Thinking Differently About Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Eccentricity, and the Globalized World [1 ed.] 1612050794, 9781612050799

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Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism

Interventions Series: Education, Philosophy, and Culture Edited by Michael A. Peters and Colin Lankshear Titles Available Subjects in Process: Diversity, Mobility, and the Politics of Subjectivity in the 21st Century Edited by Michael A. Peters and Alicia de Alba (2012) Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism By Sharon Todd (2009) Democracy, Ethics, and Education: A Thin Communitarian Approach By Mark Olssen (2007) Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future By Gert J. J. Biesta (2006) Education, Globalization, and the State in the Age of Terrorism Edited by Michael A. Peters (2005)

Thinking Differently about Cosmopolitanism Theory, Eccentricity, and the Globalized World Marianna Papastephanou

First published 2012 by Paradigm Publishers Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2012 , Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.



Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Papastephanou, Marianna. Thinking differently about cosmopolitanism : theory, eccentricity, and the globalized world / Marianna Papastephanou. p. cm. -- (Interventions: education, philosophy & culture) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61205-079-9 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Cosmopolitanism. 2. Globalization--Political aspects. I. Title. JZ1308.P365 2012 303.48’2--dc23 2012004641

ISBN 13 : 978-1-61205-079-9 (hbk) ISBN 13 : 978-1-61205-080-5 (pbk)

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism Eccentric Cosmopolitanism and a Globalized World A Critique of Globalist Positions Identity-versus-Difference Dilemmas Home, Homelessness, and the Cosmopolitan Self Who’s Cosmopolitan? Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism as Boundary Discourses The Importance of Conceptual Reconsiderations Revisiting Patriotism Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Justice Reflections on an All-Encompassing Conception of Cosmopolitanism

vii 1 9 27 45 70 87 111 134 156 180 202 219

Conclusion

240

References

250

About the Author

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Acknowledgments Let me thank here my friends outside academia for inspiring and encouraging me throughout the years. I am no less indebted to local and international academics (in particular, Anna Kouppanou, Maria Papaioannou, and Olga Papastamou) and to my students, my colleagues, and my friends in the Department of Education (among them, the new head of the department, Professor Mary Ioannides-Koutselini, as well as Charoula Angeli-Valanides, Nicos Valanides, Maria HeliophotouMenon, Zelia Gregoriou, Stavros Photiou, and Miranda Christou). I give special thanks to Michael Peters, who suggested that I write a book on cosmopolitanism about two years ago. I am grateful to him not only for providing the initial impetus but also for his overall support in making this idea a reality. Likewise, many thanks to Paradigm Publishers for agreeing to publish the book and for all the work done on their part (and many thanks to Jason Barry, associate acquisitions editor of Paradigm Publishers, for his guidance and encouragement). I am grateful to Professors Richard Smith, Paul Standish, Marius Felderhof, Bharath Sriraman, Ronald Sultana, Michalinos Zembylas, Tyson E. Lewis, Claudia Ruitenberg, David Bridges, Chris Winch, David Hansen, Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd, Cristina Cammarano, Marios Constantinou, Nick Burbules, Victor Roudometof, Simone Galea, Duncan Mercieca, Carmel Borg, Paul Gibbs, Mark Murphy, Ted Fleming, James Mensch, Alan Reid, Ian Davies, A. Britton, and H. Blee for offering me opportunities to contribute either to conferences or to collections of essays and thus to receive valuable responses to, and constructive criticism of, my ideas. I express my gratitude especially to Professors Christopher Norris, Karl-Otto Apel, Klas Roth, Leonard Waks, Alison Iredale, Lynn Fendler, vii

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Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, and Heinz-Uwe Haus for their friendship, their valuable comments, and our regular e-mail exchanges on several issues related to philosophy, art, and philosophy of education. Terry McLaughlin’s support during the early phase of my work in philosophy of education is always remembered with gratitude. The memory of his personality and friendship is as vivid as ever. Many thanks also to the following journals for giving my arguments a first airing in their pages and for permitting me to employ some of those arguments in an expanded or revised version in this book: Journal of Philosophy of Education (for the articles “Arrows Not Yet Fired: Cultivating Cosmopolitanism through Education” and “The Cosmopolitan Self Does Her Homework”); Educational Philosophy and Theory (for the articles “Globalization, Globalism and Cosmopolitanism as an Educational Ideal” and “Walls and Laws: Proximity, Distance and the Doubleness of the Border”); History of the Human Sciences (for the article “Kant’s Cosmopolitanism and Human History”); Educational Theory (for the article “Material Spectres: International Conflict, Disaster Management and Educational Projects”); Ethics and Education (for the article “Hesiod the Cosmopolitan: Utopian and Dystopian Discourse and Ethico-Political Education”); and Journal of Social Science Education (for the article “A New Vision of Europe: Infectious or Infected? The Position of Education”). I owe a huge debt to my family, whose loving and caring support cannot be overestimated. In mentioning my family, many tender thoughts come to mind about my grandfather, Panayotis, who spent most of his life sailing in local and foreign seas. His narrations of his journeys and of his childhood on his island in times that seem so distant and different from the present were always a source of excitement and wonder for me. He recounted these stories in the most engaging way, even until his peaceful death last December. I dedicate this book to his memory.

Introduction T

he book argues that a new conception of cosmopolitanism is needed and addresses this need by formulating a conception of cosmopolitanism as an “eccentric” ethico-political ideal. Such cosmopolitanism is eccentric in the sense that it decenters the self, cultivates centrifugal virtues, and questions the inflated concern for the globally enriched self. It does so for the sake of an as yet deflated concern for strong ethico-political demands that otherness makes upon the self. The demands in question will be presented in the book as higher than the currently fashionable ones of tolerance, respect, charity, duty, and moral/legal obligation. The why of discussing cosmopolitanism in fresh semantic-conceptual terms emerges through the following rationale: (1) the academic currency of diverse but often incompatible meanings of cosmopolitanism causes unease to many academics and students and creates the impression that cosmopolitanism is elastic enough to mean just about anything related to globality; (2) the reluctance to discuss some of those meanings frequently leads to uncritical dissemination of fashionable though facile and even undesirable conceptions of cosmopolitanism; (3) the overreliance on the modern understanding of cosmopolitanism and failure conceptually to go beyond it reintroduce pathologies (e.g., toxic universalism, Eurocentrism, developmentalism) that have been associated with modernity—or do not hold them sufficiently in check; and (4) the failure to handle conceptual requirements adequately consolidates and reproduces problems of needless internal contradiction or needless preoccupation with false dilemmas. Many approaches that omit conceptual work fall, precisely due to this omission, into the trap of contradictory uses of cosmopolitanism, for they employ it both   1

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as a negatively and as a positively meant concept often even within the very same text. And other approaches fail to navigate through drastic choices and unproductive tensions between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, among other things, because they lack the conceptual means for transcending terminological accounts that typically entail such dichotomous thinking. A more detailed explanation of the necessity for conceptual work is given in Chapter 1, and some further defense of it is provided in Chapter 8. However, it is important here to note that a turn to conceptual work on cosmopolitanism is not proposed as a mental exercise but rather as a springboard for a new outlook on political praxis. The necessity of conceptually revisiting cosmopolitanism is not simply semantically and logically compelling but also theoretically and practically crucial for the following reason. When the necessity of discussing what should count as cosmopolitanism is ignored, people tend to rely on established and easily digestible meanings of cosmopolitanism—the most popular being the perception of cosmopolitanism as mobility, border crossing, readiness to live and work abroad, and openness to anything foreign. Consequently, the borders that the self has to cross in order to merit the attribute “cosmopolitan” appear to be external (e.g., walls, checkpoints, frontiers). Against such an outlook on cosmopolitanism, this book claims that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal and, regrettably, traversable, raised at an early age, preserved through education, and carried along wherever one goes. The most important such internal barriers are not those that restrict one’s physical movement in space (e.g., fear of traveling, sedentary habits of life, emotional dependence on rootedness) but rather those values, mentalities, and motives for action (as well as their rationalizations) that accompany a self everywhere and underpin the self ’s uncosmopolitan treatment of others and of the environment. Because such internal barriers are cultivated from a very early age through upbringing, education, and acculturation, they are not easily shaken just by the self ’s mere exposure to alternative lifestyles that are noticeable outside her country. A truly demanding cosmopolitanism requires a capacity on the part of the self to critically reconsider the impact of her priorities and values on others

Introduction

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and nature; whether her actions and practices are ethico-politically defensible; and the extent to which the self should rethink her own intellectual, ethical, and emotive “boundaries” regardless of her mobility or rootedness in space. In other words, this book argues that a redefined cosmopolitanism requires nothing less than an ongoing decentering of the self and an education that enables such eccentricity. The book’s main argument is deployed in eleven chapters. Chapter 1 sets up and previews the direction that the book will take and forecasts the discussion of the “eccentric” conception of cosmopolitanism. It aims to cover the intellectual ground that works as a prelude to some of the arguments of the book. Chief among its concerns are to get to the heart of current debates on the desirability of cosmopolitanism that make the necessity for reconceptualization more compelling and to explain the “eccentric” in the proposed conception of cosmopolitanism by contrasting the standard illustration of cosmopolitanism through the geometrical image of concentric circles with the as yet nontheorized illustration of cosmopolitanism through the image of eccentric circles. It will be argued that the latter helps us illustrate a more complex relation of selfhood, multiple identities, and cosmopolitanism. However, a complex relation of selfhood and cosmopolitanism presupposes that the self who aspires to approximate, or is regulatively guided by, the cosmopolitan ideal perceives, to a sufficient extent, the distance that separates the ideal from the real. Against hasty identifications of cosmopolitan ideality with globalized reality, Chapter 2 discusses the world, which, in Jacques Derrida’s parlance, “has been shaken, fissured, and rearranged by all kinds of quakes” (2006, 408), as a globalized rather than as a cosmopolitan world. Hence, a first step toward a reformulation of cosmopolitanism involves a clarification of its difference from globalization and its many faces, from the global imaginary, and from globalism as the discourse of and about the globalized world. The chapter ends with the main positions of general globalism, which are traceable and informative in educational globalism too. A further step, one that is taken in Chapter 3, involves the kind of critique of globalism that eases the passage to formulating cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political ideal that presupposes a more complex outlook on current realities. For instance, the uniform, homogeneous

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treatment of the subjectivity that is influenced by globalization is deemed implausible. Globalist discourse is thus criticized regarding its main assumptions about how globalization affects unity and plurality, social and international justice, emancipatory enrichment of humanity, and protection of natural life. This critique is woven around issues of (1) the nation-state and territoriality, (2) diversity and homogeneity, (3) identity and rootlessness, and (4) equality and life options. It leads, finally, to the question of how to steer clear of both national or cultural organicism of original belonging and internationalist, globalist, and globalizing marketization. Chapter 4 translates the question with which the third chapter ends into the broader set of “identity-versus-difference” dilemmas that are often encountered in various current theorizations of cosmopolitanism. The discussion of “identity and difference politics” in this chapter aims to challenge the confines of the largely constructed opposition between these two edges of globalist discourse and to show that cosmopolitanism can take some necessary distance from both. The whole problem sometimes appears to boil down to a dichotomy of communal ethos versus strangeness—a dichotomy that informs much educational globalism too. The chapter responds to it by handling the cliché of the “cosmopolitan stranger of the world” in a way that drives home criticisms of both the unreflective communal affect and the reduction of strangeness to adaptability to life beyond borders—a reduction that operates at the expense of a more thorough challenge of the self ’s “internal” borders. The above paves the way for critiquing the conception of cosmopolitanism that is promoted by much educational philosophical globalism today, which I term “culturalist cosmopolitanism.” Such a critique is undertaken in Chapter 5 where the ideal self-description of the purportedly “cosmopolitan” self is exposed as a tacit prescription of an idealized global self, one that relies on stereotypical and domesticated otherness, a harmless, anodyne “strangeness,” which is, in the end, self-affirmative. As a contrast to such an ideal self-description, and in critical response to contemporary demands for illustrating cosmopolitanism through more embodied rather than abstract avatars, the chapter singles out historical figures who personify cosmopolitan existence in ethico-political rather than simply culturalist terms. The

Introduction

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ethico-political responsibility that makes higher demands upon the self than those (e.g., tolerance, respect for diversity) made by culturalist cosmopolitanism is thus premised (in a preliminary way) on a caustic and eccentric cosmopolitan idiom. Such an idiom shifts attention from the agreement to the treatment perspective on otherness and sees home and homelessness in a different light. Chapter 6 asks more explicitly the question that operates below the surface in Chapter 5. Who is cosmopolitan then? A head-on discussion of this question with an eye to a cosmopolitanism expected to decenter the self confronts popular self-images of the cosmopolitan that make things too easy for subjectivity. They do so because they function within the limits of a monologically understood cosmopolitanism and neglect the stronger, relational dimensions of cosmopolitanism. They thus turn cosmopolitanism into a badge, a self-bestowed attribute that secures for the self the positive moral image of cosmopolitanism being one’s accomplished reality, as shown in the declaration, “I am a cosmopolitan.” To challenge all this, the chapter makes the origin of cosmopolitanism recede further back into ancient times through reference to Democritus and suggests his “third-person” cosmopolitanism of wisdom and goodness as a line of thought that has not been mined yet. In so doing, the chapter deals with issues of intellectual, ethical, and emotional preconditions for a cosmopolitan encounter with otherness. Once the above issues are sorted out, Chapter 7 questions in more detail the neat categorizations of patriotism as the discourse of the border and cosmopolitanism as the discourse of the borderless. Using colonial expansion as an example, the chapter shows that instead of always being oppositional, the border and borderlessness can make common cause in violence. In such a case, the only way to dissolve this complicity is by realizing, along with the ethical restrictions to particularist attachment, the ethical limits to border crossing. In simpler words, when the set of values that motivates mobility remains unchallenged, the connection of mobility and cosmopolitanism is nothing more than wishful thinking. Because, as has already been said, borders and obstacles to cosmopolitanism are internal, the interplay of walls and laws, of border and order, is far more complex than usually assumed within standard accounts of cosmopolitanism. And if patriotism

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and cosmopolitanism, in their coarser, cruder, and more pernicious meanings, can make common cause in violence, they can also make common cause in justice—on the condition of their being conceived, internalized, and practiced otherwise. The ground that eccentric cosmopolitanism can cover regarding the ethico-political treatment of otherness and the accommodation of patriotic concerns leads us again to issues of conceptualization. These crop up in Chapter 8 in relation to some educational philosophical approaches that can serve as examples of how and why the reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism (by now quite extensively prepared) is much more than a semantic question or a concern of “armchair philosophy.” Failures to revisit cosmopolitanism and patriotism are now more concretely shown to place cosmopolitanism and patriotism in an unproductive and disabling tension. The complementarity of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, anticipated in Chapter 5 through the interplay of home and homelessness and investigated in Chapter 7 through the interplay of border and order, is now more clearly spelled out. As already indicated, however, the patriotism that can be reconciled with a reconceived cosmopolitanism invites its own share of conceptual elaboration. Chapter 9 attempts precisely this—yet only to a degree, since a more thorough reconceptualization of patriotism would sidetrack a book that focuses on cosmopolitanism. The degree to which patriotism is conceptually discussed is determined by the fact that the suggested compatibility of cosmopolitanism and patriotism presupposes that the meaning of not only the former but also the latter must be sufficiently clear and that such patriotism is not dangerously close to nationalism. To the extent that patriotism maintains an ethnic dimension, it is important to show that this “ethnic” element is neither the inoperative/folklore one of much globalist discourse nor the nationalist one of regressive political accounts—which is inimical to and incompatible with cosmopolitanism. Chapter 10 places cosmopolitanism and patriotism in a relation of set and subset. Once again, this raises issues about whether particularist identities are not by definition problematic and thus hostile to cosmopolitan identity. Once such objections are met, the task then becomes to meet objections of the opposite kind, that is, objections that target

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cosmopolitanism as either expendable (since its ground might be covered by a well-meant patriotism) or completely unrealistic. Answers to such quandaries are provided through a discussion of how justice authorizes the desirability of both patriotism and cosmopolitanism as distinct yet compatible ideals (and virtues). Within the suggested framework, obligations to locality and to otherness are seen through the lens of various aspects of justice and not through that of charity and aid. In this way, the ground is prepared for a redefinition and reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the significance of the diachronic and synchronic entanglement of peoples and the pending moral debts that such entanglement has effected— making the order of treatment more urgent and compelling than the order of agreement. Chapter 11 makes fall into place the nodal points of the ground of critique that the previous chapters have covered. The conception of eccentric cosmopolitanism now emerges as an all-encompassing set of ethico-politically significant aspects of relating to cosmos. The politics owed to cosmos is recast in light of the conception of cosmopolitanism as an ideal of love and care for the whole world; responsibility and accountability for individual and collective human impact on human and nonhuman existence; sensitivity and responsiveness to historical debts pending among peoples and cultures; epistemic and existential openness to cultural alterity; and economic/practical initiatives and measures for world survival and redirection. The various aspects of cosmopolitanism are then grouped in monological and relational categories, and their significance (and role) for cosmopolitanism is decided accordingly. All in all, an eccentric cosmopolitanism requires an all-encompassing synthesis of relational and monological aspects in interplay. The book tasks the ethico-political with the re-visioning of politics, that is, of polis, the second component of cosmopolis. But this does not mean that the first component, that is, cosmos, need not be seen otherwise. For it is typically treated in most contemporary literature as the opposite of chaos and equated with order. The book concludes with objections to this treatment of the term “cosmos” and by placing cosmos in a more complex relation with chaos and order. The opposite

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of cosmos, the Other that should be excluded from an otherwise allencompassing ideal, is only ethical obtuseness and cruelty, the internal borders that separate the supposedly mixed-up, modern world from its created underworld and push the planet to the brink of disaster.

Chapter One

Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism and relevant notions—that is, notions

that appear either as synonymous or allied with, or even inimical to, cosmopolitanism (e.g., globalization, universalism, multiculturalism, citizenship, patriotism, nationalism)—are widely discussed in philosophy of education and, more generally, in educational studies. There has been a vast literature on such topics, deriving from diverse and often contradictory accounts of what cosmopolitanism is about. The diversity of sources, the complexity of associated themes, and the richness of diverging perspectives are often experienced as disconcerting by many readers and researchers, who feel unable to locate in most of the available theoretical production an incentive for a discussion in fresh terms of what cosmopolitanism might be; of what related, alternative, or even opposed conceptions might involve; and of why cosmopolitanism might constitute an educational ideal. Therefore, the abundance and proliferation of material related to cosmopolitanism invites conceptual discussion and requires some work in the direction of crucial clarifications. This book attempts some such discussion and clarifications. However, against the perfunctory character that such an attempt might take, or be expected to take, the challenge that the book confronts is more critical rather than introductory-descriptive. The challenge is to put forward a specific reworking of cosmopolitanism that breaks with some problematic, though still quite fashionable, accounts of it. The need for new conceptual work is all the more pressing now that the political exploitation, the facile use, the confounding, modish ubiquity of   9

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terms such as cosmopolitanism and globalization (or their contrast and, more rarely, their coupling with patriotism or resurgent nationalisms), and the academic capitalization on them are widespread and, mostly, uncritically received. Such “utility” (and “utilization”) of these terms makes their meaning and their relation extremely familiar but, at the same time, extremely unclear to many students and academics. But even if the above complications were not operative, the necessity for conceptual work would still be there for many scholarly reasons. For example, should we teach (or, more subtly, cultivate) cosmopolitanism? A no answer usually reflects an identification (or a strong connection) of cosmopolitanism with Eurocentrism and expansionism. Defenders of cosmopolitanism have often confronted, and responded to, charges such as elitism, rationalism, and utopianism (Lu 2000); coldness and aloofness (Nussbaum and Cohen 1996); and uncritical universalism, moral rootlessness, disguised ethnocentrism, and elitist aestheticism (Hansen 2010). Now, if we opt for a yes answer to the question about teaching cosmopolitanism, will that mean that we must focus on preparing students to live and work across borders? Or is cosmopolitanism something else, something not quite identical to adaptability to unfamiliar contexts and not exhausted in tolerance of harmless cultural difference? From another perspective, should we associate cosmopolitanism exclusively with global crises and imagine it as a solution to political world problems? In that case, do we not presuppose a perception of cosmopolitanism as a reaction to crises, thus rendering it parasitic upon “rupture, strife and fragmentation” (Hansen 2008b, 206)? Should we rather view it as a cognitive ideal of human open-mindedness and broadening of one’s horizons, regardless of the global condition and the inequalities of power that usually invite the association of cosmopolitanism with politics? Do we have to make any such drastic choices, or is it possible to work out a more comprehensive account of cosmopolitanism? Further, does the teaching of cosmopolitanism mean that the cultivation of patriotism should be more limited or is perhaps illsuited to a cosmopolitan curriculum? Another yes here would rely on the assumption that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are either antagonistic or even mutually exclusive ideals. A no answer, one that

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makes patriotic teaching either necessary or at least permissible in a cosmopolitan curriculum, demands some explanation of the implicit assumption that cosmopolitanism and patriotism are compatible or even complementary. Both possibilities enjoy wide textual support in recent political philosophical sources, but the ultimate and deepest response to them depends on what the meaning of the juxtaposed terms might allow or preclude. Surely, the choice is not always between yes or no answers. But even a qualified educational welcome of an idea (or an overcautious and undecidable stance) does not avoid the semantic challenge and its theoretical and practical implications. Then again, the whole issue is not one of a simple redefinition of a term. Any understanding of cosmopolitanism, to the extent that the latter is presented as an ideal to be followed, involves both normative and descriptive levels. In simpler words, it involves an urge, an exhortation, toward an Ought that must guide, regulate, and redirect action if a specific, desirable situation is to be approximated, and it involves a description, an account of the self, the world, and the current situation, that justifies the necessity for, and the desirability and feasibility of, such redirection against dangerous alternatives. For instance, when Sharon Todd claims that “cosmopolitanism as a set of ideas that seek more peaceful forms of living together on a global scale is in need of a theoretical framework that faces directly the difficulties of living in a dissonant world” (2010, 216), she actually couples a specific normativity (the sought-for peaceful forms of living together on a global scale) with the kind of descriptive accounts (the specificities of living in a dissonant world) that protect that normativity from turning into its undesirable double, that is, into a facile notion of peace that ignores conflict and dissent in a multidimensional reality. After all, more peaceful forms of living can be the ideal of that old order that is largely known as Pax Romana or even of a new order that resembles it. For any normative discussion of peace not to slide into Eurocentric, toxic universalism,1 a new description of the world and a new specification of what counts as true peace are needed. As we will see below, some authors (for instance, trends drawing from Michel Foucault or from poststructuralism and often from

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postcolonial studies) use the term “cosmopolitanism” negatively, projecting on its ideal and normative plane the descriptive ground on which the modern Western world attempted to base cosmopolitanism. In other words, they identify principles of universality and cosmopolitanism with the kind of universalizing aspirations upheld by the so-called Western world in its most expansionist and imperialist moments. They thus incriminate normative cosmopolitanism as such. Many others leave the modern descriptive basis untouched while defending and promoting cosmopolitan principled normativity, as if it were independent from and unaffected by the faulty descriptive level. Others perform changes in the normative or in the descriptive level that range from minimal to drastic modifications. Finally, others jettison the normative level for the sake of a—supposedly—purely pragmatic cosmopolitanism qua globalized reality. The position that this book defends operates at both the normative and descriptive levels, as it views the semantic reworking of cosmopolitanism in the light of elaborations on the ethical vision of cosmopolitanism and in the light of accounts of the self, the world, and current global realities. The recently revived interest in cosmopolitanism has created, in my opinion, three major tendencies. One is to understand cosmopolitanism in negative terms as identical with a toxic universalism. Another is to understand cosmopolitanism positively, but in a pragmatic way, as mobility, rootlessness, openness to different lifestyles, and detachment from the nation-state. This tendency typically associates cosmopolitanism with a particular class of people (notice the uncosmopolitan exclusivism here), as becomes obvious in the following citation: “The new professional-managerial groups have become less concerned about national interests and turned their back on the nation-state: they display cosmopolitan tendencies” (Isin and Wood 1999, 101). In this citation, those who display cosmopolitan tendencies are new professional-managerial groups, that is, footloose and rootless people of a specific social position; by implication, those who may not belong in such groups or who may be concerned about national interests (even in a benign way) are by definition excluded from displaying cosmopolitan tendencies. Thus cosmopolitanism becomes an attitude of some and not, potentially, of all people—unless, of course, one can

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show that all people may enter the cohorts of managerial classes or that all will eventually abandon any interest in the nation-state in order to qualify as “cosmopolitans.” The third major tendency also affirms cosmopolitanism, but it differs from the second in adding to pragmatic cosmopolitanism cultural and legal or political and ethical dimensions. Some approaches clearly side with the negative option, while many others side with the positive options. Several treatments of cosmopolitanism waver between the positive and the negative, and some others hope to combine the two by recruiting the notion of aporia, or productive tension. In some cases, the (regrettably) sweepingly negative usage of cosmopolitanism can be explained as a reaction to very true and tangible complicities of self-proclaimed cosmopolitans of imperial times. For instance, Antonio Gramsci dismissed cosmopolitanism because, to him, the “cosmopolitan” implied a “superficial or ‘picturesque’ attachment to a cultural miscellany based on empire” (Brennan 1989, 16). Even today, that is, long after the formal collapse of the imperial political configuration, for some theorists, “cosmopolitanism” is one of those words that retain imperialist traces and should, therefore, be jettisoned. For Paul Gilroy, cosmopolitanism was “entangled with and tested by the expansion of Europeans into new territories and compromised, if not wholly discredited, by the consolidation and management of the resulting imperial orders” (quoted in Knowles 2007, 3).2 But the outcome of such a sweeping incrimination of cosmopolitanism is often self-contradiction. Sam Knowles shows this with regard to Gilroy, but the criticism is pertinent to many other current positions too. In various instances, Gilroy makes a facile use of the very term that he has rejected; to avoid this contradiction, he requires a revised or redefined term. As he does not follow this option, Gilroy is “left without an alternative structure with which to strengthen his replacement for ‘multiculturalism’”; he is thus forced “to employ the previously-criticised term in entirely un-critical reference to ‘cosmopolitan conviviality’ (Gilroy 9) [and] in addressing ‘provocative cosmopolitan questions’ (Gilroy 18)” (Knowles 2007, 3). Nevertheless, the complicities of cosmopolitan discourse (or, at least, of the descriptive grounds on which it was based) are justifiably

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chastised by friends and foes alike. One cannot ignore the homogenizing universalism and the developmentalism that accompanied modern imperial conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The fallacy of developmentalism consisted “in thinking that the path of Europe’s modern development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture” (Dussel 1993, 68) because it supposedly exemplified the natural process by which a superior civilization deployed itself. This sense of superiority obliged modernity “to ‘develop’ (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations” (Dussel 1993, 75). It produced, among many other atrocious realities, “civilizing heroes” and their conquered, colonized victims. One might object that such rationales underpinned the universalistic cosmopolitanism of other times. Indeed, “at the request of newly independent states, the language of civilisation was removed from international law” (Tully 2008, 26). But, as James Tully remarks, it was removed only to be immediately “replaced with the language of modernisation, marketisation, democratisation and globalisation with the same grammatical structure, signifying universal processes of development and a single endpoint of modern citizenship and its institutions” (2008, 26). The concern about undesirable vestiges of older outlooks on cosmopolitanism such as the above is evident in many contemporary endeavors to defend cosmopolitanism and see it through a less abstract-universalistic lens. Anthony Appiah’s effort to distance his cosmopolitanism from humanism reflects the extent to which the charge of a homogenizing universalism has gained popularity and infiltrated most globalist discourse. He states that it would be wrong to conflate cosmopolitanism and humanism “because cosmopolitanism is not just the feeling that everybody matters. For the cosmopolitan also celebrates the fact that there are different local human ways of being.” By contrast, Appiah continues, humanism “is consistent with the desire for global homogeneity. Humanism can be made compatible with cosmopolitan sentiments, but it can also live with a deadening urge to uniformity” (1997, 621). This neat categorization invites the objection that, if cosmopolitanism can be purified of modernist undertones of uniformity, then why would one exclude humanism from such purification? After all,

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humanism has also been a term of rich and diverse semantic content throughout history, some of which could resist the desire for global homogeneity. Besides, though it is true that cosmopolitanism is often conflated with the pernicious side of humanism, especially in some Foucault-inspired discussions of it, more often than not, it is cosmopolitanism as such that causes unease. For instance, within educational contexts, such an understandable unease about the very employment of the term has been expressed by Thomas Popkewitz (2008). However, in Popkewitz’s book we come across the same problem that we mentioned above in relation to Gilroy’s position. The recourse to the same term to denote desirable and undesirable meanings—for lack of an alternative term that would be tasked only with signifying the cultural theses of modernity—backfires because it reinforces what it sets out to criticize. Inevitably, the conclusion is that if we wish to talk about cosmopolitanism, all we have to rely on is the specific modern Western conception that now acquires transcendental value; that is, it becomes declared an inescapable human constant, the condition of possibility of any inclusive globality, so to speak. Therefore, all we can do is be aware of its duplicities and be cautious regarding its dangers. However, as I shall argue, when dealing with ideals, we need a sense of surplus, of a normativity that goes beyond sedimented meanings that the ideal may have taken at various times. This surplus helps us resist the transcendentalization of the specific, historical meaning of an ideal and urges us to redefine and reapproach it. The toxic universalistic and developmentalist ideology that passed for cosmopolitanism burdened the politically weak subject (the dominated, the marginalized, the under- or nonprivileged, the “lagging behind”) with the task of changing so as to meet the strong’s standards. Unlike it, a self-reflective cosmopolitanism should place demands on the politically strong subject,3 expecting higher levels of awareness of its global historical and contemporary responsibilities and redirection of its values and priorities. To distinguish the former cosmopolitanism from what cosmopolitanism can and should become, we need a specific term for denoting the wrongheaded, expansionist cosmopolitanism. To this end, I recommend the term “universalization” because it reflects more accurately the emphasis on the kind of universalism that the

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modern era favored and the processual character (consider the ending “-ization” of the term) that toxic universalism acquired as a modern practice. As to why the term “cosmopolitanism” should not become synonymous with modern expansionism, it is simply that toxic universality as a process of expansion is not inherent in the “cosmos” and “polis” components of cosmopolitanism for reasons that will become apparent throughout this book. Hence, I suggest that we maintain the normativity that accompanies the term “cosmopolitanism” from antiquity to the present by distinguishing it from the “universalization” that the cultural theses of modernity have favored. Following Zygmunt Bauman (1998), I take the term “universalization”—by now fallen into disuse and by and large forgotten—as encompassing concepts such as “civilization,” “development,” “convergence,” “consensus,” and many other modern ideas, and as conveying the modern, Western hope, the intention and the determination of ordermaking. Those concepts were coined on the rising tides of modern powers and the modern intellect’s ambitions. They announced the will to make the world different from what it was and better than it was, and to expand the change and the improvement to global, species-wide dimensions. It also declared the intention to make the life conditions of everyone everywhere, and so everybody’s life chances, equal. (1998, 38–39)

I believe that, thus defined, universalization covers the same conceptual ground as Popkewitz’s negatively used “cosmopolitanism,” while being temporally more accurate to account for modern thought and normatively less overarching than the ideal of cosmopolitanism. And, as David Hansen asserts, not all conceptions of cosmopolitanism project “a prior human essence to which persons must conform.” In the wake of this, there can be a cosmopolitanism outside the kind of universalism that is understood as “a unified, aprioristic, and unquestioning stance regarding such matters as human nature and reason” (Hansen 2010, 161).4 Therefore, the line of reformulation of cosmopolitanism that this book will follow views cosmopolitanism as an ideal about humanity’s relation to itself and to nature that comprises ethical, legal, political, historical, cultural, emotional, aesthetic, economic, and cognitive aspects that denaturalize established worldviews. This cosmopolitanism

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is primarily about a responsible, lawful, loving, thoughtful treatment of the whole cosmos. Inclusion enters the picture through the word “whole,” a word that extends responsibility and obligation to an unlimited number of entities affected by human action and/or by the vagaries of time. But to have a cosmopolitanism worthy of the name, such an inclusion must be taken for granted, and the emphases and tensions must concern only what counts as obligation, how responsibility must be construed, and the level of awareness of historical debt that burdens (principally though not exclusively) those who have been very active in creating inequalities, global asymmetries, hunger, poverty, destruction, and other pathologies inflicted upon others or upon nature. By contrast, when inclusion is put center stage (e.g., as happens in the case of the No Child Left Behind educational controversy), the issue seems to be that we, the “advanced” and “progressive” of the world, set the various standards, and we are kind enough not to leave anybody out; in other words, we wish everybody to catch up. Worse, as Popkewitz shows, what lies behind such emphases on inclusion is more often than not a very uncosmopolitan effort to contain difference in order to normalize it and hold it in check. Certain universalizing educational practices and measures stem from a cultural territory marked by fears about failures of cognitive utility and procedural reform to redeem totality through the incorporation of alterity. In turn, the territory of alterity causes fear that the “civilized” space is threatened by the modes of living of the disadvantaged and risk-prone Others (Popkewitz 2008, 167). When inclusion becomes the most central stake of cosmopolitanism, we have already moved away from the more demanding cosmopolitanism for which the issue is not to identify and stigmatize the excluded in the moralist and condescending effort to include her or to eliminate risky diversity by turning all alterity into a liberally tolerable and harmless difference. The issue for a normatively more elaborate cosmopolitanism is rather to highlight and debate global ethico-political responsibility. This book focuses its conceptual effort on this issue. To do so, it draws and emphasizes distinctions between globalization, globalism, and cosmopolitanism, and it attempts critical work on some widespread conceptions of cosmopolitanism.

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Beyond older, universalist conceptions and reconceptualized in a multicultural light, the cosmopolitanism that is now largely endorsed has come to be seen as a glorification of diversity and a celebration of global mobility and border crossing. In this way, cosmopolitanism is theorized in proximity to, perhaps even identification with, globalization. Within such a context, a crucial point on which most theoretical efforts converge is the primacy of culturalist cosmopolitanism, that is, a cosmopolitanism that concentrates only on challenging fixed cultural boundaries and that neglects any other possible tasks that would fall into its theoretical province (e.g., issues of redistribution of wealth and global equality). Thus, I describe the notion of cosmopolitanism that is widely held in much political philosophy, cultural studies, and philosophy of education as “culturalist” cosmopolitanism. This kind of cosmopolitan discourse operates within the confines of a more encompassing theoretico-political discourse that revolves around globalization, a discourse that can be termed “globalist.” In a nutshell, the globalized world comprises, among other things, a self-referential discourse that glorifies cosmopolitanism and purports to uphold it as an educational ideal. Yet, there are contradictions in this globalized world, just as in any other world: precisely when there is so much glorification of mobility and cosmopolitanism, things are not as one might expect in actual educational systems. The critical and cosmopolitan civic discourses “are marginalized in the curricular texts that define the standards and prominent meanings of citizenship taught in schools” (Knight Abowitz and Harnish 2006, 657). Even more threatening in my view, however, is the tendency to transfer into educational contexts the conception of cosmopolitanism that enjoys currency within globalism. This tendency enhances an educational globalism that, despite its merits, makes common cause with the culturalist and more generally undemanding notion of cosmopolitanism. Among other things, then, this book aims to challenge the educational dependence upon dominant trends within globalism and to suggest some enrichment of the notion, scope, and significance of educational cosmopolitanism. The book approaches globalization as an empirical reality (accomplished as well as in process) that comprises global facticity, the

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set of everyday experiences that make globalization constantly felt as an empirical phenomenon and the imaginary that reflects the varying reception of such a facticity. Globalization is viewed as an empirical reality that is in a complex relation to its corresponding globalist discourse and at a considerable distance from a more demanding cosmopolitan ideal. I argue that failure to grasp the distinctions between globalization, globalism, and cosmopolitanism derives from mistaken identifications of the Is with the Ought and leads to naive and Eurocentric glorifications of the potentialities of globalization. In the end, while culturalist cosmopolitanism and its educational expression purport to serve multiculturalism, inclusion, and diversity, they turn out to reproduce exclusions, divisions, and normalizations of global inequalities. Conversely, drawing the appropriate distinctions helps us articulate a more critical approach to contemporary cultural, economic, and political phenomena and to reconsider the current place and potential role of education within the context of global affairs. From this perspective, antagonistic impulses cultivated by globalization and by some globalist discourse (consolidating binary oppositions such as rootedness versus rootlessness, patriotism versus cosmopolitanism, and so forth) are singled out and targeted via a radicalization of educational orientations. Current positive receptions of cosmopolitanism are also open to criticisms that invite some reworking of the semantic content and scope of the term that today enjoys so much popularity. The positive treatment of cosmopolitanism that rests on a pragmatic conception derives from an uncritical and undertheorized adoption of the everyday use of the term, which denotes mobility, glorification of travel, eclectic responsiveness to difference, adaptability, rootlessness, and development of qualifications that guarantee success all over a globalized world. “Propelled and defined by media and market, cosmopolitanism today involves not so much an elite at home, as it does spokespersons of a kind of perennial immigration, valorised by a rhetoric of wandering, and rife with allusions to the all-seeing eye of the nomadic sensibility” (Brennan 1989, 2). The more philosophical, positive treatment of cosmopolitanism sets out from a pragmatic cosmopolitanism to add to it some more demanding preconditions. Those vary from expectations

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that the cosmopolitan self be open to and respectful of cultural diversity, as well as mindful of international legality, down to expectations that the cosmopolitan be an informed, caring, and responsible global citizen. Many such philosophical approaches adapt the notion to new givens, drawing from the philosophical tradition but couching it in a more adequate and updated philosophical idiom. The former lighthearted, pragmatic sense of cosmopolitanism can be encountered in the work of many contemporary and influential political philosophers, and it may underpin even a legalist focus on cosmopolitanism. The philosophically deeper—though in no way immune to criticism—sense of cosmopolitanism can be found in Martha Nussbaum’s renegotiation of stoicism and in neo-Kantian and post-Kantian political philosophies that pay more attention to the deontological rather than the legalist interpretation of Kantian cosmopolitanism. However, even this kind of cosmopolitanism must spell out its distance from a “tourist,” culturalist conception. It must also show that it does not rest on obsolete philosophical descriptions of the self.5 Then it must prove that it does not express the concerns of a paternalistic and elitist small group of intellectuals (Lu 2000). The latter objection can be met, I believe, by reworking the conception of cosmopolitanism in such a way that it becomes more relevant to, and approachable by, the masses. This presupposes that cosmopolitanism must acquire a meaning that rescues it from standing or falling on the grounds of one’s wealth, academic attainment, social capital, and other such factors that facilitate global mobility yet in no way guarantee truly cosmopolitan feelings, attitudes, and responsibility toward cosmos. Then again, the strong theoretical-normative element in such a meaning of cosmopolitanism might attract objections concerning a possible omission of a more embodied, practical, and everyday cosmopolitanism. It has been noted that “discourses envision cosmopolitanism as a primarily philosophical, moral, or cultural perspective; however, critics have recently called for a more material analysis of the way cosmopolitanism is performed in people’s everyday lives” (Germann-Molz 2006, 2). What is now elevated to global exemplarity is the cosmopolitan “not just as a political or cultural figure of global allegiance, but also as an embodied subject with a corporeal disposi-

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tion toward the world as a whole” (Germann-Molz 2006, 1, emphasis mine). My initial response to such objections to theory and normativity is that the words that I have just italicized give the impression of political cosmopolitan selfhood as an accomplished reality that needs now only to become somewhat more energetic and fit. I find the assumptions underlying this impression, as well as the emphasis on this kind of corporeality, too optimistic regarding the merits of rootlessness and unjustifiably lopsided in favor of contemporary, “practical” manifestations of “cosmopolitanism.” Hence, in this book, I provide an alternative to such a construal of cosmopolitan embodied selfhood by reference to some neglected, but no less real and embodied, figures of rooted/ rootless existence. I do not explore their fitness to travel or their traveling to fit into the category of the “cosmopolitan” but rather their ethico-political commitments that drove them to specific actions that are exemplary of cosmopolitan life. Keeping in mind the idea that “the traveller’s inoculated body becomes a cosmopolitan body that literally tolerates and is open to difference and danger” (Germann-Molz 2006, 13) as a background assumption to which the alternative examples that I shall be using might be contrasted, we will see that the actions required by normative cosmopolitanism are not quite risk-free. In fact, the lives of the figures whom I discuss in this book involved far realer risks than those associated with world traveling. And they undertook these risks for the sake of others rather than for the sake of fitting into contemporary fashionable ideal self-descriptions. This leads to an important difference between monological and relational conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The former concentrate on individual well-being and enrichment of one’s experience; the latter concentrate on human entanglement (I borrow the term from Paul Ricoeur [1996, 9–10]) and on the ethico-political issues that such an entanglement raises. To expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches to planetary movement, I then employ the example of colonial border crossing and its rationalization. Utilizations of claims to universality have often been sheer rationalizations of much deeper-laid motivations for expansion. Though this has not always been the case, it has not been rare, nevertheless, to embark on “civilizing” expeditions not out of a supposed faith in universalism but, in truth, out of faith in profit

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and macho usability of everything. And, ironically, that was perhaps the only genuine connection between the expansionist mentality and universalism (i.e., those with such a mentality saw everything as exploitable). Whenever such mentalities are operative, the obstacles to cosmopolitanism are not external (e.g., frontiers, laws, and regulations) but rather internal (i.e., intellectual, emotional, and ethical). Such obstacles, such walls, should be demolished, while the walls and laws (both the internalized and the internationally externally imposed) that block exploitative expansion should be fortified. To respond thoughtfully to such a complex interplay of walls and laws, the agreement perspective on cosmopolitanism is insufficient, as it emphasizes only how the “we” and “Others” meet as interlocutors. Therefore, cosmopolitanism also requires a treatment perspective that raises questions and demands regarding what is owed to otherness (human and nonhuman). The attention to the ethico-political and intellectual significance of the annihilation of space and time restrictions (and the interplay of walls and laws) relativizes the drastic choice between cosmopolitanism and patriotism that is imposed by many current theories. One way of dismantling the fundamental cosmopolitanism-versus-patriotism opposition is by showing that, upon closer inspection, the two ideals are not as mutually exclusive as they have so far been presented in much of the relevant literature. Cosmopolitanism and patriotism may coexist within a subject or a culture in a normatively undesirable way (i.e., as secret accomplices in the promotion of nongeneralizable interests and their imposition on other cultures).6 If we analyze critically each pair and each pole of the basic opposition and unveil some hidden possibilities, we realize that the status and implications of each term are not as neat and clear-cut as their proponents assume. This allows us to show that cosmopolitanism and patriotism can make common cause not only for the worse but also for the better. Thus, I argue that we should take up the challenge of elaborating on the possibility of a more cosmopolitically sensitive education, where a renegotiated cosmopolitanism is reconciled with a renegotiated patriotism that is complementary rather than inimical to it. By employing as a springboard Heraclitus’s dictum that “the citizens must defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city,” I sketch an account of patriotism that is (1) compatible with, and conducive to, cosmopolitanism, (2) mindful of the duplicity of the

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interplay of proximity and distance, and (3) resistant to nationalism. This account is later developed as a revisiting of patriotism. Such are roughly the steps that will lead us toward a reconceptualized cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitanism will be expounded as an allencompassing, eccentric cosmopolitanism that relies on a different account of the “political” in cosmo-politics and touches upon issues of justice from a treatment perspective rather than from an intercultural modus vivendi consensus and agreement perspective. Yet, not only the “polis” component of cosmopolitanism will be problematized. The “cosmos” component of cosmopolitanism should not be viewed as a supposedly uniform, taken-for-granted, and contestation-free notion. After all, those problematic theses of modernity described above with the term “universalization” emphasized order and harmony of a kind. Can cosmos—having modern connotations of order and harmony—be differentiated from such kindred notions? Therefore, the book concludes with a brief response to such a possible objection. The eccentric cosmopolitanism promoted in this book is not at odds with any of the particularist, multiple identities that make up the self as a seductively, always surprisingly, perhaps unfathomably, nondeterminate and complex existence. It rather relates to those identities as a set would do to subsets. But precisely how it does so is a separate matter in itself that can only be indicated in this book rather than argued out. Some suggestions here in this chapter are nevertheless necessary—all the more so because they will explain the why of “eccentric” both in the book title and in the reformulated cosmopolitanism. Let us tackle this with reference to concentric and eccentric circles. Consider the images in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Cosmopolitan geometrical metaphoricity.

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The mathematical metaphor of a set (cosmopolitanism) and a subset (particularist identity, e.g., familial, feminist, patriotic) is compatible with both images in Figure 1.1. However, cosmopolitanism had been associated with concentric circles of human attachment to collectivities by the Stoic Hierocles and remained thus illustrated from late antiquity onward. The first circle, that of human self-perception, is followed by ever broader circles that include the family, the extended familial milieu, the small community of the village or town, the country, and so on, up to the broadest circle, which is that of the whole of humankind. The ethical vision involved in the image of the concentric circles is the shortening of the ethical distance that separates the self from others. In other words, the task is to bring others, as much as possible, within reach of ethical concern and care. Today, this association has been made by, and dispersed in the cosmopolitan literature through, Nussbaum’s employment of Hierocles’s ideas (Nussbaum and Cohen 1996, 9). To my knowledge, to date cosmopolitanism still has not been associated with the image of eccentric circles. I introduce this association because I believe that it can be useful to theories of allegiance to collectivities and to cosmopolitan discourse. Cosmopolitanism as the outer circle of human allegiance is preserved in both cases (concentric and eccentric) for reasons that will become obvious in the course of this book. But the fact that eccentric circles are not drawn around the same center offers some new possibilities for illustrating the relation of cosmopolitanism with multiple identities. For instance, it can illustrate cases of multiple allegiances (all of them being subsets of the all-encompassing cosmopolitan allegiance), which become politically activated even when they do not have the self as their common center (e.g., one does not need to be a woman in order to be a feminist). Eccentric circles as figures of particular allegiances can also disrupt the harmonious and proportionate geometrical order that concentric circles evince and thus better accommodate the more dissonant, unruly, and fluctuating character of real human attachments to particularities. They can also make room for the complexity of a political philosophy that does not take the self for granted.

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Let me explain this with a very brief contrast of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism with Frantz Fanon’s insights.7 While Nussbaum takes the self as a given and unproblematic center whose ethical gap from distant others should be narrowed, Fanon showed that resistance to colonialism was, among other things, a subjectification process against the selfdenying impact that colonialism had on the colonized. The identity of the colonized had to be redeemed from the confusions that colonialism had so methodically and ruthlessly cultivated (or “employed” in a less intentional sense of governmentality) in order to keep control over the colonies. In other words, instead of holding a uniform and nonproblematized conception of the self of all cosmopolitans-to-be, Fanon exposed that the self of the dominated was not a given, a stable center from which all else moved outward. It was an identity that had suffered attacks and damages and that, precisely because of this, had then to be healed, restored, and reconstructed through national insurrection as a first, yet not final, stage and through an enlargement of consciousness as an end point (that would save the colonized from the risk of remaining a people trapped in a prolonged past). The image of eccentric circles can do more justice to this possible road to cosmopolitanism, I believe, than that of concentric circles. To conclude, cosmopolitanism may not just be anti-Eurocentric and nonanthropocentric but also concentric and eccentric and, thereby, multicentric. Cosmopolitanism as concentric may start from one’s “center,” move outward, and decenter the self. However, cosmopolitanism as eccentric can also signify the theoretical decentering that is sometimes required if we are to gain insight into a cosmopolitan call addressed to all—and not just to a specific group of people or specific selfhoods. More than that, it should describe the task of abandoning one’s comfort zones in order to be drawn into new ethico-political spheres where issues previously unexplored now matter—and matter intensely and profoundly. For instead of remaining a static point of all reference, the center in eccentric cosmopolitanism shifts and becomes displaced, depending on the thematization and urgency of obligation, on the ethico-political demands and challenges that become activated by various aspects of life and relationality.

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Notes 1. I borrow the terms “toxic universalism” and “nontoxic universalism” from Enslin and Tjiattas (2009). 2. For the original source of the quotation, see Gilroy (2004, 4). 3. That is, the subject who is more capable of interventions, the one who has profited and still profits from years of domination over others, the one who enjoys undeserved and disproportional benefits, and so forth. 4. I shall only sporadically return to the issue of the common human nature throughout the book because I have already explained my position on it in Papastephanou (2002b). 5. For instance, it must show how it responds to charges that derive from accounts that give antagonism ontological citizenship and establish it as an inescapable human reality upon which cosmopolitanism is destined to founder (Papastephanou 2002a, 2009). 6. Theoretically, this is evident also when tacit ethnocentric stances are discernible even in the writings of the most antipatriotist liberals or the most antinationalist poststructuralists. 7. This example came out of a classroom discussion during which my postgraduate students, to whom I am indebted, raised the issue of the different accounts of the self involved in Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism and in Fanon’s redemptive politics.

C h a p t e r Tw o

Eccentric Cosmopolitanism and a Globalized World The title of this chapter is “Eccentric Cosmopolitanism and

a Globalized World.” To some extent, the title of the book also reflects this conjunction of cosmopolitanism and the globalized world. As the word “and” and the conjunction it effects show, the cosmopolitanism theorized throughout the book is neither identified with nor subjugated to the empirical reality of globalization discussed in this chapter. This already reveals that, while the contemporary world is taken into account, the conception of cosmopolitanism that the book introduces does not depend on globalization; even less is it included in it, directed by it, or answerable to it. For instance, an eccentric cosmopolitanism in a globalized world would be a cosmopolitanism contained within a current situation that might demarcate the ideal’s reach and scope and dictate its priorities. Despite its importance as a separate sociotheoretical issue, any such prepositional connection would give the impression of an axiomatic subordination of the cosmopolitan Ought to the Being (the so-called empirical Is) within which it would be placed. It would also obscure the fact that, as an ideal to be approximated, eccentric cosmopolitanism is not already in or of the current world. It is rather a potentiality placed side by side with the actuality on which it can shed critical light. The conjunctive “and” that brings them together prevents also any hasty assumption that cosmopolitanism and globalization might be seen in this book as identical; if they were thought to be so, they would be positioned in the title otherwise. Against the tendency to identify globalization and cosmopolitanism, my approach emphasizes their difference. Therefore, the expositional   27

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priority given to globalization in this second chapter of the book is justified by the fact that, before proceeding to elaborations on cosmopolitanism, its relation to globalization has to be clarified. Because the cosmopolitanism that will be discussed throughout the book is neither a product of globalization, nor its alternative name, nor its discursive projection, this chapter concerns precisely this clarification of boundaries. Globalization will be approached as an empirical phenomenon that is related to the cosmopolitan ideal in many and complex ways. The factual character of globalization has to be explored in its many faces and distinguished from both the set of responses that constitute what will be presented here as “globalist discourse” and the interplay of ideality and spectrality (Papastephanou 2011a) that makes eccentric cosmopolitanism an ethico-political vision, as yet, out of this world.

Globalization Globalization is an empirical phenomenon that has been felt primarily as a structural transformation of the world economic system operating in a complex dialectic with time and space compression effected by advances in technology and communication. The set of advances that intensify and expand the phenomenon beyond the older, less spectacular global mobility comprises, according to Mark Olssen, “the mass media, the internet, the increasing availability and possibility of travel, the growth in multinational trade and international marketability of goods and services, [and] the general growth in the circulation of money and goods” (2008, 265). Through this new and more radical mobility and increased human contact, the traditional dichotomies between the local and the foreign, the particular and the universal, the root and the route are shaken. Along with them, older practices, institutions, and regulations that were based on such rigid divisions are also significantly affected (Held 2003, 466). Globalization, after all, entails access and excess: unprecedented access to markets, different lifestyles, and goods, as well as excessive traversing of natural, geographic, and political borders and, more symbolically, of cultural, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

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The above introductory and explanatory comment on access and excess is put in descriptive terms with no intended evaluative tint. For prior to any effort to discuss various positive or negative appraisals of developments associated with globalization, we need to say more about the multidimensionality of globalization, its types, and their interconnection. In the process, some indications of how these types are theoretically received and assessed will crop up anyway, since the descriptive and the evaluative cannot totally or always be disconnected. Our list of types, which is surely not exhaustive but rather indicative, comprises economic, political, cultural, technological, and environmental globalization. Economic globalization “is driven by trade and commerce, by currency exchange rates, by the cost and availability of labour, above all by the aspirations of multinational companies to expand and prosper” (Humes 2008, 42). It seems that the direction of economic globalization has so far been toward an international flow of capital that undermines national systems of social protection (e.g., policies of full employment) (Peters 2008, 57). Economic globalization is largely based on the dispersal of capital, but more importantly, it appears to favor the so-called economy of knowledge (Peters 2002), that is, the kind of economy that emphasizes skills, cognitive abilities, and mental achievement. Thus, the economic and commercial tendencies of border crossing have now taken the form of a shift of the population to the tertiary sector of economy—that is, to services, commerce, and transport (Habermas 1998, 308)—that goes hand in hand with the unprecedented flow of information across the globe that characterizes the economy of knowledge. Political globalization refers to the tendency toward new formations of political organization beyond the nation-state. It often becomes manifested through old and new transnational agencies (e.g., the United Nations, the European Union); bureaucratic global elites; multinational companies; and economic, military, or environmental organizations— to the extent that those indirectly set political priorities for the rest of the world (Humes 2008, 42). Yet, despite the fact that the nation-state has indeed conceded much of its public sphere to extra-state centers, political globalization has not led to the nation-state’s disappearance. It seems rather that political globalization has, for pragmatic as well

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as normative reasons, led to the transformation of the functions of the nation-state (Kaldor 2004, 166). Thus, as Olssen explains, today, “the equation is not globalization or the nation state but globalization and the nation state” (2008, 267). Cultural globalization often describes a homogenization of taste regarding fashion, mass culture, music, films, television, and so forth. Equally often, cultural globalization denotes the increased opportunities for travel, for cross-cultural encounters and contacts, and, through them, for enrichment of cultures and for a plurality of cultural experiences and choices. In fact, any person who wants to have a new cultural experience today has many more opportunities to do so than in the past. New lifestyles and cultural opportunities relativize older divisions such as those between elite/high culture and mass culture and produce fusions of cultural materials. Technological globalization emerges in the context of massive changes in information and communication technology. Personal relationships, financial transactions, educational institutions, and practices have, to a significant degree, been transformed by the rapid global advances in technology that make things happen at the press of a button (Humes 2008, 43). As W. Humes writes, “Developments in information technology affect people’s lives in richer and poorer countries alike (though as yet not in equal measure) and in a more immediate way than at any previous time in history” (2008, 44). Technological globalization is closely connected with scientific globalization. Technology is supported by, and relies on, scientific research. In turn, the latter advances in an unprecedented way due to the available technological equipment and expertise. Even scientific research that does not require laboratories has been radicalized by means of technology, since, by offering new facilities (Internet) and opportunities (fast travel), the latter shatters the older limits that international scientific communities typically confronted. Environmental globalization concerns the issues that surround phenomena such as global warming, environmental damage, depletion of natural resources, and their corresponding global risks (Humes 2008, 44). Globalization of environmental destruction signifies that the threats to humanity emanating from such destruction are more general and global than ever, as they are, according to Ulrich Beck,

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deterritorialized, nonreducible to just one source, and almost impossible to control at a local level (2004, 138). Another significant feature of environmental globalization is that, for the first time in the history of humanity’s relation to nature, the repetition of seemingly harmless everyday activities may prove to be, in the long run, destructive of the natural world and have undesirable effects for future generations (Linklater 2002, 329). Then again, the “additive” harmful effect of everyday individual activities should not obscure the fact that pollution or other forms of environmental damage are also caused by collective bodies, industries, and larger-scale activities. It is already evident that distinguishing types of globalization does not preclude their interconnection. On the contrary, we may extrapolate from the above that environmental globalization, for instance, is not irrelevant to economic, political, or technological globalization. All the types of globalization are inextricable parts of an empirical phenomenon, of a new situation that is all-encompassing. This is even more manifest in other typical examples of the intersection and synergy of types of globalization, such as the common cause that environmental and political globalization make when it comes to what Andrew Linklater calls “nuclear colonialism” and “environmental apartheid.” Nuclear colonialism refers to nuclear experiments being conducted in the South Pacific by global powers in plain indifference for the health and security of the local populations. And environmental apartheid refers to the practice of exporting dangerous materials or wastes to societies where environmental measures and restrictions are lower than in the West. The dimension of political globalization here lies in the fact that, although at first sight these examples seem to concern environmental risk, the criminal negligence behind them is of a political nature, since some expose others to the kind of dangers that they would never tolerate for themselves or for those near and dear to them (Linklater 2002, 331).

