Globalization and cosmopolitanism: Continuity and disjuncture,contemporary and historical

Globalization and cosmopolitanism

The purpose of this article is to indicate that globalizing tendencies both promote and undermine cosmopolitan possibilities. The relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism has drawn the attention of a number of writers who have presented different sets of likely configurations on the basis of different definitions or accounts of both phenomena (see the surveys in Roudometof, 2005 and Connell, 2007). Globalization is typically, although by no means exhaustively, defined in terms of ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1990) or ‘time-space distanciation’ (Giddens, 1990) resulting from a modernity in which there is an ‘intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities’ (Giddens, 1990: 64). This formulation of globalization replicates Durkheim’s late 19th-century functionalist definition of social density, not only through its reference to the role of developments in communications and transportation (Durkheim, 1964: 259–60), but in the idea that an increase in social density enhances the possibility of relationships between geographically separated units as ‘the real distance between individuals has itself diminished in some way’ (Durkheim, 1964: 256–7; see also 339 footnote). Indeed, Durkheim regards the economic ramifications of these processes as breaking down ‘the frontiers which separate peoples’ and involving production for ‘consumers spread over … the entire world’, as well as changes in the structure of civil society and alterations in the character and scope of the social sciences (Durkheim, 1964: 369–71, 1992: 72). It is no accident that on this basis Durkheim offers an early version of cosmopolitan sociology (Turner, 2006: 140–1; see also Chernilo, 2007: 27–9). Indeed, this ‘abstract linkage’ definition of globalization (Connell, 2007: 371) corresponds with the idea of globalization in terms of flows and mobilities (Hannerz, 1997; Urry, 2000), a notion compatible with a conception of cosmopolitanism in terms of transnational travel and converging consumption patterns in cuisine, media and fashion (Appadurai, 1996), the plural loyalties of individuals (Hollinger, 1995: 86; Cohen, 1992: 482), an attitude of mind characterized by openness to others and cultural translation (Delanty, 2006; Hannerz, 1996; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002), and so on. In these terms globalization and cosmopolitanism may be taken as distinct aspects of a continuous or at least connected set of processes.

A different approach to globalization emphasizes not temporal-spatial contraction through intensification of functional linkage but power relations, including those in which de-territorialized economic powers compete for world market shares (Sklair, 2001; Strange, 1996). A conception of globalization in terms of power effectively delinks it from a necessary association with globe-shrinking late-modern information technology and points instead in the direction of expansive networks of trans-territorial relations of super-ordination and sub-ordination. In this vein Anthony Hopkins (2002: 21–36) identifies four historical periods of globalization: the ‘archaic’, involving pre-state Asian, African and European empires and their trading diasporas in tributary and luxury commerce; ‘proto’ globalization, from approximately 1600 to 1800, in which European colonization and associated slave and plantation economies encroached on the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa; ‘modern’ globalization, from the 19th to the mid 20th century, based on West European and American industrialization, involving economic interdependence and organizational internationalization; and finally ‘postcolonial’ globalization, in which supranational entities such as the World Bank play an increasingly important role and in which significant cultural processes sponsored by the internet, global media and popular culture are significant. Associated with each form of historical globalization are correspondingly different forms of cosmopolitanism associated with different social groups.

The apparently contradictory fragmentation of globalization is readily grasped when it is understood in terms of power relations, although such fragmentation is difficult to conceptualize when globalization is treated as a phenomenon primarily characterized by flows and mobilities. An aspect of globalization in this sense is captured in the concept of ‘enclave society’ (Turner, 2007), which challenges the characterization of globalization in terms of mobility, transnationality and cultural and political cosmopolitanism but at the same time relies on a notion of globalization in which ‘economic requirements of flexibility and fluidity’ lead the political state to both encourage labour migration and at the same time defend territorial sovereignty (Turner, 2007: 288). Turner (2007: 290) argues that while globalization is premised on a degree of mobility it also therefore involves ‘closure, entrapment and containment’ (see also Fulcher, 2000: 534–5). In enclave society:

governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and, where necessary, to immobilise flows of people, goods and services. These sequestrations, exclusions and closures … seek to exercise governmentality … over populations by enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations … for both domestic and international regulation. (Turner, 2007: 290)

Indeed, the possibility of movement of criminal activity, disease, illegal migration and political terrorism across borders promotes increasing state engagement of techniques of containment (Turner, 2007: 290); thus arises ‘the paradox that globalisation also produces new systems of closure’ (2007: 289). Turner (2007: 300) holds that these developments are responsible for situations in which cultural differences ‘produce fragmented, isolated, and underprivileged social groups’, the members of which will have a likelihood of experiencing different forms and degrees of detention and institutionalized constraint.

