ABSTRACT
International relations scholar Peter van Ham (2002, 2008) alludes to a future in which countries become such successfully networked “brand states” that their physical territory becomes irrelevant. There are similarities here with Benedict Anderson (1991) – nations are always to some extent imagined communities – but in terms of its own subject van Ham’s observation ignores the pivotal role played by tourism in place-branding, and tourism’s reliance on identity and destinations with tangible territories (see Govers and Go 2009). Although Ulrich Beck acknowledges that we live in an age of what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) describes as “liquid modernity”, he warns against stream, flow and network metaphors that fail to “thematize the degree to which…processes [of cosmopolitanisation and anti-cosmopolitanisation (see below)] are promoted or inhibited by the agency or impotence of particular groups of actors” (2006, p. 80). His argument is that although boundaries are blurring, social structures have not as yet been fully dissolved by flows, and so mobility should not entirely supersede structure and community as a focus of academic enquiry (2006, p. 80). In Beck’s view there is not so much a privileged, mobile, cosmopolitan space of flows and a dominated non-cosmopolitan space of places but an interpenetration of the local, national and global (Holton 2009, p. 53). Beck’s (1992, 1995, 1998, 2006, 2009, 2011; Beck and Levy 2013) approach to
cosmopolitanism and his theory of risk society are provocative for the prominence they afford the environment and the media. Many of the environmental risks that populate his books and articles – climate change and radiation, for example – are not limited in time or space, and can be global or catastrophic in their consequences. Risks of this kind are much more difficult to calculate and forecast than earlier risks of industrialisation, such as smog or localised water pollution, meaning that mediated perceptions are increasingly influential in public debate (Beck and Levy 2013, p. 3). The more frequently the media represent these risks in terms of interconnected endangered futures, the more likely it is that a cosmopolitan outlook will become vernacularised, perhaps creating the impetus and conditions for responsive affiliations to form across geographical, cultural and political boundaries (Beck and Levy 2013, pp. 3, 7). Ever present, however, is the potential for anxiety about international events to trigger a retreat into nationalism (Beck 2006). Thus cosmopolitanisation, as Beck envisages it, is a non-linear process
whereby the mediated side-effects of global flows slowly coerce individuals into recognising their interdependencies and the need for a collective cosmopolitan response (Beck and Levy 2013). Beck advocates methodological cosmopolitanism – an analytical approach that
requires us to be mindful of the interpenetration of the local, regional, national, transnational and global. He considers transnational environmental communications from non-government organisations (NGOs) an important means by which boundary-crossing risks can be unveiled and refers to civil society movements as “the entrepreneurs of the cosmopolitan commonwealth” (Beck and Levy 2013, p. 15). Yet in Beck’s (2011) unsentimental hypothesis, cosmopolitanisation does not necessarily begin with empathy or the desire to make the world a better place but with self-interested recognition of the need for collective responses. With co-author Daniel Levy, he argues that “sociability is not established under conditions of united interpretations but as a result of shared attentiveness to global risks” (Beck and Levy 2013, p. 23). This approach inverts the usual argument that political cosmopolitanism will emerge from the spread of morality-driven cosmopolitanism. Rather, imagined communities of global risks and associated interdependencies are credited with the capacity to promote a cosmopolitan “politicization and establishment of norms” (Beck 2011, p. 1353). Beck contends that the media can shock people out of their complacency about
the risky by-products of industrialisation. In his view, even conflicts over whether distant populations should have a say in the fate of a county’s rainforests – which he considers to be global resources – “perform an integrating function in that they make clear that cosmopolitan solutions have to be found” (2006, pp. 23). As Alison Anderson observes, “Beck is right to recognise that perceptions of risk are selective and different environmental issues have varying degrees of cultural potency and mediagenic dying trees and seals, for example, allow us to glimpse the bigger picture” (2000, p. 96). Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry have found that multiple mobilities, including imaginative travel via the media, “may provide the context in which the notion of universal rights, relating not only to humans but also to animals and environments, comes to constitute a framing for collective action” (2006, p. 117). Szerszynski speculates that a moral environmental citizenship may be acquired, whereby “the local becomes experienced in a different way, one in which a certain abstraction informs the very perceptions of the particular – an abstraction that makes possible the critical judgment necessary to citizenship” (2006, pp. 86-87). Beck (2006), like Ulf Hannerz (2006) and Szerszynski and Urry (2002, 2006), theorises an intertwining of cultural and political cosmopolitanism. “Consumerist cosmopolitanism” (Calhoun 2002a, p. 889, see below) is a dimension of cultural cosmopolitanism exploited by place-branding and travel media because it is well suited both to places and to flows. Whether it can facilitate or accommodate political content in travel journalism will be explored in Part 2. Meanwhile, in this chapter I set the stage for such an investigation by introducing these three manifestations of cosmopolitanism – cultural, consumerist and political – and examining the role of journalism in Beck’s cosmopolitan project. I then consider travel journalism’s apparent failure to mediate cultural diversity with
cosmopolitan density before arguing that this does not necessarily mean that it cannot play a role in unveiling environmental threats and mediating cosmopolitan concern in ways that can be meaningful for diverse publics.
