'Engaged Cosmopolitanism: Reconciling Local Grounding and Distance' (2014)

EngagedCosmopolitanismReconciling Local Grounding and Distance

Paul James1

Cosmopolitanism is a philosophy of our modern/postmodern times.Since the late twentieth century, it has spread far beyond those fewGreek Stoics, eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophes andnineteenth-century intellectuals who gave the ethos a long livinglineage without naming it as such. At the same time, but intensifyingover the past two or three decades, the global imaginary fromwhich cosmopolitanism derives its ideological power has becomeincreasingly compelling.2 Most activists and philosophers, includ -ing the many radical alter-globalization figures who now argue forlocalism, are culturally compelled to acknowledge that the local isrelated to the global. Against this generalization, it is true that even positive global

exchange between people concerned about fairness and justice stillhas its nationalist, realist and provincial critics. However, for themost part, cosmopolitanism has become the ideology of choice in a

ARENA journal no. 41/42, 2013–2014

Author146

1 This essay is heavily based on work that I did for a recent edited volume: P. James (ed.),Globalization and Politics, Vol. 4: Political Philosophies of the Global, London, Sage Publications, 2014.

2 M. B. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to theGlobal War on Terror, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

globalizing world. The problem for this kind of politics is that cos -mo politanism and grounded localism are usually brought togetherwithout explicitly working through their associated tensions. Thisessay attempts to do so.The essay sets up an argument for having it both ways — a

cosmopolitanism that is both grounded in the local and reachesacross the global. This essay elaborates a form of engagedcosmopolitanism that seeks to recognize and work with thetensions between the global, national, regional and local; betweenthe universal, general and particular; and between the ethical andinstitutionalized. These tensions remain real and important. In thepresent argument, it is suggested that a positive reflexive politicsneeds to take the different orientations of these tensions seriously.The other task of the essay is to seek a more grounded basis for

valuing cosmopolitanism as an ethic. Cosmopolitanism can bedefined as a global–local politics that, firstly, projects a sociality ofcommon political engagement among all human beings across theglobe and, secondly, suggests that this sociality should be ethicallyand/or organizationally privileged in relation to other forms ofsociality. The key phrase for contestation here is ‘privileged inrelation to’. Usually the phrase would be ‘privileged over’. In the‘privileged over’ rendition, the global dimension of cosmopoli -tanism would be seen as primary. This, I suggest, is not helpful.Cosmopolitanism is not good in itself. However, even in the‘privileged in relation to’ version, questions remain about what thismeans. Engaged cosmopolitanism is a particular form of cos -mopoli tanism that treats deliberative negotiation across levels ofengagement as a way of handling these questions.In a world in which a global imaginary prevails there is a tendency,

as least for university-educated and intellectually trained persons— the so-called ‘middle class’ — to think that cosmopoli tanism isnaturally better than parochialism. However, it is always worth beingsuspicious when ideological constellations such as cosmopolitanismare set against certain clusters of bad alternative characteristics thatnaturally seem to go together. It is worth asking whycosmopolitanism finds its natural alternate in parochialism and its‘dark’ cognates — being isolated, bounded, constrained, backward,provincial, cut off, stuck in an enclave, and living in a cave. In thelanguage of modern cosmopolitanism, caves are no longer places ofshelter but rather the primordial places from which we escaped tobecome human; the dark places where terrorists hang out.


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For all of its ideological power, an easy adoration of the globalbased on differentiation from this group of other-defined darkcharacteristics does not always make for a good ethics. The presentargument for a certain kind of critical and qualified (engaged)cosmopolitanism is intended to get beyond such dubiousphilosophy. This kind of critical cosmopolitanism is thus the siblingof critical communitarianism. Actually, truth be known, criticalcosmopolitanism and critical communitarianism are more like thetwo-sided carnival character who presents each of his/her faces asif they have a different body. Cosmopolitanism in this sense needsto recognize the strengths of parochial communities before it canfind grounds for conciliation. It needs to regularly go back to thecave in order to also live in the light.It is interesting that only the concept of ‘the local’ has escaped

that closed cast of dark concepts. This has occurred mostly throughsome wonderfully evocative post-structuralist writing (itself afascinating ideological story worth narrating another time, andcriticized later in the essay). Here, I want to take all those termsseriously — not just localness, but also limits, closure andbounded ness. They too are part of the contemporary humancondition, for ill and good.The first part of this essay goes back to the cave and the earth. It

explores the philosophical and social foundations of a sense ofglobal connectedness, beginning with Plato’s allegory of the caveand moving across some basic positions from Emmanuel Kant toMartin Heidegger. This takes us to a discussion of a philosopher,John Rawls, whose work became foundational for a series ofabstracted liberal cosmopolitans who would later take on a globalremit. There can be no better starting point for illustrating themovement from the dominance of a community-based (national)imaginary to an abstracted global imaginary. Beyond Rawls and hiscompatriots, the essay moves to a discussion of the communitariancritique of cosmopolitanism by such writers as Michael Walzer.Each of these sections is written in relation to an argument for akind of cosmopolitanism that reconciles tensions withoutdissolving them. Thus the final two sections of the essay set out anargument for this alternative form of cosmopolitanism.Understanding such a position requires first an understanding ofthe extraordinary strengths and profound weaknesses of themethod by which the present argument is being made — namely,analytical abstraction. It is this point that takes us back to Plato.


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Historical Developments: Philosophical and SocialFoundations

Plato’s metaphor of the shadows on the cave wall provides us withan evocative way into understanding the process of analyticalabstraction.3 The image of the cave wall is one of the very earlyphilosophical metaphors used to suggest that appearances are notthe same as ‘the real’. According to the allegory, some prisonershave lived in an underground cave from birth. Their legs and necksare chained, limiting their vision to straight ahead. A fire burnsbehind them, casting shadows on the wall. These shadows becomethe prisoner’s only reality. According to this philosophical story,seeking the truth requires us to complete the painful ascent fromthe prison-house of ordinary sight into the daylight of directanalysis. With such a description of the dark alternative, ascent orenlightenment is the only way to go. In order to acquire thecapacity for rational deliberation we need to adjust to the brillianceof the sunlight as the source of truth. Only then can emancipatedpersons recognize the apparent reality of the subterranean shapesas a mere effect of restrained vision.4

Two of the key themes presented here later become importantthreads in the tapestry of Western philosophy: firstly, the movementfrom imprisonment to emancipation and, secondly, the movementfrom the darkness of ignorance to the light of reason.5Although Platohimself embedded his politics in the primacy of the polis, these themeslater became important to the dominant lineage of contempo rarycosmopolitanism — and particularly abstracted cosmopolitanism,discussed later in this essay. There is also a third thread with itsorigins in the Greek Stoics (not Plato) that later becomes part of thesame lineage. It concerns the movement from relations grounded inthe local to universalizing relations spread across the world. In thewords of Marcus Aurelius, writing in the second century of the Com -mon Era: ‘It makes no difference whether a person lives here or there,provided that, wherever he lives, he lives as a citizen of the world’.6



3 Plato, The Republic, book 7. 4 With thanks to Toni Erskine for drawing my attention to this allegory (Embedded

Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‘Dislocated Communities’,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008).

