Form Of Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

“The root of all evil”? Transnational cosmopolitanism in the fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlinda Bobis

This article exposes the contradictions of cosmopolitan citizenship and world peace in novels by three Southeast Asian Australian women authors. Their fiction questions the viability of transnational sisterhood in an age of humanitarian intervention where women and children have become pawns for renewed western imperialist ventures. This article asks in turn whether the incommensurable space opened up by the failures of various forms of what Stuart Hall calls cosmopolitanism “from above” can be reinvested through “reading up the ladder of privilege”, as proposed by Chandra T. Mohanty. Simone Lazaroo’s Sustenance (2010) and Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) build “grass-roots” forms of cosmopolitanism and touristic hospitality designed to redress the many evils of contemporary postcolonial societies. The Root of all Evil (1987) by Dewi Anggraeni objects to the Spivakian native informant and upwardly mobile migrant woman’s imperious desire to help her homeland’s subaltern female underclass, in light of the latter’s lack of agency and the harm such intervention may cause.

The Process Matters: Moral Constraints on Cosmopolitan Education

Cosmopolitan education aims to transmit cosmopolitan forms of life in order to participate morally in the world community. The primary characteristics of this cosmopolitan education are its acceptance of the shared humanity of all persons as a fact of human existence and as a motivating guide for human interaction, and the requirement of democratic inclusion in deliberations of the governance of those interactions, including morality. Such an education in cosmopolitan morality requires means that befit its core components. This paper contrasts the concepts of strict and moderate cosmopolitanism, empirical and deliberative morality, and structural and dispositional cosmopolitanism to show that the moderate, inclusive and deliberative processes of deliberative dispositional cosmopolitanism are more suited to cosmopolitan education in morality than strong, empirical-focused structural cosmopolitan efforts. Though strong, structural and empirically based forms may be more likely to guarantee preferred outcomes in the learning of specific morals or the implementation of institutional norms, they are also more likely to run afoul of the core components of cosmopolitanism because they will privilege outcomes over processes, and are thus more likely to be less inclusive and more coercive. In contrast, and even though they are less certain to guarantee preferred moral outcomes or actions, moderate, deliberative dispositional forms of cosmopolitan education embody the morality they seek to inform, and are more likely to find sustained internalised support over time.

‘The Coming Clash of East and West’: syncretism, cosmopolitanism, and disaffection in the colonial public sphere

ABSTRACTThis essay analyses the modernist Indian journal ‘East and West’, published in Bombay from 1901 to 1921, as a significant instance of how and why syncretic ideals circulated in the colonial public sphere in India. The idea of East–West union, I argue, was a form of modernist cosmopolitanism that mediated between Enlightenment public sphere ideals and an emergent, ‘spiritual cosmopolitanism’, critical of Western values. It was also a way to conform to the government’s criminalisation of the Indian press for expressions of ‘disaffection’; by professing its allegianceto East–West friendship, but demonstrating the fallacy of this idea in practice through its juxtaposition of articles by British and Indian writers, the journal gives us insight into the changing valences of cosmopolitanism over the period of its circulation; the way syncretism mediated between these valences; and how these discourses were shaped by the regulation of the press.

Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire!

This essay focuses on how Aimé Césaire's postwar confrontation with the problem of colonial emancipation may speak directly to our current political and theoretical impasses, especially regarding alternative (nonliberal) forms of humanism and cosmopolitanism. By pursuing alternative forms of decolonization that would enable self-determination without state sovereignty, Césaire challenged the territorial and national assumptions that typically governed twentieth-century cultural and political thinking and which still inform social thought today. This essay examines several of Césaire's critical strategies—political pragmatism, radical literalism, poetic knowledge, untimely vision, and situated humanism—through which we can think with him about his world as well as ours. It seeks, in Césairean fashion, to treat him as a contemporary thinker through whom we might begin to decolonize intellectual history, deprovincialize black thought, and globalize critical theory.

