Cosmopolitanism, Patriotism, Nationalism. Which road to Modernity?

THE END OF ENLIGHTENMENT/DAS ENDE DER AUFKLÄRUNG/ kuratiert von Philipp Blom

R.s.v.p.: einladung.kreiskyforum@kreisky.org

COSMOPOLITANISM, PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM.
WHICH ROAD TO MODERNITY?

Anthony Pagden
Professor of Political Science and History at the University of California

The world today is still divided into nation states. Yet they are increasingly linked together by what has come to be called loosely an “international system”. The relationship between the two ways of understanding civil society is always, at best, unstable. Russia claims the Crimea in the name of the nation. The E.U. and the U.S. respond with sanctions in the defence of an international law which recognizes the right to self-determination. International law, transnational justice, even “globalization”, are all part of a broader initiative called – even more loosely – “cosmopolitanism”. On the face of it cosmopolitanism and nationalism would seem to be irreconcilable? But are they? The liberal nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries imagined a future in terms of a “cosmopolitanisms of nations”. In this lecture, I will explore the evolution of the vocabularies of attachment, “Patriotism” and “nationalism” and how, as the object of attachment shifted from the person of the ruler to a constitutional order, the idea of “belonging” and the political rights and obligations which that entails, became inseparable from some kind of “cosmopolitan ideal” and – finally what that might imply for the future of Europe.

Moderator: Philipp Blom, Author and Historian