ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the issue of cosmopolitanism from the vantage point of a possibility of hospitality. The notion and action of hospitality throws into relief some issues that are at the heart of political cosmopolitanism, but cannot be addressed by it. This is because these issues do not necessarily revolve around the category of the citizen (however extended), but around the categories of stranger and outsider, which, however, are usually conflated. In order to explore and critique this conflation and thus open the topic of cosmopolitanism this chapter is propelled by two arguments.1 The first argument refers to the ways in which the notions of strangers and outsiders have been reconfigured for the lives of modern subjects, whether they are citizens belonging to nation states or have cosmopolitan attitudes. The second argument is that modern cosmopolitanism cannot be understood without reference to the continuing relevance of the nation state. Nation building continues to constitute the hiatus between the older and modern meanings of cosmopolitanism. This ‘Westphalian’ change transformed and disaggregated the older meanings of cosmopolitanism and continues to do so. The chapter argues that the standard cosmopolitan extension of citizenship
forms to international contexts risks reproducing the exclusion of ‘outsiders’ by nation states, even democratic ones. It explores a hospitable dimension of cosmopolitanism that gives it its orientating value in the condition of modern, contingent strangerhood. In this sense cosmopolitanism is ‘empty’, open and orientating.
