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DOI: 10.1177/02632764070240072505
2007 24: 286 Theory Culture Society
Ulrich Beck
The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails

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286 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)
A
t the beginning of the 21st century, we are
witnessing a global transformation of
modernity, which calls for a re-thinking of
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences. The newly
awakened interest in cosmopolitanism is fed by
various sources: globalization research, mobility
and migration research, international relations,
international law, postcolonial studies, post-
feminism, global cultural studies, geography,
ethnography, actor-network and science and tech-
nology studies, the debates on new wars and
human rights as well as mass media communi-
cation science, to mention only the most import-
ant. In sociology, at present, these analyses are
condensing into the paradigm of a Cosmopolitan
Sociology (Beck, 2006; Beck and Sznaider, 2006).
At its centre there is, on the one hand, the search
for new research methods and strategies and, on
the other, the question as to new forms of dealing
with otherness in society in an increasingly global-
ized world. Dealing with otherness includes the
otherness of nature and the materiality of threats
which is not the focus of this article, but an essen-
tial part of the programme of cosmopolitan soci-
ology (Latour, 2003).
Both tendencies can be clearly distinguished
from the philosophical-normative cosmopolitan-
ism dominant until now, whose authors (e.g.
Jrgen Habermas [2001] and David Held [1995])
read Kants world citizenship sociologically.
Cosmopolitanism is, of course, a contested term;
there is no uniform interpretation in the growing
literature. The boundaries separating it from
competing terms like globalization, transnational-
ism, universalism, glocalization, etc. are not
distinct; but there is an identifiable intellectual
movement working on New Cosmopolitanism
or Realistic Cosmopolitanism united by at least
three interconnected commitments: (1) a shared
critique of methodological nationalism; (2) the
shared diagnosis that the 21st century is an age of
cosmopolitanism; and (3) the shared assumption
that for this reason we need some kind of
methodological cosmopolitanism.
First, a shared critique of methodological
nationalism, which subsumes society under the
nation-state. There are two dimensions of this: a
historical and a systematic understanding of
methodological nationalism.
It is evident that, in the 19th century,
European sociology was formulated within a
nationalist paradigm and that any cosmopolitan
sentiments were snuffed out by the horrors of the
Great Wars. Responding to the ghost of Marx, it
was class and in particular the rise of the working
class, which was seen as the great social problem
and the solidarity of the nation-state was seen as
the solution. In the methodological nationalism of
Emile Durkheim, fraternity became solidarity and
national integration.
Max Webers sociology involved a comparative
study of economic ethics of world religions, but
the political inspiration for his sociology was
nationalistic. Indeed, in the Freiburg Inaugural
Lecture, Weber employed a Darwinistic view of
international relations in which he observed that
future generations would hold his generation
responsible for not creating sufficient elbow
room in East Germany to support a strong
German state.
In North America, the same national paradigm
is evident. Of course, Talcott Parsons adopted a
comparative sociological approach and was a
student of European social thought, but his socio-
logical interest and approach was American. In his
The System of Modern Societies (1971: 1), Parsons
starts with the admission that the thesis that
informs his work
is that the modern type of society has emerged
in a single evolutionary area, the West, which
is a century of Europe that fell heir to the
Western part of the Roman Empire north of
the Mediterranean. The society of western
Christendom, then, provided the base for
which we shall call the system of modern
societies took of .
Most classical sociology today is the study of the
national society under the umbrella of society.
We should not forget that classical sociology was
the product of national struggles, the Franco
German War of 1870 and the First World War at
the beginning of the 20th century.
