Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 41, No.

3, 2007

Internationalisation, Diversity and the

Humanities Curriculum: Cosmopolitanism
and Multiculturalism Revisited

JAMES DONALD

This article stages a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and

multiculturalism in order to think through what is at stake in
demands that universities should produce graduates who are
sensitive to social diversity and attuned to the contemporary
realities of globalisation. The argument is that, although
‘graduate attributes’ are no doubt an effective management
tool in a massified higher education system, they can also be
used to focus attention on what dispositions it is reasonable
and desirable to expect graduates to develop. The arguments
about cosmopolitanism of Jeremy Waldron and Martha
Nussbaum are considered.

The Arts and Social Science Faculty in which I work, which has been
touched surprisingly lightly by the winds of institutional reform howling
through universities over the past thirty years, is currently renewing its
undergraduate programmes, as well as much else. As its Associate Dean
for Education, before I became Dean in 2007, I was responsible not only
for the logistics of our various reviews, but also for ensuring that whatever
changes my colleagues decided to make—or any decisions we took not to
change—were negotiated in relation to the University’s planning and
policy demands. Beyond that, I saw someone in my position as having a
role in ensuring that our often-vigorous discussions were, and continue to
be, informed by intellectual developments in the field of the humanities.
That is, I do not see the reform of the humanities curriculum as purely a
technical or a management issue, but as a process that needs to be informed
by the always emerging, always contested values of the humanities. In
working on our reforms, then, my colleagues (and I) are accountable along
two axes. As humanities scholars, we have to ensure that our programmes
respond thoughtfully and creatively to changes in the world and changes in
our disciplinary fields. As humanities scholars who happen to be employed
by the University of New South Wales, we need to ensure that those
programmes are at least congruent with the strategic priorities articulated by
the University. And one measure of the degree of alignment will be how
closely the ideal graduate of our new programmes matches the sort of
citizen-subject implicit in the University’s list of ‘Graduate Attributes’.

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290 J. Donald

Possibly the most interesting of the University’s strategic priorities that

define our room for manoeuvre is ‘internationalisation’, and here I reflect
on what the consequent requirement to ‘internationalise the curriculum’
might mean in practice. As for UNSW’s Graduate Attributes, they reveal a
mixture of specifically academic aspirations, generic skills and also (this is
the relevant bit) a number of cultural attitudes or dispositions. Like other
universities, UNSW aims to create not just a reasonably well-educated
individual and a reasonably well-prepared entrant into the labour market,
but also a certain kind of citizen with a certain kind of sensibility. This
citizen will be adaptable and ethical in ways that befit our entrepreneurial
times. She will demonstrate ‘the capacity for enterprise, initiative and
creativity’ (Graduate Attribute no. 6), ‘an appreciation of, and respon-
siveness to, change’ (no. 10) and ‘a respect for ethical practice and social
responsibility’ (no. 11). But she will also have acquired two characteristics
that indicate what might be at stake in the emphasis on internationalisa-
tion. These are ‘an appreciation of, and respect for, diversity’ (no. 7) and
‘a capacity to contribute to, and work within, the international community’
(no. 8). In other words, our implied graduate will be multiculturally savvy
and a functional cosmopolitan. I therefore begin by reprising the dialogue
between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in as far as it touches on
issues of diversity and globalisation.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND MULTICULTURALISM

On the face of it, there appears to be an incompatibility between the
normative ideal of cosmopolitanism and the apparently less evaluative
principle of multiculturalism. Cosmopolitanism, at least in its stronger
versions, encourages us to rise above what Virginia Woolf called ‘unreal
loyalties’—that is, particularist affiliations, allegiances or identities.
Having exposed and rejected these unreal loyalties, we shall presumably
learn to acknowledge only real, universal loyalties to all Humanity,
whoever and wherever they may be. Given how hard it is to see what these
cosmopolitan loyalties would look like or feel like, it is small surprise that
they have often been derided and mocked. Edmund Burke, the founding
intellectual of modern English conservatism, denounced Jean-Jacques
Rousseau as ‘A lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred’ because he
farmed out his children to orphanages even as he declared his love for
Mankind. Burke ostentatiously affirmed his own preference for grounding
human sympathies in the local and the familiar: ‘To love the little platoon
we belong to in society is the first principle (the germs as it were) of public
affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a
love to our country and to mankind.’ In Bleak House, Dickens satirises
Mrs. Jellyby’s ‘telescopic philanthropy’: a narcissistic determination
to help the needy children of Africa that preoccupied her to the extent
of neglecting utterly the desires, needs and rights of her own family.
(Her eyes, writes Dickens, ‘had a curious habit of looking a long way
off, as if she could see nothing nearer than Africa’.) Maybe that is why

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cosmopolitanism has been described as ‘a parochialism with airs, and

