Cosmopolitanism in Practice

Maria Rovisco, Magdalena Nowicka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138262300
• eBook ISBN: 9781317159063
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What makes people cosmopolitan? How is cosmopolitanism shaping everyday life experiences and the practices of ordinary people? Making use of empirical research, Cosmopolitanism in Practice examines the concrete settings in which individuals display cosmopolitan sensibilities and dispositions, illustrating the ways in which cosmopolitan self-transformations can be used as an analytical tool to explain a variety of identity outlooks and practices. The manner in which both past and present cosmopolitanisms compete with meta-narratives such as nationalism, multiculturalism and religion is also investigated, alongside the employment of cosmopolitan ideas in situations of tension and conflict. With an international team of contributors, including Ulrich Beck, Steven Vertovec, Rob Kroes and Natan Sznaider, this book draws on a variety of intellectual disciplines and international contexts to show how people embrace and make use of cosmopolitan ideas and attitudes.

PART I Mobilities

Chapter 1 The Middle Class Cosmopolitan Journey:

The Life Trajectories and Transnational Affiliations of Skilled EU Migrants in Manchester

Paul Kennedy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315574424-2

Increasing migration flows, ever more multicultural cities and the forces of globalization combine to intensify human interconnectivities. Consequently we have never before experienced so many opportunities nor such a need to pursue mutual understanding across ethnic, national and other primordial boundaries. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that recent years have seen a surge of interest in cosmopolitanism. Central to this has been a noticeable tendency for scholars (for example, Cheah and Robbins 1998) to focus on what Hollinger (2002) calls the ‘new cosmopolitanism’. Here, the preservation of cultural diversity and the universalist desire to find common ground uniting all humans are seen as equally valuable goals. There is also an acceptance that most people find it easier to bestow loyalty on their own ethnic or national group but this need not preclude the existence of certain cosmopolitanism possibilities. This broader perspective also focuses our attention on the possibility of ‘multiple kinds of cosmopolitanism’ (Delanty 2006, 27) - the many ways the local and the global can be combined. This chapter focuses on one particular and likely source of such influences, namely, the impact of migration and given that around 95 per cent remain at home. However, migrants’ experiences also differ markedly and this is likely to affect their capacity to demonstrate various cosmopolitan orientations. Here, briefly, are two different cases which illustrate this point.

Economic migrants from poor countries tend to bring skills and cultural resources that do not always find a ready market and they may face racism and discrimination. Consequently they tend to forge ‘highly particularistic attachments’ (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004, 1178) which replicate the primordial affiliations they knew at home while building multi-faceted transnational links across territorial borders. Thus, we find multicultural societies which stitch the North and South together but in ways that produce mostly separate social enclaves.

In contrast, skilled migrants, especially those who migrate alone and who are not part of a company or other pre-existing organizational team, are in a very different situation. They possess high educational credentials, which can probably be exchanged for the economic capital and social linkages they may initially lack. Their training may equip them to be members of professional occupational cultures which are readily transportable across borders and permit collaboration irrespective of nationality (Hannerz 1990). Moreover, skilled migrants are unlikely to be influenced or assisted by their family or other home ties. Even if they possess a few friends and contacts overseas this does not resemble the multiplex bonds that often encapsulate the economic migrant nor can such expatriate contacts provide the kinds of automatic entry - through family, kin or ethnic-community-based business - into the jobs that skilled migrants may prefer and which they are qualified to seek. Skilled migrants are also increasingly required to valorize the more advanced sectors of the globalized knowledge economy. Yet most are not rootless members of transnational capitalist elites (Sassen 2000 and Sklair 2001). Finally, skilled migrants who are EU citizens enjoy free mobility and equal eligibility to the same employment and some welfare rights as nationals when living in a member country.

