The passing of Queen Elizabeth II marks the end of Britain’s longest reigning monarch and the passing of a global symbol of the modernization and decolonization of the British Empire over the last seven decades. While the dust begins to settle around this shocking news, the discussion about what comes next for Britain and what this change means for the rest of the world has begun to unravel. But the latter question is something of particular concern in our present age and can be seen most prominently in communities far from the British Isle.
This week, I’ve found myself having the same discussions about the Queen and Britain as my family overseas in Latin America and my international classmates from countries like India, Japan and Australia, amongst others. As a Mexican-American, I’ve never stepped foot in Britain and have no reason to follow or be concerned with the Queen despite the amount of discourse and discussion I’ve engaged in on the topic. Regardless of myself and the people in my closest circles having no real reason to be involved in discussion about the Queen of a foreign country, there’s a familiarity and understanding of her presence that seems to be universal. With everyone having something to say, it seems that the Queen’s death highlights the wide reach of the media in garnering a sense of global citizenship that transcends national borders.
Intellectuals such as Steven Vertovec, a Transnational Anthropology professor at the University of Oxford, describe this phenomenon of global interconnectedness as cosmopolitanism. In his 2002 essay Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, Vertovec elaborates on cosmopolitanism in the 21st century, saying “cosmopolitanism refers to a vision of global democracy and world citizenship… [i]t means the ability to stand outside of having one’s life written and scripted by any one community” (Vertovec).
In our present day, the death of a monarch sparking the attention and care of multicultural communities around the globe and far outside of Britain embodies the idea of the cosmopolitan that Verotec proposes. While imagining a cosmopolitan can spark thoughts of lavish travels and expensive vacations to see the world, global citizenship is now ingrained in our habitual scrolling through media apps and news feeds which allow us to “stand outside of… any one community”. In the case of Queen Elizabeth, social media feeds displayed on the screens of our smartphones have taken the place of the embedding in physical spaces for the purposes of world citizenship. In other words, Instagram and Tiktok users, amongst other forms of media, are able to be a part of global conversations and join cosmopolitan circles by simply scrolling through articles, liking images and watching “videos” (now commonly called reels).
There was a time, perhaps even when Verotec was writing about cosmopolitanism in as recent as 2002, when being a global citizen and interacting with world issues required cementing yourself in the physical country in which your concerns lie. To engage in discussions about the Queen before the age of social media and television, we’d have to travel to Britain and immerse ourselves in British culture. Although literature was an option, it provided a more rigid scope that didn’t include the intricacies and nuances that arise when one has the opportunity to talk to multiple people and experience culture in a more dynamic way within the physical borders of a nation.
The social media we engage with on a daily basis provides us with some semblance of that nuance: users scroll through interviews, posts and articles in the same way one might visit friends or family abroad to learn about different global perspectives. In this sense, we have, at the very least, the informative and educational aspects of traveling at the tip of our fingers. Global conversations are no longer limited to those with the income to book a business class flight to London, but rather those that have the data storage on their phone to scroll through the latest YouTube videos on Laotian streetfood, West African ethnolinguistic conflicts, or even the death of the longest Monarch in the history of Britain.
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