5 John Hinkson has tracked this ambiguous metaphor of the light in ‘Beyond Imagination?Responding to Nuclear War’, Arena Magazine, no. 60, 1982, pp. 45–71.

6 Cited in M. Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol.5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–25, citation from p. 1.

As Martha Nussbaum argues, it is not very far philosophically fromMarcus to Emmanuel Kant’s eighteenth-century cosmopolitanarguments concerning the possibilities of universal community andperpetual peace:

The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degreesinto a universal community, and it has developed to thepoint where a violation of laws in one part of the world is felteverywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan law is not fantasticand overstrained. It is a necessary complement to thepolitical code of political and international law, transformingit into a universal law of humanity.7

Kant was writing in the eighteenth century as part of a periodmarked by a cultural movement of European intellectuals arguingfor the emancipating effects of reason in the ordering of humanpractice. Kant can be described as a universalist cosmopolitan,although his argument also draws towards practical cosmopoli -tanism (defined below). His work is linked to a shift from thedominance of a traditional cosmological mode of enquiry to amodern analytical mode of enquiry, written against the traditionalauthority of the absolutist state. Later Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, a writer who

attempted to write a universal history of his time, can similarly bedescribed as universalists.8 Voltaire’s bête noir, Jean-JacquesRousseau, by contrast was an Enlightenment particularist whobased his ethical foundations in an original and positive ‘state ofnature’. From this noble beginning, Rousseau proposed that humanbeings had fallen into generalized wickedness. Both Voltaire andRousseau were believers in the power of enlightened reason, butthe debates between Voltaire and Rousseau about the nature ofbeing human were acerbic.Putting these beginnings of a globalizing ethics in the larger

context of ethics in general, these modern philosophers — whetherparticularists or universalists — were overlaying older traditions ofrelational ethics with an exemplary-universal ethics. Whereasrelational ethics emphasizes the right way to sustain embodied


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6 Cited in M. Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol.5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–25, citation from p. 1.

7 I. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795), cited in Nussbaum, ‘Kant and StoicCosmopolitanism’, p. 1.

8 Voltaire, An Essay on Universal History: The Manners and Spirit of Nations, from the Reign ofCharlemagne to the Age of Lewis XIV, 2nd edition, London, J. Nours, 1759.

relations between persons, and between persons and things, basedon analogical claims assuming persons are embedded in nature, anexemplary-universal ethics abstracts from relational ethics bylocating the source of meaning elsewhere other than within theperceptually known social and natural relationships themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century, a current of critical

philosophy emerged to challenge universalist cosmopolitanism. Itwas no longer the case for some modernists that the process ofenlightenment involved an unambiguous lifting into a condition ofemancipation. Movement between the earth and the light became,for one group of theorists, one of constant return. In Karl Marx’sunresolved terms, for example, political analysis required amovement from the particular to the general and from the abstractto the concrete. He was a class-oriented internationalist rather thanan abstracted cosmopolitan, even if his position was critical forlater cosmopolitanism. For Friedrich Nietzsche, writing out of a very different tradition,

seeking the light had explicitly become part of the problem — andit is here that engaged cosmopolitanism has to sit down with a philosopher of whom it would otherwise be very suspicious. For Nietzsche, universalist cosmopolitans were unintentionallydestroy ing the earth. Remain ‘true to the earth’, Nietzsche argued,‘and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrialhopes! They are poisoners whether they know it or not. They aredespisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom theearth is weary: so let them be gone’.9 Here Nietzsche is suggestingthat philosophy needs to be grounded in the figure of the earth; itcannot fly off into the space of cosmopolitan universalisms.Similarly, Martin Heidegger, writing a few decades later, arguedthat the good life entails dwelling ‘poetically on the earth’ and‘under the sky’.10

This ‘grounding’ imperative also came to include ecologicalnotions of the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ proposed by James Lovelock —that the earth is a single, complex, self-regulating system. For all ofits philosophical romanticism and post-human naturalism, there is



9 F. Nietzsche, cited in N. Turnbull, ‘The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: GlobalBeing in a Planetary World’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, pp. 125–39,citation from p. 130, original emphasis.

10 Turnbull, ‘The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus’, p. 131. See also M. Heidegger, ‘TheAge of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York,Harper Row, 1977, pp. 128–36.

even something we can retrieve here. Earth-based communitar -ianism/cosmopolitanism never became mainstream, and by thelast decades of the twentieth century it was being either challengedor changed, including by changes occurring to the figure of ‘theearth’ itself. The Apollo missions to the moon and the widelycirculating images of the planet floating in space had shaken anysense of the earth’s solidity. The metaphor of ‘space-ship earth’ wasbeginning to be used, and attempts to modify it through themetaphor of ‘life-boat earth’, as used by philosophers such asOnora O’Neill, did not change the general trend. In summary, any sense of the earth as the ground of being was

being profoundly destabilized. According to one line of critics (withsome continuities with Heidegger), the earth was and is beingabstract ed as an externalized, objectified and commodified world. Itis a world ‘out there’, opened up for exploitation. This world continuesto be dependent on the earth, but our dominant picture has becomean image of the planet as a resource for the market. In one line ofthis argument from which the present argument comes, we ashuman beings have been socially abstracted both from each otherand from the condition of being bound to the earth. And while this‘lifting out’ offers new possibilities for analytic understanding, italso presents us with profound dangers, including the ever-presentpossibility of global nuclear destruction or global climate crisis.11

According to another line of critique — the postmodernistcritique — all social life is and always has been intrinsically fluid.There never has been a solid ground to stand upon, onlyperceptions of such. In the words of Neil Turnbull:

But what happens to the Western philosophical quest forfixed ontologies and epistemological grounds when its tra -ditional ‘grounded’ notion of the earth is supplemented,possibly in the end replaced, by a more dynamic, open, per -cep tual, aesthetic and technologically produced conceptionof the earth? Might the planetary earth be the postmodernequivalent of the Cartesian malin genie — that which under -mines any idea of a fixed and stable ‘first principle’ ofknowing and judging? How can we make sense of the ideaof the return of ‘the earth’ to its former pre-modern position


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11 This argument is associated with the journal Arena. Though with a stronger heritage incritical Marxism than the work of Martin Heidegger, on this issue there are profoundparallels with parts of Heidegger’s critique of the world picture.

at the hub of Western conceptuality, while at the same timeacknowledging that this earth is not the fixed earth of thepast, but a symbolically significant and virtual — andworlded — earth?12

