Vincenzo Cicchelli
University of Paris Descartes
Gemass, MSH, CNRS
vincenzo.cicchelli@msh-paris.fr
The cosmopolitan mind
Socialisation to otherness
and mobility among
young people in Europe
A brief presentation
• A strong involvement in comparative and
post-national research perspectives as:
• General secretary of the European
Sociological Association
• Chair of the RN 15: « Global, transnational
and cosmopolitan sociology » (ESA)
• Series editor of « Youth in a Globalising
World » (Brill Publisher, Leiden, Boston).
The aim of the
presentation today
4 parts:
• What’s cosmpolitanism?
• The mobility in EU
• The cosmopolitan Bildung
• European identity at stake
Emerging cosmopolitan consciousness
• This paper engages with the emerging cosmopolitan
consciousness and practices rooted in young
people’s experiences of the globalised world.
• I am inspired here by several considerations taken
from my book on the academic mobility of European
students: “the cosmopolitan mind”
• Before dealing with the main topic of the paper (the
mobility of European young people) I will focus on,
let me linger on what cosmopolitanism and
mobilities are - or should be - in my view
Part 1:
What’s cosmopolitanism?
I won’t linger on what is globalization, this
well know phenomenon.
• I just would like to remind its main feature
(an increasing interdependence of all parts
of the world and societies) and catch your
attention on the topic of my speech
(globalisation leads to a growing flow of
people in move, eg. migrations,
expatriations, tourisms, pilgrimages).
A world of “overlapping
communities of fate”
• We no longer inhabit, if we ever did, a
world of separate national communities
living side-by-side.
• We live in a world of “overlapping
communities of fate” where the trajectories
of all countries are deeply enmeshed with
each other (Held).
• Globalization is linking people together
across borders more than in the past and
confront them with cultural, ethnical
differences.
• This connected world is still made of
various, heterogeneous cultures. We don’t
leave, as everyone knows, in a “flat world”.
Living in a world
common and plural
• We know today it is no longer tenable to see the
global society in terms of a single, integrated
and unified conceptual scheme, which means it
is more compelling to conceive globalization in
the plural.
• As we live in a world connected and plural,
formulating a cosmopolitan approach lays to a
claim to universalism and the respect of cultural
relativism (the handling of pluralism)
Three topics
• Looking to the grounded and rooted aspects of current
research on cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, in
my research I am concerned with
• A) patterns of belonging;
• B) responses to cultural diversity,
• C) and global awareness of young people.
Defining cosmopolitanism
• Even though cosmopolitanism is a term
highly context-dependent and even volatile
• Even though there are almost as many
definitions of cosmopolitanism as there are
scholars of this topic,
• I think is today a relevant approach to
study the ongoing process of globalisation
(id est a common and a plural world)
Two pillars of a cosmopolitan sociology:
between universalism and particularism
As we live in a world connected and plural,
formulating a cosmopolitan approach lays to:
• A claim to universalism and the respect of cultural
relativism (the handling of pluralism)
• According Robert Fine (2007), “cosmopolitan
social theory is a collective endeavour to build a
science of society founded on a claim to
universalism. Its basic presupposition is that the
human species can be understood only if it is
treated as a single subject, within which all forms
of difference are recognised and respected but
conceptualised as internal of the substantive unity
of all human beings”.
• How to understand the processes of
socialisation to cultural plurality?
• How do people living in contemporary
societies, both national and
transnational experience
cosmopolitan identities?
• My answer to these questions is to investigate
cosmopolitanism from the experience of young people
• Why do I focus on young people? Because they
embrace all emerging cultural changes. Another reason
is due to the lack of knowledge and understanding of the
emergence of transnational shared practices, values,
norms, behaviors, cultures and patterns
Part 2
Mobility in Europe:
discourses and reality
Increasing mobilities
• Greater mobility makes the EU an open space to
develop youth talent.
• Mobility has increased within Europe (for instance
through study mobility, twinning of European cities,
cross-border labor markets, tourism).
• Mobility concerns various young populations: pupils
and students in secondary and tertiary education,
trainees, apprentices, volunteers and participants in
professional training in or outside Europe (EU Youth
Report, 2009)
A key component
of a knowledge society
• Erasmus and Youth-in-Action programs are
reinforcing cross-border mobility of young
people.
• Geographical mobility is a key component of a
knowledge society, particularly on an EU scale.
The dynamism of an economy depends on the
ability to effectively exploit human capital in an
integrated manner and of both the individual and
the system to adapt to change (BarringtonLeach,Marcel Canoy, Hubert, Lerais, 2007).
