Cosmopolitanism and Global Risk: News Framing of the Asian Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis

Abstract

This study examines how the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2009 European debt crisis were framed in Chinese newspapers in terms of cosmopolitan communities of global risk (Beck, 2011). The relevant news articles are sampled from the People’s Daily for content analysis. The data uncover three types of cosmopolitanism: voluntary contribution, conditional promise, and coercive involvement. The results show that the sense of cosmopolitanism thatChina evoked during the European debt crisis was conditioned and less voluntary than it was during the Asian financial crisis. The results also reveal that cosmopolitanism did not necessarily transcend nationalism; instead, nationalism and national interests served as both driving forces and obstacles of cosmopolitanism.