Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | D | Daedalus

Paths to a more cosmopolitan human condition.

Article Excerpt
To be good citizens of the World and the Nation we live in, yet to



have especial fellowship with the descendants of our ancestors, is perfectly consistent with true patriotism and universal philanthropy. --Constitution and Rules of the Welsh Society of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, 1799 (1)

The reassuring assertion of the Pennsylvania Welsh at the end of the eighteenth century that their Society was "perfectly consistent with true patriotism and universal philanthropy" may well have been an effort to fend off arguments of the sort John Quincy Adams would make in 1818-that being "American" meant casting "off the European skin, never to resume it." (2) Then, and perhaps even more today, many have doubted that people can simultaneously embrace their ethnic identity, citizenship in a nation-state, and some sense of world citizenship in ways that are perfectly consistent, making themselves good citizens in all three regards.

In most places today, the appeals of ethnicity or nationalism or other more particular allegiances seem far more potent than any ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. Many of those who do endorse cosmopolitan commitments, in turn, criticize both strong particularistic attachments to "the descendants of our ancestors" and local or national patriotism. Contemporary political theorists seek to weight the merits of claims for these and other identities, portraying them as inescapably in at least partial conflict. Likewise, many contemporary political struggles are over which allegiances will prevail in practice.

This essay is not a contribution to philosophic debates over the propriety of aspiring to be "good citizens of the World" or over what such cosmopolitan citizenship ought to entail institutionally. It is also not an effort to show that ethnic attachments, national patriotism, and world citizenship are in fact wholly consistent. I simply presume that people should share the sentiments of the Pennsylvania Welsh: it is, ceteris paribus, desirable for people to try to be good global citizens as well as good national patriots and good members of other communities, including those defined by shared ancestry.

Good global citizenship need not include support for membership in a formal global political regime or for any particular set of global institutions, though it might do so. I mean by the term what some scholars call moral cosmopolitanism: any of a range of conceptions that define appropriate conduct through reference to what is taken to be the good of all humanity--and not just individuals, families, or specific communities. (3) My aim here is to consider how those who believe in the importance of giving weight to the good of humanity, however that good is defined, might encourage others to take more seriously the goal of being good citizens of the world. Thus my interest is in one dimension of what. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins have influentially termed "cosmopolitics," the political processes that might foster beliefs and behaviors that elevate moral cosmopolitan concerns. (4)

Promoting cosmopolitan sentiments and conduct is daunting not only because many reject cosmopolitan aspirations. Even among those favorably inclined, there are bound to be many conflicting notions of what good world citizenship entails. A cosmopolitics that merely advances a specific, albeit universalisic, vision of good global citizenship in preference to all others is unlikely to succeed.

I suggest a three-part strategy for fostering greater concern for the good of all humanity. It includes persuading democratic regimes to accept a permanent obligation to expand opportunities for voice to as many as possible of those whom they affect, insofar as they can practically do so. Second, it encourages everywhere an ethics of political discourse in which participants articulate the more global implications of their positions, especially in regard to problems that affect all humanity. Third, item-braces coalition building among proponents of distinct visions of the human good and of the means to cope with humanity's common problems, fully recognizing that coalitions may need to be secured and sustained by compromises that frustrate many defensible aspirations.

My arguments build in part on those I advanced in Stories of Peoplehood. (5) In that book I analyzed the types of persuasive narratives that current and would-be political elites use to inspire a sense of valued political community. Stories of Peoplehood presumes that a sense of political membership is not just socially but also politically constructed; though source materials can come from many spheres of life, elites possessing or aspiring to governing (though not necessarily office-holding) power articulate and institutionalize their conceptions of who does and does not belong to a society via their laws and public policies.

Political elites often have considerable will to power, so one might expect them to portray the potential membership of the societies they seek to influence as broadly as possible. That is, the more over whom they may wield power, the merrier. But in reality, leaders face both external and internal constraints. The coalitions they seek to build must have core constituents, and those core constituents generally have economic interests, identities, and ideological values that make them unwilling to tolerate...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!