Cosmopolitan Principles Research Articles

Advancing global citizenship and cosmopolitanism in an age of Globoskepticism: insights from the World Order Models Project

ABSTRACT This article explores insights to be taken from the World Order Models Project (WOMP) for theorists seeking to advance the uptake of global citizenship and cosmopolitan principles. WOMP, lasting from 1968 to the 1990s, aimed to generate more inclusive academic dialogue on world order reforms and develop a programme of global education to build support for them. Insights from the project include ones for structuring a dialogue on global normative concerns that is diverse but not too diffuse. It also offers a model for promoting globally normative counter-narratives in ‘globoskeptical’ times – the Cold War then and the current era of right-wing populism. And, it directs attention to the possible importance of focusing on global-scale institutional reform alongside individual motivation to assume moral duties across national borders. Finally, it offers negative lessons on setting feasible aims and timelines, and on a need to move beyond academic work in promoting change.

Through the prism of aesthetics. Napoleonic myth in the works of Goethe and Nietzsche

The reception of Napoleon in Germany was carried out under the sign of an aesthetic myth. The aesthetic myth is understood as a set of theories, concepts and texts of culture based on the idea of transforming the world through artistic creativity. Starting with romanticism, the aesthetic myth determines the specifics of the German discourse of culture. Under the sign of the aesthetic myth in Germany, the image of the French emperor is also comprehended. J.W.Goethe sees in Napoleon the embodiment of genius, the secret of which he is trying to unravel. Goethe sees in Napoleon a demonic personality, “the quintessence of humanity”, a genius, a natural phenomenon. Another aesthetic category through which the image of Napoleon is comprehended is the sublime. According to Goethe, the loftiness of Napoleon manifests itself not only during his political rise, but also during his fall. Another aesthetic category through which the image of Napoleon is comprehended is the sublime. The greatness of Napoleon is manifested, according to Goethe, not only in his military and political triumph, but in his tragic fall. Nietzsche sees in Napoleon the historical anticipation of the coming superman. The political activity of Napoleon is comprehended as an analogue and continuation of German art, the reincarnation of the ancient German spirit that overcomes the modern German decadence. In contrast to Bismarck’s nationalist empire, Napoleon’s all-European empire was founded on the principles of cosmopolitanism, which, in Nietzsche’s view, corresponds to the universalist nature of the German spirit.

Securitization and Forced Migration in Kenya: A Policy Transition from Integration to Encampment

AbstractThis article explores forced migration and policy transition in East Africa using the case study of Kenya—a key regional destination for forced migrants. Using a descriptive and historical approach to highlight the dynamics of forced migration (1990–2021), the study emphasizes on what factors underlie the change of policy from integration to encampment. The author argues that central to this transition are discourses on national security, domestic, and regional politics. Using the theory of securitization, the study finds that assumptive blames on forced migrants expose them to greater vulnerabilities, while failure to recognize the challenges facing host states also undermines the management of forced migrants. The author concludes that the principles of global cosmopolitanism should underlie response and that when critical national interests necessitate stricter limitations on the extent to which forced migrants can enjoy certain rights and freedoms, then the international community must strive to play a greater role to minimize risks to both host nations and forced migrants.

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Habermas on Moral Motivation and Secular Hope

In his massive 2019 work on the history of the faith-reason discourse in the West, Habermas replies to Kant’s question of rational hope with the prospect of an eventual intercultural agreement on cosmopolitan principles of justice. To warrant such hope he points to the growth of democratic institutions and human rights across the globe. Habermas’s answer thus relies on political structures that foster transformative social movements—but not on modern moral attitudes, which he regards as too individualistic to generate collective action. I argue that Habermas, following Kant, relies on flawed assumptions about social movements. As a result, his structural approach provides an incomplete basis for hope. In the spirit of ongoing dialogue between religion and secular thought, I translate Aquinas’s treatment of fraternal correction into an ethics of moral leadership that can fill the gaps in Habermas’s project.

Identity and the Demand for Inclusion: The Critique of Methodological Nationalism and the Political Theory of Immigration

ABSTRACT Political theorists of immigration who are critical of restrictive immigration policies generally rely on abstract, universal, cosmopolitan principles, while defenders of such restrictions focus on concrete identities. This status quo overlooks the ways attention to concrete identities can challenge restrictive immigration policies, and neglects important insights from the critique of methodological nationalism in social theory and migration studies. I first identify the strongest case for immigration restrictions, with attention to the exceptions to the right to exclude it demands, the “associative ownership” account, whose promise is due in part to avoiding over-reliance on nationalist justifications. This account has overlooked those whose identities have been coercively constituted by the actions of the state in question, who have a potentially justified demand for inclusion. The critique of methodological nationalism demonstrates the shortcomings of using national identity to determine who merits such an exception, and of abandoning judgment to states themselves.

