Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter: Essays on Borders, Cosmopolitanism, and Globalisation 9780367347314, 9780429345029

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Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter

This book offers transdisciplinary scholarship which challenges the agendas of and markers around traditional social scientific fields. It builds on the belief that the study of major issues in the global cultural and political economies benefit from a perspective that rejects the limitations imposed by established boundaries, whether disciplinary, conceptual, symbolic or material. Established and early career academics explore and embrace contemporary ­political sociology following the ‘global’ and ‘cultural’ turns of recent decades. Categories such as state, civil society, family, migration, citizenship and identity are interrogated and sometimes found to be ill-suited to the task of analysing global complexities. The limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and situated and mobile subjects and objects are all referenced in this book. The book will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, Geography, Area studies and European studies. Barrie Axford is Professor Emeritus in Politics at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where he is also a member of the Centre for Global Politics Economy and Society (GPES). Alistair Brisbourne is a Research Manager at accountancy and business advisory firm BDO LLP, UK. Sandra Halperin is a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Claudia Lueders is a Teaching Fellow in Politics at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Routledge Studies in Global and Transnational Politics Series Series editors: Chris Rumford and Sandra Halperin Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

The core theme of the series is ‘global connectivities’ and the implications and outcomes of global and transnational processes in history and in the contemporary world. The series aims to promote greater theoretical innovation and inter-­ disciplinarity in the academic study of global transformations. The understanding of globalisation that it employs accords centrality to forms and processes of political, social, cultural and economic connectivity (and disconnectivity) and relations between the global and the local. The series’ editors see the multi-­ disciplinary exploration of ‘global connectivities’ as contributing, not only to an understanding of the nature and direction of current global and transnational transformations, but also to recasting the intellectual agenda of the social sciences. The series aims to publish high quality work by leading and emerging scholars critically engaging with key issues in the study of global and transnational politics. It will comprise research monographs, edited collections and advanced textbooks for scholars, researchers, policy analysts, and students. Rethinking Ideology in the Age of Global Discontent Bridging Divides Edited by Barrie Axford, Didem Buhari Gulmez, and Seckin Baris Gulmez Egyptian Diaspora Activism During the Arab Uprisings Insights from Paris and Vienna Lea Müller-Funk Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations Interregionalism and Transnationalism Between Latin America and Europe Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter Essays on Borders, Cosmopolitanism, and Globalization Edited by Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin, and Claudia Lueders

Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter

Essays on Borders, Cosmopolitanism, and Globalisation Edited by Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin, and Claudia Lueders

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin, and Claudia Lueders; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin and Claudia Lueders to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-34731-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34502-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents

List of contributors Preface

Introduction: the importance of the ‘cultural encounter’

vii ix 1

BARRIE AXFORD, ALISTAIR BRISBOURNE, SANDRA HALPERIN, AND CLAUDIA LUEDERS

PART I

Encounters beyond borders

13

  1 What is a border comrade?

15

OLIVIER THOMAS KRAMSCH

  2 Seeing from the border with Chris Rumford: towards cosmopolitan borders and a multiperspectival border studies

23

ANTHONY COOPER

  3 Politics of space, strangeness, and culture in the global age

39

SPIROS MAKRIS

PART II

Everyday encounters and strangeness

55

  4 The complex trajectories of the commoner: cosmopolitanism, localisation, and nationalism

57

NICK STEVENSON

vi   Contents   5 Artistic encounters with difference, aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and the political imagination

72

MARIA ROVISCO

  6 The story of the ship-in-a-bottle: encountering strangeness and familiarity through a globalised object

87

ALISON HULME

  7 Don’t look back in anger: a reflection on strangeness and borders in academia

101

CLAUDIA LUEDERS

PART III

Global studies and interdisciplinarity

109

  8 Europe in crises: Europe’s others and other Europes from a global perspective

111

DIDEM BUHARI GULMEZ AND SECKIN BARIS GULMEZ

  9 Globalisation: interactive and integral

125

VICTOR ROUDOMETOFF

10 Cosmopolitan borders, strangeness, and inter-cultural encounters

139

ROBERT HOLTON

11 Religion and globalising processes: an investigation into the relationship between religious practices and institutions and the complex historical forms of global social change

153

PETER GARDELLA AND DARREN O’BYRNE

12 Challenges of globalisation and the cosmopolitan imagination: the implications of the Anthropocene

168

GERARD DELANTY



Index

182

Contributors

Editors Barrie Axford is Professor Emeritus in Politics at Oxford Brookes University where he is also a member of the Centre for Global Politics Economy and Society (GPES). Alistair Brisbourne is currently a Research Manager at accountancy and business advisory firm BDO LLP. Prior to this he was a Teaching Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London where he was also awarded his PhD in 2016. Sandra Halperin is a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Claudia Lueders (PhD, Royal Holloway University of London) is a Teaching Fellow in Politics at Oxford Brookes University.

Contributors Anthony Cooper is a Research Fellow at the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University in Belfast. Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Peter Gardella is Assistant Professor of Religion at Manhattanville College. Didem Buhari Gulmez (PhD, Royal Holloway University of London) is an Associate Professor in International Relations at Izmir Katip Celebi University, Turkey. Seckin Baris Gulmez (PhD, Royal Holloway University of London) is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Izmir Katip Celebi University, Turkey. Robert Holton is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Alison Hulme is Senior Lecturer in International Development at the University of Northampton.

viii   Contributors Olivier Thomas Kramsch is Professor of Geography and Border Studies within the Department of Human Geography, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and a leading member of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR). Spiros Makris is Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece and Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton, UK. Darren O’Byrne is Reader in Sociology and Human Rights in the Department of Social Science at Roehampton University, UK. Victor Roudometof is an Associate Professor at the University of Cyprus and Professor (adj.) at the University of Tampere (Finland). Maria Rovisco is Associate Professor in Sociology at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK. Nick Stevenson is a Reader in Cultural Sociology at the University of Nottingham.

Preface

This book is inspired by the life and work of Professor Chris Rumford and ­dedicated to his memory. The idea for the volume originated in a Symposium held in honour of Chris Rumford at Royal Holloway, University of London on 2 June 2017, a year after Chris’s untimely death from Multiple Systems Atrophy (MSA). The title – ‘Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter’ – derives from Chris’s insistence that he was first and foremost a ‘political sociologist of cultural encounters’. The collection builds on several key ideas and themes canvassed in his work. For example, fundamental to Chris’s thinking was a reconfiguration of the triad commonplace in mainstream social-scientific thinking – that of self-other-world. By replacing this triad with a focus on individual-community-world, Rumford underscored the importance of using the richness and diversity found in daily life to inform the sociological imagination. He cautioned too not to treat ‘the world’ as some kind of ontological given. He was fully aware that speaking about ‘the world’ conjures images of openness and being hospitable, but that the opposite is also true. Here globalisation looks and, more importantly, feels like, or is experienced as, ‘closing-in’, rather than ‘opening-up’. Chris’s work also directs our attention to that increasingly modal condition; of lives played out in specific places, of identities that are obviously local, but increasingly linked through, and sometimes relativised by, different kinds of mobility and connectivity, by the creation of markets without boundaries and the consumption of products that have little or no local identification, save as marketing ploys. To a large extent, research on the global has focused on processes of change and explored the structural drivers of global and transnational constitution. The experiences of those individuals and communities undergoing such changes have been of secondary concern; for all the intruiging attention to ‘glocal’ dynamics. Chis Rumford insisted that people remain important agents of change and it is only by understanding the experience of actors in the context of global and transnational processes that we can begin to understand their motivations and interpret their behaviour. In turn, it is only by addressing these things that we can truly understand global processes. Chris Rumford was an exceptional scholar. Not only was he prolific, but in an academic age of often mind-numbing and narrow specialism, his remit was wide

x   Preface and his enthusiasm for abstract social theory and good old muck-raking sociology, a breathe of fresh air. Under the broad umbrella of global studies he trafficked in themes of perennial interest to social scientists and with especial piquancy for these times. In the field of European Studies his book Rethinking Europe written with Gerard Delanty and published in 2005 mapped the process of Europeanisation – of becoming European. It, along with his many works on the European Union and on the tortured sociology of borders in Europe, should have been required reading for both ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ campaigns in the 2016 referendum in the UK. Chris’s disregard for disicplinary boundaries cocked a snook at more ­cautious and predictable scholarship and much journalism on Europe-making, on identity and on what divides and unites us. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his work on the vagaries of globalisation and, what for many people, is the abstract notion of cosmopolitanism. Both these fields attract a high degree of vague abstraction in the literature, but in Cosmopolitan Spaces, published in 2008 and in the wonderfully idiosyncratic Globalisation of Strangeness, in 2013, he reveals an unrivalled grasp of theory and a story-teller’s grasp of narrative and the quotidian. Again, both texts deserve a wider audience than academe, as they too speak to our hopes and fears about openness and threat from others. Finally, Chris loved cricket and used this motif in the 2010 collection, edited with Stephen Wagg, Cricket and Globalisation to reflect on the ‘easternisation’ of globalisation; seen not only in the rise of China and India as proto-hegemons but in the Indian-led takeover of what was once depicted as the coloniser’s favourite sport. As well as inspiring through his written work, Chris did so through his remarkable intellectual energy. He played an important role in the development of many scholars, through his work as a PhD supervisor, and was a strong supporter and collaborator of research especially in the fields of political sociology, border studies, cosmopolitanism, Europeanisation and global studies. On the latter, during his time as President he worked hard to rejuvenate the Global Studies Association (GSA), which he envisaged as a way to engage in transdisciplinary work and as a means to offer refuge for academics working across the boundaries of disciplines. The editors and contributors to this volume are conjoined in our admiration and respect for Chris and would like to dedicate the following chapters to Chris and his family, Fusun and Lara. The Editors June 2019

Introduction The importance of the ‘cultural encounter’ Barrie Axford, Alistair Brisbourne, Sandra Halperin, and Claudia Lueders

The novelty of political sociology lies in identifying the basic workings of power and politics beyond formal institutions and decision-making. Thus, politi­ cal sociology typically explores the intersection of phenomena ranging from the state, to civil society, to the family; investigating topics such as citizenship, social movements, and the sources of social power. Moreover, contemporary political sociology has been forced to come to terms with the ways in which these categories have been fundamentally transformed by transnationalisation including new forms of governance beyond the state, new social movements, identities and forms of citizenship, and questions surrounding the existence and nature of modernity. In coming to terms with these new phenomena, sociology as a field has made some notable moves, or ‘turns’, towards cultural (Alexander 2003) and global (Castells 1996, Beck 2000, Cohen and Kennedy 2012) understandings. These ‘turns’, emphasise respectively the construction of identity and culture and acknowledge the need to move beyond the nation-state. They form the backdrop to what is presented here as Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter (PSCE). In a time when natural and social scientists are trying to understand the significance of the first geological epoch – the Anthropocene – principally defined by human dominion over nature the concept of culture might seem outmoded. The reason it is not is because culture has a central role to play in determining how to respond to such a conceit. If one possible reading of the concept of the Anthropocene is that the earth itself should be conceived of, in part, as a human artefact then the practices that made this possible should be a central subject of examination. In a macro perspective it is possible to understand ­dramatic physical and global changes as the effects of human conduct and its manufactured processes. Similarly, there is much to say about the global and glocal transformations of culture. Certainly, when examining human behaviour there is still great validity to Appadurai’s (1990, 295) claim that one of the most important challenges to understanding global interactions lies in the ‘tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization’; between sameness and difference. A continued challenge is to construe the dynamic relationship between homogenising movements of commodities, symbols, imagery, and economic practices and their continual translation and negotiation locally.

2   Barrie Axford et al. ­ obertson’s concept of ‘glocalisation’ (1995) is a foundational approach in this R regard that leads toward an understanding of the cultural dynamics of globalisation and the contingent interactions between the global and the local by focusing on the multidimensional nature of globality. The cultural encounter spans interactions amongst cultural groups and within societies as well as between societies and individuals. In this book the goal is to amalgamate those lessons from both the cultural and global ‘turns’. The idea of the cultural encounter provides a way to examine how such experiences help shape concepts and practices of justice, respect, tolerance and identity. It is important to pause on the word culture for a moment and to emphasise that this should does not denote some ahistorical or reified notion of ‘cultures interacting’. To the contrary, we should be critical of such a conception as it fails to acknowledge how cultures shift over time. It risks an exoticised or politically motivated depiction of difference not to mention the intense creativity involved in the process of cultural fusion (Nederveen Pieterse 1994). In order to comprehend the experience we cannot discount the impact that ‘culture’ – its practices, knowledges, and construction – has on communal and individual experience. Beyond this, culture remains an important part of common discourse and policies devoted to cultural interaction have become commonplace within states as well as between states through cultural diplomacy, within regional bodies (such as the Council of Europe and increasingly the European Union), and international organisations, such as UNESCO. In fact, the ‘cultural encounter’ itself has become subject of policy-making through ‘organised cultural encounters’, programmes and events that are mustered around the attention to cultural diversity where it may be considered as a policy obstacle or challenge (Christiansen, Galal, and Hvenegaard-Lassen 2017). In the academic realm, then, it is necessary to look at such developments in order to understand how cultural differences are practiced – and thus produced and reproduced – within these settings. Thus, it is fitting that political sociology is capable of accounting for such trends as well. There continues to be significant complexity surrounding any precise definition of the concept of ‘culture’. However there are several features that can be identified for the current purposes. First of all, culture is a product of social interaction, meaning that it is possible to identify related practices, symbols and markers but also that it is contingent on historical and geographical relations. Second, though culture is often associated with specific regions and territories there is no inevitable link between specific cultures and place. Cultures can exist that have a more tendentious and complicated relationship with places such as towns, regions and countries. Of course, that is not to say that there is no ­relationship between the two. Scanning the world, and the anthropological literature, it is possible to find communities whose culture closely reflects their immediate environment and/or where cultural traditions are tied to geographical features. But this is less true for the majority of the world’s population who now live in urban areas.1 For many of these people, not to mention the vast numbers who rely on urban areas for work, the notion that a culture is firmly rooted in a particular place is problematic. Moreover, if we include the flows of people,

Introduction   3 information, symbols and imagery including numbers of migrants around the world (roughly 244 million), travellers (roughly one billion arrivals annually), and the expansion of media and communications technologies there is reason to reconsider the significance of ‘place’. With this basis, the cultural encounter explores interactions between individuals and groups across cultural boundaries as well as the zones of exchange and flows of objects, symbols, values, and other things that are imbued with cultural significance. The concept of the cultural encounter is useful insofar as it can offer purchase on a range of political and social contexts. It highlights the fact that cultural exchange is not the unidirectional process suggested in theories of homogenisation and cultural imperialism. As demonstrated by authors such as Delanty (2011) and Dallmayr (1996), cultural encounters have a variety of different outcomes and consequences, but they also take many forms and relate in different ways to environmental conditions. The real benefit of the encounter is that it is not wedded to the assumption of either cooperation or conflict, good encounter vs. bad encounter. It allows us to focus on the actual, characteristically heterogeneous experiences of cultural interaction (Rovisco 2010). The concept of the cultural encounter suggests the ability to progress these insights in future research while maintaining a clear link to the past. It avoids the risk of overhyping change and fluidity by recognising the individual (and social) significance of cultural symbols, practices and markers. However, built into the concept is also an acknowledgement of the long history of cultural interaction. As pointed out by Cohen and Sheringham, ‘mixing occurs while boundaries remain intact’ (2016, 157). Physically crossing boundaries does not necessarily threaten their existence. It is necessary to account for the effects of space, ­practices, and markers of identity in order to understand the nature of challenges (Cohen and Sheringham 2016, 144–57). Cultural encounters are generally considered as place-bound experiences between different cultures, identities, religions, ethnicities etc., and can range from conflictual to mundane. So to begin with they necessitate a theory of space and how different spaces might promote certain types of interaction. Here there is a rather clear distinction between the global cities of London or New York, the rural towns of the American Midwest, and the post-industrial areas of northern France and England. Historically, encounters have led to the formation of modern cultures and introduced great complexity into traditional nation-state narratives. One result of this historical process is that national markers of identity are commonplace in sport, politics, travel, and elsewhere but social and cultural identities are rarely defined solely in these terms. As a result, markers of identity can often pull in different directions and rarely remain static over time (Cohen and Sheringham 2016). Functional types of transnational practice, such as economic exchange, have also influenced these markers of identity through things like commodification. Objects have long been recognised as means of distinction and differentiation (Bourdieu 1984) meaning they can also become their own markers of identity. With their relative abundance this significance becomes more complicated. For example, it may also create a distancing between human and non-human spheres and act as ‘the basis

4   Barrie Axford et al. of modern reification and alienation’ (Woodward 2007, 20). Thus, the cultural encounter requires an attentiveness to the agency and flow of objects as well. It is a frame through which to connect space, cultural practice, and identity while presenting an account of the present that is historically informed. As pointed out by Patrick Chamoiseau, ‘In all epochs there are going to be people who take refuge in singular identities’ (cited in Cohen and Sheringham 2016, 158) but equally, as he goes on to point out, there will be continued reconfigurations of these identities, new mélanges of the existing, as well as the construction of totally new ones. The Political Sociology of the Cultural Encounter is a means of addressing and comprehending what is a moment of dislocation in the social, cultural, and political spheres. The sub-themes of this volume capture crucial issues that are at the heart of this moment. For example, the first theme ‘Encounters Beyond Borders’ seems an apt frame for understanding new political movements. Populist and alternative political movements, on the upsurge around the world, are a notable example. On the one hand, new solidarities and movements attempting to build alternative approaches for governance, such as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 and the incremental progress of LGBTQ rights provide reason for optimism. On the other hand, reactionary politics in the form of antiimmigrant, nationalist, and even neo-Nazi movements with their stress on closure and protectionism suggest a need to remain vigilant. While it is possible to distinguish these movements from each other based on policy, values, symbols and other lines, they also share some similarities. One feature in particular is demonstrated by Steve Bannon’s entry into European politics with ‘the Movement’ plan, which intends to organise support for populist, right-wing parties across Europe. Politics is transnational in scope as are the social and political imaginaries that go along with its practice. Both progressive and reactionary political movements feed from similar movements in other countries and may even go so far as to support each other in more material ways. In this environment it becomes more apparent that there is a fundamental strangeness that individuals often navigate in the flood of imagery and messaging; the second theme ‘Everyday Encounters and Strangeness’ explores this realm of the everyday. Perhaps one of the surprising ways to understand the ambiguity of times such as these is to look at curiosities like the prevalence and types of conspiracy theory being proffered. The fact that ‘Flat-Earth’ theorists have gained a small but devoted following across social media, including amongst some top athletes and artists, and have even managed to debate their views on mainstream television programmes may be one of the more strange and insightful observations on the condition of society. On a more perturbing theme, learning about the immense quantities of data held by internet firms about individual subscribers and how that data may be used by third parties to influence preferences, and potentially actions, can be deeply damaging to one’s sense of agency. Emerging from this data-oriented world is the realisation that many regular activities and choices are influenced by non-human entities including algorithms. This can be disconcerting but such revelations also make individuals

Introduction  5 more aware of the mutability of their expectations and actions and encourages them to question their relationship with both human and non-human entities. As a result, the immediate world becomes a more complicated place to navigate and strangeness becomes an implicit component. These things, as suggested, may be troubling at the individual-communal level of experience. However, they also expose the complex reality of concepts that are taken for granted. Charges of fake news and the conspicuous anonymity of twitterbots – designed to influence debate and induce feelings of ambiguity – are clearly revealing new complexities in politics. But the added result of this is that distinctions between international/domestic as well as conceptions of ­diplomacy and foreign policy are revealed to be hollow. Things that were only recently ­relegated to the past – nuclear war, chemical assassination, political polarisation, nationalist movements spreading across democratic and non-democratic states alike, the threat of diminishing international laws and regimes, trade conflict, etc. – have returned to our daily awareness. The breathless belief in progress that marked the immediate post-Cold War environment has been replaced by a sweeping pessimism in many corners of the world. It has long become clear that triumphant pronouncements about a world defined by free mobility, limitless interconnection and communication and the erosion of political borders (see for example, Ohmae 1990) were inherently flawed. Such bold analyses have since been replaced by more cautious and precise accounts of global phenomena addressing ethnic conflict (Appadurai 2006), systemic change (Albrow 1996), global consciousness (Robertson 1992), world society (Boli 1997, Boli and Lechner 2001), the rise and influence of new media (Axford and Huggins 2001, Axford 2017), the role of networks (Castells 2000), the transformation of borders (Balibar 1998, Rumford 2012), to name a few examples. And yet, our current situation still feels somewhat unfamiliar. The final theme ‘Global Studies and Transdisciplinarity’ presents continued development in understanding the complex processes associated with globalisation and presents some discussion of the relevance of new concepts and approaches. As such, through these three sub-themes the perspective proffered by a political sociology of the cultural encounter, and the questions that it poses, can be viewed a vehicle for understanding our current environment.

Challenging boundaries in challenging times The study of borders and the normative claims made on behalf of cosmopolitanism exemplify the bigger picture presented above. What the cultural encounter encapsulates is the variability of human experience including the multiple expressions of cosmopolitanism, for example. Current events can be explored through this lens to great effect. Rather than depicting the current rise of nationalism as a rejection of globalisation or regionalisation this approach might suggest that it is merely one possible expression of our daily encounter with strangeness and uncertainty – products of glocal change. Thus, expressions of solidarity across national borders and rejections of integration and mobility are

6   Barrie Axford et al. equally ‘global’, rejecting the idea that interactions with the world naturally induce openness. Together, these two subjects lead us to rethink the nature of regional processes such as European integration. The EU can be considered as a possible signifier, or avenue, for global change. For example, for many it represents a uniquely cosmopolitan form of governance that can help us to reconcile traditional identities and growing global responsibilities. But this assumption should be treated with caution if only for the reason that the EU itself does not explicitly promote its own values as cosmopolitan. Thus, it is worth questioning whether any ‘cosmopolitan values’ emanating from the EU are unintended by-products or whether the EU is wary of weakening an already tenuous attachment to the project of European integration (Rumford 2007, 5). The changing nature of European integration and attitudes in European society in response to migration are worth considering in this light. With this in mind, cosmopolitanism and borders become intertwined and can suggest new ways of exploring political communities, whether national or beyond. The current political situation, and polarisation, has revealed the reality that within state borders multiple imaginings of the world exist. As our consciousness of global transformation opens up, so does the potential for both coexistence and conflict (Rumford 2007, 2–3). This understanding privileges the role of the imagination, memory and aesthetics. Moreover, these ideas cannot be separated from the investigation of borders, whose existence, along with perception of barriers to all kinds of mobility, can suggest potential sites of cosmopolitan encounters. Thus, the invitation to ‘see like a border’ (Rumford 2014) is a challenge to social science and its deeply imbued sense of disciplinarity as well as a challenge to reflect on the many ways of experiencing such phenomena. The challenge of group boundaries is also a methodological issue which draws our attention to the role that self-reflexivity plays in the research process. Examining the cultural encounter requires the researcher to be attune to the ways in which different categorisations including gender, national identity, race might affect interactions and influence the way in which research is conducted. Moreover, it is not sufficient to be aware of such categorisations. The invocation to occupy a liminal space is required within the research process in order to identify when such identities and categories become relevant and how their interrelation between them affects the salience of subjects under study.

A Political Sociology of the Cultural Encounter This book addresses many of the aforementioned issues directly but overall the goal is to classify some unifying features and to reflect on the appropriate means for understanding change. The thematic sections do this by orienting the discussion towards the evolution of individual and communal spaces and towards the impact of glocal change on experience. But in order to do this, the book also provides an opportunity to rethink some rudimentary assumptions that remain common in thinking about globalisation.

Introduction   7 As previously mentioned, there is a need for social science (as well as the popular imagination) to move beyond state-centrism and methodological ­nationalism. Recently there have been many works that attempt to overcome this limitation pushing variously global, cosmopolitan, transnational and glocal accounts of historical and contemporary affairs. The conceptual spread of these works is vast and continually expanding to the point where it is often unclear what they have in common aside from the desire to identify something that has been excluded from mainstream theories. Some of the most insightful theorisations of global and transnational processes have come from ‘lone wolf’ accounts that can be tricky to categorise and often harder to test empirically. Arjun ­Appadurai’s typology of ‘scapes’ is one such example of a highly influential and compelling model that has received relatively little empirical validation due to its complexity. Perhaps the most useful accounts of globalisation break the concept down into its multitude of constituent parts, making it possible to engage with surgical precision while keeping an eye of the general condition of the patient. Thus, examinations that contribute models of change (Meyer et al. 1997, Scholte 2000, O’Byrne and Hensby 2011) or that examine emergent forms of systemness and experience (Robertson 1990, Shaw 2000, Axford 2013) suggest different but similarly useful and challenging ways to study the impact of social, cultural, economic and political interactions. Following from this, globalisation is best thought of as a combination of interrelated changes that cluster around geographical, technological and conceptual zones (see Kacowicz 1999, 528). It is by virtue of our living within an established state-system that the field is overrun with attempts to claim, define and redefine the global in relation to the national; which is also why concepts of globalisation or the global can become repositories for things that are difficult to situate conceptually within a worldview dominated by the nation-state. These effects can be generally summed up in terms of ‘methodological nationalism’. The chapters in this volume challenge standard assumptions found in methodological nationalism by discarding the assumed distinction between national and global changes adding both theoretical scrutiny and empirical validation to transdisciplinary approaches. This book will contribute to debate over the nature of global political and social change and stir further debate about whether it is necessary to create a new field that can unify the variety of existing approaches. Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter is a platform for current work that is building towards a new global social theory. It explores the limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and objects. It also explores the potential of concepts such as ‘cultural encounters’ and ‘strangeness’ for understanding not only cosmopolitanism, borders, and Europe but also our privileged space of academic discussion. These critical concerns all reflect the need to challenge the boundaries of academic thought and propose potential avenues for doing so. Again, we can return to the concept of the cultural encounter which brings together the central concerns of this volume by allowing us to realise and study the creative work on border transgression and the opposing forces of inertia where culture is tested; in the

8   Barrie Axford et al. everyday encounters where cultures and identities are taken for granted and ­dismissed until shocked into the consciousness; and in the need to recognise the types of diversity that must be included in any attempt to negotiate common, global problems. The list of important issues are many, and vary depending on experience and location (social and geographical). This volume addresses only a small number of subjects, but presents a framework that can and should be taken forward to consider other pressing issues of our time including that of climate change and pandemics. This volume brings together scholars that share a common desire to understand these transformations, question implicit assumptions in mainstream scholarship, and generate new approaches that leverage the insights of different fields including Global and Transnational Studies, European Studies, International Relations, Postcolonial Studies, Border Studies, Literary Criticism, and others.

Synopsis The aim of this book is to show the benefits that have been accrued from ­transdisciplinary scholars who continue to push agendas and challenge the boundaries of traditional social scientific fields. The chapters in this volume are diverse in their approach and focus. However, they are united by a common belief that the study of major issues can benefit from a perspective that does not accept as a first assumption the limitations of established boundaries, whether conceptual, symbolic or material. Together, they point towards the conclusion that transdisciplinarity and multiperspectivalism should be at the core of sociological examination and that also means that those assumptions that have been built into distinct fields over time, including methodological nationalism, should also be treated with caution. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, ‘Encounters beyond borders’, uses borders as a central site to explore encounters, governance and cosmopolitan thinking. It discusses alternative concepts of borders by shifting the focus from state borders to people’s experience of borders. In a critique of this state focus in border studies, the idea of ‘multiperspectivalism’ is introduced, accompanied by a call for new border studies that look beyond states borders. The idea of ‘cosmopolitan borders’ opens the way to new approaches and introduces interesting new concepts such as the ‘cosmopolitan stranger’. The first section includes four chapters. The first chapter ‘What is a border comrade?’ by Olivier Thomas Kramsch explores the idea of borders as democratic encounters by discussing the concepts of ‘cosmopolitan borders’ and ‘seeing like a border’ focusing on ordinary citizens’ practices of bordering in their everyday lives rather than the pervasive, top-down, state-centric perspective on the social construction of borders in the mainstream border studies. Following this expanding notion of what the border is, where it can be found and how it may be experienced as well as researched, Anthony Cooper’s chapter – ‘Seeing from the border with Chris Rumford: towards cosmopolitan borders and

Introduction   9 a multiperspectival border studies’ highlights the need to think more ­critically about how to identify new approaches to bordering that are not by definition tied to states. Finally, Spiros Makris concludes the section with a chapter entitled ‘Politics of space, strangeness and culture in the global age’ which focuses on the concepts of cosmopolitan borders and strangeness. It introduces the idea of the cosmopolitan stranger which will be further explored in the following section. The second section, ‘Everyday encounters and strangeness’ examines the idea of global citizenship by blurring the lines between insider and outsider through alternative perspectives from the commoner and the migrant. In order to cross disciplinary borders, cultural borders are explored through artistic activities providing new views on people’s perception of borders and citizenship. Moving away from subjects to objects, as well as linking both with each other, the analysis of globalised everyday objects such as a ship-in-a-bottle pushes the idea of ‘one-world’ by looking at the notions of familiarity and strangeness within our global world. The second section begins with Nick Stevenson’s chapter – ‘The complex trajectories of the commoner: cosmopolitanism, localisation and nationalism’ – which puts forth a political imaginary that charts a new course for global solidarity and citizenship. The idea of the commoner in that context is offering an alternative to the nationalist politics of social democracy and right-wing populism and European cosmopolitanism that continue to dominate the present. Maria Rovisco’s chapter ‘Artistic encounters with difference, aesthetic cosmopolitanism and the political imagination’ discusses cultural borders by exploring how artistic activities of migrant and refugee artists generate new understandings of belonging and citizenship. Through the creation of cosmopolitan public culture, artists and audiences interact as citizens, regardless of their legal status leading to an aesthetic cosmopolitanism with new political imaginations. The sixth chapter, ‘The story of the ship-in-a-bottle: encountering strangeness and familiarity through a globalised object’, by Alison Hulme explores contemporary aesthetic practices and our relationship with everyday objects. The ship-in-a-bottle is used to explore the notions of strangeness and familiarity in our globalised world. The multiple experiences of globalisation associated with such an everyday, globalised object challenges the ‘one-world’ perspective. To conclude, Claudia Lueders’ chapter ‘Don’t look back in anger – a reflection on strangeness and borders in academia’ – further explores this sense of strangeness that stems from the challenges associated with interdisciplinarity. Despite the general request to engage in interdisciplinary work, there is a strong sense of strangeness within academia whenever one engages in interdisciplinary research. Highlighting the positive rather than negative aspects of strangeness it aims to encourage further interdisciplinary research, making a nice link to our final section. The third and final section of the book comprises five chapters that explore ‘Global studies and transdisciplinarity.’ This section explores challenges facing the study of globalisation and interdisciplinary approaches to understand

10   Barrie Axford et al. c­ ontemporary issues. It suggests an alternative reading of globalisation and aims to develop a framework that can accommodate multiple and varied uses of globalisation across the social scientific literature. It pushes academic boundaries by exploring cultural encounters, the link between religion and globalisation as well as the Anthropocene debate for social science and for cosmopolitan thought. The eighth chapter by Didem Buhari Gulmez and Seckin Baris Gulmez’s ‘Europe in crises: Europe's others and other Europes from a global perspective’ questions the assumption that either concept can be understood as a single centre of authority. Reducing globalisation and Europeanisation to merely unidirectional processes, realist power-centric accounts suggest that globalisation leads to a ‘borderless world’, even a ‘single place’ whereas Europeanisation is a ­counter-point to it in the sense that it creates a refuge for Europeans against the global flows. In contrast, this contribution promotes an alternative reading of globalisation and Europeanisation as mutually constitutive processes. Victor Roudometoff’s chapter ‘Globalisation: interactive and integral’ critiques the division of globalisation into distinct dimensions presenting an original conceptualisation of globalisation. It goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries by introducing and describing a distinction of globalisation into integral and interactive which is directly linked to a general or analytical conception of globalisation as involving the worldwide spread of practices, objects, blueprints and other facets of culture. It aims to develop a framework that can accommodate the multiple and varied uses of globalisation across the social scientific literature. The tenth chapter is Robert Holton’s ‘Cosmopolitan borders, strangeness, and inter-cultural encounters’ for renewing studies of global and local politics. It provides a critical commentary on prevailing discourses about cultural encounters. Attention is given to problematic understandings of both ‘culture’, and ‘encounter’. Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne’s chapter ‘Religion and globalising processes: an investigation into the relationship between religious practices and institutions and the complex historical forms of global social change’ establishes a framework for understanding the diverse ways in which globalising processes interact with religious phenomena. The academic study of globalisation has been closely connected to and reliant upon debates within the sociology of religion, particularly through the works of Robertson and Beyer, so it is important to test the relevance of this new approach for this particular field of study. The final chapter by Gerard Delanty ‘Challenges of Globalization and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Implications of the Anthropocene’ reflects on the significance of the geological concept of ‘Anthropocene’ for conceptualising a future cosmopolitics. The Anthropocene as a political condition resonates with cosmopolitical ideas, for example increasing biological diversity, the need for a global dialogue between the developed and developing world on reducing carbon emissions in ways that respect the desire of the nonwestern world to have a share in the benefits it has had until now. It explores the ramifications of the Anthropocene debate for social science and for cosmopolitan thought.

Introduction   11

Note 1 According to the United Nations, in 2018 55 per cent of the world’s population already lives in urban areas. By 2050, that number is expected to increase to 68 per cent.

References Alexander, J. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Albrow, M. 1996. The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory Culture and Society, 7: 295. Appadurai. A. 2006. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Axford, B. 2013. Theories of Globalization. Cambridge: Polity. Axford, B. 2017. The World-Making Power of New Media: Mere Connection? Abingdon: Routledge. Axford, B. and Huggins, R. 2001. New Media and Politics. London: Sage. Balibar, E. 1998. The Borders of Europe, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Beck, U. 2000. What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity. Boli, J. and Thomas, G.M. 1997. World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-governmental Organization. American Sociological Review, 62(2). Boli, J. and Lechner, F. 2005. World Culture: Origins and Consequences. Oxford: ­Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction. Abingdon: Routledge. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, M. 2000. End of Millennium, vol. 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Christiansen, L.B, Galal L.P., and Hvenegaard-Lassen, K. 2017. Organised Cultural Encounters: Interculturality and Transformative Practices. Journal of Intercultural Studies. 38(6): 599–605. Cohen, R. and Kennedy, P. 2012. Global Sociology. Houndmills: Macmillan Press. Cohen, R. and Sheringham, O. 2016. Encountering Difference. Cambridge: Polity. Dallmayr, F. 1996. Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter. Albany: SUNY Press. Delanty, G. 2011. Cultural diversity, Democracy and the Prospects of Cosmopolitanism: A Theory of Cultural Encounters. The British Journal of Sociology, 62(4): 633–56. Kacowicz, A. 1999. Regionalization, Globalization, and Nationalism: Convergent, Divergent, or Overlapping? Alternatives, 24: 527–56. Meyer, J. et al. 1997. World Society and the Nation-State. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1): 144–81. O’Byrne, D. and Hensby, A. 2011. Theorising Global Studies. Houndmills: Palgrave. Ohmae, K. 1990. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New York: Harper Business. Nederveen Pieterse, J.N. 1994. Globalization as Hybridisation. International Sociology, 9(2): 161–84.

12   Barrie Axford et al. Robertson, R. 1990. Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept. Theory, Culture and Society, 7: 15–30. Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Robertson, R. 1995. Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity in M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage. Rovisco, M. 2010. Reframing Europe and the global: conceptualizing the border in ­cultural encounters. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28: 1015–30. Rumford, C. 2007. Cosmopolitanism and Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rumford, C. 2012. Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders. Geopolitics, 17(4): 887–902. Rumford. C. 2014. Cosmopolitan Borders. Houndmills: Palgrave. Rumford. C. and Buhari Gulmez, D. 2014. European Multiplicity. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Scholte, J.A. 2000. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Houndsmill: Palgrave. Shaw, M. 2000. Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unfinished Revolution. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodward, I. 2007. Understanding Material Culture. London: Sage.

Part I

Encounters beyond borders

1 What is a border comrade? Olivier Thomas Kramsch

Death is the ultimate border. We who write for a living realise with the passing of a comrade that we write on the hither side of this border, approaching it ourselves on borrowed time. We, too, shall inevitably cross over it, onto the ‘other side’, into the vastness of that starry night. Appropriate to his all too short lifetime’s intellectual engagement, Chris crossed this border with grace and dignity, leaving behind a lasting legacy for the field of border studies (among many other disciplines he touched). This chapter does not mean to survey the entirety of Chris’s contribution to the border studies literature. It will, however, attempt to take stock of some of his major intellectual moves, setting them in dialogue with his contemporaries, the better to highlight the pioneering problems and issues he raised. Among those to be canvassed here are Chris’s embrace of the late twentieth-­century ‘spatial turn’ for the field of border studies; his drawing attention to the ‘changing consciousness’ and concomitant ‘cosmopolitanisation’ of borders resulting from the embodied experience of crossing borders as part of everyday life in Europe; his influential notion of ‘borderwork’, which re-oriented border studies’ scholarly gaze away from state-driven bordering practices to those of vernacular and bottom-up citizen initiatives producing not only local borders but those resonating over wide geopolitical terrains (i.e. ‘global borders’); and finally his late-career intuition regarding the need to develop a multiperspectival approach to borders, one which segued beyond the ‘territorial trap’ of state-centric thinking and legitimised a space from which to ‘see like a border’. Each of these moves, I argue, illuminate Chris’s ongoing curiosity towards the cultural encounter, framed in this case as a generous and worldly border-crossing encounter with the Other.

Jumping ‘the pond’ At a conference dinner I hosted in Nijmegen some years ago, the political scientist Malcolm Anderson asked me what I was doing ‘in this small pond’, by which I took him to mean the relatively small community of Continentally-based scholars studying European borders. The implication, which irked at the time, was that someone like me should be ‘out in the world’, presumably among les Anglo-Saxons, where the real action was to be found in border studies.

16   Oliver Thomas Kramsch If I may be permitted to hold fast to Anderson’s watery metaphor, Chris did swim out there in the big wide sea among the Anglos (but of course more than just the Anglos), and we can all be grateful for that. The width and depth of that sea allowed Chris a certain freedom and latitude of thought the significance of which some Continentally-based border scholars have yet to appreciate.1 Whereas by the mid-2000s some scholars were preaching ‘interdisciplinary ­dialogue’ (Newman, 2006a), for instance, Chris by then was doing so robustly, most notably in his important call to connect the study of borders to critical social theoretical debates relating to the consequences of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, networked community, mobilities and flows (Rumford, 2006: 155; Urry, 1999; Castells, 2000; Sassen, 2002). For Chris, border studies’ more active engagement with critical social theory held the promise of overcoming what he perceived to be a major conceptual impasse in the field, defined by an unproductive choice between a neoliberal, elite-driven ‘borderless world’ narrative resulting from the supposed disappearance of borders under the impact of heightened global flows, and a ‘world of borders’, increasingly prevalent in the wake of security concerns after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers and the hardening of borders worldwide in the subsequent ‘war on Terror’. Chris was far too much the gentleman to directly name the academic peddlers of what I have elsewhere called border studies’ ‘blackmail’ (Kramsch, 2010), one made all the more defensive and reactionary to the degree that it offers scholars no way out but to accept a world of heightened border controls, surveillance, compartmentalisation and a purification of social life marked starkly by relations of Us/Them (see especially now peripatetic Newman, 2006b; also Paasi, 2009; Wastl-Walter, 2011). Reaching out to critical social theory allowed Chris to break through the deeply conservative implications of this stalemate by arguing neither along the lines of a ‘borderless world’ scenario, nor from the vantage point of a world of heightened border closure, but from the perspective of those who cross and re-cross a world of multiplying borders. Furthermore, turning to social theory allowed him to clarify the uses of theory and theorisation in border studies more broadly. During a period when scholars have been agonising futilely over whether the field should or should not have a single, unifying theoretical framework (Paasi, 2011), Chris’s explicit turn to critical social theory allowed him to pose unabashedly normative questions about borders and the bordering dynamic, while injecting an implicit emancipatory agenda into a field traditionally hostile to such approaches.

Injecting the ‘spatial turn’ into border studies Such social theoretical moves were further enabled by three crucial insights, all established as vital research frontiers by the mid-2000s. Firstly, Chris was one of the first scholars to see the theoretical possibilities of the broadly defined ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences as a boon for a border studies still mesmerised by the ‘territorial trap’ of state-centric spatial thinking.2 Thus, drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Étienne Balibar and Ulrich Beck, Chris argued that our very

What is a border comrade?   17 understanding of space had to change in order to take account of the heightened pluralisation, fluidity and cosmopolitanisation of social life (and thus, borders), in the wake of 9/11 (Bauman, 2002; Balibar, 1998; Beck, 2004). Concretely, Chris perceived the changing spatiality of politics in the rise of supranational governance (i.e. the European Union), networks of global cities, and transnational diasporic communities, all signalling for him that bordering processes had achieved a ‘spatiality beyond territoriality’ (Rumford, 2006: 160).3 Chris called on border scholars to engage more fully with such a changing spatiality of politics as one pathway out of the dichotomising impasse of the borderless/ rebordered world debate, and saw the European Union as a privileged laboratory for working out the implications of this novel spatiality, thinking with and from its multidimensional ‘borderlands’.

Cosmopolitan borders Secondly, Chris drew attention to what he called the ‘changing consciousness of borders’ resulting from changing ‘state-society relations’ under conditions of globalisation (2006: 156, 162). Here, Chris observed that the full meaning of borders could not be exhausted by ‘lines on a map’ or the securitised boundaries characterised by security check-points and passport controls, but had to consider the extent to which ‘borders and the regular crossing of borders, have become part of our routine experience, particularly in Europe where borders proliferate … but where the importance of individual borders is in many cases very much reduced’ (2006: 156). Although we may quibble to what degree the experience of routine border crossing (at least in Europe) is still very much an activity within the purview of an elite Erasmus business class, Chris firmly embedded the experiential, embodied dimension of borders as a key variable in taking account of their transformation in the early millennium, echoing parallel calls for a border studies more attuned to the ‘lived spatiality’ of borders in everyday life (Kramsch and Hooper, 2004). For Chris, the perceived unmooring of society and nation-state and the concomitant freedom for citizens and social movements to connect with others located beyond the confines of state institutions offered the promise of cosmopolitanising world society ushered by accelerating mobility (Rumford, 2007; following Beck, 2004). The gradual cosmopolitanisation of national societies for Chris would have important implications for our understanding of borders, as it would trouble the complacent dichotomies of inside/ outside, us/them, national/international characteristic of mainstream approaches in border studies (Rumford, 2008a; see also Kramsch, 2002). The elegant ruse of Chris’s conceptualisation of ‘cosmopolitan borders’ was that it did not presuppose the eradication of borders but their exuberant proliferation: Borders and mobilities are not antithetical. A globalizing world is a world of networks, flows and mobility; it is also a world of borders. It can be argued that cosmopolitanism is best understood as an orientation to the world which entails the constant negotiation and crossing of borders. A cosmopolitan is

18   Oliver Thomas Kramsch not only a citizen of the world, someone who embraces multiculturalism, or even a ‘frequent flyer’. A cosmopolitan lives in and across borders. (Rumford, 2006: 163)

Borderwork Thirdly, by posing the provocative questions ‘who borders?’ and ‘where are borders?’, Chris helped shift attention from border studies’ fixation on the state as primary bordering agent to a range of civil society actors operating at both supraand sub-state levels. Whether by producing the dramatic downfall of the Berlin Wall, the more prosaic creation of ‘gated communities’ or lobbying for the creation of a new national border police in the United Kingdom, Chris argued that the ‘borderwork’ of ordinary citizens, as well as states, have the power to border and deborder space (Rumford, 2006, 2008b). Although in conversation I gently chided Chris for a moral ambivalence inherent in the concept of ‘borderwork’ – in my view the term embraced both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of bordering, i.e. both repressive and emancipatory – it would arguably become Chris’s most powerful intervention, with the most enduring legacy for our field. The term would go on to influence a range of work addressing both the actions of states bordering their ­territories and the counter-movements of citizens seeking to overcome the repressive border regimes entailed by state actions (Paasi and Prokkola, 2008; Bialasiewicz, 2011; Johnson et al., 2011; Topak, 2014; Varró, 2016). Moreover, where some leading border scholars argue that the complexity of state borders as locatable objects of research draws on the fact that the meanings attributed to such borders are ‘inward-oriented’ and thereby closely linked to the ideological apparatus of the state (Paasi, 2011: 14), Chris asserted otherwise that some borders – most paradigmatically the Cold War Iron Curtain separating East from West, but more recently borders such as the Mediterranean or Ukraine –, in addition to expressing national territoriality also have a global resonance, hence constituting ‘global borders’ (Rumford, 2010; following Balibar, 1998). For Chris the study of global borders held the promise of refocusing the attention of border studies on the non-state, vernacular and ‘bottom up’ dimension of boundary producing practices (see also Perkins and Rumford, 2013); exploring borders ‘buried’ by nation-state borders, notably during colonialism; and reconceptualising borders as sites of encounter and connectivity, rather than only of division, purification, and death (Kramsch, 2010a).

Seeing like a border A final gift: building on his observation of almost a decade earlier regarding the ‘changing consciousness of borders’, towards the end of his life Chris argued that to move the field of border studies beyond the territorial trap of state-centric thinking it needed to embrace a ‘multiperspectival’ approach (2012). Drafting alongside a contemporaneous observation of mine regarding the ‘hidden’ quality of global borders during European overseas imperialism (Kramsch, 2012), Chris

What is a border comrade?   19 asserted that a multiperspectival border studies must dispense both with the idea of consensus on what a relevant border is as well as the notion that borders are all equally visible to all parties concerned (Rumford, 2012: 891–2). Inspired by Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledge’ (1991), Chris argued that moving beyond an Aristotelian ‘high point’ in studying societal transformation would allow the field of border studies to open up to a much larger range of actors and events involved in bordering processes, thereby proffering an enlarged variety of perspectives. Indeed, Chris went so far as to argue that rather than ‘seeing like a state’ (the traditional perspective of border studies), a multiperspectival border studies could invite us to ‘see like a border’ (Rumford, 2012: 896). Tantalisingly underdeveloped in Chris’s late work, the notion of ‘seeing like a border’ held the promise of dovetailing with postcolonial border studies scholarship, an emergent body of work seeking to grasp European bordering practices from an assertively subaltern perspective (Mignolo, 2000; Davison and Muppidi, 2009; Bhambra, 2009; Anderson et al., 2015; Aparna et al., in press). Yet despite this potential convergence, Chris maintained a curious political quietism in widening critical border studies’ perspectival lens. Chris claimed that the goal of a multiperspectival border studies is ‘not to occupy the ‘standpoint of the subjugated’, which is but one perspective’ (2012: 894). When offering examples of ‘seeing like a border’, his cases almost all involve everyday acts of border reinforcement, ‘the project of those seeking to gain further advantage in society: entrepreneurs or affluent citizens, for example. Why remain passive in the face of other peoples’ borders when you can obtain advantage by becoming a proactive borderer?’ (2012: 897). Whence this political reticence? What invisible border prevented Chris from crossing the line into a much more robustly normative stance, thus fulfilling border studies’ critical potential?

Coda: uncorking the spatial genie In sum, by offering us a much more nuanced, differentiated and creatively imagined view of borders, Chris created a space for our generation of border scholars to break out of the shackles of a number of unproductive binaries that continue to impoverish our field, i.e. borderless/rebordered-securitised worlds; borders of comfort/alienation; Us/Them. Most interestingly, while lamenting the lack of attention of mainstream border studies to the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory, he may have unwittingly hit upon the reason for this lacuna in an almost throwaway observation from the mid-2000s: The spatial turn has encouraged us to look to space first, and borders second … [It] may work to subordinate borders to spaces, as if the former were somehow dependent upon a prior spatial ordering. (Rumford, 2006: 166) Chris’s entire subsequent life’s work was dedicated to proving that intuition wrong. Pace determined efforts to continue policing the boundaries of the field

20   Oliver Thomas Kramsch so that it does not become contaminated by critical spatial thinking, borders are intricately bound up with an expansive view of socio-spatial life. Once the spatial genie is out of the bottle, she cannot be corked back into it so easily again. We can all be grateful to Chris, a true border comrade,4 for having uncorked that wine and sharing it so generously with us.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Tony Cooper for inviting me to contribute to this Festschrift volume, as well as to the wise editorial guidance of an anonymous reviewer. A shout out to the Radboud Postcolonial Reading Group, whose members, perhaps without knowing it, keep the embers of the ‘spatial turn’ alive in the Netherlands and in Continental Europe.

Notes 1 How else to read Anssi Paasi’s recent and puzzling conflation of the burgeoning field of border studies with international ‘academic capitalism’? Linking the efflorescence of border scholarship in the English language with the heightened international scientific competition between states, Paasi avers the paradox that, as he sees it, ‘such a tendency towards internationalization and border crossings is based on academic nationalism’ (2011: 12). Implicit in Paasi’s ‘paradox’ is the charge that border studies scholarship’s engagement with social theory’s critical problematisation of borders is an expression of an English-language nationalist (US? UK? Australasian?) drive for hegemony over Continental European border scholarship. More troubling still, yoking English-language scholarship concerned with boundary transcending narratives (as evinced in Chris’s work on cross-border, networked, or cosmopolitan borders) to capitalist production norms resonates all too uneasily with early-twentieth century Continental European ideologies associating minority groups who did not ‘fit’ into the hardening nationalist mold(s) – Jews, Gypsies, Roma, ex-colonial émigrés, homosexuals, dissident thinkers – with global capitalist conspiracies. In an early twenty-first century of rising nationalist populisms across the depth and breadth of Europe, we should remain wary of such juxtapositions. 2 To be accurate, Chris refers to ‘a new spatiality of politics’ when discussing this social theoretical shift (2006: 156). I take this call, however, to be in thorough alignment with the ‘spatial turn’ Barbara Hooper and I introduced into the field of border studies two years earlier, drawing loosely on the postmodern geographical framework of the so-called LA School (Kramsch and Hooper, 2004; see also Kramsch, 2011). Although Chris never directly cited our volume, I think he sensed that critical spatial awareness in my work, which is why we got on so well, both personally as well as professionally. 3 Inspired by our shared LA School experience, Barbara Hooper and I would define the late-twentieth century ‘spatial turn’ differently, drawing our lexicon from the ‘postmodern’ socio-spatial struggles of communities of colour in California and the broader American Southwest (i.e. progressive White working class, Black postmodern feminism, Chicana Lesbian activism). We would nevertheless join hands with Chris’s understanding of borders ‘beyond territoriality’ to the degree that we embrace a spatial praxis that seeks to overcome the binary thinking characteristic of modernity, i.e. us/them, Black/ White, straight/gay, auguring what Barbara Hooper and Ed Soja called a ‘new cultural politics’ (Soja, 1996: 83–105).

What is a border comrade?   21 4 This may be the appropriate moment to mention Chris’s incredibly dry, British wit, which I always enjoyed. A brief anecdote will suffice. Driving together onto the grounds of Royal Holloway some years ago en route to our conference venue, Chris and I passed the Royal Holloway Geography department. Looking over at their windows, a gleam in his eye and the faintest of smiles, he remarked: ‘Of course I don’t expect any of them [to attend the conference]. They’re all busy being “excellent” .’ That was Chris Rumford: ironic but not blasé, and on sure ground.

