Healing the Nations 2023
Cosmopolitanism: A discussion that took place on Saturday, 1st July 2023
CHAIR: Tanya Goyal, NCF Research Officer and UN Liaison Officer
SPEAKERS:
Kwame Anthony Appiah FRSL, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University
William Morris LL.D., NCF Secretary General
ATTENDEES INCLUDED
William Morris, Kwame Appiah, Tanya Goyal, David Vickers, Diren Dag, Mili Gottlieb, Bill Mather, Nagia Said, Abdelmohsen Farhat, Reverend Larry Wright, Juliette Feller, Jaafar Elahmar, Shristi Sharma, Solen Ronarch, Veronica Morris, Claudia Shaffer.
TANYA GOYAL
Firstly, good afternoon to all on the behalf of the Next Century Foundation. It is my privilege to welcome you to this session dedicated to the exploring the concept of cosmopolitanism. Today we embark on a journey of intellectual exploration where we shall develop deep insights into the idea of global citizens as an intellectual understanding.
During our time together, we have the privilege to hear from our two main speakers for the day which are Mr Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University and William Morris, Secretary General of the Next Century Foundation. It is great to have you both here. They both are experts in their respective fields. We will engage in thought-provoking discussions, explore different perspectives, and exchange ideas that will deepen our understanding of cosmopolitanism and its implications on our society. We shall reflect upon the significance of cultural diversity and how it enriches our collective experiences.
Let us begin with William Morris, who is the Secretary General of the Next Century Foundation, as well as a broadcaster. He has been an Independent Candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall. He has had an interest in law from his teenage years when he started a magazine called the London Law Quarterly making him the youngest publisher in England at the time. He has also formerly worked as a farmer, miner, and publisher. In the last 20 years, his main interest is conflict resolution principally in the Middle East. Conflict resolution means bringing peace to difficult and often dangerous areas. William was awarded the Honorary Doctorate in Law by the Earl of St Andrews at the University of Bolton in 2017 for his services for peace. Today he will be enlightening us on the main area of cosmopolitanism. It will be great to hear from you, William, over to you.
WILLIAM MORRIS
Cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and integrationalism, these words mean a lot to me regarding the situation we are in today. I look at today’s world and I find multiculturalism quite disturbing. One of those ideologies we have adopted in Britain has led to schooling that is not what it was when I was a child. In other words, now, there are faith schools.
When I was a child, I went to secondary college to study A-Levels with Hindus and Muslims in a very integrationist world. Education is much more divided now in Britain. And you could say that this is true, to a worse extent, when you view it in Northern Ireland, where the division of education has been a major cause of all the misery of Northern Ireland. And the children, who live back-to-back in the same estates, effectively with a steel wall between them, go to separate schools. The Catholic children go to Catholic schools, the Protestant children go to Protestant schools, and though there are integrated schools in Northern Ireland, 90% or more of the schooling is not integrated.
Cosmopolitanism is an ideology I wanted to embrace instantly I heard of it, and I do embrace it. But even it troubles me. It is an ideology that strikes out for a different path from the parochial exclusivity of multiculturalism and homogenous soup that often is disguised as integrationalism. And French style integrationalism is disturbing in so many ways itself.
For me, the problem comes when you put multiculturalism into practice; though one world without frontiers, like the great Lebanese mystic Khalil Gibran used to believe in, is an ideal that I aspire to; what does that mean from your perspective, for the poor and needy who are already in your society? They are difficult questions. If you look at the United Kingdom, it’s not the elite that suffers when a country like Britain has a population increase of 700,000 yearly, which is the current rate through net migration. It is not the elite, it is not the rich, it is not the wealthy, and it is not the establishment who can sit and drink coffee and weep tears about the poor. The impoverished of this nation cannot afford homes to rent or buy. I live in Cornwall and the people are unable to buy homes, unable to rent homes. It is really difficult for the poor of Britain, and not just here. Cornwall has the lowest average income in the UK because of the tourism issue, so jobs are seasonal, and that causes a lot of problems. Tourism always comes with a knife in the back because it increases house prices, and stretches infrastructure which increases the rates (the local taxes). So it is a real problem.
But what I want to say is, that the true concept of cosmopolitanism is unsustainable as much as we would like it to be otherwise. Countries like Lebanon or arguably Israel that have adopted electoral systems that allow the identity of each to be respected, they resulted in unhappy places. But that is not cosmopolitanism as its prime exponent; my friend the philosopher Kwame Appiah, would advocate it.
I also do not like parochialism, and we are in a parochial world, mired in ever greater degrees of fear and nationalism. And the people in this parochial world confront a dangerous world and they get more frightened. Parochialism breeds parochialism. And cosmopolitanism and all the tolerance it implies is perhaps a little frightening for some.
I was born in England, but I have thought of myself at various times as Anglo-American as my mother is American. I sometimes think of myself as Anglo-Arab as I lived in Oman for six years with my wife Veronica. I sometimes thought of myself as Welsh when we lived in Wales for many years. I thought of myself as a Londoner when we lived in London. And now I think of myself as Cornish. What I have never done is thought of myself as English, oddly enough. I do not think your country of birth defines you. I think home is where the heart is. And I think it is very important to assert that that applies to all societies. I think we should allow ourselves to be defined by where our heart is, I do not think there is any restriction there. So perhaps of all the ideologies around, cosmopolitanism is the most attractive, I just wonder if it is perfect.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you very much, William, that was truly enlightening and thought-provoking. Let me then take a brief minute to introduce the next speaker.
Mr Kwame Anthony Appiah is a political philosopher on ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. He is a British-American philosopher who was a professor at Princeton University before transferring to New York University in 2014, where he is employed in the NYU Department of Philosophy and of Law. In 2022, he was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For Appiah, the effectiveness of intellectual exchange comes before the formation of culture. He has a dual perspective on agencies like UNICEF and Oxfam, on one hand admiring the immediate action these organisations can bring, and on the other emphasising the ultimate futility of them. Instead, he focuses on the long-term political and economic development of countries following the Western capitalist and democratic model. He has been influenced by cosmopolitan thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel and W. E. B. Du Bois. In his 2006 book, “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers”, he introduced the notion that our responsibilities to others go beyond sharing citizenship and that we should always appreciate life and be aware of other people’s customs and beliefs.
