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5.Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry^1.Cultures of cosmopolitanismBronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry^1.Cultures of cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This paper is concerned with whether a 'culture of cosmopolitanism' is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging 'global' processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the 'world as a whole', and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is something that could be called a 'banal glob-alism', from focus group research they show that there is a wide awareness of the 'global' but that this is combined in complex ways with notions of the local and grounded, and from media interviews they demonstrate that there is a reflexive awareness of a culture of the cosmopolitan. On the basis of their data from the UK, they conclude that a 'publicly screened' cosmopolitan culture is emergent and likely to orchestrate much of social and political life in future decades.

The need for a constantly changing market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere...the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market give a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country...The individual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible (Marx and Engels, [1848] 1952: 46-7; emphasis added)

Introduction

Where the world consisted of antagonistic nation-states, the 'other' was often seen as something to fear, to attack, to colonise, to dominate or to keep at bay. The other was dangerous, especially those others who were on the move, such as armies, migrants, traders, vagrants, travellers who might travel into and stay within one's country. Citizenship came to consist of rights at­tributable to tightly specified categories of those who were unambiguously within the 'nation'. If for reasons of birth or blood or residence people were not citizens of that nation, any such outsiders were sometimes vulnerable to harsh and punitive sanctions. This system of nation-states and national

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identities involved antagonism towards the 'stranger', especially those strangers deemed to have a different colour, creed or culture. Orientations to the other, and especially to the mobile other, were generally 'nasty, brutish and short'.

But not all of recent human history has consisted of quite such hostility against the 'other'; here and there what we might call a more cosmopolitan attitude did prevail. In this paper we interrogate such a notion of cosmopoli­tanism and, with a primary focus on the United Kingdom, ask a simple empiri­cal question: with the development of global processes so brilliantly outlined by Marx and Engels in 1848 is cosmopolitanism becoming more widespread, and, if so, of what does it consist? In particular we consider the 'global other' and ask whether, and to what degree, what lies 'beyond one's society' is becoming differently valorised, in a post-national, cosmopolitan manner, as no longer quite such an intensely opposed 'other' (see Beck, 2000, on the cos­mopolitan perspective more generally). Will 'national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness' become a thing of the past, as predicted a century-and-a-half ago in the Communist Manifesto?²

Some immediate evidence is to be found in The Soul of Britain, a survey conducted in the UK in 2000. Respondents were provided with a list of geographical entities, ranging in size from their neighbourhood or community up to 'the world as a whole', and asked to say which of them they belonged to 'first of all'.³ 33% of the respondents chose England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland as their primary source of belonging, 20% the locality or town where they lived, 13% their 'neighbourhood or community', 9% Great Britain and 9% the UK. But significantly 11% chose 'the world as a whole'

(ORB, 2000).

What might this 11% have meant by saying that they felt that they belonged to 'the world as a whole', given that in giving this identification there is no obvious 'other' to which they are saying they do not belong? Is such global belonging felt in terms of formal rights and obligations familiar from ideas of national citizenship, or in the more affective terms characteristic of other kinds of belonging - a kind of 'global effervescence'? Even for those whose primary identification is with locality or nation, how might a wider awareness of the world be altering the nature and character of such local belongings? Furthermore, what is the role of the media in the production and maintenance of cosmopolitan attitudes to the wider world?

These issues were amongst those explored in a research project on the con­nections between the environment and global citizenship (see Szerszynski, Urry and Myers, 2000, for a summary).⁴ 'Cosmopolitanism' occupied a complex place in our analysis of global citizenship. Many claims concerned with in some sense 'saving the environment' appear to depend upon a notion of the cosmopolitan. We found ourselves deploying the notion of a culture of cosmopolitanism, citing inter alia Kant, analyses of cosmopolitan democracy (such as Held, 1995; Beck, 2000) and theories of global scapes, consumption and travel (Hannerz, 1990,1996; Urry, 2000).

Three significant thinkers also contributed to our thinking through the concept of the cosmopolitan. First, Henry Thoreau in his evocative return to 'nature' on the banks of Walden Pond in the mid-nineteenth century did not complain about the sound of the railway. He considered that he was 'refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odours all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts... and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world' (1927: 103). This emphasises that new socio-technical relations can positively transform connections between places. The railway made Thoreau feel a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan, con­nected and not insular. In the contemporary re-imaging of the global other a similar role may be played by air and space travel (Cosgrove, 1994).

Heidegger in similar vein commented about another new technology, the radio in 1919. He said: 'I live in a dull, drab colliery village... a bus ride from third rate entertainments and a considerable journey from any educational, musical or social advantages of a first class sort. In such an atmosphere life becomes rusty and apathetic. Into this monotony comes a good radio set and my little world is transformed', made we might say cosmopolitan (quoted Scannell, 1996: 161). We will consider how the TV also de-severed the local, national and global worlds. It has transformed all our 'little worlds' without the need to move corporeally outside one's home (Szerszynski and Toogood,

2000; Urry, 2000: chapter 3).

Third, E.M. Forster noted that certain kinds of place have are nomadic or cosmopolitan in character. He argued that 'London was a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly... Under cosmopolitanism...we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle . . .' (1931: 243). Certain local places seem quintessentially cosmopolitan; other places are not. And certain sorts of places come to be detached from nature and the physical environ­ment. Nature itself gets transformed into a cosmopolitan spectacle comprised of images of trees and meadows and mountains to be known about, compared, evaluated, possessed, but not according to Forster or Heidegger places 'dwelt within' (Szerszynski and Urry, 2001).

In the next section we elaborate some more precise research questions drawn out of these notions - those of connections, de-severance and specta­cle - in order to explore the culture of the 'cosmopolitan'.

Research questions

Our starting point consists of the writings about globalisation that have grown exponentially since around 1989.⁵ Certain points from this emerging 'globalisation-paradigm' we take for granted here: that the media (and other) industries increasingly involve globally interlocking patterns of ownership and control, that there are multiple new forms of 'global governance', that there is the proliferation of 'global' images and brands circulating across much of the world (from Coca-Cola to Greenpeace) and that the global level is partially self-organising (see Urry, 2000). While there is no global society, powerful, interconnecting global hybrids, especially capitalist corporations, are transforming social life across exceptional scales of time-space (Harvey, 2000). With regard to the media, McLuhan presciently wrote over thirty years ago: 'Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men [sic]' (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 16).

Moreover, these processes are also transforming contemporary citizenship. 1989 was also when the Berlin Wall came down (the twentieth century version of 'Chinese walls'), symbolising the emergence (or re-emergence) of various ethnic and national identities and new states that have had massive conse­quences across much of especially former Central and Eastern Europe. But also in the 1990s there has also been the development of various strands of 'post-national' or 'nomadic' citizenship resulting from the increasingly global flows of migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, tourists, environmental risks, information and images (Soysal, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 1997; Joseph, 1999). This globalisation has generated a return to issues of universal rights and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 (see Harvey, 2000).⁶

We are concerned here with whether, and to what degree, such global processes are directly transforming the cultural conditions of people's lives, in Manchester or Manchu, Blackpool or Baghdad, Preston or Pretoria. Is 'globalisation' producing 'cosmopolitanisation' - a globalisation 'in the head' (Robertson, 1992) whereby people conceive of the world as a whole, and of distant places as essentially reachable (Spybey, 1996)? At present the em­pirical analysis of the 'global' as 'culture' remains largely at the level of insti­tutional structures, even though the idea of global culture was given serious attention at least a decade ago (see the 1990 Theory, Culture and Society special issue on 'Global Cultures').

Analysis and data have mainly developed of ownership (who owns which media/leisure/fast food etc companies), consumption (in 2000, for example, TV ownership ranged from fewer than 20 TVs per 1000 people in Afghanistan to over 800 per 1000 in the US) and programming (range and scale of global TV programming; numbers of new internet sites, etc). But there has been very little examination of the consequences of such putative global cultures for everyday life and for how these cultures may be transforming the very ways that people conceive of their relationships to a variety of 'others' across the globe and where representations of those lives are widely available on film, TV, the internet and so on. It is how these mediations of 'other' peoples, places and environments are folded into our daily lives that is addressed below, and especially how such others become objects of identification, pity or compas­sion (see Boltanski, 1999).

We are thus concerned with the 'thicker', more cultural conditions for a post-national citizenship. Printed books and newspapers, radio and public service television helped to form the imagined 'community in anonymity' of nations and national citizenship (Anderson, 1989). The formation of anything like global citizenship in the twenty-first century will arguably require massive cultural work to generate a far more extensive community in anonymity (Hall, 1992; Perry, 1998), with media likely to play a key role in such work. Thus, although television may be implicated in the erosion of local belonging and involvement (Putnam, 2000), it may be beneficial for global belonging and involvement. Television is not important here simply for its cognitive effects or indeed its ideological bias, but also in terms of its circulation of symbolic resources, and its flow-like form as a medium. It circulates images and narra­tives - images of places, brands, peoples and the globe itself, and narratives of various figures, heroes and organisations (see Alexander and Jacobs, 1998, by contrast, on the narrative structure of national civil society). Above such content, television also has certain formal, collage-like characteristics that might have the effect of displacing unreflective identification with local and national cultures and placing them within a far wider context so as to facili­tate cultural, emotional and moral encounters with various global 'others'. This 'televisual flow' has become part of the everyday mode of dwelling for much of the world's population (Williams, 1974; Allan, 1997; Scannell, 1996). We thus question Bauman's argument that the 'telecity' necessarily generates

moral distancing (1993: 178; Robbins, 1999).

