Theory, Culture & Society

http://tcs.sagepub.com The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails

Ulrich Beck Theory Culture Society 2007; 24; 286 DOI: 10.1177/02632764070240072505 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com

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286 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

The Cosmopolitan Condition

Why Methodological Nationalism Fails
Ulrich Beck
Keywords cosmopolitanism, individualization, methodological nationalism, modernity, risks First, a shared critique of methodological nationalism, which subsumes society under the nation-state. There are two dimensions of this: a historical and a systematic understanding of methodological nationalism. It is evident that, in the 19th century, European sociology was formulated within a nationalist paradigm and that any cosmopolitan sentiments were snuffed out by the horrors of the Great Wars. Responding to the ghost of Marx, it was class and in particular the rise of the working class, which was seen as the great social problem and the solidarity of the nation-state was seen as the solution. In the methodological nationalism of Emile Durkheim, fraternity became solidarity and national integration. Max Webers sociology involved a comparative study of economic ethics of world religions, but the political inspiration for his sociology was nationalistic. Indeed, in the Freiburg Inaugural Lecture, Weber employed a Darwinistic view of international relations in which he observed that future generations would hold his generation responsible for not creating sufficient elbow room in East Germany to support a strong German state. In North America, the same national paradigm is evident. Of course, Talcott Parsons adopted a comparative sociological approach and was a student of European social thought, but his sociological interest and approach was American. In his The System of Modern Societies (1971: 1), Parsons starts with the admission that the thesis that informs his work is that the modern type of society has emerged in a single evolutionary area, the West, which is a century of Europe that fell heir to the Western part of the Roman Empire north of the Mediterranean. The society of western Christendom, then, provided the base for which we shall call the system of modern societies took of . Most classical sociology today is the study of the national society under the umbrella of society. We should not forget that classical sociology was the product of national struggles, the Franco German War of 1870 and the First World War at the beginning of the 20th century.

t the beginning of the 21st century, we are witnessing a global transformation of modernity, which calls for a re-thinking of cosmopolitanism for the social sciences. The newly awakened interest in cosmopolitanism is fed by various sources: globalization research, mobility and migration research, international relations, international law, postcolonial studies, postfeminism, global cultural studies, geography, ethnography, actor-network and science and technology studies, the debates on new wars and human rights as well as mass media communication science, to mention only the most important. In sociology, at present, these analyses are condensing into the paradigm of a Cosmopolitan Sociology (Beck, 2006; Beck and Sznaider, 2006). At its centre there is, on the one hand, the search for new research methods and strategies and, on the other, the question as to new forms of dealing with otherness in society in an increasingly globalized world. Dealing with otherness includes the otherness of nature and the materiality of threats which is not the focus of this article, but an essential part of the programme of cosmopolitan sociology (Latour, 2003). Both tendencies can be clearly distinguished from the philosophical-normative cosmopolitanism dominant until now, whose authors (e.g. Jrgen Habermas [2001] and David Held [1995]) read Kants world citizenship sociologically. Cosmopolitanism is, of course, a contested term; there is no uniform interpretation in the growing literature. The boundaries separating it from competing terms like globalization, transnationalism, universalism, glocalization, etc. are not distinct; but there is an identifiable intellectual movement working on New Cosmopolitanism or Realistic Cosmopolitanism united by at least three interconnected commitments: (1) a shared critique of methodological nationalism; (2) the shared diagnosis that the 21st century is an age of cosmopolitanism; and (3) the shared assumption that for this reason we need some kind of methodological cosmopolitanism.

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Problematizing Global Knowledge Commentaries 287

