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Abdennebi BEN BEYA

Universit de TunisWorking Through Anthony Appiahs Legitimacy Theory of Cosmopolitanism

Some claim that the world is gradually becoming united, that it will grow into a brotherly community as distances shrink and ideas are transmitted through the air. Alas, you must not believe that men can be united in this way.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Introduction:

Two American men had traveled to the old frontier town of Dali, one of Chinas most exotic places, where Tibetan medicine merchants swagger the streets in gold brocade fur-lined hats; where Yi minority women in umbrella-sized black hats and Yi men in shin-length felt cloaks tend sheep in the foothills of the snow-capped mountains; where from the minarets of mosques Muslim men sound the call to prayer at sunrise and sunset; where from Buddhist and Daoist temples arise the sounds of women chanting and beating handheld wooden drums. But amidst this strange new environment, the two American men had ventured into Franks Caf, run by a Muslim man who had given himself the English name Frank for the convenience of his customers, and there, perhaps, more strangely, they had found some familiarity, some home away from home.

In its classical definition, the notion of legitimacy entails the rightness or rightfulness of the political vision of a state at a particular place or time, and the ensuing obedience by the ruled to the rules of that state. Today, with the storming waves of globalization at the economic level, and the subsequent weakening of state authority in democratic countries, debates around legitimacy have gained great significance among thinkers to examine concurrent issues related to the formation of a global governance system which would launch worldwide processes of democratization and release the activist function of civil societies. These, it is maintained, would, in their global extension, augur the constitution of a cosmopolitan culture as a legitimate mode and expression, characterized by a universal openness to difference and diversity. Political theorists and ideologists claim that in such a post-national condition, cosmopolitanism enables the citizens of the world to break with their perverted and restricted patriotism, which, in its disguised pattern of love of our own country is arguably nothing more than the hatred of other countries and peoples. Lloyd L. Wong observes that currently, the traditional notion of home being associated with a single country of origin or birth does [no longer] necessarily apply. Rather, home becomes trans-or multilocal. Indeed, the above-selected epigraph introduces the local people of Bai as illustrative of a multi-ethnic community whose particularities have not hindered the possibility of a peaceful living-together among the inhabitants but has even broadened their capacity to welcome foreign travelers, thus producing a cosmopolitan ideal space which, without restricting the natives ethno-religious specificity, opens it up to others. Despite the utopian appeal of these theories, this essay attempts to interrogate the ethical legitimacy of global citizenship through a close reading of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, by Anthony Appiah, the Ghanian-born philosopher at Princeton University, alongside his inaugural article on Cosmopolitan Patriots, published nine year earlier, in 1997, which he takes as a contribution to the formation of a global community. Homi Bhabhas views, to whom Appiah owes much of what he has to say, will also be discussed appropriately. These two critics engage in an enthused celebration of an unhomely cosmopolitan patriotism, by advocating a move beyond a crippling notion of racial politics with its limiting construction of group identity, and presenting an eloquent agenda for a globalized humanhood. The article argues that Appiahs legitimation rules, which are inspired by his liberal views, bear little practical, let alone ethical validity, since, to borrow the words of Alison Van Rooy, the cosmopolitan aspirations he attempts to bring forth do nothing more than highlighting the winners and obscuring the losers. More so, as will be analyzed below, the worlds complex conditions, due to internal and external contradictory interactions, clearly indicate, according to the 2010-OECD report, an uneasy coexistence between competing and conflicting sources of legitimacy whereby non-state actors create fragile situations that reduce the states capacity of legitimacyand offer alternative sources of government (Legitimacy in Fragile Situations 9). Actually, global inequalities, regional power relations, alongside ethnic, racial or cultural conflicts (the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis; Hezbollah and Taliban, for example) are palpable misfits that merely make for elite policy-making and suffer from a democratic deficit which is, in turn, an outcrying evidence that global citizenship has not yet taken hold (Global Legitimacy 81).However, Appiah altogether disregards these tensions and repeatedly debunks any purist rhetoric of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or culture. To better grasp this purely Appiahan cosmopolitan patriotism, I choose to study briefly in the first part (I) his positions regarding the heated issues of race and ethnicity. We need simply to return to Appiahs classic book, In My Fathers House, to examine his early formulations about what Paul C. Taylor calls his racial eliminativism. These views, which are formulated in chapter two of his book, are actually the product of his liberal critique of W. E. B. Dubois. The second part (II) of the essay will concentrate on Appiahs ideas which, surprisingly, to the best of my knowledge, have not so far been critically examined closely. In his formulations, a cosmopolitan ethics of togetherness is only achievable if one realizes that truth absolutes are condemnable and that hybridization is the only assured passageway to cosmopolitanism. He is highlighted in this article because of his influence on many postcolonial cultural critics who use him without any critical focus. My analysis of his views aims to introduce him as presenting a pertinent example for my contention. My contention stems from a close critical reading of Appiahs politics and ethics in the formulation of his ideas about cosmopolitan values, in order to establish their link to the contemporary intellectual positions as regards the rights and constraints of hospitality. While Appiahs global views in his 1997 essay, for instance, attempt to suggest more liberal motives for the conception of a cosmopolitan global culture, based on such values as respect of difference and tolerance, his values nonetheless, as I will illustrate, are strongly occlusive of certain forms of difference. The last part (III) provides a further critique of Appiahs cosmopolitan ethics, carried out by contemporary engaged theorists in the fields of postcolonial studies and political theories. This aims to pave the way to the design of an ethical and political agenda for the implementation of a just and equitable distribution of global spaces so as to open up the potential for a healthy cultural togetherness among the citizens of the world. To the begging questions raised in this final section by Spivak, Edward Said and others, the following may be added and highlighted: How come that cosmopolitanism is so appealing now, at the very moment when we are witnessing overwhelming separatist events in the world, and exclusionary practices fed by growing fears of the strangers who do not fit? Is it possible today to elaborate a new nervy cosmopolitical agenda within the revivalist network of neo-fundamentalisms and conservatisms? And even if this is pragmatically impossible, would an ethics of its unconditional possibility be enough to make us survive within the turbulent flows of this disenchanting disorderly world? With these questions, I would take the risk of disrupting the current appraisal of cosmopolitanism, and contend that, sadly, cultures continue to be defined in divisive terms. As a matter of fact, in the contemporary worldwide debates about cosmopolitanism, the arguments continue to fuel all passions concerning rights for and state constraints against the immigrants residence in Euro-American countries. Yet, for one thing, many of these cosmopolitan experiences are not voluntary but are imposed by diverse circumstances, including political persecutions, economic precariousness, and/or inter-ethnic hostilities as was the case in the former Yugoslavia, or, as is still the case, in Africa and in parts of the Middle Easts religious dissentions.

I. Appiahs De-Legitimation of the African-American Racial Question If youre white, youre all right.

If youre brown, stick around.

But if youre black, get back.

African American folk saying

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a new direction on the American scene concerning the race issue, thus adding to the civil rights claims a cultural one around the African-American contribution. The latters struggle for liberty is here continued by one for cultural survival via an equal access to cultural membership as well as a participation in the production of cultural meanings. The protagonists in the canon wars argued that black literature was unevenly represented if not totally excluded from the curriculum which was designed by a predominant academic white elite who saw to it that only classical Euro-American literature and philosophy had to be included. As Dean Flower points out:

The definition of American literature did not change. In the college classroom American literature was, and still mainly is, defined by the so-called classic texts and major figures -- as if black writers had really made no difference in our literary history. Look in any publishers college catalogue. The canonized (white) writers, who represent the American tradition, are listed in one place, the African Americans appear in another. The segregation could not be more emphatic.

