Global Citizenship as a Misnomer

One of the principle pursuits of the ISP sessions is to establish a groundwork for the term global citizenship. We use the phrase constantly, because a chief concern of the programs run by the Seminar in general is to conceive of a way to work towards a more frequent and dependable paradigm of conversation and collaboration between international scholars. I suppose the theory behind the importance of defining global citizenship is two-fold. In the first place, if we are aimed at revolutionizing the isolationist, elitist attitude that is sometimes prevalent in Western countries, it is prudent to recognize and give a framework to the idea that we each of us share a great deal in common, by virtue of the fact that the reality of a nation-state being an autonomous agent is absolutely void. The extent of the connection between each of our countries is so extraordinary that to qualify it even as a connection misses the point: we are interwoven, in policy and in action, laced together in such a way that the heartbeat of one fuels the arteries of many. Second, to suggest that something like global citizenship exists is to correctly identify our residence on the planet, a conception of self which is not commonly at the forefront. It sets aside nationalism as a defining stripe of identity, and instead repositions the human at the center of a world in which each of his actions spiderwebs out from his fingertips, tugging and nudging at the lives of everyone who he will never meet, all of their options constricted by his choices.

The first manner in which establishing a definition is important, is simultaneously the chief downfall of most of the definitions I have heard so far. It seems to me that a great many thoughts in the academic sphere are reactionary, in that they aim to correct a specific problem which has arisen, usually in the face of declarations that it would arise in the first place. The response to new challenges such as these is often very bold and sometimes fairly aggressive, which needlessly echoes the understandable frustration felt by many of the contributors to the solution. For example, I have heard several advanced faculty suggest solutions which immediately seem unworkable, but which nonetheless highlight the point that some sort of change is dire. Furthermore, many of the suggestions that some visiting scholars have voiced truly reveal the disconnect between the work that they do behind closed oaken doors, and the results that occur in the classroom; the schism between what university faculty imagine that we are thinking, and what--indeed, how--we are actually thinking; the divide between what they believe is meaningful, and the reality that each student faces about what is actually practical and desired by the people who will eventually employ us.

Asked what sorts of elements comprise global citizenship, faculty tend to give answers that are in some way disheartening, because I never see anything that impresses me as being transformative. Appreciation and recognition of the value of other cultures, I have seen. Learning another language: there it is, on the board. Study abroad experience, yes. Ability to identify with the struggles of other classes, creeds, and races. Yes, yes. Yes, there they are, scattered across the graph paper board like a cluttered desk drawer of old newspaper rubber bands. And each certainly a valuable part of cross-cultural understanding, or international competency, or cosmopolitanism, some other term packed tight with buzzwords; each, though, being a definition which must be conceived as independent from global citizenship, because for all their merit, they do nothing to address the pressing concern that each of us faces as a citizen of the globe. In some way, these suggestions underscore the frustrations I have about the identities which many people hold dear. Instead of jumbling together the terms which we believe are germane to a functional, savvy world traveler--skills which no doubt have their place in a person who considers himself to be a global citizen--it is absolutely crucial that we exercise tremendous acuity in imagining each separate definition, lest the functionality of one of the terms--indeed, the utility of the term, because we would lose the ability to charge people with it, and to render them dutiful--should fall away, because its meaning is muddled.

I believe we can extrapolate the identity of a global citizen by thinking first about what it means to be a citizen of any country. Legally, the issue is senseless to argue, because there is no mitigating situation that would prevent someone from being a citizen of the globe; we can rule out all concept of legal standing. I can understand that when a person is raised in a country, he might be indoctrinated with the values of that country, either tacitly or overtly, and that in some way this is unavoidable. Furthermore, it seems to me that in the extreme majority of cases, there is engendered in a person some connection between himself and his land, such that a triumph or a disaster there would be taken as personally as if it had happened to him directly. This is the internal agent of nationalism, that one feels so much a part of his country that the land and the landmarks are extensions of the body. In this way, it is in the soil of identity that citizenship plants its feet, rooting itself in the character of a person yet being sustained by the character of the nation. Thus demonstrated, I would advocate that a weighty part of the definition of global citizenship should reflect this same type of an emotional resonance: a recognition that the world sometimes faces calamity that is somehow intolerable, that it affects a person intimately and meaningfully, and that it becomes of paramount importance to act intentionally to correct the problem. In a very important way, global citizenship is nothing more than taking the globe to be home in the same way that we have traditionally taken nations.