Globalization and the Imaginary Globalization as a multifaceted phenomenon of empirical reality, that is, of a social ontology, also comprises societal self-understanding. The

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globalized self and its globalized social world correspond to a global imaginary that is also multifaceted, complex, and heterogeneous. More generally, the imaginary, as defined by Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), is not an entirely fictive construction. It is rather a construction that depicts society in ways that emphasize those elements of reality that enjoy a special psychic investment on the part of subject. Due to such a psychic investment, the imaginary construction of a society does not always or necessarily correspond to reality. The images of such constructions of reality play a very important motivational role since they urge subjects to live and act in specific ways. They do so because those images concern how people understand and imagine their realities in virtue of their desires, hopes, fears, self-portrayals, and idealities. The imaginary self-understanding of a specific society becomes thus a motor for the self-creation of such a society. If we attempt to formulate the hegemonic imaginary of the globalized self, especially in its most complacent moments, we may single out the optimism with which it views the new proximity, the fluidity, the mobility of the contemporary world. This hegemonic imaginary assumes that the new realities of radical movement will lead of their own accord to a better world. They will bring this about almost automatically, with no sacrifice of the Western priorities and of established modalities of securitization, antagonism, and profit and with no major institutional change or drastic material restructuring such as redistribution of wealth. In turn, the celebration of traveling, cyberspace, and technology is often accompanied by a jouissance and a sense of superiority, power, control, and potentiality that could pertinently be analyzed in post-Freudian terms, though this would surely be outside the scope of this book. However, those who inhabit the margins of the hegemonic world often live the kind of interstitial existence that makes people sensitive to issues concerning less advantaged collectivities. There are also those who have, regardless of their origin or social position, developed sensibilities related to the political effects of underprivilege and discrimination or to more nuanced understandings of the political. Most of the above are characterized by a different, often more troubled, imaginary. Feminist outlooks can serve here as a brief example that relates the issues of globalization to education. Many women and supporters of women’s

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rights express concern rather than optimism about globalization and point out that globalizing processes function in contradictory ways (Blackmore 2000). It is said that, on the one hand, the liberal ideologies of the market and the practices that support economic globalization threaten to undermine whatever has been gained as gender equality in education. On the other hand, there have been possibilities for a feminist utilization of political globalization and its processes and for a heightening and recasting of gender issues (Henry 2001, 87). Let us briefly associate specific imaginaries with the types of globalization that we discerned above. Concerning economic globalization, regardless of whether the emphasis is on the movement of capital or on the knowledge society, many people experience it as a harmful development. The explanation given for such discontent is that economic globalization has the following downside: though beneficial to a few, it marginalizes two-thirds of the global population, since it has given more opportunities to the rich to increase their profits rapidly without offering similar opportunities to the global poor (Bauman 1998, 44). Political globalization has also led to different imaginaries that range from rather hasty glorifications of the new order to downright dismissals and vehement attacks. Some such imaginaries are closely connected with the imaginary that we have just above associated with economic globalization. Political globalization enthusiasts assume that the overcoming of the nation-state is imminent and that such a development will secure the annihilation of borders (real and symbolic) that block respect for human rights. People who are more critical of political globalization point out that those hopeful views make serious mistakes in identifying the nation-state (or its ideological mechanisms) as the major obstacle to global peace as well as in assuming that globalization renders the nation-state politically bankrupt. Despite a temporary sway of neoliberal demands for less state intervention, the current tendency of the Third Way (Giddens 2001) is to favor the “enabling state,” that is, the state that facilitates in a unique fashion the coordination of the individual and the society. Moreover, outside neoliberalism and the Third Way as hegemonic and divergent trends in politics and administration, it appears to many that statism and state interventionism continue to be important political options that require a strong nation-state if they are to limit effectively the dangers that accompany the market economy

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and the operations of unbridled capitalism. There are also those who lament the fact that the concession of state responsibilities to suprastate organizations or international bodies of control has not led to the empowerment of the latter but rather to more (and global) distantiation from cosmopolitan right and from ideals of equality and justice. As for cultural globalization, not everybody shares the fascination that some feel for the cultural opportunities that travel, cyberspace, and the culture industries offer. Many people deem cultural globalization at least paradoxical for the following reason: it makes the foreign accessible but simultaneously neutralizes it due to the conformist cultural stances that it has already cultivated and dispersed. The foreign may typically be available; but it is, at the same time, practically unasked for, nonfashionable, and unknown, since the largely Westernized global culture surreptitiously imposes cultural models, images, and sounds that narrow most people’s choices. Furthermore, the global culture industry has developed an impressive ability to turn the familiar and local into the foreign. To give a classroom example, all my students have either heard of or watched the Hollywood film Troy, but few of them have heard of Michalis Cacoyannis’s Iphigeneia (1977), and even fewer have watched it. The film is local, as it is a Greek production by a Greek-Cypriot director, hence culturally familiar rather than foreign. This film is internationally known to a small circle of viewers, many of whom are specialists in ancient drama and appreciate the film enough to use it in their classrooms. Yet it is unknown to the locals, despite the fact that it is, according to most international art critics, one of the most significant films of its kind (hence, justifiably worthwhile cultural material for anyone to experience). More generally, many such phenomena or paradoxes have led people to question the glorification of cultural globalization. In the educational context, Olssen, among others, has discussed the connection between expansionism and the dissemination of specific and binding lifestyles through new technologies and communications, where, at the cultural level, “ideas, images, and even language of communication [are] provided by the more powerful western states, led by the USA and Britain” (2008, 265). Let us skip any reference to the imaginary of technological globalization since discussions of technology’s potentialities and risks, as felt

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by ordinary people and as depicted in various specimens of Frankenstein filmography, abound in the relevant literature.1 Environmental globalization produces imaginaries that invite more attention here. Some see global environmental risk as precisely the decisive factor for global environmental redirection and for a new human relation with nature. Those who are not so optimistic about this possibility perceive environmental globalization as a very complex phenomenon. They worry that much talk about the globalization of environmental risks may confine us to an ego- and anthropocentric perception of risk (i.e., how to ward off dangers that human beings face due to environmental damage) and stop us from exploring nonhumanist ideals of cosmos. Or it may stop us from realizing that the social agents or groups causing environmental damage (and therefore the primary ones that should mend their ways) do not always coincide with those who suffer it. It may be true that if humanity needs to find another planet to inhabit in fifty years’ time, this will be a problem for every human being. But right now, the most dramatic consequences of global warming are chiefly felt by some islands in the Pacific and not by the administrators or managers of those multinational companies that may have a greater share than other factors in causing ecological disaster. Finally, we must not lose sight of the fact that even the capacity to deal with an ecological disaster varies according to the more general development of a country, a development that is not only synchronically but also diachronically determined. For instance, a Third World country in Africa, burdened with all the problems of its colonial past and still affected by neocolonial global policies, may not be in a position to deal with a natural disaster (e.g., flooding) as effectively as a country of the First World might be. Globalization as an empirical reality—accomplished as well as in process—also comprises the action and the imaginary of social forces that go against it. Various social movements, which often express discontent through demonstrations and activism even in localities that host the decision making of the global strong, make their opposition to globalization and its economic, political, and cultural threats clear. The movements against globalization are heterogeneous and multifaceted—and they are often praised for this, since they manage to unite in a postmodern manner left-wing, right-wing, religious, atheist, aesthetic, economic, and various other springboards for protest into a new form

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of citizenship (Tully 2008). But, since a deeper exploration of this matter belongs to what I theorize below as globalism, I will leave it at that here and take the subject up again in the relevant section of Chapter 3. It is more necessary now to give at least a skeletal account of what lies underneath the imaginary and constitutes its raw material, that is, the set of everyday experiences that make globalization as an empirical phenomenon a constantly felt new human reality. Let us attempt this skeletal account of the standardized experience of globalization (the somewhat caricaturing tone is absolutely intended). Many, perhaps most, or, shall we say, even all of us, in one way or another, experience daily the broadening of opportunities that globalization offers. The Internet helps us buy and sell, communicate, accomplish tasks by sending a simple e-mail message, and visit websites to obtain information about events, developments, or availabilities all over (or almost all over) the world. Through search engines and hypertextual electronic functions, our chances for learning or informing others multiply in a previously unimaginable stretching of space and time. In various chat rooms we can protest and express our views (the psychic discharge involved in such actions is significant in itself) without risk of censorship, liability, or exposure to the personal stakes of signature (i.e., the eponymous taking of a stance). We can also make new friends, find a new partner, or maintain friendships made at some point on our various trips. Our professional lives and the job market have also been enriched almost limitlessly. If you meet standards, you may find employment practically anywhere, emigrate, make bonds with other peoples, and learn about them and their cultures. Even if you do not settle in another country, having a profitable job gives you the opportunity to buy a house in a global city (e.g., London), to have your breakfast in Paris, your lunch in Rome, and your tea in Malta, and so on. In your more static moments, you may order Chinese food from the corner takeaway, watch a newly released Hollywood film, dance to the sounds of a new “ethnic” song, and check the feng shui of your house by reading a newly translated guide to Asian thought. In the evening, you may combine the time that you reserve for dinner with listening to the news, finding yourself informed about new wars that have broken out in geographically precarious areas, moved by the suffering that a

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hurricane causes in a remote country, angry because of the latest stories of domestic violence in the big cities of the world, and excited about the new fashions presented at New York shows or about the new love affairs of global celebrities. New opportunities offered by globalization may enrich our lives with new existential and professional choices that were previously unreachable (Rizvi and Lingard 2000, 419). But new developments are also accompanied by an internationalization of pernicious realities such as terrorism or mass destruction, which enhance the feeling that whatever happens in one place can sooner or later affect life in any other place (Olssen 2008, 265). In addition, the new situation is accompanied by the persistence of democratic deficits, by the broadening of the gap between the rich and the poor, and by the aggravation of ecological problems. As for the accessibility of the world through the Internet, this has its dark side too. Anonymity and absence of liability may lead from tiresome, yet rather harmless, everyday bombardment with spam e-mails and advertisements to the dangers of exposure to harassment or criminal plots. As for contact with the different and the remote, nothing intrinsic in the process of encountering other cultures guarantees that such contacts are not motivated by profit seeking and exploitation or based on superficiality. We have so far approached globalization as an empirical reality that affects life and societies in multiple and complex ways. For instance, we have acknowledged that, politically, globalization is playing a major role in issues of state sovereignty, world order, extra-state policies, and administrative practices. We have also explored aspects of globalization as a force for shaping new imaginaries. For instance, culturally, it is intervening dramatically in the (re)shaping of identities and selfconceptions; of the premises of human encounters and exchange of world interpretations; and of the frame of diverse sensitivities, creativities, and responses to aesthetic experience. Finally, we have provided a skeletal, purposely stereotypical exposition of globalization as everyday experience and as an important dimension of the organization of daily routines and the planning of individual action.

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Globalism Yet, globalization as an empirical phenomenon, as everyday experience, and even as imaginary should not be equated with its methodical analysis and theorization. Nor should its objective character be conflated with, or obscured by, the fact that, just like many other phenomena, globalization too is often discursively (re)constructed and thematized. Surely, theoretical responses to the facts of globalization vary and often conflate empirical reality and rhetorical myth, reflecting more the specific corresponding imaginary rather than a thoughtful, all-around, and systematic study of the phenomenon. The line distinguishing the two (i.e., empirical reality and rhetorical myth) is fuzzy, since our access to empirical reality is always linguistically and culturally mediated, but this should not lead us to blurring the distinction itself. To see globalization as a “discursively constructed master discourse of uncontrollable global market forces” (Janice Dudley, quoted in Porter and Vidovich 2000, 451) ignores the material effects of globalization and their extralinguistic factual character. That this character is thematized and known to us through our linguistically mediated interactions (a chiefly epistemological matter) should not obscure the fact that globalization occurs as a set of actualities that radicalize and accentuate older phenomena of cross-cultural human contact. Such a set may be entangled in a complex dialectics with its discursiveness, since its narrativity, its representation, and the imaginary investments they create play an important ideological role in that very consolidation and promotion of globalizing effects and the construction of the particular symbolic sphere that nurtures globalization. Globalization often becomes an ideological device that states and governments employ as an excuse for imposing certain policies that would otherwise fail to gain public acceptance or support. But it would be erroneous to conclude that the admission of the ideological role globalization plays should lead us somehow to deny its reality. It could even be politically dangerous since the political significance of a discursive construction differs from that of a detectable reality. Focusing on the former would engender one-sided interpretations, overlooking the need to deal with the latter. In any case, as A. Giddens writes,

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A few years ago, there was some doubt, particularly on the left, about whether globalization was a reality. The unpersuaded would write “globalization” in inverted commas, to demonstrate their essential scepticism about the idea. This controversy has moved on. Discussion continues about how best to conceptualize globalization, but few would any longer deny its influence—as signalled by the role of global financial markets, new developments in electronic communication and geopolitical transitions. . . . Discussion of globalization is no longer concentrated on whether or not it exists, but on what its consequences are. (2001, 3)

In this respect, I argue, when the idea that “globalization is best understood as a kind of imaginary” (Smith 1999, 2) refers to consistent and conscious efforts to theorize globalization, it should rather correspond to globalism than to globalization. For the facticity of globalization is one thing; the thematization of this facticity is quite another, despite the fact that they are surely interconnected in intricate and complex ways. Let us then see why we need a term such as globalism and why we may argue that globalization is globalism’s object of inquiry. Globalization as an empirical reality with a concomitant imaginary and a corresponding formatting of the quotidian involves also a broad, global perception of what counts as globalization, of its distinct features, and of its consequences. This ranges from a set of general impressions to a set of discourses that involve theories and systematic analyses that have globalization and its consequences as an object of study. For instance, as a result of its multidimensionality and the chaotic force of its effects, globalization is largely understood as the “indeterminate, unruly and self-propelled character of world affairs: the absence of a centre, of a controlling desk, of a board of directors” (Bauman 1998, 38). This general impression is then consolidated by many thinkers, especially Third Way advocates, into a starting point for most discourses about globalization (i.e., for most globalist accounts). Within such discourses, the impact of globalization “has been compared to that of the weather; a ‘self-regulating, implacable force of nature’ about which we can do nothing except look out of the window and hope for the best” (Andrews 1999, 1). But critics of the Third Way, such as Zygmunt Bauman, also diagnose the same quality.

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▼  Chapter 2 Globalization is not about what we all or at least the most resourceful and enterprising among us wish or hope to do. It is about what is happening to us all. It explicitly refers to the foggy and slushy “no man’s land” stretching beyond the reach of the design and action capacity of anybody in particular. (Bauman 1998, 39)

These meteorological metaphors employed by many theorists to illustrate the unanticipated and unintended character of globalization prove indirectly the facticity of this phenomenon and the need for a nuanced conceptual treatment of globalization and its discursive thematization. Given such a chaotic multiplicity and lack of determinate responsibility or liability, it is no wonder that the causes and consequences of globalization, “let alone the new political arrangements and kinds of democracy—cosmopolitan, realist, liberal, radical—that should respond to globalization are debated and contested” (Isin and Wood 1999, 92). Globalization as an empirical phenomenon involves various practices—some of which are discursive—and states of affairs. But the discourse about globalization (i.e., globalization’s thematization) should be examined separately, at least for methodological purposes, and under a different heading. To render the distinction between empirical reality and its theoretical delineation and contestation more operative, I have suggested that we reserve the term “globalization” for the description of the intensification of global interconnectedness and use the term “globalism” for the discursive treatment and analysis of the empirical phenomenon (Papastephanou 2005a). Like all “-isms,” globalism is a comprehensive—though rich in conflicting views and diverse theories—set of systematic explorations of an issue. To use an example, it is part of globalization as an empirical reality that a multinational company operating in a Western state may cause an ecological disaster that will affect primarily the climatological conditions of remote countries or perhaps even of the whole planet. The debate on this phenomenon, however, belongs to a particular discourse that we may call “globalist.” Following E. F. Isin and P. K. Wood (1999, 92), we may regard globalism as a discourse that constitutes globalization as an object. Therefore, globalism is not a process or a set of realities independent of researchers. To explain the emphasis on researchers in globalization,

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we need to realize that, while the imaginary as societal and individual self-understanding concerns all those affected by or aware of a phenomenon, not all of them systematically or consistently discuss, let alone investigate, this phenomenon (or the imaginary it constitutes). It should be noted here that not only philosophers and academics but also many others would qualify as globalization “researchers,” so long as they participate in the constitution of globalization as discourse. These may include, for instance, government officials, journalists, participants in social movements, artists, managers, politicians, and so forth. They all contribute to a “discourse in which the very idea of globalization is articulated, disseminated, justified, debated, in short, constituted as an object of reflection and analysis” (Isin and Wood 1999, 94). Globalist discourse operates at many levels, deploying a large variety of descriptive, evaluative, and normative judgments—most frequently in a syncretic and eclectic fashion. But one may synthesize some of the approaches so as to group them into three main categories of responses to globalization and theorizations of its consequences. Certainly, what follows could have been categorized in many other ways, and much of the employed material could have derived from many other sources. My selection has been based on the reader friendliness and familiarity that can be achieved when one draws from those lines of thought that have received much more attention and secured many more followers than most others. Evidently, this is not a principle of qualitative criteriology but, rather, one serving methodological purposes. 1. The first category includes the globalist positions that express deep concern about globalization as a new form of domination propelled by a “homogenization” principle. 2. The second comprises those that have a more positive and optimistic outlook resting on what I would call a “global diversity thesis.” 3. The third involves positions that share the pessimism of the first category but explain it via a description that acknowledges more subtle differentiations and accepts the dual nature of globalization. The first and third focus on the concentration of power, whereas the second focuses on its dispersal. To illustrate them, one may

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associate the first with Eric Hobsbawm, the second with M. Featherstone and Giddens, and the last with Bauman. It should be noted here that there is nothing “essential” about the association of the above thinkers with the corresponding positions on globalization. Categorizations of the above kind serve methodological purposes, as has already been stated, and can become easily relativized by the polemical shifts that often guide theoretical discussions. For instance, Giddens’s approach can be largely associated with the “global diversity thesis,” but when he confronts the glorifications of globalization that derive from the conservative internationalist camp, he adopts a far more skeptical and critical outlook. Therefore, like all generalizations, the above segregation of positions is subject to the vagaries of deliberation. 1. Hobsbawm deplores the fact that globalization puts heterogeneity and particularity under threat by imposing a single dominant culture as the model of all operations. Globalization is a state of affairs in which the globe is the essential unit of operation of some human activity, and where this activity is ideally conducted in terms of single, universal systems of thought, techniques and modes of communication. Other particularities of those who engage in such activities, or of the territories in which they are conducted, are troublesome or, at best, irrelevant. (Hobsbawm 1998, 1)

2. The opposite holds for Featherstone, who “calls into question the homogenization thesis, arguing that globalization often results in indigenization and syncretization of global symbols and hybridization of various local symbols” (Isin and Wood 1999, 105). To him, complexity is the most important feature of globalization. He argues that a paradoxical consequence of that phenomenon, as well as of the awareness of “finitude and boundedness of the planet and humanity, is not to produce homogeneity but to familiarize us with greater diversity, the extensive range of the local cultures” (quoted in Porter and Vidovich 2000, 451). Giddens singles out and focuses on another positive effect of globalization, namely, the freedom that stems from the enlargement of the economic, political, and cultural horizons of people. Thus, he

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considers globalization a “transformation of space and time in which the development of global systems and networks reduces the hold of local circumstances over people’s lives” (Porter and Vidovich 2000, 449). What I see as the common denominator of many approaches that converge in their optimist and positive appraisal of globalization is the global diversity thesis, that is, a core tenet that glorifies the prospects globalization supposedly opens for acknowledging and benefiting from cultural difference. 3. The first and second categories appear one-sided when compared to Bauman’s position. Without defining globalization in a way that rules out heterogeneity, Bauman associates the above kind of freedom (and emphasis on diversity) with the potentialities of a small percentage of the population worldwide. “The global network of communication, acclaimed as the gateway to a new and unheard of freedom, is clearly very selectively used; it is a narrow cleft in the thick wall, rather than a gate” (Bauman 1998, 44). The sway of a localizing trend triggers a new social division and hierarchy. The knowledge economy that cancels old modes and relations of production and the movement of the footloose elites and their sense of time secure for the rich an unprecedented independence from the poor. Those are now even removed from the sight of the privileged classes and become so tied to their local circumstances that social mobility no longer seems a feasible life option for them. Jürgen Habermas’s analysis converges with Bauman’s on this point. As Habermas writes, “Pauperized groups are no longer able to change their social situation by their own efforts” (1998, 315). Overall, the third large category of positions we notice in globalist discourse provides a comprehensive and nuanced reading of globalization but concentrates on a diagnosis of negative global effects. I will return to the positions that have consolidated in globalist discourse thematically after I examine how educational theory has responded to them by generating what I would call “educational globalism.” The main positions of general globalism are traceable and informative in educational globalism too. Additionally, within it, one may discern perspectives from which the relation of education and

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globalization can be examined. One perspective comprises the research that explores how practices, institutions, discourses, and structures of education have been affected by globalization. Another places more emphasis on how educational policies express and respond to the pressures of globalization (Rizvi and Lingard 2000, 421), that is, on how education actively engages with the facts of globalization and often with the promotion of globalizing effects. A third perspective, which appears as yet underdeveloped, explores ways by which education should try to counterbalance the negative effects of globalization and extend the potentialities of it for all in a democratic fashion. Most authors move within the bounds of the first two perspectives in a diagnostic mode. With respect to this last perspective, cosmopolitanism can contribute significantly on the condition that it has itself been redefined or reformulated in an appropriate way. Underlying most educational approaches is the same feeling of unease, powerlessness, and bewilderment that characterizes general globalism. As Gregory Heath remarks, “Education sits in an unfamiliar and interesting position in the face of globalization. This is new territory for education, its institutions and practitioners” (2002, 37). Patrick Fitzsimons comments that, regarding globalization, “exactly how education is involved or what it can or should do, is not quite as clear” (2000, 505). Overall, education seems to be unsure of its direction regarding globalization, and this is often attributed precisely to the tensions between the global and the local and unity and difference that mark globalist discourse (Fitzsimons 2000, 520).

Note 1. For my position on those risks and potentialities as they concern e-learning, see Papastephanou (2005b).

Chapter T hree

A Critique of Globalist Positions We have discerned three major categories of responses to

globalization. A first objection to those globalist positions that either condemn globalization wholesale or celebrate it unreservedly is that they miss the nuance and complexity of the phenomenon. The positive (or negative) consequences of globalization at a certain level do not necessarily entail positive (or negative) consequences at all levels or in all aspects of life. Hence, the study of globalization (itself by now a globalized study, that is, as one of the many faces of the phenomenon of globalization) cannot just be a study of one single effect of globalization whose significance becomes isolated and exaggerated. It has to be a study of the phenomenon as a whole, in its varying, rich, and multiple dimensions and repercussions. To understand, therefore, the contemporary global situation and how we are affected by it, we have to take into account that this “we” that is affected by globalization should not be thought of as homogeneous—just as the consequences of globalization are not homogeneous. We shall never understand the phenomenon in its true and complex dimensions if we take Western burghers as the exemplary subjects of globalization. Why this precondition is more generally important will be made apparent in Chapters 5 and 6, which discuss the ideal self-description of the cosmopolitan self. Hence there is no need to delve into this issue here; for the purposes of this chapter, suffice it to bear in mind that a uniform, homogeneous treatment of the subjectivity influenced by globalization is implausible. A second objection concerns the facile way in which the selfgenerated negation of globalization (i.e., the possibility of globalization itself producing the overcoming of its undesirable repercussions) is theorized by optimists or enthusiasts or even by mild critics of   45

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globalization. Antiglobalization activism and widespread protest are often theorized as a negation effected by heterogeneity as such, by the so-called multitude, and by global publics. That the quotidian contains its own negation may be true; but that this negation is so apparent, easy to unearth, independent from deeper global transvaluations, and empowered, nonpacifying, or potentially strong enough to constitute a new soteriological collective subject is a doubtful, even dangerous, assumption. Positions that share what the previous chapter terms the “global diversity thesis” tend to make such an assumption more often than other positions. In so doing, they turn the mere (and dubious) possibility of globalization itself producing its own negation into certainty without other qualifications. To explain this objection further, we may employ Alain Badiou’s (2003a) critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 400), who see in antiglobalization protests of various movements a dispersed power that operates within the global empire and undermines its absolute sway without diminishing the positive aspects of globalization as such. For Hardt and Negri, who have by now worked out a famous, though controversial, interpretation of the current global condition, a new form of control has been imposed. They name it “empire” and emphasize its lack of boundaries, since it exerts its power over all the so-called civilized world and understands itself not as a mere episode in human history but rather as the end of history, as a regime outside temporal limits. This regime is imposed upon various peoples who constitute what Hardt and Negri call “multitudes.” The multitudes are part of the system, and precisely as such they can resist it by transforming it through movements that the multitudes themselves generate. Yet, not all thinkers share Hardt and Negri’s optimism. Badiou sees in “‘planetary’ demonstrations against globalisation such as the one in Genoa” and related movements an element of archaic sterility and strategic inadequacy that is even reflected in the tactically mistaken selection of the location of protest. As Badiou characteristically writes, you should “never appear where you are most expected” (2003a, 120). More importantly and more deeply, according to Badiou, “the ‘antiglobalisation’ movements, or the Italian autonomists who follow the analyses of Toni Negri, for example, are only the most spectacular

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face of recent adaptations to domination. Their undifferentiated ‘movementism’ integrates smoothly with the necessary adjustments of capital” (2003a, 121). In other words, Badiou detects in this kind of globalized negation a pacifying force. He understands this force as “nothing other than a somewhat wild operator (and not that wild after all) of capitalist globalisation itself ” (Badiou 2003a, 125), and he criticizes those thinkers (especially followers of a Foucauldian line of argument or of a Hardt and Negri approach) who view it as constitutive of a “really independent political space” (121). He concludes that, in its current form, the antiglobalization movement is “not at all heterogeneous to globalisation. It seeks to sketch out for the imminent future, the forms of comfort to be enjoyed by our planet’s idle petite bourgeoisie” (Badiou 2003a, 125). Surely, the whole issue cannot be exhausted here. There have been more optimistic philosophical approaches to movementism than Badiou’s and others less confident than Hardt and Negri’s. For instance, Jacques Derrida expressed some qualified faith in antiglobalist movements, saying, “No matter how heterogeneous and at times confused they can still appear, these new anti-globalist [altermondialistes] gatherings are for me the only worthy and credible force of the future against . . . what is happening today” (2006, 409). Be that as it may, it is important to bear in mind here that an exaggeration of the possibility of globalization producing its own negation may make us lose sight of the self-recuperative mechanisms of globalization that lead it to homeostatic preservation rather than overcoming of its pathologies. Another general objection to the kind of globalist discourse that displays an unsubstantiated optimism targets what I see as its reluctance to move from the pragmatic to the deontological. The position I defend in relation to the theorization (and critique) of globalization, which underlies the educational and philosophical suggestions that will follow throughout the book, is deontological. By this I mean that my approach is primarily concerned with the imperatives and the impact of globalization regarding the ethics of relationality to the whole of biota as well as to the nonsentient world that is affected by human action rather than with the economic growth or techno-informational progress that globalization may facilitate. Issues such as productivity, efficiency, and profit enter the picture of an ethico-political, deontological

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approach only when and if they answer the questions, For whom? Who or which group of people benefits from globalization? What does globalization entail for nature and nonhuman biota? How are justice and equality affected? What seems to be happening to diversity and cultural plurality in a globalized world? How do we react in the case of a destroyed artifact or a stolen specimen or a foreign culture? How do we research the particulars of a political conflict, and what kind of conflict resolution do we recommend? Are the solutions to conflicts that we consider those that we would accept for ourselves if we had to live with their effects or by the standards that those solutions set? How does the Is of globalization relate to the Ought of the vision of better conditions for all biota as well as for the nonsentient world of, say, various cultural monuments and global heritage? Given the critical and deontological framework that has been derived from the general objections to some tendencies within globalism, now I shall narrow my critique down to some more specific issues. I shall concentrate on how globalization is viewed as affecting unity and plurality, social and international justice, and emancipatory enrichment of humanity and protection of natural life. I shall expound my critique thematically by focusing on the issues of (1) the nation-state and territoriality, (2) diversity and homogeneity, (3) identity and rootlessness, and (4) equality and life options.

The Nation-State and Territoriality The nation-state and its prospects constitute a crucial point of contention within globalism. Advocates of globalization celebrate its challenging impact on the modernist construction of the nation-state. They do so because they associate with this particular political configuration the terror of totality and homogeneity and treat it as a barrier to “cosmopolitanism.” Detractors of globalization (and of the corresponding appreciative globalist theory) defend the nation-state by recruiting a very wide spectrum of arguments. For polemical reasons, or due to lack of true engagement in the debate, many thinkers who regard globalization positively draw a caricature of their opponents and reduce

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their defense of the nation-state to a conservative and reactionary commitment to obsolete notions such as consanguinity, nationalistjingoist community ethos, and cultural purism. They define their opponents as those for whom “the de-realisation and de-territorialisation of place associated with the growth of globalization and symbolic exchange results in a loss of social meaning and disruption of established senses of community and identity” (Usher 2002, 48). This picture is accurate only for a small group of globalist theorists, and within it there is room for a variety of positions, not all of which could be considered as motivated by conservative nationalist or purist-culturalist concerns. On the contrary, there are those who defend the nation-state precisely because they see it as the last bulwark of particularity against the homogenizing flows of globalization. We may recall here what we saw in the previous chapter as a feminist reaction to the risks that globalization presents regarding past feminist gains. It is often argued that a flexible and interventionist nation-state can protect the interests of women better than any supra-state organization because it involves more mechanisms of accountability for failures to promote gender equality (Henry 2001, 87). Additionally, there are theoretical means for dissociating the nationstate from the unity-versus-plurality binary opposition by unmasking operations of domination that are not of the nation-state and that use diversity and totality equally effectively for their purposes but detrimentally for people and nature. To explore those means, let us examine the issue of the nation-state more closely. It may be true that the establishment of some sovereign states “required as a rule the suppression of state formative ambitions of many lesser collectivities” (Bauman 1998, 40), hence favoring unity over plurality. But accounts presenting any nation-state as a product of homogenization at the expense of the lives of millions of people by suppressing uprisings, oppositional movements, and so on (Isin and Wood 1999, 93) are one-sided and Eurocentric. They are so in the sense that they generalize the data that concern major Occidental states (or some of their satellites) to cover all cases of territorial sovereignty on the planet without taking into consideration the specifics of various independence wars and anticolonial movements. The latter, even

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when acting in the name of a specific unifying ethnic consciousness, did so precisely in order to counter the unity imposed by oppressive empires. Those whose territorial claims were justified on grounds of self-determination and majority principles (constitutive of any viable democracy) cannot be accused of suppressing difference, for the issue then becomes one of accommodating plurality within a larger political formation rather than of granting tout court and unjustifiably separatist rights to plurality. The reason for the discussion that follows has nothing to do with any unqualified defense of the nation-state or a belief in, or prediction of, its preservation. It aims solely to draw attention to the nation-state’s double nature, which problematizes any effort to render it a scapegoat on which we could project the trials of modernity and establish the nation-state’s overcoming as the new legitimating metaphor of globalization. The reason for this discussion, then, has to do with the need to shed more light on issues that have been treated one-sidedly for polemical purposes. The blanket attacks on the nation-state in virtue of its supposed homogenizing and unifying force forget that the nineteenth- (and even twentieth-) century alternative to the “one nation, one state” principle had been the “vast overseas empires that [had] colonized (in various ways) eighty-five percent of the world’s population by 1914” (Tully 2008, 21). They also forget that, in 1945, 80 percent of the peoples on earth were governmentally controlled by the remaining 20 percent (Smith 1999, 6). One can hardly claim that those were signs of favorable treatment of plurality. Here we need to emphasize that the above points precisely undo the superficial assumption that the nation-state had been the dominant political configuration of those centuries. They do not falsify that the nation-state had certainly been the ideal and longed-for configuration of the times. But, in reality, the dominant configuration had remained the empire, even, and more so, when the borders of many new nationstates of the twentieth century, from the Middle East down to Africa or up to the island states of the Pacific, were drawn on the map according to arbitrary criteria set by the interests of the colonial imperial powers that were giving them their freedom and independence. One may object that the empires were in fact nation-states with hegemonic aspirations

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and expanded frontiers. This would simply be a blatant misunderstanding of what counts as a nation-state in political terms. The basic principle of nation-state sovereignty that qualifies the nation-state as a distinct political configuration relies on the equation of one nation, one popular volonté générale, one territory. Only in such a context would the principle of self-determination make sense as the enabling ideal in virtue of which subaltern peoples demanded autonomy and freedom from imperial chains. The empire, by contrast, especially in its modern form, was based on the principle of one governing nation, many subaltern nations, one volonté générale (that of the sovereign nation), and many lands (to which their inhabitants’ rightful bond and claims had been denied). The significance of this will become more apparent in Chapter 7, but the point here is that, because of those different principles, any identification of empires with nation-states is wrong. Another rationale behind the wholesale incrimination of the nationstate (and therefore behind the hasty and gleeful championing of its surrendering of power to supra-state organizations) conflates the nation with the nation-state and treats the nation too as a nineteenth-century construction whose overcoming will sweep away nationalism or ethnocentrism as such. It forgets first that the theorization of the national affect (let alone the affect itself as constitutive of one of the multiple identities of people from time immemorial) is many centuries older than the nation-state (even the extant theorization of that affect goes as far back as Hesiod [eighth century BC] and more explicitly Herodotus [fifth century BC]). And the affect itself is much more resilient (and morally neutral) than people usually assume. As an example of this moral neutrality and of pernicious nationalism being not always so easily identifiable with the affect of the ethnos, or of the nation-state, one may recall that jingoism had more often been expressed by the masters of empire than by the defenders of nation-state territoriality. The rationale that hastily and wholesale incriminates the affect of the nation-state frequently makes common cause with another simplistic and historically blind rationale, the one that relies on the assumption that the trials of humanity in modernity and, worse, in all times can safely be attributed mainly to the nation (qua ethnos) or to the nation-state. As Michalinos Zembylas explains, some theoreticians

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identify “the national structure as one of the cruellest systems on the historical scene” (2008, 110). One wonders, which political configuration was less cruel: the ancient city-states that used to enslave the poor or the citizens of the neighboring city-state and fought each other for hegemony, literally, to the point of mutual annihilation; the empire with its well-documented atrocities and its time-honored ideal of the master and the subaltern; the blocs formed around ideologies (and not around national identities) entangled in the Cold War and producing McCarthyism and gulags for the corresponding citizens and dictatorships in the “spheres of influence”? For instance, as M. Kaldor (2004, 167) rightly remarks, what many theoreticians, nationalist and antinationalist alike, neglect when overestimating the role of national feelings or structures is the phenomenon of “blocism,” which had, for fifty years, supplanted nationalism. More deeply, because we are beings of multiple identities,1 there is no compelling argument that the only source of violence is the national identity. On the contrary, there is ample empirical evidence that racial, religious, gender, and even cultural grounds of various identities (grounds such as science or football) carry the potential for the exploitation or distortion of the affect that they inspire. Conversely, it is possible that national identity (or any other identity, or some other cluster of identities, and ultimately the identity of humanity itself) can combat the particularist identity that is divisive at a specific moment, and it can unite people in defying isolationist or divisive tendencies. A civil war could be a case in point. In Amartya Sen’s words, “A Hutu who is recruited in the cause of chastising a Tutsi is, in fact, also a Rwandan, and an African, possibly a Kigalian, and indubitably a human being—identities that the Tutsis also share” (2008, 14, emphasis mine). If the nation-state identity of the Rwandan or the continental identity of the African had not been undermined and supplanted by the tribal identity that had been colonially exploited in a “divide-and-rule” practice (and, according to some, constructed to an important degree along such colonial lines), perhaps the well-known events of 1994 would have never occurred. Another reason motivating some globalist theorists to allocate globalization’s challenges to the nation-state immediately to the sphere

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of progressivism is the assumption that national territoriality is intimately bound up with tribal instincts that impede the just and equal treatment of alterity imposing homogeneity. Globalization then is presented as the process that disarms territoriality and allows more diasporic and differentiated political configurations to flourish.2 In turn, this idea leads to a mistaken identification of globalized managerialism and footloose entrepreneurs as “emerging cosmopolitan classes” (Isin and Wood 1999, 7). Both assumptions are reflected in the following connection of globalization and postmodernism: “If globalization is contesting the sovereignty of the nation-state and making its boundaries permeable, giving rise to various forms of cosmopolitan citizenship, postmodernization is creating new forms of social differentiation, establishing new relationships between class and citizenship” (Isin and Wood 1999, 23). The identification in this quotation of cosmopolitan citizenship with border crossing is as such very problematic—and crucially so for the aims of this book. Hence, I will deal with it later on. Of concern here are the nation-state and territoriality and their globalist treatment as has, just now, been displayed citationally. To problematize such a treatment (since its full refutation is a much broader project and beyond the scope of this book), suffice it to refer to the ground of criticism that Zygmunt Bauman has covered. Contrary to the fashionable idea that connects the territorial principle of political organization with a dormant tribalism, Bauman asserts that political territoriality “does not stem from the natural or contrived tribal instincts alone (not even primarily)” (1998, 41–42) and proves that the relation of tribal territoriality to globalization is far more complicated. Beneath the surface gloss, and despite its threat to the nation-state, globalization encourages forms of tribal territoriality for reasons of money and power. The territorial principle is being revived now because “global finance, trade and information industry depend for their liberty of movement and their unconstrained freedom to pursue their ends on the political fragmentation, the morcellement of the world scene” (Bauman 1998, 42). Thus, homogenizing and imperialist forces use plurality in a strategic way while destroying those aspects of that plurality that would slow down the “free movement of capital and limit market liberty” (Bauman 1998, 42). Therefore, “far from acting at

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cross-purposes and being at war with each other, political ‘tribalization’ and economic ‘globalization’ are close allies and fellow conspirators” (Bauman 1998, 42). As for the optimism that emanates from the narrowing of the province of nation-states, we should recall that locally (in a nationwide sense), governments are accountable, in a way at least, to their voters, and at times they lose elections. But global fora (the United Nations notwithstanding) are not accountable to anyone. They sometimes shatter their own principles3 for the sake of serving the big powers (or under the influence of global pressure), but nothing seems to challenge their doing so. And more often than not, the very fact that they have taken measures that contradict or trample principles of international right does not even become known because very few in the world have the power or interest to introduce these cases into public (academic or political) debate. The current global governance is haunted by serious democratic deficits and lack of accountability—things that demand the transformation of its foundations and the reform of existing institutions as well as the urgent introduction of new ones (Held and Koenig-Archibugi 2004, 131). According to D. Held and M. KoenigArchibugi (2004, 125–131), the demand for accountability concerns also those who handle international institutions (e.g., the International Monetary Fund) that shape global policies intended to deal with the public affairs of international organizations and that, for lack of accountability, undergo a legitimation crisis. All these dispel, or at least render problematic, the enthusiastic support of the replacement of the nation-state with the new order. In such circumstances, the task of a profound postmodernist outlook would be, I argue, to unveil the fact that in the complexities of globalization, doubleness borders duplicity. This becomes more evident if we recall that the debilitating effects of globalizing processes on territorial sovereignty do not affect all nation-states equally. On the contrary, some powerful countries stand up against extranational publics and stop the globalizing measures that the latter impose when they do not serve the interests of the former. A glaring example was “the refusal of the United States to accept one of the few international agreements genuinely accepted by everyone else, namely, the commitment

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to cut the emission of greenhouse gases down to the required level. It had thus single-handed[ly] sabotaged a global measure” (Hobsbawm 1998, 3). And, ultimately, what kind of limitation and control of the nation-state are we talking about when one of the states of the earth is strong enough to have a controlling presence in almost all the other states on earth? As James Tully reminds us, “The United States now has over 760 small military bases around the world and the Pentagon claims to exercise ‘full spectrum dominance’ over an informal global system of commerce and freedom” (2008, 24). I would like to conclude this section by stressing that if competitiveness and destructive conflict damage the significance that intersubjectivity may acquire for our lives, then the nation-state, by not being the only possible carrier of competitiveness and conflict, cannot be the only cause of oppression of alterity, culturally or socially. Recalling the Cold War, we realize the fact that at that time, the nodal points of coexistence and competition were the blocs of states rather than the states themselves (Bauman 1998, 40). And in the Fordist and post-Fordist landscapes, economy has gradually shifted some of the political initiative and control from the nation-state to extranational formations while preserving and even exacerbating self-interested antagonism among nations and individuals. Jürgen Habermas (1998, 316) has discussed how international competitiveness places nationstates in a self-contradictory position. And other thinkers have noted that “there can be little doubt that there has been an intensification of economic competition among nations, regions, and industries with dramatic changes in state policies, markets, and work” (Porter and Vidovich 2000, 453). The persistence of competitiveness and other such “values” and their negative effects—such as the dangerous impact of competitiveness and the pursuit of self-interest on gender issues (Blackmore 2000, 480–481) and on personal relations generally (Haynes 2002, 108)—that overcome and outlive the nation-state hegemony ought to put us on guard vis-à-vis postmodern political optimism. Like other things, expansionism takes a new form too. It may, arguably, no longer conquer territories, but it preserves and intensifies the aggression and competitiveness that used to characterize many nationalist claims to superiority.

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Diversity and Homogeneity Affirmative responses to globalization do not herald only the limitations and challenges that the nation-state confronts. They also discard the idea that the new world order promotes a Western-led homogenization as too simplistic and argue that, though Occidental influence is significant, “there is a degree of cultural interpenetration, hybridity, and fluidity across different localities around the globe” (Isin and Wood 1999, 94, emphasis mine). Further, the argument goes, when equated with modernization or with Westernization, globalization becomes bereft of the multiplicity of its rationalities. Within the frame of globalization as modernization, the mobilization of encounter and influence of non-Western cultures would be underestimated. For many globalist theorists, “the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ are not opposing but mutually constituting elements of globalization” (Isin and Wood 1999, 94). For Bauman, though, this complexity and interrelation of the global and the local—what he calls “glocalization”—is precisely the vehicle of new modes of domination and oppression of diverse others. Glocalization, as the process of the “world-wide redistribution of sovereignty, power, and freedom to act” (Bauman 1998, 42), divides the world into the tourists of the planet and the vagabonds of regions, that is, those who “inhabit the globe” and the others who “are chained to place” (45). Many more counterarguments to the positive globalist outlook emanate from different interpretations and appraisals of the interconnection of the global and the local. Doing justice to the qualitative asymmetries of influence among cultures is an important reason for turning a critical eye on favorable treatments of globalization. “If globalization has to adjust to local particularities, of which ‘nations’ are an important subvariety, particularities are much more powerfully affected by globalization and have to adjust to it or be eliminated by it” (Hobsbawm 1998, 2). Hence, the positive category of globalist discourse sidesteps the fact that, in certain cases, the difference in degree makes all the difference in the world. For, surely, Western culture as such is a generalization and, therefore, too often misconstrued as a homogeneous whole, self-affirmative and impermeable; in reality, however, Western culture is a rich and open-ended formation, influenced to a degree by

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other cultures. But the influences it receives are so uneven compared to its drastic influence over other cultures that only by means of a blatantly deflationist theorization of modernization and Westernization, one that misdirects globalism, can the assumption be held that the West and its Other(s) interact to a politically important degree. Consider, for instance, the following fact: against notions such as “Americanization,” “Westernization,” and “McDonaldization,” which are employed in critical and often dismissive treatments of globalization, are counterpoised such terms as “diaspora,” “hybridity,” “metissage identities,” and so on. However, if one thinks about the generality of the latter set of terms, one cannot but notice that they do not really articulate processes that run truly counter to the dominating force of Occidental cultural influence. Contrasted with the concrete character of the terms signifying one-sided expansion and concentration of power, the generality and vagueness of “diaspora” and “hybridity” speak to a lack of analogous influence of non-Western cultures on the Western ones rather than to a possibility of a more even-handed reshuffling and dispersal of power. None of the defenders of the complexity of cultural interpenetration seems to have terms to offer that account for how the Western world is influenced to a politically significant degree (that is, to a degree that indeed makes a difference in global affairs) by nonWestern cultures—and that is no accident. The lack of terms theorizing such a thorough influence is very telling regarding the asymmetries of cultural interplay. Even the only term that comes close to describing a strong colonization of the Western lifeworld by the East, namely, “Easternization,” has so far been limited to religious discourses of globalist studies, and even there, it has been received with many qualifications (see, for instance, Andrew Dawson’s 2006 critique of Colin Campbell’s 1999 “Easternization thesis”). As Dawson explains, the absorption of Eastern religious influences is predicated upon the “‘recognition’ of Eastern concepts and practices as worthy of appropriation. However tacit this process, the estimation of Eastern themes as worthy of appropriation is an evaluation predicated upon aesthetic conditions of possibility, the provenance of which is overwhelmingly Western” (2006, 18). In effect, Eastern themes and preoccupations “are valued to the extent that they resonate with the already well-established aesthetics of the Western ‘gaze’” (A. Dawson 2006, 18).

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Also, we should take into account the qualitative differences that mark the reception of, or adaptation to, otherness by diverse cultures. Even when Western cultures are influenced by others, this does not occur with respect to what they really desire (reflecting a grappling with vision) but with respect to what they lack (reflecting a grappling with self-sufficiency and expedience). For instance, the “fastfoodization” of foreign food we notice in the Western world has added variety to Western eating habits without contributing significantly to changes of Western perceptions of time, labor, and lifestyle. Eating Chinese or Indian or Mexican food relates to cultural sufficiency, gratification, social position, and overall influence in ways that are strikingly different from those surrounding the introduction of fast food in the non-Western world. Fast food in the latter world goes hand in hand with a radical change in the conception of time, the sense of worthy activity, and assumptions about what is nutritious or healthy. Finally, the implicit assumption of some positive treatments of globalization (based on the global diversity thesis)—that cultural influence is a matter of free play in which people select merrily what they find attractive—is politically insensitive and sociologically blind to issues of power and subtle control. More criticisms of these points and this kind of globalism, which is very much present in what can be called “culturalist cosmopolitanism,” can be found in Chapter 5, so a brief comment will suffice here. The pretext of this kind of globalism is the supposed freedom associated with the opportunity of the citizen/customer to select from a marketplace of ideas and cultural products those that can survive competition. But such eugenics of cultures involves quality only on the surface. In truth, what survives is not necessarily the most worthwhile or interesting or incisive but, more often than not, the easily digestible and economically privileged (e.g., produced by a strong culture industry). In the end, it is the citizen/consumer who bears the brunt, since after a “cultural” experience of this sort (e.g., after watching a film that effects only escapism and psychic discharge), she remains the same, unchallenged and ready for the next Hollywood cliché. Some thinkers go even further and claim that globalization “can be perceived as a source of cultural and linguistic standardization or ‘dumbing down’” (quoted in Lawn 2001, 177) and is just another term for describing one more form of cultural

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colonialism through which the American principles of consumerism are imposed (Rizvi and Lingard 2000, 420). In the end, with its subsystems of economy and administration, capitalism penetrates lifeworlds, anchoring in them and often eroding them in ways that go far beyond the scope of the much-celebrated cultural merry-go-round.

Identity and Rootlessness Already in antiquity, the Stoic philosopher Hierocles, with his idea of concentric circles demarcating one’s varying provinces of belonging and obligations (Nussbaum and Cohen 1996, 9), gave us reasons to theorize ourselves as multidimensional beings, beings of multiple identities, therefore of multiple, and perhaps at times even conflicting, commitments. In more recent eras that theoretically favored homogeneity and unity rather than heterogeneity and plurality, the idea of a single identity, or a primary/main identity, gained more popularity, especially within chauvinist contexts for which a national/ethnic identity seemed to exhaust whatever is of importance in human life and education. Against the exclusiveness of the inflated particularist identity, another perspective, the liberal-cosmopolitan one that relies on the assumption of a theorizable common human nature, recognizes multiple identities. It hierarchizes them, nevertheless, and ends up singling out and favoring the one of being human. It treats it as the noncontingent one and, therefore, as the only essential identity. To explain, there is nothing inherent in one’s religious or ethnic identity, whereas in the case of one’s humanity, a person is a human being no matter what else she might grow to become. Why this should be treated as so crucial for giving multiple identities their due is quite dubious and invites much criticism (Papastephanou 2002b), but what concerns us here is that much affirmative globalist discourse builds on both, that is, the multiplicity of identities and the prioritization of the identity of being human. It does so in order to draw quick connections between, or even equations of, globalization and cosmopolitanism and to present globalization as the vehicle to the only true and essential identity, that of the human being.

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Another, more postmodernist camp of affirmative globalism criticizes the essentialism of assuming a common human nature and thus questions the priority of the corresponding identity. Its affirmative stance to globalization derives, then, from a more pragmatic source, that is, from the very fact that globalization promotes relativization and hybridization of identities, constantly reminding people that they are now free from older theoretical restrictions to becoming. There has lately been an important theoretical recognition of the fact that subjectivities are constructions rather than essences (a facticity held very dear by a postmodernism that is otherwise very suspicious of the notion of facts). Many globalist thinkers hope that such recognition will lead to eliminating or complicating the neat categorization of people that usually sparks off wars, violence, exclusion, and racism. But, ironically, a nonessentialist treatment of the embeddedness in cultures that was initially meant to combat the theoretical constraints of bloodline and nationhood and their possible racist repercussions now solidifies a eugenics of cultures, a eugenics of the kind already indicated above. If your identity is just constructed, and there is nothing attaching you inherently to your culture or to specific commitments stemming from a supposed common humanity, shape your identity at will, “shopping” from a great variety of now accessible options. Tacitly, cultures and values viewed as commodities are invited to compete in the so-called marketplace of ideas. Yet, the imperative carries on in a subtler mode that is extrapolated from the broader picture: shape yourself in the model of the dominant culture, the Western culture (and its concomitant values), if you wish to survive in a competitive world of profit and distinction. Nothing forces you to stick with your own habits of acting and living, that is, those that you may have developed as a selfhood immersed in a specific lifeworld (e.g., a more relaxed sense of time or a more companionable ethos); but much does force you to give them up for the sake of mobility, productivity, and a place in the sun. In a similar vein, if you have no means to escape from your rootedness and fly to the kind of socially enabling educated rootlessness of annihilated space and time, your chance of flourishing in a globalized world is scant. As Bauman writes, “Enforced localization guards the natural selectivity of the globalizing effects” (1998, 47).

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Equally paradoxical, and often bypassed by optimist globalists, is that globalization has, at the very moment of rapid hybridization, also effected broad attempts to put people “into a little box of a single sense of belonging” (Sen 2008, 6). Perhaps the globally best-known and most thoroughly disseminated cultural understanding today is the one about the supposed clash of civilizations and more broadly what Sen theorizes as a civilizational approach and criticizes as one of the crudest forms of culturalism. Such an approach, as Sen writes, ignores “the immense richness of the multiple identities that human beings have, given their diversity of affiliations, attachments, and affinities” (2008, 6). Even in more sophisticated versions, the culturalist celebration of antiessentialism gives such a priority to fluid cultural identity that it ends up in reductivism. Identities are reduced to cultural identities, and politics, economics, materiality, and corporeality are absent from any operation of subjectification. Likewise, all global conflict is reduced to cultural conflict. Even when culturalism deals with cosmopolitanism, even when it approaches the latter as agonistics, any conflict that cannot be tailored to cultural divergence is simply ignored, as if of no cosmopolitan relevance. But again, this means that instead of facilitating richer and more heterogeneous understandings of human subjectification and of the entanglement of subjectivities, globalization disseminates new reductions, new fashions, new borders, and new obstacles to thinking cosmo-politics Other-wise. Hopefully, it is already clear that the above criticisms of the kind of affirmative globalist discourse that praises globalization for its supposed promotion of multiple and constructed identities, while overlooking or tacitly condoning globalizing consolidations of the One, speak for more rather than less diversity. But without asserting any sense of essentialism, these criticisms also speak against the kind of relativization of local bonds and the exaggerated political expectations from such relativization that many globalists often maintain. There is no question of defending an unreflective sense of commonality and belonging, where one is chained to time and space determinants with existentially and, worse, ethico-politically undesirable consequences. What has to be realized, however, is that cultures and identities are significant and deserve recognition (Taylor 1994) in a more profound way than the

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marketplace logic and its globalist and culturalist apologists have so far allowed. In R. Usher’s terms, “Both roots and routes play a critical role in auto/biography” (2002, 47). Educational theory is all the more aware of the complexities of identity and the importance of arguments about the multiple ways in which people define themselves or are recognized by others. As Paul Standish remarks, “In contemporary policy and practice in education such arguments have become familiar enough, especially in the contexts of equal opportunities and multiculturalism” (2003, 248). All in all, it is now widely held in education, through the influence of C. Taylor’s (1994) communitarianism and Will Kymlicka’s (1995) qualified liberalism, that pupils differ in ways that are meaningful for their multifaceted identities and that cannot be left out in the course of the cultivation of individual autonomy or in the name of one’s freedom to construct one’s own self. Thus, the initial issue about the political significance of multiple and nonessential identities seems to transform into a search for the kind of identity construction that does justice to the situatedness and singularity of the self, while admitting that the self inhabits more spaces than that of a little box of a single belonging. Antiessentialism allows us to theorize the fact that the self can always become enlarged and elastic enough to go beyond the binding historicity of one’s own origin. The recognition of multiple identities allows us to theorize the fact that, say, for a black woman of a Third World country that is threatened by an ecological disaster or by an external intervention, it is possible to be equally sensitive to race and gender issues as well as to issues of global poverty, environmental concern, and international right. Consciousness of the multiplicity of identities and of the variety of demands that they place upon the self is constitutive of a rich and alert human existence. It is true that phenomena of globalization could be credited with a reassertion of fluid, diasporic, hybrid, and contingent identities, but this is only one side of the story. Only by way of a logical leap could one justify the identification of fluidity as such with its potential fruitful political interpretation (e.g., with the encouragement of a rich and alert human existence). That is to say, diasporic and hybrid identities on their own do not determine the conditions of their political treatment or their cultural reception and ethical significance. To give an

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example, the relativized identity of footloose elites does not appear very helpful when they negotiate in the good old capitalist fashion about their interests. Worse, it does not seem to enter the picture when they display the disarming innocence of the unsuspecting with regard to their own, subtle or manifest, complicities regarding the current state of the world. In this respect, rootlessness may disguise a deep and unreflective rootedness in the Occidental culture of performativity, modernization, and profit. A closer look at this issue will follow later on, and it will attempt to show that the hope that rootlessness is the royal route to transcending a tyrannical conception of identity is grounded in problematic and Eurocentric premises. But let us here examine just one example of the attention rootlessness has received as a vehicle of relativization of identity. In certain locations, the space-time compression results in globalized senses of place. This “can lead to what Benko refers to as non-places, spaces ‘devoid of the symbolic expressions of identity, relations and history: examples include airports, motorways, anonymous hotel rooms, public transport’—and possibly even cyberspace” (Benko, quoted in Usher 2002, 47). Yet, in my opinion, precisely those examples invite a more careful interpretation. For the anonymity of a hotel room, instead of rendering it a nonplace, is exactly one of the features that roots it in a particular culture (i.e., the Northwesternliberal) in relational distinction to nonanonymous space. The sense of normalcy it enjoys because it is ours empties it in our eyes of any content, as we forget that its lack of name is exactly what makes it Northwestern (i.e., ours and nobody else’s). As to airports being nonplaces, once again, this idea mirrors our Eurocentric forgetfulness that efficiency, passports, security, regional or racial origin, and so on, are still loaded with various cultural meanings. For instance, as Habermas (1998, 307) argues, international flights, global stock market transactions, the millennium, conferences, and the like, are scheduled by the Christian calendar. I believe that this example proves that the identity of the supposed nonplaces, which is not discernible to us when we assume that history and culture are canceled out when conventionally standardized, is surely felt by those who follow our conventions temporarily and then return to their own. “World air travel is possible because of a number of arrangements which .

