Global Citizenship

Consider three statements: there was an outpouring of sympathy and help for the victims of the tsunami which affected a number of countries in South Asia in 2004; international networks link terrorists today; and the United Nations works with different states to try to prevent the spread of bird flu and the possible emergence of a human viral pandemic. What is common to all three? They tell us something important about the world we live in today: it is deeply interconnected, and both problems and responses to them increasingly cross national boundaries.

New means of communication — the internet, television, and cell phones — have brought about a major change in how we understand our world. In the past, news of a development in one part of the world might have taken months to become known elsewhere; today, new modes of communication put us in almost immediate contact with events happening in very different parts of the globe. We can watch disasters and wars unfolding on our television screens in real time. This has helped develop shared sympathies and shared concerns among people in different countries — the 2004 tsunami is offered as a striking example, since it produced genuine cross-border sympathy and aid.

Supporters of global citizenship argue that although a fully-fledged world community or global society does not yet exist, people already feel linked to each other across national boundaries. They point to episodes like the outpouring of help for tsunami victims and other major calamities as a sign that a global society may be emerging, and argue that this feeling should be deliberately strengthened, and worked towards, as a concept of global citizenship.

The concept of national citizenship assumes that our own state can provide us with the protection and rights we need to live with dignity in the world today. But states today face many problems they cannot tackle by themselves. This raises a real question: are individual rights, guaranteed only by one's own state, sufficient to protect people's freedom today, or has the time come to also think in terms of human rights and global citizenship?

One attraction of the notion of global citizenship is that it might make it easier to deal with problems that cross national boundaries and therefore need cooperative action by the people and governments of many states together. For instance, it might make it easier to find an acceptable solution to the problem of migrants and stateless peoples, or at least to ensure them basic rights and protection regardless of which country they happen to be living in. …