Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society

Abstract

The concept of the national is often perceived, both in public and academic discourse as the central obstacle for the realization of cosmopolitan orientations. Consequently, debates about the nation tend to revolve around its persistence or its demise. We depart from this either-or perspective by investigating the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan nation’ as a facet of world risk society. Modern collectivities are increasingly preoccupied with debating, preventing and managing risks. However, unlike earlier manifestations of risk characterized by daring actions or predictability models, global risks can no longer be calculated or forecast. Accordingly, more influence accrues to the perception of risk, largely constructed by media representations. Cosmopolitanized risk collectivities are engendered through the anticipation of endangered futures which are, for the most part, communicated through an increasingly global media scape. While global media events produce shared exposure, risk conceptions retain distinctive political-cultural features as their respective meanings are prefigured by path-dependent pasts. Nevertheless, the promulgation of risk societies, we argue, results in a reimagination of nationhood which takes place in the context of: global norms (e.g. human rights); globalized markets; transnational migrations; global generations and their embeddedness in civil society movements; and the local interpenetration of world religions to name but a few of the global backdrops shaping new associational intersections. We develop our argument in four interrelated steps. Contrary to essentialized notions of nationalism or universal versions of cosmopolitanism, we address the cosmopolitan reconfiguration of nationhood by differentiating between presumptions of thick belonging and the actual proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations. In a second step we overcome the territorial fixation of the social sciences by shifting our attention to temporal dimensions, with a particular focus on competing conceptions of the future. In a third step we demonstrate how these cosmopolitan transformations of nationhood are taking place in the context of a world risk society regime that marshals a set of cosmopolitan imperatives situating the global other in our midst. In a fourth step we illustrate these developments by exploring how the mediatization of risk, and concomitant notions of the future, contribute to the reimagination of cosmopolitan risk collectivities.

Keywords

cosmopolitanism mass media methodological nationalism nationalism world risk society

The Nationalism–Cosmopolitanism Divide

Much of the social science literature on the nation-state is caught in a resilient methodological nationalism bound up with the presupposition that the national-territorial remains the primary container for the analysis of social, economic, political and cultural processes. At the beginning of the 21st century, globalization is posing a political and theoretical challenge to the idea that binding history and borders tightly together is the only possible means of social and symbolic integration. There is by now an established body of cosmopolitan literature making significant advances to overcome the prevailing methodological nationalism in the social sciences.¹ This burgeoning field underscores the need to develop an analytical idiom of ‘modern society’ that is not limited to a national ontology and that is suggestive of alternative modes of belonging.

Notwithstanding, cosmopolitanism too often remains addressed within a set of polarities. For one, it is frequently treated as a normative concept focusing on a static -ism rather than a process-oriented notion of cosmopolitanization. This normative outlook tends to imply an antidote to nationalism (Nussbaum, 1996). On this view, the discussion revolves around a dichotomy of the national and the cosmopolitan, which is mirrored in a juxtaposition of universalism (frequently decried as a form of western imposition) and particularism (often dismissed as cultural relativism). Lastly, these polarities are underwritten by a simplistic (and a-historical) dichotomy of robust national belonging versus soft cosmopolitan orientations.² At the core of these dualities is an assumption that belonging operates primarily, even exclusively, in the context of communal allegiances expressing thick solidarities.

Regardless of their understanding that the nation is a constructed category, most cosmopolitan scholars:

accept that it is or was the natural and rational form of socio-political organization in the modern age, i.e. that it is or was the organizing principle of political modernity. This curiously re-natured view of the nation-state mirrors the modernism it opposes. (Fine and Chernilo, 2004: 36)

The presuppositions of nationhood and statehood, as well as the histories through which both have been linked (as the composite noun ‘nation-state’ suggests), remain untouched. Cosmopolitanism itself is articulated in opposition to this conventional (i.e. naturalized) and inevitable version of the nation.³ Accordingly, nationalism and cosmopolitanism are frequently conceptualized as part of an unchanging zero-sum game. Some scholars have moved away from this ‘either–or’ perspective and emphasized how cosmopolitan orientations can complement the national. ‘In the contemporary world, human beings often combine profound local, ethnic, religious or national attachments with a commitment to cosmopolitan values and principles that transcend those more local boundaries’ (Kymlicka and Walker, 2012: 1). This view of cosmopolitanism as complementary to nationalism, which has gained some traction among scholars, represents an important step forward. Nevertheless, it does not sufficiently focus on how cosmopolitan processes are intersecting and potentially transforming the idea of the national itself.

After all, ‘because nationhood – both conceptually and in practice – is malleable, there is no reason to believe that nations will not be perpetually imagined, even though such imaginings will change in content and form’ (Croucher, 2003: 2). It is thus not sufficient to recognize that the nation is a historically constructed category (Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Hobsbawm, 1990), but essential to explore how exactly this malleability and contingency of nationhood evolves in a global context. Put simply, whereas the constructed nature of nationalism is widely recognized, the national is now naturalized in the sense that the future of nationhood is no longer addressed from a constructivist perspective.

We depart from this naturalized and dualistic orientation by directing attention to the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan nation’ as a facet of world risk society. In a first step, we suggest that this figuration is coextensive with emerging forms of sociability. More specifically, we observe a new mode of collective identification circumscribed by the problematic persistence of thick belonging and the potential proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations. This reimagination of collectivities is shaped, among other things, by the continuous exposure, perception and interpretation of world risk society, shaped by a global context marshaling a set of new global human rights norms, market imperatives, a transnationalization of migration, global generational experiences and the local interpenetration of world religions, to name but a few.

