Andrew Linklater & cosmopolitanism Essay

Andrew Linklater, an eloquent exponent of the promise of this type of cosmopolitanism, says that he is interested in ‘the social bonds which join and separate associate and disassociate’ (Linklater 1998a: 2). He points out that, ‘with the rise of the nation-state, one identity was chosen and made central to contemporary political life. Shared national identity was deemed to be the decisive social bond which links citizens together in the ideal political community’ (Linklater 1998a: 179), and he wants to resist the actually ineluctable linking of ‘political community’ with the state. Thus: ‘Regard for the interests of outsiders can expand in one epoch and wane in another: hence the significance of a cosmopolitan ethic which questions the exact moral significance of national boundaries’ (Linklater 1998a: 2). Linklater offers us two types of social bond beyond the state. The first kind of glue that might embrace people together, he says, is a ‘commitment to open dialogue’: ‘the bond which unites them [members of a society] can be obliged as much to the ethical commitment to open dialogue as to logic of primordial attachments’ (Linklater 1998a: 7). The political undertaking of the cosmopolitan, then, is to ‘create institutional frameworks which broaden the boundaries of the dialogic community’ (Linklater 1998a: 7). The most common condemnation of this kind of thing is that it needs too much of a suspension of disbelief; that obligation to open dialogue’ is a desperately weak candidate for social glue-dom in contrast with the ‘primordial attachments’ of family, history, and culture. The question is: what will ‘open dialogue’ tell us that we do not already know? Dialogic cosmopolitanism’s sustain for open and un-coerced dialogue is obviously aimed at listening to what Linklater and others call ‘subaltern voices’—the voices of the dispossessed, the marginalized, the barred. The cosmopolitan call for more dialogue is so essential to its programme that one could be forgiven for thinking that the expelled, the marginalized, and the debarred were totally silent. Yet they are not. Positively cosmopolitan, as articulated by Linklater and others, shares its non-territoriality with post-cosmopolitan nationality. Both of them are also getting on on ‘the expedition for a new language of politics which challenges the belief that the individual’s inner political obligations are to the nation state’ (Linklater 2002: 317). But on the other hand we have comment cosmopolitanism’s unwillingness to entertain care and compassion as potential citizenship virtues, and this is a key feature of post-cosmopolitan citizenship. in the same way, cosmopolitanism’s non-territoriality seems to be accompanied by the belief that citizenship is carried out completely in the public sphere, a view that is again challenged by post-cosmopolitan citizenship. Yet it is perhaps in considered to the feature that they seem most obviously to have in common that they churn out to differ most—non-territoriality. In this context, Kimberly Hutchings considerately points to two types of conception of non-territoriality, and argues for a citizenship that ‘rather than . . . being incorporated in an ethical universalism which is dormant in concepts of liberal-democratic citizenship . . . becomes located in the actual interrelation and interaction of both individuals and collectives’ (1996: 127). By suggesting that there is no right place to stand, it can take several of the moralists out of our politics. Better still, by doing so it can set free us to pursue a long term procedure of trans-local connecting that is both political and educational at once. And in the middle of the short-term politico-educational crisis where we now get ourselves, it can assign a teaching of culture competent of rallying the energy and enthusiasm of a broad front of people who are not all or even mostly leftists, whatever the right may think. As a practice of contrast, a range of tolerances and secularisms, an international proficiency or mode of citizenship that is the control of no one class or civilization, it answers the charges of â€Å"particularize† and â€Å"loss of standards. † As a constructive ideal of interconnected knowledge and pedagogy, it elevates rather than lowers existing educational standards. It presents multiculturalism as both a common program and a decisive program. Cosmopolitanism would seem to mimic capital in seizing for itself the privilege (to paraphrase Wall Street) of â€Å"knowing no boundaries. † Which is also the gendered privilege of knowing no bodies: of being, in Donna Haraway’s words, â€Å"a conquering gazes from nowhere,† a gaze that claims â€Å"the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. † (1990, p. 188) Though, Cosmopolitanism has long been a freedom in international politics, only accessible to elite—those who have the resources essential to travel, learn other languages, and take up other cultures. For the majority of the population, living their lives within the cultural space of their own state, cosmopolitanism has not been an alternative (hence perhaps the popular suspicion of cosmopolitanism). Though, in the contemporary world of international politics, cultural and linguistic diversity is all-pervading, and the capability to communicate with others and to recognize their cultures is available to everybody. Too often, circumstances are not favorable to this. Members of other cultural groups are considered of as threats, undermining recognized ways of life and competing for all too inadequate employment prospects and welfare resources. In these circumstances, the enticement towards closure might be overwhelming: to assert one’s own cultural identity aligned with the real or imagined threat of the other. In a framework of uncertainty, barriers and defenses might well appear to be the simple way to protect one’s own identity. Yet it is also the route towards cultural stagnation. It influences international politics in a means that Cosmopolitanism is the hard won and hard to sustain virtue of living with and understanding diversity. It is perhaps the prime virtue necessary if some appearance of communal social life is to be maintained in the late contemporary world. Cosmopolitanism in this sense is not contrary with the moral cosmopolitan’s persistence on the basic equality of all, nor with the legal cosmopolitan’s project of creating institutional and organizational structures through which this parity can be recognized and protected. It is, though, a significant corrective to the austere universalism to which philosophical cosmopolitans are often drawn, where particular attachments and kinships are regarded as impediments to, rather than essentials of, a global moral order. It is only if the virtue of cosmopolitanism is extensive in the relevant communities that there will be any probability of realizing cosmopolitan ideals. If cultural diversity is the needed outcome of it influence an approach to international politics, then cosmopolitanism is the asset of this necessity. Work Cited Beck, Ulrich (1994), ‘The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization’, in Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994): 1–55. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (1994), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order.Cambridge: Polity Press. Daniele Archibugi, â€Å"Cosmopolitical Democracy,† New Left Review, 4, July-August 2000: 144. Donna Haraway, â€Å"Situated Knowledges: The Science Questionin Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,† in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,† Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1990), p. 188. Epictetus. 1920. The Discourses of Epictetus; with the Encheiridion and Fragments. Translated by G. Long. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Also Available At: http://etext. library. adelaide. edu. au/e/epictetus/e65d/part9. html