Negative 1nc

Cosmopolitanism

2ac – cedes the political

Cosmopolitanism cedes the political to the Right – creates a more virulent state

Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’ network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University (Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State” Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
Given this dominant imaginary, for some radicals on the Left it made sense to turn to a more mobile and trans-national civil society, rather than the state for radical politics (Appadurai, 1996; Routledge, 2003). Within some academic disciplines there was a certain ‘distaste for [the] state’ (Low, 2003, p. 628). For society did not seem to operate anymore according to the rules of those older, modern, disciplinary categories, which concerned those radicals from the previous generation, like Foucault or Laclau and Mouffe. So new forms of analysis and radical politics were developed by new radicals, responding to the arrival of a new era (Featherstone, 2003; Anand et al., 2004). Hardt and Negri (2000), for example, talked up the idea that the new phase of capitalism operated far beyond the nation state, directly organising brain and body, through the complex interactions of globalised systems of trade and global media. Hardt and Negri therefore sought to work with the stakes of radical politics, as they saw them at the time, pre-crisis radicalising the post-modern categories4 of a global networked society itself, to create a borderless, less oppressive world. When these new radicals developed their manifesto, it seemed an almost natural conclusion to seek to get rid of outdated modes of representational politics, instead radicalising the deterritorialised potential of the multitude into new trans-national forms of bio-power, by intensifying this new phase of capitalism. This seemed logical, when all the analysis pointed to the way that globalised capitalism was going precrisis— states were holding back the revolutionary potential of the multitude.

As well as those radicals who advocate a global civil society ‘from below’, like Hardt and Negri and Mary Kaldor, there are of course those who advocate global civil society ‘from above’, in the form of some sort of global governance, such as the United Nations. Developing theories of globalisation in a particular way, many have argued for a move away ‘from the national to the cosmopolitan public sphere’, claiming that we are witnessing ‘the formation of a global polity’ (Ko¨hler, 1998, p. 231). The reality is of course that this ‘global polity’ is dominated by quasi-governmental organisations and elites that claim to speak on behalf of civil society, often without being elected by it. Nevertheless, as David Harvey (2000, p. 529) has written: ‘Cosmopolitanism is back.’ This revival has been led by authors such as David Held, Daniele Archibugi, Richard Falk, and Martin Ko¨hler (see Archibugi et al., 1998, for some examples). As David Chandler (2004, p. 320) said pre-crisis, such authors tend to look upon representational politics as a ‘mechanism of domination’. The belief is that trends in globalisation have shifted the way in which government is being and should be done.

Yet as Will Hutton (2009, p. 214) said post-crisis, on 5 December 2008:

to those who say that globalisation really constrains states, I say well look at the bail out of the last six or eight weeks. Look at the way in which when push came to shove, it was nation states that had to write taxpayers’ money to support Western banks, and suddenly we were all reminded that these nation states that allegedly had little or no power were, when the system broke, the only thing that you had.

It would have been unthinkable a few years ago that the government of the USA would own 60% of General Motors. It would have been unthinkable that British citizens would, without any major protests, allow 8% of national income to be invested in failing private banks, making the state the major shareholder in some of the world’s largest companies, like the Royal Bank of Scotland (84% in this case). From the USA to India, as recent elections reveal and trends in the global economy suggest, the new era is going to be one that extends the powers of government. Elected governments have expressed their power in an unparalleled way since 2007. Those who command the representational politics of the state command an incredibly powerful force. Radicals will need to work with the new tide of history, and the new opportunities it presents.

As Saskia Sassen (2009) says, in her contribution to a recent analysis of radical politics today,

the radical Left now needs to re-engage with the state. A point that wraps up this section of my

essay is that in that same book Chantal Mouffe (2009) looks back over the past decade or so,

noticing two dominant trends in radical politics. The first is ‘critique as withdrawal’ from the

state; the second is ‘critique as engagement’ with it. She says that many radicals believe withdrawal

is more valuable. This was (and probably still is) the dominant trend within contemporary

radical politics. And it is this trend that we need to reverse. As I will now discuss, the new stakes

also demand that the radical Left re-engage in representational politics more seriously, if the

Right is not to continue its rise to power.