Extreme cosmopolitanisms defended

Some theorists hold that there is no serious, significant issue concerning cosmopolitanism. They hold that cosmopolitanism is either the anodyne doctrine that we have some duties to distant strangers merely on the ground of shared humanity or the absurd doctrine that we have no special moral duties based on special-ties such as those of friendship, family, and national community. This essay argues against this deflationary position by defending (1) a very extreme cosmopolitan doctrine that denies special-tie moral duties altogether and (2) a slightly milder but still extreme form of cosmopolitanism that allows that there might be special-tie moral duties to intimate associates such as friends and family members but denies that broader social group associations such as those of subjection to a national state or national or ethnic community memberships ever constitute special ties that ground special moral duties. The defense proceeds by rebutting bad arguments leveled against extreme cosmopolitanisms.

Cosmopolitan Political Theology in Cohen and Rosenzweig

INTRODUCTIONHermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig have been credited with of religious in twentieth century.1 The expression is ambiguous, and has led to a division of labor between philosophical and theological receptions of their thinking. As a consequence, politico-theological aspect of their works has received less attention. However, under twin pressures of a renewal of interest in Carl Schmitt's Christian theology in contemporary Leftist thought, and of growing importance of Leo Strauss within studies, Cohen and Rosenzweig have been recently associated with a form of Jewish theology.2 This article argues that Cohen's and Rosenzweig's distinct engagements with theology share aim of providing a philosophical interpretation of messianic ideal that is oriented toward a cosmopolitan conception of democracy. Both authors seek in so-called diasporic condition of Judaism those elements needed to reconstruct a conception of peoplehood beyond those offered by liberalism and nationalism.This article puts forward three theses with respect to conjunction of Judaism and theology in Cohen and Rosenzweig. The first thesis is that messianic ideal orients theology of Cohen and Rosenz-weig towards a form of cosmopolitanism characterized by a conception of rule of law that is no longer tied to state or to sovereignty, and in that sense is both supranational and anarchic. In contrast, theology that Schmitt develops roughly at same time is designed to defend sovereignty of national and imperialist state, and assigns priority to order over law.3The second thesis is that theology of Cohen and Rosenzweig undoes kind of opposition between Greek and Roman political and monotheistic that Leo Strauss would later refer to as problem of Athens and Jerusalem.4 This article shows how Cohen and Rosenz-weig attempt to overcome division between pagan philosophy and revealed religion by adopting a Platonic-Maimonidean approach to messianic ideal that undoes opposition between reason and faith, nature and revelation, articulated by Paul's messianism and transmitted to modernity through Christian theology.The third thesis of article is that both Cohen and Rosenzweig work out their idea of messianism in an explicit confrontation with Paul's antinomianism. Current post-Marxist thinkers like Badiou, Agamben or Zizek have theorized their radical conceptions of emancipatory politics by appealing to Paul's antinomian messianism, comparing favourably with respect to messianic politics which is believed to entail an exclusivist form of cosmopolitanism. The interpretation of Cohen's and Rosenzweig's messianic thought offered here suggests that theirs may be more radical form of cosmopolitanism because is founded on priority of a natural rule of law associated with peoplehood over conventional rule of concrete state orders associated with nationhood.It is well known that Cohen and Rosenzweig were both critics of Zionism. The dilemma inherent in their critiques was clearly expressed by Rosenzweig in a fragment from 1920 entitled Der Jude im Staat: since on account of messianic ideal the state cannot be in Jew, then it is necessary that Jew be in state.5 For Cohen and Rosenzweig, state in question was German one, and had to be lived in under conditions of rising nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiments, exacerbated during World War I, which would eventually bring Hitler and National Socialism to power. Thus, in both Cohen and Rosenzweig a sort of compromise or symbiosis had to be made, not only with German state, but also with German philosophy, from Goethe and Kant through Hegel and Nietzsche, that had accompanied development of this state until age of Bismarck. …