much the worse for it’.1 People can’t really love Humanity in general, but
only particular people. To presume or pretend to do so can only signify a
disdain for mundane, messy reality; a kind of existential snobbery in
which cosmopolites assume that they alone can see through the fictions of
cultural loyalties while the rest of us remain dopily seduced by them. In
living up to that ideal or adopting that pose, goes the argument,
cosmopolites risk more than blindness to what is close at hand. They also
deprive themselves of the essential sources of human support to be found
in local communal ties.
Multiculturalists start as it were at the other end. Rather than imagining
a universal Humanity that is manifested in a taxonomy of different cultures,
they take as axiomatic the existence, value and affective claims—in short,
contra Woolf, the reality—of local, historical and collective sources of
belonging and selfhood: that is, the multiplicity and diversity of cultures.
More like Burke, multiculturalists see the middle-sized platoons of national,
ethnic, linguistic or religious collectivities as the necessary form in which
Humanity takes the stage of history. The problem with this approach, of
course, is that cultures exist as cultures in this sense only by drawing
boundaries around themselves to create the set of differences that specifies
their unique self-identity. This leads to the sort of ‘narcissism of minor
differences’ that Freud diagnosed in nationalism, and the flowering of
the germ of identification with family and immediate community into
a love for wider circles of humanity is often hard to see. It is certainly less
inevitable or organic than Burke and many of his communitarian
descendants like to suppose.
If, then, in broad-brush terms, the danger of cosmopolitanism is an
indifference to the people around me because my eyes can see nothing nearer
than Humanity, the potential flaw in multiculturalism is that, in disavowing
the airs and pretensions of cosmopolitanism, it may allow ‘cultures’ to fall
back into a parochialism that misrecognises contingent meanings, values and
beliefs as universal truths—a prejudice towards ‘community-as-destiny’.
Today, the debate has for the most part moved beyond this apparent
stalemate. Contemporary cosmopolitan writers usually insist that their
own particular cosmopolitanism is rooted, vernacular, critical, discrepant
or in some other way has its feet firmly planted on local ground, or at least
in the footsteps of global migrants. Multicultural theorists likewise fall
over themselves to eschew essentialism or the reification of culture and
embrace the historical and contingent variability of culturally or ethnically
identified groups. Reconceptualised in a multicultural light, cosmopolitan-
ism has come to be seen not as the transcendence of particularity in favour
of an acultural universalism, but rather as an awareness of the complexity
and diversity of forms of human life that interrupts and dislocates
the absolute claims of the local and the enforced unity of a culture.
Reconceptualised in light of cosmopolitanism’s scepticism, multiculturalism
now avoids the tendency to absolutism and/or relativism implicit in the image
of an infinite series of autonomous ‘cultures’. Instead, this multiculturalism
is alert to the hybridity and impurity inherent in the meaning-producing,

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identity-assigning and space-bounding dynamic of culture. Here is how

Stuart Hall articulates this version of multiculturalism:

In a world of constant movement, both forced and free, both at the centre
and the periphery of the global system, communities and societies are
increasingly multiple in their nature. They are composed of communi-
ties with different origins, drawing on different traditions, coming from
different places, obliged to make a life together within the confines still of
a fixed territorial boundary or space while acknowledging that they are
making a common life, not living a form of apartheid or separatism. They
want, nevertheless, to retain in some sense the distinctiveness of their
historical roots in the place in which they have ended up (Hall, 2002, p. 25).

There is a symptomatic tension in this passage between multicultural

and cosmopolitan habits of thought. Hall hangs onto a sense of belonging
as embedded in beliefs and practices through which a group of people,
over time, understand themselves and the world; that is, culture concep-
tualised as that which authorises, organises and sustains collective
identities and individual lives.2 At the same time, however, he acknowl-
edges the cosmopolitan axiom that such traditions are forever being
remade in new places and renegotiated with other groups. Multicultura-
lism is thus seen not in serial terms, but as a social reality that produces
ever-new formations.
Cosmopolitanism laced with multiculturalism may thus offer a way of
thinking beyond the opposition between ‘local’ and ‘global’, or between
‘particular’ and ‘universal’. Multicultural cosmopolitanism (or cosmopolitan
multiculturalism) makes it possible to conceptualise each term as simul-
taneously constitutive and disruptive of the other. Communities and
cultures are never hermetic. There is always a disorientating interplay
between culturally specific traditions and community-transcending events
and communication. By the same token, global relations, institutions and
cultures are always encountered locally, and so are negotiated and remade
through the mill of located traditions, sensibilities and frames of inter-
pretation. Cosmopolitanism thus identifies an imaginative and self-
questioning encounter with extrinsic cultures through which individuals
and collectivities develop a self-defining relationship to a globalised,
culturally complex here and now.
How does this iteration between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism
redraw the familiar social imagery of culture, community and identity?
I illustrate the argument by talking about a category with which both
traditions have had their problems, that of the nation—problematic
because it often seems to be too local for cosmopolitanism, but too global
for multiculturalism. What is the nature of national identities and their
claims? The sociologist Ernest Gellner followed Virginia Woolf on this
one, and railed against their unreality.

A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears; a
deficiency in any of these particulars is not inconceivable and does from
time to time occur, but only as a result of some disaster, and it is itself

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a disaster of a kind. All this seems obvious, though, alas, it is not true.
But that it should have come to seem so very obviously true is indeed an
aspect, or perhaps the very core, of the problem of nationalism. Having a
nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has come to appear
as such (Gellner, 1983, p. 6).

For Gellner, it was not just that such essentialist claims about national
identity were unfounded. Rather, it was that they exemplified ideology as
a not-so-noble lie. They are not just unreal, they are fraudulent: ‘Nationalism
is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where
they do not exist’ (Gellner, 1964, p. 168). In Imagined Communities, Benedict
Anderson chided Gellner for being ‘so anxious to show that nationalism
masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates ‘‘invention’’ to
‘‘fabrication’’ and ‘‘falsity’’, rather than to ‘‘imagining’’ and ‘‘creation’’.’
In other words, Gellner asks the wrong question. The issue should not be
whether collective claims on our loyalties and affiliations are real or
unreal, natural or artificial. Anderson’s persuasive alternative is that
communities should rather be distinguished ‘not by their falsity/genuine-
ness, but by the style in which they are imagined’. It is only through that
process of imagining, and at that level of the imaginary, that people are
able to sustain any sense of belonging in a place or to a community
(Anderson, 1991, pp. 5–7).
Anderson’s rethinking of nations as imagined communities was an
important move in the general argument. It shifted the emphasis to the
effective functioning of group solidarities as the support for such
belonging, whether or not you or I think the beliefs of any particular
group are true and whether or not we admire their values, conventions
and dispositions. Anderson’s approach made it possible to see more
clearly than ever that groups do not exist outside or before the processes of
social interaction, public participation and negotiations about representa-
tion and space-sharing that bring them into being and to which they
continuously adapt. He also made the important point that imagining is not
just a matter of ideas, images, stories, beliefs, desires and fantasies.
Specifically national self-imaging was just as much about the spread of
markets and mediated communication and the creation of, as it were, new
forms of virtual being-together made possible by the media forms and
technologies of novel and newspaper.
Anderson’s approach to imagined communities is valuable because it
can take account of two competing conceptualisations of the nation
without falling hostage to either. One is the ethnicised nation, the nation of
blood, stock and destiny whose claims on the individual are peremptory
and non-negotiable. The other is the neutral national state that recognises
only individual citizens who are all equally bearers of rights and
responsibilities, and therefore sets to one side cultural specificity and
differences. The imagined nation might thus be seen as politically
universalist to the extent that it recognises but brackets the multiple,
layered loyalties of its citizens, but equally as culturally monist to the
extent that supposedly neutral liberal states require identification not with

