The Cosmopolitan Identity: a Search for its Foundations, Conditions and Implications

In many academic books and articles, election campaigns and common media, Europe is characterized as a cosmopolitan civilization. Also, individual Europeans are regularly attributed cosmopolitan elements to their identity, like tolerance, secularity and rationality. However, these characteristics are often used to distinguish Europeans from ‘others’, such as in the debate about Turkey’s potential membership of the European Union. In this thesis, I demonstrate that this use of cosmopolitanism is contradictory, since it is inherent to the notion of cosmopolitanism to show respect and act beyond the limits of one’s nation or culture. Cosmopolitanism in my view encompasses a universal notion of inclusion and can therefore not be used to prove the exclusivity of European culture. I come to this point by exploring the concept of cosmopolitanism in a historical, philosophical and sociological way, as well as analyzing the notion of individual identity in relation to cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, I make use of a number of case studies. Eventually, I distinguish between three modes of cosmopolitanism which are firstly the cosmopolitan space, which can be empirically demonstrated, secondly the particular cosmopolitan point of view, which is a Western social construction, and finally the individual cosmopolitan identity. This last mode is related to ideological cosmopolitanism and is in my opinion the only approach which captures cosmopolitanism in a coherent as well as logical way.