COSMOPOLITANISM: THREE FACES
COSMOPOLITANISM: THREE FACES

Summary/Abstract: Last October, speaking to her party conference, British Prime Minister Theresa May, told her audience that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” When I read this, I felt that this was, as the saying goes now, “déjà vu all over again.” It reminded me uncomfortably of the old epithet of “rootless cosmopolitans”, used over the years to denounce certain people as unpatriotic – not least in Russia, in old imperial, as well as Soviet eras, as an anti-Semitic slur. I am sure the Prime Minister had no such intentions, but it made me think once more of notions of cosmopolitanism.

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