ABSTRACT
Identification with a national community is typically associated with 'hot' emotions, and opposed to 'cool' cosmopolitanism as an ideal (Turner, 2000). 'Hot' communicates intensity of feeling experienced as such: while the causes and the precise coordinates of feeling may be questioned or confused (the premise of psychoanalysis), that there is emotion is not in doubt. 'Hot' emotions also suggest a direct link between emotion and motivation to act that is relatively unreflexive: these are the emotions that overwhelm reason and self-interest. 'Cool' emotions are experienced as more diffuse, where there is questioning of what is felt and where motivation to act is taken to be based on reflection. 1 In this chapter we will consider how the oversimplified characterization of national feeling as 'hot' and cosmopolitanism as 'cool' tends to reify the former and idealize the latter. We will consider cosmopolitanism in the neo-Kantian terms of human rights, in which, although emotion has not been addressed directly, 'hot' national feeling and 'cool' cosmopolitanism are implicitly opposed in this way. I will argue that the dichotomy makes it difficult to see how 'warm' cosmopolitanism is actually developing in political communities organized by western national states, in less rationalist ways than is suggested by neo-Kantians and in association with, rather than in opposition to, national feeling.
