ABSTRACT
Historically, cosmopolitan movements have been born out of upheaval, revolution, conflict, war and imperialism. They arise when a fragmented country seeks to establish unity and social cohesion by asserting rights and values that all its people can acquire or aspire to or when a united country uses an appeal to such rights and values as part of a campaign to capture and subdue other territory. Cosmopolitanism does not always start with political leaders trying to sow unifying attitudes and actions among diverse people, but they almost invariably co-opt it if it is not their creation. Thus cosmopolitanism emerged out of the spread of the Roman Empire, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution and, later, the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. Today, it is the East European revolutions of 1989–1992 and the shifts associated with globalization that have been instrumental in the new wave of cosmopolitan thinking.
