Epistemology, ethics, and historicity: The fluidity of cosmopolitan ideation

At the core of this call for more emic and contextualized approaches to cosmopolitanism is a renewed surge of criticism against a latent Eurocentrism that still draws its most potent influences from early modern European imperial projects of evangelization, colonization, and modernization. In light of the body of non-Western ‘cosmopolitanism’ knowledge explored in this special issue, this history warrants an overview here.Footnote ¹⁵ Philosophers and cultural theorists in post-colonial studies, who reframe cosmopolitanism around equality, global justice, and moral commitment to humanity,Footnote ¹⁶ have sought to subvert the passé and distorted imaginaries of Western universalism. However, their critiques have also triggered a backwash of reappraisal of how Eurocentrism has, in many ways, merely shape-shifted to address global challenges of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the best introduction we can provide for readers of this special issue is to briefly historicize Eurocentric cosmopolitanism and specify its continuing influence on cultural studies and historiography.

In Europe, the revival of classical studies in the fourteenth century encompassed an embrace of ideological cosmopolitanism. It was exemplified in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in which dead heroes and icons from virtually every known culture suffered universalized justice for their cruelties, vanities, lies, and paganism. In the following centuries, Europeans in the process of projecting their economic and military power across the world consciously contrasted their renewed cosmopolitanism to the insularity, parochiality, and ignorance of the ‘Dark Ages’.Footnote ¹⁷ European philosophical cosmopolitanism was evident in Voltaire’s ideas of ‘philosopher kings’ (inspired by the Qing emperors) who enforced universalist values of reason and justice against the petty particularisms of their subjects. Immanuel Kant is famous for having posited a consciously modernist cosmopolitanism, combining a relativist appreciation of variety in human behaviour and beliefs with a universalist proposition of laws that might be globally accepted to protect peace and commerce, an abstraction of law from culture that continued to inspire philosophers, notably Jurgen Habermas, in the twentieth century. European modernism of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflected the legacy of cosmopolitanism in the construction of Marx’s universalist historical paradigm, or Freud’s universalist approach to the human mind. Yet, cultural critics today note the ways in which Kant’s perspective from the perch of European imperialism severely limited the genuine cultural relativism he prescribed, avoided questions of coercion in the construction of an international order, and never transcended the conventions of his time relating to gender or race.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite the dominance of cosmopolitanism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thought, particularism—whether religious, linguistic, racial, or national—was older and remained deeply entrenched in many corners of European culture. Indo-European linguistic theory and early modern philosophical racism depended heavily upon such a foundation for their appeal; in the varieties of European imperialism, cosmopolitan perspectives, while clearly demonstrable, were repeatedly marginalized by stronger influences of racist and culturalist hierarchies. Critical scholarship across disciplines of the later twentieth century was profoundly shaped by this post-imperial perspective, linking cosmopolitan philosophy and ethics to imperialism and the suppression of local languages and cultures, even to the extent of narrating cosmopolitanism as a distinct production of imperialism, both as an enabling ethical superstructure and as a peculiar cultural product of colonial history.

At the same time, cultural historians of the very late twentieth century began projecting cosmopolitan frameworks—not as a philosophic principle but as an ostensible historical phenomenon—into the deeper past. This was partly a method of mapping the historical lanes of continuous cultural exchange—land and sea tracks of nomadic or piratical movement and trade—upon the greater map of fixed and small-horizoned farming societies or archly particularist imperial cities. In effect this fused cosmopolitanism and globalization as two aspects of a larger historical development. Much of this approach appears to fall under the characterization of ‘borderland cosmopolitanism’ (supposing borderlands can be internal as well as external) suggested by Beth Notar, in which continuous exposure across an institutionalized (even if non-legal) boundary produces a non-ideologized cultural milieu combining two or more distinct idioms.Footnote ¹⁹

More relevant to our special issue, Kant had theorized a Europe rising above the particularisms of its own cultural ideologies. But the means and ends of his philosophy in a truly global context could be neither defined nor achieved in his own time—or perhaps in any time. Kant’s theses on cosmopolitanism epistemology and political ethics were shaped without deep knowledge of the history of cultural exchange and political conflict in the greater world, and largely for this reason remained unattainably etic in aspiration. Here, we offer explorations of cosmopolitanism both as a historical phenomenon and as a problem of modernity as they relate to China and its neighbouring regions, acknowledging our vulnerability to the European tradition but hoping to open ways of looking at contacts, exchange, translation, and shifting bases of identity by rooting our studies in an eastern Eurasian context. Partly as a response to Kant, ‘Orientalism’ as it emerged in Scotland, England, France, and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a convergence of classical cosmopolitanism and a sometimes inverted culturalism, positing a universality that had been best expressed in the civilizations of India or China, rather than the relatively isolated and undeveloped cultures of Europe.Footnote ²⁰ Rousseau had a distinct critique of cosmopolitanistic epistemology, arguing that true humanism must always proceed from the local, natural, and concrete to the general and abstract, not the other way around.Footnote ²¹

