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Is cosmopolitanism our destiny? The dominance of the high-status political ideology might not withstand our fractured age

Cosmopolitanism: the dominant normative orientation of elites and educated urban middle classes within advanced societies of the West. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty

Cosmopolitanism: the dominant normative orientation of elites and educated urban middle classes within advanced societies of the West. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty


October 13, 2020   7 mins

Over the past 20 or 30 years, the political ideology of cosmopolitanism, which prioritises the global over the local, and denigrates the nation-state as a backward relic of an oppressive past, vanquished all competitors. No longer a mere niche interest of academic social scientists and political philosophers, it has outcompeted its rivals to become the dominant value system of the Western professional classes.

Yet even as cosmopolitanism has mutated from an obscure topic of research in academic journals to the fervently-held, unexamined belief system of almost all millennials — the Instagram story of political ideologies — its most devoted adherents still shrink with horror from the term itself. 

When, in July last year, the American Republican senator Josh Hawley gave a speech to the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC, denouncing the “cosmopolitan consensus”, which “favours globalisation — closer and closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms” and in which “globalisation is a moral imperative”, he was immediately condemned by the adherents of the very ideology he was describing.  

The term was fascist, American commentators claimed; Hawley was echoing Stalin’s anti-Semitic trope of “rootless cosmopolitans” conspiring to undermine the nation-state; this was dangerous, nativist rhetoric, deserving of an apology. Yet the Twitter furore ignored the fact that the term cosmopolitanism has been widely, and entirely uncontroversially, used within the social sciences for a generation, to describe a particular set of values associated with a positive view of globalisation — a set of values which have become predominant in the taste-making class of the entire Western world. 

Indeed, the majority of academic users of the term support the worldview it describes — it is only journalists and other non-academic evangelists for cosmopolitanism who reject the term, even as they promote its worldview with ever-more ferocious zeal. How could this strange lack of self-awareness have come about?

An important recent book, The Struggle Over Borders, by a group of Dutch and German social scientists, does much to explain the roots of this strange paradox. A charitable explanation for the bizarre behaviour of the cosmopolitans can be found in the fact that “Cosmopolitanism is a notion that few people knew or used outside academic contexts just two decades ago,” even as it has become “the dominant normative orientation of elites and educated urban middle classes within advanced societies of the West.” 

Since the beginning of this century, they observe, “in political philosophy, cosmopolitanism as a normative theory has been revived as a necessary implication of liberal and universal thinking in a globalised world”, and the belief system of “those who advocate open borders, universal norms, and supranational authority,” has become not just a descriptive analysis of the social effects of globalised capitalism, but a normative, moral vision of how the world should and must be arranged. 

The great interest of the book’s analysis is that — unusually — it observes cosmopolitanism from the outside, rejecting the unthinking adherence to its values which characterises much of the debate, a worldview in which issues “like migration, free trade and European integration are historically inevitable, rational and enlightened choices, thus relegating alternatives to the domain of backwards irrationalism and seeing them as atavistic in relation to the requirements of modernisation”. 

As the authors observe, “those on the cosmopolitan side like to depict their opponents not as representatives of a legitimate political alternative, but as ‘narrow-minded chauvinists under the spell of populist demagogues’”. Cosmopolitanism, to cosmopolitans, is not a mere political ideology like any other, but the moral destiny of the world. Its opponents, here labelled communitarians, are viewed therefore not merely as rational supporters of an alternative political or economic system, but instead as dangerous relics of an oppressive past to be crushed, just as liberalism crushed the remnants of the feudal order. 

But how has the cosmopolitan ideology spread so rapidly, becoming the dominant belief system of middle-class Westerners within a mere generation? The answer lies in its association with high social status. Globalised capitalism favours the emergent transnational class, and “empowers state and supranational executives, non-majoritarian institutions within national political systems, global business leaders, experts and transnational NGO professionals, while nation-bound elected parliaments and nationally organised interest groups and protest politics see their political leverage dwindling.”

As globalisation creates a new dominant class, tastes and political opinions emerge to prop up and justify their position, which is not so much a considered moral worldview as a class consciousness, whether or not its adherents recognise it as such.

Echoing, in many ways, the Marxist critique of political opinions and aesthetic judgments as signifiers of class status and competition pioneered in the 1970s by the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, the authors observe that: “preferences for exotic food and music, and for diversity in general, are acquired tastes that can function as boundary markers of class distinctions and are apt to transform, to put it in Karl Marx’s terminology, a straightforwardly social-structural class ‘an sich’ into a self-consciously cosmopolitan class ‘fur sich’. When a taste for the exotic and the diverse comes to be defined as the refined and enlightened choice, and a taste for the local and traditional as the parochial and backward-looking one, cultural preferences become an instrument of power.”

