We explain what something cosmopolitan is, what is the origin of the term and its development from Antiquity to the present day.
What does cosmopolitan mean?
The word cosmopolitan comes from the political and philosophical idea of cosmopolitanism: the belief that all people in the world are part of the same communityfar above their national, cultural or geographical differences. The people who follow this philosophy, or even the places where it is most feasible to put it into practice, are then known as cosmopolitan.
This last term comes from the Greek voices kosmos“universe”, and politis“citizen”, that is, “universal citizen”, and is often referred to as the “citizenship of the world”.
A citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan, is that person who feels at home in any region of the planet. This may occur because she is used to coexisting with different cultures, or because she has simply traveled a lot and is so familiar with human differences that she may not even take them into account.
The origin of cosmopolitanism is difficult to pin down. According to the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius (180-240), it was the famous Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412-323 BC), who answered the question about his origin by calling himself a “citizen of the world,” to indicate that he had no home or nationality.
However, due to its political conception, Cosmopolitanism was very similar to the ancient Roman world. For the Romans, the civitas was the group of Roman citizens, regardless of where they were, while the Greeks understood the cop (and to polites“citizen”) within the framework of a specific city and territory.
Perhaps that is why the Roman jurist Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) proclaimed that Universus hic mundus an existing civitasthat is, “this entire world is a single community of citizens.” This idea survived into later times, and reappeared in the ius cosmopoliticum proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his essay About perpetual peace of 1795.
This “cosmopolitan law” was proposed as a right that protected people from the cruelties of war, under a principle of “universal hospitality”, because in the words of Kant, the “…right to the surface of the earth that belongs to the human race in common would finally bring the human race closer to a cosmopolitan constitution.”
Something similar to Kant's vision of a cosmopolitan law was put into practice for the first time after the Second World Warwhen an international tribunal was established to try Nazi leaders. Not only war crimes were tried, but also crimes whose monstrosity was so great that they constituted an affront to the entire species. These charges were those of “Crimes against humanity” or against humanity.
cosmopolitanism Today it is an important trend in the globalization imaginationdespite the fact that the latter also gives rise to numerous forms of nationalist or fundamentalist resistance. But, in principle, humanity has never been so close to constituting global citizenship as at the beginning of the 21st century.
said idea involves the harmonious coexistence of different culturesas well as sustained peace between nations, as they integrate into a single world State, of which we would all be citizens without distinction. Those who come closest to that ideal, then, can be properly called cosmopolitans.
Continue with: Migration
References
- “Cosmopolitanism” on Wikipedia.
- “Citizen of the world” on Wikipedia.
- “Cosmopolitan” in the Dictionary of the language of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Etymology of cosmopolitan” in Etymologies of Chile.net.
- “Cosmopolitanism” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- “Cosmopolitanism (philosophy)” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