In his essay The Conservation of Race, Dubois advocated racial solidarity by defining race as a socio-historical concept which refers to a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood, always of common history, traditions and impulses (Quoted in F.H. 26). Dubois propounds a legitimate claim for an ethnocultural consideration of his race in the racist nation-sate of America. Appiah, on the contrary, delegitimizes such claim and argues that we should discard once and for all any reference to race as the vehicle for the movements of solidarity among African-Americans. After a lengthy analysis and counter-argumentation drawn from analytic philosophy and medical biology, Appiah ends up asserting that the truth is that there are no races, there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us.... The Evil that is done is done by the concept, and by easy -- yet impossible -- assumptions as to its application (F.H 45). He further concludes that DuBoiss classification of races is morally inacceptable, and makes him an extrinsic racist. He goes even further to assert: Yet, in his heart, it seems to me that DuBoiss feelings were those of an intrinsic racist. (F.H. 45) According to Appiah,

extrinsic racists make moral distinctions between members of different races because they believe that the racial essence entails certain morally relevant qualities. The basis for the extrinsic racists discrimination between people is their belief that members of different races differ in respects that warrant the differential treatmentrespects, like honesty or courage or intelligence, that are uncontroversially held to be acceptable as a basis for treating people differently. (F.H. 13)

Intrinsic racists, on the other hand,

on my definition, are people who differentiate morally between members of different races because they believe that each race has a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristic entailed by its racial essence. Just, as, for example, many people assume that the bare fact that they are biologically related to another person a brother, an aunt, a cousin --gives them a moral interest in that person, so an intrinsic racist holds the bare fact of being of the same race is a reason for preferring one person to another. For an intrinsic racist, no amount of evidence that a member of another race is capable of great moral, intellectual, or cultural achievements, or has characteristics that, in members of ones own race, would make them admirable or attractive, offers any ground for treating that person as she would treat similarly endowed members of her own race. (14-15)

In his article Racisms, while he avoids considering liberation movements such as Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism as racist, he nonetheless points out that the racial ideas of these groups which stress the need for moral solidarity are usually expressed through the language of intrinsic racism (10-11). For Appiah, racial solidarity is untenable because, by taking the family, the clan, the ethnos, as its models, it threatens to fuel racial prejudice (8). This is ethically unacceptable, he argues, as in this case, one is bound to judge two otherwise morally indistinguishable people only by relying on the criterion of racial membership (13, 16). The polemics about the concept of race as well as the underlying issue of group identity have divided scholars and produced a heated debate among them. The authors of Pro-Black Doesnt Mean Anti-White critically review some key postmodern figures, including Appiah, who argue that the African-American race question creates a mentality of victimization and radicalizes positions of separatism and divisiveness which aim to promote the cult of ethnicity as a stimulus to societal conflict. Others, on the other hand, claim that ethnic identification enables, rather than disables, marginalized groups as it constitutes an empowering psychological force which connects group members to the larger political community. Such connection, they maintain, engenders dignity in the face of social rejection and enables identifiers to function successfully in a society that is dominated by whites (Pro-Black 363). It is further pointed out that as racism is produced by the discourses of domination, it is thus rarely articulated in the agendas and practices of the victims. Racial favoritism or racial pride among African Americans actually drives their political engagement as a temporary strategic step (366), but in effect it is experienced as a shelter against their marginalization and exclusion. Such views help us shed light on Appiahs unfelicitous criticism of Dubois as well as its limitations. Paradoxically, however, he himself points out elsewhere how a groups attitudes are framed by the circumstances which have shaped them as distinct members of a community, and claims that the process through which an individual consciously shapes her projects --including her plans for her own life and her conception of the good-- is done by reference to available labels, available identities. As black American, and as his human integrity is called into question by the racialized mainstream culture inscribed in the external world, DuBois is then simply attempting to sketch an identity in relation to that very external world surrounding him and his fellow African-Americans, an external world that has historically denied them the rights of citizenship. The African-American racial We, it is argued, is not racist. It is only a rallying cry for solidarity with those who share the same history and condition of oppression. We are, Paul Ricoeur claims, oriented, as agents and sufferers of actions, toward the remembered past, the lived present, and the anticipated future of other peoples behavior. In the case of DuBoiss definition of race, the features presented are the past but also the continued existence of racism and discrimination that continue, even today, to play a role in the U.S. These elements impinge on [the African-American] sense of who [they] are and how [they] should orient themselves in the world. ( L.N.I 31)

However, Appiah, who presents himself in Cosmopolitan Patriots as a liberal cosmopolitan (see below), introduces himself in Color Conscious as a passionate democrat (182) as well. As such, he contends, I believe deeply in the importance of reasonable public debate about the problems and the possibilities that face this nation. Much of what is written and spoken about race is dishonest, confused, ill-informed, unhelpful. Appiah further defends the American official discourse as having no racial momentum, by stretching it back as far as Thomas Jefferson who, according to him, saw from the beginning that black slavery was incompatible with the best principles of the American revolution; and he worried too about the political consequences of the deep rooted prejudices entertained by many of his white fellow citizens (C.C. 181-2). Appiah crosses out Jeffersons slaveholding and merely mentions him as an archetypal figure of justice and liberty. Despite his ambivalent attitude towards slavery, historical evidence reveals that not only did Jefferson own 267 slaves by 1822 but he himself admitted frequently that he used to punish them with so much brutality in order to make an example of them in terrorem to others.

I would therefore argue that a move beyond the reduction of race to its dehistoricized textual rendering as merely a mental concept, offers, in Alcoffs words, the possibility of tak[ing] into account the full force of race as a lived experience. The poststructuralist discursive reading of race, Robert Young laments, falls in an epistemic fallacy that erases its materialist, experiential salience, thereby exhaust[ing] its political/theoretical viability (Linguistic Turn 337). Race is not a mystery, he argues, since it operates as a material practice in marking racially coded subjects for differential levels of surplus extraction and violence and it has an historical emergence (336). As a historical, materially-grounded signifier, race is at the roots of the production of slavery and racism. Young quotes Eric Williams who rightly points that slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery, and Alex Callinicos who links the modern development of racism to that of capitalism as the dominant mode of production on a global scale.

These counter-claims are palpable evidence of Appiahs confusing amalgamation. Doubtless, not only would Appiah consider the countless discourses about race that have been produced since the beginnings of time as useless and aberrant, but also, worse, here he is confounding between the victim and the oppressor. For while DuBois, as a black resident in the USA, without the right to citizenship, testifies about his communitys distressing historical and current condition; while he develops his perspective on race relations, albeit strategically essentialist, in order to conserve and preserve the human integrity of the black race in the face of an oppressively segregationist dominant system, Appiahs rhetorical retort bluntly insults (Appiahs term) the insulted, those who see like Toni Morrison, for instance, in line with DuBois and multiple others, that American identity, in the WASP perspective, was viewed as European in ancestry, and that race, as Morrison explains, continues to function as a useful metaphor for the construction of Americanness. Hence, in the creation of American national identity, being American is better determined as white. II. Appiahs Cosmopolitan ValuesOne distinctively cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. (But they have to be values worth living by). K. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (144)

Values and norms, albeit apparently simple concepts whose meanings may be shared by all without much disagreement, are nevertheless a matter of wide controversial discussions among experts in diverse disciplines, ranging from philosophy, sociology, psychology and political theory. Are values and norms descriptive or prescriptive? And, if the latter is the case, what are the implications of such discrepancies on intercultural exchanges? The debates are usually centered around issues concerning whether their function in diverse cultural systems transform their meaning(s) or whether it remains the same with merely different applications, corresponding to the diversity of manners and attitudes. Are there values, for instance, which may be universal or universalizable and others which remain particular and local? The argument may be compacted into the relation between what Sven Ove Hansson calls the philosophical formalization or idealization of a concept and its non-philosophical usage or its implementation in the social world.

