Mentions of the Gezi Park protests on Twitter

In my PhD and post-doc research projects at the university, I did a lot of research on the new cosmopolitanism together with Ulrich Beck. Our main goal was to test the hypothesis of an “empirical cosmopolitanization”. Maybe the term is confusing and too abstract, but what we were looking for were quite simple examples for ties between humans that undermine national borders. We were trying to unveil the structures and processes of a real-existing cosmopolitanism.

I looked at a lot of statistics on transnational corporations and the evolution of transnational economic integration. But one of the most exciting dimensions of the theory of cosmopolitanism is the rise of a cosmopolitan public sphere. This is not the same as a global public that can be found in features such as world music, Hollywood blockbusters or global sports events. A cosmopolitan public sphere refers to solidarity with other human beings.

When I discovered the discussions on Twitter about the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, this kind of cosmopolitan solidarity seems to assume a definite form: The lines that connect people all over Europe with the Turkish protesters are not the usual international relations, but they are ties that e.g. connect Turkish emigrants, political activists, “Wutbürger” or generally political aware citizens with the events in Istanbul. Because only about 1% of all tweets carry information about the geo-position of the user, you should imagine about 100 times more lines to see the true dimension of this phenomenon.