These are dark times for cosmopolitans. Discontent
with globalization and resentment towards minorities, immigrants, and
intellectuals have fueled the rise of nationalism in Europe and the United States. Dressed in
faux-neutral neologisms like “post-truth” and “alt-right,” propaganda, racism,
and xenophobia have elbowed their way back into the mainstream. And
cosmopolitans are being portrayed as a detached and indulgent elite.
Cosmopolitanism—the
aspiration to become a citizen of the world—has become a tainted luxury good.
It might seem prudent,
in this climate, to take distance from cosmopolitanism. That choice, however,
leaves a distorted image of cosmopolitanism unchallenged and lets it become a
casualty in the clash between nationalism and globalization. We must do better
than that. If we want to fend off the globalization of ultra-nationalism, now
is the time to take a stand for cosmopolitanism—extricating its broadminded
attitude from its elitist parody, and putting it to work to temper nationalism
and humanize globalization.
Taking such stand begins
with remembering where contemporary cosmopolitanism came from and acknowledging
how it lost its way.
How We Became Cosmopolitans
I became a cosmopolitan
on August 5th, 1943, three decades
before I was born. That afternoon, the Allies entered my hometown in southern
Italy. The city was on its knees, but the children were jubilant. The war was
beginning to end, and freedom had the taste of American chocolate bars.
Soldiers threw them to the kids on the roadside as they rode their jeeps
through town. My mother never forgot the one she caught.
Wartime stories like
that were common when I was growing up, but they felt distant from my world and
my life. It took me decades to realize how much they shaped both. Like many
middle-class Europeans of their generation, my parents—who had both been first
in their families to go to high school, who spent their whole adult lives in
the same place, who never spoke a foreign language—insisted that I learn
English and travel.
My parents embodied a
distinction that the sociologist Robert Merton made in the 1950s studying a small American town. The town’s influential members, he found, were
either “locals” or “cosmopolitans.” The locals’ influence rested on strong ties
to the town and relationships within it. The cosmopolitans’ rested on their
knowledge and expertise. If locals could not imagine a life elsewhere,
cosmopolitans seemed to be always preparing for it. Neither, however, left much
and the town benefited from the contribution of both. That was back then. My
generation’s cosmopolitans were urged to be more mobile.
So, at age 14, I found
myself living and studying for a month with a small crowd of Spanish, French,
and Germans in a small town in the north of England. It was the first time I
felt at home in a place where I did not belong—or more precisely, that I felt
like I belonged in a place I had not come from. That is how I began becoming a
European. A few years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was glorious to be
coming of age as one. The promise of cosmopolitanism as a way to a better life
might have been at its zenith, but it seemed only dawn. For a moment, it really
felt as if we were ending history, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous words, ushering the triumph of liberal democracy worldwide.
Big cities all over the
world were swelling up with first-generation cosmopolitans like me, fleeing
provincial worldviews. We flocked to places that promised not to put us in our
place. We were curious invaders of each other’s countries. A peaceful army sent
to dismantle nationalism by elders who’d been hurt by it.
My parents’ generation
blessed, if ambivalently, our cosmopolitanism because it was an insurance
policy as much as an aspiration. Born out of the rubble of nationalism, it was
primarily a humanistic project—not an economic one. It emphasized commonality
of experience and tolerance of differences. It should make us realize people
unlike us were humans just like us, and replace superstition and suspicion—the
pillars of tribalism—with curiosity and compassion. If we would study, dine,
and make out with peers from other countries, we would be less likely to bomb
each other in the future. When the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2012, I felt that my mum and dad should get a piece of it—and keep it next
to the chip of Berlin Wall I had brought home two decades before.
By then, I was married
to a woman born 15 miles from that first English town I lived in. Our parents
did not share a language but had similar values. We taught in an academic
institution that helps people live working lives across borders. Our children
gave complicated answers to the simple question, “Where are you from?” and felt
at home in a country that neither of us grew up in. And we had become alert to
the skepticism about, and hostility towards, our way of life. Over the past few
years, those have only grown.
Having spent my life trying to become an educated
cosmopolitan, I now fear that my generation has failed at cosmopolitanism, or
worse, that we have failed cosmopolitanism.
Foot Soldiers of Globalization
The animosity between
locals and cosmopolitans is nothing new. It has shaped Western civilization since Ancient Greece. Up to Merton’s time, however, locals and
cosmopolitans, remained strange bedfellows. Now, it seems, they have split up,
amplifying their differences and becoming locals in different tribes—a nationalist and a globalist one. Cosmopolitans have built their own tribe. A tribe of
people unfit for tribalism, I once wrote. An
inclusive, dispersed tribe—if such a thing exists—connected by unlimited international
data plans and cheap airfare. But a tribe nonetheless. We commandeered big
cities and settled tolerant enclaves like coffee shops, universities, and most
of all, multinational corporations that let us make a living as we moved
around.