2ac – cosmopolitanism bad

A cosmopolitan ethic is driven by Western paternalism that assumes the third world is unfit to help themselves and establishes Western superiority

Dhawan 13- Professor for Political Theory at the University of Innsbruck (Nikita Dhawan, Fall/ Winter 2013, “Human Rights between Past and Future”, Qui Parle, Vol. 22, No. 1pp. 139-166, JSTOR)//Yak
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck points out that, because we live in an increasingly interdependent world, we face common threats to our ecologies, finances, and security, so that any violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. This “globalization of risk” unites us in our equal vulnerability, providing the basis for the “cosmopolitan moment” of a world risk society.9 In response to the question “How can the relationship between global risk and the creation of a global public be understood?,” Beck discusses a “globalization of compassion” (W, 114), as seen in global media events such as the Haitian earthquake and the tsunamis, spectacularly demonstrated by the unprecedented readiness of citizens in faraway countries to donate to relief efforts. World risk society’s shocking threats open up questions of social accountability and responsibility that cannot be adequately addressed either in terms of national politics or the available forms of international cooperation. Public debate enables a range of voices to be heard and the public to participate in decisions that would otherwise evade their involvement. For Beck, international civil society actors are thus given new opportunities to intercede in the fields of human rights and global justice and in the search for a new grand narrative of radical- democratic globalization. Beck endorses a “cosmopolitan realpolitik” (W, 368), viewing global institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, as well as global NGOs and transnational social movements such as the World Social Forum, as legitimate vanguards of global governance. International NGOs like Amnesty International and Greenpeace enjoy a high level of legitimacy in the public sphere and are increasingly entrusted with the task of globally monitoring issues of human rights and ecology.

Although Nussbaum and Beck enthusiastically endorse cosmopolitanism as a “solution” for past injustices and a “promise” of better times to come, I want to emphasize the complicities between liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity and the global structures of domination they claim to resist. Pheng Cheah argues that such a critique of cosmopolitanism’s elitist detachment is motivated by a vision of cosmopolitanism as an “intellectual ethos” espoused by a “select clerisy” lacking feasible political structures for the universal institutionalization of its ideals.10 But I object to the project of cosmopolitanism, because it fails to seriously address the historical processes through which certain individuals are placed in a situation from which they can aspire to global solidarity and universal benevolence— in other words, it lacks a concept of cosmopolitanism as the self- indulgence of the altruistic and the magnanimous.

Nussbaum, to her credit, is trying to explore ways of improving people’s lives. But that itself is the problem. Her attempt to act in the interests of distant others, to look beyond her position and make everyone have as good a life as “ours,” disregards the connection between the well- off “here” and the impoverished “elsewhere.” As Spivak has argued, Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism appears profoundly provincial, in its too- hasty assumption, as “given,” that a “first- world” metropolitan academic and a “third world” sexed subaltern subject would share fundamental aims and interests.11 Nussbaum firmly believes in a critical Socratic pedagogy12 that would circumvent Eurocentrism through cultivating sensitivity to other cultures and perspectives, even as she asserts that she “would rather risk charges of imperialism than refuse to take a moral stand on urgent issues facing women” (WCD, 2).

In contrast to Nussbaum’s faith in cosmopolitanism’s self-correctional reflexivity, Spivak diagnoses in the cosmopolitan call to align ourselves with our fellow citizens a shift from “the white man’s burden” to the “the burden of the fittest.”13 This revision of social Darwinism defines the “unfit” as unable either to help or to govern themselves. The distance between those who “dispense” justice, aid, rights, and solidarity and those who are simply coded as “victims of wrongs” and thus as “receivers” remains a signature of historical violence (OA, 266n14). When progressive activists and intellectuals intervene “benevolently” in the struggles of subaltern groups for greater recognition and rights, they reinforce the very power relations that they seek to demolish.

