, that Hodgson does not mention but without which England and France would not have been in any condition to lead the second wave of Western expansion. The event that Hodgson doesn’t mention but that is foundational is the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula that started in 1492, an event that was jointly articulated in the Iberian Peninsula with the conquest and colonization of Indias Occidentales. Thus when Kant in the second half of the eighteenth century envisioned a cosmopolitan and convivial world, he was straddling two colonial houses: Christianity as the first cosmopolitan project of the modern/colonial world, the vision and ambition of an Orbis Universalis Christianus. What Kant did was simply to secularize it and to find its sources in Greece rather than in Christianity; a choice that distinguished German history of thought that had, since Martin Luther, divided Saxon Protestants leaning toward Greece and Latin Catholics leaning toward Rome. Cosmopolitanism is the Greek word for a project that Christianity put in motion with the “discovery of America.” Secondly, capitalist economy doesn’t need believers but consumers – thus, Kant’s cosmopolitanism is the secular philosophic-political version of Christianism, the theological one, and of consumerism, the economic one.

The colonial matrix of power: the difficulties that cosmopolitanism has to surmount I would like to propose a different map of the global order that began to unfold at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, necessary to revisit the idea of cosmo-polis. Schmitt’s foresight was, naturally, based on the history he constructed. Imagining cosmopolitanism’s futures very much depends on how we see the past that necessitates the notion of cosmopolitanism. For cosmopolitanism is not a natural phenomenon, like the sunrise or sunset. It was conceived as a project and not as an analytic concept to understand the past. What I mean is that an-other history will prompt a different foresight. And so today we have different takes on cosmopolitanism. Schmitt’s historical version doesn’t correspond one to one with the world’s messy unfolding. It was a specific narrative of European expansion that allowed him to imagine alternative futures scenarios. He was not concerned with cosmopolitanism but rather with how the distribution of power decision will unfold.9 The history he constructed was led by global linear thinking in building the second nomos of the earth, which started towards 1500. While Schmidt responded to the demands of the Cold War, Huntington’s vision of a multi-polar world came after the end of the Cold War and it was based on the end of the US hegemony (not of the nomos of the earth) and a history he located in the North-South line dividing Christian Europe from Christian Russia and from the Islamic world. That was to map the anticipated clash between Western Christianity and South Eastern Islam, when the United States needed a new enemy to justify the expenses on national security. But for the future, Huntington based his forecast on the “World Civilizations Post-1990.” Huntington’s map of the global order after 1990 is somewhat arbitrary, but it served the orientation of his argument. As the reader will recall, he identified nine civilizations. Whether arbitrary or not, a dialogue 109

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among civilizations requires that we know which are the civilizations entering into the dialogue. This is a beginning, although not a perfect one: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

Western; Latin America; African; Islamic; Sinic; Hindu; Orthodox; Buddhist; Japanese.

One has to believe that Huntington was serious about this classification, although its logic looks very much like the logic of Borges’s reference to a certain Chinese encyclopedia founded by a doctor named Franz Kuhn, that so much enchanted Michel Foucault and inspired Les mots et les choses.10 Huntington’s classification identifies civilizations based on religions (Sinic, Hindu, Buddhist, Orthodox); on continent and sub-continents (Africa and Latin America, respectively); one country (Japan), and one sector of the globe, Western Civilization, that includes North America (except Mexico), Canada, Greenland, Australia, New Zealand, and the Federal Constitutional Monarchy and Parliamentary Democracy of Papua New Guinea. That distribution may be fine to imagine a multi-polar order in which multi-polarity means economic relations between corporations and states regulated by international relations. How would cosmopolitanism and dialogue among civilizations look in such a multi-polar world? For Kant the prospectus was easier to imagine: Western Civilization was marching to civilize the world, and cosmopolitanism was its creed. It may look a little bit messy at first sight to envision a cosmopolitan world crossing the economic and political interests of each of the nine civilizations while one can surmise that dialogues among the nine civilizations (since we cannot reduce the dialogue of civilizations to Islam and the West) would be necessary for a cosmopolitan world order. Thus cosmopolitanism in this view is no longer the Kantian universal cosmopolitanism managed by one civilization and imposed among the others, but decolonial cosmopolitanism grounded on decolonial border thinking confronting the imperial and colonial differences. Paradoxically, decolonial cosmopolitanism has to confront Kantian cosmopolitanism grounded in territorial and global linear thinking that made possible the invention of imperial and colonial differences. Dialogue among civilizations in this view shall be based on cosmopolitan localism under the universal belief that no human being and no country have the right to dominate another human being and to control other countries. What else would a cosmopolitan order be if not dialogue among equals? But a dialogue among equals turns out to be difficult in the current state of things in which institutions were built, social roles constructed and subjectivities formed to fill those roles and occupy those institutions. And that state of things and frame of mind is not conducive to a dialogue among equals but to either a submission of all to the way the dominant state wants or to a battle, instead of a dialogue, among the dominant state and those who strive to be equal. In both cases, hierarchies beyond economic and military power lie in the control of knowledge and the making and remaking of imperial and colonial differences. If cosmopolitanism is thinkable, it should be in a world where imperial and colonial differences are erased, and cosmopolitan dialogism shall contribute to erase imperial and colonial differences. Such tasks prove to be difficult where competition to

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manage the world order, on the one hand, and struggle not to be managed on the other, is the name of the game. Since civilizations would be ruled – naturally – by the rules of civility, it would not be necessary to have international organizations like the UN as the mask for one civilization to rule and the dialogue to stop. “Terrorism” would not be necessary because “terrorists” would not have anyone to attack and no one who would support them with arms and money to attack the enemies of the bosses for whom terrorists are working for. But it will be absolutely necessary to have institutions created in the service of cosmopolitanism and dialogue of civilizations. However, before that, it is necessary to share a non-capitalist vision of socio-economic organization. While capitalist economy remains as the only imaginable economy, both cosmopolitanism and dialogues among civilizations will not obtain. What we will have instead would be diplomacy, the minority of powerful states and corporations to share the dominion of the world. So then, if this rosy picture all comes together, a multi-polar order would be ruled by permanent cosmopolitan dialogues among civilizations and the constitution of the cosmo-polis as the desired horizon. Advancing toward that horizon means to accept that the function of economy is to administer scarcity, that we work to live and do not live to work for others, and the well being of all shall not rely on wealth but on the generation and regeneration of life. Toward that horizon we are already pointing to all those who are revamping Western notions of the common and the common good, and all those who are revamping non-Western notions of the communal that preceded the invasion and interference of Western Civilization in whose imperial history the common and the common good were created. All that is well and good, except that we are now living in a world interconnected by capitalist economy and capitalist economy means competition not cooperation. It means, yes, collaboration among, say, the G7 to make sure that you rule the G7, and have the support of the G13, as the capitalist periphery, when you need them to get out of economic collapses and delinquencies within Western civilizations such as the recent one on Wall Street and its collaborations and beneficiaries around the world. Looking from the receiving end of Western expansion from the sixteenth century on, the world order up to 1500 was indeed a multi-polar but non-capitalist world. Of the nine civilizations listed by Huntington, seven were already in place by the fifteenth century. Only Western Civilization did not exist, and of course, “Latin America” did not exist either. It was invented by the middle of the nineteenth century and it was a consequence of the foundation and growth of Western Civilization.11 Western Civilization was historically founded at the confluence of the Renaissance, the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, the invention of America, the massive slave trade and enslaved Africans and the massive appropriation of land. Slavery and exploitation of labor coupled with appropriation of land made possible the foundation of capitalist economy first by extraction (gold and silver) and later by exploitation of land and labor (sugar, cotton, coffee, etc.). The decolonial option shall be conceived and enacted as the connector, the spine of decolonial cosmopolitanism, the links between the commonality of colonial experiences between people with uncommon local histories – Indians in India and the Indigenous in America, New Zealand and Australia; Chinese struck by the Opium War and by neo-liberalism and the legacies of Maoism in liberation struggles. In sum, decolonial cosmopolitanism is the cosmopolitanism that emerges from the decolonial option and cuts across – at the same time that it respects – identities in life and politics: all human beings confronting – at different scales – the consequences of modern/colonial racism and patriarchy have something in common, beyond their religious, ethnic, gender, sexuality, nationalities, languages. Frantz Fanon had a name for them/us: les damnés de

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la terre. The decolonial option materializes in multiple trajectories where identities emerge. But, beyond identities, the commonality that identifies peoples and communities as being “not quite human” runs like a thread across identities, connecting (rather than uniting) many projects and trajectories in a global process of decolonial cosmopolitanism; toward the horizon of pluriversality as a uni-versal project.

Imperial cosmopolitanism and the colonial matrix of power Western Civilization was founded on a new structure of management and control – the colonial matrix of power – put in place in the Atlantic and undergirding the formation of modern Europe (e.g. before the Renaissance, what is today Europe was the land of Western Christians). Political theory, from Machiavelli to Hobbes and to Locke and political economy (in its infancy in the late seventeenth century) founded by Adam Smith, was the self-fashioning of Europe from the point of view of Europe: its own rhetoric of modernity. What European thinkers and intellectuals did not want to recognize was that beyond their rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality that I outlined at the end of the previous paragraphs was laid bare.12 From this perspective, there is no distinction between a society of sovereignty and society of control. The distinction is useful in and for the history of Europe and the humanitas, not for the history of the colonies and the anthropos, but from the perspective of the non-Western world, modernity goes hand in hand with coloniality and the history of modernity/coloniality is the history of the society of control: the colonial matrix of power is the underlying logic of the society of control. Basically, the colonial matrix of power was put in place in the process of problem solving of conquest and colonization. A new economic horizon emerged, which consisted in producing commodities for a global market and in dismantling existing economic formations (in the Andes and Mesoamerica first, in Asia and Africa later on). That type of economy, before the industrial revolution, needed land and labor. Perhaps it was the 100 years of Europeans in the Americas that prompted Frances Bacon to write The Atlantis but, above all, to be the first in sight to establish that Nature is an entity outside, independent of human beings, that Man has to dominate and conquer. Merely twenty years before, Jesuit Father Jose de Acosta was saying that to know and understand Nature was to know and admire its creator. And at the same time in Africa, the Andes, and Mesoamerica (and I would suggest in China and the Islamic world), “nature” as an entity separated from human beings did not exist because it was not conceived as such. The separation of Man and Nature, as in the eighteenth century the separation of Church and the State, are foundational pillars of Western Civilization. The first pillar established the foundations for the control of the economy. And the second, preceded by a “separation” of Christian Theology from Judaic and Islamic Theologies, established the foundation for the control of authority. Christian Theology was the form of authority that established itself in the New World while dismantling Aztec and Inca forms of governance. Next to the sphere of the economy and of authority, the colonial matrix was established by means of the control of knowledge. Christian Theology took the lead in this domain and shared it with the emergence during the Renaissance of a Humanistic tendency that announces the secular but that is still entangled with Theology. From the renaissance universities in the European colonies of the Americas (Santo Domingo, Mexico, Peru, Cordoba, and Harvard), the management of knowledge in higher education (not to mention the hundreds of monasteries and monastic orders), ruled out Inca and Aztec education that the Incanate and Tlatoanate were destroyed, as indigenous communities surviving until today in Chiapas, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala bear witness. We could move on and see the Kantian-Humboldian University that, once established in Europe, guided and managed knowledge in the British and French colonies. 112

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Last but not least, the control of knowledge went hand in hand with the control and management of subjectivity, gender, and sexuality. Thus if epistemic hegemony dictated the rules of the political and economic game it ruled also subjectivity, gender, and sexuality. It was finally the control and management of knowledge that established a hierarchical distinction among people according to their religious belief and, later on by the color of their skin and, lately, by their language and nationality. That is, it was the Western management and control of knowledge that established the racial categories under which we call racism today. Now racism is not a question that affects only the subalterns, so to speak. It is meaningful at all levels and it is felt by the “yellow race” (Japan, China). It is not much spoken today, but there have already been some public voices in the West noticing that in part of the tensions between China and the West (Europe and the US), there is a racial issue. Philip Stephens, editorialist of the Financial Times made the point in an article published in December of 2008: those who are classified never forget, those who classify seldom remember. The statement was illustrated by a caricature of a distinguished Chinese man, serious, walking with a huge volume of Linneus under his arm, toward a rather common Western businessman happily walking to the encounter of his Chinese counterpart. The Western businessman doesn’t know what the Chinese man knows: he knows that the white man makes him yellow while the white man doesn’t have to worry about being white, because after all it is whiteness that was presupposed in the epistemic formation and management of Western knowledge. Thus, both cosmopolitanism and dialogues among civilizations would have to start from there: the epistemic bases of the modern/colonial world rather than from an arbitrary division of world civilization or from an ideal cosmo-polis in a far distant and ancient Greece revamped by Immanuel Kant in the European Enlightenment.

Coda: border thinking and decolonial cosmopolitanism joint dewestern dialogue of civilizations The pending question is: would it be possible to have a dewestern vision regulating the dialogues among (people) from different civilizations that could work in tandem with decolonial cosmopolitanism? If that cooperation is possible, then border thinking shall be the point of encounter between both. Why would border thinking be a must for any decolonial cosmopolitan and dewestern dialogue among civilizational project? To have civilizational dialogues it is necessary to have several civilizations enacted by actors and institutions in dialogue. First of all, because cosmopolitanism and dialogue of civilizations that remains within the parameter of Western civilizations would remain imperial, whether with good or devious intentions. The problems that demand decolonial cosmopolitanism and decolonial dialogue of civilizations cannot be the solver, as I already stated, from within the same civilization that created it. That is, Western Civilization cannot solve the problems it created by impinging and devaluating (with some exceptions, like Israel, but nonetheless making the Jews the internal colonial people of Europe). Territorial thinking cannot solve the problems created by global linear thinking since both are one and the same. On the other hand, it is inconceivable that, say, Islamic, Chinese-Confucian, or Aymara-communal systems will prevail over liberal capitalism or socialist communism; or Akan Spirituality will prevail over Christianity and Islam. However, each of the above mentioned, and others not mentioned, have the right of decision-making in building non-capitalist and pluriversal futures. One caveat: border thinking is the basic and unavoidable condition of all non-Western people, communities, civilizations, cultures, religions, economies, political organizations, etc. In that regard, border thinking is the foundation of decolonial and dewestern dwelling, thinking, and doing. However, once capitalism became the signature of Western Civilization, de-Westernizing 113

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projects have of necessity to resort to border thinking. China and Indonesia are two cases in point. The first having recourse to Confucian legacies and the second to Islamic legacies. Both political projects are based on border thinking (e.g., the need to re-articulate their past with the unavoidable presence of the West in the past 200 years), even if their economy remains capitalist. However, accepting capitalist economy doesn’t mean to endorse Westernization, as is clear, precisely, in the platform of de-Westernization. Let’s call this option de-Westernizing border thinking. In this particular option border thinking is necessarily critical. De-Westernization, however, hasn’t so far advanced cosmopolitan projects although, nevertheless, it naturally leads to a dialogue among civilizations. Thus, decolonial border thinking, on the other hand asserts that an economy of accumulation and growth, based on exploitation, land appropriation and poisoning of the planet and of people, cannot by its very nature allow or support decolonial cosmopolitan projects and/or decolonial dialogue among civilizations.13 The bottom line is that the two cosmopolitan versions argued here, decolonial cosmopolitanism and dialogue among civilizations, shall be based on a fundamental principle that changes the horizon of life and vision of the future: life, of the planet and therefore of human beings, instead of destroying life in the name of progress and development. Institutions shall come second and be at the service of life, rather than life at the service of the institutions. “By breaking the limits set on man by nature and history,” Ivan Illich told us more than a decade ago, “industrial society engendered disability and suffering in the name of eliminating disability and suffering!”14 It is really hypocrisy to fight to save capitalism and democracy when indeed capitalism and democracy has taken us to the world we are living today and that developed countries and the media serving them have created and continue to endorse.

Notes 1 I used “Eurocentered’ like Schmitt in a descriptive sense. I do not intend to offend Slavo Zizek and make him run for a gun: When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture – to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of protofascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy? (Zizek 1998: 988) Since I am not a “self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual” but a “decolonial self-respecting intellectual” (and I respect Zizek’s Eurocentered position) I do not have the same feeling about the word. 2 For an analysis of neo-liberalism from its inception, when still it did not have exactly that name, and its connection with the Chilean coup d’etat, see Hikelammert 1986 [1974]. For an idealist proposal to solve the problem of poverty (unaware – intentionally or not – of how the logic of coloniality works, see Sachs [2005]). For further ideas about these issues see my blog entry, “Bono contra China,” http:// waltermingolo.com/2007/11/01/bono-contra-china/. 3 It was followed up, in 2005, by the creation, within the UN, of the Alliance of Civilizations, an initiative of the government of Spain, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And on April of 2007, former President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, was appointed as the High Representative for the A of C by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations. The logic continues: Turkey is a non-Western country historically but also through the European Union’s lack of enthusiasm for Turkey becoming one of them. And Spain and Portugal are the South of Europe in the geo-politics of Kant and Hegel. The meeting of the Alliance of Civilizations took place in Rio de Janeiro. Lula da Silva, Ban Ki-moon, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, and Jorge Sampaio were in the opening session (https://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/event/16039/khatami_13uthant.pdf). Alliances and dialogues of civilizations are working toward a sort of cosmopolitan world order, although not quite the way Kant has it and not decolonial either. It is a dialogue among States (and at this point capitalist States) rather than of Civilizations. 114

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4 My observation on this initial paragraph shall not detract from seeing Dallmayr’s work, and particularly this one, as an important contribution toward a pluriversal world order. 5 The bibliography is vast. I review some in my recent article, “Cosmopolitanism and the Decolonial Option” (Mignolo 2009a). For the Kantian legacies and its aftermath and also for a bibliographic update, see Mendieta (2009). 6 Immanuel Kant, the same who advanced cosmopolitan ideals and ideas, was also a defender and supporter of the line. In his landmark book on aesthetics, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (trans. 1984: 110–11) he states: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries . . . still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praise worthy qualities. About Chinese, Indians and Japanese he has things like this to say: Japanese could in a way be regarded as the Englishmen of this part of the world, but hardly in any other quality than their resoluteness – which degenerates into the utmost stubbornness. . . . Indians have a dominating taste for the grotesque, of the sort that fall into adventurous. Their religion consists of grotesqueries. What trifling grotesqueries the verbose and studied compliment of the Chinese contains!

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There you have in a nutshell the logic that traces the line, and remakes it, between the humanitas (who speaks and control the enunciation) and the anthropos (who is not allowed to enter into the debate and about whom it is spoken). Carl Schmitt, op. cit. For historians who like exact dates, I am referring here to the Pope line (1493), the Treaty of Tordesilla (1494) that extended to the West the Portuguese possessions. The three lines arranged the distribution of Indias Occidentales among the two imperial powers of the moment. The Treaty of Saragosa (1542) traced the lines in Indias Orientales. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: UNC, 1944. Sergio Bagu, Economia de la sociedad Colonial, Ensayo de historia comparada de America Latina. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1949. For an evaluation of Schmitt’s history and forecast, within the history of European thoughts, see the insightful article by Petito (2007). The reference can be found in Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Analyzing Wilkins’s logical system Borges quotes the classification of animals found in the encyclopedia titled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. According to this, animals are classified as (a) belonging to the Emperor; (b) embalmed; (c) trained; (d) piglets; (e) sirens; (f) fabulous; (g) stray dogs; (h) included in this classification; (i) trembling like crazy; (j) innumerables; (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush; (l) et cetera; (m) just broke the vase; (n) from a distance look like flies (www.crockford.com.wrrrid/ wilkins.html); Foucault (1966). I develop this argument in The Idea of Latin America (Mignolo 2005). For a detailed description of the colonial matrix of power, as well as for relevant bibliography about the topic, see Grzinic and Mignolo (n.d.). See Stephen Leahy (2010). The bad news is that there is tendency in higher education to increase the corporate values at the university, see my At the End of the University as We Know It (Mignolo 2009b). See Illich (1999: 15).

References Bagu, S. (1949) Economia de la sociedad Colonial, Ensayo de historia comparada de America Latina. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo. Dallmayr, F. (1998) Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Ernst, C.W. and Martin, R.C. (2010) Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism. Colombia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les chose. Paris: Gallimard. Goody, J. (2004) Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge: Polity Press. 115

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Grzinic, M. and Mignolo, W. (n.d.) Decoloniality. Marina Grzinic: De-Linking Epistemology From Capital and Pluri-Versality – A Conversation with Walter Mignolo. http://reartikulacija.org/?p=196. Hikelammert, F. (1986 [1974]) The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism. New York: Orbis Book (Third revised edition). Hodgson, M.G.S. (1993) Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History. Edited with an introduction and conclusion by Edmundo Burke, III. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Illich, I. (1999) ‘The Shadows Our Future Throws.’ New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 16, Issue 2, pp. 14–18. Kant, I. (1984 [1764]) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldwhait. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Khatami, M. (2000, September 5) Dialogue Among Civilizations. New York: United Nations. www.unesco. org/dialogue/en/khatami.htm. Lawrence, B.B. and Cooke, M. (2005) Muslim Networks From Haj to Hip Hop. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Leahy, S. (2010, Marzo 13) ‘Violenta ofensiva contra cientificos del clima.’ TIERRAMERICA. http://www. ipsnoticias.net/2010/03/ambiente-violenta-ofensiva-contra-cientificos-del-clima/ Mendieta, E. (2009) ‘From Imperial to Dialogical Cosmopolitanism.’ Ethics and Global Politics, Vol. 2, Issue 3, pp. 241–58. Mignolo, W. (2005) The Idea of Latin America. London: Blackwell. Mignolo, W. (2009a) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Decolonial Option.’ In Torill Strand (ed.) Cosmopolitanism in the Making. Germany: Springer, pp. 110–25. Mignolo, W. (2009b, May 7) At the End of the University as We Know It. www.waltermignolo.com/2009/05/07/ at-the-end-of-the-university-as-we-know-it-world-epistemic-fora-toward-communal-futures-anddecolonial-horizons-of-life. Petito, F. (2007) ‘Against World Unity. Carl Schmitt and the Western-centric and Liberal Global Order.’ In Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito (eds.) The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of the Global Order. London: Routledge, pp. 165–84. Sachs, J.D. (2005) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time. Foreword by Bono. New York: Penguin. Schmitt, C. (2003) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated and annotated by G.L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press. Wallerstein, I. (1995) Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. London: Verso. Historical Capitalism. Williams, E. (1944) Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zizek, S. (1998) ‘A Leftist Plea for “Eurocentrism.”’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, Issue 2, pp. 988–1009.

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10 Cosmopolitanism and social research Some methodological issues of an emerging research agenda Victor Roudometof

Cosmopolitanism has been used in reference to settings, eras, attitudes, processes and fields of study, ranging from politics to ethics or culture (see, for example, Beck 2006; Daedalus 2008; Delanty 2009; Fine and Boon 2007; Hedgehog Review 2009; Holton 2009; Pollock et al. 2000). Since the dawn of the 21st century the term has been among the most widely discussed topics in academia (for reviews, see Beck and Szneider 2006; Skrbis and Woodward 2013). Given this burgeoning literature, it is clear that the cosmopolitan agenda is a major focus for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This chapter addresses the contours of cosmopolitanism in the field of empirical social research. While offering an overview of main trends in empirical research, the chapter further attempts to develop an argument concerning the relationship between cosmopolitanism and social research. This requires meta-theoretical reflection, in large part due to the polysemous nature of cosmopolitanism. Current uses of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ vary widely depending upon the field or discipline in which the term is employed. Whatever classification is applied, it is clear that a distinction is made between the intellectual conversation concerning the viability of new foundations for normative principles versus research into ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins 1998: 3), that is, cosmopolitanism as an existing social reality. The entanglement between social theory and social research therefore assumes different formats depending upon the goals or objectives of theorists and researchers. Reflecting this difference, this chapter’s first section offers a two-fold classification of the different meanings attached to the term ‘cosmopolitan’: One interpretation uses the term as an analytical category whereas another deploys it as a substantive category. In the opening section, there is an overview with some examples of these uses of cosmopolitan in the literature. I argue that both of these categories can provide the means for empirical research. In the next section, I critically review claims that the cosmopolitan imagination requires developing new methodological tools for the social sciences. Different avenues of qualitative and quantitative social research into cosmopolitan are presented. These avenues suggest a plurality of interpretations of cosmopolitan and offer conflicting results.

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Lastly, in the third section, the issue of the relationship between socio-historical research and cosmopolitanism is explored. This type of research shows how an expanded view of the historical record allows for a richer and more complex understanding of the cosmopolitan predicament of our times.

Cosmopolitanism and social research: two modes of theorizing The theoretical literature on cosmopolitanism comes from a variety of disciplines and fields, ranging from sociology and political science to literary studies and philosophy. Although some of these disciplines are far more empirically oriented, others are explicitly theoretically – or speculatively – oriented. Reflecting this divide, uses of cosmopolitanism are sometimes analytical and other times descriptive. In the writings of major proponents of the cosmopolitan agenda, analytical and descriptive modes of theorizing are often intertwined. For example, Held (1995, 2000), Beck (2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002a), Delanty (2009) and Giddens (1998) refer to a ‘cosmopolitan nation’ and a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ or ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ and ‘cosmopolitan society’. It is often unclear whether some of these categories are descriptive (that is, they describe current social reality) or prescriptive ones (that is, terms that denote a desired or future state of affairs) or whether these are stipulated as new analytical categories for the analysis of the social world. Beck (2001, 2002a, 2006) and Delanty (2009) have referred explicitly to a ‘cosmopolitan perspective’ and ‘cosmopolitan imagination’. These are more clearly expressed analytical categories (that is, terms that denote meta-theoretical perspectives or worldviews). In so doing, theorists walk a fine line between describing social life in the 21st century and simultaneously proposing new forms of thinking and sometimes even new public policy strategies for facing up to this new reality. However, these two modes of theorizing are quite distinct, and their differences are consequential for social research agendas. In the analytical mode of theorizing, the goal is to articulate a conceptual framework, a paradigm or a meta-theory that provides a new ‘gaze’ or an ‘imagination’ or ‘vision’ upon social reality (Beck 2001, 2006; Delanty 2009; Mouzelis 1995: 1). For example, Beck (2006: 2) argues that we need a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ that constitutes both a ‘presupposition and the result of a conceptual reconfiguration of our modes of perception’. In this instance, cosmopolitan is an attribute or a tool and its heuristic validity is not subject to empirical verification. Such analytical categories stand apart from the sets of substantive statements that pertain to the social world as such. Normative and political cosmopolitanism are paradigmatic examples of such heuristic devices. Cosmopolitan ethics, for example, are a goal or policy objective that can be defined only theoretically. Once defined, one can measure the degree to which social reality conforms to the definition. But the definitions of cosmopolitan ethics, cosmopolitan democracy or cosmopolitan world polity lie outside the scope of empirical research as such. Their definitions provide the theoretical a priori to empirical research agendas. In contrast, descriptive or substantive sociological theory is engaged in the construction of statements that can be tentatively proved or disproved by empirical investigations (Mouzelis 1995: 1). In practical terms, this means that cosmopolitan is defined in such a manner that its very existence becomes contingent upon empirical research results. In other words, one has to concede from the very outset the possibility of falsification and to accept the theoretical implications of such an outcome (in revising or modifying theory accordingly). I do hope that the above are not naively equated with empiricism per se. Unlike philosophy and the humanities, the social sciences are empirically defined disciplines. This is quite different from positivism as an epistemological perspective, and one should not confuse the social sciences’ empirical focus with advocacy of positivism. The very existence of social sciences as separate fields of study rests upon their 118

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meta-theoretical move of relativizing absolute philosophical claims or of turning philosophy into substantive theory and subsequently of establishing restrictions in scope with regard to generalizations. It is integral to the nature of the social scientific enterprise to perform such a task: What is important is not whether cosmopolitanism (or for that matter, any other category) exists as an abstraction but rather when, under which conditions and on the basis of what factors (gender, class, region and so on) cosmopolitanism exists or ceases to exist. Ideally, analytical theorizing provides tools that can be used for the construction of substantive, descriptive theory – thereby allowing theory construction to have its categories verified through fieldwork, observation, historical record or other methods of social research. The analytical use of cosmopolitanism resembles the economists’ utility theory – and its related paradigm of rational choice theory across the social sciences. Utility theory, in fact, is practically inseparable from the contemporary understanding of economics as a discipline. Accordingly, it provides the foundation for examining all human behaviour as such – and its devotees have extended its reach into the entire domain of social behaviour (see, for example, Coleman 1990). When empirical tests are conducted it is not the assumptions of the general utility theory that are tested but rather the extent to which reality offers validation to a specific sub-theory that rests upon the rational choice paradigm. I should point out that similar uses of cosmopolitanism in social research are entirely plausible and methodologically defensible. For example, Norris and Inglehart (2009) employ the label cosmopolitan for a variety of indicators measuring cross-cultural convergence and divergence. So, the problematic nature of the above-mentioned approach does not rest upon methodological issues. Rather, it rests upon the predispositions and the practices prevailing across the social sciences. Although rational choice theory has groups of devoted followers, the majority of social scientists feel that what is important as a legitimizing strategy is the extent to which they are capable of developing substantive theory. In conclusion, the polysemous nature of cosmopolitan means that it can be used both as an analytical category as well as a substantive category. In turn, this means that the underlying tension in its employment is not going to be resolved theoretically. Social research is bound to relativize theoretical claims, leading to the reformulation of theories – while simultaneously the interdisciplinary intellectual conversation on cosmopolitanism will inevitably continue.

Cosmopolitanism as a research agenda: claims and results The introduction of the cosmopolitan agenda in the social sciences has been accompanied by two major claims that have a direct impact upon social research. The first one concerns the extent to which social research needs to develop different methodological strategies. In particular, Beck (2000a, 2000b, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2004, 2006) has argued that past sociological practice reifies the categories of society and the nation–state and is guilty of methodological nationalism, which should be superseded by methodological cosmopolitanism. Beck’s proposal has two major weaknesses. First, the extent to which methodological nationalism has been an inherent practice of past sociological practice has been questioned (Chernillo 2006, 2007). It turns out that the naive equation of society with the nation- state is not a practice that can be traced back to the founding fathers of sociology. Second, Beck’s proposal echoes a similar call to overturn methodological nationalism in favour of methodological transnationalism (Glick Schiller and Wimmer 2003; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). However, methodological transnationalism is a strategy with an explicit empirical referent: Namely, it concerns the tendency of immigration scholars to problematize the immigrant while accepting the seemingly natural character of the host nation–state. To have an accurate grasp of social reality, however, researchers have to be critical of nation-building mechanisms and of the social processes instigated by host 119

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nation–states. Moreover, ‘transnationalism’ also has a grounded territorial referent. It means that researchers should not examine immigrant groups in a host society; they should also examine groups both in host and home societies – and they should research both these sites in order to reveal the relationships and connections that unite people across borders. Consequently, multisite or global ethnography (Burawoy et al. 2000; for an overview, see Lapegna 2009) has emerged as the new frontier of qualitative research. From the above, it is quite unclear whether the label cosmopolitanism is superior to transnationalism. Although movement across borders suggests an opening to the world, the employment of the cosmopolitan label does not allow one to separate metaphorical ‘travelling’ across cultures and/or physical crossing of borders from a stance or attitude of cosmopolitan empathy with the Other (Roudometof 2016; Schlenker 2017). Or to put it differently, it assumes that the one is linked to the other – which is not the case: After all, terrorists cross the borders without assuming a stance of cosmopolitan empathy. The second claim concerns the extent to which empirical data collection has adequately addressed cosmopolitanism. On its face, this is a strong and potentially valid criticism. None of the main international social surveys (European Social Survey [ESS], World Values Survey [WVS], European Values Study [EVS] and the International Social Survey Program [ISSP]) have to this day devised rounds aiming at explicitly measuring cosmopolitanism. However, if an international consensus could develop that would yield relatively uniformly accepted operationalizations of cosmopolitanism, that would still fail to address the entire complexity of the underlying methodological, empirical and theoretical issues. Just like the concept of ‘class’, cosmopolitan is a contested category. Subjective class position is known to vary extensively from objective class positions, and asking people’s opinions about cosmopolitanism would only lead to an assessment of the type of predispositions and ideas people have about cosmopolitanism as such. To put it differently, people engaged in what sociologists would accept as cosmopolitan practices might refuse to be self-identified as such. This is not to say that knowledge gained by direct measurements of cosmopolitanism is unwelcome. But direct measurements are not going to solve the conceptual ambiguity; they will only reflect it or amplify it. Additionally, this criticism fails to take into account the extent to which current social research has been able to use existing data sets or even fieldwork in order to offer at least some insight into the existence of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ among the world’s public. Social scientists have been increasingly concerned with empirical – as opposed to speculative – examinations of cosmopolitanism (for examples, see Calcutt et al. 2009; Kendall et al. 2009; Norris and Inglehart 2009; Nowicka and Rovisco 2009; Ofsson and Ohman 2007; Phillips 2002; Phillips and Smith 2008; Pichler 2008; Skrbis and Woodward 2007; Szerszynski and Urry 2006). To do so requires researchers to come to terms with the multiplicity of the different meanings of cosmopolitan in the literature. It is wise therefore to concede that, as Werbner (2006: 497) has argued, many varieties of cosmopolitan views exist in late modernity. Although, according to some views, cosmopolitanism is solely the enclave of the privileged, for others it includes the perspectives of the marginalized (Calhoun 2008; Pieterse 2006). Two very general research tracks can be detected. The first track concerns the degree to which social scientists are examining the presence of conditions or practices that can be labelled cosmopolitan versus the presence of attitudes and predispositions that can be called cosmopolitan. Some researchers have interpreted the term as an attitude or predisposition (for examples, see Calcutt et al. 2009; Ofsson and Ohman 2007; Phillips 2002; Roudometof and Haller 2007). Accordingly, the main research question is whether such attitudes or predispositions prevail within the population of a country or cross-nationally. Others have interpreted it as a description of practices prevailing over a specific historical era or in contemporary society (for examples, see Jacob 2006; Nowicka 120

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and Rovisco 2009; Glick Schiller and Irving 2015). In this case, the main research question concerns the existence of such practices. The second research track concerns the extent to which cosmopolitanism is a contextual or a cross-national property. Although both interpretations are plausible, the majority of empirical research has remained confined mostly to studies of specific countries – such as Australia (Calcutt et al. 2009; Phillips 2002; Phillips and Smith 2008; Woodward et al. 2008), Germany (Helbling and Teney 2015) or Sweden (Gustafson 2009; Ofsson and Ohman 2007). In several instances, researchers have reported findings suggesting the presence of cosmopolitan orientations or predispositions. However, such approaches face two main methodological issues. The first issue concerns the fact that operationalizations of cosmopolitanism do not always use uniform indicators – and therefore research results are not always comparable to each other. The second issue concerns the degree to which the state- or country-based conceptualization of cosmopolitan offers a sufficiently accurate picture of the processes under investigation. For example Kendall et al. (2009) propose a conceptualization of cosmopolitan based upon practices that prevail within specific social fields (cf., Bourdieu 1977). They argue that cosmopolitanism should be further disassociated from globalization and its presence should be examined separately. This is an entirely plausible position and one that articulates the empirical study of cosmopolitanism as a separate topic for social research. But it begs the following question: Why is it then that cosmopolitanism matters? Why should social scientists care about this topic more than numerous other topics? After all, the plethora of academic writing on cosmopolitanism over the last decade makes it quite clear that social scientists do not simply consider cosmopolitanism as one among many topics but rather as a topic of central contemporary significance. The rather straightforward answer is that many within the scholarly community are hopeful or cautiously optimistic that cosmopolitanism might offer a possible answer to the stream of issues forced by or ‘blamed’ upon globalization. This accounts for not only cosmopolitanism’s popularity among the scholarly community over the last decade, but also for its success in competing with globalization as one of most discussed topics in academia. Cosmopolitan represents a conceptual category, however, that can stand independently from globalization. In such a case, its existence as a research genre or topic of inquiry is unrelated to globalization – precisely as Kendall et al. (2009: 1–3) suggest. It is only in the sense that the cosmopolitan predicament (Yates 2009) has an elective affinity with globalization that the relationship between the two can be considered. It is therefore plausible to examine cosmopolitanism in relation to, or independently of, globalization. If one accepts the proposition that cosmopolitanism is related to or has an elective affinity with globalization, then one has to contemplate the extent to which research results confined to the state level offer sufficient insight into a condition that is related to processes that take one beyond the state level – to the transnational or global level. To have an adequate grasp of processes that take place on such a level, cross-national research is needed. If cosmopolitanism is an issue of global importance, then its measurements and analysis should take place at the global or transnational level – and should not remain at the state or country level. This is not only a theoretical necessity but also a methodological one. Research results that appear positive (or negative) at the state level might look quite different when one moves to the transnational or cross-national level. In fact, some cross-national studies have been conducted, a majority being quantitative cross-national studies (Pichler 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Roudometof and Haller 2007; Skrbis and Woodward 2007) along with at least two qualitative studies (Favell 2008; Szerszynski and Urry 2002). Many of them have explicitly focused on Europe, which has emerged as a suitable site for testing not only notions of cosmopolitanism but also the asserted privileged relationship between European and cosmopolitan identities. Although there 121

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is no single authoritative or uniform conclusion, research results have been mostly ambivalent or ambiguous. Both in qualitative and quantitative research, often there are different operationalizations of cosmopolitanism, which in turn lead to different research results. This aptly illustrates the interrelationship between theoretical ambivalence and empirical research. Of special importance here is Norris and Inglehart’s (2009) study of cross-cultural convergences and divergences, in which the authors have reported a growing sense of cultural convergence. Still, their conclusions (pp. 300–1) suggest that cultural convergence does not occur over time among the most cosmopolitan societies, although individual exposure to mass media contributes to a greater sense of ‘opening to the world’ – inclusive of more liberal views on gender and greater civic engagement. A different and less explored route is to examine both cosmopolitanism and its opposites as part of social research agendas (Beck 2002a). Instead of thinking of cosmopolitanism as a single category, it is possible to conceptualize cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan or parochial predispositions or attitudes as forming a continuum: the cosmopolitan–local continuum (Roudometof 2016). In cross-national research (Haller and Roudometof 2010; Roudometof and Haller 2007) two distinct variants of this continuum have emerged: a place-oriented variant and a nationoriented variant. The place-oriented variant reflects people’s attachment (or lack of attachment) to place. In this variant, the two opposite ends of the continuum consist of place-based locals (those who have high levels of attachment to neighbourhood, city or country) and place-based cosmopolitans (those who have low levels of attachment to neighbourhood, city or country). The nation-based variant of the continuum reflects the importance individuals attribute to being born in, having citizenship in, spending most of one’s life in and feeling as a member of one’s country. Similarly, the two opposite ends of the continuum consist of nation-based locals and nation-based cosmopolitans. Within each variant, clusters were observed at the opposite ends of the continuum, suggesting that individuals do tend to be mostly either cosmopolitans or locals (Haller and Roudometof 2010; Roudometof and Haller 2007). The existence of these two variants of the cosmopolitan– local continuum and the fact that these two variants operate independently of each other suggest the existence of a duality within the notion of cosmopolitanism: That is, as Hannerz (2007) argues, although cosmopolitan refers to an opening to the world (in the sense of a certain detachment from place and its traditional ties), it also refers to the transcendence of the nation–state as a frame of reference. This duality is further reflected in research results: Haller and Roudometof ’s (2010) global tracking of the trends from 1995 to 2003 suggests that, although individuals grow less attached to place globally, they also grow more attached to their respective nations – with the exception of those in European countries.

Cosmopolitanism in world history Although the notion of modern cosmopolitanism is embedded in Western discourse, the term has a long history – over 2,000 years have passed since Zenon of Citium first formulated the notion of the cosmopolitan. Subsequently, the concept has travelled across different eras with its meaning subjected to different interpretations according to the needs and the Zeitgeist of each historical period. Considerations of cosmopolitanism in historical perspective therefore can follow two very different lines of inquiry. The first line of inquiry is the relatively well-known conventional history of cosmopolitanism as an ideal or philosophy. The consensus is that, for the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, a cosmopolitan was a citizen of the world, a universal humanist who transcended particularistic distinctions based on territory, language or culture (Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1997; Cheah 1998; Schlereth 1977). It is precisely because it has been embedded in Western discourse 122

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since Kant that this ideal has been the subject of criticism. Critics argue that this grounding of cosmopolitanism in Western society does not render it a truly universalistic project but rather a Eurocentric project that reflects ‘a regional, parochial order’ (Pieterse 2006: 1252). Others argue that contemporary researchers should pay closer attention to the non-Western historical and cultural contexts and the ways different versions of cosmopolitanism have been articulated outside the Western cultural milieu (Holton 2009; Pollock et al. 2000; cf., Jacob 2008). Contemporary research has sought to highlight the extent to which one can identify world varieties of cosmopolitanism across different cultures as a means of transcending this criticism (Delanty 2014). Multiple cosmopolitanisms are therefore an important avenue of research, especially for nonWestern contexts with a rich urban culture. Just to mention one relevant example, a vibrant cosmopolitan culture has been historically present in the large commercial centres of the Mediterranean and the Middle East (Zubaida 1999). For traditional urban diasporas, such as the Greek Orthodox communities, the rise of modern nationalism signified a departure from the age-old cosmopolitan urban culture of the region (see Sifneos 2005). The above illustrate the necessity for historical sociology to inquire into conditions under which – and in specific historical eras and contexts – different cultures or worldviews of cosmopolitanism (or different cosmopolitanisms) have emerged. This is the second line of inquiry into the relationship between cosmopolitanism and world history. It expands the study of cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitanisms into the historical record, and tracks the relationship between cosmopolitanism(s) and world-historical globalization in the long durée. Using an examination of debates about labour migration in early modern England Barbalet (2014) has shown that the relationship between globalization and cosmopolitan sentiments has a long history and is by no means a simple one. While cosmopolitan tendencies emerge these are also mitigated by anticosmopolitan tendencies towards enclaves and protectionism. In a series of insightful articles Inglis and Robertson (2004, 2005, 2006; Robertson and Inglis 2004) relate the emergence of a cosmopolitan worldview to the growing interconnections of the Mediterranean region during the period of Greco-Roman Antiquity. Using the writings of historian Polybius as one of the main reference points, they argue that it was during that period that ecumenical notions gained the upper hand over more parochial visions. Their argument allows one to move from narrow concern with presentism and develop more historically grounded perspectives on cosmopolitanism (see also Holton 2009). After all, it was during the Hellenistic and Roman periods that the original notion of cosmopolitanism gained popular acceptance and provided for the worldview of an entire period that lasted several centuries (Lavan et al. 2016). It was during that era that cosmopolitanism was used to denote both an opening to the world in the sense of the plurality of experiences as well as a political vision of transcending the Ancient Greek notion of the polis in favour of the imperial vision of the Roman Empire or the earlier vision of the Hellenistic ecumene. In this respect, the duality Hannerz (2007) observes about the contemporary use of cosmopolitanism might be a feature that is intimately related to the concept’s long history. But does this mean then that the cosmopolitan project simply registers the return of imperialminded universalism? This is certainly implicit in Koulmasis’s (1997) Les Citoyens du Monde Histoire du Cosmopolitisme. After reviewing the cosmopolitanism of the Greco-Roman Antiquity, Koulmasis suggests that the second main era of cosmopolitanism was the golden era of world religions (Christianity, Islam) or what Eisenstadt (1986) has referred to as the axial age of monotheistic religions. Still, a closer reading of the evidence represented suggests that, although cosmopolitanism was present in the sense of an opening to the world within the great religious traditions of this period, the same cannot be said with regard to the political forms of cosmopolis. During the European Middle Ages, the vision fostered was that of religious universalism, 123

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whereby the known world was divided according to religious landscapes (the Roman Catholic ‘West’, the Eastern or ‘Greek’ Orthodox East, and the House of Islam). This form of universalism entailed forms of communication – such as religious pilgrimages to Mecca or Jerusalem – that transcended local parochialism. However, it is a grave error to misinterpret religious universalism as cosmopolitanism. In large part, this universalism was the very opposite of cosmopolitanism: Acceptance and tolerance of the Other were not predicated upon ethical recognition of the Other as equal and entitled to universal rights of any type but rather upon the Other’s inclusion within the sacred canopies of the great (‘universal’) religions. In itself, this example shows that, although the great religions entailed an opening to the world, they entailed not a pluralistic but, instead, a universalist vision of governance, politics and culture. In the modern era, when Immanuel Kant famously recovered the concept of cosmopolitanism, it was posited as an alternative or a future state that would relieve the world from the wars of the nation–states. It was thus once more connected to a political vision: transcending the notion of ‘national society’ or nation in favour of a political cosmopolis. Around the same time, the French Revolution fostered the creation of thousands of exiles, travellers and refugees – of whom perhaps two of the most well-known names are those of François-René de Chateaubriand and Alexis de Tocqueville. These were ‘cosmopolitans besides themselves’ or accidental cosmopolitans: wanderers who, much like the modern day migrants and refugees, had their lives marked by unwarranted mobility (see Fritzsche 2004). Nostalgia haunted the post-1789 émigrés, leading European doctors to diagnose it as a medical condition. It was a dominant genre in the accounts provided by the exiles and émigrés of the French Revolution – such as Chateaubriand whose accounts are filled with a sense of loss, wreckage and mourning for the lost world of the ancient regime. Fritzsche (2004: 64–5) remarks that Chateaubriand’s ‘nostalgia is premised on an understanding of historical change that is relentless and violent in character and general in scope’ while the very genre of nostalgia thus constructed is the ‘product of a shared historical consciousness of general displacement’ that renders individual suffering socially meaningful. An ocean of difference separates these accidental cosmopolitans from the British, who were taking the Grand Tour of the Orient as a form of appropriate leisure activity – the very precursor of contemporary mass tourism. For the accidental cosmopolitans of the era, nostalgia, homesickness and a yielding for the ancient regime that was irrevocably lost was also translated into love of country, a precursor to the romantic nationalism of the 19th century (Boym 2001: 12–13). The above suggest that, although mobility might be experienced, it is far from sufficient for defining one as a cosmopolitan. Moreover, many among the post-1789 refugees were actively involved in fostering the very antithesis of political cosmopolitanism – namely the idea of patria as a national homeland. Longing for their homelands – as much as longing for their past lives that the revolution rendered obsolete – these exiles contributed to the formation of what, since the 19th century, has come to be known as romantic nationalism, i.e., attachment to the land as a form of sentiment that offers popular legitimacy to national sovereignty. In its popular form, it is this sentiment that has provided legitimacy for national democratic rule. Increasingly, from the 19th century forward, the cosmopolitan has become identified as the ‘outsider’ to this tradition, and it is in this sense that at least a portion of contemporary literature views the cosmopolitan as a manifestation of a transnational or global elite of the privileged few (Calhoun 2008). More than providing an authoritative or ultimate answer to the complexities of the historical record, the above considerations raise some important questions for further study. How does one negotiate the relationship between religious universalism and cosmopolitanism in the historical record? How is one going to face up to the seemingly paradoxical presence of displaced nationalists longing for their homeland while experiencing cosmopolitanism as an unwarranted reality? It is clear that the theoretical dilemmas of scholarship might not find ultimate answers in the 124

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historical record, yet historically oriented scholarship can offer fresh and promising insights into one’s understanding of the cosmopolitanisms of the past and add valuable perspective to one’s understanding of contemporary realities.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to offer a critical overview of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and social research. I have argued that current uses of cosmopolitanism walk a fine line between the analytical and the descriptive modes of theorizing. This is reflected in the employment of cosmopolitanism in social research agendas. It is certainly true that when an analytic definition of cosmopolitanism is applied to empirical social scientific research it significantly decreases the chances for the falsification of theoretical claims. Social research has used both analytical and descriptive definitions of cosmopolitanism, yielding a multiplicity of often conflicting or ambivalent results. This mirrors the multiple uses of cosmopolitanism in social theory, and it is a rather anticipated outcome. In the years between this chapter’s original version and its current revision, research has been published both on cosmopolitanism as a practice and as an attitude or predisposition. This chapter’s revised version has taken note of some relevant publications – but obviously, it is unrealistic to offer an exhaustive account within the space restrictions of a single chapter. While numerous single-case studies have appeared in print, the growth of comparative or cross-national research has been modest and that remains an area for future development. While cosmopolitanism does not need to be necessarily tied to globalization, it is fair to say that one of the principle reasons for the growth of scholarly interest in this field is its close affinity with debates concerning the shape of 21st century globalization. Far from settling the debate on whether cosmopolitanism exists or not or whether it is the future state of the world, social research raises additional questions and contributes to refining the theoretical debate. For example, the duality of cosmopolitanism – which can be used both as a designation of an opening to the world as well as to register the transcendence of forms of political organization – remains a promising point of departure for further theoretical refinement and revision of the way one thinks about the concept. Not only is this duality observed in contemporary cross-national research (Haller and Roudometof 2010) but it is also observed in the historical record as well as in theoretical statements (Hannerz 2007). It offers a means for developing one’s own reflexivity and for clarifying both how one thinks about and uses the term. Finally, future research should not only be concerned with the presence or absence of the cosmopolitan but also with the cosmopolitan–local (or parochial or communitarian) binary relationship (see Zürn and Wilde 2016). Contemporary political developments – such as the 2016 Brexit vote – show that research needs to integrate negative responses to the cosmopolitan agenda, and inquire both to the factors that inhibit and promote the presence or absence of cosmopolitanism.

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Inglis, D. and R. Robertson (2004) ‘Beyond the Gates of the Polis: Reconfiguring Sociology’s Ancient Inheritance’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 4(2): 165–89. Inglis, D. and R. Robertson (2005) ‘The Ecumenical Analytic: “Globalization”, Reflexivity and the Revolution in Greek Historiography’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8(2): 99–122. Inglis, D. and R. Robertson (2006) ‘From Republican Virtue to Global Imaginary: Changing Visions of the Historian Polybius’, History of the Human Sciences, 19(1): 1–18. Jacob, M. (2008) ‘The Cosmopolitan as a Lived Category’, Daedalus, 137(3): 18–25. Jacob, M.C. (2006) Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kendall, G., I. Woodward and Z. Skrbis (2009) The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Koulmasis, P. (1997) Les Citoyens du Monde Histoire du Cosmopolitisme, Athens: Kastaniotis [Greek edition translated from French]. Lapegna, P. (2009) ‘Ethnographers of the World . . . United? Current Debates on the Ethnographic Study of “Globalization”’, Journal of World Systems Research, 51(1): 3–24. Lavan, M., R.E. Payne and J. Weisweiler (eds.) (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mouzelis, N. (1995) Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies, London: Routledge. Norris, P. and R. Inglehart (2009) Cosmopolitan Communications: Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nowicka, M. and M. Rovisco (eds.) (2009) Cosmopolitanism in Practice, Aldershot: Ashgate. Ofsson, A. and S. Ohman (2007) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals. An Empirical Investigation of Transnationalism’, Current Sociology, 55(6): 877–95. Phillips, T. (2002) ‘Imagined Communities and Self-Identity: An Exploratory Quantitative Study’, Sociology, 36(3): 597–617. Phillips, T. and P. Smith (2008) ‘Cosmopolitan Beliefs and Cosmopolitan Practices: An Empirical Investigation’, Journal of Sociology, 44(4): 391–9. Pichler, F. (2008) ‘How Real Is Cosmopolitanism in Europe?’, Sociology, 42(6): 1107–26. Pichler, F. (2009a) ‘ “Down-to-Earth” Cosmopolitanism: Subjective and Objective Measurements of Cosmopolitanism in Survey Research’, Current Sociology, 57(5): 704–32. Pichler, F. (2009b) ‘Cosmopolitan Europe: Views and Identity’, European Societies, 11(1): 3–24. Pieterse J.N. (2006) ‘Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda’, Development and Change, 37(6): 1247–57. Pollock, S., H.K. Bhabha, C.A. Breckenridge and D. Chakrabatry (2000) ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, Public Culture, 12(3): 577–89. Robbins, B. (1998) ‘Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robertson, R. and D. Inglis (2004) ‘The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness’, Globalizations, 1(1): 38–49. Roudometof, V. (2016) Glocalization: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Roudometof, V. and W. Haller (2007) ‘Social Indicators of Cosmopolitanism and Localism in Eastern and Western Europe: An Exploratory Analysis’, in C. Rumford (ed.) Cosmopolitanism and Europe, Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Schlenker, A. (2017) ‘Transnational Status and Cosmopolitanism: Are Dual Citizens and Foreign Residents Cosmopolitan Vanguards?’, Global Networks, 17(3): 321–48. Schlereth, T. (1977) The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Sifneos, E. (2005) ‘Cosmopolitanism as a Feature of the Greek Commercial Diaspora’, History and Anthropology, 16(1): 97–111. Skrbis, Z. and I. Woodward (2007) ‘The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness’, Sociological Review, 55(4): 740–74. Skrbis, Z. and I. Woodward (2013) Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea, London: Sage. Szerszynski, B. and J. Urry (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Review, 50(4): 461–81. Szerszynski, B. and J. Urry (2006) ‘Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar’, British Journal of Sociology, 1(57): 113–31. Werbner, P. (2006) ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23(2–3): 496–8. 127

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11 Performing cosmopolitanism. The context and object framing of cosmopolitan openness Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbiš

The case for a performative model of cosmopolitan openness This chapter addresses the question of how to conceptualise cosmopolitanism for empirical research. Exploring this question whilst drawing upon the notion of openness as a principal discourse of contemporary cosmopolitanism studies, the chapter explores the application of performative and qualitative approaches to researching cosmopolitanism as a form of openness to cultural difference. Attempts to specify cosmopolitanism through traditional social scientific models deploying a variable-centred model of inquiry are valuable, but in this chapter we argue for the additional relevance of a performative theory. It proposes that forms of cosmopolitan openness can be effectively studied through the application of qualitative, performative models of social research, and that these can usefully complement quantitative research inquiries. Because they highlight the processual and contingent nature of cosmopolitan sentiments and the way such attitudes are afforded and constructed within particular spatio-temporal contexts, it is argued that a performative approach is well suited to exploring cosmopolitanism as an emergent, relational dimension of social life rather than a stable feature of identities or social types. While cosmopolitanism has sometimes been used as an open-ended, diverse, ‘catch-all’ concept relating to openness to diversity and cultural mixing, we argue that the long-term value of the concept must rest with both imaginative, critical and ethically exacting accounts of the concept as well as the movement toward realisation of its empirical specificities and forms. As Skrbis, Kendall and Woodward (2004: 119) argued, this task involves a hard-headed resistance to the more seductive – yet opaque – aspects of the concept: ‘The fantasy of cosmopolitanism is so appealing and effective that it discourages the attempt to tie down any real cosmopolitans; but we must resist the lure of this fantasy if we wish to make cosmopolitanism a valuable analytical concept’. In this chapter we extend and go beyond this argument. While we embrace the thrust of this sentiment, in addition we make the case that the application of analytic models of social performativity can allow researchers to conceive cosmopolitanism as an emergent and dynamic dimension of social life which is based in repertoires and cultural practices around valuing openness that are bounded and indeed made possible, at least in some part, by temporal, spatial and material structures. Such an approach resists narrow definition and conceptualisation of the forms and types of openness, yet allows the concept to operate across different circumstances and 129

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cultural locations. Instead of looking to find some type of authentic ‘cosmopolitan’ expression or form, in this chapter we explicate how various material, spatial and cultural dimensions performatively constitute cosmopolitanism, and are constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. In order to address the central concern of the chapter, we need to begin by asking what cosmopolitanism is, how it is made and identified. Theoretical work on the concept of cosmopolitanism has proliferated in recent years. Substantially, though not exclusively, this emerging corpus within sociology and political thought has been associated with vanguard thinking about the impacts of globalisation in the work of thinkers such as Giddens (1999), Beck (2002), Held (2002), Urry (2003), Delanty (2006), and Calhoun (2006), to name a few key figures. Such theorisations have been crucial to delineating the effects of global events and processes in creating opportunities for identities, personal values, politics and culture, to fuse along a fundamental axis – the world, the globe and humanity. At the core of the cosmopolitan agenda is a proposal for a radical decoupling of social action and imagination from national or local anchors – freed from the assumptions of methodological nationalism (Beck, 2003; Beck and Sznaider, 2006) and nation-bound agencies – toward a cosmopolitan culture which is seen as globally open, and inviting cultural cross-pollination, hybridity and fluidity. Typically, if we use extant theoretical literatures to discern the key threads of the meaning of cosmopolitanism as an attitude of openness then three major attributes are identifiable. The first relates to cosmopolitanness which is defined by its embracing of, expression through or a consequence of various sorts of mobilities (Beck, 2006; Hannerz, 1990; Urry, 2000). In this sense, the association between globalisation and cosmopolitanism is most immediately identifiable. These mobilities may be imaginative and virtual, as much as they are corporeal (Szerszynski and Urry, 2002: 470). Furthermore, such mobilities are also expressed in relation to many types of consumer objects and elements of technological infrastructures, whose own mobility and symbolic agency is a crucial part of the cosmopolitanisation process. These are locally consumed or used, but circulated within the global marketplace. Global economic forces demand the marketisation of products as ways of mobilising hitherto untapped labour, commodities, and resources, and of extracting economic value. As a fundamental part of this process, these goods – from tropical fruits and flora, to home decorations – can be produced and consumed through cosmopolitan frames of meaning which work with material affordances of objects and activate their cosmopolitan meaning through interpretive rituals and use practices. The second type of cosmopolitan disposition of openness involves various cultural symbolic competencies that allow one to move within a range of cultural lifeworlds. This might subsume the crucial cosmopolitan skill of code-switching, for example (Emmison, 2003; Woodward, Skrbis and Bean, 2008). We take this to refer to an individual’s ability to know, command and enact a variety of cultural knowledges and repertoires – to switch and be flexible with cultural codes as required as part of cultivating a sense of intercultural mastery that one possesses, but is able to deploy as required within relevant contexts (Hannerz, 1990: 240). Chaney’s (2002) description of shifting aesthetic and cultural economies and associated privileging of forms of cultural citizenship, suggestive of the skilful, contextualised and conscious deployment of cross-cultural symbols is a feature of the cosmopolitan disposition. The third dimension of cosmopolitan openness relates to the inclusive valuing of other cultural forms whose origin is outside one’s home culture. The cosmopolitan citizen must be receptive to the cultural outputs of others, and indeed willing to become engaged with them. The consciousness of particular types of tourists may be a step in this direction, providing it is not preoccupied with the comforts and safeties of home. A degree of reflexive ethical engagement (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005: 191; Kendall, Woodward and Skrbis, 2009) is inevitably required to move into the realm of cosmopolitan vision and social action. 130

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The cosmopolitan identity: should we look for ideal categories of identity, or sets of practices? In the refinement of empirical research in the field, an ongoing issue concerns how we are to understand cosmopolitanism as an attribute of social identity. There are considerable limitations inherent in an approach which attempts to identify particular groups or individuals as idealtypical cosmopolitans. This strategy makes an assumption that cosmopolitan individuals are there ‘to be found’ and that they can be identified through a variable-centred approach which focuses on attributes theorised to be associated with cosmopolitanness, such as openness to diversity, interest in global issues, or an expressed willingness to forgo national or local interest in favour of global matters. Alternatively, cosmopolitanism can be conceptualised as a flexible, available set of cultural practices and outlooks which are selectively mobilised depending on social and cultural contexts. This latter approach suggests not looking for fixed and stable attributes, but to the performative, situational and accomplished dimensions of being cosmopolitan. That is, it understands cosmopolitanism as an expression in particular social contexts and settings. One of its key assumptions is that comospolitanness is not the reserve of particular groups, but is a set of skills, a way of managing meaning (Hannerz, 1990) which is situationally deployed and circulates as a type of cultural capital based on mastering interpretive scripts. The positivistic approach to the questions of empirical expressions of cosmopolitanism, is clouded by a number of issues of measurement and identification (Roudometof, 2016; Skrbis, Kendall and Woodward, 2004; Saito, 2011). In terms of the identification of cosmopolitan social identities, one of the ongoing debates in the cosmopolitanism literature concerns its apparent class basis, and whether a cosmopolitan outlook is necessarily associated with privileged elites who posses higher-education levels, incomes and capacities for mobility. The motif of the cosmopolitan as privileged, globally mobile, and in possession of surplus capitals, is the dominant image in cosmopolitan studies: for example, Kanter’s (1995) ‘world class’, Kirwan-Taylor’s (2000) ‘cosmocrats’, Calhoun’s (2002) ‘frequent travelers’, or Hannerz’s (2004) ‘foreign correspondents’. In this type of approach, the cosmopolitan is identified as a relatively privileged social actor, distinguished by a command of resources – financial, cultural and social – that enhance mobility of various kinds. Counter-intuitively perhaps – but also empirically validated – cosmopolitan generosity and reasoning have been shown to exist amongst nonintellectual, relatively immobile and working-class groups. For example, this line of thought is found in Lamont and Aksartova’s (2002) account of cosmopolitan discourses amongst workers of different ethnicities. Their research intentionally chose to explore a group of people whose social networks are seen as relatively stable and lifeworlds comparatively more bounded than those of the elite, globally mobile cosmopolitans. Similarly, Werbner’s (1999) work focuses on the class dimension of transnational mobility of Pakistani Muslim religious Sufis and working-class Pakistani ‘cosmopolitans’. Both of these important studies show us that cosmopolitanness is not necessarily the exclusive domain of Western, middle class groups. They suggest that being cosmopolitan does involve having access to repertoires and linguistic scripts of universalism, though such discursive resources are not necessarily articulated or deployed in universal and consistent ways but rather have an emergent and performative quality, depending on the facilitating contexts of environment and social setting. When considering the identification of cosmopolitan identities, two complicating factors must be considered (Kendall, Woodward and Skrbis, 2009). First, we can make the distinction between accidental and reflexive dimensions of cosmopolitanism, a common move in literatures on cosmopolitanism. When talking about the accidental dimension of cosmopolitanism one can imagine it as a form of subjectivity and set of cultural practices and attitudes individuals come to develop passively, perhaps even accidentally via immersion within a globalising social and cultural field or 131

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exposure to cultural difference. For example, goods may be foreign, but not necessarily global or even cosmopolitan (Kipnis, 2018). On the other hand, we can imagine cosmopolitanism to be a set of attributes acquired and performed within various social contexts. In this account, cosmopolitanism refers practices, symbols and outlooks, increasingly available to social actors – though differentially adopted – for use in a range of cultural settings and fields. A second dimension which is commonly delineated relates to the distinction between reflexive and banal forms of cosmopolitanism, the former related to a capacity for inclusive ethical practice, and the latter to sampling and superficial enjoyment of cosmopolitan or ‘global’ opportunities in a variety of settings. The identification of these dimensions raises some basic questions that go to the heart of how we imagine the power and reach of the concept of cosmopolitanism. At their core, they suggest that cosmopolitan sentiments might be expressed through a hierarchically ordered set of cultural practices, sometimes having depth and effect in terms of cosmopolitanism, others not. This dimension of everyday openness deserves to be further interrogated and challenged in future research, as its basis is suspect and forms insecure ground which produces a range of spurious assumptions. We develop the basis of these distinctions in further detail below in the context of our argument about the performative dimensions of cosmopolitanism. The suggestion that cosmopolitanism is a circumstantially induced tendency picks up on the proliferation of global flows and mobilities of multiple sorts as a context for the uptake of some aspects of the cosmopolitan disposition, but is ultimately a weak, circumscribed account of cosmopolitanism because it fails to identify the cultural location and performative origins of cosmopolitan subjectivities. Such an account brings matters of object circulation, global media flows, trade and global governance to the fore as environmental and circumstantial factors responsible for cultivating cosmopolitanism, but leaves out crucial questions of how cosmopolitanism is performatively accomplished, cultivated by the fusion of action and disposition within particular environments and settings. Our argument is that cosmopolitanism is a body of cultural practices which rests on a particular set of cultural competencies, interactional scripts and symbolic frames that are brought into play in culturally meaningful fields where the expression of cultural capital competencies makes sense to participants. In acknowledging this, we come to see that being cosmopolitan is itself a culturally located competency, perhaps even a strategy, that affords individuals the capacity to see, identify, label, use and govern dimensions of social difference in ways which reproduce patterns of cultural power.

Openness and the cosmopolitan disposition: searching for the ideal cosmopolitan type Cosmopolitan dispositions of openness The idea that cultural openness defines the cosmopolitan outlook is the dominant way of conceptualising the idea, at least in the recent sociological literatures. Although it is a term which carries a high degree of conceptual and definitional vagueness, it is possible to see how ‘openness’ to alternative cultural forms, practices and experiences is central to all of the dimensions of cosmopolitanism outlined above (Skrbis and Woodward, 2007). Accordingly, the idea of cultural ‘openness’ has been a fountainhead for general conceptions of cosmopolitanness as an outlook or, disposition. Cosmopolitans are assumed to be ‘open’ to new experiences, peoples, ideas and to enjoy the play of otherness upon oneself. Such linking of cosmopolitan with characteristics of outward openness is frequently summarised as a core characteristic of cosmopolitanism in the recent contemporary literature as well (Hannerz, 1990; Roudometof, 2005; Tomlinson, 1999; Szerszynski and Urry, 2002; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). For example, Hannerz (1990: 239) 132

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defines the cosmopolitan as having ‘an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences’ and a ‘willingness to engage with the other’. Szerszynski and Urry (2002: 468) concur with this idea, adding that this disposition of cosmopolitan openness is exhibited ‘towards people, places and experiences from other cultures’. However, as Skrbis, Kendall and Woodward (2004: 127) point out, the notion of cosmopolitan openness is ‘vague and diffuse’, which because of its fuzziness, has limited analytic value in helping to understand what is or isn’t cosmopolitan. How one could empirically identify and measure such openness is not so clear. In identifying strands of research that theorise cosmopolitan openness as a characteristic within and of individuals, Vertovec and Cohen (2002: 13) identify the cosmopolitan individual as having a distinctive set of attitudes, and a discernible corpus of practices. In distinguishing between attitudes and practices as two components of the cosmopolitan individual, Vertovec and Cohen usefully append practices to attitudes, suggesting that to be cosmopolitan involves a mode of acting or performing, as much as it does thinking and feeling. We understand attitudes to broadly encompass beliefs, values and outlooks, while we take practices to refer to coordinated sets of learned cultural competencies which must be applied in particular social situations, akin to a cultural repertoire or mode of behaviour. Following Bourdieu’s work, Skrbis, Kendall and Woodward (2004) also advocated the idea of disposition in order to identify the principles and procedures people use in their relations with objects and others, and which could be used to distinguish cosmopolitan individuals from non-cosmopolitan, or less cosmopolitan individuals. On this basis, they propose that there should be ‘carriers’ of cosmopolitanism, and that these individuals should have particular cultural attributes, comprising sets of attitudes, values, behaviours and practices that distinguish them from non-cosmopolitans. In this sense, we can say that cosmopolitanism is defined by a disposition of openness.

From dispositions to repertoires There are a couple of potential limitations associated with identifying and labelling cosmopolitanism as a disposition. For example, Bourdieu shows that a ‘disposition’ is socially located and also structurally driven, while at the same time being a set of flexible rules for application within unique settings the concept is somewhat individualist in its application. Individuals – within their own social-structural locations – hold dispositions. Likewise, the idea of dispositions tells us that certain groups of people will have a propensity to see things in similar ways. The idea of a disposition is also somewhat vague. Bourdieu’s analytic scheme is elaborate and powerful, but his definition of disposition as predisposition, tendency or inclination is decidedly – and famously – fuzzy, and begs more questions than it answers. One of the other major downsides of thinking about cosmopolitanism as a disposition is that dispositions are consistent and homological structures – they are ‘whole’ in that they are structured and patterned in consistent ways, and relatively inflexible. They encourage us to think about cosmopolitanism in a rather reductive way: as a perspective, state of mind, orientation or habits of mind and life that are either held, or not held. Furthermore, in Bourdieu’s (1984) classic analysis, dispositions also occur within national fields, though of course we now need to account for fluidity and mobility of humans and things. To highlight a cosmopolitan disposition is, we think, only part of the story. In suggesting cosmopolitanism is a state of mind, Hannerz (1990: 238) adds (crucially and insightfully) that ‘to take a more processual view – [it is] a mode of managing meaning’. Hannerz (1990: 239) highlights this discursive feature of cosmopolitan orientations, referring to cosmopolitanness as a body of cultural skills required to manoeuvre within ‘a particular system of meanings and meaningful forms’. In his view, cosmopolitanism is a mode of meaning-making, an act which brings cosmopolitanism into being through particular frames of action and interpretation. What this viewpoint suggests is that 133

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cosmopolitanism is never an absolute or fixed category that resides simply within some individuals more than others, but a dimension of social life that must be actively constructed through practices of meaning-making in social situations. Our position is that openness per se is a useful concept for orienting inquiry into ways of being cosmopolitan, but that a focus on the performed nature of openness can be profitable. That is, we see that openness is enabled or afforded by particular spatio-temporal and meaning-making configurations and by interactional repertoires which make sense of difference, suggesting the concept has a performative core. As something identifiable in individuals, cosmopolitanism has both ideal and pragmatic dimensions, attitudinal and behavioural aspects. But, these outlooks must be brought to bear on objects, other humans and non-humans, and events within particular spatio-temporal settings. Cosmopolitanism therefore involves the knowledge, command and performance of symbolic resources for the purpose of highlighting and valuing cultural difference. Building from McCrae’s (1994) conception of openness, two important processes are emphasised. The first relates to a motivation for openness, whereby the pursuit of difference, novelty and experiences outside the norm is seen to relate to a desire to enlarge one’s experience. The second relates to the permeability or porousness of attitudes and values, and the capacity to co-exist with fluid or permeable belief structures and experiences. In this conception, openness relates to matters of boundary and border permeability, as McCrae (1994: 258) notes, ‘it (openness) refers not to the contents of consciousness so much as to the organization of the contents in a particularly fluid and permeable structure’. Of course, while claiming to be a universal position of cultural inclusiveness and generosity, it is in fact, a culturally located and environmentally enabled viewpoint, which is itself based in a regime of value-attribution. The very fact that something or someone can be called cosmopolitan implies the adoption of a regime of value, a discourse that rests on a way of seeing, with its associated inclusions and exclusions. We discuss this further below.

Repertoires and social performance We need to move toward an understanding of cosmopolitanism that integrates individuals and their dispositions with objects and spaces and the performative accomplishment of such a perspective, for cosmopolitan dispositions are often enacted or called for in particular spatiotemporal locations. If we think about cosmopolitanism not just as something that people either have or do not have as part of some consistently structured and applied set – as in a disposition – but as a sensibility that people sometimes draw upon and other times ignore then we think this is an improvement in conceptualising the nature of ‘being cosmopolitan’. In this model ‘being cosmopolitan’ refers to a set of outlooks and practices increasingly available – yet not guaranteed – to individuals for the purposes of dealing with cultural diversity, hybridity and otherness. This is consistent with Lamont and Aksartova’s (2002: 2) suggested operationalisation of ordinary cosmopolitanism as ‘cultural repertoires . . . differently available to individuals across race and national context’. Like Lamont and Aksartova (2002), we think it advisable to focus on the grounding of such dispositions in everyday experiences: what people eat, watch, listen to, shop for and buy, and dream about. We see these repertoires as flexible, and sometimes contradictory. They are discursive, practical resources available to social actors to deal with emergent, everyday global agendas and issues, related to things like cultural diversity, the global and otherness. Yet, we do not see such cosmopolitan values expressed fully, or at all times, and on all issues. Rather, ‘cosmopolitanism’ is a cultural discourse, underpinned by ideas about the ‘good’ and ‘evil’, sacred and profane, sides of globality – available to social actors (and some more than others), that is deployed intermittently. The cosmopolitan impulse is restrained by personal, local and national anchors 134

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which alert people to the downsides of globality. Furthermore, whatever ideals are understood abstractly, we see a set of counter-discourses that inhibit their full expression. The advantage of this approach is that we do not claim cosmopolitanism to be an ever-expanding frontier of global community that people in all places and times increasingly adopt as if it were part of an evolutionary adaptation. Nor do we see cosmopolitanism as something fixed solely by social location. It is an increasingly prominent, available cultural discourse – and ideal – but one that conflicts with an array of other social and personal imperatives, and thus does not always find expression in social encounters. This movement from seeing cosmopolitanism as a disposition to seeing it as a reflexively deployed cultural resource is an improvement, but again not the whole story. Although this theorisation affords us flexibility in understanding the uptake and expression of cosmopolitan sensibilities, it does not yet account for the coordinating frames of time, objects and space particularly effectively. To accomplish this, we move to foreground a performative model of cosmopolitan openness.

Cosmopolitanism and social performance We suggest that a fruitful way to think about cosmopolitanism is through the prism of a performative approach. Recent developments in performance theory (Alexander, 2004a, 2004b; Butler, 1997 [1988]; Geertz, 1973; Schechner, 1993; Turner, 1982) seek to understand the performative character of culture by drawing upon theoretical resources of symbolic action, ritual and social drama to show how social action is contingent upon history and collective sentiments, but must be brought into existence by continuous performative acts which actualise and reproduce the identities of social actors and the meaning of co-habiting objects and settings (Butler, 1997 [1988]: 409; Bennett, 2010). In his exposition of the elements of performance Alexander (2004b: 529) defines cultural performance as: ‘the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of the social situation’. To this, we should clarify that we take ‘actors’ to encompass not just humans, but a range of non-human actors including objects and aesthetic surfaces whose features are read or used in ways which afford cosmopolitan interpretations, attachments and co-actions (see Saito, 2011; de la Fuente, 2018). As Saito points out in his ANT proposal for cosmopolitanism studies, ‘people develop cosmopolitanism only when they become well attached to foreign humans and nonhumans. . . . It is not detachments but attachments – their multiplication, intensification, and concatenation – that make cosmopolitanism possible’ (Saito, 2011: 144). Here, we locate the attachments described above in the context of social performances. Alexander (2004b) develops a model of the elements of cultural performance which can be usefully applied to a range of social settings and types of explanation, including empirical analyses of cosmopolitanism. Alexander outlines a variety of elements which compose a social performance, such as: a body of collective representations to which social actors orient their actions (i.e. goals, morals, beliefs); actors and audiences; mise-en-scène (i.e. the visual and material elements of the scene within which people act); social power (i.e. some performances are understood as natural and appropriate, others as inherently challenging and iconoclastic); and the means of symbolic production. By this latter concept, Alexander refers to the range of mundane material things that allow and empower people to act socially. This consists of objects that serve to represent things to others, frequently established through iconic means (Kurasawa, 2012). These material things are a crucial part of any social performance because they assist social actors to ‘dramatize and make vivid the invisible motives and morals they are trying to represent’ (Alexander, 2004b: 532). We briefly outline each of these elements in relation to cosmopolitanism. 135

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Objectual and material networks Cosmopolitanism is inextricably linked to networked elements of material infrastructure, which both configures and enables its expression. Many of these things that enable forms of cosmopolitan mobility and openness are fixed in place and actually immobile, enlisted into an interdependent technological system which supports massive systems of mobility and movement. For example, systems of global air travel rely on airport hubs such as Singapore or Dubai, strategically located around the globe for ease and scale of distributing passengers to other regional hubs or smaller ports, and which support the capacity of airliners to travel certain distances without refuelling. Global air travel also relies on the existence of fixed radio beacons for navigation, transmissions from a terrestrial radio station for fixing a glide slope to find the runway, or runway lighting to visually alert pilots to the runway upon descent. There are many other examples of such technological infrastructures which facilitate global mobility, including ports, docks, factories, storage areas, garages and roads. In any mapping of cosmopolitanism’s growing influence, such aspects of technology are as yet part of its missing masses. As well, the internet is a massively networked global microstructure of materials, fixtures, hardware which affords cosmopolitan engagements at a distance and which allows cosmopolitan networks, for example of shopping, travel, subcultural and identity affiliations, leisure, to be mobilised and find their expression.

Spatial and environmental contexts: the cosmopolitan mise-en-scène Cosmopolitanism is best understood when performed or identified in particular time-space settings. For example, Mica Nava (2002, 2007) shows how cosmopolitanism exists in department stores of the early twentieth century, promoted by commercial interests as an alternative to stultifying and insular forms of traditional British modernism. Elijah Anderson (2004) has developed the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan canopy’, usefully indicating the spatial dimension of everyday cosmopolitanism. Here Anderson suggests that some urban locations such as Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia facilitate contact with cultural difference and that social interaction within these spaces occurs across the usual boundaries of class and race might be routinal components of everyday life. We might also refer to the contemporary cultural festival as a space of cultural cosmopolitanism (Delanty, Giorgi and Sassatelli, 2011; Bennett, Taylor and Woodward, 2014). The contemporary festival has become one principle site for representing, encountering, incorporating and understanding aspects of cultural community and cultural difference. A key example here is the WOMAD Festival, a longstanding and geographically dispersed world music event which has extended into a variety of domains, encouraging audiences to ‘taste the world’ by sampling music, food and lifestyles from around the globe. As a final example, we can think of the spaces within cities as sites of cosmopolitan exchange. Here, it is the spatial and material structures within cities which provide the structures for encountering various types of cultural difference and diversity. The question of whether such spaces can be planned, or if they emerge organically and unconsciously from the pragmatic movements of their publics cannot easily be answered but they can be both. It is obvious that forms of consumptive engagement are potentially exploitative and based on modes of cultural appropriation, though they are also motivated by curiosity and a genuine yearning for engagements with alterity (Binnie, Holloway, Millington and Young, 2006). Such questions need further empirical exploration. The emphasis on the expression of cosmopolitanism in spatial settings is a useful reminder of where, why and under what material-spatial contingencies cosmopolitanism openness is manifested. 136

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Actors and audiences Cosmopolitanism is propagated by the effective displays of particular representatives, objects or carriers, who through their social performances can display a viable and socially warrantable form or aspect of cosmopolitan identity, or behaviour. In this sense, being cosmopolitan requires people to draw upon the discourses and rationales made public by publically known and recognisable cosmopolitan objects, whether they be people, events, sounds or images. For example, a variety of global media events which broadcast natural and social traumas can present a version of cosmopolitan hospitality or generosity around natural or human disasters. The ‘Live-Aid’ events of 1984–1985 is a good example here, as is any significant natural disaster which mobilises transnational action and emotional commitment. Photographic images are also types of digital or material objects, which because of their capacity to visually narrate social events and circumstances have a type of agency in that they can motivate and encourage people to think beyond themselves, or beyond the nation (Kurasawa, 2007). Likewise, music and sounds are mobile, and can be a carriers of cosmopolitan sensibilities through both its sonic and visual content, as much as through its performance by charismatic artists who while different to ourselves, allow us to engage with difference in ways we can appreciate (Stevenson, 2003).

Scripts and narratives as means of production Perhaps the critical defining feature of the cosmopolitan ethic is the acceptance and institution of self-problematising relationships with cultural difference. The movement from a restricted to an elaborated set of codes of cultural engagement (Bernstein, 1972; Emmison, 2003) rests on a deepening relationship with the raw material of globality. In part, this involves a capacity to narrate the meaning of engagements with culturally different people and things in ways which emphasise the cosmopolitan implications of such engagements. For example, Calcutt, Woodward and Skrbis (2009) undertook an analysis of interview talk using an approach inspired by cognitive schema and discourse analysis. Their research showed that cosmopolitanism rests upon a variety of discursive strategies which compartmentalise and subsume cultural difference into manageable and understandable categories, rendering it meaningful, harmless, idealised or indeed positive, through discourses associated with activities such as travel, leisure or food. This deepening relationship has also been referred to as a ‘reflexive’ style of cosmopolitan engagement, referring to the capacity to understand the meaning of engagements with difference (Kendall, Woodward and Skrbis, 2009). In this style of cosmopolitanism, the individual can become a type of cultural aficionado and expert, familiar with culturally strange styles, sometimes to establish status within particular social reference groups or networks, but also for the pleasure gained by cultivating aspects of the self as a way of being in the world. But – crucially – along with this desire for cultural novelty, this style of engagement reflects a deeper and more culturally skilled engagement with otherness. It shows some desire and willingness to be challenged and learn from different cultural experiences, and perhaps most importantly it shows some implicit value preference for the explicit de-hierarchisation of culture on political or ethical grounds.

Conclusion At the core of recent and antique conceptualisations of cosmopolitanism is the idea of openness. While openness is based upon a range of elemental practice and attitudes and can be defined in terms of these components, in this chapter we have also argued that cosmopolitan openness is something which is situationally and contextually dependent. In fact, this form of openness 137

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is amenable to expression and flowering in some contexts more than others. The implication of this context dependency is that openness should be conceptualised as having a performative dimension, it must be brought into social frames by actors, or indeed actants, that mobilise particular ways of seeing, which elevate and promote openness as a relevant operational schema or discourse. Rather than focusing on delimiting expressions of openness to fixed expressions of agreement or disagreement, because of the contingency of expressions of openness we suggest that researchers focus on the performative and contextual dimensions of the idea of cosmopolitan openness. Thus, openness is neither a universal concept, nor necessarily more or less ubiquitous. It is more of a strategy, resource or frame for managing meaning in settings infused by different types of individuals and groups. Openness is not the same thing for every person, nor is it the same for each person across particular settings. It may rest on similar conceptual dimensions, such as curiosity and desire for new experiences, for example, though its objects can be diverse. This means that researchers must look not to absolute expressions of openness, but to its performance, effervescence and manifestation across a diversity of spatio-material contexts by a range of citizens.

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Hannerz, U. (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, in Featherstone, M. (Ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage. Hannerz, U. (2004) Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Held, D. (2002) ‘Culture and Political Community: National, Global and Cosmopolitan’, in Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (Eds.), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 48–58. Kanter, R.M. (1995) World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy, New York: Simon & Shuster. Kendall, G., Woodward, I. and Skrbis, Z. (2009) The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kipnis, E. (2018) ‘On Decomposing The ‘Thick’ and the ‘Thin’ for Measuring Cosmopolitanism in Multicultural Marketplaces: Why Unpacking the Foreign and Global Aspects of Cosmopolitanism Matters’, in Emontspool, J. and Woodward, I. (Eds.), Cosmopolitanism, Markets, and Consumption: A Critical Global Perspective, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirwan-Taylor, H. (2000) ‘The Cosmocrats’, Harpers & Queen, October: 188–91. Kurasawa, F. (2007) The Work of Global Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kurasawa, F. (2012) ‘The Making of Humanitarian Visual Icons. On the 1921–1923 Russian Famine as Foundational Event’, in Alexander, J.C., Giesen, B., and Bartmánski, D. (Eds.), Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lamont, M. and Aksartova, S. (2002) ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries among Working-class Men’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(4): 1–25. McCrae, R.R. (1994) ‘Openness to Experience: Expanding the Boundaries of Factor V’, European Journal of Personality, 8: 251–72. Nava, M. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(1–2): 81–99. Nava, M. (2007) Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference, Oxford: Berg. Roudometof, V. (2005) ‘Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Globalization’, Current Sociology, 35(1): 113–35. Roudometof, V. (2016) Glocalization: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Saito, H. (2011) ‘An Actor-Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Theory, 29(2): 124–49. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. (2005) Globalization and Belonging, London: Sage. Schechner, R. (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge. Skrbis, Z., Kendall, G. and Woodward, I. (2004) ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism: Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21(6): 115–36. Skrbis, Z. and Woodward, I. (2007) ‘The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness’, Sociological Review, 55(4): 730–47. Stevenson, N. (2003) Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions, Buckingham: Open University Press. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, The Sociological Review, 50(4): 461–81. Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity, Cambridge, MA: Polity. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Werbner, P. (1999) ‘Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology, 7(1): 17–35. Woodward, I., Skrbis, Z. and Bean, C. (2008) ‘Attitudes toward Globalization and Cosmopolitanism: Cultural Diversity, Personal Consumption and the National Economy’, The British Journal of Sociology, 59(1): 207–26.

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Part II

Cosmopolitan cultures

12 Anthropology and the new ethical cosmopolitanism Pnina Werbner

Ethics, morality and cosmopolitan anthropology Cosmopolitanism, derived from the Greek conjunction of ‘world’ (cosmos) and ‘city’ (polis), describes a ‘citizen of the world’, member in a ‘universal circle of belonging that involves the transcendence of the particular and blindly given ties of kinship and country’ (Cheah 2006: 487). Against ‘globalisation’, a term implying the free movement of capital and the global (mainly Western) spread of ideas and practices, cosmopolitanism is a word used by the ‘new’ cosmopolitans to emphasise empathy, toleration, obligation and respect for other cultures and values. Thus, at its most basic, cosmopolitanism is about reaching out across cultural differences through dialogue, aesthetic enjoyment, and respect; of living together with difference. It is also about the cosmopolitan right to abode and hospitality in strange lands and, alongside that, the urgent need to devise ways of living together in peace in the international community. Against the slur that cosmopolitans are rootless, with no commitments to place or nation, the new post-1990s cosmopolitanism attempts to theorise the complex ways in which cosmopolitans juggle particular and transcendent loyalties – morally, and inevitably also, politically. Whatever the definition, and whether we are talking of rooted, vernacular or elite interpretations of the term, cosmopolitanism has to be grasped as an ethical horizon – an aspirational outlook and mode of practice. Cosmopolitans insist on the human capacity to imagine the world from an Other’s perspective, and to imagine the possibility of a borderless world of cultural diversity. We often label as cosmopolitan individuals with a certain subjective capacity to enjoy cultural diversity and travel; but because cosmopolitanism is itself a product of creativity and communication in the context of diversity, it must ultimately be understood not merely as individual, but as collective, relational and thus historically situated (Robbins 1998a, 1998b). This raises certain questions in relation to the new, so-called anthropology of ethics. Building on Michel Foucault’s late works on the cultivation of the self, along with Kantian and Aristotelian ideas, the anthropology of ethics stresses selfhood and subjectivity as the locus of freedom (cf., for example, Laidlaw 2013; Lambek 2010). A glaring absence in the growing corpus of work in the anthropology of ethics, however, is any serious engagement with the new anthropology of cosmopolitanism. This is surprising: a 2015 reader on ‘Moral Anthropology’ (Fassin 2015) includes essays on Humanitarianism, Human Rights, War, and Borders while making only nodding reference to 143

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cosmopolitanism despite the fact that a cosmopolitan vision and normative framework is fundamental to these topics. Exceptionally, Englund’s essay on poverty in the collection notes the centrality of the ‘relational’ person in an anthropological study of cosmopolitan ethics. Englund argues that ‘anthropological engagement with world poverty brings to the study of morality . . . a renewed interest in obligation that qualifies the recent trend to regard ethical selfformation as the key topic in the anthropology of morality’ (2015: 295). In this spirit, he objects to reductive readings of Durkheimian modernist anthropology as though it is concerned only with principles of social control, when in fact it can be understood as allowing for the juggling of multiple loyalties, conflicts and obligations (ibid.). Against the privileging of the ‘autonomous individual’ in so-called Liberal Cosmopolitanism, Englund calls for a more localised, cultural understanding of embedded personhood. There are clearly fields – for example, human rights – where the autonomous individual is a basic cosmopolitan building block in international law. More broadly, however, cosmopolitanism may be conceived of as a capacity to imagine the world from an Other’s perspective, and to imagine the possibility of a borderless world of cultural diversity. Thus our focus as anthropologists studying beyond the West must be on the contexts in which cosmopolitanisms develop and flourish. These are not necessarily either Western or elitist. Nor does cosmopolitanism imply a kind of rootlessness. On the contrary, cosmopolitanism is a rooted type of engagement. There are many and varied indigenous forms of cosmopolitanisms, as contributors to an edited Association of Social Anthropologist (ASA) volume (Werbner 2008a) demonstrate in their analyses of cosmopolitan encounters in Papua New Guinea, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa. Cosmopolitanism is threatened on two fronts: on one front is xenophobia, a fear and rejection of strangers; on the other, hegemonic cultural universalisation which is homogenising and intolerant of difference. Both have dire consequences from a cosmopolitan point of view. Mitchell Cohen, who coined the term rooted cosmopolitanism, speaks of multiple patriotisms and ‘multicultural exchanges’, resting on a ‘plurality of loyalties’, while recognising that these are ‘not easily harmonized’ (1992: 483). Cosmopolitanism should not be interpreted, then, as a hidden form of westernisation, and it must necessarily engage with global inequalities, while rejecting any association with former imperial colonisers or moralising elites (Hall 2008).

Vernacular and rooted cosmopolitanisms Along with the view that cosmopolitan elites are necessarily rootless and corrupt, a second false assumption the new anthropological cosmopolitanism rejects is the idea that cosmopolitanism is only and singularly elitist. Cosmopolitanism can equally be working class (Parry 2008; Sichone 2008; P. Werbner 1999). Nor are cosmopolitan values necessarily ‘Western’ (Graeber 2008). Cosmopolitan values are widely found in different societies and, indeed, Graeber questions whether ‘the West’ ever existed at all. This questioning of the ‘West’ by the new anthropological and postcolonial cosmopolitanism points to the conjunctural dialectics of what might broadly be called vernacular cosmopolitan. Vernacular cosmopolitanism – an apparent oxymoron that seems to join contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment – is at the crux of current debates on cosmopolitanism. These pose the question first, whether local, parochial, rooted and culturally specific loyalties may co-exist with translocal, transnational, transcendent, elitist, enlightened, universalist and modernist ones; and second, whether boundary-crossing demotic migrations may be compared to the globe-trotting travel, sophisticated cultural knowledge and moral worldview of deracinated intellectuals. Indeed, the question is often reversed to ask whether there can be an 144

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enlightened normative cosmopolitanism which is not rooted, in the final analysis, in patriotic and culturally committed loyalties and understandings. Vernacular cosmopolitanism belongs to a family of concepts all of which combine in similar fashion apparently contradictory opposites: cosmopolitan patriotism, rooted cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan ethnicity, working class cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism. Such conjunctions attempt to come to terms with the dialectical elements of postcolonial and precolonial forms of cosmopolitanism and travel, while probing the conceptual boundaries of cosmopolitanism and its usefulness as an analytic concept. Paul Rabinow early on called cosmopolitanism a ‘twin valorisation’ of ‘worldwide macro-interdependency encompassing any local particularity’. He adds that ‘[we] seem to have trouble with the balancing act, preferring to reify local identities or construct universal ones. We live in-between’ (Rabinow 1986: 258). Vernacular cosmopolitanism is perhaps the most ambiguous of all these conjunctural terms: are we talking about non-elite forms of travel and trade in a postcolonial world, as in the case of the Senegalese Mourides described by Diouf (2000) and others, or of non-European but nevertheless high cultures produced and consumed by non-Western elites, such as those of the Sanskritic, Urdu, Persian or Ottoman worlds? The Sanskritic cosmopolis spanned an area extending from Afghanistan to Java and from Sri Lanka to Nepal, a non-Western but nevertheless cosmopolitan literary world that is contrasted by Pollock (2002) with the vernacular traditions that succeeded it. Are we to define, by analogy, contemporary south-east Asian, Hindi/Urdu or Cantonese mass consumer and mediatised cultural worlds as cosmopolitan, or as vernacular (Robinson 2007)? So too, how are we to place minority elites in new postcolonial nations, who struggle to defend their vernacular cultures, and seek justice through multicultural citizenship, while being at the same time liberal, tolerant and highly educated world travellers, as Richard Werbner (2008) highlights in his portrayal of a Kalanga elder statesman? Werbner calls such cosmopolitan practice among Kalanga elites in Botswana ‘cosmopolitan ethnicity’ (Werbner 2002, 2004). Terms such as cosmopolitan ethnicity or rooted cosmopolitanism, rather than denying the legacy of the ‘old’ Enlightenment cosmopolitanism of universalism beyond the local, aim to incorporate the Greek and Kantian ideas which first defined cosmopolitanism into a more complex and subtle understanding of what it means to be a cosmopolitan at the turn of the twentyfirst century. The worldview of Kalanga ‘reasonable radicals’ highlights the conjunctural features of cosmopolitanism, the fact that ethnic rootedness does not negate openness to cultural difference or the fostering of a universalist civic consciousness and a sense of moral responsibility beyond the local. This is also the point made by Kwame Anthony Appiah (1998, 2006), who argues that cosmopolitanism is equally an argument within postcolonial states about citizenship, equal dignity, cultural rights and the rule of law. Appiah speaks of cosmopolitan ‘patriotism’, a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism, and proposes that cosmopolitans begin from membership in morally and emotionally significant communities (families, ethnic groups) while espousing notions of toleration and openness to the world, the transcendence of ethnic difference, moral responsibility for the other. Postcolonial traveller elites may and do feel sentimentally attached to several homes in several different countries. In a wide reaching critical appreciation of Appiah’s foundational text(s), Richard Werbner (2008) considers a lack in Appiah’s stress on the liberal individual: public cosmopolitanism is necessarily, Werbner argues, a socially inclusive political project of creating alliances between like-minded individuals and collectivities. This project is rooted in and involves, he shows, ‘first, the restless quest for the further horizon; second, the imperative of moral re-centring; and third, the constructing and transcending of difference’ (2008: 178). Intellectuals in Malaysia (Kahn 2008), post-civil servants in Botswana (R. Werbner 2008, 2004: 27), Muslim feminists in Indonesia or Malaysia (Robinson 2008; Stivens 2008), Dalit women in 145

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India (Ram 2008), an Israeli Palestinian Bedouin academic in modern Israel (Abu Rabia 2008), Maasai activists in Tanzania (Hodgson 2008), a village intellectual in Papua New Guinea (Hirsch 2008) or Chiapo activists in Mexico (Graeber 2008) are all examples of rooted cosmopolitans who first make parochial interpretations of culture, religion and ethnicity in order to transcend them and assert wider cosmopolitan values. The conjunctural dialectic between particular and universal is never, it seems fully resolved. This was clearly evident in research on the wave of mainly youthful protests that swept North Africa and, indeed, the world during 2011–2013 and even beyond that. None of the uprisings were isolated events. Even when they began in response to local grievances, as in Botswana, India or Israel, they invariably linked themselves explicitly to protests elsewhere. They ‘spread’ contagiously and infected other protests. They were connected, most saliently through tangible aesthetic allusions and inter-textual citations, despite being locally concerned in each country with a range of specific issues: regime change (the Arab world), corruption (India), the demise of the welfare state, tycoonery (Spain, Israel, Greece), a living wage (Botswana, Wisconsin), the financial crisis and corporate greed (Occupy in the USA, Canada and Britain). Several themes travelled widely, animating protests transnationally, across borders. It was not simply that social networks spread transnationally even as they ‘aggregated’ massive numbers of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical national spaces, using modern means of communication; it was that non-verbal images, music and bodily gestures too travelled across borders and were incorporated into local vernaculars. Humour, satire, caricature and masquerade were distinctive in drawing on vernacular local figures, events, objects, jokes, puns, images and a shared history, to enact a universal morality that transcends the local. Huge protests within the Arab world and beyond it followed − in India, Israel, Botswana, Spain, Greece, the USA, Canada, the UK and in Russia and, in 2013, spectacularly in Turkey and Brazil. In Spain, the Indignados filled Spanish city squares in a move described by John Postill (2014). In Botswana, I witnessed almost 100,000 public service trade unionists singing songs of rebellion as they gathered daily for over two months under giant Morula trees in the capital and in other towns (see Werbner 2014). In Israel, Livio and Katriel describe the thousands of tents filling city boulevards and parks in a ‘dwelling’ protest against the unbearable economic burden of spiralling prices and the undermining of the welfare state (Livio and Katriel 2014). In Greece, the 2011 Indignados movement described by Theodossopoulos (2014) encamped for over a month in Syntagma Square in Athens, with rallies of 500,000 people out of a population of ten million. In Chile, students took to the streets against the post-dictatorial state’s policies in education, particularly its neoliberalist agenda, and against the police. Protests by the workers of Wisconsin erupted even before Occupy Wall Street, drawing attention to the beleaguered labour movement in the USA (Collins 2012). In Russia, mass protests sparked by the suspicion of fraud in the 2011 election articulated a challenge to the authority and political dominance of Vladimir Putin. Mass protests in Istanbul and Ankara in May 2013 against the autocratic style of a democratically elected leader were followed by huge protests in Brazil against corruption, mismanagement and poor public services. Discourses as well as images travelled. From Egypt to India and from Botswana to London, all these countries witnessed worker, youth and middle-class rebellions against the political and bureaucratic status quo and the privilege of small, wealthy and often corrupt elites at a time when the majority can no longer earn a decent wage. But beyond discourse, a key element central to the spread of the protests worldwide was their use of visual and audio citation and intertextuality. This was both historical and spatial, fusing past images, tropes, slogans, musical refrains or images reproduced from events elsewhere with current images in new bricolages and assemblages. These invoked, often as subtext, the past or other 146

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places in the present. As critical scholars we need to interrogate the role of such (re)iterative performances, the use of mimesis, the ‘doubling up’ of signs and their displacement, in revitalising and (re)inventing the ‘political’. Such citations spreading globally to different local contexts have led, we have argued (Werbner, Webb and Spellman-Poots 2014), to a newly forged ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ − a widely shared invented language across countries and divisions of class, ethnicity, religion, religiosity, race and gender, which is nevertheless also inflected by local forms of popular aesthetics, power relations and politicised understandings of inequality and injustice.

Elite and demotic world travellers Our analysis of rooted cosmopolitans expands the horizons of an earlier anthropological debate on the cosmopolitan as world traveller. The debate was initiated by Ulf Hannerz who proposed a set of useful distinctions among such travellers between cosmopolitan afficianados ‘willing to engage with the Other’ aesthetically (Hannerz 1990: 239), who consciously foster their knowledge, understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of traditions and cultures other than their own; locals, ‘representatives of more circumscribed territorial cultures’ (1992: 252), and transnationals, frequent travellers (usually occupational) who share ‘structures of meaning carried by social networks’ but remain culturally encapsulated (1992: 248–9). Strangely, Hannerz lumps migrants and refugees, the demotic travellers of a global age, with ‘tourists’ because, he says, they regard involvement with other cultures as a ‘necessary cost’ (1992: 248). They lack, in other words, consciousness and appreciation of the cultural milieu into which they are inserted. This has led to accusations of elitism and Eurocentrism (Robbins 1998b; P. Werbner 1999). In my own work I bring a counter-example of a ‘working class cosmopolitan’ in the figure of the expanding cosmopolitan subjectivity of a Pakistani migrant working on a building site in the Gulf, a simple man who embraces different cultures and members of diverse ethnic groups, but who nevertheless retains his transnational yet rooted identity as a Sufi. African migrants display similar competencies, Owen Sichone (2008) argues, when they are away from home. He portrays the complex life history of a Somali migrant in Cape Town, the type of migrant who travels without passports or visas, without any particular destination, making a new life wherever he or she happens to land. Such itineracy challenges, he argues, the system of global apartheid by claiming the right to move freely in defiance of state border regimes. They make it possible for others, who belong to the immobile 97 per cent of the human population that never leaves home, to connect with the world in ways that allow intercultural and economic encounters. Sometimes their dramatic and unpredictable impact upon the host population belies their small numbers. Sichone’s work celebrates demotic cosmopolitanism and seeks to shift the focus in migration studies from labour migration and refugees to independent ‘economic’ migrants. Despite the best efforts of postcolonial states to tie Africans’ mobility to labour contracts, some migrants have managed to venture beyond the confines of their nationstates or levels of education in order to ‘find a place for themselves’ in the world. The challenge to the idea that cosmopolitans are necessarily members of the elite was first posed by James Clifford who reflects on the status of companion servants, guides and migrant labourers, and the grounds of equivalence between privileged and unprivileged travellers (1992: 106–7; 1998). Clifford proposes that ‘the project of comparing and translating different travelling cultures need not be class- or ethno-centric’ (107). Differential, often violent, displacements that impel locals to travel create, he says, ‘discrepant’ cosmopolitanisms (108). Nevertheless, Clifford accepts the definition of cosmopolitans as individual travellers, exiles or diasporics, which he pitches against an allegedly restricted anthropological focus on the little community or culture. Later in this essay, I challenge this historiography of anthropology, just as our ASA volume 147

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challenged the idea that cosmopolitans necessarily reside or move permanently beyond their nations and cultures. Not all postcolonial cosmopolitans are travellers – nor are all travellers (as Hannerz reminds us) cosmopolitan. At the present cosmopolitan moment in anthropology there is a temptation to label almost anyone – African labour migrants, urbanites, Pentecostals, traders, diasporics – ‘cosmopolitan’. This obscures the ethical grounding of the new cosmopolitan anthropology in ideas of tolerance, inclusiveness, hospitality, personal autonomy, emancipation. For the Nigerian Chamba inhabiting a country torn by bitter animosities between Christians and Muslims, their ethnic identity enables them to transcend divisions among themselves to live in peace, Fardon (2008) argues; so too the Sufi order I studied preached tolerance, inclusiveness and peace (P. Werbner 2003); Muslim feminists in Indonesia were part of a peace alliance with Chinese and other persecuted minorities (Robinson 2008). The notion that there are many, different, cosmopolitan practices co-existing in late modernity, with their own historicities and distinctive worldviews, has led nevertheless also to an exploration of marginal cosmopolitanisms. Homi Bhabha, who possibly coined the term vernacular cosmopolitanism, is uneasy with Martha Nussbaum’s image of the self, following the Greek Stoic Hierocles, as at the centre of a series of concentric circles, with universal liberal values privileged above family, ethnic group or nation (Nussbaum 1994). The notion of a borderless cosmopolitan community seems inadequate, he proposes, in relation to the millions of refugees and migrants fleeing violence and poverty. Drawing on Appiah’s vision, Bhabha proposes a ‘cosmopolitan community envisaged in marginality’, a border zone which he terms vernacular cosmopolitanism (1996: 195–6). Such violently dislocated populations differ significantly from settled groups on the margins. Melanesian cultural groups, positioned on the margins of the metropolitan world, Eric Hirsch argues (2008), nevertheless view themselves as located at the centre, managing a vast symbolic world of exchange in which cultural boundaries and horizons are never fixed. So too, the Stoics’ vision of concentricity, Richard Werbner contends, was not ‘static’ but ‘dynamic’: ‘to be civic and truly moral . . . Stoics demanded active, deliberate change of a certain kind in the light of moral reason and perceived virtue’ (2008: 179). Although Hannerz has revised his earlier position, acknowledging that more people beyond the elite may now be identified as cosmopolitan, he notes that ‘bottom-up’ cosmopolitans are unlikely to be recognised as such in their own environment (2004: 77). Societies differ culturally in the extent to which they celebrate (or denigrate) familiarity with diverse cultures. Stuart Hall (2008: 346) says of ‘cosmopolitans from below’, part of the enormous tide of transnational movement, who are driven by civil war, ethnic cleansing, famine, economic disaster and search for economic benefits, that they live a global life by necessity, arising from ‘the disjunctures of globalisation’ (ibid.: 347). Despite that, their understanding or knowledge is just as complex, as that of global entrepreneurs; they too are ‘in translation’ (ibid.). This raises the critical question of cosmopolitan consciousness: in what sense does cosmopolitanism need to be grounded in an open, experimental, inclusive, moral and ethical consciousness of the cultural other? Such a consciousness would need to include elements of self-doubt and reflexive self-distantiation, an awareness of the existence and equal validity of other cultures, other values, and other mores. Is travel without such an inclusive consciousness cosmopolitan? Does travel inevitably lead to such openness and reflexivity? Despite their global commercial acumen, Senegalese Mouride traders engage in ‘rites of social exclusiveness’ so that ‘Mouride diasporic culture is homogenised in a way that excludes foreign values’ (Diouf 2000: 694, 695). Similarly, members of the jet-setting wealthy Chinese overseas trading diaspora studied by Aihwa Ong (e.g. 1998, 1999), with their multiple passports and multiple homes in different countries, appear to lack the kind of cultural openness and sensitivity normally associated with cosmopolitanism. 148

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Diasporas, by definition, are heterogeneous, and not all their members are equally cosmopolitan as I show elsewhere, in my analysis of the Pakistani diasporic public sphere (Werbner 2002). Sometimes it is factory workers rather than wealthy merchants who display more openness to their non-diasporic compatriots. So too, diasporic intellectuals may be alienated from underprivileged members of their community despite their celebration of cultural hybridity. But not all diasporic elites are so alienated. Similarly, not all Senegalese in Italy are inward looking, even if Mourides regard Italy as a ‘polluting’ environment. Riccio (2001: 590) reports that Senegalese in Italy are a multi-ethnic and multi-religious community who seek, as one migrant told him, not ‘only to look for jobs. To emigrate is to know new things, to broaden one’s horizons in such a way that one can bring back home what one discovered and learned.’ Much depends on context. Some environments are more cosmopolitan than others. Zubaida (1999) invokes the ‘legendary cosmopolitan enclaves of Cairo, but especially Alexandria, the paradigm case of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism’ – a hub of ideas, religions, goods and people from East and West, protected by an imperial context. Thessalonica was, according to Kenneth Brown (2006: 5), ‘a great Balkan cosmopolitan city for centuries, a veritable Babel of languages, religions, cultures and local traditions.’ Baku today is another such cosmopolitan city (Grant 2010). If we take vernacular cosmopolitanism to refer to a multi-centred world, beyond the West, in the sense proposed by Arjun Appadurai, it is perhaps among the elites of such cosmopolitan cities that distinctive vernacular cosmopolitanisms are created.

Writing social anthropology as cosmopolitan theory and practice Elisabeth Colson has proposed that, following World War I, in the face of the rise of European fascism, anthropologists in the inter-world-war period were cosmopolitan in a unique sense: ‘The superiority of western values and western institutions was not nearly as taken for granted as it was in later prosperous decades’, and hence, they were likely to respect the political economies, ritual orders, and dogmatic beliefs they described as viable alternative systems of order, i.e., ideal models of alternative reality from which much of the contention caused by perceptions of inequality and other evils was eliminated. Sceptical of ‘innate European superiority, the long term viability of European institutions’ and Western ideas of progress, in some ways the inter- and post-war anthropologists resembled today’s postmodernists. But they were not textual deconstructivists: ‘They had seen for themselves the importance of economic and political factors in determining the history of their own times, and they gave primacy to such factors in pursuing their own research agendas’ (Colson 2008: 42). The deconstructive critique of social anthropology in the mid-1980s challenged the discipline’s claims to be cosmopolitan in practice (doing fieldwork in out-of-the-way places) and in social theory (the comparative study of societies and cultures). The attack focused on the evident power imbalance between predominantly Western researchers and non-Western subjects during the colonial era. In many ways this imbalance has persisted into the present. Beneath the scientific façade of ethnographic objectivity, the critics argued, the hegemonic fieldworker remains invisible and the ‘native’ ‘voices’ of the cultural and social other are suppressed. Although undoubtedly well-intentioned, this denial of anthropology’s cosmopolitan claims starts from the distinctly sceptical, un-cosmopolitan assumption that just because one happens to come from a certain society, one is incapable of understanding other societies, empathising with their members’ predicaments and joys, learning their language, poetry, myth making or story 149

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telling, appreciating their material culture, the challenges of their environment, their mundane everyday lives. In short, celebrating their difference. This identitarian ‘nativist’ approach, Adam Kuper has argued, sees its salvation in representing the (unedited) voices of the people – the oppressed other (1994: 542–3), buying into the ‘gospel’ that ‘white people could never appreciate what it meant to be black, that men could not understand women, . . . that only the native could understand the native, only the native has the right to study the native’ (ibid.: 544). The alternative view, I have argued (P. Werbner 2008b), is that the gaze of the stranger enables new insights. It might, perhaps, seem Quixotic to attempt a revision of the entrenched view about modernist social anthropology’s founding ancestors. Millennial anthropology’s wholesale delegitimising of modernist ethnography and theory, initiated by the authors of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) is typified by a tendency towards patricide (Sangren 1988: 408, 422) or, more broadly, structural amnesia that stereotypically caricatures modernist anthropology’s unit of study as closed cultures/societies/systems. Hence a second strand in the denial of social anthropology’s cosmopolitanism relates to an alleged tendency of the early modern discipline to study ‘closed’ cultures – to misrecognise cultural openness, fluidity, internal contestation or mobility. Structural functionalism, so the conventional narrative has it, was the study of closed social systems, just as cultural anthropology studied closed cultures. A parallel accusation levelled at sociology has been Ulrich Beck’s critique of ‘methodological nationalism’, the fallacy to conflate ‘society’ with the nation-state theoretically and methodologically (2006: 27). A closer reading of the founding fathers of sociology, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, by Turner (2006) and Inglis and Robertson (2008) highlights the spuriousness of this accusation. Even if Beck were right, however, where, in classical anthropology do we find an equation of ‘society’ with the nation-state? Such allegations (e.g. by Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) are a red herring: rather than illuminating the anthropological project historically and in its contemporary vision, they obscure the fact, first, that anthropologists do most of their research within nation-states that are not, and never were, homogeneous, but are ethnically, linguistically and religiously plural – as indeed are most nation-states in North America and Europe. Second, that the comparative task in anthropology was never defined by nations or nation-states and their territorial boundaries as it may have been in sociology. This is evident in a famous passage on the ‘Unit of Study’ by Radcliffe-Brown in which he argued that, starting from ‘any convenient locality of a suitable size, we can study the structural system as it appears in and from a region, i.e. the network of relations connecting the inhabitants amongst themselves and with people of other regions’ (1940/1952: 193). In a sense, anthropology has moved in the opposite direction to sociology. An important advance in social anthropology has been the recognition that the study of part-societies and cultures must take cognisance of colonial or postcolonial states and regimes’ impact on local, regional and transnational relations (see Asad 1973; R. Werbner 1996). If sociology assumes implicitly an identification between culture, society and nation, anthropologists continue to study socially or culturally distinct part-societies, but as they relate to other such groups, and articulate with and across emergent postcolonial states. The problem of boundaries is critical here. How do anthropologists define cultural boundaries as against social or territorial boundaries, and in what sense are boundaries blurred, situationally highlighted, permeable or violently marked? The distinction Fredrik Barth draws between social boundaries and the ‘cultural stuff ’ they may or may not enclose (1969: 15) is key to many anthropological studies. As Barth says, boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them (ibid.: 9), and so too, cultural differences can persist despite interethnic contact and interdependency (10). Hence beyond the project of cross-cultural comparison, anthropology may claim to be a ‘cosmopolitan’ discipline because its subject matter is not – and has never 150

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been – closed societies but intercultural interactions across permeable, blurred or situationally marked social boundaries. Those in the ‘British’ Durkheimian Radcliffe-Brownian tradition studied unbounded social fields. On the American side, Marshall Sahlins (1999), citing cultural diffusion theories, argues that ‘it is astonishing from the perspective of North American cultural anthropology to claim that our intellectual ancestors constructed a notion of cultures as rigidly bounded, separate, unchanging, coherent, uniform, totalized and systemic’ (Sahlins 1999: 404). Indeed, they spoke ‘of “the fallacy of cultural separation”: the mistaken idea that because cultures are distinctive they are closed’ (ibid.). Following Sahlins, Jonathan Friedman (2002) similarly rejects a currently pervasive trope positing that in the past, anthropologists studied only ‘bounded’ cultures, localities and communities, while transnational or global encounters necessarily generate hybrid objects (or cultures). This, he argues, stems from a current tendency to individualise and reduce culture to substance that ‘fills’ people or objects so they can either ‘be pure or mixed’ (2002: 25). Rejecting attacks on indigenous movements, Friedman defends an earlier, ‘global systemic anthropology’ that argued that ‘[t]he fact that people occupying a particular place and living and constructing a particular world are in their entirety integrated into a larger system of relationships does not contradict the fact that they make their world where they are’ (ibid.: 31, emphasis added).

The founding fathers: classical anthropology The interest in relations across boundaries is evident in the classic study of Trobriand Islanders by Bronislow Malinowski, commonly regarded as the founder of modern social anthropology. As Marcel Mauss recognised so brilliantly (Mauss 1966: 19–20, 79–81), this was not, as might be assumed, an ethnography of a single island; it was the study of international commerce between islands, a cultural institution known as Kula (Malinowski 1922). So too, Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Nuer, although apparently focused on a discrete ethnic group, in reality was a study of situationally shifting boundaries and nesting identities. It recognised the predatory movement of the Nuer in the Sudan, who incorporated neighbouring Dinka into their society through raiding and intermarriage, a process Evans-Pritchard theorised as ‘the ‘python-like assimilation by the Nuer of vast numbers of Dinka’ through the genealogical grafting of women on to dominant lineages (Evans-Pritchard 1951: 23; 1940: 227). A salient argument Evans-Pritchard makes is that ‘The limits of the tribe are therefore not the limits of social intercourse’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 124). As a study of the dynamics of segmentary opposition and multiple shifting identities, The Nuer laid the grounds for later research on urban ethnicity (or tribalism as it was then called), among labour migrants on the Zambian Copperbelt by Clyde Mitchell (1956), Bill Epstein (1958) and others. They showed that ethnic identities and alliances were formed oppositionally, through fission and fusion, in the urban context, anticipating later discussions of identity. There were other early examples of the concern for cosmopolitan spaces and blurred boundaries. Nadel studied a multi-ethnic state (1942), Fortes the blurring of boundaries of the Tallensi generated by their ritual shrines, which extended beyond any clear definition of tribe (1945, 1949; see also Werbner 2004: 136). From Schapera’s study of the civic incorporation of strangers among Tswana (1938: 118–24), to Leach’s analysis of the alternating cultural-cum-political model of Highland Burma (Leach 1954), the founding generation of British social anthropology studied cross-ethnic engagements. Although Mary Douglas, a Catholic, is famous for her analysis of the symbolic or ritual construction of boundaries, in reality she too stressed the way that boundaries were transgressed, and the peculiar qualities of symbolic figures of boundary transgression – wives, witches or Pangolins (Douglas 1966, 1970). This points to the fact that many of the arguments in anthropology were disagreements over the permeability of boundaries 151

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or the kind of conceptual frameworks needed to study multi-ethnic empires or pilgrimage flows and central places. Some social anthropologists recognised early on the need to locate cultures within nationstates. Radcliffe-Brown, for example, and following him Gluckman, Schapera and Fortes, argued for a vision of a racially divided South Africa as a single society. The anthropologist, Gluckman argued, ‘must work with communities rather than customs . . . [with] a unit of life . . . of common participation in the everyday political, economic and social life’ (1958: 51). Such multiethnic, conflictual communities form a single, organised society, he proposed, rather than a social aggregation of heterogeneous cultural groups, as Malinowski would have it. Importantly, then, for Gluckman – as indeed for Fortes and Schapera – social relations, even those marked by difference, hierarchy and domination, nevertheless are constitutive of a shared ‘social system’: not as unified by a homogeneous set of beliefs, but as a fragmentary, contradictory and conflict-ridden social formation. Analysing the opening of a new bridge in 1938 in modern Zululand, a harmonious event welcomed by blacks and whites alike, Gluckman highlights the naturalness of the ceremony for participants. The whites took it for granted that they should be drinking tea on the banks of the Black Umfolosi River just as the blacks took for granted the ceremonial cutting of a tape across the bridge, and the sacrificial beast offered them by the native commissioner. This naturalness of what Hobsbawm and Ranger have aptly called an invented tradition (1963), referred to by Bakhtin as organic hybridity (1981: 358), is something which anthropologists increasingly began to study in the new postcolonies. In his analysis, Gluckman recognises that as conflicts between black and white sharpened, new configurations of existing cultures tended to surface as means of social and political mobilisation which stressed cultural difference (1958: 61), an argument that later came to be known through the work of Abner Cohen as ‘political ethnicity’ (Cohen 1969). Yet such social movements, like radical Islam today, even when they announce their cultural purity and sharp distinction, are necessarily hybrid culturally, since they arise from within the new social and cultural configurations of the historically transformed, organically hybridised community. The harmony of the ceremony at the bridge was necessarily an ambivalent one, given the pervasive inequalities and separations between white and black in modern South Africa. As Homi K. Bhabha recognises, hybridity may be produced by a ‘doubling up of the sign’, a ‘splitting’ which is ‘less than one and double’ (Bhabha 1994: 119). The same object or custom placed in a different context acquires quite new meanings while echoing old ones. Hence new cosmopolitan worlds studied by anthropologists are ones in which customs and objects displaced and de- or re-contextualised, are endowed with new meanings. British social anthropology, and particularly the Manchester School as it came to be known, has recognised this process of cultural change, movement and cosmopolitanisation. The argument against anthropology as the study of closed, bounded cultural groups is one also pursued by anthropologists of religion, denying the validity of certain ‘closed’ structural functional models. In South Asia the study of religious communalism and nationalism, of zones of interaction between different castes and religious or ethnic communities, is paralleled by studies elsewhere of regional cults and pilgrimage centres that often draw their followers from a vast region, across different ethnic communities. Such studies go against assumptions in anthropology of ‘naive holism’, according to which ‘essential relations with a wider context get stripped away when a small group, little community or tribe is studied as an isolated whole’ (R. Werbner 1977: IX; R. Werbner 1989). In my recent study of Sufi mystical Islam (P. Werbner 2003) I show that Sufi lodges and shrine complexes cannot be studied in isolation from the wider regional and transnational cult generated around the cult sacred centre, or 152

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the migratory and political contexts in which the cult operates. The further point implied by regional cult networks, crucial to cosmopolitan theory, is that the many diverse ethnic, caste or national groups converging on the sacred centre are held together by an ideology of peace and toleration. When do culture and society coincide? ‘Correspondence’ theory, according to which different domains (ritual, political, economic) underwrite each other, so that ritual and belief become mere representations of political divisions or economic interests, increasingly came to be regarded with suspicion by anthropologists of religion in the 1970s (R. Werbner 1976: XVIII). Such theories draw, Werbner argued, on simplistic readings of Durkheimian or Marxist texts. In the Sufi transnational cult I studied, the symbolic order cut across political divisions and remained in tension with the postcolonial and capitalist economies of modern-day Pakistan, and even more so in post-imperial Britain. The relationship between the political centre and the sacred centre is a changing, historically contingent one, and in this sense, as in others, pilgrimage centres and regional cults are historically evolving social formations, as Victor Turner recognised (1974). They enable the movement of strangers across territorial boundaries, often over vast distances. Pilgrimage cult centres and Sufi order lodges create havens of hospitality and, as Evans-Pritchard records for Sanusi (Evans-Pritchard 1949): places of peaceful mediation between feuding groups.

Conclusion It seems, then, that neither British nor American modern anthropology were ever in practice of the study of closed cultures. Most anthropologists would agree with Kuper that we are increasingly involved in a collaborative effort, in dialogue with the people we study, with local academics, journalists, public activists and other experts from a range of disciplines, in regional debates (Fardon 1990), and beyond that, in conversation among ourselves and with closely allied disciplines like sociology or social history. Above all, social anthropologists, with their comparative knowledge and cosmopolitan sensibility, can add a less parochial dimension to what are all too often Eurocentric analyses in the social sciences – even these days when the focus is on globalisation. To quote Colson (2008: 45), the anthropologists of the 1940s encroached upon the realm of the social philosophers, moralists, religious thinkers, and other social critics. . . . [They] directed attention to the narrowness of vision of economists, psychologists, and humanitarians who unthinkingly adopted western yardsticks and assumed the givenness of western categories. Hence, I argue in conclusion (Werbner 2008b), that it is not the encounter during fieldwork that makes the anthropologist a cosmopolitan; rather, anthropologists become cosmopolitan as a community of scholars engaged in building a comparative subject through argumentation and critical debate. From this perspective, cosmopolitanism is dialogical; a collective, creative endeavour, beyond the individual. But as travellers and strangers, anthropologists rely on the hospitality and welcome of the people they study. Paradoxically, then, it is they who, as cosmopolitan hosts, enable the emergence of a shared cosmopolitan dialogue.

Acknowledgements This essay draws on P. Werbner (2008c) 153

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Hall, Stuart (2008) ‘Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation and Diaspora: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Pnina Werbner’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 345–60. Hannerz, Ulf (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Special Issue on ‘Global Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2): 237–51. ——— (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (2004) ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 69–85. Hirsch, Eric (2008) ‘Paradoxes of the Cosmopolitan in Melanesia’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 197–214. Hodgson, Dorothy (2008) ‘Cosmopolitics, Neoliberalism, and the State: The Indigenous Rights Movement in Africa’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 215–32. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds.) (1963) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inglis, David and Roland Robertson (2008) ‘The Elementary Forms of Globality: Durkheim and the Emergence and Nature of Global Life’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 8(1): 5–25. Kahn, Joel S. (2008) ‘Other Cosmopolitans in the Making of the Modern Malay World’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 261–80. Kuper, Adam (1994) ‘Culture, Identity and the Project of a Cosmopolitan Anthropology’, Man (NS), 29(3): 537–54. Laidlaw, James (2013) The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael (2010) ‘Introduction’, in M. Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–36. Leach, Edmund (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma, London: G. Bell for the LSE. Livio, Oren and Tamar Katriel (2014) ‘A Fractured Solidarity: Communitas and Structure in the Israeli 2011 Social Protest’, in Werbner et al. (eds.), pp. 147–76. Malinowski, Bronslow (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London: Routledge. Mauss, Marcel (1966) The Gift, London: Cohen and West. Mitchell, Clyde J. (1956) The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No. 27. Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. Nadel, Siegfried Ferdinanad (1942) A Black Byzantium, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Nussbaum, Martha (1994) ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, The Boston Review XIX(5, Oct/Nov). Ong, Aihwa (1998) ‘Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 134–62. ——— (1999) Flexible Citizenship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parry, Jonathan (2008) ‘Cosmopolitan Values in a Central Indian Steel Town’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 325–44. Pollock, Sheldon (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular History’, in Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds.), Cosmopolitanism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 15–53. Postill, John (2014) ‘Spain’s Indignados and the Mediated Aesthetics of Non-Violence’, in Werbner et al. (eds.), pp. 341–67. Rabinow, Paul (1986) ‘Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’, in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds.) (1986), pp. 234–61. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald (1940) ‘On Social Structure’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 70: 1–12. Reprinted in (1952), Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London: Cohen & West. Ram, Kalpana (2008) ‘“A New Consciousness Must Come”: Affectivity and Movement in Tamil Dalit Women’s Activist Engagement with Cosmopolitan Modernity’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 135–58. Riccio, Bruno (2001) ‘From “Ethnic Group” to “Transnational Community”? Senegalese Migrants’ Ambivalent Experiences and Multiple Trajectories’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27(4): 583–600. Robbins, Bruce (1998a) ‘Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–19. ——— (1998b) ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanisms’, in Cheah and Robbins (eds.), pp. 246–64. 155

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Robinson, Kathryn (ed.) (2007) Southeast Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion, London: Palgrave. ——— (2008) ‘Islamic Cosmopolitics, Human Rights and Anti-Violence Strategies in Indonesia’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 111–34. Sahlins, Marshall (1999) ‘Two or Three Things I Know about Culture’, JRAI (incorporating Man), 5(3): 399–422. Sangren, Stephen P. (1988) ‘Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography’, Current Anthropology, 29(3) 405–35. Schapera, Isaac (1938) A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom, London: Frank Cass. Sichone, Owen (2008) ‘Xenophobia and Xenophilia in South Africa’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 309–25. Stivens, Maila (2008) ‘Gender, Rights and Cosmopolitanisms’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 87–110. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios (2014) ‘The Poetics of Indignation in Greece: Anti-Austerity Protest and Accountability’, in Werbner et al. (eds.), pp. 368–88. Turner, Bryan S. (2006) ‘Classical Sociology and Cosmopolitanism: A Critical Defence of the Social’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 133–151. Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Werbner, Pnina (1999) ‘Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology, 7(1): 17–35. ——— (2002) Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics, Oxford: James Currey. ——— (2003) Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult, London and Bloomington, IN: Hurst and Indiana University Press. ——— (ed.) (2008a) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, ASA Monographs 45, Oxford: Berg Publishers. ——— (2008b) ‘The Cosmopolitan Encounter: Social Anthropology and the Kindness of Strangers’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 47–68. ——— (2008c) ‘Introduction’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 1–32. ——— (2014) The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of Botswana, London: Pluto Press. Werbner, Pnina, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots (2014) ‘Introduction’, in P. Werbner et al. (eds.), The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Werbner, Richard (1976) ‘Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation: Minority Elites in Botswana’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 28(4): 731–53. ——— (1977) ‘Introduction’, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Regional Cults, London and New York: Academic Press. ——— (1989) Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey: The Process and Organization of Religious Movement, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ——— (1996) ‘Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas’, in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (eds.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa, London: Zed Books, pp. 1–26. ——— (2004) Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——— (2008) ‘Responding to Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Patriots, Ethnics and the Public Good in Botswana’, in P. Werbner (ed.) (2008a), pp. 173–96. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller (2002) ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks, 2(4): 301–34. Zubaida, Sami (1999) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East’, in Roel Meijer (ed.), Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East, London: Curzon, pp. 15–34.

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13 Cosmopolitanism and ‘civilization’ Social theory and political programmes Humeira Iqtidar

Can cosmopolitanism be taught? Social and political theory concerned with supporting cosmopolitanism – whether as ‘ironic distance from the self ’ (Turner, 2002) or a world government (Archibugi and Held, 1995) – certainly assumes that it can be fostered. Precisely how remains neglected. Even as the questions about the possibility of teaching cosmopolitanism and the kinds of methods required for the task remain unanswered there is no shortage of programmes that purport to do exactly that. The last decade has seen a phenomenal rise in the number and range of programmes that support inter-civilization dialogue as a way to teach cosmopolitanism. The most prominent among them is the UN’s Dialogue of Civilizations. Islam and Muslim societies have been singled out for great attention and over the last decade there has been a wild proliferation of programmes that focus on a ‘dialogue’ between Muslim ‘civilization’ and the rest. It is of course, almost impossible to assess the success of these programmes. While many individuals do benefit, learn and perhaps also change their actions as a result of these programme, it remains important to ask two fundamental questions. What are the contours of changes that can be expected as a consequence of participation in these programmes? And more critically, what does a dialogue across civilizations actually mean?