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link all airports and airlines of the globe, and which are handled in a standardized manner everywhere and, in fact, with the use of a single language of communication for all essential technicians anywhere in the world” (Hobsbawm 1998, 1). Thus, the so-called rootlessness and its supposed manifestations speak more to the homogenizing effects of globalization and the Eurocentrism they encourage than to the redemption of pluralism. If there is freedom from the constraints of identity, that freedom is for those others who make the effort to adjust to our normalized and Eurocentrically anonymized modes of existence. Nor do the famous diaspora, mobility, and freedom escape from the paradoxes of globalization as accomplished reality. In (such a) reality, “capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market” (Badiou 2003b, 11). In other words, the current is driving us toward the encouragement of multiple identities so long as they remain folklore and harmless, undemanding and politically inactive, free to pursue anything they wish on the condition that they are willing to pursue success and profit as much as any Western burgher would also do. At another level, “in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere” (Badiou 2003b, 10). I think that it is quite easy to notice that those restrictions forbidding circulation do not affect primarily the middle- or upper-class Northwestern world. They affect rather those people from whom the global system does not expect much, those who are viewed as a “burden” in need of “management”: the various immigrants or even the refugees. Some cases in point have already been discussed in the literature and are quite known. Hence, here I would give a less known example, that of the Greek-Cypriot refugees who were dislocated and driven out of their lands back in 1974 and are still not allowed to return to their homes and whose rights of free movement and residence constitute an obtrusive burden for many of the international referees or diplomats (especially for some British and American officials) favoring solutions of the Cyprus issue that serve the interests of their countries (P. Anderson 2008).4

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Equality and Life Options The approaches I have placed in the large category of affirmative theorizations of globalization also converge in their appreciation of the new opportunities for improvement of people’s lives. “The movement of people, money, and information across national and cultural boundaries means that we now have access to markets, cultural practices, and products as never before. This access clearly has the potential for enriching our lives by providing lifestyle and employment options that were once beyond our reach” (Rizvi and Lingard 2000, 419). Thus, much globalist literature heralds the new situation in which “even the remotest cultural traditions are now readily accessible to us” (Rizvi and Lingard 2000, 419). It is true that politically pessimistic globalist discourses often downplay these opportunities or unduly demystify them as smoke screens. But the undue emphasis on prospects for equality and enlarged existential choice founders upon serious problems too. These involve issues such as for whom the employment options are truly available, what happens to cultures that are not very adaptable to the globalizing rationale, and to what extent (and through what filters) remote cultures are really accessible. Besides, any account of globalization that purports to grasp the complexities and paradoxes of the phenomenon must pay attention to the fundamental inequalities that in the course of restratification (Bauman 1998, 43) solidify or emerge unaltered, intensified, or even effected through globalization. Given that our times are marked “by the structural menace to the welfarist domestication of capitalism and by the revival of a neoliberalism unhampered by considerations of social justice” (Habermas 1998, 314), equality is sacrificed on the altar of performativity. Let us look at some statistics and facts of our globalized realities that speak to the need for radical change rather than gleeful celebration of the existent: 840 million people are malnourished. 6 million children under the age of 5 die each year as a consequence of malnutrition. 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day, and half the world’s population lives on less

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And the contrasted realities: The wealth of the richest 1% of the world is equal to that of the poorest 57%. The assets of the 200 richest people are worth more than the total income of 41% of the world’s people. Three families alone have a combined wealth of $135 billion. This equals the annual income of 600 million people living in the world’s poorest countries. The richest 20% of the world’s population receive 150 times the wealth of the poorest 20%. (Tully 2008, 27)

As for consumption, The richest fifth of the world’s people consume 45% of the world’s meat and fish; the poorest fifth consume 5%. The richest fifth consume 58% of total energy, the poorest fifth less than 4%. The richest fifth have 75% of all telephones, the poorest fifth 1.5%. The richest fifth own 87% of the world’s vehicles, the poorest fifth less than 1%. (Tully 2008, 28)

A possible objection here might be that globalization has not yet had the time to alter things for the better. To this objection, some thinkers respond by drawing on intro-state and international new realities that can be associated with globalization. An intro-state consequence of economic globalization and the competitiveness it has imposed is the transformation and reduction of the welfare state mirrored in the fact that benefits drop, access to social security is toughened, and pressure on the unemployed is increased (Habermas 1998, 315). Outside the state and the welfare state, “in 1960, the share of the global income of the bottom 20% was 2.3%. By 1991, this had fallen to 1.4%” (Tully 2008, 28). The impression gets even worse when one turns the annual into daily data. One such example we may take from Held, who explains that almost 30,000 children under the age of five die in the “developing”

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world because of diseases that are curable and have disappeared in the Western world (2003, 468). The above have clear implications for both equality and life choice. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world [i.e., the ‘one world’ of globalization]. The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. (Badiou 2008, 38)

Apart from saying much about what we will see in Chapter 7 in terms of boundary crossing and the fall of walls, Badiou’s words here encapsulate a very significant aspect of the current global reality that is often forgotten by those who see in our contemporary world only richness of choice and unprecedented equality. Indeed, how comparable can the life choices of people be if Habermas is right in his diagnosis that “the gap between the living conditions of the employed, the underemployed, and the unemployed is widening” (1998, 315)? Globalization as, primarily, “a redistribution of privileges and deprivations, of wealth and poverty, of resources and impotence” (Bauman 1998, 43), broadens the scope of choice for some and drastically narrows it for some others. For some, immigration is a free choice, not the only choice. Leaving their place means seizing new opportunities, and their new “homeland” is already adapted to them. The host country usually offers them sea, sun, and fast food and serves them in their own first or second language without their having to learn a new one. For others, the abandonment of their place may be felt as uprooting and as an inescapable, yet the only possible, way to survive; the host country demands an almost absolute adaptability on their part, if it is not to cast them from its shores. And insecurity about an unknown future, somewhat more unknown than that faced by others, is the only aspect of reality that is certain or predictable (Papastephanou 2006, 53). Education as a vehicle for the radical change of such realities seems at times more distant than ever. Many educationalists see neoliberalism as the underpinning logic of the most recent wave of globalization

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(Fitzsimons 2000, 505; Blackmore 2000) and protest against its infiltrating educational goal setting. One needs only to think about the educational objectives5 set by some European Union directives to mark the absence of any connection of education with societal reform or the preparation of the citizen for political participation and responsibility. Padraig Hogan’s discussion of a white paper issued by the European Commission in 1996 is very revealing here. He shows that the white paper is blind to the difference between education and training and promotes excellences of a mercenary kind as it views “the public sphere essentially as a social market and education largely as a service industry for that market” (Hogan 1998, 367). Ultimately, this market logic reinforces the negative effects of globalization instead of combating them and reproduces those values that have, as we will see in Chapter 7, rationalized or inspired older forms of Western expansion. Overall, many educationalists are justifiably concerned about the fact that not only economic globalization but also the globalization of modern citizenship “has not tended to democracy, equality and perpetual peace, but to informal imperialism, dependency, inequality and resistance” (Tully 2008, 28). Tully’s further diagnosis (albeit perhaps too homogenizing and overgeneralizing) is alarming: Modern citizens see their modular form of citizenship as universal and superior, and all others as particular and inferior, and see themselves as having the imperial right and duty to enter into other societies, free them from their inferior ways, impose the institutional preconditions of modern citizenship, which conveniently brings unconscionable profits to their corporations and unconscionable inequality to the people they are modernising, and use violence and military rule against those envious “anti-moderns” who resist. (2008, 28)

Can we opt for something different, something that will be, however, equidistant from a narrow national or cultural organicism of original belonging as well as from a technicist globalist and globalizing ideal of performativity, success, and profit?

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Notes 1. On the significance of focusing on the multiple identities of people, see Papastephanou (2007). 2. A concomitant—and equally faulty assumption—is that cosmopolitanism is a simple matter of rootlessness, but this is the subject matter of other chapters. 3. See, for instance, P. Anderson (2008). 4. I am indebted to Professor Geoff Hinchliffe for drawing my attention to Perry Anderson’s text. 5. For example, “skilling pupils in the new knowledge needed for accelerated technological advance, bringing schools and business closer together, promoting communicative proficiency in three European languages, and treating capital investment in training on an equal basis” (Hogan 1998, 367).

C h a p t e r Fo u r

Identity-versus-Difference Dilemmas The previous chapter ended with a question about whether

one could hold an ideal of collective affect that is equidistant from a purist and regressive sense of belonging and from an unreflective and superficial sense of global belonging on grounds of the “global diversity thesis.” As we have so far seen, globalism has produced a wide spectrum of speculations about the significance of globalization, the position of subjects and collectivities within it, and the future of the globalized/ ing world—ranging from the despondent to the gleeful. Some of these positions have a clearly normative character and constitute critical responses to two main contemporary approaches to the political challenges that collectivities confront today. These two approaches are identity politics and the politics of difference. Identity politics defends unconditionally the preservation of the communal ethos that binds people with a specific social configuration. The politics of difference defends unconditionally one’s right to autonomously define and construct one’s own self and to assert one’s own divergence from a specific collectivity. The former approach emphasizes unity; the latter emphasizes diversity. For the former, respect is primarily owed to communities. For the latter, respect is primarily owed to individual difference. So much has been written about these approaches that here I will skip all perfunctory accounts in order to move to the nodal points of a critical response to them. This is a necessary preliminary step because what will follow in this chapter aspires, among other things, to challenge the confines of the largely constructed antithesis between these two edges of globalist discourse and to steer clear of both. 70

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It is true that identity politics sometimes approximates conservatism and purism, wishing cultures and collectivities to remain as they are, supposedly uncontaminated by obtrusive otherness. It tries to arrest time and sees any change as violation and distortion. It exaggerates to an essentialist point the embeddedness of people in their worlds and the stability of identity. It thus loses sight of the fact that selfhood is composed of a variety of identities. Our multiple identities are not always in alliance or in unity; they can also be in tension. This tension is at times productive, at times disconcerting; yet, it nevertheless enhances human pliability and self-reflectivity. In other words, identity politics often misses the complexity of the human self, since it reduces it to one of its identities, which is essentialized or singled out to the point of being mistaken as the only identity of the self. As to the solutions that identity politics offers to conflicts, they usually touch upon issues not of power but rather of communal bonds and of preservation of the “spirit” of collectivities. Politically, the exaggerated emphasis on the idea of community is no antidote to globalization “but one of its indispensable global corollaries, simultaneously products and conditions” (Bauman 1998, 43). And the functionalism underlying much theorization of collective identity and the corresponding society does not leave enough space for a critical engagement with the existing form of the society/collectivity in question and the possibility of its redirection. Educationally, such functionalism is more compatible with the view of schooling as socialization rather than as a reshaping of identity toward more critical and reflective forms. The other approach, that is, the liberal political discourse on difference, is no less problematic. It exaggerates the constructed character of any identity, missing thus much nuance regarding how several dimensions of one’s self relate differently to change and reshuffling and how this presents us with diverse political dilemmas beyond the one of purism versus diversity. It creates a secure self-image for those who glorify difference, making them feel that tolerance is all that they politically owe to any possible Other. It occludes a deeper political dialogue because it enforces the impression that the sole, or at least the main, issue in global politics is cultural conflict or that all world conflicts are reducible to cultural ones or to their cultural aspects. Such politics of difference cultivates the kind of facile cosmopolitanism that

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Alain Badiou condemns as trivial and hypocritical. As he writes, “That there are intertwined histories, different cultures, and, more generally, differences already abundant in one and the ‘same’ individual, that the world is multicolored, that one must let people live, eat, dress, imagine, love in whichever way they please, is not the issue” (Badiou 2003b, 11). The real challenge of today is to approach the kind of universalized law that may inspire a new vision of redemptive world politics (about which more will be said later on). Badiou sees the slogans that have been promoted by the exaggerated and exclusive emphasis on difference as hypocritical and “cheap liberal truisms.” “One would only like to see those who proclaim them not react so violently whenever confronted with the slightest serious attempt to dissent from their own puny liberal difference” (Badiou 2003b, 11). For the established liberal discourse on difference is, according to Badiou, nothing more than a celebration of “harmless,” inoperative folklore and liberalized difference. “We simply ask that its partisans not get themselves worked up at the sight of a veiled woman, lest we begin to fear that what they really desire, far from a real web of shifting differences, is the uniform dictatorship of what they take to be ‘modernity’” (Badiou 2003b, 11).

Strangers of the World: Globalized or Cosmopolitan? There have surely been approaches within globalist discourse that present mediations, or solutions beyond the identity-versus-difference dilemma, or concessions to both poles. Again as a preliminary step, it is necessary here to indicate the distance that this chapter takes from approaches that may aim at similar goals but set out from different springboards. A trend within postmodern discourse that affirms the diasporic effects of globalization imagines a future in which diversity and hybridity will produce new forms of solidarity—yet based on estrangement rather than on communal ethos. We may discuss here some instances in Julia Kristeva’s philosophy as exemplary of this trend. Because any thorough critique of Kristevan philosophy would sidetrack us, the brief discussion of those instances has to be citational. The instance most appropriate to our themes here is her assertion that admitting that one is strange to oneself creates a sense of solidarity

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among us because “we all belong to a future type of humanity which will be made entirely of foreigners/strangers who try to understand each other” (Kristeva 1998, 323, emphasis mine). I have argued elsewhere (Papastephanou 2005a, 546) that, to my mind, the above citation betrays overgeneralizations that neglect the complex politics of difference and normalize the experiences of one as being those of all. One such overgeneralization is, for instance, Kristeva’s assumption that the future holds in store a humanity made entirely of strangers. Similar criticisms, which are more recent and more detailed than mine and, therefore, particularly helpful in unpacking this point, have been raised by Evy Varsamopoulou. Indicatively, Varsamopoulou writes that visions such as Kristeva’s “do not take into account that not everyone will want to become alienated in a geographical or cultural sense from their context. Continuity, historicity, relation to the (nonhuman) environment or cosmos are crucial values in many human communities” (2009, 39). If that is the case, if there are people who do not share this feeling of strangeness, what kind of solidarity will bind them with those who consider strangeness as the constitutive element of the new solidarity? And, worse, “can we try to imagine such a world where all are foreigners as a purely theoretical exercise, without stopping to consider what constellation of events might lead to such a world” (Varsamopoulou 2009, 39)? The Kristevan overgeneralizing equation of all foreigners and their feelings and experiences becomes more apparent when Kristeva writes, “Whatever its ostracisms and difficulties with foreigners, on American soil I feel a foreigner just like all the other foreigners” (1998, 323). Apart from raising concerns about its being a tourist, homogenizing, and superficial view of the United States and about its assertion that one can only feel comfortable when everyone else is like her or that one can only feel at home when no one feels at home (Varsamopoulou 2009, 38), this statement also invites criticisms about its neglect of the complexity of mobility in a competitive global arena (Papastephanou 2005a, 546)—a complexity that proves foreignness should be understood as a multiform rather than uniform existential condition. Let us go deeper in deploying the above objection. It seems that underlying the Kristevan assertion is a treatment of traveling and migration within the framework of nationalism versus transnationalism.

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Nationals of various countries go to another place and experience the kind of foreignness that accompanies the sheer fact of crossing national borders. Interestingly, not only much philosophical globalism (such as Kristeva’s) but also much educational multiculturalist globalism approaches issues of assimilation and/or integration in the light of the nationalism-versus-transnationalism debate (Radtke 2005; Bomme 2005; Luchtenberg 2005). Within such a framework, the subject on foreign soil simply experiences estrangement from national determination, and the host country simply has the responsibility to allow or facilitate this experience by opening its borders to the visitor’s freely chosen transnational aspirations. Yet, transmigration and transnationalism are not always, or not in all cases, the outcome of free or laudable exercise of existential choice, independent of aspects of global power and control. Rather, as already mentioned in Chapter 3, they are sometimes the product of no choice at all, for instance, in cases of deprivation in the country of origin or perhaps of manipulated and inauthentic “choice” deriving from purely economic and opportunistic considerations. For some, leaving their country and experiencing foreignness is a heartrending, inescapable necessity effected, inter alia, by the diachronic or synchronic exploitation of their place of origin by the Western world, or by local powers, or by the standards and life patterns that are currently enforced by means of global culture. For others, especially footloose Western elites, native or fluent in English, leaving their country and experiencing foreignness is a profit- and distinction-bearing choice with very little personal and emotional cost (Papastephanou 2006, 53). This by no means entails that the people who make such choices should be less welcome in host countries or that the motives for migrating should be of concern to public policy in any exclusivist sense. It does mean, however, that the issue of the encounter of the local with the foreign is far more complex and political than it appears at first sight. It cannot just be channeled in the nationalismversus-transnationalism ideological wars, as it is far more related to synchronic and diachronic problems of depriving non-Western countries and cultures of their material resources and existential significance or of indoctrinating Western subjects in money and success worship. Hence, when treated as something more than just a subjective and arbitrary declaration, Kristeva’s assertion “I feel a foreigner just like

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all the other foreigners” is politically too crude and too homogenizing of the experience of foreignness. The undifferentiated treatment of foreignness misses the tensions, existential unevenness, and negative effects that material and symbolic deprivation and competitiveness have produced for the various strangers of the world. Significantly, the above citation is not just an isolated, decontextualized textual extract that could have been interpreted more generously, had we chosen to consider it along with the rest of the article in which it appears. Let us see why this is not the case by turning to an extract that comes closer to considerations of more “material” issues of the current world. Kristeva mentions cultural difference as something we must pay attention to. But, as she adds, still, we are fully aware of the risks that may come with such an attitude: ignorance of contemporary economic reality, excessive union demands, inability to take part in international competition, idleness, backwardness. This is why we need to be alert and always remember the new constraints of our technological world, of “causes and effects.” (Kristeva 1998, 329)

Curiously, the described risks, though not exclusive to the so-called developing world, have more often than not been associated with it. When we pay attention to cultural difference and to the risks pertaining to the “less advanced” lifeworld of the culturally different, should we do so in a way that suggests there are no serious risks related to pathologies of more “advanced” countries? Or, when Kristeva talks about paying attention to cultural difference, does she mean that this concerns solely the cultures that differ from ours? Does this not make the Western world the point of reference against which all else is defined in terms of convergence and divergence or proximity and distance? If thought through, this new citation adds some nuance as to what foreignness is, but it does so in a way that attracts suspicions of a very misguided and conservative pragmatism or even of developmentalism. That the politics of difference often neglects all critical engagement with diverse cultures and fails to take into account various aspects of reality (such as the economic) is true and should be questioned. Much of the discourse associated with the Left falls into this trap, just as it does

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when it condones the self-seeking corporatism of some working groups or unions that also ignores broader economic realities. Economic globalization should not be interpreted as a homogeneous whole that impacts life only negatively, as one that should just be discarded. On this, Kristeva’s caution that we should remember the new constraints of our technological world cannot be overestimated. However, in the text that contains the above quotation, Kristeva is too laconic about what it means to remember such constraints. What relation exactly (or approximately) does she suggest we have to contemporary economy and to a technology that has been used to bring us close to irremediable ecological disaster? What kind of change (and to what degree of radicality) should the contemporary world (and its strongest players) undergo in order to deal with the daily loss of human life as demonstrated in the statistics of the previous chapter or with the loss of human life within the context of “causes and effects” of preemptive wars? Kristeva’s main suggestion of intended change reflects a psychoanalytic rather than a sociopolitical problematic. In order to fight the state of national depression that we have in France (and in other countries as well) as a result of globalization and the influx of immigrants, and also in order to oppose maniacal reactions to this depression (such as that of the National Front), it is important to restore national confidence. (Kristeva 1998, 326)

Like many others within globalist (and educational globalist) discourse, Kristeva here concentrates on nationalism. She sees nationalism as the only obstacle to the benefits envisioned by adherents to the global diversity thesis (as we theorized it in the previous chapters) and, at the same time, as the principal affect in need of a transformative restoration. To counterbalance its effects, what is needed, she argues, is a restored national confidence. But, in its vagueness, the idea of restoring national confidence could be compatible with, or accommodating of, the worldwide pressures for more competitive nation-states instead of fighting such nationalist antagonism. Along with the previously mentioned assumption—namely, that we should take into account our technological and competitive world (in a way that would constrain our attention to cultural difference)—this extract gives the impression that

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the much-celebrated Kristevan dissident is a threat only to maniacal attachments to narrower social and cultural formations, that is, to by now obsolete and blatant manifestations of politically dangerous affects such as nationalist exclusivism. This dissident is not a threat to those globalized key values of the liberal sociocultural sphere, such as profit seeking, absolutization of performativity, and competitiveness (see Chapter 7), that, though more indiscernible and subtle, nevertheless have an important share of responsibility for the current global condition and the limited life choices many immigrants face. Surely, neither of those alternatives (exclusivist nationalism versus unreflective internationalism) should be left unchallenged, but this is precisely the point: namely, that the unchallenged Eurocentric global priorities can be neither the only alternative nor the only answer to a shortsighted and regressive sense of identity. The stake is to go beyond such a false and drastic “either/or.” Thus, the present chapter attempts to explore paths that involve the local and the global not only within the nation-state (consider the Kristevan constellation of immigrants–maniacal reactions of nationalists–restoration of national confidence–reaction to nationalism) but also in more inter- and extra-state modes of human collective entanglement that touch upon issues of just treatment rather than intercultural modus vivendi consensus. Hence, although Kristevan discourse mediates between the politics of identity and difference, it does so in a way that is not conducive to the less conventional and more cautious cosmopolitanism that is the aim of this book. More deeply, the impression conveyed by some Kristevan writings—that to qualify as a cosmopolitan dissident, one must flee or write or create art and through those activities gain a sense of heightened distance from the surrounding world—makes cosmopolitanism dependent upon a prior estrangement. “However, there is actually no necessary or immediate link between these two modes of being [i.e., of the dissident and the cosmopolitan], which is what first betrays a problem in any generalization of this ethical route, even for estranged individuals” (Varsamopoulou 2009, 33). For instance, to be forced into alienation because of your gender, race, religion, artistic, or other practice, does not automatically or even necessarily make one

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Based on such criticisms, further on in the book, more specifically in Chapter 5, I argue that if some kind of estrangement is prior to developing a cosmopolitan selfhood, it is not just any sort of estrangement but rather a very specific kind. It is the kind of estrangement that presupposes a very complex, critical relation with the home—a relation authorized by constant and profound reflection on justice.

The Local, the Global, and the Educational Significance of Cosmopolitanism Other globalists do not derive a “critical” aspect of globalization from its (supposed or real) prioritization of estrangement but rather from the very lack of coherence and unity characterizing globalization. In its crudest versions, this move takes a leap of thought that is arbitrary, for there is no compelling argument as to why and how the lack of unity and coherence will promote the positive effects of globalization and counter its negative ones. It is not that this move derives simply from wishful thinking; worse, it seems to derive from an underestimation of the negative signs of globalization. In turn, by playing these signs down, it unwittingly makes common cause with the blinkered logistics of marketization and overlooks the negative global effects of a rampant strategic rationality. A more sophisticated variation of this theme connects the unpredictability of globalizing realities with the possibility of the emergence of a critical localism (Fitzsimons 2000). Here again we have a mediation between the local and the global as well as between identity and difference. However, a major difficulty with this grassroots intervention is its limited scope and global impact as compared to the impact of globalization, especially in its economic version. If we take as an example a subset of localism, such as local governmental measures, we realize that, as Jürgen Habermas argues, those measures “would

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bring about local advantages, but would not change the pattern of international competition between countries” (1998, 316). Surely, a broader critical localism might be compatible with, and could even promote, a cosmopolitanism that would have an ethically acceptable economic dimension. But, as I see it, to deserve the name, economic cosmopolitanism must be grounded in noneconomic values if it is to become more innovative in effecting fairer global distributions of wealth and more resourceful in countering economic globalization. And such values, however critically arrived at, cannot be confined to local discourses alone. Again in Habermas’s parlance, Economic globalization, no matter how we look at it, destroys a historical constellation in which, for a certain period, the welfare state compromise was possible. This compromise, to be sure, is by no means the ideal solution of a problem inherent to capitalism, but it has after all succeeded in keeping the social costs within accepted limits. (1998, 316)

The negative effects of economic globalization are such that they cannot be met just locally and surely not strictly within the limits of economic discourse itself. Hence, we may, with Habermas, examine the opposite solution. Against localism Habermas defends the idea of differentiated international publics. To him, welfare functions may be rescued if transferred from the nation-state to larger political units that can catch up with a transnationalized economy (Habermas 1998, 317). A supranational politics catching up with markets would promote the transformation of the world into a community of solidarity, placing the emphasis on generalizable interests rather than on individual profit. Then again, we confront here another drastic choice, and if we wish to avoid it, we may imagine the idea of differentiated global publics in synergy rather than in tension with critical localism. Be that as it may, any such solutions are also problematic if they rest only on enlarging the sphere of political intervention from the local to the global. For nothing guarantees that global publics will truly serve the interests of all people. Habermas admits a similar weakness when he writes that “the creation of larger political units leads to defensive alliances opposed to the rest of the world, but does not change the

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mode of competition between countries as such” (1998, 317). Hence, he sets the following precondition that he hopes will have a reforming effect on human relations: Only under the pressure of the changing consciousness of citizens, and of its impact on the field of domestic affairs, may those collective actors capable of acting globally come to perceive themselves differently, that is, increasingly as members of a community that leaves them no choice but cooperation and compromise. (Habermas 1998, 318–319)

To my mind, this means that both critical localism and global publics require different orientations in thought. Now, if we consider the role education plays in the critical shaping and change of the consciousness of future citizens, we realize that the need for new pedagogical ideals is compelling. Regarding the topics that have preoccupied us thus far, the required ideal would oppose dominant ideals, such as the individualist and the technicist, that elevate antagonism to a major given of human coexistence. Emerging globalizing practices in education, such as the harmonization of higher education, national curriculum standards, and international testing, promote student and teacher mobility and employability across the globe, while enforcing a new global competitive order. Sometimes all this appears in cosmopolitan guise, as cosmopolitanism is often theorized in proximity to, perhaps even identification with, globalization and its relativization of borders. It is no accident that the term “cosmopolitanization” has become quite popular in the relevant literature, where it is typically used to describe phenomena such as the above that emerge within educational contexts as well as beyond them. So long as global attitudes remain trapped in such logics and logistics, and so long as global synchronizing and educational sifting and sorting continue unabated and pass for cosmopolitanism, more genuine and Other-oriented cosmopolitan tasks will remain non- or undertheorized. At loggerheads with universalist conceptions and reconceptualized through the multicultural perspective, the cosmopolitanism popular within many scholarly circles has come to be seen only as a glorification of diversity and a celebration of rootlessness and global border crossing. Within this framework, most educational

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approaches make cosmopolitanism focus only on challenging fixed cultural boundaries. But such cosmopolitanism neglects any other possible tasks that would fall into a more comprehensive theoretical province of ethico-political concern. Such approaches miss the fact that only a reformulated conception of cosmopolitanism and its transference to educational goal setting can address the need for a change of consciousness, frame it legally and ethically, and infuse it with historical sensibility. The relevance of the legal dimension is demonstrated by the fact that all efforts to counterbalance the negative side of globalization founder on a fundamental absence. As Habermas writes, “What is lacking is the emergence of a cosmopolitan solidarity, less binding, of course, than the civic solidarity that has emerged within nation-states” (1998, 319). Such a cosmopolitan solidarity requires some sense of universality of law. The ethical dimension concerns the fact that true cosmopolitanism is not just about openness to alternative ways of life but involves also the duty of material aid and transnational redistribution (Nussbaum 2000a). Historical sensibility is crucial for thinking critically about the contemporary interconnection of the local and the global. As Arif Dirlik argues, we should remember that “ours is an age when there is once again an inflation of claims to critical consciousness. These claims are often based on an expanded consciousness of space” (1999, 30). But every time we speak of the constructedness of some space or other, “it may be impossible, for that very reason, to think of spaces without at the same time thinking of the times that produced those spaces” (Dirlik 1999, 30). A challenging reconsideration of education should search for a more critical and Other-oriented conception of cosmopolitanism away from simplistic and disorienting contemporary equations of cosmopolitanism with globalization, global mobility, and mere border crossing. To make cosmopolitanism an ally of critical localism, we must normatively uncouple both from globalization. For instance, whereas educational globalization concerns new global policies and the structural changes of schooling that those are causing, the cosmopolitan pedagogical ideal concerns the cultivation of resistant, critical, and reflective subjectivities. It concerns the effort to minimize the risks for individuals and cultures and maximize the positive potentialities of globalization

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in a fairer way by encouraging noncompetitive feelings toward others and by acknowledging that there are more than just negative duties toward them.

Educational Globalist Discourse To James Banks, education should help “students learn how to act to change the world” (2008, 322); yet, a very complex set of answers, given by many educational theorists, corresponds to the further question, in what direction? However, despite their being valuable and thoughtful, those answers have not always been clear about their own normative framework or about the unique position of education regarding change. Educational philosophical globalism often performs diagnostic interventions rather than concrete and deontological suggestions for change. Or it draws from the suggestions offered within general globalism. The recourse to cosmopolitanism is also quite common within educational philosophy, yet again in a mode that, despite its importance, reflects debates within the broader globalism rather than contributing to a reformulation of cosmopolitanism. The previous chapters have already mentioned that the dilemmas and tensions of globalism are noticeable in educational theory too. Some theorists concentrate on the complexities of the global knowledge economy and its impact on education, directing their endeavors toward a theorization of the new possibilities. Novel conceptions of spatiality, cyberspace, and diaspora (Usher 2002), as well as the features of the knowledge economy (Peters 2002), attract the attention of many in a way that often refrains from painting a gloomy picture—or sometimes creates a picture that is even overtly optimistic. Michael Peters challenges this optimism and the alleged claim that, due to its emphasis on “the ‘economics of abundance,’ the ‘annihilation of distance,’ ‘deterritorialisation of the state,’ the importance of ‘local knowledge,’ and ‘investment in human capital’ (and its embedding in processes),” the knowledge economy “differs from the traditional economy” (2002, 94). In his apposite phrasing, “Not least of the ironies is that in the knowledge economy, knowledge and its legitimation is controlled by the consumers rather than the producers of knowledge” (Peters 2002, 94).

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Some educational theorists refer to the fact that globalization threatens traditional forms and structures of pedagogy to render them obsolete (Heath 2002). For instance, Bruce Haynes contrasts the conception of the university “as a community of academics engaged in a range of traditions or practices” with its conception as a “quasi-governmental administrative entity” (2002, 103)—a conception shaped by “globalizing procedures and the tolerance or welcome they encounter in educational systems and policies.” Haynes convincingly explains that “the latter conception should be combated” because it reduces the university to an organization “employing workers to value-add to customers intending to maximise personal economic rewards from future engagement in a more competitive national economy” (2002, 103). Others focus not so much on the threats confronting tradition and community but rather on what they view as an overwhelming tendency of the globalized world to treat education solely as a means to an end (Coxon 2002, 69–70). Education, then, turned to a commodity (Bagnall 2002, 81), becomes “instrumental to goods which lie outside the realm of knowledge and rational or critical understanding” (Heath 2002, 38). In this way, it is complicit in the cultivation of consumptive subjectivities (Fitzsimons 2000, 519) and in the promotion of policies that aim to “ensure the competitiveness of the national economy in the face of globalization,” disregarding the democratic deficits they involve (Rizvi and Lingard 2000, 421). Such deficits affect detrimentally, among other things, gender-sensitive state policies and educational practices (Blackmore 2000). True, many educational critics of globalizing realities also hold that there is a positive side in the relation of globalization and education that seems to relate chiefly to new modes of encouraging multiculturalism, group-differentiated citizenship, diversity, and cross-cultural encounters. However, most critics converge on the conclusion that the acknowledgment of the new potentials should not be overgeneralized and exaggerated, lest the negative, expansionist side of globalization be obscured and covered up. Some educationalists have already avowed that the educational systems of the newer states emerging as a result of recent developments in world affairs “may be shaped to some degree by colonialism” (Dale 2000, 446). R. G. Bagnall argues that the

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internationalization of higher education may be seen as “counterethical to the extent that it is irremediably cultural hegemonic, regardless of the efforts that are made to be sensitive and responsive to the cultures into which it is marketed” (2002, 85). Others diagnose a homogenizing linguistic imperialism operating in educational systems worldwide, endangering linguistic diversity and plurality (SkutnabbKangas 2001; Phillipson 2001). And despite the fact that the extent of global educational curricular homogeneity is contestable, it is evident that it imposes, at least to some degree, a kind of world culture. This favors unity rather than plurality since isomorphism of curricular categories across the world applies “irrespectively of national, economic, political, and cultural differences” (Dale 2000, 430). The hegemonic Westernization of cultures and the no less tyrannical indigenization of non-Western cultures, the economic logic of globalization’s inevitability, and grassroots efforts to globalize from below (Gregoriou 2003, 257), add more complexity to the kind of global situation that is part of the contemporary context in which education is forced to dabble. To summarize, globalization regarding education is largely taken to be guilty of promoting unity over plurality through cultural imperialism (Porter and Vidovich 2000, 451) and of cultivating antagonism. Antagonism seems to have been promoted by a major strand of new vocationalism whose insistent economic rhetoric is, according to W. N. Grubb (1996, 2), best epitomized in the book A Nation at Risk (1983)—a book of great influence in the United States as a source of controversial educational policy. It not only asserts the localism of the nation-state in its most antagonistic and isolationist expressions but even makes education subservient to visions of superiority over the rest of the world. In Grubb’s words, the idea pervades the book that “the great threat to our country’s future [is] ‘a rising tide of mediocrity’ in the schools, causing a decline in competitiveness with the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the Germans” (1996, 2). Globalization is held responsible to a significant degree for such vocationalism. It is said to enforce a market imperialism that vocationalizes higher education and privatizes educational responsibility and benefit, while encouraging the dependence of accountability on educational outcomes and “competitive marketization of educational institutions and their services” (Bagnall 2002, 78). Similar attachments to vocationalism, educational

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back to basics, and competitiveness are detected in other best-selling books on globalization, for instance, in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005), whose fallacious assumptions about education are very pertinently singled out and discussed by Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Jay Roberts (2007). Overall, this kind of educational globalist critique of the unethical consequences of globalization shares nothing—in most cases—with reactionary or conservative notions attached to narrow conceptions of value, identity, and cultural homogeneity. It also reflects the concerns of the equivalent tendencies within general globalism, and in this sense, it joins a broader spectrum of rising discontent. More importantly, this educational critique displays a very “healthy” reaction to the connection of globalization and competitiveness. It seems to be well aware of the fact that the system encourages self-regarding rather than ethical conduct through an assumption of “enlightened self-interest through individual choice” (Bagnall 2002, 81–82). Further, educational globalist critics condemn relentlessly the systemic encouragement of antagonism as well as the educational promotion of it. “Education has been seen as the key factor in honing states’ competitive edge with respect to each other” (Dale 2000, 441), which means that local diversity is promoted only to the extent that it is conducive to the goals of the market. Thus, situational sensitivity serves a largely Western, privatized, and ego-centered set of cultural values (Bagnall 2002, 86). Another strand within educational globalism, one that concentrates more on the benefits of the annihilation of time and space and thus seems attached to what I have, in Chapter 2, termed the “global diversity thesis,” introduces various conceptions of cosmopolitanism into the debate. In its most postmodernized form, the cosmopolitanism favored by some theorists is an agonistic ideal of a world in which differences flourish and are free to compete with one another for cultural space and dispersal. As yet, this conception of cosmopolitanism and its educational significance remain undertheorized. This fact enforces the impression that postmodern cosmopolitanism rests on a conflation of controversy, conflict, and antagonism. By placing together dissent, pluralism, and competition in a politically nondifferentiated manner, this cosmopolitanism runs the risk of becoming a secret accomplice of the market. Among other things, the awareness “that highly competitive,

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unregulated, marketised systems do not, in fact, encourage educational (or any other ‘product’) diversity, at least beyond a particular minimal level” (Bagnall 2002, 82), should lead us to question the hasty identification of antagonism as, supposedly, the inexhaustible source of the new and the unknown. It should also lead us to confront the failure to adequately demarcate the conceptual province of agonistics from that of antagonism and undesirable conflict. More fully theorized conceptions of cosmopolitanism within educational philosophy usually try to make sense of the new global realities and revisit old and current notions of cosmopolitanism along such lines. Philosophy of education has been exploring the degree of dependence on the home culture that the preparation of the “young” for future mobility and the respect for diversity might allow. Since “an education solely for cultural coherence will not do” (Merry 2005, 482), fixed cultural boundaries are educationally challenged by means of cosmopolitan discourse. In David Hansen’s words, “From a cosmopolitan perspective education has to do with new forms of understanding, undergoing, and moving in the world” (2008a, 298). However, concerns associated with multiculturalism and identity politics and sensibilities formed by postmodernism and feminism have presented liberal cosmopolitanism with the challenge to take local and particular cultures seriously and to reconsider its own relation to practice (Waks 2009). A context-sensitive cosmopolitanism is expected to reshuffle particular identities in such a way that the self may be made to feel at home everywhere and, at the same time, fully at home nowhere. Reconceptualized in a multicultural light, cosmopolitanism “has come to be seen not as the transcendence of particularity in favour of an acultural universalism, but rather as an awareness of the complexity and diversity of forms of human life that interrupts and dislocates the absolute claims of the local and the enforced unity of a culture” (Donald 2007, 291). When Others enter the picture, they appear as equally “glocalized” identities whose difference must be respected. Education undertakes to cultivate such respect: “Effective curriculum and instruction that [seek] to counter stereotyping and intolerance will attempt critically to examine the attitudes and cultural mores that allow prejudice to thrive” (Merry 2005, 488).

Chapter F ive

Home, Homelessness, and the Cosmopolitan Self T he previous chapter ended with an account of the

valuable globalist work that has been done in education and philosophy of education. Instead of further analyzing it, however, let us turn to how education approaches cosmopolitanism. Despite the variety of perspectives, most educational efforts converge on a crucial point, namely, the primacy of culturalist cosmopolitanism. By “culturalism,” some theorists mean the prioritization of cultural identity as primary good (Merry 2005, 494n5), which gives little recognition “to the widespread hybrid identities of persons living in multicultural societies” (484). But in a more relaxed version, the term can include the emphasis on hybridity too. In fact, postcolonial theory uses the term in such broader ways and with the intention of exposing the complicities of the emphasis on culture (homogenous or hybrid): for Arif Dirlik, “culturalism in modernization discourse served to conceal inequalities in the realms of economy and politics, and to shift the blame for problems in development from the dominant to the dominated—all the time assuming a certain teleology of development” (1999, 24). Dirlik praises postcolonialism for the fact that it “eschews teleology [and] fixed, essentialized notions of culture” (1999, 24). But he argues that postcolonialism falls into the trap of isolating “questions of culture from those of political economy” (Dirlik 1999, 24). Culturalist cosmopolitanism, as it is promoted in educational discourse and outside, seems to me to fall into such a trap. As I use “culturalist cosmopolitanism,” the term refers to an approach to cosmopolitanism from the perspective of cultural difference and 87

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cultural identity in general, be it hybrid or “coherent,” and a loss of sight of any other possible focal point of cosmopolitanism. Culturalism is now either tacitly taken for granted or commonly accepted and prioritized as the singular or preponderant reference point of debates on cosmopolitanism. In this way, the latter is reduced to a discourse regarding whether the cultural knowledge of the world is educationally more central than that of one’s origin. The tendency to view cosmopolitanism through such a prism is pertinently conveyed by Torill Strand’s phrasing: “cosmopolitanism as a way of life.” This conception of cosmopolitanism can be described as follows: The cosmopolitan is “a stranger nowhere in the world,” an individual uniquely adapted to difference and who appreciates the plurality of cultures made inevitable by globalisation. Cosmopolitanism thus portrays the lifestyle of a globally conscious person, a cultivated citizen of the world, an individual with multiple identities or multi-national citizenships. (Strand 2010, 231)

The culturalist cosmopolitanism thus emerging assumes that other societies, traditions, or cultures are there to be learned, and people associated with them are cognitively met as producers of meaning and life experience that might be enriching of one’s own. Or Others can be met affectively as subjects who desire as much as we do to learn from the insights accumulated globally. Or they can be met morally, as recipients of our respect, tolerance, and hospitality, and communicatively, as interlocutors with whom we seek agreement or compromise. When conflict becomes theorized, it is limited to cultural conflict; the corresponding politics is viewed, at worst, as universalization of Western order as new order or, at best, as agonistic over cultural space. To this cosmopolitanism corresponds a specific selfhood/consciousness that can be envisioned and prepared educationally. As James Donald asks, what “would cosmopolitan and multiculturally aware graduates be in the second decade of the 21st century” (2007, 296)? The answer usually given within the above-sketched culturalism can better be exemplified by reference to Jeremy Waldron’s theory of the cosmopolitan self.1 Even when there is disagreement on many other aspects of what counts as cosmopolitan, most theorists would take as

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self-evident that cosmopolitanism is about enriched cultural choice and the hybridization of the self. Waldron’s idealized description of the cosmopolitan self refers to the modern rootless subject who is conscious, even proud, of living in a mixed-up world and having a mixed-up self (1992, 754; 2000, 228). While earlier Waldron took rootlessness as a literal precondition of the cosmopolitan, in his later work he grants it a symbolic significance so that “many cultures in the world,” and not just the diaspora of the global cities, “have already something of a cosmopolitan aspect” (2000, 231). Apart from this modification, which responded to Will Kymlicka’s criticisms, and apart from the addition of Kantian qualifications, Waldron preserves the initial illustration of cultural cosmopolitan selfhood intact. He writes that the cosmopolitan did not take his identity as anything definitive, as anything homogenous that might be muddied or compromised when he studied Greek, ate Chinese, wore clothes made in Korea, worshipped with the Book of Common Prayer, listened to arias by Verdi sung by a Maori diva on Japanese equipment, gave lectures in Buenos Aires, followed Israeli politics, or practised Buddhist meditation techniques. (Waldron 2000, 228; see also 1992, 754)

Hence, cosmopolitan is the education that cultivates such selfhood against any “monocultural coherence” alternative. As Donald transfers Waldron’s guiding idea to education, “If the aim is to equip humanities graduates to survive and prosper in a diverse and globalized world, then developing their consciousness of living in a mixed-up world and having a mixed-up self does not seem a bad place to start” (Donald 2007, 299, emphasis in original). Undoubtedly, such graduates will survive and prosper. But in what follows I express some doubts as to their cosmopolitan selfhood. I do not imply only that a strong kind of identity politics will still inform their thought but also that they will run the risk of identitary politics (which I see as a condition either of self-exculpating politics or of an inability even to spell politics). Upon closer examination, the above examples illustrate a conformist self whose cultural loans derive from and reflect stereotypes. Koreans

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are there to provide us with clothes; the Japanese provide our technological devices; Greeks (ancient in all probability) are to be studied; the Chinese supply cooked food; the Italians compose music. Waldron argues that as long as a person can live like that [as shown by his examples], it is evident that people do not need what the proponents of cultural identity politics claim they do need, claim in fact that they are entitled to as a matter of right, namely, immersion in the secure framework of a single culture to which, in some deep sense, they belong. (2000, 228)

But, ironically, his very selection of examples could be used by his communitarian opponents as proof that such belonging is inescapable or that his own approach at least has not escaped it. Waldron’s preference for the adjective “cosmopolitan” may stave off the “-ism” of cosmopolitanism but not that of West-centrism. The stereotypical images involved in the above illustration show that this supposedly hybrid and rootless self is in fact rooted in the dominant culture, in the latter’s elevation of utility to the common good, and in its standardized perceptions of Others. It is immersed in the West’s own ways of including and excluding cultural material; of turning cosmopolitanism into “a consumerist or acquisitive sampling” (Hansen 2008b, 210); of maintaining the coherence of the West-rooted, modern self; and of affirming identity politics by raising one’s secure self-image to an exemplary status. In turn, exemplarity proves that a description is, as usual, a prescription. One may wonder why this self does not see Akira Kurosawa’s films. But even this again reaffirms that the set of foreign influences comprises what has already passed through the Western cultural filter and gained the status of “laudable” global cultural knowledge.2 A preferable example might be of a self familiar with Japanese ancient lyric poetry (beyond the well-known haiku) that is largely unknown in the West. Such an example3 depicts a self (and a student) who appears more hospitable to and welcoming of other traditions. For, as David Hansen explains, the cosmopolitan quest for meaning is participatory “in the sense of openness to being formed, not merely informed [and, I would add, served], by what one sees and learns” (2008a, 296; see also 2010, 157).4

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Does this mean that we only have to be more on our guard so as to select more unsettling examples of hybrid formation? No. Even with an example such as the above, it is, again, the self who primarily benefits from the intercultural formation and not the Other, who might be affected by such formation only by implication. When I mention ancient Japanese lyric poetry to my students (some are Greeks from Greece; most are Greeks from Cyprus), the reforming effect is that they realize that other traditions besides that of their ancestors had lyric poetry around the same period. When we read some of it in the classroom, the forming effect they themselves recognize is that they find in those poems (translated into Greek for lack of knowledge of the Japanese language) aesthetic pleasure and enlargement of their thought. The aim is to attain what Hansen elegantly describes as follows: The students still live in their local world but they are no longer merely of it. Their sensibilities are now different, again however modestly so. They have a deeper intimation of what it means to take the larger world seriously, to learn from the reality of its offerings, and to appreciate it. (2008b, 210)

Yet, there is no illusion that they supposedly do any “favor” to the Japanese culture, let alone influence the life of contemporary Japanese people, when they let themselves become thus enriched. The association of cosmopolitanism with fluid, hybrid, and diasporic identities is arbitrary insofar as the latter terms remain couched in a pragmatic monological idiom that is incapable on its own of undoing the idem of identity (to effect a “deconfounding” in Stanley Cavell’s terms [Saito and Standish 2008]). By the idem I do not refer to identity as a closed structure but rather even to the most heterogeneously composed and culturally porous identity so long as it displays the most complicit closure regarding specific challenges that otherness presents. The mere polemical reversal of the old qualitative priority of rootedness over rootlessness remains parochialism5 dressed up as universalism.6 It does not suffice to account for cosmopolitanism understood as an ethicopolitical relation of an I (or We) to an Other.7 Apart from the informing and the forming—perhaps apart even from the re-forming, rather individualist cosmopolitanism—there should be a reflective/transforming

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cosmopolitanism of radical redirection. Information entails enrichment; formation sees as cosmopolitan the knowledge of, and participation in, the meaning-making efforts of the whole of humanity. Formation (and often re-formation) overrelies on a cognitivist cosmopolitanism (one at best reconciled with affective elements of ethos) indirectly related to action and insufficiently critical of culturalist cosmopolitanism, and this is why it is not quite the same as the reflective refashioning of the self for supra-individual purposes. It does not cover the idea of rupture, disorientation, new beginning that cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political ideal of undoing the lurking idem requires. The idem of the Western identity is, more often than not, reasserted through the prioritized culturalist cosmopolitanism. Somehow, and curiously, wherever the Western self roams, she encounters only people who might be just different and thus inviting of her regard, yet never illiterate, starved, and needy (such as the subjects of the statistics of Chapter 3), who might be inviting of something other than “the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances” (Badiou 2001, 9) and other than the momentarily charitable reaction of the benefactor. Ubiquitous in cultural and educational studies, the term “difference”8 takes a very safe and uniform meaning the very moment it is celebrated as the ultimate challenge a Western self may encounter. Even when other challenging realities may become perceptible, nothing seems to connect them with a destabilization and an action other than charity. Following Alain Badiou, we see that this consistency and coordination of the mixed-up self and its mixed-up world are not accidental. “After decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism,” we have arrived at “today’s sordid self-satisfaction in the ‘West,’ with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity—in short, of its subhumanity” (Badiou 2001, 13, emphasis in orignial). When the issue is the current global state of affairs, the mixed-up world becomes neatly and conveniently separated into two parallel realities supposedly never entangled in relations of domination and pending debt. The subjects of those realities are meant to meet simply as wellintended interlocutors, as the one side is ready (or at least prepares its “young”) magnanimously to tolerate the idiosyncrasies, even the incomprehensibility, of the other side.

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Welcoming is formalized into the right of hospitality on the condition that the host remains the master of his own home, the subject whose household authority is enacted in the delineation of thresholds, the de-termination of borders and the delimitation of others: their identification, their classification, their filtering, and selection. (Gregoriou 2003, 262)

Predictably, the order of agreement is dominant in this kind of monological-passing-for-relational cosmopolitan, intersubjective engagement, making the order of treatment imperceptible and, in the end, forgotten. The corresponding mixed-up self is a creature of modernity (Waldron 2000, 228). Indeed, it is a creature of an era that privileges spatiality over temporality, mobility over duration, and synchronic culture over tradition and natural environment (Eder 1990, 27). Nowhere in the examples above do we encounter a relation of the self to local histories or to the global past9 or to nature. The education suiting the modern self will assert conveniently that anything related to the past should be forgotten, unless it concerns parallel, disengaged, and congenial cohabitation of spaces. Within such a framework, “nowadays globalization is the circumstance and [culturalist] cosmopolitanism is the ethos” (Nederveen Pieterse 2006, 1248). For instance, nothing in the above examples (interestingly leaving out anything African) or in the general educational tendency indicates that the cosmopolitan student will know about the details of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba; hear about the number of dead Kenyans (and the many more tortured) in the 1950s during their struggle for independence10; or seek to answer the question of how Amìlcar Cabral11 died. The cosmopolitan student may never learn about how the secularist attempts of development in Iran by Mohammad Mossadeq in 195312 were nipped in the bud. And even if the student were to learn all this, would she follow this knowledge to its ultimate conclusions? Would she realize that the liberal paternalism involved in the assumption that “while ‘we’ can survive change and innovation and endure the tensions created by modernity, ‘they’ cannot” (Barry 2001; see also Merry 2005, 485) has not remained theory but determined as practice the historical course of those others?13 Instead of always committing the worst

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crimes in the name of universalism, as some postmodern critics of cosmopolitanism or of nationalism (e.g., Braidotti [2004, 132]) argue, the West in fact committed some of its worst crimes by denying to others the universalist principles it usurped for itself. We take pride in our supposed ability to repeatedly reinvent ourselves, but this prerogative has not been extended to others; worse, it was often blocked whenever their reinvention meant less profit for us. Yet, what kind of reinvention does this mixed-up world allow the mixed-up self today? What otherness can feasibly be accommodated within it? As Islam did not qualify as a possible contributor to the idealized self-description, other than perhaps as a subtext to Israeli politics, let us consider an Islamic idea. For Islam, riba signifies the increase of wealth through excessive gain without providing services of equal measure in exchange, and it is proclaimed a grave sin (Chesneaux 1968, 98). Something like this never comes up in idealized illustrations of hybridity, and an exploration of its practical consequences for the mixed-up self is never attempted. As to Buddhism, it does not just have meditation techniques for relaxing after a day of hard work; it also has images of a specific lifestyle. The Buddhist Dhamma is an ideal of a harmonious society where private interest and the search for gain have no place, unless it is a question of financing some pious foundation (Chesneaux 1968, 89). Could these ideas be practiced by the mixedup self when the latter is largely constructed by an education designed to prepare future citizens to live and work within and across borders, to seize opportunities, and to achieve, to survive, and to prosper in a globalized world? Ironically, the “cosmopolitan” student favored (or unquestioned) by many thinkers today only does his homework. Behind a facade of rootlessness, this self learns all the stereotypes and preferences of the homeland and the home culture; he excels in reproducing, popularizing, and disseminating them like a good disciple; he is silent about ethico-political liabilities because the title and keywords of the assignment do not include them; and he is rewarded with the best mark, that is, with the elevation of this homework to the status of global exemplarity, the desirable model for all.