“Cosmopolitan Sympathies”: Poetry of the First Global War

“Cosmopolitan Sympathies”: Poetry of the First Global War Jahan Ramazani (bio) Witnessing dawn in the trenches, Isaac Rosenberg famously apostrophizes a rat that has touched his hand: Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between.1 Paul Fussell’s judgment of Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” (1916) as perhaps “the greatest poem of the war,” or at least one of the best, still finds broad assent in Great War scholarship.2 But in one of several departures from Fussell’s groundbreaking book, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), recent criticism has begun to address the global dimensions of a global war—for example, recovering the experience and cultural expression of soldiers from the dominions and colonies, as of observers elsewhere far from the Western Front.3 Rosenberg’s poem reminds us that, for all the traditional emphasis on the English upbringing and values behind much well-known war poetry, even such quintessentially “English” war poems sometimes also have a transnational reach, if we take seriously their “cosmopolitan sympathies.” Not that Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” is representative. Most Great War poetry is either nationalist or pan-imperial, famously exemplified by Rupert Brooke’s anglicization of earth and heaven in “The Soldier” and John McCrae’s bellicose torch toss in “In Flanders Fields.” Such works demonstrate, if [End Page 855] national anthems and imperial odes had left any doubt, that poetry isn’t inherently internationalist. But some First World War poets seized on and developed the cosmopolitan potentialities of poetry, not in the sense of airily transcendent detachment from bonds but of grounded attachments that span specific cultural and national differences, or what Bruce Robbins calls a “located and embodied” cosmopolitanism.4 Illuminating the felt or experiential basis for some of the more abstract forms of cosmopolitanism, they demonstrate that war can be, paradoxically, a catalyst for meaningful cross-cultural encounters and reflections. While the antiheroism of Great War poetry has been amply discussed, its overlapping but distinct capacity for imaginative solidarity across enemy lines, if often acknowledged, remains less fully explored. Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and other philosophers have usefully conceptualized such cosmopolitan fellow feeling, but they have tended to privilege prose fiction as an especially potent vehicle for it.5 First World War poems by Rosenberg and others demonstrate that lyric, balladic, and other forms of poetry can also function as literary spaces for enacting, and reflecting on, transnational imaginative solidarities.6 They anticipate what Paul Gilroy calls a “vital planetary humanism”: in place of the view that “we are all sealed up inside our frozen cultural habits,” they provide a “workable precedent for adopting a more generous and creative view of how human beings might communicate or act in concert across racial, ethnic, or civilizational divisions.”7 Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilroy, Rorty, Nussbaum, and Freud, but above all attending to the poetry, I explore the ways in which Rosenberg and other poets of the Great War not only state but linguistically, formally, and thematically enact their cosmopolitan sympathies. Their poems speak to our even more thoroughly globalized moment a century later and set an important example for writers such as Seamus Heaney, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Carol Ann Duffy. To give due attention to the poetic specificities, textures, and ingenuities of this body of work, to the poems as poems, I focus on a handful of examples, beginning with Rosenberg’s lyric. Instead of touching his ears in “Break of Day in the Trenches,” as Apollo touches Milton’s shepherd’s in “Lycidas,” Rosenberg’s whiskered muse goes straight to the hand that writes the poem, this living hand that, as in Keats and Whitman, reaches to us across differences of time and culture. Long before Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980), Rosenberg appropriates the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as vermin—threatening transgressors of geographic boundaries, as of the borders between the living and the dead—just as he revalues the dangerously subversive “cosmopolitanism” then often...

Cosmopolitanism with African roots. Afropolitanism's ambivalent mobilities

This paper explores some aspects of the controversy which is now surrounding Afropolitanism, and examines the philosophical and literary output in relation to the concept. Mobility between spaces, in the cosmopolitan tradition, as well as digital mobility and visibility through the use of social media, are considered as key elements of Afropolitanism as a diasporic movement. So Afropolitanism can be described as a form of cosmopolitanism with African roots. However, the commodification of the term as a brand, and the class bias of Afropolitan lifestyle are more problematic. In the second part of the paper, the positions of African intellectuals are shown to convey more philosophical depth and moral relevance to Afropolitanism. In this vision of the concept, as it was initiated by Achille Mbembe, Afropolitanism is relevant for both the diaspora and for Africa. Afropolitanism in this understanding of it decentres, de-essentializes and valorizes the continent. The paper closes with readings of two novels of celebrated writers of the Afropolitan generation, namely Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go and Teju Cole's Open City. These novels feature complex Afropolitan characters and create a dense literary landscape through which to explore contemporary Afro-diasporic identity politics. The spatial and cultural mobilities expressed in this literature confirm Mbembe's repositioning of Africa as a philosophical locus of passage and mobility.

Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman by Tobias Boes (review)

Reviewed by: Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman by Tobias Boes Gregory Castle Tobias Boes. Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. x + 201 pp. Tobias Boes’s new book, Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Bildungsroman, is the latest contribution to our understanding of a genre that has been hailed as ghostly or nonexistent, as the product of scholarly imagination founded on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and as little else. German texts are paired with French, English, and Irish exemplars, a strategy that illuminates key shared features (formal and thematic), and in the case of the two chapters on nineteenth-century French and English Bildungsromane, makes a strong argument for broadening our sense of what counts as development. In the first two methodological chapters, Boes traces the closely bundled lines of affiliation that link the literary history of Bildung to advances in philosophy and natural science (in particular, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s notion of Bildungstrieb or “formative drive” [51]). We have long known that Karl Morgenstern, a German living in imperial Russia, originated the term Bildungsroman, but few have understood the cosmopolitan environment in which his thinking about the form emerged. Following Morgenstern, whose cosmopolitanism tended to express nationalism as “a kind of performance,” Boes argues for a performative theory of the Bildungsroman, according to which the novel of formation does not reveal a national form “at the end of its plot,” but rather produces it “by means of its mimetic capacities as well as its direct rhetorical address to the reader” (28). Behind his [End Page 541] critique of the classical form is a broader critique of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s “understanding of history as a universal and transformative current,” which Boes sees as “constitutive of historicism as such” (51). This vision of historicism, he argues, has afflicted the scholarship of the Bildungsroman by positing the unity of individual and national Bildung (the soul-nation allegory). In chapter 3, the first of the analytical chapters, Boes pairs works by Karl Leberecht Immermann and Stendhal in order to explore the problem of historical temporality and its relation to individual formation. He draws on Karl Mannheim’s theory of “generationalentelechies,” the idea that generational time, with its particular unities, provides an alternative to the “epoch,” which has no entelechy and thus no possibility of unity (100). Therefore the characters in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black view the protagonist, Julien Sorel, from different generational perspectives, and this plurality of points of view enables a plurality of possibilities for Bildung, some of which extend beyond the narrow confines of nationalism and national identity. Chapter 4 shows how later novels, like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit, use this polyphonic capability to negotiate an increasingly complex cosmopolitan world in which industrial capitalism and imperialism “force the novel of formation to engage with ethnic and geographical difference” and to use “new affective and intellectual formations” (103) that transform classical Bildung into economic development through the establishment of what Boes calls “affective bridges” (105). While a critique of race, imperialism, and liberal democracy informs Eliot’s “cosmopolitan project” (127), it ultimately fails to effectively challenge the dominant narrative of English national Bildung. Chapter 5 considers James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which employ “different forms of temporal emplotment” (130), so that “historical consciousness” (100) interacts with “established local ways of expressing collective identity” (130). This dialectical interaction creates the conditions for a form of cosmopolitanism—expressed in new “urban vernaculars” (128)—that brings to light the “previously hidden connections that unite seemingly oppositional national traditions” (130). Boes sees in Joyce’s text an epiphanic mode of narrative that disrupts conjunctive modes of organization and continuity, like those we might find in narrative celebrations of nationalism. From epiphany, an “individuating rhythm” emerges (128), one that enables a disjunctive mode of self-formation. Thus Stephen Dedalus “appears as a monadic entity cutting a solitary path through historical time and into the promise of modernity” (134). The “‘rhythmical’ construction” of the text allows “emergent and cyclical...