It has been argued that a continual focus on colonial—and post-colonial—influences is, in effect, overshadowing non-Western modes of knowledge production and canonizing European epistemic traditions (exemplified, in this special issue, by Hua’s discussion of grassroots legal cosmopolitanism; discussed also in Yang’s critical approach towards Tang cosmopolitanism).Footnote ²² In parallel with his thesis on ‘cultural translation’, Delanty has criticized the lack of, and resistance to, non-Western perspectives in the cosmopolitanism discourse, which has largely been shaped by European thought that evolved from the legacy of ‘Orientalism’ to what he called ‘analytical universalism’—a residual form of Orientalism grounded in epistemic, rather than moral, superiority.Footnote ²³

Shuchen Xiang’s sharp critique of Western critical race theory, framed within her 2023 theory of Chinese cosmopolitanism, showcases the kind of ideological subjectivism that today’s transcultural perspectives must navigate to resist ahistorical and presentist biases. For Xiang, ‘Chinese cosmopolitanism’ is distinguished by a metaphysically grounded understanding of the world, premised on Confucian ontologies that were operative throughout history. Unlike the European claim of universalism, which imposes a Manichaean, hierarchical, and determinist view of (racial) ‘difference’, the Chinese tradition embraces a holistic, horizontal approach that prioritizes ‘harmony’, accommodating novelty and diverse ‘beings’.Footnote ²⁴ Ironically, by juxtaposing the Chinese ideal of ‘cosmopolitan’ harmony, purportedly embedded in Chinese history, with the West’s entrenched historic racism, Xiang has advanced a de-historicized and essentialized view of how ‘human difference’ is treated in these two cultural traditions—one that contradicts the very kind of ‘cosmopolitanism’ she sought to exalt. We would suggest that inverting the characteristics of Eurocentric cosmopolitan ideology as a hypothesized alternate cosmopolitanism offered by non-Europe is not a great distance from Eurocentric cosmopolitanism itself. For historians of China in the later twentieth century, there was a special burden to show that, contrary to prevailing characterizations in English-language writing about China, culturalism and insularity had not been hallmarks of China’s history. Instead, constant trade and communications both overland and overseas had kept China open to new influences and a constant contributor to global change. This became, for some historians of China, the key meaning of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Chinese history. It is, perhaps, much less a philosophical tenet and much more a demonstration of continuous cultural synthesis, nearly always framed against past assumptions of stasis and particularist complacency in China.

The dominance of Western traditions also accounts for a common concern among critics about what ‘cosmopolitanism’ represents: elitist and ‘born out of privileges’,Footnote ²⁵ often attributed to the mobile, endowed, socially advantaged participants of the contemporary, globalized world.Footnote ²⁶ This meaning is best captured by the French word ‘cosmopolite’, which, in its earliest usage in sixteenth–seventeenth century Europe, referred to an expansive person whose geographical awareness developed through travel and intellectual exchange. But this sense of ‘worldliness’ stood in contrast to the earlier, popular use of cosmopolitan vocabulary in Catholic and Protestant circles, where it instead signified ecclesial citizenship connected to a heavenly community.Footnote ²⁷ In the modern era, the demographic that most readily self-identifies as a cosmopolite and benefits from the privileges of peripateticism has remained largely unchanged.Footnote ²⁸ In this way, differential experiences of cosmopolitanism expose the very inequalities it seeks to dismantle, upending its own universalist claims. This realization has since brought on a new regime of critical cosmopolitanism studies, centring on the ‘subaltern’, ‘dialogical’, and ‘vernacular’.Footnote ²⁹