A “natural feature
of being European”
• A high level expert forum on mobility,
established by the European Commission, has
stated that “learning mobility should become a
natural feature of being European and an
opportunity provided to all young people in
Europe”.
• Learning mobility would be important for
strengthening Europe's competitiveness, for
creating a knowledge-intensive society and for
deepening citizenship within young
generations(EU youth report, 2009)
The virtues of mobility
• Mobility should:
• A) create skilled, integrated, educated
European citizens;
• B) improve open-mindedness among
young people.
Part 3
The cosmopolitan Bildung
• The above issues (e.g. mobility and
cosmopolitan socialization) refers to my book
dealing with the growth of plural identities in a
context of cultural difference.
• The book is based on 170 interviews with
Erasmus students in Europe.
• The sample is composed of students coming
from, or having stayed in Southern, Continental
and Eastern Europe, Scandinavian countries
and the British Isles.
A new culture for a new world
• What education, what cultural baggage do
young people need today if they are to
become citizens of Europe and of a global
society?
• This book, aims to answer that question by
exploring how Erasmus students, today's
heirs of the Age of Enlightenment’s 'Grand
Tour’, learn about other European
cultures.
the cosmopolitan Bildung:
a new injunction
• I called cosmopolitan Bildung this
education to otherness.
Traveling
• Travels formed youth, to which the
Erasmus exchanges constantly attest.
• Traveling, seeing other horizons,
discovering other ways of living, of being.
To learn, to understand, to enrich oneself,
to open oneself, to adapt oneself, are
some of the many qualities necessitated
and required all at once by traveling.
• Gaining those qualities is the aim of many
students engaged in Erasmus program.
• The journey of European students in
foreign lands is a very old tradition, coming
from the Grand Tour of the XIXe century:
young people from the upper classes used
to spend some time travelling around
Europe before taking their father’s
position.
• Its novelty resides in the fact that, for the
first time, this mobility is favored by
European institutions and does not only
concern elites.
The promises of empowerment
and self-fulfilment
• An Erasmus exchange is full of promises
of empowerment and self-fulfilment,
adventure and self-discovery, encounters
and life-sharing.
• Two of the most recurrent reasons
accounted for undertaking an exchange
programme are curiosity for unfamiliar
ways of living and possibility to meet with
young people from all over Europe.
• The encounter with European neighbours
can produce a shift in the definition of the
self and enlarge the circle of personal and
cultural landmarks.
Three topics
in narratives on Otherness
• I have focused on the way in which young
people mark out symbolic and cultural identity
borderlines between themselves and the natives
• For doing so, I have examined:
• a) what otherness means to the interviewed
when they compare their own societies with the
host society;
• b) what is appreciated (or rejected) by young
people when they describe the host society;
• c) the presence (or non presence) of gapbridging efforts on the part of the students with
natives.
• The above three topics find their way in all
the narratives.
• To sum up, the major question for young
people in mobility is: “who is the Other I
met abroad, and what kind of place do I
give him/her?”
A reflexive comparison
• And yet living abroad means to take risks.
Decentring might prove perturbing for
young people (e. g. by becoming
conscious of the relativity of one’s own
way of living).
• The reflexive comparison between the
host and one’s own society could provoke
a critical feedback
The lack of hospitality
• The interviewed often complain that their
counterparts in age will not help them to
decipher the cultural patterns of the host
country. The socialization to cultural
differences seems to be the aim of the
travelers and not the priority of the natives.
The result is that the Erasmus students
socialize with one another and are all
interested in sharing their experiences.
The Erasmus ‘bubble’
• Their circle of sociability is therefore, in
most cases, international. If this is not
initially selected, the “Erasmus bubble”
becomes the guarantee of the
international character of the journey and
seems to be the only one apt to entertain
this thrust towards the meeting, to
concretize this utopia of a festive
communion.
Part 4:
European identity at stake
A rooted cosmopolitanism
• The « pure » model of the cosmopolitan person
who is free of bonds, the so called world citizen,
is very marginal in our sample.
• Cosmopolitism does not mean that the students
are free of national ties.
• In most cases, people claim a strong feeling of
national identity that coexists together with a
strong interest for heterogeneous European
ways of living.
National identities
• The inhabitants of Europe do not feel
European/refer to themselves as
European: they regard themselves
foremost Spanish, French, Greek,
Swedish, Estonian, etc.
• The cosmopolitism of young Europeans
must not be seen as a universal
citizenship.
• It expresses more a desire to reach a
horizon of universality by encountering
other ways of being and thinking, while
remaining strongly attached to the
homeland. Hence, it is clearly understood
that to call yourself European, you must
begin with a national identity
• Comparing to national identities, the extent
of a strong European identity is still to be
confirmed. The Union is not yet in the
hearths and minds of its inhabitants.