Keywords cosmopolitanism, individualization,
methodological nationalism, modernity, risks
The Cosmopolitan Condition
Why Methodological Nationalism Fails
Ulrich Beck
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Commentaries 287
Systematically, methodological nationalism
takes the following ideal premises for granted: it
equates society with nation-state societies, and
sees states and their governments as the corner-
stones of a social sciences analysis. It assumes that
humanity is naturally divided into a limited
number of nations, which on the inside, organize
themselves as nation-states, and on the outside, set
boundaries to distinguish themselves from other
nation-states. It goes even further: this outer
delimitation, as well as the competition between
nation-states, presents the most fundamental
category of political organization. Indeed, the
social science stance is rooted in the concept of the
nation-state. It is a nation-state outlook on society
and politics, law, justice and history, that governs
the sociological imagination. And it is exactly this
methodological nationalism that prevents the
social science from getting at the heart of the
dynamics of modernization and globalization, both
past and present: the unintended result of the radi-
calization of modernity is a disempowerment of
Western states, in sharp contrast to their
empowerment before and during the 19th-century
wave of globalization (Beck, 2005).
Second, the shared diagnosis that the 21st
century is becoming an age of cosmopolitanism. In
the 1960s, Hannah Arendt (1958) analysed the
Human Condition, in the 1970s, Jean-Franois
Lyotard (1984) the Postmodern Condition; now at
the beginning of the 21st century we have to
discover, map and understand the Cosmopolitan
Condition.
Third, there is a shared assumption that for
that reason we need some kind of methodological
cosmopolitanism. Of course, there is a lot of
controversy about what this means. We can distin-
guish three phases in how the code word globaliz-
ation has been used in the social sciences: first,
denial; second, conceptual refinement and empiri-
cal research; and, third, epistemological shift.
To the extent that the second phase was
successful, the insight began to gain ground that
the nation-state unit of research has become arbi-
trary when the distinctions between national and
international, local and global, us and them, lose
their sharp contours. The question for the research
agenda following the epistemological turn is: what
happens when the premises and boundaries that
define the units of empirical research and theory
disintegrate? The answer is that the whole concep-
tual world of the national outlook becomes disen-
chanted, stripped of its necessity. We need an
alternative which replaces ontology with method-
ology: what are alternative, non-national units of
research? What are post-national concepts of the
social and the political? How can we invent a
methodology of cosmopolitan understanding in
order to decode the multi-ethnic, multi-religious
conflicts insight of France, of Germany, and on a
global scale? How does cosmopolitanism relate to
universalism, relativism, nationalism, etc.? In other
words, the sociology for the 21st century has to be
reinvented.
As prisoners of methodological nationalism we
do not understand Europeanization, we do not
understand the new global meta-power game. We
do not understand that the nation-state legitimacy
of social inequalities is being challenged to its core
by universalized human rights, we do not under-
stand the global generation and its transnational
fragments, and so on. This is because we are
captured by zombie categories, sociology is threat-
ening to become a zombie science, a museum piece
of antiquated ideas.
The Cosmopolitan Condition
The Cosmopolitan Condition can be explained, for
example, in relation to global risks. The experience
of global risks Chernobyl, 9/11, BSE or the mass
media, the experience of the Asian tsunami which
induced a planetary torrent of sorrow is an occur-
rence of abrupt and full confrontation of the
apparently excluded other. Global risks tear down
national boundaries and jumble together the native
with the foreign. The distant other is becoming the
inclusive other. Everyday life is becoming cosmo-
politan. Human beings must find a meaning of life
in the exchange with others and no longer in the
encounter with the like. This is what I call
enforced cosmopolitanization: global risks
activate and connect actors across borders, who
otherwise dont want to have anything to do with
one another.
I propose, in this sense, that a clear distinction
is to be made between the philosophical and
normative ideas of cosmopolitanism, on the one
hand, and the impure actual enforced cosmopoliti-
zation, on the other. The crucial point about this
distinction is that cosmopolitanism cannot, for
example, only become real deductively in a trans-
lation of the sublime principles of philosophy, but
also and above all through the back door of global
risks, unseen, unintended, enforced. Down
through history, cosmopolitanism was detained of
being elitist, idealistic, imperialistic, capitalist;
today, however, we see that reality itself has
become cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism, then,
does not mean as it did for Immanuel Kant an
asset, a task, that is to order the world. Cosmopoli-
tanization in world risk society opens our eyes to
the uncontrollable liabilities that something might
happen to us, might befall us and, which at the
same time could stimulate us, to make borders
transcend new beginnings. Risks cut through the
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288 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)
self-absorption of cultures, languages, religions and
systems as well as the national and international
agenda of politics; they overturn their priorities
and create contexts for action between camps,
parties and quarrelling nations, which ignore and
oppose one another.
