1 Transnational citizens and cosmopolitan citizens: same, same or different? By Cindy Horst and Tore Vincents Olsen Paper prepared for Dansk Selskab for Statskundskabs Årsmøde, Kolding October 29-30, 2015 Very first draft, please do not cite or circulate 1 Introduction The paper discusses to what extent transnational citizens, understood as international migrants who maintain connections to their country of origin and its (former) residents, could be considered to be cosmopolitan citizens. We hold the normative idea of cosmopolitanism up against the empirical research conducted among transnational citizens. On the one hand, migration entails that people have connections to other places or polities than the one they currently live in and their political identity and activity is not determined by one national context. Transnational citizens belong to societies and/or communities that cross national political and cultural boundaries. Yet transnational citizens are often described as tied to their ethnic, national and/or religious roots and these bonds are seen as primary determinants of their political identity and activity. This emphasis on ‘roots’ and embeddedness in a specific ethnic, national or religious culture suggests that transnationals are unlikely cosmopolitans. On the other hand, transnational studies also point to how the experience of migration has a formative effect on the identity of transnationals. From this perspective, it is ‘the routes’ and not ‘the roots’ (Clifford 1994) that determine the political identity and activity of transnational citizens. Precisely this aspect of transnationalism leads to a presumption in favor of thinking that transnationals have an enlarged perspective on the world and are thus cosmopolitan citizens. Of course there is a critical matter of perspective here since the theoretical focus placed on transnational migrants in part would determine how they are identified. Or in other words: if you work from the theoretical presumption that it is roots rather than routes that determine identity and activity of transnationals you are likely to overlook the cosmopolitan dimension of their identity and activity. Moreover it is not clear why people from the Global South should be more parochial in their worldview than people from the Global North to start with. The purpose of the paper is to preliminarily explore the extent to which transnational citizens should to be identified as cosmopolitan citizens thereby implying a possible shift in perspective in some part/ a large part of the literature on transnationalism.