ogc163
Superstar
by Gianpiero Petriglier
These are dark times for cosmopolitans. Discontent with globalization and resentment towards minorities, immigrants, and intellectuals have fueled the rise of nationalism in Europe and the United States. Dressed in faux-neutral neologisms like “post-truth” and “alt-right,” propaganda, racism, and xenophobia have elbowed their way back into the mainstream. And cosmopolitans are being portrayed as a detached and indulgent elite.
Cosmopolitanism—the aspiration to become a citizen of the world—has become a tainted luxury good.
It might seem prudent, in this climate, to take distance from cosmopolitanism. That choice, however, leaves a distorted image of cosmopolitanism unchallenged and lets it become a casualty in the clash between nationalism and globalization. We must do better than that. If we want to fend off the globalization of ultra-nationalism, now is the time to take a stand for cosmopolitanism—extricating its broadminded attitude from its elitist parody, and putting it to work to temper nationalism and humanize globalization.
Taking such stand begins with remembering where contemporary cosmopolitanism came from and acknowledging how it lost its way.
How We Became Cosmopolitans
I became a cosmopolitan on August 5th, 1943, three decades before I was born. That afternoon, the Allies entered my hometown in southern Italy. The city was on its knees, but the children were jubilant. The war was beginning to end, and freedom had the taste of American chocolate bars. Soldiers threw them to the kids on the roadside as they rode their jeeps through town. My mother never forgot the one she caught.
Wartime stories like that were common when I was growing up, but they felt distant from my world and my life. It took me decades to realize how much they shaped both. Like many middle-class Europeans of their generation, my parents—who had both been first in their families to go to high school, who spent their whole adult lives in the same place, who never spoke a foreign language—insisted that I learn English and travel.
My parents embodied a distinction that the sociologist Robert Merton made in the 1950s studying a small American town. The town’s influential members, he found, were either “locals” or “cosmopolitans.” The locals’ influence rested on strong ties to the town and relationships within it. The cosmopolitans’ rested on their knowledge and expertise. If locals could not imagine a life elsewhere, cosmopolitans seemed to be always preparing for it. Neither, however, left much and the town benefited from the contribution of both. That was back then. My generation’s cosmopolitans were urged to be more mobile.
So, at age 14, I found myself living and studying for a month with a small crowd of Spanish, French, and Germans in a small town in the north of England. It was the first time I felt at home in a place where I did not belong—or more precisely, that I felt like I belonged in a place I had not come from. That is how I began becoming a European. A few years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was glorious to be coming of age as one. The promise of cosmopolitanism as a way to a better life might have been at its zenith, but it seemed only dawn. For a moment, it really felt as if we were ending history, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous words, ushering the triumph of liberal democracy worldwide.
Big cities all over the world were swelling up with first-generation cosmopolitans like me, fleeing provincial worldviews. We flocked to places that promised not to put us in our place. We were curious invaders of each other’s countries. A peaceful army sent to dismantle nationalism by elders who’d been hurt by it.
My parents’ generation blessed, if ambivalently, our cosmopolitanism because it was an insurance policy as much as an aspiration. Born out of the rubble of nationalism, it was primarily a humanistic project—not an economic one. It emphasized commonality of experience and tolerance of differences. It should make us realize people unlike us were humans just like us, and replace superstition and suspicion—the pillars of tribalism—with curiosity and compassion. If we would study, dine, and make out with peers from other countries, we would be less likely to bomb each other in the future. When the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, I felt that my mum and dad should get a piece of it—and keep it next to the chip of Berlin Wall I had brought home two decades before.
By then, I was married to a woman born 15 miles from that first English town I lived in. Our parents did not share a language but had similar values. We taught in an academic institution that helps people live working lives across borders. Our children gave complicated answers to the simple question, “Where are you from?” and felt at home in a country that neither of us grew up in. And we had become alert to the skepticism about, and hostility towards, our way of life. Over the past few years, those have only grown.
Having spent my life trying to become an educated cosmopolitan, I now fear that my generation has failed at cosmopolitanism, or worse, that we have failed cosmopolitanism.
