Social Justice Usage
Source: United Nations
Global citizenship is the umbrella term for social, political, environmental, and economic actions of globally minded individuals and communities on a worldwide scale. The term can refer to the belief that individuals are members of multiple, diverse, local and non-local networks rather than single actors affecting isolated societies. Promoting global citizenship in sustainable development will allow individuals to embrace their social responsibility to act for the benefit of all societies, not just their own.
The concept of global citizenship is embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals though SDG 4: Insuring Inclusive and Quality Education for All and Promote Life Long Learning, which includes global citizenship as one of its targets. By 2030, the international community has agreed to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including global citizenship. Universities have a responsibility to promote global citizenship by teaching their students that they are members of a large global community and can use their skills and education to contribute to that community.
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Source: McCarthy, Joe. “What Exactly Does It Mean to Be a ‘Global Citizen’?” GlobalCitizen.org
At its core, being a Global Citizen means believing that extreme poverty can be eliminated, and that the resources to end it can be mobilized if enough people take action. It means learning about the systemic inequalities that fuel poverty — racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and economic inequalities — and joining us in taking action to overcome these in a way that’s sustainable. Most importantly, it means realizing that when we use our voices together, we are powerful and we can ensure lasting change in the mission to defeat poverty, demand equity, and defend the planet. Global Citizens recognize the power of advocacy, of shining a light on overlooked issues to rally people worldwide and mobilize ongoing support from those that can drive real change — governments, the private sector, philanthropists, and everyday citizens. We recognize advocacy as a tool that complements the vital work of on-the-ground organizations to ensure access to food and water, education, health care, and more, for the communities most in need. And we also recognize advocacy as a vital part of the mission not only to respond to humanitarian crises, but to help prevent them in a way that’s long-term and sustainable.
New Discourses Commentary
Despite the rising popularity of the term, there is no such thing as a “global citizen.” Citizenship refers to the relationship between a government and the people who are recognized as being governed by that government, usually expressed in terms of rights, duties, privileges, and expectations on both parties. As there is no global government with any legitimate sociopolitical authority over the globe, no such relationship exists for any people on Earth. Therefore, “global citizen” is, at best, an unwise misnomer, and, at worst, a purposeful and purposefully deceptive fiction.
The term “global citizen” is used heavily in various aspirational texts recently, especially in education, which is misframed as being purposed for raising and educating (future) global citizens. The purpose of this widespread and increasing use of the term is likely its normalization, which will be discussed further below after explaining the two sides of a potential equivocation in play around its meaning. The people intentionally using the fictitious term want people to think of themselves as global citizens and want children to be raised not only to think of themselves this way too but also to have adopted a “global consciousness” that outlines the duties and rights that global citizenship might entail. Because it can take on a very specific technical meaning implying these rights and duties, people adopting this term should think carefully about what it actually entails.
The term “global citizen” currently has two obvious meanings, and these are easily equivocated between. One of these is technical and important; the other is colloquial and inaccurate. The existence of these two meanings—one “cute” and popular with an unreflective public and one with specific technical meaning implying certain duties and the extension or retraction of privileges by a sovereign in exchange—must be recognized. (Indeed, this circumstance matches the activist application of what Nicholas Shackel described as a “equivocating fulcrum” in his 2005 paper “The Vacuity of Postmodern Methodology.”)
The important technical one signifies nothing currently in existence. As there is no global sovereign to be in a meaningful governing relationship to any people, the technical meaning of “global citizen” refers to no one. The less important colloquial one is either a misnomer or a purposeful deception—and given the quantity of deliberate activism on behalf of this term and concept, it is likely to be a purposeful deception used by some to take advantage of those for whom it is an unwise misnomer. It is a fanciful way of describing a consciously quasi-cosmopolitan life in a world that is interconnected globally, both physically by virtue of air travel and communicatively through the Internet and Social Media. People like to think of themselves as “global citizens” when what they actually mean is “self-conscious denizen or resident of the globe,” meaning someone who lives on planet Earth, usually with a mind to some degree of international awareness and communication. This is an important distinction, and equivocation between or conflation of these two understandings is manipulative.
To understand the manipulation in this equivocation, readers should note that everyone is a denizen or resident of the globe, and so this use of the term describes no one in particular while seeming to describe certain people more than others—those with an elevated “global” consciousness. Indeed, the notion that one can be educated as a global citizen depends on the idea that it extends from an elevated consciousness of precisely this type. This situation should be read as a warning because it designates people who adopt a certain mindset as somehow being superior at being something that everyone already is by default. People in such positions are often used for totalitarian purposes.
A pretense of global citizenship already exists, though the governing entities to which it refers, for instance the United Nations, do not have the power to enact either side of the citizenship agreement. Though thinking in terms of “global impact,” whether environmental, social, or economic, is treated as a de facto duty for “global citizens,” for example, this expectation is wholly voluntary and in no way binding (at present). Any such binding agreement is actually between voluntary member nations and their citizens, and even then, it is only binding up to the point of that nation’s government being included in the internationalist or globalist body in question. Similarly, and on the other hand, statements like universal declarations of human rights are offered in exchange for willing participation (at the level of states, not individuals) in these duties, though any securing of these rights or enforcement upon their violations is also carried out by the member states. In other words, global citizenship is only a fictional simulacrum of citizenship (that is, an artificial facsimile of citizenship in which the real citizenship it seems to point to cannot be located at all).
One might guess at the purposes behind normalizing the concept of and term “global citizen.” People who think of themselves as global citizens already may enact the alleged duties of that status regardless of the ephemeral nature of the alleged rights secured and privileges granted. For example, claiming “global citizenship” status will not grant you access through immigration in any country in the world, nor should it. For that to work would require dissolving the most essential concept of a nation at all—a geopolitical region with the right and capacity to define and maintain its borders from other regions and to uphold the laws defined within those borders. Furthermore, people who think of themselves as global citizens may welcome or even invite the power of a “global sovereign” that will possess the authority to secure their rights or grant them privileges (above the heads of their home states). In other words, people who already think of themselves vaguely as “global citizens” may find themselves accepting of a global sovereign that promises to make good on that relationship. At that point, we would find ourselves with a world government. The term “global citizen” therefore cannot be considered without recognizing its potential to falsely justify the undercritical acceptance of a world government through equivocation and conflation (i.e., word games).
Revision date: 11/28/22
