Redefining the Sociological Project: The Cosmopolitan Challenge

Presented at the British Sociological Association, 60th Anniversary Annual Conference, 6–8 April 2011

Once upon a time the categories of ‘class’ and ‘class conflict’ were the conceptual tools to unlock and understand the key political dynamics of the modern world. But this is no longer the case. Just think a moment of the ‘cosmopolitical events’ that changed the world during the last 25 years – the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the financial crisis, climate change or the two ongoing processes: the nuclear catastrophe in Japan and the revolts against the authoritarian Arab regimes. All of those have two features in common: (1) they come by total surprise, which means they are beyond sociological categories and imagination; and (2) all of them are transnational or global in their scope and implications.

From this follows: the mainstream of sociology still floods loftily above the lowlands of epochal transformations in a condition of universalistic superiority and instinctive certainty. This universalistic social theory, whether stucturalist, interactionist, Marxist, critical- or systems-theory, is both out of date and provincial. Out of date because it excludes a priori what can be observed empirically – a fundamental transformation of society and politics within modernity; provincial because it mistakenly absolutizes the trajectory, historical experience and future expectation of western, predominantly European or North-American, modernization and thereby also fails to see its own particularity.

My thesis is that class is too soft a category to capture the cosmopolitan challenge at the beginning of the 21st century. The social sciences, especially sociology, need a cosmopolitan turn in research and theory, a paradigm shift from ‘methodological nationalism’ to ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. We are not living in an era of cosmopolitanism but in an age of cosmopolitization. There is an ongoing very lively critical debate on this thesis, including for example Craig Calhoun’s and Paul Gilroy’s contributions in the British Journal of Sociology special issue ‘On Varieties of Second Modernities: Extra-European and European Perspectives’ (Calhoun, 2010; Gilroy, 2010) and by Raewyn Connell in Global Dialogue (2010). Raewyn Connell, who identifies herself as a ‘Southern sociologist’ asks rhetorically: ‘… can we not hear the Northern narrative in these concepts?’.

Let me therefore start with listing what ‘cosmopolitization’ is NOT about. It does not – as Raewyn Connell suggests – reflect ‘the experience of a privileged minority, and treats that as the new reality of the world’; it is not a view from a highly specific somewhere, namely the European Enlightenment; it is not intended to convey the shallow political message that ‘we all are connected’, nor does it normalize imperialism and existing global power relations.

What does the notion of ‘cosmopolitization’ then have to say? And why is it so important to clearly distinguish it from the many ‘cosmopolitanisms’ of European philosophy and extra-European histories of thought (Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Nussbaum, Appiah, Benhabib, Held, etc.)? ‘Cosmopolitization’ is not about ethics but about facts. It is not about philosophy but about sociology. There is nothing as informative as some significant examples to illustrate this: (1) fresh kidneys; (2) global families; (3) competition between national populations of workers.

Fresh Kidneys

The victory of medical transplantation (and not its crisis!) has swept away its own ethical foundations and opened the floodgates to an occult shadow economy supplying the world market with ‘fresh’ organs (Scheper-Hughes, 2005). In this radically unequal world there is obviously no shortage of desperate individuals willing to sell a kidney, a portion of their liver, a lung, an eye, or even a testicle for a pittance. The fates of desperate rich patients waiting for organs have become obscurely embroiled with the fates of desperate poor people, as each group struggles to find a solution to basic problems of survival. This is what impure, actually existing cosmopolitization of deprivation means: the excluded of the world, the economically and politically dispossessed – refugees, the homeless, street children, undocumented workers, prisoners, ageing prostitutes, cigarette smugglers, and petty thieves – are lured into selling their organs and this way becoming physically, morally, and economically ‘embodied’ in mortally thick bodies and in persons who are rich enough to buy and ‘incorporate’ the organs of their poor global others.

In the cosmopolitanized body-scapes, continents, races, classes, nations and religions all become fused. Muslim kidneys purify Christian blood. White racists breathe with the aid of one or more black lungs. The blonde manager gazes out at the world through the eye of an African street urchin. A Protestant bishop survives thanks to the liver carved from a prostitute living in a Brazilian favela. Thus – as this case shows – cosmopolitization:

And it is a structural phenomenon. This calls for an idea of ‘cosmopolitization’ as ‘encounter’ or ‘enmeshment’ with the excluded Other, rather than simply being dependent on something that is on the outside. In this case we are talking about the version of cosmopolitization without dialogue, without interaction, maybe even without reflection of the involved persons.

