Cosmopolitan
The word
cosmopolitan describes an environment where many cultures from around the world coexist; or a person whose intellectual baggage comes from many different cultures. It may also have the weaker senses of "worldly" or "sophisticated".
The word derives from Greek
cosmos (the
world) and
polis (city). Its sense overlaps to some extent with
citizen of the world, implying identification with a world community rather than with a particular nation or people. Indeed, its first recorded usage was the by
Diogenes the Cynic, who described himslef as a
"kosmou polites", i.e. "a citizen of the world"; and as such he would seek attachments beyond the local ones, disregarding the importance given to 'accidentally' obtained concepts of gender, place of birth, place of residence and so on.
The word is sometimes misused to mean only "the global", either as a person who is seasoned in ways of the world, or as an adjective, to describe something with a far-reaching impact. However, it is argued by many scholars that a
multicultural context, multiculturalism, is a necessity for people to develop a cosmopolitan identity.
Cosmopolitan identity would, as all other identities, be contextual and situated. This might mean that while feeling quite cosmopolitan in a situation, a person could act, for example, as a nationalist in a different context.
The cosmopolitan view is the core of
Cosmopolitanism, a socio-political stance or movement which sees all persons in all nations as members of a single global community -- in contrast with
nationalism. Actually, the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is not a simple one. Research so far has not produced data that unambigiously support the idea that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are opposites, despite a shown negative relation between the two. The fact that there exist several different understandings of both nationalism and cosmopolitanism does not make it easier to comprehend the relationship between the two concepts.