Systematically, methodological nationalism takes the following ideal premises for granted: it equates society with nation-state societies, and sees states and their governments as the cornerstones of a social sciences analysis. It assumes that humanity is naturally divided into a limited number of nations, which on the inside, organize themselves as nation-states, and on the outside, set boundaries to distinguish themselves from other nation-states. It goes even further: this outer delimitation, as well as the competition between nation-states, presents the most fundamental category of political organization. Indeed, the social science stance is rooted in the concept of the nation-state. It is a nation-state outlook on society and politics, law, justice and history, that governs the sociological imagination. And it is exactly this methodological nationalism that prevents the social science from getting at the heart of the dynamics of modernization and globalization, both past and present: the unintended result of the radicalization of modernity is a disempowerment of Western states, in sharp contrast to their empowerment before and during the 19th-century wave of globalization (Beck, 2005). Second, the shared diagnosis that the 21st century is becoming an age of cosmopolitanism. In the 1960s, Hannah Arendt (1958) analysed the Human Condition, in the 1970s, Jean-Franois Lyotard (1984) the Postmodern Condition; now at the beginning of the 21st century we have to discover, map and understand the Cosmopolitan Condition. Third, there is a shared assumption that for that reason we need some kind of methodological cosmopolitanism. Of course, there is a lot of controversy about what this means. We can distinguish three phases in how the code word globalization has been used in the social sciences: first, denial; second, conceptual refinement and empirical research; and, third, epistemological shift. To the extent that the second phase was successful, the insight began to gain ground that the nation-state unit of research has become arbitrary when the distinctions between national and international, local and global, us and them, lose their sharp contours. The question for the research agenda following the epistemological turn is: what happens when the premises and boundaries that define the units of empirical research and theory disintegrate? The answer is that the whole conceptual world of the national outlook becomes disenchanted, stripped of its necessity. We need an alternative which replaces ontology with methodology: what are alternative, non-national units of research? What are post-national concepts of the social and the political? How can we invent a methodology of cosmopolitan understanding in order to decode the multi-ethnic, multi-religious conflicts insight of France, of Germany, and on a global scale? How does cosmopolitanism relate to universalism, relativism, nationalism, etc.? In other words, the sociology for the 21st century has to be reinvented. As prisoners of methodological nationalism we do not understand Europeanization, we do not understand the new global meta-power game. We do not understand that the nation-state legitimacy of social inequalities is being challenged to its core by universalized human rights, we do not understand the global generation and its transnational fragments, and so on. This is because we are captured by zombie categories, sociology is threatening to become a zombie science, a museum piece of antiquated ideas.

The Cosmopolitan Condition

The Cosmopolitan Condition can be explained, for example, in relation to global risks. The experience of global risks Chernobyl, 9/11, BSE or the mass media, the experience of the Asian tsunami which induced a planetary torrent of sorrow is an occurrence of abrupt and full confrontation of the apparently excluded other. Global risks tear down national boundaries and jumble together the native with the foreign. The distant other is becoming the inclusive other. Everyday life is becoming cosmopolitan. Human beings must find a meaning of life in the exchange with others and no longer in the encounter with the like. This is what I call enforced cosmopolitanization: global risks activate and connect actors across borders, who otherwise dont want to have anything to do with one another. I propose, in this sense, that a clear distinction is to be made between the philosophical and normative ideas of cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and the impure actual enforced cosmopolitization, on the other. The crucial point about this distinction is that cosmopolitanism cannot, for example, only become real deductively in a translation of the sublime principles of philosophy, but also and above all through the back door of global risks, unseen, unintended, enforced. Down through history, cosmopolitanism was detained of being elitist, idealistic, imperialistic, capitalist; today, however, we see that reality itself has become cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism, then, does not mean as it did for Immanuel Kant an asset, a task, that is to order the world. Cosmopolitanization in world risk society opens our eyes to the uncontrollable liabilities that something might happen to us, might befall us and, which at the same time could stimulate us, to make borders transcend new beginnings. Risks cut through the

