Ulrich Schmid and I taught a series of PhD seminars in St. Gallen in January 2025. As ever, this was a wonderful occasion and a chance to renew our friendship through long conversations in the afternoons, during which I learned a lot from him, as always. One evening we chatted over beer, with Ulrich casually asking, “Are you done now with cosmopolitanism?” What he meant was my forthcoming book, so I answered in the affirmative. Yet later on I kept thinking about his question: could either of us ever be done with it? An unflagging interest in, and respect for, different cultures was very much part and parcel of who we had become after several decades of reading, writing, and teaching in a manner that would embrace and uphold a set of liberal values, however loosely understood. Of course, we were not alone; in our increasingly interconnected world of global risks and opportunities cosmopolitanism had morphed into a catchword, a slogan seen and heard from the covers of popular magazines (The Cosmopolitan) to the offices of politicians. But today the defence of cosmopolitanism, more than before, was assuming urgency amidst the new world order that was beginning to take alarming shape in the aftermath of the US presidential elections.