The lesson gained from global pluralism lies in the emergence of a cultural and philosophical thought that gives primacy to toleration and respect of difference. Truth and value are today purified from universal or universalizable absoluteness. This postmodern challenge to the totalizing absolutes, or to the divisive segmentation of world cultures, separated from one another, each protecting and defending its unique authenticity and integrity, attempts to be inaugurative of a cosmopolitan project that designs the necessary foundations for dialogue among different communities. An alternative philosophy is being born, stipulating that, although we all hold deep-seated moral, philosophical and cultural differences, we may nevertheless, by the mere fact of our being rational human beings, meet and agree on certain general moral and political global principles and standards. For Appiah, every culture has its own standards of truth, its own values and belief systems, its distinctive features, its particular moral perspectives, and political choices which make it unique without undermining its participation in the human global affairs. Visions may be incompatible, he cautions, yet, today such incompatibility is respected and even ought to be celebrated for the promotion of a diversity of value systems among the different cultures of the cosmos. No culture is superior to, no truth is truer than another, no system is acclaimed as good at the expense of another which, by comparison, is considered bad. The current attraction to cultural difference, which fuels the cosmopolitan imagination, as Sonya O. Rose suggests, implies that for the latter to be practically implemented, difference itself must be maintained. As long as universalism is pushed aside, truth accordingly becomes a matter of a groups relative interpretation of its value. By defining value in such a way, truth becomes in the relevant sense, as truth relative to that group. This determined project is discussed by Appiah who, by move[ing] back and forth between racial specificity and an unraced universal, sees in its ultimate realization the possibility for humanity to change our minds, and further our enquiry about difference, so as, ultimately, to be able to construct a cosmopolitan human ethic. This ethical ideal, Appiah maintains, aims at inscribing our obligations to others (or theirs to us, obligations we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity. (Cosmopolitanism xv, xxi) It may thus be argued that in the case of any formalization, any philosophical engagement with a subject matter is bound to simplify the complexity of the issue by selecting the evidence that most appropriately validates the authors ideas. By doing so, however, one will most likely choose to answer, among the questions raised by the issue, those s/he is capable of tackling, hence leaving out many other pertinent philosophical features. This is why the merits or drawbacks of any formal approaches can only be judged after each of them has been critically thoroughly investigated. For instance, as examined above, I contend with Appiah who, by highlighting the semantic/conceptual complexities of race and identity, merely questions their validity and undermines their relevance to current debates. In his book on cosmopolitanism, to avoid the thorny issue around the homogenizing spread of global capitalism, he in turn starts by eliminating provocative correlates to the cosmopolitan question by cautioning his readers that this is not a study on globalization, nor is it one on multiculturalism as these two often designate a disease [they] purport to cure, and hence settles on the least unwholesome term cosmopolitanism, as it, albeit equally disputed has proved a survivor (Cosmopolitanism xi-xii) since the Cynics outlined its conceptual foundations, and for the subsequent development of its values as those which are based on limiting conflict between local partialities and universal morality. (xvi)

In this section, my main focus is limited to a critique of Appiahs cosmopolitan ethics, by examining its implicatedness in matters of truth-value, belief, particularism, partialism, and relativism. To put it simply, I take cosmopolitanism as a static value whose ethics is ideally shared by anyone everywhere, from the most classical philosophical formulations in Greece to todays least intellectual lay persons around the world. Yet, even as the latter comprises a truth-value, believed in as abstraction, since circumstances may change, so too our attitude to value will automatically change by the experience of its implementation. One would not believe in something unless they have a verifiable experience of it in their lives. Peoples particular standpoints differ in accordance with each individuals empirical advantage, or lack of it. The degree of advantage or benefit becomes the norm, the rule for our evaluation, the means by which we set criteria of valuation. Our moral views are dictated by our political and/or material positions, and thus are framed by ideological perspectives, which are in turn represented by changes in our states of mind, changes made by external factors in our lives. The ideal example for this would be to observe how fascism brought about by WWII had belied Kants national character appraisal that a German was too cosmopolitan to be deeply attached to his homeland Accordingly, the point here is that value remains the same unless a decision is taken or changes in circumstances transpire to transform it in a way or another.

Anthony Appiah gets engaged in a cautious and seemingly self-conscious strategy to demonstrate the truth-value of his arguments concerning a formal philosophical debate around the thorny issue of current cosmopolitanism. Aware of the complexity of the problem as regards the implementation of such ideal in todays social and political normative spaces, and thus conscious of the possibility for his opponents to devise solid challenges to his arguments, Appiah proceeds, in a quasi-pedagogical and philosophically unorthodox manner, to justify his position, by attempting to prove the ideal validity of his claims despite the non-ideal environment that makes it hard for these claims to be worked out properly.

1. The Roots of Appiahs Cosmopolitan EthicsAppiahs philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism is taken from the message his deceased father left for him and his sisters: Remember you are citizens of the world. (Cosmopolitanism xvi) The whole book will be a further illustration of the truth-value and validity of the paternal idea(l) to the more and more globalized contemporary world. In other words, he indulges in analyzing, explaining, simplifying the concept, via what he calls the model of conversation. The latter method or strategy blends together Appiahs own philosophical engagement with his proponents and opponents alike, alongside his attempts to show the ethical benefit impacted by conversation on the contemporary worlds multilayered interactions. As a philosopher by trade, he thus presents his goal in terms of managing to persuade you that there are interesting conceptual questions that lie beneath the facts of globalization, (xviii) facts which, based on his autobiographical personal upbringing, he sees as persuasive phenomena for the construction of an ethics, represented by what he used to term as rooted cosmopolitan patriotism in his 1997 essay, and which he coins as partial cosmopolitanism, in memory of his father, in the present book. Consider his simplified explanation. In remember you are citizens of the world, he states,

