The Case for Global Citizenship

The phrase "We're all citizens of Mother Earth" may ring hopelessly idealistic to many, but the concept of global citizenship is taking on a new vitality and practicality in the current age of globalization, mobility and geopolitical instability.

Probably the most visible aspect of this is the rise of dual citizenship. Many people now enjoy full legal status as citizens of two (and sometimes more) countries. Once frowned on by most national governments, dual citizenship is now increasingly tolerated and in some cases encouraged by countries that let citizens retain their original citizenship when they become naturalized citizens of another country.

Although the people who are going about with two or three passports in their pockets may not think of themselves as global citizens in an idealistic sense, they have moved into a new terrain where the sense of national identity is less clear than it once was.

The basic idea of membership in a universal society that transcends all others is as old as the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome. Today, it is being revived as part of a widespread move toward new social contracts, new ways for people to understand their political allegiances, rights and obligations.

It is a subject of intense interest among the world's ethicists who, dismayed by the seemingly endless clashes of nationalities, races, cultures and religions, search for a common ground of minimal values and norms for all. Some ethicists are secular; others are theologians such as Hans Kung of Germany, president of the Global Ethic Foundation, whose objective is to advance dialogue among the world's religions. "No peace among the nations without peace among the religions" is one of his basic propositions.

It is being explored by political thinkers, who are trying to make sense of what is often called a "post-Westphalian" world -- no longer divided neatly into sovereign nation-states, as Europe was in the years following the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, but instead turned into a complex tangle of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, networks, corporations and regimes. In this new world, says Richard Falk of Princeton, people no longer have one clear allegiance but rather an "emergent matrix of citizenship, complex, uneven and fluid."

And global citizenship is being explored by ordinary people who need to figure out what to identify with, what kind of a position to take amid all the political conflicts swirling about the world, and where to turn in the search for justice. This need becomes particularly intense, even desperate, for the countless migrants, refugees, travelers and tourists who find themselves far from their countries of birth and required to rely on foreign governments or international organizations.

There was a time when a person had rights as a citizen of his or her own country, but not much in other places. Now all people have rights -- at least on paper -- in all countries, guaranteed by the many treaties that have been negotiated since the end of World War II. That change, although far from being put into universal practice, is slowly redefining the legal status of all people and the obligations of all national governments.

It may be that "citizenship" isn't even the best term for describing the new patterns of identity and allegiance, rights and obligations springing up in the world. Some people invent words like "denizenship" to describe the rights of resident noncitizens in foreign countries, or "netizen" to describe the growing importance of "virtual communities" of cyberspace that have no geographic locus.

"Cosmopolitan," another term with a long history, is also being dusted off and put to use as a way of making some sense of the new realities. David Held of the London School of Economics, an eloquent spokesman for this perspective, writes about the emergence of "cosmopolitan governance" in which people have multiple citizenships -- memberships in the various local, regional, national and global systems that impact their lives.

Another, more personal way of looking at cosmopolitanism in 21st-century terms is to stress people's freedom to create new identities for themselves, choosing from the many options available from the world's cultures and lifestyles, or, as Jason Hill, a young Jamaican-born philosopher puts it, "the right to forget where you came from."

Whatever global (or cosmopolitan) citizenship is, it is not simply a matter of renouncing all previous ties and pledging allegiance to the United Nations or to some yet-to-be-invented world government. The people around the world who are searching for a new understanding don't expect that to happen in the foreseeable future. They are articulating a vision in which national citizenship is still real and important, but no longer the powerful definer of personal identity it once was.

This understanding is as yet embryonic, unformed, nowhere near as solidly defined as citizenship was in the very recent past. We know what we were, but, as we advance haltingly into the 21st century, we are no longer certain what we may become.

Walter Truett Anderson (waltt@well.com) is a political scientist and author of "All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization" (Westview Press, 2001), which will be issued in a new paperback edition this summer.