For some time now, internationalist tendencies and an empowering form of regionalism have been joining to create new and productive formations in the art scene. Despite the much-cited locational specificity of art, many reflections on the globalized structures of production and power that have arisen in the past few years were not informed solely by ethics of the local or the interrogation of concrete metropolitan living environments. Indeed, these locally anchored, yet transnationally oriented approaches have been followed by a growing call for an emancipatory interpretation of »cosmopolitics,« a new concept of world citizenship.
The post-Documenta issue of springerin investigates this call and its repercussions in today's globally extended culture. There is a central opposition reflected in the wide conceptual range of the term »cosmopolitics.« On the one hand, it gathers together hopes and projections aimed towards establishing »fundamentally democratic« international cultural politics with a multi-cultural reach; this is demonstrated, for example, in the discursive approaches of African post-colonialism (Achille Mbembe) or the paradoxes of hospitality and migration as exemplified by south-eastern European art (Suzana Milevska). On the other, the »cosmopolitical« - in as far as it always also has to do with politico-cultural supremacy - also comprises the quest for power, and there are warnings from various points of view (Neil Smith, Klaus Ronneberger, Yates Mckee) of global endeavours by the USA - the last remaining world power - in this direction.
A close scrutiny of new, internationalist institutions purporting to have a cosmopolitan outlook shows that »cosmopolitics,« or their strategic employment, are often also based on exclusions (Nebjosa Jovanovic on Sarajevo). The many practices and projects discussed in this springerin issue prove that it is the internal contradictions of an all too hastily ordained »world citizenship,« and the undiminished recalcitrance felt towards it, that are the decisive and crucial issues in the contemporary understanding of culture.