ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changing relationships between ‘mega-events’ – and Olympic Games – and forms of cosmopolitanism. It takes a long-term socio-historical perspective on the development of both mega-events and modern society, considering mega-events both as modernizing factors and also as illuminating some of the possibilities and limitations of modern societies as cosmopolitan social orders. First it is worth noting a vector which particularly characterized European expos and which had a more ambiguous and conflictual relationship with normative cosmopolitanism, namely that involving the production of 'imperial expos'. Secondly there is a form of cosmopolitanism that the people can refer to as 'touristic cosmopolitanism' and which is associated with the consumer culture promoted by expos. This chapter has addressed the main mega-event genres, particularly expos, as key cases of the development of cosmopolitan culture in western modernity in general and European modernity in particular through a brief socio-historical review of the expo genre.