Teaching cosmopolitanism Social and political theory has tended to treat the idea and practice of cosmopolitanism in a generally de-contextualized manner. Political scientists have seemed most closely concerned with designing tools for the establishment of cosmopolitanism, imparting to it much normative value without significant reflexivity. In other disciplines, particularly in the disciplines of anthropology and history, cosmopolitanism is seen as linked very closely to, and defined quite intimately by the context. There has been a tendency to see cosmopolitanism as an attempt to move beyond the constraints – on imagination and practice – imposed by the nation-state (Breckenbridge and Appadurai, 2002; Appadurai, 2006; Barkey, 2008; Bayly, 2004; Ho 2006). The use of cosmopolitanism within many studies has been closer to transnationalism, or what has also been called post-nationalism (Brennan, 1997; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). While dislodging the centrality of the nation-state is an important project, and describing a history and future beyond the nation is integral to that project, it remains important to pay close attention to what cosmopolitanism may 157

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not be. One common confusion that remains important to clarify is that it is not the same thing as hybridity.1 The existence of diversity by itself is not cosmopolitanism, but the appreciation of diversity and an understanding of its implications is. More critically, such has been the enthusiasm for fostering cosmopolitan values in the context of neoliberal globalization that the actual mechanics of how that may be done has not been considered closely enough. I have argued elsewhere (Iqtidar, 2009) that cosmopolitanism is not always the result of planned and managed programmes. Nor are religious barriers alone the key ones to surmount; social class, for instance, may form a formidable challenge to a cosmopolitan interaction. Being able to imagine and understanding lives across social and economic classes is in many contexts a greater display of cosmopolitan imagination than the ability to engage with others of similar class but across national or ethnic barriers. Moreover, through a look at the consumption of media in Egypt, the practice of pilgrimage in Palestine and the involvement in a proselytizing movement in Pakistan I have attempted to show the diversity of ways in which an ironic distance from the self, an engagement with another way of being – a cosmopolitanism if you will – is practised in contemporary Muslim societies. Here I want to take that argument further by thinking about the current interest in managed programmes to foster cosmopolitanism. The proliferation of interfaith dialogue, civilization conversations and cultural exchanges is often premised on the assumption of lack of enough interaction between the groups being brought together. In bringing together Palestinian youth with Israeli students, Muslim clerics with Christian priests, American artists with their counterparts in Pakistan, the assertion is often made that once both sides have actually interacted they will be better able to understand the competing position. There is no denying the goodwill that often goes into these programmes. However, what they tend to neglect engaging with directly is the imbalance in power. The issue is not so much knowledge as the power that inflects knowledge: often there is significant knowledge about the other position but it is just not a convincing argument for those who have to live with the implications of an imbalance in political, economic and military power. One fundamental way in which the imbalance in power is not just ignored but also institutionalized is through setting up mechanisms through which legitimate dialogue is seen to take place. An example of such an attempt is the Dialogue of Civilizations Forum, supported by UNESCO, various state governments and private companies. It aims to unite the efforts of the world community to protect spiritual and cultural values of humankind, and to organize space for constructive dialogue among the major civilizations of the modern world. The work of the Forum is aimed at defining, developing and spreading dialogue standards, and introducing the spirit of cooperation and understanding into everyday life.2 There can be little disagreement with the general aims of promoting love, peace and harmony. However, it is interesting to note that the development and spread of dialogue standards, for the Forum are framed within the attempt at “combining liberal standards and humanitarian values”. Standards of dialogues, particularly of the type that are held in beautiful resort hotels tend to also set standards for participants – those who can and cannot be part of the conversation. These have a considerable track record of resulting in significant exclusion. The suggestion here is not that these attempts should be abandoned completely, but that their limits should be understood and acknowledged. Bayat (2008) alerts us to the possibility that an interest and engagement with the other goes hand in hand with increased awareness of, and “exaggerated emphasis” (198) on boundaries, demarcation and difference. In his explorations of everyday cosmopolitanism among Muslim 158

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and Coptic Christian residents of Cairo, he found an overwhelming narrative of shared norms, practices and long-term friendships. Curious about the state of relations between the two communities away from the few incidents of violence heavily reported in media, he found that in fact, the much-reported deaths at an incident had actually been caused by the rubber bullets used by the police to disperse the crowd. However, notwithstanding the narrative of neighbourliness and friendship, he also found that there were clear demarcations and definitions. Thus, he suggests, it is possible that active cosmopolitanism requires a clearer articulation of one’s own position and identity as a necessary corollary of engaging with another. In similar vein Laura Ring’s (2006: 181) perceptive work on the construction of everyday peace within an ethnically diverse apartment building of Karachi suggests that rather than being a release from tensions, either through “violent explosion, sublimation or ‘conflict resolution’”, peace is linked to the maintenance and management of tension. Her rich ethnography is extremely valuable in highlighting two further issues. First, her description of the range of ethnic, professional, linguistic and cultural differences alerts us to the variation within a seemingly homogenous ‘Muslim’ population. Second, and more importantly, she details the ways in which a subtle balance between maintaining difference and sustaining peace is actively managed by the women in the apartment building. Engaging with difference, thinking about reasons for one’s own preferences in comparison and trying to work out relationships within a context of diversity is something that requires a lot of active engagement: “Peace cannot be said to emerge in the wake of spent creativity. On the contrary, it is the product of relentless labor – in this case, labors of emotional regulation (individual and collective) carried out by women” (178). The fact that at a particular moment of crisis – a fire in the building – inhabitants of the building were able to come together and support each other is, according to Ring, due to women’s creative management and transfer of goodwill to others in the building. The spontaneous coming together was possible only because of everyday work done over a long term. Critically, Ring’s narrative also suggests that there is no central person or group coordinating these activities, nor an active discourse of cosmopolitanism per se. Similarly, in a nuanced study, Anna Bigelow (2010) has shown how the tomb of sufi saint Hayder Shaykh in a Muslim majority town, Malerkotla, in the Sikh majority province of Punjab, within a Hindu majority India, has been central in the town’s strong tradition of communal harmony. This communal harmony she argues is the result of long-term and everyday ‘work’ that communities carry out and which is facilitated by the shrine. Thus, before the partition of India local narratives about the saint and his tomb were oriented towards legitimating the shrine but, after the partition the focus shifted towards highlighting the role of the saint as a unifying force among devotees from different religious traditions. The shrine and its legacy provide important resources for supporting peaceful coexistence, but the work of everyday negotiation and reframing of these resources is what produces the critical glue for binding together communities that remain in many other ways sharply divided. There can be little doubt that certain social arrangements are more likely to foster cosmopolitanism. However, we do not seem to have a clear idea of what they may be. Interestingly, there seems to be a clearer idea of what would inhibit cosmopolitan behaviour. Situations of extreme violence and deprivation such as wars and famines are potential inhibitors of cosmopolitan behaviour. There is some academic consensus that overarching narratives of nationalism have tended to create exclusionary behaviour (Appadurai 2006; Barkey 2008; Delanty, 2009). However, this assertion is not without contending views: others have suggested that nationalism and cosmopolitanism do not have to be mutually exclusive (Duara, 2004; Regan-Lefebvre, 2009; James, 2010). For instance, in his paper exploring the dynamics of Pan-Africanism, Winston James brings to the fore an imagination that was nationalist at the same time as cosmopolitan. 159

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Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre (2009) allows us a glimpse into the cosmopolitanism of an Irish nationalist. Similarly, the internationalism of communism involved a certain kind of cosmopolitan engagement. Perhaps one way to cleave through these paradoxes is to the think about variation in or types of nationalisms. Nationalisms that have been associated with imperial expansion may have a different impulse and texture to their engagements with difference. We see in the context of longer running projects for defining imperial nationhood that the homogenizing impulse has met with considerable success. For most of the last two centuries the North Atlantic experience has been one of homogenizing. Erasing or at least ignoring the many internal ‘others’ within Europe – Muslims, Jews, Arabs and Africans3 – a history of a particular kind of Europe has been constructed and internalized: a Europe that is white, Christian, distinct, self-contained, and, above all, unique in its role in human history.4 While it is important, as William Connolly (2006) suggests, to disaggregate the European experience to think about the various ‘minority’ traditions in European Enlightenment that do not fit neatly into dominant narratives, it is also useful to recognize that this homogenizing construction has been relatively successful. During the 20th century it has, interestingly, gone hand in hand with a view of European secularism as being supportive and tolerant of minorities – in short, of being cosmopolitan. This tension between the idea and its actual practice has been put under greater strain in recent years as the increase in visibly different populations with a variegated religious and cultural patina coincided with the increased entrenchment of politics of rights. Not only were there more people to challenge the carefully constructed, yet always fragile narrative of European and North American identity, but they were entitled through legal languages, political vocabularies and mobilizational alliances to do so. The tensions generated by homogenizing nationalism and liberal rights are beginning to be felt more dramatically in recent years with the rise of right wing, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic parties across Europe. The crisis of the minority in the modern project of nationstates and democratic politics is not particular to Europe/North America (Devji, 2007; Mufti, 1995), but is felt more acutely within these spaces because of this history of homogenization particularly at the level of political imagination. The interest in cosmopolitanism within North Atlantic academia comes at this particular historical juncture and it is important to take the context into consideration. In this context there has been a premium on entwining liberalism and cosmopolitanism together with secularism. The idea that cosmopolitanism exists most comfortably with liberalism is implicitly or explicitly supported (Nussbaum, 1996; Appiah 2006). This does not seem to me to be a readily warranted relationship. Through a focus on members of the pietist proselytizing group Tablighi Jama‘at, I have tried to raise questions about our association of cosmopolitanism with a liberal subjectivity and selfhood (Iqtidar, 2009). Members of that group do not start out with the express purpose of evaluating themselves and their norms. In fact, they are motivated by the rather parochial interest in converting others to become like them. However, through the process of proselytizing and engaging with others across various kinds of divides they seem to develop a distance from some aspects of their own selves and immediate contexts. If cosmopolitanism is understood as a distancing of the self, the ability to re-evaluate one’s own norms and practices, then many of the members of the Tablighi Jama‘at have developed those capabilities. It does not seem to lead however, towards a liberal sensibility nor towards a conscious desire to understand difference for the sake of understanding alone. Engagement with other ways of being in this context is quite often tied to fairly prosaic and instrumental motivations. If there is any higher motivation involved it is often expressed in primarily religious terms as the desire to please Allah. Indeed the role of religion in defining and shaping agency is an important lacuna in discussions about cosmopolitanism. 160

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Delanty (2009) is right to tie the issue of imagination with cosmopolitanism because it does bring to the fore the importance of a certain way of perceiving the world and its links with practice. My purpose in pointing towards these paradoxes is to caution, in contrast to the aspirational tone of many programmes for civilizational dialogue, that it may be worthwhile to engage with how cosmopolitanism is practised in actually existing contexts rather than the idealized settings created in resorts.

Civilizations today A related issue with the concept of civilizational dialogue is of defining civilizations. The Oxford English dictionary defines the term as the stage of human social development and organization which is considered most advanced; the process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social development and organization; the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area; the comfort and convenience of modern life, regarded as available only in towns and cities. The last connotation of the word has obvious links with its origin. The word civilization comes from the Latin civilis linked to civitas meaning city or city-state and civis meaning citizen. All four meanings are tied to notions of development, progress, and to some extent, competition and comparison. ‘Stages’, ‘advancement’, ‘development’ and ‘modern’ are important concepts when trying to explain what a civilization means today. The sense of competition is perhaps not an insignificant contributor to the widespread use of the term towards the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Linked to a growing exploration and subsequent conquest of other parts of the world, and an impulse at creating the idea of a unique entity ‘Europe’ that is advanced compared to the others, there was considerable interest among European social and political theorists in understanding the basis and differences between different civilizations, as well as thinking about modernity in civilizational terms. Rousseau’s indictment of civilization can be read as a critique of what we may also call modernity. Nietzsche’s underlying conception of civilization highlights the very ambivalence that social scientists today exhibit towards the idea of modernity. Historians like Toynbee and Gibbons focused on civilizations with the motive of understanding the reasons for their rise and fall equating empires with civilizations. It is, of course, not entirely coincidental that the language of civilizational comparisons comes laden with the vocabulary of the ‘civilizing mission’ that sustained colonial rule particularly among audiences in the home country (van der Veer, 2001). This is not to suggest that the idea of civilizations does not have a longer history, nor that many societies outside of Europe did not conceive of themselves as civilizations. It is however, important to recognize the close linkage between civilization, colonialism and empire towards the early twentieth century. Given the rise of third world nationalism and anti-colonial movements towards the middle of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that the concept had lost much ground in academic usage during that period. However, a few exceptions remained. In his ambitious analysis of modernity Eisenstadt (1999) built on Karl Jasper’s notion of Axial civilization to assess their contributions in defining modernity. Marshall Hodgson in his magisterial three volumes of The Venture of Islam (1974) investigated Muslim civilization in greater detail. But within most disciplines the idea of civilization was not taken up with any conceptual rigour. In any case, the notion of a coherent, relatively closely knit civilization has become more difficult to sustain with the rise of globalization. Nevertheless, the idea persists in various guises. Many who criticize the imposition of a ‘Western’ consumerist culture assume an unsullied, insular entity prior to the McDonaldization of the world (Barber, 1996) – whether that entity can be classified as a civilization remains unsaid. Yael Navaro-Yashin (2002: 8) observes that some of the most influential critics of Orientalism such as 161

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Edward Said have nevertheless risked reproducing essentialism in “leaving a precipitation of cultural authenticity or tradition underneath the layers of European costume”. Others, like Samuel Huntington (1993) took this notion of cultural authenticity as critical and saw the clash of civilizations as the defining feature of the current century. For Huntington (1993: 24) civilization is “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species”. In short, civilization today seems to be used interchangeably with culture. It is that composite form that brings together cultural norms, religious traditions and material progress. However, assuming coherent and well-defined civilizations today does not seem to be an entirely satisfactory way of thinking about a world that has been deeply interconnected well before the current round of financial and media globalization. Trade, cultural exchanges and migration have been features of Asia and Africa in particular (Bayly, 2004; Fawaz and Bayly, 2001; Frank, 1998). If anything, the anomaly in world history was the brief period of many new nation-states during the 1940s–70s that saw a significant reduction in global trade and hardening of borders. Moreover, the persistence of certain norms cannot be taken to mean unchanging ‘traditions’. By ignoring the composite nature of all civilizations including that supposed monolith ‘the West’ we are practising at the minimum grave empirical errors. The contributions of Jews, Muslims, North Africans and Central Asians to name some obvious examples, to the material and cultural patina of Europe remain not additional or peripheral but central to it. The imagination of Europe as a separate continent when it is but a sub-continent of Asia in geographic, historical and ethnic terms is important to the construction of the West (Delanty, 1995). Similarly, the idea of a coherent, self-contained Muslim civilization may be attractive for various political projects but breaks down quite easily upon a second look. In a nuanced study of the intellectual influences on key Islamist thinkers such as Qutb, Khomeini and Afghani, Roxanne Euben (1999) traces their engagement with the ideas of Mazzini, Racine and Hegel. Taking her cue from Partha Chatterjee who suggests that the imposition of colonial forms of knowledge has meant that even those who wanted to resist have had to engage with them, she is concerned to demonstrate an ongoing intellectual, social and political dialogue. What her work also helps highlight is how new and innovative certain claims to authenticity and tradition are. In my work I have tried to show how Islamists who claim a particular claim on tradition and nativism actually posit a radical break from a wide range of historic Muslim practices in South Asia (Iqtidar, 2011). If thinking of civilizations as self-contained and clearly demarcated is less than satisfactory, then using the term interchangeably with culture is even less so. Culture – what it is, how it is shaped, who shapes it and what impact it has on social, political and economic relations – has been the focus of much historical, sociological, linguistic, literary and anthropological research. While the concept may not travel smoothly from one discipline to the next, and there are variations in what the term implies and how it is debated, there is nevertheless an immediate recognition of the debates with the term. The associations with the term are rich with references and thick with descriptions from different fields. There is, in other words, an uncontested recognition of its contestations. The term ‘civilizations’ on the other hand remains underconceptualized in contemporary social and political theory, indeed in most of the disciplines mentioned above. There is no ready set of debates one can refer to, and if there is a lineage of rather consistent use then it is most probably in the domain of religious studies. And so it is a little curious that the term has received a revival of sorts particularly in the last decade. The most widespread use of the term has been linked to the rise of Political Islam. Despite the barrage of academic criticism that Huntington’s polemical essay received, it is instructive to note the pervasive use of his analysis in mainstream media: that there is an internally coherent, singular entity called Islamic civilization/Muslim world/Islam, which at its core has values and 162

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practices fundamentally incompatible with Western values of democracy, liberalism, secularism and cosmopolitanism. Academic debunking of these ideas has not led to a recognizable change in popular usage in the same way as academic criticism of ideas and practices related to development have not had a significant impact on popular understandings. Popular associations with these terms – civilizations and development – have been built over a long period of time and are tied quite intimately to ideas about the place of individuals and their societies in the world. For citizens of Western Europe and North America, these ideas have been constitutive of their selfimage; these are not easy to let go of. The question of timing, of the rise of the use of ‘civilization’ post 9/11 must be addressed. The urge to manage and control political manifestations of religious vocabulary certainly seems central to the interest in an inter-civilization dialogue – which ultimately always seem to include a heavy emphasis on Muslim ‘civilization’ – and its construction as a depoliticized, humanistic coming together of religious and political leaders is often presented as a new development. This attempt at ignoring a long and much more complicated history of relationships across societies is an important political strategy in itself. The Islamists provide a productive window into the range of ‘civilizational dialogue’ already taking place. They engage with the modern state, Western cultural and political influence and colonial imposition in complex ways. They tend to be educated not in madrasas but in ‘modern/ Western’ educational system with a heavy emphasis on applied sciences. Maududi (1903–1979), the founder of the archetypal Islamist party in South Asia, the Jamaat-e-Islami was familiar with world history through both Muslim and European sources. He was also familiar with strands of European political philosophy such as the works of Marx and Hegel. Finally, he was a journalist who synthesized insights from various sources and made them accessible to a wide public through clear and lucid writing. The organizational practices of the JI have incorporated innovations made by the communist parties – the JI was organized as a Leninist-cadre-based party. In later years Islamists have shown considerable adaptability to the parliamentary system. These practices have been adopted even when at the philosophical level the Islamists have defined themselves in opposition to concepts such as popular sovereignty.5 Maududi had early in his career claimed that the concept of democracy as the sovereignty of people was incompatible with Islamic injunctions to recognize the sovereignty of God, but this to him did not invalidate democracy as a viable political arrangement for the modern period. Towards the 1950s, the JI under his leadership began to actively participate in electoral democracy. However, most academic studies and journalistic reports about JI continue to emphasize his criticism as a fundamental antagonism towards democracy. This example alerts us to media and even scholarly constructions of Islamism which focus on the proclamations of leaders at particular points in history without considering later changes, and do not engage with the philosophical underpinnings of Islamist ideas nor the variety of ways in which followers interpret and modify such stances. More importantly for our purposes here, it points towards the fact that a kind of dialogue is already taking place. It may be fractured, non-linear and confrontational in parts; it is unlikely to have a definitive beginning or end point but it is a conversation. Specifically, it is a conversation that recognizes differences in power structures. While the Islamists are just as guilty of creating essentialized identities of the ‘West’ as it is of them, a question as important as whether the Islamists will be willing to carry out an official/ semi-official dialogue is which official/semi-official group within the US/European governments can actually afford to initiate a meaningful dialogue with them? The dynamics of creating an other in islamsim, Al Qaeda and in Good Muslims vs. Bad Muslims (Mamdani, 2005), have generated a situation where it seems unlikely that a significant political overture will be made in the near future. Groups like Hamas and FIS, which for all their problems were nevertheless democratically elected, were shunned by North Atlantic governments. The overthrow of Mohammed 163

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Morsi’s democratically elected government in Egypt and its replacement by another military dictatorship was tacitly supported by Western powers. This has created a situation where their potential remains untested and thus open to exaggeration by their leadership. More critically, it is the interest in defining ‘standards of dialogue’ that we saw at play in the Dialogue of Civilizations Forum, now being asserted at the scale of national governments.

Conclusion The emergence of a range of programmes supporting dialogues of civilizations in the same period as the ‘war on terror’ targeting predominantly Muslim societies is indicative of a desire on the part of North Atlantic governments to manage the dialogue and the conversation as closely as possible. With specific reference to the Islamists then, while it seems realistic to assume that the only option may be a relatively insufficient semi-official Western initiative, it would be dishonest to blame that insufficiency only at the doorstep of the Islamist groups. I have outlined above that JI has been engaged since its inception in a kind of dialogue across societal (civilizational?) boundaries. The contours of this dialogue have shifted with changing political and social realities, and as the tone moves between antagonistic to confrontational the conclusion may be nowhere in sight. The cacophony of voices generated by conversations that are not as closely managed as the official dialogue of civilizations is likely to be confusing, complex and ultimately quite frightening. But in recognizing it for what it is we may be practising a deeper kind of cosmopolitanism – one that is not aimed at producing replicas of ourselves once we have ‘understood’ where the differences come from. I want to suggest precisely that political and social entanglements cannot proceed along strictly linear formations. David Scott (1996) has critiqued much of post-colonial theory in his concern to go beyond the claims of Eurocentricism in social science concepts. In this and a more recent paper (2003) he makes a persuasive case for not just understanding the political context in which particular concepts find resonance and sustenance but also recognizing the continued potential for difference. He points out that The contrast-effects produced by the epistemological critique to which postcolonial criticism . . . has been committed for the last fifteen years or so have lost much of their critical force. In part this is because our present, so marked by the collapse of those modernist hopes that animated our political pre-occupations in the aftermaths of sovereignty, provokes another demand than the one this criticism was designed to meet. This new demand is to rethink the claims and the categories of that very political modernity in which these hopes found the voice – that of a morally neutral citizen-subject – in which to speak. Finally, meeting this demand entails folding the critique of the Enlightenment project into a practice in which our target is defined in terms of challenging the story of our political present (and thus of our prospects for alternative political futures) according to which there is a single horizon towards which it is desirable for us all to head. (Scott, 1996: 22) [emphasis in original] Scott raises the possibility that not only do various polities and societies not start from the same departure point, they may not all be moving in the same direction. Post-colonial critique has been concerned primarily in defining the contours of the first part of this proposition. But lurking behind the nuanced arguments has been an assumption that once we understand the different vantage points towards history and the present, we will willingly share in the same future. And Scott, I think rightly, raises the question whether this can really be so. To raise this here is not 164

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to promote a continuous project of cultural relativity and disengagement. Rather, it is to argue here for the critical need for deeper engagement that attempts to keep power imbalances and alternative horizons sharply in the foreground. Our interest in supporting cosmopolitanism has to move beyond establishing its normative value to thinking about precise mechanisms to support it, all the while recognizing that continued difference has to be an important aspect of the cosmopolitan imagination.

Notes 1 For some discussion on these lines see Breckenridge and Appadurai (2002); Rajan and Sharma (2006). 2 www.wpfdc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59&lang=en (last accessed 3 March 2011). The Dialogue of Civilizations Forum has in the last few years funded a range of different organizations to carry out specific projects. 3 Navaro-Yashin (2002), Martin Bernal (1987), Asad (2003), Connolly (2006). 4 Bayly (2004), Hobson (2004), Frank (1998), Chakrabarty (2000), for questions regarding the uniqueness of Europe. 5 See Zaman (2015) for some elements of Maududi’s critique of popular sovereignty and the influence of his ideas.

References Appadurai, Arjun (2006) Fear of Small Numbers, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appiah, Anthony (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton. Archibugi, Daniele and David Held (1995) Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press Barber, Benjamin (1996) Jihad vs. McWorld; How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, New York: Ballantine Books. Barkey, Karen (2008) Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bayat, Asef (2008) ‘Cosmopolitanism: Living Together through the Communal Divide, Almost’, in Shail Mayaram ed., The Other Global City, London: Routledge. Bayly, Christopher (2004) Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell. Bernal, Martin (1987) Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, Volume 3, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bigelow, Anna (2010) Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breckenridge, Carol and Arjun Appadurai (2002) Cosmopolitanism, Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press. Brennan, Timothy (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Connolly, William (2006) ‘Europe, a Minority Tradition’, in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind eds., Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Delanty, Gerard (1995) Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Delanty, Gerard (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devji, Faisal (2007) ‘Apologetic Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History, 4(1): 61–76. Duara, Prasenjit ed. (2004) Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, London: Routledge. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1999) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobian Dimension of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Euben, Roxanne (1999) Enemy in the Mirror, Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fawaz, Leila and Chris Bayly (2001) Modernity and Culture From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, New York: Columbia University Press. 165

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Frank, Andre Gunder (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in an Asian Age, Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Ho, Enseng (2006) The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Hobson, John M. (2004) The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgson, Marshall (1974) The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huntington, Samuel (1993) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72(3): 22–8. Iqtidar, Humeira (2009) ‘Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Contemporary Practice and Social Theory’, in Bryan Turner ed., Handbook of Globalization Studies, London: Routledge. Iqtidar, Humeira (2011) Secularizing Islamists? Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Urban Pakistan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, Winston (2010) ‘Black Contact Zones: Their Roles in the Development of Pan Africanism, Transnationalism and Internationalism: The Case of London, 1897–1939’, Paper presented at Writing Post National Narratives: Other Geographies, Other Times Conference at University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, November 1–3. Mamdani, Mahmood (2005) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, New York: Three Leaves Press. Mufti, Amir (1995) ‘Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique’, Social Text, 45(Winter): 75–96. Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2002) Faces of the State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (1996) ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Joshua Cohen ed., For Love of Country? Boston: Beacon Press. Rajan, Gita and Shailaja Sharma (2006) New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Regan-Lefebvre, Jennifer (2009) Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ring, Laura (2006) Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scott, David (1996) ‘The Aftermaths of Sovereignty: Postcolonial Criticism and the Claims of Political Modernity’, Social Text, 48(Autumn): 1–26. ——— (2003) ‘Culture in Political Theory’, Political Theory, 31(1): 92–115. Turner, Bryan (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism’, Theory Culture & Society, 19(1–2): 45–63. van der Veer, Peter (2001) Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vertovec, Steven and Robin Cohen eds. (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaman, Mohammed Qasim (2015) ‘The Sovereignty of God in Modern Islamic Thought’, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 25(3): 389–418.

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14 Cosmopolitanism and translation Esperança Bielsa

Approaches to what has been widely described as the new cosmopolitanism have brought attention to the key role that translation plays in mediating between different traditions or modernities. Emphasising a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than the world’s ‘unicity’ (Robertson, 1992) or homogenising trends towards the constitution of a global culture, cosmopolitan competence has been defined as the art of translation and bridge-building (Beck, 2006: 89), while cosmopolitan processes are seen as taking the form of translations between things that are different, where one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result (Delanty, 2006: 23; 2009: 193–8). On the other hand, there is a renewed urgency to specify the conditions and principles of a cosmopolitan order that recognises the interconnectedness of political communities and provides a democratic space at local, national, regional and global levels (Held, 2010). In this context, there is an increasing awareness of the significance of multilingualism and translation in key aspects of the cosmopolitan project such as global democracy (Archibugi, 2008; Balibar, 2010), human rights (Santos, 2010), transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship (Balibar, 2006), social movements (Santos, 2005) and borders (Balibar, 2010). Challenging conventional conceptions of translation as the communication of meaning from one language into another, this chapter relates the centrality of translation in accounts of cosmopolitanism to a wide notion of translation as the experience of the foreign, and specifies the relevance of different translation strategies from a cosmopolitical standpoint. After that, the significance of translation in relation to literary cosmopolitanism and world literature, on the one hand, and cosmopolitan democratic designs, on the other, is explored. A perspective that draws from and is relevant to both political and aesthetic cosmopolitanism is proposed in a concluding section centred on the politics of translation.

The experience of the foreign Affirming the key mediating role of translation from a cosmopolitan standpoint requires challenging common definitions of translation as the transfer of a verbal message from one language into another and the adoption of a broader definition of translation as a social relation, as an experience that mobilises our relationship to others as well as our conception of ourselves. 167

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This notion of translation as an experience of the foreign can be found in the German tradition from Goethe and the Romantics to Benjamin, as well as in contemporary authors such as Antoine Berman (1992), Paul Ricoeur (2006), Lawrence Venuti (2008), Gayatri Spivak (2000) and Naoki Sakai (1997). It is perhaps most openly expressed in Walter Benjamin’s statement that ‘any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information – hence, something inessential’ (2007: 69). As Berman has shown, the dynamics of translation start from what is one’s own, what is known and familiar, the same, in order to go towards the foreign, the other, and to return again to the point of departure through this experience of alterity (1992: 46). This is markedly different from a conception of translation as appropriation because, as the author remarks, through a simple reduction or annexation of the other to the same there could never be an experience of the foreign. Translation, moving constantly between the foreign work and the domestic reader, asserts the existence of one language among others and serves to question the mother tongue through an exercise in reflexivity and decentering that allows the foreign to appear in its midst. Moreover, according to Ricoeur, the work of translation, which is by necessity correspondence without adequacy, arises from but must also renounce the dream of a perfect translation that would paradoxically turn us all into language’s stateless persons, abolishing both the memory of the foreign and the love of one’s own language (Ricoeur, 2006: 9). The ambiguous role translation has in mediating between the foreign culture and the mother tongue has been approached throughout the history of translation in different ways. In Schleiermacher’s words, it is a matter of leading the author to the reader or leading the reader to the author (1992). And in the most influential contemporary formulation, it is the difference between what Lawrence Venuti has called domesticating translation and foreignising translation (2008). Domesticating translation is based on making a translated text read fluently, as if it was an original, thus rendering translation invisible, transparent. Domesticating translation denies the foreignness of the text and hides translation’s very intervention. According to Venuti, its effects are to conceal the conditions under which it is made, starting with the translators’ intervention in the foreign text, and to create a recognisable, even familiar, cultural other. To this Venuti opposes what he calls foreignising translation, which disrupts the cultural codes of the translating language in order to do justice to the difference of the foreign text, and deviates from native norms to stage an alien reading experience (2008: 15–16). Foreignising translations, which are doubly interrogative (Venuti, 2008: 20), construct an image of the foreign that does not deny its fundamental strangeness while also interrogating prevalent conceptions in the receiving culture. The distinction between domesticating and foreignising translation, the strategy followed of either leading the author to the reader or the reader to the author, is a fundamental one for a consideration of cosmopolitanism today. For domesticating translation, by denying the foreign as foreign, by rendering the foreign falsely familiar and translation transparent, is in fact denying any true openness to the other as other, an experience of the foreign, in Berman’s sense. And domesticating translations are not only the most prevalent form of literary translation into English, thus expressing the global dominance of this language, but are the dominant strategies followed for the translation of commercial information and of foreign news, where communicability and accessibility to the target reader are emphasised. This accounts for the invisibility of translation in these fields, which has often led social scientists to remark on the speed and spread of global information flows without considering the material conditions that are necessary to produce them. It also reveals the underlying idealism of views that assume translation’s unproblematic role in overcoming ethnocentrism, such as Beck’s notion of translation as ‘the capacity to see oneself from the perspective of cultural others’ (2006: 89). What is interesting about translation is not the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism, but rather the struggle that is established with cultural 168

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ethnocentrism in any translating act, a struggle that confronts ethnocentric demands for intelligibility with respect for the irreducible strangeness of the other. The theorisation and practice of alternative forms of translation that attempt to do justice to the difference of a foreign text also point to its significance in debates on aesthetic cosmopolitanism and world literature, to which I now turn.

World literature David Damrosch has characterised world literature as ‘writing that gains in translation’ (2003: 281). This refers to a form of valorisation to which traditional literary histories, which are nationally based, have been typically blind, thus minimising the extent and significance of the global factors that shape the production and circulation of literary works. Translation has been conceptualised as a key element in accounts that describe the cosmopolitanisation of reality in the literary field. Johan Heilbron drew on world systems theory to provide a structural analysis of the international flows of translated books, approaching translation as a measure of centrality: the more central a language is in the international translation system, the more books are translated from this language; conversely, the most central languages tend to have the lowest proportion of translations in their own book production (Heilbron, 1999: 438–9). Pascale Casanova, on her part, showed how literatures are constituted relationally in a highly unequal international field, which she called the world republic of letters (2004). While literature is initially bound to national language and political institutions, there is, according to Casanova, a process of progressive autonomisation. Autonomous fields become denationalised, and Paris acquires in the 19th century a unique role as the measure of literary modernity and a power of universal consecration. Translation is in this model approached as an element of valorisation of texts and diffusion of literary modernity. In the movement from centre to periphery, translation serves a basic function of capital accumulation: for poorer languages, it is a means of acquiring capital and prestige. Through translation the great universal texts are nationalised (as for example in German romantic translations of the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity, which opened a new status for German as a literary language). On the other hand, translation facilitates the international diffusion of central literary capital and expresses the power of a language and a literature. But Casanova is especially interested in the way translation functions when the transfer proceeds in the opposite direction, from the periphery to the centre of the literary space. In this case, she describes the function of translation as one of consecration or literarisation: translation gives writers in dominated languages literary recognition, international existence, and also allows and reinforces the existence of an autonomous international position within their national field, while for the dominant languages it is a way of appropriating works from the peripheries. For Casanova, this quantitatively smaller, often neglected function of translation in consecrating peripheral texts is of key importance, because it is in this form that the great literary revolutions that help to radically change the whole of the literary space take place. In spite of the relevance of Casanova’s work in showing the role of translation as literarisation, capital accumulation and universal consecration, her approach tends to conflate cosmopolitan literary projects with market-driven globalisation and cannot adequately theorise the role of translation in this context, because it obscures the more substantive dimension of translation as the experience of the foreign. If we take cosmopolitanism as an ethical and political commitment towards opening ourselves to others with whom we share the world we live in, then translation also emerges as a crucial manner in which this commitment can be materialised. In this approach, translation’s gain is not principally one of facilitating the access of new readers to works, or of increasing the symbolic value of these works, but of promoting a form of cosmopolitan reflexivity 169

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that leads to reconsider and to expand a notion of self through engagement with the difference of the other. Only certain forms of translation that can call into question what is one’s own in the light of the foreignness of others make such a gain possible. Domesticating translation, which responds to prevalent market demands and renders translation invisible, contributes to a form of valorisation and exchange that could actually be seen as a loss in cosmopolitan terms. This dimension is not ignored by authors who have called attention to the responsibility of translators into English in the context of a growing market for translations from non-European languages as ‘a quick way to “know a culture”’ (Spivak, 2005: 94). In this context, it is useful to refer to Goethe’s original formulation of the concept of world literature in 1827 to refer to a new historical epoch in which a market for international literary exchanges becomes generalised (Eckermann, 1850: 350–1). Interrelations and exchanges between literatures are at the centre of Goethe’s conception of world literature, which is thus ‘less a set of works than a network’ (Damrosch, 2003: 3). They are expressed in the intense literary practice of polyglots like Goethe himself, who not only profusely read and reflect on a multitude of foreign works, but also avidly borrow, incorporate and transform elements taken from them to their own benefit. Literary traditions are shaped by this intensified process of appropriation and transformation of foreign elements in a highly interconnected literary space, while world literature refers to the active co-existence of all contemporary literatures (Berman, 1992: 56). Moreover, Goethe is interested not only in reading and borrowing from other literatures, but also in finding through the international reception of German works a mirror image of his tradition that is far more revealing because it reflects a vision of self through the eyes of the other, a type of cosmopolitan reflexivity that is explicitly highlighted by him (Eckermann, 1850: 432; see also Bielsa, 2016: 74). Goethe’s concept of world literature also centrally identifies a notion of cosmopolitanism as translation, because translation both allows and incarnates the international literary exchanges that for Goethe come to define the new modern era. As Berman points out, ‘Weltliteratur is . . . the age of generalized intertranslation, in which all languages learn, in their own way, to be languages-of-translation and to love the experience of translation’ (1992: 57–8). Goethe not only spoke several languages and translated many works,1 but also particularly welcomed the translations of his own works into other languages, finding his words mirrored and regenerated in the strangeness of foreign tongues. Translated works can recover an original novelty which the originals themselves may have lost, pointing to a view of translation that emphasises its effects for the translated culture in terms of ‘regeneration’ and ‘revival’, and not just the significance of translation in mediating foreign works to readers who do not know the language and in introducing newness to the translating culture and language. And in the age of generalised intertranslation, the German cultural tradition has something to offer that can be of benefit to all contemporaries: a conception that aims ‘to make the translation identical with the original’, overcoming ‘the greatest resistance’ and shaping ‘the taste of the multitude’ towards it (Goethe, quoted in Berman, 1992: 59). This is a form of foreignising translation – according to Berman the most advanced expression of classical German thought on translation – that is explicitly conceived as opposed to the then dominant French mode of translation based on appropriating the foreign. Goethe refers as follows to its potential value to nationals of all countries and speakers of all languages, and not just of German: young men do well to come to us and learn our language; for . . . no one can deny that he who knows German well can dispense with many other languages. Of the French I do not speak; it is the language of conversation, and is indispensable in travelling, because everybody understands it, and in all countries we can get on with it instead of a good interpreter. But as for Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, we can read the best works of those nations in such 170

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excellent German translations, that . . . we need not spend much time upon the toilsome study of those languages. It is in the German nature duly to honour after its kind, everything produced by other nations, and to accommodate itself to foreign peculiarities. This, with the great flexibility of our language, makes German translations thoroughly faithful and complete. (Eckermann, 1850: 190–1) This constitutes the most persuasive argument about the cosmopolitan potential of foreignising translation: to serve as a vehicle for an experience of the foreign potentially to all contemporaries, as opposed to a narcissistic experience of recognition of dominant cultural values of one linguistic group. German thus becomes, through a form of translation that is particularly open to the foreign, a privileged language for the acquisition of a cosmopolitan culture, whereas French (English today) merely represents a more pragmatic choice for ordinary travel and exchange. In this context, we must not forget that Goethe’s cosmopolitan views are a product not only of his explicitly universalistic political and moral stance, conceived in opposition to the new forces of nationalist mystique and militant chauvinism that were emerging in Europe and especially in Germany (Steiner, 2013: 119–20), but also of the latter’s rather peripheral role in Western culture at the time, in contrast with the Anglo-American ethnocentrism and closure to foreignness that Venuti denounces in the contemporary context. Through his understanding of world literature, Goethe is to aesthetic cosmopolitanism what Kant is to moral and political cosmopolitanism. Moreover, Goethe’s view of world literature as a cosmopolitan space where national literatures are not abolished but exist and grow through intensified contact and interaction with each other is closer than Kant’s to contemporary notions of a critical cosmopolitanism that highlight the interrelation between localities and between the local and the global, pointing towards social relationships that are primarily conceived in post-universalistic terms (Delanty, 2009). This is why it is highly relevant and should be incorporated to a conception of cosmopolitanism beyond the cultural sphere. Rebecca Walkowitz’s notion of world literature as born-translated literature (2015) offers a new approach to world literature that preserves Goethe’s emphasis on interconnection and exchange, while also accounting for the specificity of literary developments in the 21st century. For Walkowitz, world literature is born translated not only because it appears in multiple languages and circulates globally from the start but, significantly, because it thematises and incorporates translation into its production in substantial ways, thus alerting us to works that begin in several languages and several places, generating alternatives to the experience of native reading and challenging the very idea of a national literature as the expression of an imagined community. Rather than reducing translatability to a feature of commercialisation or to the commodification of a ‘world fiction’ especially designed for international circulation, such as critics of world literature like Casanova, Walkowitz values born-translated novels as works that solicit translation, bring circulation into view and destabilise traditional categories like original/derivative and native/foreign. As the author perceptively maintains in a reference to Venuti’s work commented above, the emphasis here is not on ‘foreignisation of the word’, in which a single-language edition seeks to retain the impression or the quality of a prior language, but on the ‘foreignisation of the form’ (2015: 23). By building translation into their form, born-translated novels ‘force readers to grapple with partial fluency, register the arrogance of U.S. monolingualism, and invent strategies for incorporating the several languages, geographies and audiences in which they get their start’ (2015: 42). Multilingualism and translation are thus at the very basis of a linguistic and political project that gives literary form to the transnational, exploring forms of self-understanding and belonging 171

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that are not premised on the closure of native language and community of birth. Whether with reference to dominant or central languages and traditions (in addition to Walkowitz’s key book, see Yildiz [2012]), or in relation to more peripheral and postcolonial literatures (Cheah, 2016; Siskind, 2014), it is precisely in the conceptualisation of a transnational space that is not reduced to a market for exchanging literary goods and in the exploration of the aesthetic projects and interventions of authors and critics engaged in understanding and remaking the world, that the contribution of world literature to the cosmopolitan imagination is revealed.

The language of democracy In reflecting on the possibility of a multilingual democracy, Daniele Archibugi (2008: 256, 259) refers to Will Kymlicka’s renowned statement that a democratic politics is politics in the vernacular (Kymlicka, 2001) as dangerous and even reactionary, given that monolingual communities are becoming increasingly rare and with reference to new demands for democratisation not just on a national level but increasingly beyond. Instead, Archibugi proposes a cosmopolitan approach that, from a normative standpoint, maintains that ‘democratic politics must be in Esperanto’ (2008: 260), defending a passage from a language of identity to a language of communication as a basic prerequisite for promoting democracy amongst diversity. However, whereas Kymlicka falls prey to an essentialist view of language as the defining property of a community or a nation, Archibugi instrumentalises language as a vehicle of communication, ignoring the powerful connections between language and subjectivity and blinding himself to the politics of language in the context of globalisation. A more sociological approach is needed that retains a perspective on language as the basic means of socialisation, and not just an instrument of communication, and that considers the implications of going beyond one’s language in order to be able to communicate with others, both at the individual and collective levels. Esperanto in Europe (Archibugi, 2008: 265–6), English in India (Archibugi, 2008: 267–8; Sommer 2004: 96) or Spanish in the Philippines (Rafael, 2005) have helped to bring people together because they did not belong to any single group. But the use of a lingua franca as a democratic means has important implications that relate to existing power asymmetries between languages and to the specific consequences derived from adopting and promoting one particular language, which inevitably benefit some and are detrimental to others. Archibugi’s unwillingness to consider the politics of language is reflected in the choice of the Esperanto metaphor as a normative principle, which in reality hides the promotion of English as the de facto common democratic language, as his discussion of paradigmatic cases at different local, national and supranational levels reveals. As Peter Ives has argued, Archibugi’s position can be none other than an advocacy of global English for cosmopolitan democracy. The reasons for obscuring this advocacy – or presenting it in very abstract and metaphorical terms – are telling of the political issues that Archibugi hopes not to have to deal with. (Ives, 2009: 520) Despite their apparent differences, Archibugi and Kymlicka share some fundamental ideas about the language of democracy. On the one hand, both authors highlight that states cannot be neutral towards language, unlike in matters concerning religion or race, an idea that is at the basis of Kymlicka’s emphasis on nation-building through the promotion of a common language (Archibugi, 2008: 254, 257; Kymlicka, 2001: 26–7). On the other hand, like Kymlicka, Archibugi unquestioningly believes that democracy is monolingual, in spite of the fact that he acknowledges 172

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that monolingual communities are becoming increasingly rare (2008: 257). Archibugi is right in presenting a cosmopolitan approach to the possibility of a multilingual democracy as relevant at different local, national and supranational levels. However, by adopting the prevailing linguistic model for democracy at the national level to tackle the conditions for a democratic politics outside the state, he is bound to amplify its paradoxes and unresolved contradictions, falling into idealist notions of a universal language of communication that is detached both from the social contexts from which it emanates and from the materiality of language itself. From this perspective, it would seem that cosmopolitan designs are inextricably bound to fall upon an abstract vindication of a universal language, implicitly conceived mainly as a vehicle for conveying ideas (Ives, 2009: 521; May, 2014) and diluting the significance of a politics of language to which multiculturalists have called attention. According to Kymlicka, most individuals cannot feel comfortable using more than one language for ordinary exchange and plurilingualism inevitably leads to a deficiency in democratic terms because it disrupts the shared meanings that are considered to make possible and facilitate collective decision-making. However, this view of democratic politics as politics in the vernacular is itself the product of the pervasiveness of what could be characterised as the monolingual vision, which constructs monolingualism as second nature and blinds us to the significance of already existing widespread plurilingual practices. As in transnational commercial exchanges or in global news production and circulation, democratic politics is already shaped by high levels of linguistic diversity, both locally and globally, even if the prevalence of plurilingual exchanges and translation tends to remain invisible or is simply forgotten. Contrary to old assumptions that relegate the competence of polyglots to the rare attribute of a privileged few, thus ignoring the widespread plurilingual practices in which the majority of the world’s population is ordinarily involved,2 it is necessary to break with dominant conceptions of the monolanguage of democracy in order to recuperate an already existing reality of cultural mixing for cosmopolitics. Thus, in opposition to both multiculturalist views and the cosmopolitan approach defended by Archibugi, it can be argued that cosmopolitan democracy is necessarily plurilingual and takes place through the practice of translation. Although explicitly conceived for a democratic politics outside the state, such a perspective on the language of democracy is also relevant at the local level because it recognises an already existing reality of plurilingual practice, and challenges multiculturalists’ underlying assumptions regarding the homogeneity of communities or groups conceived as relatively separate and bounded wholes. Linguistic diversity is not detrimental to democracy or an unnecessary hurdle for the conduct of a democratic politics. The transparency and ease of communication that are presumed and celebrated as basic characteristics of community and of democracy must be questioned in order to make space for heterogeneity. In contrast to nation-building processes and designs, a cosmopolitan democracy cannot be based on the construction of a common culture through the privileging of one language over others, but emerges from the negotiation of diversity and from the continued exposure of different languages to each other, opening them up to the presence of others. In this approach, the incongruities and discrepancies that appear at the interstices between languages are not erased, but turned into a source of cosmopolitan reflexivity. It is precisely the difficulties of understanding that in Kymlicka’s view limit the scope of democracy beyond the nation that can generate new forms of cosmopolitan democracy, through which difference can be productively confronted, our horizons widened and our convictions re-examined. And, as Étienne Balibar has already clearly perceived, translation is the basic medium for the creation of a transnational public space in a democratic sense, the real ‘common’ idiom of its citizens (Balibar, 2006: 5–6). If we consider translation as the non-transparent medium of democracy, a non-instrumental means, the key is no longer communication but rather confronting the opacity of meaning that 173

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results when diverse people attempt to communicate with each other. This is why linguistic hospitality becomes in this context more important than the practical possibilities offered by the use of a common language of communication, for instance international English, which in reality erases issues of cultural difference and power inequalities that bear on the democratic process. Goethe’s argument quoted above about the advantages of learning an international language like German which, through its particularly hospitable translations, can become a vehicle for an experience of the foreign potentially to all contemporaries, complicates the false dichotomy between a democracy in the vernacular or a democracy in a language of international currency. His perspective is not just relevant to aesthetic cosmopolitanism, but also to a form of cosmopolitics that sees in deliberation between heterogeneous people the very substance of democracy. Goethe’s approach also reminds us that, even if we resort to the use of a lingua franca, translation is unavoidable, and it always implies taking a position with respect to the strangeness of others and of ourselves.

Politics of translation Linguistic hospitality is at the centre of a politics of translation that challenges an instrumental view of translation as the transmission of information and proposes a more substantive conception of translation in its key intersubjective and social dimensions (Bielsa and Aguilera, 2017), a notion of translation as the experience of the foreign. Linguistic hospitality – the ethical objective of translation – clashes with the ethnocentrism that is present in any culture, and that is why there is a permanent pressure to resist translation or to produce bad, ethnocentric translations that deny translation’s very aim – ‘to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilise what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign’ (Berman, 1992: 4). Without the dangers implicit in a Derridean notion of absolute hospitality that admits others and gives them shelter without asking them their names or intentions (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 25), even if they are criminals or terrorists, linguistic hospitality could function as an antechamber to real hospitality by giving a place to others in their language – in what remains unintelligible of their language – as a translation that does not close itself by aiming for immediate usefulness. A cosmopolitan politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality breaks with a view of language as a vehicle of identity without resorting to an instrumental view of the lingua franca of democracy as a language of communication. Translation is not about identity, but about how we deal with the strangeness of others. In preserving a degree of linguistic hospitality, a type of non-transparent translation that does not succumb to demands for instantaneous communication can make space for the strangeness of others, obliging us to step outside ourselves and look at ourselves as another. Indeed, there is scarcely a better source of cosmopolitan learning than confronting ourselves through the language of the other, questioning our innermost beliefs and interrupting the fluidity that gives our reality its rock-firm naturalness. Ultimately, a cosmopolitan politics of translation also breaks with the prevailing conception of translation as a bridge between two separate languages or communities. As Naoki Sakai has argued, the binary opposition between same and other that is established by what he sees as a regime of translation based on monolingual address, in which distinct language unities are taken for granted, cannot be maintained. Sakai argues instead for a different attitude based on the translator’s ambiguous and unstable position as a subject in transit, or a form of heterolingual address as ‘a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner’ (2006: 75). We must try ‘to speak and listen, write and read among the “us” for whom neither reciprocal apprehension nor transparent communication are guaranteed’, encountering ‘not only misunderstanding and misapprehension but also lack of comprehension’ among ‘us’ (Sakai, 1997: 4). 174

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The stranger’s language, a language that does not belong to us as a property, allows us to perceive the fallacy of an ideal of community as the realm of transparent communication and is key to cosmopolitan reflexivity and self-transformation in light of the difference of the other, enabling us to connect with others whom we do not understand.

Notes 1 According to George Steiner, Goethe translated from a vast and diverse range of materials in eighteen languages, and his activity as translator covers an astonishing seventy-three years of his long life (2013: 115). 2 Extensive monolingualism is a relatively recent feature in the Western world, derived from enforced monolingual designs in nation-building processes. However, a recent Eurobarometer survey shows that over half of Europeans (54%) are able to hold a conversation in at least one additional language to their mother tongue, while regular foreign language use is widespread, particularly with reference to watching films/television or listening to the radio, using the internet and communicating with friends. The proportion of Europeans who do not use a foreign language regularly in any situation was only 9% in 2012 (European Commission, 2012). David Crystal estimates that approximately one in four of the world’s population are now capable of communication to a useful level in English (Crystal, 2003: 69).

References Archibugi, D. (2008) The Global Commonwealth of Citizens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Balibar, É. (2006) Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship. Globalization Working Papers. Université de Paris-X Nanterre and University of California, Irvine (06/4). Balibar, É. (2010) At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation? European Journal of Social Theory, 13(3): 315–22. Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, W. (2007) The Task of the Translator. In: Benjamin, W. (ed.), Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 69–82. Berman, A. (1992) The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation: Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. London and New York: Routledge. Bielsa, E. and Aguilera, A. (2017) Politics of Translation: A Cosmopolitan Approach. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4(1): 7–24. Casanova, P. (2004) The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Cheah, P. (2016) What Is a World? Durham and London: Duke University Press. Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Damrosch, D. (2003) What Is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Delanty, G. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1): 25–47. Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, J. and Dufourmantelle, A. (2000) Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eckermann, J.P. (1850) Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret. London: Smith, Elder & Co. European Commission. (2012) Europeans and their Languages. Special Eurobarometer 386. Available from: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf. Heilbron, J. (1999) Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(4): 429–44. Held, D. (2010) Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities. Cambridge: Polity. Ives, P. (2009) Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates. Political Studies, 58(3): 516–35. Kymlicka, W. (2001) Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. May, S. (2014) Contesting Public Monolingualism and Diglossia: Rethinking Political Theory and Language Policy for a Multilingual World. Language Policy, 13(4): 371–93. 175

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Rafael, V.L. (2005) The Promise of the Foreign. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ricoeur, P. (2006) On Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sakai, N. (2006) Translation. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3): 71–8. Santos, B. de S. (2005) The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation. Development, 48(2): 15–22. Santos, B. de S. (2010) Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder. Development and Change. Montevideo: Trilce. Schleiermacher, F. (1992) On the Different Methods of Translating. In: Schulte, R. and Biguenet, J. (eds.), Theories of Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Siskind, M. (2014) Cosmopolitan Desires. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sommer, D. (2004) Bilingual Aesthetics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Spivak, G.C. (2000) The Politics of Translation. In: Venuti, L. (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 397–416. Spivak, G.C. (2005) Translating into English. In: Bermann, S. and Wood, M. (eds.), Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 93–110. Steiner, G. (2013) A Footnote to Weltliteratur. In: D’Haen, T., Domínguez, C., and Thomsen, M.R. (eds.), World Literature: A Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 114–21. Venuti, L. (2008) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Walkowitz, R.L. (2015) Born Translated. New York: Columbia University Press. Yildiz, Y. (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue. New York: Fordham University Press.

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15 Third Culture Kids and paradoxical cosmopolitanism Rachel Cason

Third Culture Kids are as complex and multi-faceted a phenomena as cosmopolitanism itself. Which is fitting, as they appear to be perfectly suited – a synergy of theorem and lived reality in an ever globalising and inter-cultural world. Cosmopolitans are generally understood to be individuals who possess the skills and ‘cultural competencies’ to effectively navigate different meaning systems (Roudometof 2005: 114). Third Culture Kids are prime candidates for this cosmopolitan status. They are the children of people working outside their passport countries, who are employed by international organisations as international business people, development experts, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, international NGO and humanitarian aid workers, or UN representatives. The first culture of their title refers to the Third Culture Kids’ parental homeland(s), while the second culture incorporates the country or countries in which they spent their formative years, commonly referred to as their host culture(s). The third culture to which their title refers is the temporary, nomadic and multi-cultural space they typically inhabit as children, within an expatriate community and, in some cases, international schools. This ‘third culture’ is not a straightforward amalgamation of their first two cultural spheres of influence, but instead comprises a third space for their unstable integration and interpretation (Knörr 2005). Raised in this third culture, Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are nevertheless aware that employment, further education or indeed turning 18 for military TCKs, will propel them ‘back’ to their passport cultures. Third culture belonging, established in childhood, is to be negotiated in adulthood. Growing up ‘in between worlds’ (Pollock and van Reken 2009), the TCK is typically uncomfortable with homogeneity (Killguss 2008) and instead seeks out diversity in the margins, in company with the cosmopolitan (Foner 1997: 73–4). Living in liminality, many TCKs achieve in childhood, and then maintain into adulthood, the ‘reflexive distance’ deemed prerequisite to a cosmopolitan worldview (Turner 2002: 57). Indeed, the multi-sited nature of TCK belonging facilitates an ironic detachment from any one particular worldview, and instead fosters a multisited approach to belonging. In this way, both the TCK and the cosmopolitan may be seen as building relationships with a ‘plurality of cultures’ and engaging with ‘the coexistence of cultures in the individual experience’ (Hannerz 1990: 239). However, the very plurality of the TCK’s cultural exposure may belie the rootedness of their cultural outlook. As members of a third space, are TCKs as culturally unattached as they seem? 177

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Historically, cosmopolitans have been identified as elites, using high levels of mobility to consume high culture on the global stage, and have thereby opened themselves up to criticism as ‘rootless’, being both unconcerned and unaffected by local attachments and commitments (Delanty 2000: 54). Indeed, some TCKs claim that this disconnectedness from the local is fundamental to the TCK experience, both as children and on into adult life. However, Werbner argues that the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ has an ethical dimension, combining both local and global commitments in a bid for a more rooted orientation towards diversity (2008: 60). In this way, Third Culture Kids offer an opportunity to explore the extent to which experiences of high mobility has predisposed them towards a cosmopolitan rootlessness or, if their strong identification with their ‘third culture’ has instead evolved, a kind of rooted cosmopolitan approach. For TCKs however, rootedness would be less based in territory, than in the expatriate communities and organisational cultures of their childhoods, and so they could confound and expand current understandings of the rooted/rootless dichotomy in the cosmopolitan narrative. This chapter will explore this link between Third Culture Kids and cosmopolitanism, and the cosmopolitan nature of the Third Culture Kid experience and outlook. It will explore the structural and collective basis of Third Culture Kid cosmopolitanism, and the ways in which their experiences propel them, paradoxically, both towards transnational rootedness and territorial rootlessness. An analysis of continuing mobility in the lives of adult TCKs lends itself to a final discussion of ‘elite vagrancy’ and the ways in which this phenomenon suggests that TCK cosmopolitanism is a paradoxical set of cultural (in)competencies.

A cosmopolitan upbringing Rapport speaks of cosmopolitanism as offering ‘emancipation’ from the ‘superficial differentiation’ of social categories such as ethnicity or class (2012: 104). For him, cosmopolitanism is the ultimate individualising projects; liberating people ‘to become themselves’ (2012: 101). This vision suggests that cosmopolitanism is an especially individual quality; a quality beneficial to and emerging from self-actualisation. However, Werbner argues that both normative cosmopolitanism, imagining a global society based on democratic republics, and cultural aesthetic cosmopolitanism, imagining a global ‘space of cultural difference and toleration’, stress ‘collective creativity’ (2008: 50–1). If we are to understand Third Culture Kids are collectively cosmopolitan, it becomes necessary to establish their cosmopolitanism as structurally facilitated, rather than a coincidence of individualisation. After all, the very identity of the TCK is structurally defined, with reference to the formal or informal expatriate communities around which the TCK’s experience of the world coalesces. Werbner (2008) claims that cosmopolitanism acknowledges, and even relies upon, an understanding that so-called cosmopolitan individuals are, in fact, very much embedded in societal networks that have engendered particular worldviews that, in turn, encourage a cosmopolitan outlook. Indeed, the consistency with which adult TCKs display a propensity towards cultural aesthetic cosmopolitanism is certainly suggestive of a commonality of experience (Cason 2015). Writings on other societal networks, such as Hannerz’s foreign correspondents, imply a structural bias may exist in certain sectors towards a cosmopolitan outlook, and that individuals may be involved in an attempt to collectively further the culturally aesthetic cosmopolitan values; ‘Some foreign correspondents, it seems, are quite self-conscious about their cosmopolitan convictions, going to work with the hope to educate’ (2004: 34). The societal networks in which Third Culture Kids are raised are typically global in focus and encourage, in narrative at least if not in always in practice, a broad cultural awareness and inter-cultural discourse. These agencies and organisations openly acknowledge the inter-cultural 178

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careers of their employees, their presence in a host culture, and the multi-cultural demographics of their own expatriate community. The extent to which these expatriate communities nurture a cosmopolitan outlook, a desire for ‘difference and toleration, multiple cultural competencies and shared communication across cultures’ (Werbner 2008: 50–1) may be variable, yet such an outlook is generally held to be positive. Third Culture Kids are encouraged into a cosmopolitan identity by their sponsor organisations and educational institutions. They are defined by their difference from both passport and host country peers, and are encouraged to value their difference. They straddle cultural worlds, performing their different selves chameleon-like. TCKs learn that there is power in being different: ‘I am a person set apart, able to enjoy the benefits of the place without paying the taxes’ (Iyer 2004: 11). Henderson-James concurs, observing, ‘The rules evidently didn’t always apply to me, heady stuff for a teenager’ (2009: 121). TCKs are told from a young age that they are special, mature, with a unique perspective of the world, and possessors of exotic knowledge. Moreover, they are told they are ‘cross-culturally skilled and globally aware at the age of eighteen’ and that they are ‘prime candidates for . . . leadership roles’ (McCaig 2011: 45). For many Third Culture Kids, identifying as different or unique is experienced as a significant strength. Bennett’s notion of constructive marginality (1993) goes some way to illuminating the mechanisms TCKs use to manage cosmopolitan identities. TCKs identify predominately as marginals, both in their passport and their host country cultures, and while TCKs often go through periods of feeling encapsulated, limited and isolated by their marginal status, many feel able to enter into constructive marginality. TCKs typically report feeling ‘at home’ in various cultural traditions (Killguss 2008: 6), and able to constructively engage with the various facets of their cultural identities. They feel at ease juggling different identities, and learn to employ a flexible sense of belonging not unlike Ong’s notions of ‘flexible citizenship’ (1999). Rather than being culturally limited to territorial belonging, TCKs typically define themselves by their ‘multicultural sense of self ’ (Killguss 2008: 6). In this way, they align themselves closely with cosmopolitanism, as having ‘an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other’ (Hannerz 1990: 239).

Transnational rootedness Hannerz (1990) observes that some cosmopolitans may not simply be individuals in the process of navigating multiple territorial cultures. He suggests that they may be involved also with a supraterritorial culture, a kind of ‘transnational network’ (Hannerz 1990: 240–1). It is to this kind of cosmopolitan experience that TCKs appear especially affiliated, and in this way TCKs may typically be seen, paradoxically, both as rootless, in terms of lacking a clear territorial cultural ‘home’ in which they invest long term, and as rooted in a non-territorial transnational network composed of international organisations and a distinct expatriate cultural framework. The use of telephone and internet video calling technologies allows TCKs to maintain intimate relationships with friends in geographically disparate locations. Indeed, for some TCKs, their effectiveness at maintaining transnational relationships may go so far as to negate a need for more locally based attachments. Through the use of these internet technologies and social media, including numerous dedicated forums, chatrooms and alumni organisations, TCKs experience belonging transnationally, maintaining links with a geographically disparate community of TCKs around the world. They mirror Glick Schiller et al.’s transmigrants, ‘whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders’ (1995: 48). Harnessing the possibilities of the internet, TCKs are typically expert at maintaining cross-border connections and, in so doing, they explore virtual spaces of belonging (Roudometof 2005). They experience marginality in solidarity with each other, constructively employing their experience of 179

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marginality in ways that seek to connect their experiences with those of other highly mobile populations. One of the ways in which many TCKs construct a sense of collective identity independent of the nation state (Featherstone 1996) is through a return to the ‘abroad’ as adults. Paradoxically this is a return to the familiar, rather than to the exotic Other as it would represent for many of their compatriots. Faist describes transnational communities as ‘connected by dense social and symbolic ties over time . . . based on solidarity’ (2000: 9). These connections and shared experiences draw TCKs back to the third space of their childhoods. After all, where all members of the expatriate community are strangers to their locale, belonging may be negotiated on a more equal footing than in the TCK’s own passport country, where strangerhood is lonesome. Given their high rates of return (Cason 2015), these expatriate communities are increasingly made up of Third Culture Kids for whom home is the broader expatriate field. Should one field abroad eject them due to habitation or citizenship limitations, for example, another will accept them. For some TCKs, the field of anthropology, arguably cosmopolitan in itself, provides a social and cultural framework with which to re-enter the mobile communities of TCK childhoods. Certainly, the process involved in belonging, through perpetual and perpetuated marginality, hints at a kind of rooted cosmopolitanism. This rooted cosmopolitanism combines the desire for diversity, global perspective and regular challenges to concepts of self, identity and belonging, with the easy familiarity born of early engagement in just such social contexts and experiences via expatriate organisational cultures. Theories around rooted cosmopolitanism have centred on the idea that an open, inquiring attitude towards diversity, alongside a commitment to universal issues, does not preclude enduring commitments on a local, territorial or communal level (Appiah 1997; Werbner 2008). While Molz claims the nation to be central to the way in which ‘travellers develop their cosmopolitan orientation to the world as a whole’, it is arguable that transnational networks do this for the TCK (2005: 523). Through the experiences of Third Culture Kids, it becomes possible to see this kind of rooted cosmopolitanism as tethering the individual, not to territory, but to a transnational network or community.

A cosmopolitan skill set The transnational networks and expatriate organisations that are so culture-defining for the Third Culture Kid also equip them with a cosmopolitan skill set. This skill set enables them to move from childhood mobility as structurally (or externally) motivated onto a perpetuation of ongoing mobility into adulthood. Woodward and Skrbis posit that a strong link exists between cosmopolitanism and a ‘particular set of cultural competencies’: being cosmopolitan itself is a culturally located competency, perhaps even a strategy, that affords individuals the capacity to see, identify, label, use and govern dimensions of social difference in ways which reproduce patterns of cultural power. (2012: 130) In this way, these authors suggest that cosmopolitanism is less an outlook than a skill set arising from a specific set of environmental circumstances. Being able to access and engage with the cultural subtleties of the society around them, be this a host country familiar to them, or their own expatriate community, gives TCKs access to ‘cultural power’. TCKs, by virtue of their highly mobile upbringing, have had exposure to, and engagement with, multiple cultures. This mobility 180

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has afforded them a cosmopolitan skill set, a mechanism or strategy through which they can harness social difference and gain cultural power and influence. In a somewhat similar vein, Hannerz argues that this cultural power offered by cosmopolitanism broadens the individual’s locus of control: Competence with regard to alien cultures itself entails a sense of mastery, as an aspect of the self. One’s understanding has expanded, a little more of the world is somehow under control. (1990: 239–40) Cultural competence equips TCKs with a strong sense of multiple rootedness; they feel rightfully embedded in multiple geographical and cultural locations. They become skilled in the management of global relationships, through the use of email and webcam, and learn how to navigate in new cultures skillfully, engaging effectively with the means of nationally based rights of belonging, passport and right-to-work paperwork. If TCKs have the cultural resources necessary to expand their field of belonging, a good deal of the world may appear tamed under their well-practised hand. It is true that the cultures through which the Third Culture Kid moves shifts its cultural expectations and behavioural norms as well as its borders. However, the third space that contributes to the destabilisation of the TCK, also teaches them the complicated sequence of steps that enables them to dance, rather than stumble, on the global stage. Mary Edwards Wertsch (author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, 1991) in an interview for the documentary film Brats: Our Journey Home (Donna Musil Films 2006) makes this observation: ‘What these children learn to do very well is to read other people and then to become the manifestation of that person’s wants/needs/desires’. This statement points to the highly developed adaptive skills of TCKs who, as children, have learnt how to adapt in many different cultural contexts. While this ability is predictably problematic on a personal level, as potentially complicating agency in adulthood, it is a highly prized skill that facilitates active inclusion and engagement in cultures other than one’s passport culture. However, cultural competence in cultures other than the passport culture should not be confused with any kind of permanent allegiance to it; the cosmopolitan ‘has . . . obvious competence with regard to it, but he can choose to disengage from it. He possesses it, it does not possess him’ (Hannerz 1990: 240). With a chameleon-like ability to pick up and shed cultural allegiances with remarkable ease, TCKs often adjust their personas to fit the cultural circumstances surrounding them (Pollock and van Reken 2009; Cason 2015; Crossman 2016). Crucially, success in meeting these social expectations is dependent on a TCK’s competence at assessing the cultural environment rather than a reliance on a shared set of cultural expectations. Even when a TCK does seem to have settled into one particular culture, it is often a temporary settledness; ‘the cosmopolitan may embrace the alien culture, but he does not become committed to it. All the time he knows where the exit is’ (Hannerz 1990: 240). Settledness itself may be enforced by physical, emotional or legal restrictions on the individual’s mobility rather than long-term investment in a society based on a set of shared cultural values. For many TCKs, cosmopolitanism is experienced as a set of cultural competences developed out of a need, and a desire, to effectively harness the effects of high mobility in childhood, and to maintain access to diversity in adult life.

Territorial rootlessness If TCKs are rooted cosmopolitans, embedded in the transnational networks of their childhoods, they also present as rootless cosmopolitans, perpetuating highly mobile lives into adulthood. The 181

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concept of a ‘rootless’ cosmopolitan has historically been used to denigrate those who seem to hold few territorial ties, and who are thus seen to be threatening commitment and investment in local, social and economic structures. Ideologically, however, cosmopolitanism lends itself to an inherent rootlessness; a lack of strong local attachments and identification is precisely what encourages an openness towards the ‘Other’ that might threaten a more fixed, territorially based identity. This willingness, or even desire, to engage with the Other marks TCKs as a traditionally cosmopolitan group, rootless in that they resist the more bounded national identities of their passport country peers. Rootlessness is a defining feature of many TCK life stories (McLachlan 2004: 15). An internal compulsion to mobility, an internal inescapable restlessness, is so seminal to the impact of the TCK experience on adult life that mobility actually constitutes a welcome relief in a world that would otherwise threaten to suffocate many TCKs with stability. Knell writes that ‘TCKs often develop a migratory instinct – they soon get itchy feet after being in any one place for a time. This can affect their academic lives, career, family and marriage’ (2001: 19). Indeed, Laird Knight (Brats: Our Journey Home, Donna Musil Films 2005) revealed that once anything in his life, such as work projects or personal relationships, settled down to became established and steady, he would develop an urge to move on and create change. Indeed, commitment of any kind is particularly challenging to TCKs (Knell 2001). Instead, many TCKs seek to retain a sense of perpetual impermanence. For some TCKs, however, this internal compulsion towards mobility, while integral to their cosmopolitan identification and sense of belonging, is not unproblematic. After all, committing to a particular course of action is difficult when one’s base assumption is that the only certain thing in one’s life is that the future is uncertain. The rootlessness, or restlessness, common to Third Culture Kids could ‘affect their academic life, career, family and marriage’ (Knell 2001: 19). While all of these aspects are of interest, most writers on TCKs focus on the relational impact of frequent mobility. Eakin speaks of how TCKs are often able to avoid problem-solving throughout their relationships, confident in the assumption that, at some point, one or other participants in the disagreement will leave to move on to another country and other relationships (1998). For this reason, TCKs sometimes appear indecisive and noncommittal or find establishing and maintaining long relationships to be challenging (McCaig 1994). For some TCKs, beginning any new relationship can seem like a betrayal of past loyalties and a huge risk in the face of ‘future separations’ (Gould 2002: 152). For other Third Culture Kids, rootlessness has a different relational impact. The perceived lack of longevity in their relationships can encourage them to ‘move quickly through superficiality into deep emotional investment’ (Gould 2002: 153). This eagerness to forge significant relationships quickly can sometimes be misunderstood as a desire for intimacy, much to the non-TCK’s confusion. Margo Knight (Brats: Our Journey Home, Donna Musil Films 2005) said: ‘I don’t believe that trusting and telling people stuff are necessarily the same thing’. Indeed, because of the constant ‘newness’ of their lives, TCKs share very little historical connections with their peers and, upon making a new acquaintance, will often be eager to share in detail, the intimate facts of their lives. This however, does not necessarily equate to trust. Wertsch observed that this sharing was a strategy learnt by many military brats, and was one that elicited mutual disclosure, thus establishing friendship quickly (1991). Where friendships are social currency, this is a necessary skill set for the highly mobile child. Indeed, TCKs can sometimes harbour a deep distrust of their peers, particularly when residing in their passport countries; they are never quite sure of where they stand in relationship to them (Knell 2001: 53). In the words of one TCK, as he gave advice to those ‘going home’ to their passport countries: ‘Be on your guard. They’ll try to trick you’ (Knell 2001: 61). For these reasons, amongst others, TCKs often wrestle with settledness throughout 182

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adulthood, aiming for stability but finding the emotional demands of it challenging. The TCK is, in fact, most comfortable when rootless, and ‘foreign’ (Killguss 2008).

Elite vagrancy The rootlessness, towards which many TCKs feel regularly propelled, can become a heavy weight. The internal restlessness and compulsion towards mobility described by many TCKs echoes the constant and relentless propulsion of vagabonds, as described by Bauman (1996). One difference here, however, is that the TCKs rootlessness is typically internally motivated, while the rootlessness of the vagabond is in response to external pressures. In many ways TCKs seem bound to maintain into adulthood the high mobility of their childhoods, transforming them into ‘elite vagrants’ (Cason 2015). These elite vagrants are a seemingly disparate group of people who are nevertheless united by early childhood experiences of high mobility, rootless and homelessness in terms of territorial boundedness, yet who are in constant search for the familiarity and rootedness of community. New constructions of fluid third spaces enable many TCKs to perpetuate the inner compulsion towards movement, a compulsion that propels them away from settledness and towards a more familiar and comfortable marginality as ‘elite vagrants’. Applying Bauman’s notions of vagrancy (1995, 1996, 1998) to the TCK experience illuminates the processes by which TCKs interact with, and move through, the world around them. Bauman describes the vagrant as ‘a stranger; he can never be “the native” . . . whatever he may do to ingratiate himself in the eyes of the natives, too fresh is the memory of his arrival’ (1995: 94). This effectively aligns with many accounts of TCK strangerhood (Pollock and van Reken 2009; Eidse and Sichel 2004; Ender 2002), but goes so far as to suggest motivations for the perpetual movement of TCKs into their adult lives. Where Bauman’s vagrants are typically compelled in onward motion through lack of resources, TCKs experience an inner compulsion towards rootlessness – a restless and constant seeking after the novel. TCKs are raised and rooted in several specific territorial landscapes, and also in the social and organisational place(s) of their parents’ employment. They were, initially, rooted in the lands of their employers. Upon entering further education, or coming of age, they were expelled out of their parents’ lands and here many began living out their careers of vagrancy. For many TCKs, the urge to wander is as innate and inescapable as the longing for a place of their own, for they may never return to the places of their childhoods. The only ‘return’ available to them is in perfect replication of their parents’ careers, or through a certain mirroring of these through other internationally oriented career paths. TCKs, unlike Bauman’s vagrants, are typically welcomed by sedentary populations as elite contributors to social and financial economies, possessed as they are with the cultural competencies that facilitate successful wandering. Yet the unpredictability of their wandering and their perceived lack of comprehensible allegiances may well display their relative incompetence around social and emotional settledness, and compromise relationships with their settled peers.

Conclusion Third Culture Kids are almost inherently cosmopolitan, raised as they are ‘in between worlds’ (Pollock and van Reken 2009). Their outlook on the world traverses the limits of the nation state and reaches for the cultural influences of their myriad host countries. However, their outlook, open as it is, is nonetheless rooted in broad transnational fields, and in the organisational cultures of their parents’ employment. Their rootlessness, more traditionally associated with cosmopolitanism, arises in later life when, expelled from the agencies of their childhood, they begin to 183

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wander the globe as professional nomads, or ‘elite vagrants’ (Cason 2015). Possessors of a cosmopolitan skill set and competent in the ways of nomadism and transnational belonging, TCKs nevertheless display a certain cultural incompetence in the field of settled relationships and local engagement. The paradoxical nature of their cosmopolitanism, the rooted/rootless dichotomy they demonstrate, is just one of the many contributions Third Culture Kids have to make to our understanding of belonging, identity and place.

References Appiah, K.A. (1997) ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots. Critical Inquiry’, Front Lines/Border Posts, (Spring), 23(3): 617–39. Bauman, Z. (1995) Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1996) ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist – Or a Short History of Identity’, pp. 18–36 in Hall, S. and du Gay, P. (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: SAGE Publications. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalisation: The Human Consequences, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Bennett, J. (1993) ‘Cultural Marginality: Identity Issues in Intercultural Training’, pp. 109–36 in Paige, E.M. (ed.), Education for the Intercultural Experience, Intercultural Press: Yarmouth, Maine. Cason, R. (2015) Third Culture Kids: Migration Narratives on Belonging, Identity and Place. Doctoral Thesis, Keele University, UK. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/1029/1/Cason%20PhD%202015.pdf Crossman, T. (2016) Misunderstood: The Impact of Growing Up Overseas in the 21st Century, Great Britain: Summertime Publishing. Delanty, G. (2000) Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics, Buckingham: Open University Press. Donna Musil Films (2006) Brats: Our Journey Home: The First Documentary about Growing Up Military, Brats Without Borders, Inc., Eatonton, Georgia. Eakin, K.B. (1998) According to My Passport, I’m Coming Home. www.state.gov/documents/organization/2065. pdf Eidse, F. and Sichel, N. (eds.) (2004) Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Ender, M.G. (ed.) (2002) Military Brats and Other Global Nomads: Growing Up in Organization Families, Westport: Praeger Publishers. Faist, T. (2000) ‘Transnationalisation in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture’, WPTC-99-08, Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, Bremen: University of Bremen. Featherstone, M. (1996) ‘Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity’, pp. 46–78 in Wilson, R. and Dissanayake, W. (eds.), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foner, N. (1997) ‘What’s New about Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at the Turn of the Century’, Diaspora, 6(3): 355–75. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. and Szanton Blanc, C. (1995) ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68(1): 48–63. Gould, J.B. (2002) ‘Review of “The Third Culture Kid Experience”, by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. van Reken, Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press (1999) 333 pages, ISBN 1–877864 72–2; and “Letters I Never Wrote”, by Ruth E. van Reken, Oakbrook, IL: Darwill Press (1986) 175 pages’, Journal of Loss and Trauma, 7: 151–6. Brunner-Routledge. Hannerz, U. (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society, 7: 237–51. Hannerz, U. (2004) Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson-James, N. (2009) At Home Abroad: An American Girl in Africa, Austin: Plain View Press. Iyer, P. (2004) ‘Living in the Transit Lounge’, pp. 7–14 in Eidse, F. and Sichel, N. (eds.), Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Killguss, B.M. (2008) ‘“Identity and The Need to Belong”: Understanding Identity Formation and Place in the Lives of Global Nomads’, Illness, Crisis & Loss, 16(2): 137–57. Knell, M. (2001) Families on the Move: Growing Up Overseas – and Loving It!, London: Monarch Books. Knörr, J. (ed.) (2005) Childhood and Migration: From Experience to Agency, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

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McCaig, N.M. (1994) ‘Growing Up with a World View: Nomad Children Develop Multicultural Skills’, Foreign Service Journal, September: 32–41. McCaig, N.M., 2011. ‘Raised in the Margin of the Mosaic: Global Nomads Balance Worlds Within’, pp. 45–56 in Bell-Villada, G.H., Sichel, F., Eidse, F. and Orr, E. N. (eds.), Writing out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. McLachlan, D.A. (2004) ‘The Impact of Globalisation on Internationally Mobile Families: A Grounded Theory Analysis’, The Journal of Theory Construction and Testing, 9(1): 14–20. Molz, J.G. (2005) ‘Getting a “Flexible Eye”: Round-the-World Travel and Scales of Cosmopolitan Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, 9(5): 517–31. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, London: Duke University Press. Pollock, D.C. and van Reken, R.E. (2009) Third Culture Kids: Growing Up among Worlds, Revised Edition, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Rapport, N. (2012) ‘Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: A Vision of the Individual Free from Culture, Custom and Community’, pp. 101–14 in Delanty, G. (ed.), Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, Oxon: Routledge. Roudometof, V. (2005) ‘Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Glocalisation’, Current Sociology, 53: 113–35. Turner, B.S. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalisation and Patriotism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19(1–2): 45–63. Werbner, P. (2008) ‘The Cosmopolitan Encounter: Social Anthropology and the Kindness of Strangers’, pp. 47–68 in Werbner, P. (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Berg. Wertsch, M.E. (1991) Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, New York: Ballantine Books. Woodward, I. and Skrbis, Z. (2012) ‘Performing Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 127–37 in Delanty, G. (ed.), Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, Oxon: Routledge.

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16 Festivals, museums, exhibitions Aesthetic cosmopolitanism in the cultural public sphere Monica Sassatelli

Cultural versions of cosmopolitanism are often seen as derivative of political ones: this is not surprising since the term originated, in ancient times as well as in modern and then again in contemporary revivals, as a regulatory idea for personal or collective political ethics. Ethical cosmopolitanism, which often informs normative political theories (Nash 2006), remains the defining variant. Even if there are a few dissenting voices (see in particular Papastergiadis in this volume), aesthetic versions – also associated with empirical or ‘really existing’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘banal’ dimensions – tend to be dismissed, as the chosen qualifiers reveal. The fate of the aesthetic dimension is revealing of a still dismissive stance, even after the ‘cultural turn’, towards cultural phenomena. This is particularly the case for certain cultural manifestations, whose contemporary development has prompted the introduction of expressions such as global culture and more recently global culture industry. An exploration of the relevance of cosmopolitanism in their widespread rise can thus be instrumental to a better understanding of how both cosmopolitanism and culture work today. Not only does this show the increasing overlap of cultural institutions and industry – and as would have more commonly been said until recently, high- and low-brow culture – but in so doing both continuities and ruptures between old and new issues and themes in cultural analysis are exposed. Taking up this lead, and with the intent of both charting the current tone of the debate and proposing a specific transversal reading of it, in what follows I first briefly outline and contextualise the distinction between ethical and aesthetic cosmopolitanism as an important facet of contemporary cultural theory. I will then assess its relevance for the interpretation of trends in contemporary global public culture, especially as expressed in key examples such as museums, exhibitions and major international festivals. Finally, in a brief concluding section I take up recent notions of aesthetic, or cultural, public sphere as a concept that can help integrating rather than dichotomising the political and cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism.

Aesthetic versus ethical cosmopolitanism If we consider Vertovec’s and Cohen’s (2002: 1–22) classification of six varieties of cosmopolitanism, we can further observe that three of these lean towards the political and are at the core of the field (a philosophy or worldview; a political project of transnational institutions; a political project for recognising multiple identities) and the other three towards the cultural, functioning as a 186

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wider, supporting or pre-conditional context (a socio-cultural condition, an attitudinal or dispositional orientation; a competence). As one can see scanning the themes and dates of publications featured in the now numerous reviews of concepts of cosmopolitanism such as this, the contemporary return of cosmopolitanism since the 1990s is to be connected with historical as well as intellectual developments the significance of which underlies the balance between these two faces of cosmopolitanism, or between cosmopolitics and its cultural conditions and implications. Historically, with the end of the Cold War an era began when it became both more possible and more imperative to find new directions for international relations and governance, with greater expected opportunities as well as growing insecurity that placed human rights and issues of world citizenship, now apparently within reach, at the forefront. Intellectually, this growing interconnectedness prompted the exponential growth, around the same time, of ‘globalisation’ as the new keyword across the social sciences and in public debate, gradually but steadily spilling over from its economic origins. To a certain extent, cosmopolitanism studies represents a reaction to these developments, or a qualified critique of some of the more reductive and determinist views of the new world orders within globalisation studies. These motives at the root of the revival of cosmopolitanism affect its meaning, so that the possibility of a radical cosmopolitan imagination remains trapped in its image as a cultural manifestation of globalisation, limiting the ‘reframing of the act of the imagination’ that Papastergiadis (in this volume) advances as the full meaning of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Instead, as a corollary of globalisation cosmopolitanism has been seen mainly as involving an emphasis on the role of (world) citizens rather than consumers and a questioning of automatic, or reactionary, spill over of globalisation from economy and politics to (global) culture. Initially the most accepted cultural correlates of globalisation were theorised under two opposite rubrics: either as cultural homogenisation or, once the first phase of euphoria (or fear) was over, as cultural clash. As these two options have been increasingly criticised as satisfactory scenarios (although elements of each accepted as local or specific rather than general or overarching trends), a space is created for the idea of some form of combination of local and global or hybridisation as a critical third way. This perspective developed often at the same time and in connection with the growing interest for cosmopolitanism in a cultural-aesthetic connotation, rather than a political-ethical (and legal) one only.1 Aesthetic cosmopolitanism is described as a cultural disposition promoted by the new world (culture) system, flows or ‘scapes’. Aesthetic cosmopolitans are versed in recognising and appreciating cultural diversity – what is normally described as ‘openness’ – having developed a mode of managing meaning that allows them at the same time a certain indifference towards their own cultural norms and a cross-cultural omnivorousness.2 Among the first to consider such cultural and aesthetic versions of cosmopolitanism and to distinguish it from political versions, Ulf Hannerz underlines that the former does not have to assume the superficial, shallow and artificial form of the tourist’s hunger for the ‘home plus’ experience, the security and familiarity of home, plus the thrill of exoticism. Whilst Hannerz recognises that this is certainly one possible, even likely, outcome, his claim is that ‘as the core of cultural cosmopolitanism, the ability to make one’s way into other cultures, and the appreciative openness toward divergent cultural experiences, could be a resource for cosmopolitical commitments’ (Hannerz 2005: 204). This indeed is presented as the crux of the matter: not only does it show how cultural cosmopolitanism is still seen as derivative – its worth is measured in terms of how much it can then transform into political cosmopolitanism – but also the sort of stigma it faces because of that, especially when termed ‘aesthetic’ and contrasted with ethical cosmopolitanism. By and large, the negative reputation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism comes out of an association with the cultural industry and the resulting dismissal as a consumerist form, where the openness to and familiarity with diversity that supposedly mark the cosmopolitan disposition and 187

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competence, remain superficial or cosmetic, if not accused of exoticising and commodifying the Other for the benefit of the (probably Western, probably white) self (Massey 1994). Predominantly, the idea of a non-elite, ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanism spread via forms of public and popular culture is accepted, but also dismissed as not being quite the real thing.3 How this came to be becomes clearer through tracing the history of the notion. Two more or less simultaneous origins of the expression ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ in recent times are found in the mid-1990s. On the one hand, as noted before, within the emerging consideration of cultural globalisation: it is not rare to find the latter conflated with ‘cultural cosmopolitanism’. For instance the globalisation of subculture and the creation of a global popular culture has been portrayed as increasingly displaying cosmopolitan identities (Roberts 2005). This refers chiefly to the capacity and desire, supposedly linked to being immersed in globalised surroundings, to experience or consume the cultural products of ‘others’. Such a disposition is created as a possibility by these surroundings, but should not be taken for granted, hence the distinction between those who display cosmopolitanism in their aesthetic choices, and those who do not and remain, according to the usual dichotomy, local (Hannerz 1990). Only more recently from a theoretical space of possibilities this also became an analytical tool for empirical studies (Kendall, Skrbis and Woodward 2009). On the other hand, but not too far removed, another origin of the idea of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism is found in scholarship on tourism, describing a similar attitude of tourists to being immersed, through travel, in other cultures (Urry 1995; Szerszynski and Urry 2002, 2006). As one can see, the two contexts share much: tourism is a specific form of consumption and cultural practice, even more so when considering that post-modern tourism has been characterised, among other things, as also happening without actual physical displacement, through media experience in particular – thus allowing us to become cosmopolitans at home (Hebdige 1990). The cosmopolitan displays a capacity and eagerness to become familiar with other cultures, through experience and reflection: cultural diversity is appreciated on aesthetic grounds in so far as it is predominantly an issue of taste and of a certain type of experience somehow removed from the seriousness of ‘real life’ that allows a risk-taking attitude, semiotic skills and as a result the reflexive ability to relativise and take distance from one’s own society and culture. The issue here is that, although presented as a democratisation of travel, within tourism such democratisation involves a measure of corruption. Hence, aesthetic cosmopolitanism will never be as profound and engaged as a proper ‘ethical’ cosmopolitanism: The aesthetic is not, of course, to be confused with the ethical and . . . there is no guarantee that the lifting of general cultural horizons, the honing of semiotic skills and the development of hermeneutic sensibilities will be followed by any necessary sense of responsibility for the global totality. (Tomlinson 1999: 202) Nevertheless, some space for a less dichotomous division of aesthetic/ethical cosmopolitanisms is allowed in that: ‘it is perhaps more likely that such a sense will develop obliquely from these popular cultural practices, than that it will be directly cultivated in some sort of abstract global-civic ethic’ (ibid.: 202). This ‘frequent flyers’ cosmopolitanism would be rather soft though, in that the conditions of contemporary travel (hotel chains, airport lounges and all the typical so-called non places similar everywhere) considerably cushion the impact and the otherness itself, of the other (Calhoun 2002).4 So this aesthetic cosmopolitanism belongs to (mass) tourists as passive consumers, kept in a bubble, enjoying commercialised pseudo-events, screened off from authenticity. Their cosmopolitanism is superficial, not really conducive of engagement with the world, not ‘ethical’. So too, more generally, is assumed to be the disposition of audiences of contemporary, 188

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post-traditional cultural phenomena. This perspective derives from locating aesthetic cosmopolitanism at the individual level, with little attention for the collective and institutional conditions in which culture is produced and displayed as well as experienced, not only as a mode of managing meaning but also as a mode of producing meaning. Criticising this, Motti Regev (2007: 126) has claimed that aesthetic cosmopolitanism comes into being not only through consumption of art works and cultural products from the ‘wider shores of cultural experience’ but also, and more intensively, through the creation and consumption of much of the contemporary locally produced art and culture that are believed to express ethno-national uniqueness. . . . As such, aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not the exception in contemporary cultural practices, but rather the normal and the routine. The superficiality may not be in the phenomena we observe – often confusing the preconditions for cosmopolitanism with the actual disposition itself, then finding the latter unsatisfactory – but in the analytical tools and dichotomies we use. As we shall see further in the next section, the dismissive stance that social theory has often displayed towards the aesthetic, precisely on account of it being exclusively associated with art (rather than with ‘experience’ as the etymology and early use of the notion suggest) a sphere beyond ethics, and beyond social reality, has weighed on the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism and has limited its possible interpretive contribution.

Global culture institutions and industry: globalisation and the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum Work on museums (Levitt 2015) and exhibitions, in particular major biennials (De Duve 2007; Papastergiadis and Martin 2011) stresses the shift from national representation to cosmopolitan self-reflexivity. As Peggy Levitt shows on the basis of her extensive research on major museums around the world, however, rather than a shift between two mutually exclusive models, we are witnessing a ‘cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum’. Rather than seeing these as competing, I think of cultural institutions as falling along a continuum of cosmopolitan nationalism whose two constantly changing parts mutually inform and transform each other. In fact, in some cases, it is by recognizing and representing the nation’s internal diversity, and thereby redefining the national, that some institutions connect to the cosmopolitan. (ibid.: 3) Where specific museums and countries sit on this continuum remains an empirical question with much variation from case to case, based on historical, economic and political factors as well as even more specific issues of curatorial expertise. Still, a shift is also in place to the extent that whilst on the one hand museums maintain their major role in producing and representing the nation, on the other in today’s global world they increasingly rely on a global narrative to do so. The global narrative, as we have seen, carries its own connotations and one risk of the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum is to overlook the economic context that remains a key factor in the current worldwide expansion of museums as well as exhibitions like biennials. This different perspective is the starting point of Thierry De Duve (2007), remarking how, when it comes to the recent and hyperbolic proliferation of art biennials around the globe, the reasons are to a great extent economic. Recognising that, however, should not be taken as an explanation, 189

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and therefore dismissal, of the aesthetic cosmopolitanism enabled within these cultural institutions that can be viewed as symptomatic of our times (Born 2010). In fact, De Duve’s important contribution is the claim that in those contexts we can glimpse ‘a cosmopolitanism that is not founded politically, but aesthetically, and on which it would be illegitimate to actually found the cosmopolitan state, because an actual aesthetic community extending to all would be a monster’ (De Duve 2007: 685). What is important in this remark is that aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and the empirical contexts in which it is most likely to find expression, are not to be assessed on their direct political or ethical effects. Accusations of false consciousness or naivety with respect to the conditions of inequality that make a full empirical realisation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism’s ideal unlikely miss precisely this point. De Duve develops this argument as a reprise of Kant’s normative ideal of sensus communis; here I find it more useful however to insist on that connection with the critique of culture industry that De Duve brushes aside very rapidly, as it is, once again, in its opposition to a certain instrumentality of culture (Yudice 2003) that this version of cosmopolitanism is defined – and also confined. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism’s negative connotations can indeed be better understood considering the underlying, long-standing distinction between the products of the culture industry, allegedly repetitive and passive, and ‘real’ culture, engaging and challenging. In a sense, and notwithstanding the contrary efforts of cultural studies to show popular culture as a site of resistance, the loss of the critical, emancipative function of aesthetic (high) culture is considered the price to be paid to dispose of the associated high cultural elitism, and thus a condition for the democratisation of culture (Jones 2007: 74). So aesthetic cosmopolitanism cannot avoid exuding connotations absorbed in the much longer history of the terms that compose it. What we end up addressing with this new expression is a reformulation of old dilemmas, such as the semantic tension within culture between aesthetic and non-aesthetic notions and the social implications of both for collective as well as individual identity. Addressing shifts in public culture and cultural citizenship, David Chaney has traced an older, ‘modernist’ association of cosmopolitanism with cultural manifestations, which allows us to see precisely how associations have changed over time. Here too the loss of an emancipatory, resistant character of culture is seen as a consequence of the post-modern breaking of barriers between high and low culture. How, when and if a shift from modern to post-modern has actually taken place and what its implications are in terms of forms of domination and opportunities of resistance and participation are notoriously contentious, the issues at stake are more widely recognised, and still debated. What is relevant here is that this well-rehearsed post-modernist narrative is qualified by a connection with cosmopolitanism: The consequence [of post-modernist cultural fragmentation] is usually felt to be that a space for a distinctive type of cultural opposition to the rationalization of social order in the interests of global capital has been removed. . . . When the challenge was effective it was often presented (or condemned) as cosmopolitanism. (Chaney 2002: 157) As we have seen, it is as if in becoming crystallised as the ‘opposite of global capital’, other connotations of ‘radical cosmopolitan imagination’ especially as expressed in its cultural, aesthetic version, do not develop. This is perhaps even clearer in the difficult entanglement of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, as Levitt’s research reminds us. Cosmopolitanism has been an uncomfortable but necessary part of the imagination of national cultures as reflected in the establishment of its major institutions, such as national museums and galleries. These have been one of the main forms of cultural 190

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institutionalisation of the nation-state, whilst at the same time laying claim to a universalistic culture for the purposes of foreign relationship and cultural diplomacy. This is the modern, national cum universal ‘exhibitionary complex’ of museums and world fairs that provided the cultural underpinning for the development of nation-states (Bennett 1988). Cosmopolitanism contributed to their high culture and international prestige, but they were also premised on the persistence of a localised popular culture. This configuration was precisely what was undermined by the development of new mass communication and entertainment as well as growing economic and political inter- or trans-nationalism. This explains the shifting connotation of cultural cosmopolitanism as increasingly coupled with consumerism and commercialisation. In terms of contemporary culture, Chaney’s conclusion is that whilst cosmopolitanism becomes naturalised and deprived of its controversial character, it has also flourished and has been legitimated, within institutions of public culture as well as within industries of private culture, gaining what it lost in critical edge by becoming a spectacular attraction (on the limits and promise of the ‘cosmopolitan museum’ from the point of view of an insider see Cuno 2011). Concerned fields are in particular those of cultural policy and museums (McGuigan 2004; Karp et al. 2006), as their institutions of reference have been mainly national and find themselves in a crisis of legitimation. If we consider in particular the modern and contemporary history of museums, as a result of the wider transformation of public culture, these cultural (national) institutions are being transformed in their core curatorial functions of collection, interpretation and preservation. Under the influence of globalisation theory and post-modern theories of culture, the trend in the new museology is to see museums in terms of experience and interpretation (rather than in an object-centred perspective), or what may be called a critical hermeneutical approach. The focus shifts to the multiple meanings of museum exhibits as a result of changing ideas about cultural rights, authenticity and cultural authority (Maronate 2005; Ballé 2002). At the end of the 20th century it still seemed that due to globalisation, decolonisation and multiculturalism, (national) museums were fading into dusty sites of nostalgia and away from the pressing issues of new forms of citizenship. However, museums in the 21st century are reinventing themselves, stressing their trans- and post-national aspects and boarding the train of the spectacularisation of culture, diversifying the possible range of ‘exhibits’ and exhibition strategies and operating increasingly by way of major exhibitions and events that are explicitly oriented to a (global) audience, problematising their traditional role as sites for rituals of citizenship (Kaplan 1994). By becoming increasingly audience oriented (as opposed to having mostly scholarly and archival purposes), museums and other cultural institutions converge with the modes of operation and rationale of an increasingly global culture industry, no longer addressing mainly the imagined anonymous citizen, but also the anonymous consumer. At the same time, the role and nature of the public has also become more central to museum practice in that it is no longer seen as homogeneous and passive, but plural, reflexive and active, further stressing the public or audience orientation of the new museums. Not only institution and industry, but also public and private, citizen and consumer blur: this brings about two connected and seemingly contradictory trends. On the one hand, it brings to the fore issues of cultural citizenship and, therefore, of the political implications of cultural choices, on the other hand however the real opportunities for participation and engagement through culture are often described to be shrinking. In this respect cultural forms typical of the contemporary global culture industries and institutions, the major festivals, blockbuster exhibitions, branded museums and their burgeoning global satellites, biennales and other cultural mega-events that have all grown exponentially in recent years (Roche 2000; Gardner and Green 2016) should, and in part are starting to command increasing attention within cosmopolitanism studies. Still, research on global culture and museums is, for instance, limited and apart from the occasional, often dismissive or sceptical passing remarks, 191

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rarely avails itself of recent cosmopolitan approaches, especially of the cultural and aesthetic variants. In museum theory and practice there exists a debate on the cosmopolitan or communitarian nature of heritage, whose rationale is however mainly to establish ownership rights and decide controversy over repatriation and in general the location of collections (Sylvester 2006: 46–9; see Chalcraft this volume). This, one can note, is geared towards the politico-ethical, and legal, side of cosmopolitanism studies.5 A more encompassing questioning of cultural production, display and consumption is inscribed in recent definitions of museums as sites of exchange or ‘contact zones’ (Clifford 1997) and ‘cultural connectors’ (Castells 2010), which have been taken up in studies of organised cultural display in particular. In one of the early thematisations of the broader significance of cultural globalisation for museums Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1997) has argued that several strategies seem to have been progressively introduced to allow for different voices to be represented, as required by these new multicultural conditions. He distinguishes pluralism, dialogue, self-representation, intercultural hybridity and reflexive representation as alternative display agendas. However, none is found to really solve the haunting issue of exhibiting power: elitism vs. democratisation and related issues of domination and empowerment. As is well put in an influential collection on Exhibiting Cultures (Karp and Levine 1991) cultural displays such as those found in museums but also temporary exhibitions and festivals are contested arenas for competing meanings, ‘settings in which different parties dispute both the control of exhibitions and assertions of identity made in and experienced through visual displays’ (Karp and Levine 1991: 279). At the same time, cultural display has a high potential for empowerment and an underlying question remains as to who exactly is empowered in given cases. Whilst specific modes and rationales of cultural display are important to empirically answer these questions, the general theoretical stance is to posit a dichotomic alternative, well synthesised recently by Tony Bennett: The more museums prioritize their role in relation to what might from one perspective be viewed as global public spheres, or from another as international tourist networks, the greater the risk that they might forget their civic obligations in relation to the spheres of local and national governance. (Bennett 2006: 65) When considering the neighbouring field and literature on festivals (Bennett et al. 2014; Waitt 2008), issues of elitism vs. populism, participation and consumption, authenticity and commercialism are also at the centre of public discourse.6 Still, festivals, and in particular contemporary, post-traditional festivals are more generally dismissed in cultural analysis. Most literature on contemporary festivals is very little attuned to the substantial literature on traditional festivals, developed in particular by anthropology and folklore studies, which conceives of festivals as organic expressions of so-called traditional societies and platforms for the representation and reproduction of their cultural repertoires, and, thus, identities. Contemporary festivals instead are mainly analysed within the so-called culture-led urban regeneration approach, aimed at defining and assessing their impact, especially in economic terms (Evans 2001; Quinn 2005; Richards and Wilson 2004). This has led to a rather dichotomised, or simplified debate, revolving around whether or not festivals have regeneration effects, whether or not they are sites of more open cultural politics, whether or not their association with tourism, industry and globalisation necessarily implies a loss of authenticity, specificity and identity – and ultimately of their social and cultural relevance. The relatively little attention social sciences dedicate specifically to contemporary festivals has thus mainly applied the wider thesis of cultural fragmentation recalled above, positing a similar direct proportional relationship between the growing professionalisation, commercialisation and basically popular success of festivals and their becoming both less critical 192

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and less significant in terms of their role within wider social life. Also their role in global public culture tends to be either overlooked or elicit dismissive comments about their ‘consumer cosmopolitanism’ (Amin 2004). In short, contemporary festivals are on the whole portrayed within a fundamental narrative of falling from grace with respect to their pre-modern (temporally or conceptually) counterparts. Or, taking the lead from the theory of the public sphere, festivals and other cultural expressions typical of our age are taken as an example of the shift from a critical and engaged ‘culture debating’ to a passive ‘culture consuming’ public sphere. Ultimately, this can be linked to master narratives of modernisation as secularisation and disenchantment, or even more critically, commoditisation and one-dimensionality. When this remains the implicit major premise, cultural analysis remains caught in the old dilemmas around cultural industry. However, this may be missing the point for contemporary, global, culture industries (and institutions). According to the global culture industry approach developed by Lash and Lury (2007), new conditions require new distinctions. With globalisation the culture industry develops a fundamentally different mode of operation. Culture is so ubiquitous that it, as it were, seeps out of the superstructure and comes to infiltrate, and then take over, the infrastructure itself . . . culture, which was previously a question of representation, becomes thingified. In classical culture industry – both in terms of domination and resistance – mediation was primarily by means of representation. In global culture industry instead is the mediation of things. (ibid.: 4) If this is so, even just as a trend, then also within cosmopolitanism studies agonising on issues of representation in cultural phenomena (as directly reflecting political representation) may be missing the point, whilst the distinction between cultural and political needs to be reframed too. If culture is no longer representational, then its objects do not only count instrumentally, for the effect they might have beyond culture, but in themselves. However, as we have seen in the way trends in cultural institutions and industry are theorised – through the key examples of museums and festivals – we still think of cosmopolitanism within a regime of representation (and rights), cultural and political. As such, rather than to try and come to terms with culture’s new modes of operation, where one of the signs of the global culture industry users’ active engagement is rather deciding what is culture for them, we tend to see the failures of subsequent modes of representation as a sign of wholesale decadence.

Conclusion: a cultural public sphere In an attempt to undo this rise and fall narrative, and to cut free from the limiting assumptions it harbours regarding aesthetic cosmopolitanism as detailed in the previous section, some authors have started proposing the idea of an aesthetic, or cultural, public sphere (McGuigan 2005; Jones 2007) by way of recuperating non-cognitive, and in particular, aesthetic and affective dimensions of the public sphere.7 Conceived of as ‘the routinely mediated aesthetic and emotional reflections on how we live and imagine the good life . . . the articulation of politics, public and personal, as a contested terrain through affective – aesthetic and emotional – modes of communication’ (McGuigan 2005: 435), the concept has also been applied to festivals as well as other cultural ‘objects’ in order to understand their specific role in contemporary public culture (Giorgi et al. 2011). Within a cultural public sphere perspective, the aesthetic cosmopolitanism found in these cultural manifestations need not be framed in an evaluative distinction with ethical cosmopolitanism that sees it as minor or missed form of cosmopolitics. Issues 193

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of cultural citizenship do not have to be brought to bear on cultural objects from outside; they are already there. However, as we have seen in connection with the global culture industry, they may have less to do with strategies of display and symbolic representation – key both in classical public sphere theory and, as we have seen, still pivotal in the analysis of cultural displays – and more with what may be called modes of sociability and their alternative critical potential (Costa 2002; Sassatelli 2011). Judged in terms of the ‘standard’ public sphere, the aesthetic cosmopolitanism discussed here appears inauthentic and inconsequential with no ‘real’ (read: political or ethical) purchase. Within a more inclusive – yet specific to contemporary cultural manifestations – cultural public sphere, it becomes possible to consider culture, or meaning, not in terms of purely cognitive, rational-argumentative communication, but also as the result of multifaceted sociable experience, where representation strategies are not the only indicator of empowerment. The idea of a simple, unilinear decadence of the public sphere then seems less tenable. Participation does not only take place through rational debate, but can notably find ways of critical engagement that are alternative not only in content but in form, such as aesthetic experience: to be able to address the specificity of the latter can be the value of the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. It is not only a matter of there being counter-publics or other forms of public sphere such as the plebeian one that Habermas conceded responding to critiques to his original public sphere theory (Calhoun 1992). Here the alternative is not extrinsic but intrinsic in the type of public sphere. It is an issue of a multidimensional approach in the very definition of what a public sphere is, of what, therefore, is worth considering an expression of it, and of what, descriptively or normatively, to expect of it. In a vast literature, and given the several qualifiers, ‘aesthetic’ or ‘cultural’ cosmopolitanism illuminates why cosmopolitanism in general is considered more as an ideal of rational development than as a lived expression. It exposes the persisting dismissal of that which is aesthetic or cultural in the sense of ‘beyond’ the cognitive and reason – because sensible experience (the etymological meaning of aesthetic) is so. Non-rational then is equated to ir-rational (much in the same way in which aesthetic as non-ethical becomes un-ethical), and thus detrimental to social organisation. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism exposes the fact that what is paid to cosmopolitanism in general is often just lip service: we celebrate it explicitly, but the way we theorise it makes it into a threat to social organisation if spread beyond the elite. The difficulties in coming to terms with aesthetic cosmopolitanism within global cultural industries and institutions shows that a descriptive or normative vision based on ‘cosmopolitanism of elite’ and ‘localism of local communities’ – Castells’s influential characterisation of globalisation – is paradoxical, not cosmopolitanism per se. Appadurai’s recent calls for attention to forms of ‘compulsory cosmopolitanism’ (see note 4) also call for a less confined and exclusionary definition. The limitations found in (empirical, descriptive) aesthetic cosmopolitanism are instead often then projected into the (normative) ethical or political. So the distinction is ultimately negative for the latter as well, foreclosing possibilities that are seen as paradoxical – or presupposing others that are seen as inevitable (such as the idea of an inevitable irreconcilability between cosmopolitan openness and rootedness, and thus fears of cultural loss, see Szerszynski and Urry 2002). It is only ‘[i]f we can overcome the sense that “the rooted cosmopolitan” is somehow a paradox, [that we] can get away from some of the doubts that theorists have nourished with regard to the viability of cosmopolitan politics’ (Hannerz 2005: 209). Such a shift presupposes wider changes in cultural and political theory: as those who are adept to take distance from ‘their’ culture and can cope with unpredictability the cosmopolitans are unpredictable themselves and at odds with conventional notions of culture as unquestioned and naturalised ‘ways of life’ and therefore as instrumental to the organisation of social life. A display of such ability to transcend cultural confines has long been seen as the prerogative of small intellectual elites, such as those avant-garde artists with which cosmopolitanism was first associated. They were at the same time, and contradictorily, reaffirming their status 194

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and challenging the status quo. This fragile equilibrium was bound to be shaken by globalisation and democratisation. Cosmopolitanism studies can contribute to interpreting the new emerging configuration: aesthetic and ethical components are usefully distinguished not if the distinction is used normatively, but if it serves the purpose of developing a better understanding of a contemporary cultural public sphere, with concepts more sensitive to its specific forms of participation, reflexivity and sociability.

Notes 1 Whether or not they consider them the most likely scenario, most authors agree on the distinction and main features of cultural homogenisation and culture clash as two possible opposite results of globalisation. Positions are more diversified as regard to number and type of other alternatives; one important difference being precisely the place of a cosmopolitan attitude. For example, to mention two authors moving in different fields, cultural historian Peter Burke sees four possible outcomes of cultural encounter: as well as the ‘standard’ cultural homogenisation and counter-globalisation, cultural diglossia and, drawing on Hannerz (1996), creolisation. Social theorist Gerard Delanty also proposes a fourfold scheme, overlapping for the first part but distinguishing for the last two hybridisation, where cultures borrow from each other and variously adapt, and cosmopolitanism, which extends hybridisation to include a normative dimension of critical deliberation and self-problematisation (Delanty 2011). 2 Cosmopolitanism can be seen as a form of what in the sociology of culture has been called ‘omnivorousness’ (Ollivier 2008): this time not only as cultural tastes that cross genres or ‘levels’ within ‘a’ culture but – as boundaries demarcating a culture from another are increasingly questioned – among different cultures. Not surprisingly cosmopolitans and omnivores tend to trigger the same fears; as the mixing of high and low can be seen as a threat to high culture, so the mixing of cultures is sometimes seen as a threat to cultural distinctiveness as such and to our capacity to deeply engage with it. 3 In some versions, such as in Bhabha’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ based on translating between cultures or ‘crossing over’ (Bhabha 2000) this type of cosmopolitanism is more positively connoted. Equally, Hannerz posits that cultural or aesthetic cosmopolitanism can be likened to cultural or ‘thick’ nationalism and as a counterbalance to it, it is more about affect than reason, not cold but warm, not thin, but thick (Hannerz 2005). However, authors that try to defend vernacular cosmopolitanism seem caught in a double bind – by the very act of intellectualising it they can then be accused of disingenuously speaking for and as if belonging to a vernacular that is not really one (Knowles 2007). 4 In his recent work Arjun Appadurai has been among those to try and compensate this exclusive focus on elite forms of cosmopolitanism, forcefully exploring both empirically and theoretically the consequences of including non-elite forms where, far from a naïve and optional aspiration, ‘the struggle to extend one’s cultural horizons, linguistically and otherwise, is non-optional. . . . The compulsory nature of cosmopolitanism for the urban poor also makes it a more reliable resource for the practices of deep democracy’ (Appadurai 2012: 211–12). 5 There is indeed a growing debate and literature over issues of international law, museums and cultural objects (Vrdoljak 2006), prompted by such phenomena as the World Heritage List of UNESCO, which explicitly embraces a cosmopolitan stance (Musitelli 2002). 6 The quoted Karp and Levine (1991) do consider this other mode of cultural display (mainly within the framework of traditional or folklore festivals) through a comparison with museums. Festivals carry a more democratic and non-judgemental participatory and sensory aesthetics than museums; the distinction between museums and festivals is seen as basically reproducing that between elite and popular culture: Elite culture tells a story of cultivation that has universal implications. . . . Festivals tell stories that deny or ignore the universalizing themes of elite culture, in that they often entail just those cultural experiences and groups that resist the universal. Universal stories lead to tidy events; particularizing stories do not allow their tellers to wrap them up into neat packages. (ibid.: 283–4)

Interestingly, today this characterisation of the difference between museums and festivals may be more effective as a way to appreciate the ongoing convergence. If cultural displays are indeed increasingly spectacularised or even ‘festivalised’, this prompts a questioning of consolidated distinctions, such as that between museums and festivals and their respective rationales and respresentation strategies. 195

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Increasingly also museums’ stories are far from tidy and universalising. It is precisely in their increasingly particularising and multiple narratives, as well as in their more overt marketing strategies to target visitors, that museums are becoming more similar to festivals – and a good example of the convergence of cultural institutions and industries. 7 The cultural public sphere, like aesthetic cosmopolitanism itself, is an attempt to re-enter previously dismissed (non-cognitive) dimensions. Recent years, as Papastergiadis shows in his contribution, referring to authors such as Castoriadis, Deleuze and Raunig, whom have had a strong impact on social theory, have definitely registered – as part of the wider cultural turn but also as a response to the more superficial aspects of it – a turn towards these dimensions. But this mainly occurs in the register of normative (political) philosophy; in empirical studies the tendency is to go back to the dismissive account (with some exceptions, such as Papastergiadis’s and McGuigan’s own empirical work; see for instance their contributions in Giorgi et al. 2011).

References Amin, A. (2004) ‘Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Space’, Geografiska Annaler, 86 B(1): 33–44. Appadurai, A. (2012) The Future as a Cultural Fact, London: Verso. Ballé, C. (2002) ‘Democratization and Institutional Change a Challenge for Modern Museums’, in D. Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds.), Global Culture Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, London: Routledge. Bennett, A., Taylor, J. and Woodward, I. (2014) The Festivalization of Culture, London: Routledge. Bennett, T. (1988) ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations, 1: 73–102. Bennett, T. (2006) ‘Exhibition, Difference and the Logic of Culture’, in I. Karp, C.A. Kratz, L. Szwaja and T. Ybarra-Frausto (eds.), Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, Durham and London: Duke. Born, G. (2010) ‘The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production’, Cultural Sociology, 4(2): 171–208. Calhoun, C. (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Calhoun, C. (2002) ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds.), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, M. (2010) ‘Museums in the Information Age’, in R. Parry (ed.), Museums in a Digital Age, London: Routledge. Chaney, D. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural Citizenship’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(1–2): 157–74. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Costa, X. (2002) ‘Festive Traditions in Modernity: The Public Sphere of the Festival of the “Fallas” in Valencia’, Sociological Review, 50(4): 482–504. Cuno, J. (2011) Museum Matters: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. De Duve, T. (2007) ‘The Glocal and the Singuniversal’, Third Text, 21(6): 681–8. Delanty, G. (2011) ‘Cultural Diversity, Democracy and the Prospects of Cosmopolitanism: A Theory of Cultural Encounters’, British Journal of Sociology, 62(4): 633–56. Evans, G. (2001) Cultural Planning: An Urban Renaissance, London: Routledge. Gardner, A. and Green, C. (2016) Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art, Oxford: Wiley. Giorgi, L., Sassatelli, M. and Delanty, G. (eds.) (2011) Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London: Routledge. Hannerz, U. (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, London: Routledge. Hannerz, U. (2005) ‘Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 3. Hebdige, D. (1990) ‘Fax to the Future’, Marxism Today, January: 18–23. Jones, P. (2007) ‘Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere’, Cultural Sociology, 1(1): 73–95. Kaplan, F.E.S. (ed.) (1994) Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity, London: Leicester University Press.Karp, I., Kratz, C.A., Szwaja, L. and Ybarra-Frausto, T. (eds.) (2006) Museum Frictions. Public Cultures/Global Transformations, Durham and London: Duke.

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Karp, I. and Levine, S.D. (eds.) (1991) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kendall, G., Skrbis, Z. and Woodward, I. (2009) The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Knowles, S. (2007) ‘Macrocosm-opolitanism? Gilroy, Appiah, and Bhabha: The Unsettling Generality of Cosmopolitan Ideas’, Postcolonial Text, 3(4). Lash, S. and Lury, C. (2007) Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Cambridge: Polity. Levitt, P. (2015) Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, Berkeley: University of California Press. Maronate, J. (2005) ‘Museums and the Constitution of Culture’, in M. Jacobs and N.W. Hanrahan (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity. McGuigan, J. (2004) Rethinking Cultural Policy, Maidenhead: Open University Press. McGuigan, J. (2005) ‘The Cultural Public Sphere’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4): 427–43. Musitelli, J. (2002) ‘World Heritage, between Universalism and Globalization: Reforming the World Heritage Convention’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 11(2): 323–36. Nash, K. (2006) ‘Political Culture, Ethical Cosmopolitanism, and Cosmopolitan Democracy’, Cultural Politics: An International Journal, 2(2): 193–211. Ollivier, M. (2008) ‘Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical, and Indifferent’, Poetics, 36(2–3): 120–47. Pieterse, J.N. (1997) ‘Multiculturalism and Museums: Discourse about Others in the Age of Globalization’, Theory, Culture and Society, 14(4): 123–46. Quinn, B. (2005) ‘Arts Festivals and the City’, Urban Studies, 42(5–6): 927–43. Regev, M. (2007) ‘Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(1): 123–38. Richards, G. and Wilson, J. (2004) ‘The Impact of Cultural Events on City Image: Rotterdam, Cultural Capital of Europe 2001’, Urban Studies, 41(10): 1931–51. Roberts, M. (2005) ‘Notes on the Global Underground: Subcultures and Globalization’, in K. Gelder (ed.), The Subcultures Reader, London: Sage. Roche, M. (2000) Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture, New York: Routledge. Sassatelli, M. (2009) Becoming Europeans: Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sassatelli, M. (2011) ‘Urban Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere: Cosmopolitanism Between Ethics and Aesthetics’, in L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty (eds.), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London: Routledge. Sylvester, C. (2009) Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It, New York: Paradigm Press. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Review, 50: 461–81. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar’, British Journal of Sociology, 57: 113–31. Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Urry, J. (1995) Consuming Places, London: Routledge. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (eds.) (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vrdoljak, A.F. (2006) International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waitt, G. (2008) ‘Urban Festivals: Geographies of Hype, Helplessness and Hope’, Geography Compass, 2(2): 513–37. Yudice, G. (2003) The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Durham: Duke University Press.

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17 Aesthetic cosmopolitanism Nikos Papastergiadis

Cosmopolitanism is the product of an idea of the world and an ideal form of global citizenship. Everyone who is committed to it recalls the phrase first used by Socrates and then adopted as a motif by the Cynics and the Stoics: “I am a citizen of the world”. Indeed the etymology of the word and its theory appear to be in wondrous symmetry. Throughout history cosmopolitanism has continuously surfaced as a concept that addresses the meaning of the subject at both the core of being and the widest spheres of belonging. It can be traced back to the mythological fascination with the abyss of the void and the infinite cosmos, as well as recurring in the philosophical debates about the relationship between individual freedom and universal rights. I will argue that the need to give form – to make a world – out of these extremities is a persistent feature of critical imagination and that its contemporary manifestations are more clearly grasped through the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. This general claim about aesthetic cosmopolitanism is grounded in the observation of the current tendencies to generate a dialogue between global issues and local experiences in contemporary art, and is subsequently developed through a reframing of the debates over the function of the imagination within aesthetics and politics. Theories of cosmopolitanism and approaches in studying cosmopolitan culture have been dominated by normative frameworks. Kant continues to serve as the key reference point, even as debates have moved to widen the institutional frameworks on governance (Held 1995; Beck 2006), address the vernacular expressions of culture (Werbner 2006; Bhabha 1996) and incorporate critical perspectives on immanent cosmopolitanism (Delanty 2009). Common to most of these theories is the assumption that a cosmopolitan outlook and value system is both a belated and civilizing influence that ‘tames’ the aggressive primary drives in human subjectivity and social formation. A closer understanding of the intersections between creative practice and critical imagination also reveals new lines of thinking on cosmopolitanism. It goes beyond normative claims on solidarity and ethical perspectives on inter-personal obligation. In order that we can unpack the folds between critical and creative imagination it is also vital that aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not reduced to a naïve form of cultural commodification, and a second order form of ethical duty. Culture, and the aesthetic domain in general, is not seen as either prefigured by moral outlooks, or determined by economic forces. As such, aesthetic cosmopolitanism offers an alternative lens to the normative cosmopolitanism that has pervaded dominant interactions with 198

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the concept; value is given to the imaginative and sensory experience of cosmopolitanism as producing care, compassion and curiosity, rather than being merely a means to mitigate a perceived human tendency towards destruction. In this sense, aesthetic cosmopolitanism coexists with, and even precedes, normative cosmopolitanism. For the Stoics this notion of being and belonging was expressed in a complex way – there was spiritual sense of inter-connectedness, and aesthetic interest in difference, as well as a sense of political equality and moral responsibility with all humanity. Since the Stoics the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of cosmopolitanism have been slowly disregarded. Roman Stoics like Tacitus and Seneca were the first to link the moral values of prudence, endurance and steadfastness with imperial governance. In the 16th century the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius put further stress on the stoic virtues of moderation, courage and toughness, as he defined the principles of good governance through the ethos of emotional self-restraint. Henceforth, the cosmopolitan vision of conviviality and justice was dependent on the moral fortitude of the leaders and a state system based on reason (Oestreich 1982). By the time Kant adopted cosmopolitanism as a key concept for thinking about global peace, the focus was almost entirely on de-provincializing the political imaginary and extolling the moral benefits of extending a notion of equal worth to all human beings. Since Kant the debates on cosmopolitanism have been even more tightly bound to the twin notions of moral obligations and the virtue of an open interest in others. In more prosaic terms, the concept of cosmopolitanism now serves as a catchphrase for expressing the ‘duty’ to live with all the other people in this world, and the moral challenge that humanity should rise up to (Appiah 2006). If we have to elevate ourselves in order to become cosmopolitan, then what is ordinary existence? And, from where does the original cosmopolitan vision of conviviality come? Is it the outcome of reasoned argument, or the perception that mutuality is an inherent human quality? Kant argued that reason delivers a cosmopolitan order through the progress of the historical narrative of civilization. I propose an alternative view that through the perpetual function of the imaginative world picture making ensures that aesthetics is always cosmopolitan. I obviously share the commitment towards securing the moral and political ideals of cosmopolitanism, but the emphasis on ethical duties and deliberative frameworks, and the attendant disregard for the aesthetic process has constrained both the scope of the ideal and obscured the signs of cosmopolitanism. In short, I will argue that the focus on the necessary moral stance of openness has failed to notice the concomitant forms of aesthetic interest. Cornelius Castoriadis claimed that the act of the imagination is the principle means for facing both the abyss of the being and the eternity of the cosmos (Castoriadis 1997a: 3). This act of facing is a big bang aesthetic moment, filled with horror and delight. Traces of this aesthetic encounter with the abyss of being and the infinity of the cosmos can be found in the everyday acts of curiosity, attraction and play. It is from this perspective that I will argue that the cosmopolitan images of conviviality arise not only from a moral imperative, but also from an aesthetic interest in others and difference. I will propose that the aesthetic dimension of the cosmopolitan imaginary can be reclaimed through a critical overview of the contemporary artistic practices in world making, and a reframing of the act of the imagination. Imagination – irrespective of the dimensions of the resulting form – is a world picture making process. Imagination is therefore a crucial starting point for cosmopolitanism. Hence, the appearance of cosmopolitan tendencies in contemporary art are not just cultural manifestations of globalization. These are the imaginings that combine an old universalism with a new kind of globalism. My interest in aesthetics is therefore not an attempt to announce the triumphant return of the repressed, but to demonstrate the need for re-thinking both the general role of the imagination in cosmopolitan visions of the world, and the specific visual practices that have emerged in the contemporary art scene. 199

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The concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism has been used to refer to the now normal cultural condition in which locally situated modes of cultural production and consumption are in dialogue with globally hegemonic forms (Regev 2007). My aim is not directed toward outlining the social forces that are defining this emergent cultural field, but rather to reflect on the imaginary constitution of cosmopolitanism through aesthetic practices. I should stress that aesthetic cosmopolitanism does not simply refer to the aesthetic representations of cosmopolitanism, but to a cosmopolitan worldview that is produced through aesthetics. Therefore the attention to contemporary artistic practices is not confined to either the visualization of cross-cultural interactions, or even the appearance of global processes in artistic practices, but is more concerned with the proposition that the process of world making is a radical act of the cosmopolitan imaginary. It is a sensory experience of production and reception. The theoretical underpinnings of the concept of cosmopolitanism can thus be retraced through the recent tendencies in artistic practices. The artist Liam Gillick has also claimed that since the ‘war on terror’, the earlier models for representing aesthetics and politics have been rendered obsolete. Much postmodern theory was based on how to understand a globalised environment of relativism, subjectivity and simulation. We are now facing a situation of specificity and desperate rationalisation in Iraq and elsewhere. Art became more and more diverse throughout the 20th Century. The Iraq war is an example of one of the many clarifications that may appear to render art more and more irrelevant. The US army has reconvened and prays to its God for strength. The factions in Iraq pray to theirs. Everywhere we see the routine obscenity. For artists, the combination of piety and pragmatism from politicians on all sides is not worth showing back to them. Documenting the increasing piles of body parts is pointless pornography. What artists can do is occasionally step outside of their normal practice and stand as citizens against the delusions of their leaders. This is an exceptional moment, where it is necessary for some to suspend their normal work in order to make a direct statement. In this context, the ICA exhibition is not an answer, it is a melancholic and sullen response. The idea of creating a memorial to something that is still taking place is an honest concession. It is no good looking back to some earlier moment of apparent cultural consensus. We have to look instead towards art as a carrier of differences and a perfect form for the revelation of paradox. (Gillick 2007) With all seriousness Gillick has compared the effect of his art to “the light in the fridge door, it only works when there are people there to open the fridge door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else – stuff in a room” (Gillick 2000: 16). The influential political theorist Chantal Mouffe also endorsed Gillick’s view that the radicality of art was found not in the clean break with all institutional relations, but in the disarticulation of conventional discourses and practices that uphold existing authority. This artistic process of public participation is, according to Mouffe, analogous to her own effort to define an agonistic framework that facilitates the interaction and exchange of different perspectives (Mouffe 2009: 94). This conjunction between aesthetic practices and political theory points towards a growing discursive convergence of horizons between art and politics. In broad terms I will map out five artistic themes and tendencies that are expressive of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism – a cultural phenomenon that is borne from a productive tension between globally oriented networks and locally grounded practices. I will outline the emergence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism by tracing the rise of interest in the issues of denationalization, reflexive hospitality, cultural translation, discursivity and the global public sphere in contemporary art. 200

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Five tendencies in aesthetic cosmopolitanism For Marcel Duchamp leaving home was a de-nationalizing act of disentangling himself from the feeling of being rooted in one place. From this seminal figure in the history of modernism we can witness a cosmopolitan tendency that starts from a process of subtraction. The self-defined cosmopolitans of early modernity, such as the avant garde artists and revolutionary intellectuals, often spoke of belonging nowhere. They eschewed any fixed or authentic attachment to their origins and adopted a perspective that Amit Chaudhuri calls “worldview as angularity” (Chaudhuri 2008: 96). This persistent exilic tendency is now complemented by a form of artistic practice in which the spaces and protocol for receiving the work of art assumes a kind of reflexive hospitality. According to Daniel Birnbaum the understanding of alterity and the principle of hospitality amounts to an epistemic revolution. For instance, in Olafur Eliasson’s artworks, Birnbaum observes the construction of a scenario in which the viewer is not only aware of the process by which he or she sees the work, but he also notes that “a kind of inversion takes place – you are seen by the work” (Birnbaum 2008: xii). By adopting an active role in shaping the whole environment, the viewer’s subjectivity is in turn shaped by the experience of giving in to it. This shift in perspective towards the object of the artwork, and the heightened attitude towards the consciousness of the viewer in the artwork, also amounts to a re-distribution of agency. It stimulates a relationship of co-production. The viewer is no a longer passive and detached observer. Given the vigorous interplay between subject and object, and the fundamental role of alterity in defining the intentionality of the viewer and the form of the artwork, this tendency recasts the relationship between self and other as a form of reflexive hospitality. A more explicit articulation of this tendency can be found in the numerous artistic collectives such as, “No One Is Illegal” and “Fadait Temporary No-Border Media Laboratories”. These collectives aim to create a ‘mirror space’ that reflects back the transnational movements of people and stimulates the coming into being of community that is based on universal human rights. The proliferation of non-Western artists within the institutions of contemporary art has also prompted critical attention towards the process of cultural translation. For many critics when faced with the sheer volume and diversity of art that now appears in Biennales, there is the instant reaction of horror – how to judge the merits of so many different works, what model can address both the cultural specificity of the artwork’s context and elucidate the capacity of art to transcend cultural differences? This cross-cultural challenge is neatly outlined by the Iranian-born but USbased artist Shirin Neshat. At one moment I am dealing with Iranians who know the sources of my material, and then I am dealing with an audience who has not a clue. To me they both have their advantages and disadvantages. With Iranians, I can never fulfil their expectations because I am outsider; with foreigners I can never fulfil their expectations because I am Iranian and they are Westerners. And I can never really break down the cultural context of the work. (Neshat 2007: 724) This neat separation between Iranians and foreigners obscures one crucial fact: Neshat’s work is speaking to a new constituency – composed of Iranians and foreigners who know what it means to be outside of a culture but still attached to it, or what Naoki Sakai calls a “non-aggregate community” (Sakai 1997: 7). Obviously not everything becomes clear to a foreigner, but the artist – as a virtual cosmopolitan – embarks on the process of translating between the global and the local, without the foreknowledge of a known addressee (Mitter and Mercer 2005: 38). 201

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The themes of hospitality and the challenge of cross-cultural communication were also formative processes in the tendency that Bruce Ferguson defined as the “discursive turn” (Ferguson and Hoegsberg 2010: 360–77). Ferguson was referring to artistic projects like Gillick’s that were organized as modest participatory events. While modest in form they also confronted some grand thematic issues and pursued overarching objectives such as examining the gaps between the processes of modernization and the cultures of modernism, exposing the shortcomings in modernity, challenging the commodification of culture, and encouraging new forms of communal activity. This discursive turn was also evident in curatorial practice. Curators such as Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Maria Lind, Charles Esche, Claire Doherty, Nick Tsoutas, Vasif Kortum, Nina Montmann, Gerardo Mosquera, and the curatorial team that work under the name Who, What, How redefined the function of institutional art venues as spaces of encounter, and adopted a method of representation that was sensitive to the spirit that Manray Hsu described as “decentralizing cosmopolitanism” (Hsu 2005: 76). The discursive turn in artistic and curatorial practice, with its wild embrace of hybrid identities, and its committed efforts to hijack capital, was also aligned with a desire to build a new global public sphere. At present it is impossible to ground this desire within a concrete site. The global public sphere has no territorial location, it lacks any administrative entity, and there is not even a coherent community that would claim ownership over the idea. Within the conventional geo-political categories the global public sphere does not exist. And yet, within the rustling republic of texts and images that circulate in the net, in the weak gatherings of people from across the world at events such as Art Biennales and Social Fora, there is, as Immanuel Wallerstein claims, the beginnings of a cultural and political imaginary that is moving away from an absolutist and nationalist ideology on cultural identity (Wallerstein 2003). The Retort collective also found inspiration from the unanticipated: appearance on the world stage as something like a digital ‘multitude’, a worldwide virtual community, assembled (partly in the short term over the months of warmongering, and partly over the preceding decade, as various new patterns of resistance took advantage of cyberspace) in the interstices of the Net; and that some of the intensity of the moment derived from the experience of seeing – of hearing, feeling, facing up to – an image of refusal become a reality. (Retort 2006: 4) The Retort collective is right to stress that the visuality of the conduct of this war on terror, that is, the global witnessing of its mode of representation was crucial in provoking a global protest. However, just as crucial is the cascading effect of witnessing the formation of a global resistance. It is in the interplay of these two processes that they also claim a “premonition of a politics to come”. This vague definition of the locations, form, constituency and dynamics of this new politics is echoed further on in their text when they claim that: “something is shifting in the technics and tactics of resistance” (Retort 2006: 12). These new alliances are by nature fragmentary, ephemeral and loose, often operating beyond, or on the margins of institutions, and in opposition to formal structures. These flashes of creative resistance do not offer simple or even unified solutions. On the contrary, they often take us deeper into the messy complexity of everyday life. They also remind us of a fundamental principle that these days seems to have been pushed to the side of political discourse – that is when people, whose worldview is formed in different civilizations, encounter each other, they do not necessarily erupt into a violent clash, but can also utilize their respective intelligence to understand each other and create a dialogue about what is possible and necessary. Put more simply, this aesthetic experience of encounter 202

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produces a curiosity, compassion, and care that counters the top-down narrative of normative cosmopolitanism. I am not so naïve as to rest my case on such faint claims about the potentialities that occur within transitory gatherings. Neither am I so cynical as to assert that art and activism is incapable of making any difference. Between these two extreme points is the more demanding task of teasing out emergent forms and probing the shape of reconfigured structures. Art materializes thought in all its contradictions. It does not always make the meaning of things more clear. At times, it just comes out the way things are being lived, with anachronisms still glowing and anticipations not yet reached. If the “global public sphere”, as Okwui Enwezor suggests, has become both the destination of art and the focal point for shaping the politics of human life, then the challenge is to represent the relationship between art and politics within a cosmopolitan framework (Enwezor 2004: 14).