• "The European flag or hymn don't evoke
the same patriotic feelings as they do in
their American counterpart" (Halman,
Sieben and Van Zundert, 2012).
• .
Europe from a bottom-up view point
• In several Eurostat surveys the most recurring
item to define Europe is the possibility for a
European to travel, live and work from one end
of Europe to the other.
• For a very large majority of young Europeans the
ability to study and the right to work in any
country in the EU, respectively, are the main
elements o fbeing a European citizen
(Eurobarometer, 2007)
• In my sample, Europe represents a space open
to mobility: people claim a right to freely choose
where to travel, live and work.
• The EU is considered the framework which
preserves each and every single national culture
and identity.
• This means that cultural differences should be
protected and promoted throughout the
continent.
The “European mosaic”
• The cultural and historical diversity and the
peaceful coexistence of the European
countries is the most characteristic feature
of Europe which means a lot to young
people.
• The painful past, made of wars, genocides
and persecutions, has been forgotten for
the sake of peace and equal dignity of
each country.
• The “European mosaic” is distinguished
from other Western areas, particularly
from the United States.
• However according to the
results of the survey, the
European specificity does not
mean a feeling of transnational
belonging.
Cosmopolitanism as an attempt
• The cosmopolitan mind is rather the work
of a social actor to drive his or her culture
of belonging to a meeting with other
European cultures.
• “Cosmopolitanism consists in recognizing and
appreciating the other as a stranger. And that
means that he/she is not completely a stranger,
nor an exact copy of oneself. Re-conciliating
community and otherness, identity and
difference, finding the universal in the particular
and the particular in the universal, that is not
only the definition of the dialectic but the
condition of all authentic dialogue” (Hassner,
2002).
To sum up
• I focused on the awareness of one’s
cultural pluralism, the place of otherness
and the feeling of national belonging at
various scales.
• The sense of familiarity is certainly the
bedrock of cultural adherence.
• At the same time, in a world made of
connected cultures and under the
pressure of globalisation, familiarity
cannot be the only yardstick by which
one can measure reality.
• the journey may be a series of
enchantments and disenchantments, of
euphoria and disappointments.
• This education to alterity, which I have
termed cosmopolitan Bildung, is less of a
long-lasting and irreversible learning than
an ambivalent and incomplete tentative to
make a place for the other in one’s identity
•
Further considerations for
ongoing research
• It would be expedient if research in the
future were in line with the perspectives of
the emerging cosmopolitan awareness
and practices that are derivative of
globalised world, in which nations are no
longer the only units of analysis.
• I suppose that youth cultures are not
confined to nation-states, even if
comparative works confirm the widely
accepted thesis that national contexts still
impact considerably on juvenile conditions.
• What is the down side of these
new normative injunctions to be
open-minded and curious?
• How do young people cope with
this pressure to be open-minded?
• The question of familial (or school) transmission
of open-mindedness is still unexplored.
• Finally, the question of the reproduction of social
inequalities in this kind of socialization is
underrated. Even if the opportunities to confront
global imagination are bigger than in the past,
cosmopolitan practices such as speaking a
foreign language, traveling and studying abroad,
are still the prerogatives of the upper classes.
• Answers to these questions require
extensive research, theoretical models
and willingness to question existing
analysis: this is the challenge scholars
should take up in the future in order to
displace the aloof, globetrotting bourgeois
image of cosmopolitanism (Vertovec and
Cohen, 2002).
•
• Thank you very much
Short bibliography in English
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Cicchelli V., (2013), “How do people engage with globalization? A
cosmopolitan socialization approach”, in Cicchelli V., Cotesta V. and
Nocenzi M., Global society, cosmopolitanism and human rights
Cicchelli V., (2012), “Public debates and sociological research based on
the semantic of autonomy: The case of French young people”, in HahnBleibtreu M. and Molgat M., (eds), Youth Policy in a changing world,
Cicchelli V., (2012), “The Cosmopolitan ‘Bildung” of Erasmus students’
going abroad”, in Hébert Y. et Abdi A. (eds), Critical Perspectives on
International Education, Rotterdam/Taipei, Sense Publishers.
Cicchelli V., (2009), « The Contemporary Engagement of Young People
in France: Normative Injunctions, Institutional Programs, and the
Multiplying Forms of Grouping », Italian Journal of Sociology of
Education, 2, pp. 104-126.
Cicchelli V. and Martin C., 2004, “Young Adults in France: Becoming
Adult in the Context of Increased Autonomy and Dependency", Journal
of Comparative Family Studies, special issue Youth and Family:
Intergenerational Tensions and Transfers, vol. 35-4, pp. 615-626.