Cosmopolitan Sociology and Confucian Worldview: Beck’s Theory in East Asia

Beck’s Cosmopolitan Appeal

The late Ulrich Beck’s ‘Cosmo-Climate’ European Research Council project has aimed at a dialogue with East Asia, pursued in two ways (Han, 2015b). A passive approach may begin by applying Beck’s concept of cosmopolitan sociology (which encompasses the likes of cosmopolitization, cosmopolitan realism, methodological cosmopolitanism, etc.) to East Asia to find the extent to which countries such as China, Japan and Korea show the aspects of changes diagnosed. Beck’s theory is then privileged, at least implicitly, as a taken-for-granted starting point and reference. In contrast, an active approach may attempt to define or redefine the space of cosmopolitan imagination and sociology from East Asian perspectives, thereby raising the open question of how Western and non-Western trajectories of development can be related to each other. Beck (2016) strongly encouraged East Asia to take an active approach while striving to rid itself of fixed assumptions (or hegemonic presuppositions) underlying the Western traditions of sociology (Han and Shim, 2010). In the same spirit, we want to pursue a reciprocal dialogue in this article by critically reconstructing the Confucian traditions in order to engender an alternative worldview of cosmopolitanism to come.

The Interaction between Beck and East Asia

Beck’s influence in East Asia is profound (Han, 2015d). His ideas of risk society, second modernity, emancipatory catastrophism and metamorphosis have received intensive public attention, particularly in Korea. However, other responses to Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology have been rather cool, as exemplified by the reactions to his 2009 lecture at Fudan University in Shanghai and his 2010 lecture at Nagoya University in Japan. This can be explained by the intellectual and geopolitical conditions of East Asia today. Yet, one should not overlook two tendencies of the interaction between Beck and East Asia. First, Beck became increasingly keenly aware of not only apparent difficulties but also profound potentialities of cosmopolitan imagination in East Asia. Second, significant attempts have been made in East Asia to explore the possible link between Asian traditions and Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology. Therefore, we would like to draw attention to some emerging outcomes of the interaction between Beck and East Asia in order to make Beck’s implicit (Asian) sensibilities and the implicit Asian (cosmopolitan) orientations explicit, as a double process of cosmopolitan self-reflection and dialogue (cf. Tyfield, 2016).

We believe that Beck’s methodological cosmopolitanism can be radicalized in this way in order to detect from Beck an extraordinary range of historical and cultural sensitivities while exploring the contemporary significance of East Asian traditions such as neo-Confucianism in connection with Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology. The Chinese pathway to Confucian development and modernity has been far from linear (Wang, 2014; Alitto, 1979; Makeham, 2014). On the contrary, it has involved internal critiques, ruptures and collective denial as demonstrated by the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 and the May Fourth Revolution in 1919. Based on these experiences, we also want to reconstruct Confucianism critically, as a response to the Western reflexive approach to second modernity and cosmopolitan change, in order to better handle such foundational issues of cosmopolitan sociology such as (1) cosmopolitan world, (2) cosmopolitan actor, and (3) the neo-Confucian ideas of cosmopolitan publicness.

Climate Change and Tianxia Worldview

The Potsdam workshop on climate change was held in late November 2013. Its purpose was to be a brainstorming session for the ‘Cosmo-Climate’ ERC project members to define the term ‘cosmopolitan’ as precisely as possible, with particular attention to distinguishing it from the term ‘global’. It was through this workshop that the Chinese concept of Tianxia (all-under-heaven) – originating from ancient China – was first introduced by Han (2013), the principal author of this essay, as an East Asian (mostly Chinese) source of cosmopolitan imagination. Beck brought to Munich the whiteboard on which Han had drawn the conceptual map of the Tianxia worldview and hung it on the wall of his new research center for cosmopolitan study. Beck later commented that ‘all the answers that I have been looking for are on this whiteboard’. This indicates that Beck was sensitive to other sources of cosmopolitan imagination aside from the Western (cf. Wieviorka, 2016).

Yet, interpreting the Tianxia worldview today is an open-ended issue, since it involves multiple orientations with potential contradictions. One may see it with his eyes on the Chinese empires of the past or on China as the G2 power. ¹ The Tianxia worldview may then come close to another form of hegemonic project rather than being cosmopolitan in its genuine sense. Our viewpoint differs from those who move along this road. We think that Beck’s concept of global risk community must presuppose a radically inclusive cosmopolitan vision and that this can be worked out by paying conscious attention to the normative dimensions of the Tianxia worldview. Otherwise, as Zhao (2006) demonstrates, the world can be imagined only as an aggregate (super-national) category of nation-states. All cooperation, then, depends on the costs and benefits calculated by nation-states in terms of national interests rather than any consensual framework of a cosmopolitan world. Beck himself spoke of a global community of risks primarily in terms of a ‘negative’ threat to the survival of humanity and not as a ‘positive’ moral force originating from a culturally-rooted cosmopolitan worldview. This suggests that Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology may become more effective if the moral force associated with the normative layer of the Tianxia worldview can be connected to his concept of cosmopolitan sociology. However, we concede that the task of reconciling global risk politics, cosmopolitan idealism, and the pull of existing national interests is a difficult one indeed.