KWAME APPIAH
Thank you very much. I wanted to say something before turning directly to the problem, about one of the topics William raised which is how our identities work, both to divide us and the image of the divide in Northern Ireland.
It is right, of course, that this is a problem in many places like Lebanon and Israel that you mentioned. Let me first agree with that. But the trouble is that these identities also have a positive role, and the challenge is to allow us to combine the positive role of identities while managing the negative risks that come from the kind of chauvinism that identities often come with. It is not just that I am Protestant, and you are Catholic, but that maybe the Protestants are better and should rule over Catholics. So there is a kind of chauvinism. And we also have many identities which is also an important point, because sometimes one of them can crowd out the others. And I think both of these are dangerous, both the danger of chauvinism against people of other identities, ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, and all other instances of that. But also, that one identity, like being British, can crowd out all the other things that you also are. You are British, but you also have a religious identity, you may be a fan of some football team – I hesitate to mention any names because that is such a divisive topic – and so on. I think it is important to manage our identities in part by remembering which ones are important and not considering them when they do not belong in the context. When I am doing philosophy, it does not matter whether I am English, Ghanaian, or American, all of which are things that I could at various points claim to have been. What matters is the topic at hand, and when I am picking out philosophers that I want to think about, I do not care where they came from, I care about whether they have interesting ideas. Say when I teach a course that has Confucius, Ibn Arabi, and Locke in it, it is because I think these are three interesting philosophers, not because I think that it matters that one of them is Arab, one of them is Chinese or one of them is English. I think the challenge is balancing the good and the bad in our identities, so the good things can flourish, and the bad things don’t.
Let us now turn more directly to cosmopolitanism. Tanya kindly mentioned that I wrote a book about this. When I wrote the book, I did not anticipate that this ideal which I found so attractive, would turn out to eventually be one of the great bogeymen of our age.
A couple of years ago, Josh Hawley who is a senator from Missouri in the United States, in a keynote address to the National Conservatism conference said, and I quote, “The great divide of our time is between the cosmopolitan elite and everyone else”. And naturally, he was not on the side of the cosmopolitan elite. He was speaking at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, which you might think was an odd place to criticise elites, but never mind. He said the politics of both left and right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests, not of the American middle class, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities. They live in the United States, but they identify as citizens of the world, and their primary loyalty is to the global community. They chase profits without concern for their country, creating an economy that ultimately benefits those who have the money to start with. And they left Middle America with flat wages and lost jobs. Very interesting to hear an American Conservative talking about the downside, as it were, of global capitalism. It is a new thing, this American, conservative, moderately anti-capitalist, but more importantly for our purposes, anti-cosmopolitan stance, and it will be interesting to see what happens with it.
This is not just the conservative view; you can find Democrats saying the same things. Barack Obama himself gave an address some years back, I think it was a Mandela lecture in South Africa, where he described a new business elite that was cosmopolitan and insulated to the pain it inflicts on particular people in particular communities. Further to the left, Bernie Sanders, for years, has railed against plutocrats, whose avarice, he says, shows very little concern for our country. Senator Elizabeth Warren, in her second Democratic presidential debate, said that the giant multinational corporations crafting our trade policies have no patriotism. “If they can save a nickel by moving a job to Mexico, they will do it in a heartbeat”.
And that is just the Americans. You may remember Theresa May at the Conservative Party Conference in 2016 saying, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.
And so we are hearing this rhetoric from the left, right, and centre, and you might begin to wonder whether cosmopolitanism is such a good idea. But I think all this talk misunderstands what is interesting and what is distinctive about cosmopolitanism. It mistakes, and mischaracterizes its alleged enemy. So let me try and frame cosmopolitanism in a way that I think makes it clear why these criticisms misunderstood the point.
As you know, the term dates back to ancient Greece. Diogenes in the 4th century said he was a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. This idea came from early stoicism and cynicism, and it was very influential in some of the great Roman thinkers like Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. And because Christianity developed in the context of Roman stoicism, it shaped early Christianity too. You may recall St Paul saying, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free”. That is the beginning, an expression of a stoic idea about cosmopolitanism. Now that way of expressing it can be a bit misleading because it suggests, as it were, that we should abandon our other identities, and I am going to insist that that is not the point. Nevertheless, there are echoes, as I say, of stoic cosmopolitanism and Christianity. And this led Marcus Aurelius to see that precisely because we have multiple identities, there is no clash. Marcus Aurelius said, my city and my country insofar as I am Roman, is Rome. Insofar as I am a human being, it is the world. That is the point that in different contexts, different identities matter. And sometimes it is our human identity that matters most, and we can think that everybody everywhere matters. That is a central cosmopolitan idea.
It is a kind of universalism, but it is not integrationist universalism, because everybody matters, and we do not want everybody to be the same. Everybody matters in their diversity. Everybody matters in the ways that they are different as well as in how they are the same. We can have special obligations to those who depend on our caring concern like our families, our local communities, and our countries. Cicero famously said human fellowship will be served best if we treat most kindly those with whom we are most closely connected. So of course, we have to acknowledge that we have special connections to some people. And in a way, I think the easiest way to make the point is to say, look, I do not have children, but I have nephews and nieces and I have special responsibilities to them which I do not have to your nephews and nieces and grandchildren. But that does not mean I think your nieces and nephews do not matter. Of course, they matter. In many contexts, the things that I should be thinking about are things that should be good for my nephews and nieces and yours. And that is just true in the local version of local family identities, as when we move more widely into the world. I have a special concern for the children of New York and New Jersey where I live, and for the United States. But I also think that it is important to care that every child in the world grows up with the resources for a dignified existence in a society that respects her or him.
