The Concept of Cosmopolitanism - Essay Example

"COSMOPOLITANISM" Cosmopolitanism is said to be the concept to where humanity belongs to a single community perhaps based on shared morality. This may simply refer to an inclusive morality, shared economic relationships of nations, and/or political structures that covers different nations. There transpire mutual respect among individuals belonging to a cosmopolitan community. Someone who adheres to this idea is referred to as a cosmopolite. Furthermore, this said community can also be understood as an elite club, one that is solely based on financial privilege and capabilities. In this reference, the cosmopolite has some advantages that might include personal and political emancipations and freedoms over less economically privileged individuals. The philosophical significance in cosmopolitanism lies in its challenge to generally recognize attachments to fellow-citizens, parochially shared cultures, the local state, and the like. In Ancient Greece the term Cosmopolite meant citizen of the world. The opus of the Greek term, cosmopolis, already indicates this unsolved stress: cosmos, an accepted universal order, is related to polis, society's inconsistent order. As a result, from the Greek democratic city-state to the international village, the idea of cosmopolite has been disturbed by questions such as whose world this actually is. Can the forces of homogenous external expansionist exist harmoniously with the heterogeneous localized ones A truly cosmopolitan answer would imply a permanent interest in difference and the recognition that internationals and locals depend on each other in order to exist. Since its beginning, cosmopolitanism has been a category marked by a need to negotiate with "others" and has reflected tensions between local and regional realities, ethnocentric and relativist perceptions, and particularism and universalism. Historically, cosmopolitanism has reflected the ideologies of different periods and modes of integration to larger, colonial or global, political units. As a category mostly held by elites, it often means the sophistication that results from familiarity with what is diverse. It has become an allegory for mobility, migrancy, sensitivity and forbearance to otherness, independence from specific authorities, and transcultural and intercontinental realities and claims. Its opposing concepts have often indicated racism, fixity, parochialism, restricted sovereignty, and commitment to a motherland or a nation-state. The history of the relationships between local and regional conceptions is old as human race. A strong inclination towards local reality, particularism, variety and context may oscillate, such as at the end of the Renaissance or during the Enlightenment, towards highlights on general formal timeless statements that pretend to be universal. Having its roots in Ancient Greece, cosmopolitanism has been disconnectedly present in western philosophical or political deliberations. The military conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) opened up the situations for the existence of a "world empire" that supposedly aimed at uniting East and West into an enlightened commonwealth. Greek became the lingua franca of the Hellenistic age (4th - 1st century B.C.), an age that lasted until the institution of Roman hegemony. Although cosmopolitanism was a subject for Greek philosophers before Stoicism, this school of philosophy established in Athens by 300 B.C. systemized cosmopolitan theories advancing revelations such as that of a world city, an ideal state where everyone would be a resident. Stoics were active in assessing Greek ethnocentrism towards barbarians and promoted a sense of brotherhood, a vision of humankind that was conveyed to Romans and predated Christianity's claims to universalism. Cosmopolitanism passed on to different political and intellectual elites from the Roman Empire through Medieval Europe. The Christian church played a chief role in the reproduction of cosmopolitan ideals and apparatuses by shaping two or more cultures sacred imagined communities and diffusing Latin as the language of a international European power. Some of the fundamental historical processes of long period that reinforced cosmopolitanism was related to the organization of Modernity, itself a civilizatory cosmopolitan concept and force. The printed book, a new expertise of communication developed in mid-15th century, put into question parochialisms in time and space, performing a classic cosmopolitan procedure: the development of the awareness of diversity and the construction of superior imagined communities. Sixteen-century European expansion gave inclinations to the world capitalist system through the integrations of new territories and populations, and established universal colonialism, multiplying the number of images of and contact with foreign others. Science, technology and reason began their trail to hegemony in the building of universalizing discussions. The sentiments cosmopolitanism induces are not confined to the western world. Humans are often interested in finding out where people come from. The ability to trace oneself or others in cultural, political and even geographical terms depends on a selection of classificatory categories that are culturally and historically molded. These modes of representing association to socio-cultural and political entities, means that