While its origin was
political, cosmopolitanism made us unfit for national government. Our lives
were too mobile, our allegiances too unclear, our relationship to the state too
ambivalent for us to be its trustworthy standard bearers. A cosmopolitan
attitude comes with suspicion of people and politicians too tied to nation
states, and makes us look suspicious to them in turn. But if politics could not
pin us down, business set us up.
When globalization took
off, we were ready. We had the mindset and skills needed to deal with and, let
us face it, profit from the opening up of global markets. Cosmopolitan
enthusiasm was redirected from a humanistic project to an economic one. We
stopped taking marching orders from John Lennon and started taking them from
Jack Welch. If most political leaders found imagining no countries very hard to
do, it seemed almost too easy for corporate leaders to do so. Thus we became
foot soldiers of globalization, setting out to turn the world into one of our
cities. In hindsight, that was not just overreach. It was a betrayal of the
very essence of cosmopolitanism: being a citizen of a varied world.
The wave of nationalism
sweeping through the globe has been framed as a rejection of and a reaction to
globalization. Some analysts focus on the economic devastation that
globalization has brought to Western middle classes. Others focus on the threat that it poses to local social hierarchies and worldviews. Seen that way, nationalism is a blunt tool for those
hurt by the cultural and economic blows of globalization to strike back. A
blunt old tool, it must be noted, familiar to the kind of provincial
masculinity that has held power for centuries, and resents how a changing world imperils its local status.
What Is To Be Done?
Where does that leave
cosmopolitans? Caught between the exhortation to empathize with nationalists,
out of guilt for having left them behind, and the temptation to double down on
globalization and build up de facto city-states out of comfort and fear.
Personally, I don’t lack
empathy for angry nationalists. I count many among my family and friends. What
I lack is sympathy for their prejudices and faith in the economic benefits of
isolationism. Similarly, I have little sympathy for the evangelism and
isolationism of worried globalists, many of whom I also count as family and
friends.
Given where I come from
and where I have got to, however, it is hard for me to choose a side. And I
believe that choosing one, if one can choose at all, will not do anyone much
good. Tribes seldom coexist peacefully and never for long—and picking a tribe
gives cosmopolitanism away just when we need it most.
While they might sound
similar, cosmopolitanism is not the same as globalization. One is a fragile
personal attitude, the other is a relentless socio-economic force. One strives
to humanize the different, the other to homogenize it. One celebrates
curiosity, the other convenience. (Curiosity is often inconvenient.) One is
embracing, the other expansive. One is easy to lose, the other hard to stop.
Nationalism and globalization are more similar to each other than to
cosmopolitanism, that way. And cosmopolitanism is what might help us counter
nationalism and humanize globalization, pushing it to be a vehicle of freedom
and opportunity for most, not just a privileged few.
A cosmopolitan tribe,
however, preoccupied with protecting hard-earned cultural advances and economic
advantages, will only make things worse. There is neither an undo button for
globalization, nor a wall high enough to keep it at bay. But the challenge to
humanize globalization is more urgent than ever—and it is both cultural and
economic. Doing so requires doubling down on cosmopolitanism, reclaiming
its humanistic roots and acknowledging that its promise is far from fulfilled.
There is more work to do.
Make Cosmopolitanism
Good Again
One November morning last year, I found myself asking
my mum about her childhood in the war. The night before, a terrorist attack had
devastated a cosmopolitan neighborhood in Paris, not
far from where I live. Watching the news, I learned that the German football
team had not been able to leave the stadium where they were playing France when
the terrorists hit. The French team had spent the night in the locker room too, in solidarity.
For some reason, that
image stayed with me. When she called to ask if we were safe, I asked my mother
if she could have ever imagined such camaraderie between French and German
athletes when she was a child. “Of course I couldn’t have,” she replied.
“Neither could I have imagined the freedoms you have enjoyed for decades, nor
your way of life.”
I seldom think of my
mother as daring, but I did then. Her generation dared to dream the
unimaginable for mine and set us on a path to make it real.
It also struck me that,
in many ways, our cosmopolitan enclaves are like that locker room in Paris. It
took good people the best part of a century to build them. We will lose them if
we just guard them. If we regard them as safe bubbles and do not have the
courage to venture out and work on building many more—easier to get into,
fairer, and roomier too.
In short, instead of
just being welcoming, cosmopolitans must keep reaching out. Welcoming without
reaching out, or expecting to be always welcome, is what cosmopolitans do when
they get lazy or entitled. It’s time to stop being either.
Cosmopolitanism thrives
outside bubbles. Inside any bubble, it soon dies. And if we let cosmopolitanism
become a casualty of the conflict between nationalism and globalization, we
will have betrayed the dreams and wasted the work of two generations. Our
humanity, if not humanity—our worlds, if not the world—are at stake.
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