ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant's idea that world government was a world federation of states rather than transcending them was more transformed into the idea of the nation as carrier of the universal. Micro studies of cosmopolitan cities in the world are the example of a fruitful field for the development of new approaches in world history. The growing references to global history or world history after 1990 hardly meant a general agreement on the substance of the terms or its distinction from world history. The problem of the genealogy of the concept of cosmopolitan is from a world-historical perspective not only its failure to address the social question but also its European centrism. From the 2000s onwards the term multicultural came ever more to draw attention to the escape and shifted to become a negative counter concept of cosmopolitan. However, 'multicultural' came in the 2000s ever more to connote the opposite of cosmopolitanism: immigrant ghettos, marginalisation, exclusion and poverty.