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an abstract civic patriotism but with necessarily cultural meanings—the

crown, the flag, the football or cricket team, certain songs, the memory of
old television comedy shows, and so forth. This very tension, however,
implies why modern citizen-subjects are not going to inhabit or be formed
by one and only one community. To that extent, as Nietzsche foresaw in
The Gay Science, we are all to a greater or lesser extent homeless: ‘We,
who are homeless, are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent
being ‘modern men,’ and consequently do not feel tempted to participate
in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades
in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking’ (Nietzsche,
2001, p. 242). At the very least, Nietzsche’s ethical option for home-
lessness means a refusal of the monocultural claims of an ethnicised
nation, or presumably for any sub-national or transnational culture
characterised by ‘mendacious racial self-admiration’. Nietzsche is just as
scathing, however, about the claims of a deracinated humanitarianism
masquerading as cosmopolitanism:

The ‘religion of compassion’ to which one would like to convert us—oh,

we know these hysterical little men and women well enough who today
need just this religion as a veil and finery. We are no humanitarians; we
should never dare to allow ourselves to speak of ‘our love of humanity’—
our type is not actor enough for that! (Nietzsche, 2001, p. 242).

Nietzsche’s homelessness does not mean that modern subjects have freed
themselves from the affective dimensions of living with others, as calls for
civic nationalism or constitutional patriotism seem to presuppose. More
positively, it foreshadows the possibility of relating to the world, to others
and to oneself through imaginative means other than those of identity and
culture. That seems to be what Nietzsche was getting at when he insists
that however bad he and people like him may be as Germans, nonetheless:
‘We are . . . good Europeans’ (ibid.). Through this avowal, he embraces the
complexity of belonging in a supranational and perhaps cosmopolitan
frame. A cosmopolitan homelessness suggests that the texture of those
affective social relationships is not given and fixed but is always
experienced as an oscillation between belonging and disorientation.3
This approach produces a different emphasis from Hall’s multicultural
image of people wanting to ‘retain some sense the distinctiveness of their
historical roots’ in the everyday agonism of metropolitan life. Rather than
treating the diasporic as residual or disruptive, it presents a vision of
located community that has the diasporic at its heart; that, perhaps
counter-intuitively, sees the diasporic as generative of located culture.
Think of it this way. We find it perfectly easy to accept that the communal
identity of people settled in a place is secured rather than undermined by
the temporality and change that we call history. It is Australian history
that, according to Prime Minister John Howard, makes Australia
Australia, just as it is English history that supposedly makes the English
English. (Of course, you might say that it is largely British colonial history
that made Australia Australian, rather as in The Satanic Verses Salman

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Rushdie’s stuttering Whisky Sisodia points out that ‘the trouble with the
Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they do do
do not know what it means’—but that is a different story.) In contrast to
the translation of historical flux into the narrative certainties of tradition
and heritage, it seems far less self-evident that collective identity might
equally be produced by geographical flows and even underwritten in
particular by the supposedly disruptive cultural force of transnational
migration. What is less clear is why, if historical change is assumed to
produce cultural identity, it is taken for granted that geographical or
demographic change will subvert it.
The assumption only makes sense if you freeze culture as given identity
rather then accepting that culture is a never-ending and inherently unstable
process of negotiation and change, a process of becoming rather than a
state of being. The alternative and more compelling approach is to
envisage diaspora not merely as a term for transnational movement, but
equally as a signifier of how the cosmos gets into the polis. It points us, as
Andrew Benjamin has put this, to ‘political struggles to define the local, as
distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement’ (Benjamin,
2006, p. 120). The local should not be imagined as a settled community
that is disrupted by newcomers. Rather, the possibility of settlement—that
is, sharing space together and in doing so creating a symbolic and
institutional fabric of cultural and social relations—is conceivable only
through processes of often inharmonious and sometimes even violent
negotiation that exceed any given version of identity. This is how the
cosmopolitan necessarily informs locality (pp. 120–21).
What does this line of thinking mean for multiculturalism and diversity?
For a start, it puts a question mark against any version of multiculturalism
that treats ‘cultures’ as things or sets of things, even abstract things like
beliefs, values and identities. It blurs the image of self-sufficient cultures
negotiating difference and contamination when they bump up against
other cultures. It certainly undermines the idea of an uncomplicated and
unambiguous national, ethnic or other cultural identity, and in doing so it
pulls the rug from under the idea that the responsibility of a university
education is either to bolster a unitary national identity or to affirm as
equally and unarguably valid multiple cultural identities. Instead, it
implies that, taken seriously, an effective ‘appreciation of, and respect for,
diversity’ would entail a capacity for agonistic respect. This term was
coined by the political philosopher William Connolly in an attempt to
think through the conditions in which the sort of cosmopolitically-
informed, locally-enacted negotiations about values, ends, means and
meanings described above might actually be possible. For Connolly,
agonistic respect connotes:

. . . a civic virtue that allows people to honour different final sources, to

cultivate reciprocal respect across difference, and to negotiate larger
assemblages to set general policies. Agonistic respect is a reciprocal
virtue appropriate to a world in which partisans find themselves in
intensive relations of political interdependence. Agonism is the dimension

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through which each party maintains a pathos of distance from others with
whom it is engaged. Respect is the dimension through which self-limits
are acknowledged and connections are established across lines of
difference (Connolly, 2002, p. xxvi).

