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Cosmopolitan Patriots Author(S): Kwame Anthony Appiah Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol Cosmopolitan Patriots Author(s): Kwame Anthony Appiah Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3, Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997), pp. 617-639 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344038 Accessed: 03/10/2010 17:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org CosmopolitanPatriots KwameAnthony Appiah My fatherwas a Ghanaianpatriot. He once publisheda columnin the Pioneernour local newspaperin Kumasi,under the headline"Is Ghana WorthDying For?' and I knowthat his hearts answerwas yes.l But he also lovedAsante, the regionof Ghanawhere he and I both grewup, a kingdomabsorbed within a Britishcolony and, then, a regionof a new multiethnicrepublic: a once-kingdomthat he and his fatheralso both lovedand served.And, like so manyAfrican nationalists of his classand generation,he alwaysloved an enchantingabstraction they called Africa. My thinking on these topics has evolved out of discussionsof multiculturalismover the past few years and was stimulatedprofoundly by an invitationto read and respond to Martha Nussbaum'sessay "Patriotismand Cosmopolitanism,"Boston Review, Oct.-Nov. 1994, pp. 3-6. I am particularlygrateful to Homi Bhabha, LawrenceBlum, RichardT. Ford, Jorge Garcia, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Amy Gutmann, Martha Minow, Maneesha Sinha, Charles Taylor,David Wilkins,and David Wong; and to those participantsin two conferences- "Textand Nation"at GeorgetownUniversity in April 1995, and the Annual Conferenceof the Associationof UniversityTeachers of Englishin South Africa(AUTESA), at the Universityof Natal, Pietermaritzburg,inJuly 1995 who commentedon earlierver- sions of these thoughts. Portions of this essay appeared in my essay "AgainstNational Culture,"in Textand Nation: Cross-DisciplinaryEssays on Culturaland National Identities, ed. Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer(Columbia, S.C., 1996), pp. 175-90. 1. This questionwas firstput to him byJ. B. Danquah,leader of the majoropposition party in KwameNkrumah's Ghana, in 1962. See Joseph Appiah,JoeAppiah: TheAutobiogra- phy of an African Patriot (New York,1990), p. 266. My father'scolumn is reprintedin Appiah, Antiochus Lives Again! (Political Essays of Joe Appiah), ed. Ivor Agyeman-Duah (Kumasi, Ghana, 1992). CriticalInquirw 23 (Spring1997) <) 1997 by The Universityof Chicago.0093-1896/97/2303-0001$01.00. All rightsreserved. 617 618 KwameAnthony Appiah CosmopolitanPatriots When he died, my sistersand I found a note he had draftedand neverquite finished, last words of loveand wisdom for his children.After a summaryreminder of our double ancestry-in Ghanaand in Eng- land he wrote:"Remember that you are citizensof the world."And he went on to tell us that this meantthat-wherever we chose to live, and, as citizensof the world,we could surelychoose to live anywhere we shouldmake sure we left that place "betterthan you found it.""Deep insideof me,"he went on, "isa greatlove for mankindand an abiding desireto see mankind,under God, fulfil its highestdestiny." The favoriteslander of the narrownationalist against us cosmopoli- tans is that we are rootless.What my fatherbelieved in, however,was a rootedcosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitanpatriotism. Like GertrudeStein, he thoughtthere was no point in roots if you couldn't takethem with you. "Americais my countryand Parisis my hometown," Steinsaid.2 My father would have understood her. We cosmopolitansface a familiarlitany of objections.Some, for ex- ample, have complainedthat our cosmopolitanismmust be parasitic: where,they ask, could Stein have gotten her rootsin a fullycosmopolitan world?Where, in otherwords, would all the diversitywe cosmopolitans celebratecome from in a worldwhere there were only cosmopolitans? The answeris straightforward:the cosmopolitanpatriot can enter- tainthe possibilityof a worldin whicheveryone is a rootedcosmopolitan, attachedto a homeof one'sown, with its owncultural particularities, but takingpleasure from the presenceof other,different places that are home to other,different people. The cosmopolitanalso imagines that in sucha worldnot everyonewill find it best to stayin their natalpatria, so that the circulationof people amongdifferent localities will involvenot only culturaltourism (which the cosmopolitanadmits to enjoying)but migra- tion, nomadism,diaspora. In the past, these processeshave too often been the resultof forceswe shoulddeplore; the old migrantswere often refugees,and older diasporasoften began in an involuntaryexile. But whatcan be hateful,if coerced,can be celebratedwhen it flowsfrom the free decisionsof individualsor of groups. 