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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present.
Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening, and if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world the way we live in the world, think about the world and seek to act upon the world through our actions and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It is creating an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it.
The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
The Story of an Unfinished Book
Preface
Part I: Introduction, Evidence, Theory
1: Why Metamorphosis of the World, Why Not Transformation?
1 Conceptual Clarification: Cosmopolitized Spaces of Action
2 Conceptual Clarification: the Notion of Metamorphosis
Note
2: Being God
1 Why not Social Change, Why Metamorphosis of Parenthood?
2 Being God without Wanting to be God
3 Prenatal Cosmopolitization
4 A New World and World Picture of Human Life is Emerging in the Shadow of Speechlessness
5 Outlook: the Categorical Imperative of Parental Responsibility is Breaking Down
3: How Climate Change Might Save the World
1 What Does Climate Change Do to Us?
2 Metamorphosis is about a New Way of Generating Norms
3 Climate Change: Nature and Society Combined
4 Global Risk Comes as a Threat and Brings Hope
5 World Cities are Rising as Cosmopolitan Actors
6 Pascal, God and Climate Change
4: Theorizing Metamorphosis
1 The Return of Social History
2 Forms of Historical Change: the Axial Age, Revolution, Metamorphosis of the World and Colonial Transformation
3 Risk Society as Agent of Metamorphosis
4 Cosmopolitan Theorizing
Notes
Part II: Themes
5: From Class to Risk-Class: Inequality in Times of Metamorphosis
1 Conventional Sociology Focuses on the Distribution of Goods without Bads
2 Coastal Flood Risk and
River
Flood Risk
3 Climate Risk is Convulsing the 2,000-year-old Civilization of Winegrowing in Southern Europe
4 How Privileged Places turn into Risk-Places
5 Outlook
Notes
6: Where Does the Power Go? Politics of Invisibility
1 Politics of Invisibility
2 Manufactured not Knowing
3 Politics of Invisibility: Nuclear Science
4 Politics of Visibility: Climate Science
5 Outlook
7: Emancipatory Catastrophism: Common Goods as Side Effects of Bads
1 How Metamorphosis of the World Works Can be Seen and Analysed through Three Conceptual Lenses
2 Hurricane Katrina: How the Normative Horizons of Climate Justice are Globalized
3 Outlook: Compass for the Twenty-First Century
8: Public Bads: Politics of Visibility
1 New Landscapes of Communication
2 Public Bads
3 Digital Construction of the World
4 Outlook: Cosmopolitan Data
9: Digital Risk: The Failure of Functioning Institutions
1 Digital Freedom Risk
2 Digital Metamorphosis of Society, Intersubjectivity and Subjectivity
3 Outlook
10: Meta-Power Game of Politics: Metamorphosis of the Nation and International Relations
1 The Metamorphosis of European Politics
2 How Climate Change Risk is Used to Renegotiate China's National Self-Definition
11: Cosmopolitan Communities of Risk: From United Nations to United Cities
1 The Metamorphosis of World Affairs as Seen Through the Lens of World Cities
2 Cosmopolitan Communities of Risk
3 Metamorphosis of Traffic
4 Expropriation Through Risk
5 Metamorphosis of Conflict
6 The New Urban-Cosmopolitan ‘Realpolitik’?
7 Outlook: A Reinvention of Democracy?
Note
Part III: Outlook
12: Global Risk Generations: United in Decline
1 Metamorphosis of Socialization: the Disempowerment of the Older Generations and the Empowerment of the Younger Ones
2 United in Decline
3 Outlook
References and Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © Ulrich Beck 2016
The right of Ulrich Beck to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9021-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beck, Ulrich, 1944-2015, author.
The metamorphosis of the world / Ulrich Beck.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-9021-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-9022-3 (pbk.) 1. Social change–Environmental aspects. 2. Climatic changes–Social aspects. 3. Risk–Sociological aspects. 4. Environmental sociology. 5. Social evolution. I. Title.
