Form Of Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

World State

This article discusses Hauke Brunkhorst’s account of cosmopolitan statehood. In order to demonstrate its novelty in comparison with other diagnoses of world statehood, the article first sketches out some core ideas on the concept of a world state. This sketch then serves as the basis in order to more closely recall and assess Brunkhorst’s account of the evolution of ‘cosmopolitan statehood’. The article then proceeds to argue that although there is nothing substantially wrong with Brunkhorst’s diagnosis, the hopes he invests in cosmopolitan statehood are probably too optimistic. This optimism results from the fact that he buys too deeply into Luhmann’s rather undercomplex account of functional differentiation in world society. A more nuanced differentiation theoretical account of contemporary world politics reveals a greater variety of forms than suggested by the simple juxtaposition between particularist and cosmopolitan forms of statehood. This also leads to caution against overblown optimism when it comes to the integrative performance of the latter.

Toward a cosmopolitan ethos

There has been a rising trend in cosmopolitan moral theory to seriously take into consideration the human's rootedness in, and partiality toward, particular cultures, places, peoples and traditions. This essay suggests that reframing our theorizing on cosmopolitanism from one that primarily addresses an ethico-political set of questions to one that addresses questions related to moral psychology, personal and collective identity formation and the ways in which civilizations and cultural communities cultivate an ethos may assist in the task of generating a rooted form of cosmopolitanism. Conceptualizing cosmopolitanism as an ethos entails a shift from considering our moral obligations to distant others toward a focus on the types of dispositions and character traits necessary to forge a sense of intercultural solidarity. Through an analysis of the ideas of ‘diaspora’, ‘proximity’, ‘partiality' and the ‘foreign’, it will be suggested that through our rootedness in particularity, and our ability to be partial to particular persons and identify with particular cultures, we are capable of fostering a sense of world citizenship that can serve as a foundation upon which we can secure a tenable global ethic for our pluralistic society.

‘What nationality he is doesn't matter a damn!’ International football, mediated identities and conditional cosmopolitanism

Sport, and, in particular, football, has become an important lens for examining processes of globalisation and, increasingly, cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I explore the ways in which competing national and cosmopolitan discourses are articulated by and through the media's reporting of football. Analysing coverage of the appointment of three recent managers of the English national team, two foreign, one English, I show how ideas about (national) self, other and place are being scrutinised and negotiated in the contemporary era. However, rather than rendering national modes of thinking obsolete, these debates point to the periodic emergence of conditional forms of cosmopolitanism.

Globalizing forms of elite sociability: varieties of cosmopolitanism in Paris social clubs

This article examines the cultivation of transnational connections, cosmopolitanism and global class consciousness among members of elite social clubs in Paris. Drawing from interviews with members, it compares how – according to their respective characteristics – various social clubs promote different kinds of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, while rejecting the more recent internationalism of upper-middle-class service clubs such as the Rotary. Each club's peculiar ethos, practice and representations of social capital are related to the features of competing clubs through relations of mutual symbolic distinction; for example, some clubs emphasize the ‘genuineness’ of links while stigmatizing others for the accent they put on utility. The varied forms of cosmopolitanism that they promote partly replicate these logics of distinction, eliciting struggles over the authenticity or inauthenticity of transnational connections. Yet, clubs also oppose each other according to the unequal emphasis that they place on international ties per se, which creates a competing axiology within the symbolic economy of social capital accumulation.

Exilic Suffering: Music, Nation, and Protestantism in Cold War South Korea

In Cold War South Korea, the unmarked term “music” (eumak) came to signify Western classical music, and a host of ambiguous terms, including “folk music” (minsogeumak), “traditional music” (jeontongeumak), “indigenous music” (hyangtoeumak), and “national music” (gugak), emerged to categorize traditional practices that were rapidly disappearing from everyday cultural terrain. This West-centric development in musical culture has been euphemistically called “cosmopolitanism,” and in some cases, considered an index of national progress in the “race to modernization.” This paper attempts a critical reckoning of a specifically Cold-War form of cosmopolitanism by examining musicians who were at the center of this mid-century development: Christian Korean composers who left the North to flee the persecution of Christians by communist officials between 1945 (Korea’s independence from Japan) and 1953 (the end of the Korean War). I argue that the exiled composers were strategically positioned to construct secular and sacred music practices that reinforced the official cultural policy of the nascent U.S.-South Korea coalition. This exilic cultural work involved not just reconciling anticommunist nationalism with Western music idioms but also a related project of discouraging alternative conceptions of national (and nationally important) music. I first investigate how Christian exiles became the poetic voice of Cold War official culture through their elevated status in this culture’s institutions and narratives. Secondly, I consider the politics of this official culture, examining the music styles, genres, and compositions that were promoted or repressed. As I will show, Cold War music culture in South Korea was shaped by a confluence of mid-century international and intra-national politics, and Christian exiled composers were situated at the convergence of these mid-century concerns.

