“Rootless Cosmopolitans”? Visual Resources, an International Journal in Nationalist Times

Abstract

A few months before I wrote this editorial, Theresa May (b. 1956), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered an anti-immigration speech at the 2016 Conservative Party Conference, expressing her solidarity with British citizens who found themselves “out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration.” Britain, May believed, should principally look after its own citizens and its own communities. She continued, with a logical non sequitur that has been widely criticised in the press, by stating: “citizens of the world are citizens of nowhere.” In October 2016, May’s government had just begun the process to leave the European Union following the result of the 23 June 2016 referendum, a marginal victory for the “Leave” faction (who gained 51.89% of the votes), which has been widely interpreted as a vote of protest against immigration. May’s outburst against the “citizens of the world” was widely taken as a xenophobic comment against a progressive, utopian vision of open borders, cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Meanwhile Donald Trump (b. 1946), current President of the United States of America, still aimed to keep his electoral promise to build a “wall” to separate the country from Mexico and thus to prevent immigration, specifically by non-whites. In 2017, as happened before in the course of the twentieth century, political factions principally connected with the far right have appeased popular unrest about the continuing financial crisis by blaming immigration. This intolerance has manifested – practically – into a bureaucratic and political cull of immigration and – culturally – by voicing concerns against the intellectual notions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism themselves. The Heritage Foundation, an American right-wing think tank, writes: “the immigration crisis in America is the physical manifestation of our nation’s intellectual confusion. The growing influence of dogmatic cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism has caused chaos in the public mind, which is reflected in the chaos we see on the ground.” The current words of the writers of the Heritage Foundation echo the Stalinist criticism of the “rootless cosmopolitan,” a pejorative label widely used both in anti-Semitic and anti-Western campaigns in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s. The Russian satirical periodical Krokodil published a caricature of the “rootless cosmopolitan” (Figure 1) in March 1949. A travelling writer, with caricatured Jewish features, is described negatively as a “passportless drifter” for whom writing is a weapon: he wears