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self-absorption of cultures, languages, religions and systems as well as the national and international agenda of politics; they overturn their priorities and create contexts for action between camps, parties and quarrelling nations, which ignore and oppose one another. What is meant by that can be explained with reference to Hannah Arendt. The existential shock of danger therein lies the fundamental ambivalence of global risks opens up unintentionally (and often also unseen and underutilized) the (mis)fortune of a possible new beginning (which is no reason for false sentimentality). How to live in the shadow of global risks? How to live, when old certainties are shattered or are now revealed as lies? Arendts answer anticipates the ambivalence of risk. The expectation of the unexpected requires that the self-evident is no longer taken as self-evident. The shock of danger is a call for a new beginning. Where there is a new beginning, action is possible. Human beings enter into relations across borders. This common activity by strangers across borders means freedom. All freedom is contained in this ability to begin. nostalgia and kulturkritischer Pessimismus built into the foundations of sociological thought which has never disappeared starting with Max Weber and today including Foucault, system theory and postmodernism. Perhaps this nostalgia can be overcome by the theory of world risk society. My aim is a non-nostalgic New Critical Theory to look at both the past and the future of modernity. The word for this is neither utopianism nor pessimism but ambivalence. Yes, there is a historic alternative of political action. The new global domestic politics that is already at work here and now, beyond the nationalinternational distinction, has become a meta-power game, whose outcome is completely open-ended. It is a game in which boundaries, basic rules and basic distinctions are renegotiated not only those between the national and the international spheres, but also those between global business and the state, transnational civil society movements, supra-national organizations and national governments and societies. No single player or opponent can ever win on their own; they all are dependent on alliances. This is the way, then, in which the hazy power game of global domestic politics opens up its own immanent alternatives and oppositions. The first one, which is dominant today, gives the priority of power to global capital. The goal of the strategies of capital is, in simplified terms, to merge capital with the state in order to open up new sources of legitimacy in the form of the neoliberal state. Its orthodoxy says: There is only one revolutionary power, which rewrites the rules of the global power order, and that is capital, while the other actors nation-states and civil society movements remain bound by the limited options of action and power of the national and international order. This dominant coalition of capital and national minimal state is in no position to respond to the challenges of world risk society. The strategies of action, which global risks open up, overthrow the order of power that has formed in the neo-liberal capital-state coalition: global risks empower states and civil society movements, because they reveal new sources of legitimation and options for action for these groups of actors; they disempower globalized capital, on the other hand, because the consequences of investment decisions contribute to creating global risks, destabilizing markets and activating the power of that sleeping giant, the consumer. Conversely, the goal of global civil society and its actors is to achieve a connection between civil society and the state, that is, to bring about what I call a cosmopolitan form of statehood (including a cosmopolitan form of democracy). This is not wishful thinking, on the contrary, it

Is There a Historic Alternative of Political Action?

It is precisely this question that I have tried to answer in my book Power in the Global Age (Beck, 2005). Here I can outline only two premises: (1) world risk society brings a new, historic key logic to the fore: No nation can cope with its problems alone. (2) A realistic political alternative in the global age is possible, which counteracts the loss to globalized capital of the commanding power of state politics. The condition is, that globalization must be decoded not as economic fate, but as a strategic game for world power. (1) The nation-state, which attempts to deal with global risks in isolation, resembles a drunk man, who on a dark night is trying to find his lost wallet in the cone of light from a street lamp. To the question: Did you actually lose your wallet here?, he replies, No, but in the light of the street lamp I can at least look for it. In other words, global risks are producing failed states even in the West (latest example: the Iraq war). The state structure evolving under the conditions of world risk society could be characterized in terms of both inefficiency and post-democratic authority. A clear distinction, therefore, has to be made between rule and inefficiency. It is quite possible that the end result could be the gloomy perspective, that we have totally ineffective and authoritarian state regimes (even in the context of the Western democracies). (2) But this is normal sociology. There is a

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Problematizing Global Knowledge Commentaries 289

is an expression of a cosmopolitan realpolitik. In an age of global crises and risks, a politics of golden handcuffs the creation of a dense network of transnational interdependencies is exactly what is needed in order to regain national autonomy, not least in relation to a highly mobile world economy. The maxims of nation-based realpolitik that national interests must necessarily be pursued by national means must be replaced by the maxims of cosmopolitan realpolitik: the more cosmopolitan our political structures and activities, the more successful they will be in promoting national interests and the greater our individual power in this global age will be. The historic examples of globally empowered individuals are transnational actor-networks and movements, including terrorist networks. Global risks are the expression of a new form of global interdependence, which cannot be adequately addressed by way of national politics, nor by the available forms of international co-operation. All the past and present practical experiences of human beings in dealing with uncertainty now exist side by side, without offering any ready solution to the resulting problems. Not only that: key institutions of modernity such as science, business and politics, which are supposed to guarantee rationality and security, find themselves confronted by situations in which their apparatus no longer has purchase and the fundamental principles of modernity no longer automatically hold good. Indeed, the perception of their rating changes from trustee to suspect. They are no longer seen only as instruments of risk management, but also as a source of risk. judgement he cannot, yet must, trust. Sustaining an individual self of integrity in world risk society is indeed a tragic affair. Of course, there are fundamental ambivalences. I am talking here about only one large transnational fraction of everyday life in world risk society. At the same time we observe the rise of (what might be called) the individualization of war: the transnational super-empowerment of the individual vis--vis the super-state power But that is a different story.

