Cosmopolitanism

Robert Fine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415392242
• eBook ISBN: 9781134164189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The idea of cosmopolitanism has informed some of the most important developments in current sociology. It has changed the way in which we think about a vast array of issues: the forces of globalization, the resurgence of nationalism, the future of political community in Europe, the role of international law in social life, changing forms of violence and even the life of the mind. This book explains what cosmopolitanism is and why it has grabbed the sociological imagination.

Robert Fine explores the concept of cosmopolitanism and its application to a range of contemporary issues, including:

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• the future of Europe
• the role of human rights, global governance and perpetual peace in the construction of a cosmopolitan order
• crimes against humanity
• the justification of humanitarian military interventions
• the extension of democracy beyond national limits.

This book offers an innovative mix of theoretical and socio-political elements that will be of great interest to students and researchers in the fields of international political theory, international relations, social theory and cultural studies.

1
TAKING THE ‘ISM’ OUT OF COSMOPOLITANISM

Laying out the field

The physical dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 offers a compelling image of the breaking down of boundaries maintained by force and of the re-opening of suppressed forms of human contact. This event appropriately marked the emergence of a new intellectual and political movement that is itself international and places human rights, international law, global governance and peaceful relations between states at the centre of its vision of the world. When we speak today of the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ it is this movement that we have in mind.

Within the social sciences cosmopolitanism has evolved since 1989 into a vibrant, interdisciplinary movement with its own distinctive research agenda (for edited collections see, for example, Archibugi 2004a; Archibugi et al. 1998; Beck and Sznaider 2006; Boon and Fine 2007; Breckenridge and Pollock 2002; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Held and McGrew 2002; Vertovec and Cohen 2003). The contours of this movement are not always well defined and it is traversed internally by all kinds of fault lines; and yet the new cosmopolitanism is an identifiable current gravitating around a number of shared commitments. These include: (a) the overcoming of national presuppositions and prejudices within the social scientific disciplines themselves and the reconstruction in this light of the core concepts we employ; (b) the recognition that humanity has entered an era of mutual interdependence on a world scale and the conviction that this worldly existence is not adequately understood within the terms of conventional social science; and (c) the development of normative and frankly prescriptive theories of world citizenship, global justice and cosmopolitan democracy. The dividing lines between these differentiated conceptual, societal and normative concerns are by no means always clear and it is possible to accept one without the other. All the social scientific disciplines have their own particular story to tell, though one of the strengths of the new cosmopolitanism from the start has been that it is an interdisciplinary project and that all its intradisciplinary stories are the products of considerable exchange across the disciplines.

THE NEW COSMOPOLITANISM WITHIN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

In the field of international law cosmopolitanism displays a logic that extends the scope of the discipline and to some extent transcends its origins. International law is conventionally conceived as a form of law which recognises the individual nation-state as its unit of analysis and advances national self-determination and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states as its guiding principles. It imagines a world of sovereign freedom constrained by few international rules to constrain the behaviour of governments towards other states and towards their own citizens and subjects. Cosmopolitanism seeks to extend the reach of international law beyond issues of state sovereignty. It concerns itself with the rights and responsibilities of world citizens. One of the key problems it addresses is that some of the worst violators of human rights can be states or state-like formations. Whilst international law has traditionally developed according to the principle that every state is sovereign within its own territory, cosmopolitanism endorses legal limitations on how rulers may behave towards the ruled; and whilst international law leaves it to states to protect the rights of individuals, cosmopolitanism looks also to the formation of international legal bodies above the level of nation-states to perform this function. To be sure, there is a substantial grey area between state-centred and cosmopolitan conceptions of international law, but the core analytical distinction is between the conventional form of international law that recognises only states as legal subjects and limits the role of international bodies to that of protecting the sovereign rights of states and the cosmopolitan form of international law that extends its reach to the rights of individuals and freedoms of civil society associations on the one hand and to the widening legal authority of international bodies on the other (Archibugi 1995; Douglas 2001; Eleftheriadis 2003; Falk 1998, 1999; Hirsh 2003; Robertson 2006; Sands 2003, 2006).