The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

Kazuo Ishiguro’s gentle transgression of tradition, myths and stereotypes

The present article aims to provide a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day that focuses on the author’s ‘gentle transgression’ of three local myths become international commodities: the myths of the English butler, the English country house and Englishness itself. It also examines how, in the process, the butler’s identity becomes an increasingly heterogeneous one, a “transindividuality” (Bessière 2010) potentially representative of a sedentary or “rooted” (Appiah 1997) form of critical cosmopolitanism. Ishiguro thus responds to the challenges of globalization, suggesting that a constantly questioned to-and-fro movement between the local and the global, each in turn enriching the other, might prevent the much-feared homogenization of cultures.

Downloading plug-ins for nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

A crucial factor in differentiation between existing approaches to nationalism and cosmopolitanism is the positioning of these approaches within a continuum between particularism and universalism, based on their understanding of space and time. However, this also poses a major difficulty in studying practices of nationalism and cosmopolitanism: Reducing these practices to a position within the particularism/universalism continuum establishes different forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism as 'order of things', through which any practice is projected as an approximation or a distortion of this ideal 'order'. Such a projection tells more about the researchers' own theoretical commitments than the participants' practices. This article utilizes some conceptual tools from Actor-Network Theory in an effort to establish a sketch for an alternative projection to study practices of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which will give the participants an opportunity to perform their own time and space, instead of reducing them to placeholders of an already determined position, a priori identified by researchers.

The connected worlds of Haji Mustapha (c. 1730–91): A Eurasian cosmopolitan in eighteenth-century Bengal

Haji Mustapha (d. 1791), sometimes also referred to by the French name Raymond, or by his pen name ‘Nota Manus’ (‘a known hand’), is best known as the translator and publisher of one of the most celebrated Indo-Persian histories of the eighteenth century, the Seir Mutaqherin, published in Calcutta in 1789–90. Situating Mustapha’s life story within a growing historiography concerned with early modern forms of cosmopolitanism, ‘trans-imperial subjects’ and ‘go-betweens’, this essay presents new evidence about the origins and longer trajectory of Mustapha’s remarkable career. It explores his family background in the trans-imperial networks of merchants and dragomans that connected the French and Ottoman empires in the early modern period. It shows how Mustapha reinvented himself in Bengal as a political informer to the British Empire, cultivating a persona as a Eurasian cosmopolitan who could mediate between European and South Asian political cultures. Treating Mustapha as an interesting political thinker in his own right, the essay examines his adaptationist view of imperial politics and his efforts to conjugate and cross-fertilise the political and intellectual traditions of European and Islamic empires. It also shows how Mustapha’s Eurasian cosmopolitan style struggled to contend with the changing forms of British imperial patriotism.

Utopia in the Suburbs: Cosmopolitan Society, Class Privilege, and the Making of Maʿadi Garden City in Twentieth-century Cairo

In the midst of the many uncertainties facing twenty-first century Egypt, memories of Cairo’s seemingly cosmopolitan past have become prominent signifiers of the liberal possibilities that might exist for the country’s future. While the city certainly became home to a diverse, multinational society during the first half of the twentieth century, that population did not necessarily embrace the universalism associated with a cosmopolitan society. By looking at the development of Maʿadi, a well-to-do garden city suburb of Cairo, this article examines the perimeters of cosmopolitanism in Egyptian society. As a fashionable residential community, Maʿadi became home to Egypt’s diverse bourgeoisie. Jewish railroad developers, English engineers, German doctors, and French archeologists all made homes for themselves in the suburb. While residents’ seemingly happy domestic lives in this carefully planned space might appear to exemplify a multinational ideal, this article asks what historical details contributed to the establishment of this particular form of cosmopolitanism in Cairo. What attracted these people to Egypt in the first place? What made their affluence possible? And how and why did those circumstances change over time? Maʿadi might appear cosmopolitan in retrospect, but it represented different social ideals to the people living there in the past. By better understanding the historical meaning of the place, and the other ways that its society has remembered it over time, Maʿadi represents more than cosmopolitanism and can more accurately and usefully inform conceptions of Egypt’s future. When Saffeyah Al-ʿArab sat down in the late-1980s to pen her memoir, she recalled a life in Egypt where beautiful homes sat among lush gardens, and regular interaction with nature was accessible and expected. In particular, she focused on the pleasant domestic life she and her husband Mustafa Moyine Al-ʿArab established south of Cairo in the garden city suburb of Maʿadi. In 1947, the couple purchased a turn-of-the-century English villa with a large garden on just over an acre of land. Saffeyah recollected, “The front of the old house was covered in wisteria and purple bougainvillea cascaded over the verandah which was supported by classical white columns. I loved it at first sight.” 1 More than 40 years after those

