ABSTRACT
Current literature that engages with questions of globalization and migrancy points to the importance of people’s mobility in generating new forms of belonging. Among these new forms it is predominantly cosmopolitanism that has received the greatest attention. Globalization is believed to enhance the possibilities for cosmopolitanism since under the new forms of belonging generated by the global condition, national belonging is believed to have lost its capacity to have a privileged hold on people’s identification. Neither are right claims believed to be capable of being restrained narrowly within the strictures of the nation-state. It has been suggested that one of the consequences of globalization is the undermining of the sovereignty of the nation-state, resulting in the disjointing of citizenship and nationality. In a situation where the state has lost its capacity to be the exclusive reference point of sovereignty, cosmopolitanism is seen as offering new possibilities for membership as well as acting as a new ground for rights claims that are beyond the nation-state. These new forms of belonging, and in particular the cosmopolitan form of attachment, are celebrated mainly because they are believed to establish discordant relationships with nationalist forms of belonging, which are believed to be primordialist and archaic.