This chapter is based on the findings from a qualitative study of 61 skilled migrants from 13 EU member, or associated member, countries. In depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2005. An overall framework of questions was used but they were designed so as to permit multiple responses and to allow the respondents freedom to develop some themes more than others where appropriate. Reliable data bases indicating nationality, gender, age and occupation were not available. EU nationals are not required to register with their consulates. Employers, too, do not compile lists including such information and the UK Data Protection Act prevents them from giving out contact details. The respondents were obtained by sending out emails to organizations, by approaching groups and associations which might offer useful leads and by visiting likely venues frequented by foreigners. Initial contacts were then followed up through a snowball technique. The study is therefore an exploratory one which makes no claims for wider validity though there is no reason to suppose that the respondents were markedly different from other skilled, young EU migrants elsewhere in Britain. Thirty-four women and 27 men were interviewed. The average length of stay was six years but with considerable variation around this mean. Fifty-four per cent were aged between 27 and 34 years, 23 per cent were between 22 and 26 years old and a similar percentage were 35 years or older. All but two were postgraduates and all were in work, mostly full-time. They were employed in a range of local economic sectors as professionals in private businesses, universities, medicine, nursing, dentistry and veterinary services, third sector enterprises and the creative industries and a few were employed in restaurants and shops.

The argument follows a grounded or inductive approach which draws on theoretical insights trawled from recent literature. The discussion begins by outlining a research framework for understanding middle class cosmopolitanism. It then draws extensively on the personal experiences and narratives of the respondents in order to explore these ideas.

Understanding Cosmopolitanism among Skilled Migrants

The Initial Reasons for Migration

It is useful to distinguish the initial reasons skilled migrants may have for moving abroad from those that shape their motives for remaining overseas later. Thus, their cosmopolitanism may be influenced far more by their overseas experiences than whatever orientations they possessed prior to migrating. To different degrees there are perhaps three key factors which may be crucial in prompting these initial moves. One involves access to an appropriate stock of cosmopolitan capital which might predispose some individuals to move overseas and equips them to deal with the difficulties involved. Then there are instrumental needs relating to job and career prospects, pushed partly by a dearth of such opportunities at home. Skilled migrants may face less pressing economic constraints than poor Southern migrants, but to the former these are nevertheless serious and real. Third, many individuals may be affected by a desire to find adventure and cultural diversity through travel. I elaborate on these motives later.

The Career of the Middle-Class Cosmopolitan

Whatever cosmopolitanism may be, it is important not to regard it as a quality that is fixed but as an evolving one. Rather, cosmopolitanism can perhaps be conceived as following a trajectory. In the case of migrants, for example, we can suppose that once overseas they move into a social field fraught with risks and unfamiliar situations and this may propel them in unanticipated directions. Accordingly, we can speak of the potential journey of the cosmopolitan so that over time many people first become one, and then, what began as a one dimensional orientation, might develop a momentum and become a more prominent and multi-faceted aspect of their subjectivity.

Cosmopolitanism as Self-Transformation

It can be inferred from this that cosmopolitanism involves self-transformation whereby individuals interrogate their identity, affiliations, subjectivity and life space (Delanty 2006). Of course, a heightened self-reflexivity and the need to construct one’s own persona and life course (Giddens 1991 and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) are said to be ubiquitous processes in late modern societies and not just for those who migrate. However, for skilled migrants, constructing a do-it-yourself biography is likely to involve a far greater exposure to the ‘other’ or ‘others’ than is the case for those who remain at home. This, in turn, seems likely to influence the ways they then pursue their individual projects of self-realization.

Varieties of Middle-Class Cosmopolitanism Abroad

Some individuals may already possess certain cosmopolitan orientations prior to migration and these are discussed below. However, we can identify several qualitatively different kinds which may be either ignited or deepened by living overseas. First, cosmopolitanism may arise or become intensified where individuals establish social relationships with members of ethnic or national groups different from their own and are no longer content to merely gaze with aesthetic curiosity from the outside (see also, Kennedy 2005). The findings from the Manchester research suggest that the experience of building enduring transnational relationships gradually awoke in most a greater awareness and knowledge of other cultures, countries and indeed sometimes of the world or aspects of it. Accordingly, this shift towards world openness constitutes a second orientation but overlapped with, and was largely generated by, engagement in multiple social relations involving border crossings.

There is perhaps a third kind of cosmopolitanism where, fuelled by the interpersonal relationships forged with people from different cultures, individuals might begin to assume a degree of moral responsibility towards distant, unknown others in far away societies. Of course, close social interaction between individuals requires ‘a field of moral forces’ (Turner 2006, 139) to underpin recognition, trust, respect and reciprocity. This is a normal part of friendship. However, expressing a generalized ethical responsibility - or the preparedness not just to think and feel but also to act outside one’s own society and towards unknown others - is perhaps much more difficult than engaging in interculturality and evincing a general openness to the world. Thus, it requires an especially high capacity for empathy that may be related to personality but may also be set in motion or deepened by a unique syndrome of life experiences.

Motives for Migration and the Role of Cosmopolitan Capital

Earlier I suggested three reasons why skilled migrants may see moving overseas as possible and desirable. In this section we explore these in respect to the Manchester respondents. A central theme concerns how far their propensity to migrate was partly or wholly fed by the possession of cosmopolitan capital accruing through earlier experiences.

Some migrants may have greater stocks of cultural and other resources which predispose them to cope with migration. Here, social class is likely to be important especially where individuals come from a middle-class background. This may endow them not just with educational credentials but also social confidence and an individual rather than a collective frame of reference. They bring a freewheeling and culturally experimental approach to their lives. Certainly, more than half of the Manchester respondents had parents either or both of whom were professionals, company directors or people in high administrative positions. The parents of another quarter were lower civil servants, religious ministers, therapists, middle ranking police or army officers, small entrepreneurs and so on. A capacity to cope competently with one or more foreign languages would also seem to provide cosmopolitan capital and is likely to be associated with social class and educational attainment. Interestingly, in the case of the Manchester respondents, around one third claimed that their desire to learn or improve English - mainly people from the Southern European countries - was one of their main reasons for moving to the UK. A stay in Britain offered them a route to enhancing future career opportunities whether in the UK, back home or elsewhere.

Both these resources, a middle class background and English language proficiency, probably made it easier to engage in migration strategies. However, in neither respect were the respondents markedly different from the rest of their university-educated age cohorts across the EU and in the case of English language we have seen that many initially lacked a proficiency yet they still migrated. A third source of cosmopolitan capital, therefore, which may have been more unique to this particular group - though it is impossible to be certain - was perhaps their previous experience prior to reaching early adulthood, for example, studying abroad or childhood exposure to other cultures. Here, one third of the respondents had spent a period of around six months studying in another country on some kind of degree exchange programme. Britain was the recipient country in roughly half of these instances. Although mostly the respondents regarded these as brief interludes in their undergraduate training rather than as migration experiences, they had encouraged some to move overseas for work and/or postgraduate training later. In the case of childhood experiences 16 respondents reported one or more of the following: having bi-national parents (six cases), living abroad with their parents during childhood (seven cases), spending time at an international school with pupils of many nationalities (two cases) or coming from families with a history of migration across national boundaries associated with geo-political upheavals (two cases). Just under half of the sample fell into either or both of these two categories - short-term overseas degree study and/or childhood exposure to an overseas life.

While it is likely that these respondents were better endowed with cosmopolitan capital as a consequence of such experiences, care is needed in placing too much emphasis on this supposed uniqueness. First, student exchange schemes have been strongly encouraged by the EU for many years and large numbers have enjoyed this experience. Between 1987 and 2003 one million EU students engaged in an overseas exchange experience (Recchi 2006, 71). Second, the remaining respondents who had not enjoyed either or both of these experiences had nevertheless also become migrants. Third, a close examination of the explanations given by the respondents for migrating reveals that hardly anyone provided a single reason. Instead, most claimed a mixture of motives and this is clearly evid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Making Sense of Cosmopolitanism
• Part I: Mobilities
• Part II: Memories
• Part III: Tensions
• Index