Much of the current spate of international political activism (anti-
globalisation, anti-war, and so on) is transnational or transversal in genesis
and organisation but often resolutely internationalist in its policy focus. It
seeks not the dissolution of states or the transcendence of national
sovereignty but greater internal and external accountability and
responsibility on the part of states.^38Calhoun complements this view, pointing out that:
Business leaders attending the World Economic Forum at Davos and social
movement activists attending the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre
tended each to think they were the real cosmopolitans. And both tended to
describe global civil society as more autonomous from states than it really
was.^39A prime example of this is one of the biggest recent global civil society campaigns,
the Make Poverty History campaign and its impact on pledges made in 2005 at the
G8 Gleneagles summit. The political traction of the Make Poverty History campaign
in Britain cannot be dissociated from the disenchantment of an important left-
liberal constituency opposed to the Iraq war. There are clear echoes here of the
electoral importance of the abolitionist vote in early nineteenth century Britain as
made clear by Kaufmann and Pape.^40 Furthermore, Britain’s relatively good record
in sticking to its pledges cannot be dissociated from a political culture in which
overseas aid is now, even after a change to a right-of-centre government, seen as a
privileged area of government spending, and a marker of British national identity.
The other point to make here is the comparative rarity of cosmopolitan as a
genuinely “lived category”, to borrow Margaret C. Jacob’s phrase.^41 That is, a
category that corresponds to actual behaviour, to “lived practices and habitudes”.^42
38
39 Lawler, "The Good State: In Praise of 'Classical' Internationalism": 440.
Craig Calhoun, "Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary", Daedalus 137, no. 3
(2008): 113. There are interesting parallels with the account given by Margaret C. Jacob in
the same issue of eighteenth century bankers as an example of cosmopolitanism as a lived
category. Margaret C. Jacob, "The Cosmopolitan as a Lived Category", Daedalus 137, no. 3
(2008). 40
Kaufmann and Pape, "Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-Year
Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade". 41
42 Jacob, "The Cosmopolitan as a Lived Category".
Ibid.: 18.