References Anderson, D.J., Kramsch, O., and Sandberg, M. (2015) ‘Inverting the telescope on borders that matter: conversations in Café Europa’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 23, 4, 459–76. Aparna, K., Mahamed, Z., Deenen, I., and Kramsch, O. (in press) ‘Lost Europe(s)’, ­Etnografia and Ricerca Qualitativa. Balibar, E. (1998) ‘The borders of Europe’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Z. (2002) Society under siege. Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (2004) ‘The cosmopolitan dimension’, in N. Gane, (ed.) Rethinking social theory. London: Continuum. Bhambra, G. (2009) ‘Postcolonial Europe, or understanding Europe in times of the postcolonial’, in Chris Rumford (ed.) The Sage handbook of European Studies. London: Sage, pp. 69–85. Bialasiewicz, L. (2011) ‘Borders above all?’ Political Geography, 30, 6, 299–300. Castells, M. (2000) End of millennium, vol. 3: the information age: economy, society and culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Davison, A. and Muppidi, H. (eds) (2009) Europe and its boundaries: words and worlds, within and beyond. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Haraway, D. (1991) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, in Donna Haraway, Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. Johnson, C., Jones, R., Paasi, A., Amoore, L., Mountz, A., Salter, M., and Rumford, C. (2011) ‘Interventions on rethinking “the border” in border studies’, Political Geography, 30, 2, 61–9. Kramsch, O. (2002) ‘Navigating the spaces of Kantian reason: notes on cosmopolitical governance within the cross-border euregios of the European Union’, Geopolitics, 6, 2, 27–50. Kramsch, O. (2010) ‘The Rabelaisian border’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 28, 6, 1000–14. Kramsch, O. (2011) ‘Negotiating the “spatial turn” in European cross-border governance: notes on a research agenda’, Geopolitica(s), 2, 2, 185–207. Kramsch, O. (2012) ‘ “Swarming” at the frontiers of France, 1870–1885’, in Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds.) The Blackwell companion to border studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 230–48. Kramsch, O. and Hooper, B. (2004) Cross-border governance in the European Union. London and New York: Routledge. Mignolo, W.D. (2000) Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22   Oliver Thomas Kramsch Newman, D. (2006a) ‘Borders and bordering: towards an interdisciplinary dialogue’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9, 2, 171–86. Newman, D. (2006b) ‘The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our ‘borderless’ world’, Progress in Human Geography, 30, 2, 143–61. Paasi, A. (2009) ‘Bounded spaces in a “borderless world”: border studies, power and the anatomy of territory’, Journal of Power, 2, 2, 213–34. Paasi, A. (2011) ‘A border theory: an unattainable dream or a realistic aim for border scholars?’ in Doris Wastl-Walter (ed.) The Ashgate research companion to border studies. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 11–31. Paasi, A. and Prokkola, E.-K. (2008) ‘Territorial dynamics, cross-border work and everyday life in the Finnish–Swedish border’, Space and Polity, 12, 1, 13–29. Perkins, C. and Rumford, C. (2013) ‘The politics of (un)fixity and the vernacularisation of borders’, Global Society, 27, 3, 267–82. Rumford, C. (2006) ‘Introduction: theorizing borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9, 2, 155–69. Rumford, C. (2007) ‘Does Europe have cosmopolitan borders?’ Globalizations, 4, 3, 327–39. Rumford, C. (2008a) Cosmopolitan spaces: Europe, globalization, theory. Abingdon: Routledge. Rumford, C. (2008b) ‘Introduction: citizens and borderwork in Europe’, Space and Polity, 12, 1, 1–12. Rumford, C. (2010) ‘Guest editorial – global borders: introduction to the special issue’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 951–56. Rumford, C. (2012) ‘Towards a multiperspectival study of borders’, Geopolitics, 17, 887–902. Sassen, S. (ed.) (2002) Global networks, linked cities. London: Routledge. Soja, E.W. (1996) Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell. Topak, O.E. (2014) ‘The biopolitical border in practice: surveillance and death at the Greece-Turkey borderzones’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 5, 815–33. Urry, J. (1999) Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century. London: Routledge. Varró, K. (2016) ‘Recognising the emerging transnational spaces and subjectivities of cross-border cooperation: towards a research agenda’, Geopolitics, 21, 1, 171–94. Wastl-Walter, D. (2011) ‘Introduction’, in Doris Wastl-Walter (ed.) The Ashgate research companion to border studies. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 1–8.

2 Seeing from the border with Chris Rumford Towards cosmopolitan borders and a multiperspectival border studies Anthony Cooper […] a particularly interesting thing about borders in the contemporary context is that they are often constructed in new ways, in a variety of locations, by diverse types of people. This means that looking afresh at some basic what, where and who questions is an important part of the Critical Border Studies agenda. Chris Rumford (2012: 887–8)

For a long time, terms such as borders, territory, security and sovereignty (and so on) were traditionally assumed to be empirical bedfellows and any mainstream analysis of the relationship between them would ‘naturally’ focus on the geographical edges of nation-states. Borders were easily locatable and their function easily definable as they were mostly observed as visible instruments of division constructed by, and between, nation-states. Over the past 20 years, however, a defining factor across the border studies literature has been the shift away from borders as territorial dividing lines to interpreting borders as sociocultural practices, experiences, and discourses – a focus on bordering (and more recently borderscaping). This general ‘processual-turn’ was important because it allowed scholars to focus on differentiation across space (Brambilla, 2015), recasting borders as spaces in their own right rather than ‘lines in the sand’ (the borderland being a prominent example). It also opened up a wider disciplinary space for border studies that was arguably more encouraging of new perspectives and interdisciplinary (non-human geography) research, particularly critical social theory (Sohn, 2015; see also Newman, 2006a, 2006b). Chris Rumford was at the forefront of encouraging this disciplinary expansion as well as embracing the spatiality of borders as a fundamental approach to studying them (see also Olivier Kramsch in this volume). He argued for a multidisciplinary border studies as a way of exploring the inherent multiplicity and multidimensional nature of borders. Drawing upon his expertise in political sociology he was able to utilise his wider interests in (critical) cosmopolitanism (political and cultural) globalisation and European studies in order to interrogate dominant debates taking place across border studies. To this end, even though the afore mentioned processual turn had taken hold, Chris’s principal bugbear was the continued subject wide preoccupation with borders of the state and the

24   Anthony Cooper inertia that this encouraged, namely the assumption that meaningful borders only exist at the political edges of a nation-state (Rumford, 2006, 2008b, 2010, 2012, 2014). It was this general annoyance that arguably galvanised Chris to produce an impressive portfolio of work on the topic of borders that, in different ways, stressed the need to look at the changing nature, form and function of ­bordering in a globalising world that often remain buried by dominant state-centric narratives and histories (see Rumford, 2010). There are several important and overlapping arguments put forward by Chris that resonate across the literature and critically discussing each one in detail would far exceed the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, the aim is to look at Chris’s final contribution to the subject literature – namely ‘multiperspectivalism’ – that in doing so also logically takes into account and nicely frames the evolution of his prior thinking on borders (particularly cosmopolitan borders). The call for a multiperspectival border studies is at its core the fundamental acknowledgement that bordering cannot be understood from a single dominant vantage point. In other words, bordering can be interpreted from many different perspectives (Rumford, 2012), hence Chris’s call to ‘see like a border’ (to be discussed in due course). Evoking the quote at the beginning of the chapter, a multiperspectival and cosmopolitan border studies re-visits some basic questions as well as asking some novel new ones: do borders need mutual recognition to exist and function (must a border be visible to all)? What constitutes a border in the first place? Where are important borders to be found (and why)? Who borders, how and for what reasons? When ‘seeing like a state’, these questions seem basic and almost irrelevant given the ready-made orthodox answers that would be given. When ‘seeing like a border’, however, such questions become powerfully heterodox. Borders become messy and not so easily observable or understandable but in doing so they shed their unproductive binary logics and territorial veneer. The aim of this chapter is to show the critical/theoretical utility of a multiperspectival approach to the study of borders and to argue that it is particularly useful for analysing the inherent multiplicity of borders without reducing their complexity or disregarding their specificity to place. In other words, it constitutes a framework, it is argued, within which borders can be analysed without being reduced to a singular, overly simplified or coincidental relevant aspect, which typically amounts to binary mechanisms of connection/division, inclusion/exclusion, networks/security and so on (Sohn, 2015: 3; Rumford, 2006, 2012, 2014). The chapter further argues that some borders can represent what Chris called ‘cosmopolitan workshops’ not only because they provide vantage points from which novel cosmopolitan activity can be observed (Rumford, 2014: 21) but also because they are no longer the sole project of the state (a fundamental aspect of what Chris termed ‘borderwork’). The conceptual ideas of ‘seeing like a border’ and ‘borders as cosmopolitan workshops’ heavily inform my own (multiperspectival) approach to studying borders and a general aim is to show why they are particularly useful to contemporary border studies. To which end, the chapter will proceed as follows. The next section outlines and frames Chris’s approach to, and position within, border studies broadly put and details his

Towards cosmopolitan borders   25 d­ issatisfaction with the state-centred security/mobility (re-bordering) agenda. Born out of this dissatisfaction the following two sections examine his specific contributions in more detail with particular focus on his discussion of global borders and cosmopolitan borders (borders as cosmopolitan workshops). The final section discusses how Chris’s previous ideas cumulated in his call for a multiperspectival border studies and outlines why such an approach is particularly well placed to better understand the complexity and multidimensional nature of bordering.

Theorising borders The sub-heading of this first section proper – ‘Theorising borders’ – is also the title of Chris Rumford’s first intervention into the border studies literature. Tellingly published as the introduction to his own special issue on the topic of borders in the European Journal of Social Theory, it systematically outlines his initial thinking that would resonate across his later work. From the outset Chris is concerned with the changing nature as well as our changing consciousness of borders under conditions of contemporary globalisation, particularly expressed in terms of the routine experiences of borders by ‘ordinary people’ (Rumford, 2006). He argued that there is a need to seriously ‘think about borders in ways which take us beyond the logic of open versus closed, or security versus network’ (Rumford, 2006: 159). He argued that to do so involved recognising the importance of new political spaces beyond the territorial state – ‘spatiality beyond territoriality’ – such as ‘public spheres, cosmopolitan communities, global civil societies, non-proximate or virtual communities, and transnational or global networks’ (Rumford, 2006: 160). And, progressing this logic further, he argued that the assumed relationship between state and society is changing under conditions of globalisation that has fundamental implications for borders and their assumed relationship to state territoriality. Across all of his work Chris highlighted and critically drew upon three ­particular aspects of multidisciplinary literature on borders that, each in their own way, dispensed with the traditional state ‘edge-like’ and tessellating function of borders, while at the same time emphasising the importance of border process and spatiality. The first was Étienne Balibar’s (2002, 2004) idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ (what Balibar termed heterogeneity) and the recognition that borders may be found at multiple locations throughout society. Anssi Passi (2011) has usefully summed up the overlapping manifold logic of this observation: on the one hand, it can mean the ways in which the national border is narratively reproduced throughout national communities, which Paasi (1996) himself has so clearly shown, not simply in terms of fences and watchtowers but also via textual constructs such as monuments, songs, maps and national curriculums and so on (see also Struver, 2004). On the other hand, attention has been drawn to the ways in which state borders function to regulate and manage mobility wherever it is deemed to be required (Balibar 2002), evoking metaphors such as ‘firewalls’ (Walters, 2006) and ‘asymmetric membranes’ (Hedetoft, 2003),

26   Anthony Cooper serving to visualise the dynamic in which borders disproportionately channel usually inward but increasingly outward flows of people and things. This has been particularly framed by the shift from geopolitics to biopolitics (Amoore, 2006), which places emphasis on the securitisation of everyday life whereby some borders arguably become as mobile as the mobilities they are employed to govern (see Cooper and Perkins, 2014). This latter form of mobility in relation to borders provides a good example of border transformation and has arguably coalesced around the post 9–11 (re-bordering) security agenda. The second is the idea that borders mean different things to different people and act differently upon different groups, what Balibar (2002, 2004) also termed border ‘polysemy’. Depending on the individual or group, any given border can be seen and interpreted in different ways. A wall – to give a traditional example – may be protective, oppressive, a site of artistic and/or political expression, or an economic resource. The diversity of actors, in everyday life, contribute to the ways in which borders are created, shifted and transformed, and ultimately ­perceived and experienced. Chris also focused on border polysemy in relation to ‘asymmetric membranes’ mentioned above, as well as Durrschmidt and Taylor’s (2007: 56) observation that borders function to ‘control mobility rather than territory’. The control of mobility and the subsequent mobility of borders and how people experience them has become a rich focal point for border studies. This bordering does not necessarily resemble the usual paraphernalia that is commonly associated with securitised state borders – the fences, checkpoints and guards and so on – but is rather more subversive, surveillance oriented and less visible depending upon who you are and (framed in relation to who you are) what you are doing. This generates ‘exceptional spaces’ (see Salter, 2008; Vaughan-Williams, 2009; Jones, 2012) but also contested meanings about the border, particularly in relation to what borders should and should not do (see Cooper and Perkins, 2012, 2012). The third influential component of the literature is a general focus on borderlands, which empirically highlighted the conceptual shift from lines to the spatiality of borders. The very idea of borders-as-lands educes often disciplinary specific discussions pertaining to cross-border regions, frontiers and transition regions, within and across which contact, encounter, and qualified cooperation can (or potentially can) take place. The interest in globalisation has arguably increased the interest in borderlands of one form or another particularly in relation to the economic intensification of different competing regions across borders as well as areas of political and economic competition between neighbouring states that share a border. Yet Chris was particularly drawn to van Schendel’s study of the Bengali border regions. Van Schendel argued that the study of borderlands should be less state centric because they are spaces of interest in their own right, regardless of the level of ‘neighbourliness’ (however defined) between states. For van Schendel (2005: 46), borderlands are spaces that should be better understood as ‘dynamic sites of transnational reconfiguration’ – not limits (or limited) – they are systems of complex social and cultural relations that straddle international borders. Via the everyday life practices and experiences of those residing within

Towards cosmopolitan borders   27 the (Bengali) borderland – particularly their ability to take part in clandestine cross-border activity that state level institutions struggle to prevent – borderlanders can possess the capacity to restructure and rescale away from the state level, what van Schendel (2005: 55) calls ‘everyday transnationality’. This ‘scale jumping’ amounts to people being able to construct and inhabit their own scale of importance to suit their own purposes, an ability that is made possible because of the spatiality of the border as well as what Chris would later describe as ‘seeing like a border’ (see Rumford, 2011). Although Chris utilised different aspects of the literature as theoretical resources to generate and frame his own emerging ideas, he was dissatisfied with the general state/mobility/security research agenda. An overt focus on mobility, he alluded, led to a disciplinary immobility regarding the study of borders. Taking the three aspects of the literature just discussed above, for example, Chris argued that idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ may challenge the conventional mapping of borders as territorial edges, yet for Chris, any move towards the study of ‘diffused’ borders is partially offset by a post-9/11 preoccupation with securitisation and surveillance. For all the discussion on territorial complexity and transformation under conditions of heightened mobility, connectivity and interaction, it nevertheless remains a competition between ‘spaces of flows’ and ‘spaces of place’, ambiguously framed by a globalisation more often than not defined in terms of continual debordering and re-bordering. Likewise, the nature of borderlands – the intensity of the interactions within them – depends to large degree on the nature of the relationship between the neighbouring states and the subsequent type (and porosity) of boundary separating/­ connecting them, with the level of cooperation within the borderland being determined accordingly (see, for example, Martinez, 1994; Kolossov and Mironenko, 2001). They are spaces for sure, powerfully moulded in relation to geopolitics, political ideology, competing/complementing market forces and the normative phantasm of the positive and transformative power of global capital but they still amount to traditional borders. Borderlands are defined by and in relation to neighbouring states and accompanying geographic proximity. They are, in one way or another, wholly framed by the state territorial border. To this end, the following two overlapping sections outline the way in which Chris moved away from state territoriality.

Global borders (borders and globalisation) As noted, theorising the changing nature of borders necessarily takes into account their wider relationship to processes of globalisation (and vice versa). Previous thinking about globalisation – often narrowly cast in terms of the increasing physical movement of communications, goods, finances, and people across territorial borders (with added normative thrust) – assumed it would lead to a geopolitically borderless world. Empirically, however, this has obviously not been the case and such thinking has long since fallen by the academic wayside. Political and territorial borders have proved to be more stubborn in the

28   Anthony Cooper ‘global’ age. A heightened post 9–11 security landscape, alongside the increased awareness of global interconnectivity (broadly put), has fuelled the demand for more and better borders (Rumford, 2010). Global processes that were once seen to be detrimental to borders have arguably provided the catalyst for their transformation in the form of juxtaposed borders, biometric (e)borders and offshore borders to name but a few examples. In this regard, borders are becoming as mobile as the people and things crossing them (Cooper and Perkins, 2014; Vaughan-Williams, 2009) and the idea that borders are everywhere by definition acknowledges the impact of globalisation on borders (Rumford, 2010). To capture the dynamic relationship between the changing nature of borders and processes commonly attributed to globalisation Chris put forward the concept of ‘global borders’. In doing so it would form an important conceptual/ theoretical steppingstone towards his multiperspectival border studies. Ironically, given that borders were often seen as secondary to global processes and general international relations, Chris thought that globalisation thinking was often somewhat undercooked when broadly applied to the study of contemporary borders. Two examples exemplify this. First, Balibar (2002:  79) argued that borders can represent more than state demarcation and have the potential to create separations and categorisations between people on a global level, what he termed ‘overdetermination’. Balibar (2010: 316) phenomenologically sums up thus: [B]orders are never purely local institutions, never reducible to a simple history of conflicts and agreements between neighbouring powers and groups, which would concern only them, bilaterally, but in fact are always already ‘global’, a way of dividing the world itself into regions, therefore places, therefore a way of configuring the world or making it ‘representable’ as the history of maps and mapping techniques testifies. The Berlin Wall was a typical example of an overdetermined border because it came to symbolise ideological division that was also experienced thousands of miles away from its physical locale. In similar fashion the USA/Mexico border has been described as a ‘hyper border’ (Romero, 2008). For Chris, however, the world should not be taken as an easily definable – and therefore dividable – whole but rather globalisation should be examined in terms of its impact upon all borders (Rumford, 2010). This is not to say that Balibar’s contribution is not useful, on the contrary, but rather that it is much more nuanced to study global borders by taking into account in equal measure both parts of the term: the global and borders. This also applies to the next example. Second, recent emphasis on security has coalesced around mobility not only in terms of those who are supposedly crossing borders but also in relation to the mobility of borders themselves. In this regard an increasingly important function of contemporary state bordering has been to simultaneously facilitate and therefore privilege access for some while denying access to others, a function that has arguably helped to catalyse the increasing diffusion – and messiness – of borders

Towards cosmopolitan borders   29 throughout society well away from traditional entry points and territorial peripheries. For many observers this dispersed bordering amounts to the ‘joining-up’ of more traditional and visible ‘checkpoints’ present at airports, train stations, and ferry terminals with less visible ‘networked’ borders spanning university campuses, major transport routes and supermarket checkouts (Rumford, 2008b; see also Walters, 2006), wherever surveillance is practised and databases can be mined for information (Amoore and de Goede, 2008). Characteristic of this dispersed and messy bordering, particularly as framed by the shift from geopolitics to biopolitics, is the securitisation of everyday life and the ways in which a ‘culture of surveillance’ is arguably becoming a defining feature of contemporary society (and bordering). Lyon and Bauman hold that the idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ is a product of ‘the database’, itself one major outcome of everyday securitisation (Bauman and Lyon, 2013). Yet, for Chris, it would be a mistake to posit too firm a link between databases and the advent of diffuse borders. For one thing, the reliance upon ‘informatisation’ – the reduction of self to data – suggests a technological determinism which places the world in thrall to networks and mobilities in such a way as to oversimplify (and over-technologise) the dynamics of contemporary globalisation. The idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ is very much a product of the cosmopolitanisation of borders (discussed in the next section), especially the ways in which a range of political actors, including but not limited to the nation-state, can utilise borders and bordering as a political resource and mechanisms of connectivity. Here, globalisation is not reduced to what Bude and Durrschmidt (2010) have called ‘flow speak’. On the contrary, increased awareness of global connectivity has arguably fuelled the demand for more sophisticated borders replacing or complementing older ones. Yet for the multiplicity of securitised and surveillance-oriented bordering, Chris (2010: 953) argued that: The dichotomous border (us/them, inside/outside) is too simplistic. As well as marking boundaries and divisions, borders are also the site of encounters and connectivity. Studying global borders represents an opportunity to connect, as well as divide, the world. In this sense, considerations of global borders opens up border studies to new challenges, new approaches, and new core issues. Chris wanted to place emphasis on the spatiality of overlapping but different lived experiences rather than the empirically erroneous binary oppositions often enforced by territorially institutionalised power (see Kramsch, 2010: 1012). The study of global borders – taking into equal account the global and borders – requires us to think about the relationship between the local and the global via a focus on lived experiences. In this vein, Robertson’s idea of ‘glocalisation’, for example, is a key resource to understand global borders because it magnifies local constructions and transformations of social relations in relation to borders rather than simple extensions of social relations across borders (Rumford, 2010; Cooper, 2018). Global borders places emphasis on connectivity and encounter

30   Anthony Cooper (between the local and the global) but in ways that connect the non-proximate, that is, the construction of local borders and/or the local experiences of borders can act as reference points that bring together localities that would not otherwise communicate (Cooper and Rumford, 2011). Likewise, a focus on global borders suggests taking into account local experiences of different types of border and borderer that are not simply borders of the state or the state as primary borderer. In this sense, global borders are also cosmopolitan borders and vice versa.

Bordering and connectivity: border spaces as cosmopolitan workshops Like globalisation, cosmopolitanism has traditionally been discussed in relation to the ability of cosmopolitans to easily cross borders and, as such, the idea of cosmopolitan borders is something of a contradiction in terms. For Chris, the key to understanding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and borders – a relationship where a focus on the former often ignores the importance of the latter – is to understand the changing nature of borders. Framing borders as cosmopolitan highlights how borders are rapidly changing ‘in terms of their nature, their function, their location and their ownership’ (Rumford, 2014: 2). To this end, rather than equating cosmopolitanism to ‘world openness’ (for an elite few), cosmopolitanism for Chris concerned ‘the possibility of connectivity under conditions where globalisation closes in on us and restricts our options, the border being a prime site for such “cosmopolitan encounters”’ (Rumford, 2014: 2). Referring back to Balibar, Chris placed emphasis on two of his important contributions as key components of cosmopolitan borders: the heterogeneous and polysemic nature of borders, where the former implies that borders are becoming diffuse throughout society, and the latter asserts that borders mean different things to different people. Chris’s cosmopolitanism implies not a borderless world but a proliferation of borders, of which some can become political and spatial resources, providing cosmopolitan opportunities in a world where moments of openness are not as forthcoming as the traditional would-be cosmopolitan would expect. On this reading, the idea of cosmopolitan opportunities refers to the potential global and non-proximate connectivity of individuals through cultural encounters at and via the border (Rumford, 2012; Rumford and Cooper, 2019). Borders are cosmopolitan workshops in the way that borders are central to the study of political and social transformations and can therefore change the way we think about and study cosmopolitanism. There are three important aspects to cosmopolitan borders (and borders as cosmopolitan workshops) that Chris formulated and built upon in order to express how borders could have cosmopolitan qualities. First, Chris theoretically underpinned cosmopolitan borders via a critical reading of Ulrich Beck (for a more in-depth account of this see Rumford, 2012b, 2014; Rumford and Cooper, 2019). Of principal interest, in the first instance, was Beck’s assertion that borders are best thought of as ‘mobile patterns that

Towards cosmopolitan borders   31 facilitate overlapping loyalties’, something that seems counter intuitive to the idea that borders function to divide (particularly in the context of Europe). Thinking in this way, however, acknowledges that borders are not simply crossed by some enhanced mobility but are themselves mobile across society, wherever they are needed or discursively constructed. Overlapping loyalties implies that relations between self, community and the world are shifting, thus blurring the binary distinction between us/them and inside/outside that methodological nationalism would hitherto or commonly imply. Importantly, it is (cosmopolitan) borders that facilitate overlapping loyalties, in Chris’s (2012b:) own words: Borders do not impose order on an inchoate collection of shifting loyalties. Borders are not a solution to the problem of overlapping loyalties (as they perhaps would be thought to be from a nationalistic perspective). It can be inferred that without borders there would be no overlapping loyalties: borders cause the overlap. Cosmopolitanism causes us to be positioned in such a way that we fall within the orbit of many communities but are not necessarily committed to any of them. Traditional hierarchical loyalties are not set in stone and people choose the basis of their loyalty rather than, by definition, have it imposed upon them. Borders facilitate connectivity allowing individuals to connect to other ­collectives that would otherwise be distant. Beck also talked about a ­‘plauralisation of borders’, which also resonated with Chris because Beck is referring to the multitude of different borders – cultural, economic, political and so on – that may or may not map onto the borders of the nation-state. For Beck (2002: 19), cosmopolitanism (defined as globalisation from within) asserts that borders are not predetermined but can be chosen and as such be continually redrawn and legitimated. The pluralisation and mobility of borders ‘points to a multiplicity of possible cultural encounters (in a wide variety of border locations), and a variety of resulting cosmopolitan opportunities’ (Rumford, 2012b: 252). Second, one of the implications of cosmopolitan bordering is that it designates a new landscape of bordering activity whereby citizens, entrepreneurs, and ‘civil society’ actors (amongst others) can engage in tangible bordering activity, what Chris would separately and importantly call ‘borderwork’ (see Rumford, 2007, 2008b, 2010, 2012). He argued that ‘borderwork is less and less something over which people have no control (Rumford, 2008b). For Chris, borderwork is not necessarily the sole business of the nation-state or conducted at its edges or traditional places of securitisation but can rather be found at a range of sites throughout society: in towns and cities, in local neighbourhoods, in the countryside, sites that would not be visible when using more conventional approaches to studying borders. Moreover, borderwork does not necessarily result in borders that enhance national security, but it provides borderworkers with new political and/or economic opportunities: borders work to strenghten

32   Anthony Cooper some people while disempowering others. The importance of borderwork is that it causes scholars to rethink the issue of who is responsible for making, dismantling and shifting borders, rather than rely upon the assumption that this is exclusively the business of the state. Third, Chris also emphasised the spatial qualities of cosmopolitan borders, particularly building upon (and returning to) van Schendels’s borderlands. The everyday transnationality of the borderlanders comes about because of their ability to construct internal cognitive maps whereby they can both envisage and situate themselves across multiple scales of which the state is only one. An example of this put forward by van Schendel include an Indian government ­official accompanying his pregnant wife to her parents’ home in Bangladesh, in doing so flouting the citizenship laws of both countries by utilising individual family networks spanning multiple borders. Another example refers to arms smugglers who use the pronoun ‘we’ to simultaneously refer to other cross-­ border smugglers, religions and fellow citizens (that would not all cooperate in other contexts). This resonated with Chris because, on such a logic, borders become ‘engines of connectivity’ – and not only to what is geographically ­proximate – producing cultural encounters and negotiations of difference in ­relation to changing social relations (Rumford, 2014).

Studying borders differently: a multiperspectival border studies This final section packages the ideas of global borders and cosmopolitan borders into a multiperspectival approach to border studies. In its simplest iteration border multiperspectivalism implies that a multiplicity of perspectives on borders that now exist, which is taken from the idea that social relations cannot be viewed from a privileged vantage point – Haraway’s (1991) ‘situated knowledge’. The implication is that it is no longer possible to only ‘see like a state’ in respect of borders and any attempt to do so will fail to capture the full range of bordering activity being conducted at any one time. In other words, a magisterial viewpoint is neither possible nor desirable. This multiperspectival approach nicely packages Chris’s earlier arguments and discussions pertaining to cosmopolitan and global borders but, in doing so, it also builds on them and offers some important new perspectives and theoretical directions. Chris underlined several key components of border multiperspectivalism, with borderwork (and therefore border cosmopolitanism and connectivity) being centrally placed. Borderwork, for example, implies multiperspectivalism (Rumford, 2012) because it offers a framework for understanding the contemporary transformation of borders and is centrally concerned with the diffuse nature of borders and the multiplicity of actors involved. Although borderwork and its cosmopolitan framing is arguably Chris’s most referenced work to date within the border studies literature, it can be argued that there are particular aspects of his multiperspectival agenda that are equally if not more novel and thought provoking, namely border consensus and border visibility.

Towards cosmopolitan borders   33 Van Schendel (2005: 41) argued that ‘a border that is not visible for all is a border that has failed its purpose’, which arguably represents an accepted truism within most work published on the topic of borders. Chris argued, however, that borders are not always visible to all, thereby going against this deeply entrenched and uncritically accepted position in border studies. This principal argument was at the heart of his multiperspectival approach and would retrospectively provide nuanced conceptual framing for his earlier work. As Chris (2012: 891–2) alluded: In the contemporary context far less consensus exists on what constitutes a border, where borders are to be found, or which borders are the most important. This is partly because we are no longer constrained to inhabit particular world views within which the symbolic meaning of borders are organised as ‘givens’. It is also partly because important borders are no longer only nation-state borders […]. When we take seriously the idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ we must dispense with the assumption that consensus must exist […]. Borders can be highly selective and work so as to render them invisible to the majority of the population, who do not recognise the border as a border, or for whom no such border is deemed to exist. Chris provided numerous different examples of this lack of consensus throughout his work. For example, in the UK context, those less visible surveillanceoriented borders constantly requiring movement are increasingly inhabiting what Chris (2008: 639) has called ‘spaces of wonder’, particularly juxtaposed borders overseas. Their low visibility marks them out as different, untrustworthy and ineffectual – not border-like at all – prompting the construction of traditional, fixed, and more visible border forms to compensate. These ‘spaces of wonder’, in other words, become domesticated and familiarised (Rumford 2008). The more governments opt for less visible border options the more they feel the need to instigate traditional, more familiar and increasingly visible borders in equally familiar places demanded by the public. The ‘visible’ border becomes an act of display by the state aimed at the public ‘audience’ (de Lint, 2008). Writing together, we provided examples where borders can be even more bespoke, narrowly cast and non-state’, such as Melton Mowbray, a small English town whereby residents successfully applied for the creation of a Protective Geographical Indication (PGI). This means that only foodstuffs produced from within a strictly designated area could use the name Melton Mowbray, a development which had serious financial implication for producers that were effectively bordered out. The point is that borderworkers constructed tangible borders that are not imposed by the state in top down fashion. In this regard, although the interested parties within the town initially had to follow official application procedures laid down by the state and the EU, it was still the borderworkers of Melton Mowbray that constructed (made legitimate) the border (and indeed continue to maintain it). Therefore, rather than being visible to all, borders should be seen as a political resource which can be mobilised by some

34   Anthony Cooper against others and where these borders might be deployed is not easy to predict. In my own work (at the time of writing), I am looking at the ways in which the Irish border has been potentially utilised and activated as a conflicting resource by different stakeholders – different policy makers, local activists, and identity groups – to examine how the border is being made more or less visible/­ prominent for their own ends. Using Chris’s multiperspectival tool box, I am focusing on the how the Irish border is being made discursively (in)visible to different people, in different ways and in different places. Making the border (in)visible in this way, I argue, is also an example of bordework. The point is that an overview (or a complete picture) of bordering activity at any given time will be almost impossible to establish. This is the most significant sense in which the border can be said to be messy: there is no longer a societal vantage point or privileged position from which we can reliably know where all borders are to be found, what forms they take, and who is involved in maintaining them (Rumford, 2008). Put another way, borders take so many forms, are constituted by such diverse practices, and are influenced by so many people that the very idea of the border lacks coherence. Bordering practices are many and various and do not aggregate together to form a seamless whole. Bauder (2011: 1132) has also identified this as a key issue, and he too draws attention to the wide range of ‘uses of a border and border practices’. Moreover, he takes the view that ‘various aspects of the border represent meanings and material practices that cannot be unified into a stable and coherent concept’. Chris’s work, cumulating in his call for a multiperspectival border studies, stresses the need to be aware of the sheer multiplicity of practices and functions connected to ever changing border processes under conditions of globalisation. The question is how to study this multiplicity of borders and border practices within a mutiperspectival border studies. Chris perhaps never fulfilled the empirical potential of his mutiperspectival approach and framing with many previous examples given to borderwork and border cosmopolitanism. Indeed, his subsequent work led him away from dealing with borders directly to examining the globalisation of strangeness. Olivier Kramsch (in this volume) is right to point out that, for all the focus on non-state actors, border connectivity and cultural encounters, many of the examples given by Chris concern acts of re-bordering and border construction. Chris (2012a: 897) argues, for example, that ‘there is no guarantee that borders constructed will be recognised by everyone’. Yet, the capacity to ‘see like a border’ means to take every aspect into account, that is, ‘seeing like a border’ means taking into account perspectives from those at, on, or shaping the border, and this constituency is increasingly large and diverse’ (Rumford, 2012: 897). Therefore, following Sohn (2015: 8), the aim of investigating the inherent multiplicity of borders should be to locate and examine the relations between heterogeneous components of any given border in terms of their connection, interaction and coherence with each other, thus avoiding privileging one aspect over the other and presenting as all defining – what Sohn (2015: 3, 2016), aware of Chris’s approach, has very usefully termed a ‘border synecdoche’.

Towards cosmopolitan borders   35

Conclusion Chris Rumford was interested in theorising borders without recourse to producing overarching, universal or privileged narratives. He posited that borders are messy, multiple and not easily or readily observable or understandable despite simplistic assumptions strategies and geopolitical dichotomies between a borderless inside and an excluded outside (see Andersen, Klatt, and Sandberg, 2012). Utilising discussion within critical social theory, and linking bordering to cosmopolitanism and political and cultural globalisation, allowed Chris to push an agenda for border studies that pressed the need to look at the nature, form and function of bordering that often remains buried by dominant state centric narratives (Rumford, 2010). His principal grievances revolved around what he considered to be a subject wide preoccupation with state borders and the disciplinary status quo (stagnation) that this encouraged. He took issue with the state/security/ mobility agenda, which he argued failed to take into account the simultaneous multiplicity of border locations, functions and meanings and the relationships between them. He argued that the role of citizens in bordering activity remains largely the same in the border studies imagination and shifted the direction of focus to an exploration of the ways in which ordinary people (citizens) can contribute to the ‘messyness’ of borders. Importantly, he argued that there is a pressing need to identify new meanings of the border not fundamentally tied to the state. These grievances would cumulate with his call for a multiperspectival border studies. Accordingly, this chapter examined Chris’s contribution to border studies. Embedding Chris’s thinking on borders within his wider social theory/global studies approach, the chapter predominantly discussed the critical potential of multiperspectivalism as a theoretical approach to studying all borders. It argued that such an approach will have lasting value and influence because it challenges core assumptions and meanings – or seeing like a state as Chris put it – but also because it fundamentally asks us to (re)think epistemologically about what borders are and by definition how they might be experienced (or not). For example, to add and to end with more questions, is it necessary for borders to be recognised as borders for all concerned or seen in the same way? Do borders have to be recognised as divisionary by all concerned? Can borders be treated as objects of study in their own right while still affording central importance to social, cultural and political transformations? A multiperspectival border studies – a border studies done differently (Rumford, 2012) – not only allows such nonstate centric questions to be asked but also provides the theoretical foundations strong enough to build complex approaches to answer them. Ultimately, many excellent research papers and general approaches to studying borders have emerged that attempt to capture the hidden multiplicity and lived experiences that are being made invisible by dominant (elite driven) narratives, capturing the variations of borders in space and time; perhaps most notably the interrogation of the ‘border multiple’ (Andersen, Klatt, and Sandberg, 2012), the critical potential of the ‘border assemblage’ (Sohn, 2016) and the recent call to move

36   Anthony Cooper from bordering to borderscaping (Brambilla, 2015). This all sounds like a multiperspectival approach and it could be argued that, within border studies at least, Chris did indeed get his cosmopolitan border in first and the study of borders is much better and much more productive for that.

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38   Anthony Cooper Struver, A. 2004. Everyone creates one’s own borders: the Dutch-German borderland as representation. Geopolitics, 9(3): 627–48. Van Schendel, W. 2005. How borderlands, illicit flows, and territorial states interlock. In Van Schendel, W. and Abraham, I. (Eds), Illicit flows and criminal things: states, borders, and the other side of globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vaughan-Williams, N. 2009. Border politics: the limits of sovereign power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Walters, W. 2006. Border/control. Europe Journal of Social Theory, 9(2): 187–203.

3 Politics of space, strangeness, and culture in the Global Age Spiros Makris

Critical cosmopolitanism in the light of postmodern social theory This chapter will argue that Chris Rumford’s ideas on critical cosmopolitanism are not just a mere social theory on the globalisation phenomenon and its very critical impacts, especially in the West-European context (Rumford, 2000: 74–122), but, first and foremost, a postmodern-inspired approach on a politics of space, borders and strangeness in the twenty-first century. In this specific sense, his work, as a theoretical and empirical whole, in particular since the mid-2000s onwards, has a prophetic character, to the extent that he has already predicted and analysed in-depth most of refugee, migrant and terrorism crises of our days. Unquestionably, his most prominent and influential book on the grand theories of Cosmopolitanism and Globalisation Studies is ‘Cosmopolitan Spaces’, where he defines and specifies in detail the main points of critical or non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism (Rumford, 2008: 111). Actually, as far as this chapter is concerned, Rumford’s critical cosmopolitanism is a significant postmodern-driven reformulation of the current dominant globalisation theory as ‘a strong vision of the singularity of the world’ (Rumford, 2008: 1). Instead of this conventional modern approach, he displays Europe, the West, and the globe as well through a totally postmodern-like perspective, where the political and social spectrum is constituted by a multiplicity of worlds or, in other words, by multiple modernities (Rumford, 2008: 111–12). So, it could be argued, in Chantal Mouffe’s similar terms, that ‘modernity should therefore be conceived as an open-ended horizon with space for multiple interpretations’ (Mouffe, 2013: 35). In this vein, if Chris Rumford complements postmodern approach of globalisation in a very specific way, which is the working hypothesis of this chapter, it could be said that his account of critical cosmopolitanism draws our attention to a differentiated globe, West, or Europe, especially in the case of European Union (EU), full of a multiplicity of spaces, borders, perspectives, and mainly a plentiful variety of cosmopolitan strangers. To put the matter in a different way, critical cosmopolitanism is defined as a politics of space. The state borders are either places of humane meetings or cultural encounters; or spaces of refugees’ mobility; or immigrants’ passing from one country to another; or even a crucial

40   Spiros Makris point for imported terrorism and criminality, which are always being under construction and re-construction. By summarising thus far, we could argue that Chris Rumford’s critical cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, should be understood as a postmodern-like politics of space, which, in pure Foucauldian terms, sharply problematises the methodological nationalism; on the other hand, it brings to the fore some critical postmodern theoretical and empirical aspects or potentialities of the ongoing bordering and re-bordering process around the world in the Global Age, mostly in Europe and particularly in EU (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 120–36), which chiefly designate a paradigmatic shift of modern social sciences’ analytical categories, paving the way to a new genre of Cosmopolitan and Globalisation Studies. So, critical cosmopolitanism, he points out, ‘can provide us with the requisite conceptual “toolbox” with which to understand the novel spaces and borders emerging in Europe’ (Rumford, 2008: 1). Paraphrasing Rumford, it could be argued that from this postmodern-driven standpoint, his critical cosmopolitanism seems like ‘‘a cosmopolitanism worthy of the name’’ (Rumford, 2008: 2). In fact, this approach leaves aside the doctrine of ‘one-worldism’ in the field of Globalisation Studies and brings attention to a new perspective, where the global or the European borderland is ‘open itself to a multiplicity of worlds which are possible’ (Rumford, 2008). In Derridean terms, this multiplicity of worlds ‘to come’ is an experience of the possibility of the impossible, in the sense that this postmodern-inspired non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism could be perceived as a deconstruction of the modern forms of borders and spaces in general. As far as strangeness is concerned, it ‘exposes us to what may arrive or happen’ beyond the obvious ontological, historical or cultural horizon (Wortham, 2010: 144). By posing methodological cosmopolitanism versus methodological nationalism, Rumford helps us reconsider the relationship among individuals, states, Europe (mainly EU), globalisation, and cosmopolitanism in the Global Age (Rumford, 2016: 37). No doubt, this ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in Globalisation Studies indicates a strong academic interest with regard to the ‘changing relationships between individuals, their communities, and the world’ (Rumford, 2008: 5). Unlike both methodological nationalism and Kantian cosmopolitanism (Makris, 2015: 177–94), this postmodern-driven cosmopolitanism, as a politics of space, borders, and strangeness, is concerned with the new spatial and/or ontological dimensions of global politics, which, in Rumford’s viewpoint, ‘presumes no “natural” political spaces’ or ‘does not come with a ready-made spatial scale attached’ (Rumford, 2008: 5). It is worth noting that Rumford chooses to illustrate this new global and European, spatial and ontological, multiplicity using the figurative metaphor of ‘levels’: Selves/individuals, communities/others and worlds/spaces (Rumford, 2008: 15). Although Bauman’s particularl style metaphor could be seen as a venture to reduce complexity of Global Age (Bauman, 2014: 86–8), finally, it must be perceived as a method to display it and especially its ambivalences and potentialities in a proper theoretical and academic manner. Hence, this postmoderninspired approach shows us that the new global (or European) relation of individuals, communities and worlds constitutes a fluid, open-ended and contingent

Politics in the global age   41 terrain of ontological and social spatiality. Methodological cosmopolitanism looks like a polysemic threshold, where spaces and borders are unstoppably changed meaning and strangers are situated in a state of relativity and/or relationality, crossing and re-crossing different ontological, territorial and institutional regimes. Each moment of our everyday life, each one of us is simultaneously positioned as an insider/outsider; or an individual/collective identity; or a local/ global entity. Insofar as the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ is conceived as a ‘spatial turn’, politics of space approach sheds light on a multiplicity of new ontological and spatial beings. In Cornelius Castoriadis’ terminology, spatial and border-like aspects of the world turn into a vast range of novel ontological and social imaginaries and encounters (Castoriadis, 1998: 115). Rumford’s postmodern-inspired critical cosmopolitanism could be seen, at the same time, as a Baumanian sociological narrative of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000: 91). This means that both essentialism and relativism are cast aside for the sake of a new form of creative sociological imagination, where ontological, discursive and spatial multiplicity dominates (Blackshaw, 2005: 49). Ambivalence, contingency, openness, and even unpredictability of spatiality, borders, and strangeness make the world seem polymorphic and heterocosmic, i.e. multi-faced, differential and heteronomic. One world is no longer enough. Hence, whatever means for someone globalised humanity is for another the realisation of risk society (Beck, 2009: 19). World in the Global Age is appeared, imagined, constructed and re-constructed in so many perspectives. The world is made and re-made without an Archimedean point of reference (Blackshaw, 2005: 46). This radical heterocosmic imaginary allows us not only to interpret but to change the world (Marx and Engels, 1998: 574), by giving it a constructive and subjective multi-form. Plurality of worlds means diversity of spaces, entities and meanings (Rumford, 2008: 144). If this new sociological imagination is the self-reflection of a completely heterocosmic world, then critical ­cosmopolitanism, as Rumford underlines, ‘requires us all to negotiate our relationships to the communities we live in (or live in proximity to), our relationships to others, how these communities are bordered and bounded (or not), and how we move between them’ (Rumford, 2008: 14). Furthermore, in postmodern terms, this heterocosmic cosmopolitanism must be seen as a theory of performative activity, where every ontological or spatial entity stems from a deconstructive and discursive praxis of negotiation, deliberation and imagination (Butler and Spivak, 2007: 26). Especially, the metaphor of ‘levels’, in the specific sense it has been defined above, brings to focus the heterocosmic imagination as a radical vision about multiplicity of the world. The world is constructed and re-constructed through many potentialities which coexist. Everyone sees its own world vision. However, cosmopolitan imaginaries are not idealistic or arbitrary desires. As we have seen, they are open-ended and liquid spaces of interconnections and interactions between different actors and agencies (strangers, states, borders), where the meaning of the world is plural, contingent and ambivalent. The world is not the outcome of a deterministic necessity. Actually, the world is not one, but a multiplicity of world visions,

42   Spiros Makris which are produced through struggles of inclusion and/or exclusion; or in the form of antagonistic negotiations, narrations, and imaginary confrontations. The only steady social or performative fact is that the world that one imagines is just one of the very possible (or impossible) worlds in the future. To the extent that cosmopolitan imagination, as a never-ending world making and re-making procedure, ‘is not necessarily linked to globalization, and certainly cannot be reduced to it’, Rumford argues that ‘the world can exist independently of any processes of globalization’ (Rumford, 2008: 150). Summarising thus far, it could be claimed that contrary to the modern cosmopolitanism, within which globalisation is conceived as an obvious reality (Rumford, 2014: 5–12), critical or postmodern-inspired cosmopolitanism is concerned with a multiple world. This means that there is not a vantage point to see the world as a solid entity and therefore there is not a way to imagine the world as a single universe. Cosmopolitan imaginaries signify the existence of many worlds. Nevertheless, as Rumford states throughout his work, this does not mean that the world in the Global Age is either unlimited or easily accessible. By adopting the Roehampton School’s approach on globalisation, he argues that ‘the global can “press down” on individuals constraining their global opportunities and thereby engendering the conditions within which […] strangeness emerges’ (Rumford, 2016: 79). In fact, he claims that borders are not, by definition, open to everybody. In a Derridean view, heterocosmic imagination brings to light different worlds full of hos(ti)pitality (Derrida, 2000: 3–18; Makris, 2017: 1–21). It can be said that modern cosmopolitan realism and postmoderndriven cosmopolitanism promote two different ways of imagining the world: ‘In the case of the former the world is interconnected, systemic, unified, singular. In the case of the latter, it is possible to imagine a plurality of worlds which are multiple, simultaneous, and perspectival, and their construction can become a site of political contestation’ (Rumford, 2008: 150). In his seminal book ‘Cosmopolitan Spaces’, Rumford defines critical cosmopolitanism as a paramorphoscopic sociology, which mainly ‘prioritizes the study of worlds which exist in addition to the one given to us’ by the globalisation theorists of the ‘oneworldism’ (Rumford, 2008: 155).

Borderwork and the ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ thesis Cosmopolitan borders ‘‘are more and more assuming the characteristics of spaces’’ (Rumford, 2008: 53; Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 26). In fact, both cosmopolitan borders and cosmopolitan strangers constitute the two basic forms of postmodern-like imagination or paramorphoscopic sociology. In the beginning of 2010s, Rumford published two important books on these new spatial and ontological aspects of Global Age’s cosmopolitanism (Rumford, 2014; Rumford, 2016), which along with his treatise on ‘Cosmopolitan Spaces’ compose a groundbreaking theoretical and epistemological trilogy in current literature on Globalisation and Cosmopolitan Studies (Rumford, 2014: 4). Rumford’s ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ thesis is at the epicentre of his account of cosmopolitan

Politics in the global age   43 borders. Actually, it brings to the fore the paradoxical phenomenon of ‘global closure’. In doing so, this thesis shows methodological cosmopolitanism as a procedure of liberation, connectivity and sociality. So, cosmopolitanism allows for the possibility of breaking out of the constraints imposed by this experience of globalization, by creating ‘room of manoeuvre’ in what are experienced as the closed spaces of globalization […] cosmopolitanism can be thought of as a political strategy which drawn upon resources of the imagination in order to constitute an alternative social connection between previously unconnected individuals. On this reading cosmopolitanism is not a social reality or existing state of affairs, rather it is product of subjective experience and the need to open up new possibilities for human sociality. (Rumford, 2014: 8) The cosmopolitan paradox or ‘global closure’ thesis helps us creatively challenge the naive assumption that both globalisation and cosmopolitanism are equated with world openness. This account of modern cosmopolitanism is simplistic and normative (Rumford, 2014: 9; Makris, 2015: 177–94). By contrast, the cosmopolitan borders approach sheds light on a multiplicity of spaces and borders beyond national state control (Makris, 2018: 87–107), which are defined by Rumford as the locus classicus of bordering and re-bordering of the world, i.e. an agonistic activity signified by the notion of ‘borderwork’. The more the globalisation closes up our options for connectivity and sociality the more cosmopolitan borders become the prime space for cosmopolitan encounters. As an ‘engine of connectivity’, states Rumford, ‘borderwork’ shifts ‘the focus towards the role of ordinary people in making, shifting and removing borders’ (Rumford, 2014: 2–3). Thus, against the simplistic view of cosmopolitan realism that the world is singular, unified and accessible without conditions, the cosmopolitan paradox thesis brings to the forefront a plurality of worlds full of borders and exclusions (Rumford, 2014: 2). Cosmopolitan borders are thresholds within which the ‘cosmopolitan moment’ takes place. In Rumford’s terms, cosmopolitanism looks like a ‘fleeting glimpse’; i.e. a spectral entity. So, cosmopolitanism is not a factual reality, which must be taken for granted. It is like an event; a ‘messianicity without messianism. Thus it must be that event is also introduced as impossible or that its possibility be threatened’ (Derrida, 2006: 227, 2005: 92). Its existence, stresses Rumford, ‘is indicative that societies are characterized by fragmentation, transformation and multiplicity’ (Rumford, 2014: 10). ‘Borderwork’, as a procedure of a fragmented and contingent world, full of cosmopolitan spaces and cosmopolitan strangers, could be seen as a ‘pluri-stepworld-threshold’, where cosmopolitan moments take place first and foremost as heterocosmic performances. In this vein, everything is possible and at the same moment contingent, risky, and also impossible. The ‘global closure’ triggers an entire explosion of subjective imaginaries and visions of world connectivity and sociality, that transforms politics of space, borders, and strangeness into a

44   Spiros Makris p­ aramorphoscopic kaleidoscope of actions and re-actions of a globe ‘to come’. Consequently, cosmopolitanism in the Global Age is not a conventional, diplomatic or inter-state, reality but, as Delanty and Rumford stress, it is a reflexive stance towards individual and collective identity, and importantly, a positive embrace of the values of the Other. Cosmopolitanism includes an engagement with difference […] is alert to the importance of contestation […] in a pluralistic society and understands the positive value of agonistic democracy […] thus enables the expression of sympathies and emotions associated with close-knit communities while simultaneously promoting the cool distancing associated with encounters with strangers or action-at-a-distance. (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 194) Rumford turns everything we know about globalisation and cosmopolitanism upside down. The globalised world is the realization of a ‘global closure’ (Rumford, 2014: 8). Cosmopolitan openness is nothing but a Kantian illusion (Makris, 2015: 177–94). So, ontologically speaking, if there is a real world out there, this is a multi-faced world, full of borders and exclusions. It is noteworthy to point out that this is not a pessimistic world image as it happens in the most of the cases of the mainstream postmodern social theory (Baudrillard, 1997: 159). On the contrary, it is an optimistic view of a totally globalised world, which changes faces without predetermined patterns. Furthermore, it is a world whose inhabitants passionately seek, each moment of the time (in the sense of the ‘cosmopolitan moment’), the messianic event of cosmopolitan encounter. Although, Rumford argues, this ‘brave new world’ in the Global Age constructs and re-constructs walls as a ‘teichopolitics’ of surveillance, cosmopolitan strangers are looking for new spaces of human connectivity and sociality (Rumford, 2014: 11). Therefore, being both Hobbesian and Lockean, this postmodern-inspired critical cosmopolitanism reveals a world image full of thresholds and mainly cosmopolitan strangers who try to draw their heterocosmic or even paramorphoscopic visions in the map of globality. Hence, it could be strongly claimed that Rumford’s critical cosmopolitanism is an innovative and heuristic postmodern-driven theory and method of social constructivism within the broader disciplinary area of Globalisation and Cosmopolitan Studies (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 12). Without doubt, by following his footsteps, it would be alternatively defined as cosmopolitan ‘Border Studies’ (Rumford, 2014: 2). Rumford poses the cosmopolitan paradox (or borderwork) thesis at the heart of the contemporary discussion on cosmopolitanism (Rumford, 2014: 91). As early as the end of the 2000s, when he published his seminal treatise about cosmopolitan spaces, he drew our attention close to the phenomenon of ‘borderwork’ as a daily performance and imagination of ordinary people (Rumford, 2008: 52). To the extent that, as we have seen above, the world is constituted via a proliferation of borders, critical cosmopolitanism is concerned with the ability of individuals

Politics in the global age   45 to cross and re-cross spaces (Rumford, 2008: 53). Rumford has formulated a theory of cosmopolitan borders within which it takes place a shift from a high to a low level ‘borderwork’. This crucial shift from the borders as sovereign ‘sand lines’ to bordering as a complicated and sophisticated process is but the epistemological transfer ‘from a study of the borders of the state to a study of societal borders’ (Rumford, 2014: 18). By stating that borders are everywhere, e.g. ‘at railway stations, at airports, in internet cafes, along motorways, and throughout city-centers and shopping malls’ (Rumford, 2008: 52), he reflects a shift in emphasis from the modern question of borders as the political edges of a nation-state to the postmodern-driven question of cosmopolitan borders as a ‘supermarket checkout’ effect. ‘The supermarket checkout’, Rumford underlines, ‘now resembles a border-crossing or transit point where personal possessions, goods and identities are routinely scrutinised […] The supermarket checkout has come to resemble a border; a border in the midst of society’ (Rumford, 2014: 13). Although, it could be plausible to talk about a ‘frisk society’, at the same time it has become obvious that this paradox thesis does not connote a state security borderland. In contrast, it indicates a vernacularisation of borderwork. On the one hand, this signifies the weakening of the association between borders and states and on the other, the democratisation of cosmopolitanism insofar as the ‘cosmopolitan moment’ is experienced by ordinary people in their daily lives. According to Rumford, ‘borderwork is the sine qua non of cosmopolitan borders: bordering which is devised and driven by state security concerns can never be cosmopolitan’ (Rumford, 2014: 89). Experiencing cosmopolitan encounters, citizens democratize cosmopolitanism anew and loosen ‘the association between privileged elites and cosmopolitan actorhood’ (Rumford, 2014: 90). Therefore, if we seriously take for granted the ‘cosmopolitan paradox thesis’ as a metaphor of ‘levels’; or a heterocosmic imagination; or even a paramorphoscopic sociology, it is as if we recognize that ‘borders mean different things to different people and act differently on different groups: borders are designed to separate and filter’ (Rumford, 2014: 14). In a postmodern-like and especially Derridean terminology, it could be argued thus far that cosmopolitan borders are polysemic spaces, within which cosmopolitan strangers are incarnated as spectral and hauntological entities, i.e. ‘borderwork’ must be seen, first and foremost, as a process of spatial and ontological mutation (Makris, 2017: 1–21). So, bordering is ‘a dynamic and open process rather than stable system and is characterised by disjuncture, flow and uncertainty rather than “older images of order, stability, and systematicness” ’ (Rumford, 2014: 90).

