Cosmopolitan Vision

Ulrich Beck, Ciaran Cronin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly.

Contrasting a 'cosmopolitan vision' or 'outlook' sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the 'national outlook' neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing.

A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.

Part I

Cosmopolitan Realism

1

Global Sense, Sense of Boundarylessness: The Distinction between Philosophical and Social Scientific Cosmopolitanism

1 What is novel about the cosmopolitan outlook?

We can distinguish three phases in how the code word ‘globalization’ has been used in the social sciences: first, denial, second, conceptual refinement and empirical research, and, third, epistemological shift. The first reaction of the mainstream was to deny the reality or relevance of (economic) globalization and to declare that nothing that fell under the heading ‘globalization’ on the social scientific agenda was historically new. This explaining away of the phenomenon began to lose credibility during the second phase when social scientists in the most diverse disciplines began to subject phenomena of globalization to conceptual analysis and to situate them in the theoretical and empirical thematics of the social sciences (e.g., among many others, Held et al. 1999; Beisheim, Zürn et al. 1999; Beck 2000a; Randeria 2001; Sassen 2003).

To the extent that this was successful, the third phase witnessed an epistemological shift. The insight began to gain ground that the units of research of the various social scientific disciplines become arbitrary when the distinctions between internal and external, national and international, local and global, lose their sharp contours (Gille and O’Riain 2002; Brenner 2000; Schmitt 1963; Beck 2003, 2005; and many others). The question for globalization research following the epistemological turn is: what happens when the premises and boundaries that define these units disintegrate? The answer provided by the present book is that the whole conceptual world of the ‘national outlook’ becomes disenchanted, that is, de-ontologized, historicized and stripped of its inner necessity. However, it is only possible to justify this and think it through to its logical conclusion within the framework of an interpretive alternative which replaces ontology with methodology, that is, which replaces the currently prevailing ontology and imaginary of the nation-state with what I propose to call ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’.

The foundations of this perspective will be laid in the present chapter in three steps. In the first part, I will distinguish between different types of ‘cosmopolitanism’; most widespread is the reading which pleads for harmony beyond national and cultural boundaries (‘normative’ or ‘philosophical cosmopolitanism’). This normative conception must be distinguished from a descriptive-analytical perspective in the social sciences which liberates itself from national categories (the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ or ‘analytical-empirical cosmopolitanism’). The increase in interdependence among social actors across national borders can be observed from this perspective, whereby the peculiarity consists in the fact that this ‘cosmopolitanization’ occurs as the unwanted and unobserved side effect of actions that are not intended as ‘cosmopolitan’ in the normative sense (‘really existing cosmopolitanism’ or ‘the cosmopolitanization of reality’). Under certain circumstances the last type of ‘cosmopolitanization’ leads to the emergence of global discussion forums, with the result that global regimes concerned with transnational conflicts develop (‘institutionalized cosmopolitanism’). In the second part, I will focus on the growing contradiction between ‘methodological nationalism’ and real cosmopolitanization.

The third part sketches a ‘new grammar’, the theoretical and empirical programme of a ‘cosmopolitan social science’, and develops by way of example four thematic complexes on which this shift in perspectives should concentrate on its path towards a ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. The risks of modern society are, as a matter of their internal logic, transnational and all attempts to control them unleash global conflicts and debates. Moreover, the cosmopolitan outlook also enables us to analyse interdependencies not only between states but also between other actors at different levels. Beyond that, denationalized social science can throw new light on global (‘glocal’) injustices. Finally, we can distinguish between different forms of more or less ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ and ask under what conditions awareness of them as such arises.¹

1.1 The distinction between philosophical cosmopolitanism and social scientific cosmopolitanization

Focusing on analytical-empirical cosmopolitanism, on demonstrating the epistemological necessity of the cosmopolitan outlook in a world without boundaries, opens up a new field of research and controversy, that of cosmopolitan reality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It demands not only that we develop new categories, but that we revise the grammar of the social and the political. The challenge is to devise a new syntax, the syntax of cosmopolitan reality.²

The national outlook, together with its associated grammar, is becoming false. It fails to grasp that political, economic and cultural action and their (intended and unintended) consequences know no borders; indeed, it is completely blind to the fact that, even when nationalism is reignited by the collision with globality, this can only be conceptualized from the cosmopolitan perspective. The cosmopolitan outlook is a prerequisite for analysing the real process of overcoming boundaries that triggers the neonational reflex to re-erect fences and walls. The ‘why’ and ‘whither’ questions which haunt stubborn and inert nations can only be answered through connection and cooperation. But cosmopolitan realism also includes a sense for the inexorability and bleakness, the horror, the malevolence and the sheer inhumanity which find violent expression when the boundaries between us and them lose their sharp contours.

