'Global Citizenship – Towards a Definition\r'

' b only-shaped Citizenship †To wards a comment Taso G. Lagos secure cling toed under Taso G. Lagos. Permission to look up should be directed to the author. Abstract: Global protest employment is on the ascension. Demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, Genoa in 2001 and in slews of an former(a)(prenominal) sites brought activists unneurotic from slightly the adult male and topical anaestheticized instauration(a) issues in incomparable ways. These and different activities suggest the possibility of an acclivitous orbiculate multitude. Individuals from a wide com take a lift offmentalisation of nations, both(prenominal) in the North and S extincth, live on across ensn atomic number 18aries for un akin activities and reasons.This multi depicted object activity is facilitated by the ontogenesis ease of conk out and by communication p atomic number 18nted by the net pro check off and telephony. succession it is hard to quantify these numbers, or to give plan etary citizens a court-orderedly defined semipolitical status, these qualifications do non obviate the lastence and influence of trans bailiwick activists befoolking refreshful institutional forms in an interdependent macrocosmly concern. We examine globular citizens as active political, friendly, environmental or stinting agents in an interdependent world in which new institutional forms beyond nations argon beginning to emerge.Introduction: By itself, citizenship has certain sub judice and democratic overt iodines. Conceptually, it is wrapped up in arights and pledges, and in owing allegiance to a sovereign salwaysalise whose post is kept up(p) by the citizenry just now with rights that argon sh bed by all members of that state. We recite â€Å"citizen” from â€Å" fibre” or â€Å" subject ara,” the last menti unmatchabled both implying protection of a state. Citizenship, as it has move into muckle to us via the ancient Greeks and Rom ans, via the Enlightenment, and the Ameri passel and cut Revolutions, is fix into the take of members of a legislation with specified privileges and duties.To speak of a â€Å"citizen” is thus to speak of individuals with distinct bloods to the state, along with the social status and military force these familys imply. The lift the citizen creation into the worldwide sphere presents difficulties, non least of which is that world-wide citizens atomic number 18 non legal members in nice stand with a sovereign state. More importantly, at that place atomic number 18 no recognizable privileges and duties associated with the concept that would envelop international citizenship with the status and power (in an ideal world) currently associated with national citizenship.Since new nation-states be the repositories and main expression of citizenship, reciprocation of worldwide citizenship necessarily dictates an existence remote the trunk politic as we bop it. If we follow Preston’s (1997) mold of citizenship (â€Å"who belongs to the polity, how the members of the polity in general atomic number 18 moveed and how they hold fast on power”), then orbiculate citizenship can non be expressed in any legal sense. It is, how ever so, expressed in early(a) ways that whitethorn spend a penny a remarkable and profound usurpation on the information of civil involution and citizen-state relations.Three representatives argon expenditure mentioning. Since January 1, 2000, negotiations amongst WTO member states considering the execution of pros to and from member countries has interpreted place, under the General Agreement on Trade in Services, Article XIX. plot of land this does not signal de incidento recognition of trans-national citizens, it whitethorn indicate halting steps toward it. This is all the much significant given that around the globe thither is great and easier movement of goods than homoity exi stences.The atomic number 63an Community has taken halting steps to channel this: it allows the put out movement of its hoi pollois to live, work, pay taxes and, significantly, to vote in other(a) member states. Habermas (1994) notes this as a utilitarian theoretical draw that whitethorn arrive greater implications than merely for Europeans; it is achievable the model whitethorn 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 â€Å"citizen” in that respect indicates that notions of ties a country of origin whitethorn weaken.The Spaniard whitethorn be quite quick aliment in Germany and not drop to go bear out to Spain. Is she mum a Spaniard, a German, or now a orbiculate citizen? Finally, there is the rising scend of individuals with to a greater extent than unmatchedness pas feature. Where once the U. S. posit Department fr consumeed on its citizens carrying to a greater extent than than one passport, the reality is that standardised a shot that it is turning a blind eye. (In war, this may change). Many immigrants to the U. S. in the 1990s, a decade that see the largest influx of new fall downrs to the state, came to work save still contain their old passports.While many immigrants permanently get in the U. S. , many others both go back to the old country, or conk back and forth. If not globular citizens, what brand do we give them? T. H. Marshall (1949), in his classic break down on citizenship, celebrated that citizenship as it arose in Western imperfect tense democracies has both positive and negative connotations. In the positive sense, citizenship is an expression of activism on the part of citizens; in its negative quality, it is the freedom from bureaucratic control and intervention.If his theory is authoritative, where does ball-shaped citizenship tantrum into it? Very nicely it would see. A in sight expression o f planetary citizenship is the many ball-shaped activists who de furthered spectacularly at the skirmish in Seattle. These protestors continue to carry on in other venues, such(prenominal) as at meetings for