Cosmopolitanism and Space

Cosmopolitanism is an ethical, moral, and political philosophy that is simultaneously very old and relatively recent. It is also a deeply geographical topic, with rich implications for how people view the world, one another, and themselves. The term has suffered from its popularity: For some observers, it simply connotes being worldly and sophisticated and thus able to negotiate cultural differences with ease, a trait that can apply to places as well as to people. For many advocates, the term implies a vague allegiance to ideals that transcend the narrow confines of individual places. The orthodox, liberal version of cosmopolitanism stands in sharp contrast to ideologies such as racism, religious fundamentalism, and nationalism, which emphasize and often exaggerate or oversimplify the differences among human beings at the expense of their common humanity. Liberal cosmopolitanism comprises an "imagined community" that extends everywhere. In this light, the moral community to which each person owes an obligation is worldwide, generating an obligation to "care at a distance," in which the concerns of distant strangers are held to be as important as those of people nearby. For some critics, cosmopolitanism is a rootless, liberal universalism. For Craig Jeffrey and Colin McFarlane, it is a "repertoire of imaginaries and practices" that "involves symbolically or physically crossing defined boundaries and claiming a degree of cultural versatility" (2008a, 420). Yet beneath these broad contours profound variations writhe and surface. Cosmopolitanism comes in many other forms, ranging from the religious to the neoliberal. Whom one defines as belonging to one's cosmos--and whom one does not--lies at the heart of these varying conceptions of what it means to be human. Cosmopolitanism has a long and distinguished history. Its origins are often traced to classical Greece, particularly to Diogenes Laertius, who, when asked where he was from, replied, "I am a citizen of the world" (kosmou polite, or citizen of the cosmos), thus defying the then-prevalent source of identity construction, the city-state ([1925] 1972, 2: 63). This notion, which the Stoics explicitly advanced, found its most common expression in Hierocles's "circle model" (Kunneman and Suransky 2011, 388), in which each individual is located in progressively larger webs of obligation and compassion, extending from self and family, to community, to region, and to the world as a whole. During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism found new voices among the Western intelligentsia. Global circumvention initiated an incipient planetary consciousness among the elites of Europe, an understanding of the world as a unified entity and, for some, rising compassion for those victimized by the new capitalist world order. The famous sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas advocated energetically on behalf of Native Americans and against the genocide then under way (see, for example, Mignolo 2000, 727). Immanuel Kant, generally regarded as the first modern thinker about cosmopolitanism, despite his numerous oversimplifications and errors, articulated a clear and coherent vision for a cosmopolitan world order, calling for a world federation of states that would promote international trade and make war obsolete. In "Perpetual Peace," written in 1795, Kant held forth that "the peoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it is developed to the point where a violation of laws in one part of the world is felt everywhere" (quoted in Nussbaum 1997b, 25). The problem with this vision, as David Harvey argues, is his geography, not in the sense that he simply lacked accurate information but because of his reliance upon absolute notions of space and time; that is, as devoid of social origins (2009). More contemporary manifestations of cosmopolitanism tend to focus on the disastrous repercussions of nationalism and the meaning of identity in a globalized world. …