In the light of the political philosophy of the last two millennia, it may seem odd to find the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘cosmopolis’paired together.footnote¹ Democracy is the power of the many and, internally, the rule of the majority. It came into being not as an abstract concept but as a means for taking the most concrete decisions: what government to appoint; what taxes to collect, and from whom; how public money should be spent, or schools and hospitals organized. Another defining feature: for the power of the demos to work, all those who constitute it must belong to the same community. Until a few centuries ago, the members of the few existing democracies—some Greek polis, the Swiss Cantons, a few Italian republican cities—would know each other by sight. The term ‘cosmopolis’ is no less ancient than that of ‘democracy’, but from its very origin it has referred to an ideal condition. The notion that the individual is a citizen of the world and, indeed, that the world might become his or her polis, was an individual aspiration rather than a mass reality. Only merchants, soldiers, the odd intellectual and a few potentates were acquainted with lands, cities and people outside their own native communities. All the rest, the majority—in other words, thedemos—could only imagine what the other parts of the planet were like from legends and travellers’ tales.

The ideas of democracy and cosmopolis have passed through many stages, being progressively modified down the centuries, and there is no shortage of learned treatises charting their semantic, cultural, historical and even anthropological evolution. The first, groundbreaking transformation of democracy was the result of the American Revolution, when the idea was asserted on a hitherto unthinkable geographical scale. The Founding Fathers, however—understanding the term as ‘direct’ democracy—thought it inappropriate for the system they were designing; they preferred to christen their creature a ‘republican’ system. In his celebrated philosophical project Towards Perpetual Peace Kant, too, favours the term ‘republic’.footnote² Only in the nineteenth century was the modern system of electoral proxy by citizens deemed a form of ‘democracy’—of representative democracy, that is.

The changing fortunes of ‘cosmopolitanism’ have been no less dramatic. Over the millennia it has shed its original, ideal dimensions and materialized into reality. The number of people—merchants, explorers, writers, intellectuals and, ultimately, tourists—able to travel and find out about the world has grown hand-in-hand with the economic expansion and the assertiveness of mass society. These cosmopolitans, as they became acquainted with ‘the other’, developed two attitudes towards it: the first was curiosity—which, as Giambattista Vico reminds us, is the child of ignorance and mother of science—about the habits and customs of non-western societies; the second, parallel to the first, was the idea that different civilizations should ultimately converge towards the best of these. Cosmopolitanism meant not just discovering but also assessing, comparing, selecting and, finally, wherever possible, applying the ways of life deemed most valid. If cosmopolitans have—too often, alas—fallen prey to the conviction that, by coincidence, the best customs are their own, they have never claimed the use of violence to impose their ideals.footnote³

Yet not even in today’s mass society—not even within the narrow confines of the western world—can the epithet ‘cosmopolitan’ be applied to the demos, the majority. In the era of the computer, a third of the inhabitants of our planet have never even used a telephone; cosmopolitanism remains the prerogative of an elite.footnote⁴ It is certainly curious that the two terms—virtually the product of a twin birth in the Greek cradle of the West—have stayed so resolutely apart from one another over the centuries. Perhaps the cause lay in this intrinsic difference between their social reference points: while one spoke of the many, the people, the other implicitly evoked the privilege of a few. But when, about a decade ago, we began to work on cosmopolitan democracy, new conditions had arisen which arguably justified the conjunction of two such apparent antitheses.footnote⁵

The first of these conditions was the forceful advent of what has been called globalization—a neologism without a precise date of birth, but already, at such a tender age, invoked even more frequently than Rossini’s Figaro. Under this capacious term are classified events that charge into daily life without even knocking at the door. Jobs, mortgage payments, contagious diseases and the style of the shoes sold in the local shops may now depend on decisions taken in remote places: a Japanese manager’s bid to buy a European firm, the Federal Reserve’s decision to increase the interest rate, an African government’s desire to cover up an epidemic, or the creative flair of a handful of designers in Milan.

We tend to find globalization disarming. All we can do is resign ourselves and think of Nietzsche: ‘The world is independent from my will’. But it is not only individuals who feel helpless. Equally unprepared seem the institutions—families, parties, trade unions, associations, churches and, above all, the state—from which he or she might demand protection. States increasingly fail to control their borders, fall victim to the blitzkriegs of financial speculators, or find their political autonomy strictly restrained. Even the United States, the new hegemon, realized on the morning of September 11 that its soil was not a safe haven. The nation-state—the institution that once imposed itself as the oligarch of the planet—is progressively losing its power.

Globalization is far from being a headless monster, and much has been written in recent years to identify the forces which regulate its dynamics. Some have coined new terms—‘international regimes’, ‘control mechanisms’, ‘governance’ and so on—to describe how decisions are taken even where there is no explicit chain of command. David Chandler has pointed out the ways in which a political and military hegemony is being recreated; Peter Gowan has shown that economic interests have been the fastest to reorganize in the new international climate. In both cases, only one country, the United States, has the political, economic and military power to assert its interests. But no country today can escape interactions with other parts of the globe. We are not, of course, living in a situation of international anarchy; nevertheless, many of the decisions that affect our lives are taken behind the scenes, by shadowy figures—people over whom neither we nor, it seems, our governments exercise any control. The state may pose itself as a protective womb, assuaging the anxieties of its population, but it has too often failed to deliver what it has guaranteed. Globalization makes it all the harder for it to fulfil its contract with its citizens.