Travel Gone Awry: Cosmopolitan Love and Female Ordeals in Games Women Play (2005)

the designation of the present age as a restless epoch is evident in many ways across space, but it is perhaps best validated in the unique form of cosmopolitanism that African citizens exhibit particularly in their travel and quest for survival in the West. Against this backdrop, this article first reflects on the socioeconomic crisis of the 1980s and how it laid the foundation for the mass exodus of Africans to the West. It explores further how this exodus in turn today provides a false sense of cosmopolitanism to a number of Africans, as they try to cope with the treacherous and precarious situations of economic survival in the West and the constitutive elements of instability and mobility of locale. Turning to the Nigerian movie industry, the article focuses on Games Women Play (2005) and contends that Emerald's (Stella Damasus-Aboderin) ordeals in the movie should be seen not as direct consequences of the games women play, but instead as the awry fallouts of the overwhelming but deceptive allure of migration, especially of the cosmopolitan strand. This view is underscored by the way young Africans are taken by the prospects of living fulfilled career lives in the West, without any knowledge of the migratory imagination and its contradictory realities. I argue that if the socioeconomic conditions of the homeland and its attendant dystopia are vectors for migration of Africans (male and female) to the West, the envisaged largess of utopia in the West is mostly elusive, making a pawn of African migrants from both ends of the travel spectrum. However, it is the female gender, as in the case of Emerald, that is at the worst receiving end when travel goes awry. Therefore, Emerald's plight is evident in the multiple scandals of her double marriage to two friends in Northern Ireland and the United States. The traumatic consequences of the friends' eventual knowledge of this on return to Nigeria should not be seen as an attempt to be smart, as suggested by the title of the movie, but must be conceived as a culmination of the socioeconomic ramifications of migration for the African female folk within the logic of contemporary travel and return.The global transformation brought about in screen art has meant a major push for the extension of Africa's horizon of mimetic performance in a manner that places it on an accelerated track. The evidence of the transformation is the invention and development of the nowcelebrated Nigerian movie industry, whose critical reception within a relatively infant evolution places it in the class of the big three in the world-Hollywood, Nollywood, and Bollywood.1 This Nigerian movie industry, better known as Nollywood, continues to exhibit various tendencies-ranging from generic delineation to thematic preoccupation. The tendencies, in so many instances, instantiate a form of fidelity to various African cultural worldviews. Nevertheless, a number of other such tendencies instantiate the connectivity of the movie industry to issues that continue to have ramifications for humanity, irrespective of location. In the particular case of the film under study, perhaps a convenient point of departure will be the explication from the outset that Games Women Play is easily located in the genre of love and romance. Nevertheless, for greater critical clarity, it is better understood when more specifically designated as playing out against the backdrop of cosmopolitanism.To that extent, the film touches on one of the issues that have ramifications for people all over the world, no matter where they are located; this is the contemporary understanding of cosmopolitanism. There is, moreover, a strong reason to include cosmopolitanism in the list of concepts that touch us all also because of its capacity to involve all categories of humanity, whether as willing or reluctant participants. As a phenomenon reputed for manifesting both idealism and materiality, cosmopolitanism references all endeavors of human activities and thoughts. …

The Clash of Cosmopolitanisms: The European Union from Cosmopolitization to Neo-Liberalization