What is meant by that can be explained with
reference to Hannah Arendt. The existential shock
of danger therein lies the fundamental ambiv-
alence of global risks opens up unintentionally
(and often also unseen and underutilized) the
(mis)fortune of a possible new beginning (which is
no reason for false sentimentality). How to live in
the shadow of global risks? How to live, when old
certainties are shattered or are now revealed as
lies? Arendts answer anticipates the ambivalence
of risk. The expectation of the unexpected
requires that the self-evident is no longer taken as
self-evident. The shock of danger is a call for a new
beginning. Where there is a new beginning, action
is possible. Human beings enter into relations
across borders. This common activity by strangers
across borders means freedom. All freedom is
contained in this ability to begin.
Is There a Historic Alternative of Political
Action?
It is precisely this question that I have tried to
answer in my book Power in the Global Age (Beck,
2005). Here I can outline only two premises: (1)
world risk society brings a new, historic key logic
to the fore: No nation can cope with its problems
alone. (2) A realistic political alternative in the
global age is possible, which counteracts the loss
to globalized capital of the commanding power of
state politics. The condition is, that globalization
must be decoded not as economic fate, but as a
strategic game for world power.
(1) The nation-state, which attempts to deal
with global risks in isolation, resembles a drunk
man, who on a dark night is trying to find his lost
wallet in the cone of light from a street lamp. To
the question: Did you actually lose your wallet
here?, he replies, No, but in the light of the street
lamp I can at least look for it. In other words,
global risks are producing failed states even in
the West (latest example: the Iraq war). The state
structure evolving under the conditions of world
risk society could be characterized in terms of both
inefficiency and post-democratic authority. A clear
distinction, therefore, has to be made between
rule and inefficiency. It is quite possible that the
end result could be the gloomy perspective, that
we have totally ineffective and authoritarian state
regimes (even in the context of the Western
democracies).
(2) But this is normal sociology. There is a
nostalgia and kulturkritischer Pessimismus built
into the foundations of sociological thought which
has never disappeared starting with Max Weber
and today including Foucault, system theory and
postmodernism. Perhaps this nostalgia can be
overcome by the theory of world risk society. My
aim is a non-nostalgic New Critical Theory to look
at both the past and the future of modernity. The
word for this is neither utopianism nor
pessimism but ambivalence. Yes, there is a
historic alternative of political action. The new
global domestic politics that is already at work
here and now, beyond the nationalinternational
distinction, has become a meta-power game,
whose outcome is completely open-ended. It is a
game in which boundaries, basic rules and basic
distinctions are renegotiated not only those
between the national and the international
spheres, but also those between global business
and the state, transnational civil society move-
ments, supra-national organizations and national
governments and societies. No single player or
opponent can ever win on their own; they all are
dependent on alliances. This is the way, then, in
which the hazy power game of global domestic
politics opens up its own immanent alternatives
and oppositions.
The first one, which is dominant today, gives
the priority of power to global capital. The goal of
the strategies of capital is, in simplified terms, to
merge capital with the state in order to open up
new sources of legitimacy in the form of the neo-
liberal state. Its orthodoxy says: There is only one
revolutionary power, which rewrites the rules of
the global power order, and that is capital, while
the other actors nation-states and civil society
movements remain bound by the limited options
of action and power of the national and inter-
national order. This dominant coalition of capital
and national minimal state is in no position to
respond to the challenges of world risk society.