It might be assumed that a fragmented globalization in which state power is directed towards enclavement tends to undermine cosmopolitan prospects. Certainly this approach is compatible with the idea that economic globalization enhances rather than depletes the opportunities and capacities of states (Hobson and Ramesh, 2002; Weiss, 1999; see also Giddens, 1990: 70). It therefore challenges or at least qualifies the idea that global forms of supranational governance and the transnational enhancement of democracy and human rights generate a latent cosmopolitanism in the form of global citizenship (Boli and Thomas, 1997; Delanty, 2000; Falk, 1994; Held, 1995).

These different accounts of globalization raise questions concerning possible relationships between cosmopolitanism and the state (see Kendall et al., 2009: 33–50). In contrast to an historically earlier view of cosmopolitanism as a project of political governance, associated with Enlightenment thinkers, is the more recent idea that cosmopolitanism can be understood in terms of a ‘principle of world openness associated with global publics’ (Delanty, 2006: 27). This shift from a political or ethical to a sociological conceptualization of cosmopolitanism is strenuously defended in a number of publications by Ulrich Beck, who argues that there are many cosmopolitanisms and that it is possible to distinguish between cosmopolitanization as a social process – what he calls ‘globalisation within societies’ – and cosmopolitanism as a methodological device (Beck, 2002; see also Beck, 2006). Beck (2000) provocatively argues that a rights-based form of cosmopolitanism is manifest in the humanitarian interventions of states such as occurred in the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, and by extension possibly in the 2011 military strikes by NATO in Libya.

The state-enforced cosmopolitanism Beck identifies functions to distinguish between the first age of modernity ‘based on international law’ and the second ‘based on human rights’ (Beck, 2000: 83):

In this framework, the Nato bombing in response to the genocide in Kosovo appears as a striking breach of international law … [but a] government may now forfeit the recognition of its sovereignty under international law by a blatant violation of human rights of its own citizens and on its own territory. (Beck, 2000: 82–83)

The ‘paradigm shift’ entailed in this development, in which ‘international law goes over the heads of nations and states and addresses individuals directly’ posits a cosmopolitanism comprising a ‘legally binding world society of individuals’ (Beck, 2000: 84). Yet Beck’s acknowledgement that not all states and therefore not all individuals as human rights subjects can be located in this paradigm shift, and that some states may engineer its form for their own purposes made possible by a ‘world monopoly of power and morality’ (Beck, 2000: 85) effectively transforms his discussion from analysis to metaphor. Indeed, his claim that globalization ‘implies the weakening of state sovereignty and state structures’ (2000: 86) may be true for some states (those subjected to such dominant state practices) but not for all states and is therefore untrue as a general statement (Hirst and Thompson, 1996; Mann, 1997; Weiss, 2003). Indeed, the checklist of empirical indicators of cosmopolitanization which Beck (2000: 96–7) provides is effectively neutral on state sponsorship.

The discussion that follows indicates that globalization both promotes and undermines cosmopolitan tendencies, a conclusion suggested for the present stage of globalization by the concept of enclavement as outlined by Turner. There is a suggestion in Turner’s argument that these developments are late 20th-century responses to contemporary economic contingencies which generate electoral pressures on plebiscitary governments. But rather than being of recent origin, the themes Turner points to, of opposing trends of an expansive globalization and at the same time a restrictive state containment of foreigners, may be a more enduring paradoxical relationship of globalization that does not require the mediation or facilitation of electoral politics. A related matter concerning the cosmopolitan outlook or disposition is its differential incidence, in which the same configuration of globalization provokes both cosmopolitanism and antipathy to it among different social groups. Finally, the interactive generation of globalization and state power cannot be regarded as a recent development, a fact revealed by consideration of a classic account frequently but erroneously assumed to show that global markets render the political state ineffectual. Indeed, these problems of what Beck calls the ‘second age of modernity’ and Hopkins describes as ‘post-colonial globalisation’ are already manifest in the period of Hopkins’ ‘proto-globalisation’. An examination of these issues of globalization and cosmopolitanism in a 17th- and 18th-century context not only provides an historical perspective on contemporary themes, but permits examination of classic sources that dispels some misleading current readings of them.