It is clear that the European Union (EU) is currently in the worst crisis situation it has ever been in. The forms of social solidarity, inter-national cooperation, and trans-national structures and processes that many commentators have seen as the basis of ‘cosmopolitan’ Europe’ are under severe strain. Dec-ades of apparent cosmopolitization - of political bodies, economic networks, social connections and the patterns of everyday life - seem to be rapidly going into reverse, being pulled apart or self-destructing. If the last several decades could be understood as involving the increasing appearance and strength (albeit unevenly and in contested ways) of cosmopolitan features both within the EU as an entity and ‘inside’ its external borders, then today the tearing fabric of ‘European’ life seems to point in the opposite direction. This paper poses the question: how ‘cosmopolitan’ really was the EU before the current set of crises, and how have the latter undermined what cosmopolitan features there were? The argument proposed is that the EU was from the very beginning ambivalently cosmopolitan, for it was structured around a liberal-economic, market-based cosmopolitanism, as well as a rights-based conception of citizenship and democ-racy, a kind of legal-political cosmopolitanism. Both forms of cosmopolitanism existed up until recently in a highly ambivalent relationship with each other. But as over time, and especially from the late 1970s, liber-al-economic cosmopolitanism mutated into neo-liberal cosmopolitanism, then the tensions between the two cosmopolitanisms now stand out very starkly, and have reached breaking point. The nature and con-sequences of this situation are diagnosed.

Thinking India in South Africa: Gandhi’s Conundrum

The focus of the article is the way in which Gandhi in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 constructed a notion of India through a process of partly imaginary circulation between South Africa and India. While he embarked upon a career, firstly as spokesman, and then as leader of the very diverse Indian population of South Africa, he tried to remain in touch with political developments in India. His attempt at ‘inhabiting two spaces at the same time’, while necessarily utopian in character, nevertheless offers a fascinating case study in ‘long distance nationalism’, and the way it was intertwined with forms of cosmopolitanism. There is no indication however of an inclination on the part of Gandhi to think in terms of a wider space that would extend to contemporary South Asia.

Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City by Edgar Illas (review)

Reviewed by: Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City by Edgar Illas William Viestenz Keywords 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona, Cosmopolitanism, Mediterraneanism, Global Capitalism, Post-Marxism edgar illas. Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City: Liverpool UP, 2012. 244 pp. The title of Edgar Illas’s Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City asserts a double epistemology; namely, Barcelona is at once a contemplative subject whose urban model elicits transformations as well as a concept, to be thought through critically, containing various ideological foreclosures. The argument of Thinking Barcelona begins with the latter and ends with the former—in a very convincing fashion that will be welcomed by scholars of Barcelona’s urban transformation of the 1980s to the present day. Illas proposes to analyze the ideologies fabricated within the political and social imaginary in Barcelona in the lead up to, and aftermath of, the 1992 Olympic Games, a time period that produced a “euphoric politics” that bore a spectral relationship with the past and crafted various systems of thought to be applied to the articulation and retrofitting of public space. Politically, Barcelona’s evolution also unleashed cosmopolitan forms of citizenship and national identity, but Illas is careful to stress that such movements are effects of the structural forces that modes of production exert on given historical circumstances. Thinking Barcelona comprises a wide spectrum of cultural critique, including analyses of novels, urban master plans, public speeches, and political declarations. Illas trenchantly deploys an array of critical theories, generally from the Marxist and deconstructionist schools of thought, which provide a sociohistorical framework that slots the study of post-Olympic Barcelona into more expansive discussions related to urban planning and postmodern globalization. Illas’s frequent incorporation of critical theory never feels gratuitous. Even more remarkably, Thinking Barcelona’s theoretical maneuvers never hurtle the book’s primary object of study into the aporetic, irreducible paradoxes that tend to accompany poststructuralist analysis. This is evidenced in [End Page 240] Illas’s productive fourth chapter and conclusion: that critically thinking through Barcelona teaches key lessons regarding the way urban planning can limit the capitalist logic of suburban expansion and, secondly, that the radical openness of public spaces can predicate an emancipatory politics that uproots ideology from the collective perception of civic space and historical time. On this latter point, Illas argues very rightfully that open public spaces in the postmodern megalopolis suffer an “open indeterminacy,” as they are both condemned to rapid obsolescence and deprived of being spaces for the “living together of people” (214). The target of Illas’s critique is the tourist economy of Barcelona and the vast commodification of its spaces, which were meant to project to the global economy the city’s distinctiveness. This analysis of public space, coming at the conclusion of the book, tempts the reader to return to a contradiction that Illas outlines in the introduction. To wit, “urban public spaces stand for the constitutive but unavailable essence of the city” (21). The city’s openness to a heterogeneous occupation of public spaces also establishes the consumer market that enables the privatization and commodification of the polis, often through the marriage of political and economic agents, ultimately defusing the original openness to all. Illas thinks through this paradox in relation to the urban cosmopolitanist discourse of Barcelona’s Ajuntament (city council) that gained considerable traction throughout Pasqual Maragall’s tenure as mayor. The phenomenon, of course, exceeds Barcelona and touches all postmodern megalopolises—one thinks in particular of the 2013 renaming of the Plaza del Sol metro station in Madrid ‘Vodafone Sol’—, which reveals the utility of Thinking Barcelona’s critique for other spaces beset by the same contradiction. At the book’s conclusion, Illas cogently outlines how public occupation of these spaces undermines corporate proprietorial belongings and can seek to expose political agendas tied to commodification The pending question for this reader is whether such an emancipatory politics can endure and supersede the contradiction outlined in Thinking Barcelona’s introduction, based on the sole questioning of paradox and “ideological vigilance” (77). Such vigilance, of course, may resist the commodification of public space by political and economic agents at the service of the tourist industry in Barcelona. But without...