Thus conceived, there are many things that we can infer about how a global citizen must act, and we can delineate the myriad ways that the definitions that have been given by so many scholars are necessary, yet insufficient. In order to keep this essay to a readable length, I will only briefly address some of the most frequent suggestions about what makes up global citizenship, and I will discuss how those fit into the three marginalized terms that I mentioned above. I will also show how it is that those terms are each valuable, but how those ultimately fall short of garnering the solution-oriented mindset that the global citizenship I have defined seems to afford. For the duration of this essay, the idea of global issues or world problems or some such language will be applied, and each of these should be taken to mean some hazard that affects the planet as a body of land on which we all live. In some ways, the definition which I will put forward will be equally workable for solutions to calamities which affect humanity although this is not my express intent, nor do I believe that global citizenship as such should encompass this mode of action. For this type of duty, that is, our responsibility to protect each other and humanity, we might devise some other term, or refer to others which presently exist, such as the ethic of care, a popular tenet of feminist theory and many modern prima facie ethical discussions.

Some of the most commonly suggested terms are perhaps the first to come to academic minds because of their ease to defend, when imagining the sort of world that a mentor would like to create for this pupils. Such suggestions included to build in an emphasis on learning at least one foreign language, participating in study abroad, executing a service project, being able to respect and appreciate other cultures, and possessing a willingness to engage and overcome the differences that one sees between himself and another. These are surely each respectable traits for an individual to have, but they constitute different terms than global citizenship, and if we settle for these as adequate definitions for that term in question, we cheat our way out of rightful ownership of certain universal problems.

In the first place, learning a foreign language does not make a person any more accomplished in the area of addressing a solution that faces the globe. Perhaps a common language would facilitate communication between two parties who engaged a problem together, but increased ease is the only benefit: this commonality would not encourage a certain worldview or additionally persuade a person to be able to address any global problem. It would not be too much to suggest that learning a foreign language might make a person too confident that he is able to identify with the plight or concerns of a people, given that he can already identify with them in some fundamental way. But this presumption would be out of order: it does not follow that two people who are able to communicate with each other are any more likely than any two others to be tightly knit in kinship; look plainly at the existence of civil war to support this fact. It seems absolutely proper to suggest that learning a foreign language is a helpful skill, and even a helpful exercise; but perhaps only in the area of multi-national competence or cultural affinity or something of the sort, because the new skill might spark within a student the passion for travel, or might be taught concurrently with a history course which discussed the country in greater detail. And even if the language is learned with no attention to any other subject, the student is at least able to understand a variety of new texts, navigate a new space, and perform other tasks which might somehow brighten his life. But he is not a global citizen; he is a citizen of more or perhaps two countries, who can trek through either with equal ease, but he does not necessarily care an inch about the rest. Surely, then, he cannot consider himself to be a citizen of the globe any more than he can consider himself to be a lemur.

The misstep of second suggestion echoes that of the first, in the sense that it is simply a physical instance of this tendency towards familiarizing oneself with elements of a foreign culture, and as such, is incomplete. However, just the same as the last example fell short, I cannot see how it is that participation in a study abroad session would necessarily make a student any more than a long-term traveler, which does nothing to demonstrate care about the country which he visits, and none the more for the globe, with which we are more specifically concerned. It is easy to support and prudent to object that traveling to another country would infuse some of that country’s values or tendencies into the traveler, thus making him likelier to be a more socially apt individual; but after all, certainly the opposite might be true. For it cannot be that every student who travels to another country enjoys his experience and internalizes the great truth that cultural diversity is a beautiful occasion of the vibrance of the human appetite. A student abroad is entirely capable, just as any traveler is, of finding something repulsive in the people of the nation he inhabits, and would thus return with a certain distaste for inter-cultural fluency. Notwithstanding, even the best study abroad experience could not ensure that a student would transition from an average collegiate to a global citizen, because travel and cultural savvy do not by themselves constitute, nor would they necessarily engender, a perspective centered around addressing a calamity that faces the world, as if it were just the same as a nation with which he so strongly identified.