Much of the political tumult of recent years is explained by this sociological analysis. As a political ideology associated with the values of celebrities, international business travellers, NGO professionals and journalists, the cosmopolitan worldview has, like its eponymous women’s magazine and cocktail, acquired the glossy sheen of high social status. As globalised capitalism rewards its chosen few materially, the worldview that enables it acquires both a moral justification — as not just lucrative, but fundamentally right — and the social cachet that comes with worldly success.

Like Victorian factory owners lauding themselves as the engines of social and moral progress, today’s cosmopolitans see their rewards as the justly deserved outcome of their tolerance and worldliness. Those who object to their newfound wealth and status are not just political opponents, acting according to their own interests: they are on the wrong side of history, backward, even evil.

Even at the turn of the millennium, at the height of the breathless discourse on globalisation within academia, more perceptive social scientists could already discern the direction of travel. In 2000, the anthropologist Richard A. Schweder observed that “the emergent ’New World Order’” would end up resembling “a postmodern Ottoman ‘millet system’ on a global scale,” divided between “two castes,” where “there will be the cosmopolitan liberals, who are trained to appreciate value neutrality and cultural diversity and who run the global institutions of the world system.

And there will be the local non-liberals, who are dedicated to one form or another of thick ethnicity and are inclined to separate themselves from ‘others’, thereby guaranteeing that there is enough diversity remaining in the world for the cosmopolitan liberals to appreciate.”  

Indeed, the Ottoman analogy is often made, with some ambivalence by social scientists and in a more romanticised fashion by cosmopolitans themselves, retrospectively recasting the polyglot trading cities of the Levant as havens of multicultural tolerance (a view Ottoman minorities themselves would view with markedly less enthusiasm). The inherent conflict between imperial cosmopolitanism and nationally-bounded self-governance has existed throughout modernity, the sociologist Craig Calhoun, an early critic of cosmopolitan discourse, warned in 2002, as “the tolerance of diversity in great imperial and trading cities has always reflected, among other things, precisely the absence of need or opportunity to organise political self-rule”. 

The close association between cosmopolitanism and empires past and present, made by both critics and adherents, is nevertheless correct. The authors of The Struggle Over Borders address this dynamic, noting that “the emerging cosmopolitan world culture not only has a liberal upper- and middle-class bias; it is also decidedly Western. Moreover, it is ‘Western’ especially in the more limited sense of being Anglo-Saxon or, even more narrowly, US American.” It is no wonder then, that “outside the West, many communitarian intellectuals see ‘Westernisation’ or ‘Americanisation’ as incompatible with local traditions and as a perpetuation of post-colonial relationships, even though the masses are often greatly attracted by the consumption-oriented vision of Westernisation”.

If today’s faltering episode of globalisation is the product of US global hegemony, then the fate of the dependent bourgeoisie it has created as a service class — clustered around the nodes of trade and exchange, its politics and fashions derived from the metropole — is clearly deeply intertwined with that of its imperial sponsor.

Consider, for example, a world where China has surpassed the United States as the dominant global power: Chinese hegemony would be highly unlikely to sustain the intellectual and ethical fashions of the modern-day cosmopolitans; instead, a rival class would likely emerge, whose material interests and subsequent political and moral choices were more closely aligned with those of the new hegemon.

But the greatest threat to cosmopolitanism’s ideological dominance perhaps lies in its very success. Viewed from without, an association can convincingly be made between its success in becoming the default worldview of the professional middle classes and the simultaneous erosion of the financial security and social status of the very same caste.

After all, “in the global age”, as the book’s authors observe, “the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as markers of class boundaries have been partly replaced and partly overlaid by the distinction between cosmopolitanism and local or ‘provincial’ culture. Mastering the intricacies of the latest requirements of appropriate gender and race relations discourse and behaviour has become a marker for belonging to the cosmopolitan class, in a similar way that tastes for classical music and art were markers of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” 

The frantic assertion of ever-more cosmopolitan positions by downwardly-mobile millennials therefore looks increasingly like a form of competition over status. Like Leonard Bast in Forster’s Howard’s End, today’s aspiring cosmopolitans cling desperately to the outward signifiers of bourgeois success even as the traditional markers of class belonging — financial security, home ownership, family formation — recede ever further from view.

Yet with each Instagram story and performatively absurd Twitter declaration of cosmopolitan belonging made by ever more tenuously-bourgeois aspirants, the value of the brand diminishes. When what was the status signifier of a transnational elite becomes firmly associated with an unenviable precariat unwillingly entering middle age, the arrival of some new, more attractive status marker seems almost certain. 