HM856.B43 2016
303.4–dc23
2015032724
Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
The Story of an Unfinished Book
1 January 2015 was a splendid winter day: blue sky, sun all over, snow sparkling with light. It was scenery out of a picture book, filled with magic. In a joyful mood, Ulrich and I set out for a walk in the nearby park, Munich's famous Englische Garten. Some weeks before, at the beginning of December, Ulrich had sent a preliminary and unedited version of Metamorphosis to Polity Press, and just some two or three days previously, at the end of December, he had received the first reviews. While initially he had been somewhat irritated by some of the comments, now, in the course of our walking and talking, he came to see that they did indeed touch upon important issues. Immediately he started on a course of brainstorming, and I joined in. We spoke of adding new parts that would help to clarify and improve critical issues.
But then, in the midst of our brainstorming, the end.
A sudden heart attack.
Ulrich died.
A few days later, I tried to record the major points we had been talking about on that beautiful New Year's day. But, try as hard as I could, I could not accomplish the task. Memory failed me. All I could remember were fragments, bits and pieces. The essence was gone.
In February 2015, the LSE paid a special tribute to Ulrich. At an event held in his honour, Anthony Giddens spoke of Metamorphosis, calling it an ‘unfinished book’. In the following months I learnt the truth of his statement. This was when the task of transforming the preliminary manuscript into a book began and kept me going and going. It was but the last chapter in a long story that involved many people and was closely associated with Ulrich's ERC Advanced Grant ‘Methodological Cosmopolitanism – In the Laboratory of Climate Change’.
From the very beginning Anders Blok (Copenhagen) and Sabine Selchow (London) had been engaged in discussing first drafts of the manuscript. Both Blok and Selchow, in their own way, have given much time, energy and expertise to this task. Thanks to their efforts, the manuscript gained in depth and theoretical foundation as well as in precision and empirical detail. Furthermore, numerous people – some also members of the ERC team, some colleagues from a variety of academic backgrounds, some based in Munich, some living in faraway regions and continents – have come up with fruitful suggestions and inspired new ideas. The following persons took part in this network of cosmopolitan cooperation: Martin Albrow (London); Christoph Lau (Munich); Daniel Levy (New York); Zhifei Mao (Hong Kong); Svetla Marinova (Sofia); Gabe Mythen (Liverpool); Shalini Randeria (Vienna); Maria S. Rerrich (Munich/Blackstock, South Carolina); Natan Sznaider (Tel Aviv); John Thompson (Cambridge); David Tyfield (Lancaster/Guangzhou, China); Ingrid Volkmer (Melbourne); and Johannes Willms (Munich). Once again Almut Kleine (Munich), trained by twenty years of working with Ulrich, bravely navigated through his handwritten notes and corrections and typed her way through many versions of the text. And Caroline Richmond at Polity did a wonderful job copyediting the text and ironing out any wrinkles that remained.
But, before that, there was the task of completing the unfinished book. It was a challenge indeed, and it needed the collaboration of three individuals.
Fortunately, as Ulrich and I had been close companions and colleagues for so many decades, the subject of metamorphosis had been part of our daily discussions – indeed, our daily lives. I had seen Ulrich struggling with it and eventually coming to terms with it. Furthermore, I could build on the experience of four books and numerous articles we had written together. Yet, when it came to producing a final version of Metamorphosis – a version ready for print – each chapter presented a series of open questions, from metaphors of mysterious meaning to arguments based on unknown sources. In such moments – and there were many of them – John Thompson, close colleague and most loyal friend, stepped in, investing enormous amounts of time and energy, of sociological knowledge and publishing experience. Whenever I longed for a break, for some time off from Metamorphosis, or even for a chance to finish my own book, John patiently brought me back in line, pressed me to go on, or went ahead himself. Time and again, he helped to make sense of and revise incomplete sentences, paragraphs that ended abruptly, and text (written in English) that sounded too German.
But, in the end, both John and I would have been at a loss if it had not been for Albert Gröber, scientific coordinator of the ERC team and noted expert on every detail of Ulrich's writings. During the difficult period directly following Ulrich's death, Albert did not only have a major role in steering the project through serious problems; at the same time he also actively contributed to finishing Metamorphosis. He ingeniously tracked down references, unearthed remote quotations, and compiled a list of relevant authors and publications.
In this way the unfinished manuscript gradually gained in shape and was eventually transformed into a book. I am deeply indebted to John and Albert, and my warmest thanks go to both of them.
