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Introduction 3
branches of capitalist liberal democracy—notably within the “divided West”—widened. These developments opened up fault lines within what had previously appeared a more or less unified, if plural, field of progressive cosmopolitanism. The fates of three tendencies in particular bear mention: • Some intellectuals and politicians who rallied around the universal values of human rights and democracy and its leading latenineties expression, humanitarian intervention, found themselves defending these same values in the form of a reinvigorated Anglo-American imperialism. The effortless transition of many who advocated liberal cosmopolitanism in the 1990s to the selfconscious defense of “empire lite” in the 2000s—from Tony Blair to Michael Ignatieff—reflects the discomfiting fact that it was not the central values and arguments that changed, only their breadth of reference. • Meanwhile, social-democratic cosmopolitanism, represented, for example, by Jürgen Habermas, David Held, and Mary Kaldor, and based largely on hopes for international law and multilateral institutions, found its resonance increasingly limited to Europe, at odds not only with its traditional Atlantic partner but also with Europeans’ growing determination to erect walls against the extra-European world. Even as they clung to their Kantian hopes, it became more and more difficult for cosmopolitans of the center-left to connect their designs with any observable trends, and they downscaled their globalism first to European regionalism, then to a desperate defense of Europe’s social-democratic potential even as it threatened to collapse. • Finally, the nascent bottom-up, left cosmopolitanism born in the jungles of Chiapas, the streets of Seattle, and the plazas of Porto Alegre appeared to have lost much of its momentum. In part this was because of its absorption into the global movement against the US-led war, in part because it all but disappeared from the Western media in the years immediately after 9/11. If flashes of democratic political energy continued to appear, from the electoral successes of the Latin American left to the Arab Spring, they seemed to represent a rejection of the main trends of globalization at least as much as its possible expressions.