These issues are important because global processes transform the very nature of the public life (Sheller and Urry, 2000). In Habermas' conception of the 'public sphere' in the late eighteenth century, the salon, coffee house and the periodical press provided a sphere where private individuals could debate and resolve political issues (1989). Central to this notion (criticised for its gender-bias) is that of co-presence and dialogue between people face-to-face. But the 'mediated' character of contemporary social life transforms such a sphere. Thompson hypothesises that 'deliberative democracy' might develop through the media conceived hermeneutically rather than cognitively (1995; Cohen, 1996). People can develop forms of quasi-interaction through the media, a kind of 'enforced proximity'. Indeed there is an increasingly visual and narrative 'staging' of the public sphere, as it is transformed into a 'public stage' or even a 'public screen' (Szerszynski and Toogood, 2000; Meyrowitz, 1985; Sheller and Urry, 2002). This has led Ignatieff to suggest that future con­flicts such as that in Kosovo can be viewed as 'virtual wars' which appears 'to take place on a screen...War affords the pleasures of a spectacle...When war becomes a spectator sport, the media becomes the decisive theatre of

operations' (2000: 191).

First, we consider whether media images and narratives have developed a global equivalent to what Billig terms 'banal nationalism' (1995), a 'banal globalism' present within various broadcast genres, including advertisements. Interestingly, some writers suggest an increasing overlap between consumerist images in advertising and citizenship rights and responsibilities (Meijer, 1998). Second, we consider an issue raised by The Commission on Global Gover­nance, set up to report on the first 50 years of the UN. It talks of 'Our Global Neighbourhood' [sic] where a mediated, enforced proximity may be generat­ing a new cosmopolitan ethics involving many individuals and social groups (1995; Bauman, 1993;Tomlinson, 1999: chapter 6; Beck, 2000). Has there been any change in the level, impact or nature of cosmopolitanism? How possible is it to be cosmopolitan while still being an unambiguous member of a local­ity or a nationality? To what degree is widespread travel important in the very development of cosmopolitan culture?

In various lengthy focus group discussions conducted in the north west of England, with other colleagues, we began to address these issues, in particu­lar, the notion of 'banal globalism' and the contemporary nature of 'cos­mopolitanism'. We deal mainly with the latter but in the next section we briefly consider the former that is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the latter.

Banal globalism

Billig describes vernacular or banal nationalism, the many features that serve to articulate the identity of societies through their mundane differences from each other (1995). These include the waving of celebratory flags, singing national anthems, flying flags on public buildings, identifying with one's own sports-heroes, being addressed in the media as a member of a given society, celebrating independence day and so on (Billig, 1995). Such banal national­ism is inscribed within language, so that when ex-President Clinton points to 'this, the greatest country in human history', the 'this' evokes a national place of belonging, an habitual nation which will implicitly understand that the 'this' refers to the US (Billig, 1995: 107). All Americans will understand that the US is 'the greatest country in human history'.

However, this deictic pointing can occur to wider imagined communities stretching way beyond a nation's borders. Billig himself cites Mandela who refers to 'the people of South Africa and the world who are watching' (1995: 107). The 'we' in Mandela's speeches almost always evokes those people beyond South Africa watching South Africa upon the global media and have collectively participated in the country's rebirth. When Mandela states that 'we are one people' he is pointing both to South Africa and to the rest of the world. Likewise much of the pointing from the television commenta­tors to the collective 'we' at Princess Diana's funeral, was to the estimated 2.5 billion people watching, as a post-modern saint, a 'global healer', was sancti­fied in the face of the whole world (see Richards, Wilson and Woodhead,

1999: 3).

We undertook a 24-hour survey of all the visual images available on a variety of TV channels within Britain (see Toogood, 1998; Szerszynski and Toogood, 2000). We found numerous examples of the following 'global' images over this brief period: images of the earth, including the mimetic blue earth; long, often aerial images of generic 'global' environments; images of wildlife that index the overall state of the environment; images of the family of man sharing a global product; images of relatively exotic places that sug­gests the endless possibilities of global mobility; images of global players famous in and through the world's media; images of iconic exemplars who demonstrate global responsibility; images of those engaging in actions ulti­mately on behalf of the global community; images of corporate actions; and images of global reportage shown to be present, live and staffed by iconic figures able to speak, comment and interpret the globe (see Richards, Wilson and Woodhead, 1999, on Diana as the global clothes-horse/global healer).

Central to banal globalism are representations of the earth or globe that might be seen as paralleling 'national' flags (see Ingold, 1993; Cosgrove, 1994; Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2000). A common version is the 'Blue Globe': the Earth seen in dark space, as a whole defined against threatening emptiness, with no lines or political colouring, freezing a moment in time. But the globe appears in many other forms. It can function as a symbol of authority, organi­sation, and coverage of global information, particularly in news programmes - the graphic news globe, for instance, shown at the beginning of the BBC's or CNN's regular news broadcasts. These representations draw on the image of the Earth seen from space, but altered to incorporate other conventions: the land may be yellow and sea green; or the globe might be translucent, and weather formations absent.

This sort of globe suggests a universal perspective, what Franklin, Lury, Stacey term a 'second nature', in which physical and geographical boundaries processes do not obscure the outline of the continents - everything can be seen but a distance. The Blue Globe is associated with a perspective from outside the Earth, from the point of view of an astronaut or satellite. And any vast panorama, especially seen from above, and especially with a curved horizon, seems to suggest that it is the Earth itself that we are looking at, not the particular local place and people. Space is often used to connote the endless possibilities of cosmopolitan travel and the potential consumption of many other places and cultures from across the globe (see Toogood and

Myers, 1999; Urry, 2000: chapter 7).

Thus there is much global imagery on contemporary TV, both directly of the globe and indirectly through images of exemplary 'global' individuals and peoples and through various iconic places, peoples and animals. The media frequently uses techniques by which different places and people are framed as representing, or speaking on behalf of, the one earth. And we explored the production, circulation and reception of 'banal globalism' beyond the tele­visual genres usually regarded as of 'civic' significance, including advertise­ments, logos, music video, and soap operas (Szerszynski and Toogood, 2000; Meijer, 1998). The global is thus 'ready-to-hand', a backcloth to a world of exceptional co-presence. As well as the ubiquitous TV (1 billion world-wide), PCs, planes, mobiles and modems enable people to straddle that globe, cir­cling it with bodies, messages, bits of information and images that pass over and beyond horizons (see Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2000).

This array of global images is very familiar to viewers who were well able to discuss its main features and characteristics. Indeed when respondents were asked to consider such global imagery analytically, they demonstrated high levels of 'visual literacy' (Szerszynski and Urry, 2001). They showed familiar­ity with images used to connote the global, some knowledge as to how these images had been produced and were likely to be used, a capacity to compare and contrast different visual regimes of signification, and the capacity not just to grasp intended meanings, but to reflect upon the multiple intentions of those producing the images, often offering competing interpretations of imagery. For example, respondents particularly disliked the use of the blue globe in an advertisement for insurance services. In the small business persons focus group:

Male 3:       This advert, I've seen that one before, I find that type of

advert quite cynical Moderator: Mmmm

Male 3: Well they are trying to sell you insurance, aren't they? And they are talking about something which, they are bringing in images which are totally false

While in the corporate professionals group:

Female 3:     ... it frustrated me actually, it's very kind of God like, it's like

saying we're everywhere Female 2:     [laughs] Big brother

The use of children standing for the globe in charitable appeals was also regarded on occasions as manipulative, while a retired man stated 'It's all staged', in the creative professionals group:

Moderator:  What do you think lies behind the use of children as an

image? You know, what do they signify? Male 4:       To nobble people, you know [laughs]

Cosmopolitanism

We turn now to the culture of cosmopolitanism. We take this to be a cultural disposition involving an intellectual and aesthetic stance of 'openness' towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures, especially those from different 'nations' (see Tomlinson, 1999: chapter 6). Cosmopolitanism involves the search for, and delight in, the contrasts between societies rather than a longing for superiority or for uniformity. Hannerz especially emphasises the importance of 'openness' and of the way that cosmopolitanism may generate new forms of critical knowledge (1996: 103-9). The cosmopolitan, he says, needs to be in 'a state of readiness, a personal ability to make one's way into other cultures, through listening, looking, intuiting and reflecting' (1990: 239). This parallels Heidegger's description of how the radio 'has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance of the "world''' (quoted Scannell, 1996:167). By this he means bringing close, within range, abolishing distance or farness with events and especially people. 'Hei­degger interprets the possibility of radio...as making the... the great world beyond my reach...as accessible and available for me or anyone' (Scannell, 1996: 167). However, communications through the radio, nor other forms of communication or travel, do not necessarily produce cosmopolitanism - most argue that the latter entails a particular set of cultural predisposition and practices.