my father never saw a conflict between local partialities and a universal morality between being part of the place you were and a part of a broader human community. Raised with this father and an English mother, who was both deeply connected to our family in England and fully rooted in Ghana, [] I always had a sense of family and tribe that was multiple and overlapping: nothing could have seemed more commonplace [or more cosmopolitan, for] cosmopolitanism [] begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association. (xvi-xvii; emphasis added)In Appiahs mixture of the informal autobiographical element and the more formal language of philosophy, a few notes have to be focused on. First, as philosophical specialized terminology tends to have, in the terms of Sven Ove Hansson, no justification apart from [its] capability of clarifying the corresponding non-philosophical concepts, we [philosophers], on the one hand, have to deviate from the general-language meanings of our key terms in order to obtain the precision necessary for philosophical analysis; but on the other hand, if we deviate so far as to lose contact with general-language meanings, then the rationale for the whole undertaking will be lost. (S.V.N. 4; emphasis added) Indeed, clearly, Appiah is engaged in the classical rhetorical tradition of persuasion which he presents as part and parcel of the form and structure of the philosophical convention of conversation. The latter is immediately represented informally as the basis for the development of a worldly cosmopolitan ethics. Conversation is presented here, in the philosophical sense, as a static value with dynamic properties. For ideal conversation to be carried out, it ought to abide by certain rules --norms and rules of exchange, interaction, dialogue--, required to develop habits of coexistence,of living together, of association. With his fathers message as foundational, Appiah oscillates between the meanings of philosophical concepts (conversation, cosmopolitanism) and the real world with its general-language meanings, hoping, in the long run, that the rationale for the whole undertaking will [not] be lost. Yet, throughout Cosmopolitanism, the way how conversation, as material practice, experientially happens among different subjects in the world is left unexplained by Appiah, thus leaving out its possible implication with power dynamics and the rhetorical will to control. Indeed, everyone admits that conversation is a communicative means that involves mutual recognition and negotiation, and that dialogue, as it involves speaking to and listening to another, enhances the possibility for protagonists to express their different positions and perspectives. The need for dialogue to end disputes or to set the grounds for more justice in human relations is a valid option. This has been practically the case with the Palestinians and the Jews, with gender relations, with the North and South dialogues for the instauration of more democratic participation in world affairs and more equitable economic exchange. However, alongside this reciprocal address, no one can deny that conversation may also -- and actually does -- involve the will to master, the will to impose ones positions and to defend ones interests. Truly Bakhtin has stressed the dialogic quality of speech communication but has not neglected the fact that disputes may occur and that when dialogue fails, a culture of indifference is established .Appiah, for instance, refuses to commit himself in thorny current issues such as those that concern Islamic fundamentalism as presenting a threat to the West and modernity, or the practices of female genital mutilation in some African countries. He does indeed find the latter abhorrent, but does not claim any cosmopolitical institutional interference to stop these atrocities. To justify the practice, he simply states that in any conversation about certain ingrained values, we are not likely to come to a reasoned agreement. Female genital cutting, he hastens to caution, may be shocking to those who consider it as mutilation, but is that any more than a reflex response to an unfamiliar practice? Such people, he continues, exaggerate the medical risks. They say that female circumcision demeans women, but do not seem to think that male circumcision demeans men. Lets recognize this simple fact: a large part of what we do, we do it because it is just what we do. You get up in the morning at eight-thirty. Why that time? (Cosmopolitanism 72-3; emphasis added)

In his book about the philosophical failure in the aspirations of justice theory, Mark Kingwell rightly argues, the desire for a public conversation that is challenging, lively, decisive, undistorted, and fruitful is widespread. Unfortunately, disagreement about what this conversation should be like, and how it should be defended, is just as widespread. Calls for a dialogue are frequent in disputes about justice; detailed and convincing models of it are far less so. Appiah mentions numerous issues and points to the difficulty in reaching consensus in many of them, but he does not explore the ways to continue conversation despite the possibility of contestation; he avoids outlining the ethical strategies, or determining the moral duties that may help limit the risk of confrontation. In the absence of ethical responsibilities that guarantee mutual respect and conservation of interests for all partners in a dialogic situation, a return to a Hobbesian state of nature would not be far from transpiring.

In brief, Appiah does not develop his conversational talent beyond his dialogic interaction with his peers whom he attempts to persuade so that they change their minds. He thus relies on a rhetorical strategy that places him as an expert orator. In rhetoric, as he must know well, lies are so well-coated within the message that they take the appearance of truth and trust; an undetected falsehood retains its truthful appearance. His dialogic stance and persuasive conversational skill, as shown above and as will be further highlighted, are in the words of Leonard C. Hawes, predicated on an affirmative will to falsehood, a creative will, a will to power rather than a will to truth, which ultimately is a will to be right, and in the process to make others wrong.

2. From Homi Bhabhas Unhomely to Appiahs Cosmopolitan Patriots

Homi Bhabha, (to whom Appiah is particularly grateful for the elaboration of his essay Cosmopolitan Patriots (617) picks up the sophisticated and complicated concept of the unhomely to deconstruct the notion of belonging to a particular home or country or nation. Drawing on Henry Jamess exilic ideas about unhomeliness, Bhabha expands his theoretical stance on what he refers to as this international theme. By celebrating it as inaugurating the diasporic extra-territorial initiation, he draws our attention from the start to the fact that to be unhomed is not to be homeless. To be unhomed is to be a citizen of the world, it is to be relocated, made to attend to the collapse of the private/public, here/there polarities.

According to Bhabha, the unhomely corresponds to the seemingly by now happy displacements of millions of peoples of the former colonies to the countries of their former oppressors. It is as such a post-colonial invasion of the Euro-American spaces, whose residents have been historically implicated in the violent dispossession of their respective homelands. This thirdworldization of the Western home, Bhabha claims, inaugurates a new era where the notion of home itself is put into question, as the dichotomy between private and public is turned uncanny, and as the metropolitan border is opened up to welcome these unprecedented settlements, designed by nomadic subjectivities who are determined to construct new homes in the spaces from which they have been for a long time excluded. Diasporic invasions reverse the ancient polarities by transplanting the there (Asia, Africa, the Caribbean Islands, etc.) into the here. In such blessing condition, one is no longer excluded, banned, outcast from the worlds alluring opportunities, one inhabits the world, fuses with it, appropriates while s/he is appropriated by it, adopts it and is happy to be adopted by it. In this diasporic unhomely displacement, he continues,

the intimate recesses of the domestic spaces become sites for historys most intricate invasions...[in which] the border between home and world becomes confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other. In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible....The home does not remain the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its social or historical counterpart. The unhomely is in short the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world.

Ironically enough, by vindicating the name and fulfilling the praise of the unhomely, Bhabha considers that he is carrying out one of the most intricate historical invasions into the pure Western space. It is shocking here to see how he, not only appropriates the colonial trope of the unhomely and makes it correspond to his condition, but also that of invasions. His text is actually a reproduction of the colonial experience during which displacement was not a matter of alienation, but rather, through presencing mechanisms, the settlers have defamiliarized the colonized space and have made it appear like their respective Home Countries left behind, the glorious invasions of which they never fail to celebrate. By doing so, they could feel literally at home in the world. Since the alien world has disruptively become theirs, they have in turn become citizens of Europe-the-Home-in-the-World, the World-in-Europe-the-Home. By acclaiming global spatial compression, and by celebrating the openness of the Western world to its difference, Bhabha clearly allegorizes his comfortable condition. Indeed, it may be worth recalling that as a Western colonial trope, being at-home-in-the world, for the Euro-American touristic imaginary, hardly designates a cosmopolitan utopian ideal. In vulgar terms, it rather means to go out, take possession of a place from which its original owners are marginalized, made only to service their Western visitors .

By the time the imperial powers left their respective colonies, they saw to it to establish an economic system that would guarantee their firm grip on the Capital of the new nations. Multinational companies were the privileged substitutes for such mission. In Daughters, Paule Marshall recounts a discussion between a national Caribbean representative and the visiting North American businessmen, in which the latters views are made in a form that illustrates that the table is not turning. These views are not articulated in the terms of a negotiation between equal partners but uttered in the form of a few commandments. Businessmen do not want to hear about economic projects that would develop the country and profit its citizens by improving their conditions. What they need are nice harbors, gigantic hotels, and the accompanying sophisticated resorts for their deserved holidays:A large balding man,...the spokesman for the entire delegation...[did] not even let Primus [the national representative] finish telling him about the cannery.... No!, he said, cutting him off almost as soon as he began. No!, he repeated, the metal gray eyes taking over the expression on his face and the tone of his voice. What they needed to do first and foremost was to improve their port. ... A first rate port. ... And they didnt have nearly enough hotels. Tourism. Now thats what they should really be pushing. And in a big way. It was natural for the place. ... They needed to get rid of a fancy relic like this place and bring in the chains. The Hiltons and Sheratons ... .along with some healthy concessions on custom duties, taxes and the like. And everything nice and stable politically, no coups or government takeovers. ... And they also offer the addicts like himself two or three first-rate golf courses...