So now as William also suggested, Cicero’s thought is that we should treat most kindly those to whom we are most closely connected, just because we can be more effective locally. Not because they matter more than anybody else, but because they matter more to us. But many of us are now closely connected to people in many countries. Many, like me, were born in one country and made our livelihood in a second, and I am married to people from yet another place. I know this directly from my own family; I have three sisters, and their grandchildren have ancestors from England, Namibia, Nigeria, Norway, and Russia. That is just among my great-nephews and nieces. And that is increasingly common. When William and I were growing up, he was a person of American and British ancestry and I was a person of Ghanaian and British ancestry, which was less common. But now it is incredibly common and of course, the children of those people are going to also end up making families with people who are yet from other places as I just suggested. So the thought that I have a special responsibility for my nephews and nieces turns out to connect me to people in Namibia, Norway, and England, even though I live in the United States, and that is increasingly an issue for many people. As William also said, not everybody is comfortable with this fact. There are people in many places in the world today who are comfortable in their local community, who are not much connected directly in the sort of way that I have just been talking about with people from other communities. Everybody in the world today is connected in lots of ways, whether they are aware of it or not. Just think of what the pandemic taught us about that. We are all connected ecologically. So I understand that there are people who were made uncomfortable by this and who also find it disturbing to have their local communities shifted by the arrival of migrants of other identities. That is a bigger problem in cities than in villages, but I understand this. There is something nice about the comforts of being in a place with people that you grew up with and who go to the same churches, and who meet at the village hall in the summer to raise money for the village swimming pool and so on. That is the kind of local that everybody should recognize. It can be attractive and valuable, and it can seem threatened if people come from other places who have different ideas about swimming pools and what you should sell at local fairs. So I am not denying the force of these feelings, there is something comfortable about growing up in this context, and everyone must recognise that this is very valuable.
Cosmopolitanism has two things to say about that. One is that precisely because cosmopolitans value interaction with people who are not the same as them, they recognize that some people do not value interactions with other people. And we do not insist on anybody to be anything except being respectful of the rights of others. So, as a cosmopolitan, I respect the rights of Orthodox Jews in New York City to live in close communities where they do not want to have much interaction with other people and to spend their days, the men studying the Torah, and the women looking after the men. I am not sure I approve of that because of the gender dynamics, but still, if the women go along with it, it is up to them. And the same is true with, say, Amish Mennonites in Pennsylvania, who also want to live in close communities, they do not like being visited by strangers. And they do not like modernity, they drive around with horse and buggy et cetera. That is fine. I mean, I am interested in them, but they are not interested in me. But I can only converse with them if they want to converse with me. And if they do not want to converse with me, as it goes, I do not require them to do that. But I am interested in conversing with anybody interested in conversing with me.
And the second point I want to make is that there are lots of cosmopolitans. And we only need enough of us to make the world work. We do not need everybody to fall into one pattern. So in other words, cosmopolitanism is perfectly consistent with accepting that there will be un-cosmopolitan people in the world. And provided they do their moral duty by the rest of us and do not colonize us and invade us, that is up to them. But we do need us cosmopolitans because of many of the problems the world faces today, the pandemic was an obvious example, but questions about the environment and global warming, are also like that. Many of those problems are problems that can only be solved by all of us, representatives of all of us working together. And a cosmopolitan attitude among the people who do the interacting is going to make all that go more easily. And the key point is that loyalties are not exclusive as those remarks by Senator Hawley and President Obama and Senator Sanders and Warren suggested.
I am an American citizen now. And happy to be one. And I have a sense of belonging in my hometown, which is New York City. And last week, I voted in a very local election in New York for somebody on the local Manhattan Borough Council, in an election in which about 5,000 people voted. I also voted for a civil court judge in that election, and I took the trouble to investigate which of the candidates seemed most likely to be a good judge. But I also co-spoke for the senators from New York, I vote for my congressman from my district, and I vote in the presidential elections. So I have layers of citizenship. And these are not incompatible with one another; when I vote for the Senate, I am thinking both about New York and about the United States. And that the thought that this idea has this difficult tension is just ridiculous. So it seems to me that adding in another layer of a sense of citizenship, namely a global layer is no more troublesome than that. Of course, countries can go to war. But states can go to war, the United States lived through the bloodiest war of the 19th century between the states. And in that war, in that civil war, people had to decide whether they were on the side of the Union or of their local state. And people forget that many Southerners made the other choice, they chose the union.
So nothing stops you from conceiving yourself as a citizen of your country and the wider world. Cosmopolitanism is not an attack on loyalty to country. I am the author of a paper called Cosmopolitan Patriots. That is a viable combination of identities. So when Senator Hawley said that America is not going to become the rest of the world and the rest of the world is not going to become America, he was right. But that is not a point against cosmopolitanism. It is a precondition that cosmopolitanism is about the idea that we value cross-cultural encounters. And of course, those would be pointless if everybody everywhere was the same. So we are not trying to make everybody everywhere the same; that would be to violate one of the ideas that underlie cosmopolitanism, which is the sense of the value of human diversity. Being a cosmopolitan is consistent with all kinds of differences in policy, of course. Some cosmopolitans are more free traders, and some are more fair traders. I know that this is a view that is in recession, but I am a huge fan of the good things that came from the expansion of global trade in the last couple of decades, that expansion of global trade took hundreds of billions of people, especially in Asia, out of poverty. And you do not have to be an Asian to think that that is a good thing. It is a good thing to take people out of poverty, I wish to take more people out of poverty in more places, I wish to take more people out of poverty in Africa. And I wish the COVID pandemic had not set us back in that and pushed many people back into poverty because of the economic consequences of the policies adopted to protect us against the pandemic. But the fact that I am glad that hundreds of millions of people were taken out of poverty in Asia does not mean I am happy about poverty in the United States. Quite the contrary because the question of the value of human flourishing applies everywhere. So though I think globalisation and labour mobility have been overall greatly beneficial to the United States, as well as to the world, these forces have produced winners and losers. And I think political leaders should have directed some of the enormous winnings made by global trade increases towards ensuring that those who lost out find a better footing.
And I agree very much with William’s observations about the fact that too little attention is paid to poverty, everywhere. But I think the potential for poverty is even in the richest countries in the world. And it certainly exists to a high degree in the country in which I am a citizen. As William points out, it is a problem in England too. And it is not cosmopolitanism that is the enemy there. Cosmopolitanism does not explain why people are not able to rent their houses and rent houses in Cornwall. It is policies made in the United Kingdom that could have been made differently, that is what is responsible for that. And as I say, nobody can claim to be a genuine cosmopolitan if they do not care about human beings at home. Because the central idea is that every human being matters. And of course, if most of every human being matters, then the people next door matter too, in fact, they matter more, in my view, they matter more to us because we are entitled to be partial to our families and our communities and our countries. And I think that is a cosmopolitan thought, not an anti-cosmopolitan thought.
