Coercive Cosmopolitanism and Impossible Solidarities

In postcolonialism we don’t know our friends.

—Gayatri Spivak, “Attention: Postcolonialism!”

In recent years, an increasing number of global citizens’ movements have taken “justice” as their explicit goal. At issue here are the scope and scale of struggles for justice: What are the boundaries of justice, and how are they being renegotiated? In contrast to those who, committed to domestic justice, contribute to the well-being of their immediate communities and fellow citizens, theorists and activists in the field of transnational justice argue for a broader and deeper commitment that would encompass strangers both within and beyond state borders. They argue that in a globalized world our duties and responsibilities are not limited to our fellow citizens. A concurrent effort emphasizes the economic, political, cultural, and sexual aspects of injustice. The increasing scale and velocity of economic, cultural, and technological connectivity, along with the speed of global flows of capital, commodities, people, and ideas, have led some to claim that a profoundly new global condition has emerged, marking the end not just of borders but of empires too. Challenging imperialist globalization lies at the heart of counterhegemonic movements that bring together the concerns of groups as diverse as urban slum dwellers and sex workers, war crimes victims and metropolitan anarchists. Accordingly, these movements focus on human rights and on the equitable distribution of resources, as well as politics of recognition and representation, to ensure that all members of the world society have equal opportunities and parity of participation.

This has resulted in a renewed interest in cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political imperative and as a commitment to planetary conviviality in a postnational, globalized world. Ideas like Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,¹ Ubuntu or uMunthu,² and Weltbürgerrecht are gaining popularity, seeming evidence that the sentiment of bonds of humanity is universal. In a globalized world of growing interdependence, the project of “solidarity across borders” promises to facilitate a transnational citizen’s movement, which in turn could inspire the creation of democratic transnational institutions. The figure of the “cosmopolitan” has gained prominence as an agent of global justice, peace, and democracy. In the face of the increasing transnational circulation of capital, commodities, people, ideas, and images, cosmopolitans seem to overcome narrow, territorial-based affiliations in favor of an allegiance to all of humanity. Such an expansive conception of world citizenship has as its normative ideal the pursuit of the “perfect civil union of mankind.”³

Detractors of liberal cosmopolitanism highlight the specter of global capital, seen as the necessary precondition for the emergence of contemporary cosmopolitan sensibility. They argue that cosmopolitanism leaves intact the privileges of the global elite by erasing the continuities between cosmopolitanism, neocolonialism, and economic globalization. Postcolonial feminists, in particular, locate the shortcomings of transnational alliances by unpacking how they can be mobilized in service to predatory global capitalism and imperialism. My essay seeks to address some of these concerns. After a brief genealogy of the idea of cosmopolitanism, I investigate how claims of transnational solidarity and planetary conviviality enable access to the globe and its resources. Furthermore, I will argue that without the integration of subaltern groups into hegemonic structures, emancipatory politics will continue to reproduce feudal relations despite contrary intentions. I will draw on the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Gayatri Spivak to examine the tenuous relation between the subaltern and the intellectual and simultaneously address the ambivalent negotiation of the post-colony with the legacies of European Enlightenment. I will explore how the discontinuity between the dispensers of justice and rights and those coded as receivers can be undone through a remapping of subject formation through what Spivak calls “epistemic change” at both ends of transnationality.

One World, One Pain?

The notion of cosmopolitanism was first advanced by the founding father of the Cynic school of ancient Greek philosophy, Diogenes of Sinope, who, when asked where he came from, answered: “I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês].” This is a groundbreaking moment in intellectual history, since until then issues of political consciousness were limited to the individual city-state. The Stoic thinker Hierocles later developed a circle model of...