Seventeenth-century enclavement

The 17th century is regarded by historians as a period of crisis, in which political and religious change was associated with demographic and military instability (Aston, 1965; Parker and Smith, 1997). At the same time it was an age of burgeoning commerce and international trade, in which trade wars between states adhering to monopolistic policies were conducted on behalf of overseas trading companies possessing outward cross-border orientations. These different features of ‘mercantilism’ made it an ambiguous if not paradoxical phenonenon. A shift in the centre of gravity of capitalist development from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic was consolidated during this time and the existence of a world market was established within it (Hobsbawm, 1965; Wallerstein, 1974). The practice and doctrine of this mercantile period determined that an increase of a nation’s wealth could only be achieved if foreign trade was governed by a singular rule, namely, ‘to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value’ (Mun, 1970 [1664]: 125; see also Petyt 1970 [1680]: 371–4). A balance of trade in favour of export required high customs against imports and a prohibition on export of a nation’s wealth in the form of gold and silver. And yet an element of the free trade argument usually attributed to writers of the following century emerged at this time not so much against these restrictive aspects of the political economy, although that did occur, but principally against the monopolies that dominated English commerce of the period and its foreign trade.

Given that the Crown granted commercial monopolies it is not surprising that the movement against monopoly had a parliamentary source. At the beginning of the 17th century Sir Edwin Sandys’s ‘Report from the Committee [of the House of Commons] on Free Trade, 1604’ found that ‘the mass of the whole trade of all the realm is in the hands of some two hundred persons at the most, the rest serving for a show only, and reaping small benefits’ (1972 [1604]: 437). The restriction of freedom of trade imposed by monopoly, Sandys found, was ‘against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England’ (1972 [1604]: 437). His expectation was that when trade is free there would be no fall in the price of commodities, a fear the monopoly lobby encouraged, but rather that ‘many young men will seek out new places, and trade further for great benefit’ (1972 [1604]: 439). In its expression at the time, as in its later manifestation, the argument for free trade was one for the further expansion of commercial activity, including global expansion.

Characteristically for the 17th century, trade could be free only if it were protected. This prospect was made clear in ‘The Commissioners of Trade and Plantations Report on the State of Trade, 1697’ that ‘enquire[d] into the several obstructions of trade and the means of removing the same’ and also into ‘what manner and by what proper methods trade may be most effectively protected’ (Commissioners of Trade, 1972 [1697]: 568). The report charted the extent of involvement of English traders in foreign markets during the period 1670 to 1697. These markets included: Sweden and the Baltic, Denmark and Norway, France, East India, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Barbary, Guinea, the American Plantations, Hamburg and Germany, Holland and Flanders, Russia, Newfoundland, Greenland and the fisheries of the northern seas. Not only was the balance of trade between England and each of these reported but also what components of imports from particular countries were re-exported. The picture that emerges is one of 17th-century England at the centre of a significant global economy.

