. Cosmopolitanization – a multidimensional process of global and local change
Educational institutions are frequently assigned tasks to prepare pupils for flexible labour
and entrepreneurship in knowledge-based economies (Hargreaves, 2003). The
European Commission’s (2002) vision for a united Europe involves us becoming the
most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world. A market oriented concept of
lifelong learning closely connected to key competencies involved in such learning can be
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seen as core values aiming at shaping national education in the European member states.
Our children are supposed to grow into a competitive marketplace, and schools should
aim at their attaining the required knowledge and competencies. The concept of lifelong
learning and its accompanying competencies can be seen as examples of globalization in
and marketization of education. However, I think it is somewhat misleading to make
such one-sided economic interpretations of education.
The world our children are growing into and changed conditions for education can also
be understood in terms of a process of cosmopolitanization. The sociological concept of
cosmopolitanization captures not only globalization in its economic aspects under economic
descriptions; rather, it captures changes in society and education in multidimensional
terms including cultural, social, political and moral aspects relevant for
education (Beck, 2006, 2009). Cosmopolitanization can be understood as a multidimensional
process that changes nation states from within, and as a result our social reality are
becoming cosmopolitan in its structure. Local, national, ethnic and global cultures and
phenomena interconnect and interpenetrate, and it is difficult to draw boundaries between
these categories when they are constantly re-negotiated and blurred in a world
wide web of meaning (Beck, 2006, 2009). For educational institutions, traditionally
serving as a vehicle for shifting people’s loyalties from their local communities to a
nation as the centre of gravity for self-identification, cultural belongingness, social integration
and moral obligation, cosmopolitanization constitutes a challenge.
(1) Culturally, the formation of national cultures and identities can be seen as attempts to
represent diverse societies as belonging to one great national family (Hall, 2004, p. 605).
At the same time, theories of identity formation used to include assumptions about cultures
belonging to a specific territory, and they were conditioned on our separating ourselves
against what was perceived as foreign (Beck, 2006). Cosmopolitanization makes
such formations and representations highly problematic; not only do they neglect the
plural source of culture and meaning as well as the recognition of different lifestyles and
cultures within a nation, they also fail to take citizens, teachers’ and young people’s
everyday experiences seriously in that they are likely to construct shifting and multivocally
shaped identities. Cosmopolitanization means that cultural goods and meanings
are increasingly uncoupled from their territorial pasts in the world wide web of meaning.
(2)Morally, cosmopolitanization means extension of our space of moral interpretations
as well as moral responsibilities in comparison with national loyalty, but also changed
conditions for emotional imagination and empathic perspective taking. The import and
export of cultural meaning, worldwide media and demographic change opens up for
cosmopolitan empathy because those who used to be seen as distant strangers can now
be recognized as neighbors coming closer. A commonly made assumption is that moral
sympathies are restricted to a close circle of significant others and neighbors that we
experience as same, but the meaning and scope of that assumption have altered. Boundaries
between strangers and neighbors are often blurred, and in the globally connected
society people anywhere can affect people everywhere. Our global interconnectedness
introduces the very idea that citizenship education, moral responsibility but also moral
sympathy can be understood in cosmopolitan terms, that is, understanding ourselves at
least partly as citizens of the world and taking seriously our responsibilities and obligations
to global others living near or distant.(Waldron, 2003; Beck, 2009; Appiah, 2006).
(3) Socially and politically, when local, national and global cultures interpenetrate and
co-instantiate and nationally demarcated societies are becoming increasingly diversified,
we cannot expect a harmonious social order or broad consensus regarding lifestyles.
Moreover, our global interconnectedness makes our habitual identification of nations
with societies somewhat misleading. In many aspects, we have reasons to think of ourselves
as co-existing in one common, our, society in which there are many nations, and
the political autonomy of sovereign nation states have become more of a social fiction
than a social fact. The cosmopolitan character of social reality makes re-negotiation of
concepts like ‘society’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘market’ etc. necessary, resulting in a
break with nationalistic social science and education. In the cosmopolitanized society,
Beck (2009, p. 60) argues, one can trace a new communicative logic forcing people to
co-operate who otherwise do not want to have anything to do with one another. One can
trace forms of compulsory democratic co-operation between people who think of themselves
as having to deal with common concerns that are forced upon them.
The cosmopolitan reality our children are growing into can on these grounds not only be
understood in terms of knowledge based economies competing on a global market, and
the knowledge and competencies they should attain cannot only be understood as those
immediately connected to market contexts; rather, cosmopolitanization calls for a concept
of “lifelong learning” that includes qualitatively different aspects than those suggested
by the European Commission. Beck (2006) thinks that the co-presence of rival
lifestyles and the quality of multi-vocal difference often recognized within oneself
makes us experience a growing need for cosmopolitan competence involving the art of
translation and bridge-building, and to: “situating and relativizing one’s own form of life
within other horizons of possibility [and] the capacity to see oneself from the perspective
of cultural others and to give this practical effect in one’s own experience through the
exercise of boundary-transcending imagination” (Beck, 2006, p. 89). In short, we have to
develop capacities for dialogical imagination and communication.
Subject: Cosmopolitan Leadership perspective 
Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:56 pm
