And there will be the local non-liberals, who are dedicated to one form or another of thick ethnicity and are inclined to separate themselves from ‘others’, thereby guaranteeing that there is enough diversity remaining in the world for the cosmopolitan liberals to appreciate.”
Indeed, the Ottoman analogy is often made, with some ambivalence by social scientists and in a more romanticised fashion by cosmopolitans themselves, retrospectively recasting the polyglot trading cities of the Levant as havens of multicultural tolerance (a view Ottoman minorities themselves would view with markedly less enthusiasm). The inherent conflict between imperial cosmopolitanism and nationally-bounded self-governance has existed throughout modernity, the sociologist Craig Calhoun, an early critic of cosmopolitan discourse, warned in 2002, as “the tolerance of diversity in great imperial and trading cities has always reflected, among other things, precisely the absence of need or opportunity to organise political self-rule”.
The close association between cosmopolitanism and empires past and present, made by both critics and adherents, is nevertheless correct. The authors of The Struggle Over Borders address this dynamic, noting that “the emerging cosmopolitan world culture not only has a liberal upper- and middle-class bias; it is also decidedly Western. Moreover, it is ‘Western’ especially in the more limited sense of being Anglo-Saxon or, even more narrowly, US American.” It is no wonder then, that “outside the West, many communitarian intellectuals see ‘Westernisation’ or ‘Americanisation’ as incompatible with local traditions and as a perpetuation of post-colonial relationships, even though the masses are often greatly attracted by the consumption-oriented vision of Westernisation”.
If today’s faltering episode of globalisation is the product of US global hegemony, then the fate of the dependent bourgeoisie it has created as a service class — clustered around the nodes of trade and exchange, its politics and fashions derived from the metropole — is clearly deeply intertwined with that of its imperial sponsor.
Consider, for example, a world where China has surpassed the United States as the dominant global power: Chinese hegemony would be highly unlikely to sustain the intellectual and ethical fashions of the modern-day cosmopolitans; instead, a rival class would likely emerge, whose material interests and subsequent political and moral choices were more closely aligned with those of the new hegemon.
But the greatest threat to cosmopolitanism’s ideological dominance perhaps lies in its very success. Viewed from without, an association can convincingly be made between its success in becoming the default worldview of the professional middle classes and the simultaneous erosion of the financial security and social status of the very same caste.
After all, “in the global age”, as the book’s authors observe, “the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as markers of class boundaries have been partly replaced and partly overlaid by the distinction between cosmopolitanism and local or ‘provincial’ culture. Mastering the intricacies of the latest requirements of appropriate gender and race relations discourse and behaviour has become a marker for belonging to the cosmopolitan class, in a similar way that tastes for classical music and art were markers of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
The frantic assertion of ever-more cosmopolitan positions by downwardly-mobile millennials therefore looks increasingly like a form of competition over status. Like Leonard Bast in Forster’s Howard’s End, today’s aspiring cosmopolitans cling desperately to the outward signifiers of bourgeois success even as the traditional markers of class belonging — financial security, home ownership, family formation — recede ever further from view.
Yet with each Instagram story and performatively absurd Twitter declaration of cosmopolitan belonging made by ever more tenuously-bourgeois aspirants, the value of the brand diminishes. When what was the status signifier of a transnational elite becomes firmly associated with an unenviable precariat unwillingly entering middle age, the arrival of some new, more attractive status marker seems almost certain.
So much for the cosmopolitans, the status-hungry children of American empire and globalisation, as the world enters a more fractured and unsettled age. The idea that globalised free-trade capitalism would ever fulfil the stated aims of cosmopolitanism’s more zealous adherents was always absurd. As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”
But if we understand politicised cosmopolitanism precisely as a middle-class fantasy, and as a marker of social status rather than a serious attempt to describe reality, the frantic inflation this curious ideology has undergone in recent years reveals its hidden logic. The millennial generation might never become the jet-setting global citizens the prophets of globalisation promised, but they can at least decorate themselves with the glittering symbols of belonging as they compete for status and security in the wreckage of the world economy.
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