POLITOLOGISKE STUDIER - ÅRG. 4 NR. 4  - FILM OG POLITIK -OKTOBER 2001

Af Ulrich Back
The title of my article 'The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies' is, of
course, a reminder of the famous book 'The Open Society and its Enemies',
written by Karl Raimund Popper in the face of the fascist assault on freedom
and democracy, published in 1945. For Popper too the Open Society is a
cosmopolitan society and its enemies are Marxism and Fascism both advocating
closed societies.
Once upon a time, it was possible to believe in all the splendid
Enlightenment values - progress, universal laws, perpetual peace, the
Kantian 'sensus communis' - in an unproblematic way. I am always moved how
convincingly Kant and Popper believed that all the diverse human cultures
were destined to transcend their conflicts of interest and achive some sort
of federal world-state - the United Nations as an Idea of Reason, if you
like. I do think those values are still open to us, they are even becoming
more important in what I call the Second Age of Modernity; and I think that
the current fashionable anti-Enlightenment rhetoric, such as we find it in
some theories of Postmodernity, is both ethically and politically
disastrous. There is a need for a second Enlightenment to understand the
shift in global relations and highlighting different key concepts and
conjunctures to those embedded in the classical narrative of modernity. So I
am reading and confirming Popper against Popper.
There are, indeed, many enlightening ideas in Poppers Open Society. But as
an antidote to tribalism Popper envisions a 'democratic cosmopolitan empire'
(to me a contradiction in terms), having in mind, for example, the British
Empire. So his argument provides an ideal backcloth for an investigation
into the dilemmas of cosmopolitanism.
There is, for example, the tribal dilemma of cosmopolitanism: all attempts
to open up the ethnic ghetto, to rig ethnicity, seem to produce and enforce
it. Even more than that, as Popper himself experienced to his cost. Defining
yourself as a member of the cosmopolitan community can be counteracted by
the violent ethnical self-definition of others who force you to be a jew. 'I
do not consider myself as an assimilated German jew', Popper argued, 'this
is
how the Führer would have considered me.' Ascribed ethnical identities,
because they tent to be violent, do have the dreadful power of
self-fulfilment.  They do awake the bloody nightmares of history.

The title of my paper again is 'The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies',
so I want to discuss  three questions:
What is a 'cosmopolitan society'?
Who are its enemies?
But I will start with a methodological question:
What is a cosmopolitan sociology?

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