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Global citizenship

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 This article is written like a personal reflection or essay and may require cleanup. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (January 2009)

Global citizenship, or world citizenship, is the concept of citizenship on a global level. It is a moral and ethical disposition which might guide the understanding of individual or groups of local and global contexts and their relative responsibilities within different communities.

A feeling of global citizenship is motivated by local interests (love of family, communal fairness, self-interest) as well as global interests (a sense of universal equality), and care for fellow humans as well as human rights and human dignity. The key notes of global citizenship, which include a respect for any and all fellow global citizens, no matter their race, religion or creed, giving rise to an universal sympathy above the barriers of nationality, were initially summarized by the American philosopher Thomas Paine in the The Age of Reason:

“ The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.[1] ”

As participatory action, global citizenship entails a responsibility to reduce International inequality (both social and economic), refrain from action that hinders individual well-being, and avoid environmental degradation. The notion of global citizenship is linked to an understanding of globalization and cosmopolitanism.

In education, the concept of global citizenship education (GCE) is rapidly incorporating, and at times superseding, references to multicultural education, peace education, human rights education and international education.

In international relations, global citizenship may refer to the responsibility of states to act with awareness of the world as a global community by recognizing and fulfilling its global obligations and the rights of global citizens, such as freedom of movement. Global citizenship is related to the international relations theory of idealism, which holds that states should include a level of moral goodwill in their foreign policy considerations.

Contents

[edit] Legal and philosophical basis

By itself, citizenship has certain legal and democratic overtones. Conceptually, it is wrapped up in rights and obligations, and in owing allegiance to a sovereign state whose power is retained by the citizenry but with rights that are shared by all members of that state. We distinguish “citizen” from “national” or “subject,” the latter two implying protection of a state. Citizenship, as it has come down to us via the ancient Greeks and Romans, via the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions, is tied into the emergence of members of a polity with specified privileges and duties. To speak of a “citizen” is thus to speak of individuals with distinct relationships to the state, along with the social status and power these relationships imply.

Associational status in this realm does double duty. It serves to explain a unique characteristic of global citizenship while it also expresses that particular lighthouse of postmodernity known as “lifestyle politics.” (Giddens, 1991, Bennett, 2000, et al.) Rather than a technical definition of a citizen “on his or her relationship to the state (p. 2), Steenbergen (1994) suggests that the global citizen represents a more holistic version: you choose where you work, live or play, and therefore are not tied down to your land of birth. The greater number of choices offered by modern life (from consumer products to politics) lies at the root of lifestyle politics. (Franck, 1999) As Falk (1994) put it, in global citizenship there is the rudimentary institutional construction of arenas and allegiance- what many persons are really identifying with- as no longer bounded by the formal relationship that an individual has to his or her own territorial society as embodied in the form of a state. Traditional citizenship is being challenged and remoulded by the activism associated with this trans-national political and social evolution. (1994: 138)

Traditional ties between citizen and the state are withering, and are replaced by more fragmented loyalties that explain lifestyle politics. Notions of ties between citizen and state that arose in the aftermath of the American and French Revolution, and the creation of the modern state after the 18th century no longer hold sway. It is not by coincidence, for example, that the first to receive enfranchisement were adult males who also happened to serve in American and French armies. (Kaspersen, 1998) The citizen army today is replaced by the professional army, and a central cog in the bonds between state and citizen is removed. Voting turnout decreases, and the public has low regard for politicians.

Since global citizens are not recognized legally, their existence may be best represented as “associatively.”

1. Global citizenship is less defined by legal sanction than by “associational” status that is different from national citizenship. Since there is no global bureaucracy to give sanction and protect global citizens, and despite intriguing models suggested by the EU, global citizenship remains the purview of individuals to live, work and play within transnational norms and status that defy national boundaries and sovereignty.

[edit] Activism

Many newly emerging global citizens are actively engaged in global efforts – whether in business ventures, environmentalism, concern for nuclear weapons, health or immigration problems. While various types of global citizens exist, a common thread to their emergence is their base in grassroots activism. We may identify different types of global citizens, yet many of these categories are best summarized by their emergence despite a lack of any global governing body. It is as if they have spontaneously erupted of their own volition. Falk (1994) identified five categories of global citizens which he named as, • global reformers • elite global business people • global environmental managers • politically conscious regionalists • trans-national activists

Scholars have noted the emerging power struggle between corporations and global activists who increasingly see the nexus of de facto governance taking place more and more within the corporate world (mediated by communication technologies like the Internet) and not in the halls of representative government. Hence, the tendency on the part of activists to promote rallies and events like the protests at WTO, as more effective means of citizen participation and democratic accountability.