During the national phase of modernity cosmopolitanism could only be grasped intellectually, in the head, but could not be felt as a living experience. Nationalism, by contrast, took possession of people’s hearts. This head–heart dualism is turned upside down in the second modernity. Everyday life has become cosmopolitan in banal ways; yet the insidious concepts of nationalism continue to haunt people’s minds almost unabated, not to speak of the theories and research practices of the advanced social sciences.

Taking my orientation from the distinction between philosophy and praxis, I distinguish in this book between cosmopolitanism and really existing cosmopolitanization. This distinction turns on the rejection of the claim that cosmopolitanism is a conscious and voluntary choice, and often that of an elite. The concept ‘cosmopolitanization’ is designed to draw attention to the fact that the becoming cosmopolitan of reality is also, and even primarily, a function of coerced choices or a side effect of unconscious decisions.³ The choice to become or remain an ‘alien’ or a ‘non-national’ is not as a general rule voluntary, but a response to acute need, political repression or the threat of starvation. Or cosmopolitanization crosses frontiers like a stowaway, as an unforeseen consequence of mundane market decisions: people develop a taste for a particular kind of pop music or for ‘Indian’ food; or they respond to global risks by sorting their rubbish or changing their diet; or they invest their money in states whose policies conform to the neoliberal ideal of responsiveness to the imperatives of the global market. ‘Cosmopolitanization’ in this sense means latent cosmopolitanism, unconscious cosmopolitanism, passive cosmopolitanism which shapes reality as side effects of global trade or global threats such as climate change, terrorism or financial crises. My life, my body, my ‘individual existence’ become part of another world, of foreign cultures, religions, histories and global interdependencies, without my realizing or expressly wishing it.

A ‘banal’ cosmopolitanism in this sense unfolds beneath the surface or behind the façade of persisting national spaces, jurisdictions and labellings, while national flags continue to be hoisted and national attitudes, identities and consciousness remain dominant. Judged by the lofty standards of ethical and academic morality, this latent character renders cosmopolitanism ‘trivial’, unworthy of comment, even suspect. An idea that formerly strutted the stage of world history as an ornament of the elite cannot possibly slink into social and political reality by the back door. That simply won’t do! Isn’t it a straightforward contradiction to claim that the unconscious or half-conscious, coerced, migratory or minority cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitanism of globalized production and consumption, of global movements and civilizational risks, are infiltrating the world of nation-states from below and transforming it from within?

No, really existing cosmopolitanism is deformed cosmopolitanism. As Scott L. Malcomson argues, it is sustained by individuals who have very few opportunities to identify with something greater than what is dictated by their circumstances.

The decision to enter a political realm larger than the local may sometimes be taken at leisure, but is more often made under force of circumstances. More narrowly market-driven choices usually derive from a desire not to be poor, or simply not to die. Entertainment choices are based on a range of options frequently beyond the control of the individual consumer. Such compulsions may explain in part why the mass of real cosmopolitanisms rarely enters into scholarly discussions of cosmopolitanism: to argue that the choice of cosmopolitanism is in some sense self-betraying and made under duress takes away much of its ethical attractiveness. If cosmopolitanism is both indeterminate and inescapable, it becomes difficult to theorize. Yet such is, I think, normally the case. (Malcomson 1998: 240)

In other words, cosmopolitanism in Kant’s sense means something active, a task, namely, that of imposing an order on the world. Cosmopolitanization, by contrast, sharpens our gaze for uncontrollable events that merely befall us. This tends to nourish the view that globalization is a scourge of humanity, and hence the temptation to cast oneself in the role of victim – as the victim of the United States, of the West, of capitalism, of neoliberalism, etc. The paradoxical impression arises that everyone is in some sense suffering the fate of minorities, of species threatened with extinction. Even majorities feel like uprooted aliens in their own land.

This is because all communities and cultures have a sense that they are up against others stronger than they, a feeling that they can no longer keep their heritage safe. Looked at from the South and the East, it is the West that dominates. Looked at from Paris, it is America that hold sway. But if you go to the United States, then what do you see? You see minorities reflecting all the diversity in the world, all needing to assert their original allegiances. And when you have met all these minorities and been told a hundred times that power is in the hands of white males, or of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you suddenly hear the sound of a huge explosion in Oklahoma City. And who are the people responsible? Some white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants who regard themselves as members of the most neglected and despised of minorities, and who believe that globalization is sounding the knell of ‘their’ America. (Maalouf 2000: 124)

But the practice of this conspiracy theory is terrorism.

There can be no doubt that a cosmopolitanism that is passively and unwillingly suffered is a deformed cosmopolitanism. The fact that really existing cosmopolitanism is not achieved through struggle, that it is not chosen, that it does not come into the world as progress with the reflected moral authority of the Enlightenment, but as something deformed and profane, cloaked in the anonymity of a side effect – this is an essential founding insight of cosmopolitan realism in the social sciences. A non-deformed cosmopolitanism, by contrast, results from the sense of partaking in the great human experiment in civilization – with one’s own language and cultural symbols and the means to counter global threats – and hence of making a contribution to world culture.