In the field of international relations cosmopolitanism also contains a logic that extends the scope and transcends the origins of the discipline. The ‘realist’ mainstream of international relations holds that the state is the ultimate source of authority and by implication that there is no legal or moral authority beyond the plurality of sovereign states. In mainstream international relations the idea of an international system composed of independent and sovereign states, called ‘Westphalian’ after its origins in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, provides its normal point of departure. In realist international relations this ‘anarchic’ system of sovereign states is regarded as a natural and immutable order, a given for all analytical purposes, or in more historically informed accounts as a rational outcome of modernisation processes finally achieved at the end of history. The new cosmopolitanism criticises realism for its readiness to rationalise a system of sovereign states that is in fact historically specific and normatively conditional. It emphasises that the sovereignty of the state is itself a product of history rather than a permanent feature of the human condition and that its origins are to be explained rather than its ontological status assumed. It entertains the thought, excluded by realism, that the Westphalian system of sovereign states is in fact being surpassed. It breaks down the categorical distinction it sees in realism between the domestic field, in which individuals freely submit to the state as to their own rational will, and the international field, taken to be devoid of all ethical values. It rejects the temporal matrix which declares that inside the state progress can be accomplished over time but that outside there can be only an eternal repetition of power and interest. And it repudiates the intellectual rationalisation of a political order based on a lack of moral and legal inhibition as to how states relate to one another and especially as to how they relate to their own citizens and subjects. Its basic intuition is that many of the assumptions of the Westphalian model are still operative in international relations today but that the conditions for the reconstruction of international relations along cosmopolitan lines are now ripe (Bartelson 2001; Brown 2006; Doyle 1993; Held 1995a; Linklater 1998).

In the field of political philosophy the new cosmopolitanism is usually based on the revival of ideas of universal history, perpetual peace and cosmopolitan justice developed in the eighteenth century and formalised by Kant around the time of the French Revolution. The core contention is that the cosmopolitan ideals of Enlightenment thought are once again pertinent to our own times. The new cosmopolitanism sets itself the task of ironing out inconsistencies in Kant’s way of thinking, radicalising it where its break from the old order of sovereign states was incomplete, freeing it from the old metaphysical baggage, elaborating linkages between peace and social justice which Kant neglected, and applying it to a radically transformed social context. The basic agenda of cosmopolitan political philosophy is to ‘think with Kant against Kant’ in reconstructing the cosmopolitan ideal for our own times. A crucial aspect of this programme is to reassess the normative value of nationalism. While advocates of the new cosmopolitanism are prepared to acknowledge that nationalism may have had value in the past, not least in the pursuit of anti-colonial struggles or in the building of modern welfare states, they renounce the idea that solidarity ties must be conceptually linked to the nation-state and pronounce the death of nationalism as a normative principle of social integration. The credo of the new cosmopolitanism is that the universalistic character of the idea of right, once swamped by the self-assertion of one nation against another, is best suited to the identity of world citizens and not to that of citizens of one state against another (Apel 1997; Archibugi 1995; Cavallar 1999; Fine 2001a, 2003a; Habermas 1998, 2001; Hoffe 2006; Kant 1991; Kuper 2000; Lara and Fine 2007; Nussbaum 2002; O’Neill 2000; Pogge 2001; Rawls 1999; Smith and Fine 2004).

My final example is in the field of sociology and social theory. Here the rise of cosmopolitan thinking is closely aligned with attempts to dissociate the core concepts of social theory, especially that of ‘society’ itself, from the presuppositions of the nation-state. It is argued that a strong notion of national society has prevailed within the sociological tradition as a result both of the discipline’s own nationalistic consciousness and of the actual solidity and expansion of national societies during the time of sociology’s development. The new cosmopolitanism maintains that the concept of ‘society’ was shaped at birth by a coincidence between the rise of sociology as a discipline and the formation of nation-states as the modern form of political community. It emphasises the historicity of this conceptual framework and its inappropriateness for understanding social life in an age of globalisation. Its conviction is that the old national framework of sociological analysis is no longer capable of dealing with the major social transformations currently taking place under the register of globalisation: the proliferation of connections between societies, the growth of power structures outside national frameworks of accountability; the proliferation of global risks (of an ecological, political, economic, epidemic, criminal and terrorist character) that have no respect for national boundaries; the increasing movement of people across national frontiers and the resulting heterogeneity of populations in most modern societies; growing numbers of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers; and the increasing importance of international political and regulatory bodies. The new cosmopolitanism holds that such changes in social life indicate the need for a corresponding change in social theory – one which takes the world and not the nation-state as its primary unit of analysis. Its project is to free social theory from a world that no longer exists and overcome those categories of understanding and standards of judgement which depend on a moribund national framework (Albrow 1996; Beck 2006a; Castells 2000; Delanty 2000; Urry 2000).

