1
Bhambra, G. K. 2011. ‘Cosmopolitanism and Postcolonial Critique’ in M. Rovisco and M.
Nowicka (eds) The Ashgate Companion to Cosmopolitanism (chapter 20). Ashgate: Farnham
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cosmopolitanism and Postcolonial Critique
Gurminder K. Bhambra
Introduction
The paradigms of postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism have emerged in recent times offering
different responses to similar questions, the most pertinent, perhaps, being: how do we, with
our manifest differences, live together in the world?1
While the two approaches have been
articulated and elaborated in a number of disciplines, my concern in this chapter is with their
sociological expression in the context of a global world. In work spanning the first decade of
the twenty-first century, Ulrich Beck (2000, 2006) has argued that a cosmopolitan approach is
necessary to engage critically with globalization. As such, cosmopolitanism, for him, is defined
explicitly in terms of a global world society, separate and distinct from the age of nation-states
which preceded it (and which gave rise to the intellectual tradition of cosmopolitanism he
uses).
Globalization has often been regarded as a synonym for modernization or Westernization and
so it is not surprising that ideas of the global have similarly been equated with the modern
West. In recent years modernization theory, with its assumption of global convergence to an
explicitly Western model, has been supplanted by the approach of multiple modernities
(Eisenstadt 2000). Within this theory, the modern is understood as encompassing divergent
paths, with the diversity of cultures in the world giving rise to a multiplicity of modernities.
Beck (2006) allies his version of cosmopolitanism with the global understood as multiple
modernities and so cosmopolitanism confronts the modern world as, potentially, a
multicultural world. This raises the question of cosmopolitanism’s relation to multiculturalism.
In what follows, I shall I take issue with Beck’s cosmopolitanism because of its inability to deal
with issues raised by a multicultural world deriving from a ‘Eurocentric’ definition of the
cosmopolitan.2
He is not alone in his ‘Eurocentric’ definition of cosmopolitanism; in fact, in this
regard, as we shall see, he is typical rather than unusual. However, what does make his work
distinctive is that he places his argument in the context of an embrace of the idea of ‘multiple
modernities’ and, in criticism of ‘multiculturalism’, both of which are central to my concerns. If
we can now understand dominant approaches as Eurocentric, it is because of new voices
1
The literature on both postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism is vast. As an indicative guide, see Bhabha (1994),
Gutmann (1994), Nussbaum (1996), Loomba (1998), Vertovec and Cohen (2002), Fine (2007).
2
The terms ‘Europe’ or ‘Eurocentric’ are used in this chapter as continuous with central aspects of North American
social and political undertakings.
2
emerging in wider political arenas and in the academy itself, which might now be regarded as
beginning to emerge as a ‘multicultural’ space. More specifically, I argue that postcolonial
scholarship, with its critique of Eurocentrism in particular, provides more adequate resources
for making sense of our contemporary world (Bhambra 2007a). The demise of colonialism as
an explicit political formation has given rise to understandings of postcoloniality and, perhaps
ironically, an increased recognition of the role of colonialism in the formation of the modern
world and its associated concepts. Scholars such as Homi Bhabha (1994) and Walter Mignolo
(2000) argue for the necessity of postcolonial or decolonial understandings as integral to the
opening out and questioning of the assumptions of these dominant discourses. Such
recognition, I suggest, is not present in most contemporary discourses on cosmopolitanism;
what is required instead is a form of provincialized cosmopolitanism.
Cosmopolitan Eurocentrism?
What appears striking in not just the sociological, but also the wider academic literature on
cosmopolitanism, is the extent to which ‘being cosmopolitan’ (as a practice) is associated with
being in the West and cosmopolitanism (as an idea) is seen as being of the West.3
As will be
discussed later in this chapter, by writing out the wider contexts within which ideas and
practices are located, a particular cultural homogeneity is assumed and this becomes a
standard of universal significance. Anthony Pagden, for example, writes:
‘it is hard to see how any form of “cosmopolitanism” can be made to address
the difficulties of the modern world if it does not in some sense begin where
Kant *and the Stoics+ … began, that is with some vision of a community of ‘the
wise’ whose views must in the end triumph … In the modern world it is equally
hard to see, at least in the immediate future, that those views can be anything
other than the reflection of the values of western liberal democracies’ (2000:
19).
With this, Pagden asserts the origin of ‘cosmopolitanism’ – both as idea and as practice – in the
history of what he claims as European, or, more generally, Western thought and draws a direct
link between that history and our present – again, here, in the West. This is a parochial reading
of cosmopolitanism which betrays the very ideals that the concept expresses. The issues with
the claims made here are twofold. First, there is a refusal to acknowledge that there have been
cosmopolitan practices and the development of cosmopolitan ideas in other parts of the world
outside of European contact, in relation to European contact, and not subordinate to it (see,
for example, Bhabha 1994, Pollock et al 2000). Second, there is no engagement with the
problematic tension brought to the fore when we (if, we) address contemporaneous European
domination over much of the world as the very real negation of the idea and ideals of
cosmopolitanism otherwise put forward.
3
This section is informed by arguments made in Bhambra (2010).
