Cosmopolitanism” has seen resurgence in the humanities and social sciences as a way to describe global citizenship. To paraphrase CUNY professor David Harvey cosmopolitanism has meant so many things to so many people it can’t be a rally point for any group or its goals, whether it be to unify two anarchist blocs or to describe the socio-cultural effect of the reconfiguration of markets in the European Union. In other words, the term has been overused, watered down and rendered weak and in some cases meaningless.
Yet, it is still used. Popular words never die; they are magically reborn, like phoenixes. Today, cosmopolitanism describes democracy at a global level. And, whether or not we wish to admit it is always regulated to ensure economic, ecological, and political security: Bush’s tariffs on European steel, subsidies given to US farmers by its government, etc. If cosmopolitanism describes a coming together, what was once divided, separate? There is no mention (in fact there seems to be no reason to discuss) the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of the separation preceeding global cosmopolitanism. What’s the hidden link?
In the essay “Cosmopolitanism & the Banality of Geographic Evils.” Which appeared in the second issue of the 12th volume of Public Culture and which I paraphrase above, David Harvey notes that the term originally implied the outcast: Jews, communists, anarchists—dissidents and traitors to nations. These connotations have simply been “shaken off” or, better yet, spun in the favor of a more democratic vision. However, what lurks beneath the surface of this particular representation of cosmopolitanism is another, more disturbing, connotation that, Harvey also notes, complicates the benign ideology of the cosmopolitan “global village.” Marx and Engels said it best in their party’s manifesto, “The bourgeois has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.”
Both groups find common ground in that they make the majority uncomfortable. Political and cultural dissidents as well as those who face forms of exploitation in the global economy—if you are puzzled by my stepped up rhetoric, ask George Soros about his discussions with Latin American women at the WEF in, I believe 2000—are, in the least, requesting that controls be put in place to guarantee fair trade.
Back to cosmopolitanism; at this point, we have two definitions working: the latter removes the benign notion of cosmopolitanism as a mere cultural or social way of being in the world and ties it to the global economy in such a way that it is the ideological icing on an industrial and now post-industrial cake. The former indicates that the word was imposed by the purveyors of geopolitical spaces and institutions against specific cultural, social and political groups that represented, both separately and together, a threat to the “project” which would form the modern nation.
The democratic principle is that societies work best when minorities with less political power can engage with the majority, whoever or whatever that is. That is the model of a true cosmopolitan democratic system. If the principle of an unregulated market is linked to “freedom” or “full democratic participation” then “right” is linked to self interest: since we are all interested in freedom, are we not? What we are witnessing, is the materialization of an answer to the following questions: Who will decide on the definitions of justice in a global order? Who defines the concept of peace? Will globalization occur through unilateral participation or by force?