It is a good question, but not one that can be answered byfetishizing fluidity. By the last decades of the twentieth century,universalist cosmopolitanism had lost its philosophical centrality.Certainly significant lineages of universalism continued on,particularly in those writers who carry older cosmologicalconnections from Christianity and Buddhism, but for the most part,including in the later writings of key political philosophers in theKantian tradition, such as Jürgen Habermas, it has tended to evolveinto what is better described as abstracted cosmopolitanism. It isthis kind of cosmopolitanism that this essay seeks to distinguishitself from, even as it appreciates the questions its proponents ask.Cosmopolitanism for them becomes the civilizing ideology ofpositive globalization. Those proponents who continued to use thelanguage of universalism tended to become more modest in theirclaims. For example, Thomas Pogge allows for

… a universalistic moral conception to be compatible withmoral rules that hold for some people and not for others. Butsuch differences must be generated pursuant to fundamentalprinciples that hold for all. Generated special moral benefitsand burdens can arise in many ways.13

Towards an Ethics of Global Relations

What happens to the philosophical quest for grounding when bothsets of prior sources have been destabilized: first God and Being asproviding a cosmological grounding, and then the earth and‘human being’ as providing a lived metaphorical grounding? Thissection elaborates the grounding of different philosophicalpositions as they seek to generalize their ethical standpoints.One of the most influential contemporary approaches to ethics is



12 Turnbull, ‘The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus’, p. 133.13 T. W. Pogge, ‘Moral Universalism and Global Economic Justice’, Politics, Philosophy and

Economics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2002, pp. 29–58, citation from p. 30. However, Pogge’s positioncompounds all the abstracting problems of Rawls. He argues that the only way to realizeRawls’s theory is to construct ‘a single, global, original position’ so that ‘the relevant “closedscheme” is now taken to be the world at large’ (T. Pogge, Realizing Rawls, Ithaca, CornellUniversity Press, 1989, pp. 246–7).

found in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.14 Rawls seeks a way inwhich agreement can be found to accept a set of general principlesof social justice. This, he suggests, can be achieved through positinga hypothetical group of rational persons from whom all theparticularities and embodied identities and attachments of theirlives have been abstracted. He places this group behind a ‘veil ofignorance’. From that position any knowledge that persons have oftheir own standing in the world is stripped away. They are, ineffect, lifted into the position of being universal persons with noconception of what this world looks like. This is Rawls’s ‘originalposition’ — very different from Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’, even ifboth are posed as thought experiments. Rawls’s original conditionis constructed as imposing neutrality upon people, who thus candecide for us all what principles are just because they have novested interest in the outcome of their decisions. At this stage in his thinking — the 1960s to 1970s — the persons

in question may be universalistic in their epistemology, but they arefar from being global. Rawls does not assume a global originalposition from which one would identify principles of global justiceand obligation. The abstract persons within Rawls’s originalposition are motivated by concern for the well-being of futureothers. However, as he puts it, the domain of their ethical projectionis ‘a self-contained national community’, ‘a closed system isolatedfrom other societies’.15 This is an extraordinary irony — theapproach constructs universal persons, but the framework for thatapproach is still framed by a national imaginary.Two-thirds of the way through the massive Theory of Justice

(1971), Rawls does briefly turn to the question of extending beyondthe national border: ‘Now at this point’, he says, ‘one may extendthe interpretation of the original position and think of the parties asrepresentatives of different nations who must choose together thefundamental principles to adjudicate conflicting claims amongstates’.16 In the couple of pages that follow, we read that thesepeople would agree to the usual things that international relationstakes for granted already: the equal rights of nation-states; thebinding nature of treaties and contracts; and the necessity offighting wars justly. But, from this absurdly thin conversation, two


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14 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 136–42.15 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 457, 458.16 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 378–9.

pages later he returns to the national frame. It takes Rawls twodecades to move from the ‘law of nations’ to an internationallyrelevant position concerning the ‘law of peoples’. And even whenRawls does return to the question of the global in the ‘law ofpeoples’, he indicates that although he has a commitment toextending liberal justice beyond the nation-state, his foundationremains ‘the case of a hypothetically closed and self-sufficientliberal democratic society’ — and then how they relate to a globalworld.17 In the meantime, theories of globalization had swept uponthe scene. It was no longer the kind of basis for justice that anumber of his liberal colleagues had come to propose, drawingupon Rawls’s massively influential work but leaving it behind.Onora O’Neill counters part of the communitarian critique of

Rawls when she argues that abstraction is a fundamental elementof ethical deliberation. It is basic to making any patterned orgeneralized ethical claims about individual cases.18 Abstractionand sensitivity to actual situations, she suggests, are compatible.This is the basis of engaged cosmopolitanism. By carefuladjudication, abstract principles can explicitly and comfortablyallow for different contextualized outcomes for differently affectedpersons or communities. The poor or the colonially exploited, forexample, can be afforded special rights. For O’Neill, it isidealization rather than abstraction that is the problem. Whenethical accounts idealize individual rationality or human needs andtreat all elements as if they are on a par, then ethical systems losetheir applicability. For engaged cosmopolitanism it is unreflexiveabstraction that is the problem. Rawl’s ‘original position’ has toallow both for the possibility of knowledge about global–localrelations and also for ontologically different ways of life. In otherwords, those abstracted entities who make up the ‘originalposition’ have to be in a deliberative position to acknowledge andtranslate across fundamentally different ways of life, thus alreadyqualifying their own abstraction.Communitarians such as Alastair MacIntyre have also heavily

criticized the setting up of an abstract global ‘original position’from which to derive ethical principles. These criticisms extend to



17 J. Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, pp. 36–58.18 O. O’Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Development and Justice, London, Allen &

Unwin, 1996. O’Neill distinguishes her neo-Kantian abstracted cosmopolitanism fromSinger’s consequentialist variation of this position. See P. Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence andMorality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 3, 1972, pp. 229–43.

what he calls ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ — abstracted cos -mopolitanism in general. By ‘aspiring to be at home anywhere’,MacIntyre says, we have become ‘citizens of nowhere’.19 Thiscritique is powerfully supported by the work of sociologists such asCraig Calhoun, who point to the ideologically self-serving qualityof contemporary forms of thin cosmopolitanism:

In offering a seeming ‘view from nowhere’, cosmopolitanscom monly offer a view from Brussels (where the postna -tional is identified with the strength of the European Unionrather than the weakness of, say, African states), or fromDavos (where the postnational is corporate), or from theuniversity (where the illusion of a free-floating intelligentsiais supported by relatively fluid exchange of ideas acrossnational borders).20

A different version of the same critique of abstracted cos -mopolitanism comes from Walter Mignolo. The first global ethicaldesign articulated by Immanuel Kant occurred, he reminds us, inthe context of a European mission to ‘civilize’ the world as part ofa globalizing colonial process. The more recent set of globalizingethics — abstracted cosmopolitanism — occurs within a setting ofneoliberal globalization. Globalizing ethics thus have a history ofresponding inadequately to their own constitutive framing. Evendebates about human rights have a dark side that needs to becritically addressed. Thus, ‘instead of cosmopolitanism managedfrom above (that is, global designs)’, Mignolo advocates a criticalcosmopolitanism ‘emerging from the various spatial and historicallocations of the colonial difference’.21 This brings into contentionthe prior history of the coloniality of power. One way of handlingthis would be to consider questions of ontological design.22 Suchdesign would involve locals and globals in debating about anddeliberating on how a particular locale might be developed fromdifferent ontological standpoints.Similarly, the contemporary ethical philosopher Michael Walzer


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19 A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London, Duckworth, 1988, p. 388.20 C. Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually

Existing Cosmopolitanism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 4, 2002, pp. 869–97,citation from p. 873.