3
Even scholars critical of the standard forms of cosmopolitanism as expressed by Pagden, often
remain circumscribed to a particular geographical territory and intellectual tradition in their
exposition of a critical cosmopolitanism. Muthu (2003), for example, develops a sustained
argument for ‘Enlightenment against Empire’, the title of his monograph, in which he uses the
relatively lesser known (or ‘underappreciated’) resources of Enlightenment thinkers to
elucidate the largely unacknowledged anti-imperialist strand within their philosophies of
cosmopolitanism. Fine, in turn, presents a critical engagement with modern cosmopolitanism
and seeks to reinstate it within the tradition of social theory as distinct from the natural law
tradition from which it is said to emanate (2007: 133-4).
Yet, while opening up the space to consider the standard histories of cosmopolitanism
differently, these histories also reproduce what it is that they are counter to and, in many
cases, what is reproduced – even in the work of scholars who may not wish consciously to do
so – is a European genealogy. It is not that forms of universalism are peculiar to Europe, but
that Europe seems to have real difficulties with the universalism it espouses. While scholars
argue for the universalism of what are assumed to be European categories, they then rarely
acknowledge the processes through which that universalization is enacted, processes of
colonization and imperialism for the most part. Nor do they address the forms of
cosmopolitanism that have emerged in non-European contexts. As a consequence, they limit
the possibility of cosmopolitanism properly to be understood ‘cosmopolitan-ly’.
From Modernization to (Cosmopolitan) Multiple Modernities
Beck’s (2000, 2006) argument for a cosmopolitan approach is based on his critique of the
contemporary state of the social sciences. He argues that disciplines such as sociology and
political science have been historically bound to nation-states in their emergence and
development such that they are no longer adequate to the task of dealing with the problems
and processes that emerge at the level of the ‘global’ world that is now increasingly our
common fate. He highlights the increasing number of social processes that are no longer
contained within national boundaries and suggests that, as a consequence, ‘world society’
should now be the starting point of sociological and other research. His argument is based on a
perceived transition from a process of singular ‘modernization’ to one giving rise to co-existing
‘multiple modernities’. This shift is understood by Beck as a shift from the first age of
modernity – that is, one shaped by nation-states – to a second, global cosmopolitan, age.
Increasing recognition of the global context of sociology is evident in recent arguments against
the supposed methodological nationalism of the past (although, see Chernilo 2007, for a
qualification of this interpretation applied to past sociological discourse). This view is
supported by a shift within sociology more generally towards the paradigm of multiple
modernities as a more adequate frame within which to understand global, and globalizing,
processes. Key to this development has been the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000, 2001) in
conjunction with a core group of European historical sociologists such as Johann Arnason
4
(2000, 2003), Bjorn Wittrock (1998) and Peter Wagner (2001).4
In essence, they have argued
that the problem with earlier modernization theory was that it understood modernization as a
singular, uni-directional process that emerged in the West and, in its diffusion globally,
brought other societies and cultures into line with its own presuppositions. Modernization was
believed to have initiated a process of convergence and homogenization globally such that the
rest of the world would, one day, become modernized, that is, Westernized. However, towards
the latter part of the twentieth century there has been a growing realization that
modernization was not coming to pass as had been expected in the heyday of modernization
theory (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998).
The emergence of multiple modernities, then, came in the context of scholars beginning to
appreciate that the differences manifest in the world were not, as had previously been
believed, simply archaic differences that would disappear through gradual modernization.
Instead, there is an appreciation that societies could modernize differently and that these
differences, for theorists of multiple modernity, now represented the different ways in which
societies adapted to processes of modernization. There was still a belief that modernity was, in
its origins, a European phenomenon, but now, the argument is that in its diffusion outwards it
interacted with the different traditions of different cultures and societies and brought into
being a multiplicity of modernities. These modernities are defined in terms of a central
institutional core that was taken from the European experience and the particular cultural
inflections of that core as it was interpreted through the cultures present in other places. Beck
concurs with this analysis by arguing that ‘the Western claim to a monopoly on modernity is
broken and the history and situation of diverging modernities in all parts of the world come
into view’ (2000: 87). The global age, then, is necessarily perceived as being a multicultural
age, given that multiple modernities are said to be the expression of cultural differences.
Beck (2006) follows the multiple modernities paradigm in its general analysis, but his call for a
second age of modernity, and what follows from this, is distinct and, I will argue, contradictory.
In this age, he argues, not only is modernity now multiple, but the concepts which had been in
use in developing sociological understandings in the first age are no longer adequate to the
task. This is primarily a consequence of the fact that the standard concepts of the social
sciences, according to Beck, were developed to understand a world of nation-states and now
that we are in a global world, these concepts are no longer appropriate. What is needed is a
new set of categories and concepts that would emerge from reflection upon this new
cosmopolitan second age of modernity. While I have also argued that sociological concepts are
inappropriately bounded – specifically, that they are ‘methodologically Eurocentric,’5
rather
than methodological nationalistic – this is not something that is only now becoming
problematic as a supposedly ‘first modernity’ has given way to a contemporary now-globalized
world.
4
See the two special issues of Daedalus: ‘Early Modernities,’ Daedalus 127 (1998) and ‘Multiple Modernities,’
Daedalus 129 (2000). For further details on the sociological debates on modernization and the shift to multiple
modernities, see chapter 3 of my Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination.