At the end of this process, the bio-political ‘citizen of the world’ emerges – a white, male body, fit or fat, with the addition of an Indian kidney or a Muslim eye. In general, the circulation of living kidneys follows the established routes of capital from South to North, from poor to more affluent bodies, from black and brown bodies to white ones, and from females to males, or from poor males to more affluent ones. Women are rarely the beneficiaries of purchased organs anywhere in the world. From this it follows that the age of cosmopolitization is divided and recombined into organ-selling nations versus organ-buying ones.

The age of cosmopolitization stands for a world that for better or worse we all share, a world that has ‘no outside’, ‘no exit’, ‘no other’ any more. We have to recognize that, regardless of how brilliantly and trenchantly we critique the ‘northern narrative’ or ignore the ‘southern narrative’, we are destined to live with these interwoven, contradictory framings and situations in this World at Risk (Beck, 2009), not only subject to its power of domination but also contaminated by its self-endangerment, corruption, suffering and exploitation. Abandon all dreams of autonomy that would allow anybody to remain outside! And abandon all clear cut ‘geographical racism’ between ‘southern voices’ and ‘northern voices’ in the social sciences!

Is this a ‘northern narrative’? Is it a ‘southern narrative’? No, it is both. And looking for ways to combine those contradictory perspectives systematically on the level of sociological analysis is what ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ is all about.

Are ‘fresh kidneys’ the exception? No, they symbolize the condition humana, the encounter with the excluded Other at the beginning of the third millennium. The processes of cosmopolitization fundamentally affect and transform all kinds of intermediate institutions worldwide, like family, household (global care chains), class, work conditions and labour market, schools, universities, villages, cities, sciences, civil society movements, monotheistic religions – in a polycentric world and increasingly diasporic character of population ensconced in the boundaries of most of its state or quasi-state units; and they also include phenomena like climate change and global financial risks. Let’s go a bit more into details.

Global Families

Cosmopolitanized ‘global families’, for example, embody both the seeming paradox of long-distant intimacy and the contradictions of the world; and these contradictions are worked out in them. Not all families embody all contradictions, but some embody some of them. There are marriages, parents, and couples with dual-nationality and they may embody the tensions between two countries or between the majority and minority communities in those countries, while migrant families may incorporate the tensions between the centre and the periphery. Global families and long-distant intimacy can be used to rethink conventional wisdom and to prepare a powerful new narrative of ‘distant love’ and its contradictions. It mirrors a state of ignorance that has been nationally programmed and embodied in law. It follows that distant love and the global families become settings in which the cultural wounds – the rage and anger that global inequalities in their imperial history continue to generate in the souls of the living to this day – are endured and fought out.

Or take global care chains as an example. For migrant domestic workers all over the globe, love means first of all having to go away. Mothering is passed down the race/class/nation hierarchy (Hochschild, 2000: 137). The work implied by the three Cs – caring, cleaning, cooking – is outsourced along the lines of nation, colour and ethnicity.

When we look at the family from the nation-state perspective, for instance, with regard to the changes in national family law in the West, we find that a move toward more equality has taken place. But the picture takes on a different colour once cosmopolitization comes into view:

Competition between National Populations of Workers

The increasing power of capital is prompting a sweeping transformation of the labour market, and this is occurring without public ballots or democratic decision-making processes, without consultation and without those affected having any say in the process. The labour market is being rocked by tectonic shifts – from North to South and from West to East – which threaten the existence of millions of workers and their families. Employees in the affluent countries are becoming replaceable; they can be laid off and replaced by employees in the poor, low-wage countries.

In the era of the (first) modernity, when the nation-states were still strong and sovereign, national borders prevented international competition among workforces. Today, by contrast, in the phase of the second modernity, a capitalism specialized in outsourcing breeds an increasingly virulent competition between domestic and foreign labour, pitting Korean factory workers against Japanese factory workers, Polish tradesmen against British tradesmen. Here, existential enmeshment means that the unknown ‘Other’ in another country, or even in a different global region, is becoming the internal economic enemy for the inhabitants of the affluent countries because he is threatening their jobs, their wages and their prosperity. The result is that hostility towards foreigners is spreading, reaching epidemic proportions.

