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Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary Craig Calhoun Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary Article (Published version) (Refereed) Original citation: Calhoun, Craig (2008) Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary. Daedalus, 137 (3). pp. 105-114. ISSN 0011-5266 DOI: 10.1162/daed.2008.137.3.105 © 2008 American Academy of Arts and Sciences This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42642/ Available in LSE Research Online: November 2012 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. Craig Calhoun Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary One day in the early 1980s, I was rid- to see who else might be passing through ing in the backseat of an old Land Rover the seemingly empty desert. My curiosi- through the desert southwest of Khar- ty was mild–I had been in the Sudan toum. There was no road, but the land- only a month or two and didn’t think I’d scape, mostly flat, was marked by the know anyone–until I realized that in occasional saint’s tomb distinctive to fact I did know the face looking back at Sudanese Islam. My companions and I me through the window of the other hadn’t seen another vehicle for a couple Land Rover. It was my friend Vaughan, of hours when one appeared as a tiny dot an Oxford classmate from years earlier. on the horizon. It was headed our way, We both shouted and our cars stopped. and as is typical both cars slowed down The reunion was a pleasure. It seemed very old-school, and we laughed about Craig Calhoun is President of the Social Science how many Oxford classmates of differ- Research Council and University Professor of the ent generations had run into each oth- Social Sciences at New York University. Among er in the Sudan over the last 150 years. his publications are “Lessons of Empire” (2005), More than a few, I’m sure, each taking “Understanding September 11” (2002), “Han- pleasure in his or her cosmopolitanism nah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics” (1997), (and more than a few in colonialism, “Nationalism” (1997), “Critical Social Theory: too). Culture, History, and the Challenge of Differ- Vaughan and I caught up on families ence” (1995), and the prize-winning study of the and careers and work on multiple conti- Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 “Neither nents. Being citizens of the world was Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle going well for both of us. Vaughan was for Democracy in China” (1994). He has served an attorney by the time of our reconnec- as editor in chief of the Oxford “Dictionary of tion, working for Chevron, which was the Social Sciences” and, from 1977 to 1996, developing oil ½elds near Bentiu in the taught at the University of North Carolina at Southern Sudan. A university professor Chapel Hill, eventually serving as Dean of the supported by the Kellogg Foundation, I Graduate School and Founding Director of the had come to Sudan on the heels of trav- University Center for International Studies. eling through China and was teaching at the University of Khartoum while my © 2008 by the American Academy of Arts wife Pam worked for the U.S. State De- & Sciences partment’s Of½ce of Refugee Affairs. Dædalus Summer 2008 105 Craig She would go on to a career in the Unit- imagine that their experience of global Calhoun ed Nations. Vaughan’s wife Mary be- mobility and connection is available to on cosmopoli- came a photographer and founded a sup- all, if only everyone would “be” cosmo- tanism port group for expatriates. politan. We need continually to remind Our little group exempli½ed much of ourselves of the extent to which felt cos- the cosmopolitanism that was sweep- mopolitanism depends on privilege. As ing up a wide variety of young profes- Anthony Appiah suggests, “Celebrations sionals and activists in a global network of the ‘cosmopolitan’ can suggest an of relief work, diplomacy, corporate in- unpleasant posture of superiority to- vestments, journalism, and advocacy. wards the putative provincial.”1 In oth- “Small world!” at least one of us ex- er words, the genuinely attractive eth- claimed tritely. Indeed it is for those ical orientation toward a common hu- equipped to navigate as we were. I’m man community of fate can be under- sure it didn’t seem small in the same mined by an unattractive self-congratu- way for the Eritrean refugees seeking lation and lack of self-critical awareness shelter in Sudan from ½ghting to the of privilege. east or, in some cases, being resettled in Europe or America. Cosmopolitanism is in fashion. The Eritreans who settled in the United trend started in the 1990s, after the end States also found old friends, sometimes of the cold war and amid intensifying former comrades in arms and often dis- globalization. Cosmopolitan is now tant relatives: they, too, inhabited a a compliment for the suave in a way it global world. In fact the Eritreans suc- hadn’t been since the 1920s or at least cessful in navigating the maze of inter- the 1960s, when in cold war spirit spies national organizations and national gov- epitomized the cosmopolitan. The Cos- ernments to reach Europe or the United mopolitan is a popular drink, a vodka- States were generally the more cosmo- based cocktail, flavored with orange and politan among the migrants. They knew cranberry, made famous as the favorite of far-flung events and appreciated cul- drink of the girls on tv’s Sex and the tural difference; they were more educat- City.2 Those self-styled girls didn’t show ed than their fellow nationals; they had much interest in the political philosophy more experience with cities and com- plex organizations. But they were less 1 Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New prone than the Western aid workers York: Norton, 2006), xiii. they met to think of globalization as a matter of nations fading into a border- 2 One of the several bartenders with claims to less world. The refugees made connec- have invented the Cosmopolitan, Toby Ceccini tions across long distances, but they rec- of the Odeon in New York’s Tribeca, entitled ognized these as particular, speci½c con- his autobiography Cosmopolitan: A Bartender’s Story (New York: Broadway, 2004)–and the nections and didn’t confuse them for pun is intentional. Tribeca is the New York unambiguous tokens of a universalistic neighborhood most identi½ed with the 1990s type: global connections. boom, but the boom was, in general, identi- Common approaches to the idea of ½ed with the Silicon Valley–apt then that the cosmopolitanism encourage people like blogging consensus gives San Francisco the strongest claim on inventing the drink of the Vaughan and me to confuse the privi- decade. But only in New York did the relevant leged speci½city of our mobility for uni- bartender write his autobiography. It was that versality. It is easy for the privileged to sort of decade. 106 Dædalus Summer 2008 of globalization or Kantian ethics; they patory institutions adequate to contem- Cosmopoli- were cultural descendants of Helen Gur- porary global integration, especially out- tanism in the modern ley Brown, who reinvented Cosmopolitan side the nation-state framework. Some- social imag- magazine in the 1960s. times it is claimed for an ethical orienta- inary Now, as then, cosmopolitanism lives tion of individuals–each should think a double life as a pop cultural evocation and act with strong concern for all hu- of openness to a larger world and a more manity–at yet other times it is claimed systematic and academic claim about for a stylistic capacity to incorporate the moral signi½cance of transcending diverse influences or for a psychological the local, even achieving the universal. capacity to feel at ease amid difference Both have flourished, especially in good and appreciate diversity. Used some- times and amid optimism about global- times for all projects that reach beyond ization. (Cosmo, as the magazine came the local (with some slippage depending to be called, was founded in 1886, riding on whether the local means the village or the wave of a stock market boom not the nation-state), it is used other times unlike those of the 1920s and the 1990s.) for strongly holistic visions of global Cosmopolitanism, though, is not totality, like the notion of a community merely a matter of cocktails or market of risk imposed by potential for nuclear ebbs and flows. It’s what we praise in or environmental disaster. Cosmopoli- those who read novelists from every tan can also describe cities or whole continent, or in the audiences and per- countries. New York or London, con- formers of world music; it’s the aspira- temporary Delhi or historical Alexandria tion of advocates for global justice and gain their vitality and character not from the claim of managers of multinational the similarities of their residents but businesses. Campaigners on behalf of from the concrete ways in which they migrants urge cosmopolitan legal re- have learned to interact across lines of forms out of both concern for immi- ethnic, religious, national, linguistic, and grants and belief that openness to peo- other identities.
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