Cosmopolitanism as an Aspirational Identity: When Normative Ideals Give Rise to Identity Struggles

While cosmopolitanism is often celebrated for its contemporary ideals of openness toward people from different cultural backgrounds, this paper reveals how and why these same ideals can generate tensions and identity struggles when rigidly applied in everyday cross-cultural encounters. Based on 32 life story interviews with globally mobile professionals who have worked and lived extensively across different countries, we observed and analyzed how these professionals pursued aspirational identity projects aligned with normative ideals of cosmopolitan 'being' ('thinking globally'), 'doing' ('integrating locally'), and 'becoming' ('transforming the self'), when interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds than their own. In their everyday local encounters, this pursuit of cosmopolitan ideals also produced adverse effects: participants experienced resistance to their global mindset, rejections of their integration attempts, and deflections on their path toward self-improvement. These adverse effects created tensions which we theorize as three types of identity struggles: (a) showing tolerance toward intolerance; (b) enduring discrimination in order to fit in; and (c) denying one's aspired self-image to match the perception of others. We argue that these identity struggles reveal the limitations of aspirational cosmopolitan identity projects that adhere too strictly to normative ideals, as rigid moral scripts around 'openness toward the other' can (somewhat paradoxically) restrict the agency of global professionals in their everyday encounters with cultural others. By drawing attention to this limited agency-and the vulnerability it can produce-this paper contributes a new perspective to the literatures on aspirational identities, cosmopolitan identities, and everyday cosmopolitanism, aiming to help bridge the gap in theory and practice between moral principles and lived cross-cultural encounters.