Keywords of the Postcosmopolitan Condition: Putting the New State-Centrism in Perspective

In the 1990s and 00s, rising awareness of globalization following the fall of the Soviet Bloc spurred a Zeitgeist around the “end of the nation-state” and the dawn of a new cosmopolitan age. Today, the world remains interconnected as ever, but the “cosmopolitan imagination” (Delanty) that defined those decades has receded. International and supranational organizations such as the ICC and EU remain active, but political agendas have turned increasingly inward and state-centric. This new inward focus is not limited to the rise of populist movements, as mainstream parties have also reset their gaze on buttressing the sovereign state. Even progressive and left parties, otherwise propagating emancipatory visions against capitalist exploitation and oligarchy, remain conservative on the role of the territorial state. In this paper, I investigate the ways our politics has come to take on a postcosmopolitan tenor, sedimenting into a variety of issue areas and framing our perception of present-day challenges. I begin by delineating my conception of a postcosmopolitan condition: what it means, what it does not mean, and how it may intersect with other prevailing political frames, such as globalization or neoliberalism. Next, I explore more deeply the way a postcosmopolitan attitude has come to characterize our politics. Raymond Williams innovated the approach of analyzing “keywords” to elucidate the presuppositions and characteristics of social life. Following him, I point to several exemplary keywords that have come to define present-day political conversations. Terms like “polycrisis,” “polarization,” “post-truth,” or “cost-of-living crisis” may not have obvious relevance to questions of cosmopolitanism or statism, but they are positioned and inflected in political discourse to encourage an inward, defensive orientation regarding the territorial state. Lastly, I will show how these keywords and their accompanying framings are contingent and constestable, and I pose questions about the possibility of a more emancipatory frame for casting contemporary political challenges.