Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Personal Identity

Many critics of increasing freedom of trade and of movement, and the phenomena of cosmopolitanism and globalization that result from such freedom, insist that the consequence of greater trade and movement is a net loss of identity. Globalization is, they allege, destructive of personal identity itself, which they see as reliant on sharply delineated differences among cultures. This paper sets out the anti-globalist critique and then shows that cosmopolitanism and globalization are hardly new phenomena, but have deep roots in European civilization. The threat allegedly posed by globalization to personal identity is described and the arguments of its main proponents given, followed by a critique of the theory of personal identity implicit in the argument and an alternative theory of personal identity (a “focal theory”) is described; that theory is both truer to lived human experience and fully compatible with the securing of personal identity in the context of an increasingly globalized world of free individuals