These are dark times for cosmopolitans. Discontent with globalization and resentment towards minorities, immigrants, and intellectuals have fueled the rise of nationalism in Europe and the United States. Dressed in faux-neutral neologisms like “post-truth” and “alt-right,” propaganda, racism, and xenophobia have elbowed their way back into the mainstream. And cosmopolitans are being portrayed as a detached and indulgent elite.
Cosmopolitanism—the aspiration to become a citizen of the world—has become a tainted luxury good.
It might seem prudent, in this climate, to take distance from cosmopolitanism. That choice, however, leaves a distorted image of cosmopolitanism unchallenged and lets it become a casualty in the clash between nationalism and globalization. We must do better than that. If we want to fend off the globalization of ultra-nationalism, now is the time to take a stand for cosmopolitanism—extricating its broadminded attitude from its elitist parody, and putting it to work to temper nationalism and humanize globalization.
Taking such stand begins with remembering where contemporary cosmopolitanism came from and acknowledging how it lost its way.
How We Became Cosmopolitans
I became a cosmopolitan on August 5th, 1943, three decades before I was born. That afternoon, the Allies entered my hometown in southern Italy. The city was on its knees, but the children were jubilant. The war was beginning to end, and freedom had the taste of American chocolate bars. Soldiers threw them to the kids on the roadside as they rode their jeeps through town. My mother never forgot the one she caught.
Wartime stories like that were common when I was growing up, but they felt distant from my world and my life. It took me decades to realize how much they shaped both. Like many middle-class Europeans of their generation, my parents—who had both been first in their families to go to high school, who spent their whole adult lives in the same place, who never spoke a foreign language—insisted that I learn English and travel.
My parents embodied a distinction that the sociologist Robert Merton made in the 1950s studying a small American town. The town’s influential members, he found, were either “locals” or “cosmopolitans.” The locals’ influence rested on strong ties to the town and relationships within it. The cosmopolitans’ rested on their knowledge and expertise. If locals could not imagine a life elsewhere, cosmopolitans seemed to be always preparing for it. Neither, however, left much and the town benefited from the contribution of both. That was back then. My generation’s cosmopolitans were urged to be more mobile.
So, at age 14, I found myself living and studying for a month with a small crowd of Spanish, French, and Germans in a small town in the north of England. It was the first time I felt at home in a place where I did not belong—or more precisely, that I felt like I belonged in a place I had not come from. That is how I began becoming a European. A few years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was glorious to be coming of age as one. The promise of cosmopolitanism as a way to a better life might have been at its zenith, but it seemed only dawn. For a moment, it really felt as if we were ending history, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous words, ushering the triumph of liberal democracy worldwide.
Big cities all over the world were swelling up with first-generation cosmopolitans like me, fleeing provincial worldviews. We flocked to places that promised not to put us in our place. We were curious invaders of each other’s countries. A peaceful army sent to dismantle nationalism by elders who’d been hurt by it.
My parents’ generation blessed, if ambivalently, our cosmopolitanism because it was an insurance policy as much as an aspiration. Born out of the rubble of nationalism, it was primarily a humanistic project—not an economic one. It emphasized commonality of experience and tolerance of differences. It should make us realize people unlike us were humans just like us, and replace superstition and suspicion—the pillars of tribalism—with curiosity and compassion. If we would study, dine, and make out with peers from other countries, we would be less likely to bomb each other in the future. When the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, I felt that my mum and dad should get a piece of it—and keep it next to the chip of Berlin Wall I had brought home two decades before.
By then, I was married to a woman born 15 miles from that first English town I lived in. Our parents did not share a language but had similar values. We taught in an academic institution that helps people live working lives across borders. Our children gave complicated answers to the simple question, “Where are you from?” and felt at home in a country that neither of us grew up in. And we had become alert to the skepticism about, and hostility towards, our way of life. Over the past few years, those have only grown.
Having spent my life trying to become an educated cosmopolitan, I now fear that my generation has failed at cosmopolitanism, or worse, that we have failed cosmopolitanism.
Been realizing lately how much beef people on both sides of the political aisle have with cosmopolitanism.