Art and politics through a cosmopolitan frame What sort of knowledge of the world does art furnish? The discourse of aesthetics has, in broad terms, proposed that art is the free play of the mental faculties. It is capable of giving form to sensation, impression and intuitions without a conceptual order that is yoked to the logic of either instrumental function or reasoned benefit. Art represents the capacity of human imagination to conceive possibilities that have no necessary objective purpose and, as Kant argued, it can appear in an almost disinterested state of apprehension. However, for all its appreciation of art’s creative force, the discourse of aesthetics has generally viewed the knowledge of art with suspicion. Philosophers acknowledge that art can constitute its own subjective world, but they tend to argue that truth does not reside in art. This fundamental distinction between art’s ability to constitute its own image of the world, and the role of reason to deliver the truth of the world, has vexed all the debates on aesthetics and politics. My concern with this distinction is not guided by a desire to assert the priority of aesthetics, or to wrestle with the superiority of reason’s access to truth, but rather to highlight the knowledge of art as a world making activity in order to recast the debates on aesthetics and politics through a cosmopolitan frame. Putting aside the recent flutter of hope that neuroscience can provide a new psychologism to explain the mystery of creativity, the dominant trend in the discourse of aesthetics continues to persist along two broad trajectories. One side stresses the primacy of formalist concerns, and the other emphasizes the structural significance of social and political forces such as race, class, gender and power. This division is rarely articulated in absolute terms. For instance, while Liam Gillick openly acknowledges the influence of political theory, his critics would nevertheless assert, in a somewhat anxious tone, that he also remains “judiciously peripheral” to the critical discourses that intersect with his practice (Szewczyk 2009: 29). This uncertainty over the divide between aesthetics and politics can be traced from Victor Burgin’s examination of the “unbroken thread” in art historical treatises in which he identifies a recurring correlation between the social value of art and non-aesthetic qualities such as spiritual sensitivity or political commitment (Burgin 1986), to T.J. Clark’s promotion of the model that art becomes revolutionary through its ideological critique of the everyday (Clark 1982), and even in Arthur C. Danto’s exploration of the triple transformation of art in its transfiguration of the ordinary (Danto 1992). Throughout these diverse accounts there is a common argument that art acquires an elevated status – it becomes revolutionary – as it is embedded within the social or propelled by external political forces. These approaches were well suited to the task of explaining the discursive affiliations, unpicking the political premonitions in the medium of art, and demonstrating the formal services of art in social transformation. However, I will depart from these art historical 203

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approaches because they place the aesthetic knowledge of the world in a kind of limbo. At best, the artistic imagination is perceived as occupying a space of speculative detachment that is separated from the activity that produces social change, and in the worst cases the function of the artwork is reduced to “a mute form of political economy” (Lutticken 2009: 93). My aim is distinct from the view that either upholds art as a mercurial entity that eludes the grasp of theory, or condemns art to a position of ‘complicit alongsidedness’ with the dominant social forces. Of course, there is no shortage of examples in which art has been co-opted to either decorate a corporatist agenda or promote activist propaganda. Art does not exist in a pure space outside the messy complicities of institutional objectives and economic imperatives. However, the recent tendencies in art also point towards a different mode of engagement with the processes of social transformation, and in these instances the medium of art is not confined to a fixed object. This mode of political engagement and the current play with non-material media compels a reconfiguration of the relationship between art and politics. Although artists are forever denying that they are part of something that is recognized and defined by others, artistic practice is now increasingly tending to be defined as a medium for constituting ‘the social’ in contemporary society. In particular, I will argue that the five emergent artistic tendencies require a new cosmopolitan conceptual framework. This framework would depart from the traditional approaches that focussed on the capacity of an artwork to either formally embody, or pictorially represent the social changes that society is yet to recognize (Gillick 2010). Given the politicization of contemporary visual practice, and the aestheticization of contemporary politics, the discourse of aesthetics cannot be confined to the contemplation of an artistic object. Aesthetics is now propelled into the ambient field of image production and circulation. The ubiquity of images and the enhanced capacity of public participation has not only disrupted the conventional categories for defining the agency of the artist, and opened up the meaning of collective authorship, but it also underscores the necessity to re-think the function of the imagination as a world making process. Arjun Appadurai stated it most succinctly: “the imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only escape” (Appadurai 1996: 7). By drawing together insights from the recent work of Jacques Rancière and Gerald Raunig I will argue that it is possible to move beyond the dead-ends that appeared whenever the relationship between art and politics was defined as either the pictorial representation of political messages, or even the political inspiration that is drawn from art. The concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism overcomes this impasse as it addresses the transformation that occurs through the interplay between the creative imagination and inter-subjective relations. Against the grain of the art-historical attention towards the emergence of the objective forms of art, and its placement within a regional cultural context, I will argue that the current tendencies in art, as well as the role of the image in the ambient spectacle of war, are begging for a different perspective on the significance of place and the flow of ideas. Such a critical methodology would not only go beyond the Eurocentric foundations of art history by acknowledging the diverse contributions to contemporary global culture, but it would also develop new theoretical approaches to the relations between different cultural and geographic fields, as well as re-evaluate the function of both individual and collective imagination in contemporary knowledge production. This approach is not only focussed on the re-distribution of agency in the production of meaning and event, but also concerned with tracing the participant’s capacity to imagine their place in the world as a whole. This cosmopolitan frame thereby serves as my standpoint for reviewing two of the key figures in the recent debates on aesthetics and politics. Rancière has stated that the aim of his book The Politics of Aesthetics had been to challenge the long history of aesthetics that repeats a stigmatic hierarchy between the image and truth, and thereby create some “breathing space” – an intermediary zone that enables an affirmative 204

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engagement with the way art can modify the realm of the “visible, sayable and possible” (Rancière 2007a: 259). Rancière’s approach is a break with contemporary theorists and artists such as Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu, who he claims repeat the “Platonic disparagement of the mimetic image” (Rancière 2007b: 274), as they repeatedly set up visuality, spectacle and spectatorship as the source of deception, superficiality and alienation. He utterly rejects the assumption that the image invariably imposes an ideological distance between reality and interpretation, and that the subject, by being trapped in the abyss of images, is separated from the essence of his or her real humanity. Rancière also disputes the radicality of formalist innovations that are aimed at empowering the viewer to decode or embody the artwork’s intended political message, because they reinscribe the presumption that the primary position of the audience is passivity. This rejection of the negative relationship to the image parallels a shift in contemporary artistic practice. Since the 1970s it was commonplace to observe artistic projects that sought to ‘awaken the public imagination’ by either including public participation, or incorporating critical theory into the framework of the art project. The aim of these projects tended to be defined in terms of revealing or demystifying the machinations of dominant power structures. The aesthetics of resistance in contemporary art assumes a different stance towards public participation, aesthetic form and political theory. A critical stance is not defined by simply claiming to be standing outside or against power, but also in finding ways to rework the meaning and form of power by collaborating with the public. The point of art is not the exposure of the truth, but the creation of public situations for re-imagining reality. Rancière’s contribution to the debates on aesthetics and politics has, in part, come through his engagement with contemporary artists, but its roots lie in his historical investigation into the emergence of “the aesthetic regime in the arts”. He claims that this regime commenced in the late 19th century when visual and literary techniques were invented to juxtapose and relate the visible with the invisible (Rancière 2007c: 5). From his analysis of the new visual techniques such as fragmentation and montage, Rancière outlined three basic modes of visual representation. Naked images that serve as a depiction of the original. Ostensive images that transform themselves as they react again the original referent. Metaphoric images that play on the “ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances” (Rancèire 2007c: 24–5). It is the capacity of metaphoric images to go beyond mere reflection and mystification, and their potential to reconfigure the possible that leads Rancière to assert that the status of the image is not a mask that hides truth, or a foil that can displace our grasp on reality, but the “supplement that divides it” (Rancière 2004b: 224). Having identified the productive force of the image Rancière also set out to challenge the conventional theories of aesthetics. For Rancière, aesthetics refers not only to a discipline for either appreciating the formal properties of a given artistic object, or articulating the affect that comes from an encounter with art, but rather it is the discourse through which artistic practices, sensible affects and thought are constituted through mutual inter-dependence. His aim is not to separate art and politics, which would presuppose that they can be discerned in isolation of each other and then placed in a proper hierarchy, but rather to investigate the knot that entangles art with affects and meaning. Firstly, he claims that art only exists insofar as there is a specific mode of appreciation. This training of the gaze is not the problem that is in need of being cleared away, but rather the necessary starting point for the constitution of art. Second, aesthetics is not just the discipline that trains ‘the good eye’ – for distinguishing between the worthiness of the subject and spotting the reconfiguration of forms, but rather it is the discourse for the identification of art. Hence, it is the means by which art is made intelligible. Third, the complaint that aesthetic theory fails to grasp the ineffable mystery of art is, he argues, a contest for sovereignty over the forms of representation and the faculties of reception (Rancière 2009: 14). 205

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At the centre of Rancière’s theory of the image and aesthetics is the key concept “distribution of the sensible”. The distribution of the sensible refers to the symbolic and social transformation that arises from the active involvement of people who are normally excluded from the process of defining the rules of everyday, and their ability to create new terms of perception and interaction. Hence, Rancière defines the process of transformation through the interplay between the rise of new subjects and the emergence of new forms of knowledge. By giving primacy to the distribution of the sensible Rancière stresses that aesthetics and politics are two forms of an underlying imaginary process (Rancière 2009: 26). By foregrounding the imaginary function in the distribution of the sensible Rancière overcomes the false hierarchy that separates art from politics. He proposes that both are formed within their independent “regimes of identification”. Aesthetics and politics are different ways, distinctive discourses, unique modes of addressing the task of the distribution of the sensible. While they operate within their own system they do not exist in separate realities. They share a common space and both have their respective capacity to suspend the normal coordinates of sensory experience and imagine new forms of life. In short, aesthetics is engaged in the distribution of the sensible as it invents specific forms that link the realm of individual affect to a social way of being. Hence the intervention of aesthetics is always political because the “principle behind an art’s formal revolution is at the same time the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience” (Rancière 2004a: 17). However, while the principle of the distribution of the sensible underpins both aesthetics and politics, Rancière goes one step further as he claims that the aesthetic regime precedes the political (Rancière 2004a: 34). By stressing that the “real must be fictionalised in order to be thought”, Rancière lays claim to aesthetics as a regime of thought that can challenge the established order of politics. While Rancière’s work challenges both the negative ideology of the image, it has thus far remained as a philosophical reflection on aesthetics. A more radical conceptualization of aesthetics can be found in the recent work of Gerald Raunig who claims that philosophical reflection needs to be combined with active engagement and commentary from the sites of emergent social transformations (Raunig 2007). Raunig shares Rancière’s view that the politics of art is not found in the depiction of political struggles. Like Rancière, Raunig also rejects the modernist claim of aesthetic autonomy and argues that, while art is not subordinate to politics, they are both discrete fields that rest on the same terrain. Rancière’s work begins from a crucial disagreement with the Althusserian circles and gained his distinctive perspective as he distanced himself from what he called the “extravagant topology” of the politicized French intellectuals (Rancière 2004b: 76). Raunig’s engagement with art and politics also emerges from a struggle against the academicist discourses of the old left, and sees himself as being part of a “broad assembly of artistic platforms of resistance” (Raunig 2002). Raunig’s response to the contemporary condition of precarity and his fascination with the cross-over between artistic and activist communication techniques is, in my view, framed by a new kind of cosmopolitan agenda. For instance, he repeatedly celebrates the way that the antiglobalization movement and new artistic collectives have sought to re-route information flows and widen the legal and political frameworks from a state centric perspective of citizenship, to the articulation of a political agenda that “explodes the national framework, as it were, from the inside” (Raunig 2002). Raunig argues that the radical function of art is not confined to the articulation of differences in the perceptual sensorium, but also evident in the mobilization of differences in social encounters. Raunig’s approach towards representing the inter-subjective experience and his analysis of the transversal organization of artistic collectives goes beyond the conventional approaches of art history and philosophy. This perspective shifts the meaning of political context from a mere background that the artist may draw from, to the notion of the field through which the artist 206

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is constantly passing. The focus upon politics is no longer on whether but how the artist passes through politics. It is an approach that highlights the dynamics of flow not just as an intervention from aesthetics to politics, but as a perpetual oscillation between the two fields. Raunig’s conception of flow draws on two Deleuzian terms: concatenation and transversality. Concatenation refers to sequential practices of fluid movements between each field that occur for limited durations and result in the creation of temporary alliances. Transversality is an a-centric geometric concept that refers to the movement that occurs across the time–space continuum. Movement is normally thought of as a linear passage from one point to another. Change is thereby defined by delineating the difference in an entity between the departure from one point and its arrival at another. This perspective tends to stress the negative or positive impact of an external force, and overlooks the dynamic agency of the entity in motion. Transversality provides an alternative perspective on the transformation that occurs in the time and space of movement. An apposite definition of transversal activism can also be found in the motto of Viennese Volxtheater Favoriten: “living revolutionary subjectivity in the here and now instead of saving up wishes for changes in the party funds – for the some fine day of the revolution” (Raunig 2007: 206). He notes that these collectives, like the autonomous movement in general, sought to invent new networks of social organization. However, Raunig also conceded that transversal activism “required a great deal of energy, incited many conflicts and could only be maintained by most actors for a certain period of time” (Raunig 2007: 218). A striking feature of Raunig’s approach is not only the combination of philosophical reflection with participant observation, but also the adoption of an evaluative standpoint that recognizes ephemerality and intensity as a virtue. Raunig has relinquished the effort to create a model of transversal activism that can serve as a master plan for the future. Through his account of the intense and short moments of critical encounter he gives an insight into the shuttling exchange between aesthetic and political activities. In short, this reflexive method has the distinctive benefits of attending to the persisting tension between utopian ideals and precarious realities, and thereby offers a new framework through which we can view the cosmopolitan dialogues in contemporary art.

Outline of a cosmopolitan imaginary These recent approaches to the vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics take us some of the way towards understanding the significance of the emergent tendencies in contemporary art. Rancière highlights the role of aesthetics in producing a supplement to existing modes of perception and meaning. Raunig takes us further into the transversal relations between aesthetic representation and political organization. Through these accounts we gain insight into the ways artistic practices are producing knowledge in the world, rather than simply reflecting other forms of knowledge of the world. This crucial distinction prompts further reflection on the function of creative imagination and the use of cosmopolitanism as a framework for contemporary artistic practice. According to Richard Kearney the theories of the imagination have been dominated by three metaphors that respectively highlight the mimetic/reflective function, as if it were a mirror that reflects another reality; the generative/creative process, such as a lamp that produces its own light and heat; and the parodic/refractive state, that can be compared to a labyrinth or looking glasses in which the object unfolds in infinite variations (Kearney 1988). In my view imagination is the faculty for both representing and creating realities through the form of images, and the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art could be defined as an aesthetic of openness that engenders a global sense of inter-connectedness. As already noted, this cosmopolitan imagination is neither grounded within a territorial claim, nor directed by institutional parameters, but 207

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is an emergent concept that can generate an alternative sense of being in the world and intersubjective relations. Art historians like David Summers have conceded that the conventional approaches based on either a visual analysis of the formal resemblances between the artworks, or the historiography of artist’s place of origin are inadequate tools for addressing both the cosmopolitan dialogues in art, and the capacity of art to be a medium for “the first impulses in which the world is ‘formed’ and made into a characteristic unity” (Summers 2003: 33). Mark Cheetham has also turned to the ancient and contemporary discourse of cosmopolitanism in order to renew and extend the disciplinary models of art history. While sceptical of the “lazy cosmopolitan” appellations that adorn art criticism and artistic self-proclamations, Cheetham has acknowledged that there is a need to find the “connective tissues that enable artists to be properly placed and appropriately mobile”. However, he also questions the very foundation of the art historical discipline by concluding that the cosmopolitan visions in contemporary art will not be properly conceptualized via the “strictures of Kantian reason” (Cheetham 2009). A sign of the new directions in art history can also be witnessed in Marsha Meskimmon’s attempt to track the ways artists engage “with the processes and practices of inhabiting a global world”, and participate “in a critical dialogue between ethical responsibility, locational identity and cosmopolitan imagination” (Meskimmon 2011: 5). This focus on the engagement with global mobilities and participation in the invention of new forms of ‘being at home in the world’, not only radically expands the contextual framework, but also shifts the attention away from merely decoding what art represents, to also testing the creation of new modes of social interaction. Art is thus not just a reflection of the process of cosmopolitanization but also an active partner in articulation of cosmopolitan ethical agency and spatial habituation. Hence, the cosmopolitan imaginary is, in Summers’s account, materialized through the artistic invention of real forms that are inseparable from habitual activities, whereas for Meskimmon, it is found in the embodiment of a multi-centred cultural vision and the adoption of ethical modes of global citizenship. Meskimmon’s account is of particular interest because, like Raunig, she is not concerned with the representation of art as a static exemplification of moral virtue, but rather her focus is directed towards active situations in which the artist and the viewer are mutually entangled in a “transitive economy”. The moral and aesthetic function of art emerges from the journey undertaken by participants. Through this transformative relationship between images, objects and ideas, both the artwork and the viewer are changed as “the participants complete the thought, undertake a passage, as they become part of the transitive economy” (Meskimmon 2011: 63). The zone within which the creative imagination and social habituation occur is the imaginary. Cornelius Castoriadis defined the imaginary as a fluid space that accommodates both the inner images of the world and the social practices for living in the world. Although Castoriadis never spoke directly to the concept of cosmopolitanism, on numerous occasions he linked the act of creativity with the capacity to grasp universality. It is through creativity that being is given form, otherwise existence is an “abyss, chaos, groundless” (Castoriadis 1997a: 3). For Castoriadis all the social institutions of our daily life can only exist insofar as they have been imagined. However, while social institutions furnish a worldview that enables the individual to deal with the flux of life, it also tends to produce a sense of belonging that is experienced through the feeling of enclosure and exclusivity rather than an exposure to the world at large. Hence, while Castoriadis argued that social institutions are viable only insofar as people find them symbolically meaningful and are willing to identify with them, he also noted that institutional closures blocked the individual’s freedom to question the limits of existing structures, engage with strangers, and develop a genuine interest in the ideas that are formed in one culture but are also expressive of a “potential universality in whatever is human for humans” (Castoriadis 1997b: 270). Paradoxically, 208

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it is imagination that makes and breaks the limits of social institutions. However, by placing the grip of universality inside the hand of the creative imagination Castoriadis flies against the grain of Western metaphysics. Imagination is not just a speculative mechanism for producing opinion and fantasy. For Castoriadis imagination is the primary means for inventing social ideals, (Castoriadis 1997b: 379) and it is through the “unceasing and essentially undetermined” function of the imaginary that rationality and reality is delivered (Castoriadis 1997c: 3). Whether it has been defined in terms of perceptual modification or social transformation the function of the imagination has been at the core of the debates on aesthetics and politics. By contrast the role of the creative imagination has not been the focus of the recent sociological and political debates on cosmopolitanism (Delanty 2009). As Étienne Balibar has observed, much of the theoretical discussion on cosmopolitanism has proceeded within a deliberative paradigm that stressed the role of reasoned argumentation in the delivery of a new transnational public sphere (Balibar 2007). The absence or marginalization of the aesthetic function from the debates on cosmopolitanism reinscribes the stigmatic chain of association that separates the ordered, consistent and steadfast truth of reason from the faulty, fleeting and flighty genius of imagination. This gap is not corrected by acknowledging the visceral aspects of cosmopolitanism, but requires a conceptual framework that links the creative and sensory imaginary to the cosmopolitan visions of the world. To assume our original condition of human relations is territorial and that we are inherently violent overlooks human affinity for an aesthetic encounter with the world that is constructive rather than destructive. It is in this sense that our perception of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism framework demands expansion to incorporate more than the formalist perspective that sees cosmopolitanism as a necessary salve aiding social and political stability. By invoking the creative and sensory imaginary, such a framework acknowledges that our ability to produce and interpret cultural artistic manifestations relies on compassion, curiosity and care as much as the normative social affects that inform how humans relate to one another and their world.

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, K. (2006) Cosmopolitanism, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Balibar, É. (2007) On Universalism in Debate with Alain Badiou, translated by Mary O’Neill. http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0607/balibar/en (accessed March 2009). Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bhabha, H. (1996) ‘Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in Garcia-Morean, L. and Pfiefe, R.P. (eds.), Text and Nation, London: Camden House, pp 191–207. Birnbaum, D. (2008) The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl’s Phenomenology, New York: Sternberg Press. Burgin, V. (1986) The End of Art Theory, London: MacMillan. Castoriadis, C. (1997a) World in Fragments, edited and translated by David A. Curtis, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997b) The Castoriadis Reader, translated by David Ames Curtis, Oxford: Blackwell. Castoriadis, C. (1997c) The Imaginary Institution of Society, translated by Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: Polity Press. Chaudhuri, A. (2000) ‘Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face’, New Left Review, 55(Jan–Feb) pp 75–84. Cheetham, M. (2009) ‘Theory reception: Panofsky, Kant, and disciplinary cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Art Historiography, 1, Page/record No.: 1-KJ/3. www.doaj.org/doaj?func=openurl&genre=journal&issn=2 0424752&volume=1&issue=&date=2009 (accessed December 2010). Clark, T. (1982) Image of the People, Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Danto, A. (1992) Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post Historical Perspective, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 209

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Enwezor, O. (2004) ‘Documentary/Verite: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 4/5(1): 11–42. Ferguson, B. and Hoegsberg, M. (2010) ‘Talking and Thinking about Biennials: The Potential of Discursivity’, in Filipovic, E., Van Hal, M. and Ovstebo, S. (eds.), The Biennial Reader, Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall & Hatje Cantz. Gillick, L. (2000) Renovation Filter: Recent Past and Near Future, Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery Publications. Gillick, L. (2007) www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/may/22/isthereanythingforarttosay (accessed March 10 2009). Gillick, L. (2010) Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place. http://e-flux.com/jour nal/view/192 (accessed 20 December 2010). Held, D. (1995) Democracy and Global Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hsu, M. (2005) ‘Networked Cosmopolitanism on Cultural Exchange and International Exhibitions’, in Tsoutas, N. (ed.), Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange: Remapping Cultural Globalism from the South, Sydney: Artspace. Kearney, R. (1988) The Wake of the Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lutticken, S. (2009) Idols of the Market, New York: Sternberg Press. Meskimmon, M. (2011) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, London: Routledge. Mitter, P. and Mercer, K. (2005) ‘Reflections on Modern Art and National Identity in Colonial India’, in Mercer, K. (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernism, London: INIVA & MIT Press. Mouffe, C. (2009) ‘Politics and Artistic Practices in Post-Utopian Times’, in Szewczyk, M. (ed.), Meaning Liam Gillick, London: MIT Press. Neshat, S. quoted in Chin Tao Wu. (2007) ‘Worlds Apart: Problems of Interpreting Globalized Art’, Third Text, 21(6): 719–31. Oestreich, G. (1982) Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, edited by B. Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, translated by D. Mclintock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, J. (2004a) The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (2004b) The Philosopher and His Poor, translated by John Duru, Durham: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2007a) ‘Art of the Possible’, Artforum, XLV(7). Rancière, J. (2007b) ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Artforum, XlV(7). Rancière, J. (2007c) The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliott, London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents, translated by Steven Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity Books. Raunig, G. (2002) A War Machine against the Empire: On the Precarious Nomadism of the Publix Theatre Caravan. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0902/raunig/en (accessed March 2008). Raunig, G. (2007) Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, translated by Aileen Derieg, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Regev, M. (2007) ‘Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(1): 123–38. Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts) (2006) Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London: Verso. Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Summers, D. (2003) Real Spaces, World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London: Phaidon Books. Szewczyk, M. (2009) Meaning Liam Gillick, London: MIT Press. Wallerstein, I. (2003) The Decline of American Power, New York: New Press. Werbner, P. (2006) ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3): 496–8.

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18 The cosmopolitanism of the sacred Bryan S. Turner

Introduction In historical terms, inter-civilizational contacts inevitably created notions of otherness between different peoples and civilizations. Hence cosmopolitanism is the exception, not the rule. There is a sense in which any society with a more or less coherent cultural boundary, especially a linguistic or religious boundary acting as an inclusive foundation of solidarity, must necessarily have an exclusionary notion of the outside world and thus of difference and otherness. The more inclusive the notion of social membership, the more intense the notion of an exterior contrasting world. This idea of an outside and an inside social world is the basic truism of almost every general theory of society. In pre-modern or tribal societies, the depth of group identity and the closure of society against the outside world produced an intense sense of membership which was classically defined by Emile Durkheim (1960) as ‘mechanical solidarity’ involving low individualism, rituals of inclusion and shared values. The spatial isolation of small communities in pre-colonial Australia, as in the United States and Canada, intensified the practices of difference and distinctiveness. Similarly Mary Douglas’s notion of group and grid as the basic structure of any community with a strong framework of beliefs defining pollution provides another insight into these exclusionary structures (Douglas, 1973). If for the sake of argument we accept Durkheim’s interpretation of what we might label ‘the elementary forms of solidarity’, how did human groups break out of the inside-outside ritual dichotomy and how did respect for the other take shape? The standard sociological answer would be simply ‘modernization’ involving the division of labour, differentiation of functions, urbanization and finally industrialization. These processes allegedly liberated individuals from a closed social framework. But where and when does ‘the modern’ start? One intriguing answer which is particularly germane to religion and cosmopolitanism is offered by the debate about the Axial Age religions. There have been many attempts in the past to create a social philosophy that recognized the value of other cultures. One important example came from Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History (1968) in which he responded to the devastation of World War II and the post-war crisis in German culture to look at the contribution to human development from ancient manifestations of religion and philosophy. In his study of the Axial Age (the Achsenzeit) Jaspers explored the ideas of Socrates, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao-Tse and the Old Testament Prophets 211

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(Jaspers, 1962). By looking at the Axial Age (800–200 BC) he wrote critically against the legacy of Hegel’s vision of history in which China for example had no history. Jaspers claimed that criticism, transcendence and humanity were already developed in the Axial Age before the rise of what we conventionally regard as the modern world. According to Axial Age theories ‘modernity’ has a much longer history than commonly assumed. Jaspers’s thesis explored the remarkable conjunction of prophets, poets and philosophers that came to define what we now regard as ‘humanity’. These Axial Age figures offered, in Jaspers’s moral vision, a basis for an assumption about the unity of mankind. Jaspers is obviously the principal figure in the concept of an Axial Age breakthrough, but Max Weber has to figure prominently in any discussion of the religious origins of axiality. Weber’s comparative sociology of religion, prophecy and the world religions anticipated many of the issues in the debate about the antecedents of modernity. The age of prophets was the critical event in the unfolding of religion and religions in the transition from tribalism and an enchanted magical world. In the idea of revelation, the prophets constructed a vision of a different and superior world beyond our immediate empirical reality. These charismatic figures developed ethical codes and established norms about virtuous behaviour constituting a breakthrough in human history. The prophets and philosopher-poets created ‘the age of criticism’ (Momigliano, 1975: 9). Their ethical understanding of the world recognized a tension between political realities and the religious ideas and between earthly constraints and ethical norms. For the Axial Age empirical reality was profoundly unsatisfactory – or dukkha in the Buddha’s teaching. Our earthly finite existence is associated with the widespread notion in religious systems of a world beyond. More radically, this religious vision of a world-to-come was in principle available to all human beings. The goal of history was to transform this moral and critical vision into a social reality. The importance of this debate for this chapter is that cosmopolitanism must have some basic notions of both the cultural distinctiveness of different societies and the unity of human kind. This interpretation of the ancient world and the Axial Age runs immediately into a number of obvious problems. Jaspers’s scheme treats both Christianity and Islam as simply variations on a theme that he had been established long before Christ and Mohammed. Critics have avoided this problem by arguing in terms of ‘second wave’ Axial Age religions (Boy and Torpey, 2013; Torpey, 2017). A more significant problem for ‘the age of criticism’ was the widespread presence of slavery in the Axial and post-Axial Age. The universalism of axiality did not automatically extend to slaves. Because slavery was a basic fact for example of ancient Greece, how did this issue appear in Greek thought? Fear of the other was fundamental to Greek politics, because endless wars against outsiders always involved the threat of enslavement (Saxonhouse, 1992). Slave status in the polis entailed the loss of freedom and the denial of rationality. Aristotle’s Politics (2000) identified citizenship as the social glue of the Greek polis and recognized that membership was only granted to free rational men. He struggled to find a moral principle to defend slavery as a social fact when it involved erstwhile free men. While men had a ‘natural’ superiority over animals, there was no obvious natural hierarchy of men apart from the accident of slavery as a consequence of defeat in war. This sense of an alien and threatening external world arose then out of the expansion of international trade and warfare, and was expressed powerfully in the historical commentaries of Herodotus on the Peloponnesian War (431–4). While the problem of otherness in the Roman world was primarily a secular issue in the political domain, it became a defining issue in Judaism. Because Yahweh was a jealous God, there was a sacred covenant between God and the tribes of Israel, which automatically excluded those who worshipped idols and false gods. In Christianity, a universalistic orientation that recognized the other was contained in Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans, which rejected circumcision as a condition of salvation. Because the uncircumcised were among the righteous, the 212

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salvation message of Jesus had, at least in Pauline theology, a global significance. The universalism of Christianity and Islam was ultimately compromised, as I have indicated, by their involvement in the institution of slavery and the ideology of racial supremacy. The introduction of slavery in the Americas, the Protestant underpinning of South African Apartheid and the subordination of indigenous peoples in America and Australia by the doctrine that these colonies were empty lands has created a powerful imperialist legacy in which other races were treated as uncivilized, if not inhuman. The great land rush between 1650 and 1900 destroyed indigenous communities around the world, but colonization also converted aboriginal people into objects of Western science, especially cultural anthropology and colonial medicine. As the modern world emerged from the seventeenth-century expansion of trade, the divisions between barbarians and civilized societies intensified. This is not the whole story. In the long-term struggle to end slavery Roman Catholic missions came to play a large part in the uneven growth of universal humanitarianism. In his influential The Origins of Global Humanitarianism, Peter Stamatov (2013) showed how in the early sixteenth-century Catholic missionaries in Latin America – most notably Bartolome de Las Casas (1484–1566) – campaigned against the enslavement of human beings, especially if they had been converted to Christianity. If an aboriginal had freely converted to the universal faith of Christianity, how could the civilized world enslave a person whom Christ had declared equal and free? Catholic missionaries on the margins of the Western world often turned against the colonial powers and defended the rights of native communities. Much later Protestant sects such as the Quakers developed what Stamatov calls ‘long distance advocacy’ to connect London and Philadelphia in an abolitionist network against slavery. Recent work on the Jesuits, globalization and origins of humanitarianism further reinforces the claim that Catholic missionaries paved the way towards a global world (Banchoff and Casanova, 2016). In the twentieth century, Christian values and Christian writers were central to the promotion of the notion of human dignity as the foundation of human rights ideas and laws (Moyn, 2015). Jesuits belonged to an early stage of globalization as their missionary activity took them to Latin America, Africa and Asia. While one might suspect that globalization has produced a system of societies with porous boundaries and open hospitable attitudes towards outsiders, I argue on the contrary that the paradox of contemporary globalization has been to create new systems of insider and outsider divisions in civil society. Globalization has compressed the spatial relations between societies, and the problems of otherness and difference have been magnified by modern systems of global communication, transportation and migration. There is therefore a paradoxical relationship between the growing hybridity, inter-connectedness and inter-dependency of the world and the contrasting notion of otherness in politics, philosophy and culture. The contemporary rise of populism has been interpreted as a response to globalization and especially to the globalization of labour through various patterns of migration creating social groups that have been ‘left behind’ by social change. It has been claimed that many populist movements in Europe have ‘hijacked’ religion as a convenient framework for rejecting foreigners as alien to the host religious traditions (Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy, 2016).

The argument This discussion of religion and cosmopolitanism is underpinned by four issues and a conclusion. The first is to emphasize the fact that cosmopolitanism is neither new nor necessarily secular. Stoicism may have contributed significantly to the origins of cosmopolitanism, but its real driving force was, and probably remains, religious. The second is to stress the uneven development of cosmopolitanism over time; there is no steady and certain progression towards a normative 213

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cosmopolitan world view. Britain, in many ways the champion of liberal values, voted in 2016 for Brexit to leave the European Union to forge a closed society with strong borders and reduced migration. President Trump – over-ruling or forgetting the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me’. Thirdly, while many sociologies of globalization have optimistically imagined a movement towards an open, tolerant and democratic culture with political modernization, there is related but counter processes of social closure that may be described as the ‘enclave society’ (Turner, 2007). Although cosmopolitanism can be embraced by ‘men of good will’ – liberals, humanists, feminists, environmentalists and those of a religious disposition – as an ethical standpoint, the actual prospects for cosmopolitan harmony in the twenty-first century look grim. The contemporary rise of populism – with its hatred of cosmopolitan elites, their openness to a global world and their acceptance of diversity – presents an explicit threat to the inclusive world of cosmopolitanism. Recent elections in the United States, Great Britain and continental Europe have shown that the populist vote is associated with rural constituencies, rust-belt states and small towns, whereas the ancient and modern seat of cosmopolitanism is the large city. Less than one in five New Yorkers voted for Donald Trump. My conclusion is that the relationship between major world religions and cosmopolitan virtue is characteristically tragic. The universal thrust of both Christianity and Islam has been compromised by the legacy of slavery and racism. The pre-war Jews of Vienna, London and Berlin were the epitome of cosmopolitanism and partly for that reason much hated by the Nazi movement. The ultra-orthodox Jews of modern Israel are deeply involved in what are internationally regarded as unlawful settlements. The inclusive and peaceful doctrines of Buddhism are compromised in modern day Myanmar and Thailand by violence against Muslim minorities. There are nevertheless a range of philosophical arguments that offer various powerful defences of a value position in favour of recognition of the other, advocating cosmopolitan respect for cultural difference, and embracing an openness to diverse cultures. Because the individual resides in a world of other subjectivities, there exists a mode of existence that is referred to as ‘being-forothers’. In the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1998), the other plays a positive role in questioning the confidence and assurance of the subject. The face of the other challenges us to take responsibility for the other, and hence otherness creates the conditions that make ethics possible. Another source of such ideas came from the work of Jacques Derrida (2001) who wrote movingly about the significance of hospitality to any notion of ethics. Other writers concentrating on the legacy of Hegel’s master-slave commentary on individual freedom and respect for others have developed a tradition of recognition ethics as a basis for modern cosmopolitanism (Williams, 1997). There are other approaches, most notably Kwame Appiah (2006), that have connected the need for cosmopolitanism with the rise of a world of strangers and the problems that face post-colonial societies especially in Africa. Unfortunately much of this philosophical debate about the normative characteristics of cosmopolitanism does not engage seriously with the anthropological and sociological literature on actual cosmopolitanism. It is important to distinguish between normative arguments in favour of ‘cosmopolitan virtue’ and the political constraints on such a world vision (Turner, 2002). It is partly for this reason that continuing sociological interest in and empirical research into cosmopolitanism is important. One can refer here to the work of Ulrich Beck, Gerard Delanty, David Harvey, David Held, Ulf Hannerz, Robert Holton, Chang Kyung-sup, Roland Robertson, Natan Sznaider and many others. These comparative and historical investigations have also served to show that cosmopolitanism is not a single topic but a network or field of research issues including ideas as diverse as the second modernity, multiple modernities, human rights, genocide and 214

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individualism. In this particular contribution, I shall focus on one small aspect of this debate, namely the question of religious cosmopolitanism. At the outset I should emphasize the fact that I shall be concerned primarily with the relationship between Christianity and cosmopolitanism, but acknowledge the fact that Islamic cosmopolitanism is an equally important, if not more urgent example of cosmopolitanism (Iqtidar, 2010; Marsden, 2002).

The ancient world and rise of world religions There are several issues here. Perhaps the least important is the fact that the idea of globalization appears to have been explored originally in religious studies, because in historical terms the debate about otherness and difference has been a preoccupation of students of ‘world religions’. Nevertheless religion is all too frequently absent in contemporary sociological accounts of globalization. Secondly, and for related reasons, the historical aspects of the globalization of religion and its interconnections with pre-modern world trade are rarely considered. For instance in the development of the Silk Route over some three thousand years, intercontinental trade routes connected Ancient China and the Mediterranean, thereby playing a major role in the early transmission of Buddhism to China in the first century CE and subsequently in the growing dominance of Islam in Central Asia in the seventh century. During the time of Emperor Ashoka (304–232 BCE), Buddhism, with its emerging critique of caste, urban society and its rejection of the Vedic idea of cosmic man in favour of a philosophy of the non-existent, spread quickly through South Asia and into Thailand and Burma (Ling, 1973). While these examples from the ancient world are almost never seriously considered in modern sociology, in religious studies and the historical research on world religions these global formations have been the topic of major investigations. In particular we can refer to the work of Marshall G.S. Hodgson (1993) who developed a post-national epistemology and theory of the world in Rethinking World History and explored the oikoumene in The Venture of Islam describing an ‘Islamicate history’ from the perspective of an integrated Mediterranean system (Hodgson, 1974). In these examples, the theory of world history had already gone well beyond the traditional conventions of ‘methodological nationalism’. These historical examples from religious studies raise difficulties in particular for Ulrich Beck’s account of the ‘second modernization’ (Beck, 2000 and 2006). Briefly the second modernization is characterized by fluid social structures, ever-changing institutions, by new patterns of love and friendship outside the traditional world of stable families and life-long marriage, and by an intense individualism. In short the second modernization created what Beck celebrated as the ‘risk society’. Above all, a risk society is a product of globalization. Of course, the empirical evidence relating to the ancient or early modern growth of global networks for trade and cultural transmission does not automatically create a fatal difficulty for Beck’s theory about a second modernization. It is necessary to demonstrate, in addition to the mere fact of these trade and cultural networks, the emergence of a cosmopolitan consciousness in the pre-modern period. While it is relatively easy to produce evidence about inter-connectedness through trade, cultural exchange and religious conversion, we need also to demonstrate the emergence of cultural openness to the outside world and more significantly a world view that reaches out to the other. It is important to keep in mind that ‘to qualify as cosmopolitan, such interpersonal milieux need to exhibit some sense of inter-cultural openness’ (Holton, 2009: 101). Human migration, the exchange of goods through early patterns of trade or the conversion of tribes on the edge of Christian or Islamic civilization do not necessarily produce a cosmopolitan ethos or an ethic of world-openness. The argument here is that any evangelical religion with a universalistic set of assumptions must confront the problem of the other and out of that dialogue with otherness an early or ‘primitive’ 215

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form of universalism and cosmopolitan consciousness can emerge. My first example would be the problem that confronted the apostle Paul when faced by the conflicts between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians over the relevance of Judaic legalism to the early Church. In Galatians 5:6 Paul rejects the idea that salvation can come from the old Law in claiming ‘For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision availeth any thing; but faith which worketh by love’. To achieve salvation, humans must be transformed into ‘a new creature’. In claiming that there was neither Gentile nor Jew, slave nor free man, man or woman, Paul laid down a universalistic doctrine that challenged any allegiance based on blood and kinship (Badiou, 2003). The early Christians had to be spiritually circumcised in their hearts rather than in their bodies. On these grounds, Jacob Taubes (2004) claims that Paul is our contemporary because he engaged with the problem of conflicting visions of religious truth. In short Pauline ‘political theology’ contains a reflexive understanding of otherness and offers an incipient cosmopolitan vision of the problem of ‘the world’. Similar arguments can be presented about the early history of Islam. When Mohammed the Prophet came to construct an early polity, he was also presented with a social situation that was divided between pagan, Christian and Jewish tribes. In searching for a solution to these political conflicts, the Constitution of Medina represents an early document describing a political solution to social divisions, but one that also recognized, albeit implicitly, the need to engage with the other. Because Islam claims to be the fulfilment of all forms of preceding monotheism and ethical prophecy, this dialogue with other ‘people of the book’ has had a long history in the development of Islam. While Max Weber argued that Islamic expansion was the product of a warrior religion, early Islam spread through trading routes in Asia and the Mediterranean on the back of the Sufi brotherhoods (Diouf, 1999). The division between a pure Islam and the hostile outside world – the world of the ignorant – is relatively modern and in particular a product of the theology of Syed Abul Ala Maududi in the 1940s (Ahmad, 2009). The global spread of Islam in the modern period has produced a Muslim cosmopolitanism that is in part the legacy of the traditional ummah, but which also responds to the modern development of a global diaspora. The history of religious conflict and co-operation produced a traditional consciousness about the other and in turn one can therefore detect an original reflection on these religio-cultural differences that created an ecumenical consciousness. It would however be an exaggeration to call this ‘reflexive cosmopolitanism’ and it is definitely not ‘reflexive modernization’, but we need to take these early developments seriously in the spirit of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2000). These early forms of awareness of the other were for one thing not epistemologically open; they were based on the assumption that other traditions were either defective or false. They could be tolerated but they were nevertheless departures from an absolute revealed Truth. The inter-faith tolerance that is often associated with Islamic Spain or the millet system of the later Ottoman Empire was still based on an assumption about the superiority of Islam. Christians and Jews were tolerated, but they had to wear special clothing, they could not carry swords or ride horses, and were excluded from certain occupations. Tolerance of difference has had a slow, fragile and uncertain development, and we have to wait for Leibniz to give a plausible philosophical justification for taking other beliefs seriously (Turner, 2005). However, I follow Holton (2009: 81) in rejecting the assumption that ‘cosmopolitanization and the cosmopolitan outlook are essentially very recent phenomena’. If the empirical validity of the idea of a second modernity is in doubt, the theoretical structure of Beck’s argument may be insecure. We can in thinking about these pre-modern foundations of cosmopolitanism refer to them as examples of ‘reflexive traditionalism’ (Turner, 2010). In Christianity and Islam, this reflexivity emerged out of a world of cultural contact through global trade and as a result of global evangelical competition for world influence. Nevertheless, because both the New Testament and Qur’an 216

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were and continue to be treated as revelations of a singular but separate and distinctive Truth, there were specific limitations on these early forms of world consciousness. The conditions for such a reflexive traditionalism were mobility and exchange, an evangelical religious culture that undermined the idea that a religious community (‘church’ or ummah) is merely an extension of kinship relations, the presence of alternative religious traditions in a competitive relationship and a theological critique of idolatry. Reflexive traditionalism did not however generate what we might call a ‘vernacular hermeneutics of doubt’ in that these religions assumed an unquestioned notion of revealed Truth that had exclusionary consequences. These elementary forms of cosmopolitanism could not easily cope with the possibility of apostasy. These historical issues create significant empirical problems for Beck’s claims about a second modernization. However the development of religion in the modern world does appear to verify one important feature of Beck’s theory about modernity, namely the idea of ‘individualization’. There is widespread agreement in the sociology of religion that one major trend in contemporary religious life is towards ‘spirituality’ which is defined as post-institutional, global, hybrid and post-orthodox (Hunt, 2003). It is partly a result of the growth of online religion, and partly a consequence of consumer youth cultures that have an experimental attitude towards religion (Hulsether, 2000). These self-consciously post-orthodox, post-institutional trends in personal religiosity are not confined to Christianity, but are widespread in other religions and other continents. In many parts of there is a powerful mixture of traditional practice and the contemporary commodification of religion (Kitiarsa, 2008). Although Beck’s periodization of modernity is not supported by the historical evidence, the notion of religious individualization provides an important insight into changing subjectivities in the modern period. These are however fundamentally individualistic and post-institutional, and therefore it is difficult to believe that these modern movements can significantly influence cosmopolitan beliefs and practices within the public domain.

Globalization and piety One might reasonably assume that cosmopolitan values and vernacular cosmopolitanism would expand with modern globalization thereby becoming more dominant in public discourse. There are however many social and political forces working against these cultural developments. In the field of identity politics, as religion becomes increasingly the marker of ethnicity, the conditions of ethno-religious conflict are magnified. The effect of globalization has been to intensify the opportunities for religious conflict as a consequence of sheer propinquity, the competition for resources and ideology. There appears to be in modern societies a contradiction between the universalistic and cosmopolitan message of much Christian and Muslim theology and the propensity of diasporic communities towards intra-marriage between co-religionists, geographical consolidation of parallel communities within the metropolis, and the evolution of separate religious schools. With the growth of religious tribunals – Jewish courts, cannon law and Shari’a arbitration – there is also growing legal pluralism. When one adds to this list the development of urban piety movements that implicitly emphasize separate religious development, the results are divisive, producing exclusionary patterns of piety. The unintended consequences of personal piety – such as the expansion of halal certification of restaurants or the development of ultraorthodox Hasidic communities in modern Judaism – is to reinforce the structural separation of religious communities that is a consequence of large-scale conflicts between religions, namely a ‘clash of civilizations’. This problem of global security has often been discussed and analyzed within the framework of a civilizational crisis (Huntington, 1996). The argument has of course been heavily criticized. 217

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By emphasizing the conflicts between Muslims and Christians, it is said to have ignored the conflicts within Islam between Sunni and Shi’ite communities (as we have seen in Iraq since the American invasion) and the conflicts within Christianity for example in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics. But as a general hypothesis it has much to commend it – if we consider the conflicts in Africa between Muslim and Christian in Nigeria, Congo, Sudan and so forth, or if we think of the conflicts between Thai Buddhists and Muslims in the southern three states of Thailand, or the ongoing conflicts between Muslim and Hindu communities in South Asia, or the conflicts between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. This debate has focused on the basic ‘fault line’ between Muslim and Christian; it is further suggested that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent a concerted attack on Muslims. However, this discussion ignores the ways in which Christians are being pushed out of Iraq, Syria and Iran, or how Coptic Christians are being squeezed out of Egypt (Sennott, 2001). Beyond the Middle East, we have the example of attacks on Christians who were massacred in the Moluccas as a result of the Laskar jihad which started in May 2000. These attacks were partly driven from outside by Al Qaeda influences. The brutal attack on the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad on Monday November 1, 2011 in which fifty-eight people were killed is perhaps a further reminder of this clash of civilizations. Iraq was at one time highly diverse in cultural, ethnic and religious terms, but now all the Jews have left and the Christian population which was once around 1.4 million is now under half a million. At the macro level therefore there is ample evidence of a globalization of religious conflict producing further social and political division.

Uneven development These developments have since 9/11 filled the major newspapers on a regular basis. I want however to consider a more subtle creation of social distance between communities by considering the world-wide spread of urban movements of religious piety. With urbanization and the improvement of literacy, there has been a global growth of piety movements not just in Islam but also among Christian and Jewish groups. These piety movements are especially important for women for whom literate piety is an important step, perhaps paradoxically, towards greater gender equality (Tong and Turner, 2008). One obvious example is the popularity of veiling among urban Muslim women – a practice that was uncommon in previous generations (Joppke, 2009). In research in Southeast Asia on Muslims in Singapore (Kamaludeen, Pereira and Turner, 2009), Muslim piety was considered in everyday life. Employing a framework from Erving Goffman’s studies of everyday interaction strategies, one can explore how Muslims avoid pollution such as contamination from pork or alcohol when dining in restaurants. In these situations, Muslims developed ‘rituals of intimacy’ towards strangers to avoid contact with things that were forbidden. One such ritual involved ‘defensive dining’ – such as keeping one’s arms off a table where pork may have been served. Among the pious these practices were in fact far reaching: they avoid dating or marrying non-Muslims, they avoided eating in restaurants that were not officially guaranteed with a halal certificate and they avoided contact with tobacco and alcohol. The daily practice of religion created a symbolic wall around the pious and with the pietization of the everyday world there has been an inflationary process of ‘halalization’. One finds of course very similar processes at work among ultra-Orthodox Jews who follow many practices that create social distance between themselves and both Gentiles and other Jews. It has been argued that one aspect of the current growth in the number of urban Jewish sacred spaces or eruvin has been a demand from orthodox women for greater equality with men outside the home (Vincent and Warf, 2002). Orthodox Jewish women demand to attend synagogue services alongside men and to engage in other activities outside the home on the Sabbath without breaking the prohibition 218

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on ‘carrying’. An eruv is a space created by erecting a symbolic wall (often merely a wire) inside which Orthodox Jews are allowed to move around on the Sabbath, for example to push a stroller around. In religious terms the eruv can be considered ‘as a (rabbinic) theory of neighbourhood, as a tool for ritualizing Jewish neighbourhood, and perhaps not so much establishing rather than providing an affirmation and ritual formalization of the neighbourhood’ (Fonrobert, 2008: 243). Traditionally the eruv was a rabbinical community in which meals were shared and typically defined a court-yard between observant houses. Eruvin have despite their modest dimensions caused considerable public outcry in Tenafly, New Jersey, in Barnet, London and in Bondi Beach in Sydney, because they are thought to reduce the heterogeneity of a neighbourhood resulting in a modern but voluntary Jewish ghetto. In my terms, they could be called an ‘enclave of choice’. While in America the controversy around the New Jersey eruv raised issues about the separation of church and state and freedom of religion, in London the objections were at a formal level about planning permission and environmental issues. The less obvious reasons were to do with the extent of multiculturalism and the prevalence of anti-Semitism. However, the anti-Semitic criticism cannot be that clear cut, since much of the opposition in Barnet came from liberal Jews, but opposition comes also from the ultra-Orthodox who fear that the eruv make ‘carrying’ permissible thereby undermining the Sabbath restrictions. The legal or political problem with eruvin is that they convert public space into a form of private ownership (Valins, 2000). The consequence in social terms is to reclassify an area and to unify the inhabitants by ritual means such as collecting food or by reciting an appropriate blessing. These pious movements, while not intentionally and overtly aggressive, have the unintended consequence of creating symbolic walls between communities and hence undermine the bridging social capital that might otherwise arise from such social investments. These walls of piety have the consequence of further dividing and fragmenting the urban environment thereby limiting the prospects of a cosmopolitan imagination. Is this just European pessimism? In my recent work on the erosion of citizenship and the enclave society (Turner, 2007), I have been struck by the pessimistic quality of much European research against the more optimistic tone of American sociology. To take one example, Jeffrey Alexander (2006) in The Civil Sphere argues that America has been relatively successful in including and integrating minorities – the black population through the civil rights movement, women as an outcome of the women’s movement and the Jewish population through mobility and cultural acceptance. This positive view of American inclusiveness has been called into question by the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump with his promise to build a wall separating Mexico and the United States in order to exclude illegal migration and by the subsequent treatment of Hispanics and ‘Dreamers’ or the children of illegal migrants who wish to remain and prosper in the United States. In talking about the walls of piety, perhaps the ultimate test of spiritual openness and acceptance of other cultures and traditions revolves around the question of what people or persons can have entry into heaven. If one thinks a certain group of people are damned and cannot enter into heaven, surely this is the ultimate test of social harmony. A narrow definition of the salvation of the elect can be regarded as the opposite of secular cosmopolitanism. How far have we come from the strict Calvinist position on the salvation of the Elect and how far have we come from the Parable of the Tares in which the Devil sowed weeds to contaminate the field of good wheat? Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace (2010) present, like Alexander, a highly positive view of American society in which, despite the great diversity of religions and cultures, America is depicted as an essentially open and liberal society. Let us take the question of who can be saved? When asked in the Faith Matters Survey of 2007 ‘can a person who is not of your faith go to heaven or attain salvation, or not?’ 89% of Americans believe that heaven is not 219

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reserved for the few. One might regard this finding as the final consequence of the Methodist Revolution with its universalistic Arminian doctrine of salvation by a personal faith in Jesus or one might argue that it is an aspect of the democratization of Christian belief and practice in America. Another interpretation is that, where orthodox belief no longer has any salience, then the truth value of belief no longer counts. This interpretation is partly borne out by the fact that only 83% of evangelicals as opposed to 96% of mainline Protestants think that heaven is open to people of other faiths. A Pew report (2009) however found that when asked specifically whether Islam leads to eternal life only 35% of evangelicals agreed. The other important finding of the Faith Matters survey was that clergy invariably have a more restrictive view of who can enter heaven than their laity. Putnam and Campbell concluded that ‘most Americans do not believe that those of a different religious faith are damned. Devotion plus diversity minus damnation equals comity’ (2010: 540). This is a remarkable affirmation of the openness of heaven in modern Christianity and it is strikingly unlike the social world that produced the Parable of the Tares. Modern religious tolerance requires a distinctive watering down of the biblical legacy. While Putnam and Campbell’s conclusions may be reassuring they appear to be out of step with recent public outcries against Islam such as the controversy around the Danish cartoons in Europe or the Ground Zero protests in New York. This picture of moderation is not supported by general Western criticisms of the wearing of the Muslim burqa in public spaces. They also appear to be out of line with current anxieties in Canada, Europe and America about the alleged encroachment of Shari’a in Western legislatures. In particular, Islam as a civilization has come to be defined as fundamentally incompatible with Western values. Muslim communities have thus been marginalized by a mixture of official processes of securitization and by popular suspicion and hostility. Early public criticism of veiling has been followed by anxiety about the spread of Shari’a courts. In the United Kingdom, there has been considerable disquiet, expressed in the national press, that the government has adopted a pragmatic policy of de facto recognition of Shari’a courts and not just arbitration. For example British newspapers reported in 2008 Shari’a judges were to rule on cases relating to divorce and financial disputes. Shari’a court rulings can be enforced in terms of the Arbitration Act 1996 through the county courts or High Court. Under a system of alternative dispute resolution, cases can be heard and judgements enforced where both parties have already agreed to give the power of resolution to an arbitration tribunal. However, following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture in 2008 in which he suggested that the use of Shari’a to promote community cohesion was unavoidable, the Labour Government of Gordon Brown was quick to assert that, while there had been changes in the regulations to allow ‘sharia-compliant mortgage products’, there was no possibility that Shari’a could be used in any British civil court. In Europe Angela Merkel also stated that, while the Liberal Democrats would take measures to support migrants, only the Constitution and not the Shari’a could apply in Germany. Similar opposition to Shari’a has been expressed in the United States where Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, has claimed that America needs a federal law to establish the principle that the Shari’a could never be recognized by an American court. In the United States arbitration arrangements are in fact available through the U.S. Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) of 1925 which provides for the resolution of disputes arising out of private contractual relationships by an arbitration panel. These examples which could be multiplied at considerable length suggest that the everyday reality of inter-communal conflicts does not support the attitudinal data that are presented in American Grace, but they do support the argument that modern societies are going through a process of urban ‘enclavement’ that mitigates against the trend towards cosmopolitanism that, other things being equal, might emerge from the experiences of migration. 220

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Populism and the ‘hijacking’ of religion Religion (or more specifically Christianity) has emerged in populist opposition to Islam insofar as Muslim migrants are uniformly regarded as actual or potential jihadists. Brexit (the British referendum vote to leave the European Union) and the election of President Donald Trump were seen as important manifestations of populist anti-immigrant developments. In addition there is a growing tendency across Europe to define political boundaries by reference to Christendom as the foundation of Western values. In a secular Europe, the appeal to Christian values only makes sense as a contrast to the alleged threat of Islamization. In the United States, religion, especially since the creation of the Moral Majority, is never that far removed from politics. While religion played some role in the rise of the Tea Party, it was largely absent from the election contest between Trump and Clinton. However, postelection Trump is enjoying support for his anti-abortion stand (from both conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants), for his pro-Israeli stance (from orthodox Jews) and from ‘Tender Warriors’ (evangelical Protestants embracing masculinity and conventional gender roles). Trump enjoys the benefit of a spiritual guide in the televangelist Paula White who affirms that he has a ‘hunger for God’. Finally, Trump during the National Prayer Breakfast promised to ‘destroy’ the Johnson Amendment that separated politics and pulpit for churches classified as tax-exempt charities. It appears that religion is extending Trump’s political base and increasingly acts as a dimension of American populism. It is very difficult to predict how these social tensions will unfold. The electoral defeat of Le Pen in France, the failure of Theresa May to win more parliamentary seats in the snap election of 2017 to secure a mandate for a ‘hard Brexit’, and the continuing support for Angela Merkel were seen as evidence that the growth of populism was not inevitable. However the influence of Stephen Bannon on Trump’s world view constitutes a clear rejection of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The West in general appears to be divided between elites, the middle class and young voters who support international openness on the one hand and the elderly and blue collar workers (the so-called ‘left behind’) on the other who believe that globalization has destroyed their jobs and their social standing. The division is evident in the United Kingdom between Remain and Leave voters. Despite overtures from politicians – ‘Better Together’ in the United States or the idea of Britain as a caring and trading nation – hostility between these social groups appears to be deep rooted. The inclusion-exclusion character of Western societies is clearly illustrated by Islamophobia, but hostility to feminists, gay men, Hispanics, east coast intellectuals and ‘the media’ are also an important element of Trump populism.

Conclusion The history of religious conflict and co-operation produced a traditional consciousness about the other and consequently one can detect an early form of reflexivity in relation to these religio-cultural differences. They produced a primitive or early ecumenical consciousness. The cosmopolitanism of the Axial Age was promising but premature. Were the ideas of the ‘age of criticism’ translated consistently into subsequent practice? In the second-wave Axial Age religions, Saint Paul and the Prophet Mohammed have impressed modern commentators with their religious universalism that promised to reach out beyond the narrow confines that were imposed by tradition and kinship loyalty. Similar arguments could also be constructed to support the idea of Buddhist universalism. These forms of reflexive traditionalism did not however enjoy a successful transition into full-blown cosmopolitan reflexivity, because the consolidation of theological orthodoxies promoted the idea of a singular and exclusive truth over an inclusive notion 221

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of brotherhood. In the contemporary period, the growth of state securitization has intensified a ‘clash of civilizations’ making the flowering of an ecumenical inter-faith solidarity a utopian dream. At the everyday level, what I have called the ‘wall of piety’ has contributed to or at least reinforced existing symbolic divisions between religious communities. The promise of religious cosmopolitanism has been continuously compromised by a variety of social and political conditions – from slavery to right-wing populism – making the defence of world-openness urgent but problematic. It is unclear – given the election outcomes in Britain, France and Germany in 2017 – whether the tide of chauvinistic populism has been contained or whether the hey-day of urban cosmopolitanism with the rise of the global city was merely an episode that is now consigned to history.

References Ahmad, Irfan (2009) Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey (2006) The Civil Sphere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton. Aristotle (2000) Politics. New York: Dover. Badiou, Alain (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Banchoff, Thomas and Casanova, Jose (eds.) (2016) The Jesuits and Globalization, Washington: Georgetown University Press. Beck, Ulrich (2000) ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity’, British Journal of Sociology, 51(1): 79–105. Beck, Ulrich (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press. Boy, John D. and Torpey, John (2013) ‘Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of a Historical Concept’, Theory and Society, 42(3): 241–59. Derrida, Jacques (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London: Routledge. Diouf, Mamadon (1999) ‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3): 679–702. Douglas, Mary (1973) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd edn., New York: Random House. Durkheim, Emile (1960) The Division of Labor in Society, Glencoe: Free Press. Eisenstadt, Samuel N. (2000) ‘The Reconstruction of Religious Arenas in the Framework of “Multiple Modernities”’, Millennium. Journal of International Studies, 29(3): 591–611. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva (2008) ‘Neighborhood as Ritual Space: The Case of the Rabbinic Eruv’, Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte, 10: 239–57. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. (1974) The Venture of Islam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. (1993) Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holton, Robert J. (2009) Cosmopolitans: New Thinking and New Directions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hulsether, Mark D. (2000) ‘Like a Sermon: Popular Religion in Madonna Videos’, in B.D. Forbes and J.H. Mahan (eds.), Religion and Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 77–100. Hunt, Stephen (2003) Alternative Religion. A Sociological Introduction. Farnham: Ashgate. Huntington, Samuel (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Iqtidar, Humeira (2010) ‘Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Contemporary Practices and Social Theory’, in Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 622–34. Jaspers, Karl (1968) The Origin and Goal of History, New Haven: Yale University Press. Joppke, Christian (2009) Veil: Mirror of Identity, Cambridge: Polity. Kamaludeen, Mohamed Nasr, Pereira, Alexius A., and Turner, Bryan S. (2009) Muslims in Singapore: Piety, Politics and Policies, London: Routledge. Kitiarsa, Pattana (ed.) (2008) Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods, London and New York: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. (1998) Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. London: The Athlone Press. Ling, Trevor O. (1973) The Buddha: Buddhist Civilization in India and Ceylon, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 222

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Marsden, Magnus M. (2002) Islamization and Globalization in Chitral, Northern Pakistan, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge. Marzouki Nadia, McDonnell Duncan and Roy Olivier (eds.) (2016) Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo (1975) Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Helenization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moyn, Samuel (2015) Christian Human Rights. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2009) Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the US. http:// pewforum.org/docs/?DOCID=409 Putnam, Robert and Campbell, David E. (2010) American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, New York: Simon & Shuster. Saxonhouse, A.W. (1992) Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sennott, Charles M. (2001) The Body and the Blood: The Middle East’s Vanishing Christians and the Possibility of Peace, New York: Public Affairs. Stamatov, Peter (2013) The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires and Advocacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taubes, Jacob (2004) The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tong, Joy Kooi-Chin and Turner, Bryan S. (2008) ‘Women, Piety and Practice: A Study of Women and Religious Practice in Malaysia’, Contemporary Islam, 2: 41–59. Torpey, John (2017) The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental, Newark: Rutgers University Press. Turner, Bryan S. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism’, Theory Culture & Society, 19(1–2): 45–64. Turner, Bryan S. (2005) ‘Leibniz, Islam and Cosmopolitan Virtue’, Theory Culture & Society, 22(6): 139–47. Turner, Bryan S. (2007) ‘The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(2): 287–303. Turner, Bryan S. (2010) ‘Reflexive Traditionalism and Emergent Cosmopolitanism: Some Reflections on the Religious Imagination’, Soziale Welt, 3–4: 313–18. Valins, O. (2000) ‘Institutionalised Religion: Sacred Texts and Jewish Spatial Practice’, Geoforum, 31: 575–86. Vincent, P. and Warf, B. (2002) ‘Eruvim: Talmudic Places in a Postmodern World’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 27: 30–51. Williams, Robert R. (1997) Hegel’s Recognition Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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19 Imagining cosmopolitan sexualities for the twenty-first century Ken Plummer

The early twenty-first century is a troubled, schismatic global world. Amongst the many major problems it confronts are those of inequalities, environmental crisis, religious conflict, the risks of a robotic and surveillance age, the renewed threat of nuclear war and a world being reorganized through major patterns of exclusion and expulsion (e.g. Sassen, 2014). Tucked well into all this is another less visible but just as important crisis: the global frictions over gender, sexualities and intimacies. How are we to live personal lives in these new worlds we are making? New fault lines are being drawn on many issues ranging from conflicts over gender equality and the enhanced status of women to conflicts over the rights and equalities of sexual minorities; from conflicts over reproductive practices, sexual violence, trafficking, abuse and the rights to ‘safe bodies’ to conflicts over gender pluralism (third sex rights), family diversities, AIDS and health rights, and sex education. Taken together these are major fields of contestation and conflicts. Complex as these divides are, we can see a potential for polarization between traditionalists who seek the maintenance of old values, usually religious; and progressivists, who seek change. How are we to advance on such conflicts? Here I have two imaginaries of hope: intimate citizenship (Plummer, 2003) and cosmopolitan sexualities (Plummer, 2015). For the rest of this article I want to explore some of the features of the latter.

What is cosmopolitan sexualities? While there is very long history of cosmopolitanism, the idea of cosmopolitan sexualities is relatively new and under explored. Cosmopolitan sexualities suggests new imaginations, imaginaries and institutions for living globally with gender, sexual and intimate variety. It starts with an awareness of (a) a long history of debates about cosmopolitanism, which this volume clearly illustrates; and (b) the facts of global sexual, intimate and gender variety that are now very well documented (e.g. Ford and Beach, 1952; Therborn, 2004; Aggleton, Boyce, Moore and Parker, 2012; Plummer, 2012a, 2015; Parker, Petchesky and Sember, 2008). I will not rehearse any of this here. Cosmopolitanism always seeks to create bridges across differences. So the foundation of any project of cosmopolitan sexualities project is to establish what these grounds of difference might be. What are the kinds of conflict that need resolution before we can move towards cosmopolitan 224

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sexualities? Many issues appear as sites of confrontation. We confront differences of desire: of what sexually excites or fails to excite – from same sex to other sex, from self to objects, from passivity to activity; differences of gender – of how we play out the modalities and challenges of varying masculinities and femininities; differences of relationships – of how we connect to each other – coercively or voluntarily, monogamously or poly-amorously, lovingly or full of malice; differences of reproduction – of how we give birth to others and the conflicts over abortion and the new reproductive technologies; differences of representation – of how we speak about and present our sexualities to ourselves and across groups; differences of disease: of global pandemics like AIDS and old horrors like syphilis and the ways we can handle them; differences in danger – of violence, coercion, rape, abuse and sexual murder – and the many kinds of threats and dehumanization we experience around our sexualities. Surveying these tensions, cosmopolitan sexualities looks with alarm at how differences in human sexualities and intimacies can generate such huge (and unnecessary) human conflicts and sufferings through people’s unwillingness to negotiate ways of living across differences. It might be claimed that over history vast swathes of people have lived damaged, mutilated or wasted lives because of the failure to deal with these problems (Bauman, 2003). It asks therefore: how can we establish ways of living together with our sexual, gender and intimate differences? More abstractly: how can we bridge our specific pluralistic sexual and gendered individualities with a common humanity? How can we connect our unique sexual and gender differences with collective values, our uniqueness with multiple group coherence? Cosmopolitan sexualities brings a social imaginary, a sense of new institutions and as ever, a critical imagination. Arising from ubiquitous and perpetual conflicts about our intimate differences, it seeks a recognition that these sexual differences are surely part of what is meant by being human, and looks for the building of social structures of social solidarity of reciprocal inter- and intracultural awareness of sexual differences, ultimately becoming enshrined in rights, institutions and everyday practices. At its core, much cosmopolitan thinking adopts some version of a critical humanism: it starts from some sense of a complex, embodied, emotional, multiple and contingent human creature who acts in the world, one who is ultimately grounded in certain dynamic plural values like care, dialogic empathy and compassion for others, human dignities, justice and rights (Plummer, 2012b, 2015). Of course, these will always be contested, open to dialogue and debate, will never finally be resolved: but there is also a long genealogy behind all these ideas, and they can usefully serve as the start for working towards common grounds (e.g. Joas, 2013; Kitcher, 2011). Out of this, we can also sense the beginning of a global ethics that believes in a world community of different lives living and flourishing together well; and global institutions that could develop frameworks of international conducts and laws for organizing diverse sexualities in the modern world. Through all this, cosmopolitan sexualities develops a long-term imagination of ‘openness’ and ‘tolerance’ towards sexual differences; an agonistic political awareness of sexual differences connecting local political struggles with global ones through dialogue and a search for a grounded common humanity; and a social psychology that recognizes tangled emotional, biographical and vulnerable bodies, cultivating critical self-awareness, empathy and dialogue, and bringing a capacity to live with these sexual differences through a ‘circle of others’ spreading across the globe. Cosmopolitan sexualities will develop both locally and globally. Establishing cosmopolitan sexualities at a local level is almost a precondition of the development of a global one. It will also depend upon the development of social structures – most likely ‘democracies’ – that allow for diversities, autonomy and freedom to flourish. Certain kinds of social order – those that are authoritarian, closed, dictatorial, ruled by despots and religious absolutisms – are not easily conducive to the openness and diversities that are part of cosmopolitan sexualities. Put like this, 225

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cosmopolitan sexualities starts to sound more like a utopian imaginary than a grounded practice! And yet there have undoubtedly been some practical activities that have taken us in this direction. I consider some of them below.

Protagonists and movements Behind all modern cosmopolitanism, there is likely to be agitation and activism. Arising in opposition to dominant orders, much political activity of the modern political world is shaped by social movements (Tilly, 2004). At least since the French Revolution, movements bring about social change, and sometimes democratization. Gender and sexual politics entered the earliest of these movements through their focus on issues of family, and health – appearing first locally, then nationally and ultimately internationally. Those dealing with gender issues would initially build on an embryonic women’s movement. The women’s movement has a history spanning nearly two hundred years, moving through various ‘waves’ (first, second and third wave feminisms), confronting various schismatic splits (classically between liberals, socialists and radicals) and moving largely from being Western focused to being international. In the mid 1970s a convergence of the women’s movement, the human rights movement and the post-colonial movement led to the designation by the UN of 1975 as the International Year of Women. From this the decade 1975–1985 became the UN Decade of Women, and what this managed to do was bring women from all round the world together for the first time, especially from low-income countries. From here, the women’s movement moved into the mainstream of UN activities with the passage in 1979 of The Convention to Eliminate all Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW). Often seen as the International Bill of Women’s Rights, this became a benchmark for global social change. ‘Gender mainstreaming’ was adopted by the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Women, reaffirmed at the Beijing World Conference on Women, 1995 and became a buzzword for the next decade or so. And now, in the twenty-first century, the women’s movement engages with a multitude of global issues from women’s rights to education, health and work to more controversial issues like female genital mutilation, child marriage, polygyny, reproductive rights, sexual rights and sexual violence in countries as different as Zimbabwe, Poland and Mexico. Many new global movements have appeared to address specific problems – the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women (GAATW), and the Global Campaign for Violence Prevention (GCVP) among others. More than this, women’s movements are now found in nearly all countries around the world developing their own agendas (Rupp, 1997; Petchesky, 2003; Corrěa, Petchesky and Parker, 2008). But other movements were in the making. The earliest ‘homophile’ was a small and somewhat secretive movement: it was after all illegal and taboo. There is an early history in the Netherlands, France, Germany and the UK where seeds were sown; and the Modern Western Gay Movement is usually dated from the late 1960s and symbolized by the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York. Soon there was plenty going on around the world. Argentina has probably the oldest movement in Latin America – founded by Héctor Anabitarte in 1969 (Nuestro Mundo [Our World]), and closely aligned to the revolutionary left (as gay movements frequently were). In Brazil, the gay movement developed a decade later in São Paulo as Grupo Somos. In India the most prominent group arose out of HIV/AIDS crisis: the Naz Foundation formed in 1994 as a NGO based in New Delhi (but became an international movement). Today gay movements (by whatever name) can be found in most countries across the world, though often covertly. Change is in the air; and to try to make widespread international connections on gay issues, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) was established in 1978 in the UK, developing a European branch in 226

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1986. ILGA is now the major global organization publishing an annual report on State Sponsored Homophobia (Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel, 1998; Tremblay, Paternotte and Johnson, 2011; Paternotte and Tremblay, 2015, ILGA, 2017). There are other connections. A significant cluster of movements must be those found within the world health movement: initially with global family planning, with children’s and women’s health and reproductive care; later from the early 1980s, with the crisis of HIV and AIDS demanding responses from each country. Not all movements are progressive. Many seek a return to more traditional and more conservative orders: there are very many pro-family, anti-feminist, anti-gay and right-wing movements here too. Despite their presence and their power, these social movements are rarely discussed, often not even mentioned, in studies of both social movements and civic society. Yet they are omnipresent and act as counterforces to progressive change, being major harbingers of conservatism and traditional gender and sexuality. Some such organizations include United Families International, Family Action Council International, the Howard Center/World Congress of Families Alliance for Marriage. Clifford Bob’s The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (2012) claims that there is now a ‘global morality market’ with its own global ‘merchants of morality’, and within this there is a potent alliance formed between Muslims and Christians working in defence of the traditional gendered patriarchal family (the Baptist-Burqha Network as he calls it). This alliance sets up a major stumbling block for what might be called the ‘Cosmo’ Project. At their most extreme and violent there are movements such as Boko Haram responsible for thousands of deaths. Most recently we have seen the rise of the Anti Gender Movement (Kumar & Paternotte, 2017).

Global animations: creating world institutions for a conversation The making of human worlds is one of the central activities of human beings (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). Having critically imagined a world where people could live together with their sexual and gender differences, the challenge is how to make it. We have seen a major step in the development of social movements around gender, sexualities and intimacy that start locally but can then move into international arenas. Ultimately, new stories and arguments will be developed, along with new identities, through the gradual recognition of the growth of global social movements. Such movements will soon find themselves confronting counter movements and arguments; in this case usually traditional religions will revolt against such arguments. Conflict ensues. Dialogues become a possibility. This is the foundation of an agonistic politics (Wenman, 2013). What we see in the current moment, and why cosmopolitan sexualities becomes at least a possibility, is that for the first time in history it has become possible for large numbers of people across the globe to readily speak politically across many different cultures about their varying sexualities, relationships and desires, to share information of all kinds directly with each other, and to make ‘open’ or ‘fluid’ contacts. We can see this across many developments including world governance, multifaith organizations, transnational global social movements, and in the new social media found in the global digital sphere. Take one example: how new social media shapes the new global sexual politics (Castells, 2012). This media provides an impetus for new information routes about sexualities and generates new political practices and global networks of political connectivity. For example, social networking has greatly raised the intercultural awareness of plural genders and sexualities: feminist ideas, queer radicalism and issues of ‘rights’ move online around the world, even as they change in the process. Google and mobile phones become the new mode of talking across the world. At the same time, of course, right-wing and intolerant groups are also on the rise in these media; and 227

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there are also many countries that place restrictions, and a few (notably China, Iran, Syria, Vietnam and Bahrain – named the five enemies of the internet in 2013) are intensely regulative. Still, the new global sexual network of connectivity means that global sexual politics changes rapidly. Many of the old barriers to communication and action have collapsed; and people are open to new ways of gathering: there is talk of a new ‘fluid’ emotional ‘choreography’, an emphasis too on performance and emotions. It has been seen at work in places as far apart as Pussy Galore and All Out in Russia, with Stop the Gays Bill in Nigeria, and with tensions in Singapore, India and in South America. In the world of sexual politics, the women’s movement, the gay, queer, transgender movements (and their responsive conservative counterparts) have gotten mobilized. Most countries now have their own ‘feminist’ and ‘queer’ internet connections (and have had so for several decades: they are well established), and even in countries where they may be deemed illegal, alternative and underground connectivity is made (e.g. Dasgupta, 2017).

Creating global human rights regimes and global intimate citizenship Much contemporary cosmopolitan talk depends on the language of human rights and its modern fashioning in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Not surprisingly, ideas of rights have also been of widespread importance in the developing of cosmopolitan sexualities, providing a core, if contested, possible common ground. Ideas of ‘sexual rights’ (and ideas of ‘gender rights’ and ‘sexual orientation’) started to be pioneered in the late nineteenth century. In the earliest days of the United Nations Human Rights Council, such concerns could never be raised. Instead, issues were raised obliquely on debates on health, family, children and eventually ‘equality between the sexes’. Gradually ideas of rights moved across a range of contested areas and consolidated both women’s reproductive rights and women’s concerns with violence. And, as these rights themselves had to confront sexual issues, so sexual rights moved onto the agenda. By the 1990s it had become “the new kid on the block” (Petchesky, 2000). It became an organizing focus for social movements both conservative and radical; and as new alliances were made, new zones of conflict and arguments on the nature of human sexualities entered the public global stage at the United Nations and elsewhere. A stream of debates around women’s rights, reproduction and fertility and abortion (which became known as ‘reproductive politics’), children’s rights, sexual violence and HIV/AIDS gradually established a space for a language of sexual rights. Espoused initially by women’s groups, then by HIV/AIDS groups and gay and lesbian lobbies (like International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA, 2017] and the Sexual Rights Initiative [SRI]) and latterly by human rights movements such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the main antagonists have always been the conservative wings of religious and family movements, creating strange ‘unholy alliances’ between the Holy See and the Traditional Mullahs through the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). By contrast, a broad programme of gay, lesbian and transgender rights have been more readily put into place through the European Union through the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999, the Strasbourg Court and Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2009. In the field of sexual rights, CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women) was an early example in 1979; and it has become progressively established. Likewise, in 2006 the Yogyakarta Principles (2006) were developed by 29 world human rights experts on sexual orientation and gender identity issues, and moved towards affirming binding international legal standards with which all States must ‘gradually’, ‘progressively’ comply. Out of all this, we could start to sense the fostering of a global dialogic intimate citizenship and the beginnings of conditions for common grounds and good dialogues around human intimacies (Plummer, 2003; Vivienne, 2016). But much more: what we also started to see was the facilitation 228

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of a universal empathy towards sexual differences across and within cultures (part perhaps of a wider cosmopolitan sensibility detected by Jeremy Rifkin [2009] as a movement towards an ‘empathic civilization’). Along with this comes common languages and modes of speaking of sexual differences across cultures. And out of all this global activity, almost unwittingly, we get a glimpse of a new possible normative global order emerging of putative global discourses of shared humanities. However successful or not this may be, the languages of human dignity and rights, of child protection, of women’s equality, of reducing world poverty and misery, of peace-making, of human development, of security and so forth have surely become part of the routine everyday language of bodies like the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and many international conferences. They have been mainstreamed into it. In just half a century we have seen the formation of a global discourse for a common humanity, a world aiming to give people their dignity (Friedman, 2011; Mazlish, 2009). None of this is binding; huge swathes of people do not like it; it flies in the face of much history; it is riddled with problems: but its presence and influence cannot be in dispute. And as it spreads out: it can be found too in the global education movement, the global interfaith movement, the global music movement and across many social movement worlds. At the highest level, it may now be possible to speak of the reaching out for a common human global ethics on which many have already started to agree (Van Hooft, 2009; Tremblay, 2009; Widdows, 2011). And a growing part of this has been the language of human sexual rights, human sexual justice and human sexual flourishing. An imaginary cosmopolitan sexualities starts to look more grounded.

Facing critical problems This is all very hopeful! But cosmopolitanism is a troubled intellectual project and always an easy target for critics. Elsewhere I have suggested a litany of problems that cosmopolitan sexualities faces. In effect, they are the same problems that all cosmopolitanisms face, revealed elsewhere in this volume. Here I summarize them rather dramatically: Cosmopolitanism brings a utopianism in the face of more pragmatic and practical politics; it brings internationalism in the face of major local claims; it brings elitism when confronted with grass roots politics; it brings a tendency towards abstractions and theory in the face of grounded sufferings. Above all, it brings into focus a tension between a cosmopolitan spirit of pluralism and openness tolerant of human variety and a simultaneous belief in absolute universal values of truth and ethics. Here, and all the time, we walk a fine, fine line of contradictory tensions between the general and the specific: between particularism and universalism, the local and global, the relativist and absolutist, the abstract and grounded, the essentialist and constructionist, the utopian and the realist. (Plummer, 2015: p. 89) I have no space here to review all these problems; I will just focus on one. This is the classic problem of universalism. Many universalistic claims favoured by cosmopolitan theorists regularly come from the rich North or the ‘advanced’ West who then become imperialistic over the poorer south and east. Cosmopolitanism can easily become a symbol of the West’s hegemony and cruelty (e.g. Chea, 2006). The so-called ‘universal’ just becomes another colonizing version of neo-liberalism specificity, the white Western-centric middle class manqué. The ‘universal’ becomes a new homogenizing view that co-opts and dominates ‘the other’, rather than being an attempt to create innovative human bonds and belonging through difference. It can readily become a racializing tendency to suppress 229

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a ‘savage, racial or ignorant other’: Muslim women come to be seen as victims brutalized by their religion and Africans are seen as homophobes failing to understand homosexuality or gay rights. Ultimately, much cosmopolitanism in the past has been like this: suggesting progress towards a Western liberal citizenship and disavowing non-Western cultures (i.e. most of the world). It is not surprising that many of these countries have made strong arguments against the UN and its rights models as being too Western. Consider the example of ‘gay rights’, which is now on its way to being accepted as a global human right by the United Nations since the creation of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007. Pro-Palestine Middle East academic Joseph A. Massad (2002, 2007), examining the history of same-sex relations in Arab culture, has argued forcefully that “gay rights” are claims made by a Western movement, orchestrated by what he calls “The Gay International”, to universalize the specific case of Western gay rights to the rest of the world. These may not be at all applicable to Arab cultures coming from very different histories and backgrounds (which he claims have historically accepted same-sex relations organized in a very different way). Indeed ‘gay rights’ itself has caused a backlash as these groups work with ‘orientalist’, not Muslim frames. He says: What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the third) world is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by third world elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible. (2007: pp. 49–50) Massad has a major point. That said, more recently it could be claimed that the lead in promoting gay rights and challenging laws around homosexuality has moved from the West to the South. There are now many Latin American and Asian countries that take a very positive lead in challenging the oppressions of people with different sexual lives. They are aware of the critics, drawing back a little from the West, moving ahead with their own arguments and original political claims, and then making bridges back to earlier arguments. In some ways, this becomes a model of how cosmopolitanism can work. We can see this clearly in Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan and parts of Africa (e.g. Corrales and Pecheny, 2010; Epprecht, 2013; Jackson, Martin, McLelland and Yue, 2008; Kapur, 2005; Kong, 2011; Tamale, 2011; Wieringa and Sivori, 2013). Some take these arguments further, suggesting that the US gay movement has fostered a growing Islamophobia within its global queer organizing. Through this it cultivates a form of ‘homo-nationalism’ that marks out the ‘properly hetero’, and now ‘properly homo’, US patriots from ‘the other’: And this ‘other’ becomes the dangerous racialized terrorist and the sexualized enemy (Puar, 2007). And there are parallel problems with feminism and women’s rights. The rise of a global women’s movement has long posed many dilemmas about just how far the claims of the Western woman can be linked to those of non-Western cultures and the creation of a ‘third world female subject’ (often a victim). In Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003) words, it has led to a feminism that is beyond ‘Western eyes’, a “decolonizing feminism”. Here, the very ideas of ‘care’, ‘justice’ or ‘rights’ come to mean very different things in different cultures. Indeed, looking at the work of women’s movements in many cultures suggest the obvious: there are some things they work for in common and yet there are many very specifically different tensions: the history of the Iranian Women’s Movement is a classic case (e.g. Barlow, 2012). So where might this lead us? It is far from a new problem. Ruth Lister seeks what she calls a “differentiated universalism” – “a universalism that stands in a creative tension to diversity 230

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and difference and that challenges the divisions and exclusionary inequalities which stem from this diversity” (Lister, 1997: p. 66; Kymlicka, 2000). A differentiated universalism seems a useful concept. It suggests moving between very detailed, local, unique and differentiated knowledge of specific cultures and making a linkage with their wider contexts: of general awareness, common grounds, universal principles, abstractions. Cosmopolitanism needs a globalization which creates diversification and heterogeneity rather than pushing for homogeneity and essentialist categories. There can be neither ‘centre’ nor core to cosmopolitanism; and yet it is very hard to work from a position that is ‘nowhere’. Still, in the twenty-first century, many ideas are being developed to help us move beyond the fixed one stance view: not just ‘differentiated universalism’, but also, shifting positions, multiple stances, contested tensions, mobile knowledge, hybrid views, relationalism, and connectivity. The struggle is on to find new ways to capture the diversities of multiple voices at work together. These changes are important and constantly serve as a reminder of the potential arrogance of that small part of the world known as ‘the West’ that persistently claims itself to be best or right. Cosmopolitanism must knowingly challenge this arrogance, asking questions about the ways narrow Western (largely Anglo-American) ideas ooze through the world shaping an intellectual hegemony. These are everywhere challenged by the differences of other cultures. Yet these other cultures also harbour troubles, and the need is to simultaneously, critically and paradoxically look for the common grounds of our humanities – those slender golden threads that tie human life together – even as we accept the deep world of human differences.

The future of cosmopolitan sexualities? In just half a century we have seen the formation of a global discourse for a common, caring gender and sexual humanities, a world aiming to give people – women, LGBT, queer people – their equality and their dignity. At the most general level, whether successful or not, the languages of human dignity and rights, of child protection, of women’s equality, of reducing world poverty and misery, of peace-making, of human development, of security and even of ‘love’ have surely become part of the routine everyday language of bodies like the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and many international conferences. They have mainstreamed humanity. These changes have been slow and falteringly uneven, and the future brings many problems. Indeed, as I write there are many omens of the optimistic moments ending and darker moments appearing. For much of my life I have seen a slow but steady progress in the development of cosmopolitan sexualities. I have tracked a little of this growth in this article. But recent world developments suggest a tragic rightwards leaning of the world. Is the world regressing? (Geiselberger, 2017). There are omens that the optimistic moments I discuss above are under threat, and a darker world reappearing. In this world, opposition and outright hostility is generated towards sexual radicalism and liberalism, gender equality and the rights of sexual and gender minorities. Activisms around abortion, reproductive health and technologies, marriage equality, sex education and transgender rights all come under attack (e.g. Altman and Symons, 2016; Kuhar and Patternotte, 2017). That said, it must be claimed that the new millennium has brought a partial success to the story of cosmopolitan sexualities: there have been real changes in gender and sexualities that only the most fanciful utopians could ever have dreamed about in the past. There are now Muslim women debating their subordination and conservative Christians debating gay marriage rights! With new institutions have come new languages, debates, networks, practices, beliefs and hopes that have emerged from and diffused through many differentiated cultures. Not all cultures for 231

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sure, and with very differing impacts; but there is much more than could perhaps have ever been imagined just a little while back.

Note In this article, I draw heavily from two earlier works: Plummer (2003), Plummer (2015). Over the years, my ideas on cosmopolitanism have been implicitly shaped by the many fine works on cosmopolitanism by Anthony Appiah, Ulrich Beck, Seyla Benhabib, Gerard Delanty, Robert Fine, Robert Holton, Stan Van Hooft, Mica Nava, Martha Nussbaum, Adam Smith, Bryan S. Turner, Nira Yuval-Davis and many others. I use their ideas to start throwing light on what a critical cosmopolitan sexualities might look like.

References Adam, Barry, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Andre Krouwel eds (1998) Global Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Politics: National Imprints of a World-Wide Movement, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Aggleton, Peter, Paul Boyce, Henrietta Moore and Richard Parker eds (2012) Understanding Global Sexualities, London: Routledge. Altman, Dennis and Jonathan Symons (2016) Queer Wars: The New Polarization over Gay Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press. Barlow, Rebecca L. (2012) Women’s Human Rights and the Muslim Question, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2003) Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity Press. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann (1967) The Social Construction of Reality, London: Allen Lane. Bob, Clifford (2012) The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castells, Manuel (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Chea, Phen (2006) Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corrales, Javier and Mario Pecheny eds (2010) The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Corrěa, Sonia, Rosalind Petchesky and Richard Parker (2008) Sexuality, Health and Human Rights, London: Routledge. Dasgupta, Rohit K. (2017) Digital Queer Cultures in India: Politics, Intimacies and Belonging, London: Routledge. Epprecht, Marc (2013) Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa: Rethinking Homophobia and Forging Resistances, London: Zed Books. Ford, Clellan S. and Frank A. Beach (1952/65) Patterns of Sexual Behaviour, Suffolk: Eyre and Spottiswood. Friedman, Lawrence M. (2011) The Human Rights Culture: A Study in History and Context, New Orleans: Quid Pro Books. Geiselberger, Heinrich ed (2017) The Great Regression, Cambridge: Polity Press. ILGA (2017) State Sponsored Homophobia, 2017. A World Survey of Sexual Orientation Laws: Criminalisation, Protection and Recognition. Online at http://ilga.org/what-we-do/state-sponsored-homophobia-report/ Jackson, Peter, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland and Audrey Yue eds (2008) Asia Pacific Queer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Joas, Hans (2013) The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Kapur, Ratna (2005) Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Glasshouse Press. Kitcher, Philip (2011) The Ethical Project, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kong, Travis S.K. (2011) Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tonghzi and Golden Boy, London: Routledge. Kuhar, Roman and David Patternotte eds (2017) Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Kymlicka, Will (1995, 2000) Multicultural Citizenship, Oxford: Clarendon. Lister, Ruth (1997, 2017) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, 2nd ed 2017, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Massad, Joseph A. (2002) ‘Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab world’, Public Culture, 14: 361–85.

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Massad, Joseph A. (2007) Desiring Arabs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mazlish, Bruce (2009) The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham: Duke University Press. Parker, Richard, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky and Robert Sember (2008) Sex Politics: Reports from the Front Lines. Sexuality Policy Watch Report. Online at www.sxpolitics.org/frontlines/book/pdf/sexpolitics.pdf Patternotte, David and Manon Tremblay eds (2015) The Ashgate Research Companion to Lesbian and Gay Activism, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack (2000) ‘Sexual Rights: Inventing a Concept, Mapping an International Practice’, in Richard Parker, Regina Maria Barbosa and Peter Aggleton eds, Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power, Berkeley: University of California Press. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack (2003) Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights, London: Zed Books. Plummer, Ken (2003) Intimate Citizenship: Personal Decisions and Public Dialogues, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Plummer, Ken (2012a) ‘Critical Sexualities Studies’ 1st edition, in George Ritzer ed, Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Sociology, Chichester: Blackwell, pp. 243–68. Plummer, Ken (2012b) ‘A Manifesto for Critical Humanism in Sociology: On Questioning the Human Social World’, in Daniel Nehring ed, Sociology, Harlow: Pearson/Routledge, pp. 489–517. Plummer, Ken (2015) Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Hope and the Humanist Imagination, Cambridge: Polity Press. Puar, Jasbir K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke University Press. Rifkin, Jeremy (2009) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World of Crisis, Cambridge: Polity. Rupp, Leila (1997) Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sassen, Saskia (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Press. Tamale, Sylvia ed (2011) African Sexualities, Cape Town: Pambazuka Press. Therborn, Göran (2004) Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000, London: Routledge. Tilly, Charles (2004) Social Movements 1768–2004, London: Paradigm. Tremblay, Mannon, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson eds (2011) The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Tremblay, Rodrique (2009) The Code for Global Ethics: Toward a Humanist Civilization, Victoria, DC: Trafford. Van Hooft, Stan (2009) Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics, Stocksfield: Acumen. Vivienne, Sonja (2016) ‘Intimate Citizenship 3.0’, in Anthony McCosker et al. eds, Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture, London: Rowman & Littlefield pp. 147–65. Wenman, Mark (2013) Agonistic Democracy, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Widdows, Heather (2011) Global Ethics: An Introduction, Durham: Sadler Press. Wieringa, Sakia and Horacio Sivori eds (2013) The Sexual History of the Global South: Sexual Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America, London: Zed Books. Yogyakarta (2006) The Yogyakarta Principles. Online at www.wow.com/wiki/Yogyakarta_Principles?s_chn= 90&s_pt=source2&s_gl=US&v_t=content

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Cosmopolitan theory as applied to education has received sustained and energetic interest. As I found in a study of philosophy of education journals from 2000–2011, cosmopolitanism was the sixth most-referenced theory behind such concepts as liberalism, postmodernism, and pragmatism, and ahead of such concepts as realism, multiculturalism, and humanism (2012a). This interest has resulted in attempts to define, describe, explain, and circumscribe the field of cosmopolitan education. Most of these attempts have relied on philosophical conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism as applied to morality and politics, utilizing various sub-groupings therein. In the field of educational theory and philosophy most articles on cosmopolitanism include references to Diogenes and his profession to be a citizen of the world and the typology of cosmopolitanism constructed by Pauline Kleingeld (1999; Kleingeld and Brown, 2013). Such research owes a great debt to this typology, which has made it possible for interesting and thought-provoking questions to be asked in the attempt to understand cosmopolitan philosophy in education. However, as the body of research on cosmopolitan education grows and questions are asked in response to both that research and emerging conditions in the world and education, it has become apparent that the existing categories may not adequately serve the needs of present and future research. Kleingeld originally formulated a list of six types of cosmopolitanism – moral, political, legal, cultural, market, and romantic – by examining 18th-century German cosmopolitan theory (1780–1800) that emerged in response to that period’s “public debate about cosmopolitanism, nationhood, and patriotism” (Kleingeld, 1999: 506). Kleingeld and Brown have further revised down the original list to four broader categories – moral, political, cultural, economic – that retain much of their original characteristics, but are informed by more comprehensive historical and disciplinary examples (Kleingeld and Brown, 2013). In contrast, the recent increase in scholarship on cosmopolitanism can be attributed largely to the effects of globalization and the increased connectedness of global networks, national economies, and persons. This research reveals distinctly clear and different categorizations of cosmopolitan education debates for which the existing categories may no longer be adequate. What follows is a thematic organization of cosmopolitanism in education that aims to represent existing and traditional conceptions of cosmopolitanism in education while also providing scholars with a framework to move beyond definitional and descriptive purposes and delve more deeply into more specific and nuanced questions of cosmopolitan philosophy’s role in education. 234

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Identity While culture has long played a role in cosmopolitanism, educational scholarship has emphasized individual identities within cultural contexts. Diogenes’s response is one that contains not only a description of his metaphoric legal citizenship status, but also a self-conception of who he is: his identity as a human is fundamental (Roth, 2011). Costa (2005) distinguishes between a “Oneperson-one-culture” model – which requires a preservationist reverence for a culture – and a “One-person-many-fragments” model – which accepts heterogeneity of cultural influences and is open to finding common norms (p. 255). The latter conception can more easily avoid the absolutist claims of unchanging and impermeable identities as well as reject wholesale hegemonic assimilation, and adopts a more flexible approach to identity. Culture and identity become adaptively intertwined, and where one is the object of inquiry, the other is as present as a shadow. Increased mobility and migration demands that individuals develop multiple identities to match their past, present, and evolving circumstances. Osler and Starkey (2003) suggest an educational program to produce “educated cosmopolitan citizens” who “will be confident in their own identities and will work to achieve peace, human rights and democracy within the local community and at a global level” (p. 246). This compels students to recognize that their identities are shaped not only by personal experiences and cultural traditions, but that others’ identities are as well. A deeper understanding of the origins of identities, one’s own and others’, goes well beyond simply learning about identities, requiring a flexible, adaptive approach, and encouraging the use of personal narratives. But how are these identities realized in practice? For instance, the preoccupation with human rights education’s emphasis on developing world citizens complicates the constructions of cohesive narratives where individual, national, and global identities intersect (Adami, 2014). Identity plays a core role in international educational cosmopolitanism, drawing distinctions between culture as we typically understand it in the social, ethnic, and linguistic sense and the culture that can develop in certain settings that transcend these others. Many students in international schools move frequently and thus experience an internal global diversity of other students in these schools. They are not immersed in any one culture for long, including their parents’ culture, and yet manage to create an identity through constant interactions with other students in similar circumstances. As a result, they develop a third culture identity that is dynamically constructed; a flexibly receptive and adjustable identity that is the result of a cosmopolitan process (Gunesch, 2004). For students collaborating cross-nationally, the influence their identities have are not monolithic, but can take varying forms based on their perceived relationship with the Other, adopting a proximal, reflexive, or reciprocal stance in communication strategies (Hull and Stornaiuolo, 2014). Further, as Cason notes in this volume, their experiences may result in a disposition that desires heterogeneity in their lived lives. Multicultural education programs that seek to maintain the survival of cultures can also illustrate how cosmopolitan identity might work. That survival goal treats culture as static and may apply a fixed identity to children from a culture that may prove to be more offensive than simply ignoring the children’s culture (McDonough, 1997). A rigid, applied identity does not allow them to grow or adapt and redefine themselves in their own development and inhibits their ability to respond to changing conditions around them. Conceiving of a cosmopolitan orientation as open-ended and evolving could allow for the creation of hybrid identities that “weave together a variety of disparate cultural ‘fragments’” (p. 130). Constructing a cosmopolitan identity requires established sensibilities and capabilities to do so, such as the capability to critically examine one’s own identity, itself a form of flexibility. This can be difficult to do and may seem threatening to some, but it may first involve a sense of pride in one’s local identity which can be developed into 235

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other identities as parts of one’s whole, unique identity. This problem is reflected in the European Union experiment as well, where Olson (2012) notes that the move from I to we can also include exclusion. This poses a challenge to cosmopolitan proponents of universalism.

Universalism One of the most persistent problems in cosmopolitanism is that of universalism, a concept that emerges as both a justification and a criticism. Universalism illustrates “a dilemma between an abstract universalism from above versus a concrete moral commitment from below” (Strand, 2010: 233). Justifications usually begin with the core cosmopolitan tenet of universal shared humanity and spread into conceptions of the human capacity for rational thought, human rights, the interdependency of humans and groups, and the global benefits of peace and harmonious co-existence. This has influenced attempts in cosmopolitan education to “formulate the universal conditions (political, legal, and/or moral) through which coexistence can be made more democratic and more harmonious” (Todd, 2010: 216). Critics often point to the infinite subjectivity of lived lives. A theory of living that promotes the “right to rights” (Bergström, 2010: 179) that would require people to accept a universal claim with which they disagree might in fact violate that theory’s own condition of the right to one’s rights. Reimers (2017) argues that schools ought to engage in the development of cosmopolitan civic participation oriented to the global good instead of merely engaging students in acquiring personal traits of the self with the hope that these traits of self will be globally applied. At its most strident, whether in politics, economics, culture, or morality, universalism implies a one-size-fitsall ideology which conflicts with national, cultural, or religious particularities (Koczanowicz, 2010). In contrast to these problems, Hansen (2010a) compares the views of Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah to show that localized values are not necessarily threatened by cosmopolitanism and instead encourage a reflective approach to the seeming incompatibility of Nussbaum’s emphasis on “universal moral fealty” and Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitanism” (p. 154). Appiah’s moderate version allows for positive partiality that does not operate as oppositional or exclusionary. The subtle way in which this tension in cosmopolitanism is situated in education can be seen by Hansen’s distinctions between it, humanism, and multiculturalism. Multiculturalism begins with culture and community, a point that has already categorized humans and therefore separated them; cosmopolitanism starts with humanity at large, grouping everyone together. Similarly, humanism is distinct from both multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism because it organizes itself around the individual. Hansen’s strain of moderate cosmopolitanism attempts to bridge the gap that these sharply defined paradigms create. However, universalism need not subsume local traditions in all cases. As Todd (2010) notes, universal claims such as human rights, humanity, and rational communication may become subject to revision if they experience new cultural practices. This creates an adaptive universalism. These same tensions might be resolved by examining the promotion of individual ways of living while at the same time advocating for universal human rights. Koczanowicz (2010) takes the dialogue-as-bridge approach and suggests a “dialogical cosmopolitanism” that exists as “diversity and dialogue” rather than as some universal idea or mode (p. 148). This requires rethinking of conceptions of universalism; the universal may be in the openness and willingness to listen and communicate rather than in the particulars heard or stated. Such a dynamic approach seems necessary when one considers “boundary-defying emergencies” such as climate change that challenge our notions of non-universality and how to approach these issues pedagogically (Spector, 2015). Is global warming, for instance, merely a pragmatic problem of human survival, or is 236

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it a moral problem of environmental stewardship wherein we have obligations to other forms of life on the planet, too, thus expanding even our conceptions of what universal actually means? A challenge to universalism can be found in Popkewitz’s (2007) description of cosmopolitanism as an ideology that imposes order on the world (emphasizing universality in a different way), which receives curious support from Tröhler’s (2010) discussion of large-scale, global assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS). Tröhler first describes the world institutionalization of education that is responsible for the standardization of “organizational structures, compulsory schooling, curricula, and professionally trained teachers” (p. 5) which provides the foundation for cross-national, transglobal standardized assessments. Tröhler attributes this to its basis in a philosophy of harmonization that attempts to standardize structures, but in the end, does not achieve educational goals. This standardization, or universal ordering, can be seen as an outcome of the cosmopolitan ordering of a global society of reason, educators, and learners that Popkewitz identifies, seeking the organization of society rather than interactive harmony or educational improvement. Such ordering, to continue thinking with Popkewitz, even extends to the governance of human interactions where the ordered reason gets codified into laws, as is the case with human rights. Thus, strict universalism in cosmopolitan education may come to supersede the principles of cosmopolitanism philosophy itself.

Diversity Cosmopolitan proponents of diversity mount a significant challenge to universalism and human rights. Hytten (2009) reminds us that Dewey believed “diversity of perspectives is essential for growth” (p. 398) and diversity plays the same role in cosmopolitan education. If education can be broadly equated with growth, then cosmopolitan education is about world growth. Cosmopolitan education is not only useful to help students acquire an appreciation for diversity, but it can facilitate the quick changes taking place in liberal education noticed by Nussbaum, changes that are the result of meeting the challenge of increasingly diverse populations of students confronting more and more schools (Holowchak, 2009). That liberal tack need not be exclusively Western as Waghid (2014) demonstrates that meanings in Islamic education – such as learning, nurturing, and goodness – can connect with liberal conceptions of cosmopolitanism. A school that embraces unity in diversity will create a much safer space for students to explore difference and similarities. Nerland (2010) offers a pragmatic illustration showing that discourses of knowledge and learning in professional life enable workers to more productively communicate, share, and add to knowledge, particularly as the “knowledge domains of professionals” more frequently move through globalized channels rather than through corporations or nation-states (p. 184). Professional knowledge is sent through a type of diversity filter that reshapes and re-defines knowledge discourse in terms of the work, the profession, and the diverse influences of the professionals, all of which aids in the growth of knowledge and the profession. Zhao (2015) attempts to bridge the conflict by utilizing Levinas’s prioritization of the expressive use of language over its rational forms, providing linguistic diversity in the dialogue of difference. Others are concerned with institutional roles in cosmopolitan diversity. Donald (2007) reviews his university’s mission statement and observes that the school explicitly hopes to produce students who will acquire “an appreciation of, and respect for, diversity” (p. 290), the clear implication that this means recognizing the diversity of cultures. He elides the universal/particular and local/foreign debates by addressing the multiculturalist “awareness of the complexity and diversity of forms of human life that interrupts and dislocates” (p. 291) both universalist/ global and particularist/local claims that are susceptible to absolute claims about their unity or 237

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impermeability. Diversity permeates individual cultures and universal unities and blurs the lines used to draw around each, requiring a flexible approach. Golmohamad (2009) states that diversity, along with unity, identity, and social cohesion, is a global concern, and moves away from Donald’s position where lines are blurred and cites that education should strive for “unity in diversity” that might result in the “acceptance of and value in difference” (p. 477), thus allowing lines back in but de-emphasizing them. The “integrative society” consists of citizens who respect unity in diversity and maintain relationships that are collaborative and consultative rather than hierarchical (p. 478). Such a society, aiming for growth and integration, would welcome collaboration of diverse ideas, opinions, and ways of thinking and doing, promoting creativity along with growth. This can lead to a united, cohesive society/world wherein individuals can retain what is meaningful to them. But can one find meaningful diversity through immersion in localized, homogeneous conditions? Farrer and Greenspan (2015) found that international migrants to China who wish to raise their children as cosmopolitans are increasingly choosing to send their children to local, nationalist Chinese schools rather than “placeless” international schools. This conception of a cosmopolitan experience can be seen as a uniquely situated experience for an Other, otherwise inaccessible to the local “non-cosmopolitans” and may reinforce negative conceptions of “tourist cosmopolitanism.” In contrast, Papastephanou (2011) sees the necessity of trans/re-forming the self in response to cosmopolitan educational demands. Despite the variety of influences and interactions traversing the globe, Papastephanou (2005) also points to the Western domination of globalization processes that create power imbalances requiring non-Western, non-dominant cultures to adapt or be eliminated. As an example, she cites the lack of terminology to describe the influence of non-Western cultures on the Western world; there is little scholarship on Easternization for instance. Diversity, in this context, becomes a one-sided affair in which some get to choose which diverse experiences and influences to have while others are forced to have them. Forced diversity experiences may be diverse, but will they be positive or negative influences in the life of the individual so forced? As illustrated by Donald and Golmohamad, diversity does not have to be divisive; it can instead be used to find a connection. The following type, cosmopolitan agonism, illustrates a similar approach to difference, but an alternative approach to using it.

Agonism Agonism has received attention in cosmopolitan education literature for its alleged potential to increase understanding through examination of conflict and difference. By focusing on the cultural conflicts in education, Todd (2010) notes that schools are a natural site for these tensions where students from different cultures meet and expose the need for new ways of living together. “[R]eal, on-the-ground issues” centered “around questions of citizenship, belonging, and intercultural exchange” (p. 214) are the critical motivations. Todd uses the example of Muslim forms of dress in schools in many parts of Europe to illustrate how certain cultural practices, no matter how tolerant or well-meaning the society, can expose the troublesome gap in political cosmopolitanism and how the antagonism therein “might be understood on ‘cosmopolitical’ terms . . . by a critical and political approach to cosmopolitanism itself ” (p. 214). The typical cultural cosmopolitan emphasizes intercultural similarities in attempts to find universal modes of interest and communication, an emphasis that Todd thinks misses significant educational opportunities that can be found in a more agonistic approach. The conceptualization of difference and subjectivity of humans is both the problem and the solution (Zhao, 2015), a nuanced position that does not advocate actively fomenting conflict, but recognizes the educational opportunities that it might 238

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contain. Differences mean something to those who possess them and can be sites for understanding oneself and others. Agonism is also manifested in the conflict space of cosmopolitanism, but some focus on concepts of openness or “hospitality” and may reference aporia as “inquiry” and “difficulty of passage” which reveals the continuous negotiation of contradictions that are present in cross-cultural contact (Gregoriou, 2004: 264). This requires an educational process “to cultivate respect for the Other and accept possibility of assimilation by the Other . . . to translate while enduring the essential incompleteness of such a translation” (p. 264). The educational imperative is to develop this type of hospitality culture. The “difficulty of passage” conception of aporia extracts and exposes difference where it might be possible to find productive agonism whilst disputing the significance and inevitability of conflict, what Derrida conceived as absolute rather than conditional hospitality (Choo, 2014). For example, Rizvi (2010) does this as he critiques the popular “clash of civilizations” narrative that purports to explain the source of geo-political conflict as cultural rather than ideological or economic, a narrative that essentializes and naturalizes cultural conflict. Rizvi argues that promoting the simplistic views of culture clashes couches them “in absolutist and binary terms” (p. 8) which stifles debate about, and for, responses that are perceived to result from culture clashes. He places cosmopolitanism in between the conflictual intercultural exchange paradigm that views conflict as inevitable and the more hopeful agonism described by Todd. Neither a clash of civilizations-ist nor an agonist, Rizvi nevertheless proposes a pedagogical approach that “highlights both the cognitive and ethical dimensions of intercultural learning, and suggests that learning about others requires learning about ourselves” (p. 10), a difficult process that is similar to Gregoriou’s aporia. Donald (2007) concluded that his university’s desire to produce a cosmopolitan graduate who has developed an “appreciation of, and respect for, diversity” requires “a capacity for agonistic respect” (p. 295; emphasis mine). Agonism helps people maintain distance between each other, while respect invokes self-limits that govern interactions. This self-regulatory concept contains strong Kantian and Stoic influences, one that is consistent in cosmopolitan theory and squares with a moderate approach, linguistically aligned through the concept of self-moderation. Unlike Rizvi, Donald sees these cross-cultural relationships as necessarily agonistic, but like Rizvi not necessarily conflict-laden. Donald could (but does not) speak for Todd, Gregoriou, and Rizvi when he posits an education that engages students “in a process of conversation and negotiation across the difference: a difficult process that entails a capacity for narrative imagination, creative understanding, cultural translation and agnostic respect” (p. 306). The fact that none of the above can take place without dialogue leads to another prevalent theme in cosmopolitan education literature.

Dialogue Dialogue seems an obvious concept for a philosophy that promotes engagement, interaction, understanding, and respect; how can any of these occur without communication? Most scholars of cosmopolitanism admit the importance of communication and dialogue. Hansen et al. (2009; see also Hansen, 2010b) consider dialogue to be a vital form of life that enables one to simultaneously gain reflective distance and remain attached to one’s values. This distance can help suspend judgment in order to learn about and understand the other. The very fact of difference triggers dialogue to explore the difference. This exploration can be highly educative and promotes growth through discovering other people and other modes of interaction. Conceptions of cosmopolitan dialogue have taken nuanced turns. Dialogical cosmopolitanism (Koczanowicz, 2010) is form that fosters inquiry into complex relationships that exist between different cultures and points of view, envisioning a cross-cultural cosmopolitanism that unifies 239

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diversity rather than one that unifies norms. This vision of cosmopolitanism expresses a dynamic, ongoing conversation of divergent points of view as inquiry and interest as opposed to justification and dominance, which combines nicely with the idea that one should recognize agonistic realities. This moderate approach does not aim for a predetermined outcome, but rather to uncover an emerging “never-ending story” that constructs a whole that proposes to find the unity in diversity expressed by Golmohamad. Dialogue holds the promise of hope in possibilities that cannot be realized without its exploration (Hytten, 2009), but not without the desire to take on the role of the other (Koczanowicz). For instance, Hytten cites the polarized debate about globalization as an example of how the shape of the discourse can inhibit or terminate constructive dialogue because it is seen not as a means to learn and understand the other, but as a means to win an argument and dominate the other. It is vital for cosmopolitan education to communicate the idea that dialogue is a collaborative process of growth rather than a competitive process of conquest. Rönnström (2010) complicates the picture of dialogue as bridge-builder by questioning the assumption that people must have access to some kind of shared language for education and cosmopolitanism to occur, and refers to discourse ethics as an example of this assumption. He cites research that indicates language is based on “idiolects” (languages only one person speaks) (p. 7), which more accurately describes language within the same linguistic community. Additionally, Todd (2015) complicates the dialogic promise by conceiving of difference and facing our humanity as an existential problem, and posits the reconception of dialogue as conversation because it possesses an open-mindedness that dialogue might not possess. Both of these ideas look to be problems for dialogic cosmopolitanism because they suggest limits to what dialogue can accomplish. Regarding language, cosmopolitan actors can both co-exist and learn to understand others while accepting both the unfamiliar forms of communication and one not laden with dialogic agendas. Dialogue, even when fraught with different language, meaning, and purposes can still be effective in communicating, exploring, and learning about and with another person. For most dialogic cosmopolitans, it is not necessary for effective communication to take place. Cosmopolitan dialogue (or conversation) can retain respect for cultural and individual particulars of language and communication while still holding to a universal concept of constructive and collaborative dialogue.

Virtue (moral) As we near the end of this survey of cosmopolitan education it may seem that virtue and character have been largely absent, but the cosmopolitan educational project leads to a significant emphasis on the development of a cosmopolitan character or cosmopolitan virtue. This link is betrayed by cosmopolitanism’s origins in Stoic philosophy, which was keenly interested in the normative dimensions of human behavior. The Stoics saw the lack of virtue as an illness to be cured. This magnanimous (and slightly compassionate, though not uncondescending) view comports with commonly attributed cosmopolitan traits of tolerance, respect, openness, and a willingness to engage with others regardless of the particularities of their conditions (race, religion, culture, and here, health). This metaphor even extends to the correct diagnosis of the student by the teacher. Not unlike a physician, the teacher must know what his student needs and should apply only the appropriate treatment. This requires attention and communication, and brings the cosmopolitan virtue education project into the arc of collaborative dialogue and engagement. This also requires of the student a desire to develop her rational capacities in order to understand how she is to act.

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Cosmopolitan education is inherently positioned to affect the character of a student because deliberative nature of humans is directly responsible for character formation. Starting with Kant, Roth (2011) explains that a person cannot avoid being deliberative because of “the reflective structure of our mind” (p. 3), and this deliberative nature contributes to an obligation to take responsibility, which takes shape in the duty we feel to our self-legislated moral law. Having the “moral strength or virtue to fulfill” one’s duty is the determinant of character. Cosmopolitan education must develop the appropriate capabilities to form the character or disposition that will deliberate and act according to moral duty (p. 8). Kristjansson (2002) examined different approaches to character education and determined that formalist and subjectivist accounts of character education offer too little for students to learn, and more expansive and inclusive accounts offer too much that becomes contradictory in its plurality of values. Instead, he suggests that character education should occupy a middle ground that acknowledges the single-species aspect of our humanity and the resulting necessity of “a minimal set of common virtues” (p. 155), and thus falls in line with more moderate versions of cosmopolitan education. The question remains: Which virtues? In trying to identify cosmopolitan virtues, Waghid and Smeyers (2010) encounter an apparent paradox in cosmopolitanism and virtue using the Kantian identification of the right to hospitality. There might be a cultural practice that contradicts hospitality, one that cosmopolitanism would be loath to condemn, resulting in the support of competing and contradictory practices. Also, if hospitality as a cosmopolitan practice is virtuous, then cosmopolitanism makes a moral claim (p. 210). However, cosmopolitanism must also be able to accept the utterance of competing, non-moral claims, placing it in a potentially untenable moral position. Further, the way in which cosmopolitan education is implemented is very much constrained by its own precepts and subject to moral scrutiny (Hayden, 2017). Thus, cosmopolitan education as pedagogy of virtue is not without its controversy, but also not without its imperative. Its greatest, and least challengeable, virtue might be its fairness or sense of justice in allowing space for people to share freely and interact peaceably (moderate) rather than delineating specific virtues to acquire (strong). In any event, virtue-based cosmopolitanism is very much a clear and distinct category of cosmopolitan thought and scholarship in the cosmopolitan education field. The connection of virtue to moral cosmopolitanism is strong and clear. Of the original types of cosmopolitanism identified by Kleingeld, moral and cultural cosmopolitanism continue to influence cosmopolitan thought in education. This should not be surprising since cosmopolitanism is fundamentally an ethical construct born out of specific cultural impulses. It was formulated as an answer to the fundamental question “how ought I to live?” Diogenes and the Stoics provided some answers, and thus begat cosmopolitanism.

Instrumental Some forms of cosmopolitanism manifest themselves in terms of personal interest, gain, achievement, or success, a category I call instrumental. This form has not been formally or explicitly identified in research, but is often described indirectly. Instrumental cosmopolitanism encompasses examples of cosmopolitanism that put an emphasis on instrumental, pragmatic, and utilitarian uses. This category may include the concepts of and from the other categories and is developed mostly to identify the contemporary phenomenon of cosmopolitanism as a good that has economic or cultural capital value. These forms focus on tangible, concrete, quantifiable, and discreet outcomes wherein cosmopolitanism becomes a “functionalist instrument” or means to an end (Hansen, 2010b). Cosmopolitanism in this light is a technique, a skill, or even an application that produces a desired effect (Strand, 2010; Waghid and Smeyers, 2010; Popkewitz et al., 2006;

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Jollimore and Barrios, 2006; Nerland, 2010; Papastephanou, 2013). This instrumentalism was also identified in a study of the cosmopolitan aspirations of 67 international schools that found that over 82% of these schools admit cosmopolitan education goals in their mission statements (Hayden, 2012b). These schools are confronted with significant educational incentives to promote a global or cosmopolitan educational curriculum, incentives made manifest by demands of parents and students. This is, however, not only an international trend. Weenink (2007) found that in the Netherlands, local populations, rather than expatriates, fueled the growth of international schools. The demand for these schools was driven by the practical reasoning of parents who saw the international school as a better means to educate their children for an increasingly competitive and globalized world and for the acquisition of cosmopolitan attributes. A majority of these parents, whom Weenink called pragmatic cosmopolitans, maintained that the skills and competencies – akin to cosmopolitan capital – obtained would be of great material benefit, while only a minority of parents (labeled dedicated cosmopolitans) cited the attention of these schools to such characteristics as open-mindedness, flexibility, and the willingness to understand and identify with people across borders and boundaries. Cultural capital acquisition supports Nerland’s (2010) identification of a growing need to develop one’s place within a global professional network of knowledge workers who require “skills in reflexivity and self-management,” a conception that adds a toolbox of cosmopolitan skills to go with the intangibles of cosmopolitan capital (p. 191). Parallel with these arguments are those of Glendinning (2017) when he references Heidegger’s distinction between meditative and calculative thinking as applied to technology and contemporary schooling, where calculative is used instrumentally. There is an odd paradox in that the meditative approach focuses on deeper considerations of what is close and familiar, suggesting a localized and parochial approach, while the calculative approach emphasizes far-reaching plans, solutions, and organization which easily lends itself to global-scale considerations. The paradox is that deliberate and contemplative thought processes are more suited to analyzing and reflecting on global and cosmopolitan complexities, while the calculative approach is suited to discrete, mechanical problem solving with predetermined ends, and is likely to oversimplify global and cosmopolitan complexities. However, such cultural capital through exclusive schooling may not only be the spoils of the global elite. Salazar (2010) found that local service providers and guides for tourist activities are able to acquire substantial cross-cultural and cosmopolitan competencies, which constitute cultural capital with which to further develop the same and enhance cosmopolitan status. Paradoxically, these local cosmopolitans often best benefit from cosmopolitan tourists by representing themselves to tourists as frozen in time and place, devoid of cosmopolitan competencies. Put another way, guides gain more cosmopolitan capital by selling to the tourists the image of the guides that the tourists wish to see, thereby increasing contact with the cosmopolitan tourists and the guides’ cosmopolitan competencies, but eroding that fixed identity in regard to the guides’ cosmopolitan conceptions of themselves. This sentiment is echoed by Papastephanou’s recognition that globally mobile, cosmopolitan elites stand to benefit by borrowing from the rootedness of locals without contributing “ethical debt and commitment to locality” (Papastephanou, 2013: 186). A clear implication of this insight is that the benefits to the mobile elite might diminish if the locals were allowed to adopt a more cosmopolitan way of being.

Conclusion What emerges from this investigation in cosmopolitan education research is a picture of cosmopolitan education that defies easy description and impermeable boundaries. However, the 242

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themes that preoccupy researchers in this field are relatively clear. They ask questions of identity, universalism, diversity, agonism, dialogue, virtue, and instrumentalism. They also ask questions that transcend these categories and they do so with extraordinary frequency. Additionally, all of these concepts operate on a dynamic spectrum of strong-to-moderate (and even weak) forms of application. This thematic review is offered as a means to help researchers more efficiently conceptualize and situate their investigations of cosmopolitan philosophy in education. These types also offer a framework by and through which to draw clearer distinctions about the inquiry and arguments being made, reducing unnecessary distractions in the engagement of scholarly dialogue.

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Contemporary mediascapes are characterized more by global flows than containment in national settings, despite the exertions of governments from Washington to Moscow to retain control. The flow is not just of information, but also of images, and over the past decade, audiences across the planet have watched together as people lost their homes and lives in terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes, as a wave of uprisings swept across the Arab world, as political elites blushed then paled in the face of serial Wikileaks disclosures, and as legions of athletes and musicians competed in Olympic games, World Cup football matches and Eurovision song contests. They have gazed at, shared and commented on images such as that of a small red-shirted corpse of a refugee child washed up on a distant shore. Such global mediated communion is a central feature of the process that, according to Beck (2006), is making people cosmopolitans ‘by default’. The excitement unleashed by Facebook revolutions, digital leaks and Twitter wars has drawn attention to the social media once referred to as ‘new’, and interesting questions have been posed by scholars who argue that technological change is reconfiguring the cosmopolitan potential of the media (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard 2013; Chouliaraki 2013; Dahlgren 2013a, 2013b; Fenton 2013; Georgiou 2017; McEwan and Sobre-Denton 2011; Pantti 2013). But established journalistic actors and institutions continue to wield considerable power in a globalized world. This power extends beyond the imparting of accurate, impartial and reliable information so esteemed by political and cultural elites. The power of television in particular – however it is to be conceived in its current form – resides in its potential to engage its viewers, as well as to inform them; to help them remember as well as to know; and to make it possible for them to recognize and identify with the distant Others who populate their screens, rather than just to sit back and play the role of spectator. It is thus plays a key role in cosmopolitan processes, although the potential to raise cosmopolitan consciousnesses is activated differently in different media and newsroom cultures. Cosmopolitanism is understood in what follows as an outlook on the world, and the people who populate it, that has both a political and cultural dimension. The media are a good place to explore cosmopolitan relationships because they are the interface between the political and the cultural, and because they provide people with the semiotic materials that are resources when it comes to making connections with distant Others, or in showing that they are not as distant as we may think. The ability to make such connections is a prerequisite for a cosmopolitan outlook. 245

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The cosmopolitan imagination For quite a while, scholars have been writing about the imagination involved in getting our bearings in the world. Benedict Anderson (1983) famously depicted a man enacting the morning ritual of reading the newspaper at his 19th-century breakfast table. Anderson’s man would meet only a fraction of the other members of his nation, but when he read his newspaper, he did so confident that his fellow citizens were doing the same. By virtue of such routine media consumption, the newspaper reader had become part of a community of the imagination. Years before Anderson published his influential history, the political scientist Kenneth Boulding argued that consciousness of shared experiences was essential to collective identities. While the child sees everything through its own eyes, the adult comes to see the world through the eyes of others. Learning to see in this way, said Boulding, is like a Copernican revolution, because ‘the sophisticated image sees the world from many imagined viewpoints, as a system in which the viewer is only a part’ (Boulding 1959: 130). Both the community imagined by Anderson’s newspaper reader, and the system of which Boulding’s viewer imagined himself a part, were national (and the person in focus a man). But the same imaginative work is involved when it comes to communities beyond national borders. Arendt is an oft-cited thinker in this respect. Imagination, she wrote, is what makes it possible for us to see things in their proper perspective – neither too close, because understanding requires ‘proper distance’, nor too far. Remoteness must be bridged ‘until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair’ (Arendt 1994: 323). In another media age, Appadurai argued that imagination has become social practice and is ‘the key component of the new global order’. The building blocks of what he calls ‘imagined worlds’ are five dimensions of global cultural flows. These are the famous ‘scapes’ – ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes. The last of these, in Appadurai’s account, offer repertoires of images and narratives that can be used in making sense of our lives and those of others (Appadurai 1996: 33–5). Thompson (1995) has provided an equally influential term – ‘mediated worldliness’ – to denote how mediated symbolic forms increasingly shape our experience of the world. He maintains that, as our sense of the world and our place in it becomes increasingly nourished by messages circulating in media texts, so too our sense of the groups and communities with which we share a common path through time and space, a common origin and a common fate, is altered: we feel ourselves to belong to groups and communities which are constituted in part through the media. (Thompson 1995: 35) He is not referring to the experiences of passive media consumers, into the empty minds of which broadcasters deposit messages. Like others working within the hermeneutic tradition, Thompson is concerned with what has been called the ‘active audience’. The idea is that the consumers of news and other media products actively engage with them, work with them and create meaning in their meeting with the text, rather than having the message imposed on them. These scholars are in effect writing about the work of the imagination, sometimes implicitly (Barker 1999; Morley 1980; Ang 1985; Liebes and Katz 1991), sometimes explicitly (Appadurai 1996; Boltanski 1999; Delanty 2006; Chouliaraki 2006, 2008; Nava 2007; Silverstone 2007; Stevenson 2003). The work of the imagination has been associated with identity-formation and maintenance. Nationhood, for example, as been described as ‘a symbolic and communicative device around which people can imagine themselves to be one and to identify with their neighbours’ (Barker 246

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1999: 5). While imagining the nation – and energetically contesting opponents’ versions of it in times of global human flows – has returned to the centre of political discourse in a period of ascendant right-wing populism, the cosmopolitan imagination and the role of the media in raising consciousness about shared problems, has been of interest to scholars since the turn of the millennium (Brennan 2002; Cheah 2013; Christensen and Jansson 2015; Chouliaraki 2006, 2008; Delanty 2006; Kryiakidou 2009; Ong 2009; Orgad 2012; Robertson 2010, 2015; Stevenson 2003; Szerszynski and Urry 2006). It is argued that the power of community is strongly related to cultural discourse, and to the definitions, principles and cognitive models that emerge for imagining the world. As Delanty (2003: 157) puts it, the power of community is essentially the power of communication.

Culture, connectivity and cosmopolitan citizenship As mentioned above, cosmopolitanism has both a political and a cultural register. Political cosmopolitanism has been described as ‘thin’ (Calhoun 2002: 878) and is often seen as an elite project with a ‘top-down’ trajectory. Issues relating to gender, environment, human rights and peace are often mentioned in this context: as Hannerz (2005: 204) has so pithily observed, it is ‘cosmopolitanism with a worried face’. The figure at its heart is someone with civic obligations, and is familiar as the ‘well-informed citizen’, who is expected to keep abreast of developments in the political environment, and to act in a responsible fashion on the basis of that information.: Stevenson (2003) has drawn attention to the relationship between the practice of politics and an increasingly ‘symbolic’ society. In order to understand that relationship, he says, it is not enough to explore the political itself. There is a relationship between culture and globalization to be addressed, and cause to consider the cultural dimension of cosmopolitanization. The changes we need to understand are located within powerful discourses that shape everyday life, which means the analytical gaze must be shifted from ideas and political projects to discourse and everyday practices (Kuipers and de Kloet 2009; Schirato and Webb 2003: 8–9). This is the realm of culture. World culture, according to Hannerz, is not about reproducing uniformity, but about organizing diversity. His cosmopolitan is someone who has developed the competence to do such work, who can respect and deal with such diversity, and who is willing to engage with the Other. Cosmopolitanism in this version ‘is an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity’ (Hannerz 1990: 239). Cultural competence has two sides, both of which are activated when the subject matter is media texts and audiences. The research challenge is to be able to discern the meanings that culturally competent audience members develop out of media discourse, and which comprise one dimension of the communicative relationship that journalists have with their readers, listeners and viewers. But the challenge also involves keeping an eye on how such journalistic work may help audience members develop competence at manoeuvring in cultures with which they are less familiar, and which may become less strange through increased exposure. Connectivity is a key term in Tomlinson’s influential account of globalization and culture, which he ends by asking what it means ‘to have a global identity’, to think and act as a cosmopolitan (Tomlinson 1999: 184). Szerszynski and Urry ask how a wider awareness of the world might be altering the nature of local feelings of belonging, and what role the media play in the production and maintenance of cosmopolitan attitudes to the ‘wider world’ (Szerszynski and Urry 2002: 462; see also Holton 2009: 44). In their view, a cosmopolitan predisposition involves extensive mobility. This need not be physical or, as they put it, ‘corporal’; it could be virtual or imaginative. It involves curiosity about many places, peoples and cultures; a willingness (familiar 247

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from Hannerz’s account) to take risks by encountering the Other; semiotic skills to interpret images of various others; and ‘an ability to “map” one’s own society and its culture in terms of a historical and geographical knowledge, to have some ability to reflect upon and judge aesthetically between different natures, places and societies’ (Szerszynski and Urry 2002: 470). Cosmopolitanism, seen in cultural terms, has to do with inhabiting the world at a distance (Szerszynski and Urry 2006: 115). Political and cultural understandings of cosmopolitanism coincide in the notion of citizenship. In the political version, citizenship has to do with the right to belong and with the obligation to keep informed about matters of concern to the wider community. In the cultural version, it has to do with the right to information and to developing the competence to deal with that information – to understand – and with an obligation to use that information and understanding in a way that promotes solidarity with others, even if they are geographically distant or culturally different. Seen from a cultural perspective, these rights and obligations are not just connected to information. They have to do with images, visuality and meaning as well – if not more so. Cosmopolitan citizenship has to do with ‘a transformation of vision’ (Szerszynski and Urry 2006: 115) and thus with media images of the world.

Television and cosmopolitanism As argued above, the media in general, and television in particular, have a role to play in the cultivation of cosmopolitan outlook (and their antithesis, a subject that warrants separate treatment). Television serves as a window on the world, changing our experience of space. It offers a site for mutual visibility and recognition (Silverstone 2007). It has been seen as a site of travel (Loshitsky 1996), and as altering the ‘situational geography’ of social life, ensuring that people come to inhabit a worldwide space in which new forms of identification can be forged (Meyrowitz 1999). Reversing the gaze, Nava (2007: 13) sees the intimate form of the television medium as cumulatively generating ‘in the familiar domestiscape of the living room, an increasing deterritorialization of the globe by normalising difference’. Whether opening a window and letting the viewer climb out to explore distant realms, as in the Meyrowitzian version, or letting the world come home and snuggle up beside the viewer on the couch, as in Nava’s account, television has the potential to foster cosmopolitan ways of thinking and imagining. As television has undergone radical changes of late, it is worth recalling how many different phenomena the concept refers to. It is content (what we refer to when we speak of ‘watching television’) that can be accessed on the traditional set, but also online, on the phone and on YouTube. Television drama awards now go to series made and distributed by streaming services like Netflix. It is, in other words, both ‘new’ and ‘old’ media. Television is also an institution (especially when it is public service) and a business (in the case of commercial channels and companies). Television is, as Dahlgren (1995) put it, ‘the place where public sphering gets done’, offering a shared space in which identities are formed and maintained, and common problems reviewed and made sense of. Despite being in a new phase of evolution, it remains a medium with characteristics that can displace ‘unreflective identification with local and national cultures’ and place them in a wider context, thereby facilitating encounters with various global ‘others’, thereby fostering contemporary cosmopolitanism (Szerszynski and Urry (2002: 121–2; 470). Inspired by Heidegger, and in particular his 1919 comment that the radio had transformed his little world, they, like Scannell (2014), consider how broadcast media ‘de-severed the local, national and global worlds’ and transformed not just Heidegger’s but all our ‘little worlds’, helping us conceive of the world as a whole. This is cosmopolitanism in its ‘thicker’ form, a proclivity that may be developed on a routine basis, through mediations of people and places that are ‘folded into our daily lives’. 248

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In her earlier work, Chouliaraki (2006, 2008) pointed to a need for a systematic examination of the symbolic properties of television in a global setting, and the difficulties involved in identifying the aesthetic registers and ethical discourses through which news stories contribute to the sort of collective dispositions that matter to cosmopolitanism. Similarly, Cottle and Rai (2008) discerned a need to map out how different communicative structures could help sustain bonds of solidarity. The key concept here is ‘communicative frames’, or ‘the established repertoire of communicative structures’, on which journalists draw in their reports. These can be discursively open or closed. Analyzing global broadcasts, they found that television news contains a number of ‘consensual frames’ that are based more on cultural display than on reporting information and which ‘work at a more culturally expressive level, visually displaying resonant symbols, affirming communal identities and values or recycling cultural myths’. Some frames valorize cultural difference by communicating ‘something of the lived experiences of distant others or elaborating analyses and discussion that provide “thick descriptions of reality”’ (Cottle and Rai 2008: 167). These have been explored in empirical studies comparing the newsworlds of national and global television broadcasters, to see how they might be thought to foster cosmopolitanism (Robertson 2010, 2015). Rather than communicative frames, Stevenson is interested in metaphors – particularly more fluid ones – and perceives a need to be able to distinguish discourses that foster cosmopolitan solidarity from those that simply homogenize difference (Stevenson 2003: 16, 29). To talk of cultural citizenship in a cosmopolitan context, he argues, using different language from Cottle and Rai but with the same thing in mind, means developing an appreciation of the ways in which ‘ordinary’ understandings become constructed (Stevenson 2003: 4). Silverstone developed the notion of ‘mediapolis’ to describe the moral space in which such construction work takes place: a space ‘in which the world appears and in which the world is constituted in its worldliness, and through which we learn about those who are and who are not like us’ (Silverstone 2007: 31). His vision is explicitly cosmopolitan, and his concern is with ‘mediators between the present and immediate realities of everyday life and the world which is spatially and temporally beyond immediate reach’ (ibid.: 45). His version of the relationship between the media and cosmopolitanism is essentially a cultural one, in the sense used here, and one of obligation. Inhabiting Silverstone’s mediapolis entails reflecting upon how the other is viewed, and how such a vision is constructed. The discourses and frameworks of understanding that matter to the development of cosmopolitan outlooks, it should be emphasized, are more of the ‘banal’ variety (in the sense that Billig [1992] uses the term) than the spectacular ones that attract attention in times of global crises and terror. The steady drip of images, and flow of narratives, shape understandings of the world in unspectacular, and thus often unnoticed, ways. A person may consume the daily news in a routine or ritual fashion (the cultural dimension), while at the same time developing the information resources and cognitive competence needed to deal with new information (the political or civic dimension). News consumption, in other words, is about using old understandings to comprehend changing circumstances such as those of an increasingly globalized world. The wellinformed citizen (in the moments in which people play this role) is given insights by journalists into new developments and people and places with which he or she may be unfamiliar. The ritual of viewing provides the instruments, or cultural repertoire, to make sense of these novelties. Such a repertoire consists of frameworks of understanding, myths, values and narrative themes that are rehearsed and reworked in what Vivian Martin (2008) calls the daily news ‘regimen’. This sort of imaginative work is the key to what Ettema (2005) refers to as ‘cultural resonance’, which has to do with how the recurrences of formal textual features in news reporting project ‘cultural power’ and thereby help constitute the ‘public and cultural relation among object, 249

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tradition and audience’. Seen from this perspective, the news ‘enables and directs the gaze of its audience upon others’ making it possible to recognize difference between self and others (Ettema 2005: 143). Reflexive acts, says Ettema (2005: 143), make our familiar world strange without rendering it incomprehensible. The question is whether, and how, they may also make strange worlds familiar and understandable.