The effort to correct the historical marginalization of knowledge and perspectives has created new dialectic avenues for uncovering overlooked loci of cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, it remains to be explored how best to elevate and integrate once-obscure discourses without invoking a false dichotomy against Western strongholds of cosmopolitanism thought. In this regard, examining the myriad cosmopolitanism histories of China and its neighbours—which in this special issue spans the period from the Warring States to the present day—can contribute in two ways. The first is empirical, achieved by expanding the non-Western pool of materials for testing the hypotheses of cosmopolitanism, which, in turn, can ‘open up new intellectual vistas’, to borrow Johan Elverskog’s words of reflection at the conference on ‘Chinese cosmopolitanism 1600–1950’ in 2012, where the semantic and dialectic significance of cosmopolitanism for the study of China was critically debated.Footnote ³⁰ The second is methodological: How do we study cosmopolitanism in order to gauge where and how deep it engages with culture? Is it tokenized and circumscribed, or integrated and ubiquitous? This is not the same question as distinguishing between the elite and the subaltern, or between the banal and the reflexive, as even the most reflexive cosmopolitan is not perennially cosmopolitan, just as the subaltern would seek to disengage from cosmopolitanism. By taking an atomistic approach—dissecting when and where cosmopolitanism is invoked, borrowed, or practised—we can avoid culturalist treatments that compare different cosmopolitanisms as though they were unitary concepts, thereby expanding the analytical scope of ‘cosmopolitanism’.

The worlds/tianxia of cosmopolitanism

Integral to every conception of cosmopolitanism is a kosmos imaginary that aligns with a known world—whether delineated culturally, metaphysically, or geodetically. Thus, it is often assumed that kosmos must be commensurate with a ‘rounded’ global order that is homogenized and collectively beneficial. Namely, a pluralistic or multicultural empire, given its wholeness, must necessarily be cosmopolitan. But, as Papastergiadis pithily put it, ‘The globe in globalization is not the same as the cosmos in cosmopolitanism.’Footnote ³⁵ Understanding the world encapsulated in kosmos is an ontological challenge that underlies the tianxia concept, commonly equated with ‘Chinese cosmopolitanism’.

Contrary to the internalist view of an inherently ‘Chinese’ tianxia-cosmopolitanism consistently shaping Chinese history,Footnote ³⁶ Yuri Pines’ and Elke Papelitzky’s articles show how the concept adapted to evolving political landscapes in different periods. In Pines’ research, the Zhou tianxia was a ‘known civilized world’, one that emerged during the transition into the Warring States period, and was traversable by means of a shared code of ritual (li 禮)-stipulated behaviour,Footnote ³⁷ irrespective of ethnicity. Achieving universal rule, through civilizing (hua 化), which at the time was congruent with a unification of the Central States (excluding Qin and Chu), was primarily an ‘elite’ preoccupation. These were aristocrats and the shi 士 (intellectually active men of service) who, as proud tianmin 天民 (equivalent to kosmopolitēs), took pride in their interstate mobility and had no qualms about debasing local customs to realize the higher tianxia ideal. This pronounced renunciation of the local, Pines argues, stands in sharp contrast to seventeenth–nineteenth century nation-state-building efforts in Europe.Footnote ³⁸

Papelitzky’s article presents a detailed trajectory of how the geography of tianxia changed graphically, and cartographically, even in the course of the Ming–Qing transition. Once again, tianxia represented a unified dominion of the ‘civilized’; however, as the 70 maps Papelitzky collected reveal, the interpretations of the Ming and Qing scholars differed from those of the Jesuits. The Jesuits understood tianxia, ‘All-under-Heaven’, as geographically equivalent to the globe, whereas Ming and Qing scholars portrayed its extents either as a composition of huayi 華夷 (Sinitic and non-Sinitic yi peoples) territories or as part of a greater world that comprised also wanguo 萬國 (myriad states) and sihai 四海 (four seas). The details and projections of these tianxia maps represented the political visions of the Ming and Qing empires, but they also clearly reflect efforts to reconcile an ethnocentric view of foreign relations with increasingly precise geographical knowledge gained from advances in mapmaking, driven by transoceanic explorations and new navigation tools.

It can be seen that while the term tianxia endured, its connotations were by no means static, as they have shifted in response to changes in physical boundaries and thresholds for cultural differences.Footnote ³⁹ It is simultaneously an artefact of historical processes and of historiography. Thus, to argue for its immutability would be to assert its fundamental universalism, not cosmopolitanism.

Historicizing cosmopolitanism in historiography and archaeology

Shao-yun Yang explores the idea of early Tang cosmopolitanism in twentieth-century Western language historiography as openness to foreign cultures, inclusivity of vastly disparate cultural and ecological territories, and the valorization of these qualities as part of the ‘glory’ of the Tang age. Yang suggests that the projection of ‘cosmopolitan’ values onto the Tang period was at least partly related to the increasing enthusiasm in post-war Europe and North America for cosmopolitanism itself—meaning, hostility to cultural parochialism and nationalist perspectives that devalued consciousness of international problems of ecology, poverty, or social justice. In China, too, the approved characterization of Tang—from qualified criticism to recent glamorization—has been determined by official views of conquest, strong rulers, and global pre-eminence. In its most recent iteration, cosmopolitanism and nationalism are seen as mutually reinforcing, which both expands and stabilizes the historicization of multiple manifestations of cosmopolitanism in land and expanding empires. Yang provides a fresh assessment of Tang connections and attitudes, qualifying the typical narrative of the contraction of cosmopolitanism in the later Tang period as a consequence of ostensibly new attitudes of suspicion and rejection of foreign influence.

