Cultures of cosmopolitanism

This paper is concerned with whether a `culture of cosmopolitanism' is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging `global' processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture, they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the `world as a whole', and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is something that could be called a 'banal globalism', from focus group research they show that there is a wide awareness of the `global' but that this is combined in complex ways with notions of the local and grounded, and from media interviews they demonstrate that there is a reflexive awareness of a culture of the cosmopolitan. On the basis of their data from the UK, they conclude that a 'publicly screened' cosmopolitan culture is emergent and likely to orchestrate much of social and political life in future decades.