Social Identity and Cosmopolitanism, or How Cosmopolitanism Sells Itself Short

• In Event: Norms of Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The recent surge in nationalism and tribalism across Western societies brings renewed salience to questions of identity within and across borders. Notably, it exposes the pervasive tension between bounded social identities and attachments, on the one hand, and universalist yearnings and commitments, on the other. Liberal democracy—and the ostensibly universal recognition on which it is based—is struggling to resolve this tension. I turn instead to the cosmopolitan tradition in political theory, as well as to empirical research in social psychology, to argue that one of cosmopolitanism’s most powerful contributions to this debate has been significantly underdeveloped and undervalued in philosophical engagements with the issue. Specifically, I argue that cosmopolitanism—and a genuinely cosmopolitan (i.e., unbounded) social identity, in particular—represents not just an extension of scope from the national to the global, as is often conceived, but rather, a qualitative shift that permeates all identities, and serves to fundamentally protect and liberate particularist attachments from their otherwise inherent instabilities and contradictions. On this view, the promise of cosmopolitan identity does not rest exclusively in what it can deliver beyond our borders (by motivating concern for distant others, for example), but also in its potential to fundamentally recast social identities and relationships within boundaries, resolving crises of identity (e.g., racial, national, partisan, ethnic, etc.) at all levels of society. This perspective contrasts with a common conceptualization of the cosmopolitan project as one of outwardly extending scope, in which the “national” serves the “cosmopolitan”—either by providing a model (of justice, governance, solidarity, etc.) to replicate at the global level, or by providing the vehicle through which cosmopolitan ends can be pursued and achieved (e.g., “rooted cosmopolitanism”, “a globally sensitive patriotism”, etc.).

Author

• Shahrzad Sabet, University of Maryland