Global protest activity is on the rise. Demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, Genoa in 2001 and in dozens of other sites brought activists together from around the world and localized global issues in unprecedented ways. These and other activities suggest the possibility of an emerging global citizenry. Individuals from a wide variety of nations, both in the North and South, move across boundaries for different activities and reasons. This transnational activity is facilitated by the growing ease of travel and by communication fostered by the Internet and telephony.

A visible expression of global citizenship is the many global activists who debuted spectacularly at the Battle in Seattle. These protests continue at other venues, such as at meetings for the World Bank and the IMF, and most recently at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Other activists fight for environmental protection, human rights to the impoverished and the unrepresented, and for restrictionson the use of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Freedom from bureaucratic intervention seems to be a hallmark of global citizenship; the lack of a world body to sanction and protect these citizens also means to a certain degree freedom from bureaucratic control.

Also see: Global citizens movement

[edit] International political issues

Global citizenship is qualitatively different from the national variety, where rights and obligations came (even when fought and protested for) at the behest and generosity of the state. With global citizenship, individuals exercise organizational tools such as the Internet to make themselves global citizens. No government sanctioned this development.

Since January 1, 2000, negotiations amongst WTO member states regarding the movement of professionals to and from member countries has taken place, under the General Agreement on Trade in Services, Article XIX. While this does not signal de facto recognition of trans-national citizens, it may indicate halting steps toward it. This is all the more significant given that around the globe there is greater and easier movement of goods than human beings.

The European Community has taken halting steps to change this: it allows the free movement of its peoples to live, work, pay taxes and, significantly, to vote in other member states. Habermas (1994) notes this as a utilitarian model that may have greater implications than merely for Europeans; it is possible the model may be expanded in other regions of the world, or to the entire world itself. The ability of a Spaniard to pick up and move to Germany and be a “citizen” there indicates that notions of ties a country of origin may weaken. The Spaniard may be quite happy living in Germany and not wish to go back to Spain.

There is also the rising tide of individuals with more than one passport. Where once the U.S. State Department frowned on its citizens carrying more than one passport, the reality is that today that it is turning a blind eye. (In war, this may change). Many immigrants to the U.S. in the 1990s, a decade that saw the largest influx of newcomers to the state, came to work but still retained their old passports. While many immigrants permanently stay in the U.S., many others either go back to the old country, or travel back and forth. Such people may be considered global citizens.

Jacobson (1996) noted this fracture of the state as dispenser of citizen rights and obligations, although he sees the decline of overall citizenship as a result. Keck and Sikkink (1998) on the other hand, regard such global activism as a possible new engine of civic engagement. These global activists, or “cosmopolitan community of individuals” (p. 213) as they call them, transcend national borders and skillfully use pressure tactics against both government and private corporations that make them viable actors on the emerging global public sphere.

A striking example of this pressure is the anti-sweatshop campaign against Nike. Literally dozens of websites are devoted to exposing Nike’s labor practices. In 1996, with the aid of Global Exchange, a humanitarian organization that later helped to organize the Battle in Seattle, Nike’s labor practices became the subject of increasing mainstream media attention. In the process, Nike was linked to sweatshop labor, a label it has tried to shed ever since.

The Internet and other technologies such as the cell phone play an instrumental role in the development of global activists, as does cheaper air travel and the wide acceptance of credit cards. But there are other forces at work: decline in civic engagement, rise of lifestyle politics, homogenization of products, conglomeration in media systems and communication tools that let us know more about each other than ever before. Add to the mix the rising concern for universal human rights and for trans-global problems such as environmental degradation and global warming, the result is a landscape that tends to be more global than national.

This is not the first time in the history of our civilization that society has been “internationalized”, but never has it been easier for average citizens to express themselves in this globalized fashion – by the clothes they wear, the soda they drink, the music they listen to (e.g. world music) and the vacation land they visit. It is increasingly obvious that our identities, as Lie and Servaes (2000) and Scammell (2001) suggest, are tied to our roles as citizens. Scammell’s “citizen-consumers” vote with their purchases and are engaged in their communities to the extent they have the freedom to shop.

[edit] Geographical issues

Global citizens may redefine ties between civic engagement and geography. The town hall meetings of New England and other regions of the U.S. seem increasingly supplanted by “electronic spheres” not limited by space and time. This heralds a potentially startling new mechanism in participatory democracy.