I hope that, taken all together, we have done well, at least on most occasions. I hope the result allows us to see the vision Ulrich had in mind when he started on the journey to Metamorphosis.
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
September 2015
Preface
The world is unhinged. As many people see it, this is true in both senses of the word: the world is out of joint and it has gone mad. We are wandering aimlessly and confused, arguing for this and against that. But a statement on which most people can agree, beyond all antagonisms and across all continents, is: ‘I don't understand the world any more’.
The aim of this book is to try to understand and explain why we no longer understand the world. To this end, I introduce the distinction between change and metamorphosis or, more precisely, between change in society and metamorphosis of the world. Change in society, social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.
We have been repeatedly confronted with metamorphoses of this magnitude in recent decades, in a series of (in colloquial terms) ‘insane events’, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the September 11 terrorist attacks, catastrophic climate change all over the world, the Fukushima reactor disaster, and the financial and euro crises to the threats to freedom by totalitarian surveillance in the age of digital communication brought to light by Edward Snowden. We are always confronted with the same pattern: what was ruled out beforehand as utterly inconceivable is taking place – as a global event, mostly observable in every living room in the world because it is transmitted by the mass media.
Part IIntroduction, Evidence, Theory
1Why Metamorphosis of the World, Why Not Transformation?
This book represents an attempt to rescue myself, and perhaps others too, from a major embarrassment. Even though I have been teaching sociology and studying the transformation of modern societies for many years, I was at a loss for an answer to the simple but necessary question ‘What is the meaning of the global events unfolding before our eyes on the television?’, and I was forced to declare bankruptcy. There was nothing – neither a concept nor a theory – capable of expressing the turmoil of this world in conceptual terms, as required by the German philosopher Hegel.
This turmoil cannot be conceptualized in terms of the notions of ‘change’ available to social science – ‘evolution’, ‘revolution’ and ‘transformation’. For we live in a world that is not just changing, it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same – capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they have always been. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present.
Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening and, if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world – the way we live in the world, think about the world, and seek to act upon the world through social action and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality – drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It creates an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it.
The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.
But the word ‘metamorphosis’ must still be handled gingerly and placed within quotation marks. It still bears all the hallmarks of a foreign body. Certainly, for the time being this word will probably have to be content with guest worker status, and it remains open whether it will ever become part of our common sense. At any rate, with this book I propose to adopt the migratory concept ‘metamorphosis’ into the social common sense of countries and languages. This is simply an attempt to offer a plausible answer to the urgent question ‘What world are we actually living in?’ My answer is: in the metamorphosis of the world. However, this is an answer that requires willingness on the part of the reader to risk the metamorphosis of their worldview.
And of course there is a second overwhelming term in the title: ‘world’, which is closely linked to the term ‘humanity’. What is this about?
The talk of the failure of the world focuses attention on the concept ‘world’. All institutions are failing; no one and nothing is decisive enough in confronting global climate risk. And it is precisely this insistence on failure that is making the world the point of reference for a better world.
In this way, the concept ‘world’ has become familiar. It has become indispensable for describing the most mundane things. It has lost its aloof isolation, its Himalaya-like grandeur, and through the back door it has crept into and ensconced itself in our everyday, most private language. Nowadays, pineapples, no less than the nursing staff for the elderly, have a global background (and everyone knows this). Someone who asks where the pineapples come from receives the welcome information that they are ‘flown-in pineapples’. Correspondingly, there are ‘flown-in mothers’, who want to (or have to) care and provide for other people's children here and their own children back home in accordance with the rules of ‘long-distance love’. Even cursory reflection shows that the concepts ‘world’ and ‘one's own life’ are no longer strangers. They are now and henceforth bound together in ‘cohabitation’ – in ‘cohabitation’ because there is no official authenticating document (whether of science or the state) for this lifelong global union.
Having said all this, the question remains: Why metamorphosis of the world, why not ‘social change’ or ‘transformation’?