21 W. D. Mignolo, ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmo -politanism’, in C. A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. K. Bhabha and D. Chakrabarty (eds),Cosmopolitanism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2002.

22 T. Fry and E. Kalantidou (eds), Design in the Borderlands, London, Routledge, 2014.

rejects an external, ahistorical, universalist or abstracted vantagepoint. He argues explicitly against the conclusions of Plato’sallegory of the cave. The communitarian philosopher is clear thathe sees it as a strength to ‘stand in the cave, in the city, on theground’.23 It is part of a commitment to a grounded ethics thatrecognizes the realities of social power of many kinds. As ToniErskine relates, this standpoint is not just a perverse reversal of theEnlightenment or abstracted cosmopolitan perspectives:

Importantly, Walzer’s commitment to the cave responds tothe perceived shortcomings of a range of perspectives — adetail that his frequent and often fleeting allusion to Plato’sallegory threatens to obscure. He is not merely offering analternative to the Platonist notion of transcendental moraltruth. His site of opposition also includes the type of pers -pective that does not claim access to ‘truth’, but, more modestly,understands itself as the point beyond all particularity towhich one temporarily abstracts in order to deliberate with -out the problem of debilitating bias. Both require, in Walzer’slanguage, that one ‘leave the cave’, and Walzer’s forcefuldescription of his preferred starting point is useful for thisreason. For Walzer, requisite to moral deliberation is loyaltyto the cave and to the shared beliefs of those with whom heinhabits it. His cave represents neither moral ignorance, norintellectual illusion, nor distorting bias. On the contrary,Walzer cautions that if one aspires to a detached, impersonalstandpoint — in other words, if one attempts to abandon thecave — then ‘one describes the terrain of everyday life fromfar away, so that it loses its particular contours’. It is in theinterpretation of these particular contours that Walzer arguesmoral decisions can be made.24

Particularism and Cosmopolitanism

In the philosophical debates over the global, two major positionscan thus be drawn out: particularism and cosmopolitanism. They arenot opposites in the way that universalism and particularism can



23 M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, p. xiv.

24 Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism, p. 125. See also M. Walzer, ‘Achieving Global and LocalJustice’, Dissent, vol. 58, no. 3, 2011, pp. 42–8.

be said to have radically different bases. Rather they are differentorientations, defined through their primary responses to the fol -lowing questions:

1. How is one’s ethical position to be grounded?2. Who is to be included in the scope of the derived ethicalprinciples?

3. What is the spatial and temporal reach of its set of ethicalprinciples?

In this part of the discussion, I want to set up the conditions forarguing that it is possible (with some important qualifications) tohave a strong particularistic stance on ethical debate andapplication — even as this kind of particularism needs to reach outto globalizing protocols and universalizing claims. In relation toglobal politics, particularism is normally defined as a kind of globalethics that rejects either a universalizing rationalizing of its ethicsor the global reach of a single set of ethical principles. In the versionthat I want to foreground I am not going to argue for particularismper se but for recognizing its strengths in providing an importantorientation for developing an engaged cosmopolitanism.Particularism grounds its ethical position in particular com -

munities — communities of people of different kinds and spatialreaches. It suggests that ethical claims are framed by the par -ticularity of the communities. They have a part in deciding what isright and good. Particularism frames its scope of derived ethicalprinciples in terms of the people who are part of a constituency andhow this relates to those communities they deal with beyond theirspatial boundaries. And it gives qualified priority to the local andimmediate community or communities that enact their ownprinciples.Particularism is thus a demarcated, located ethics. Its ethical

regimes are not global. Nevertheless, our way into making anargument about ‘reaching out’ beyond the local is actually quitesimple. It begins by recognizing that particularism, in effect, isalready making a global claim — or what might be called a meta-claim— for the priority of the local, the culturally sensitive and thespatially demarcated over the universal. Thus particularism is still— in its form at least, though not its directed content — a globalclaim. Firstly, it has to have a global perspective in order to setlimits to the universalizing or global reach that any one claim canmake about the applicability of its content. Secondly, it makes aglobal claim about how this should be done ethically. Against


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different forms of universalizing ethics such as universalizingcosmopolitanism (discussed in a moment), it suggests that ethicalprinciples need to be embedded in local places and relevant toparticular cultural histories. Against a single set of ethics thatpresumes to cross all cultural and political boundaries, it arguesthat nuances of ethical difference should be formed throughnegotiated dialogues between communities based upon the well-considered formulations of particular communities.Two major kinds of particularism can be distinguished:

communitarian particularism and nationalist particularism. The firstworks much better because it does not seek to prioritize one formof community over others. Communitarian particularism arguesthat ethics need to be both grounded in and relevant to particularcommunities, crossing the very different ways in which thesedifferent communities might be defined. This group of approachesis best known as ‘communitarianism’. Nationalist particularists, bycomparison, work with the assumption that there is one overridingform of community in the world that best provides the politicalframework for ethical debate about what should be done and howour primary responsibilities might be considered — the nation. Even here, national particularism is not as dark as it first

appears. Nationalist particularists centre on national community,but it is not an ontologically grounding move so much as it is apractically grounding move. In the sphere of ethical debate, mostnationalist particularists are liberal conservatives, and to the extentthat national communities are already abstract communities ofstrangers living side by side in an abstract territorial space, it is thepractical space of dialogue that frames their approach, not thenation as the essential ground of being. For all the ideologies of soil,blood and primordial connection that still permeate some lineagesof nationalism, there are no deep primordialists among this cohortof philosophers and historians.25 There are no philosophers whoessentialize either the nation in general or their own nation inparticular. Nationalist particularists tend to be realists or prag -matists. They are not necessarily chauvinists or inwardly turnedrealists. They are not necessarily against aid and hospitality to otherpeople across the world, even if they would prioritize acts of givingto those with whom they have national solidarity. In other words,they take seriously the proverb that charity begins at home. In



