Cosmopolitics For Gordon Brown And A New World Order
ULRICH Beck, professor of sociology at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University and the London School of Economics, and author of Power in the Global Age, thinks about the bigger picture:
Gordon Brown needs to change the course of New Labour and replace the national agenda with a new cosmopolitan realism in order to tackle the challenges of terrorism, globalisation and climate change. To meet these goals, of course, he needs a strong European Union with the UK playing a major role in it. He also needs a strong alliance with civil society movements. Only then will he be able to get the new “global generations” on his side, those who have created networks across all manner of boundaries for the purpose of overcoming not capitalism as a system but neoliberalism. The left I see in my mind’s eye does not want its good old postwar agendas of nationalisation back. Nor is it neoliberal, and it is certainly not hunkered down in some xenophobic fortress. Rather, it is cosmopolitan. Its vision of a cosmopolitan future combines the concern for national and global justice with an interest in the survival of each individual. In other words, the idea of having roots and wings at the same time could replace the worn out ideas of communism, socialism, neoliberalism and old Labour. And this cosmopolitan left might make the improbable possible – namely the survival of humanity beyond the 21st century without lapsing back into barbarism.
If it used to be the case that power could be won only by giving up utopia, now the opposite is true: only by developing a new vision of a cosmopolitan future can New Labour be renewed and power retained.
Posted: 13th, July 2007 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