Taking the Chinese case, transformation means what China has experienced since the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese economic reform: an evolutionary path from closed to open, from national to global, from poor to rich, from isolated to more involved. Metamorphosis of the world means more than, and something different from, an evolutionary path from closed to open; it means epochal change of worldviews, the refiguration of the national worldview. Yet, it is not a change of worldviews that is caused by war, violence or imperial aggression but one that is caused by the side effects of successful modernization, such as digitalization or the anticipation of climate catastrophe to humankind. The institutionalized national-international Weltbild, the world picture, the significance in how humans today apprehend the world, has withered. ‘World picture’ means that for every cosmos there is a corresponding nomos, combining normative and empirical certainties as to what the world, its past and its future, is all about. These ‘fixed stars’, fixed certainties, are not fixed any more. They are metamorphosed in a sense that can be understood as the ‘Copernican Turn 2.0’.
Galileo discovered the fact that the sun is not circulating around the earth, but that the earth travels around the sun. Today we are in a different but somewhat similar situation. Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world. The world is not circulating around the nation, but the nations are circulating around the new fixed stars: ‘world’ and ‘humanity’. The internet is an example of this. First, it creates the world as the unit of communication. And, second, it creates humanity by simply offering the potential of literally interconnecting everybody. It is in this space that national and other borders are renegotiated, disappear, and then built up anew – i.e., are ‘metamorphosed’.
Consequently, ‘methodological nationalism’ is the lesson of the sun turning around the world or, to put it differently, the lesson of the turning of the world around the nation. ‘Methodological cosmopolitanism’, on the contrary, is the lesson of the earth turning around the sun or, better, the lesson of the nations turning around the ‘world at risk’. From a national outlook the nation is the axis, the fixed star, around which the world turns. From a cosmopolitan outlook this nation-centric world picture appears historically false. The metamorphosis of the world means that the ‘metaphysics’ of the world is changing.*
To understand why the world picture is ‘historically false’ we need to distinguish between the Copernican Turn in the natural scientific and in the social scientific 2.0 sense. The world picture which claimed that the sun is turning around the earth has always been false. It is only that this reality has been denied by those following and defending the religious dogma. The Copernican Turn 2.0 unfolds in reality – that is, in everyday activity – in the actual upheaval and downfall of the world order. This does not mean, however, that nations and nation-states dissolve and disappear but that nations are ‘metamorphosed’. They need to find their place in the digital world at risk, in which borders have become liquid and flexible; they need to (re)invent themselves, turning around the new fixed stars of ‘world’ and ‘humanity’.
In a similar manner to how the modern international world order, the sovereign state, industrialization, capital, classes, nations and democracy set in and unfolded after the collapse of the religious world order, global climate risk contains a sort of navigation system for the threatened world (see later). Climate risk denotes the path. But this does not mean that it will be a successful path. It is possible that humanity may choose a path at the end of which lies its self-destruction. This possibility exists not least because, when this path comes into plain view, it becomes clear that the ‘eternal certainties’ of the national worldview are short-sighted and wrong and lose their self-evidence as the beliefs of a whole epoch.
The history of metamorphosis is a history of ideological conflicts (wars of religion) – in the past regionally, today globally. We are experiencing a struggle between competing images of the world involving fierce, brutal conflicts, bloody conquests, dirty wars, terror and counter-terror – for example, Christians against barbaric heathens. Charlemagne built his Christian empire in the secure knowledge that it was permissible to kill for the holy faith, to wipe out the unbaptized and their culture. In an alliance with the pope, he imposed God's commandments with brute force. This Christian-religious worldview was based on the unity of conquest and mission, on the alliance between the sword and the cross. Christian baptism was realized with violence in the act of subjugation. This religious worldview taught that peace is possible only as peace within the unity of Christendom.
In a historical variation on Galileo's discovery, the world no longer revolves around the minor princedoms, around the conflict between Catholics and Huguenots, between colonial masters and barbarians, between superhumans and subhumans. The race-centric view of the world is defunct (especially in Germany and in Europe as a response to the racial fanaticism of the Nazis) – the patriarchal world picture, too (though not in all parts of the world), and the world picture which proclaims equality but excludes women, slaves and ‘barbarians’. Just take the founding fathers of the United States of America and its constitution, who did not even notice that African Americans were excluded from human rights – they took it as the most natural thing on earth.