Rather than viewing cosmopolitanism as a normative desideratum, or as antithesis to an essentialized version of the national, we contend that cosmopolitanization itself is a constitutive feature for the reconfiguration of nationhood. Whereas normative cosmopolitanism is a voluntary choice and often an elite affair, cosmopolitanization draws attention to the fact that an increasingly cosmopolitan reality produces side effects that are often not wanted and even go unobserved. A ‘banal’ and ‘coercive’ cosmopolitanization unfolds beneath the surface of persisting national spaces. Globalization provides a new context for the transformation of national identifications. And cosmopolitanization is the mechanism through which nationhood is reimagined. Unlike older philosophical engagements with cosmopolitanism as a universalistic principle, the sociological dynamics of cosmopolitanization imply an interactive relationship between the global and the local. It is a ‘non-linear, dialectical process in which the universal and particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the global and the local are to be conceived not as cultural polarities, but as interconnected and reciprocally interpenetrating principles’ (Beck, 2006: 72–3).

The aforementioned crisis of territoriality not only recasts which collectivities reimagine themselves, and how, but also carries significant theoretical implications as the spatially rooted understanding of social theory is being challenged by a ‘temporal turn’. Accordingly, we examine how nationhood is being recalibrated through the proliferation of imageries that are based on the cosmopolitanization of the temporal triad of past, present and future. The absence of a commanding national narrative of the future produces an open field with a set of competing conceptions of the future.

Our findings suggest that cosmopolitan nations are reimagined through the anticipation of endangered futures. They are reimagined collectivities based on forms of affiliation that are potentially generated by shared encounters with risk. Modern collectivities are increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risks. Unlike earlier manifestations of risk characterized by daring actions or predictability models, global risks cannot be calculated or predicted anymore. Consequently, more influence accrues to the perception of risk, largely constructed by media representations of disasters, which are mediat(iz)ed through the recasting of these temporal registers. Disasters conventionally signify interruptions. In contrast, in the context of an increasingly interconnected world, they have become limiting cases, challenging the taken-for-granted spatial assumptions of nationhood and its attendant methodological nationalism. Underwriting this proposed reconceptualization of temporalities then is the apprehension of global risks as the anticipation of (localized) risks.

Contemporary mediat(iz)ation of risks is reflective of and contributes to new horizons of future expectations. Contrary to previous traditional, religious and statist attempts to provide secure images of the future, the cosmopolitanization of disasters engages with insecurities through the global diffusion of risk iconographies. What happens when the past of progress, so to speak, has been discredited in the context of world risk society? How do we experience the temporal triad of past, present and future when the past ceases to be a reliable guide for knowledge of the future? When staged and mediated under what conditions do risks turn into events with a cosmopolitan purchase? Media portrayals of globally shared risk scenarios, we argue, give rise to the emergence of new ‘cosmopolitan affiliations of risk’. While the particular meanings ascribed to these risks may differ, they vernacularize cosmopolitan outlooks by their habitual consumption, inevitability, institutionalization and normative validation.

From National Time to Cosmopolitan Times

The spatial preoccupation in social theory dates back to sociology’s birth amid the 19th-century formation of nation-states. Ironically, the territorial conception of national culture – the idea of culture as ‘rooted’ – was itself a reaction to the enormous changes that were going on as that century turned into the 20th. It was a conscious attempt to provide a solution to the ‘uprooting’ of local cultures confronted with the formation of nation-states. Sociology understood the new symbols and common values, transmitted primarily through the consolidation of cultural memories by establishing links to foundational pasts, as means of integration into a new unity. The triumph of this perspective can be seen in the way nation space has ceased to appear as a project and a construct and has become instead widely regarded as something natural. These developments are mirrored in a resilient methodological nationalism bound up with the presupposition that the national territory remains the key principle and yardstick for the study of social, economic, political and cultural processes (Beck and Sznaider, 2006b, 2010; Levy and Sznaider, 2010). On this view, the nation-state reflects a:

spatial understanding of the possibility of political community, an understanding that necessarily gives priority to the fixing of processes of historical change in space. Not only does the principle of state sovereignty reflect a historically specific resolution of questions about the universality and particularity of political community, but it also fixes that resolution within categories that have absorbed a metaphysical claim to timelessness … Time and change are perceived as dangers to be contained. (Walker, 1990: 172–3)

The spatialization of theory is the more remarkable considering that ‘knowledge and experience are temporal in contexts, and their contextual temporality sets limits to their communicability and translatability into new contexts in new times’ (Miller, 2008: 8). A reflexive interrogation of the validity of a historically specific and hence contingent national figuration which has been instilled in the sociological imagination by the classical canon is thus needed.

Developing an analytical perspective that escapes this national caging requires not only reflexivity towards the cultural parameters of this national ontology; it also necessitates grasping the emergence of alternative ontological models. A brief historical sketch of changing temporal figurations is instructive. Conventional western perspectives on changing conceptions of the future address the ideological and institutional transformations of temporality along a series of three epochal strands. Analytically distinguishing between traditional, religious and political dominions over time, the latter culminates in the modern nation-state. Each of these formations has shaped respective temporal conceptions during a given period.