The strategies of action, which global risks
open up, overthrow the order of power that has
formed in the neo-liberal capital-state coalition:
global risks empower states and civil society move-
ments, because they reveal new sources of legiti-
mation and options for action for these groups of
actors; they disempower globalized capital, on the
other hand, because the consequences of invest-
ment decisions contribute to creating global risks,
destabilizing markets and activating the power of
that sleeping giant, the consumer. Conversely, the
goal of global civil society and its actors is to
achieve a connection between civil society and the
state, that is, to bring about what I call a cosmo-
politan form of statehood (including a cosmopolitan
form of democracy).
This is not wishful thinking, on the contrary, it
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Commentaries 289
is an expression of a cosmopolitan realpolitik. In an
age of global crises and risks, a politics of golden
handcuffs the creation of a dense network of
transnational interdependencies is exactly what
is needed in order to regain national autonomy, not
least in relation to a highly mobile world economy.
The maxims of nation-based realpolitik that
national interests must necessarily be pursued by
national means must be replaced by the maxims
of cosmopolitan realpolitik: the more cosmopolitan
our political structures and activities, the more
successful they will be in promoting national inter-
ests and the greater our individual power in this
global age will be. The historic examples of
globally empowered individuals are transnational
actor-networks and movements, including terror-
ist networks.
Global risks are the expression of a new form
of global interdependence, which cannot be
adequately addressed by way of national politics,
nor by the available forms of international co-oper-
ation. All the past and present practical experi-
ences of human beings in dealing with uncertainty
now exist side by side, without offering any ready
solution to the resulting problems. Not only that:
key institutions of modernity such as science,
business and politics, which are supposed to
guarantee rationality and security, find themselves
confronted by situations in which their apparatus
no longer has purchase and the fundamental prin-
ciples of modernity no longer automatically hold
good. Indeed, the perception of their rating
changes from trustee to suspect. They are no
longer seen only as instruments of risk manage-
ment, but also as a source of risk.
Tragic Individualization
As a consequence, everyday life in world risk
society is characterized by a new variant of indi-
vidualization. The individual must cope with the
uncertainty of the global world by him- or herself.
Here individualization is the default outcome of a
failure of expert systems to manage risks. Neither
science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass
media, nor business, nor the law or even the
military are in a position to define or control risks
rationally. The individual is forced to mistrust the
promises of rationality of these key institutions. As
a consequence, people are thrown back onto them-
selves, they are alienated from expert systems but
have nothing else instead. Disembedding without
embedding this is the formula for this dimension
of individualization: the individual, whose senses
fail him in the face of ungraspable threats, who,
thrown back on himself, is blind to dangers,
remains at the same time unable to escape the
power of definition of expert systems, whose
judgement he cannot, yet must, trust. Sustaining
an individual self of integrity in world risk society
is indeed a tragic affair.
Of course, there are fundamental ambiva-
lences. I am talking here about only one large
transnational fraction of everyday life in world risk
society. At the same time we observe the rise of
(what might be called) the individualization of
war: the transnational super-empowerment of the
individual vis--vis the super-state power But that
is a different story.
Consequences for Sociological Theory and
Research
How does this relate to the basic conceptual ideas
of international sociology which have appeared
since the 1970s, such as world system theory
(Wallerstein, 2004) and world polity (Drori et
al., 2006)? Immanuel Wallersteins world system
theory is still captured by an enlarged methodo-
logical nationalism, because it presupposes the
nationalinternational dualism as does John
Meyers concept of world polity. Even though
both concepts are powerful in producing
extremely interesting empirical interpretations,
they both ignore the historical fact that the
distinction, which underpins their view of the
world, namely, that between national and inter-
national spheres, is now dissolving. Nonetheless, it
was this duality that helped to shape the world of
the first modernity, including the key concepts
(and theories) of society, state, sovereignty, legiti-
macy, class, solidarity, generation, and so on.