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Culturalist Hybridity, Rootedness, and the Cosmopolitan Apart from being unable to avoid a much deeper-laid rootedness, culturalism fails to notice a stronger argument in favor of some rootedness that has nothing to do with purist homogeneity. I illustrate this by reference to Ernesto Che Guevara. While still a student, Che set out from Buenos Aires on a journey of homelessness, which was to last until his death. Unlike other fit-to-travel tourists or round-the-world travelers, global city dwellers, and elated global crowds, during that journey, he did not simply encounter different people. He witnessed not just diversity but also poverty, oppression, uneven power, and lack of education and medication. His determination to act so that such realities and “differences” were no longer operative led him in 1964 to an intermediate stop, the United Nations. Against our contemporary assumptions that nothing contests hybridity other than a conservative purist concern about the loss of homogeneity, Che expressed there his mistrust of the capacity of a forced hybridization to produce a politically active and interventionist identity. This is how he phrased it in his famous UN speech14: “The North Americans, for many years, have tried to convert Puerto Rico into a reflection of hybrid culture—the Spanish language with an English inflection, the Spanish language with hinges on its backbone, the better to bend before the United States soldier” (Guevara 1964, 3). Che (who came from a mixed Spanish, Basque, and Irish background, was fluent in many languages, and had read Buddha, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, among others) expressed that mistrust of hybrid identity not for communitarian reasons of ecological preservation of cultures as museum pieces but for political reasons of local empowerment. He envisioned people’s ability to articulate confrontational words against whoever would violate their freedom or the freedom of others. Like many contemporary thinkers, Che also had an ideal description/prescription of the self, but his was usually summed up in the following phrase, which he borrowed from José Martí and employed as pedagogical advice in his letters to his children: “Every true man [woman] must feel on his [her] own cheek every blow struck against the cheek of another” (emphasis mine).15 The normativity of the italicized “must,” along with the corporeality of the cheek and the life history of Che, shows that ethico-political cosmopolitanism is not

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necessarily abstract. On the contrary, it is as embodied and corporeal as any footloose, culturalist cosmopolitanism that takes pride in its passing as “actually existing” (Germann-Molz 2006, 18) might be. And the “radicalism” of Che’s vision can be made to connote not just the “extreme” but also, and on etymological grounds (from radix, meaning “root”), the “rooted,” or the act of going to the root, to the origin or cause of something (e.g., of injustice or of the violation of freedom). Thus, rootedness need not be ancestral but ethico-political, although the latter is not necessarily at odds with the former. Being a nomadic subject “means to be in transit within different identity-formations, but sufficiently anchored to a historical position to accept responsibility for it” (Braidotti 2004, 137). The most critical outlook owed to the local is the one that confronts head-on asymmetries that the local either causes to others or undergoes due to uneven power within and without. In other words, critical cosmopolitanism requires us to be at home with, and to respond to, the hiss of history. If history haunted only individuals, things would be much simpler because one would suggest psychoanalysis. But the past haunts all human dwellings, the whole world of today, and that invites ethical endeavor16 and politics of material measures. This is why accepting responsibility is, in its productive ambiguity (i.e., being responsive and responsible), an ethico-political cosmopolitan project par excellence. Ethico-political cosmopolitanism does not address differences in outlook and practice but asymmetries and uneven life potentials caused by domination and control. Such cosmopolitanism is more encompassing than a mere internationalism of economic mobility or of institution building for supposedly dealing out justice worldwide. Facile culturalism has damaged cosmopolitanism to such an extent that the very term’s presupposing the polis and the politics of cosmo-polis is forgotten. Since modernity, cosmopolis is regarded as a gigantic household in need of management and housework, politics amounts to housekeeping and domestic affairs, and the private domain has imposed upon the public sphere the logic of maintenance at the expense of politics as vision and as struggle for the ideal city and the ideal world (Arendt 1989, 25–30). Consider, for instance, the following, which, although it is at first sight a defense of patriotism, also sets the parameters of what can count as the political that can justifiably be extended to cosmos:

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But those who, though citizens by birth, adopt the view that any country in which they have their business is their homeland, are evidently people who would even abandon the public interest of their city to seek their private gain, because they regard their fortune, not the city, as their homeland. (Lysias, Against Philon, 31, 6)

The individual who regards her property, not the city, as her homeland can be neither patriotic nor cosmopolitan because she has surrendered to identitary politics, which amounts more or less to giving up politics. The tension of the private and the public is constitutive of what counts as politics, for the latter is inextricably connected with the public sphere, not with the kind of management that suits the private sphere of oikos (home) and nomē (property). Rather than being cosmopolitan, the modern, apolitical, managerial, mixed-up self might be just globalized because nothing in that particular idealized self-description concerns responsibilities beyond those toward the self and other than the enrichment of one’s existential choice. To show this, let us hypostatize the idealized self-description somewhat extremely. Think of a German philosopher of the World War II era, who studied Greek, read French thinkers, was taught by Jewish professors, had Jewish colleagues and friends, and obviously did not consider his identity to be muddied by all that. He might even be considered, in virtue of his work, a guardian of thought provocation itself. But if we attach to this list of particulars his silence about Nazi atrocities, his failure to respond to provoking times, we realize that thinking of him as cosmopolitan would be rather embarrassing, if not gruesome.17 Now let us multiply our small narratives of scholarly selfhood and concretize embodied cosmopolitanism by reference to two other professors, Kurt Huber and Pedro Albizu Campos. Huber taught philosophy and musicology at the University of Munich in the early 1940s and worked with a nonviolent resistance group, the White Rose (die Weisse Rose),18 against Nazism. The group distributed leaflets quoting extensively from the Bible, Aristotle, Novalis, Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller, exhorting the German people to act on the grounds of philosophy and reason. Like the other members of the group, Huber was arrested and beheaded in 1943.

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Campos was a Puerto Rican scholar of African descent who became a leader of the people of Puerto Rico and a symbol of their struggle for independence. He was known as El Maestro (The Teacher), studied at Harvard University, and was elected president of Harvard’s Cosmopolitan Club. He met with foreign students and lecturers, like Subhas Chandra Bose (Indian Nationalist leader with Mahatma Gandhi) and the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore. He also helped to establish several centers in Boston for Irish independence. He graduated from Harvard University, obtaining a law degree while studying literature, philosophy, chemical engineering, and military science. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Impressive as it might be, the richness of this background is evidently Euro-centered, as was that of Huber. It is saved from the Eurocentrism of the traditional depiction of the cosmopolitan icon as “the multicultural Western scholar” by precisely the life history and political action of Campos, again, as was that of Huber. Among other things, in 1932 Campos accused Cornelius Rhoades19 of infecting Puerto Rican citizens with cancer as part of medical nonconsensual experiments. Rhoades was simply transferred and placed in charge of two chemical warfare projects, while Campos was jailed and later subjected (in the 1950s) to radiation experiments.20 He died in 1965— one year after Che paid tribute to him at the United Nations as a figure of resistance to the forced hybridization that was aiming to perpetuate the status quo in Puerto Rico. Neither Huber nor Campos is a renowned, metonymized public figure, but both can be considered exemplars of what it might mean to be a nomadic subject sufficiently historically anchored in a place to take responsibility for it. Huber responded ethico-politically to the liabilities burdening his collectivity. Campos responded ethico-politically to the legitimate demand of his community not to be oppressed by another. Their homelessness was one of principles that do not apply differently to the “We” and to “Others” and of a “universality of law” (Badiou 2005, 129) that should never be trampled. The exceptionalism of the circumstances under which their cosmopolitan sensibility was enacted may invite the criticism that not all cosmopolitan manifestations can be of this kind. But this amounts to missing the point of their being discussed here. They are being discussed as emblematic of a rooted

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cosmopolitanism beyond simple cultural knowledge and of action inspired by a critical homework guided by local self- or Other-corrective ethico-political visions of a better world for all. The task of a cosmopolitanism minus the quote marks, a homework yet to be done, is (among other things) to research the way the home has been implicated in the condition in which the world is found today. And this is a universal task, for no home (class, group, collectivity, community, state, or empire) of any sort is excluded from it. In this case, homework becomes a kind of introspection that has decentering effects. Thus, cosmopolitanism may not just be anti-Eurocentric and multicentric but rather eccentric, starting from one’s “center,” moving outward, and decentering the self. And it is the possibility of such a cosmopolitanism that is sought throughout this book. Against the deracinated humanitarianism of the risk-averse actor who intervenes as a punishing hand, and against the individualist missionary Samaritanism of older, modern versions of cosmopolitanism, we must realize that estrangement from home presupposes the highest and deepest possible knowledge of home. In J. Nederveen Pieterse’s words, a “cosmopolitanism that does not acknowledge its lineages and does not examine its positionality is unreflexive, unexamined cosmopolitanism” (2006, 1256). This is not because cosmopolitan encounters with otherness are self-disclosing in the facile abstract universalist sense of reasserting one’s humanity through the conclusion that “we are all human, after all”; quite to the contrary, it is because home for humanity is the whole past and present world, and homelessness is the transcendence of the world as it is for the sake of an as yet “no topos,” the world as it should be.21

Eccentric Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Mime But what is a more homely cosmopolitanism outside the order of the global public figure or the order of the heroic that has or has not attracted the global public eye? Cosmopolitan sensibility includes “in its everyday avatar respect for the moral, ethical, and cultural reality of other people, which encompasses in turn the willingness to engage that reality through speaking, listening, contemplating, being patient,

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and the like” (Hansen 2008a, 302). The relational aspect of this cosmopolitan sensibility that singles out respect and not, say, responsibility runs the risk of (1) overlooking the material reality of other people and the particular issues it raises, (2) presupposing that the reality of other people has run parallel with ours, perhaps never becoming entangled with ours or even being shaped and set in course by ours, and (3) limiting engagement with otherness to the communicative needs of the speaking subject. Important as this approach remains, it cannot cover the ground of the ethico-political—that will be treated as a key tenet of cosmopolitanism in the final chapter of this book. This is so because the ethico-political pushes communication in the direction of the struggle to change some realities, not just to focus on those realities that require nothing other than respect. Some realities are not there to be imagined, respected, or perhaps even negotiated but to be felt by all people (a universal call) as stirring or disturbing and to be treated within the order of action. To deserve the name, a cosmopolitan consciousness, a cosmopolitan self, must not only move within unlimited space but think about the complexities of time and act for a time yet to come. And now let us go even further back, to another philosopher, Diogenes the Cynic, the first to use the term cosmou politis and to identify himself as one such world citizen. Among other things, Diogenes’s case can help us discuss the charge of elitism that cosmopolitanism attracts when thought to have always been personalized in the figure of the educated, the philosopher, or the footloose traveler. As Strand pertinently puts it, “cosmopolitan” (my quotation marks) “round-the-world travellers desire to ‘be like chameleons,’ not necessarily by adapting and blending in with the locals, but rather by blending in with the ‘traveller’ category” (2010, 231). Some versions of postmodernism often add “the Romantic and contemporary European favorites: strangers, especially outcasts of some sort, artists and women. In a nutshell, anyone claiming alienation and estrangement from the society in which they live at that moment” (Varsamopoulou 2009, 32). Such theoretical moves involve a romantic marginality that exalts “cosmopolitan” strangers “not for their ideal but—what is problematic—for the very margin they inhabit, attempting to render it as a positive attribute, a kind of

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heroism” (Varsamopoulou 2009, 32). In so doing, they single out and usurp the marginality of the ancient cosmopolitan while ignoring the ideal underlying, for instance, Cynic or Stoic cosmopolitanism. Diogenes indeed emphasized mobility and rootlessness in his world citizenship. But unlike the modern, globalized Western self who moves about motivated by distinction, adventure, settling down, pleasure, or profit, Diogenes traveled light, with a modest sack rather than a full purse, and philosophized aneconomically. Economy (home and property [oikos and nomē]) is the management of the household (and, further, government and administration of a place), while politics is the public deliberation about the city’s direction, the implicit ideals of how the city should be. For Crates, Diogenes’s pupil and the Stoic Zeno’s teacher (D. Dawson 1992, 111), who distributed his property to the poor of his home city (133), mobility meant not only free movement and even self-exile but also, and more importantly, symbolic freedom from the stranglehold of home and property. And it meant severe criticisms of political conduct as well. The ideal, the polis Crates praises, is one “where no one owns anything, and war and conflict do not exist” (D. Dawson 1992, 149). For the Cynics, if love of money is the metropolis of all evil, its antipolis is a cosmopolis (D. Dawson 1992, 149), where dice are the currency among cities (113). Hence, there is much more in Cynic philosophy than just blending with the traveler category or claiming the existentially aesthetically uplifting position of the citizen of the world who is alienated from her narrow and conventional locality. Homelessness may not entail a refusal to inhabit, or be formed by, a single communal space but a rejection of the systematic and ongoing educational conditioning of pupils to always make economic sense whether within or across borders. I am not suggesting that the Cynic version of cosmopolitanism is the only possible alternative to globalization or that its aneconomical character is totally defensible. I am saying, rather, that the cosmopolitanism of the Cynic is not as undemanding on selfhood as it is now made to appear when limited to mobility beyond locality or to a moralized Other orientation.22 Most contemporary thinkers tend to forget Diogenes’s cynical, uncompromising, radical, and anticonventional (or, frequently, postconventional) selfhood, which the modern bourgeois mobility or politeness would

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find cumbersome, to say the least. This must be kept in mind when all that is retained from Diogenes is so selectively and conveniently the literal meaning of rootlessness. There is something auto-affective, indeed self-congratulatory, in the emphases on difference, diversity, and their respect by the “empathizing” self that characterize almost all cosmopolitan discourse (educational or other). To balance out the tendency toward such emphases (which themselves must, however, never be relinquished) with a more Other-originating cosmopolitanism, one may need a dose of disrespect. What the Cynics offered, apart from what is usually attributed to them (the coining of the term “cosmopolitanism” and the idealization of mobility), is the caustic idiom, namely (adapting Friedrich Nietzsche [2003, 122]), the tendency to “philosophize with a hammer.” As I see it, the caustic idiom is perhaps something similar to what Antonio Gramsci meant by “impassioned sarcasm.”23 For everyday, homely cosmopolitan topics may include the spectrality of issues of spilled blood or of inequality or of destruction of life and nature. To think that only issues related to tolerance of difference are amenable to a cosmopolitan approach presupposes an often conveniently huge understatement of global conflicts, of their causes and effects, and of the predatory attitudes they involve. Much against seeing cosmopolitanism exclusively as a solution to difficulties of pluralism and against the ethically obtuse stances to which this leads, we must treat the umbrella term “conflict” as the much more nuanced notion that it truly is. In cases when conflict emerges not due to the difficulties of pluralism but rather due to more complex and more material causes, responsibility becomes justificatory, and the confrontational words and corresponding persuasion do not belong to the order of bourgeois etiquette; the appropriate idiom is the caustic. How would the self of the culturalist idealized description (and its identitary politics) cope with such an idiom? The Western self who learns to concentrate only on recognizing diversity and is predictably afraid of being rude when discussing politics becomes equally defensive when a political conversation cuts deeper, when it comes to “bloody truths” (to adapt Cavell [1991, 133]). The “cosmopolitan” selves who would be involved in such a “risky” conversation would place themselves in the position of the martyr, of those who are

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rudely and relentlessly reminded of being in a state of political denial of responsibility or of blood spilled in their name, in the name of universality but in fact for the sake of home and property. To them, it is only now that the order of treatment enters the picture. And they would tolerate such “mishandling” precisely because of their having learned to value political correctness and cultural moralist courtesy, without ceasing for a minute to consider the Other “one-sided,” “too emotionally involved,” “utopian,” perhaps “fanatic,” “militant,” and, ultimately, radically24 Other. But in a context of relativism, antiuniversalism (Enslin and Tjiattas 2009), and antirepresentationalism, what kind of “aversive thinking” (Cavell 1991, 134), of “questioning as the piety of thought” (to adapt Martin Heidegger’s famous phrase), can be tolerated or effective in moving the interlocutor (and public opinion) about the truth of a reality? The (post)modern plea for spatiality to the neglect of temporality, as we saw in Chapter 4, involved the imperative to “forget history” and directed it at particular recipients at will, a will dictated by power. What modernity had initiated postmodernity completed through hostility to representation (in its double sense of depicting a truth and speaking for an Other), to criteriology, and to the universalism of right and wrong. What is left of political cosmopolitan dialogue? What might the “grounding” of the caustic and the eccentric be? Let us explore a possible path, one paved by J.-F. Lyotard’s distinction between philosophical piety and paganism. “Whereas the pious philosopher aims to speak the truth, the pagan uses ruses and trickery in order not to redefine the truth but to displace the rule of truth” (Readings 1992, 73). Paganism is to judge without criteria, and as such it is just gaming. Ruse is not just a technique or a device for the purpose of overcoming one’s opponents; it is much more than that. Ruse is an activity bound up with the will to power, because the will to power, if the word is to have a meaning, is carried out without criteria. (Lyotard and Thebaud 1996, 16)

In such a context, the nonrepresented is glorified as that which exceeds the order of representation and of its violence, and in this way it preserves its evental, ineffable, and exceptionalist character. The Holocaust

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is an example of unique and unrepresentable horror—on the indisputable objectivity of which, of course, very few thinkers have remained silent. But “nonrepresented” can also mean—as I see it—unknown or forgotten (consider here, for instance, the Kenyan victims of colonialism), never wronged in the consciousness of the strong, of the wrongdoers themselves, of the third party, the judge, or anyone interested in politics. “One ought to be pagan” means that “one must maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives” (Lyotard and Thebaud 1996, 59). To what effect? Justifiably, revolutions are no longer feasible or desirable options. Those who have been wronged not only in practice but also in theory (since too few have recounted or “theorized” their stories), or those who may wish to speak in their name, have no means to demand justice or the refashioning of the self, other than to articulate, to re-present, the inflicted wrong. The only ruse and trickery they can perform in such postmodern times is, perhaps, the mimesis suiting the hybrid: to imitate the strong or their language game, to learn the language of the strong and limit the inflection of weakness as much as possible so that it can be received only as charming. Is it accidental, one wonders, that some of the most successful politicians of the Third World, who achieved the status of global figures and are still remembered or who voiced globally and effectively the concerns of their people, were bilingual (or native English speakers), studied in Europe or in North America, or managed to be hardly distinguishable in mannerism from their Western colleagues?25 At least so far as it concerns writers, we remark, with Tim Brennan, that “in the interplay of class and race, metropolis, and periphery, ‘high’ and ‘low’ [culture], the cosmopolitans have found a special home,” for the avatars of homelessness “are both capturing a new world reality that has a definite social basis in immigration and international communications, and are at the same time fulfilling the paradoxical expectations of a metropolitan public” (1989, 9). “While mastering the language of the metropolitan tribe,” such avatars of homelessness do not assimilate in any one-way process. “Being invited to speak as ‘Third World’ intellectuals, they take the opportunity to chastise too, and with the aid of their global awareness, state in clear accents that the world is one (not three), and that it is unequal” (Brennan 1989, 6).

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The various wronged, their (global) representatives, or those who may wish to speak in their name may mimic the lifestyles of the strong and pretend that they are like them so as to draw their attention and perhaps persuade them—for, the Habermasian verb “to convince” is no longer allowed in this new philosophical universe, for fear of universalist criteriological connotations. They can trick those who are strong by articulating the wrong in a manner that the strong would find appropriate and by making the strong speak about it themselves, in their self-bestowed inflection of impartiality and in what we might call “their own genuine way of putting things nicely,” without malapropisms. And they must do that gently, in order not to offend the masters, and subtly, in order not to raise the suspicion of self-indulging propaganda, lest there be neither effectiveness nor charm in their move. For nontoxic universalism and intoxicating displacement presuppose one another. What I have just sketched can be described as part of an empirical narrative pragmatics. As Lyotard defines it in Instructions païennes, pragmatics means “all the complicated relations that exist between a speaker and what he is talking about, between the story-teller and his listener, and between the listener and the story told by the story-teller” (for this English translation see Lyotard 1989, 125). Within such pragmatics, then, perhaps the best idea of trickery, an idea that is imposed by our times, may operate not outside the dominant language game (as Lyotardians think) but entirely within it. On the melancholic stage of contemporary world politics and the corresponding, often rhetorically histrionic, supporting discourses, the most persuasive narrative of injustices suffered and of injustices still productive of effects such as hunger, illiteracy, and the like is given not by the one who avoids the game of the strong and shifts her position but by the one who learns to play the game better. With and against Lyotard, perhaps the cause of justice can be taken up not by the pagan but by the perfect mime. The figure of the mime may thus add another interesting dimension to the African proverb “Until lions tell their tale, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” If such empirical narrative pragmatics is too cynical, then we have to question and undo it by readdressing theoretically and practically the Manichean universe of strong and weak on which it rests. We may have to go beyond the false drastic

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choice between the old universalism of the grand narrative of ahistorical cosmopolitanism and the new isolationism of small narratives unable to cross divides, employ criteria, and articulate ethico-political transcendence. Perhaps Slavoj Žižek is right when he claims that “true universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that engages them” (1998, 1002). Be that as it may, if we truly do not want cosmopolitanism to be just a critical response to world troubles, to be “merely parasitic upon crisis” (Hansen 2008a, 290), then the best way to avoid this is to start by demanding the solution of some crises, to assert passionately the truth that can be subtracted from them, to open up the space in which a nonparasitical cosmopolitanism would flourish without being a luxury for some and an unreachable dream for others. Contemporary world troubles are not just the usual trials of humanity but realities with specific authorial subjects, continuously authorized by global liabilities (and academic inattention or denial is one of them) and with a possible expiry date. The latter potential, often obfuscated by a pacifying Pax Romana culturalist logic, can be activated precisely by a militant cosmopolitanism of driving criticisms home. If the position of the “one-sided,” radical critic or her mime should be temporary, that is precisely because it presupposes a Manichean and not a mixed-up world, a world always tidied up in two distinct global spaces. In front of “the good-Man, the white-Man” lies the “victim-Man”: “on the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens” (Badiou 2001, 13, emphasis in original). This morality, “which rests on the misery of the world,” always “assigns the same roles to the same sides” (Badiou 2001, 13). It does so to the exclusion of what is indeed universal in cosmopolitanism: a universally justified call to all to strive for a better world for all biota. Doing one’s homework critically is a universal task from which no one is excluded because no one may permanently claim the position of the victim or the benefactor. About the inexorable specificity of such a project, let us not worry: even if cosmopolitanism always begins from the home, it surely does not end there.

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Notes 1. The extent of the influence that this conception of the cosmopolitan has exerted can be illustrated by the following comment by V. P. Marotta: “The rootlessness of the cosmopolitan self has been effectively captured by J. Waldron in his critique of identity politics in the USA. Waldron examines the communitarian’s critique of cosmopolitan subjectivity, especially their claims that the cosmopolitan self is nomadic, and that this self undermines the fixed and stable identities that constitute the modern subject. The outcome, according to the communitarians, is a lack of commitment and responsibility towards others. Waldron rejects these assertions because they are a misrepresentation of the ‘cosmopolitan self ’ and they seem to hark back to, and be nostalgic for, Gemeinschaft relations. These relations no longer reflect the ‘real communities’ to which most of us belong. As examples of these ‘real communities,’ Waldron designates the international community of scholars, the scientific community, the human rights community, the artistic community, and the feminist movement. Waldron concludes that we need these global communities which incorporate diverse opinions and ideas to generate common solutions to common problems. It is only those who are ‘citizens of the world,’ or what he occasionally categorizes as the ‘cosmopolitan self,’ who can contribute to resolving global problems. Similar to the in-between stranger—who is not confined by particular identities—the cosmopolitan self has greater allegiance to international communities and organizations than to local cultures and communities” (2010, 113). 2. Tim Brennan, among many others, has discussed the cosmopolitan intellectual as the product of a global-market process of celebrity making. He detects a tendency “to regard the work of even Oxford-educated” Third World authors “as a form of ‘low’ art,” whereas, “if that art happens to depict angrily and in some detail the mechanisms of oppression employed by imperialism, it usually ceases to be thought of as art at all” (Brennan 1989, 9; see also p. 8). 3. It can be defended despite its intellectualism, which is a problem that cannot be dealt with here. 4. Educational cosmopolitanism goes beyond the aims of “liberal and multicultural education, understood as including matters such as coverage and comprehensive scope, cultural recognition, and holistic self-development on the part of individual students” (Hansen 2008a, 305). 5. Interestingly, in an era that glorifies hybridity, any hybridity that is more demanding than the globally recognizable and digestible one is not easily accommodated or promoted. Brennan contrasts the example of acclaimed authors with other authors whose creative sensibilities are equally hybrid. Yet the latter “have not entered the international scene with the same pedagogical force” because “their books are simply too difficult for the parochial tastes of the Western public” (Brennan 1989, 8). 6. I borrow and adapt Nederveen Pieterse’s (2006, 1253) phrasing here. 7. Waldron has added the Kantian element, which accommodates some relational, intersubjective dimension of cosmopolitanism. It is no longer the urban dweller who by living in the global city is closer to cosmopolitanism. “Kant appeals to Waldron

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because he starts from the opposite assumption that ‘we are always likely to find ourselves alongside others who disagree with us about justice’” (Donald 2007, 299). Yet, this relational approach is again, deep down, monological and self-affirming in imagining the Others as solely those with whom we may talk, not as those to whom we may owe responsibility and settlement of the damages we may have caused them. 8. Even K. A. Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism, despite its nuanced deployment, can be placed into culturalist cosmopolitanism on grounds of its revolving around difference and weaving the scope, and hence the limits, of ethical responsibility around difference. Consider his assertion: “A liberal cosmopolitanism of the sort I am defending might put its point like this: we value the variety of human forms of social and cultural life; we do not want everybody to become part of a homogeneous global culture; and we know that this means that there will be local differences (both within and between states) in moral climate as well. As long as these differences meet certain general ethical constraints—as long, in particular, as political institutions respect basic human rights—we are happy to let them be” (Appiah 1997, 621). 9. The part of Waldron’s work that touches upon history (e.g., his “Redressing Historic Injustice” [2002]) does not neutralize the criticisms just raised. 10. Harvard University professor Caroline Elkins, whose study of the revolt, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, won the Pulitzer in 2006, claims the number is probably at least as high as 70,000, but more realistically it is in the hundreds of thousands (“Mau-Mau Uprising,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising). 11. Cabral (b. 1921, Bafatá, Portuguese Guinea—d. January 20, 1973, Conakry, Guinea) was “an agronomist, nationalist leader, and founder and secretary-general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde; PAIGC), who helped lead Guinea-Bissau to independence. Cabral rapidly emerged as the leader of the PAIGC. The group organized early political resistance to the colonial power in the form of workers’ strikes— calling for better wages and improved conditions; however, when the Portuguese fired on demonstrators during a dockworkers’ strike in early August 1959, the need for a different approach became evident. Resistance activity was subsequently shifted to the countryside and was altered to make use of guerilla-style tactics. Beginning in 1962, Cabral took his party into an open war for the independence of Portuguese Guinea, and in the late 1960s Cabral was the de facto ruler of the parts of Portuguese Guinea not occupied by army units from Portugal. In 1972 he established the Guinean People’s National Assembly as a step toward independence. On Jan. 20, 1973, Cabral was assassinated outside his home in Conakry, where his party had established its headquarters. In September of that year the PAIGC unilaterally declared GuineaBissau’s independence, a status formally achieved on Sept. 10, 1974” (see the e-version of Encyclopedia Britannica). In Wikipedia we find out that “he was assassinated in 1973 by Guinea-native agents of the Portuguese colonial authorities.” We thus learn a crucial detail about how he was killed, one that is not mentioned in e-Britannica. For more corroboration, see Cabral (2009).

Home, Homelessness, and the Cosmopolitan Self ▼  109 12. See Mark Gasiorowski, “Just Like That: How the Mossadegh Government Was Overthrown,” The Iranian, July 7, 2000, www.iranian.com/History/2000/July/Coup/ index.html. We may view those examples as proof of what Habermas sees as a possibility for non-Western cultures to draw the “universalistic content of human rights from their own resources and in their own interpretation, one that will construct a convincing connection to local experiences and interests” (2003a, 369), as well as of the fact that such possibilities had often been violently stopped. 13. As Arif Dirlik puts it, “One of the most remarkable pieties of our times is that to speak of oppression is to erase the subjectivities of the oppressed, which does not seem to realize that not to speak of oppression, but still to operate within the teleologies of modernist categories, is to return the responsibility for oppression to its victims” (1999, 16). 14. He delivered it before the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 11, 1964. 15. I am indebted to Loukas Perikleous for drawing my attention to this phrase. 16. Among other things, it invites us to revisit the utilitarian framework of our dominant conception of the common good. 17. Conversely, to argue that there was something cosmopolitan about him, we would need to look at his work and thought rather than at the facts listed above. 18. The most famous members of the group are Sophie and Hans Scholl. In 1941 Hans Scholl read a copy of a sermon by an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, Bishop August von Galen, decrying the euthanasia policies (extended that same year to the concentration camps), which the Nazis maintained would protect the European gene pool. Horrified by the Nazi policies, Sophie obtained permission to reprint the sermon and distribute it at the University of Munich as the group’s first leaflet prior to its formal organization. Huber wrote the sixth and last leaflet. From their second leaflet: “Since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. . . . The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals. . . . Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!” (“White Rose,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose). 19. Rhoades was a famous medical researcher. 20. In 1994, under the Clinton administration, the U.S. Department of Energy disclosed that human radiation “experiments” were conducted without consent on prisoners during the 1950s and 1970s. Campos was among the subjects of such experimentation (“Pedro Albizu Campos,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Pedro_Albizu_Campos). 21. My handling of issues of dwelling in the fourfold, homecoming, homelessness, and welcoming the Other into the home is equidistant from both Heidegger’s and Levinas’s responses to questions about how human beings should relate to place. For a very interesting comparison of Heidegger and Levinas on these themes, see Gauthier and Eubanks (2005).

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22. Interestingly, K. A. Appiah (2007, 2375–2377) also bypasses any of this in his text that is most relevant to our discussion here and that dedicates an important part to what can be borrowed from Diogenes. 23. Gramsci held a dichotomy between the cosmopolitan, on the one hand, and the activist intellectual, on the other. The former he associated with the ironic attitude and the latter with the sarcastic. In Tim Brennan’s words, for Gramsci, irony was “the attitude of ‘isolated intellectuals’” indicating “the distance of the artist from the mental content of his own creation.” Such distancing “related to a more or less dilettantish scepticism belonging to disillusionment, weariness, and ‘superominismo’ [superman-ism], whereas ‘impassioned sarcasm’ was the ‘appropriate stylistic element for historical-political action’” (Brennan 1989, 16). 24. To a deracinated, globalized internationalism, any radicalism (which comes, as said above, etymologically from rootedness) is automatically dogmatic. 25. A result of the mixture of educational opportunity and achievement, perhaps?

Chapter Six

Who’s Cosmopolitan? Chapter 4 explored some of the issues about identity versus

difference and localism versus universalism that undergird the disjunction (against the hasty and faulty conjunction) of cosmopolitanism and globalization. I argue there that the potentiality for bottom-up reforms presupposes a heightened awareness of the cosmopolitan stakes involved in critical subjectivity. Chapter 5 took up an exploration of the challenges that the cosmopolitan self confronts. At this point we have reached an exposition of the interplay of home and homelessness that breaks with the kind of culturalist globalist discourse that informs much of what passes as cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan selfhood today. Who’s cosmopolitan, then? I have already mentioned in the brief discussion of Julia Kristeva’s dissident (Chapter 4) that philosophy is frequently accused of maintaining an elitist or romantic image of cosmopolitan subjectivity and of identifying such a self with the estranged artist, the academic, the footloose traveler, or the renowned philosopher. When philosophy is accused of maintaining an abstract, disembodied account of cosmopolitanism, other disciplines come in to “correct” this only by empirically concretizing the cosmopolitan self as the embodied world traveler: “The cosmopolitan characteristics of flexibility, adaptability, and openness to difference and risk are not just cultural dispositions, but rather embodied performances of fitness and fitting in. Travellers literally embody cosmopolitanism” (Germann-Molz 2006, 17). Yet, in this way, what passes as cosmopolitan in modern, Occidental (self-)understanding remains untouched. For the cosmopolitan as a stranger nowhere in the world (defined in such terms by Denis Diderot, for instance, back in 1751) had been a distinctly modern Enlightenment ideal that, by the second half of the   111

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eighteenth century, enjoyed widespread acceptance (Jacob 2006, 1). In like manner, “cosmopolitan” hybrid intellectuals, then the strangers of the world, have now indeed become strangers nowhere; for they are welcome everywhere, so long as they can display that, for them, “national affiliations that had been previously ‘given’ as part of a common worldview of the Third World intellectual have lost their meaning” (Brennan 1989, 9). That this conception of the cosmopolitan has not been adequately challenged is all the more interesting given the wholesale attacks on the Enlightenment by many postmodern critics and the attacks (to an important degree unjustified) on the Kantian cosmopolitanism of duty and order beyond a specific society. More alarmingly, sometimes this self-description of the Western burgher as an adaptable and benign traveler (and the intellectual as its more “sophisticated” version) is the only one that survives criticism and seems to qualify as the most resilient, harmless, and worthy element of modern ideality. I have also raised objections to Jeremy Waldron’s liberal account of the cosmopolitan self (Chapter 5). Using again Waldron’s culturalist approach as a springboard, let us here, in Chapter 6, unearth the conservative, dismissive treatment of the cosmopolitan to which culturalist globalism is often a reactive polemical response. This will help us better see what is involved in the question about who the cosmopolitan might be. Waldron begins his discussion of “what cosmopolitan is” by reference to the definition of cosmopolitanism that the English conservative Roger Scruton gave in his Dictionary of Political Thought. In Scruton’s words, cosmopolitanism is “the belief in, and pursuit of, a style of life which . . . [shows] acquaintance with, and an ability to incorporate, the manners, habits, languages, and social customs of cities throughout the world” (Scruton, quoted in Waldron 2000, 227). Scruton’s concomitant answer to the question about who the cosmopolitan is reads as follows: “In this sense, the cosmopolitan is often seen as a kind of parasite, who depends upon the quotidian lives of others to create the various local flavors and identities in which he dabbles” (Scruton, quoted in Waldron 2000, 227). This dismissive approach to cosmopolitanism reflects a much older prejudice against rootlessness that had even promoted1 (or, conversely,

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been fed by) anti-Semitism. For intellectuals such as T. S. Eliot,2 for instance, the rootless cosmopolitan has a clear anti-Semitic resonance (Julius 1996, 49–54). Waldron rightly protests against those who, according to Scruton (or, as Waldron implies, like Scruton), characterize the cosmopolitan subject as a parasite. But, in a very revealing way, Waldron shows that his own description of the cosmopolitan self is exactly what Scruton was targeting. Hence, his disagreement with Scruton is limited to the characterization of the cosmopolitan; it is not extended to the conception of the cosmopolitan as such. For Waldron’s cosmopolitan self is, as we have already seen, a person acquainted with other cultures, capable of incorporating habits, customs, and languages, and consciously seeking the enrichment that various localities around the globe offer to one’s identity. In holding such a description of the cosmopolitan self, Waldron leaves Scruton’s definition of cosmopolitanism untouched. Waldron’s disagreement with Scruton concerns solely the evaluative judgment involved in the conception of the self that derives from his definition of cosmopolitanism. It does not concern Scruton’s narrow definition of cosmopolitanism as such—one that is so open to bourgeois, elitist, and Eurocentric usurpations and so negligent of other possible meanings of cosmopolitanism. In fact, as it appears in Waldron’s text, his disagreement with Scruton boils down only to this: Scruton dismisses contemptuously what Waldron celebrates as the “person as a creature of modernity, conscious, even proud, of living in a mixed-up world and having a mixed-up self ” (Waldron 2000, 228). Both theorists, then, equate the cosmopolitan exclusively with fluid and eclectic identity. I emphasize “exclusively” precisely because this definition operates to the exclusion of any other, old or new, meaning of cosmopolitanism. Let us add here one more interlocutor, K. A. Appiah, whose rooted cosmopolitanism is an important mediation between liberalism and communitarianism. He also protests against the depiction of the cosmopolitan as a parasite: “We cosmopolitans face a familiar litany of objections. Some, for example, have complained that our cosmopolitanism must be parasitic” (1997, 618). As he explains, those who endorse this objection go on to ask where cosmopolitans could have gotten their various identities in a fully cosmopolitan world. “Where, in other words, would all the diversity we cosmopolitans celebrate

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come from in a world where there were only cosmopolitans?” (Appiah 1997, 618). To Appiah, the answer is straightforward and constitutive of his “rooted cosmopolitanism” theory. The “cosmopolitan patriot can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people” (Appiah 1997, 618, emphasis mine). Appiah’s cosmopolitan subject is not only pleasure seeking but also potentially mobile. The cosmopolitan “imagines that in such a world not everyone will find it best to stay in their natal patria, so that the circulation of people among different localities will involve not only cultural tourism (which the cosmopolitan admits to enjoying) but migration, nomadism, diaspora” (Appiah 1997, 618). Important and plausible as Appiah’s answer might be, it nevertheless approaches cosmopolitanism, as much as Waldron’s does, primarily within the confines of the modern understanding of it as enrichment of one’s identity and movement across borders. (In this way, Appiah’s own insistence on cosmopolitanism as realization of one’s ethical obligations becomes undermined by his culturalist approach to the term, but this is beside the point here.) Hence, to this chapter’s question about who the cosmopolitan might be, Appiah would respond (as he did in his The Ethics of Identity [2005] and as Gerard Delanty sums up) that “cosmopolitans are people who construct their lives from whatever cultural resources to which they find themselves attached” (Delanty 2006, 30). It is true that in such a response there is an “interesting suggestion of culture as an on-going process of construction as opposed to being embodied in a particular way of life” (Delanty 2006, 31). But there is also something else: within such a conception of the cosmopolitan self, the understanding of cosmopolitanism that precedes and grounds it limits cosmopolitanism to being a self-referential ideal of rich and multiple identity construction. Thus, in Waldron’s and Appiah’s appreciative accounts, as much as it is in Scruton’s dismissive account, cosmopolitanism is about how the self benefits from cultural variety and otherness. Scruton’s account fails totally to offer a philosophically informed sense of cosmopolitanism. Scruton completely ignores the emotive, ethical, and legal dimensions of cosmopolitanism available via Stoicism

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and Kantianism (to name just two of many other sources). He does not accommodate in his definition any ethico-political and emotive concerns or legal obligations to otherness of the kind that belong to a relational (in the sense of nonmonological, non-self-referential) framework. He misses whatever would make the cosmopolitan self not just eclectic but also radically (penetratingly, going to the root of things) critical, committed, and responsive to cosmos. Instead, he regards—and sweepingly dismisses—cosmopolitan life as just a merry-go-round of rich pragmatic-existential cultural choice. On his part, Waldron defends cosmopolitanism as rich pragmatic-existential cultural choice, but in keeping with the inflation of the culturalist account of cosmopolitanism to the point of identifying it with cosmopolitanism as such, he remains trapped in the polemics revolving around conservative construal of rootedness versus progressive glorification of rootlessness. Appiah escapes partly the narrowness of such polemics due to his insistence on rooted cosmopolitanism—which reconciles a well-meant patriotic rootedness with cultural-cosmopolitan rootlessness. Consider, for instance, his statement: “My father’s example demonstrates for me, more clearly than any abstract argument, the possibilities that the enemies of cosmopolitanism deny. We cosmopolitans can be patriots, loving our homelands (not only the states where we were born but the states where we grew up and the states where we live)” (Appiah 1997, 622, emphasis mine). The “can be” that I have emphasized shows that Appiah retrieves a possibility within cultural cosmopolitanism that Scruton fails to see. To reveal more of what is at stake for the cosmopolitan self within the culturalist framework of Scruton’s position and Waldron’s and Appiah’s reactive responses to Scruton-like positions, let us briefly go back in time to introduce here another interlocutor, the ancient orator Lysias (b. 459 BC or, according to other sources, 445 BC). In his Against Philon (circa 404 BC), Lysias (see also Chapter 5) raged against “those who, though naturally citizens [physei politai], are of the opinion that any land [pasa gē] in which they have their business [epitideia] is their homeland [patris]”; they “are evidently people who would even abandon the public good [koinon agathon] of their city to seek their private gain [idion kerdos], because they regard their fortune [ousian], not the city, as their homeland” (Lysias, Against Philon, 31, 6, my

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translation). Lysias’s was a complaint against rootlessness that at first glance resembles that of Scruton (although, as will become apparent, it is even more interesting in its dissimilarity from Scruton’s complaint). For one thing, as R. Schlaifer had already remarked in 1936, this whole point shows that the argument in favor of cosmopolitan mobility and relativization of one’s roots, “although adopted perhaps for base reasons, was quite widespread” years before the Cynics and before Alexander (1936, 170). That aside, important for our discussion is that Lysias points to an apparent contradiction such as the one that contemporary critics of cosmopolitanism as parasitical point to, namely, that although “cosmopolitans” are rooted and presuppose rootedness, they abandon their patriotic commitments for the sake of rootlessness. Unlike Scruton, who describes as parasites those who let themselves be shaped by cultural variety and become mobile, Lysias targets a more specific group of self-declared cosmopolitans. He targets those who monologically, egoistically, and nonrelationally move about motivated by self-interest alone and act accordingly, giving up collective good and turning into a patria whatever place suits their purposes. This qualification rescues Lysias’s criticism from being just a reactionary, sweeping dismissal of any movement and makes it an important reference point for demarcating our defense of cultural rootlessness as well as for exploring the preconditions for the possibilities opened for rooted cosmopolitanism. Surely, Lysias’s incrimination of any decision to give up one’s natal place on grounds of work or profit outside the border would not be defensible. But being grounded in the tension between the citizen considering a collectivity as his home, on the one hand, and the citizen considering property as his home, on the other, Lysias’s comment is nevertheless illuminating in drawing our attention to cases of movement that are motivated by private gain regardless of the consequences the pursuit of this gain might have for any relevant collectivity. Against such cases, we may argue that the enrichment of pragmatic-existential cultural choice (and of the corresponding selfhood) that merits the attribute “cosmopolitan” is the one that is coupled with ethico-political concerns and with the various local and global obligations that can be associated with them. In contrast to the qualification that we have just added, the “cosmopolitan” self defined within Scruton’s, Waldron’s, and Appiah’s idioms (and within that of many

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contemporary thinkers of globalism) is vague enough to include even the slave trader as a case in point. For nothing precludes the slave trader from being fun loving and thus from enriching his life with material from the cultures he comes across the very moment that he crosses his country’s borders for profit and performs his business transactions. In Lysias, just as we saw in the previous chapter more generally about the conception of polis in the ancient Greek world, politics and, by extension (an extension that we may draw and that is not in the text itself), cosmo-politics presuppose the distinction between the private and the public (oikos and polis, property and the common good). When the private and the public are in tension, that is, when one has to choose which one to serve (e.g., in contemporary terms, when environmental damage demands a thinking that goes beyond profit), those to whom property and not the polis or cosmos is home will choose their private gain over the public good or the environment—regardless of whether they appreciate, as persons, various cultures and benefit from them. The current association of cosmopolitanism with fluid, hybrid, and diasporic identities is arbitrary insofar as those terms are placed within a pragmatic monological idiom that fails to recognize the significance of politics and the public, a significance that raises demands upon the self beyond the call to enrich one’s existential choice. I have already argued in the previous chapter that the mere polemical reversal of the old qualitative priority of rootedness over rootlessness does not suffice to account for cosmopolitanism understood as a relation of an I (or We) to an Other. Ultimately, the subject described by Scruton, Waldron, and, to an important degree, Appiah as cosmopolitan is rather a globalized self. To be more than a globalized self (i.e., to be a cosmopolitan self), one should be committed to some kind of (a) political and ethico-emotive concerns and (b) legal obligations to otherness and should display (c) a reflective depth that makes possible the critical judgment upon (a) and (b) and the concomitant cognitive transformation and practical redirection. Most theorists who give culturalist cosmopolitanism exclusive priority or those who couple it solely with legal cosmopolitanism confuse cosmopolitanism with (in-process or accomplished) internationalism and multiculturalism. I see this confusion as a result of a quasi-naturalistic fallacy in the sense that the Is (the current state of affairs, especially that of Occidental societies) is elevated automatically to the level of the

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Ought (how the world should be). This is also evident, for reasons that follow, in Waldron’s response to criticisms that, in his earlier work, he took the cosmopolitan commitment to be contrary to immersion in one’s own culture. Acknowledging the pertinence of Will Kymlicka’s objection that not all cultures are homogenous and “uncontaminated” by otherness, Waldron concedes that “many cultures in the world have already something of a cosmopolitan aspect. A person who grows up in Manhattan, for example, cannot but be aware of a diversity of cultures, a diversity of human practices and experiences, indeed a diversity of languages clamoring for his attention” (2000, 231). The new position he adopts is indeed fairer to the cultural diversity that is available in most societies and abandons the idea that there is nothing cosmopolitan in a rooted identity. However, it identifies the Is of some places with the cosmopolitan Ought and continues to overlook the relational dimension of cosmopolitanism that is expressed as openness to affective and ethico-political bonds with others. In addition, Waldron’s new position can attract the charge of Eurocentrism in the following manner. By equating the Is of some societies with the cosmopolitan Ought,3 it takes for granted that people of global cities (even people rooted in them) are somehow closer to cosmopolitanism as such than those whose choices are more limited due to living in less heterogeneous and less multicultural societies. He seems to rely on a “global city–versus–rural periphery” dichotomy and to equate the lifestyle within the former with cosmopolitanism as such, without examining how the world is treated (rather than just experienced or utilized) by the global citizen. It is thus overlooked that, just as “the examples are countless in which the poorest of the poor have been more hospitable than the richest of the rich” (Hansen et al. 2009, 606), likewise, it is very possible that the periphery may display more relational-cosmopolitan attitudes than the “culturalist-cosmopolitan” center. In fact, part of the unintended Eurocentric implications of Waldron’s ascription of cosmopolitanism to global citizens is that, ironically, in a globalized world, as a capstone to all the other discriminations and deprivations the underprivileged (and often rooted) periphery is exposed to, it is denied the possibility to be, equally or more, cosmopolitan than the global center, at least in terms of political orientation, ethical sensibilities, and Other-oriented feelings such as compassion.

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The following statement makes even clearer how Waldron dissociates cosmopolitanism from the relational frame, rendering it a monological ideal of individual choice while simultaneously falling into the trap of Eurocentrism (and thus doing again a great service to communitarians by proving them right in their claim that the liberal is as much immersed in her own culture as any other human being): However we describe it, the fact is that someone who makes a life in this milieu is already making a life in the world, whether he has particular affection for one of the available cultures or not. Even if he spends his whole life in Manhattan, he is by virtue of his location necessarily open to new practices and new experiences in a cosmopolitan sort of way. (Waldron 2000, 232, latter emphasis mine)

It may be true that people in global cities are closer to making culturally richer existential choices, consciously or not, but nothing guarantees that such choices entail that particular stance to alterity that deserves to be called “cosmopolitan.” We must not forget what Georg Simmel emphasized: that we often flourish “in dense urban settings because we are largely indifferent to the fate of those around us, and we do this by shaping our psyche in line with the sort of calculating mentality demanded by a money- and commodity-based economy” (Simmel, quoted in Gardiner 2006, 11). Yet, Simmel’s theory was dialectic enough to accommodate Waldron’s appreciation of the modern metropolis and to avoid overturning the dichotomy of urban versus rural, center versus periphery, in favor of the latter poles. But unlike Waldron, Simmel could see that along with “inestimable richness and variety of objects and experiences,” the big city often engenders overstimulation and “a blasé attitude that is an adaptive response to it” (Gardiner 2006, 12). In the cultural environment of the global city, perhaps the issue of cosmopolitanism is likely to be more thematizable than in a relatively homogeneous society. But it is Eurocentric to assume that the globalist imaginary and the culturalism that is more noticeable in big Western cities (or in global cities that resemble them and are located outside the strictly defined Western world) lead automatically to cosmopolitanism. (They surely do not lead automatically to the cosmopolitanism of the more encompassing kind that this book defends; but they do not even

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secure the cosmopolitanism of the narrow culturalist kind that satisfies Waldron, since availability of rich cultural material does not keep away the blasé attitude that comes with satiation, overstimulation, or daily-routine diversions.) And it is Eurocentrism as much as it would be exoticization and romanticization to assume that the Third World is automatically more prone to relational cosmopolitanism than the world that is generally described as Western. If cosmopolitanism is an attitude and, at the same time, both outlook (theasis) and practice (praxis), rather than just symbiosis or personal enrichment, we cannot say that someone or something is cosmopolitan without first knowing how he, she, or it treats otherness. To repeat, then slave traders would have been some of the most cosmopolitan people ever. On the whole, I argue that the deflation of ethico-political and emotive cosmopolitan elements in favor of a cultural-pragmaticcosmopolitan life choice derives from a monological phenomenology colonizing, and encroaching on, a regulative ideal that is relational par excellence. Such a phenomenology posits an isolated actor— disengaged from others in the sense that what connects all of them (the self and the others) is a solitary desire for a rich variety of goods. This approach places the actor in a subject-object relation to the material that belongs to other cultures and then jumps to conclusions about the intersubjective relation itself. Within this phenomenology, the transition from participation in, or utilization of, another life-form to a comprehensive engagement with cosmos (including true respect, political vision, ethical responsibility, duties, or feelings for it) is as problematic as the transition from the solipsistic Cartesian subject to the moral actor. Such solipsism operates even when the culturalist conception acknowledges the significance of the legal dimension of cosmopolitan normativity, which, at first glance, seems to escape monologism by binding people in a relation of mutually restricted freedom. This happens because, within culturalist cosmopolitanism, legality is interpreted in a monological way that suppresses its relational character and downplays legality’s interplay with ethics. In such a context, law acquires only a protective quality that, again, serves primarily the self and reduces ethics to a narrow sense of morality, one that secures for the “cosmopolitan” subject the uplifting moral self-image of the person who does not intentionally harm those from which he borrows cultural

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material, who respects and tolerates their idiosyncrasies, and who at times performs acts of charity. Even those who avoid some of the pitfalls of culturalist cosmopolitanism by maintaining a more demanding legal or moral cosmopolitanism often resort to problematic identifications of who the cosmopolitan might be. Consider, for instance, David Held’s view that “those born after the Second World War are more likely to see themselves as cosmopolitans, to support the UN system and lend their support to the free trade system and the free movement of migrants” (2003, 469). Apart from being an interesting question for empirical research rather than a self-evident assertion, this view invites criticisms as to what counts as cosmopolitan and whether we should accept uncritically the selfdescription/self-image of postwar subjects as truly cosmopolitan. Is support of the United Nations (one that, as Jacques Derrida [2003, 111; 2006, 410] and Jürgen Habermas [2003b, 39] have criticized it, is gradually becoming more like a paper tiger in the thrall of strong global players rather than a truly justice-oriented organization of international right) and/or support of the free trade system and free movement all it takes for one to be cosmopolitan? Even if those commitments are a necessary condition, are they also sufficient for developing cosmopolitan subjectivities? Is cosmopolitanism a solipsistic matter of what ideas the thinking subject entertains? Again, a monological legalism and a flat liberalism can deliver at most globalized rather than cosmopolitan selves. And just in case one might think this is a purely liberal problem not encountered in discourses that are critical of both liberalism and communitarianism, one might consider postcolonialism. Then again, as such a consideration would sidetrack us from the issue of legality that concerns us here, let us just suggest Homi Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitan” (2000, 133–142) as a case of a postcolonial approach that invites criticisms like those that I have just formulated. A careful reading of that text, as well as of other texts that also belong within the broad framework of postcolonialism, can help us see that the distance separating the “cosmopolitan” self-description they promote from that of Waldron and Appiah is too short. The following explains further the above objections to culturalism and legalism and shows why the negligence of ethico-political cosmopolitanism and the suppression of the relational quality of the legal

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dimension render legalist cosmopolitanism problematic, or at least incomplete. Let us discuss Bruce Ackerman’s (1994) focus on a legal understanding of rooted cosmopolitanism in one of his texts. There Ackerman takes the standard conception of cosmopolitanism as universalist agreement on certain values and rightly perceives its dangers. As he writes, “I remain an unrepentant cosmopolitan. But there are risks lurking in this existential stance—a clear and present danger of pretentiousness, preciocity, and solipsism, as I find that others refuse to engage on the terms that ego finds so reasonable” (Ackerman 1994, 535). I believe that Ackerman here touches unwittingly on a question that proves again the limits of the rootless-versus-rooted and identityversus-difference framework of cosmopolitan theorization. The question is how different and independent egos would consent on maxims of action without each of them absolutizing solipsistically her own standpoint or fearing that the other will do so. The answer I give to this question relies on acknowledging the necessity for turning to the relational-versus-monological framework. This shift in perspective would prioritize understanding cosmopolitanism as treatment of others over agreement with them. Our diachronic and synchronic entanglement with others and with the whole world and the indispensability of the role of the Other for examining our life and for the vision of a redeemed cosmos constitute a kind of cosmopolitan spectrality that puts cosmopolitan ideality in the appropriate perspective. If we acknowledge the importance of facing such spectrality, we realize that we need first to question whether we are indeed cosmopolitan instead of declaring our cosmopolitanism an objective indisputable fact. We need to ask more deeply what it takes to be cosmopolitan, then try to find out how others can cope with our becoming cosmopolitan in harkening to the demands of cosmos or whether they would converge in possibly common values. If we always assume that negotiation on world affairs is irrelevant or even prior to changes in our ways of treating others (or treating the environment), then we will never escape dilemmas such as the above. For one thing, dialogue is facilitated where there is trust and care—not in lip service but in reality, through provable and visible commitments to justice. One cannot trust another whose cosmopolitan declarations serve more her need to uphold a positive self-image than concrete, practical measures of changes in treating cosmos.

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The problem of others (supposedly cumbersome eccentrics or unmanageable fanatics) failing to agree with what the “cosmopolitan” ego finds so reasonable will keep haunting all “cosmopolitan” efforts so long as we are exclusively preoccupied with the tensions of identity and difference. Similar problems will persist if we carry on assuming that by changing our attitude toward others, those others will take advantage of us, and that to avoid this possible exploitation of our more benevolent attitude to them, we should first make them negotiate with us and share our values. The difficulty with Ackerman’s “agreement perspective” is that we wait to figure out whether the others would agree with us in order to declare ourselves cosmopolitans and act accordingly. In both modern legalist (interpreting international right in a flat way) and poststructuralist conceptions of negotiation of meanings, be they universalist or relativist, what remains unshakable is the priority of cosmopolitanism as agreement (and its opposite, that is, cosmopolitanism as dissent and Gelassenheit acknowledgment of disagreement) over cosmopolitanism as focus on treatment, practical reorientation, and amends for past crimes against humanity or nature. Within such conceptions, global conflict (sadly always reduced to cultural conflict at the explanatory level) appears only as an object of negotiation. Negotiation, etymologically coming from the Latin nec and otium, meaning “no free time,” is precisely the negation of leisure that urgent action demands, the cancellation of the pause for thought that is usually necessary when one considers issues of justice and of dealing out justice. For the busybody international negotiator who views reconciliation as “give-and-take,” any pause for thought, any detailed study of the particularities of a conflict that touch upon justice, is just a waste of time that is precious for pressuring those who can tolerate pressure (usually the weaker party of a conflict, which more often than not, though surely not always, happens to have a lesser share of culpability than the stronger party) and for achieving agreement that will bring us closer to global peace (and the negotiator to a Nobel Peace Prize), to a conflict-free world in which all will indulge safely and merrily in the illusion of cosmopolitanism. Calgacus’s complaint about the Romans creating wilderness and calling it peace (as stated in the well-known narrative by Tacitus) has had a lasting pertinence. But cosmopolitanism as a relational regulative ideal is not a problem

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of negotiation and self-serving agreement with the Other. It is not a quick and time-saving response to disagreeing or negotiating parties. It is rather a problem of how others have been treated. Because of this, cosmopolitanism requires the lived time and the thinking about time that question invested time. It requires the pause for thought that may urge thought to a new orientation. Who’s cosmopolitan? Waldron’s, Appiah’s, and Ackerman’s cosmopolitanisms, so diverse at first sight but interestingly sharing much beneath the surface—like the cosmopolitanism of Kristeva’s strangers, who are cosmopolitan because they feel strange nowhere and everywhere, as she does, and like the culturalist or legalist cosmopolitanism of many globalist thinkers—are amenable to an objection that can be drawn from David Hansen’s more general reticence about one’s selfbestowed characterization of being cosmopolitan: “There is something amiss, awkward, and untrue to experience for a person to claim, ‘I am a cosmopolitan,’ or to say about his or her community, ‘We are cosmopolitan’” (2008b, 213). For Hansen, “a cosmopolitan sensibility is not a possession, badge, or settled accomplishment. It is an orientation that depends fundamentally upon the ongoing quality of one’s interactions with others, with the world, and with one’s own self ” (2008b, 213). The changing consciousness of the future citizen has, in one of the previous chapters, been associated with the tasks of a cosmopolitan education. Is that the same as thinking oneself a cosmopolitan? Is one of the tasks of education to make students think of themselves as cosmopolitans? For instance, Martha Nussbaum (2000b, 9–11) connects education for citizenship with three capacities: critical examination of oneself and one’s tradition, the development of the narrative imagination, and seeing oneself as a cosmopolitan. Although Nussbaum means it in the sense not of describing oneself as cosmopolitan but rather of realizing one’s obligations beyond one’s local commitments, there is a tendency on the part of some of her readers to misinterpret her plea for the development of such a capacity as a declarative self-description. Something similar happens when Diogenes’s declaration of himself as a citizen of the world is taken out of context and interpreted outside its performative (in Judith Butler’s sense) role. When meant and construed at face value, then consolidated into a self-image, the claim “I am cos-

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mopolitan [kosmou politēs]” indeed gives the impression of something awkward, untrue to experience, and self-indulgent. As Diogenes’s self-proclamation is inextricable from the performative purposes that it served when firstly uttered, let us go even further back in time to a third-person ideal self-description of the cosmopolitan that is more ancient than the Cynic. Democritus (b. 460 BC) had stated roughly 50 years before Diogenes that “any land is traversable by the wise; to the good self the whole world is homeland” (frg. 247, emphasis mine; in the original Greek: andri sophē pasa gē vati; Psychēs gar agathēs patris o xymbas cosmos).4 Although traversibility points at first sight to an association of cosmopolitanism with mobility and rootlessness, that this association is accompanied and qualified by the intellectual (wisdom) and ethical (goodness) precondition makes this statement more interesting than some contemporary approaches to footloose cosmopolitanism. The third-person description keeps away the danger of cosmopolitanism as self-proclamation. Thus, it adds an important dimension to eccentric cosmopolitanism as a decentering process, as a diversion from the self-centeredness of the contemporary globalized self and from the self-congratulatory, soothing self-image of the self-declared cosmopolitan. It also keeps away associations of accomplishment because it sets demands on selfhood that, thankfully, the Western world still regards as daunting (or at least shies away from claiming that it meets already). Although citizens of the globalized world often raise claims to cosmopolitan selfhood, seldom do they feel comfortable with claims of having achieved the status of the wise and the good. They would not declare “we, the wise and good” with the same ease that they declare “we, cosmopolitans.” At the same time, the elitism usually associated with the academic, the traveler as such, or the footloose manager can be challenged by the fact that neither wisdom nor goodness is inextricably tied with the Eurocentric notion of the educated and well-fed burgher: apparently paradoxically, the cognitive and affective significance of learning about the Other can often be grasped and then expressed by people who have developed a selfless and inquisitive personality regardless of inability to “prove” their cosmopolitanism by means of degrees, journeys, and other such tokens of mobility and encyclopedic knowledgeability.

