Why Cosmopolitanism Needs Rethinking

Abstract

This chapter argues that hegemonic conceptions of cosmopolitanism fail to theorize a complex cosmopolitan normativity. Within such hegemonies, cosmopolitan education for global citizenship constructs future citizens as culturally mixed-up selves mobile across borders and merely respectful to, and tolerant of, the diversity that they encounter. The reader of the chapter will be presented with arguments about why this is politically too inadequate to cover the normative significance of cosmopolitanism and too uninspiring as regards citizenship education. Cosmopolitanism needs a rethinking that makes higher ethico-political demands on the global self and world for the cultivation of critical-educational ecological and relational sensibilities.