Navigating world order: neoliberalism between nationalism and cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT Through a morphological analysis of early neoliberal discourse, it is argued that preserving the system of states became integral to neoliberalism after a period of contestation. It is common knowledge that the early neoliberals thought of economic nationalism as an archaic practice. But it is less well known that they also learned to dread institutional cosmopolitanism. The first cohort of neoliberal theorists, despite displaying cosmopolitan propensities economically and morally, decided during the 1940s to abandon the cosmopolitan political principles that several early institutional designs had followed. The neoliberals realized that nationalism had an upside. Their reasoning was pragmatic rather than democratic. A cosmopolitan world order, with a central democratic decision-making body – such as a world government answerable to a world parliament elected by the world populace – would more likely than not be anathema to their primary project; creating a world economy for entrepreneurs. Hence, they finally embraced borders.

Spiritual Cosmopolitanism, Transnational Migration, and the Bahá’í Faith

Scholars have wrestled with the question of how people can be persuaded to extend feelings of kinship beyond their own ethnic or national groups. This article identifies spiritual cosmopolitanism, whose principles of universal love and harmony can be found in the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith, as key to such borderless solidarity. Drawing on data gathered from interviews with Iranian refugees who have settled in the United States, the article demonstrates how cosmopolitan principles shape the worldviews of Bahá’ís. Through this case study, spiritual cosmopolitanism’s potential to enrich public arguments for the inclusion of Others such as immigrants becomes apparent.

Child-volunteer socialisation in an after-school programme: a case study about transcaring and transformation

ABSTRACT This paper explores interactions between a local volunteer and a newcomer child in an after-school programme in Barcelona. Building on the principles of transcaring, language socialisation and critical cosmopolitanism, I propose that adult and child engage in a transformative, two-way socialisation process as their cultural and linguistic repertoires are appraised and new meanings and understandings emerge. This socialisation enables them to develop essential dispositions to inhabit our globalised societies. The article also questions bounded conceptions around language, culture and belonging, foregrounding the complexity of life trajectories and cultural and linguistic repertoires in contexts of intense mobility and transnational interaction.

The Modern Form of Cultural Cosmopolitanism

The article deals with interaction of transculturalism as the ideology of uncertainty with a cultural version of cosmopolitanism. In the cosmopolitan in its ontic plane, today’s thinking is not just universal and global. The emphasis is predominantly on the unidentified, in particular, the deprived of national attributes or opposed to national ones. Thus cosmopolitanism represents itself as an alternative to identification, that is, as uncertainty, incertitude in the conditions of a cultural homogenization of the world. This emphasis is connected to the idea of the possibility of an individual’s existence at once in several cultures or coexistence in a cultural mix, expressed in the concept of transculturality. The application of principles of cosmopolitanism in the realm of culture initially causes a certain contradiction through which radical cosmopolitans reject the very idea of culture. After all, this idea asserts human pluralism: culture as the attribute of the human by definition is something plural – a variety of ways to be human; so it can`t be abstractly-human. While the principle of cosmopolitanism consists of the oneness of humanity, and therefore indistinguishability within it. The overcoming of contradictions is sought in the justification of the purely private relations of a single person-nomad with world culture, his or her devotion to it. Such devotion in the vision of transcultures is achieved by an individual’s refusal from one’s own (local, national, etc.) culture and by endless journeys through cultures, that is, a cosmopolitan identification of both individual and culture. In an escape from the “captivity” of a specific culture, that is, in confirming the principles of uncertainty, transculturalists perceive almost the only path to cultural freedom. The article describes how transcultural ideology is formed and unfolded in the framework of modernized cosmopolitan trends. The author shows that transculture now is not an accomplished feat, it remains a kind of utopian project, a projective construct of cosmopolitan-oriented culturological thought.

