Cosmopolitan Borders

C. Rumford

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349468836, 9781137351395
• eBook ISBN: 9781137351401
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cosmopolitan Borders makes the case for processes of bordering being better understood through the lens of cosmopolitanism. Borders are 'cosmopolitan workshops' where 'cultural encounters of a cosmopolitan kind' take place and where entrepreneurial cosmopolitans advance new forms of sociality in the face of 'global closure'.

1

Introduction

Abstract: The relationship between cosmopolitanism and borders is established via discussion of the changing nature of borders and a critique of the main characteristics of contemporary cosmopolitanism and its likely future trajectory. An alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism is offered, emerging from a critique of the idea of ‘openness’, and founded on a different understanding of the relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism. The four cosmopolitan dimensions of borders are introduced – vernacularization, multiperspectivalism, fixity/unfixity and connectivities – each having a chapter in the book devoted to it. The idea of borders as ‘cosmopolitan workshops’ is also introduced.

Rumford, Chris. Cosmopolitan Borders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137351401.0004.

What is a cosmopolitan border? An oxymoron, perhaps. For many people a border could never be cosmopolitan; a ‘cosmopolitan border’ is a contradictory term. My usage of the term is not intended to signify a cosmopolitan age in which all things, including the most unlikely, have become cosmopolitan. I do not subscribe to the ‘cosmopolitan realism’ thesis advanced by Beck, among others (Beck, 2006). The term ‘cosmopolitan border’ signifies not that the world has become more cosmopolitan but that borders are changing rapidly and in many different ways: in terms of their nature, their function, their location and their ownership. But these wide-ranging changes would not by themselves necessitate the designation ‘cosmopolitan’. The main reason for labelling some borders ‘cosmopolitan’ is that they are no longer only a project of the (nation-)state.

Borders are increasingly shaped by forms of governance beyond the nation-state, the European Union (EU) being the most obvious example, and by citizens working from the ‘bottom-up’, this activity being termed ‘borderwork’ (see Chapter 2). In short then borders are cosmopolitan because they are no longer only under the control of the state; other actors and agencies may also be involved. This represents an important shift from state to society as the locus of bordering, but as yet the literature on borders does not adequately reflect this change. Border studies’ scholars have already embraced many dimensions of the changing nature of borders (‘borders are everywhere’, ‘remote control’, offshore bordering etc.), but studying the cosmopolitanization of borders is still in its infancy. If the term ‘cosmopolitan border’ signifies a major change in the nature of borders, it also says something about how we can best approach cosmopolitanism. It is argued that borders are good vantage points from which to observe cosmopolitanism, and more importantly perhaps studying ‘cosmopolitan borders’ leads us to challenge the assumption that cosmopolitanism equates to ‘world openness’. In fact, the line taken here is that cosmopolitanism is better thought of as the possibility of connectivity under conditions where globalization closes in on us and restricts our options, the border being a prime site for such ‘cosmopolitan encounters’.

The existence of cosmopolitan borders impacts other debates. For instance, there is an increasing dissatisfaction with the state/security/mobility agenda which continues to dominate the field of border studies. The need to identify new meanings of the border not tied to the state (Bauder, 2011) has emerged as a key theme in the critical literature as has its corollary, the inadequacy of many existing conceptualizations of the border (Rovisco, 2010). In this book I seek to advance this emerging agenda by shifting the focus towards the role of ordinary people in making, shifting and removing borders – the idea of ‘borderwork’ (Rumford, 2007, 2008b, 2012) and the variety of roles that borders can fulfil in addition to being markers of (state) division. A border studies which embraces the vernacularization of borders shifts the emphasis from state bordering, securitization and the regulation of mobilities to a concern both with the role of borders in ‘the politics of everyday fear’ (Massumi, 1993) and bordering as a political resource for citizens who are able to both contest nation-state bordering practices and institute their own versions of borders. Rather than simply existing as manifestations of an ‘iron cage’ borders can be appropriated as political resources; they can be drawn upon by a range of actors who seek to either selectively regulate mobility, use the border as a staging post to connect to the wider world, or simply use the border as a way of navigating the multiplicity of spaces which characterize a world in perpetual motion. Arguably, the single most important conceptual development laying the ground for the recognition of cosmopolitan borders is Balibar’s insight that borders are increasingly diffused. To sit alongside this I propose a second key innovation; the idea of borders as ‘engines of connectivity’. Borders not only divide; they also connect, both to the other side of the border and, on occasions, far beyond. Borders can be prime sites for connecting individuals to the world by creating cosmopolitan opportunities through the possibility of cultural encounters and negotiations of difference. In this way the centrality of borders to cosmopolitan thinking can be fully understood.