So, we live with eight billion or so people on a small warming planet. And the cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity, I think, as I have just argued, is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity. And when I am thinking about that idea, I like to remind people of a remark made many, many centuries ago by a Roman, a freed slave from Roman Africa, who took Greek comedies and made Latin comedies out of them. One of the great writers of classical Europe, a man who called himself Afer the African, though he lived in Rome, and his name was Publius Terentius Afer, and he said famously, “Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me”.
So to return to the point about identities, we make our lives as men and women and non-binary people, as black and white and Asian, as Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and atheists, as gay and straight and bi and nothing, as cis and trans, as teachers and lawyers and novelists and engineers, along an incompletable and an everchanging list of identities. And these identities do help us, they help us make choices. They help us make our lives. But in the end, the lives we make that way are human lives. And what we have in common as humans is as important for ethics of living as what divides us. So that is my invitation to a cosmopolitan conversation.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you so much, we are all grateful for the knowledge, the expertise, and the passion that you have brought to our conference. Before we go on, I would like to invite other participants to actively participate and they can pose questions, take part in the discussion, and have an excellent opportunity to dive deeper into the topic.
ABDELMOHSEN FARHAT
Thank you very much. Thank you very much William, Kwame. And thank you for everyone who made this meeting possible. I want to make three quick points.
Number one, from the Holy Quran, God speaks and says, we have created you peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. And even the word in Arabic does not mean only knowledge, it means intimate knowledge or friendly knowledge. And in another verse, it says God could have created all of humanity as one people. And even if he did so, they would still differ. So differences, or more accurately, diversity, and knowing one another are some of the aims of God for creating humanity according to the Holy Quran.
Number two, no study of cosmopolitanism is complete without mentioning Al-Andalus in which Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together for around eight centuries. It is very surprising how this could take place at that time and is not taking place in the same degree of harmony today. Of course, there were problems. But the general theme, the general judgment is that they lived in harmonious living, there were churches, there were synagogues, there were mosques beside one another, and people governing themselves of the three sects. A giant character of this period is Musa bin Maimun [Maimonides] as pronounced in Arabic, he was a product of the Jewish culture and the Muslim culture and did huge work on purifying Judaism from superstitions, and some Jews consider him to be the second most important Jew after Prophet Moses, peace be upon him. He deserves a lot of attention from all of us. I am astonished that not a single movie has been created about him.
My third remark is that cosmopolitanism is part of globalization and of feeling strongly connected. So in a way, it is inevitable. But as Kwame mentioned, how to manage the multiple identities, and multiple feeling of belonging here and there. And in my opinion, justice, and fairness must play a huge role. Because new forms of colonialism can take part in the name of cosmopolitanism. Thank you.
KWAME APPIAH
I completely agree about the importance of thinking about the cohabitation in Al Andalus. And I think there are other models too. There is a different model but with similar theoretical background, in the Ottoman empire which also had mosques and synagogues and churches side by side, and churches of many denominations, Syrian, Armenian, Roman Catholic and so on. And I agree that Maimonides is an incredibly important figure too and that he is well worth thinking about. The point that the Quran makes both cosmopolitan points, the point that we are all human and we are all creatures of God’s creation means that there is something important and universal about us and that he made us different, that he made us diverse and that he did not intend us to lose our diversity. The Holy Quran also is remarkably clear in expressing its tolerance, at least for people of other faiths, and other monotheists anyway, which again makes it far more advanced than many other religious texts at the time. If you compare the incredible intolerance of the Holy Roman Empire under the rulers like Charlemagne who faced Al Andalus sometimes in battle. It is very striking how much more tolerant they were and to a very high degree. You could have the highest jobs in Al Andalus and not be Muslim. As you say there were also problems. But very many interesting episodes in the history of the interfaith relations in Al Andalus.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you for your reply. William, can we invite you to speak next?
WILLIAM MORRIS
Yes, it is interesting. I was very interested in what Abdelmohsen said as well. And the experiment Al Andalus of living side by side. I was living in Oman in the 90s with Veronica. At the time, some of us were saying, would it not be lovely to have a space that was a mosque on a Friday, a synagogue on a Saturday, and a church on a Sunday in the same building? In the same space, not in separate buildings. And my Muslim friends agreed this was a good idea, some of my Jewish friends, and some of my Christian friends too. I took it to a couple of leaders. I took it to Richard Chartres, who is a very important Christian leader in the UK and who was then Bishop of London. And he said, no William, it’s a nice idea. But we cannot do that sort of thing because it would be endorsing Islam. Now you may find that a strange remark, but that was from the then Bishop of London. And I took it to one of the Deputy Prime Ministers of Oman and asked him about the idea, somebody who I felt would be sympathetic. And he said, no William, we cannot do that because that would be endorsing the State of Israel. Which was again an extraordinary thing for him to say. I also took it to the then Chief Rabbi, now dead, but he said, no problem. No problem, as long as it has no religious symbols in such a building, then we could do that. But anyways, obviously the idea never got off the ground. There must be examples of buildings that are used in that way, I would love to see that. But I do not know of any yet.
The only other thing I wanted to say was to ask Kwame, for me, with the cosmopolitan approach or any approach to relations with your brothers and sisters in mankind, there is still this problem of migration. And I presume the true cosmopolitan would believe in a world without frontiers. And therefore, you are stuck with a normal but enormous social problem. The social problems we are seeing now and that are not going away. The huge numbers that, as I said, the net figures of the population increase in Britain is just under 700,000. And obviously, if you are cosmopolitan, I would think you will welcome this with open arms.
KWAME APPIAH
Let me just say, I do not actually think that. I am actually not in favour of open borders. I do believe that we have a cosmopolitan duty to accept asylees. So there is one kind of migrant to whom I believe we have a moral responsibility. If somebody arrives at your border and says, if I go back home, they will kill me or lock me up, I think you have a duty to let them in and look after them until they can go home. And if they cannot go home, they have a right to stay, in my view. And this is not a modern idea. Kant already said this in his essay, Perpetual Peace, that one of our cosmopolitan duties was to accept asylees. But that is not most of the world’s migrants today. There are people who are moving for other reasons.
