Beck's cosmopolitan politics

Abstract

This article evaluates Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitan global politics. I argue that areas where Beck sees bases for communal and cosmopolitan politics are structured by power, inequality and conflict. Beck has a conflict perspective on local responses to globalization but this is not carried through to his global politics. There are issues that need to be tackled at a global level but I argue that this will have to be done on the basis of conflicting interests, power and nation-states as much as through global cosmopolitanism and co-operation.

Keywords:

• Ulrich Beck
• globalization
• cosmopolitanism
• conflict
• power

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke Martell

*Luke Martell is a reader in sociology at the University of Sussex. He is author of Ecology and Society (Polity, 1994), co-author of New Labour (Polity, 1998) and Blair's Britain (Polity, 2002), and is writing a book on the Sociology of Globalization to be published by Polity in 2009. Email: [email protected]