Taming cosmopolitanism: the limits of national and neoliberal civic education in two global cities

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes global education policy and curricular documents in Singapore and Hong Kong. Using a discursive approach, we characterize curricular aims through various cosmopolitan perspectives. We posit that although touted as Asian global cities, Singapore and Hong Kong are cases where neoliberal and nation-centric educational agendas have effectively rebranded cosmopolitanism and tamed its transformative potential. To develop this argument, we review theories and critiques of cosmopolitan forms of global citizenship education deemed necessary to prepare young people for complex global social conditions. We discuss cosmopolitan principles on identity, values, and deliberation and draw on critical cosmopolitanism and Asian forms of cosmopolitanism to provide a discursive framework for analyzing curricular intentions in the two cases.

Kosmopolityzm jako praktyka międzygatunkowa. Parę uwag o gościnności nieantropocentrycznej

Derridiańskie pytanie o paradoksalną (bez)warunkowość zakodowaną w pojęciu gościnnościjest także pytaniem o zasięg i przedmiot odniesienia: jeśli gościnność ma być tym,co rządzi wszelką interakcją, to być może nie ogranicza się ona wyłącznie do relacji międzyludzkich.Celem artykułu jest prześledzenie pojawiających się w ostatnich latach nieantropocentrycznychwizji gościnności, związanych z rozwinięciem Kantowskiego pojęcia kosmopolitycznegoprawa w odniesieniu do zwierząt i ich politycznej podmiotowości. Artykułpodejmuje wątki zwierzęcia kosmopolitycznego, kosmopolityki, kosmopolityzmu rozumianegonielogocentrycznie, jak w tradycji starożytnego cynizmu, kosmopolitycznych inspiracjiw nurcie posthumanizmu oraz projektu państwowej polityki opartej na ładzie kosmopolitycznym– zoopolis.

Communication, reflexivity and harm principle: what might an ideal speech situation look like in responsibility to protect?

ABSTRACTPrevious accounts of International Relations research have extensively focused on deontological ethics in analysing Responsibility to Protect (R2P). At the same time, discourse ethics – along with Jürgen Habermas’ theory of ideal speech situation – has been overlooked. This article argues that the R2P process has gradually moved toward the Habermasian ideal speech situation. The Habermasian approach also provides a useful theoretical framework to understand the new, more inclusive and critical, forums of communication and initiatives set in motion by emerging non-Western norm-entrepreneurs in the R2P process, notably the Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) initiated by Brazil in 2011. From the perspective of discourse ethics, RwP could be understood as a cosmopolitan harm principle designed to manage the potentially harmful side-effects of the application of R2P. The article further argues that, despite the current paradigm shift of norm-entrepreneurship on R2P from deontological ethics to discourse ethics, it has thus far only partially fulfilled the criteria of an ideal speech situation.

Leϊla Choukroune (ed.), Judging the State in International Trade and Investment Law: Sovereignty Modern, the Law and the Economics, Springer, 2016, xix-222pp, ISBN 978-981-10-2358-3, Hb €128.39

Leϊla Choukroune (ed.), Judging the State in International Trade and Investment Law: Sovereignty Modern, the Law and the Economics, Springer, 2016, xix-222pp, ISBN 978-981-10-2358-3, Hb €128.39 - Volume 32 Issue 2

Migrace jako aktuální zdroj společenskopolitického konfliktu:Inspirativní a kritická úloha sociálního učení církve - svědecká role církve a jednotlivých křesťanů

The article reflects on the phenomenon of migration as the basis of the current social­‑political conflict. Its aim is (above all) to point out the inspirational and critical importance of the social teaching of the Church on this current issue. It focuses on the two key moments contained in this teaching, which also appear to be pivotal within the socio-political discourse in relation to migration. It is a question of the relevance of the cosmopolitan principle, respectively the question of political decision­‑making on a transnational level. The article also provides a partial view of the role and the importance of the Church and individual Christians as the witnesses to the issue, i.e. the confrontation of the migration phenomenon in the context of growing urbanization.

