Globalization and Global Citizenship

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Irene Langran, Tammy Birk, Irene Langran, Tammy Birk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138941335
• eBook ISBN: 9781317377108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization and Global Citizenship examines the meaning and realities of global citizenship as a manifestation of recent trends in globalization. In an interdisciplinary approach, the chapters outline and analyse the most significant dimensions of global citizenship, including transnational, historical, and cultural variations in its practice; foreign and domestic policy influences; and its impact on personal identities. The contributions ask and explore questions that are of immediate relevance for today's scholars, including:

• How does globalization in its current form present a new set of challenges for states, non-state actors, and individual citizens?
• How has globalization diminished, expanded, or complicated notions of citizenship?
• What rights could exist outside the context of state sovereignty?
• How can social accountability be imagined beyond the borders of towns, cities, or states?
• What forms of political representational legitimacy could be productive on the global level?
• When is it useful, possible or desirable for individuals to identify with global political communities?

Drawing together a broad range of contributors and cutting edge research the volume offers chapters that seek to reflect the full spectrum of approaches and topics, providing a valuable resource which highlights the value of an extended and thoughtful study of the idea and practice of global citizenship within a broader consideration of the processes of globalization. It will be of great use to graduates and scholars of international relations, sociology, and global studies/affairs, as well as globalization.

Part I

Conceptual and historical contexts

Introduction to Part I

Tammy Birk

The chapters in Part I introduce foundational ideas and central debates about the relationship between global citizenship, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. We know that globalization has been challenging traditional forms of national civic identity and attachment. Whether we praise its promotion of cultural hybridity or criticize its erasure of particularity, globalization is steadily rewriting our relationship to civic belonging. Alternative models of citizenship – global, cosmopolitan, flexible – are emerging at the same time that exclusively national frameworks for civic participation and obligations are becoming less persuasive.

Part I opens with an overview of the historical conversation on global citizenship as well as the complex and changing status of global citizenship in a world shaped by globalization. Later chapters focus their attention on the impact of these new understandings of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism on education. We will examine the benefits of a critical cosmopolitan framework for global learning in higher education; the links between rapidly evolving technology, transnational advocacy, and educational practice; and the gains of a post-colonial perspective when defining the reach of global citizenship education.

April Carter begins Part I by exploring how Western and Eastern religious traditions have claimed and complicated the ethical commitments central to global citizenship. In “Historical Origins of Global Citizenship”, Carter also traces how the concept of a universal moral law found expression in codes (and courts) of international law and the Stoic world citizen has shaped international movements against slavery and war.

In “Global Citizenship in a Post-Westphalian Age”, Irene Langran examines the varying dimensions of citizenship. The chapter considers the implications of the political shifts of a post-Westphalian age for new conceptions of global citizenship. It also discusses complex aspirations for global governance, the form and feasibility of a global political community, and the role of rights, obligations, and political legitimacy in a world that globalization is redefining.

Tammy Birk defines and explores the central features of critical cosmopolitan teaching and learning in “Critical Cosmopolitanism as a New Paradigm for Global Learning”. As a socially relevant and transformative language for global learning, this chapter argues that critical cosmopolitanism can help refine, deepen, and complicate the shared conversation about global citizenship as well as ask new questions about the complex role that globalization plays in encouraging new forms of belonging.

In “Technology’s Role in Global Citizenship Education”, Elizabeth Langran and Irene Langran examine the historical and contemporary use of technology in transnational advocacy, with particular attention to the rise of social network participation. While technology can play a key role in supporting global citizenship and civic engagement, they argue that it also has the potential to spread misinformation, division, and inequality.

Both Karen Pashby and David Jefferess ask important and challenging questions about the representation of global citizenship in educational policies and practices that are designed to address injustice and promote humanitarian action. Specifically focused on global citizenship education, both writers interrogate given assumptions of the field and seek to decolonize its premises. Pashby’s “The Global, Citizenship, and Education as Discursive Fields: Towards Disrupting the Reproduction of Colonial Systems of Power” considers the risks of ignoring taken-for-granted colonial systems of power and failing to interrogate good intentions in global citizenship education initiatives. David Jefferess’s “Cosmopolitan Appropriation or Learning? Relation and Action in Global Citizenship Education” examines the way that specific ideas attributed to the Global South – the injunction to “be the change that you wish to see in the world” and the notion of ubuntu – have been appropriated by conventional humanitarian discourse as well as neo-liberal and post-racial discourse on global community.