bind people to groups and territories, can be conceived as a variety or concentric circles expanding from local, phenomenological immediacies, to more far-flung regional, national, international, and transnational levels of assimilation whose influence is unpredictably present in the lives of social agents. Given the current nature of world system integration, all these levels are concurrently present allowing feelings of numerous belonging, generally conceptualized in terms of "hybridism." Participation on one level triggers certain forms of social versions and adherences that are relational and circumstantial, and that defines unyielding or flexible identity boundaries and subject stances which in turn reveals social cooperation or competition. Someone can simultaneously hold affiliations to a district, a city, county, country, or continent or be a trans-emigrant in a city, or a global itinerant, an employee of a transnational company. Many forces have made modern cosmopolitanism possible: individualism with its relative indifference from immediate, tapered solidarities; global expansion of economic and political systems by commercial, military, and religious means: development of transportation and communication technologies that have aggravated time-space compression and, consequently, the movement of people, information and commodities on a terrestrial scale; growth of global cities and the enhancement of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity they have brought; the domain of the mass media especially of global television and the materialization of the information era with its world-wide virtual web; new political key-players such as non-governmental organizations that are fanned by international organizations and beliefs. Two criticisms are commonly made against cosmopolitanism: first, that it is an elitist social representation; second, that it is an improbable project. Arguments can be offered to correct both these aspects. The massive global migratory movements of the last two centuries generated large numbers of displaced people, multipart urban and national cultural segmentations, transnational networks that intermixed with the works of the mass media, created a well-known cosmopolitanism, facilitating procedures and visions of globalization from below. It is thus essential to discover the existence of several cosmopolitanisms. Corporate ones differ from popular cosmopolitanisms, which in turn differ from those of seasonal tourists, business tycoons or international scholars. There is no doubt that exposure to disparity and cultural diversity is swiftly increasing as is the number of trans-emigrants and distinguished groups, most often occupational ones, among whom commitment to a nation-state is not a priority. The efficiency of historical and sociological facts such as satellite integration, atomic bomb, the international connection of the stock markets, the European Union, and of new universalist beliefs such as environmentalism, and respect for human rights, together with the surfacing of new political subjects and social movements, has further enhanced expressions and actions of a new transnational activism. All this will result in the organization of a global civil society for some. Despite of the fact that these processes also produce relativist criticisms in the midst of the unequal global distribution of sovereign, they create a more tangible framework for cosmopolitanism than in any earlier period. Extraterritoriality is also a real challenge to legal systems firmly rooted on national legislations and sovereignty in a world system where imperial powers or multinational operations of military alliances. In the 1970's, with the conclusion of the nation-state system, cosmopolitanism clearly meant transcending this unit. More than ever, the discussion on cosmopolitanism became intimately interwoven with the arguments on trans-nationalism. Sometime in the late 1980's, the end of 'really existing socialism' helped to spread the image of a unified world, monopolized by a victorious capitalism under the hegemony of the powerful trans-national companies and economic capital. In the domain of flexible capitalism, globalization turned into a tune and much of the usual tensions inherent to cosmopolitanism as an idea were dramatized within the globalist framework of study, sometimes regarded as antithetic divisions, and sometimes approving and articulated terms. Notions of transnational classes, cultures, and individualities entered the horizon of the social sciences. Cosmopolitanism is repeatedly conflated with the colonial inclinations of a historical period; a fact that stresses its contradictory relationships with power. In the early 21st century, it will be increasingly criticized as a masked form of Americanism or of servicing transnational capital. Cosmopolitanism which is simply the need to exceed received loyalties and attachments in favor of imagining distant strangers, of constructing wider solidarities and global ideas of citizenship will continue to furnish, with its peacekeeper, democratic utopian reverberations, a powerful ideological avenue into the future of a seemingly shrinking world. Bibliography Bohem M H 1942 Cosmopolitanism. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences vol. 4: 457-461 Brennan T 1997 At Home in the World. Cosmopolitanism Now. 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