Pamela Crossley’s article ‘What keeps the Kitans enigmatic’ examines the importance of the historiography of Karl Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng on the Liao period for the establishment of ‘ethnicity’ as a dynamic in historical change. In the middle of the twentieth century, as historians in the United States in particular struggled to minimize class conflict as a causative factor in history, ‘ethnicity’ arose as a new focus. It both displaced the previous emphasis on materialist historical change and accommodated the established American and European hypotheses regarding the importance of race. Wittfogel and Feng strongly influenced the general theoretical acceptance of ‘ethnicity’ as an explanation for historical change. Kitan aristocrats appear enigmatic to modern historians, she suggests, only because of the expectations of modern historians that ethnic identities were primary. She finds that in real time, rank identities were the primary identities across eastern Eurasia, and the historiographic dividing line for historians planting ethnic identities atop rank identities was not between East and West, but between medieval and early modern narrators.

Archaeology and epigraphy, Crossley points out, have not only supplied information missing from the dynastic histories, but have sharply contradicted the interpretations that historians have fitted to the documents. Our third contribution on the medieval period also uses archaeology both to amplify and to correct standard treatments from the dynastic histories. In ‘The cosmopolitanism of Karakorum’, Susanne Reichert starts with traveller’s descriptions of the city in the thirteenth century as marked by diversity of architecture, language, and dress. But she is able to use archaeology to uncover the daily ‘practices of cosmopolitanism’—understanding people moving through the city, eating, and engaging in rituals of worship. Local inscriptions capture the real-time concerns and language of the residents (whether temporary or permanent), and the overall patterns of movement underscore that on the steppe, as contrasted to China, walls and compartments were less important than movement and exchange. ‘Cosmopolitanism’, she suggests, may be only an awkward way of describing the real life of places that outsiders (and later historians) may regard as cosmopolitan. When considered in situ, the integration of historically diverse cultural influences woven into daily life, and relatively free access long-distance imports, become a local phenomenon, distinct in its own way. Reichert’s discussion strongly reinforces the problems of cosmopolitanism as a historical phenomenon that is only visible to outsiders and later historians, and cosmopolitanism as an ideology that is characteristic of relatively homogeneous societies seeking accommodation with the greater world.

Recontextualization and leveraging pluralities

Since, in cosmopolitanism, culture—geographically or territorially delimited—serves as the denominator of ‘difference’, pluralism and multiculturalism become important measures of its spatial dynamics. Homi Bhabha posited that the interaction of cultures takes place in the ‘Third Space’, a liminal realm where new, hybrid forms of cultural expression emerge through negotiation, resistance, and transformation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although this theory enables the critical enquiry of identities that challenge binary colonial constructs, it rests on the supposition that boundaries keeping cultures entire exist and are to be transcended. While cosmopolitanism engages the same kind of transcultural encounter and translation, it is, nevertheless, often associated with a different spatial characterization—‘rootlessness’ or ‘footlooseness’Footnote ⁴¹—an indifference or non-attachment to ‘place’ that does not hinder engagement with the ‘global’.

Here, we propose that the relationship between cosmopolitanism and culture can be understood as ‘recontextualization’—the reinterpretation of identity in geocultural contexts other than one’s own. Cosmopolitanism transfigures the cultures it engages with, leveraging pluralities in order to reach the ‘global’. Rather than dispensing with or downplaying the ‘local’, it leans into it. In locational terms, this means that cosmopolitanism does not occur in liminal, derivative spaces; it takes place at the centre of culture. In each of the following articles from the special issue, we see this recontextualization play out across different kinds of pluralism—ethnic, cultural, and legal.

Soojung Han and Rui Hua each presents a case of what can be described as strategic or pragmatic cosmopolitanism. Han’s study of royal interethnic marriages in the Sixteen Kingdoms and Northern Dynasties reveals the calculated appointments of crown princesses and empresses to consolidate imperial rule and secure political control over an ethnically diverse populace comprising Han and non-Han peoples. Rather than rationalizing the political tactics as an outcome of a broader Sinicization process during a politically tumultuous period where the Han political apparatus was displaced, her article closely examines imperial rule specifically through the roles of women as instruments of court diversity. Here, the politics of ‘managing differences’ was articulated through targeted agendas that exploited the stabilizing effects of miscegenation on rulership, aiming to avert the governing challenges posed by a pluralistic populace. The contrast of women-centred political tactics and the historiography of these accounts being ‘patriarchal’ is equally telling as the hidden tensions between gendered power dynamics and the inception of cosmopolitanism in early medieval China.

