Richard Bellamy:

Unsurprisingly, Greek citizenship has appeared to many later thinkers as the epitome of a true condition of political equality, in which citizens have equal political powers and so must treat each
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Theories of citizenship and their history

other with equal concern and respect. They have viewed the trend towards delegating political tasks to a professional class of politicians and public administrators with foreboding, as presaging a loss of political freedom and equality, and lamented the in their opinion short-sighted tendency for ever more citizens to desert public service to pursue personal concerns. By contrast, critics of this model of citizenship argue that it was not so much an ideal as hopelessly idealized. In reality, it was doubly oppressive. On the one hand, it rested on the oppression of slaves, women, and other non-citizens. On the other hand, it was oppressive of citizens in demanding they sacrifice their private interests to the service of the state. As we saw, the two forms of oppression were linked: citizens could only dedicate themselves to public life because their private lives were serviced by others. Both have also been the mark of totalitarian regimes. The latter too have typically treated non-citizens as less than fully human and have demanded not just allegiance but also the total identification of citizens with the state, regarding all dissent as indicative of self-interest rather than an alternative point of view or valid concern. As well as being repressive, such systems tend to be highly inefficient not least in diverting all talent away from the private sphere of the economy on which the wealth of a society rests. Contrary to what was intended, making the public sphere the main avenue of personal advancement can lead to corruption and the abuse of public power for private again.

Derek heater on cosmopolitan citizenship

The conception of world citizenship presupposes a certain, at least potential, homogeneity of mankind; that all human beings have the capacity to recognize the superficiality of cultural or ethnic differences. Such a notion cut clean across the Greek belief that the world was composed of the cultured people who spoke Greek and those who did not, who babbled - the barbarians.

Even so, the two interpretations of humanity - homogeneity and bifurcation - did manage to co-exist in Greek thought. The Stoics stressed the homogeneity of all men capable of reasoning. The Greek word which is often translated as 'citizen of the world' is 'kosmopolites', but it is more accurately rendered as 'citizen of the cosmos' or 'universe'. The belief in world citizenship challenges the view that the state has the monopoly of what is right, challenges Aristotle's assertion that man can achieve social and moral excellence only by membership of a polis. Cosmopolitanism asserts that there is another, higher criterion. At the turn of the second millennium AD the validity of this thought came to be reemphasized,

 We owe it to the Stoics (see Chapter Two) for developing the concept of world citizenship, albeit as little more than a figure of speech and certainly not a legal or political status. However, it was in the second wave of classical revival, the Enlightenment, that the notion of world citizenship became widely broadcast. For a century, expressed with different emphases, the cosmopolitan ideal caught the imagination of numerous thinkers, including the giants of political thought, Locke and Kant, at each end of the hundred-year span. Yet the boost to the concept of world citizenship afforded by the Enlightenment was of feeble strength in comparison with the ideological power of nationalism, which virtually obliterated the cosmopolitan ideal for one-and-a-half, if not two, centuries. The evil inherent in nationalism was made starkly manifest by the two World Wars. From 1945 the need for cosmopolitan thinking and action took on an even greater appearance of urgency because of the frigidity of the Cold War confrontation and the prospect of nuclear holocaust. In the immediate post-War years three, often interconnected, movements got under way which were directly or indirectly bound to the concept of world citizenship. One was the attempt to persuade individuals to declare themselves to be world citizens and to mobilize them as a force to promote global interests. The second was the production of schemes for a federal world government. The third was an expression of discontent with the UN and the drafting of plans for its reform. Two developments reinvigorated the idea of world citizenship during the last quarter-century of the second millennium. First came the accelerating consciousness of global environmental problems, a sheaf of observed and calculated hazards, some of which are as terrifying in the long term as the thermo-nuclear threat seemed to be in the short term in the most tense years of the Cold War. The second development was the collapse of the Communist Cold War antagonist in 'counter-revolutions' of 1989-91 and the exciting expectation of a more collaborative international regime.