At the beginning of human history, the dimension of time itself was understood as something mythic … The only way to make mundane existence meaningful was to suffuse it with sacred time through a festive or ritual re-enactment of the events that were presumed to have occurred in primordial time. (Gross, 1985: 55)

Here time was plotted socially. As Christianity was consolidating its power, time was charted religiously for almost one millennium. By the 16th century political temporality was emerging and challenged both religious and traditional conceptions of time (Gross, 1985). The nation-state has since become the dominant institution for the structuration of temporality. National time has been caged as a unifying source and central means for collective mobilization. Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]) has shown how the national (secular) state was seeking to establish a functional equivalent to conceptions of religious temporality. Here the past served as a foundational myth based on heroic narratives. The nationalization of time was a central endeavor of the modern state producing empty and homogeneous time. And, in its Hobbesian incarnation, the state becomes the provider of the aforementioned ontological security. These modes of temporal structuration were premised on the ability to provide a cultural response to the future and render it intelligible. Both Christianity and nation-states were eager to provide linear notions of deliverance, one anchored in distinctive forms of salvationism and the other through visions of progress. Reinhart Koselleck points out that:

the genesis of the absolutist state is accompanied by sporadic struggles against all manner of control of the future by suppressing apocalyptic and astrological readings of the future. In doing so, it assumed a function of the Old Church for anti-Church objectives. (Koselleck, 1985: 10–11)

What both national and religious authority shared was an attempt to monopolize the temporal registers of existence. Theories of progress became the chief prism through which nation-states sought to control the political and cultural interpretations of the future. The classics of sociology essentially acquiesced to this view (Abbott, 2001) by relegating the past and memory practices to tradition(al) societies, thus making room for a presentism – in the double sense of projecting contemporary sensibilities into the past and imposing concerns of the present onto a developing future – that was progressing continuously (be it in the dialectical fashion of historical materialism or the Weberian variant of rationalization).

Contemporary global trajectories, we suggest, have given rise to a fourth temporal epoch that is characterized by fragmented times and the absence of a dominant, let alone hegemonic, conception of temporality and attendant views of futurity.⁴ These new temporal figurations bear upon the potential reimaginations of new forms of collective affiliations. In the absence of a dominant narrative about the future, global risk frames structure how national experiences are informed by global expectations and how global experiences are shaping national expectations. Perceiving the future through the prism of risk perceptions reveals how representations of catastrophes of various kinds (e.g. ecological, human rights) are challenging the ontological security once provided by the temporal narratives of nation-states. However, the result of these developments is not some pure normative cosmopolitanism of a world without borders. Instead, these risks produce a new ‘impure’ cosmopolitanization – the global other is in our midst. What emerges is the possibility of ‘risk collectivities’ which spring up, establish themselves and become aware of their cosmopolitan composition – ‘imagined cosmopolitan collectivities’ which might come into existence in the awareness that dangers or risks can no longer be socially delimited in space or time.

Cosmopolitan Figurations

Contrary to the normative universalism of some cosmopolitans, we highlight processes in which universalism and particularism are no longer exclusive either–or categories but instead a co-dependent pair. Subtending this argument is the notion that meaningful identifications express particular attachments: one’s identity, one’s biography of belonging, is always embedded in a more general narrative and memories of a group. On this view, particularism becomes a prerequisite for a cosmopolitan orientation. Cosmopolitanism does not negate nationalism; national attachments are potential mediators between the individual and cosmopolitan horizons along which new identifications unfold.⁵

To understand how past and present narratives of nationhood are related to each other and how the universal and the particular are folded into processes of cosmopolitanization, we propose to think about the relationship of the nation-state community to a cosmo-national imagination in Norbert Elias’s terms of a ‘continuum of changes’ (Elias, 1992: 46). Meaningful political and cultural premises are informed by significant pasts, presents that are being transformed and different horizons of future expectations. On this view, collective modes of identification and the claims that are perceived as legitimate may change over time, however, their respective meanings remain linked ‘by a long continuum of changes’. Elias’s methodological deliberations on historical processes seem particularly beneficial for the study of epochal change and changing figurations. Figurations form by way of mixing old and new elements. Hence the persistence of older structures (and norms) cannot be interpreted as a mere anachronism – as theorists of first modernity did with religion and ethnicity, and cosmopolitan scholars are apt to do with regard to the nation, nationalism and the nation-state. Rejecting any kind of self-sustaining logic of development, Elias instead focuses on the historical and institutional conditions through which cultural and political claims are established and sustained as foundational meaning systems. Their respective dominance is a function of changing figurations.⁶

Elias’s figurational sociology assumes that claims of legitimacy are the successful product of a particular development of interdependencies. Those interdependencies cannot be reduced to, say, independent variables, but always remain the very object of our investigation. Figurations thus are webs of interdependence, which tie individuals together and shape their collective self-understandings and the ways in which they articulate times within changing existential coordinates. ‘People make up webs of interdependence or figurations of many kinds, characterized by power balances of many sorts, such as families, schools, towns, social strata, or states’ (Elias, 1978: 15). What matters for our purposes is that, over time, these figurations frequently mutate into new forms. Villages have become cities, tribal solidarities are absorbed into larger states, cities have become global, to name but a few examples of how collectives have been reimagined in the context of changing social, political and economic interdependencies.

Mediated Affiliations

In each transition, media representations have played a crucial role of reimagiNation. The nation-state, at the turn of the 20th century, depended for its coming into existence on a process by which existing societies used representations to turn themselves into new wholes that would act on people’s feelings, and upon which they could base their identities – in short, to make them into groups that individuals could identify with. This nation-building process parallels what is happening through globalization at the turn of the 21st century. The ability of representations to give a sense to life is not ontologically but rather sociologically determined. So if the nation is the basis for authentic feelings and collective memory – as the critics of global culture seem to believe almost unanimously – then it cannot be maintained that representations are a superficial substitute for authentic experience. On the contrary, representations are the basis of that authenticity. It is, therefore, not inconceivable that media representations create conditions for the expansion of affiliations beyond the nation-state. How can we apply the concept of imagined cosmopolitan affiliations in the context of social, political, economic and cultural consequences of global risks?