Absentee ballots opened up the way for expatriates to vote while living in another country. The Internet may carry this several steps further. Voting is not limited by time or space: you can be anywhere in the world and still make voting decisions back home.

Most of U.S. history has been bound up in equating geography with sovereignty. It did matter where you lived, worked, played. Since travel was expensive and cumbersome, our lives were tied to geography. No longer can we entirely make this claim. Thompson (1996), writing in the Stanford Law Review, suggests that we can do away with residency and voting in local elections. Frug (1996) even suggests that alienation in the way we regard our geography already creates a disconnect between it and sovereignty. If we are not entirely “home” at home, do boundaries make any difference anymore? This is not just an academic question, but one rife with rich and disheartening social and political possibilities. Global citizens float within, outside and through these boundaries. The implications seem significant.

[edit] Causes and influences

Many elements seem to spawn global citizenship, but one is noteworthy: the continuous tension that globalization has unleashed between various forces local, national and global. An interesting paradox of globalization is while the world is being internationalized at the same time it’s also being localized. The world shrinks as the local community (village, town, city) takes on greater and greater importance. Mosco (1999) noted this feature and saw the growing importance of “technopoles,” or high-technologized city-states that hark back to classical Greece. If this trend is true then it seems global citizens are the glue that may hold these separate entities together. Put another way, global citizens are people that can travel within these various boundaries and somehow still make sense of the world.

Any rights and obligations accorded to the global citizen come from the citizens themselves, growing public favor for “universal rights,” the rise of people migrating around the world, and an increasing tendency to standardize citizenship. Difference may exist on the cultural level, but in bureaucracies, increasing favor is placed on uniformity. Efficiency and utilitarianism lie at the core of capitalism; naturally a world that lives under its aegis replicates these tendencies. Postal agreements, civil air travel and other inter-governmental agreements are but one small example of standardization that is increasingly moving into the arena of citizenship. The concern is raised that global citizenship may be closer to a “consumer” model than a legal one.

The lack of a world body puts the initiative upon global citizens themselves to create rights and obligations. Rights and obligations as they arose at the formation of nation-states (e.g. the right to vote and obligation to serve in time of war) are at the verge of being expanded. So new concepts that accord certain “human rights” which arose in the 20th century are increasingly being universalized across nations and governments. This is the result of many factors, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948, the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust and growing sentiments towards legitimizing marginalized peoples (e.g. pre-industrialized peoples found in the jungles of Brazil and Borneo). Couple this with growing awareness of our impact on the environment, and there is the rising feeling that citizen rights may extend to include the right to dignity and self-determination. If national citizenship does not foster these new rights, then global citizenship may seem more accessible.

One cannot overestimate the importance of human rights discourse in shaping public opinion. What are the rights and obligations of human beings trapped in conflicts? Or, incarcerated as part of ethnic cleansing? Equally striking, are the pre-industrialized tribes newly discovered by scientists living in the depths of dense jungle? Leary (1999), Heater (1999) and Babcock (1994) tend to equate these rights with the rise of global citizenship as normative associations, indicating a national citizenship model that is more closed and a global citizenship one that is more flexible and inclusive. If true, this places a strain in the relationship between national and global citizenship. Boli (1998) tends to see this strain as mutually beneficial, whereas Leary (1999) and McNeely (1998) regard the rupture between the two systems as merely evolutionary rather than combative.

Like much social change, changing scopes of modern citizenship tend to be played out in both large and minute spheres. Habermas (1994) tends to place global citizenship in a larger, social context, arguing that nations can be central engines of citizenship but culture can also be powerful. He regards the formation of the “European citizen” as a kind of natural epiphany of governmental conglomeration within the forces of globalization, only remotely alluding to the corporate conglomeration that has been both the recipient and cause of worldwide economic expansion. Others, including Iyer (2000) see globalization and global citizens as direct descendents of global standardization, which he notes, for instance, in the growing homogeneity of airports. Standardization and modernity have worked together for the past few centuries. Ellul (1964), Mumford (1963) and other scholars attack this as a form of oppression, in the same vein that Barber (1996) saw the proliferation of carbon-copy fast-food chains around the globe. Why not a set of basic citizen rights followed the world over?

