Cosmopolitan Identity

One of the most trenchant by-products of globalization is the revival of cosmopolitanism in popular imagination and scholarly analysis. The term, originally derived from the Greek denoting the fusion of cosmos (world) and polis (city), has a venerable history. In its principal philosophical articulations, cosmopolitan identity represents a global outlook that extends a kind of world citizenship that transcends narrower communal identifications. In its contemporary versions, this expansive cosmopolitan social contract revolves around a set of universal values such as shared environmental [Page 298]concerns and human rights norms. Cosmopolitan identity here stands at the intersection of the global and the local, encompassing inclusive views of the other, openness toward different cultures, and concern regarding the global commons. Some philosophers have posited somewhat utopian assumptions about cosmopolitanism, especially when the world community is perceived as the primary circle of identification (Nussbaum, 1994).

Social scientists have been more circumspect about the possibility of such global citizenship and have conceptualized cosmopolitan identities as a set of cultural dispositions and practices that are tied at the interstices of global familiarity and corresponding local experiences. Cosmopolitan dispositions are based on boundary, transcending feelings and affiliations, involving cultural competencies and aesthetic preferences that are reinforced through ongoing exposures to global flows of information and imagery. Command over different cultural vocabularies is sustained by mobility, transnational experiences, and consumption patterns. Whatever differences might exist considering the exact nature of these cosmopolitan dispositions, there is a widespread agreement among scholars of cosmopolitanism that identities are no longer confined to the national or local but that they can be extended globally.

However, some scholars have raised doubts about the global reach of communal attachments, suggesting that cosmopolitan identifications are not possible because identity cannot be extended beyond the national. Globalization is perceived as dissolving collective identities and as setting up inauthentic and rootless substitutes in its stead. Anthony Smith puts it as follows:

Smith's statement is emblematic of two recurring assertions: (1) It restricts identity to the symbolic boundaries of the nation, and (2) it situates identity in a normative dichotomy of real life experiences and inauthentic mediated representations.

These contentions seem problematic, considering that national identity itself was the historical outcome of continuous enlargements from smaller circles of affiliation. The same arguments thrust against the expansion of identity beyond the nation were used in reaction to the idea of nationhood in the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from organic local communities to the new artificial nationwide political and economic structures of modern society. Then (as now), objections to these broader circles of affiliation were predicated on the notion that they were soulless as they were driven by impersonal means of communication, like newspapers. But the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies's dichotomy of community and society (like the misleading juxtaposition of the national and the global) turned out to be a romantic and nostalgic one. Mechanical representations (newspapers then, the Internet now) did not stand in the way of strong identifications but actually promoted them.

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