Perhaps performing a service project most closely approaches what would count as global citizenship, but only because of the ambiguity of the term. Depending on the aim of the project, service could indeed count as the exercising an act of global citizenship, although it must be service of a certain specific type. It is obvious that ideal service to humankind in whatever form is beneficial to those whom it targets; this is plain to see, and moreover its negation would not serve to disprove the thesis of this essay, so we need not to waste time bickering about whether a particular sort of service is efficient, or whether it cares for the proper people, or any other argument which condemns its practice. In order to count as global citizenship, it seems as if the type of service has obvious constraints: it must act to somehow mend a pressing concern which affects the planet, or it must in other words be aimed at relief of an ailment--such as global warming, oceanic carbonation, overfishing, et al.--which afflicts the physical space of the world, and by implication, our success in it. But the focus must always be external, and founded upon the notion that we must be mindful of the deleterious effect that we constantly exact on a global scale. It is this wording that brings into light a chief concern that I have about generating global citizens, in the sense that I suggest: it seems to be necessarily implicit that if someone cares about the earth itself being in danger, he also cares about human beings being in danger. In other words, it does not seem possible to care about the condition of the earth and nonetheless maintain that humans are not germane to the conversation; it would be difficult to suggest that the planet should exist for its own sake, and that our collective existence should not rightly be considered. However, too liberal of a conception of the notion of care for humankind reduces the composition of a global citizen to the suggest elements which this essay contests; in other words, the notion that service is important serves to highlight the crucial fact that care for humankind is a tangent of global citizenship, but the one does not collapse into the other, nor does the one exist when the other is too prominent.

Two suggestions which sounded incredibly valuable actually carried little weight when constructing a definition of global citizenship, although in another way, they do give global citizenship some meaning. Being able to respect and appreciate other cultures, and possessing a willingness to engage and overcome the differences that one sees between himself and another are certainly relevant to any iteration of talks about two groups of nearly any stripe, but the old objection still holds: these consider relations between people, and miss entirely what seems to be the aim of global citizenship. Instead, as I have suggested already, these cherished characteristics should instead be members of a list of traits which describe ideal peacekeepers, or empathetic diplomats, but surely they are of little consequence when considering our relationship to the planet on which we find ourselves. One sort of term is needed for this interpersonal type of cultivation; quite another is needed to reflect a need for attention to global ailments.

It may be interesting to note here, that much of my conception of a global citizen has a focus which is distinctly reactive, preventative, defensive. This might come from my generally radical approach to how I perceive the world, an attitude which philosophically resembles having constantly to put out fires. Let me then very clearly aim my effort here at ringing the alarm on two distinct fires, thus calling attention to a division which the whole of the conversation about global citizenship seems to miss. There should be one set of terms, along with unique descriptions and goals, for the sort of individual that the conversation about global citizenship has, until now, seemed to describe: a person whom, if we were all a bit more like him, would transmogrify us to a more compassionate, understanding, patient people, and not the least bit xenophobic or ethnocentric. There should be quite another set of terms devoted to the discussion of what it properly means to be a global citizen, that is, a person who considers himself to be a member of the world just as much as he is a member of his nation or his family, and who takes quite seriously any impending misfortune which he can see will befall the planet, with effective respect towards the care for, excellence of, and betterment of humankind.

The persistent theme to be seen in these suggestions is that they are each of them new skills that the educator who mentioned it seeks to instill into his student; or at best, they are passions which the educator believes will make the person more well-rounded, capable of creating a better world. Each of these is probably a fair position to hold, but it no further demonstrates the definition of what it means to be a global citizen, because these oft-mentioned traits only misappropriate the term under examination. The error they encounter is that they each circumvent the crux of the simple language, which can perhaps be understood just a bit better if it is phrased differently: we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be a citizen, and then, to make the debated definition a practical one, how is it that a citizen of the globe itself would react to a global hazard, given what we know about what it is to be a citizen. In this way, we establish first a definition and then a test, the latter acting as sort of a metric for the former, and each further validated because the other is logically taut and pragmatic. After all, it is unreasonable for us to expect to solve for ourselves the great calamities which now clearly face both our globe and our race, if we neglect to establish a language which properly directs those who are charged with solving such problems.