Figures of the cosmopolitan

Abstract

In contemporary European social and political thought, cosmopolitanism is frequently closely linked with the modern cultural citizen, who is open to the variety of global cultures and can participate equally at al levels of society from the local to the global. The cosmopolitan or privileged national moves freely and, from a secure vantage point, is at home anywhere. However what I suggest in this paper is that there is a darker dimension, which is too easily forgotten in the celebratory figures of the cosmopolitan based on unfettered movement and consumption of places. There is another cosmopolitan figure which draws upon an ambiguous historical baggage where the rootless and flexible outsider was treated with suspicion and hostility. In 20th century Europe, cosmopolitanism often epitomised the Jew with divided allegiances and little attachment to the land, and more often at home in the city, unlike indigenous populations. Today the fear of divided loyalties and transnational political participation falls in particular upon Europe's Muslim populaitons, who must demonstrate that they are not cosmopolitan. Thus what is interpreted positively in the privileged national is deemed to be negative and problematic in the migrant.

Notes

So much of the globalization literature confuses and conflates a number of distinct processes and in particular trans-border or transnational movements with not having any location or living virtually. It is the truly exceptional person who lives nowhere and without territoriality.

Her male interviewees (150 in the USA and France) correspond more to the old stable working class and are in fact well educated (high school qualifications) and have worked continuously in proper jobs for the past five years. It therefore does not cover those who have been unemployed or working in flexible and part-time employment, a growing number in both states and especially among racialized minorities.

The emphasis on the positive connotations of cosmopolitanism leads many writers to replace what is actually the more neutral and less charged concept of ‘transnational’ with ‘cosmopolitan’. Thus Werbner (1999: 34) concludes: ‘cosmopolitanism, in other words, does not necessarily imply an absence of belonging but the possibility of belonging to more than one ethnic and cultural localism simultaneously’.

Transnationals, who simply transfer their cultural baggage to another country, exiles and frequent travellers (usually occupational) who share ‘structures of meaning carried by social networks’, may be only very marginally cosmopolitan.

For Beck (2002), cosmopolitianization means 'internal globalization from within national societies in which not only are interconnections made across borders but more fundamentally transform the quality and nature of social and political life within national societies'. It is thus a methodological concept which helps to overcome methodological nationalism and to build a frame to analyse the new social conflicts, dynamics and structures of Second Modernity. … It corresponds to rival ways of life and puts the negotiation of contradictory cultural experiences in the centre of activities’ (p. 18). Unfortunately it seems to be waning with the revival of national understandings and prioritization of national or Western value systems being demanded of migrants.

Muslims form 2.5% of the population in the UK, 3.7% in Germany, and 10% in France.