So much for the cosmopolitans, the status-hungry children of American empire and globalisation, as the world enters a more fractured and unsettled age. The idea that globalised free-trade capitalism would ever fulfil the stated aims of cosmopolitanism’s more zealous adherents was always absurd. As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”

But if we understand politicised cosmopolitanism precisely as a middle-class fantasy, and as a marker of social status rather than a serious attempt to describe reality, the frantic inflation this curious ideology has undergone in recent years reveals its hidden logic. The millennial generation might never become the jet-setting global citizens the prophets of globalisation promised, but they can at least decorate themselves with the glittering symbols of belonging as they compete for status and security in the wreckage of the world economy.

 


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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Daniel Goldstein
Daniel Goldstein
3 years ago

Quote: As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”

And yet the left loves cosmopolitanism, often promoting it in terms of “universal brotherhood”. I suppose that’s the ideology of the bourgeois left. They cannot see cosmopolitanism as having a destructive impact on settled communities.

Daniel Goldstein
Daniel Goldstein
3 years ago

Quote: As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”

And yet the left loves cosmopolitanism, often promoting it in terms of “universal brotherhood”. I suppose that’s the ideology of the bourgeois left. They cannot see cosmopolitanism as having a destructive impact on settled communities. The “victims” always come from somewhere else.

John Mattingley
John Mattingley
3 years ago

An excellent and informative article, Aris. Thank you greatly.

Ferox Mill
Ferox Mill
3 years ago

First let me congratulate you on putting out an article on mainstream media that is not written for children. This is a very welcomed new development these days.

Second, I am one of those literal nazis that are popping up in social media everywhere these days precisely because of the problems you are talking about. So let me tell you that the references to the Ottoman empire is something that is being actively discussed and researched in our small corner of the internet. In fact, the way we call journalists working for publications like Buzzfeed is Janissaries.
For those not versed in Ottoman history, Janissaries were a caste of officials that the Ottomans created by kidnapping children from the conquered Byzantine Empire and then proceeded to educate in the ways of the new empire. The way we see things, the Global system takes healthy children from the Midwest, turns them gay drug addicts bent on “social justice” and puts them to work for the system. Janissaries is most apt.

But overall we make the same reading you do with the caveat that we do identify who the global class is comprised of and why it does what it does. Hence, what we predict is what is already happening, the local working class is turning national socialist and racist and we think this is a fantastic development for us “locals”. We know the global class is not going to give us our political sovereignty back by just asking.

Will Fipps
Will Fipps
3 years ago

Maybe I need to read it again but something seems to be missing from this assessment. The particular heraldry of status-forward signalling is not just an organically developed semaphore for padding the neurotic insecurities of the spiritually adrift bourgeoisie with a surrogate social validation to compliment the psychic padding of their superfluous material affluence, but rather is rendered effective social currency precisely by its synonymity with establishment power, whereby the social ostracism meted out to one guilty of failure to parrot the prescribed ritual gestures and dogmas is echoed by official statute, and the legal punishment meted out by the state for the same transgression is echoed in the contemporary logic of social ostracism. The current cosmopolitan religion is a STATE religion, and its administration and enforcement lend to political, not just socioeconomic, ends. What these ends are and the particular mechanism by which their means, as detailed by the article, are undertaken toward them, is beyond my purview to intelligibly suggest, and is left wholly untreated upon by the article.

Is it that these spheres of agenda and influence are simply indistinguishable, and political celebrities merely participate in a more visible sector of the cosmopolitan status pyramid, playing for higher stakes at the pinnacle of geopolitical graft?

David Simpson
David Simpson
3 years ago
Reply to  Will Fipps

I do like this. Is it a very extended joke?

Peter Mott
Peter Mott
3 years ago

The idea that cosmopolitanism will fade when potential adherents no longer see it as high status I have seen before – but the juxtaposition with Marx suggesting that the very idea of neoliberal “wokeness” enduring is absurd was new to me. Good piece,

cjhartnett1
cjhartnett1
3 years ago

This is a subtle and nuanced article, with lots of ramifications.
Of course, David Goodhart gave rise to the ” somewheres” versus the ” anywheres” and you apply the notion with an anthropological, historical deftness of touch that adds texture and richness to what is defining the two polarising classes we now live in.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, there was a screaming ” peace dividend” on offer. But Bush, Hammer and the likes of Major saw it as a financial excuse to bury Yeltsin and the Russians in their destitution, and waded into Iraq too.
The Warsaw Pact and its useful idiots in the West, were able to avoid punishment,let alone repudiation and slipped into EU politics, Green movements and academia
Catastrophic.
Like calling Soros a Cultural Marxist, calling these types cosmopolitan is mere wordplay and power. Both descriptions are valid, when either is questioned, you can bet that it’s a traitor who’s squealing.
Other key words, sustainability…solidarity….new normal etc…are also indicators of the ubermenschen who seek to control our words. And reveal their own restricted codes as pidgin Esperanto for the benefit for Schwab’s Coming Project. Indeed, Bush in 1992 went in with Agenda 21 , and now we’ve got Gore as a result.