2. Gertrude Stein, "AnAmerican and France"(1936), WhatAre Masterpieces? (Los Angeles, 1940), p. 61. KwameAnthony Appiah is professorof Afro-Americanstudies and philosophyat HarvardUniversity. He is the author of, among other works,In My Father'sHouse: Afraca in thePhilosophy of Culture(1992) and, withAmy Gutmann, Color Conscious (1996), a pairof essayson race and publicpolicy. He is alsoan editorof Transition. CriticalInquiry Spring1997 619 In a worldof cosmopolitanpatriots, people would accept the citizen's responsibilityto nurturethe cultureand the politicsof theirhomes. Many would,no doubt,spend their livesin the placesthat shapedthem; and thatis one of the reasonslocal cultural practices would be sustainedand transmitted.But manywould move; and thatwould mean that cultural practiceswould travelalso (as they have alwaystravelled). The result wouldbe a worldin whicheach localform of humanlife was the result of long-termand persistentprocesses of culturalhybridization: a world, in thatrespect, much like the worldwe live in now. Behind the objectionthat cosmopolitanismis parasiticthere is, in anycase, an anxietywe shoulddispel: an uneasinesscaused by an exag- geratedestimate of the rate of disappearanceof culturalheterogeneity. In the globalsystem of culturalexchanges there are, indeed,somewhat asymmetricalprocesses of homogenizationgoing on, and thereare forms of humanlife disappearing.Neither of thesephenomena is particularly new,but their range and speed probablyis. Nevertheless,as forms of culturedisappear, new formsare created,and they are createdlocally, whichmeans they have exactly the regionalinflections that the cosmopol- itancelebrates. The disappearanceof old culturalforms is consistentwith a rich varietyof formsof humanlife, just becausenew culturalforms, whichdiffer from each other, are beingcreated all the timeas well. Cosmopolitanismand patriotism,unlike nationalism, are both senti- mentsmore than ideologies.Different political ideologies can be made consistentwith both of them. Somecosmopolitan patriots are conserva- tive and religious;others are secularizersof a socialistbent. Christian cosmopolitanismis as old as the mergerwith the RomanEmpire, through whichStoicism came to be a dominantshaping force in Christianethics. (On my father'sbedside were Cicero and the Bible.Only someone igno- rant of the historyof the churchwould see this as an expressionof di- vided loyalties.)But I am a liberal, and both cosmopolitanismand patriotism,as sentiments,can seem to be hard to accommodateto lib- eralprinciples. Patriotismoften challengesliberalism. Liberals who proposea state thatdoes not takesides in the debatesamong its citizens'various concep- tionsof the good life are held to be unableto valuea statethat celebrates itself,and modernself-described patriots, here in America,at least,often desirea publiceducation and a publicculture that stoke the firesof the nationalego. Patriotsalso seem especiallysensitive these daysto slights to the nationalhonor; to skepticismabout a celebratorynationalist histo- riography;in short,to the criticalreflection on the statethat we liberals, withour instrumentalconception of it, arebound to engagein. No liberal shouldsay, "My country, right or wrong"because liberalism involves a set of politicalprinciples that a statecan fail to realize;and the liberalwill 620 K7lvameAnthony Appiah CosmopolitanPatriots haveno specialloyalty to an illiberalstate, not leastbecause liberals value peopleover collectivities. This patrioticobjection to liberalismcan also be made,however, to Catholicism,to Islam,to almostany religiousview; indeed, to any view, includinghumanism, that claims a highermoral authority than one's own particularpolitical community. And the answerto it is to
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