To answer this question it is indispensable to push for a more complex understanding of ‘groupness’ and the ways in which multiple forms of identification can coexist or conflict. Much of the debate on cosmopolitan orientations is circumscribed by a narrow understanding of belonging which is, no doubt, compounded by the vagueness the notion of identity elicits (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). Strong forms of belonging, such as communitarianism and ethnic nationalism, are usually based on a naturalized image of the nation. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, is frequently characterized (by both its champions and nationalist opponents) as the breaking down of boundaries. Underlying this dualistic notion is an assumption that belonging operates primarily, even exclusively, in the context of communal allegiances expressing thick solidarities. Conversely, as Craig Calhoun has pointed out, we ought not succumb to the opposite fallacy either, which presents cosmopolitan identity ‘as freedom from social belonging rather than a special form of belonging, a view from nowhere or everywhere, rather than from particular social spaces’ (Calhoun, 2003: 532). His critical engagement with the nexus of cosmopolitanism and nationalism has yielded important insights (Calhoun, 2007). According to Calhoun ‘cosmopolitanism is neither a freedom from culture nor a matter of pure individual choice, but a cultural position constructed on particular social bases and a choice made possible by that culture and those bases’ (Calhoun, 2003: 544). In our view, the cosmopolitanization of these bases is not solely a matter of voluntary choice but also becomes a readily available complement and source for the reconfiguration of the national (not its alternative) through both banal and coercive cosmopolitan experiences. Ultimately, at both the national and cosmopolitan level, successful identifications with distant others are predicated on a balance between immediate attachments with concrete others (e.g. kin, local) and thickening versions of solidarity with distant others (e.g. the nation, the global). For Bruce Robbins (1998) this is neither a matter of detachment or simple attachment. Instead, cosmopolitan affiliations consist of multiple attachments driven by re-attachments and long-distance attachments. This leads us to interrogate how these new forms of sociability arise. Interdependencies are an essential ingredient, but they are neither consensual nor territorially caged. There is a common exposure to risks. What is shared, however, is not so much the meanings ascribed to these risks but the simultaneous exposure.

As long ago as 1927 John Dewey was already asking ‘for conditions under which a Great Society may become a Great Community’. He distinguished between collectively binding decisions on the one hand and their consequences on the other. He linked this to the theory that a public sphere only ever emerges at the focal point of public communication, not out of any general interest in binding decisions but, rather, as a result of their consequences. People remain indifferent to political decisions as such. It is not until they begin to communicate with one another about the problematic consequences of decisions that they wake up. It is this communication that shakes them out of their complacency, creating a potential collectivity of action. In our language, it is global risk – or, more precisely, the staging and the perception of global risk – that creates cosmopolitanized affiliations. As we show in the next section, the contours of world risk society are providing the conditions of possibility for cosmopolitan orientations.

The World Risk Society Regime of Transformation

There is not one universal process of cosmopolitanization but there are varieties of cosmopolitan trajectories (Beck and Grande, 2010b). Those varieties cannot be identified on the national level alone, they have to be conceptualized on a global level related to the theory of world risk society. The world risk perspective focuses on global institutional factors and transformation processes, exploring how global principles penetrate societies. How does the social construction of global risks propel the cosmopolitanization of the national? In what follows, we present some of the global dynamics explaining why and how nation-making and world-making are actively mixed from within national settings. We briefly illustrate the emergence of this world risk society regime along five thematic sketches:

The human rights imperative

The world market imperative

Migration as the prism for Otherhood (‘The global Other is in our midst’)

Global generations and civil society movements

Local interpenetration of world religions

The Human Rights Imperative

Cosmopolitanization has an affinity to human rights or, to be more specific, to the national abuse of human rights. The political will of nation-states to legally engage with memories of rights abuses is a central factor for their legitimate standing in the international community and increasingly also a domestic source of legitimacy. This finds its expression in an increasingly de-nationalized conception of legitimacy, which results in a cosmopolitanization of sovereignty. While states may retain most of their sovereign functions, their legitimacy is no longer exclusively conditioned by a contract with the nation, but also by their adherence to a set of nation-transcending human rights ideals (Levy and Sznaider, 2006b). Human rights norms are a key site for the incorporation of cosmopolitan imperatives into national consciousness and the transformation of national self-definitions. This development relates to both non-citizens and citizenship, as the nation-state is confronted with cosmopolitan legal injunctions commanding the equal treatment of humans as others (Soysal, 1994).

To be sure, a top-down approach only provides limited inferences on how much of this cosmopolitan transformation of the judicial sphere actually trickles down to society. Institutional cosmopolitanism does not enable reliable inferences on popular (dis)identifications with the national – and how these come about (Nash, 2007).⁷ However, juridification should not be treated in a narrow legal frame, but as a socially embedded, meaning-producing act. Law has jurisgenerative power. Law also structures an extra-legal normative universe by developing new vocabularies for public claim-making, by encouraging new forms of subjectivity to engage with the public sphere and by interjecting existing relations of power with anticipations of justice to come (Benhabib, 2009: 696). On this view, the legal domain is not only about the institutionalization of universal claims on which nation-state sovereignty and the self-understanding of a political community rest, it also figures as a strategic site of their transformation (Held, 2002).

The World Market Imperative

The unbundling of nationhood through global capital, transnational production processes and transnational institutions of commercial law is again a major transformation of active self-cosmopolitanization of the nation-state. Deregulation is a vehicle through which states are incorporating the world market regime and guaranteeing the rights of global capital as an essential ingredient of the national. ‘No one can do politics against the markets.’ Joschka Fischer’s dictum is emblematic of the self-image of the political class over the past two decades. Politicians see themselves as pawns in a power game dominated by globally operating capital. Here we are dealing with a self-delusion of unpolitical innocence in a twofold sense: on the one hand, it glosses over the fact that the political class brought about the alleged powerlessness to act through its own conduct. Specifically, it imposed the rules of the globalized markets at the national level under the banner of ‘reform policy’, thus giving rise to the allegedly no longer controllable financial world risk capitalism. Note that global capital acquires its ‘unchallengeable’ power only when national politics actively colludes in its own self-abolition (Beck, 2012). On the other hand, the self-inflicted impotence of politics serves as a convenient excuse to deflect the pressure to act within global domestic politics and not to make use of the opportunities for action that are opening up. Since there are no consensual global political answers to the consequences of globalization, allegedly nothing can be done!