There are however various problems in suggesting that the cosmopolitan is a specific cultural type clearly distinguishable from locals, tourists, visitors, migrants, refugees and so on. First, supposedly cosmopolitan openness mainly refers to masculinist opportunities and dispositions always to remain 'on the move' (Jokinen and Veijola, 1997). Second, such a stance of openness is predominantly the preserve of affluent travellers of the 'north' rather than poorer migrants of the 'south' or even of rich (Japanese) tourists from elsewhere. There is a danger that a distinction of social taste is being imple­mented through deploying the concept of the cosmopolitan (Massey, 1994; and see Buzard, 1993, on the traveller-tourist cultural binary). Third, so-called cosmopolitans may seek to escape from contributing to national or local states and to move within self-enclosed cosmopolitan enclaves or bubbles (Lasch, 1995: 47). Fourth, thus cosmopolitanism is often constructed at the expense of the local and local peoples who are presumed to be narrow, insular and parochial in their patterns of mobility and in their ethics.⁷ Fifth, as we argue in the next section, there is no one form of cosmopolitanism; it rather functions as an 'empty signifier' (Laclau, 1998), having to be filled with specific, and often rather different content, in different situated cultural worlds.

Clearly different societies have initiated different modes of cosmopoli­tanism, including what we might call Heidegger's 'aural cosmopolitanism'. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries an aesthetic cosmopoli­tanism developed amongst the British upper class that expanded its repertoire of landscapes for visual consumption. Barrell summarises the importance of how their mobility throughout Europe provided the cultural capital for devel­oping such a cosmopolitanism: 'the aristocracy and gentry...had experience of more landscapes than one, in more geographical regions than one; and even if they did not travel much they were accustomed, by their culture, to the notion of mobility, and could easily imagine other landscapes' (1972: 63). Appadurai makes a similar argument about contemporary migration, arguing that people's capacity 'to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born' is enabled by a 'mass-mediated imaginary that...transcends national space'

(1996: 6).

The following sets out a more general model of cosmopolitanism that seeks to avoid the dangers mentioned above (see Urry, 1995: 167; Tomlinson, 1999: 200-2; Beck, 2000). Cosmopolitan predispositions and practices involve some or all of:

•   extensive mobility in which people have the right to 'travel' corporeally, imaginatively and virtually and for significant numbers they also have the means to so travel

•   the capacity to consume many places and environments en route

•a curiosity about many places, peoples and cultures and at least a rudi­mentary ability to locate such places and cultures historically, geographi­cally and anthropologically

•   a willingness to take risks by virtue of encountering the 'other'

•   an ability to 'map' one's own society and its culture in terms of a his­torical and geographical knowledge, to have some ability to reflect upon and judge aesthetically between different natures, places and societies

•   semiotic skill to be able to interpret images of various others, to see what they are meant to represent, and to know when they are ironic

•   an openness to other peoples and cultures and a willingness/ability to appreciate some elements of the language/culture of the 'other'

Contemporary cosmopolitanism has developed in and through imaginative travel through the TV (Urry, 2000: chapter 3). Hebdige argues that a 'mundane cosmopolitanism' is part of many people's everyday experience, as they are world travellers, either corporeally or via the TV in their living room: 'It is part of being "taken for a ride" in and through late-twentieth century consumer culture. In the 1990s everybody [at least in the 'west'] is more or less cosmopolitan' (1990: 20). This is not so much the consequence of indi­vidual programmes but of 'televisual flow' itself (Williams, 1974; Allan, 1997). Viewers are thrown into the extraordinary, flowing visual world that lies beyond the domestic regime, an instantaneous mirror reflecting much of the rest of the world that is then mirrored into people's homes. In an Indian context, Arundhati Roy evocatively writes of an elderly woman whose life is transformed by the instantaneous and often 'live' visual perception of the multiple 'global others':

She presided over the World in her drawing room on satellite TV...It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massa­cres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants (1997: 27).

Sensations of other places, especially facilitated through channel-hopping, and programmes that simulate channel-hopping, may create an awareness of cosmopolitan interdependence. Featherstone summarises this argument: 'the flows of information, knowledge, money, commodities, people and images have intensified to the extent that the sense of spatial distance which sepa­rated and insulated people from the need to take into account all the other people which make up what has become known as humanity has become eroded' (1993: 169). By participating in the practice of consuming in and through the media people can experience themselves as part of a dispersed, global civicness, united by simultaneously watching with millions of dispersed others (Anderson, 1989; Dayan and Katz, 1992).

However, Tomlinson reworks the notion of the cosmopolitan in terms of transformed relations between the global and the local (1999: 194-207). He argues that we should not counterpose the local and the cosmopolitan, maintaining that forceful moralities in the contemporary world will not be either localist and proximate or cosmopolitan and global. Rather Tomlinson advocates a contemporary cosmopolitanism that involves the capacity to live ethically in both the global and local, in the proximate and the distant simultaneously. Such a cosmopolitanism involves comprehending the specificity of one's local context, to connect to other locally specific contexts and to be open to a globalising world. He thus develops a kind of 'glocalised cosmopolitanism' or an 'ethical globalism' in which 'in the everyday life­style choices they make, cosmopolitans need routinely to experience the wider world as touching their local lifeworld, and vice versa' (Tomlinson, 1999:

198).

Tomlinson suggests that the transformation of many 'localities' into 'glocalities' provides some of the preconditions for developing such a cosmopolitanism:

changes in our actual physical environments, the routine factoring in of distant political-economic processes into life-plans, the penetration of our homes new media and communications technology, multiculturalism as increasingly the norm, increased mobility and foreign travel, even the effects of 'cosmopolitanizing' of food culture (1999: 199-200; and see Rotblat, 1997; and Beck, 2000, for further processes involved in 'cosmopolitanisation').

Also deepening and developing a cosmopolitan stance is the vast amount of localised moral commitment and practice undertaken by people. Berking notes that 45% of US citizens dedicate over 5 hours a week to voluntary activ­ities beyond the individual and family (1996:192-3). Such mutualities involve potential forms of 'extended solidarities that are no longer restricted to my own community of shared values' (Berking, 1996: 201; Tomlinson, 1999: 207; see Keck and Sikkink, 1998, on 'activists beyond borders').

In the next section we report upon our focus group research to see if these claims about contemporary cosmopolitanism are empirically significant at least in one part of the UK.⁸

Researching cosmopolitanism

We conducted nine focus groups, each meeting twice for two-hour sessions. They were recruited to provide a wide distribution of occupational group, age and gender, as well as of different kinds of local-cosmopolitan lives (see Myers, Szerszynski and Urry, 1999, for a lengthy summary). Three groups from Blackpool were chosen to explore different kinds of activity that people pursue in their leisure time (local citizenship; consuming the globe through travel; consuming the globe through the media). Three groups were convened in Manchester to explore comparable set of options in different professional, working domains (caring for local places and people; producing the global mediascape; travelling the global corporate world). And three Preston groups were chosen to explore how notions of citizenship might play out within recognisable, existing subcultures (local business-people; 'Old Labour' inter­nationalism; global flows of labour).

Our first finding was that few participants claimed an identity as a 'citizen of the world' or to challenge existing conceptions of national identity (for much more detail on the following, see Myers, Szerszynski and Urry, 1999). In that sense we found few 'global citizens'. When notions of abstract or formal rights or responsibilities were introduced, the discussion developed along national lines, with people exploring what their particular nation can and cannot demand of its citizens - and what non-citizens can and should demand of it. We found little evidence of what we had systematically hypoth­esised as the thesis of 'global citizenship' (see Urry, 2000: chapter 7). However, simultaneously it was clear that nation-states and national peoples were deemed to have a wide variety of obligations beyond that of narrow self-interest, including some obligations of a post-national character.

