Cosmopolitanism and the Right to be Legal The Practical Poverty of Concepts.docVIP

Transcience Journal Vol 1, No 1 (2010) Cosmopolitanism and The Right to be Legal: The Practical Poverty of Concepts by Julten Abdelhalim Travelling for profit is encouraged. Travelling for survival is condemned...The globalized world is a hospitable and friendly place for tourists, but inhospitable and hostile to vagabonds. The latter are barred from following the pattern that the first have set. But that pattern was not meant for them in the first place. (Bauman 2002:84) A cosmopolitan is a person who is highly mobile, moving largely within elite circles and participating in the consumption of high culture. (Delanty 2000:54) There has been an appalling increase in the number of victims of irregular immigration coming from North African countries, who lose their lives attempting to illegally cross the Mediterranean in search for more promising lives on the other side of the sea. One Egyptian Newspaper reported this increase to be three hundred percent in the last ten years (Al-Ahram 2008). Nevertheless, while we hear about these deaths, we also hear about rising international tourism, investment, global cities, and what is now commonly termed cosmopolitanism. In this article, I attempt to contextualize the debate on cosmopolitanism through critiquing and linking it to Eurocentrism. Through this, the lived reality of being ‘cosmopolitan’ will be juxtaposed to the experience of “irregular immigrants”. By examining Arendt’s and Benhabib’s ideas and how the moral parochialism of sovereign nation- states renders the debate on certain human rights meaningless, the debate on cosmopolitanism could be enriched when confronted with its practical limitations. Cosmopolitanism: A Contextual Analysis of its History, Definitions, and Critique The idea of cosmopolitanism has been recently gaining solid theoretical ground in intellectual circles as an