5
I owe the coining of this term to Peo Hansen.
5
Such an approach, I suggest, is as limited as the state-centred approaches under criticism as it
is based on the idea that the concepts of the first age of modernity were appropriate to that
age and that the only problem is with the application of those concepts to the present and the
future (for discussion, see Chernilo 2007; Fine 2007). At a minimum, however, the ‘first age of
modernity’ is as much characterized by empires as by nation-states and so the concepts of
that age would be, by that token, as inadequate in their own time as they are claimed to be
today. There is little acknowledgement in Beck’s work that if certain understandings are seen
as problematic today then there is also an issue of whether they were not also problematic in
the past and have, in fact, led to misunderstandings of the nature of the present in terms of
how it has arisen from that past (for discussion, see Holmwood 1997). As such, the concepts of
first age modernity require a more thorough overhaul than Beck proposes in his simple shift to
a cosmopolitan second age.
Another significant problem with Beck’s call for more appropriate sociological concepts is that
his version of cosmopolitanism is at odds with the global age he describes. To the extent that
multiple modernities, as the contemporary condition of the global world, are predicated on
cultural inflections of modernity, then the world has to be understood as a multicultural world.
Beck’s version of cosmopolitanism, however, is set out in both explicit and implicit opposition,
if not downright hostility, to understandings of multiculturalism. These issues will be discussed
in further detail in the following section.
Cosmopolitanism and Multiculturalism
While Beck argues for the singular Western claim on modernity to have been broken and
suggests that it is necessary to engage with divergent modernities, the place of Others within
his new cosmopolitan paradigm is not straightforward. Cosmopolitanism, for him (Beck and
Grande 2007), is something if not already achieved in Europe is nonetheless defined by the
European experience. Its intellectual genealogy is seen to be European as is its political
practice. In particular, Beck (2003) argues that the project of a ‘peace-loving’ Europe, which
emerged in the wake of the Second World War, was a cosmopolitan project and one that was
the political antithesis of the destructive nationalism that had culminated in the Holocaust.
Europe, he suggests, was now to be ‘motivated by clear ideas of inviolable human dignity, and
of the moral duty to relieve the suffering of others’ (Beck 2003: np). This duty appears not to
apply, however, when those Others exist outside of commonly acknowledged European
frontiers, or commonly accepted understandings of ‘being European’ (see Weber 1995,
Ehrkamp and Leitner 2003, Saharso 2007). Quite apart from other anti-colonial struggles
involving European states, as Hansen argues, not even a war fought within Europe – the
Algerian-French War, 1954-62, which resulted in the deaths of over a million people and
engaged approximately half a million French troops – ‘has been able to impinge on the notion
of European integration as a symbol of peace’ (2002: 488); or as a symbol of cosmopolitanism
in practice.
6
In the contemporary context, there appears to be little recognition of the potential
discrimination against those subject to the face veil ban being proposed in France and other
European countries (see, BBC 2010). What purchase does the idea of ‘Europe’ and its
supposedly distinctive civic traditions have on cosmopolitanism when a number of states seek
to repress the exercise of religious freedom of some of its citizens through an over-zealous
attention to the clothes that women choose to wear? The political debates regarding ‘banning
the burkha’ (see, Saharso 2007), call into question the depth of the cosmopolitan commitment
within Europe that is otherwise, for Beck, seen to be one of its defining features. The issue, as I
will go on to suggest, is that Beck’s cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of similarly
constituted individuals that is unable to accommodate Others within its conceptual or political
frameworks. In fact, Beck addresses the issue of multiculturalism by pointing to its inherent
incompatibility with the idea of cosmopolitanism.6
He sets up the difference between the two
in the following terms.
Multiculturalism, according to Beck, asserts a world of variety and plurality while at the same
time presenting humanity as a collectivity divided on cultural grounds. Individuals within this
conception, he continues, are seen as the product of their own languages, traditions, customs,
and landscapes and have an attachment to their homeland which ‘is regarded as a closed, selfsufficient
and sacrosanct unity’ (2002: 36-7). This entails a defence of that homeland ‘naturally’
against imperialism, but also, he suggests, against ‘miscegenation, internationalization, and
cosmopolitanism’ (2002: 37).7
This then leads to the conclusion, again without any
substantiation, that ‘multiculturalism is at loggerheads with individualization’ and that, within
multiculturalism, ‘the individual does not exist,’ being simply an ‘epiphenomenon of his
culture’ (2002: 37). Cosmopolitanism, however, Beck suggests, ‘argues the reverse and
presupposes individualization’ (2002: 37). However, Beck does not elaborate on how a
cosmopolitanism of individuals is accommodated within a vision of the world as otherwise
structured by different cultures. The concept of ‘multiple modernities’, as suggested earlier,
expresses a form of global multiculturalism; cosmopolitanism, then, must also be a cultural
issue, and one that, for Beck, is the expression of European culture. In this way, Beck’s
cosmopolitan version of multiple modernities is more thorough-going in its Eurocentrism than
the simple version embodied in multiple modernities.