Strangeness and the ‘cosmopolitan stranger’ thesis In Rumford’s trilogy, politics of space is gradually transformed into politics of strangeness. This is a very crucial phenomenological shift in his theoretical ­analysis on cosmopolitanism in the Global Age. ‘If globalization makes and ­re-makes the world’, he stresses, ‘it makes the world increasingly strange’ (Rumford, 2008: 70). Needless to say the cosmopolitan stranger is perceived as

46   Spiros Makris a new sociological figure, which is situated at the heart of his critical cosmopo­ litanism project (Rumford, 2016: 119). However, as it has already been analysed, Rumford’s cosmopolitanism is a postmodern-inspired and mainly a post-­foundational onto-topology of spaces/strangers (Marchart, 2007: 1–10; Makris, 2017b: 739–40). Neither a realistic nor a metaphysical foundation fulfils the world’s meaning anymore. His social ontology turns the conventional ‘politics of fear’ into a postmodern-like theory of ‘spaces of wonder’, where borders and strangers are open-ended heterocosmic procedures. To put it another way, strangers and spaces ‘are produced and therefore also reproduced’ via a kaleidoscopic and paramorphoscopic imagination (Rumford, 2008: 72). He outlines this new and paradoxical sociological figure as follows: Cosmopolitanism is likely to appear only under conditions in which identities are partially fixed and there is no firm barrier between […] inside/ outside, self/other, individual/group. Moreover, there is no perspective from which we can view ‘cosmopolitan reality’ […]. Cosmopolitanism is best thought as an escape from permanence and solidity. A ‘cosmopolitan moment’ would be fatally undermined by an attempt to make it more ­permanent […] It is a feature of the cosmopolitan stranger that s/he may advocate new forms of sociality. (Rumford, 2015: 111) As a contemporary Janus, the cosmopolitan stranger is double-faced. On the one hand, s/he ‘is a key figure for understanding the dynamics of societal change’. On the other hand, s/he ‘reveals some interesting […] aspects of contemporary thinking about cosmopolitanism’ itself (Rumford, 2016: 116, 124). ‘Cosmopolitan stranger thesis’ sheds further light on the metaphor of ‘levels’. ‘In fact’, Rumford writes, ‘thinking about the stranger alerts us to a potential problem in the self, other, world triad’ (Rumford, 2016: 112). Expressed in a Derridean way, critical cosmopolitanism could be perceived as a deconstruction of modern binaries, e.g. inside/outside, us/them, self/other, friend/enemy and so forth (Rumford, 2016: 78). However, as we have seen, this postmodern-like deconstruction does not signify the creation of a more open and safe world. This is a romantic, simplistic and naive view of Global Age. In fact, deconstructive openness, that ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ indicates, is a double-edged sword, because, despite the fact that it reveals many social and political opportunities, at the same time it causes a sense of disorientation by increasing strangeness to all levels: self, community, world. Thus, critical cosmopolitanism could be understood as a ‘form of cultural experience which appears in the changing relations between individuals, their communities, and the world’ (Rumford, 2016: 114–16). The characteristic of spectrality and hauntology of the cosmopolitan stranger, who looks like a ‘fleeting glimpse’, could be clearly illustrated by Rumford’s favourite maxim that cosmopolitan stranger is ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ (Rumford, 2016: 121). Whether the cosmopolitan stranger has an individual or a societal face, it could be argued that it functions as a Derridean spectral, explicitly digital-like in

Politics in the global age   47 the Computer Age, which ‘has the potential to connect people with distant others, who betokens new forms of social solidarity, and who can manoeuvre in the restricted spaces caused by the social and political compression of the Global Age’ (Rumford, 2016: 121; Albrow, 1996). The cosmopolitan stranger gives the impression of a new social agent who works like a passe-partout. To cut the long story short, it is no exaggeration to say that these paradoxical and anti-conventional superheroes behave like a ‘social enzyme’, which interconnects horizontally and vertically the three ‘levels’ of globality. Rumford defines these interrelated trajectories, which are personified and realised by cosmopolitan strangers, using the terms ‘socioscapes’ and ‘sociospheres’. ‘Both concepts’, he writes, ‘helps us rethink sociality across global space’ (Rumford, 2016: 76–8). In this regard and to the extent that cosmopolitan connectivity is no longer a real or a corporeal phenomenon, but it takes the intangible shapes and/or traits (see spectrality and hauntology) of a fictitious, cinematic, or TV entity, this new genre of cosmopolitan strangeness is differentiated so much from the modern figures of strangers, such as migrants, foreigners, outsiders, or even the Arendtian conscious pariah (Arendt, 2007: 283), who, in the most of the cases, was a cosmopolitan intellectual hero, usually with Jewish origin, ‘structured’, as Enzo Traverso points out, ‘[…] by mobility, circulation […] acculturation, exile and multilingualism’ (Traverso, 2016: 20). As Rumford states, the new figure of the cosmopolitan stranger is ‘everywhere, at home’. This means that its intangible horizontal and vertical mobility stems from new forms of connectivity, which are ‘made possible by developments in communicative technology – satellite television, the World Wide web, mobile telephony – all of which can be consumed in a domestic setting’ (Rumford, 2016: 122). Therefore, the postmodern stranger does not come from outside anymore, as the modern one did, but is situated at the heart of a new ontological, topological and semiological field, which paradoxically is the ‘average’ home. The world in the Global Age turns upside down. The ordinary home is transformed into a communicative hub, full of mobile phones, laptop computers and wi-fi connectivity. Paraphrasing the title ‘living the global city’ of the foundational text concerning the Roehampton School, we could mutatis mutandis formulate the expression: ‘living the global home’ (Rumford, 2016: 70). These new forms of mobility and connectivity provide the basis for new forms of human sociality, solidarity, and alternative forms of individual and collective action. Although the cosmopolitan stranger is more likely to be found at home than in public space, Rumford argues that ‘the idea that a cosmopolitan is at home everywhere […] suggests that we can never be at home, even when we are chez soi’ (Rumford, 2016: 123). The paradox of a world-as-a-threshold reaches here its peak here. In fact, the (one) world is not enough. So, he writes that the most crucial aspect of cosmopolitan strangeness ‘is that the people who are likely to feel most at home are the cosmopolitan strangers, who realise that it does not pay to fix on one place and that feeling “at home” is only likely when one is so dispersed that one is connected “everywhere” ’ (Rumford, 2016: 123).

48   Spiros Makris Cosmopolitan strangeness is no longer a matter of corporeality and tangible visibility. Cosmopolitan strangers are paradoxical homeless spectres within four walls. They are a peculiar sort of contemporary fugitives, although nobody runs against them, who actually are ‘able to escape the clutches of existing ideological or cultural groupings, they are able to manoeuvre in the closed spaces which can be one outcome of global processes, and to differing extents they celebrate their role as strangers’ (Rumford, 2016: 124). Some critical questions are raised here. Are cosmopolitan strangers, so to speak, the incarnation of a postmodern almost anarchical way of freedom (Makris, 2018a: 79–96)? Could the cosmopolitan strangeness be the realisation of a new democratisation of the globalisation? From this point of view, could we strongly support the working hypothesis that cosmopolitan strangeness is that case of deconstruction which Derrida equates with justice (Derrida, 2002: 243)? Rumford does not give us a final answer concerning these critical questions. He just argues that ‘cosmopolitan stranger aims at the reconstitution of community, even though s/he chooses to remain free of community ties’. So, cosmopolitan stranger is both inside/ outside. Is this really a new utopian project which concerns the Global Age? The answer is difficult. Rumford refers to real-life superheroes. The only certainty is that this new generation of cosmopolitan strangers, who potentially are ourselves, could be perceived as a perfect identification of that paradoxical genre of cosmopolitan imagination which he defines either as heterocosmic or paramorphoscopic (Rumford, 2016: 135).

Towards a cosmopolitan liberation via technology and art In his book ‘The Globalization of Strangeness’, Rumford displays a typology about cosmopolitan strangers, where the state of strangeness has the sense of liberation. From this standpoint, we can argue that strangeness concerns more an onto-topological human condition in the Global Age and less the situation of stateless people or the strangeness even in the extreme form of ‘homegrown terrorist’. This is a crucial aspect of his late work. Hence, it should be studied carefully helping us to formulate a holistic theory of cosmopolitan strangeness in the era of ‘the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, which is ‘characterised by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines [especially, Social Sciences], economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human’ (World Economic Forum, 2017). It is no coincidence, that Rumford’s typology is articulated around a constructive interpretation of TV, film or fiction figures, whose strangeness is connected with the new emerging technologies. In fact, he interprets, via a critical and postmodern-inspired reading, some of the best-known novels of the twentieth century, such as Franz Kafka’s The Castle or Albert Camus L’Étranger’, where the technological elements of strangeness are absolutely dominant in the narrative illustration of stranger (Rumford, 2016: 139). In doing so, Rumford poses his cosmopolitan ‘anti-heroes’ in a global or even a

Politics in the global age   49 hyperreal environment in the manner of Baudrillard full of the emerging technological breakthroughs and innovations, which are ‘covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing’, by causing ‘a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological worlds’ (Schwab, 2016: 1). Both cosmopolitan fugitives in the manner of Camus and clones in the sense of Baudrillard’s ‘third order of simulacra’ are the basic cosmopolitan strangers in Rumford’s sociological typology of cosmopolitan strangeness in the twentyfirst century (Rumford, 2016: 137–70). The cosmopolitan universe is seen as a multiplicity of hyperreal and cybernetic images or a new biopolitical space of postmodern bodies (Haraway, 2010: 213). To put it another way, heterocosmic imagination is turned into a simulation-inspired social theory (Baudrillard, 1983: 81), while paramorphoscopic sociology is transformed into a postmodern version of critical cosmopolitanism, where prototypes give their positions to the clones. Instead of cosmopolitan realism, Rumford draws attention to the novel space of cosmopolitan hyperreality either it has an onto-topological or a technological dimension. The world is plural and multiple due to the fact that is inhabited by absolute strangers. Late Rumford shifts the emphasis from a sociology of cosmopolitan strangers to a phenomenology of cosmopolitan strangeness ­(Waldenfels, 2011: 15), who either have corporeal or ‘digital’ bodies (Rumford, 2016: 137–70). At stake in these hyperreal spaces is the liberation of cosmopolitan strangers in the sense of a counter-alienation struggle: i.e. liberation either from social norms (fugitives) or from inner alienation (‘self as stranger’). The globalisation of strangeness brings to the fore a new human condition (Arendt, 1998) or even a new form of homo politicus (Makris, 2017a: 535–63). In this vein, ­Rumford’s late work could be classified as the field of postmodern-like social constructivism to the extent that it problematises the essentialist and foundational origins of modernity. Cosmopolitan strangeness becomes the onto-topological space of exploring the content and meaning of humanity as such in the Global Age (Rumford, 2016: 171). Instead of a risk society, Rumford draws the attention back to the important Marxian issue of human liberation (in the meaning of a counter-alienation procedure), showing the strong bonds between critical theory and postmoderninspired social theories, as in the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman for instance (Rumford, 2008: 72; Blackshaw, 2005: 55). The dominant representative of the cosmopolitan stranger, in the case of liberation, is the fugitive. Inspired by the The Fugitive, the well-known American TV series from 1960s, Rumford ­introduces this type of cosmopolitan stranger as the identification of freedom. Fugitive, he writes, ‘embodies a form of sociality which is free from commitments to causes and social entanglements; the principle of solidarity is based on mutually-supporting individual self-containment. In a society where the majority of people are “tied up” with jobs, relationships, political commitments and ­consequently lack mobility’, the cosmopolitan stranger, in the sense of social spectrality, ‘is relatively mobile, despite (or perhaps because of) his fugitive

50   Spiros Makris status’ (Rumford, 2016: 163). The fugitive is a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ stranger, who ‘aims at the reconstitution of community, even though s/he chooses to remain free of community ties’ (Rumford, 2016: 135). The paradoxical attitude of this postmodern-like form of cosmopolitan stranger signifies the fact that s/he works separate from community in order to ‘propagate’ new ontospaces of sociality and solidarity. Thus, the fugitive, as a social ferment and mainly as the realisation of socioscapes, sociospheres and social milieus (see thresholds), interconnects people across distances, within the onto-topological field of ‘levels’ of globality, creating ‘neighbours where previously only strangers existed’ (Rumford, 2016: 135). Without doubt, it could be claimed here, that fugitive is the identification of cosmopolitan stranger in the sense of a postmodern-driven onto-topology of multi-perspectivalism, or, in other words, the metonymy of a cellular politics, a colourful networking world, within which Rumford does not hesitate to raise the thorny question of contemporary terrorism (Rumford, 2016: 98 and 116 respectively). Actually, ‘homegrown terrorist’ represents the counter-face of liberation, i.e. human alienation. It is no exaggeration to claim that this controversial entity of the cosmopolitan stranger is someone who, feeling alienated by the whole community, experiences its ‘self as a stranger’ (Rumford, 2016: 82–100, 154–8). Both massification of society and depersonification of the self are strongly challenged by the liberating attitude of a corporeal or digital clone who becomes the representative of a world full of simulacra (Makris, 2018b: 91–112). At the same time, a vast range of selves, communities and spaces are violently homogenised in the narrow image of ‘one-worldism’ (Rumford, 2016: 97). From this standpoint, liberation and alienation are the two faces (Janus) of the cosmopolitan stranger in the twenty-first century. So, regardless whether the figure of cosmopolitan strangeness is a simulacrum of a new digital universe; or a British Muslim, where the cricket is simultaneously an aspect of Britishness and an evidence of transnational identification of current jihadism; or a super-hero who lives on the margins of society dispersing new forms of social connectivity and solidarity in a totally interconnected world, Rumford presents the strangeness as a direct sociological and political ‘result of engagement with globalization’ (Rumford, 2016: 175). The interesting point of this postmodern-inspired sociological typology of cosmopolitan strangeness is based on the fact that Rumford uses the semiological codes of literature (fiction), cinema and TV as a metalanguage of social sciences (critical cosmopolitanism). Art and politics are situated within the same social, theoretical, and cognitive framework. From this view, both cosmopolitan strangeness and ‘borderwork’ are conceived in the sense of a paramorphoscopic sociology, i.e. a postmodern-like understanding of the Global Age, especially global culture (Rumford, 2002: 20–45). To put it differently, he imaginatively illustrates the contemporary social reality as a kaleidoscope in the meaning of an artistic expression of the multiplicity of the globalised world (Rumford, 2008: 155). Thus, cosmopolitan strangeness is, in the last analysis, a ‘vehicle’ of multi-­perspectivalism in the globalisation era. By representing the

Politics in the global age   51 sociology of the cosmopolitan stranger through art, Rumford brings to the fore the potentiality that both literature and film can generate and re-generate the multiple perspectives of social ontology and spatiality in the Global Age. ­Furthermore, Art, playing the role of metalanguage of the postmodern-like sociology of cosmopolitan strangeness, is perceived as an entire theoretical, epistemological and methodological approach, which can offer ‘a new understanding of process of social change’ (Rumford, 2016: 141). Insofar as the elemental characteristic of cosmopolitan strangeness is the ‘citizen vernacular’ or the ­‘vernacularisation of cosmopolitanism’, Rumford uses a variety of artistic forms, especially fiction, film and TV series, as an entire socio-political analysis of popular culture in the era of globalization (Rumford, 2016: 138).

Some concluding remarks Cosmopolitan strangeness is no longer about alterity but concerns the ordinary individuals in the Global Age. Put it simply, it is about new forms of sociality, encounter and connectivity in a digital era of distance and speed networking relations. As a significant concluding remark, it could be argued that cosmopolitan strangeness is seen by Rumford as a ‘masterpiece of art’ itself. ‘When I look at film and literature’, he states, ‘I am particularly interested in the ways in which books and movies offer an alternative conceptual framework for viewing collective action and the connectivity of strangers’ (Rumford, 2016: 140). Art, as a constructive way for reconstituting ‘the social’ in the Global Age or as meta­ language of social theory in the globalisation era, reveals the onto-­topological potentialities of sociological imagination (Mills, 1959: 3–24). ‘Culture gives individuals a sense of the world beyond their own, providing them with access to the dialectic between the self and Other, the familiar and the unfamiliar’ (Blackshaw, 2005: 21). In this vein, Rumford’s postmodern-inspired heterocosmic, paramorphoscopic and, in Castoriadis’ lexicon, imaginary typology of cosmopolitan strangeness in the Global Age could be seen as a symbolical metatheory of cosmopolitanism, where the signifier of art are the signifiers of the globalised world and vice versa. Thus, imagination, reflexivity, contextuality and discursivity are the basic conceptual tools for a postmodern-driven cosmopolitan analysis. ‘Social reality’, Delanty and Rumford write, ‘is the product of a process of becoming and is open to new designs. In this sense, constructivism has generally been held to be tied to the radical democratic ethos that the world can be shaped by human process. This suggests a discursive dimension to the constructivist process, which is the view that social realities are shaped in conditions of contestation and negotiation. Social reality is negotiated in discursive contexts rather than being simply given’ (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 16). This kind of democratic ethos has a lot in common with Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic model of democracy (Mouffe, 2009: 80–107), that ‘is a form of democratic identification which accommodates otherness and breaks down boundaries between identities’ (Rumford, 2002: 234). Critical thinking in this radical way, cultural alteration

52   Spiros Makris and linguistic interpretation are conceived as an imaginative and ambivalent socio-cognitive process of constructing and re-constructing the world in the Global Age (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 1–24). Rumford in his late work on cosmopolitanism magnificently shows this constructive relationship between Art and social theory. To the extent that ‘cosmopolitan or spatial turn’ could be seen as a ‘linguistic or cultural turn’, it would be no exaggeration to claim that ­Rumford’s radical sociology on spaces, strangeness and art is an essential part of the so-called ‘new political sociology’; or ‘new critical theory’; or ‘the globalization of critical thinking’ (Keucheyan, 2013: 20).

References Albrow, M. (1996), The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Arendt, H. (1998), The Human Condition, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (2007), The Jewish Writings, New York: Schocken Books. Baudrillard, J. (1983), Simulations, New York: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1997), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: The University of ­Michigan Press. Bauman, Z. (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2014), What Use is Sociology?, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (2009), Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington, DC: Sage. Blackshaw, T. (2005), Zygmunt Bauman, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, J. and Spivak, G. C. (2007), Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging, London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull. Castoriadis, C. (1998), The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Delanty, G. and Rumford, C. (2005), Rethinking Europe. Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization, London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2000), ‘Hostipitality, Angelaki’. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5(3): 3–18. Derrida, J. (2002), Acts of Religion, New York and London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2005), Paper Machine, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2006), Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, London: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2010), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, London and New York: Routledge. Keucheyan, R. (2013), The Left Hemisphere. Mapping Critical Theory Today, London and New York: Verso. Makris, S. (2015), Jacques Derrida and the Case of Cosmopolitanism: ‘Cities of Refuge’ in the Twentieth-First Century, In S. De La Rosa and D. O’Byrne (eds), The Cosmopolitan Ideal. Challenges and Opportunities, London and New York, Rowman & ­Littlefield International, Ltd, pp. 177–94. Makris, S. (2017a), ‘Politics, ethics and strangers in the 21st century. Fifteen critical reflections on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hos(ti)pitality. Theoria & Praxis. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought, 5(1): 1–21. Makris, S. (2017b), ‘Aristotle in Hannah Arendt’s Republicanism. From homo faber to homo politicus’. Annuaire International des Droits de l’homme, IX: 535–63.

Politics in the global age   53 Makris, S. (2017c), ‘Democracy as a “form of society”. Claude Lefort’s post-foundational approach’. Thirteenth Conference of the European Sociological Association. (Un)Making Europe: Capitalism, Solidarities, Subjectivities. Paris: European Sociological Association, pp. 739–40. Makris, S. (2018a), European Demos, Citizenship and Migrants in a Globalized World. Some Critical Reflections from a Habermasian Perspective, In Marco Caselli and Guia Gilardoni (eds), Globalization, Supranational Dynamics and Local Experiences, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–107. Makris, S. (2018b), ‘Emmanuel Levinas on hospitality. Ethical and political aspects. International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2(2): 79–96. Makris, S. (2018c), Masses, turbo-capitalism and power in Jean Baudrillard’s social and political ontotheology. International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2(3): 91–112. Marchart, O. (2007), Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, K. with Engels, F. (1998), The German Ideology. Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, New York: Prometheus Books. Mills, C. W. (1959), The Sociological Imagination, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Mouffe, C. (2009), The Democratic Paradox, London and New York: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically, London and New York: Verso. Rumford, C. (2000), European Cohesion? Contradictions in EU Integration, London: Macmillan Press Ltd. Rumford, C. (2002), The European Union. A Political Sociology, Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell. Rumford, C. (2008), Cosmopolitan Spaces. Europe, Globalization, Theory, New York and London: Routledge. Rumford, C. (2014), Cosmopolitan Borders, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rumford, C. (2016), The Globalization of Strangeness, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwab, K. (2016), The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Cologne: World Economic Forum. Traverso, E. (2016), The End of Jewish Modernity, London: Pluto Press. Waldenfels, B. (2011), Phenomenology of the Alien. Basic Concepts, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. World Economic Forum (2017), The Fourth Industrial Revolution, by Klaus Schwab. Available at www.weforum.org/about/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-by-klaus-schwab. Wortham, S. M. (2010), The Derrida Dictionary, London: Continuum.

Part II

Everyday encounters and strangeness

4 The complex trajectories of the commoner Cosmopolitanism, localisation, and nationalism Nick Stevenson Citizenships After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was in the ‘end of history’ debate an acceptance that Europe’s revolutionary past was over. Western political elites assumed that capitalism had triumphed over communism and that the victor was liberal democracy. This moment lent the development discourse of capitalism, economic growth, technology, and consumerism as progressive a renewed vigour on the world stage. More critically however many authors associated with the New Left continued to argue that many of the problems of capitalism had not yet been resolved given its dependence on hierarchical rule from above, profit, and the destruction of the environment that meant that we could not assume that history had come to a close (Thompson 1991). The so-called ‘end of history’ debates assumed that Eastern European societies simply wished to install Western style governments and capitalism. In this respect, the dominant assumption of this period – whose aftermath we are still living through – was that capitalism had no ‘limits’ that could not be solved through the application of science and technology. Here I want to explore the possibilities of the politics of the commoner as potentially offering an alternative narrative to that of both neoliberalism and more ­individualistic traditions that can be associated with liberalism. This seems to be especially important in the current context where the rise of the nationalist-populist Right, as evident in the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and in a range of movements across Europe, has suggested a deeper investment in an anti-immigrant, nationalist and neoliberal politics. The question remains as to how could more ‘progressive’ forces respond to our troubled and dangerous times? The idea of the commoner in this setting offers a more ecologically sensitive form of politics that prioritises the local over the global and argues for a more active engaged citizenship in an age threatened by populism and anti-democratic sentiments.

Alter-globalisation, social democracy, the third way, and cosmopolitanism During the 1990s a new kind of radical politics developed in the form of the alter-globalisation movement (Maeckelbergh 2009). The dominance of neoliberal

58   Nick Stevenson governments across the world meant that many activists needed to engage in a civil sphere outside of the formal competition for state power. A new generation of activists sought to develop a form of global citizenship from below that ­protected the rights of refugees, embarrassed global corporations for their exploitative practices, protected the environment and protested against militarism (Falk 2010, Graeber 2002). The aim of these radical movements was not to seize state power, but to embarrass the powerful while seeking to defend and reinvent the commons. Naomi Klein’s (2000) best-selling book No-Logo caught the mood of the times by pointing to how capitalist globalisation had led to the disappearance of public space, the destruction of secure jobs and often ‘hidden’ economic exploitation in the Third World. Unlike the radical movements of the past the aim was to work within the cracks of capitalism (Holloway 2010). Whereas previous anti-capitalist revolutionary movements imposed the rule of the state on civil society the aim of anti-globalisation movements was to both refuse the power of the state and capital and create more autonomous zones of possibility. The recovery of human dignity emerged less through attempts to gain power, and more by opening up common spaces to the voices and perspectives of those involved in struggle. If modernity remains trapped within the logic of economic growth, and representative democracy equals peace and prosperity, then the alter-­ globalisation movement sought to reveal the poverty, environmental destruction and human rights abuse that becomes partially concealed by the dominant narrative (Stevenson 2017). Vandana Shiva (2008: 5) argues that a ‘paradigm shift’ is required to address questions of global poverty and human rights within a sustainable context. Development has to be conceptualised as what is good for people and the planet rather than corporations, in ways that did not reproduce patterns of domination. Similarly Giovanna Ricoveri (2013: 95) argues that the commons ‘favours the local not the global; solidarity and not competitiveness; renewable decentralised energy, not fossil fuel controlled by a handful of multinationals’. During the 1990s however mainstream politics took a different turn and social democracy sought to reinvent itself through the idea of the third way. Social democrats were urged to ‘take a positive attitude towards globalization’ while distancing themselves from protectionism (Giddens 1998: 64). In addition the new politics of the centre Left would focus less upon rights and more upon duties and obligations while seeking to make links with progressive civic organisations outside of the state. According to Anthony Giddens (1998: 78) this would open up possibilities of a more engaged and democratised politics addressing concerns about civic decline. However radical critics were concerned about the abandonment of more substantial forms of social democracy based upon public ownership, equality, and trade union power for what many saw as increasingly market friendly forms of government (Callinicos 2001, Mouffe 2005). Although third-way style political parties had progressive elements these were undermined by a market-orientated mangerialism that in effect did little to introduce popular forms of democracy.

Complex trajectories   59 In retrospect one of the most progressive elements of third way politics was to try and bring in civil society and encourage more progressive forms of debate around cosmopolitan identities. Anthony Giddens (1998: 130) the key architect of the third way policies sought to defend a more pluralistic view of cosmopolitan nationhood positioned within a European context. However underlying the modernising tone, third way politics tended to address citizens as consumers while seeking to adapt workers to the new technological economy. In practice this often meant the adoption of a language of elites and performance managers that were distant from more grassroots organisations and concerns (Finlayson 2003, Faucher-King and Le Gales 2010). After 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq those interested in more radical forms of politics found it difficult to reconcile themselves with how the third way had seemingly been co-opted by a return to imperialism (Harvey 2003). For a brief period during the 1990s many activists had heralded a new age of critical politics around anti-corporate protest, peace, and human rights. But the war on terror ushered in a return to geopolitics dominated by the military ambitions of large states. If the 1990s had seen the beginnings of a global consciousness concerned with humanity and human rights, this was met with a move towards more state-dominated and military-based solutions (Kaldor 2003). The banking crash of 2008 alerted citizens to the globally interconnected nature of the new economy even if the obvious political winners thus far have been cheerleaders for more nationalist forms of politics. Across Europe there has been an increased focus upon national forms of citizenship on the political Right that is both anti-immigrant and neoliberal, although more recently there have also been attempts to radicalise social democratic politics offering an alternative to neoliberalism. For both Left and Right there has been a return to a politics of the state. Especially evident here has been the concerted attack on more cosmopolitan ideals and values associated with European citizenship (Beck 2007). The idea of the European Union has become increasingly unpopular especially after the financial crash. In this context, the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe seems to be withering on the vine. Despite attempts by Ulrich Beck (2007) and Anthony Giddens (2014) to articulate a vision of Europe that defends a revised version of the social model, super-diversity and free movement of peoples, these principles are all now under threat. This is not however to claim that these ideas are simply redundant. As Chris Rumford (2008) reminds us despite the recent revolts against the European Union globalisation has not delivered a citizenship of homogeneity but has made way for complexity and multiplicity. However the post-Brexit era should at least be partially defined through the need to explore other alternatives. Especially significant here is the work of the historian Tony Judt (2010) who has urged those still interested in progressive politics to move away from a politics of identity and to return to the collective politics of common provision and security that witnessed the setting up of the welfare state. This would seemingly recapture the idea of the common good that has been progressively displaced in the context of neoliberalism. Tony Judt (2011) argues that rather than viewing

60   Nick Stevenson the European Union as an idealistic project as cosmopolitanism tends to do it is better to see it as a pragmatic set of arrangements. This worked well in the 1950s and 1960s containing the threat of war and securing high levels of growth and relatively generous welfare states in Western Europe. However since the 1970s, in the context of high levels of unemployment and inequality this led to an increased sense of resentment against new waves of immigration. After the fall of the Berlin Wall that helped integrate large parts of Eastern Europe into the European Union such features became problematic as without the levels of economic growth and social policies of the 1950s and 1960s this created even further resentment against migrants. Here Judt (2011) argues that a better bet for the future is less cosmopolitanism, but more civic nationalism and a return to the virtues of social democracy. It is this ideal that best served Europeans after the long and bloody history of communism and fascism. Social democracy was built upon a bond between the middle- and working-class populations after the failure of the 1930s to deliver economic stability, through the establishment of a large public sector and shared national identities. This has however been progressively undermined by the market and the cult of privatisation that has produced increasingly unequal and class polarised societies. For Judt the cornerstone of the European project is less cosmopolitanism than the defence of the national public good; the virtues of community as opposed to privatisation and individualism. Similarly Perry Anderson (2009: 55) warned of the consequences for Western European workers after the integration of Eastern European societies into the EU. This promoted a race to the bottom in terms of cheaper labour and of ex-Communist societies pioneering flat taxes to attract inward investment in societies with weak labour organisations. Anderson (2009) argues that these ­features, coupled with low levels of turnout in EU elections and on-going sense of national rather than European identification, spell problems for the European project. There are good reasons to be sceptical of the cosmopolitan ideal in the European context. The European Union since the 1980s has helped foster a neoliberal environment of flexible, part-time and exploited labour, often without trade union protection (Gray 2004). The idea of a ‘social Europe’ has long since disappeared from the European Union as it has become increasingly driven by neoliberalism. These features have more recently have been challenged by attempts to breathe new life into European-style social democracy in Greece, Spain and Britain. This is likely to be a complex process that faces considerable challenges within a context where cultural and material forces remain concentrated in the hands of elites, giving them considerable sway over attempts to remake mainstream politics (Crouch 2004, Seymour 2016). Organised labour is confronted by both the realities and the myth of globalisation that mutually help create increasing numbers of insecure jobs (Bourdieu 2000). It is of course currently difficult to say anything about the success or otherwise of the return to more statist forms of politics other than to point out that despite the ‘nationalist-­ populist’ mood of our times that they will need to navigate a world of global interconnection that was less evident during the social democratic era of the

Complex trajectories   61 1950s and 1960s. The relative decline of the labour movement, the arrival of the post-industrial economy and the intensification of a media politics driven by the spectacle has all changed the dimensions of debate. Indeed, more cosmopolitan frameworks continue to be necessary to point to shared global problems that have no purely national solutions such as poverty, ecological destruction, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Again, as Chris Rumford (2008) suggests, there is currently no exit from a world of multiple citizenships that include global, local, and of course national dimensions and forms of identification. Yet after ‘Brexit’ the limitations of a purely cosmopolitan approach to shared problems are now more obvious than they had been previously. While we are likely to continue to need cosmopolitan sensibilities in a world where there are no purely national solutions to more global problems we need other trajectories as well. As George Steiner (1997) suggests, the cosmopolitan sensibility is required within a world that is continually threatened by ethnic nationalisms of various kinds. At its heart cosmopolitanism insists that human-beings are not rooted to the spot but are capable of crossing borders and calling into question the hatred of nationalism (Steiner 1997: 55). It is just that Brexit revealed there were other sensibilities whose complexities also need to be explored.

The arrival of the commoner Here I seek to investigate the idea of ‘the commoner’ as a complex identity that potentially cuts across local, national, and more global forms of citizenship. In this context, I shall argue that the idea of ‘the commoner’ connects the alter-­ globalisation movement as well as more social democratic forms of thinking. These movements are of value precisely because they locate questions to do with neoliberalism and capitalism more centrally along with the need to generate an ethical form of politics that looks for non-market and citizenship based solutions to social problems. During the ‘Brexit’ campaign the most effective piece of propaganda used by those wishing to leave the European Union was the need to ‘take back control’. This was largely placed within a framework that stressed the need for nations to control their borders and restrict the flow of immigrants. However there is also an argument that many citizens deeply resent the loss of control over their lives and local environments that has come along with globalisation. Colin Hines (2000) has argued that whereas under globalisation national economies are progressively integrated into global economies, localisation offers a radical alternative by increasing the control of nation-states and localities over the commons. The project of localisation challenges third-way enthusiasm about globalisation for a set of policy measures that seeks to devolve power downwards. Similarly Serge Latouche (2015) argues that a different world beyond capitalist globalisation needs to be imagined by both intellectuals and social movements. The idea of the consumer society is built upon an excess that continually trades upon the need to simulate the desire for new consumer goods. Daily life is less a matter of citizenship than it is of advertising, credit, and shopping. Yet our long-term survival on the planet depends upon us finding a

62   Nick Stevenson different way of life beyond the high-carbon lifestyles imagined by capitalism. Such a strategy will necessarily involve relocalisation projects that develop specifically local food, democracy, policies, and trade. John Urry (2013) argues that a powered down life would necessarily seek to ask ‘quality of life’ questions rather than be simply concerned with how much wealth we have. If people are to be encouraged to live more local and less globally mobile lives then we will need to collectively reimagine what we mean by success. If the consumer economy and celebrities seek to encourage the public to fantasise about a world of wealth and global travel then more sober forms of life would need to revalue social connectedness, equality and more convivial social relationships. The revival of the commons necessarily involves a resistance to the normalisation of globalisation that explicitly seeks to defend the local over the global. Such features will necessarily ask us to think more carefully about place-specific identities. These questions explicitly raise the thorny issue of national identity which makes many people feel uncomfortable. However, as Paul Kingsnorth (2017: 210), argues such a view condemns as wrong the sense of attachment that many people have to place, nation and identity. Indeed some of the resentment about globalisation can be seen in terms of the imposition of corporate forms of development that impose a soulless sameness. Towns, cities and villages progressively lose their local flavour through the arrival of urban landscapes that privilege motorways, supermarkets and shopping malls. Here globalisation is recognised as a specifically cultural project that seeks to delocalise the world. This opens the possibility of building a sense of ecological nationhood where experiences of place are taken seriously rather than dismissed in the name of progress. This is perhaps different from the usual understanding of nationhood as imperialism, empire, or as the domain of ethnic exclusivity. Kingsnorth (2017) in this respect is very critical of an environmental movement more driven by rational calculation than the need to develop a sense of care and connection to the complexities and mystery of nature. Raymond Williams’s (1989) writing is important in this respect for recognising the extent to which ideas of nationhood often suggest complex attachments to ideas of identity, landscape, and a sense of place. However he was well aware that such ideas are rarely politically innocent. Here much of this complexity is often ignored or neglected by cosmopolitan thinking. Nations contain a number of diverse and competing traditions, not all of which can simply be dismissed as toxic. Especially important within this context is a careful consideration of the national story in respect to questions of race and multiculturalism which are not the exclusive property of cosmopolitanism (Stevenson 2003). However we need to recognise that ideas of the nation have often been tied up to gendered understandings of manhood and masculinity. Homi Bhabha (1995) argues that the masculinised nation is often built upon ideas that naturalise ideas such as the need to defend the feminised homeland against masculinised invaders. This makes the effort to reimagine the nation an especially difficult undertaking. Jonathan Rutherford (1999:126) has also commented that in the European context imperial ideas of nationhood while celebrating a tough stoic masculinity often denigrate more feminine ideas of softness

Complex trajectories   63 and interconnection. If neoliberal forms of rationality depend upon an indifferent impersonality and militarised nationhood and an idea of the warrior it also seeks to dismiss more reciprocal ideas of care and nurturance required by ecological sensibilities (Benjamin 1990). The protection of the ecological commons is likely to depend upon citizens who wish to defend their local and distinctive identities from corporate landscapes that reflect the dominant consumer culture. The commoner is driven by an ethical sensibility that seeks to recover what the environmental writer Wendall Berry (2017: 183) calls the ‘sympathetic mind’. Berry seeks to emphasise the extent to which the environmental crisis is an invitation to move beyond the politics of disinterested detachment, instead by trying to reconnect local economies to specific landscapes while upholding virtues such as love, care, and compassion. These features are likely to be more sociologically significant if they can be carefully connected to a sense of national identification. The intention here is not to cancel the idea of the cosmopolitan, but to accept Chris Rumford’s (2008) challenge to think about questions of citizenship through the rubric of complexity. If the appeal of the European project was partly its ability to hold in check far-Right nationalism and anti-cosmopolitan sensibilities then today we face new threats and dangers that are evident in the ecological crisis and the triumph of market economics that threaten our collective futures. More ethical sensibilities that break with the disconnected self of neoliberalism require new waves of thinking beyond actually existing cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalisation. This will necessarily accept that the domains of nationalism and localism will be involved in our thinking about the citizenships of the future.

The alter-globalisation movement and the commoner At its most basic the commoner is opposed to the rule of private property and state power that seeks to enclose previously shared goods and resources. If the commoner is usually seen as someone of ‘lowly status’ then the term works in two related ways. Firstly the idea of the commoner presumes a shared identity amongst a diversity of persons who are dependent upon natural and cultural resources that could or are being shared rather than privately owned and controlled. The commoner in this respect seeks to point out that literally no one owns the planet and its resources are necessary to the future of humanity. These features are however threatened by capitalist attempts to impose the rule of private property and enclosure thereby either restricting their use or converting them into commodities only available to those with appropriate resources. Secondly the commoner prefers sharing and co-operation over bureaucratic hierarchies or ideas of competitive individualism instilled by capitalism. This is not a matter of an ‘essential’ human nature; rather these virtues are part of shared human capacities that often go unrecognised by capitalism. The essential attributes of the commoner are going to be suspicious about control from above, while endorsing the idea that knowledge, culture and nature are part of a shared and developing commonwealth.

64   Nick Stevenson Historically many of these ideas can be traced back to the socialist and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century. Especially significant at this juncture is a Romantic sensibility that opposes the ethical dimensions of culture to the instrumentality of the economic system. In this respect, William Morris (1973) sought to imagine a post-capitalist world beyond war, competition and wage labour where the population lived a life of ease and luxury without over work. Peter Linebaugh (2014: 110) argues that for Morris capitalism was merely the period between the commons of the preindustrial period and the liberated commons of the future. Similarly E.P.Thompson (1994: 71) argues that Morris’s vision of the commons was significant because it rejected the utilitarian and competitive ethic. In other words, the transformation of human societies is not merely a matter of getting the economy ‘right’, but also requires a moral and poetic sensibility. In addition the society of the commons depends on communal relationships that are radically decentralised, based upon face to face relationships and a mutual sense of responsibility. Peter Kropotkin (1892/2015) argued that the right to well-being was different from the right to wage-labour. The wage-labour society not only exploited the commons, but was constructed on the rule of the few by the many and required scarcity in order to enforce wage labour contracts. The point of being alive was not to labour for the profit of others, but the right to share in the common wealth of the community. This meant access to schools, libraries, parks and gardens, water and food that were not commodified or hierarchically run but could be shared with the wider community. More recently, Colin Ward (1996) (a follower of Kropotkin) argues that the neglect of the commons helped to usher in a meritocratic competitive world where the wealthy barricade themselves into privately run estates protected by security guards. The so-called ‘economic losers’ feel an increasing sense of anger and resentment as their human dignity is undermined by the fight for survival in an exploitative, unequal and competitive world. Ward (1996: 82) predicted that the future of the commons would be contested at a local level with community activists building food co-ops, credit unions and other mechanisms through practices of self-help and mutual aid. Colin Ward (2011) was keen to emphasise that mutual aid and self-help offered commoners an alternative route to the good society, whereas the state sought to control society from above. The art of commoning requires an ethics of solidarity and mutuality that is freely chosen. According to historian Peter Linebaugh (2014: 143–4) the idea of the commoner has become more recently constituted through a multiplicity of struggles (the internet, environment, indigenous struggles for land, and the struggle for global and local consciousness) even if there is a shared concern around the need to resist capitalist enclosure of different kinds. David Bollier (2014) argues that the practice of commoning relies less on the politics of state and domination by private capital than it does upon opposition to neoliberalism and active engagement in a number of local and grassroots ­projects. The main project for the commoners is not to elect new groups of leaders, but ‘to devise durable and appropriate institutions for commoning’ (Bollier 2014: 171). In this respect, Bollier argues that debates over the

Complex trajectories   65 commons have arisen due to the failures of neoliberal policy and its support for privatisation. Commons based approaches seek to develop a different relationship with the state by promoting ideas of stewardship, self-management, and ­co-operatives. Similarly Naomi Klein (2014) argues the emergent neoliberal ­citizenship of the new century is based upon privatisation, low corporate taxation, and cuts to public spending that have given shape to a context that is hostile to the commons. Facing a shared ecological threat, a society of the commons requires considerable public resources to reduce emissions, localise the economy, and introduce a carbon tax and corporate forms of regulation along with genuinely global social movements seeking to prevent the further extraction of fossil fuels. These concerns hold open the possibility of a politics of the commons emerging out of a partnership between the state and civil society. These would need to be different from those suggested by the ‘third way’. More commons based solutions would need to actively develop a commons based sector rooted in ideas of co-operation, ecological care, and self-management rather than the rule of private property or a renewed emphasis upon charities. We might then expect to find commoners seeking to reclaim food to share with the community, protesting against fracking and other potentially ecologically hazardous activities or sharing information on free websites. The imperative of the commons within the imagination of the alter-globalisation movement is to reject big solutions to global problems but to work in a committed fashion through more local initiatives. Rob Hopkins (2013) has probably best captured the spirit of the commoner by insisting that a sustainable world is currently unlikely to be introduced through either mainstream politics or the current economic system. Citizenactivists reading Hopkins’s book are advised not to sit around hoping for a better world to come but to get on and produce it. This can be done by engaging in a number of locally sourced and funded projects including growing food, ­recycling and repair initiatives, the creation of sustainable energy networks, the promotion of cycling and setting up tool share schemes. Here the idea is that taken alone these and other forms of citizen action may have little impact, but taken together can provide an alternative to neoliberal forms of globalisation. Yet it is not clear how effective these strategies are likely to be outside of a revived form of local democracy at the level of the state? Without the necessary resources it is not clear how far citizens on their own can make a long term shift in terms of the global economy. This brings us to the central problem with the politics of the commoner suggested by the alter-globalisation movement. The issue remains that the alter-­ globalisation movement mostly works at the level of sub-cultural politics (Hebdige 1979). The aim here is to disrupt the flow of politics as usual through a politics of resistance and more horizontal social movements. These features are of course important in raising questions and interrupting the agendas of the powerful, and yet it is not clear how they would ever become attached to the horizons of large numbers of citizens. The localism of the commoner can indeed be a powerful agent for change, and yet the levers of power remain in the hands

66   Nick Stevenson of the intrinsically neoliberal elite. If the politics of the third way sought to ­criticise what it saw as the big-state solutions of social democracy through an engagement with community-led initiatives then the localism of the alter-­ globalisation movement often sounds as if it is indifferent (or indeed) hostile to state politics. There are good reasons to think that this is a mistake.

Social democracy and the commoner The idea of the commoner is critical of the individualism of mainstream ­liberalism and has developed more out of socialist traditions of thinking. However the problem remains with the alter-globalisation movement that the idealistic refusal to operate through the domain of state power means that it is reduced to the level of either community activism or the politics of protest. However these arguments could not be made about the histories of European social democracy. Geoff Eley (2002) argues that in the European context socialism was concerned with the separation of politics from economics and the need to build a society based less upon egoism and more on co-operation. After the failure of the Bolshevik revolution, the socialist Left mostly gave up insurrectionary politics for the reformism of social democracy. After 1945 socialists became locked into ideas of ‘improvement’ which linked together nationalism, social justice, and democracy. Similarly Gerassimos Moschanos (2002) argues that the two features that allowed social democracy to develop were the failure of the ideas of the Russian revolution to spread across Europe and nationalism. Social democracy after 1945 abandoned the idea of using force to gain power, adopted a mixed economy approach, opposed communism, and was committed to the rule of law and parliamentary elections. The society social democrats sought to bring about was built upon a fair distribution of wealth, full employment, the development of a welfare state, and empowered trade unions. Political parties and the trade unions within this set of relationships adopted an educational disposition towards the working-class population, seeking to insist upon the virtues of socialism. Moschanos (2002: 28) suggests that this helped build what he calls a ‘plebian public sphere’. Social democratic parties and trade unions were not simply election-winning machines but were places of identity, pedagogy, and participation. While the social democratic compromise was built upon an unequal set of power relationships between the owners of capital and working-class institutions, social democracy helped to institutionally validate these organisations (Moschanos 2002: 66). R.H. Tawney (1964) recognised that democratic socialism was not simply built upon a set of institutional power relationships, but had an ethical core based on the common good and co-operation as opposed to individualism and competition. Social democracy was based upon a revolt against the capacity of capitalism to dehumanise the working-class. The struggle for a more humane society inevitably led to attempts to improve the communal provision of education, public health, and the welfare state. Notably however the principal value that supported these endeavours was not class resentment but freedom. At the

Complex trajectories   67 centre of the social democratic struggle was a principle that recognised that if ‘to lead a life worthy of human beings is confined to a minority, what is commonly called freedom would more properly be described as privilege’ (Tawney 1964: 168). The aim here is to ‘civilise’ capitalism, reduce inequalities of wealth and create a society of solidarity and common humanity. The social democratic heritage explicitly recognises that the riches of civilisation should be made available to the common people through education and welfare. The historian E.P. Thompson makes an important contribution to this story in recognising both the limitations and the achievements of social democracy. Thompson (1978), whose historical work sought to recover the revolutionary traditions of the commoner, pointed out that for all of social democracy’s limitations it was in fact a product of the class struggle. Thompson had little time for Marxist purism but instead insisted that the labour movement had struggled for ‘alternative institutions with an alternative, socialist content’ (Thompson 1978: 144). Thompson at this point spoke warmly about public systems in health and other forms of public ownership as being progressive. Similarly David Harvey (2012: 23) argues that social democracy asks the question what proportion of the economic surplus will stay in private hands and how much will be under the control of the democratic state? Neoliberalism in this respect has been very successful since the early 1970s at attacking the social state and redistributing the surplus into the hands of the upper classes, thereby enhancing the politics of class division. In terms of a politics of the commons, state forms of authority are often required to maintain non-commodified places from being plundered by the market. Harvey argues we need to be clear that all forms of enclosure are not necessarily bad. For example, if the commoner wishes knowledge and information to be open to all then clearly libraries are important. Libraries are largely seen as public goods which depend upon the state and are subsidised through general taxation. Notably they are currently under threat by neoliberalism which has at its core the idea that goods that are free restrict the role of the market and reduce the ability to make profits. If indeed the commons depends upon a radical form of decentralisation it is not clear how this is made possible without state intervention to protect shared or common land and resources. Alternatively we can think of the commons in terms of needing to resist an urban landscape dominated by cars and consumerism. Urban spaces can however be reimagined to make space for cafés, cycle routes and parks that are likely to require local state intervention. The issue Harvey (2012: 73) is raising is the role the state can indeed play in helping provide a commons and the continued importance of the idea of the public through housing, health care, and education. The problem of course with social democracy historically is that the way in which the public spaces and institutions are organised is often anything other than democratic. Stuart Hall (2017a) has long argued that part of the success of neoliberalism and the New Right is its assault on social democracy as being intrinsically statist and bureaucratic. The statist conception of socialism sought to displace questions of individual choice and more democratic arrangements. In this respect, many people’s experience of the state was not as a compassionate

68   Nick Stevenson administration dispensing welfare, but as imposing a certain level of conformity while being personally intrusive. By insisting upon privatisation and ‘rolling back’ the state the New Right and neoliberalism struck a popular chord. The need to democratise power in the name of socialism is not the same as defending existing forms of social democracy. The idea of the commoner seeks to breathe new life into the ethic of self-­ management, emerging from the workplace into questions over the distribution of food, the control of nature, and life of the city. Serge Latouche (2015: 34) proposes a radical agenda for localisation that involves the principle that ‘social life should take precedence over endless consumerism’. This would involve radical relocalisation policies that redistributed wealth, promoted reuse and recycling, relocalised production and reduced waste. As well as reducing the effect of the economy on the environment the other major effect of these policies would be to seek to reduce working hours and consumerism, thereby allowing citizens time for other activities like the arts, parenting or sports. If these features seem a long way from the masculinised culture of long hours and excessive consumerism this does not mean they are not both utopian as well as realistic ideas. Indeed returning to some of the remarks I made earlier a more sustainable culture would need to be a more feminised world that recognises there is more to life than consuming and work. Away from the treadmill of employment and bland consumerism the society of the commons offers citizens renewed possibilities for a more relational and meaningful society (Seidler 1997: 218).

