We Are Not Living in an Era of Cosmopolitanism but an Era of Cosmopolitization

Most of the time, discussions are blocked by misunderstandings. ‘Cosmopolitization’ does not reflect the experience of a privileged minority, and treats that as the new reality of the world; it is not a view from a highly specific somewhere, namely the European Enlightenment;it is not intended to convey the shallow political message that ‘we all are connected’, nor does it normalize imperialism and existing global power relations.

I define the notion of ‘cosmopolitization’ as different modes of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of ‘the global other’ - ‘the global other’ is in our midst. ‘Cosmopolitization’ is descriptive not prescriptive; it is not about ethics and philosophy (‘cosmopolitanisms’, ‘multiversalisms’) but about facts. There is nothing as informative as a significant example to illustrate this: fresh kidneys.

The success of medical transplantation (and not its crisis!) has swept away its own ethical foundations and opened the floodgates to an occult shadow economy supplying the world market with ‘fresh’ organs. The excluded of the world, the economically and politically dispossessed – refugees, the homeless, street children, undocumented workers, prisoners, ageing prostitutes, cigarette smugglers, and petty thieves – are lured into selling their organs and this way becoming even physically included and socially excluded at the same time.

It fundamentally affects and transforms all kinds of intermediate institutions worldwide, like family, household, class, local cultures, ethnicity, generation, labor, elites, publics, schools, villages, cities, sciences, monotheistic religions, and nation-states. And a cosmopolitan turn in social sciences.

In the name of neo-liberal capitalism and the basic democratic right to unlimited choice, fundamental values of Western modernity – the sovereignty of the body, the human being and the meaning of life and death – are being sacrificed without anyone noticing this for what it is: a process that symbolizes our age of cosmopolitization.