ABSTRACT
The term cosmopolitanism may not have been in popular use until the twentieth century, but the phenomenon itself is quite old. In his 1928 essay on ‘Human migration and the marginal man’, Park stated that ‘the first cosmopolite and citizen of the world [was] to be found in the emancipated Jew’. Since the twentieth century, the opportunities to become cosmopolitan, a ‘citizen of the world’, have multiplied as the spread of capitalism and the rapid growth in the technologies of communications and transport have compressed time and place. This phenomenon, called globalisation, generates an intensified consciousness of the world as a whole and of the interconnectedness of the people within it. Globalisation sharpens our sensitivity to people and things different and foreign, setting up a context in which we begin to develop a certain attitude, tolerant or not, towards others.