In a subsequent article, Beck and Grande develop the cosmopolitan perspective by arguing
that ‘it is vital to perceive others [both] as different and as the same,’ but without lapsing into
postmodern particularism (2007: 71). In other words, the active cosmopolitan tolerance of
Others has to be balanced by ‘a certain amount of commonly shared universal norms’ (Beck
and Grande 2007: 71). It is this, they suggest, that enables cosmopolitanism ‘to regulate its
dealings with otherness so as not to endanger the integrity of a community’ (2007: 71,
6
For a discussion of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, see Stevenson (2002); see also
Gutmann (1994).
7
This attribution is ironic not least because the term ‘cosmopolitan’ was used in European discourse to indicate the
‘de-racinated’ foreigner – frequently, the ‘Jew’ – whose allegiance to national state formations and political
communities could not be guaranteed.
7
emphasis added). Where cosmopolitanism had initially been defined, against multiculturalism,
as being presupposed by the individual, it is now being defended as an expression of a
particular community threatened by others. As Beck and Grande go on to argue, ‘the
legitimate interests of others’ ought to be taken into consideration in the ‘calculation of one’s
own interests,’ (2007: 71, emphasis added), but there is little discussion on what basis
‘legitimacy’ is to be established or how those Others are constituted separately from oneself in
a way different than within the premises of multiculturalism. What is clear is that the
prescription for a cosmopolitan Europe ‘united in diversity’ takes little account of the diversity
within Europe as constituted by its minorities within states.8
Beck’s failure to address the place of Others internal to Europe – except obliquely, as
mentioned, via a reference to ‘cosmopolitan society and its enemies’ (2002) – is exacerbated
by the way in which he discusses the issue of Others explicitly seen as external to Europe and
the West. Not only does he not recognize cosmopolitanism as also having a provenance
beyond the European intellectual tradition, he is loath to discuss cosmopolitan practices in
other places. Engagement with Others, in this new cosmopolitan age, seems to follow a
pattern also prevalent in the previous age: condescension. This is nowhere better illustrated
than in Beck’s statement that: ‘the West should listen to non-Western countries when they
have something to say about the following experiences’ (2000: 89, my emphasis).9
He then
lists four main themes: (1) the possibilities for coexistence in multi-religious, multi-ethnic and
multicultural societies; (2) the question of tolerance in a confined space where cultural
differences are prone to lead to violence; (3) ‘highly developed’ legal and judicial pluralism in
non-Western countries (his use of scare quotes); (4) experience of dealing with multiple
sovereignties (such as are a consequence of empire, although this word is not used). The
implication is that, when non-Western countries are not speaking about these issues, it is not
necessary for the West to listen. This appears to be less a form of cosmopolitan engagement,
new and distinct from the nation-state hierarchies of the first age, and more like ‘business as
usual’.
Beyond the simple arrogance of listing areas where ‘we’ should listen to ‘them’, there is also
much to comment on in the substance of the list itself. Not least, the aspect that the West and
the non-West are presented as two internally homogenous blocs confronting each other as
‘actors’ in a world that is not recognized to have been structured by historically constituted
hierarchical relations. Beck’s (2002) argument, that he is not interested in the memory of the
global past, but simply in how a vision of a cosmopolitan future could have an impact on the
politics of the present, is disingenuous at best. He appears to think that it is possible simply to
discuss ‘the present implications of a globally shaped future’ (2002: 27) without addressing the
legacies of the past on the shaping of the present. He simply brushes away the historically
inherited inequalities arising from the legacies of European imperialism and slavery and moves
on to imagine a world separate from the resolution of these inequalities. Any theory that seeks
8
The problematic place of Turkey within a cosmopolitan Europe is another issue within this debate. For discussion,
see Ahiska (2003), Baban and Keyman (2008) and Parker (2009).
9
The following paragraphs in this section are informed by arguments made in Bhambra (2010).
8
to address the question of ‘how we live in the world’ cannot treat as irrelevant the historical
construction of that world (for discussion, see Trouillot 1995).
Beck (2000: 89) continues to ignore the presence of Others on the global stage with his
assumption that the European ‘social settlement’ presents the apex of negotiating the
contradictions of the modern world order. There is little discussion of other constructions of
social solidarity that have existed such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
which, as Shilliam argues, ‘stretched across 800 chapters in 40 countries on four continents’
(2006: 379). Further, where there is some acknowledgement of ‘development’ in other places
it is relativized through the use of scare quotes. The implication is that legal and judicial
pluralism is only necessary in otherwise complex and developed Western societies because of
the migration of populations to them from places that have such pluralism due to the presence
of ethnic and religious differences (for discussion, see Amin 2004). This is then compounded by
Beck’s subsequent list of areas in which the West is ‘beginning to adopt non-Western
standards of reality and normality which do not bode well’ (2000: 89, my emphasis).
