The Limits of Cosmopolitanism

Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature

Aleksandar Stevic, Philip Tsang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429638176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the limits of cosmopolitanism in contemporary literature. In a world in which engagement with strangers is no longer optional, and in which the ubiquitous demands of globalization clash with resurgent localist and nationalist sentiments, cosmopolitanism is no longer merely a horizon-broadening aspiration but a compulsory order of things to which we are all conscripted. Focusing on literary texts from such diverse locales as England, Algeria, Sweden, former Yugoslavia, and the Sudan, the essays in this collection interrogate the tensions and impasses in our prison-house of cosmopolitanism.

Part I
Cosmopolitan Hegemons

1 Cosmopolis Besieged

The Exilic Reunion of Bogdan Bogdanović and Milo Dor

Vladimir Zorić

Much like cosmopolitanism, sieges are predicated upon the existence of certain limits—in space, in military power, in knowledge—and they ostensibly seek to transcend those limits, by conquest or by counterattack. To be sure, cultural competence and linguistic practice have predisposed us to consider each siege as a fundamentally unequal, i.e., anticosmopolitan affair: the position of the besieger is associated with strength and that of the besieged with weakness, which needs to be compensated by ramparts. Yet again, cosmopolitanism has also been associated with hegemony, when its outlook is actively imposed on others, and with withdrawal, when it is nourished and defended as a personal belief system. In practice, however, these limits are often blurred. Up-to-date fortification systems integrate offensive components and even very credible acts of withdrawal have hegemonic implications. This essay will explore the rhetoric of siege in three fields of discourse: in theoretical approaches to cosmopolitanism, in the literary (self-)representations of disengaged intellectuals, and in the conditions of actual siege warfare. The siege will appear successively as a master trope of cosmopolitanism, as a spatial practice of cosmopolitan writers, and as an opportune practical context for political mythopoeia. In all of these realms, the state of siege will emerge as an ambiguous phenomenon: at the same time, a product of imagination and a springboard for that imagination; a defensive act and simultaneously a disciplinarian measure. While most of my literary and political examples will be drawn from the former Yugoslav area, the argument will aim to shed light on a much wider problem which is the interaction between cosmopolitan discourses and siege technologies.

Diogenes’ Syndrome: Siege as a Master Trope of Cosmopolitanism

The most significant practical challenge facing any theory of cosmopolitanism is transition between any of a gamut of abstract moral positions of Weltoffenheit and a set of formal political provisions aimed at implementing those positions legally, institutionally, and culturally. What is less obvious is that this difficult transition is necessarily spatial: it is mediated through different conceptualizations of space, which are informed by antagonistic habituses and practices. From Diogenes of Sinope, who envisioned a global polity from a barrel, to Montaigne, who relished in somnambulistic journeys through the Greco-Roman tradition from the tower of his Aquitaine castle, to the Occupy movement, which aimed to carve a global polity within a contained urban area, cosmopolitanism has been simultaneously the schematic imagining of a non-hegemonic space and a self-indulgent individual pose within that space. Unsurprisingly, it is the city that takes on the role of the ultimate touchstone of cosmopolitanism: before turning into a global space, the cosmopolis comes across as a polis, etymologically, metaphorically, and practically.

To extend the aforementioned urbanistic analogy, cosmopolitanism can emerge intra muros, extra muros, or both. To begin with, cosmopolitanism is often seen as a precarious in-between space immanent to both national and globalist discourses. Thus, for instance, Ulrich Beck, the emphatic proponent of cosmopolitanism, sees global citizenship as essentially an interstitial phenomenon, as something already there―“immigrant in reality”―that complements and completes national empathies by forming transnational networks (Beck 2004, 9). Differently from these networked interstices, cosmopolitanism may elsewhere be conceptualized as a position of exteriority or at least as predicated upon a constant engagement with exteriority. For Walter D. Mignolo, cosmopolitanism arises from Europe’s encounter with the unabsorbed other: “exteriority is indeed the borderland seen from the perspective of those ‘to be included’ […] critical cosmopolitanism comprises projects located in the exteriority and issuing forth from colonial difference” (Mignolo 2000, 724). Finally, cosmopolitanism may well be visualized as internal and external at the same time, a wider entity which includes but also transcends any particularist affiliation. In her seminal essay, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Martha Nussbaum replaces the metaphors of niches and borders with concentric circles:

The first one is drawn around the self; the next takes in one’s immediate family; then follows the extended family; then, in order, one’s neighbors or local group, one’s fellow city dwellers, one’s fellow countrymen […] Outside all these circles is the largest one, that of humanity as a whole.

