A spectre is haunting the globe – the spectre of cosmopolitanism. You might discern it in the call by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, for a new kind of European justice, replete with regional police force (Europol) and magistracy (Eurojust). You might glean it from the global spread of human rights movements, protesting the suffering of children and civilians in, say, Iraq, Africa, Israel or Palestine. You might infer it from the cultural ties of, say, Chinese or Korean migrants living in Sydney, whose working lives embed them in global networks. All are expressions of a vital new cosmopolitan outlook, the global refashioning of a centuries-old tradition that rejects nationalism in favour of the wider embrace of humanity. One could argue that modernity was ever thus. Certainly, since thinkers such as Goethe, Kant, Humboldt and Marx, the challenges of international politics have been associated with a transformation from narrow nationalism to universal governance. In this connection, the achievements of multilateralism – since World War II particularly – have been notable, from the founding of the United Nations system to the development of the European Union. From this angle, ‘cosmopolitanism’ might simply be a new word for what used to be called ‘internationalism’. In these bold political statements, The Cosmopolitan Vision and Power in the Global Age, Ulrich Beck argues that the influence of today’s cosmopolitanism is reconstructing the world order afresh, replacing provincialism and nationalism with a mature moral outlook capable of responding to contemporary global crises. Beck, one of Germany’s most subtle social analysts, has been writing for some years of a new European consciousness and, beyond that, of global cosmopolitanism. Now he has provocatively pushed cosmopolitan theory into a polemical engagement with neo-liberalism throughout the consumerist, post-imperialist West.