Has the commoner a future? The ethical dimensions of the commoner begin from the view that we need a new narrative to help face shared problems. If along with modernity comes a set of assumptions that democracy, capitalism, and science would usher in the good society then this story has run its course. Equally the alternative narrative of social democracy that economic growth, state intervention, and equality might do the same has been found to be limited. Of course, the problem has been that the current dominant narrative of neoliberalism of a small state, free market, and an entrepreneurial ethos both produces huge amounts of class inequality and is actively hostile to the sustainability of the commons. The commons challenges both the ways in which we ordinarily think and feel about questions of culture and society. As David Bollier (2014: 157) argues the commons is basically a way of seeking to reimagine what we mean by development. This begins less from large state solutions than from an attempt to reimagine community, interdependency and our relationship with the ecosystem. Commoners, as we have seen, may become active in promoting local food, sustainable forms of transport, the maintenance of parks and green spaces. As I have suggested the work of the commoner is dependent upon the revival of local forms of democracy, but this becomes difficult in a world where the state centralises power and imposes topdown solutions. We need on this context to remember some of the limitations and successes of social democracy: it was historically successful at addressing

Complex trajectories   69 questions such as inequality and poverty, but less successful in developing more democratic and participatory structures, thereby removing democracy’s much needed intimate connection with everyday life. More local democratic structures evident within jury service, local councils, and schools remain important forms of citizen based participation. However they are often threatened by the state and face being eroded within social contexts based upon state power and Orwellian forms of control. As John Dewey (1916) well understood unless democracy becomes a feature of everyday life it is unlikely to flourish in the future. The commons then requires new, more democratic settlements based upon a radical decentralisation of power. The localisation of the economy is however not possible while the predominant political position is to defend global free-trade at all costs. Nation-states will then need to carefully investigate more protectionist measures which discriminate in favour of both locally owned businesses but also attempts to develop different ownership structures built upon a more co-operative and less exploitative basis (Lang and Hines 1993).The localism promised by the idea of the commoner requires new structures of governance and cannot afford to be indifferent to the politics of state. The struggle for the commons rests upon the latent potential which may yet become discovered when citizens are invited to find solutions to their shared problems. A politics of the commons is only really imaginable if it works through a sense of connection that many citizens feel for their locality. This does not mean that it rejects cosmopolitanism, but it does mean that there is an on-going suspicion of top-down solutions that do not empower more local feelings of control while fostering a sense of democratic responsibility.

References Anderson, P. (2009) The New Old World, London, Verso. Beck, U. (2007) Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge, Polity. Benjamin, J. (1990) The Bonds of Love, London, Virago. Berry, W. (2017) ‘Two Minds’, in Kingsnorth, P. (ed.), The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, London, Allen Lane. Bhabha, H. (1995) ‘Are You A Man or A Mouse?’, in Berger, M., Willis, B., and Watson, S. (eds), Constructing Masculinity, London, Routledge, pp. 57–65. Bollier, D. (2014) Think Like a Commoner, Gabriola Island, New Society. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Acts of Resistance, Cambridge, Polity. Callinicos, A. (2001) Against the Third Way, Cambridge, Polity. Crouch, C. (2004) Post-Democracy, Cambridge, Polity. Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education, New York, Free Press. Eley, G. (2002) Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe 1850–2000, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Falk, R. (2010) ‘Anarchism without “Anarchism”: Searching for Progressive Politics in the early 21st Century’, Millenium – Journal of International Studies, pp. 381–98. Faucher-King, F. (2010) The New Labour Experiment, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Finlayson, A. (2003) Making Sense of New Labour, London, Lawrence and Wishart. Graeber, D. (2002) ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, pp. 61–72.

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Complex trajectories   71 Thompson, E.P. (1994) ‘William Morris’, in Making History: Writings on History and Culture, London, Merlin, pp. 66–77. Urry, J. (2013) Societies Beyond Oil, Cambridge, Polity. Wall, D. (2014) The Commons in History, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Ward, C. (1996) Social Policy: An Anarchist Response, London, Freedom Press. Ward, C. (2011) ‘Self-Help and Mutual Aid: The Stolen Vocabulary’ in (eds) Wilbert, C. and White, D.F. (eds), Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility, Oakland, AK Press, pp. 109–20. Williams, R. (1989) ‘Decentalisation and the Politics of Place’, in Resources of Hope, London, Verso, pp. 238–44.

5 Artistic encounters with difference, aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and the political imagination Maria Rovisco Introduction The aims of this chapter are two-fold. On the one hand, it reflects upon the legacy of Chris Rumford’s work on borders, bordering and cosmopolitanism and its influence on my own work on cosmopolitanism and cultural borders; on the other, it shows how the artistic productions of artists with a migrant and refugee background can constitute an important site for the exercise of the cosmopolitan imagination by enabling both imaginary and real-life encounters with difference. Here, I am particularly interested in understanding whether and how artistic interventions that deal with themes of migration, belonging, and asylum invoke an aesthetics of openness to difference and the world that is capable of unsettling established symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the first part of the chapter I discuss and reflect at length on the influence of Chris Rumford’s theorisation of cosmopolitan borders on my own work. I go on to critically engage the scholarship on aesthetic cosmopolitanism in order to explore the role of the cosmopolitan imagination in the artistic contexts. The second part of the chapter presents a case study of UK-based artists with a migrant or refugee background who display the cosmopolitan imagination through cultural encounters of various kinds.1 This empirically-grounded research is based upon data collected from 20 in-depth interviews with UK-based artists with a migrant or refugee background2 whose work is thematically concerned with themes of migration, asylum, and belonging. Using a snowball sampling approach, my main sampling objective was to achieve a balance between established and emerging artists working in various art forms (dance, film, theatre, performance art, digital media art, literature, music) and a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, gender, and migratory experiences. The interviews aimed to attain an in-depth understanding of the ways in which migrant and refugee artists use their art form to express something that matters to them around issues of inclusion and exclusion from the body politic and experiences of belonging, migration and forced displacement. The transcripts of the interviews were subjected to thematic analysis using themes that emerged deductively from conceptual work on citizenship, aesthetics, performance, and the public sphere, but also themes that emerged from the interviewee’s own narrative. This chapter speaks to the theme of volume – Political

Artistic encounters with difference   73 Sociologies of the Cultural Encounters – by illuminating how certain artistic interventions can contribute to the process of imaginary world-making where national communities and the relation with cultural others can be imagined anew. As we shall see, artistic interventions by migrant and refugee artists offer audiences the possibility of an imaginary ethical encounter with displaced people and marginalised others who are often invisible in public life within and beyond nationally-defined public spheres. These ethical encounters are cosmopolitan in nature to the extent in which artists engender in their work an aesthetics of openness that promotes radically new engagements with difference in the world. This chapter also engages with the real-life encounters that bring together artists, their subjects of representation and audiences, which, as we shall see, nurture the cosmopolitan imagination in artistic spaces.

Chris Rumford on cosmopolitan borders I met Chris in 2004 at a conference he organised at Royal Holloway University of London on the theme of ‘Europe and cosmopolitanism’. At the time, I was interested in researching narratives of Europe and had developed a growing interest in collective belonging and cultural borders in Europe, and the paper I presented at the conference was eventually published in a book edited by Chris. This was the beginning of a fruitful and very inspirational collaboration with Chris and other scholars working mostly in the disciplines of political science, inernational relations and geography. As a cultural sociologist working across the social sciences and humanities, I felt that through these collaborations I was being introduced and exposed to a range of new concepts and approaches that proved very inspirational and enabled to develop my own thinking on borders and cultural encounters. These collaborations were further cemented in the NORFACE Seminar Series network on ‘Globalization and borders in Europe’ (2007–2009). This seminar series informed in important ways my own my own thinking and theorising on cultural borders, cultural encounters and cosmopolitanism. Chris’s work on borders and bordering was hugely influential in the establishment and consolidation of the now vibrant field of critical border studies (see Parker et al., 2009). Chris’s conceptualised borders as key sites where cosmopolitan experiences enable various forms of contact, imagination and connectivity beyond the limits of the nation. As Chris’s puts it ‘borders are cosmopolitan because they are no longer only under the control of the state; other actors and agencies may also be involved’ (Rumford, 2014: 2). His take on borders as a site of cultural encounters that are cosmopolitan in nature was particularly influential on my own attempts to conceptualise the border in cultural encounters (Rovisco, 2010) and intervene in debates on aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Rovisco, 2013). From the point of view of my own research interests, one of the most interesting aspects of Chris’s thinking on cosmopolitan borders was the call for a new border imaginary that sheds light on how ‘ordinary people, through their daily encounter with, and negotiation of, borders can be said to have the potential for cosmopolitan experiences on a routine basis’ (Rumford, 2012: 248).

74   Maria Rovisco If borders have the potential to be sites of cultural encounters of a cosmopolitan nature, this is because borders can connect individuals to the world and bring people into contact with others causing them to be more reflexive and reassess their relations with individual and collective others (Rumford, 2014: 3–4). In a similar vein, I have argued in my own research (Nowicka and Rovisco, 2009; Rovisco, 2010) that the cultural encounter between Europeans and their others can be understood through the lens of a cosmopolitan grammar of difference that sheds light on processes of border-shifting and crossing to ­illuminate fine negotiations, intersections, and exchanges that take place within and across borders. Chris was primarily concerned with processes of bordering, which he sees as a political resource available for citizens to both contest nation-state bordering practices and institute their own versions of borders (Rumford, 2014: 3). In contrast, I have been more interested in understanding and ­conceptualising how cultural borders move and shift to allow the creation of new identities and the redrawing of old ones in conditions of intense cultural exchange. I have shown, for example, how Europeans’ real-life struggles to bridge borders between self and other shed light on phenomena, such as intercultural dialogue, estrangement, and difficulties in translation, in the context of the difficult co-existence of ­Europeans and their others in conditions of deep injustice and inequality (Rovisco, 2010). I have further developed and applied my thinking on borders and cultural encounters in a paper on cosmopolitan cinema (Rovisco, 2013) where I engage more closely with debates on aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Here, I argued that film – as a visual art – can serve as a springboard for a more robust investigation of connections between cosmopolitanism, borders, and mobilities. In this research, I was interested in understanding how borders and mobility are articulated and experienced in film – as both a text and a cultural practice – might be consequential for how audiences, critics, cast, and crew experience and imagine their own experiences of difference and identity, but also the possibility of political and social change. I argued that cosmopolitan cinema, as a cross-cultural practice and mode of production, is predicated in intense negotiations of difference whereby the symbolic borders between self and other, us and them, are challenged and redefined through cosmopolitan dialogue. By engaging critically with approaches to aesthetic cosmopolitanism, I advanced the idea that we need to interrogate the ways in which film, as an aesthetic creation, is capable of engaging audiences, by generating a cosmopolitan public dialogue. I suggested that such dialogue is cosmopolitan in nature because it is predicated on capabilities of the cosmopolitan imagination (Kogler, 2011: 109), in particular self-reflexivity, empathetic perspective-taking and critical engagement of generally accepted beliefs and notions. On the whole, what my approach to borders has in common with Chris’s approach is an analytical and empirical interest in how people experience borders of various kinds in everyday life contexts through a range of encounters. Building upon this earlier work, my current research attempts to move forward debates on aesthetic cosmopolitanism and borders by directing the analytical

Artistic encounters with difference   75 lens to the arts as a site for cultural encounters that can be socially and politically transformative. Drawing on interviews with artists with a migrant and refugee background, I am interested in understanding the ways in which artists use the cosmopolitan imagination to invite particular processes of social and political change and transform the terms in which we understand the world.

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan imagination Although cosmopolitanism is a burgeoning field of interdisciplinary research, research on aesthetic cosmopolitanism or, more broadly, on the relation between the arts and cosmopolitanism remains scarce and confined to the work of a small number of scholars, in particular, Regev (2007a, Regev, 2007b), Papastergiadis (2012a, 2012b), Papastergiadis and Trimboli (2017), and Bielsa (2014). Regev’s conceptualisation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism as a cultural condition that expresses the complexity of flows in the current conditions of globalisation has been very influential, particularly in studies of cosmopolitanism that are ­concerned with the consumption of cultural forms in popular culture like film and music. For Regev (2007a: 123) aesthetic cosmopolitanism is a ‘cultural condition in which late modern ethno-national cultural uniqueness is associated with contemporary cultural forms like film and pop-rock music, and as such it is ­produced from within the national framework’. Regev (2007b: 336) sees these contemporary popular genres as an incarnation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism that is expressive of world culture and in which ethno-national cultural uniqueness and diversity are re-arranged in conditions of greater proximity and interconnection. However, and as I argued elsewhere (2013), although Regev clearly attempts to overcome the antimony between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, he goes on to equate cultural phenomena such as hybridity, cultural flows and ‘mix-and-match’ cultural fusion, which are typically associated with processes of cultural globalisation, with expressions of a thin cultural cosmopolitanism that lacks a strong normative dimension. There is little consideration in Regev’s work of cosmopolitanism – as an ethico-political orientation – which might inform struggles for a more just and peaceful world or particular kinds of ethical engagement with difference. Another problem with the Regev’s formulation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is that it does not adequately account for the distinction between popular culture and high culture, being the research lens directed to the cosmopolitan underpinnings of mundane cultural forms and processes of ­cultural consumption that are produced ‘from within’ the national culture. In a similar vein, Bielsa (2014) has criticised the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism for failing to differentiate between low culture and more artistic forms of culture, and she goes on to propose the more narrowly-defined concept of artistic cosmopolitanism, which she argues is a ‘more accurate term to refer to the world-­ opening projects and experiences that are specifically the product of an artistic or literary endeavour’ (Bielsa, 2014: 397). Differently from Regev, Bielsa’s (2014: 397) notion of artistic cosmopolitanism has a stronger normative ­dimension

76   Maria Rovisco because it can teach ‘radical openness to and engagement with the other means and open up imaginary spaces for living with difference’. Bielsa’s take on artistic cosmopolitanism is important to the extent in which it draws attention to the relation between cosmopolitanism, artistic practices and the cosmopolitan imagination. Similarly to Bielsa, Papastergiadis (2012a, 2012b) is concerned with the role of the imagination in the constitution of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Differently from Regev, he does not see aesthetic cosmopolitanism as stemming purely from locally situated modes of cultural production and consumption. Rather, by conceiving aesthetic cosmopolitanism as a process of world-making, Papastergiadis (2012) goes on to emphasise the necessity to rethink the function of the imagination as a world making process, which is about producing new images and not simply recall the images from the past. He notes that given the growing politicisation of contemporary visual practice, aesthetics is no longer confined to the contemplation of an artistic work. In so doing, they shift the debate from focusing purely on the aesthetic representation of cosmopolitanism (e.g. the appearance of global processes in artistic practices) and cross-cultural dimensions of cosmopolitan cultural production and consumption – as Regev does – to shed light on the transformations that occur through the interplay between the creative imagination and inter-subjective relations (Papastergiadis, 2012a: 226). I find Papastergiadis’s approach to aesthetic cosmopolitanism as a process of world-making compelling because directing the analytical lens to the workings of the cosmopolitan imagination – ‘defined as an aesthetic of openness that engenders a global sense of interconnectedness’ (Papastergiadis, 2012a: 229) – enables us to think about the relation between the arts and social and political transformation. This is a dimension of aesthetic cosmopolitanism that has not been considered by Regev. Artistic practices in the contemporary art world represent as much as they create through the form of images the world in which we live. Through the exercise of the cosmopolitan imagination, contemporary arts practice can work as a testing ground for new modes of social interaction between artists, audiences, and cultural producers as much as a site for exercising cosmopolitan ethical agency and creatively express the need for new modes of being in the world (see Papastergiadis, 2012a: 230). In a similar vein, Meskimmon (2010: 6) argues that it is crucial to go to go ‘beyond seeing how works of art reflect the conditions of the world and consider ways in which art plays an active constitutive role within these conditions’. In this context, Meskimmon is interested not only in asking what is the role of art in conceiving and reconfiguring the political, ethical and social imaginaries, but also in interrogating the potential of contemporary art to promote the cosmopolitan imagination, which she understands as ‘an aesthetic of openness that acknowledges its place within the world and is responsible for it’ (Meskimmon, 2010: 7). If we accept, like Chris Rumford suggests, that ‘cosmopolitanism can be thought of as a political strategy which draws upon resources of the imagination’ (Rumford, 2014: 8) to generate alternative forms of social connection, then it makes sense to interrogate whether artistic practices can offer an alternative ways of imagining social relationships between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and cultural difference. It is

Artistic encounters with difference   77 interesting to note that while Chris was not primarily concerned with debates on aesthetic cosmopolitanism, in one of the chapters in his book Sociology of Strangeness he draws on Papastergiadis (2012b) to probe the ways in which film and literature offer ‘an alternative conceptual framework for viewing collective action and the connectivity of strangers’ (Rumford, 2013: 140). Against this backdrop, I want to suggest that the artistic interventions of artists with a migrant or refugee background can promote the cosmopolitan imagination by creating spaces where audiences, artists and subjects of representation encounter each other. My interest in these cultural encounters is twofold: first, I want to shed light on how particular artistic productions can invoke imaginary encounters with difference and redraw the entrenched symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ (citizens, the majority) and ‘them’ (non-citizen; the asylum-seeker; the immigrant minority) by bringing audiences in contact with images of distant, marginal, and invisible others; second, I want to show how the artists’ subjective experiences of engagement with cultural difference, their cosmopolitan identities, and their own real-life encounters with others, demand particular aesthetic and ethical choices in art-making. The focus on symbolic boundaries and cultural encounters is important because as argued by Delanty (cited in Rumford, 2012: 251) ‘thinking beyond the established forms of borders is an essential dimension of the cosmopolitan imagination’.

Imaginary ethical encounters – challenging the invisibility of the other In this section, I show how particular artistic creations by artists with a migrant or refugee background create the possibility of imaginary ethical encounters with marginal and invisible others that have the potential to be socially and politically transformative. I argue that these artistic productions promote the cosmopolitan imagination to the extent in which they invite audiences to engage in an ethical imaginary encounter with the experiences of people (the asylum seeker, the migrant, the refugee, colonial subjects) whose presence in public life has been rendered invisible. While scholarship has suggested that policy and academic debates often fail to listen to refugee voices (Malkki, 1995; Sigona, 2014), more attention needs to be paid to how artistic expressions of experiences of forced displacement and mobility become visible and their potential for ­stirring social and political change. The artists I interviewed demonstrate a strong belief in the power of the arts and the creative imagination to bring audiences in close imaginary contact with the experiences of marginalisation and the silencing of displaced subjects. Artists engage with ideas about the world around us and what it means to be together. As Martin (2006: 3) puts it: ‘art can be considered a particular kind of social good that serves as a means to bring forth ideas about our lives together’. An important way in which the artists I interviewed engender imaginary ethical encounters is by creating work that invites audiences to be more reflexive towards the perils of invisible others via dialogical perspective-taking.

78   Maria Rovisco The underlying assumption here is that audience members can be seen as capable of taking a cosmopolitan perspective vis-à-vis themselves and others (Kogler, 2011) through a range of intellectual and affective engagements with the artwork. Perspective-taking, as a cosmopolitan capability, is connected to the problem of the visibility. As insightfully argued by LaBelle (2018: 29–32), visibility operates as an extensive affective and psychological base by which people gain presence in and amongst others, but it can also give recognition to what may be hidden. One can only take the perspective of another when this other is visible. Lalya Gaye is a digital media artist with a Swedish and Senegalese-Malian background whose productions and installations tackle precisely the problem of the invisibility of minorities in public life. She tells me that that her artistic productions seek to ‘to make their presence more visible’ and stresses how important it is for audiences to be able to put themselves in the shoes of people who are part of minorities. Artistic productions that invite audiences to put themselves in the place of invisible others can be said to be cosmopolitan in nature because they invite the audience to adopt the perspective of another. Importantly, Lalya is not interested in prescribing how the audience interprets and engages with the artwork in a particular vein. For Lalya, what is important is to produce work that is capable of inviting audience members, as situated subjects, to engage critically and affectively with the work: It’s not exactly to push ‘you should be doing that or that or think that’ instead to make them think, ‘Is it really?’ like, ‘What do you think about it?’ And using empathy and trying to evoke emotions or experiences. […] We don’t all live in little bubbles and the only way for it to work is for us to have empathy towards each other and then, there’s a whole spiritual aspect of it as well. (Lalya Gaye, digital media artist) Another important way in which artistic productions enact imaginary ethical encounters is precisely through the exercise of the cosmopolitan imagination, which I understand here in terms of what Bielsa (2014) has called an artistic ­cosmopolitanism, i.e. an ‘aesthetic of openness’ with otherness that opens up imaginary spaces for living with difference in an interconnected world. As we shall see, by offering audiences the possibility of radically new engagements with cultural difference, migrant and refugee artists seek to challenge entrenched national imaginaries and legal and exclusionary definitions of citizenship. These artists draw on the resources of the creative imagination to invoke alternative images of experiences of belonging, migration and displacement, which have the potential to invite audiences to imaginatively breach the insider/outsider divide that underpins the national imaginary. The cosmopolitan imagination is, ultimately, exercised through an aesthetic of openness to difference that is translated in the artistic imagining of new ways of being at home in the world and alternative images (in figurative or symbolic form) of otherness.

Artistic encounters with difference   79 As it became clear to me in the interviews, these artists are compelled to engage in their work with personal and collective histories of migration and human interconnectedness and go on to nurture the cosmopolitan imagination by creating and making visible alternative images of ‘others’ (migrants, refugees, colonial and postcolonial subjects). They do so not only by stirring the imagination of alternative forms of social connection and ways of living with difference, but also by uncovering (often violent) histories of human contact and connection that are rarely deployed in the mainstream media or political discourse. What we can see here is an example of what Bennett (2011: 112) has identified as shift towards a migratory aesthetic that is deeply political in terms of marking ‘a decisive break with the conception of art as representative of group identity’. One of my interviewees is a refugee musician who is originally from Egypt and specialises in Coptic music. He is keen to emphasise that while politics divides, music unites people as human beings: ‘[…] a good message for others when a Coptic musician plays with a Muslim singer … and share one thing which is music […] because all of us are human beings. […] So I think it’s returning to the basic idea of human beings’. His words suggest whether people (the musicians, the audience) experience music collectively in a music performance; music invokes a common humanity and togetherness by helping to bridge religious and ethnic divides. In a different vein, Sophie Ernst, an international visual artist who is interested in themes of displacement, memory, and identity (Ernst, 2012), has produced work that could be said to display a migratory aesthetics in that it seeks to debunk those myths of postcolonial separation invoked by Stuart Hall (see Bennett, 2011: 111). This is particularly visible in ‘The Silent Empress’, a public art installation displayed in Wakefield in 2012 that explicitly aimed to challenge conventional interpretations of the British colonial past. The artist’s experience of living and working across cultures played an important role in the development of the piece. As Sophie Ernst puts it: So for me, moving to England, it was just really curious to see so many statues reminding you of colonial history and there being no debate around them at all. […] You know in England you have a lot of colonial sculptures or sculptures around commemoration. In Holland there’s no large tradition for public sculptures at all. […] And I thought I really wanted to work with this piece, with these public sculptures because you know, in the end, […] for my friends of Indian or Pakistani origin it is quite odd to see some of these colonial heroes being celebrated without any contemporary contextualization. (Sophie Ernst, visual artist) The ‘Silent Empress’ and the ensuing controversy – the installation generated public debate an controversy on social media and in the British press about whether the piece was appropriate (Wakefield Express, 2012) – is an interesting example of the kind of the vibrant public debate that can stem from art that

80   Maria Rovisco invokes a radical openness towards alternative imaginings and histories of migration, displacement and postcoloniality that elude the official historical record. For this public art installation, Sophie put up a loud-speaker on the statue of Queen Victoria with the permission of Wakefield’s City Council. The installation involved the devising of a sound piece that consisted of monologue from journals and letters of Queen Victoria alongside speeches and texts from past and contemporary politicians and writers such as Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, David Cameron, W.E. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Winston Churchill and ­Somerset Maugham. The audio monologue quotes were delivered in received pronunciation by an actress. The installation lasted less than an hour due to the intervention of some city council officials who felt it was inappropriate. The ‘Silent Empress’ is an artistic intervention in the imagination of the British colonial past that could be seen as politically consequential because the audio quotes suggest a quasi-apology for Queen Victoria’s involvement in colonialism. Sophie tells me that the piece ‘really touched a nerve because you don’t make fun of royalty in England’. The ‘Silent Empress’ challenges the official interpretation of the colonial past of the nation by both evoking the lack of an official apology for the colonial past  and challenging the terms in which the postcolonial nation celebrates the past through commemorative statues of eminent colonialists. There is here an attempt to give recognition to what remains hidden by commemorative public sculptures that too easily close off debate and act to house a particular historical record (see LaBelle, 2018: 31). Sophie Ernst recognises that a piece like the ‘Silent Empress’ touches on ‘a very difficult subject’ that is not widely discussed, but she also indicates that it is important to produce art that generates public debate and ‘makes people think’. Sophie tells me that she thought that being asked by city council officials to take down the installation was an interesting response ‘because, yes, the people who passed by came and discussed it with us. The council members discussed it with us. […] some journalists came in and discussed it with us. So this is I think what art can do. Even if they took it down and they felt offended by it.’ The possibility of radically new engagements with the British colonial past is being engendered here also in the ways in which city council officials, journalists and passers-by who interact with the artwork are invited to be critical of historical relations of domination and oppression, and of official narratives of the nation associated with commemorative public statues even when they try to resist them. The ‘Silent Empress’ is an artistic intervention that uses the creative imagination not only to disrupt the insider/outsider, citizen/non-citizen divide, but also allows for imaginary encounters of the audience with an alternative image of the Britain’s colonial past, which is embodied in the public art installation. This is notably apparent in the way audiences were invited to be more critical and reflective about the role of commemorative public statues and the meanings they carry. Similarly to Lalya Gaye, Sophie Ernst wants to create art that provokes and unsettles audiences to encourage them to develop an ethical openness to difference that is, arguably, characterised by cosmopolitan capabilities such as reflectiveness and critical participation in

Artistic encounters with difference   81 public debates. This is also to sayartistic interventions such as the ‘Silent Empress’ are not merely reflective of global conditions, but should also be seen as a political intervention in public debates on the national imaginary and postcolonialism.

Spaces of encounter – cosmopolitan identities and the political imagination An important finding of this research is that the artists I interviewed display strong cosmopolitan dispositions in the way they talk about their artistic practices, identity and the subject-matter of their artworks. These dispositions which involve openness towards and knowledge of cultural ‘others’, a desire to cut across racial and ethnic divides and engage closely with strangers, (Rumford, 2013), and experiences of belonging that challenge traditional categories of identity and belonging, support the view that these artists display cosmopolitan identities. Migrant and refugee artists’ experiences of belonging can be seen as a manifestation of an actually-existing cosmopolitanism (Robbins, 1998) which is also rooted (Appiah, 1997) in the sense in which these are individuals who speak openly about having multiple attachments beyond the nation. While their professional and biographical trajectories might enable them to more easily engage in cross-cultural engagements and real life encounters that are capable of generating cosmopolitan ways of thinking and acting, an interesting finding of this research is how these experiences and cosmopolitan dispositions powerfully inform and shape the subject-matter of the artwork and their aesthetic strategies. Siamak Foroutan, a visual artist originally from Iran based in Leeds, speaks compellingly about how the mix of cultures and his multiple attachments to different cultures shape his own experiences of belonging and artistic practice: […] in my own art practice I was always struggling with my own identity, identity in this world. And now, yes it’s true, I’m in England, but I don’t belong to England. I’m from other culture which I was always denying so many things from that culture, and I didn’t accept so many things from that culture. Yes, there are so many things beautiful from that culture and from this culture I love, but having that fixation or belonging to this – to a culture … I can say I’m a bit of both and I’m nothing […] and this [points to a piece of ceramics he created], you know, is a bit of both too, this is like, you know, I made this statement by mixing different pigments and colour into clay and mixing together and having one thing which is beautiful. If you are saying, you know, blue or black is from the other nation and white is from here, then you have got a beautiful combination of one thing united in one world for example. It’s a mix of cultures. (Siamak Foroutan, Fine Art artist) It could be argued that some artworks invoke a radical openness to cultural difference and nurture respect for our common humanity not simply because the

82   Maria Rovisco artist displays an identity outlook that is cosmopolitan, but also because the artists’ subjective experiences of mobility and belonging lead them to engage with processes and experiences of inhabiting the world and conditions of transnational affiliation beyond the confines of the nation-state (see Walkowitz, 2006: 14). This is visible, for example, in how Sarah Yaseen, a second-generation Muslim singer and composer from Manchester, laments the ways in which the media, in particular social media, decry our shared humanity by reaching out to mass audiences: We’ve lost something in the world. There is nothing human about us anymore. There’s no, all of us. […] When you’re seeing things in social media and you’re seeing some awful images of what’s happening with people. And it’s like, you’re just, it’s like you’re becoming used to it […]. And I need to be able to cut away from that. Because right now, social media is the most powerful medium (…). And you know one story goes through to the rest of the world like that [snaps fingers], you know. And I feel, yes, that I'm able to share that music, political music, through the work, without having any repercussions. (Italics added for emphasis) (Sarah Yaseen, singer and composer) What is interesting about Sarah’s words is how she sees the media as being able to significantly undermine our ability to live comfortably with difference and recognise our shared humanity, which is a distinct cosmopolitan orientation. Yet, she is also aware of the limits of art that is deemed political and the difficulties artists face in reaching out wider audiences vis-à-vis the powerful mainstream media which have a mass appeal. Equally important is how the artistic productions and interventions of the artists I interviewed create a collective experience that can bring together artistic productions, artists, subjects of representation, and audiences. This collective experience is predicated on real life cultural encounters that are cosmopolitan in nature because, as Chris Rumford would argue, they ‘allow us to us to connect to the world in a productive way (and which offer the potential of becoming a citizen of the world in a meaningful sense)’ (Rumford, 2012: 252). As Appiah as insightfully noted: ‘conversations across boundaries of identity – whether national, religious or something else – begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own’ (Appiah cited in Meskimmon, 2011: 7). Yet, the cosmopolitan imagination stems also from a critical public dialogue about belonging, identity and difference that takes place in artistic spaces (for example, in post-show discussions, or question-and-answer sessions with artists) and has the potential to mobilise audiences, journalists, critics and artists to question the terms in which we imagine the cultural borders between us and them and the ways in which we engage with distant and invisible others. Against this backdrop, it is possible to argue that when people engage with certain artistic productions, such an encounter can potentially foster

Artistic encounters with difference   83 the cosmopolitan imagination not only through imaginative engagement with the artwork, in the sense described above by Appiah, but also through conversations about the work that open up negotiations of difference and challenges to established symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The artistic productions of artists with a migrant or refugee background can generate a kind of ‘civic talk’ (Dahlgren, 2009) that can raise awareness of issues of common concern around migration, belonging, postcolonial experiences and exclusion not just through deliberation and rational discourse, but through face to face meaningful and playful interactions and ethical dialogue that take place within and beyond concrete artistic spaces (e.g. critics reviews, media coverage of exhibitions, films and performances). New conversations about issues of political concern around migration and asylum can happen, for example, when a play travels outside legitimate and traditional artistic spaces. Zodwa Nyoni, a playwright originally from Zimbabwe based in Leeds, talks compellingly about the importance of taking ‘Nine Lives’, her play about the life of a young gay man seeking sanctuary in the UK, to the Houses of Parliament and the power of the play to challenge the terms of the public debate about asylum. She tells me that the play was part of an event called ‘Sanctuary Parliament’, which was open to the public, refugees, asylum seekers, and MPs. That’s what I can do. I can take the arts there and have a conversation with the MPs and it was great because we got like tweets from MPs talking about the piece, saying there is a conversation that needs to happen about the treatment refugees and asylum seekers. And what was beautiful about that event was that we had refugees and asylum seekers saying to MPs that ‘This is how your policy makes me feel, this is the experience that I had as a result of your policies’. (Zodwa Nyoni, theatre playwright) It is clear that one of the reasons why Zodwa wanted ‘Nine Lives’ to generate these conversations is precisely to challenge established cultural borders which between separate us (citizens) from them (non-citizens, asylum seekers, refugees). She wants to create work that allows conversations about what ‘we’ – artists, politicians, audiences, engaged citizens – can do to support refugees and asylum seekers and acknowledge our common humanity because what an asylum seeker might say to an MP is, ‘I’m a person, I’m not just a file in a drawer, I’m a person, so what can we do about that?’ By opening up the possibility of cultural encounters in public space, the artistic productions of the artists I interviewed call for a more vibrant and informed public culture that is built upon the interaction of different public realms and arenas, including those episodic publics found in presentations and events, such as theatre performances, rock concerts and party assemblies, which are distinct from the abstract public sphere of isolated readers, listeners, and viewers scattered within and across national borders (Habermas, 1996 cited in Stevenson, 2003: 21). It is important to acknowledge that although ‘the public sphere in the

84   Maria Rovisco modern media age operates as a ‘signalling device’ highlighting matters of public importance’ (Stevenson, 2003: 21), more attention needs to be paid to artistic spaces as public spaces for introducing and discussing matters of common concern and bring about a more participatory democracy where people learn to see and hear about what is political in the interactions they have with fellow citizens (see Allen, 2005: 88). As Papastergiadis (2012b: 96–101) argues in his discussion of Rancière’s work, aesthetics is now seen as playing a role in producing a supplement to existing modes of perception and meaning, and can no longer be restricted to the appreciation of the formal properties of a given artistic object. Hence, artistic or aesthetic cosmopolitanism of the kind I discussed in this chapter is important to the extent in which it nurtures the individual and collective imagination by producing new images of alternative accounts of our collective present and past, the role of political borders, and of how we might live better with difference in an interconnected world.

Conclusion We have seen that artistic practice can make a difference to how audiences engage with alternative histories and experiences of migration, postcolonialism, and displacement. We have also seen how the arts can emerge as a cultural realm for political engagement of the kind that might bring about social and political change that is no longer confined to formal politics (see Allen and Light, 2015). The chapter has also discussed how forms of artistic cosmopolitanism, such as those that are articulated in the work of migrant or refugee artists, stem from imaginary and real life ethical encounters with distant, marginal and invisible others. By creating alternative images of otherness (the migrant, the asylum-seeker, the colonial subject) and certain collective experiences (e.g., critical public dialogue, experiences of collective engagement with the arts), the artistic productions of these artists forcibly challenge the terms in which we imagine the difference between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens.

Notes 1 This research received funding from the College Development Fund for Research, College of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Leicester. 2 The University of Leicester’s Research Ethics Committee approved this research. All participants gave informed consent to have interviews recorded, and, agreed that identifying details should be disclosed.

References Allen, D. (2005) Talking to Strangers – Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Allen, D. and Light, J.S. (2015) From Voice to Influence – Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Appiah, K.A. (1997) ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry 23(3): 617–39.

Artistic encounters with difference   85 Bennett, J. (2011) ‘Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics Beyond Identity’, in M. Bal and M.Á. Hernández-Navarro (Eds.) Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture – Conflict, Resistance and Agency. Amsterdam Rodopi, pp. 109–26. Bielsa, E. (2014) ‘Cosmopolitanism as Translation’. Cultural Sociology 8(4): 392–406. Dahlgren, P. (2009) Media and Political Engagement – Citizens, Communication and Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ernst, S. (2012) ‘Why to Remember, What to Forget’, in I. Dadi, S. Ernst, T. Mehmood, and H. Pheby (Eds.), Home Architecture of Memory. Wakefield and London: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, pp. 38–48. Kogler, H. (2011) ‘Hermeneutic Cosmopolitanism, or: Toward a Cosmopolitan Public Sphere.’ In M. Rovisco and M. Nowicka (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 225–42. Labelle, B. (2018) Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press. Malkki, L. (1995) Purity and Exile. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Martin, R. (2006) ‘Artistic Citizenship: Introduction’, in M.S. Campbell and R. Martin (Eds.), Artistic Citizenship – A Public Voice for the Arts. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Meskimmon, M. (2011) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, London: Routledge. Nowicka, M. and Rovisco, M. (2009) Cosmopolitanism in Practice, Aldershot: Ashgate. Papastergiadis, N. (2012a) ‘Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism’. In G. Delanty (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 220–32. Papastergiadis, N. (2012b) Cosmopolitanism and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Papastergiadis, N. and Trimboli, D. (2017) ‘Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: The Force of the Fold in Diasporic Intimacy’. International Communication Gazette 79(6–7): 564–83. Parker, N. et al. (2009) ‘Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies’, Geopolitics (14) 3: 582–7. ‘Queen Victoria is “not amused” by gagging in Wakefield’, Wakefield Express, 30 June 2012. Available at: www.wakefieldexpress.co.uk/news/queen-victoria-is-not-amused-bygagging-in-wakefield-1-4695663 (accessed 4 September 2017). Regev, M. (2007a) ‘Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism’. European Journal of Social Theory 10(1): 123–38. Regev, M. (2007b) ‘Ethno-National Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism Made From Within’. Cultural Sociology 1: 317–41. Robbins, B. (1998) ‘Actually-exiting Cosmopolitanism’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (Eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rovisco, M. (2010) ‘Reframing Europe and the Global: Conceptualising the Border in Cultural Encounters’. Special issue on ‘Global Borders’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, 1015–30. Rovisco, M. (2013) ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Cinema: Rethinking Borders, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary film’. Mobilities 8(1): 148–65. Rumford, C. (2012) ‘Bordering and Connectivity – Cosmopolitan Opportunities’, G. Delanty (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 245–53. Rumford, C. (2013) The Globalization of Strangeness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rumford, C. (2014) Cosmopolitan Borders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sigona, N. (2014) ‘The Politics of Refugee Voices: Representations, Narratives and Memories’. In Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Kathy Long and Nando Sigona

86   Maria Rovisco (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 369–82. Stevenson, N. (2003) Cultural Citizenship – Cosmopolitan Questions, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Walkowitz, R.L. (2006) Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.

6 The story of the ship-in-a-bottle Encountering strangeness and familiarity through a globalised object Alison Hulme

Introduction The ubiquitous ship-in-a-bottle (SIB), now most often an inexpensive seaside trinket, was once the highly-crafted pastime of sailors on long voyages of discovery and conquest. It was present at the very beginnings of globalisation, and it is present now, in an era of ever-present globalisation. Its meanings however, have changed, adapted, and re-surfaced in different ways over time, providing it with the ability to reveal the multiple and diverse layers of strangeness (and familiarity) encountered as a result of globalisation. First, there is its presence (even in cheap trinket form) as a ghost form of those earlier hand-crafted SIBs that helped make sense of the immensity of the world’s as yet unmapped oceans in the era of early sea journeys, when encountering global strangeness was sometimes a genuinely dangerous pursuit. Then, there is its ability to offer comfortingly familiar connotations of the Victorian heyday of the British seaside town; an era in which social values are often perceived to have been more consolidated and stable (less ‘strange’) than those in the globalising times that have since followed. Then, there is its status as a vehicle for economic success on the part of (mainly) Chinese manufacturers who, putting to one side an all too familiar colonial history that had disastrous consequences for their own nation, engage with the forces of globalisation for financial gain. Alongside the hugely useful and apposite nature of his work on globalisation more generally, one of Chris Rumford’s biggest influences on me personally was his enjoyment of, and encouragement to continue using, what he called my ‘storytelling form’. Unlike many more traditional academics who had asked where the demographic rigour was, and why anthropological ‘case studies’ were being treated as ‘vignettes’, Chris understood the potential for such work to trigger different thoughts from the usual discussions of the global. So, in this chapter, and by way of celebrating his influence and openness to new ways of thinking and doing academia, I tell a story – unapologetically.

Chapter 1 – the ship on the windowsill This story starts sat with Donald at the bay window of his small flat in an English seaside town. On the windowsill sits a small SIB – a classic sailing

88   Alison Hulme ‘clipper’, in full sail, on blue-green choppy seas. ‘Clippers’, were trading vessels, so-called because they could ‘clip’ days off the usual time for a sea voyage. Throughout the height of the British Empire they carried cargos of exciting new products back to the West from India and China – spices, silk, and much sought-after tea from China. They became potent symbols of British trading power, new global adventure, and the prowess of empire. Models of clippers, which typically had three masts, square-rigging, and a sharply pointed hull designed to slice through the water, were made by sailors on board the ships they represent, during the long periods of inactivity that came about as a result of the lack of wind. Donald’s SIB is a mass-produced replica of the most typical hand-crafted SIBs. He bought it at one of the many inexpensive souvenir shops in the town, fully recognising that its appeal for him was pure nostalgia for his childhood seaside holidays staying with grandparents. He recalls energetic days playing in the sand and windswept evenings during which his grandfather would regale the children with stories of shipwrecks and pirates. He too, had a SIB on his windowsill – a large hand-made one, Donald recalls; again a classic clipper with its sails a-flurry. As his grandfather told the tales of adventures on the high seas, Donald would often gaze at the SIB and try to imagine the sailors heaving down the sails, and calling to each other in rough voices against the crashing sounds of the waves. For him, it was an object that captured the excitement of seaside holidays (rather than empire adventures), and his own mass-produced SIB still captures something of that excitement, as well as something of the ‘Great British seaside’ in its heyday.1 However, Donald speaks of these childhood memories not only as part of an era of ‘the Great British Seaside’, but also as part of ‘more innocent times’, explaining when questioned further, that people had not travelled as much and the British seaside holiday was still something looked forward to by many across the country with a sense of excitement and glee. ‘Donkey rides, sandcastle competitions, and ice-creams were enough excitement … we felt lucky and happy just to have those things … simple things really compared to what you can do on holiday nowadays’. This was late 1950s Britain, before the ‘traditional’ seaside holiday had fallen from favour due to changing social tastes and norms and the availability of affordable holidays abroad, which meant that even those on a moderate income could afford to fly to warmer climes, abandoning the British seaside’s bracing waters (Walton, 1983: 67–8). What had effectively happened was that the seaside holiday created in Britain had become a victim of its own success, as resorts began to crop up in other (crucially, warmer) countries. As Walton argues, these countries own cultural mores surrounding pleasure, display, and the mingling of the sexes in turn came back to British shores and changed norms: ‘sunshine, swimming and hedonism displaced fresh air, control and formality as the dominant seaside resort idioms’ in the decades following the Second World War (Walton, 1983: 67–8). Donald’s attitudes are representative of a wider sentimentality about the seaside; they represent a clinging on to the positive aspects of the quintessentially British seaside holiday – healthy, ­un-glamourous, family fun.

The story of the ship-in-a bottle   89 What is that particular version of Britishness for Donald though? Why was knowing less about, or at least having less direct experience of, other places and cultures, part of an ‘innocence’ that he has a fondness for? ‘It was simpler’, he explains, ‘people knew what was what … there were rules in society, and people, on the whole, kept to them … and knew their place … there was an order’. Asked whether he means a hierarchy in the sense of class, he agrees that was part of it, but that it was a somehow less tangible order than that; ‘it was about being decent and respectable in the way you could be, considering your situation … about behaving properly based on who you were and your role in society’. Crucially of course, for this to be possible, it was about a sense that the majority of people in British society understood what ‘properly’ entailed and indeed were able to understand their own ‘role’ as map-able against a set of understood roles. In many ways, Donald is echoing the sense many had of living in British post-war consensus society in which social cohesion felt stronger than it does today (which is not to suggest that it necessarily was). Yet he is also expressing something of what Chris Rumford meant when he wrote about the past surety of the categories of ‘them’ and ‘us’; and of the fading sense that ‘we’ are definitely not the strangers in ‘our’ own society (Rumford, 2013). For Donald then, the SIB is an object that connotes the ‘Great British seaside holiday’, but that on a deeper level somehow embodies the ‘innocence’ and ‘simplicity’ of (in his view) more cohesive social times. Importantly though, it also harks back to an age before the repercussions of empire had become a fully embedded part of life in Britain (and indeed other ex-colonial countries); before new groups of ethnic minorities had become perceived as an established part of its history and fabric, and before its sense of self in the world had become specifically nuanced by being a former colonial power. Such imaginations of ‘simpler times’ are undeniably beset by cultural myths surrounding an era when ‘Britain ruled the waves’; days before the onset of pluralism, when values were (apparently) more unified; a time before post-colonialism had changed the face of sceptred Europe and postcolonial guilt dulled its gilded edges. Whether intended or not, empire, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, ‘became part of the ­sentimentalised literary and cinematic memories of the former imperial states’ (Hobsbawm, 1995: 222). The seaside as object of communal nostalgia was about days when Victorian mores meant rules were rules and those who broke them were punished; when fun could be innocent and culture was (apparently) not yet sexualised and self-conscious; and when the stucco-fronted buildings of seaside towns (now crumbling facades) provided grandiose settings for the drama of their times. The cohesion Donald refers to in the later era of his childhood was of course to some extent an illusion built on the remnants of the British Empire, just as the ‘heyday of the seaside’ was really a remnant of ­Victorian seaside culture. The tales that Donald’s grandfather told, of shipwrecks and pirates on the high seas, were in many ways tales of empire. At least, they were tales of times when the seas were less chartered and more perilous than they are today. They were tales whose characters stemmed from types and roles that emerged due to

90   Alison Hulme colonial explorations and encounters. From a non-European viewpoint, they are tales of foreign invasion and forced trade. Yet for Donald, these tales are simply elements of the ‘classic seaside holiday’, rather than evidence of the empiredesires contained inside the bottle. It is as though the empire has been emptied from the bottle. This is interesting in terms of the function of early SIBs, which were actively created in order to render the oceans less fearsome. The miniature worlds of SIBs were often made by sailors for their wives and sweethearts. In many ways they can be seen as objects that served to reassure and enable comprehension of adventures whose scale and level of danger was at this stage beyond the experience of most people, and therefore unimaginable and frightening. Miniaturisation served to render real-life perils less frightening, not only for the maker, but for those close to him. Indeed, alongside this miniaturisation was also a process of abstraction, through which ‘real-life’ ships were removed from their perilous habitat of the sea and enclosed in glass, rendering the unknown manageable, controllable, and able to be studied and understood. In fact, even before miniature ships, the art of creating scenes in bottles had begun precisely as an exercise in enabling comprehension, with early makers tending to create explanatory scenes of the processes involved in extracting resources from the earth. These semi-educational artefacts, often made in Germany or Eastern Europe, tended to have different ‘layers’ of scenes in order to explain the different parts of the process (Aubry, 2010: 6–8). This enclosing of the unknown in glass environments was typical of the Victorian era, during which the new discoveries of the British Empire, such as previously unseen flora and fauna, were frequently brought home and arranged under glass domes for the educational benefit of the middle-classes. The natural wonders of empire were effectively a fashionable learning tool and display of knowledge in the parlours of the Victorian affluent. As Thad Logan (2001) points out, many twentiethcentury commentators cite fruit or flowers modelled in wax and preserved under glass domes as the most characteristically ‘Victorian’ items in the typical wellto-do parlour (2001: 174). In addition, she insists that the objects in parlours ‘articulated and mediated Victorian social tensions such as … issues arising around empire, industry, urbanity, and science’ (Logan, 2001: 106). Along such lines, SIBs captured the sense of adventure and danger felt by a nation which in many ways still felt itself to be on the crest of a wave of global pioneering. They would sit in the cabinets of wealthy Victorians alongside tropical butterflies pinned to velvet, taxidermic wonders and other exotic curios typical of the age, and as such were objects intricately embedded in the meanings of imperialistic relations. Indeed, James Bunn argues that such objects were linked to the mystifications produced by the imperialist economy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Bunn, 1980: 319). To collect them, was to perceive of oneself as a ‘citizen of the world’ who could not be tied to ‘a single region’ or ‘the limited learning of one era’ (Bunn, 1980: 313). Similarly, in the essay, ‘Unpacking my Library’, in Illuminations, Walter Benjamin argues that the collector places objects in a kind of magical arrangement which enables a ‘renewing of the world’ as the collector comes to life in the objects. Using stamp

The story of the ship-in-a bottle   91 collections as his example, he says collecting can also capture the power of great states (Benjamin, 1999). Interestingly then, the aspirations and self-perception in these colonial times, strike notes with the new kind of ‘stranger’ Rumford’s work tried to explain, who feels themselves to be at home, and yet, not at home, everywhere. However, miniaturisation was not simply about learning and abstraction; it also involved a negation of the details and political machinations of empire that can be likened to what Susan Stewart (1984) refers to as an erasure of history by the miniature. The SIB, encased and made small and manageable unlike its fullscale counterparts, could hide the darker side of the global networks it was enmeshed in. As she argues, ‘the function of the miniature is to bring historical events to life, to immediacy, and thereby to erase their history, to lose us within their presentness’ (Stewart, 1984: 60). The SIB can be understood therefore as fossilised by its glass surrounding; captured as a moment in time as well as an object – a singular moment that has lost the context of the moments that led up to it, or indeed resulted from it. As Stewart argues, the miniature presents only a spatial transcendence, which erases the productive possibilities of understanding through time, and which therefore ‘erases not only labour but causality and effect’ (1984: 60). It is precisely this lack of visibility of the processes involved in empire, the obscuring of colonial relations, the bringing of vast swathes of historical events into something immediate and accessible, which made the SIB an object that embodied empire whilst creating a lie about its nature. As an object, the SIB took no responsibility for the exploitative processes involved in empire – it simply captured a moment of grandeur on the high seas. For their recipients in the colonising countries, SIBs stood for the majesty of the age of sail, negating the looming presence of colonial backlash such as the Opium Wars and the ever-brewing tensions in the South China Sea. For British people of the late nineteenth century, the idea of overseas territories was still a source of national pride and had not yet become a guilty embarrassment. As Jeremy Black (2004) argues, ‘morality shared with remembered triumph in a potent psychological brew’ when it came to imperialism, and commentators of the day often saw divine sanction in the greatness of the British Empire, William Wordsworth for example speaking of Britain as a ‘favoured nation’ in his Ode for the Day of General Thanksgiving (1816). In addition, as Black argues, the abolition of slavery in 1833 across all British colonies had provided a sense that Britain stood on firm moral ground compared to other imperial powers and was therefore superior (2004: 179–80). Indeed, even in 1901 when Queen Victoria died ‘there was much talk of Britain as the uniquely successful imperial power’ and despite the fact the empire was in flux, opposition to imperial control was limited due to the notions of community, identity and democratisation embedded within it (Black, 2004: 247). Therefore, late-nineteenth century people lived in an age in which the sheer scale of the journeys undertaken, the ships that made them, and the weird and wonderful things they brought back, had created a sense of (as yet un-tainted) wonderment. SIBs, then, for the British subject, were objects linked to a sense of one’s country’s expanding place in the world.