I think it is precisely someone who is cosmopolitan who thinks that it is important to allow people to continue to be different in their different ways and who thinks that societies have a right to decide on what basis they will allow other people to come in. I do not think that a cosmopolitan should be in favour of open borders. We should be in favour of recognizing the right of asylum which is now a right in international law. Also, I do not think as a cosmopolitan in my society, I would vote for rules that limited entry on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and a whole bunch of other things. I would be against discriminatory limitations on migration. But if a country says we have a certain character, we think we can only absorb a reasonable number of people, so once we have taken our asylees, we will take only so many more, and we will take them on the basis of whether we have a need for them in our economy to give them economic rankings or whatever. I would need to see an actual proposal to decide whether I wanted that to be the policy of my country, but I do not think it is incompatible with cosmopolitanism. Because, as I say, cosmopolitanism is universality plus difference, and if diversity is part of what we value in humanity, then maintaining separate societies is part of what maintains that diversity. And a simple, totally free movement of everybody would undermine the possibility of maintaining separate practices in society. When I see the Danes teaching people who come to live in Denmark things about Danish traditions and values, I think that is fine. I do not like the French solution any more than you do, William, but I do not think that it is wrong to help migrants. I think it is important when people migrate and settle that you explain to them the history and traditions of your political system. I think that is fine. That is not about requiring them to agree with you about everything. It is just telling you how things work. And to get people to understand how things work and invite them to participate, I think that is the right way to treat migrants. So I know there are cosmopolitans who think that we should not have borders, but as I say, precisely for reasons that are deeply built into the character of cosmopolitanism as the thought that we want to live in a world of many societies in fruitful interaction with one another, simply taking down all the borders is going to make that very, very hard and perhaps impossible. So no, I think we can be against some of the nasty reasons why people do not like migrations, without thinking that it follows from that, that we should allow any migration at all.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you. We will now move on to Nagia.
NAGIA SAID
Thank you very much Kwame, thank you William, and thank you for what you shared. It all confirms my convictions and beliefs. I was brought up in a liberal family in Egypt. I remember that my mother used to say, my country is the world, and my religion is to do good. And she also used to say, it takes all sorts of men to make the world. And I think this reflects the diversity and the cosmopolitanism that we are talking about. It is the human family that we all come from, one father and mother, Adam and Eve.
And the other thing that William suggested is the idea of the building where Jews, Christians, and Muslims take turns to pray. I do not know if you have visited Cairo, there is a place called “mugamma’ el-adyan”, the triangle of religions in Old Cairo. Because in that place, we have one of the oldest churches, the oldest synagogues, and the first mosque built in Egypt and Africa. So that triangle will have Jews, Christians, and Muslims worshipping in the same vicinity and are in the same spot. Also in the old days, maybe not anymore now, Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea was a cosmopolitan city. We had Greeks, British, French, et cetera. And we all enjoyed living as part of the Egyptian community even though some of them were not originally Egyptian.
And the last thing I want to say on Kwame mentioning about asylum, this reminded me that in the Holy Quran, there is a verse, an order to the believers that even if an infidel or someone of another religion seeks safety in your place, grant him this refuge until he reaches safety. And I think this was more than 14 centuries ago, and this applied even to those following a different faith tradition, had no faith, or were pagans. If they sought safety where you are, you have to grant them this chance until they are secure. Thank you.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you so much Nagia. Veronica, can we have your question now?
VERONICA MORRIS
Thank you very much Kwame for the lovely talk. I am currently very concerned about these people that are being shipped off to Rwanda, because I think that is rather dangerous to them. Because to come from thinking, I have now got a homeland, and then suddenly being told, no, you have got to go to Rwanda. To me, that seems strange that the person is trying to settle somewhere, and sent off to Rwanda. And it seems to me extraordinary that this has been allowed to happen. I think there have been people saying, this should not happen. What do you believe?
WILLIAM MORRIS
Yes, and just to say, some of those people would be economic migrants. So would say, is that treatment valid?
KWAME APPIAH
Right. So as I said, I do not think having borders and having rules is un-cosmopolitan. But it can be wrong to have certain rules. And one obvious rule is that you should not force people to move from a place where they have a settled life unless they choose to. I think you do not have to be a cosmopolitan to think of that as just a basic ethical idea. Forced migration is an assault on the sense of place, which is, as I said, one of the things that matter to almost everybody. I mean, some of us are the kind of cosmopolitan who really can settle and feel in place in different places. And so for me, having grown up between England and Ghana, the cost of adding America to the places that I knew was not terribly high. I had already done one lot of adjustments, and also America and especially the American Academy is not very different from England and the British Academy. They are pretty similar culturally speaking. But I would feel that I was a bit lost if you dumped me in Rwanda. Not because I have anything against Rwanda, but because I do not know very much about it. I think for Cosmopolitans the rules that are applied at borders are themselves morally acceptable rules, but I think moving people from places where they are settled against their will is a very good example of something that violates very basic principles of morality.
I prefer something that Nagia and William said. There is this new centre in the Emirates, right? Where the Abrahamic religions all work together, I forgotten what it is called. It is in Abu Dhabi. They have a centre for interfaith activities among Muslims and Christians and Jews, which I think was started a couple of years ago. So that might be another place to get to see whether they are doing the sort of thing you had in mind.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you. Yes, Abdelmohsen.
ABDELMOHSEN FARHAT
Regarding the noble idea of William about having one building devoted to the three religions on different days. With all due respect, I would prefer three separate buildings with one common facility in between, because the cosmopolitan aspect, in my opinion, should relate mostly, almost totally to culture, but not to religion, except in the art of interpretation of religion, how can each one in his own religion reach his own interpretation related to all of humanity. So, as Kwame mentioned, here it is a matter of managing identities. There is a sense of exclusiveness in certain parts and there is a sense of inclusiveness in other parts. And in my opinion, it may generate a lot of conflict or at least doubts about having the same building for the three religions. But if we have, let us say, a building on exhibition, places where music, painting, sculptures, all the arts and sciences by the way, that relate all cultures together, I think that would make more sense. Then scholars can study and show to people that there are a lot of commonalities between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Yes there are some differences too, otherwise we would not have been Muslims, Christians and Jews today. Even amongst Muslims, amongst Christians there are a lot of differences.
But we are searching for the common, and I think the scientific part should also get its fair share. If we were to write our numbers today in Roman numbers, then the number 1 billion, let alone 1 trillion would take several pages to write. And most people forget that the numbers we are writing today are called Arabic numerals. There is also an Indian contribution to that. The other thing is the algorithms. Algorithms are – as much as I know, I am not biased here – a Muslim invention. And they prevail throughout all science and technology today. Without algorithms, you could not have the science and technology of today. Thank you.
