ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changing relationships between ‘mega-events’ – (or international public cultural event genres like World’s Fairs (hereafter ‘expos’) and Olympic Games (see Roche 2000) – and forms of cosmopolitanism. It takes a long-term socio-historical perspective on the development of both mega-events and modern society, considering mega-events both as modernizing factors and also as illuminating some of the possibilities and limitations of modern societies as cosmopolitan social orders. Mega-events can be subjected a variety of interpretations. These range from the overly optimistic, which acquiesce in their claimed contributions to modern civilization, to the overly pessimistic, which critically reduce them to only their capitalistic and hegemonic aspects. The view taken in this chapter aims to avoid these polarities, and to be more nuanced and realistic. Taken overall the socio-historical analysis and account of expos the chapter suggests that mega-events and the socio-cultural processes associated with them can be provisionally assessed to have contributed positively to the development of European-level culture and civil society in the modern period (also see Roche 2000: ch. 8 and 2011).
