Cosmopolitanism Rebooted? Theorizing a Post-National Solidarity

Cosmopolitanism has been mooted as a possible transcendence to the supposed demise of multicultural theorizing by some authors (Beck, 2007; Held, 2010).  Others have argued that its Western origins and bias limits its usefulness as universalizing theory to promote global solidarity (Pensky, 2007), while in contrast some have suggested that it is best complemented by a creation of solidarity “from below” (Kurasawa, 2004) or by focus on “everyday” forms of non-elite cosmopolitanism (Nava, 2002).

In this paper, I focus on criticisms of a free-floating cosmopolitanism, emphasizing an anthropology of the everyday worldliness viewed as a political project.  In other words, the elite form of cosmopolitanism’s chief weakness can be traced to its lack of a rootedness in the political struggles of working people in the face of economic and social injustice.  These cannot be remediated simply by foci of liberal multiculturalism’s tolerance and recognition but potentially only in a more radical projection of conviviality with otherness that recognizes the other in oneself (Hage, 2012).  This involves a conundrum that the newcomer “other” is already part of one’s community, not separate.  Therefore the question is not only of creating identities that surpass nations or borders, but ones which facilitate understandings of the self in communities replete with multicultural differences of post-national immigrant societies.

How to generalize such understanding across contexts is a key problem.  One avenue suggested is that the construction of identities compatible with global and transnational phenomena (as opposed to substantive and more national-oriented identities) promotes the type of relationality conducive to acceptance of global humanism (Pries, 2013).

However, another problem ensues as transnational imagined communities can also harbor anti-humanist attitudes and tendencies as illustrated both by exclusive conclaves (the super rich international elite, typified by Davos) or reactionary anti-immigrant populists, unified as political parties or in online groups.