Presumably, the point is that they do not bode well for the West since, in his own terms, they
are the everyday conditions of existence for the non-West – on which there is no comment. In
particular, Beck identifies the de-regulation of the labour market in the West as leading to the
‘abandonment of the co-operatively organized employee society that froze the class conflict
between work and capital’ (2000: 89). This is an expression of methodological nationalism,
given that he does not comment on the conditions of the international division of labour, and
the hierarchies between the global north and south, which were themselves a condition of this
‘frozen’ settlement.10
In another, again un-reflexive, example, Beck uses the image of a sand-pit to address the
current world situation. He argues that the first age of modernity involved capital, labour and
state ‘making sand cakes in the sandpit’, (where the sand pit is the national community), and
attempting ‘to knock the other’s sand cake off the spade in accordance with the rules of
institutionalized conflict’ (2000: 89). The situation in the second age of modernity is akin to
business having been given a mechanical digger which is being used to empty out the whole
sandpit (2000: 89). The metaphor is peculiarly inept given the association of infancy with the
sandpit and the use of adult-child metaphors to understand colonial relations and
responsibilities from a Western perspective. What is clear is that Beck’s construction is itself an
example of the methodological nationalism he opposes. He appears ignorant of the processes
of colonialism, imperialism and slavery, which ‘emptied out’ from the sand pit of the colonized,
not only mineral resources, but also human bodies, and did so not ‘according to rules of
institutionalized conflict’, but through naked appropriation.
In one rare attempt to address the issue of cosmopolitanism ‘from below’, Beck substitutes the
term ‘transnationality’ for cosmopolitanism and writes that this ‘characterizes not only the
globalization elites, but the poor exploited immigrants as well. They are treated as “excluded
10
For a discussion of the development of the UK welfare state in the context of the ‘postcolonial’ demise of a
system of Commonwealth preferences and re-orientation to the EU, see Holmwood (2000).
9
others” in the United States, but Haitians, Filipino or Indian immigrants are at the same time
active in sustaining “their” households overseas and engaging in political struggles against
corrupt regimes *back home+’ (2002: 33; emphasis in original). While Beck does not say ‘back
home’ this is the clear implication at the end of that sentence (in that I don’t think he means
corrupt regimes in the ‘West’); his emphasis on ‘and’ is also telling – the implication being that
it should be of some surprise that these immigrants can be active in sustaining households
overseas (as opposed to ‘back home’) as well as engaging in politics elsewhere. His refusal to
ascribe the notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to the ‘poor exploited immigrants’ makes them
‘excluded Others’ from his framework and locates them in nationalistic particularity without
providing any information on why this must be case. Further, there is little explanation about
what makes global elites specifically cosmopolitan while these immigrants are only
transnational. Beck’s patronizing attitude towards these ‘poor immigrants’ continues a few
lines along when he says that: ‘it is not only the global players who are learning the deterritorialized
game of power and putting it to the test, but also some ethnic minorities’ (2002:
33). ‘Global players’ are not, in Beck’s understanding, ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘ethnic minorities’
are not ‘global players’; the Eurocentrism implicit in the identification of ‘global players’ is
apparent.
Beck’s (2000; 2006) argument for cosmopolitanism is part of a long line of social theory that
takes Western perspectives as the focus of global processes, and Europe as the origin of a
modernity which is subsequently globalized, whether in convergent or divergent forms. Beck’s
cosmopolitanism is not a cosmopolitanism inclusive of Others who, in his terms, are different
in some potentially radical way. He is not interested in what he can learn from them in their
own terms.
Cosmopolitanism Provincialized
A ‘provincialized’ cosmopolitanism, as Pollock et al (2000) argue, would be made up of
dialogues among a series of local perspectives on cosmopolitanism, with no unifying centre. If,
as they argue, we were to take cosmopolitanism as a way of looking at the world, this would
require us to take the perspective of the world in our considerations; that is, we would need to
be cosmopolitan in our very practices in understanding what it was and is to be cosmopolitan.
Cosmopolitanism, as a sociological or historical category, they continue should be considered
as open and not pre-given in form or content: it ‘is not some known entity existing in the
world, with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Immanuel Kant, that simply awaits more
detailed description at the hands of scholarship’ (2000: 577). Rather, they suggest, we should
look at ‘how people have thought and acted beyond the local’ (2000: 586) in different places
and across time to generate new descriptions of cosmopolitanism.11
These would suggest new
11
See Lamont and Aksartova (2002) for one example in which this has been successfully undertaken.
Acknowledging that much of the literature on cosmopolitanism is either implicitly or explicitly associated with elites,
they seek ‘to explore ordinary cosmopolitanisms, defined as the strategies used by ordinary people to bridge
boundaries with people who are different from them’ (2002: 1).
10
practices, which in turn ‘may offer a better understanding of the theory and history of
cosmopolitanism’ (2000: 578).
The primary argument made by Pollock and others is that the very phenomenon of
cosmopolitanism is threatened by the work of purification that insists on regarding it as the
product of one culture, emerging from a centre and diffusing outwards. If we wish an inclusive
cosmopolitanism, it would have to be one outside a centred universalism. Mignolo, in putting
forward an argument for a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, similarly argues against the idea of a
‘cosmopolitanism that only connects from the centre of the large circle outwards’ (2000: 745).
His argument for decolonial understandings resonates with Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to
provincialize Europe, that is, to decentre Europe in our considerations. At the same time, we
would need to recognize contributions made in connections of which Europe had no part, as
well as connections suppressed in representing the history of European uniqueness. Contra
Pagden (2000), we do need to think of cosmopolitanism as something other than the values
emerging from a reflection on western liberal democracy (though, this is not to say that there
is nothing to be learned from such reflection). The task now is a provincialized
cosmopolitanism that can learn from others where we recognize that what they contribute is
not a confirmation of what we already know, but the bringing into being of new
understandings relevant to the worlds we inhabit together. These new understandings both
reconfigure our existing perceptions of the world, as well as inform the ways in which we live
in the world.