Mediated narratives of shared worlds A quarter of a century ago, Price (1995) argued that the fates of governments were ‘inextricably linked’ with the structure and capacity of communications, and that states were struggling to maintain a monopoly over imagery: ‘The millions of images that float through the public mind help determine the very nature of national allegiances, attitudes towards place, family, government and the states. . . . Communal symbols reinforce cohesion’ (Price 1995: 3). Today, it is strategy rather than struggle that is in focus – particularly strategic communication (Price 2015) and strategic narratives (Miskimmon et al. 2013). Fragmentation is more in evidence than cohesion, and it seems that Appadurai’s mediascape has become a terrain of ‘filter bubbles’ rather than a site of common conversations about shared problems. In this context and political climate, it is no less imperative to study how real actors – journalists working for national and global media, as opposed to the abstract states referred to by Price – curate the images that float through the public mind. How do they approach the task of ‘reporting the world back to itself ’, as an advertisement for Al Jazeera English once expressed it? That challenge is, arguably, a question of both ‘what’ and ‘how’; the noun and the verb. The noun refers to events, issues and problems shared by people and polities regardless of borders. Given the troubled times we live in, it is reasonable to expect the news media to contain a lot of what Cottle (2009) defined as global crises – stories about climate change, terrorism and battle against poverty, humanitarian disasters and other threats to humanity. A cosmopolitan outlook, on the other hand, would lead one to expect news about the lives of distant others and news that would shed light on different cultures – whether or not crisis is involved. As for the verb or the ‘how’, Wasserman (2011) and Berglez (2008, 2013) have argued that global journalism involves imbuing the news with a sense of the world as a single place. What is needed, reflected a correspondent who expressed a keen awareness of the visual and emotional power of television, is to explain to people who have not yet got it, the universality of human nature and aspiration. The more you work in this field, and the more you travel, you realize, we’re all the same, one millimeter under the skin (UK journalist Anita McNaught, then working for Al Jazeera English, interviewed in Robertson 2015: 36) While little is known about how publics – and in particular global publics – make sense of ‘strange worlds made familiar’, interviews have shown how journalists approach the work of reporting difference and diversity to global audiences, and how storytelling is intrinsic to that work. The challenge of reporting to a global audience starts right from the word go. You choose a story and then you think: would this interest a refugee in Yemen? Would it interest the mother of four kids in Vietnam? Is it something that’s going to put someone in Europe on the edge of their seat? . . . You’re reporting to no ethnic group or nationality. . . . I think of different people in different places. I think of an immigrant in Norway, I think of a refugee in Yemen, I think of a tycoon in a different part of Europe. (Al Jazeera English journalist Mohammed Adow, interviewed in Robertson 2015: 30) 250

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The task of the journalist, in this view, is to share an understanding of why things matter – to speak to someone who may come from ‘a poverty-stricken middle-class household in suburban Delhi’ and explain why they need to care about Syria, as one correspondent put it. That sort of storytelling involves two sorts of explanation. It means helping the viewer understand why and how the ripples of that conflict could wash up on their shore too. And it means explaining ‘how like you this person is, and how this person’s suffering could have been yours’ (ibid.: 36). Despite the ubiquity of global flows which bring people from different backgrounds into direct contact, simplistic depictions of Others persist and, indeed, thrive. Difference needs to be acknowledged and represented if cultural homogenization is to be resisted and something done about the increasing proclivity of Western societies to lower the national portcullis against migrants seeking refuge. But how is the journalist to report difference and represent societal diversity without tipping over into stereotyping? It is a constant challenge, admitted one newsroom executive, because news by its nature is simplifying things and kind of distilling them down to their core elements. The danger of that is of course that you sometimes do slip over into oversimplification and stereotyping. . . . That is a daily, hourly challenge, to avoid over-simplification, stereotyping. (executive producer for global news channel interviewed in Robertson 2015: 63) As Resande and Paes (2011: 215) have argued, rather than asking whether media narratives make it possible to get to know the Other, ‘the question to be raised in this landscape has more to do with how media builds – or helps intertwine – the contact between the I and the Other’. Silverstone opens his work on Media and Morality by ruminating on a BBC radio interview with an Afghani blacksmith, who thinks his village is being bombed because Al Qaeda has killed many Americans and their donkeys and destroyed their castles. Silverstone claims that the appearance of the blacksmith, and his version of the world, is relatively rare, and that the Afghani ‘is who he is’ only on Western screens and has no existence otherwise. He, in his unfamiliarity and distance as a speaker, on the one hand, but in his familiarity and closeness as visible or audible presence, on the other, is a presence that those who hear him can neither touch nor interrogate. (Silverstone 2007: 3) This is a compelling claim, but should be problematized rather than accepted uncritically. It is, at least partly, an empirical question whether or not the presence of such a figure as the Afghani can be interrogated. Some narratives may invite us to engage in (imagined) dialogue with distant others, even if many may not.

Conclusion An audience member, interviewed to see how ‘ordinary people’ related to a mediated world, expressed sentiments that are probably familiar to many readers. The woman apparently considered herself to have obligations of what, in the terminology deployed here, could be called the political or ‘civic’ variety of cosmopolitanism. These were obligations to keep abreast of current affairs; to be aware of what was happening in the world. She expressed feelings of inadequacy to do so, and said she felt guilty about not being able to take on board reports of ‘war and so on’. The problem she experienced was of not being as moved by seeing many people dying as by a single story, with one person telling it. ‘It’s easier to put yourself in the tragedy then’, she said, ashamed (Robertson 2010: 72). Her 251

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lament echoes that of scholars and others who have commented on ‘the ironic gaze’ and ‘compassion fatigue’, and identified a problem in ‘tabloidization’, the ‘feminization’ of news reporting and ‘personification’ techniques – in the tendency, under conditions of media globalization, for processes and policies to be under-reported while the gaze is directed at the individual, and increasingly at the ‘ordinary person’, at the expense of the powerful elites thought to be the ones who change the world. The discomfort of the respondent will be familiar to those who watched and thought about refugees trudging from Budapest train station north to Germany in 2015, the people caught in terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice in 2016, the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar in 2017 and the Syrian children staring at the news consumer from the opening of a tent throughout all those years. At a time when global political discourse is muddied by such acts as the US president retweeting videos posted by a group of convicted racists in the UK that falsely purported to show a Muslim migrant beating a Dutch boy, professional journalists throughout the world have strengthened their resolve to call out false claims that can inflame misconceptions about different cultures. National policymakers and transnational institutions ranging from the European Commission to UNESCO have also urged the media to service culturally diverse societies in a way that celebrates difference. The question that needs to be continually interrogated is what this responsibility entails when the society in question extends beyond the borders of the nation, when journalists work in newsroom cultures governed by commercial incentives rather than public service mandates, and when narrowcasting and filter bubbles fragment the public. Is it a cosmopolitan responsibility, and, if so, what version of cosmopolitanism is suitable? There is an inherent tension between ‘othering’ mechanisms, which can be thought detrimental to democracy within and beyond the nation, and respect for and representation of diversity, which can be thought to promote it. How that tension is manifested in media reporting, and ways of resolving it, are compelling topics for reflection and further research.

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Cottle, S. (2009) Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Cottle, S. and Rai, M. (2008) ‘Global 24/7 news providers: Emissaries of global dominance or global public service?’, Global Media and Communication, 4: 147–81. Dahlgren, P. (1995) Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media, London: Sage. Dahlgren, P. (2013a) The Political Web: Mediation, Participation and Alternative Democracy, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Dahlgren, P. (2013b) ‘Online journalism and civic cosmopolitanism’, Journalism Studies, 14(2): 156–71. Delanty, G. (2003) Community, London: Routledge. Delanty, G. (2006) ‘The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and social theory’, British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 25–47. Ettema, J. (2005) ‘Crafting cultural resonance: Imaginative power in everyday journalism’, Journalism, 6: 131–52. Fenton, N. (2013) ‘Cosmopolitanism as conformity and contestation’, Journalism Studies, 14(2): 172–86. Georgiou, M. (2017) ‘Is London open? Mediating and ordering cosmopolitanism in crisis’, The International Communication Gazette, 79(6–7): 636–55. Hannerz, U. (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7: 237–51. Hannerz, U. (2005) ‘Two faces of cosmopolitanism: Culture and politics’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 107(3): 199–213. Holton, R.J. (2009) Cosmopolitanisms: New Thinking and New Directions, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kryiakidou, M. (2009) ‘Imagining ourselves beyond the nation? Exploring cosmopolitanism in relation to media coverage of distant suffering’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 9(3): 481–96. Kuipers, G. and de Kloet, J. (2009) ‘Banal cosmopolitanism and The Lord of the Rings: The limited role of national differences in global media consumption’, Poetics, 37: 99–118. Liebes, T. and Katz, E. (1991) The Export of Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loshitsky, Y. (1996) ‘Travelling culture/travelling television’, Screen, 37: 323–35. Martin, V.B. (2008) ‘Attending the news: A grounded theory about a daily regimen’, Journalism, 9: 76–94. McEwan, B. and Sobre-Denton, M. (2011) ‘Virtual Cosmopolitanism: Constructing Third Cultures and Transmitting Social and Cultural Capital through Social Media’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 4(4): 252–8. Meyrowitz, J. (1999) ‘No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior’, in H. Mackay and T. O’Sullivan (eds) The Media Reader: Continuity and Transformation, London: Sage and Open University Press, pp. 99–120. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B. and Roselle, L. (2013) Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order, Abingdon: Routledge. Morley, D. (1980) The Nationwide Audience, London: British Film Institute. Nava, M. (2007) Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference, Oxford and New York: Berg. Ong, J.C. (2009) ‘The cosmopolitan continuum: Locating cosmopolitanism in media and cultural studies’, Media, Culture & Society, 31(3): 449–66. Orgad, S. (2012) Media Representation and the Global Imagination, Cambridge: Polity. Pantti, M. (2013) ‘Getting closer?’, Journalism Studies, 14(2): 201–18. Price, M. (1995) Television, the Public Sphere and National Identity, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Price, M. (2015) Free Expression, Globalism and the New Strategic Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Resande, F. and Paes, A.B. (2011) ‘The Arab conflicts and media discourse: A Brazilian perspective’, Global Media and Communication, 7(3): 215–19. Robertson, A. (2010) Mediated Cosmopolitanism: The World of Television News, Cambridge: Polity. Robertson, A. (2015) Global News: Reporting Conflicts and Cosmopolitanism, New York and London: Peter Lang. Scannell, P. (2014) Television and the Meaning of Live, Cambridge: Polity. Schirato, T. and Webb, J. (2003) Understanding Globalization, London: Sage. Silverstone, R. (2007) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, Cambridge: Polity. Stevenson, N. (2003) Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2002) ‘Cultures of cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Review, 50: 461–81. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘Visuality, mobility and the cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the world from afar’, British Journal of Sociology, 57 (1) 113–31. Thompson, J. (1995) The Media and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Wasserman, H. (2011) ‘Global journalism studies: Beyond panoramas’, Communicatio, 37(1): 100–17. 253

22 Interspecies cosmopolitanism Eduardo Mendieta

Cosmopolitanism is at the very least three things: an ethical stance, a political agenda, and a philosophical methodology (Mendieta 2009: 241–58; Kleingeld 2011). As the synergetic synthesis of these three elements, then, cosmopolitanism is a way of seeking an orientation, and trying to find a proper place in the world with others, and for others. It is a world making, a worlding, practice. Cosmopolitanism, therefore, challenges cartographies of exclusion based on teleologies, theodicies, and ontologies that support exceptionalisms and invidious hierarchies. We can think of cosmopolitanism as a practice of mapping cartographies of co-habitation, rather than of binding through boundary making and mapping topologies of exception. Yet, as transgressive and ‘cosmopolitan’ as recent debates and re-articulations of cosmopolitanism have been, very few thinkers have acknowledged the elephant in the room: can, should, must cosmopolitanism take up the question of animal others, of what Haraway has called “companion species” (Haraway 2003, 2016b)? It can be said that this imperative is already implied in the etymology of the world itself: cosmo-politics. The word means, literally, to be a citizen of the world, to be in the world, to co-habit the world, to be with, in companionship with others in and of the cosmos (Toulmin 1990). Yet, the polis in cosmopolitics refers to a distinct set of human practices: political practices through which humans as members of self-determining and artificial units recognize each other. Politics is an eminently human practice that entails drawing distinctions that bound and bind by excluding while including and include while excluding. There is indeed something oxymoronic about cosmopolitics, for how can other beings in the cosmos enter into the political contract that is entailed by a cosmopolitical stance and agenda? Cosmopolitics, however, is more than a political agenda, or a political imperative. It is an ethical stance and a philosophical methodology that places in question the ground on which the political itself is drawn. Cosmopolitics is a meta-political reflection; it is the name for questioning of the political as much. In fact, as it will be argued here cosmopolitics is to a politics of co-habitation of “becoming-withcompanions” (Haraway 2008: 38) what political theology was to a politics of the exception, that is, its overcoming and dialectical sublation. As a politics of “becoming-with-companions” that entails also a distinct form of worlding, of making worlds, this form of cosmopolitanism requires the enlightenment of cosmopolitics itself – cosmopolitanism has to become cosmopolitan. This means, above all, its becoming not simply a cosmopolitanism of the being-alone of humans, the egocentric, Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian cosmopolitanism of human exceptionalism, but 254

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an interspecies cosmopolitanism that acknowledges from the outset that, to quote Anna Tsing, “Human nature is an interspecies relationship” (quoted in Haraway 2008: 19). If cosmopolitanism in general challenges the cartographies that exclude other human beings from the community of humanity, the interspecies cosmopolitanism challenges the most fundamental of cartographies, namely that which draws a boundary between human animals and non-human animals. In fact, interspecies cosmopolitanism commands us to rethink not simply the political as such, but also the ethical. Here, we follow the tracks left by Kelly Oliver, who herself was tracking the pedagogical traces of non-human animals. In her book, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (2009), Oliver argues that: “either kinship with animals is possible or kinship between humans is impossible (and perhaps both). Either way, we must rethink the very notion of kinship, making it strange rather familiar” (2009: 16–17). Indeed, unless we are able to conceive a humanity that is not predicated on the ritual elimination and ontological exclusion of animal others, then the humanity we have hitherto conceived of will continue to result in concomitant acts of dehumanization and genocide. This leads to the second major argument in Oliver’s book, and I quote, since she has put it so succinctly and clearly: “we need to move from an ethics of sameness, through an ethics of difference, towards an ethics of relationality and responsivity. Animal ethics requires rethinking identity and difference, by focusing on relationships and response-ability” (2009: 21). This is the ethics that Haraway names a cosmopolitics of “interspecies contact” in which being with different others entails worlding differently (Haraway 2008, 2016b). Oliver and Haraway urge us to consider how most moral philosophy has failed to think the question of the animality of the animal in relationship to the humanity of the human, and more specifically, how the entwinement of the sovereignty of one – human – with the exclusion of the other – the animal – requires that we rethink ethics tout court. It should not go unnoted that the exclusionary trope of the animal/human is entwined also with the dyad of animal/woman and animal/race. Rethinking the ethics of provincial human exceptionalism that is so urgently required in view of the challenge of animal philosophy, and the planetary ecological crisis, will thus also lead us to rethink the relationship among ethical responsibility, gendering, and racing. Such rethinking of the ground of ethics in terms of “strangeness” and “responsiveness to difference,” leads us to rethink the gendering and racing of embodied vulnerability. The ethics of corporeal vulnerability and co-dependence requires an ethics of limits, of conservation, of generosity that makes us perpetually vigilant, or as Haraway puts it: “subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity” (2008: 36) to the ways in which modes of embodiment render us mutually – if not always symmetrically – injurable and thus vulnerable. Interspecies cosmopolitics is an autre-mondialisation, a worlding of entangled vulnerabilities, caring, touching, co-dependences, acknowledged having become-with as companions.

The exceptional animal The project of interspecies cosmopolitanism requires that we think beyond either anthropocentrism or zoocentrism (Wolfe 2013; Calarco 2008, 2015). This entails, however, that we educate ourselves to think beyond the metaphysical chauvinism that centuries of anthropocentrism have instigated. At the center of the philosophical, religious, theological, and ethical legitimation of this anthropocentrism is the Judeo-Christian tradition, and at the heart of this tradition are two related ideas. On the one hand, there is the idea that humans were created in the image of God, the imago dei doctrine; on the other, we have God’s delegation of creation to the sovereignty of humanity, that is, the doctrine of human dominion over the earth. It could be said that humans are sovereign over creation precisely because they are God’s creation that most resemble Godself. Regardless of whether human dominion is grounded in imago dei, or whether we inherit the earth 255

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directly from God, it can be seen that human control over nature is predicated on its assumed distinctness, its having been singled out by God. It should be pointed out that Judeo-Christian monotheism became the basis for a form of universalism that established a horizontal relationship among humans. So long as humans were creatures of God, we were expected to treat all of them in a similar, if not equal way. Being children of God was a form of cosmopolitanism in as much as it leveled the horizontal plane of human moral considerability. Although such inchoate moral universalism got cashed out in de facto exclusion and exceptions, the de jure injunction to consider all human beings as equal by virtue of their divine progeny continues to fuel certain critical cosmopolitanism. Most importantly, however, the Judeo-Christian tradition established the ground on which human exceptionalism would be built. Since we began to accept the notion that humans were created in God’s image and delegate to rule over creation, humanity has been educated to image itself as metaphysically alone. An abyss separates us not simply from other animals, but even from God. This religiously and theologically justified human exceptionalism has also been the source of human solitude. We dwell alone in a world in which we only resemble God. In Kelly Oliver’s terms, our exceptionalism has meant disavowing our kinship with other animals. Exiled from heaven, and masters over non-human animals, we think ourselves entirely alone. The blessing of our divine kinship turns into the curse of our worldly solitude. As a visceral reaction, zoomorphism challenges the hubris of anthropocentric exceptionalism. We are not the lonely animal sundered from both God and the animal kingdom by our divine progeny. Instead, humans are taken just as another animal, and all animals are like us. Behaviorism and neurobiochemistry are just the most recent iterations of the reactive belief that wants to think of humans as just another animal, no more and no less sophisticated than other animals. Biological reductivist views of humans and animals aim to erase the differences among human and non-human animals. In the end we are all, as animals, a bundle of hormones, pheromones, and instinctual drives that have to do with chemical reactions. In a more recent iteration of this perspective, human and non-human animals are no more than bundles of DNA resulting in different phenotypes. Notwithstanding its attempt to reject the religious-theological worldview of human exceptionalism, zoomorphism still reenacts its hierarchies and divisions. If we take evolutionary biology as an umbrella term for all attempts to bridge the rift between human and beast, to speak in hyperbolic language, we can see how evolutionary biology reinscribes the divine scala naturae into the incremental and dynamic phylogenetic stages. As Joseph and Barrie Klaits put it: “For the fixed Chain that according to the Christian view ascended from animal through man to angels and God, eighteenth-century biologists were on the verge of substituting the dynamic concept of evolutionary development” (Klaits and Klaits 1974: 3). The abyss between humans and other animals is no longer ontological, but remains unbridgeable and inscrutable as the infinitesimal differences between genome and genome are now the cause of distinctness. The abyss between human and animal is as depthless as that between the anthropocentric and zoomorphic view that erases this distinction. Interspecies cosmopolitanism requires, then, that we think past this metaphysical extortion. We must accept neither anthropocentrism nor zoomorphism because the rejection of one or the other inevitably means the affirmation of human exceptionalism. In Haraway’s words, what we require is a “robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is accountable to irreducible differences” (2008: 90), which at the same time, it needs to be underscored, accounts for this irreducible differences as resulting from a process of worlding together. In other words, circumventing human exceptionalism requires that we acknowledge the becoming-with of human and animal others. Or more precisely, becoming human is partly an anthropo-zoo-genetic practice, to use the language of Vinciane Despret (2004: 130). Acknowledging, in this context, is perhaps too Aesopian a term for coming to terms with the vertigo of 256

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being in a world in which we are no longer exceptional, in which living-with means worldingwith, which means having to respond, and respect, beyond the metaphysical injunctions and ontological verities of a fictitious supremacy. The ethics of co-habitation entailed by an interspecies cosmopolitanism requires that we descend down the scala naturae of both Christianity and evolutionary biology into the messy world of companion species (Mendieta 2015). Tracking Jacques Derrida, who is tracking Freud and Lacan, we can talk about three major ethical-metaphysical panics, panics occasioned by three great historical traumas that have left distinct psychic wounds, which continue to force us to reenact anthropocentric exceptionalism (Derrida 2008: 136). The first trauma was occasioned by the Copernican decentering of the earth. This meant that the earth no longer occupied a unique place among the celestial bodies. Our home was just another rock caught in the grip of celestial forces that all they intimated of the divine was their precision and beauty. Copernicus exiled us to an immense cosmos in which we would wonder without sense of uniqueness or purpose. The second trauma was occasioned Darwin’s theory of evolution. Human, as well as all life was a product of a non-teleological process of evolution. The death of species, and individuals, could not be translated into a theodicy of salvation. Contingency was introduced into the very fabric of our organic being. Like every other living being, we were caught in the same logic of extinction and survival, without guarantee that our next evolutionary gain would secure our perpetuation. Finitude was simply an ontogenetic factor; it became also a phylogenetic factum: species are fated to transform into something else that may no longer be kin. We may become something that we will no longer recognize as being our progeny. The third trauma was caused by Freud, who exiled us from the allegedly unassailable castle of rational self-legislation. Freud, like Darwin, showed how we were deluded animals: animals who disavowed their kinship with other animals, animals who refused to recognize that their autarky is figurative and not real. Haraway suggests that a fourth trauma has been inflicted on human narcissistic exceptionalism: “the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well” (2008: 12). This fourth trauma has rubbed in our faces the fact that we are our technologies, that our bodies are bio-technological dispositifs, which we have manipulated in the process of domesticating animal others. We have become who we have become by inventing/developing biotechnologies of domesticating others. We are our own domesticated animals. We should see these four traumas and their corresponding wounds not as precipitous plunges from the heights of achieved ascents, but the slow dismantling of fictitious steps on a ladder that has allowed us to delude ourselves that we live above the world of other living beings. These four traumas have been awakening us to the fact that we live on a fragile planet with other living beings who are vulnerable with us. We are no longer too far from God, and too close to animals. We have ceased to be exceptional, but we have ceased to be alone. Instead of ontological solitude, we have recognized that we dwell in a community of living others, of animal others. We are part of a community of living beings, with whom we are entangled in irreducible and uncircumventable relationships of co-dependence. An ethics of co-habitation requires a politics of life, not in the sense of a biopolitics of biocapitalist exploitation, but a politics of companion species flourishing (Haraway 2016a).

Building the peaceful kingdom1 Earlier I intimated that there seems to be a fundamental contradiction at the core of the notion of cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, there is a reference to the whole wide world, to the universe, to the boundless expanse of nature, the known and unknown ‘cosmos.’ On the other hand, there is a reference to an all-too human notion, to a circumscribed, limited, fragile, and at times 257

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unacknowledged institution, namely the polis as a realm in which humans rise above nature in as much as they live in a world made according to laws they dictate. Thomas Hobbes captured this tension wonderfully in his Leviathan. In the state of nature we are like rapacious and unhinged wolves, while it is only in a contingently constructed commonwealth that we acquire rights. In the state of nature there is no right. We are all equal, but only because we are all equally capable of killing each other, either by strength, cunning, or machination. We have risen above the state of nature and created an artificial automaton that wields the sword of war in order to impose a peace. Peace, which is unnatural, is the foundation of the polity within which we acknowledge each other as equals under the watchful eye of the sovereign. Even for Immanuel Kant, we remained irrevocably citizens of two worlds: the phenomenal world of nature, and the noumenal world of the moral law. Kant also captured the contradiction at the heart of the ‘cosmopolitan’ ideal in one of the most provocative versions of the categorical imperative: “act as though the maxim of your action can become a universal law of nature.” Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius already understood this dual ‘citizenship’ of the human. Kant’s philosophical anthropology, which can be argued inverted Jacques Rousseau’s on philosophical anthropology, as well as his cosmopolitan project, are ultimately based in the Stoic notion that it is precisely as creatures of nature that we all belong to the same nomos. Kant went so far as to argue that it is ‘nature’ that compels us to rise to the level of the self-legislating creature that we have become. The cunning of nature itself forced us to become cosmopolitan. In this sense, then the contradiction that Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant noted at the heart of cosmopolitanism dissolves, but not without giving rise to a different contradiction. From Hobbes, through Locke and Rousseau, to Kant, the juxtaposition between nature and the polis is resolved into the realization that the artificial creature that is the commonwealth, to use Hobbes’s language, is but a natural response of the human. For, as Margaret Macdonald put it curtly, “even Hobbes’ unpleasant savages have sufficient sense, or reason, to enable them to escape their ‘natural’ predicament” (Macdonald 1984: 26). Indeed, it is by the ‘law of nature’ that humans are compelled to seek their preservation by entering into the contract that establishes the commonwealth. Politics is not contrary to human nature, but rather an extension of it. But already in Chapter XIV of Part One, “On Man,” Hobbes reveals a new contradiction: if the state is an artificial creation, to what extent does it supersede or remain tethered to the natural condition of the human? Locke will make explicit this contradiction when he argued that the aim of government is the preservation of fundamental natural rights, the most fundamental of these being the right to one’s life and the fruit of one’s labor, which is undertaken for the sake of one’s preservation. For Locke, then, the fundamental end of political society is the preservation of private property, a legal fiction if there ever was one, but which is grounded in the right granted by the state of nature. The contradiction, or paradox, is now between the authority the sovereign has to create and enforce the law, and the ‘natural’ rights individuals have which that sovereign must either aim to protect or use as guides for its own legislating. The opposition between nature and state now becomes the opposition between some natural right and some artificial rights. Jeremy Bentham will attempt to dissolve this contradiction in the corrosive acid of his legal positivism and utilitarianism. Law is always and only the law enacted by extant authority. Law can only aim at the general welfare of the commonwealth, and there is no other gauge or standard by which to adjudicate on the legitimacy of the law. In his line by line critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Bentham claims: that there are no such things as natural rights – no such things as rights anterior to the establishment of government – no such things as natural rights opposed to, in contradistinction to, legal: that the expression is merely figurative; that when used, in the moment you attempt 258

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to give it a literal meaning it leads to error, and to that sort of error that leads to mischief – to the extremity of mischief. This claim will be re-articulated most succinctly and quotably in the following way: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, – nonsense upon stilts” (Bentham 1843: 500–1). If ‘natural rights’ can no longer guide the production of law by the sovereign, is then the sovereign a blind and absolute legislator? For Bentham, however, there is notwithstanding his rejection of natural right, a reference to nature. He begins his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the booming affirmation: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. . . . The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. (Bentham 2007: 1–2. Italics in original) All of post-Kantian moral and political philosophy is but an attempt to resolve what we can call the Hobbes-Bentham problem, which has two horns. On the one hand, we have the problem of either the deference, nay subordination, of the artificial automaton that is the commonwealth to something that remains ‘imprescriptible,’ or the utter subordination of all rights to the fiat of the sovereign. The dilemma here is that we either subordinate the commonwealth to something that is itself not part of the general contract, but the reason for why the commonwealth is itself created, namely the preservation of the life of each individual, or we subordinate to the sovereign, even if this demands we surrender our life for the alleged preservation of the life of the commonwealth. We could say, following Michel Foucault, that biopolitics is already inchoate in Hobbes’s Leviathan (Foucault 2003: 95). On the other, we have the problem of having to give primacy to reason over happiness, or, on the other side, having to acknowledge the force of an authority that is either guided by rationally discernable principles or that is simply the expression of a principle that is subordinate to feeling (pain and pleasure). Bentham sought to dissolve the paradox of the origin of the commonwealth, but he fell back upon a different conception of the human being, one that conceives it as a natural creature of feeling, of passion. Bentham trades Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology that grounds reason is nature for a philosophical anthropology that grounds reason in feeling, which is grounded in nature, nonetheless. At play here, however, is always a metaphysical conception of the political association, law and government. So long as political philosophy remained ensnared in the tangles of a philosophical anthropologies grounded in the metaphysics of nature, cosmopolitanism remained caged in the provincialism of an anthropocentric metaphysics. Cosmopolitanism, however, has been stripped of this metaphysical baggage and has been analyzed in much more abstemious philosophemes. A stronger claim can be made, in fact, namely that the moral and political promise implicit in cosmopolitanism is cashed out in proportion to the way in which moral and political philosophies that raise its banner disavow and dispossess themselves of strong metaphysical commitments to either humans and nature. Cosmopolitanism calls for a post-metaphysical stance, and post-metaphysics finds its lingua franca in cosmopolitanism (Habermas 1992, 2017). Thus, a quick survey of the contributions to the clarification of cosmopolitanism as a desirable and possible ideal in the 21st century – that is to say, a survey of the works by Martha Nussbaum, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, and Walter Mignolo, to mention the ones that have influenced me the most – reveals that we can analyze cosmopolitanism as both 259

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an ‘epistemic’ and a ‘moral/ethical’ principle. As an epistemic attitude it challenges the monopoly of one worldview, and advocates epistemic humility and fallibilism. As an ethical/moral principle or guiding norm, it commands the mutual respect of humans and the solicitous moral regard for those who are our others. Cosmopolitism, in short, implies a dual relationship that urges that we remain cognitively open to the other and that we be morally accountable for and to the other. Cosmopolitism is not at all like what we can call ‘elite’ knowingness, or Davos man internationalism. Cosmopolitism is not simply an insouciant tolerance that blithely looks on with amusement at others. To put it in terms of Habermas’s language, cosmopolitanism brings together the first person with the third-person perspective. To put it in pedestrian terms: this person, life form, cultural configuration, etc., matters to me and I have an uncircumventable moral relationship to it, but I also can see myself as someone who is challenged to know it and to see how in knowing it, it transforms my view of the world. As an ethical/moral relationship cosmopolitanism is thus about co-existence and co-habitation – to use Judith Butler’s recent language (Butler 2011: 76). To act and to know the world from a cosmopolitan standpoint is to ask oneself about the conditions and duties of co-existing and co-habitating. Indeed, Kant already noted that it was the fact of the planet’s finitude that forces us to seek to occupy every corner of the planet with equal claims as every other human being. The physical fact of the geography of the planet forces us to be cosmopolitan, namely to aim to co-exist and co-habit. Kant, as well as most Kantians after him, did not consider to what extent this cosmopolitan ideal of co-existence and co-habitation included non-humans. We know that in his ethics lectures Kant talked about subsidiary duties to animals, that is, we do have duties to animals, but only as a proxy for duties towards other humans. Arguably one of the greatest challenges we face as humans, in general, and as philosophers, in particular, is the ecological crisis. This crisis has several components, or rather, victims. First and foremost, there is the moral and political challenge entailed by the fact that the poorest of the poor will suffer once again disproportionably the disastrous consequences of the warming up of the atmosphere. Second, there is the moral and political challenge of how to distribute the burdens of halting and hopefully reversing the ecological effects of too much consumption, which again is unevenly distributed throughout the planet. Third, there is the moral and political challenge of the depletion of biodiversity throughout the planet. This extinction of life, due to human agency, has been so massive that biologists and ecologists call it the “Sixth Extinction,” to compare it with other similar extinctions that have taken place in the natural history of life on earth (Kolbert 2009, 2014: 53; Quammen 2008: 161). Of course, this is not one but several moral and political challenges, for the massive planetary extermination of countless species is not just of consequence to the overall ‘status’ of life on the planet, but also to the unforeseen consequences for future generations. Indeed, the future of ‘life’ on the planet is not simply an issue about future human life, but also of both ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ life tout court. It is this particular cluster of problems that I want to consider, namely to what extent the already two millennia old ideal of cosmopolitanism must be re-thought in terms of not just a legal/political order of rights, of mutual rights and duties, that is extended to only human subjects, but now of right and duties that must be extended to the entire space of nature, of the cosmos, of that physical horizon in which we live, to which we belong, along with every other living being on the planet. We are truly on the threshold of a cosmopolitan order that captures the earliest intuitions of the Stoics, namely that by nature we all, as living beings, live under a legal umbrella that grants us all rights, that is, equal protections. In the following I will argue that the combined resources of discourse ethics, deliberative democracy, dialogic or communicative cosmopolitanism can provide us with the kind of critical resources that would allow us to face some of the challenges that we face due to the ecological crisis. Most concretely, I want to argue that the universalization, discourse and democratic principles Habermas has elaborated by linguistifying Kant’s moral philosophy allow us to develop a non-metaphysical and 260

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non-anthropocentric grounding of rights of nature. It is precisely Habermas’s post-metaphysical turn that has allowed Frankfurt School-inspired ‘critical theory’ to be able to offer some theoretical tools that can help in the discussion of what rights not just other humans and cultures have, but also what other non-human beings may or should have. Post-metaphysical critical theory has matured not simply to a post-secular stance, but also to a post-anthropocentric moral and legal consideration of life. In this way, then, post-metaphysical thought is the foundation for an interspecies cosmopolitanism that offers a de-centered universalism that thinks from the standpoint of the future of life on the planet. We are now in the position to recognize that the moral and political promise of cosmopolitanism can be actualized if we transform intraspecies cosmopolitanism into an interspecies cosmopolitanism, lest we betray cosmopolitanism’s inner logic of dissolving no longer tenable and extremely costly anthropocentric “ontological luxury” (Dworkin 1977, xi).

Post-metaphysical law Habermas’s most extensive treatment of the question of animal others is to be found in his long essay entitled “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” which is included in Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (1993). In Section 13 of the main essay, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” Habermas is addressing Günther Patzig’s critique of discourse ethics’ anthropocentrism and its putative deficit with respect to ecological moral and ethical challenges. Habermas acknowledges that the anthropocentric profile of Kantian deontological moral theories, of which discourse ethics is a variant, does seem to blind them to “questions of the moral responsibility of human beings for their nonhuman environment” (1993: 105). Even within a Kantian framework it would be possible to recognize that there are duties towards animals and nature precisely as derivative or secondary duties, which are always referred to human beings, existing or future ones. But Patzig pushes past this recognition. He asks: does nature have a claim on our duty to respect it independently of our duties to humans? Does nature have a moral status that commands our respect independent and irrespective of other human beings? Habermas acknowledges that we do have the moral intuition that animals do make moral claims on us precisely in their bodily integrity, which is revealed to us when they suffer some cruelty. Habermas writes: “We have an unmistakable sense that the avoidance of cruelty towards all creatures capable of suffering is a moral duty and is not simply recommended on prudential considerations or even considerations of the good life” (106). In fact, Habermas is here rejecting Kant’s subordination of our duties towards animals to duties towards other human beings. “Animals confront us as vulnerable creatures whose physical integrity we must protect for its own sake” (106). This for its own sake, is what in humans we call personal dignity. Thus, animals may be said to have a unique form of dignity that commands our moral consideration. The moral considerability of non-human suffering is based on their vulnerable physical integrity. Animals are irreducibly alive and thus also vulnerable in their own way. But, taking distance from Patzig, Habermas notes that these moral claims remain of a different character and order than the claims humans make on us. There is no way in which our moral considerability of animal suffering can be part and parcel of the deontological structure of the moral point of view. Why? Habermas makes the following distinction. When we address the physical vulnerability of an animal we are addressing the bodily integrity of a nonhuman animal. When we address the physical vulnerability, or injurability, of a human being, we address it in terms of personal integrity (of which physical integrity is only a part, even it is only a large and important part). Habermas notes, and I quote at length because it is so crucial: The person develops an inner life and achieves a stable identity only to the extent that he also externalizes himself in communicatively generated interpersonal relations and 261

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implicates himself in an ever denser and more differentiated network of reciprocal vulnerabilities, thereby rendering himself in need of protection. From this anthropological point of view, morality can be conceived as the protective institution that compensates for a constitutional precariousness implicit in the socialcultural form of life itself. Moral institutions tell us how we should behave towards one another to counteract the extreme vulnerability of the individual through protection and considerateness. Nobody can preserve his integrity by himself alone. . . . Morality is aimed at the chronic susceptibility of personal integrity implicit in the structure of linguistically mediated interactions, which is more deep-seated than the tangible vulnerability of bodily integrity, though connected with it. (109) Evidently, our moral duties towards the personal integrity of other human beings does not carry over into animals, because we cannot attribute personality to them, since they are not part of our communicative world, although they are part of our lifeworld. What is meant here is that they do not enter into the world of giving and taking reasons, of providing justifications that call for the redeemability of our speech acts. We don’t come to an understanding with them about something in the world, even if we are in non-verbal forms of symbolic interaction with them. Habermas concludes: “Like moral obligations generally, our quasi-moral responsibility towards animals is related to and grounded in the potential harm inherent in all social relations” (109). Thus, not only does the suffering of animals command our moral considerability, on the grounds that the physical integrity of animals is an issue for their own lives – it is their suffering that commands my moral response to them – they also command our moral considerability because even if we are not able to reach ‘understandings’ with them, they are embedded within social relations within which they are vulnerable to the potential harm that is part and parcel of every social interaction. But how are these moral claims embodied in our social interactions? How do our moral intuitions take shape in social institutions and direct our social interactions? This is what Habermas set out to answer in his Between Facts and Norms (1996). At the heart of this treatise on law and democracy are two key ideas, which are directly relevant to the aims of the present paper. First, that “law is the medium through which communicative power is translated into administrative power” (1996: 150), that is, the power that is generated when humans come together to act in accord guided by an opinion generated through public discussion and publicly held gets transformed into administrative action. Law is the medium that transforms this communicative power into administrative wherewithal. Second, that “law is the only medium in which it is possible reliably to establish morally obligated relationships of mutual respect even among strangers” (1996: 460). Rights, which is the way we experience law, embody moral intuitions while also guiding our everyday interactions in a non-coercive way that nonetheless regularizes our mutual expectations. Rights stabilize our mutual behavioral expectations and serve as either dis-burdening or un-burdening mechanisms in so far as they transfer the weight of moral oughts to the positive sanction of enforceable law. In this way, law is Janus-faced. One face is directed at enforceable sanction, while the other points in the direction of moral duties. In fact, in a recent paper entitled “Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights” Habermas put it this way: Because the moral promise is supposed to be cashed out in legal currency, human rights exhibit a Janus face turned simultaneously to morality and to law. Notwithstanding their exclusively moral content, they have the form of enforceable subjective rights that grant specific liberties and claims. They are designed to be spelled out in concrete terms through democratic 262

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legislation, to be specified from case to case in adjudication, and to be enforced in cases of violation. Thus human rights circumscribe precisely that part of morality which can be translated into the medium of coercive law and become political reality in the robust shape of effective civil rights. (2010: 479) Evidently, this way of thinking about law assumes that law is not just the fiat of the sovereign but instead that positive law is the materialization of rational decisions that either have or would have the assent of all those affected by those laws. Rights result from the crystallization of the abstract character of the ‘legal form,’ that is, rights are the instantiation of the general form of law. To use Rousseau’s language, we could say that “right” or “droit” is only that which treats the general body politic in the form of generality. The form and content of law is always general, i.e. it applies to all, and establishes a general relation among the individual members of the polity. Habermas takes this key Rousseauian idea of the general form of law, and links it with what he calls the democratic principle, namely: only those statues may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent (Zustimmung) of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (1996: 110) The interpenetration of the legal form with and by the democratic principle is the site of the genesis of rights. A polity must always deliberate on what “statues” it is willing to submit so as to deal with the contingencies of economics and politics. Rights are always being generated to deal with those contingencies, but at the basis of the legislative edifice is a set of basic rights that allow for the further specification of rights. At the same time that rights are meant to ‘stabilize’ our behavioral expectations, they are also, and perhaps most importantly, meant to give voice to our moral intuitions, those intuitions that could be the basis for an agreement about how we should treat each other and all kinds of members of the polity, even if we don’t acknowledge them directly as our equals and are merely treated as strangers or ‘others.’ This overview of how we can justify granting animal rights on non-metaphysical, nonanthropocentric, non-human exceptionalism assumption on a discourse ethical, deliberative democracy understanding of the genesis of rights also allows to note the following: interspecies cosmopolitanism is a hybrid ethical-political-legal stance. It aims to bring about a transformation in our moral sensibilities and expand the horizon of those beings that command our moral considerability. Consequently, it is also making claims about what moral intuitions ought to be translated into rights, that is enforceable legal sanctions and claims. And, thus, it is also about the philosophy of law. In this sense, interspecies cosmopolitanism stands at the borders of political theory and moral philosophy. It calls for a radical enlightenment in those fields, in fact. Interspecies cosmopolitanism is a form of “animal politics” (Ahlhaus and Niesen 2015: 7–31), or what has been called by Donaldson and Kymlicka a form of “zoopolitics” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011), or what Ivano Dionigi has called a Res publica naturalis (Dionigi 2011: 51–66). Following Ahlhaus and Niesen, we can identify at least five distinctive features of this form of animal politics (2015: 10). First, it brings to the forefront the question of the political and legal subjection of both humans and animals, and thus, second, it raises the question of coercion of animals and animal-human relations. Third, and following from the antecedent, it demands that we explicitly discuss the forms of the inclusion of animals into human polities, on the one hand, and on the other, that we deal with the ‘sovereign’ claims of animals collectivities (such as for instance the populations of wild animals in the many nature preserves in Africa, or the numerous wild horses 263

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roaming the planes of the Midwest in the United States). Fourth, this zoopolitics thus must articulate normative standards that ought to aim at their realistic and practical implementation. In this sense then animal politics is also jurisgenerative. Fifth, in so far as animal politics challenges the boundaries of political inclusion and exclusion, it is also part of democratic theory. Animal politics, qua interspecies cosmopolitanism, is a contribution to democratic theory in general and deliberative democracy in particular. Animal politics qua interspecies cosmopolitanism remits us to the recognition of the moral imperative of democracy, that is, that there are moral justifications for democracy over other forms of political organization. In other words, interspecies cosmopolitanism puts the spotlight on the moral foundations of democracy, and the entwinement of morality and law.

Conclusion: to live under the categorical imperative of being a good moral companion species Comte de Buffon wrote in his massive Histoire naturelle (1749–1804) “If there were no animals human nature would be far more incomprehensible” (quoted in Klaits and Klaits 1974: 59). After Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Haraway, we should say: “If there were no animals, we humans would have never become” not simply because we would not have evolved the way we evolved, but simply because our entire biological make us is suffused with the mingling of biota and DNA soup of entangled evolution of companion species. The scala naturae through which we ascended to a deluded cosmic solitude has been dismantled. As traumatic as this dismantling may have been, we should joyfully embrace the sobriety that it has allowed us to gain by plunging us into the world in which we have to assume a different ethics, an ethics without moral absolutes, and metaphysical certitudes. Cosmopolitics, when seriously pursued, de-centers us, uproots us from our provincialisms and chauvinisms. It commands an obsequious questioning and curiosity about how we have become with, how we have worlded with companion species. As Haraway put it: cosmopolitical questions arise when people respond to seriously different, felt and known, finite truths and must cohabit well without a final peace. If one knows hunting is theologically right or wrong, or that animal rights positions as dogmatically correct or incorrect, then there is no cosmopolitical engagement. (2008: 299) Interspecies cosmopolitanism is a way of responding to this finite truth by means of which we must co-habit without a final peace, bereft of any metaphysical or ontological guarantees for our abiding by the force of our own laws. I have offered a post-metaphysical reading of rights that allows us to dispense with anthropocentric exceptionalism when drawing up right to impose on us duties and responsibilities for different others. Isabelle Stengers has captured well epistemic and metaphysical parsimony of interspecies cosmopolitanism when she writes: No unifying body of knowledge will ever demonstrate that the neutrino of physics can coexist with the multiple worlds mobilized by ethnopsychiatry. Nonetheless, such coexistence has a meaning, and it has nothing to do with tolerance or disenchanted skepticism. Such beings be collectively affirmed in a “cosmopolitical” space where the hopes and doubts and fears and dreams they engender collide and cause them to exist. That is why, through the exploration of knowledge, what I would like to convey to the reader is also a form of ethical experimentation. (Stengers 2010: vii–viii) 264

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Interspecies cosmopolitanism is born from the new matrix of knowledge that has emerged after the four traumas we discussed above, which have led us to land on our feet in a world of entangled relations, but also from what Stengers here calls ethical experimentation. Interspecies cosmopolitanism is the response to a new categorical imperative: “to try to live so that one may believe oneself to have been a good animal [ein gutes Tier gewesen zu sein]” (Adorno 2004: 299).

Note 1 The following uses parts of an essay that appeared in Mendieta (2010: 208–16).

References Adorno, T.W. (2004) Negative Dialectics, London and New York: Routledge. Ahlhaus, S. and Niesen, P. eds. (2015) ‘Animal Politics. A New Research Agenda. Forum I’, Historical Social Research-Historische Sozialforschung, Vol. 40, No. 4, 7–31. Bentham, J. (1843) The Works Jeremy Bentham, Edinburgh and London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Bentham, J. (2007) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc. Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1749–1804) Historie Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi. Paris: Imprimerie Royale. Butler, J. (2011) ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’, in E. Mendieta and J. VanAnterwen (eds.), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, New York: Columbia University Press. Calarco, M. (2008) Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, New York: Columbia University Press. Calarco, M. (2015) Thinking through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2008) The Animal That Therefore I Am, New York: Fordham University Press. Despret, V. (2004) ‘The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis’, Body and Society, Vol. 10, Nos. 2–3, 111–34. Dionigi, I. (2011) ‘Res publica naturalis: animali politici’, in I. Dionigi (ed.), Animalia, Milano: BUR Saggi Iuglio, 51–66. Donaldson, S. and Kymlicka, W. (2011) Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, R. (1977) Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (2003) ‘Society Must Be Defended’ Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, New York: Picador. Habermas, J. (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1993) Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2010) ‘Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights’, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 41, No. 4, 464–80. Habermas, J. (2017) Postmetaphysical Thinking II, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D.J. (2008) When Species Meet, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D.J. (2016a) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D.J. (2016b) Manifestly Haraway, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Klaits, B. and Klaits, J. (ed.) (1974) Animals and Man in Historical Perspective, New York: Harper Torchbooks. Kleingeld, P. (2011) Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Idea of World Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolbert, E. (2009) ‘The Sixth Extinction? There Have Been Five Great Die-Offs in History, this Time the Cataclysm Is Us’, The New Yorker, Vol. 85, No. 15, 53. Kolbert, E. (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New York: Henry Holt and Company. Macdonald, M. (1984) ‘Natural Rights’, in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 265

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Mendieta, E. (2009) ‘From Imperial to Dialogical Cosmopolitanism’, Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3, 241–58. Mendieta, E. (2010) ‘“Interspecies Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Discourse Ethics Grounding of Animal Rights”, in Cynthia Willett and Leonard Lawlor (eds.), Recenterings of Continental Philosophy, Vol 35’, SPEP Supplement 2010 of Philosophy Today, Vol. 54, 208–16. Mendieta, E. (2015) ‘The Bio-technological scala naturae and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism: Patricia Piccinini, Jane Alexander, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’, in V. Cisney and N. Morar (eds.), Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 158–79. Oliver, K. (2009) Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, New York: Columbia University Press. Quammen, D. (2008) ‘Planet of Weeds’, in D. Quammen (ed.), Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, New York and London: Norton, 161–88. Stengers, I. (2010) Cosmopolitics I, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Toulmin, S. (1990) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, C. (2013) Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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23 Making heritage cosmopolitan Jasper Chalcraft

Heritage has long been a contentious term. Scholars from various disciplines have criticised it as partial, contingent, difficult and – famously in the case of David Lowenthal’s (1998) disavowal of heritage in contrast to history – as basically fictitious. These various heritage sceptics can point to many examples of poorly managed, cynically exploited and depressing heritage spaces and practices, for example in rapid and massive gentrifications often tied to the advent of World Heritage status (e.g. Chan et al. 2016; Herzfeld 2010). Their critique is easily made, but is contemporary heritage-making always about hollowing-out the meaning of spaces and practices? And if heritage is not a thing but a process – to recall with nostalgia that Clifford could emphasise that procedures rather than essences were the key to the experience of cultural identity (1988: 275) – then can heritage be made cosmopolitan? Or rather where is cosmopolitanism in the ways heritage is being made at present? For cosmopolitans everywhere, making heritage genuinely cosmopolitan should be a crucial part of a genuine recognition of difference and dignity. This chapter will outline three ways in which heritage is being made cosmopolitan. Firstly, we look at how UNESCO’s World Heritage List has tried to expand the idea of there being a ‘world heritage’ that is imagined to belong to the idealised citizens of the world. Secondly we see how violence, or the memory and silencing of violence, helps constitute iconoclasts as the alter of the heritage citizen. And finally we briefly cover the rise of ‘heritage rights’ as a new emphasis in policy that revives some of UNESCO’s foundational ethos, and that may offer some hope for genuinely cosmopolitan heritage-making processes. Firstly though, what exactly is ‘heritage’, and what kinds of cosmopolitanism – or otherwise – does it engender? Both heritage and cosmopolitanism have become keywords, and as such are freighted with a range of meanings, expectations and problems. In The European Heritage Gerard Delanty (2017) reminds us that what heritage is seen to be is hugely influenced by its different contexts, and can therefore carry very different meanings; expanding heritage to include the intellectual and political helps unpack the entanglements and problems of European heritage. However, in this chapter we will only consider ‘cultural heritage’ in the more limited sense, that is, material culture and cultural practices. By doing so we recognise how the academic disciplines most involved with heritage – archaeology, museology, tourism studies and anthropology – have become arbiters of power. Because heritage-making is fundamentally about constructing the past, these disciplines work both within and as critics of the heritage industry. In fact, the emergence of 267

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critical heritage studies has made use of a series of characterisations of heritage that extend and build on Hewison’s (1987) useful phrasing. For example, Regina Bendix et al. (2013) and others (see Geismar 2015) talk of heritage regimes, something that both emphasises the procedural aspects of heritage and recognises the diversity of bureaucratic approaches to heritage-making. The most influential theorisation of heritage in recent years has perhaps been Laurajane Smith’s “authorised heritage discourse” (2006), but as Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Rico (2015: 4) note, this risks presenting an overly pessimistic view of an immutable hegemonic system. Instead, she proposes refocusing on the rhetoric of heritage, or ‘heritage as persuasion’ as she puts it. A common theme in all of these characterisations of heritage is to emphasise the role of power, and it is this that challenges the making of a truly cosmopolitan heritage. Theorisations of cosmopolitanism are diverse, and this chapter finds affinities with approaches that afford equal recognition to alternative ways of being cosmopolitan. Peggy Levitt’s book Artefacts and Allegiances (2015) uses an open definition that also emphasises other cosmopolitanisms like the Islamic umma and Sanskrit cosmopolis in order to highlight the Euro-American biases of the term. Of course, when writing about traditions, sites, practices and meaningful cultural spaces, it makes most sense to use a notion of cosmopolitanism that encompasses the diversity of local perspectives. For example, whilst many of the visitors to UNESCO’s World Heritage sites might be considered ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’ (with all the ‘lightness’ this sometimes implies, see Sassatelli this volume), those living and working with heritage tend to have a rather different kind of engagement. Therefore, in her introduction to Cosmopolitan Archaeologies Lynn Meskell draws heavily on Cohen’s ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ and on scholars such as Appadurai, Bhabha, Clifford and Appiah as the most relevant for thinking through heritage-making. Given how freighted heritage-making is with other issues, with both ethics and economies, identities and injustices, I prefer to see making heritage cosmopolitan as more of a political project, one that amalgamates the critical perspectives of aesthetic cosmopolitanism with the peculiar spatialities of a geographer like Doreen Massey (1994) arguing against particular spaces having defined identities. So even more than for other kinds of cultural cosmopolitanism, in heritage there are incommensurabilities that cannot be translated, because to do so transforms the nature of cultural production itself, turning heritage into a shadow or second-life of itself, what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) describes as metacultural production.

A world heritage? At first glance, and in the minds of its creators, UNESCO’s World Heritage (WH) programme appears a good example of heritage as an integral and formative part of a cultural public sphere (McGuigan 2005). Expanding the original concept to include ‘intangible’ heritage and diversifying ideas about what could be considered ‘authentic’ was supposed to make WH more representative (Bortolotto 2007). However, recent ethnographies of the World Heritage Committee (e.g. Brumann 2014) reveal a global institution with an identity crisis. Furthermore, if UNESCO is the highest profile example of how to make heritage cosmopolitan, we must conclude that international heritage-making contradicts itself though a heavy reliance on ‘expert advice’ and opaque and highly politicised cultural diplomacy. To begin with, UNESCO’s universalist view of culture can be characterised as the child of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. A WH had been imagined right at the very inception of the United Nations in 1946, but only came into being in 1972 with the Convention on Protection of World Natural and Cultural Heritage. Terence Hay-Edie (2000) describes the origins of the WH concept as actually coming from the US conservationist Russell Train in a recommendation he made to the White House in 1965. Train was first chair of the US Presidential Council 268

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on Environmental Quality when the recommendation suggesting a trust for the WH should be established “that would be responsible to the world community for the stimulation of international cooperative efforts” (Hay-Edie 2000: 2). In contrast to the Convention’s cosmopolitan ideals, the creation of a WH was therefore intimately linked to one nation’s pursuit of internationalism. The WH Centre itself recognises that the idea came from the USA, but presents the origins of the sentiment in the 1959 Abu Simbel appeal, and subsequent efforts to safeguard Venice, Moenjodaro and Borobodur. The WH idea emerged through these collaborative international rescue efforts, but took onboard the US notion of a ‘World Heritage Trust’ and similar proposals from the IUCN. The List has been amazingly successful, at the time of writing including 1073 sites. If early on it was much criticised for its eurocentrism (listing mostly churches and castles), it has since become a useful place-marketing tool, and is treated as such by governments. Yet UNESCO always tries to balance itself between absolute cultural relativism and universalism; see the report produced by the World Commission on Culture and Development in 1995 entitled Our Creative Diversity (Eriksen 2001: 127). The report reveals the intellectual dynamics of UNESCO (ibid.: 129), but unlike similar reports – Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1974), or Our Common Future (World Commission on the Environment 1987) which adopted the zeitgeist of each era – Our Creative Diversity doesn’t propose clear political strategies or policy. This is because UNESCO does not have just one idea of culture: in fact the real problem with the organisation lies in its difficulty in navigating between the right to a (‘local’) culture, and a global ethic. The key example in this respect was the creation of another list in 2003 to recognise, valorise and protect intangible heritage, for it represented a conceptual break with the making of a largely monumental past. However, the success of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage still depends, just as for tangible sites, on how effectively the proposed management plans describe their management process during the applications for inscription. Thus, whilst UNESCO has managed to shift the debate beyond the monumental, the nation-states signatory to its conventions and the professionalisation of their heritage sectors remain the ultimate determinants of what gets defined as WH. Christoph Brumann (2014) also notes how things have improved with regard to the ‘authenticity’ requirement for sites. More interesting is how his institutional ethnography points to a shift in the composition of members of the WH Committee, now increasingly dominated by the interests of BRIC countries, whose sensibilities are much less eurocentric. Ironically, it was the old guard of mostly white Euro-American heritage experts who tried to make WH more cosmopolitan (for example by pushing Japan’s nomination of the Horyuji temple complex and drafting much of the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity), and they are increasingly being replaced by cosmopolitan diplomats who reflect diversity themselves, but pursue nationalistic interests rather than cosmopolitan goals, “Precisely by having become a global canon and gold standard of value, [WH] provokes national and local ambitions to secure a place on the world map” (2014: 2189). Echoing this, a further way in which WH can be criticised is that rather than making heritage cosmopolitan, it instead makes heritage for international tourists: its lists are little more than tourism marketing. Indubitably, the presence of tourists at sites and practices influences how locals experience heritage. This becomes significant because meeting the needs of tourists is so central to the priorities of management plans, for they represent both the biggest threat to conserving a site/practice, and the possibility of gaining the resources through which it may be managed. This double-bind is noted by Handler and Gable (1997) in discussing the ‘historical’ reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg which they see as essentially a theme park. Dismayed by an image of the past that never presents itself as a social construction, they observe that visitors to Colonial Williamsburg do not get presented with “a social construction reflective of 269

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political and social interests. . . . [Instead] the public is encouraged to admire the historic tableau, rather than to engage in social criticism” (Barthel-Bouchier 2001: 224). Critics of these heritage theme parks – which are well-established from South Africa to China and Mexico (GuerreroRodríguez 2015) – point to their commoditisation of heritage, where the educational is invariably subordinated to entertainment. It is this epistemology (of consumption) that may be the most influential on that of locals, rather than the apparent cosmopolitan universalism of the WH Centre. But this is an easy cynical view of top-down UNESCO heritagisation. The next section looks at how iconoclasm and other forms of destruction delimit the possibilities of an emergent cosmopolitan heritage in other ways.

Iconoclasts versus heritage citizens This section considers one form of heritage-making seemingly in direct contrast to the cosmopolitan ideals of UNESCO: the ‘heritage citizen’ is constructed both in opposition to iconoclasts, but also through development-led heritage-making. The question here is why other destructions of heritage remain masked, and how a particular idea of heritage citizenship is emerging that echoes neoliberal logics of development and market expansion. If “[c]ulture is more often not what people share, but what they choose to fight over” (Eley and Suny 1996: 9) then cosmopolitan ideas of shared global heritage are contrasted most spectacularly in acts of iconoclasm. In an era of increased culturalism, iconoclasm is extraordinarily potent for the subaltern, and in the words of Grima (1998: 42) discussing graffiti on the Maltese archaeological site of Mnajdra, “The function of monuments as symbols of the established order is conveniently inverted as they become useful metonyms of protest”. Of course, such acts have long histories, in the Western tradition dating back to the mutilation of the herms (busts of Hermes) in Athens on the 6th of June 415 BC to discourage a war expedition to Sicily. A more recent example of this metonymic potential was the attack on the Buddhist World Heritage site of the Sacred City of Kandy, Sri Lanka. Just before the planned celebrations of 50 years of independence (4 February 1998), a highly charged moment in the nation’s ritual calendar, Tamil Tiger separatists (the LTTE) set off a bomb outside the 16th-century Temple of the Tooth Relic (Wijesuriya 2007: 87). Blowing off the roofs of the surrounding buildings was about challenging notions of Singhalese identity through destroying a religious site. For the LTTE Singhalese Buddhist heritage had become a battleground in a long-running and complex identitarian conflict, and the destruction of heritage ensured significant coverage in the local media and civil society, more so than many of the murderous atrocities committed by either side (ibid.). This should not have been a surprise: it is because heritages are contingent, diversely defined and experienced, that contestation frequently extends beyond primarily socio-economic or political needs. One group’s definition or claim to a heritage may challenge the basis of another’s world-view. It is for this reason that Appadurai (1981) was able to talk, with reference to Hindu contestation of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, of ‘the past as a scarce resource’. The great doublebind with monuments is that loading them symbolically – whether by the state as part of a nationalist project or by a cosmopolitan-leaning internationalist organisation – leaves them ripe for (iconoclastic) appropriation. And since the attack on the Temple of the Tooth Relic, ‘World Heritage’ has increasingly become the spectacular symbolic and literal frontline in other ideological battles. The Taliban’s infamous ‘attack’ on the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 was widely presented as an act of ‘heritage terrorism’, a deliberate assault on the avowed cosmopolitan ideals of the West. The significance of Bamiyan lies in its regalvanisation of public opinion with regard to heritage. ‘World’ opinion appeared to be unanimous, with statements of condemnation from The People’s Daily in China 270

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(whose silence on China’s concurrent destruction of Tibetan Buddhist heritage made a telling contrast) and across much of the Islamic world. It represented a contrast to the supposedly successful internationalism and the enormous publicity campaign of UNESCO to save Abu Simbel from Lake Nasser’s spread in 1962. Nevertheless, the post-factum enlisting of niches the Buddhas once occupied and the surrounding cultural landscape as a WH site represents a clear attempt to assert a cosmopolitan idea of heritage; similarly countries with Buddhist majority cultures – like Sri Lanka – were quick to offer their help and assistance to Afghanistan, financial and otherwise (Wijesuriya 2007: 95). If Bamiyan was becoming the epitome of heritage consciousness for a new generation (Meskell 2002), it has been outflanked by the destruction of monuments, museums and people undertaken by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, most famously the Temples of Baal and Bel at Palmyra in 2015, and the murder of Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad. Combined with systematic looting for revenue, the group’s actions have weaponised heritage sites and objects in even starker ways, but the extraordinarily extreme violence overshadows many other kinds of iconoclasm. Everyday and banal development pressures and misuses of sites constitute a constant erosion of the world’s patrimony. Back in 2003, Bamiyan mobilised UNESCO and pushed it to restate its cosmopolitan vision for the past: these were the cultural goods of all humanity, not the playthings of the Taliban, or indeed the responsibility of Hazara locals, residents of the Bamiyan valley. The 2003 UNESCO Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage, included state and individual criminal responsibility for such acts. The reaction of UNESCO, both in discourse and practice, clearly presents the iconoclast is the alter of the global citizen. Of course, iconoclasm has frequently been adopted by those in power, by nations themselves, from Nazi destruction of whole cities like Warsaw, to UK state policy in the 1970s which supposedly encouraged individual soldiers to deface Republican murals in Northern Ireland in order to ‘depoliticise’ Catholic areas (Davies 2001: 158). Should we also consider the current heritageflavoured gentrifications of cities like Skopje in Macedonia – now remade in an imagined classical guise that obliterates the city’s Ottomon past (Mattioli 2014) – as a kind of iconoclasm? It is deliberate, and it reshapes the past to suit one ideological interpretation. Yet in most institutional heritage-making the iconoclast is never the city authority, the national government’s heritage agency, the international development programme, or the property speculators; rather, the iconoclast is identified as a particular kind of actor, in contradistinction to the good global citizen, respectful of the conservation needs of a shared heritage. Other iconoclastic acts remain masked as ‘progress’ or ‘development’, frequently enacted through the narratives of nationalism, urban regeneration or as ‘site management’. In her study of the World Bank’s Fez Medina Rehabilitation Project Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels (2009) shows how development agendas act against both the actual heritage values of places, and intrude on the lives and livelihoods of locals, even as they purport to help them. Similarly, in her examination of heritage-making in Ben Ali’s Tunisia (2012: 159), she shows how the state used the country’s rich Roman heritage to selectively demonstrate prior cosmopolitanism, and to help create the idea of ‘heritage citizens’. Such attempts mask difficult pasts like colonialism, in favour of a simplistic view of the past as an asset, and try to refashion the citizen in the service of heritage-tourism. Stretching the idea of iconoclasm somewhat, we can see a kind of destruction enacted through Europe’s almost systematic colonial amnesia. This is evidenced in the continuing lack of institutional and state-sponsored heritage-making by former colonial powers that addresses the horrors and atrocities of their colonial pasts (Logan 2012: 236). What this wilful ignorance, or silencing, destroys here is any meaningful public memory of difficult pasts. This has real and lasting effects 271

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not just on the lack of social inclusion in many former colonial states, but also on contemporary politics and even renewed conflict. For example, Alessandro Triulzi (2006) has argued that differing memories of Italian colonialism were instrumentalised in the 1998 to 2000 EritreanEthiopian Border War. In particular, the role that askaris – Eritrean troops used by Italy – played in Italy’s attempt to conquer Ethiopia in both 1896 and 1936 was central in fuelling this contemporary conflict: both sides used their different interpretations of colonial heritage to foster and promote their conflict over a contested colonially created border zone. Iconoclasts then are weaponising heritage as a means of challenging a UNESCO-inspired cosmopolitanism that is often placed in opposition to local developmental needs (this was the Taliban’s risposte when they were threatening to blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan). At the same time, other kinds of iconoclasms – like the colonial amnesia mentioned above – go unrecognised, yet still exert damage on a genuinely cosmopolitan heritage-making.

Heritage rights So far we have seen how heritage is still used by UNESCO to build a supposedly global citizenry. Yet we have also seen how reactions to iconoclasm help define how such ‘heritage citizens’ are imagined. In this section we explore a shift in heritage-making that once again offers the promise of a more cosmopolitan-oriented use of the past, but that also carries particular risks. There are two key questions here: are heritage rights cosmopolitan? And do they represent the future of heritage practice? Recent years have seen the heritage sector revive the idea of cultural participation as a right. For example, the internationalism that drove heritage-making over the last few decades naïvely hoped that simply listing sites and practices furthered both a cosmopolitan global imaginary, and that local epistemologies would adapt to the new global values placed on their heritage. Instead, current approaches are increasingly favouring the idea of a ‘right to heritage’. As the archaeologist Ian Hodder puts it, “the attraction of rights talk is that it may be a mechanism for widening the debate about cultural heritage to focus on social justice” (2010: 864). The flipside is that it might also perpetuate the existing tendency to use heritage to bolster identitarian conflicts, many of which use the past to legitimate exclusive group identities. One key international convention has not only brought the issue into the light, it does contain a genuinely cosmopolitan definition of what heritage is, and can be. The Council of Europe’s 2005 Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (‘Faro Convention’) went beyond previous attempts to diversify heritage, for example in UNESCO’s late adoption of the ‘cultural landscapes’ category (in 1992), and its 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Instead, the Preamble of the Faro Convention recognises that every person has a right to engage with the cultural heritage of their choice, while respecting the rights and freedoms of others, as an aspect of the right to freely participate in cultural life enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and guaranteed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). (Zagato 2015: 142) A defining characteristic of the Convention is that it enshrines the choice to engage in heritage, sidestepping ideas of ‘ownership’ and helping to conceive of heritage as something that is not tied to descent, ethnic, linguistic or religious groups. In other words, its framing of citizens vis-à-vis heritage is cosmopolitan, and participation is voluntary. We see this clearly too in the Convention’s definition of a ‘heritage community’, set out in Article 2b: “a heritage community consists 272

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of people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations”. Furthermore, the Convention offers the possibility for other non-European countries to participate (Zagato 2015: 157). As well as the Council of Europe, other international bodies are also, increasingly, seeing cultural rights as key to framing their calls for social justice and equality. For example, Karima Bennoune, the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights and her predecessor Farida Shaheed have both pushed for heritage rights to be more widely recognised, and deployed in international conventions (OHCHR 2016). Many of Bennoune’s recent statements have focused on rights and obligations towards heritage because of the ongoing Syrian war and the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage. Yet international conventions and official statements don’t speak directly to heritage communities, and they have done little to counter the massive under-representation in museums and cultural programming of minority heritages. It is unclear just how useful ‘heritage rights’ might be for creating more socially inclusive cultural heritage: for example, how do minorities and migrants, as bearers of ‘difficult heritage’ assert their right to represent alternative representations of the past? This will depend on national contexts, and on access to legal representation as it seems likely that ‘heritage rights’ will need to be asserted in order to counteract the prevailing trends of recent heritage-making: place marketing, expert knowledge and top-down management regimes. Another way of putting the key question here is: how can the recognition and use of ‘heritage rights’ foster a socially inclusive heritage? Despite the promise of the Faro Convention, archaeologists like Meskell (2010; cf. Hodder 2010) are cautious about the imagined benefits of a rights approach to heritage management. She recognises it might be useful in some contexts, but using examples from her own work in South Africa she highlights a number of dangers: foremost amongst these is how to use heritage rights in non-exclusionary ways where the past is contested between different groups. Given how institutional heritage-making increasingly frames heritage as a resource, and leverages it for development and livelihood creation, conflict over who ‘owns’ heritage is unlikely to diminish. Of course, the Faro Convention takes a much broader approach to heritage rights, one that envisages heritages as public goods, and as ones to which we should all have access. To a certain extent, this may work in Europe, but the politics of indigeneity in countries like Brazil, Bolivia, South Africa and Australia mean such an idea would overturn existing ideas of ownership and stewardship over cultural and environmental resources, ideas that have increasingly become protected in national legislation. For a number of scholars heritage rights is an emergent and disruptive field, one that offers opportunities to subvert neoliberal logics and to empower communities (De Cesari 2010) – especially those outside Euro-America – to seek recognition and solidarities beyond the national, and beyond the market. Or, as Coombe and Weiss (2015: 56) put it, Heritage is a new language of political currency for seeking investment, but it has also assumed enhanced value in advancing the political agendas of grassroots, minority, and indigenous actors. . . . Under neoliberal conditions in which class-based identities have lost political resonance and peoples struggle to have colonial and modern state-based dispossession redressed, the cultural frame may provide the only means through which a ‘right to have rights’ may be articulated.

Conclusion The promises of heritage continue. At the time of writing the forthcoming European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 was being inaugurated, and the promises of heritage made in earlier policy 273

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documents, aid programmes and post-conflict reconstruction emerged yet again. The headline message on the Year’s webpage announced hopefully that promoting heritage will “reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space”. But heritage is a problematic cosmopolitanism. Its key international agents rarely see it as a form of cultural production characterised by governmentality (site management, listing, place marketing). Instead, the Romantic heritage of heritage persists: it is frequently seen as inherent, even immutable, and so the work of heritage-making is hidden from view. This chapter has argued that whatever cosmopolitan possibilities are represented by heritage-making processes, they remain largely unrealised. In most cases, from UNESCO’s World Heritage programme to the use of the past by groups claiming distinct identities (both in crude ethnocentric ways, and also through using the new language of heritage rights), attempts to make heritage cosmopolitan are offset by the role heritage now plays in contemporary governance and cultural diplomacy. Or, as Brumann (2014: 2188) puts it, describing the work of UNESCO functionaries attempting to get sites onto the World Heritage List, what ought to be the cosmopolitan heritage-making par excellence is in fact controlled by “people with cosmopolitan habituses but thoroughly national assignments”. More significant still, these internationalist makings of heritage still rely on international experts and the technical administration and management of the site/practice (Hodder 2010: 862). In other words, as it is currently practised it is hard to see ‘expert culture’ as genuinely cosmopolitan. Meanwhile, the emergence of heritage rights as a way of subduing previous appropriations of heritage – from crude ethnonationalisms to gentrification – offers the promise of a field of heritage practice that we might consider cosmopolitan. However, it is unclear how this new regime will unfold in practice; the risk is yet another fine phrasing on the inherent fluidity of cultures, which will look very different when heritage actors continue to use heritage for identity politics, to attract development funding, or as a marketing tool. The small number of countries that have actually ratified the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention demonstrate that the idea may be radical enough that it undermines the myths of ethnonationalists and the sense of bounded ‘ownership’ of culture and the past. When Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and others also ratify the Convention, we may finally witness a more genuine shift to trying to make heritage cosmopolitan. In the introduction I claimed that cosmopolitans ought to be interested in making heritage genuinely cosmopolitan. Ironically, one of the ways to recognise the dignity of difference may be to let some heritage sites and practices remain outside of the norms, lists and visibility of international heritage-making, hidden in their own enclaves of cultural practice and relevance. To pretend otherwise is to favour western heritage management regimes and discourses over indigenous ways of making sense of the past. Ironically, heritage-making focused on creating public memory for a global citizenry may actually exclude other historicities, and in so doing to gentrify and simplify diverse pasts in order to make them comprehensible.

References Appadurai, A. (1981) ‘The past as a scarce resource’. Man (N.S.), 16(2): 201–19. Barthel-Bouchier, D. (2001) ‘Authenticity and identity: Theme-parking the Amanas’. International Sociology, 16(2): 221–39. Bendix, R.F., Eggert, A. and Peselmann, A. (eds.) (2013) Heritage Regimes and the State. Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property, Volume 6. Bonnici, U.M. (2009) ‘The human right to cultural heritage – the Faro Convention’s contribution to the recognition and safeguarding of this human right’. In Council of Europe (ed.), Heritage and Beyond. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

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Bortolotto, C. (2007) ‘From objects to processes: UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage’. Journal of Museum Ethnography, 19: 21–33. Brumann, C. (2014) ‘Shifting tides of world-making in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention: Cosmopolitanisms colliding’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(12): 2176–92. Chalcraft, J. (2016) Negotiating Heritage Rights. Vision Document for the Cultural Base Social Platform on Cultural Heritage and European Identities. Online at: www.culturalbase.eu Chan, J.H., Iankova, K., Zhang, Y., McDonald, T. and Qi, X. (2016) ‘The role of self-gentrification in sustainable tourism: Indigenous entrepreneurship at Honghe Hani Rice Terrances World Heritage Site, China’. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 24(8–9): 1262–79. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coombe, R. and Weiss, L. (2015) ‘Neoliberalism, heritage regimes, and cultural rights’. In L. Meskell (ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 43–69. Davies, L. (2001) ‘Artworks: Republican murals, identity, and communication in Northern Ireland’. Public Culture, 13(1): 155–8. De Cesari, C. (2010) ‘Creative heritage: Palestinian heritage NGOs and the defiant arts of government’. American Anthropologist, 112(4): 625–37. Delanty, G. (2017) The European Heritage: A Critical Re-Interpretation. London: Routledge. Eley, G. and Suny, R.G. (1996) ‘Introduction: From the moment of social history to the work of cultural representation’. In G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds.), Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Eriksen, T.H. (2001) ‘Between universalism and relativism: A critique of the UNESCO concept of culture’. In J.K. Cowan, M.-B. Dembour and R.A. Wilson (eds.), Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 127–48. Geismar, H. (2015) ‘Anthropology and heritage regimes’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44: 71–85. Grima, R. (1998) ‘Ritual spaces, contested places: The case of the Maltese prehistoric temple sites’. Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 8(1): 33–45. Guerrero-Rodríguez, R. (2015) ‘Mexico for sale. The manipulation of cultural heritage for tourism purposes: The case of the Xcaret night show’. In C. del Mármol, M. Morell and J. Chalcraft (eds.), The Making of Heritage: Seduction and Disenchantment. London: Routledge. Handler, R. and Gable, E. (1997) The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hay-Edie, T. (2000) Enchanted Networks: Institutional Linkages & Sacred Sites: From UNESCO to Nepal. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Herzfeld, M. (2010) ‘Engagement, gentrification, and the neoliberal hijacking of history’, Current Anthropology, 51(2): 259–68. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Hodder, I. (2010) ‘Cultural heritage rights: From ownership to descent to justice to wellbeing’. Anthropological Quarterly, 83(4): 861–82. Isar, Y.R. (2011) ‘UNESCO and heritage: Global doctrine, global practice.’ In H. Anheier and Y.R. Isar (eds.), Heritage, Memory & Identity. Los Angeles: Sage, pp. 39–52. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2004) ‘Intangible heritage as metacultural production’. Museum International, 56(1–2): 52–65. Lafrenz Samuels, K. (2009) ‘Trajectories of development: International heritage management of archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa’. Archaeologiea, 5(1): 68–91. Lafrenz Samuels, K. (2012) ‘“Roman archaeology and the making of heritage citizens in Tunisia”. In K. Lafrenz Samuels and D.M. Totten (eds.), Making Roman Places: Past and Present’. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, 89: 159–70. Lafrenz Samuels, K. and Rico, T. (eds.) (2015) Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage. Denver: University Press of Colorado. Levitt, P. (2015) Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. University of California Press. Logan, W. (2012) ‘Cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights: towards heritage management as human rights-based cultural practice’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 18(3): 231–44. Lowenthal, D. (1998) The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mattioli, F. (2014) ‘Unchanging boundaries: The reconstruction of Skopje and the politics of heritage’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20(6): 599–615. 275

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McGuigan, J. (2005) ‘The cultural public sphere’. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4): 427–43. Meadows, D. et al. (1974) The Limits to Growth. Report for The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. London: Pan. Meskell, L. (2002) ‘Negative heritage and past mastering in archaeology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 75(3): 557–74. Meskell, L. (ed.) (2009) Cosmopolitan Archaeologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meskell, L. (2010) ‘Human rights and heritage ethics’. Anthropological Quarterly, 83(4): 839–60. OHCHR (2016) Report of the Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Rights. A/HRC/31/59. United Nations. Online at: www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/CulturalRights/Pages/AnnualReports.aspx Smith, L. (2006) Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Triulzi, A. (2006) ‘Displacing the colonial event: Hybrid memories of postcolonial Italy’. Interventions, 8(3): 430–43. Wijesuriya, G. (2007) ‘The restoration of the Temple of the Tooth Relic in Sri Lanka: A post-conflict cultural response to loss of identity’. In N. Stanley-Price (ed.), Cultural Heritage in Postwar Recovery: Papers From the ICCROM Forum held on October 4–6, 2005. Rome: ICCROM. World Commission on the Environment (1987) Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zagato, L. (2015) ‘The notion of “heritage community” in the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention. Its impact on the European legal framework’. In N. Adell, R.F. Bendix, C. Bortolotto and M. Tauschek (eds.), Between Imagined Communities of Practice: Participation, Territory and the Making of Heritage. Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, pp. 141–68.

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24 Bordering and connectivity Thinking about cosmopolitan borders Chris Rumford and Anthony Cooper

There are good reasons for other scholars to want to engage with Cosmopolitan Borders. (Rumford, 2014: 88)

Accounts of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and borders have traditionally centred on the ability of cosmopolitans to cross borders with ease, or even live across borders (Holton, 2009: 40). According to such accounts the novel aspect of this relationship is the facility with which territorial borders can be crossed, which underpins the idea that cosmopolitanism – in both theory and practice – is detrimental to the nation-state (and borders). Yet the relationship between cosmopolitanism and borders is much more complex than hitherto supposed not least because thinking about the former often lacks serious consideration of the latter. When thinking about cosmopolitanism what is not taken into account in any meaningful way is the changing nature of borders under conditions of contemporary globalisation. Indeed, under such conditions, the ability to cross borders may not, by definition, be such an impressive achievement. Within the EU, for example, where many national borders are marked by nothing more substantial than a signpost at the side of the (open) road, what freedom or mobility is represented by crossing such a border? Alternatively, what if the border is not immediately recognisable as a border? How does this impact thinking about cosmopolitanism more generally? The core argument progressed in this chapter is that a focus on the changing nature borders is key to understanding the complex relationship between borders and cosmopolitanism. Although it should also be noted that a focus on cosmopolitanism can offer a valuable insight into the changing nature of borders. Corollary to their changing nature, the chapter argues that borders represent ‘cosmopolitan workshops’ because they provide good vantage points from which novel cosmopolitan activity can be observed (Rumford, 2014: 21). An outcome of this is that borders can themselves be considered cosmopolitan – for many a contradiction – not only due to their changing function, location and ownership but also because they are no longer the sole project of the (nation) state (Rumford, 2014). Thinking about ‘cosmopolitan borders’ provides a way of understanding how borders can become political resources, utilised by an array of different actors in different places and in some instances becoming engines of connectivity by providing cosmopolitan opportunities via cultural encounters and negotiations of difference. Cosmopolitan 277

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borders represent the possibility of connecting individuals to the world where globalisation often amounts to world of closure as well as openness. However, it is important to point out that this is not necessarily the case in respect of all borders, at all times, in all places. The significance of the border/cosmopolitanism relationship is explored here mainly in respect of contemporary Europe. Before proceeding further, it is necessary to say something about cosmopolitan opportunities, a term which refers to the potential (global) connectivity of individuals through cultural encounters, such encounters not necessarily needing to take place in the ‘global distance’. As Beck has argued, cosmopolitanisation can be equated with ‘globalization from within’: in this sense, the cultural encounter can be a local affair. Importantly, for Beck (2002) the nature of state and society is undergoing change as a result of globalisation and that inside/outside, and domestic/foreign assume new meanings. This is the crux of the matter: opportunities are cosmopolitan when they cannot be reduced to a binary, an either/or, or, an us/them dichotomy (Rovisco, 2010). Cultural encounters blur the distinction between us and them (this theme will be taken up again in the concluding section). The chapter will proceed as follows. The following section concentrates on the changing nature of borders, which forms the basis for understanding the relationship between borders and cosmopolitanism. The chapter will then outline how borders can be considered to be cosmopolitan workshops as well as cosmopolitan in themselves. Particular attention will be given to ‘borderwork’, ‘multiperspectivalism’, the ‘politics of (un)fixity’ and ‘connectivity’. The final section explores Beck’s (2000) idea that borders can be productively thought of as ‘mobile patterns’. The chapter concludes with some reflections on studying borders in conjunction with cosmopolitanism via a critique of Beck’s approach.

The changing nature of borders According to traditional logic borders exist to divide one country from another and the possession of these mechanisms of territorial control is a mark of state sovereignty. However, in contrast to, and in parallel with, such statist accounts the idea that borders can now be diffused throughout society (Balibar, 2002) has become widely acknowledged throughout the social sciences (but certainly not wholeheartedly accepted by all commentators). That this shift in understanding has gained more than a foothold in academic circles is the result of a whole range of important changes in the ways we comprehend borders, driven by the need to understand the variety of borders and bordering processes that exist in a changing and unpredictable world. In the contemporary literature the following have emerged as key changes in the nature of borders. The first change is the idea mentioned above that ‘borders are everywhere’. This is the recognition that multiple sites of bordering now exist; at airports, Eurostar terminals, and maritime ports, but also in other locations, many of which would not be thought of as borders in the conventional sense (i.e. the nation-state’s edges): in travel agencies and other offices where travel documents are issued and databases checked, along motorways where trucks are scanned and car number plates monitored, and on the internet where credit card shopping makes possible the ‘transaction mining’ of information for security purposes (Amoore and de Goede, 2008). Dispersed borders and their privileging function has been widely framed in terms of the shift from ‘geopolitics’ to ‘biopolitics’. The second change is the recognition that borders mean different things to different people and act differently on different groups; borders are designed to separate and filter. This shift is captured by Balibar’s (2002) idea of polysemy, which suggests that borders are becoming ‘asymmetrical membranes’ (Hedetoft, 2003) or acting like ‘firewalls’ (Walters, 2006). These metaphors 278

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point to borders being designed so as to allow the passage of ‘desirables’ while keeping out ‘undesirables’. The UK has long developed polysemic borders in its attempt to create ‘security in a global hub’ (Cabinet Office, 2007) through e-borders designed to be ‘open to business but closed to terrorists and traffickers’. The border is polysemic precisely because it works very differently on those who have ‘trusted traveller’ status compared to those on whom suspicion falls upon (or before) entry, e.g. those travelling on a student visa, or those without adequate documentation. The third change is further recognition that the location of borders is changing, away from the edges of a nation-state. In fact, borders can now be remote and distant from the territory they are designed to protect. The UK has developed ‘offshore borders all over the world’ (see Home Office, 2007) in order to prevent undesirables from starting their journey to the UK. The Eurostar train link introduced ‘juxtaposed’ borders so that UK passport control takes place at Gard du Nord and French passport control at St Pancras. As Lahav and Guiraudon (2000) allude to, borders are not always at the border. The fourth change follows logically from the first three: borders have developed to be mechanisms to ‘control mobility rather than territory’ (Durrschmidt and Taylor, 2007: 56). The traditional idea that borders lock down territory or form a security perimeter for the sovereign nation-state has given way to the idea of the border as a manageable conduit, speeding up transit where necessary, blocking passage when required. Some borders actively require movement to be (or to function as) borders, becoming as mobile as the people crossing them (Cooper and Perkins, 2014). Finally, the fifth change in understanding is that borders are conceptualised less as things (lines on a map) but as processes. More recently, however, the term ‘borderscape’ – and hence its verb form ‘borderscaping’ – has gained analytical purchase as a way of capturing how continuously changing borders are imagined, experienced as well as well as reinforced, crossed, traversed and inhabited (Brambilla, 2015). There are two important dimensions to the term borderscape, as utilised in the recent literature, that are useful to this chapter: One, is that it provides a deeper analysis of the ‘relationship between bordering processes and the “where” of the border, that is to say its shifting and changing location (Brambilla, 2015: 19, original italics). Another important dimension of the borderscape is that it captures the kaleidoscopic nature of borders much more forcefully than the conceptual movement from borders to bordering. In this sense, there is no longer a privileged position from which we can reliably know where all borders are to be found, what forms they take, and who is involved in maintaining them. Borders take so many forms, are constituted by such diverse practices, and are influenced by so many people that the very idea of the border lacks coherence (Bauder, 2011). Put another way, bordering practices are many and various and do not aggregate together to form a seamless whole. This leads to a world of fewer (recognisable at least) inside/outside reference points than would be the case in a world defined by methodological nationalism (Rumford, 2012). Across the border studies literature there is a need to critically evaluate readymade and simplistic assumptions concerning bordering, namely that re/de-border strategies involve a geopolitical dichotomy between a borderless inside and an excluded outside. To remedy this oversimplification, the complexity of re-bordering practices must be seen as part of a more general process of re-scaling political spaces and landscapes, the need to focus on the multiplicity of border practices in which borders are performed throughout the sphere of everyday life (Andersen et al., 2012). We agree with the need for a greater focus on the multiplicity of border practices, many of which remain anonymous to conventional approaches and methodologies. The activities of cultural entrepreneurs, promoters of nationalism, public artists and environmental activists are significant in this regard, introducing borders into societal spaces unaccustomed to bordering activity. It is in 279

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this sense, to quote Delanty (2009), that ‘thinking beyond the established forms of borders is an essential dimension of the cosmopolitan imagination’.

Towards cosmopolitan borders While the various ways in which borders are changing have been outlined, the ways in which borders are becoming more cosmopolitan requires discussion (Rumford, 2007). The point here is that not only have borders changed, but they have changed in ways that make them more cosmopolitan, beyond the simplistic idea that they are easier to cross (the ease of which also requires consensus and visibility). But in what sense can we think of borders as possessing cosmopolitan qualities? How are they cosmopolitan workshops? This section outlines five key ways in which processes of bordering are becoming cosmopolitanised (for a fuller account see Rumford, 2008a, especially Chapter 4). First, borderwork suggests a cosmopolitanisation of borders in the sense that they are no longer under the control of the nation-state. They can be influenced from above by supra-national bodies such as the EU and from below by citizen borderworkers (Rumford, 2008b). In Europe, for example, the EU has emerged as a major actor in the business of creating, relocating and dismissing borders. The EU turns national borders into European borders, it regulates and harmonises European borders through Frontex, its borders agency, and it has the power to decide where the important borders in Europe are to be found (Rumford, 2006a). It could be argued that EU bordering is state bordering by a different name, and, as such, the EU’s ability to re-border Europe does not offer strong support to the cosmopolitanisation thesis. But as Papadopoulos et al. (2008) point out Europe’s borders are constructed wherever they are needed (by the EU), not according to nation-state preferences. More pertinently, borderwork captures how people can utilise borders for their own advantage, as smugglers, tourists and market traders frequently do, and that people are active in marking the (state) border through shows of nationalist fervour or grassroots protest, for example. However, it is rarely given consideration that citizens (and indeed non-citizens) may be active in constructing or dismantling borders as a form of political opportunism or self-empowerment. This borderwork may or may not take place at the edge of a polity, but is in fact more likely to take the form of bordering dispersed throughout society, as Balibar has theorised (Rumford, 2008a, especially Chapter 3). If borders are increasingly dispersed and diffused throughout society, and borders are central to our understanding of cosmopolitanism (because they are no longer only the business of nation-states), as is argued here, then ordinary people, through their daily encounter with, and negotiation of, borders can be said to have the potential for cosmopolitan experiences on a routine basis. Moreover, the range of actors involved in borderwork means that we can never be sure where and when bordering processes will be set in motion. Borderwork means that bordering has become an unruly business, difficult to map and difficult to govern. Second, borderwork implies multiperspectivalism (Rumford, 2012). Walter Mignolo has argued that ‘border thinking’ is a core component of critical cosmopolitanism. For Mignolo, critical cosmopolitanism comes from the ‘exterior of modernity’, in other words coloniality (Mignolo, 2000: 724). Border thinking – ‘the transformation of the hegemonic imaginary’ from the perspective of the excluded – is a tool of critical cosmopolitanism (Mignolo, 2000: 736–7). This can usefully extend this and propose that ‘seeing from the border’ is a key dimension of the cosmopolitanisation of borders. ‘Seeing from the border’ cannot be reduced to the idea that it is possible to view a border from both sides. It is no longer possible to only ‘see like a state’ in respect of borders, as attempts to do this will fail to capture the full range of bordering activity being conducted at any one time. In other words, a magisterial viewpoint is neither possible nor desirable. 280

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Multiperspectivalism, recognises that borders are not always visible to all, thereby going against a deeply entrenched position in border studies. Van Schendel speaks for many when he says that ‘a border that is not visible for all is a border that has failed its purpose. But borders can be bespoke and narrowly cast. For example, we have previously written about Melton Mowbray, a small English town whereby residents successfully applied for the creation of a Protective Geographical Indication (PGI), meaning that only foodstuffs produced from within a strictly designated area could use the name Melton Mowbray, a development which had serious financial implication for producers that were effectively bordered out. Without revisiting this example in detail, the point here is to illustrate the ways in which borderworkers can construct tangible borders that are not imposed by the state in top-down fashion. In this regard, although the interested parties within the town initially had to follow official application procedures laid down by the state and EU, it was still the borderworkers of Melton Mowbray that constructed (made legitimate) the border (and indeed continue to maintain it). Therefore, rather than being visible to all, borders should be seen as a political resource which can be mobilised by some against others and where these borders might be deployed is not easy to predict. Third, cosmopolitan borders (incorporating borderwork and multiperspectivalism) can constitute a politics of fixity and unfixity (Perkins and Rumford, 2013). On the one hand, borders lend order to everyday life but, on the other hand, the illusion of permanence also provides the conditions for their own undoing. Fixity can be defined when bordering practices crystallise to produce objective institutional realties via the production of stable knowledge (Cooper and Perkins, 2012). In this regard, borders function as key everyday reference points, providing practical methods for navigating a global landscape and world in motion. Borders on this logic can be understood as part of the institutional governance of the anxiety-inducing indeterminacy of everyday life (although the production and existence of borders is also anxiety inducing). However, borders cannot completely fix down the meanings they seemingly produce (Perkins and Rumford, 2013: 275); they create the conditions for their own demise (Perkins and Rumford, 2013) and become political resources to be used by an array of different actors to create, dismantle and fix their own borders. This border politics of (un)fixity allows different actors in different ways to create, unfix and redeploy borders as a constitutive element of social action (Perkins and Rumford, 2013: 275). Fourth, borders can be thought of as connective tissue. Borders are conventionally thought to divide one nation-state from another but they are also able to connect, not just proximate entities, but, it is argued here, transnationally and globally. In other words, the border does not only allow for ‘local’ connectivity with the other side of a border but creates the potential for transnational networking and global mobility. This builds upon van Schendel’s (2005) notion that borderlanders are able to ‘jump’ scales (local, national, regional, global) through their everyday practices and their ‘mental maps’, and therefore do not experience the national border only as a limit: what forms a barrier to some can present itself as a gateway to others. People can ‘invoke’ the scale of the border themselves; as a ‘local’ phenomenon, a nation- state ‘edge’, or as a transnational staging post, thereby allowing them to experience the border as a conduit. This means that we must take issue with the idea, expressed for example by Hakli and Kaplan (2002: 7), that ‘cross-border interactions are more likely to occur when the “other side” is easily accessible, in contrast to when people live farther away from the border’. This connectivity also lends credibility to the ‘vernacularisation’ of cosmopolitanism, opening up political opportunities and avenues of empowerment to ordinary people. Placing border perspectives – thinking and seeing from the border – as central components of cosmopolitan thinking has several important consequences, not least of which is the centrality of borders to understanding the world: borders are increasingly important in the study of political 281

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and social transformations. It also means that borders can change way we think of cosmopolitanism. Borders are cosmopolitan workshops.

Borders as mobile patterns In the context of a discussion about inclusion and exclusion, Ulrich Beck (2000: 51–2) asserts that borders should be conceived of as mechanisms of inclusion, a claim which initially seems to be counter-intuitive. But for Beck, borders are best thought of as ‘mobile patterns that facilitate overlapping loyalties’. He acknowledges both that this idea cuts across the grain of border studies, and that his argument for inclusion is not the only way in which borders can be conceived. However, he argues – somewhat provocatively, perhaps – that ‘it may be an important way in the future’ (Beck, 2000: 51). This chapter concurs with Beck on this point and would suggest that the idea that borders are prime sites of connectivity dovetails neatly with his ‘inclusive thesis’. In any case, the idea that borders are ‘mobile patterns that facilitate overlapping loyalties’ captures the essence of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and borders. The first point to note is that Beck rightly draws attention to the mobility of borders rather than assume an enhanced mobility for cosmopolitans across borders. Europe’s borders are mobile: they are forever changing location, as a result of enlargement and as a result of discursively constructed ‘important borders’ (Rumford, 2006b); they are deployed wherever they are deemed most effective; they range across society, not only at its edges. A new border can be called into existence very quickly when required. For example, the boat patrols carried out by the EU’s border harmonisation agency, Frontex, in the Mediterranean and off the West coast of Africa operationalise a new sort of flexible border, deployed whenever and wherever it is needed but projected at a distance from the borders of EU member states (an example of (un)fixity). In sum, whereas conventionally the emphasis falls on cosmopolitan mobility in terms of border-crossings, the transformation of borders in Europe reveals a heightened mobility of borders themselves. Second, one of the under-explored dimensions of cosmopolitanism is the ways in which shifting relations between self, community and the world lead not to clear cut differences between us and them but blurred distinctions resulting from the cultural encounters which cosmopolitanism engenders. For Beck (2000: 51), borders do not follow the logic of either/or. Cosmopolitanism encourages negotiations with communities which make claims on our allegiance. Whereas nationalism answers questions of belonging in very clear (dichotomous) terms, cosmopolitanism creates a range of possibilities and potential dilemmas: in Beck’s well-known formulation, ‘[t]o belong or not to belong – that is the cosmopolitan question’ (Beck, 2007: 162). Third, it is borders that facilitate overlapping loyalties. On this reading, borders do not divide one set of loyalties from another. Borders do not impose order on an inchoate collection of shifting loyalties. Borders are not a solution to the problem of overlapping loyalties (as they perhaps would be thought to be from a nationalistic perspective). It can be inferred that without borders there would be no overlapping loyalties: borders cause the overlap. Cosmopolitanism causes us to be positioned in such a way that we fall within the orbit of many communities but are not necessarily committed to any of them. In Beck’s words, someone ‘is part of a large number of circles and is circumscribed by that’ (Beck, 2000: 51). Some of these communities may claim us as a member while others fail to capture our allegiance either because they hold no interest for us or because they fail to touch our lives (they lack reach). The cosmopolitan navigates his/her way through the troubled waters of multiple communities, sometimes opting for no community membership at all. That loyalties (comprising ties of varying strengths) overlap is due to the cultural encounters engendered by the connectivity inherent in borders (and the fact that the outcome of these encounters in not easy to predict). 282

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This leads to the fourth point. The term ‘overlapping loyalties’ appears somewhat ambivalent leading to a number of questions. What exactly does Beck mean by ‘overlapping loyalties’? How can loyalties overlap? Do some loyalties overlap more than others? How do borders work to facilitate this overlap? This is a rather mischievous set of questions because the interrogative thrust may lead us by default to the assumption that any overlap will be framed in terms of the nation-state ‘container’, i.e. the overlap is that which cannot be contained with a nation-state. On this (restricted) interpretation some loyalties, for example nationalism, would have very little overlap, while others, for example ethnic belonging or membership of a religious community, may be spread across many national states. It is important then to invest the phrase ‘overlapping loyalties’ with a greater degree of precision. The idea that borders should be conceived of as ‘mobile patterns that facilitate overlapping loyalties’ points to the non-exclusivity of belonging in contemporary Europe. The mobility of borders means that there are far fewer inside/outside reference points (as there would be in a world constructed by ‘methodological nationalism’) and subsequently fewer us/them (either/ or) reference points. Individuals may be captured by the orbits of a multiplicity of communities which compete for allegiance. However, belonging does not ‘nest’ in this environment; the hierarchical order of communities and belonging which is associated with modernity – nation and class being primary, standing above (but rarely challenged for primacy) by gender, ethnicity and religion, and supplemented by regional, urban or subcultural identification – no longer holds. ‘Overlapping loyalties’ mean that the hierarchies of belonging are no longer set in stone, membership is elective rather than ascribed and those loyalties traditionally considered as primary now vie for attention with what were previously relativity unimportant communities associated with lifestyle choices and personal preferences. People choose the basis of their loyalty, it is no longer imposed on them: people choose how best to demonstrate that they are loyal, and to whom they offer their loyalty; it cannot be assumed or ‘read off ’ from an imputed location in the social order. Borders allow individuals to connect to a variety of communities and project themselves into ‘distant’ collectivities by using borders as connective tissue. We have already encountered the cosmopolitan potential of Europe’s borders: ‘mobile borders’ can work to (selectively) enhance mobility. If we conceive of borders not as barriers to mobility but as mechanisms to manage mobility then it is possible for them to speed up flows as well as slow them down. In such a context, opportunities arise for people to utilise the connective potential of borders for their own ends. Loyalties are overlapping in the sense that they are not rooted in separate, discrete geographical spaces. Loyalties are clamouring for attention in the geographical space inhabited by the individual. Belonging is selective and perhaps also transitory, community is bespoke and borders are a networking resource. Beck’s idea of overlapping loyalties can be usefully compared with Appadurai’s vision of the global as a ‘fractal cultural configuration’ (Appadurai, 1996: 46), a series of overlapping polythetic cultures (i.e. sharing many properties) which are weakly patterned and structured, certainly not taking the form of a global structure or global system. For Appadurai, globalisation is best thought of as a dynamic and open process rather than a stable system and is characterised by disjuncture, flow and uncertainty rather than ‘older images of order, stability, and systematicness’ (Appadurai, 1996: 47). Appadurai’s idea of ‘overlapping polythetic cultures’ can be usefully placed alongside Beck’s notion of ‘overlapping loyalties’ in order to provide a complementary perspective on cosmopolitan overlap.

Concluding thoughts At the time of writing the UK is in the laborious process of exiting the EU following a referendum in which 51.9% of the UK electorate voted to leave. One of the principle arguments put 283

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forward by the leave campaign was to take back control of ‘our’ national/territorial borders – to reclaim the sovereign power to close our borders to the great unwanted; to rescue the inside from a dominant and selfish outside. Curiously, ignoring its inherent impossibility, the outcome of such thinking is likely to render UK territorial space much less coherent than was the case within the EU. The devolution settlements of the UK are embedded in EU membership. The EU has provided common frameworks for policy areas such as agriculture, regional development and home affairs that would otherwise be under the power of devolved nations. A UK-wide common framework will have to be agreed, and depending on the agreement, the UK’s internal borders could suddenly become much more visible. The UK’s internal borders are potential new resources for different actors to utilise. In Scotland, for example, the European cosmopolitan project is at the centre of national rhetoric, tacitly framing a potential independence (Knight, 2017: 240). In Northern Ireland, the new visibility of the Irish border because of Brexit has brought to the fore discussions about Irish territorial unity. In the months after the referendum result, for example, the leading republican party in N. Ireland, Sinn Féin, called for a border poll, a call that would have not been possible before the referendum. One aim of this chapter has been to make a robust case for studying the changing nature of borders (and the relation of these borders to cosmopolitanism) rather than assume that borders remain largely unchanged as footloose cosmopolitans skip merrily across them as a result of their constitutive mobility. For Agier (2016: 156), borderlands – which mark the difference between borders and walls – are ‘cosmopolitan crossroads’, acting as staging posts where people learn the ways of the world and where the cosmopolitan subject emerges: The question then is to transform the global foreigner, invisible and phantom like, whom identity politics leaves nameless and voiceless behind material or invisible walls, bureaucratic or ideological, into a person whose alterity becomes again relative and potentially closer. On this basis it will be possible to reconsider each border as a new test of alterity where an othersubject emerges, the cosmopolitan subject, come to disturb the existing identity-based order. Cosmopolitan opportunities emerge when choice cannot be reduced to a binary, an either/or, or, an us/them dichotomy. Borders facilitate cultural encounters which blur the distinction between us and them. This final section will expand upon these points in order to draw out more fully the importance of cultural encounters to the cosmopolitan imagination. This will be done by opening up briefly two new avenues of exploration. The first of these centres on registering some key differences in terms of the approach offered here from other ways of viewing the self/other, us/them dichotomies in the contemporary literature on cosmopolitanism. The second avenue of exploration is to view the idea of cultural encounters from the perspective of Beck’s notion of the ‘pluralization of borders’. The self/other distinction, blurred in moments of cosmopolitan opportunity on the account offered here, is dealt with differently by other commentators on cosmopolitanism. For instance, Delanty (2009) holds that the interplay of the global and the local conditions, the ways in which self and other interact, and the interplay of self, other and the world causes cosmopolitan process to come into play. These formulations suggest that the transformation of self and other under the aegis of cosmopolitanism is of the nature of an internal transformation of discrete entities rather than a merging or blurring of once distinct binaries. What is key for Delanty is the interplay of self and other rather than the erosion of their distinctive status. The argument offered in this chapter is that we must approach questions of cosmopolitanism without the reassuring framework that such binaries provide.

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Turning once more to Beck, we can explore the centrality of cultural encounters from a different perspective. For Beck the ‘pluralization of borders’ refers to a multitude of non-identical borders, for example: economical, cultural, political, legal, technological etc. (Beck, 2002: 19). In other words, each of the named domains possesses its own borders which may or may not map on to the borders of the nation-state. Beck draws out the distinctions in the following terms: according to the logic of methodological nationalism these borders coincide; in terms of a methodological cosmopolitanism these borders diverge (Beck, 2002: 19). Cosmopolitanisation (globalisation from within) reveals that ‘borders are no longer predeterminate, they can be chosen (and interpreted), but simultaneously also have to be redrawn and legitimated anew’ (Beck, 2002: 19). The pluralisation of borders points to a multiplicity of possible cultural encounters (in a wide variety of border locations), and a variety of resulting cosmopolitan opportunities. Before concluding it is necessary to introduce a caveat. There may in fact be a conceptual danger in using the term ‘cosmopolitan opportunities’. It could be interpreted to refer to opportunities to evade the ‘methodological nationalism’ which frames everyday experience for many people. As such the term could be interpreted to frame cosmopolitanism as a means of escape from nation-state society. This is not the way the term ‘cosmopolitan opportunities’ should be understood. Cosmopolitan opportunities do not appear ready formed as the antidote to the ‘iron cage’ of nationalism. Cosmopolitan opportunities offer the potential for cosmopolitan experiences the value or meaning of which is not pre-given. Moreover, cosmopolitan opportunities, which allow us to connect to the world in a productive way (and which offer the potential of becoming a citizen of the world in a meaningful sense), are not always readily available or easy to find. In fact, connecting with the world is far from straightforward (Rumford, 2008a: 14), despite the assumptions of the more enthusiastic cosmopolitan thinkers.

References Agier, M. 2016. Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition. Cambridge: Polity. Amoore, L. and de Goede, M. 2008. ‘Transactions after 9/11: The banal face of the preemptive strike’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(2): 173–85. Andersen, D., Klatt, M. and Sandberg, M. 2012. ‘Introduction’, in Andersen, D., Klatt, M. and Sandberg, M. (eds.), The Border Multiple. Farnham: Ashgate. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Balibar, E. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso. Bauder, H. 2011. ‘Toward a critical geography of the border: Engaging the dialectic of practice and meaning’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(5): 1126–39. Beck, U. 2000. What Is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. 2002. ‘The cosmopolitan society and its enemies’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19: 17–44. Beck, U. 2007. ‘Cosmopolitanism: a critical theory for the twenty-first century’, in Ritzer, G. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell, 162–176. Brambilla, C. 2015. ‘Exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept’, Geopolitics, 20: 14–34. Cabinet Office. 2007. Security in a Global Hub: Establishing the UK’s New Border Arrangements [Online]. Available at: www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/cabinetoffice/corp/assets/publications/reports/border_ review.pdf [accessed: 15th September 2010]. Cooper, A. and Perkins, C. 2012. ‘Borders and status functions: An institutional approach to the study of borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15(1): 55–7. Cooper, A. and Perkins, C. 2014. ‘Mobile borders/bordering mobilities: Contemporary state bordering practices and the implications for resistance and intervention’, in Kinnvall, C. and Svensson, T. (eds.), Bordering Securities: The Governing of Connectivity and Dispersal. London: Routledge. Delanty, G. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durrschmidt, J. and Taylor, G. 2007. Globalization, Modernity and Social Change. Houndmills: Palgrave.

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Hakli, J. and Kaplan, D. 2002. ‘Learning from Europe? Borderlands in social and geographical context’, in Kaplan, D. and Hakli, J. (eds.), Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hedetoft, U. 2003. The Global Turn: National Encounters with the World. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. Holton, R. 2009. Cosmopolitanisms: New Thinking and New Directions. Houndmills: Palgrave. Home Office. 2007. Securing the UK Border: Our Vision and Strategy for the Future [Online]. Available at: www. homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/securing–the–border [accessed: 15th September 2010]. Knight, D. 2017. ‘Anxiety and cosmopolitan futures: Brexit and Scotland’, American Ethnologist, 44(2): 237–42. Lahav, G. and Guiraudon, V. 2000. ‘Comparative perspectives on border control: Away from the border and outside the state’, in Andreas, P. and Snyder, T. (eds.), The Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe. London: Lanham; Rowman and Littlefield, 55–80. Mignolo, W.D. 2000. ‘The many faces of cosmo-polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3): 721–48. Papadopoulos, D., Stephenson, N., and Tsianos, V. 2008. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century. London: Pluto Press. Perkins, C. and Rumford, C. 2013. ‘The politics of (un)fixity and the vernacularization of borders’, Global Society, 27(3): 267–82. Rovisco, M. 2010. ‘Reframing Europe and the global: Conceptualizing the border in cultural encounters’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(6): 1015–30. Rumford, C. 2006a. ‘Theorising borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2): 155–69. Rumford, C. 2006b. ‘Borders and rebordering’, in Delanty, G. (ed.), Europe and Asia beyond East and West: Towards a New Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge. Rumford, C. 2007. ‘Does Europe have cosmopolitan borders?’, Globalizations, 4(3): 327–39. Rumford, C. 2008a. Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory. London: Routledge. Rumford, C. 2008b. ‘Introduction: Citizens and borderwork in Europe’, Space and Polity, 12(1): 1–12. Rumford, C. 2012. ‘Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders’, Geopolitics, 17(4): 887–902. Rumford, C. 2014. Cosmopolitan Borders. London: Palgrave. van Schendel, W. 2005. ‘Spaces of engagement: How borderlands, illicit flows, and territorial states interlock’, in van Schendel, W. and Abraham, I. (eds.), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 38–68. Walters, W. 2006. ‘Border/control’, Europe Journal of Social Theory, 9(2): 187–203.

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25 Cosmopolitan public space(s) Daniel Innerarity and Ander Errasti

The idea of the public space refers to a myriad of elements that interact with each other in a diverse fashion in each historical period. The analysis of these elements and their interactions involves thorough work that has been undertaken by many authors throughout modern history. As if this endeavour were not complicated enough in and of itself, analyzing a phenomenon that is so context-dependent about the same historical time period when it is being analyzed requires an enormous amount of work as a part of what is, in most cases, a life-time career (see the works by Niklas Lumann, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Jürgen Habermas or Manuel Castells as clear examples). However, in a period of constant acceleration, increasing uncertainties, permanent change and complexity such as the one we are currently experiencing, this attempt becomes almost impossible. That is why this chapter will not afford an exhaustive analysis of the public space. Instead, it will reveal some of the main clues that should, in our view, guide the analysis and critical approach to the notion of public space. Particular emphasis will be placed on one of the crucial elements of the social and political transformations in which we are involved as a result of the globalization process: the ongoing cosmopolitanization of social and political life. We begin by reviewing some of the elements that prove the relevance of adequately addressing the cosmopolitan public space(s). To do so, we first look at the new understanding of the common as a core concept. Then we introduce what we consider the two main indications of the ongoing transformation: (a) the switch of the private/public distinction as a fundamental element of modernity and (b) the new impact of emotions in structuring social life. In ‘Understanding cosmopolitan territories’, we continue by reviewing a principle that used to define the understanding of the public space in early modernity: the principle of territoriality. We argue that even if the locally defined territory has lost its traditional meaning, this does not result in its dissolution but in its transformation. The concept of place and proximity are not, from this point of view, threatened by globalization, but reaffirmed as core elements of social, political and also economic life. However, territories cannot continue to be closed, well-defined and exclusive, because otherwise their interaction with globalization (unnecessarily, in our opinion) becomes a zero-sum game. That is, either local territories become cosmopolitan spaces, or they will struggle to survive. Finally, in ‘Politics in cosmopolitan public space(s)’, we address two fundamental aspects of the impact that this new understanding of the public space has on contemporary democracies: 287

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the renewed centrality of cities as regional cosmopolitan cities and the idea of transnational selfdetermination as the principle that should ground democracy in a cosmopolitanized context. The chapter concludes by stating that a correct understanding of the cosmopolitan public space(s) should meet at least two requirements: (a) that, after globalization and subsequent transformations within modernity, we cannot continue to address the public space from the same deterministic perspective as in early modernity and (b) that this still cannot result in the dissolution of the local in favour of an abstract global space, but in its necessary critical and reflexive transformation as well as its complex interaction.

The relevance of adequately addressing the cosmopolitan public space(s) This chapter’s fundamental hypothesis is that in late modernity the idea of the public space – that sphere of deliberation where we articulate the common and channel divergencies – is not a given reality, but rather a laborious, fragile, variable construction that requires a continuous work of representation and argumentation. In early modernity, the idea of public space answered to overall clear patterns: defined actors, delimited territories, homogeneous identities, simple dynamics or univocal understandings. In contrast, the cosmopolitanization process in which we are involved led to “normative challenges raised by difference, the reconfiguration of borders, and the many questions brought about by globalization” (Delanty 2009: 9). The raising those questions and their horizontal and vertical heterogeneous manifestations makes it more accurate to talk about cosmopolitan public space(s) than about a singular understanding of the public space. However, the tools to properly interpret that plurality of expressions of the public space has become more necessary than ever in an age of increasing uncertainties. That is why it is crucial to renew the understanding of the public space to provide a normative and critical concept capable of accurately capturing the transformations on everyday social and political life. Little wonder, it is not merely a descriptive concept, but also prescriptive: it can orient our political practices and cultures, which are the most valuable goods in democratic societies. This understanding has evolved over time. In early modernity, with printing and the mass media, the public sphere disengaged from specific assemblies or institutionalized forums (Habermas 1991). Moreover, the early modern public sphere was different from the ancient public space as it was almost exclusively constituted around representative democratic institutions. Nowadays, in turn, it seems reasonable to state that there is not a single public space but a plurality of public spheres, as stated by Niklas Luhmann (1992). In differentiated, heterogeneous societies that are no longer ruled by a single and all-inclusive public sphere, where states no longer ensure a stable frame for deliberation and where social and cultural fragmentation do not foster homogeneous shared values, the understanding of the public space has changed. The public space is no longer the place where societies talk with themselves, but the place where different societies talk with each other. The social sciences only fully address this transformation once they reject the national outlook that dominated the understanding of early modernity (Beck 2003), exactly as the national outlook presupposed a linear identification between the institution of representative democracy, the nation-state and the public sphere. This identification is undermined by the impact of globalization. This renewed understanding of the concept of public space affects, in the first place, a key distinction from modernity: the distinction between the private and the public. First modernity is built on the affirmation of subjectivity in contrast with both objectivity and all other subjectivities. This self-affirmation, in addition to the conquest of individual rights, is what explains the emergence of a truthful private life, which can only appear when the socio-cultural system 288

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entitles subjects to determine which aspects of their lives they want to publish and which aspects they do not. Concurrently, the whole regime that codifies property assumes a quite simple and clear assignation of objects to their owners and a definition of the common (understood as common good or will). The first theories of democracy took this assumption as almost uncontroversial. As Joseph Schumpeter has explained, philosophers from the eighteenth century considered the common good so self-evident that anyone could recognize it, which led them to argue that if someone was not capable of recognizing it, this was necessarily due to some hidden interest, stupidity or bad faith (Schumpeter 1942). Transformations in public life and changes in private life have shaken the distinction between the common and the particular (Hardin 1968; Olson 1971; Sennet 1977; Olstrom 1990; Beck 1986). In fact, most contemporary political discussions are associated with conflicting definitions of what we may consider common or how we can articulate the particular. We may distinguish at least two different aspects of this re-defining process, as they were crucial for the constitution of the public sphere through history: the intimate and the emotional. On the intimate side, there is an eruption of the private, the personal, on the public sphere. The first condition of this phenomenon is the possibility of emptying the public space; it is incapable of offering shared meanings with which individuals may identify. The lack of tension between the private and the public that shaped early modernity has caused what we may call the total intimate sphere. It is total because, since it is not intimate in the traditional sense but is strongly personalized, it does not shape, strictly speaking, a public space. Private values, beliefs, claims, emotions, feelings and identities acquire primacy over any other consideration that defines citizen engagement. That is, a privatization of the public. Nevertheless, this phenomenon comes together with the politicization of the private. As Giddens (1990) notes, we live in a time when the private experience of having a personal identity has become a political force with huge consequences. Traditional matters such as social and economic justice no longer bind individuals through collective identities. In this scenario, the private sphere could be defined as that which is particularly protected when individuals are exonerated from the duty of justifying their own actions at any time, from assuming dominant reasons as their own or, from another perspective, that interference on self-identity needs to be justified. In a completely intimate sphere, particularly aggravated by social networks, we cannot lose sight of the conventionality and functionality of the distinction between public and private, the hard equilibrium that any society must maintain between the principle of respecting privacy and the prevention of the possibility that the protection of the private may cover power-relations that have nothing to do with the normative content of privacy (Young 2000). Neither strict dichotomies nor their suppression can capture the institutional complexity of contemporary cosmopolitanized societies. This interweaving between public and private is even more confusing in the era of the internet, when phenomena such as the voluntary exposure of personal life or the involuntary monitoring of that which is private through big-data force us to reconsider a distinction that was nuclear in early modernity. The second aspect of the cosmopolitanization of the public space refers to the emotional. As Luhmann argued, societies feel more threatened by emotionality than is usually assumed (Luhmann 1992: 365). In each individual country and on the global sphere, we are constantly witnessing events that cause strong emotional shocks. When political spaces are not protected or delimited, as they were in early modernity, it becomes infeasible to stop the globalization of emotions (Bauman 1998). If anything is shared by global risks such as ecological catastrophes, transnational terrorism, new forms of war or financial crises, it is their emotional impact which generates global communities of outrage, as powerful as they are volatile. This emotional dimension of the public space has become its core, the substitute for the frame that modernity conceived as oriented by pure ideological confrontation and articulated by corresponding well-defined 289

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institutions.1 At a time when identifications are weaker than in early modernity, outrage has become one of the main elements for cohesion. These phenomena show the need to transform modern institutions, which prove incapable of reasonably binding collective emotions together by providing societies an adequate means to channel that outrage. The quantitative (exponentially increasing number) and qualitative (emotional charge) impact that global media has on social life, in the absence of the modern moderating dynamics of distance and compartmentalization that used to articulate emotional reactions, are another symptom of the institutional weakness of late modernity (Putnam 2000), a weakness that is not restricted to the nation-state. In other words, the increase of issues that require mediation and interpretation has come together with the decrease or even failure of the traditional mediating and interpreting actors, increasing the levels of uncertainty in the public space. In sum, these cosmopolitan transformations of the understanding of the public space, however variable they may be from one place to the other – as described by the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000) – have led to the dissolution of the public space, at least in the way it was conceived in early modernity. This transformation stems from more individual approaches to social life and an increasing depoliticization of modern societies. However, this depoliticization of modernity’s basic institutions has opened the door to new forms of politicization, not necessarily anchored in container society’s bonds of identity, proximity or shared nationality and mainly driven by global risks. That is the core paradox of modernity: we know that modernity has succeeded in its purposes as we come to be aware of the risks it has created and how those risks threaten the modern project itself (Sørensen and Christiansen 2012: 15), including the pillar of a well-structured and defined public space. To a certain extent, risks have made all individuals equal: famine is hierarchical: it affects those who are in society’s lower social stratum. Pollution, on the contrary, affects everyone or may end up affecting everyone (Beck 1995: 99, nuanced by Martell 2009: 259–63). The realization of that transformation is precisely what makes modernity reflexive, that is, forced to reconsider its basic institutions in order to preserve its basic principles of freedom, equality or rationality. Following the example that Beck used throughout his work, pollution is not new; what is new is the role pollution plays in society. The same logic applies to issues of war, unemployment or the global means of communication: societies already experienced those changes during early modernity. However, they addressed them from the traditional categories and dichotomies of industrial societies: those affected or involved were easily identifiable and homogeneous. The rise of global risks dismantled the clear-cut divisions assumed by first modernity in a way that makes it necessary to reconsider basic institutions and their interactions, which necessarily affects the understanding of the public space. Does this mean that the cosmopolitan space(s) is/are completely disengaged from concrete places, locations or territories that defined it/them in early modernity? That is precisely what we address in the next section, introducing an analysis of the new understandings of cosmopolitan territories.

Understanding cosmopolitan territories The first diagnostics on the globalization process suggested a teleology that was insensitive to local contexts. It believed, implicitly or explicitly, that the global was defined by the suppression of the local and dissolved the physical spaces on a virtual globality. Some even claimed that geography had died and, alongside it, distance (Ohmae 1990). Space, in the sense of a material ground, seemed to have become almost irrelevant. From this assumption, there were authors who concluded that ‘time has annihilated space’ (Harvey 1990: 299), that we live in an ‘atopic society’ (Willke 2001) or that we are attending to the ‘trifling of the place’ (Luhmann 1997: 152). Meanwhile, theories of globalization departed from the contrasting position of flows and places, as if 290

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they were two separate or even contradictory territorial logics. Without denying that, the principle of territoriality is subject to high levels of uncertainty in cosmopolitanized societies (Badie 1995; Innerarity 2006); financial flows, commercial exchanges, diffusion of waves and images, human mobility and religious, cultural or linguistic bonds still seem to have a relevant say on fragile world cartography. Just as it seems exaggerated to speak about the end of territories, there is little doubt that the core character of space has given way to an ambiguous, versatile and diffused territoriality. In late modernity, the global public space gathers a set of political, economic and social strategies that contradict early modernity’s principle of territoriality. In most cases, the logics of mobility are imposed over territorial ones. Be that as it may, it seems we are experiencing a downplay of distance, of the understandings of close and far, that is shaking the fix and stable locations of early modernity. Globalization, as one of the main causes of ongoing cosmopolitanization (Beck 1997), has rendered useless the idea that social realities are built on territorially delimited unities according to which politics, culture and identity need to be conceived as isomorphic categories, i.e., as coextensive to the space of a territorial unity. Territories are no longer container spaces, but places that acquire diverse ways of interacting with the world depending on the issue at stake. In any case, what seems clear is that the social sciences cannot conceive of social realities in terms of totalizing spatial categories. The usual discourse about globalization and its consequences is full of misunderstandings. One of them is the idea that de-territorializing implies that limits and differences are completely dissolved. Those who state that ‘the world is flat’ (Friedman 2007) fail to see that the delimitation of spaces is just a phenomenon in a new territorializing process. As we confirm in the phenomena of injustice and exclusion, as well as in the competitivity factors that continue to be related to territorial differences, the world is not ‘flat’ but unequal and unalike. That is, it is not that space has become irrelevant, but diverse. The inability to recognize the dialectic nature between global and local realms, alongside the tendency to consider the interactions between actors in terms of absolute winners and losers, has resulted in interpretations that explain very little and guide societies even less. The idea that the global interacts with the local in a sort of zero-sum game, where the wins of the global imply a progressive loss of the local, is a serious categorical mistake. Why should we understand the local as the only form of territoriality and the global as a de-territorialized fluid space? The global financial system would not exist without its concrete expression in local cities such as London or New York. Concrete local cultures, local catastrophes or injustices would be unknown to us if globalization had not made them available to the global public. Equating the global with capital, progress and civilization while conceiving of the local as tradition and territoriality is a simplification that does not consider the complexity of the interaction between these two realities (Baraldi, Fors and Houlz 2006). Neither is it correct to view the local as the victim of exogenous powers that could not be domesticated, as if the local could not generate any sort of context because decision-making conditions were beyond its scope. Theories of de-territorialization are expressed as if the local would imply territoriality and as if the global were a process that makes spaces irrelevant. Now, the fact that global standards of rationality might be imposed does not necessarily equate to cultural uniformity. Local cultures and global flows should not be considered as a necessary contrast in second modernity. The global is not a sphere to compensate the local. Rather, what happens in cosmopolitanized space(s) is that global events burst in and are smoothed over or strengthened at the local sphere. We may understand the places as the products of encounters between diverse histories, a notion of place whose particularity does not result from a mythically rooted relative isolation but from the absolute particularity of its mixture of influences (Casey 1998). The particularity of a place is not the result of separation but of the way that place has synthesized diversity. Believing that the global 291

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implies domination and dependency while the local implies tradition and continuity is a mistake insofar as it implies denying the interaction between at least those two levels and, thus, their creative evolution. In this sense, the fact that a territory may or may not find itself threatened by globalization depends on the way it interacts with the global and not so much on its capacity to protect itself from global influences. Therefore, being a place in the world is now more an issue of how to define that connection and not as much of resisting or being closed to it. Beyond the stereotypes of globalization, in the late 1990s, a new concept of spatial development, better adjusted to the reality of the society of knowledge, appeared (Albrow 1996). Against the apparent irrelevance of concrete places and territories in the information society, the social sciences began to address the simultaneous and hybrid dynamic between global flows and concrete places (Innerarity 2011). Concrete spaces stopped being hindrances to general virtualization and began to be incentives for innovation. The social sciences began to address the advantages of local public spaces with regard to competitivity and transnational mobility. In the field of activities based on intensive knowledge, the involved actors also have a more intense interaction with space. The debates on information and knowledge geographies used to assume that, in a global society, knowledge and information would be more and more ubiquitous, i.e., accessible anywhere in any way. This standpoint proves to be mistaken when we address the distinction between information and knowledge: information is universally accessible, while knowledge is linked to concrete contexts. Little wonder, the knowledge implicit in information can only be transferred through personal interaction. Given that both the exchange of specific knowledge and the process of learning presuppose, on a large scale, direct personal communication, the specificities of the territory, despite the global flow of information, both persist in part and acquire core relevance. The acquisition of knowledge implies a learning process that is based on communication and requires some infrastructures that are, therefore, settled on a place. The ability to innovate within a territory rests on the articulation of explicit knowledge of a place and the information obtained from the global networks. Structures and locations in space have not become obsolete due to the mobility of goods, people and information in favour of virtual flows. Despite global connectivity, the concepts of the centre or of local rootedness have not lost their meaning, even if they have changed their value. As stated by Sassen (1998: 349), “when activities move beyond the digital space, they do so through a massive concentration of material resources, from the corresponding infrastructure to buildings”. That is Sassen’s critique of the idea of ‘informational cities’ understood as mere interchangeable nodes that will confirm the preeminence of flows over places: an abstract urbanity with a space economy where centres will lose gravitational power in favour of a pure virtual connectivity. However, the local dimension keeps reassuring itself about the new relational economic geography that has little to do with early modernity’s understanding of the local as traditional, closed and self-sufficient. Instead, the cosmopolitan space(s) is/are open space(s) that is/are embedded into a system that works globally. Thus, the space that is now being reconsidered and recovered, once the social sciences have evidenced the depletion of abstract global space, is a space whose limits do not have the rigidity implied in early modern understandings of competence, border or territorial integrity. New spaces are less limited and exclusive, more multi-dimensional and open to imbrications and overlapping. In fact, if a particular territory acquires some centrality, it will be due to its capacity to interact with the surrounding territories. From this perspective, it is possible to understand the value of the concept of proximity but also its limitations. Proximity is relevant as it facilitates face-to-face contacts that could develop a relational capital and stimulate collective learning. Nevertheless, it is important to avoid mystifying the concept of locality and conceive of it together with transnational openness as the exchange of knowledge is verified through diverse means, not always or necessarily in contexts 292

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of proximity. In the case of business clusters, for instance, only some of the smaller companies benefit from local knowledge while bigger companies benefit from non-local interactions (Porter 1990). The evaluation of the efficiency of technology parks reveals that spatial proximity does not automatically lead to more intense contact between the involved actors (Baraldi, Fors and Houlz 2006). In sum, it seems clear that spatial density does not equal social density, since proximity does not automatically lead to building strong local networks. Competitiveness, in turn, derives from the interaction of ‘relational proximities’ that, in cosmopolitan spaces, do not depend on the distance between each of the elements. Current means of innovation are mixed forms of mobility and urban stability. However, since communication and transportation techniques have made the concentration of people and products unnecessary, geographic proximity no longer has economic and political centrality. A new geography of centrality and marginality has appeared; a ‘spatial economy of the center’ (Sassen 1996) where the centre and the peripheries must be reconceived, just as the social sciences need to review the categories of close and far beyond the variable of physical proximity. As stated by the theories of a relational economic geography (Bathel and Glückler 2002: 49), proximity is a concept that integrates many other dimensions that, we add, were not decisive in early modernity. That is, a spatial, cultural, institutional, organizational or virtual proximity that cannot be properly understood from the scope of a single variable. These transformations in the categories involved in the understanding of territory, as a core element for understanding cosmopolitan space(s), have a clear impact on governance and its limits, particularly given that the principle of territoriality continues to be a pillar of institutional structures. The porosity of societies within territories that are governed by delimited institutional frameworks has exponentially increased the amount of input they receive. This has resulted in at least two phenomena: an unprecedented level of interdependencies between the diverse institutional networks and, concurrently, the difficulties of traditional institutional frameworks to deal with the transnational or global challenges they need to address (Castells 1996). These two phenomena lead to the need for cooperation between states. The question, then, is how these transformations affect politics. That is precisely what we will address in the next section, through the analysis of the increasing political relevance of cities as fundamental cosmopolitan space(s) and the introduction of the concept that, in our view, will rule cosmopolitan politics: the idea of transnational self-determination.

