Vincenzo CicchelliUniversity of Paris Descartes

Gemass, MSH, CNRSvincenzo.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).

• One of the widely accepted consequences of the globalized, mobile society is the development of individual outlooks, behaviors and feelings that transcend local and national boundaries.

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 (Barrington-Leach,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 gap-bridging 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• 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 Hahn-Bleibtreu 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.