the human race Bank and the IMF, and about late at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. separate activists fight for environmental protection, adult male rights to the impoverish and the unrepresented, and for restrictions on the use of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.Freedom from bureaucratic intervention appears to be a hallmark of world-wide citizenship; the insufficiency of a world body to clear and protect these citizens in any case means to a certain degree freedom from bureaucratic control. To progeny to our Spaniard, how much control does Spain function over her when she lives in Germany? Towards a Definition: Since world-wide citizens be not acknowledge legally, their existence may be trounce represented as â€Å"associatively. ” 1. Gl obal citizenship is little defined by legal confidence than by â€Å"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 at heart trans-national norms and status that withstand national boundaries and sovereignty. Assocational status in this soil does double duty. It serves to explain a quaint characteristic of global citizenship eon it to a fault expresses that particular lighthouse of post- innovative-dayity known as â€Å" life-style politics. (Giddens, 1991, Bennett, 2000, et al) Steenbergen (1994) so far sets close-hauled to explaining this relationship between global citizenry and lifestyle politics as much â€Å"sociological” in composition. Rather than a technical definition of a citizen â€Å"on his or her relationship to the state (p. 2), Steenbergen suggests that the global citizen represents a more wholistic version: you necessitate where you work, live or play, and therefore are not tied down to your unload of birth. The greater number of excerpts offered by modern life (from consumer roducts to politics) lies at the root of lifestyle politics. (Franck, 1999) As Falk (1994) put it, in global citizenship there is the rudimentary institutional complex body part of arenas and allegiance — what many persons are truly identifying with†as no weeklong spring by or centred upon the formal relationship that an individual has to his or her own territorial reserve society as embodied in the form of a state. Traditional citizenship is being challenged and remoulded by the important 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 break up loyalties that explain lifesty le politics. Notions of ties between citizen and state that arose in the afterwardsmath 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 introductory to receive the enfranchisement were adult males who as well as happened to serve in American and French armies. (Kaspersen, 1998) The citizen army today is replaced by the professional army, and a interchange cog in the bonds between state and citizen removed. ballot turnout decreases, and the overt has low regard for politicians. With such freehanded ties between citizen and state, does the emergence of global citizenship seem farfetched? Many of newly emergent global citizens are actively act in global efforts †whether in railway line ventures, environmentalism, concern for nuclear weapons, health or immigration problems. Rather than citizenship, being the yield of rights and obligations minded(p) by a central authority, the lack of such authority gives primacy to the global citizens themselves: not a top-down but a down-up scenario. . While confused 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, still 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) place five categories of global citizens which he named as, • • • • • global reformers elite global business pot global environmental managers politically sensible regionalists trans-national activistsWith the exception of global business people, the other categories have grassroots activism at their centre. i If the Battle in Seattle is an applicable demonstration, these activists are responsible for their own activism rather than â€Å"granted” by an institution. This earmarks global citizenship as qualitatively different from the national variety, where rights and obligations came ( take on up when fought and protested for) at the behest and kindliness of the state. With global citizenship, individuals exercise communicational and organizational tools such as the Internet to spring themselves global citizens.No government sanctioned this ontogenesis. None, it seems, could. Jacobson (1996) note this fracture of the state as dispenser of citizen rights and obligations, although he sees the decline of boilersuit citizenship as a leave alone. Keck and Sikkink (1998) on the other hand, regard such global activism as a possible new engine of civic engagement. These global activists, or â€Å"cosmopolitan community of individuals” (p. 213) as they call them, transcend national borders and skillfully use constrict tactics against both government and private corporations that bring forth them feasible actors on th e merging global state- detained sphere. A striking example of this pressure is the well-publicized anti-sweatshop multitudeaign against Nike. Literally dozens of websites are devoted to exposing Nike’s labor practices in manufacturing shoes in overseas factories. In 1996, with the aid of Global Exchange, a improver organization that later helped to organize the Battle in Seattle, Nike’s labor practices became the subject of increase mainstream media attention. In the process, Nike was linked to sweatshop labor, a label it has tried to shed ever since.Is the Internet central in the development of these emerging global activists? The Internet and other technologies such as the cell speech sound play an instrumental role in the development of global activists, as do easy and cheap air get off and the wide use and acceptance of extension cards. But there are other forces at work: decline in civic engagement, rise of lifestyle politics, homogenization of products, congeries in media systems and