When I’m asked where I’m from, I hesitate for a split second, partly to judge the patience of my interlocutor and partly with vague hopes of reinventing my typical reply. But then I do it again – I’ll recite my itinerary. I’m French and American and grew up in England and Belgium. I’ve lived in Boston, London, Brussels, Oxford, Paris, New York and Washington. It’s longwinded, but then I’ve never had a single word for home.
I’m often asked next what that makes me—French? American? European? Would I prefer tea because my accent suggests I’m English? I respond that it depends where I am: In Europe, I miss America’s energy and optimism; in America, I long for Britain’s civility or the continent’s sense of history; in England, I wish for a pinch of Gallic insolence; and, when it comes to soccer, I’d support “Les Bleus” even from the moon. I’ve had trouble being more succinct because I can never fit my sense of self, with its multiple transplants and attachments, into definitions of identity still largely conceived of in mono-ethnic or -national labels. I’m a composite. To ask which part of me stands out more would be a bit like asking a mongrel to select its favourite paw.
Cosmopolitan
Perhaps I ought to answer as Diogenes the Cynic did back in 4th-century Turkey. “I am a cosmopolitan,” he reportedly quipped when a Sinopean asked where he hailed from, thereby introducing the expression for citizen of the world into our lexicon, and leaving it to posterity to embellish the term with its veneer of glamour and worldliness.
But calling myself a citizen of the world doesn’t quite capture my émigré sensibility, with its mixture of detachment and nostalgia for things distant and half-imagined.
It’s all very well having the protean ability to adapt to each new place or feeling as light and free as that species of duckweed that travels rootless along the rivers of South America or Asia.
Roots, though, will always carry grains of another soil, however hard one’s attempts to transplant them.
Global consciousness
Mine’s a sensibility as old as the first migrants who were allegedly kicked out of Eden. It used to be the small preserve of diplomats, roving merchants, exiles and emigrants of all stripes. But as the number of my cross-cultural peers has swollen, well beyond the ranks of yesteryear, I’ve also encountered something novel and infectious—a shared global consciousness forged as much by day-to-day exposure to transnational diversity as by the opportunity to roam over borders.
I meet like-minded folk in all walks of life, a diffuse group of 20- or 30-somethings who migrate over borders or to some of the great metropolises to study or to work, armed with an affinity for adventure, a hunger for new opportunities or for a different perspective.
Woven into their itinerant tales is a common motivating sensibility—a humanitarian language of intolerance for intolerance and respect for difference without condescension. There’s the writer reared in California to Pakistani parents whose stories reflect the tense meeting point of her two cultures; the New York-based Singaporean filmmaker who traveled through rural China capturing the whims and attitudes of peasant women; the Connecticut-born Fulbright fellow who studied the plight of child soldiers in Sierra Leone; the Indian engineer who worked on climate-change in Bangkok; or the New England non-profit worker who ditched a job in D.C. for a microfinance project in Darfur.
[The wrecking ball of globalisation? Photo by
anjan58 ]
Between us, differences of nationality or language are conversational curiosities, not dividers. And while many of us have been favoured by advanced education or relative affluence, ours is hardly an exclusive club. Access requires only broadmindedness, and the perspective and empathy that are often born of immersion in another culture. The pull of different worlds, or the curiosity to explore them, makes us more apt to appreciate the validity of other viewpoints. It also makes us attuned to recognising shared human impulses for free thought, self-expression, self-determination, and democracy, iterated to fit the idiosyncrasies of each culture.
Shared values
Like the Third Culture Kids in our ranks (and that includes me), we are tied less by territorial or ethnic reductions than by a triumvirate of shared values—of pluralism, individualism, and universalism (not the theological doctrine, but recognition of the common traits that bind us all). Ours is, in fact, a wholly cosmopolitan mindset.
Diogenes’ quip was at least partly intended to suggest he owed no allegiance to Sinope, his city of origin.
Cosmopolitanism long had negative connotations of rootlessness and ultra-individualism, coupled with the denunciation of faith, family and community. The 1762 dictionary of the French Academy defined the cosmopolitan as “one who does not adopt a nation. A cosmopolitan is not a good citizen.” It was also a term of abuse leveled at the stereotypical wandering Jew, feeding hatreds and suspicions that would eventually lead to the gas chambers. Today still, cosmopolitanism in the guise of globalisation carries in its wake a host of anxieties about the loss of national authenticity to an encroaching bland homogeneity.