Unpacking cosmopolitanism

When borders and cosmopolitanism are considered together it is frequently assumed that the cosmopolitan ‘lives across borders’ (Holton, 2009: 40). In reality, the relationship is much richer and more complex than that. Focusing on the ease with which some individuals can cross borders results in a rather one-dimensional perspective. Moreover, it gives little clue to the changing nature of borders or the range of possibilities emerging from contemporary thinking on cosmopolitanism. The argument here is that borders have the potential to be sites of ‘cultural encounters of a cosmopolitan kind’: connecting individuals to the world, bringing them into contact with Others and causing them to reassess their relations with the (multiple) communities to which they may or may not belong. Furthermore, borders serve a very useful function in that they offer up connections to the world, which contrary to received wisdom are not that plentiful. According to Delanty (2006: 27), cosmopolitanism is concerned with the ‘very conceptualization of the social world as an open horizon in which new cultural models take shape ... and wherever new relations between self, other and world develop in moments of openness’. It can be argued that connecting with the world is, in fact, far from straightforward and ‘moments of openness’ are not always readily available (Rumford, 2008a: 14). In this sense, cosmopolitans do not automatically have the access to the world that is often supposed, and the ‘self, other, world’ triad gives the impression that the world is more open than it actually is. The cosmopolitan challenge is to find manoeuvre room in an environment where the world, others and community can appear to smother rather than nourish the self.

Cosmopolitanism is now recognized as offering an important perspective on contemporary affairs, and is an increasingly important research theme across the social sciences. The rise of cosmopolitanism has been aided by the publication of several ‘cornerstone’ texts in the past few years which have helped consolidate the field and provide a road map for extending cosmopolitanism into fresh realms. Two edited collections are particularly significant: Delanty’s Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (Delanty, 2012), and Rovisco and Nowicka’s Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism (Rovisco and Nowicka, 2011). These scholarly compendia stand alongside a number of other key texts in the study of cosmopolitanism that have also been published in the past few years. Of these, the following have been particularly important in shaping the field: Beck’s Cosmopolitan Vision (Beck, 2006), Archibugi’s The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Archibugi, 2008), Holton’s Cosmopolitanisms (Holton, 2009), Delanty’s The Cosmopolitan Imagination (Delanty, 2009), and Kendall, Woodward and Skrbis’ The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism (Kendall et al., 2009). These books have made cosmopolitanism more relevant to researchers in many disciplines, help instil in researchers the confidence to work within a cosmopolitan frame, and to extend the applicability of cosmopolitanism to new areas of investigation.

Alongside the growing social scientific legitimacy of cosmopolitanism we have seen an important shift to ‘cosmopolitan realism’ as the default perspective. Cosmopolitan realism, as represented by the work of Beck and Delanty, for example, insists that the world is/has all along been cosmopolitan, although it is only now that we are beginning to acknowledge this (it being the victim of ‘methodological nationalism’ for a long period). This is a very confident vision of cosmopolitanism and a much more assertive iteration vis-à-vis its relevance to understanding the contemporary world than was evident just a few years ago. Beck’s argument is that although the national imagination continues to hold sway in intellectual life and in explanatory frameworks, everyday life is cosmopolitan, although this is not necessarily acknowledged in many efforts to account for, or explain, everyday life. One consequence of the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ which has been a feature of the social sciences over the past decade or so (Beck and Grande, 2010) is the growing confidence with which the existence of ‘cosmopolitan reality’ has been proclaimed. The journey from the first claims for a ‘new’ cosmopolitanism – originating with the ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ project for greater democracy between nation-states launched by Archibugi and Held (1995) – to a range of assertions that modernity has been cosmopolitan all along (even though we did not recognize it as such) has taken place in a relatively short time. For some this cosmopolitan reality finds fullest expression in the European Union (Beck and Grande, 2007), for others it signals a shift in emphasis in concern from ‘sociality to humanity’ (Ossewaarde, 2007). The popularity of cosmopolitan realism should not mask the fact that it is by no means the only way to understand cosmopolitanism. In the remainder of this section we will examine the claims of cosmopolitan realism, offer a critique and suggest an alternative basis for a cosmopolitan social science.

Ulrich Beck is the primary advocate of cosmopolitan realism. He argues that the ‘cosmopolitan condition’ is the reality of contemporary society: social reality has become cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan reality can be discerned from the fact that people are living in an interconnected world and experience it as such. This then is what is termed ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2006: 19) and it characterizes everyday life: ‘the many-coloured mixture of food, drinks, nourishments, restaurants, music, etc. that characterises the cities all over Europe’ (Beck and Grande, 2007: 72). Banal cosmopolitanism is experienced in the supermarket where culinary cultures and a steady growing variety of produce from around the world are made available to shoppers as a matter of course. Banal cosmopolitanism is an unconscious cosmopolitanism rather than a reflexive cosmopolitanism. Beck draws a distinction between cosmopolitanism, as a set of ideas and beliefs, and ‘cosmopolitanization’, which results from unconscious decisions but which is leading to the reality of ‘becoming thoroughly cosmopolitan’ (Beck, 2006: 21).

Providing ballast for Beck’s perspective is the idea that we are witnessing a ‘cosmopolitanization of reality’, the full dimensions of which can only be understood once we dispense with the ‘methodological nationalism’ which pervades the social sciences. ‘Methodological nationalism’ refers to the ways in which ‘social scientists in doing research and theorizing take it for granted that society is equated with national society’ (Beck and Sznaider, 2006: 2). Cosmopolitan realism has three facets: a critique of methodological nationalism; the recognition that ‘the twenty-first century is becoming an age of cosmopolitanism’ (ibid.: 3); and a recognition that what we need is ‘some kind of “methodological cosmopolitanism”, which can dispense with the dualisms that have informed globalization theory: global/local, national/international, inside/outside’ (ibid.). Beck and Sznaider seek to mark a distinction between their vision of cosmopolitanism – the ‘really-existing processes of cosmopolitanization of the world’ (ibid.: 7) – and the more commonly held view of cosmopolitanism as a set of normative principles, for example the project of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ advanced by Held and Archibugi. Interestingly, Daniele Archibugi also looks at the EU and sees ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’, or the nearest thing to it, thus demonstrating that these contending perspectives on cosmopolitanism do share some common ground.

Beck seeks to uncover ‘dormant’ cosmopolitanism. For example, the European Union has brought about the cosmopolitanization of Europe even though this was never the intention. Europe possesses a cosmopolitan reality which ‘normal social science’ tends to overlook; the ‘real Europe’ can only be understood through the cosmopolitan lens (Beck, 2008). Beck’s belief is that once we have learnt to transcend the restrictions placed on social science by ‘methodological nationalism’ we will discover ways of studying transnational reality and in doing so discover (cosmopolitan) dimensions to Europe that we never realized existed. It is possible that Beck’s cosmopolitan version of Europe is the result of what Philip Schlesinger has termed the ‘cosmopolitan temptation’, whereby wishful thinking about cosmopolitanism gets in the way of clear analysis (Schlesinger, 2007).

The encounter between cosmopolitanism and globalization (in the contemporary context) is normally seen as one in which the latter has encouraged the former (creating the grounds for ‘cosmopolitan realism’). On this conventional reading, cosmopolitanism is stimulated by globalization and is dependent upon it. But such interpretations are the result of very broad brush strokes indeed: what is meant by globalization and cosmopolitanism varies greatly from formulation to formulation, and the assumed relationship only ‘works’ if cosmopolitanism is viewed as a form of consciousness which corresponds to contemporary processes of globalization.

Inglis and Robertson (2011: 296–7) summarize the connections between globalization and cosmopolitanism advanced in the recent literature in the following way. They identify four such connections. First, globalization generates ‘cosmopolitan conditions’ such as the ‘global capitalist market ... cosmopolitan political structures and legal norms ... cosmopolitan modes of citizenship ... cosmopolitan lifestyles ... cosmopolitan cultures ... and cosmopolitan forms of consciousness’ (ibid.: 296). Second, what are previously thought of as processes of globalization can also be seen as processes of cosmopolitanization (as understood by Beck) in the sense that these undermine boundaries both within and between nation-states. This feeds the tendency towards ‘cosmopolitan realism’ identified above. Third, ‘[g]lobalization produces needs for, and generates forms of, social science which can analyse its deepening complexity’ (Inglis and Robertson, 2011: 297), Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology being a good example. On this understanding, cosmopolitanism is called forth to help make sense of globalization. Fourth, some cosmopolitan theories are an attempt to correct or ‘tame’ tendencies associated with globalization. In this sense, globalization is the backdrop against which cosmopolitan perspectives emerge and ‘make sense’. There is also a sense that cosmopolitan perspectives can hold a degree of optimism which has been difficult to sustain in many readings of globalization. Many accounts of globalization emphasize the transformations which are wrought by global processes, and these may be associated with negative subjective experiences of globalization as ‘something that happens to you’ and which is largely beyond your control. At the same time, cosmopolitanism is seen to be more about shaping the world according to a normative vision. If globalization is a ‘done deal’, cosmopolitanism embodies the hope that other forms of (human) connectivity are possible.

So what more is there to say of the relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism? Actually, quite a lot. In the literature the consensus is very much that accelerating (technologically driven) processes of globalization over the past 30 years or so have caused the renewal of interest in, and new forms of, cosmopolitan thought. There is every reason to question this line of causality: the relationship between cosmopolitanism and globalization in this book is understood in very different terms. It is argued that cosmopolitanism is a strategy of connectivity resulting from a particular experience of globalization: ‘global closure’. Cosmopolitanism is often thought to depend upon ‘global openness’ but, it is argued, such a state of affairs occurs a lot less often than many scholars of cosmopolitanism optimistically believe to be the case. Globalization, in the way that it is experienced at the level of individual experience, often ‘presses down’ on people and restricts access to the world. This then provides a corrective to accounts which emphasize that globalization opens up the world to experience and imagination. Cosmopolitanism becomes a strategy for living under conditions of ‘global closure’. In the contemporary context cosmopolitanism allows for the possibility of breaking out of the constraints imposed by this experience of globalization, by creating ‘room for manoeuvre’ in what are experienced as the closed spaces of globalization. More specifically, cosmopolitanism can be thought of as a political strategy which draws upon resources of the imagination in order to constitute an alternative social connection between previously unconnected individuals. On this reading cosmopolitanism is not a social reality or existing state of affairs, rather it is the product of subjective experience and the need to open up new possibilities for human sociality. To the extent that this points to a link between cosmopolitanism and globalization, it is a contingent one. Not all attempts at cosmopolitan connectivity are the result of a troubled experience of globalization. New forms of sociality can be advanced by ‘entrepreneurial’ cosmopolitans, rather than being driven by global flows and mobilities.

According to Kendall et al. (2009: 14–22) there are four problems with contemporary approaches to cosmopolitanism. First, ‘indeterminacy’ – cosmopolitanism can stand for almost anything. Second, ‘identification’ – who are the cosmopolitans? Third, ‘attribution’ – what constitutes cosmopolitan behaviour or culture? Four, ‘governance’ – what forms of rule are envisaged under the cosmopolitan banner? Up to a point I would agree with this sketch of deficien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Citizen Vernacular: The Case of Borderwork
• 3  Seeing Like a Border: Towards Multiperspectivalism
• 4  Fixity/Unfixity
• 5  Connectivites: Monumentalizing Borders
• 6  Concluding Comments
• References
• Index