Politics in cosmopolitan public space(s) In the cosmopolitanized public space, there is a crisis of political representation. In early modern democracies, the capacity of politics to articulate the public space resulted mainly from representation procedures, which helped shape political opinions, identities and interests. This virtuality has been questioned by a series of processes that have put politics in a horizon of immediacy, making it lose its character as a social construction. However, new forms of politicization arise. One of the most relevant ones is the transformation happening within cities. Either as parts of a ‘network of global cities’ (Sassen 1991: 103), a ‘neo-medieval reality’ (Zielonka 2015: 214–15) or ‘united world cities’ (Beck 2016: 164), cities are once again at the core of the ongoing transformation. Unsurprisingly, the idea of the public space has always been closely linked with the reality of the city, with the values of citizenship and the horizons of civilization. That is, with the understanding of the city as the civic space devoted to the common good where urban environments constitute the core of the individual’s social and cultural life. The city as the expression of a cosmopolitan space could be expressed in terms of a ‘place for the strangers’ (Innerarity 2006: 97). The mixture resulting from human mobility subjects them to 293

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both constant combination and novelty. It is in the city where humanity has always acquired the profound experience of diversity, mostly because cities are not the result of voluntary design but of the eventful choices of many individuals. The city becomes, then, a sum of constant interaction, passive or active, between complete strangers: a place where physical proximity cohabits with social distance. That is why cities were the driving forces of modernity: they fostered the separation of social spheres resulting in a process of individualization compatible with deep-diversity. A phenomenon that, with the emergence and consolidation of the cosmopolitan understanding of territory, is also breaking the rural/urban distinction so clearly defined in early modernity. The distinction still persists, but it is both transforming and feeding the ongoing change in urban areas. The radical openness of the city goes beyond the ‘municipal boundaries’ understood in early modernity’s parameters, developing mutually enriching networks that cover wider regional areas. These cosmopolitan territories adopt the dynamics of urban tolerance that assume the stranger as a normal element of social life, allowing diverse ways of living and, therefore, fostering cultural innovation. In early modernity, these urban spaces, at least in Europe, became the place where bourgeois, civil society and communities of citizens fostered modern values and institutions. In the ongoing cosmopolitanization, urban life has descaled, and regional cities are where the exchange and coexistence between distinct individuals points to a truly common horizon. In sum, in the ongoing process of cosmopolitanization, cities regain a significant role while losing their material dimension, and thus, they transform into more globally connected regional cities. This renewed understanding of cities is particularly relevant in political terms. As we have explained, cosmopolitanization of the public space also implies new forms of politicization that no longer answer to traditional state-defined patterns. Instead, political communities are increasingly defined by the need to address shared challenges, needs and risks that do not answer to traditional delimitations. The key issue is that the actual community where global risks are suffered and discussed most intensely are the cities (Beck 2016: 165). In contrast to early modern nation-states, which are still stuck in a container understanding of society (i.e., homogenizing and exclusive) and national interests (i.e., a zero-sum game), cities are more open to cosmopolitan cooperation. As Beck notes, “nowhere other than in world cities and their informal and formal connections is the opportunity to shape the potential for indignation, the power of the anticipated catastrophe, into institutional, democratic political forms so palpable” (Beck 2016: 171). This is particularly true in the case of risk-communities aiming to fight climate change: this can be seen in the recent examples of 125 cities in the United States opposing the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement2 or the global repercussions of attempts by Barcelona’s City Council to fight excessive traffic by creating semi-pedestrian superblocks.3 However, focusing solely on this issue also raises problematic aspects: the inability of cities to properly address some global challenges or, more importantly, the fact that ‘city interests’ do not necessarily match global interests or may even contradict them. These problems result from complex dynamics where cities are left with little to no margin to decide. Moreover, we cannot take for granted that cities are home to ‘well-trained liberal citizens’ (Beck 2016: 173) who will necessarily engage in a cosmopolitan debate regarding global risks; this ignores the fact that cities also harbour a wide range of interests, preferences, ideologies and life-circumstances that can generate anti-cosmopolitan dynamics. Hence, it is once again a matter of equilibrium: the municipal/ regional-national-transnational dynamics in cosmopolitanized politics not only do not need to be in competition, but they must reinforce each other. What, then, about decision making? What principle should guide this context of horizontal and vertical complex interdependencies? In early modernity, sovereignty was understood as the supposed convergence of nationality, citizenship and an institutional framework ruling over a given territory. The will of the people was the ethos underlying the early modern understanding 294

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of self-determination. In cosmopolitanized environments, this outlook no longer seems functional or justified. Despite anti-cosmopolitan resistances, nationalities are no longer the exclusive, essentialized and hegemonic bonds presupposed in early modernity. Citizenship, in turn, is not linked to a single institutional framework, as proven by the plurality of institutional frameworks operating within the European Union, including the just described political relevance of cosmopolitanized cities. Because of this, institutions cannot expect to operate as if they were the direct expression of a perfectly defined people’s will, because there is no such thing as a perfectly defined people anymore, if ever there was. Therefore, self-determination today, under current conditions, means accepting the effects that the decisions of other political facts (Dryzek 2001; Gutmann and Thompson 2004; Bohman 2007) have on us insofar as we have had the chance to make our interests heard in their decision-making processes and, on the flip side, to be ready to convert other citizens into subjects of our own decisions (Innerarity 2017: 328). It is not, then, a matter of setting aside the principle of national self-determination and necessarily breaking with the status quo (although, as opposed to first modernity, that is always a possibility), but about the duty of any democratic government to somehow take foreign interests into account as if they were national interests (Lagerspetz 2015: 20). That is, democratically governing cosmopolitan public space(s) require(s) the principle of transnational self-determination. With the dissolution of colonial empires and state homogenization, cosmopolitan spaces are politically influenced by a sum of externalities resulting from a myriad of political decisions with cross-border impact. The extraterritorial effects of state decisions challenge the self-government of everyone. That is clear if we think about the case of German and British governments that did not implement some environmental rules, causing a high mortality rate of the fish in Scandinavian waters. Swedish fishermen did not participate in the formation of the political will nor of British or German decision-making bodies, but they were undoubtedly affected. Since then, the level of interdependence has increased in the world in general and in the European arena, in particular. The idea that decision-making bodies must answer only to the electorate of those bodies is not operative anymore. The idea of a contractual responsibility regarding this electorate must move toward a sovereignty that engages the peoples toward the outside when decisions refer to certain common goods. In sum, the new understanding of the public space in a cosmopolitanized context where the container view of society is no longer operative requires democratizing the impacts, the collateral effects, the discriminatory accelerations that are the basis of most of the political outrage nowadays. Under current conditions of interdependence, there will not be national justice without transnational justice, nor democracy without some inclusion of the non-electorate. In a context where politics is supposed to rule the cosmopolitan public space(s), rather than early modernity’s national public space, the republican principle of non-domination can only be respected if it also refers to those who, despite not belonging to the national demos in the traditional sense, are definitively affected by our decisions. This principle is, of course, necessarily based on reciprocal acceptance that is promoted (although not forced) by the urgency of the challenges we share. In the case of the EU, this idea is captured, among other proposals, by the concept of European Demoicracy (Nicolaïdis 2012). It provides an ontologically ambiguous but procedurally realistic balance between the respect of self-determination and the need to foster a sovereignty that commits citizens toward the external world when certain common goods are in play (Innerarity 2014: 2). Nations are in a process that requires adapting democratic ideals in the same way as pre-modern political thinkers adapted democratic theories to spread legitimate sovereignty and decision making beyond the local communities (Innerarity 2017: 87). The key element of the demoicratic approach is that it does so accepting that – just as in the case of pre-modern local communities with the rise of the nation-state – this will not necessarily imply the disappearance of 295

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nations. The key change, in this regard, is opening self-determination transnationally, committing to both consider interests emerging beyond the particular nation and raising our interests beyond particular national decision-making processes. Otherwise, especially in the European context of increasing interdependence, even if a nation’s internal self-determination might be formally recognized, it will not in fact be sufficiently self-determined (Innerarity 2015: 9). Furthermore, European Demoicracy does so without this necessarily meaning a loss of democracy, in the same way that movement from Athens to Westminster cannot be automatically interpreted as a loss of democracy. In sum, as Chris J. Bickerton rightly states, the most relevant transformation in Europe is that its peoples no longer constitute nation-states, but member-states, assuming that European decisions are also national decisions (Bickerton 2012). That is, the political management of the local cosmopolitan public space(s) cannot be understood without the European cosmopolitan public space and vice versa.

Conclusion The idea and reality of the public space has gone through many different phases: it has been understood as a unifying sphere, as a plurality of spaces that overlap and occasionally dispute with each other. It has also been projected as a cosmopolitan horizon. Nowadays we most probably have to conceive of it as the place where we articulate the pretensions of universality and the particularity of difference in an unstable and dynamic way. Meanwhile, it is a factual verification – our destinies are shared, while threats and opportunities are not blocked by delimitations – and a reality that is in permanent construction, which always implies a normative dimension. The concept of the public space we may endorse will depend, to a large extent, on how we may understand globalization and the role territories – concrete spaces – played in that process. Once we overcame the deterministic conceptions of the territory that considered it as almost irrelevant, the physical or material spatial dimension of the territory has regained new relevance, not despite new theories about the knowledge society but, precisely, because of them. Once we understand the public space as an open, less determined, space, it becomes a place of special relevance for the knowledge economy, the transfer of knowledge and the logics underlying innovation. Without mystifying local expressions of the public space, there is little doubt that the local continues to be the space where flows happen, even if this means changing its value and rethinking notions of proximity and distance. A necessary reflection on the type of knowledge we are contemplating when we talk about the knowledge society allows us to understand the interaction between the local and the global in a more analytically fruitful and complex way. An interaction that the first theories of globalization assumed implied a deterministic clash where there could only be winners and losers. The review of these concepts, necessary due to the ongoing processes of globalization, allows us to build a more precise view of its cosmopolitan significance. Cosmopolitanism can no longer imply, if it ever did (Delanty 2009: 44), the dissolution of distance or difference and particularity. It refers, instead, and in accordance with a discovery that Dewey made long ago, to the standpoint that the necessary understanding of public space needs to be matched by the magnitude of what is at stake in each case (Dewey 1927). The cosmopolitan public space(s) is/are not defined by the delimitation of an identity or by the closing of a locality, but neither is it completely unlimited as some versions of cosmopolitanism that disregard the value of differences seem to assume. Our concerns define what we are and the institutional levels where we may address those concerns, not the other way around, even in a context where those institutional frameworks can no longer be closed on themselves. 296

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Notes 1 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 1996, 2008. By Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton. 2 ‘The fight against climate change: Four cities leading the way in the Trump era’, The Guardian, 12/06/2017. By Oliver Milman, Joe Eskenazi, Richard Luscombe, Tom Dart. www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/ jun/12/climate-change-trump-new-york-city-san-francisco-houston-miami 3 ‘What New York can learn from Barcelona’s ‘Superblocks’’, New York Times, 30/09/2016. By Winnie Hu. www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/nyregion/what-new-york-can-learn-from-barcelonas-superblocks. html?mcubz=2&_r=0

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Olson, M. (1971) The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Olstrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, M.E. (1990) The Competitive Advantage of Nations, New York: The Free Press. Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (1996) Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia University Press. Sassen, S. (1998) ‘Zur Einbettung des Globalisierungsprozesses. Der nationale Staat vor neuen Aufgaben’ in Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 3: 345–57. Schumpeter, J. [1942] (1966) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London: Unwin University Books. Sennet, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sørensen, M.P. and Christiansen, A. (2012) Ulrich Beck: An Introduction to the Theory of Second Modernity and the Risk Society, Reprint edition, New York: Routledge. Willke, H. (2001) Atopia. Studien zur Atopischen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Young, I.M. (2000) Inclusión and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zielonka, J. (2014) ‘Legitimacy in a Neo-Medieval (Post-Crisis) Europe’, in Champeau, S., Closa, C., Innerarity, D. and Maduro, M.P. (eds.), The Future of Europe: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice after the Euro Crisis, London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

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26 Cosmopolitanism in cities and beyond Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin

Given their distinctively multicultural character, it is widely understood today that cities, as nodes in transnational networks, are exemplary crucibles where cosmopolitanism and its accompanying creative energies are forged (Warf, 2015). In extreme form, it is assumed that “a veritable urban alchemy” is at work that can transform “the diverse and divided population of a city . . . into one harmonious community of cosmopolitan citizens” (Muller, 2011: 3416). In recent years, cosmopolitanism has been inserted back into both scholarly and popular discussions on urban diversity and emergent civil spaces, particularly in the context of the rising presence of transnational migrants and the increasing proliferation of contact zones that renders the contemporary globalising city as “the very place of our meeting with the other” (Jacobs, 1996: 4, paraphrasing Barthes). Urban managers around the globe have also been eager to project their respective cities as “cosmopolitan” in order to signify their roles as creative hubs, economic powerhouses and magnetic poles where diverse streams of activities, ideas and people converge. In alluding to the ascendancy of difference and hybridity as key signatures of today’s urban landscape, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for instance, hailed New York as “the freest city in the world”, “built [and] sustained by immigrants . . . from more than a hundred countries, speaking more than two hundred languages, and professing every faith” (Bloomberg, 2010). Similarly in Asia, former Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew (2000) at the millennial turn had urged Singaporeans to embrace the idea of becoming “a cosmopolitan city that attracts and welcomes talent in business, academia, or in the performing arts [in order to] add to Singapore’s vibrancy and secure our place in a global network of cities of excellence”. These pronouncements, also prominent in diversity campaigns among cities elsewhere aspiring for ‘hub’ status, or to host ‘globe-fitting’ mega-events, are indicative of the widespread currency of ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the new language of urban success. To wit, these novel forms of representation strive not just to celebrate cities’ capacity to welcome a myriad of people of disparate origins, but also endeavour to conjure cosmopolitanism as a major selling point for aspiring cities as proof of global status (Benton-Short et al., 2005). This easy logic of equating cultural diversity with signs that a city has arrived at the zenith of its developmental progress is but another example of the rhetoric of globalisation, a form of macroscopic ‘globe talk’ that superficially glossing over the ways in which social contents and interests may vary considerably across and within places (Robertson, 1992: 113). Indeed, this ambiguous 299

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association of multiplicity with urban achievement does not even account for the lack of a consensus over any single definition of cosmopolitanism in the urban context. As a philosophy of world citizenship, it may speak of a political organisation and a unifying vision for democracy in the city that takes a shared humanity as its frame of reference (Binnie et al., 2006). As a practice and attitude, it may more individualistically refer to its practitioner’s disposition and “willingness to engage with the Other”, and his/her “intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences . . . [and] contrasts” (Hannerz, 1996: 103). More recent theorisation has also produced variants such as ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’, ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ and ‘situated cosmopolitanism’ in order to broaden the concept beyond individual orientation to take into account collective dimensions and to localise the concept in period and place (Kaur, 2011: 198). Given the multiplicity of definitions, a closer examination of how cosmopolitanism, and the difference it portends, is actually being negotiated and worked out on the ground is necessary (Robbins, 1998). As Harvey (2000: 557) cautions, cosmopolitanism “bereft of geographical specificity” remains abstracted reason, liable to become “either mere heterotopic description or a passive tool of power for dominating the weak”. Taking this critique further, Jazeel (2011: 92) cautions against Eurocentric visions of universal humanity that may lurk beneath cosmopolitan thought, and advocates “opening out some of the concept’s more restrictive geographical imagination” to thinking of “place as inherently relational, . . . constituted by the coming together of narratives, trajectories and border crossings from elsewhere”. Our way of interrogating the conceptual linkages between cosmopolitanism and cities is hence to take a geographical and contextual stance. The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections followed by a conclusion. In the first section, we critically consider scholarship that explicates the capacity and potential of cities to generate new opportunities for contact, interaction and mutual learning among its dwellers and communities. Recognising their long-standing role as convivial sites of exchange and encounter even before the present era of contemporary globalisation, we seek to give shape to the multiple forms of cosmopolitanisms that have adorned urban histories across different contexts. The next section then goes on to contemplate the uneven manifestations of cosmopolitanism in everyday urban reality. In particular, we take issue with the discursive and managerial approach that cities presently adopt to market themselves as multicultural models for emulation. In delving deeper into such practices, we seek to tease out the numerous omissions and exclusions that are attendant in these (overly) celebratory proclamations. The last substantive section then finally extends this line of argument in another direction to locate alternative ways of realising the cosmopolitan ideal. One of our goals is to emancipate the concept from its current accretion to the ‘world city’, and to rediscover it in less-than-conventional settings in the rural ‘periphery’. A few closing remarks on the implications of these ideas on future research will then follow.

Cities as cradles of cosmopolitanism Writing of an emerging terrain in critical urban studies at the turn of the century, Soja (2000: 265) notes the increasing need to recognise the centrality of urbanism as a way of life in the world today. Notably, its “fractal” nature is founded upon, not so much the structured foundations of modern capitalism, but “a recomposed sociality that has become . . . fluid, fragmented, decentered, and rearranged in complex patterns” arguably warrants our immediate attention. In many ways, Soja’s (ibid.) preoccupation with the uneven “social mosaic” and “polymorphous . . . social geometry” of cities can be said to stem from his belief in the primacy of difference – and the right to be different – in the urban domain. In a similar vein, Isin (2002: 283) calls the city a “difference machine”, one that is not just “a container where differences encounter each other” 300

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but which “generates differences and assembles identities”. These arguments echo Jane Jacobs’s (1961) vision of the city as a cauldron of diversity, and, more than that, a site for the formulation of a cultural politics that advocates the multiplication of social milieus and progressive movements, rather than diminution to any single planning solution. Such is the expectation of the role of the city – it is a dwelling, a motley collection of happenings (Massey, 2007), not reducible to the quick, easy outer impressions, but is rather qualified by the social life that it harbours, and the cosmopolitan potentials it holds out. In this vein, a common node of scholarly interest has pertained to the interactive interface that cities make available for the experience and acceptance of disparate viewpoints, lifestyles and subjectivities. As Keith (2005: 1) observes, the process of urbanisation necessarily “foregrounds encounter and contact in the metropolis”, and the city is most aptly the geographical scale at which the “challenges of multiculturalism” are met and ironed out. Similarly, Warf (2015: 933) asserts that it is in global cities that “confronting difference on a daily basis . . . mitigates against the dehumanizing stereotypes that sustain discourses of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism”. Cognisant of the salience of the ‘local’ in urban practices, several authors have concerned themselves with the study of micro-level, “inadvertent cosmopolitanism” (Radice, 2015: 599) associated with particular hotspots where genial moments of sociality are initiated and allowed to unfold. Latham (2006), for instance, argues that there is an impetus to examine more closely how cosmopolitanism is experienced and mediated through banal settings such as restaurants and bars. Using Auckland as an example, he interrogates “the particular ways by which the world has become [progressively] cosmopolitan” (ibid., p. 98) in parts of that city, interweaving its heterogeneous texture with the rhythms of residents’ ordinary activities in particular public places and along particular streets. Also focused on such mundane, local exchanges in negotiating co-presence with others, Laurier and Philo (2006) draw on ethnographic research on gestures between strangers in cafés to reveal how “the work of conviviality is . . . accomplished on a momentary, situated and improvised basis” in Western cities (ibid.: 204). In a different context but also putting the accent on everyday encounters, Lahiri (2010: 192) argues that for Brahmos, a middle-class religious minority in Kolkata, the politics of urban belonging does not juxtapose local and global attachments as “disjunct registers of affiliation” but considers them affective structures that can be lived simultaneously as part of a “rooted cosmopolitanism”. Choosing an active “elective form of belonging” to a Bengali and cosmopolitan city, Brahmo cosmopolitanism goes beyond “tolerating ethnic, religious and cultural others within the metropolis” and is centred on “taking pleasure” in the presence of different peoples through appreciating different foods, friendships and religions in the everyday spaces of the city (Lahiri, 2010: 196–7). Such a form of “affective cosmopolitanism” is however being tested at its limits as the cultural hegemony of the community suffers gradual decline in the face of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism within the city. As scholars such as Castro (2013) and Werbner (2015: 575) observe in different contexts, “cosmopolitanism is everywhere a fragile achievement, threatened by countervailing ethnicist, nationalist and racist forces”. Part of the urban serendipity of everyday encounters draws its strength from the fact that cities are seldom homogeneous, but are instead composed by multiple social groups. This particularity of city life is in fact scarcely a recent phenomenon and can be traced to the major port towns in colonial times. As Cartier (1999: 279) writes, maritime “progenitors of contemporary world cities” not only were the “early centers of polyglot population and exotic things, and extraordinary mobility”, but, being “tied by cultures and economies to distant shores”, fostered cosmopolitanisms that claimed diverse origins and complex geographies. Such cosmopolitan diversity can even be traced back in time to the Roman Empire, when “European cities like London first became 301

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a site of ‘ancient cosmopolitanism’ open to migration from regions including South Asia” (Kaur, 2011: 197). Given their role as entrepôts and emporiums of the world, port cities became test beds for the harmonious co-existence of diverse communities and transient populations, such as seafarers, immigrant labour and members of the trading bourgeoisie, in the imperial world. That these transit centres were, then, not yet folded into the territorial logic of the nation-state, they arguably refer back to a sort of “golden age of cosmopolitanism” (Waley, 2009: 247), offering a glimpse of how “actually existing” forms of the same once flourished under the impetus of trade and mercantilism. This maritime legacy constitutes the foundation upon which many of today’s most widely recognised cosmopolises are built (Cartier, 1999); indeed, their open and culturally diverse disposition speaks not merely of a relic population, but the historical ties they share with other places that continue to this day (Bunnell, 2007). In this regard, New York City stands out as a multicultural port city par excellence. It boasts an illustrious history of effective immigrant incorporation, and exudes a compellingly global and multi-ethnic character in its present-day districts, neighbourhoods and demographic profile (Benton-Short et al., 2005). Affirming its exceptionality as such, Foner (2007) contends that, while not completely estranged from its national context, the city is extraordinary for its constant flux and deep connections globally, resulting in its tendency to delineate its own (expanded) notions of race, ethnicity and other markers of difference apart from American norms. A striking feature, in particular, concerns the observation that despite the city’s large immigrant population, “[n]o one or two, or even three or four, nations [are capable of] dominat[ing]” (ibid.: 1002) it. This does not even account for the fact that on top of divergences in racial and ethnic affiliations, New York is concomitantly home to people of many contrasting political, social, gender and sexual inclinations (Stansell, 2000), whose presence just as impactfully contributes to (re)vitalising its urban scene in the form of varied (sub)cultural pockets and landscapes. Such an overt expression of diversity, in both demography and morphology, and the accommodative co-existence of multiple groups readily become putative proof of the city’s uniquely cosmopolitan nature, reflecting its pioneering role in heading a new urban mode(l) that denotes not just vitality but also the hallmarks of a ‘good’ city (Amin, 2006). Hoping to replicate this urban success, many cities worldwide are, not surprisingly, eager to subscribe to similar ideals of cosmopolitanism, by fashioning themselves after archetypes like New York. If proving a little superficial, wannabe-global cities have variously experimented with, and adopted, a repertoire of ‘world-class’ environments to substantiate their claims as emergent cosmopolises (Chang and Huang, 2008). As a case in point, numerous cities have in recent years become preoccupied with undertaking gentrification projects involving the conversion of loft dwellings into prestigious, and culturally emblematic, downtown residences for the professional and managerial class (Hamnett and Whitelegg, 2007). Attempting to re-capture the artistic charms and bohemianism that these spaces evoke of 1970s New York, these urban renovations have given rise to what Shaw (2007: 140) terms as the “dormitorization of former industrial and commercial areas” and the “Manhattanization” of cities. Other non-Western cities operating in different socio-political environments such as Shanghai are grappling with local-national politics in trying to translate “the global city of economic openness” into “a cosmopolitan city of exploratory culture and experimental transnationalism” poised to take its part on the world stage through signature cultural events and novel international collaborations (Schilbach, 2010: 232; Winter, 2015). Here, cosmopolitanism is not just taken to be a sign of social progressiveness, but also a cultural resource with which cities are increasingly being marketed. The examples above by no means exhaust the multifarious ways by which cosmopolitanism has been weaved into imaginations of the urban in contemporary times (Miles and Paddison, 302

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2005). Nevertheless, it is ostensible that a normative ‘global city’ culture founded upon a particular standard of diversity and conviviality is beginning to take shape and has come to define the range of possibilities available for implementation as ‘best practices’. In this section, we have intimated that cities universally are increasingly cajoled into accepting a hegemonic brand of cosmopolitanism, often favouring ‘worldly’ (read: Western) and ‘festive’ appearances of multicultural vibrancy, to the neglect of more indigenous and grounded ways of negotiating difference (Chang and Huang, 2008; Notar, 2008). In this context, a careful analysis of how socially plural cities come to grips with their inherent diversities – whether due to industrial, postcolonial or neoliberal reasons – in equally plural ways is imperative (Grillo, 2000). Recognising this ‘difference’ both within and between cities not only prevents one from mistaking superficial glosses of urban aesthetics for ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanisms, but also provide a wider latitude for critiquing overly optimistic pronouncements concerning the inevitable rise of the ‘global (multi) cultural city’ (Yeoh, 2005).

Cosmopolitan cities, un-cosmopolitan realities The speciousness of cosmopolitanism as a peculiarity of all cities becomes especially salient when one considers the persistent tensions of everyday urban life. Douglass (2009) highlights the need to distinguish between a city that merely – and only for the sake of markets, investment and global competition – professes to be cosmopolitan (‘globopolis’), and that which genuinely encourages the participation of all residents in the making and the re-making of the city (‘cosmopolis’). He cautions that while the ‘globopolis’ is an attractive model that makes economic sense, it tends ultimately towards the endorsement of elitist values that are often antithetical to the spirit of cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately, neoliberal practices in much of urban planning today have emphasised serving the corporate economy, leading to the widespread privatisation and commodification of urban space and the marooning of human-scale associational life even as urban populations become more internationalised and diverse. Despite common caricatures of cities as defenders of heterogeneity and civic gregariousness, these agglomerations harbour invisible power asymmetries, rigid hierarchies and the politics of inclusion and exclusion that continue to plague today’s ‘global’ definitions of cosmopolitanism. In sum, by equivocating diversity for middle-class consumption, market-driven cosmopolitanism “cloaks power asymmetries in equality” (Langegger, 2016: 1816). The most visible imprint of this incongruity between urban marketing and reality is perhaps found in the spatial layout of numerous ‘divided’ cities, where while some privileged sites are valorised as international and globally oriented centres of knowledge exchange (Power and Lundmark, 2004), others – along with their residents – are rendered out-of-sight and out-of-place (Cresswell, 1996). Most conspicuously, ethnic neighbourhoods in Western cities, such as Harlem in New York and the inner suburbs of Sydney, are commonly given the latter, inferior treatment (Turner, 2008), notwithstanding their location in some of the most affluent regions of the world. Stereotyped as ghettos filled with exotic danger, they not only figure as spaces of exception for the containment of undesirable elements associated with poverty, blight and racial deviance, they are also economically disconnected from the rest of the city and starved of social services (Smith, 1996). This contrasts starkly with the simultaneous development of white suburbia in some of the very same cities, where a “calmer, safer and more prosperous way of life” is promised to those who can afford to ‘differentiate’ themselves (Pile, 1999: 28), and who desire to lead self-segregated lives apart from the ‘Other’ (Butler, 2003). Following this arc of scholarship, researchers interested in the gentrification of public space show “how difference is simultaneously celebrated as a diverse pulse and flattened onto an even 303

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playing field, then honed into a powerful gentrification tool” (Langegger, 2016: 1805). Using a case study of a working-class Latino neighbourhood in Denver, Colorado, Langegger (2016: 1816–17) discusses how “unassuming, local-serving pizzerias and tacquerias lost street legitimacy to hip restaurants with taglines such as ‘farm-to-table’, ‘world street food’ and ‘Asian comfort food’” as the rhythms of public space are altered to cater to gentrifier norms and practices. Cultural festivals and religious performances become subjects of the tourist gaze as the neighbourhood’s ethnic diversity is “semantically smoothed with touristic terms such as hip, diverse and eclectic” (Langegger, 2016: 1812). By championing a cosmopolitan discourse that actually reinforces a thin notion of diversity, urban planners may become complicit in supporting, through processes of subject- and place-making, the inequitable treatment of some people as ‘normal’ and ‘rightful’ owners of the city, while others as aliens in their own home. Such discrepancies and exclusions are likewise observable at the micro-scale of public encounters and banal interactions. Focusing on these levels provides tangible clues to the extent to which a city’s diversity is in fact translatable into a proportionate measure of cultural mixing and mutual acceptance on the ground. Valentine’s (2008) study on urban residents’ interchanges in the United Kingdom suggests that this correlation between the (mere) presence of difference and truly cosmopolitan attitudes is not at all automatic. Instead of finding enhanced social equality and cross-cultural understanding with proximate living and increased social interaction, her study detects confounding signs of mistrust, social distance and even feelings of repulsion beneath calm appearances of civility and urban friendliness. As Valentine (2008: 334) concludes, while established “codes of behaviour in public space mean that people do commonly behave in courteous and sometimes kind ways towards others, this is not the same as having respect for difference”, and, more critically, does not in any way validate assumptions that a city is cosmopolitan by virtue of its demographic mix. Muller’s (2011: 3415, 3429; see also Devadason, 2010) work on London and Amsterdam extends these findings by showing that “urban cosmopolitanism needs to be understood as a situated, temporal and contingent performance . . . [which is] unequally accessible to people positioned differently in terms of race, class and residential status”. In sum, rather than being valued for its advocacy of democracy, cosmopolitanism is increasingly deployed today as a mythological metaphor of multiculturalism, as well as ready proof of a city or nation’s mosaic history and compatibility with the ideologies of late capitalism and globalisation (Hatziprokopiou 2009). As the humanist handmaiden to globalisation, the effects of cosmopolising projects in creating class disparities and social polarisation in urban societies through the act of concretising and naming difference have received increased critical attention (Jacobs and Fincher, 1996; Balbo and Marconi, 2006; Yeoh, 2013). Herein lies as well a fundamental question and paradox about cosmopolitanism, concerning who gets to make that distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the choice to tolerate (or disapprove of) the ‘Other’. In city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong, ongoing developmental and globalising efforts have culminated in the frequent projection of these nodes as welcoming ‘cosmopolitan’ playgrounds for ‘talented’ people, but where migrant contract workers further down the skills hierarchy are incorporated into the urban fabric as a low-waged transient labour force rather than sociopolitical subjects (Yeoh, 2004). Most notably, legal measures such as work permits and shortterm contracts are instituted as some of the most common devices used to curtail the residential permanence, and hence social participation, among ‘unskilled’ migrants. In other words, control and containment measures become particularly significant in cities where cosmopolitanism is applied ‘upwards’ and not ‘sideways’ (Yeoh, 2013). Persistent calls to tighten surveillance and keep migrant populations at the margins of host society are symptomatic of the imperative to manage the contradictions between the need for a large low-waged, supposedly temporary, migrant population to service the urban economy on the one hand, and the fear of the malaise associated 304

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with ‘migrant concentrations’ that appear overwhelmingly palpable and permanent on the other hand (Yeoh et al., 2017). Not all accounts of cosmopolitan makeovers for cities see these projects as irredeemably negative. For example, focusing on the massive transformation of Cusco, Peru, as a result of tourist inroads, Lawhon and Chion (2012: 551) discuss how the cultivation of a ‘rooted’ form of cosmopolitanism encourages openness to diversity and difference, values aesthetics based on local traditions and grows territorial commitment to shared space and its people, which, in turn, provides an antidote to “the instant consumption and disposal tendencies of current tourism”. Other authors have attempted to provide a more nuanced understanding of how the urban mosaic is not merely produced hegemonically, but is also fiercely contested through everyday resistance and activism. For instance, to take Filipina domestic workers’ subversive ‘occupation’ of Central Hong Kong for weekend gatherings as an example, Law (2002) alerts us to the ways in which a city’s public space can be symbolically transformed into sites where alternative meanings about one’s identity are re-written and re-inscribed onto the city’s landscape (see also Fahmi, 2009). Such transgressive behaviours not only help make visible again the forgotten ‘Other’ in the city, but also remind us of the multi-centred potential of urban politics, and its innately conflictive and plural nature. It follows that how coherently the different strata of a city stick together would ultimately depend on the extent to which members of that community are willing to make a commitment to accommodate each other’s agendas, “building and sustaining a certain ease with unassimilated difference and agonistic disagreement” (Amin, 2006: 1016). Notwithstanding the fact that cosmopolitanism is a trait many cities claim to possess today, the manifestation of its ideals likely takes more than the simple co-presence of diverse populations, or spirited proclamations that a city has thus arrived.

Cosmopolitanism beyond the city Fixating on the urban sphere alone harbours the risk of blindsiding researchers to the prospect that cosmopolitanism can sometimes take on more compelling and intimate forms outside the context of the city. In seeking to give shape to these alternative appearances in small towns and rural settings, this final section seeks to investigate how peripheral locations may likewise hold the secrets to fostering cosmopolitanism, and hence offer some valuable insights for urban planners. In the first instance, it is commonly (and erroneously) held that because non-metropolitan areas have a lesser likelihood of encountering difference in their relatively homogeneous societies, their inhabitants are also more insular and resistant to any kind of infiltrating ‘Otherness’. In this context, to ascribe the values of cosmopolitanism to only those who have the benefit of dwelling in a ‘global’ space is tantamount to denying those living elsewhere a chance to express the same kind of human relationality. Instead, a number of scholars have stressed that the skills needed to bridge social gaps are often acquired through “mundane cultural interaction[s]” (Cohen, 2004: 148) which are not the monopoly of urban environments. Cheshire et al. (2014: 84), for example, characterise entrepreneurial family farmers as “cosmopolitan farmers” as they are well equipped with “everyday cosmopolitan repertoires and sentiments” in running farm business practices. More colloquial and ‘indigenous’ forms of cosmopolitanism, particularly in areas and contexts where globalisation was thought to be absent, may be as vital (Hannerz, 2005; Lamont and Aksartova, 2002). In thus treating such cross-cultural exchanges as equally valid displays of social openness and democracy, the true breadth of cosmopolitanism can be more fully appreciated, even if this sometimes means having to transcend the capsule of the global city. This perspective becomes especially relevant with the increasing recognition that the distinction between the rural and the urban is proving to be an arbitrary one in contemporary times. 305

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As Cid Aguayo (2008: 541) provocatively argues, “[r]ural places are not distant, isolated, and precapitalist spaces, but rather have become fully integrated into the global economy” – whether as active partakers in that global order, or, more passively, as part and parcel of transnational production chains. For her, no place is truly estranged from the putative ‘global world’, and there exists, instead, only a continuum between “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” integration. This is illustrated in Jansson and Andersson’s (2012: 191) work on rural Sweden, where they show that access to the internet creates bridges between urban and rural life in such a way that the ‘rural’ can no longer be “un-reflectively understood as something non-cosmopolitan”. Instead, through mediatised self-reflexivity, mobile subjects with cosmopolitan life biographies seeking spatial anchors in rural settings engage in a cosmopolitan politics of place that potentially disrupts urban-rural dichotomies and re-evaluates the role and responsibility of the Self in relation to local and global forms of life (Jansson and Andersson, 2012). Corresponding to this process of spatial integration, human migration, often originating in the periphery, serves the purpose of further disrupting the delineation between the two spheres. Specifically, the accelerated movement of people across the rural-urban boundary has but led to the introduction of new strangers into large cities (Datta, 2009), as well as to the growing exposure of rural regions to diverse cultural traits brought in by return migrants and augmented linkages with other places (Werbner, 2002). Rather than viewing cosmopolitanism as a bounded phenomenon belonging only to the city therefore, research may profit from re-understanding the same as “a more general . . . experience of living in a state of flux, uncertainty, and encounter with difference that is possible in rural, urban, [and] metropolitan settings” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003: 345). Cosmopolitanism is, in short, best interpreted not in terms of particular bounded territories, but of mundane acts and practices that are contextually generated through multiple immediate as well as far-flung convergences. Recent scholarship that applies this logic of spatial interconnectedness to places once sidelined as ‘rural’ demonstrates cosmopolitanism’s reach. Drawing on fieldwork based on the small town community of Nuku alofa in Tonga, Besnier (2004) reveals how participants in a Tongan marketplace (the fea) and their activities are deeply intertwined with their diasporic relatives, whose material remittances become second-hand goods for exchange at the bazaar. As he argues, the fea is in fact a site for the performance of cosmopolitan aspirations outside – though not cut off from – the global city. Not only is it a place for profiteering and finding cheap bargains of overseas merchandise for the local community, it has also developed into an unexpected context in which the Tongans’ encounters with the rest of the world are negotiated and mediated through their diasporic contacts (Besnier, 2004). Thriving on such transnational connections, this ‘local’ activity at once draws externally from the (imagined) symbols of elite cosmopolitanism, as well as engages in selecting, transforming and localising the same objects and symbols in indigenously creative and dialogic ways. Others have sought to dispel notions that non-urban spaces, owing to their apparent provinciality, inevitably contradict the spirit of cosmopolitanism by occluding, or at least diminishing, opportunities for mobility. Notar’s (2008) research on the rural borderlands of Southwest China provides one of the clearest rejoinders to this assumption. Explicitly, contesting the view that cosmopolitanism can only be acquired through “travel, consumption or metropolitan residence”, her careful interrogation of how the indigenous people of Yunnan have managed to overcome their (colonial) mischaracterisation as “isolated” and “backward” by adopting an open attitude towards visiting foreigners – sometimes unto marriage – radically unsettles the long-standing association between cosmopolitanism and the need to be on the move. Providing anecdotes of the ways in which these ‘sedentarists’ are able to share in the acquisition and embrace of foreign values, styles and artefacts while ‘staying put’, her anthropological examination suggests that there 306

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exist other, perhaps less self-conscious, forms of cosmopolitanism, whose concern is not so much about urbaneness or consumption, but rather the “production” of an accepting atmosphere for others who do travel. Such studies usefully reorient standpoints that unwittingly immobilise cosmopolitanism as a skill that is only contained within the body which travels. Paying heed to the fact that more and more people – whether rural or urban – are “facing a transnationalization of their life-world” regardless of their place of residence (Mau et al., 2008: 2), they invoke a new logic that seeks to decouple cosmopolitanism from the select few who consider themselves its rightful owners. As a term, “rural cosmopolitanism” (Sierk, 2017: 350) is no longer oxymoronic. In this light, a more place-sensitive, situated approach to cosmopolitanism encourages the view that “cosmopolitan dispositions are negotiated, actualized and subdued in relation to specific space-time contexts” (Jansson and Andersson, 2012: 177). A greater emphasis is needed on how cosmopolitanism may at times excel in non-metropolitan contexts and contact zones, exceeding its most intuitive forms in the city, which may have more to do with place marketing than any sense of urban openness to the world. As Clifford (1998) similarly intimates, cosmetic appearances of cosmopolitanism do not in themselves lead to democratic and egalitarian outcomes. Rather, as the inhabitants of Nuku alofa and the Yunnan borderlands have shown, it is by having and exercising the will to wade through the unfamiliarity and discomfort of difference, in any context, that cosmopolitan competencies can be cultivated. For cities struggling still to reconcile opposing factions dwelling in their midst, learning from these rural and small town examples may very well be the beginning of their forging a more cohesive and cosmopolitan society.

Conclusion Recent literature is replete with references to the portentous role that cities are playing in facilitating a ‘comeback’ of cosmopolitanism (Binnie et al., 2006; Keith, 2005). In this chapter, we have taken this to be our starting point as well, and explicated on the various reasons why this belief has come to be so entrenched in our present-day social imagination, as well as within policy circles. In many ways, the function of cities as nodes and contact zones for the convergence of different kinds of people opens up opportunities for new forms of sociality; but, as earlier examples from Asia, Europe and the Americas have shown, a diverse and transnationally mobile urban population by no means guarantees the development of cosmopolitan attitudes and characteristics. Instead, any cosmopolising project must recognise as a first step that the geographies of encounter in the globalising city are structured by socio-spatial inequalities and insecurities. To attain that prize of urban democracy as pledged by the ideals of cosmopolitanism, the will to engage others as human and cultural beings as well as respect and hospitality towards strangers are still values that elude many cities today and therefore in need of cultivation. In the present climate of persisting schisms and tears in the urban fabric, Cheah and Robbins’s (1998) effusive neologism, ‘cosmopolitics’, comes to mind. Negotiating the manifold lines of difference within cities is oftentimes a contestatory process animated by backlashes in the form of “strengthened barriers, exclusions and cultural conflicts” (Jansson and Andersson, 2012: 176). At best, it is a never-ending tussle to ensure that no one social group may dominate the urban milieu with their cultural standards and prejudices. At worst, cosmopolitanism loses its power and becomes merely an empty signifier that cities use to market themselves, or to distinguish particular (privileged) citizens from their undesirable and ‘parochial’ neighbours. In the absence of a contextually specific solution to quagmires such as these, it would be mistaken to conclude that, just because the winds of globalisation are blowing in their (economic) wings, cities would necessarily morph into more progressive and egalitarian social forms on their own. On the contrary, with greater access and heterogeneity, more ‘ground work’ needs to be done to relate urbanites in 307

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ways that do not just focus on the cosmopolitan experiences of a few selected elites, but also those living alongside them (Featherstone, 2002). In this chapter, our evaluation on how difference is being variously negotiated in a variety of everyday situations is in some ways taking a small step in this direction. Besides pointing out the limits to cosmopolitan sensibilities under various urban regimes, our brief foray into the non-metropolitan world offers a glimpse of how the cosmopolitan politics of place can play out in seemingly ‘distant’ spaces, taking account Massey’s (in Massey et al., 2009) insight that place is neither static nor bounded, but relational, constellatory and ‘throwntogether’, as well as her encouragement to engage in a “politics of place beyond place”. Scholars have also begun looking for cosmopolitan beginnings in other unlikely places. Instead of concentrating on the public face of the city as the quintessential reflection of cosmopolitanism’s topography as is often the case in projects of urban boosterism, bringing into view the inner workings of more privatised, vernacular places characterised by relations of care and intimacy may help us in unlearning the normalised contours of cosmopolitanism. For example, Datta (2011: 3) proposes moving “beyond the public sphere into more private and affective spaces” of the city to search for “cosmopolitan neighbourliness” amidst a Delhi squatter settlement in the context of communal violence. Yeoh and Huang (2015) explore the emergence of a fragile cosmopolitan sociability based on embodied relationships of care and mutuality between foreign careworkers and local care recipients in eldercare homes in Singapore. Geographical scholarship has also turned to notions of “cosmopolitanism from below” to reflect on dimensions of social life that is grounded in more open, unfixed, provisional and ethically conscious notions of the other. For example, Kothari’s (2008) ethnographic work with Bangladeshi and Senegalese street traders in Barcelona associates non-elite cosmopolitanism with ordinary people such as street peddlers who are artful political subjects in their use of translocal social networks to acquire resources and respect (see also Pang et al., 2014, on the everyday cosmopolitan skills of migrant female vendors in Beijing). Yeoh and Soco (2014) examine changes in consumption patterns, the adoption of cultural learning, the development of new sensibilities and the negotiation of cultural differences in order to identify potential emancipatory hope for migrant domestic workers as “working-class cosmopolitans”, despite the retrogressive contours of transnational domestic work. These alternative perspectives focusing on the ‘affective’ rather than the quintessentially ‘urban’ have suggested in a practical way how there can be scope for nurturing a more positive and happier ‘cultural’ face of cosmopolitanism (Hannerz, 2005), which has so far eluded many urban aspirants. Indeed, further research is warranted to discover how there can be many cosmopolitanisms apart from the hard-selling tactics often observed in cities today. As this chapter has demonstrated, being an ordinary world citizen may in the end depend not so much on the possession of certain cultural capital or status, but simply the awareness of the rich trove of cultural resources and opportunities that cosmopolitanism has already bequeathed us.

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Cosmopolitics

27 Seeking global justice What kind of equality should guide cosmopolitans? Gillian Brock

Cosmopolitanism, according to a widely used account, embraces the idea that every person has global stature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal respect and consideration no matter what her citizenship status, or other affiliations happen to be (Pogge 1992). Cosmopolitanism guides the individual outward from local obligations, and prohibits those obligations from crowding out responsibilities to distant others (Brock 2013; Brock and Brighouse 2005). Cosmopolitanism highlights the responsibilities we have to those whom we do not know, but whose lives should be of concern to us. The borders of states, and other boundaries considered to restrict the scope of justice, are irrelevant roadblocks in appreciating our responsibilities to all in the global community (Brock 2013; Brock and Brighouse 2005; Brock and Moellendorf 2005).1 However, while cosmopolitans agree on the scope issue, they disagree among themselves as to what the content of these global justice obligations are – just what are we obligated to do for all in showing the necessary equal respect and consideration? And non-cosmopolitans about global justice (statists, liberal nationalists, and the like) – those who typically think the state border does mark off some salient factor in determining the kinds of obligations we have to one another – have a variety of interesting views about our global justice obligations as well. They often endorse robust responsibilities to non-compatriots even if those duties differ in kind to compatriots. What then does our commitment to our equal moral worth entail? If non-cosmopolitans can endorse similar views, what is the special value in calling a view of global justice “cosmopolitan”? We need to cover more ground in order to answer this question. This chapter has the following structure. In the next section we survey some key themes concerning current issues in the domain of global justice. We come to appreciate that matters of global distributive justice dominate contemporary debate. In particular, discussion flourishes on a few topics such as, what should the appropriate focus of our obligations of global distributive justice be: global poverty alleviation (as some “sufficientarians” maintain) or addressing global inequality (as is the focus for many egalitarians)? Should we be concerned with justice among individual human persons (as cosmopolitans hold) or among states (as statists argue)? In addition, there are many traditional egalitarians who maintain that the borders of states are significant in delimiting our egalitarian commitments: egalitarian justice is the appropriate principle of justice we should endorse within states, but beyond borders, sufficientarian justice (such as a 315

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commitment to meeting basic needs) is the salient principle of justice. We examine those debates in the second section. Many cosmopolitan justice theorists ground their commitment to equality in the global domain in a luck egalitarian intuition. The idea is that it is a significant matter of luck that those in developed affluent countries have such good prospects for great lives whereas those born in poor developing countries suffer poor life prospects. It is radically unfair to allow the moral arbitrariness of birthplace to result in such disparities and the luck egalitarian believes we should aim to eliminate these. In the third section we begin by discussing the debate between the luck egalitarians and a rival conception – that what we should aim at is standing in relations of equality with one another rather than eliminating global inequalities in brute luck. While the luck egalitarian intuition has much force as a starting point for theorizing, as a focus for the positive development of a theory it has less to offer. Relational egalitarians have more to contribute, I argue, in advancing helpful guidelines for our development of progressive theory. Furthermore, I maintain that the alleged chasm between sufficientarians and egalitarians can be bridged by examining how and when equality matters in aiming at a vision in which we do stand in relations of equality with one another in the global sphere. We should aim to secure prospects for decent lives for all, and that commitment often requires we attend to inequality, but not always. A more reflective view about how and when equality matters is then available. I marshal support for why all kinds of egalitarians should embrace this view by drawing on the work of Tim Scanlon. The final section concludes.

Global justice: some key themes Like many concepts in political philosophy, what global justice consists in is contested and the subject of much debate (Brock 2015). However we can identify at least one common element to theorists’ use of the term, namely, an appreciation that the topic of justice is not exhausted by considering what justice within a state consists in, but rather it includes a concern for matters of justice that extend beyond the borders of one’s state. Questions that have attracted much interest include: What does global distributive justice consist in? What do people in one country owe to those in other countries? In particular, what do people living in affluent countries owe those in vulnerable positions in developing countries, such as those who live off less than $1 (US) per day? What responsibilities, if any, arise from basic human rights? If we ought to protect basic human rights, when is military intervention permissible in the name of such protection? How, if at all, does membership in states or communities of affiliation matter to our obligations to assist? Is partiality towards compatriots justified in a world filled with the more pressing needs of non-compatriots? If there are obligations of global justice, how will these be implemented or enforced? Should our accounts of global justice be feasible? Is global democracy feasible or desirable? Theorizing about global justice has been dominated by issues of global distributive justice over the last two decades, though this is not to say that other issues have been entirely neglected. Various theorists advocate different models of global justice which might consist of several components such as advocating a more equal distribution of resources globally (Beitz 1979; Pogge 1989; Moellendorf 2002; Tan 2004); that every person be well positioned to enjoy the prospects for a decent life (Nussbaum 2006; Miller 2007; Brock 2009); more global equality of opportunity (Caney 2005; Moellendorf 2002); universal respect for and promotion of human rights (Shue 1980; Pogge 2002; Miller 2007; van Hooft 2009; Risse 2013); promotion of the autonomy of peoples who stand in relations of equality with one another (Rawls 1999; Miller 2007); or criteria governing intervention, especially military intervention, in the affairs of states (Moellendorf 2002; Tan 2000; Buchanan and Keohane 2005). There is also much debate about how best to realize the 316

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desired elements, what principles should govern our interactions at the global level, and how to improve the management of our global affairs, including how best to govern globalization (Held 1995; Cabrera 2004; Weinstock 2005). Also prominent is a debate about the role of national selfdetermination in accounts of global justice and space for local affiliation and partiality (Miller 2007; Tamir 1993; Ypi 2012). Because of its dominance in the literature, in what follows here we focus on issues of global distributive justice.2 Clearly, there is much debate about the content of our global distributive justice obligations. In particular, much of the debate centres around a very particular question: Should the focus of our obligations of global justice be on eliminating global poverty, especially ensuring people’s basic human needs are met? Or, should we be concerned about eliminating inequalities more generally, even if people are above the poverty line? So, should we care about alleviating global inequality or global poverty? In the language commonly used, should we care about sufficiency – whether people have enough for a decent life – or equality? I explain the concerns in more detail next. On sufficientarian accounts of global distributive justice obligations, what we owe others is informed by what is sufficient for a decent life. Different theorists elaborate on this theme by invoking a set of basic needs, capabilities, or basic human rights, as we see with accounts offered by Martha Nussbaum (2006), David Miller (2007), and Richard Miller (2010). Alternatively, sufficiency theorists may stress instead the central role of political autonomy or self-determination, and give weight to the necessary conditions for a society’s being able to manage its affairs competently, as John Rawls does in The Law of Peoples (1999). Egalitarians vary in what they take the more demanding content of the duty to be. But they often have in common the view that there is more that can be required of one in discharging our obligations of justice. Sufficientarian accounts are often contrasted with egalitarian positions, and the sufficientarian standard, especially when it takes the form of so-called humanitarian duties to meet basic needs, is thought to be weak or otherwise misguided. It is not clear that this contrast accurately captures the range of possibilities, as we see shortly in discussing positions such as the one I have developed in Global Justice (2009), but that is how the debate is usually framed. Global egalitarians can take themselves to be committed to various positions. They might, for instance, argue for one or more of the following: a global difference principle (Beitz 1979; Pogge 1989; Moellendorf 2002), global equality of opportunity (Caney 2005; Moellendorf 2002), global basic income (Van Parijs 1992 and 1995), entitlements to an equal share of the value of all resources (Steiner 1999 and 2005), equal consideration of the interests of all in designing a just global basic structure (Moellendorf 2009), equal positive freedom (Gould 2004), or global luck egalitarianism (Tan 2004 and 2009; Caney 2005; Moellendorf 2002). There is also concern about what the basic elements of justice should be. Are we trying to promote justice among states, as statists maintain? Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, argue that we should be aiming at justice for all individuals. Much of this debate is heavily influenced by the views of John Rawls. Indeed, much discussion between cosmopolitans and critics is still heavily influenced by John Rawls’s views on international justice. Rawls defends an account of what justice in the international domain consists in which appears to be quite at odds with the account of domestic justice he famously endorses, and this has seemed puzzling. In The Law of Peoples, Rawls aims at a “realistic utopian” account of what justice in the international sphere requires, namely one that aims for equality among peoples rather than persons. Goods such as self-determination and political autonomy are therefore prominent and appear to trump respect for individuals and their human rights. This gives rise to concerns about what tolerance in the international sphere requires, a concern especially pressing for cosmopolitans, who are committed to the ideal that each person is entitled to equal respect, on the frequent occasions where this ideal appears to be violated. 317

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At any rate, we see then that there is debate in the literature concerning what the units of concern should be in theories of global justice. Are we aiming at justice among individual human persons (as cosmopolitans maintain) or among states (perhaps aiming more at international justice)? Indeed, for many a central issue revolves around state membership. One of the key issues concerns whether membership in a state matters to the principles of distributive justice that we should endorse. To examine how this issue dominates discussion, we turn next to a hotly contested sample debate.

Does membership in a particular state make a difference to commitments to equality? A debate continues to rage between those who believe that full egalitarian justice applies within the state but not outside it, and those who believe the state does not and cannot make this kind of difference to one’s commitment to egalitarian distributive justice. The argument may take several forms. One kind emphasizes the fact that states are legally able to coerce whereas the lack of a global legal coercive authority rules out the need for global equality (Blake 2002; R. Miller 1998). The idea here is that legal coercion must be justifiable to those who will find their autonomy restricted, if it is to be legitimate. This coercion would be justifiable if no arbitrary inequalities are permissible in the society, hence we get a strong commitment to traditional egalitarian conceptions of distributive justice. This form of argument has been criticized from several directions. One line of attack is to dispute the idea that coercion is necessary for a concern with egalitarian distributive justice. There may be other reasons to care about equality in the absence of coercion. Another way to criticize this argument is to emphasize that even if we agree that coercion triggers egalitarian duties of justice, coercion in the global sphere being rampant, the necessary ingredient for egalitarian duties of justice is present at the global level (Cohen and Sabel 2006; Abizadeh 2007; Valentini 2012). A second version of the “equality among compatriots but not among non-compatriots” position argues that when we make laws within a state, we become “joint-authors” of the laws of our society (Nagel 2005). As “joint-authors” citizens live under a shared coercive system, the legitimacy of which relies on their consent. In order to give their consent, members can demand that no arbitrary inequalities are permissible. So their shared involvement in authoring and sustaining a coercive system triggers egalitarian duties among compatriots. But there is no relevant analog in the global context: there is no global law-making process, and so no global legislation of which all persons are similarly joint-authors. This argument has been challenged in several ways, including questioning whether joint-authorship of legislation is necessary for the requisite concern (Caney 2008) and also arguing that even if it is, similar processes can be found in the global context (Cohen and Sabel 2006). Furthermore, others contend that the argument is somewhat perverse in that I owe justification for coercion only to joint-authors of a coercive scheme, whereas those who are not similarly placed are owed none. This thereby removes protection to some of the most vulnerable people: those affected by my coercion but uninvited to the joint-authorship process in virtue of their status as non-members (Julius 2006; Abizadeh 2007). Another attempt to justify the difference proceeds from an awareness that social co-operation grounds special duties. A democratic society is one in which there is fair social co-operation and arrangements that people can reasonably endorse. Members of a state owe egalitarian duties of justice to one another because each member plays a part in upholding and sustaining the collective goods of the society, such as maintaining a stable system of property rights or doing their part to uphold the good of security. Reasonable endorsement requires that there be no arbitrary inequalities within a society. Since there is no scheme of global social co-operation of the same 318

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type or scale, there is no similar requirement at the global level (Freeman 2006; Sangiovanni 2007). Several cosmopolitans have challenged the view that there is no set of global institutions based on social co-operation (Beitz 1979). Others contest the normative argument that egalitarian justice only arises when there is social co-operation and maintain rather that justice can require the very establishment of such institutions of social co-operation (Abizadeh 2007; Caney 2008). Sufficient interaction among agents may obligate agents to ensure that the interactions proceed on fair terms, which might require the establishment of institutional arrangements that can secure or protect such fair terms. Debate continues on numerous fronts about whether and how equality matters at the global level. Questions that are still the subject of debate include: (a) What are the circumstances for triggering concern with equality in matters of justice? (b) What should we be trying to equalize? Capabilities (Nussbaum 2006), access to primary goods (Tan 2004), opportunities (Moellendorf 2002; Caney 2001), positive freedom (Gould 2004), or the value of resources (Steiner 1999), are just some of the candidates that have been presented. (c) Why and how does equality matter? Here a debate has emerged between luck egalitarians (Tan 2004 and 2009) and relational egalitarians (Anderson 1999). The field is also rich with new possibilities. In particular, the idea that what we should be trying to achieve in the global sphere is a certain kind of equality in our relations with one another is gaining increasing attention (Brock 2009; Nath 2011). We turn to some of this debate next.

Luck egalitarianism and its relational rival A dominant grounding for the egalitarian commitment to matters of justice is heavily influenced by a luck egalitarian intuition. Luck egalitarianism is a view according to which the purpose of distributive principles of justice should be to mitigate the influence that luck has on individuals’ life prospects. Consider how it is a matter of luck whether one is born into an affluent, developed country or a poor, developing nation. Yet where one happens to have been born has such an important bearing on how one’s life will go. The current distribution of global wealth and opportunities does not track persons’ choices and efforts but rather is greatly influenced and distorted by luck. What is objectionable here is that existing social and political institutions have converted contingent brute facts about people’s lives into significant social disadvantages for some and advantages for others. Persons as moral equals can demand that any common order that they impose on one another start from a default assumption of equality and departures from this be justified to those who stand to be adversely affected (Tan 2012). Though I concede luck egalitarians start with a powerful intuition and have some quite good arguments, I reject luck egalitarianism on now familiar grounds made famous by Elizabeth Anderson (1999) in her influential article, “What is the point of equality?”, namely that the concern with equalizing luck focuses on the wrong object in attempting to address inequality. As we see with real-world egalitarian social movements, the focus should rightly be on creating relations of equality which have as their focus not equalizing luck but rather eliminating sources of domination and oppression that preclude standing in the right kinds of relations with one another, namely those characterized by equal respect, recognition, and power. I endorse relational equality. The power of relational equality is underappreciated in my view. It sometimes gets us to some quite strong commitments, indeed ones that might even converge with those egalitarians, more traditionally conceived, would endorse. In this section I explore important ways in which the sufficientarian ideal of ensuring people have the prospects for decent lives can rightly lead to concern with equality. Even if we focus only on obligations to ensure people have enough for a decent life, this sometimes entails 319

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appropriate concern for equality. I first outline what ensuring people have the prospects for a decent life consists in on my view. I also examine how concern for equality, especially relational equality, fits into this account. Finally, I briefly argue that the gap between my account and what egalitarians should rightly be concerned with may not be all that great. By appealing to Thomas Scanlon’s views about when equality matters, I make a succinct case for possible convergence for an important range of cases. In Global Justice (2009) I develop a cosmopolitan model of global justice that takes seriously the equal moral worth of persons, yet leaves scope for defensible forms of nationalism along with other legitimate identifications and affiliations. What can we reasonably expect of one another in the domain of justice? A normative thought experiment offers a systematic and vivid way for thinking through such issues (though the arguments stand alone as well).3 The main issue delegates to a hypothetical conference must entertain concerns what basic framework governing the world’s inhabitants we can reasonably expect to agree on as fair.4 After considerable argument about what that entails, I endorse the following position: Global justice requires that all are adequately positioned to enjoy prospects for a decent life, which requires we attend especially to (1) enabling need satisfaction, (2) protecting basic freedom, (3) ensuring fair terms of cooperation in collective endeavours, and (4) social and political arrangements that can underwrite these important goods are in place. All four of these components constitute the basis for grounding claims of entitlement. The detail of which claims they ground is begun by considering five domains in which our entitlements can be specified in more particular terms, concerning global poverty, taxation, liberty protections, humanitarian intervention, immigration, and the global economic order. There is no easy or straightforward way to move from the four categories that describe the contours of a decent life to obligations to secure these for others. Moving from items on the list of what is needed to secure a decent life to obligations requires significant discussion of empirical theories dealing with causes, contributory factors, and obstacles to the realization of goals listed. It also requires discussion of mechanisms available for protecting the goods enumerated, for enforcing obligations, and the like. Sometimes appropriate mechanisms to secure elements may not be straightforward or obvious, as is the case when we consider the role freedom of the press has in securing adequate protection for basic liberties. Similarly, when we consider our taxation and accounting regimes we see much scope for reforms that would better protect and secure countries’ abilities to assist their citizens in meeting basic needs. How does equality matter in my account? In virtue of the four central components of my account of global justice, equality can matter in significant ways. Recall that global justice requires that all are adequately positioned to enjoy prospects for a decent life, which entails that we attend especially to (a) enabling need satisfaction, (b) protecting basic freedom, (c) ensuring fair terms of co-operation in collective endeavours, and (d) social and political arrangements that can underwrite the important goods outlined in (a)–(c). The basic account of global justice has these four central components, which can all have implications for equality. Consider, for instance, that one of our basic needs is for autonomy, which means we must be vigilant for ways in which autonomy can be undermined by conditions conducive to domination. When inequality gives rise to such opportunities, such situations become a matter of normative concern. It is also important to emphasize that the commitment to fair terms of co-operation in collective endeavours will often entail a concern for equality. In addition to the basic account, I endorse a number of other views that have a bearing on how demanding this account is, and also how equality matters in it. For instance, I am also committed to an ideal of democratic equality. This requires that we promote 320

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standing in relations of equality with one another, notably those that promote equal respect, recognition, and power (Brock 2009: 298–321). To illustrate how all of this works in favour of a concern for equality within societies, let us start with a specific form of the worry about inequality: is it permissible to provide an adequate but unequal (and inferior) education to girls in a particular society, when boys within that society receive a much better education? If a good is being provided to boys, there is much in my account that would support the view that it should be equally provided for girls. Consider the idea that democratic equality requires standing in relations of equality with one another. Standing in relations of equality with others in the same society requires equal provision of certain goods, such as voting and education. We also have a basic need for autonomy, which requires that we are vigilant for ways in which features of our societal arrangements might promote domination. Insofar as boys’ superior education fosters such opportunities, further support can be marshalled against the idea of endorsing adequate but inferior education for girls. Support for equal provision can also be derived from the commitment to fair terms of co-operation in collective endeavours, because unequal provision of educational resources is inconsistent with fair terms of co-operation. The fourth central criterion that seeks social and political arrangements that promote the preceding three important goods would require this as well (at least in virtue of the need for autonomy and fair terms of co-operation). Unequal provision would not be consistent with a background social and political culture that appropriately expresses our equal moral worth, a commitment to promotion of our equal basic liberties or equal promotion of needs-fulfilment, fair terms of co-operation, and the like. Concerns with relational equality, non-domination and fair terms of co-operation that often yield a concern for more equality within states attract parallel attention in the global sphere. Indeed, there is a significant need for improved global regulation as an effective and neglected way of honouring our global justice commitments. As we see then, fostering relational equality is the goal and distributional issues are important to that goal, but they do not and should not exhaust our concern with equality. By looking at where unequal provision does undermine standing in relations of equality with one another and where it does not, and, importantly, where other factors not related to individual holdings undermine standing in relations of equality, we are able to come up with a more nuanced account of when and how our equality matters. The argument has to be made in domain- and good-specific terms. For certain goods, equality is part of adequacy. Education and voting would seem to be paradigm cases. But equal provision need not be important for all goods. Equal provision of housing may be one example. Moreover, in many cases, relevant concern with equality should guide us towards a focus on improved regulation rather than distribution per se, since what blocks the possibility of standing in relations of equality is the exercise of unequal power. Improved regulation in the areas of taxation and accounting, securing public goods, promoting press freedom, better protecting the architecture of international justice, and promoting a culture of accountability are the sorts of reforms which would have a more profound effect on promoting the kind of equality to which we should aspire.5 I also maintain that aiming at relational equality better captures the moral equality to which cosmopolitans are committed than rival conceptions which are exclusively attuned to distributional issues. A central component to being a cosmopolitan is recognition of our equal moral worth and entitlement to equal respect. What is common to various formulations of cosmopolitanism is commitment to the idea that all human beings deserve moral consideration and that in some sense we should treat their claims equally (Miller 2007: 27). The question of what it is to treat people as equals has generated an enormous literature (Brock 2009: 298–321). Clearly, what such treatment involves can vary significantly depending on contexts, especially when we focus on who is distributing what to whom. Let us then focus on the global setting and assume that we are trying to establish a just global structure or just global institutions. 321

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What is it to treat people as equals in this context? It is hard to come up with an answer that does not rely at some level on a conception of fairness, of what fair terms of co-operation might consist in, or of what counts as a fair share of burdens and benefits. For instance, to treat A as an equal with B, where A needs B’s help, is for B to recognize A’s reasonable demands on her, and to treat B as an equal to A is to recognize what is a reasonable view of the kind of burden A might legitimately ask B to bear and also what burdens A can be expected to assume in helping herself appropriately. However, distributional issues do not exhaust our legitimate concern with equality. Standing in relations of equality requires attention to distributional issues, to be sure, but issues of how we show equal recognition may be just as profound. Institutions that create and protect the preconditions for showing equal recognition have an enormously valuable role to play. It is commonly held that equality matters because of its effects on power. Inequality of wealth can translate into inequality in influence and power, which can be used to entrench further inequalities through (for instance) getting to determine the rules of global institutions. So, a common reason cited as to why we should be concerned with material inequalities is that it leads to objectionable power inequalities, which can limit abilities to participate with others on equal terms. I too am concerned with the way radical inequality in holdings can undermine equality, but I argue that quite comprehensive solutions are required in order to counteract the problem. Consider a case such as the aggressive recruiting of healthcare workers from developing countries to work in developed ones, which has the effect of entirely stripping a community of all its healthcare workers. Those healthcare organizations that have deep pockets will have great purchasing power. If we are concerned about vulnerability to coercion or oppression, or anything else in this vicinity, why stop at regulating the distribution of resources to individuals when organizations can be so much better endowed? Why stop at the way inequality of wealth between individuals can diminish crucial aspects of life prospects? And why consider only inequalities of wealth, when there are so many other ways inequalities can render one vulnerable to exploitation, domination, or other unfairness? If people are to be free and equal in determining the conditions of their own existence, an array of protections must be in place. When absence of public funding for electoral processes undermines political participation, when a lack of public funding is available to secure an adequate public education system or public health system, or when freedom of expression is threatened by a monopoly on ownership of the media, these can greatly undermine our freedom and equality. Unequal access to various resources, such as water or nuclear technology, can have a more profound impact on our abilities to be self-determining than our holdings. Inequality of holdings is just one facet of what prevents us from standing in the relevant relations of equality. It is plausible that my views converge with recommendations egalitarians should endorse from their preferred accounts. There is insufficient attention paid to the issue of just when equality matters. Equality does not always matter, as many egalitarians, of course, admit.6 In order to make this case quite succinctly I discuss Thomas Scanlon’s position. In “When Does Equality Matter?” Scanlon identifies five kinds of reasons for objecting to inequality and for seeking to eliminate or reduce these. First, “we often have reason to reduce inequalities for essentially humanitarian reasons, because taking from those who have more is the only, or the best, way to alleviate the hardships of those who have less” (Scanlon 2007: 15). A second type of reason derives from concern with status: concern for reducing inequality is often merited because of the humiliating differences in status that are created. (He suggests that perhaps this is connected to promoting fraternity.) A third reason derives from concerns about power, especially, the unacceptable exercise of power of those who have more over those who have less. Fourth, there are concerns related to fairness: sometimes eliminating inequalities is necessary “to preserve the equality of starting places that is required if our institutions are to be fair. Great 322

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inequality of wealth and income can, for example, undermine equality of opportunity and the fairness of political institutions” (Scanlon 2007: 15). And the fifth reason is that at least sometimes “if an agency is obligated to deliver some good to various beneficiaries, it must, absent special justification, deliver it in equal measure to all of them” (Scanlon 2007: 16). Scanlon conjectures that these “reasons may provide a full account of the role that substantive equality has in our thinking about social justice” (Scanlon 2007: 16). Scanlon’s astute views seem to have helpfully identified the occasions on which we should be concerned with equality. But if these are the occasions on which we should be concerned with equality, it seems that what egalitarians should be concerned with converges importantly with my own view. Recall that on my account eliminating neediness, attending to situations in which people stand in relations of inequality with one another, eliminating opportunities for domination, and fair terms of co-operation (inter alia) are what should command our normative attention. These foci correspond strikingly well with the occasions Scanlon identifies as warranting attention from a more traditionally egalitarian perspective.7

Conclusions In this chapter we have been considering debates concerning current issues in the domain of global justice. I drew attention to the fact that debate flourishes on a few topics such as, what should the appropriate focus of our obligations of global distributive justice be: global poverty alleviation (as sufficientarians maintain) or addressing global inequality (as is the focus for egalitarians)? Should we be concerned with justice among individual human persons (as cosmopolitans hold) or among states (as statists argue)? In addition, we saw that there are many traditional egalitarians who maintain that the borders of states are significant in delimiting our egalitarian commitments: egalitarian justice is the appropriate principle of justice we should endorse within states, but beyond borders, sufficientarian justice (such as a commitment to meeting basic needs) is the salient principle of justice. We examined those arguments and some prominent cosmopolitan responses to them. We also saw how many cosmopolitan justice theorists ground their commitment to equality in the global domain in a luck egalitarian intuition. In the third section I discussed the debate between the so-called luck egalitarians and a rival conception – that what we should aim at is standing in relations of equality with one another rather than eliminating global inequalities in brute luck. While the luck egalitarian intuition has much force as a starting point for theorizing, as a focus for the positive development of progressive theory (of what we should aim at in eliminating radical disparities in prospects for good lives), relational egalitarianism has more to offer. Furthermore, I argued that the alleged chasm between sufficientarians and egalitarians can be bridged by examining how and when equality matters in aiming at a vision in which we do stand in relations of equality with one another in the global sphere. We should aim to secure prospects for decent lives for all, and that commitment often requires we attend to inequality but not always. A more reflective view about how and when equality matters is then available. I argued that support for such a view could be found in the work of Tim Scanlon whose persuasive argument for when equality matters converges strikingly with the view for which I advocate.

Notes 1 These standard accounts of the distinctive features of cosmopolitanism seem to be under some pressure. Indeed, the line between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans seems, in some ways, to be getting harder to locate. See The Monist, Vol. 94, issue 2, October, 2011. 323

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2 For more on all these other issues see Global Justice (Brock 2009). 3 In arguing for what we are all owed as human beings, I argue for what our reasonable expectations of one another should be, especially in situations of ongoing co-operation. The set-up of a normative thought experiment simply aims to make this more vivid to us, but the basic idea can be argued for independently of that framework. When properly set up, such thought experiments are a good way to flesh out what we can reasonably expect of one another in a way that avoids inappropriate partiality: if people do not know what positions they might find themselves in during the lottery of life, they will pay more attention to what would constitute fair arrangements. 4 I will not be able to cover the details of the normative thought experiment here, but I can give a brief sketch of some of the main moves. An easy way to enter the thought experiment is to imagine that a global conference has been organized. You have been randomly selected to be a decision-making delegate to this conference. You are to participate in deciding what would be a fair framework for interactions and relations among the world’s inhabitants. Though you have been invited to the decision-making forum, you do not know anything about what allegiances you have (or may have after the conference concludes), but you do know that decisions made at this conference will be binding. It may turn out that you belong to a developing nation, occupy a territory with poor natural resources, and so forth. Given these sorts of possibilities, you are provided with reasons to care about what you would be prepared to tolerate in a range of different circumstances. 5 I argue for all of this in much detail in Global Justice (2009), especially Parts 2 and 3. 6 Moellendorf (2009) gives at least four kinds of cases where equality is not required. The presumption in favour of egalitarianism is defeasible – there can be morally relevant reasons for diverging from equality such as: (a) because of what some have done to harm the interests of others, some persons can deserve to have their interests given less weight, (b) some might voluntarily consent to lesser realization of interests or absorbing higher risks, (c) some might have different morally relevant needs requiring more resources, or (d) offering incentives might be more beneficial for all. 7 Scanlon notes: “The importance of eliminating stigmatizing differences in status also depends on a kind of proximity. Where people reasonably compare their lives and conditions with each other, differences in level can lead to reasonable feelings of loss of esteem” (2007: 17). This is important and again seems to place notable constraints on which inequalities matter.

References Abizadeh, A. (2007) ‘Cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion: on the scope (not site) of distributive justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35(4): 318–58. Anderson, E. (1999) ‘What Is the Point of Equality?’, Ethics, 109: 287–337. Beitz, C. (1979) Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blake, M. (2002) ‘Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30: 257–96. Brock, G. (2009) Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brock, G. (2013) Cosmopolitanisms versus Non-Cosmopolitanism: Critiques, Defenses, Reconceptualizations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brock, G. (2015) ‘Global Justice’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/justice-global/. Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (2005) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brock, G. and Moellendorf, D. (2005) Current Debates in Global Justice, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Buchanan, A. and Keohane, R. (2005) ‘The Preventive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Proposal’, in C. Barry and T. Pogge (eds.), Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Global Justice, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 253–79. Cabrera, L. (2004) Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State, London: Routledge. Caney, S. (2001) ‘Cosmopolitan Justice and Equalizing Opportunities’, Metaphilosophy, 32: 113–34. Caney, S. (2005) Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caney, S. (2008) ‘Global Distributive Justice and the State’, Political Studies, 57: 487–518. Cohen, J. and Sabel, C. (2006) ‘Extra Republicam Nulla Justitia?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34: 147–75. Freeman, S. (2006) ‘The Law of Peoples, Social Cooperation, Human Rights, and Distributive Justice’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 23: 29–68.

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Gould, C. (2004) Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Julius, A.J. (2006) ‘Nagel’s Atlas’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34: 176–92. Miller, D. (2007) National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, R. (1998) ‘Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27(3): 202–24. Miller, R. (2010) Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moellendorf, D. (2002) Cosmopolitan Justice, Boulder: Westview Press. Moellendorf, D. (2009) Global Inequality Matters, Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nagel, T. (2005) ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33: 113–47. Nath, R. (2011) ‘Equal Standing in the Global Community’, The Monist, 94: 593–614. Nussbaum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Pogge, T. (1989) Realizing Rawls, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pogge, T. (1992) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’, Ethics, 103: 48–75. Pogge, T. (2002) World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press. Rawls, J. (1999) The Law of Peoples, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Risse, M. (2013) On Global Justice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sangiovanni, A. (2007) ‘Global Justice, reciprocity, and the state’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35: 3–39. Scanlon, T. (2007) ‘When Does Equality Matter?’, Unpublished paper presented to a Workshop at Stanford University. Available at hrrp://politicalscience.stanford.edu/politicaltheoryworkshop/0607papers/ scanlonpaper.pdf. Shue, H. (1980) Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steiner, H. (1999) ‘Just Taxation and International Redistribution’, Nomos, 41. Steiner, H. (2005) ‘Territorial Justice and Global Redistribution’, in G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tamir, Y. (1993) Liberal Nationalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tan, K. (2000). Tolerance, Diversity, and Global Justice, University Park: Pennsylvania State University. Tan, K. (2004) Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tan, K. (2009) ‘A Defense of Luck Egalitarianism’, The Journal of Philosophy, 105(11): 665–90. Tan, K. (2012) Just Institutions and Luck, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valentini, L. (2012) Justice in a Globalized World: A Normative Framework, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Hooft, S. (2009) Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics, Stocksfield: Acumen. Van Parijs, P. (ed.) (1992) Arguing for Basic Income, London: Verso. Van Parijs, P. (1995) Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weinstock, D. (2005) ‘The Real World of (Global) Democracy’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 37(1): 6–20. Ypi, L. (2012) Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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28 Cosmocitizens? Richard Vernon

The cosmopolitan idea has the potential either to deflate the idea of citizenship or to enhance and extend its demands. Its origins were, it should be noted, decidedly deflating in their tendency. When the Greek ‘Cynic’ Diogenes used the term Kosmopolites – he is thought to have been the first to do so – he intended to debunk the idea that citizenship was of any real importance to us. He didn’t mean to say that the world, still less the Kosmos, was something like a city, he meant to say that all the value that we (mistakenly) attach to being a member of one city or another evaporates when we look at ourselves from a larger perspective – from a cosmic point of view, what, after all, does it matter that one is an Athenian or a Theban? The cosmopolitan idea’s most famous critics have certainly been alive to this debunking potential: cosmopolitans, Rousseau complained, ‘boast of loving the whole world’ – and perhaps the word ‘loving’ should be in quote marks here, in order to convey that nothing so abstract can really be loved – ‘in order to have the right to love no one’ (Rousseau [c.1761] 1962: 553). And in the vocabulary of racial prejudice, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is, notoriously, a term reserved for (ethnoreligious) minorities who are alleged to have contempt for the ties of local citizenship. But that isn’t how most contemporary political theorists think of cosmopolitanism at all. They want to retain the idea that citizenship embodies something of great value, and they want to affirm what is of value in it and to extend its reach or scope. Extending its scope would be pointless unless its value were affirmed. When Philippe van Parijs, for example, writes that, as globalization proceeded, ‘there were fewer and fewer people whose city was their world, and more and more people for whom the world had become their city,’ he clearly wants to convey that the new city-like character of the world really means something – that it elicits concern for distant others, even perhaps solidarity with them (van Parijs 2007: 638). To say that the world is city-like, or has in some sense a political character, is to call for an extension or even a transfer of citizen-like attachments or duties to a global level. Why is that important? It’s important because the idea of shared citizenship contains, wrapped up inside, almost all the values that the history of Western political thought has celebrated. Justice has been thought of in terms of the proper distribution of goods or opportunities among citizens. Equality has been thought of as civic equality. Freedom has been thought of in terms of citizens’ shared enjoyment of freedom-conferring laws and institutions. Loyalty and courage have been thought of in terms of the disposition to sustain shared laws and institutions of that 326

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kind. So even to think about enlarging or transferring the locus of citizenship is to contemplate nothing less than a moral revolution, one that involves fundamental issues about the practical bearing of all the values and principles that have sustained the Western political tradition. To whom must we be just? Whose equality with whom needs to be measured? Whose freedom matters? Which institutions deserve our loyalty? Remarkably, then, a term that comes into being as part of a radically corrosive attack on citizenship is coopted by a political theory that takes the value of citizenship for granted – it’s exactly because it’s so highly valued that we have to think about where it belongs. Even in its early history, however, the relationship between cosmopolitan value and the actual city (polity) had been radically readjusted, so that cosmopolitan duty turned back into a moral support for civic duty, cosmopolitan duty requiring us to do what falls to our lot as a member of the political society in which the Kosmos has placed us – so that our ‘citizenship’ in the world cashes out, in the end, and in practice, as a duty of citizenship in the normal sense. Cicero’s Romanized Stoic version of the cosmopolitan idea modified it profoundly: from a view that treated the local with contempt, rejecting all deference to local convention and authority, it was transformed into a sort of high-minded moralized patriotism that leaves space for only the most minimal obligations to those outside that particular city where providence happens to have placed us. While Diogenes, the Greek Cynic-cosmopolitan, denied that we owed anything at all by virtue of common citizenship, Cicero, the Roman Stoic-cosmopolitan, denied that we owed to non-citizens anything that diminished the resources available to citizens – we must give them only renewable resources such as fire and running water, he said (Cicero [44 BC] 1991: 22). So the cosmopolitan/citizenship nexus gives us, even from the earliest years of its history, a rich array of questions. According to some views, cosmopolitanism evacuates citizenship of meaning. According to others, it reaffirms and extends the scope of citizenship’s application. According to yet others, it leaves the scope of citizenship alone, but radically changes its moral content. This leads us to two main questions: Should the cosmopolitan be a good citizen (or any sort of citizen, in fact)? And can the good citizen be (any sort of) cosmopolitan, in a way that imposes significant moral limits on what citizenship requires? To address these questions, the chapter proceeds as follows. First, it considers whether, starting from a cosmopolitan point of view, one can successfully arrive at an account of the obligations of citizenship. Second, turning the argument around, it asks whether, starting from the idea of local civic obligation, one can get to a compelling idea of cosmopolitan duty – a question then briefly pursued in the context of an especially demanding idea of civic obligation, that of republicanism, a topic that deserves a section to itself. Third, in view of the largely inconclusive answers turned up by those two enquiries, it considers whether we should think in terms of two incommensurable moralities, one local, the other universal. Acknowledging the importance of that proposal too, the chapter concludes by sketching an alternative to it.

Can we get from cosmopolitanism to citizenship? Suppose we have a basic duty to all humans, by virtue of the vulnerabilities that all humans share: to pain, to violent death, to poverty, to starvation, to preventable disease, and to threats to impose or allow any of the above. Can we get from there to the idea that, while we have a universal duty, exclusive citizenship is justifiable nevertheless? The simplest answer to that question draws on the idea of efficiency. Universal duties are most efficiently carried out, or perhaps can only be carried out at all, by assigning local responsibility for them. The point is made by Robert Goodin’s story about swimmers and lifeguards (Goodin 1988). Imagine a crowded ocean beach. Some of the people on it go swimming and get swept away by 327

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dangerous tides. Should everyone on the beach go to their rescue, not only imperilling their own lives but also likely impeding one another in their intended rescue attempts, or should they leave the job to the designated and trained lifeguard? If you favour the latter alternative, should you not, by analogy, also approve of states as instruments by which universal duties fall, efficiently, into competent local hands? So that citizenship is just local cosmopolitanism? The story as outlined so far – refinements will follow shortly – invites at least three important objections. First, if the analogy between lifeguards and governments depends on assumptions about competence, it is obviously questionable because, whatever the truth about lifeguards, governments do not hold office because they are competent in carrying out functional tasks. They hold office by virtue of whatever the local power-assigning procedures happen to be, and if they happen to have special competence analogous to the lifeguard’s surplus of competence over the average bather’s, that is only a fortunate plus. Second, and more strongly, the argument seems to put the wrong governments in charge, given the efficiency value: for more deprived populations need governments that can deploy more resources to their benefit, while less deprived populations need less from their governments, whereas in the world as it is the arrangements are upside down – the governments with the least resources are put in charge of the most needy populations (Miller 1995: 63–4). Finally, and more strongly still, the most basic considerations of economic efficiency suggest that everyone, not just their governments, should redeploy their resources globally: since one dollar means much more to someone below the poverty line that it does to the comfortably off, efficiency – the maximization of value – would seem to require that comfortably off societies and their governments should devote their resources to the global poor (Singer 2002: 171–2). Now Goodin anticipates much of this objection in his original proposal, noting that the efficiency model depends on each local government actually having the capacity to carry out its duties (just as lifeguards must have the capacity to swim). When local governments lack the capacity, it falls to other governments to transfer resources to them so that they can carry out their responsibilities. However, that proposal may provide no basis, as it stands, for discriminating between what we owe to cocitizens and what we owe to outsiders. What we contribute – by way of taxation – to socially beneficial projects should flow to wherever it will do the most good. Of course, that could be the right answer, but it tends to extinguish the special claims of citizenship rather than to explain how cosmopolitanism supports them. Starting from a cosmopolitan point of view, in short, it is no easy task to explain why local civic duties have any more than a very conditional force that is defeated by the premises of the argument itself (Singer 2002: 153–80). Nevertheless, the idea of ‘statist cosmopolitanism’ – that is, the idea that cosmopolitanism’s value is fully recognized in a world of states – is given an interesting defence (Ypi 2008). Values can’t be free-floating things contained only in people’s heads, they have to be institutionally embodied, and their best chance of effective embodiment lies in their embodiment in states. If ideas of human equality come to be institutionalized in the political cultures and practices of states, they will come to be built into their citizens’ expectations, thus becoming reliable, to an extent that would otherwise be impossible. Moreover, this process would lay to rest the otherwise mysterious issue concerning motivation – people would come to adopt cosmopolitan values not through some conversion experience but through the powerfully habituating force that institutions exercise on people. Even if this is true, it leaves unresolved two major issues. First, even political entities (states) that embody common values may nevertheless have divergent interests: Canada and the USA, let’s say, may both be committed to promoting equality among their citizens, but may still be in competition over the resources that would enable them both to do so. Second, however committed to cosmopolitan values we suppose states to become, we still face what has been called the ‘particularity problem’ (Simmons 1979: 31–5) – in fact, it becomes more 328

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pressing to the extent that other states become more just. The particularity problem is this: if my commitment is to cosmopolitan values, why should I not give my support to the state that best promotes them? It may happen that it’s my own state that best promotes them, but there again, it may not be. The statist version of cosmopolitanism would work if it were true that in every instance cosmopolitan values could best be promoted by my contributing to my state rather than to any other. But that is unlikely, both because (a) my own state’s interest may conflict with another state’s more weighty interest and (b) cosmopolitan values may be more effectively advanced if I make my contribution to some state other than my own.

Can we get from citizenship to cosmopolitanism? It is no surprise to find that, starting from the other side of the issue, we encounter the reverse problem: that of giving a compelling account of what is owed to outsiders. On this side of the issue there are several importantly different views that should not be conflated, but they may be treated together to the extent that they share (what is often called) the ‘associative’ belief that moral attachments arise from real experienced connections among people and cannot be generated by disembodied principle. So David Miller, from a civic nationalist point of view, contrasts his position with the cosmopolitan view by saying that it invokes a different picture of the ethical universe, in which agents are already encumbered with a variety of ties and commitments to particular other agents, or to groups or collectivities, and they begin their ethical reasoning from those commitments. (Miller 1995: 50) Richard Rorty, from a postmodern angle that makes him sharply critical of ‘Enlightenment’ beliefs, endorsed the view that ‘one’s moral identity is determined by the group or groups with which one identifies – the group or groups to which one cannot be disloyal and still like oneself ’ (Rorty 1998: 48). And Michael Walzer, the communitarian theorist whom both Miller and Rorty cite favourably, likewise maintains that it is the ‘thick’ morality of strong local connections and expectations that provides the centre of ethical life (Walzer 1994). Cosmopolitans should acknowledge that this general position has a lot to recommend it. For one thing, it faithfully reflects the character of moral experience itself: we don’t first have a universal duty and then decide to apply it to those near and dear to us – even if it’s clearly true that the world goes better if parents look after their own children rather than other people’s, that isn’t the reason why parents actually care for their children. For another, it reflects the fact that we have obligations to obey one particular state, something that, as we have just seen, may be hard to explain if we adopt the cosmopolitan view that we have an obligation to promote justice in general and everywhere. Assuming that these features give us a reason to take the view seriously, can the associative view give any good account of global duties at all? All three of the theorists cited above maintain that it can, although here there is a parting of the ways between Rorty and Miller and Walzer. Rorty maintains that exactly the same kind of sentiment, loyalty, can be given an indefinite extension of scope – we can, potentially, enlarge our affect-rich sense of connection from small through larger contexts to, eventually, the human race at large. Miller and Walzer, however, seem to envisage an affectively thinner idea of cosmopolitan duty: while citizens are bound together by thick associative ties, they are connected to outsiders by something that, while far from negligible, is of a different moral order. Miller speaks of human rights, Walzer of a ‘thin’ morality that enables us to identify, and respond to, what is at stake in the moral and political struggles of outsiders. We can, it seems, come to this thin moral experience 329

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only after exposure to the thicker experiences of citizenship. We can’t just be thin, without ever having been thick in the first place – a view with which Rousseau would agree (Rousseau [1754] 1962: 543). We may think of the thin cosmopolitan morality as a sort of point of overlap among thicker moralities, or else as a sort of moral minimum that we come to appreciate as a result of experiencing a thick morality – whether it’s an overlapping consensus or a necessary truth that we come to by contingent routes. Whichever it is, though, it may pose a question for the associativist view. The thin morality enables us to see through the thick smokescreens thrown up by oppressive regimes elsewhere: we may know little about (say) Czech political culture – Walzer’s example, referring to the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 – but when we see Czech demonstrators carrying placards we know enough to understand the slogans printed on them. But if the thin view can discredit oppressive thickness elsewhere, it can also lead us to question and undermine thickness at home. If, even despite lack of local knowledge, we can see what’s wrong with other people’s ruling ideologies, then surely, given the additional benefit of local knowledge, we can see through our own too. If that is true, then the thickness of our own political culture, despite its historical roots and its particularity to us, is subject to critique and reassessment from a thinner and more abstract point of view. But that is all that the cosmopolitan needs to claim. It is entirely consistent with the cosmopolitan point of view that particular societies have their particular histories and unique mores. All the cosmopolitan needs to show is that particular historically generated mores are subject to review from a larger perspective. That as a matter of fact they are embedded in particularity, and learned in particular ways, is not an objection to the moral point, which is a point about where they lead, not about where they come from. Rorty’s version of the bridge from the local to the universal, in terms of the enlargement of affect, raises some queries of a psychological kind: in terms of how we think and feel, is it ever the case that we first have a sense of loyalty, and then seek objects to attach it to, or does the object itself precede and generate the feeling of loyalty? Even if the former were possible, it still wouldn’t give us a reason to expand loyalty’s object, unless we already had some other kind of reason to try to do so. In that sense, it resembles a bridge that one can use only after one has already crossed the river. As for the alternative approach, favoured by Miller and Walzer, it may better be viewed not as a bridge from citizenship to cosmopolitanism, but as a combination of those two ideas – one that is potentially unstable if, as suggested, it leads to the conclusion that its claims on us are only conditional. In either case, one may have doubts about the proposed connections between associative and cosmopolitan views, if we adopt consistently associative premises.

Expanding republicanism Intriguingly, some of the most promising overtures towards cosmopolitanism come from a source that may be unexpected: from the republican tradition, or one of the traditions. Historians of political thought have taught us to distinguish between the ‘civic humanist’ version and the ‘neoRoman’ version, the former a view about political action as the fulfilment of human life, the latter a view about the circumstances in which liberty is best preserved (Skinner 1998). The differences are important, but both versions advocate active engagement in the public life of one’s polity, and a focusing of value on the common interest of citizens. At least at first sight, this may seem an unpromising basis for concern of a global kind, for the elementary reason that the interests of one polity clash with the interests of others. Sometimes, indeed, republicanism is identified with ‘realism’ in international relations, that is, the view that states do and should pursue their own interests, that international politics resembles a Hobbesian state of nature in which the actors (states) accept only those restraints that they believe will promote their own purposes. Rousseau, perhaps 330

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the pre-eminent republican theorist of the modern period, offers the memorable image – often adopted in the international relations context – of a stag hunt in which a cooperative enterprise is liable to break apart at any moment when any party sees an opportunity for personal advantage (Rousseau [1754] 1962: 171; but see Williams 2005: 52–81). In recent years, though, in response to a surge of interest in global ethics, theorists sympathetic to republicanism have begun to reevaluate this standard interpretation of the tradition. To Rousseau’s republicanism we must counterpose Kant’s, for Kant maintained that as global interactions expanded and one society’s decisions impacted other societies there was a positive duty to create a cosmopolitan republic, not a world-state (an idea that he deplored) but a sort of confederal arrangement governed by a common law (Kant [1795] 1970: 93–130). As James Bohman (2004) points out, this Kantian theme importantly distinguishes the republican approach from an approach recently debated by theorists of distributive justice, that is, one that is focused on deciding whether or not current international arrangements are sufficiently statelike to demand the application of political justice to them (Nagel 2005; Cohen and Sabel 2006). Whether or not they are already state-like, Bohman argues, they should, like states, become the subject of justice, because, as things stand, they render people subject to the arbitrary and unaccountable decisions of others. And just as republicanism was a movement of protest against arbitrary and unaccountable decisions within states, so too it protests, now, against such things in the global context. The key value here is that of ‘non-domination’: one person is dominated by another if they are in such a relation to them that – regardless of what is happening in the present instant – the other can, at their discretion, annul the person’s basic interests (Bohman 2008). Along broadly similar lines, some republican theorists have shown that someone committed to the value of non-domination will have powerful moral reasons to be concerned about global forms of domination as well as (the republicans’ home turf) the tyranny within her own state (e.g. Pettit 2016). So, for example, it is argued that the republican tradition can be more welcoming to the idea of human rights than is often supposed (Ivison 2010), and that, since global inequalities clearly entail domination, republicans have strong reasons to be concerned about matters of distributive justice (Laborde 2010). These most interesting reappraisals seem to lead, however, to something other than a rapprochement between citizenship, understood as a political relation, and cosmopolitanism. What they lead to is the conclusion, in itself of great interest, that one of the core values of the citizenship tradition – in its neo-Roman mode, at least – can be given cosmopolitan application. That seems quite different from showing that the civic relationship itself can be reproduced at a global level – that there are more than normative analogies between issues at the national and global levels. To show more than that would entail showing that the typical practices of citizenship and its solidarity can occur, and be effective, at a level beyond the state. There is an important body of literature that claims that they can be (Held 1995); doubts are also expressed (see Bellamy 2017); but critical discussion of the topic is reserved for other chapters in this book (Held 1995), but doubts are also expressed (Bellamy 2017). To doubts about the replicability of the civic relationship, we should add the view that the road to cosmopolitanism may lie, rather, in the supra-national ties that arise from functional or affinity groups (Erskine 2008) – so that it is as a global ‘civil society,’ as it were, rather than in the form of global citizenship, that cosmopolitanism may come to flourish. What, though, of the normative question? Here the discussion of the republican contribution tends to reproduce the fault lines that were sketched in the second and third sections of this chapter. From the ‘associativist’ side, an objection is likely to be that the republican ideal is ‘bounded’ because it is tied essentially to the common life of an historical and exclusive political community (Miller 1999, 2008) or to ‘love of country’ (Viroli 1995). From the other side, 331

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cosmopolitans – applying to the global case a general scepticism about the republican revival (Goodin 2003) – are likely to question the republican road to human rights: why not go straight to human-rights cosmopolitanism (Jones 1999)? Alternatively, they may raise questions about a possible lack of moral comprehensiveness in the republican approach. What if – regardless of who is dominating whom – equality itself is a value, so that enjoying a standard of life above the global average is itself something that demands a moral response (Singer 2010)? Or what if – regardless, again, of who is dominating whom – there are undeserved and thus unfair advantages deriving from the ownership of natural resources, advantages demanding correction (Beitz 1999: 136–43)? These issues may not be fatal to the global republican project, but may suggest that that project raises questions in the course of offering solutions to others.

Two moralities? – or a common ground? In Boundaries and Allegiances, Samuel Scheffler (2001) argues that moral and political philosophy today must recognize that claims upon us derive from two sources, one local and one global, that both are compelling but are, nevertheless, in competition with one another. Cosmopolitans propose that there are duties owed to others simply as humans. Associativists propose that there are duties owed to others by virtue of their standing in a certain relation to us. These duties conflict. And it cannot be, as some cosmopolitans want to argue (see above), that the associative duties are just a local case of universal duties, because they are, as it were, morally self-standing: that one has a special commitment to friends and spouses is written into the very idea of a friend or spouse, and so it doesn’t call for any external validation from some universal source. Moreover, it isn’t the case that these two sets of moral demands, cosmopolitan and associative, can coexist pacifically. They compete, and the requirements of local attachment diminish what we might have to give if we were pure cosmopolitan beings, not civically embodied. Scheffler’s view drives a wedge sharply between the values of the citizen and the values of the cosmopolitan. And his view would be, as it were, the default position, if nothing more could be done to find common ground for these competing values. But I would like, finally, to sketch a different approach, one that readers may find worth considering if they accept the force of the various criticisms set out above, and so are tempted by Scheffler’s proposed moral dualism. This is an approach that persists in seeking common ground between citizenship and cosmopolitanism and their respective moral justifications (Vernon 2010). Scheffler points out, as we have just seen, that shared citizenship amounts to a sort of implied claim to privilege – in two ways, in fact: in attending to the demands of citizenship we withdraw our attention from the needs of outsiders, and on top of that we create, through our common association, new benefits from which outsiders are excluded. What can justify this double unfairness? I think there is a simple answer: we are justified in doing all this if others, the outsiders, can do the same – if they, too, can withdraw their attention from us, and contribute to exclusive associations and benefit from their joint product. Let us call this the ‘iterative principle’: it’s a principle that tells us that privilege-conferring arrangements, of the sort that shared citizenship creates, are acceptable if iterable, if, that is, the excluded have the option of making similar arrangements for themselves. If this looks like a recipe for indifference to others it certainly isn’t meant to be so, because we can invoke the principle only if we do so in good faith. That lends it a very critical edge. We can’t invoke it in good faith if the excluded, as a matter of fact, are unable to engage in a society-building project to their mutual benefit. And we can’t invoke it in good faith if, as a matter of fact, the way in which we go about our own society-building project impedes the parallel attempts of others. So the good-faith condition of the iterative principle leads to two duties. 332

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First, there is a duty to aid outsiders when their circumstances are such that they have no realistic chance to pursue the benefits of political society – because, for example, their political arrangements have entirely collapsed, or because their capacity for joint political action has been blocked by tyrannical violence. Second, there is a duty not to harm, which I take to be a duty not to undermine the conditions of others’ effective self-governance. We undermine those conditions by economic policies that impede the creation of usable local surpluses and/or cause immobilizing local conflicts, as well as by policies, strategically or otherwise motivated, that give rise to or support local dictatorships (Pogge 2002: 146–67). Like some other proposals that were entertained and questioned above, this may seem to go too far, in a way that undermines the common ground that this chapter has been seeking. If we have strong cosmopolitan duties both not to harm and to aid outsiders, what space remains for the duties of citizenship – likewise duties not to harm and to aid? The argument needs to find a basis for special duties – not owed to outsiders – among citizens. One plausible candidate arises from the fact that shared citizenship creates shared risks that in turn call forth a responsibility to remedy. As Goodin points out, citizens do things to one another that they do not and cannot do to outsiders: they tax them, conscript them, expropriate their property, divert their rivers – all things that international law forbids in relation to outsiders (Goodin 1988). Moreover, civic membership, which collectivizes security, requires persons to resign to the community their powers of self-defence; and it exposes everyone to the power of majorities, not only in formal political decision-making, but also in the informal politics of social convention that forms a pervasive background to civil life (Scanlon 1996). Because of all this, each of us, as a citizen, is complicit in exposing others to the risks of association, and so can reasonably be held responsible for supporting measures that mitigate these risks. We have special duties, of a diffuse kind; and states can legitimately exact them from us. Goodin quite rightly posits what we may call generic risk as the basis of obligation – the risks that we run just because we are constituted as we are. That gives us a powerful argument for cosmopolitan duty. But we need to introduce what we may call associative risks – the risks that we expose each other to as cocitizens – in order to explain why cosmopolitan duty is not all-absorbing, and why a space remains for the value of citizenship. A space remains because citizenship increases our mutual vulnerability, so that we have obligations to cocitizens not just because they are vulnerable but because we’re part of a system of arrangements that makes them more so. To sum up: at the core of the view proposed here is the idea of complicity. As members of exclusive political societies we are complicit in the effects of exclusiveness, and thus face a justificatory burden; for reasons outlined above, we can carry this burden only if we acknowledge two duties, one positive, one negative, to the excluded. But those duties face a practical limit if we acknowledge another level of complicity, one that arises from the risks of political association itself, and which imposes special duties that outsiders do not benefit from. This way of conceptualizing cosmopolitanism and citizenship makes choices about what we owe easy to make: but it suggests a way of getting two apparently incommensurable things into a single frame of moral assessment. The point of doing so becomes clearer in light of one final consideration. In recent years, cosmopolitans have advanced three key demands. One is that states should sign on to an international criminal law regime that will give direct international recognition to the victims of atrocity (for they are ‘citizens of the world’) and also hold the perpetrators of atrocity directly accountable to international courts. Another is that states should recognize an obligation to go to the aid of the victims of atrocity perpetrated by other states, even to the extent of deploying military force, if certain criteria are met. A third is that the citizens of wealthy states, who enjoy the benefits of a global political economy that is massively skewed to their advantage, must accept a reduction in their standard of material life for the sake of fairness to other (less advantaged) societies. 333

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If we consider these demands, we can see at once that they don’t imply any reduction in people’s civic responsibilities. On the contrary, they imply that states need to be more demanding of their citizens than they currently are. They will have to call on them give support to international criminal law, and to the financial and political costs of its application and enforcement. They will have to call on them to accept the even greater costs of military intervention when it is justified, or the costs (such as loss of trading opportunities) entailed in alternative measures such as sanctions. They will have to call on them to accept the disruptions that would follow from abandoning the exploitative practices on which the rich nations’ standard of living depends. So if these cosmopolitan projects are to be realized, the demands of citizenship will have to be reinforced, not weakened. We will have to give more in return for our citizenship.

Conclusion This may well seem a counter-intuitive proposal, for the relationship between civic and cosmopolitan demands is so often seen as zero-sum. If cosmopolitanism leaves a space for civic duties, it would seem to require a distanced, perhaps ‘ironic’ attitude to them (Turner 2002; for discussion, see Smith 2007): we can perform them, but always with a sense of their eventual relativity – rather as St. Augustine said that Christians could serve as soldiers for their country, but only if they were sad about doing so. Something like that is true if citizenship is understood in a traditional way, and if, as the above discussion has suggested, the values of citizenship and cosmopolitanism diverge as much recent political thought may lead us to believe. But, I have argued, cosmopolitanism makes it necessary to rethink the basis and the nature of political obligation itself, and thus to rethink what it means to be a citizen: a ‘cosmocitizen’ will have fundamentally rethought not only what she owes to others but also what she owes to her cocitizens.

References Beitz, C.R. (1999) Political Theory and International Relations (2nd edition), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bellamy, R. (2017) ‘A European Republic of Sovereign States: Sovereignty, Republicanism and the European Union’, European Journal of Political Theory, 16(2): 188–209. Bohman, J. (2004) ‘Republican Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 12(3): 336–52. Bohman, J. (2008) ‘Nondomination and Transnational Democracy’, in C. Laborde and J. Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cicero ([44 BC]: 1991) On Duties, M.T. Griffin and E.M. Adkins (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, J. and Sabel, C. (2006) ‘Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34(2): 147–75. Erskine, T. (2008) Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‘Dislocated Communities’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodin, R. (1988) ‘What Is So Special about Our Fellow-Countrymen?’, Ethics, 98(4): 663–86. Goodin, R. (2003) ‘Folie Républicaine’, Annual Review of Political Science, 6: 55–76. Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Cambridge: Polity. Ivison, D. (2010) ‘Republican Human Rights?’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9(1): 31–47. Jones, C. (1999) Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. ([1795] 1970) Political Writings, H. Reiss (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laborde, C. (2010) ‘Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9(1): 48–69. Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. (1999) ‘Bounded Citizenship’, in K. Hutchings and R. Dannreuther (eds.), Cosmopolitan Citizenship, Houndmills: Macmillan. 334

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Miller, D. (2008) ‘Republicanism, National Identity, and Europe’, in C. Laborde and J. Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Nagel, T. (2005) ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33(2): 113–47. Pettit, P. (2016) ‘The Globalized Republican Ideal’, Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, 9(1): 47–68. Pogge, T. (2002) World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity. Rorty, R. (1998) ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rousseau, J.-J. ([1754, c.1761] 1962) The Political Writings, C.E. Vaughan (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell. Scanlon, T.M. (1996) ‘The Difficulty of Tolerance’, in D. Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scheffler, S. (2001) Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmons, A.J. (1979) Moral Principles and Political Obligation, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Singer, P. (2002) One World, New Haven: Yale University Press. Singer, P. (2010) The Life You Can Save, New York: Random House. Skinner, Q. (1998) Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, W. (2007) ‘Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Virtue, Irony and Worldliness’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(1): 37–52. Turner, B. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: Globalization and Patriotism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(1): 45–63. van Parijs, P. (2007) ‘International Distributive Justice’, in R. Goodin et al. (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Political Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Vernon, R. (2010) Cosmopolitan Regard: Political Membership and Global Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viroli, M. (1995) For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, Oxford: Clarendon. Walzer, M. (1994) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Williams, M.C. (2005) The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ypi, L. (2008) ‘Statist Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 16(1): 48–71.

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29 Global civil society and the cosmopolitan ideal Alexander Hensby and Darren J. O’Byrne

Introduction Theorizations of global change are certainly not in short supply. Indeed, to glance over the different approaches to globalization is to witness an array of vastly different diagnoses of its nature and scale (O’Byrne and Hensby, 2011). Within this debate, those who speak of global civil society or cosmopolitanism tend to be put on the same side: both perspectives seeing globalization – that is, the process of global interconnectedness and compression in which the world increasingly is understood as a single space – as an ever-unfurling reality that is both totalizing in reach and broadly irreversible in its effects. With this process established as a given, its advocates fervently argue that in political thought one cannot retreat to a purely statist model: we can only go forwards. Nor must the juggernaut of globalization be dominated by the interests of the neo-liberal marketplace, as ultimately, the securing of a peaceful and prosperous global coexistence must be of profound importance. Such sentiments are an essential foundation of cosmopolitan thought, and arguably presuppose the concept of an active global civil society. To give a broad definition, global civil society represents globalization’s social and ethical sphere: a symbolic space for ‘world citizens’ to debate the experience of globalization, and how it can be ‘steered’ in ways that benefit everyone. In practical terms, global civil society can be ‘seen’ (not to mention experienced) in the plurality of international non-government organizations (INGOs), as well as in social movement activism exemplified by recent protests at the G20 meeting in Hamburg, as well as the global Occupy Movement. Cosmopolitanism can be found there too, but as a concept has been sometimes employed in different ways. For the purposes of this chapter, it is perhaps best to see cosmopolitanism as representing a reflexive and critical engagement with globalization where ‘the interplay of self, other and world . . . cosmopolitan processes come into play’ (Delanty, 2006: 41). Following Delanty’s definition further, cosmopolitanism invokes an ethic of ‘world openness’ that generates for individuals and institutions knowledge and experience of global processes, and as a result, a greater mutual understanding and respect for different ways of life. This does not contradict the basic thrust of more normative accounts such as those advocated by David Held (2004) except that it represents a conscious attempt to recognize both macro and micro processes. Thus, a ‘world openness’ is performed in everyday life as much as it is legislated for in corridors of political power. 336

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As sociological concepts, however, both have their flaws. John Keane (2003: 3–4) argues that although ‘civil society’ functions as an analytical and descriptive term for making sense of the social effects of globalization, it also exists as a normative project, deemed by many to be a ‘good thing’ and worth fighting for. But where global civil society at least incorporates the possibility of self-critique through its role as a space for ethical debate, cosmopolitan thought requires greater specificity. As a concept, it, too, has been marred by conflations of interests: The late Ulrich Beck, one of the pioneers of sociological cosmopolitanism, was perhaps guilty of oscillating all too freely between the normative and the empirical in his writings (see Martell 2008, 2009). As a result, critics came to fear that cosmopolitanism represented too neat, celebratory and idealistic a picture, a belief that we were on the verge of some sort of global political enlightenment for no other reason than that allegedly cosmopolitanism is ultimately within us all. In the recent context of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, however, this view appears increasingly naïve. Initial grounds for optimism among cosmopolitan thinkers arguably derived from the fact that their sociology draws strongly from the literature on cultural globalization as the process from which cosmopolitan ethics and practices can emerge. This is convincing insofar as the global creolization of culture is a heterogeneous process which implicitly promotes openness and creativity. Beck (2006), for example, drew on creolization as a precondition of cosmopolitanism in his use of the term ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ to describe everyday globalized consumption: thus, if cosmopolitanism ‘in itself ’ has become a reality for most people, does this not mean that cosmopolitanism ‘for itself ’ is not unachievable also? Cosmopolitics understood as a sort of political creolization, however, throws up more obvious problems. Unlike creole commodities, cosmopolitanism produces a multitude of complex political discourses that fundamentally disagree with each other. Consider, for example, the ‘cosmopolitan’ response to the following: should states be entitled to opt out of IMF structural adjustment programmes that do not benefit their national economy? Should there be universal labour standards? Was the United States justified in its decision to bypass the UN and invade Iraq? Should membership of the EU be championed on the grounds of internationalism or rejected out of opposition to its neo-liberal tendencies? All of these pose difficult questions, and can attract a variety of ‘cosmopolitan’ answers that each stakes a claim to the better argument. This chapter seeks to uncover the complex political discourses put forward by social movement networks and institutions that operate under the auspices of global civil society. Cosmopolitanism can be defined as a reflexive engagement with, and openness to, the world, but what kinds of ‘world openness’ characterize the politics of global civil society, and how compatible are they with the discourses of cosmopolitan sociology? To interrogate this, we will first review the complex idea of civil society, and, from it, of global civil society, before discussing the dynamics of the global civil society movement, particularly in respect of its critique of global capitalism.

Civil society, the state and the marketplace The renaissance of global civil society in sociological thought is owed in part to the emergence of a post-Cold War politics of ‘post-material’ values that operated on a level above that of nation states. Nevertheless, as a concept ‘civil society’ is very malleable, with its meaning seemingly broadened, narrowed or redefined altogether by whoever chooses to use it. There are perhaps two reasons for this. First, it is a compound of two similarly contested terms: the latter, of course, has been criticized by libertarian thinkers for representing an ideologically motivated attempt to make the abstractedly normative appear concrete and unitary, one that former British Prime 337

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Minister Margaret Thatcher famously judged not to actually exist. The former, too, is contentious in that it attracts a problematic sliding-scale of what might be considered ‘civil’ (or ‘uncivil’) behaviour. Second, civil society tends to be defined more in terms of what it is not rather than what it is. This curious dependency on oppositional yet more easily definable concepts such as state, nation and economy lends the term an air of fragility, suggesting that its users have vested interests in upholding a term that is apparently incapable of existing in its own right. Despite these frailties, however, civil society can be distinguished conceptually due to its distinctively social core that renders it inherently valuable in sociological and social theoretical thought. Such an understanding was implied, at least, in Hegel’s classic definition, in which civil society is the realm of social and individual relations mediating between the private and the public (or political) realms, and thus incorporating the domains of economic, legal and juridical relations. The emphasis on the social dimensions of civil society is also present in Gramsci’s quite different theorization of it as ‘the political and cultural hegemony of a social group on the whole of society, as ethical content of the state’ (1966: 164). Gramsci’s association of civil society with culture as well as society is telling, because it demands that normative aspect which is so crucial. Civil society is clearly more than society: if society is the recognition of others within a network of associations, then civil society is doing something about it. A more recent definition which further muddies the waters comes from the American sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, who defines civil society as ‘the realm of interaction, institutions, and solidarity that sustains the public life of societies outside of the worlds of economy and state’ (Alexander, 1993: 797). If we look closely at these three contrasting definitions, certain details stand out: Hegel’s view that civil society mediates between private and public and thus incorporates the economy, Alexander’s claim that civil society operates outside the worlds of economy and state and Gramsci’s insistence that it serves as ethical content of the state. A compromise between these positions would render the realm of civil society outside the state, for sure, but also, with apologies to Hegel, outside the marketplace. But at the same time, it cannot be synonymous with society per se; rather, it adds to the concept of society a normative dimension, the dimension of ethics. In a sense, it can be seen as ‘the residue of political action left within the consciousness . . . untainted by the colonizing, systemic machinery’ of government, as both a legal and ‘an inherently ethical space’ (O’Byrne, 2005: 4). Such a compromise is at least implicit in the definitions cited above, and provides the core point of departure for Alexander from Hegel. Following the work of Adam Ferguson, Alexander observes that civil society is a public form of sociality, and reflects the need for mutual moral and ethical co-operation above and beyond the private self-interests of individual clans and families. Civil society is thus borne out of more complex associational societies, though according to Hegel the tension between the private interests of individuals and the public interests of wider society could only reach resolution through the development of a constitutional-legal state (Rechtsstaat) which would serve as the ‘ultimate guarantor’ of social ethics (Poggi, 2001: 145). So, although separate from and independent of state power, civil society lacks its own political-institutional equivalent: a transnational state that upholds and regulates its social ethics institutionally. This leads us to a second point, that Alexander’s definition implies civil society is more of a free-standing concept than its critics assume: although closely entwined with the political sphere (in the form of the state), the economic sphere (in the form of the market) or even the cultural sphere (in the form of the nation), civil society is not reducible to any of these. As Taylor (1990: 95) argues, civil society ‘exists over against the state’ as it ‘includes those dimensions of social life which cannot be confounded with, or swallowed up in the state’. These may include voluntary organizations, charities, community groups and independent political bodies such as civic associations and social movements. Viewed in this way, we can see further evidence of 338

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the fundamentally ethical dimension of civil society: the dialogue that comes from this dense network of groups and associations can be seen to promote its own form of social capital, and as a result seeks to provide the ‘necessary checks and balances on the powers of the state and its institutions’ (O’Byrne, 2005: 4). Civil society, then, serves to protect the individual freedoms and rights of individuals from colonization by the state or the capitalist economy. Liberal economists have tended to dispute its economic independence by conflating social exchange with economic exchange. There is certainly overlap in the sense that property rights and the market shapes social relations, but as Erikkson (1993) has pointed out, it is ‘sociality’ that ultimately underpins contractual relations, not the other way round. Furthermore, as McCrone (2010: 191) argues, should relations of social trust fail, then so would market relations. Yet the extent to which civil society movements have been able to induce political reforms to prevent the reproduction of social inequalities has historically been one of its key shortcomings. Where Hegel saw the state acting as the guarantor of civil society interests, Karl Marx saw obfuscation, with civil society representing social organization that had evolved directly from relations of production. Thus for Marx, civil society represented a sphere dominated by the bourgeoisie, and saw Hegel’s argument that formal legal equality could overcome class inequalities between classes as illusory. Marx’s view of capitalist society was essentially one of conflict, and that only communism could genuinely bring the sort of social unity that civil society promised. For most of the twentieth century, the Marxian critique of civil society precipitated its fall into disuse in academic discourse. This would last until the 1980s, by which time the effects of the Cold War had caused the development of anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe. The emergence of a state-challenging ‘politics of the powerless’ defending freedom of expression and other individual liberties had been gaining strength since the 1968 revolutions, and for many commentators and activists, ‘civil society’ represented its point of origin. The revitalization of the term reflected the fact that anti-Cold War politics was predicated on recovering the substantive power of citizens in opposition to overarching state power, as well as a feeling of heightened risk owing to the loss of faith in modernity’s expert systems (see Beck, 1992). This form of politics complemented the Hegelian notion of civil society to some extent, but perhaps reflected more of a shift towards a socio-cultural definition recalling the works of Gramsci, whose definition of civil society implied a more dynamic, ‘elite-challenging’ capacity in which political groups could engage in ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggles alongside more conventional means of pressure politics. Thus, the ‘civil society’ movements that emerged in the 1980s broadly rejected Hegel’s Bürgerliche Gesellschaft for being coterminous with the state, and advocated in its place a politics of social movement activism and independent protest. The tension between its bourgeois, integrative expression, and its transformative activist expression, arguably remains an undercurrent to civil society politics today. As this suggests, activist efforts to reframe civil society around a Gramscian politics also reignited longstanding tensions over its relationship to the marketplace. In short, the question is thus: Even if the realm of civil society is defined first and foremost by its ethical content, does it have a monopoly on ethics? Clearly, all definitions are conceptual and imaginary, Weberian ‘ideal types’ if you will. As social theorists operating on the conceptual plane, we treat such terms as ‘civil society’, ‘the market’ and ‘the state’ rather as fields, in Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term. Each is defined by its own goals and its own currency. To put it simply, the currency of the state (the site of political action) is power, and its goal is the maintenance and extension of power. The currency of the market (the site of economic action) is money, and its goal is the increased accumulation of money. On this conceptual plane, civil society exists as a separate field in which the currency is ethics, and the goal the promotion of these ethics which are treated as values in themselves and 339

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not reducible to money or power. What, then, of notions of ‘corporate ethics’ or ‘corporate social responsibility’ (to say nothing of ‘ethical foreign policies’ and the like) which became fashionable in the last quarter of the twentieth century? Are such terms inherently contradictory – in other words, is it possible to imagine an ‘ethical capitalism’? Or can the boundaries of civil society expand sufficiently to incorporate, or at least overlap with, the market? These are challenging questions not least because it is often difficult for us to distinguish between the ethical dimension and our normative understanding of ethics, i.e. our values. When we think of civil society, or of the ethical sphere, we tend to think of those particular organizations, groups and charities which are somehow ‘progressive’ and ‘humanitarian’. We think, for example, of human rights defenders, of aid workers in developing countries, of those providing shelter for the homeless, of those marching under the unified banner of peace, of those protecting the interests of women, children or other vulnerable groups. Surely such groups stand outside of the realms of state and market, and surely they are driven by a particular set of values, by a commitment to a particular form of justice, whether that be the need for tougher punishments to cut down on crime or the protection of a specific way of life. Surely, therefore, they are also manifestations of fundamentally social relations. Can the pursuit of a more ethical capitalism, whether in the form of these localized corporate policies or in some broader, transformational sense, not be seen in the same light? The answer to this depends, of course, on whether it is considered possible for a corporation to act in the same way as a ‘citizen’, namely, as the bearer of particular rights and responsibilities (Whitehouse, 2005: 111, drawing on Andriof and McIntosh, 2001). This dilemma becomes even more crucial for our understanding of the dynamics of civil society in the context of the more recent discourse on global civil society, insofar as much of this discourse posits the ‘global civil society movement’ in direct opposition to global capitalism. It is to this discourse that we turn now.

From civil society to global civil society: the roots of cosmopolitics Embedded within the conditions of the late-twentieth century revival of civil society is the spectre of globalization. The politics of anti-Cold War movements were notably universalistic in their applicability: if this did not owe wholeheartedly to the growing global interconnectedness that was eroding the boundaries of nation states and by proxy, national civil societies, it certainly complemented this transformation. Either way, civil society as an ideal could no longer be confined to the borders of the territorial state, giving rise to the idea of a ‘global civil society’, a concept that perhaps represents – recalling Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase – the ultimate ‘imagined community’. Clearly its citizens are joined by a mutual faith in inclusivity and openness in the absence of a shared physical community or even culture. In other ways, though, their hand has been forced as the globalization of risk has made their future an indubitably collective one regardless: in the words of Zygmunt Bauman, the indiscriminately universalizing effects of globalization, exemplified by terrorism, climate change and crises in the global economy has meant that ‘no one can any longer cut themselves off from the rest of the world’ (Bauman, 2002: 88). Global civil society is duly held up as an alternative to the failings of rival models of the contemporary global condition, the global marketplace model which celebrates unregulated capitalist expansion in a borderless world; the nation-state model which accepts that it is the duty of the militarily and economically powerful states to oversee world affairs; and the world federal model which demands more centralized political administration at the supranational level. (O’Byrne, 2005: 1) 340

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Thus, it is clear that the concept of global civil society demands close inspection, at both a theoretical and an empirical level (Walzer, 1995; Eade and O’Byrne, 2005). But there is a need for caution in such an endeavour because the term is clearly too easily conflated with other aspects of the ‘cosmopolitan project’, such as global citizenship and even world government. Its distinctiveness in respect of the latter should be straight-forward enough, if we are to remain faithful to the earlier discourse on civil society summarized above. The cosmopolitan image which presents world government, in the form of a nation state government writ large, a single global polity, as an achievable and desirable goal inappropriately conflates the political and ethical dimensions and is duly criticized by a majority of cosmopolitan scholars. Even so, even as brilliant a commentator as Danilo Zolo, in his powerful condemnation of the cosmopolitan tradition in general, is inclined to associate what he describes as the ‘blind alley’ of international ethics with the road to world government (Zolo, 1997). Its relationship to the concept of global citizenship is more complicated. Clearly, those acting under the banner of the ‘global civil society movement’ see themselves as global citizens at one level. But the term ‘citizenship’ has itself been subject to such confusion as to render it almost meaningless as a sociological concept. Citizenship has ever been a dualistic and perhaps contradictory concept because it has never been altogether clear whether citizens owe their allegiance to the state or to the realm of civil society. The Western liberal tradition, nurtured in the writings of Enlightenment scholars such as Hobbes and Locke, has always emphasized the former: this is citizenship as a contract between an individual and the political community, the state, in which rights are conferred in return for duties to the law. By contrast, the communitarian tradition has placed its emphasis firmly on the latter: citizenship as membership of a political community, which transcends the narrowly political goals of the machinery of the state to incorporate an ethical dimension. The literature on global citizenship, insofar as there is clearly no empirical reality to the idea of world government, has focused largely on developing this latter approach, although it is necessary to point out that such a communitarian ideal as belonging to a ‘oneworld community’ is itself an ancient one and in no way requires conditions of globalization as a pre-requisite (O’Byrne, 2003). The concept of global civil society is thus important in the sense that represents a political field that deals head-on with the universalizing effects of globalization, both as a critique of the dominant form of global transformation (whether as global capitalism or American cultural or military imperialism) and as a plea for a sustainable and progressive globalizing alternative. With individual states unable to deal with the enormity of such issues on their own, a ‘democratic deficit’ has been created allowing for alternative political cultures to prosper. Within this vacuum, we can draw attention to a number of overlapping and interconnecting pan-global activist networks that in aggregation have been called the ‘global justice movement’, in effect the politics of global civil society. This rather broad and amorphous parent term incorporates a number of different organizations and networks including social movement organizations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International, campaign networks such as Global Justice Now and the World Social Forum, and increasingly, spontaneous mobilization networks such as the global Occupy Movement. Broadly speaking, the overall movement is united by a shared commitment to promoting social autonomy against the tyranny of overarching hegemonic structures. This clearly reflects civil society’s historical rootedness in the politics of 1968 and the Cold War uprisings in Eastern Europe: as Habermas argues, the movement seeks to re-moralize and reinvigorate everyday life by championing ‘equal rights, individual self-realization, participation and human rights’ (Habermas, 1987: 392). Historically, the hegemonic structure deemed the most pressing threat to personal autonomy has been the state which accepts that it is the duty of the militarily and economically 341

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powerful states to oversee world affairs. Whilst this remains a key part of civil society politics, since the 1990s greater attention has been drawn to the hegemonic power of the global marketplace, expressed in particular through the silent ‘takeover’ of everyday life by neo-liberal market values and rationalities (Klein, 2000; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Hertz, 2001). As Hertz has argued, neo-liberalism has changed the rules of the game, so that today, ‘business is in the driving seat . . . and governments have become referees, enforcing rules laid down by others’ (Hertz, 2001: 165). Nevertheless, shared opposition to unfettered global economic liberalization within global civil society belies a lack of unity in what the alternative should be and how it should be achieved. This will be a key area of focus in the following sections.

Global civil society movements and economic liberalization: the building of a cosmopolitan public As we have already argued, the protection of social ethics from the rationalizing principles of capitalist economics is clearly crucial to upholding civil society’s social distinctiveness, as per the definitions of Ferguson, Alexander et al. As a result, unfettered economic liberalization poses a threat to cosmopolitanism through its capacity to supplant social ethics for economic ones. This instigates a significant global power shift: Beck argues that the world economy now stands in relation to the state as a kind of ‘meta-power’ in the sense that it can dictate national and international policy: states are blighted by fear of non-investment by multinational corporations in their territory, meaning that political reforms are implemented in order to guarantee the maximum freedom for capital. Taken to its natural conclusion the removal of economic regulation has dangerous knock-on effects, Beck observes that ‘without taxation, there is no public sphere. Without a public sphere, there is no legitimacy. Without legitimacy, there is no conflict management and no security’ (Beck, 2008: 799). Resistance to economic liberalization, however, is no easy task. It is both banal and omnipresent in our everyday lives, making it difficult for global civil society movements to characterize a common ‘enemy’. Moreover, the inherently opaque nature of the global marketplace renders it extremely difficult to critique until something demonstrably goes wrong with it, as the 2007/8 global financial crisis has illustrated. Clearly, a fundamental starting point for building resistance is the extension of cosmopolitan values so that the notion of global civil society can be strengthened as an active reality. Much groundwork has been achieved in the post-war era, as ‘human interest’ news stories detailing the effects of poverty, war and natural disasters across the globe have become commonplace. This foundation of global consciousness has given greater credence to the idea of a ‘global public’ and potentially, a ‘globalized empathy’ which transcends local, ethnic and national boundaries. As a result, political movements that originate in global civil society are integral to highlighting globalization’s existing democratic deficit. Global justice campaigns, as well as membership-based social movement organizations are actively focused on spreading the concept of global civil society to those preoccupied with nation state politics and missing out on the bigger picture, or those who choose not to act by giving them the chance to do something. So how might a global civil society get results? Mary Kaldor (2003) argues that global civil society broadly seeks ‘the possibility of opening up access for the individual to global centres of power’ (Kaldor, 2003: 14). This can be problematic: although global political change is clearly sought, it is not initially clear how those ‘global centres of power’ might be challenged. Institutions such as the UN, EU, IMF and the WTO form a patchwork of transnational governing bodies which struggles to serve as a unitary state counterpoint to global civil society. According to Keck and Siddink (1998), this has forced social movements to bypass individual states and instead appeal to transnational governing bodies in the hope of having their demands filter down to nation state 342

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reform. This ‘boomerang effect’ also applies to the global media, representing as it does a key site in which civil society debates are played out and where campaign groups seek to disseminate knowledge broadly and quickly whilst transforming the visibility of its activities in the hope of creating paradigm-shifting ‘global events’ (Thompson, 1995; Thörn, 2007). Notable campaigns of this nature have included Jubilee 2000, the Make Poverty History/ONE campaign and Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair movement. These campaigns have sought to generate a sense of cosmopolitan solidarity so that individuals feel ‘intimately connected with the lives of people far away, with whom they might otherwise feel that they have nothing in common’ (Nash, 2008: 172). Although these sort of ‘awareness campaigns’ are clearly important in helping to build a reflexive cosmopolitan public, they are not without flaws and contradictions, and as a result are not supported unanimously by all global civil society groups. Awareness campaigns are politically moderate in the sense that they specify clear policy goals such as global debt cancellation, but do not call for a fundamental overhaul of the global capitalist system. Of course, one can be proglobal justice without being anti-capitalist, but it has been argued that the desire to gain popular support among the global public has resulted in the deliberate sidestepping of more complex political and economic debates – debates which according to more radical protest groups would reveal inconvenient truths about who might be culpable in the perpetuation of global inequalities. As Thomas Pogge provocatively asserts, we are familiar, through charity appeals, with the assertion that it lies in our hands to save the lives of many . . . [but] we are less familiar with the assertion of a weightier responsibility: that most of us do not merely let people starve but also participate in starving them. (Pogge, 2002: 214) This is admittedly a complex debate to enter into, one in which the ‘best’ mode of action is by no means self-evident. For example, campaigns calling for a ban on Third World sweatshops, or promoting universal labour standards are undeniably anti-poverty in sentiment, but have nevertheless been criticized for taking an oversimplified view of First World and Third World trade relations, Kiely (2005) noting that the implementation of such policies would actually exacerbate poverty in the Third World.1 Moreover, the question can be asked whether debt elimination represents the biggest priority in the fight against global poverty, or whether it just represents the most attainable. The UK branch of 2005’s Make Poverty History campaign is a case in point. Although the campaign sought to pressurize G8 leaders to act on global debt, trade and climate change, Gorringe and Rosie (2005) note that as a social movement campaign the desire among its organizers to welcome a broad coalition of different civil society groups into the campaign gave it a curiously depoliticized notion of protest, preferring instead – using Giddens’s phrase – to simply ‘dramatise what might otherwise go largely unnoticed’ (Giddens, 1994: 250). Depoliticization, however, was arguably the point. The campaign’s key objective was to raise awareness and stimulate some degree of cosmopolitan solidarity and the removal of any overt – and potentially divisive – political dialogue was deemed important to achieving this goal. In their study of the campaign march through Edinburgh, Gorringe and Rosie found that whilst the campaign was successful insofar as it mobilized large numbers for a cosmopolitan cause, the altruistic intentions of its participants were somewhat questionable, with many seeing their involvement as simply a chance to ‘feel good’ and ‘be part of history’. Make Poverty History was accused by some critics of acting as a ‘cheerleader’ for the establishment, rallying around the G8’s (already decided) conciliatory debt-relief pledge, whilst watering down the issue of poverty to a broadly inclusive yet ultimately banal sentiment that most would find impossible to dispute.2 343

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It has also been argued that the apparent watering down of Make Poverty History’s politics to the level of the indisputable (who doesn’t want to make poverty history?) was counterproductive to building a foundation of meaningful cosmopolitan solidarity. As Kate Nash argues, ‘solidarity requires more than identity . . . [i]t also requires social relationships across differences, the shared appreciation of material risks and benefits that are unevenly distributed and yet experienced as of common concern to the group’ (2008: 176). This arguably required a more demonstrative sentiment than simply the desire to ‘make poverty history’. Furthermore, the campaign’s unquestioning attitude towards G8 policy revealed a Western bias in its attitude towards global problemsolving: Nash noting how the campaign failed to incorporate the voices of African activists and intellectuals into the debate, presumably on the grounds that many had already criticized the campaign’s representations of Africans as little more than grateful recipients of ‘our’ help (ibid: 177). In this sense, Make Poverty History risked degenerating into ‘narcissistic sentimentalism’ – a cosmopolitan vision as designed by the West, and sold to the rest of the world.