From Post-Colonialism to Cosmopolitan Nation-Building? British and French Imperial Heroes in Twenty-First-Century Africa

The independence of African colonies generally turned imperial heroes into unwanted memories of a bygone age. However, half a century later, the pantheon of European heroes of the colonial era seems to be enjoying a new lease of life in sub-Saharan Africa under the impulse of a variety of factors linked to local religious beliefs, global tourism or new approaches in the construction of post-colonial national identities. This article argues that the rebirth of imperial heroes in Africa reveals a deep process of renegotiation of nation-building narratives, moving away from post-colonialism and towards a post-racial form of cosmopolitanism.

Monism: A Tale of the Undead

Exploring the relationship between domestic law and international law had been a hobbyhorse of German and French public law scholarship well into the early twentieth century. The relevant debates revolved around two major positions: “dualism”, on the one hand, and “monism”, on the other.With international co-operation becoming at least moderately successful in the wake of the Second World War, these debates were no longer continued. They came to be regarded as intellectual relics stemming from a different age. Often with little accuracy, they were presented in the introductory chapters of textbooks, based on an understanding that they concern mere constructive matters. They were taken to be irrelevant to the progress of humanity that was to be advanced by international law. Quite remarkably, the themes relevant to the old debate have been resuscitated in discourses dealing with final authority in the European Union. The themes have become mingled with discussions of federalism and are now presented, without further ado, as issues possessing a constitutional significance. Hence, traditional disputes are recast in a manner that appears to affect, in one way or another, the “constitutionalisation” of the Union. As is well known, the European constitutionalisation farrago has in the meanwhile spilled over into general international law. Remarkably, the constructive questions revert to their original intellectual habitat, even if in the new cloth of ideas concerning the purported constitution of international law.As is often the case in intellectual history, when prior debates are almost forgotten the reformulation of older ideas comes dressed up in new vocabulary. What has emerged from the constitutional context of Union Law and begun to reach out into general international law are (relatively) new kids on the block, namely, “pluralism” and “cosmopolitanism”. Adorned with constitutional pathos they are advanced as alternatives to the trite dualist and the long abandoned monist paradigm. The article argues, first, that pluralism and cosmopolitanism do not really offer any alternatives. Making sense of the relevant positions requires translating them into the conceptual world of the received debate. If defensible, pluralism, either in simple or cosmopolitan form, formulates a new version of monism; if not, it amounts to a travesty of constitutional ideas, which assimilates legality to the mindset of administrative action. Moreover, it is argued below – in a spirit somewhat reminiscent of Kelsen – that choosing one construction over the other is a question of political philosophy. Monism commends itself not least owing to its superb constitutionalist sensibilities.