CITIZENS OF SOMEWHERE
The former UK prime minister Theresa May made a conference speech back in 2016, where she said:
if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means. [see the Video]But others would disagree.
In the annual set of Reith Lectures on the BBC, Prof Appia said: 'Mrs May, we are all citizens of the world,':
Real cosmopolitanism is not a privilege; it is an obligation. It does not belong to the rarefied circles of some frequent-flyer upper class.It belongs to anyone who cares about global justice, about the environment, about the alleviation of strife and carnage beyond our immediate national borders.
A disease that starts, unnoticed, in an African forest can devastate a Manchester family; CO2 emissions from India can derange the weather around the Gulf Stream; an ideological pathology that incubates in schools halfway around the world can bring down jets and skyscrapers.
We can be tempted to imagine - like children who think they can hide by closing their eyes - that our human concerns can stop neatly at the border, with a wider world kept forever at bay. But that is the unaffordable luxury.
If cosmopolitanism involves a simple recognition that our lives are interrelated in ways that transcend boundaries and that our human concerns must, too, it has brute reality on its side. A citizen of the world? Better believe it.
But where do the prime minister's ideas come from? Here we look at How Theresa May Understands People as 'Somewheres' and 'Anywheres':
One of these commentators is David Goodhart, whose book, The Road to Somewhere, ... manages to state the intellectual case for Mayism in a very concise way. The book’s central distinction – repeated ad nauseam throughout – is cleaved through the middle of the UK population. It is between “Anywheres”, who make up roughly 25 percent of the population, and “Somewheres”, who make up about 50 percent (the rest are “Inbetweeners”, although we’re never told very much about them).
The Anywheres are the hated metropolitan elitists of the Mayist narrative: high-achievers whose worldview values “autonomy, mobility and novelty”, placing a much lower value on “group identity, tradition and national social contracts”. They are comfortable with immigration, pro-international development and have progressive views about minority rights. Typically, they have what Goodhart calls “portable, achieved” identities – which means they’ve left the area they grew up in to attend a residential university and now live in London, or “even abroad”. The Anywhere worldview encompasses a broad swathe of educated society from “polished business executives to radical academics”.
Somewheres, by contrast, are the real bloody people of the UK. “Socially conservative and communitarian by instinct,” they have “rooted, ascribed” identities based on “group belonging and particular places”. They feel “uncomfortable about many aspects of cultural and economic change – such as mass immigration… the reduced status of non-graduate employment and more fluid gender roles”...
Goodhart’s central distinction is bogus. Somewheres are supposed to be authentic, rooted in space and place; Anywheres, meanwhile, are inauthentic elites who have abandoned their roots to pursue personal success.
This doesn’t work for at least two reasons. On the one hand, Goodhart struggles throughout with the fact that – far from being placeless – Anywhere identity is in fact associated with one very specific place: London, which has a distinct culture of its own. On the other, it is conveniently forgetful of the very real financial struggles that young Anywheres in particular often face: leaving your hometown and moving to London is hardly any guarantee of great wealth...
Jonathan Freedland also doesn't like the easy divisions in his look at The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart
First, in his sympathy for Somewheres he caricatures Anywheres. Too easily does his category – which, by his measure, should include between 8 million and 10 million people – collapse into an upmarket version of the hated “metropolitan liberal elite”. He makes the same mistake as Theresa May did when she declared last year: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” This is to assume that those who look outward are automatically disconnected from the people around them. But a visit to even the much derided, ultra-remain districts of, say, north London would show areas that are still genuine communities, right down to their neighbourhood street parties for the Queen’s 90th birthday. Anywheres come from somewhere too...
Where Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities. Even though he concedes that these groups can exhibit Somewhere-ish attitudes – prioritising stable families, for example – he frames them throughout as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with.
Perhaps my own experience as a member of Britain’s Jewish community has skewed my perspective, but I’d suggest that the very qualities Goodhart most admires among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities, they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be emulated than to be feared.
Even if that is asking too much, surely the task now is not to look back to the time when homogeneity made a cohesive society easy, but to ask how today’s heterogeneous society might be made more cohesive, despite the difficulties. Goodhart is right that people are more inclined to share with those they regard as their fellows: so the challenge is to make all citizens, including the newer ones, appear to each other as fellows.
COSMOPOLITAN, MULTILINGUAL, MULTICULTURAL PLACES
Firstly, a good question on Reddit: What are/were a few traditionally multilingual towns/cities around the world? : r/linguistics
HOIMA:
As for the most multilingual/cultural continent, it is Africa that is so linguistically diverse:
A study conducted by Shigeki Kaji of Kyoto University in 2013, centred on inhabitants of the Ugandan town of Hoima, found that the average inhabitant knows 4.34 languages. Interestingly, Uganda has no lingua franca, i.e. no common language used by speakers with different native languages. The average Ugandan therefore has to employ multiple languages during the course of daily life, depending on where he is and to whom he is speaking.
Such multilingualism is impressive, particularly when one considers that we are not talking about language scholars, but about average citizens just going about their business and flicking effortlessly between four or more languages.
WREXHAM:
We can consider Wales as Britain’s hidden corner of bilingualism:
Tucked away in the corner of the UK, one of the world’s most monolingual countries, you’ll find a beacon of bilingualism for the rest of the world: Wales. Out of the four home nations that make up the United Kingdom, Wales has led the way in its efforts to revive and promote the Welsh language, and has set a precedent for other countries all over the world. What makes this more impressive, is that it has managed to do so while living side-by-side with global giant English.And Wrexham has been chosen as a bilingual town to promote the Welsh language...
SARAJEVO:
Today, there is life beyond war in Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo 30 years on. And despite all the attempts at ethnic cleansing, multicultural Sarajevo is the most diverse city in Europe.
CHERNIVTSI:
In his book Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders by Lewis Baston, the author walks us across these European borders and shares their stories. The book is named 'one of the most engaging and fascinating histories of Europe I've read for years' in a review by Dominick Sandbrook, the history podcaster.
Lewis Baston finishes his book by looking at Chernivtsi - "Secret Capital of Europe."
Here's a very touching piece on coming across the book by someone whose grandparents lived there: Crying in bookstores, thinking of borders. And they finish:
Today, I teared up in a bookstore. Today, I bought a book because the first two paragraphs of its final chapter made me feel like crying. I picked it up and leafed through it to kill time, and because the title, Borderlines, caught my eye. I picked it up with some cynicism, wondering what this book might have to teach me about borders. I went to the last chapter, ‘The secret capital of Europe (Ukraine/ Romania)’ because I was curious what this book had to say about a border that tore hearts in half in my family. I read the first paragraph and I felt like crying.
Cernăuți (Chernivtsi) was my paternal grandparents’ birthplace, a home they fled under duress as young people, and where they never returned. A childhood home my grandmother spoke of often, when I went to visit her in the summers. These few lines, read by chance today, seemed to echo her words. Her voice, and not the writer’s, filled the page under my eyes.
Thus it was that, picking up a book at random in a listless moment, I found myself fighting back tears in a little bookshop in a quiet seaside town more than 1,400 miles away from where my grandparents started their lives’ journeys.
I am tired of tyranny, greed, and borders seared with violence, borders that shift with the desires and interests of small-minded men.
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