1.2 The distinction between (latent) cosmopolitanization and the cosmopolitan outlook

While reality is becoming thoroughly cosmopolitan, our habits of thought and consciousness, like the well-worn paths of academic teaching and research, disguise the growing unreality of the world of nation-states. A critique of the science of unreality of the national, which presents itself in universalist garb but can neither deny nor shake off its national origins, presupposes the cosmopolitan outlook and its methodological elaboration. But what is the difference between (latent) cosmopolitanization and the cosmopolitan outlook? That is a difficult question which we will approach from different angles during the course of this book. But essentially it can be answered thus: the (forced) mixing of cultures is not anything new in world history but, on the contrary, the rule; one need only think of wars of rapine and conquest, mass migrations, the slave trade and colonization, world wars, ethnic cleansing and forced repatriation and expulsion. From the very beginning, the emerging global market required the mixing of peoples and imposed it by force if necessary, as the opening up of Japan and China in the nineteenth century demonstrate. Capital tears down all national boundaries and jumbles together the ‘native’ with the ‘foreign’. What is new is not forced mixing but awareness of it, its self-conscious political affirmation, its reflection and recognition before a global public via the mass media, in the news and in the global social movements of blacks, women and minorities, and in the current vogue for such venerable concepts as ‘diaspora’ in the cultural sciences. It is this at once social and social scientific reflexivity that makes the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ the key concept and topic of the reflexive second modernity.⁴

1.3 The distinction between cosmopolitanization and institutionalized cosmopolitanism

Ultimately, not only is the distinction between cosmopolitanization and the cosmopolitan outlook important but also that between cosmopolitanization and institutionalized cosmopolitanism. Under what conditions, subject to what limits and by which actors are certain cosmopolitan principles nevertheless translated into practice, and thereby acquire enduring reality? This question can be posed and answered in a paradigmatic fashion within the theory of world risk society. As recognition of the risks springing from global interdependencies increases, so too do the compulsion, the opportunity, but also resistance – stemming, for example, from environmental politics and the politics of human rights – to arriving at cosmopolitan solutions.

Some time in the not-too-distant past a qualitative transformation in the perception of social order took place. The latter was no longer perceived primarily in terms of conflict over the production and distribution of ‘goods’; rather, it is the production and distribution of ‘bads’ that contradict the steering role claimed by the established institutions of the nation-state. This category shift in self-perception precipitated an interdependency crisis in the way modern societies organized their institutions and functions, a crisis which found quite diverse expressions: climate change (‘risk of ultraviolet radiation’), global poverty, transnational terrorism, the BSE crisis, AIDS, etc. I call this interdependency crisis ‘world risk society’. It also precipitates a crisis in the social sciences and political theory, which follow Marx and Weber in construing modern societies as capitalistic and rational. The truly epoch-making difference consists in the expansion of culturally produced, interdependent insecurities and dangers, and the resulting dominance of the public perception of risk as staged by the mass media. In world risk society what is at stake at all levels is accordingly the compulsive pretence of control over the uncontrollable, whether in politics, law, science, the economy or everyday life.

In the spatial dimension we are confronted with risks that disregard the borders of the nation-state, and indeed boundaries as such; climate change, pollution and the hole in the ozone layer affect everyone (though not to the same degree). Something similar holds for temporal disembedding. The long latency period of problems, such as the disposal of nuclear waste or the long-term effects of genetically modified foodstuffs, escapes the fixed routines for dealing with industrial dangers. Finally, in the social dimension, the attribution of responsibility for potential threats, and hence the question of who is liable, becomes problematic: who in a legally relevant sense ‘causes’ pollution, or a financial crisis, is difficult to determine, since these events are the result of interactions among many individuals. Thus civilizational threats are to a large extent deterritorialized, and hence it is difficult to pin the blame for them on anyone in particular or to control them within the framework of the nation-state.

We need to distinguish between at least three different axes of conflict in world risk society: first, ecological interdependency crises, which have their own global dynamic; second, economic interdependency crises, which are initially individualized and nationalized; and, third, the threat produced by terrorist interdependency crises.

Despite their differences, however, ecological, economic and terrorist interdependency crises share one essential feature: they cannot be construed as external environmental crises but must be conceived as culturally manufactured actions, effects and insecurities. In this sense, civilizational risks can sharpen global normative consciousness, generate global publics and promote a cosmopolitan outlook. In world risk society – this is my thesis, at least – the question concerning the causes and agencies of global threats sparks new political conflicts, which in turn promote an institutional cosmopolitanism in struggles over definitions and jurisdictions.

Conflicts over civilizational risks arise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What is ‘Cosmopolitan’ about the Cosmopolitan Vision
• Part I Cosmopolitan Realism
• Part II Concretizations, Prospects
• Notes
• References and Bibliography
• Index