We then have to ask: How might we concep-
tualize a world in a set of global dynamics in which
the problematic consequences of radicalized
modernization effectually eliminate cornerstones
and logics of action certain historically produced
fundamental distinctions and basic institutions of
its nation-state order? Thus my theory of reflex-
ive or second modernity is about the unintended
consequences and challenges of the success of
modernity. It is about more modernity and the
crises it produces, but not about post-modernity.
How does this renewed cosmopolitan curiosity
and sociological imagination relate to the post-
Second World War period of sociological thinking?
In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School and the
Critical Theory dominated the intellectual move-
ments. In the 1980s, this role was assumed by the
French post-modernists; and now a cosmopolitan
mixture in global sociology could give birth to a
cosmopolitan vision for the humanities. This
opens up the horizon for a new Cosmopolitan
Critical Theory which investigates the social and
political grammar of the Cosmopolitan Condition
and therefore has a strong standing against the
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290 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)
T
he construction of social memory and the
preservation of cultural heritage are closely
related practices concerning the reproduc-
tion of social life. Both create affective and cogni-
tive landmarks, providing shared references to
historical change and continuity. However, one
major difference between them lies in the fact that
while the former mainly concerns social agencies
and actors belonging to specific social milieux, the
latter is a specialized activity that necessarily
involves professionals, experts, governmental
agencies, regional and multilateral organizations
and NGOs whose institutional cultures, political
commitments and economic priorities may differ
from and sometimes are in conflict with local
social realities. The nature and complexity of the
gap between such inner and outer cultural, politi-
cal and economic domains tend to vary widely and
become particularly complex depending on the
values attached to cultural diversity in the social
environments concerned. This is often the case
when officially protected heritage is built on the
basis of popular and indigenous cultural practices.
So, a crucial question is whether such landmarks
are recognized beyond the limits of the cultural
history of specific social groups, which values are
attributed to them beyond their more immediate
symbolic boundaries and whether they effectively
participate in the processes of social identification
that underlies the formation of hegemonies and of
national cultures.
The global turn of cultural production gave
new significance to objects and ideas that convey
senses of localization and/or cultural singularity,
raising public interest and institutional concern
with inventorying and protecting cultural diversity.
The implications of this shift not only concern the
so-called creative industries, as this issue was the
Keywords cultural heritage, global public
sphere, local knowledge, social and economic
development
Diversity, Heritage and Cultural Politics
Antonio A. Arantes
retrogressive idealism of the national perspective
in politics, research and theory.
References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beck, U. (2005) Power in the Global Age.
London: Polity Press.
Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, U. (2007) Beyond Class and Nation:
Reframing Social Inequalities in a Globalized
World, British Journal of Sociology 58(4):
680705.
Beck, U. and N. Sznaider (2006) Unpacking
Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A
Research Agenda, British Journal of Sociology,
Special Issue 57(1).
Drori, G.S., J. Meyer and H. Hwang (eds) (2006)
Globalization and Organization: World
Society and Organizational Change. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. (2001) The Postnational
Constellation, trans. and ed. M. Pensky.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global
Order: From the Modern State to
Cosmopolitan Governance. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Latour, B. (2003) Is Remodernization Occurring?
And if So, How to Prove it? A Commentary
on Ulrich Beck, Theory, Culture & Society
20(2): 3548.
Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition.
Manchester: Manchester University Press
(original edn 1979).
Parsons, T. (1971) The Systems of Modern
Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Wallerstein, I. (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the
University of Munich, and the British Journal of
Sociology Visiting Centennial Professor at the
London School of Economics and Sciences. Ulrich
Beck is the co-editor of Soziale Welt and editor of
Zweite Moderne at Suhrkamp (Frankfurt a. M.).
His research interests focus on risk society, globaliz-
ation, individualization, reflexive modernization
and cosmopolitanism. He is the founding director
of a research centre at the University of Munich
Reflexive Modernization financed since 1999 by
the DFG (German Research Society).
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