Cosmopolitanism and Networks: Odessa, Trieste, Tbilisi

Abstract

In order to illustrate the interplay between networks and narratives in the construction of cosmopolitan communities, we discuss Odessa, Trieste, and Tbilisi. Each has a past that was more cosmopolitan than the present, and each, in different degrees and manners, remembers and uses that cosmopolitan past to understand its present and guide them towards its future. In each case, the cosmopolitan past is mythologized in different ways, masking less pleasant or less understandable aspects of these past societies. The current frames to remember these pasts are very different from the conceptual frames one can surmise in the cosmopolitan periods remembered/reconstructed. Each city picks different symbolic sites, practices, events, groups, story lines, to illustrate the cosmopolitan character of the past. The influence of policy and planning differed per city, as did the network dynamics that enabled rise and fall of these places. We start with an introduction of a few post-structuralist concepts which can assist us in developing our theory of local cosmopolitanism and analyze our case communities.