We explain what is something cosmopolitan, what is the origin of the term and its development from antiquity to the present.
What does cosmopolitan mean?
The word cosmopolitan comes from the political and philosophical idea of cosmopolitanism: the belief in which all persons of the world are part of the same community, far beyond their national, cultural or geographical differences. People who follow this philosophy, or even the places where it is more feasible to put it into practice, are then known by the name of 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 can happen because she is used to living 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, no nationality.
However, due to its political conception, cosmopolitanism was very akin to the ancient Roman world. For the Romans, the civitas was the set of Roman citizens, no matter where they were, while the Greeks understood the cops (and to polites, “Citizen”) within the framework of a specific city and territory.
Perhaps that is why the Roman jurist Marco Tulio Cicero (106-43 BC) proclaimed that Universus hic mundus a civitas existimanda, that is, "this whole world is a single community of citizens." This idea survived until later times, and reappeared in the ius cosmopoliticum proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his essay On perpetual peace from 1795.
This "cosmopolitan law" was proposed as a right to protect people from the cruelties of the 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 akin to Kant's vision of a cosmopolitan law was first put into practice after the WWII, when an international tribunal was formed to try Nazi leaders. Not only were war crimes 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 It hurts humanity.
Cosmopolitanism today is an important trend in the imaginary of the globalization, despite the fact that the latter also provokes numerous forms of resistance nationalist or fundamentalist. But, in principle, humanity has never been so close to constituting a global citizenship as at the beginning of the 21st century.
This idea supposes the harmonious coexistence of different cultures, as well as the sustained peace between nations, as they are integrated into a single world state, of which we would all be citizens without distinction. Those who come closest to that ideal, then, may be properly called cosmopolitans.