KWAME APPIAH
I think raising science is a very important point, because one of the things that is clear about the success of natural science over the last few hundred years, is the enormous importance of the fact that the scientific community is a cosmopolitan community of people of different cultural backgrounds, working together on a common set of problems. The modern calculus is invented at the same time by a German and by an Englishman, the modern calculus of probability as a result of conversations between people in France and in Holland, and so on. And contemporary genomics is the result of the work of people on every continent. And they share their results across that world. Except where the sharing is limited by rules about national security which means that some science cannot be shared because it is thought to be useful for military purposes. But the broad character of science as a cosmopolitan institution is very important.
The point about shared spaces, without literally having a single place of worship is an interesting one. I think this difficulty arises not just between the different Abrahamic faiths, but within them. I once went to a service at a synagogue in Hong Kong. And the Jewish Community Centre in Hong Kong has an orthodox synagogue and a reformed synagogue in separate spaces, and they share some of those common spaces and their kosher cooking facilities. So even as you said, among people of one faith, there can be reasons why people do not want to share literally the space. And another example, I once spoke at a funeral of a Jewish friend of mine which was held in a chapel at Harvard, and the family asked for the cross to be covered during the ceremony. That seemed fine to me. And eventually, the chaplain at Harvard was persuaded too. So I think, especially when you have conventions about how the space is organised, in terms of crucifixes and the organisation of the mosque, around facing Mecca and so on, all those things can make it difficult for architecture to share a space. But doing things together while recognising that you are different, that is the key of cosmopolitan thought, and sometimes architecture can permit you to do that in a single space, and sometimes it cannot. Some spaces have to be consecrated for certain religious purposes. And that can be a problem for people who do not recognise that form of consecration. With all these things, I think the point is that conversation among the parties can discover what is and what is not possible together. And that is the thing that the cosmopolitan favours, it is continuing these conversations across these different identities and learning how we can share our things together or not being able to share our things together. I mean, if I do not keep a kosher kitchen, I cannot have you to dinner if you are keeping kosher. But I can have you in my house and we can drink water and tea and coffee together. So, in order to know what you can do together, you have to get to know each other and figure out what is possible.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you, Kwame. Bill, would you like to add something?
BILL MATHER
Yes, I would like to thank Kwame, William, and yourself, and all the contributions. This is a very complex but critical issue. It is at the very heart of how we have to operate in a globally interdependent world. My particular interests are about leadership and cosmopolitan leadership to be cross-cultural and open. And to understand that there are some very difficult issues like identity when people feel like their identity has been threatened. That is when you get mixed extremism coming out, hence why I agree with borders and rules. It is not very helpful to push people into a situation of not understanding who they are. And the same for faith groups. I think some areas of consolidation with people who come with the same kind of perspectives is good, as long as it is open. And it is from that confidence that you can welcome difference. So all these issues have been totally spot on for me. What I have looked at is why do we behave like we do. Sensemaking means people really want around them what they know and understand. Similarity-seeking says that people are looking for common traits. And hence, all the biases that exist all over the place. But these are stereotypes, there are all kinds in human nature. And that is why we need leadership that can move them into less prominence but understand that they are our realities of human survival. Thank you all.
KWAME APPIAH
I think what you just said is tremendously important, to stress the role of leadership here. Because there is a terrible temptation in people, particularly political democratic leadership, to use the bad side of identity to bring your side together. Using the xenophobic side to unite your people. And that is what leads to things like the Holocaust, it is what led to the Rwandan genocide, it is what led to the Armenian genocide in the days of modern Turkey, trying to build up a modern, national identity by focusing on enemies. And that is, as you said, a part of our psychological equipment. And leaders abuse it all the time, the big populists of the moment. Donald Trump, Prime Minister Modi, Orbán, Putin, and Bolsonaro, are all people who have used that negative side of identity in pursuit of populist success. And as I said, down that road lies mass killing and mass murder.
So I think it is very important for all of us to point that out and to resist those political people who seek to build political leadership by demonizing of the other. And unfortunately, I think that tendency is very strong at the moment in many places, and it is part of what has led to the recession of the global openness which, for a couple of decades, was an important part of how the world was working. And precisely because it is sort of built into us, it is extremely hard to resist once it starts going. So you do not really want to get started at all. I think some people think, well I can use it for a bit and then I can control it, but that is not what happens. You use it for a bit, and then it controls you. And I worry when President Xi in China uses Japan as a phobia and he gets enough Chinese people excited by that, he will not be able to stop it leading to actual conflict. And I would advise any leader who is thinking about going down that route to look at the historical evidence and recognize that in the long run, it will not be good for the country. Because it will lead to the kind of disasters that have unfortunately plagued modernity, where this kind of xenophobic side of national identities or religious identities has been mobilised in order to create solidarity among us, but at the cost of destroying peace.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you, sir. William, you have raised your hand?
WILLIAM MORRIS
Thank you, so many interesting things.
Britain is a bit cosmopolitan. We have a Hindu Prime Minister and a Muslim chief minister in Scotland. We are certainly going down that road to a point. And I think it does not faze any of us in Britain in the slightest, it seems just part of the natural process. I certainly am not bothered, and I would not say many of the younger generation are, our generation maybe. But the interesting issue of migration, like in the Harry Secombe world, If I ruled the World, what would I do, you know? I mean, if I was a dictator of a small country, or a large one, would I try a radical experiment and open the borders? And see what happened? Initially it would cause a lot of pain for some, but then would it reach a point where it stopped? What would it do to your country if you had truly open borders? Would it be the end of the world? But it is an interesting ideology because in principle, I want to adhere to it and believe in a world without borders. I think that is what, ultimately, we must aim for. And if the people who were arguing for Britain not to exit the European Union had done so on a more cosmopolitan approach, instead of an economic approach. If they had talked more idealistically about the need for one Europe, because we were brothers and sisters and it is time to move that way, I think the vote could have gone differently. I think the vote went the way it did partly as an anti-establishment vote. And largely because the arguments were on economic reasons and many of the people who voted remain were irritated by being preached about the fact that Britain would go down to the back of the queue, as Obama put it. And I think a lot of that economic discussion was counterproductive. I think people need and want to be idealistic, and if you appeal to idealism, then they will be idealistic, in my view.
