In one way, we live in a shrinking world. The human population is expanding but important natural resources are being depleted and the environment is being degraded. At the same time, information is rapidly increasing and becoming more readily available. Partly through the Internet, we are also becoming more and more conscious of what is happening far away. Distances are shorter. International trade and technology transfer are expanding. These and other factors have increased the pressure for industrialization among historically agrarian societies. People in poor nations are increasingly aware of what people in rich nations have. Their aspirations contribute to competition and, potentially, to hostility. International justice is more urgent than ever – in part because terrorism and war are increasingly dangerous.

Globalization, then, is with us; it is on the rise; and it poses special challenges to the powerful prosperous nations, especially the USA. Approaches to it range from extreme nationalism, embodying patriotism as a characteristic attitude, to extreme cosmopolitanism. This paper will characterize those two poles and proceed to address a set of related problems and ideas. My aim is twofold: conceptually, to clarify both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and normatively, to propose some guiding standards for their mutual adjustment and their applications to the activities that are central in globalizetion.

I Nationalism

Nationalist views fall on a spectrum from minimal to extreme. There are too many possible versions to describe here. The same holds for cosmopolitanism, which in many ways is the converse of nationalism. To minimize complexity in both cases, I will characterize extreme, moderate, and minimal forms. I will do this, however, in relation to important variables that, when appropriately assessed, enable us to identify and order nationalist and cosmopolitan positions of many more kinds than we can now address.

The main variable that, in my view, determines the strength of a nationalism is the relative importance it ascribes to national vs. human concerns.