Cosmopolitan perspective in the work of Zygmunt Bauman

The theoretical legacy of Zygmunt Bauman is an inexhaustible sourceof inspiration for sociological analysis, particularly bearing in mindthe scope of his work and the diverse range of modern day problemsthat this British-Polish author dealt with. The first part of this articleexamines the question of personal identity in liquid modernity, whichis the starting point of Bauman’s work. Similar to some other authors,Bauman discusses the paradox of the individual who is not free inan individualized society. Bauman’s diagnosis carries pessimistic featureswhich in some places correspond to insights developed in classicalsociology. Bauman makes occasional and sporadic incursionsinto the pitfalls of conservative thought, particularly in relation tothe dichotomies of individual versus community, individualism versustogetherness, and egoism versus solidarity. However, it seems thatthe author manages to skilfully avoid the inherent theoretical traps ofsociology, turning towards cosmopolitan theory. The second part ofthis article presents the thesis that Bauman’s thought is in fact cosmopolitan,especially bearing in mind his final public appearances andwritings. This argument is based in his description of global societythat is simultaneously integrating and developing, and dramaticallydisintegrating and regressing. Bauman writes about violent killingsand expulsions of people in the 21st century and their inability to findrefuge in the Western and democratic world that promotes humanrights. Recalling the crucial cosmopolitan principles of solidarity andhospitality, Bauman makes an appeal to progressive forces to consolidateand work on opening and reaffirming the “cosmopolitan condition”of contemporary society.

The politics of urban climate risks: theoretical and empirical lessons from Ulrich Beck’s methodological cosmopolitanism

In the face of global climate risks, world cities increasingly figure in academic and policy discourse as strategic spaces for harnessing the expertise and governance capacity needed to steer societies toward more sustainable and low-carbon futures. This article reviews existing approaches to the study of urban climate politics, by way of asking what contribution Ulrich Beck’s theory of world risk society – and principles of methodological cosmopolitanism – make to such epochal conversations? Three main analytical frameworks stand out: low-carbon transition literature highlight generic processes of socio-technical ‘greening’ of urban infrastructures; urban policy mobility work documents growing intercity networks around climate and sustainability; and actor–network theory-informed takes on urban controversies engage the localized politics of specific city-based ‘riskscapes’. While each framework makes valuable contributions, this article suggests that all of them remain under-theorized from the point of view of the specific dynamics of local–global interdependencies in urban climate risk politics. In response, the article draws on Beck in outlining the contours of new urban–cosmopolitan risk communities. To this effect, empirical studies into large-scale East Asian and European port cities is used to illustrate how a shared transnational risk imaginary (e.g. of future sea-level rises) may help spur collective action and new forms of trans-boundary solidarity. Reflecting on such research practices, the article ends by pointing to the need for reworking methods of (multi-sited) ethnography and comparison as central parts of realizing Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology in the domain of urban climate risks.

Can Non‐Europeans Philosophize? Transnational Literacy and Planetary Ethics in a Global Age

Defenders of the Enlightenment highlight the long neglected anticolonial writings of thinkers like Immanuel Kant, which serve as a corrective to the misrepresentation of the Enlightenment's epistemological investment in imperialism. One of the most pervasive repercussions of the claim that the Enlightenment was always already anti‐imperial is that postcolonial critique is rendered redundant, and the project of decolonizing European philosophy becomes unnecessary. Contesting the exoneration of Enlightenment philosophers of racism and sexism, this article debunks the claim that Kantian cosmopolitanism was an antidote to colonialism. Addressing the ambivalent legacies of the European Enlightenment for the postcolonial world, with special focus on the “Syrian refugee crisis,” the article examines the enduring normative violence exerted by Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitanism and outlines the contested terrains that inflect current geopolitics of knowledge‐production. Given that the normative idea of philosophy, as defined during the Enlightenment, continues to delegitimize non‐European perspectives, the integration of previously marginalized knowledges into the philosophical canon is insufficient; rather, in order to desubalternize non‐Western epistemologies, it is imperative to undo the uneven distribution of epistemic agency globally. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's ideas of transnational literacy and planetary ethics, the article concludes by underscoring the contribution of postcolonial‐feminist critique in imagining postimperial philosophy in a global age.

Crossing boundaries: Understanding the pro-asylum narratives of young Australians

This paper uses interview data collected from young people in Queensland, Australia, to report the narratives of young Australians on the issue of ‘boat people’ and to explore the ‘accepting’ viewpoint. Consistent with existing literature, the ‘anti-asylum’ interviewees construct symbolic boundaries via language to justify why they believe exclusionary measures should be taken against asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by boat. In order to challenge this language of exclusion, our findings suggest the ‘pro-asylum’ participants adopt narratives aligned with the cosmopolitan principles of responsibility, openness and compassion. By doing so, they defend their belief that Australia’s obligations towards the broader global community should take precedence over any challenges ‘boat people’ present to the Australian nation.

Fostering the Hospitable Imagination through Cosmopolitan Pedagogies: Reenvisioning Literature Education in Singapore

While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.