And were I empowered as a ruthless dictator, I would abolish, like the French do, religious education and religious schools and have all schooling secular. In theory they do in America, but then they self-segregate. America is a very strange place. I know Georgia very well, having travelled there many, many times for personal reasons, and I found the segregation of America astonishing. Even though schools are ostensibly secular, it is just enough to make you weep. I tried not to be segregated in Georgia when I was in Georgia, and I was there many times. And I would go to a black church every time. The first time I went, I startled the congregation. And then one of the elders came up to me and said, do you have a bill? They thought I was a debt collector. It was the first time a white man had entered the church, you know. And they were very welcoming after that.
But to go back to the issue that I raised, that Abdelmohsen replied to, the issue of the one centre of worship for three faiths, I noticed that Larry put the link in the chat for the Abrahamic house in the UAE and it is very much like the triangle of wisdom that Nagia referred to in Cairo, and I had never heard of either and I am very grateful to have been told of each. But it is interesting to me that neither of them is one building used by three faiths. I would love to see one building used by three faiths. And I noticed Abdelmohsen’s hesitations about it, but I would love to see it. I do not see that it should be a problem.
My last point, a question for Kwame, I would assume that, by definition, a multiculturalist should be a pacifist, but that might not be the case. And I would not mind hearing his opinion about that.
KWAME APPIAH
That is a good question. I think obviously cosmopolitanism and multiculturalists ought to be against what in international law is called aggressive war. On the other hand, I do not think you need to be against the right of self-defence. You do not need to be a pacifist about self-defence. So I think my own view is, and in fact, this is the view in international law now, that starting a war is basically always a crime in international law now, but defending yourself is not. You are permitted to defend yourself if someone attacks you, but you are not permitted to attack anybody. That is sort of the basic idea. And I do not think you need to be cosmopolitan to say that, I think that is just sort of basic morality. I mean, the international system allows the states of the world through the United Nations together to begin a war if a society is engaged in severe human rights abuses, including, of course, genocide. So it is not illegal if you go through the United Nations mechanisms to use force to enter a country which is engaging in genocide or mass human rights abuses.
But again, I am not a pacifist in the sense that I think that there is always a moral argument against war. But if you are going to do that sort of thing, it seems to me there is a basic idea that ought to govern those sorts of interventions, which is that you ought to be pretty confident that what you are going to do is going to make things better. And an awful lot of recent interventions authorised by the United Nations have not made things better, they have made them worse. So I am not a pacifist, I do not think cosmopolitans need to be pacifist. But I think precisely because cosmopolitans think that everybody matters, the threshold for thinking about when a war is justified is going to be very, very high. And it is going to have to be because there are really important human interests – of the sort that are challenged in genocide – at stake, and the horror of war is worth it. Because the horror of doing nothing is even worse. But that would be my thought about the cosmopolitan view.
If you want to come to a place where there are people of all faiths using the same space, come to NYU, our religious centre has an Imam and a Rabbi and a Catholic priest and some Protestant priests, and they constantly do things together in the same space.
WILLIAM MORRIS
That is encouraging, thank you.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you. We are approaching an end, we just have another half an hour left, so can quickly move on to Nagia and Abdelmohsen and then maybe have a conclusion speech.
NAGIA SAID
Thank you very much. Regarding the idea of abolishing religious schools and so on, and just establishing secular schools, the way I was brought up in Egypt, I went to a national school which was cosmopolitan. And we had students from different parts of the world, from different continents. We had Christians, we had Muslims and Jews. The curriculum was formed by the Egyptian ministry, we had a curriculum for Christians, and a separate curriculum for Muslims, I do not think there was one for Jews at that time. So were brought up like that, and it did not create any problems that we came from different faiths traditions. And the school song that we learned was so beautiful that we repeated it every day in the morning assembly, that standing together we come from nations, from Syria, from Germany, from India, from Japan, we are one family, united and happy. And we will always be proud of our school. And this song united the primary and middle school.
The other thing about synagogue, church, and mosque, again our experience, our Christian friends used to come and pray in the mosque for Eid, and we used to go to church to our Christian friends, even though we were Muslim. During Ramadan, my parents were praying together with Hindus, even Christians, lighting a candle together, but it was not the traditional ritual, it was just praying to God. But of course, we have our different special prayers, but we had a common prayer as well. And we allowed Christians to pray in our mosque. When we went to Caux in Switzerland, we once did a common prayer in the church, a prayer for Jerusalem, and we invited Jews, Christians, and Muslims to attend that. So I do not think it was really a problem. But still, there is the distinction that this is a mosque, this is a church, this is a synagogue, it does not obstruct us from praying together in any of these houses of worship, because they belong to God. Or at home, or in a conference centre, or even at the airport, I think there was a prayer room at one airport for everybody, and we went and prayed in that prayer room which was very interesting. Thank you.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you Nagia. Can we have your thoughts, Abdelmohsen?
ABDELMOHSEN FARHAT
Thank you. I try to be very quick with two points.
Number one. I think the antithesis of cosmopolitanism deserves more conscious study from all of us, and that is tribalism. Tribalism does prevail in all countries all over the world, in sports clubs for example, and it leads to some ugly behaviour. People sometimes are injured and then I hear some people died in certain incidents. It also goes for gated communities, some people are willing to pay much, much higher prices to be part of the club or part of a gated community, looked at as being aristocratic or something. And in doing so, they isolate themselves from the rest of society. A healthy city and a healthy urban environment should have a place for all income categories. Not necessarily living together, house beside house, but community beside community. I think tribalism needs more attention from all of us to be conscious about what to avoid.
Secondly, another giant character that is extremely important is Ibn Arabi another character from Al Andalus. A great Sufi scholar, and Muslim scholar, and he could be regarded as a model for cosmopolitanism. He wrote in poetry: “I used to deny my friend if his religion is different from mine. Today, my heart is open to all forms, a pastureland for years, a monastery for monks, house for the worshipers of higher prayer, the place of Torah and the Holy Quran, I adopt the religion of love. Wherever its caravans may lead to, love is my religion and my belief”. So please notice here that he did not say I am not a Muslim, he is a Muslim. And from his Islamic point of view, he is open to all forms, even of the different religions, as long as love unites them all. Thank you.
