Country of Exiles (22 page)

Three scholars in particular, all like Duara at the University of Chicago, have much shaped the character of this postcolonial position—Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arjun Appadurai, and Homi Bhabha. Chakrabarty teaches postcolonial theory and “subaltern” history (India’s version of bottom-up history) and sees the nation-state, citizenship, and even “linear” history itself, as fabrications of Western imperialism. Intellectually, he wants to “provincialize Europe,” and although he gets a good salary at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, he condemns both universities and history as collusive players in the Western game of “repression and violence.” He longs to “write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections.”
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Born in Bombay, India, and educated in Britain, Appadurai, an anthropologist, migrated to the United States in the 1970s.
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Twenty years later, he headed a “globalization project” at Chicago, funded by the MacArthur and Ford foundations.
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Appadurai has written widely on transnational subjects, but in no piece has he been more provocative than “Patriotism and Its Futures,” written in 1992 and republished in his 1996
Modernity at Large.
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Appadurai argues that millions of people live today in a “deterritorialized” condition, the result of the near-collapse of the “nation form.” “Key identities,” he insists, “now only partially revolve around … place.” “In the postnational world we see emerging, diaspora runs with, and not against, the grain of identity.”

Appadurai sees this condition as a healthy one, partly because nationalism was always “the last refuge of ethnic totalitarianism.” But it is especially healthy because it should challenge societies to devise a “new language [and politics] to capture the collective interests of deterritorialized groups.”
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This challenge, Appadurai believes, can best be met by the
United States, the least national of nations, indeed no nation or country at all. America is the world’s “greatest apparent falsification,” “a fascinating garage sale for the rest of the world.” Appadurai scoffs at the idea that an “Americanness” unifies the country, and he deems the “melting pot” a vain fantasy. No one really “belongs” in this place, he claims. America, he contends, is merely “one node in a postnational network of diasporas,” a “diasporic switching point to which people come to seek their fortunes but are no longer content to leave their homelands behind.”

The existence of diasporas, moreover, is why America offers the best site for the future; here the Third World outcasts, long despised, might create a “new Americanism” unlike any in history, “a delocalized transnation.” Here a new patriotism might emerge, not tied to the “sovereign nation,” nor to any traditional American “locality” but to other sovereign locations. If only Americans would accept what they have become—a diasporic people with no ties to historical places—then a new order might emerge. All it would take would be for Americans to lift the movers above the settled, diasporics over the natives, strangers over themselves.

Like Appadurai, Homi Bhabha was born to an upper-caste Indian family in Bombay and educated in Britain. Bhabha’s appointment at the University of Chicago was greeted by administrators as “a coup for the university.”
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The move pleased Bhabha, too, for it brought him into contact—as he said—with “a whole range of stellar individuals” and into a place where he might study “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and “the structures of modernity in a transnational context.”
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Bhabha’s work—especially his major book,
The Location of Culture
—shows the usual postcolonial revulsion for the Western nation-state and for citizenship.
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Like Appadurai and Chakrabarty, he seeks a “radical revision of the human community,”
not from the angle of “soil and place,” but from the point of view of “the marginalized, the displaced, the diasporic,” and the “border.” He also sees the new culture emerging from “the freaks of culture displacements.” For him, as for the others, “national cultures” must give way to “sovereignties” that transcend place—gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, the migratory condition itself. “It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking,” he says.
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Bhabha’s contribution to the cosmopolitan debate has been to harden the placelessness already present in American academic cosmopolitanism. Uninhibited by affection for any traditions of place, he and his postcolonial colleagues have given more life to the central view that America is not really a place at all but mostly an idea, a state of mind, a condition open to continual amendment, a road rather than a destination.

As formidable a creation as academic cosmopolitanism is in all its forms, there is another form that surpasses it in reach and power: market cosmopolitanism. Market cosmopolitanism emerged after 1980 in much of the business world. It replaced Marxism (with which it once competed) in the sweep of its internationalist ambitions. This cosmopolitanism, however, is one of money not of workers. It is the thinking of those who, at the very least, are averse to any kind of fixed national boundary, anything that might limit the flow of ideas, money, goods, or people.

Market cosmopolitans share many of the above academic liberal themes. But what distinguishes the market version from the others, however, is, obviously, its aim—money and profit—
which inevitably determines how long and to what degree any business might remain committed to any liberal idea.