Free trade doctrine, especially as developed by Adam Smith in the 18th century, is frequently held to be a statement of economic cosmopolitanism, as shown below. Regardless of how this later argument is interpreted, 17th-century proponents of freeing trade from monopoly could not be understood as entertaining cosmopolitanism in any direct sense as the national interest was explicitly paramount in their deliberations. The marginal title that opens Lewes Roberts’ The Treasure of Traffike or A Discourse of Forraigne Trade summarizes exactly an ethos of the age, namely that ‘No Man is born for himselfe, but for his Countrey’ (Roberts, 1970 [1641]: 57). Indeed, it is the institutional strengthening of the nation and the conflict between nation-states that gave rise to the need during the 17th century for international law. The contribution to this development of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, for instance, through elaboration of natural law principles, is frequently regarded as laying the basis for a philosophically grounded cosmopolitanism. Grotius’ claim, that ‘among the traits characteristic of man is an impelling desire for society … not of any sort, but peaceful, and organised, according to the measure of his intelligence’ (quoted in Sabine, 1964: 423), is taken to underpin the possibility of a moral community transcending national boundaries. Desiderius Erasmus’s similar idea of over a hundred years before, namely that nature ‘necessitates [in humankind] mutual assistance … [and] has amply provided man with inducements to peace and concord’ (1964: 179–80), similarly indicates a cosmopolitan current coterminous with original capitalist globalization. The motif of common humanity as a cosmopolitan theme (Jacob, 2006) suggests a test for any cosmopolitan ethos at the time in the treatment of alien nationals in the contemporary English discussion of global commerce.

Although the 17th-century English economy is typically characterized in terms of commercial or mercantile capital, its industrial basis is acknowledged and reflected in a recognition towards the end of the century of the importance of labour in production, as in William Petyt’s statement that:

People are … the chiefest, most fundamental, and pretious commodity, out of which may be derived all sorts of Manufactures, Navigation, Riches, Conquests, and solid Dominion. (1970 [1680]: 458)

John Locke, writing in 1689, similarly claims that ‘labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things’ (1965: 339). Even before these statements appeared, their recognition of the significance of labour to economic well-being was reflected in debates concerning migrant labour earlier in the century. Transnational migration is a phenomenon that links in various ways economic and political causes and concerns. Economically migration is associated with the movement of both capital and skill, with means of employment and labour supply; politically, it raises concerns of nationality, citizenship and rights more generally, as well as questions concerning security, for both the host society and the alien migrant. A global economy relies upon and encourages migration (Turner, 2007: 293–4). This was certainly the case in 17th-century England. Removal of the disability of alien status, then, can be taken as an element of a cosmopolitan ethos.

The number of complaints and petitions against foreign crafts-workers and traders during the 17th century is a measure of the extent of their settlement in England at the time. In 1622 alone there were complaints and petitions in London against aliens from organizations of goldsmiths, coopers, clockmakers, brokers, leather-dressers and others (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972: 716–21). Later years saw additional complaints (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972: 725–9, 735–7). In 1661 ‘The Council of Trade Deliberations on the Petition Against the Aliens’ accepted the petitioners claim that ‘there are multitudes of foreigners who do employ themselves in the manufactures specified in the petitions about the City of London’ (Council of Trade, 1972 [1661]: 737). But it went on to observe that if the aliens were to be removed and ‘would plant their manufactures elsewhere’ it would be to ‘the prejudice of the kingdom’ (1972 [1661]: 737). Indeed, the point is made that these aliens ‘carry not the wealth of the land out of the kingdom, but marry and incorporate here and bring their children up in the same crafts and occupations, who become native English’ (1972 [1661]: 738). These assessments, including the pivotal last one concerning the transmutability of alien status through residence and generation, are made repeatedly throughout the century.

Economic writers, noting the contrary view of ‘self-interested ignorant Traders’ (Petyt 1970 [1680]: 358) argued for the settlement and naturalization of (only) Protestant foreigners in order to achieve the economic benefits of expanded demand and importation of capital and expertise (Fortrey, 1970 [1673]: 219–24; Houghton, 1970 [1677]: 263–5; Petyt, 1970 [1680]: 358–9; Roberts, 1970 [1641]: 80; Violet, 1972 [1653]: 724–5). Indeed, legislation aiming to attract alien workers for particular industries was enacted to enhance England’s national economy, but such aliens were required to ‘tak[e] the oaths of allegiance and supremacy’ (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972: 738–9). Yet the nation was unable to offer naturalization in return. A Bill of 1673 to naturalize aliens was unsuccessful (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972: 744–5) and an Act naturalizing alien Protestants, passed in 1708, was repealed in 1711 (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972: 749–50).