And, again, what does ‘withered’ mean? Many, most likely even all of these world pictures still exist today simultaneously and alongside each other. ‘Withered’ means two things: first, the world pictures have lost their certainty, their dominance. Second, nobody can escape the global. This is because, as we will see in the chapters to follow, the global – i.e., the cosmopolitized reality – is not just ‘out there’ but constitutes everybody's strategic lived reality.
In order to grasp this, it is necessary to distinguish between Glaubenssätze, ‘doctrines’, and Handlungsräume, ‘spaces of action’, which are the existential parameters of social activity when it comes to world pictures. Doctrines can be particular or minority-oriented e.g., anti-cosmopolitan, anti-European, religiously fundamental, ethnic, racist; spaces of action, on the contrary, are inevitably constituted in a cosmopolitan way. The anti-Europeans actually sit in the European parliament (otherwise they don't matter at all). The religious anti-modernist fundamentalists celebrate the beheading of their Western hostages on digital channels and digital media platforms in order to shock the world with their inhuman terror regime. If tomorrow a group appears that propagates the political superiority of left-handed redheads, they will announce and practise their belief not just locally but globally.
Even immobile people are cosmopolitized. People who have never left their villages, let alone ever boarded a plane, are still closely and commonly linked with the world: in one way or other they are affected by global risks. And they are linked with the world not least because the mobile phone has come to be an integral part of the everyday across the globe. The metamorphosis in this, however, is not simply that everybody is (potentially) interlinked but that this entering into the ‘world’ means to enter something that follows a completely different logic. They end up in a world that is fundamentally different from what they think and expect – i.e., a world in which, as mobile phone users, they are metamorphosed into (data) resources and transparent and controllable consumers for global transnational corporations. This is a key feature of metamorphosis.
No matter if you want to save money by avoiding taxes or if you are infertile but long for a child, to reach your goal you need to understand and make use of the legal and economic differences that exist between various economic and legal realms in different national contexts. A developer who thinks strictly nationally – i.e., rigorously dismisses cheap foreign labour in favour of more expensive German building workers – will go bankrupt. To put it differently: those who take the national imperative as the imperative for their action – i.e., who stop at national borders – are the losers in the cosmopolitized world.
Of course, everybody is free to choose not to board an aeroplane or not to send emails. Yet, this decision means that they exclude themselves from the spaces of successful action. The world order arises from the historical necessity of acting beyond and across borders in order successfully to pursue fundamental goals in life. In other words, an imperative of cosmopolitized action arises globally: no matter what one thinks and believes – nationalistic, religious fundamentalist, feminist, patriarchal, (anti-)European, (anti-)cosmopolitan, or all of this together – if one acts nationally or locally one is left behind. Regardless of which past era people take flight to in thought – the Stone Age, the Biedermeier era, the time of Muhammad, the Italian Enlightenment or the nationalism of the nineteenth century – if their actions are to be successful, they must build bridges to the world, to the world of the ‘others’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, spaces of action are cosmopolitized, which means that the frame of action is no longer only national and integrated but global and disintegrated, containing the differences between national regulations in law, politics, citizenship, services, etc.
In the cosmopolitized world, even national elections are organized in a cosmopolitan way: the parties who want to win need to secure the votes of citizens abroad – e.g., Turks living in Germany, US citizens outside the United States. States that react to the ‘cosmopolitan criminal’ only nationally fundamentally miss the cosmopolitization of criminality. Only if one looks at and understands the cosmopolitized spaces of action of criminals and ‘trans-legally’ acting corporations is an adequate reaction and handling possible.
This is the end of cosmopolitan idealism and the beginning of the cosmopolitan realism of successful action. You have to open up for the world if you want to succeed!
For those for whom the nation, ethnicity or religion constitutes their metaphysical certainty, the world breaks down. Their despair makes them turn to national and religious fundamentalism. Consequently, hundreds of sociological studies, asking what people have in mind, tell us the story of a backlash to renationalized orientations. This might be true in relation to what people think, but what about their activities? Those studies focus only on orientations, thereby missing the essential point: whatever people think and believe in, they cannot escape the Paradox of Metamorphosis that is the cosmopolitized world: in order to defend their national and religious fundamentalism they need to act – in fact, think and plan – in a cosmopolitan way. Hence, they foster what they originally set out to fight against: the metamorphosis of the world.