Indeed we found a widespread if rather general cosmopolitanism. People had a strong awareness of the global flows of money, commodities and pollution; of extended relations connecting them to other peoples, places and environments; of the blurring boundaries of nation, culture and religion; and of a diverse range of possible local, national and global experiences. As a creative professional expressed it: 'globalisation has become more of a pos­sibility and a reality' (Male 4). Such a cosmopolitanism was found within all the focus groups, and most interestingly not just amongst those who travelled a great deal or had international links as part of their work. Most groups demonstrated a mundane 'cosmopolitanism' within their daily lives, even where their lives were currently based within geographically proximate com­munities (it should be noted that most groups had shown a history of consid­erable geographical mobility). Thus a member of the small business persons group happily talked of the idea of a 'shrinking world' (Male 2). Another member of the group (Male 5) said of the mobile phone: 'Years ago it didn't happen, you'd link up here, link up here. And it took 10 minutes to get through. The whole world's shrunk'. A retired man (Male 2) said: 'I think we are living in a shrinking world now aren't we, I think you can't do anything without having a you know an environmental effect on everybody else.' A member of the women involvers group commented:

Female 7:  The media bring it all... they bring it right into your living room

Female 4: Mmm

Female 7:  Immediately it happens, it's there... Female 4: Mmm

Female 7:  . . . on the television, very graphically sometimes

Similarly one of the creative professionals group (Female 3) argued that: 'I am a global citizen because I am aware of people, I'm aware of cultures, I'm aware of other countries and to a certain extent the impact that I have on it as well'. On another occasion in the same group:

Moderator:  I mean, should everybody everywhere be entitled to travel? Female 3:    Without a doubt Moderator:  To buy foreign food?

Male 3:       Without a doubt if you've got any sort of belief in a free world and a free, you know, sure...

One of the young European students (Female 1) argued: 'We could say that maybe there are different cultures and different people but there's only one planet, that we're all in it, we're all involved into this planet'.

For European students cosmopolitanism involved less commitment to specifically local forms of life and embraced a culturally more mobile sense of identity between 'national cultures'. An Italian student (Male 6) said that:

I've got my family, my brothers, my parents and nobody is pulling me away from Italy, at the moment nobody's pushing me away from England so I feel quite comfortable in both places even if they are quite different.

Another student contrasted the situation with former East Germany (Male 1) bringing out the importance of consumption processes to cosmopolitanism:

I mean they didn't have the right to travel, they didn't have the right to try any European or Western country food or clothes or cars or anything. And just, I think it's horrible. You should have the right, at least the right to enjoy or to try it.

At the same time as this people's political formulations involved an embedded vocabulary of feeling, emotion and localised care. And across different social groups there were strong expressions of particularistic care, specifically to various kinds of compassionate and charitable 'local social action'. Without prompting, participants consistently used the word 'care' for what could be legitimately asked of them to do. Care is concrete, physical and grounded (Gilligan, 1982; Lash, 1999). The concepts of global connectedness and responsibility that people deployed seemed to be very firmly grounded in proximate citizenship and belongingness (see Berking, 1996: 192-4, on the huge scale of local gift giving).

Moreover, in the Soul of Britain survey referred to earlier, voluntary activ­ity seemed to be if anything negatively correlated with global belonging. For example, only 9% of those who work in some capacity for a voluntary organ­isation claimed 'global belonging', compared with 12% of those not working for such organisations. On the other hand, 'local belonging' identification with neighbourhood or community does seem to be correlated with voluntary activity. For example, 17% of those working for voluntary organisations chose the local community as their primary source of belonging (ORB, 2000).

However, one should not counterpose the local and the global too starkly. As Doreen Massey argues, 'each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations' (1994: 156). Our qualitative research enables further light to be shed on how this mixture shapes the relationships between local loyalty, global openness and moral connectedness. Most, if not all, of the respondents had some kind of active and compassionate commit­ment to an immediate community, as an actually existing way of life, as a lost world of the past, or as an ideal for the future. However, this community was not always based upon a geographical territory. People also conceived of wider, dispersed communities based not on geography but on shared interests or 'affect', organised around practices and issues such as football, collecting for a hospice, scouting, work, the environment, student unions, caravanning, car racing, short wave radio, or even tortoise protection (Hebdidge, 1990; Szerszynski, 1997,1998). Just as respondents were well aware of global culture so they also articulated Lash's second grounded modernity of 'haptic space, as the tactile community, as community, as memory' (1999: 14).

Respondents also found it difficult to extend the taken-for-granted sense of moral connectedness in their more grounded communities to the larger and more abstract global community, since the latter seemed to lack the immediacy and groundedness ascribable to the former (see Bauman, 1993, on ethics at a distance). As a result respondents described their ethics in terms of either specific iconic figures (Mandela, Diana, the Pope, Mother Theresa, Bob Geldof), special kinds of figures (especially children who are often deemed to have global concerns), special kinds of organisations (Red Cross) or special kinds of event (Band Aid), rather than in terms of more abstract concepts of duty and belonging. A member of the creative professionals group (Female 2) maintained: '. . . Band Aid, look at that. That was amazing, that was huge. I mean, that highlighted charities, most people wouldn't even bother thinking about stuff like that or even care what's going on across the world'.

In questions of moral consideration, at times compassion seemed (as might have been predicted) to decrease with distance - as one of the women involvers ironically expressed it: 'oh it's another famine advert' (Female 4). Compassion seemed to be directed first at family and friends, then at one's particular 'community', and only then extended further afield. But at other times respondents placed the emphasis not so much on the near but on the particular, the problem being abstraction not distance (Bauman, 1993; Ginzburg, 1994). People were numbed by having to choose between the huge range of moral demands that the globalising world now confronts them with, whether these are proximate or distant. They also felt numbed by the very abstractness of many moral demands, often preferring to fill a shoebox with gifts to send a particular child who may not be at all proximate, rather than donating money to a charitable cause where there is an anonymous, generalised beneficiary (see Boltanski, 1999:18).

This particularisation also manifested strongly in the respondents' talk about moral agents. Participants clearly had different interpretations of what 'citizen' might mean in relation to the local, national and the global. As we noted above they found talking about citizenship as an abstract concept difficult and unnatural, preferring to talk about specific figures, types of figures or organisations who might serve as exemplars. These focus groups were held in late 1997, and the discussion often turned to Princess Diana. She was used to show the extension of the local sense of personal responsibility and immediate face-to-face contact. For many participants, she could stand for the personal and affective relations needed for global community, and she could be contrasted to politicians, with their programmes and apparent self-interest. The simplicity and directness of her concern, as well as her ap­parent cosmopolitanism, were taken as evidence of its sincere authenticity (Richards, Wilson and Woodhead, 1999). A corporate professional (Male 5) argued that:

She helped by her personality to bring it a lot more to the public attention. Again landmines is only one issue, she did the same with something like AIDS, it was an interest and a caring nature to do what she could from her abilities, to influence world opinion.

The overall choice of people chosen to stand as exemplars of the cosmopoli­tan showed that respondents conceived their wider moral obligations more in the affective terms of care and compassion than those of abstract duty (Gilligan, 1982). However, the global exemplars were not regarded as examples that people simply ought to copy. The respondents operated with an implicit division of moral labour between the extraordinary morality exhib­ited in many highly mediated global lives, and the ordinary morality of their everyday, private lives. The global exemplars were overwhelmingly seen as what Blum calls 'idealists' - people who appear to have a mission in life, who consciously choose and affirm their ideals and look for ways to implement them in their own life and the wider world. However, within their own lives, the participants felt that it was enough for them to be what Lawrence Blum calls 'responders'; people who, although they have no clearly articulated moral vision, nevertheless try to respond in morally appropriate ways to situations that confront them (Blum, 1988: 208-9). People rarely talked of actions by governments but many groups mentioned the importance of ethical con­sumption and consumer boycotts - showing the greater importance of grounded daily and proximate concerns and practices.

The focus group discussions revealed orientations that were 'global' in the sense of involving moral and cultural openness to diverse other peoples, environments and cultures. But these orientations are not global in the sense of being universally shared and consistent (see Therborn, 2000, on this dis­tinction). The Soul of Britain survey found that age, religious belonging and voting intentions were amongst the most significant factors that seemed to shape the distribution of a sense of global belonging. For example, whereas 19% of 18-24 year olds chose 'the world' as their primary locus of belonging, this figure dropped to 11% of 25-34 year olds, and dropped further to 9% amongst those over 65. In terms of religion, 14% of Roman Catholics and 'other' religionists and 13% of those with 'no religion' chose 'the world', com­pared with 9% of 'convinced atheists' and only 6% of Protestants. Similarly, 12% of Labour voters identified with 'the world', compared with 6% of

Conservative voters (ORB, 2000).

But as well as the global having a different salience for different social groups, our research indicates that it is also given particular meanings within specific cultural worlds. Ideas of global connectedness, belonging and respon­sibility are as ubiquitous, 'banal' and taken for granted amongst the public as they are in the media, but they are interpreted in different ways. Amongst younger and more mobile groups, it appears as a cosmopolitan openness to the new and the culturally different (although this too has its limits). For older groups, ideas of responsibility and intervention beyond national boundaries were sometimes interpreted in relation to received notions of British charac­ter and the fulfilment of duty, familiar from the days of Empire and the World Wars (see Szerszynski, Urry and Myers, 2000). Also, although we never raised issues of immigration, some groups, who otherwise engaged in much localised care, expressed considerable cultural hostility to various categories of im-migrant.⁹ As a corporate professional said: 'they don't have the right to come here and insist that they can do whatever they like'.

