Old baggage and missing luggage: a commentary on Beck and Sznaider's ‘Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda’

Abstract

It was within the swirling political, economic, ideological and intellectual currents of the turn of the twenty-first century that ideas about cosmopolitanism once more began to be delineated and debated. This discussion came in the wake of vibrant literatures that described and theorized globalization and transnationalism. All these scholarships reflected on and reflected a series of transformations in the organization of capital accumulation that made processes of production and consumption more flexible and fluid (Harvey 1989). Both powerful globe-spanning organizations such as the World Bank and World Trade Organization and the political leadership of individual nation-states were significant actors in these processes. Nation-states did not fade away but they did reorganize their regulatory apparatuses. A number initiated dual citizenship policies for the first time, which enabled migrants to claim membership in two or more states simultaneously. Responding and contributing to global restructuring, new social movements developed espousing a range of issues including environmentalism, opposition to structural adjustment policies and the debt of third world nations, various forms of long distance nationalism and religious fundamentalisms. In this historical conjuncture,the concepts of globalization,transnationalism and the related notion of disparic communities were embraced by various powerful institutions and major scholars in different formats and forums. At the same time potent critiques of globalization developed and these critiques contributed to the further development of social and political organizing against growing global inequality. Yet unlike globalization theory, cosmopolitanism has had less of a public presence, although there has been a