The paper demonstrates how contrastive linguistics may receive a fresh breath of life from approaching certain problems from the cognitive linguistic point of view. Cognitive linguistics is not only capable of providing contrastive linguistics with a comprehensive but coherent theoretical backbone the latter has always badly needed for its survival, but it is also certain to open up new avenues of research that have so far been more or less out of bounds for contrastive linguistics. At the same time, contrastive linguistics may play a critical, catalytic role in the development of cognitive linguistics theory and methodology. This is due to its immense potential in validating or falsifying some claims put forward by cognitive linguistics. which is inherently biased towards stressing the more universal aspects of language. This mutual cross-fertilization is demonstrated on the example of metonymically used names of capitals in English, German, Croatian and Hungarian.