The 17th- and early 18th-century debate concerning economic migrants is in many ways a mirror to 21st-century concerns. A globalizing economy generates a clear demand for migrant labour. In doing so it ostensibly encourages a cosmopolitan tendency, a sentiment represented in the works of many economic experts. And yet the strengthening of national reservation and the imperatives of state control that appear as responses to globalization lead, in turn, to a resolutely anti-cosmopolitan outcome with regard to the treatment of aliens, and not only in terms of national citizenship.

Laissez-faire, globalization and cosmopolitanism

Having considered the structure of relations in the case of a globalized 17th-century English economy and society it is appropriate to now turn to the theory of the global economy and its relationship with both cosmopolitanism and the political state as it was developed by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Smith’s position will be given clear relief by comparing it with the approach of a 19th-century critic of Smith, Karl Marx.

In a remark directed against the mercantile writers of the previous century Adam Smith, writing in 1776, observed that the merchants knew ‘in what manner’ foreign trade ‘enriched themselves’ but not how it ‘enriched the country’ (1979: 434). Against the thinking of the previous generation Smith notes that ‘the exportation of gold and silver in trade might frequently be advantageous to the country’ and that the regulation of the requisite quantity of these metals required only ‘the freedom of trade’ and not ‘the attention of government’ (1979: 433). Even more pointedly, Smith suggests that the earlier concerns were not only false but misplaced when he says that ‘it is not by the importation of gold and silver, that the discovery of America has enriched Europe … [for through] the abundance of the American mines, those metals have become cheaper’ (1979: 447). But it was the discovery of America itself, he continues, that ‘by opening a new and inexhaustible market to all the commodities of Europe’ was an impetus to the development of productive capacities in particular and new wealth in general (1979: 448). Even more significant was the ‘discovery of a passage to the East Indies, by the Cape of Good Hope, which … [opened] a still more extensive range to foreign commerce than even that of America’ (1979: 448).

Smith understood that the expansion of markets produced not only extensions of bilateral trading relations but was generative of an economic globalization in which all countries were involved in more generalized arrangements. He says that, in addition to the augmentation of the industry of those countries that trade directly with American colonies, there are similar benefits to those countries that trade indirectly ‘through the medium of other countries’ (1979: 591). In addition there is a less visible consequence that ‘encourage[s] the industry of countries, such as Hungary and Poland, which may never, perhaps, have sent a single commodity of their own produce to America’ insofar as American products – sugar, chocolate, tobacco – are consumed in these countries and ‘must be purchased with something which is either the produce of the industry of Hungary and Poland, or with something that has been purchased with some part of that produce’ (1979: 591–2). It is the idea, associated with Smith, that free markets are both internationally expansive and that national government is unnecessary to the process – that free markets produce ‘free men’ – that has led to the notion that economic globalization is in this sense cosmopolitan. Thus a test for the cosmopolitanism of laissez-faire globalization is the degree to which the national state becomes irrelevant in the economic liberalization of a global economy.

For Smith, globalization provides a fiscal incentive for individuals to be cosmopolitan: ‘The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country’ (1979: 848–9). Indeed, the opposition in this sense between globe and nation is made clear when he suggests that such movement might be prompted by ‘a burdensome tax’ (1979: 849). The potential mobility of capital is not uniform according to Smith, however, as he says that ‘capitals employed in the agriculture and in the retail trade of any society must always reside within that society’ whereas the ‘capital of the wholesale merchant … may wander about from place to place, according as it can buy cheap or sell dear’ (Smith, 1979: 364). The apparent opposition indicated here, between globalization on the one hand and the state on the other, is not a situation that Smith necessarily accepts, however. Indeed, when he repeats that the ‘discovery of America … and the passage to the East Indies … are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind’ (1979: 626), he prefaces his remarks with an argument for American representation in the British parliament on the basis of taxation (1979: 624–5). We shall return to this complication in Smith’s economic cosmopolitanism. Before doing so it is instructive to compare his account with that of Karl Marx, writing just 60 years after Smith.