Although the various writers I have invoked would doubtless each take
a different position on the possibilities of the cosmopolitan and the claims
of community, they all make it possible to think culture as a process
of meaning-production and naming that always and inevitably entails—or
simply is—the negotiation of differences. It is true the process spins off
the collective identities and shared narrative imaginings that supposedly
author and anchor the culture, and that those by-products are routinely
mistaken for, or misrepresented as, the process. But that’s to confuse the
still with the movie. When we say culture or community we have to use
the nouns, but what we need are verbs. For ‘culture’ always read ‘making-
culture’; for ‘community’ always read ‘negotiating-community’.

TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN HUMANITIES

Getting back to the exigencies of curriculum reform in an internationally-
minded Australian university, how in practice might these thoughts about
cosmopolitanism, diversity and culture feed into a remade humanities
curriculum designed for the coming ten to fifteen years?
One place to start would be with a new map of knowledge for a trans-
formed and still largely inscrutable world. This would require a collective
effort to think through the reality of global forces, flows, relations and
cultures today and then somehow to map the outcome as the content and
perspectives represented across a range of disciplinary programmes. Even
I balk at the mad encyclopaedism of such a project. The other, more
manageable place is to start is with something like graduate attributes.
What, we might ask, would cosmopolitan and multiculturally aware
graduates be in the second decade of the 21st century? What could we
reasonably expect such graduates to be able to do? And what knowledge
and expertise would enable them to be what they need to be and to do
what they need to do?
In the early 1990s, in an article entitled ‘Minority Cultures and the
Cosmopolitan Alternative’, Jeremy Waldron presented a provocative
picture of what it means these days for a person to be cosmopolitan. His
vision of cosmopolitan ‘life, agency, and responsibility’ was inspired in
part by Salman Rushdie’s vivid apologia for The Satanic Verses, the
reaction to which in the UK had exploded many well-meaning orthodoxies
of 1980s multiculturalism. The novel, explains Rushdie, was ‘written from
the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or
rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition’ and so
represents ‘a migrant’s-eye view of the world’ (Rushdie, in Waldron,
1995, p. 93). Setting himself against those of his critics who fear that
‘intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin
their own’, Rushdie protests that the novel:

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. . . celebrates the hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation

that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and
fears the absolutism of the Pure. Me´lange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a
bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that
mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The
Satanic Verses . . . is a love-song to our mongrel selves (Rushdie, in
Waldron, 1995, p. 93).

Taking his cue from this exuberant celebration of homelessness,

Waldron—a US-based but still self-consciously Kiwi legal philosopher
who got to his new home via Oxford and Edinburgh—asked his readers to
recognise that for increasing numbers of people movement is becoming as
ordinary a way of life as settlement, to consider whether migrancy should
in all cases be valued less highly than settlement, and so to see
cosmopolitanism as an emerging but viable style of affective being. For
Waldron, then, in this article at least, the experience of relocation (or
dislocation) came to be seen as entailing a cosmopolitan disposition: that
is, a mongrel and migrant self, adaptable to change, not transparent, and
‘conscious of living in a mixed-up world and having a mixed-up self’.
This cosmopolitan self Waldron distinguishes from two other disposi-
tions characteristic of competing philosophical, ethical and social
perspectives. One is the liberal self, whose defining trait is that she is
an autonomous individual leading life according to a plan based on a
conception of what is good and worthwhile. As a liberal himself,
Waldron’s objection is not to this orientation as such but rather to ‘the
rather compulsive rigidity of the traditional liberal picture’ (Waldron,
1995, p. 94). The problem with this view is that it has a tendency to see
people as philosophical constructs rather than social beings, and so as
desiccated, self-interested and overly rational thinking-machines. Given
his worldly experience, Waldron understandably seems to feel that it
offers a less accurate and certainly a less vivid portrait of contemporary
humanity than Rushdie’s vulnerable, versatile and nimble-witted migrants.
The liberal self often remains an abstraction: at best, the sort of person
who lives comfortably in a liberal democracy and who would be the ideal
graduate of a liberal education; or, to put it another way, the implicit norm
that frames the various abilities, attitudes and characteristics taxonomised
as graduate attributes. The liberally disposed self will have achieved the
maturity to reflect systematically on the world and so to become an
autonomous person, ready to take responsibility for their own lives, and
predisposed to decide—quite freely—that the good life is one in which
people are intellectually active, creatively entrepreneurial, socially
responsible, open to change, respectful of diversity and not exclusively
parochial in their interests and sympathies.
In the end, Waldron wants to present a culturally thicker version of the
liberal self, not to junk it. The real target of his cosmopolitan argument is
communitarianism, whether in its monist or multicultural variants, and in
particular its image of a communitarian self premised on the assertion of

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a universal human need for rootedness in the life of a particular cultural