Consider as a consequence the bleak picture that Jamaica Kincaid gives her readers about tourism in her native island, Antigua. In A Small Place, she focuses on the servile manner tourists are treated by customs officers, and draws our attention to the internal hatred and hostility against the indigenous population. The tourist obviously is unaware of such self-denigrating practices, for what s/he is concerned with is simply to get out as soon as possible and marvel at the exotic landscape. Moreover, being favoured by the customs officers is clearly not surprising for them. This simply designates the expected special way in which masters are to be treated by their slaves: you move through customs swiftly, Kincaid says, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which is to say special). (4-5)

Jamaica Kincaids A Small Place and Paule Marshalls Daughters provide a blatant refutation of Appiahs claims and denounce the neo-perpetration of exploitation carried out, on their native islands, by the heirs of the imperial systems. In their views, cosmopolitanism, as it manifests itself through the touristic practices, is an extension of the past colonial practices, imposing a unilateral dissemination of a leisure culture that continues to have a colonizing effect. Kincaid and Marshall read tourism as part and parcel of an unfinished program of dispossession of the land, wherein the Europeans continue to take advantage of the paradises they left, while the natives, today like yesterday, are displaced in their homeland. They accordingly locate the contemporary Western globe-trotters as the privileges left by their forefathers. Hence, as they illustrate, the current universalist trends, which transpire under the guise of cosmopolitanism that attempts to transcend ethnocentric prejudices, cannot hide its relation to power and hegemony. As Ackbar Abbas contends,

the ideal cosmopolitanism, as an orientation, a willingness to engage with the other an intellectual stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences may be an admirable one, but it is sustainable only in metropolitan centers where movement and travel are undertaken with ease. Yet, what about a situation where these conditions are not available --a situation where divergent cultural experiences are not freely chosen but forced on us, as they are under colonialism? What form of openness should we cultivate then, and would this constitute a cosmopolitan stance or a compradorist one? Isnt cosmopolitanism one version of cultural imperialism? Isnt there a chapter missing, a chapter on colonialism as infamy?

With this stated evidence, one can better detect that, whether conscious of it or not, the blindness, whereby both theorists create a peaceful unhomely location in the heart of the Western environment, underlies a palimpsestic Victorian ideology that denied the right to home not only to strangers but even to one part of the native citizens themselves. To put it more clearly, the equation I mention here between Bhabha and the Victorians is dictated by the formers symptomatic un-vision of the excluded (the homeless at home), which I understand as a refusal to see those who are kept out of the picture, and subsequently as a denial of their wretched existence. Home, territory, nation, country, are then, for some, the places from which they have to escape, while for others, they are defined as the spaces of safety and protection from the intrusion of or contiguity with the barbaric. To illustrate this exclusionary ideology which she sees as contemporaneous, Rosemary Marangoly George quotes a passage from John Ruskins Sesame and Lilies that stands as a master exemplar of the Westerners idealisation of their homogeneous space as well as their determined intention to keep it uncontaminated by the savageonnic society of the peripheral world:This is the true nature of home --it is a place of Peace; the shelter not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer world penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile barbaric society of the outer world is allowed...to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it then becomes only a part of the outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in it. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods...so far as it is this...so far it vindicates the name, and fulfills the praise, of Home.

As shown in this passage, there is a subtle distinction to be drawn between Bhabha and the Victorians. While Ruskin celebrates home as a place to escape to in order to find shelter within its protective frame, he simultaneously excludes the corrupting intruders from its sacred space. It sounds as if the law, whether ancient or current, the very law, as an absolute moral determinant, which equates human beings absolutely in the Love thy neighbour! logically had to slip into its secular counterpart so as to institute divisions between peoples and lands. The cosmopolitan ideal of Love thy neighbour ironically inscribes a cultural and political history based on the exclusion and marginalisation of the deviant, the improper, the alien, the foreigner, in short the stranger.

In his essay, Cosmopolitan Patriots, Appiah, like Bhabha, deplores rigid attachments to nation and culture. It would be interesting to mention that the essay was initially published as Against National Culture. Inspired by Gertrude Steins America is my country and Paris is my hometown, Appiah comes to see that the world is no longer composed of fixed territorial locations. It has been so compressed, he notes, that it no longer constitutes a group of nations with differentiated cultural and political structures; it has turned into an idea implying the deconstructive move towards post-nationalist, post-Third Worldist configurations. In short, quoting from his deceased fathers letter, he claims that today, we could proudly and safely say that [we] are citizens of the world. Appiahs explicit target are those who charge the proponents of cosmopolitan patriotism of parasitism and desired uprootedness. In his own terms, the response to this exaggerated accusation is straightforward. For him,

the cosmopolitan patriot can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of ones own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other different people. (Cosmopolitan Patriots 618)Appiah attempts to introduce cosmopolitanism, not so much as an enemy image to the bordered nation but as a concept that opens to the latters natives the possibility to live in-and-out of its frames. The etymologically compounded essence of the term (cosmos and polis) expressly implies that double relation. One may be born in by fate, and thus belong to, a particular place (polis), yet, either by imposed historical circumstances or by choice, they may aspire to live somewhere else, and become connected to larger communities which provide the opportunity of more extensive human relations (cosmos). By being rooted, albeit unrooted, the cosmopolitan patriot, for Appiah, enjoys the double-bind. S/he is not limited to the either-or position imposed by the restrictive nationalist rhetoric of bondage; s/he is both-and; an outsider-insider citizen of the world, that is, hybrid.

Appiah seems here to be advocating the possibility of a world where each one of us may practically live ethically by unconditionally respecting other peoples differences. He further claims that if we have all become globe trotters, and if the world is one and undividable, i.e. borderless, we may move from one place to another, share the pleasures of the new places, or enjoy their availability in those places that are home to different people. Besides, one can easily agree with Appiah when he admits that not anyone can take pleasure in exile, for he separates the kind of forced, coerced immigration from the self-willed kind of cosmopolitan Diaspora. The first, he explains, is involuntary, hence hateful and deplorable. Yet, he continues, -- and here the problem arises -- what can be hateful, if coerced, can be celebrated when it flows from the free decision of individuals or of groups. (618; my emphasis) At this stage, I hasten to argue --in the same ironic mood as the statement which stipulates that we are all equal but some are more equal than others-- that the trope of colonial mobility[attached to a home of ones own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other different people] is being unquestionably transferred into the postcolonial subjects realm of displacement with the deliberate blindness to or unconsciousness of the fact that, in the words of Caren Kaplen, displacement is not universally available or desirable for many subjects, nor is it evenly experienced. Indeed, in a recent timely volume, entitled Ltranger dans la mondialit [The Stranger in Globality], a number of intellectuals have taken issue with the European Unions latest legislations against immigrants from their former colonies, and stress the European Countries failure to design a democratic model that takes into account their new citizens cultural difference. The reason for such failure, they note, lies in their inability to break of their colonial instincts, by continuing to behave on the basis of a logic of inclusion and exclusion which contains immigrants in a quasi apartheid system with different legislations that segregate against the non-autochthonous population in terms of rights and duties (20). Further, in his critical work on the ethics of postmodernity, Zygmunt Bauman provides a pertinent illustration of the way todays actual cosmopolitan togetherness is encountered in daily life, among even common people and ordinary citizens. He gives the example of what he calls the stationary togetherness of the railway carriage, or the aircraft cabin, or the waiting room, and demonstrates how people cope with it by the production of instinctive strategies that favor the feeling of loneliness, so as to construct a virtual site of dead interaction, a site of suspended animation, of frozen togetherness, of refrigerated encounters. All this to keep the stranger at arms length. Bauman further reacts by arguing that the peoples attitudes, as instinctive as they appear, are actually dictated by a visible/invisible institutional program in city-planning, a program that guarantees to keep the stranger at bay. Among the strategies to live with[out] the strangers, he notes, have been the recurrent attempts to burn out the uncertainty of the citizens by focusing the abhorrence of the indetermination of the abnormal on a selected category (immigrants, the ethnically different, vagrants, the homeless, all of whom are devotees of bizarre subcultures), while hoping against hope that their elimination or confinement would provide the sought-after solution to the problem of their existence, and install the dream of safety. City planning is a war declared on strangers --on that under-determination, that puzzling idiosyncrasy [or aberration], which makes strangers out of the others; not a war aimed at a conquest (a forceful conversion of the multitude of strangers into so many individual acquaintances, tamed and domesticated)-- but at the excision and burning out of the strange (that is, of everything unique, surprising, baffling in them, through reducing the strangers to categories in which all members are the same. The stranger is the enemy of the well-bred, established community, and the city planning (guided by the utopia of perfect society achieved through city planning) is about exterminating whatever there is strange in the strangers and, if needed, the strangers themselves. (L. F. 128-9)