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Furthermore, the inconclusive character of the ideals of wisdom and goodness can be transferred to the ideal of being cosmopolitan and make the latter’s inconclusiveness stand out too. In this way, the necessity that global mobility acquire an intellectual and emotional significance—just as John Dewey stated in 1916 and we shall see presently—as well as an ethico-political significance that globally remains to be seen, becomes already manifest. As to another possible objection—one related to the fact that making cosmopolitanism’s historical appearance recede further back in the Greek past does not keep away the suspicion of the uncosmopolitan reassertion that everything imaginable began in Greek antiquity— I can only answer by pointing to four distinct lines of research that respond to such objections and open possibilities of connecting Greek cosmopolitan thought with other traditions (some of them older than the Greek): (1) Greek antiquity was a much less homogeneous and much more East-influenced culture than has been presented, especially by some Northwestern researchers. (2) Archaeological findings trace some ideas of egalitarian universality to ancient Egypt and Pharaoh Akhenadon, something that I find indicative of preoccupations related to cosmopolitan concerns beyond the confines of Greek cultural space and, again, long before Alexander. (3) The Upanishads always constitute an important source for present-day cosmopolitan research into times long before King Asoka—unfortunately, these texts are much neglected by practically all cosmopolitan (post)modern thinkers who quibble about the supposed Eurocentrism of maintaining ideas that originated in Greek antiquity. (Of course, there are some exceptions, such as Ananta Kumar Giri [2006], but most of those theorists who rehabilitate non-Greek cosmopolitanism descend from non-Western cultures). And (4) visions of a better life from various non-Greek as well as non-Western religious worldviews, upon which I cannot comment here (see, however, Papastephanou [2008a, 2009]), are fraught with ideas that can be associated with an egalitarian and more generally ethico-political cosmopolitanism. But my concern here has been with extant material attesting to a more clearly stated thematization of cosmopolitanism, one that had indeed, to our present knowledge, emerged in Greek antiquity but which may lay out the case for a cosmopolitan wisdom and goodness that opens up to futurity and decenters the self.

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The cosmopolitan might be not the one who feels stranger everywhere and nowhere but the one whose ethico-politically heightened consciousness turns all the world into home and whose desire for an as yet unreached wisdom and goodness displaces selfhood and moves it toward an eccentric citizenship of an as yet no place (topos).

Cosmopolitanism, Expansive Eras, and Crossed Internal Borders I have so far suggested that we search for, or (re)construct, those ideals whose educational cultivation will encourage a different way of relating to otherness rather than just acknowledging it as a source for enriching and pleasing our own selves. And this is where cosmopolitanism has, in the course of the book, entered the picture as an ideal in tension with globalization understood either as process or as accomplished reality. However, how cosmopolitanism enters the picture more generally, outside this particular book, is significant as such and must be discussed. For it seems that many believe that cosmopolitanism enters the picture whenever we have radical expansion, of either the imperium or globalization kind. For instance, Amanda Anderson asserts that “cosmopolitanism has repeatedly emerged at times when the world has suddenly seemed to expand in unassimilable ways” (quoted in Todd 2010, 214). An indication of this view is also the fact that many theorists (see, for instance, Delanty [2006, 28])5 exaggerate the relation of ancient cosmopolitanism with radical expansion—for instance, they exaggerate the connection of the later Cynic and early Stoic phases with Alexander’s expansion and of the later Stoic phases with Pax Romana. But a closer look at antiquity proves such exaggerations inaccurate. Democritus’s statement that, for the wise and the good, homeland [patris] is the whole world [xympas cosmos] shows that cosmopolitan ideality antecedes Alexander’s expansion by roughly a hundred years. Surely there was mobility back then too. In Democritus’s times, movement had the relatively much slower pace of commercial and cultural exchange (or at times military entanglement) among city-states, kingdoms, metropolises, and their cities, on the one hand, and among citystates, kingdoms, and empires (e.g., Persia), on the other. Movement

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also comprised the frequent phenomenon of the founding of new cities all over the Mediterranean by Greeks, Phoenicians, and others. But it was not the kind of movement that can be associated with the sudden and unassimilable expansion of Alexander’s times. If we go even further back, to the eighth century BC, and explore the cosmopolitan elements in Hesiod’s didactic poetry (Papastephanou 2008c), we see that rather than being dependent upon expansion, cosmopolitanism entered the picture in association with much smaller-scale movement and referred to the duties to the stranger and to the vision of perfect cities where war and injustice have no place. It referred neither to the benefits the self might draw from mobility nor to the convenient relativization of one’s commitments to her locality. Apart from being inaccurate, assertions such as Anderson’s make cosmopolitanism dependent upon sudden radicalization of expansion; thus, they limit the cosmopolitan ideal to being a reactive response to expansion. Transferred to our contemporary context, the idea that cosmopolitanism emerges at times of expansion or of radicalization of humanity’s space and time relation makes cosmopolitanism parasitic upon globalization, a mere subset of globalist discourse, a way of pragmatically coping with an unprecedented situation. Surely cosmopolitanism can deal with questions about how to cope with new givens of life, but it can also deal with much more than that, as it can be approached as a relational ideal of how the world and the human should be entangled. And it has emerged, at least within the ancient Greek context, through such an approach to cosmos (again, Hesiod comes to mind) and to interhuman relations. The modernism of making cosmopolitanism dependent upon expansion is quite clear in John Dewey’s following connection of the elimination of distance (even that effected by war) with learning from otherness and broadening one’s horizons: Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and

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thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. (1993 [1916], 110, emphasis mine)

But as early as 1916, Dewey had already realized, much unlike many of us postmoderns, that there is a surplus of ideality in such hopeful diagnoses that cannot be channeled naively and tout court in the celebration of border crossing as such. In what follows the above quotation, he indicates that the crossing of external barriers does not automatically secure the crossing of internal borders: “Travels, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of space” (Dewey 1993 [1916], 110, emphasis mine). Today, although the relevant empirical phenomena have advanced in incredible ways and at incredible paces, the intellectual, emotional, and (I add) ethico-political significance has not been debated exhaustively, let alone secured. Cosmopolitanism is often conflated with globalization; in turn, the theorization of the cosmopolitan pedagogical ideal strongly reflects the overlooking of the fact that globalization is an empirical phenomenon, whereas cosmopolitanism should refer to an ideal about how the world and the human(s) should relate and to the virtues that would correspond to, or facilitate, such an ideal. When cosmopolitanism is theorized beyond simple equations of expansion and learning from others, just as when it distances itself from its Pax Romana alter ego, it envisions peace and reconciliation, and it may aim also to free cultures from self-immurement. In the latter circumstance its objective is not only irenic but also deconstructive and reconstructive. It still remains within the confines of culturalism, as it concentrates principally on paving paths for cross-cultural encounters. Nevertheless, this kind of cosmopolitanism has its merits. Encounters undo or reinvent identities, reshuffle their interpretive material and their self-understanding, and unleash new creative energies. The monological springboard—benefiting primarily the self—can have some indirect relational relevance if thought through to some of its deeper, possible implications. The encounter with others may dismantle hierarchies and reset priorities—on the precondition, of course, that

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the self has already undergone some intellectual transformation, for instance, that she has learned to suspect qualitative differentiations among cultures (Papastephanou 2002b). This means that moral/ethical assessments of different cultural orientations and practices (assessments that are both inescapable and necessary if we are to avoid an “anything goes” stance to everything) need not be thought to reflect a supposedly essential, qualitative asymmetry among cultures—that is, an asymmetry understood biologistically or metaphysically as inherent in the Other’s essence. But this is more or less where most approaches of this kind seem to exhaust their critical-exploratory energies. This is the case even with those that present cosmopolitanism as an ideal of equality, or of compassion, and, at times, of democracy or of care. Relationality is then exhausted in such indirectness that emphasizes only the respect one should show to diversity and bypasses the cosmopolitan challenges and further demands upon the subject that the relation of the I and the Other raises. I have so far argued that this consolidates monologism and makes cosmopolitanism an anodyne, lukewarm ideal of a society that feels it owes nothing else to the world but respect for harmless, inoperative difference and believes that this is the most serious change that it must undergo. Thus understood, cosmopolitan education undertakes, at best, to impart this ideal to the young so as to prepare for or secure the existence of such a society. Within this context, which is also the context of very many current theorizations of global politics in terms of nearness and distance, the obstacles to cosmopolitanism are frequently imagined as geometrical lines and geographical borders (natural borders such as mountains or rivers acquiring symbolic sociocultural meaning) or as directly political demarcations of territory such as artificially drawn frontiers. Within most debates, borders are characterized by a pragmatic doubleness, that is, they are treated either as helpful in organizing and controlling life or as damaging to free movement, exchange, and communication. This is so even when borders are no longer theorized as “simply lines on a map or a physical frontier between nation-states” and acquire their own space, thus becoming “zones of exchange, connectivity and security” (Rumford 2006, 161–162). In general, the doubleness of borders is still limited to an existential-pragmatic sense of disabling

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versus enabling possibilities—to the neglect of an ethico-political sense of local and global perfectibility (as I shall attempt to show in the next chapter). Likewise, mobility is identified with a progressivism of border crossing and with a deracination of the thorns blocking the path to human contact; stability is then identified with a conservative, jaundiced sentimentalism raising barriers, immuring communities, and compromising mobilities and freedoms. Human bonds, in the double sense of keeping people stuck together and of linking them through shared feelings and interests, are said to have been spatially relativized, extended, annulled, or reshaped. A worldwide connectivity through new forms of communication and transportation has radicalized the human experience of proximity and distance.6 Related virtues and ideals are no less affected by what is now known as a “spatial turn.”7 Patriotism is largely regarded as an obsolete and pernicious political stance that borders on chauvinism. To many theorists, it appears as a parochial ideal of rooted people who fail to perceive the terra incognita of new economic, political, and existential opportunity ahead, the unexplored topos that is flickering and hazy in the distance but yielding and trustworthy when patria’s borders are crossed. Such border crossing, such broadening of one’s horizons beyond the nation-state or the region, is further expected to help distant others become familiar and to minimize the political “cost” of their difference. Contrasted to, or in tension with, patriotic rootedness, cosmopolitanism is taken to signify global potential for enriched lifestyles, action coordination beyond the nation-state, freedom of movement, and unobstructed economic activity. Thus, for Chris Rumford, for instance, “a cosmopolitan lives in and across borders” (2006, 163). Through those, life is connected with “both the multiplicity of communities we may elect to become members of and the cross-cutting tendencies of polities to impose their border regimes on us in ways which compromise our mobilities, freedoms, rights, and even identities” (Rumford 2006, 163). Despite their apparent radicality, however, current glorifications of annihilation of distance are historically updated versions of nineteenthcentury approaches to mobility (Papastephanou 2008b). Being so, they perpetuate old dichotomies as much as their old conservative counterpart (i.e., the kind of glorification of rootedness that had charged

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mobility with lack of commitment to collective interest) used to do. Both residual approaches leave standardized conceptions of political ideals untouched and pigeonhole all virtue within one of the poles of the dichotomy to the exclusion of the other pole. Patriotism versus cosmopolitanism is the most exemplary dichotomy in this respect. And the two poles operate as such a dichotomy even when approached in more relational rather than monological terms—for instance, when they are theorized through transitive-affective terms such as love. Even in such cases, the monological glorification of rootlessness on which they rest suffices to undo the possibilities of less dichotomous thinking that relationality involves. Thus, patriotism is conceived as the love of one’s own country and cosmopolitanism as the love of the whole world; in both cases, the self who entertains those feelings is the center of debate (what his benefits and obligations might be, what challenges he may face in trying to agree with others, and so forth). All this, then, gains priority over a broader and much more complex net of entanglement of collectivities, Other-derived perspectives, and so on. In the end, the definitions and conceptions thus asserted, being too minimal and unconditional, fail to determine and to justify the virtue and ideal character of both patriotism and cosmopolitanism. Translated into love for particularity and love for universality correspondingly, such definitions of patriotism and cosmopolitanism entrench the belief that these ideals are at odds. One is about being chained to place, worshiping autoerotically the ground one walks on. The other is about the inclusiveness of a common human nature. In this way,8 political ideals end up being about frontier lands at which one draws the line regarding one’s cognitive and affective involvement. Patriotism becomes a border discourse whose horizon sets limits to mobility and obligation, whereas cosmopolitanism is taken to be a borderless discourse of unlimited inclusiveness, a monotopia of freedom of movement supposedly bringing along an active concern for all humanity. Hence it is hardly surprising that “many of the themes central to contemporary social theory—globalization, cosmopolitanism, networked community, mobilities, and flows—have led to both a rethinking of the nature and role of borders, and, at the same time, have caused social theorists to place borders more centrally in the study of society” (Rumford 2006, 155).

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Notes 1. Lu (2000) also explains how this approach could even inform anti-Semitic stances. 2. I am indebted to Christopher Norris for drawing my attention to the connection of anti-Semitism and anticosmopolitanism in Eliot. 3. Probably this is so because, just like many other contemporary thinkers, he thinks that the Ought can be, and should be (here one may notice the irony of the inescapability of normativity!) sidestepped in order to avoid the utopianism that is supposedly inherent in it. 4. The phrase is also mentioned by Schlaifer (1936, 169). 5. There Delanty writes that the ancient cosmopolitan tradition “is based on a strong notion of a universal morality, which can be seen too as reflecting the decline of the closed world of polis and the rise of the universal empire of Alexander.” Against such claims, I suggest a more detailed and careful study of Greek antiquity (e.g., from Hesiod, to Herodotus, to Aeschylus, and down to Euripides), one that proves that ancient cosmopolitanism as a whole did not reflect the “universality” of Alexander’s empire (much of it precedes it by centuries) and that the world of the polis was not as closed as many contemporary theorists assume. 6. For a discussion of the educational effects of new ways of dealing with proximity and distance, see Andrew Stables (1998). 7. For more on this term, see Rumford (2006, 166ff.), and on the primacy of spatiality against temporality in current globalist educational discourse, see Usher (2002). 8. Here, many approaches come to mind: either the line now associated with Martha Nussbaum (1997); or that of a common human progress (the neopragmatist line of Richard Rorty [1992]); or that of a universal contract (continental cosmopolitan liberalism up to Habermasian-style [1997] communicative utopias or the American cosmopolitan liberalism of Rawls’s The Law of Peoples [2002]). To avoid a possible misunderstanding, we must keep in mind that many of these theorists (e.g., Habermas, Rorty) have a theory of patriotism too. But what is important here is that, like many others, they see the difference between the two ideals as a matter of inclusiveness rather than of scope and relevance.

Chapter Seven

Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism as Boundary Discourses Against the neat categorizations of patriotism as the

discourse of the border and cosmopolitanism as the discourse of the borderless criticized in the previous chapter, this chapter aims to treat both cosmopolitanism and patriotism, as boundary discourses but in a more nuanced and, hopefully, less unsuspecting sense. Rather than being merely about external political boundaries, about fixed patriotic horizons as the limits of one’s view across the surface of the earth, ostensibly ever receding in a globalized world, these discourses should be equally, and perhaps more, about internal limits. The latter are not connected to actual walls impeding movement but rather to the specific motivational basis of movement that nourishes dominant pursuits of enriched existential and economic opportunity all over a pragmatically borderless world. I shall argue that a certain attitude to the relational is the boundary to be crossed, equally, by both patriotic and cosmopolitan identities. What is required is the intellectual, emotional, and ethico-political extension of the pragmatic significance of spatiotemporal border crossing. The extension in question is the one that undoes the internal obstacles to worldwide concerns, obstacles that, once raised at an early age, are carried along wherever one goes. The internal (psychological, mental, emotive) obstacles to cosmopolitanism derive from a dominant profit-seeking and success-oriented motivational basis of movement and block ethico-political relational considerations of mobility. The real challenge for education is to demolish such obstacles and not just to prepare people to live and work across borders. 134

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Ironically, as they stand, cosmopolitanism and patriotism are mainly boundary discourses1 in a sense other than the dominant globalist one of mutually exclusive and rigidly separated accounts of borders and borderlessness: not only do they deal with the frontier, but they themselves include and exclude by leaving important meanings out of their province. What a standard notion of patriotism is supposed to exclude and how is quite known and evident and needs no further elaboration here. In its liberal standard sense, patriotism is about restricted obligations, thus leaving out the extension of responsibility to the whole world. In its continental standard sense, patriotism concerns the affect toward one’s collectivity, thus leaving out the conditions in which such affect might be permissible and meaningful. The standard notion of cosmopolitanism, however, invites a longer comment, since it purports to be the borderless discourse of inclusion par excellence. When understood only in terms of encountering diversity, enriching one’s existential opportunity through diversity, and setting laws for protecting diversity from illiberal infringement, cosmopolitanism becomes a political ideal of an individualist freedom that is restricted solely or principally by negative duties. Left out is the whole set of positive duties that restores global and interstate relations and comprises everything from contrite apologies and reparations for caused harm up to supererogatory ethics of material aid. In silencing all this, contemporary conceptions of cosmopolitanism seem no longer drastically separated from the standard account of patriotism (i.e., the liberal account of patriotism that is treated as benign and thus as reconcilable with cosmopolitanism) in the following sense: what was supposed to divide them (i.e., the treatment of insiders and outsiders) now appears to unite them, in the doubleness that is most eloquently expressed by the French verb partager, where division coincides with sharing. Both converge on treating the Other, local or global, in a politically correct way. Obligation, then, is narrowed down to facile (and ultimately self-congratulatory), mostly verbal concern for the Other. Despite their conventional theorization as either opposing political commitments or as possibly compatible ideals of respect for (global or/and local) otherness, cosmopolitanism and patriotism as boundary discourses turn out to be tacitly about the limits of help, the nearness

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and distance of obligation. In the case of cosmopolitanism, the celebration of unbounded movement and unconditional border crossing is curiously combined with a very telling silence on unconditional obligation: very few texts both in general political philosophy2 and educational philosophy develop arguments for global redistribution of wealth and for redefinition of what counts as wealth, beyond the conceptualizations that have taken precedence in the West. Even fewer go beyond redistribution as a matter of supererogatory ethics of charity and material aid (Nussbaum 2000a) or as a purely synchronic obligation (Dobson 2006). More surprisingly, the texts that most glorify mobility and border crossing are the most silent on these issues. Any simple Internet search using scholarly engines can show that notions such as global redistribution of wealth and material aid are kept at bay even in works that are exclusively on cosmopolitan and multicultural education, proving, once again, that cosmopolitanism qua globalism remains a boundary discourse when more active and demanding ways of engagement with otherness are at stake. It is accurate that “theorizing borders and the dynamics of bordering and rebordering have become key components of understanding contemporary social and political change” (Rumford 2006, 155, emphasis mine). What is significant in this statement for the purposes of this chapter, however, is that such fashionable theorization of borders is precisely a key component of understanding contemporary social and political change, not of shaping and directing it to normatively desirable ends. This receptivity that overlooks any demand for more active intervention in the current state of the world and favors a rather passive perception of change (at the expense of normatively regulated aspirations to drastic change) occurs because, within the framework of the most faddish sociology, cosmopolitanism is a boundary discourse in yet another sense: it is raised within a specific conception of the social that fences off the ethical, the normative-political, and the metapolitical (in Alain Badiou’s [2005] sense). In Ulrich Beck’s (2004) work on cosmopolitanism, in Manuel Castells’s (1996) theory of globalized networks, and in Chris Rumford’s (2006) own approach, it becomes clear that this is no mere methodological and epistemological demarcation. It is rather a failure to overcome the positivist segregation of facts and

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values that assigns the former to sociology and the latter to philosophy,3 either to the total exclusion of the transformative demands of philosophical cosmopolitanism or to the tout court appropriation of them. Hence, for Rumford, for instance, “if societies are not constrained by the imposition of national borders, then the development of a global or cosmopolitan society becomes a possibility” (2006, 163). The interchangeable use of “global” and “cosmopolitan” and the placement of their possibility in the mere transcendence of national borders speaks either for the abandonment of the philosophical, strong demand for ethical cosmopolitanism as something more than mobility, or for the unsubstantiated expectation that border crossing will automatically deliver the goods regarding ethics and world justice. In Rumford’s words, “Cosmopolitanism is best understood as an orientation to the world which entails the constant negotiation and crossing of borders” (2006, 163). Yet nowhere in his text do borders take the meaning of internal relational obstacles to ethical or environmental worldwide concerns. Ethics and ecology remain the outsiders of sociologists’ “insiders’ talk.”4 If Rumford’s definition of cosmopolitanism is more appropriate for describing globalization, as I believe, cosmopolitanism is best understood as an ideal of treating the self, the Other, and the environment in a way that renegotiates and crosses the ethical borders that the hegemonic Western view of the good has consolidated. To be something more than just expedient and footloose opportunism, cosmopolitanism requires “a ‘nearness’ to vulnerable, suffering, disadvantaged others.” Yet it is true that “the recognition that we are all members of a common humanity seems not to bring such others near enough” (Dobson 2006, 171). If participation in common human nature does not secure ethical proximity, what does? A possible answer might be the awareness of nearness as such, of the nearness effected by actual historical entanglement, that is, by the guilty border crossing of the past. For, after all, nearness is not just an ideal to be reached and radicalized by globalization, as many theorists believe today. Proximity has already been an effected reality of human cultural and political entanglement, forming a solid ground not only for redistributive justice along supererogatory egalitarian lines but also for restorative justice along lines of historical ethical debt. Such nearness has not always been a positive experience for all those affected by it; some (e.g., the victims

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of aggressive, expansive wars) would have infinitely preferred to have remained distant. Hence, with Andrew Dobson, I would argue that we must seek the overcoming of “the distance that separates us one from another and that makes obligations seem supererogatory rather than strict” (2006, 170). Against Dobson, however, as I explain in Chapter 10, I see such obligations as emanating not only synchronically from environmental concerns but also diachronically from relational concerns. Instead of realizing the responsibilities emanating diachronically from relational concerns, many cosmopolitan and patriotist liberals or communitarians tacitly agree on the convenient, discursive exclusion of such issues. The buffer zone of their polemics seems to be the minimal expectation for Western redirection, the minimal crossing of internal, ideological borders, and the minimal awareness of historical guilt. For Rumford, “Borders can shape our perception of the world” (2006, 166): this can find no better illustration than in the dominant assumption that cosmopolitanism is attainable through a simple expansion of Western ideals (e.g., of adventurous job seeking prepared by the appropriate education), with no need for radical change of Western orientation other than the minimal one of pulling down walls. Such minimalism leaves the distance separating us from others untouched and loses sight of the evaluative doubleness of boundary crossing. For border crossing is double in an evaluative sense: it is a Janusfaced operation (regarding its value) that does not necessarily have the ethical significance of transcendence that is usually expected from it. It can be ethically desirable when it brings about an enlarged and fuller theorization or materialization of obligation. But it can be ethically repugnant when it secures profit by extending the sphere of exploitable sources and people and by drawing them within reach. What separates the two sides of this operation constitutes the set of the true borders to be crossed, the internal ones that hinder ethics, those that are crossed only by uncompromising commitment to law. The latter should not merely signify the thetic, monological, conventionalist sense of the term as protective of the particular interests of the lawgiver and her collectivity. We have already in the previous chapter discussed (regarding the “agreement perspective” on cosmopolitanism) how legalism reduces the universality of right(s) to negotiation. Legal (rather than legalist) cosmopolitanism should refer to the law’s universalizability and to its

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ethically enabling potential as that which sets limits to the celebration of limitlessness and of unconditional dispersal of one’s power across the globe. Both cosmopolitanism and patriotism should be, then, among other things, about walls and laws, border and order. Thus, cosmopolitanism and patriotism can also be described as boundary discourses for one more reason: because, first and foremost, they should be about limits. Positively meant this time, such limits concern the moment and place where movement needs pause for thought (i.e., for thinking the concrete claims to justice of a specific collectivity), as well as the instance when introvert thought (i.e., the thought about one’s specific ethico-political demands and just claims) needs to be enlarged or even brought to a halt. For love for one’s collectivity must not be unconditional, and love for the whole world must not be superficial and costless for the self. In setting such limits within their own province, cosmopolitanism and patriotism further set limits on each other’s justificatory and motivational scope. In doing so, they become mutual correctives and preclude debased versions of each. Rather than being conceived as oppositional, they can be described as in tension whenever they operate as mutual counterdiscourses, that is, whenever they expose how the one may take precedence over the other or trample on its legitimate demands.

Colonialism and Border Crossing To illustrate my argument that the terms of the debate between many cosmopolitans and patriotists are often miscast and their notions ill-defined, I employ the example of colonialism. Colonialism facilitates the exposition of my argument in two ways: first, it proves that the object of the debate, the significance of border crossing or stability (i.e., the rootlessness and rootedness binarism), is a pseudo-dilemma. Neither the mobility and apparent rootlessness of colonial authorities, officials, civil servants, army officers, and so on, nor their proximity to the lands and their contact (even coexistence) with the people they were ruling stopped them from being rooted in hegemonic Western conceptions of profit and rationalizations of predatory treatments of otherness. Crossing external borders effected more rather than less tension with,

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and oppression of, otherness. Nor did it demolish the internal borders that blocked the sense of justice or compassion that would make the colonial self jib at conquest and exploitation of others. The two poles (i.e., rootedness and rootlessness) can make common cause in violence, and the only way to dissolve this complicity is by realizing, along with the ethical restrictions to particularist attachment, the ethical limits to border crossing. Second, the example of colonialism demonstrates that the historical moral debt created by past understandings and handlings of “lawless” border crossing, overlooked by those fascinated with the opportunities offered by mobility, ought not be neglected. Let us begin these connections of colonialism and border crossing with a view that is widely held in most general and educational political philosophy. “The most egregious injustices in our world are commonly fueled by hatred or indifference toward those who live and suffer beyond the borders of one’s own country” (Callan 1999, 197). Are they? “Fuel” operates at the level of motivation. Are those who commit injustices motivated by hatred or indifference toward the peoples beyond the borders? In most cases they seem to be more motivated by prospects and benefits (Papastephanou 2008b, 178). This is why they may be indifferent to or contemptuous of very many populations across the globe, but only few such populations at a time become the target of calculated aggression. For instance, the CIA intervention in Guatemala in 1954 was not organized due to hatred or indifference for the people of Guatemala but due to the “risks” the local government presented for US interests in the largest banana company there. Likewise, the Suez crisis occurred not because the Europeans simply hated the Arabs but because the former had “compelling” geopolitical interests in the area of the latter. Indifference may be one reason why the aggressors did not hesitate to pursue their goals. And indifference may be a principal reason why the above examples have not become metonymies in the hegemonic political academic discourse. But indifference was not the principal cause or motivation for the above “interventions.” This point needs to be unpacked a little more. Indifference is an existential-relational matter: I am indifferent to someone or something; this acquires its corollary ethical or political significance depending on whether the object of my indifference should rather be worthy of

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attention (e.g., one may be right in feeling that his friend’s preference for green apples over red ones is indifferent to him, though not in being equally indifferent to her complaint about his behavior). By contrast, motivation operates at the level of action and its causality: I am doing this or that because a, b, c . . . Often the phrase “I am indifferent to . . . ” can be taken to answer this “because” that is involved in vita activa. But this is in most cases misleading. Indifference reflects a stance deriving from deeply laid assumptions about what counts as worth considering; undertaking a political “project” (e.g., an expansive one) reflects deeply laid assumptions and often meticulous and systematic considerations of what counts as worth doing, judged within a framework of expedient assessment of gains and losses. For sure, existential-relational stances and motivated actions often complement one another and are mutually supportive to the point of being pragmatically indiscernible. Also, those who advance profit-seeking expeditions often employ cultural means in order to succeed (in other words, means concerning existential choice and symbolic, collective meanings that usually undergird decisions about where to focus one’s attention and what can be indifferently bypassed). Amìlcar Cabral’s theorization of this complex relation of economy, culture, and domination is very telling: history “teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned” (2009, 1). But this by no means justifies the contemporary forgetting of the analytic distinction of material causality and cultural outlook (and their confounding), which leads to understating the material gains and antagonism that motivated expansion and continue to be enshrined and cultivated values in schools. As to hatred, consider the following: a person A stands by the window and sees a person B whom A hates walking outside. A throws a pot and injures B. Now contrast the example to another event: C (a person, company, country, or political bloc) crosses borders in pursuit of gold as marvel and, worse, gold as booty (to use Ernst Bloch’s [1986] symbols) in the land of D. To C, the encountered D is not quite hated; D is rather seen as a nuisance and an obstacle standing in the way. D starts being an object of hatred only when D’s resistance stops or delays C’s triumphant march.

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Rather than just being the border to be crossed so as to bring those outside the frontier closer, hatred and indifference are themselves raised as explanatory borders that keep out a deeper and more accurate detection of the why of injustices. The explanatory exaggeration of the role of hatred and indifference in relational political injustices establishes a political idealism (i.e., a tendency to reduce conflicts to the divergent views, frames of thought, or cultures of those involved and to forget the material profit at stake). It also establishes a psychologism (reducing everything to how one feels) that functions as a further internal border blocking the awareness of the materiality of cross-cultural encounters and the need to reconsider our commitment to the values that motivated such materiality (Papastephanou 2008b, 177; Papastephanou 2011a). Outside Eamonn Callan’s statement above and within a much broader globalist discourse, the psychologistic reduction of injustice, and implicitly of conflict, to the emotivism of hatred and indifference is often accompanied by the tendency to reduce phenomena of conflict or violence to culturalist explanations. As Amartya Sen remarks, “Different cultural theories have something in common—they tend to look at conflicts and violence as they relate to modes of living as well as religious beliefs and social customs” (2008, 5). One such theory is, according to Sen, that of the clash of civilizations, which has “become the most popular in the world today” although it “is perhaps also the crudest” (2008, 5). Yet, following Sen again, we must take some more precautions. The talk about profit-motivated movement, or about capitalism in relation to present and past injustices, and about the violence or conflict that may have been associated with it must be cautious enough to avoid what is called “economic reductionism.” The latter signifies the obliteration of all other causal connections such as the political, the cultural, the social, and so on, for the sake of a “solitarist” explanation of violence and conflict, the economic one. As Sen urges, “We must try to understand the different interconnections that work together, and often kill together” (2008, 11). Thus, we must keep in mind that wherever, say, capitalism is used in this chapter, it is meant much more as a comprehensive worldview than as simply an economic system. It is thus used in its complex relation with politics, society, culture, and value systems rather than as a disconnected economic force.

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For its part, the reductivism that we have theorized as emotivist, psychologistic, and culturalist blocks the possibility of the Western self ’s acknowledging the complexity of conflicts or world problems. It further leads the Western self to spectralize (Papastephanou 2011a) the ways in which she or he may be implicated in causal responsibilities for past and current injustices or people’s inabilities today to handle their misfortunes at the state level. Even if some toleration of injustices boils down to indifference or to inability to tolerate difference, it is by no means the cause of them. The most egregious injustices to distant others have involved domination over land, a land no longer distant. This position eases our passage to the example of colonialism. Let us first examine “global domination,” of which, as Anne McClintock (1994, 257) argues, “one might distinguish theoretially between a variety of forms.” She distinguishes mainly among three forms: 1. Colonization, which involves “direct territorial appropriation of another geopolitical entity, combined with forthright exploitation of its resources and labour, and systematic interference in the capacity of the appropriated culture (itself not necessarily a homogenous entity) to organize its dispensations of power” (McClintock 1994, 257, emphasis mine) 2. Internal colonization, which occurs “where the dominant part of a country treats a group or region as it might a foreign colony” (McClintock 1994, 257) 3. Imperial colonization, which involves “large-scale, territorial domination of the kind that gave Britain and the European ‘lords of humankind’ control over 85 per cent of the earth in the nineteenth century, and the USSR totalitarian rule over Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century” (McClintock 1994, 257) The third form of domination casts a totally new light on Seneca’s statement in De Otio that there are two communities: “the one to which we have been assigned by our birth,” and the other, “which is truly great and truly common, embracing gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our state by the sun” (Seneca, quoted in Nussbaum 1997, 25). Culminating in empires

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on which the sun never sets, the gruesome historical twist of Seneca’s distinction had a great future before it. In hindsight, this twist further casts a different light on both modernist assumptions about a mixed-up world and postmodernist hopeful treatments of the imperial or the view that the empire is “a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii). As to my claim above that most injustices have ultimately occurred due to profit and involved domination over land, consider here Edward Said’s account of the essence of colonialism: Underlying social space are territories, land, geographical domains, the actual geographical underpinnings of the imperial, and also the cultural contest. To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about. (1994, 78, emphasis mine)

That particular spatiality of politics had its own favorite practices of debordering and rebordering.5 As Amartya Sen remarks, “It is hard to ignore the memory of ill treatment of the Middle East by Western powers during colonial times, when the new masters could subdue one nation after another and draw and redraw the boundaries between countries in ancient lands just as the colonial superpowers wanted” (2008, 12). The spatial energy of capitalism worked to “deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land)” (Harris 2004, 172, emphasis mine). Cole Harris reminds us that, for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari too, capitalism “may be thought [of] as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe ‘the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth’” (Harris 2004, 172). The domination over land, therefore, fueled expansion, debordering, and rebordering, as well as the violence (bloodshed, executions, torture, and other such means of suppression) with which the uprisings of the colonized were met.

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Crossing geographical borders was not only permissible but even commendable in European discourse in virtue of the view of distant land as terra nullius (i.e., empty land). It was seen as empty because the dominant idea was that “civilized people knew how to use land properly and that savages did not” (Harris 2004, 170). Unsophisticated versions of such ideas were held by most ordinary (frequently illiterate) settlers, but the refined versions had already been on offer by the theoretical discourse of very early times. The first European theorizing about the rights of the colonizer is found in the thought of the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria in the 1530s and in that of the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius a century later. However, this theorizing was powerfully and influentially elaborated by John Locke in his labor theory of property. Locke held that God’s gift of land to Adam and his posterity acquired value only as labor was expended on it, and that labor justified individual property rights. Those who did not labor on the land wandered over what Locke called unassisted nature, land that yielded little and lay in common. (Harris 2004, 171)

That was taken to have been the condition of distant land before the arrival of European settlers. The most egregious world injustices usually, though not exclusively, occur whenever borders are lawlessly crossed, not just when the strong display indifference toward those who live and suffer beyond the borders. In cases where the “frontier defines a state of equilibrium and balance between the opposing forces of expansion and resistance” (Marin 1993, 9), crossing the frontier should immediately activate our ethico-political concerns. The borders that maintained distance from wealth outside territorial sovereignty and those raised by a universalizable justice blocking expansion were demolished only by the appropriate rationalizations of Western domination that accompanied the goal setting of the times. Some such rationalizations included “Europe’s right and duty to appropriate the bounty of nature wasted by the natives to benefit its industrial classes and feed its hungry”; “Europe’s obligation to exploit the world’s natural and labour resources in the interests of promoting international progress”; “the natives’ unfitness for organizing a rational society and

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exercising self-government because of their teeming sexual proclivities and unlicensed sexual performance”6; and the “divinely ordained task of Europeans to rule, guide and elevate backward peoples as a trust for civilization” (Parry 1987, 54). For Benita Parry, This magniloquent self-representation, with its messianic notions of subjugation and its mystical conception of exploitation, is condensed in Conrad’s laconic remark on “the temperament of a Puritan [joined] with an insatiable imagination of conquest,” and “the misty idealism of the Northerners, who at the smallest encouragement dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth.” (Parry 1987, 54)

Today, those rationalizations are no longer openly employed, but the taxonomy of Western values that generated them has not changed radically. The basic concepts of capitalist and imperialist ideology have been, in Raymond Williams’s terms, “limitless and conquering expansion” and “reduction of the labor process to the appropriation and transformation of raw material” (quoted in Parry 1987, 54). They repeat “the triumphalist version of ‘man’s conquest of nature’” and preserve “the capitalist drive to mastery over nature as the foundation of the dominative tendencies pervading capitalist social relations from labor to sexuality” (Williams, quoted in Parry 1987, 54). Finally, as Simon During shows, using Diderot’s “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” as an example, a notion of male sexuality is presented as naturally more aggressive and urgent. Thus, in turn, “in this text and others, sexual violence is seen as one of the components of a destructive but necessary energy which propels men over the ‘border’ into the future, annihilating identity on the way” (During, quoted in Barker, Hulme, and Iversen 1994, 8, emphasis mine). What stops this kind of border crossing? Law does, not just as cosmopolitan right but as the order or category of justice that entails ethical check of profit, restorative effort, and limitless obligation. It is the kind of order that dictates a full awareness of a past that should not be reenacted and whose continuous profit (for some) should be brought to an end. As Fazal Rizvi remarks, globalization is rooted in older imperialist and colonialist projects that still shape the lives of people in both the developed and the developing world (2007, 259–260). For “colonialism

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was not just a vicious process of modernization, but a system of slavery and labor exploitation. What are the signs that European people and states have responded to a call for accountability with gestures of contrition and reparation?” (Young 2005, 157). An account of this sense of order has not gotten much of a word in edgewise in contemporary educational theory of cosmopolitanism and globalization. As a genuine boundary discourse, it remains outside curricular considerations. It remains equally outside textbooks that usually initiate children in the “collector’s” view of global conflict, the impartial and politically correct, distant gaze of the “disinterested” and uninterested third party, fairly knowledgeable about general world affairs so as to avoid the charge of parochialism but sitting on the fence when a position of justice must be taken. Easy and convenient, the current cosmopolitan qua globalist discourse spreads worldwide, through education, a forgetfulness of the doubleness of the border, of home and homelessness, a doubleness that, at times, protects the strong from the risks of truth and, at times, raises obstacles to their voraciousness. The taxonomy of values enunciated by imperialist discourse comprises “virility, mastery, exploitation, performance, action, leadership, technology, progress” (Parry 1987, 55) and continues to inspire, beneath some surface gloss, contemporary educational systems. As Kenneth Saltman puts it, marketization (and its thesis that there is no alternative to the market) “has infected educational thought as omnipresent market terms such as accountability, choice, efficiency, competition, monopoly, and performance frame educational debates” (2007, 10). Made to reflect the time-honored taxonomy of values held by the figure of the rational egoist, these terms are transferred into educational discourse in a fashion that preserves the uniform and unquestioned meaning that has made them so kindred with a narrow conception of selfhood as primarily profit seeking. Despite the debordering and rebordering effected in the contemporary world, despite the fact that borders wax and wane, this taxonomy of values as the most important border in our ethical and political lives remains fixed and internalized, preserving further mental and emotional boundaries. Predictably, any virtue associated with normatively acceptable patriotic and cosmopolitan concerns is absent

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from this taxonomy. There is no room left for the virtue of loving what one’s country is sometimes capable of in a universalizable sense (Badiou 2005, 2), no topos for the virtue of putting the generalizable interest of cosmos as the totality of biota above any other consideration. For Alain Badiou, “The declaration of a national day of mourning suggests that there are good grounds for commemorating something that, although national, is no less worthy of universal public celebration” (2005, 2). For facile views of cosmopolitanism that set it in artificial opposition to patriotism, a bank holiday and all its connotations are considered infinitely more politically correct, risk-free, uncontroversial, and acceptable than any kind of national day of celebration, even if it commemorates the day when a people decided to resist Hitler’s march through their country. The edge, the fringe, that sutures the colonial past with the globalized present and anticipates a likely future is the unchanged taxonomy of values that reduces law to protection and border to inhibition. The uninhibited global individualist is restricted only by a standard sense of law that can, at its best, protect a ceremonial, folkloric, and inoperative diversity from losing its museum piece character, its safe classification among the curiosities that add spice to Western life and uplift its moral(ist) self-image.

Border and Order: Virtues and Justice on Their Edge Lysias’s argument against the kind of rootlessness that disguised Philon’s exclusive allegiance to property (as we saw in previous chapters) was accompanied by another argument, one centering on Philon’s placing private safety over public well-being. Lysias accused Philon of setting his private safety above the public danger of the city and holding it preferable to pass his life without danger to himself rather than save the city by sharing the city’s dangers with the rest of the citizens (Lysias, Against Philon, 31, 7). Risks (e.g., travel) for profitable movement were more worth taking than those related to the defense of a collectivity. As a complementary double to the figure that we see personalized through Philon, we may borrow Badiou’s symbolic figure of the Thermidorean as against the Jacobin.7 This will help us make the connection between

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domination, colonialism, land, property, securitization, and absence of virtue more apparent. For a Thermidorean, a country is not a possible place for Republican virtues, as it is for the Jacobin patriot. It is what contains a property. A country is an economic objectivity. For a Thermidorean, the law is not a maxim derived from the relation between principles and the situation, as it is for the Jacobin. It is what provides protection, and specifically what protects property. In this regard, its universality is entirely secondary. What counts is its function. For a Thermidorean, insurrection cannot be the most sacred of duties, as it is for a Jacobin whenever the universality of principles is trampled over. The property owner’s central and legitimate demand is for peace. (Badiou 2005, 129, italics in the original)

It is no accident that the Thermidorean whom Badiou has in mind, Boissy d’Anglas, delivered a speech arguing against any notion of independence for the colonies (2005, 130). As Badiou comments, Boissy d’Anglas’s sole concern is to satisfy his planter and slave trader friends, in accordance with the three maxims espoused by the exemplary Thermidorean: the colonies belong to France because we have property there; the law must “pacify” the independence movement’s emancipatory fervour because it threatens this property; and finally, direct administrative control of these colonies is desirable because our security is at stake. (2005, 131)

Over two centuries later, the borderless new world promotes (or tolerates or remains unsuspecting of tacit ways of condoning) a new world order that promises to meet contemporary Thermidorean anxieties about property, security, and the preservation of the biological existence of the global citizen (i.e., the life of the working, mobile self/body, to the extent, of course, that it is a precondition for the preservation of the owner and the consumer). No wonder then that the cosmopolitan self signifies today, for many, the embodied performance of the round-theworld traveler ideal type. Hence, “the consumption of exercise, clothing, equipment, travel products, and vaccines is central to the performance of a corporeal fitness that reworks the body as flexible and adaptable in the face of global risks and experiences” (Germann-Molz 2006, 7). And

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no wonder that the corresponding cosmopolitan anxiety signifies only “vogue” issues such as terrorism, fundamentalism, fractionalism, global warming, intense religious and political controversy, and other similar topics that attract globalist attention after having acquired the status of fact by becoming perceivable, actual risks. Virtues and responsibilities, positive duties toward the world, and hope or endeavor to the best are off the agenda as ideals that are supposedly too lofty and dangerous. For every Thermidorean, “whether from 1794 or the present day, the category of virtue is declared to be devoid of political force. Virtue is an unsustainable effort that necessarily leads to the worst: Terror” (Badiou 2005, 132, italics in the original). A Thermidorean might retort that the taxonomy of values underpinning Western border crossing may well exclude virtues that capitalism renders otiose. But this exclusion is not so bad, because virtue causes disasters when mishandled. Capitalist values are preferable to patriotic or active cosmopolitan virtues because they are less pernicious. After all, people usually die a pointless death for conflicting virtues, religions, ideologies, and nations; they do not seem to be willing to die for capitalism.8 Perhaps they are not willing to die for capitalism, but they have very much been willing to kill for it.9 Interestingly, in a world that has not been mixed up but rather neatly categorized into anonymous victims and well-nourished benefactors, the footloose, well-off traveler who is usually unaware of, and insensitive to, the temporal dimensions of spatiality and the ethico-political burdens such spatiotemporality carries does not encounter the others en route. Rather, if we follow Badiou’s theory through to some of its most provocative implications, he encounters them at his most sedentary moments, as television viewer. We have seen this in Chapter 5, but let us repeat the relevant point here: in front of “the good-Man, the white-Man” lies the “victimMan.” The powerful and successful mixed-up self who feels that he owes nothing or very little of his current position to a specific past of his collectivity feels pity and concern for the others whose supposedly self-inflicted immaturity has kept them back, fixed in the position of the recipients of charity: “on the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens” (Badiou 2001, 13, emphasis in original). Both sides cannot escape animality and rise to the level of the immortal that the human can be (Badiou 2001, 13). I might add that next to the

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depiction of the hubristic predatory and plundering animal, there is also the bathos of the blundering Western animal, conquering places, making a mess, and leaving it behind. Some metonymies of this: Kashmir, Cyprus, the Middle East, Kongo, Mozambique, Rwanda, Iraq. The doppelgänger of the heirs of the plundering and blundering conquering Western nomad is then the set of others, theorized by Iris Young as the “others within Europe and North America” and the “others in the East and South” (2005, 155). They are those who, when strong powers make a spectacle of their sibling rivalry in the arena of global fora, take the role of the viewers who “stand in the shadows, perhaps, huddled at the edges of this playground where the big boys call each other names” (Young 2005, 155).

Walls and Laws: Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism The spur of a truly cosmopolitan and truly patriotic self should be justice. This authorizes when the border (and which border) must fall or stay. Heraclitus’s dictum that “the people of a city should be ready to defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city”10 had already thematized and condemned the tendency of people to react positively to the call for protection but to be less sensitive when law is concerned. Not just the wall but also the law deserves a citizen’s virtuous commitment. To my knowledge, this dictum has been discussed in philosophy only by Hannah Arendt (1989, 63n62), who misinterprets it completely. She implies that instead of a formal relationship between people,11 Heraclitus’s words indicate that the law is “the wall that separates them from others” (in a negative sense of separation)! Either due to inadequate knowledge of the illocutionary effect of the Greek propositional content of the whole dictum or due to a consciously forced reading that tailors the dictum to the purposes of the particular chapter of her Human Condition in which it is quoted, she concentrates on the etymology of the word nomos (law), which in Greek is the same as that for “hedge.”12 The matter is much more than a technicality related to right and wrong interpretations of antiquity. Arendt sees in legality and rulefollowing an automatism that blocks unexpected and unpredictable

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action. In other words, in Arendt’s perspective, law takes a rather conservative meaning, one that is unable to accommodate the doubleness that I have attributed to it when discussing legality as understood by the Thermidorean against legality as understood by the Jacobin. But, in the automatism of her tendency to incriminate legality and rule-following, or perhaps inadvertently, she fails to do justice to the antithesis, the implicit contrast that gives to that ancient dictum its special meaning and significance and its pedagogical, admonishing, and normative tone. The duty of a people (demos13) is not just to stave off external aggression but, equally, to serve lawful action coordination.14 I would like to employ here the antithesis that Arendt misses in order to expand my line of interpretation of the dictum and thus illustrate the interplay of order and border. Walls and laws are equally necessary reference points of democratic allegiance. One can further expand the coupling and implicit contrast, the counterdiscursive effect of placing walls and laws side by side for a more encompassing sense of patriotism. This coupling has an educational significance in showing the reactive and active character of the virtue of patriotism.15 Patriotism is reactive when mobilized by a situation of external danger (an outside force threatening the collectivity) or internal danger (domination of one group, class, or region over others within the collectivity) to which it responds. But patriotism is incomplete when it is only reactive. It has to be active in opening ever new paths to justice: if you love a collectivity, you abide by its laws, while also critically approaching its dominant values and combating its exclusions, its narrowness, and its nationalisms. You have expectations of it and you want to see it capable of actions that, in the universalizability of their significance, would enjoy the compelling force of law. They would combine the miraculous quality that Arendt (1989, 246) considers constitutive of actions that break with automatism and the heroic immortality that Badiou sees in one’s imagining the good, in devoting one’s collective powers to it, and in working “towards the realization of unknown possibilities” (2001, 14). One can go beyond Heraclitus’s dictum and show that the coupling of walls and laws can reconcile patriotism with cosmopolitanism. It can provide a metaphor for a stereoscopically rich insight into cosmopoli-

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tanism and patriotism beyond the moralism of tolerance and respect for diversity that Badiou (2001, 4–39) detects in contemporary human rights talk. This metaphor is also capable of recasting the discourse on ethics, diversity, otherness, and obligations rather than attacking it wholesale, as Badiou often does.16 Through universalizability, law introduces the cosmopolitan element in patriotism, and through sensitivity to the here and now of a specific collectivity, to the walls of justice that should regulate its permeability, the abstraction of the love of cosmos is overcome. The law as the universality of a maxim that emanates from the interplay of principles and given situations can be a wall that separates real fear of external aggression from various imagined and hysterical ones. In this case, it takes the shape of the law of logic (Badiou 2005, 4), that is, of reflective and intelligent analysis of the situation, and it inspires resistance or insurrection in Badiou’s sense. It can also be a wall that stops the private from encroaching on the public within a community. To be consistently just, you need to be consistently educated to perceive the common cause and the legitimate claims of cosmos and localities. You cannot be patriotic if you entertain an idea about your collectivity that is ungrounded or grounded in partial and convenient silencing of the past. You cannot be truly patriotic just by defending your country against real or imagined enemies, while mistreating your fellow citizens (internal domination in McClintock’s terms) or while breaking the law for private gain (the stance that Charles Taylor [1996] sees as antipatriotic). And you cannot be cosmopolitan just by subscribing to an arbitrary globalist discourse that secures your academic visibility and success without defending walls of justice and demolishing walls of rationalized exploitation. In each case, what makes the difference is what the “wall” and the “law” stand for, far beyond the facile assumption that the former separates people and the latter is confined to a formal relation between them. Flying over borders, flying over the law, is and is not what cosmopolitanism is all about.

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Notes 1. For more on how I theorize boundary discursivity more generally, see Papastephanou (2010). 2. As an example of texts that defend a global egalitarianism involving global redistribution, see, for instance, Pogge (2001) and Beitz (1999). 3. This in no way justifies philosophy’s own methodological turning of cosmopolitanism into a boundary discourse, mostly exemplified by the solid demarcation of traditions from which a theorist is usually expected to draw. If you are a liberal, you do not go near sources and material of cosmopolitanism deriving from opponents. If you identify yourself as a disciple of the French continental persuasion, you tend to read only Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. If your sympathies lie with Habermas, there is nothing but post-Kantian legal cosmopolitanism. 4. Ecology is taken into account in Beck (2004) but only for the global risks it represents. 5. On the local and contextual character of such processes, as well as on the connection among globalization, postcolonial theory, and education, see Rizvi (2007). 6. Consider here as an illustration the survival of ancient practices of Aphrodite’s cult, even after Christianity in Cyprus appears in old British texts that reflect the colonial imaginary and rationalization as proof of the “fact” that the Greek majority on the island had not advanced beyond a corrupted paganism and thus should be denied their rights to political self-determination and kept under British control (see Given 2002). 7. Badiou refers to the French Revolution and the Thermidorean Convention that supposedly brought revolutionary terror to an end. He contrasts the principled action of Jacobin militants with the corrupted and no less terrorist opportunism of Thermidorean bourgeoisie (2005, 124–140). 8. Yet, this is debatable too. For example, consider the connection of contemporary eating habits, media-related psychological dysfunctions, stress, and environmental damage with capitalism. Even in its more direct sense—namely, that even if people die as a consequence of their capitalist lifestyle, they do not do it willingly and consciously—the Thermidorean objection is still debatable, especially within the historical context of colonial expansion that offers many examples of the colonialists’ conscious commitment to “heroic” defense of colonial interests. My attention was drawn to such cases by Professor Pradeep Dillon, to whom I am indebted for this. 9. Consider, for instance, how many people were killed and tortured during the uprising of the Irish against the British Empire (Ken Loach’s film The Wind That Shakes the Barley depicts the historical event very powerfully). They died for their nation, for that was the metonymy of freedom of the times. But they were killed for the preservation of the empire, the continuation of the flow of profit, and the prestige and symbolic reproduction of its assumed superiority. 10. Machesthai chre ton demon hyper nomou hokosper techeos (DK22B44). 11. This is what she assumed that the Roman word for law, lex, did.

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12. This etymology would be helpful for the purposes of this chapter too, since it illustrates nicely what I have already discussed about the boundary being not only negative but also positive in keeping lawless expansion in check. But this cannot be drawn from the dictum itself because the word it uses for “wall” is teichos, which has nothing to do with the etymology of nomos. 13. Citizenship in a democracy, we may say in our contemporary terms. 14. The content of this coordination can be made relevant to internal affairs, within the walls, or extended to relations outside the wall. 15. The patriotism evoked in Heraclitus’s dictum is compatible with (and thus useful for illustrations of) a wide spectrum of contemporary theories of patriotism that remained marginal or unexploited in the sweeping polemics of our times, as we shall mention in the next chapter. 16. This is the subject of another work, one in progress, but, indicatively here, consider his view that the “essential ‘objective’ basis of ethics rests on a vulgar sociology, directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter with savages”(Badiou 2001, 26) and his view that “the ‘respect for differences’ and the ethics of human rights do seem to imply an identity! . . . As a result, the respect for differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity” (24).

Chapter Eight

The Importance of Conceptual Reconsiderations It has already been indicated that cosmopolitanism and

patriotism can be boundary discourses in many respects, some of which have not yet attracted the attention of much globalism today. The dominant tendency is to discuss cosmopolitanism and patriotism through the prism of rootlessness and rootedness, respectively. A major consequence of this tendency is, as I have argued, to miss the complexity of the relation between cosmopolitanism and patriotism and to obscure their connection with a more profound sense of justice. Debates on cosmopolitanism and patriotism in various fields and in philosophy of education have surely contributed, among other things, to valuable clarifications; still missing, however, is the attempt to discuss the terms together and comprehensively in their definitional ground rather than separately and with regard to some of their nodal points. True, the importance of debating, for instance, whether we must teach patriotism with or without obligations (White 2001) and whether liberal patriotism is sensitive to cosmopolitan concerns (Callan 1999) and the discussion of the tension between cosmopolitan universal right and cosmopolitan respect for particularity (Todd 2007) cannot be overestimated. However, debating our understanding of cosmopolitanism and patriotism should be temporally and logically prior to exploring their relation. In simpler words, before negotiating the dose of patriotism and cosmopolitanism “permitted” in teaching, we must ask, What patriotism? What cosmopolitanism? Because this chapter argues primarily for the need to redefine and reconceptualize these terms, the argument will focus on (1) the relation

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of patriotism and cosmopolitanism as it has evolved and currently stands, and (2) educational philosophical positions regarding that relation. For the aim is to substantiate the need to revisit patriotism and cosmopolitanism and to reconsider their relation by showing how this relation depends on conceptions of the relevant terms.

