הממשות של הקוסמופוליטיות
The Reality of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

תקציר בעברית: בהקדמה זו לתרגום לעברית של ספרו של אולריך בק אני סוקר ומעריך באופן ביקורתי את התיאוריה הקוסמופוליטית של בק.

English Abstract: Beck's wonderful book is among the first to deal directly with the concept of cosmopolitanism in Hebrew. Liberal thinkers and international law theoreticians started to advance this idea in order to describe the direction in which the post-Second World War world order should progress. After the fall of the Berlin wall, this line of thought became even stronger. In the view of these thinkers, the appearance of one, transnational human community is an almost unavoidable logical deduction and philosophical unfolding of liberal humanism, which views the rights-bearing individual as the core and purpose of all moral values. Communities, including national ones, should take second priority (if at all), and withdraw when faced with the moral imperative to advance the dignity and equal liberty of each and every human individual. International law should reflect this understanding and abolish the preferential and unequal treatment that is the byproduct—or even the goal—of the national order and of the political theory of nationalism.

Cosmopolitan liberals disagree among themselves on the theoretical and concrete consequences of cosmopolitanism: what moral obligations stem from such global humanistic commitment? Should international legal norms be rigid or flexible, in order to leave some room for existing cultures to express their competing views about what humanity is and what should it become? And what political institutions should exist in order to advance and protect this ideal? Thus, some support a world federation which, while committed to cosmopolitanism, would still protect some degree of community difference and particularity, others try to advance a unitary world government.

Cosmopolitanism has attracted critiques from left, right and center. Communitarians—liberal (Schmitt) and non-liberals (Kymlicka and Walzer) alike—have argued that it ignores the importance of communities and of collective identities in the life of individuals. Conservatives have decried cosmopolitanism as "parasitical" to urban lifestyle. Critics from the left also debunked it as the new imperialism, western ethnocentrism falsely masking itself as universal humanism.

Beck rejects the regular meanings of cosmopolitanism, thus separating it from other concepts such as universalism, globalism, trans-nationalism, and internationalism. For him, and this is his unique contribution to the debate, cosmopolitanism is an ideal and a reality of universalism that maintains a particularistic dimension, of globality that includes nationalism, and of trans-nationalism which does not exclude a plurality of ethnicities and of cultures. Hence the two immense contributions that Beck makes are as follows. First, the sociological shift: the question one needs to ask is "what is cosmopolitanism?" rather than "what cosmopolitanism should be?" Second, is the substantive shift he makes: cosmopolitanism, he claims, is not the universal antithesis of the various particulars (nationalism, localism, culturalism, etc.), but is rather the synthesis of previous theories. It is the overcoming of the dialectics between universalism and particularism, between internationalism and nationalism, between globalization and localization

In this Preface to the Hebrew edition of Beck’s writing on cosmopolitanism, I critically review and assess the immense contribution of Beck to the sociological study of globalization and of the emergence of cosmopolitan identity.

Note: Downloadable document is in Hebrew.

Keywords: קוסמופוליטיות, תיאוריה ביקורתית, גלובליזציה, ערים גלובליות