If the poor do not act transnationally – i.e., if they don't become ‘world mobile’, in the sense of migrate – they risk getting poorer. The poor become poorer because they remain in the slums of Bangladesh, North Africa and the ghettos in the US. The rich become richer because they invest their money wherever they make more profit and can avoid paying taxes. This logic is true even for the social sciences: those who practise methodological nationalism will lose. Sociologists who do research only from within and about the national context block their careers and remain what they are: national sociologists.
If you want to be successful you need to discover yourself as an actor in cosmopolitized spaces of action. (This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.) Let's take the example of the desire to have a child: you need to ‘google’ to find the right egg donor mother, surrogate mother or sperm donor. The same goes for household help, university degrees, job openings – everything needs to be ‘googled’ so that successful action is possible. It is the cosmopolitan frame that makes local action successful: just think of pineapples or the football club Bayern Munich!
Consequently, the distinction between doctrines and spaces of action is crucial: at the beginning of the twenty-first century the world is turning schizophrenic in a fundamental sense. Notwithstanding what people believe in, hope for or question, they have to act in a cosmopolitan manner if they want to be successful – in the economy, religion, the nation, the community or in their family, their jobs, their football club, their romantic life – last but not least, in their terrorism. Cosmopolitization includes the body as well. Those who eat only locally will starve. In fact, in times of climate change, those who just want to breathe local air will suffocate.
1 Conceptual Clarification: Cosmopolitized Spaces of Action
If you ask for the systematic characteristics of the notion ‘cosmopolitized spaces of action’, a number of constitutive aspects appear. In exploring these characteristics it is essential to keep in mind that the concept ‘cosmopolitized spaces of action’ is interlinked with the notion ‘metamorphosis of the world’.
It is useful to distinguish between
action
, which combines reflection, status and perception held by actors, and
cosmopolitized spaces of action
, which exist even if they are not perceived and used by actors. To be clear, ‘cosmopolitized’ comes out of the theory of ‘cosmopolitization’ and is not to be confused with ‘cosmopolitan’, which refers to ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a norm. Beyond perceptions of actors (governments, business, religions, civil movements, individuals, etc.) there has to be an analysis of cosmopolitized spaces of action, which need to be understood as not institutionalized in a national frame. They are
not
integrated,
not
limited and
not
exclusive. They include transnational, transborder resources for action, such as the differences between national judicial regimes, radical inequalities and cultural differences.This nexus of doings beyond borders and beyond taboos is not necessarily a value or emotional nexus but is often based on ‘mutual ignorance’ (surrogate mothers, kidney donors and kidney transplant recipients). In order to make use of them you do not need to have the corresponding passport, speak the corresponding language or have the corresponding identity. The differences make the difference! The differences between cultural traditions, the differences between rich and poor populations, the differences between law systems and the differences in geography constitute the new cosmopolitized structure of
opportunities
.It is also necessary to distinguish between
actions
and
practices
. Practices are routinized, actions are reflexive, bridging and using transborder differences. They are the outcome of historical processes of learning by doing. They create
cosmopolitan milieus
, not only at the top and the middle of society but also at the bottom. Undocumented migrants become
Artisten der Grenze
, ‘artists of borders’.This does not mean that under certain conditions cosmopolitized spaces of action might not be turned into routinized ‘fields of practices’ (Bourdieu 1977, 1984) – i.e., that borders are redrawn and new systems of regulation are created and implemented. But the point is that cosmopolitized spaces of action are open opportunities of action which are subject not to the logic of reproduction but to the logic of metamorphosis of the social and political order.