25 See, for example, Y. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993.

some of the public shouting matches between cosmopolitans andparticularists this needs to be recognized for the debates to goforward productively.Without such recognition, it does not make sense that both forms

of particularism, even nationalist particularism, can be associatedwith weak forms of cosmopolitanism. This is the case for manyparticularists, from Giuseppe Mazzini in the nineteenth century toMichael Walzer in the present. For them the global (or internation -al) is not anathema, but simply secondary to a practical ethics. Theirposition is better expressed as suggesting that global communityremains either secondary in practice to, or achievable in practicethrough, the standing of either national or grounded communities.Alternatively again, a position such as international ism — oneversion of which suggests that a system of nation-states is currentlythe predominant organization of political power in the world, andtherefore a manageable site of ethical consideration — provides ahalfway house between particularism and cosmopoli tanism.In response to the three questions above, engaged cosmopoli -

tanism grounds an ethical position in the global community insofaras it relates to particular places and peoples — a global civil societyof ontologically different ways of life, different communities andindividuals, considered as one and many. It frames its scope ofderived ethical principles in terms of this engagement betweenglobal community and local differences, including existentialdifference. And it gives only qualified priority to the global debatein generating a globalizing set of ethical principles that applyequally to all to the extent that one of these principles needs to berecognition and respect for local and ontological difference.

Practical and Ethical Cosmopolitanism

Contemporary cosmopolitanism comes in different forms. We canfurther distinguish here between two prominent variations: ethicalcosmopolitanism and organizational cosmopolitanism. It is adistinction based on emphasis.26 For some writers and activists,both positions are held at the same time. Practical cosmopolitanismputs its emphasis on the organizational means by which acosmopolitan ethics can be achieved in an already globalizing


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26 F. Dallmayr, for example, says that a positive cosmopolitanism depends on bringing bothtogether in a global political praxis (‘Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political’, Political Theory,2003, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 421–2).

world. It advocates the radical transformation of the status of stateborders within some system of representation and global governancethat transcends political divisions. Ethical cosmopolitanism holdsthat each person in the world has equal ethical standing. Forengaged cosmopolitanism to be viable it needs to be both practicaland ethical. The question now is what kind of practical politics andwhat kind of ethics.The social democratic version of practical cosmopolitanism,

argued by writers such as David Held and Daniele Archibugi, putsits emphasis on the emerging political sphere of democratic globalgovernance.27 This position is based upon the cogence of a criticaltransformative description of the present state of politics, whichsuggests that the reality of the long-term globalization of politicsrequires in practice the values of global cosmopolitan democracy tobe carried into all levels of governance. Cosmopolitanism in all itsvarious guises is an attempt to come to terms with globalization,but it is the raison d’être of this particular kind of cosmopolitanism.Practical cosmopolitanism sees itself as giving globalization ahuman face through a global political governance system. This isvery different from the neoliberal version of organizationalcosmopolitanism, advocated by writers such as Kenichi Omhae,which puts its emphasis on the borderless global market as thebasis for global self-governance.28

Ethical cosmopolitanism does not have the same emphasis asorganizational cosmopolitanism on the institutions of global gov -ernance. It champions what might be called a global civil spherewhere everybody has equal ethical standing. According to thisperspective, neither friends, nor family, nor fellow citizens countfor more than others. It thus brings together ethics (the social frameof good and right action) with morals (the personal enacting of thissocially framed ethics). In defining their respective positions,adherents to both types of cosmopolitanism invoke the phrase‘global citizenship’. Narrow practical cosmopolitans understandthis quite literally: we will become citizens of the world upon thecreation of a global state or the development of some sort of globaldemocratic system. Ethical cosmopolitans use the same phrasemetaphorically: we are already citizens of the world because we



27 See, for example, D. Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the WashingtonConsensus, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004.

28 K. Ohmae, The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World, Delhi,Pearson Education, 2005.

have duties to everyone else globally. It is this latter vein ofcosmopolitanism that has been central to debates within normativeinternational-relations theory. Two kinds of such ethical cosmopoli -tanism concern us here: universalist ethical cosmopolitanism andabstract ethical cosmopolitanism.

Universalist CosmopolitanismThe most universalizing ethical cosmopolitan approach — hence thename used here, universalist cosmopolitanism — makes an essentialclaim to a trans-temporal, trans-spatial truth, grounded in God,Nature or Being, or alternatively, in its radically modern version, inhuman discourse itself. Universalist cosmopolitanism is usuallyassociated with traditional religious grounding and continuingcosmologies — such as those that suggest that we are all equal inthe eyes of God and across all time. But more recently a new form ofuniversalism has emerged. Contemporary universalist cosmopolitansinclude transcendental universalists such as the Swiss theologianHans Kung, mentioned earlier, and immanent universalists suchthe German philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel.29

In the Christian version of transcendentalism (Kung), ecumenicalengagement is based on the Greek notion of the oikoumene,understood as the whole inhabited world. ‘Love your neighbour asyourself’ is a key principle. In the dialogical version (Appel andHabermas), engagement is based on a rejection of both traditionalcosmologies and the modern value-neutrality of science. Ethics isgrounded in the communicative rationality of ‘good argument’.With the emerging dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries of modern epistemologies for grounding ethics, thetraditional form of cosmopolitanism has lost its former taken-for-granted pre-eminence as an enveloping ethic. In developing a newfoundation for ethics, political philosophers have become increas -ingly aware of the limitation of being caught between religion and science. In Max Weber’s words, ‘We know of no scientificallydemon strable ideals. To be sure, our labours are now renderedmore difficult, since we must create our ideals from within ourchests in the very age of subjectivist culture’.30 Apel describes theproblematique thus:


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29 K. Apel, ‘Globalization and the Need for Universal Ethics: The Problem in the Light ofDiscourse Ethics’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 3, no. 2, 2000, pp. 135–55.

30 Weber’s ‘Viennese Declaration’, cited in L. Scaff, ‘Fleeing the Iron Cage’, American PoliticalScience Review, vol. 81, no. 3, 1987, p. 783.