Some of what is required is captured in Homi Bhabha’s earlier work on postcolonialism. The
starting point for Bhabha’s (1994) explication of postcolonial theory is a history adequate to
the political conditions of the present. Those conditions are not simply informed by
understandings of ‘globalization’, but more specifically by an understanding of the postcolonial
global conditions which are rarely the starting point for sociological analyses (see Bhambra
2007b). As Seidman remarks, sociology’s emergence coincided with the high point of Western
imperialism, and yet, ‘the dynamics of empire were not incorporated into the basic categories,
models of explanation, and narratives of social development of the classical sociologists’
(1996: 314). The potential contribution to the sociological paradigm of events outside the west
(and the experiences of non-Western ‘others’) has not often been considered (see Chakrabarty
2000, Bhambra, 2007a). This is, in part, a consequence of the erasures that are implicit when
the remit of sociology is understood to be ‘modern societies’ – that is, societies engaged in
processes of modernization – where the ‘postcolonial’ is necessarily associated with ‘premodern’
societies, societies that have traditionally fallen to anthropology, or to the
interdisciplinary area of development studies. The association of cosmopolitanism with an
intellectual genealogy that begins with the ancient Greeks and is located in the modern West
similarly prevents any meaningful discussion of cosmopolitanism in a postcolonial context. As
Bhabha argues, however, shifting the frame through which we view the events of ‘modernity’,
or cosmopolitanism, forces us to consider the question of subaltern agency and ask: ‘what is
this “now” of modernity? Who defines this present from which we speak?’ (1994: 244).
11
This is not a version of multiple modernities, in that it does not offer an alternative other
modernity to be placed alongside those already seen to be existing. Rather, it calls on us to
interrogate the conceptual paradigm of modernity, as it has commonly been understood, from
the perspectives of those Others usually relegated to the margins, if included at all. These
Others, constituted ‘otherwise than modernity’ Bhabha argues, exist both in the global south
and the global north (1994: 6). Their perspectives are now taken to be central to
understanding modernity conceptually. The task, as Bhabha puts it, is to take responsibility for
the unspoken, unrepresented pasts within our cosmopolitan present and, in their renewal, to
interrupt, refigure, and re-create present understandings adequate to that past (1994: 7). One
aspect of this would be for the metropolitan centres of the West to confront their postcolonial
histories whereby the ‘influx of postwar migrants and refugees’ would be constituted as part
of ‘an indigenous or native narrative internal to [their] national identity’ (1994: 6 emphasis
added; see also Amin 2004). It is not only by movement across ‘borders’ that migrants might
be argued to express cosmopolitanism, but also in their very understanding of how those
borders came to be constituted and their involvement in reconceptualising understandings of
citizenship and belonging, that is, as cosmopolitan subjects within nation-state boundaries.12
This reconsideration of modernity does not relegate difference simply to cultural expression,
but calls upon that difference to make a difference to the narratives already in place.
For Bhabha, as for Edward Said (1978) before him, the social expression of ‘difference’ is to be
contextualized with the historical ‘emergence of community envisaged as a project’, that is ‘at
once a vision and a construction’ (1994: 3). As such, the question of difference is not to be
addressed simply through its multiple expressions, but by problematizing ‘the unity of the “us”
and the otherness of the “other”’ that produces these differences in an interconnected and
interdependent world (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 14). This is to be understood not in terms of
a community of individuals who happen perchance to live in an age of cosmopolitanism – that
is, individuals who, in Beck’s terms exemplify the cosmopolitan age because they ‘shop
internationally, work internationally, love internationally, marry internationally, research
internationally, grow up and are educated internationally (that is, multi-lingually), live and
think transnationally’ (2000: 80). Rather, they are a cosmopolitan community because of the
postcolonial history that brought them into being – they are economic and other migrants,
refugees, asylum seekers, temporary workers. Their cosmopolitanism is inextricably linked to
their (post)colonial past, present, and future. The cosmopolitanism of ‘now’ within the West,
then, has to be recognized as the outcome of a history that was colonial and then postcolonial;
a history to which Others have always contributed whether willingly or not. While there have
been few voices identifying a specifically ‘postcolonial’ Europe (see Hansen 2002, 2004,
Bhambra 2009), there has been an increasing focus on the seeming diversity and hybridity of
12
Thus, long before the ‘rediscovery’ of cosmopolitanism in Western discourse, minorities within Western
populations were expressing cosmopolitan aspirations in their engagement with wider anti-colonial struggles. For
example, Black American citizens were cosmopolitan in their pan-African engagements, while their fellow citizens
were engaged with national expressions of citizenship (see Singh 2004). For a discussion of the limits of
cosmopolitanism in addressing the situation of refugees and asylum seekers as they attempt to challenge nationstate
border controls, see Morris (2009).
12
European cultural constellations that moves us beyond the stale binaries of much of the
literature in this area (see Gilroy 1993, 2003, Stevenson 2006).