In close summary of Smith, Marx famously declared that the ‘discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie … [and] gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 36). The discovery of America ‘paved the way’ for the establishment of the world market, continues Marx, a market that ‘has given an immense development to commerce’ which has in turn allowed the bourgeoisie to ‘conquer for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 37). Marx goes on to say that the ‘need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe … [and] through its exploitation of the world-market give[s] a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 38–9). Marx astutely observes that it is not only in material but ‘also in intellectual production’ that national ‘one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 39). It might be noted in passing that the conception of cosmopolitanism indicated here by Marx is not political or ethical but sociological.

And yet a political cosmopolitanism of the global capitalist economy is more a prospect than a reality in Marx’s estimation. Even if national boundaries yield to economic and intellectual penetration, the national political state and its class political functions remain, indeed are enhanced and augmented. Relatedly, because of the oppressive domination of capitalist production for those who are subjected to it through employment, free markets do not produce ‘free men’, as Smith supposed. Marx agrees that the world market is cosmopolitan insofar as ‘working men have no country’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 51). This is because modern industrial labour is labour subjected to capital, and because of the homogenizing force generated by the needs of capitalist production, capitalistic labour is ‘stripped … of every trace of national character’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 44). But in order to free itself from capitalist domination ‘the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 45). It is in the development of the working-class struggle against capital that the true cosmopolitanism of an international working class organization arises, according to Marx (Marx and Engels, 1970: 63). At best, then, the development of commerce leads production, as Marx said in Capital, to be ‘cosmopolitan …[and] therefore has a … dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organisation’, but ‘whither this process of dissolution will lead … does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production itself’ (Marx, 1971: 331–2).

The global capitalist economy generates the possibility of a generalized cosmopolitanism, according to Marx, but not its realization. Marx holds that within a capitalist global economy the state necessarily serves a class function insofar as it supports the economic needs of the capitalist class. In contradiction to this latter prospect, the drive for liberation from economic and political domination leads the proletariat to take a cosmopolitan course in the creation of an international working-class movement. Indeed, the late modern identification of cosmopolitanism with privileged lifestyles and associated values, and its antithesis with disadvantaged groups, is empirically unfounded (Holton, 2005: 13–14, 144–5).

Smith and Marx could not be further apart on the question of what is necessary for ‘true’ cosmopolitanism. And yet the issue does not depend on their respective assessments of the relationship between the global economy and the national state, as we shall see. This is because, in addition to his remarks concerning the cosmopolitan consequences of stock ownership, Smith offers an account of cosmopolitan possibilities premised on the character of human nature. For Marx’s proletarian insurrectionism Smith offers what he regards as universal moral sentiments that underlie not only human sociality but also industriousness, including the ‘self-command’ that finds common expression in American Indians, for instance, and thrifty Protestants (Smith, 1976: 145–56), even though the sentiment of sympathy has a perilously limited range (Smith, 1976: 136–7). The emotional basis of common humanity, in Smith’s account in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, contrasts with the more frequently mentioned contemporary Kantian notion that it is reason that unifies humans into a single moral community.

In other ways, however, Smith and Marx are less distant than they may at first appear. Smith’s argument that the growth of international commerce can only be achieved through the free market and in the absence of state interference is not absolute. Indeed, he says that it is quite utopian to expect ‘that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored’ (1979: 471). When Smith makes clear the qualifications necessary to explain the actual operations of expanding international trade, his position and Marx’s are remarkably close and it emerges that, for Smith, the global economy relies in many ways on national states and in that sense must bear an ambiguous relationship with cosmopolitan tendencies.

Returning to consideration of the advantages to Europe of American and East Indian trade, Smith notes that it is necessary to distinguish ‘between the effects of the colony trade and those of the monopoly of that trade’ for one is ‘always and necessarily beneficial’ and the other is ‘always and necessarily hurtful’ (1979: 607). And yet, in practice, he continues, the colony trade is so beneficial that, ‘notwithstanding the hurtful effects of that monopoly, is still upon the whole beneficial, and greatly beneficial’ (1979: 607–8). And even though he says here that monopoly is ‘always and necessarily hurtful’, he goes on to say that:

When a company of merchants undertake, at their own risk and expense, to establish a new trade with some remote and barbarous nation, it may not seem unreasonable … to grant them … a monopoly of trade for a certain number of years’ (Smith, 1979: 754)

This is a measure that Smith acknowledges is necessarily supported by the military and other instrumentalities of the state (1979: 755). It would be a mistake to assume that Smith holds that the state’s support of the free market is only ever temporary. While individual merchant companies may have state provision of monopoly for a limited time only, there is no requirement that only one company receive such benefit or that several such benefits be fitted into a single time frame. The state’s involvement, therefore, will be continuous though the advantage of monopoly to any single company may be of limited duration.

