Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is supposed to be a very high-flown idea, evoking notions of human togetherness across borders and the transcendence of difference. It is, however, in reality, an empty and useless idea, a mere placeholder for those who cannot get to the point of imagining real solidarity. Those who say they favour cosmopolitanism tend to think only in abstract terms of what it would be for human beings to transcend the boundaries that separate them; they have no concrete politics.
This is not accidental. We owe the concept of cosmopolitanism itself to Diogenes of Sinope (c.412–323 BCE), a prominent member of the Cynical School of Greek philosophy. A Cynic (kunikos) was someone who tried to live like a dog (kuōn). Accordingly, Diogenes lived in the marketplace in Athens, satisfying only his basic material needs, and openly masturbating in public, among other things. One day Diogenes was asked where he was from and, exasperated by the question, and in an attempt to get the questioner off his back, declared flippantly that he was a kosmopolitēs, or ‘citizen of the cosmos’ (as reported by another Diogenes, the biographer Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 6.63).
Although Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century revived the idea of Weltbürgertum (citizenship of the world), and elevated it to a high-flown philosophical status, it remains essentially empty. The cosmos, or the world, is not a place one can participate in politically, however much one would like this. The real question is how a citizen’s involvement in political life can transcend the nation state or replace it. To say you are a cosmopolitan, unless you can specify how you are going to transform the reality that makes your ideal, as things stand, impossible, is just to give the fob-off response to the question of citizenship that Diogenes the Cynic gave.