… recourse to concrete ethos-traditions ... could not reallysolve the post-conventional and post-traditional problem ofa universally valid foundation of ethics in the age ofscientific-technological-strategic rationality. It could not evenstrive for such a solution, since it did not try to surmount thescientistic-technological-strategic monopoly of rationality byrevealing a deeper (communicative-discursive) type ofrationality. It rather evaded this problem through apragmatic-hermeneutic recourse to the customs of a given‘form of life’ as a ‘contingent basis of consent’. Now, at thispoint, the other characteristic dilemma of the ethicalchallenge of our situation of globalization becomes visible:whereas the universal rationality seems to be value neutraland hence cannot provide a basis for ethics, the existingfoundations of ethics seem to be culture-dependent andhence cannot provide a basis for a global or universal ethics.This dilemma comes to the fore as soon as — for example, inthe context of the discussion of human rights — the secondgreat problem of our situation of globalization has to befaced, which is determining the moral and juridicalconditions of a multicultural society.31

Apel’s way out of the dilemma, like Jürgen Habermas’s, is to turn towhat they call ‘discursive’ or ‘communicative rationality’. Througha process by which each person in an ethical dialogue takes a self-consciously impartial position, interlocutors can metaphoricallycome together from across the globe to forge an agreement about acommon set of values.32 For engaged cosmopolitanism, it is notimpartiality that is required so much as empathy and an ethics ofcare that allows people to engage in dialogue across the borders ofcontinuing and fundamental difference. With the qualifications thatwe have already made, Rawls’s metaphor of an ‘original position’remains useful here, but it is not a single ‘original position’ or ametaphorical coming together that we are arguing for. Rather,engaged cosmopolitanism projects many ‘original positions’, allcontested, all contingent, all a question of deliberative judgementin a particular time and place by actual people. It is not just therealm of philosophers thinking for us.



31 Apel, ‘Globalization and the Need for Universal Ethics’, p. 140.32 J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992.

Abstracted CosmopolitanismAs we have seen, the second and dominant kind of cosmopoli -tanism today, abstracted cosmopolitanism, is not grounded in God,Natural Law or the like, but rather in the intellectual force ofabstracted modern rationality (or, as a second-order claim, in thereality of the globalization of politics in the contemporary period).In an attempt to get beyond subjectivism, abstracted cosmopoli -tanism in its different manifestations sought different methods ofrational grounding. One contemporary voice of this kind ofcosmopolitanism is rationalist cosmopolitanism, best represented byextensions of John Rawls’s theory of justice. Rationalism of thiskind projects a hypothetical abstracted condition where a group ofunknown individuals, shorn of any particular attachments, cansupposedly impartially decide on what are good principles. Theyare responding to the same dilemma as the universalistcosmopolitans, but they ground their ethics in an abstractedcondition of social neutrality rather than even a metaphoricaldialogue.Another voice of abstracted cosmopolitanism is utilitarian

cosmopolitanism, based on the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber. This position, represented by contemporary philosopherssuch as Peter Singer, has its origins in Jeremy Bentham’seighteenth-century critique of the notion of ‘natural rights’.Bentham rejected the early modern appeals to grounding ethics ineither Natural Law or an Original Contract to form a sovereignstate, and argued instead for the principle of utility as the basis ofhuman action:

… with respect to actions in general, there is a property inthem that is calculated so readily to engage and so firmly tofix the attention of the observer, as the tendency they mayhave to or diverging ... from that which may be styled thecommon end of all of them. The end I mean is Happiness; andthis tendency is its utility.33

A third abstracted cosmopolitan voice, continuing along theutilitarian line, is liberal cosmopolitanism. It similarly leaves behindthe notion of ‘natural rights’ but in effect argues for the greatestfreedom of the greatest number. Freedom and its flourishingbecomes the key. Good global development is development that


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33 M. Warnock (ed.), Utilitarianism and On Liberty, Malden, Blackwell, 2003.

enhances the capabilities of people to choose and enact what theyfeel to be life-enhancing practices within an equality of opportunityavailable to all globally. This position is represented by contem -porary writers such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, withits bases in the writings of the nineteenth-century liberal JohnStuart Mill, and is influenced by contemporary liberals such asJohn Rawls.34 In each of these cases, rationality of choice orabstracting analysis of the most rational set of precepts is used toground the ethical claims, and none of these positions accord withwhat I am trying to argue here.

Engaged Cosmopolitanism

Engaged or grounded cosmopolitanism, by comparison, provides analter native to both of the current dominant forms of cosmopoli -tanism. This approach brings together both critical particularismand reflexive abstracted cosmopolitanism into a mutuallyqualifying whole. It has resonances in what Walter Mignolo calls‘critical cosmopolitanism’, Toni Erskine calls ‘embedded cos -mopolitanism’, Kwame Anthony Appiah ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’and Mamadou Diouf ‘vernacular cosmopoli tanism’.35 The term‘engaged’ has been chosen here as the most appropriate because itrefers to the reflexively engaged epistemological status of anevertheless abstracting claim: namely, that ethics, howevergeneralizing it might be, needs to be engaged in actual on-the-ground dialogue and deliberative debate between individuals,communities, peoples, philosophers and agents on behalf of others— dead and alive and still to be born — who bring their taken-for-granted habitus into reflexive contention.A lot here turns on two concepts: the realm of the habitus and the

practice of reflexive contention. The term habitus comes from PierreBourdieu. He defines it as ‘systems of durable, transposabledispositions, structured structures … which generate and organizepractices and representations’.36 The layers of the habitus, from thelocal to the global, its norms and dispositions, should be the context



34 A. Sen, The Idea of Justice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009.35 Mignolo, ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis’; T. Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to

Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‘Dislocated Communities’, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008; K. A. Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3,1997, pp. 617–39; M. Diouf, ‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of aVernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha and Chakrabarty (eds),Cosmopolitanism.

36 P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p. 53.

for all ethical debate. The global may have different meanings fordifferent communities, but engaged cosmopolitanism requires thatcommunities engage internally and externally, up and out. The second term, bringing ethics into reflexive contention,

involves reflection on the consequences of reflection and learning,including on how power and knowledge are bound up with eachother in making ethical claims.37 For example, it is often said that‘knowledge is power’, but without reflection on the layers ofontologically different forms of knowledge in different socialsettings, an unreflexive modernist response is to conclude that there -fore increased dissemination of knowledge (read: ‘information’)will give those receiving all that information more power. It is oneof the liberal modern illusions, among others such as ‘more inter -connectivity will bring about stronger social integration’ or ‘moreinclusion makes for stronger communities’. In these terms, Rawls’soriginal position, which attempts to strip us of the habitus ofinformed meaning, or Habermas’s communicative dialogue, whichabstracts a process of intense reflection and dialogue, both requiregrounding in a reflexivity about the kinds of knowledge that arebeing brought to any dialogical table.Engaged cosmopolitanism — the position from which this essay

is working — takes grounded social relations, including partic -ularized or embodied social relations with known others, as crucialto qualifying the potentially thin emptiness of abstracted cos -mopolitanism. But at the same time it takes the process of analyticalabstraction as crucial to qualifying the possible parochialisms andself-limiting interests of particularism. A number of propositionsunderlie this position:

Proposition 1While it is both philosophically possible and necessary to abstractmoral agency, ultimately ethics is always grounded in the particularsocial contexts of persons connected through layers of differentkinds of relationships from the local (place as the locale ofmeaningful social relations) to the global (the earth and the naturalas the ground of human history, even as humans reach beyond it).