(Nussbaum 1994)

Nussbaum posits two fundamental poles, the individual and the universal, with a range of possible affiliations: the innermost circle, the self, is central to all wider groups and it is at the same time developed within those groups.

The multifarious spatial forms associated with cosmopolitanism have been traversed by equally heterogeneous prototypes of the cosmopolitan mind-set. The role models of cosmopolitanism, or cognates thereof, have been variously recognized in the flâneur, who is intra muros; in the exile, who refers to the extra muros; and in the traveler, who negotiates and reconciles those categories. From a liminal observation point in the arcade, a flâneur observes the mechanical flow of the otherwise amorphous crowd on the street. Another avatar, the exile, evinces a different itinerary: s/he reaches a liberal metropolis from a political and economic backwater and effectively surrenders to its class mechanism, accepting the necessity to become a nobody before becoming a somebody. The traveler engages with metropolitan crowds as part of an underlying class contract: the affinity and capacity for travel are predicated upon prior membership in the urban elite and cultural competence for processing diversity and abstracting from it.

Thus, in the realm of spatial templates, which broadly reflect the developments on the geopolitical map, cosmopolitanism has been theorized as a niche, as a border zone and as a series of concentric circles; in the realm of spatial practices, which are largely played out on the class map, cosmopolitans have acted, or masqueraded, as flâneurs, exiles, and travelers. Nevertheless, one distinct spatial form has largely escaped the attention of the theorists of cosmopolitanism despite offering considerable heuristic benefits to their schemes: the siege of the city as a trope for the ongoing, constitutive crisis of cosmopolis. It takes cosmopolis back to the early medieval function of the city as an enclosure; at the same time, it also stokes cosmopolitanism’s apocalyptic pathos: the devastation of the cities and the demise of traditional humanism, both at the hands of technology.

For one thing, siege brings together, amplifies and transforms several spatial templates of cosmopolitanism. If Nussbaum’s scheme of concentric circles amalgamates the notions of the niche and the border, siege takes us a step further in that it epitomizes those concentric circles and turns the metaphor on its head. Schematically, patriotism is surrounded by cosmopolitanism; empirically, the arrangement is often precisely the opposite, that is, cosmopolitanism is surrounded and actively threatened by patriotic ventures. Thomas Mann showed that the mechanism can work both ways, with several rings of siege and defense: while in his lecture “Germany and Germans,” he challenges the entire German culture for “a self-centred defence against anything that could constrict the folk egoism,” in his novel Doctor Faustus the siege is laid by that very particularism against the cosmopolitan individualism, embodied by the narrator Serenus Zeitblom (Mann 1975, 7; 1986, 710). For another thing, the denizen of a besieged city merges several visages of the cosmopolitan mind-set. S/he has something of a flâneur, in that s/he can use the ramparts as an elevated observation point, and of the exile, in that s/he concedes to a form of internal displacement during the siege and expulsion following the conquest; the besieged and besiegers are also travelers, seeking the target of the siege or a relief from it. Bringing together different spatial templates and spatial practices, siege provides a more comprehensive and at the same time a more poignant cognitive model for understanding the internal tensions of cosmopolitanism.

Nevertheless, any association of the state of siege with cosmopolitanism is bound to meet a major objection. Besieged cosmopolis may be challenged as contradiction in adjecto. A relentless siege, until one of the warring sides yields, goes against the main pragmatic tenet of cosmopolitanism which, in Kant’s famous formulation, is a long-term, collaborative arrangement for the preservation of peace (Kant 1917). In metaphorical terms, foreclosure is often self-inflicted, and perpetuated, without a military siege as apparent in Camus’s allegorical representation of Franco’s regime as a plague in the uniform of a lieutenant: “He does not reign, he lays siege. His palace is an army barrack, his pavilion a tribunal” (Camus 2006, 322). If every siege projects some form of “siege mentality”―an induced constriction of political space, moral outlook and cultural horizon―should it not be seen as the precise antipode of, rather than a suitable context for, the cosmopolitan Weltoffenheit?