KWAME APPIAH
I think raising the question of pragmatism is very important. There is a question from Rev Larry Wright in the chat box, let me just read it out loud, because I think it invites discussion among other things, of tribalism: ‘While Cosmopolitanism provides an aspirational framework for differing identities to cooperate, we seem to be speaking more about: ideas, political policies, religious tolerance (historic and contemporary) but we have in the West a corrosive set of “culture wars” between identity-based groups which is anything other than cosmopolitan. What are Kwame’s views on this?’
I mean yes, it is really important that the logic of cosmopolitanism is about respect for and dialogue with difference, not just across borders, but within them. And so, the divisions in the culture wars are good examples of the kinds of divisions that I think a cosmopolitan cannot accept. We want not just the international society, but national societies to be homes to people who understand that they have different religious views and different tastes in many cultural matters, including literal tastes in food. And that nevertheless, we are equal fellow citizens, and we want to interact with one another on terms of equality and learn about one another, and we think that interaction will be valuable for us without our all becoming the same.
The object of the exercise in these kinds of intergroup conversations is not to make us all the same. It is to help us to get along in a way that is made possible by spending time together. And it is spending time together with people that can help you get along with needing to come to agreement about everything. And so one way to connect the sort of political and the cultural dimensions of this is to talk about tribalism and to say that, yes, tribalism is the enemy of cosmopolitanism. Why? Because tribalism is giving weight to your tribe in the political context, in a context where it is not appropriate to do so. My father was a very proud Ashanti which is the region of Ghana we come from. He was the nephew and the brother-in-law of the successive kings of Asante, and he did a lot for the kingdom. But he thought it very important when he was in the Ghanaian parliament, that he should be advocating policies that were good for everybody, not just for Asante. And he campaigned against tribalism, even though he was very proud of his tribe. So his anti-tribalism was not about rejecting his tribal identity. It was about making sure that he did not abuse his obligations to his fellow citizens by giving inappropriate favouritism to people of his own tribe. He did not think that ministers ought to hire people of their own tribe, they ought to have the best candidates. He did not think that the point of national policy was for people of different ethnic groups to campaign to get things for themselves, he thought the object of the exercise was for Ghanaians to work together and to get a good balance for everybody. And so I am glad Abdelmohsen raised the language of tribalism which I did not use. But it is very important, I think, that the cosmopolitan is not against tribes.
Tribalism is not having an identity, it is giving the wrong weight to that identity, it is not recognizing that other things matter too, and that when you are thinking about your country, you have to be thinking about the whole country. If something is good for London and bad for the provinces, then cosmopolitan Londoners should be against it, or should be in favour of trying to reshape the policy so it is good for everybody. If something is bad for Cornwall, that should concern everybody in the United Kingdom, not just the people of Cornwall. And that thought is the domestic equivalent of the international cosmopolitan thought, which is, I am not going to encourage my country to engage in policies that are actively bad for people in other countries. I am going to try and make sure that as we pursue our interests, we do so while respecting the interests of other people in other societies.
So I think it is very important to see a connection between transnational cosmopolitanism and the rejection of the kind of diversity and identity that is central to the so-called culture wars which are occurring now. We may have sort started it in the United States, but they are now occurring all over the place in Europe and, of course, in England. And this relates to what William was saying about education, it is very important to bring our children up in diverse contexts. Ideally I think like William, that schooling is best done in non-faith based schools, but I went to an Anglican school in England which had a Rabbi who came on Friday evening, and there were Muslims, I do not know if there was an Imam at that point, and the chapel was set aside for use, actually also for a Buddhist and Hindu meditation which I learned at my Anglican school. So the important thing is that we grow up together in societies, and cohabitation in cities, I deeply agree with that.
Because in the end, cosmopolitanism as much as anything else, it is not an intellectual thing, it is a matter of the heart. And the way you get to have those feelings, those good feelings about people who are different from you in the deepest way, is by spending time with them, doing things that matter to you both. And schooling is a good example of spending time together things that matter to you both. And so it is a very important part of the relevant psychology here that I am sure my own cosmopolitan attitudes were shaped by the fact that, like Nagia, I went to my Muslim cousins at Ramadan, and they came to us for Christmas. And sometimes they came to our church. And so I grew up learning that you could be in the deepest kind of intimate cohabitation with people who had different faith traditions. And I am now married to someone who came from a Jewish family, and so I do a Seder every year in our house. And I have learned a lot from participating not as a Jew but as a guest in a very useful and important Jewish ritual. Because the Seder is now conceived among reformed Jews to be about celebrating the escape from bondage. And that is something that puts Jews in solidarity with all kinds of people around the world who need to escape from bondage. Today, we have hundreds of millions of people who are in bondage around the world who need escape and having a regular reminder of the importance of freedom, which is what the Seder means, among other things, there is something you can learn whether you are Jewish or not. Nagia is reminding us that Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana had an Egyptian wife and a son who lives in Egypt, and I think that actually Nkrumah was someone who was very preoccupied with symbolism. I really think that for him it was important that he was able through his marriage to express the idea, which was not shared by everybody, that it was important that the Maghreb and the rest of Africa were not two different places. That Arab Africa and the rest of Africa were not separate things, that they were all Africa. And he expressed that in this very powerful way by marrying a North African woman from Egypt.
TANYA GOYAL
Thank you, sir. So before we move towards words of thanks, I would just like to ask the people who have not spoken yet if they have anything to add or any questions. If not, we can move towards the words of thanks.
Today’s session was certainly very enlightening in terms of different areas where cosmopolitanism at its core as philosophy came out to be a philosophy that transcends borders and recognizes our shared humanity. It is a belief in the idea that we are all citizens of the world, regardless of nationality, race, or religion. It is an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. The significance of embracing cosmopolitan values cannot be overstated. It is through a commitment to cosmopolitanism that we can address the challenges that confront us as a global community. On behalf of the Next Century Foundation, it is my honour to propose a word of thanks as we draw the session on cosmopolitanism to a close. This gathering has been a remarkable journey of knowledge, insights and inspiration. And it is only fitting that we express our gratitude to all those who have contributed to its success. First and foremost, I extend my deepest appreciation to our esteemed speakers, Mr Kwame and Mr William, your profound knowledge, expertise, and passion has enriched our understanding of cosmopolitanism and its significance in today’s world. We are grateful for your invaluable contribution. Thank you. And I would also like to extend my gratitude to all the participants who have joined us here today. Our thanks also go out to the organising committee and volunteers and interns of the Next Century Foundation who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure a smooth running of the session. Thank you everyone.
End of discussion