Consequences for Sociological Theory and Research

How does this relate to the basic conceptual ideas of international sociology which have appeared since the 1970s, such as world system theory (Wallerstein, 2004) and world polity (Drori et al., 2006)? Immanuel Wallersteins world system theory is still captured by an enlarged methodological nationalism, because it presupposes the nationalinternational dualism as does John Meyers concept of world polity. Even though both concepts are powerful in producing extremely interesting empirical interpretations, they both ignore the historical fact that the distinction, which underpins their view of the world, namely, that between national and international spheres, is now dissolving. Nonetheless, it was this duality that helped to shape the world of the first modernity, including the key concepts (and theories) of society, state, sovereignty, legitimacy, class, solidarity, generation, and so on. We then have to ask: How might we conceptualize a world in a set of global dynamics in which the problematic consequences of radicalized modernization effectually eliminate cornerstones and logics of action certain historically produced fundamental distinctions and basic institutions of its nation-state order? Thus my theory of reflexive or second modernity is about the unintended consequences and challenges of the success of modernity. It is about more modernity and the crises it produces, but not about post-modernity. How does this renewed cosmopolitan curiosity and sociological imagination relate to the postSecond World War period of sociological thinking? In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theory dominated the intellectual movements. In the 1980s, this role was assumed by the French post-modernists; and now a cosmopolitan mixture in global sociology could give birth to a cosmopolitan vision for the humanities. This opens up the horizon for a new Cosmopolitan Critical Theory which investigates the social and political grammar of the Cosmopolitan Condition and therefore has a strong standing against the

Tragic Individualization
As a consequence, everyday life in world risk society is characterized by a new variant of individualization. The individual must cope with the uncertainty of the global world by him- or herself. Here individualization is the default outcome of a failure of expert systems to manage risks. Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law or even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally. The individual is forced to mistrust the promises of rationality of these key institutions. As a consequence, people are thrown back onto themselves, they are alienated from expert systems but have nothing else instead. Disembedding without embedding this is the formula for this dimension of individualization: the individual, whose senses fail him in the face of ungraspable threats, who, thrown back on himself, is blind to dangers, remains at the same time unable to escape the power of definition of expert systems, whose

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retrogressive idealism of the national perspective in politics, research and theory. Cosmopolitan Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Latour, B. (2003) Is Remodernization Occurring? And if So, How to Prove it? A Commentary on Ulrich Beck, Theory, Culture & Society 20(2): 3548. Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press (original edn 1979). Parsons, T. (1971) The Systems of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Wallerstein, I. (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich, and the British Journal of Sociology Visiting Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Sciences. Ulrich Beck is the co-editor of Soziale Welt and editor of Zweite Moderne at Suhrkamp (Frankfurt a. M.). His research interests focus on risk society, globalization, individualization, reflexive modernization and cosmopolitanism. He is the founding director of a research centre at the University of Munich Reflexive Modernization financed since 1999 by the DFG (German Research Society).

References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beck, U. (2005) Power in the Global Age. London: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2007) Beyond Class and Nation: Reframing Social Inequalities in a Globalized World, British Journal of Sociology 58(4): 680705. Beck, U. and N. Sznaider (2006) Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda, British Journal of Sociology, Special Issue 57(1). Drori, G.S., J. Meyer and H. Hwang (eds) (2006) Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (2001) The Postnational Constellation, trans. and ed. M. Pensky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to

Diversity, Heritage and Cultural Politics

Antonio A. Arantes
Keywords cultural heritage, global public sphere, local knowledge, social and economic development gap between such inner and outer cultural, political and economic domains tend to vary widely and become particularly complex depending on the values attached to cultural diversity in the social environments concerned. This is often the case when officially protected heritage is built on the basis of popular and indigenous cultural practices. So, a crucial question is whether such landmarks are recognized beyond the limits of the cultural history of specific social groups, which values are attributed to them beyond their more immediate symbolic boundaries and whether they effectively participate in the processes of social identification that underlies the formation of hegemonies and of national cultures. The global turn of cultural production gave new significance to objects and ideas that convey senses of localization and/or cultural singularity, raising public interest and institutional concern with inventorying and protecting cultural diversity. The implications of this shift not only concern the so-called creative industries, as this issue was the

he construction of social memory and the preservation of cultural heritage are closely related practices concerning the reproduction of social life. Both create affective and cognitive landmarks, providing shared references to historical change and continuity. However, one major difference between them lies in the fact that while the former mainly concerns social agencies and actors belonging to specific social milieux, the latter is a specialized activity that necessarily involves professionals, experts, governmental agencies, regional and multilateral organizations and NGOs whose institutional cultures, political commitments and economic priorities may differ from and sometimes are in conflict with local social realities. The nature and complexity of the

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