ABSTRACT
The idea of the end of cosmopolitical utopias – frequently proposed today – is far from original, but it can be understood in two different ways.1 Both play a role in contemporary discourses. One of them says that today’s globalization has eventually created ‘one single world’, where all individuals and all communities are virtually communicating with each other. Accordingly, the sphere of common interests of humankind as such, in such fields as the economy, culture, information, environment, even collective security, is no longer a utopia, it no longer pertains to the imaginary realm of dreams. It has become a reality, even if this reality is conflictual, and produces as much division as unity. The Greek terms cosmopolis, cosmopoliticos, cosmopolites, would explicitly relate the idea of the ‘public’ or the ‘common’ with a constitution of the citizen (politeia) whose limits nowadays coincide with the whole world: therefore conflictual interests on this scale could become objects of consciousness and public debate. As individuals learn to take into account the ‘global dimension’ of their own affairs, as they start ‘feeling global’, to put it in Bruce Robbins’ words, the necessary institutions and languages for such a debate would emerge across administrative and linguistic boundaries (Robbins 1999).