Chinese Socialism as Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

This paper follows the life of an idea, a fundamental concept in modern Chinese intellectual life: socialism. It explores this idea as an alternative form of Chinese cosmopolitanism, drawing from Pheng Cheah’s identification of two kinds of Chinese cosmopolitanism: mercantile and revolutionary. If part of what we mean by cosmopolitanism is the local use of an external, or international, or otherwise “independent” (relative to local power and practice) ideology or discourse to promote an agent’s sense of social good at home and connection to the world, then the ways that socialist thought, ideology and praxis have been employed in China in the twentieth century constitute one such strain of cosmopolitanism. Shehuizhuyi (socialism) meant related but significantly different things to Chinese in the twentieth century. This essay argues that Chinese socialism can be viewed as a version of vernacular cosmopolitanism through two examples: Wang Shiwei in the 1940s and Deng Tuo in the 1960s, as well as the discourse of Pan-Asianism before and after the Mao era. Chinese socialism was as much a terrain of debate and contestation about what it means to be “Chinese and modern” as it was a shared vocabulary and set of aspirations. All along it has been able to play the role of cosmopolitan thought for some influential Chinese thinkers and doers—connecting China to the world in order to pursue universal values.

Cosmopolitanism and the culture of peacebuilding

AbstractCosmopolitanism has been argued to be a crucial component of peacebuilding, both with regard to its aims as well as its staff. In a universalist-liberal understanding of the concept, cosmopolitanism is the optimal mind frame for peacebuilders to rebuild post-war societies, due to the tolerance, justice-orientation, and neutrality regarding local cleavages that the concept entails in theory. This article argues, however, that cosmopolitanism cannot be understood outside of its social context, therefore requiring sociological empirical analyses. Drawing on three such sociological concepts, namely elite, glocal, and localisable cosmopolitanism, the article analyses empirically through interviews with peacebuilders in Kosovo whether and in which form these international civil servants display cosmopolitan worldviews. The study concludes that while in theory the localisable variant would be best suited to contribute to locally sensitive, emancipatory peacebuilding, this form of cosmopolitanism is absent in practice. Given the novel, exploratory character of this analysis of hitherto uncharted terrain, the article also discusses in detail how the findings were obtained and in how far they are generalisable.

Writing History Intimately: The House of Jacob , the Quest for Home, and the Other Language

INTRODUCTION If one were to attempt initial definition of ontology of our age, one might do worse than to characterize it in terms of war against inhabitancy. --Robert P. Marzec 314 The focus of this essay is Sylvie Courtine-Denamy's The House of Jacob which received Alberto Benveniste Prize for Sephardi Literature in 2002. This is autobiographical journey into turbulent history of Sephardic Jewry from fourteenth-century Spain to death camps. As Julia Kristeva suggests in her foreword to book, what is at stake in Courtine-Denamy's herstory of alternative Jewish tradition (a tradition that can be interpreted as critical to one currently promoted in Israel) is an intimacy that reinvigorates (x). The force of this intimacy, according to Kristeva, lies not so much in autobiographical sources of Courtine-Denamy's account but in her use of which (in contrast to Hebrew, sacred language) draws on sensory experience and the universe of kinship (xv, xiii). More importantly for my intervention here, this is of landless people whose distinct fate and history exemplify what Robert Marzec has aptly called the war against (314). Inhabitancy, as Marzec defines it, refers to an obligation between humankind and land, between human subjects as born in and through relation to ecosystem (315). According to Marzec, what we are currently experiencing in face of the 'abject' of dislocated inhabitants is latest stage of erasure of inhabitancy as distinct form of human subjectivity (310). Marzec traces this erasure back to enclosure movement in England and imperial territorializing politics, arguing that specter of this systematic severing of bonds between human animal and its habitat still haunts all neoimperial orders of late twentieth and early twenty-first century world (314, 315). What I find valuable in Marzec's reclamation of real of interconnected land is that it opens up space within which to rethink human possibility of dwelling and dwelling-with against blood-and-soil politics that has historically enframed this possibility and beyond uncritical celebrations of a free-floating human subjectivity, figure much cathected by certain forms of postmodern cosmopolitanism (Marzec 321). As I will go on to demonstrate, Courtine-Denamy's The House of Jacob makes important contribution to cultivation of contagious, hospitable and guilt-free imaginary that does justice to human need to connect through and across shared (home)land. What is more, I will suggest, this imaginary functions as form of resistance in face of distinct spatial pathologies that are part of legacy of war on inhabitancy: namely, territorial occupation, land dispossession, exile, displacement, migration, nationalist politics of blood-and-soil, but also systematic abjection of national thing. In what follows, I intend to trace this imaginary as it unfolds in Courtine-Denamy's sensory and affect-based language. Kristeva's foreword to book (significantly written in form of letter addressed to author) will serve as main intertext in light of which I will explore intimate national and politics of The House of Jacob. Given my concern with what for Kristeva is central idea in book (that is, language as one's only homeland [Foreword xi]), my intention here is to attend closely to possibilities opened up by this idea in Courtine-Denamy's narrative. At same time, I want to reflect on Kristeva's cosmopolitan reinvestment of this idea, in other words, her (subtly yet clearly) corrective reiteration of Courtine-Denamy's suggestion; to wit, Languages as One's Only Homeland, which she uses as subtitle of her foreword (ix, emphasis added). Finally, I propose to approach this reinvestment as site of productive (though by no means nonconflictual) dialogue between Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, especially his Monolingualism of Other Or Prosthesis of Origin. …

Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism

Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism Joel Nickels (bio) In his contribution to Debating Cosmopolitics, Craig Calhoun poses several questions central to much transnational political theory: “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen of the world’? Through what institutions is this ‘citizenship’ expressed? Is it mediated through various particular, more local solidarities?” (90). Questions like these are at the core of many well-known theories of globality and locality. Arjun Appadurai, for example, examines the multiple ways in which transnational networks play a role in the production of locality, and Homi Bhabha examines the ways in which transnational flows of culture and affect are inscribed in local patterns of contestation.1 Less familiar, however, is the note of skepticism audible in Calhoun’s interrogation of cosmopolitanism as a political project. When “a large proportion of global civil society—from the World Bank to non-governmental organizations setting accountancy standards—exists to support capitalism and not pursue democracy” (92), what credible institutions of global self-government can we point to? Ultimately, Calhoun argues, if cosmopolitan democracy is to be “more than a good ethical orientation for those privileged to inhabit the frequent traveller lounges, it must put down roots in the solidarities that organize most people’s sense of identity and location in the world” (112); in other words, it must be built from the ground up, from “networks of directly interpersonal social relations, such as those basic to local community” (98). This ideal of local autonomy within transnational self-government is frequently invoked in contemporary theories of global democracy.2 But its practical corollary—what this ideal would look like in terms of institutions, practices, and regulative mechanisms—is often difficult to visualize. For example, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak notes that invocations of local, concrete experience all too often [End Page 1] construct the fantasy image of a general will based on “the credit-baited rural woman” who can be “‘format[ted]’ . . . through UN Plans of Action” in the service of an unquestioning “financialization of the globe” (259). Similarly, in “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism,” Pheng Cheah questions the capacity of local social negotiations to develop a contemporary political life beyond the nation-state: “In the current conjuncture, nationalism cannot be transcended by cosmopolitan forms of solidarity,” since “transnational networks are, in and of themselves, neither mass based nor firmly politically institutionalized” (1998, 312). Moreover, as Cheah further argues in Spectral Nationality, the depredations of multinational capital make “the nation-state necessary as a political agent for defending the peoples of the South from the shortfalls of neocolonial capitalist global restructuring” (2004, 300). In terms of its institutional imagination, then, transnational theory faces something of an impasse. According to Cheah, celebrations of “endless hybrid self-creation and autonomy from the given” (2004, 301) too often ignore globalization’s other face—forced migrancy, underdevelopment, and neocolonial domination—and tend to articulate purely cultural models of transformative agency, which fail to consider “framework[s] for the distribution and regulation of economic resources and capabilities to satisfy human needs” (2004, 299). At the same time, Cheah admits that the real-world emancipatory resources of the postcolonial state are perpetually contaminated by “comprador indigenous elite[s] in collaboration with multinational capital” (2004, 351). If it is difficult to imagine this transnational administrative elite transforming itself into a neutral arbiter of international justice—it is often just as difficult to imagine local communities evolving their own structures of international self-government without access to the formidable resources of state and interstate institutions. When facing conceptual impasses of this kind, it is often useful to return to technologies of perception and social speculation that have long been forgotten to see if they can furnish us with anything of contemporary value. It is in this spirit that I would like to reconstruct the intellectual environment and literary worlds of Claude McKay—an author intimately concerned with the problem of international and community self-government, but whose intellectual commitments and figural devices are very different from much of what is to be found in [End Page 2] current debates about cosmopolitanism and transnational governance. Like many contemporary theorists, McKay turns to the...