community. In contrast to the liberal emphasis on autonomy and self-
direction, this perspective sees communal belonging rather than freedom
as the human capacity that confers character and depth on individual
choices and actions. Waldron accepts absolutely that humans are
inherently social beings who are formed ‘by attachments and involve-
ments, by culture and community’ (p. 110). What he objects to is the
Herderian reduction of that complex and protean social being to the
absolute claims over the person of a single cultural group or a single
defining identity. He questions whether ‘all people need their rootedness
in a particular culture in which they and their ancestors were reared in the
way that they need food, shelter and clothing’ (p. 100), and he throws
down the challenge that ‘a freewheeling cosmopolitan life, lived in a
kaleidoscope of cultures, is both possible and fulfilling’ (p. 99).
Although there was an ethical as well as a descriptive dimension to his
account of these different ways of conducting oneself in the world,
Waldron soon came to recant some aspects of the ‘idealized self-
description’ he presented in ‘Minority Cultures’ (Waldron, 2000, p. 227).
Cosmopolitanism, he realised, was ‘much more complicated than the
raffish airs of an insecure young man, thousands of miles from home, and
grasping at whatever cultural straws he can reach to concoct an identity for
himself’ (p. 243). In ‘What is Cosmopolitan?’, published in 2000,
Waldron acknowledges that the answer to that question cannot be simply
the nomadic bricolage described by Rushdie. He regrets the ‘unfortunate
impression’ he gave that ‘there can be nothing cosmopolitan about the life
or lifestyle of someone who stays where he is, immersed in the traditions,
language and practices of a particular culture’ (p. 228). That is in part
because of the way that at least some local cultures are informed and even
defined by extrinsic forces and influences. But it also has to do with the
way one only becomes aware of the specificity of one’s cultural
predispositions—the common sense that defines community—once they
are thrown into relief by an encounter with a different common sense.
The central flaw in Waldron’s earlier formulation of cosmopolitanism,
in short, was that he had mistaken a ‘lifestyle’ for a disposition (see
Skrbis, Kendall and Woodward, 2004, pp. 127–131). He had been seduced
by one vision of what it is to be cosmopolitan, at the expense of thinking
through the knowledge and capacities that would inform a cosmopolitan
way of relating to others in the world. In the later article, he carefully
works through Kant’s use of the term ‘cosmopolitan right’ to refocus the
argument about cosmopolitanism on the question of how we share space
with neighbours ‘who may have ways of doing things that are different
from our own, perhaps ways of doing things that we can barely
understand, and who may make demands on us, for cooperation or
forbearance, that are quite different from the demands with which we are
prepared to comply’ (Waldron, 2000, p. 238). Whereas many liberal and
communitarian philosophers share an assumption that ‘a well-ordered
society should be thought of as something constructed among those who
share certain fundamental understandings which are constitutive of

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justice’, Kant appeals to Waldron because he starts from the opposite

assumption that ‘we are always likely to find ourselves alongside others
who disagree with us about justice’ (p. 240). Hence the need to work out
ways of living together, a ‘common framework for living’ that will contain
both formal and informal elements.
Waldron’s updated answer to his question ‘What is Cosmopolitan?’ still
remains sceptical about communitarianism and actively hostile to those
forms of identity politics that entail ‘the presentation of one’s engagement
with a particular set of cultural norms and practices as though they were
brute aspects of one’s identity . . . and therefore non-negotiable by anyone
who takes seriously and respects one’s identity, one’s self’ (p. 242).
Waldron’s revised view has more Kant and less Rushdie in it, and leads
him pretty much to the same place as William Connolly’s agonistic
respect. Honouring different ‘final sources’ (Connolly’s term) is not just
about tolerating signs and symbols, the outward markers of ‘a culture’.
Rather, it means accepting that the ways of acting, feeling, thinking and
relating to others that form the unthought bedrock of our daily lives are not
the only possible—and more pressingly, not the only actual—norms and
standards of behaviour. Hence Connolly’s ‘pathos of distance’, and
Waldron’s Cosmopolitansim Mark II:

Only if one’s initial allegiance to the practices of one’s culture is held and
presented in this sort of spirit can it be presented to others of different
cultures (others who hold different norms) as a first move in the
complicated business—involving bargaining, deliberation, compromise,
voting, authority—of coming to terms with those with whom we need
to come to terms (rather than simply those with whom we would like to
come to terms) (Waldron, 2000, p. 243).

In other words, what is entailed by the fundamental cosmopolitan disposi-

tion of ‘openness to others’ is the willingness to make the effort to nego-
tiate coexistence with actual others when there appears to be no common
ground, only mutual incomprehension.
Although I think that his conclusion here is right, I must admit to a
twinge of regret at Waldron’s stern disavowal of his earlier enthusiasm
for Rushdie’s mongrel’s eye view. You do not have to be a migrant or an
expatriate to be a cosmopolitan, but migration and expatriation are
certainly eye-opening experiences. And if the aim is to equip humanities
graduates to survive and prosper in a diverse and globalised world, then
developing their consciousness of living in a mixed-up world and having a
mixed-up self does not seem a bad place to start. This view takes it as
axiomatic that selfhood, like community, is always unsettled and in the
process of conflicted negotiation. It is a profoundly social and inherently
pluralistic vision, one that sees persons with radically different and
possibly incommensurable affiliations sharing space in a necessarily
agonistic relationship. Whereas the communitarian often learns to see
difference quite quickly in terms of the deficiency and abnormality of the
other, this mongrel cosmopolitan knows that any conversation about how

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we might live together without doing each other too much violence will be
informed by the simultaneous reality of political interdependence, cultural
partisanship and the pathos of subjective distance and separation.
Waldron seems to be skirting an unnecessary either/or between moral
philosophy, autobiographical experience, and anthropological observation,
and so missing the opportunity for a genuinely interdisciplinary conver-
sation about how best to encourage students to get out and see the world or
to develop a cosmopolitan disposition in those who opt to stay at home. It
is the latter that may be the more difficult task, ensuring that those who
stay at home do not altogether feel at home and show an imaginative
interest in, or at least engage with, extrinsic cultures. In this spirit, the very
cosmopolitan Meaghan Morris suggests that one might make a start by
rethinking the claims of a parochialism as ‘a complex disposition of
variable significance which provides an angle from which to consider
issues of cultural impact and change under globalisation in a concrete
way’ (Morris, 2005). If a cosmopolitan disposition involves a certain type
of experience—or range of experiences—as well as an ethical perspective,
this angle must also be the point of entry for the extrinsic that interrupts
the routines and common sense of the parochial.
Probably the most sustained attempt to conceptualise a cosmopolitan
humanities curriculum for universities can be found in Martha
Nussbaum’s 1997 book Cultivating Humanity. There is nothing raffish
or mongrelish here: Nussbaum offers a very sober if again controversial
analysis and programme. Her premises are derived from Stoic philosophy,
or at least from a number of ancient Greek philosophers like Seneca who
were also, a bit like Rushdie in London, troublesome migrants to Athens.
Looking back to even earlier Stoic views, Seneca asserts that education
should instil an awareness that each of us is a member of ‘two
communities: one that is truly great and truly common . . . in which we
look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our
nation by the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by
birth’ (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 58). Although Seneca’s double consciousness
appears to capture the oscillation between belonging and disorientation
that I see as definitive of cosmopolitanism, Nussbaum herself insists on a
single, classical cosmopolitanism. That is, she is more interested in the
worldwide community of human beings than in hybrid, locally negotiated
cosmopolitanisms. As a result, as one not unsympathetic critic has put it,
she finds herself in the paradoxical position of defending ‘the rest against
the West . . . by means of an unrepentant reassertion of Western
philosophical universalism’, while another protests that Nussbaum should
not be regarded as a cosmopolitan at all, but rather as a liberal universalist
(Robbins, 1999, p. 148; Hollinger, 2002, p. 229).
There is justice in both comments, but the skewed nature of Nussbaum’s
cosmopolitanism is most apparent to me in the book’s mode of address. In
effect, a bit like Nietzsche, Nussbaum was appealing to her fellow-citizens
to become worse (that is, less introverted) Americans and better (that is,
more outward-looking) world-citizens. That appeal is clearly framed
within a specifically national debate about the resurgence of patriotism