Cosmopolitan identities and practices were differently articulated at dif­ferent stages in the lifecycle. Young people talked about travelling and working around the world, but, possibly reflecting the strong regional identity of the north west of England, still expected to return to the locality of their origins to settle down. Adult responsibilities brought a greater salience of ideas of duty, responsibility and care, ideas that are then extended to other places and peoples. Retirement brought a re-opening to a sense of wider connectedness. But these life phases also bring their own situated jus­tifications for not being 'good' global citizens. The young people frequently said that it is not their job to care or to be responsible, but to enjoy them­selves while they could. The parents and workers explained how wider expe­riences and loyalties took second place, while the retired said that it is time to think of themselves for a change.

Finally, another part of the research showed that media professionals are reflexively aware of this cosmopolitanism and seek ways of extending it, through brands, icons and narratives, often in ways that enhance global 'connectedness' (see Szerszynski, Urry and Myers, 2000). Two comments from media professionals are interesting here. First, the Director of One World Broadcasting noted a growth of cosmopolitan sentiment and commented on its causes: '... I wonder whether things like tourism aren't a bigger factor, the international markets for music or whatever. The sort of anti-Japanese feeling that I grew up with completely changed because of really the consumption relationship we now have with Japan' (2.12.98). So rather like Marx and Engels he argued that consumer interconnectedness might in fact lessen nationalist hostility.¹⁰

Second, the Head of Media Affairs, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva (14.12.98) argued:

That figureheads are able to convey to an audience is a certain moral authority, a certain message which institutions made of brick and stone, apart from people in them, can't really do. And in a world where you have moving images, a photo of a still red cross probably doesn't have that kind of authority, whereas somebody speaking on television and moving around a landmine field does have significance.

And this authority appears to derive from the fact that iconic figures are also known for moving around countless other places - it gives them added author­ity if it is known that they have been and seen many other global sites (as of course with Princess Diana as a cosmopolitan 'media saint'; see Richards,

Wilson and Woodhead, 1999).

Conclusions

This research was designed to be exploratory rather than definitive; never­theless, three broad conclusions can be drawn from the empirical findings in north west England. First, a banal globalism is ready-to-hand and increasingly acts as a backcloth for an enormous amount of media output. With the emerg­ing convergence of media, from televisions to computers to phones, this global vernacular will be increasingly folded into an wide array of other practices -such as advertising, sport, education, arts, travel and so on - that are saturated with media images and information, with a banal globalism that is both outside and in a way within each of us.

Second, there is some evidence of a 'cosmopolitan civil society'. There is an awareness of a 'shrinking world' of global transportation and communica­tions, together with an ethics of care based upon various proximate ground­ings. What is less clear though is how such cosmopolitan predisposition and practice intersects with and is refracted by local, national, ethnic and gender practices. But its development will undoubtedly inflect civil society, trans­forming the conditions under which 'social actors assemble, organize, and mobilize' (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 151). And as they do assemble, organise and mobilise differently, so there will be new, unpredictable and emergent cosmopolitan cultures and cognitive praxes (see Eyerman and Jamison, 1991).

Third, this cosmopolitanism, of what we might call the global and the grounded, is placed upon the visual and narrative 'staging' of contemporary life, as the public sphere is transformed into a cosmopolitan public stage or screen (Szerszynski and Toogood, 2000; Sheller and Urry, 2000). Television and travel, the mobile and the modem, seem to be producing a global village, blurring what is private and what is public, what is front-stage and what is back-stage, what is near and what is far (Meyrowitz, 1985). Especially, they blur what is co-present and what is mediated, what is local and what is global, what is embodied and what is distant (see Harvey, 2000: 85-6, on reconciling material embodiment and universal rights).

The effects of these transformations upon the possibilities of cosmopolitan democracy in the twenty first century remain to be seen, but even a hesitant growth of a cosmopolitan culture does suggest changes in the context within which social and political life has been historically understood.

Lancaster University                                               Received 16 February 2002

Finally accepted 5 July 2002

Notes

1  The authors would like to thank their colleagues on the Global Citizenship and the Environment project, Greg Myers and Mark Toogood, for helping them think through the issues explored in the paper. They would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful and constructive comments on the submitted version.

2  See Harvey 2000, for an extensive reworking of the Manifesto.

3  The Soul of Britain was conducted by the Opinion Research Business (ORB) for the BBC, 1000 telephone interviews being carried out in May 2000. The authors would like to thank Gordon Heald of ORB for making available data and cross-tabulations from the survey.

4  The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Global Citizenship and the Environment, award number R000236768.

5  For two of the most impressive, see Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999; and the UNDP Report 1999.

6  For an elaboration of post-national citizenship in terms of global risks, global rights and global duties, especially relating to nature and the environment, see Urry 2000, chapter 7.

7  See Tomlinson 1999, chapter 6;E.M. Forster himself interestingly criticises 'cosmopolitan chatter'.

8  It should be noted that our data here is extremely limited in time and place - for example, taking place well before the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, after which the notion of cosmopolitan openness and tolerance has at once been qualified in the

West and also trumpeted as one of its defining features. Obviously researching the global in some ways requires global data sets. We hope that others will find our specific research of use in developing studies of cosmopolitan cultures in other times and places. 9 The connections between cosmopolitanism and ethnic difference needs much more exami­nation elsewhere.

10 For a critical account of the use of global imagery in consumer culture, see Franklin, Lury and

Stacey (2000).

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6.Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco. Making Sense of Cosmopolitanism

Investigationsof actually-existing cosmopolitanisms (Robbins 1998) and of cosmopolitanism as a research method to study the social beyond the national are now at the heart of the research agenda of the social sciences. This renewed scholarly interest on the notion of cosmopolitanism draws attention to changes in the social world, from the expansion of global markets, transnational networks, and new patterns of collective attachment, to the expansion of new forms of global governance. A great deal of research has identified and described migrants and members of transnational communities as 'cosmopolitans'. However, it is often unclear how this condition involves a genuinely felt moral commitment to the world. Other research has focused on cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political project that underpins new institutional and political arrangements at a worldwide scale. These are visible, for example, in the way human rights conventions turn into international laws, and in the implementation of international criminal tribunals to stop humanitarian crises and wars against humanity. Yet, in this research agenda, individuals are often deemed only significant as abstract subjects of an emerging cosmopolitan world order and there is little sense of the role that ordinary individuals and social groups play in the making of this new cosmopolitan order (see Nash 2006).

Overall, and despite a considerable body of research that has already emerged from within a variety of disciplines, cosmopolitanism remains largely a prescriptive concept concerning the development of a new world order or a descriptive concept that enables one to label and distinguish between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans (Hannerz 1992; Roudometof 2005, 116). The problem of treating cosmopolitanism purely as a social category to describe and analyse particular types of groups is that the term is routinely used to refer to some kind of identity that singles out 'cosmopolitans' in opposition to 'locals' or 'nationals' (see Jones 2007, 74-75). But how are cosmopolitan ideas, narratives and values, which are institutionally-embedded, shaping everyday life experiences and practices? How are ordinary individuals and groups making sense of their identities and social encounters in ways that can be said 'cosmopolitan'?

The aim of this book is to illustrate some of the ways in which cosmopolitanism can be used as an analytical tool to explain certain identity outlooks and ethico-political practices that are discernible in a variety of social and institutional settings. This collection of chapters focuses on empirically grounded research and engages current debates and new research findings on a variety of cosmopolitan practices, meanings, ideas and narratives. In terms of structure, the chapters have been grouped into three parts - Mobilites, Memories and Tensions - each part reflecting a major concentration of study on cosmopolitanism from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

The purpose of this Introduction is to introduce the reader to the themes of this collection of chapters, especially in light of the major trends and issues of concern to scholars researching the topic of cosmopolitanism. While the first part sheds light on the analytical framework and theoretical interventions that underpin this volume, the second part sets out the organizing themes of the book and illustrates some new directions in the research agenda.

Cosmopolitanism as Practice and Moral Ideal

Cosmopolitanism in Practice is concerned with cosmopolitanism at two analytical levels: (1) cosmopolitanism as a practice which is apparent in things that people do and say to positively engage with 'the otherness of the other' and the oneness of the world; (2) cosmopolitanism as a moral ideal that emphasizes both tolerance towards difference and the possibility of a more just world order.

As a moral ideal, cosmopolitanism can be traced back to the thinking of the ancient Cynics and the Stoics, re-appearing, more forcefully, in various forms, within Enlightenment universalism (cf. Stade 2008; see also Fine and Boone 2007). In Enlightenment thinking, the notion refers to a normative ideal which purports that every singular human being is worthy of equal moral concern and ought to have an allegiance to the community of humankind. Kant (1991), for instance, defends that all human beings are equipped with the ability to discern what is morally demanded from them and envisions a loose confederation of nations obedient to cosmopolitan law. In the current research agenda, the idea of cosmopolitanism is more commonly tied to claims concerning the recognition of difference or the rise of new supranational arrangements and social movements founded on the human rights regime.