cjhartnett1
cjhartnett1
3 years ago

A good article that raises plenty questions. Which is a good thing in itself.
The ability for ourselves not to agree- indeed to contradict, double down- on what terms we choose to use for them is a start. Orwell told us of this, words are power and language has been so debauched and policed by the idiot left that we must continually besmirch and belittle in their virgin fields. They’ve had these to themselves for too long.
Next up, it’s clear that these moral pigmies have no concept of truth as it aligns with reality as we live it. And so they are ideal kowtowers for Xi and the godless CCP. As well as willing mask wearers for Islam or Fauci, depending on who grooms then first. Only scorn, mockery with violence lurking behind the smile will deal with them. They’ve never reasoned, so why bother now?
Finally, that social anthropologies and other crack( quack) notions( lotions) give up voices from the inside like our writer here : is greatly appreciated. These clowns we fight know nothing but a few passwords to their sad empty dorms. Once we use them, they quickly come to heel.

Steve Gwynne
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago

In my view, cosmopolitanism is essentially a Hegelian ideal which within contemporary metropolitan idealism is seen as the answer to many of our global problems, i.e climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological degradation due to human expansionism.

However, pragmatic obstacles prevent the realisation of cosmopolitanism in any life affirming way except through cultural rhetoric.

In particular, is the insurmountable problem of distributing national fair shares of resource consumption, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and other planetary limits.
https://www.sciencedirect.c

Consequently, it is acknowledged, even by cosmopolitan sustainability scientists, that regions need to manage their ecological impacts themselves.
https://stockholmresilience

The cosmopolitan ideal is further compromised by the fact that transnational trade further destabilises the operation of the Earth System.
https://bilaterals.org/?exp

It is similarly compromised by the uneven ecological accounts of different countries, whereby a rational approach towards migratory flows means transnational migration should be directed towards ecological credit countries.
http://data.footprintnetwor

Recent work by cosmopolitan sustainability professionals, in particular in the field of Earth jurisprudence, is to give legal protection to the entirety of Earth systems, but this does not detract from the pragmatic obstacles above.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/b

Essentially, the lofty cultural idealism of cosmopolitanism is bounded and limited by the reality of our variable ecologies which are better managed at more local levels in cooperation with other localities.
https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/

Rob Alka
Rob Alka
3 years ago

Why do we have to make binary choices? Can’t I be comfortable within my own “society base camp” while also being worldly? Can’t I be curious, respectful, enlightened and stimulated by how other societies live, be open minded to how my society can learn, borrow, be inspired from their’s, but without being woken up by the call for prayer from a mosque just down the road or walking along our local shopping high street and bumping into daleks or people wearing burkas or being knifed by a overload of “black people who matter” or having nowhere to go on holiday that is any different to where I am already except for more sunshine and open air restaurants? Where’s the cultural exchange in that?

The notion that globalism is a moral imperative is vacuous unless it addresses the distinction between society and economics. There should be no need to trade-off the former (a societal sense of belonging) for the latter (global trading and cooperation without barriers).

Or look at this way: society is already a multi-cultured, multi-coloured experience. Up to a point that serves a need for all living creatures: stimulation. But force-fed cosmopolitanism can lead to over-stimulation, creating over-excitability, fractiousness, mental imbalance and hostility (aka identity politics).

If the cosmopolitan-ists have their way and National Brotherhood Week becomes permanent togetherness, assimilation and intermarriage, then the stimulating colourfulness of cosmopolitanism melds into a 1-colour blob. This is worse than ending up back where we started. We end up dulling the variety which is the spice of life. At that stage, where does society get its stimulation?

Stuart Chambers
Stuart Chambers
3 years ago

This is pessimistic article about cosmopolitanism and shows little understanding of cosmopolitanism’s merits, especially its ability to prevent blind loyalty to nation, class, race, or religion. Better to read Martha Nussbaum’s take on cosmopolitanism or Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book on the issue. They understand cosmopolitanism at a more nuanced level.