Tunç Aybak (International Relations, Middlesex University, London)
Diogenes’ Lantern*: Searching for a Regional Cosmopolitanism in the Black Sea Region
Since the early 1990s, Turkey and Russia, among other littoral states, have been promoting regionalism in the Black Sea. Whilst the state elites concerned adopted overtly regionalist strategies to re-brand their official identities in an increasingly deregulated global market economy, Istanbul has gradually emerged as a global city of ethnic and cultural diversity and a site for everyday cosmopolitanism. In this vein, despite his Islamic and conservative convictions the Turkish Prime Minister recently lauded Istanbul as cosmopolitan city of harmony and tolerance and intercultural dialogue. Istanbul indeed plays a central role in this state led regionalism, and is home to the headquarters of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) and the Secretariat of the Black Sea Parliamentary Assembly (PABSEC). Given this conjuncture, do these tendencies between state-led regionalism and everyday cosmopolitanisms interconnect and what impact, if any, do these practices have on the everyday lives of exiles, migrants and travellers from the other shores of the region?
Apart from investigating the state and governmental practices and their extension into the receiving society as techniques and strategies of social control, in this paper I will focus on the forms of subjectivities and contrasting imaginaries of Russian émigrés, dissident intellectuals; and more recently the female migrants arriving from the other shores of the Black Sea. For instance, for Russian exiles and émigrés, Istanbul provided a site of cosmopolitan reflection, historical memory and Slavic melancholy, a liminal site that may offer passage to other worlds-‘a Third Rome’. On the other hand, for the recently arriving female Post-Soviet migrants, Istanbul offers a global city of material opportunities and as well as gender-specific threats in informal commodity markets.
How are these everyday cosmopolitanisms negotiated by the practices, techniques and discourses of ‘governmentality’ and sovereign nation ‘state-mentality’? How does cosmopolitanism function in liminal sites, gendered markets inscribed and tampered by the desires and fantasies of everyday geopolitics? What implications might this have for the regional identity and governance of diversity? How are these transnational links between regional and local intercepted by geopolitics of governmentality, state mentality, liminality and even gendered imageries of sexuality? Does regional cosmopolitanism really exist in the Black Sea region?
*The title was inspired by Diogenes who was the first cosmopolitan philosopher from the Black Sea city Sinope looking for cosmopolitan virtue holding a lantern in daylight.
Diogenes’ Lantern*: Searching for a Regional Cosmopolitanism in the Black Sea Region
Since the early 1990s, Turkey and Russia, among other littoral states, have been promoting regionalism in the Black Sea. Whilst the state elites concerned adopted overtly regionalist strategies to re-brand their official identities in an increasingly deregulated global market economy, Istanbul has gradually emerged as a global city of ethnic and cultural diversity and a site for everyday cosmopolitanism. In this vein, despite his Islamic and conservative convictions the Turkish Prime Minister recently lauded Istanbul as cosmopolitan city of harmony and tolerance and intercultural dialogue. Istanbul indeed plays a central role in this state led regionalism, and is home to the headquarters of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) and the Secretariat of the Black Sea Parliamentary Assembly (PABSEC). Given this conjuncture, do these tendencies between state-led regionalism and everyday cosmopolitanisms interconnect and what impact, if any, do these practices have on the everyday lives of exiles, migrants and travellers from the other shores of the region?
Apart from investigating the state and governmental practices and their extension into the receiving society as techniques and strategies of social control, in this paper I will focus on the forms of subjectivities and contrasting imaginaries of Russian émigrés, dissident intellectuals; and more recently the female migrants arriving from the other shores of the Black Sea. For instance, for Russian exiles and émigrés, Istanbul provided a site of cosmopolitan reflection, historical memory and Slavic melancholy, a liminal site that may offer passage to other worlds-‘a Third Rome’. On the other hand, for the recently arriving female Post-Soviet migrants, Istanbul offers a global city of material opportunities and as well as gender-specific threats in informal commodity markets.
How are these everyday cosmopolitanisms negotiated by the practices, techniques and discourses of ‘governmentality’ and sovereign nation ‘state-mentality’? How does cosmopolitanism function in liminal sites, gendered markets inscribed and tampered by the desires and fantasies of everyday geopolitics? What implications might this have for the regional identity and governance of diversity? How are these transnational links between regional and local intercepted by geopolitics of governmentality, state mentality, liminality and even gendered imageries of sexuality? Does regional cosmopolitanism really exist in the Black Sea region?
*The title was inspired by Diogenes who was the first cosmopolitan philosopher from the Black Sea city Sinope looking for cosmopolitan virtue holding a lantern in daylight.