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 Internationalisation, Diversity and the Humanities Curriculum 301

during the Clintonite 1990s, and it explains why so many of her fellow
intellectuals got hot under the collar about her cosmopolitan critique.4
Because she fails to make that time, place and occasion sufficiently
explicit, however, the cartography of her universalism seems to assume an
unacknowledged here that inevitably tends to decentre and alienate non-
US readers.
At an important moment in her argument, for example, Nussbaum
distinguishes between two versions of cosmopolitanism. In the ‘sterner,
more exigent’ ideal, the cosmopolitan citizen has a ‘primary loyalty’ to
‘human beings the world over’: ‘national, local, and varied group loyalties
are considered distinctly secondary.’ Although Nussbaum admits a degree
of sympathy for this view, she accepts that, for the sake of expedience, she
will limit herself to making the case for a ‘more relaxed version’ as the
baseline for her educational agenda. In this compromise version, and
making concessions to both liberals and communitarians, Nussbaum
defends a humanities curriculum that would allow ‘a variety of different
views about what our priorities should be’ [the liberal concession] but
says that, however we order our varied loyalties [the communitarian
concession], ‘we should still be sure that we recognise the worth of human
life wherever it occurs and see ourselves as bound by common human
abilities and problems to people who lie at a great distance from us’
(Nussbaum, 1997, p. 9). It is that last phrase about ‘people who lie at a
great distance from us’ which begs not just the question of where we are
but of who we are. It is an old Australian gripe that Chicago is just as
distant from Sydney as Sydney is from Chicago. But, as Mrs. Jellyby’s
family learned the hard way, this sort of distance is about perspective
rather than geography. It is difference rather than distance that is the issue,
and any good multiculturalist will tell you that difference is to be found
not only a long way off but much more immediately here, on your street
and in your face. Nussbaum’s unspoken identity of us as US citizens tends
to reassert the associative chain between distance and difference and so
lets ‘us’ forget that we too are strangers to others.
Despite these reservations about the substance and tone of her argument,
what I find useful is Nussbaum’s emphasis on the attributes that would be
developed by students who successfully engage in the cosmopolitan
programmes she endorses. Although she does not address this explicitly in
Cultivating Humanity, in several of her other writings, especially those on
development, Nussbaum draws on the human capabilities approach first
proposed in economics by Amartya Sen. This is a perspective that
attempts to shift the focus of debate about development away from
questions about resources—who has access to resources or how many
resources they have access to. Instead, as Nussbaum puts it in Women and
Human Development, the human capabilities approach focuses on ‘what
people are actually able to do and to be—in a way informed by an intuitive
idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being’ (Nussbaum,
2000, p. 5). It is a method explicitly framed in a context of political
liberalism, in that a debate about what constitutes necessary and desirable
capabilities is a matter for continuing negotiation between people who

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may have different cultural affiliations and so competing conceptions of

the good. A fundamental—and again liberal—principle, however, is that
each person should be regarded as an end rather than a means. The
purpose of developing capabilities is to develop a person’s capabilities;
making a society or an economy operate more effectively is a desirable,
predictable but nonetheless secondary consideration.
In Cultivating Humanity Nussbaum focuses on the development of three
capabilities that would characterise a cosmopolitan humanities graduate.
The first attempts to operationalise Socrates’s ideal of the examined life as
‘the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions’. This
critical practice encourages scepticism towards traditional authority on the
basis of ‘reason’s demand for consistency and for justification’, and it
would thus tend to interrupt the enforced unity of cultural belonging
(Nussbaum, 1997, p. 9). The corollary of Socratic scepticism is that the
examined life is one in which the examiner formulates a conception of the
good life and conducts their life on that basis. In other words, the capacity
for critical self-reflection entails the kind of liberal conception of the self
discussed by Waldron, and vice versa. Its ideal of maturity as self-
transparency, autonomy and self-direction is clearly that of a Kantian
rationalist, rather than one of Rushdie’s pragmatic migrants.
Although this sceptical liberal self appears to travel light in terms of
cultural baggage, a telling blow in the multicultural critique of Western
education has been that the ideal abstraction is always in reality quite
specifically located in historical and cultural terms. To counter this, the
second attribute Nussbaum wants cosmopolitan graduates to develop is the
‘ability to see themselves not simply as citizens of some local region or
group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other human
beings by ties of recognition and concern’ (p. 10). For her it is the
‘fundamental ingredients’ of humanity—‘reason and moral capacity’—
that should authorise choices and actions rather than the claims of rooted
cultural community. For Nussbaum, a curriculum that is both universalist
and multicultural will be one ‘that acquaints students with some
fundamentals about the histories and cultures of many different groups’,
while acknowledging the afterlife of colonial ways of thinking and
the temptation to see ‘other’ cultures as homogenous and untroubled
by internal conflicts and antagonisms (pp. 68, 116, 127). The purpose of
Nussbaum’s multiculturalism is to engage with the cosmopolitan oscillation
between belonging and disorientation. Thus she protests that ‘[t]o be a
citizen of the world, one does not, the Stoics stress, need to give up local
affiliations’, even though a critical perspective does at the same time require
us ‘to become, to a certain extent, philosophical exiles from our own way
of life, seeing them from the vantage point of the outsider and asking the
questions an outsider is likely to ask about their meaning and function’
(pp. 60, 59). Typically, however, Nussbaum does not see this outsider’s
view as passionately partisan and so potentially incommensurable with, or
hostile towards, the ‘final sources’ of the observer’s view of the world.
Rather, her argument requires that it embody Stoic objectivity: ‘a stance of
detachment from uncritical loyalty to one’s own ways [that] promotes the