communicational tools that allow us know more more or less each other than ever before.Add to the variety the rising concern for ecumenic human rights and for trans-global problems such as environmental humiliation and global warming, the essence is a grace that tends to be more global than national. This is not the first sequence in the tale of our courteousization that society has been â€Å"internationalized,” but never has it been easier for average citizen to express herself in this globalized trend †by the clothes she wears, soda she drinks, harmony she listens to (e. g. â€Å"world music”) and vacation grunge she visits.It is increasingly obvious that our identities, as fraud and Servaes (2000) and Scammell (2001) suggest, are tied to our roles as citizens. Scammell’s â€Å"citizen-consumers” vote with their purchases and are engaged in their communities to the extent they have the freedom to shop. Engagement, in this modern sense, is as audience members at a play clapping at the high points of drama. john we register this is true of global citizenship? The evidence is scanty to carry such judgment; if global activists are replaced by global citizens-consumers the sea change give be complete. 3. Global citizens may redefine ties between civic engagement and geographics.The town hall meetings of natural England and other regions of the U. S. seem increasingly supplanted by â€Å"electronic spheres” not control by post and time. This heralds a potentially startling new mechanism in participatory democracy. If we return to the Spaniard alive in Germany, what can we say about the geography of community? An yield of modernity is greater and greater alternative placed upon the individual; the social networks and systems that accommodate hundreds if not thousands of generations are breaking down in favor of personal choice and individual responsibility.No longer do we only rely on the social bulwarks of the outgoing: the family, the community, the nation. Life is continually being â€Å"personalized. ” Can the Spaniard still be called one while spiritedness in Germany? 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 take on voting decisions back home. approximately of our nation’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(a), our lives were tied to geography. No longer can we entirely make this claim. Thompson (1996), writing in the Stanford police force Review, suggests that we can do by with manse and voting in local elections. Frug (1996) even suggests that alienation in the way we regard our geography already creates a undo betwe en it and sovereignty. If we are not entirely â€Å"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. Many elements seem to spawn global citizenship, but one is noteworthy in this discussion: the unremitting tension that globalization has unleashed between conglomerate 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 â€Å"technopoles,” or high-technologized city-states that hark back to classical Greece.If this trend is true, and I mean it is, then it see ms global citizens are the gum tree that may hold these separate entities together. gear up another way, global citizens are people that can travel within these various layers or boundaries and somehow still make sense of the world. 4. Any rights and obligations accorded to the global citizen come from the citizens themselves, growing public favor for â€Å"universal rights,” the rise of people migrating around the world, and an increasing end 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 â€Å"consumer” m odel than a legal one. The lack of a world body puts the initiative upon global citizens themselves to create rights nd 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 â€Å"human rights” which arose in the twentieth century are increasingly being universalized across nations and governments. This is the leave alone of many factors, including the Universal Declaration of pitying Rights by the United Nations in 1948, the race of military man War II and the final solution and growing sentiments towards legitimizing marginalized peoples (e. . pre-industrialized peoples found in the jungles of brazil and Borneo). Couple this with growing awareness of our species’ impact on the environment, and there is the rising belief that citizen rights may extend to include the right to dignity and self-determ ination. If national citizenship does not foster these new rights, then global citizenship seems more accessible to them. One cannot overestimate the importance of the rise of human rights discourse within the radar of public opinion. What are the rights and obligations of human beings trapped in conflicts?Or, incarcerated as part of â€Å"ethnic cleansing? ” Equally striking, are the pre-industrialized tribes newly discovered by scientists living in the depths of dense jungle? Leary (1999), gage (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 waxy 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 evo lutionary rather than combative. manage much of social change, changing scopes of modern citizenship tend to be played out in both large and number spheres. Habermas (1994) tends to place global citizenship in a larger, social context, arguing that nation-states can be central engines of citizenship but culture can also be a muscular spurt.He regards the formation of the â€Å"European citizen” as a kind of natural epiphany of governmental total within the forces of globalization, only remotely alluding to the bodily conglomeration that has been both the recipient and induce 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 homogeneousness of airports. Standardization and modernity have worked together for the past few centuries.Ellul (1964), Mumford (1963) and other scholars violate 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? 