In a 2008 moving article, in line with Bauman, the Caribbean-born Caryll Phillips -- who has just become American citizen -- laments how the post 9/11New York, the world city par excellence, with an astonishing degree of diversity, has turned into the most unwelcoming place for strangers with or without green cards. This fact and feeling of closure, he painfully realizes, is fuelled by an official hostile delirium against immigrants, with a political discourse that has established a climate of patriotic fear in which it is good to be afraid and vigilant and strong, thus encouraging Euro-American citizens to tape up their windows, and be on the look-out for. those immigrants the White House now wishes to castigate as the Other.

Frontiers, barriers, borders, prohibitions, are all, in these observations, halting markers. They are then the terms which are not lived or experienced in the same way by everyone. There are those who, wherever they go, believe they are at home-in-the-world, and those who, wherever they are, either within or without, either inside or outside their countries, feel tragically homeless. Indeed, as shown in the previous section about race and as this will be further developed below, Appiahs obligations towards a shared humanity (see above) does not seem to take into account ones full commitment to the suffering of a large proportion of crying humanity, nor does he consider the value of any practical involvement to defend the integrity of those who are globally subjected to multifarious violations and the worst forms of injustice.

3. Appiahs and Bhabhas Elitism

After we have illustrated the material, practical inappropriateness of their arguments, perhaps the best way to approach Appiahs and Bhabhas unconvincing happy mood about the diasporic cosmopolitanism is to look at their respective intellectual affiliations. This will hopefully at least relatively clarify their deconstructive theorization about the subject of home and nation. Actually, it would not be insignificant to note that Appiah himself admits, in his essay, that he is politically a cosmopolitan liberal, an anti-essentialist, anti-universalistic humanist, and that he is engaged in the polemic about the politics of multiculturalism in the United States. Philosophically, he also recognizes his affiliation to the problematic contemporary discourse ethics and its vanguards (Rawls, Habermas, etc.). Yet, he hastens to note that his commitment is critical, not integrationist. For instance, he claims that a cosmopolitan is different from a humanist in the sense that the latter is all-embracing, integrating everything and everyone, while the former celebrates the fact that there are different local human ways of being. A humanist then expresses a desire for global homogeneity while a cosmopolitan stands as a defender of heterogeneity and diversity. Immediately after, however, Appiah restricts his cosmopolitan vanguardism with stringent rules which belie his advocacy of this very heterogeneity. For him, differences are to be respected as long as they meet certain ethical constraints --as long, in particular, as they respect basic human rights. Who chooses and decides what is ethical and what is not? In this complex heterogeneous world, whose morality is to be followed? Whose is rejected? What are the criteria for acceptance or rejection? And under whose auspices are these to be designed and negotiated? A myriad of questions asked by social theorists engaged in the contemporary discourse ethics are left unanswered by Appiah. But maybe the text has one which is reiterated throughout: We cosmopolitans! Let us consider the whole passage:

We liberal cosmopolitans of the sort I am defending might put its point like this: we value the variety of human forms of social and cultural life; we do not want everybody to become part of a homogeneous global culture; and we know that this means that there will be local differences. As long as these differences meet certain general ethical constraints --as long, in particular, as they respect basic human rights --we are happy to let them be. (Cosmopolitan Patriots 621; my emphasis)

The proliferation of the pronoun we in this extract clearly belies Appiahs ethical mission. In his attempt to present the liberal values in terms of openness to and respect of the variety of human forms, he inadvertently paradoxically falls into an exclusionary rhetoric that limits toleration only to a particular kind of difference. What one gets from his statement is that the liberal community to which he belongs accepts new members with the conditional restriction that they should themselves share their liberal views. Appiahs we then constructs, to borrow the words from Rebecca Comay, a defiantly ethnocentric political institution that reserves the right to let be those who feel and defend its political agenda, and to refuse those who do not. Comay, who has noticed a similar attitude in Richard Rorty, might have perfectly expanded her critique to Appiah. In her observation, Rortys political writings are shot through with we descriptions -- we liberal intellectuals, we liberal democrats, we Western liberal intellectuals, we pragmatists, etc. -- that define not only his current sort of self-identification but also his relevant ethnos. It is a we which is defiantly parochial and names itself without flinching. We does not proselytize; we is as we are. To claim more than this is sanctimoniousness; to claim less, bad manners.

As a matter of fact, as his text explicitly shows, Appiah and his collaborators (the sort I am defending), who define not only [their] current sort of self-identification but also [their] relevant ethnos (Interrupting 36), obviously present themselves as the absolute guardians of justice in their so-restricted realm of new liberalism. Appiahs cosmopolitan patriots constitute a liberal founding ethnocentric elite set to design the norms and codes of its constitution. Appiahs liberalism turns out to be legalistic rather than engaged in the ethics and politics of multicultural diversity. The cosmopolitan liberal decision to welcome, to include strangers is ironically countered by the right to exclude those who do not correspond to the criteria of integration. New members or citizens, say, are tolerated under the condition of their performance of basic obedience to and respect of the liberal values. In other words, it is clearly inferred from his statement that differences of local cultures may be maintained in a global culture, only and only if these cultures abide by the rules and respect the global system of certain basic norms. Difference is assimilated here under the rubric of a homogeneous set of attributes. Such homogeneity guaranteeing social cohesion is best illustrated in a passage where he appears to hail cultural relativism while paradoxically stressing the grounds for the elimination of that very difference through similitude in leisure practices or intellectual elitism between different subjectivities: Though the cosmopolitan will remind us that what we share with others is not always an ethnonational culture: sometimes it will be just that you and I a Peruvian and a Slovak both like to fish, or have read and admired Goethe in translation . . . or believe as lawyers with very different trainings, in the ideal of the rule of law. (Cosmopolitan Patriots 639)

Appiahs ideal cosmopolitans are somewhat selected and classified in accordance with certain class and intellectual affiliations, alongside corresponding political affinities (the ideal of the rule of law). His liberal views, admittedly, open up the dominant cultural space to include new cultures. Notice here that the Peruvian and the Slovack do not present a threat as they are integrated conditionally by their adherence to the norms of liberal democracy and their obedience to the rule of law. More so, such assimilated citizens may not need to travel for them to participate in the cosmopolitan project. Their mobility is not required. They may remain at home, say remain rooted cosmopolitans, yet, as Dorothy Geller argues, at thesame time benefit from the pleasures of cosmopolitan citizenship, enjoyed by those with whom they share distinctions of taste and, therefore, by implication, class position.