Migration as the Prism for Otherhood (‘The Global Other Is in Our Midst’)

In the current academic climate, where nationalism is often discussed as a right-wing patriarchal ideology, the following is a widely accepted account: cosmopolitanism is good and nationalism bad for human values and rights. Against this either–or account we must understand that cosmopolitanism grows out of nationalism. Without nationalism there can be no actually existing cosmopolitanism. The same is true with economic globalization. Without global capitalism there will be no cosmopolitanization. Cosmopolitanization is the sociological face of globalization. Already Marx and Engels captured this nexus in the opening paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations … National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible … (Tucker, 1972: 476)

As greater economic interdependence is fostered among countries through trade and investment, a transnational space is created for the circulation not only of goods and capital, but for the cosmopolitanization of labor as well. Cosmopolitanization through migration is here created by the systematic link between labor emigration and development and its institutionalization through national state policy with the sanction of international bodies. While migration is not a new phenomenon, older assimilationist trajectories have given rise to multicultural conceptions where the ‘other’ is at least normatively validated.

The feminization of labor migration is one example of the large-scale, if uneven, interaction of different cultures, which involves the increasing migration of women from poorer countries to fulfill the growing international demand for workers in low-status ‘feminized’ occupations – nannies, caretakers for kids and older people, workers in restaurants and hotels and so on. Many of these demands are generated by another gender dynamic within high-growth nations: the entry of middle-class women with sufficient training into white-collar employment at the same time that the surplus of young female labor, traditionally the resource of paid domestic work for middle-class households, has been completely absorbed into industry and other non-domestic services. Thus middle-class families and households the world over have been cosmopolitanized: the global other works in their midst.

Global Generations and Civil Society Movements

From Arab uprisings to protests in Athens, Barcelona, even middle-class movements challenging capitalism in Washington and democratic movements challenging authoritarian power in Moscow – all of these civil society actors have three features in common: first, they come as a surprise, which means they are beyond political and sociological imagination; second, they are transnational or global in their scope and consequences; and, third, they are centered on issues of justice, equality and human rights using the virtual electronic space of the internet, a powerful site for transforming and reimagining the national. Consequently, the idea of generations isolated within national boundaries is historically out of date. What we are observing is the rise of ‘global generations’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2009), the deepening of generational gaps and conflicts at the same time inside and across national borders, through which cosmopolitan nations are being recreated.

Civil society movements constitute (il)legal, (il)legitimate constellations that operate in both highly legitimate and highly precarious ways within national and transnational power spheres. The extraordinary legitimation capital they possess cannot be compared with that on which their competitors – states, global capital – can draw. Civil society movements are, after all, the entrepreneurs of the cosmopolitan commonwealth. They not only develop the categories in which global issues of poverty, human rights, women’s rights, justice, climate change etc., are formulated; they also place them in practice on the political agenda, both at the national and the global level. Of course, these civil society movements are not a one-way street, but the full range of social forces will use their power, from fighters for human rights to political and religious fundamentalists. Global civil society becomes a democratic space for many opposing views including a range of anti-cosmopolitan uses as well.

Local Interpenetration of World Religions

Why is the omnipresence of world religions such an important feature for the cosmopolitanization of nationhood? In the new communicative thickness of the world, the non-comparability of religions based in national cultures and territories is coming to an end. As Nietzsche foresaw, at the beginning of the 21st century we are living in an ‘age of comparing’, where all religious belief systems are in one way or the other present in all locations of the globe. That fact – a shared present and universal proximity – creates new forms of coexistence, interpenetration, resistance and conflict among world religions. The ‘religious other’ is in our midst (Beck, 2010).

By committing themselves to universalism, the world religions create a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority which results in a radical otherness. This occurs because they are rooted in a dualism of believers and non-believers, not as a pre-existing fact but to be understood as a consequence of choice, ascribable to individuals. This means the distinction between ‘we’ and ‘others’ fuses with the distinction between Good and Evil. Under the impact of this process, the universalist claims of western modernity, like those of Christian revelation, find themselves exposed to criticisms. This comes about, on the one hand, through decoupling modernity from westernization, since this denies the West its monopoly over modernity. On the other hand, the certitudes of Christian revelations are forced to confront the certitudes of the revelations of Islam and other faiths. The result is that the necessity to compare the different religious faiths under conditions of their mutual interpenetration ends up in an everyday clash of religious universalisms. This state of affairs is reflected in the growth of transnational forms of life in which comparisons between the world pictures of the various religions and discussions of their relevance in everyday life act as an existential stimulus.

In sum, these facets of cosmopolitanization accentuate cosmopolitan imperatives which no state can avoid without endangering its own survival. The imagined collectivities of risk are imposed, they are not based – as cosmopolitanism seems to imply – on voluntariness, choice, elite status, normativeness and philosophical premise. The cosmopolitan risk collectivity is not based on the insight that we are all members of a community of humankind. What might be called the ‘good Samaritan effect’ is not sufficient: that is, that in a Christian or cosmopolitan exercise of neighborly love we act in solidarity with others who are vulnerable, suffering, whose humanity is threatened. Instead it is we who are forced, in our own most pressing interest in survival, not only to address those distant others, but to come together with them in order to devise a new kind of collectivity. In other words, cosmopolitanized collectivities depend on realism and not simply on sympathy, regret and pity for the suffering of others (Beck, 2011). How can strangers – constructed as members of imagined national communities – become part of enlarged webs of affiliation? Or to put it differently: how can ‘thin normative cosmopolitanism’ be replaced by ‘thickening cosmopolitan affiliations’?