The Relation of Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism To show why it is necessary to turn to definitions, I first discuss how the relation of cosmopolitanism and patriotism depends on our understanding of them and why, therefore, the debate on the relationship of the two ideals cannot precede our effort to reconstruct their semantic content. For instance, if one takes patriotism to be a form of chauvinism or cosmopolitanism to entail hostility to all particular attachments, the relationship of the two becomes one of incompatibility (Kleingeld 2000, 317). Even if we avoid such extremes, still, the more the particular communal element is emphasized in patriotism and the generalizable in cosmopolitanism, the more the binary opposition of cosmopolitanism versus patriotism becomes consolidated. Many theorists take it for granted that the local and the global are irreconcilable and perhaps incommensurable dimensions of being, so that the development of strong patriotic feelings entails the lack of care for remote cultures. Likewise, not only expedient opportunist rootlessness but even the commitment to ideals of global solidarity and reconciliation appears to some as a cold and unattractive expression of lack of interest in one’s specific community.1 The binary opposition of nationalism versus unreflective universalism has also accompanied polemics all along, manifesting the flip side, the border that not only separates each ideal from its own fall but also brings it into a dangerous proximity to it. For some adherents to cosmopolitanism, patriotism “encourages unbridled and virulent chauvinism” and is held “responsible for many of the most ghastly disasters in human history” (Yonah 1999, 379). In less appalling yet still reprehensible cases, “patriotism usually appeals to the tradition and heritage of one or some dominant cultural groups, marginalizing and excluding minority groups belonging to the same nation” (Yonah

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1999, 379). For proponents of patriotism, cosmopolitanism reflects the imperialist, idealist, and rationalist prejudices of an elitist group of intellectuals (Lu 2000). In turn, some invert the charge of elitism so as to apply to communitarian detractors of cosmopolitanism (Lacroix 2002, 949). There is no compelling argument for accepting such a bipolar reasoning. Since the latter is often imposed by the narrowness of what counts as cosmopolitan or patriotic, it is imperative that philosophy cover much ground on the definitional and conceptual plane. Such ground can be used as a springboard for debating theories constructed around current “functional” conceptions. Already in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the polarization was being solidified (Dewey 1993 [1916], 116), several philosophers (e.g., the Marquis de Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and even Johann Gottfried von Herder) understood cosmopolitanism and patriotism as compatible and complementary ideals. Patriotism had been revived during the Enlightenment, as had cosmopolitanism, often by the same philosophers. Since then, some thinkers have argued that the citizen must be interested not only in attractive otherness and the distant universality of common humanity but also in her own surrounding reality, the immediacy of the near and dear. The patriotic feeling is considered capable of inspiring devotion to generalizable communal interests beyond individualist self-absorption. Along the lines of this side of Enlightenment legacy, patriots are expected to serve the community and care for public affairs. Of course, the fact that in previous centuries philosophical thought comprised efforts to couple cosmopolitanism and patriotism speaks only to the theoretical possibility of constructing mediating and reconciling accounts. It proves that unexploited undercurrents have been running counter to the mainstream modern tendency; it does not establish that those accounts have been convincing as such. Important here is that the “either/or” logic was not thought of as binding even then. And it shows how selective contemporary thinkers are when they treat Kant as the modern initiator of cosmopolitanism, while overlooking the many arguments he offers for theorizing patriotic duty (Kleingeld 2000). They are equally selective when they consider Rousseau exclusively a precursor of modern nation-state patriotism

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and overlook his cosmopolitan ideal of a common human nature. John Dewey (1993 [1916], 114–116) set the record straight on this by identifying Rousseau as an emblematic figure of eighteenth-century individualist cosmopolitanism in education while acknowledging the strain in Rousseau that tended toward patriotism. Let us now turn to the current tendency in most trends to impose this “either/or” logic. I say “in most trends” because this tendency is not common only in approaches, say, of poststructuralist or liberal leanings. Communitarian revivals of eighteenth-century debates on patriotism privileging rootedness are often trapped in the very same pseudo-dilemmas as their liberalist opponents or their poststructuralist detractors. In any case, this tendency can be traced back to the separation of the social from the political in the modern imaginary. As Gerard Delanty explains, one implication of such separation was the equation of cosmopolitanism with the political in opposition to the social: Cosmopolitanism thus reflected the revolt of the individual against the social world, for to be a “citizen of the world” was to reject the immediately given and closed world of particularistic attachments. Not surprisingly it became associated with the revolt of the élites against the low culture of the masses. (2006, 26)

It is worth recalling here that cosmopolitanism in antiquity emerged from completely different considerations, as we have already seen in the relevant chapters, where we associated cosmopolis with the notion of the political as understood in antiquity. Be that as it may, the public sphere usually took a different course from that of its mobile elites, and education serves as an example here. In becoming democratized, open to the masses, and increasingly dependent on state funding, education helped the ideal of the citizen of the state surpass the ideal of the citizen of the world. In Dewey’s words, “Education became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The ‘state’ was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form the citizen, not the ‘man,’ became the aim of education” (1993 [1916], 116). Yet, equally strong in the societies of the times was the feeling that “the social world as territorially given,

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closed and bounded by the nation-state and the class structure of the industrial societies did not sit comfortably with the openness of the cosmopolitan idea, with its universalistic orientation” (Delanty 2006, 26). I see the current unresolved tension of theories of cosmopolitanism and patriotism (or the tension between the particular and the universal that some theorists locate within cosmopolitanism) as a spectral presence of such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century false dichotomies. Polemics contributed a great deal to entrenching the idea that cosmopolitanism as routes and patriotism as roots are opposing and conflicting. As we saw in Chapter 6, many conservative thinkers saw in rootlessness an expedient detachment from patriotic duty and a parasitic exploitation of various local resources without giving anything in return. To them, cosmopolitanism became a synonym for that kind of rootlessness and had to be rejected wholesale for the sake of a wholehearted immersion in one’s own culture and subservience to one’s own country. Their progressive opponents often detected anti-Semitic motives in such a defense of patriotism, while emphasizing the irenic significance of rootlessness against the role that patriotic passion played in exploiting the masses for nationalist purposes.2 Both parties, however, were so absorbed in the debate that they lost all sight of possibilities that cosmopolitanism and patriotism thus defined might even be tacit accomplices in global power relations. As a result, there were few serious attempts to redefine both terms and even the richness of older conceptualizations, such as the Stoic or the Kantian (Papastephanou 2002a; Roth 2010), was largely bypassed. But the tendency to impose this “either/or” logic can also be explained as a product of a particular faulty sociohistorical understanding of mobility as, by definition, Other oriented and Other sensitive. The centrifugal element of a decision to migrate, trade, travel, and encounter foreign lifestyles and cultures was exaggerated in the twentieth century to the point of expressing, ostensibly, a moral or emotive commitment to remote alterity. It was thus identified with progressivism and contrasted with the supposedly inescapable parochialism of a rooted existence. However, the hasty identification of cosmopolitanism and rootlessness (in their currently held conceptions) with progressivism may be easily subverted when we realize that mobility may assist the promotion of ethnocentric and imperialist concerns (remember here the colonialism

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example of the previous chapter), thus making common cause with an unacknowledged, ill-defined patriotism. When cosmopolitanism signifies merely constant exposure to various cultures and, by way of it, enrichment of existential choice, there is no guarantee that the cosmopolitan agent is less nationalist, exploitative, or manipulative of otherness than any other agent immersed in her own communitarian ethos. In simpler terms, we have argued in previous chapters that one may eat foreign food, listen to foreign music, abide by the law, and travel or live abroad without being truly cosmopolitan in the way she or he treats others. But even when cosmopolitanism is understood in governmental, institutional, and legal terms or relies on a narrow liberal sense of morality and duty, it still does not make enough room for perceiving and combating the myriad subtle oppressions of, or injustices to, otherness that cannot be channeled in such moralist and legalist discourse (Papastephanou 2002b). Ironically, such cosmopolitanism can be shown to suffer precisely from the problems that it attributes to patriotism, that is, from expansionism and totalitarianism. It has appeared historically that the “tourist,” voyeuristic conception of cosmopolitanism has been an easy operation for the powerful, those who had opportunities for movement (and the positive self-image it created) and the theoretical freedom to combine it with all their other economic and political objectives. Some of those objectives were clearly imperialist and predatory (again, as we saw in the previous chapter) and thereby at odds with a more complex and demanding conception of cosmopolitanism. Often, instead of having commitments to all people, the nomad “cosmopolitan” seemed to have commitments or obligations to no one. In that case, Cicero’s ubi bene ibi patria was evidently taken to mean, “Where my profit lies, that land I will make my homeland; I will seize, exploit, and shape it [e.g., by molding the self-image (Fanon 1967) of those I render subaltern] at will so as to make it a true, hospitable patria for me.” Equally, whether the “cosmopolitan” nomad’s own country of origin would have been better (politically and ethically, through more egalitarian treatment of the Other within and out) had he had a less outward and expansionist stance, this was of no importance to him. As already mentioned previously (Chapter 6), we must not forget that some of the most mobile people in the past were the slave traders: can one describe them as

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cosmopolitans on the grounds of their rootlessness and diaspora without feeling that the term is dismally violated? Rousseau overturned Cicero’s dictum for other purposes,3 but this reversal is very appropriate here for showing how easily cosmopolitanism and patriotism can make common cause in exploitation. Even in postcolonial times, Rousseau’s (Yonah 1999; Korsgaard 2006) ubi patria ibi bene (“Wherever [my] homeland, there is [my] well-being”) has been taken by the Occidental footloose elites seriously enough to turn the whole world into a patria for them. No land is foreign to their economic activities, their employment potentials, and their residence rights. No country is inhospitable to their ways of entertaining themselves in leisure time, that is, too different for their tastes or unable to accommodate and display on offer whatever would please them. However, this does not always entail appreciation or even awareness of such privileges that derive from and perpetuate asymmetrical relations between economies and cultures (Bauman 1998). Worse, some members of managerial and other “rootless” classes often appear so interest driven and power oriented that only the words “sheer exploitation” and “callousness regarding the effects of their actions on the environment, on cultures, and on the lives of others” can describe their conduct. Thus, their “patriotism” may not exactly signify a conscious commitment to their original community and its symbolic forms (e.g., their flag). It may nevertheless reflect their wholehearted immersion in the symbolic content (e.g., “values” related to profit) of their own community as well as their substantive contribution to its global material reproduction. Patriotism and cosmopolitanism may collaborate in a subterranean way to maintain and expand the stranglehold of Western countries over the world. Their prima facie opposition and incompatibility collapse in cases where an arrogant and superior self-understanding finds in the prospect of global mobility and action coordination a major outlet for its interests. If these ideals can display compatibility with regard to homogenizing or even predatory tendencies, it is crucial to examine whether they could also display compatibility with regard to more Other-oriented and Other-sensitive goals. Frantz Fanon’s texts, not accidentally neglected by most contemporary liberalist cosmopolitan discourse, are monumental in paving the path to a modernist positive

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coupling of patriotism and cosmopolitanism. To Fanon, resistance to colonial power and national insurrection should not turn the colonized into “people of the past.” Nationalist struggle is simultaneously struggle for a future of cosmopolitan true justice. I argue that to activate this possibility, we need a redefinition of both terms and a coupling of them with a comprehensive4 theory of justice. The “either/or” tendency has been so strong that even some of the most elaborate efforts somehow to redefine cosmopolitanism and patriotism (e.g., Martha Nussbaum’s and Charles Taylor’s, respectively) focus on either one of the terms and give it priority over the other (Cohen and Nussbaum 1996). Hence the binary opposition is preserved, while the option of reformulating both poles in one theoretical framework goes totally unnoticed. Further, much confusion arises and affects not only philosophy but also political science and party politics and, by implication, philosophy of education. At least some of the inconsistencies and oscillations of the Left and the Right in their positive or negative reactions to globalization and their ideological prior attachment to cosmopolitanism or patriotism attest to this lack5 of sufficient theorization and clarification of the concepts in question. However, recent efforts to mediate between the two camps have produced very interesting syntheses, such as various Kantian defenses of the compatibility of cosmopolitanism and patriotism,6 rooted cosmopolitanism (Ackerman 1994; Appiah 1996), embedded cosmopolitanism (Erskine 2002), and R. Bellamy and D. Castiglione’s (2004) cosmopolitan communitarianism.7 Beyond the liberalist framework and within postcolonial theory, there have already been excellent endeavors, such as Neil Lazarus’s (2002) and Benita Parry’s (2003), to couple a revisited patriotism (termed nationalitarianism) with forms of cosmopolitanism or internationalism. Yet even those attempts, especially the liberalist, require more thorough redefinitions and reconstructions. For it is not that any fresh redefinition would do, just by breaking the automatism of established meanings in an Arendtian (1989) sense of natality. Reconceptualizations need be new not only in the sense of being disruptive and unexpected but also in being well researched, well judged, and well argued.8

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Educational Philosophical Preferences To substantiate why it is useful to turn to (re)definitions and conceptions, I discuss here three educational philosophical positions on the relationship between cosmopolitan and patriotic concerns. Even some very sensitive and thoughtful (although diverging) accounts of that relationship could still benefit from “first-step” reconsiderations, as they might be termed, of established and well-worn meanings that, in some ways, lead their approaches astray. John White (2001) regards cosmopolitanism and patriotism as compatible; Eamonn Callan (1999) defends the view that liberal patriotism can cover the normative ground of cosmopolitanism without the latter’s supposedly utopian ideological baggage; and Sharon Todd (2007) focuses on the ostensibly internal contradictions of a cosmopolitanism that shifts away from patriotism. White claims in this specific text that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are compatible, but he does not define them or describe their relation in any detail.9 “The proper virtue of patriotism can help to bind a liberal democracy together in pursuit of its ideals. It is not an alternative to cosmopolitanism” (White 2001, 146). Are all possible ideals of a liberal democracy conducive to cosmopolitanism, or at least not alternative to it? And to what cosmopolitanism: one that simply promotes a cultural-pragmatic relativization of one’s roots? A cosmopolitanism of legality and global order? If yes, is it the cosmopolitanism of an inconsistent paper tiger, like the United Nations (Habermas 2003b, 39), or that of superpowers praying to God before unleashing a war in the name of political liberalism? Even if the vice of chauvinism is staved off by following the “middle path” (White 2001, 146) of compatible attachments to human beings in ever narrowing circles (homeland, friends, family), are all anticosmopolitan tendencies attributable to chauvinism, so that its liberal containment would suffice in combating those tendencies? One may have no superior national feelings regarding others at all and perhaps no strong attachment (faulty or not) to a patria either. She or he may simply, however, view several others (and the environment) as sources of profit. Would this person act in a cosmopolitan way in that case? Empirical synchronic and diachronic reality falsifies this hope.

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Now, is it possible to provide a definition and, further, a conception of cosmopolitanism and patriotism that would be minimal enough to be a definition or a conception but also comprehensive and specific enough to keep some distance from the undesirable doubles and duplicities (chauvinism as well as deeper and more materially motivated vices) of the terms? If not, the reason must be explained and in various ways (i.e., as a purely futile task, or a superfluous and unnecessary demand, or perhaps as a Derridean aporetic necessary yet impossible effort). If it is possible and worth pursuing, as I believe, then it should at least be hinted at. White’s defense of patriotism would benefit from a discussion about the faulty descriptive ground on which standard definitions of cosmopolitanism and patriotism are based and the limits such ground sets on the normative reach of these ideals. White’s implicit definition of patriotism is more comprehensive than alternative approaches. But this merit can stand out only through conceptual focus. For instance, White’s patriotism can be shown to be more apposite than that of Charles Taylor. In his discussion of Nussbaum, Taylor (1996) describes patriotism as citizens’ commitment to the common weal, as opposed to private interest, and renders patriotism the cement of society in structural-functionalist terms. His is an inward-looking patriotism, oblivious to the kind of patriotism that synchronically and diachronically has signified commitment to defending the freedom of a land, a people, or a community against external aggression and expansionism. The most one gets from Taylor’s theory in the latter direction is the cultural ecology of communitarianism that aims to prolong the viability of a culture and to protect its communal ethos against losses due to the competitive liberal marketplace of ideas and lifestyles. Unlike Taylor, White treats more thoroughly the concept of patriotism by stating clearly (although not in such terms) what I call its “internal” and “external” content (Chapter 9). As he writes, “Sometimes, as when Britain was under attack in 1940, [patriotism] is a matter of doing what one can to protect one’s national group from attack.” We could take this as an example of outward-looking, or external, patriotism and add anticolonial struggles of various peoples or the Iraqi resistance to the Western invasion as further examples of such patriotism. But he acknowledges the significance of another

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aspect of patriotism, the one termed above “inward looking” and traced in Taylor’s text too. “Sometimes patriotism can also take the form of shame or disgust that such discrepancies of wealth and life-chances can co-exist in the same national community; and of political action to rectify these” (White 2001, 144). This is not necessarily a sign of unease on White’s part regarding the elasticity of the term. I believe that White would include both aspects equally in his conception of patriotism and would have no objection to adding another variety, the one that combines the two aspects in feeling shame and regret when your homeland fails to treat ethically not only the Other within but also the distant Other outside its borders or the Other as the totality of nonhuman biota. But this is precisely my point: what is included in patriotism, what patriotism is and what it is not, and why must be spelled out and theorized along with an examination of how aspects of patriotism might relate. White’s account would also benefit from the definitional and reconstructive work that is necessary for sharpening the defense of patriotism that he rightly promotes and coupling it with the right kind of cosmopolitanism. White remarks that globalization is not necessarily at odds with nationality, and in doing this he offers an insight that very many contemporary theorists overlook, caught as they are in a self-deceptive enthusiasm and fascination for dispersal and diaspora. Globalisation is not necessarily at odds with nationality. Economic forces may press in that direction; but culturally national attachments show no sign of weakening. Indeed, the more cosmopolitan we become, the more we tend to become aware at the same time of other national cultures and of the distinctive features of our own. (White 2001, 146, emphasis mine)

This insight helps us see, if we think it through to its implications, how it is possible to become less hospitable to otherness the more we encounter it, if we are unprepared intellectually, ethically, and emotionally (that is, educationally) for such an encounter. Yet the implicit equation here of globalization and our becoming cosmopolitan displays White’s reliance on the current, standard conception of cosmopolitanism as transnational mobility or common legality. Such a conception conflates an empirical phenomenon with an ideal and makes cosmo-

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politanism seem like an accomplished reality by missing the normative gap that separates the two, that is, globalization and cosmopolitanism. A critique of the fashionable meaning of the cosmopolitan and the globalized self would preclude the employment of the adjective “cosmopolitan” here, where “globalized” would be more appropriate. The previous chapters have shown that this is not just a terminological issue. You do not become more cosmopolitan just by becoming more mobile and adventurous. Proximity does not determine the way others are treated, and cosmopolitanism in a redefined, more cautious version, more aware of political subtleties, should be more about the treatment of others than about our contact and our agreement with them.10 Callan prefers liberal patriotism to world citizenship due to the latter’s utopianism. His worry is “that the aspiration to world citizenship is utopian in an invidious sense, and educational practices inspired by the aspiration might often sacrifice the real if imperfect possibilities of patriotic attachment for an ideal that exists only in the fancy of its adherents” (Callan 1999, 199). Concerning utopianism, one may object that what counts as unreal or unrealizable depends on what one perceives as realistic impediments that render the ideal unrealizable, and on this liberalism needs much explanatory and justificatory work (for more on this, see Papastephanou 2009). More relevant here, however, and emanating from his whole paper is Callan’s preference for liberal patriotism because, in the way he defines it (1999, 198), he considers it capable of accommodating obligations to distant others anyway. Thus, it seems that his well-argued objections to the received view on world citizenship do not point to a necessity to redefine cosmopolitanism, perhaps against the existing accounts of it that he finds undesirable. However, if we examine his account of what patriotism is capable of doing, we realize that much remains to be done that requires either a further redefinition of his patriotism or a redefinition of cosmopolitanism and a placing of it alongside patriotism as two compatible and complementary ideals/virtues. Like White’s paper, Callan’s too is a response, and it would be unfair to examine it as supposedly exhaustive of his views on the issue. But it is very useful for what it implies regarding our concerns here. Callan and White single out chauvinism as the main reason for patriotism

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turning into a vice, and their educational solution is to guide students away from chauvinism. “The patriotic sentiment runs deep in many contemporary societies, and in its liberal form it can militate against the civic alienation and ethnic chauvinism that are among the most serious threats to the viability of mass democracy” (Callan 1999, 199). As we saw in the previous chapter, Callan accepts or, at least does not question, the “cosmopolitan” view that “the most egregious injustices in our world are commonly fueled by hatred or indifference toward those who live and suffer beyond the borders of one’s own country” (Callan 1999, 197). He only tackles the charge that liberal patriotism, with its emphasis on the just state rather than the just world, is ostensibly insensitive to this fact. We notice again the psychologism that dematerializes conflict (and most conveniently the Western expansionist oppression of the rest of the world), as if material motives for expansion based on faulty conceptions of human needs and desires were irrelevant to injustices or as if they would vanish through merely learning that peoples are equal. Is it out of chauvinism that cosmos as environment and nonhuman biota is being destroyed? Liberalism thinks that it can have maximum ethical effects with only minimal theoretical concessions (such as the overcoming of a glaring pathology like chauvinism) without any radical shifts from its own priorities, its own perception of humanity as profit seeking, and the self as rational-egoist. This indeed affects Callan’s conception of patriotism because a patriotism that considers itself hospitable to cosmopolitan concerns only due to its universalist principles of justice is blind to the fact that these principles do not secure on their own their cosmopolitan interpretation. They are too formal and minimal to meet a more fleshy account of justice and too exculpating of their proponents. More clearly, Callan’s liberal patriotism is not assisted by the universalist principles enough to perceive the simple fact that the Western burgher who pursues his interest in remote places at the expense of the locals does not necessarily hate them. He may even not be indifferent to them, in the sense that he may have justified his conduct through all kinds of rationalizations (e.g., to civilize, to save others from their undemocratic selves, and so forth) that would interpret universalistic principles in ways suitable to, convenient to, and exonerating of that conduct.

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Patriotism is compatible with and complementary to cosmopolitanism, but it cannot replace or dispense with it. For cosmopolitanism, as I perceive it, is not about the false dilemma (obsolete since Kant [1992]) of the creation of a world state or not or about world citizenship as participation in the global sphere in equal measure to participation in the local. Cosmopolitanism can be shown to be about the way distant others and the whole world of biota and nonbiota have been treated, still suffer, and become endangered or destroyed by such treatment as well as how some still profit from that treatment of cosmos. Against standard conceptions, cosmopolitanism becomes eccentric when it supplies the voice of the Other, when it makes the complaint, the expectation, of the Other heard, so that the patriot will not judge the way her collectivity has treated others self-referentially, lightheartedly, and introspectively. The betrayal of universalistic principles or their adaptation to the standard Occidental interpretive framework cannot be unveiled foro interno, without harkening to remote or interstitial others. On this inability, Callan’s own neglecting to mention global redistribution of wealth and pending historical moral/ethical debts as an issue of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, as well as his possible relegation of them to the sphere of utopianism, is very telling. Finally, to elaborate more on the need to revisit the terms, let us turn to the kinds of patriotism that are implicit in Callan’s and White’s texts. Civic patriotism “is the love of . . . shared political freedom and the institutions that sustain it. . . . This kind of patriotism is of an inherently political nature and is not dependent on national or ethnic identity” (Kleingeld 2000, 317). At first sight, being beyond the nation seems to secure a safe distance from chauvinism when the latter signifies illusions of national grandeur or claims to national superiority or outstanding quality. Being based on politics, civic patriotism appears reconciled with cosmopolitanism if it can be argued that the principles determining it are truly universalizable. However, if that is not indeed the case, then we end up with illusions of political superiority and with the pernicious, subtle assumption that our patria is closer to unquestioned principles and thus better than the patria of others. Ironically, sometimes things turn out to be the other way around, and political patriotism may prove to be as pernicious as (or even more

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so than) nationalist patriotism. Nationalist patriotism “does not focus on the political commonwealth in which one is a citizen, but on the national group to which one belongs” (Kleingeld 2000, 319). Because this focus is on the nation as one’s own, “instead of as the instantiation of a general ideal or as the bearer of particular qualities, there is no implication that one’s own nation is better than others” (Kleingeld 2000, 320). That is, it might be possible that political patriots entertain more illusions of grandeur (this time regarding political achievement—one that they would want others also to attain, even if that would involve military enforcement) than those nationalist patriots who love their nation just because it is their own. Then again, we should not rest content with such subversion. For the fact that political patriotism is no less susceptible to illusions of grandeur than nationalist patriotism does not rule out the possibility that even the patriotism that relies exclusively on belonging rather than on achievement might lose sight of responsibilities to outsiders. Thus, no accommodation of justice is secured in the way patriotism (nationalist or political) has so far theoretically been defined. Unlike White’s paper, which seems to promote a national(ist) patriotism, Callan’s paper adheres to a civic patriotism. Both versions are defensible within liberalism (Kleingeld 2000). But neither theorist seems to justify this choice in a way that would make the preferred version of liberal patriotism stand out adequately. Each version of patriotism appears axiomatically stated; it does not emerge differentially from a contrast with other possible meanings. Even if not feasible in the particular texts, it was not mentioned as a considerable issue of either past, present, or future research. This, in my opinion, proves once again a broader tendency in contemporary educational thought to select and draw from current and received views on such topics rather than realizing the need for redefinitions and reconceptualizations of crucial notions. A possible objection to my suggestion (and, indirectly, an explanation of why a definitional-conceptual approach to these notions is being neglected) comes from “the difficulty of defining” (Todd 2007, 26) the terms and from the fact that defining them may as such be an uncosmopolitan move. As this problem has already preoccupied postcolonial

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theory, I draw a first response from Sam Knowles’s answer to similar objections raised by S. Pollock et al., for instance, objections claiming that specifying terms such as “cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do” (2000, 577). Knowles characterizes strategies such as those of Pollock et al. as “short cuts through insufficiently well-argued terrain.” He criticizes them sharply and remarks that “in employing these tactics, critics tend to gloss over the fact that there is something at the centre of many of these concepts that is just not understood” (Knowles 2007, 1). My own response will become clearer on the way, but let us first see some implications of endorsing the objection to definitions and how this affects the relationship one perceives between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. For her part, Todd states that specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitively is an “uncosmopolitan” thing to do because cosmopolitanism “invokes an openness to the indefinite and gestures to an unknown ‘beyond’ of the nation-state” (2007, 36n1). If this claim is weak and means that cosmopolitan responsibilities extend beyond any specific collectiveness, be it the nation-state, region, social class, gender, or any other particular community, it is indeed a valid and minimal requirement for making cosmopolitanism intelligible. Then the question is, why is only the nation-state singled out in this statement? It seems that the claim is a strong one, presupposing that cosmos is in a relation of opposition to the nation-state or to any similar particularity rather than one of set and subset. The former relation is one of mutual exclusion; the latter can be one of inclusion or complementarity. I believe that, because of this strong claim, Todd (2007, 26, 27) describes as inherent contradiction something that can be seen merely as a tension, namely, the demand to embrace human rights in relation to the demand to respect particularity. The weaker position would place the tension within a particular conception of cosmopolitanism (one that could be revisited or abandoned); the stronger locates the tension within the concept of cosmopolitanism. I consider only the weaker position defensible and argue that this tension is produced by failures in most Western discourse to theorize the double demand for universality and particularity adequately; thus, I take issue with Todd’s view that this “double demand inevitably creates a contradictory logic” (2007, 26,

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emphasis mine). For particularity is not the opposite of universality, as it is usually theorized, but rather a subset of it.11 Rather than being in endemic tension, particularity and universality are interconnected and equally present in cosmopolitan ethics. Once again, the problem is how we define cosmopolitanism; avoidance of redefining it forces us to rely on its standard conceptions. A further implication of such avoidance is that, ironically, the very Derridean efforts to stress the indefinitiveness and openness of conceptualizations are in the end those that consolidate conceptual essentialism. They do so by elevating conceptions to the onto-epistemological level of the concept and by regarding contingent tensions as ontological constants (consider here the phrase “inevitably creates a contradictory logic” italicized above). I do not object to the openness and inconclusiveness of cosmopolitanism or of any other concept for that matter, and Todd’s remark is valuable to that effect. What should be stressed, however, is the gap between the essentialist character of the notion of a concept and the fluid pluralism inherent in the notion of a conception, a well-known issue in general philosophy that underpins the tendency to speak about formulating conceptions even when our ultimate aspiration might be to approach something like the concept of a term. When redefinitions are suggested, it is not necessarily claimed that the latter will constitute “the last word” on the subject. They will be revisable reflections of how the terms could be more comprehensively and plausibly grasped so as to clarify many issues at stake. Despite the emphasis on openness, a specific definition of cosmopolitanism is clearly presupposed and conceptually essentialized through Todd’s assumption of inevitability that I italicized above. Her approach operates on the grounds of an implicit, functional definition that connects cosmopolitanism negatively with the nation-state in a relation of opposition and transcendence (note the “unknown ‘beyond’ of the nation-state” in the first quotation from Todd above) and is, precisely because of this, a very specific and definitive position. Against this position it can be pointed out that cosmopolitanism does not necessarily (that is, by definition) gesture beyond the nation-state. This is so first because, as an ideal, cosmopolitanism predates political constructions of the nineteenth century such as the nation-state (and it

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has not been a response to them); second because there is no compelling argument that cosmopolitanism should be conceived as opposite to a commitment to a nation-state; and third because there is no guarantee that what lies beyond the nation-state is automatically cosmopolitan (see Chapter 3 in this book and Papastephanou [2005a, 539–540]). Empires lie beyond the nation-state, but thinkers do not usually treat them as exemplary of cosmopolitanism, with the exception of a small number who have, anyway, attracted much criticism for doing so.12 While acknowledging the difficulty of defining cosmopolitanism, Todd relies on a very clearly demarcated and widely held definition of it that excludes other possible conceptions of cosmopolitanism. To her, cosmopolitanism comprises “a political and ethical mission to embrace a sense of worldliness outside the confines of national belonging, where our neighbours are no longer those who are ‘just like us,’ but who exist in a global, as opposed to a national, neighbourhood. It is a shift away from patriotism” (2007, 26, emphasis mine).13 The very opposition of the global to the national without qualification is a first restriction of this otherwise minimal definition to a truly limited and specific account of cosmopolitanism, one that is unsuspecting of the ethico-political gap that might separate the global from the cosmopolitan. Already “the shift away from patriotism” determines the conceptual content of cosmopolitanism as incompatible with or noncomplementary to the ethical commitment to locality. Even if the intention is only to contrast cosmopolitanism to a very narrow form of nationalist commitment, the aphoristic disjunction effected by the distance involved in the phrase “shifting away” suffices to impose a sense of wholesale indictment of patriotism and an unwillingness to examine the possibility of some compatibility of cosmopolitanism and patriotism. And it is no accident that, as Todd writes, these are arguably the “historical and current invocations” of cosmopolitanism. In other words, they are not invocations coming from theoretical reformulations that might transcend or breathe new life into the historical and current contents of the term (though the historical contents are far more diverse, rich, and complex than made to appear by Todd). The idea justifying the unwillingness to engage in definitional dialogue is usually that, if we cannot grasp the concept of a term (because such grasping is just a

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hubristic, phallogocentric illusion), then let us sidestep the whole problem and move on to a head-on discussion of the term. Yet there is no way of sidestepping definitions and their philosophical implications. What really comes about instead is a tacit reliance on workable, socially current definitions that in this way remain unshakeable and, worse, are thus elevated to the onto-epistemological status of concepts. This is why I say above that Todd’s approach essentializes, despite intentions, the modern invocations and conceptual contents of cosmopolitanism. It is likewise no accident that when cosmopolitanism acquires more substance in Todd’s text, its positive and definitive specification as exclusion of other possible contents becomes more apparent. “Cosmopolitanism reveals a commitment to notions of ‘world,’ ‘transnational,’ or ‘global’ citizenship, and also frames its pursuit of global justice largely along two lines: universal rights, on the one hand, and a respect for diversity, on the other” (Todd 2007, 26). These two lines are exactly what makes Alain Badiou (2001, 1–29) criticize both liberalism and Emmanuel Levinas’s face-to-face ethics as secret accomplices in the promulgation of the Western, tourist, or voyeuristic treatment of world affairs. They could also be criticized from Andrew Dobson’s (2006) “thick cosmopolitanism” point of view for their presupposing too narrow a notion of moral obligation. People who have long been exploited cannot be said to be treated in a cosmopolitan way just when their universal rights are acknowledged and their cultural differences respected. And ongoing environmental damage affecting the poor and the rich differently (Dobson 2006, 173–174), while setting the liabilities of the latter in a different perspective, points to a new kind of obligation. Although not at odds with demands for rights and diversity, such obligations definitely go beyond them. More important here is that universal rights and respect for diversity are put center stage (in Todd’s text as much as in Callan’s and White’s and as much as in most culturalist cosmopolitanism) in a way that leaves the issue of justice as redistribution of wealth, not as a supererogatory act of charity but as a moral duty emanating from diachronic and synchronic moral debts, out of the scope of cosmopolitanism. Likewise, universal rights and respect for diversity cannot fully accommodate an environmental sense of cosmopolitanism. All in all, we notice that even if we agree with other

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points of Todd’s otherwise interesting and sensitive approach to the issue, we cannot accept that the difficulty of defining cosmopolitanism commits us to accepting the historical and current invocations of the term and to leaving such a minimalist cosmopolitanism (comprising only respect for human rights and diversity) unchallenged. Another objection to this book’s effort to approach political ideals conceptually, the last one that I can deal with in the present chapter, concerns the justification of the very need for patriotism prior to redefining it. This objection might be raised by the critics to whom White’s and Callan’s papers respond, as well as by proponents of the idea, as we encountered it in Todd, that cosmopolitanism is a shifting away from patriotism. If cosmopolitanism is love for the whole world that is always instantiated and tried out in particular situations, does it not cover the ground of patriotism anyway, rendering it expendable? To answer this objection, let us go via Kant. Kant (1992, 46–47, 90) ruled out the possibility of a world state because he saw in it a soulless despotism. This means that cosmopolitanism as world government is normatively undesirable and even dangerous, leaving us only the option of smaller configurations such as states coordinated by international law. In whatever form, national or multiethnic, such states require commitment and active participation on the part of their citizens. Public affairs of any specific configuration are of such a complex nature that only the citizens belonging to that configuration are capable of a meaningful and consistent vita activa (Arendt 1989) within its confines. Due to the limited human life span, as Kant (1992, 227) observed, no matter how “extroverted” or “eccentric” we are, we cannot know or intervene in, say, the taxation system of a remote country, especially if that system has no dramatic effect to display and belongs only to the sphere of quotidian consideration. Thus, so long as a world state is both nonfeasible and politically undesirable, what we may call “internal patriotism,” civic or national, is indispensable. Regarding external patriotism, the argument is somewhat different but touches upon the confinements of the human life span too. If a country exerts a subtle power (but one no less intrusive for that matter) over another country, if the interests of the elites of the former translate into risks for the masses of the latter, it is very possible that we

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may never hear of it. Those who suffer an injustice are alone in making it more globally public and in mobilizing international attention and, hopefully, international law. Their patriotism as defense of their rights against external threat or the indifference of the uninformed is, regrettably but pragmatically, their own battle, their own call. It could be the battle of the pious (i.e., who employs genuinely the language game that is hegemonic at a given time), or that of the pagan (who uses ruses and trickery to shift the rules of the game), or perhaps that of the mime (as explained in Chapter 5). Regardless of the kind, it is a battle that can be undertaken by the locals who experience the problematic situation. Even the decision of an impartial sympathizer to give them voice, to speak in their name—a rare thing anyway—does not alleviate this solitude. The only way to make external patriotism expendable, so that cosmopolitanism could therefore shift away from it, would be to create a just world in the sense that no political configuration or (supra)national groups and forces would be predatory, driven by narrow interest, or perhaps simply blundering. One might argue that, when and if that occurred, the need for patriotic praxis, internal and external, could be reconsidered or made obsolete. Still, even the most extravagant utopia of an accomplished cosmopolitanism, or a just state or a just world turning into reality, would not be a static photographic arresting of time. It would still presuppose a constant effort to preserve such justice, so that if patriotism is in dialectical relation with justice, then like all virtues it can never become obsolete. The retreat from redefinitions and reconstructions affects political discourse and political education negatively because of the unnecessary vagueness and mystification it introduces to it. Patriotism as love for one’s community (and for the universalizable reworking of the relation with the Other within and without that this community is capable of) can be easily reconciled with a complex conception of cosmopolitanism. To anticipate some of the ideas that will come up in the rest of the book, this complex, eccentric cosmopolitanism can be theorized as love for all biota and cosmos, international legality, and worldwide ethical responsibility, sensitive to diachronic and synchronic moral debt. The argument with which the previous chapter ended—that is, that the reconciliation of patriotism and cosmopolitanism can be

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achieved through a comprehensive theory of justice—will be further developed later on. The idea of justice that is thus sought is directive and corrective. It gives the appropriate dose of normativity to love and aspires to ward off some possible dangerous political implications and slippages to unreflective nationalism and chauvinism, on the one hand, and to an arrogant and facile globalistic internationalism, on the other. Authorized by justice, these ideals (and corresponding virtues) may enhance vigilance about causes of political evil that are more profound and subtle than chauvinism, thus diluting the double standards that usually confound students in classrooms regarding the scope of human responsibility. Patriotism and cosmopolitanism in the form of praxis-oriented ideals and embodied virtues can be compatible and complementary as well as counterdiscourses (mutually corrective). And, as I hope to have so far shown, just as patriotism cannot cover the ground of cosmopolitanism, likewise, cosmopolitanism cannot replace patriotism in its special relation to the spatiotemporal ontological confines of an inexorably localized existence. If patriotism and cosmopolitanism mean, at their best, the ethicopolitical, intellectual, and emotional worthiness of immediate proximity and annihilated distance, then it is evident that the empirical, accomplished or in-process, reality of spatiotemporally unhindered possibilities does not secure anything on its own; nor does it cancel locality. If globalization is defined simply as the empirical evidence of such possibilities of annihilated time and space, as I believe it should be defined, it cannot promote, on its own, an enabling sense of cosmopolitanism, and it is not on its own immune to the extended and camouflaged “patriotism” of the strong. Without the necessary ethico-political, intellectual, and emotional interpretation of human entanglement—and there education has a huge task to address—the global may at best represent a “tourist” enrichment of individual lifehistory. At worst, it may represent a more advanced form of New Roman Times through the anonymous, sweeping, and uncontrollable sway of cyberspace, in other words, of Times New Roman.

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Notes 1. See, for instance, some contributions in Cohen and Nussbaum (1996). Along these lines, similar binary oppositions are enshrined in recent theory in most traditions and persuasions—oppositions such as “rootedness versus rootlessness,” “immobility versus fluidity,” and “identity versus hybridity or diaspora” (Isin and Wood 1999). 2. See, for instance, Lu (2000, 250n36); Waldron (2000, 227). 3. On those purposes, see Korsgaard (2006). 4. I say “comprehensive” to contrast it with more narrow notions of it such as the distributive (so as to add restorative justice, for instance) and also to allude to its difference from Rawls’s claim that contemporary political theory can do away with comprehensiveness and endorse political liberalism. 5. It is a lack that has, as stated in the second chapter and initially deployed in Papastephanou (2005a), led theory to conflating globalization and cosmopolitanism. I have so far argued that, to overcome this predicament, political philosophy should draw and keep distinctions between globalization as an empirical phenomenon, globalism as globalization’s discursive thematization, and cosmopolitanism as an ideal of global well-being. 6. For a summary of them, see Kleingeld (2000, 315). 7. For an exposition and critique of the latter, see Lacroix (2002, 951ff.), to which Bellamy and Castiglione respond with their 2004 text. 8. Kleingeld writes that “rather than ahistorically trying to claim a single meaning for the term patriotism, one should acknowledge that some terms change their meaning over time or acquire additional meanings. In such cases, the point is not to determine which usage is wrong and which is right, but to distinguish the different meanings carefully” (2000, 318). Yet, in some cases, I believe, certain usages are too flat, unproductive, and unhelpful regarding hidden semantic possibilities and thus are less preferable than other usages. 9. This is not a criticism of the actual content of White’s paper itself, for, being a response to critics, the paper is meant to address a different matter than the one that I am discussing here. It is rather a criticism of the text’s noticeable omission of acknowledging the need for redefinitions up to the reconstruction of different corresponding theories. The same holds for Callan’s text too. 10. Against what it tends to be now in pragmatic-culturalist or legalist-procedural accounts of cosmopolitanism. 11. Although this requires a much broader and more detailed discussion, suffice it here to rely even on an intuitive understanding of cosmopolitanism: would that understanding allow us to name as “cosmopolitan” one who is contemptuous of or insulting to those who do not share her religious or nonreligious beliefs? Likewise, would we call “cosmopolitan” a person who supports the expansionist foreign policy of his country on grounds of national interest at the expense of universal human rights? Instead of being the opposite of particularity, cosmopolitan universality includes, requires, and defends particularity.

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12. See, for instance, criticisms of Hardt and Negri’s Empire in Parry (2003) and Badiou (2003a). 13. There is no compelling argument supporting Todd’s implicit assumption in this quotation that our co-nationals are “just like us.” In most nation-states, co-nationals differ in many aspects that constitute their multiple identities/selfhoods. In some respects, some members of a nation-state feel closer to people from other countries with whom they share other kinds of commonality or solidarity. 14. Even in more blatant cases, such as wars, the complications and the stakes that escalated into crisis and matter immensely in judging fairly the conflict and determining the parameters of a just conflict resolution leave most observers (international referees notwithstanding) indifferent, as has been mentioned in Chapter 6.

C hapter Nine

Revisiting Patriotism Patriotism (ideal and virtues) has been revived recently,

possibly for a variety of reasons, some of which might have to do with the growing interest in communitarianism and the failures of liberalist discourse to accommodate genuine respect for cultural heterogeneity or to recognize the significance of solidarity. But even liberal thinkers themselves have, in the course of the 1990s, made concessions to national patriotism and acknowledged its compatibility with liberal principles (see, indicatively, Tamir 1992; Williams 1995). The reasons for such a revival aside, in contemporary contexts, “some authors take patriotism to consist in loyalty to a particular nation. Others think it is the love of political liberty and the institutions that sustain it, or a matter of self-conception and identity.” For others, the term refers “to all of these or more” (Kleingeld 2000, 316). Y. Yonah (1999) also provides a very interesting and informative account of versions of contemporary patriotism that range from pluralist and constitutional down to communitarian conceptions. Most debates that revolve around what kind of patriotism might be acceptable today draw either from Jürgen Habermas’s (1996b) constitutional patriotism with its commitment to law and moral principles or from communitarian accounts of commitment to public weal such as Charles Taylor’s (1996) idea of patriotic ethos. In educational contexts, patriotism crops up in many debates about citizenship (Golmohamad 2009), though, again, not in a uniform or univocal manner. For instance, “the idea of patriotism is more contested in political liberal discourse than in civic republican discourse, which views patriotism as a fundamental value and disposition to be nurtured in citizenship education” (Knight Abowitz and Harnish 2006, 666). 180

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However, as mentioned in previous chapters, this revival has confronted as a given of the era the fact that, within the broad social imaginary and within much philosophy of late modernity and postmodernity, patriotism and cosmopolitanism have largely been defined as opposing terms. Within such frameworks, the focus of the one has to gain exclusive value, or at least a significant priority, over the other. That this given is not intrinsically valid has been argued from many perspectives. For instance, P. Kleingeld remarks that patriotism could be seen as “a duty on Kantian grounds, without this involving the general principle that ‘compatriots take priority’” (2000, 313). Nevertheless, when friends and foes take patriotism to denote a narrow attachment to one’s particular group or community (McIntyre 1992; Nussbaum and Cohen 1996; Hand and Pearce 2009) and one’s special commitment to territorially demarcated duties and concerns (Mason 1997; Linklater 1999), it is more likely to be ill fitting in a broader context of ethico-political concern. Moreover, there are indeed versions of patriotism that border with nationalism, even with chauvinism and jingoism. They are prohibitive of, or inimical to, a cosmopolitan point of view as they give unconditional or exclusive priority (either on motivational or justificatory grounds) to one’s compatriots as recipients of obligations. Or they nurture a commitment to unreflective interpretations of national interest, tailoring justice to it or ignoring any claims to justice whatever. Yet, this leaves a whole scope of other versions of patriotism undertheorized—especially regarding their relevance to, and compatibility or incompatibility with, cosmopolitanism. This is why I consider it imperative that discourse on such issues break out of previous definitional and conceptual moulds, prior to debating what is or is not appropriate for teaching. There is no space in this book for a proper revisit of patriotism: some indications of its direction—a re-viewing, that is, a different outlook on the whole matter—are nevertheless necessary for explaining its possible compatibility with the revisiting of cosmopolitanism that will follow in the final chapter. To begin with, the term “patriotism” needs some discussion. For one thing, it bears associations of patriarchy with which it shares perhaps more than just an etymological affinity. Patriotism often connotes love for a Fatherland, submission to the Law of the Father, a sacrifice

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of the pleasure principle for the sake of the reality principle involved in patriotic defense of a community, a childlike partiality and lack of criticality for the near and dear, a projection of paternal protection onto the state (a state-father to the children-members of the community), and even self-sacrifice for a masculinist order. More generally, the gender connotations of the term “patriotism” bring along notions of control, domination, paternalism, and male power. Though it is true that the Greek patris and the Latin patria derive from the respective word for “father,” the nouns themselves are feminine (in these languages) and have frequently been thought as “motherlands” (this is the broad use of the term in Greek, for instance), where the figure of the mother bears more associations with the affective involved in the semiotic rather than in the symbolic order—if we speak in Kristevan terms. The motherland brings along notions of spirit rather than law and paternal power, of nurture and care rather than law and aloofness. Still, even a shift in gender orientation toward a more “maternalist” conception can be problematic from a feminist point of view as it reproduces traditional, essentialized, and rigid taxonomies of gender and emotions, attitudes, outlooks, and so forth. In any case, the familial metaphors extend in both cases (fatherland, motherland) to the members of the community who view one another as siblings. This is problematic as such, not only for patriotism but also for cosmopolitanism—for reasons that we shall see presently. For even cosmopolitanism, which does not bear such connotations terminologically, has not always escaped from paternal and familial associations of the above sort. This is so because much cosmopolitan discourse has been formulated as brotherhood/sisterhood of people in the eyes of God—the father of all. Ironically, even in secular versions, the shift from the father to the mother (e.g., Mother Earth) and further to siblings and the treatment of the local and the global as a big family neither guarantees justice nor secures peace. Family is far from being the archetype of equality. And myths and literature from all times and from all over the world have provided ample illustration of failures of familial bonds to ward off violence and aggression. Hence, the issue of the terms that have been used for patriotism, along with the issue of the connotations of the familial metaphors that have been employed

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to account for patriotism (and cosmopolitanism), is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. Still, as I believe that connotations are somewhat less crucial than the actual content of a conception, I leave the issue of terminology, still inconclusive and in no way settled, in order to move to meanings/conceptions of patriotism. Some thinkers of egalitarian cosmopolitanism make room in their theories for some specific and limited meanings of patriotism. For instance, following C. R. Beitz, T. Pogge concedes two “respects in which patriotic allegiance to political units may be desirable: it supports a sense of shared loyalty; and it allows one to see oneself as a significant contributor to a common cultural project” (1992, 58n18). And for Anthony Appiah, a rooted cosmopolitan is one “who loves his or her homeland and culture and feels a responsibility towards making that homeland a better place” (Kaldor 2004, 174). From the German-continental persuasion, we may single out Habermas’s (1996a and 1996b) philosophy, for which patriotism is constitutional. Constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus) expresses an affirmative stance on the part of the members of supra- or multi-nation-state configurations toward their common rules of government. We may discern the main current tendencies of understanding and theorizing patriotism as follows. Civic patriotism is love for common political liberty and the institutions that support it. This kind of patriotism is inherently political and does not depend on ethnic or national identities (Kleingeld 2000, 317). At first glance, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the postnational character of this type of patriotism seems to secure a safe distance between chauvinism and nationalism—especially when the latter denotes illusions of grandeur and superiority. Based on politics and the civil society, this patriotism appears easily reconcilable with cosmopolitanism, particularly when it can prove that the political principles grounding it are indeed universal or generalizable. But if the latter is not the case (and this is a matter that cannot be settled easily, as it goes beyond the self-understanding of the patriots themselves), the patriots may end up entertaining illusions of political grandeur by assuming that their patria is closer to unshakable universal principles than the homeland of others. This may not quite be nationalism, as it does not focus on the nation (but rather on the

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multi-nation-state or on a regional political configuration); yet, it has all the negative effects of nationalism. A similar danger lurks, I believe, in the so-called trait patriotism (Kleingeld 2000, 319), which does not explain love for a locality or group by means of origin, belonging, or political consciousness but rather by means of the traits of a place or community that inspire the patriot. National or ethnic patriotism does not focus on the political commonwealth in which one is a citizen but on the national or ethnic group to which one belongs (Kleingeld 2000, 319). Since the emphasis here is on the nation that one feels as her own and not necessarily as a successful concretization of a general ideal or as a carrier of specific and uniquely attractive traits or properties (Kleingeld 2000, 320), the undesirable implication that our patria is supposedly better or superior than that of others can more easily be staved off. Often such an understanding of national affect involves familial metaphors and turns the nation into an extension of family relations and bonds (without necessarily implying biological connection—although it often does). Yet neither does this conception of patriotism preclude the possibility that this sense of belonging may obfuscate obligations to those who are nationally Other and block the justice and duties to nonnational groups. This possibility is more threatening when the idea of a “nation as my own” is construed as a ground for unconditionally and irrationally favoring the familiar/familial at the expense of the foreign. Therefore, patriotism of all forms (probably just like cosmopolitanism of all forms) may slide into undesirable and dangerous doubles with which it shares borders. It is in the light of this doubleness that we may understand Richard Rorty’s insistence on national patriotism. Rorty bridges the collective with the individual by arguing that “national-pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement” (1998, 3). He goes on to argue, however—and here is where boundary discursiveness is burdened with the task of keeping equal distances—that “too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance”; then again, “just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely”

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(Rorty 1998, 3). Therefore, Rorty approaches the idea of national pride as a politically important notion in a boundary-discursive manner (and I mean it positively here). For he seeks to place it within those limits that can keep it safe from degenerations such as the above mentioned. Patriotism can thus be deployed through keeping a lookout for the specters of nationalism and unreflective internationalism. Surely, to be compatible with cosmopolitanism, patriotism of any kind (ethnic, civicpolitical, or other) should not be nationalist, if the latter term denotes claims to superiority or of exclusive priority of one group over another. However, regrettably, this conceptual specification of nationalism is inordinately extended in many ordinary globalist debates to describe and then dismiss even cases of commitment to a community that not only are acceptable but may also be laudable from a cosmopolitan point of view. More significantly, the attack on any notion of national consciousness and national identity,1 as well as on any possible meaning of nationalism qua national patriotism, has itself undergone changes that have not contributed to a more nuanced thinking but rather to even more sweeping generalizations. Tim Brennan accounts for this change as follows: “In recent years, the attack has shifted to the related but somewhat different argument that nationalism is not evil so much as obsolete in a world run by global media networks, international agencies and multinational corporations” (1989, 2). In fact, there are those who argue that the recent wave of nationalism (of the 1990s) is an anachronism pure and simple; contrast it with cosmopolitanism, and engage in critical dialogue selectively with proponents of the national idea as a response to some dangerously vague, deeply felt human need (Kaldor 2004, 161). By selecting such proponents of the national idea as their sole opponents, those theorists make things too easy for their arguments. Others, David Held, for instance, differentiate between cultural and political nationalism. The former is considered more resilient and is expected to remain, in all probability, “central to people’s identity” (Held 2003, 469). By contrast, political nationalism (interestingly, though in my view wrongly, identified by Held with “the assertion of the exclusive political priority of national identity and the national interest”) may “not remain as significant” (Held 2003, 469). The reason given for this is that “political

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nationalism cannot deliver many sought-after public goods without seeking accommodation with others, in and through regional and global collaboration” (Held 2003, 469). Held is right in pointing out the need for a cosmopolitan perspective. But I think he errs in defining the political attachment to an ethnic locality in terms of exclusive priority of identity and narrow interest and in considering political nationalism (unlike cultural nationalism) by definition hostile to cosmopolitanism. Held here misses the fact that political nationalism need not be defined as he has defined it and need not be so rigidly disconnected from cultural nationalism. The nationalism of the liberation movements had been political; yet this did not block its theorization through a cultural (though not culturalist) perspective that opened it up to what lies outside the nation in a cosmopolitan sort of way. The task Frantz Fanon had set for the colonized after their national liberation was to avoid displaying that kind of narrow nationalism that keeps people hostage to history and turns them into a people of the past (Parry 1987, 44). Likewise, in Amìlcar Cabral’s words, a people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if, without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. (2009, 3)

And another connection of politics and national pride is conducive here for showing that the national (in its double and often confusing sense of the ethnic bond and the [multi-]nation-state bond) may have a lasting political relevance and usefulness even outside the historically determined phase of liberation movements. Rorty, for instance, illustrates this connection as follows: “Emotional involvement with one’s country—feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various present-day national policies—is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive” (1998, 3). National attachment within such a perspective is political rather than merely cultural in its effects and significance. The above connection is also conducive for

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showing that political national consciousness may not necessarily rely on a blind priority of national interest (as Held believes). What leads even nuanced accounts such as Held’s astray is, I believe, the more general incrimination of the politics of any national affect and the exaggeration of the possibility of a supposedly freestanding political/constitutional patriotism. Brennan argues that, by finding the origins of the nation in “everything from the messianic chauvinism of the Hebrew Bible, the Herderian ‘folk’ of German Romanticism, or the belligerent expansionism of Europe’s late-blooming fascist powers” (1989, 1), many scholars have attacked the nation as imaginary projection altogether. In so doing, they have “sidestepped the fact that it was precisely decolonization that, unconsciously or not, they were also attacking” (Brennan 1989, 1).2 This predicament, along with the admission that the supposedly freestanding liberalism cannot so easily sidestep national attachment, has led some prominent figures of postcolonial theory to perceive the need to coin another term that would do justice to the positive sense of national feeling that exceeds the abstractly political, institutional, and constitutional content of contemporary liberal takes on patriotism. Thus, the term that Neil Lazarus (2002) and Benita Parry (2003) employ is “nationalitarianism.” More generally, in addition to current theoretical defenses of patriotism, there have been defenses of a kindred notion of nationalism divested of chauvinist connotations (e.g., Tamir 1992). Some such defenses within globalist discourse spring from liberalism or from by now classic theorizations of anticolonial movements (e.g., Fanon’s [1967]) or from contemporary discussions of postcolonialism or from Rorty’s neopragmatism (1998). Other approaches (e.g., Nielsen’s [2003]) aspire to combine nationalism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and socialism in a coherent political theory. In what follows I add some further clarifications to what I specified above as a need for a reconceptualization of patriotism and to what I illustrated in Chapter 7 through Heraclitus’s dictum as a need for distinguishing between internal and external patriotism (acknowledging the inward-looking concern for domestic affairs and the law and the outward-looking concern for defending the walls of the city). In this way, it will become clearer why I reserve the term “nationalism”

