ABSTRACT
If the history of twentieth-century Europe could be written as a struggle between capitalism and socialism then with the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 few were in any doubt as to who had won. The socialist dream of an egalitarian and work based society had, it seemed, floundered upon the rocks of authoritarian, state-managed societies. The idea of the cosmopolitan joins together a notion of global citizenship as well as the capacity to live with the “Other.” Cosmopolitan critique is suspicious of dogmatism and should be as alive to the fundamentalism of neoliberalism as to the promotion of pure or separatist identities. Historically the idea of cosmopolitanism can be traced back to the Stoics but has since then found expression in the writing of both Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. However ideals of a universal cosmopolitanism were quickly displaced by the beginning of the Cold War.
