Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk

Abstract

Modern societies—Western and non-Western alike—are confronted with qualitatively new problems, which create the “cosmopolitan imperative”: cooperate or fail! This cosmopolitan imperative arises because of global risks: nuclear risks, ecological risks, technological risks, economic risks created by radicalized modernity and insufficiently regulated financial markets, and so on. These new global risks have at least two consequences: First, they mix the “native” with the “foreign” and create an everyday global awareness, and second therefore, the concept of imagined communities, so beautifully outlined by Benedict Anderson, has to be redefined. However, the result of global interconnectedness is not a “pure” normative cosmopolitanism of a world without borders. Instead, these risks produce a new “impure” cosmopolitization—the global other is in our midst. What emerges is the universal possibility of “risk communities” that spring up, establish themselves, and become aware of their cosmopolitan composition—“imagined cosmopolitan communities” that might come into existence in the awareness that dangers or risks can no longer be socially delimited in space or time.