The anti-globalization movement as ‘insurgent cosmopolitanism’ For more radical activists within global civil society, the tangle of contradiction and hypocrisy illustrated by the Make Poverty History campaign is only the tip of the iceberg. A number of Marxism-influenced authors including Petras and Veltmeyer (2001) and Callinicos (2009) elaborate on this by characterizing capital market globalization as the product of a set of deliberate ideological and political decisions, embodied in the global ‘monarchy’ of the United States, the G8, the UN, WTO and IMF. With share capital dictating voting power in the latter ‘unholy trinity’, Ha-Joon Chang notes how the United States effectively has the power of veto over key economic decisions (Chang 2007: 34–5). As a result, liberalization can be seen to exacerbate already-existing economic inequalities between the First and Third World, such as national debt and food shortages. This makes it easy to identify clear winners and losers: the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos critically observes, ‘the dominant discourse on globalization is the history of the winners, told by the winners’ (Santos 2006: 395). For activists critical of such imperial ambitions, calls to ‘make poverty history’ ring hollow and see a more radical form of change as the only real alternative. This view gets a mixed reception within global civil society movements, largely due to their nefarious image as unwelcome, extremist party crashers. Gorringe and Rosie (2005) note that the initial media coverage of Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh focused less on its politics than apparent ‘fears’ felt by many that it would attract ‘anti-capitalist and anti-globalization extremists’, and the event would descend into violence and anarchy of a ‘baying mob’. Yet the anti-globalization protestors do not see themselves as marginalized extremists on the fringes of global civil society: rather, they consider their ‘direct action’ activism as representing the only means of genuinely challenging the existing world order. This stems from their capacity to create more provocative, show-stealing ‘global events’, of which the closing down of the WTO meeting in Seattle, December 1999 is perhaps the most famous example. Seattle attracted around 70,000 demonstrators, but it was media images of heavy-handed policing against anarchic protestors that gave hitherto underground anti-globalization politics a platform in the mainstream media for the first time. The term ‘anti-globalization’ is rather misleading as the movement is clearly globalized in its organization and outlook. Unlike the leftist vanguard politics of old, the movement is organizationally defined by transnational networks rather than traditional hierarchies. Moreover, it seeks to unite and mobilize different social groups on a non-class, pro-humanitarian basis, leading Santos (2006) to characterize it as an expression of ‘insurgent cosmopolitanism’. This, too, is helped by the wide range of non-Western voices it assimilates, including Mexico’s Zapatistas, 344

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Ecuador’s CONAIE indigenous confederation and India’s Chipko environmental movement. These groups reflect the wider movement’s emphasis placed on local resistance to globalization, particularly campaigns to protect land ownership rights from the clutches of big business and pro-market governments. Emphasis on the local also complements the strong influence of antistate philosophies such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1977) and more recently, Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) which reject the homogenizing thrust of modernity by creating new, autonomous spaces akin to a ‘new commons’ outside of the state and formal economy. For Hardt and Negri, the spread of local resistances to hegemonic empires represents the coming of a new global solidarity movement – an autonomous yet interconnected ‘multitude’. As the Seattle protest illustrates, direct action repertoires seek to dramatize citizens’ autonomy and empowerment, which through worldwide media coverage, can quickly acquire a mass audience. Nevertheless, the unpredictable and disruptive nature of these protests also risks feeding a pre-existing media stereotype of activists as self-serving mindless hooligans, as well as diluting their original political message. The same was arguably true for the Occupy Movement, as activists’ efforts to foreground the damaging effects of neo-liberal power structures were eventually outweighed by the need to defend their right to claim public spaces for protest. For this reason, direct action repertoires have sometimes come in for criticism from voices within the movement: the author and activist Naomi Klein (2001), for example, favours the politics of engagement above the politics of negation, arguing that the increasingly inevitable attempts by activists to blockade WTO meetings whenever and wherever they are held has now become an end in itself. For cosmopolitan thinkers, the anti-globalization movement gets a mixed response. Somewhat inevitably, its politics fall outside of David Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy. Held’s normative vision of global power networks, democratic law, transnational parliaments and cosmopolitan citizenship is broadly compatible with global civil society movements to the extent that it propounds an alternative to the neo-liberal Washington Consensus and its single-minded concern with ‘market access’ (Held 2004: 56–8), but in practice has more in common with the ‘integrative’ approach as practised by Jubilee 2000, Make Poverty History and the like. Indeed, one might reasonably argue that the model proposed by Held is flawed precisely because it does not go far enough in challenging the structural barriers to cosmopolitanism, not least the nation state itself, born as it is out of a desire to revive social democratic politics. By contrast, the antiglobalization movement would be wary of the idea of a cosmopolitan state, steeped as they are in histories of civil society struggles against hegemonic states claiming socialist legitimacy. Furthermore, Held’s model incorporates a reframing – but not replacing – of the market system seen by anti-globalization protestors as the root cause of polarizing global inequalities. Held is sympathetic with the protestors insofar as they clearly and articulately draw attention to the present system’s ‘damaging externalities’, but ultimately refutes the notion that a more ‘ethical’ capitalism is contradictory. Instead, he argues that the movement’s position on ‘the potential for locally based action to resolve, or engage with, the governance agenda generated by the forces of globalization’ is ‘deeply naive’ (Held, 2004: 162). Kiely agrees insofar as the movement’s abiding principle ‘to immediately create a new society independent of [the] mainstream’ can easily descend into a politics of ‘dropping out’ rather than changing the system (Kiely 2005: 202, 218). Yet writing the recipes for the kitchens of the future is perhaps not the movement’s real raison d’être. Perhaps taking a more resolutely social science approach, Beck (2005) defines cosmopolitanism more as an ethic of social thought and action. Furthermore, he argues that Held’s vision of cosmopolitan democracy would only succeed in substituting one set of conflicts and contradictions for another. Although transnational governing agencies need to be installed to provide the institutional framework for cosmopolitan values to be debated, Beck acknowledges that the values themselves are contingent and not necessarily universal in their appeal. As a result, cosmopolitan 345

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debate ‘can only be settled pragmatically, namely in the conclusions that can be derived from them and examined empirically and politically’ (Beck 2005: 306, original emphasis). Beck’s more contingent conceptualization of cosmopolitanism is therefore more accommodating to the continuum of different standpoints within global civil society. In fact, they represent a valuable contribution to the emergence of a cosmopolitan debate: unlike states and transnational corporations, Beck argues that social movements counteract their lack of power by achieving a high level of legitimacy. These are movements that lend ‘a voice to ordinary people’ who become credible ‘witnesses at the scene’, and help identify perpetrators of global injustices. With the global media as its mouthpiece, global social movements ‘are acting in the experimental anticipation of a cosmopolitan morality and cosmopolitan reforms that will put ideas generally considered to be “unrealistic” on to the global political agenda’ (Beck 2005: 77). In contrast to Held, Beck accommodated the anti-globalization movement within this system, praising the Seattle protests for its ability to ‘politicize’ globalization under the gaze of the global media, and promote a ‘global consciousness’ more generally (Beck and Willms 2004: 146–7). But in allowing the social movements of global civil society to be understood as a single functional entity, Beck is himself also guilty of undervaluing the notion of conflict in his model. Aware of the heterogeneous nature of global civil society movements, he nevertheless lumps them together as a single entity ‘united in their common concerns about globalization’ (Beck 2005: 145). This is problematic, as Beck idealizes global civil society for espousing a global consciousness that is fundamentally post-state. This ignores the fact that a key political division within global civil society debates has been between advocates of globalized resistance and advocates of a nationalist defence of state sovereignty (Hardt 2002: 114; see also Kiely’s [2005: 212–13] discussion of India’s Chipko movement). Nor can this be characterized in terms of essentialist ‘globalist’/‘sceptic’ binaries: Walden Bello (2004; 2009), for instance, has argued persuasively on sub-Saharan Africa’s struggles with global market liberalization, and how Malawi’s rejection of IMF micromanagement policies in favour of its own state-subsidized agricultural production caused instant improvement in lowering poverty relations. The stand-off between the European Union and the Greek government following the ‘collapse’ of the Greek economy can clearly be read as a manifestation of the same fundamental issue. Clearly, the identification of actions which are irrefutably cosmopolitan (and actions which are irrefutably not) is by no means self-evident. In sum, Beck essentially saw the anti-globalization movement as a useful catalyst for the broadening of global consciousness across the world and its characterization of globalization as politically contestable. Yet it remains unclear whether the arrival of Beck’s cosmopolitan vision would involve the quiet marginalization of the anti-globalization movement’s radical politics in favour of something closer to Held’s social democratic and statist model. As a political philosophy, social democracy fundamentally relies on its Weberian belief in the objective rule of law, its Rawlsian belief in an institutionalized system of justice, and its Keynesian belief in state intervention to ensure economic growth, and despite the best efforts of scholars from Hans Kelsen to Habermas and beyond to develop a more transnational form of social democracy, the extent to which this is capable of truly embracing cosmopolitanism remains questionable. In short, it now seems not only naïve but fundamentally misguided to believe that this represents a rational, evolutionary process of cosmopolitan dialogue and action rather than merely an overly optimistic smoothing-over of conflicts that continually risks falling back into old balkanized hostilities. Indeed, the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote to leave the EU arguably exposed the complacency of the socio-democratic elite in assuming that cosmopolitan values and virtues – banal, cultural or otherwise – had penetrated the everyday consciousness of British citizens to the extent that they were considered actively worth

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voting for. For many ‘leave’ voters, European cosmopolitanism incurred hostility not only for its threat to national sovereignty and borders, but also its prioritization of corporations over people, political cronyism to the point of perceived corruption, and apologism for systemic financial crisis. The same might be said of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, as his rhetoric of ‘putting America first’ equated the cosmopolitan project with self-serving liberal elitism. Of course, these developments do not necessarily spell the end of cosmopolitan ideals, as they too, have provoked a refocusing of GCS activism targets and campaigns. What remains clear, though, is that negotiating conflict remains at the heart of cosmopolitan project: not just externally through reprisals against emboldened nationalists, but also internally by recognizing its diversity of political voices that in different ways are all fighting for a fair and inclusive global civil society.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to discuss the role of the ‘global civil society movement’, and in particular its critical position in respect of capitalist globalization, in the context of broader debates over the strengths and weaknesses of the cosmopolitan ideal. Understandably, it raises more questions than it answers. The malleable nature of core terms such as citizenship, cosmopolitanism and civil society makes any absolute resolution of these problems unachievable. What needs to be understood, at the very least, is that these terms are far from synonymous, and if cosmopolitanism as a contemporary social and political theory is to avoid falling into the same traps and ambiguities as earlier accounts of civil society, it needs to develop greater substance and content so as to address the political concerns of the multiple agents of this global civil society. In this respect, a conventional cosmopolitan vision would necessitate a broadening of the definition of civil society to incorporate not just non-governmental political actors such as campaigning organizations and activist movements, but other contributors to the ethical sphere, such as social networks3 and, possibly even, capitalist corporations, which, curiously, would take it closer to the earlier Hegelian definition. However, the perceived incompatibility of the logic of the marketplace from the logic of the ethical domain that has ever characterized Marxist and radical thinking on the subject takes us down an altogether different road. It is curious that the questions asked by Hegel and Gramsci remain with us even now as we try to make sense of the complexities of contemporary global transformations, including recent nationalist backlashes. For theories of cosmopolitanism, and critical approaches to ‘cosmopolitics’, it should, however, be clear that global civil society is a concept crucial to its inception. This is because global civil society – characterized by global awareness campaigns, social movement organizations and discussion forums, even the anti-globalization movement – represents a fundamentally social engagement with the effects of globalization. The desire to preserve its social distinctiveness is well illustrated through its opposition to unfettered economic liberalization, arguably the pre-eminent hegemonic power of the global age. This has to be the focus of a genuine cosmopolitan philosophy – its critique of rather than assimilation into the neo-liberal globalist project. Evidence has shown that cosmopolitanism has failed also, in its current incarnation at least, because of its inability to detach itself from social democratic statism. It needs to be understood, then, that global civil society in its current form struggles to provide the solid, consensual base necessary for the coming of a cosmopolitan ‘moment’, as envisaged by Beck (2006). Recalling Gramsci’s argument that civil society is both empirical and normative, we have shown that its political agents disagree on a number of issues, not least on the question of whether ‘ethical capitalism’ is a contradiction in terms. Furthermore, the political repertoires of global civil society campaigns have been accused of becoming ends in themselves, from the pallid,

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depoliticized awareness campaigns of Make Poverty History, to the anti-globalization movement’s preoccupation with creating a media spectacle at the expense of delivering a clear political message to the rest of the world. Although each is cosmopolitan in its own way, it does not necessarily mean that they are sufficiently united on fundamental issues to ensure that a cosmopolitan moment is within sight. Clearly, then, we as academics must consider with more caution what ‘cosmopolitics’ are. There are many different varieties of cosmopolitics, and multiple reflexive engagements with the politics of globalization by actors and groups across the world will not necessarily guarantee even a minimum consensus model of how a cosmopolitan society should exist. This is true of global civil society’s relationship with the global market, but also on a range of other areas of global political concern such as migration, environmental politics and in particular, the thorny issue of multilateral military intervention (see Martell, 2008, 2009). Cosmopolitanism as a broad ideal – that all human beings require equal moral respect and concern – is hard to argue against, and the extension and deepening of cosmopolitan ethics and sensibilities across the world would undoubtedly help this process. For this reason, it is important for academics studying global civil society to be clear in its separation of the empirical from the normative, so that such debates can take place as transparently and rationally as possible. There is, finally, a particular contemporary significance to a re-interest in the idea of civil society. The rise of populism represents a significant challenger to ‘softer’ forms of conservatism that preceded it in the US and the UK. For example, the neo-conservatism of George W. Bush was at least embedded in a commitment to the globalization (of sorts) of Western liberal values, while former Prime Minister David Cameron’s compassionate conservatism in the UK reflected a model of civil association in which private individuals were encouraged to care less about themselves and more about others, albeit via the voluntary sector. Whether this philosophy represented a genuine commitment to civil society or just an excuse to ‘pass the buck’ for what socialists would maintain is the role of the state – to care for others – now seems a somewhat moot issue. Certainly, the present Trump administration does not even pretend to invoke the cosmopolitan ideals of civil society to justify rolling back the state and its moral crusades. Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of what such ideals, and policies, might represent. Critics would surely say that if civil society is to mean anything, it has to work with the state by providing its checks and balances, but not to replace it. Throughout this chapter we have re-examined the relationship between civil society and the market. Perhaps it is time to re-discover the relationship between civil society and the state.

Notes 1 Kiely (2005) argues that making a claim for universal labour standards would undermine employment in the developing world. In the case of sweatshops, he argues that ‘while high levels of exploitation exist in “Third-World” sweatshops, these factories are often seen as desirable places of employment, when the alternatives may be even worse’ (Kiely 2005: 236-7; see also Bhagwati 2004). 2 See, for example, G. Monbiot (2005) ‘Africa’s New Best Friends’, Guardian, 5 July. 3 On which, see Paul Kennedy’s interesting work on the relationship between transnational friendship networks among professionals and the concept of global civil society (Kennedy, 2005).

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Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Beck, U. (2005) Power in the Global Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2008) ‘Reframing Power in the Globalized World’, Organization Studies 29(5): 893–4. Beck, U. and Willms, J. (2004) Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bello, W. (2004) Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy, London: Zed Books. Bello, W. (2009) The Food Wars, London: Verso. Bhagwati, J. (2004) In Defense of Globalization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callinicos, A. (2009) Imperialism and the Global Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge: Polity Press. Chang, H.-J. (2007) Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies, and the Threat to the Developing World, London: Random House. Delanty, G. (2006) ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, British Journal Sociology 57(1): 25–47. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1977) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, New York: Viking Press. Eade, J. and O’Byrne, D. (eds.) (2005) Global Ethics and Civil Society, Aldershot: Ashgate. Erikkson, B. (1993) ‘The First Formation of Sociology: A Discursive Innovation of the 18th Century’, American Journal of Sociology 34(2): 251–76. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gorringe, H. and Rosie, M. (2005) ‘“Pants to Poverty?” Making Poverty History, Edinburgh 2005’, Sociological Research Online 11(1): 1–15. Gramsci, A. (1966) Passato e Presente, Turin: Einaudi. Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume II: System and Lifeworld, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hardt, M. (2002) ‘Today’s Bandung’, New Left Review II, 14: 112–18. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Held, D. (2004) Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hertz, N. (2001) The Silent Takeover, London: Heinemann. Kaldor, M. (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity Press. Keane, J. (2003) Global Civil Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keck, M.E. and Siddink, K. (1998) Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kennedy, P. (2005) ‘Informal Sociality, Cosmopolitanism and Gender among Transnational Professionals: Unravelling Some of the Linkages between the Global Economy and Civil Society’, in J. Eade. and D. O’Byrne (eds.), Global Ethics and Civil Society, Basingstoke: Ashgate, pp. 89–107. Kiely, R. (2005) The Clash of Globalizations, Boston, MA: Brill. Klein, N. (2000) No Logo, London: Flamingo. Klein, N. (2001) ‘A Fete for the End of the End of History’, at www.nologo.org. Martell, L. (2008) ‘Beck’s Cosmopolitan Politics’, Contemporary Politics 14(2): 129–43. Martell, L. (2009) ‘Global Inequality, Human Rights and Power: A Critique of Ulrich Beck’s Cosmopolitanism’ Critical Sociology 35(2): 253–72. McCrone, D. (2010) ‘Recovering Civil Society: Does Sociology Need It?’, in P. Baert, S.M. Koniodos, G. Procacci and C. Ruzza (eds.), Conflict, Citizenship and Civil Society, London: Routledge. Nash, K. (2008) ‘Global Citizenship as Show Business: The Cultural Politics of Make Poverty History’, Media, Culture and Society, 30(2): 167–81. O’Byrne, D. (2003) The Dimensions of Global Citizenship: Political Identity beyond the Nation-State, London: Frank Cass. O’Byrne, D. (2005) ‘Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Civil Society: Some Introductory Remarks’, in D. O’Byrne and J. Eade (eds.), Global Ethics and Civil Society, Aldershot: Ashgate. O’Byrne, D. and Hensby, A. (2011) Theorizing Global Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. (2001) Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century, London: Zed. Pogge, T. (2002) World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press. Poggi, G. (2001) Forms of Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santos, B.S. (2006) ‘Globalizations’, Theory, Culture and Society 23(2–3): 393–9. Taylor, C. (1990) ‘Modes of Civil Society’, Public Culture 3(1): 95–118. Thompson, J.B. (1995) The Media and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Thӧrn, H. (2007) ‘Social Movements, the Media, and the Emergence of a Global Public Sphere: From AntiApartheid to Global Justice’, Current Sociology 56(3). Walzer, M. (ed.) (1995) Toward a Global Civil Society, Oxford: Berghahn. Whitehouse, L. (2005) ‘The Global Compact: Corporate Citizenship in Action’, in J. Eade and D. O’Byrne (eds.), Global Ethics and Civil Society, Aldershot: Ashgate. Zolo, D. (1997) Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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30 The commons and cosmopolitanism Nick Stevenson

The history of the commons According to the historian Peter Linebaugh (2016: 57) the ideas of the commodity and the commons were central to understanding the popular morality of the sixteenth century. The commons (or at least ideas of the Commonwealth) adopted a specifically humanist set of concerns implying notions of law, hospitality and related understandings of civic life. The class power of land owners, the politics of enclosure and peasant revolts helped develop a popular morality of ‘commoning’ (sharing, mutual aid and reciprocity) as opposed to the violence of the practice of enclosure. On the other hand, the morality of the commodity effectively withheld food and land from the poor. Similarly many of the ideas embodied in the English revolution of the seventeenth century rejected the ideas of the Protestant ethic, private property and the political authority of parliament for a more communal ethic based upon sharing and solidarity (MacLaughlin 2016). The historian of popular commons-based movements, E.P. Thompson (2017a) argues that the long and complex history of the commoner not only offered the story of revolt from below against hierarchical rule, but a different tradition of freedom from that of the individualism of liberalism. These features were especially present in the making of the working-class movement offering a democratic and anti-authoritarian heritage that connects the peasant movements of the past to the foundation of the labour movement. The idea of the commons offers a community-based ethic located within ideas of a shared common humanity; that stands opposed to the ethics of individualism and competition that are more connected to private property and hierarchical control. The struggle for the commons historically also has implications for the imposition of slavery and more patriarchal social relationships. Silvia Federici (2004) describes how the displacement of the peasants off common land provided labour to work on slave ships and as wage slaves in factories. The privatisation of the land meant that the poor lost their access to a subsistence outside of their ability to earn a wage. This sense of dispossession especially applied to women whose intimate relationship with the land meant that they had previously been able to find a role as ‘wise’ women or healers. However the partially repressed memory of more communal freedoms before the arrival of capitalism would continue to haunt modernity. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redifer (2000) argue that if the seizure of land in Europe, Americas and Africa helped lay the 351

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foundations for capitalism and imperialism then the idea of the rural commons and associated communal sensibilities based upon sharing and reciprocity helped inspire much of the resistance of the future. In more recent times the idea of the commons has returned not as an attempt to return to an agrarian past, but as a global movement opposed to the imposition of capitalist modernity. Vandana Shiva (2012) argues that the idea of the commons is especially important in the context of ecological politics. If capitalist forms of enclosure that sought to remove people from any intimate relationship with nature encourages a sense of life without limits then a commonsbased approach seeks to reconnect the economy and the fragile web of life. Shiva argues that continuation of life on earth is dependent upon our ability to reimagine ourselves as part of an ecological commons. Under capitalist-consumerism the fragility of the commons remains hidden in a system based upon waste, inequality, over-consumption and exploitation. Veronika Bennholat-Thomsen and Maria Mies (1999) argue that the commons raises the question of the subsistence principle. This rejects the idea that poorer communities simply need to adapt themselves to trickle-down economics and neoliberalism. The problem with endless economic growth is there is no sense of limits and sufficiency. Indeed capitalist development encourages ideas of backwardness and inferiority. The sufficiency principle instead asks us to think about more community-level forms of development based upon co-operation, sharing and more local forms of economy. Similarly Ivan Illich (1992) argues that if capitalist enclosure imposed the idea of homo-economicus then the commons contains other ethical possibilities. With dispossession from the commons, the commoners lost their right to hunt, fish and collect medicinal plants, but it also implied a radical change in society’s disposition towards nature and the environment. In other words, the commons was converted into a resource to be plundered by capitalism instead of being something intimately connected to the identities, livelihoods and experiences of commoners. If however there are now other kinds of commons, such as the linguistic commons or the urban commons, all of which are prone to the practice of enclosure and privatisation. Some commons like language and sociality are open to all, whereas other commons like housing, libraries and parks require the governance of public authorities. Apart from the ecological crisis there are a number of reasons why the idea of the commons has made a dramatic return more recently: the struggles of indigenous peoples for land rights; the development of the internet and knowledge commons; the arrival of an aggressive form of capitalism intent on the practice of privatisation; and the collapse of the Cold War that has opened up ideas based upon global citizenship (Linebaugh 2014: 143–4). Many of those seeking to recover the commons from capitalism also seek to use this idea to explore a different set of social and ethical relationships between humans, other species and the land. Central in this respect has been rejecting the idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. The economist Elinor Ostrom (2012) has been central in refuting the idea that unless resources are subjected to the control of capitalism and individual ownership they necessarily face ruin and depletion. Commoners can just as easily create rules, sanctions and moral imperatives to govern how shared resources are used. In other words, the logic of dispossession is not underwritten by efficiency criteria or questions of rationalisation, but through specific attempts to impose exploitative economic practices. Indeed many of those who support the commons often point to the possibilities of other ethical responses that emerge during the aftermath of catastrophes (Solnit 2010). The commons then represents other imaginative possibilities for more communal possibilities and pleasures beyond neoliberalism. These ideas were also apparent to many of the anarchists and socialists writing at the end of the nineteenth century. Peter Kropotkin (2015) and William Morris (1973) argued the priority 352

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should be given to the ‘right to live’ over capitalism’s need to make a profit. Kropotkin’s (1987) work has proved to be especially significant in this respect, arguing that both human beings and animals have capacities for mutual aid that is denied expression by the state and capitalistic forms of control. Especially significant is the argument against a form of social Darwinism popular within elite circles during the Victorian period. Both Morris and Kropotkin argue that the possibilities for a more generous and co-operative life remain latent within the shared natures of human beings. However if the sensibilities of Kropotkin and Morris sought to abolish capitalism in the name of the commons then this is no longer the case. After the long and violent history of the twentieth century the commons is now more of a matter of working within the cracks of capitalism than seeking its abolition (Holloway 2001). Most significantly the work of Hardt and Negri (2009) has sought to recover the idea of the commons for more contemporary political and social movements. Rejecting state-driven forms of politics, Hardt and Negri (2009) argue that the idea of the commons needs to avoid being trapped in a form of anti-modernity that looks back to the pre-modern period. This is perhaps evident in the imaginary of a number of social movements that mourn the loss of a shared commons after the imposition of capitalist forms of enclosure. Instead they propose a philosophy of the commons that is linked to an altermodernity. This is where pre-modern traditions are kept alive, but only to propose new modes of becoming in the present. These are important distinctions within a context whereby the idea of the commons can easily be dismissed as a form of romantic nostalgia. Instead altermodernity seeks to free global humanity from poverty, exploitation and hierarchy while breaking with the rule of capitalism and the state. Hardt and Negri insist upon the rights of humanity to the common (knowledge, food, water) as the basic means of life while participating in democratic forms of citizenship that allows the free movement of peoples across borders. The problem of course with these laudable aims is that they fail to explore what an arguably more practical politics of the commons might be able to achieve. As we shall see, many scholars and critics of the commons have doubts about the feasibility of a movement that entirely rejects the politics of the state. Instead a politics of the commons insists that aggressive capitalism left unregulated undermines both the eco-system and the rights of labour. According to David Harvey (2011: 106) the origins of the banking crisis of 2008 lies within the creation of low-paid jobs and eroded welfare rights as well as an unregulated banking sector. The point of the commons in this setting is to rediscover the art of the common good through a dialogue between labour organisations and ecological movements (Williams 1983).

Eco-socialism and the commons Many of these issues can be traced back to the emergence of the eco-socialist writing that developed from the 1960s onwards. Raymond Williams (1989a) argued that while much of the work of William Morris and others associated with the Romantic movement remained valuable it was built upon an idealisation of a pre-industrial society. Williams argued that the decentralised socialism of the future needs to build a more complex society than modern capitalism. A commons-based society was built less upon the lure of the rural ideal than a complex technological modernity. Once the rule of capital had been broken this would enable local communities to develop their own solutions to ecological problems, but environmental issues posed a number of problems for socialists. The dominant solution to society’s problems amongst Marxists and socialists was that poverty and inequality could only be solved through more economic production. In this respect, socialists had not yet escaped from a number of metaphors that had come along with the Enlightenment and capitalism suggesting that nature had to be controlled and conquered in the interests of progress. Here the main enemy remained capitalism whose dominant imaginary 353

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promised levels of consumption experienced by middle-class Westerners as being feasible for the entire planet. As Williams suggests such features are clearly a fantasy given the levels of poverty and inequality generated by the economic system and the destructive effects upon the eco-system. Williams (1989b) argued that these ideas potentially opened the space for a more localised and community-orientated socialism of the future. This would mean a rejection of the legacy of scientific Marxism and instead the recognition that a diversity of different socialist traditions and more ecologically sensitive sensibilities would need a different relationship with the politics of place. Similarly Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) argued that the deterministic features of Marxism had run its course offering a theory of historical change mostly determined by the relationship between the forces and relations of production. This seemingly cancelled any meaningful idea of working-class agency and subordinated the revolutionary project to a productivist imaginary similar to that of capitalism. For Castoriadis (1997: 240) the central aim of the ecological movement could be described as seeking to question the idea of the neutrality of science and technology that had become embedded in the central project of modernity as ‘the unlimited expansion of rational mastery’. Within such a society the dominance of capitalist-consumerism defines what we take to be human needs. More autonomous movements that have broken with the dominant imaginary of capitalism are required to suggest that a less destructive civilisation is indeed possible. This would involve the recovery of the self-management tradition that had arguably fared just as badly under capitalism as it had under European state socialism. The ecological and self-managed society begins with a revolt against the passivity imposed on the citizenry of a centralised and hierarchical system built upon minimal forms of citizenship. Similarly Raymond Williams’s (1980: 185) argument is suggestive in this context as in thinking about capitalistconsumerism we are often ‘not materialist enough’. By this phrase he was not only seeking to highlight how consumerism works through a form of everyday magic suggesting an immediate resolution to our problems, but equally hides its more destructive and wasteful features. Williams (1980: 187) confidently argued in this setting that a ‘genuine democracy’ depended not on ‘a system of government but self-government’. However this was written during a period when there had been a revival in socialist politics during the radical 1960s, when there was a strong sense that more meaningful and decentralised democracies could take root within everyday life. Both Castoriadis and Williams argue that the main threat to the commons is capitalist-consumerism and that a more radical decentralised democracy can help convert the consumer into the citizen. Similarly Ivan Illich (1973), Andre Gorz (1982) and Murray Bookchin (2004) all published important works in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s that supported the idea of an ecosocialist future. These publications began to question the extent to which a radical democratic society could be built upon the working-class movement in a post-industrial setting. If the recovery of the commons was unlikely to be achieved within the context of a capitalistic society there were good reasons to doubt whether these aims could be achieved solely through the support of the industrial working class and trade union movement. In this respect, Illich (1973: 149) argued that the histories of state socialism and capitalism meant that what was required was a ‘cultural revolution’ that broke with the structures of the industrial society. Instead of more of the same, Illich (1973: 150) argued that industrialism had delivered a society built upon hierarchical control and centralisation that had failed to build upon ‘the educability of man’. The school system, meritocracy and associated ideas of inferiority stunted many people’s development, allowing them to be dominated by an ecologically hazardous civilisation. Later Illich and Barry Sanders (1989) would claim that the linguistic commons was also under threat by a specifically technocratic language that was increasingly detaching the population from more authentic literary experiences. Sanders (1995) would develop these arguments further suggesting that an over-reliance upon computers and standardised testing was especially harming children’s experience of education as 354

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a place of play, improvisation and where they can develop a love of reading. The linguistic commons in this sense is threatened by a progressive technocratic enclosure of schools and the idea of learning. The threat to the commons is not simply located within the ecological sphere and needs a new popular social movement emerging from below suggesting alternatives. Bookchin (2004: 120) argued that many working-class people had little interest in establishing a decentralised ecological society and remained connected to socialism only insofar as it promised a larger pay packet. Instead, Bookchin suggested the lifestyle revolts of the 1960s counter-culture contained a greater sense of revolutionary possibility given the extent to which it incorporated a revolt against more mainstream identities. If Bookchin accepted the need to recover the selfmanagement tradition then this had to be connected to the revolt against all forms of hierarchy including those based upon class, race and gender. Further, the ecological society of the future would need to utilise technology to serve less a world built on domination, than one of plentitude and genuinely free communities. Similarly Andre Gorz (1982) argued that an ecologically sustainable society should be based upon liberation from capitalism. The cornerstone of such a society would be the abolition of wage labour and a new world of freetime built on a basic citizen’s income. Like Bookchin, Gorz felt that the possibilities of new technology could not be utilised due to the domination of capitalism. Gorz feared that in the post-industrial future technology would destroy jobs and create the misery of poverty and mass unemployment. This suggested that capitalism and the wage-labour society would not be able to produce an ecological society as well as enough jobs for people who wanted them. A more liberated society would require the maximisation of self-determined activities and a greater sense of personal fulfilment. Automated societies could be ecologically sustainable with higher degrees of personal autonomy being experienced by people no longer forced to work for a wage in order to survive. Instead of socialism being a Weberian bureaucratic nightmare, it would be built upon the maximisation of personal freedom and human creativity. The society of the commons is not only decentralised, but built upon human happiness with deeper forms of engagement with sports, arts and education. These more utopian features recall the need for a politics of the commons to become involved in a politics of the imagination. E.P. Thompson (2017b) argued that one of the reasons why Morris remains central to the socialist tradition was for his ability to imagine the possibilities of living in a society that had rejected competition and narrow-minded forms of utilitarian calculation. Such features required the possibility of imagining a more egalitarian, community-oriented future built upon more reciprocal and less exploitative human relationships. In the 1960s and 1970s ideas of eco-socialism suggested a complex social order beyond the yearning for a return to a rural idyll and the poisonous environment of unlimited economic expansion. Most of these writers were both supportive and critical of an environmental movement that sought to work on single issues rather than liberating society from capitalism. However the idea that utopian possibilities of the future could be built upon localised microsocialisms was to almost entirely disappear in the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, eco-socialist visions lost a considerable amount of their appeal amongst environmental groups. More progressive forms of politics increasingly abandoned talk of socialism and instead discussed questions of citizenship. After the collapse of state socialism there was a strong sense that socialism was no longer feasible and would inevitably lead to a state-controlled society. There was a significant attempt to revive talk of the responsibilities and duties of the ecological citizen (Dobson 2003; Steward 1991; van Steenbergen 1994). Here there is little talk of the economy or capitalism as questions of ecological citizenship became bound up within a liberal democratic paradigm that wished to open up talk about virtues such as care across species divides and a concern for generations to come in the wake of environmental degradation. 355

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The cosmopolitan dimension The most important contribution linking the ecological commons to questions of cosmopolitanism or more global dimensions of citizenship has been that of Ulrich Beck. Ulrich Beck’s (1992) idea of the risk society formulated in the aftermath of the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl suggested a different society emerging in the wake of industrialism. Similar to the work of many eco-socialists, Beck suggests that environmental hazards are not necessarily reducible to class politics. However Beck takes this argument a stage further by suggesting that the emergence of the risk society is a qualitatively different kind of society. If the dominant normative demand of a class-based society is that of equality then the focus of a risk-based society is that of safety. Increasingly in the context of modern consumer-based societies citizens are not impoverished but anxious. The problem being that science and technology had produced a society within which we currently run incalculable risks in terms of the food that is safe to eat, the levels of pollution in the atmosphere and the harm caused by the use of fertilisers. Such features potentially turn our shared global society into a huge laboratory (Beck 1992: 69). Further, as the wider class society has broken down, the social world has become more individualised. Instead of a society governed by tradition, an individualised society enhances the significance of life-projects, friendships, partnerships and life styles that have the potential to become more freely chosen. There are however few guarantees that individuals will make good choices as life within an informationbased culture becomes increasingly experienced through the prism of uncertainty. Westerners inevitably become pulled into a number of difficult questions around the body, health and safety. In the wake of the decline of class politics, there emerges a new form of politics or sub-politics. Sub-politics both serves democracy by raising questions displaced by political parties, but tends to increase a sense of uncertainty as it challenges the views of ‘experts’ by asking questions related to the costs and uncertainties of scientifically defined progress. The environmental movement in this new setting seeks to call upon alternative experts, acts locally while thinking globally, and concentrates upon the inherently risky nature of modernity. These arguments clearly have a number of ecological questions within their midst. Beck (1995: 2) argues that the risk society is one of ‘organised irresponsibility’. By this Beck meant the failure of legal measures to deal adequately with the complexity of globalised hazards and environmental uncertainties. Indeed much of the new ecological consciousness has not found its roots within the urban poor but instead amongst the stressed and health conscious middle-class populations. Within the heart of the affluent society there has emerged not increasing contentment, but a new sensitivity towards the potentially destructive and insecure nature of modern life. These features are driven less by the utopian dreams of eco-socialism, but a sense of fear and dread of new globalised risks. After Chernobyl it became increasingly apparent to those who thought their affluence would protect them from risk that hazards do not necessarily respect spatial or indeed temporal boundaries. Indeed the increasing levels of global interdependence meant that risks and dangers could only be met by calls for more public discussion. The consideration of environmental risks and dangers are necessarily cosmopolitan problems that cut across national and cultural boundaries. Notably these problems can only be faced in context of a cosmopolitan democracy that simultaneously works at global and local levels. As Ulrich Beck (1999: 15) suggests, ‘central human worries are ‘world’ problems’. Similarly Anthony Giddens (2009), who has been influenced by Beck, suggests that ecological issues related to the protection of the commons should not be seen as a Left/Right issue. Giddens is especially critical of ecological arguments that call for zero forms of growth to protect the environment and instead adopts an ecological modernisation approach that foregrounds questions of global warming. He is concerned that many activists who seek to talk about values of care and respect in terms of the environment are 356

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unhelpfully polarising the debate that needs to build upon cosmopolitan agreement and cross party consensus. David Held (2004) is also significant in this respect rejecting the localism of the environmental movement for a commitment to a new form of global politics built through the development of global cosmopolitan institutions. In this model states should be required to come to new global agreements built upon human rights and the responsibility to protect the planet. Large climate change conferences and global agreements within this rubric become the most sensible and rational way to address shared global problems. However other critics such as Andrew Dobson (2003) have argued that ideas encouraged under the rubric of cosmopolitanism often underestimate that environmental problems like global warming are more the responsibility of rich and powerful nations like the United States than poorer parts of the world. In this respect, the globalisation of risks is less a matter of shared risks, but that of unevenly distributed risks. For all the cosmopolitan talk of new transnational agreements and communities required to deal with global risks, we need to look at questions of power and responsibility in more critical terms. Kate Soper (1995) argues that one of the major flaws of some cosmopolitan accounts is the underestimation of how a system built upon power, class and inequality produces ecological risks. In this respect, we have to reckon with the considerable vested interests that would forcibly resist the transformation of such a system. Further the work of Giddens and Beck remains indifferent to thinking about the value of nature and how it might be better protected and nurtured in the context of a destructive consumer culture. Missing from more mainstream cosmopolitan accounts is an appreciation of how capitalist neoliberalism wages a war upon commons-based solutions, producing both an insecure environment and precarious labour contracts.

Localisation, the commons and cosmopolitanism Despite the major insight of cosmopolitanism, that ecological questions are indeed global problems that are generated in the context of uncertainty, there seem to be many features missing from the argument. Here the concern is that cosmopolitanism remains connected to a form of top-down and bureaucratic politics formulating policy without requiring much in the way of participation from local actors. However Gerard Delanty (2009) argues that despite the stress played upon global solutions there is still the need to formulate cosmopolitan dialogues and discussion across different cultural traditions. This may not necessarily end in consensus, and opens out the possibility of less top-down and more inclusive forms of dialogue. This is a significant development within the cosmopolitan argument as it recognises the possibility of a plurality of commons-based solutions, rather than the more homogenous politics based upon powerful institutions seeking to meet technocratic targets. Wolfgang Sachs (1999) argues within a more cosmopolitan context that our shared planet stands as the best inspiration for more globally orientated forms of citizenship. Within that context, we should carefully search for different models of human development that do not create poverty or destroy the environment. There is a collective need to think about how Western models of development can be tied to the construction of a mono-culture that is the opposite of more cosmopolitan features. Just as the colonial period saw non-Western countries as backward then, dominant ideas associated with neoliberalism and growth equally undervalue the plurality of different languages and more traditional or indigenous forms of knowledge. Instead of capitalist defined progress, Sachs develops the concept of cosmopolitan localism. At its heart this idea is built upon the recovery of a plurality of ideas around the good society, the importance of self-restraint and the necessity of dialogue within and across civilisations while respecting Otherness and difference. Especially significant 357

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is a cosmopolitanism that is open to an appreciation of the richness of place and location. If globalisation is often experienced as a constant battle against the restraints of space and time, then cosmopolitan localism seeks to value slowness and an attachment to specific locations. The time of neoliberal globalisation is one of speed and acceleration through the drive to produce more and more in ever shorter time frames. The paradox here is that in the world of time-saving technology, citizens experience themselves as short of time and pressed into ever higher levels of performance and exhaustion. Alternatively more sustainable forms of development would require the exploration of a diversity of different temporal frames not all based upon speed. More communal forms of life depend upon social capital that cannot be generated without a connection to place and the possibility of forming bonds and connections with others, all of which takes time (Putnam 2000). The central idea of the commons-based society is the importance of more local solutions. If as Serge Latouche (2014: 34) argues, the sustainable society of the commons relies upon the recovery of the idea of social life and democracy over ‘endless consumerism’ then this requires a deeper investment in more local forms of identity and involvement. More commons-based arguments need to relocalise the economy, redefine what we mean by abundance, redistribute wealth both nationally and globally, reduce the amount of waste and pollution while promoting a radical culture of reuse and recycling. This can only be done by connecting such a project to more place-specific identities and opening spaces for local democratic initiatives. For example, many cities are threatened by the dominance of the car and shopping. An alternative to a consumerbased modernity requires making space for public and alternative transport, a greater variety of housing and local shops and other forms of development. This is not so much the neoliberal project of austerity and cuts as the recognition that a flourishing commons will require wellfunded public resources such as libraries, hospitals and schools. The post-development perspective of the commons seeks to develop a plurality of ways of reconnecting citizens to their locality while encouraging them to reimagine the urban landscape. Colin Ward (1992) argues that against the politics of privatisation, urban decline and largescale retail development there is a need to build cities that include the voices of local people in their planning, design and control. The liveable city needs not only to struggle against the domination of multinational capital, but to make spaces for children to wander, play and form friendships. This is a far cry from a view of the city as a Disneyland of commercial opportunities, but requires adventure playgrounds, places where people can congregate safely and educational opportunities (Ward 1990). In addition, in the field of housing the state has increasingly relinquished its responsibilities which has led to a decline in public housing stock and the marginalisation of poorer residents from the life of the city (Davis 2006). Colin Ward (1996) argues in this context that the previous social democratic period along with governments across the world had preferred a centralised and hierarchical approach to housing as opposed to one built upon the principles of self-help and self-management. Instead of an urban commons dominated by the desire of the wealthy to barricade themselves into securitised private estates there are other, commons-based solutions. Alternatives need to recognise the desire of all human beings to be valued and respected and participate in the shaping of their environment. Ideas related to the urban commons also need to raise arguments about the size of institutions and the amount of power that can be exercised by ordinary citizens. This question was purposefully explored in Schumacher’s (1973) important phrase ‘small is beautiful’. If a world ruled by capitalism and the state produces a society where human beings are ruled from above there are a number of alternatives we can explore in this respect. A new kind of economics (or what Schumacher calls a Buddhist economics) would move the argument from the maximisation of trade and goods to one that promoted meaningful work and education, and 358

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the careful use of non-renewable sources. All of these features presume spaces that value face-toface contact, reciprocal negotiation and structures that are human-sized. More recently, Giovanna Ricoveri (2013: 95) makes a similar point that the commons ‘favours the local not the global; solidarity and not competitiveness; renewable decentralised energy, not fossil fuel controlled by a handful of multinationals’. Ultimately as the eco-socialists realised the society of the commons requires radically decentralised and (as much as possible) mostly small institutions that foster a sense of personal connection and involvement. Again Colin Ward (1995) captures the importance of these ideas for the knowledge commons, advocating schools that are less instrumentally driven, but under the control of children, parents and teachers. A commons-based education would require not only the ability to turn the city or countryside into a place of learning, but where the ideas of young people are nurtured and respected. This would require a programme of radical democratisation and localisation. Colin Hines (2000) argues that if globalisation is the integration of economies into spatially complex relations of trade then public policy needs to reverse this relationship. Localisation would require a public policy to prefer the local over the global. If, as John Urry (2011) suggests, modern cities are both significant tourist venues of fascination as well as places of consumerist excess then they pose specific problems for the possibility of low carbon futures. Commons-based solutions necessarily depend upon different understandings of human flourishing and the good life. Returning to the commons-based arguments of the sixteenth century the most important ‘recovery’ that becomes necessary within our speed obsessed and impersonal culture saturated by the logic of the market is a resensitisation towards the complexities of the natural world. This is not the sentimentalisation of nature often found within ‘new age’ or consumer advertising or capitalist marketing. Instead commons-based strategies need to explore new ways of connecting culture and nature. This can be undertaken through new forms of art, decentralisation and localisation strategies, but equally through a politics of attachment. While a politics of the commons cannot escape the world of rational calculation especially when it comes to the cosmopolitan assessment of risks and dangers it must equally recognise that unless the commoners feel connected to the ecological commons they are unlikely to wish to preserve it. This insight returns us to the violence of the brutal acts of enclosure and dispossession that came along with the enclosure of the commons in the industrial revolution. Paul Kingsnorth (2017: 176) argues that ‘the dominant culture, the cultural empire that measure everything it sees and demands a return, is not a clever trick but a clever trap’. More complex aesthetic and ethical sensibilities are too easily dismissed in a rationalistic culture that feels uneasy in discussions of the poetic, the sacred and the need to develop a sense of humility in the face of the natural world. The concern that such feelings necessarily lead back to an anti-modern world view are actually a prejudice encouraged by the domination of techno-sciences over the complexities of the life-world. The poet Wendell Berry (2017: 55) suggests that if we are to genuinely address our problems we will need to resist the temptation to think big, and think small instead. The argument is not to refuse to vote for responsible political parties or participate in cosmopolitan agreements, but to develop the art of acting in the places where we live. This might mean growing food, cycling and walking, tending to a garden, organising a community festival, promoting convivial local relationships, seeking to reduce the size of our ecological footprints and participating in locally based forms of activism. Despite the ethical nature of these arguments they do seem to embody a politics of retreat. Indeed recovering many of the ideas from the eco-socialists of a previous period the sustainable economy will require a more decentralised society under local and democratic forms of control and renewable sources of energy. The society of the commons will also require new waves of activism promoting the living wage, sustainable local economies and a world less governed by corporate globalisation and the oil industry (Woodin and Lucas 2004). The idea of the commons 359

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is not the opposite of cosmopolitanism, but requires a politics of humility that is equally concerned to resist the enclosure of the physical landscape as it is the cultural imagination. For Serge Latouche (2014) such projects need to call time on the idea of living to work for the demand that we each live more abundant, self-managed and democratic lives. The project of the commons offers a humanism that sometimes struggles to survive in a culture of large-scale developments, shopping centres and neoliberal economic cruelty. The artist John Berger (2016: 37) best captured the modern project of the commons when he suggested it is a form of permanent protest against those who would ‘delocalize the entire world’. The placeless, anonymous domination of profit-driven multinational corporations finds its opposite in the stubborn refusal to give up a sense of control over the local spaces and ecologies in which we live. The idea of the commons is necessarily a pedagogic political strategy whereby the complexity of the local and the possibility of democracy is opposed to more corporate forms of globalisation from above. Vandana Shiva (2008) makes the point that this struggle in the context of peak oil, climate change and the globalisation of food requires a shift from the neoliberal to the earth citizen. This more rooted version of cosmopolitanism offers a vision for the future of the commons based upon declining global trade and carbon emissions and greater forms of local control, trade and identity. Such features only become possible in the context of a post-development societies emerging as much in the global North as in the South. The main opponent of such a politics is an anti-politics machine of development that seeks to impress the normality of consumerism, hierarchical social relations and endless economic growth as signs of progress (Ferguson 1994). The idea of the commons is often a submerged appeal to the imagination to think beyond these limitations without any guarantees of success.

References Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage. Beck, U. (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Cambridge, Polity Press. Beck, U. (1999) World Risk Society, Cambridge, Polity Press. Bennholat-Thomsen, V. and Mies, M. (1999) The Subsistence Perspective, London, Zed Books. Berger, J. (2016) Hold Everything Dear, London, Verso. Berry, W. (2017) The World-Ending Fire, London, Penguin Books. Bookchin, M. (2004) Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Oakland, AK Press. Castoriadis, C. (1975) The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Polity Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997) ‘From Ecology to Autonomy’, in Curtis, D.A. (ed) The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 239–52. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums, London, Verso. Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Dobson, A. (2003) Citizenship and the Environment, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, Automedia. Ferguson, J. (1994) The Anti-Politics Machine, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Giddens, A. (2009) The Politics of Climate Change, Cambridge, Polity Press. Gorz, A. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay in Post-Industrial Socialism, London, Pluto Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2011) ‘The Future of the Commons’, Radical-History Review, 109: 101–7. Held, D. (2004) Global Covenant, Cambridge, Policy Press. Hines, C. (2000) Localisation: A Global Manifesto, London, Earthscan. Holloway, J. (2001) Crack Capitalism, London, Pluto Press. Illich, I. (1973) Celebration of Awareness, London, Pelican. Illich, I. (1992) ‘Silence Is a Commons’, In The Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990, New York, Marion Boyars, pp. 47–54. Illich, I. and Sanders, B. (1989) The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, London, Pelican.

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Kingsnorth, P. (2017) Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, London, Faber and Faber. Kropotkin, P. (1987) Mutual Aid, London, Freedom Press. Kropotkin, P. (2015) The Conquest of Bread, London, Penguin. Latouche, S. (2014) Farewell to Growth, Cambridge, Polity Press. Linebaugh, P. (2014) Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance, Oakland, PM Press. Linebaugh, P. (2016) The Magna Carta Manifesto, Berkeley, University of California Press. Linebaugh, P. and Redifer, M. (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, London, Verso. MacLaughlin, J. (2016) Kropotkin and the Anarchist Intellectual Tradition, London, Pluto Press. Morris, W. (1973) Political Writings of Williams Morris, London, Lawrence and Wishart. Ostrom, E. (2012) The Future of the Commons, London, Institute of Economic Affairs. Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, Touchstone Books. Ricoveri, G. (2013) Nature for Sale: The Commons versus Commodities, London, Pluto Press. Sachs, W. (1999) Planet Dialectics, London, Zed Books. Sanders, B. (1995) A Is for Ox, New York, Vintage Books. Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful, New York, Harper Row. Shiva, V. (2008) Soil Not Oil, London, Zed Books. Shiva, V. (2012) Making Peace with the Earth, London, Pluto Press. Solnit, R. (2010) A Paradise Built in Hell, London, Penguin. Soper, K. (1995) What Is Nature? Oxford, Blackwell. Steward, F. (1991) ‘Citizens of Planet Earth’, in Andrews, G. (ed) Citizenship, London, Lawrence and Wishart. Thompson, E.P. (2017a) ‘The Free-born Englishman’, in Winslow, C. (ed) E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, New York and London, Monthly Review, pp. 291–306. Thompson, E.P. (2017b) ‘The Communism of William Morris’, in Winslow, C. (ed) E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, New York and London, Monthly Review, pp. 249–62. Urry, J. (2011) ‘Excess, Fascination and Climates’, in Sahr, W.D. et al. (eds) Cities and Fascination beyond the Surplus of Meaning, London, Ashgate. van Steenbergen, B. (1994) ‘Towards a Global Ecological Citizen’, in van Steenbergen, B. (ed) The Condition of Citizenship, London, Sage. Ward, C. (1990) The Child in the City, London, Bedford Square Press. Ward, C. (1992) Towns for People, Buckingham, Open University Press. Ward, C. (1995) Talking Schools, London, Freedom Press. Ward, C. (1996) Social Policy, London, Freedom Press. Williams, R. (1980) ‘Advertising: The Magic System’, in Culture and Materialism, London, Verso, pp. 170–95. Williams, R. (1983) The Long Revolution, London, Pelican. Williams, R. (1989a) ‘Socialism and Ecology’, in Resources of Hope, London, Verso, pp. 88–96. Williams, R. (1989b) ‘Decentralisation and the Politics of Place’, in Resources of Hope, London, Verso, pp. 238–44. Woodin, M. and Lucas, C. (2004) Green Alternative to Globalisation, London, Pluto.

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31 The idea of cosmopolitan solidarity Robert Fine

In this chapter I shall discuss a concept that perhaps ought to be more central to the cosmopolitan literature than it is:‘cosmopolitan solidarity’. In political thought the notion of solidarity does not have the brio that it once had in the heady days of class and international solidarity. In sociology the concept of solidarity, which used to be pivotal to understanding the ties that bind people to one another, now tends to be relegated to a sub-field relating to the role of altruism, compassion and sympathy in social life. It is in this context that the idea of ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’ has arisen as an extension of or alternative to the kind of solidarity that once existed at the level of class and nation (e.g. Brunkhorst 2005; Habermas 1998; Habermas 2003; Pensky 2000; Stevenson 2006). My aim in this paper is to explore the nature of cosmopolitan solidarity and raise some of the difficulties that its conceptualisation raises. The origins of the concept of ‘solidarity’ go back to Roman Law (obligatio in solidum) where it was used to refer to the joint liability or joint responsibility a number of people have for the debt of any one individual within the community (Brunkhorst 2005). In modern times the term ‘solidarity’ has become part of political discourse since the Enlightenment. The revolutionary potential of solidarity was recognised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he characterised the solidarity of the people, in which ‘the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate’, as ‘at all times . . . the horror of rulers’ (Rousseau 1991: 164). In the course of the French Revolution this sense of solidarity was echoed in Article 34 of the Constitution of 1793: ‘There is oppression against the social body when one of its members is oppressed. There is oppression against each member when the social body is oppressed’. In the lexicon of the Revolution fraternity was surely the preferred term but in the nineteenth century the concept of solidarity largely displaced that of fraternity in national and workers’ movements. Whereas fraternity has patriarchal familial and blood origins, solidarity has its roots in law and politics. More recently the idea of the solidarity of the people has come to the fore in the name of the Catholic-syndicalist Solidarnosc of 1989 but also in the idea behind UN International Solidarity Day: ‘Let us live our daily lives in solidarity with those less fortunate than us – the poor, the sick and elderly, those enduring abuse, discrimination or violations of their rights – and thereby build a better world for all’ (Ban Ki-moon, 20 December 2010). In sociological discourse of Durkheim and Tönnies the concept of ‘solidarity’ was deployed within a societal setting to contrast ‘mechanical’ forms of solidarity characteristic of traditional 362

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communities (Gemeinschaft) with ‘organic’ forms characteristic of modern, functionally differentiated societies (Gesellschaft). In its modern form it expresses the solidarity of strangers who, in spite of fragmentation and heterogeneity, are dependent on one another and linked together through media of exchange, law, associational life, welfare and political representation. The nation state, arguably the dominant form of modern political community, had elements from both forms of solidarity within it. It combined an abstract form of solidarity with cultural symbols of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’. As Jürgen Habermas has argued, what was required for the formation of the nation state was ‘an idea which was vivid and powerful enough to shape people’s convictions and appealed more strongly to their hearts and minds than the dry ideas of popular sovereignty and human rights’; the need was met by the idea of a nation crystallised around myths of common ancestry, language and history (Habermas 1998: 112). National consciousness necessarily has a mythic aspect and has always been distinguished by getting its own history wrong (Hobsbawm 1992), but it is legitimated by the claim that it inculcates willingness on the part of citizens to do what is required of them for the common good: be it, acceptance of democratic decisions as legitimate, maintenance of social services through taxation, or the fighting of wars for one’s country. Certainly, the formation of the modern state was heavily dependent on the development of a national consciousness to provide it with the substrate for civic solidarity. The historical strength of nationalist sentiment was due to its capacity to act as a binding power enabling individuals to coalesce around commonly shared symbols. The possibility both of expanding the basis of solidarity beyond the boundaries of the nation and of overcoming the more mythic elements of national consciousness has been widely investigated within the contemporary cosmopolitan literature. One common thematic is that there can be no Europe-wide democratic polity capable of enacting effective redistributive policies without an expanded basis of solidarity and that the civic solidarity once limited to nation states has now to be appropriated by citizens of the European Union as a whole (Delanty and Rumford 2005). There is no compelling reason to accept the defeatism which declares that this cannot happen, for example, on the ground that there is no such thing as a European nation. If the artificial form of solidarity among strangers that already exists within modern nation states owes its existence to an abstraction from local and dynastic conditions and an appeal to national forms of consciousness, why should this learning process not continue beyond national borders? A question remains, however, whether the conception of European identity based on notions of common culture and common forms of life is any less mythic than the national forms of solidarity it seeks to supplement or even displace. Most cosmopolitans believe that solidarity at the global level is possible but cannot take the same form as solidarity at the national or even transnational levels. This is either because every political community must distinguish between the kind of solidarity which exists among members and that which relates to non-members, while global solidarity does not easily allow for this distinction, or because the prospect of a world state is a frightening one in its implications. This raises the question of what kind of cosmopolitan solidarity might exist at the global level. Habermas’s answer is indicative of much of the cosmopolitan literature: it looks to the ‘constitutionalisation of international law’ and the expanded scope of human rights rather than on the building of a global political community (Habermas 2008). This juridical conception of solidarity is justified by the limited functions performed by international institutions (e.g. securing peace and promoting human rights) and the negative duties imposed by them (e.g. no wars of aggression and no violations of human rights). However, it does not directly address the ethical basis on which such cosmopolitan solidarity is formed and in not addressing it leaves open a reading of cosmopolitan solidarity that attaches it more to feelings of compassion and sympathy than to the substance of ethical life in an interconnected world. 363

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Modern forms of solidarity Two of the main cornerstones of solidarity in the modern era have been nations and classes and the two of the main forms of self-understanding have been those of nationalism and socialism (Fine and Chernilo 2003). These forms of consciousness have proven capable both of mobilising huge numbers of people in the name of self-determination and freedom from want and of overturning old regimes and empires. There can be little doubt but that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they were the dominant forms in which emancipatory movements expressed themselves. However, their negative side lay in prioritising their own particular interests over the universal interests of humanity or in identifying their own interests with the universal interests of humanity as a whole. Nationalism and socialism were two great sources of social and political transformation and gave shape to Enlightenment conceptions of universality, but their exclusivity manifested itself in all manner of exclusions, cruelties and mimetic representations of the powers they opposed. The solidarity engendered on the basis of class and nation came at a cost: that of constructing and vilifying enemies, excluding those deemed not to belong and suppressing the plurality of voices within. These quintessentially modern forms of solidarity laid the foundations on which cycles of dehumanisation were repeated. The idea of ‘internationalism’ was an attempt to integrate both aspects of solidarity, class and nation. It was the symbol of solidarity extended across national boundaries to foreign strangers suffering at the hands of their own oppressors. We only have to think of the international solidarity shown to republicans in the Spanish civil war to understand that individuals risked their livelihoods and lives for the freedom of others. However, the name of ‘internationalism’ also became a justification of a Marxist kind for subordinating the interests of humanity to the interests of particular national elites, who were anti-colonial but not necessarily pro-democratic, and to the interests of the social fatherland, the Soviet Union. The ideology of ‘internationalism’ gave no less priority to nationalist struggles than nationalism, but it validated some nationalist regimes as ‘progressive’ and denounced others as ‘reactionary’. Dissenting Marxists called for a new internationalism able to resist both ‘great-nation’ and ‘little-nation’ nationalisms as well as the reified dualism between ‘nationalisms of the oppressed’ and ‘nationalisms of the oppressors’. This dualism arose in the colonial era when the world was divided between the colonial and the colonised, but it became dissociated from its origins and ever more instrumentalised (Hobsbawm 1989; Memmi 1974). In spite of all these limitations solidarity was an honourable mode of conduct. It was practised by people who together put their lives at stake and were ready to sacrifice themselves for each other. However, with the rise of fascism and communism solidarity turned into a charade of its former self. As Theodor Adorno put it, solidarity became little more than confidence that ‘the Party . . . has a thousand eyes . . . is the stronger side . . . and is swimming with the tide of history’. Adorno knew a charade when he saw one: Any temporary security gained in this way is paid for by permanent fear, by toadying, manoeuvring and ventriloquism: the strength that might have been used to test the enemy’s weakness is wasted in anticipating the whims of one’s own leaders who inspire more inner trembling than the old enemy’. Solidarity polarized into ‘the desperate loyalty of those who have no way back and virtual blackmail practised on those who want nothing to do with gaolers or to fall foul of thieves. (Adorno 1996: 51–2) In a similar vein Hannah Arendt posed the question of what kind of ‘basic experience in the living-together’ of human beings permeates a form of government whose essence is terror. She 364

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answered that isolation is the fertile ground of terror and its result: ‘Isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together’. Totalitarian rule went further still in the ‘merciless’ process of converting isolation into loneliness by enforcing the loss of one’s own self and ‘destroying all space between men’ (Arendt 1979: 474–5). Solidarity was replaced by a proliferation of police apparatuses which all did similar work, spying on the population and on each other, without any clear knowledge of who would be rewarded and who would be purged. Victims and executioners became interchangeable and human beings were prepared to fit into either role. In the shadow of Auschwitz and the Gulag, the politics of anti-totalitarianism has looked to the reformation of solidarity on a new basis, not by going back to class and nation but by taking seriously the old sociology distinctions between community and society, crowd and public. The new solidarity it seeks is premised on cultivating a culture of joint responsibility to keep alive the memory of those who had been murdered, on developing a critical historiography that interrogates our shared past, the losses that were endured, the normative foundations that can be built from the past (Pensky 2000). It conceptualises newly defined territorial entities, new forms of transnationalism, new laws comprehending the whole of humanity. Under the register of civic nationalism, postnationalism, constitutional patriotism and the like it imagines a political community that is all-inclusive, respects universal principles of right and integrates multicultural communities (Muller 2007). However, the new solidarity can turn out less ideal than its progenitors imagined. It can evince the pride of being the only ones who have learnt from history. It can demonise those who remain rooted in the nationalist past. It can split good nationalism from bad without confronting the equivocations of nationalism as such. It can repeat in a more formal mode the categorical distinctions between one kind of nationalism and another in Marxist thought. The temptation remains to reconstruct a moral division of the world between them and us, foes and friends, postnationalists and nationalists, which stigmatises the other as much as it idealises ourselves.

Cosmopolitan solidarity: the idea and its actualisation Although the initial self-confidence of cosmopolitanism lay in thinking that it had resolved all the contradictions running through past forms of solidarity, it soon revealed itself as beset by the same kind of conflicts and contingencies of human co-existence. The idea of cosmopolitan solidarity is both continuous with the modern history of solidarity and an attempt to address the problems of exclusion and violence associated with it. Certainly, it no longer looks to a particular class or nation as the embodiment of the universal, still less to the destruction of another class or people as the condition of its fulfilment. The idea of rights provides a starting point for cosmopolitan solidarity. Whereas nationalism and socialism tended to subsume human rights to one or other collective representation, the obstinacy at the heart of cosmopolitan solidarity is to insist upon the ineradicable idea of universal human rights. Rights are a particular social form of recognition between human beings based on my recognition of your rights and your recognition of mine. It is a limited form of recognition since right is only one aspect of a social relationship and it is merely formal in character compared with the relationship as a whole. Right is more like a permission or warrant. I do not have to pursue my rights. The only necessity is negative: to respect others as persons, as bearers of rights, and not to violate their rights. An ethical life presupposes there is more to a human relationship than right alone. If I relate to others and others to me exclusively in terms of rights, then everything which depends on particularity would become a matter of indifference. Hegel put it well: if individuals were interested only in their formal rights, this would be a sign of ‘pure 365

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stubbornness, such as is often encountered in emotionally limited people; for uncultured people insist most strongly on their rights, whereas those of nobler mind seek to discover what other aspects there are to the matter in question’ (Hegel 1991: §37A). Or as Marx might have said, as far as other needs are concerned indifference would be the only rule. Recognition of rights constitutes the necessary starting point for the long process of the education (Bildung) required for cosmopolitan solidarity to be realised. Cosmopolitan solidarity starts with recognition both of the ‘right of every individual to have rights’ (Arendt 1979: 298) and of the social character of the right of every individual to have rights. Individuals can only be free in relation to others. Right is the expression of a social relation. In the modern world a multi-layered and open system of rights has emerged, always in processes of mutation and development, always at risk of closure or eradication. Civil laws guarantee rights of person, property and private life; public laws guarantee rights of free association, free speech and political representation; international laws guarantee rights of states in relation to one another; cosmopolitan laws guarantee human rights regardless of the powers to which individuals are subjected. The system of rights is capable of growth and transformation over time. The relational character of rights is incompatible with any notion of absolute sovereignty since every sphere of right must have its due (Brown 2005). The inter-connectedness of peoples in the current era has given rise to new forms of right born out of the experience of living in ‘one world’ – a situation in which loss of home, work and political status can become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether. Cosmopolitan solidarity is formed around this relational understanding of rights: that the freedom of each is dependent on the freedom of all. However, we recognise that the system of rights is contradictory. We resist the temptation to fetishise one right as superior to or absolute over all other rights – be it the right of the state (in the manner of bureaucratic collectivism) or the right of private property (in the manner of neo-liberalism) or the right of civil society (in the manner of some forms of communitarianism). We resist the instrumentalisation of rights by the powers that be and we resist the hostility to rights that is a perennial feature of modern political life – whether expressed in the name of the people, tradition or a higher justice. We resist the reduction of the universality of rights that sees it as no more than an ideology of power or a specific cultural expression of its alleged place of origin. (Bhambra and Shilliam 2009). Cosmopolitan solidarity demands a sharp eye for the abuse of the language of universal rights, for misrepresenting the simulacrum of rights for the genuine article. This sharp eye is what Arendt revealed when she described the notion that ‘what is right is what is good or useful for the whole’ as essentially barbaric whether the whole is the German people, the world proletariat, the workers’ state or even humanity as such. As Arendt put it, It is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by a majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. (Arendt 1979: 299) She echoed Kant’s critique of the ‘rights of nations’ under international law as a licence for rulers to go to war as they please, use any means of warfare they deem necessary and exploit colonies as if they were lands without people. He wrote of the abuses unleashed on non-European peoples in the name of ‘rights of hospitality’, on the pretext that they mistreated European ‘travellers’ who were actually armed invaders (Kant 1991: 106; 172–3). Cosmopolitan solidarity is both the condition and product of the expanded scope of the system of rights, but its ethical commitment is to develop a culture of rights in which the activity 366

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of understanding how they work in practice is also present. Consider, for example, the institution of ‘crimes against humanity’ in the Nuremberg Charter of 1945. Karl Jaspers attempted to articulate the cosmopolitan significance of this legal innovation. It challenged the state’s exclusive prerogative over crimes committed within its borders. It transcended the principle of national sovereignty which made heads of states inviolable; it removed the excuse of only obeying orders from perpetrators; it held officials who plan atrocities as liable as those who participate; it extended the notion of criminal guilt in international law beyond war guilt; it treated mass murderers as criminals and deprived them of that demonic quality they might otherwise be endowed with; not least it signified that crimes committed against one set of people, Jews, Poles or Roma, are an affront not only to these people but to humanity as a whole (Jaspers 2001). However, cosmopolitan solidarity also requires an understanding of how this legal innovation translates in the world. The problems are not difficult to see. For example, when a machinery of mass murder impels a great many people to participate in atrocities, finding a few individuals guilty seems disproportionate and permits others who participated to absolve themselves of responsibility. The difficulty becomes deeper, as Hannah Arendt understood, if a court subsumes norms of legal justice to moral indictment of the accused. In the Eichmann trial, according to Arendt, the court correctly indicted Eichmann for the crimes he committed, administering the transport system for the mass murder of Jews, but it also tried to represent him as a committed antisemite who murdered Jews with his own hands, crimes for which there was little proof. The court could not come to terms with the evidence: that the accused was not a perverted or sadistic monster but terrifyingly normal, more like ourselves than we would like to think, and that Jews were not only victims or heroes but could in some cases collaborate with their executioners. Whether or not Arendt was right in this particular case is hotly contested, but the more general point is that the task of a criminal court is to ‘weigh up the charges, render judgement and mete out due punishment’, not to demonise the accused or treat him in the same way he treated his victims – as beasts to be slaughtered. For with this posture there is nothing to learn about ourselves (Arendt 2006). When Arendt later turned to a study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, she found a straightforward way of formulating the insight she gained from her report on the trial: One is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one’s ‘cosmopolitan existence’. When one judges and acts in political matters, one is supposed to take one’s bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen. (Arendt 1992: 75–6) What this formulation might mean for us, and how it relates to the call of human compassion, is the subject matter of the next section.

Cosmopolitan solidarity and compassion The art of taking one’s bearings from the idea of being a world citizen is a good formulation of the requirement of cosmopolitan solidarity, but in practice it is no easy matter. Consider, for instance, the ambivalence associated with the doctrine of ‘humanitarian military intervention’ and the responsibility of the international community to protect people from genocide, crimes against humanity and other such human cruelties. The urge to intervene, at least in the final analysis, derives from compassion for the victims of these horrendous crimes, whoever the victims and the perpetrators might be. It is a necessary extension of the precedent set at Nuremberg: if crimes against humanity serve as a justification for legal prosecution of the perpetrators after the event, it would appear to follow that they also justify forceful intervention on behalf of the 367

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victims before or during the event. The responsibility of power is not to stand idly by while vulnerable people are persecuted or exterminated, sometimes by the very states which are meant to protect them. Nostalgia for the classic system of international law whose principle was nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states under all circumstances, including the mass murder by the state of its own subjects, is misplaced. On the other hand, for one reason or another we may not feel compassion for the victims or our compassion may be overridden by other political considerations. We may focus, for instance, on those unintended consequences of military intervention that are far from humanitarian, or on the ‘imperial’ licence the right of intervention seems to accord to already powerful states, or on the consequences of intervention for the promotion of an international law capable of offering an effective regime of rights enforcement, or finally on the dependence on military power that the responsibility to protect seems to embrace. While we may support the exercise of state power in defence of the victims of atrocity and against its perpetrators, a conception of cosmopolitan solidarity that is exclusively dependent on the exercise of state power will lose sight of the revolutionary origins of the idea of solidarity itself. What we are faced with here is what we might call the equivocation of judgement (Fine and Smith 2008). We have to use our judgement to find our way through these equivocations. The relation of cosmopolitan solidarity to human compassion lies close to the heart of the problem. Compassion is a feeling one has for the suffering of other people, a feeling that is not ‘just there’ but can be refined and fostered by culture and society (Boltanski 1999; Hunt 2007; Turner 1993). Cosmopolitan solidarity requires compassion; it is built on the foundations of compassion; and it would be difficult to conceive of cosmopolitan solidarity without some prior notion of human compassion. However, they are not the same and I want to argue that their confusion can lead to problems. Solidarity is a legal and political concept denoting a shared responsibility for seeing through a particular project. Compassion is a feeling, an emotion, and as such is the product of all manner of subjective considerations. Whom we feel compassion for is the product of many contingent factors. Kant noted that its weakness lies in its lack of proportion: ‘a suffering child fills our heart with sadness, but we greet the news of a terrible battle with indifference’ (Boltanski 1999: 12). The temptation to substitute human compassion for cosmopolitan solidarity subsumes an egalitarian sense of shared responsibility to the contingencies of feeling. We may feel compassion for a people for the suffering they endure. We may wish to turn this feeling of compassion into action, into doing something for the people in question. However, the problem of transmuting a personal quality into a political concept becomes most visible when the subjects of our compassion are treated as one body with one voice, the voice of common suffering, and when the individuality of its parts is sacrificed to our compassion for the whole. Boltanski speaks of the politics of pity in this vein: it ‘regards the unfortunate together en masses, even if . . . it is necessary to single out particular misfortunes from the mass in order to inspire pity’ (Boltanski 1999: 4). The ‘one voice’ of the oppressed may be identified with the cry for bread or the cry for freedom; yet it remains the only voice we hear, a voice given precedence over all other voices by those who feel the compassion and translate it into a political principle. The temptation to substitute one voice for many is reductive to the extent that it defines people entirely by the victimhood and not as moral, legal and political subjects. This is not to say that the people for whom we feel compassion are not victims but that they are not only victims. If we turn victimhood into a master status, we are faced with the paradox that compassion for the victims can also strip them of their humanity. We only hear wound-based narratives and our sense of injustice inclines us to see only that injustice as formative. The politicisation of compassion may lead us to search for those who are responsible for the plight of the victims in equally holistic terms. In a more active mode we may seek to transform the masses from les malheureux into les enragés and invite the rage of naked misfortune to pit itself 368

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by any means against the forces of domination (Arendt 1988(b): 114). The temptation here is to reverse the problem we are trying to address (Fine 2010). Just as racists racialise particular groups of people into a unitary otherised category, an act of reversal would treat racists as an equally unitary otherised category (Cousin 2010). The sociologist, Raymond Aron, raised this issue in his discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew, where he argued that Sartre’s treatment of the antisemite was close to the antisemite’s depiction of the Jew: Anti-antisemites tend to present all the colonisers, all the antisemites, all the whites as essentially defined by their contempt for natives, hatred of Jews, desire for segregation. They paint a portrait of the coloniser, the antisemite or the whites that is as totalising as their stereotypes of the Jew, the native or the Blacks. The antisemite must be wholly antisemitic. (Aron 1969: 87–8, my translation) Whether Aron was right or wrong in his characterisation of Sartre, the general point is this: when we view others from an exclusively victimist stance, they become ciphers of our ressentiment towards those perceived as their victimisers. We despise the people we charge with despising others. Our compassion for the victims becomes subordinate to our hostility to the perceived victimisers. In this variant on ‘methodological nationalism’, we forget that no human being is entirely ‘other’ than another, even where unequal social structures make this hard to see (Chernilo 2007). Gillian Rose put it well: the representation of others in terms of ‘sheer alterity’ forgets that ‘the other is equally the distraught subject searching for its . . . ethical life’ (Rose 1993: 8). If compassion is treated as a basis for solidarity, what is to become of those who are ‘unloveable’? The politicisation of compassion for the victim and of condemnation for the executioner becomes particularly problematic if we think of each side as a category, the larger the better, and judge whole groups of people without making distinctions or holding individuals responsible. We rightly condemn states we hold responsible for serious abuse of human rights (Rawls 1999), but we also have to be reflective on the institutional dynamics of judgement. How serious does a rights violation have to be to exclude a particular state from the society of states? Which body has the authority so to do and on what basis? What is the role of power and contingency in such labelling processes? How are criteria of judgement to be balanced between states that have aggressive international aims and those that commit major human rights abuses? Should we judge the wrongs committed by a state in relation to an ideal standard of what a state ought to be or in comparison with the wrongs done by other states (Sen 2009)? The politics of labelling states raises difficult questions but these difficulties can become wholly destructive when there is slippage from condemning a state for human rights abuses to condemning a people as having a propensity to commit serious human rights abuses. The sheer negativity of this logic holds whether the propensity for abuse attributed to a particular people is said to lie in their nature or, as we sometimes find, in a psychology of callousness and cruelty they are said to have acquired as the result of a previous trauma. Even the language of human rights may be instrumentalised in the service of judging and condemning whole peoples in the name of the suffering they cause (Habibi 2007).

Conclusion In empirical terms the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity provides sociology and the social sciences with a research agenda. We may study its existence in the world and often ambiguous role in literature, art and philosophy; in global civil society, non-governmental organisations and global mass media; in third world charities, political campaigns and anti-globalisation movements; in official bodies from the UN to UNESCO; and in the everyday life of ordinary people. 369

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In conceptual terms I have argued for a twin-track approach: on the one hand, focusing on the necessity for laws to prevent the day dreams of big business and political power from becoming reality; on the other, emphasising the development of a political culture in which the idea of a world citizen becomes a kind of trigonometric point from which we can find our bearings. I have sought to uncover some of the difficulties this stress on building a culture of cosmopolitan solidarity raises and in particular its difficult relation to human compassion. Consider the Christmas Day ‘truce’ in the trenches of 1914 or the U-boat rescue of passengers from the sunken Laconia in 1942. These were fleeting phenomena in which cosmopolitan solidarity and human compassion were deeply imbricated, but they also have the force of an example for establishing cosmopolitan solidarity on a more solid and enduring basis. Cosmopolitan solidarity may be nurtured by compassion but it is rooted in the soil of universal human rights. Cosmopolitan solidarity is a struggle against powerful tendencies in the modern age to divide the world into camps and to idealise one camp as much as we demonise the other (Gilroy 2000). It occupies what Homi Bhabha calls a ‘third space of enunciation’ – an ambivalent and turbulent space that confounds all binary epistemologies (Bhabha 1994). It may take courage to ‘take one’s bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen’ in the face of hostility from those who know only the self-certainty of which side they belong to (Smith 2007). In a world in which people are required to choose between camps, the in-between can be a rough terrain to try to occupy. The history of the denigration of Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ from both sides of the totalitarian divide, Stalinism and Nazism, attests to the dangers that can be involved in being so labelled. Courage is not simply an individual virtue, though individuals like Hannah Arendt displayed oodles of it, but a product of co-operation with others. In this sense we might say that cosmopolitan solidarity can never be the property of an individual; it belongs to society and is constructed in struggle. The dualism cosmopolitan solidarity defies is not simply given. Its origins lie in the social processes through which we construct unity out of heterogeneous elements by means of homogenising typifications. Cosmopolitan solidarity is, if you like, the politics of phenomenology. It is by no means an alternative to action; it is a form of action. It takes the side of those who oppose the dualisms of our age – racism, antisemitism, homophobia, xenophobia, national exclusivity, the subordination of women, punitivism – in whichever camp they find themselves. It is oriented to what we have in common as human beings, to a human complexity that is irreducible to a single category, to an engagement with other cultures that declines to turn difference into a capital Difference. That said, the capacity of cosmopolitan solidarity to go wrong is doubtless no less than other forms of solidarity characteristic of the modern age.

References Adorno, T. (1996) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1979) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, H. (1988a) On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Arendt, H. (1988b) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1992) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Arendt, H. (2006) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Aron, R. (1969) Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris: Calmann-Levy. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge Education. Bhambra, G. and Shilliam, R. (eds) (2009) Silencing Human Rights: Critical Engagements with a Contested Project, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Boltanski, L. (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Brown, G. (2005) ‘State sovereignty, federation and Kantian cosmopolitanism’, European Journal of International Relations, 11(4): 495–522. Brunkhorst, H. (2005) Solidarity: From Civil Friendship to a Global Legal Community, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chernilo, D. (2007) ‘A quest for universalism: Re-assessing the nature of classical social theory’s cosmopolitanism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(1): 17–35. Cousin, G. (2010) ‘Positioning positionality: The reflexive turn’, in Savin-Baden, M. and Howell Major, C. (eds) New Approaches to Qualitative Research: Wisdom and Uncertainty, London: Routledge Education. Delanty, G. and Rumford, C. (eds) (2005)Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanisation, London: Routledge Education. Fine, R. (2007) Cosmopolitanism, London: Routledge Education. Fine, R. (2010) ‘Dehumanising the dehumanisers: Reversal in human rights discourse’, Journal of Global Ethics, 6(2): 179–90. Fine, R. and Chernilo, D. (2003) ‘Classes and nations in recent historical sociology’, in Delanty, G. and Isin, E. (eds) Handbook of Historical Sociology, London: Sage: 235–50. Fine, R. and Smith, W. (2008) ‘Cosmopolitanism and humanitarian military intervention’, in Hughes, C. and Devetak, R. (eds) The Globalisation of Political Violence: Globalisation’s Shadow, London: Routledge Education: 46–66. Gilroy, P. (2000) Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race, Allen Lane. Habermas, J. (1998) ‘Learning by disaster: A diagnostic look back on the short twentieth century’, Constellations, 5(3): 307–21. Habermas, J. (2003) ‘Towards a cosmopolitan Europe’, Journal of Democracy, 14(4): 86–100. Habermas, J. (2008) ‘The constitutionalisation of international law and the legitimation problems of a constitution for a world society’, Constellations, 15(4): 444–55. Habibi, D. (2007) ‘Human rights and politicized human rights: A utilitarian critique’, Journal of Human Rights, 6(1): 3–35. Hegel, G. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1989) ‘Some reflections on the break-up of Britain’, in Politics for a Rational Left, London: Verso. Hobsbawm, E. (1992) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, L. (2007) Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York: W. W. Norton. Jaspers, K. (2001) The Question of German Guilt, Fordham: Fordham University Press. Kant, I. (1991) Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Memmi, A. (1974) The Colonizer and the Colonized, London: Orion Press. Muller, J.-W. (2007) Constitutional Patriotism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pensky, M. (2000) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the solidarity problem: Habermas on national and cultural identities’, Constellations, 7(1): 64–79. Rawls, J. (1999) The Law of Peoples, London: Harvard University Press. Rose, G. (1993) Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Blackwell. Rousseau, J.-J. (1991) The Social Contract and Discourses, London: Dent. Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice, London: Allen Lane. Smith, W. (2007) ‘Cosmopolitan citizenship: Virtue, irony and worldliness’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(1): 37–52. Stevenson, N. (2006) ‘European cosmopolitan solidarity: Questions of citizenship, difference and postmaterialism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(4): 485–500. Turner, B. (1993) ‘Outline of a theory of human rights’, Sociology, 27(3): 489–512.

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The exponential growth in the number of humanitarian international non-governmental organizations over the past century is ‘often celebrated as an indication of growing cosmopolitanism and conscience’ (Calhoun 2008: 85). Insofar as contemporary societies are involved in ever more intensive processes of ‘cosmopolitanization’ then it may be argued that the cultural appeal, political influence and bureaucratic organization of humanitarian action are signs of ever more widespread commitments to ‘global citizenship’ (Beck 1999: 37–40; 2006). It is often assumed that by venturing to understand the conditions that establish and sustain modern humanitarianism we are also set to negotiate with the moral substance and social meaning of cosmopolitanism. By no means, however, is this a straightforward task. The cultural character, political significance and social consequences of humanitarianism attract much critical debate. Many conflicts of interpretation and evaluation are raised when humanitarianism is set as the focus for study. It is widely recognized that ‘humanitarianism is nothing less than a revolution in the ethics of care’ (Barnett 2011: 18), but there is no agreement as to how this should be conceptualized, analyzed or assessed. Critical debates over how we should venture to understand modern humanitarianism are set also to problematize favoured conceptions of cosmopolitan values and practices. In this chapter I outline some of the controversies that beset the attempt to set modern humanitarianism with adequate frames of sociological and historical understanding. I further review how these relate to contemporary debates over the values associated with ‘cosmopolitanism’, and how in turn, these might inform further projects of theoretical thinking and empirical research. I contend that the controversies stoked by critical assessments of the moral state and political condition of humanitarianism fuel ongoing debates over how cosmopolitanism should be culturally represented and evaluated. As a means to clear a space for further dialogue and debate I suggest that it may be helpful to address this matter by drawing an analytical distinction between, on the one hand, the potential for cosmopolitanism to operate as the moral motivation for humanitarianism, and on the other, as a disciplinary force that operates to regulate the conditions of humanitarian intervention and practice. In both instances, it is possible to identify a critical role for cosmopolitanism within the politics of humanitarianism. It may be argued that the moral and political controversies raised in response to humanitarian thought and practice hold the potential to operate as a spur to a critical cosmopolitanism that seeks to be reflexively alert to its social and historical contingencies, its cultural variations and its intrinsically contested value (Delanty 2006). 372

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The first section highlights some of the differences between the ‘conventional narrative’ on humanitarianism in the academic field of international relations and the more expansive and elaborated account of this phenomenon that adopted by social historians and sociologists with a concern to chart key transformations in the moral-emotional experience of modernity. I then briefly review some of the challenges that are set by the latter for terms of sociological inquiry and critique. In later sections I offer some reflections on how cosmopolitanism might venture to engage with modern humanitarianism and the difficulty of setting this within an adequate frame of sociological understanding.

Understanding modern humanitarianism In contemporary social science the study of humanitarianism is dominated by academics working in the fields of international relations and anthropology. These share in a concern to critically analyze the humanitarian politics and practices of the intergovernmental agencies of the United Nations and allied international non-governmental organization such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Oxfam, CARE, Save the Children and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In this context, a ‘conventional narrative’ holds that the founding moment of modern humanitarianism lies in the efforts made by Henri Dunant to establish a permanent system of assistance for the casualties of war following his shock encounter with the wounded dead and dying on the battlefield of Solferino in 1859 (Barnett 2011; Lester and Dussart 2014; Skinner and Lester 2012). At its origins, modern humanitarianism is narrowly conceived as a specific and form of civil action. This is guided by principles of impartiality (the quality and quantity of aid is set to correspond with people’s needs), neutrality (humanitarian action is motivated by a direct response to people’s suffering and nothing else besides) and independence (humanitarian actions operate above the fray of politics). On these terms, analysts proceed by charting the historical processes and political decisions by which the original aims and objectives of Dunant’s heroic mission have been left compromised and corrupted by competing political imperatives and ideological agendas. A focus is brought to the institutionalization of humanitarianism within state-like organizations and its incorporation within the apparatus of inter-state relations and interventions (Barnett 2010: 173–97). It is argued that over the course of the twentieth century, and perhaps even more so during the early decades of the twenty-first century as it has become ever more ‘militarized’, the moral character and social functions of humanitarianism have been radically transformed. Humanitarianism is held to be morally suspect and is frequently denounced as a set of inherently corrupt and corruptive political movements caught up within spiralling crises of legitimacy (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 2011; Rieff 2002a; Jones 2016). While appealing to the ethics of humanity and professing commitments to the project of building humane forms of society it is argued that, more often than not, projects of humanitarian aid and intervention are to be found imposing a culturally partisan and possibly neo-colonial way of life on the people that are made objects of their care (Abu-Lughod 2002; Davey 2015; Bornstein and Redfield 2010). Critical attention is directed to the ways in which humanitarian organizations and individuals are set to negotiate with the political status of people’s lives and to the ethical and political values by which they hold themselves to be justified to intervene to ‘save’, ‘assist’, ‘develop’ and ‘care’ (Fassin 2007, 2012; Marsland and Prince 2012; Redfield 2005; Ticktin 2011). Humanitarianism is cast as an ideology in the service of ‘governmental’ regimes that operate to manage and control vulnerable populations in the interests of institutionally privileged global elites. Furthermore, on some accounts its political and social appeal is held to be ‘contaminated’ by celebrity culture so that, while employing ‘ambassadors’ such as Angelina 373

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Jolie to inspire large numbers of people to sympathetically identify with the ‘distant suffering’ of strangers, humanitarianism operates to depoliticize global capitalism and mask its complicity within the creation of social conditions that visit harm on vulnerable populations (Kapoor 2013; Ž iž ek 2008). In short, where contemporary social science sets humanitarianism as an analytical concern, it tends to operate from a critical position where its values and practices are cast as ethically misguided, morally compromised and political naïve. On many accounts, moreover, it is exposed as a sop or prop to economic and political conditions that create human misery (Calhoun 2004, 2008; Krause 2014). Such works of critique are valuable as a means to reflect on the many conflicts of value that inform humanitarian motives and action. They also serve a useful purpose insofar as they draw public attention to what goes wrong in practice and to many unintended, and sometimes catastrophic, consequences that result from initiatives spurred by humanitarian political objectives (Bellamy 2005). However, they are by no means sufficient to set modern humanitarianism in an adequate frame of sociological and historical understanding. The ‘conventional narrative’ that holds that the modern humanitarian starts with the founding of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and that it has subsequently morphed into forms of intervention that leave it corrupted and compromised, leaves too much unacknowledged and under-theorised. A position of wholesale critique, moreover, often turns a blind eye to its own guiding values and premises, and in this respect, fails to acknowledge the extent to which the critique of humanitarianism also draws from a well of humanitarian concern (Wilkinson 2016). The history of modern humanitarianism is far more extensive and elaborate than that featured within the academic fields of anthropology and international relations. Indeed, it might be argued that as far as the latter is concerned, an excessively ‘presentist orientation’ results in a critically short-sighted and analytically impoverished account of modern humanitarianism and its social consequences (Green 2014). By contrast, it is argued that the proper study of this phenomenon must involve us in the attempt to make sociological and historical sense of the ‘humanitarian revolution’ of the eighteenth century, and how this served to inaugurate many contrasting and sometimes competing humanitarian movements of social reform (Pinker 2011; Fiering 1976; McGowan 1986). In this regard, humanitarian interventions in international politics and as part of the machinery of global governance represent just one domain of humanitarianism that operates alongside, albeit with some important connections, to many others. A broader and more historically committed understanding of modern humanitarianism recognizes this as a moral culture and social sensibility that is implicated in a considerable range of political and social movements. It requires us to attend to the history of campaigns against the abolition of slavery, movements for the protection of children and for the promotion of women’s rights (Sznaider 2001). It calls on us to consider how, over the course of the last three hundred years or so, matters of religious conviction, sexual preferences, gender identification and animal welfare have all been significantly modified while under the direction of humanitarian concern (Thomas 1983). It involves a reckoning with moral imperatives that have driven a broad range of advancements in modern medicine and health care (Aeberhard 1996). It requires us, moreover, to dwell on the extent to which entire systems of law and government administration have come under the influence and direction of humanitarian impulses and political agendas. In this more expansive and historically nuanced conception of humanitarian culture and society, it is argued that while there are many humanitarianisms, they all share in ‘a medley of interconnected assumptions’ that mark them off as peculiarly modern and as subject to the determining influence of social conditions of modernity (Abruzzo 2011: 3). Firstly, these include the conviction that a great deal of human pain and suffering is unnecessary and unjust,

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and that its presence in extreme forms amounts to a moral obscenity. This incorporates a radical revision of classical, medieval and most early modern understandings of people’s pains and miseries as either an inevitable part of life or as connected to the workings of Divine Providence. A substantial amount of human suffering is no longer viewed as part of what Thomas Beard in his famous work of 1597 referred to as ‘the theatre of God’s judgements’, but rather, it is seen as a terrible and unwarranted misfortune (Beard 2012 [1597]). Secondly, it involves an emotionally charged moral response towards pain that is hardly if at all present in other contexts and periods of human history before the eighteenth century. It is not only the case that most pain comes to be viewed as wholly against us and as forms of experience we must oppose, but also, that the spectacle of human misery excites moral sympathy. In modern times individuals have acquired a more pronounced capacity to feel for the suffering of others; and further, may be moved by this to a position of moral outrage. As Emile Durkheim observes, at the same time as modern people are liable to experience social pressures by which they are inclined towards egoism, those same pressures also appear to be implicated in the development of a ‘sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them [and] a greater thirst for social justice’ (Durkheim 1973 [1898]: 49). Thirdly, modern humanitarianism is intimately connected to debates over the condition of our ‘humanity’ and how it binds ‘us’ in ties of moral responsibility towards the fates experienced by ‘others’. In eighteenth-century debates over the ‘meaning of our humaneness’ are for the first time explicitly identified with a ‘fellow-feeling’ that is recognized as ‘social’ (Abruzzo 2011: 3; Mullan 1988). The moral feelings aroused in face of the spectacle of human suffering are taken not only as a form of social revelation, but also, as a provocation to question the moral meaning of human sociality and the forms it takes (Smith 2006 [1759]). Moreover, such social sensibility and conviction, as dramatically illustrated in works such as Voltaire’s Candide, is involved in movements to locate the explanation for human suffering in conditions of human society; and further, for this to be addressed as a problem requiring us to engage in efforts of social reform (Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016). Given the many controversies attached to contemporary forms of humanitarianism, it is important to recognize that, as outlined above, modern humanitarianism has always attracted a lot of critical debate and political contest. The putative motives underlying expressions of humanitarian sentiment and commitment have always been questioned and have often been found wanting (Moyn 2006). Moralists have consistently worried over the extent to which the feelings aroused by the spectacle of human misery hold the potential to operate more as a self-serving pleasure than as an incitement for people to actively care for the well-being of others (Halttunen 1995). The possibility that modern humanitarianism, while presenting itself as a heart-felt commitment to the good of others, may in fact work as an ideology in the service of people’s oppression, has long been recognized (Brunstetter 2012; Muthu 2003). In these regards, in her famous essay on ‘the social question’ when Hannah Arendt portrays the ‘passion of compassion’ as a justification for revolutionary violence and as a force set opposed to democratic political debate, then she is operating within longstanding traditions of critique (Arendt 1963). Moreover, on this view, where Michel Foucault and his many followers alert us to the harmful consequences of the ‘politics of life’ enacted by humanitarian organizations, then they might also be recognized as operating out of a concern for more openly expansive conception of humanity that is shared by many of those committed to humanitarian ideals (Golder 2010). Indeed, on some accounts, in his later works it is possibly to read Foucault as setting the groundwork in place of a ‘radicalized humanitarianism’ that operates with a pronounced concern for human spontaneity, creativity and alterity (Campbell 1998; Reid-Henry 2014).

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Yet more social questions I would stress that we are still very much in the process of working to piece together an adequate understanding of the range of historical events, cultural developments and social conditions that are implicated in the origins, consolidation and spread of modern humanitarianism. This involves a negotiation with a great deal of unfinished business in the sociological analysis of modernity. It also requires us to visit some longstanding traditions of theoretical thought which in the twentyfirst century are being placed under critical review. It requires us to reconsider the role of religion in society and collective notions of the sacred and profane. On some accounts modern humanitarianism is best explained as a development within strands of Christian tradition, although one that, once established, had a tendency to push humanitarian conviction in a secular direction (Cunningham 1998; Cook 2013; De Bruyn 1981). Accordingly, when writers such the Third Earl of Shaftsbury, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine subsequently appear to operate with the largely unquestioned assumption that humanitarian conviction sentiments are an intrinsic part of human nature and a feature of common sense, then it is argued that they are involved in secularizing a peculiarly sentimentalized form of Christianity (Himmelfarb 2001; Fiering 1976; Morgan 2009). It is certainly the case moreover that when the word ‘humanitarian’ first gathered currency in English language, it was often used with reference to the ‘heretical’ teachings of Unitarians such as Joseph Priestley, who appeared to his critics to be far more committed to advancing a materially grounded ‘social gospel’ than one geared by spiritual and other-worldly concerns (Zastoupil 2009). If the analysis of modern humanitarianism is to operate with commitment to understanding its historical roots and genealogies, then it must once again engage in the attempt to understand the social appeal of ‘humanity’ as a religious concern and how this is implicated in the moral transformation of the modern social character. No doubt this must also concern a further review of the social psychology of modern individualism with a focus brought to how this is set to inform moral conviction and feeling (Joas 2013). In this regard, moreover, we are not only brought to debate with the sociological legacy of Emile Durkheim and his contention that under conditions of modernity ‘moral individualism’ would serve as the wellspring for new political solidarities and institutional arrangements, but also with the more theoretically elaborated account of these ‘processes’ advanced by Norbert Elias (Elias 1994). Indeed, in some quarters it is argued that if we are to better understand the social condition, moral authority and appeal of modern humanitarianism, then we must adopt a position on the relative merits of an Eliasian perspective on our ‘civilization’ (Linklater 2004; Pinker 2011). It is widely recognized, however, that such ‘classically’ committed perspectives fall short of providing us with adequate insight into forms of cultural experience in which ‘mediatized’ imagery of human suffering plays a part in crafting our emotional attitudes and political standpoints. On many accounts our understanding of how the moral and political currency of humanitarianism is moderated in relation to the production and distribution of visual imagery is still in its infancy (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015; Kurasawa 2013; Orgad 2013; Wilkinson 2013). Moreover, it may be argued that the analytical difficulties we are faced with here are yet further exacerbated in an age where humanitarian appeals and action are subject to processes of ‘digitalization’ (Burns 2015; Norris 2017). When mapping the geography and human consequences of the digital humanitarianisms of the twenty-first century, it appears that we are dealing with conditions of knowledge production, exchanges of information, forms of collective consciousness, networks of association and modalities of action that are without precedent. In all these contexts ‘the social question’ of the nineteenth century is being raised again and as a pressing matter for twenty-first century society (Faist 2009). Here, moreover, it is increasingly recognized 376

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that a better understanding of the history of modern humanitarianism and its social conditions is a vital component of the ongoing attempt to fashion terms of analysis and critique that are adequate to piece together a sociological understanding of our human condition as we are made to live now.

Cosmopolitan connections and critical engagements What does all this imply for the understanding of cosmopolitanism? How might an engagement with the problem of understanding modern humanitarianism direct our negotiation with the history of cosmopolitan thought and action? I suggest that, at the very least, some useful ground is cleared where we start by distinguishing between, on the one hand, cosmopolitanism as an ethical outlook fostered by humanitarianism, and on the other, a cosmopolitanism that operates as a means to critically assess the terms under which humanitarian principles and actions attain their social and political legitimacy. As far as the first approach is concerned, cosmopolitanism is understood as an ethical outlook fostered by humanitarianism. It is identified as a companion component of humanitarianism; that is, a moral standpoint that ‘naturally’ accompanies the spread of humanitarian feeling across society. In the second, cosmopolitanism is addressed as a set of rational principles that work to steer humanitarian feelings towards global concerns and problems of humanity in general. Here cosmopolitanism is approached not so much as a ‘side-effect’ of humanitarianism, but rather as an ideological attempt to encourage the development of a distinctly cosmopolitan and politically discriminating form of humanitarian orientation and action. Amanda Bowie Moniz usefully illustrates the first approach in her study of the foundation and activities of ‘Humane Societies’ at the turn of the eighteenth century. Such societies were founded through Western Europe and North America with the aim of saving lives and providing relief in events of ‘grievous accident’; particularly, those that involved the risk of death by drowning. Moniz notes that where most societies were originally set up with the partial aim of only saving the lives of people who belonged to their communities, they quickly moved to adopt an ethics of impartiality and held that their beneficence should extend to the lives of all people, regardless of status, creed, gender, age or nationality. Moniz explains this as being in part the result of a general sense of excitement about the effectiveness of new resuscitation technologies that made it possible to rescue people that hitherto would have perished. She also highlights the importance of the problem of drowning being an obviously universal concern. However, it was the opportunities afforded by this context to give encouragement to a ‘new operative sense of moral responsibility’ that she holds to be the most important part of the explanation for why humane societies adopted cosmopolitan principles. Moniz argues: Like all charitable organizations, the lifesaving societies defined their ambit, and they did so by limiting their aid to people suffering sudden death and, in some cases, to those at risk of death from certain preventable causes. But, in another way, humane societies did not delimit their pool of beneficiaries. Anyone might drown, so all humanity was the object of the movement’s concern. . . . The extent of drowning in any given community and the demographics of beneficiaries mattered little. Rather, the targeted nature of the program and the global reach of the problem combined to foster in the minds of its supporters belief in the feasibility of cosmopolitan philanthropy. (Moniz 2009: 637) On this account, cosmopolitanism is portrayed not so much as the spur to humanitarianism, but rather, as a moral standpoint that only becomes imaginable as a statement of principle once 377

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humanitarianism is licenced and encouraged to extend its reach to the lives of strangers. Moniz argues that, if left unchecked, the humanitarian impulse is inclined to be impartial; but in this instance, it required the opportunities afforded by an enthusiasm for new technological and organizational approaches to life-saving in order to serve as a means to inspire cosmopolitan attitudes and beliefs. In a similar vein, if we take the early history of humanitarian intervention as indicative of the increasing spread and appeal of cosmopolitan values, we may well pause to reflect upon the extent to which this was only made possible insofar as the humanitarian impulse to oppose human suffering was provided with cultural circumstances to extend its reach. For example, Gary Bass argues that it is impossible to explain British humanitarian interventions in the 1821–30 Greek Wars of Independence or popular support for campaigns for the humanitarian reform of the Ottoman Empire following the Turkish massacre of Bulgarians in April 1876 without attending to the part played by newspapers in the incitement of peoples’ moral sensibilities. Indeed, Bass argues that it was largely in response to the ‘massive public outcry’ that followed graphic accounts of violent death in the Daily News that William Gladstone was moved to publish his pamphlet on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’. Here Gladstone makes appeals to ‘the general sentiment of civilized mankind’ and the ‘the broad and deep interests of humanity’ as a means to justify his moral condemnation of the atrocity and to make the case for humanitarian intervention (Bass 2008: 271–3). In this example at least, it appears that cosmopolitan ideals are only made conscionable and brought into public debate through sympathy being aroused for the suffering of distant strangers. Cosmopolitanism is brought into being as a principled standpoint by the forcefulness and extended reach of moral feeling. In such instances, the passion for compassion bequeaths a quest for principles of moral virtue; that is, it hungers for a good reason to justify its moral outrage before, and fundamental opposition to, the horror of human suffering. On this understanding, it may now appear somewhat paradoxical to note the extent to which cosmopolitan values and principles are now debated under the attempt to devise a more rational and politically discriminating form of humanitarianism. An alternative and contrasting approach to understanding the relationship between humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism holds that the value of latter lies in its potential to define the conditions and set limits for humanitarian interventions. Here cosmopolitanism is not so much cast as the child of humanitarianism, but rather, as a disciplinary force seeking to impose some parental control over the unruly offspring of humanitarianism. Here cosmopolitanism is portrayed as involving a ‘forward-looking’ set of moral principles and political theories that aim to prescribe the conditions under which humanitarian interventions should take place as well as the forms of conduct that are legitimate under these terms (Archibugi 2004; Smith 2007). In this context, cosmopolitan ideals, or rather, interdisciplinary debates connected with the possible ways in which such ideals might be realized, are approached as a critical and legislative resource in efforts to address the contemporary ‘crisis of humanitarianism’; that is, a three-fold ‘crisis’ of principle, identity and practice inaugurated by the increased ‘militarization’ of humanitarianism in international affairs (Rieff 2002a, 2002b). A critical focus is brought to the viability and authorization of humanitarian interventions in the context of ‘complex emergencies’; emergencies that involve extensive loss of life or massive displacements of people across a range of societies, that call for multi-faceted forms of humanitarian assistance and which are also set to be made subject to political and military constraints (perhaps also involving significant security risks to humanitarian relief workers) (Keen 2007; OCHA 1999). Here debates with, for and against cosmopolitanism are taken up in an effort to prescribe the legal and political conditions under which governmental and non-governmental organizations might justify their actions as ‘humanitarian’. 378

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For example, Tom Farer proposes that we use cosmopolitan principles within a five-part test for distinguishing the contexts in which legitimate humanitarian interventions can or should take place. These concern issues relating the scale of the violation of human rights, the possibility of identifying and pursuing alternative courses of action to remedy the situation, compliance with international humanitarian law and setting legal checks and balances in place that involve respect for the authority of the UN Security Council (Farer et al. 2005: 211–20). Others are inclined to place an emphasis on the requirement that, in order to be referred to as ‘cosmopolitan’, interventions should be conducted by ‘global political institutions’ (i.e. the UN) (Archibugi 2004). Accordingly, aside from demonstrating a capacity to meet some legal definition of the appropriate context for cosmopolitan humanitarian intervention, it is argued that this should only be practised by organizations that operate as a global alliance in co-operation to attend to humanitarian disasters in the interests of the globe. In this context, there is no agreement as to what should be taken as the fundamental unit of moral concern or guiding principles for action. Whilst seeking to better understand and legislate for the ways in which humanitarian interventions might take place under the authorization of a ‘global civil society’, there is no settled point of view on how this should be identified or promoted within existing structures of trans-national governance (Smith 2007); however, the overriding imperative to secure a more rational basis for the conduct of humanitarianism is made clear. It is most emphatically the case here that ‘cosmopolitanism’ is no longer being associated with the mere awakening of humanitarian consciousness, but rather, is being made to work at containing and disciplining its involvement within international affairs.

Conclusion I have highlighted the potential for cosmopolitan principles to be packaged and promoted as a means to discipline and regulate humanitarianism. At the same time, I have also underlined the potential for humanitarianism to inspire forms of cosmopolitan consciousness that oppose discriminatory ideologies so as to extend the ambition and reach of humanitarian concern. On this account, cosmopolitanism is to be found both as a moral force licencing the unbridled spread of humanitarianism and as a component of a critical movement to limit its responsibilities and domain. The majority of commentators hold that under the attempt to arrive at a more analytically refined and logically consistent account of the interrelationships humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism, we are participating within an increasingly politicized arena of debate. Indeed, on some accounts, more than anything else, this marks the ‘crisis’ of humanitarianism; for by lending weight to overtly political initiatives and by publicly favouring distinctly political points of view on humanitarian concerns, it is argued that humanitarians lose their moral authority to act in the interest of humanity in general (Rieff 2002a). A contrasting view holds that it is only insofar as we are prepared to treat our social sympathies as matters for political debate, that we might hope to acquire the legitimacy and solidarity to act to promote and defend human rights (Arendt 1963). Accordingly, the greater danger here may lie in the attempt (or temptation) to render our passion for compassion devoid of politics. In this context, there is no doubt that many will be inclined to treat ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ as no more than ‘Trojan horse’ considerations; ideals that are all too easily used to legitimize the brute force of military might and to ideologically endorse Western neo-liberalism (Feinstein and Slaughter 2004; Martell 2009; Weiss 2004). Most certainly, I hold that it is important to give full and serious consideration to the potential for cosmopolitan values and humanitarian concerns to be used as a smokescreen for the oppression of humanity. At the same time I contend 379

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that, more often than not, in current arenas of debate the controversies surrounding the moral meaning and practice of cosmopolitan humanitarianism are serving to draw an unprecedented level of critical scrutiny to the conditions under which these are liable to be experienced as progressive forces of social emancipation (Pieterse 2006). We are witness to a heightening critical consciousness of humanitarian impulse and aspiration; and in this regard, movements to define and explain cosmopolitanism as an active social force have the potential to draw us into renewed debate over the conditions under which we are most likely to make the project of building a humane society our social passion. In this context, it is not only the case that cosmopolitanism will be made to critically reflect on its own conditions of possibility and moral legitimacy, but further, that it will be required to engage with the task of understanding emergent forms of culture, society and moral experience that set new challenges for the sociological imagination of our times.

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Delanty, G. (2006) ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 25–47. Durkheim, E. (1973 [1898]) ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, in Bellah, R. (ed) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Elias, N. (1994) The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell. Faist, T. (2009) ‘The Transnational Social Question: Social Rights and Citizenship in a Global Context’, International Sociology, 24(1): 7–35. Farer, T.J., Archibugi, D., Brown, C., Crawford, N.C., Weiss, T.G. and Wheeler, N.J. (2005) ‘Roundtable: Humanitarian Intervention after 9/11’, International Relations, 19(2): 211–50. Fassin, D. (2007) ‘Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life’, Public Culture, 19(3): 499–520. Fassin, D. (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fehrenbach, H. and Rodogno, D. (eds) (2015) Humanitarian Photography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feinstein, L. and Slaughter, A.M. (2004) ‘A Duty to Prevent’, Foreign Affairs, 81(1): 136–50. Fiering, N.S. (1976) ‘Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Compassion’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37(2): 195–218. Golder, B. (2010) ‘Foucault and the Unfinished Human of Rights’, Law Culture and Humanities, 20(10): 1–21. Green, A. (2014) ‘Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered, National’, The Historical Journal, 57(4): 1157–75. Halttunen, K. (1995) ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, The American Historical Review, 100(2): 303–34. Himmelfarb, G. (2001) ‘The Idea of Compassion: The British vs the French Enlightenment’, Public Interest, 145(Fall): 3–24. Joas, H. (2013) The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington: Georgetown University Press. Jones, J. (2016) ‘Humanitarian Intervention in a Multipolar World’, Washington University Global Studies Law Review, 15(1): 161–90. Kapoor, I. (2013) Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity, London: Routledge. Keen, D.J. (2007) Complex Emergencies, Cambridge: Polity Press. Krause, M. (2014) The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurasawa, F. (2013) ‘The Sentimentalist Paradox: On the Normative and Visual Foundations of Humanitarianism’, Journal of Global Ethics, 9(2): 201–14. Lester, A. and Dussart, F. (2014) Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth Century British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linklater, A. (2004) ‘Norbert Elias, the “Civilizing Process” and the Sociology of International Relations’, International Politics, 41(1): 3–35. Marsland, R. and Prince, R. (2012) ‘What Is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival, and the Politics of Life’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 26(4): 453–69. Martell, L. (2009) ‘Global Inequality, Human Rights and Power: A Critique of Ulrich Beck’s Cosmopolitanism’, Critical Sociology, 35(2): 253–72. McGowan, R. (1986) ‘A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth Century Britain’, The Journal of British Studies, 25(3): 312–34. Moniz, A.B. (2009) ‘Saving the Lives of Strangers: Humane Societies and the Cosmopolitan Provision of Charitable Aid’, Journal of the Early Republic, 29(4): 607–40. Morgan, D. (2009) ‘The Look of Sympathy: Religion, Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling’, Material Religion, 5(2): 132–55. Moyn, S. (2006) ‘Empathy in History: Empathizing with Humanity’, History and Theory, 45(3): 397–415. Mullan, J. (1988) Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, London: Clarendon Press. Muthu, S. (2003) Enlightenment against Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Norris, W. (2017) ‘Digital Humanitarians: Citizen Journalists on the Virtual Front Line of Natural and Human-Caused Disasters’, Journalism Practice, 11(2–3): 213–28. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (1999) OCHA Orientation Handbook on Complex Emergencies. Available to download at: www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/ocha__orientation__ handbook_on__.htm 381

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Orgad, S. (2013) ‘Visualizers of Solidarity: Organizational Politics in Humanitarian and International Development NGOs’, Visual Communication, 12(3): 295–314. Pieterse, J.N. (2006) ‘Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards and Agenda’, Development and Change, 37(6): 1247–57. Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, London: Penguin. Redfield, P. (2005) ‘Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis’, Cultural Anthropology, 20(3): 328–61. Reid-Henry, S.M. (2014) ‘Humanitarianism as Liberal Diagnostic: Humanitarian Reason and the Political Rationalities of the Liberal Will-to-Care’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(3): 418–31. Rieff, D. (2002a) ‘Humanitarianism in Crisis’, Foreign Affairs, 81(6): 111–21. Rieff, D. (2002b) A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, New York: Simon and Schuster. Skinner, R. and Lester, A. (2012) ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40(5): 729–47. Smith, A. (2006 [1759]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Mineola: Dover Publications. Smith, W. (2007) ‘Anticipating a Cosmopolitan Future: The Case of Humanitarian Military Intervention’, International Politics, 44: 72–89. Sznaider, N. (2001) The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Thomas, K. (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, London: Penguin. Ticktin, M.I. (2011) Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiss, T.G. (2004) ‘The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Protect in a Unipolar Era’, Security Dialogue, 35(2): 135–53. Wilkinson, I. (2013) ‘The Provocation of the Humanitarian Social Imaginary’, Visual Communication, 12(3): 261–76. Wilkinson, I. (2016) ‘The Problem of Understanding Modern Humanitarianism and Its Sociological Value’, International Social Science Journal, 65(215–216): 65–78. Wilkinson, I. and Kleinman, A. (2016) A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zastoupil, L. (2009) ‘Notorious and Convicted Mutilators: Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible’, Journal of World History, 20(3): 399–434. Ž iž ek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, London: Profile Books.

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33 A deeper framework of cosmopolitan justice Addressing inequalities in the era of the Anthropocene Tracey Skillington

First introduced in 2000 by Crutzen and Stoermer, the Anthropocene defines a previously undetected interval in geological history, one thought to constitute the third division of the Quaternary period (2.6 million years ago to the present) when for the first time in the history of the planet Homo sapiens became the primary agent of change, altering the Earth’s surface, oceans, atmosphere, and nutrient cycles to unprecedented degrees. Its origins are thought to be located in the eighteenth century when the invention of steam technology allowed for the rapid expansion of agriculture and industrialization. However, it was only when certain activities became a force of global eco destruction from the mid-twentieth century (including the expansion of nuclear energy, fossil fuel combustion, nitrogen and phosphorous in agricultural fertilizers, and subsequently, the spread of micro-plastic particles into waterways and food chains) that the Anthropocene would become a calamitous agent of change, altering the Earth’s atmospheric composition and physical structures. In the years since Crutzen and Stoermer first introduced the Anthropocene to the world, the exploitation of energy from detrital carbon has continued to soar, further distorting the behavior of natural cycles, including average temperatures of air and water and encouraging, in the process, the modification, even the disappearance, of certain habitats (Hamilton and Grinevald 2015). Today, all aspects of the Earth’s natural features have been altered to varying degrees by carbon-climate-actor interactions and warming effects. One consequence of these developments is the radically reduced likelihood of another Ice Age occurring in the future (see Delanty and Mota 2017: 12). The cumulative effects of ambient air, soil, water, and chemical pollution now confront us with considerable force, triggering changes in the Earth’s systems that, potentially, are far greater than our abilities to control them. The single largest contributor to such changes is CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and related industrial processes (Raupach and Canadell 2010: 210). Yet despite the growing magnitude of danger posed by fossil fuel consumption, no serious effort is made to drive levels downwards (in the last four decades alone, there has been a 147% increase in the amount of petroleum consumed worldwide, a 286% increase in natural gas and a 252% rise in the quantity of coal burned; see International Energy Agency 2013). Whilst all parties at this stage are clear 383

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as to what the primary objective must be (to reduce rates of CO2 emissions), sustainable options are not being pursued with sufficient vigor or within a time frame adequate to offset the likelihood of future disaster. Rather than affirming commitment to a partnership model of resource justice and taking responsibility for harms already inflicted, the tendency has been towards the continuation of practices of ‘dis-saving’ (Rawls 2001: 118), that is, depleting aggregate reserves of essential resources to levels insufficient to preserve save living conditions into the future. How then are we to explain this disconnect between knowledge of impending disaster and ongoing practices of destruction? One explanation is that offered by Malm and Hornborg (2014: 66) who point to the limited explanatory power of official policy discourse on climate change. In particular, the failure of this discourse to provide an adequate explanation as to how a qualitatively novel order of exploitation as the fossil fuel economy came into being, or even how it continues to dominate climate change issues to this day. What we do know is that this economy was not created accidently. Neither does it continue to burn because it is indispensable to our lives. Rather, the primary agents promoting the fossil fuel agenda of today (e.g., the so-called oil shale revolution, or mining of coal through mountain top removal and mechanized long-wall mining), as before, are amongst the wealthiest, most politically influential, and ecologically harmful. From its earliest years, the wealth and pollution generated by this economy were unevenly distributed and predicated on major divisions between peoples (wage, class, geographical differences) and power (capital accumulation, labor exploitation, and widespread natural resource inequalities). Against a background of deepening eco-system and fossil fuel destruction, the dominant viewpoint is that ‘humanity’ continues on its journey towards more ‘advanced’ conditions of development. Rising concentrations of ozone in the troposphere are framed as an ‘unfortunate side effect’ of otherwise universally beneficial processes of industrialization and capitalist expansion. The more autonomous agency is accorded to such ‘side effects’, the more passive symbolic formulations of climate action sequences diminish popular social consciousness of the role played by specific polluters (Fowler et al. 1979). That is, those whose largely unhindered operations are disproportionately responsible for the further advancement of the Anthropocene. For those critical of this framing process and its strong political dimensions, a new discourse on climate change is needed, one that advocates more pro-active engagement and frames the issue of responsibility in specific rather than general terms (Loria 2015). This means addressing current hindrances to the achievement of low carbon futures and tackling the uncooperative stance of governments and corporate actors alike. Realizing that climate change is ‘anthropogenic’ also calls for an acknowledgment of its ‘sociogenic’ (Malm and Hornborg 2014: 66) nature. That is, a product of the decisions of specific agents engaged in historically grounded practices. For instance, the decision to pursue further extreme measures to extract remaining reserves of nonrenewable energy sources is one made by a few, not a democratic majority. The will to change in this instance is unlikely to emerge voluntarily from within this power structure. Instead, the impetus to change, most probably, will come from below, amongst those whose long-term safety is jeopardized by such actions and those that support them (e.g., weak government regulatory procedures). The emphasis is on targeting environmental destruction ‘from within’ situated fields of action. Deteriorating climate conditions are thereby understood as embedded in ‘thick’ social practices, as are the essential preconditions for positive transformative action. Critical perspectives on the Anthropocene, therefore, focus on both the sociogenic roots of climate destruction (e.g., Hornborg 2015) as well as the internally generated conditions of possibility for a democratic reform of Anthropocene futures (e.g., see Skillington 2017: 231–60). The discovery of the Anthropocene thus proves to have a strong societal significance beyond its power to define a new epoch in geological history. Its advancement necessitates not only a 384

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fundamental change in perspective on ecological agency, but democratic justice as well. In terms of ecological agency, the Anthropocene calls for a new account of history, one that re-embeds nature-altering practices, especially those associated with industrial-capitalist developments, within the deeper time scales of the planetary system (Chakrabarty 2009: 212) and defines the relationship between cause and effect in more expansive terms than the here and now. As theorists such as Chernilo (2017) and Chakrabarty (2017) point out, these changes have major implications for how we conceptualize geological change and construe the relationship between past, present, and future. Traditional assumptions regarding the relationship between presence (e.g., of victims of climate harms) and truth (proven acts of destruction), for instance, are subject to revision. The understanding now is that presence is no longer a perquisite for harm (for instance, the discovery that greenhouse gases cause centuries of sea level rise, see Chu 2017). If the relationship between climate harm and effects can no longer be formulated as linear, how are we to construct the boundaries of the just society and identify its most relevant subjects? The Anthropocene, therefore, not only raises serious questions about conceptualizations of nature as largely passive in relation to the destruction imposed upon it (Chakrabarty 2015: 204) but also, how we have conventionally formulated the justice dimensions of such practices. The Anthropocene thus necessitates a fundamental shift in perspectives on justice. As potentially catastrophic as the Anthropocene might be, the type of perspective changes its discovery triggers also bring certain advantages. First, knowledge of the Anthropocene provokes a moment of ‘world disclosure’ (Honneth 2000: 116–27) when the micro foundations of a global system of climate destruction are finally exposed. Deepening climate problems are revealed as the product of relations of domination and highly exploitative asymmetrical flows of cheap labor and natural resources to sites of concentrated power. The realization is that the long-term survival of this planet depends fundamentally on our capacity to ensure the operations of primary agents of harm are subject to tighter regulatory control. In this sense, knowledge of the Anthropocene generates new insights on the nature of social and political, as much as geological worlds, prompting new interpretations of ‘progress’, as well as what is morally ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, thereby altering how we have conventionally construed the relevant boundaries of ‘the just society’. This, in turn, stimulates a greater need to consider how democratic traditions can be reinvigorated in response to a growing range of inter-related problems (Chernilo 2017). Attention shifts to those cultural and political components of modernity with the potential to address the calamitous forces that chiefly capitalist interests have unleashed upon the world. In particular, how ideals of equality, freedom, and right might be better utilized in light of the fact that resource inequalities between peoples are expanding both regionally and inter-generationally (see United Nations General Assembly 2013, Report of the Secretary-General, ‘Intergenerational Solidarity and the Needs of Future Generations’). The analysis that follows examines how the ongoing cosmopolitanization of climate risks triggers demands for a radically new framework of cosmopolitan justice, one that takes the present planetary conjuncture as a starting point for redefining justice in deeper terms (politically, temporally, spatially, and inter-generationally).

The cosmopolitanization of climate risks across generations According to Rawls (1999 [1970]), the difference principle is satisfied by a given order of distributive justice only if those who are worse off under it would not be better off under an alternative regime. When applied across generations, is the difference principle satisfied by the current order of natural resource justice, given present rates of depletion of non-renewable resources? The best way to answer this question is to focus on the likely impact of current rates on future supplies. Scientists predict, given current usage rates, that natural gas deposits will last for another fifty 385

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years approximately and oil for an estimated fifty-three years. Similarly, the expectation is that our oceans will be fish-free by 2050 without a major change in present fishing and pollution practices (UNEP 2010: 18–19). The crucial point, as Cohen (1985: 91) observes, is that the appropriation of a disproportionate amount of essential resources on the part of some today not only opens up a greater possibility of severe shortages in the future but diminishes the capacities of future others to flourish by reducing what resources are available to them. Future generations, by virtue of their non-existence at present, cannot challenge current rates of resource depletion nor defend their interests in ensuring a sufficient portion of essential life-sustaining resources are preserved for the future (see Hansen et al. 2013). As commercial interests secure legal access to remaining reserves of oil, gas, minerals, and coal, it is difficult to see how the difference principle in state democratic reasoning, when applied across generations, is actually being satisfied by the current policy regime. Instead, present resource depletion practices fall foul of legitimate standards of resource appropriation, especially the understanding that ‘enough and as good’ will be left for those that follow (see John Locke’s non-arbitrary proviso governing legitimate resource distribution practices). What is more, it would appear that this situation is set to deteriorate even further. In the last decade alone, approximately 203 million hectares of arable land in the developing world have been appropriated by foreign commercial interests to grow crops such as wheat, sugar, rice, and bio-fuel (ethanol, palm oil, or jatropha) for so-called First World consumption (see Christian Aid 2015; Oxfam 2015; Wallerstein 2012). Moves to accumulate major agricommercial land holdings in the interests of First World resource security is leading to serious problems of access to precious, life-sustaining resources amongst indigenous communities in regions of Ethiopia, Sudan, the Congo, and beyond (Skillington 2012: 1206). As Harvey (2005) rightly notes, the current grab for arable land and energy reserves in the developing world is a form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ of indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands and wildlife of their habitats. However, the legal ‘right’ of the world’s most economically powerful to confiscate dwindling resource reserves may also be seen as a form of dispossession of future generations of their ecological inheritance. Such practices interfere with peoples’ freedoms to realize a future that is safe and plentiful chiefly by denying them opportunities to conserve sufficient resources supplies and implicating them in cycles of irreversible ecological destruction, many of which they had no hand in creating. In practical terms, what are the likely implications of these developments? If powerful political and economic interests fully back the continuation of what some describe as a ‘conscienceless’ (Nelson 1971: 169) and ‘ecologically irresponsible’ (Greenpeace International 2016) approach to natural resource distribution and long-term management, how likely is a lowering of global emissions levels (given the steady increase in investment in new fossil fuel projects worldwide [see Institute for Policy Studies 2013: 1] and the decision of governments to issue further Petroleum Exploration and Development Licenses [PEDLs] to major petro-chemical corporations [see Practical Law 2017])? There are worrying indications already that average global temperatures are edging closer to a 1.5°C increase above pre-industrial levels (NASA Earth Observatory 2015). As they do so, lesser quantities of ecological goods and greater quantities of ecological bads are being transferred to newer generations. At the start of 2016, scientists reported that 2015 was the hottest year in modern history, roughly 1°C warmer than the pre-industrial average. However, that record was broken again in early 2017 when scientists reported that 2016 had been the hottest year on record (NASA 2017). The maize harvest failures in Africa left 6 million people on the brink of starvation in 2016 and, according to experts at the UK Met Office, are a worrying indication of how staple crop failures will become more regular occurrence in the future as temperatures rise and drought conditions become more pronounced (McKie 2017). Already, the frequency of drought in dry subtropical regions has increased significantly (see UNEP 2015: 3), affecting 386

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vulnerable sections of the population, including children, the elderly, and the disabled (see UNICEF 2015). With extreme heat fueling wildfires across the US and central Europe at present, all indications are that temperatures for 2017 will be record breaking. Scientists now agree that such temperature extremes will prove increasingly difficult to avoid in the years ahead. The likely consequences of a 2°C rise in average global temperature will be serious, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III (2014) but hard to evade if dramatic changes are not introduced in the way we consume and produce energy. Many critical thresholds have already been reached. In April 2015, CO2 atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million for the first time in 3 million years (in the mid-Pliocene era), a figure subsequently surpassed in late 2016 when concentrations increased to 403.3 parts per million, thereby leading the way for further significant increases in global warming and sea level rises (UN World Meteorological Organization 2016). Contamination of groundwater, oceans, food chains, and the atmosphere with toxic chemicals have reached critical levels of saturation (see National Geographic 2009). Not only are such changes likely to pose a serious threat to the health and security of living generations, but will gravely endanger the welfare of future ones as well. The products of high carbon living linger in the atmosphere and oceans potentially for millennia, according to scientists (e.g., see Frölicher et al. 2014). In a report to the UN General Assembly in February 2016, the Human Rights Council pointed to the fact that ‘we are running out of time to avoid [climate change’s] worst effects’ (p. 9. A/HRC/31/52). Klein (2014) describes unfolding scenarios as an early glimpse at a future of ‘steering failure’ when climate change no longer responds to efforts to control it. Such predictions have a definite ‘nightmarish quality’, as McKinnon (2012: 2) rightly observes. But if we are aware that global temperatures are being pushed beyond safe thresholds and that abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes will follow, why are the real sociogenic sources of escalating climate change not being challenged? Perhaps the answer partially lies in the nature of ‘normal justice discourse’ (Fraser 2008) (typically state bound) in a Westphalian order and its inability to address what are increasingly transnational sources of harm. In the absence of any serious attempt to impose responsible limitations on the real sources of ecological devastation, the Westphalian order of justice becomes profoundly unjust. In the process, the Anthropocene enters a qualitatively new phase, one of radical inequality. Major inconsistencies emerge between those who shape the nature of global climate risk today and those who pay the ultimate price for these decisions. Current acts of extreme resource depletion are more than forms of ecological destruction. They are also acts of injustice against those whose capacity to withstand the shock of adverse climate conditions in the future will be severely limited (i.e., today’s youth and future generations). Beck (2014: 1) describes how such inequalities have a distinctly imperialistic structure on account of the extent to which decisionmaking processes and their outcomes implicate different peoples. With the span of affectedness of today’s pollution practices extending radically beyond the present time frame, opportunities open to future generations to avoid ecological devastation will, without doubt, be minimal. Tendencies to restrict the analyses of inequalities and relations of exploitation to the present, therefore, prove increasingly unsatisfactory. With greater knowledge of the extended nature of ecological harms in this era of the Anthropocene, the type of temporal frameworks that have traditionally guided our thinking on justice debates to date are subject to increasing scrutiny. Legal experts (e.g., Lewis 2018), future justice (e.g., World Future Council 2016) and youth campaigners (e.g., Our Children’s Trust 2018), for example, query whether human rights obligations only make sense in justice terms when their violation is linked to the harming of currently living persons. Given the present mis-spending of future generations’ environmental capital, such peoples, however hypothetical, have become 387

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deeply relevant to current deliberations on justice (Skillington 2015; see, also, World Future Council 2016). We have entered an era in which a trans-generational frame of reference on climate change issues has become unavoidable. For more than a decade, sociological perspectives on the cosmopolitan have challenged sociology to adjust its analytical perspective beyond borders of a social, cultural, legal, and political kind, and account for processes of ‘cosmopolitanization’ occurring across territories, nationalities, regions, and cultures (e.g., Beck 2006: 19). Attention now shifts to relations of justice between present and future humanity. For many, a concern for the welfare of unborn generations is an indulgence present society cannot afford. For others, it is one we cannot avoid. If current ecological practices will be felt most severely by peoples living in the future, the realization must be that relations of justice can no longer be legitimately restricted to the present. Justice must be defined in terms more relevant to the ‘deep time’ of our planetary existence and future well-being. In other words, the deep time of the Anthropocene necessitates a model of ‘deep justice’, one that critically re-evaluates relevant contexts for the application of principles of justice and understands our existence as intricately intertwined with multiple others located across space and time. The ‘really-existing relations of interdependence’ identified by Beck and Sznaider (2006: 9) to explain the contemporary force of processes of ‘cosmopolitanization’ are heightened further by challenges associated with the advancement of the Anthropocene. Land degradation, loss of bio-diversity, and increasing resource scarcity, in being globally relevant problems, are inescapably all our concern (Beck and van Loon 2011: 123). Such challenges require a level of commitment to a principle of global solidarity not witnessed before (e.g., an ethos of resource sharing in and across time, including land, rather than one of competition for the same) and a distinctly cosmopolitan ‘quality of mind’ (Ossewaarde 2007: 808) when addressing the evolving nature of relations between peoples and the rest of nature (Skillington 2016). For Delanty (2006: 252; see also Delanty and Mota 2017), it is more comprehensively a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ that is required, one that envisages the growing interdependencies between all living systems on this planet as an opportunity to reconfigure the global relevance of modernity’s democratic potentials and reflect critically on dominant ways of thinking and acting in relation to this world.