Global citizenship may be the indirect result of Pax Americana. The 20th century, as well as the 21st, may be a time dominated by the United States. America’s domination of the WTO, IMF, World Bank and other global institutions creates feelings of imperialism among smaller nations. Cross national cooperation to counter American dominance may result in more global citizens. If economic, environmental, political and social factors push towards more global citizenry, we must also within this camp consider the ramifications of the post cold war world, or realpolitik.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Thomas Paine in: The Age of Reason, III, 1794

[edit] Additional literature

 This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)
  • Babcock, Rainer, Transnational Citizenship (1994: Edward Elgar, Aldershot, England)
  • Bauman, Zygmunt, Intimations of Postmodernity (1992: Routledge, London)
  • Bellamy, Richard, “Citizenship beyond the nation state: the case of Europe,” from Political Theory in Transition, edited by Noël O’Sullivan (2000: Routledge, London)
  • Bennett, W. Lance, News: the Politics of Illusion (1996: Longman, New York)
  • Bennett, W. Lance, “Consumerism and Global Citizenship: Lifestyle Politics, Permanent Campaigns, and International Regimes of Democratic Accountability.” Unpublished paper presented at the International Seminar on Political Consumerism, Stockholm University, May 30, 2001.
  • Best, Steven & Kellner, Douglas, The Postmodern Turn (1997: Guilford Press, New York)
  • Boli, John, “Rights and Rules: Constituting World Citizens” in Public Rights, Public Rules: Constituting Citizens in the World Polity and National Policy, edited by Connie L McNeely (1998: Garland, New York)
  • Clarke, Paul Berry, Deep Citizenship ( 1996: Pluto Press, London)
  • Eriksen, Erik & Weigård, Jarle, “The End of Citizenship: New Roles Challenging the Political Order” in The Demands of CitizenshipI, edited by Catriona McKinnon & Iain Hampsher-Monk (2000: Continuum, London)
  • Falk, Richard, "The Making of Global Citizenship" in The Condition of Citizenship, edited by Bart van Steenbergen (1994: Sage Publications, London)
  • Franck, Thomas M., The Empowered Self: Law and Society in the Age of Individualism (1999: Oxford University Press, Oxford))
  • Habermas, Jurgen, "Citizenship and National Identity" in The Condition of Citizenship, edited by Bart van Steenbergen (1994: Sage Publications, London)
  • Heater, Derek, What is Citizenship? (1999: Polity Press, Cambridge, England)
  • Henderson, Hazel, “Transnational Corporations and Global Citizenship,” American Behavioral Scientist, 43(8), May 2000, 1231-1261.
  • Iyer, Pico, The Global Soul (2000: Alfred A. Knopf, New York).
  • Jacobson, David, Rights across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (1996: Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore)
  • Lie, Rico & Servaes, Jan, “Globalization: consumption and identity – towards researching nodal points,” in The New Communications Landscape, edited by Georgette Wang, Jan Servaes and Anura Goonasekera (2000: Routledge, London)
  • Kaspersen, Lars Bo, “State and Citizenship Under Transformation in Western Europe” in Public Rights, Public Rules: Constituting Citizens in the World Polity and National Policy, edited by Connie L. McNeely (1998: Garland, New York)
  • Keck, Margaret E. & Sikkink, Kathryn, Activists Beyond Borders (1998: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York)
  • Kennedy, John F., Profiles in Courage (1956: Harper & Brothers, New York)
  • Leary, Virginia, “Citizenship, Human Rights, and Diversity,” in Citizenship, Diversity, and *Pluralism, edited by Alan C. Cairns, John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon, Hans J. Michelmann, & David E. Smith (1999: McGill-Queens’ University Press, Montreal)
  • McNeely, Connie L., “Constituting Citizens: Rights and Rules” in Public Rights, Public Rules: Constituting Citizens in the World Polity and National Policy, edited by Connie L. McNeely (1998: Garland, New York)
  • Mosco, Vincent, “Citizenship and Technopoles,” from Communication, Citizenship, and Social Policy (1999: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, England)
  • Preston, P.W., Political/Cultural Identity: Citizens and Nations in a Global Era (1997: Sage, London)
  • Scammell, Margarett, “Internet and civic engagement: Age of the citizen-consumer” found at http://jsis.artsci.washington.edu/programs/cwesuw/scammell.htm
  • Steenbergen, Bart van, "The Condition of Citizenship" in The Condition of Citizenship, edited by Bart van Steenbergen (1994: Sage Publications, London)
  • Turner, Bryan D., "Postmodern Culture/Modern Citizens" in The Condition of Citizenship, edited by Bart van Steenbergen (1994: Sage Publications, London)
  • Weale, Albert, “Citizenship Beyond Borders” in The Frontiers of Citizenship, edited by Ursula Vogel & Michael Moran (1991: St. Martin’s Press, New York)

[edit] External links

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