This coercive process of cosmopolitization is structural, is taking place above the heads of those affected, without their say, and without dialogue or communicative interaction. National borders are not presenting any obstacles to this enforced cosmopolitization, which is bypassing the claim to power and sovereignty of the nation-states. The political consequences are profound. As global competition between employees becomes a reality, resentment against the ‘Other’ in the affluent regions is on the increase. Hostility towards foreigners is spreading.

The fact that life-worlds are no longer small-scale, isolated and provincial, but are increasingly being drawn into the turmoil of global events, by no means entails that people’s horizons are becoming broader and that they are turning into urbane cosmopolitans. The cosmopolitization of living conditions and life-worlds does not necessarily engender cosmopolitanism as consciousness and mentality. In other words, world-shock does not always entail world openness.

So one thing is for sure: no matter, if the classics of sociology have been pioneers in ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ or not – today ‘methodological nationalism’ blinds both ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ sociology to the epochal facts of cosmopolitization. And the category of ‘class’ being prisoner of the nation-state is too limited, too soft, a category to unlock and to understand the political explosiveness of transnational inequalities embodied into the bodies, families and working lives of nations at the beginning of the 21st century.

Why? The national gaze – one land, one passport, and one identity – is a secular version of the Holy Trinity. Thus the national attitude towards social inequality is inverted. It stops at the borders of the nation-state. Global inequalities may blossom and flourish but always on the other side of the national garden fence; that is, at best, cause for moral outrage, but it is politically irrelevant.

National boundaries draw a sharp distinction between us and them, politically relevant and irrelevant inequality. The legally institutionalized focus lies on inequalities within national societies; at the same time inequalities between national societies are faded out. The ‘legitimation’ of global inequalities is based on an institutionalized ‘looking the other way’. Living, for example, in Europe, the national gaze is ‘freed’ from looking at the misery of the world. It operates by way of a double exclusion: it excludes the excluded. And the sociology of inequality, which equates inequality with nation-state inequality, is unreflectively party to that. It is indeed astonishing how firmly global inequalities are ‘legitimated’ on the basis of tacit agreement between nation-state government and nation-state sociology – a sociology claiming to be value-free!

Raewyn Connell argues: ‘The way to break out of the frame of Eurocentric thought is, surely, to study non-Eurocentric frames of thought.’ I do not agree. In mapping the motley modernities that make up today’s world, we need to define, discover and combine post-southern and post-northern framings. The aim is not to reaffirm the illusions of an objective ‘god’s eye perspective’ from nowhere, but to find practical answers to the everyday sociological problem, sitting somewhere in France, Australia, Japan, Mexico, India, South Africa: how to research the encounter with the ‘Other’ in a cosmopolitanized world?

Is this all that cosmopolitan theory has to offer? Where is its critical bite and ambition? Isn’t impure cosmopolitization likely to feed into the ‘status quo’ to serve as a prop in global governmentality? Or does cosmopolitan theory have the staging power and wherewithal to boost its critical leverage? Can it bootstrap itself into critical self-reflexive cosmopolitanisms (plural!)?

Yes, we can! No doubt, there is a normative horizon and critical social theory included in the notion ‘reflexive cosmopolitization’. Let me finish with a few hints.

It is not a matter of top-down (as with Kant and Habermas), but a matter of bottom-up; it is not universalistic but post-universalistic; it is not western but post-western; it is not an elite, ‘pure’ matter but an everyday, coercive, ‘impure’ matter. I agree with Gerard Delanty (2009): cosmopolitization means that the Self, or the ‘We’, is not merely defined by reference to an ‘Other’, a ‘They’ that is external to the Self, but is defined by the abstract category of the world as a form of third culture. The constitution of the cosmopolitanized world in and through globally filtered processes of communication cannot be seen in the simple terms of Self and Other. It is thus possible to speak of world openness in cosmopolitan terms and situation where the global public impinges upon political communication in other kinds of public discourse, creating as a result new visions of social order in which codification of both Self and Other undergo transformations.

To summarize: in the age of cosmopolitization the normative horizon is no longer ‘nation-building’, but ‘world-building’.