BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: THE EQUIVOCATIONS OF THE NEW COSMOPOLITANISM

• Published date: 10 December 2003
• Pages: 25-44
• Date: 10 December 2003
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(03)31002-6
• Author: Robert Fine,,Daniel Chernilo,Robert Fine

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE:

THE EQUIVOCATIONS OF THE

NEW COSMOPOLITANISM

Robert Fine and Daniel Chernilo

ABSTRACT

Our point of departure is a reservation concerning the validity of cosmopoli-

tan ideas in response to 9/11. Cosmopolitanism in the social and political

sciences plays an important role in the reconstructionof conceptual tools, the

diagnosis of the current epoch and the creation of new normative standards.

Its key motif, however, that of epochal change from a nationally-based to a

cosmopolitan world order, is prematurely dismissive of traditional categories

and assimilative of a normative vision. The separation of the present from

the past is as overstated as is its conflation with the future.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND 9/11:

THE CASE OF ULRICH BECK

A common trope of contemporary social theory is to construe the present as an era

of radical epochal change. There are various ways in which this sense of change

is formulated – not least as a transition from the modern to the postmodern or

from one form of modernity to another – but in all such formulations what makes

change radical and epochal is the fact that a specific event or social process can

be singled out as the definitive marker of historical transition. At these critical

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society,Volume 31, 25–44

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ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(03)31002-6

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26 ROBERT FINE AND DANIEL CHERNILO

moments the very categories of understanding and standards of judgement of one

epoch are questioned as inappropriate in relation to the other. There is perhaps

nothing new in this proclivity to see the new. J¨

urgen Habermas (1969), for one,

has long argued that a sense of crisis is part and parcel of any epochal diagnosis of

modernity and that the “classic” texts of social and political thought all expressed

this sense of crisis and identified the problems associated with making sense of

the newly transformed world. The mark of classical social theory was always to

locate the idea of “crisis” within a framework of continuity and to comprehend it

through universal categories of class, nation, rationality, relations of production,

the division of labour and so forth. Today, by contrast, the distinguishing mark of

social theory is the historicisation of concepts and the claim that our own epoch

can only be understood through the development of new categories beyond the

classical frameworks of the social and political sciences. The idea that something

radically new is happening in the world now goes hand in glove with the idea

that something radically new is required in social and political thought. The very

eventfulness of such events seemed to lie in their originality and resistance to all

parallels with earlier social forms.

Today the event known to the world as 9/11 is commonly presented by social

scientists as a marker of a significant rupture between past and future, an indicator

of major social transformation and a call for major conceptual transformation. The

sociologist, Ulrich Beck, provides us with a compelling example of this way of

thinking. He argues that 9/11 “stands for the complete collapse of language,” that

we do not have the right concepts to understand it, and that we need to construct

new ones. He sees 9/11 as a sign of a new global terrorism and associates it with

other global threats – including ecological disasters and financial crises – as the

expression of the central condition of our times, that of a “global community of

fate” to which we all necessarily belong. Beck argues that this global community of

fate reveals the inappropriateness or even bankruptcy of old national perspectives

and he himself is on this basis cautiously optimistic about the direction of change:

“Since September 11,”he writes, “governments have rediscovered the possibilities

and power of international cooperation” (Beck, 2002, p. 48). He presents the

current age as confronted by two existential choices: first, between nationalism

and multilateralism and then between a regressive multilateralism based on

surveillance states and a progressive multilateralism based on cosmopolitan

states. If a multilateralism based on surveillance sacrifices rights, law, democracy

and hospitality to the security of a Western citadel, a multilateralism based on

cosmopolitan principles also seeks security but by re-affirming human rights,

international law, democracyand hospitality at the transnational level. In a “world

risk society,” Beck argues, we need a “new big idea” to survive and civilise the

twenty-first century. For Beck, this new big idea is that of the cosmopolitan state.