Snapshots from the margins

Right-wing parties and governments in Europe have recently expressed greater hostility towards cultural pluralism, at times officially denunciating multiculturalism, and calling for the closure of borders and denial of rights to non-European nationals. Within this context, this article argues for rethinking Europe through radically transgressive and transnational understandings of cosmopolitanism as articulated by growing transnational populations within Europe such as immigrants, refugees, and irregular migrants. Transgressive forms of cosmopolitanism disrupt European notions of borders and identities in ways that challenge both liberal multiculturalism and assimilationist positions. This article explores the limits of traditional cosmopolitan thinking while offering a vision of cosmopolitanism based on everyday negotiations with cultural differences, explained using two illustrative examples or snapshots.

Public diplomacy, international news media and London 2012: cosmopolitanismTM

This article investigates the nature of cosmopolitanism in the production and reception of public diplomacy discourse surrounding London 2012. It focuses on three actors: the UK Government, the International Olympic Committee and the international news media. It finds that UK public diplomacy actors and their partners were focused more on the promotion of a competitive identity, albeit a cosmopolitan one, than engagement. It argues that the cosmopolitanism evident in the discourse was a form of branded cosmopolitanism, and, ultimately, this limited the success of UK public diplomacy in achieving its aims. This style of communication – that was evident across the discourse surrounding London 2012 – was exclusionary of key actors to UK public diplomacy objectives. Applying a form of critical discourse analysis, the ideology surrounding the Olympic ideal is revealed as significant to maintaining uncritical acceptance of exclusions and conspicuous contradictions.

Cosmopolitan imaginaries on the margins: negotiating difference and belonging in a Delhi resettlement colony

In this article, I examine how social boundaries are drawn and contested by residents in a Delhi resettlement colony, established in 2004 and expanded during the wider slum clearance drive, prior to the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Drawing from life narratives, I explore how residents navigate new social terrains and decide in which situations difference becomes a salient issue. Building on literature that engages with subaltern forms of cosmopolitanism, I argue that openness and conviviality are seen as predominantly urban behaviors, external to that of the colony located on the margins of the city. Residents instead express ambivalent and sometimes contradictory subjectivities in quotidian encounters, and often see social distancing as a necessary tactic. I suggest the narratives offer a nuanced understanding of the multiple constructions of home, community, and belonging amongst the marginalized in and ‘beyond’ the city.

A Civilizing Mission? Music and the Cosmopolitan in Edward Said

Though Edward Said’s passionate interest in Western classical music is a well-known aspect of his biography, scholars have largely treated Said’s musical writings and activities as peripheral to his intellectual legacy. Through an examination of his extensive writings on music and his intense engagement with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an explicitly political/musical project intended to promote Arab-Israeli collaboration in the context of Western classical performance, this article examines how Said deployed Western classical music as a discursive space on which he could inscribe and celebrate the political and cultural values of his mobile, cosmopolitan upbringing in interwar Cairo. Said’s insistence on the universality and political applicability of Western musical forms thus came to represent a mode of relocating a lost form of elite cosmopolitanism as a central aspect of Arab identity and rejecting what he saw as the intolerant, philistine parochialism of the post-war Arab political landscape.

A Cartography of Cosmopolitanism: Particularising the Universal

The present assumed understandings of cosmopolitanism can lead legal scholars to misinterpret what is entailed by a given cosmopolitan claim and result in their talking at cross-purposes. This article is a call to refine what we mean by cosmopolitanism and to develop an understanding that is fit for purpose. It will attempt to categorise the major strands of cosmopolitan understanding, from institutional and political cosmopolitanism to moral and legal cosmopolitanism, amongst others. With the distinctions between these understandings of cosmopolitanism exposed, legal scholars may be better equipped to speak more precisely about the form of legal cosmopolitanism they are advocating or rejecting. Indeed, charting the topography and destination of these major strands may also serve to rebut the counter-narratives of the cosmopolitan critics, such as Koskenniemi, who suggest that cosmopolitanism can be used as a 'facade for particular interests'. Cosmopolitanism can no longer be all things to all people.

