Cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitanisms? The Universal Races Congress of 1911

Abstract

Recent discussions of cosmopolitanism have moved beyond the moral philosophy of Western liberal‐democratic universalism towards a newer sociology emphasizing plurality and embracing the world beyond Europe. The new cosmopolitanisms have also come to be seen in terms of a dialectic between general orientations toward humanity and the particular temporal and spatial contexts within which they emerge. After disentangling various meanings of the term cosmopolitanism, the article examines their relationship with notions of universalism and globalization. The idea of multiple rooted cosmopolitanisms is then explored empirically using data on the Universal Races Congress of 1911. This is seen as an example of multiple cosmopolitanisms, challenging both the Euro‐centricity of older unitary ideas of Western cosmopolitanism, and the over‐emphasis of theories of imperial dominance on mechanisms of discursive incorporation. The main difficulty with the new cosmopolitanism thesis is the difficulty of distinguishing between varieties of transnational identity, which vary in their openness and inclusivity.