Another polemical issue is whether the Tianxia worldview is only anthropocentric in nature or includes ecological dimensions. Insofar as Confucianism is defined by its emphasis on moral relations among men, one may argue that the conception of Tianxia is essentially homocentric. Daoism or Buddhism, rather than Confucianism, may be more useful for exploring ecological reciprocity. Yet Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology, especially when addressing itself to climate change, sensitizes attention to cosmological inspiration which goes beyond human-centered presuppositions. Likewise, neo-Confucianism has shown strong ecological inspirations by incorporating the concept of Heavenly Order, as we will soon discuss in the context of the notion of Tianxiaweigong. This is another reason why we think it desirable to link Beck to Confucianism in its reflexive form.

Cosmopolitan Actor

Perhaps one of the most sensitive and controversial issues of cosmopolitanism in East Asia is related to the future of China. The dialogue between Beck and the late former President of Korea Kim Dae-jung on 4 April 2008 was suggestive of this. Kim maintained that China will likely follow the cosmopolitan pathway of democracy backed by the rising middle class and other factors unless ‘the US, together with Japan, does not put too much military pressure on China’ (Kim Dae Jung Peace Center, 2008). However, aware of the enforced aspect of cosmopolitanization, Beck anticipated that the future will show more uncertainties and fluidities than we expect today.

It was in the 2014 Seoul conference that Beck (2015) proposed global cities as cosmopolitan actors and the ‘United Cities of Asia’ as a new framework of cosmopolitan cooperation. Beck encouraged the city of Seoul to take the initiative for regional risk governance in Asia. The Mayor of Seoul, Park Won-Soon, delivered a heartfelt address at a tribute ceremony for Beck in Seoul on 17 March 2015, stating that the city of Seoul will do its best to realize Beck’s proposal in East Asia (Joongmin Foundation for Social Theory, 2015). This illustrates an interesting aspect of the interaction between Beck and East Asia not only academically but also politically.

In this regard, a simple but key question is who the cosmopolitan actor is in East Asia. Qinghai Gao (1930–2004), known as a ‘Chinese Lukacs’, deserves particular attention since he developed an inspiring concept of ‘Leidecunzai’, which can be translated as cosmopolitan actor (Gao, 2004; Han, 2014). The cosmopolitan significance can be seen by his particular way of conceptualizing ‘Lei’ as emerging out of the liberation from all dependencies on collectivism including orthodox Marxism in China, the embodiment of liberal ideas such as individualization and free market competition, and the activation of civil society and communication. Gao (2004: 12) declared that the key question today is ‘how to transform the nature-like dependency into a social and universal one and to expand the closed relationship of communication based on the given region to the communication among men in the world histories’. We can put Gao’s imagination of the cosmopolitan actor into the Tianxia worldview to make a Chinese cosmopolitan vision more explicit and visible.

Back to the empirical question: Beck (2015) moved into the action-theoretical arena in his Seoul lecture by suggesting three conceptual lenses – sacred (unwritten) norms of human survival, anthropological shock, and social catharsis. Han (2015a: 117) formulated an empirical proposition from this: ‘the more deeply shocked by a disaster destroying the norm of human survival and justice, the greater the energy for cosmopolitan sympathy and solidarity’. With this as the springboard, Han and Shim have conducted an empirical analysis of cosmopolitan actors by using survey data taken in 2012 from the citizens of Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. First, Shim (2015) examined citizens’ responses to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi radiation leakage and climate change. Data analysis showed that the higher the citizens’ perception of risks, the more strongly they agreed to the need of transnational cooperation – thereby supporting Beck’s proposal. With respect to the readiness to act, however, it was found that even those with high risk perception are not prepared to join the international campaign to help the victims of radiation leakage, most likely due to the hazard of the risks involved. Such a tendency was particularly prevalent among Beijing citizens. This suggests that shock alone is insufficient. The role of catharsis needs to be carefully investigated and plugged into Beck’s empirical theory of cosmopolitan actor.