Farmers of the Yalu River islet enclave in Hua’s Manchurian borderland study deftly leveraged another kind of plurality—legal systems. They enlisted the help of state-appointed judges and legal professionals in their campaign to defend land rights, taking advantage of the ambiguity and transience of territorial sovereignty under the Qing, a Chinese warlord regime, the Japanese empire, and continuing Russian influence. Theirs was a kind of ‘convergent legal pluralism’, Hua argues, that provided a strong grassroots alternative to the top-down European model of ‘international legal cosmopolitanism’, empowering non-state actors to defend individual rights beyond the framework of modern nation-states. The strategies of the farmers were clever multilateral negotiations to transplant concepts of ownership from one system to another and the integration of resources from multiple legal regimes—essentially processes of ‘recontextualization’ that were made inevitable by the border location. Hua’s article effectively illustrates subaltern cosmopolitanism in action within a ‘transnational, counter-hegemonic sphere of politics’,Footnote ⁴² demonstrating that cosmopolitanism does not require a supranational moral and judicial framework to thrive.

In addition to overtly strategic attempts at leveraging pluralities, there are also cases of more subdued—or embedded—practices. Sebastian Eicher’s, Haina Jin’s, and Anna Stecher’s articles exemplify the nuances of cosmopolitanism, as experiences curated through the media of literature, film, and theatre, respectively. Eicher presents the autobiographical accounts by Wang Tao and Jiang Dunfu, two treaty port intellectuals whose scientific collaborations with Protestant missionaries took place in a period of political upheaval, from the Opium War to the Self-Strengthening Movement. Wang and Jiang recounted their experiences of Western intellectual exchange differently, modulating their narratives in consideration of the prevailing atmosphere of xenophobia. They downplayed the positives of their cosmopolitan experience, reducing it to encounters motivated by mere intellectual or military interests, while avoiding the topic of religion. Moderating their ‘cosmopolitan’ experience served to prevent backlash at a time when foreign interactions could be perceived as unpatriotic.

Jin’s portrayal of Shanghai in the period that ensued (1896–1949) reveals almost a volte-face in the reception of foreign cultures. The establishment of foreign concessions in the Republican era led to a surge in foreign forms of recreation, with film being one of the most popular. Contrary to Wang’s and Jiang’s cosmopolitanism accounts where the influx of Western knowledge was narrowly contextualized, cinema was a wide-open forum for ‘cultural translation’ and articulation of differences. Multimodal textual and vocal renditions of foreign films exposed the Chinese audience to a broad spectrum of foreign cultures. The translators and interpreters served as mediators between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘local’, actively increasing the legibility and intelligibility of foreign films. Jin’s article showcases a dialectic link between cinema and cosmopolitanism, emphasizing film translation as a cosmopolitan praxis, rather than a mere form of cultural life participation. Compared to the scientific and religious texts circulated during treaty port Shanghai, film in the early Republican era was a welcome novelty. Its wide accessibility and low political sensitivity expanded the reach of cosmopolitanism, making the experience more ubiquitous and culturally integrable. Arguably, Shanghai was not what Leo Ou-fan Lee called ‘the cosmopolitan city par excellence’Footnote ⁴³ simply because of its massive exposure to multiple cultural influences; more importantly, it was a hub for a diverse range of foreign media—arts, literature, entertainment, fashion—that facilitated various channels of ‘cultural translation’.

In Stecher’s article on Li Jing’s contemporary play Daxiansheng, the protagonist Lu Xun (reimagined), a widely known figure in modern Chinese literature, is an embodiment of a tangled ‘cosmopolitan’ self. Untethered to genre, Daxiansheng is a multiplex exploration of one’s belonging in a global world. It is achieved through, as Stecher explains, a dramaturgical ‘interweaving’ of narrative fragments and images that transposes an icon’s (Lu Xun’s) ‘divided’ self into contexts and environments inspired by different traditions of theatre aesthetics. In this way, Li Jing’s play effectively accentuates the global dimensions of the local material, inviting the audience to reflect on the universality of human experience. Through Stecher’s analysis, we see in Daxiansheng a dramaturgical experiment in cosmopolitanism. By ‘recontextualizing’ Lu Xun’s multiple selves within different theatrical, literary, and philosophical traditions—that is, constructed pluralities—Li Jing crafts a microcosm of cosmopolitanism experience on stage that has generated real-world cosmopolitan effects.