A Cartography of Cosmopolitanism: Particularising the Universal

<section class="abstract"> The present assumed understandings of cosmopolitanism can lead legal scholars to misinterpret what is entailed by a given cosmopolitan claim and result in their talking at cross-purposes. This article is a call to refine what we mean by cosmopolitanism and to develop an understanding that is fit for purpose. It will attempt to categorise the major strands of cosmopolitan understanding, from institutional and political cosmopolitanism to moral and legal cosmopolitanism, amongst others. With the distinctions between these understandings of cosmopolitanism exposed, legal scholars may be better equipped to speak more precisely about the form of legal cosmopolitanism they are advocating or rejecting. Indeed, charting the topography and destination of these major strands may also serve to rebut the counter-narratives of the cosmopolitan critics, such as Koskenniemi, who suggest that cosmopolitanism can be used as a ‘façade for particular interests’. Cosmopolitanism can no longer be all things to all people. </section>

Appiah's Cosmopolitanism

AbstractThis article critically evaluates the cosmopolitan writings of Kwame Anthony Appiah, investigating especially the extent to which he challenges or fails to challenge the problem of Eurocentrism in cosmopolitan discourse. I begin by discussing the way Appiah's construction of his cosmopolitan vision attempts to address criticisms of cosmopolitanism as unable to accommodate the partiality that is an inescapable aspect of human relationships. I relate this issue to Eurocentrism, arguing that the historical integration of the world through European imperialism gives people of color added reason to uphold certain forms of group partiality. I then consider promising points in Appiah's work, in which he can be seen as helping to construct an anti‐Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism, as well as problematic points, in which he shows insufficient regard for the importance of cultural resistance.

Black Internationalism, Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, and the Spatial Politics of Antifascism

This article explores black internationalist articulations of antifascism in the 1930s through a discussion of the “maps of grievance” mobilized by African American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. It interrogates how African American volunteers linked the conflict in Spain to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and to struggles against white supremacy in the United States. Through making such linkages, black internationalist intellectuals and political activists have made significant, if frequently neglected, theoretical and political engagements with fascism and antifascism. By decentering the national in internationalism and situating forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism as constitutive of internationalist political activity, it reconfigures aspects of the spatial constitution of internationalism.

O sublime e o cosmopolitismo de Kant no século XXI

In today’s political conjuncture, Kant’s cosmopolitan thinking stands in some unique relation to his notion of the sublime. The present paper aims to articulate (i) how the Kantian sublime is re-appropriated in analyses of the mediated images of social disasters in this century, (ii) how a cosmopolitan thinking can be registered as an aesthetic experience which restores the lost moral dimension of the classical sublime and lastly (iii) what constitutes the nature of this new cosmopolitan structure that is temporary and different in its occurrence from what is suggested by many forms of new cosmopolitanism(s) in the discourse of social and political sciences. Key words: cosmopolitanism, Kant, sublime, distant suffering.

Is the capability approach a sufficient challenge to distributive accounts of global justice?

I begin by discussing forms of cosmopolitanism that motivate challenges to distributive accounts of global justice. I then use Sen's version of the capabilities approach to show how distributive accounts fall short, why an overarching theory of justice is not needed, and that democracy understood as the exercise of public reasoning can do the work of identifying and addressing injustices. That said in favor of Sen, I argue that his account fails to attend to the kinds of injustices emerging from relationships of power and the institutions and structures in which these relationships are embedded. To show this, I outline features of a feminist relational approach, which I then apply to Canada's attempt to address historic harms through the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While I agree with Sen that we do not need a theory of global justice that is universal, ideal, impartial, or abstracted from context, I aim to broaden the scope of justice beyond both distributive accounts and Sen's version of the capabilities approach.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis: risk governance and the emergence of pre-emptive surveillance

AbstractThis article examines the financial reforms that have been undertaken through two perspectives on risk: that of Beck's world risk society and an alternative Foucauldian approach. The former argues that, catastrophes such as the recent financial crisis will induce a political shift towards a cosmopolitan form of statehood. Yet, the lack of radical reform since the financial crisis would suggest otherwise. The article therefore argues that what we are witnessing is best understood in terms of reflexive governance in which the various rationalities of risk are reassessed and strengthened in order to avoid a similar occurrence in the future. Moreover, in response to the uncertainty that surrounds such rare events, more intense forms of surveillance have been adopted with the objective of pre-empting any future crisis. Yet, for various reasons, the reforms remain rather limited and the new rationality of pre-emption is unlikely to prevent further crises from occurring in the future.