The Reach and Limits of Cosmopolitan Liberal Citizenship

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The post-war liberal world order, and its neoliberal transformations since the 1990s, supported a citizenship model that envisions agentic, right-bearing and globally oriented cosmopolitan individuals.  This model unfolded and became standardized through a number of interacting dynamics including national and transnational courts (e.g. the European Court of Justice), instruments of international organizations (e.g. the International Conventions on Human Rights, the UN’s Human Development Index), and the expansion of education worldwide and a network of expertise around it.  Drawing on a joint book project (with Hector Cebolla Boado) and using a multi-sided, representative survey of internationally mobile and non-mobile Chinese higher education students (with control groups of European students), we analyze the reach and limits of this citizenship model. In the broader migration literature, international mobility and globalization are linked in two specific ways: (i) the experience of mobility is highly transformative and engenders individuals with broad agentic qualities (defined as transnational human capital) and open, tolerant, solidaristic affinities beyond “own kind” (defined as cosmopolitanism); (ii) those who are internationally mobile are a positively selected group on human and cultural capital and thus are already more agentic and inclined to cosmopolitanism than those who are sedentary. Our findings question both these propositions; we do not find support either for mobility or selectivity argument.  We suggest the standardized and transnational nature of higher education, on the one hand, and the timing and context of China’s entry into the global world, on the other, as plausible explanations.

Yasemin Soysal is Research Professor of Global Sociology at WZB, Berlin Social Science Center (https://www.wzb.eu/en/persons/yasemin-soysal) and the PI in SCRIPTS Excellence Cluster (https://www.scripts-berlin.eu/people/Soysal/index.html).