Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is an ethical, moral, and political philosophy that is simultaneously very old and relatively recent. The term has multiple meanings and is often used to connote someone who is sophisticated and urbane; for this reason, cosmopolitan culture is often associated with large, internationally oriented cities. There are many varieties of cosmopolitanism, including religious and secular, and conservative and liberal.

The most common form of cosmopolitanism seeks to uncouple ethics from distance, arguing that each person is bound up with, and obligated to, humanity as a whole. Cosmopolitans are moral universalists who insist on the inherent worthiness and dignity of all individuals, irrespective of their place of birth. Morally, therefore, national and cultural boundaries are irrelevant and meaningless or, worse, distractions from the important task of caring for others in light of their shared humanity. In this view, compassion and empathy know no borders. Nationalists sometimes denounce cosmopolitans for not “being one of us.”

The origins of cosmopolitanism are often tracked to classical Greece, particularly to Diogenes, who when asked where he was from, famously replied [Page 591]“I am a citizen of the world” (kosmopolite, or citizen of the cosmos), thus defying the then prevalent source of identity construction, the city-state. This notion, explicitly advanced by the Cynics and the Stoics in the 5th century BC, found its most celebrated form in Hierocles's circle model, in which each individual is located in progressively larger webs of obligation and compassion, extending from the self and family to community to region to the world as a whole. Others find elements of this notion in the Bahá'í faith, whose founder, Mirza Husayn Ali, proclaimed, “The Earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.”

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism found new voices among the Western intelligentsia. Global circumvention initiated an incipient planetary consciousness among the elites of Europe, an understanding of the world as a unified entity. The 16th-century Spanish religious activist Bartolome de las Casas advocated on behalf of Native Americans and against the genocide then underway. In 1788, the German philosopher Christoph Martin Wieland wrote that all the peoples of the Earth are members of a single family. Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” offers the principle that the optimal means for avoiding war was to treat all human beings as equals; he also proposed a league of nations, but his vision collapsed in the face of the advancing nation-state. After World War II, Albert Einstein, advocate of world government, dismissed nationalism as an “infantile disease.”

In this sense, cosmopolitanism is antinationalist and antipatriotic, viewing nation-states as artificial (but nonetheless very real) constructions, that is, as historical constructions, as made and not given, and therefore as mutable, plastic, and lacking inherent validity or meaning. Nationalism—with its emphasis on citizenship and on the moral geographies of inclusion and exclusion, its parochial narrowing of community to ethnic communities, its frequent xenophobia, its exaggerated importance of borders, and often its sanctification of violence against others—inherently tends to privilege some groups over others. Without this sanctification of difference, nationalism deprives itself of the legitimacy of violence against others—in other words, war, which is its central purpose. Cosmopolitans conscientiously reject the Westphalian system of national borders as artificial and destructive constructs. As Martha Nussbaum (2002) puts it, “What is it about the national boundary that magically converts people toward whom our education is both incurious and indifferent into people to whom we have duties of mutual respect?” (p. 16). In this view, there is no such thing as an “illegal immigrant,” for no human being can be “illegal.”

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