Media(tion) and the ReimagiNation of Cosmopolitan Risk Collectivities

We address these questions by focusing on the seminal role of the media in producing new frameworks of identification. As the current age of uncertainty is deprived of modular pasts and aspirational futures, risk perceptions are resituated in new forms of manufactured insecurities and related temporal modalities. The linkage between risk perception and mediatized disaster representations is not incidental but intrinsic to each. Risks are social constructions and definitions based upon corresponding relations of definition. Their ‘reality’ can be dramatized or minimized, transformed or simply denied according to the norms which decide what is known and what is not. They are products of struggles and conflicts over definitions within the context of specific relations of definitional power, hence the (in varying degrees successful) results of stagings (Beck, 2009: 30). The more obvious it becomes that global risks cannot be calculated or predicted, the more influence accrues to the perception of risk. What is perceived as dangerous is not only a function of cultural and social contexts but also of an issue’s career of media representation and social recognition. In world risk society, the central question of power is a question of definitional authority (Beck and Kropp, 2007). We shall see below that the power of the media to address, thematize and represent risk is contained in its agenda-setting function and the fact that certain issues are largely ignored (e.g. chronic and structural features of climate catastrophes). Instead, much of the agenda-setting function is driven by a focus on disasters that carry the requisite features of media events (Dayan and Katz, 1992). The main point here is that it is wrong to regard social and cultural judgments as things that only distort the perception of risk. Without them there are no risks. It is those judgments that constitute risk.

They are by now firmly embedded within a media ecology that has global reach. Media research shows that disasters are registered, culturally defined and assume their meanings through an ongoing communication flow (Cottle, 2009). On this view, media not merely represent disasters but help generate them. We can speak of global media events – GMEs (Ribes, 2010) – which are critical in defining catastrophes and producing cosmopolitan vocabularies of motives. ‘GMEs are very much present in daily routines because they call our attention long before they occur, there are always people engaged in one or more of them, and, finally, when one event concludes another will begin’ (Ribes, 2010: 5). They may depend, among other things, on how disasters are mediat(iz)ed and locally appropriated in the context of world risk society.

Paradoxically, the global media(tiza)tion of risks also provides new temporal narratives intended to alleviate our anxieties about the future. In the absence of a self-confident disposition toward the past and a widely shared vision of the future, risks are now enmeshed in an age of post-catastrophe via the principle of premediation. As Richard Grusin has pointed out:

Where remediation characterized what was ‘new’ about new media at the end of the twentieth century as its insistent remediation of prior media forms and practices, premediation characterizes the mediality of the first decade of the twenty-first as focused on the cultural desire to make sure that the future has already been pre-mediated before it turns into the present (or the past). (Grusin, 2010: 4)

It is not in spite but precisely because of the uncontrollable nature of risks that premediation is culturally so appealing. The exception no longer tests the rule but it is the breach itself that is being routinized and ritualized through the pre- and remediation of GMEs.

Premediation differs from remediation in that it is no longer concerned with earlier questions about the authenticity of representation. Nor should it be confused with the prognostic ambitions of earlier times.

Premediation is not to be confused with prediction. Premediation is not about getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the networked world experienced on 9/11. (Grusin, 2010: 4)

Non-knowing here is not merely a side effect but a prerequisite for envisioning the future as:

premediation imagines multiple futures which are alive in the present which always exist as not quite fully formed potentialities or possibility. These futures are remediated not only as they might become but also as they have already been in the past … Premediating the future entails remediating the past. (Grusin, 2010: 8)

As such, it provides what Grusin refers to as an ‘affective prophylaxis’ to the existential and scientific status of non-knowing. Risk refers to a future that needs to be prevented. The pluralization of time differs from earlier attempts to control the future, even if the basic impulse to manage the future might be similar.

Clearly the current expression of premediation in televisual new media and film bears some affinities to the traumas of modernity, particularly to the preoccupation with predicting and controlling the future attendant upon the increased risks and consequences of industrial accidents in modernity. Developments like insurance, political polls, or economic forecasts, for example, are in some sense, early efforts to premediate the future. Yet they differ from the current logic of premediation in their desire to control the future rather than to proliferate competing mediations of it. (Grusin, 2010: 157)

Moreover, they are situated in a fragmented media ecology (Cottle, 2009) that supplies a plurality of affiliations with others.

The burgeoning literature on the cosmopolitanization of media images has focused on how meaningful the other is and what degree of empathy and compassion such images produce (Robertson, 2010; Silverstone, 2007; Urry, 2000).⁸ These projects have yielded a wide array of results, ranging from claims that a global iconography of ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski, 1999; Wilkinson, 2012) has generated significant attention (Höijer, 2004; Kyriakidou, 2009), produced awareness of the misery of others (Chouliaraki, 2006; Tester, 2001) as well as reverse claims about ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999). How extensive and intensive contemporary collectivities of solidarity actually are and what the mechanisms for an engagement with the other consist of thus are questions that remain open. To be sure, this qualification is not restricted to cosmopolitan identifications. It is, for instance, not clear how a comparable set-up focusing on attention to the other within national boundaries would fare. How do nationals respond when they are confronted with the misery (e.g. chronic unemployment, poverty) of their fellow nationals? While this article cannot possibly answer these questions, we would like to direct attention to the role of the media in producing new forms of connectivity. What is the threshold of collective identification – be it local, regional, national or global?

