That is what ‘enforced cosmopolitanization’ means: global risks activate and connect actors across borders, who otherwise do not want to have anything to do with one another. I propose, in this sense, that a clear distinction be made between the philosophical and normative ideas of cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and the ‘impure’ actual cosmopolitanization on the other. The crucial point about this distinction is that cosmopolitanism cannot, for example, become real only deductively in a translation of the sublime principles of philosophy, but also and above all through the back doors of global risks, unseen, unintended, enforced. Down through history cosmopolitanism bore the taint of being elitist, idealistic, imperialist, capitalist; today, however, we see that reality itself has become cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism does not mean - as it did for Immanuel Kant - an obligation, a task, that is to order the world. Cosmopolitanism in world risk society opens our eyes to the uncontrollable liabilities, to something that happens to us, befalls us, but at the same time
stimulates us to make border-transcending new beginnings. The insight that in the dynamic of world risk society we are dealing with a cosmopolitanization under duress robs ‘impure’ cosmopolitanism of much of its ethical attractiveness. If the cosmopolitan moment of world risk society is both at once: deformed and inevitable, then seemingly it is not an appropriate object for sociological and political reflections. But precisely that would be a serious mistake. As I hope I have been able to suggest with these few roughly sketched notes, it is also worth, in addition to everything else, inquiring as to the enlightenment function of
global risks, to open it up conceptually and to research it.