Conversely, Beck proposes that our common vulnerability in the face of risk brings us together. But as we all know, though we might be facing the same storm, we are not all in the same boat, and that makes all the difference. For Beck, the tsunamis resulted in the “globalization of compassion”; but, as an instructive contrast, I would like to consider a moment in Spivak’s narrative of a major cyclone in Bangladesh in 1991 and the subsequent intervention by Médecins sans frontières. The MSF workers, none of whom spoke the local language, were obliged to work through interpreters. When Spivak later arrived at one of the villages where she had worked actively in the past, some of the villagers ran up to her, saying, “We don’t want to be saved, we want to die, they are treating us like animals.”14 In a situation like this, and without any common language, can we even think of solidarity? For these reasons, the Sri Lankan feminist Malathi De Alwis15 has asked if we are truly capable of empathizing with the pain of others, and even if we should be allowed to witness their pain if this witnessing only serves to affirm our humanity and our capacity to care. Correspondingly, of course, we need to find “authentic victims” who truly deserve our benevolence. What do we do with our “will to empower” the “disenfranchised and the vulnerable,” and how do we deal with those who refuse to be interpellated as appropriate objects of our solidarity?

Cosmopolitanism has an authoritarian underside that reinforces state power

Pallitto and Heyman 8 – Political Science, Seton Hall University; Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The University of Texas at El Paso (Robert and Josiah, “Theorizing Cross-Border Mobility: Surveillance, Security and Identity”, 2008, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/3426/3389) KW

One such analysis involves the concept of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism covers various phenomena within which political and cultural imaginations become relatively unbounded, losing their localized prejudices and sentiments, and thus cosmopolitanism is, predictably, often celebrated as a triumph of technology, or of social-cultural development (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). However, its benefits are unequally distributed, and they come at a cost. The mobility freedom enjoyed by some depends on an “authoritarian underside” that denies movement to others (Sparke, 2006: 173, 174). Mobility freedom can be seen as a right or as a privilege, but either way it usually comes with greater speed of movement and lower designation of risk; that is, high rights and high speed are mutually reinforcing, and they are associated with lower risk. Those designated as “higher-risk,” on the other hand, will experience risk in a double sense: they are seen to pose a higher risk of harm to others, and at the same time they themselves are more at risk for state scrutiny, detention and even mistreatment. Ulrich Beck (1992,1999) sees risks as products of modern and post-modern technological, social, and economic processes, creating new, shared domains of political collectivity that cut across traditionally bounded polities. Risk calculations made on a global scale can drive political decisionmaking, with the resulting calculations shaping the space for action in a postmodern context. This may be plausible for some issues (such as global warming), but as our analysis of securitization of movement after 9/11 shows, world risk may also result in greater differentiation of treatment and potentially segmentation of subjectivities. When applied to social groups, risk calculation is problematic because of its stratifying effect that entrenches the unequal position of those at the losing end of the rights/risk/speed calculus.

2ac – state good

Transforming state institutions from within is a better political strategy – giving up on the state fully cedes it to corporate control and subjects the subaltern to the violence of the market

