The cosmopolitan standard of civilization: a reflexive sociology of elite belonging among Indian diplomats

This article sketches out the social rules for belonging among the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ at the geopolitical margins of international society. It does so by analysing an awkward balancing act performed by career diplomats of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS): even as Indian diplomats contest Western political hegemony and its attendant ideologies, they perpetuate social behaviours that signal a desire to be recognized as elite members of a Westernized diplomatic club, in whose hierarchies of race and class they hope to ascend. Cosmopolitanism operates in this balancing act not as a world-embracing ethic upholding an equal, pluralistic, or liberal international order but as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance and social assimilation into Westernized mores. If it once was European powers who employed a colonial ‘standard of civilization’ to legitimate their dominance over those whose social practices they judged inferior (Buzan, 2014), in a formally postcolonial order, Indian diplomats themselves have come to employ elite performances of cosmopolitanism as a kind of civilizational standard. This standard is continually enacted to secure one’s status as a worthy participant of a white,