This article aims at an active dialogue between Ulrich Beck and East Asia with respect to cosmopolitan imagination. Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology requires a reflective cosmopolitan publicness to cope with various kinds of global risks. We therefore extract three different layers of publicness from neo-Confucianism – survival-oriented, deliberative, and ecological – and argue that Beck’s cosmopolitan vision can be better conceptualized when properly linked to, or founded upon, the Tianxiaweigong normative potentials of neo-Confucianism. In so doing our intention is to make (...) Beck’s implicit sensibilities and the implicit Asian orientations explicit, as a double process of cosmopolitan self-reflection and dialogue. We also draw attention to the analysis of the cosmopolitan actor in East Asia. Finally, we note that the cosmopolitan future of East Asia still remains uncertain and that reconciling global risk politics, national interests and cosmopolitan morality presents a big challenge to second modern transformation. (shrink)

This dialogue addresses the global risk that broke out of the North Korean development of nuclear weapons and missiles. It starts from the brutal consequences of the national division for Korea and asks why North Korea has been so preoccupied with nuclear projects as has been found to be the case since the 1990s, and how much and why Kim Jung-un today differs from his father in terms of his future, and where the fundamental limit lies in Moon Jae-In’s as (...) well as Trump’s approaches to Korean denuclearization and peace. The highlight of this dialogue is to explain the intrinsic difficulties for Donald Trump and Kim Jung-un in finding a reasonable solution to their respective demands for denuclearization and regime security, and explore the likely future of the Korean Peninsula from the vantage point of Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy and metamorphosis. (shrink)

This introduction briefly describes the relational trajectory between Ulrich Beck and Asia in the last few years. It draws particular attention to his last words about the role of Asia in the global risk community. Beck began to speak of the concept of metamorphosis in the 2014 Seoul conference as the correct key to understanding emancipatory catastrophism that he had expressed in the 2013 Potsdam conference. He was fascinated by the explanatory power of this concept and was driven to complete (...) a book to explain the cosmopolitan change of the world from this perspective. With his advocacy of cities as cosmopolitan transformers, he urged Asian cities, particularly Seoul, to initiate ‘United Cities of Asia’ for a cosmopolitan cooperation for risk governance. Beck also suggested ‘a parliament of risk actors’ as a practical task to be realized in the future. In this introduction the author attempts to trace back the formation of these ideas by focusing on the interaction between Beck and Asia before his sudden passing. (shrink)