Introduction
In the first part of this post (Reflections on multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and globalisation- Part 1) I introduced the Guardian story about the global musical hit Pasoori, a song by a Pakistani singer Ali Sethi which became a hit first in Pakistan, soon after in India too, and then a global hit with more than 111 million views of its YouTube video as a vehicle for developing some ideas about multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and globalisation. The song was composed and orchestrated using diverse cultural elements and was designed to illustrate the common cultural roots of two national cultures, those of India and Pakistan, nowadays confronting each other as enemies. Its huge success in both countries and globally was said to be helping to undermine the animosity between the countries.
In Part 1 I focused attention on and critiqued the concept of multiculturalism. I concluded that the concept couldn’t be used as a means of understanding the Pasoori phenomenon. My critique of multiculturalism can possibly best summarised by a quotation from a by a Guardian commentator, Kenan Malik. On 17 March 2010, in an article entitled ‘Multiculturalism undermines diversity’ which I reproduced in Part 1. Malik wrote
As a political policy, multiculturalism’s desire to put people in boxes has left many minorities feeling misrepresented – The experience of living in a society transformed by mass immigration, a society that is less insular, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan, is positive. As a political process, however, multiculturalism means something very different. It describes a set of policies, the aim of which is to manage diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes, defining individual needs and rights by virtue of the boxes into which people are put, and using those boxes to shape public policy. It is a case, not for open borders and minds, but for the policing of borders, whether physical, cultural or imaginative.
I then asked the question as to whether cosmopolitanism was a better concept to use in understanding the process of creation and success of Pasoori and what role globalisation plays in it. This is the main purpose of this part of the post.
Cosmopolitanism
The above quotation from Malik is a good starting point from which to address the concept of cosmopolitanism. Malik is grasping for a form of expression which celebrates the positive and creative process of the intermixing of cultures which isn’t captured by the term “multiculturalism” when he says that ‘(t)he experience of living in a society transformed by mass immigration, a society that is less insular, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan, is positive”.
To fight the appeal of the discourse of the far-right in the ‘culture wars’, it is necessary to move beyond the defence of the term ‘multiculturalism’ which the right attacks and which I have argued is deeply flawed, and to find a positive way of celebrating the progressive cultural effect the mixing of cultures. Implied in Malik’s sentence is a celebration of the cultural effects of mass migration as a fundamental contribution to the dynamism of societies and their progress. This is a far more inspiring and mobilising approach than the economic argument normally deployed that immigrants are essential to keep the economy functioning. The latter argument, mainly directed at consumers, tends to sound dubious to the native workforce whose real wages are falling when the economy is said to be in need of additional labour.
So, the question that arises is whether cosmopolitanism, a word used by Malik in the form of an adjective, is a term that might fit the bill. I sought to find out.
Wikipedia defines cosmopolitanism thus:
“Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are members of a single community. Its adherents are known as cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. Cosmopolitanism is both prescriptive and aspirational, believing humans can and should be “world citizens” in a “universal community”.[1] The idea encompasses different dimensions and avenues of community, such as promoting universal moral standards, establishing global political structures, or developing a platform for mutual cultural expression and tolerance.”
Cosmopolitanism is also the focus of the interview with Stuart Hall to which I referred in my previous post. In it, Hall argues that cosmopolitanism only makes real sense if associated with the concept of a global society where everyone is connected to everyone else, and the notion of universal citizenship as opposed to national citizenship becomes possible. This is consistent with the Wikipedia definition.
However, Hall also argues that whilst globalisation has created the conditions that make such a vision a possible future reality, it has simultaneously developed contradictions which strengthen the importance of particularism such as nationalisms, religious identities and promoted the possibility of a “war of all against all”. This latter statement seems to describe reasonably well current events worldwide.
Hall also develops the idea that globalisation can be viewed as being created in two very different ways. The first is what he calls “globalisation from above”. To clarify what he means by this he refers to the global entrepreneur who travels the world from airport to airport all of which are very similar, staying in hotels which are also all very much alike perhaps enjoying and sampling a variety of different cuisines, but with no real roots anywhere. The second he calls “globalisation from below”. By this he means the kind of social transformation caused by the forced migration of large numbers of people due to economic circumstances and war. “Globalisation from below” creates multicultural communities and people whose identities have complex geographical and cultural roots. Hall refers to himself and his own complex relationship to British national identity as an example. This resonates very much with my own experience.
Further delving into the literature on cosmopolitanism has confirmed the interpretation of the term presented by Hall and by the Wikipedia definition above. It is very much associated with the concept of the universal human being, the citizen of the world. It can be understood as the elevation of one of the foundation texts of liberalism, Tom Paine’s hymn to the rights of the individual to the global level. This is the idea of universal human rights, amongst which are the rights to private property, as the fundamental ethical principle which is upheld by much of liberal opinion and the founding ideology of the United Nations. It is an inspirational myth used to sell the Olympic games to the population of the world, the vision of a world united in awe for the achievements of individuals 1 . Its positive connotations are also what attracts Coca Cola to associate itself with Pasoori and what attracts the Guardian to promote the story in its pages. Insofar as Pasoori is a cultural artefact that doesn’t challenge the global economic power structure, it can be celebrated by Coca Cola.
Globalisation
The way Stuart Hall introduces of the abstract term “globalisation” into his discussion seems to take for granted that the meaning the word is clear, even though he suggests that, like multiculturalism, it is open to many interpretations2.
However, what that use of the term obscures is the fact that most of the phenomena described as contributing to an understanding of its meaning are in fact the results of the operation of the capitalist economy at the global level. Both Hall’s “globalisation from above” and “globalisation from below” largely originate here. Even to analyse the Pasoori story, that’s where we need to start.