Most cosmopolitan (and general) approaches regarding the capacity of the media to produce moral sensibilities vis-à-vis others are predicated on assumptions of audience attentiveness and active involvement. Paul Frosh challenges this ‘attentive fallacy’. Instead he emphasizes ‘the work of “phatic morality”, the moral ground created by long-term, habitual, ambient forms of mediated connectivity’ (Frosh, 2011: 383). Contrary to the equation of attentiveness and empathy, Frosh argues that ‘television is in part morally enabling because of forms of inattention and indifference that frequently characterize relations between the medium and its audience, as well as between viewers and viewed’ (Frosh, 2011: 385). Accordingly, audience inattention is not a deficiency but a necessary condition for what he calls ‘mediated sociality’: ‘one can disengage from media texts without relinquishing connectivity – without severing the links to others and to “the social” that television routinely enables and symbolizes’ (Frosh, 2011: 384). What matters here then is less the hard-to-measure and often presumed attentiveness, but rather the extent to which viewers become habituated to certain types of (global) media events.

But it is not the paying of particular attention to specific programs that constitutes the ground of audiences’ experience of mediation, but the presence of media perpetually in attendance in our lives and intimate spaces, available when needed to be of service. (Frosh, 2011: 384)

This line of thought is closely aligned to the above-mentioned agenda-setting functions of media, which have long dispelled Orwellian and Marxisant assumptions about control and hegemony. Instead of reducing the impact of the media to the notion that they tell us what to think, agenda-setting and its correlate of habituation suggest that the ideological power of the media consists in telling us what to think about. Whether cosmopolitan collectivities are formed depends, among other things, on how risks are mediated and consumed as habituated practices.

Research shows that global media images are recontextualized through national broadcasting frames (Clausen, 2003) and their consumption is prefigured by national cultural inflections (Fairclough, 2006). Maria Kyriakidou succinctly states that:

media are more than technologies or media discourses; they also entail practices, most importantly the practices of the producers of media content and of their audiences, which are embedded within specific social, cultural, historical, and economic contexts. … Mediated cosmopolitanism as the mediated expansion of social imagination beyond the local and the national is dependent on these practices, technological and discursive, and cannot be taken for granted on the basis of the global dissemination of media cultural products. (Kyriakidou, 2009: 485–6)

Her research is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of cosmopolitan media studies. Yet, like so many other scholars operating under the global umbrella, she too reverts to a problematic binarism: ‘The discussion here has illustrated how audiences draw alternatively upon national discourses and cosmopolitan ideas in making sense of distant suffering’ (Kyriakidou, 2009: 493). This assessment is underwritten by the either–or logic which reproduces a static conception of national identification and minimizes the salience of multiple and thickening affiliations.

A cosmopolitan perspective seeks to overcome the habit of theorizing globalization in an either–or logic predicated on oppositions in the mold of inside–outside or exogenous–endogenous (Beck, 2006). Cosmopolitanism, as an analytic paradigm, highlights the emergence of new social spaces and imaginaries through their very interaction. Cosmopolitanization carries transformative effects for the inner grammar of cultural and national identifications. Our main interpretive point is that even if particular cultural orientations are prefiguring how GMEs are decoded, these very national outlooks are not necessarily the same as earlier incarnations of nationhood. GMEs do set the agenda and create the potential for phatic morality as a foundation of cosmopolitan risk collectivities. However, the degree of habituation is not the result of shared interpretations of global risks but rather of the shared exposure and consumption of media events themselves.

Outlook

In this article we have dealt with reimagining nationhood in terms of how the mediation of global risks is potentially changing the sense of national belonging. Rather than viewing cosmopolitanism as alternative or even antithesis to a naturalized version of the national, we have argued that cosmopolitanization itself is a constitutive feature of the reconfiguration of nationhood. We have delineated the features of cosmopolitan nationhood in the context of world risk society including: (1) the human rights imperative; (2) the world market imperative; (3) migration as the prism for Otherhood (‘The global Other is in our midst’); (4) global generations and civil society movements; (5) and the local interpenetrations of world religions. We have treated the catastrophic global risk potential as compulsive force, in terms of actors having to respond to this global situation (varieties of cosmopolitanization). In the absence of clear secular and nation-state driven visions for the future, most contemporary societies are involved in various forms of risk management (including the denial of global risks).

Whereas national heuristics have treated (global) risks as temporary, pathological and residual, cosmopolitan heuristics approach risk as central and constitutive. This shift is characterized by a transition from homogeneous national time to cosmopolitan times that are fragmented and contingent. It is, thus, not merely the pluralization of temporal conceptions, but the fact that these ‘mixed times’ underwrite the normative validation of ‘other’ times (and times of the other). While ‘mixed times’ are not necessarily new (religious and statist attempts to shape temporality have been competing for primacy for a long time), they are now coextensive and a legitimate feature of cosmopolitan realism. To be sure, we are still in the midst of these cosmopolitan changes, which at times makes it difficult to observe them, and many issues remain open. We would like to conclude, therefore, by briefly sketching three areas that require further attention.

First, if we accept the assumption that cosmopolitanism can only thrive if it provides an answer to the ontological insecurity that characterizes the crisis of the national, then the following questions become fundamental: What are the conditions for the creation of ontological security inscribed into cosmopolitan nations? If we think of cosmopolitanism along the lines of the aforementioned four epochs, is each of them a self-conscious engagement with the dominant system that preceded it? In the traditional model security is accomplished, among other things, through a cyclical approach and the power of recurrent rituals. The religious model gets rid of the cyclical approach but is eager to provide a teleological narrative, also underwritten by rituals (thus retaining some cyclical dimension), offering a secure vision for the future (depending on which religious sect you choose this can be taking place in the here and now or projected into the future). The national model recognizes the need for ontological security and the future by focusing on modern nationalism and a new teleology – that is, progress. The cosmopolitan model emerges and contributes to the ontological crisis and future visions against the background of world risk society. In order to succeed, cosmopolitanism too needs to build on a set of pre-existing meaning systems (and transform them without losing track of their ‘function’) and attendant visions of the future.

