Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in cosmopolitan theories, fuelled in part by the end of the Cold War, hopes of post-national or cosmopolitan forms of loyalty, economic as well as cultural globalisation, and migration. The new buzz word "cosmopolitanism" has begun to mean almost anything, and it is therefore useful to distinguish between different types or forms: human rights or moral cosmopolitanism, political or legal cosmopolitanism, cultural cosmopolitanism and economic or commercial cosmopolitanism. This taxonomy of cosmopolitanisms can be further refined, for instance, we could refer to Christian cosmopolitanism, romantic cosmopolitanism, patriotic cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitisme littéraire towards the end of the eighteenth century, or republican cosmopolitanism.¹