But, in tandem, cosmopolitanism suggested a transcendence of obligations beyond the parochial bubble to wider humanity, a philosophy elaborated by the Stoics, and given modern resonance by, among others, Immanual Kant, who wrote that rational beings formed a single moral community. Out of such modes of thought grew the doctrine of rights of man, and its 20th century human rights equivalent, whereby individuals were entitled to certain claims by virtue of their common humanity and states were accordingly duty-bound to them as sovereign beings.
Members of my generation have of necessity come of age with a cosmopolitan sensibility. Our circle of empathy has expanded to encompass people beyond our borders—we grew up witnessing live TV images of Rwandan waterways choked with bodies, of concentration camp inmates in the Balkans or of swollen-bellied children in Ethiopia. We can tune out or tune in, but we can’t plead ignorance. Schooled in long-standing “one-world”-style campaigns from the likes of Oxfam, Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund, we’ve also grown up alongside a tide of nongovernmental and civil society organisations, which increasingly function to articulate our collective moral anguish on concerns from AIDS to global warming.
Moreover, Digital Age access to information, music and movies from far afield adds flavour and nuance to our knowledge of the world beyond, whether the subject is the slums of Brazil or the mood for love in Hong Kong.
Bridge-blogging
Or take this instance of bridge-blogging, a term coined by the founders of site-tracker Global Voices Online to describe thousands of individuals on every continent blogging about their countries or regions, often in English, for a transcontinental audience: Tehran-based blogger Lady Sun, the nom-de-Web of a then-25-year-old online editor, described in an April 2003 post how fear of arrest had compelled her to switch from Persian to English.
Cue a reader from the Philippines, Joan Uy, who chanced on the site a year later – “I can relate to you,” Uy wrote in a comment on the post. “Here in the Philippines freedom of speech is guaranteed, but you pretty much can’t count on the government or even society to protect you from the consequences of exercising this right…”
[Core Team Attending Global Voices 2006]
Developing global sensibility
The structure is in place to encourage the perpetuation of this global mindset. Study abroad programmes are perennially successful and ever more competitive. Growing also are the ranks of graduates entering professions such as conflict resolution, international economics, or sustainable development—career paths that only in recent years have largely opened up, often luring the best and the brightest away from traditional government or private sector jobs.
But a wider global sensibility exists even beyond the growing international elite who accumulate degrees or work experience in several countries. A 2004 study of 66,000 people across 49 nations by the Pew Institute, revealed a pronounced open-mindedness to global issues among surveyed youth worldwide. Results varied between regions, and are less pronounced in Asia and Eastern Europe but compared to older generations, the 18 to 29 age cohorts in North America, Europe, Africa and countries of the Middle East were far more supportive of globalisation (as understood to mean the world connected through greater economic trade and faster communication), less worried that their way of life was threatened, less chauvinistic about their own nation's cultural superiority, and less supportive of restrictions on immigration.
It’s hardly a revelation, of course, to suggest that the technological developments and economic integration of the past decade could have led to greater international awareness and acceptance of diversity among a younger set. We are the best educated in new technologies and the most likely to adapt to new ideas and make use of new opportunities. But it is easy to understate the barely perceptible changes taking place at the level of generational thinking and focus instead on the shocking news that the tools once touted as the means to a borderless, more unified world have actually fractured communities.
Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and one-time émigré from Russia to Britain, posited that that if pluralism were a valid view, and if respect between different value systems were possible, then toleration and liberal consequences would flow. He recognised the necessity of pluralism in the aftermath of two world wars, decades before the technological and economic forces that have had a hand in dissolving traditional barriers.
We’re hardly more saintly than the generations before us but our more globally conscious choices and lifestyles will cumulatively impact on the evolution of our cultures toward a cosmopolitan and pluralist dawn. From increasing cross-cultural dialogue to channelling greater stores of creativity toward global problems, who knows how we’ll guide the Zeitgeist? So watch out for us. We’ll be watching out for the world. We have no choice.
By Delphine Schrank*
*Delphine Schrank is a writer at The Washington Post and will reside in Washington, DC until the call of the Wanderer sounds again.
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Call me naïve, but I’m an optimist. For all the persistence of nationalist and sectarian agendas, I see hope in the rise of a generation that is redefining traditional conceptions of identity—and a value system.
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