Introduction

What is 'Cosmopolitan' about the Cosmopolitan Vision

What makes the cosmopolitan outlook 'cosmopolitan'? What do we mean by 'cosmopolitanism'? This word evokes at once the most marvellous and the most terrible histories.

The greatest and most productive controversies of the European Enlightenment are connected with it, but they have long since been forgotten. Some, such as Heinrich Laube in the middle of the nineteenth century, invoked the therapeutic value of the fatherland against the allegedly excessive demands of cosmopolitanism: 'Patriotism is one-sided and petty, but it is practical, useful, joyous and comforting; cosmopolitanism is splendid, large, but for a human being almost too large; the idea is beautiful, but the result in this life is inner anguish' (1973: 88). Cosmopolitanism is in the end just a beautiful idea: 'Nowadays in our concern for humanity we tend to lose sight of human beings; and in this time of conflagrations, cannons and fiery speeches this is abject. The idea is a beautiful thing, too large for almost everybody, and it remains a mere idea. If it does not take on a concrete individual form, it might as well have never existed' (ibid.: 131).

Heinrich Heine, by contrast, who regarded himself as an embodiment of cosmopolitanism, prophesied around the same time 'that in the end this will become the universal conviction among Europeans, and . . . it has a greater future than our German chauvinists, these mere mortals who belong to the past' (1997: 710). He criticized German patriotism, which in his view involved 'a narrowing of the heart, which contracts like leather in the cold, and hatred of all things foreign - a desire no longer to be a world citizen or a European but merely a narrow German.' He excoriated 'the shabby, coarse, unwashed opposition to a sentiment which is the most splendid and sacred thing Germany has produced, that is, opposition to the humanity, the universal brotherhood of man, the cosmopolitanism to which our great minds, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul and all educated people in Germany have always paid homage' (ibid.: 379). (These quotations, like many others in this introduction, are taken from Thielking 2000.)

Nowadays there is no point in arguing over whether patriotism, although practical, is too petty, whereas cosmopolitanism, by contrast, is splendid, but cold and unliveable. The important fact now is that the human condition has itself become cosmopolitan. To illustrate this thesis we need only highlight the fact that the most recent avatar in the genealogy of global risks, the threat of terror, also knows no borders. The same is true of the protest against the war in Iraq. For the first time a war was treated as an event in global domestic politics, with the whole of humanity participating simultaneously through the mass media, even as it threatened to shatter the Atlantic alliance. More generally, the paradox that resistance against globalization itself produces political globalization has been apparent for some time. The globalization of politics, economic relations, law, culture, and communication and interaction networks spurs controversy; indeed, the shock generated by global risks continually gives rise to worldwide political publics.

In this way cosmopolitanism has ceased to be merely a controversial rational idea; in however distorted a form, it has left the realm of philosophical castles in the air and has entered reality. Indeed, it has become the defining feature of a new era, the era of reflexive modernity, in which national borders and differences are dissolving and must be renegotiated in accordance with the logic of a 'politics of politics'. This is why a world that has become cosmopolitan urgently demands a new standpoint, the cosmopolitan outlook, from which we can grasp the social and political realities in which we live and act. Thus the cosmopolitan outlook is both the presupposition and the result of a conceptual reconfiguration of our modes of perception.

The national outlook - or, in technical terms, methodological nationalism - opposes this structural transformation. Until now it has been dominant in sociology and in the other social sciences, such as history, political science and economics, which analysed societies on the assumption that they are nationally structured. The result was a system of nation-states and corresponding national sociologies that define their specific societies in terms of concepts associated with the nation-state. For the national outlook, the nation-state creates and controls the 'container' of society, and thereby at the same time prescribes the limits of 'sociology'.

Cosmopolitanism which has taken up residence in reality is a vital theme of European civilization and European consciousness and beyond that of global experience. For in the cosmopolitan outlook, methodologically understood, there resides the latent potential to break out of the self-centred narcissism of the national outlook and the dull incomprehension with which it infects thought and action, and thereby enlighten human beings concerning the real, internal cosmopolitanization of their lifeworlds and institutions.

What enables and empowers the concept of cosmopolitanism to perform this task? Paradoxically, two contradictory tendencies: the fact that it represents an age-old, untapped and unexhausted tradition, and the fact that it has had a long and painful history. That cosmopolitanism has been forgotten, that it has been transformed and debased into a pejorative concept, is to be ascribed to its involuntary association with the Holocaust and the Stalinist Gulag. In the collective symbolic system of the Nazis, 'cosmopolitan' was synonymous with a death sentence. All victims of the planned mass murder were portrayed as 'cosmopolitans'; and this death sentence was extended to the word, which in its own way succumbed to the same fate. The Nazis said 'Jew' and meant 'cosmopolitan'; the Stalinists said 'cosmopolitan' and meant 'Jew'. Consequently, 'cosmopolitans' are to this day regarded in many countries as something between vagabonds, enemies and insects who can or even must be banished, demonized or destroyed.

Adorno thought that one cannot write poems after Auschwitz. However, the contrary also holds: all poems speak or remain silent about Auschwitz.

Which contemporary author is not an author of the Holocaust? What I mean is that the Holocaust does not have to be made an explicit theme for us to sense the under-current of trauma that has haunted modern European art for decades. I would go even further: I know of no genuinely good and authentic art in which one cannot discern such a rupture, like someone shattered and disoriented after sleep haunted by nightmares. For me the Holocaust represents the human situation, the terminus of the great adventure at which Europeans have arrived after two thousand years of ethical and moral culture.

Imre Kertész also stresses the power of this negative experience to found new traditions: 'In my view, when I consider the traumatic impact of Auschwitz I touch on the fundamental question of the viability and creative energy of present-day humanity; which means that, in reflecting on Auschwitz, I am, perhaps paradoxically, thinking about the future rather than the past' (Kertész 2003: 2, 51, 255).

To paraphrase Gottfried Benn - 'Words, words - names! They need only take wing and the millennia fall away with their flight' - the name 'cosmopolitanism' need only take wing and the European trauma will fall away with its flight. This lends it a sober seriousness and lightness, a sharpness and penetration, by which it may succeed in breaking open the iron conceptual cage of methodological nationalism and reveal how, and to what extent, global reality can become cosmopolitan, thereby rendering it visible, comprehensible and even liveable.

What do we mean, then, by the 'cosmopolitan outlook'? Global sense, a sense of boundarylessness. An everyday, historically alert, reflexive awareness of ambivalences in a milieu of blurring differentiations and cultural contradictions. It reveals not just the 'anguish' but also the possibility of shaping one's life and social relations under conditions of cultural mixture. It is simultaneously a sceptical, disillusioned, self-critical outlook. Nothing can show this better than a couple of examples.

Cosmopolitan identities, or the logic of inclusive differentiation

In sociological research there is currently much talk of new identities, including the demonstrative reassertion of national, ethnic and local identities all over the world. What is new about them becomes clear when we examine their peculiarities. They are identities which are perhaps too quickly labelled as 'neonational' but which, in contrast to the explosive fascistic nationalisms of the twentieth century, do not aim at ideological and military conquests beyond their own borders. These are introverted forms of nationalism which oppose the 'invasion' of the global world by turning inwards, though 'introverted' here should not be confused with 'harmless'. For these domestic nationalisms do in fact foster an...