Irrespective of whether, in empirical terms, the city is a theatre of an actual war, or a site of a metaphorical siege, the anti-cosmopolitan credentials of siege mentality loom large at the more theoretical level, that of political philosophy. In the first instance, the state of siege is the ultimate citadel of an embattled nation-state as it allows for constitutional liberties and international treaties to be suspended in order to protect a particular local polity. In the well-known formulation of the jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, the foundational function of any sovereign nation-state is the entitlement to declare a state of exception on its territory, whereby the entire legal system is temporarily shut down. One could argue that if the state of siege is an exception by sovereignty (usually referred to as sovereign exception), the cosmopolis is precisely the opposite, an exception from sovereignty (Schmitt 2005). More recently, siege mentality has been associated not with capsular nation-states but with the excrescences of globalization, an international collusion for totalitarian management of the public spheres in multiple nation-states. According to the theorist of architecture Paul Virilio, the global war against terrorism has engendered an insidious and prolonged state of siege, whereby images of terror are disseminated worldwide and turn into the very source of terror, “the collective hallucination of a single image […] designed to sow panic while pretending to quell it” (Virilio 2005, 86–87). Differently from the media siege of the global village, cosmopolis can plausibly be described as the individual’s openness and competence for multiple images. All these arguments indicate that correlation between the state of siege and the cosmopolitan state should be approached with caution.

Yet again, the evidence from different periods of military history indicates that some form of cosmopolitan alignment was requisite for a serious, consequential siege. In their dual function as financial centers and as fortified garrisons, city fortresses were repositories of economic capital and technological know-how and their conquest or defense required a degree of coordination and competence usually beyond the reach of any individual sovereign state. This supra-sovereign realm of siege engineers and practitioners involved mobility: technological solutions and the requisite expertise to run this technology routinely changed hands, often across the opposed camps as the most capable engineers were lured by overbidding in salary (Purton 2009, 359). The supra-sovereign network also included collaboration: craftsmen across different trades joined forces in order to design a ballistic machine and so did soldiery of different nations in order to conduct a multinational campaign against a designated enemy (Duffy 1979, 40–41). Finally, the supra-sovereign sphere included transnationality: some of the most successful commanders, and very often troops, were political and religious converts (Henderson 1964; Schmitt 2009). To give but one example, the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople in 1453 were facilitated by a Hungarian who had initially served in the city but switched sides to construct, with the help of several trades, a formidable cannon, a piece of artillery that had recently spread from Italy, which was deployed to prepare the final assault of the janissaries, converts into Islam from the Christian lands, which were for their part assisted by Christian vassal troops (Runciman 1965).

Nevertheless, regardless of the number of historical instances of siege adduced, we remain in the realm of empirical cues. The historical coincidence of the sundry siege technologies and cosmopolitan collaborative frameworks would be analytically irrelevant if it failed to alert us to a deeper, structural correlation between the two phenomena. A broadly cosmopolitan framework is a condition of possibility of historical siege but, used as a metaphor, siege can in its own turn inform us about the balance of power in cosmopolitan platforms. In his book Radical Cosmopolitics, James D. Ingram sees all traditional forms of cosmopolitanism as suspended between withdrawal and hegemony:

either it is equally compatible (or incompatible) with everything―all laws, ways of life, and systems of belief―in which case it is at most a personal ethos; or it is identified with one of them, in which case it can easily become an aggressive chauvinism, justifying its supremacy over all others.

(Ingram 2013, 30)

Illustrating the stark contrast between the two pragmatic modes of cosmopolitanism, Ingram refers to Cynics and Stoics: whereas in the earlier generation the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope withdraws from the political arena and turns a barrel into a private cosmopolis, in the next generation the Emperor Marcus Aurelius seeks to implement and spread the cosmopolis within the expanding Roman Empire. Since the barrel is, much like city walls, a circular structure designed to protect and contain, and given that the empire is expanded by conquests of cities, the opposition between withdrawal and capture can be rephrased with reference to siege. On the one side, in the case of withdrawal, one builds fortifications around one’s own ethos and braces oneself for a siege; in the case of aggression, on the other side, one lays siege to other positions that need to be assimilated. Thus, not only does siege provide a favorable setting for collaboration, but it also emerges as a master trope of cosmopolitanism in that it reflects its fundamental ethicopolitical conundrum.

In this essay, however, I am not going to discuss whether the integrity of cosmopolis is better preserved in a self-isolating thrust against the world or in the push for its hegemonic capture; what interests me more is mutual transfers between those attitudes. The push for domination and the personal ethos of withdrawal are not mutually exclusive pathways of cosmopolitan ethos. In effect, they partly overlap: the ethos of withdrawal may well be accompanied by a push for imaginary domination within own, self-proclaimed polity, even when the territory of that polity is limited to private premises and the subjects to personal belongings. A constituent part of that motion is what one can venture to call the political correlate of Diogenes’ syndrome: a tendency to enforce personal states of siege as a complement to a real state of siege or as a surrogate thereof.

The epitomic exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: Cosmopolitan Hegemons
• PART II: Subjects of Displacement
• PART III: Circulated Objects
• List of Contributors
• Index