This brief outline of the parameters of the new cosmopolitanism is anything but exhaustive; it is intended only to illustrate the parameters of the new cosmopolitanism within the social sciences and how the new cosmopolitanism presents itself in this context. At the core of the cosmopolitan project is the notion that social science has in the past made its peace with the nation-state and the conviction that this reconciliation with reality must now be overcome. The new cosmopolitanism is an endeavour to denature and decentre the nation-state – to loosen the ties that bind the nation-state to theories of democracy in political theory, theories of society in sociology, theories of internationalism in international relations, theories of sovereignty in international law and theories of justice in political philosophy. We should add theories of culture in cultural studies and theories of space in human geography. Its critical function is to emancipate social science from its bounded national presuppositions and construct new analytical concepts appropriate to globalising times. My question, however, is whether the new cosmopolitanism is as new or as cosmopolitan as it suggests. To explore this issue further, I am now going to narrow my focus and concentrate for a moment on the work of one sociologist who has arguably done more than any other to construct the new cosmopolitanism over the last decade: Ulrich Beck.

ULRICH BECK AND THE CRITIQUE OF METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM

In a path-breaking series of essays and books spanning the last decade (1998a, 2000a, 2000b, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2007) Beck has campaigned persistently and urgently for the overcoming of the tradition of ‘methodological nationalism’ within sociology and for the development of a ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ in its place. I want to address here one aspect of his multifaceted work: the time-consciousness, that is, the conception of past, present and future, which informs his cosmopolitan vision. The rigidities of how he conceives the relation between past and future may serve as an exemplar of a wider problem within the new cosmopolitanism – and one that rightly worries the most astute observers (Chernilo 2007a,b, 2008a).

Beck argues that traditional sociology has equated the idea of ‘society’ with the nation-state and that it has simply assumed that humanity is naturally divided into a limited number of nations: ‘It is a nation-state outlook’, Beck writes, ‘that governs the sociological imagination’ (Beck 2002b: 51). He maintains that the solidity and self-sufficiency of the nation-state are now being shattered and that this social transformation places upon sociology the responsibility to re-invent itself as ‘a transnational science . . . released from the fetters of methodological nationalism’ (Beck 2002b: 53–4). He writes of the ‘obsolescence’ of traditional social theories and their ‘zombie categories’ and looks to the emancipation of social theory from the old ‘container theory of society’. Beck sees the canon and tradition of social theory dominated by the conceptualisations of methodological nationalism: ‘The possibility that the unity of state and nation might dissolve, disintegrate or undergo a complete transformation remains beyond the purview of the social sciences’ (Beck 2006a: 29). He stands for the replacement of the old ‘methodological nationalism’, which used to dominate the social sciences, with a new ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that is capable of tackling ‘what had previously been analytically excluded’ (Beck 2002b: 52). Beck concedes we can find partial arguments in the history of sociology that point beyond methodological nationalism, but is insistent that there has been no serious questioning within sociology of the unity of state and nation until the emergence of the new cosmopolitanism itself.

The critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ actually goes back to the 1970s when a number of sociologists, including Anthony Giddens (1973) and Herminio Martins (1974), argued that a major defect of existing social science was the treatment of nation-states as if they were closed, autonomous and self-contained units. Their contention was that the limited vision of methodological nationalism led to predominantly endogenous explanations of social change and that this explanatory bias had to be rectified (Smelser 1997; Wagner 1994). Beck radicalised this critique of prevailing sociological theories of social change and turned it into a far more general dissatisfaction with the sociological tradition (Chernilo 2006a, 2006b, 2007a). He presents the critique of methodological nationalism not so much as a contribution within the tradition of social theory but as a major rupture in the history of social theory – one made necessary by the era of radical epochal change in which we now live.

Now, a sense of rupture, of epochal change is widely shared within social theory. It is evident, for instance, in the classification of modernity into ‘periods’: modernity and postmodernity, high modernity and late modernity, first modernity and second modernity, solid modernity and liquid modernity, national modernity and postnational modernity. It is a vital part of social theory to identify what is new in social and political life and to think about what this entails for social and political thought. We cannot assume that old concepts suffice to convey new phenomena. For example, it can be positively misleading to assume that concepts of power drawn from a pre-totalitarian age will be sufficient to understand the unprecedented forms of terror and annihilation brought into existence by totalitarian movements. We must always question whether the words we use have caught up with our experiences.