In his discussion ‘of the expense of justice’ and the role of the state, Smith acknowledges that, from the pastoral stage of societal development the growth of property gives rise to a need for the state or ‘civil government’ to secure the advantage of possession against the possibility of rebellion against injustice (1979: 710). Indeed, so important is this fact in Smith’s estimation that he uses it in his argument against contract theory. This understanding of the necessity of the political state under conditions of private ownership must be joined to another observation made by Smith regarding the behaviour of property owners. Smith reports the inclination of employers to form combinations, often covert, to protect and advance their own interests (1979: 84). He also acknowledges the power of what he calls the ‘authority of riches’ (1979: 711). The concatenation of these many factors indicates that those who directly benefit from the international market are ever likely to draw upon the resources of the national political state in advancing their commercial and manufacturing interests. In more general terms, Smith notes the role of the state in the provision of an infrastructure necessary for commerce: ‘the erection and maintenance of the publick works which facilitate the commerce of any country, such as good roads, bridges, navigable canals, harbours, etc’ (1979: 724).

Smith shows, then, that property owners in order to satisfy their interests harmonize the international or global market and the institutions and operations of the national state from the point of view of their own needs. It is for this reason that his analysis of international market expansion demonstrates that the tendency and dynamic of the global economy depends on and strengthens the national state in its relation with transnational capital. Cosmopolitan tendencies under such circumstances are subject to cross-cutting imperatives, depending on the contingencies of both global capital and national state, and their changing interactions.

Conclusion

The relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism can be considered against the backdrop of over four centuries of exchanges between them. Seventeenth-century discussions of migrant labour and access of aliens to citizenship were looked at above, as well as 18th- and 19th-century accounts of state support for global capitalism. While the possibility of cosmopolitan tendencies emerges under globalization, counter-forces also operate through which aspects of globalization undermine or limit them. It is never the single common thread linking globalization and cosmopolitanism that effectively indicates the full relationship between the two, but the contradictory relationship between them that relies on a number of different connections, both inhibitory as well as enhancing, involving enclavement as well as mobilities. Most important of all is the necessity of the nation-state to economic globalization, and the possible antipathy of a political state, defending locally based transnational interests in a global world, to cosmopolitan aspirations.

The state’s support of globalization is not confined to the mercantilist period, in which it was legitimated by prevailing doctrine, but remains significant during the period of laissez-faire, when prevailing doctrine appeared to deny the fact although, as shown here, the necessity of state management of and provision for market relations is indicated in Adam Smith’s classic statement of economic liberalism. The forms of globalization and cosmopolitanism have changed enormously over four centuries. What remains constant, however, is the paradoxical and uneven relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism at the institutional level through the enduring role of the nation-state in support of economic globalization.

One difficulty in appreciating the variable contours of the historical relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism is the variety of understandings of the phenomena and processes of both globalization and cosmopolitanism (Connell, 2007; Roudometof, 2005), thus making clear specification of prospective outcomes unavoidably imprecise and speculative. Another problem is the lack of historical perspective in most accounts, especially of globalization, which encourages both a sense of generality on the basis of particular current experiences and also a neglect of different contexts in which recurrent orientations may be located. It has been shown here that a migrant experience of 21st-century enclavement may be parallel to 17th-century patterns of treatment of alien nationals, even though electoral politics and mass-circulation media are absent in the latter. The common elements of global market relations, in which political states have a key role in defending sectional economic interests and promoting internationalization, tends to generate contradictory pressures which frequently resolve into both expanding globalization and contracting cosmopolitanism, even in the presence of contrary possibilities for each prospect. In this sense, tendencies for globalization and cosmopolitanism may arise from a common source and yet be associated with opposing outcomes for wealth and poverty, patriotism and humanism, war and peace (Veblen, 1964).