ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the analysis of cases challenging the withdrawal of welfare support from late claimers by further considering their implications for recent sociological debate on cosmopolitanism. We have seen how Isin and Turner’s (2007) call for a citizen engagement with cosmopolitan ideals may be exemplified by the civil society action documented in the previous chapter. We now turn to the process of judicial interpretation, and here key cases are revisited in the context of socio-legal theory and examined for signs of a ‘national’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ paradigm in judicial interpretation. The focus of the chapter is therefore on how the national resistance to growing asylum numbers was confronted by claims to a universal right, and on how far the normative ideals of cosmopolitanism can be identified in the ensuing judgements. Beck and Sznaider (2006) have called for a reconceptualisation of the social
sciences by means of a ‘cosmopolitan turn’ which would challenge the ‘container theory’ of society associated with methodological nationalism. Border crossing and other trans-national phenomena are argued to have undermined an assumed correspondence between national and social boundaries, ‘denationalising’ national spaces and requiring a new conceptualisation of society. Fine (2007), in this context, indentifies a denaturing and decentring of the nationstate, as part of a desire to emancipate social science from bounded national presuppositions. To this end, Beck and Sznaider advocate a reflexive cosmopolitanism which would reconfigure existing cosmopolitan ideals into concrete social realities. However, in so doing they recognise nationalism as a co-existing (and conflicting) force, and acknowledge a distinction between the normative ideal of cosmopolitanism and the full achievement of a cosmopolitan condition. One stage in the emergence of a cosmopolitan outlook has been a rejection
of the false dichotomy of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forces – itself symptomatic of methodological nationalism (Grande, 2006), in favour of a cosmopolitan constellation which combines both dynamics (cf Habermas, 2001). For Beck and Sznaider this amounts to ‘globalisation from within’, illuminating transnationality inside the nation-state itself (cf Levy and Sznaider, 2006), and for Fine (2007), the engagement of existing forms of political community in a transformative cosmopolitan project. The cosmopolitan moment therefore
arises when principles inform practice (Beck and Sznaider, 2006:10), but this possibility invites more detailed questions on the relation between normative ideals and their empirical realisation. The development and implementation of human rights have provided one
reference point for such questions, along with an allied interest in the transformation of national sovereignty (Levy and Sznaider, 2006). Human rights are cited as one example of multiple trans-national forces associated with a cosmopolitan legal frame, such that their consolidation denationalises concepts of legitimacy and contributes to a reconfiguration of sovereignty (cf Meyer et al., 1997; Held, 2004). With the incorporation of international legal norms into domestic regimes, we have a concrete case of the blurring of internal and external factors, seen by some as the basis for a global citizenry – which Fine (2007) terms the ‘credo’ of cosmopolitanism (see Habermas, 2001). Hence the argument (eg Douzinas, 2000) that human rights have the ability to create new worlds by pushing and expanding the boundaries of society, identity and law. Another related empirical referent for cosmopolitanism has been the growth
of cross-national migration and asylum seeking, though this border crossing plays an ambivalent role. Grande (2006:104) sees migration as a polarising issue, revealing a structural cleavage between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, such that it is precisely ‘the lowering and unbundling of national boundaries which renders them more salient’. While Beck and Sznaider suggest that in defending the human rights of foreigners and strangers people may feel they are defending their own identities, Douzinas has argued that the plight of the refugee puts claims of the universalisation of rights to the test. Where Beck and Sznaider see ‘cycles of cosmopolitan sympathy’, Fine (2007:43) sees rather a dilemma for citizens in choosing between their own national interpretations of constitutional principles and a more distant cosmopolitan view. As Habermas (2001) notes, a peculiar tension arises between the universal meaning of human rights and the local conditions of their realisation. Beck and Sznaider hint at this ambivalence in their recognition that a single
phenomenon may be analysed at a variety of levels:
In the cosmopolitan constellation sociology is then concerned with the formation of post-national and cross national bonds, or who belongs and who does not, and how inclusion and exclusion arise.