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for the theorization of a regressive attachment to national locality and employ “ethnic patriotism” as a supplement to constitutional-political patriotism that covers the conceptual ground of a positive account of the ethnic/national affect and its complex relation to culture and politics. For most attempts to incorporate a revised patriotism, the perspective is inward (relation to compatriots, relation to domestic legality), that is, it allocates to patriotism the role of the “cement” of society— regardless of whether it expresses collective ethos or public reason— and dissociates it from outward concerns (relation of the country to those surrounding it or immediately transacting with it). The notion of patriotism that appears almost irrelevant to the relation with what lies outside the community can be called “internal patriotism.” But the discussion below will show that this understanding of patriotism is implausible if it becomes inflated to the point of exhausting what should be meant by patriotism with no further requirement of supplements and correctives. Usually traced back to the classical republicans of ancient Rome, affection for a nation has been treated by contemporary civic republicans as a source of social stability and loyalty to collective purposes and a remedy to pathologies such as individualist political apathy. Within such discourses, patriotic “passion is not the result of our rational consent to the principles of governance, but of a love that translates into action and service to the common good” (Knight Abowitz and Harnish 2006, 658). More broadly, communitarianism takes patriotism to denote devotion to public weal and the limits this entails to private and self-regarding goals. For Taylor (1996), in an account that is redolent of structural-functionalist leanings, patriotism is the collective ethos that secures allegiance to democratic practices and concessions of privileges for the sake of common benefit. The unqualified presentation of this introverted, sentimentalist patriotism as a guarantee of altruistic attitudes of wealthy and powerful citizens is implausible for the following reasons. Justice may lead to patriotic conduct because the just citizen recognizes the legitimate claims of her compatriots and relativizes her own conception of what counts as interest in the light of something more generalizable. However, the opposite does not always hold: patriotism on its own, that is, as devotion to one’s community, does not necessarily lead to

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justice—more specifically, to acting in just ways—for one may define the interest of her community in a totally privatist sense. The truly devoted subject is not necessarily truly just, whereas the truly just subject can act as a truly devoted subject would be expected to act. That an ideal might be motivationally efficacious does not entail that it is also effective at the justificatory and normative level. That patriotism may turn people on under certain circumstances does not entail that it turns them on for the right reasons and for just purposes. Further, the assumption that there is a readiness, on the part of privileged citizens, to concede some of their advantages for the sake of the community’s stability and public weal misfires when we consider it historically. In many instances, patriots united against external threat but felt no specific obligation to minimize internal inequalities when decisive pressure from trade unions or social movements was lacking. Patriotic solidarity was not evenly felt or expected by all the members of a community. Even if some social conflicts were indeed controlled through an appeal to patriotic feelings, this frequently meant an uneven compromise that secured the allegiance of the masses rather than restratification and egalitarian policies. The modus vivendi generated through the patriotic ethos was not based on equality and fairness. From this perspective, the well-known hostility to patriotism as a political virtue by some Marxist circles was not entirely unjustified. As such, it proved indirectly the extent to which it was felt that patriotic stances were manipulated in such a way as to secure the silence of the masses about inequalities along with their blind support for various war operations. Instead of providing motives for excessive responsibilities and sacrifices on the part of local elites, patriotism supported insular and often expansionist tendencies with regard to others and offered legitimacy to unfair, unequal, and hierarchical socioeconomic systems. The viability of the state was not comprehended in the direction of egalitarianism as much as in the direction of conformity and assimilation. In a nutshell, patriotism as practice has, so far, led not to selfless attitudes but, more often than not, to the effacement of the critical self that fights oppression within and without. Unfortunately, the idea that patriotism by definition mitigates selfinterest—a misconception that leads to overrating the standard notion of patriotism and emphasizing internal, inward-looking affect—has

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guided not only defenders of patriotic unreflective ethos but also many of their liberal critics, who may nevertheless share with them the suspicion that under stronger demands for justice, utopianism may lurk, as well as a structural-functionalist account of society that downplays societal redirection and favors consensual or modus vivendi equilibria. But even the Marxist opponents of both (i.e., liberals and communitarians), those who do not share the above premises, also look to patriotism through an internal perspective that emphasizes primarily social justice and disconnects—often despite their declarations—patriotism from issues of global, international justice at the definitional level. Put differently, they lack the conception of external patriotism that is relevant to such issues. For instance, patriotism in discourses of Marxist leanings is, in some senses, the antithesis of what civic republicans mean by “love of country.” To love the United States is to “encourage dialogue, critique, dissent and social justice.” It is to engage in the messiness and difficulty of a pluralistic democracy that does not currently work well for all citizens. (Knight Abowitz and Harnish 2006, 673, emphasis mine)

Despite its merits, this internal patriotism falls, at least momentarily, into the trap of structural-functionalist frameworks of sociological explanation. For it fails to see that a more demanding patriotism—one that would promote a more radical transformation of society and not just small, ameliorative steps toward improvements in treating internal (local) otherness—has an external dimension in the following sense: it expects patriots also to be critical of how their country responds to issues of global justice in which it is involved, and it presses for a more radical redirection of their own society regarding its relation to various national others. This dimension is external patriotism rather than cosmopolitanism (despite its coming very close to it) because it sets out from and focuses on the debates about how one’s patria is or should be and not on a broader ideal of how the whole world should be. Familiar as they are with the stance of a broadly conceived Left to render any expression of concern for ethnicity and nationhood suspect, so long as it refers to the patriot’s feelings of shame or pride (depending on how her country fares in relation to what lies outside of it), these

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Marxist circles shy away from a more extrovert love of country or hastily relegate its conceptual scope entirely to cosmopolitanism. But unlike cosmopolitan ethico-political concern, which may refer to the whole or a part of cosmos regardless of how one’s locality is related to it, external patriotism refers, for instance, to the patriot’s consciousness of how her country is implicated in (as a wrongdoer) or threatened by (as a victim) what lies outside. The example of shame may be useful here in order to show how external patriotism and cosmopolitanism meet halfway without losing their distinctiveness. A citizen of one of the Pacific islands threatened by global warming may feel indignation for the fact that her island is endangered by the practices of other countries, strong or weak, and by their not taking the appropriate measures (external patriotism). But she may also feel shame as a human being for the destruction that humanity has caused to the environment. Or she may feel shame for the Holocaust during World War II carried out by fellow human beings, even if her small locality had in no way been involved in it (cosmopolitanism). Nothing, of course, precludes an external patriotic stance from also being cosmopolitan, and in an exemplary sense for that matter—as we have seen in Chapter 5—so long as the principles on which it is based are universalizable. If they are, they reflect more broadly a concern for the whole world and not just for the desirable status and conduct of the patriot’s particular collectivity. Not only is the inflated and overrated internal patriotism inoperative, but it also has subtle ethnocentric implications that seem so far to have remained unnoticed. Even when the ideal of patriotism is weakened, as in the patriotic ideal that some cosmopolitan liberalists concede and that consists of an acknowledgment of the value of boundedness and some concomitant special obligations to compatriots, its inwardness allows only a loose connection to ethico-political cosmopolitanism. At most, internal patriotism is compatible with such cosmopolitanism to the extent that the former improves society and better coordinates it with the objectives of the latter (e.g., an affluent and well-ordered society can contribute more effectively to institutionalized global structures). A more extroverted patriotism, by contrast—one that raises legitimate demands and protects the rights of a particular people without nationalist claims to superiority and expects its people to be fair to others—actively promotes the concretization of cosmopolitan

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principles. Looking outward, a patriotic stance measures the quality and value of the community’s conduct in the world not only by standards that the community itself sets but also by taking seriously into account the way that others see this conduct. Thus, external patriotism, on the condition of being cautious, vigilant, and self-critical, may turn out to be less ethnocentric than internal patriotism due to its being more relational to a broader otherness (and not just with the otherness within). It is more relational because by definition it takes into consideration what lies outside a particular collectiveness and what is encountered at times as a visitor, as a neighbor, as a historical Other, as another concrete national Other, and so forth. Internal patriotism does not always take the right direction, much as external patriotism can easily revert to nationalist treatment of otherness. For internal patriotism may end up in a self-absorbed preoccupation with internal affairs. It may even lead to a problematic situation that is very common in contemporary Northwestern democracies. The preoccupation with internal issues and some gains in terms of social justice create the impression among citizens that their governments are fairly democratic and responsive to public demands or to public discontent. This satisfaction with the internal makes citizens unsuspecting of how their governments may be dealing with the external (i.e., with issues concerning how governmental policies affect other peoples). This is why cosmopolitan feelings and justice are imperative and necessary correctives and directives of both internal and external patriotism. Pluralist, constitutional, and communitarian conceptions of patriotism (Yonah 1999) are examples of efforts to purify the standard way by which the patriotic ideal has been operative within, while keeping the specter of nationalism away—yet often unsuccessfully and at a high cost. This is so because all this concentration on the internal relation misses the significance of the external relation and the need to overcome false dilemmas of the past. Attention to a patriotic consideration of what lies outside one’s community can prove to be a crucial reaction to expansionist and homogenizing globalizing effects and an indispensable other side to the internal aspect of a full-fledged patriotism. Thus, we may imagine a patriotism that is Janus-faced in having both internal and external aspects and that comprises legal-political and ethnic-political commitments that differ but complement, instead

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of oppose, one another. Rather than being undermined by the ethnos, this kind of full-fledged patriotism can be served by it, if the ethnos becomes understood in a different way.

Ethnic Political Commitments: The Nation and the Ethnos Let us elaborate more on this through a critical outlook on Habermas’s version of patriotism. Habermas’s notion of a constitutional patriotism becomes extremely relevant for the politics of multiethnic states or regionalist quasi-federations because it avoids the apolitical emphasis on performativity that lurks in functionalist, reproductive accounts of society and the emotional element of a communal ethos grounded in a binding past, an element that is not always available and cannot be created by force. Instead, Habermas’s constitutional patriotism opts for a purely legal-political commitment to common principles and political visions. Those can bind even ethnic communities whose past has been one of friction, conflict, or even disproportionate violence of the one (conquering power) against the other (the conquered). For some such communities, separatism, parting of the ways, is no option for various plausible reasons. The stake they confront (one that has typically been undertheorized within educational globalism, with the exception of Sigal Ben-Porath’s book Citizenship under Fire [2006]) is to make a fresh political start, to create a new, common political future. Ethnically and culturally they may not share enough to have a commonality of the sort that used to bind older political configurations, and commonalities of that kind cannot be constructed artificially or in a short time. The best option such communities encounter is to create their own (positively meant) political utopia (i.e., to maintain their distinctive ethnic identities as lively, operative identities but to reconcile them with the political identity that is shaped by the common vision of peaceful togetherness and the common future of no apartheids). Constitutional patriotism means, as I understand it, that citizens will develop a patriotic stance toward a shared frame of political thought and action that will comprise all the maxims that would meet the agreement of all those affected by the constitution.3 With its formalist emphasis on debating principles and its proceduralist openness

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to futurity and to the unexpected, constitutional patriotism, or any legal-political patriotism more generally, can be a supplement and corrective to national/ethnic patriotism, not an enlarged substitute that repeats the failures of nation-statism by operating in a similar way and deriving its force from historical contingencies of the realpolitik kind. Yet, I find the Habermasian constitutional patriotism problematic in that it does not accommodate the positive political significance that ethnic patriotism can have. It fails to do so because it maintains the modern conception of the nation (to avoid a possible misunderstanding, let me make explicit that I am not referring to the nation-state), if only to depoliticize it, relegate it to a semiprivate sphere, and even (depending on interpretation) discard it. Much like Held’s account that we saw above, Habermas’s sees the politicization of the nation as a discontinuous moment in modern history. As Kathleen Knight Abowitz and J. Harnish sum up his position, Until the middle of the 18th century, and later in many cases, nations were communities of people linked by heredity. “Hereditary nationality gave way to an acquired nationalism” after the French Revolution, and that form of nationalism “was able to foster people’s identification with a role which demanded a high degree of personal commitment” (p. 23). (2006, 682n6)

Indeed, Habermas uses as a token of the apolitical and biologistic character of the nation the fact that “even Kant still maintained that ‘that group which recognizes itself as being gathered together in a society due to common descent shall be called a nation (gens)’” (1996a, 22). Significantly, in the same text, Habermas omits any reference to the broader sense of the political involved in the affect that grounded ethnic claims and insurrections related to the principle of self-determination as a principle of democracy in action. Much worse, he generalizes Eurocentrically (in the sense that the experience of few Northwestern countries is taken as representative of any experience) the idea that until the eighteenth century nations were communities linked with heredity in an apolitical sense. Things had not been quite so, since there have been historical examples of conquered peoples claiming their freedom on grounds of nationality (ethnicity),

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territoriality, and language. An example of the connection between resistance, irredentism, self-determination, land, nation, and language is found as early as AD 968 in Liutprand’s (bishop of Cremona) report of his mission to Constantinople, where he confronted Nike¯phorus (the Byzantine emperor) with the following words: “The land which you say belongs to your empire belongs, as the nationality and language of the people proves, to the kingdom of Italy” (emphasis mine).4 More generally, the identity corresponding to the collectivity “nation” had, throughout history, at various times been politically activated (granted, not always for the better but often for the worse). And no identity is by definition divorced from political activation. Rather than being arbitrarily condemned to obsolescence, any one of the multiple identities that make us up as human beings can acquire political significance whenever there is contestation of space as resistance to domination and not just to power. One’s identity as a woman may stand out and become politically operative when she feels and judges that the collectivity “women” suffers,5 at the very moment that her ethnic identity might be at political rest, given that the circumstances of balanced power allow such comfortable relegation to the sphere of the implicit. Or both identities may be at a given time equally active, again, for reasons of domination, felt oppression, real threat, or even less crisis-ridden or crisis-tinted visions of a better life. Habermas, who has famously criticized various theorists, Michel Foucault among others, for failing to distinguish adequately between domination and power, himself fails to see that national distinctiveness has had a specifically empowering role in people’s resisting domination and that national culture should not be taken (as liberal culturalism tends to do) as belonging to a rather private realm divorced from politics. As Amìlcar Cabral noted, When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis, who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination—even if they were all degenerates like Hitler—had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination.6 (2009, 1)

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This had also been known to the colonial officials themselves: “To take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation” (Cabral 2009, 1). Some metonymies of this colonial practice? There are too many to account here; indicatively, one of the first things you come across when visiting Wales is local stories about the British colonial authorities’ fight against the Welsh language precisely to achieve the cultural homogeneity that would make it easier for them to rule over Wales. It would be unjust to describe the current, organized efforts on the part of the Welsh to revive their language as a “nationalist” residue supposedly rendered obsolete in our postcolonial times. Likewise, it would be superficial to describe it as merely culturally “ethnic,” prior to extracting from the term “ethnic” what goes beyond current connotations of folklore and politically inoperative identity. For the revival of the Welsh language is not just a cultural phenomenon; it is replete with politically significant collective memory. To sum up, ethnic patriotism may not be as expendable or as disconnected from a principled political patriotism as many thinkers believe today. But let me explain in ascending order of importance what in the term “ethnic” makes it more suitable than the term “national” for a revisited patriotism and what in ethnicity goes beyond folklore. First, the term “national” is often confoundedly used to refer to what pertains to the nation-state (the political configuration thought to have been consolidated in the nineteenth century through print capitalism [B. Anderson 1991]). Second, as I have already stated, nationalism can be reserved to denote a negative stance that grants either superiority or exclusive priority to one’s group or country. Third, it can be shown— and this is what I shall attempt to do below—that the history of the word ethnos, from which “ethnic” derives, activates some important associations that are missing in the word “nation.” The latter argument can be deployed with reference again to Habermas, who traces the origin of the word “nation” to the Romans and Natio, their goddess of birth and origin. Though he confines his account of the history of the word “nation” to Roman antiquity, at another point in the same text (Habermas 1996a, 23), he refers to ethnos as if it could

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be used interchangeably with the word “nation.” The problem I see is not so much that his historical account does not go back enough but, more, that an assumption of easy translatability operates underneath Habermas’s text. Yet, ethnos is not so easily translatable into nation— not without an important surplus of meaning being left out. For while the term “nation” indeed described the bond of people on grounds of bloodline, as it was associated with the deity of birth and origin, the term “ethnos” is something far more complex. Ethnos derives from ethos (with Sanskrit etymological affinities) and comprises meanings such as custom, mood, character, habit, abode, and use. The “nos” of ethnos, though there is no conclusive evidence, has sometimes been explained as deriving from the verb naiō (to reside, dwell) or from naō (to flow, run, stream) or from neō (to swim or navigate). The connotations of all these possibilities, which are operative regardless of etymological accuracy, bring together the stability of the common abode (home) with the mobility of flow and of a common navigation, the collective passage (homelessness) through a half-remembered, half-forgotten past and an unknown and uncertain future. Hence, scholars of classics understand the ancient word ethnos as meaning a group of people (or animals) cohabiting a specific land and having a specific way of living. Associations of bloodline remain in this meaning implicit and derivative, since the formative ideas are the group of people (collectivity), the connection with territoriality, and the common cultural life. Finally, unlike the Latin word natio, it is noticeable that ethnos has no associations with a deified genetic origin. Thus, the word-for-word translatability of nation and ethnos is too facile and obscures some significant semantic differences that have not so far been explored. Mythos—not in the modern sense of enabling or, worse, expedient fiction, but in the more original and minimalist sense of imaginative, collectively held narrative (and varying) response to collectively raised questions about life and the world—accompanied ethnos in Greek antiquity from very early on. It is true, as we can make out from Hesiod’s Catalogues, the oldest, partly extant (eighth century BC) mythic account of Panhellenism (against a narrow tribalism of scattered genē and phyla), that the presence of a genealogical-familial element

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in such myths did not do justice to the richness of ethos/ethnos but had rather been a historically specific way of answering the question about the ethnic bond. And, for sure, even later, when Herodotus thematized ethnos, he made it signify the constellation of consanguinity (omaimon), common religion (omothrēskon), and common language (omoglosson). In doing so, he defined it in a way that mystified the more minimalist premises of the term and therefore raised the bloodline to an equal status with the cultural components that he had singled out, thus leaving out a more general sense of common cultural life (e.g., one that includes memory, movement in time, and narrativity) and the clearest manifestation of the collectively experienced inescapable spatiotemporality of beings (i.e., home and homelessness). Nevertheless, even Herodotus’s definition is untranslatable to the Latin word “nation,” at least as we know it from the upshots of research up to now, as it combines the cultural aspects with that of descent in an inextricable whole, much unlike the Latin one, which gives exclusive priority to the bond of consanguinity. To realize why this might be significant, we need recall here that even Cicero—an otherwise very important thinker of Roman, Stoically influenced cosmopolitanism—notoriously held the view that some nations are, supposedly due to genus, more servile and docile than the Romans.7 However, let us be cautious here: this does not mean that only the biologistic conception of the nation leads to undesirable political consequences. The more broadly naturalist Aristotelian dichotomy of the slave and the free and his culturalist dichotomy of the Greek and the barbarian, which regrettably triumphed over the egalitarian and cosmopolitan views of his opponents (e.g., Antiphon, Alcidamas, Philēmon) (see Papastephanou 2011b) prove that political things can never be a simple matter of combating just one dangerous idea. Hence, I am simply saying here that a specific, positive meaning of patriotism can better be theorized by the term “ethnic” rather than “national” because the word ethnos comprises as yet unexplored counterfactual possibilities. The ethos of ethnos assists us in disentangling knots of collective affect beyond the traps of heredity that accompanied the historical course of the term “nation” from Roman imperial antiquity to the present. Ethos as much more than “custom”

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(as it is usually translated) has enabling associations that are compatible with Fanon’s challenge of the then theoretical tendency to combine the ancient customs (of various peoples) with those people’s claims to authenticity. To Fanon, as Brennan puts it, custom in this sense locks culture up “in a past sealed off from the vigorously altering effects of contemporary events” (1989, 17). The alternative task that Fanon assigns to custom is to “assimilate downwards by locating the ‘zone of occult instability where the people dwell’” (Brennan 1989, 17, emphasis mine). “Dwelling” here brings to mind the association of ethos with the abode, the home, the land that is defended through acts of resistance—a home that is a dynamic, porous, unstable, and rich set of complex and often contradictory realities, always in interplay with the symbolic homelessness of the altering effects of temporality. As I understand him, Fanon’s connection of ethos, plurality, and resistance has, to adapt Brennan’s parlance here, been an attempt “to recognize supple variations” and not “to fetishise the supposedly fixed identity of a metaphysical ‘people’” (1989, 17). Hence, in Fanon’s statement below, I find the best coupling of ethos and mythos (in the sense of thoughtful response to collective questions, as mentioned above). It is one that can underpin a revisiting and positive usage of ethnos and ethnic patriotism. “A national culture is not a folklore nor an abstract populism discovering the people’s ‘true nature’” (Fanon 1967, 188). Instead, it is “the whole body of efforts by a people in the sphere of thought” (Fanon 1967, 188; also quoted in Brennan 1989, 18). In its relation to the previously stated connection of ethos, dwelling, and lived instability with which events suffuse the everydayness of a people, Fanon’s statement captures the ethnic affect that accommodates the best connotations of the ancient term “ethos” much more accurately than Herodotus’s crude definition. Let us summarize the direction of the revision of patriotism that this chapter has suggested. Patriotism comprises constitutional and ethnic elements. Both can be approached from the affective perspective (love for the state and the community); from the ethico-political perspective of futurity (vision of an egalitarian, well-ordered state and a community that enjoys recognition, equality, and fair treatment); from the historical perspective (avoidance of convenient selectivity regarding past entanglement with others and regarding the debts that

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such entanglement may have created); and from the moral perspective (duties to fellow citizens or ethnic consociates and moral responsibility for the community—be it a nation-state, region, or ethnic community with a larger configuration or region—in the face of outside pressures of homogenization, exploitation, effacement, or even ethnic cleansing). Thus, there is no drastic choice between constitutional/legalist-political/ civic patriotism and ethnic patriotism, since they are mobilized depending on the context, the circumstances, and the action that must be taken. Patriotism can be meaningful today only as that kind of love and allegiance to a specific collectivity that defends it not against hospitability (that is, it does not support it in nonhospitable and exclusivist tendencies) but against detrimental effects on its lifeworld (that is, it supports the collectivity when it confronts real threats to its singular and legitimate efforts in the sphere of thought and action). Yet, for this qualification not to be an empty letter, patriotism should be the kind of love for the community/state that acknowledges challenges to what it takes as “detrimental to its lifeworld.” Instead of protecting the “home” from criticism, true patriotism takes criticism seriously and inspires struggle for betterment. And this patriotism is Janus-faced (i.e., internal and external), regardless of whether the emphasis is on the ethnic or the legalist-political aspect. But precisely because of this, true patriotism must also be understood as doubly self-restraining. It restrains the self within the collectivity, and it restrains the collective self with regard to its predatory aspirations against what lies outside the collectivity. Hence it is both about laws and walls, as well as about order and border in multiple and eccentric ways.

Notes 1. We must not forget that these two are not identical, but here there is no space for exploring the intricacies of such a distinction. 2. Moreover, many authors have supplied “sceptical readings of national liberation struggles from the comfort of the observation tower” (Brennan 1989, 6). 3. For sure, there have been many objections to Habermas’s ideas on this kind of patriotism and identity formation as well as merits and important insights that I have discussed elsewhere (Papastephanou 2000, 2007), but they are beyond the scope of the book.

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4. Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana ad Nicephorum Phocam. Online translation at UCdavis.edu, http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/20A/Luitprand.html; “Liutprand of Cremona: Report of His Mission to Constantinople,” UC Davis, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/20A/Luitprand.html (accessed December 10, 2010). 5. Yet, to avoid another misunderstanding, let me state that I do not imply that people are mobilized only when they are directly, through their own identity, involved in relations of domination. 6. As becomes obvious from reading his text as a whole, by “culture” Cabral meant the distinctively national character of culture. 7. M. Tullius Cicero, Orationes: Pro Milone, Pro Marcello, Pro Ligario, Pro rege Deiotaro, Philippicae I–XIV, edited by Albert Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918). Online at Tufts.edu, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection= Perseus%3Acorpus%3Aperseus%2Cwork%2CCicero%2C%20For%20Milo.

C h a p t e r Te n

Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Justice As a virtue and an ideal, patriotism can be a subset of the

comprehensive ideality of cosmopolitanism. This is so because its object of concern, its province, is the collectivity that mediates between narrower and smaller collectivities, on the one hand, and the all-encompassing collectivity of cosmos, on the other. Precisely due to being a subset, patriotism has inward and outward possibilities—that is, it can be approached doubly with regard to affairs and life within the collectivity (the treatment of otherness within notwithstanding) and with regard to how this collectivity treats all those forms of otherness outside of it that are entangled with it in situations that invite a wide spectrum of ethical responses (from justice down to voluntary acts of care). A relation between set and subset is one of complementarity, inclusion, mutual reinforcement, and counterdiscursivity (the set and the subset being directive and corrective of one another). It is not a relation of mutual cancellation or exclusion. For instance, “as declaration of otherness vis-à-vis the invader’s culture” (Brennan 1989, 15) or vis-à-vis the invader’s political demands, or even, as I would expand the argument, vis-à-vis less blatant forms of external threat, the external ethnic patriotism that I rehabilitate in the previous chapter is not inimical to a cosmopolitanism worthy of the name. It is at loggerheads only with the “cosmopolitanism” that Tim Brennan theorizes as the “unprocessed importation of the cultural values of an external oppressor” (1989, 15). Finally, I would add, it is incompatible with the version of cosmopolitanism that rests on a facile, abstract universalism and on a sweeping 202

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dismissal of all claims to justice that a rooted existence and a local collectivity may raise. But can we defend particular identities without at the same time opening up our discourse to the worst complicities due to the dichotomy of inside versus outside on which particularity might rest? Iris Young formulated such an objection regarding Europeanness, arguing that “a European identity cannot exist unless there are others from whom it is differentiated. The call to embrace a particularist European identity, then, means constructing a new distinction between insiders and outsiders” (2005, 155). This criticism is very pertinent at the practical level when directed at the actual way in which particular identities are formed or construed. Indeed, Europeanness is largely understood, especially by many European intellectuals and politicians, in exclusivist and self-congratulatory ways that exaggerate the difference of Europe from the United States, look down upon the “poor relations” within Europe itself, and overlook the Third World totally or treat it as a cumbersome and troublesome Other. At issue here, however, is whether Young’s criticism can be generalized and raised to the ontological level, that is, whether the exclusivist repercussions accompany—by logical necessity—any attachment to particular identities. Only then would one be justified in claiming that all identities except the cosmopolitan (which supposedly cannot have an outsider) sustain their particularism in virtue of a constructed distinction between insiders and outsiders. And in that case, it would be difficult to defend patriotism (or feminism or any other attachment to a politically active identity) at a deeper level. For it would seem that for a patriotic (or feminist, feminine, postfeminist, and so forth) identity to exist, there must be others from whom it is differentiated and, by implication, whose otherness must become excluded or tarnished in order for the particularist identity to find its raison d’être and its self-vindication. I find the ontological side of Young’s criticism too reminiscent of the Hegelian account of identity construction—but the deployment of this argument and of an alternative, non-Hegelian account definitely exceeds the scope of this book. Thus, I explain why the criticism is implausible with less thoroughgoing arguments. Young and many other thinkers assume, as I interpret them, that any identity formation presupposes an idealized insider in

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contradistinction to an actual outsider. Because the existing others from which such idealized, particularist identities differentiate themselves are real and not ideal, the idealized insiders ground the understanding of their own existence in an imagined superiority over existing others. The actuality of those others (i.e., the fact that they are real people rather than idealized, imagined subjectivities) condemns them to unfavorable and incriminating comparisons to the idealized, imagined selves. But in my view, despite their empirical corroboration (i.e., that people often understand themselves in such contradistinction to others), such assumptions of identity formation do not have an inescapable ontological status. That is, they do not describe just any or all identity formation; rather, they are applicable to those practical realizations of identity formation that lack reflection, vision, and self-criticality. For things can and should be the other way round. The actual, existing identity/collectivity should be neither understood nor shaped in any qualitative contrast to other similar and actual particular identities/ collectivities (the differentiation from which can adequately occur, in any case, purely on nonqualitative, value-neutral grounds). The actual, existing identity/collectivity should rather be qualitatively contrasted to the ethical image that should guide it (i.e., to the collective self that it could and should become). The ethical, vivid content of a vision is the idealized outsider to which the existing, actual, and particular identity (and its order) should be contrasted and always found wanting. Differentiation is indeed necessary for the existence of any identity, and because of this constant, any particularist sociopolitical formation, and not just the nation-state, would be prone to the same risks and complicities that confront the nation-state. But identity-constitutive differentiation need not be qualitative in empirical terms (i.e., qualitatively contrasting an existing self with an existing other in terms of superiority/inferiority). It need not stem from idealizations of the empirical self in contrast to real, actual, and equally empirical others. Identity-constitutive differentiation can take a qualitative twist when the actual self compares her being with the potential of her becoming, that is, with an ideal self (e.g., of wisdom and goodness) that regulates self-formation the very moment that it proves itself as ever receding. All efforts to begin with the opposite, that is, with an all too convenient differentiation from existing others of supposedly or truly “lower”

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records, inevitably leads to self-absorption and self-indulgence. This does not mean, however, that we can or should refrain from forming opinions about other ways of life and that we would be right in maintaining an uncritical stance toward what happens in the world and how collectivities act. On the contrary, it simply entails that self-critique should enjoy a primacy when (individual or collective) self-formation or self-direction is at stake. Thus, the patriotism that could be cultivated in classrooms should relate to a utopian vision in comparison to which the particular collectivity stretches its imaginative, normative reach and demarcates its scope of perfectibility. It should not be deployed through a self-centered and competitive contradistinction to some kind of existing otherness (recall the references in Chapter 4 about the popular educational worry of some countries about the decline in competitiveness with the Japanese, South Koreans, and Germans). What should unify a group of people is not the glorification of the past, the sanitization of the present, or the presentation of others as inferior but commitment to the advent of a specific futurity, noneschatological but no less inspiring for that.1 Just as in eccentric cosmopolitanism, likewise in eccentric patriotism, the center that has to be kept in check is the self (individual and collective). Then again, this conclusion may invite the following criticism on the part of adherents to some globalist trends. Many libertarians regard the inculcation of patriotism as a risky operation, for it may create subjectivities whose immersion in their community will engender an inability or failure to promote their self-regarding goals. It is noticeable that from the Enlightenment until now, an absolutist treatment of the demands that collectivities place on people has imposed an “either/ or” logic: one is either self-regarding and exploitative of otherness (wherever such exploitation is possible) or so devoted to Samaritan action that her own well-being is totally neglected. Such absolutism was exemplified by the metaphor of the loving saint (Yonah 1999, 382) and provided a philosophical moral alibi: if one cannot be a loving saint, one is almost justified, or naturally expected, to act in a self-centered way. Parenthetically, it is surprising that in an era that glorifies piecemeal politics, abandonment of metanarratives, and commitment to mere approximations of regulative ideals, this false, drastic, and absolutist choice is still quite popular. More to the point, there is no need to aspire

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to model oneself after a loving saint, since it is quite clear that between the loving saint and footloose elites,2 a huge gap offers ample space for modest but necessary ameliorative steps—even if not for the spectacular redirection that the planet needs in order to survive. Postmodern patriots and cosmopolitans are not asked to give up all their personal desires or self-regarding plans in order to undertake remedial action for the sake of their community and for the whole world. It does not take an ascetic self-denial at least to try to minimize the environmental destruction or alleviate the pain one causes or has caused for reasons of expedience, profit, and control. An eccentric existence can still be a happy and beautiful one. Another set of counterarguments would originate from realist (Lu 2000) objections to the cultivation of decentering ideals. C. Lu describes succinctly the realist charge against cosmopolitanism: “Because we live in a broken rather than united world, amongst self-interested rather than altruistic groups, no harmony or reconciliation of universal and particular, public and private, or international and national, interests can be assumed, or perhaps, even attained” (2000, 247). Any demands for the opposite are, at best, merely utopian (and thus doomed to failure) or, at worst, prone to totalitarianism. People lack, supposedly by nature, the amount of altruism required if such ideals are to be approximated at all. My response to these arguments is that the philosophical anthropology on which they rest can be refuted by appeal to nonessentialist accounts of hominization. As I have elaborated on this point elsewhere in chapter-length detail (Papastephanou 2009, ch. 8), here I shall leave it at that. But the argument against cosmopolitanism can take a more individualist twist and go as follows: even if it were not true that we are by nature prone to egotism, it would still be unfair to people to expect from them such a high degree of Other orientedness as a willingness to take upon themselves, say, the recognition of the burden of diachronic and synchronic responsibility to the deprived within or beyond borders. The response to the individualist assumption that such ideals place too high a demand on people needs further elaboration here. To regard a heightened sense of ethical responsibility as unfair on people amounts to holding a specific view of what counts as justice. Much globalist discourse maintains a rather narrow conception of justice. It focuses on distributive justice, theorizes global justice as a

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mere spatial extension of social justice through stretched obligations, and overlooks restorative justice. In this way, two main tendencies are formed: one defends a “patriotic” unqualified priority to local obligations; the other extends obligation globally but, more often than not, as an issue of supererogatory beneficence rather than as an issue of justice. Thus, much globalist discourse turns out to be Eurocentric, because it views redistribution and material aid purely in terms of charity, placing the West in a pragmatically and morally superior position. Strong Western forces or those who can imitate them are, the view goes, pragmatically the only players that can have a noteworthy global role. To meet the challenges of this role, they must uphold the moral image of the benefactor. Though in no way held to be morally responsible for the condition of others, the benefactor is progressive, “cosmopolitan,” and magnanimous enough to perform, even at a global scale, acts of pure Samaritanism. Even Martha Nussbaum’s (2000a) acclaimed defense of the duty of material aid seems to depict it as an act of benevolence and charity rather than as a moral obligation deriving from a restorative justice that is sensitive to actual ethical debt. Because of the narrow view of justice that we saw above, most thinkers of cosmopolitanism avoid the broader term “ethical responsibility” and opt for terms such as “moral duties” and “political obligations.” The nature of obligation acquires in such approaches a variety of palliative contents depending on the theorist. As Andrew Dobson (2006, 167) remarks, it is significant that most such accounts of obligation concern avoidance of harm, cultivation of compassion, empathy, and creation of open communities of discourse. Evidently, the omission of any reference to the moral actor’s being causally implicated in, and thus being causally responsible for, some pathologies that occur elsewhere takes cosmopolitan obligation too quickly out of the strict territory of justice and places it conveniently in the more relaxed realm of charity and good will. This makes common cause with what we have, in previous chapters, seen as a globalist discursive encroachment on the order of agreement at the expense of the order of treatment. Let us unpack the argument of political obligation as it has appeared in much globalist discourse. The main issues surrounding it are, according to Dobson, the scope (who is obliged and to whom), the nature (what we are obliged to do), the source (what triggers it), and its

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limits (“how political obligations ‘trade’ against other obligations and against rights that might ‘trump’ some obligations”) (2006, 166).3 The source is usually taken to be the membership of common humanity, which appears, however, motivationally weak to many since it cannot undo the distance that “makes obligations seem supererogatory rather than strict” (Dobson 2006, 170). In this way, even those theorists who believe that the nature of our cosmopolitan obligation is “to provide economic and social support” unwittingly attenuate it by locating the source of that obligation in “our membership of a common humanity” (Dobson 2006, 169). Drawing extensively on a recent essay by Andrew Linklater connecting the issue of motivation with causal responsibility, Dobson explores the possibility that the people expected to show cosmopolitan concern and assistance to vulnerable groups might be the very people responsible for the condition of vulnerability of those groups. Thus, in Dobson’s recent claims that causal responsibility goes beyond the supererogatory nature of the appeal to membership of common humanity, and in his admission that “reasoning from causal responsibility is largely absent in cosmopolitan theory” (with the exception of Linklater’s most recent work) (2006, 172), I find additional textual support—and from a liberal point of view—for similar criticisms of liberalism that I formulated back in 2002 and leave aside here for reasons of space.4 Dobson considers the following possible objection to the causal responsibility argument for cosmopolitan obligation: perhaps “there is not enough causal responsibility around to reach cosmopolitan levels of universalism” (2006, 173). Yet, instead of exploring the historical axis of human entanglement, Dobson tackles the objection via globalization. He regards globalization as that “which consistently turns ‘Samaritan’ relationships into relationships of justice” (Dobson 2006, 173). Surely, globalization increases considerably the amount of causal responsibility, especially from an ecological perspective. However, it provides a purely synchronic and inadequate response to the above objection. I believe that a better response should also make relevant the dimension of diachronic causal responsibility. And it should presuppose a redefinition of cosmopolitanism toward a conception that involves the aspect of awareness of historical debt.

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To explain the why of my critique of Dobson’s response and to concretize my suggestion, let me discuss one of his examples. Dobson explains the “hands-clean” moral self-image obtained through the reduction of justice to charity as follows. Aid is regarded as the appropriate response to a situation in which others are suffering, in respect of which the donor can help, and which the donor has done nothing to engender. The giving of aid is voluntary. The disposition that drives aid is something like compassion, as in the story of the Good Samaritan. (2006, 173)

He illustrates this point by reference to the money that was “transferred from the British government to the government of Mozambique after the floods of February and March 2000” and “referred to as ‘aid’” (Dobson 2006, 173). Now, why should this money be considered within the structure of justice and not within the structure of aid? Here is how his argument goes: “Justice refers us to giving people their due, in connection with some antecedent action or agreement. The giver and recipient of justice are, therefore, connected in ways that the giver and recipient of aid are not” (Dobson 2006, 174). In other words, justice involves wrongdoers and victims; aid involves compassionate, goodwilled moral agents who rally to a cause. Justice is compelling, while aid is voluntary.5 When one country is implicated in the misfortune of another, the assistance the former provides to the latter can in no way belong to the structure of aid. It belongs to the structure of the political, perhaps even legal, obligation. Thus, to show that the order of justice is more appropriate than that of aid in the Mozambique example, Dobson needs to establish how Britain has some responsibility for the intensity and devastating effects of that particular flood in Mozambique. The causal connection he finds concerns solely the environmental damage and global warming that Britain has, together with other developed countries, caused. He stresses the synchronic causal responsibility that undoes the privileged and self-exculpating positioning of Britain in the place of the benefactor. We may complete and strengthen Dobson’s argument by stressing the diachronic entanglement of British colonialism (via Rhodesia and its support of regressive local forces) and the people of Mozambique

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in the following way. The causal connection of Britain with the flood is loose and rather indirect, but its ethico-political liabilities on grounds of its causal connection with Mozambique’s contemporary situation are stronger in the following sense. The condition in which a country is found (Mozambique in this case) and its capacity to cope with natural disaster are affected by its socio-politico-economic condition. Not all countries are capable of dealing with misfortune effectively—and I assume and hope that few of us would think that the difference in that capacity is simply due to superior and inferior political talents and responsibility of local politicians and citizens. C. R. Beitz’s (1999) work is particularly informative here as it refutes successfully the argument that state poverty usually has local sources, though, much like Dobson’s work, it does so from a synchronic perspective. More broadly, most theorists would accept that a country’s capacity to cope with natural disaster reflects its domestic condition. But the latter has, especially in the case of former colonies, largely, though not exclusively, been shaped by the diachronic repercussions of the imperial past—a fact that, again, most theorists tend to forget. In the example we are using, the countermovements in Mozambique (McClintock 1994, 259) in colonial and early postcolonial times had played an important role in the future of the country, affecting its political capacity to deal with eventualities. And the colonial exploitation of its resources had, to an important degree, affected its future financial capacity. Granted, a possible objection here concerns the years that have passed since the early-twentieth-century colonialism and involves the expectation that most countries should, by now, be the sole authors of their historical course from their liberation onward. Hence, ideally, they ought to be exclusively responsible for their capacity to deal with eventualities. But this objection forgets the peculiar nature of colonialism, that is, the fact that, in its effort to cling to power and the possessed lands, colonialism tended to produce dead ends or such long-lasting, intricate, and cumbersome problems that most subaltern populations are still burdened with them, trapped in a prolonged past and unable to move on. The white Rhodesian colonial sponsoring of destructive countermovements in Mozambique, resulting in the displacement of 2 million people and the loss of many lives (McClintock

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1994, 259), offers ample space for considering the enlarged scope of causal responsibility. The dialogical space thus created presupposes a very good knowledge of localized history and politics and takes the whole issue beyond the narrow and vague synchronic claim that Britain owes justice to Mozambique just because Britain is one of the many countries implicated in the environmental damage that caused the flood. However, this dialogical space has remained blocked in most discursive dealings with global material aid or redistribution of wealth.6 One possible reason why the issue of restorative justice along the temporal axis has not arisen within some approaches or is not radical enough in others7 is, I believe, the fear that preoccupation with the historical dimension of cross-cultural encounters and with the entanglement of nations is inescapably self-serving and nationalist. Delving into the past has been blamed, and most times rightly so, for the kind of excessive memory and resentment against national Others that ultimately leads to nationalism and fanaticism. The exaggerated fear of this, however, causes a narrow limitation of the study of human encounter to a synchronic dimension. The limited discourse thus produced loses sight of unresolved problems, historical injustices still informing political conflicts, apologies that were never made, and failures to heighten consciousness of ethical responsibility and to make practical amends for older responsibilities. In this way, cultural encounters are viewed in a very superficial way, as an exchange of lifestyles and knowhow. Likewise, global ethico-political obligation is viewed moralistically with little or no attention to defense mechanisms (e.g., rationalization), power operations, and injustices that block the cosmopolitan spirit of truly restorative justice. The omission of the diachronic dimension of cosmopolitan ethico-political responsibility may also come from the conviction that the past concerns only those who lived in it and that responsibility dies with the moral agent. Surely, contemporary generations are not accountable for the mistakes or crimes of past generations, even if those were performed in their name. However, issues of justice can emerge not only out of one’s direct liability but also out of the continuity of the effects of past handlings. Contemporary generations still profit from past exploitations of others, and many current asymmetries in wealth and

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power can be explained as prolonged outcomes of historical injustices. And, as argued above, in the Third World, for instance, many conflicts, handicaps to development, and what in the West is perceived as backwardness could be attributed, in good part, to old colonial strategies of stirring animosity and producing negative or confusing self-images, as well as to the sheer draining of the resources of the colonized. Liberal political thought conveniently silences all this when it ponders what is owed to foreigners. This does not mean that the formerly colonized are excluded as agents and viewed as incapable of bearing responsibility. Their confrontational words against the hegemonic imperial text had not always been a sign of true patriotism. Often (though not always or not exclusively) due to their responsibility, the course that their affairs took failed to compose the alternative text that acts of resistance could have made possible. But this fact has quite frequently functioned as a source of self-exoneration of Western agency and as an excuse for not bothering to acquire knowledge about how one’s collectivity might be implicated in the ongoing misfortune of another. To know the Other better presupposes a deep and thorough knowledge of your own community so that no entanglement with otherness can escape your attention and thus no pending debt be overlooked. But knowledge on its own cannot guarantee the most accurate ethico-political interpretation of the cosmopolitan possibilities that such knowledge opens. J. Rawls’s acknowledgment, for instance, that “the United States overturned the democracies of Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and some would add, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua” (1999, 543) displays an admirable awareness of the complex political entanglement of the United States with other nations. Yet somehow that admission did not produce the kind of discourse (even among his followers) that would explore the pending ethical debt and obligations to those countries. If one fails to follow the thread of an admitted historical responsibility through to its deepest implications, one gives the impression that, deep down, she treats those specific, past collective “interventions” lightly as capricious attitudes rather than as the crimes against humanity that they truly were. Knowledge of this kind of past might guarantee that the one who parades that knowledge will be safely classified into the category of the progressive and leftist and enjoy the academic praise, the psychic discharge, and the moral

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self-image that such classification allows. This has become alarmingly frequent and typical within contemporary globalist discourse. Now, if nationalism is defined as selective reenactment of the nation’s past, then being patriotic and not nationalist means knowing your collectivity’s past in its entanglement with otherness and from the point of view of that otherness too. But more, it means going beyond mere cognitive awareness and realizing the cost and consequences of such entanglement for that particular otherness. In this way, the nonnationalist patriotic cosmopolitan might be the one who recovers as fully as possible the past of her own collectivity, obtaining awareness not only of its achievements but also of its dark moments. And even more, such a patriotic cosmopolitan might be the one who goes a step further and seriously considers what such awareness entails in practical ethico-political terms. Against much contemporary globalist discourse that treats the simplistic assumption “that we have only minimal samaritan responsibilities to foreigners but have much more robust obligations to assist compatriots” (Wellman 2000, 544) as a patriotic position, a deeper kind of commitment to a collectivity can be defended. It is the one that is not only compatible with but conducive to the wisdom and goodness that cosmopolitanism requires us to strive for. A more complete knowledge of one’s own past and present reveals the entanglement of one’s community with others and the debt that entanglement may have generated for both sides, paving the way to an external patriotism that truly serves cosmopolitan sensitivity. Thus, more patriotism of this kind means better preconditions for enacted cosmopolitanism; for it serves not what one’s country has always been but what one’s country could become and what an ideal role performed from an ethically acceptable place in world affairs should be like.8

Justice To avoid nationalism and a conscious or unconscious slippage to an uncritical communitarian ethos or to a narrow and overprotective entrenchment of what lies inside a community against osmosis with otherness, the internal and external patriotism that is not inimical to eccentric cosmopolitanism must be authorized by justice. Justice

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should function as a corrective or a touchstone that raises the border between the basic dimensions of patriotism and their undesirable flip sides. Why a theory of justice—even up to a theory of just war (Orend 2000)—would be indispensable to the external dimension of patriotism is evident. The line separating nationalist absolutization of interest, imperialist encroachment, and xenophobic isolationism, on the one hand, and rightful defense of one’s particularity against external threat or exploitation, on the other, is quite fuzzy. Yet, a very important problem that arises after three chapters reiterating the claim that cosmopolitanism and patriotism can coexist, authorized by justice, concerns the theorization of justice itself. Unrelenting efforts to define justice have resulted in a complex variety of conceptions, most of which conflict with one another. As there is no unifying metadiscourse of justice that would settle the issue by pointing to the proper account, placing cosmopolitanism and patriotism side by side with justice requires some elaboration of the latter’s meaning. This is at least one more book in itself; therefore, here I shall only sketch in a skeletal way what I mean by justice. The account of justice that this book presupposes is comprehensive yet formal and comprises deliberative, distributive, and restorative aspects. From the perspective of political space, the comprehensive justice that I have in mind concerns relations of individuals and collectivities. Such relations raise various questions. If we follow Linklater on this, we may group them into questions of transnational justice, that is, justice between individuals within world society (e.g., injury caused by societies or transnational corporations), and questions of international justice, that is, justice between societies within the system of states (Linklater 1999, 474). Ethico-political relations and their questions can be approached through some fundamental aspects of justice. In my view, such relations and questions can be approached at the level of agreement, and in that case, the relevant aspect of justice is the deliberative. Deliberative justice encompasses ethical, political, and legal concerns without taking any viewpoints as nonnegotiable and as granted prior to dialogue. It does have some general orientations, nevertheless. A deliberative notion of justice should focus critically on ethical expectations, harken to the Other, and thematize those asymmetries in existential position that harm the cosmopolitan spirit. Within this framework, dialogue on

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issues of justice should be opinion and will formative, that is, it should have a reforming effect on people, thus going beyond negotiation and mere compromise (Habermas 1992). But deliberative justice is incomplete when not followed by a fuller sense of praxis. The domain of praxis concerns also the level of treatment and not just that of deliberation and agreement. (Re)distributive and restorative forms of justice operate at the level of treatment and provide the touchstone for judging the practical intent and sincerity of deliberation—the very moment that (re)distributive and restorative forms of justice are themselves subjects of deliberation. Hence, a comprehensive theory of justice aspires to do justice to the complex dialectic of praxis as both ethico-political dialogue and active measures. As mentioned above, a more detailed discussion of the presupposed notion of justice cannot take place here. However, I must offer due response to two sets of arguments that speak against the coupling of patriotism and cosmopolitanism with justice. One concerns arguments against the dialogical accommodation of questions about how others have historically been treated and what ethical debts this treatment has created. The idea is that historical debt cannot burden new generations since different individuals are not responsible for the deeds of their ancestors. As already stated, this is true in general—except in cases of continuous profit. In such cases, there is a blatant contradiction between the demand to put the past to rest (usually raised by the powerful) and the perpetuation of the effects of the wrongful act (usually still profit bearing for the powerful) (Papastephanou 2003). Related to the qualification about continuous profit is a second set of arguments against the recuperation of the historical dimension in questions of international justice. It concerns the criteriology required for discussing such issues and the judging agent of past or present debts: would the various judging agents (those involved in such a debate) ever reach consensus? A further difficulty emanates from the possibility that one may find the role of the victim very appealing and convenient for putting forward incessant claims for compensation and doing away with one’s responsibilities and duties to one’s own self. A variation of this is a case where one “arrests time” and absolutizes the moment of his or her victimization, thus silencing previous or later wrongs on his or her part. Most frequently, people alternate in the role of victim and

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wrongdoer—a fact that those who place themselves in the position of the permanent victim tend to forget. Exploitation of the Other’s guilty feelings or self-indulgence in them is a real and serious danger of the coupling of collective political ideals with justice. Finally, how far back in time would this process of self-critique and undertaking of responsibility for harmful deeds go? And if people start raising claims for reparations, will this not stir more animosity and resentment on both conflicting sides? A possible response to such difficulties might be to paraphrase John Dewey’s famous dictum about more democracy being the remedy for the problems of democracy. The problems that crop up when we reflect on justice may be met by more reflection on justice on the part of all those involved in such contemplation. Wisdom and goodness are never givens; as ideals, they are ever receding, and one cannot find comfort and relief in the assumption that one has already thought or acted enough in directions of perfectibility. Another potential line of response is to discern voices (who raises demands and on what grounds) and associate them with a different kind of self-reflection each time. The significance of the voice is evident in the distinction between the perspective of the giver and that of the recipient of aid that we examined above. The rehabilitation of the historical dimension is a topic of consideration suggested first and foremost for the one who is capable of providing material help (and ponders it) in a certain circumstance to a suffering Other. To decide whether her act is one of duty or supererogation, the subject needs to know the history of her entanglement with this concrete Other and judge the effects of that entanglement. In Lilian Alweiss’s words, “There are instances in which the situatedness, or to use the Heideggerian term the ‘facticity,’ of the voice counts” (2003, 309). Hence, the historical dimension of justice should primarily be the “helper’s” concern. There can be the voice of the victim, to which different considerations and claims correspond than those corresponding to the wrongdoer’s reflection. But the distinction of the victim and the wrongdoer should not be treated as rigid and absolute, just as the voice of each cannot be raised in an unqualified or permanent way. There is no question of a separation of “good” and “bad” peoples—a separation that would justify the position of one collectivity in the place of the peren-

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nial victim always to be assisted by the guilty party. As Alweiss writes, “One is not morally superior to the other, rather the voices embody a history of inequality and injustice which cannot be ignored” (2003, 311). Collective responsibility expresses only “the realization that we share a common world that includes both those implicated in the wrongdoing and those wronged” (Alweiss 2003, 311); it does not speak for an essentialist segregation of people into “goodies and baddies.” As to how far back one may go in history, it is true that certain past crimes bear no obvious consequence to current affairs, and to theorize their difference from historical debts, we could adapt Alweiss’s discussion of shame and guilt. Members of a particular sociopolitical or national group can feel only shame for what human beings do, not guilt for a wrong that, even if committed in their name (or by those they identify as their ancestors), no longer has an impact. Guilt in such a case would be not only unjustified but also moralistically selfindulgent. Here we can only raise the issue of remembrance (Alweiss 2003, 313)—an edifying remembrance, as I see it—doing justice to the need to acknowledge the harm caused and to know what to avoid doing in future. The significance of this for patriotic cosmopolitans is immense because it has a direct relation to the way they depict their communities, and it wards off the nationalist idolization of one’s past. But when it comes to a patriotic cosmopolitan treatment of redistributive matters, and when shame, remembrance, or charity does not apply, wherever current profit derives from past wrongs or failures to act, guilt is the most appropriate feeling and the most relevant motivating force for resolving the matter justly. Here, deliberative justice is once again the key for deciding on such issues, but the ultimate goal is restorative justice. Overall, if a commitment to justice—simultaneously patriotic and cosmopolitan—could be cultivated, then the motivation to use the challenge of history in an expedient manner would be overcome or kept at bay.

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Notes 1. I believe that this conception of patriotic identity is quite close to what Sigal Ben-Porath suggests for teaching patriotic citizenship as shared fate, despite the fact that her approach differs from mine in many other respects (chief among them in that she somewhat dissociates this teaching from identity [2006, 42, 48] and in that I maintain a positive and constitutive [for identity] account of utopia whereas Ben-Porath uses the term negatively [e.g., ibid., 6]). 2. I refer here to academics, politicians, managers, and all others whose liability ranges—depending on the case—from environmental destruction down to encouragement of competitiveness and of exploitation or pacification for the sake of profit (such liabilities vary from causing such phenomena to letting them happen or failing to take deterring measures or to problematize and protest against them). 3. The usual handling of the limits of obligation is a good example of the fact that borders are internal. When limitless and unconditional obligation, and not just geographical mobility, is at stake, all sorts of new rationalizations of limited responsibility are mobilized. 4. For more, see Papastephanou (2002b). 5. The example of colonialism in the seventh chapter is relevant here too. If one realizes the scope and effects of the colonial radicalization of the rationale for border crossing, one will also realize that the consideration of issues of justice, and not only of Samaritan conduct, is cosmopolitically imperative: the way in which borders had been crossed effected a proximity and an acquaintance of otherness that consistently turns the apparently supererogatory into duty. 6. All the cosmopolitan sources of the broadly liberal persuasion that I have checked treat economic unevenness synchronically as a challenge posed by the inequalities and other detrimental side effects of globalization (see, for instance, Held 2003, 468; Beck 2004, 149–150). Even if it is not total (given the limits of research), this reluctance to consider diachrony is surely a sign that the informative significance of the historical dimension of this issue is underrated—to say the least. 7. For instance, despite Beitz’s clear commitment to a redistributive sense of international justice as the most appropriate moral response to synchronic exploitation or intervention in non-Western lifeworlds, his association of the welfare state with demands for global aid (1999, 525–527) is inadequate. It is so because of the connotations of charity or condescending care implied in the examples he uses (Beitz 1999, 526) and because of the total overlooking (at least in that particular text) of the effects of diachronic entanglement as causes of poverty and thus as a point worthy, at least, of discussion. 8. Even from a less decentered perspective, one serves one’s country better in this way because she creates the conditions for it to inspire global respect and love, not terror and hatred.