1 Historical origins of global citizenship

April Carter

The concept of global citizenship seems particularly appropriate to the twenty-first century – a world that experiences globalization through technologies of travel and new methods of communication, and that faces common dangers of environmental damage and disastrous climate change. Belief in universal values and moral obligations can, however, be traced back thousands of years in a variety of both Eastern and Western religious traditions as well as in the evolution of legal and political thought deriving from classical Greece and Rome. This chapter discusses briefly different ways in which global citizenship can be understood and then examines the religious origins and the later (mainly) secular evolution of important strands in the total concept.

Defining global citizenship

Global citizenship as an ideal has a number of characteristic features. Here I identify four:

1 The first is an ethical commitment to respect and treat fairly and humanely all other individuals irrespective of their race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or social status. This sense of ethical obligation today requires a belief in social and political equality, but this was not generally the case in earlier historical contexts.

2 The second aspect relates to identity: an individual choice to see oneself as a member of a universal human society. Identifying with all human beings suggests recognition of an essential commonality by virtue of being human; but given the major cultural, ethnic, and other diversities that characterize people, it also logically implies a valuing of these diversities. Respect for differences manifested in social life is therefore a necessary value underlying global citizenship.

3 The third strand of global citizenship is linked to a concept of universal moral law, which grants individuals basic rights by virtue of their humanity, and therefore imposes obligations on others to respect those rights. A specific global legal framework of “cosmopolitan law”, embodied in conventions upholding individual human rights and holding individuals responsible for “crimes against humanity” – as opposed to international law constraining states – has mostly evolved since the Second World War. But the concept of a “natural law” applying to all humanity goes back over 2,000 years and has had formal status in Roman law. It was elaborated in the Middle Ages and found a place in the developing theories of international law from about 1600 CE.

4 The fourth strand in the ideal of global citizenship is more specifically political and implied by the word “citizen”: a belief in the goal of a world political community and a willingness to support policies or take individual action consistent with this goal. Despite the metaphorical concept of the “cosmopolites” coined by the Stoics around 300 BCE, this political version of world citizenship can be seen as essentially modern: linked to proposals for international confederation and world peace from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and very imperfectly realized in the League of Nations and, after 1945, the United Nations. There is also a more radical version of acting as a world citizen, embraced by movements against slavery and war, and in recent decades by green activists seeking to preserve our common environment. Both the proposals for world political institutions and political activism linked to global citizenship are closely linked to attempts to end violent conflict and create bases for cooperation and greater social and economic well-being around the world.

Religious roots of universal ethical commitment and identification

Religious beliefs and doctrines provide the earliest sources for universal values suggesting an ethical commitment to respect all human beings and also indicate that these values have roots in a great variety of world cultures. However, since religious traditions tend to be very complex, with varying interpretations and allegiances over time and in different geographical and cultural settings, and there are major differences in the degree of sophistication and scholarship between believers, generalization is dangerous. Moreover, religious faith can foster exclusive forms of religious belief and identity. But it is possible to find within many religions an emphasis on compassion towards all human beings (or all living creatures) and a sense of belonging to a wider human society, two facets of a sense of global citizenship. Ways in which this frame of mind can be expressed in the social sphere include acceptance of religious and cultural diversity (within a framework of overarching values) and avoiding violence against others at a personal, and as far as possible, at a social and political level.

Hinduism, the oldest major religion, comprises many strands, and has been tolerant both of divergent spiritual paths within its tradition and (historically) of other religions. This spirit of tolerance was reflected in new forms of religion that arose in India (Buddhism and Jainism) and led to India offering a home over very many centuries to “Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs, Bahai and others” (Sen 2006, 16–17). Its philosophy also stresses universal and eternal values.

The ideal of nonviolence can be traced back to ancient Hindu texts, the Vedas. “Ahimsa”, strictly “nonharm” but often interpreted now as “nonviolence”, was emphasized in an offshoot from Hinduism, Jainism, which became a clearly articulated set of beliefs by the fifth century BCE. Nonviolence is central as well to Buddhism, which was also developed within a Hindu context by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (ca. 563–483), whose transmitted teachings stressed an end to personal suffering through enlightenment and promoted a correct frame of mind and behaviour, which avoids causing suffering to others. Peter Harvey suggests that core values of Buddhism are “lovingkindness” (or benevolence) and compassion related to a spirit of generosity (2000, 103–104). Like most important religions, over time Buddhism evolved into a number of different schools, which gave emphasis to different values. Zen Buddhist techniques were even used by the Japanese military elite as part of their discipline.