92   Alison Hulme Donald’s mass-produced SIB however, does not serve to domesticate the sense of the gargantuan, threatening nature of the oceans – these are now mapped and ‘conquered’. Rather, it enables a celebration of the seaside with just a touch of nostalgia. As Jeremy Black (2004) argues, after the First World War, although pride in empire was strong, the psychological draw of the sea changed in nature: … the popular imagination was far more engaged by the car and the plane. The ocean now had less of an impact than the seaside [my italics] … those on the beaches, promenades and piers eyed each other up, rather than gazing out to consider the nation’s maritime destiny. (Black, 2004: 281) The trials of empire expressed in the earlier SIBs had also become ‘trinketised’ – to use John Hutnyk’s (2014) term – rendered acceptable, un-threatening, and above all, buyable as seaside souvenirs. The very fact they were becoming massproduced souvenirs, suggests that they had become in some sense ‘safe’ objects that commemorated agreed upon values of wholesome family fun by the sea. Their connection to memories of colonial adventures on the high seas was fading. It was precisely this sentimentalising of the seaside as part of a golden age, not only of Empire, but also of Britain’s social history (the ‘Great British Seaside’), that led to the market for mass-produced seaside trinkets such as Donald’s SIB. They became kitsch pieces of cheap frippery on the windowsills of seaside cottages, to be smiled at with nostalgic but knowing looks in which the looker recollected some vague and now mismatched ideas from various eras – exploration, empire, bathing carriages and donkey rides – in a manner very much akin to what Henri Lefebvre terms the ‘blending of memory, recollection, the imaginary, the real’ that the kitsch object can possess (2008 [1981]: 133). This ‘blending’ led to an object that many, Donald being one of them, find deeply comforting. It speaks not only to a time when ‘you knew where you were’ and ‘there was an order’ as he says, but also when (to put it in Rumford’s terms) you knew if you were a stranger or not. You knew who ‘us’ and ‘they’ were, unlike in what he calls the ‘generalized condition of societal strangeness’ in which such differentiations are increasingly problematic (2013). The great era of sail declined towards the end of the nineteenth century, as steam ships gradually overcame the advantages enjoyed by clipper ships – such as relying on free wind power rather than coal, and not needing to lose time on refuelling stops. Even before they were rendered obsolete by steam, the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal drastically shortened sailing times from Europe to Asia and decreased the necessity of sailing ships designed for speed. Trade ­journeys were no longer the epic voyages they had been throughout most of the nineteenth century and there was no time for sailors to make models. In addition, the onset of mass production and containerisation of global trade saw huge container ships traversing the same historic sea routes as their sailing predecessors,

The story of the ship-in-a bottle   93 bringing hundreds of factory-made SIBs to be sold as nostalgic tourist paraphernalia in the seaside souvenir shops … … and there, on the bottom of Donald’s SIB, imprinted in the glass, are the words ‘Made in China’…

Chapter 2 – the ship that was made in China In a small display booth, about two metres square, on one side of a never-ending wholesale market in the Chinese city of Yiwu, sits a small, mass-produced SIB, identical to the others around it – sailing clippers, sails at full mast, on choppy green seas, just like Donald’s. The stall-holder – Mr W – explains that manufacturers of SIBs tend to mainly make models of the tea clippers as they are considerably more popular amongst wholesale buyers (and consumers) than those depicting more contemporary scenes2. When asked sensitively what historical meaning such ships have for Chinese people, he states plainly that they are recognised as British vessels that played a large part in trade with China – especially the tea trade. Pushed a little further, he acknowledges that the era of the clippers is sometimes seen as a ‘painful memory’ in terms of China’s history. What Mr W is implicitly referring to is the damage inflicted upon China during the Opium Wars – two wars from 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 between Britain and China. The disputes arose due to Britain’s increasing demand for tea, alongside the strict control of trade with foreigners through the Canton System3 (1757–1842), the lack of interest in British goods, and the fact that China would only accept silver, not gold, as payment. This situation led to huge trade deficits between the two nations, and in response British merchants began trading in opium from India – a move that not only saw them finally find a product the  Chinese wanted to buy, but had the added benefit of enabling profit to be made from the Indian colony which had up to that point been money-losing. The importing of opium was initially tolerated by the Qing government – in fact opium smoking was not unusual amongst even the highest in Chinese society. The problems began in the early nineteenth century when Britain stole tea plants from China, and took them to India where they started their own tea plantations and no longer needed to buy tea from China, meaning that China was paying Britain for opium and not recovering that money by Britain buying tea with it. In addition, China was beginning to realise just how disastrous the effects of opium addiction were becoming for its economy and society. The drug was destroying the lives of huge numbers of the Chinese populace and its sale was creating vast profits for the British merchants. John Fairbank refers to the British opium trade as ‘the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times’ (1992:35) and the Opium Wars that ensued as a result of it have rightly gone down in history as some of the most morally contentious. Despite the obviously immoral behaviour of the British towards China, and the strong sense of being bullied, there was in China at the time, a public feeling in many quarters that regardless of the moral rights and wrongs of the opium trade, its handling by the Chinese was proof of their own ‘weakness’ and should

94   Alison Hulme be blamed on the dynastic leaders as much as the Western powers. Others still, went further in their self-critique, formulating a kind of self-essentialised version of ‘the Chinese character’ in order to explain events, and promoting emulation of the West and all things Western as the solution to standing up to the West. This was the philosophy of the New Culture Movement in the 1910s and 1920s which saw Confucianism as totally incompatible with the new state of China and believed what China needed was to import certain Western values – equality, human rights, progressive science, freedom – and use them to combat the West. Indeed, Julia Lovell asserts that Chinese writers in the nineteenth century tended to use the memory of the Opium War more as a spur toward modernisation, seeking answers for why China was weak, rather than dwelling on anger toward Britain. In fact, she argues, it was not until the Nationalist regime of the 1920s and 1930s that the Opium War began to be taught as a moment of great national shame and humiliation that all citizens should work together to counter (Lovell, 2011). The attitudes of Mr W are certainly far more in keeping with this countermovement (and indeed the way in which such nationalism has been promoted throughout the reform era (1978–present) in China. He emphasises that Chinese manufacturers cannot afford to care what they make, and are solely concerned with finding products that make financial sense and a good profit margin – ‘if this is making models of British colonial ships, so be it’. So, Chinese factories churn out bottled versions of the very tea clippers that brought opium to Chinese shores causing a huge percentage of the population to become addicted and the economy to fall into ruin. There is little place for sentimental reactions to history in Mr W’s world. His attitude is purely instrumental – history and its ironies stand firmly in second place for him, when profit is at stake. China today is about getting on, improving things … I make whatever works. I have many Western buyers who come to me for these model ships. Last year I was making different products. Now I am making these. It doesn’t bother me – I just do good business. Effectively, manufacturers such as Mr W have re-appropriated the role such vessels played in the British colonial exploitation of China and forged them as part of their own current-day production prowess. They are owning their own colonial experience in order to sell it back to the West; making historical events that are often presented as part of a history ‘done to’ China, part of a present in which such events are sold back to those who ‘did to’. This therefore presents a particularly interesting example of grapples with the question of who is globalising and who is being globalised. For Mr W, a globalising world is as much, if not more, about his ability and agency to sell history back to whoever is happy to buy it, as it is about histories and culture from elsewhere forcing their way into his everyday life. Furthermore, Mr W is embedded in his country’s own historical trajectory within a globalising world – a trajectory that, precisely, has enabled him to

The story of the ship-in-a bottle   95 operate in the way he does in business. The existence, or rather, creation of the city of Yiwu has enabled manufacturers and wholesalers such as Mr W to reconfigure their relationship with both the colonial histories of their nation, and the current-day globalising processes they find themselves, and make themselves, part of. Yiwu is famous for its wholesale markets, in fact it was built around them, transforming itself from a small village to a global hub over the past three decades. Most of its companies are small family-owned enterprises that manufacture small, inexpensive commodities such as socks, toothbrushes, plastic cups and cheap ornaments and has become a huge economic driver for the whole of the Yangtze River Delta region. This success is due largely to the adoption of a specific economic paradigm – the Wenzhou model4 – based on numerous small-scale private enterprises, facilitated by highly mobile traders who utilise various forms of informal finance. This means that the Wenzhou model works to maintain low costs in return for low profit margins, which in turn means scale is required in order for the low profit margin per unit to still deliver economic viability overall. Therefore, typically, the Wenzhou model relies on small family businesses, making lowvalue products, in great numbers. The model is historically specific to Wenzhou city in south-east Zhejiang province, and has existed for centuries despite struggling to be accepted under both Confucian and Maoist rule. However, it was with the coming to power of Deng Xiao-ping in 1978 that the Wenzhou model began to gain clout. Deng’s reform and opening policies saw a new national rhetoric of creating individual entrepreneurs of all Chinese citizens – Mr W was one of this new wave of entrepreneurs who ‘leapt into the sea’ (as it was called) by setting up his own business and giving up his state-funded job. He became part of China’s manufacturing revolution, and its (then) newly burgeoning engagement with a globalising world. For him, this was the point at which China took charge of its own history, and he expresses pride in being part of that historical moment. He recognises that the success of low-end Chinese products, or ‘Made-in-China’, changed consumptive habits in the West, causing Western consumers to expect a low price. The SIB in Yiwu is part of a globalised and globalising process, and is typical of the type of product required as part of this, as Mr W knows only too well. It is indicative of the changes in China, the changes in Mr W’s own life, and the changes in attitudes towards history (with all its globalising forces).

Chapter 3 – on what to do with strangeness There are implications in the folds of the pages between Donald’s story and Mr W’s story about the ways in which we might view strangeness and the stranger. One of the points Rumford makes in The Globalisation of Strangeness is that the stranger still needs to be visible in order to exist, but tends to ‘arise from within society’ as opposed to from outside of it (2013:7). This manufacturing ‘stranger’ (Mr W) who made Donald’s SIB then, is invisible to Donald, as he is far away and does not physically enter Donald’s world. (Of course it was

96   Alison Hulme this urge to reveal the unseen others and, importantly, their labour, that led David Harvey to extol the virtues of following things in order to uncover their production and defetishise them.) Indeed, when Donald is asked about where his SIB was made he has not really thought about it, being more caught up on the familiarity of the object than its strangeness. At this stage at least, it is more a comfort to him than a trigger for a minor version of what Rumford called a ­‘globalization moment’, in which an individual suddenly feels the forces of globalisation ‘bearing down’ on their lives’ (2013: 10). He sees it as capturing something explicitly ‘national’ and ‘British’, rather being a container for concepts with far wider impacts – such as colonialism, or globalisation. Globalisation in this chapter has emerged in many guises – current-day waves of immigration bringing ‘strangers’ to our shore in (according to Donald) ‘everincreasing numbers’; the globalisations of Victorian adventures on the high seas and the impact of such colonising missions for non-Europeans; and the globalisations of the Chinese manufacturing revolution bringing tourist trinkets for rock-bottom prices. There are many layers and many different strangers here. There are many points at which a ubiquitous object such as the SIB is rendered strange and familiar in different ways. In fact, the story of the SIB from the eighteenth century to the present day, and the impact this history had on this object’s status as a cultural artefact in Britain, is in some ways the story of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. It first existed to make the strangeness of the oceans more familiar and reassuring; it then took on aspects of a familiar and ‘cosy’ seaside, only to be used to re-expose the strangeness and pain of Empire. From its function as a collectable in the age of empire, to its transition into kitsch souvenir as the British Empire began to fade and containerisation brought mass versions of previously hand-crafted objects into ubiquity, the SIB has skipped in and out of a story about colonial power, globalisation, strangeness and familiarity. In becoming mass-produced, and therefore kitsch, SIBs came to be an object that could be viewed ironically, and enabled the subversion of its previous meanings, leaving it open to multiple interpretations and associations. As Sam Binkley (2000) argues, ‘the uniqueness of kitsch is a distinct style, one which celebrates repetition and conventionality as a value in itself’ (2000: 133). He notes the ability of kitsch to topple old assumptions about cultural hierarchies based on the supremacy of ‘high culture’, and agrees with those theorists (such as Lawrence Grossberg, John Fiske and Stuart Hall) who posit consumers as intrinsically creative and critical in their choices. Kitsch, for him, must be seen as a distinct category that deflects creativity and innovation whilst celebrating routine, sentiment, and banality, revelling in a repetition of the familiar and a resounding affirmation of the everyday (Binkley, 2000: 133). With the SIB, this affirmation of the everyday is done with a knowing nod to the past and to its reinterpretation in the present. While it does indeed spurn creativity as Binkley argues, the kitsch SIB is, on a subtle ­psycho-social level, creative in itself as it exists to encourage enjoyment in recreating the past in the present.

The story of the ship-in-a bottle   97 The kitsch-ing of the SIB has also enabled the subversion of its previous meanings, leaving it open to multiple interpretations and associations. Therefore, in many ways the kitsch-ing of the SIB is an opportunity. Empire is neither emptied out of the bottle nor rendered harmless by the kitsch SIB; rather, kitsch enables the SIB to play upon its own connotations and subvert previous meanings. The kitsch SIB does precisely that—it recreates its own past as an object, sea-bathing pasts, and colonial pasts of all nations. It is quintessentially ­postmodern, and as a postmodern object it leaves itself open to multiple interpretations and associations. If the ‘trinketising’ of the ship-in-bottle has made it a comforting object that affirmed social norms, then the ‘kitsch-ing’ of it in the era of mass production has opened it up to ironic interpretations and uses. The advent of the SIB as mass-produced kitsch object also makes it a contested object – one that carries multiple associations from its various pasts. It is perhaps the familiar made strange that Rumford speaks of; there is something unheimlich about the return of these histories. So, if the mass production of the ship-in-bottle in the seaside era has made it a comforting object that affirmed (by-gone) social norms for some (like Donald), then it has also opened it up to ironic interpretations and uses – an object that carries multiple associations from its various pasts. It can then, as well as rendering the strange familiar, render the familiar strange. It can take the connotations of ‘seaside holidays’ and force a rerecognition of the colonial origins of the SIB. A recent example of how this contestation can manifest itself is the work of the British artist of African descent Yinka Shonibare who has re-asserted the colonial nature of the SIB by making a 1.30 metre replica SIB of Nelson’s HMS Victory. First displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, it now sits permanently outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Shonibare, who was born of Nigerian parents, describes the inspiration for his work as his awareness of the part the colonial process (including the HMS Victory herself) played in the formation of his own identity: If Napoleon’s fleet had won that battle, I might be speaking to you in French because victory at Trafalgar enabled the British Empire to expand further. The French would have had control of the seas if that hadn’t been the case. (Hoult: 2014) It is the sails of the model ship that have particular meaning here. They are made from wax fabric – batik – that in past eras was sold to West Africa as part of colonial trading. While culturally associated with genuine African identity (at one time being worn by African nationalists as a sign of solidarity), the cloth has actually accrued many complex, and often ambivalent associations, in addition – those of colonialism, industrialisation, emigration, cultural appropriation, and the invention (and reinvention) of tradition. As Shonibare explains, ‘It [the cloth] was made in Hyde, near Manchester, and I buy it in Brixton market. I like the fact that something seen as being African is actually the product of quite complex cultural relationships’ (Hoult: 2014).

98   Alison Hulme Shonibare’s artwork is one example of the ways in which British postcolonial relationships can be played out via objects with contested memories and is typical of the beginning of an era in which such kitsch-ed objects can be appropriated using the as-yet (still) less seen and heard interpretations of post-colonial subjects. So, with the advent of the SIB as a mass-produced kitsch object, it also becomes a contested object – one which, now carrying associations from various parts of its past, can be discussed precisely as its parts, rather than as a single object with a unified meaning. This is then an object that represents strangeness very well. This lack of unified meaning had its base not only in the postmodern nature of the images now associated with the SIB, but also in the more tangible fact that in a post-colonial era, ‘meaning’ was no longer agreed upon. History itself was a contested realm – whose history, of what, where, when and defined by whose agenda? The post-colonial subjects of Britain’s former empire, now citizens, could not entirely accept the trinketising of ‘their’ historical experience and ‘their’ ‘collective’ memory of colonial times, and began to compete with the other ‘collective’ memory of the British seaside, making the SIB a contested object, whose meaning deserves to be fought over. The ‘strangers’ are refusing to allow a simple reading of the SIB by the ‘non-strangers’, because these strangers are actually joint owners in the story of the SIB and all it stands for. They challenge the normative view of the SIB, making visible its layers, and rendering untenable its status as a comfortingly familiar object. The twenty-first century SIB then, is an object that in many ways acknowledges various past versions of itself and yet contains none of them, re-forging of itself a discursive site for contesting the truths of empire and the experience of living in the globalised and globalising present day. The SIB, interpreted as an object of high-globalisation, captures the layers of belonging that means the stranger must be seen within ‘us’ as well as within ‘others’. The mass production of the SIB has enabled it to operate as an object with the potential to awaken the realisation that ‘we are all strangers now’ (as Rumford said). And perhaps as such, the best potential reaction is to take such objects and subvert them as Shonibare has, rendering them proof (and more to the point) celebration of the ways in which ‘we’ are no longer ‘we’, and ‘we’ are not quite sure who ‘they’ are. In this way, objects can become vehicles for discrediting and disenabling the rhetoric of other powerful ‘stranger makers’ (Trump, Farage, May, Brexit, Fascists – the link is intentional!). After all, the strangers that ‘came today’ and did not ‘leave tomorrow’, are the strangers that are all of us, and objects such as the SIB capture the layers of history that went to create of the stranger a less definable and far more challenging subject through which to view the processes of globalisation.

Notes 1 As John Walton writes, the origins of the ‘Great British seaside’ began to emerge in the first half of the nineteenth century when sea-bathing became popular among the higher strata of English society as part of a fashionable concern with the pursuit of

The story of the ship-in-a bottle   99 health (Walton, 1983: 16). According to Walton, the origins of the British seaside town lay in a belief the British shared with much of Catholic Europe that the sea had prophylactic powers. Then, the growth of the railways from the 1840s onwards greatly aided the development of seaside towns, and made it possible for middle- and lower-class people to afford the trip to the seaside (Walton, 1983: 16). Blackpool became the world’s first working-class seaside resort in the late nineteenth century, while Margate earned its reputation as a ‘great day at the seaside’ for working-class Londoners. During this period, the seaside was seen as counteracting the impact of the industrial revolution in much the same way as the countryside, but with the addition of ‘pleasure’ and ‘luxury’ as powerful connotations. Queen Victoria’s love of the seaside contributed to this development too, and the sea became very much about holidaying, as opposed to something perceived solely as connected to trade and ships. 2 These informal interviews with Chinese manufacturers were carried out over the course of two months in the city of Yiwu, China, as part of an AHRC-funded research project. The interviews were with various manufacturers, not only those of SIBs. The project forms the bases of the author’s book On the Commodity Trail (2015). 3 The Canton System was a single port system in which all external trade had to pass through Canton (Guangzhou) and was required to be managed by one of thirteen Chinese merchants known as Hongs. 4 The Wenzhou model originates from Yonjia county (in which Wenzhou is situated) in Zhejiang province. Unlike other proponents of neo-Confucianism, Yonjia thinking placed emphasis on business, arguing that traders, not only officials, could be the backbone of society. Therefore, unlike in other provinces, in Wenzhou, commercialism was celebrated, and went largely unnoticed by the emperor as the region was quite cut-off geographically. If the Wenzhou model was viewed with suspicion under Confucianism, it was positively controversial under Mao and indeed banned even before full collectivisation began to take place. Under Maoist logic, it was deemed to be particularly capitalistic in nature as it was seen to rely upon individualism and small-scale entrepreneurship (i.e. at the level of the family unit). However, following the coming to leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the reform and opening policies initiated saw Wenzhou become the first city to set up private enterprises and shareholder cooperatives.

References Aubry, G. (2010) ‘Histoire des bateaux en bouteille’, Rose des Vents, 131(1): 6–8. Benjamin, W. (1999) Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Binkley, S. (2000) ‘Kitsch as a Repetitive System: A Problem for the Theory of Taste Hierarchy’, in Journal of Material Culture, 5: 131–52. Black, J. (2004) The British Seaborne Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bunn, J. (1980) ‘The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism’, in New Literary History, 11(2): 303–21. Fairbank, J.K. (1992) ‘The Creation of the Treaty System’ in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10, part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1995) The Age of Extremes. London: Abacus. Hoult, N. (2014) ‘Interview with Yinka Shonibare’, The Telegraph. Available at www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/7739981/Fourth-Plinth-Yinka-Shonibareinterview.html (accessed 18 July 2014). Hutnyk, J. Trinketization. http://hutnyk.wordpress.com (accessed 18 July 2014). Hulme, A (2015) On the Commodity Trail. London: Bloomsbury.

100   Alison Hulme Lefebvre, H. (2008) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3. London: Verso. Logan, T. (2001) The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovell, J. (2011) The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. Melbourne, Australia: Pan Macmillan. Rumford, C. (2008) Cosmopolitan Spaces. London: Routledge. Rumford, C. (2013) The Globalisation of Strangeness. London: Palgrave. Stewart, S. (1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walton, J.K. (1983) The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

7 Don’t look back in anger A reflection on strangeness and borders in academia Claudia Lueders

Introduction The Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounters aims to build towards a new global social theory. The chapter discusses the limitations of the academic community and the challenges of academic scholarship by exploring the potential of ‘academic encounters’ for the understanding of borders within academia in the context of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. This chapter reflects on Chris Rumford’s work on borders and strangeness and applies it to the academic context. It aims to challenge existing borders within the academic world. The chapter looks at the tuition fees and funding policies within the UK and discusses what kind of impact these policies have on students and young academics. I argue that the British tuition fees show for example that the academia world is not as global and ‘borderless’ as expected. It could be argued that the tuition fees act as a ‘bordering mechanism’ to include or exclude students from the academic community based on their nationality. A similar description could be applied to the mobility regulations of UK and EU funding policies which as it will be argued can create a sense of strangeness among postgraduate students and young academics. Inspired by Chris’s intellectual openness and his interest in bringing different disciplines together, my thesis on British identity and Britpop engaged in interdisciplinary research aimed to bring together the knowledge of academic discourses on national identity and popular culture. I argue that despite the general request to engage in interdisciplinary work there is a strong sense of strangeness within academia whenever one engages in interdisciplinary research. The chapter will briefly reflect upon my personal experience of presenting my interdisciplinary work at both national and international conferences within different academic fields. Presenting my academic research at these conferences made me very much aware of these disciplinary borders and made me feel like a stranger within each of these different disciplines. This chapter aims to highlight the positive rather than negative aspects of strangeness to further encourage academics to engage in interdisciplinary research. The chapter consists of three parts which will discuss: borders in academia, strangeness in academia and interdisciplinary research in academia. The first

102   Claudia Lueders two sections focusing on borders and strangeness will look at the UK tuition fees and UK/EU funding policies more generally while the final part will take a more reflective approach looking at my personal experience of borders and strangeness while engaging in interdisciplinary research as a German PhD student studying national identity and popular music in the UK. This is an unusual approach but seems an appropriate choice given that the idea for this book was conceived in memory of my PhD supervisor Chris Rumford who always encouraged me to follow my research interest and sadly passed away too early. My argument is that borders and strangeness play a role within the academic world and that they need to be taken into consideration when we engage in our research projects linking back to his research on borders and strangeness.

Borders in academia The first part of the chapter discusses the challenges of the idea of global academic scholarship, by exploring existing borders within the academic community in the UK. It reflects on Chris Rumford’s work on borders and tries to apply it to the fee and visa policies within the UK. It tries to understand what kind of impact these nationally driven policies have on students. Political Sociology aims to bring the ‘cultural’ and ‘global’ ‘turns’ together, by emphasising the constructions of identity and culture and acknowledging the need to move beyond the nation-state and the national society. Cultural as well as academic encounters are important to the understanding of contemporary change at both the local and global scales. Political and social science students worldwide are studying concepts such as globalisation as ‘the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ and glocalization as the ‘simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems’ (Robertson, 1992, 1994, 8) while their access to the academic community seems to be determined by their nationality. Chris Rumford argues that while Robertson’s definition of globalisation seems to suggest that the subjective experience of globalisation further drives interconnectivity, it also creates a sense of strangeness due to the tension between ‘a highly developed global awareness’ and ‘the global dis-connectivity’ as a result of individual experiences of less-than-complete global connectivity (2016, 15). In ‘Theorising Borders’, Chris focuses on the changing nature of borders as well as our changing consciousness of borders in the context of globalisation which includes ‘ordinary people’ such as students and young academics’ experience of borders (2006). It could be argued that borders are still important in the global age; the increased awareness of global connectivity might have even increased the demand of borders and the idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ seem to acknowledge the impact of globalisation on borders (Rumford 2010). The study of global borders needs to take into consideration the local, the national and the global. The idea of cosmopolitan borders tries to highlight the changing nature of borders ‘in terms of their nature, their function, their location and their ownership’ (Rumford, 2014, 2).

Don’t look back in anger   103 Rumford identifies two broad approaches to theorising borders: the first approach, contextualises borders by the idea of the networks, while the second approach discusses borders in the context of societal transformations and a new spatiality of politics (2006, 155). According to Rumford, ‘the idea of networks, along with associated ideas of mobilities, flows, fluids and scapes, has become a key metaphor for understanding modern life in a ‘world in motion’ (2006, 155). Urry’s (1999) call for a study of mobilities, Wellman’s (2002) idea of ‘networked individualism’, and Castells’ ‘network society’, where a space of places is being replaced by a space of flows (2000) are key studies within this field of research. The idea that territorial borders are easily transcended by flows and mobilities which take place within globalised circuits of academia needs to be contested by looking at the British tuition fee policies for example. Since students were responsi­ ble for payment of tuition fees at British universities in 1998, tuition fees have increased significantly originally starting at £1,000 and vary between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Study in the UK, 2019). UK tuition fees, as well as visa eligibility criteria, vary depending on the student’s nationality. It could be argued that in that sense ‘national borders’ play an important role within academia and act as a bordering mechanism: giving access to some while denying access to others to the academic community within the UK. There is a general distinction between home students, EU students and international students. There is also a distinction for home students depending on which UK nation they are from and in which nation they decide to study within the UK. English universities can charge up to £9,250 per year for home students for an undergraduate degree. Welsh universities charge up to £9,000 for home students and £3,925 for European Union and Northern Irish students. Welsh students can apply for a fee grant to cover some of the fees which are not repayable, or means tested. Scottish universities do not charge home or EU students fees at the undergraduate level, however, any student from England, Wales or Northern Ireland is expected to pay up to £9,250 per year. Northern Irish universities charge up to £4,275 for home students and may charge up to £9,250 for students from elsewhere in the UK (Times Higher Education, 2019). Social theorists such as Bauman (2002), Beck (2004) and Balibar (1998) have been concerned with the role of borders in the context of societal transformations and a new spatiality of politics. According to Bauman, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 can be considered as a symbolic end to the era of space and the primacy of territorial power and he defines ‘global space’ borders as extraterritorial ‘frontier lands’ (Bauman, 2002: 88, 90). Beck’s work on the cosmopolitanisation of societies identifies the pluralisation of borders as a key development whereby borders are no longer only national but may take many different forms (2004). Balibar argues that ‘borders are everywhere’ and he acknowledges that borders can be found at different locations throughout society relating to his idea of the border ‘polysemy’, that borders mean different things to different people and affect different groups in multiple ways (2002, 2004). The distinction between home/ EU students and international students applies for both undergraduate as well as post-graduate studies. In 2017, international

104   Claudia Lueders students paid between £10,000 and £35,000 annually for lecture-based undergraduate degrees (Times Higher Education, 2019). Postgraduate study fees depend on cost depending on the type of study programme and the duration of course. Home students pay £6,842 per year for a full-time taught Master’s course, while an international student must pay the highest UK tuition fees on average £14,096 in order to attend the same course (Study in the UK, 2019). The idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ can be considered a product of the cosmopolitanisation of borders. It could be argued that students study abroad programmes have the potential to enhance their subjective experience of globalisation and further drive their interconnectivity, while the limitation of these experiences due to restrictive fee or visa policies criteria can create a sense of strangeness caused by the tension between ‘a highly developed global awareness’ on the one hand and ‘the global dis-connectivity’ as a result of individual experiences of less-than-complete global connectivity on the other hand (2016, 15). Examples of ‘the global dis-connectivity’ are students who because of their nationality are neither allowed to study in the UK nor allowed to attend conferences, workshops or study trips because of fee or visa restrictions.

Strangeness in academia The second part of the chapter discusses the challenges of global academic scholarship, by exploring existing borders within the academic community in the UK. It reflects on Chris Rumford’s work on strangeness and tries to apply it to the funding policies within the UK. I argue that the postgraduate funding policies create a sense of strangeness among postgraduate students and young academics. Chris Rumford’s The Globalization of Strangeness focuses on the nature of dynamics of cultural globalisation, the dynamics of the global and local relations, the transformation of subjectivity and the cohesiveness of contemporary societies and argues that globalisation can ‘weigh heavily’ upon individuals (2016, 13). Chris Rumford highlights that both kinds of literature on strangeness and stranger focus on ‘the other as the stranger’ (2016). The key argument of the globalisation of strangeness is that neither the idea of ‘the other as stranger’ nor the idea of ‘us as strangers’ are enough to understand the contemporary sense of strangeness within the context of our globalised and cosmopolitan world (Rumford 2016). Strangeness results from our individual experiences of globalisation, the ways in which processes of globalisation have transformed our relationship between near and far, inside and outside and self and other. The idea of strangeness that is caused by the tension between our highly developed global awareness and our global dis-connectivity which results from our individual experiences of lessthan-complete global connectivity which was discussed in the previous section, will be linked to the idea of the stranger who emerges within national, global, and cosmopolitan construction of the world in this section (Rumford, 2016). In the Globalization of Strangeness, Chris Rumford suggests that the idea of the traditional stranger, that ‘Comes today, stays tomorrow’ (Simmel) should be replaced by the global stranger, that is ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’ (Rumford).

Don’t look back in anger   105 The UK and EU postgraduate funding policies provide a good example for the identity of what I would like to call a global ‘academic’ stranger who is ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’. The ‘mobility’ criterion of funding policies, which states that the candidates must or must not have resided for a certain amount of time within the UK, makes it almost impossible to apply for an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) full scholarship or a Marie-Curie Scholarship in the UK when applicants have not lived or lived in the UK prior to their studies. In order to be eligible for an ESRC full scholarship including maintenance and fees, applicants must have settled status in the UK, meaning there are no restrictions on how long they can stay in the UK. They need to have been ­‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK for three years before to the start of the studentship grant. This means they must have been normally residing in the UK. However, they do not have to be resident in the UK wholly or mainly for ­full-time education. This does not apply to UK and EU nationals (ESRC, 2020). In contrast to the ESRC scholarship, in order to be eligible for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, applicants must not have lived or worked in the country they intend to travel to for more than 12 months during the three years up to the closing date of the call (UCL, 2020). Due to the mobility criterion, that states that the candidates must or must not have resided for a certain amount of time within the UK, I was not eligible to apply for an ESRC full scholarship when I started my PhD in the UK as I had not lived in the UK for three years prior to my studies and I was not able to apply for a Marie-Curie Fellow in the UK because I had not resided in the UK for more than three years. So, the idea of the global stranger, that is ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’ (Rumford) resonates very much with my personal academic experience of studying and applying for scholarships in the UK. Balibar’s idea that ‘borders are everywhere’ that borders mean different things to different people and affect various groups differently (2002, 2004). ‘If globalization makes and re-makes the world’, he stresses, ‘it makes the world increasingly strange’ (Rumford, 2008, 70). Obviously, that experience will be a completely different one for someone who due to their different sense of mobility might be able to apply for a full ESRC scholarship and/or a Marie-Curie Fellowship. The focus on mobility links to Durrschmidt and Taylor’s understanding of borders to ‘control mobility rather than territory’ (2007, 56). States use borders to regulate mobility wherever it is required (Balibar, 2002) by giving access to some while denying access to others and the distinction between more visible versus less visible borders such as ‘networked’ borders at university campuses becomes blurred (Rumford, 2008). Borders become as mobile as people and/or things crossing them (Cooper and Perkins, 2014; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). At the stage of writing this chapter, the UK started the process of leaving the European Union and it is still unclear at this point what kind of effects the Brexit will have on the academic community within the UK. Stone and Viña highlight that the Brexit rhetoric which was very much driven by migration will have even more profound effects (cited in Prazeres and Findlay, 2017, 5). Prazeres and Findlay highlight that the trend of declining EU student numbers in the UK over

106   Claudia Lueders the last five years has been caused by the UK government’s increase in tuition fees in 2012 and the trend is likely to continue due to further increases in fees as proposed in the UK 2015 budget showing the effect on Home/EU students from 2017/2018 (Prazeres and Findlay, 2017, 13). Changes to tuition fees and student visas for European students, like international student tuition fees and visas, will impact their mobility to the UK.

Interdisciplinary research in academia The final part of the chapter will briefly reflect upon my experience of presenting my research at national and international conferences within different academic fields. My thesis on British identity and Britpop engaged in interdisciplinary research aiming to bring together the knowledge of academic discourses on national identity and popular culture. I presented my academic research at eight national and international conferences throughout my doctoral studies including three political science conferences (two ECPR, GSA), three popular music conferences (IASPM, KISMIF, Institute of Musical Research), one British cultural studies conferences and one postgraduate conference. Based on my experience presenting at these conferences, I would like to argue that despite the general request to engage in interdisciplinary work there is a strong sense of strangeness within academia whenever one engages in interdisciplinary research. My sense of disciplinary belonging has been challenged many times more often at the political science conferences than at the popular music ones where academics seem to be more open to the idea of researching national identity through popular culture. As a young academic who researches national identity, I was quite surprised how many times I have been asked the question why I (‘as a German’) am interested in studying Britpop’s representation of British identity and my answer to this question usually was because I (‘as a German’) have the necessary distance to study the representation of national identity within the British context. My familiarity with Britpop and my unfamiliarity with British identity as well as my interest in both was a good starting point and foundation for my research. The ‘Interdisciplinarity Survey Report for the Global Research Council’ highlights that disciplines are used to competing rather than collaborating and that interdisciplinary research is not accorded the same prestige as disciplinary research from a publication or academic career perspective (Global Research Council 2016). Early career interdisciplinarity should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Given the fact that interdisciplinary research can be uncertain, researchers with the potential to work across multiple disciplines should be given extra encouragement and support from universities, funding agencies, and publishers. The British Academy (2016) suggests that despite the broad and deep support for interdisciplinary research, early-career researchers who intend to engage in interdisciplinary research or start an interdisciplinary career should wait until they are established within their own discipline. According to these suggestions,

Don’t look back in anger   107 researchers should aim to develop an academic home first, which includes a set of publications within a disciplinary area as well as professional networks forged by attendance at conferences (2016). Many of the major challenges that society faces today will require solutions developed through interdisciplinary research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Improving support for and addressing the barriers to this work could contribute to major scientific breakthroughs at the interface of disciplines, develop new technologies and ultimately support the economy and develop novel solutions to societal challenges. (The Royal Society, 2015)

Conclusion This chapter reflected on Chris Rumford’s work on borders and strangeness which was applied to the academic context. It looked at the both the fee and funding policies within the UK and argued that these policies reinforce national borders within the academic community. It has been argued that the tuition fees act as a ‘bordering mechanism’ to include or exclude students from the academic learning experience in the UK. In addition to this it has been argued that the mobility regulation or more effectively the restrictions of the UK and EU funding policies can create a sense of strangeness among postgraduate students and young academics. The final chapter argued that there is a strong sense of strangeness within academia associated with interdisciplinary research. Disciplines should be more collaborating rather than competing and interdisciplinarity research should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Both universities and publishers should provide more support for early career researchers to engage in interdisciplinary research by helping them to establish professional networks and helping them to publish a set of publications across disciplines. The chapter discussed the limitations of the academic community and the challenges of academic scholarship by exploring different examples of ‘academic encounters’ to improve our understanding of borders within academia in the context of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. Borders and strangeness play a role within the academic world and academics will need to take that into consideration when trying to build a new global social theory.

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108   Claudia Lueders Beck, U. (2004) ‘The Cosmopolitan Dimension’, in N. Gane (ed.), Rethinking Social Theory. London: Continuum. Castells, M. (2000) ‘Toward a Sociology of the Network Society’. Contemporary Sociology, 29(5): 693–9. Cohen, R. and Sheringham, O. (2016) Encountering Difference. Cambridge: Polity. Cooper, A. and Perkins, C. (2014) ‘Mobile Borders/Bordering Mobilities: Contemporary State Bordering Practices and the Implications for Resistance and Intervention’, in C. Kinnvall and T. Svensson (eds), Bordering Securities: Governing of Connectivity and Dispersal. London: Routledge. Durrschmidt, J. and Taylor, G. (2007) Globalization, Modernity and Social Change. Houndmills: Palgrave. ESRC (2020) Prospective students. https://esrc.ukri.org/skills-and-careers/doctoral-training/ prospective-students/ [Accessed 15 January 2020]. Global Research Council (2016) www.globalresearchcouncil.org/fileadmin/documents/ GRC_Publications/Interdisciplinarity_Report_for_GRC_DJS_Research.pdf [Accessed 18 December 2019]. Prazeres, L. and Findlay, A. (2017) An Audit of International Student Mobility to the UK. ESRC CPC Centre for Population Change. Working Paper 82. February 2017. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Robertson, R. (1994) Globalisation or Glocalization? The Journal of International ­Communication, 1(1): 33–52. Rumford, C. (2006) ‘Theorizing Borders’. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2): 155–69. Rumford, C. (2008) ‘Introduction: Citizens and Borderwork in Europe’. Space and Polity, 12(1): 1–12. Rumford, C. (2010) ‘Global Borders: An Introduction to the Special Issue’. Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 28: 951–6. Rumford, C. (2014) Cosmopolitan Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rumford, C. (2016) The Globalization of Strangeness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Study in the UK (2019) www.studying-in-uk.org/uk-tuition-fees/ [Accessed 18 December 2019]. The British Academy (2016) ‘Crossing Path: Interdisciplinarity, Institutions, Careers, Education, and Application’ www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Crossing% 20Paths%20%20Full%20Report.pdf [Accessed 18 December 2019]. The Royal Society (2015) ‘Response to the British Academy’s Call for Evidence on “Interdisciplinarity”’. https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/Publications/2015/2906-15-rs-response-to-ba-inquiry-interdisciplinarity.pdf [Accessed 18 December 2019]. Times Higher Education (2019) The Cost of Studying at a University in the UK. www. timeshighereducation.com/student/advice/cost-studying-university-uk [Accessed 18 December 2019]. UCL (2020) Marie Curie Fellows. www.ucl.ac.uk/research-services/managing-funding/ marie-curie-fellows [Accessed 15 January 2020]. Urry, J. (1999) ‘Mobile Sociologies’. The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1): 185–203. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2009) Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power. ­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wellman, B. (2002) ‘Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism’, in M. Tanabe, P. van den Besselaar, and T. Ishida (eds), Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches. Digital Cities 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2362. Berlin: Springer.

Part III

Global studies and interdisciplinarity

8 Europe in crises Europe’s others and other Europes from a global perspective Didem Buhari Gulmez and Seckin Baris Gulmez Introduction Following Rumford’s ‘many Europes’ (Biebuyck and Rumford 2012) and ‘European Multiplicity’ (Rumford and Buhari Gulmez 2014), this chapter focuses on the chronic uncertainty and the multiplicity of understandings about who represents Europe. By focusing only on Europe’s ‘Others’ and ignoring the existence of ‘Other Europes’, the mainstream scholarship fails to capture a whole series of alternative European visions about European self, which co-exist with the dominant discourse and start to gain ground in times of crises. Turkey’s relations with the European Union (EU), Eurozone crisis, Brexit and the Syrian refugee crisis are primary examples where the EU-centric studies remain insufficient to explain the complex picture and they tend to reduce the problem to technical and economic issues at national or regional level. Building upon Buhari Gulmez and Rumford (2016), this chapter puts forward four ideal categories to grasp the complexity underlying ‘Europe in crises’ in a global context: thick, thin, parochial, and global Europes. Before starting the discussion about many Europes, it is necessary to explain the study’s understanding of ‘Europe in crises’ emanating from ‘cultural encounters’ with its internal and external Others. Instead of an abrupt event that radically transforms a well-established project like the EU, a crisis can be understood as a process through which the existing alternative visions – such as Euroscepticism, nationalism, populism and other parochial and universalistic, if not cosmopolitan, visions – that have formerly been marginalised by the dominant EU discourses become more visible. Hence, the study puts a strong criticism against the static, Eurocentric accounts of European/regional identity as fixed and predetermined. European identity, Self and Others are prone to redefinition in a constantly changing domestic, regional and global environment. ‘Europe-making’ (Axford 2015) does not only involve parochial, nationalistic and ‘gatekeeper’ projects. It also involves compliance with global standards and it even becomes a ‘gateway’ to global standards in certain policy areas (Buhari Gulmez 2017). In this regard, following Nabers who defines society as a crisis-ridden ‘unfini­shed project’ (2015: 12), crisis is an inherent characteristic of European identity in the global era. Based on a notion of European multiplicity, this study

112   D.B. Gulmez and S.B. Gulmez argues that contemporary Europe cannot be reduced to a singular dynamic because it relies on the constant negotiations of competing parochial and universalistic visions about who is European and who is not European (Buhari Gulmez and Rumford 2016; Rumford and Buhari Gulmez 2015). In this context, this study resonates with the main aim of the book to transcend both one-worldism and Eurocentrism in exploring identity, borders and belonging. In particular, it seeks to explore the shifting dynamics underlying Europe ‘both as a system of governance and as a space of cultural exchange’. Finally, by emphasising the multiplicity and complexity of European politics and society, this study introduces a new way of thinking about the current crises in Europe as exemplified in the case of the Syrian refugee crisis. The chapter is organised into three sections. The first section will discuss in detail the perspective of ‘many Europes’ raised by Buhari Gulmez and Rumford (2016), and then seek to refine the original framework by offering a new typology (thick, thin, parochial and global Europes). The second section will scrutinise ‘the others of Europe’ with the claim that Europe’s others keep changing as they depend on which Europe we are talking about. Finally, European responses to the Syrian refugee crisis will be under focus to highlight the multiplicity of discourses within Europe each emphasising diverging problems, identifying different others and prescribing different solutions.

Many Europes The EU artificially established a notion of a ‘unified Europe’ although Europe had always reflected a fragmented nature (Agnew 2001). The EU, just like the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century, provided only a temporary sense of unity within Europe. However, in times of crisis, the illusion of «oneness» in Europe dissipates and formerly marginalised groups and trends become more visible. By taking the fragmented nature of Europe more seriously, this chapter emphasises the multiplicity of ‘Others’ and of visions about Self-Other relationships. The notion of Europe is not fixed and unified, which implies that many Europes co-exist. According to Buhari Gulmez and Rumford (2016), there are at least three main Europe-making dynamics that constitute a fragmented Europe: thick, thin, and parallel Europes. Thick Europe-making involves frequent references to the past in order to emphasise common ancestors, kinship, civilisational, cultural and religious notions shared by Europeans transcending national differences. It assumes that Europe as a whole needs protection against nonEuropean intrusions (Buhari Gulmez and Rumford 2016: 47). For its part, thin Europe-making puts forward an intergovernmental vision of Europe. Rather than a singular system of values, norms or a civilisational category, Europe is seen as a problem-solving mechanism that helps negotiate ‘win-win’ solutions by reducing transactional costs and international mistrust. ‘Limited but continuous interaction among Europeans is expected to create mutual interdependencies and thus, mutual benefits in particular functional domains’ (Buhari Gulmez and Rumford 2016: 48). Non-Europeans are not necessarily seen as anathema in the

Europe in crises   113 context of thin Europe. They often become potential allies or partners in order to maximise European interests in social, political and economic domains. While thick Europe relies upon common identity, thin Europe stresses a harmony of interests and complex interdependencies among Europeans. In addition, Buhari Gulmez and Rumford (2016) suggests that there is also an alternative Europe-making process that may be called ‘parallel Europe’ since there are alternative trends that transcend the processes of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ Europe-making. Parallel Europe generally involves a future-oriented thinking that puts Europe in a global context and therefore, considers Europe as ‘an open idea, symbol or potentiality, rather than as a unified and closed project’ (Isin and Saward 2013: 5). [Parallel Europe] is thus a response to the emerging necessity to develop a ‘less spatially bounded’ conception of European society due to rising global connectivity (Büttner 2012). While ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ European societies assume clear boundaries that separate the European Self from its Others, a ‘parallel’ European society emphasizes the lack of clear boundaries between European Self and non-European Others. (Buhari Gulmez and Rumford 2016: 48–9) Parallel Europe seeks to replace other (thin and thick) Europes by establishing an alternative, parallel narrative about Europe’s past, present and future in line with universalistic standards and norms. If ‘Europe as a whole has a common cultural heritage which has its roots as much in the East as in the West’ (European Parliament 1995 cited in Macmillan 2013), it means that Europe is no longer a representative of the West (Delanty 2006; Delanty and Rumford 2005). This is not simply an emphasis on the internal divisions in Europe along cultural, local, national, and other dimensions. It is also about the blurred boundaries between Europe and the world and/or between European and non-European. It reflects the fact that non-European (often global) forces and actors animate, enact, and shape European norms, identity and behaviour. For instance, the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund advise Europeans how to manage a social, political, and economic crisis in Europe and they (global actors) hold certain leverage on Europeans helping the latter decide important policies and strategies (Buhari Gulmez and Rumford 2016: 48–9). Given the multiplicity of narratives about European past, present and future, it is plausible to argue that Europe is ‘an active site of multiple –and often times contradictory– productions and transformations’ (Biebuyck and Rumford 2012: 5). Focusing on the current era of ‘Europe in crises’ and the rise of nationalist populism in different European countries at the expense of Europe-making, this study puts forward two new categories as ‘parochial’ and ‘global’ Europe. The main reason for using ‘parochial’ and ‘global’ instead of parallel Europe is the increasing necessity to differentiate between the parallel processes and narratives that both seek to integrate and fragment Europe. In line with Rosenau’s thesis of ‘fragmegration’ (2003), both cosmopolitan pro-European trends and divisive

114   D.B. Gulmez and S.B. Gulmez anti-European trends gain ground at the same time and as a consequence, ­Europeans reflect simultaneously both ‘particularistic and universalistic aspirations’ (Rumelili 2011: 238). The multiplicity of visions about Europe and the internal divisions it creates within Europe is openly admitted by the Vice-President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans: The Brits have always seen Europe as a market, nothing more. But the countries of Eastern Europe also have a vision of Europe that is different to ours. Our duty is to respect the differences within the Union. Values are being questioned in all of Europe’s societies today. Hungary and Poland talk of Christian values as a way to reinvent a golden era from the past. This is also a tactic of the extreme right. But it is a past that has never existed and a future that we will never see. In politics, nostalgia is always an expression of fear for the future. (Timmermans quoted in Lefranc 2016) We have fallen into the trap of identity politics. If the driving force of the European construction is national, cultural or ethnic identity, then it will not survive. (Timmermans quoted in Lefranc 2016) This statement demonstrates that there are at least four trends in Europe that create internal contradictions about what Europe is. The British vision of Europe can be considered as thin Europe-making due to its emphasis on common economic interests and integration at the expense of a fully-fledged political union. Some countries’ emphasis upon Christianity as the common ­religion of Europe and the Christian values as binding Europeans together across national borders is an example of thick Europe-making. Timmermans disagrees with both thin and thick Europes. He also openly dismisses the argument of common religion of Europe as a myth and as an argument of the far-Right populist parties with parochial, divisive agendas. It is thus necessary to capture the clash between the globalist visions of Europe-making and the parochial visions that work towards unmaking Europe. A globalist vision is about looking at the future rather than the past and adopting alternative projects, standards and norms that are generally considered as ‘universal’. In this context, by putting the emphasis on the lack of common values and the necessity for respecting the diversity, Timmermans represents a different vision about Europe that can neither be categorised as thin, thick nor parochial Europe. The following section discusses thin, thick, parochial and global Europes in order to elaborate on the differences between these ideal categories that have become more visible during the multiple crises that hit Europeans. Europe in crises: thin, thick, parochial and global Europes Following Buhari Gulmez and Rumford (2016), thin Europe-making refers to an instrumental approach whereby Europe becomes a strategy to maximise

Europe in crises   115 predetermined national, group and individual interests. In other words, for those who contribute to thin Europe-making, individual, group, and national identity prevail over Europeanness. Taggart and Szczerbiak’s ‘Soft Eurosceptics’ (2004) fall into this category. They do not aim to dismantle European integration as a whole but they work towards the introduction of some restraints over the deepening of integration in economic, political, social and cultural domains. Those who considers Europe as a single market and wish to see it remain so are part of the thin Europe. For its part, thick Europe aims to produce and project a singular European value system based on a civilisational discourse. Here, religion is a common denominator and the mode of differentiation between Self and Other. The tendency to define ‘Europe’ with reference to (Christian) religion is part of thick Europe-making and it is often associated with ‘fortress Europe’ mentality that aims to protect Europe from non-Europeans at all costs. Unlike thin and thick Europe-making, parochial Europe is about unmaking, disintegrating, and emphasising internal divisions in Europe. If thin Europe represents ‘Soft Euroscepticism’, parochial Europe is ‘Hard Eurosceptic’ (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2004). In other words, it is generally against the idea of integration at European level and it is prone to far-right, nationalist populism. Parochial Europe sometimes adopt a rhetoric that is similar to that of thick Europe. For example, the emphasis on Christian values and the need to protect oneself from external forces can be seen in both trends. Yet, parochial Europe opposes the existence of common European interests or ideals that may bring Europeans under a single umbrella. Hence, it stresses that national and local differences are too big to reconcile through integration in Europe. In this respect, even the most Europeanist discourse serves parochial interests and identities. Last but not least, global Europe is an alternative trend that rests upon the lack of clear boundaries of Europe. In this context, Self/Other distinction is no longer meaningful. Europe is viewed as a ‘gateway’ to the wider world rather than a ‘gatekeeper’. European norms and standards do not solely rely on European as they follow universalistic recipes or global standards (Meyer 2001). The debates about reintroducing ‘death penalty’ in Turkey and in Poland face serious criticisms from global Europe (Beunderman 2007). Reintroducing the death penalty is ‘the reddest of all red lines’ for Europe (EU Commission spokesperson quoted in Euronews 2017). Those who contribute to global Europe-making put strong emphasis on the global actorness of Europe and opposes the idea of introducing an emphasis on Europe’s ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ (Chaplin and Wilton 2016). Global Europe provides an alternative narrative about Europe’s past by presenting the European integration project and the ‘fathers of Europe’, i.e. politicians who worked for European integration, as a unified camp with a globalist ideal to render Europe a peaceful region and a role-model for other parts of the world. Although the EU list of the ‘fathers of Europe’ includes politicians with thin and thick Europe visions (see, for example, Wilton 2016), the EU reinforces the illusion that there has been a common ideal towards a global Europe. Multiple crises including the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit and the severing of Turkey-EU relations have contributed to the dissipation of

116   D.B. Gulmez and S.B. Gulmez this illusion by making the clashes between different trends in Europe more visible. Formerly marginalised trends and groups such as far-right populist parties and anti-EU rhetorics have gained ground and Europe in crises implies the increasing visibility of hegemonic struggles between thin, thick, parochial and global Europes over the question of who represents Europe.

