The Social Identity Construction of Cosmopolitanism: The Nation State and Transnational Social Justice Movements

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is an exemplar of the consequences of global economic development contributing to national crises that require supranational cooperation, collaboration, and coordination to address. Threat and use of deadly force will fail to overcome these crises and is likely to worsen them. The nuclear setting proffers such responses as potentially suicidal. Growing awareness of economic and political interdependency is expanding de facto awareness of existing in a global polity. Complex interdependency presents opportunities to develop further these critical global polity collective capacities. Strategic neo-functionalism can promote cosmopolitan political attitudes and values via creation and promotion of vested interests in global integration. Social identity theory posits three forms of social identity management on the basis of four primary individual impulse axioms: (1) a distinctive motivation of the subject is to maintain a positive self-image;(2) subjects form in-groups vis-à-vis out-groups;(3) individuals comparatively evaluate the social status of their in-groups with significant out-groups;and (4) individuals tend to equate the comparative status of their ingroup with their self-image. If and when individuals comparatively evaluate themselves negatively within their societal contexts, then they will respond psychologically and socially, individually and collectively. Social justice movements press for the accommodation of differences to cease using them as a basis for ascriptive hierarchical community societal status differentiation. This accommodation takes the form of creation of substantive social creativity capacities that ultimately produce measurable, exploited social mobility opportunities. It aims to be policy relevant by underscoring the tasks confronting regime strategists for managing nationalism.