Looking at it this way, the open question is: how can world risk society (as an objective phenomenon, based on regimes of cosmopolitanization) be understood in the context of a competing set of orientations (the religious mode is probably the most powerful one today, with the diminishing response national tropes enjoy) to create conditions of certainty, stability and prospectivity? The context of world risk society does not mean these securities can be dispensed with. And this gives rise to the following paradox: how, in the context of world risk society, can the transformation of calculable risks into manufactured uncertainties be combined with the creation of cosmopolitan ontological securities? How can the old certainties of thick belonging and homogeneity give way to new affiliations and diversity? Put differently, while we can attribute many transformative qualities to cosmopolitanization (both from the observer and the actor perspective) we also need to think about the conditions of possibility for its routinization, for its naturalization and also for its rejection. The bottom line is that unless one tackles this deliberately, we cosmopolitan scholars might face the same fate as early Marxists who perceived Marxism as the main tool to explain social change, when in effect its elaborate understanding of power made it into a valuable explanation for how the social order was reproduced (driven by questions of why the expected changes and revolutions did not materialize).

Second, the national has no longer the legitimate authority to determine the future, let alone sole control over it. How then can cosmopolitan figurations in world risk societies become coextensive with new forms of sociability? More specifically, how can we differentiate between assumptions of thick belonging and the proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations? How can cosmopolitanization, embedded within structural manifestations such as individualization and risk capitalism (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Chang and Song, 2010; Suzuki et al., 2010; Yan, 2010), provide a new context for the transformation of collective identifications and the reimagination of nationhood? These new collectivities are neither traditional nor voluntary. Instead they are affiliations imagined under conditions of interdependencies imposing collective constraints. Ultimately the political and cultural salience of these cosmopolitan affiliations depends on how risks are mediatized and consumed as habituated practices. Here sociability is not established under conditions of united interpretations but as a result of shared attentiveness to global risks. In the absence of teleological futures and in the face of unknown risks, questions of collective survival constitute shared concerns.

If Georg Simmel (2004) conceptualized first modernity as a web of affiliations envisioned as concentric circles (from kin to nation), second modernity is characterized by intersections (where individualization, national identification and cosmopolitanization are mutually constitutive). To be sure, collectivities do not have the same perceptions of future risks, but they are articulating their affiliations in the context of various imperatives marshaling shared cosmopolitan horizons of expectations. These can, of course, be resisted, but they nonetheless have become the global measuring stick for how futures are engaged. Whereas cosmopolitanism has served us well as a sensitizing concept, directing our attention to cosmopolitanization as an operationalizing concept moves us ahead and opens avenues for future research. As we have noted above, cosmopolitanization is ‘coercive’ in that it transforms the experiential spaces of nation-states from within – often against their will, beyond awareness, parliamentary elections and public controversies, as a side effect of flows of migration, consumer choices, tastes in food or music or the global risks that tyrannize everyday life. This is what sparks political conflicts, specifically when cosmopolitanization (potentially) explodes taken-for-granted understandings and intuitions of national society and politics which have become second nature. Thus the conflict-laden dialectic of cosmopolitanization enforces anti-cosmopolitanization – and vice versa!

Third, these processes raise questions of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2000, 2006; Beck and Sznaider, 2006b), especially with regard to the relation between theory and empirical data: the cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences requires a new kind of middle-range ‘descriptive social theory’ that opens up the empirical dimensions of the cosmopolitanization of nationhood. This also implies that the task will often be one of creative concept generation ‘opening up lines of inquiry that encourage a rethinking in historical time, of the relationships among observation, the object of study, and the analytical instruments used’ (Werner and Zimmermann, 2006: 45).

Together, these considerations refocus our attention to a ‘cosmopolitan realism’. In world risk society conventional nationalism has become a backward-oriented idealism which ignores and contradicts the condition of the cosmopolitan nation. Earlier iterations of nationalism are increasingly being replaced by the maxims of a cosmopolitan realism, namely the more cosmopolitan the political structures and activities, the more successful they are in promoting national interests and the greater the weight of national structures in world risk society (Beck, 2005, 2009; Beck and Grande, 2010b). Cosmopolitan realism calls for neither the sacrifice of one’s own interests, nor an exclusive bias towards higher ideas and ideals. On the contrary, it accepts that for the most part political action is interest-based. But it insists on an approach to the pursuit of one’s own interests that is compatible with those of larger entities. Thus cosmopolitical realism basically means the recognition of the legitimate interests of others and their inclusion in the calculation of one’s own interests. In this process, interests become ‘reflexive national interests’ through repeated joint strategies of self-limitation; more precisely, empowerment arises from the cosmopolitan redefinition of national interests which national realism otherwise essentializes. To be sure, there are often limits to and dilemmas in cosmopolitan Realpolitik and it is no panacea for all the world’s problems. But then again, neither is the nation-state model. The challenge for future research is to re-evaluate social, political and cultural bonds in a cosmopolitanized context. Empirically we want to explore how and which nation-states are being cosmopolitanized and whether distinctive cosmopolitan affiliations are emerging.

Footnotes

Notes

Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and the London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research focuses on the cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences, the sociological dimensions of climate change and related theoretical issues.

Daniel Levy is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York. His research interests revolve around the study of memory cultures, political sociology and globalization.

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