It is important to stress that cosmopolitanism - understood as a moral ideal - and cosmopolitanism - as enacted in the outlooks and practices of ordinary individuals and groups - are dimensions of cosmopolitanism which, although analytically distinct, are intrinsically related at the level of empirical reality. In this sense, and in some particular contexts more than others, concrete individuals embrace and mobilize - with different degrees of reflexivity - certain cosmopolitan values and ideas which allow them to develop a cosmopolitan imagination and a moral standpoint. Where in some social settings cosmopolitan sensibilities remain latent, in other contexts, they are more actively and consciously displayed by people. These are visible in the ways people manage their sense of living in 'one world' and with 'others', while being also articulated in the collective actions and 'reflexive capabilities' (Kloger 2005) of the members of those transnational networks of social movements who struggle against global injustices through various forms of ethico-political practice (Vandenberghe 2006; Kurasawa 2007).

All in all, cosmopolitan sensibilities, orientations and ethico-political outlooks presuppose an ontological dimension (Rapport and Stade 2007) and can be readily captured in personal narratives. It is against this background that this book seeks to address some of the links between cosmopolitanism as moral ideal, institutionalized forms of cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitan identity outlooks, which remain largely unelaborated in the literature (cf. Cheah 2006, 492). Theoretically, the contributions to this volume are particularly concerned (although not exclusively) with cosmopolitanism as grounded category (Skrbis et al. 2004) - as something that people do and is 'in the making' - rather than an abstract idea (cf. Pollock 2000, 593). Hence, cosmopolitanism can be used as an analytical tool to explain a particular mode of self-transformation that has been observable in everyday social and political life for a long time (cf. Rumford 2005, 4).

Cosmopolitan Perspectives

It is useful to briefly sketch the main intellectual traditions of thinking and theorizing cosmopolitanism for the purpose of giving the reader a better sense of how this collection of chapters suggests ways of widening the discussion. It is under the umbrella of three perspectives - moral cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism and cultural cosmopolitanism (see also Kleingeld 1999; Delanty 2006) - that distinct theoretical orientations and empirical analyses have developed in disciplines as diverse as international relations, sociology, anthropology, political science and cultural studies.

Moral cosmopolitanism is the philosophical perspective that posits that all human beings ought to be morally committed to an essential humanity above and beyond the reality of one's particularistic attachments (such as nationality, kinship, religion) (see Nussbaum 1996; Turner 2002). As a moral standpoint, cosmopolitanism does not necessarily entail a duty to reshape the international political world order. Yet it does involve political duties, insofar as morality provides guidelines for one's actions in one's capacity as a citizen. This cosmopolitan ethic does not prescribe a set of readily applicable principles but it requires everyone to judge each situation in context and to act reflexively (Kleingeld 1999, 516). Moral cosmopolitanism has shaped and informed cultural and political cosmopolitanism approaches. In positing the moral equality of all human beings and all cultures, it sets the ground for the view of cosmopolitanism as a competence based on tolerance and openness towards 'other' cultures and value-systems, a perspective that is commonly found among the advocates of cultural cosmopolitanism. In a different vein, moral cosmopolitanism also involves a strong notion of universal morality that is implicated in calls for a cosmopolitan world order.

While rejecting both cultural relativism and ethnocentrism, cultural cosmopolitanism approaches are concerned with the problem of the recognition of difference and the respect for the variety of cultures (Kleingeld 1999, 517). A great deal of theorizing - informed by notions such as 'vernacular cosmopolitanism' (Bhabha 1996; Nava, 2007), 'rooted cosmopolitanism' (Appiah 1998, 2006; Beck 2003), and 'actually-existing cosmopolitanism as a reality of multiple attachments' (Robbins 1998) - attempts to transcend the tension between universalism and particularism. The underlying question here is, as Werbner (2006, 496) puts it, 'whether there can be an enlightened normative cosmopolitanism which is not rooted [...] in patriotic and culturally committed loyalties and understandings'. Some authors have shown how past and present cosmopolitanisms shape distinct worldviews and identities in a variety of times and places (Mignolo 2000; Pollock 2000). Falzon (Chapter 2, this volume), for example, suggests, in a case study of the Sindhi diaspora, that spatial unboundedness per se does not make the cosmopolitan grade and that actually-existing cosmopolitanisms are always located within some historical and geographical framework.

Other scholarship stresses the need to overcome the gendered, class and ethno­centric biases that blight the literature. For example, the figure of the cosmopolitan as a typically privileged, male and upper class citizen (Kanter 1995; Calhoun 2002; Hannerz 2004; Sklair 2000) has been challenged by research that points towards the existence of cosmopolitan attitudes among ordinary and working-class groups (Werbner 1999; Lamont and Aksartova 2002; Sassen 2006) and focuses on the vernacular, emotional, and everyday expressions of cosmopolitanism (Nava 2002,

2007).

Other authors (Pollock et al. 2000) offer a critical reading of triumphalist and neoliberal notions of cosmopolitical coexistence. It is in this vein that Cheah (2006) criticizes Habermas's (2001) vision of a cosmopolitan global public sphere which remains oblivious of the neoliberal logic of global capitalism, especially with regards to the imbalance in power relations created by an allegedly cosmopolitan North that is sustained by global exploitation of a postcolonial South in structural conditions of deep inequality. There is here a call for 'cosmopolitanism from below' which is not utopian, elitist or Western-centred and that has political implications of its own (Werbner 1999; Bhabha 1996; Nava 2007).

Overall, anthropologists and sociologists have been primarily concerned with the less reflexive aspects of cosmopolitanism which are apparent in mundane practices and lifestyle options on the micro-scale of daily interactions. In contrast, other authors, particularly political scientists and IR scholars writing within the tradition of political cosmopolitanism, understand cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political ideal that seeks to respond to the limitations of the nation-state unit in addressing global challenges and problems. In this context, cosmopolitanism emerges as a political project that fosters new forms of supranational and transnational governance (e.g. NGOs, the human rights regime) as well as the emergence of a robust global civil society (see e.g. Held 1995, 1999; Archibugi et al. 1998; Kaldor 2002; Rumford 2007).

Some advocates of political cosmopolitanism posit the development of a global legal order which can be seen as the institutional embodiment of cosmopolitan values of equality, solidarity and human rights, as well as the expression of a universal political consensus (Habermas 2001). This perspective is inspired by the cosmopolitan vision of Kant, which can be found in his writings on perpetual peace, and remains an authoritative approach within political cosmopolitanism. In Kant's view, cosmopolitan law regulates not only the relation between states, but also the interaction between state and individuals. The latter have the right to attempt to establish relations with other states and their citizens, but not the right to enter or settle in a foreign territory (cf. Kleingeld 1999, 513). Kant conceives the global federation of republic states as a form of political organization based on cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum), which is negatively defined as the right of 'hospitality', i.e., the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility (Kant 1991). This cosmopolitan vision still holds sway in contemporary arguments suggesting that individuals and states ought to be morally and legally bound to international law agreements (Beck 2002). Finally, other authors point towards the development of a cosmopolitan citizenship that ought to be accompanied by an ethical change underpinning ways in which concrete citizens of different national states live and act towards 'others' regardless of national boundaries and in transnational contexts (Benhabib 2002, 183). Nash (2006), for example, suggests that the international human rights system can only set the ground for the development of a more cosmopolitan world order if ordinary people are able to identify themselves with the values that constitute this system.

It is important to note that the chapters included in this volume are not representative of traditional 'schools of thought' (namely, the 'moral', the 'cultural' and the 'political'). While many contributors deal with themes and issues that are typically developed and encountered in cultural cosmopolitanism approaches, in practice, we find that some contributions deal with issues of concern to more than one of the perspectives above outlined.

Overcoming disciplinary divisions, recent approaches to cosmopolitanism underpin, in a more forceful fashion, the claim that the social sciences need to break with the research lens that takes the national frame (collectives and systems of classification) as the given unity of analysis (Martins 1974; Chernilo 2006;

Beck 2002, 2004; Beck and Sznaider 2006). The advocates of the so-called

'cosmopolitan turn' emphasize the limitations of the national imaginaire (Robins 2006, 19) and reject the assumption that human groups live in closed and self-contained spaces, and that cultures 'are clearly delineated as identifiable entities that coexist, while maintaining firm boundaries' (Benhabib 2002, 8). More importantly, there is here a call for an epistemological turn that occurs 'within an interpretative framework in which [...] "methodological cosmopolitanism" replaces the nationally centred ontology and imagination dominating thought and action' (Beck 2004, 132). This is predicated on a new 'grammar' that is enacted in actual challenges to boundaries - between internal and external, local and global, us and them - which become more complex, pluralized and ambivalent as we enter the twentieth-first century. This new 'grammar' equips the social sciences with the capability to grasp the 'real-world of cosmopolitanisation' (Beck 2004, 133). This new research lens is also concerned with aspects of a cosmopolitan imagination that is articulated in cultural models of world openness that enable novel understandings and explanations of the local/global nexus (Delanty 2006).

