Who’s afraid of a world state? A global sovereign and the statist-cosmopolitan debate

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian.     

The problem with English(es) and linguistic (in)justice. Addressing the limits of liberal egalitarian accounts of language

Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World furthers a nascent examination of multilingualism within political philosophy, drawing on continental European contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Van Parijs argues, in effect for linguistic cosmopolitanism via English as the current world language, and this seems ostensibly to be a considerable improvement on ‘the untrammeled public monolingualism’ of Anglo-American political theory. However, Van Parijs’s account is flawed in four key respects. First, there is the fundamental problem of his reductionist account of language – by which language is viewed only in terms of its communicative uses and reach and not in relation to its symbolic and identity functions. Second is his simplistic advocacy of English as a global lingua franca, which ignores issues of power and inequality, along with related delimited access to high-status English language varieties. Third are the inherent limitations associated with his advocacy of linguistic territoriality, which recognizes state-sanctioned languages but little else, thus failing to mitigate existing linguistic hierarchies. Finally, the wider argument for English as a global lingua franca is inevitably underpinned by a monolithic/hegemonic view of English itself. This monolithic conception of English stands in contradistinction, not only to the actual plethora of Englishes in the world today, but also, more importantly, to their widely varying status and use in furthering cross-communication and related notions of social and economic mobility. The latter thus fatally undermines Van Parijs’s central argument linking social and economic mobility ineluctably to access to English.     

The Absolute Stranger: Shakespeare and the Drama of Failed Assimilation

Abstract

While Shakespeare's historical and political imagination mainly centres on the traditional character of the stranger or exile, The Merchant of Venice and Othello stand out as dramas about a new figure, the absolute stranger. The absolute stranger belongs to a new situation Shakespeare found in cosmopolitan Venice. Through Shylock and Othello, Shakespeare encounters the drama of the outsider's failed assimilation into cosmopolitan life. For Shakespeare, the figure of the absolute stranger is a representative illusion, and these two plays are dramas about the modern world.     

Cosmopolitanism and the African Renaissance: Pixley I. Seme and Alain L. Locke

Abstract

The heretofore unknown relationship between Pixley kaIsaka Seme, one of the founders of the African National Congress, and Alain L. Locke, the primary architect of the Harlem Renaissance, is revealed and explored. I suggest that Seme's Pan-African sensibilities created the conditions for Locke to explore what it means to pursue an African Renaissance; and Locke's focus on literary expression was an exemplar for Seme's later forays in journalism and cosmopolitan unions across ethnic lines. Seme and Locke, however, created significantly different concepts of African regeneration, Renaissance, race and cosmopolitanism. Their concepts are described and evaluated. Seme's approach to Renaissance is criticised for its reliance on an ideal of valuation that renders values stable and unchanging. Locke's value theory contends that valuation is necessarily engaged in transvaluation, thus, human cognition is necessarily always engaged in creating new value categories. Locke's approach is criticised because it allows for what I define as ‘sophisticated cruelty’ – the unintentional social destruction of ethnic group values. I argue that Locke's approach of moderate cosmopolitan has the least theoretical disadvantages of major concepts of cosmopolitanism and Pan Africanism.     

Transnational mobility,social capital,and cosmopolitan women traders in Ghana

Abstract

The dynamic economic power of Ghanaian women as traders in cloth and foodstuffs is well documented in the humanities and social sciences. This paper focuses on an emergent category of Ghanaian traders, women who are educated abroad and travel the globe to purchase consumer items, art, and cloth to sell on the Ghanaian market. The narratives of these women highlight numerous sociohistorical moments relevant to the global economy. As first- and second-generation immigrants in North America, these young traders are the children of the first-wave highly skilled African immigrants who sought educational opportunities in North America and Europe in the 1960s–1970s. The offspring of these educational elite now often speak of and act on a different set of desires and experience, to earn degrees in North America and Europe but return to Ghana in order to start entrepreneurial endeavors in art, fashion, and music. This new Ghanaian market woman earns a lucrative income using their cultural capital garnered through highly prized Western diplomas, the social history of women as formidable traders in Ghana, and the economic start-up funds garnered from transnational job opportunities and global family networks. In this paper, I examine the ways in which young women take advantage of global capital in order to achieve economic success in ways that question as well as challenge public policy and development programs in Ghana. Using a qualitative analysis based on ethnographic research conducted during 2009–2011 during which I interviewed 16 women ages 23–36, this paper examines how elite women progressively participate in and benefit from globalization in the ballooning informal economy of Ghana.     

Tenacious diasporic homelessness in Moroccan Dutch writing: A. Benali's ‘May the Sun Shine Tomorrow’ and H. Bouazza's ‘The Crossing’ as a case of study

The highly estimated reception of Abdelkader Benali's debut Wedding by the Sea and Hafid Bouazza's Abdullah's Feet in the mid-1990s is the hyped celebration of multiculturality by the Dutch establishment. Because of attributed to stories' apparent embedment in the native background (Moroccan exotic village), the writers were hailed as successful models for the Dutch multicultural society that was based on the policy of integration (while retaining one's own cultural identity). This paper argues that those exotic proses are imbedded in the culture of routes rather than the rhetoric of roots which is centered on otherness and ethnicisation. The narrative structure of the debuts is undergirded by a discursive disruption of the centripetal moves toward unified autochthonous belonging. It is suggestive of the precariousness of the migrants' homes and their sense of origins. More importantly, A. Benali's ‘May the Sun Shine Tomorrow’ and H. Bouazza's ‘The Crossing’ are produced in a different context dominated by the New Right nationalist demand for sameness and critique of the pluralist discourse of correctness. Nevertheless, it is contended here that in displaying a persistent accent on migratory experience and full incorporation of foreigners in society as equals rather than identical, the short stories maintain the obstinate immersion of the writers in the poetics of homelessness. As such, Bouazza and Benali are claimed to enunciate a diasporic transnational position which resists social exclusion and sees dialogic cosmopolitanism as an adequate home for identities that are constantly on the process of emerging.     

Romanians’ current perception of threat from immigrants in a context of co-ethnic migration: assessing the role of intergroup conflict and active/passive contact

This paper investigates the predictors of natives’ perception of the immigrant threat in Romania, an interesting site given immigrants’ marginal presence in the total population and the sizeable proportion of co-ethnic immigrants. Yet the interplay between nationalism and religion shapes an ideological frame that favours unwelcoming attitudes towards immigrants that challenge the Romanian identity forged along ethnic and religious ties. The authors used regression to analyse immigrant threat according to several dimensions: cosmopolitanism, group conflict and intergroup contact. In order to reflect specificities of this particular context, the latter dimension is conceptualized so as to include active and passive contact with immigrants. This distinction is relevant because of immigrants’ low presence in Romania. Findings suggest that variables from conflict theory explain more of the variation in the perceived threat, while indirect contact through mass-media exposure to immigrant content has the potential to reduce the perception of immigrant threat.     

Cosmopolitanism and Global Politics

This article discusses whether global politics are the best means for achieving cosmopolitan ends. It distinguishes the cosmopolitan goal of global obligations from the cosmopolitan politics of global governance. Evidence for cosmopolitanism in society and culture is not strong. In global politics states pursue their own material interests rather than cosmopolitan goals. Copenhagen and the financial crisis did not lead to global cosmopolitan politics as might have been hoped. The article argues that it is dangerous to continue to believe in cosmopolitan politics in such a context. Cosmopolitanism is better pursued through a politics that recognises material interests, conflict, is bottom‐up and based in what is happening, rather than top‐down and optimistic about cosmopolitan attitudes.