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37 This is therefore quite different from Ulrich Beck’s discussion of ‘reflexive modernization’ asthe modernization of modernization, occurring autonomously, ‘undesired and unseen’, as a‘self-confrontation with effects of risk society that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in thesystem of industrial society’ (Ulrich Beck in his book with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash,Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge,Polity Press, 1994, p. 6).

When seen from this perspective, the global is treated as a specialkind of ‘particular’ social context or habitus. Just as locales, com -munities and nations have their own histories, the global has itsown long histories of human relations: sodalities of religion, empiresof domination, trade routes of silk, movements against slavery,sojourns in emigration — all told from various per spectives. In thisargument, cross-cutting histories, including the global history ofbeing human, frame us all. Global history carries what AndrewLinklater calls the ‘ambiguities of human inter relatedness’.38

Moreover, engaged cosmopolitanism argues that persons areunable in practice, even during philosophical moments of workingthrough techniques of abstraction, to completely disengage fromthis manifold local–global context in order to enter the sphere ofneutral moral deliberation. How could they? This is what definesthem as human. It suggests that the overriding emphasis on freedomby liberal cosmopolitans is a reductive consequence of notreflexively taking into account their own assumed politics. Evenwhen liberals claim to have stripped their grounding claims of allideological presumptions, it is salutary to remember thatconceptions of freedom, liberty, autonomy and choice form one ofthe dominant ideological clusters of our time. Philosophical approaches that suggest that abstraction is a neu -

tral process, without recognizing that the hypothetical stripping ofparticularities can only be an exploratory or heuristic exercise, havealready significantly thinned out the meaning of what it is to behuman. In the same way that freedom as a dominant ideology ofliberalism lies at the heart of the putatively neutral body of liberalcosmopolitanism, abstraction, the sinew of modern analyticalphilosophy, connects the body of the supposedly neutral system ofabstracted cosmopolitanism. This is the core of the problem withabstracted cosmopolitanism — it does not reflexively understandthe epistemological basis of its own standpoint.

Proposition 2While cross-border criticism and solidarity — both requisites tomeaningful discussions of local and global justice — are compli -cated by the particularistic grounding, it is possible to achieve boththrough reflexive translation, deliberation and debate across such



38 A. Linklater, ‘Global Civilizing Processes and the Ambiguity of Human Interconnectedness’,European Journal of International Relations, vol. 16, no. 2, 2010, pp. 155–78.

boundaries. This reflexive translation entails the recognition thatthere are ontologically different ways of being in the world, most ofwhich take the dominance of modern abstraction and rationalneutrality as anathema to being human.39

Proposition 3While cultural, political and economic boundaries remain animportant part of the human condition, one of the core ethicalprinciples of cosmopolitanism is that spatial boundaries are notlines on a moral map that mark the extent of the ethical domain.Proximate or distant, friend or enemy, insider or outsider, eachperson and community on the planet needs to be considered as partof and equal in any ethical framework.40

Part of the reflexivity of grounded cosmopolitan ethics is thateven very localized ethical dialogues need to be conducted openly,bringing into contention the ethical frames of others. Others,whether close or far, need to be considered as ethical equals. Thatis, themes of belonging and mobility, inclusion and exclusion,freedom and obligation are in a dialectical relationship with oneanother, and they have been across global history in different waysacross different traditions.

Debating Cosmopolitanisms

Engaged cosmopolitanism thus rejects the post-universalist abstrac -tion of the rationalist cosmopolitan position — the notion of a pre-social self — but it is also concerned about the framing ofparticularistic communitarianism: the notion that a singular boundedcommunity provides the context for ethics. All communities arealways and already caught in complex webs of intertwined socialrelations. Counter-reactions to the claim that moral reasoning mustbe rooted in context and particularity are worth considering. Thecommunitarian critique of abstracted cosmopolitanism is strong,but if one adheres to a dismissal of ethical abstraction per se withoutoffering an alternative way of generalizing ethics beyond their


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39 G. E. R. Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern Societies,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

40 These three premises are argued at length in Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism. See also T.Erskine, ‘“Citizen of Nowhere” or “The Point Where Circles Intersect”? Impartialist andEmbedded Cosmopolitanisms’, Review of International Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2002, pp. 457–78.It should however be carefully noted that she handles them differently from theirexpressions here.

grounding in particular communities it seems to leave us boundeither to separated zones of ethical dialogue or to isolated sets ofassumed ethical principles. Ulrich Beck puts this dilemma starkly:

Universalism, for example, obligates respect for others as amatter of principle, but, for that very reason, arouses nocuriosity about, or respect for, the otherness of others. On thecontrary, universalism sacrifices the specificity of others to aglobal equality that denies the historical context of its ownemergence and interests. Relativism and contextualism arelike wise self-contradictory: stress on the context and relativityof particular standpoints has its source in an impulse torecognize the otherness of others. But, conceived and prac -ticed in absolute terms, that recognition is transformed intoa claim that perspectives cannot be compared — a claim thatamounts to irremediable mutual ignorance.41

Beck’s both/and rather than either/or position, evades the limi -tations of either abstract universalism or embedded particularism,and is akin to what is proposed by engaged cosmopolitanism.However, his critique tends to caricature the alternative positionsas extreme ‘types’ rather than the actual arguments of existingabstracted cosmopolitans or grounded particularists. It makes ithard in practice to bring the strengths of those two standpointsback together.42 If we return to the threads of our previousdiscussion, a number of considerations can be made clearer.One consideration relates to the nature of the moral agent. From

the standpoint of abstracted cosmopolitanism, a system of globalethics is derived from a moral agent who needs to be either givenan independence of context by virtue of intellectual abstraction (aphilosopher in dialogue with other philosophers) or abstractedfrom that context by virtue of a projected philosophical play (theplay about the putative person behind the veil of ignorance).People in the world may bring this system to their various life-worlds, but the source of the ethical frame itself is, for abstractedcosmopolitans, the abstracted individual. By contrast, from the standpoint of grounded cosmopolitanism,



41 U. Beck, ‘The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 3,2004, pp. 430–49.

42 See also L. Martell’s extended critique of Beck in ‘Global Equality, Human Rights and Power:A Critique of Ulrich Beck’s Cosmopolitanism’, Critical Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp.253–72.