Bhabha, on the other hand, undeniably stands as one of the fervent advocates of intellectual eclecticism encompassing simultaneously psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, sociology, deconstruction, etc. These inter-textualist interventions, despite their opacity and frustrating hermeticism even for specialists, show a discursive mastery of the theorized issues. Yet one has to lament that in this case, like in the case of some of the postmodern ludic theories of subjectivity, the reality of the world as a lived experience with its daily chores and traumas, is pushed aside, displaced, in short, subalternised, sub-ordinated. III. Contesting Appiahs and Bhabhas EliminativismMy countrys name is apathy. My land is smeared with shame. My sightscape moves its homeless hordes through the welfares turgid flame. The search goes on for rooms and warmth, a drawer; a hot place just for ones soup--what liberty is for.

Testimony, in David Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity Spivak has eloquently critiqued some of the postmodern theorists limitations and political distance from public matters. While she herself uses abundantly poststructuralist and deconstructive theory, she claims, like Said, that her engagement with it is guided by a vigilant critical awareness of its pitfalls. She deplores the anti-humanist partial interrogations, based on their discursive critique of Humanisms hero --the sovereign subject as author, the subject of authority. Apart from this, in vain do we look in their texts, for the design of a liberative exit from the crippling grip of individualism. This is why, she argues, the crisis in anti-humanism does not really seem to move our collective fully.

Concerning the postcolonial intellectuals blind borrowings from Western contemporary theory, Spivak refuses to accuse them of the eclecticism of supermarket consumerism. Yet, she points out to their obstinate blindness to the never-shifting material problems of the oppressed, and considers the enjoyment of the privileged space they are occupying as indicative of the narcissism of the new cosmopolitan [Third World] academic. Spivak ends up warning that as there is an affinity between the imperialist subject and the subject of humanism, todays Third World scholars have to be aware of the historico-political provenance of their various Western collaborators. Therefore, falling prey to the easy seductive lure of uncritical borrowing will ultimately lead to the repetition of the same old structures of hegemony and domination. Discontinuous, vigilant collaboration is then the only way that displaces repetition, and guarantees a transactional quality and rupture from the colonial predicament. (202)

To tackle this issue of cosmopolitanism, Beth E. Notar begins her article by focusing even on the semantic status of the term, while relating it to other isms, such as imperialism, colonialism, factionalism and tribalism:

But then again, what is cosmopolitanism? And what has been its relationship with the other -isms? Is cosmopolitanism a positive condition, potentially leading to world peace? Or is it an ideology of the colonizers? Is it simply a predicament of those who are drifting and disaffected? From whose perspective? What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Who is cosmopolitan, and who not? And cosmopolitan on whose terms? (PCB 617)Edward Said, in turn, condemns the academic platitudes of some postcolonial scholars perspectives vis--vis the new global order, by arguing that as critical methodology, their discourse has lapsed into a purely academic practice which has lost its political edge. Its failure today, he notes, is due to its delivery of a self-sufficient rhetoric about a world that is injuriously devoid of the the terrible negative effects of globalization. As he laments: the gradual emergence of confused paradigms of research [is fuelled by] the new ascendancy of globalized, postmodern consciousness from whichthe gravity of history has been excised. Anticolonial liberation theory and the real history of empire, with its massacres and exploitation, have [been silenced] by those purely academic practices [where] we cannot see sites of resistance to the terrible negative effects of globalization.

One would safely add to Saids contention that worse, in our context, the colonial displacing practices seem to be echoed by their postmodern discursive counterpart in Appiahs and Bhabhas texts. In their textual camouflage, they seem to adopt a parodied oedipal-like self-blinding strategy, which, far from making them acquire more knowledge about the world, rather allows them to disregard their fellow immigrants turmoil, not to mention that in this very Western world, there is an uncountable number of people who are homeless at home, as the epigraph to this section demonstrates. The massive flow of immigrants to the Euro-American countries is often studied by diverse scholars, not as a wholesome opportunity, but is examined as a challenge to [these] nations sense of unity, [as) globalization threatens both the identities of the original residents of the areas in which newcomers settle and those of the immigrants and their children, with long-term social [and psychological] implications.

Other contending forces such as Masao Miyoshi and Craig Calhoun deplore the state of ruins some of todays postcolonial scholars (working in American universities) are participating in, and urge for the construction of a counter knowledge that enables the transformation of the world in which global capitalism blindly reigns. In the mid of the worlds disorderly increasing implementation of oppressive and exclusionary state legislations against immigrants and refugees alike, the uncritical advocates of the so-called globalized World-citizenship, as an antidote to such practices, cannot hide the fact that cosmopolitanism is not affordable by everyone or anyone. By blinding themselves to such blatant realities, these academics, Miyoshi observes, conceal [their] liberal self-deception. Rather, their views provide an alibi for their complicity in the TNC [transnational corporation] version of neocolonialism. These evangelists, he continues to argue, are simply collaborating with the hegemonic ideology, which looks, as usual, as if it were no ideology at all. Craig Calhoun, in a similar staunch criticism, makes a direct reference to the academic hailers of world citizenship, for whom cosmopolitanism has a considerable rhetorical advantage and denounces them as late travelers who while being armed with visa-friendly passports and credit cards, oscillate between their position as native informants in the US and as expert go-betweens in their respective countries. Certainly, he further ironizes, in Western academic circles, it is hard to imagine preferring to be known as parochial, but it is also hard not to want to be a citizen of the world. Yet, Calhoun concludes with a series of rhetorical understated questions addressed to these scholars:

What does it mean to be a citizen of the world? Through what institutions is this citizenship effectively expressed? Is it mediated through various particular, more local solidarities? Does it present a new, expanded category of identification as better than older, narrower ones, or does it pursue better relations among a diverse range of traditions and communities? How does this citizenship contend with global capitalism and with noncosmopolitan dimensions of globalization?... What experiences make cosmopolitan democracy an intuitively appealing approach to the world? What experiences does it obscure from view? (170-3)

Regarding the issue of cosmopolitan patriotism, it becomes, therefore, imperative that we remain vigilant alongside Spivak, Miyoshi, Calhoun, etc., and ungenerously see Appiahs and Bhabhas celebration of a global village where we are all connected not as a utopian vision, but as a further conspiracy now designed by a group of upper-bound middle-class intellectual migrants working within the First World academy. Furthermore, we have to remind ourselves that the dangerous links, made by diverse transnational corporations, have not exactly created a stability of at-home-in-the world for the global transnational laborers.... [These are actually] displaced not only within the borders of the nation-state but also across them to the United States and Western Europe, With these counter-testimonies in mind, one need not wonder whether the radical division between First World and Third World countries is new or old. It simply is. The burdensome opposite connotations that both labels carry are blatantly self-evident. The European global expansion has for long been justified and hailed by its practitioners in the name of the by-now-Americanised Western man and culture. We all know that the European modernizing (read civilizing) planetary era has placed the West at the centre of everything that may be related to what it means to be human: reason, enlightenment, science and progress. All that lies outside, that is, the places and peoples that lack these noble qualities have to be targeted as threatening axes of evil. This is not the past. This is so overwhelmingly present. Sadly, we come to the conclusive realization that the violent disruptions, generated by colonial rule, are further mirrored in the theoretical scramble produced by some post/colonial scholars working within the Western academy. Enjoying their highly comfortable cultural hybridity, and preferring not to sound like TV evangelists or propagandists, many postcolonial scholars, particularly in the U.S., choose to follow the strict rules of their respective academic institutions, and even compete in providing discursive problematizations of every social, political, or cultural issue that is at the heart of millions of peoples life-to-death daily dilemmas. These dilemmas, because they concern a massive majority of excluded citizens around the world will be feared by our anti-essentialist thinkers for their totalizing nature. Indeed, the institutional strict recruiting exigencies based on what is rightly called political correctness, cannot, as this essay has attempted to show, blind us to its devious strategies.