Many others This chapter argues that many Europes generate many and different ‘Others’. The notion of Europe’s other is a complex phenomenon and throughout history, Europe’s others were constantly changing. Traditionally, external actors such as the Ottoman Empire and Russia were represented as the others against whom Europe had been in constant struggle (Neumann 1999; Levin 2011). The histori­ cal image of Turkey was predominantly associated with Islam, and Turks were largely represented as ‘Muslim invaders’ necessitating a Holy Crusade against the Turkish/Muslim menace (Neumann 1999: 41; Levin 2011: 31). Although currently a candidate for EU membership, Turkey’s European credentials are still under serious debate (Rumelili 2008; Levin 2011). Although religion is widely accepted as a crucial demarcation line between Europeans and non-­ Europeans, Russians were essentially kept out of this equation and considered the other of Europe despite their Christian beliefs. The predominant tendency from sixteenth century onwards was to dismiss Russians as barbarian ‘Muscovites’, ‘mécréants’ (unbelievers) and ‘despotic Christian ruler’ poised to invade European lands (Neumann 1999: 67–73). In the twentieth century, the Russian other was revitalised through the threat of Communism. The Soviet Union was viewed by many as a ‘revolutionary political threat’ as well as a considerable military menace haunting ‘Europe as a spectre’ (Taylor 1961: 18; Neumann 1999: 99). On the other hand, the fragmented nature of Europe also created ‘the others within’. For example, the France of Napoleon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Germany of Wilhelm II and then of Hitler in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were viewed as ‘the others’ from within Europe. Besides, in the early nineteenth century, Britain was viewed by many European statesmen as a serious threat to Europe (Dwyer 2001: 16). During the First World War, Britain and Germany were engaged in a constant propaganda depicting each other as the most important threat to Europe (Taylor 1963). It is also necessary to take into account the possibility that the Self-Other relationship is not inherently antagonistic. It may also be pragmatic, if not mutually constitutive. As regards the ‘external Others’ of Europe, Islam and Turkey have not always been considered as the ‘antagonistic Others’ of Europe given the Turcophilism in Britain and Germany in the nineteenth century (Gürpınar 2012; Ihrig 2014). Besides, the interwar years marked the rise of Islamophilia in the Weimar Germany where Germans tired of the war and the ensuing economic crisis, and disillusioned with Christianity sought refuge in Islam as a new and exotic religion (Hannun and Spaan 2016). Moreover, Turkey was even considered as a source of inspiration by Nazi Germany where Hitler had claimed to

Europe in crises   117 have followed Atatürk’s footsteps in his endeavour to remake Germany along nationalist, secular, totalitarian, and ethnically exclusive lines (Ihrig 2014). Overall, it would be misleading to consider Europe’s others merely as predetermined, fixed, foreign and antagonistic. Not only have there been ‘others within’ as in the cases of France and Germany which dominated the threat perceptions of Europeans for centuries, but also ‘the other’ has not always been viewed along antagonistic lines evidenced by Turcophilism and Islamophilia in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Building upon this complex nature of the notion of other, this chapter further argues that the others of Europe are also prone to change depending on how Europe is construed. Accordingly, different interpretations of Europe create different ‘Others’. This chapter hence claims that the notion of Europe’s other is primarily structured by whether we are talking about a thick, thin, parochial or a Global Europe. Regarding the notion of ‘thick’ Europe which aims to maintain and project a singular European value system through a common civilisation of shared culture, religion, and history, its others are viewed as ‘existential threat’ to (thick Europe’s) survival, since they are perceived to carry the potential to violate this established value system distorting the homogeneous European identity. Adopting a fortress mentality to seek protection from external threats, those who contribute to Thick Europe-making demarcate a certain boundary against cultural and religious outgroups such as Muslims (Turks and Arabs) and Jews. For instance, the civilisational discourse to draw the borders of Europe through common history, culture, and religion (i.e. Christianity) has been increasingly used in the European Parliament to determine who is European and who is not (Aydın-Düzgit 2015). Accordingly, the opponents of Turkey’s EU membership have incessantly resorted to the civilisational argument that Turkey cannot become an EU member since it is not European on the basis that it has a different culture, religion, geography, and history from many European countries (Rumelili 2008; Levin 2011; Aydın-Düzgit 2015). Besides, Islamophobia has been marshalled to safeguard a supranational Europe, and Turkey’s membership process particularly has led to the intensification of anti-Islamic rhetoric among European political circles (Bunzl 2005). On the other hand, the notion of thin Europe does not necessarily presuppose such a culturally rigid, external, and antagonistic conception of the other. Since the contributors to the thin Europe-making prescribe Europe as a common market, they do not necessarily view others as existential threats. They rather maintain a pragmatic account on the notion of others. Accordingly, cultural and religious difference does not automatically make one antagonistic, but a potential partner. For instance, Turkey’s EU membership process is not necessarily represented in the British press as a threat to Europe, but rather as a ‘positive other’ having the potential to constitute a bridge between the East and the West (Paksoy and Negrine 2016: 500). Besides, the pragmatic understanding of the other in thin Europe-making also highlights the existence of the ‘others within’. Accordingly, Europeans perceive other Europeans as a threat, for instance, to the economic welfare of the society. The typical example is the notion of the ‘Polish

118   D.B. Gulmez and S.B. Gulmez plumber’ emblematic of the ‘hordes of cheap foreign labour … unleashed’ upon Western Europe through the adhesion of the Central and Eastern European countries to the EU (Fortier 2006). In this case, the others of Europe are Christians sharing similar culture, geography, and history with many other European nations. They do not necessarily pose an existential threat to the survival of a (Thick) European civilisation, but rather threaten the socio-economic well-being of Europeans. Another example is that the former UK Prime Minister David Cameron justified the BREXIT referendum as a response to the threat posed by EU nationals to the UK economy. Cameron depicted EU-nationals as more threatening than non-EU nationals as they had unrestricted access to in-work benefits (Hartley-Brewer 2015). The others of parochial Europe, on the other hand, involve strange bedfellows, since subscribers to the notion of parochial Europe, including far-right populist and ultra-nationalist groups and individuals, feel threatened by anything foreign, European or otherwise. Therefore, they stand against the very idea of Europe, the notion of European integration and Europeans, as well as any non-European ­outsiders. Similar to thick Europe, the others of parochial Europe are viewed as ‘existential threats’ to the society, since parochial Europe has its own parochial version of a ‘fortress’ to protect against foreigners. However, distinct from Thick Europe, the notion of Parochial Europe not only stands opposed to the so-called ‘violators’ of the European civilisation, but opposes the notion of an inclusive European civilisation as well. Far-Right populist political actors across Europe such as the Front National in France led by Marine Le Pen, the Hungarian Civic Alliance in Hungary led by Viktor Orbán, and the Freedom Party of Austria under Norbert Hofer are known as both anti-Islamic and anti-Europe, and they gain popularity through identity politics feeding upon political and economic crises engulfing Europe such as the Syrian refugee crisis and the Eurozone crisis. Therefore, those attached to Parochial Europe-making not only view the others of thick Europe as the others of their own, but also consider Thick Europe as the other too. Finally, global Europe has rather an unorthodox understanding of others, since it does not solely rely on the European, but offers a universalistic reading of Europe through global standards. For instance, global Europe is inclusive of culturally distinct outgroups such as Muslims that automatically fall into the other category of parochial and thick Europes. For global Europe, anyone posing a threat to the globalistic account of Europe is prone to be viewed as the other. Therefore, nationalism and far-Right populism (parochial Europe) and the fortress Europe mentality (thick Europe) could be considered as the natural others of global Europe, since they deny global perspectives to the notion of Europe. Moreover, global terrorism, i.e. the dark side of globalisation, poses an existential threat to the notion of global Europe as well. The case of Syrian refugee crisis: European reactions The anti-regime protests in Syria that commenced in March 2011 culminated into a civil war claiming hundreds of thousand lives and forcing millions of

Europe in crises   119 civilians to seek refuge in other countries. As of March 2017, the civil war ­generated more than 5 million Syrian refugees fleeing the country (CNN 2017). The civil war resulted in the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War engulfing not only the Middle East but Europe and many parts of the world as well. The refugee crisis led to another crisis within Europe where the EU member states disagreed on how to deal with the refugee flow into Europe. ­Germany’s proposal of hosting refugees proportionate to the population ratios of member states faced with protests especially from the Central and Eastern ­European member states that were adamant to close their borders to refugees in any circumstance. The EU then sought a solution in making a deal with Turkey, an EU candidate hosting the greatest number of Syrian refugees in the region amounting to 3 millions. The deal aiming to prevent illegal entry into the EU through the Turkish border and via the Aegean Sea could be summarised as follows: ‘one Syrian refugee on the Greek islands will be returned to Turkey and, in exchange, a Syrian asylum seeker in Turkey will be found a home in Europe’ (Kingsley and Rankin 2016). Although the deal initially prevented the massive flow of Syrian refugees to the EU, the refugee crisis is far from being resolved. Taking into consideration the ideal categories of thin, thick, parochial and global Europes, it is possible to differentiate between different European reactions towards the Syrian refugee crisis. Those in favour of thin Europe tend to find the EU’s refugee deal with Turkey useful and offer pragmatic arguments to justify self-interests. For instance, Manfred Weber, chairman of the CentreRight EPP in the European Parliament states that the agreement is a ‘win-win’ for both sides as the number of illegal migrants arriving in Europe has decreased over time after the deal (Nielsen 2017). ‘From a peak of around 7,000 per day in October 2015, the average number arriving was brought down to 47 per day by the end of May 2016.’ (European Commission 2016). Similarly, Gerald Knaus, one of the architects of the deal and the head of the European Stability Initiative research group welcomes the deal as a solid success for ‘the dying and drownings in the Aegean Sea has dropped dramatically’ (Jones 2017). Finally, EU Commission chief spokesman Margaritis Chinas praises the deal as a ‘gamechanger’ breaking ‘the cruel business model of smugglers exploiting human misery and putting people’s lives in danger’ (AP News 2017). Thick Europe refers to common European heritage and the need to protect the European civilisation, often with a special emphasis on Europe’s common religious heritage. There are numerous instances of thick Europe-making regarding the European political discourses on the refugee crisis. For instance, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, provided a thick Europe mentality when he commented that ‘Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims…This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity’ (Orbán 2015). Representing a far-right nationalist movement in his country, Orbán can be seen as a representative of parochial Europe. However, as regards the refugee crisis, Orbán resorts to thick Europe

120   D.B. Gulmez and S.B. Gulmez rhetoric in order to attract support from a wider segment of European society. Moreover, a popular right-wing Polish magazine ‘wSIECI’ or ‘The network’ published a cover entitled ‘The Islamic Rape of Europe’ showing a young blonde woman, symbolising Europe, ‘garbed loosely in the flag of the EU, being groped by three men’ (Tharoor 2016). Reminiscent of the European cartoons from the First and Second World Wars, which generally depicted a blond girl (Europe) harassed by the enemy (Jews, Africans, and French colonial troops), the Polish cover explicitly represents Muslims/Syrian refugees as Europe’s other posing an existential threat to its survival. Parochial Europe, on the other hand, focuses on the protection of national and local cultures and interests at the expense of European integration. Accordingly, Syrian refugees are dismissed as the others and the denial of their entry into national borders is prescribed as the ultimate solution. The motto of ‘We protect Slovakia’ and political statements claiming that ‘Multiculturalism is a myth’ come from parochial Europe. The Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico offers an example of parochial-Europe logic when he states that ‘Whether someone likes it or not, 2016 will be the year when the EU will either get the migration crisis under control or collapse’ (Reuters 2016). In this respect, the case of the Syrian refugee crisis is of vital importance to the future of European integration as parochial Europe becomes more and more prominent among Europeans. The Slovakian government strongly opposes, and even went to the Court against, the EU’s plan to allocate 160,000 asylum seekers throughout the 28 member states (Reuters 2016). Similarly, Poland's ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski dismissed refugees as they might bring ‘diseases and parasites to Poland’, and claimed: ‘We have to strengthen the nation states and reduce the jurisdiction of the Union’ (DW 2017; Reuters 2017). Contrary to parochial Europe, global Europe focuses on the blurred boundaries between European and global. Opposing both thin and thick Europes, global Europe refers to the conviction that ‘The EU has a legal and moral obligation to protect those in need’ regardless of their ethnic, national or religious origin (European Commission 2016). The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs opposes the Turkey-EU deal and offered a globalist vision in the following statement in Brussels: Spain will only accept … an agreement that is coherent, compatible to the international law, and that is extraordinarily respectful towards the human rights of the persons that need to flee from their home country. (José Manuel García-Margallo quoted in Oiveira and Von Der Burchard 2016) Finally, the 2017 French Presidential election television debate bringing together all major political parties in France makes an excellent example of how thick, parochial and global visions of Europe collide over the Syrian refugee crisis. Accordingly, representing parochial Europe, Marine Le Pen claims she will put a near-total stop on immigration to France: ‘We have to have national

Europe in crises   121 borders…We can’t count on Greece to deal with the flow of migrants’ ­(Batchelor 2017). Subscribing to the thick Europe mentality, Mr Emmanuel Macron, the leader of a Centrist party, the Republic on the Move, raises the necessity of issuing a quota system for allowing refugees into Europe: ‘We don’t do enough to coordinate the protection of European borders’ (Batchelor 2017). Finally, Mr Benoit Hamond, leader of the Socialist Party, represents global Europe as he particularly highlights global warming as a key factor behind another wave of refugees fleeing climate change (Batchelor 2017). He also denies a quota system to refugees and campaigns for the free entry of refugees and their rapid integration into Europe.

Concluding remarks This study focuses on the multiplicity of visions about the European past, present and future with a special focus on the current era which is defined by crises in the world and in Europe in particular. Following Rumford, the starting assumption of the study is the need to take more seriously the co-existence of ‘many Europes’. In times of crisis, the fact that there are multiple trends, visions, cultures, interests, and identities becomes more visible whereas in other times a dominant trend like the European integration project creates an illusion of singularity, oneness, and a unidirectional trajectory. When the dominant trend starts to lose its credibility due to social, economic, and political crises, formerly marginalised trends become more visible and popular. Hence, the simultaneous rise of far-right populist trends, Eurosceptic sentiments, and the calls for a ­‘fortress Europe’ cannot be fully grasped without taking into account the context set by certain Europe-wide political and economic developments such as the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, and Turkey’s difficult accession ­negotiations with the EU, among others. Once the multiplicity is seen as an inherent characteristic of Europe, it thus becomes possible to grasp the differential threat perceptions and relations between Self and Other. In order to list all of the ‘Others’ of Europe, one should include some parts of Europe, if not European past (Risse 2010), in the list. Besides, it is necessary to trace the process through which the list of ‘Others’ changes over time. Furthermore, the relationship between Self and Others is not always antagonistic. Rather than an existential threat, the Other may be a ­potential ally or a constitutive part of Self. Facing this multifaceted and complex phenomena, this study aims to put forward four ideal categories of Europe that will allow better understanding of the dynamics underlying the multiplicity of ­European visions. Building upon Buhari Gulmez and Rumford’s work on the thin, thick and parallel dynamics of European society, this study suggests thin, thick, parochial and global Europes in order to better capture the transformations that are associated with Europe in crises. While thin, thick, and global Europes are about constructing Europe on their own terms, parochial Europe is about unmaking Europe. Thin and thick Europes can be distinguished from global Europe in

122   D.B. Gulmez and S.B. Gulmez terms of drawing clear boundaries between Europe and its external environment. Global Europe implies the embedded nature of Europe in a global environment. As pointed out above, identifying Europe’s other is contingent upon which Europe we are talking about. Accordingly, each conception of Europe has a different understanding of the other. Thick Europe presupposes culturally distinct groups as its others and views them as existential threats to its survival, while Thin Europe reflects a rather pragmatic understanding of its others seeking ways to cooperate with them. Thin Europe also identifies the ‘others within’ considering Europeans as a potential burden to its socio-economic development. Parochial Europe, on the other hand, not only stands against culturally distinct groups deemed as other by thick Europe, but also opposes the idea of Thick Europe as well. Finally, global Europe takes an unorthodox view of others. Accordingly, it does not exclude the traditional others of thick Europe, but instead it considers people subscribing to thick Europe and/or parochial Europe as its potential others. The example of the Syrian refugee crisis which proves a serious test for European integration demonstrates the co-existence of thin, thick, parochial, and global Europes and the decoupled, if not self-contradictory, nature of Europe. In this respect, the notion of ‘many Europes’ helps us to better understand the multiplicity of discourses within Europe towards the Syrian refugee crisis each emphasising diverging problems, identifying different others and prescribing different solutions.

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9 Globalisation Interactive and integral Victor Roudometof

In this chapter I explore one of the most contentious facets of the debate on ­globalisation – that is, the attempt to delineate specific facets or dimensions of globalisation. Suffice it to say, there is no agreement in the literature, as different disciplines and fields of study and also individual authors have pursued definitions that are more appropriate to their respective research agendas. Perhaps the most conventional strategy is to define globalisation as cultural, political, and economic, but such an approach, as Pieterse (2009) has insightfully noted, ­confuses disciplinary lenses for dimensions. The importance of identifying dimensions is self-evident, as only by doing so does it become possible to relate arguments and contextualise evidence regarding the variety of claims and counterclaims associated with the concept. In this discussion, I introduce and describe a distinction of globalisation into integral and interactive. This is directly linked to a specific conception of globalisation that is deliberately set at a generic level. The objective is to develop a framework that can accommodate the multiple and varied uses of globalisation across the social-scientific literature. But before doing so and in keeping up with the volume’s theme and scope, I address the significance of the late Chris Rumford’s work for the topics of ­cosmopolitanism, Europeanisation and globalisation. As these topics directly intersect with some of my own research areas, I focus more explicitly on the relationship between Chris’s work on these topics and the way it has shaped my research trajectory. For reasons that are or should be self-evident, the following are written in a personal and self-reflective manner. Suffice to say, the following are meant as a very brief summary of the ways I am indebted to him, and my contribution is just a small token of gratitude. Of course, Chris played a key role in maintaining and strengthening the organisational infrastructure of the UK’s Global Studies Association and helping the association persevere in contemporary academia’s uncertain waters.

A semi-autographical appraisal I met Chris in 2004 while I was participating in the Cosmopolitanism and Europe Conference at Royal Holloway University of London. Later, I was a contributor to his volumes Cosmopolitanism and Europe (Rumford 2007) and

126   Victor Roudometoff the Handbook of European Studies (Rumford 2009). His editorial remarks were extremely helpful and constructive, and his generous assistance was always welcome. He had an extremely mild-mannered demeanour that facilitated acceptance. Several years later, I invited Chris to Cyprus where he gave a talk at my graduate seminar on Globalisation and Social Theory. His lecture on cosmopolitanism was particularly effective and made a deep impact on the students enrolled on the course. He further inspired one of the course’s students in her choice of her MA thesis topic, which she eventually completed a couple of years later. Chris’s interest in the areas of globalisation, cosmopolitanism and Europeanisation should not be seen as merely ‘academic’ but as growing out of his multiple cultural engagements. Chris possessed the same temperament and intellectual scope displayed among intellectuals (like Stuart Hall, Roland Robertson or Edward Said) who have embodied cross-cultural mobility. In this sense, I felt Chris was like a fellow traveller with whom I shared a certain structure of feeling about the world. Being ‘out of place’ – as Said (2000) has remarked – is of course a sentiment quite familiar to scholars. In his Globalization of Strangeness (Rumford 2013) this problematic is explored in depth. Chris examines the way Simmel’s classic ideal-type of the stranger has become globalised, turning neighbours into strangers and cosmopolitan Others into potential terrorists. The book’s topic touches precisely on a key facet of contemporary life and an important conundrum in contemporary sociology: how are we to understand the growing connectivity and interdependence of our daily lives without succumbing to fear, anxiety, and intimidation? A central characteristic of Chris’s work has been the constant effort to understand and illuminate the complexity of human reactions and responses to globalisation while maintaining the necessary dividing line between empirical description and theoretical perspective. Preservation of this fuzzy-at-times boundary between the two (or what the late Norbert Elias [1987] referred to as the dynamic of engagement and detachment) is one of the hardest facets of sociological analysis, yet one of the most important components for sound interpretations. In his work on cosmopolitanism and Europe (Delanty and Rumford 2005, Rumford 2002, 2007, 2008, Rumford and Buhari Gulmez 2014) this intellectual strategy is applied to the contested terrain of Europeanisation, whereby a distinction between the EU-based project of ‘Europe-making’ and Europeanisation is suggested. In this regard, Chris Rumford (2002) has been a pioneer who has sought to re-think the very manner in which European Studies are envisioned in academia and elsewhere. In Rumford’s (2008) interpretation, cosmopolitanism is not abstract or intellectual but instead materialised in concrete cosmopolitan spaces. In turn, that makes possible Rumford’s central theoretical innovation; that is, going beyond the standard sociology of the EU and into a social theory for Europe at large. In this respect, Europe is not singular and certainly not ­identified with Western Europe as such; instead, there are multiple Europes (Rumford and Buhari Gulmez 2014) or a European multiplicity (see also ­Stoianovich 1994). This multiplicity makes it possible to conceptually separate

Globalisation: interactive and integral   127 the institutional aspects of contemporary EU statecraft from the cultural space(s) of Europe (or the different versions of ‘Europe’ as these have been reconfigured throughout the centuries). This overall orientation was later further extended into what has become the European ‘glocalisation thesis’ (Robertson 2014). That is, instead of looking upon the European project as co-terminus with the institutionalised EU-policy oriented agenda, it is suggested that it is best to think of Europeanisation as a form of glocalisation, whereby the global EU directives and policies are selectively applied and reinterpreted creatively in order to accommodate local distinctiveness. What is distinctive about this approach is the recognition of the impact of the shared European legacy or legacies as a concrete and in some respects irreversible cultural reality – while at the same time also acknowledging that the contested, uneven, fluid and fuzzy nature of this integration leaves very little room to seriously entertain the dream of political EU integration (e.g. the federal Europe or European state that used to be a long-term Brussels-based EU bureaucracy). This nuanced vision has guided Rumford’s (2009) efforts to chart a more sociological perspective on European Studies – a field long dominated by political science or policy-oriented perspectives that focused mainly on EU-related projects, hence missing out on the multiple and contradictory responses to the EU among the European public. It is important to highlight the extent to which, as is so often the case, this particularly nuanced interpretation did not by any means represent the conventional wisdom of the pre-2008 intellectual debates. In the aftermath of the ­post-1989 euphoria caused by the transformation of the European Economic Community (EEC) into the European Union (EU), the introduction of the Euro common currency and the 2004 EU enlargement, the general consensus was very much one echoed in Beck and Giddens’s (2005) joint statement that declared nationalism to be the enemy of Europe’s nations. The public debate was instead framed in terms of the so-called Habermas-Derrida ‘Core Europe’ proposal (see Levy, Pensky, and Torpey 2005), which called for furthering European integration with the explicit objective of constructing multiple layers of integration and assigning countries to different layers in accordance to their progress. The introduction and popularisation of cosmopolitanism among the intellectuals therefore has been often seen as promotion of visions and strategies that have been specifically geared towards the few, the privileged and the socially and culturally mobile classes (Douthat 2016). In the aftermath of the Great Recession and of course following the 2016 Brexit vote and the US’s 2016 presidential elections it has become quite clear that the 1990s notion of ‘globalisation’ fails to capture current realities ­(Roudometof 2017). But that does not suggest that globalisation has become obsolete but rather that it has now entered into a far more cautious and regulated phase, whereby a ‘gated globe’ or an ‘enclave society’ is constructed (Turner 2007). Walls have been created to obstruct the free flow of trade, money and people as governments adopt a more selective approach concerning their trade partners, the capital that is welcomed within their borders and the individuals

128   Victor Roudometoff who are viewed as legitimate candidates for inclusion in their societies (Samuelson 2013). In today’s world, Rumford’s (2013) globalised stranger is our constant companion; s/he not a relic to be pushed aside by ‘globalising progress’ but a creation of our own fears, anxieties, threats and uncertainties (as well as the mechanisms of surveillance that prey on and amplify these sentiments). From within these lenses, Rumford’s work could be seen as a forerunner to the more ambivalent notion of glocalisation that I have explored elsewhere (Roudometof 2016). In fact, it was Chris who invited me to contribute to the Routledge book series on Global and Transnational Politics. In revising the manuscript proposal, and also after the submission of the final version, he further offered invaluable suggestions that helped shape the final outcome. In developing the book’s arguments, I have addressed some of the aforementioned concerns and themes that are very much present throughout his work. As the above brief overview above has shown, one of the most important themes under consideration concerns precisely the conceptual relationship between globalisation and glocalisation.

‘Gazing’ globalisation: the role of concept-metaphors Globalisation is known for its multiple meanings. A variety of definitions exists, and these relate globalisation to a variety of ‘things’. Let me refer here to two of the best-known definitions that may serve as illustrations of this point. Robertson’s (1992, p. 8) classic definition of globalisation refers to ‘the compression of the world’. That is a notion with a long history, as different conceptions of the ‘world’ exist that date back several centuries. Three examples of such different conceptions of ‘the world’ include: the Ancient Greek notion of cosmos (originally proposed by Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras), the Chinese Tian xia (which literally means ‘all under heaven’) and the Christian ecumene (Hannerz 1992, Harris 2007). In contrast to such an understanding stands the notion of globalisation of capitalist relations, or ‘the annihilation of space through time’, famously invoked by Marx (1857/1978, p. 539) in the pages of the Communist Manifesto. This latter interpretation has become the topic of intense debate among Marxists and neo-Marxists – with Wallerstein’s (1974) work offering the best-known example. However, although the above highlight some instances in which globalisation is identified with the spread of a ‘whole’ (whether cultural or economic), there is a plethora of authors and researchers who have sought to apply globalisation to a bewildering array of topics, disciplines, genres, and relationships. To restrict therefore the subject of discussion to specific economic or cultural totalities is at variance with scholarly practice. As Rosenberg (2005) notes, invoking globalisation as such does not actually say anything about what is being globalised. In fact, asking this question indicates confusion over prescriptive and descriptive perspectives on globalisation. That is, on the one hand, there are theories that operate as policy-making models, suggesting global scripts for societies and cultures; whereas on the other hand, there are theories meant as

Globalisation: interactive and integral   129 interpretations of social reality through analyses of contemporary and historical trends. It is problematic to turn the latter into the former; especially when that is done at the expense of the latter. Often, social-scientific discussions about globalisation, and relevant questions about the status, claims and implications of globalisation theories, revert back to the post-World War II context from within which generalised notions of the ‘global’ have emerged (for an overview, see James and Steger 2014). It is for this very reason that perhaps the wisest choice for theorisation is to acknowledge that globalisation has, or at least it has acquired by the twenty-first century, a generic meaning. It can refer and has been applied to numerous and often distinct processes, cultures, transactions and other relationships and human actions. Therefore, it is preferable to openly acknowledge that globalisation as a term that indicates a process of transformation of some kind, whereby X – whatever that X may be (a specific topic, process, condition, artefact, etc.) – is becoming worldwide or global (Albrow 1997, p.  88, O’Byrne and Hensby 2011, pp. 10–11). This general definition enables relating globalisation to a multitude of instances, fields, and areas of interest without necessarily having to revert back to a ‘totality’. Moreover, such a definition is restrictive – which, given the overuse and abuse of the term may be appropriate. Indeed, from the perspective adopted here, globalisation applies solely to those instances in which phenomena, practices, ideas, models or in general a specific X theme or domain of human action spreads throughout the globe or comes reasonably close to it. This definition allows for the analytical differentiation between globalisation and its outcomes, while it remains agnostic over the consequences or end state of ­globalisation – thus, making the issue of the end state (or telos) a matter of empirical investigation not over-determined by theoretical a priori. In all cases of the globalisation of X, there is acceptance that globalisation is a process of transformation, and to a considerable degree, contemporary scholarship has overcome the conventional division among enthusiasts, sceptics, and proponents (for an overview, see Guillen 2001). Globalisation indicates a process or set of processes, but that leaves open whether this process entails mere exchange or transference among the interacting units and whether this transference necessitates a process of transformation that inexorably leads to the formation of new objects or levels of analysis or new units (Bartelson 2000). Unlike other perspectives, this theoretical choice allows one to contemplate different outcomes without making a commitment to either one of these eventualities. Let me mention some examples of authors who highlight different eventualities. Albrow (1997) for example suggests that ‘the global’ supersedes the ‘modern’ – and subsequently that the ‘Global Age’ supersedes the ‘Modern Age’. In contrast, Turner (2007) suggests that globalisation may deliver further fragmentation and not a new singularity. From the perspective adopted here, a gated globe is equally an option, just as the ‘borderless world’ used to be popular in the globalist vision of the 1990s. That in turn suggests that transference or exchange does not necessarily imply a unitary outcome. Although­ ­globalisation can refer to many different levels of (micro- or macro-) social

130   Victor Roudometoff action, it is communication, interaction or transference that provides its essential ingredient. In contrast, systemic transformation or creation of a new end state or new supranational units remains a potential. Within this broad view, it is important to specify the concept-metaphor of globalisation – especially because the underlying concept-metaphor offers the means for grasping its dynamics. The two mainstream concept-metaphors used to capture globalisation are those of diffusion and liquidity. The notion of ­diffusion of course goes back to twentieth-century anthropological approaches and has been quite influential in shaping the world society or world polity perspective, which offers accounts predicated in explaining the cross-national similarity or institutional isomorphism caused by world diffusion (for discussions, see Schofer et al. 2012, Lechner and Boli 2005, Meyer 2010, Krücken and Drori 2010). It is necessary to highlight that world society theorists assume the presence of cultural linkages that render exchanges among ‘actors’ (states, organisations, individuals) not merely relational but also cultural. Diffusion for world society theorists occurs through its ‘theorisation’ by those who adopt items – and is effective insofar as the adopters have strong relations to the models they adopt. When such relations are absent, then this theorisation of diffusion in effect helps innovation masquerade as diffusion (Strang and Meyer 1993). The notion of diffusion is explicitly invoked by Robertson and White (2007) as a major precursor to the notion of glocalisation, whereas authors working within the world society tradition (Drori et al. 2013a) elaborate on the precise manner in which this diffusion operates. Systemic accounts (for example, Ritzer 2004, Ritzer and Ray 2010) also depend upon the notion of flows, which brings forth the concept-metaphor of liquidity. In fact, the concept-metaphor of fluidity or of thinking of social relations as becoming fluid and therefore resembling in character the properties of liquids has been quite a popular and influential means for interpreting social realities in late 20th and 21st centuries societies (for specific discussions, see Bauman 2000 and Urry 2000, 2002). It is necessary to point out though that the notion of liquidity does not necessarily alter the foundations of modernist narratives or of conceiving modernity as the master concept in sociological analysis. It may be helpful to remind readers in this case that the very notion of liquidity – popularised by Bauman (2000) – is famously derived from Marx’s description of modernity as a condition in which ‘all that is solid melts into the air’ (see Bergman 1982). In other words, this is an interpretation that simply takes one of the central interpretations of Western modernity (that of Marx and of the Marxist tradition) all the way to its logical conclusion.

Two dimensions: integral and interactive globalisation My own view on examining the generic version of globalisation is to suggest a different concept metaphor that I consider far less bound to Western-centred grand narratives than the aforementioned concept-metaphor of liquidity or diffusion. In particular, the concept-metaphor that my analysis uses is that of a wave. The metaphor of a wave has been influential in historical readings or interpretations

Globalisation: interactive and integral   131 of globalisation (for specific examples, see Therborn 2000, Robertson 2003, and Roudometof 2013).1 In this respect, my suggestion is in line with past socio-­ historical interpretations. But thinking about globalisation in terms of ‘waves of X’ spreading around the globe brings forth the possibility of going even further. It makes it possible to introduce the concept-metaphor of refraction as an alternative means for describing the dynamics of globalisation. In physics, refraction refers to the fact or phenomenon of light or radio waves being deflected in passing through the interface between one medium and another or through a medium of varying density. Although the traditional concept-metaphors of liquids and of diffusion are largely derived from nineteenth-century physics, the concept-metaphors of wave and refraction are more in tune with twentieth-­ century quantum physics. Refraction offers a concept-metaphor that allows for the re-interpretation of the global–local binary. In the case of the globalisation of X, what actually takes place is the migration and spread of X into different localities. If one further views these localities as having varying degrees of density or ‘thickness’, or to put it differently, as having different wave-resistance capacities, the process can then operate in two different ways. First, the wave-like properties can be absorbed and amplified by the local and then reflected back onto the world stage. That process of reflection is rather accurately described by world society theorists – and in many respects it is the very mechanism through which institutional isomorphism comes into existence. Second, it is possible for a wave to pass through the local and to be refracted by it – and that is precisely what happens in some instances. As I have argued elsewhere (Roudometof 2016) glocalisation is globalisation refracted through the local. The local is not annihilated or absorbed or destroyed by ­globalisation but, rather, operates symbiotically with globalisation and shapes the telos or end state or result. The above allows the clarification of a mechanism or process that shows the manner in which globalisation is responsible both for homogeneity and heterogeneity (as both Robertson [1995] and Ritzer [2004] suggest). Whether reflected or refracted, these processes offer the fundamental means for defining globalisation’s two key dimensions. That is, globalisation can be both integral (that is, it signifies a trend or movement towards a complete unit or a whole) and interactive (that is, it involves multiple interactions among local actors). My suggestion is that these are seen as two distinct dimensions. When globalisation operates integrally it leads to the construction of new layers or meanings or new ‘social facts’ (as Durkheim argued). It leads to new irreversible realities. However, globalisation can also be merely interactive – whereby the multitude of interactions might be transnational or trans-cultural or hybrid or glocal or trans-border, yet these interactions may not lead inexorably or inevitably to new layers or strata or new ‘empirical realities’. Integral globalisation brings forth new empirical objects (e.g. institutions, mentalities, processes) that are under consideration. The emergence of a ‘network society’ (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998) is such an object, and Pieterse (2013) has also suggested that the emergence of global datasets is another. To

132   Victor Roudometoff make the point far more explicit, the various international social survey programmes (such as the European Values Study [EVS], International Social Survey Program [ISSP], European Social Survey [ESS] and World Values [WVS]) deliver new objects of inquiry that make it possible to study social relations in a manner hitherto impossible.2 Of course, not all interactions and social relations that stretch across borders evolve into new units or strata; in fact, the vast majority of our relationships with global Others are fleeting, seemingly light, intermittent, piecemeal, haphazard, fluid, frivolous, mechanical or taken for granted. Other interactions may be semi-formalised or recurrent but may not construct new entities, objects, or strata. These forms of interaction are part of interactive globalisation. Glocalisation is implicit in interactive globalisation, as the global–local binary and its transcendence through the glocal are constituted in the context of interactive globalisation. Both dimensions are facets of globalisation easily understood by nearly everyone living on the globe. It is further possible to link these two dimensions. For example, Bartelson (2000) has argued that globalisation can be interpreted as exchange, transformation and transcendence. The classification proposed here is partly an extension of that idea: when a series of interactions accumulate or reach a critical point, then transformation can take place and new units or strata can emerge out of these interactions. Transcendence in turn is often the result of cumulative shifts observed in interaction patterns over time: thinking about the world ‘as a single place’ or contemplating ‘world-consciousness’ (Robertson 1992, see also Robertson and Buhari Gulmez 2016) is made possible on the basis of past experiences typically accumulated through multiple, regular and recurring interactions. What is often tempting for authors to do is to argue in favour of one of these two dimensions as having ad hoc causal primacy or to suggest a theoretical causal link between them, whereby what takes place in one of them is seen as causal for the other. In such a case, the difference between dimensions collapses. It is then possible to construct unifying grand narratives that offer presumably full (as opposed to partial) accounts of social processes. To various degrees, that is the case for several popular strands of cultural imperialism, Americanisation, McDonaldisation, neo-institutional interpretations and numerous other related ideas, perspectives and approaches (inclusive of some influential trends within the lively debate on cosmopolitanism). But preserving the distinction between the proposed two dimensions is important in order to safeguard the scope restrictions inherent in all social-scientific inquiry. The very existence of social sciences as separate fields of study and their knowledge claims rest upon relativising absolute theoretical claims and subsequently of establishing restrictions to generalisations.

The world society perspective: a comparison The proposed notions of integral and interactive globalisation echo Meyer’s (2007) discussion of two sets of meanings associated with globalisation but also depart from Meyer’s interpretation in key ways. What I refer to in the above

Globalisation: interactive and integral   133 d­ iscussion as interactive globalisation is discussed by Meyer as involving the notion of globalisation as ‘exchange’. The very word in effect restricts the range of phenomena, as social interaction is certainly broader than exchange, a point made nearly a century ago by Georg Simmel (1950). By ‘exchange’, Meyer (2007, p.  262) means ‘expanded interdependencies and rates of transaction around the world’. Meyer points out several indicators of such activities (inclusive of rates of international trade, global production or commodity chains, flows of technology and intellectual property goods, flows of labour and labourers, and international investment patterns). In Meyer’s view these activities are mere exchanges, whereas I would expand the list of items under consideration to all forms of interaction such as cross-cultural encounters and interactions among people and groups, electronic and other information and computer technologymediated forms of communication, metaphorical and actual travel across borders, shared communities of taste and cultural communities (professional, managerial, religious and others) that span the globe and so on. An important element in interactive globalisation is power relations, and that is of crucial importance, for interaction, as Simmel noted, can be expressed through dynamics of subordination and domination. Meyer’s (2007, p.  263) second set of meanings attached to the concept of ­globalisation involves, in his own words, ‘a very widespread cultural consciousness: a) of interdependence and b) of local and national embeddedness in world society’. Meyer’s second set of meanings is close to but not identical to what I mean by integral globalisation. Interdependence is just one of the various ­possible forms of interaction – and I would consider interdependence per se to be one among many forms of social interaction. For integral globalisation much more is required. That is, self-reflexive actors need to realise their own interdependence and be normatively bound by it. That in turn requires Meyer’s notion of local and national embeddedness in world society; it requires commitment to specific ideals or scripts or models. Although this is plausible, it is necessary to point out that these models or scripts should be seen as forming a new stratum or unit that is not necessarily based on its prior historical origins. For example, Castells’s (1996, 1997, 1998) ‘network society’ or the global-level data produced by social scientists are such new levels or ‘wholes’. Their existence constructs new units that are not bounded by the historical, institutional, or cultural legacies that contributed to their creation; to put it differently, using the Internet is open to people irrespective of their ideals or beliefs or values or even cultural scripts. More broadly, a key difference in the notion of integral globalisation visà-vis Meyer’s classification is the intent to recognise a broader range of phenomena as cultural; yet, these are not seen as necessarily part of the Western cultural tradition. Meyer’s world society/polity perspective is an excellent starting point for analysing integral globalisation. In effect, world culture theorists suggest that what I have referred to above as integral globalisation is consequential and produces cultural standardisation. However, although diffusion is seen from the world polity or society perspective as a key mechanism for modernisation and as

134   Victor Roudometoff a matter of mainly one-directional flows (from the West to the rest), these implications are not essential for a working definition of integral globalisation. In this respect, it may be useful to note that Meyer’s world-society perspective has historically emerged as a viable alternative to the older interpretations of modernisation theory, and to a considerable extent, it remains bound by several assumptions of the post-World War II problematic of modernisation. Some of these assumptions include an almost uncritical acceptance of the Western origins of modernity and an empirical predisposition to focus on one-directional flows from the West to the ‘rest’. Of course, these assumptions have largely become empirically unsubstantiated by now. At its core, the world society perspective offers a theory of modernity and of global modernisation that departs from ­traditional modernisation theories (So 1990). The goal is to unpack the institutionalised culture of modernity and to characterise social actors (inclusive of states and organisations) as products of that culture. World society scholars emphasise rationalisation, universalism, belief in progress and individualism as foundational cultural assumptions that undergird global discourse and organisation (Boli and Thomas 1999). This deep culture supports a wide array of movements, initiatives and innovations but proscribes many others. The world society perspective has been shaped by the strong influence of Durkheim’s legacy upon the notion of culture; that is, culture is seen as an element of integration on a world scale. It also displays an understanding of culture as deep culture (culture = rules, scripts, models, etc.). This view is strongly reminiscent of twentieth-­ century structuralism (for an overview, see Buhari Gulmez 2010). Although these tendencies can be legitimately criticised, it is undeniable that the world society perspective offers an insight with regard to integral globalisation. It is not however particularly helpful for analysing interactive globalisation. According to the world society perspective, ‘actors’ (i.e. a generic term that can include states, organisations and individuals) are seen as ‘loose structures’ fraught with internal inconsistencies and instabilities over time. Lacking coherent interests or identities, states and sub-national units draw upon cultural models from their broader international institutional environment, moving simultaneously in multiple and at times inconsistent directions. The global models that form the contemporary ‘world culture’ are often followed in a ritualistic fashion. Disjuncture is the norm. This gap in implementation is a form of loose coupling, and it is a pervasive feature of modern organisations. From within the lenses of the world society perspective, it is possible to interpret interactive globalisation and glocalisation as a process that complements the world society perspective’s traditional themes of loose coupling, incomplete diffusion and disjuncture (Drori et al. 2013a, 2014). Drori et al. (2013b, p. 10) consider that glocalisation ‘involves translation – as in order to adjust ideas, structures and models to new and different social and cultural domains’. This interpretation views interactive globalisation from within the lenses of the world society ­perspective’s key notion of ‘theorisation’, which involves the actors’ tactical translation of imported models and scripts. Theorisation and glocalisation are seen as similar in their stress on top-down influences in the process of global

Globalisation: interactive and integral   135 d­ iffusion, with ‘the dynamic nature of transcendental glocalisation’ seen as ‘a rebound effect … where locally enacted ideas and models influence the globally theorized schemes’ (Drori et al. 2013b, p. 10). However, from within the confines of the interpretation advanced here, interactive globalisation – and the related notion of glocalisation I have proposed elsewhere (see Roudometof 2016) – mean far more than mere diffusion. As this discussion has sought to demonstrate, interactive globalisation covers a broader range of phenomena than those that would be captured from within the world society perspective, inclusive of the conceptual alternatives of lobalisation (Chew 2010) logalisation (Lyu and McCarthy 2015) and grobarisation (Ritzer 2004). These conceptual alternatives are instances of regional power asymmetries or classic cases of transnational capitalist dominations. All of them can be accommodated through interactive globalisation but not through conventional interpretations of glocalisation.

Conclusions Certainly, the inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary debates on delineating specific facets or dimensions of globalisation have been quite lively. Although the above analysis by no means offers a full or even sufficient account of the nuances and the complexity involved in the distinction between integral and interactive globalisation, it nonetheless offers a sufficient theoretical foundation to advance the discussion forward. This chapter is an effort to go beyond the disciplinary boundaries that are typical of most classifications. Its goal is to introduce and describe a distinction of globalisation into integral and interactive. This distinction is directly linked to a general or analytical conception of globalisation as involving the worldwide spread of practices, objects, blueprints and other facets of culture. The objective is to develop a framework that can accommodate the multiple and varied uses of globalisation across the social scientific literature. In principle, globalisation can be both integral and interactive. That is, on the one hand, globalisation may lead to the formation of a new level of relations and produce new objects of inquiry that exist at a level beyond that of the nationstate or the ‘national society’; whereas on the other hand, globalisation can also be self-limiting or involve merely increased interconnectedness and exchanges among the units of interaction on the world stage. In contrast to past interpretations, it is important to realise that both outcomes are theoretically valid eventualities, and consequently, it is imperative to treat these not in terms of theoretical a priori but instead as concrete developments that take place in the real world. Although interpretations from within the world polity or world society perspective echo some of the features of the perspective outlined in this discussion, the proposed interpretation does not look upon global modernisation as involving acculturation into the West. In contrast, it does accommodate multiple flows of cross-cultural interaction. In this respect, the proposed interpretation offers a means for grasping the increased multi-faceted importance of the East in the

136   Victor Roudometoff twenty-first century. Additionally, in this framework it is possible to distinguish between (a) global culture or culture at the global level (Robertson and Buhari Gulmez 2016) and (b) various glocalisation processes, which can become a new source of heterogeneity and difference worldwide (Roudometof 2016).

Notes 1 It is not possible to cite the entire voluminous literature on the historicity of globalisation here. For some general discussions on the varieties of historical approaches to globalisation, see Sterns (2010), O’ Brien (2006), Pieterse (2012), and Roudometof (2014). 2 The list is of course not an exhaustive one. Additional programmes include the Eurobarometer and the surveys conducted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and so on. There are numerous additional programs instituted for specific purposes such as the Transparency International, which reports annual corruption indexes (see www.transparency.org/).

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10 Cosmopolitan borders, strangeness, and inter-cultural encounters Robert Holton

Contemporary social trends are becoming very difficult to decipher. On the one hand the revival of nationalism and protectionism, and the election of populist leaders like Trump and the British Brexit vote, suggests a serious movement away from a global world of free trade, open borders, and cosmopolitan politics and law. Yet on the other hand, the resistance to Trump – in the USA and ­elsewhere – coupled with movements of support for refugees and human rights, suggests polarisation rather than convergence to a new all-embracing epoch of sharply-bordered nationalism. It is nonetheless very hard to be sure about how polarisation will turn out, because old certainties are breaking down, not simply in the world of institutions but also in micro-level cultural interactions. The rise of uncertainty and complexity predates recent political events, reflected in a range of scholarly debates (Merry and Kassavin 1995, Urry 2003). These include discourses around globalisation, and cosmopolitanism, but extend to a wider inter-connected terrain of topics. Chris Rumford’s contributions to the study of borders (2006, 2007, 2014) and strangeness (2013), represent two important components of this wider terrain, and provide us with a legacy of insights for further elaboration and assessment. In this chapter I contribute to this process beginning with a critical analysis of the concept of cross-cultural encounters

Cross-cultural encounters This notion is in widespread use within discourses about social difference, borders and connectivity, colonialism and post-colonialism, race, immigration multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet it has received hardly any explicit analytical attention until recently (Delanty 2011). This neglect has helped to underwrite the prevalence of unexamined and problematic views about culture and cross-cultural relationships. The current experience of global refugee crisis, much of it connected with instability and conflict in Islamic societies has encourage many in the belief that cultures are distinct and separate entities that express unbridgeable ways of life. Encounters between ‘cultures’ may involve initial curiosity about others, and the possibility of learning new ways of living based on co-operation, exchange, and

140   Robert Holton sharing (Jolly, Tcherkékoff, and Tryon (2009). Contacts with the ‘unknown’ are nonetheless typically risky and potentially dangerous. For many, such encounters – real or imagined- generate primordial senses of insecurity, fear, and hostility. Fear of refugees and Islam has become a highly charged rallying point in contemporary global conflicts over the politics of cultural difference, generating a hardening of national and cultural borders, and massive inequalities of access to human rights and social protection between cultural groups. From an analytical and normative point of view, however, this way of thinking about cross-cultural encounters has a number of difficulties. Many of these stem from unexamined assumptions and presuppositions. At the outset the idea of cultural encounters seems innocent enough simply entailing some kind of contact between different social groups, with no necessary reference to cultural evaluation, hardening of boundaries between groups, or political conflict. Yet on deeper inspection, the key terms ‘encounter’, and ‘culture’, have acquired more problematic connotations over time. The seemingly neutral word ‘encounter’, has become bound up with two particular notions. The first is associated with ‘contre’ meaning ‘against’ (deriving from the term’s French roots), suggesting a meeting between adversaries, a context full of potential conflict. A further connotation that has become attached to the idea of ‘encounter’, is that of the presence of the unexpected and potentially exciting, but also possibly the dangerous or fateful, as in ‘a close encounter with death’. These notions are captured in the marketing of lifestyle and tourist experiences through invitations to ‘shark encounters’, ‘ghostly encounters’, or ‘local casual encounters’ of a sexual kind. The dangers of encounters may not simply be to individual persons, but wider threats to social order and convention. In the celebrated movie Brief Encounter (1945), a married woman living a conventional suburban life meets a stranger at a railway station, starting a chain of events that leads from a chance encounter to an increasingly erotically charged but unconsummated relationship. Whether at the individual or more collective cross-cultural level, ‘encounters’ have come to be associated with particular cultural signifiers. These may take a social-­ psychological form such as excitement, transgression, or danger, but may equally raise cultural expectations of adversarialism and disorder. Such connotations are especially problematic when associated with certain powerful ways of looking at culture Following Raymond Williams (1976) and Terry Eagleton (2000), we may say that culture is one of the two or three most complex and frustrating keywords in the English language. This is partly because its meaning has shifted around historically, starting out in a material context activity of cultivation/husbandry, only later becoming seen as a characteristic of social groups, and most recently as a form of identity. But it is also because a wide range of philosophical and political issues are embedded within its use. These include questions as to whether culture is synonymous with the ‘natural’ or given. If so, does that mean that apparent cultural differences are natural, and therefore inescapable. One implication in this kind of naturalistic thinking is that multicultural societies cannot work.

Cosmopolitan borders   141 Underlying much commentary is a further problematic tendency to transmute the idea of culture into the notion of discrete cultures that are seen as sharply ­differentiated from each other, and which treat each other as in some sense foreign. The cultural domain, in this view, ceases to be a complex multi-faceted and constantly shifting arena, based on multiple cross-cutting identities and associations. It is narrowed, instead, to a contest between separate ‘cultures’, the key question becoming ‘what happens when one culture encounters another’ (Delanty 2011, 642) This way of thinking is a key element in the contemporary resurgence of nationalism, and hostility to refugees, where refugees are treated as different, dangerous, and threatening to cultures with which they come into contact. Two major historical processes underlie the presupposition that cultures are fundamentally distinct, and that contact between them is likely to be problematic and dangerous. The first involves the rise of Romanticism and Historicism from the late eighteenth century. This focussed on the emergence of different peoples with historically distinct cultural traditions in reaction to the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment. The second is tied up with the expansive colonising thrust of the West, whereby peoples around the world encountered during the colonising process were perceived as exotic or dangerous ‘Others’ to be controlled, enslaved, or co-opted. Widely expressed in nineteenth-century literature and anthropology, many such assumptions have re-emerged in contemporary commentaries on immigration and the refugee crisis. Given that contrasting cultural affiliations often do generate conflict and ­hostility in cross-cultural encounters, it would be misleading to write off connections between cultural difference and conflict altogether. Equally, however, it may be said that such connections seem contingent rather than necessary since they do not always occur. There is then some value in looking at alternative ways of thinking about the cultural domain and its shifting relationship with processes of social change under the impact of colonisation, immigration, and globalisation. Alternatively it may be said that cultures are socially created or invented and re-invented, rather than inherited from the past. They are therefore politically malleable according to changing circumstances and evolving ideas about desirable social arrangements. The implication is that cultures can mix successively, or, put another way, the cultural domain can be reconfigured – from below as well as above- to be supportive of mixture. Encounters, in this way need not be ­conflict-prone or inspire fear. A further proposition that undermines naturalistic and holistic accounts, is that culture is always profoundly influenced by and implicated in structures of sovereign and discursive power. This typically gives cultural encounters an asymmetrical character where relations of domination and subordination are at stake. This certainly contributes to conflict and possible violence, enslavement, or death. Most importantly, though, it shifts attention from culture as nature, to culture and cultural encounters as social phenomena, produced, and reproduced within society, and capable of change and conflict-resolution through social action.

142   Robert Holton From an analytical point of view it is certainly premature and misleading to restrict the notion of cultural encounters to contact between collective, highly integrated, communities. Cultural relationships in an increasingly globalised world are better thought of in terms of looser-knit forms of cultural activity that are more complex. Rather than immutable dichotomies between contrasting ­cultures, the historical and contemporary evidence shows significant area ­co-operation and cross-cultural dialogue, accommodation, and fusion. Much of this evidence is associated with the historical sociology and social history of cosmopolitanism (for a wide-ranging critical assessment of this evidence see Holton 2009). In their recent paper on ‘cosmopolitan encounters’, for example, Plage, Willing, Woodward and Skrbis (2017), treat encounters simply as forms of contact, whether between individuals, networks, or groups. There is no cultural baggage here around expectations that difference is likely to be fraught with fear or heightened emotional excitement or insecurity. Even though asymmetries of power may well be present in many encounters, these yield complex results in terms of cosmopolitan openness and its limits. There are also many broader bodies of work on inter-culturalism, influenced, in part, by post-colonial theory. One important example is Paul Gilroy’s (1993) analysis of diasporic connections within the Black Atlantic over the last 300 years. This cultural configuration is characterised by mobility across cultural and political boundaries that refuses racial or ethnic dichotomies. Another is Maria Rovisco’s (2010) study of the neglect of hybridity, trans-nationalism, and cosmopolitan affiliations that arises from the assumption that political borders somehow contain and constrain separate and distinct forms of cultural activity. This argument is sustained through an analysis of Iberian globalisation in the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards in both the colonial and post-­ colonial periods. This looks at complex forms of inter-cultural engagement in religious and theatrical settings, moving beyond the ‘mantra of Otherness’ which, all too often regards cultural borders as partitions rather than cultural constructs that are permeable and often-crossed. It is with mixed feelings then that I regard Gerard Delanty’s (2011) paper on cosmopolitanism and political community approached through a theory of cultural encounters. This initiative in an under-developed area is overdue. There is also much to like about his relational approach to the emergence and logic, of cultural encounters, to the focus on culture as ‘fluid, mobile, and contested’ (641), and to asymmetries of power in cultural encounters. This yields a six-fold typology of such encounters ranging from hostility and rejection, at one end of the spectrum, to cultural fusion or syncretism, at the other. In between come ­processes like integration and assimilation. Taken together these constitute a systematic typology which is of considerable utility in identifying social trends, whether to homogenisation, polarisation, hybridity or unity in diversity (649). All this represents a valuable restatement and extension of themes in an older literature around immigration, ethnicity and multiculturalism (Glazer and Moynihan 1963 is the classic text here). Delanty is also very well aware of the

Cosmopolitan borders   143 complexity of culture, reaffirming its ‘fluid, mobile, and contested’ character. What is less satisfactory is Delanty’s decision to focus on the different relational logics at work in cultural encounters, putting the question of the types of social groups involved to one side (644). This leaves intact – perhaps unwittingly – the notion that it is different ‘cultures’ that are somehow present in cultural encounters. As has already been argued, this perspective represents only one of a number of modalities of cultural activity in which different, or at least distinct cultural practises and attitudes are present in social engagement. Taken literally, the ‘encounters between cultures’ focus works best in two kinds of settings, where macro-sociological processes of confrontation are often present. The first is engagement and conflict between ‘civilisations’, an argument with an older background in notions of West versus East. More recently this kind of engagement is central to Samuel Huntington’s (1996) ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, and Benjamin Barber’s (1995), civilisational conflict of Jihad versus McWorld. As Delanty rightly points out there is also a more subtle Weberian historical sociology associated with Benjamin Nelson (1976, 1981), elaborated more recently by writers like Johann Arnason (2003, 2006). While working with the concept of civilisations, this line of thinking does not present them as unitary or monolithic. This allows for conflicts and schisms within civilisations, such as the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-­ Reformation or Sunni versus Shia Islam. This helps lay the basis for notions of multiple modalities within particular civilisational configurations, such as Eisenstadt’s (2000) idea of ­‘multiple modernities’. The civilisational focus, therefore, is not quite as amenable to notions of conflicts between ‘cultures’, as might be imagined. A second setting within which conflicts between ‘cultures’ seems less ambiguous is that of encounters between would-be colonisers and indigenous peoples, or between slave-owners and slaves, where racial or ethnic difference is marked out in stark asymmetries of power. This is the context for Kipling’s poetic formulation ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’. Outside of these two kinds of settings, the presumption that it is ‘cultures’ per se that experience or undergo encounters works less well. In more complex less dyadic inter-actions it is not ‘cultures’ that engage, but individuals and groups influenced by a rich array of cultural practices, performances, and attitudes influenced by class, gender, religion and age, not simply race and class. So it is not only that cultures do not act as integrated wholes, but also that cultural interaction takes place on a range of scales (micro as well as macro) in a multidimensional manner. This operates on civilisational, regional, national, local, and intimate scales, within which the terrain of action includes armies, churches, workplaces, arenas of musical performances, territorial communities, and communications media, as well as various kinds of border posts and regulatory spaces. It is in pursuing this approach in search of further elaboration, that the work of Chris Rumford has been so important.