Many businesses, as well as business journals and consultants, have adopted the new market cosmopolitanism in both its multicultural and fluid forms. Think tanks, too, trumpeting the glories of the cosmopolitan market, have sprouted in the nation’s capital.
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Among the most ideologically unique has been the Cato Institute, a medium-sized organization in Washington, D.C., founded by Ed Crane in 1979 and housed in a blue-glass building on Massachusetts Avenue, ironically just across the street from a bronze statue of labor unionist Samuel Gompers. Market libertarians all, the men at Cato have urged that all obstacles—religion, nationalism, patriotism—be modified or dumped before the god of Productivity. No group has so acclaimed the privatization of everything, the deregulation of everything, the stripping away of most governmental safeguards, the free movement of everything from money to migrants. Their influence has reached into the minds of such leading Republicans as Texans Richard Armey and Tom DeLay.
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Businesses, too, have hoisted the cosmopolitan banner, promoting “diversity” among their workers, and pursuing “multicultural marketing” for their customers. Like their academic contemporaries, they view the United States as a “culture without a center” and pursue niche-thinking in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity.
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Many firms also display the fluid-protean-open-borders approach, none more so than the bankers and financial managers who reaped the most from the deregulation of the world’s money markets, as well as from the spread of electronic and intermodal technologies, which facilitated rapid trading in huge volumes.
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“When I look at a map of the world,” says John Doerr, top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who arranged the financing
for such firms as Netscape and Sun Microsystems, “I don’t visualize it in terms of … countries. Instead I see Internet packages or E-mail messages flowing between various points.”
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“It is a matter of complete indifference to the chief financial officer of any major company whether one sells capital notes in New York, Hong Kong, or London. Decisions are made on the basis of rate and availability, not geography,” writes Walter Wriston, in his 1992 book
The Twilight of Sovereignty
. Former head of Citicorp, a bank with hundreds of branches around the world, Wriston also argues that new technologies have made “obsolete” “the old political boundaries of nation-states.”
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“Boundaryless behavior is the soul of today’s GE,” said Jack Welsh, CEO of General Electric, in his 1994 annual report. “Simply put, people seem compelled to build layers and walls between themselves and others, and that human tendency tends … to cramp people” and “smother dreams.”
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“The real work today,” observes Whirlpool’s CEO, David Whitwam (sounding rather like Homi Bhabha or Richard Sennett), “takes place at the boundaries.”
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Throughout the nineties, gambling moguls have created “international marketing programs” to bring high rollers from around the world to their casinos. “This is going to be an international clientele,” said Ralph Sturges, chief of the Mohegans, of his Mohegan Sun Casino. We want “visitors from all over the world,” said Steve Wynn of the Mirage Casino-Hotel in Las Vegas.
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As for the major port terminal directors, they have long thought of themselves as efficient businessmen on the frontlines of the “new international world order,” erecting “commercial bridges between nations,” and—through marketing offices around the world—aggressively recruiting new clients to fill berths and terminals.
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Their approach has been inclusive, technocratic, managerial, and cosmopolitan. As far back as
the 1940s, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey demanded that “the barriers of provincialism” be thrown down and that a nonpartisan vision come to the fore. Today, that port leads as an evangel for the globalization of the greater metropolitan region.
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High-tech companies have readily accommodated the diverse workforce they helped create, and have forged an ideology to fit the vast markets they command. Among the heaviest users of foreign skilled labor, they have all adopted “boundaryless” multicultural policies.
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“Today,” said Ray Smith, CEO of Bell Atlantic, in 1995, “businesses [seek to claim] citizenship in the global community by replacing the declining significance of
place
with the ascending significance of
people
.”
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By 1996 IBM had established thirty-two “global diversity councils,” according to Ted Childs, vice president for IBM’s “global workforce diversity,” to make sure that “we value contributions by people who are not ‘American.’ ” “We are global in scope, our values are global,” said Nicole Barde, Intel’s diversity manager.
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Along with these companies are many business newspapers and magazines, notably
The Economist
and the
Wall Street Journal
, both with editorial offices around the world, and both in tune with the cosmopolitan view. To be sure, the
Wall Street Journal
is schizoid about cosmopolitanism. It endorses both the multicultural and the transborder approaches, the former found mostly in its B section, where the paper’s regular column “Business and Race,” written by Leon E. Wynter, often discusses the latest data on group niche-marketing. On its editorial page, however, the
Journal
, led by editor Robert Bartley, reviles multiculturalism. Bartley recommends instead a pure vision of “free markets, free trade, and open immigration.” In 1993 he wrote scathingly about “cosmopolitan elites,” by which he meant the “do your own thing” people who thrust on the American people the “selfish” values of the “1960s.”
Three years later he bemoaned the “decline in standards” and warned that “the very rationality of capitalism”—if left unchecked by “economic necessity or religion”—“will eat away its ‘bourgeois’ moral underpinning.” Around the same time, however, and in a way that ate away at his own moral underpinning, he said that “the big trends of the age transcend national boundaries and national sovereignty.” “In the end, newly empowered individuals throughout the world will make their own decisions minute by minute, expressing emotional demands and creating financial markets.” “In the 21st century, we will be ruled not so much by the writ of politicians but by the logic of markets.”
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American Demographics
, a slick magazine published for over twenty years by Dow Jones, publisher also of the
Wall Street Journal
, seems to inflect nearly every article in a cosmopolitan direction.
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Its editors, who claimed to have brought demography “out of the shadows,” have advocated “multicultural marketing.” They have published handbooks on how to squeeze the most out of the group niches, offering material on practically every lucrative identity market from singles who refuse to have children to lesbians and gays who, according to a recent piece, constitute “a separate tribe” with “distinctive mores and fashions.” At the same time, the magazine has showcased the fluid culture of America’s new class of young “self-navigators,” professionals who boast a “new value structure” and “who seem to ‘drop in’ on and migrate between different ways of living.”
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In a fall 1997 piece, “Matters of Culture,” it argued “conclusively” that “cosmopolitan Americans outnumber those with less open cultural views.”
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Finally, there are the individual consultants, who through their writings have done a great deal to popularize market cosmopolitanism. Among them are Joel Kotkin, a ubiquitous business consultant and senior fellow at the Pepperdine University
School of Business and Management in Malibu, California; and Rosabeth Kanter, professor at the Harvard Business School and popular consultant to America’s biggest companies.

Kotkin, a frequent contributor to the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
, asserted in 1995 that the future belongs to the “rich and affluent voters” who work in the mobile “new economy,” hate “small town culture,” and believe that “economics, not morality, is the key challenge facing society.”
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Kotkin believes that “borders” are the centers of the new order of things, and he is attracted to what he calls “global tribes” or the world’s most ambitious emigrés set loose from their homelands to float about in quest of alliances with transnational firms. “These global tribes,” he wrote in his 1993 book
Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
, “are today’s quintessential cosmopolitans, in sharp contrast to narrow provincials. As the conventional barriers of nation-states and regions become less meaningful under the weight of global economic forces, it is likely such dispersed peoples—and their worldwide business and cultural networks—will increasingly shape the economic destiny of mankind.”
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