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Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann and Anna van der Vleuten, eds., Closing or Widening the Gap? : Legitimacy and Democracy in Regional International Organizations (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007) 4. Further referred to as Legitimacy and Democracy. Beth E. Notar, Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands: Lonely Planeteers and Local Cosmopolitans in Southwest China, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81.3 (Summer 2008) 616. Later referred to in the text as PCB, followed by page number.

Rodney Barker defines legitimacy as the belief in the rightness of a stateso that commands are obeyed not simply out of fear or self-interest [but] because subjects believe that they ought to obey. See Rodney Barker, Political Legitimacy and the State (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1990) 81. The latest OECD publications focus on the crisis of legitimacy brought about by current conflicts and competitions within and among Western and non-Western nations which fragilized political institutions. The 2010 publication, entitled The States Legitimacy in Fragile Situations: Unpacking complexity (further referred to as Legitimacy in Fragile Situations), is introduced by the definition and examination of state legitimacy in fragile situations. The editors state that

a political order, institution or actor is legitimate to the extent that people regard it as satisfactory and believe that no available alternative would be vastly superior. Lack of legitimacy is a major contributor to state fragility because it undermines state authority, and therefore capacity.

(7).

Hugh Harris, The Greek Origins of the Idea of Cosmopolitanism, The International Journal of Ethics,Vol.38.1 (October 1927)1.

Lloyd L. Wong, Home away from home?, in Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof, eds., Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures (London & NY: Routledge, 2002) 169-70.

Alison Van Rooy, The Global Legitimacy Game: Civil Society, Globalization, and Protest (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 81. Further referred to as Global Legitimacy followed by page number(s).

Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann and Anna van der Vleuten, eds., Closing or Widening the Gap? : Legitimacy and Democracy in Regional International Organizations (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007) 4. Further referred to as Legitimacy and Democracy.

I have spent enough time arguing against the reality of races to feel unhappy about using the term without scare quotes. See In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), passim. Anthony K. Appiah, Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction. In Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994)148.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) Subsequent references will be inserted in the text as F.H followed by page number.

Paul C. Taylor, Appiahs Uncompleted Argument: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race, Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 26.1. (2000) 105.

Dean Flower, Desegregating the Syllabus, Hudson Review (Winter 1994) 683-4.

An ethnocultural claim is defined as the one according to which groups sharing a common history and culture have fundamental and morally significant interests in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it for generations. See Chaim Ganss critical introduction to Zionist ideology in Just Zionism, On the Morality of the Jewish State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 3. For Gans, just zionism will not be accomplished without consideration and resolution of the following problems:

The Palestinian refugee problem, which was a result of the 1948 Israeli War; the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 Six-Day War (as well as subsequent Jewish settlement activities there); and the policies of the State of Israel toward the Arab minority living within Israels pre-1967 borders. (6)

K. Anthony Appiah, Racisms, in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

Mary Herring, Thomas B. Jankowski, and Ronald E. Brown, Pro-black Doesnt Mean Anti-white: The Structure of African-American Group Identity, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 61.2 (May 1999) 363. Later referred to within the text as Pro-Black, followed by page number. The authors cite Appiahs In My fathers House, Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Characters: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1991) .

See Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992); Thomas C. Holt, Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History, American Historical Review, Vol. 100.1 (1995) 1-20. See also, for instance, R. Fred Wacke, Ethnicity, Pluralism, and Race: Race Relations Theory in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ. Publication: Princeton University Press, 1996) 78. Later referred to as C.C., followed by page number.

Yet again, in a 2004 essay, entitled The Need for Roots, Appiah expressly considers the importance of Identity construction in the terms that DuBois claims in his narrative. Stories about African roots, Appiah explains,

narrate the beginnings of a group a lineage, a clan, a state, a people, a community, and, in so doing, give shape to some collectivity in the present. The vocabulary of identity is our natural response to such processes, because we see communities as mattering in large measure not in themselves but because of what they provide for members of those communities. And part of what they provide is aid for each of us in shaping our lives, which they do by way of their role in helping to make our individual identities.

Anthony Appiah, The Need for Roots, African Arts, Vol.37.1 (2004) 27.

Paul Ricoeur,Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 112-113. In HYPERLINK "F:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrateur\\Bureau\\cosmop & patriotism\\race & solidarity--appiah.htm" \l "authbio"Melvin Rogers, Liberalism, Narrative, and Identity: A Pragmatic Defense of Racial Solidarity, Theory and Event, Vol.6.2 (2002) 30. Later referred to in the text as L.N.I, followed by number.

Appiah became an American citizen in 2003. Asked by his interviewer about the reasons that pushed him to apply for it, Appiah responds:

There are very few differences between the things you can do as a resident alien and as a citizen, but I wanted to be able to vote and to be on juries. And I felt that there was a possibility that there would be a backlash against dark-skinned immigrants and it might be difficult to stay here unless one was a citizen.

Robert S. Boynton, Dialogue between Kwame Anthony Appiah & Robert S. Boynton: on Philosophy, Race, Sex &C., Daedalus, Vol.132.3 (2003) 143.

Focusing on the contradictions inherent in US legal system, Madhavi Sunder recounts that a recent law (2001) denies automatic U.S. citizenship to a child born abroad and out of wedlock when the father is a U.S. citizen but grants immediate citizenship to a similarly situated child when the mother is a U.S. citizen. In Madhavi Sunder, Cultural Dissent, Stanford Law Review. Vol. 54.3 (2001) footnote.359.

Ronald Takaki, A different Mirror (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993) 69.

Linda Alcoff, Philosophy and racial identity. Radical Philosophy 75 (1996) 9. Quoted by Robert M. Young, The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis, Callaloo, Vol. 24.1 (2001) 137. Later referred to within the text as Linguistic Turn, followed by page number.

Quote from Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. 8th ed. (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989) 7.

Quote from Alex Callinicos, Race and Class, International Socialism 55 (1992) 11.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)47.

See, Nicole Dubois, ed. A Sociocognitive Approach to Social Norms (New York: Routledge, 2002); Feliks Gross, Ideologies, Goals and Values (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1985); Franois Ewald, Norms, Discipline, and the Law, Representations, Vol.30 (Spring, 1990)138-61.

Sven Ove Hansson, The Structure of Values and Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Further reference to this book will be inserted in the text as S.V.N, followed by page number.

HYPERLINK "file:///E:\\oO%20Babdenn%20Oo\\cosmop%20&%20patriotism\\cosmop%20&%20difference.htm" \l "back" Sonya O. Rose, Cosmopolitanism and Difference, History Workshop Journal, Issue 67 (Spring 2009) 241.

Philip Pettit, Rules, Reasons, and Norms: Selected Essays. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) 55.

Malin Pereira, The Poet in the World, the World in the Poet: Cyrus Cassellss and Elizabeth Alexanders Versions of Post-Soul Cosmopolitanism, African American Review. Vol. 41.4. (2007)

Walter D. Mignolo, however, explains the relation between globalization and cosmopolitanism by stressing that the latters projects, albeit with significant differences, were worked out during the religious and secular moments of modernity/coloniality. As he claims:

Lets assume then that globalization is a set of designs to manage the world while cosmopolitanism is a set