Marx and Engels prefigured globalisation in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. It is well worth reproducing an extended quote from it here as it so clearly reflects today’s world:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Whatever limitations Marx’s thinking has, the fundamental insight that the dynamic of the capitalist economy is determined by the relation between capital and labour and by the capitalist’s need to create profit out of the labour of others remains true today.
Hall’s global entrepreneur is no more than the global ambassador of the bourgeois capitalist depicted in the quote. Whilst “globalisation from below” doesn’t appear explicitly in the quote, its roots are the same. The system of slavery in the Americas is perhaps its first example, the product of the early imperial expansion of capital. We are still living with its consequences today, not least in the United States. Many of the fault lines in the “culture wars” originate there. Black Lives Matter can be viewed as a modern echo the slave’s revolt, part of the revolt of a new working class created by “globalisation from below”.
Globalisation, cosmopolitanism, and liberal ideology
In the above quote from the Communist Manifesto, the statement ‘(t)he bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ suggests that it is the dynamic of capitalism as an economic system that develops cosmopolitanism.
I have also argued that the celebration of cosmopolitanism associated with the concept of the universal citizen who should benefit from universal human rights is a product of the liberal ideology of the Enlightenment which became the dominant ideology under capitalism. It prioritises the individual and enshrines the right to private property.
Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:
- Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
- No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
This is supposed to apply equally to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the increasing number of homeless and propertyless people throughout the world as all citizens are equal before the law. Even though wealth and property concentration are rapidly increasing, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the property of billionaires and oligarchs from being redistributed or socialised.
Marx criticised the liberal notion of democracy that is based on the rights of the individual and which defends private property as part of these rights thus:
The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it…
None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.
It is the absorption of this ideology which makes us see the private car as preferable to public transport and the private house preferable to public housing. The first has made a major contribution to the global climate crisis. The second has turned the need for shelter into a commodity to be traded and from which profit can be derived. This has contributed greatly to the development of the current housing crisis and the rise in homelessness. Boris Johnson is now trying to save himself by returning to the Thatcherite stratagem of the private sale of social housing at greatly discounted rates. Attempts to brainwash us into believing that private medicine is preferable to a national health service are ubiquitous in the media. This is fortunately still a long way from being achieved in the UK.
These appeal to the instincts of Marx’s egoistic individual at a great cost to society. In the same article, Marx points out that “(e)goistic man is the passive result of the dissolved society”. He counterposes the need to develop the social human being for whom freedom and fulfilment are based on the contribution made to society, not on selfish self-interest. He calls this species-being.
Cosmopolitanism is therefore an ideology linked to the promotion of the idea of a world citizenship, in contrast to narrow notions of the national citizen. But the citizen of the world is viewed only as a private individual. The ideology obscures the fundamental division that exists in capitalist society between the interests of capital and those of labour, insofar as capitalists and workers are considered equal citizens despite the fundamental differences in their social and economic positions and power.
As Marx and Engels indicate in the extract from the Communist Manifesto reproduced above, it is a progressive ideology when compared with reactionary ideologies such as those being promoted by the forces of the right in the “culture wars”. But it is also misleading because it removes from view the reality of economic exploitation within the nation and imperialism as a system dictating the relations between nations. According to cosmopolitan ideology, all citizens are assumed equal and all nations equally sovereign.
Conclusion
The idea that cultural products such as Pasoori can help unite divided and warring peoples by demonstrating their common humanity is appealing. This is an expression of the ideology of cosmopolitanism. It is deployed in defence of liberal humanism against attacks from the ideologies of chauvinism and narrow nationalism that stoke conflicts such as that between India and Pakistan. An appeal to cosmopolitan values as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be used to counter the promotion of British values as superior to foreign ones and the demand that foreigners need to adopt “British values” to be accepted as British.
Yet, it is also misleading insofar as it obscures the reality that in existing global capitalist society individuals are far from equal for structural reasons. The social position, power and economic interests of those that live by profiting from the labour of others is fundamentally different from that of those that live primarily from the sale of their labour. The liberal idea of the sovereign individual as citizen of the nation translates at the global level to that of the commonwealth of sovereign nations expressed in the United Nations. This, in turn, obscures the fact that nations aren’t born equal, and that imperialism exists. Tom Nairn, a prominent Marxist theoretician of nationalism, even argues in The Modern Janus that modern nations are largely the product of imperialism.
Pasoori appears to be an expression of liberal cosmopolitanism, preferable to the ideology espoused by Modi and by Islamic fundamentalists but ultimately flawed as solution for the global crisis that we face. That Coca Cola, a product of the process by which ‘(a)ll old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed’, feels able to promote the product is an indication that it isn’t posing any challenge to the system creating the chaos that is leading humanity to the brink of extinction, either by climate breakdown or nuclear holocaust.
To prevent the victims of the system trying to save themselves through a war of all against all, our main hope lies in what Stuart Hall has called “globalisation from below” creating a working class aware of its common interests, fighting together to put an end to the global system and regarding the intermixing of cultures as a source for social progress. Thus, perhaps what we need isn’t so much to celebrate the development of cosmopolitanism, but that of a working class cosmopolitanism associated with “globalisation from below” which acknowledges and appeals to the collective interests of the victims.
This will no doubt appear a very unrealistic suggestion, but I would argue that it is no more unrealistic than the illusion that the solution to our global crisis will be achieved through strengthening the national state or by electing slightly more progressive national governments increasingly powerless to affect the global dynamics of capitalism. Strengthening belief in national solutions will only pander to the rising influence of the reactionary ideology fuelling the ‘war of all against all”.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
10 June 2022
I have developed this idea in my article The Economic Power of the Olympic Brand and the Legacy of London 2012 ↩
Because of this the terms could be viewed as what cultural theorists call “empty or floating signifiers” ↩