In order to understand the nature of the cosmopolitized space of action, we need to understand the idea of
spaces of spaces
. Spaces of spaces open up unexpected opportunities, thereby making metamorphosing orders and cultural relativisms of law, values and state authority visible and usable. Obstacles (in the national frame) metamorphose into opportunities (in the cosmopolitan frame). Because foreign law allows what your country's law prohibits; because you are rich and can afford to buy organs while people in other parts of the world are so poor they have to sell them; because you can mobilize friends or fighters by internet communication, Facebook, etc. – for such reasons your political aims, your hopes and goals in life, may be fulfilled in the cosmopolitized spaces of action that are constituted in highly different ways. The experience of the relativity of values and prohibitions changes into a question: What is common practice in the US and Israel can surely not be a crime over here, so why is it prohibited? Are our laws wiser than others? The pro and contra of argument and counter-argument renders all points of view suspect; each helps to undermine the other. Many people gain the impression that no one has a monopoly on the truth. That in turn raises the question: If all the opposing views seem to be well founded, how can there be an acceptable prohibition? The effect of these disagreements is to undermine the law's effective claim to legitimacy, so that people justify ‘their’ right to break the law by getting somewhere else what is prohibited here. What we see in the cosmopolitized spaces of action is the metamorphosis of value relativism into the legitimation of the prohibited.In this sense, the idea of ‘spaces of spaces’ differs fundamentally from Bourdieu's ‘fields of fields’, because the latter exist in the unity of the nation-state. Spaces of spaces include exclusive national fields of practices. In contrast to my notion of ‘cosmopolitized space of action’, Bourdieu's influential notion of ‘fields of practices’ makes sense of how broader structures of social and cultural domination are lived, reproduced and transformed in everyday life and practice or practices (methodological nationalism).
In order to understand ‘cosmopolitized action’, it is useful to bring in the concept of ‘creative action’ (Joas 1996). ‘Creative action’ is about the ability not to accept existing borders of thinking and acting. Even more than that, one needs to be ready and able to translate existing borders into opportunities in order to achieve one's goals. The creativity of cosmopolitized action means that the rationality of action metamorphoses. The notion of ‘rationality’ is metamorphosed because of the ‘simple’ fact that the internalization of the world has become the condition for successful action.
A key characteristic of ‘cosmopolitized spaces of action’ is that they do not equal particular ways of thinking, doctrines, religious beliefs and ideologies. Rather, they are used strategically; in fact, they have to be used strategically if one wants to be successful – that is, if one wants to achieve one's goals. National elections are a good example. It might not be a successful move to follow a normative cosmopolitan
doctrine
, but there is no way around strategically
acting
in and through the ‘cosmopolitized spaces of action’. There are different ways of doing this, the most prominent of which is strategically to instrumentalize the cosmopolitized resources behind a national façade.
For the first time in history there is a space of action that is open to everybody. In fact, from now on it is an
active
decision
not
to use the cosmopolitized spaces of action (or spaces of cosmopolitan resources for action). They are not exclusive in the sense that only powerful economic, political and military actors can make use of them. Individual actors can also use cosmopolitized resources – depending on their social position and economic means. It also implies a chance for ‘upward mobility’. The cosmopolitized resources can be used by people living ‘at the bottom’ through enforced migration, which enables them to use the ladder to rise to a better life, even if the outcome is a mixture of disappointment and despair. This means that the situation is fundamentally different from one in which the cosmopolitized spaces of action do not exist, as has been the case in the history of mankind up to the last part of the twentieth century.
Today we all are global players, more or less! Maybe not voluntarily, maybe not deliberately, but because the cosmopolitan spaces of action offer superior chances of success compared to nationally, religiously and ethnically limited action in the cosmopolitized world. We know what Erdanziehungskraft is – the gravitational pull of the planet earth. This book unveils, reveals, and thinks through the new historical law of Weltanziehungskraft – the gravitational pull of the world.
2 Conceptual Clarification: the Notion of Metamorphosis
The metamorphosis of the world is apparent not least in the way in which the dominant cultural pessimism is becoming metamorphosed. Nowadays, many people see the preachers of catastrophe as the last remaining realists. They believe that the catastrophists' pessimism offers the best arguments when it comes to making a robust assessment of the situation:
It's only a matter of time until this planet is so profoundly convulsed that we will fly away from it like annoying insects. The gentle twitches that we are already experiencing are merely the seismic harbingers of a global collapse which – if you believe the credible preachers of catastrophe – has become irrevocable. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that everywhere small competing groups are forming that offer their homeopathic healing arts as a way of saving the world: everything a little smaller, if you please, more credible, more manageable, fairer, simpler, cleverer, more human. Everyone of goodwill agrees wholeheartedly with them – only, please, not right now, not here…in Germany, in Europe, but first of all over there, where I am not right now. The rescue of the world is always supposed to start somewhere else, where the individual is not.
(Krüger 2009)
