Towards a Bipartisan Cosmopolitanism: A Shared Horizon for Left and Right
Cosmopolitanism is no partisan creed. From Stoic circles to today’s hybrid identities, it calls us to widen our loyalties without erasing our roots—a bipartisan horizon where patriotism and shared humanity can stand together.
“I am a kosmopolitēs" (κοσμοπολίτης) - a citizen of the world, Diogenes of Sinope once declared, when asked where he came from. Diogenes, the fourth-century BCE Cynic, was infamous for his austerity and biting wit—he lived in a barrel in Athens, mocked conventions, and carried a lantern in daylight “searching for an honest man.” To Greeks for whom loyalty was owed to the polis—Athens, Sparta, Corinth—his claim was scandalous. The polis was the unit of identity, law, and honor; to belong to none was to belong nowhere. Yet Diogenes fused kosmos (world) and polis (city) into a single word, suggesting that human identity could not be reduced to one tribe or city-state. It was less a program than a provocation, but it planted a seed: the idea that there is a wider citizenship in humanity itself.
That claim has haunted politics ever since. Can a person be loyal to humanity without betraying the community that raised them? Is cosmopolitanism a noble extension of conscience—or a dangerous dilution of belonging? In our own age, the question is urgent. A BBC/GlobeScan poll found in 2016 that a slim global majority—51 percent—now identify more as citizens of the world than of their country, with strongest support in Nigeria, China, and India. At the same time, populist politicians in the West deride “globalists” as rootless elites. “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” Theresa May once told a Conservative Party conference, “you are a citizen of nowhere.”
Cosmopolitanism has never been the monopoly of the left. Conservatives, too, have long invoked it.
The caricature is powerful. Yet it obscures a deeper truth: cosmopolitanism has never been the monopoly of the left. Conservatives, too, have long invoked it—in the Christian doctrine of universal dignity, in the free-trade liberalism of Adam Smith and Hayek, in Ronald Reagan’s vision of “one world” bound by liberty, and in the libertarianism of thinkers like David Boaz, who reminded us that free societies flourish when individuals are free to exchange, associate, and imagine across borders.
What is needed today is a bipartisan cosmopolitanism: a moral vision that transcends ideological capture and reaffirms our common responsibilities in an interdependent world.
Properly understood, cosmopolitanism is not a partisan program but a perennial orientation, born of philosophy and lived by ordinary people across cultures. We inhabit layered identities—local, national, global—and conscience demands we balance them. To recover cosmopolitanism is not to erase tradition or patriotism, but to situate them within a larger horizon. What is needed today is a bipartisan cosmopolitanism: a moral vision that transcends ideological capture and reaffirms our common responsibilities in an interdependent world.
To recover cosmopolitanism is not to erase tradition or patriotism, but to situate them within a larger horizon.
The Stoics gave philosophical shape to Diogenes’ intuition. Hierocles described identity as a set of concentric circles: self, family, town, nation, humanity. Our natural tendency is to care more for the inner rings. The task of the wise, he wrote, is “to draw the circles somehow toward the center,” until even the most distant stranger is regarded as kin.
Marcus Aurelius, emperor and Stoic, echoed this in his Meditations: “My city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the world.” He did not renounce Rome; he placed it within a larger order. The Stoic message was clear: patriotism and cosmopolitanism are not enemies. One can love Athens or Rome while acknowledging a deeper kinship with humankind.
This insight was not confined to the Mediterranean. In China, the philosopher Mozi urged jian ai—“impartial care”—arguing that peace required extending concern beyond clan or state. In India, the Maha Upanishad proclaimed vasudhaiva kutumbakam: “the world is one family.” Emperor Ashoka inscribed edicts of tolerance across his empire, reminding subjects that every creed deserved respect. The cosmopolitan impulse is no Western invention; it is a recurrent discovery of conscience across civilizations.
The cosmopolitan impulse is no Western invention; it is a recurrent discovery of conscience across civilizations.
The Enlightenment revived cosmopolitanism in the language of rights. Kant’s 1795 essay Perpetual Peace imagined a “cosmopolitan law” of universal hospitality: no stranger should be treated as an enemy merely for crossing a frontier. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, described the “impartial spectator” within us—the moral faculty by which we judge ourselves from the standpoint of humanity at large. Both Kant and Smith saw conscience as inherently cosmopolitan. Critics struck back. Rousseau derided cosmopolitans who “boast they love everyone, to excuse loving no one.” Nationalists claimed that universal loyalties must weaken concrete ones. Yet defenders insisted otherwise. Christoph Wieland, a German contemporary, argued that the cosmopolitan who serves humanity serves his country better than the narrow patriot. The French Declaration of 1789, invoking “the rights of man,” assumed precisely this: that France would be ennobled, not betrayed, by recognizing universal rights.
Two world wars made the cosmopolitan conscience less abstract. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refugee stripped of German citizenship, discovered what it meant to be stateless. Without political membership, “the rights of man” proved hollow.
Two world wars made the cosmopolitan conscience less abstract. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refugee stripped of German citizenship, discovered what it meant to be stateless. Without political membership, “the rights of man” proved hollow. From that experience she coined the “right to have rights”: the demand that every human belong to a political community where dignity is guaranteed. Cosmopolitanism here was not utopia but survival.
Isaiah Berlin, another émigré intellectual, defended a pluralist cosmopolitanism. He insisted that cultures embody incommensurable values, yet a minimum set—dignity, liberty, avoidance of cruelty—appears in all. He warned that a person who sheds all roots in the name of “humanity” may lose something essential. “Cosmopolitanism,” he once quipped, “is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself.” Yet his point was not to reject cosmopolitanism but to temper it with pluralism: universal concern need not mean uniform culture.