the source of ethics is persons who, in dialogue, develop an ethicalstance while remaining embedded in their constitutive worlds. AsKwame Anthony Appiah writes, ‘our social lives endow us withthe full richness of resources available for self-recreation: for evenwhen we are creating new and counter-normative identities, it is theold and the normative that provide the language and the back -ground’.43 Engaged cosmopolitanism suggests that the abstrac tionprocess occurs at one level of being (analytical technique) with nopretense that any persons in ethical dialogue can leave behind thelayers of the self that embed them in relation to others, here andnow.Another consideration relates to questions of inclusion and

exclusion, including the meaning of political boundaries. While mostvariations of abstracted cosmopolitanism look forward to the endof any exclusive cultural or political boundaries, engaged cosmopoli -tanism does not assume an automatic right for people to move acrossall boundaries in a borderless-world scenario. It is a matter forlocal-to-local and local-to-global negotiation, taking into account andsubstantially qualifying the current power of different regimes simplyto say ‘no’, particularly to strangers in need. This common conceptionof the problem elides the issue that in certain circumstances it isexclusion that is positive and leads to a social good. For example, inplaces where harassment or exploitation is common or social differ -ence is threatening, there may legitimately be a need to excludedominating or exploitative ‘outsiders’ from certain activities or places.Sometimes, even the open and mobile presence of others in a zoneof difference — for example, a place of worship or a customarysacred site — renders that site culturally and politically dead. A second and more abstract point is that concentrating on

overcoming questions of exclusion per se tends to leave issues ofexploitation unaddressed. Unless, for example, we take seriouslythe forms of poverty specific to being marginalized under con -temporary conditions of globalization, exclusion is seen to have noperpetrator. Seen in this way, exclusion or exploited inclusion ‘isthe form that poverty develops in conditions where the realizationof profit occurs through organizing economic operations in[globalizing] networks’. It represents the ‘exploitation of the immo -bile by the mobile’ and therefore suggests that a city, community or


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43 K. A. Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, pp. 617–39,citation from p. 625.

organization act to tie down the perpetrators of such exclusion-inclusion exploitation.44 The point here is that only by coming togrips with how, on what terms, and who a community, nation ororganization includes and excludes that ethical practice in its mostmeaningful sense can be implemented. A third consideration relates to the question of to whom we have

primary allegiance. In an apparently minor difference fromErskine’s inclusion-positive approach and Nussbaum’s rationalistdefinition that cosmopolitanism involves ‘primary allegiance’ to‘the human beings of the entire world’,45 the position taken here isthat developing a global ethics is not about designating a primaryallegiance but deciding on a prime consideration. The grounding andprime consideration of engaged cosmopolitanism is the humancondition as we have known it — complex, intersecting anddifferently extended communities of identity and difference,authority and autonomy, inclusion and exclusion, needs and limits— from the local to the global.In summary, grounded cosmopolitanism of the kind presented

here argues for a reconstituted understanding of firstly the morallyrelevant community, and secondly the relevant way of derivingethical principles. In relation to the first question of which com -munity is relevant, instead of positing either local community orglobal community as primary, it understands ‘communities ofplace’ as overlaid and in continuous tension with more extendedcommunities, including the global community — where the earthis a place. This is in part based on an empirical and historical claim,redoubled by the contemporary processes of intensifying glob -alization. However, even historically, embodied particularismextended from the local to the global through such processes aschains of migration and movements of slaves, missionaries, sailorsand soldiers. This has been intensified by materially more abstractprocesses such as extended personal communications networks.But it also links to the second question about the method of comingto the principles. It is a false binary to suggest that we are forced tochoose between concrete particularism and analytical abstraction.Reflexive abstraction allows us to reflect on the meaning ofdifferent particularisms, including our own.



44 L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2005, pp. 354–5.45 M. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, Boston Review, vol. 19, no. 5, 1994, p. 3.

Conclusion

What are the limits of cosmopolitanism? Can there be new forms ofcosmopolitanism shaped by intensifying globalization? Whathappens to current debates about cosmopolitanism underconditions of intensifying globalization? These are the kinds ofconsiderations that are debated in the contemporary literature. Theunderlying quest that motivates the whole of the presentdiscussion has been to find a way to get beyond the quandariesimplied in the three questions with which we began. A fourthquestion also needs to be added in relation to practice. How can alocal–global ethics be institutionalized? Elaborating this and earlierquestions makes clear what is in contention.Firstly, how can an ethical position be adequately grounded

when neither a perceptual-analogical relation to nature and others,or a traditional relation to the sanctity of God, Nature or Being, issufficient to authorize an ethical frame? Particularism grounds itsauthority in the living traditions and current dialogues of existingcommunities, but as many philosophers have argued this is notsufficient. Critical particularism and critical communitarianismalso require a global standpoint. In response, cosmopolitanism in itsdominant form — abstracted cosmopolitanism — turns to abstractanalytic techniques that according to critical communitarians arereductive and ideologically projected. Engaged cosmopolitanismattempts to go beyond both of these standpoints, using thestrengths of both. It requires negotiation of ethical principles, usingtechniques of abstraction, but with those techniques qualifiedthrough, firstly, reflexive recognition of the limits of analyticmodernism and, secondly, debate across epistemologically differentapproaches. It requires cognizance of the constitutive milieu of anylived set of ethical principles, qualified by the need for thosecommunities-of-practice to always reach beyond themselves.Secondly, who is to be included in the scope of the derived

ethical principles when those close at hand seem to have moreclaim on our support? From an ethical cosmopolitan perspective,we have duties to all others as human beings, but the questionremains: what is the nature of these duties? Is modern inclusion theanswer? It is for most cosmopolitan theorists, including somepolitical philosophers who present versions of groundedcosmopolitanism. In the grounded cosmopolitanism presented inthe present essay, the contemporary emphasis on inclusion is


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another of those ideological dominants that needs interrogationand deliberative debate. The relationship between inclusion andexclusion in these terms becomes a question of negotiated ethicaldialogue to be institutionalized through relations of governancefrom the local to the global. The promise of providing a setting forthe ongoing negotiation of relations of inclusion and exclusionoffered by this form of grounded cosmopolitanism arguablymitigates the concomitant shortcomings of that approach.Thirdly, what is the spatial and temporal reach of its set of ethical

principles? Borders and divides may be necessary and ethicallydefensible for sustaining a plurality of life-worlds, as may be slowingthe movement of people in a way that is culturally or ecologicallysustainable. But how this works in practice is an ongoing questionfor debate within a globalizing ethical framework. One of theprinciples of a global reach is that globalizing principles need toqualify the terms and articulations of their local engagement. Bythe same token, principles need to project into possible futures,taking into account the generations to come. Fourthly, how can a local–global ethics be instituted? This brings

in the strength of practical cosmopolitanism with its emphasis oninstitutionalizing appropriate processes of governance. If we are toget beyond ethics being the purview of philosophers, theninstitutionalizing debates about fundamental principles of sociallife is crucial, as is developing regimes of practice. This is why thedistinction between ethical and practical cosmopolitanism — thelatter being a position that advocates the radical organizationaltransformation of the nature of global governance and state borders— is useful, even if some theorists would maintain that it is un -necessary. But it does not mean that approaches to cosmopoli -tanism should focus only on regimes of global governance. Powerextends in different ways at different levels, and this too should bethe focus of an engaged cosmopolitanism.



'Engaged Cosmopolitanism: Reconciling Local Grounding and Distance' (2014)

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