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kind of evaluation that is truly reason based’ (p. 59). This outsider view is
constitutively other, not different.
What Nussbaum really has in her sights in her critique of communi-
tarianism, then, is not the Herderian reductionism of which Waldron
complains in ‘Minority Cultures’ but rather—and again this is redolent of
the moment in the 1990s when Cultivating Humanity was written—the
identity politics he attacks in ‘What is Cosmopolitan?’. Nussbaum
illustrates and justifies her denunciation of multicultural teaching that
‘celebrates difference but denies the very possibility of common interests
and understandings, even of dialogue and debate, that take one outside
one’s own group’ by considering why one might opt to include Ralph
Ellison’s novel Invisible Man in a literature syllabus.

In the world-citizen version of multiculturalism, the ethical argument for

adding a work such as Invisible Man to the curriculum will be Ellison’s
own argument: that our nation has a history of racial obtuseness and that
this work helps all citizens to perceive racial issues with greater clarity. In
the identity-politics version of multiculturalism, by contrast, the argument
in favour of Invisible Man will be that it affirms the experience of African-
American students. This view denies the possibility of the task Ellison set
himself: ‘of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one
who was both black and American’ (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 110).

This foreshadows Waldron’s objection to the presentation of ‘identity’ as

non-negotiable. But Nussbaum’s endorsement of Ellison’s emphasis on
‘human universals’ reflects a perspective throughout Cultivating Humanity
that differs from Waldron’s vision. Whereas he emphasises the difference
of near neighbours, and so the perspective of someone living and
negotiating otherness and uncertainty, she adopts the point of view of a
member of the majority society observing otherness from a distance and
extracting from it ‘universal’ commonalities. This aesthetic distance is
then translated back into multiculturalism at home: ‘The world citizen
must develop sympathetic understanding of distant cultures and of ethnic,
racial, and religious minorities within her own’ (p. 69). In other words,
Nussbaum’s universal sympathies are intended to make the distant
familiar. That’s fine, but a diversified and internationalised humanities
curriculum equally needs to embrace the other side of cosmopolitanism:
the making strange of the familiar.
The same paradigm can be observed in the third of Nussbaum’s
capabilities, which she elegantly names ‘the narrative imagination’. This
refers to ‘the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a
person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s
story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone
so placed might have’ (pp. 10–11). As so often with Nussbaum’s
universalism, there is a degree of ethnocentric security and egocentric
comfort in this formulation that disavows the gulf that separates us from
the experience of others—Connolly’s ‘different final sources’ through
which different people make sense of experience and the consequent

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‘pathos of distance from others with whom [one] is involved’. Although

she insists on the need for imaginary empathy with others, Nussbaum
remains parochial to the extent that she assumes that it is she/we/I who are
the final arbiters:

. . . the first step of understanding the world from the point of view of the
other is essential to any responsible act of judgment, since we do not
know what we are judging until we see the meaning of an action as the
person intends it, the meaning of a speech as it expresses something of
importance in the context of that person’s history and social world
(Nussbaum, 1997, p. 11).

As well as making it sound easier than it is, this account of transcultural

empathy glosses over the equally important lesson of acknowledging the
limits of one’s own understanding and living with one’s opaqueness and
simple irrelevance to others. The emphasis is again on us learning to
identify, not uncritically, with them, rather than on the strangeness of
being us, especially ‘us’ perceived as by ‘them’.
Despite these doubts and hesitations, however, I would still claim that
the aspiration behind Nussbaum’s narrative imagination is of absolutely
central importance for a humanities curriculum that engages seriously
with the questions of diversity and intercultural communication, and with
the possibility of effective and ethical agency in international commu-
nities. The claim is that, despite all the difficulties, the cultivation of an
informed and critical imagination—the business of the humanities—does
make it possible, to some extent and despite all the difficulties, both to get
inside the experience of people different from oneself and also to develop
a realization of the contingency of how we live and the strangeness of who
we are. (Is this not how the younger Waldron was using The Satanic
Verses to make sense of his own disorientation?)
Seeing ‘from the point of view of the other’ entails not just a shift
of perspective, but an ability to translate a whole cultural framework of
meaning-ascription and interpretation, of which the other’s language is
just the most manifest feature. It therefore entails bracketing to some
extent one’s own interpretative frameworks, but not pretending to abandon
them altogether and hoping to disappear entirely into the position of the
other. An imaginative and respectful engagement with other cultures and
other experiences entails a play between self and other, inside and outside.
This is what the Soviet cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1987) called
creative understanding. Bakhtin may understate the degree to which
‘one’s own’ culture already contains ‘the foreign’, but he does bring out
more clearly than Nussbaum the point that intercultural study is as much a
reflection on one’s self as an observation of the other.

There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy idea that
in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it,
forgetting one’s own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign
culture. Of course, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes is a

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necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only
aspect it would merely be a duplication and would not entail anything
enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place
and time, its own culture; it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is
immensely important to be located outside the object of creative
understanding. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones it did
not raise for itself; we seek answers to our questions in it; and the foreign
culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and semantic
depths. Without one’s own questions, one cannot creatively understand
anything other or foreign. Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does
not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open
totality, but they are both enriched (Bakhtin, in Willemen, 2000, p. 214).

