WT17 – Nationalism and cosmopolitanism

Workshop presentation

Our societies were essentially formed during an already ancient era, when economic and social life was organised within limited communities that gradually extended to the scale of States and empires. Because of this, a clear distinction was established, from the level of the family or clan to that of the State and then planet, based on a series of distinctions between what was a matter for the domestic space and what was a matter for relations with the other communities. It’s upon these bases that national identities were generally created and asserted. These latter were supposed to based on a common culture, a history and a shared destiny, a community of interest and sometimes a common ethnic origin faced with a foreign world defined by identities of the same nature.

These international exchanges have existed for thousands of years, and if the idea of unity in human nature inspires most of the great philosophies and if, finally, among the elites of each country there often developed a practice of the « other », which gave rise to a certain cosmopolitanism – in its literal meaning the awareness of forming only one single humanity – it remains that for the majority of peoples what is of a domestic order and what is of the order of relations with the outsider were clearly distinct. The previous waves of globalisation and the development of imperialisms – this English empire of Queen Victoria upon which the sun never set – has given rise to a considerable intermixing of ideas, cultures and peoples. Yet this did not remove or even weaken national sentiment, to the point that the 19th-century period above all others of Western expansionism, is also that in which nationalism was the most strongly established as a political doctrine.

Where do we stand today? The new wave of globalisation, inaugurated at the end of the 1970s and combined with the development of global systems of information and communication and the awareness of the fragile nature of the biosphere and of the common destiny of our different societies, is in the process of building a radically new situation and imagination. But the movement observed is nevertheless not that of old nationalisms being taken over by a victorious cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, the globalisation of the economy and the globalisation of relations is leading to a generalised and deep feeling of threats to identities. They are nursing giddiness and anxiety, all the more so because the economic and social gains and losses stemming from globalisation are not shared equally in the different sectors of society.

The contradictions within each society, especially due to the rapidity of transformations are significant, and it’s now appealing for all political powers to go look for the responsibility among others and to rebuild cohesion through extolling national identity, pride and nationalism.

The construction of the European Union itself has represented a unique process in history of overcoming nationalisms. But the rapid enlargement of the Union to 27 members and the national political elites’ fear of losing their autonomy, which led them in the 1990s to give priority in the European Union to inter-state negotiation over that of building a supranational group, is today giving rise to a renewal of nationalisms. In the eyes of Europe, China is about to become the very symbol of what is threatening about globalisation for its future. In China, the economic successes are creating new giddiness of power, and the West is suspected of wanting to block its development today. Alongside an expanding cosmopolitanism and in some ways as a counterweight to this cosmopolitanism, nationalisms are waking up and asserting themselves. How can Europe and China work together to exorcise these new dangers.