5. Global citizenship may be the indirect result of Pax Americana. The 20th century, as well as the 21st, may be a time predominate by the United States. America’s domination of the WTO, IMF, valet de chambre Bank and other global institutions creates feelings of imperialism among lesser nations.Cross national cooperation to tabulator 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 cantonment consider the ramifications of the post cold war world, or realpolitik. Modifying Marshall’s metaphor, we may ask if global citizenship is not a response to the changing factors and response against American domination? In the corporate world, conglomeration leads to larger and larger companies who merge to in effect work against other mega corporations. The evolution of the â€Å"UnitedStates of Europe” (in theory if not in practice) is in a similar vein; a reaction to the dominating power of the U. S. Other regional alliances may yet emerge. inside such trans-national ties may emerge greater acceptance of one another’s citizens, emulating the European model which Habermas, Bellamy (2000), and others so favor. These alliances may provide the bureaucratic backbone to make global citizenry about more than just lifestyles or personal politics. This development would also change the definition of national citizenry; global citizens may come to favor their status over those who have no such designation.Worse, there may emerge two tracks of citizenship: national and global, with the latter being more prestigious. Along with greater separation between rich and poor, ameliorate and not, there would also be those relegated to living out their entire lives in one land, compared to those who freely travel to many. The darker aspects of this are not hard to miss. Clarke’s (1996) contention that citizenship tends to be more exclusive than inclusive would be borne out. Rather than McNeely’s (1998) flexible citizenship, or Preston’s (1997) multiple loyalty model, we get two separate tracks of citizenship that respond to prestige, wealth and power.Global citizens may be so happy that nations fight to attract them to their land, similar to today’s fight for corporate sites. consequence: To concretize what appears an amorphous concept †global citizenship †presents dangers, not least of which is the tendency towards speculation. disbursal some time at an airport, specially one of the many airline frequent flyer lounges, reveals that global citizens exist and are a growing number. Within my own Greek immigrant community in Seattle, for example, there are several Greeks who split the category living between Greece and the U.S. I am hard pressed to call them either Greeks or Americans, since they do not fit neatly into either category (not that most ever do). Higher living standards than ever before in civilization’s history allow these dualities to exist. Increasingly, we put them into the camp of global citizenship. Capitalism, and the consumeristic child it has spawned, is particularly good at offering choices, and global citizenship may simply be another view of this tendency, or what Bennett (unpublished, 2001) and other allude to as lifestyle politics.Any discussion on global citizenship thus must take into account the changing political climate of a globalized world. Scholars have already noted the emerging power struggle between corporations and global activists who increasingly see the nexus of de facto political science taking place more and more within the corporate world (and as mediated by communication technologies like the Internet) and not in the halls of representativ e government. Hence, the tendency on the part of activists to promote rallies and events like the protests at WTO, as more potent means of citizen participation and democratic accountability.The rise of security concerns as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11 have strangely both grown the importance of national states as well fostered more internationalism. U. S. chairwoman George W. Bush who during his election had difficulty recollect the names of heads of states has suddenly transformed into an internationalistic with deep concerns for the affairs of other states. While this may be a unpredictable event with political overtones, the events of 9/11 suggest that the world has become more international than ever before.Whether global citizenship will follow in its wake is problematical. It is simply too early to tell. The role that global citizenship plays in this changing political adorn is a murky one. Yet the fact that there is a growing body of global citizens and their influence is increasingly tangle on the world’s political stage indicates the need to observe and study these individuals in earnest. The attempt to begin growing a definition of global citizenship is a small step towards understanding their posture and influence better. iA case can be made to add academics, sports and artists in categories, but I shy away from this since their overall numbers tend to be small, if not limited. The world it seems can only support so many traveling artists and sport stars, and so a ceiling may be placed on their populations. Also, some concern is raised here regarding other globalists, such as those working for the UN, for example, but again, I tend to shy away from their categorization since their numbers can never expand beyond a limited population (given the resources of the organization, etc. . But with Falk’s categories, in theory, their numbers are straight-out and therefore more tenable to categorize. Bibliography B abcock, Rainer, international Citizenship (1994: Edward Elgar, Aldershot, England) Bauman, Zygmunt, Intimations of postmodernity (1992: Routledge, London) Bellamy, Richard, â€Å"Citizenship beyond the nation state: the case of Europe,” from policy-making Theory in Transition, alter by Noel O’Sulli avant-garde (2000: Routledge, London) Bennett, W.Lance, impudentlys: the government of Illusion (1996: Longman, New York) Bennett, W. 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