Global Metropolis and the City of Neighborhoods: Polish Immigrants and New York City’s Two Cosmopolitanisms

A growing body of social science literature analyzes various aspects of cosmopolitanism. Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbis, the authors of Cosmopolitanism: The Uses of the Idea, point out four dimensions of cosmopolitanism as it is implemented by people and approached by researchers. The cultural dimension of cosmopolitanism is seen as a “disposition of openness to the world around them” (2). Therefore, the populations and individuals studied include international migrants and members of the host societies, as well as individuals and groups that form ethno-racially diverse societies or associations. The second, political dimension of cosmopolitanism distinguished by Woodward and Skrbis includes support for international political organizations, including the United Nations. The third, and nowadays the most sensitive aspect of cosmopolitanism is marked not only by openness, but empathy and solidarity that goes beyond the boundaries of one’s ethnic group, nation-state, religion, and culture. Finally, they identify a methodological cosmopolitanism that directs social researchers to study international and transnational flows of people, ideas, and commodities rather than those within nation-states. In this chapter, I focus on two types of cultural cosmopolitanism that I observed among the Polish Greenpoint immigrant community leaders in New York City during my research in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The first is the cosmopolitanism characteristic for the Polish community leaders of the baby boomer generation and with a college education. It involves an aesthetic fascination with New York’s ethno-racial diversity and the city’s status as a global cultural metropolis. This is a cosmopolitanism understood as “the citizen-of-the-world philosophy” held by those “who have the resources necessary to travel, learn other languages, and absorb other cultures” (Vertovec and Cohen 4). I call it a “cosmopolitanism of metropolises” and argue that this type of cosmopolitanism is characteristic for New York’s global elite members. They typically work as professionals in institutions of international significance, appeal, and outlook, but their professional and residential experience in the city takes place in relatively homogenous environment of white and native-born US citizens. The second type of cosmopolitanism that I identified among the Polish immigrants in the city involved actively coping with and taking advantage of the fact