Chapter Eleven

Reflections on an AllEncompassing Conception of Cosmopolitanism I have argued that the order of ethical treatment and its

extension in space and time have been overlooked in current globalist discourse. This has blocked the theorization and possibility of a more praxis-oriented, eccentric qua self-critical and disinterested cosmopolitanism. It has thus narrowed the conceptual scope of cosmopolitanism down to pragmatic and culturalist aspects. There has also been a tendency to approach cosmopolitanism in a negative boundary-discursive, semantic way, that is, as a one-dimensional notion whose main semantic content excludes all other possible and more complex meanings. The cosmopolitan doctrines that have thus been produced could be termed “exclusivist” and “competitionist,” as they appear to have impermeable boundaries and to compete with one another in their efforts to cover the conceptual ground of the term. For example, for many contemporary political philosophers, scientists, and international relations theorists, cosmopolitanism signifies a set of principles, institutions, and measures for globally promoting peace, democracy, and fairness to persons (Pogge 1992; Beitz 1999; O’Neill 2000; Archibugi 2003; Held 2003). For many cultural critics, social anthropologists, and philosophers or sociologists—proponents of a cultural interpretation of the term—cosmopolitanism denotes a transcendence of state borders through an encounter with other ways of life and values (Waldron 2000; Beck 2004; Rumford 2006). And for philosophers and thinkers with a Stoic background, cosmopolitanism   219

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means an emotional involvement and ethical investment in the interests of humanity (Cohen and Nussbaum 1996; Nussbaum 2000b). The force with which the narrowing of the meaning of cosmopolitanism into a single idea has been asserted creates the impression that cosmopolitanism can be approached through a set of various “either/or” oppositions and not as a more comprehensive and multidimensional, stereoscopic notion. That being said, a narrow and focused version of cosmopolitanism can be valuable for methodological-analytic reasons. But it can serve methodological purposes so long as it does not aspire to exhaust the content of the term to the exclusion of other, necessary dimensions and at the high price of overlooking the complex relation of such dimensions. However, most of the narrow approaches are surreptitiously overarching in aspiring to cover the entire conceptual scope of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, when it comes to different persuasions, we perceive next to no notice or engagement. Even when many theorists of cosmopolitanism acknowledge the legitimate existence of different approaches, they tend to engage in dialogue only with the proponents and opponents of their own persuasion. For instance, most followers of Jacques Derrida’s (2001) cosmopolitanism hardly borrow from work conducted outside the deconstructive tradition or French Continental philosophy. Also, theorists known as cosmopolitan egalitarian liberalists neglect projects that belong to the French Continental tradition or, when they encounter them, dismiss them as irrelevant to their own efforts. And many employ sources that derive almost exclusively from Northwestern theorists or Ivy League institutions, and they appear negligent of cosmopolitan ideas or practices in non-Occidental thought and history (e.g., those of Chinese thought) or of discussions of cosmopolitanism within more peripheral institutions outside the Northwestern canon. Hence, in a very noncosmopolitan spirit, the focused and narrow discourse on cosmopolitanism often becomes insiders’ reasoning. I have suggested, throughout this book, that cosmopolitanism can and should be redefined in less exclusivist and more encompassing terms. Before moving to such an attempt, let us clarify a point about the redefinition as such. The suggestion of a redefinition of cosmopolitan-

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ism invites an initial clarification about whether we should revise or abandon the doctrine of cosmopolitanism. In other words, should we change the dominant conception of cosmopolitanism, or should we jettison the concept of cosmopolitanism altogether and endorse one that would support a more desirable doctrine? Consider, for instance, utilitarianism and the objection that its commitment to maximizing happiness entails that it justifies rights violations. Suppose one wished to respond to this objection by redefining utilitarianism in such a way that it no longer involved maximization of utility. Surely, the appropriate criticism of such a move is that it has simply avoided the objection by abandoning a key tenet of utilitarianism. This is unacceptable and implausible because, if a key tenet of a concept is given up, the term is hijacked and made to signify something completely different, while still being presented as a reformulation of the old concept. It is as if someone were to defend libertarianism against the charge that it circumscribes the freedom of the poor by defining libertarianism as the doctrine that promotes the idea that the needs of the poor should be met.1 Is it, then, that cosmopolitanism could take just any content and that there are no restrictions on possible reformulations to the point that we end up with just a hijacking of the term? The answer is no. First of all, the aim of the reformulation of cosmopolitanism is not polemical; the conceptual work that I am suggesting does not attempt to meet opponents’ objections by creating a shifting target. The aim is to show that we may critique the various historical conceptions of cosmopolitanism and reconstruct the kind of conception that does more justice to the possibilities of an ideal of a cosmou politis. Such a conception frees the concept of cosmopolitanism from those variations of modern cosmopolitanism that often become essentialized even within a broadly postmodern literature—as we saw in Chapter 8 in the discussion of Sharon Todd’s conception of cosmopolitanism. The attempted changes in the formulation of cosmopolitanism do not constitute an abandonment of key tenets of cosmopolitanism but rather revisions, reinterpretations, and additions of other semantic dimensions and qualifications. Of course, the issue is, what counts as a key tenet, and who decides this? For example, developmentalism and toxic universalism have arguably been constitutive of a modern,

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dominant conception of cosmopolitanism. Are they also key tenets of the concept of cosmopolitanism? Further, have there been no conceptions of cosmopolitanism, other than the hegemonic modern, that do not depend on developmentalism and toxic universalism? To answer these questions with an eye to all the above issues, we need a formal, minimalist definition of cosmopolitanism. A formal, minimalist definition of cosmopolitanism as thoughtful commitment to peace, freedom, and good for all individuals suffices to make the ideal distinctive and recognizable. Still, that individuals are the sole recipients of such commitment betrays that this definition is more suitable to modern worldviews and that, when thus defined, cosmopolitanism excludes whatever meanings go beyond modern anthropocentrism and individualism.2 To avoid these conditions and their uncosmopolitan exclusivist effects, we may replace “good for all individuals” with the phrase “good for all biota, human beings, and nonsentient reality (e.g., items of cultural legacy from all over the world).” The removal of the obstacle of individualism would also assist the task of eliciting from this definition an eccentric conception of cosmopolitanism. Then we could examine whether the definition as such (not yet in any of its specific interpretations and conceptual concretizations) involves developmentalism and toxic universalism as key tenets (in the same manner in which utilitarianism involves the maximization of utility as a key tenet). I believe that it does not, and it rests with opponents to show the opposite. Minimalist definitions are minimally informative about the limits to polysemy that a shared understanding (or approximation) of a notion requires. In simpler words, the above definition does not tell us what counts as peace or freedom or good. Precisely because of this, definitions as efforts to pin down concepts are broad enough to cover diverse conceptions that interpret the concept (and its key words/ tenets), sustain theory-building ventures, and produce principles. Further, as Onora O’Neill remarks, “principles are intrinsically indeterminate and can be institutionalized in many distinct ways” (2000, 46)—which makes the practical pursuit of an ideal and the critique of that pursuit a very complex operation. Hence, when we normally refer to (re)formulations of a doctrine or ideal, we imply (and judge) more elaborated and “fleshy” constructions and not just simple

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(re)definitions. By implication, the extent of revision that existing cosmopolitan discourse has to undergo depends on the plausibility of various distinctive, full-fledged, and detailed conceptions of it. This also explains why Chapter 8 asserts that the revision and reformulation attempted in this book prepares the ground for a new conception of cosmopolitanism and does not succumb to the illusion of a “last-word” discussion of the concept of cosmopolitanism. The objection to reformulating cosmopolitanism may come down to whether this re-vision means abandoning the original doctrine or reinterpreting the possibilities that a concept opens up. Prior to clarifying my position on this dilemma, let me problematize the “original” in the name of which the objection indirectly speaks. What is the original doctrine that should not be abandoned? Often it is the most resilient and dominant, rather than the most convincing or conceptually appropriate, version of the doctrine. More to our point of concern: on what grounds should the modern version that leaves out the ideal of wisdom and goodness and clings to mobility and adaptability (border crossing and living anywhere) be elevated to the status of the original doctrine and thus immune to any effort to shift the various given emphases? Or why should it be preferred as a candidate for what cosmopolitanism might be over the other modern version, that of legal and political cosmopolitanism of, say, a Kantian type? Even at a more empirical-historical level, cosmopolitanism has never been the exclusive prerogative of a homogeneous school of thought. Various cosmopolitanisms are not mere kinds of cosmopolitanism; they are rather different conceptions of cosmopolitanism that can and should be subjected to scrutiny as to their semantic contents and not just as to their applicability, popularity, and the like. Conversely, various kinds of cosmopolitanism presuppose or imply different corresponding conceptions of cosmopolitanism. All in all, to adapt David Hansen’s words to the aim of this book, the point has not been to treat the plurality of approaches to cosmopolitanism as “cacophony or conceptual confusion.” The point is, however, to treat them as in need of “serious interest” and of engagement for “illuminating significant aspects” of cosmopolitanism (Hansen 2010, 152). In addition, the book aims to unveil the risk of exclusivism that lurks when such plurality is composed of various approaches as isolated and essentialized islets. Therefore, the

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response to the above dilemma is the modification of its stakes. The revision means critiquing whatever doctrine claims the status of the original and draws authority from such a claim and reinterpreting the possibilities that a concept opens up in a constructive dialogue with various conceptions regardless of the socioepistemic status they enjoy (be it original, hegemonic, or marginal). The above constitute some of the reasons why I would suggest a reformulation of cosmopolitanism as an all-encompassing ideal, all encompassing in the sense of comprising the efforts of as many persuasions as possible, manifested in the different emphases on different aspects of cosmopolitanism. A disclaimer is needed here: the reconstruction of cosmopolitanism that places side by side various aspects that have so far been theoretically disconnected should not be syncretic and eclectic. It presupposes conditions of compatibility and plausibility. To illustrate how such preconditions should be understood, let us imagine a persuasion that accommodates developmentalism in its conception of cosmopolitanism. Though it should not be excluded from discourse and study, it is nevertheless incompatible with nondevelopmentalist conceptions. Inclusion in research and dialogue does not entail an automatic, unqualified, or undeserved concession of the status of conceptual belonging. The same holds in the case of emphases or priorities: those can be granted only by means of compelling argument. For instance, a conception that overrelies on international law to the exclusion of other dimensions is too narrow to cover the whole ground of cosmopolitanism demarcated by the phrase “thoughtful commitment” that is so central within the above definition. Likewise, the kind of legal-political version that concerns itself with the materialization of cosmopolitanism through world government fails to single out what in cosmopolitanism makes it distinctive from rival expansionist doctrines that tend toward assimilation and concentration of political power. Worse, if understood exclusively as pragmatic annihilation of time and space barriers, cosmopolitanism would lack the normative force and critical edge necessary to distinguish itself from existing or future globalizing or expansionist practices. An all-encompassing cosmopolitanism can be a stereoscopic notion that engulfs all those dimensions (yet with varying emphases) that protect it, through their interplay, from sliding down into undesirable doubles.

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Cosmopolitanism should be understood as an ideal that encompasses love and care for the whole world, responsibility and accountability for individual and collective human impact on human and nonhuman existence, sensitivity and responsiveness to historical debts pending among peoples and cultures, epistemic and existential openness to cultural alterity, and economic/practical initiatives and measures for world survival and redirection. Consequently, an all-encompassing cosmopolitanism must comprise the ethico-political3 significance of affective, ethical, moral, legal, historical, political, economic, cognitive, cultural, and pragmatic aspects. Each of these aspects intersects with the others and functions in directive and corrective ways. Ethico-political is an umbrella term here that concerns issues of justice and redemptive vision, which are crucial to a truly eccentric cosmopolitanism (that is, a cosmopolitanism of a decentered self). Before proceeding further, let us first see how the above may relate with other, similar differentiations. Some theorists have discerned aspects or types of cosmopolitanism, especially with an eye to the history of the term. Perhaps the most popular in the relevant literature is Gerard Delanty’s (2006, 28ff.) differentiation of three types of cosmopolitanism—moral, political, and cultural—that have emerged at various times historically. The approach above should not be misunderstood as supposedly just a more detailed reproduction of Delanty’s differentiation. For it differs from Delanty’s on the following (and, I believe, important) points: (1) it disentangles aspects of cosmopolitanism from a philosophical-conceptual perspective and not from a sociohistorical perspective (as Delanty’s approach does) on whether and how cosmopolitanism has indeed emerged as a multifaceted notion. In this way, (2) it is more nuanced because it sheds light on those aspects of cosmopolitanism (e.g., economic, emotive, historical) that may not yet have practically enjoyed the status of “a type of ” cosmopolitanism, that is, of an independently studied and theorized category. Finally, (3) Delanty unravels his differentiation of types of cosmopolitanism around the axis of “weak and strong forms,” whereas, as I have already indicated in previous chapters and will spell out more clearly below, the differentiation I am introducing revolves around the axis of monology and intersubjectivity.

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Let us make a detour in order to unpack this last point and explain its importance. Delanty differentiates between major strands of cosmopolitanism on grounds of their universalism. The moral version of cosmopolitanism is segregated from the other versions “due to the strong emphasis in it on the universalism of the cosmopolitan ethic” (Delanty 2006, 28). Moral universalism “suffers from a major drawback in so far as it lacks a nuanced sociological dimension and assumes a too strong universalistic sense of universal humanity. It has been criticized for failing to see cosmopolitanism as ‘rooted’ and not necessarily universalistic” (Delanty 2006, 28). Conversely, to Delanty, cultural cosmopolitanism offers a less dualistic view of the relation between the particular and the universal, while political cosmopolitanism “suggests an alternative to the individualism that underlies moral conceptions of cosmopolitanism” (2006, 29). Political cosmopolitanism relates to citizenship and democracy and boils down to strong and weak versions too. In the strong version of political cosmopolitanism, such as those of Immanuel Kant, David Held, D. Archibugi, and others along the postKantian lineage, the issue is a world polity, a “cosmopolitan world order of republic states,” and the typical feature is the “firm commitment to universalism” (Delanty 2006, 29). In a weaker version of political cosmopolitanism, there emerges “a cosmopolitan concept of citizenship, which varies from being a modification of the traditional understanding of citizenship in liberal political theory to an emphasis on global citizenship and post-national kinds of membership” (2006, 30). What I find problematic in this emphatic conjunction of cosmopolitanism and the particular-versus-universal binarism, especially when it is hastily transferred from the sociological to the philosophical-conceptual level, is the dependence that it establishes between cosmopolitanism as an ideal and the justification that various eras provided for holding such an ideal. Cosmopolitanism as an ideal has a suggestive-normative character, one that could be termed “protreptic” as it urges us to specific ways of thinking about and acting within the whole world in virtue of an ethical ideality. It is true that various eras confronted the theoretical challenge to ground this character in a specific description of humanity and the self. In simpler words, many thinkers answered the question, why think and act cosmopolitically? by recourse to the idea of a common human nature.

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If we confine our study to this descriptive-justificatory level, we may indeed endorse the connection of moral cosmopolitanism with the individual “whose loyalty is to the universal human community” (Delanty 2006, 28). But in this way we become bogged down in the specific universalist justification that an era has found for cosmopolitan normativity—given its favorite description of selfhood and humanity —and that has served as a rationalization for expansionism and profit. We fail to see, then, that the suggestive-normative character of moral cosmopolitanism can be supported by new justifications and new descriptions of subjectivity, humanity, and cosmos—new in being contemporary and aware of the dangers of developmentalism and toxic universalism and not new in the sense of being disengaged from past times and breaking with spatial rootedness. We also fail to see that moral cosmopolitanism at a protreptic level is far less individualistic than, say, cultural cosmopolitanism. For moral cosmopolitanism—even when grounded in faulty and expendable descriptive-justificatory accounts—is relational in urging people to reflect on their entanglement with others and with the world. This intersubjective element is not so explicit in cultural cosmopolitanism, whose protreptic character is rather monological and humanist in urging the individual to enrich her life, reform herself, and enjoy other cultures in ways that may or may not directly affect other people, cultures, or nature. Hence, the differentiations I propose above and the varying emphases on some of them that will follow have not been decided on grounds of degrees of universalism. They revolve around the monological and intersubjective (relational) axes because those help us raise more radical demands on selfhood at the protreptic level and pressure us to direct our descriptivejustificatory efforts to as yet unexplored or undertheorized accounts of the subject, humanity, and cosmos. Having finished the detour, let us now go back to the aspects of cosmopolitanism that give it its stereoscopic and encompassing quality. The aspect of love and care for the whole world comprises the good will and positive dispositions toward cosmopolitan action that are necessary if people are to have the appropriate motivation and determination to act cosmopolitically. I have already indicated that love and care have typically been illustrated through familial metaphors and have commented upon the problems this entails. Such notions of

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the affective cosmopolitan aspect should be tackled in deeper, more cautious, and more detailed expositions that are beyond the scope of this book. But the affective also involves feelings of guilt and shame that are crucial for a cosmopolitan worldview and are better activated and cosmopolitically operative when they do not come up only from synchronic but also from diachronic considerations. Hence, the historical aspect of cosmopolitanism, referring to the diachronic entanglement of cultures, regions, and nations and to the effects on nature, enters the picture. It reveals pending debts created by past exploitation, requirements for a settlement of damages, and a varying relevance of amnesty and amnesia as decisive factors in conflict resolution, distributive duties, and institutional world measures. Unfortunately, issues related to this aspect have been the most neglected in the hegemonic cosmopolitan discourse and are in need of recuperation—this is the main reason why the suggested reformulation of cosmopolitanism in this chapter had to be preceded by a chapter precisely on such issues of diachrony and justice. The political aspect is more fashionable and influential in contemporary discourse, often to the point of supposedly exhausting the notion of cosmopolitanism, especially within the liberal tradition. Usually, the political appears as the aspect that concerns contemporary global order/ governance and aspires to remedy its democratic deficit by suggesting “the thorough reform of existing institutions as well as the creation of new ones” (Held and Koenig-Archibugi 2004, 131). In much philosophy of education too, the political aspect of cosmopolitanism is viewed as focusing on “institutions, policies, laws, and negotiations that transcend national jurisdictions and that are intended to protect human rights and ways of life” (Hansen et al. 2009, 588; also Hansen 2010, 153). Such accounts of the political overlook the most fundamental question of the polis, that is, the one about the vision that should guide its future and its redirection as an object of debate that should engage all citizens and as an ideal to be practically approximated. Alternatively, they reduce it to a protective sense of legality. However, a different, broader conception of the political4 can be followed, one that has to do with the ideal polis—not in the sense of governance but, prior though related to it, in the sense of a vision of how we would wish the world to be. I only indicate rather than argue out this point here because I have already

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dealt with it (and with the charge of utopianism that typically accompanies it in liberal discourse) elsewhere (Papastephanou 2009, 26). Within the framework that I am employing, the standard understanding of the political has more affinities with what can be seen as a legal aspect of cosmopolitanism. Following T. Pogge, we may use the term “legal” to refer to “a concrete political ideal of a global order under which all persons have equivalent legal rights and duties” (1992, 49). Surely, the political and legal aspects are closely connected. Cosmopolitan right should reflect a political vision; yet it can in no way be considered conceptually identical with it. Rather, their relation should be one of pattern (political) and realization (legal). Nevertheless, they are often indistinguishable in many cosmopolitan liberalist accounts whose manifest legal emphasis often touches upon issues of forms of governance (e.g., a universal republic or a Kantian-like confederation of states). Many cosmopolitan liberals elaborate on the aspect of politics and/or legality but presuppose the moral (O’Neill, Pogge) or the ethical (Linklater, Held)5 because, for them, and rightly so, a realpolitik or mere modus vivendi regulation of world affairs is ruled out from the start. Let us then explain the meaning that the moral and ethical aspects of cosmopolitanism take in this book. Moral inquiry can be summarized “as the study of the subject’s universal duties and rights, plus the validity of intersubjective social norms” (Jones 2003, 51). The moral agents within this frame vary from individuals and collectivities to institutional schemes (interactional and institutional cosmopolitanism, in Pogge’s [1992, 50] parlance). Now, what I see as ethical (contra Held’s6 use) invites more discussion, as it differs from the liberal notion of the moral enough to constitute a distinct aspect. Action should not be theorized solely in terms of affirmation or negation within the scope of morality and its law; it should also be “seen as a site of human engagement and self-creation” (Jones 2003, 69). If this is valid, the moral aspect within cosmopolitanism requires as a complementary force the realm of judgment that goes beyond morality’s scope of maxim-determined action. Yet, this account of the ethical seems vague without some distinctions within it that add nuance as well as precision. Within the ethical, I place the sphere of inquiry into the virtuous character and self-creation

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(from the Stoics and Nietzsche down to Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari)—this dimension coincides in many respects, I believe, with Hansen’s (2008b) educational cosmopolitanism7; the sphere of phronesis and the ideal of the good life (neo-Aristotelianism and Gadamer); ethics as unconditional and infinite responsibility to otherness (Levinas); and the applied ethics that shifts our attention from the humanist-liberal tackling of ethical existence to less human-centered domains of action. Modes of existence in their relation to how we answer “metaphysical questions of the good,” as they are usually called, intersect with morality as defined above. But they have their own legitimate province in addressing the surplus of cosmopolitan ideality that transcends human rights discourse and its list of principles or duties. Ethics “counters moral tendencies towards a public or private fascination for processes of judgment and punishment” (Jones 2003, 60) and enlarges the scope of cosmopolitan responsibility beyond direct subjective accountability. Nevertheless, moral inquiry is crucial for preventing the selfcenteredness into which the ethical may slide within discourses about a beautiful existence and for avoiding, by means of its formalism, the risks of ossified metaphysics that lurk in determinations of the good. Thus, the moral and the ethical can be made to operate not as opposites but as mutual correctives. Most cosmopolitan liberalists avoid associating cosmopolitanism with the ethical for the sake of the moral. They do so in their belief that the ethical emphasis on the good life rests on metaphysics rather than politics and entails risks of ethnocentric privileging of one life-form over the other.8 The moral sphere with its thrust on duties, clear-cut principles, and universal norms seems to them more appropriate for finding politically “safer” paths to global equal treatment of persons. They overlook, however, among other things, that such indifference to issues of the good life emanates in fact from the rationale that people must be left free to choose among conflicting interpretations of the good in the marketplace of ideas and cultures. But the very metaphor of cultural eclecticism as a marketplace mirrors ethnocentrically Northwestern existential priorities and ways of interpreting life. So long as those priorities and life and world interpretations pass as natural and freestanding or as practically stronger or globally more attractive than all alternatives, they remain broadly nonthematized. In this fashion, the

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literal market antagonism and solid interpretations of what counts as “good” for the Western world are transferred elsewhere unadulterated. Ultimately, this silence over the good life and allocation of its relevant issues in the private or existential sphere secures that capital mobility as the dominant good will continue anchoring in other lifeworlds rather than being checked, constructively questioned, or resisted by otherness. In stark contrast to such practices of, inter alia, economic globalization, cosmopolitanism has an economic aspect that touches upon ethico-political vision and the good life for all. It concerns issues of material aid, redistribution of wealth, environmentally sensitive and responsible sustainable development (though not susceptible to developmentalism), and inventiveness regarding new possible ways of imagining and organizing alternative systems of economy and administration. As Hansen et al. put it, economic cosmopolitanism “spotlights global economic arrangements that advocates argue can engender greater equality and equity” (2009, 589). Thus, economic cosmopolitanism is not about the global market and the movement and circulation of capital. It is rather about poverty, inequality, and (re)distributive and restorative justice. An economic cosmopolitanism touching upon such issues must also be methodologically worthy of the name, that is, cosmopolitan also in the sense of displaying the explanatory complexity and all-roundedness that one notices, for instance, in Amartya Sen’s (2008) discussions of poverty and inequality or in his capability approach (Hansen 2010, 156; Papastephanou, Christou, and Gregoriou 2012). The above aspects constitute the intersubjective/relational axis of cosmopolitanism because they involve a more direct responsiveness to the ethico-political significance of engagement and entanglement with global otherness than the aspects that will be presented now. The relational does not guarantee accuracy, correctness, and true eccentricity regarding the understanding of a specific entanglement with others or the appropriateness of the response to others. It focuses, nevertheless, on such issues, that is, on issues that concern primarily relations. By contrast, the monological (in cosmopolitanism as elsewhere) focuses on issues that revolve around individual life choice and affect others only by implication. For instance, the popularized pragmatic aspect of cosmopolitanism is monological because it rests on an outlook of

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life that ponders primarily what is useful and expedient for selfhood. Torill Strand discusses a recent survey that illustrates well this point and serves in multiple ways as a springboard for discussing the complexities of monological cosmopolitanism. The majority of the researched sample of Dutch parents whose children attended international schools “saw the advantage of an international orientation (for example, to learn advanced English). But they did not relate to a vision of the world as open, to be explored by everyone,” and so forth (Strand 2010, 232, emphasis mine). Strand describes them very appropriately as “pragmatic cosmopolitans” (Strand 2010, 232), but she sees as missing in their cosmopolitanism an existential, aesthetic, and intellectual openness that brings her notion of cosmopolitanism closer to cultural rather than more relational aspects. This chimes with M. Kaldor’s view that “cosmopolitanism is ‘a cultural disposition involving an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures’” (2004, 173–174). True, cultural cosmopolitanism objects to “conceptions of identity that wall in human conduct and generate spiralling categories of the foreigner” (Hansen 2010, 154). Therefore, the cultural aspect of cosmopolitanism can work, indeed, as a corrective of the pragmatic aspect when the latter concentrates on the advantageous without demolishing walls of prejudice. But the cultural aspect can do so only to a limited extent because of the monologism that characterizes it too—focused as it is on the cultural enrichment of the self. Likewise, the cognitive aspect of cosmopolitanism is at the explicit level rather monological and only implicitly and optionally relational. Knowing others (as we saw in previous chapters) does not entail, of its own accord, a concerned consideration of what their cosmopolitan treatment might be; it does not mean that learning about others is carried out for the sake of better contemplating one’s ethico-political entanglement with them. On the contrary, in certain cases it may speed up or refine their most efficient exploitation or even their elimination.9 Similar reservations can be expressed about the aesthetic. It is assumed that “knowing multiple musical traditions develops empathy towards different others and contributes to such ends as tranquility and peace between different others” (Jorgensen 2002, 37). Despite the more general merits of this assertion, the unqualified connection of

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aesthetic knowledge and relational ideality (empathy, tranquility, peace) on which it rests misses all the intermediary steps that are necessary for such a translation of aesthetic-cultural knowledge into ethico-political benefits. Just knowing or enjoying musical traditions (familiar or foreign) does not lead to empathy or peace without the intervention of ethico-political commitment. Let me clarify the above claim with an illustration. Art itself has selfreflectively depicted the extremes to which the monological character of the intellectual and the aesthetic may be led. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò, an adaptation of and critical commentary on the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, high-ranking soldiers torture and kill their victims while listening to classical music. Is that just an avantgarde exaggeration? Does contemporary reality offer more faith and confidence when it comes to how music might be experienced or used as, by definition, a cosmopolitan instrument of empathy and peace? In times when the culture industry has made ethnic music and hybrid sounds popular and globally disseminated, there have been instances of music being used as a means of torture. According to the testimony of Professor Ali Shalal, his interrogator “in Abu Ghraib played the pop song, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ by Pop Group Boney M, continuously until the next morning.” The effect on him was that, as he put it, he lost his hearing, and he lost his mind.10 That was only one of several songs used in such a way in various prisons and in many instances, to the point that this fact caused some “talk that the US government may owe royalties on the song that has been blared over and over and over again to weaken detainees.”11 We live in an era in which avant-garde critique of reality stumbles on the representational control and “aesthetization” of the cruelty of the real. In simpler terms, we live, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, “in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media.”12 Pasolini’s Salò turned upside down the theatrical staging and filming of executions and torture in Abu Ghraib videos and sardonically poked fun at facile cosmopolitanism and its exaggerated faith in mobility, global order, art, and cultural knowledge. Pasolini’s filming fiction (de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom) to critique and change reality is reversed by the soldiers’ filming reality

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unwittingly to make the “fiction” of a just war for global order vanish along with the myth of humanity’s heading toward a better global condition or having easy access to it. If it were not too tragic and gruesome, this epochal subversiveness would be felt as black comedy. Whether the cultural can operate toward cosmopolitan ends (instead of reasserting realist assumptions that humanity is, supposedly inherently, unable to overcome selfish cruelty) depends on extra- and supracultural interpretations of, and relational demands on, humanity, the self, and reality. Not that there is something wrong with the monological aspects as such (e.g., with people’s considerations about their survival and success, individual well-being, broader knowledge of the world, self-formation, aesthetic pleasure, and so forth). However, if left on their own, monological aspects of cosmopolitanism, such as the pragmatic, the cultural, the cognitive, and the aesthetic, serve primarily individual desire and existential choice and impact otherness mainly indirectly. Certainly, it would be a mistake to assume that they always end up in extreme uses such as those described above. But the widespread assumption that they are better and less dangerous candidates for what cosmopolitanism might be about than, say, moral or politicallegal doctrines (for fear of the latter’s nearness to toxic universalism) is also a plain mistake. The borders that are internal are not demolished just by more individual growth or more happiness. Unsupported by other, more relational aspects that can function as qualifications and correctives, cultural cosmopolitanism may be reduced to what we have already described as culturalist cosmopolitanism (deriving a comforting “cosmopolitan” self-image and much uplifting energy from what music we listen to, what we eat or drink, and so forth). The current emphasis of globalist discourse on the pragmatic, cognitive, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism, then, must be played down for the sake of legal, ethical, emotive, and other such prerequisites. Yet, some theorists endorse the pragmatic or, at best, the cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism with such an inflated enthusiasm that they level cosmopolitanism and globalization and lose sight of the gap between empirical reality and normative ideality. Or they are led to a truncated conception of cosmopolitanism—blind to the normativity that should back up existential-cultural cosmopolitan choice. Against

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all this, an eccentric cosmopolitanism requires an all-encompassing synthesis of relational and monological aspects in interplay. I emphasize the political (in the more general, ancient sense), moral/ ethical, economic, and affective/historical aspects for the following reasons: they are more fundamental to an eccentric cosmopolitanism because their relationality can put to the test the more monological aspects of cosmopolitanism, although they do not suffice, on their own, to tackle all the issues of cosmopolitanism. Commitment, responsibility, political vision, and voluntarism (as free choice of and desire for cosmopolitan perfectionism) in a harmonious interplay of counterdiscursivity (i.e., discourses operating as mutual correctives) are the pillars of cosmopolitan normativity. The political (in its modern sense), the economic, and the legal are the materializations, the steps taken toward the empirical approximation of the ideal, and must reflect and serve the work that is done on the plane of the previous aspects. Not only are they important for institutionalization or application; they are practically noncircumventable. They cannot be sidestepped, and as an example of the why of this assertion, consider the following: some problems of international right are unmanageable through mere redirections of focus onto cultural openness or enlargement of thought and irreducible to modish explanations of conflicts such as religious difference or tension. If they are not ironed out in political-legal terms and measures, the very hopes for affective and ethical stances to otherness cannot be fulfilled (it is quite hard to have positive feelings for an occupation army!). The monological aspects can be placed after the intersubjective/relational ones, but this asymmetry signifies nothing more than the inherent lack of independent normative functionality of the former. However, that the cosmopolitanism advocated throughout this book questions the priority given to the pragmatic, cultural, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of cosmopolitanism does not amount to underestimating them, much less to considering them uncosmopolitan. On the contrary, the monological aspects of cosmopolitanism can prove very important for infiltrating the lifeworld with sensibilities that prepare the ground for cosmopolitan normativity or adjust and correct approximations of cosmopolitan vision. Let us then unpack the significance of monological aspects for eccentric cosmopolitanism with the following example. A cognitively

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inquisitive cosmopolitan spirit can prove valuable especially with regard to moral and legal issues of cosmopolitanism. For instance, “thinking about responsibilities is especially important and especially challenging in a global context where massive harms are often caused by the conduct of many agents who, individually, do not seem to contribute enough, or to know enough about their contributions, to deserve serious moral criticism” (Pogge 2001, 2, emphasis mine). The priority of relational aspects such as the ethical accommodates the importance of “thinking about responsibilities,” just as Pogge claims in the above citation. But the cognitive aspect is indispensable to eccentric cosmopolitanism because it enlarges the spectrum of awareness, criticism, and accountability. One must love human beings enough to wish to know more about them, not just about their lifestyles or cultural achievements but also about diachronic and synchronic responsibilities to them. Surely, knowing about others does not as such remedy symptoms of ethically obtuse outlooks or moral deficits; yet lack of knowledge of others invites ethical liability. In more specific instances, the cognitive aspect helps when articulating a wrong suffered or raising a demand in one’s own voice is impossible and a representative voice is required, as well as when a conflict needs the constructive services of impartial third parties or international referees. Regrettably, the role that the cognitive aspect of cosmopolitanism can play within such a context has not yet been sufficiently theorized. Like many other political theorists, Archibugi maintains that cosmopolitanism is served when independent parties judge conflicting claims (2003, 489, 500). Most globalist discourse assumes that super partes political authorities should consist of cosmopolitans, and by the latter they mean those people who are committed to international order, peace, and reconciliation (Archibugi 2003, 489, 500). Apart from resting on a vague sense of commitment,13 this assumption links the Northwestern glorification of the supposed objectivity and impartiality of its bourgeois cohorts with cosmopolitanism tout court. Even in cases where the commitment to cosmopolitan ethico-political relationality is beyond doubt, still one cannot content oneself with it. Most conflicts are very complex and involve crucial historical detail and facticity that, when missed, result in most understanding of the conflict being lost. The cognitive aspect of cos-

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mopolitanism supplies the expectation that one is determined to learn about others, to empathize or harken to them, instead of projecting on them her own preestablished and prejudiced views of them and of the stakes of their conflicts. The impartiality thesis, so fundamental in much Continental and Anglo-American liberalism (Held 2003, 472), cannot depend solely on goodwill (supposed or real) on the part of the mediator. Apart from commitments to the intersubjective aspects of cosmopolitanism, if it is to avoid Eurocentrism, impartiality presupposes thorough knowledge of the conflicting parties, their problem, and the history of their problem.14 Illustrations of the complex dialectics and the interplay and significance of all aspects of cosmopolitanism could go on and on, moving from issues of restorative justice to redistribution of wealth down to environmental stakes. But as the above suffices to indicate broadly the direction that a reformulation of cosmopolitanism should take within the eccentric conception that I am suggesting, let me finish with the claim that we need an all-encompassing ideal authorized by justice.15 If some aspects of cosmopolitanism remain unacknowledged or undertheorized due to the globalist prioritization of more faddish ones, and if education fails to take them into account and cultivate them, the disjuncture between cosmopolitan aspirations and their partial and one-sided application that Held chastises (2003, 475) will be exacerbated. Only with the cooperation and mutual redirection and correction of all its aspects will the imaginative reach of the cosmopolitan Ought achieve its true extensive critical force. Some may think that ideals of this kind are too demanding or utopian and that we should be contented with even minimal approximations of a peaceful and civil society. However, if they are to avoid becoming (or remaining) an empty letter, prospects for a peaceful and civil society, no matter how minimal, presuppose a broader ideal that breathes enthusiasm into human effort.

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Notes 1. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of some of my previous work on these issues for drawing my attention to such objections. 2. Conceptions of cosmopolitanism that are not encompassing, those which narrow cosmopolitan discourse down to human rights, may also accommodate ecological concerns. But they do so from a human-centered perspective. Pogge responds to the question “Why should people not be free to live in a degraded natural environment if they so choose?” as follows: “Perhaps they should be, but for now they won’t have had a choice. The degradation of our natural environment ineluctably affects us all” (1992, 63). A more encompassing cosmopolitanism can answer this question in more decentered ways through an ethic that does not focus only on how humans are affected by environmental damage. However, a fuller development of such a response would go beyond the scope of this chapter. 3. The ethico-political significance derives from the definition of cosmopolitanism as an ideal (hence the political as vision of the perfect city) of thoughtful commitment (hence the ethical responsibility beyond mere duty) to the whole world. The specific significance and source of the ethico-political justifies the presence of the ethical and the political as separate aspects of cosmopolitanism that have a different meaning from the one that the ethico-political has. As we proceed, this difference in meaning will become much clearer and more justified. 4. I follow Doyne Dawson’s distinction between the political in the fullest Greek sense and the political in a common modern sense. The political in the Greek sense proposes that one dealt with the affairs of the polis, which did not necessarily “include programs for immediate action,” that is, with the politika in the sense of reforms of a public and social nature. The political in the modern sense recommends that one be “engaged in or taking sides in the struggle for governmental power” (D. Dawson 1992, 6). 5. Yet, those who use the term “ethical” within the confines of liberalism tend more or less to mean moral. Thus, the moral aspect they assume concerns duties, human rights, universal principles or norms, and respect for autonomy and other constraints of conduct or of shared practices. 6. Held often employs the term “ethical,” but his “concentrating on the rights and duties of the world citizen” (Jones 2003, 54) corresponds rather to what I have described as moral. 7. As he writes, “Educational cosmopolitanism presumes a creative potential on the part of persons everywhere to craft lives of meaning and purpose” (Hansen 2008b, 208). 8. I believe that for social or cosmopolitan liberalists (Beitz’s distinction [1999]) of the Anglo-American persuasion, the main influence toward this direction has been Rawls’s later work and the definition of his political liberalism as free standing (for my critique of it, see Papastephanou [2004]). For the continental persuasion, more decisive has been Habermas’s mode of differentiation of the spheres of duty and values or morality and ethics.

Reflections on an All-Encompassing Conception of Cosmopolitanism ▼  239 9. Consider the following report from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, “Annals of War: Exposure: The Woman behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, March 24, 2008, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_ gourevitch#ixzz1BShSldeZ (accessed March 15, 2012): the soldiers guarding Abu Ghraib prison “knew very little about their Iraqi prisoners or the culture they came from, but at Fort Lee, before being deployed, they were given a session of ‘cultural awareness’ training, from which they’d taken away the understanding—constantly reinforced by M.I. handlers—that Arab men were sexual prudes, with a particular hangup about being seen naked in public, especially by women. What better way to break an Arab, then, than to strip him, tie him up, and have a woman laugh at him?” 10. “Torture at Abu Ghraib: The Full Sworn Testimony of Ali Shalal,” Global Research, February 19, 2007, www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle &code=20070219&articleId=4865 (accessed January 19, 2011). 11. Eliot Van Buskirk, “Does Government Owe Royalties on Torture Music?” Wired.com, July 8, 2008, www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/07/does-us-governm (accessed January 19, 2011). 12. Robert Plummer, “US Powerless to Halt Iraq Net Images,” BBC News, May 8, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3695897.stm. 13. How is this commitment judged? Is it just a verbal assurance on the part of the appointed mediator, or does it require more tangible proof? To give an example: Alexander Downer, the minister of foreign affairs serving Australia at the time of the United Nations–defiant invasion of Iraq, has recently been appointed by the United Nations as its mediator in Cyprus and as advisor to the UN secretary-general on the Cyprus issue. He has been given the post of the impartial judge in a conflict that boils down to unauthorized, illegal, and destructive invasion and ongoing occupation of land. Even if one takes his commitment to reconciliation and peace as unquestionable, one cannot but raise some questions regarding his commitment to international order as understood by the United Nations during his service to the Australian government of 2003 and even many more questions regarding his outlook on all the other issues of justice that are involved in such conflicts and go beyond a simple equation of cosmopolitanism with order, peace, and reconciliation. 14. For instance, if one knows very little about the Cyprus issue or knows it from a very concrete perspective and depiction (e.g., from Henry Kissinger’s Years of Renewal), no matter how impartial she is determined to be and despite her more general good intentions, she will tailor the whole issue to her arbitrary, unexamined, or unsubstantiated views. 15. As to the question why justice is treated as something external that authorizes cosmopolitanism rather than as something covered by the legal, political, and moral aspects, this is explained by the fact that there is a surplus in the notion of justice that cannot be canalized in those terms. That is why I am referring to a comprehensive notion of justice.

Conclusion The main argument of this book relies on certain assumptions

about citizenship. As a subject of theoretical debate and of teaching, citizenship presupposes a constellation of political concepts and conceptions that require philosophical discussion. Citizenship may concern the approximation of an ideal political situation through reflective membership in various collectivities and in common humanity. From this, the normative reach of the term can be extended to the ideal person/member of many particular configurations up to the human community as such. Thus, it can direct political education to cultivating virtues that enhance awareness and commitment to multiple identities and to contributing to efforts toward the best possible political situation1 worldwide. If citizenship touches upon identities and self-images in their political significance for the whole world, then the cosmopolitan, patriotic, and globalized selves must first be approached with regard to their conceptual content and their similarities and differences. To substantiate the why of a corresponding political education, one has to establish the benign character of what is supposed to be educationally cultivated, and this further means that one should consider the nuances that separate the ideals to which one aspires from empirical reality as well as from their debased and unacceptable doubles or possible degenerations. I have tried in this book to recast cosmopolitanism in a critical dialogue with the above assumptions—that is, roughly put, to set cosmopolitanism in critical tension with globalist discourse, in critical distance from globalization, and in critical alliance with patriotism against both nationalism and culturalist internationalism. Chapter 11 defined cosmopolitanism as thoughtful commitment to peace, 240

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freedom, and good for all (i.e., biota, human beings, and nonsentient reality). From this minimalist, formal definition of cosmopolitanism, whose key words require specification, we moved to an all-encompassing conception of cosmopolitanism. On the way, relationality rather than monologism and time rather than spatial dispersal stood out for the sake of the kind of decentering of the self (individual or communal) that renders cosmopolitanism eccentric. Eccentric cosmopolitanism is thus suggested as the educational ideal that does not treat education as an institution that has to adapt or respond to the ongoing transformations of a globalized world. It treats it, rather, as a personal and collective journey that reorients human beings to the world of policy and practice. Cosmopolitan education thus becomes a counterweight to those transformations of the globalized world that consolidate undesirable practices and a suspect new order that reflects universalization (and past understandings of cosmopolitanism as an order-making process) and old, destructive attitudes to cosmos. Like all protreptic visions that regulate actions, the educational ideal of cosmopolitanism is necessarily normatively oriented toward the future. The description of the ideal and of its stakes, however, operates in the present, deals with current concerns, and reflects the here and now of everyday experience. For this reason, these last pages of the book will flesh out some issues at the descriptive level that reflect the above considerations. That is, they will deal with questions about the relation of eccentric cosmopolitanism to practice, to the old and the new, and to order. Since conceptual work is not particularly popular in globalist discourse because, as a philosophical task, it is typically more associated with logic rather than with practice, a charge of abstract universalism would come as no surprise. My general response to such a charge is that there is no compelling argument why all conceptual preoccupations would place someone automatically in a theory-versus-practice opposition and on the side of semantic abstraction. But more specifically, with regard to what has been carried out in this book, my response is that when I draw attention to failures of reformulating cosmopolitanism, I do so precisely because such failures affect practice and our critique of practices. The dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism

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reintroduce the pathologies of toxic universalism by the back door, despite declarations and protests to the contrary. They do so because, as they are conceived and argued out, they can accommodate principally the agreement perspective of respect (mainly verbal) of otherness and the enrichment of one’s life choice through the encounter with otherness. They leave out or marginalize tasks that can be approached from a treatment perspective, tasks related to restorative justice, to radical redistributive justice, and, more generally, to the justice that demands redirection, amends, and care for specific collectivities (and nature) that have been wronged (or suffered damage) not just verbally but rather materially. Surely, dealing with pragmatic abuses of older universalism requires practice, but can this practice be dissociated from performing conceptual tasks? Can a new practice become institutionalized (and thus effectively followed) without prior conceptual change? Underneath questions about new practices and old mind-sets lie perceptions of time. Cosmopolitanism is still, and often unwittingly, presented as celebration of the radically new and as a radical break with the past. Despite appearances, such modernist claims to radicality are not radical enough—precisely because, among other things, they do not break sufficiently with the modernist (and modernizing) unqualified glorification of anything new. I shall tackle such issues about the new and the old by reference to an approach to cosmopolitanism that in some respects resembles mine but in others differs crucially from it. Let us consider the following definition of cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitanism is a name for an orientation toward self, others, and world. In this orientation, a person or community juxtaposes reflective openness to new influences with reflective loyalty toward the tried and the known. Put another way, cosmopolitanism is a name for an outlook toward the challenges and opportunities of being a person or community dwelling in a world of ongoing transformation. (Hansen et al. 2009, 587, emphasis mine)

This definition has the merit of relating cosmopolitanism to the old and the new in a much more nuanced and reflective manner than most other perspectives that wholeheartedly surrender to the new and the unknown. But reflective loyalty toward the tried and the known seems

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too weak and too cognitivist to imply more than sifting the old hermeneutic cultural material so as to discard what is undesirable and keep what is worthy. That we have a reflective loyalty toward the tried and the known is not quite the same as, say, being aware of the significance of the past in understanding the global present and anticipating the future, being deeply touched and moved by prolonged pasts, pasts that are still active in producing effects. And reflective openness to new influences has the dose of passivity that is involved in thinking that just openness (even of the most reflective kind) is all that the self may counterpose to the new, and not drastic intervention in either promoting or undoing the effects of some new influences or active resistance to new groundings of older pathologies. Openness and loyalty: the one is owed to the new, the other to the old; but why not be reflectively open (instead of just reflectively loyal) to the past? Not only do we need an outlook toward challenges and opportunities of the global present; we also need an outlook on the global past and how it places current affairs in truly cosmopolitan perspective. Surely, openness to the new may include open-mindedness about new interpretations of the past that relativize our loyalty to some aspects of the past. Likewise, even if they go back in time as to their causes or origin, influences are new to the influenced person who lives in the here and now. But the synchronic time that dominates in the above-quoted definition obscures the fact that precisely by dwelling in a world of ongoing transformation, we live in fact in a world of asynchronous time, asynchronous, among other things, because of the reverberations of the drama of historical human entanglement. For the subjects of the statistics of Chapter 3 (and the subjects of less glaring misfortune) live in a time that is different from that of others. This invites a relation with the old that is more “painful,” disturbing, and “costly” than that of reflective loyalty to an “old” understood as a hermeneutical cultural material that can be seen more or less either as obsolete or as of lasting significance. Even more peculiarly, instead of just dwelling in a world of ongoing transformation, we all dwell also in the past—in the sense that the world that is being transformed undergoes changes that are to a great extent determined by logics that date back in time. Cosmopolitanism cannot just be about new influences, opportunities, and opportune time; it has to do with

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handling old ethical debts, developing a historical consciousness, being able to perceive how the past influences the present. Otherwise, the very plausible and important remark of the same theorists, at another point, that, “from a cosmopolitan perspective, the rhythm of leaving and remaining at home mirrors the dynamics of remembering and forgetting—of heeding the voice of the past and at other times letting it recede” (Hansen et al. 2009, 595) would appear anemic or ill-fitting and even contradictory if seen in connection to a definition such as the one cited above. Or it would be left an empty letter if premised upon a purely modernist definition of cosmopolitanism as openness to the new and as catching up, albeit reflectively, with a world in constant transformation. Throughout the book, the ethico-political has been tasked with the re-vision of politics, that is, of the second component of cosmopolis. We should not be left with the impression that only the second component of the term “cosmopolitanism” is in need of thematization and discussion. It is now time to consider what is involved in the first component, cosmos. And this connects us with the final issue that can be dealt with within the confines of this book: order. It is a widespread tendency in the relevant literature to translate cosmos as order. As Torill Strand puts it, the term “cosmopolitanism” “is composed of ‘cosmos’ and ‘polis’: ‘Cosmos’ derives from the Greek ‘kosmos’, which literally means ‘order’” (Strand 2010, 235). This is a widely held modern assumption, albeit a rather inaccurate one. The Greek meaning of cosmos is “not to be related entirely with the idea of order. Kosmos connotes basically the image of the ‘ornamentation’ or ‘cosmetic’” (Girardot 1988, 5). Nevertheless, based on the equation of cosmos and order, much postmodern globalist discourse deploys objections to any reliance on cosmopolitanism as supposedly being irremediably tarnished by connotations of patriarchal, obsessive control over, and tidying up of, the world. Hence, more important for the discussion of cosmos and its hasty connection with order is its opposite. What is the opposite of (and perhaps alternative to) it? A disorder that might even be attractive and desirable against the modernist and often masculinist fascination with order? A dissenting world rather than one of consensus and

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pacification? These questions can be made relevant to eccentric cosmopolitanism in this formulation: has this book merely tried to show that the difference between the real and the ideal is a missing order? Is cosmos the order that cosmopolitanism aspires to introduce in the world so as to oppose dissent, disorder, and the pluralism of the incongruent? Chaos becomes here the crucial notion. As Torill Strand notes, “‘Cosmos’ is distinct from ‘chaos’ and carries the connotation of a universe regarded as a well-ordered whole.” She draws this from Mircea Eliade for whom “cosmos is the ideal archetype of an orderly system, embracing ‘all that is perfect, complete, harmonious or fruitful. . . . Cosmos is the pattern created by the gods, their masterpiece’” (quoted in Strand 2010, 235). Indeed, for Eliade, “one of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it” (1987, 29). If these are truly the connotations of the Greek word cosmos, are we not left with the predicament of an insiders-versus-outsiders dichotomy and the undesirable implications of a notion that purports to be inclusive yet, in fact, privileges the familiar and orderly against the unknown and chaotic? Worse, we may be left with a notion that identifies the chaotic with the foreign and turns both into negative ideas. Here is Eliade again: the inhabited territory “is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of ‘other world,’ a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, ‘foreigners’” (1987, 29). If all this is operative in the term “cosmos,” then cosmopolitanism becomes nothing other than a vision of a well-ordered civilization that incriminates disorder and tries compulsively to wipe it out with the chaotic foreignness that supposedly brings disorder along. “Adopting the name ‘cosmopolitanism’ is thus adopting a relationship that parallels, compares and contrasts the contemporary ways of the world to an image of something which it is not—namely an orderly, ordered, stable, and harmonious whole—and thereby transferring the meaning provided by the name to reality” (Strand 2010, 236). Associating the cosmopolitan ideal with the real of a globalized world, we would be led to contrast an ideality obsessed with order, accountability, stability,

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consensus, and wholeness with the actuality of globalization as the fragmented, indeterminate, unruly, and self-propelled character of world affairs. The vision would appear totalitarian, compared to a transformed world whose opportunities are felt by many, due to cybernetic anonymity and accessibility, as radically democratizing. Against the widespread assertions that rely on extrapolations from overgeneralizing readings of Eliade, all this modernist ideological baggage of cosmos as order contrasted with chaos as disorder is not there in the Greek meanings of the terms. Chaos comes from the verb “chaino” (χαινω), which means to gape, to yawn, and it is the void, the abyss, the primeval emptiness from which things come into being. Textual support for all this we may find, for instance, in Norman Girardot’s work: “Chaos is not in its mythological origins to be equated with the absence of all order” (Girardot 1988, 5). More specifically, the earliest Greek uses of chaos carried little of the later extreme negative connotations of absolute disorder or meaningless nonbeing, interpretations that were in part due to the theological exclusivity found in the Biblical ideas of “genesis” and the antagonistic dualism of early Zoroastrian tradition and some forms of Hellenistic gnosticism. (Girardot 1988, 4)

We may add here, from Encyclopaedia Britannica, that Ovid “gave Chaos its modern meaning of the original formless and disordered mass.”2 There had been ancient precursors3 of the modern change in meaning, for sure, and as Petar V. Grujic´ remarks, “One of the first interpretations of chaos in modern terms as disorder can be found in Lucian’s Amores 32, where it was taken for shapeless matter” (2008, 53).4 In contrast to later and to modern conceptions, in Hesiod “the primordial yawn of chaos, the toothless gaping emptiness of the beginning is not absolute nothingness or confusion but the fertile space of the center that established the dual cosmic form of heaven and earth and is filled with the power of Eros” (Girardot 1988, 5). Against considering cosmos as the center, for Hesiod, chaos is the center from which all else emerges. Against Eliade’s assertion (quoted above by Strand) that cosmos is the pattern created by the gods, their masterpiece, we see that it is chaos (feminine in Hesiod’s Theogony, verse 116) out of which the gods, humans, and all things arose.5

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Thus, cosmos is not order but rather a created whole that includes order, not just any order, much less the modern one obsessed with regulation, but that with aesthetic connotations of adornment—to recall and adapt Michel Foucault here, cosmos as a beautiful existence. The wholeness and all-inclusiveness of cosmos does not leave out disorder, and it can relate to the chaotic (qua mysterious yet fertile gaping emptiness) as its complementary source of the unexpected and of a relentless creativity and transformation that is not just of this world but also of any world, of all societies from time immemorial. Being all-encompassing, the cosmos evoked throughout this book on cosmopolitanism contains both order and disorder; consensus and dissent; reading, writing, and acting; the concentric and the eccentric; the caustic and the serene; the mime and her despair; empathic and aversive thinking; the perfunctory, technical, and dry along with the oratory and the oracular, soothing, and stirring; protest, irony, and impassioned sarcasm along with point-for-point, meticulous reconstruction, somewhat uninspiring yet nonetheless indispensable; the piety and the paganism of philosophizing about the mixed-up world, the neatly categorized and hierarchized world, the world to come and the world that should be. All these, plus all the in-between and all the outside, enjoy citizenship in cosmos and its politics. The way in which such elements and forces should relate is indeed a very important issue that cannot be treated lightly. In Chapter 10, I said that there is nothing outside cosmos and that, in this sense, a cosmopolitanism worthy of the name is not a particularist ideal in risk of exclusivist tendencies. Yet, this remark concerned the concentricity of communities up to the outer circle. It did not mean that there cannot be an outside of cosmos or a possible opposition to it that could be viewed from an eccentric position. “On the one side there is a cosmos, on the other a chaos” (Eliade 1987, 29). However, the opposite of cosmos is not the life-generating void, the abyss from which everything else appeared (for we have already stated that this sense of chaos is complementary to cosmos, side by side, but not in opposition). Outside cosmopolitanism there should be another kind of chaos, one that so far has being within cosmos: neither disorder nor foreignness nor disharmony nor even

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misfortune. The opposite of cosmos is human cruelty—attributable to all sorts of complex causes, emotive, ideological, or material, and suffered by all those who do not count, who are chained in an underworld and remain the spectrality of the supposedly mixed-up world. This “outside” of cosmos, this “chaos” within it, ranges from hunger, violent death, lack of education, and poverty for very many people to less discernible pathologies that, being less vociferous, cannot easily attract the attention of a world accustomed to being moved by televised blood; to all the rationalizations and alibis contrived to stave off reorientation (the ultimate such alibi being the “foul stain of our species”/“the crooked timber of humanity”)6; to all the invested time and all the wasted time that cancel out the time for thinking, learning, and acting; and to the destruction of the planet and the specter of nonexistence. And this is, sadly, a very palpable, present-day alternative to cosmopolitanism indeed.

Notes 1. On ideals having two sides that correspond to a desirable personhood and a desirable situation, see, for instance, De Ruyter (2003, 469–470). 2. See “Chaos,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/ topic/106011/Chaos# (accessed March 15, 2012); see also Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.1: “Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds of ill-joined elements compressed together.” 3. Already Plato had used chaos in his Timaeus in a somewhat different sense from that of Hesiod, and Stoics of the Hellenistic times followed Zeno of Citium in interpreting chaos as liquid, flowing substance (wrongly deriving “chaos” etymologically from the verb cheesthai, to flow). 4. Indeed, in Lucian’s Erotes (Amores), 32, we read, “Only do you come to my aid divine spirit, protector of friendship, hierophant of its mysteries, Eros, not the mischievous child drawn by the hands of painters, but Him whom the first principle of the seed made perfect from birth: it is you, in fact, who formed the universe, until then shapeless, dark and confused. Pulling the world as if out of a grave you have pushed back Chaos which enveloped it [the world] and flung him [notice that Chaos, feminine in Hesiod, is masculine here] into the deepest abyss of Tartarus, there where there truly are gates of iron and doorsteps of bronze, so that he may never return from the prison in which he has been chained. Then, beating back the night with your dazzling light, you became the demiurge of all beings, animate or inanimate. You have inspired in men, by means of the exalted sentiment of harmony, the noble passions of friendship, so

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that a soul still innocent and tender, nurtured in the shade of goodwill, will ripen into maturity” (“Different Desires: A Dialogue Comparing Male and Female Love Attributed to Lucian of Samosata,” translated by Andrew Kallimachos, The Stoa Consortium: Diotima, 2000, www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/lucian.shtml (accessed March 15, 2012, emphasis mine). 5. “Chaos was born first and after her came Gaia . . . ” Hesiod, Theogony, verses 116–136. For more, see Abraham (1988, 200ff.). 6. For my position on the essentialist anthropological theses that correspond to Immanuel Kant’s “foul stain of our species” and Isaiah Berlin’s “crooked timber of humanity” discussions, see Papastephanou (2009, ch. 8).

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About the Author Marianna Papastephanou has studied and taught at the University of Cardiff, UK. She has also studied and researched in Berlin, Germany. She is currently teaching Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests include political philosophy; the “modern vs. postmodern” divide; utopia; the Frankfurt School; and epistemological, linguistic, and ethical issues in education. She has written numerous articles on these topics, and she is the editor of K-O Apel: From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View (Manchester: MUP, 1997) and the author of Educated Fear and Educated Hope (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009).

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