In its scope and aims, the present volume is indebted to this emerging cosmopolitan research agenda and its methodological presuppositions, which lay the ground for understanding cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool to study a particular mode of self-transformation.

Cosmopolitanism as a Mode of Self-Transformation

This volume involves, above all, an attempt to move beyond the tendency to purely identify and describe a social category of cosmopolitans. The contributions to this volume illustrate how cosmopolitanism can be seen as a mode of self-transformation, which occurs when individuals and groups engage in concrete struggles to protect a common humanity and become more reflexive about their experiences of otherness. This capability enables people to reflexively rework the boundaries between self and other, us and them (cf. Lamont and Aksartova 2002), and, thus, come closer to the reality of others and the world taken as a whole in fields often loaded with tensions and emotions. Self-transformation implies a sense of continuous self-scrutiny both with regards to the ways one positively engages the otherness of other cultures and people, and to the ways one is committed to the building of a more just world in conditions of uneven globalization. A key assumption here is that people can actually become more cosmopolitan in ways that are both reflexive and emotional.

Furthermore, the fact that individuals may at times seemingly act in a non-cosmopolitan fashion or display non-cosmopolitan feelings does not necessarily mean that people are then becoming less cosmopolitan. There is evidence in the contributions to this volume that cosmopolitanism as a set of practices and identity outlooks is not to be seen as predicated on the transcendence of the particularistic and parochial ties, which are often associated to non-cosmopolitan feelings and dispositions. While this stance may render irrelevant the antinomies between universalism and particularism, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, one should not lose sight of the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination, a consideration that is sometimes overlooked in the literature. Jansen (Chapter 4, this volume), for example, shows that the grammar of difference in post-Yugoslav antinationalism, which is carried on by a group of self-professed urbanites, attempts to resist nationalist closure by deploying cosmopolitan openness in a way that implies closure to some types of difference. Cosmopolitanism - as expression of both an attachment to 'the World' and a characteristic of the civilized urban self - works here as a rhetorical resource in these struggles to value certain forms of belonging over others.

Cosmopolitan identity outlooks and practices that are observable in real life situations have to be seen in connection with the way cosmopolitan norms and values become increasingly institutionalized in the contemporary world. Formal organizations, such as the United Nations, have included cosmopolitan values in their mission, whereas transnational non-governmental organizations, grassroots social movements and informal networks of NGOs are also appropriating cosmopolitan values and ideas for accomplishing their causes and agendas. These are all forms of an institutional cosmopolitanism that is embedded in various formal rules, laws and organizational structures.

It is against this backdrop that Cosmopolitanism in Practice seeks to explore the connection, rather than the tension, between institutional cosmopolitanism and forms of 'actually-existing' cosmopolitanism. It does so by acknowledging that, on the one hand, there are cosmopolitan ideas already ingrained in formal structures, imaginaries and ethico-political projects and, on the other, that individuals deploy - with different degrees of consciousness and in a variety of contexts - a set of cosmopolitan practices and orientations. The contributors to this volume take up cosmopolitan self-transformations in terms of people's 'real life' struggles to bridge boundaries between self and other or to profess an allegiance to humankind, and do so with different analytical and empirical focuses. While some contributors highlight individual interpretation to explore cosmopolitanism as a mode of self-transformation (Chapters 1 and 2), other authors pay special attention to the cosmopolitan imaginaries that shape and inform cosmopolitan identity outlooks (Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 8) or the situational contexts and social structures that both enable and constrain cosmopolitan self-transformations (Chapters 3, 7, 9 and 10).

Mobilities

In this part, the contributors consider how patterns of mobility and interconnectivity shape the cosmopolitan identities of particular groups. Some authors have focused on networks, patterns of consumption, and complex flows and mobilities of people, capital, technologies and cultural forms to explain and theorize cosmopolitanism (Urry 2002, 2003; Szerszynski and Urry 2002; Thompson and Tambyah 1999; Molz 2006). Inspired by globalization theory (see especially Robertson 1995; Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996), other scholarship ties cosmopolitanism to processes of transnational contact by looking at migrants, exiles and refugees. Examining issues of class location, ethnicity and subjectivity, this research has theorized the cosmopolitanism of working class labour migrants (Werbner 1999; Kofman 2005) and the emergence of a cosmopolitan citizenship in transnational contexts (Ong 1998). This is a major area of interest which has generated a good deal of scholarship in sociology and anthropology. The essays presented in this part take up this agenda to show how active geographical mobility might enable as well as constrain the experience of cultural engagement with 'others' and 'the world'. Cosmopolitanism is often seen as a characteristic of the global elites insofar as it is them who enjoy less financial barriers to frequent travel (see e.g. Calhoun 2002).

Yet, as the contributions to this part suggest, the unobstructed movement of people across national borders is not per se always consequential in terms of fostering cosmopolitan self-transformations. The fact that some mobile people are being more exposed and aware of 'other' cultures and value-systems does not necessarily mean that the conditions for positive interaction and engagement with others are created a priori. We might also be aware of the existence of 'others' and yet find ourselves in a situation when we are unwilling to interact with 'them'. The research agenda is thus challenged by the need to understand to which extent wide exposure to the 'Other' always encourages more cosmopolitan openness and dialogue with other cultures and realities.

Magdalena Nowicka and Ramin Kaweh address this question by focusing on cosmopolitanism as a mode of personal interaction with culturally different 'others' in alien local contexts. By focusing on an instance of cosmopolitanism among highly mobile professionals of an international organization (the United Nations), they go on to show that cosmopolitanism requires a constant effort to overcome one's emotional distance towards 'others' despite the reality of their bodily co-presence. Arguing that the institutional context of the UN enhances the cosmopolitan self-identification of individuals who describe themselves as citizens of the world, the chapter contrasts narratives of world-openness with the reality of everyday practices of UN professionals in unfamiliar sites, and demonstrates how moments and expressions of openness alternate with experiences of closure towards 'others'.

In a similar vein, Paul Kennedy examines the different personal quests that propelled a group of around sixty continental Europeans from fourteen countries to ultimately settle in Manchester, and traces their 'cosmopolitan careers' by exploring the complex relationships and personal networks they develop with other non-British nationals and with the 'locals'. He goes on to show that, despite the rich cultural resources that skilled middle-class migrants bring with them, they also experience several difficulties in gaining entry to local social networks and that many gravitate towards other foreigners. He argues that it is through the incidence of encounters with both foreigners and locals that these continental Europeans forge their paths into local society and, ultimately, become more cosmopolitan as they attain greater levels of self-understanding, personal autonomy, and openness to aspects of the wider world.

Whereas Nowicka and Kaweh's and Kennedy's contributions stress the personal networks and life trajectories of a particular category of highly mobile people to probe their cosmopolitan identity, Mark-Anthony Falzon explores, through an ethnographic lens, the dynamics of the social processes that make the cosmopolitan grade and argues that there is no necessary contradiction between ethnicity and one's commitment to 'world society'. Looking at the case of Sindhis, he shows that belonging to this diasporic Indian group constitutes a powerful and well-trodden path into the cosmopolitan way of engaging with the world - even if mitigated by factors such as caste, resources, location, occupation and level of education. He probes the essentially paradoxical set-up in which a particular group that is known by its mobility and defines itself on the basis of kinship and locality produces a particular type of cosmopolitanism with far-reaching economic and social consequences.

Overall, the three chapters included in this part suggest that cosmopolitanism is better seen as a form of imagination - that one can exert and develop in certain transnational contexts - rather than an essential quality of mobile people.

Memories

The contributions to this part focus on the changing meanings of cosmopolitanism, especially with regards to the consideration that cosmopolitan self-transformations are tied to historically-specific cosmopolitan imaginaries and frames of memory. Cosmopolitan approaches often link the condition of globalization to postnational phenomena and the reality of an emerging cosmopolitan age. This is consistent with the fact that there has been in the literature a great deal of emphasis on cosmopolitanism as a condition of the 'present' that assigns meanings to a 'past' (understood as less cosmopolitan) and to a 'future' (expected to be even more cosmopolitan) (see Fine 2003; see also Jansen, Chapter 4, this volume). With the speed-up of new patterns of travel, tourism and communication via the electronic media, there have been important changes in the ways in which more and more people are able to come close to the reality of other cultures in a variety of world sites. But while there is ground to argue that the current stage of globalization

-   in its economic, cultural and technological dimensions - facilitates, in an unprecedented fashion, the rise of a banal and latent cosmopolitanism (Beck 2004, 134), a sense of the historical grounding of present and past cosmopolitanisms is often sidelined in the literature. As Pollock et al. (2000, 584) insightfully noted 'cosmopolitanism must give way to the plurality of modes and histories - not necessarily shared in degree or in concept regionally, nationally, or internationally

-   that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history'. In fact, while individuals can become more cosmopolitan in distinct world sites in rather banal ways (synchronic time), cosmopolitan identities, practices and ethico-political outlooks of various kinds are also tied to historically-rooted memories and imaginaries (diachronic time).