144   Robert Holton

Globalisation, cultural complexity, and borders Rumford’s contribution centres on two inter-related themes. The first concerns borders and their changing forms and functioning in a globalising world. The second involves a re-thinking of strangeness and its implication for cultural identity and coherence, again in a context of intensifying globalisation. The changing nature of borders is highly relevant to cross-cultural encounters, though this is less apparent when borders are seen purely in geo-political terms. Following the pioneering work of Balibar (1998, 2003, 2004), Rumford agrees that borders are not necessarily where we expect to find them (Rumford, 2008, 37). Taking Europe and the EU as his terrain for analysis, Balibar notes that older borders between nation-states have become less significant, as new forms of largely invisible bordered space occur at control points such as airports, railway stations, and along roads and motorways are a basis for transport-­ zoning. Borders separate ‘particularities’, but are not necessarily experienced in the same way by different classes or social groups. Rich or educated, poor or unskilled confront borders in different ways. Inequalities of this kind require a democratisation of borders, if European identity and citizenship is to become a reality. Rather than globalisation leading to a borderless world, however, borders for Balibar have multiplied and become more diverse. Beyond this point, Rumford identifies problems with Balibar’s account. One is that Balibar assumes a ‘shared and reciprocal knowledge’ of borders throughout a polity (op. cit. 44), an assumption that has uncertain empirical plausibility. Another is that Balibar’s discussion of ways in which borders might link with enhanced citizenship, focusses more on the activities of nation-states and the EU, rather than citizens (op. cit. 51). Rumford’s very interesting notion of ‘cosmopolitan borders’ enters into the discussion at this point, and permits a further refinement of alternative modes of cross-cultural encounter to those focussing on fear, anxiety, and danger. Cosmopolitanism has often been thought of simply as a philosophical orientation toward world citizenship in which all particularities are somehow transcended. More recent scholarship, by contrast, links cosmopolitanism with the lived experience of social groups rooted in time and space, where openness to others is the primary focus (for further discussion see Skrbis and Woodward (2007) and Holton (2009). Where then do borders fit in? For Rumford, cosmopolitanism is less about a borderless world and more about the capacity to cross and re-cross borders. This kind of border-work is not dominated by nationstates, but rather represents a ‘cosmopolitan space’ where interest groups, citizens, enterprises, scholars, and creative artists are also involved. This also means that borders and bordering have cultural as much as geo-political qualities, though Rumford (2008) does not elaborate this connection between bordering and cultural meaning very far. A major legacy of this phase in his thinking is to challenge the widespread presupposition that borders inevitably generate cross-cultural tension and exist primarily as defensive forms of security rather than bridges to alternative

Cosmopolitan borders   145 c­ ultural possibilities. This being said, Rumford, even in this earlier study, was aware of a serious potential problem for more optimistic accounts of cosmopolitanism within lived experience. This centred on the issue of strangeness in everyday life (Rumford op. cit., 69–75), which became the subject of a full-scale study in The Globalization of Strangeness (2013). The arguments developed in this major work then fed back into Cosmopolitan Borders (2014), offering a more elaborated statement of Rumford’s thinking on cosmopolitanism. Globalisation and the problem of strangeness The figure of the ‘stranger’ has been a persistent feature in social science and literature, with Simmel’s essay on ‘the stranger’ first published in 1908 (see Wolff 1950, 402–8), being a major reference point in the sociological tradition. From the 1990’s, with the intensification of globalisation, a range of social observers, including Bauman, (1997), Robertson (2007), Turner (1992), and Beck (2010) expanded on notions of strangers and strangeness as key aspects of the contemporary human condition. In Rumford’s (2013) commentary, this body of work is seen as grappling with a range of notions such as insecurity, fear, and risk, which have all been associated in one way or other with the contemporary globalised human condition. For Robertson (2007), the experience of strangeness and the increase in surveillance are two-sides of the same coin. The threat of contact with strangeness as diverse peoples, cultural repertoires and new technology cross and re-cross borders provides a growing audience for protective measures including harder borders. For Beck the ubiquity of strangeness means social actors increasingly fail to recognise the everyday world around them (such as their cities and streets). The paradox here is that global openness generates moves towards greater security through forms of closure. Does this mean that all roads led to the anti-immigration anti-diversity agenda of UKIP and Trump rather than a more open tolerant cosmopolitan outreach? For Rumford some care is needed in responding to this paradox, because social reactions to strangeness are complex, leading in a number of directions. In his initial (2008, 72ff.) discussion, he identifies energising and empowering aspects of wonder and awe in the face of global crises. Alongside fear and risk associated with terror or environmental catastrophes, he detects examples of awe-inspiring human fortitude in the face of adversity. Awe in this context partakes of older ideas of the sublime, not so much in contemplation of nature, but in recognition of social creativity in the midst of strangeness and instability. This argument is, however, not entirely explicit, and not connected with his emphasis on everyday cosmopolitan actors. Rumford does not return to this specific argument in his book-length work on strangeness (2013). Here, his first concern in this important and original study is to differentiate the older discourse on the stranger, who is here today but stays tomorrow, from the social experience of strangeness. At its most generic, this involves cultural encounters with the unfamiliar, in which it is difficult to

146   Robert Holton r­ ecognise conventional reference points or markers. Strangeness ‘occurs when people are no longer sure who “we” are, and who “the other” might be (op. cit., 7)’. This state of affairs also radically destabilises any sense of insider and outsider, such that strangeness can arise from within, rather than necessarily being a threat from outside. And when it appears it is typically a sudden eruption of the unfamiliar and confronting that disrupts ‘routinized existence’ (82). The ‘home grown terrorist’ seen in the 2005 London bombings, is taken as a striking example of strangeness. Individuals, who are at one moment holding down regular jobs and playing cricket at the weekend, are suddenly revealed as bombers. This is not the classic appearance of the stranger from outside, but a seemingly unfathomable eruption from within. Why ordinary people become terrorists, is not for Rumford, simply the eruption of evil. Rather it is connected with the identification of some young people with global networks of terror (Appadurai 2006). Jihad has in this sense gone global, making the initial sense of a specifically home-grown terrorism somewhat misleading. This analysis fits very well with the recent March 2017 terrorist attacker on the British parliament, Khalid Masood, whose neighbours remember him as a quiet gardener. So where does this leave cosmopolitanism and the possibility of productive inter-active cultural encounters? Will the politics of fear and securitisation behind harsh borders now come to predominate reinforcing the older connotations of danger and threat in confrontation with others? Rumford is sceptical of Beck’s notion of the ‘cosmopolitanization of reality’ (Rumford 2013, 104–5). His alternative focusses on the problematic figure of the ‘cosmopolitan stranger’. This figure is situated in a social context in which cosmopolitanism is very far from being the ‘commonplace reality’ (op. cit., 110), proposed in one shape or form by Beck, Delanty, and many others. In a very original conceptual move, cosmopolitanism is seen by Rumford as ‘exceptional’, and in ‘fleeting glimpses’ rather than writ large. While there are many connections between globalisation and cosmopolitanism, Rumford does not believe that globalisation opens up a wider world of cosmopolitan opportunities. Many of the effects of globalisation ‘press the world in on us’, and global access is for many highly constrained (Rumford 2013, 113). What the ‘stranger’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ have in common, in this argument, is that both appear as outsiders, with attachments that are at odds with existing communities. The new sociological figure of the cosmopolitan stranger has only a fleeting presence for Rumford, but can play a significant role, having the potential ‘to connect people with distant others, who betokens new forms of social solidarity’, (121). In this manner cosmopolitan innovators can move productively through the tightening social and political spaces of the ‘Global Age’. The themes of strangeness and a fleeting presence for cosmopolitanism hemmed in by globalisation are reaffirmed in Cosmopolitan Borders (2014). What makes such borders ‘cosmopolitan’, an idea seemingly at odds with notions of cosmopolitanism as openness, is that they are not the work of the state, but of civil society populated by innovative social actors (2). Such borders

Cosmopolitan borders   147 are regarded as ‘cosmopolitan workshops’, where four themes predominate, namely vernacularisation, multiperspectivalism, fixity/unfixity, and connectivities. Vernacularisation connects cosmopolitan bordering with democratic mobili­ sation through the everyday lives of ordinary people, while multiperspectivalism, refers to different ways of perceiving borders, not limited to the hard securitisation agenda. Fixity/unfixity, meanwhile, creates space for the fleeting character of cosmopolitan interventions, while connectivities are seen as ‘close encounters of the cosmopolitan kind’. All this gives a somewhat more elaborate and positive gloss to the contemporary fate of cosmopolitanism than is found in the Strangeness volume, while retaining a sceptical posture. Cosmopolitanism: now you see it now you don’t! Rumford’s rich line of argument has been outlined at some length because it is a breath of fresh air in repetitive debates over cosmopolitanism that have become dominated by optimistic cosmopolitan realism. What is less clear is whether Rumford’s radical scepticism is entirely justified. While some may see cosmopolitanism everywhere, the alternative perception of strangeness everywhere is equally or even more problematic. While the presence of cosmopolitanism has been researched empirically in sociology, political science, history and law, yielding a good deal of plausible evidential support (for a wide-ranging review see Holton 2009, for detailed studies see essays in Delanty 2012, and also Berman (2004–5), and Robertson (2010)), the notion of existential strangeness remains a more speculative zeitgeist. It can certainly claim face-value topical plausibility, but as yet no equivalent empirical elaboration or support. One theoretical problem in sociological enquiry is that searches for an allembracing zeitgeist generate an inevitable reduction in complexity. Even allowing for paradox or contradiction it is not at all clear that there is much long-term value in the constant announcement of new characterisations unless these generate a research agenda that can refine and evaluate the characterisations in more depth. Rumford’s work on strangeness and cosmopolitan borders, unlike some other characterisations, has emerged out of both theoretical and empirical work on Europe (Delanty and Rumford 2005, Rumford 2006, 2007), but I believe now justifies more systematic attention. This is perhaps, very urgent in the light of Brexit and the election of Trump. This is partly because of the hardening of government policy and much popular opinion against new flows of culturally diverse immigrants as well as ‘cultural strangers’ already settled in new countries. This harder kind of bordering is not cosmopolitan, and perceptions of strangeness may be mediated as much through racist stereotyping and bigotry as through curiosity and wonder. But it is also because of complex, sometimes contradictory and often ambivalent features of contemporary social and political life. These elements are perhaps clearest in the divergence in the USA between populist and humanitarian responses to Trump’s attempted ban on certain categories of migrants. This can be interpreted as a conflict between nativist and cosmopolitan bordering.

148   Robert Holton In the exploration of issues raised by Rumford’s research agenda two further questions need to be tackled. One is the hypothesis that cosmopolitan actions and achievements, as distinct from attitudes are ‘fleeting’ and ­episodic. A serious issue that this hypothesis would need to address is the significant institutionalisation of cosmopolitan perspectives in aspects of law, public policy and the structure of the media (Berman 2004–5). This suggests a degree of robustness rather than a fleeting ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ character. A second question on his agenda is whether globalisation processes are more to do with closure than with openness. This is one of the more original but controversial aspects of Rumford’s argument. Since globalisation is a very multidimensional set of processes evaluation of this position would need to specify far more explicitly what types of global activity close off or hem in social actors, and what types enhance openness. Global opportunities and constraints are certainly unequally distributed by wealth, income, geo-political and geo-cultural processes. And it is not clear that much-vaunted forms of electronic connectivity do much to assist the world’s poor, or politically and culturally marginalised social groups to participate. Seamus Heaney and a productive cosmopolitan imaginary In the current state of research it is not possible to give more definite answers to all the questions raised by Rumford’s discussion of borders, cosmopolitanism and strangeness. One possible way of exploring Rumford’s challenge to cosmopolitan realism is through the accessibility and robustness of cosmopolitan ­imaginaries. A powerful route into this is through the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. His poem, From The Republic of Conscience (Heaney 1990, 218–19), written in the mid-1980’s to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Amnesty ­International, may be regarded as an extended commentary on the idea of cosmopolitan borders although he does not use this term. But it is also suggestive of the accessibility of cosmopolitanism sentiments and behaviour in everyday life. This in turn is helpful in understanding why the cosmopolitan imagination has a robustness that does not go away, however hostile or powerful real-world obstacles may be. The historical terrain of contest and conflict within which Heaney’s work has developed, centres on the north of Ireland. Conflicts between Ulster Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists and Republicans, had created a cultural and political landscape through which material, symbolic and social-psychological borders fractured any kind of over-arching unity. The presence of borders, however, also involves the experience and possibilities that may arise in border crossing, and in Heaney’s imaginary, is designed to highlight alternative types of cultural encounter, to those dominated by fear and hostility. The poem is in three parts of which the first and last deal with border crossing as a visitor (the narrator) proceeds inward and then outward through immigration and customs within the ‘republic of conscience’. On entering,

Cosmopolitan borders   149 at immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather. (218) Similar unfamiliar encounters were found at customs where a woman asked me to declare the words of our traditional cures and charms to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye. (Ibid.) Heaney continues, No porters, No interpreter. No taxi. You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared. Similar experiences occurred at customs and immigration on the return journey. The ‘old man’ gazed into the face of the departing visitor saying that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen … [and that I should] … consider myself a representative and … speak on their behalf in my own tongue ... when I got home. (219)   Although Heaney does not use the term ‘cosmopolitan’, these poetically drawn cultural encounters seem both to fit the idea of cosmopolitan borders, and project beyond the bordering experience to a wider cosmos of inter-­ cultural engagement. We are clearly dealing with the role of ordinary people in making and transforming borders as emphasised by Rumford. But in Heaney’s case there is also some sense of projection beyond the bordering experience to a wider cosmos of inter-cultural engagement between ‘dual citizens’, since   Their embassies … were everywhere but operated independently and no ambassador would ever be relieved. (Ibid.) There is a utopian poetry here, which may well be consistent with Rumford’s belief that cosmopolitanism is more successful as an attitude, but far less able to achieve change. The context of the poem is also one of a voluntary journey between two countries where engagement is between individuals settled in their respective homes. This contrasts with the context of forced movement through risky and often illegal channels by contemporary refugees, and confrontation between refugees and those hostile to them occurring within large social groups. So how much purchase does the idea of a republic of conscience have in bridging attitude and action? What is striking about this poem is not the fleeting character of its cosmopolitanism, but rather its intelligibility as an orientation toward the world. It seems to be saying this is how things should be – utopian maybe – but not strange in the sense of a thoroughly unfamiliar scenario that requires decoding. It certainly

150   Robert Holton fits with Rumford’s sense of ordinary people’s involvement in cosmopolitan bordering. But it departs from Rumford in projecting activity that is not sharply distinct from the activities of states. The emphasis is on a sense of popular participatory republican democracy which somehow imbues the state-like ­institutions of immigration and customs with a conscience. Utopias may be fertile or barren, as Eric Hobsbawm once remarked. Heaney’s republic of conscience may be seen not only as a fertile cosmopolitan attitude, but also as activity. There are clearly parallels with the activist NGO activity of environmental and human rights bodies, which bridge the divide between thought and action, as in the adage ‘think globally, act locally’. The example of Médécins sans Frontières rescuing drowning refugees crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa is both a kind of cosmopolitan activity and achievement. The plausibility of Heaney’s alternative way of thinking of cultural encounter gains a more solid and enduring character because the border-crossings of his protagonists are steeped in vernacular ways of being. There is a consistency here with recent understandings of cosmopolitanism that emphasise its situated character in time and space. (Cheah and Robbins 1998, Holton 2009). Rather than a de-contextualised universalism, cosmopolitanisms rise within groups of actors with this of that cultural, religious, and national backgrounds. Heaney’s poem, especially in its second section elaborates the contextualised nature of the republic of conscience. We have already encountered the immigration official dressed in his ‘homespun coat’ inviting the border-crossing to talk about his cultural traditions. The border-crosser then tells of their unfamiliar but intelligible cultural practices relating to interpretation of weather patterns, birth, and funeral practices, and the inauguration of public figures. Strangeness, it seems can be transcended through vernacularisation. Heaney then offers a route into the critical evaluation of Rumford’s work, both in relation to cosmopolitan bordering and strangeness. While not described in this precise language, many of the issues raised by Rumford in his political and cultural sociology, are evident in Heaney’s poetic treatment of cultural encounter and engagement. There is nonetheless a significant contrast between Rumford’s scepticism and Heaney’s optimism. The tension between these two orientations is very much at the heart of recent social scientific work on the dynamics, potential, and limitations of cosmopolitanism and resurgent nationalism.

Conclusions In this chapter I have brought together three main arguments. The first is that cultural encounters are not necessarily adversarial or sources of danger and risk. To presuppose that they are, is to foreclose on broader and more open-ended possibilities suggested in part by cosmopolitan opportunities and utopian poetry. The second is that the case for regarding contemporary social life as dominated by cosmopolitan attitudes and practices is not convincing. Beck’s powerful case to this effect has too many problems with it. The third – and this is where Chris

Cosmopolitan borders   151 Rumford’s legacy is so important – is that the complexity of political cultures in a globalising environment demands new concepts and a research programme capable of (re-)exploring cultural encounters. Rumford’s notions of ‘cosmopolitan bordering’ and ‘strangeness’ represent two important contributions to the development of new thinking and the construction of a new research agenda. I have suggested some problems with the radical directions in which Rumford developed his arguments about strangeness and the fleeting character of cosmopolitanism. Yet the challenges he posed in his work over the last decade remain very real, and as yet under-explored. His legacy to current and future scholars is one that should be fully embraced.

References Appadurai, A. (2006), Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Arnason, J. (2003), Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions, Leiden: Brill. Arnason, J. (2006), ‘Understanding Civilizational Encounters’ Thesis Eleven, 86, 39–53. Balibar, E. (1998), ‘The Borders of Europe’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.) ­Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 216–29. Balibar, E. (2003), ‘Europe as an “Unimagined” Frontier of Democracy’, Diacritics, 33(3–4), 36–44. Balibar, E. (2004), We the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barber, B. (1995), Jihad versus McWorld, New York: Ballantine Books. Bauman, Z. (1997), Post-modernity and its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (2015), originally published in 2010 – now a broken link), ‘The Necessity of a Cosmopolitan Outlook’, at www.euroalter.com/2015/ulrich-beck-for-a-cosmopolitanoutlook (accessed 28 February 2017). Berman, P.S., (2004–5), ‘From International Law to Law and Globalization, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 43, 484–556. Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds.) (1998), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Delanty, G. (2011), ‘Cultural Diversity, Democracy, and the Prospects for Cosmopolitanism: A Theory of Cultural Encounters’, British Journal of Sociology, 62(4), 633–56. Delanty, G. (ed.) (2012), The Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Delanty, G. and Rumford, C. (2005), Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization, Abingdon: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (2000), The Idea of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Eisenstadt, S. (2000), ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 192, 1–29. Gilroy, P. (1993), Black Atlantic, London: Verso. Glazer, N. and Moynihan, D.P. (1963), Beyond the Melting Pot, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Heaney, S. (1990), Seamus Heaney. New Selected Poems, 1966–87, London: Faber and Faber. Holton, R.J. (2009), Cosmopolitanisms: New Thinking and New Directions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

152   Robert Holton Huntington, S. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster. Jolly, M. Tcherkékoff, S., and Tryon, D. (eds) (2009), Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, Canberra: ANU Press. Merry, U. and Kassavin, N. (1995), Coping with Uncertainty: Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity, Westport CT: Praeger. Nelson, B. (1976), ‘Orient and Occident in Max Weber’, Social Research, 43(1), 114–29. Nelson, B. (1981), On the Road to Modernity, Totowa NJ, Rowman and Littlefield. Plage, S., Willing, I., Woodward, I., and Skrbis, Z. (2017), ‘Cosmopolitan Encounters: Reflexive Engagements and the Ethics of Sharing’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(1), 4–23. Robertson, A. (2010), Mediated Cosmopolitanism: The World of Television News, ­Cambridge: Polity. Robertson, R. (2007), ‘Open Societies: Closed Minds? Exploring the Ubiquity of Suspicion and Voyeurism’, Globalizations, 4(3), 399–416. Rovisco, M. (2010), ‘Reframing Europe and the Global: Conceptualising the Border in Cultural Encounters’, Environment and Planning, D: Society and Space, 28(6), 1015–30. Rumford, C. (2006), ‘Theorizing Borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 115–70. Rumford, C. (2007), ‘Does Europe Have Cosmopolitan Borders?’, Globalizations, 4(3), 327–39. Rumford, C. (2008), Cosmopolitan Spaces. Europe, Globalization, Theory, Abingdon: Routledge. Rumford, C. (2013), The Globalization of Strangeness, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rumford, C. (2014), Cosmopolitan Borders, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Skrbis, Z. and Woodward, I. (2007), ‘The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness’, Sociological Review, 55(4), 730–47. Turner, B.S. (1992), ‘The Concept of “the World” in Sociology. A Commentary on Roland Robertson’s Theory of Globalization’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 31(3), 311–8. Urry, J. (2003), Global Complexity, Cambridge: Polity. Williams, R. (1976), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Croom Helm. Wolff, K. (trans.) (1950), The Sociology of George Simmel, New York: Free Press, 402–8.

11 Religion and globalising processes An investigation into the relationship between religious practices and institutions and the complex historical forms of global social change Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne Introduction This chapter is proposed as a contribution to the literature on the relationship between religion and globalisation (Altglas, 2010; Beyer, 1994, 2010; Lehmann, 2009; Robertson and Garrett, 1991; Roudometof, 2014a, 2014b). This is not a theme which is, perhaps, central to the work of Chris Rumford, in whose honour this collection has been assembled. However, what we offer in this chapter is an extension of Professor Rumford’s key concerns, namely, an engagement with the cultural-political intersection (and the politicisation of culture), a commitment to understanding the specific forms of globalisation, and a willingness to work across disciplinary boundaries (in this case, sociology and religious studies, the disciplines within which the co-authors are formally located) to best develop the field of global studies. Indeed, Rumford’s concept of the ‘cultural encounter’ is particularly relevant here, because it demands engagement with the experiences of, and interactions with, the world in its multiple forms beyond the purely abstract, normative sense. The existing literature on this topic has presented us with diverse accounts of the extent to which globalisation is enabled by, and impacts upon, religion, religious institutions and religious identities. It is our contention that a framework for identifying and interrogating different forms of what is frequently called ‘globalisation’ introduced by O’Byrne and Hensby (2011) can be of immense value for sociologists of religion, in so far as it can help us to investigate the diverse, particular and complex ways global change intersects with religious phenomena. The purpose of the chapter is therefore to speculate on some of these intersections and to suggest how each might relate to a different form of the broader globalising process. To this end, we begin with a ­restatement of the centrality of religion within the sociological discourse on globalisation, then proceed to outline eight different forms of global change, which one might think of as eight different uses (or misuses) of the term ­‘globalisation’, as offered by O’Byrne and Hensby. We conclude by suggesting how each form (or use, or misuse) can relate specifically to our understanding of contemporary religion.

154   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne

Globalisation and religion The sociological literature on globalisation has always been closely interwoven with the sociology of religion. On a basic level, it is not unreasonable to treat the major world religions as inherently globalising, insofar as they may claim universal authority over a global constituency, the constituency of humankind, and in some cases, conspicuous efforts have been made to extend the global reach of particular religious doctrines which have been closely allied to the proto-­ globalising projects of Western colonialism and trade liberalisation. However, the reality is more complex. Roland Robertson’s own efforts at a generic theorisation of globalisation as a long-term historical process grow out of his earlier contributions to the sociology of religion, and treat religion as a crucial factor in global transformations (Robertson, 1992). While Robertson to some extent equates the long-term project of globalisation with the project of modernisation, he does so in a way that appreciates both the globalising and localising ­tendencies of religion, as simultaneous and indeed inseparable processes. Peter Beyer’s work also highlights the complex relationship between religion and globalisation (Beyer, 1994). Like Robertson, Beyer adopts a sociological approach to globalisation (rather than an exclusively economic or political one, although such aspects are incorporated into his wider definition), and this enables him to more closely interrogate the role of religion, as a ‘mode of communication’, a social process distinct from economic and political forces, within it. Although Beyer, like Robertson, treats globalisation in part as a continuation of modernisation, he is equally careful to distinguish it from any simplistic process of Western imperialism. For him, globalisation entails far more than the triumph of one set of values and practices over all others, but rather emphasises the complex relationship between the universal and the particular. Whereas ‘modernisation’, narrowly conceived, seemed to imply secularisation (and in any simplistic understanding of globalisation as modernisation, secularisation is only one obvious outcome of the triumph of Western-style modernity which, driven as it is by instrumental rationality, also lays the foundations for capitalism, populist democracy, and the liberal theory of individual human rights), globalisation allows for religious resurgence, in part as a response to the marginalisation of religion as a mode of communication in ‘modern’ societies (Beyer 1994, 4; see also Robertson, 1987). It enables both a global recognition of religious particularism and a revitalisation of the inherently globalising tendency of most world religions: In sum then, there are two formal directions for religion under conditions of globalisation, one that approaches the global system from the perspective of a particular, subglobal culture, and one that focuses on global culture as such. While I certainly do not rule out hybrid forms, the pure types point to the paradoxical simultaneity of the universal and the particular, of the ­transcendent and the immanent, in religion. Implicitly, they also show the paradoxical nature of the global system and the theories about it. (Robertson, 1987, 10)

Religion and globalising processes   155 Such issues are taken up in the recent work of Victor Roudometof, who, drawing explicitly on Robertson’s later contributions, locates the sociological study of religion not in the context of a dualism of globalisation and localisation, but rather in their duality – glocalisation (Robertson, 1994; Roudometof, 2014b). More specifically, his interest resides in identifying ‘multiple glocalisations of religion’ (Roudometof 2014b, 63; following Beyer, 2007). Looking specifically at Orthodox Christianity, Roudometof presents us with four such forms of glocalisation: vernacularisation, indigenisation, nationalisation, and transnationalisation. Vernacularisation is closely allied to religious expansionism, empire building and conflicts between rival elites. Indigenisation involves the local appropriation of a broader set of practices and beliefs into particular ethnic communities in such a way as to sustain and strengthen that community. Nationalisation occurs when those localised forms of apparently universal religious beliefs and practices become embedded in national traditions and national churches as part of the modern project of nation-building. (It is in part here, in this reduction of religion to polity, Roudometof suggests, that we can identify the seeds of secularisation – membership of a national church may be an essential part of one’s national identity that has little or nothing to do with belief in God!) Transnationalisation is the contemporary process driven by post-imperial diasporas, the contemporary crisis of the nation-state and the increasing separation of nation from state, in which those nationalised beliefs and identities become diffused across the globe. Roudometof’s point is that at each stage of this historical process, the factors at play are not ‘globalising’ in any totalising way, but rather involve an inseparable conjunction of the global and the local. The centrality of religion within any sociological understanding of globalisation is evident, not only in respect of the universal-particular issue, but in respect of the changing public role and private practice of religion associated with ­modernising processes during the twentieth century. Modernisation and universalisation are undoubtedly precursors to the modern globalising process, but not synonymous with it, just as vernacularisation, indigenisation, and nationalisation provide the historical foundations for the transnationalisation of religious identities within a broader process of glocalisation. For writers such as Robertson, Beyer, and Roudometof, religion as an autonomous mode of communication both drives the globalising (or glocalising) process and is driven by it, as old and new religious movements are publicly empowered to respond to globalising threats and anxieties. Research into such responses and other articulations of the global religious resurgence have focused on the globalising tendencies of, for example, emergent Pentecostal or Charismatic churches (Martin, 2005), or various forms of religion ‘fundamentalism’ (Lehmann, 1988). However, insofar as globalising and localising processes are inseparable, we must also consider the way dominant Western religions have been appropriated and localised within the colonial context, resulting in new religious forms, and also how more traditionally local or regional religions have been disembedded and are now actively practised (often in very traditional ways) by diasporic communities of followers around the world.

156   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne This complex relationship between religion and globalisation is further illustrated by research emerging from the fields of cultural studies and social anthropology. For example, John Eade (1997) demonstrates how religion provides a source of identity for residents of the ‘global city’ whose lives are defined by complexity. Researching educated young Bangladeshi males in London’s ‘East end’, Eade shows how the experience of globalisation results in the availability of multiple identities from which self-identity is formed: Eade’s subjects strategically shift between defining themselves as Bangladeshi, Bengali, British, Londoner, and Muslim. Against the heavily politicised backdrop of religious conflict and the perceived ‘threat’ of new, radical religious identities, Eade’s work demonstrates the resurgence of religion as both a source of identity and a public discourse under globalised conditions. Similar interest in how globalisation enables a resurgence of religious identity as a contested terrain in a post-secular world is found in the work of Turner (1994).

Rethinking the globalising process: forms of global change While such accounts rightly challenge any ‘essentialist’ assumptions about religion itself, they tend to leave ‘globalisation’ defined solely in the abstract, suggesting only that it must be treated as a multi-dimensional process involving social and cultural transformations as well as the well-documented economic ones. Even the now-popular concept of ‘glocalisation’ advocated by Roudometof and others appears to suffer from being, effectively, all things to all people. It is, for example, unclear whether glocalisation is the form or merely a form of the broader globalising process, i.e. whether it allows for the possibility of globalising processes which are not at all localising (and vice versa), or whether by its very definition it negates such possibilities. It is our contention, following O’Byrne and Hensby (2011), that rather than speak of ‘globalisation’ (or even ‘glocalisation’) as a singular process, we should consider it to be merely one form of what might be called ‘the globalising process’ (O’Byrne, 2015), which takes multiple forms, each identifiable as a distinct process in its own right, some of which may seem contradictory to one another, but all of which impact in different ways upon social lives, experiences and institutions. According to writers such as Robertson (1992), globalisation as a process requires a gradual engagement with the globe itself as a single space, an arena for social action defined by an agent’s capacity to act upon it unmediated by the nation-state. This is clearly a logical and ‘hard’ definition of globalisation because it makes explicit the relationship between globalisation as a process and the global as a unit of analysis, in contrast to ‘soft’ definitions which equate globalisation to any form of de-localisation or de-territorialisation (although these may represent stages in the historical process of globalisation). Accordingly, globalisation as a process challenges the centrality of the nation-state as a point of mediation between an agent and the globe by demonstrating the presence of

Religion and globalising processes   157 globality, the quality of ‘being global’ which facilitates this capacity to act on the global stage. Such a quality may be present in the actions and orientations of individuals who espouse ‘global citizenship’ (O’Byrne, 2003), and equally of corporations who market their products as ‘global brands’ to a consumer base irreducible to nation-state distinctions. But not all uses of the term ‘globalisation’ fall into this ‘hard’ definition. For example, much of the economic discourse on ‘globalisation’ does not directly refer to ‘the globe’ at all, but rather to the establishment of a ‘free market’ which serves to break down the barriers between nation-states. Although such a process undeniably undermines the sovereignty of the nationstate, there is nothing inherently globalising about it. According to O’Byrne and Hensby (2011), this process is better defined as liberalisation. Of course, this is precisely the same process which, when articulated by more critical voices, can be interpreted as something altogether different – one of polarisation. It polarises because it enhances the economic power of wealthier states through the exploitation of the resources of the poorer states, reinforcing the division between core and periphery, exploiter and exploited, rich and poor (Bello, 2004; Brecher and Costello, 1998). In such debates, these two ‘faces’ of economic ­globalisation – liberalisation and polarisation – are often presented as alternative interpretations of the same ideological process. According to the framework ­proposed by O’Byrne and Hensby, however, the globalising process can simultaneously be both – and neither – liberalising and polarising. This complexity is true not only of those definitions of ‘globalisation’ that are primarily economic in focus, but also those which emphasise cultural and political dynamics. For some commentators, ‘globalisation’ equates to global homogenisation, the annihilation of local diversity under the tidal-wave of dominant practices and values which are primarily Western in origin. The standardbearers of this form of globalisation are not only the Hollywood movie, the American TV show, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but also the implementation of a Western-style constitutional democracy with an emphasis on the protection of individual rights. This form of globalisation-as-standardisation or McDonaldisation (following Ritzer, 1993) equates to a globalisation of institutional practices. For example, rather than suggest the weakening of state sovereignty, it highlights the extent to which states are becoming increasingly similar. This is, for sure, a rather bleak image of global transformation, inheriting the legacy of earlier debates concerning modernisation, secularisation and ‘one-dimensional society’. But its critics point out that as a paradigm within which to understand contemporary change, it suffers from a one-dimensionality of its own, ignoring as it does the extent to which such hegemonic practices are resisted or appropriated at the local level. Such critics – influenced by postmodernist theory and contemporary trends in cultural anthropology – counter this paradigm with an alternative reading of globalisation as creolisation or hybridisation (Hannerz, 1996; Nederveen Pieterse, 1995). Here, the local is perceived as a perennially contested space in which identities, values, meanings, and practices are always being re-shaped, in a constant process of fluidity which challenges essentialist

158   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne assumptions of ‘authenticity’. Such a process is heightened during the post-­ colonial period of migration flows and diasporic communities (Hall, 1991). In the framework proposed by O’Byrne and Hensby, these two processes – McDonaldisation and creolisation – are treated not as incompatible opposites but as mutually-occurring contradictory projects of the broader globalising process. For some, the process of ‘globalisation’ is primarily one of transnationalisation. This type of global transformation is defined by O’Byrne and Hensby as the formation of a ‘space beyond place’, and thus overlaps considerably with the use of the term adopted by Roudometof. This transnational space is not inherently global, in so far as it does not necessarily extend to the globe as a single space, but it exists beyond the level of the nation-state and of international relations. Transnational institutions, practices, elites, and systems of power are ‘lifted out’ of their local (national) context (Sklair, 2002). Transnational corporations, which exercise power and influence beyond the international arena and which are no longer identified with particular national contexts, are a good example. Another is the United Nations, which as a transnational institution exhibits influence beyond straightforward international relations but which does not engage directly with the globe (in that it is not a world government). The suggestion that real political power now operates primarily at this transnational level has been challenged by some more traditional Marxist and leftist writers, who continue to equate globalisation with a process of Americanisation. Fears about Americanisation as a cultural process prevalent among cultural ­theorists of the 1950s (e.g. Hoggart, 1958) have given way to contemporary polemics in which ‘globalisation’ is seen as little more than the cultural, economic, political and military project through which the New American Empire is built and upheld (see, for example, Chomsky, 2003; Panitch and Gindin, 2003). Such narratives can of course be accused of over-stating the influence of the USA – for example, are those transnational corporations which exert such influence in the global economic system nothing more than puppets of the US nationstate? The Americanisation paradigm is also open to criticism for exaggerating the reality of this American ‘empire’, which is defined in terms of the rest of the world’s dependency upon the USA. It has also been argued that right-wing American foreign policy-makers have actively pursued a process of empirebuilding in response to an alternative ‘reality’ of globalisation – that of balkanisation, in which global power is distributed among a few geo-political or civilisational blocs, of which ‘the West’ (the USA, Western Europe, and allied countries) is only one, and these blocs are often perceived by each other as threatening to their interests or ways of life (following Huntington, 1997). ­Proponents of the balkanisation paradigm thus maintain a distinctive image of the contemporary global condition – one of division and seemingly inevitable conflict. Such ­apparent contradictions between the transnationalisation, Americanisation and balkanisation paradigms might, however, actually reflect the mutual co-existence of the three projects within the contested global arena. The framework proposed by O’Byrne and Hensby enables us to research the complex realities of the globalising process as it is articulated in different aspects of

Religion and globalising processes   159 the social world, in which each such aspect can be understood as a generic and contested institutionalised discourse. Rather than be drawn into narrow and sometimes naïve debates in which one model of global transformation necessarily excludes all others, it provides us with a sophisticated way of interrogating the extent to which these aspects, or discourses, of society are (or are not) at the same time globalised, liberalised, polarised, McDonaldised, creolised, transnationalised, Americanised, and balkanised, and, by extension, the way in which these diverse and sometimes contradictory projects are being ­contested in different areas of life. Such a framework has already generated ­conceptual research in a diverse range of social practices, institutions, and ­discourses, including business practices (Bond and O’Byrne, 2014) and human rights (O’Byrne, 2015). It is our intention here to apply it to the practices, institutions, and discourses of religion.

Religion and the various forms of the globalising process In order to demonstrate the extent to which these eight models can be applied to the study of religion, and more specifically, can serve to demonstrate the complex relationship between religious discourse and historical processes of global change, we will now present a very crude survey of major historical and contemporary developments in (certain examples of) religious discourse, and attempt to map these within our framework. Note that our goal here is to identify general processes within the broader religious discourse and not specific illustrations or articulations of those processes. In the history of religions, processes that would later be identified as ‘globalisation’ became an explicit goal about 2,500 years ago, during the era identified by the philosopher Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age. This can be seen as a period of ‘proto-globalisation’, insofar as its primary concern was less with the globe itself than with understanding and formalising universal conceptualisations. Even so, these conceptualisations were more than mere abstractions. During the fifth and sixth centuries bce, many religions produced visionaries who pointed beyond local holy places, gods, and temples to assert that some universal principles and/or a universal God should be acknowledged by all humanity. In China, Confucius (551–479 bce) and Lao-tzu (b. 604 bce), in India the Buddha (563–483 bce), the Hebrew prophet Second Isaiah (c.540 bce), and the Greek Pythagoras (570–495 bce) all lived and taught at approximately the same moment, and all sought to raise the focus of their audiences from the local to the universal, and from the concrete rituals of religions to abstract principles of ethics and belief. Though some criticise the idea of an Axial Age because these thinkers had no contact with each other, the flourishing Persian Empire of that time actually touched all of their civilisations. Persia itself had a prophet, ­Zarathustra, who spoke for a universal God. Cyrus, the king of Persia who permitted Jews to return from their exile in Babylon and to rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem, was given the title of ‘Messiah’ by the prophet Isaiah, even though Isaiah saw that Cyrus did not know the God of the Jews (Isaiah 45).

160   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne Why religious teachers with universal (or universalising) messages appeared in so many different cultures at the same time has been explained in socio-­ economic terms by Karen Armstrong (2006) and in evolutionary terms by Robert Bellah (2011). One prominent factor would be the rise of cities that traded and communicated with each other, both within and across imperial and cultural boundaries. Trade links this first form of religious globalisation to the second, liberalisation. Trade, and the liberal ideal of the market, has been associated with religions since the Apiru or Hebrews who led their caravans between Mesopotamia and Egypt 4000 years ago. Prophet Muhammad was a merchant, and the hajj was both a religious pilgrimage to Mecca and an occasion for trade long before Muhammad dedicated it to Allah alone. Trade resulted from the Christian ­Crusades and helped to drive the Conquistadores to the Americas. In the modern world, both trade and evangelisation accompanied slavery. Missionaries from the nineteenth century to the present have often seen trade as at least an adjunct to their activities. In many Pentecostal Christian churches, a gospel of prosperity is preached that tends to make Pentecostal Christians into good citizens of a global capitalist system. The Pentecostal revival has in recent decades made that form of Christianity into the second largest Christian tradition in the world, with about 500 million adherents (Jenkins, 2002). But the values of these Pentecostals have also contributed to the rising importance of a third form of religious globalisation, polarisation. Polarisation begins with the origins of religion. Religion almost certainly began in part as a way of directing violence outward, from within a group to those outside. The rivalries of Taoists and Confucians, Jews and Gentiles, Greek and Roman Christians, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims are all examples of the inherently polarising tendency of religions. If religions are systems of non-rational commitments that hold life together (Gardella, 1998, 2014), then it should be noted that units may also be held together by opposed and mutually attractive magnetic poles. Today, Christianity is divided between North and South. Northern Christians tend to be more committed to hierarchy in their churches and to emotional restraint in their worship, while Southern Christians (especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South America), have looser attitudes toward structure and more often express strong emotional states in prayer. Southern Christians also reject the Northern tendencies toward liberal sexual attitudes and equal gender roles. Similarly polar oppositions are appearing between universalistic, Gandhian Hindus and Hindu fundamentalists and between Islamic universalists and Muslims who seek an Islamic social order. In all cases, growth in numbers occurs more rapidly on the side of the polarity in which religious groups demand more of their followers but also provide greater rewards, in a model first described by sociologist Rodney Stark (Finke and Stark, 2005). Rapid growth across the globe may be fostered by people and organisations that apply similar methods everywhere, in the phenomenon known as McDonaldisation. Evangelists like Billy Graham and Sun Myung Moon held standardised rallies in many places for decades and attracted global followings.

Religion and globalising processes   161 The exile of Tibetan Buddhist monks that began with the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet in 1950 has resulted in a network of Shambhala Centres teaching Tibetan Buddhism on every continent. Master Sheng Yen (1930–2009), a Buddhist exile from China, established a global network of Chan Meditation Centres in the United States with roots in Taiwan and branches in Europe. Yoga and t’ai chi and Buddhist martial arts are taught in health clubs and storefront businesses around the world. The most spectacular example of McDonaldisation in religion is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, who now have 180 temples already operating or planned, each with a statue of the Angel Moroni on the top, running identical ceremonies around the world. Mormons who use these temples send delegates twice each year to massive conferences in Salt Lake City, where they sit together in a 21,000-seat auditorium and hear sermons and get instructions from their president and other leaders. In a complementary process, the globalisation of religion also involves the combination of different religions within the same settings, in the phenomenon that O’Byrne and Hensby have called creolisation. The term originated in West Africa, derived from the verb for ‘to raise’ in Portuguese, Spanish, and French; it was applied to people with partial European ancestry who had been raised in Africa. The most famous example of Creole religion arose in Haiti, where ­Africans transplanted by slavery combined the Roman Catholicism of their French masters with their own Yoruba and other West African traditions. Today, this combination of Christian and African elements continues in Pentecostal spirit possession and in Christian music in West Africa and the United States. Meanwhile, missionaries from Africa are increasingly employed to bring unapologetic faith and enthusiasm to non-Pentecostal churches in the United States and Europe. Creolisation is also taking place in the international Buddhist community. For example, the New York Buddhist Church, founded in 1938 to provide a traditional service of chanting prayer for an expatriate Japanese community in the Jodoshinshu tradition, now teaches Zen meditation and even martial arts classes as part of its weekly programming. Although creolisation and McDonaldisation may seem to be opposites, these processes do not actually exclude each other. As the principal theorists of McDonaldisation are quick to point out, McDonald’s itself does not offer the same menu in every culture, and its variations often result from religious pressures. In Hindu India, where the eating of beef is a major taboo, the Maharaja Mac is a chicken burger. There is a green, vegetarian menu for observant Hindus and a red menu with chicken, lamb, and fish, for lower caste or less observant Hindus and Muslims. Israel has 180 McDonald’s outlets, of which 50 are halal (mcdonalds.co.il/About_McDonalds). Transnationalisation – the form of globalisation in which there is an effort to transcend the significance of national differences – also has its role in the history of religions, and not merely as a contemporary, post-imperial process as identified by Roudometof. The Roman Catholic Church, as a self-conscious successor to the Roman Empire, has always been transnational, seeing the overcoming of nationalism as part of its mission. Like the United Nations in New York, which

162   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne exists outside the jurisdiction of the United States, the Vatican has created a transnational space, its own transnational state, within the nation of Italy. Islam rejected nationalism from its origins, with the Muslim emphasis on a universal ummah or community of faith, sometimes institutionalised in a caliphate, which was abolished in 1924 but reasserted by some who sought recognition as Mahdis and by the Islamic State organisation today. The United Nations building has a universalistic chapel, and the UN agency UNESCO promulgates a spirit of transnationalism in its activities and selections of ‘world heritage sites’ in many nations. Americanisation has often worked alongside transnationalisation, especially since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Americans played a significant part in the establishment of League of Nations and its successor the United Nations, and the US has its own unique contribution to religious history, American civil religion. American civil religion accompanies the American military presence in more than 100 nations. The American flag has universal elements, solar red stripes and a night sky with stars (Gardella, 2014). The Four Freedoms (of speech and worship, from want and fear) promulgated as war aims of the USA by President Roosevelt during World War II, appear in the preamble to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, the content of American civil religion within the United States has also been altered by the process of globalisation. Institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Ellis Island National Park express a conviction that the United States is part of a global community. Like ancient Rome with its Pantheon, housing gods from all over the empire, there is something of the global capital in both New York and Washington. Finally, the world of the early twenty-first century reveals that the process of globalisation does not exclude the proliferation of localities at odds with each other that O’Byrne and Hensby have identified as balkanisation, after the tensions among Balkan states and regions that preceded World War I and reemerged with the end of the Soviet empire. Religious distinctions were the foundations upon which Huntington (1997) based his concept of the ‘clash of civilisations’. Today, local religious tensions prevail in many regions, and within many religions. Contemporary balkanising processes within the discourse of religion parallel the rise of religious ‘fundamentalism’ since it first appeared on the scene in the early twentieth century (Beyer, 2010: 270–2). Fundamentalism is perhaps a phenomenon too quickly misunderstood and dismissed, even among the world’s great thinkers. In an interview with Eduardo Mendieta, Jürgen Habermas expressed the view that: We call ‘fundamentalist’ those religious movements which, given the cognitive limits of modern life, nevertheless persist in practicing or promoting a return to the exclusivity of premodern religious attitudes. Fundamentalism lacks the epistemic innocence of those long-ago realms in which the world religions first flourished, and which could somehow still be experienced as limitless. (Habermas, 2002: 151)

Religion and globalising processes   163 Habermas’s conflation of fundamentalism with pre-modernism is of course an articulation of his own somewhat Eurocentric Kantian cosmopolitanism, a framework he has consistently struggled to escape from. Nevertheless, what he so eloquently articulates here is a common presumption. The reality, though, is no doubt quite different. Perceptions of what is or is not modern, and what is or is not global, among those directly involved in religious divisions present an altogether more complex picture than might be presumed within linear accounts of social ‘evolution’, be they articulated in the language of ‘modernisation’ or ‘globalisation’. Today, millions of American Christians are motivated by an ideology that sees the world divided between realms of darkness and light, but with contested areas even within Christian territories. Among Pentecostals, concepts of ‘spiritual warfare’ against territorial fallen angels and of a ‘10/40 Window’ extending in a rectangle from West Africa through Japan from the tenth to the fortieth degree of latitude above the Equator give powerful impetus to opinions about United States foreign policy. Some Christian localities, in Greece and Italy and Lebanon for example, fall into the dark places on this map (Otis, 1991). Other places, such as San Francisco, are described as ‘contested’. The old Muslim division of the Dar al Islam and the Dar al Harb, or the House of Peace and the House of War, has broken down into Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi-dominated realms with much contention among them. Jews in Hasidic groups, in Reform and Conservative congregations, and in lobbying groups contend with each other over how to define the Jewish people and how to influence the policies of Israel. As the global perspective becomes more important, local conflicts often intensify, and resources and recruits from around the world can be called into action in local wars. Chep Hernawan, a Muslim leader in Indonesia, claims to have sent more than 150 young men to fight for the Islamic State in Syria, sponsoring their travel through Malaysia and training in Pakistan. In his view, this has not only helped those men to fulfil their religious destiny, but also has helped to keep Indonesia itself stable and peaceful. The Indonesian government, of course, remains fearful of the militant agenda such initiatives will provoke and thus declares them illegal. Contradictions of this kind abound in the process of religious ­globalisation, but the process is none the less real. Easily dismissed as antithetical to the globalising project, in fact Peter Beyer is correct when he asserts that fundamentalisms constitute a ‘globalism of a particular sort, not anti-globalism’ (Beyer, 2010: 278).

Conclusion In applying the framework proposed by O’Byrne and Hensby to religious instances, we have consciously adopted a trans-historical approach, illustrating the extent to which the specific processes not only continue to be evident within the processes and practices of religion, but have been for many centuries. We do so in part to counter any suggestion that there is a singular globalising process which evolves across successive stages in a linear way (a position adopted, for

164   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne example, by Robertson in his early work; see Campbell, 2007; Robertson, 1992: 57–60). This is not to say that such a linear approach is not at all useful – in some applications, for example when trying to make sense of the legal appropriation of human rights as a framework within national and international law (see O’Byrne, 2015: 125), it would appear to make perfect sense. Religion, though, is a far more complex and contested discourse, and so has to be understood within a framework of historical complexity. Our journey through these historical and contemporary complexities has facilitated recognition of general processes common within the discourse of ­religion, which equate to the eight processes described within the theoretical framework. These can be summarised in tabular form, thus: Of course, for each of these general historical processes, one can identify numerous specific examples. Our purpose here has been to apply the model generally, but there is clearly much work to be done in identifying and researching specific manifestations of the globalising process with the religious discourse, and highlighting the complex ways in which these specific manifestations engage with, complement and perhaps conflict with one another and duly influence the general, abstract discourse of religion as it navigates its way through the global complexities of the twenty-first century. Such work would build, for example, on the rich body of work carried out on the contemporary meanings of religious identity and practice in a ‘post-secular’ world. It is curious to think, perhaps, that only a few decades ago, many academics in the Table 11.1  Application of the eight models of global change to religious discourse Form of the globalizing process Globalisation Liberalisation Polarisation McDonaldisation Creolisation Transnationalisation

Americanisation Balkanisation

Associated historical process within the discourse of religion Application of universal belief systems with global jurisdiction Historical inter-connectedness of cross-border trade and religious expansion Historically contingent power dynamics between core and periphery within most major religions Standardisation of practices and methods of religious organisation across time Cross-faith recognition and often appropriation of specific beliefs and practices resulting in religious fusion Historically contingent formation of transnational politico-religious cores (e.g. Vatican) with global jurisdiction, and of transnational communities of faith (e.g. in Islam) Spread of American civil religious values Prevalence of inter- and intra-religious tensions and rise of religious fundamentalisms

Religion and globalising processes   165 sociology of religion would be in agreement with science fiction writers and evolutionary scientists in assuming that the only meaningful globalising process applicable to the study of contemporary religion would be secularisation (perhaps understood in our context as a form of McDonaldisation). This is ­evidently no longer the case. Just as Marx called religion ‘the heart of a heartless world’, in the same sentence that contained the more famous phrase, ‘the opium of the people’, so religion may be said to stand at the heart of the historical processes of globalisation. Religions transmit basic values regarding what is worth living, dying, or killing for. Religions have rituals, techniques of prayer and meditation, and holiday traditions that lift people out of the tedium (as Bellah would have it) of ‘everyday life’. Naturally then, we should expect religion, like economics and politics, to play a basic role in all historic processes, including the processes of globalisation. What seems special about religion is its potential for directive power. Leaders can use religion to move people to act for change, as Gandhi used Hinduism and Martin Luther King used Christianity. Among the most intensely religious people acting in the political and military world today, there are some who believe that nationalism is God’s will for humanity, so that all efforts at transnational organisation are deeply suspect. This position is held by many fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal Christians and by many Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. On the other side, deeply religious Muslims are often inclined to hold that all national borders should be erased. And whether we are discussing Americanisation or McDonaldisation, transnationalisation or balkanisation, we can find examples of people who believe that their religion commands them to act in ways that contribute to these forms of the globalising process. If the partisans of a militant American civil religion hold power, the United States will predictably try to impose the values of Western individualism, of personal freedom, political democracy, cultural tolerance, world peace and, of course, an unregulated free market, around the globe, as a religious imperative. If transnationalists dominate the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church will try to teach transnationalism to more than 2 billion people, and this may well move the Church into conflict with nationalists in China and in India. Meanwhile, Pope Francis may contribute to an emerging recognition of a polarising conflict between North and South, rich and poor, that could become the main theme of the globalising process in coming decades. If this last recognition dawns because of this pope, religion will truly fulfil the role that Marx predicted for it.

