What Is Cosmopolitanism?

Cosmopolitanism is a western notion that epitomizes the need social agents have to conceive of a political and cultural entity, larger than their own homeland, that would encompass all human beings on a global scale. Cosmopolite in Ancient Greece meant citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism presupposes a positive attitude towards difference, a desire to construct broad allegiances and equal and peaceful global communities of citizens who should be able to communicate across cultural and social boundaries forming a universalist solidarity. Its inclusive drive is most evident in moments of crisis of other modes of representing and ascribing membership to existing sociopolitical and cultural units. Much of the malaise and misunderstanding cosmopolitanism may provoke are related to its ambiguity, i.e. its unique way of uniting difference and equality, an apparent paradox of wishing to reconcile universal values with a diversity of culturally and historically constructed subject positions. The composition of the Greek term, cosmopolis, already indicates this unsolved tension: cosmos, a natural universal order, is related to polis, society’s variable order. As a consequence, from the Greek democratic city-state to the global village, the idea of a cosmopolite has been haunted by questions such as whose world this is. Can homogeneous external expansionist forces coexist with heterogeneous localized ones? A truly cosmopolitan answer would imply a permanent interest in difference and the recognition that globals and locals depend on each other to exist.