Cosmopolitanism, of course, is not simply at issue in colonial and postcolonial migration to the
West (see, Yeĝenoĝlu 2005). The exercise of coloniality itself, as Mignolo (2000) has argued,
needs to be considered as an important locus of cosmopolitanism, both in intent as well as
practice. Mignolo begins his articulation of a critical cosmopolitanism, not from the Greeks, but
in the commercial circuits that brought together ‘the Spanish Crown with capitalist
entrepreneurs from Genoa, with Christian missionaries, with Amerindian elites, and with
African slaves’ (2000: 725). He presents a philosophical consideration of cosmopolitanism that
engages with European thinkers, but does so from the perspective of the historical debates on
the Spanish engagement with the Amerindians in the sixteenth century. By bringing attention
to otherwise ‘silenced and marginalized voices’ (2000: 736) within contemporary discussions of
cosmopolitanism, Mignolo enriches the debate and opens up productive avenues for further
exploring the question of how we live with and across differences. As he argues, critical
cosmopolitanism must be truly dialogic where ‘everyone participates instead of “being
participated”’ (2000: 744); that is, he is not arguing for the inclusion of Others in our
conversations, but rather, for a recognition of their already existing participation, if only we
could listen (see, Back 2009).
Beck’s version of cosmopolitanism is an expression of cultural Eurocentrism masquerading as
potential global inclusivity. As has been demonstrated, however, this inclusivity is dependent
upon Them being included in Our designs. It is not an inclusivity that recognizes the Other as
already constitutive of, if marginalized within, the frameworks of understanding. Further, while
Beck uses the approach of multiple modernities to present the distinctiveness of the present
age over preceding ones, he does not deal with the contradiction this poses for his
commitment to his version of cosmopolitanism. Multiple modernities are predicated on an
understanding of different cultures such that their vision of the global is constituted as a form
of global multiculturalism. To the extent that Beck sets up cosmopolitanism in opposition to
multiculturalism he denies the basis for the very global age he describes. Concluding an article
on ‘Understanding the Real Europe’, Beck writes that ‘*m+ore than anywhere else in the world,
Europe shows … Europe teaches … The catchphrase for the future might be Move over
America – Europe is back’ (2003: np; my emphasis). Perhaps what is also needed, however, is
for Europe to listen, and to learn, for Europe and the United States, alike, to move over. A
cosmopolitan sociology that was open to different voices would be one that provincialized
European understandings, not one based on the perpetuation of ‘triumphalist’ ideas of
Europe’s singular contribution to world society.
Provincialising cosmopolitanism would require both a de-centring of dominant understandings
of cosmopolitanism as well as an acknowledgement of understandings of cosmopolitanism
outside of the otherwise canonical frame of reference exemplified by European thought and
practice. This would need to be done through an address of global histories and
interconnected experiences that requires ‘both critique and the production of a different
13
archive of knowledge’ (Featherstone and Venn 2006: 4). New understandings of such
conceptual issues, however, cannot simply be added to already existing ones without in some
way calling into question the legitimacy and validity of the previously accepted parameters –
both historical and ethical. As such, a more thorough-going critique is needed, one which goes
beyond de-centring to transforming. The provincialising of cosmopolitanism is not just a
different interpretation of the same ideas, but the bringing into being of new understandings.
14
Bibliography
Ahiska, M. 2003. ‘Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern,’ The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Spring/Summer 102 (2-3), 351-79
Amin, A. 2004. ‘Multi-Ethnicity and the Idea of Europe,’ Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2): 1-24
Arnason, J. P. 2000. ‘Communism and Modernity,’ Daedalus: Multiple Modernities 129 (1), 61-
90
Arnason, J. P. 2003. ‘Entangled Communisms: Imperial Revolutions in Russia and China,’
European Journal of Social Theory 6 (3), 307-25
Baban, F. and Keyman, F. 2008. ‘Turkey and Postnational Europe: Challenges for the
Cosmopolitan,’ European Journal of Social Theory 11 (1), 107-124
Back, L. 2009. ‘Global Attentiveness and the Sociological Ear,’ Sociological Research Online, 14
(4), http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/14.html
BBC 2010. ‘France MPs' report backs Muslim face veil ban’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8480161.stm
Beck, U. 2000. ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity,’
British Journal of Sociology 51 (1), 79-105
Beck, U. 2002. ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,’ Theory Culture Society 19 (1–2),
17–44
Beck, U. 2003. ‘Understanding the Real Europe,’ Dissent summer
Beck, U. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision Cambridge, Polity Press
Beck, U. and Grande, E. 2007. ‘Cosmopolitanism: Europe's Way Out of Crisis,’ European Journal
of Social Theory 10 (1), 67-85
Beck, U. and Sznaider, N. 2006. ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A
Research Agenda,’ The British Journal of Sociology 57 (1), 1-23
Bhabha, H.K. 1994. The Location of Culture London, Routledge
Bhambra, G.K. 2007a. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination
Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan
Bhambra, G.K. 2007b. ‘Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another ‘Missing’ Revolution?,’
Sociology 41 (5), 871-84
Bhambra, G. K. 2009. ‘Postcolonial Europe: Or, Understanding Europe in Times of the
Postcolonial’ in Chris Rumford (ed.) Sage Handbook of European Studies chapter 5
Sage, London
Bhambra, G. K. 2010. ‘Sociology after Postcolonialism: Provincialized Cosmopolitanism and
Connected Sociologies’ in M. Boatcă, S. Costa, E. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (eds)
Decolonizing European Sociology: Trans-disciplinary Approaches Aldershot, Ashgate
Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
Princeton, Princeton University Press
Chernilo, D. 2007. A Social Theory of the Nation-State: Beyond Methodological Nationalism
London, Routledge
Daedalus 1998. Special Issue on ‘Early Modernities’ 127 (3)
Daedalus 2000. Special Issue on ‘Multiple Modernities’ 129 (1)
Eisenstadt, S.N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities,’ Daedalus: Multiple Modernities 129 (1), 1-29
15
Eisenstadt, S. N. 2001. ‘The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity: Modernity as a Distinct
Civilization,’ International Sociology 16 (3), 320-40
Eisenstadt, S.N. and Schluchter, W. 1998. ‚Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities – A
Comparative View,’ Daedalus: Early Modernities 127 (3), 1-18
Ehrkamp, P. and H. Leitner 2003. ‘Beyond National Citizenship: Turkish Immigrants and the
(Re)Construction of Citizenship in Germany,’ Urban Geography 24 (2), 127-46
Featherstone, M. and Venn, C. 2006. ‘Problematizing Global Knowledge and the New
Encyclopaedia Project: An Introduction,’ Theory, Culture, and Society 23 (2-3), 1-20
Fine, R. 2007. Cosmopolitanism London, Routledge
Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness Cambridge, Harvard
University Press
Gilroy, P. 2003. ‘‘Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night’: Homogenous Community and the
Planetary Aspect,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (3), 261-76
Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson 1992. ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference,’ Cultural Anthropology 7 (1), 6-23
Gutmann, A. (ed.) 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition Princeton,
Princeton University Press
Hansen, P. 2002. ‘European Integration, European Identity and the Colonial Connection,’
European Journal of Social Theory 5 (4), 483-98
Hansen, P. 2004. ‘In the Name of Europe,’ Race and Class 45 (3), 49-62
Holmwood, J. 1997. ‘Postmodernity, Citizenship and Inequality: Social Theory in “the New
Consumer Society”’ in P. Sulkunen, J. Holmwood, H. Radner, G. Schulze, (eds)
Constructing the New Consumer Society London, Macmillan Pp. 58-78
Holmwood, J. 2000, ‘Europe and the “Americanization” of British Social Policy,’ European
Societies 2 (4), 453-82
Lamont, M. and Aksartova, S. 2002. ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial
Boundaries among Working-Class Men,’ Theory, Culture and Society 19 (4), 1-25
Loomba, A. 1998. Colonialism / Postcolonialism London, Routledge
Mignolo, W. D. 2000. ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical
Cosmopolitanism,’ Public Culture 12 (3), 721-48
Morris, L. 2009. ‘An Emergent Cosmopolitan Paradigm? Asylum, Welfare and Human Rights,’
British Journal of Sociology 60 (2), 215-35
Muthu, S. 2003. Enlightenment against Empire Princeton, Princeton University Press
Nussbaum, M (ed.) 1996. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism Boston,
Beacon Press
Pagden, A. 2000. ‘Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism,’
Constellations 7 (1), 3-22
Parker, O. 2009. ‘“Cosmopolitan Europe” and the EU-Turkey Question: The Politics of a
“Common Destiny”,’ Journal of European Public Policy 16 (7), 1085-1101
Pollock, S., Bhabha, H.K., Breckenbridge, C.A. and Chakrabarty, D. 2000. ‘Cosmopolitanisms,’
Public Culture 12 (3), 577-89
Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient London, Routledge and Kegan
Paul Ltd
16
Saharso, S. 2007. ‘Headscarves: A Comparison of Public Thought and Public Policy in Germany
and the Netherlands,’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 10
(4), 513-30
Seidman, S. 1996. ‘Empire and Knowledge: More Troubles, New Opportunities for Sociology,’
Contemporary Sociology 25 (3), 313-16
Shilliam, R. 2006. ‘What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation of Sovereignty
Debate,’ Review of International Studies 32 (3), 379-400
Singh, Nikhil 2004. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
Cambridge, Harvard University Press
Stevenson, N. 2002. 'Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship,’ Sociological Research
Online 7 ( 1) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/1/stevenson.html
Stevenson, N. 2006. ‘European Cosmopolitan Solidarity: Questions of Citizenship, Difference,
and Post-Materialism,’ European Journal of Social Theory 9 (4), 485-500
Trouillot, M-R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Beacon Press,
Boston
Vertovec, S. and Cohen R. (eds) 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and
Practice Oxford, Oxford University Press
Wagner, P. 2001. Theorizing Modernity: Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory
London, Sage
Weber, B. 1995. ‘Immigration and Politics in Germany,’ The Journal of the International
Institute 2 (3), spring
Wittrock, B. 1998. ‘Early Modernities: Varieties and Transitions,’ Daedalus: Early Modernities,
summer 127 (3), 19-40
Yeĝenoĝlu, M. 2005. ‘Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in a Globalized World,’ Ethnic and
Racial Studies 28 (1), 103-131