“Cosmopolitanism,” he once quipped, “is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself.”
Later, Martha Nussbaum renewed the Stoic vision for democratic education. Citing the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore—who opposed the idolization of nation in the Swadeshi movement—she argued that students should see themselves “as citizens of a world of human beings.” Tagore had written: “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right, which is far greater than my country.” Cosmopolitanism, in this view, is not disloyalty to nation but fidelity to conscience. Kwame Anthony Appiah has called this “rooted cosmopolitanism.” We are born into tribes, but our task is to extend the tribe until it includes humanity. “Cosmopolitans,” he writes, “believe in universal concern and respect for legitimate difference.” We can be loyal patriots and world citizens, if we learn to hold both in tension.
Cosmopolitan ideals have never been confined to one camp. On the left, socialist internationalism rallied workers beyond borders: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” On the right, free-traders from Smith to Hayek envisioned commerce as a cosmopolitan bond. Reagan himself spoke of America as part of “one world” of freedom.
Both sides have also distorted cosmopolitanism. Stalin denounced “rootless cosmopolitans”—a euphemism for intellectuals—to mask xenophobic purges. Today’s populists wield “globalist” as a slur. Yet beneath the rhetoric lies a bipartisan heritage: the left’s solidarity and the right’s liberty, both with cosmopolitan roots.
Both sides have also distorted cosmopolitanism. Stalin denounced “rootless cosmopolitans”—a euphemism for intellectuals—to mask xenophobic purges. Today’s populists wield “globalist” as a slur. Yet beneath the rhetoric lies a bipartisan heritage: the left’s solidarity and the right’s liberty, both with cosmopolitan roots.
For today’s youth, layered identity is lived reality. A second-generation immigrant in London may speak Yoruba at home, English at work, and join a global K-pop fandom online.
Belonging is no longer singular but hybrid. As sociologist Ulrich Beck observed, modern life is a “cosmopolitan vision”: ambiguity, plurality, multiple affiliations.
modern life is a “cosmopolitan vision”: ambiguity, plurality, multiple affiliations.
Empirical studies show that those who identify with “all humanity” exhibit less prejudice and greater readiness to help strangers. Movements like Fridays for Future, led by Greta Thunberg, embody this: a cosmopolitan ethic mobilizing youth across continents for a planetary cause. Yet hybridity brings tensions too. To hold global values may alienate one from local norms. To belong everywhere may feel like belonging nowhere. Authenticity becomes a balancing act.
Yet hybridity brings tensions too. To hold global values may alienate one from local norms. To belong everywhere may feel like belonging nowhere. Authenticity becomes a balancing act.
Cosmopolitanism has long attracted suspicion, and three charges recur. The first is elitism—the idea that to be a “world citizen” is the privilege of jet-setters, academics, or multinational executives, detached from the ordinary struggles of community life. Yet evidence complicates this caricature: surveys consistently show that cosmopolitan identification is stronger in countries like Nigeria, China, and India than in Western Europe. Global solidarity is not confined to those who travel widely; it flourishes among people who may never cross a border but who recognize their fate as bound up with that of humanity.
The second charge is rootlessness. Rousseau quipped that those who claim to love everyone really love no one. Yet this misunderstands the moral claim. True cosmopolitanism does not cancel local loyalties; it multiplies them. To love humanity in general does not mean abandoning family or nation, but serving them better—holding one’s community to universal standards of justice, so that it honors its own highest values.
The third charge is relativism—that cosmopolitans, in welcoming all cultures, stand for nothing. But pluralist cosmopolitanism is not moral laxity. It affirms a common minimum—dignity, liberty, avoidance of cruelty—while recognizing that these values take different cultural forms. It is not a bland universalism that levels difference, nor a relativism that excuses anything. It is what philosopher Seyla Benhabib calls a “dialogic universalism”: universals discovered through encounter, enlarged through listening.
In each case, the critique illuminates a danger, but the richer tradition of cosmopolitan thought offers an answer. Properly understood, cosmopolitanism is neither elitist nor rootless nor relativist, but a discipline of belonging—learning to widen our circles of loyalty while remaining faithful to the places and people we call home.
Properly understood, cosmopolitanism is neither elitist nor rootless nor relativist, but a discipline of belonging—learning to widen our circles of loyalty while remaining faithful to the places and people we call home.
Why does this matter now? Because the great crises of the twenty-first century—climate change, pandemics, mass displacement—are insoluble within borders. Because polarization at home threatens to collapse civic life into echo chambers. And because the alternative to cosmopolitan responsibility is not a sturdy patriotism but a brittle tribalism that corrodes both nation and world.
A bipartisan cosmopolitanism would ask conservatives to draw on traditions of stewardship and universal dignity, and liberals to affirm solidarities that reach beyond class or nation. Both could agree that our duties extend across frontiers.
A bipartisan cosmopolitanism would ask conservatives to draw on traditions of stewardship and universal dignity, and liberals to affirm solidarities that reach beyond class or nation. Both could agree that our duties extend across frontiers. In practice, this might mean civic projects that braid local pride with global concern: schools twinned with foreign counterparts, cities of refuge that host persecuted artists, national service that includes options for work abroad.
The truth we must recover is simple and perennial: we are many, and we are one. To affirm that is fidelity—fidelity to our roots, to our conscience, and to the shared world we inhabit together.
The truth we must recover is simple and perennial: we are many, and we are one. To affirm that is fidelity to our roots, to our conscience, and to the shared world we inhabit together.