Youth-led activism and the cosmopolitan imagination As inequalities between rich and poor, regions, and generations continue to widen, expectations of equality and fairness seem increasingly one-sided and at odds with the lived reality of growing numbers. Concerned youth come together around shared sentiments of frustration with governments regarding the ongoing mis-management of their environmental, economic, and social capital. Across regional, local, and national borders, youth forge new solidarity alignments and construe the ecological, financial, social, and political burdens imposed disproportionately on them as a glaring symbol of social injustice. With the public resources that could compensate somewhat for current inequalities reduced considerably (cuts in funding of public education, housing, health, community conservation measures), long-term security concerns move to the fore of the issue agenda. Governments are reminded of their legal commitments to build just, sustainable, and inclusive societies for the future (e.g., Greer 2016; European Youth Forum 2017) and formulate a plan of rescue for ‘lost generations’. Consistently, the emphasis is on the transnational relevance of histories of rescue, resistance, and democratic transformation to a cosmopolitan reimagining of worlds under threat. Social media provides these actors with an indispensable tool with which to explore these ideas and devise new ‘infra-national maps’ (Beck 2003: 467) of generational identity, where youth 388

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evaluate the micro details of cosmopolitan belonging from the shared vantage point of stolen futures. Social media platforms provide a means of stimulating communication on the inequalities bestowed on youth through the inactions of government and the liberties denied to them to change this state of affairs (Gackenbach 2007; Murthy 2012). In this sense, social media plays a crucial role in extending the ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ (Delanty 2006) on issues of justice to a consideration of how, as well as why political, social, and ecological worlds must be remade. It offers youth a mechanism with which to challenge their political disenfranchisement and reshape the theatrics of contemporary political life (Knorr-Cetina 2009: 79).1 The cosmopolitan dimensions of this communication are reflected in participants’ willingness to engage as much with global climate realities as particular expressions of the same in more situated settings (personalized accounts of the effects of climate change on local communities). Participants in this communication acquire a better understanding of wider social and political processes in which their own partial experience of injustice are embedded. A more situationally grounded interpretation of the Anthropocene gradually emerges together with ‘enlarged’ modes of understanding (Young 1997) climate change as the product of relations of domination, denied opportunities to realize sustainable worlds, and blatant inequalities between peoples. In particular, climate change is construed as an injustice against future generations (e.g., see World Future Council 2016; Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations 2001). As the product of a ‘dialogical cosmopolitanism’ (Mendieta 2009), that is, a communicationbased learning that emerges from ‘below’ in everyday discourse settings, such insights reflect the degree to which mobilized youth have become active interpreters of human and political rights rather than mere addressees of the same (Buchwalter 2017). The cogency of traditional justice beliefs is critically reassessed from the standpoint of excluded others (e.g., future generations and concrete others located in climate vulnerable regions), as well as the lived reality of deepening ecological, social, economic, and political problems. Ideas of justice are fleshed out with concrete moral experiences of injury in particular circumstances (McCarthy 1997: 203). The cosmopolitan spirit of this communication is without borders or membership requirements. The ‘other’ is internalized in a solidaristic manner as youth search for the transformative potential of the present cosmopolitan moment: ‘we are all human beings first and privileged with responsibilities to each other, to future generations and to the planet’ (global activist organization Avaaz 2011). With the formal political regime largely unresponsive to their demands, mobilized youth have sought other platforms to assert both constitutionally grounded rights to a healthy environment and safe future, as well as newly formulated frame alignments, such as the right of all to atmospheric justice. For example, the global Atmospheric Trust Litigation campaign, launched in 2011, seeks to hold states legally accountable for the destruction of a transnational public trust asset in urgent need of protection – the atmosphere. Harnessing the power of domestic courts and the doctrine of public trust, campaigners draw on established legal instruments to advance a peoples-led legal approach to atmospheric justice.2 Extending the trust doctrine beyond its traditional scope of relevance (the protection of groundwater, wetlands, national parks, non-navigable waterways, etc.), campaigners defend its applicability to a legal protection of air quality and the atmosphere. In true cosmopolitan form, campaigners insist that all communities on Earth, as co-trustees of the atmospheric commons, are bound together in a framework of corollary and mutual responsibilities. In their role as responsible trustees, states are legally obliged to protect the energy balance of the climate system by ensuring CO2 emissions levels are reduced and essential, life-sustaining resources are justly distributed for the benefit of all, including future generations. In the first week of May 2011, youth in cooperation with the non-profit organization, Our Children’s Trust, put these demands into operation and initiated legal proceedings against every state in the US. 389

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Atmospheric Trust Litigation seeks to accomplish through domestic litigation settings what has eluded international diplomatic treaty negotiations and emissions reduction targets to date, that is, an effective legal mechanism to force state agencies to respond more appropriately to escalating pollution and work towards achieving a greater climate balance that will benefit all into the future. Plans to launch similar suites in other countries are now well under way. Our Children’s Trust has already partnered with attorneys in Ukraine, Pakistan, and Uganda and is currently working with legal experts in India, Canada, the UK, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France with a view to building legal cases. In all instances, public trust principles and fundamental rights remain the primary orientation to action, as they have in the past, but are now contextualized in ways that increasingly unstable environmental circumstances demand. More generally, the realization is that climate futures are cumulatively made and, therefore, can be remade through coordinated strategic action (Urry 2016; Adam and Groves 2007). Just as inhumanities such as slavery or racism were not a ‘problem’ for political elites until peoples movements made them such, the realization today is that governments will not respond adequately to sources of escalating climate destruction without a globally relevant democratic movement determined to hold them and capitalist elites legally and politically accountable. Synonymous with catastrophe and destructive tendencies, the arrival of the Anthropocene also provokes a moment of critical re-assessment of the abilities of publics to be a force of positive democratic change, as much as one of harm (Beck 2015: 81). The cosmopolitan imagination now focuses on the question of how modernity’s traditions of rights, duties, distributive and deliberative justice can be opened up to a wider range of subjects and relations between peoples (encompassing the future). Such moves trigger a more ‘enlightened anthropocene’ (Chakrabarty 2017: 41) where society gradually comes to be steered by a deeper appreciation for knowledge of harm and corrective action. However, the realization also is that prevailing models of justice are in need of revision. Various ontological assumptions as to who is legitimately entitled to make claims to justice in this era of deepening climate problems (e.g., individuals, communities, generations) is subject to dispute, as is the question of to whom should justice considerations be extended (bounded political communities or wider transnational ones) and in what settings can questions of climate justice be intelligibly raised (e.g., conventional political and legal settings or new communication contexts)? Equally, the question of what social cleavages typically foster injustice is opened up for reconsideration. For those who seek answers to these questions, the realization is that the prevailing grammar of environmental justice (mainly state bound) only partially addresses these issues. In recognition of these shortcomings, the Office of the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court, in a position paper on case selection and prioritization (September 2016), declared its intention to include ‘destruction of the environment’ as relevant to its future investigations of conduct that constitutes a serious crime under international law. Under conditions of growing natural resource scarcity worldwide, a planetary frame of reference proves evermore difficult to avoid. Global climate change ushers in a conflict structure and cooperative imperative that runs far deeper than politically constructed sovereign borders can accommodate. Deteriorating environmental conditions drive societal processes of cosmopolitanization not only in terms of awakening amongst transnational communities a stark need for more far-reaching cooperative measures (Beck and Sznaider 2006; Beck 2016), but also a need to rethink justice in deeper terms (spatially, temporally, and inter-generationally). Attention shifts to the transformative capacities of the existing ‘basic structure’ (Rawls 1999: 3–4) of justice and the question of whether a more comprehensive program of intergenerational solidarity, sustainable development, legal, as well as political responsibility for environmental destruction is realizable by the same. Given that the democratic imperative of existing international legal commitments

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requires that all constitutional democracies remain open to new demands of justice (for instance, the principle of openness embedded in various EU treaties and international Law) (see Skillington 2017: 246–7; Brunkhorst 2014: 455), in theory, prevailing democratic institutions are capable of accommodating demands for a deeper justice framework and working towards the realization of more sustainable and equitable futures. However, in order to realize such potentials, a more open communicative approach to these issues is required, one that allows for a broader debate on emerging inequalities and contingencies, as much as more enduring exclusions. The understanding, therefore, is that a more democratically ‘enlightened anthropocene’ is possible if commitments to addressing specific sources of ecological destruction are applied uniformly and in ways that uphold internationally agreed emissions reductions targets and sustainable development goals. Without such commitments, prospects for a minimum resource equity being established across time are not favorable.

Conclusion If recent indicators of escalating rates of climate destruction and the harms imposed on vulnerable communities the world over tell us anything it is that a fuller realization of modernity’s democratic potentials is urgently required. This means looking beyond the ‘settled convictions’ (Rawls 1985: 229) of conventional state-bound political reasoning on climate change to a consideration of how principles of justice can be extended to new subjects and problem areas exacerbated by deteriorating ecological conditions. The achievement of necessary political goals in this regard is best secured on the basis of collective decision-making and open democratic debate across a variety of configurations of solidarity (local, national, and transnational). In the interests of fairness to all parties concerned, justice must remain a genuinely collective achievement, one that reflects the imperatives of public reason and a deliberative process that builds on the efforts of successive generations committed to cosmopolitan principles of freedom, responsibility and right, generations whose histories and ecological fate are increasingly intertwined. As associates of local, national, and transnational democratic collectivities, we all possess a legitimate claim over the decision-making structures of such collectivities, especially those addressing issues such as global warming, atmospheric pollution, rising sea levels, or water scarcity. Our associative relationship with each other forms the strongest moral basis for action to protect the capacities of these democratic collectivities to address the problems created by the further advancement of the Anthropocene and to nurture the abilities of publics to realize more sustainable futures.

Notes 1 Mass protest rallies, such as the ‘No Planet B’ campaign (led by Avaaz ahead of the 2014 Climate Summit at the UN Headquarters in New York) or those held in Washington in November 2015, are organized largely online, with youth demanding that government formulate a program of action that guarantees greater climate, immigration, and racial justice. Organizers of these events, including United We Dream, the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network, and the Million Hoodies Project pledge to ‘change the landscape of what is politically possible’ and ‘galvanize youth action’ to secure a democratic and safe future for all. 2 The doctrine of public trust, recognized by courts the world over, dates back to Roman times. It is also specified in English common law principles as sovereign trust ownership of ‘air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea’. The understanding is that the power lodged in the state will be exercised for the benefit of all to ensure these resources remain ‘common to mankind’ (The Institutes of Justinian, 2.1.1. [1867], quoted in Wood and Woodward 2016: 648).

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34 Cosmopolitan care Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

Cosmopolitanism as a theory and a way of life (praxis) goes back to the Cynics and Stoics who saw themselves as world citizens that are primarily loyal to the universal community of humanity (Nussbaum 2010 and Dallmayr 2003). While their ideal never left the “utopian imaginary of the Western tradition,” the realities of modern globalization made it re-emerge in the idea of “world governance within which cosmopolitan democracy can flourish” (Turner 2002: 48). Cosmopolitan democracy requires a form of multilayered citizenship and governance, which recognizes the “continuing significance of nation-states, while arguing for layers of governance to address broader and more global questions” (Held 2010: 306). According to this moderate form of cosmopolitanism, being a global citizen does not mean ignoring ignore local and national attachments and forms of belonging. The hope is that global citizenship will not only coexist with other forms of citizenship but it will grow out of them, thus reflecting the ability of individuals to continue the “highly abstractive leap from the local and dynastic to national and then to democratic consciousness” to a post-national level (Habermas 2001: 102). At the same time, it has been argued that cosmopolitan democracy and global citizenship should be seen not only as transformative political projects that are driven by the obligation of acting so as to promote human rights, justice, and cultural diversity, but also as being connected to a global ethics for which the “problem of responsibility and solidarity as opposed to rights” is central, especially in response to the presence of violence (Delanty 2009: 89–90). Global ethics needs to be dialogical and as such driven by the demand to incorporate the perspective of the other and to engage in a mutual questioning of assumptions. At the same time, the global ethics should not be dismissive of “the emotional dimension of commitment and solidarity,” which indicates that the best way to understand it, is as a “moral consciousness that is rooted in emotional responses to global issues” (Delanty 2009: 97–8). The argument in favor of adding a global ethics to cosmopolitanism as a political project assumes that to be cosmopolitan does not mean to escape locality or nation, but rather it is “participation in a particular, if potentially broad, process of cultural production and social interconnection that spans boundaries” (Calhoun 2008: 443 and 2003: 544). The demand is that cosmopolitan citizens should develop the attitudes, sensibilities, and emotions, as well as the virtues that would make them sensitive to the duties of supporting human rights, of fighting for justice, and of acting against violence in the world (Smith 2007: 39 and 395

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Turner 2002: 50 and 2001). The line of argument brings an important shift in moral cosmopolitanism, which is “based on the idea of loyalty to humanity” or on dialogic reason, the universal capacity human beings have for dialogue (Delanty 2009: 54–5), while connecting it, at the same time, deeper to cultural cosmopolitanism, understood as “as a form of world disclosure,” which consists in the “creation and articulation of communicative models of world openness in which societies undergo transformation in their self-understanding as a result of coming into contact with each other” (Delanty 2009: 67–8). The shift in the idea of moral cosmopolitanism refers to the fact that morality is not only a matter of justice, universality, and impartiality, which takes individuals as the “most significant units of moral concern,” as stated by moral cosmopolitanism, but also a matter of care, responsibility, trust, and solidarity (Clark Miller 2010: 146–7 and Appiah 2005). This is a perspective on moral cosmopolitanism that is developed by the ethics of care. According to this, the prevalent moral question is not “what is just?” but rather “how to respond?” to difference and to the needs of others (Gilligan 2008: 469 and 1982). The feminist ethics of care sees caring as being fundamental to human life. Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care, on the most general level, as a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (Tronto 1993: 103) The ethics of care begins with a moral and “a social ontology of connection” (Lawson 2007: 3), according to which persons are relational and interdependent rather than self-sufficient rational individuals, as well as “at least partly constituted by their social ties” (Held 2006: 119, 46), which defines them as selves-in-connection (Clark Miller 2011: 396). The claim is that the existence of independent, autonomous, and rational individuals, which the liberal approach to morality and politics takes as the basic units of human life, relies on human interdependency and on caring relations (Held 2006: 43). Central to the ethics of care is the recognition of the finitude and vulnerability of human beings, “their susceptibility to suffering and needing” (Clark Miller 2011: 397), which makes them dependent on others (Engster 2005: 59). However, while recognizing the centrality of dependence in human life, the feminist ethics of care argues for the importance of learning “how to accept dependence and recognise it not as a weakness and opportunity for exploitation, but as a natural feature of social relations” (Robinson 2011a: 855). While all human beings are dependent, the aim of a critical ethics of care is to move towards increased interdependence, thus recognizing the pervasive role of care in human lives, the fact that individuals are both caregivers and care-receivers, as well as the fact that dependence and autonomy are not mutually exclusive (Tronto 1993: 162–3 and Slote 2007: 60). The ethics of care values the ability of individuals to be respectful of others by seeing them as being worthy of attention and responsiveness, attentive (able to care about the needs of others), responsible (willing to take care of the needs of others), competent in providing care, responsive to difference, that is, aware of the “possibilities of abuse that come with vulnerability” (Tronto 1993: 127–35 and Engster 2005: 54–5), as well as able to show empathy and even compassion for the suffering and pain of others. Moreover, the ethics of care emphasizes contextuality and the embeddedness of moral agents, the fact that they are “situated in a nexus of human relationships” and are “persons with specific identities” (Clark Miller 2010: 149). Thus, more than moral cosmopolitanism, the ethics of care takes into consideration the cultural connections and the social ties that individuals have, their life stories, as well as the specific character that needs and practices of care develop across cultures. 396

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Reflecting all these features, the ethics of care accentuates partiality rather than impartiality. However, by valuing partiality and human embeddedness, the ethics of care also argues that individuals have obligations to care for distant others and for strangers and that cosmopolitan care should be an important ability of global responsible citizens. By cultivating a caring, empathic, and compassionate imagination cosmopolitan citizens can learn to indirectly listen to those who are in need and suffering and thus be moved to mobilize themselves to necessary activism and political action. Moreover, the hope is that cosmopolitan citizens would be able to bring into the global public realm their caring skills in ways that would increase their openness and their ability for dialogue and cultural learning thus contributing to the democratization of care. Nevertheless, to thus value and practice care does not mean to divorce it from issues of justice and rights, but to rather see the two of them as complementing each other (Held 1995: 128–32 and Tronto 1993: 166). As Fiona Robinson argues, “relations of responsibility and care” are the basis of human security and, consequently, human rights cannot be realized “in the absence of robust, equitable, well-resourced relations and networks of care at the household, community, state, and transnational level” (2011b: 44, 55, and 59). In sum, giving reality to cosmopolitanism as a political project, which acts for the promotion of human rights, global justice, and cultural diversity, requires, as an important part of a global ethics, the practice and value of care and, consequently, democratic caring citizens. Relying on literature from social and political thought, philosophy, and feminist care ethics, I argue that cosmopolitan citizens should engage in a threefold form of care: care for the self, care for others, and care for the world. All three forms of cosmopolitan care are intertwined with each other. Care for the self should cultivate the ability/virtue of individuals to reflect and to be critical of their own traditions, which is an important quality of cosmopolitans, but also to think about their own lives as being an expression of freedom that is unavoidably intertwined with the lives of others (both close and distant) and with care for them, which is required for the creation of cosmopolitan solidarities. The aim of the cosmopolitan care for others is to contribute to their flourishing and wellbeing, thus empowering them to become participants in global forms of dialogue about what it means to care and about what we shall care about as global citizens. An important asset of global dialogue is the ability to patiently listen to others and to imaginatively respond to their needs as they are defined by their particular socio-cultural and historical contexts. Finally, I contend that, both care for the self and care for others need to be complemented by care for the world. The latter refers to the creation of a global in-between space, of institutions, norms, and policies, which both brings cosmopolitan citizens together and separates them from each other (world). An important aspect of caring for the world refers to the ability of cosmopolitan citizens to engage in a form of thinking that aims at changing existing (local and national) institutions and norms in light of the ideal of being a citizen of the world.

Cosmopolitan citizenship, self-care, and responsibility Ulrich Beck argues that the contemporary world, which is characterized by the increasing presence of global risks (2006: 35), calls for a reinvention of politics and of the political subject in a way that “places globality at the heart of political imagination, action, and organization” (2010: 222–3), a task hard to complete given the radical individualism of late modern societies. The reinvention of politics is pressing given the need to form a “shared space of responsibility and agency bridging all national frontiers and divides” (Beck 2006: 23), and to develop a “consciousness of cosmopolitan solidarity,” which dealing with “the limited controllability of the dangers we have created for ourselves” requires (Beck 2010: 225). The reinvention of politics and of the political subject is also 397

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pressing given the danger that collective identities could be defined not along the lines of cosmopolitanism, but, instead, along those of fundamentalism, in the attempt to resist or attack the late modern process of individualization, as well as in reaction to the growing presence of transnationals, a situation that can be both enticing and threatening (Beck 2006: 66). Redrawing solidarity in late modern societies along global lines necessitates a new ethics, which would be made possible by the fact that “thinking of oneself and living for others” do not exclude each other and by the fact that being an “individual does not exclude caring about others.” At the same time, the reinvention of politics and of the political subject should be moved by a renewed emphasis on passion and emotions, not only on efficiency, as well as on the ability to listen to others and to trust them (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 222, 220). Beck’s call for the reinvention of politics and solidarity in late modernity suggests that the task might rely to a large extent on the ability individuals have to care both for themselves and for others. According to a line of argument in contemporary political theory, which is inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, practices of self-care (therapeutic ethics) can make an important contribution to the coming into being of a democratic ethos of pluralization, of openness, appreciation of difference, and transformation, all values that belong to cosmopolitanism. According to this corpus of literature, self-care is understood as the self-reflexive creation and transformation of the individual, which is an act of freedom that is, nevertheless, not divorced from care for others and from responsibility for the world. Self-care is intersubjective in a double sense. It is a situated practice, which requires the participation and the care of others (it is relational), and a precondition for being able to care for others (it is responsible) (Myers 2013: 34–5). The aim of self-care is to make individuals better democratic citizens through the cultivation of attitudes and virtues that would make them more open to difference and more appreciative of its role in the constitution of their own identities. While irony and the critical ability to see one’s own traditions and values from a distance and with a sense of estrangement are central virtues to be cultivated through practices of self-care, the aim of self-care is to, eventually, enable individuals to pair the practice of irony and their freedom to make themselves with care for others. As Foucault argues, the role of critique is not only to help individuals to distance themselves from their own traditions, but also to expand the bonds of friendship and affection, of solidarity with “the whole of humankind,” which is an important part of rethinking the function of true politeia, as being not a question of war and peace, revenues and taxes in the city, but as being about “happiness and misfortune, the freedom and slavery of the whole of humankind” (2011: 300, 303). Among the virtues that self-care should form in individuals, critical responsiveness to difference, agonistic respect, and presumptive generosity occupy an important place. Critical responsiveness denotes “the disposition to listen with new ears to a movement that may jostle elements in your identity,” while critically deciding, at the same time, whether the “movement promises to support or curtail the spirit of pluralism” (Connolly 1991: XXIX) thus, resisting the temptation “to reduce the other to what some ‘we’ already is” (Connolly 1995: XVII). Agonistic respect for difference makes the “engagement between contending constituencies” possible (Connolly 1995: 16, 89), while presumptive generosity defines “a quality of initial openness and attentiveness toward difference that bears witness to or expresses a mimetic relationship with the agonistic becoming or presencing of life, thus avoiding the transformation of difference into hostile otherness” (White 2009: 48, 22). Presumptive generosity is thus meant to make democratic citizens aware of the fact that the other is not an obstacle between them and truth but a partner that can reveal to them aspects of the truth that they did not consider previously. The aim of self-care is to resist normalization, by inventing new modes of subjectivity, and to denaturalize identities, by showing their constructed and relational nature (their indebtedness to 398

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difference), which contributes to the emergence of a democratic ethos of pluralization and to the reworking of the contemporary imagination of diversity (Connolly 1995: 37). The hope is that citizens that cultivate such virtues and dispositions would develop forms of activism and solidarity across territorial borders that will exert pressure on states when they violate the democratic ethos of pluralization, because today “decent democrats must sometimes be disloyal to the state that seeks to own them morally and politically; and they must sometimes do so in the name of allegiances to a global condition that exceeds the confines of any state” (Connolly 1995: 156–7). In his argument for cosmopolitanism as a set of virtues, Bryan Turner makes an explicit connection between the ability of global citizens to take an ironic distance from their own culture and their ability to show respect, care, and stewardship for other cultures (Turner 2002: 57). Turner has been criticized for the fact that the cultivation of irony might not be enough to emotionally bring individuals to the point where they care for others (Smith 2007: 42). While irony can contribute to self-reflexivity, it needs to be combined with and tempered by other virtues and dispositions of mind, such as critical responsiveness, agonistic respect, and preemptive generosity, in order to move people from criticism to care for others (which seems to require more so the ability to be responsive and emotionally tuned to others in ways that irony and criticism are not). However, Turner himself comes closer to complicating the portrait of the virtuous cosmopolitan citizen, when he claims that the frailty and vulnerability that human beings share in the late modern condition of globalized risks and institutional precariousness can play an important role in “rebuilding community, solidarity, and inter-communal understanding” (Turner 2002: 59–60). Moreover, Turner does not fail to praise the emphasis that Montaigne placed on “the softer (feminine) values of mercy, compassion and tenderness” as central to the humanité that is required to moderate vengeance and resentment (2001: 144–5). The suggestion seems to be that, an important ability of cosmopolitan citizens, as participants to the global civil society and to the debates that constitute it, should be the (‘feminine’) ability to “listen carefully to what the other is saying,” as part of a form of care that is defined by Turner “as a controlled emotional engagement” (2001: 149). With this portion of the argument, Turner’s case for “ironic cosmopolitanism” crosses into or rather intersects the feminist ethics of care and its argument for the importance of cosmopolitan care. The feminist ethics of care makes an important contribution to the portrait of the cosmopolitan virtuous citizen, as well as to the global ethics and to the politics of care – a politics that militates for “an inclusive polity that is responsive to people’s needs” (Porter 2006: 116) – that would come with it.

Cosmopolitan care for others The feminist ethics of care argues that care does not belong exclusively to the private realm, but equally so to the social realm and to politics. Ethics and politics cannot be separate from each other, hence, the unavoidable political nature of care (Tronto 1993: 6; Sevenhuijsen 1998: 15 and Gould 2004: 45). For Joan Tronto, becoming more caring does not only make us more moral, but also “better citizens in a democracy.” An important part of thus becoming better democratic citizens is to recognize “how care – especially the question, who cares for whom? – marks relations of power” not only in local societies, but also globally (Tronto 1993: 167–8). Thus, according to Robinson, the role of a critical ethics of care is to expose “the ways in which dominant norms and discourses sustain existing power relations that lead to inequalities in the way societies determine how and on what basis care will be given and received” (2011b: 28). However, the hope is that to thus become aware of the intersection between power and care along the lines of gender, race, and class, should lead to the construction of “new forms of relationships, institutions, and actions that enhance mutuality and well-being” (Lawson 2007: 8), 399

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thus reducing the presence of unequal power relations both locally and globally. At the end of the day, the aim of a global ethics and politics of care should be to facilitate better interactive and communicative relations across cultures and national boundaries, which respect difference and have, at the same time, the patience and the emphatic and critical imagination to contribute to a better understanding of others, of their needs, hopes, and fears (Engster 2005: 51). Rather recently, the feminist ethics of care began arguing for the relevance that networks of care and responsibility have on a transnational and global level for issues related to justice, human rights, and human security; in short, for cosmopolitan care. One difficulty in moving the argument in this direction is to prove that it is realistic to think that individuals can really care about distant others and about strangers, given that “all caregiving involves a direct, intimate relationship between two or more people” (Feder Kittay, Jennings, and Wasunna 2005: 444), which can lead to parochialism, as a result of overstating the importance of the care relationship in which I am involved (Tronto 1993: 170–1) or to the colonization of others whom we care about and care for, due to the distance that removes the interpersonal nature of the relationship with them (Jaggar 1995: 197). Against these concerns, Robinson makes the case that globalization and the interconnectedness of the contemporary world reduce the distance between cultures and societies, between us and the distant and strange others, thus confronting us with their difference in new and challenging ways (1997: 125–7). As Beck points out, we assist today to the globalization of emotions and empathy, which makes people experience themselves as “parts of a fragmented, endangered civilization and civil society characterized by the simultaneity of events and of knowledge of this simultaneity all over the world” (2006: 42). The globalization of empathy bears the promise of increasing the sense of cosmopolitan responsibility and of (re)imagining the solidarity that needs to glue together the community of global citizens, which is demanded by the serious task of defining and dealing with the global risks that threaten contemporary societies, as it can succumb to new forms of essentialism and nationalism, in the name of protecting oppressed minorities (Beck 2006: 67). The challenge is how to engage the promise that the globalization of empathy and of emotion brings with it so that it does not turn anti-democratic and anti-cosmopolitan (anti-inclusionary). This is where the ethics of care and the idea of cosmopolitan care can provide useful insight. Central to the ethics of care is not only the idea that relations and responsibilities of care are central features of human life, but also that “morality consists in the practices of attentive caring for particular others” (Robinson 2011a: 847). Morality consists in an attentive and responsive listening to others. Thus, the aim of the ethics of care is “not simple ‘inclusion’ of the previously excluded into a system, community or dialogue that may in fact lead to further isolation,” but rather “a longer-term commitment of listening and responding to the needs of those who are excluded, marginalized or exploited, and therefore vulnerable.” Part of the longer-term commitment to listening to others is to understand “not only their needs, but also the ways in which their dependency came about historically,” thus making the responsibility and the duty to care for others to arise not from charity, but out of a “common history and an interdependent future” (Robinson 2011a: 853–4). To thus engage in an effective and active listening to others’ stories, fears, and hopes is the path to really respecting their difference and to allowing them the distance for becoming and for being themselves. Recognizing the importance of responding to the cultural, social, and historical context that defines people’s values and practices in ways that respect their difference and contribute to their empowerment, Sarah Clark Miller points out that a major aspect of cosmopolitan care is attention to the “importance of local understandings of care, need, and well-being,” because “to help people at a distance will often involve not meeting their needs directly, but rather finding ways to bolster the culturally specific forms of care in which they engage” (2011: 405–6). However, it 400

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can happen that the practice of active and patient listening might result in exposure to religious beliefs that we do not agree with, cultural practices that we do not comprehend, or stories of torture and suffering that might require change from us. Elisabeth Porter argues that, in moments like these, compassionate listening will be crucial to understanding others’ needs and stories and thus to keeping the discussion going (2006: 115). In its most general sense, cosmopolitan care for others can thus be characterized as a form of discourse ethics that values not only the ability to speak, but equally so the ability “to listen effectively” (Robinson 2011a: 855) to concrete others “with specific needs, talents and capacities” (Benhabib 1992: 159), as well as the virtues of patience, attentiveness, responsiveness, and trust (Robinson 2011a: 855, 860). Moreover, because, in many situations there would be a lack of “previous history and everyday relationship between the parties involved” (Porter 2006: 99), the ability to practice cosmopolitan care also requires the cultivation through narrative imagination of “sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs” (Nussbaum 1997: 9, 90). The commitment of responsive imagination is thus required for understanding and judging well the situations in which others’ needs, pain, and suffering require our attention, responsiveness, and care. However, cosmopolitan care does not divorce the ability to listen effectively and sympathetically to others and be responsive to their needs, fears, and hopes from the critical responsibility to become aware of where we “are situated in terms of global power structures” and of how we “might inadvertently contribute to the creation of distant need, suffering and oppression” (Clark Miller 2010: 155). Thus, one important aspect of the cosmopolitan care for others is to reframe responsibility through the challenging of the neoliberal market logics “that intensify the marginalization of care by expressing (seemingly) everything in terms of personal responsibility or competition between communities,” thus making it possible to assume “responsibility for global inequality, indebtedness, and health/environmental disasters” and to understand that the way we live our ordinary lives is implicated in inequality (Lawson 2007: 5–6). In this sense, being a cosmopolitan citizen who cares for others starts at home, through the ability to critically examine and transform our daily life and habits, our taken-for-granted values and practices.

Cosmopolitan care for the world While care for the self focuses on the cultivation of virtues and dispositions and care for others focuses on relations and responsibilities, care for the world, a concept that is associated with the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, focuses on features of milieus (Myers 2013: 122). Ella Myers argues that care for the world is about “working with others to make the world or, more accurately, certain places, laws, customs, and practices within it, more hospitable for every human being” (2013: 115). Thus, one important aspect of caring for the world is to transform collective arrangements so that to meet the basic needs of others. In short, to care for the world means to make it a home. Another important aspect of caring for the world entails “creating and sustaining democratic practices that enable the world to emerge as an in-between” (Myers 2013: 126), that is, as a public space that brings people together (under common norms and institutions, under a common language) and separates them at the same time (respects their difference). Translated on a cosmopolitan level, care for the world thus understood would mean the transformation of global arrangements (practices, institutions, policies) so that violence, suffering, and pain are alleviated throughout the world and the basic biological needs and social capabilities of people are satisfied worldwide, thus empowering them to live a life of human flourishing and well-being (Engster 2005: 51–3). An example of thus caring for the world and of cosmopolitan care for others would be to foster social policies that provide care for the caregivers that cross national boundaries, thus reflecting the fact that wealthy countries have an ethical obligation “to 401

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mitigate the hardship of poorer countries facing problems of longterm care,” that is, the costs of neglecting care at home for their own children, spouses, parents (Feder Kittay, Jennings, and Wasunna 2005: 449). Cosmopolitan care for the world would also mean “to promote and support cosmopolitan institutions and arrangements” through the development of a cosmopolitan solidarity that will aim to establish “a worldly space that can house speech and action that transcends national boundaries” (Smith 2007: 47). The speech or dialogue that would take place in this worldly space would be inclusionary, to a large extent due to the ability of the participants to affectively and effectively listen to others, to their life stories, to their needs, fears, and hopes. Thus, while this dialogue will create commonalities it will not do so to the detriment of uniqueness and difference. William Smith argues that, to thus be able to care for the world, individuals would need (to cultivate) the virtue of worldliness. The cosmopolitan virtue of worldliness requires that we cultivate self-reflexivity so that we can become critical of the “world we inhabit or of the group to which we ‘belong.’” It requires a heightened feeling and responsibility for the creation and preservation of a common public space where speech and action can take place, as well as excellence in the skills we exhibit “in our worldly performances and in our public judgments” (Smith 2007: 46–7). Part of the skills that are relevant to the virtue of worldliness belong to what Arendt calls the life of the mind. The life of the mind includes the ability to think, to will, and the capacity to judge, to understand, and to imagine. To care for the world seems thus to be made possible by the complex skill to think, without dissolving all values and meanings (all attachments), to will/ act, in ways that make change possible without falling into the terror of utopianism, and to judge, without becoming self-righteous and “scholastic or coldly analytical” (Fine 2007: 127, 129). Drawing on his interpretation of Arendt’s notion of the life of the mind, Robert Fine argues that cosmopolitan care for the world requires that individuals engage in reflective judgment, defined as the ability to tell right from wrong in the absence of fixed rules. Reflective judgment is always made within the context of a particular community (thus it does not require individuals to escape locality and nation, the existing world to which they belong). It is situated. At the same time, reflective judgment strives for universality, which means that, we “must judge as members of a world community and take our bearings from the idea of being world citizens” (Fine 2007: 126); that is, we should take our bearing from norms that have no visible existence in our societies. Cosmopolitan citizens, who care for the world, would cultivate the capacity for reflective judgment, in recognition of the fact that late modern societies require them in many instances to think without bannisters. However and more importantly, reflective judgment is a form of cosmopolitanism because it brings the particular (the present culture and society) and the universal (the distant, but not less real, world community) together. To engage in reflective judgment means thus to value the existing world, while constantly trying to change it in light of the universal, through an interpretation and transformation of existing values, norms, and institutions. Reflective judgment requires from individuals to be committed and attached to the existing world and thus care for the local communities that lend significance to their particular lives (Appiah 2005: 222–3), while able, at the same time, to distance themselves from existing cultural, social, and political arrangements, in order to be able to critically transform them. Thus understood, reflective judgment, as a form of cosmopolitan thinking, requires understanding and imagination. It requires an imagination that is both “sensory, namely, responsive to and intimately involved with things” and post-sensory, “namely, representative of the thing in its absence” (Czobor-Lupp 2014: 70). If cosmopolitanism is to take seriously both local attachments and the critical-normative dimension, in light of which these can be transformed, then it needs to include a form of care that balances the ability of the citizens to be attentive and respond to what is unique and 402

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particular and the ability to transform existing social and institutional arrangements in light of the universal. This form of care would require a complex form of cultural imagination. As empathic and receptive, imagination makes it possible to feel one’s way into others’ configurations of meaning. As reflective, imagination makes individuals aware of their limitations, while revealing, at the same time, their indebtedness to others, their interdependence. Finally, creative imagination invents the language for understanding and judging new situations and experiences, thus, being quintessential to individual freedom and autonomous reasoning (Czobor-Lupp 2014: 152 and 2017). Not only that such complex form of cultural imagination would make possible a criticism that can expand the bonds of affection and solidarity, but it would enrich at the same time the communicative abilities of the cosmopolitan citizens who are engaged in the debates and the global public sphere that the emergence of a global ethics requires (Delanty 2009: 97).

Conclusions I argued that the global ethics that cosmopolitanism as a transformative political project requires, should add to its emotional dimension the practice and value of care. To think about individuals from the perspective of an ethics of care means to see them as having needs, as being relational and interdependent beings, and as vulnerable. To invoke the neediness and fragility of human beings challenges the masculine liberal image of humans as self-sufficient and autonomous. Instead, an alternative picture emerges that shows humans as beings that are a part of complex networks of care and responsibility, where they play the roles of both caregivers and care-receivers. Such beings are, unavoidably, both autonomous (agents) and dependent. To invoke the potential vulnerability of all humans means to imagine our equality in neediness and dependence. If one of the most urgent tasks of late modernity is to reinvent politics and solidarity along global lines, thus allowing humans to define and deal with global risks, paradoxically, to invoke the interdependence and vulnerability of human beings might work as a powerful force in the late modern reinvention of agency, of politics and solidarity, along global lines. Moreover, the arguments for the centrality of care in human life emphasize the relevance that the ability to be attentive, responsive, and imaginative have in communicating with each other. One implication is that democratic citizens need to be caring persons, that is, attentive and responsive persons, an ability that could prevent the derailment of late modern societies in the direction of essentialism, which, as a form of relativism and tribalism that strictly separates indentities from each other, works against cosmopolitanism (Beck 2006: 114). To bring into politics the caring ability to be attentive and responsive, to patiently listen to others, to be able to feel with them and imagine their experiences is crucial for the recognition and respect of difference. However, it also speaks to the capacity human beings have to understand what is different and make it familiar, bring it home, accept it as another facet of what it means to be human. In this sense, a caring and responsive imagination bears a strong democratic and cosmopolitan potential. Last but not least, given the complex realities of late modernity (individualization, cosmopolitanization), but also the requirement of cosmopolitan democracy for a multilayered form of citizenship that needs to grow out of local attachments, cosmopolitan citizens should engage in a threefold form of care: care for the self, for others, and for the world. I claimed that the aim of self-care is to cultivate those virtues and dispositions in individuals that make them not only critical, self-reflexive, and able to estrange and detach themselves from their own traditions and forms of life, but also open, attentive, and responsive to difference (a form of care for others). I contended that care for others is meant to lead not to paternalism/maternalism, but to foster, instead, the others’ ability to care for themselves and to live a flourishing life, thus building their agency and the ability to become partners in the global debates and the global civil society that 403

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a dialogic global ethics requires. Finally, I argued that care for the world involves the creation of cosmopolitan institutions and arrangements through the ability to engage in a specific form of political judgment. To be a cosmopolitan who cares for the world would then mean to be able to transform, through acts of reflective judgment, the existing world, by giving reality and making visible universal norms, through the interpretation and transformation of existing norms and institutions, and of the language in which they are expressed. Reflective judgment relies on a cosmopolitan imagination that can be critical, because it is responsive to particularity and creative, that is, able to envisage alternative visions of order.

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. (2005) The Ethics of Identity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beck, Ulrich. (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. (2010) ‘The Cosmopolitan Manifesto’, in Garett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds.), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich and Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth. (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage Publications. Benhabib, Seyla. (1992) Situating the Self, London: Routledge. Calhoun, Craig. (2003) ‘“Belonging” in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary’, Ethnicities, 3(4): 531–68. Calhoun, Craig. (2008) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 14(3): 427–48. Clark Miller, Sarah. (2010) ‘Cosmopolitan Care’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2): 145–57. Clark Miller, Sarah. (2011) ‘A Feminist Account of Global Responsibility’, Social Theory and Practice, 37(3): 391–412. Connolly, William. (1991) Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, William. (1995) The Ethos of Pluralization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Czobor-Lupp, Mihaela. (2014) Imagination in Politics: Freedom or Domination? Lanham: Lexington Books. Czobor-Lupp, Mihaela. (2017) ‘Herder on the Emancipatory Power of Religion and Religious Education’, Review of Politics, 79(2): 239–61. Dallmayr, Fred. (2003) ‘Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political’, Political Theory, 31(3): 421–42. Delanty, Gerard. (2009) Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engster, Daniel. (2005) ‘Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and the Obligation to Care’, Hypatia, 20(3): 50–74. Feder Kittay, Eva, Jennings, Bruce and Wasunna, Angela A. (2005) ‘Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 13(4): 443–69. Fine, Robert. (2007) Cosmopolitanism, London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (2011) The Courage of Truth, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilligan, Carol. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, Carol. (2008) ‘Moral Orientation and Moral Development’, in Alison Bailey and Chris J. Cuomo (eds.), The Feminist Philosophy Reader, 467–77, Boston: McGraw-Hill. Gould, Carol. (2004) Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. (2001) Postnational Constellation, Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, David. (2010) ‘Reframing Global Governance’, in Garett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds.), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, Virginia. (1995) ‘The Meshing of Care and Justice’, Hypatia, 10(2): 128–32. Held, Virginia. (2006) Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaggar, Alison M. (1995) ‘Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason’, in Virginia Held (ed.), Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder: Westview. Lawson, Victoria. (2007) ‘Geographies of Care and Responsibility’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1): 1–11. Myers, Ella. (2013) Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Nussbaum, Martha. (1997) Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. (2010) ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, in Garett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds.), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, Cambridge: Polity Press. Porter, Elisabeth. (2006) ‘Can Politics Practice Compassion?’ Hypatia, 21(4): 97–123. Robinson, Fiona. (1997) ‘Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations’, Alternatives: Global, Local, and Political, 22(1): 113–33. Robinson, Fiona. (2011a) ‘Stop Talking and Listen: Discourse Ethics and Feminist Care Ethics in International Political Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39(3): 845–60. Robinson, Fiona. (2011b) The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sevenhuijsen, Selma. (1998) Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics, London: Routledge. Slote, Michael. (2007) The Ethics of Care and Empathy, London: Routledge. Smith, William. (2007) ‘Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Virtue, Irony, and Worldliness’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10(1): 37–52. Tronto, Joan. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York and London: Routledge. Turner, Bryan. (2001) ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: On Religion in a Global Age’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4(2): 131–52. Turner, Bryan. (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism’, Theory, Culture, & Society, 19(1–2): 45–63. White, Stephen K. (2009) The Ethos of a Late Modern Citizen, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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‘[T]he use of communication media transforms the spatial and temporal organi[s]ation of social life, creating new forms of action and interaction and new modes of exercising power’ (John B. Thompson, 1995: 4).

The aim of this chapter is to present a specific case for the Internet as a communications media enabling the relational and cognitive conditions for the discursive construction of distinctive cultural and political types of critical cosmopolitanism. In contrast to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as a universal moral framework of normative principles, a ‘critical cosmopolitan sociology’ advanced in this chapter roots the intersections of ‘self, other and world’ within a relational ontology of the social, that is, in the transnational field of social relations where symbolic struggles, differences and conflicts play out in dialogical exchanges creating distinct types of cosmopolitan relationships in moments of openness (Delanty, 2009: 79; 2012b: 43; Agustín, 2017: 701; Mendieta, 2009). Indeed, as an approach, critical cosmopolitanism ‘is about the [very] extension of the moral and political horizons of peoples, societies, organisations and institutions’ grounded in a ‘conceptualisation of the social world as an open horizon in which new cultural models take shape’ in encounters between the local and the global (Delanty, 2012a: 3, 2006: 27; Mignolo, 2000). However, with articulations of social mediation increasingly cutting across national borders in cultural and political flows, this chapter will argue that virtual expressions of critical cosmopolitan relations now take shape in technologically mediated networks of symbolic exchanges, communications and interactions across the Internet. With this animus, the chapter will begin by challenging the core premises of existing critical-narratives of virtual cosmopolitanism by critiquing its conceptions of the virtual and cosmopolitanism. By advancing an understanding of its status as a dominant cultural mode of sociotechnical mediation, the second section argues that (a) the Internet, as a technological expression of the virtual is embedded within the relational, cognitive and symbolic structure of the social world where (b) its transmission of cultural meanings, codes and signs across the local and the global open up spaces for specific types of soft cultural cosmopolitan relationships found not only in expressions of curiosity and openness arising in online consumptions of other cultures, but also in a greater intersubjective reflexiveness emerging out of discursive intercultural encounters. The 406

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final section connects this discursive construction of virtual spaces to harder political expressions of cosmopolitan relationships located in the affective structures of subpolitical communications where (a) networks of global justice orientated toward a shared normative culture and (b) extensions of political community shaped by an inclusive politics of recognition emerge in transnational networks of solidarity.

Virtualising social capital: bonding or bridging? Because cosmopolitanism has its roots in the communicative structures embedded within social processes, the prospects for a virtual cosmopolitanism are contingent upon the socio-technological capabilities of the Internet to not just mediate, but reciprocate and bridge cross-cultural connections, ties and networks within and across national boundaries. For this reason, the idea of virtual cosmopolitanism as a ‘cosmopolitanism . . . facilitated by mediated social spaces’ is framed by a debate on the explicit effects of the Internet on social capital (Sobre-Denton, 2015a: 129). By constituting ‘connections among individuals – social networks and . . . norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness’ the virtualisation of social capital has created a series of critical-narratives rejecting its cosmopolitan possibilities by advancing an attenuated conception of the virtual as embodying inauthentic and denigrated expressions of the social and community measured against its face-to-face counterparts (Putnam, 2000: 19). These critical-narratives can be taxonomised under the rubrics of the time-displacement thesis, the weak thesis and the homogenisation thesis. The time-displacement thesis is abstracted from a small cross-section of earlier empirical-theoretical analyses extrapolating the Internet to have corrosive effects on social capital by ‘degrad[ing]’, ‘fragment[ing]’ and ‘displac[ing]’ the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ forms of face-to-face interactions (Nie and Erbring, 2000; McPherson et al., 2006; Turkle, 2011) and losing its ‘affective and soulorientated communion’ (Birkerts, 1994) by creating a depthlessness of superficial, ephemeral and isolated interactions (Barber, 1998; Luke, 1997). This thesis implicates the increasing usage of the Internet in corroding collective social capital by ‘individuali[s]ing’ leisure time and ‘disrupting opportunities for social capital formation’ as it was once contextualised within the thick bonds of face-to-face social relations between friends, neighbours and relatives anchoring a sense of belonging in ‘real’ communities (Chen, 2013: 407; Putnam, 1995: 9; Olds and Schwartz, 2009; Hlebec et al., 2006). Along this line of reasoning, this thesis advances its critique to encompass a conceptualisation of virtual community as transmogrifying into a ‘pseudocommunit[y]’ parasitic on the real-life ‘authentic’ expressions of belongingness created in face-to-face communities, ‘a progressive disavowal of the real . . . a culture of experiential disengagement [and] a pacification of embodied experience’ (Robins, 1999: 166), responsible for creating a sense of alienation and a loss of ‘real’ community (Ludlow, 1996: xv; Stoll, 1995; Parsell, 2008; Dreyfus, 2001; Galston, 2000). From the logic of its premise, this thesis would not just reject the very idea of a virtual cosmopolitanism, but would also extend to its attrition of corporal cosmopolitanism situated in contiguous communities. But, this premise suffers from presupposing an erroneous dichotomy – setting the virtual in opposition to the real – which romanticises the social as an apotheosis of the latter vis-à-vis rooted in thick, contiguous, face-to-face social relations with the former collapsing into an inauthentic mimesis, simulation or hyperrealisation of the real. However, a longitudinal study by Woolgar (2002), coupled with drawing from our modern experiences of mediated sociality suggests the virtual to be every part of the real, not set against or replacing it, but supplementing, if not, enhancing the social (2002: 16–18). By abstracting elements from this argument, the weak thesis challenges the possibilities of a virtual cosmopolitanism, not according to a time-displacement hypothesis, but on the grounds of its failure to replicate the strong, substantive and enduring social connections and experiences – with 407

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the cultural other – emerging out of interactions and communities of co-presence. In The Experience of Virtual Communities: Cosmopolitan or Voyeur? Komito (2010) argues to this effect, by asserting that most online social aggregations constitute ‘normative communities’ constructed, not out of strong affective ties, but from a highly instrumentalistic, egoistic individualism creating transient connections of reciprocated communications from shallow, fragile and weak cognitive ties codified around idiosyncratic engagements (2010: 146). This virtualisation of community routed across segmented, flexible and individualistic networks, according to Komito (2010), amounts to nothing more than an ephemeral coalescence of disaggregated online ‘voyeurs’ with a diluted sense of commitment, trust and reciprocity shaping superficial experiences of cultural diversity incapable of replicating the thick and sustained intercultural exchanges essential for cosmopolitan experiences (2010: 149). But, this thesis makes a misplaced assumption about the nature of cosmopolitanism: it is not exclusively rooted in the thick, lasting and propinquitous networks of social ties, but increasingly found in the broader, diffuse and plural networks of weak ties opening up communicative moments, in virtual spaces, extending across not just the local, but also the global. As Granovetter (1973) famously argued, in his treatise on ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, its expansive networks create wider channels, through which more heterogeneous ideas, influences and information can disperse beyond localities broadening worldviews, exchanges, knowledge and a sense of belongingness in the world (1973: 1370–3). Hence, it is not in the permanence of strong ties, but in the momentariness of weak ties – stretching across cultural boundaries in despatialised networks – where the greatest prospect for a virtual cosmopolitanism can be found as cosmopolitanism emerges not necessarily from longevity, but in moments of world openness. Likewise, the specific structure of these weak ties is not given its content by a narcissistic moral individualism, but by a convivial networked individualism implicit in shaping complex social configurations around multiple, diverse and diffuse networks of choice creating the intersubjective basis for the discursive and imaginative construction of community. Thus, instead of representing an imitation of a corporal community, the more abstract virtual community is a different way to imaginatively pursue a modern sense of belongingness as communities are ‘distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson, 1983: 6). Therefore, as an important basis for virtual cosmopolitanism, the virtual community is neither thick, concrete nor enduring, but just as legitimate as a ‘mode of consciousness’ shaped by ‘a symbolically-constituted level of experience and meaning’ with an imaginative structure ‘underpinned by the search and desire to pursue a sense of belonging’ (Delanty, 2010: 153). The homogenisation thesis, on the other hand, locates its incredulities for virtual cosmopolitanism in a wider sociological tendency toward creating homophilic networks, interactions and groupings. According to Zuckerman (2013), in Digital Cosmopolitans, the electronic flows of interactions and ideas may have the theoretical capabilities to promote diverse networks across cultural borders, but, in practice, the concentration of individuals’ information flows circulate within the bordered, local and homogenous networks of one’s meaningful lifeworld (2013: 70). This is the unconscious effects of homophily or ‘the love of the same’ operating as a basic structural principle shaping levels of exposure to diversity in our lifeworlds where networks, exchanges and interactions coalesce around preferences toward commonalities of ‘ethnicity, gender, age, religion, education, occupation and social class’ (Zuckerman, 2013: 70). Despite its promises of greater diversity, the Internet, according to Zuckerman (2013), has only created an ‘imaginary cosmopolitanism’ where most interactions are among ‘people with whom we have a great deal in common’ (2013: 70). This too extends to the composition of virtual communities which are said to constitute ‘socio-spatial enclaves’ crystallising around similarities of opinion, belief, taste, interest and also prejudice shaping ‘pernicious communities’ of polarising thought and extremist ideology evidenced in anti-cosmopolitan movements of right-wing xenophobic-ethnic nationalisms, 408

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white supremacist groups and terrorist networks promoting intolerance, hatred and violence (Calhoun, 1998: 384; Parsell, 2008: 42). The crux of this thesis is that the Internet only strengthens the bonding of social capital vis-à-vis connections that are ‘inward looking . . . reinforc[ing] exclusive [or] “categorical” identities’ (Putnam, 2000: 22; Calhoun, 1998: 388). Despite its more extreme cases, as evidenced in pernicious communities, the homogenisation thesis exaggerates the effects of homophily: its existence does not ipso facto presuppose the affirmation of a singular, all-encompassing and homogenistic categorical identity as homophilic networks coalescing around common interests, beliefs or orientations can cut across a wide spectrum of culturalhistorical experiences, horizons and categorical differences intersecting various markers of identity from ethnicity, age, gender to religion class and sexuality; as Calhoun (2002) admits, ‘not all individual identities reflect categories of similarity’ (2002: 161). Furthermore, more recent sociological empirics have shown the Internet to be conducive for ‘bridging’ social capital, that is, creating ‘inclusive, outward looking networks and heterogeneous groups’ ‘encompassing people across diverse social cleavages’ extending to appropriations of ‘e-mail’ (Zhao, 2006), ‘blogs’ (Stefanone and Jang, 2008; Qian and Scott, 2007; Herring et al., 2005) and ‘social media sites’ (Ellison et al., 2007; Kujath, 2011; Putnam, 2000: 22). Hence, on reflection, these critical-narratives present an unconvincing case against the notion of virtual cosmopolitanism by (a) advancing a narrow conception of the virtual as an imitation of the real and (b) presupposing cosmopolitanism as a zero-sum condition. But, the existence of virtual anti-cosmopolitan trends does not negate virtual cosmopolitan possibilities: cosmopolitanism is less zero-sum and more of an emerging condition arising, in degrees of intensity, from the discursive interactions, exchanges and nexuses of transnationally mediated social relations.

The virtualisation of cosmopolitanism This critique is not to contextualise virtual cosmopolitanism within a wider teletopia of Internetexceptionalism or as a ‘technoromanticism’ (Coyne, 1999) espousing unique virtual milieux collapsing all ascriptive markers of social differentiation (Barlow, 1996) disembodying corporal subjectivities (Turkle, 1995; Poster, 1995) or constructing superior expressions of community (Rheingold, 2000: 20). By these accounts, the virtual inhabits a separate realm of social existence and thus fractured from the real in a fixed virtual/real dichotomy. But, this binary is a false dichotomy: the virtual is a constitutive, inseparable and indissoluble dimension of the real mediating the cognitive, symbolic and dialogic modes of human experience, but with its increasing cultural embeddedness, the Internet – as a technological expression of the virtual – comprises a major thread in the communication fabric of the social world (Shields, 2003: 23). It is as Castells (2001) describes ‘an extension of life as it is, in all its dimensions and with all its modalities’ (2001: 16). As an integral component of modern culture, the virtual is entangled within the core structures of social practice mediating most expressions of everyday life – from fashioning a sense of subjectivity, organising professional life, creating personal connections, accessing information to enabling artistic expressions, religious worship and forms of political resistance (Castells, 2013: 64). Hence with its roots embedded within the symbolic and imaginative structures of social relations connecting ‘neural networks’ across electronic networks of communication, the Internet as a media is actively used in the construction and transmission of meaning where its relational and cognitive environments give shape to a dialectics of closure and openness, that is, between the entwined courses of both anti-cosmopolitan trends and cosmopolitan moments (Castells, 2012: 5; Beck, 2006; Thompson, 1995). But, its capability to disperse and propagate symbolic meanings across cultural boundaries via digital communications has greatly enhanced its cosmopolitan possibilities. With the Internet positioned at the centre of a global communications environment, modern 409

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expressions of the virtual, in all its banal, routinised and habitual practices, now increasingly take the shape of hyperchaotic, instantaneous and deterritorialised digital flows ‘de-stabliz[ing] old hierarchies of scale’ ‘compressi[ng] [space] and de-sequencing time’ by stretching the contextuality of social life and its symbolic forms across national frames of reference (Sassen, 2004: 301; Castells, 2000 [1996]: 77, 2010: 21, 2001: 3). These cultural flows of information, signs, images, ideas and ideologies, circulating throughout global network scapes, attribute to shaping new imaginaries of the world by expanding the spatial horizons of our cultural experience, understandings and worldviews from outside our immediate locale (Appadurai, 1996: 35). Hence, it is in this ‘global [electronic] cultural economy’ where the cultural circulations of symbolic flows can open up multiple, diverse and interactive spaces broadening cultural exchanges, consumption and contact around expressions of curiosity and commonalities of interest. (Appadurai, 1996: 32). However, these electronic flows of cultural globalisation do not constitute a cultural homogenisation or westernisation vis-à-vis the subsumption of diverse cultures under a single dominant Western model, but, instead, as Held et al. (1999) contend, creates a broadening of opportunities and spaces for cultural pluralism, creolisation and hybridisation with greater interconnectivity from transnational circulations of international cinema, foreign music, TV, fashion, news, food, radio, languages to communications, exchanges and politics (1999: 374). As Norris and Inglehart (2009) contend, the intensification of electronic interconnectivity across the world has created a shift from national to cosmopolitan communications: we follow real-time news of events in Darfur or Baghdad on our laptops and Blackberries. Headlines about Barack Obama’s victory instantly surged around the globe connecting Kenyans celebrating in local villages with Americans rejoicing in Times Square. Travellers have access to Internet cafés in Bali, CNN in Doha Airport, or Die Hard movies in Beijing. Satellite TV from Al Jazeera and Al Arabia broadcasts reality television shows, music clips and images to 200 million Arab speakers from Morocco to Syria. People . . . in Belgium, the Netherlands, or Switzerland can receive dozens of foreign-language channels from Britain, Germany, Italy and France. (2009: 7) Thus, the cosmopolitan potential of the Internet is situated in its cultural status as a core anchorage point for transnational mediations of social practice – contextualised within its rich, imagistic and linguistic virtual landscapes – opening new symbolic spaces of intercultural contact across the local and the global, a type of world culture, as described by Hannerz (1990), where ‘increasing interconnectedness of varied local cultures [and] ‘network[s] of social relationships’ have created ‘distributed structures of expression’ and ‘flow[s] of meanings’ across borders (1990: 237–249). In this sense, cosmopolitanism implies a ‘post-western register of meaning . . . located neither on the national nor global level, but at the interface of the local and the global’ (Delanty, 2012b 41). However, as cosmopolitanism implies a deeper cultural engagement with the other, these plural transnational spaces do not constitute cosmopolitanism per se, as it is more than a simple condition of plurality, but offer important preconditions for an ontological framework of specific cosmopolitan relationships: a soft cultural cosmopolitanism as a type of ‘cultural omnivorousness’ can be located in ‘mode[s] of managing meaning . . . an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences’ (Hannerz, 1990: 238–9), a ‘curiosity about other cultural values’ (Delanty, 2014: 221) and a reflexiveness of one’s own culture evidenced in a recognition and tolerance of cultural diversity (Urry, 1995: 167). The notion of cultural openness as ‘an expression of interest, curiosity and willingness to recognise, engage and learn about the Other’ has been in evidence across the Internet in broader patterns of transcultural consumption, 410

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as indicated from a quantitative analysis of Eurobarometer data, where Verboord (2017) identified ‘positive associations’ between cultural openness and the everyday online practices of downloading, web-searching and consuming foreign books, television, film and music (2017: 476). In deeper, more reflexive cultural contact shaped by direct intersubjective engagements, McEwan and Sobre-Denton (2011) showed from an analysis of ‘INTASU’ (a Yahoo group page) that thicker interactions, exchanges and translations emerging out of intercultural communication facilitated cross-pollinations of social and cultural capital attributing to the discursive construction of a ‘third-culture community’ with its own normative structure of social rules, customs and codes of behaviour (2011: 256). Resonating with these findings, in a cross-cultural educational project set across the social network ‘Space2cre8’ Hull et al. (2010) found cosmopolitan moments emerging in dialogical exchanges stimulated by ‘intercultural triggers’ where courses of critical selfreflection were evidenced in immediate shifts in attitudes, understandings and actions ‘becoming for a time hospitable communicators able to recognise the Other in-themselves’ (2010: 361). These generative processes of cultural cosmopolitanism found in ‘creating new ideas, perceptions and interpretations of problems’ emerging from intercultural contact typify the communicative, symbolic and imaginative structures enshrined in shaping virtual cosmopolitan communities. But, with the formation of these communities constituted by its imaginative possibilities, they can radicalise invoking a ‘radical imaginary’ abstracted from wider symbolic materials of ‘social imaginary significations’ creating critical, transgressive and transformative projects where the institution of society is collectively imagined anew shaping spaces of tension, conflict and sociopolitical praxis (Castoriadis, 1987: 369). Therefore, this generative-cultural imaginary assembling communities-in-themselves can radicalise and transmutate into transformative-political communities-for-themselves vis-à-vis as communities of dissent where the imaginary becomes ‘the staging ground for [collective] action’ orientated toward the actualisation of ‘imagined worlds’ (Appadurai, 1996: 3–8). This radicalisation of the imaginary informs the critical component of the cosmopolitan imagination: its orientation toward a normative critique of social reality and search for imminent possibilities of self/societal transformation emerging out of dialogical encounters with the other (Delanty, 2012b 41). Hence, the normativity of critical cosmopolitanism is bound up with ‘the extension of the space[s] of the political’ (Delanty, 2012a: 3; Rumford, 2011 [2008]: 5).

A virtual cosmopolitics? The radicalisation in the content of the imaginary – as an expression of collective resistance – increasingly mobilises across the geopolitical boundaries of the state challenging concentrations of global power where transnational grievances cluster around supranational institutions and its imposition of a socioeconomic model shaping the ‘top-down hegemonic, neocolonial and neoliberal forces of globalisation’ (Bardhan and Sobre-Denton, 2015: 136). Because this imaginary is not just embedded, but shaped, according to Appadurai (1996), in transnational forms of social practice, it not only reflects, but crystallises around a heightened global consciousness politicising the systemic ramifications of ‘global risks’ created by incumbent power structures throughout transnational public spheres across civil society (1996: 31; Beck, 1999: 39). The discourses of global risk – from war, poverty, famine to financial collapse and climate change – are framed by a notion of global justice constituting a new master frame in which to mobilise subversions of dominant cultural codes in an extra-institutional subpolitics evidenced in the stretching of collective action, resistance and struggles across national borders (Strydom, 1999: 69; Beck, 1999: 39). With its status as an expansive articulation of cultural openness and inclusiveness, the concept of global justice as ‘a concern for matters of justice . . . extend[ing] 411

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beyond the borders of one’s state’ is a dominant political expression of critical cosmopolitanism as it can connect and unite a wide spectrum of differences in political, cultural and ethical orientations, across borders, in transnational expressions of collective actions mobilising around common grievances (Brock, 2012: 341). But, the virtual prospects for these political expressions of a critical cosmopolitanism are framed by a debate on whether political spaces, over the Internet, can be democratising or politically polarising? On one side of this debate, the Internet with its decentred, instantaneous and horizontal communications has been envisaged as conducive to democracy by creating open and inclusive transnational political spaces comparable to a ‘global electronic agora’ (Castells, 2001: 139), a ‘global public-sphere’ (Volkmer, 2003: 11) or ‘a global civil-society’ (Kaldor, 2003: 585) where the communication field of global politics and the structure of political communities are said to transnationally extend across social, cultural and political boundaries. On the other side of this debate, the Internet has been viewed as weakening incumbent democratic structures by creating isolated publics with homogeneous compositions demarcating political communities with reference to differences in political orientations and opinions where, according to Calhoun (1998), the ‘compartmentali[s]ation of community is antithetical to the social constitution of a vital public sphere’ (1998: 389). Resonating with Calhoun (1998), Habermas (2006) contends that this deterritorialisation of political publics has led to a denigration of politics, a rupturing and fragmentation of public opinion and discourse: In the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world tends instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated publics. Within established national public spheres, the online debates of web users only promote political communication, when news groups crystallize around the focal points of the quality press, for example newspapers and political magazines. (2006: 423) Along similar lines, Sunstein (2001) asserts that with its increasing customisation, the Internet caters political information around personal preferences shaping a ‘daily me’ intensifying a personalisation of politics subjectively filtered with ‘preferred points of view [structured] along divisions of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, wealth, age [and] political conviction’ necessitating the formation of ‘deliberative enclaves’ and polarisations of political publics (2001: 4). This cyber-balkanisation is given a degree of credence with increasing corporate-state expropriations of metadata and complex algorithms to construct user profiles, as Butcher (2012) notes, the EdgeRank algorithmic architecture used by Facebook filters selections and sequences of information based on a system of probabilistic relevance abstracted from users’ personal metadata (2012: 1167). But, as with the homogenisation thesis, the premise of cyber-balkanisation exaggerates the marginal/peripheral existence of extreme forms of fragmentation as characteristic, if not totalising of all online political spaces. However, these technological advances relate to another objection to its democratic potential by colonising its networks with new expressions of politico-economic power with cultural communications subject to a post-panoptic statecorporate surveillance apparatus extracting, categorising, retaining and commodifying almost all transactional metadata and content data (IP addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses to the verbatim content of transmissions) (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 65; Lyon, 2010: 325–6). This datafication of users’ communications, thoughts and personal activities constitutes, according to Ceyhan (2012), a new power dynamic with velocity and scope – a ‘new modality of [bio]power’ influencing, shaping and controlling most biosociological dimensions of individuals’ lives (2012: 412

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39). But, this technique of power is more embedded, hidden and silent operating on the level of cultural practice, as Beer (2009) and Lash (2007) suggest, it is algorithmic, protocological and post-hegemonic manifesting in ‘systems of management’ as an ‘everyday neoliberalism’ where metrics, data and analytics increasingly shape performances of the social world (2009: 987; 2007: 67). Despite its modern relevance, these datafication arguments fail to frame new technological assemblages of domination within a wider dialectics of power and resistance by placing too much analytic focus on power without acknowledging its shaping of new digital techniques, repertoires and spaces for resistance. In contrast to conceptualising it as a system of networks with isolated publics, the Internet is more a ‘bow-tie structure’ where common interests cluster around topical categories intermeshed by networks of hyperlinks structured by peer-recommendations, editing and filtering mechanisms (Benkler, 2006: 27). This intertwined structure does not preclude expressions of a daily me, which do exist, but is more representative of a ‘see-for-yourself ’ culture embodied in practices of sharing, tagging and linking references to political arguments in webs of hyperlinks acting to connect disparate topics, perspectives and orientations across a wide spectrum of critical publics (Benkler, 2006: 218). By situating the Internet in between the polarities of extreme inclusiveness/openness as a ‘global electronic agora’ (Castells, 2001) or extreme exclusiveness/ closure as networks of isolated publics (Habermas, 2006; Sunstein, 2001), it can be seen more as a constellation of networked publics where communication spaces form discursive enclaves that can (a) remain isolated/disconnected or (b) can be potentially democratising by connecting to wider public spheres both vertically (stretching across time/space in other avenues of the mass media) and/or horizontally (by overlapping with different publics (Maireder and Schlögl, 2014: 690; Benkler, 2006). In this sense, the conceptualisation of networked publics can give a greater account of its democratising potential in expressions of a transnational subpolitics where multiple, diffuse and plural compositions of critical publics and counterpublics can vertically/horizontally connect across borders in articulations of a post-foundational politics giving rise to a cosmopolitics characterised by a communicative diversity with an inclusiveness of voice cutting across cultures, languages, religions and political and moral orientations (Marchart, 2007: 176; Beck, 1999: 40). As a discursive expression of a subpolitics, these networked publics foster articulations of transnational solidarities and form ‘postnational communities of risk’ codifying around common elements in value systems, a shared ethics, commitment and dedication to issues of global risk centring on ‘the universali[s]ed demand of humanity, ecology and sustainability’ (Cohen and Rai, 2000; 152; Beck, 1999: 16). Its networks consist of a wide spectrum of distanciated identities, solidarities and collective identities stretching across geographical borders in mobilisations of political resistance evidenced, according to Kurasawa (2004), in the alternative globalisation or global justice movements (2004: 235; Staggenborg, 2012: 163). These movements have a diverse social base cutting across different ideological networks – from socialists, feminists, to environmentalists and anarchists – composing various cultural backgrounds, but with multiple belongings and flexible identities, they can converge, connect and unite around shared moral and ethical commitments (Edwards, 2014: 161; Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005: 239–40). The moral content of these political movements reflects a specific type of cosmopolitan relationship: the search, desire and discursive construction of a shared normative culture shaped by ‘the formation of a moral consciousness rooted in emotional responses to global issues, [a] concern with global ethics based on shared values, putting the non-national interest before the national interest’ (Delanty, 2012b: 44). In this sense, cosmopolitanism is ‘constitutive of a new politics’ with a strong ethical-moral content typified by mobilisations for global justice as it organises movements, in communicative engagements, across virtual networked publics and converges throughout urban spaces in collective 413

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political action (Delanty, 2012b: 44; Castells, 2012: 11). These waves of demonstrations, rallies and marches against incumbent power structures utilise electronic communications to internetwork across virtual spaces, media platforms and transnational activist networks (ATTAC, PGA, WSF) to mobilise resistance across the globe evidenced in the G8 summit in Genoa in (2001); the European summits in Barcelona and Florence in (2002); the G20 in London (2009); Occupy Wall Street movement in New York (2011); the G20 in Brisbane and, most recently, in Germany where over 50,000 protestors demonstrated, marched and protested against the G20 summit in Hamburg (2017). This transnational subpolitics can also exhibit a weaker form of cosmopolitan relationship where, instead of its stronger sense, as a shared normative culture, it can be encapsulated in virtual extensions of political community organised around an inclusive politics of recognition. The specificities of this relationship, according to Delanty (2014), can be characterised by ‘the cosmopolitan ethic of a “solidarity among strangers” [where] [e]xpressions of solidarity . . . illustrate a . . . level of engagement with the other’ (2014: 221). This political type of virtual cosmopolitanism can be evidenced in recent mobilisations of a global solidarity march coordinated across social media and mobilising in urban spaces, throughout the globe, in response to the derogatory-sexist, xenophobic and hateful rhetoric espoused by the Trump administration which encompassed over two million people and spread to 161 countries, across all seven continents (Jamieson et al., 2017). This specific demonstration of virtual cosmopolitanism (as existing in online communications) typifies what Fenton (2012) describes as ‘a politics that makes a virtue out of a solidarity built on the value of difference . . . go[ing] beyond a simple respect for otherness and involv[ing] an inclusive politics of voice’ (2012: 152). Because these electronic networks of solidarity exhibit a strong ethical component, the content of its communicative structures go beyond an overly procedural Habermasian (1981) notion of rational discourse as redeemed by validity claims toward more affective-emotional structures of communication, as Wetherell (2012) contends, the currents of affect are entangled in online social practice rooted in the relational, dialogic and intersubjective flows of ‘normatively organi[s]ed practices’ where empathy, rapport and solidarity are discursively constructed (2012: 24–5). These structures of affective communication exhibited by this type of virtual cosmopolitanism are theorised by Dean, (1996), Mason (2000), Bartky (2002) and Bayertz (1999) as embodying forms of compassion, empathy, reciprocity and notions of mutual concern (1996; 2000: 27; 2002; 1999). Furthermore, as Gould (2007) argues, these expressions of affective communication can attribute to the formation of ‘transnational solidarities’ by giving shape to discursive networks between distant strangers around a moral disposition orientated towards mobilising cooperative-political projects with an ethical recognition of opportunities afforded by changes in institutional structures for improving the lives of others (2007: 158). These types of cosmopolitan relationships as embodied in a moral consciousness articulated in a shared normative culture and in an inclusive politics of recognition are indicative of a ‘riskcosmopolitanism’ where, according to Beck (2006), an intensification of cosmopolitan interdependencies is ‘bringing transnational conflicts and commonalities into everyday practices’ emerging out of an increasing awareness of global risk dynamics necessitating the construction of discursive bonds, connections and ties in common commitments to global justice and politics (2006: 34). These cosmopolitan moments, as described by Beck (2006), transcend the self-absorption of cultures, languages and religions by activating, connecting and mobilising a plurality of social actors from different geographical and territorial regions in ‘coalitions of action’ – stimulating ‘border-transcending new beginnings with new social imaginaries of political alternatives’ (2006: 34; 12–13). Likewise, for Theodossopoulos and Kirtsoglou (2013) these ‘new political imaginaries’

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can offer a foundation for cosmopolitan communities of discontent to emerge ‘with [a] worldwide consciousness’ engaging in cross-cultural and postcolonial critiques of a top-down neoliberal globalisation (2013: 4; Mignolo, 2000: 174). Importantly, as Kurasawa (2004) describes, these ‘transnational modes of practice’ diverge from ‘thin’ top-down institutional models of cosmopolitanism by expressing a ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ built out of interlacing lines of affinity between civic associations dispersed throughout a ‘vast web of shifting nodes of commonality, shared interests and solidarity’ negotiated across discursive networks (2004: 234–9). These bottom-up networks of virtual communications, according to Kurasawa (2004), structure processes of intercultural exchange, collaboration and critique that can nurture a cosmopolitanism borne out of a ‘dialogical widening of horizons’ where different cultural models collide eliciting forms of cultural learning, coupled with an appreciation and tolerance toward cultural pluralism (2004: 246). It is in these bottom-up responses to the human threats posed by global risks where ‘cosmopolitan project[s]’ committed to egalitarian universalism and a recognition for cultural pluralism can be found in the ‘thick bonds of global solidarity structure[d] around intersecting modes of thought and action [articulated] in values, beliefs, narratives and symbols’ (Kurasawa, 2004: 247). In closing, this affective-emotional content shaping cosmopolitan political communities exhibits an insight into a global moral consciousness where the discursive construction of alternative ethical and political models is mediated by structures of critical communication creating the basis upon which a non-foundational, post-universalistic conception of a global ethics can be found, that is, as a sociocognitive construct ‘resid[ing] more in the domain of affect . . . evident in ways of thinking, feelings, social movements and struggles’ and as a significant dimension of online social practice constitutes, I endeavour to argue, an important expression of a virtual cosmopolitanism (Delanty, 2009: 109).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have presented an argument for the Internet as a significant relational, cognitive and symbolic environment for the discursive construction of distinct types of cultural and political expressions of cosmopolitan relationships. For the basis of this argument, I have challenged common presuppositions shaping understandings of both the virtual and cosmopolitanism within arguments against the notion of a virtual cosmopolitanism by asserting that (a) the virtual is not set in opposition to the real nor does it corrode it; (b) the Internet as a technological expression of the virtual does not exclusively reproduce homophilic networks nor does it create a system of isolated political publics and (c) cosmopolitanism is not a zero-sum condition nor does it presuppose strong ties for its existence. From these arguments, an understanding of the Internet is advanced in its most abstract terms as a communications media transmitting meaningful symbolic flows, across time-space, in virtual geographies where soft cultural types of cosmopolitan relationships can emerge in expressions of curiosity and openness located in the banal practices of online consumption of different cultural forms, but also from a greater intersubjective reflexiveness arising out of discursive intercultural exchanges. I have also attempted to demonstrate that harder political articulations of cosmopolitan relationships can be found in two types of subpolitical activity: (a) in the discursive construction of transnational networks built around commitments to global justice shaping orientations toward a shared normative culture and (b) in symbolic-imaginative constructions of virtual political communities with an inclusive politics of recognition mediated by affective-emotional structures of communication. Lastly, these affective structures of communication composing subpolitical networks of solidarity can offer a fruitful reference point for the sociocognitive basis for a cosmopolitan conception of a global ethics.

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36 Cosmopolitanism and migrant protests Tamara Caraus and Camil-Alexandru Parvu

We have witnessed in recent decades a revived interest in the political and social theory of cosmopolitanism, prompted both by the marked acceleration of globalization itself and by the corresponding need to adapt our conceptual, normative and empirical instruments for conceiving justice in an interdependent world. Alongside the mainstream theoretical renewal of Kantian strands of cosmopolitanisms in global justice and global democracy approaches (Pogge 2002; Archibugi and Held 2011), several other new approaches of cosmopolitanism have been advanced, some of them oxymoronic: ‘anchored’ (Dallmayr 2003), ‘embedded’ (Erskine 2008), ‘situated’ (Baynes 2007), ‘moderate’ (Scheffler 1999) and ‘statist’ (Ypi 2012). These as well as other cosmopolitan propositions are considered oxymoronic forms in that they try to reconcile the universal with the particular. At the same time, reformulations of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of a radical cosmopolitics (Douzinas 2007; Harvey 2009; Ingram 2013; Wenman 2013; Hayden 2013; Caraus and Parvu 2014, 2017; Caraus and Paris 2016; Bailey 2017) are particularly relevant for the subject of this chapter. Indeed, a promising and fertile development in cosmopolitan scholarship now reimagines cosmopolitanism as generated from below and is critical of top-down, abstract or totalizing forms of universalism that seem to characterize most classical or mainstream theorizations of cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, social movements that are engaged in creating new political vocabularies or resisting social and political transformations (neoliberal governance, inequality, corruption or authoritarian rule) have become predilect sites for bottom-up cosmopolitan politicization. Radical cosmopolitanism is seen therefore as an archetypical contestatory practice and action: it questions both the existing articulations of political power and society’s contingent grounds, thus opening uncharted transformative possibilities. Through contestation, cosmopolitanism undermines authority and power and promises to inaugurate alternative political modes grounded on affirmations of freedom, justice and equality. Migration has been until recently a relatively less explored resource of radical cosmopolitics from the bottom up. But if we start with the core idea – common to any cosmopolitan perspective – that all human beings belong to a single moral community, as citizens of the world, with no borders, then migration and the general idea of a basic human freedom of movement without impediments appears to be a natural starting point for a cosmopolitan view. The gist of this view would then be that migration and cosmopolitanism are consubstantial. Yet 419

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the contemporary practice of migration is thus far portrayed in media reports and political discourse rather as a threat to the endurance of cosmopolitan sensibility and as cause of the perceived intensification of an anti-cosmopolitan backlash. It stands therefore as an important test for our times and the challenge is to meaningfully discern its normative potential situated in the co-substantiality of cosmopolitanism and migration. In this chapter we attempt to map this co-substantiality in migrant protests such as Sans Papiers, No One Is Illegal, No Borders, A Day without Us marches, migrant protests related to the Lampedusa or Calais camps, as well as in other migrant protests from the last decade. From within the emerging approach of migration from a cosmopolitan perspective, various authors have mobilized the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship in order to describe how migrants can sometimes attempt to negotiate the process of their integration in the host countries. Thus, ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ indicates the way in which immigrant groups employ the language of cosmopolitanism in order to facilitate their inclusion (Landau and Freemantle 2010, 375). In the same way, ‘transgressive cosmopolitanism’ describes how marginalized groups in Germany have challenged the mechanisms of exclusion embedded into existing national narratives and seek to redefine the ‘what Germanness means’ (Baban and Rygiel 2014, 469). A further approach probes the way in which, during the 2011 hunger strikes of 300 undocumented migrants in Greece, and despite the overwhelming crisis of austerity, there were both acts of citizenship that migrants performed assuming ‘universality of equality’, as well as Greek activists enacting an ethics of cosmopolitan hospitality (Topak 2016). Yet in this chapter we aim to explore the potential of the idea of cosmopolitanism from below that is not confined to the various tactics that migrants may adapt in view of their integration and coexistence within the host country. We claim that migrant protests contain essential aspects for a richer notion of a radical cosmopolitanism. In this sense, we build upon the basic premises that we share with the approach put forth, for instance, by Nyers in reference to the anti-deportation activism of undocumented persons in Canada: Nyers shows how “the political campaigns by abject migrants are potential sites of a critical cosmopolitanism” (Nyers 2003, 1070) and refers to this as “abject cosmopolitanism” from below, which involves “acts of citizenship” that “contest and reshape the traditional terms of political community, identity and practice” (2003, 1075). This framework of abject cosmopolitanism captures very plausibly the radical cosmopolitan potential of migrant acts, a potential that we consider below. Thus, this chapter aims to examine the circumstances in which migrant protests may perform acts of cosmopolitan citizenship and become instances of a radical cosmopolitics, and the argument is developed as follows. The next section briefly examines some of the specific repertoires, morphologies and spatial strategies of migrant protests and the ways in which they are related with protests of non-migrants. The second section expounds on the vernacular and fragile processes of cosmopolitan subjectivization within migrant protests, against the background of pervasive methodological nationalism. The third and last section explores the radical cosmopolitan dimension of migrant protests and then locates it at the intersection of mobility, cosmopolitan subjectivity and radicalism.

Migrant activism There is a wide recent literature on social movements and contentious politics (Castells 2015; Della Porta 2013; Glasius and Pleyers 2013; Jasper 2014; Pleyers 2010; Snow et al. 2004). Migrant activism can be seen as part of the wider set of recent waves of protests and social movements, and at the same time as displaying some unique features, and these similarities and differences are briefly examined here. Migrant protests occur at different points of interaction with the border 420

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regimes and the domestic regularization norms – and hence adopt varying vocabularies, strategies and alliances that reflect the modular nature of such protests. As the border regimes have evolved in recent decades, with states closing safe passageways and erecting walls, migrants are forced to attempt ever more dangerous routes while frontiers have become sites of violence, exploitation and wanton death. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have recorded a staggering rise in the numbers of deaths at the border over the last years – mostly dues to the destination states’ changing border regimes: in the case of Europe, especially after the 2016 closing of the ‘Balkan route’ for Syrian refugees, [p]art of this rise is due to the greater proportion of migrants now taking the most dangerous route – that across the central Mediterranean – such that 1 in 49 migrants now died on this route in 2016. . . . The central Mediterranean route, ending at Lampedusa or the main island of Sicily, accounts only for about a quarter of almost 1.5 million people who have arrived since 2014 on all routes, but for 88% of all migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. (Laczko et al. 2017: 64) For the US-Mexico border, another recent report released by the IOM highlights a rise in deaths simultaneous with a decrease in overall attempts to cross the border – with an expert quoted by The Guardian suggesting that “The ratio of people dying to people trying [to cross the border] has to be way higher than 17%” (Holpuch 2017). Many forms of migrant protests target the swelling violence of the lethal border regimes in recent years. Migrants experience both the violent and the dehumanizing effects of frontiers and of the bourgeoning offshore detention policies. A form of protest specific for migrants is the lip sewing and hunger strikes. In 2002, nearly 60 detainees in Woomera, Australia’s biggest camp for illegal immigrants, have sewn up their lips as a protest over delays in processing their visa applications. Since then the practices of lip sewing and hunger striking are frequent among refuges (Bargu 2017; Montange 2017). Earlier in 2015, around four hundred asylum seekers in an Australian detention centre located offshore on Manus Island went on hunger strike, and some forty also stitched their lips. In November 2015, a group of Kurdish and Iranian refugees stitched their lips shut after being denied passage at the Greek-Macedonian border. In March, 2016, seven refugees in Calais sewed their lips to stop the eviction by the French security forces and the demolition of the southern part of the refugee camp, known as the ‘Jungle’. The protest of migrants and pro-migrant activists, joined by the ‘normal’ population, is another feature of migrant activism, as was shown, for example, by the grassroots process which brought together various associations and individuals in Lampedusa in January 2014. The gathering followed the death of over 600 women, men and children in the shipwrecks from October 2013, one of a long series of tragedies. The protests were against border patrolling, which prioritizes border protection against (migrants’) life protection, as a result the Mediterranean Sea becoming a cemetery (Puggioni 2015). The grassroots mobilization adopted the Charter of Lampedusa which intends the whole planet as its sphere of application (Lampedusa Charter 2014). The Sans Papiers movement in France, credited with first articulation of migrant activism, began with the occupation of the St. Bernard Church on 28 June 1996 by 300 migrants, who protested against a law of French government that ended the automatic renewal of residence permits and required French citizens who were hosting immigrants to inform authorities about their arrival and departure (Balibar 1996; Gundogdu 2015). The law incriminated hospitality and the migrant protest generated a public support, expressed in the slogan ‘We are all foreigners’, not ‘We are all French’ – a significant fact that signalled a nascent ‘no borders’ subjectivity (Anderson, Sharma and Wright 2012). Chronologically, after Sans Papiers, the resistance by No 421

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One Is Illegal/NOII emerged – a transnational network that represents illegal migrants at risk of being deported and which organizes rallies and campaigns to draw attention to the situation of refugees. The actions started in 1997 in Germany with a ‘deportation-class action’ targeting the airlines that took part in deportations, following the death of an immigrant in the hands of the police while deported. In two decades, the NOII movement has spread all over Europe, Canada, USA, their manifesto resonating worldwide: “There are no illegal or undeserving human beings, only inhumane and immoral laws” (NOII Manifesto 2003). Another transnational network, No Borders, which has existed since 1999 in the EU and beyond, coordinates migrant resistance and anti-deportation campaigns in refugee camps, cities and airports. According to their manifesto, “Borders create misery and death. They are a cruel fiction, a weapon of divide and rule” (No Border Manifesto 2002). One of the most resounding actions of No Borders was the Calais Solidarity Movement (Rygiel 2011). Another form of migrant activism is marches under the banner ‘A Day without Us’ – a form of strike to make the native population realize how necessary migrants’ work is. The first march took place on 1 May 2006, in the USA, when millions of undocumented Latin American workers demonstrated against harsh new anti-immigrant legislation. Migrants took part in hundreds of marches, rallies, school and labour walkouts – 170-plus events across the US – chanting ‘I Am a Worker, Not a Criminal’, ‘Let Us Be a Part of the American Dream’, ‘Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote’ (Beltrán 2009). These events inspired the ‘A Day without Us’ marches and strikes in Italy, Greece, Spain and France and continue to inspire today. Occupation and marches as forms of migrant activism were reaffirmed further when, in 2012, migrants from all over Germany marched to Berlin on foot, where they occupied the Oranienplatz, a public space in which migrants formulated their requests: ‘Abolish Residenzpflicht!’, ‘Abolish Lagers!’, ‘Stop Deportations!’ (Ataç et al. 2016). A similar march and occupation took place in Vienna, when a protest against precarious conditions in a refugee camp turned into a march to Vienna, and on the 18th of December 2012, the International Migrants Day, the Votive Church/Votivkirche was occupied by refugees. The occupiers were evacuated in April 2013, but the experience was crucial for the protesters themselves acquiring visibility and voice (Atac et al. 2016; Balibar 2013). The number of migrant protests is growing, and a single chapter cannot do justice in enumerating all of them; however, the mentioned cases show the most relevant features of the morphology of migrant activism that include occupation of public spaces, marches, strikes, networking, petitions, boycotts, non-cooperation, etc., which are similar to the forms of protest of nonmigrants. There are also features characteristic mainly to migrant protests such as resisting deportation, targeting the airlines, collaboration of migrant and pro-migrant activists, and the practice of lip sewing. There are as well invisible forms of resistance, such as escaping illegally across and beyond borders, false identity, false passports, fake visas, fake marriages, escaping the camp, escaping the detainee centres, destroying or hiding passports and identity documents, destroying of fingertips with acid or heat in order to avoid identification and deportation. These forms of resistance have been described through similarities with the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985) of everyday resistance and with the underground cultural and political resistance in authoritarian regimes (Caraus 2018b). All these forms of migrant resistance and protest have a feature in common which is not characteristic for other protests – these manifestations are considered illegal because are enacted by persons considered illegal/irregular. The illegality is produced by the laws and the order of the nation-state, and the protests contest exactly this order and here is the cosmopolitical dimension of the migrant activism, enacted through acts of cosmopolitanism from below (Caraus 2018a).

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Autonomy of migrants’ gaze An important challenge in analyzing migrants’ protests stems from the still overwhelming presence – in scholarship as well as in public discourse – of variants of methodological nationalism. The nation-state’s ‘gaze’ remains the powerful default perspective that infuses primarily the state’s own security-based policies concerning to migration, borders and citizenship, but also much of the scholarship and media reports on the subject. Policing is the primary angle through which states ‘see’ migrants. Through the violent securitization of borders and the antagonistic classification of individuals in mutually exclusive and normatively hierarchized binary modes (citizen/alien, legal/illegal), states have deployed in recent decades an extensive array of biopolitical technologies designed to prevent, dissuade, constrain and filter movement across their borders (Jones 2016). It is hard to eschew the hegemony of the state’s perspective on migration that permeates dominant vocabularies and use of concepts (Dumitru 2014). Hence, the prevalence of methodological nationalism not only affects social sciences and how they understand migration (Chernilo 2006) but also raises important issues of agency and autonomy for the migrants themselves and for their capacity to articulate protest and to be recognized as subjects. The ‘autonomy of migration’ approach tries in recent years to dislodge the securitization approach and to examine how the evolving nature of the border regimes permits and challenges at the same time the migrants’ capacity to reformulate and reenact the basic meaning of human mobility (Tsianos and Papadopoulos 2013). The fact that the dominant perspectives on migration are constituted and triggered primarily through the state’s lenses is therefore a defining feature of the migrants’ own context for repertoires and possibilities for collective action. For instance, while there is an extensive record of migrants protesting when they reach the nation-state’s borders (including the deterritorialized and externalized border regimes of Europe, Australia and the US) or come in contact with its domestic policies of regularization, much less visible are the migrants’ departures and trajectories before arriving there – the ‘hidden’ protests, deaths, tragedies and hopes – or the massive migrations and displacements within a state’s borders – and which in fact involve overwhelmingly larger numbers. This also highlights how much of the data we use is state-relevant data: The IOM’s 2018 World Migration Report deplores the fact that [d]ata collection challenges are significant. For instance, the majority of deaths are among migrants travelling irregularly, which often occurs at sea, or in remote areas (chosen with the aim of evading detection), meaning bodies are not found. Few official sources collect and make data on migrant deaths publicly available. (IOM 2017: 25) A soft methodological nationalism is present also in some of the humanitarian activist positions that, even while empathizing with the migrants’ plight and extolling the virtues of a ‘welcoming culture’, indirectly reinforce the very paradigms of inclusion and exclusion that contemporary states have now formalized. ‘Solidarity with’ migrants may be grounded on the very ontological inequality between members and non-members, enfranchised and disenfranchised, and may furthermore risk effectively becoming substitutes for the migrants’ voices themselves – a debate that is now important in activist circles. For instance, activists defending specifically the Dreamers (as a limited subset of worthy, innocent migrants) from the threats of deportation professed by the Trump Administration today reproduce and legitimize in fact the very statist, meritocratic and exclusionary principles of selective inclusion that previous Administrations developed.

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Methodological nationalism inspires not only the dominant security paradigm in which many reports address migration, but also – and in less obvious ways – some of our other political and cultural presuppositions. According to Alex Sager, methodological nationalism connects with a sedentarian bias in which movement is ignored or treated as abnormal. Much state-funded social science asks why people move with the implicit or explicit agenda of figuring out how to prevent them from moving – at least into wealthy states. Movement is conceived as a problem; if many people move, it is deemed a crisis. (Sager 2017: 3) Against this context, for instance, much of the recent work of James C. Scott envisions a radical rethinking of our anthropological and political understanding of human propensity for movement, sedentarization and the early states’ role in ‘domesticating’ and violently regulating human mobility (Scott 2017). In this sense, migrants’ protests include claims of subjectivization that are altogether more complex than in the case of other social movements. Indeed, constituting oneself as a subject goes in their case beyond claiming inclusion into the political community or demanding safe passage across the border. What is underlying in migrant protests – and becomes a quintessential cosmopolitan act – is the very claim to have a claim, the fragile and precarious process of generating an autonomous gaze that may coexist but cannot be reduced to the state’s dominant gaze. In other words, while they protest specific forms of violence and exclusion, migrants also introduce themselves as cosmopolitan subjects and advance alternative non-statist perspectives on the fundamental categories of movement, inclusion and borders. Migrants’ autonomy of gaze is inherently fragile and precarious – as the vernacular cosmopolitan condition itself. Their capacity to actualize processes of subjectivation, to contest and transcend the territorial and legal categories, is partially constrained by the availability of cosmopolitan translations (Delanty 2009; Parvu 2017) within the host society. The repertoires and morphologies of protest described above contest the statist paradigm of securitization – but are in a continuous reconfiguration and re-iteration as the states’ border regimes become more pervasive and violent.

The radical cosmopolitanism of migrant activism Therefore, we turn to the interrogation: in what way are the migrant protests cosmopolitan – and which may be the radical dimension of such cosmopolitanism? The above analysis of the broad range of examples of migrant activism reveals several cosmopolitan dimensions, and in order to highlight the inherent cosmopolitanism of migrant protest and its radicalism, we present it as a paradigmatic confluence of several elements: cosmopolitan subjectivity, mobility and radicalism. Diogenes coined the term cosmopolitanism in the fourth century BCE: “when he was asked where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the kosmos’ [kosmopolitês]” (Moles 1995, 129–58). This sentence heralds the naissance of the idea and practice of cosmopolitanism, born as a challenge and rejection of the existing political order. Diogenes himself emphatically disregarded the conventions of the polis: he performed in public view those activities deemed private or belonging to sphere of the household – eating, sleeping, conversing – thus defying his society’s social and legal norms (Gebh 2013). His cosmopolitanism was meant as a radical critique of all society’s norms and conventions, and the roots of this radicalism are identified in his personal experience of exile. Acting and speaking freely meant for him shedding the conventions of 424

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the polis and refusing their authority, and it is a result of not having a shelter, a home or even a homeland city (Gebh 2013, 75). Crucially, freedom from conventions and local authority implies for him freedom of movement across different borders, be they physical or moral: “Enacting the cosmopolitan’s allegiance with the universe means crossing borders and changing the living environment without letting that determine one’s identity as a political subject” (Gebh 2013, 75). Thus, Diogenes’s exile and statelessness were the condition that made possible his mobility across different types of borders, and mobility itself appeared as a pre-condition for the ‘birth’ of cosmopolitanism. This ‘birth’ shows therefore a consubstantiality of cosmopolitanism with mobility, rootlessness and statelessness, features that have been emphasized by later versions of cosmopolitanism. In Enlightenment expressions of cosmopolitanism, Hume writes to Diderot in 1763: “You belong to all nations of the earth and you never ask a man for his place of birth. I flatter myself that I am, like you, a citizen of the great city of the world” (Schlereth 1977, 1). Today’s illegal migrants who burn their identity documents would probably prefer as well not to be asked about their birthplace. In the same vein, the most influent account of cosmopolitanism from modern philosophy, the Kantian one, articulates the cosmopolitan right as pre-conditioned by mobility: “The cosmopolitan right should be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality” (Kant 1991, 105), while hospitality is the “right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another” (Kant 1991, 106). For Kant however, the cosmopolitan right is less radical than for Diogenes, as it assumes the division of the globe into different nations and their borders as a norm, and this partially obstructs his vision of a further cosmopolitan world. Thus, the consubstantiality could be formulated as a kind of ‘syllogism’: cosmopolitanism means to be a citizen of the world, with no borders or, at least, with permeable borders. Mobility means to move from one place to another. Therefore, unimpeded migration appears to be the natural starting point for a cosmopolitan view. As such, from the perspective of the consubstantiality of cosmopolitanism and migration, migrant activism is inherently cosmopolitan. While other cases of protests and resistance may not necessarily generate a cosmopolitan component unless overtly acknowledged – for instance, by voicing concern for the fate of the whole world and of the planet itself, as was expressed by different social movements and protests, from Zapatistas to Occupy and beyond (Caraus and Parvu 2017) – in the migrants’ case their very act of protesting has a direct cosmopolitanizing effect: it contests the border regimes of the nation-state and, indirectly, it projects the world as a whole either without borders, or with porous borders. Migrant resistance has cosmopolitan effects without migrants using, or probably without even knowing, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’. The quiet, invisible transformation of the world takes place when migrants clandestinely defy the borders and expose the contingencies of citizenship without ever intending it (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). Furthermore, the very fact of mobility engenders a cosmopolitan subjectivity of migrant activists. Mobility is productive of cosmopolitan subjectivity by generating an empirical ‘real feeling’: transgressing state borders has an immediate de-territorializing effect and has the potential of a cosmopolitan act. In times where citizenship is mainly defined in terms of territorial attachment, to transgress a border can be interpreted as a protest and critique per se of the existing borders and, by extension, of the nation-state itself (Gebh 2013; De Genova 2013). In overcoming or snubbing the obstacles for free movement migrants also make a first step towards a cosmopolitan restructuring of the world. But primarily, this act is a first step in restructuring of their own subjectivity, especially through their first-order experience of the injustice and contingency of existing state borders. Migrants’ cosmopolitan subjectivity is further strengthened in and through the very act of protests. Migrants protesting in (offshore or onshore) camps and detention centres experience the 425

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world as a whole also in its abject cosmopolitan form; but the abjection becomes here a resource for the radical transformation of an otherwise non-political person into a protester on a political stage beyond the nation-state. The protesting experience of occupying public or symbolic spaces and reclaiming visibility entails for migrants to cast away the double predicament of immobility and invisibility that is imposed upon them by the lack of legal status. Although visibility brings a great risk for the migrants themselves, it is part of the process of acquiring a new political subjectivity. Even when protesters are dispersed or evicted from the public places they occupy, the experience of the protest transforms them into different persons; in other words, they leave the public spaces as different persons from the ones who entered it (Beltrán 2009; Nyers and Rygiel 2012; Ataç et al. 2016). Transformed by the condition of visibility and publicity, migrants posit themselves as subjects entitled to rights, political subjects able to act and speak and have a stake in the decisions that affect their own lives. The cosmopolitan transformation of migrants’ subjectivity stands in this very transformation of their condition from oppressed subjects of specific nation-states, into subjects that act to radically reconfigure the substance and the meaning of borders. Migrant protests are rejecting the exclusionary nature of the nation-states’ laws and this feature is radically cosmopolitan because it contests the foundations of the nation-states’ legal order as unjust. Migrant illegal mobility is a direct challenge to the state’s coercive, monopolistic and narrow understanding of what constitutes legal mobility. The very notion of ‘illegal migrant’ is the consequence of the successful monopolization by the state of its means of legitimate movement (De Genova 2013; Mezzadra 2015). In this sense, the whole panoply of the nation-state laws is contested by the migrants’ unbridled mobility, while the central legal instrument that produces migrants’ illegality is the state’s immigration law itself: “Under all other laws it is the act that is illegal, but under immigration law it is the person who is illegal. . . . There are no illegal or undeserving human beings, only inhumane and immoral laws” (NOII Manifesto 2003). Migrant protests therefore are rights-forming events where claims that are radically cosmopolitan in their ideational content are shaped. As a matter of fact, the mottos and rallying cries of migrant protests already contain in nuce these new demands and new visions of the world: ‘No One Is Illegal’, ‘Papers for All or No Papers at All!’, ‘No Borders, No Nations, No Flags, No Patriots’, ‘No Borders, No Nations, Stop Deportations!’, ‘Right to Come, Right to Go, Right to Stay!’, ‘Justice and Dignity for Everyone’, ‘We Are Here and We Will Fight. Freedom of Movement Is Everybody’s Right!’, etc. As Nyers puts it, the “radical cosmopolitanism of these chants are being heard from the barrens of Australia, to the streets of Montreal, to the activist ‘border camps’ on the outskirts of Fortress Europe” (Nyers 2003, 1080). These manifestos reclaim rights on behalf of the whole planet, the world itself, the earth: the Charter of Lampedusa, for instance, states that, as human beings, “we all inhabit the planet Earth as a shared space and call for a radical transformation in the social, economic, political, cultural and legal relations which form the basis of global injustice” (Lampedusa Charter 2014). There is a central performative cosmopolitan event in migrant protests, where migrants claim and enact rights that they do not officially have. They actualize the rights denied to them and at the same time they do it in a much more egalitarian way. Rights are claimed not as citizens of a particular state but as human beings as such. In this sense, they perform and behave as if they have rights as simply being in the world, or being there, or in other words, they behave in that very moment as cosmopolitan citizens. Making demands on behalf of, and acting in the name of the world means functioning as if the world already exists as one. If insurgencies “do not have a plan, they are the plan” and represent the “symptoms of our becoming other” (Arditi 2015, 121), then the migrant protests are the very symptoms of the world becoming one.

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Therefore, migrant activism is a cosmopolitan transformative experience for participants. It is, as well, a cosmopolitanism from the bottom up and a cosmopolitan action and practice. Migrant protests confirm that rather than being an affirmative condition, cosmopolitanism is transformative and is produced by social struggles rather than being primarily elite-driven (Delanty 2014). Concomitantly, migrants’ cosmopolitanism is radical and contestatory, because it contains a radical critique which aims at the roots/foundations of a given order that was presumed necessary or normal and reveals the contingency of the grounds of the current global system.

Conclusions Compared with the previous waves of global protests and resistance, migrant protests are the most radical because they address the roots of the current world order. Migrants protests are radical at the level of ‘ideational content’, such in the affirmations ‘No one is illegal’ or ‘No borders no nations’, and at the level of morphology of protests: migrants’ occupation of public/symbolic spaces, marches, blockades, rallies, hunger strikes are all considered illegal and, thus, impossible, but in their alleged illegality they undermine the current state-based world order. This chapter explored the radical cosmopolitan potential of migrant protests, following the perspective of migrant, that is through the autonomy of migrants’ gaze. Approaches analyzing migrant protests from the citizen perspective observed that migrant protests risk re-enacting and reconfirming the nation-state, i.e. migrants end up by applying for citizenship of a concrete nation-state (Marciniak and Tyler 2014, 146; McNevin 2013; Ataç et al. 2016). As well, most of the responses to migration reaffirm the state-centric world order: both migrants’ integration through the test of citizenship and deportation are practices constitutive of a nation-state-centric world order. Thus, migrant activism appears captured by the logic and practices of state sovereignty, and the cosmopolitan potential risks to vanish. Nevertheless, the failure is not of migrant activism itself, but of the methodological nationalism that permeates and structures the theoretical and practical approaches of migration – including migrant activism – and in the reluctance to think and theorize migration through the perspective of methodological cosmopolitanism. As well, the apparent failure of migrant activism comes from the perspective of the citizen which is still the norm of theories of migration, which theorize the migrant as a problem that needs solving. What is still overlooked is the perspective of the migrant, for whom citizenship, as an exclusive category, is a problem. The migrant protests show that current building blocks of (political) theory – borders, states, political membership – are political arrangements that are morally and rationally contingent. The migrant actions challenge theorists to re-construct a (political) theory with only two building blocks: the world and the deterritorialized personhood as a minimal cosmopolitan theory. Migrant protests compel us to move towards an idea of membership of a global political community, such that to be a free and equal member of that global community is deeply connected with one’s freedom of mobility throughout it.

References Anderson, B., Sharma, N., and Wright, C. (2012) ‘“We Are All Foreigners:” No Borders as a Practical Political Project’. In Nyers, P. and Rygiel, K. (eds.) Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge: 73–91. Archibugi, D., and Held, D. (2011) ‘Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents’. Ethics & International Affairs, 25(1): 433–61. Arditi, B. (2015) ‘Insurgencies Don’t Have a Plan: They Are the Plan’. In de la Torre, C. (ed.) The Promise and Perils of Populism. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press: 113–39.

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37 Cosmopolitan diplomacy Seckin Baris Gulmez1

Diplomacy is ‘the application of intelligence and tact to the conduct of official relations between the governments of independent states’ (Otte 2001: 129). It aims to deal with the outside world through dialogue rather than use of force (Watson 1982: 2). Diplomacy hence constitutes ‘the infrastructure of world politics’, facilitating representation and governing relations among recognized polities through reason and dialogue (Sending et al. 2011: 530). The conduct of diplomacy is conventionally based on the logic of raison d’état, that is, ‘the elevation of the needs of the state above personal morality’ (Berridge 2001: 24). Raison d’état suggests that national interests supplant universal morality and thus ‘the well-being of the state justifie[s] whatever means [a]re employed to further it’ (Kissinger 1994: 58). Conventional wisdom expects diplomacy to remain within the confines of national interests. However, in practice, diplomacy has not always been conducted in accordance with raison d’état. For instance, Karl Nesselrode, Russian foreign minister in the 19th century, concentrated his diplomatic activities on the achievement of a lasting European peace even at the expense of Russian national interests (Ingle 1976). Similarly, Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat in the early 20th century, became the chief architect of the Anglo-Japan alliance and played a major role in the Anglo-Japanese-Russian diplomatic negotiations with his deep understanding of Russian, Japanese and English cultures (Wien 2015: 19). Diplomats such as Nesselrode and Rice are now viewed as cosmopolitan diplomats for their persistent efforts for international dialogue and peace. Furthermore, non-governmental organizations such as the International Red Cross introduced a humanitarian dimension to diplomatic practice. Rising diplomatic competence of supranational bodies such as the United Nations and the Vatican further questions the credibility of raison d’état in diplomatic practice since they conduct diplomacy to promote world peace and prosperity. Therefore, diplomacy has proved to be more than a mere instrument of national foreign policies (Sharp 1999: 51). It reflects a tendency to go beyond national interests and fulfil a cosmopolitan agenda. The aim of this chapter is to offer a sound account for what constitutes cosmopolitan diplomacy. With this motivation, it first highlights the fragmented nature of the existing scholarly literature on diplomacy, which tends to focus on diverse diplomatic activities in resonance with cosmopolitan diplomacy but fails to offer a holistic and elaborate account. The chapter aims to remedy this gap by elaborating on the three main triggers of cosmopolitan diplomacy, or three 430

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P’s: Players, Platforms and Problems that, respectively, promote, enable and enforce the conduct of cosmopolitan diplomacy. The chapter will concentrate on the examples of the Vatican as a player of cosmopolitan diplomacy, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations as a platform for cosmopolitan diplomacy, and space debris as a problem necessitating cosmopolitan diplomacy. Highlighting the strengths and drawbacks of the aforementioned examples, the chapter will conclude by critically assessing whether a sustainable practice of cosmopolitan diplomacy is attainable.

What is and what is not cosmopolitan diplomacy? Cosmopolitan diplomacy involves a series of diplomatic activities with a global focus and an appeal to humanity as a whole that goes beyond national interests. It is global in the sense that its main area of focus is the whole world. It de-emphasizes the logic of raison d’état in the conduct of diplomacy for it is more concerned with what is good for humanity rather than what is good for a particular society. It hence concentrates on the common problems of humanity and seeks to find common solutions through intercultural dialogue. Cosmopolitan diplomacy remains largely unelaborated in the scholarly literature. Scholars of diplomacy tend to discuss raison de système as an alternative, secondary approach to the raison d’état when they investigate the primary logic underlying diplomatic relations. Raison de système is defined as ‘a conscious sense that all states in an international society have an interest in preserving it and in making it work’ (Watson 1982: 87). In contrast to raison d’état, states ‘subsume national interests to broader systemic considerations’ (Bjola and Kornprobst 2013). Raison de système forces states to pursue their interests with ‘prudence and restraint’ in their relations with each other, and urges great powers to be involved in crisis management to provide and maintain international stability and order (Watson 1982: 193). Raison de système constitutes a clear step away from the pursuit of parochial national interests. However, it does not necessarily reflect a cosmopolitan agenda since it essentially focuses on the well-being of a states-system, while cosmopolitan diplomacy concentrates on the well-being of humanity as a whole. Certain diplomatic practices hold some resemblance with cosmopolitan diplomacy. The extant literature usually employs such terms as moral, humanitarian and disaster diplomacy to depict those diplomatic activities that have a narrower scope than cosmopolitan diplomacy. Moral diplomacy is a liberal diplomatic practice introduced by the US President Woodrow Wilson that aimed to instal democracy in non-democratic countries through economic and political conditionality. Today, the European Union conducts a similar type of diplomacy to transform non-liberal societies into liberal democracies through conditionality (Manners 2002). Humanitarian diplomacy primarily refers to the policies and practices of national and international actors to carry out humanitarian aid work outside their borders (Regnier 2011). For its part, disaster diplomacy involves joint activities enabling rapid response to domestic or international emergencies and disasters such as earthquake, tsunami and hurricane (Gaillard et al. 2008; Ganapati et al. 2010; Kelman 2012). All three types of diplomacy mentioned above involve a certain degree of stepping away from states’ parochial interests. However, they have a narrow geographical focus. Besides, since disaster diplomacy is only valid in the context of a natural disaster, the sustainability of a peaceful dialogue reached after disaster diplomacy rests on further disasters to take place. Moreover, states often exhibit a tendency to use moral and humanitarian diplomacy to establish and consolidate regional and international hegemony (Akpınar 2013). Therefore, rather than representing a fully cosmopolitan character, moral and humanitarian diplomacy reflect the features of ‘thin/weak cosmopolitanism’: Hence, they attach priority to the principles and well-being of domestic society while having some – albeit 431

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limited – notion of extra-national moral obligations towards non-nationals (Linklater 1998; Brock and Brighouse 2005; Held 2005). Cosmopolitan diplomacy, on the other hand, goes beyond national interests and provides the foreign policy-maker with a global geographical focus and an appeal to humanity as a whole, rather than a particular society. It hence resonates with ‘thick/strong cosmopolitanism’ (Brock and Brighouse 2005; Held 2005; Dobson 2006). The thick/strong cosmopolitan philosophy suggests that the most important duties in the world are to humanity as a whole; hence, deliberation and problem solving should focus on what is common to all persons as citizens of the world (Held 2005: 10–1). Cosmopolitan diplomacy hence aims to fulfil the overarching objective of achieving world peace by bridging societal divides through intercultural dialogue. It seeks to find common solutions to the common problems of humanity such as environment, terrorism, poverty, xenophobia and racism. There are three main triggers of cosmopolitan diplomacy, or three Ps; players, platforms and problems. Players of cosmopolitan diplomacy are international actors that pioneer and promote the conduct of cosmopolitan diplomacy through a strong cosmopolitan outlook in their discourses and actions. States tend to have a limited capacity to assume such a role since national interests often prevent the realization of cosmopolitan discourses. Supranational bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union and the Vatican, and resourceful individuals such as the rock star Bono are better equipped to act as players of cosmopolitan diplomacy. Platforms are multilateral cooperation schemes that provide an enabling environment and framework for the conduct of cosmopolitan diplomacy. Platforms are not diplomatic actors themselves, but they constitute a catalyst for the solution of worldwide problems by drawing the world’s attention to common problems and by encouraging major international actors to sit on the same table to establish a global dialogue. Finally, problems are the unintended consequences of human activity at a global scale such as climate change, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the depletion of world resources, the solution of which necessitates a united worldwide effort. The three Ps either separately trigger cosmopolitan diplomacy or they interact with each other to make it sustainable. Each trigger helps governments de-emphasize national interests and adopt a cosmopolitan discourse in their diplomatic activities. Moreover, players support the formation of platforms that provide them with opportunities to promote a cosmopolitan solution for problems. For their part, problems provide players with a justification to convince other actors on the necessity of resorting to cosmopolitan diplomacy. To offer an elaborate perspective, this chapter will discuss in detail the Vatican as a player of cosmopolitan diplomacy, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations as a platform enabling cosmopolitan diplomacy, and space debris as a problem necessitating cosmopolitan diplomacy.

The Vatican as a player of cosmopolitan diplomacy By focusing on the establishment of world peace, the foreign relations of the Vatican aim to go beyond the fulfilment of national interests and represent an excellent case for the conduct of diplomatic activity with a cosmopolitan agenda. The Vatican diplomacy is based on its ‘special mission in the world’; that is to solve ‘the problems of the world’ through dialogue ‘with all people of good will, regardless of any racial or ideological differences, any philosophy or opposite social, political and religious matters’ (Walczak 2016: 497). Its ultimate objective is not to work towards the emancipation of the Catholics, but all human beings of good will. The Vatican claims to have a cosmopolitan approach to help the world become a better place by contributing to the prosperity and the peaceful co-existence of humanity (Walczak 2016: 499). Accordingly, the Vatican has developed four main diplomatic activities. First, the Pope sends his emissaries to international 432

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conferences in order to help develop a more humanitarian language for international agreements. For instance, the Vatican successfully campaigned for the insertion of the statement, ‘Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development’ into the final document of the International Congress on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Walczak 2016: 518). Besides, the Vatican promotes and participates in international conventions that focus on the resolution of global problems. For instance, the Vatican supported and called for governments to sign the Paris climate change agreement as a landmark deal to prevent global warming. Moreover, the Vatican actively participated into the UN negotiations on the prohibition of nuclear weapons and became one of the first signatories of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the test, production, possession, stockpiling, and the use or the threat of use of any nuclear weapons. Second, the Vatican acts as a moral authority in global politics and proves to be a credible actor of conflict resolution in international relations (Shelledy 2004: 149). The Vatican diplomacy is thus concentrated on the resolution of conflicts through mediation. A well-known example of the Vatican’s peace-building success was its mediation between Chile and Argentina who had a bilateral conflict over the sovereignty of three small islands, Nueva, Picton and Lennox, located along the Beagle Channel. The Vatican’s supreme moral authority and influence over the large Catholic populations in both Chile and Argentina enabled the Vatican to enjoy such a mediating role that neither government could ignore (Laudy 2000: 293). The Vatican’s diplomatic efforts not only prevented an imminent armed clash between the two military governments, but also provided a long and flexible process of peace negotiation enabling both parties to modify their initial demands and come to an equitable agreement (Lindsley 1987: 454; Laudy 2000: 293). The Vatican’s diplomatic envoys enjoy a high level of credibility in the eyes of Catholic countries, because they represent ‘the supreme authority of the Catholic Church’ and act on behalf of the Pope and under his supreme authority (Walczak 2016: 500). In the case of the Beagle Channel dispute, Cardinal Antonio Samoré’s mediating efforts were successful primarily because his position as the representative of ‘the supreme authority of the Catholic Church’ led both Chilean and Argentinian governments to place complete trust on his absolute neutrality and willingness to solve the dispute favourable to both parties (Laudy 2000: 320). The Vatican’s authorization provided a considerable credibility to Samoré’s mediating efforts which eventuated into a bilateral agreement over a century-old territorial dispute between two states. Third, the Vatican employs diplomacy to prevent a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and Christianity (Shelledy 2004: 158). Aiming for a healthy dialogue with Islam, the Vatican is particularly concerned about the potential repercussions of the US hegemony over the Middle East. Especially during the second Gulf crisis, the Vatican extensively resorted to diplomatic dialogue with the objective of deescalating the conflict in Iraq. Pope John Paul II was particularly against a US-led war in Iraq – irrespective of how just it was – since he feared that it would result in an irreversible civilizational clash between Islam and Christianity (Simpson 2011). He accepted the visit of Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz and sent envoys to Europe to discuss the situation in Iraq with European leaders. Besides, the Vatican sent Cardinal Roger Etchegaray to Iraq to meet with Saddam Hussein. The Vatican also sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to the United States for a meeting with the US President George W. Bush. Although the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts fell short of preventing a US-led war in Iraq, its efforts constituted an important example of cosmopolitan diplomacy conducted by a credible third party to prevent wars and restore peace in the world. Finally, the Pope personally acts as a cosmopolitan diplomat reaching out to Catholics as well as to national governments for the resolution of the world’s pressing issues. Most recently, Pope Francis has launched ‘Share the journey’, a global campaign on migration, inviting all Catholics 433

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as well as all governments of the world to extend a welcoming hand to migrants and refugees. He has also personally overseen the drafting of both the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact for Refugees, which aim to guarantee the protection and integration of migrants and refugees throughout the world. However, despite its cosmopolitan rhetoric and active mediating efforts that go beyond the logic of raison d’état, the capability of Vatican diplomacy to restore world peace is rather restrained for a couple of reasons. First, its field of operation is mostly limited to countries where Catholicism is predominant. One of the main reasons why the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts were successful in the Beagle Channel dispute is that Chile and Argentina are both Catholic countries upon which the Pope has a strong spiritual influence. The Vatican has neither the capacity nor the credibility to exert such a diplomatic effect over non-Catholic countries. Besides, it is too costly for the Vatican, both in terms of manpower and financing, to develop such a capacity to conduct diplomacy at a global level. Finally, diplomacy and foreign affairs do not constitute the major focus of the Vatican, since it spends most of its time and energy on internal church matters (Shelledy 2004: 151). Therefore, despite its cosmopolitan rhetoric, in practice, the Vatican sees itself more as a mediator of last recourse than a force for good resolving all international conflicts (Lindsley 1987: 454). Nevertheless, the Vatican, having diplomatic representations in 173 states and 48 international and regional organizations, and maintaining a spiritual influence over 1.2 billion Catholics around the globe, proves to have a considerable potential for conducting diplomacy at a global level with a cosmopolitan agenda.

The Alliance of Civilizations as a platform of cosmopolitan diplomacy A cosmopolitan approach to the conduct of diplomacy has recently been revitalized through a UN-sponsored project entitled the ‘Alliance of Civilizations’, a platform enabling cosmopolitan diplomacy. It aims to diminish hostility and promote harmony among nations and cultures of the world, and prevent polarization between two prominent but also conflicting civilizations; the West and the East. Established in 2005 as a political initiative of Mr. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, and co-sponsored by the Governments of Spain and Turkey, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) seeks to promote peaceful dialogue to bridge cultural and religious divides, and forge a collective political will to address the world’s imbalances (Uthup 2010: 402). The initiative is intended to respond to the need for a committed effort by the international community – both at the institutional and civil society levels – to bridge divides and overcome prejudice, misconceptions, misperceptions, and polarization which potentially threaten world peace. The Alliance will aim to address emerging threats emanating from hostile perceptions that foment violence, and to bring about cooperation among various efforts to heal such divisions. (Secretary-General of the United Nations (2005) quoted in Goff 2015: 407) The UNAOC constitutes a forum for representatives of different cultures and religions throughout the world to join forces in the pursuit of a multi-religious/multicultural advocacy. It aims to put pressure on governments for the peaceful settlement of conflicts, reconciliation between different faiths and promotion of intercultural dialogue and cooperation. The UNAOC is not a diplomatic actor itself, but it acts as a catalyst for joint diplomatic activity at a global level engaging individuals, groups, governmental and non-governmental actors. The all-embracive rhetoric of the UNAOC has facilitated the inclusion of prominent governments including the 434

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US, Russia, India and China, and the participation of international organizations such as the European Union, the League of Arab States and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The UNAOC also promotes the empowerment of religious figures in world politics in order to facilitate interstate cooperation and peace-building through an all-encompassing religious rhetoric going beyond national or parochial political agendas. With this motivation, the UNAOC oversaw the realization of the World Congress of Religious Leaders bringing together religious and political leaders from different parts of the world to develop a mutual understanding of the world’s problems and seek global solutions (Uthup 2010: 415). Therefore, the UNAOC proves to be a cosmopolitan platform for diplomatic practice beyond the margins of raison d’état. Rather, its raison d’étre advocates a ‘post-Westphalian’ framework. The scholarly literature depicts the UNAOC as a form of global public diplomacy anchored in the joint performance of public engagement with global civil society (Goff 2015: 403). For instance, in partnership with UNESCO and a wide coalition of partners including governments, corporations and civil society groups, the UNAOC launched a worldwide campaign ‘Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion’ engaging people around the world to bridge the gap between cultures. Another example of the UNAOC-sponsored public diplomacy is the Global Youth Movement launched in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2011 with the participation of 130 young people from over 80 countries. The movement aims to empower youth in advancing peace at global level through intercultural co-existence. However, the UNAOC is more than a medium of public diplomacy at the global level since its ambitious objective of bridging cultural and religious divides to reach world peace grants the UNAOC a cosmopolitan character. Not only its geographical focus is global, but also its objectives go well beyond and sometimes even contradictory to national interests. It hence constitutes a platform for diplomatic dialogue at the global level where diplomatic activities are conducted through a cosmopolitan rhetoric and with a particular motive to (re)shape public perceptions on the banality of religious divides. However, the very character of the UNAOC as a platform for cosmopolitan diplomacy jeopardizes its sustainability. It does not have an explicit membership criteria based on legal commitments, and there are no specific rules about who is eligible and who is not. While this qualifies the UNAOC as categorically distinct from international organizations and grants it an all-embracive feature, it also makes it difficult to determine the extent of its international influence. Besides, there is no sanction mechanism to ensure commitment to the objectives of the UNAOC and enable continuous participation in the UNAOC activities. This rather loose organizational structure renders the UNAOC vulnerable in its efforts to respond effectively to the decreasing attachment of its participants and the rising financial difficulties that might eventually result in the liquidation of the UNAOC (Lachmann 2011: 190). Moreover, some consider the cosmopolitan rhetoric of the UNAOC merely as a rhetorical tool for political actors including the UN, the EU and the US to justify their counter-terrorism strategies following the 9/11 attacks (Lachmann 2011: 191). According to this line of thinking, the UNAOC’s cosmopolitan perspective only serves to strengthen the raison d’état as the primary logic of diplomacy. Besides, even the cosmopolitan nature of the UNAOC is contested, since its scope is mostly limited to relations between the ‘West’ and the ‘Muslim world’, recognizing and even reinforcing the ‘us vs. them’ tendencies rather than remedying them (Balcı 2009: 102). However, this criticism overlooks the postwesternization processes underlying social, political and cultural transformations in Europe and the Western world in general blurring the boundaries between East and West (Delanty 2006; Rumford 2008). Nevertheless, replying to its critics, the UNAOC has recently introduced a new objective, that is, the pursuit of global justice by promoting ‘dignity, justice and stability for all people’ (Haynes 2017: 1133). Besides, the UNAOC introduced a 2013–2018 Strategic Review to emphasize that, despite budget cuts, its activities 435

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would not only continue but even expand into new areas to consolidate its global outreach (Haynes 2017: 1136). Overall, notwithstanding its critics, the UNAOC constitutes a global platform for cosmopolitan diplomacy engaging both governments and non-governmental actors to work towards the restoration of world peace through intercultural dialogue and understanding. The example of UNAOC also confirms that governments can transcend the logic of raison d’état in diplomatic activity. Even though it is early to judge whether the UNAOC is a success or a failure, it nevertheless stands as a crucial platform for the conduct of cosmopolitan diplomacy.

Space debris as a key problem triggering cosmopolitan diplomacy The final case illuminating the prospects for cosmopolitan diplomacy is the space debris problem, the solution of which necessitates a united response. As previously stated, problems constitute a crucial trigger of cosmopolitan diplomacy forcing governments and other international actors to go out of their diplomatic safe zone and work for a common solution through multilateral negotiation. Since the beginning of the Cold War, space has always been used for fulfilling national interests through emphasis on technological supremacy to deter rivals. Space diplomacy has thus been primarily conducted in accordance with the logic of raison d’état. The US-Soviet rivalry in space led to the early forms of public diplomacy at a global level where both Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts travelled around the world to advertise the American and Soviet grandeur. Space diplomacy is not only used to exert greatness, but it is also employed to fulfil aspirations for establishing regional hegemony. For instance, India’s launching of the GSAT-9, also known as the South Asia Satellite to ‘help neighbours’ improve their telecommunication systems as part of its ‘neighbourhood-first foreign policy’ could be viewed as an indication of India’s quest for regional supremacy. However, space diplomacy is now having a serious turn to move beyond the logic of raison d’état as Earth’s orbit has been filled with numerous satellite debris threatening the entire planet. Currently, there are more than 20,000 identified pieces of orbital debris larger than 10cm in diameter, and half a million more between 1cm and 10cm. Space debris has grown exponentially following two recent events. In 2007, as part of its anti-satellite weapon test, China destroyed a weather satellite generating a massive debris field. The event was followed by a collision between a defunct Russian satellite and a functioning US satellite in 2009. The total number of junk created by these two events constitutes one-third of the entire space debris in Earth’s orbit. The current density of space debris not only endangers space travel, but also threatens to incapacitate functioning satellites in Earth’s orbit, crippling financial markets, mobile phone networks and television signals. Once a distinct platform for superpower rivalry during the Cold War, space is now hardly reserved only for great powers. The number of countries having space-launch capacity has now reached 11, while over 60 countries operate more than a thousand satellites for communication and information gathering purposes. Therefore, space debris is a collective disaster perpetrated by numerous nations resulting in the suffering of the entire world. Despite the fact that states pursue diplomacy over space mostly with the motivation to fulfil national interests, the space debris problem forces them to shift their focus away from their parochial interests and work together to find a common solution. Scholarly attempts to bring a new diplomatic perspective to the solution of space debris date back to McKnight (1991: 20) who suggested in 1991 the establishment of Orbital Debris Action Committee, an international institution under the UN ‘to investigate means to reduce the growth of orbital debris in a cooperative international framework’. Similarly, Perek (1991) called for an 436

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immediate response to the burgeoning space debris problem from a unified world community. Bird (2003) proposes the reformation of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) so that it becomes a truly global institution to deal with the space debris problem. Recent scholarly works even promote the establishment of a new international organization separate from the UN to offer efficient solutions through ‘polycentric governance’ (Munters 2016). A recent EU-led initiative, namely, the ‘International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities’ stands as the first decisive political attempt towards establishing a cosmopolitan framework to deal with the space debris problem. The EU, the United States, Japan and Australia endorsed the International Code of Conduct to determine ground rules for debris mitigation, collision prevention and space traffic management. The Code, according to some scholars, constitutes a potential catalyst for a global space policy under the auspices of the COPUOS (Percy and Landrum 2014: 30). For others, it is doomed to failure as long as it remains a soft law having no legal effect on governments to enforce global compliance (Lele 2012). The latest version of the Code was negotiated in a meeting at the UN Headquarters in New York from 27 to 31 July 2015. The reservations of several governments hampered the implementation of the Code worldwide. Especially, Russia and China dismissed the Code as a Western creation. Nevertheless, the meeting can still be deemed a success since it brought together over 100 countries most of whom were willing to contribute to the adoption of a global unified stance to prevent the growth of space debris. Diplomatic attempts to find a common solution for the space debris problem will eventually come to fruition as long as the world’s governments remain conscious and worried about the dangers that the problem poses for their future. Overall, despite current setbacks, the space debris problem has proved instrumental for the development of a cosmopolitan diplomatic discourse, both in academia and in politics, which aims to deal with the problems of space for the good of all mankind. International deliberations on how to solve the space debris issue shook the foundations of space diplomacy traditionally based on the logic of raison d’état. The global endorsement of a code of conduct for dealing with space debris may even constitute a catalyst for a cosmopolitan diplomatic practice not only in other space-related issues, but also in other areas of global concern such as climate change and energy.

Conclusion This chapter discussed cosmopolitan diplomacy as transcending moral, humanitarian and disaster diplomacy with a particular focus on three primary triggers that respectively promote, facilitate, and enforce the conduct of cosmopolitan diplomacy, namely players, platforms and problems. These triggers help governments de-emphasize national interests and embrace a cosmopolitan outlook in their diplomatic discourses and initiatives. Accordingly, the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts were instrumental in finding a common solution to the Beagle Channel dispute convincing both Chile and Argentina to de-emphasize their national interests. Similarly, the UNAOC enabled governments and non-governmental actors to take a step back from their parochial interests and embrace a cosmopolitan discourse of bridging cultural and societal divides. Finally, the space debris problem helped governments shift their space policy preferences towards a more cosmopolitan discourse to find a common solution. The triggers not only individually contribute to the uses of cosmopolitan diplomacy, but they also interact with and feed on each other. The Vatican not only acted as a promoter of world peace and the well-being of humanity, but it also contributed to the debates on how to tackle with global problems including space debris. The Vatican representatives participated to forums assembled by platforms including the UNAOC, which facilitated their diplomatic activism. 437

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However, as the three cases indicate, the persistence of raison d’état within governments constrains the development of cosmopolitan diplomacy. The Vatican suffers a credibility problem outside the Catholic lands. For its part, the UNAOC has institutional limitations to enforce lasting commitment to its cause. Finally, the EU-led code of conduct regarding the space debris problem is yet to be endorsed globally as it is perceived as a top-down Western project. Notwithstanding criticisms of the concept, these cases nevertheless evidence the promise of cosmopolitan diplomacy to offer a peaceful search for viable solutions to the common problems of humanity by de-emphasizing selfish, parochial visions and interests.

Note 1 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Chris Rumford, a great mentor and friend. I would like to thank Didem Buhari Gulmez for her invaluable comments and feedback.

References Akpınar, P. (2013) ‘Turkey’s Peacebuilding in Somalia: The Limits of Humanitarian Diplomacy’, Turkish Studies, 14(4): 735–57. Balcı, A. (2009) ‘The Alliance of Civilizations: The Poverty of the Clash/Alliance Dichotomy?’, Insight Turkey, 11(1): 95–108. Berridge, G.R. (2001) ‘Machiavelli’, in G.R. Berridge, M. Keens-Soper and T.G. Otte (eds.) Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bird, R.C. (2003) ‘Procedural Challenges to Environmental Regulation of Space Debris’, American Business Law Journal, 40(1): 635–85. Bjola, C. and Kornprobst, M. (2013) Understanding International Diplomacy: Theory, Practice and Ethics, London and New York: Routledge. Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2006) ‘Introduction: The Idea of a Post-Western Europe’, in G. Delanty (ed.) Europe and Asia beyond East and West, London: Routledge. Dobson, A. (2006) ‘Thick Cosmopolitanism’, Political Studies, 54(1): 165–84. Gaillard, J., Clavé, E. and Kelman, I. (2008) ‘Wave of Peace? Tsunami Disaster Diplomacy in Aceh, Indonesia’, Geoforum, 39(1): 511–26. Ganapati, E.N., Kelman, I. and Koukis, T. (2010) ‘Analysing Greek-Turkish Disaster-related Cooperation: A Disaster Diplomacy Perspective’, Cooperation and Conflict, 45(2): 162–85. Goff, P.M. (2015) ‘Public Diplomacy at the Global Level: The Alliance of Civilizations as a Community of Practice’, Cooperation and Conflict, 50(3): 402–17. Haynes, J. (2017) ‘The United Nations Alliance of Civilisations and Global Justice’, Globalizations, 14(7): 1125–39. Held, D. (2005) ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan Order’, in G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingle, H.N. (1976) Nesselrode and the Russian Rapprochement with Britain, 1836–1844, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kelman, I. (2012) Disaster Diplomacy: How Disasters Affect Peace and Conflict, London and New York: Routledge. Kissinger, H. (1994) Diplomacy, New York: Simon & Schuster. Lachmann, N.S. (2011) ‘In the Labyrinth of International Community: The Alliance of Civilizations Programme at the United Nations’, Cooperation and Conflict, 46(2): 185–200. Laudy, M. (2000) ‘The Vatican Mediation of the Beagle Channel Dispute: Crisis Intervention and Forum Building’, in M. Greenberg, J.H. Barton and M.E. McGuinness (eds.) Words over War: Mediation and Arbitration to Prevent Deadly Conflict, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Lele, A. (ed.) (2012) Decoding the International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities, New Delhi: Pentagon Press. Lindsley, L. (1987) ‘The Beagle Channel Settlement: Vatican Mediation Resolves a Century-Old Dispute’, Journal of Church and State, 29(3): 435–55. 438

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Linklater, A. (1998) The Transformation of Political Community, Cambridge: Polity Press. Manners, I. (2002) ‘Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40(2): 235–58. McKnight, D.S. (1991) ‘Track Two Diplomacy: An International Framework for Controlling Orbital Debris’, Space Policy, 7(1): 13–22. Munters, W. (2016) ‘Space Debris: Towards an International Organization?’, Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies Working Paper Series, 175 1–50. Otte, T.G. (2001) ‘Satow’, in G.R. Berridge, M. Keens-Soper and T.G. Otte (eds.) Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Percy, T.K. and Landrum, D.B. (2014) ‘Investigation of National Policy Shifts to Impact Orbital Debris Environments’, Space Policy, 30(1): 23–33. Perek, L. (1991) ‘Space Debris and the World Community’, Space Policy, 7(1): 9–12. Regnier, P. (2011) ‘The Emerging Concept of Humanitarian Diplomacy: Identification of a Community of Practice and Prospects for International Recognition’, International Review of the Red Cross, 93(884): 1211–37. Rumford, C. (2008) Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory, London: Routledge. Secretary-General of the United Nations (2005) ‘Secretary-General Announces Launch of Alliance of Civilizations Aimed at Bridging Divides between Societies Exploited by Extremists’, Press Release SG/ SM/10004, 14 July. Available at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/sgsm10004.doc.htm (accessed 30 March 2018). Sending, O.J., Pouliot, V. and Neumann, I.B. (2011) ‘The Future of Diplomacy: Changing Practices, Evolving Relationships’, International Journal, 66(3): 527–42. Sharp, P. (1999) ‘For Diplomacy: Representation and the Study of International Relations’, International Studies Review, 1(1): 33–57. Shelledy, R.B. (2004) ‘The Vatican’s Role in Global Politics’, SAIS Review of International Affairs, 24(2): 149–62. Simpson, P.L.P. (2011) ‘Transcending Justice: Pope John Paul II and Just War’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 39(2): 286–98. Uthup, T. (2010) ‘Bringing Communities Closer: The Role of the Alliance of Civilizations (AoC)’, Crosscurrents, 60(3): 402–18. Walczak, R. (2016) ‘Papel Diplomacy – Characteristics of the Key Issues in Canon Law and International Law’, The Jurist, 76(1): 489–530. Watson, A. (1982) Diplomacy: The Dialogue between States, London: Taylor and Francis. Wien, S. (2015) Ambassador for Peace: How Theodore Roosevelt Won the Nobel Peace Prize, Morrisville, NC: Lulu Publishing Services.