The chapters presented in this section are primarily concerned with ways in which the cosmopolitan imagination functions as a cultural resource that allows one to trace shifts in the meanings of cosmopolitanism with regards to historically specific socio-cultural contexts. Issues related to how concrete individuals and groups experience cosmopolitan self-transformations that are observable in concrete practices and outlooks, and issues related to the links between cosmopolitanism and spatial unboundedness, which were all at the heart of the previous Part I, are given somewhat less attention in this part. The focus is here placed on the temporal dimension and the discursive frames of actual cosmopolitan memories.

Stef Jansen's chapter draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the post­war period in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia to look at non-dominant memories of home amongst a specific group of urbanite activists and other post-Yugoslav refugees. He argues that these are people who recall they had lived, until very recently, lives that they may now sometimes describe as 'cosmopolitan', but they feel they have been robbed of them in the context of the post-Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s. He shows that the ethico-political practices and identities of these activists rely heavily on strategies of continuity with a remembered 'normal' cosmopolitan past, and that the grammar of difference of post-Yugoslav antinationalism attempted to resist nationalist closure by insisting on the previously open nature of national boundaries in a messy everyday life context, where national loyalties coexisted along urban-centred collective self-understandings.

Rob Kroes' contribution on cosmopolitan engagements of Europe through the lens of American mass culture shares some of the concerns of Jansen's paper, arguing that certain discursive frames and forms of representation are tied to historically-specific cosmopolitan imaginaries. Yet, while Jansen uses an ethnographic approach to suggest that the grammar of antinationalism underpins the imagination of a cosmopolitan past among post-Yugoslav refugees, Kroes underlines, through a historical and semiotic reading, how both a European tradition of high-minded cosmopolitanism and the vernacular memory of cosmopolitan 'Europes' have cut across lasting ethnic and national divides, but are yet unable to provide an overarching imagery of Europe that is potentially meaningful for all in the context of a wider EU. Looking at American iconography in public space, Kroes shows, more specifically, how American mass culture allows cultural exchanges and conversations across older dividing lines in Europe, while being also used as a subtext in forms of European resistance against global cultural icons. Ultimately, he argues that such cosmopolitan cultural exchanges are visible in a self-conscious and ironic appropriation of American mass culture in popular culture.

The chapter by Ulrich Beck, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider makes a rather more radical case for a cosmopolitan memory that is combined with memories manifested in many different places. They argue that the shared memories of the Holocaust provide the foundation for a cosmopolitan memory that is of universal applicability and involves an orientation towards a shared cosmopolitan future. Arguing that this new cosmopolitan memory lends political and moral authority to the human rights regime, the chapter analyses the historical roots of the transition from national to cosmopolitan memory by looking at instances of forgiving and restitution in the context of concrete legal practices. Specifically, the authors develop their argument by presenting two case studies - the Polish struggle for a cosmopolitan memory in the discourse on Jedwabne and the German reparation of the 1950s - in which they show how the discourses of guilt and forgiveness are indicative of a new historical awareness detaching itself from the boundaries of the nation-state.

Notably, the contributions to this part illuminate how cosmopolitanism has been, alongside nationalism, a powerful form of collective imagination in the western world.

Tensions

The chapters presented in this part discuss if and how cosmopolitan ideas and discourses actually foster cosmopolitan outlooks in settings blighted by ethnic, religious or gender tensions. The contributions contained on the previous parts of this collection were more specifically concerned with the role that dimensions of time and space consciousness play in the makeup of cosmopolitan identities or imaginaries. Whilst these remain issues of concern for the contributors to this part, the chapters here presented turn to a more close consideration of how, in the contemporary world, certain cosmopolitan discourses and ideas - which are increasingly articulated in institutional settings - enable specific individuals and groups to bridge differences with 'others' (cf. Lamont and Aksartova 2002, 1). They are indicative of a move in the research agenda that shows that cosmopolitan ideas and values are tied to particular worldviews, and investigates whether such ideas and values can actually foster cosmopolitan practices and identities (see Vertovec, Chapter 7, this volume).Cosmopolitanism is here understood in terms of new strategies and ways of coping with problems and challenges concerning the problem of the recognition of difference. In this context, cosmopolitanism proves useful as an analytical tool to deal with the question of tension and conflict in the social and political world, an aspect which is often neglected in the literature (cf. Delanty 2006, 33). If we accept that conflict and strain are intrinsic features of social life (Douglas 1966; Alexander 1992, 302) and not a condition, or a social malaise, that an emerging cosmopolitan world order would completely eradicate, we can see how cosmopolitanism is instantiated in some of the ways individuals and groups overcome social tensions between self and other, us and them.

This section begins with an essay by Steven Vertovec which makes a case for both display and fostering cosmopolitanism in Berlin via a case study of the public station SFB4 Radio Multikulti. With its ethnically diverse personnel and distinctive programming, broadcasted daily in several languages, Radio Multikulti handles a diversity of news topics, debates and world music which appeal to diverse local audiences. Drawing on Nussbaum's proposal for cosmopolitan education, Vertovec argues that this media experiment actually fosters cosmopolitanism in communicating cosmopolitanism - as a socio-cultural condition - that is reflected in representations of Berlin as a site of multiple cultural entanglements and vibrant ethnic and cultural diversity - and also - as an ideology - that is conveyed by Radio Multikulti's programming strategies. This programming agenda not only facilitates cosmopolitan orientations and affiliations but also the respect for human rights and anti-racism.

While Vertovec shows how a particular media environment fosters cosmopolitan imagination in the way Radio Multikulti helps its diverse local audiences to bridge racial and ethnic differences, Gillian Youngs's contribution, by contrast, places the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination at the centre of her argument. Departing from a critical reading of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, she shows, for instance, how masculine cosmopolitan imaginaries entail an abstract notion of the cosmopolitan individual that has prevented women's voices from participating more fully in the cosmopolitan debate. Youngs argues that at the heart of Woolf's arguments is a concern about the exclusions and limitations resulting from national masculine traditions of higher education - in particular, the fact that cultural and economic resources have been explicitly diverted away from women to men - and that these exclusions are consequential in terms of investigating the limits and possibilities of a cosmopolitan orientation on education in the so-called Age of the 'War on Terror'. She draws attention for the critical question, raised in Three Guineas, of how and why women's influence on bringing about a more peaceful world across local and national divides has been historically restricted, and demonstrates that Woolf's critical thinking on education, as a means by which cosmopolitan worldviews that are not shaped by masculine characteristics can bring about social change and self-transformation, is still relevant nowadays.

Like Youngs, Kira Kosnick's contribution is concerned with a particular expression of the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination. In her ethnographic study of migrant artists with a Turkish background who are residents of the city of Berlin she suggests that while young postmigrant artists of second and third generation display cosmopolitan affiliations and sensibilities in their life trajectories, cosmopolitanism is appropriated in the rhetoric of urban cultural policy as an ideology that actually prevents and conflicts with the accomplishment of such actually-existing cosmopolitan affiliations. Kosnick examines the tension between an urban cosmopolitan discourse that seeks to market Berlin as a world-open capital and an urban integrationist discourse aiming at discouraging transnational and diasporic identifications of migrants. She suggests, ultimately, that the localizing drive of these urban policy measures and discourses is subverted by the activities and orientations of artists and people with Turkish background who work in the cultural industries.

Whereas the contributions of Youngs and Kosnick engage the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination by focusing on particular ideological frames, Maria Rovisco's chapter highlights ways in which the situational context can actually constrain the cosmopolitan imagination of concrete people. By contrasting the accounts of youths who volunteer within the religious networks of the Catholic Church with the accounts of youths who volunteer within a nonreligious organization, she shows that young Portuguese volunteers, who participate in programmes of cooperation and development in Africa, adopt a cosmopolitan ethico-political outlook by drawing on cosmopolitan narratives, worldviews and ideas that are channelled and enforced in the institutional structures of the organizations where they volunteer. She goes on to make a case for a Christian cosmopolitanism that does not necessarily entail parochialism or religious intolerance. Whereas this type of cosmopolitanism is contrasted with the cosmopolitan outlook of nonreligious young volunteers, she also shows that the image of the cosmopolitan as someone that travels smoothly between cultures and value-systems, and as a consumer of global tastes, does not hold sway in view of the various challenges, uncertainties and tensions the volunteers face in the local sites where they care for others.

The chapters contained in this last part are representative of an emerging line of research that places the management of differences and tensions of various kinds (e.g., religious, ethnic and sexual) at the heart of the research agenda. Taking all chapters together, we hope to have shown that cosmopolitanism can be used as an analytical tool to study 'real life' self-transformations and that this has implications for future research on the topic. We also hope that the empirical evidence the contributors offer will generate fruitful discussions among scholars across the social sciences and beyond traditional disciplinary divisions.

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