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166   Peter Gardella and Darren O’Byrne Bello, W. (2004): Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy. London: Zed. Beyer, P. (1994): Religion and Globalization. London: Sage. Beyer, P. (2007): ‘Globalization and Glocalisation’. In The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by James Beckford and Jay Demerath. London: Sage. Beyer, P. (2010): ‘Religion Out of Place? The Globalization of Fundamentalism’. In The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies, edited by Bryan S. Turner. London: Routledge. Bond, C. and O’Byrne, D.J. (2014): ‘Challenges and Conceptions of Globalization: An Investigation into Models of Global Change and their Relationship with Business ­Practice’. Cross-Cultural Management: An International Journal 21, 1, 23–38. Brecher, J and Costello, T. (1998): Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Campbell, G.V.P. (2007): ‘Religion and Phases of Globalization’. In Religion, Globalization and Culture, edited by Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Chomsky, N. (2003): Hegemony or Survival: American’s Quest for Global Dominance. London: Hamish Hamilton. Eade, J. (1997): ‘Identity, Nation and Religion: Educated Young Bangladeshis in London’s East End’. In Living the Global City: Globalization as Local Process, edited by John Eade. London: Routledge. Finke, R. and Stark, R. (2005): The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gardella, P. (2014): American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred. New York: Oxford University Press. Gardella, P. (1998): Domestic Religion: Work, Food, Sex, and Other Commitments. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. Habermas, J. (2002): Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. Edited by Eduardo Medieta. Cambridge: Polity. Hall, S. (1991): ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’. In Culture, Globalization and the World-System, edited by Anthony D. King. Basingstoke: ­ ­Macmillan. Hannerz, U. (1996): Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: ­Routledge. Hoggart, R. (1958): The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Huntington, S. (1997): The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Jenkins, P. (2002): The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. Lehmann, D. (1988): ‘Fundamentalism and Globalism’. Third World Quarterly 19, 4, 607–34. Lehmann, D. (2009): ‘Religion and Globalization’. In Religion in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations, edited by Linda Woodhead et al. London: Routledge. Martin, D. (2005): Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell. Nederveen Pieterse, J. (1995): ‘Globalization as Hybridization’. In Global Modernities, edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson. London: Sage. O’Byrne, D.J. (2003): The Dimensions of Global Citizenship: Political Identity beyond the Nation-State? London: Frank Cass. O’Byrne, D.J. (2015): Human Rights in a Globalizing World. Basingstoke: Palgrave. O’Byrne, D.J. and Hensby, A. (2011): Theorizing Global Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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12 Challenges of globalisation and the cosmopolitan imagination The implications of the Anthropocene Gerard Delanty

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to explore the implications of the Anthropocene for cosmopolitan thought.1 The idea of the Anthropocene has recently emerged to be not only a major development in the Earth Sciences, but it has also become influential in the human and social sciences (see Chakrabarty 2009). One of the far-reaching implications of the Anthropocene idea is that it suggests a new way of thinking about the constitution of the political. In this sense, it is an alternative way in which to think through the notion of the risk society, which Ulrich Beck (2006) saw as the basis of a cosmopolitical conception of the political. Although this was not a concept that Chris Rumford worked with, the implications of his cosmopolitan approach to globalisation have a direct bearing on the relevance of the Anthropocene for contemporary social and political theory. The Anthropocene is not simply an objective condition of planetary change, but it is also an interpretative category by which contemporary societies reflect upon themselves and upon life itself and reimagine their location in space and time. The Anthropocene is not then a politically neutral concept, but contains strong normative elements including imaginary significations. It is a space of cultural and political encounters. The normative dimensions are not clear-cut in that the course of political action is, like the scientific account, contested. It is contested in many ways, in terms of who is the political subject, the nature of objective problems and the potential solutions. The politics of the Anthropocene can be seen in interpretative terms as ways of knowing and containing an imaginary component in that it is about imagining future possibilities and re-defining the present in order to realise such possibilities. This would appear to come close to the idea of cosmopolitanism which is also centrally concerned with a vision of the world as the scope of the political. The notion of the Anthropocene can be cast in the terms of cosmopolitanism, but it can also offer cosmopolitan thought with a new relevance that allows it to challenge more firmly neo-liberalism and its more positive response to globalisation. This chapter seeks to bring together the idea of the Anthropocene and cosmopoli­tan social and political thought. These bodies of literature are rarely considered together. On the one side, the idea of the Anthropocene can give

Implications of the Anthropocene   169 c­ osmopolitanism a new significance and political relevance and, on the other side, cosmopolitanism can offer the emerging theory of the Anthropocene with a political philosophy and a social theory. There would therefore appear to be some value in greater dialogue between these two paradigms of thought, which in their very different ways are both concerned with the nature of the encounter, the encounter of one culture with another and the encounter of the human and the natural world.

Rethinking globalisation In the 1990s the idea of globalisation became one of the most important concepts in the social sciences. It led to a rethinking of the nature of sociology and led to much valuable research. In certain respects the challenge of globalisation has been diminished by recent perspectives. There are two reasons for this. One, is that a backward glance at classical sociological theory reveals that in fact it was very conscious of the arrival of a more globally connected world which accompanied modernity. Globalisation, though the term was not used, was a force in the world if not since the beginning of human civilisation, certainly since the Columbian exchange from the sixteenth century. The tremendous transformation brought about by electronic communication since the late 1980s must be placed in a longer historical perspective on major historical transformations that precede modernity. Second, my main concern in this chapter, is that recent developments around the notion of the Anthropocene require a deeper understanding of the spatial and the temporal nature of human society than can be captured by the notion of globalisation. Social science, and sociology in particular, has not fully digested the arrival of the Anthropocene, which I argue requires a major rethinking of the sociological imagination since it offers an account of epochal transformation and it is the very name of the current epoch. However, I am not suggesting that sociological theory is now redundant or that the notion of globalisation must be jettisoned. The problems of modern sociology and current challenges are not so far removed from each other in that common to both is the explanation of epochal change. If there is any continuity in the sociological enterprise it is the concern with making sense of major historical transformations. Current challenges are different from those of the late nineteenth century when sociology emerged. But common to then and now is the challenge of making sense of the present time in light of changed historical experience. The quintessence of the sociological imagination was described in 1959 by C.W. Mills in a classic formulation that is still compelling: The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of the meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals…It is the capacity to range from the impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two. (Mills, 1970: pp. 11 and 14)

170   Gerard Delanty Mills stressed the challenge of understanding the larger historical reality of world history as it manifests itself in the lives of peoples. In their different ways, the great classical sociologists attempted to do this, for they had a very historical understanding of the sociological task. This was also a theme is in the work of Chris Rumford, who argued for a notion of globalisation that addressed its multiple dimensions and trajectories. He brought this to bear on the multitude of encounters that make up contemporary social change. The impact of globalising processes, the theme of his work, has also cultural dimensions that are far-reaching and, as I argue in this chapter, have planetary dimensions in terms of the transformations that they bring about. One of the hallmarks of modern sociology is the concern with making sense of major historical transformations. Classical sociology was deeply historical, but its approach always differed from that of the historian in that it sought to understand the specificity of the present time in terms of the totality of social relations and to view the past with a view to the future. Its questions were different from those of historians as were its methods, which were generally comparative and interpretative. There is a danger today that this character is lost and that a new generation of global historians are taking the lead in making sense of epochal change. So this chapter is also plea for the recovery of macro-comparative historical sociology and a focus on major historical transformations of the present. I claim, as did Chris Rumford, that a distinctive feature of sociology is the concern with epochal transformations. This is not only an academic concern. It is probably one of the defining currents in the world today. The turbulence of the contemporary world is in part due to different interpretations of major social and political change. In this respect sociology has a specific task, namely to offer the public ways in which people can view their lives through the prism of the wider social world and world history. But we now have to see such human and social history as intertwined with the natural world.

Major historical transformations and the entry of the Anthropocene The modern world was shaped by a number of historical ruptures that led to the reconfiguration of time and space. Lying behind these ruptures were dynamics and processes that continue to shape our world and which create a degree of continuity. In order to contextualise the encounter with the Anthropocene, I offer here a short reconstruction of these ruptures and continuities, which can be characterised in a number of ways. Undoubtedly, the first was the European discovery of America. After 1492 neither the New nor the Old Worlds were the same. The Age of Discovery and the realisation of the world as a globe along with the concomitant mastery of the Earth that came with the Scientific Revolution was the first major transformative moment in the history of human societies. It led to the world-wide expansion of European colonial powers, the rise of capitalism, and the dominance of science.

Implications of the Anthropocene   171 The next major transformation came after 1789 when the ideas of the French Revolution transformed the political imagination in Europe and throughout the American continent. In the nineteenth century, capitalism became increasingly unleashed on the world as a whole. It may have been held in check by countermovements, as Karl Polanyi argued, but nothing stopped its unrelenting rise. The prospect of a counter-modernity did not manifest itself until 1917 and the subsequent rise of the USSR, when for the first time an entirely different order of modernity was created. The period that followed the end of World War I can be seen as a major moment of historical transformation that saw the rise of different totalitarian powers, of which the Soviet one was the most durable. The next historical transformation came with the demise of that order in 1989/1990 and the extension of capitalism to the entire world, which at this time also included China. It was a moment that was accompanied by the rise of information technology. There can be no doubt that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that followed amounted to a major transformation in the modern world. It promised a vision of a more open world in which the individual might enjoy new liberties. The illusion was shattered after 2003 with the Iraq War and a new age of techno-security. Now, the present time, the centenary of the October Revolution, could be seen also as a moment of historical transformation, albeit of a very uncertain kind. It is first a time when capitalism appears to be entering into a critical phase, following the convulsions of 2008/9, and the crisis of neo-liberalism in what are now low or zero growth economies, the collapse of the Arab dictatorships and the crisis of the European Union. However, it is a period of profound uncertainty and a questioning of many assumptions about the meaning of truth and democracy in an era of new authoritarian populist politics. It is a period of great disappointment with the promises of modernity and of democracy. A feature of all earlier historical transformations was, for good or for bad, the impact of fundamentally new ways of seeing the world. New ideas came and opened up new visions of the human and natural world. This is what is absent today. Whether in Brazil, in the UK and Europe, in the USA, there is a deep pessimism if not despair that a better world is possible. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that a sociological view of the current situation would require looking beyond the immediacy of the present and identify more formative features of contemporary society. It is in this context that the notion of the Anthropocene is a relevant frame of reference for sociology as it grapples with the challenges of the present day. The designation of the current time as modernity, global modernity or the postmodern or, as is currently fashionable, the posthuman, could be more accurately termed the Anthropocene. Can this notion be rendered sociologically significant? Or does it point to the obsolescence of the very notion of the social, as argued by posthumanist thinking? I shall endeavour to show, contrary to the posthumanist position, that it can be a useful way in which to understand the transformation of the modern world and that it is a way in which contemporary societies can both know and govern themselves. In that sense, it is form of

172   Gerard Delanty historical self-understanding. It may also be a way to correct some of the blind spots of modern social theory, for example, its alleged Eurocentrism and northern hemispheric view of the world, and the impact of natural history of the Earth on the human world. However, as I will also argue the notion of the Anthropocene must be rendered more sociological and demystified of some of the characteristics that have become associated with the idea. It can be seen as not simply a geological designation of our era but also a cultural one. It is in fact a prism through which contemporary societies encounter their relationship of the world and the Earth.

New challenges: the Anthropocene, time and modernity The Anthropocene is first and foremost a temporal concept in geological time: the Human Age. It is the time when human beings have brought about a major transformation in the physical structure of the Earth. This has now (since August 2016) been accepted by the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy.2 It refers to a time when the human world and the physical earth enter into a new phase. It is of course also a political concept in that it implies a critical position with respect to the consequences of, what I call, the earth-world relation and, I shall argue, it is also a cultural concept in that it entails an interpretation of current times. These three dimensions – the temporal, the political and the cultural – make it potentially relevant for social science and related directly to the core concerns of classical sociological theory as it faces new challenges arising from new insights that have come from the natural sciences. Developments in geology and biology are now forcing the social sciences to move on from the scientific legacy of the nineteenth century. The idea of the Anthropocene suggests a new approach to temporality. I argue that there are three temporalities that up to now have been seen as separate, but which need to be seen as interconnected. The first is Earth time (the time of the history of the Earth); the second is human time (the history of Homo sapiens sapiens i.e. modern humans as distinct from the earlier Homo sapiens);3 and the third is historical time (the deep time of human societies prior to the emergence of civilisations). To reconstruct their entanglement would require something like an integrated history of the human, social and natural sciences. There may be a role in this for sociology and for social theory. There are certainly implications for the philosophy of social sciences, since a number of the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of classical social thought will need to be revised in an age when natural reality is increasingly bearing the signature of humans. I return to this in conclusion. However, sociological theory can offer new insights in the ­analysis of the present time in terms of such intersections that are shaping transformations in human societies that are not fully grasped by the existing range of ­theories and concepts (modernity and globalisation, for example). As a term that designates the present Epoch in Geological Time Scales (GTS) as a rupture with the preceding Holocene Epoch, which began c. 12,000 years

Implications of the Anthropocene   173 ago at the end of the last Ice Age, the Anthropocene foregrounds the impact of historical time on Earth time. It thus brings a new perspective to bear on the problem of periodisation. While much of the discussion on the periodisation of GTS has been conducted within the discipline of geology and in the wider context of Earth system science, it has had ramifications for the human and social sciences. Of the various theories to account for the emergence of the Anthropocene, and thus a new geological epoch within the Quaternary Period, the one that has reached more or less consensus within Earth system science is the so-called Great Acceleration, which places the point of origin in the post1945 period. This periodisation has replaced alternative accounts, which include the ‘Early Anthropocene’ that postulates the commencement of the Anthropocene with the beginning of civilisation in the Late Pleistocene or a commencement with the Industrial Revolution. The Great Acceleration began between 1950 and 1964, but could be formally dated to the 16 July 1945 with the detonation of the first atomic bomb. By 1964 there is clear evidence of a peak in atmospheric radiocarbon recorded in tree rings and which can be attributed to nuclear testing and which goes beyond natural variability (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011). Whatever the specific origin is, it is now widely accepted to be in the period – essentially the past 50 years – when planetary change is also evident on the Earth system as a whole. This includes climate change, but a range of other changes, such as ones relating to the oceans, for example the formation of plastic as a new rock. Recent evidence suggests that plastic, a human invention in 1907, has combined with natural sediment to constitute a new rock stratum. The Anthropocene thus amounts to a major transformation in the geophysical nature of the Earth system that coincides, more or less, with the world-wide transformation brought about by capitalism and westernisation. nd World War II was itself a major contributory factor as was the Cold War in that the permanent conduct of war in the second half of the previous century led to a massive increase in energy on a scale previously unknown (Steffen et al. 2011a, 2011b, 2015; McNeill and Engelke 2014). This is where Earth Science meets social science. A historical sociological reconstruction of the Anthropocene would distinguish between the antecedents – in this case with the consolidation of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century – and its maturation in the second half of the twentieth century with the advent of new technologies and the world-wide impact of industrialisation, which include new extractivistic countries, including Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and Indonesia. Earth system science is able to account for much of the timing, the extent and significance of the geophysical evidence of the transformation of the Earth system. However, it is interesting to see that while a certain consensus appears to be emerging within Earth system science, there is still controversy and a questioning of the application of rigorous GTSs that form the basis of geology as far as the problem of periodisation is concerned. But periodisation extends to the future: is the Anthropocene dystopic or does it admit of the possibility of redemption as a positive political project? In these terms, the temporality of the

174   Gerard Delanty Anthropocene partly coincides with modernity, itself, too, a temporal category (the age of the new, the affirmation of present time and of human freedom). The first signs of the Anthropocene coincide with the emergence of modernity in Europe but consolidates as a geological epoch as varieties of modernity take shape throughout the world. However, it would appear to encompass a wider spectrum than that of modernity and strictly speaking refers only to the past 50 years. While I am not arguing that it makes the notion of modernity redundant, it certainly gives it a reduced significance. The Anthropocene is inextricably bound up with sociological questions that concern capitalism, war, power, and inequality on a global scale. Yet, social science has remained relatively silent in accounting for the major forces that have brought about these epochal changes to the Earth and in how they should be interpreted. As a temporal category, the Anthropocene is not just a natural epoch, but an era in human and in historical time. Before considering these dimensions of time, I wish to remark that, all things considered, the Anthropocene – like the idea of modernity – is more than a temporal category and also more than a spatial one. It is a cultural category, a prism, indeed even a vortex, though which contemporary societies can be interpreted. Given the predilection of geologists for pin-pointing specific dates with socalled ‘golden spikes, I would suggest that 1986 marks a moment in time when historical experience shifted as a result of a new consciousness that the human world and the Earth form an endangered unity. This was when two related events coincided: the Chernobyl explosion on 26 April 1986 and the discovery of the ozone hole in the Antarctic c. 1985/6.

The Anthropocene and human time Much of the debate on the Anthropocene concerns the problem of origins: when did it begin? What evidence can be given? At what point and where can a boundary be established in GTS? As I have argued, the more one engages with this problem, the more it becomes entangled in questions that bring the problem of geological periodisation into the historical and sociological context of modernity. Here one unavoidably engages with issues of consciousness and of the interpretation of epochal change. There are further implications. The Anthropocene raises major questions about the nature of human time. First, the very conception of the Earth system includes life itself – and this includes human life – since the Earth is composed not only of the rock formation, but encompasses the oceans, the atmosphere, the magnetic field, and life itself. It is now recognised that without life the Earth would be not too unlike the uninhabitable Venus. The particular form of life represented by Homo sapiens sapiens, the subject of social and human science inquiry, is a relatively late arrival taking shape c. 60,000 to 30,000 years ago when the human mind emerged with the evolution of the advanced front lobe, a development that occurred along with the beginning of the a major cultural shift in the life of Homo sapiens when they developed cognitive and aesthetic capacities

Implications of the Anthropocene   175 for cultural representation (in art), consciousness (religion, the burial of the dead) and technology, developments that led to the commencement of historical time (Mithen 1998). It was also a time when this species eradicated rival hominins and superiority over all hominids (i.e. the broader genus).4 One question that can now be posed is whether human beings have now reached a point at which it is possible to speak of an evolutionary transformation that coincides with the Anthropocene. Here developments in biology are significant. Human and nonhuman populations have evolved together and continually modify each other (Russell 2011). The human body due to processes of chemical acceleration is very probably physiologically different from the pre-1945 body (Thomas 2014). It has been claimed that 7 per cent of human genes have undergone recent change. Life can now be syntheticised by human beings who are themselves also transformed by their capacity for change. Neurological, biotechnical and physiological developments in relation to human life have created the ‘toxic body’, but they have also produced a human being that is very different from the one that lived some centuries ago in terms of health, longevity, and cognitive capability. For much of history, human life was dominated by the experience of suffering. For Weber this was one of key factors that accounted for the rise of the world religions. As Bryan Turner (2017) has argued, science and technology today have the capacity to considerably reduce human suffering, thus putting into question the ontological basis of religion. These developments may be early signs of a new evolutionary phase in the life of Homo sapiens sapiens and thus of a major shift in the human condition that can be compared to the transformation that took place 60,000 to 30,000 years ago when developments in the human front lobe of the brain occurred and which led to cultural transformation. Such questions are of course sociologically pertinent, but should be seen in the wider context of a major epochal transformation that is probably better located within the Anthropocene. The evolution of modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, into if not into a new kind of species being, at least into a modified form of its present form, thus overlaps with the Anthropocene, which it must not be forgotten is also a projection (of the present) of an epoch that has only just begun. However, a note of caution is in order, since the evidence from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology is inconclusive that a genetic modification has taken place in modern humans in recent times, quite aside from whether it has occurred through adaptation (Pinker 2011: 742–51). It may indeed be the case that we are talking only about biochemical evolution. Evolution is now, in any case, recognised to take a diversity of forms and does not necessarily entail the formation of new species (Russell 2011). The idea of the Anthropocene raises the normative question whether humans are now capable of devising the political and technological means necessary to solve the problems of the Anthropocene. Here there is a danger of Anthropocentrism: an over-emphasis on human beings as the masters of the world. On the one side, the notion of the Anthropocene, as the age of humans, gives humans a

176   Gerard Delanty special place in the history of the Earth, even if they are the agents of its destruction. On the other side, there is danger that humans are over-evaluated as the masters of the Earth and have both the powers of destruction and redemption. This neglects that no matter what humans do, they will not be able to change the Earth in ways other than possibly rendering it inhabitable, for the Earth will outlive its temporary residents. The possibility of other forms of life being discovered – even if as a theoretical possibility – cannot be discounted. Indeed, it is already being speculated that this possibility raises major questions for religion, in particular to those than give a special place to Homo sapiens sapiens as the centre of a designed universe. In view of the world-wide rise of religion, this is not a flight of fantasy.5 The Anthropocene is also the age of the growth of religion throughout the world. Nasa, in 2014, gave more than 1 million US dollars to the Center for Theological Inquiry in the USA to study the societal implications of what is now called astrobiology.6 This illustrates the sociological fact that the idea of the Anthropocene is not simply a geological designation but is domain of historical self-understanding. The idea of the Anthropocene has given a new prominence to reflection on the human condition, what it means to be human, and humanity as a species being (see also Chernilo 2017). In much of the popular reception there is a lurking danger of a de-politicisation of the Anthropocene as not only an irreversible epoch but one that is divested of power and inequality. The idea of an Anthropocene may also risk over-simplification of complex processes (see Lukes 2017). A sociological corrective is important here in drawing attention to the notion of humanity as a whole can be over-abstract when the reality of the negative imprint of humanity derives to a large extent from the developed world, which is predominantly western and northern. Not all of humanity is in the same boat. Nonetheless, I would argue that the idea of humanity as a whole contains an important normative force that draws attention to problems that cannot be solved on a national or regional level. In this sense, the notion of humanity affirms the importance of human agency in contrast to a depoliticised invocation of humanity as subjectless.

The Anthropocene and historical time The full implications of the Anthropocene for social science are probably more likely to fall within the interface of geological (Earth), biological (life) and the historical temporalities (human societies). These constitute different modalities of evolution and they act upon each other in different ways. The nature of these interactions and the resulting evolution has not been adequately studied. There are certainly accounts, such as Fernand Braudel’s (1990) work on environmental influences on the long term historical formation of societies. More recently Jared Diamond (1998, 2005) in two path-breaking studies on the influences of biological life on human societies showed what happens to societies that fail to locate themselves in their natural environment. In a work

Implications of the Anthropocene   177 inspired by the Anthropocene, Costanza et al. (2007) have attempted to produce an integrated history of human life in relation to natural history. The authors argued that societies respond to climatic signals in multiple ways, from collapse or failure, migration, and creative mitigation. In their view, future response and feedbacks with the human-environmental system will depend on understanding the global past. They argue that ‘examining socioecological systems across ­multiple timescales can identify the antecedents further back in time of major phenomena that occur in a particular era or time’ (2007: 13). Since Lovelock’s classic work Gaia (1979), it is now increasingly recognised that human and biological evolution and Earth history are interwoven in a web of life. However, I think the argument can go further than demonstrating the environmental limits of human societies. Some of these limits have been identified by Clarke and Gunaratnam (2017) who highlight, following Brooke (2014) and Davis (2001) that significant social upheaval coincided with major geophysi­cal change. In an age such as ours in which climate change is increasing impacting on global politics, it is likely that we will see more social upheaval. Until now the northern hemisphere has escaped the worst, but it is possible to foresee a future that is not too distant when migration out of Europe will occur due to climate change resulting from the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Human societies and human beings are not only conditioned by the natural environment, but they must be seen in deep historical terms as embedded in the natural history of the Earth. The notion of ‘deep history’ has been put forward to provide a new reading of history in which recent history – modernity – is cast in a much longer-time span this allows us to see more clearly that historical time is embedded in the natural history of the Earth. The temporal framework of history is based on the division of history and prehistory, whereby history begins with the advent of writing. Recent efforts by historians to overcome this division of prehistory and history seek to bring the Neolithic and Palaeolithic into view as part of a ‘deep history’ of human life (Shryrock and Smail 2011; Smail 2008). Such a deepening of the historical framework makes it possible for history to be spatially widened to encompass areas and domains of experience not previously included within historical time which give predominance to the Eurasian civilisations of the ‘Axial Age’ (Mota 2016). In this light, the present may be seen in a different light and not exclusively dominated by spatially bounded entities such as nations. Deep history challenges the nineteenth century theory of history associated with Rank, Langlois and Seignobos that asserts that the unwritten past is unknowable. Against what can now be said to be a short history of humanity, in effect produced by European Christian civilisation, it instead sees a common history that goes back to Eastern Africa where Homo sapiens emerged. There can be no doubt that a deep history of humanity that overcomes the division of prehistory and history offers a basis for thinking of human subjectivity in ways that challenge Eurocentric conceptions of history and subjectivity. And it also forces us to re-think the centrality of modernity and possibly to the evolutionary breakthrough that came with the evolution of modern humans c. 50,000 years ago (in showing for example similarities with earlier hominids).

178   Gerard Delanty Nonetheless, the real challenge remains unaddressed, namely how to connect up the different logics of evolution that unfold through the natural history of the planet, the transformation of human life and consciousness from the early ­hominids to Homo sapiens sapiens, the rise and transformation of human societies. The interweaving of biology, the evolution of the brain, the shaping of human behaviour and formation of human societies are all deeply connected through co-evolution. However, the logics – the mechanisms and processes – of these evolutionary domains are very different. If the idea of the Anthropocene is to have any real substantive meaning beyond a term in Geological Time Scales, it must encompass these evolutionary spheres. It is already apparent that the Anthropocene is no longer merely a concept or a theory, but it a cultural model through which contemporary societies can view themselves in terms of a larger scale of meaning (Strydom 2017). For these reasons, all things considered, I am not convinced that that the idea of modernity is no longer relevant. Only modernity can deliver modern societies from the perilous condition they have created. In this sense, then, the Anthropocene is linked to other ideas of the modern era that have a normative significance, such as responsibility, truth and justice. The attraction of deep history in correcting conventional accounts of history that focuses only on the modern world does not adequately address the fact that the solutions to the problems of the modern world will not be found in the early history of humanity. There are those who argue with considerable conviction that the Anthropocene is the coeval with the age of capitalism and thus we should speak of a ‘Capitalocene’ rather than an Anthropocene. The systemic effects of human activity on the Earth must certainly be attributed to capitalism rather than to humanity in the abstract sense of the term. As a cultural model, the idea of the Anthropocene, is more than the condition of capitalism, but also includes the consciousness of the epochal condition of human life. This is why I believe the notion of the Anthropocene is compatible with the view that it is capitalism that is the generative force of planetary destruction. But it also contains a politi­ cal dimension. The politics of the Anthropocene can be seen in interpretative terms as ways of knowing and containing an imaginary component in that it is about imagining future possibilities and re-defining the present in order to realise such possibili­ ties. This would appear to come close to the idea of cosmopolitanism which is also centrally concerned with a vision of the world as the scope of the political. The notion of the Anthropocene can be cast in the terms of cosmopolitanism, but it can also offer cosmopolitan thought with a new relevance that allows it to challenge more firmly neo-liberalism and its more positive response to globalisation. Some of the central objectives of the Anthropocene as a political condition resonate with cosmopolitical ideas, for example increasing biological diversity, the need for a global dialogue between the developed and developing world on reducing carbon emissions in ways that respects the desire of the nonwestern world to have a share in the benefits that have until now been confined

Implications of the Anthropocene   179 to the western world, the need to strike a balance between short and long term thinking.

Conclusion I shall conclude with a number of observations and propositions on the implications of the idea of the Anthropocene for sociology and for social science in general. The Earth is not an objective stable reality on which human societies are built, but is entangled in the human and social world in ways that challenge the ontological assumptions of much of modern social thought. Developments within Earth system science, in particular geology, have opened up new perspectives that challenge the post-positivistic view of science and the idea that the natural and social sciences are based on very different epistemologies. The implications now for social ontology demonstrate that with the formation of new rock stratum that human are the makers of the rock surface of the Earth. The inhuman (rock) has been given a new meaning and significance. As is well known, cosmopolitanism was born with the notion of hospitality, as in Kant’s argument in Perpetual Peace that the cosmopolitan law requires the recognition of the right of the stranger. In the epochal scale of time of the Anthropocene, it is now humanity as a whole that is the stranger in the Earth which it inhabits for what will be a short time in the history of the planet. As noted by others, especially Latour, we need to move beyond the nature v society dualism that underlines much of modern social thought. However, this does not necessarily justify a posthumanist position (Latour 2017). It certainly does question the phenomenological and interpretative tradition of social science of a social world that exists independently of the natural world. While geology has recently acquired a new significance for social science, I do not think that there must be a ‘geologisation’ of social science. However, the social sciences must be able to engage more productively with the natural ­sciences, in particular with Earth system science and the life sciences. The Anthropocene is a mode of knowing the world. As such it is more than a concept; it is also an epistemic model and a cultural model. It is a way of approaching major epochal transformations that encompass societal, natural and human change. One of the attractions that the notion of the Anthropocene has it that it is offers a narrative that links the present to the past and the future in which the human subject is the author. Narratives are essentially interpretative categories by which people – whether individuals or collective actors – make sense of their situation and give continuity to their lives. The Anthropocene fulfils that ­function even if the dominant narrative portends doom. However, the catastrophic narrative of a dystopic future is not the only one. Other Anthropocene narratives offer a more positive account of human potential to bring about change. Anthropologists and sociologists have much to contribute in grasping subjectivities, including spatio-temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal

180   Gerard Delanty transformation. Narratives are important, but in so far as it is a cultural model, the Anthropocene is more than a question of narratives, but also entails normative and explanatory components that go beyond the subjective dimension of narratives.

Notes 1 Acknowledgement. I am grateful to Aurea Mota for her advice in writing this chapter The chapter is based on a key keynote lecture, Congress of the Brazilian Sociological Association, 26–29th July 2017, Brasilia. It draws from G. Delanty and A. Mota (2017) ‘Governing the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Knowledge’ European Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 9–38. 2 www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urgegeological-congress-human-impact-earth (accessed April 2017) https://quaternary. stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/ 3 Homo sapiens sapiens is distinct from its ancestors Homo sapiens, and other species such as homo idaltu. 4 Archaic Homo sapiens eradicated at least two other hominin species, Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The Neanderthals, who lived mostly in Europe until just over 30,000 years ago, were also almost certainly wiped out by Homo sapiens. 5 www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010–2050/ (accessed April 2017). 6 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/26/discovery-of-alien-life-religionwill-survive (accessed April 2017). Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication include The European Heritage: a Critical Re-Interpretation (Routledge, 2017), Formations of European Modernity: A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (Palgrave 2013) and The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Department of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. BN19QE Email [email protected]

References Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Outlook. Cambridge: Polity. Braudel, F. (1990/1987) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip 11. London: Penguin. Brooke, J. (2014) Climate Change and the Course of Global History. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2009) ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222. Chernilo, D. (2017) Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, N. and Gunaratnam, Y. (2017) ‘Earthing the Anthropos? From “Socialising the Anthropocene to Geologizing the Social”’, European Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 146–63. Costanza, R., Graumlich, L., and Steffen, W. (eds) (2007/2011) Sustainability or ­Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Implications of the Anthropocene   181 Davis, M. (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. Diamond, J. (1998) Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. New York: Vintage. Diamond, J. (2005/2011) Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fall or Survive. London: Penguin. Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Lovejoy, A. (1979/2000) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luke, T. (2017) ‘Reconstructing Social Theory and the Anthropocene’, European Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 80–94. McNeill, J.R. and Engelke, P. (2014) The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mills, C.W. (1970 [1959]) The Sociological Imagination. London: Penguin. Mithen, S. (1998) The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Phoenix. Mota, A. (2016) ‘Uncivilized Civilizations’, Social Imaginaries, Vol. 2 (4): 71–86. Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin. Russell, E. (2011) Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shryock, A. and D.L. Smail (eds) (2011) Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smail, D.L. (2008) On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Steffen,W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., and McNeil, J. (2011) ‘The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship’. AMBIO 40: 739–61. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., and McNeil, J. (2011) ‘The Anthropocene: ­Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369: 842–67. Strydom, P. (2017) ‘The Sociocultural Self-creation of a Natural Category: Social-theoretical Reflections on Human Agency under the Temporal Conditions of the Anthropocene’, European Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 61–79. Thomas, J.A. (2014) History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value. American Historical Review 119 (5): 1587–1607. Turner, B.S. (2017) ‘Ritual, Belief and Habituation: Religion and Religions form the Axial Age to the Anthropocene’, European Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 132–45. Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Haywood, A., and Ellis, M., (2011) ‘The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 369: 835–41.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote tables. academia 7, 9, 101–8; borders in academia 102–4; funding policies 105; interdisciplinary research 101, 106–7; mobility 105; residence requirements 105; strangeness in academia 104–6, 107; tuition fees 101, 103–4, 106, 107; visa eligibility for students 103, 106 agency 4–5, 6, 176 Albrow, Martin 129 Americanisation 158, 162, 164 Armstrong, Karen 160 Anderson, Malcolm 15–16 Anderson, Perry 60 Anthropocene concept 1, 10, 168–81; and capitalism 171, 178; deep history notion 177, 178; dimensions of 172; earth system science 173–4, 179; European discovery of America 170; French Revolution 171; and globalisation 169–70; Great Acceleration 173; and historical time 176–9; human development 174–5, 178; and human time 174–6; implications for sociology and social science 179–80; and major historical transformations 170–2; periodisation 173–4; politics of 168, 178–9; sociology and historical transformation 169–70; three temporalities 172–3; and time and modernity 172–4; totalitarian powers, rise of 171 Appadurai, Arjun 1, 7 Appiah, Kwame A. 82 Arnason, Johann 143 art see migrant and refugee art Axford, Barrie 1–12

Balibar, Étienne 25, 26, 28, 30, 103, 105, 144 balkanisation 158, 162–3, 164 Bannon, Steve 4 Barber, Benjamin 143 Bartelson, Jens 132 Bauder, Harald 34 Baudrillard, Jean 49 Bauman, Zygmunt 29, 49, 103, 130, 145 Beck, Ulrich 30–1, 59, 103, 127, 145, 146, 150, 168 Bellah, Robert 160 Benjamin, Walter 90–1 Bennett, Jill 79 Berlin Wall 28, 57, 60, 171 Berry, Wendall 63 Beyer, Peter 154, 155, 163 Bhabha, Homi 62 Bielsa, Esperança 75–6, 78 Binkley, Sam 96 Black, Jeremy 91, 92 Bollier, David 64–5, 68 borders and boundaries 3, 4, 8–9, 15–22; in academia 102–4; borders are everywhere idea 25; border crossings 148–50; border polysemy 26, 30, 45, 103; border studies and the spatial turn 16–17, 19–20, 20n3; borderlands notion 26–7, 32; ‘borders are everywhere’ notion 103, 104, 105; borders as spaces in their own right 23; borderwork and the ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ thesis 42–5; borderwork notion 15, 18, 31–2; challenging boundaries 5–6; changing nature of 144; cosmopolitan borders 9, 15, 17–18, 30–2, 73–5, 102, 144–5, 146–7, 149–50, 151; as cosmopolitan

Index   183 workshops 24, 30–2; cultural borders 9, 74; and cultural complexity and globalisation 144–50; dispersed bordering 28–9; global borders 27–30, 102, 103; interpretation of by individuals/groups 26; loyalties 31; and multiperspectivalism 24, 32–4, 35; overdetermined borders 28; relation to state territoriality 25–6, 27, 35; seeing like a border notion 18–19, 24, 27, 34; as sociocultural practices 23; ‘spaces of wonder’ 33, 46; ‘supermarket checkout’ effect 45; theorising borders 25–7, 102–3; visibility 32–4 Braudel, Fernand 176 Brexit 57, 59, 61, 105–6, 118, 139, 147 Brief Encounter (film) 140 Brisbourne, Alistair 1–12 British Academy 106–7 Brooke, John 177 Bude, Heinz 29 Bunn, James 90 Camus, Albert, L’Étranger 48 capitalism 57, 58, 61, 63–4, 67, 171, 178 Castells, Manuel 103, 133 Castoriadis, Cornelius 41 Chamoiseau, Patrick 4 Chinas, Margaritis 119 citizenship: and complexity 63; European citizenship 59–61, 144; global citizenship 9, 58, 157 Clark, Nigel 177 Cohen, Robin 3 colonialism 79–80, 89, 91, 97–8, 141 commoner, trajectories of 9, 57–71; alterglobalisation movement and the commoner 63–6; alter-globalisation, social democracy, the third way, and cosmopolitanism 57–61; arrival of the commoner 61–3; future of the commoner 68–9; localisation 61–3, 65–6, 68, 69; mutual aid and self-help 64; practice of commoning 64–5; social democracy and the commoner 66–9; society of the commons 63–4, 65; statist politics 59–61, 67–8; wage-labour society 64 connectivities 147 conspiracy theory 4 consumer society 61–2 Cooper, Anthony 8–9, 23–38 cosmopolitanism 5–6, 60, 61, 125, 127, 142; aesthetic cosmopolitanism 75–7;

and the Anthropocene 168–9, 178–9; and artistic encounters 72–86; borderwork and the ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ thesis 42–5; cosmopolitan borders 8, 9, 15, 17–18, 73–5, 102, 139–52, 144–5, 146–7, 149–50, 151; cosmopolitan cinema 74; cosmopolitan hyperreality 49; cosmopolitan identities and the political imagination 81–4; cosmopolitan imagination 75–7, 77, 78–9, 148–50; cosmopolitan moments 43–4, 45; cosmopolitan strangeness 8, 9, 40–1, 44, 45–8, 50–1, 146; cosmopolitan workshops 24, 30–2, 147; critical cosmopolitanism and postmodern social theory 39–42; cultural cosmopolitanism 75, 76; identities 59; and the lived experience of social groups 144; methodological cosmopolitanism 40–1, 43; and nationhood 62–3; presence of 147–8; and technology and art 48–51; and world-making 76 Costanza, Robert 177 creolisation 157–8, 161, 164 critical social theory 16, 23, 35 culture 1, 133; concept of cultural encounters 2–4, 7–8; cross cultural encounters 139–43, 144, 146; cultural borders 9, 74, 142; cultural complexity, globalisation and borders 144–50; cultural cosmopolitanism 75, 76; cultural encounters 1–8, 10; definition 2–3, 140–1; and hostility/conflict 141, 143; notions associated with the term encounter 140; politics of 39–53; and power 141, 142, 143 Dallmayr, Fred 3 Davis, Mike 177 Delanty, Gerard 3, 10, 44, 51, 77, 142–3, 146, 168–81 Dewey, John 69 Diamond, Jared 176 Drori, Gili 134 Durkheim, Émile 133 Durrschmidt, Jorg 26, 29, 105 Eade, John 156 Eagleton, Terry 140 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 143 Eley, Geoff 66 Elias, Norbert 126 Ernst, Sophie 79–80

184   Index Europe/European Union 6, 10, 17, 39, 40, 59–61, 63, 144; Brexit 57, 59, 61, 105–6, 118, 139, 147; ‘Core Europe’ proposal 127; creation of different ‘Others’ 116–18, 121; differing views of Europe 112–16; Europe in crises 111–24; ‘Europemaking’ 111, 112–13, 126; European identity 111–12; Europeanisation 10, 126–7; Euroscepticism 111, 115, 121; far right political actors 118, 119–20, 120–1; ‘global’ Europe 113, 114–16, 118, 120–1, 122; ‘others within’ 117–18; ‘Parallel Europe’ notion 113–14; ‘parochial’ Europe 113, 114–16, 118, 120, 121, 122; and Russia 116; Syrian refugee crisis, reactions to 118–21, 122; thick Europe 112, 114–16, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122; thin Europe 112–13, 114–16, 117–18, 121, 122; and Turkey 115–16, 116–17, 119 European Journal of Social Theory 25 Fairbank, John 93 fake news 5 Fico, Robert 120 film 74, 75, 77, 140 Findlay, Allan 105–6 fixity/unfixity 147 Flat-Earth theorists 4 Foroutan, Siamak 81 Gardella, Peter 10, 153–67 Gaye, Lalya 78 Giddens, Anthony 58, 59, 127 Gilroy, Paul 142 globalisation 5, 7, 9–10, 17, 25, 27, 39, 42, 125–38, 148; alter-globalisation 57–61, 63–6; and the Anthropocene 169–70; and cultural complexity and borders 144–50; definition 125, 128–9, 156; diffusion 129, 131; as exchange 133; ‘gated globe’ concept 127–8, 129; ‘gazing’ globalisation and conceptmetaphors 128–30; global borders 27–30, 102, 103; global change, forms of 156–9; global closure 43–4; global datasets 131–2, 133; global home 47; as global homogenisation 157–8; globalised objects and strangeness/ familiarity 87–100; globalising process forms and religion 159–63, 164; globality 156–7; and historical trajectory 94–5; integral and interactive globalisation 125, 130–2, 133–4, 135; liquidity 130, 131; and loss of control

61–2; power relations 133; as a process of transformation 129–30, 132; reflection 131; refraction metaphor 131; and religion 154–6; and strangeness 95–8, 102, 104, 128, 145–7; transcendence 132; wave metaphor 130–1; world society perspective 132–5 glocalisation 2, 29–30, 102, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134–5; and religion 155, 156 Gulmez, Didem Buhari 10, 111–24 Gulmez, Seckin Baris 10, 111–24 Gunaratnam, Yasmin 177 Habermas, Jürgen 162–3 Hall, Stuart 67, 79 Halperin, Sandra 1–12 Hamond, Benoit 121 Haraway, Donna 19, 32 Harvey, David 67, 96 Heaney Seamus, From the Republic of Conscience 148–50 Hensby, Alexander 153, 156, 157, 158 Hernawan, Chep 163 Hines, Colin 61 Historicism 141 Hobsbawm, Eric 89, 150 Holton, Robert 10, 139–52 Hopkins, Rob 65 Hulme, Alison 9, 87–100 human rights 58, 59, 94, 120, 139, 140, 154, 159, 162, 164 Huntington, Samuel 143, 162 Hutnyk, John 92 hybridisation 157 identity 1, 97–8; cosmopolitan identities 59, 81–4; European identity 111–12, 114–15; markers 3–4; national identity 62–3, 106–7; religious identity 155, 156 immigration 60, 61 imperialism 59, 62, 91–2 indigenisation 155 Jaspers, Karl 159 Judt, Tony 59–60 Kaczynski, Jaroslaw 120 Kafka, Franz 48 Kant, Emmanuel 179 Kingsnorth, Paul 62 Kipling, Rudyard 143 Klein, Naomi 58, 65 Knaus, Gerald 119

Index   185 Kramsch, Olivier Thomas 8, 15–22, 34 Kropotkin, Peter 64 LaBelle, Brandon 78 Latouche, Serge 61, 68 Latour, Bruno 179 Le Pen, Marine 120–1 Lefebvre, Henri 92 levels, metaphor of 40, 41, 45, 46; levels of globality 47, 50 liberalisation 157, 160, 164 libraries 67 Linebaugh, Peter 64 localisation 9, 61–3, 65–6, 68, 69 Logan, Thad 90 Lovejoy, Anthony 177 Lovell, Julia 94 Lueders, Claudia 1–12, 101–8 Lyon, David 29 McDonaldisation 157, 158, 160–1, 164 Macron, Emmanuel 121 Makris, Spiros 9, 39–53 Martin, Randy 77 Marx, Karl 128, 130, 165 Melton Mowbray (UK) 33–4 Meskimmon, Marsha 76 Meyer, John W. 132–4 migrant and refugee art: aesthetic cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan imagination 75–7; artistic encounters 72–86; audience participation 9, 73, 74, 76, 77–8, 79–81; collective experiences 82–3; colonialism 79–80; cosmopolitan cinema 74; and cosmopolitanism 48–51, 52; and cosmopolitan borders 73–5; imaginary ethical encounters and the invisibility of the other 77–81; multiperspectivalism 50–1; ‘Nine Lives’ (play) 83; perspective-taking 77–8; ‘The Silent Empress’ 79–81; spaces of encounter 81–4 Mills, C. Wright 169–70 mobility 25–6, 28–9, 30–1, 35; and strangeness 49–50, 105 modernity/modernisation 1, 39, 41, 49, 58, 68, 130, 133–4, 135, 143, 154, 155, 163; and the Anthropocene 172–4, 177, 178; transformation of the modern world 171–2 Morris, William 64 Moschanos, Gerassimos 66 Mouffe, Chantal 39, 51

multiperspectivalism 8, 9, 24, 35, 50–1, 147; borders 18–19, 32–4 music 75, 79 Nabers, Dirk 111 nationalisation 155 nationalism 5–6, 57, 60, 61, 127, 141, 165; China 94; gendered understandings 62–3; methodological nationalism 7, 31, 40; national identity 62–3, 106–7 Nederveen Pieterse, Jan 125, 131 Nelson, Benjamin 143 neoliberalism 16, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67–8 networks 103, 131, 133 Nyoni, Zodwa 83 O’Byrne, Darren 10, 153–67 one-world idea 9, 40, 41–2, 50 Orbán, Viktor 119–20 the other: creation of different European ‘Others’ 116–18, 121; differing views of Europe 112–16; Europe’s others 111–24; invisibility of 77–81; ‘others within’ 117–18; as a stranger 104; Syrian refugee crisis, reactions to 118–21, 122 Paasi, Anssi 20n1, 25 Papastergiadis, Nicos 76, 77, 84 Plage, Stefanie 142 Polanyi, Karl 171 polarisation 157, 160, 164 poverty 58, 61, 69 Prazeres, Laura 105–6 Protective Geographical Indication (PGI) 33–4 refugees 149, 150; hostility to 141; mistrust of 139–40; Syrian refugee crisis, reactions to 118–21, 122; see also migrant and refugee art Regev, Motti 75 religion 10, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119–20, 153–67; Americanisation 158, 162, 164; and the Anthropocene 176; Axial AGE 159, 177; balkanisation 158, 162–3, 164; creolisation 157, 161, 164; fundamentalism 162–3; global change, forms of 156–9; and globalisation 154–6; and identity 155, 156; liberalisation 157, 160, 164; McDonaldisation 157, 164; polarisation 157, 160, 164; secularisation 154, 155,

186   Index religion continued 165; transnationalisation 161–2, 164, 165; universal principles 159–60; and the various forms of the globalising process 159–63, 164 Ricoveri, Giovanna 58 Robertson, Roland 2, 29, 102, 128, 130, 145, 154, 155, 156, 163–4 Romanticism 141 Rosenau, James N. 113 Rosenberg, Justin 128 Roudometoff, Victor 10, 125–38, 155, 158, 161 Rovisco, Maria 9, 72–86, 142 Rumford, Chris ix–x, 8, 15, 16–20, 59, 61, 72, 76, 82, 87, 101, 102, 125, 128, 139, 147–8, 153, 167, 170; borderwork and the ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ thesis 42–5; citizenship and complexity 63; cosmopolitan borders 30–2, 73–5, 144–5, 146–7, 149–50, 151; Cosmopolitan Borders 145, 146; ‘Cosmopolitan Spaces’ 39, 42; cosmopolitan strangeness 45–8, 50–1, 146; Cosmopolitanism and Europe 125; critical cosmopolitanism and postmodern social theory 39–42; ‘Europe-making’ 112–13, 126–7; global borders concept 27–30; globalisation and strangeness 102; The Globalisation of Strangeness 48, 95, 104–5, 126, 145, 145–6; Handbook of European Studies 125; and multidisciplinary border studies 23–4; multiperspectivalism 24, 32–4, 35, 50–1; social reality 51; Sociology of Strangeness 77; spatial turn 15, 16–17, 19–20, 20n3; ‘Theorising Borders’ 25–7, 102–3 Rutherford, Jonathan 62–3 Said, Edward 126 secularisation 154, 155, 165 securitisation 26, 27, 28–9, 35, 146 self-reflexivity 6, 74 Sheringham, Olivia 3 ship-in-a-bottle 9, 87–100; collectors of objects as ‘citizens of the world’ 90–1; as a contested object 97, 98; enclosing of the unknown in glass environments 90; globalisation and historical trajectory 94–5; as a mass-produced kitsch object 96–7; memories of damage inflicted on China 93–4; miniaturisation 91; objects and memories of “simpler times” 87–90,

92; opium trade and wars 93–4; seaside memories and souvenirs 88, 89–90, 92–3, 98–9n1; souvenirs made in China 93–5; strangeness and globalisation 95–8; Wenzhou model 95, 99n4 Shiva, Vandana 58 Shonibare, Yinka 97–8 Simmel, Georg 126, 133, 145 situated knowledge 19, 32 social democracy 9, 58, 59, 60–1; and the commoner 66–9 social media 82 social reality 43, 51 sociology 171; and historical transformation 169–70; implications of the Anthropocene 179–80 Sohn, Christophe 34 space 3, 4, 6, 18, 23, 25, 26, 27; border spaces as cosmopolitan workshops 30–2; and critical cosmopolitanism 39–40; global space borders 103; politics of 39–53; spaces of encounter 81–4; ‘spaces of wonder’ 33, 46; spatial turn 15, 16–17, 19–20, 20n3, 41 Stark, Rodney 160 Steiner, George 61 Stevenson, Nick 9, 57–71 Stewart, Susan 91 strangeness 7, 9, 126, 145; in academia 104–6, 107; cosmopolitan strangeness 8, 40–1, 44, 45–8, 50–1, 139–52, 146; encountering strangeness through a globalised object 87–100; existential strangeness 147; fugitive 49, 50; and globalisation 95–8, 102, 128, 145–7; ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ strangeness 104–5; making strangeness familiar 96–7; mobility 49–50; the other as a stranger 104; politics of 39–53; social reactions to 145; technological elements of 48–9 surveillance 16, 26, 27, 29, 145 Szczerbiak, Alex 115 Taggart, Paul 115 Tawney, Richard. H. 66 Taylor, Alan John Percival. 116 Taylor, Graham 26, 105 technology 171; and cosmopolitanism 48–51 terrorism 50, 59, 146 third way idea 58–9, 65, 66 Thompson, Edward P. 64, 67 time see Anthropocene concept Timmermans, Frans 114

Index   187 transnationalisation 1, 155, 158, 161–2, 164, 165 Traverso, Enzo 47 Trump, Donald 57, 139, 145, 147 Turner, Bryan 129, 145, 156, 175 twitterbots 5 United Nations 113, 158, 162 Urry, John 62, 103

Wallerstein, Immanuel 128 Walton, John K. 88 Ward, Colin 64 Weber, Manfred 119 Wellman, Barry 103 Wenzhou model 95, 99n4 White, Kathleen E. 130 Williams, Raymond 62, 140 Wordsworth, William 91

Van Schendel, Willem 26–7, 32, 33 vernacularisation 147, 150, 155

Yaseen, Sarah 82