This perspective of heuristic in-betweenness does at least suggest how it

might be possible to imagine oneself a bit outside one’s own community
and so to imagine oneself a bit into another culture. Harking back to
Nietzsche’s ethic of homelessness, it moves beyond a purely parochial
vision without buying into the type of universalism espoused by
Nussbaum; or at least it changes the angle of alignment between the
local and the global. In place of her cartography of a located observer
getting the measure of other people and other cultures, it offers a map of
interacting cultures with real but porous boundaries in which ‘our’ culture
is not necessarily at the centre of the world.
This Copernican realignment thus suggests the possibility, and the
desirability, of provincialising rather than internationalising the huma-
nities curriculum. This term I take from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book
Provincializing Europe. There, writing as a social scientist, Chakrabarty
accepts that, in his attempt to make sense of political modernity in South
Asia, he will have to continue to make use of concepts such as citizenship,
the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the
law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the
subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice and scientific
rationality. He does so knowing full well both that this vocabulary is the
legacy of ‘a universal and secular vision of the human’ and that its
genealogies go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of
Europe. The justification for using such contaminated methods, while
knowing them to be contaminated, is the ‘in-between’ logic that ‘European
thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think
through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations’.
Rather than disavowing that reality, insists Chakrabarty, the challenge is to
explore ‘how this thought . . . may be renewed from and for the margins by
engaging with the partiality of its universalist claims’ (Chakrabarty, 2000).
Provincialising the humanities curriculum in Australia might then mean
defending the ‘universal and secular vision of the human’ around which it
has traditionally been organised while acknowledging its Eurocentric
origins and orientation. This realignment might also prompt some
rethinking about what might actually be at stake in UNSW’s graduate
attributes of ‘an appreciation of, and respect for, diversity’ and ‘a capacity

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306 J. Donald

to contribute to, and work within, the international community’. As I say,

the ideal of mature, self-directed and critical thinking has to remain
central, but tempered now by a degree of imaginative epistemic home-
lessness. That implies the recognition that the universal frame of one’s
own culture exists alongside alternative, competing universalisms. That is
not to say that all universalisms are equally true and equally valid, but
that—so far as education rather than faith goes—any universalism needs
to be revealed as a universalism and then defended rather than asserted.
Other cultures and other people then no longer appear as objects for
aesthetic appreciation, exotic consumption or disinterested understanding
and judgment. Rather, they need to be engaged in a process of conver-
sation and negotiation across the differences: a difficult process that
entails a capacity for narrative imagination, creative understanding,
cultural translation and agonistic respect.

CONCLUSION
What emerges from a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and multi-
culturalism about ethnicity and diversity in general and about humanities
curriculum reform in particular? The multiculturalist reminds the
cosmopolitan of the thickness and the stickiness of culture, the fatuousness
of utopian schemes that disavow its affective claims, and the need to get
one’s hands dirty in creating tolerable conditions in which people can
share space and move around the globe. The cosmopolitan reminds the
multiculturalist of the contingency and historicity of affective and moral
communities, the lethal consequences of giving culture precedence over
politics in the ordering of social affairs, and the need to articulate political
discourses that adopt a universal frame (like those of citizenship, law and
rights), even while acknowledging the partiality of all universalisms.
Both the cosmopolitan and the multicultural might agree on the need not
to romanticise a life of movement and migration. For many people—for
refugees, asylum seekers, guest workers and others—being a citizen of the
world is a forced choice that has nothing to do with abstract philosophical
universalism or the freewheeling, globetrotting lifestyle of successful
novelists or leading academics. Whether chosen or imposed, cosmopo-
litanism is about learning to be more or less at home anywhere and to
accept being fully at home nowhere.
In terms of an internationalised humanities curriculum, I have argued in
principle for programmes that are provincialised rather than universalised.
The aim would be to produce less ‘the world citizen’ envisaged by
Nussbaum than ‘21st century Australian, European or American citizens
trying to function as world citizens’; that is, to balance rootedness and a
sense of place against mobility, imaginative empathy and a degree of
intellectual homelessness. In practice this would lead away from either
traditional American-style ‘Western Civilization’ courses or from multi-
cultural studies of ‘other cultures’ and towards courses that study the
specific historical formation of (say) Australian national cultural through

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the interweaving of colonialism, indigeneity and multicultural migration,

and its contemporary place in the world. At the same time, the para-
digms of knowledge produced by and supporting that cultural formation
would be put into disorienting conversation with other paradigms
and imaginaries.
As a perspective on human agency and human interaction, the main case
for cosmopolitanism is that it enacts the oscillation between belonging and
disorientation, a disorientation that reveals the impurity, fluidity,
contingency and negotiability of located community as well as the limits
and fallibility of all world views. It insists on openness and hospitality to
the stranger. But it goes beyond the banality of our respect for their
diversity to a recognition of us as them: myself the stranger.5

Correspondence: James Donald, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,

University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
E-mail: j.donald@unsw.edu.au

NOTES
1. This is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s gloss on the position of Alasdair MacIntyre (Appiah, 2005,
p. 332, n. 29).
2. Cf. Bhikhu Parekh: ‘Multiculturalism is not about difference and identity per se but about those
that are embedded in and sustained by culture; that is, a body of beliefs and practices in terms of
which a group of people understand themselves and the world and organise their individual and
collective lives. Unlike differences that spring from individual choices, culturally derived
differences carry a measure of authority and are patterned and structured by virtue of being
embedded in a shared and historically inherited system of meaning and significance’ (Parekh,
2000, pp. 2–3).
3. Here I follow the discussion of Nietzsche in Benjamin, 2006, p. 120.
4. Cultivating Humanity appeared the year after the collection For Love of Country: Debating the
Limits of Patriotism (Nussbaum, 1996), in which fifteen leading intellectuals respond
to Nussbaum’s article on ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, first published in Boston Review
in 1994.
5. This article is based on a talk presented to a symposium on Ethnicity, Diversity and
Multiculturalism held at the University of Birmingham on 7–9 September 2006 and sponsored
by Universitas 21. The research it is based on has been supported by ARC Discovery Grant
DP0664990. I am grateful to Gurminer Bhambra, Peter Looker, Paul Patton, Michele Scoufis and
Zlatko Skrbis for comments and suggestions.

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