Dhawan, 13- NIKITA DHAWAN is a junior professor of political science for gender/postcolonial studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt. (Nikita Dhawan, Winter 2013, “Coercive Cosmopolitanism and Impossible Solidarities”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, JSTOR)
The other significant challenge lies in negotiating the Enlightenment legacies of cosmopolitanism, democracy, justice, and rights without reproducing the constitutive violence that marked the emergence of these normative ideals. Spivak proposes that the aporetic, simultaneously imperial and counter-imperial, nature of the Enlightenment makes the exploration of possible ways to mobilize anti-paternalistic forms of Enlightenment more necessary than nativist denunciations of the legacies of Enlightenment or ethnocentric searches for “pure” non-Western knowledge systems. Despite their white, bourgeois, masculinist bias, Enlightenment ideals are eminently indispensable, and we “cannot not want them,” even as we must doggedly critique their coercive mobilization in service [End Page 156] of the continued justification of imperialism. Spivak proposes an “affirmative sabotage” of those Enlightenment principles “with which we are in sympathy, enough to subvert!”32 One etymology of “sabotage” traces the word back to sabot (wooden shoe): workers in fifteenth-century Holland would throw their clogs into the gears of textile looms, breaking their cogs lest the automated machines render the human workers obsolete. The saboteur aims to subvert through obstruction and disruption, through intentionally withdrawing efficiency. Spivak supplements the term with the adjective “affirmative,” devising a strategy in which the instruments of colonialism are turned around into tools for transgression, poison turned into medicine. She explains: “The invention of the telephone by a European upper class male in no way preempts its being put to the use of an anti-imperialist revolution.”33 Thus decolonization is not about forsaking the “master’s tools” but about enabling subaltern access to these tools.34 The problem is that native elites have monopolized the “master’s tools” and use them not to dismantle the master’s house but to cement their own hegemony. Transnational elites have an interest in preventing subaltern agency and manipulating the tools to serve their purposes.

The project of desubalternization poses some interesting questions, which it leaves necessarily unanswered. How can we listen to and learn from those who have been exiled from intellectual labor, from those who do not know the larger script? How can we resolve the paradox in which the intellectual must learn to be transformed through an ethical encounter with the subaltern, even as he or she must create conditions conducive to subaltern agency, activate habits of democracy, and insert subalterns into hegemony, which in turn reinforce the agency of the vanguard? Finally, we must ask: What is the role of “wrongs” in the constitution of our ethical agency? Spivak stresses that wrongs is not the only antonym of rights; rather, responsibility is another possible antonym that has not yet been derived from rights. Differentiating between “rights-based” and “responsibility-based” subordinate cultures (oa , 37) impels us to rethink the meaning of responsibility, not as the duty of the “fitter self” for the other but as responsibility to the other (ph , 180; oa , 28). Spivak moves beyond the traditional [End Page 157] aporias of ethics and politics: here ethics is imagined not as a self-driven political calculus of doing the right thing but rather as openness toward the imagined agency of the other; and political work is marked by uncertainty, the ethical interrupting the political even as they become more and more entangled. Spivak describes critical practice through the example of brushing your teeth: although you know that you will die, you still brush your teeth as an act of defiance of mortality.35 Revisiting Lenin’s suggestion in “What Is to Be Done?,” Spivak recommends that vanguardism be supplanted by the slow, patient work of “building up of a will to social justice for all” in place of the promotion of self-interest and consciousness raising. Changing the intellectual’s habits of mind while training the subaltern to undertake “intellectual performance” involves much more than producing “educated electorates.” In contrast to Rousseau’s dictum “Men must be forced to be free,” Spivak outlines the impossible, albeit necessary, task of uncoercive rearrangement of desires.

The task of undoing subalternity demands the Gramscian/Spivakian intellectual to be a “permanent persuader” even as the question of how uncoercive persuasion should function poses itself more and more forcefully. In contrast to Nussbaum’s project of educating “intelligent world citizens” (np , 100), I find more compelling Spivak’s idea of preparing subalterns to enter the circuit of hegemony so that they are capable of governing. The challenge is to transform the subaltern from an object of benevolence into an agent of democracy. Instead of ensuring the survival of the suffering classes, thus reducing the deprived to their basic needs (themselves coded as transparent to our reading practices), decolonization engages with the imaginations and desires of both the dispensers and the receivers of justice. Against theories that presume sovereign subjects, who know what they need and how to get it, Spivak unpacks the discontinuity of interest and desire, namely, how subjects perceive unpleasure as pleasure to protect themselves. Rather than teach self-help or seek to ensure immediate material comfort, Spivak attempts to act as a conduit between class-privileged and subaltern subjects and to construct a necessary but impossible collectivity: her aim is the “uncoercive undermining of the class habit [End Page 158] of obedience” (“ss ,” 562), to elicit consent rather than compliance (“ss ,” 558).