From a different angle, Han (2015c) drew attention to citizens’ identities in East Asia. The two explanatory axes are (1) whether citizens perceive themselves to be part of the emerging middle class or the lower class, and (2) whether they continue to prioritize the state as the pacemaker of development as in the past, or uphold the view that citizens are more important in defining public interests and agendas. The combination of these two axes results in four categories of social identity in East Asia: public citizens, state citizens, popular citizens, and compliant citizens. ² Of these, Han showed that public citizens are most clearly and consistently cosmopolitan, followed by popular citizens, in regard to the issue of nuclear power plants.

These empirical studies may strengthen Beck’s cosmopolitan sensitivity to the increasing tension and ambiguities within cosmopolitan change today. Simply put, public citizens demand the reduction of nuclear power plants from an ecological perspective whereas state citizens support the increase of such plants from a growth-centered perspective, even though both categories belong to the middle class. Likewise, the battleground of cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan actor is fluid and multi-directional in East Asia.

Tianxiaweigong as Cosmopolitan Publicness

Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology requires a reflective cosmopolitan publicness to cope with various kinds of global risks. ‘Reflective’ here means being aware of the democratic and the ecological deficit that we face today. From this viewpoint, Park and Han (2014), two co-authors of this paper, tried to critically reconstruct the grammar of neo-Confucian Tianxiaweigong, which literally means ‘all things under the heaven belong to the public’. This grammar involves three layers of publicness and, hence, three paths of critical reconstruction.

The first one is clustered around the material conditions of life, such as survival, security, safety, and welfare. This type of publicness, i.e. Minben publicness, is crucial because Confucianism endorses the potentiality of all human beings by the norm of Tianxia, or Heavenly Principle, and argues that securing material conditions is indispensable for actualizing such a principle. ³ China’s socialistic path to modernity shows various attempts and experiments to meet the requirements of the materialistic Tianxiaweigong. The implication of this publicness for coping with economic poverty and inequality is strong, not only in the past but also in the age of neoliberal globalization.

The second is clustered around the political publicness of deliberation. The key question is how to identify the Heavenly Principle in political processes despite the fact that the principle remains unspoken. According to Confucianism, the Heavenly Principle can be expressed in the form of popular opinion, which often remains precarious. As a solution to this dilemma, neo-Confucians invented Gongnon as an institution to find the rational core of the popular opinion through public deliberation around which deliberative publicness was formed.

This concept of deliberative publicness is premised upon a vantage point of understanding politics and society in terms of interacting flows and networks of language roads. The deliberative politics based on Gongnon is also an answer to questions about the arbitrariness of the sovereign power, such as the question of how to control the misuse of power located at the center and summit of the bureaucratic and authoritarian state. The neo-Confucian conception of Tianxiaweigong is distinctive by its profound commitment to the discursive justification of power and order. The normative implications of this Confucian publicness are significant when examined against ‘the democratic deficit’ that Habermas (2014) has observed in the global public institutions today.

Cosmopolitan publicness as discussed above is more conceptual than empirical. Perhaps the degree of intensity may vary depending on the types of publicness. While the survival imperative of Confucian publicness has received keen attention everywhere in East Asia, particularly in China, the imperative of a discursive justification of power and politics has been more prominent and influential in Korea since the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910). Asian tradition and democracy have been deeply interwoven to the extent to which the normative Confucian concept of discursive publicness provided a driving force of student movements, from 1960 to the Gwangju democratic movement in 1980 and since then (Han, 2016). In particular, the participatory communitarian approach to human rights was visible in the experience of self-rule by the citizens of Gwangju from 22–27 May 1980.

The debate on the Confucian principle of meritocracy also deserves due attention. Bell (2015) suggested the combination of meritocracy in the central government and electoral representation in the local government as a model of democratic publicness in China. This idea may be well backed by the new policy framework declared by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in November 2013 – namely, ‘social governance of risks’, which requires intensive consultation with NGOs, experts, and opinion leaders for political reform and stability. However, this model is limited in political deliberation. The group interests can be set against each other even though they share a Confucian heritage of meritocracy and political consultation. Despite this, we argue that the Confucian normative vision of publicness, if well-institutionalized, can cope with the ‘democratic deficit’ coming from the techno-bureaucratic rule.

Finally, there is an ecological aspect which comes from the character of the Heavenly Principle as a meta-biological principle of the autopoietic process of the universe. This aspect may take two modes of existence today. On one hand, it can take the mode of ecological publicness to cope with the ecological risks. On the other hand, it can take the figure of an ecological stormy sea on which the ship of the cosmopolitan publicness floats. The first mode is meaningful insofar as it effectively sensitizes attention to such kinds of global risks as climate change or radiation leakage. We think, however, that the second mode of ecological publicness is especially prominent for visualizing the image of Tianxiaweigong as the ship of publicness on the ecological stormy sea in the direction of ‘the emancipatory catastrophism’ defended by Beck (2015) against apocalyptic catastrophism.