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Part IV

World varieties of cosmopolitanism

38 Cosmopolitanism in Latin America Political practices, critiques, and imaginaries Aurea Mota

Introduction Most discussions of cosmopolitanism take as their starting point a manifested attitude in people’s moral orientations and one that is not constrained only by local contexts (Roudometof 2005). It is therefore worth starting this chapter by noting that while classical approaches strongly emphasized the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism structured around abstract universal ideas, more recently the emphasis is moving to the understanding of how cosmopolitics emerges from the diversity of historical contexts (Appiah 2005; Mendieta 2012). As many contributions to this volume show, cosmopolitan practices, projects, and imaginaries can be found in many situations and places. However, as will be argued in this chapter, world orientations seeking ways of non-exclusive conviviality is not something that should be seem as a ‘natural’ (Taylor 1989) or an ahistorical human ability. Cosmopolitism emerges because of the transformation of internal and external societal borders creating new interpretations of what communality means in the context of diversity. That is why cosmopolitics should rather be seen as a universal orientation created through the many encounters between humans and non-humans which puts the idea of respect (but also disrespect) within and between peoples and species at the center of dispute. Before moving forward, the reader should be aware of the fact that in this chapter, cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics are used deliberately without distinguishing the terms from each other. As Mignolo and Stråth (both in this volume) put it, cosmopolitanism is always a ‘disputed political project’ that should not be seem as field of studies apart from social and political struggles. One should be always suspicious of any attempt to put apart cosmopolitanism as a field of study and as a political practice. The dispute over different interpretations of communality and conviviality is found in historical moments when specific social groups start to see the other as a way to construct their own idea of about what moral respect consists. In history, this phenomenon has been based mostly on the minimal acquaintance and the mutual knowledge of the ‘others’ in relation to ‘us.’ Projects of domination have been much more strongly emphasized than the projects of emancipation that also come with those historical encounters. It is through the historical process itself that a reconfiguration of the meaning of the ‘I’ and of the ‘we’ happens in each specific situation. The aim of this chapter is to explore how a number of Latin American thinkers have put in practice cosmopolitan projects and by doing so developed cosmopolitical projects that should be better 443

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be seen as tools to advance universalism as humanitarian and inter-species projects of conviviality. This is what we understand by cosmopolitism as a struggle for emancipation and for the creation of a more substantive meaning of humanity. Despite the European dominance in the intellectual debates about cosmopolitanism, the concept entails in its very definition a worldly moral orientation that is always pushing the mind to expand the limits of what is locally constructed. What is specific for each one of the ‘regional’ varieties of cosmopolitanism is the way that different orientations are historically expressed. That is why it will not be maintained here that there is a specific Latin American cosmopolitan ideal that goes in a different direction of what is found in others parts of the world. Rather the argument is that different historical experiences have led to different cosmopolitan perspectives, and the history of cosmopolitanism has been nothing but a history of entanglements of world views that have been pushing societies to reflect about what we are and what we should be. Any specificity in terms of what it means for the broader understanding of cosmopolitanism will come from the historical experiences of approximation and divergence between worlds. It is claimed that to talk about ‘Latin American Cosmopolitanism’ or ‘Cosmopolitanism in Latin America’ only makes sense when we understand that the specificity of any ‘variety’ of cosmopolitanism refers to how reflexivity is formed in a critical context when history brings about a re-interpretation of the meaning of ‘ourselves’ and ‘others.’ The chapter departs from the idea that cosmopolitics is rooted in histories and interpretations which are the main sources of creation of a cosmopolitan imaginary, a version of what Appiah (2005) calls ‘rooted cosmopolitanism.’ That is why it is not contradictory that in Latin America we find one of the most outstanding cosmopolitical projects in the early nineteenth century exactly in the moment of formation of independent national states with the post-colonial re-shaping of the Americas. This peculiar kind of what one could call for that period a ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ involved declarations about local idiosyncrasies which must be taken into account and how the new societies wished to construct their own place in a ‘pre-existed’ global world, as the intellectual tradition of that time believed.1 It also included a discussion about the political unification of the New World as a way of overcoming the problems of the colonial physical bordering of the whole continent.2 What is interesting about the Latin American intellectual vanguard who devoted themselves to the project of constructing a new world in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is the declaration of a historical moral and ethical specificity alongside a morality that is larger than what is contained within national frontiers. In this sense it has much in common with Meinecke’s (1970 [1907]) famous discussion of the cosmopolitanism of the German Enlightenment, except that in the Latin American case it should not be seen in terms of a model of decline, but of continuous transformation for the better. Some of these ideas that emerged out of the movement for independence remain today in a new form (Grueso 2014). This new form of re-imagining what constitutes the communality of Latin America has gained a less clear cosmopolitical imaginary, an aspect that I will come back to in the conclusion of this chapter. It will be argued that the cosmopolitanism as expressed in a number of key works has always been present since at least the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, we must agree with Salomon (1986) when he writes that the concept of cosmopolitanism was not developed very clearly in the subcontinent. But I claim that it does not allow us to say that the cosmopolitan imaginary and cosmopolitical projects did not exist or that it was not important in the region. One could say that cosmopolitanism as a ‘sociological concept’ was not in common usage by intellectuals of Latin America.3 However the core defining elements are present in some paradigmatic works which will be selected as representative examples of Latin America cosmopolitan social and philosophical ideas – despite the fact that cosmopolitics have always been part of the construction of the possible emancipatory horizons that emerged in this part of the world. 444

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Following from the previous idea, a wider epistemological point should be made: we must distinguish between the subject which defines a social phenomenon and its scientific conceptualization. According to Alberto Melucci, there must be awareness of the constructive nature of concepts in order to see how social phenomena are not just objective entities. This is especially relevant to the analysis of power and what Melucci (1996: 182) has referred more specifically to as the ‘power of naming.’ In the process of interpreting and knowing, the meaning used to define social experiences involves an epistemological struggle which is almost impossible to recognize after the concept was formed and consolidated. Post-colonial theorists see ‘the power of naming’ as something which expresses the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 1992) which was born with the ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Eurocentric’ constitution of knowledge (Dussel 1995, 2007; Mignolo 2000). One of the core ideas put forward by these authors is that Europe did not derive its identity from itself, but from the formation of a set of global contrasts. The established contacts between different cultures, and ways of life, and peoples were fundamental to determine the development of the modern world institutions and imaginary from the very beginning, and especially in shaping the cosmopolitan perspective. The importance of the invention of a ‘discovery moment’ which determined an ‘object’ that was discovered and a ‘subject’ who discovered it marked the modern European expansion and re-shaped the European societal imaginary. However, this critical moment has mostly been understood as only a way of imposition of European imaginary and institutions over the dominated historical subject. Re-interpretations of the world and formation of new ways of conceiving historical relations that emerged in the ‘New World’ have been very much ignored. It is a fact, however, that the intellectual wealth of the New World and its importance for European modernity needs to be critically reexamined (Mota 2015). In the case of cosmopolitics, it should be suggested that the cosmopolitan debates were led by a strong European ‘power of naming.’ Nonetheless, this chapter shows that there is a Latin American intellectual tradition which entails a moral orientation that has important implications for cosmopolitanism both as a concept for the social sciences and as a political practice for the modern world. To develop the analysis about how the cosmopolitan imaginary was formed and transformed in Latin America in the two hundred years since the colonial period, and how it has transformed worldly perspectives, three moments of re-signification of history will be discussed: the period of formation of nation states; the struggle over what race means in the Latin American context and how it has positively created a unique societal order; and the latter revision of all previous historical moments that come along with the post-colonial critique by the end of the twenty-first century.

Cosmopolitanism and the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century The starting point chosen for this approach about cosmopolitism in Latin America is the moment of independence. During the decades between the end of the eighteenth century4 and the first half of the nineteenth century it is possible to find the raising of moral claims and political practices that configured a cosmopolitan perspective in the region. Nonetheless the political transformation of these years had a global impact which has been ignored by the main currents in modern thought. According to Weinberg and Damas (2006) four events of these decades had Latin America playing a central role, though we find little discussion mentioned in the conventional historiography. They are, firstly, the fact that the mentality of colonial liberation created a new source of what collective emancipation could be; secondly, as Aguilar Rivera (2000) claims, never before in world history did liberal ideas have such a strong impact in so many different countries at the same time, a development that was essential for the foundation of the liberal political thought in Europe and elsewhere; thirdly, in the same way, there was a large-scale adoption of modern republic institutions in South 445

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and North Americas; fourthly, the Pan-American ideal was a kind of prototype for later national consolidation. Some of those ‘contributions’ will be analyzed in detail below. The cosmopolitan imaginary of that period was influenced by the break from colonial political dependency. The main contribution of Latin America during that period for the modern world was in the politics of the liberation movements seeking national autonomy. This was a movement that also had important implications for the cosmopolitan imaginary that arose in Latin America. Since the early period of independence the moral question about how to make possible the mutual respect between human beings was present in the main political debates. For that, two names must be highlighted: Simón Bolívar and Simón Rodríguez. Both of them were intellectuals and political agents of the liberation movement in the Spanish colonized countries of Latin America. For Rozo Acuña (2007: 223), Bolívar ‘has affirmed that America was his motherland, but thanks to his great intellectual achievement he could claim an universal citizenship without stingy frontiers.’ This claim, it could be argued, could also be applied to Simón Rodríguez. Both were talking about the political reality of Latin America, but always relating it to what was happening abroad and somehow taking the wider world as something really present in their actions and political writings. Fojas (2005) also identifies the formation of the Pan-American political community of this period as an early cosmopolitan organization of the states. In his book The American Societies [Sociedades Americanas] (1840 [1828]) Simon Rodríguez made an argument for popular education, what he calls ‘general education’ which must be applied in all the Latin American countries. The desire was to show the way for a formation of a specific social behavior led by a kind of collective compromise towards the building of an ‘enlightened’ state. For him, only this enlightened state could give the general education for all and teach everyone how a global human behavior could be possible. In this general education what must be taught is what is morally appropriate for all human beings. For him, it would based on the knowledge of other societies and their public affairs. What is really important for the main claim of this chapter is that the general education proposed by him must be based on a comparison between the Latin American reality and other parts of the world. As such the general education must show how cultural, ethical, and civilizational idiosyncrasies could be encompassed by a kind of mutual moral respect (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]). Thus the main character of this general education is ‘forming a social conduct’ based on the knowledge of the public affairs outside the national territory to build a new society led by the cosmopolitan pursuit of respect. Nonetheless, he was very clear when he asserted that the general education ‘must be national’ (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]: 05). But it is also clear that he was thinking about another kind of national community, and not the one which is based on the construction of ways to differentiate ourselves from others. He was also not talking about the shape that the nation states assumed in Latin America. As with Simón Bolívar, he was thinking about a broader national formation of the liberated Latin America (Belloto and Martinez Corrêa 1983). For Rodríguez (1840 [1828]) the specific character of Latin America was that it would be the place where it would be possible to create a large and integrated liberal and republican state. According to his model the modern liberal ideas could be better applied in the region because it was a place without the legacy of the old political institutions. In his words, ‘Europe will never reform their moral as they are rebuilding their edifices’ (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]: 8). In this project based on a general moral education, liberal ideas played a central role. The guarantee of individual property and liberty was the only way to make possible the openness of any society. For him, what sustains the liberty of the person is: first, even primitive peoples must respect each other’s faculties with which everyone came to the world; secondly, between the civilized 446

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peoples it must be recognized the unalienable and unforgivable liberties that all individuals had when they got into any society. (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]: 12–13) The similarity is very clear between Rodríguez’s proposal and the text by Kant’s that is conventionally taken as the foundation of modern cosmopolitanism (Kant 1991 [1795]). For both thinkers the violation of rights would make the creation of any kind of universal community fall apart, but also necessitate a cosmopolitan order. What is original in his ideas in relation to other authors of that period, including the European authors, is that for him to concretize an enlightened moral society the comparisons of different people’s behavior and faculties must be made. In this model, curiosity to know what other peoples do is the motor which could make populations come out of the state of ignorance (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]: 16). As an analogy, it could be possible to say that is the law of inertia applied for the universal knowledge. The only way to improve ourselves is to understand the realities of others and one’s own situation will be improved by the contact with those near and those distant from us. He was also proclaiming that the progress of a nation was only possible by the capability of human beings to learn with others matters of public affairs. As ‘hospitality’ is the main principle in the Kantian proposal to achieve ‘perpetual peace’ between nations, ‘compassion’ is the key for the mutual understanding between different peoples for Simón Rodríguez. In his model, compassion makes possible that people do not feel insensitive to the problems of others. True compassion is something that one has because they have lived the same problematical situation. In human history, for instance, societal segregation and hierarchical patterns of exclusion were experimented in different forms in many human societies. In all cases, social segregation makes specific groups suffer prejudices and other forms of humiliation. As a consequence, all societies must feel compassion when they know how the others are suffering as consequences of this tendency. A moral cosmopolitanism based on the principle of compassion must try to help the others when they are in a situation that nobody would choose. This could be seen as a very negative way to cast the cosmopolitan morality. But then Kant’s major work which led to the emergence of modern cosmopolitanism had the terror period of the French Revolution as the main inspiration. It was a clear attempt to think about a world becoming more connected and how the republican states should avoid war and guarantee the recognition of individuals who are not part of a nation. Maybe in the birth of modern cosmopolitism, in which the Latin America perspective is constitutive, it is possible to find a sort of intellectual uncertainty. The work of Simón Rodríguez, for instance, is very positive when he is saying what should be done, but is more pessimistic when he was talking about could be the motor of this worldly moral orientation. But taking the different social realities, the same could be said of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant 1991 [1795]). Despite its strong emphasis on the Americas as the context where the political community must be centered, in the moment of the formation of independent nation states in the new world, the Latin American intellectual vanguard were claiming that moral respect should be applied to all human beings. For instance, the text ‘El Crimen de La Guerra,’ of the Argentinean liberal legalist Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), originally published in 1879, in my view could be seen as a synthesis of the cosmopolitical perspective in that period. Alberdi (1920 [1870]) had very strong ideas about the political situation during the nineteenth century in Latin America and about what was happening around the world. In this seminal text, he claims that: [B]efore the world will be one whole and unique association, it will be naturally organized in other large but unitary sections, as continents. . . . It doesn’t mean anything more than 447

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the practicable shape of the international centralization of the general human being which is beginning to exist in ideas because it was present before in facts. (Alberdi 1920 [1870]: 84) If we take this core idea as an example, we could say that the Pan-Americanism of the nineteenth century was much more than a regional organization. It was something which shows an alternative way to construct a cosmopolitan world which is only possible if the local and regional powers were well organized. An important point, largely ignored by the conventional literature, is the fact that, and in contrast to Europe, Latin America was the first continent of the world where the liberal state was widely adopted. The ‘liberal constitutional experiment’ of the nineteenth century, as Aguilar Rivera (2000) calls it, could be seem as a first large-scale attempt to realize liberal ideas in the Western world. Simón Rodríguez (1840 [1828]), for instance, believed that the mission of Latin America for the new world was building liberal institutions. According to him, there were some important political claims in the nineteenth century: the liberal education was demanding for a lot of philosophy; alongside the general interest was a claim for institutional rebuilding. Because of the fact that in Latin America it was easier to create new and liberal modern institutions it was their task to undertake this liberal project (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]: 7). For him, the best thing about the creation of the liberal states in Latin America was the absence of absolutistism. In this way, we must make clear that since the abolishment of slavery in Latin America, formally the liberal republican guaranties of equality and freedom never regressed. Maybe the main question for the cosmopolitan perspective in the nineteenth century was how to think the relation between Latin America and what is conventionally called the Western world. This twofold way to see the relation has an ontological dimension for human beings with experience of different social realities (Fernandez Retamar 1973). Thus, the question is how to think about two different sorts of uncertainty, which had led to these singular but comparable cosmopolitan perspectives. For Cuban poet Fernandez Retamar (1973: 325) the only way in which it is possible to relate these worlds in an equal sense is to insert the Latin America reality inside the occidental one without any kind of epistemological priority. In an empirical sense, in Latin America in the nineteenth century there was the foundation of non-colonial, modern, liberal, and republican states which were marked by a new kind of mixed social configuration. The European, Amerindians, and the Africans were mixed together during the consolidation of the colonial period and after that in first decades of independence. In Europe the main question was how it could be possible to find liberal states without the hierarchical absolutistic determinations. As we saw, in this period Latin American thought was deeply marked by the comparison between the local realities and what was happening elsewhere, especially in Europe. As it was shown, it had a strong impact also in the cosmopolitan perspective put forward by Simón Rodríguez and his contemporaries. It is also present in the new shape that the cosmopolitan perspective would assume in the early twentieth century. It will be discussed in the following section.

Cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century: issues that emerged from the racial debates and the de-colonial critique In the beginning of The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos asserts that ‘the central thesis of this book is that the distinct races of the world tend to mix themselves more and more, until a new kind of human being will be formed, made by the selection of one of each peoples in the world’ (Vasconcelos 1986 [1925]: 9). It sums up probably the strongest view about the racial question in Latin American. For Vasconcelos, Latin America was the place where the mixture of races reached 448

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the highest level in the human history. As such it is possible to identify in the subcontinent the starting point for the formation of a ‘cosmic race.’ Without the same intensity, Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist who became known for been developing the idea of ‘racial democracy,’ is another key figure for the understanding of how the issue of race would be connected to a broader interpretation of social integration. According to Freyre, as counter example for what was happening in the United States, Brazilian society is more racially inclusive and democratic (Freyre 2006 [1933]). Despite the differences, both of them have the same view about the racial contribution of the Latin American form of modernity. For Vasconcelos (1986 [1925]) the main contribution that one could find in Latin American history is the cultural improvement brought about by the mixing of different races. The mission of the ‘Latin America race’ was, in his view, above all ethnic. According to him, provincialism was the worst mistake of the liberators (an interpretation that I do not share). Vasconcelos believed that the ‘emancipators’ were so self-centered in the idea of colonial emancipation and that they did not realize that the main task of Latin American societies for the global world was to consolidate a universal race. The new shape that the world was deemed to be assuming, which is a more global one, was fundamental for the formation of this notion of an universal race. The ‘universópolis’ means that only a real cosmopolitan universe would be possible whether or not the traditional frontiers become weaker. Side by side with this boundary issue, the society must have a fairer distribution of economic wealth, and, as expressed in the work of Rodríguez (1840 [1828]), the general education must become a public good for everybody. Cosmic Race can be seen as a kind of scientific fiction based on ‘real facts,’ that explores how the multiplicity of the races in Latin American societies would be the key factor for the formation of humanity as the integration of different people. For Vasconcelos, Latin America was the first place in world where the four main races – the white Europeans, the Asian, the Pre-Colombian civilization, and the Africans – mixed to form the ‘fifth race,’ the cosmic one (1986 [1925]). But in his work it is impossible to find, for instance, something like how the possible formation of this fifth race was marked by the subjugation by one race over others. Vasconcelos and Freyre were talking about the question of how the cultural encounters in the tropics were marked by the racial and ethnic mixture. But, as we will see further in Freyre’s (Freyre 2006 [1933]) work the societal problems which had emerged as a result of this process were forgotten. In Casa Grande e Senzala (Freyre 2006 [1933]), The Masters and the Slaves, it is possible to see how in the Northeast of Brazil a strong racial hybridization marked by a weak differentiation between the public and private spheres occurred. This is a very important book for thinking about the racial question in Latin America (see Burke and Pallares-Burke 2008). However it is not clear how this question could be related to a cosmopolitan morality. Freyre did not express the stronger view as it appears in the Cosmic Race discussed above. For Freyre, what was the most important character of hybridization in Brazil was the way in which societal links were revived and recreated in a fairly democratic way. Sheriff (2001) remarks that Freyre made a historical reconstruction of the slavery in Brazil as racial democracy. Souza (2000: 70) also shows how the work of Freyre could be read as an ‘ideology of the extinguishing of difference.’ Nonetheless, it is possible to see Freyre’s ideas as a moral proposal to abolish the inequalities brought about by racial segregation. One could read the aim of Casa Grande e Senzala as an attempt to explain how the racial question was above all organized in Brazil. But, as Souza (2000) suggests, what Freyre was really writing about is the distinctive element of Brazilian slavery in relation to other experiences in the continent, mostly the North American one. Because, as he had shown, the racial hybridization in this country did not produce a formally segregated society as happened, for instance, in the United States and in South Africa. In this sense, Freyre should be recognized as the one who was also talking about the relative success of cultural hybridization 449

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in Brazil without the same moral transcendence that it is possible to identify in Vasconcelos’s approach. Nonetheless, both authors were talking about the triumph of cosmopolitan cultural encounters in Latin America as its main moral legacy for the modern world. Side by side with the racial debate during this period, the question about social inequality was very influenced by Marxism. In fact, especially in the middle of the twentieth century, it was impossible to say which current was leading the debates in Latin America. There was a significant debate between these two intellectual traditions. The socialists believed that the concentration of economic power and division between the proletariat and the bourgeois was responsible for the inequalities observed in the region, while the ‘racialists’ believed that the class question overshadowed the racial formation of the subcontinent. This debate is clearly reflected in Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality5 (2008 [1928]) by José Carlos Mariátegui. In this book seven theses are presented about how the indigenous question was related to the class struggle. In the fifth thesis, for instance, he argues that the indigenous problem in Peru is essentially a social and economic issue. The future resolution of this question must be made by the indigenous groups. Nonetheless, as he claims in the seventh thesis, the socialist revolutionary movement is compatible with the indigenous movement. What must be done to make this relation clear is to show that the indigenous struggle is a class question. It is possible to see in his thought, despite the centrality of the Peruvian reality, the necessity to go beyond the local context to understand the ethnic and social question of this period. The history of Latin America, with the idea of the discovery of the New World by the Europeans, was essential to construct the idea of justice and to found modern institutions. In this way, for Mariátegui, Peru is only a small part of the world. But in the analysis of the Peruvian reality with the indigenous problem and socialism as the main questions, it is possible to see how revolution and traditional ways of life are connected. To address this problem for a Latin American cosmopolitical perspective, it could be argued that for Mariátegui (2008 [1928]) the moral condition for a socialist revolution is not to forgot that the ethnic constitution is one of the core elements in which modern patterns of inequality was constructed. After the period of national independence, it is possible to argue that the intellectual tradition starts to connect the societal idiosyncrasies of those societies as an alternative way to solve modern social problems. As the work of Mariátegui shows, the ethnic and the racial question in post-colonial Latin American dominated debates in the first half of the twentieth century. A very important critical turn has emerged in the last decades in Latin America. In close connection with the post-colonial debates that also emerged in other parts of the world, many thinkers have revised the history of the formation of the modern world as it was told by Eurocentric narratives. Cosmopolitism has been taken very seriously by the followers of this critical perspective that have as one of its main proponents, Walter Mignolo. His principal contribution is to put the cosmopolitan perspective forward as the best way to understand the modern colonial history. To appreciate his work, first of all, we must differentiate the cosmopolitanism as an aggregation of projects towards a planetary conviviality from phenomena which could be seen as the expression of globalization (Mignolo 2000). His focus is on the first, of course. His approach is marked by a critique of the colonial world as historical fact and as an intellectual legacy. For him, to overtake the problematic outcome of the modern colonial period it is necessary to undertake what he calls by ‘border thinking’ which departs from a ‘subaltern perspective.’ His proposal can be summed up as follows: critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism as a regulative principle demands yielding generously toward diversity as a universal and cosmopolitan project in which everyone participates instead of ‘being participated.’ Such a regulative principle should replace and displace the abstract universal cosmopolitan ideals that helped to hold together the modern/colonial 450

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world system and to preserve the leadership role of the North Atlantic. ‘For that reason, cosmopolitanism today has to become border thinking, critical dialogic, from the perspective of those local histories that had to deal along with global designs’ (Mignolo 2000: 744). For Mignolo, the constitutions of rights are a very important issue if we are talking about the real possibility of a ‘dialogic cosmopolitanism.’ For instance, it could be possible to say that he is in agreement with Beck (2002: 19) when he says that that ‘without the rule of law is there is only the rule of force and ruse – not the cosmopolitan societies we are looking for.’ However, according to Mignolo what should be done to take the next step towards a cosmopolitan world is to think about a ‘radical reconceptualization of the human rights paradigm’ (Mignolo 2000: 739). Without taking the post-colonial critique as a point of departure, Chernilo (2010 and in this volume) claims that in contemporary social science cosmopolitanism as a concept must be studied as something which asserts a normative principle. For Mignolo (1998) the cosmopolitan perspective has also the moral task of showing how the geography of the power/knowledge was constructed in the modern world to initiate a change from below. In other words, it concerns the attempt to re-design world power in a more balanced way. His proposal is closer to what Delanty (2009 and in this volume) calls a critical-cosmopolitan approach. This is marked by a strong emphasis in the internal transformations of the societal world. For Chernilo (2010: 163) cosmopolitan social theory could help us to understand the social conditions of our time and to fix the parameters for a new normative order. However, contrary to what we might expect, Mignolo along with Eduardo Mendieta and Daniel Chernilo, have not attracted much support in their attempt to bring cosmopolitanism into contemporary Latin America debates. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the cosmopolitan perspective in Latin America has been marked by the fact that we are living in an increasingly connected world. In the ‘racial’ works discussed above the ethnic question was mentioned to understand how a very important Latin America intellectual contribution reacted to the legacy of the cultural encounters that were a feature of the history of this region. According to Mariátegui, Vasconcelos, and Freyre, it is essential to take the social foundation of Latin American societies to understand how a universal solidarity could be formed. Despite the significant difference between their proposals, it is possible to argue that these three intellectuals believed in the idea of a universal solidarity. Similarly to Mignolo, the work of Dussel (2007) aims to show how the Eurocentric conception of modernity developed a negative definition of power as domination. But for both of them, neither Mariátegui’s indigenous socialism, nor Freyre’s ‘racial democracy,’ is the way to get over the colonial heritage. For this new critical Latin America thought, what must be done is to form a real sense of universal solidarity; in Dussel’s (2007) words, this is to pay attention to the communal ‘wish of life.’ For him, this wish of life is ‘an original of any human being which compels themselves for community life and make possible the politics as potency to move, to pull, impel’ (Dussel 2007: 26). It could be said by interpreting this idea that the cosmopolitan perspective in Latin America could be seen as the argument that post-liberal human communal life must be taken over by the critical heritage.

Conclusions The path that was followed in this chapter begins in the nineteenth century. A moment in which the debates were strongly influenced by the Enlightenment and the rationalistic humanist traditions which were present in the major intellectual and political discussions of that time (Mitre 2003; Marichal 1978). This reality has driven the core questions about how to consolidate autonomous, independent, and stable states. As the Pan-Americanism ideal of that period shows, the question about how this state formation could be enlarged to encompass the ‘others’ was 451

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done at the same time that diverged ideas of ‘we’ were created. To understand the rooted cosmopolitics of this period, the seminal work of Simón Rodríguez, The American Societies, was brought to the frontline with the core idea of ‘comparison of faculties.’ Along with the discussion about ‘race,’ the indigenous question, and the critical reflection about the history of the modern world developed by contemporary approaches such as the de-colonial one, the chapter offered a picture of cosmopolitanism in Latin American thought and practices in a historical perspective. To offer conclusions to the argument developed here it is important to explain what Gaos (1944) calls the Latin American ‘a-filosofada’6 tradition, which literally means a social approach that is half philosophy and half a kind of freely written interpretative essay. Especially during the nineteenth century, there was a very important model of social analysis in Latin America which was more concerned with articulating a philosophical position than to develop a scientific understanding. It is a characteristic which could be easily identified in Rodríguez’s approach. What it is interesting about this way to approach social reality, in my view, is that it could more easily express a moral and ethical position. And, as the intellectual perspective is always speaking from a specific historical perspective, it is possible to imagine that the approach could be a way to give expression to major social and political transformations that are specific to that context. Regarding the cosmopolitan imaginary discussed so far in this chapter the first conclusion is that Latin America intellectual thought has been strongly connected to European approaches. My second conclusion is that the Latin America cosmopolitan perspective assumed since the very beginning a moral task. In the twentieth century the political issue was how to consolidate strong, autonomous, and law-ruled states after three hundred years of European colonial exploration. The argument in relation to Simón Rodríguez’s work shows how his idea was a reflection of this main moral task of that period. His strong emphasis on the general education for the formation of a social conduct based on illustrated national states is explained by the desire of that time for the creation of a new and much better society. But what is really important for the argument developed here is that despite the desire to create a local power there was a strong wish to contribute to the creation of a universal communality of human beings (Rodríguez 1840 [1828]). From his perspective, only when we start to learn how different societies were dealing with public affairs it will be possible to form a universal system of rights which could be useful for a cosmopolitan world. Representing a significant turn, the early twentieth century in Latin America was a time when the racial question was at the center of the debates that could be considered cosmopolitan or the basis of cosmopolitanism. In this way it should be argued that it was the first real attempt to put the ethnic variation of the world society into the cosmopolitan debate. This is a very original contribution from Latin America for this general framework. As it is possible to see from the work of Mariátegui, Vasconcelos, and Freyre, the cosmopolitan framework must admit that to form a new societal principle with an emphasis on the worldly agency of human beings, research must begin from the insight that ethnic, racial, and moral questions are connected as a result of particular kinds of cultural encounters. In this sense, we could conclude that in the first half of the twentieth century, there were two main political tasks in the eyes of these intellectuals. Firstly, they were trying to show how Latin America racial hybridization was the most successful example that human history has led to. Secondly, they were also trying how to combine the socialist organization of labor markets with the ethnic question. It does not matter what was the practical outcome of this moral task, what is important to highlight is that this was the main driving force in this period. For the de-colonial perspective, which has posed new questions for the cosmopolitan approach, as in Mignolo’s work, the main task assumed by the Latin American thought is to show how worldly power relations is not merely an economic and practical question. It is, above 452

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all, an epistemic and political one. To understand this point, it must be stressed that Mignolo’s arguments, which represent a new moment of the cosmopolitan perspective in Latin America, do not share what Beck and Sznaider (2006) call the division between the ‘cosmopolitan condition’ from the ‘cosmopolitan moment.’ These authors make a distinction between the ‘normativephilosophical’ and the ‘empirical-analytical’ cosmopolitism. According to them, ‘like the distinction between modernity and modernization, we have to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of normative principles and (really existing) cosmopolitanization’ (Beck and Sznaider 2006: 07). However, following Mignolo’s claim about how the cosmopolitan issue is an epistemic and at the same time a practical/political one, both of these aspects must be analyzed together. Thus, the general conclusion to be stated is that the cosmopolitan perspective in and from Latin America has always assumed a moral purpose and has been very much entangled with other histories. There is at least one good legacy from this way of thinking about cosmopolitism to make a concrete proposal for the creation of a possible world society and that is that the cosmopolitan perspective is not a naïve question. It has been taken very seriously by Latin American social thought which has not been preoccupied with a very abstract notion of cosmopolitanism or an overly normative one. The arguments presented in this chapter concerned the analysis of social reality, in both its local and global forms, and how it might be possible to create a global solidarity in which human beings are concretely treated as equals. Last but not least, I need to say that the path I have chosen led me to the perspectives presented and analyzed here. But of course the literature on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan practices in Latin America is much wider than what can be covered in this chapter.

Notes 1 This European division between the ‘New’ and ‘Old’ world and its impact in the universal historiography influenced strongly the Latin American intellectual thought. It could seem for instance that almost all of the intellectual, economical, and political elite of the region used to send their children to Europe to study and to learn the knowledge of the old world because only there we could find the real human development. The history of the subcontinent before the Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century was deemed as our pre-history. To invent the Americas (Dussel 1995) this history must be put behind the history of the world. 2 I would recommend the reading of the book La Unión Latinoamericana: diversidad y política (Villavicencio 2014) to understand the particularities of different projects of American Unification from a philosophical and political point of view. 3 Only in some literary movements, above all from the first half of the twentieth century it is possible to find it in a clear way (Fojas 2005). 4 It is believed that the ‘Túpac Amaru’ Revolt (1780–1782), the main rebellion during the Colonial period in the region where at the present at time encompasses part of Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, was the first autochthonmous emancipatory attempt in Latin America. The leaders of this revolt, almost all of them indigenous people, tried to form an autonomous organization without any Spanish interference. In only two years, the Spanish crown publicly executed all the leaders and broke up the liberation movement. 5 There is an English translation of this book: Mariátegui, J.C. (1971) Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Austin: University of Texas Press. 6 For ‘a-filosofada’ Gaos intends a sort of social thought which is supposed to be a scientific approach but actually it is a more like a philosophical essay.

References Aguilar Rivera, J.A. (2000) En Pos de la Quimera: reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico, México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica e Centro de Investigaciones y Docencia Económica. Alberdi, J.B. (1920 [1870]) ‘El Crimen de La Guerra’, in J.B. Alberdi (ed.) Obras Selectas, Buenos Aires: Librería ‘La Facultad’ de Juan Roldán. 453

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Appiah, K.A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beck, U. (2002) ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(1–2): 17–44. Beck, U. and Sznaider, N. (2006) ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1): 1–23. Belloto, M.L. and Martinez Corrêa, A.M. (1983) Simón Bolívar: Política, São Paulo: Ática. Burke, P. and Pallares-Burke, P. (2008) Gilberto Freyer: Social Theory in the Tropics, Land: Oxford. Chernilo, D. (2010) Nacionalismo y Cosmopolitismo: Ensayos Sociológicos, Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales. Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dussel, E. (1995) The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity, New York: Continuum Publishing. Dussel, E. (2007) 20 Teses de Política, São Paulo: Expressão Popular and CLACSO Livros. Fernandez Retamar, R. (1973) Caliban: Apuntes Sobre la Cultura de Nuestra America, Buenos Aires: Editorial La Pleyade. Fojas, C. (2005) Cosmopolitanism in the Americas, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Freyre, G. (2006 [1933]) Casa Grande e Senzala, 51st ed., São Paulo: Editora Global. Gaos, J. (1944) El Pensamiento Hispanoamericano, Mexico DF: El Colegio de Mexico. Grueso, D.I. (2014) ‘El Desafío de la Incorporación Política de la Diversidad: una reflexión a partir del caso colombiano’, in S. Villavicencio (ed.) La Unión Latinoamericana: diversidad y política, Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Kant, I. (1991 [1795]) ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Kant: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mariátegui, J.C. (1928 [2008]) Sete Ensaios de Interpretação da Realidade Peruana, São Paulo: Expressão Popular and CLACSO. Marichal, J. (1978) Cuatro Fases de la Historial Intelectual de Latinoamerica 1810–1970, Madrid: Fundación Juan March and Ediciones Cátedra. Meinecke, F. (1970 [1907]) Cosmopolitanism and the Nation State, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendieta, E. (2012) ‘Interspecies Cosmopolitanism’, in G. Delanty (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 1st ed., London: Routledge. Mignolo, W. (1998) The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Mignolo, W.D. (2000) ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3): 721–48. Mitre, A. (2003) O Dilema do Centauro: Ensaios de Teoria da História e Pensamento Latino-Americano, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. Mota, A. (2015) ‘The American Divergence, the Modern Western World and the Paradigmatisation of History’, in Africa, American and European Trajectories of Modernity, Annual of European and Global Studies, vol. 2, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Quijano, A. (1992) ‘Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad’, Perú Indígena, 13: 11–20. Rodríguez, S. (1840 [1828]) Sociedades Americanas: luces y virtudes (Primera Parte). Facsímil in HTML of the Valparaíso’s edition. Roudometof, V. (2005) ‘Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Globalization’, Current Sociology, 53(1): 112–35. Rozo Acuña, E. (ed.) (2007) Simón Bolívar: Obra Política y Constitucional, Madrid: Editorial Tecnos. Salomon, N. (1986) ‘Cosmopolitismo e Internacionalismo’ (desde 1840 hasta 1940), in L. Zea (ed.) America Latina en Sus Ideas, Mexico DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Sheriff, R.E. (2001) Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press Souza, J. (2000) A Modernização Seletiva: uma interpretação alternativa do dilema brasileiro, Brasília: Editora UNB. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Vasconcelos, J. (1986 [1925]) La Raza Cosmica Mision de la Raza Iberoamericana: Argetina e Brasil, Mexico DF: Espalsa-Calpe Mexicana. Villavicencio, S. (2014) ‘Tensiones entre diversidad y derechos en un mundo global’, in S. Villavicencio (ed.) La Unión Latinoamericana: Diversidad y politica, CLACSO: Buenos Aires. Weinberg, G. and Damas, G.C. (2006) ‘La significación histórica de América Latina’, in E.R. Martins (ed.) and H.P. Brignoli (co-ed.) Historia General de America Latina, vol. IX, Paris: Ediciones UNESCO. 454

39 Caribbean cosmopolitanism The view from ethnography Huon Wardle

In a 2006 film interview1 Stuart Hall speaks of the inescapability of a cosmopolitan outlook for someone who comes from the Caribbean. Can you be a cosmopolitan ‘at home’? anthropologist Pnina Werbner asks him, or are you ‘locked into a nationalist vision’? Hall replies: That is a difficult question to answer because the Caribbean is by definition cosmopolitan. The original people don’t exist; everybody who is there came from somewhere else – the English, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Africans – Everybody comes from somewhere else. OK, so you’re sort of a natural cosmopolitan . . . and the very distinctiveness of Caribbean creole culture, what is indigenously Caribbean, is itself ‘the mix’ – that is what is peculiar about it. This candid response from the eminent cultural theorist summons a long history of Caribbean philosophy – from Marcus Garvey, through C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire – that connects the grandscale historical ‘mix’ of Caribbean creole culture with muted nationalist sensibility but heightened political internationalism. Indeed, for many, as the iconic site of creolisation, as a place typified by varied pulses of human movement, struggles for emancipation and modes of cultural creativity, the Caribbean has suggested an optimistic metaphor for general cosmopolitan potentials that act to keep the planet’s ‘local futures uncertain and open’ in the face of dangerous demands for global orthodoxy and cultural monologic (Clifford 1988: 15; Hannerz 1989). For others, though, this deployment of the Caribbean as ‘master symbol’ for global cultural mixture stretches credibility and effaces a long and particular history of enslaved and indentured plantation labour and of associated institutions of violence (Mintz 1996; Khan 2001). Yet others may point with surprise to Hall’s claim that ‘everyone’ in the Caribbean ‘came from somewhere else’. Not only do the descendants of pre-Columbian communities continue to maintain their indigenous presence in the Caribbean, many assert their own cosmopolitan trajectories (Grund 2017). Which Caribbean does Hall have in mind? we may ask. Likewise, if the whole world is thought of as the Caribbean scaled up then the historical peculiarity of the region is blurred and marginalised (Palmie 2006; Khan 2012). Does not the current image and celebration of ‘mix’, of cosmopolitan openness and overcoming, truly depend for its continuing elaboration on its flip side – an incomplete history of typological segregation, of recidivist cultural essentialism 455

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and racism? There seems good evidence that whatever is complex and specific about Caribbean modernity will also hold lessons of global significance. However anthropologists parse this debate, it is clear that regional ethnography can make, and has already made (Besson 2002; Carnegie 2002; Olwig 2007, 2010), a vital contribution both to understanding the Caribbean condition as culturally open, mobile and transmigrant, and to comprehending how this transmigrant open condition itself continues to instigate contrary and, in their intersection, fractal local cultural ideas and practices. There remains a need, though, to understand in ethnographic detail the variations of cosmopolitan orientation and bildung involved. In other words, there is a need for ethnographies of cosmopolitanism which take into account not just the individual’s mobility but also their ‘motivity’;2 the acts of imaginative orientation or navigation that give organisation to a move (Wardle 2000, 2010, 2011a, 2015a, 2015b, 2017a). This is precisely because, when it comes to noting and trying to comprehend the conditions of cosmopolitan agency, it is vital to avoid eliding distinctive local contexts, marginalising unique voices and thereby reducing the particular to the general, polylogue to monologue – whether it be migration patterns or the historical effects of plantation slavery that are under discussion. In this regard, Trouillot’s (1992) recognition of a West Indian aptitude for dealing with categorical overlap and multiplicity should offer a warning against the analytical temptation to dissolve uncertainty, complexity and individuality in favour of a notional collective condition and identity. Hence, while it may be, as Orlando Patterson has recently restated, that Caribbean historical conditions have given rise to a distinct ‘transcendental cosmopolitanism’ (Donette 2013), it is the task of ethnography to provide the pragmatic meaning of this universalising assertion as it appears in the common sense of some actual person’s life (Wardle 1995). And similarly, whatever transcendent claims we may make on behalf of the Caribbean it is also true that, for the subject of ethnography, ‘I is just myself ’ as one of Francio Guadeloupe’s Caribbean informants put it to the ethnographer (Guadeloupe 2009). The principle that not peoples, not places, but ‘Anyone’ is the proper subject of cosmopolitan inquiry (Rapport and Stade 2007; Rapport 2012) is in this sense at odds with sweeping identity claims made for entire culture regions.

From territorial closure to Caribbean ‘cultural openness’: a brief theoretical history For all the contemporary flurry of discussion ‘cosmopolitanism’ was almost entirely absent as an analytic term in academic debate on the Caribbean until the late 1990s. Academic social science took shape in the Caribbean during the 1940s toward the end of the epoch of European imperialism and in the midst of regional struggles for independence begun during the global politicaleconomic crisis of the 1930s. Moves to decolonisation by the diverse West Indian proto-nations provided the context for the dominant theoretical models of the period (Smith, R.T. 1956, 1962; Clarke 1957; Smith, M.G. 1965). The anthropologists coming to the fore at this time mapped their expectations regarding social structure onto a proto-national Caribbean geography (Wardle 2002). Methodological nationalism dominated the discussion of Caribbean societies because this was the future that theorists imagined for the region. The assumption was that the parameters and internal (and the possible federative) organisation of Caribbean societies would correspond to the boundaries of the soon to be decolonised national entities – for the most part small islands with populations, in some cases, in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Viewed through the (proto)nationalist lens, by the early 1960s, an increasingly pessimistic vision of Caribbean culture had begun to emerge aggravated when attempts to create a federation of West Indian states collapsed during the late 1950s. Observing contemporary events, G.K. 456

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Lewis pointedly noted that transfer of national sovereignty might make little difference to the societies in question: Nationalism, as such, solves the national question. But it rarely solves the social question. It has been, traditionally, the characteristic ideology of the white bourgeois civilization; will it be anything different as the banner of the black bourgeoisie? (1963: 105) At the same time the development of collective nationalist sentiment in the Caribbean seemed to be impeded by the very culture which should have provided its essence (M.G. Smith 1965: 9). Certainly, if as Gellner argues (1983), nationalism entails a heightened state of cultural and linguistic homogenisation protagonised by a middle class, then this simply never came into being. Indeed, it is by no means clear that ‘nationalism’ has to date solved even ‘the national question’ in the Caribbean. The only, arguable, exception being Cuba where due to revolutionary isolation the national, cultural and social questions have been more forcibly integrated. For an emerging group of theorists problems previously construed as questions of, or for, national culture, were better posed in Marxist materialist terms. The plantation economy theorists argued that the present-day Caribbean was unable to fulfil its political potential because of a historically determined economic dependency on the West. Since the beginnings of New World colonialism no coherent tradition of national sovereignty or civil institution-building had taken root in the archipelago because the Caribbean economy had developed as a satellite of metropolitan economic interests (Best and Levitt 1968; Best, Levitt and Girvan 2009; Beckford 1972). Sidney Mintz, a preeminent figure in regional studies, also emphasised the enduring role of the plantation in the formation of Caribbean cultures taking a broad-based ecological-materialist perspective. In contrast to the prevailing emphasis on the rigidity of social structures, Mintz early on indexed ‘dynamism, change, elaboration and creativity’ as elemental in the cultural-material life of the region (Mintz and Price 1992: 51). The social frame for Mintz was not the nation state but rather a historically understood ‘sociocultural area’ which included the plantation, but also peasant and urban sectors. What made the Caribbean region distinctive was also what tied it inextricably to changing modes of production, exchange and consumption in Europe, North America and Africa (1956, 1971, 1985, 2010). It is in the context of noting the relative absence of communal institutions and national identification in Caribbean life (1971: 38–9) that Mintz has also indexed ‘cultural openness’ as a specific capacity in Caribbean cultural communication: a learned openness to cultural variety, an openness not so much relativistic as non-valuative – an openness which includes the expectation of cultural differences, and is not shocked by them. (1996: 295) However, it takes a further turn of the analytical wheel to recognise these perspectives and dispositions as evidence of cosmopolitanism as such (Wardle 2007).

Cultural intersystematicity and transnational mobility as key premises of Caribbean cosmopolitanism In the 1980s, Drummond (1980), drawing on the cultural historian Brathwaite (1971) and the linguist Bickerton (1975), produced a set of theoretical insights in the arena of creole culture that 457

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complemented Mintz’s general analysis. With its striking diversity of ethnic groupings, myths and symbols, Guyanese ‘culture’ presented no type of systematic totality, Drummond argued, it was instead best seen as a generative ‘continuum’, as open-ended rather than bounded. For individuals in this context making cultural meaning meant creating workable ‘intersystems’ out of heterogeneous and conflicting cultural experiences, imageries and descriptors (Obermuller 2016). Drummond never connected his theory of Guyanese culture with the facts of Guyanese migration or transnationalism, but his ideas were suggestive. Hannerz in particular proceeded to extend the notion of creole cultural continuum onto a global scale with his notion of the ‘global ecumene as a network of networks’ (1989, 1992). Recognising that locality for the creolising individual is both a function of the networks they are part of as well, as of their capacity to synthesise these imaginatively, allowed room easily enough for an awareness that this same individual is in essence a cosmopolitan. Culture was now no longer a locale into which the individual fitted as an objective component; it had instead become a field of meaning that the individual actively localises vis-à-vis and via their own movements. These movements are both projected onto and acted out in space. These ideas took the discussion well beyond the Caribbean in their scope, ultimately triggering some of the critical responses noted at the beginning of this chapter. Implicit within this emerging argument was the awareness that whatever culture is, for the individual is not a totality and its meaning must be synthesised from complex materials. As Trouillot puts it: Caribbean peoples seem to have fewer problems than most in recognizing the fuzziness and overlap of categories, and multiplicity is not confined to the economic realm or to the poor. . . . What seems to be at stake here is a way to live what the Post-Enlightenment West calls . . . individual oneness. (Trouillot 1992: 33–4) Geographical movement and the strategic synthesis and deployment of cultural meaning have tended to go together and both are connected to the question of discovering ‘individual oneness’ as Trouillot puts it or the ‘transcendental’ self-awareness that James, Patterson and others have referenced. Thomas-Hope (1995) has described how interregional mobility became crucially built into Caribbean definitions of freedom after slavery. Olwig (1997: 206) and Basch et al. (1993) likewise showed that Caribbeans find themselves caught up in, and ‘deterritorialised’ by, inter-generational transmigrant social networks that overlap the boundaries, and ideologies of inclusivity, of multiple nation states. Caribbean family systems, often described as ‘dysfunctional’ or in terms of a ‘culture of poverty’ in the post-war period make better sense if understood adaptively in terms of the patterns of individual movement built into the making of family over time (Wardle 2004). West Indians have been network-builders across national boundaries, creating ‘outernational’ social hubs (to use the Rastafari expression) in locations as dispersed as New York, Oxford and Addis Ababa, extending the potential for cultural creolisation as they go – and return (Olwig 2007; Gomes 2011; Wardle 2017b). In the meantime, as we have sketched out, few Caribbean societies have gained anything akin to the national political independence taken for granted by the theorists of the 1950s – the future that has opened up consists instead of varying kinds of ‘non-sovereignty’ (Bonilla 2015). So, one face of Caribbean ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘outernationality’ comes then from awareness of this notable absence or non-occurrence of national self-governance; the other from creative syntheses of globality and locality in the lives of individuals and networks. 458

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Bringing these strands together, Crichlow underscores how Caribbean culture is best understood in strategic or tactical (rather than absolute) terms. While ‘fleeing the plantation’, West Indians have simultaneously tried to narrate, place or ‘home’ their freedoms somewhere, she argues (2009; Wardle 2017b). In the absence of institutionalised rights of citizenship, popular Caribbean culture is from this perspective best conceived as a tactics or pragmatics for establishing ‘citizenness’ (2009). The cultural gestures involved take place in the sight of powerful actors and institutional controls: inevitably the particular social situation demands a compromise between its hierarchical and egalitarian potentials. Crichlow construes these dynamics in terms of a revision of the notion of creolisation – one that takes relations of power fully into account.

Germinating ethnographies of cosmopolitanism For most of anthropology’s disciplinary history, the idea of an ethnography (or ethnographies) of cosmopolitanism would have appeared as a contradiction in terms. Ethnographies were by definition studies of society on a local and ‘small’ scale. As little as a decade ago, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’, or the figure of the ‘cosmopolitan’ barely featured in ethnographic accounts (Wardle 2010). My ethnographic exploration of lower class urban Jamaicans as ‘cosmopolitans’ seemed counter-intuitive for many anthropologists, initially at least (Wardle 1995, 1999, 2000): one anonymous reviewer of an article I submitted to the journal Cultural Anthropology in 1997 informed me that I would have to ‘prove’ that the nation state was weakly developed in the region before I could make further claims toward a Caribbean cosmopolitanism (the article was rejected). Behind this kind of reaction was a taken-for-granted topography: ethnographies (and their subjects) are not concerned with ‘global’, but with ‘local’ concerns – localised institutions, symbols, cosmologies. Anthropology, as a generalising activity can pick up examples from the ethnographies of dispersed localities, but this need not change the view of ethnography as limited in scope to the analysis of small-scale, local, social life. In contrast, anthropology has been understood as the totalising theoretical activity that gives the local picture a frame and meaning (Wardle 2011b). The simple recognition that people do not stay still, that cultural ideas are inherently open to transformation through reiteration, should shatter part of the assumptions involved here. And, to a great extent the longstanding critique of ethnography has been driven by observations of that kind (Clifford 1988). In the previous sections we noted how Caribbeanist anthropology began by emphasising social boundaries and hierarchical structures but became increasingly aware of the ‘fuzziness’ of local cultural categories, as well as the strategic quality of their deployment within patterns of transnational movement (though it took time to recognise both features at once). The Caribbean remains, as Trouillot put it, ‘an open frontier in anthropological theory’ (1992), and precisely for that reason it is a region where ethnographic approaches have been heterodox and never acquired anything like the orthodoxy achieved elsewhere – Melanesia or Amazonia for instance. So, in coining the ‘ethnography of cosmopolitanism’ (Wardle 2000), I aimed to pinpoint an aspect of Caribbean social experience that had remained unnamed up to that point. During my initial fieldwork in Jamaica there had become evident, not just openness to cultural difference and alternative possibility, but also social institutions, patterns of activity toward (trans)migration, that constantly regenerated these qualities. It was, I noted, not simply the emigrants whose cultural apparatus was transformed by these moves to, and returns from, New York, Toronto, Curacao, Britain and other parts of ‘foreign’ as Anglophone West Indians say. Perhaps to an even greater degree it was people who did not leave the island for whom openness to imaginative and actual mobility took autobiographical shape in the trope of migration as ‘adventure’ (Wardle 1999; Olwig 2016). The micro-rituals of departure and return affecting 459

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neighbourhood social life, provoked ‘extraterritorial’ hopes and expectations in those who witnessed them and a sense of connection to distant imagined elsewheres; in this way they called up further cosmopolitan capacities and orientations. The ethnography of cosmopolitanism aims precisely to illuminate these personal capacities, institutionalised behaviours and ways of communicating; it shows how these come to light in contingent situations and are subjectively reconstructed within a life trajectory. But it also creates other perhaps unexpected effects. Based on my fieldwork, but pursuing insights of the philosopher C.L.R. James, I argued that urban Jamaicans were in certain respects building a transcendental model of the self and a cosmopolitical viewpoint close in key respects to the Enlightenment philosopher Kant’s (Wardle 1995). These working class urbanites very much fitted Robotham’s description: identities in the Caribbean have never been able to take the form of autochthonous, primordial fundamentalisms. Rather they . . . formulate themselves . . . [as] some form of transnationalism . . . seeking to contest the forces of globalization . . . on the terrain of globalization itself, contesting modernity on the terrain of modernity. (1998: 308) Indeed, as modern subjects, Caribbeans have, as C.L.R. James shows (1989), repeatedly reached out toward this transcendent view of human individuality and likewise to the notion of rights in a global community. Toussaint L’Ouverture or, in more general terms the ‘neg mawon’ – the black escaped slave given analytical status by Aimé Césaire have offered archetypes of this transcendentalism. Even so, the cultural effects produced by these kinds of selfhood have been characteristically ‘fractal’ and ‘chaotic’ in historical terms. With deliberate vagueness, BenitezRojo notes, for example, how the assertion of a universal humanity can be found in an idiomatic Caribbean manner of holding the body ‘in a certain kind of way’ (1996). Ethnographies of the Caribbean encounter both of these aspects – a heightened individualism which is simultaneously imaginatively ‘fractal’ and intentionally ‘transcendental’.

The cosmopolitan life Caribbean history and creolity have offered social science a bridging metaphor, though inevitably a complex one. As theoretical attention has moved beyond methodological nationalism with its expectations of cultural boundedness, vistas have opened up onto forms of subjective experience and world-knowledge that are no longer constrained by the commitment to fit subjectivity inside the frame of the nation, the stratified society or the pre-figured expectations of a culture system (Appiah 1997). Cosmopolitan methodologies shift attention toward subjective ‘motivity’, and away from the quasi-physics of ‘push and pull’ on which the migration studies of the past was grounded (Rosenbaum and Troccoli 2017). In turn, the ethnographic focus moves to take into account those subjective imaginative expectancies, placings and coordinations that give an order to the given ‘move’. So, for example, cosmopolitan thought can engage imaginative relations of ‘foreign’ and ‘close at hand’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘homely’, ‘guest’ and ‘host’, ‘risky’ and ‘predictable’, ‘magical’ and ‘quotidian’ that come into play as motivating themes, amongst many other possibilities within the pragmatics of the situation. Here I give an illustrative account from ethnographic fieldwork of one cosmopolitan life project. Ras Dizzy’s life story carries recognisable elements of a Caribbean culture with it. On the other side, arguably more importantly, what we see is a life bound up in practices of 460

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‘world-travelling’,3 ‘world-making’ and horizon-crossing that draws cultural expectancies together according to a cosmopolitan gestus that is surely unique to it and goes beyond any particular a priori cultural definition. Like many I have spent time with in fieldwork and, indeed, most Caribbeans in the twentieth century, the artist Ras Dizzy’s life was consciously shaped by the possibilities of international travel. His journeys had taken him to Panama, Haiti, Antigua, the Cayman Islands and perhaps further afield – he told me of other more obviously imaginary journeys; of flying over Africa, for example, and of how Jomo Kenyatta offered him the presidency of Kenya, but he declined. Dizzy presented himself as a painter, poet and itinerant Rastafarian activist, but apart from these facts his early life always remained mysterious. He was probably born in 1932 to landless peasants living in the slums of Kingston, his name at birth was most likely Albert Livingstone. Either way he also used Birth Livingstone, Clive Gillespie and Birch Lincoln amongst other monikers in his prolific pamphlets and poems. Ras Dizzy, the name he used when I knew him, combines the Rastafari honorific Ras, which means ‘head’ or ‘prince’ in Amharic, with an admiring reference to jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie. Travel imaginatively refigured was a stimulus for his art and social philosophy – and vice versa. When I met Dizzy it was almost always by chance walking in some part of the city. In Kingston, Dizzy likewise moved often, sometimes squatting in empty houses, or briefly renting accommodation in the shanty dwellings of the inner city. Into the surfaces of these varied dwellings Dizzy would inscribe his personal mythopoetic imagery – figures of cowboys, jockeys and Haile Selassie (the latter being for many Rastafarians the supreme deity). And here he joined others affiliated with Rastafari – musicians and street philosophers – engaging in that characteristically Socratic style of Rastafari philosophising, the ‘reasoning’. Personal visions, dreams and other spiritual experiences figure large in reasonings where they are deployed to probe the meaning of contemporary events, assisted by use of the ‘holy herb’, ganja. Dizzy wrote down his views in his brief discursive essays and long poems that he mimeographed and distributed. For co-dwellers in this milieu, Ras Dizzy was a spiritual visionary, a ‘crazy genius’. For others, like the landlady I met in a grim Trenchtown tenement yard, Dizzy was a law unto himself: ‘I going to give him notice; him paint whole night and don’t sleep’ she informed me; she may also have resented his painting the grimy walls of his cell-like room with jockeys, cowboys and images of Haile Selassie. Dizzy had multiple contacts and moved frequently. He was a prolific producer of small paintings on cardboard; these he would sell to visitors, or to academics and students at the University of the West Indies. In doing so, he built a close relationship with staff at the University and at the National Gallery of Jamaica, who in turn made various efforts to provide him with resources. None of these offers of help ever seemed to have any effect in constraining his sense of freedom, and his compulsion, to move.  Whatever each individual human life may embody or mirror in terms of local culture, what we are here calling a cosmopolitan life involves an imaginative practice of overcoming, synthesising, reorganising and repositioning individuality in a movement with others toward living in a common world. There is no reason to suppose that Ras Dizzy acted in his life according to the norms of a fixed Caribbean culture. All the evidence points in the opposite direction – toward his fundamentally subjective, perspectival and intentional constitution of quite diverse kinds of time-space through which he nonetheless constituted a common life with others. We might say that Dizzy is an unusual or extreme case, but the wider facts of Caribbean society and culture don’t allow us any simple basis for normative claims of this kind. 461

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Either way, placed in the notional frame of a larger, distinctively Caribbean, cosmopolitanism, the evidence provided by world-travelling lives such as Dizzy’s must remain ambiguous. In putting matters thus, we acknowledge that the common world indexed by the cosmopolitan idea cannot be already fixed; whatever else this common world is it is always subjectively an object of search and likewise always in-the-making. In the same manner the notion of ‘Caribbeanness’ attached to the practice of lives like Dizzy’s is inevitably radically open; whatever orientation or contextualising parameter ‘Caribbean culture’ offers it cannot be taken for granted. We are better off thinking of the deployment of culture as contingent, partial and tactical.

Cosmological closure and the question of relativism in ethnographies of cosmopolitanism The currently burgeoning literature on cosmopolitanism now offers almost innumerable types – ‘critical’, ‘banal’, ‘actually existing’, ‘elite’, ‘from below’, ‘vernacular’, ‘western’, ‘rooted’, ‘gendered’, ‘discrepant’, ‘postcolonial’, ‘planetary’, ‘indigenous’ – to name a few. All these adjectives appear to provide the comforting role of theoretical qualifiers to some notional universal meaning. As such they all indicate an anxious concern to make sure that the universalising claims and the human beings involved do not ‘get out of hand’ and are always positioned inside a pre-existing contextual order of values; but what order is this? It seems to vary according to discourse and commentator. In contrast the broader claim of cosmopolitanism is that we live in the world at large and the proper subject of a cosmopolitan viewpoint is Anyone – however variously Anyone’s subject position and understanding of ‘world’ may be expressed. Hence, as opposed to philosophies of cosmopolitanism that start from established ontological assumptions about world or cosmos, ethnographies of cosmopolitanism offer a democratisation of the subject position of the cosmopolitan. In effect they aim to show – experientially and descriptively – how an engagement with world is built up from relationships and meanings that are socially and subjectively localised – as Ras Dizzy’s were in the tenement yards and street sides he located himself in with others. Even though the focus is on finding out about the ‘world’ of the interlocutor, ethnography has an inherent ethical (as well as intellectual and aesthetic) compositional role – it gives analytical status to a dialogical negotiation over what constitutes a world, or the world in the first place. Arguably, ethnographic method implies a ‘sharing [and mapping] of horizons’ between ethnographer and interlocutor (Taylor 1989). Distinct ethnographies of cosmopolitanism may well produce highly diverse accounts of people’s (as opposed to peoples’) engagements with world or cosmos, but the kinds of insights they generate will not be reducible back to a relativistic comparative cosmology or a shared culture. Cosmopolitanism implies a searching and testing out of the consistency of the cosmos as it is now understood – through practices of subjective construction which are, in effect, practices of ‘world-making’ (Goodman 1975; Overing 1990). At the same time, the ‘openness’ that is a necessary, though not perhaps sufficiently defining, feature of cosmopolitanism implies a perceptual-aesthetic transition – that is to say, a transition of subjective experience vis-à-vis an external field that needs to be made sense of. Cosmopolitanism suggests, not just a certain nonchalance about differences, as Mintz highlights (above), but also the possibility that a person may change their conception of reality as they encounter and comprehend alternative knowledge schemas. A person can stay in the same place and the problem will come to them. An ethnography of cosmopolitanism will attend to these moments and narrations of transit even in mundane – or as current debates label them ‘banal’ settings (Beck 2004: 10). 462

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Conclusion Kant argued that the most meaningful indices of cosmopolitanism are on the one side the history of the human species and, on the other, the life of some given world-travelling individual human being; albeit that in the latter case at least the cosmopolitan pattern will appear as ‘complicated and unpredictable’ (Kant 2006, 1988: 29). The concern in this chapter, then, has been not only with the possibility of recognising Caribbean cosmopolitanism, but also with the Caribbeanness of this cosmopolitanism. Many factors, both positive and negative are ‘mixed’ in here. At the level of history and globalisation the modern Caribbean from the 1500s onwards became an unprecedented laboratory of human movement and displacement, forced and free, terroristic and idealistic. Negatively, as a periphery of political-economic demands centred elsewhere, the Caribbean archipelago never attained certain key types of civil institution, particularly no homogenous national languages, nor state frameworks. Even where some of the trappings of nationhood exist, much of the archipelago remains in a limbo of ‘non-sovereignty’ or partial sovereignty. It is vis-à-vis this regional history that the ‘outernational’ assertions of Rastafari, or the other ‘transcendental’ and cosmopolitan claims toward ‘individual oneness’ and interpersonal ‘conviviality’ made by Caribbeans on the move, take on particular meaning (Gilroy 2004). We can note, then, both a negative cosmopolitanism described by national absence and a positive creative assertoric individualist cosmopolitanism of world presence; each potentially playing foreground (text) to the other’s background (context) situationally. Though it was not the focus here, we should recognise how widespread horror at Caribbean slavery was undoubtedly foundational in the emergence of transcendental cosmopolitan philosophy and politics in Enlightenment Europe. In 1795, describing the concept of ‘cosmopolitan right’, Kant indexed the ‘Sugar Islands, the seat of the cruellest and most ingenious slavery’ as evidence for how a ‘community widely prevails amongst the earth’s peoples: a transgression of rights in one place is felt everywhere’ (1988[1795]: 119). It was the Trinidadian philosopher and historian C.L.R. James (1989), though, who showed that the actual struggle for freedom by African slaves in the Caribbean became the first test of the actuality of the Enlightenment idea of Humanity. Abstractly, Enlightment philosophy and politics had enlisted all human beings as individually equal members of a possible world community: but it took slave insurrection, and full-scale revolution in Haiti, for the principle to be tried out in practice. The Cuban revolution in 1959 with its call for a new kind of revolutionary personhood was, James argued, only the most recent Caribbean re-envisioning of the Enlightenment imperative – what would the world look like if we took the concept of shared humanity and individuality seriously? The traces of extreme unfreedom alongside the quest for cosmopolitan right continue to evidence themselves in today’s Caribbean in more and less refractory cultural forms and in multiplex situations. ‘Children of the Cuban revolution’, for instance – los hombres nuevos – have shaped unpredicted narratives and patterns of movement, as Berg has shown (2011). Caribbean people (and peoples) have made the Enlightenment their own in ways that can be unrecognisable viewed from the metropolitan centres. For enduring geopolitical reasons, the Caribbean is neither fully inside nor in any simple sense socially or culturally outside, the West. Caribbean cosmopolitanism is implicated in the Western cosmopolitan dialogue: but not simply as one strand in a uniform weave; rather as a complication, disturbing the tendency toward philosophical monologue. The ethnography of cosmopolitanism should not only bring out new insights into lives-in-transit it should also engage this potential for disruption productively in the service of a truly heteroglot cosmopolitanism. 463

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Notes 1 ‘Cosmopolitanism: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Pnina Werbner, March 2006’ Producer Haim Bresheeth. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBfPtRaGZPM. See Werbner (2008) for the published revision of the interview. 2 John Locke coined this term to describe how we are moved by our own thoughts (Rosenbaum and Troccoli 2017). 3 My use of the phrase ‘world-travelling’ here draws on the sense described by Lugones (1987).

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——— (2010) ‘A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?’, Social Anthropology, 18(4): 381–8 (Special Issue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?). ——— (2011a) ‘Ethnography and an Ethnography in the Human Conversation’, Anthropologica, 53(1): 117–27. ——— (2011b) ‘The Double Life of MG Smith? Rethinking Caribbean Citizenship beyond, between and within the National Frame’, in B. Meeks (ed.) MG Smith and the Emergence of Social Anthropology and Social Theory in the Carribbean and Beyond, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Press. ——— (2015a) ‘The Artist Carl Abrahams and the Cosmopolitan Work of Centring and Peripheralizing the Self ’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 803–19. ——— (2015b) ‘Ras Dizzy 1932–2008’, in F.W. Knight and H.L. Gates (eds.) Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press and W.E.B. Dubois Institute. ——— (2017a) ‘Cosmopolitics and Common Sense’, in Shaffner, J. and H. Wardle (eds.) Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the Open Anthropology Cooperative, St Andrews: OAC Press. ——— (2017b) ‘John Brown: Freedom and Imposture in the Early Twentieth-Century TransCaribbean’, in M. Lino e Silva and H. Wardle (eds.) Freedom in Practice: Governance, Autonomy and Liberty in the Everyday, London: Routledge. Werbner, P. (2008) ‘Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation and Diaspora: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Pnina Werbner’, in P. Werbner (ed.) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Berg.

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40 Americans and others Historical identity formation in the United States Andrew Hartman

The United States of America is arguably the most racially and religiously diverse nation in modern history. As such, the history of identity formation in the United States is instructive, given that “problems” associated with racial and religious mixing have only intensified across the globe. “The United States is not so much a model for the world,” David Hollinger contends, “as an archive of experience on which the world can draw critically” (Hollinger 2006: xxii). Although American identity was exclusive to white Protestantism for much of the nation’s history, racial and religious “others” continually pushed at the boundaries of Americanism, expanding the circle of “we” to include previously marginalized minorities. And yet, ironically, as American identity became more capacious – more cosmopolitan – solidarity became more problematic, to the degree that the last few decades are now referred to as an “age of fracture” (Rodgers 2011). The election of Donald Trump in 2016 cements this problem. This chapter seeks to explain this paradoxical historical development by rooting the history of American identity formation in relation to three powerful historical forces that have also reshaped the United States: (a) the pressures of diasporic identity formation; (b) the powerful steadfastness of American conservatism; and (c) the splintering tendencies of postmodernism, or the cultural and intellectual representations of late-twentieth-century capitalism. Cosmopolitan thinking works in varying degrees of tension with all three forces.

White Protestant America and its discontents The history of American racial exclusion is well known. To paraphrase W. E. B. DuBois, the problem of America is the problem of race. The United States was founded on the dispossession and extermination of indigenous non-whites, and made rich by the enslavement of African blacks. Even after the U.S. Civil War resulted in the abolition of slavery, African Americans existed as a marginalized caste, never considered fully American until the post-World War II civil rights movement forced the issue. In contrast, though the millions of European immigrants who streamed into the nation often suffered hardships related to nativist discrimination and the coercions of Americanization, they almost always came to enjoy the benefits of citizenship by fact of their whiteness. The Irish, for instance “became white” – and thus accepted as Americans – by demonstrating their anti-black prejudices (Ignatiev 1996). Furthermore, the 467

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psychological “wages of whiteness” brought diverse populations of laborers into the American fold at the expense of blacks (Roediger 1991). The stark differences in the ways immigrants and blacks related to American identity is perhaps best represented by the radically different analogies for intermixing: whereas European immigrants were encouraged to mix into one big American “melting pot” irrespective of ethnic background, “one drop” of black blood led to an individual being written out of the American project. In short, for most of American history, national identity was a white affair. The nation’s history of religious exclusion is less well known. This is due to what historian David Sehat refers to as “the myth of American religious freedom,” or, the false belief that the American nation was founded as a bastion of religious liberty (Sehat 2011). Although early interpretations of the U.S. Constitution disallowed the institutional establishment of any one religion, which meant that the government could not officially sanction or subsidize any one religious denomination, a moral establishment became the norm. This was because the Bill of Rights – including the First Amendment, which supposedly guaranteed religious freedom – was never applied to the states throughout most of American history. As such, the Protestant majority extended Protestant moral code as law at the state and local levels, including strict anti-blasphemy laws, a tacit form of religious establishment. Since Protestants were in power for much of the nation’s history, this moral establishment was the de facto codification of Protestant values, often of the evangelical strain, always the fastest growing religious strain in the nation. The U.S. Supreme Court uniformly upheld the Protestant moral establishment well into the twentieth century, before an evolution in legal interpretation slowly gave way to a more secular public sphere. Several landmark Supreme Court cases severed church and state, most famously, Engel v. Vitale (1962), which ruled prayer in public schools unconstitutional, and Roe v. Wade (1973), which ended legal restrictions on many abortions. The Christian Right has been fighting for the return of the moral establishment since, in a battle commonly referred to as the culture wars (Hartman 2015). White supremacy and the moral establishment were far from mutually exclusive. Quite to the contrary: the moral establishment enforced both slavery and then the racial caste system known as Jim Crow that emerged in the decades following the Civil War. Although a majority of black slaves had been converted to Protestant Christianity, a religious affiliation that persisted beyond slavery, African American Protestantism developed along syncretistic lines, accentuating a liberation theology of spiritual resistance to slavery and repression. In contrast, moral establishmentarians emphasized religious deference to hierarchy. They assumed that the best way to maintain order in a democracy was to enforce a moral check on public behavior. And they linked order to the hierarchies they assumed natural: those of race, religion, and gender. The moral establishment thus represented a conservative check on attempts to widen the circle of American identity. David Hollinger has probably done the most of any historian to theorize the history of race and religion in relation to American identity. His many interventions represent a cosmopolitan exploration of the ways in which our solidarities and identities – racial, religious, and national – govern our lives. In his now standard work, Postethnic America, Hollinger focuses on how solidarities and identities should ideally operate according to the principles of “affiliation by revocable consent” (Hollinger 2005 [1995]). In other words, he seeks to transcend the stultifying debates about multiculturalism, the players in which assume identities to be rooted in blood or immutable culture, to embrace more individualistic and voluntary conceptions of identity. However, in Hollinger’s follow-up to Postethnic, titled Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, he emphasizes the less voluntary structures of solidarity, what he terms a “political economy of solidarity.” Solidarity, for him, “is a commodity distributed by authority,” especially when tied to the nation state. “Central to the history of nationalism, after all, has been the use of state power to establish certain 468

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‘identities,’ understood as performative, and thus creating social cohesion on certain terms rather than others” (Hollinger 2006: xvi). This compels a question: is the American nation the appropriate place to invest solidarity in the hopes of a more encompassing justice? The nation, in this sense, has always had a dialectical relation to justice. Though it is “capacious enough to act effectively on problems located in a large arena,” as Hollinger contends, conversely, it “is poorly suited to satisfy the human need for belonging.” But the alternative, to form solidarities based on smaller circles of identity, such as race or religion, though “tight enough to serve the need for belonging, cannot be expected to respond effectively to challenges common to a larger and more heterogeneous population” (Hollinger 2006: xvi). The knottiness of this dialectic does not, by Hollinger’s reckoning, render the American nation incapable of serving the ends of justice. Despite his hesitations, mostly related to the persistent racial injustices suffered by the descendents of African American slaves, Hollinger defends the American nation as a proper place to seek justice. “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States,” he writes. “This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity” (Hollinger 2005 [1995]: 201). Although the white moral establishment dominated American national identity for much of the nation’s history, resistance was inherent to it. Towards the end of the twentieth century, as such resistance grew, cracks in the establishment led to a substantial widening of the circle of “we.” To name but a few examples of such progress: the public sphere was secularized; the racial caste system lost its legal and ideological support systems; and women were brought fully into American citizenship. Yes, enthusiasm needs to be tempered by qualifications to this progress narrative: the Christian Right has chipped away at the secular public sphere in their efforts to return the nation to the moral establishment; racial inequality persists, as most of the nation’s cities harbor large pockets of extremely poor blacks who are effectively disfranchised; and women’s equal rights, though codified by law, are constrained by the persistent, intimate, daily machinations of an enduring patriarchy. Nonetheless, progress is real. And yet, American identity has never been so fractured. Intriguingly, this state of fracture is partly due to the progress made by white Protestant America’s discontents. The loudest nineteenth-century discontents were radical individualists, even libertarians, from abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to women’s rights activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton to freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll. Sehat writes that “the ultimate goal of the moral establishment was to tame the individual” (Sehat 2011: 97). As such, those who resisted it did so in the name of individual rights. But individualism negated solidarity. This became problematic when corporations came to dominate the political economy towards the end of the nineteenth century, resistance to which required class solidarity. Interestingly, the moral establishment aligned forces with the titans of the emergent corporate order – the “robber barons” – in part because they saw the labor movement as a threat to the naturalized hierarchy of the moral establishment. As such, labor organizers like Eugene V. Debs menaced both the corporate order and the moral establishment. But these new alignments were mostly marriages of convenience. The libertarianism of the anti-moral establishmentarians never very effectively meshed with the new forms of solidarity arising to oppose corporate domination, namely the labor movement. By the early twentieth century, a liberal moral vision emerged as an apparent alternative to both the moral establishment and the libertarianism of its enemies. This vision went by the name of pluralism, and its most influential proponents were Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke. Where moral establishmentarians believed that all individuals should be subjected to the moral will of society, and where radical individualists thought everyone was 469

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a moral agent unto themselves, pluralism, in the words of Louis Menand, sought “to make a good out of the circumstance that goods are often incommensurable” (Menand 2001: 377). In other words, pluralists recognized and even embraced American diversity, which they believed invalidated, as Croly argued, an “earlier instinctive homogeneity” (Croly 1909: 139). The pluralists expected that individuals would, first and foremost, seek close solidarities, in race, ethnicity, and religion. But they also theorized that recognizing different, sometimes incompatible interests would better bring Americans together. The key was to promote American solidarity without eliminating, as Croly put it, the “desirable individual and class distinctions that were integral to a society that was liberal and free” (Sehat 2011: 206). This form of pluralism – recognition of difference under an umbrella of national identity – served as a de facto American consensus from the Progressive Era until the 1960s (though the Cold War narrowed ideological difference). But despite pluralism’s expansion of the circle of “we,” its influence was always tenuous, given its unsolvable contradiction. How could Americans rebuild collective ethical norms (the given rationale for the moral establishment) that were fair to the individual (in ways that moral establishmentarian repression was not)? How to have American solidarity without coercion? The diasporic identity movements of the 1960s – especially the Black and Chicano Power movements, the focus of my next section – turned these questions on their head. Was it even possible for historically repressed groups to find justice in America? In turning American identity upside down, however, the diasporic challenge reoriented questions of American identity and cosmopolitanism.

The diasporic challenge The leaders of the minority identity power movements of the 1960s committed their solidarities to the international anticolonial movement – to a diasporic identity, rather than an American identity. In this vein, even some of the more revolutionary anticolonial thinkers evinced elements of identity in their politics. In his classic 1953 memoir of his travels across South America, The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto “Che” Guevara displayed attentiveness to identity as a liberating force. Critical of education “according to the white man’s criteria,” he believed that only by virtue of Indian or Mestizo identity could one grasp “the moral distance separating” Western civilization from a once proud indigenous civilization. Although the young Guevara of The Motorcycle Diaries accentuated political economy, anticipating his later turn to communism, he also emphasized “spreading a real knowledge of the Quechua nation so that the people of that race could feel proud of their past rather than . . . ashamed of being Indian or Mestizo” (Guevara 1995 [1953]: 81, 96, 102). Immanuel Wallerstein argues that Franz Fanon’s 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks was “in no way a call to identity politics” (Wallerstein 2009: 118). Wallerstein has a point, since Fanon concluded the book on a universal note, distancing himself from any particular conception of blackness: “The Negro is not. Any more than a white man” (Fanon 1967 [1952]: 231). In his 1963 The Wretched of the Earth, a seminal anticolonial text, Fanon was critical of black nationalist celebrations of ancient African civilization. But he recognized such racialized expressions of culture as necessary first steps in severing ties with colonial power, especially since the representatives of Western civilization “have never ceased to set up white culture to fill the gap left by the absence of other cultures” (Fanon 1963: 212). In other words, cultural identity mattered to the larger diasporic, anticolonial struggle, and was integral to Fanon’s work, which accentuated the experience of a black man thrown into a white world. In this, Fanon’s position resembled Richard Wright’s famous response to the 1952 Bandung Conference of non-aligned nations, where he called for a “reluctant nationalism” that “need not remain valid for decades to come.” 470

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Both Fanon and Wright joined the Second Congress of the Negro Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959, dedicated to the “peoples without a culture,” a mission aligned with one of Fanon’s more famous dictums: “The plunge into the chasm of the past is the condition and the course of freedom” (Joseph 2006: 254). In his 1967 tour de force, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, African American intellectual Harold Cruse argued that the role of black intellectuals was to reconceptualize black identity as independent of white society and, thus, to gain control of those “cultural institutions” responsible for representing black history and culture. Cruse wrote: “The individual Negro has, proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield” (Cruse 1967: 7–8). Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton made similarly nationalistic arguments in their book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, also published in 1967: “Group solidarity is necessary before a group can effectively form a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society” (Carmichael and Hamilton 1992 [1967]: 44). Because the rights of black individuals were not sanctioned like those of white individuals, Black Power thinkers saw the need to better theorize racial identity prior to understanding how blacks should position themselves vis-à-vis American identity. The Chicano movement of the late 1960s also trumpeted nationalistic and diasporic identity politics, of which Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales was one of the more eloquent spokespersons. Gonzales directed the Denver, Colorado-based Crusade for Justice, a Mexican American activist group that considered its mission to foster “a sense of identity and self-worth” among Chicanos. Both in his speeches and in his poetry, Gonzales emphasized that improvements to the Mexican American condition necessitated self-realization. Gonzales complained that so many minorities identified “with success and the Anglo image” instead of with Aztlán, his term for the Mexican Diaspora, and that it was imperative to “admit that we have a different set of values.” Mexican Americans needed to be more aware of “their cultural attributes, their historical contributions, their self-identity and most importantly their self-worth” (Gonzales 2001: 38). Corky Gonzales’s “epic” 1967 poem I Am Joaquín paid hyper-attention to Chicano identity as distinct from American identity. Joaquín, representative of Aztlán, recalled venerable rebel leaders of the Mexican past – Benito Juarez, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata – in order to symbolically resist “a country that has wiped out all my history, stifled all my pride.” Culture was Joaquín’s battleground. “I am the masses of my people, and I refuse to be absorbed” (Gonzales 2001: 16, 23, 25–6, 29). I Am Joaquín “was a journey back through history,” according to Gonzales, “a painful self-evaluation, a wandering search for my peoples, and, most of all, for my own identity.” In the words of Carlos Muñoz, the founding chair of the nation’s first Chicano Studies program at California State University at Los Angeles, “the most significant aspect of I am Joaquín was that it captured both the agony and the jubilation permeating the identity crisis faced by Mexican American youth in the process of assimilation” (Muñoz 2007: 76). In other words, the constraints and prejudices of American identity pushed Chicanos to theorize alternative identity formations. Like Harold Cruse and the intellectual advocates of Black Power, Gonzales did not view Chicano nationalism as a narrow solidarity. “Nationalism is a tool for organization not a weapon for hatred,” he wrote. Gonzales saw Chicano nationalism as a stepping stone to an international movement of oppressed peoples, in turn a springboard to universal human liberation. However, there was a proper order of struggle, and the particular preceded the universal. “Dealing only within our own sphere of involvement,” Gonzales argued, “we must teach on a grassroots level and identify with our own self worth and historic ties” (Gonzales: 1966: Box 3: 26). “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” created by Gonzales and the other participants in the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, hosted by the Crusade for Justice in March 1969, expressed 471

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the way the identity politics of the late 1960s mixed cultural nationalism with more universal, even anticapitalist desires: “Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the Gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood” (Marin 1977: 36). The intellectuals of the Black and Chicano Power movements, in short, were pluralists – an early if less flexible form of cosmopolitanism than the voluntary identification sort promoted by Hollinger. But, they often sought to relate their racial and ethnic solidarities to diasporic solidarities unaffiliated with the American nation. They aligned with international anticolonial movements and, if they saw the American nation as good for anything other than repression, it was as a location for their diasporic struggles. This move had at least two crucial consequences. First, in locating justice in non-American, diasporic identity formation, it destabilized the twentiethcentury liberal expansion of the circle of an American “we.” The second consequence of this move was related to the first: it unintentionally empowered the moral establishment revanchists as the legitimate defenders of American identity.

Conservative retrenchment Conservatives battled back against the influx of new identities that threatened the stability of an older American identity. In doing so, they often focused their retrenchment on the university, that esteemed American institution, which was logical given the university’s central role in challenges to late-twentieth-century American identity formation. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservatives had succeeded in reorienting the American imagination regarding the academy, reconceptualized as a leftist redoubt, where cultural and moral relativism reigned supreme and the best of American civilization had been replaced by a “politically correct” mish-mash of multicultural nonsense. An exposé genre – with titles including The Closing of the American Mind, Tenured Radicals, The De-Valuing of America, and ProfScam – became a cottage industry, helping to harden tropes about university professors, especially in the humanities, as anti-American. Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education and Lynne Cheney’s Telling the Truth were two of the most important such books in this battle for the soul of the American university – a battle over claims to American identity. D’Souza framed his1991 bestseller, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, as a response to what he termed the “victim’s revolution” that had taken place on American campuses in the wake of the sixties – a revolution “conducted in the name of those who suffer from the effects of . . . race and gender discrimination in America.” D’Souza, a South Asian immigrant, thought that affirmative action – a by-product of 1960s attempts to level the playing field for women and minorities – violated the universal standards codified by the American Founders: equal opportunity and equal responsibility. For D’Souza, this was a dangerous development since, “as Aristotle observed,” such uniformity was “the only lasting basis for community.” D’Souza applied this anti-relativist framework to a critique of the multicultural curriculum, which taught students “justice is simply the will of the stronger party; that standards and values are arbitrary, and the ideal of the educated person is largely a figment of bourgeois white male ideology” (D’ Souza 1991: 13, 5, 50, 229). The victim’s revolutionaries, according to D’Souza, joined forces with a new literary relativism, schooled in Foucault and Derrida. This combination put the nail in the coffin of the universal standards of traditional American identity. “Because the old notion of neutral standards corresponded with a white male faculty regime at American universities,” he intoned, “minority and feminist scholars have grown increasingly attached to the au courant scholarship, which promises to dismantle and subvert these old authoritative structures” (D’ Souza 1991: 157). Whereas generations of scholars celebrated the transcendent genius of someone like Shakespeare, a new 472

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generation of scholars worked to reshape the canon to include multicultural books such as The Color Purple and I, Rigoberta Menchu. The canon had gone cosmopolitan. D’Souza believed that the new literary theorists, rather than make the case for the multicultural texts on their aesthetic merits, snuck inferior works into their classrooms with claims that the very idea of the canon was illegitimate, a cover for racism and patriarchy. Lynne Cheney, who chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993, took the critique of the academy to new levels of conservative animosity in her 1995 book, nonironically titled, Telling the Truth. She believed that scholarly efforts to expand or defy conceptions of Americanism violated standards of truth with a mushy relativism. Following a well-worn path, Cheney critiqued postmodernists for going far beyond the ideas that have shaped modern scholarship – that we should think of the truth we hold today as tentative and partial, recognizing that it may require rethinking tomorrow in light of new information and insight – to the view that there is no truth. She scorned the academic fashion of reading power and hierarchy into everything, including canonical texts. “The humanities are about more than politics, about more than social power,” she argued. “What gives them their abiding worth are truths that, transcending accidents of class, race, and gender, speak to us all” – especially all of “us” Americans (Cheney 1995: 15, 16, 14). Part of the revanchist response by conservatives like Cheney was disgruntlement over the academic denial of American exceptionalism. In the eyes of conservatives, being American was recognizing the nation’s fundamental uniqueness and, frankly, its cultural superiority. Cheney’s widely publicized critique of the National History Standards grew out of her attempt to return American exceptionalism to a normative framework for understanding American identity. Prompted by political leaders concerned with falling standards, a large group of historians and educators, led by UCLA historian Gary Nash, developed the National History Standards in 1994. These Standards – based on professional historiography, especially the post-sixties turn to social history – accentuated the “people from below,” including minorities and women. In a widely cited Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Cheney generated a venomous conservative media blitz by blanching that the Standards portrayed American history as “grim and gloomy.” Many found her message amenable. In 1995, the U.S. Senate voted 99–1 to condemn the standards. Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole described historians as “intellectual elites who seemed embarrassed by America” (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 2000: 3). For Cheney, the Standards encouraged “students to take a benign view of – or totally overlook – the failings of other cultures while being hypercritical of the one in which they live.” Most egregiously, the standards equivocated on a topic that seemed morally certain to Cheney. “The Cold War is presented as a deadly competition between two equally culpable superpowers, each bent on world domination,” she lamented. “Ignored is the most salient fact: that the struggle was between the communist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the freedom offered by the United States, on the other.” In short, Cheney worried that relativism opened the backdoor to unflattering portrayals of the United States. She maintained that the United States is “a political and economic lodestar to people around the world,” and to teach differently would be “at the cost of truth” (Cheney 1995: 26, 29, 30). Conservatives were not the only ones to wage a culture war against threats to a stable American identity. Many liberals of the pluralist faith that served as a consensus until the 1960s joined conservatives in defending American identity against encroachments. With his 1991 bestseller The Disuniting of America, venerable liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., offered a critique of diasporic threats to national solidarity. Although he generally disdained attempts to define 473

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political identity in accordance with solidarities other than American – what became known in short-hand as “identity politics” – Schlesinger was more willing than conservatives to admit that the identity ethos stemmed from his beloved nation’s blemishes. As such, he begrudgingly softened his critique of black hyper-attention to identity. “Like other excluded groups before them,” Schlesinger wrote, “black Americans invoke supposed past glories to compensate for real past and present injustices. Because their exclusion has been more tragic and terrible than that of white immigrants, their quest for self-affirmation is more intense and passionate.” But in other instances, his rhetoric was indistinguishable from conservative critics who lambasted the academic left for replacing traditional history and literature with, in Schlesinger’s words, “a compensatory literature, inspired by group resentment and pride.” Outflanking both left and right, Schlesinger fought back against the “cult of ethnicity” that “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus” (Schlesinger 1991: 71, 55, 16–17). In his Twilight of Common Dreams, former New Left activist Todd Gitlin not only worried about the fractured national identity, but he also fretted over a severed American left, which he believed nourished a larger American identity. To this degree, Gitlin named the degraded, tribal condition of the left in the age of the culture wars the “twilight of common dreams.” “Identity politics became an organizing principle among academic cohorts . . . whose political experience . . . began in the late 1960s or thereafter,” Gitlin complained. “Politics for them was the politics of interest groups – however laced with revolutionary rhetoric” (Gitlin 1995: 146). Schlesinger and Gitlin believed that American racism stemmed from Americans not living up to their stated ideals. For instance, when white Americans murdered American Indians to clear the land for white settlers, this was a violation of the spirit of America rather than endemic to it. They argued that an Enlightenment appeal to common humanity was the best response to discrimination. In contrast, the practitioners of identity politics, to their dismay, joined their political enemies in emphasizing difference. “The cant of identity underlies identity politics,” Gitlin wrote, “which proposes to deduce a position, a tradition, a deep truth, or a way of life from a fact of birth, physiognomy, national origin, sex, or physical disability” (Gitlin 1995: 126). But these concerns that non-national identities were eclipsing any hope for a common American dream, whether expressed by conservatives like D’Souza and Cheney or liberals like Schlesinger and Gitlin, overlooked another threat to a unified American identity: the postmodern tendency towards fracture.

Postmodernism and fracture By the 1970s, feminism became one of the central theoretical battlegrounds for thinking through identity in an increasingly fractious era. Because second-wave feminism formed, in part, as a response to the fact that the diasporic identity movements of the 1960s ignored patriarchy while fighting racism, it scattered identities even further from older conceptions of American identity. As Alice Echols has shown, cultural feminists, who were in the vanguard of the movement by the 1970s, deemed the national culture irredeemably sexist, and thus sought to construct a positive female identity as apart from a patriarchal American identity (Echols 1989). Gitlin criticized this mode of feminism for inverting “inferior status, so that distinct qualities once pointed to as proof of inferiority were transvalued into the basis for positive distinction” (Gitlin 1995: 141). But, in this, Gitlin critiqued the last form of modern subjectivity – identity politics – just as postmodernism had seemingly rendered all forms of modern subjectivity theoretically dead. The most influential postmodern theorists, such as Judith Butler, moved beyond identity towards post-subjectivism, which undermined identity politics from within. In her 1990 book Gender Trouble, Butler argued against an essential feminist subject on the grounds that such a 474

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position adhered to reified patriarchal norms. She contended that “it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the questions of primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics.” Furthermore: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” In other words, earlier feminist theorists sought to build an oppositional female identity, in contrast to that which was falsely constructed by patriarchal norms. But Butler understood all gendered subjects, even those in opposition to patriarchy, as constructed, discursive, and ultimately, performative. This represented the death of identity, American or otherwise, as a force for liberatory politics (Butler 1990: ix, 25). Although Butler was the most influential feminist theorist of the 1990s, others emerged to challenge her postmodern claims about the death of the feminist subject, including political theorist Nancy Fraser. Fraser generally theorized that an identity-less subject was easy to neutralize since, without an autonomous subject, or more precisely, without a firm ethical framework, realigning the political coordinates of sex and gender was impossible. Fraser demonstrated her skepticism with regards to postmodernism by way of a critical look at Foucauldian politics, which might as well have been a critical look at Butlerian feminist politics. In this way, Fraser anticipated Seyla Benhabib’s 1992 labeling of Butler’s “feminist appropriations of Nietzsche” – the “strong version of the Death of Subject thesis” – as “incoherent.” Benhabib questioned whether challenges to identity politics were “only thinkable via a complete debunking of any concepts of selfhood, agency, and autonomy” (Benhabib 1992: 214–15). Fraser summed up Foucault’s theory of power as follows: rather than residing in the agency of sovereign subjects, power was too diffuse to be contained by mere individuals. The result of such a postulation, if not the death of identity writ large, was the obliteration of the modern liberal or pluralist identity that stood in opposition to forms of coercive power, such as the moral establishment. In other words, power was not to be found solely in a specific political sphere but rather in the “politics of everyday life,” which lent philosophical support to the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” But more important to the postmodernist theories of Butler, such a conception introduced the idea that power shaped people positively rather than negatively, that people acted in accordance with power out of desire rather than fear. In short, Foucault rejected liberal norms about how individuals or groups might form a solidarity against illegitimate forms of power. Similarly, Butler overturned the idea that feminism could build a barricade of female identity against patriarchy (Fraser 1989: 19–27). Although Fraser hit her target when critiquing the political problems of postmodernism, she ran into a dead end at the epistemological level. A radical ethical norm – a common standard towards which people, in solidarity, might strive – is certainly preferable at the political level to postmodern theories of transgressive fragmentation. That said, Fraser failed to explain how such a normative framework might take root in a postmodern world lacking such foundations, in a world deprived of political subjects. In short, is it possible to bracket off politics from epistemology? Fraser believed it not only possible but also desirable, writing that “you can’t get a politics straight out of epistemology, even when the epistemology is a radical antiepistemology like historicism, pragmatism, or deconstruction” (Fraser 1989: 6). Like Fraser, Fredric Jameson fretted about the political possibilities for a subject-less left. But, by attaching the intellectual and cultural particulars of postmodernity to the postindustrial transformations of capitalism, Jameson better theorized the close relationship between epistemology and politics. Jameson recognized that both identity fragmentation and epistemological dissolution were structured by the postmodern condition he prematurely called “late capitalism.” As such, far from offering hope, he predicted that any universal principles of solidarity, whether national or not, would be nearly impossible to rebuild. 475

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Jameson wrote that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.” In the realm of political theory, this entailed that natural rights, which rationalized the classic liberal principle of individual liberty, had scattered. But so too had equally grand narratives that justified more coercive forms of power, such as nationalism. Neither liberty nor coercion, both entailing autonomous agents, drove postmodern social relations. Agreeing with Foucault at the level of description, if not prescription, Jameson argued that postmodern humans were shaped by desires constitutive of late capitalism. The postindustrial displacement of class and national struggle from the urban centers of the developed world, accompanied by the new technologies of imagery that allowed capital to invade the human psyche beneath consciousness, spelled the death of the subject. “In psychological terms,” Jameson observed, “we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience.” Such a dream-like existence helped explain the prevalence of postmodern antiepistemologies: “never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless” (Jameson 1991: 51). In sum, in the age of fracture, longstanding struggles over American identity began to seem remote, at least, in the theoretical discourse. Smaller circles of solidarity also appeared on the wane. As Jodi Dean wrote in her book Solidarity of Strangers: “early on it seemed as if the nineties were going to be the ‘we’ decade [but] as it turned out, no one really knew who ‘we’ were. . . . Situated at the borders and intersections of the ‘we,’ people with multiple identifications experimented with notions like ‘world-traveling,’ ‘hybridity,’ and ‘the new mestiza’” (Rodgers 2011: 178). Perhaps this pointed towards an experimental cosmopolitanism of sorts, but certainly not Hollinger’s national solidarity of cosmopolitan justice.

Cosmopolitanism and its limits Recent theorists of cosmopolitanism – the idea that people might identify with specific groups but, at base, are part of a larger human community – including Hollinger but also philosophers Charles Taylor and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and literary theorist Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have analyzed race as a way to undermine its political power. Cosmopolitan thinkers posit that, because race is a social construction, it is malleable, and thus could be politically reconstructed to reflect a multicultural society like the United States. Cosmopolitanism is optimistic. Charles Taylor historicizes identity politics, the concept that political attitudes necessarily flow from self-identified social groups, including racial groups. From a critical if sympathetic vantage point, Taylor argues that identity politics arose as a plausible, perhaps even a necessary response to centuries of racial inequality. In this, Taylor follows Fanon, who theorized in The Wretched of the Earth that the most powerful weapon of the colonizer, more than military might, was the collective inferiority complex of the colonized – an inferiority engendered by the colonial condition. Taylor transposes such logic onto an American political context, where the long and brutal history of racism has conditioned many blacks to a wretched view of themselves. As such, identity politics, or what Taylor calls a “politics of recognition,” a politics that treats all cultures as intrinsically valuable, is a rational response. Taylor argues as much despite his skepticism of relativist claims that all cultures are equal. He contends that Americans, who often judge minority cultures unfavorably due to prejudice and arrogance, have a limited view of the world and their place in it. The solution, Taylor argues, is “a willingness to be open to comparative cultural study of the kind that must replace our horizons in the resulting fusions.” In other words, by challenging ethnocentric views, a better cultural framework might emerge. 476

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Framing cosmopolitanism in this way, Taylor vehemently opposes the racial arrogance of Saul Bellow’s infamous statement: “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy we will read him.” Taylor argues against Bellow not only on the grounds that the Zulus might have produced a Tolstoy that has yet to be discovered, but also from the standpoint that Zulu culture likely evaluates merit differently and that Americans would benefit from learning their evaluative system. This is what he means by replacing narrow horizons with a vision formed by cultural fusion. It is his “dialogic process,” a process aligned with various other cosmopolitan thinkers (Taylor 1994: 73). Kwame Anthony Appiah, though more critical of identity politics than Taylor, is similarly sympathetic in his recognition that racial inequality distorts liberal politics grounded in universally recognized rights and freedoms. Appiah believes that in a multicultural society like the United States, identities, insofar as they governed political behaviors and expectations, should ideally be based on individual choice. But he is sensitive to the fact that identities are often ascriptive, and that some ascriptive identities are more coercive than others. Blacks, for instance, have little choice but to be identified as African Americans. And a much more coercive set of norms are ascribed to the African American identity than to a less visible, more voluntary ethnic identity, such as Irish American. Appiah makes clear that positive racial identification is “a predictable response” by blacks in at least two ways: it gives them a sense of racial solidarity in their struggles with a racist society; and it reminds whites of their unearned racial privilege. But such benefits do not come without costs. “If, in understanding myself as African-American, I see myself as resisting white norms, mainstream American conventions, the racism of ‘white culture,’” Appiah asked, “why should I at the same time seek recognition from these white others?” In other words, blacks cannot reject normative America with one hand, while asking to be included in it with the other. Appiah’s solution to this quandary is for people to reject forced racial ascriptions altogether. Instead, people need to “live with fractured identities; engage in identity play; find solidarity, yes, but recognize contingency, and, above all, practice irony.” In sum, Americans should live by the recognition that racial identity is a social construct (Appiah and Gutmann 1996: 82–3, 94, 104). Henry Louis Gates, Jr. does not perfectly fit the cosmopolitan mold. But, more hopeful on the question of racial identity than most other black literary theorists, Gates is much closer to Taylor, Appiah, and Hollinger than to the theoretical proponents of identity politics. As the United States grows more diverse, Gates believes that the “cultural impulse” of African Americans “represents the very best hope for us, collectively, to forge a new, and vital, common American culture in the twenty-first century.” In positing culture as something that can be fashioned anew, Gates joins cosmopolitans in theorizing that racial identity is a subjective enactment of hybridity. And yet, he also recognizes that such an optimistic reading is often unwarranted: thinking about racial identity “in terms of its practical performative force doesn’t help me when I’m trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue. (‘Please sir, it’s only a metaphor.’)” Gates rebuffs those who use the social constructed-ness of race as an excuse for refusing the political legitimacy of black identity. In this, Gates has in mind colorblind conservatives like Linda Chavez, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, who maintained that “any attempt to systematically classify human beings according to race will fail, because race is an arbitrary concept” (Rodgers 2011: 141). Whereas white Americans have no need to declare themselves white because they are assumed American, black Americans can neither declare themselves black nor be assumed American. While rejecting racial ontology in the same terms as Taylor and Appiah and Hollinger, in this way Gates also highlights the political problems that accompany such an antiracial epistemology: it draws attention away from the negative consequences of racism. This is the irony of colorblind America. Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize winning author of Beloved, a novel about a runaway 477

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slave who murders her daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery, puts this paradox as follows: “The people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’ when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist” (Gates 1992: xvii, 38). Gates understands cosmopolitanism, then, in appropriately perplexing terms. Since racial identities are constructed – since they are performative – they are malleable enough to suit a more enlightened racial order. But because most people understand racial identities in ontological terms, and because the racist regime from which such understandings emerged has yet to abate, political battles about racial inequality have to be fought on older terms. The cosmopolitan theory of voluntary affiliation, as such, is undercut by inequality, racial and otherwise. The fact that the United States has grown less and less economically equal since the 1970s, and that economic inequality often reinforces racial inequality, undermines the likelihood that American culture will embrace the cosmopolitanism of Hollinger, Taylor, Appiah, and Gates. Hollinger seems to realize as much when he qualifies his hopes for a postethnic America by pointing out that “a society that will not take steps to help its poor citizens of all ethno-racial groups will have little chance to find out how successful have been its efforts to overcome the racist attitudes empowered by whites.” Although the civil rights movement had left the nation much less sadistic, the color line will persist so long as Americans’ racial nerves are frayed by deindustrialization, urban blight, and economic inequality. Donald Trump makes this clear (Hollinger 2005 [1995]: 167–8).

Postscript: cosmopolitanism in the age of Trump Despite the limits of cosmopolitanism, the liberation movements of the 1960s – from civil rights and Black Power to feminism and beyond – made the American nation less open about its white masculine Christian nationalism. Openly racist people and groups like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan have been made pariahs; liberation movements made such political sentiments taboo. Even Republicans, who have been the true beneficiaries of coded racial slogans such as “law and order” – the southern “backlash” strategy that has worked well since Richard Nixon – have shunned open racists. Until now Trump, who won first the Republican nomination and then the presidency in 2016, discarded code. Trump, who has a long history of racial discrimination in his business practices, made his way onto the world’s biggest political platform by first establishing himself as the leader of the racist “birther” movement – those people who openly challenged, without a shred of evidence, Barack Obama’s right to be president on the basis that he was not born in the United States. During the campaign, Trump spoke openly about how a federal judge could not be trusted because he is a “Mexican,” after calling undocumented Mexican immigrants “rapists.” He threatened to ban Muslims from entering the United States, and followed through on that threat as president with his “Muslim ban,” which has been overturned by federal courts serval times, much to his dismay. Trump has a long history of sexism which also became well known during the campaign. Trump, in sum, openly represents masculine white nationalist America. Trump is the negation of cosmopolitanism. But this does not mean cosmopolitan American is dead. The “resistance,” as those who oppose Trump have taken to calling themselves, is made up of cosmopolitan America – by those who believe that American identity is not limited to white Christians. Who will win the future battle for American identity? Trump’s America? Or cosmopolitan America? Or perhaps a different formulation – a different solidarity, a different circle of “we” – is necessary.

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References Appiah, K.A. and Gutmann, A. (1996) Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Carmichael, S. and Hamilton, C. (1992 [1967]) Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, New York, Vintage. Cheney, L. (1995) Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense – And What We Can Do about It, New York: Simon and Schuster. Croly, Herbert (1909) The Promise of American Life, New York: The Macmillan Company. Cruse, H. (1967) The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc. D’Souza, D. (1991) Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, New York: The Free Press. Echols, A. (1989) Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gates, Jr., H.L. (1992) Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, London: Oxford University Press. Gitlin, T. (1995) The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, New York: Metropolitan Books. Gonzales, R. (2001) Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings, Houston: Arte Público Press. Gonzales, R. (1966) Rodolfo (“Corky”) Gonzales Papers, Denver: Western History Collection: The Denver Public Library. Guevara, E. (1995 [1953]) The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America, London: Verso. Hartman, A. (2015) A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hollinger, D. (2005 [1995]) Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, New York: Basic Books. Hollinger, D. (2006) Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ignatiev, N. (1996) How the Irish Became White, New York: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Joseph, P.E. (ed.) (2006) The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, New York: Routledge. Marin, C. (1977) A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement: Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Fight for Chicano Liberation, 1966–1972, San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, Inc. Menand, L. (2001) The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Muñoz, C. (2007) Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, London: Verso. Nash, G., Crabtree, C. and Dunn, R. (2000) History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, New York: Vintage Books. Rodgers, D. (2011) Age of Fracture, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Roediger, D. (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso. Schlesinger, A. (1991) The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Sehat, D. (2011) The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1994) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wallerstein, I. (2009) ‘Reading Fanon in the 21st Century’, New Left Review, 57: 117–25.

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41 Cosmopolitanism in Asia Baogang He and Kevin Brown

Cosmopolitan theory claims that cosmopolitans transcend the borders of national societies and actively embrace diversity, differences and an all-inclusive society of strangers (Pichler 2009: 3–26 and Ossewaarde 2007: 367–88). Cosmopolitan theory offers normative arguments and visions about cosmopolitan democracy (Held 1995), transnational discursive democracy (Dryzek 2006) and global governance on poverty (Pogge 2008). These normative theories of cosmopolitanism, despite vast differences, share the common features of what Delanty (2006a: 25–47) calls “critical cosmopolitanism”. Yet, as Pichler (2009: 3–26) argues, we know little about what cosmopolitans are like and what distinguishes them from non-cosmopolitans on empirical grounds. Moreover, normative cosmopolitan theories tend to be American or European-centric suffering the problems of constituency, democratic scope, social prerequisites and practical institutionalisation (Bray 2009: 683–719). These problems highlight the importance of a pragmatic cosmopolitanism which ought to be rooted in daily life. This calls for an empirical study of whether normative claims of cosmopolitan theory can be confirmed on empirical grounds not only in Europe (Pichler 2009: 3–26), but also in Asia. Moreover, cosmopolitanism has been developed in the disciplines of philosophy, international relations, political theory and sociology. Today, area studies are increasingly becoming a testing ground in confirming or negating some claims made by cosmopolitan theorists. Asian studies are a valuable discipline for answering the following questions: Is cosmopolitanism merely a ‘Western’ product or a global one? Will the Asian story confirm the universal aspiration of cosmopolitanism? There is some evidence that cosmopolitanism is becoming an important factor in economic, political and cultural life in Asia, and correspondingly there is an increasing literature on variants of Asian cosmopolitanism. However there are different understandings of what constitutes cosmopolitanism. A number of debates exist over whether nationalism promotes or inhibits cosmopolitanism, whether lifestyle cosmopolitanism is compatible with critical cosmopolitanism, and whether religion and tourism promote cosmopolitanism. Many important questions arise. What are Asian patterns and variants of cosmopolitan development? Where does critical cosmopolitanism gain support in daily life (He 2002: 47–68)? Will critical cosmopolitanism be sustainable in Asia? Is it possible to further strengthen cosmopolitan trends across Asia? This paper takes a quantitative study of Asian cosmopolitanism and addresses the above questions and debates in an Asian context. Utilising the 2008 data of the Asia-Europe Survey (ASES) 480

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of nine Asian countries, we aim to find out the variants and pattern of Asian cosmopolitanism, address several debates on empirical grounds and find out whether and how the Asian region can support and contribute to the normative cause of cosmopolitanism. This paper proposes that cosmopolitanism falls into a rubric of lifestyle cosmopolitanism and critical cosmopolitanism. Lifestyle cosmopolitanism reflects the daily life of people, encompassing the everyday attitudes, connections and actions of Asian people in terms of their appropriation of other cultures (Hannerz 1996). Enjoying or celebrating the practices or products of other cultures such as food or music, however, does not necessarily reflect a shared or equal cultural value system. Critical cosmopolitanism is more or less based on equal values. It can be defined by the extent to which people engage with other cultures on a self-critical level, reflecting the limitations or shortcomings of their own cultures and nation-states. It exhibits the features of willingness to suspend narrow national interests in order to deal with global environmental degradation or global justice, respect for basic human rights, acknowledgement of the moral equality of all people and individuals, willingness to come to the aid of those suffering from natural or man-made disasters including extreme poverty (van Hooft 2009). Given the available data, this paper focuses on multilateral cosmopolitanism, the view that urgent common regional and/or global issues need to be addressed by multilateral institutions beyond narrow national borders. The paper consists of five sections. The first section discusses the manifestations of Asian cosmopolitanism. The second examines several debates on cosmopolitanism in Asia. The next section introduces the data and measurement. The fourth section reports the empirical findings. The final section addresses the four debates on cosmopolitanism through an empirical testing. The paper concludes with a summary on Asian cosmopolitanism.

The manifestations of Asian cosmopolitanism1 Cosmopolitanism is rooted in Asian histories. In China’s Tang dynasty (618–907) the emperors had to rely on nomadic non-Han for military defence from the north and a literary class drawn largely from the demilitarised south, creating a unique cosmopolitan empire (Lewis 2009). Various forms of South Asian cosmopolitanism existed in the era of anti-colonial agitation. Asian intellectuals spanned the Indian to Pacific Oceans, from Johannesburg to Tokyo, from Calcutta to New York, from Bombay to Rome within a global horizon (Manjapra and Bose 2010). Asia’s rich cultural heritage has often been regarded as the basis for Asian cosmopolitanism. The hybrid and dynamic societies of Asia are rooted in the deep traditions of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism. Sanskrit, for instance, can be seen as the Asian cosmopolitan equivalent of Latin (Pollock 2002). The ethnically plural nature of Asian civilisation, where cultures and identities have overlapped and mixed over time, suggests a more pronounced popular cosmopolitanism, which might be seen as a precondition of a new kind of civic cosmopolitanism. The Chinese doctrine and tradition of ‘Tianxia’ is one form of Asian cosmopolitanism that existed in ancient times (Dallmayr 1996; Delanty 2006b: chapter 21). Throughout Asian history leading figures spoke of values similar to the cosmopolitan outlook of today. Mo Tzu (480–390BC) promoted universal love, an outwardly oriented disposition of mind which is completely devoted to acting for the benefit of others. His notion of “love is defined almost in terms of Kant’s principle of treating all men as ends in themselves” (Scwartz 1985: 146–7). The Chinese Confucian scholar Kang Youwei (K’ang Yu-wei 1858–1927) advocated the elimination of national boundaries, class structure and racial discrimination in order to achieve his vision of universal peace and greater unity of mankind; Tan Shitou (T’an Ssu-tung 1865–98) imagined the formation of global government in which only the world exists but nations dissolve (Fung Yu-lan 1973: 689, 698). Today Zhao Tingyang (2005) reinterprets Tianxia as a cosmopolitan philosophy 481

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and world institution and articulates a cosmopolitan version of how China should play its global role in the context of the rise of China. Most Asian countries are now fully linked to the global economy, and Japan, China and India are major players. In meeting the Western powers head-on, new models of modernity in Asia have come into play. These new expressions of modernity are the product of a unique constellation of forces that are shaping the world in ways that cannot be understood in terms of ‘westernisation’ (see Beck et al. 2000). The situation is perhaps better understood as one of invigorated Asianism (He 2004c). It has brought with it an entirely new approach to culture and to politics in Asia. Postmodern culture, now an integral part of many major Asian cities, accentuates this Asianism and has given rise to a new kind of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Arguably, developments in culture and aesthetics persist as one of the major expressions of Asian cosmopolitanism. Inhabitants of Asian capital cities are increasingly orientated towards a cosmopolitan outlook. This is most evident in Singapore and Hong Kong. Both are models of cosmopolitan capitalism and the cosmopolitan city. The urban middle class in Asia may also identify, for example, with the cosmopolitan life, showing an attitude of openness to other cultural possibilities and a practice of thinking beyond the local (Rofel 2007: 111–34; Rohlen 2002: 26–31). It can be seen as a manifestation of the mentality of the global elite, and/or a way of life based on consumption. Thus, in the context of China, cosmopolitanism is rendered as ‘desiring China’ and is considered as a site for the production of knowledge about what it means to be human in a reconfigured world (Rofel 2007: 111–34). Migration is one of the leading driving forces of cosmopolitanism. It is no less a significant fact in present-day Asian cosmopolitanism. Just as Jewish migration was a carrier of cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century Europe, Asian experiences with multiculturalism and citizenship are expressions of cosmopolitanism. Migrants returning from Western countries are having a major impact on Asian countries. Aihwa Ong has commented on how intensified travel, consumption and communication has led to a transnational Chinese public (Ong 1999). Throughout South and East Asia, countries are now debating, and sometimes adopting, new policies to accommodate minorities, from the recognition of indigenous rights in the Philippines to regional autonomy in Indonesia and China, and to multinational federalism in Sri Lanka and India (Kymlicka and He 2005: 1). Largely due to migration, a ‘diasporic consciousness’ and cosmopolitan lifestyle characterise groups of people moving about temporarily. This is in stark contrast to traditional diasporas, which were a permanent situation brought about by accident rather than transnational intention. Hence, people are increasingly using several identities simultaneously in more than one nation. There is an enormous statistical increase in dual citizenship across Asia. In addition to migration, cosmopolitanism can be understood as ‘virtual migration’. Cosmopolitanism, as virtual migration, moves independently of people through cultural exchanges of ideas, images, money, music, electronic messages, sport, fashion, religion, etc. (Cohen 2004: 134–9). Empirical evidence of Asian transnational forms of collective identity is now emerging. The AsiaBarometer (Inoguchi et al. 2005) documents some evidence of transnational identities: 3,573 respondents constituting 39% of the sample population reported that they feel part of an Asian supranational group. The Asian lifestyle is becoming more and more cosmopolitan, albeit with some limits. For example, 24.1% of the 9,160 respondents said that they have friends from other countries, 52.8% often watch foreign entertainment programs, 44.9% often watch foreign news programs, 10.5% use email to communicate with other countries and 33.5% receive international satellite or cable TV.2 One of the most important expressions of Asian cosmopolitanism is normative transnationalism or regionalism within Asia (He 2004c). One example is ASEAN (Association of S. E. Asian 482

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Nations), which was established in 1967 and has been influenced by the EU. The Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the Establishment of the ASEAN Charter in 2005 was a watershed in the history of Asian normative regionalism. The charter embodies the first written requirement for the promotion of democracy and human rights, for transparency and good governance and for strengthening democratic institutions. NGOs such as the ASEAN People’s Assembly have taken the lead in recent years in taking seriously the values of democracy, human rights, participation and good governance in building an ASEAN Community of Caring Societies (He 2008: 63–80). New emergent transnational civil society has played an increasing role in addressing the national boundary issue in East Asia (He 2004b). Transnational activism, its moral principles, beliefs, organisation and behaviour demonstrate the existence of new emergent world citizenship in Asia. World citizenship provides a new code of conduct, a source of identity and a new ethics for transnational activism. It challenges and erodes the idea of national citizenship. The idea of world citizenship constitutes a normative foundation for transnational activism and a source of ideological power against the ideologies of nationalism. World citizenship and transnational activities also constitute a material power against the nation-states and for good global governance (He 2004a).

Debates on Asian cosmopolitanism The literature on cosmopolitanism in Asia is growing fast together with different understandings and definitions of cosmopolitanism. Below we briefly review several understandings and debates. This list, however, should not be taken as exhaustive. Hiebert uses the term ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, referring to the phenomenon that “men and women from different origins create a society where diversity is accepted and is rendered ordinary” (Hiebert 2002: 212). One dimension of this everyday cosmopolitanism is ‘functional cosmopolitanism’, which is now becoming a matter of everyday survival for many workers, labour migrants and refugees. “There is a sense in which ‘globalisation from above’, driven by powerful countries and transnational corporations, is now being paralleled and to a degree subverted by ‘globalisation from below’, driven by the enhanced mobility of labour” (Hiebert 2002: 148). Kirin Narayan distinguishes between political and cultural cosmopolitanism. In its political configuration, cosmopolitanism is fostered by a strong sense of responsibility beyond the nationstate. It comprises all the elements of compassion, human rights, solidarity and peacefulness. Culturally, cosmopolitanism raises awareness and develops an appreciation of diversity. Curiosity is mixed with a wider sense of civic responsibility in accommodating differential modes of thought or ways of life, but does not necessarily translate into a sense of political responsibility (Narayan 2007: 61). While cosmopolitanism is understood in different ways in Asia, there are also several debates on the nature and feature of cosmopolitanism.

Do nationalism and cosmopolitanism conflict with or complement each other? In one debate over the nature of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to nationalism, one side holds the view that cosmopolitanism embraces nationalism, for example, as revealed by the concept of “cosmopolitan patriots” (Appiah 1998). Historically, the idea of cosmopolitanism emerged in the context of liberal nationalism in the nineteenth century. Theoretically speaking, nationalism and cosmopolitanism are complementary and mutually implicated (Delanty 2006b: chapter 30). Instead of being against nationalism per se, cosmopolitanism, as Rofel (2007: 113) argues, constitutes the human in the context of neoliberal capitalism. While it poses as a universal 483

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category it is dependent on concrete manifestations of cosmopolitanisms that are, for example, vernacular, rooted, plural and religious in nature (Rofel 2007: 113). The other side of this debate pits the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism against an ageing nationalism. Cosmopolitanism (also referred to as transnationalism) is characterised by benign effects. Social actors knowingly transgress national frontiers as they grow in self-awareness and broaden their identity through diversity (Cohen 2004: 140). It is argued that cosmopolitanism transcends the nation-state model, mediates actions and ideals orientated towards the universal and particular, global and the local, and represents complexities of allegiance, identity and interest (Cohen: 141). Thomas P. Rohlen (2002) points out the tension between the cosmopolitan city and state. The cosmopolitan city and its liberal inclinations, he says, are dwarfed by national governments and military forces. Cosmopolitanism provides alternative notions of ‘cultural’ identity and undermines nation-state, tribal or minority ethnic absolutisms. Social, cultural, economic and religious resources go beyond the confines of localities of birth into ever-moving horizons that transcend the political boundaries of the nation-state (Robinson 2007).

Does lifestyle cosmopolitanism promote or inhibit critical cosmopolitanism? Major cosmopolitan cities generate the majority of revenues, but whether or not the populations of successful cities will be willing to subsidise their fellow citizens in poorer regions begs the question (Rohlen 2002: 12). One view holds that lifestyle cosmopolitanism is likely to lead to or promote critical cosmopolitanism as the former extends one’s horizon and knowledge. It is found that ordinary cosmopolitanism has bridged racial boundaries in everyday life (Lamont and Aksartova 2002: 1–25). However, others hold the opposite view that lifestyle cosmopolitanism is characterised by consumption and lacks a critical capacity. As Rofel points out, in the context of contemporary China, there is a need to make China appear cosmopolitan. While a desire for lifestyle cosmopolitanism is allowed and interpreted as non-political, other aspects such as socialist passion, critical thinking and an independent mentality are seen as dangerous in China. The creation of a consumer identity domesticates cosmopolitanism even as the goal of such a creation is to transcend place. Ironically when China is in the process of transcending nationalism to become cosmopolitan, it is also domesticating cosmopolitanism within China (Rofel 2007: 119). In a similar vein, van Hooft (2009) makes a distinction between a genuine ethical cosmopolitan outlook and fake cosmopolitanism. For him, lifestyle cosmopolitanism, such as following international fashion trends in an urban café society, tourism and international travel, and consumer interest in exotic products, clothing and world music, is not genuine cosmopolitanism.

Is religion at variance with cosmopolitanism? Anthony Appiah poses a challenging question: “can a fundamentalist, say, Islamic or Pentecostal, be a cosmopolitan?” (Appiah 2006). In the context of global securitisation, cosmopolitanism is sometimes seen as a non-religious phenomenon; and new religious globalists as counter-cosmopolitans. In historical terms, religion, however, was a cosmopolitan practice. The global design and ambition of Christianity saw the endless campaigns of conversion, and the global flow of fundamentalist Christianity to the Asia-Pacific region. Even globalised Islam also wants to build a community open to all. In examining temple construction in the kingdom of Bishnupur in southwestern Bengal from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries Kumkum Chatterjee (2009) shows how the Mughal–Rajput court facilitated and developed a culture of cosmopolitanism. 484

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We cannot simply categorise cosmopolitans or counter-cosmopolitans along religious lines. It is a complex matter that requires empirical variation. We need to find out whether significant differences exist within or between different religious groups with regards to critical cosmopolitanism, to what extent religious believers are cosmopolitan and whether a higher level of cosmopolitanism relates to a higher number of religious believers.

Does tourism promote or inhibit cosmopolitanism? Robin Cohen argues that theories on contemporary cosmopolitanism have often overlooked the importance of tourism. Tourism, like migration, presents a major challenge to the monochromatic national identity of all societies. More and more people are drawn into tourism as “participants, service agents, or objects of the tourist gaze” (Cohen 2004: 134–6). Molz (2006) asserts that travellers embody cosmopolitanism through their “fitness”, the ability of adapting to a variety of geographical and cultural environments. One may, however, argue that the cosmopolitan perspective does not necessarily apply to tourists, for they do not have to contend so much with alien systems of meaning. We will find out empirically the extent to which international travellers embody or lack the cosmopolitan spirit.

Data and measurement We can begin to empirically explore aspects of the debates above through an analysis of data from the Asia-Europe Survey (ASES) 2001 for nine Asian countries (China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand). This cross-sectional design produced data on a range of demographic and attitudinal variables and provides a potentially useful comparative measure of cosmopolitanism-related measures. The analysis is necessarily limited by virtue of the fact that the survey did not set out to measure cosmopolitanism per se and so the findings presented here are based on reconstructions of cosmopolitanism measures from the available survey items. In addition, the sampling was biased towards urban rather than rural respondents. Later iterations of ASES did not include the same set of countries and/or used differing sampling designs making direct comparisons to the 2001 data problematic. Nevertheless, we argue that useful measures and initial comparisons can be made through the means of analysing this data set. Five measures were developed using data from the ASES. Scales were constructed from groups of questions to measure aspects of respondents’: • • • • •

International Connection (IC); attitudes towards Multilateral political solutions (ML); attitudes towards Economic Internationalisation (EI); National Identity (NI); Supranational Identity (SI) (this relied on responses to a single question).

International Connection (IC) was measured by a scale comprising 9 questions about various kinds of connections that are international at base. Higher rates of connections are assumed to stand for increased ‘lifestyle cosmopolitanism’. Multilateralism (ML) was measured by 7 questions about whether particular problems should be solved multilaterally. This is arguably one aspect of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ that denotes a focus on issues beyond the respondent’s national boundaries and forms of solutions that are cross-national. Economic Internationalisation (IC) was measured by answers to two questions relating to the import of foreign products and foreign 485

Baogang He and Kevin Brown

ownership of land. National Identity was measured by 4 questions pertaining to nationalism. Supranational Identity was measured by 1 question that asked if respondents felt they had a transnational identity. High scores on all measures indicated greater support. Reliability tests showed all measures achieved satisfactory scores. As previously stated, the measures were reconstructed within the process of the secondary analysis of the ASES data. As such, we attempted to find survey questions and groups of questions that related to the key concepts of cosmopolitanism set out in the discussion above. Inevitably, the measures are partial and provide results that are indicative rather than being in any way conclusive evidence for the general themes identified.

Results General pattern (by country comparisons) Data were divided into three equal groups on each measure giving ordinal categories of ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ scores for each scale/measure. Table 41.1 presents a summary of the percentage of each country sample that comprised the ‘high’ category for each measure. The countries with the largest proportions of their sample in the ‘high’ category for International Connection were Singapore (65%), South Korea (33%) and Taiwan (32%) while Japan (17%), Thailand (15%) and Indonesia (4%) had the lowest. The countries with the largest proportions of their sample in the ‘high’ category for Multilateralism were Philippines (46%), Japan (34%) and South Korea (30%) while Malaysia (12%), Indonesia (8%) and Taiwan (4%) had the lowest. The countries with the largest proportions of their sample in the ‘high’ category for Economic Internationalisation were Singapore (44%), Japan (35%) and Taiwan (27%) while Indonesia (11%), Malaysia (10%) and Thailand (7%) had the lowest. The countries with the largest proportions of their sample in the ‘high’ category for National Identity were Philippines (89%), Thailand (83%) and Malaysia (72%) while Japan (39%) and Taiwan (23%) had the lowest. The countries with the largest proportions of their sample in the ‘high’ category for Supranational Identity were Malaysia (69%), Philippines (62%) and Thailand (43%) while Taiwan (33%), Japan (24%) and South Korea (24%) had the lowest.

Table 41.1 Percentage of sample in ‘high’ category of selected measures by country (rank ordered by IC score)

Singapore South Korea Taiwan Malaysia All nine countries China Philippines Japan Thailand Indonesia n = 8420 Source: ASES, 2001

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IC% (rank)

ML% (rank)

EI% (rank)

NI% (rank)

SI% (rank)

65 (1) 33 (2) 32 (3) 29 (4) 26 21 (5) 19 (6) 17 (7) 15 (8) 4 (9)

28 (4) 30 (3) 4 (9) 12 (7) 21 14 (6) 46 (1) 34 (2) 16 (5) 8 (8)

44 (1) 14 (6) 27 (3) 10 (8) 21 26 (4) 17 (5) 35 (2) 7 (9) 11 (7)

45 (4) 44 (6) 23 (9) 72 (3) 55 45 (4) 89 (1) 39 (8) 83 (2) 44 (6)

35 (6) 24 (8) 33 (7) 69 (1) 43 42 (4) 62 (2) 24 (8) 43 (3) 41 (5)

Cosmopolitanism in Asia

To provide further comparison between scale scores by country, all scores were standardised to a range –1.0 to 1.0 (mean = 0). Higher than average scores on International Connection and Multilateralism were found for Singapore and South Korea. Lower than average scores on International Connection and Multilateralism were found for Indonesia and Thailand. Higher scores on International Connection and Economic Internationalisation were found for Singapore and Taiwan. Lower scores for International Connection and Economic Internationalisation were found for Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. Higher-than-average scores on Economic Internationalisation and lower-than-average scores on National Identity were found for Japan, China, Taiwan and Singapore. Lower than average scores on Economic Internationalisation and higher scores for National Identity were found for Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines. Higher National Identity and Supranational Identity scores were found for Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. Lower National Identity and Supranational Identity scores were found for Singapore and Japan. Lower National Identity and Higher Supranational Identity scores were found for South Korea, China and Taiwan.

“Cosmopolitans” (group comparisons) Groups were created based on respondent’s scores on International Connection and Supranational Identity. These measures together combined self-reported actual connections with a transnational outlook/identity. The combined measures formed a score on a new variable named Cosmopolitans measured ordinally in three categories: high, mid and low. The group of high scoring Cosmopolitans comprised 9% of the total sample of nine countries. The mid scoring group made up 35% of the sample and the modal group was the low scorers with 56% of the sample. In terms of the distribution of Cosmopolitan types across the nine countries, 24% of the sample’s high Cosmopolitan types were located in Singapore. This was followed by Malaysia (14%), Philippines (13%) and China (12%). Japan had the largest single group of low Cosmopolitans (16%) followed by Philippines (12%) and Indonesia (11%). The Singapore sample had one high scoring Cosmopolitan for every 2.6 low scoring Cosmopolitans. Countries above the average ratio of 1: 6.2 were in addition to Singapore: Taiwan (1: 4.8); Malaysia (1: 5.2); South Korea (1: 5.6) and China (1: 5.9). Countries below the average ratio were: Philippines (1: 6.1); Thailand (1: 8.1); Japan (1: 13.6) and Indonesia (1: 63.6). The distribution of Cosmopolitan types across the sample was therefore uneven with a ratio range of 1: 2.6 (Singapore) to 1: 63.6 (Indonesia).

Predictors of International Connection and Multilateralism A comparison of mean scores for Cosmopolitan types in the sample was made with four sociodemographic measures: age; years of schooling completed; English language proficiency (selfreported and measured on a six-point scale from ‘none at all’ (0) to ‘native fluency’ (6)) and household living standard (self-reported on a five-point scale from low (1) to high (5)). While only very small differences existed in scores for the mid and low Cosmopolitans on these variables, larger differences were found between the high Cosmopolitans group and the mid and low groups. High Cosmopolitans were younger (4.5 years younger than mid and 4.8 years younger than low), had completed more years of schooling (2.3 years and 2 years difference to the other groups), were more proficient in English (1.2 higher than other groups) and had a higher household living standard (0.3) higher than both other groups. Analysis of variance tests confirmed that the differences between the high and both the mid and low Cosmopolitan groups were significant while the differences between the mid and low groups were not significant. 487

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A multiple regression/path analysis was conducted to measure the predictive effects of sociodemographic variables on International Connection and Multilateralism scores. The model explained 31% of the variability in International Connection with English proficiency (beta weight = .42), Household living standard (beta weight = .14), Years of schooling (beta weight = .13) and Economic Internationalisation (beta weight = .011) being the main effects on International Connection. In contrast, only 3% of the variability in Multilateralism was explained by the model with all significant effects being very small at beta weight = .10 (English language proficiency) or below.

Discussion The results indicated that at the regional (nine countries) level, there appeared to be some support for arguments that both stronger lifestyle-based International Connections and Supranational Identity are associated with Multilateral forms of thinking and that stronger National Identity is linked to a protective stance towards perceived national interests/borders. Considerable intercountry differences were measured in relation to the key measures of International Connection, Multilateralism, Economic Internationalisation, National Identity and Supranational Identity. High scoring Cosmopolitan types formed 9% of the overall sample but their distribution was uneven across the sample with Singapore having a larger proportion than any other country and Indonesia the least. High scoring Cosmopolitans were younger (4.5 years younger than mid and 4.8 years younger than low), had completed more years of schooling (2.3 years and 2 years difference to the other groups), were more proficient in English (1.2 higher than other groups) and had a higher household living standard (0.3) higher than mid and low scoring Cosmopolitans. However, high scoring Cosmopolitans were not associated with any particular religion nor did their scores on National and Supranational Identity differ much from mid and low scoring Cosmopolitans. Scores on Multilateralism were significantly higher for the high scoring Cosmopolitans. Model testing confirmed earlier analysis that higher scores on International Connection were associated with younger, more educated respondents who have higher-than-average English language proficiency and household living standard. Turning again to the research questions raised by the discussion above:

Do nationalism and cosmopolitanism conflict with or complement each other? Correlations between pairs of measures for all nine countries aggregated were calculated using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. There was a significant weak to moderate positive association between International Connection and Economic Internationalisation (r = .202, p =