Without intending to romanticize the twentieth-century history of the left in the Americas and Europe, replete as it has been with internal conflicts and failures to live up to its own principles, here I would suggest that at their best, left social movement activists have
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tended to manifest a cosmopolitan vision of society and a welcoming of the cultural production of other countries, especially in the case of cultural production that promotes egalitarian ideals of distributive justice. Here, two interrelated sociological concepts—cosmpolitan-ism and cosmopolitan citizenship—can help orient our interpretation of this aspect of the history of “No nos moverán.” In reviewing the work of Jeremy Waldron (2000), cultural theorist Stuart Hall (2002:
26) argues that cosmopolitanism refers to the process in which social actors “draw on the traces and residues of many cultural systems, of many ethical systems [and represents] the ability to stand out-side of having one’s life written and scripted by any one community, whether that is faith or tradition or religion or culture.”5 In addi-tion, according to Ulrich Beck (1998), cosmopolitanism points to the recognition that “the central human worries are ‘world’ problems”
and require transnational collaboration to address them. Further-more, he suggests, addressing problems that transcend individual nation-states requires the creation of what he calls “world parties,”
whose goals have a cosmopolitan foundation that attempts to appeal to “values and traditions in every culture and religion” and whose members “feel an obligation toward the planet as a whole.” For his part, Michael Ignatieff (1999: 142) argues that while every cosmopoli-tan “defends universal values against national ones,” he distinguishes between “Marxist cosmopolitans,” who “stand for the brotherhood of working men [sic] or the brotherhood of oppressed colonial peo-ples against various forms of reactionary nationalism” and “liberal cosmopolitans,” who “proclaim their adherence to universal human standards rather than national cultural traditions.” In accordance with any or all of these three authors’ explanations of what cosmo-politanism is, cosmopolitan citizenship refers to a type of citizenship that engages the individual not only with her or his own national culture but also with cultures at all levels of society, ranging from the neighborhood to the region within a country, to the rest of the continent, to communities on the other side of the ocean (Cuccioletta 2002: 4). Cosmopolitan citizenship refers, in other words, to people coming to understand themselves as citizens of a world of intercon-nected peoples and cultures. Especially relevant for our discussion of the internationalist singing left, cosmopolitan citizens “are attracted and related to members in the same and other sites around the world
through a substantial degree of cultural similarity as well as travel, institutions, and concrete communication loops” (Turino 2003: 62).
It seems clear to me that most of, if not all, the key participants in the transmission of “We Shall Not Be Moved” as a “movement” song can fruitfully be understood as cosmopolitan citizens. In this regard, Pete Seeger, whose vast repertoire of songs and melodies was multina-tional and multilingual, is exemplary, having sought out and learned musical forms from multiple cultures as well as having reached across multiple cultural boundaries to perform them. But Seeger was not the only one. At Highlander in the 1950s, Guy Carawan’s multicultural vision and knowledge of both black and white cultural forms allowed him to serve as a catalyst for the development of a “freedom song”
canon for the civil rights movement. Bernice Johnson Reagon of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Sing-ers may not have been a cosmopolitan when she began her career as an activist and a singer, but she quickly became one as a consequence of her participating in the civil rights movement and serving as its musical ambassador to white, northern audiences. Similarly, Teatro Campesino founders Agustín Lira and Luis Valdez quickly developed an awareness of and connections to a broader cultural world beyond the daily lives of farmworkers through their organizing work. More-over, their native bilingualism and biculturalism gave them some-thing of a cosmopolitan perspective from childhood. Although he was a Catalan nationalist, Xesco Boix clearly recognized himself as a participant in cultural and political matters beyond the confines of his country and actively sought to learn from other cultures and bring what he learned to bear on the situation in Catalonia. The mem-bers of Canción del Pueblo in Madrid shared similarly cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors with Boix and his colleagues in Barcelona.
And clearly the Chilean participants in the nueva canción movement during the time of Salvador Allende were well aware of the relation-ship between the social, political, and cultural changes occurring in their country and elsewhere in the world, in spite of their country’s geographic isolation. In the specific case of the members of Tiem-ponuevo, their upbringing in the port city of Valparaíso also undoubt-edly contributed something to the group’s cosmopolitan outlook.
In this regard, it might be helpful to think of cosmopolitanism as an aspect of what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) refers to as habitus—that is,
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the attitudes, world views, and dispositions toward varying types of stimuli that are the imprint left on individuals by the varying types of socialization to which they have been subjected.6 These types of socialization can involve a variety of aspects of human existence, including but not limited to nationality, religion, language, social class, occupation, racial and ethnic group membership, historical generation, and urban versus rural residence. Habitus can also be the outcome of political socialization, including individuals’ experiences in social movements. Thus, we can think of cosmopolitanism of the type discussed here as a “way of being in the world” or habitus asso-ciated with political struggles of the left in many parts of the world.
More specifically, we can conceive of this habitus as a disposition toward valuing and assimilating the contributions of other cultural groups to a worldwide struggle for social justice, however vaguely
“social justice” is to be defined.