However, the sense of epochal change that plays so large a role in social theory can itself be misleading if it simply makes a cult out of novelty. We live in an age in which ‘the new’ is proclaimed from every advertising banner and contemporary social theory is itself a creature of our age. It too is inclined to speak freely of new forms of democracy, new forms of war, new types of personal relationship and so forth. Too often however, it does so on the basis of homogenised views of the past and without consideration of the multiple ways in which the past weighs upon the present. We cannot simply set aside concepts, like old hats we remove from our heads, without considering whence they came and what work they do (Young-Bruehl 2006). New concepts have to be squared with new realities or they too can become a constraint on our thinking. Today there is nothing new in declaring the new, and the claim that this or that event is ‘unprecedented’ and that there are no words to describe it has itself become almost a commonplace of philosophical discourse (Habermas and Derrida 2003a).

The cult of the new, if we may call it thus, can be illustrated through Beck’s analysis of the destruction of the World Trade Center. 9/11, he writes, stands for the ‘complete collapse of language’. It signals the bankruptcy of all national frames of reference. It indicates the ‘global community of fate’ to which we are all now bound. It demonstrates that in a world risk society we need a ‘new big idea’, that of cosmopolitanism itself (Beck 2002a: 48). Beck likens the advent of cosmopolitan norms in our own times to the sea-change achieved by the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. He declares that it marks the advent of a ‘second Enlightenment’ – one that will ‘open our eyes and our institutions to the immaturity of the first industrial civilization and the dangers it posed to itself ’ (Beck 2002b: 50). He argues that 9/11 confronts the world with an existential choice: not only between nationalism and multilateralism but also between regressive multilateralism based on surveillance states and progressive multilateralism based on cosmopolitan states. A multilateralism based on surveillance states sacrifices rights, law, democracy and hospitality to the security of the Western citadel. A multilateralism based on cosmopolitan principles also seeks security but by means of human rights, international law, democracy and hospitality at the transnational level. 9/11, he writes, brings to the surface the defining characteristic of our age – that risks are now spatially de-territorialised and uncontrollable at the level of the nation-state and that it is necessary to construct a new principle of cosmopolitan order transcending both the classical framework of nation-states and the imposition of police powers at the international level.

Over against the cult of the new, I do not wish to suggest that there is nothing new in the kind of terrorism practised on 9/11. On the contrary, it seems to me that recent attempts to analogise this event to the old totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler or to the old uses of terror in national liberation movements are equally inadequate ways of dealing with what is new in this case. But to speak of a ‘complete collapse of language’ diminishes our ability to understand the event. No understanding is possible without analytical concepts against which to measure what is new. While all social theory tries to make sense of a rapidly transforming world, the idea of crisis only makes sense against a backdrop which allows us to see what has changed (Habermas 1988).

THE CRITIQUE OF THE CRITIQUE OF METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM

The other side of the coin of being stuck in old ways of thinking is what Frank Webster has termed the ‘fallacy of presentism’ (Webster 2002: 267). The fallacy of presentism refers to the tendency to turn the present into an ‘ism’ and prematurely declare the redundancy of old concepts and theories. The paradox of ‘presentism’ may be illustrated by the observation that while Beck argues in relation to 9/11 for the need for new categories of understanding and new standards of judgement to deal with this event, he declares his own debt to the seventeenth-century political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and poses his analysis of global risk society in Hobbesian terms (Beck 2002a: 46) concerning the risks that arise in global society and the conditions of achieving security in these circumstances.

Beck’s representation of the history of the nation-state strangely mirrors the ‘methodological nationalism’ he criticises. He argues that ‘national organization as a structuring principle of societal and political action can no longer serve as a premise for the social science observer perspective’ (Beck 2002b: 52, my italic), implying that in the past this national principle may well have been an appropriate premise. According to this account, methodological nationalism was right for its own times, though obsolete for ours, and Beck criticises it only from a historical point of view (Joas 2003). The fairly obvious point to make is that a methodologically nationalist social sci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface: Twenty-One Theses on Cosmopolitan Social Theory
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Taking the ‘Ism’ Out of Cosmopolitanism
• 2 Cosmopolitanism and Natural Law
• 3 Cosmopolitanism and Political Community
• 4 Cosmopolitanism and International Law
• 5 Cosmopolitanism and Humanitarian Military Intervention
• 6 Cosmopolitanism and Punishment
• 7 Cosmopolitanism and the Life of the Mind
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography