Cosmopolitanism in Conflict

Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War

Dina Gusejnova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781349952748
• eBook ISBN: 9781349952755
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book is the first study to engage with the relationship between cosmopolitan political thought and the history of global conflicts. Accompanied by visual material ranging from critical battle painting to the photographic representation of ruins, it showcases established as well as emerging interdisciplinary scholarship in global political thought and cultural history. Touching on the progressive globalization of conflicts between the eighteenth and the twentieth century, including the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic wars, the two World Wars, as well as seemingly 'internal' civil wars in eastern Europe's imperial frontiers, it shows how these conflicts produced new zones of cultural contact. The authors build on a rich foundation of unpublished sources drawn from public institutions as well as private archives, allowing them to shed new light on the British, Russian, German, Ottoman, American, and transnational history of international thought and political engagement.

© The Author(s) 2018

Dina Gusejnova (ed.)Cosmopolitanism in Conflicthttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95275-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Dina Gusejnova¹

(1)

University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Dina Gusejnova

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

CosmopolitanismLineageGenealogyImmanuel kantOrientationEnd of the cold warNegative cosmopolitanismCitizenship and urban historyGlobal history of citiesCultural history of frontiersWorld orderCivil warPostimperial history

End Abstract

In his essay ‘What is Orientation in thinking?’ (1786), Immanuel Kant analyses the concept of ‘orientation’, conjuring up the image of a person who is looking for direction.¹ He says: ‘To orientate oneself […] means to use a given world region—and we divide the horizon into four of these—in order to find the others.’ Orientation happens by external markers—by relying on the certainty that the sun always rises in the same spot, which we call the Orient. Surprisingly, Kant then undermines his own picture by suggesting that all this may be fine, but such a person who would take only external markers of orientation would be helpless at midday, and even at night constellations of stars might become invisible. Thus, says Kant, we ought to discard the geographical image as an incomplete approximation of what actually happens when we orientate ourselves. Provisionally, he proposes another mental image to replace that. In a dark chamber, he says, he can still feel ‘a difference concerning my own subject, namely, that between my right and left hands’.² At this point, however, he invites his listeners to recognise that this model is not sufficient for explaining what orientation really is, either. Orientation does not happen in seeing or bodily feeling of ‘sides’. We are only orientated when we are able to project from this sense of handedness or the perception of stellar constellations to a moral ordering of our actions. Ultimately, Kant concludes then, orientation is a function of thinking. True orientation is not derived from geographical knowledge or bodily senses; rather, our senses of space, and even, therefore, of ideas of left and right, are products of reason alone.

The aim of this volume is to follow Kant’s model in reverse: rather than seeking to find a spatially and historically agnostic notion of cosmopolitan order, we look at the way in which ideas of world order developed in specific historical and geographical situations. Cosmopolitan theory as a type of political imagination sees the ideal political order in terms of a congruence between good laws and the good life, whilst projecting this vision on a potentially global as well as universal scale. But this ideal typical construction is, arguably, itsel f a kind of projection. As Kant’s own reflections on orientation suggest, not only do ideas of a global political orientation emerge in particular settings, but the very notion of a global orientation is necessarily tied to subjective positions. We hope to reconstruct the kind of disorientation which Kant himself had described when imagining how constellations of stars or objects in a dark chamber can change or be rearranged. It is the confusion and the rearrangement of desired norms and expectations, not the imagined order, that we are interested in exploring further.³ Kant’s name looms large in ideal-typical lineages of cosmopolitanism . Without wishing to diminish his significance as one of the authors who gave the idea of cosmopolitanism a new status in modern political thought, we hope to draw attention to the politically varied and unstable historical contexts within which cosmopolitan ideas developed—including, but not restricted to, Kant’s own.⁴ The term ‘c osmopolitanism’ h as its own fortune history: it became popular in the European Enlightenment , even though the word κοσμοπολίτης, formed from ‘cosmos’, or universe, and ‘politēs’, or citizen, had been initially associated with a type of personal attitude rather than a political theory, and dated back to classical Greece—at least according to the 3rd century biographer of Diogenes the Cynic, Diogenes Laertius. Seen more broadly, the concept of ‘global citizenship’ or, more loosely, universal politics, can also be legitimately connected to the history of other periods, and to wider geographical regions . This volume concentrates on the period in which cosmopolitanism became a contested concept by placing it in different contexts through case studies reaching from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. A fuller representation of ancestry—which should not be confused with a complete representation —should include those forebears which do not intuitively appear related to, let alone liked by their progeny.⁵ Cosmopolitanism was neither a unified tradition of thought, nor was it ever bound by a common purpose.

Seeing conflicts as a type of contact zone between previously disconnected communities seemed to us to be a fertile ground for the study of cosmopolitanism . Surprisingly, this connection has only recently received scholarly attention from historians.⁶ Focusing on conflicts between some of the large European powers, including, notably, Britain , Russia and Prussia , we identify some of the eyes around which the storms of global conflicts as well as ideas of global world order revolved. There are plenty of approaches to the history of the globalisation of conflicts themselves, including studies in the fields of new international and transnational history , which we could build on. The present volume does not aim for geographical completeness in its representation of cosmopolitan thought in the context of conflict. However, new critical and global perspectives on cosmopolitan ideals have served as important springboards for this book.⁷ The ‘international turn’ in intellectual history has sensitised scholarship to the globalisation of ideas in a way that allows to get away from a Eurocentric understanding of cosmopolitanism without neglecting the European history of the concept.⁸ To use David Armitage’s expression, some of the ‘transformative’ historiographical movements of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century, such as a transnational approach to the history of ideas, along with new cultural histories of conflict, were harnessed to explore in more detail how a variety of cosmopolitan conceptions emerged in the increasingly global conflict zones .⁹

In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a conceit particularly among liberal political philosophers that cosmopolitanism was an ideology of peace.¹⁰ In the 1990s, the millennial sense of a ‘new epoch’, in Gerard Delanty’s words, renewed the status of Kant’s 1795 treatise as a seminal text for European political thought, ju st as a new era of democracy and world peace seemed to beck on.¹¹ After all, Kant’s Perpetual Peace contained propositions for dealing with what he calls humans’ paradoxical nature, consisting in their unsocial form of sociability that enables just regimes of law as a means to overcome conflict .¹² As subsequent critical readings of the cosmopolitan tradition and cosmopolitan ideals today have shown, however, the image of cosmopolitanism as exclusively an ideology of progress—and of Kant as its dogmatic progenitor— which early post-Cold War interpreters have project ed, is rather self-serving.¹³ Echoing the late Ulrich Beck , we can differentiate between the globalisation of ideas and the ‘cosmopolitanisation’ of political theories, a process which has eventually led to the development of more critical perspectives on the cosmopolitan ideal in i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. Conflicts as Cosmopolitan Moments
• 2. Between Empires
• 3. Cosmopolitanisms in the City
• Backmatter