The “epistemic discontinuity” between the advocates of global justice and human rights and those they protect is a constant reminder of the subaltern as a “space of difference.” The subaltern has been torn away from the public sphere, and this tear must be invisibly sutured through epistemic transformation, as a supplement to infrastructural support (oa , 34–35). This demands a “wider egoity” of the postcolonial feminist: we are forced to think beyond ourselves. We have to resist becoming “self-selected moral entrepreneurs who distribute philanthrophy without democracy” (“ss ,” 482). Spivak reminds us that colonialism was carried out by ethical subjects like us with good intentions. Directly scapegoating colonialism masks our complicity in global injustice.36

Spivak examines a case of sati in 1987 in India, in which the mother of the eighteen-year-old Rup Kanwar, who had been married for only eight months, smiled at her daughter’s suicide and said that she was proud. She points out that feminist activists in India could not come to terms with this smile. To remove this smile involves engaging in a painstaking and patient work of epistemic change, which any “mere” criminalization of gender violence will not achieve.37 Instead of seeing ourselves the altruistic solvers of the world’s problems, as those who have the responsibility as well as the capacity to implement global democracy, peace, and justice, we have to learn to see ourselves as part of the problem. This entails “a productive acknowledgement of complicity” wherein we need to interrogate the processes that convert us into dispensers of justice and rights. Self-doubt and modesty are important aspects of ethico-political practice, but not in the Christian sense of “selflessness.” Instead, we must question the invincibility of our convictions (“we ,” 532). As Spivak warns: “History is larger than personal goodwill. In this business of solidarity with the poorest of the poor in the global south personal goodwill is not enough. That’s a Christian thing to think that you can undo thousands of years of oppression by just being nice” (“mg ,” 27). In addition to the necessary collective efforts to reform laws and relations of production and to improve access to education and health care (cpr , 383), [End Page 159] we must undo the rupture between the privileged classes and the gendered subaltern, and this will not be done through top-down solidarity politics. Spivak cautions that without persistent efforts to establish ethical singularity with subalterns (cpr , 384) first-world activism (US-based anti-sweatshop consumer boycott campaigns, for example) can take the form of the highly damaging “moral imperialism” of “solidarity tourists” (cpr , 415). Instead, the “uncoercive rearrangement of desires” through an interruptive, supplementary education, the remapping of subject formation through “epistemic change” at both ends of postcoloniality, is the heart of the project of decolonization. This entails a recoding of our reading practices of interpreting and acting in the world. We, transnational elites, urgently need to rethink and reimagine our understanding of politics by examining how, despite our best efforts, subaltern groups remain the objects of benevolence and not the agents of transformation.

The relationship of democratization and decolonization to the indigenous subalterns remains a tenuous one. Even as subaltern groups weather the impact of neocolonial globalization, they remain marginal to both nation-states and to civil society. Resistance, for subaltern groups, lies not in anti-statism or postnationalism, but instead in their insertion into the existing framework of the nation-state.38 Despite the nation-state’s crisis of legitimacy, it is dangerous to disregard the immense political implications of state-phobic positions, which are immensely popular in radical discourses in the West (“cn ,” 106). Postcolonial states are still the most important mediators between the injunctions of global capital and disenfranchised groups. We cannot understand the state narrowly as a repressive apparatus; instead, we must envisage a different state capable of articulating the will of excluded subaltern populations (“cn ,” 106). To a large extent, the dictates of neoliberal political economy, which posits a false opposition between the ills of state planning and the virtues of free markets, drive this attack on the state. What this operation conveniently conceals is that neoliberalism itself requires the state as its precondition (“cn ,” 114). Thus we should not frame the discussion as for or against the state, but instead focus on how the interests of disenfranchised groups can be articulated in the struggle for hegemony, through [End Page 160] the institutionalization of the redistributive functions of the state (“cn ,” 114). We should direct our efforts toward enabling subaltern groups to make claims on the state within the formal grammar of rights and citizenship to activate a “democracy from below.”