Ancient Chinese culture fostered a number of schools promoting theories of the universe and advocating appropriate attitudes and modes of behaviour, associated with sayings of legendary founders. Kongzi (Confucius) is the most widely known, and with the establishment of a unified empire in 221 BCE Confucianism became the dominant religious and political orthodoxy, stressing an ideal of social harmony under a good ruler. Two other early religious traditions can be seen as more radical and more directly relevant to a universalist ethical commitment. Daoism, which looks back to Laozi, reputed to have been a contemporary of Confucius, did not have any written sources until (probably) the fourth century BCE, and only acquired a religious following around 100–200 CE. It is cited as an early inspiration for ideals of peace and harmony and possible advocacy of nonviolence, though the transmitted texts are open to conflicting interpretation (Mayer 1966, 31–35). The school of Mozi,who lived in the latter part of the fifth century BCE, a period of increasing warfare between states within Chinese territory, believed in “universal love” and mutual responsibility; but later followers accepted the necessity of war and a few became noted military experts (Gittings 2012, 66–67). Both Daoism and the school of Mozi, therefore, suggested an original aspiration to peaceful relations between states and an embryonic sense of a universal society.

The core values that can be found in many religions, especially in their early teachings, often contrast with social and political practices which claim validation from that religion. This contrast is strikingly illustrated by the history of Christianity. The teachings of Jesus reached out to people in very varied social and economic circumstances and from diverse cultures, as the early spread of Christianity indicated. A key text from the Gospel of Saint Luke (10: 29–37) is the parable of the Good Samaritan, who stopped to help a man by the roadside who had been robbed and beaten by thieves. Jesus told the parable in response to the question “who is my neighbour?” His answer stressed both that strangers in need should be treated like neighbours, and impressed on his Jewish audience that while two “good” Jews had passed by on the other side, a member of a despised “heretical” group, the Samaritans, had not. (Martin Luther King cited this parable in his very last speech, “I’ve been to the mountain top”, 3 April 1968, and used it to illustrate how compassion crosses racial divides.) Christian teaching has also been influenced by the concept expressed in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians that all people are “children of God”, and that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free … male nor female” among those who have faith (3: 26–28). Although Saint Paul links this intrinsic equality to Christian belief, this sentiment is now often extended to non-Christians as well. Christianity was also at first strongly associated with belief in nonviolence and early Christians refused to join the army or fight in wars. Nevertheless, Christianity is associated in many periods with persecution of Jews, and Christian rulers engaged in many wars with Islam, initially over Jerusalem in the crusades, as well as wars between Catholics and Protestants after the Reformation.

In practice, religions have often served to promote political authority resting on repression. In some cases where empires adopt an “other-worldly” religion this may (at least initially) have beneficial effects – as in the adoption of Buddhism by the Emperor Ashoka in India in the third century BCE. Christianity also underwent a major political transformation when the Roman Emperor Constantine made it the imperial religion in the third century CE. In both cases imperial authority helped turn Buddhism and Christianity into major religions with adherents in many parts of the world, but necessarily tended to challenge core original values, such as rejection of violence. But in both there is potential tension between religious precepts and temporal authority, which creates a basis for a sense of universal obligation beyond political boundaries.

Those religious beliefs that transcend political borders and (at least potentially) qualify obligation to political rulers can also provide a sense of self-identification with a moral and social universe that is not limited by the status quo. To count as a sense of “world citizenship” this understanding of identity needs to transcend not only political but exclusive religious affiliation. This is easier in generally tolerant religions like Hinduism and Buddhism that recognize in principle the potential validity of other beliefs than it is in Christianity and Islam. Although Islamic rulers have in the past often shown tolerance for subjects of other faiths (much more so than some of their Christian counterparts), and from the eighth century to the thirteenth centuries often embraced the learning and arts of varied civilizations, Islam can also foster a strong and exclusive political and religious identity, long manifested by the internal division between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Some of the groupings that arose within Islam did, however, absorb very varied religious and intellectual influences (see below).

In the Christian tradition there is an important universalist emphasis in Catholic theology (see below), but it is those Protestant sects which do not demand adherence to a complex theology that tend to reflect most clearly a sense of global citizenship. Unitarianism for example, which evolved out of the Reformation, suggests that no religion holds exclusive truth and stresses the role of rationalism; while the Quakers – founded in the early seventeenth century – look for “that of good in every man”. Emphasis on the unity of humanity, core spiritual truths that underlie all religions, and an ideal of peace, distinguish the Baha’i faith, which accepts the revelations of its founders as part of a history of progressive religious revelation. The Baha’i faith arose in Muslim Persia in the nineteenth century, but now has adherents around the world.

Universal moral rules and philosophical debate

Reflection on the moral (and potentially legal) rules that should guide relations not just between individuals, but between social communities and political entities, originally drew on religious sources, but also encourages philosophical debate. The distinction between religion and philosophy is contestable in relation to some tradit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptual and historical contexts
• Part II Shifting boundaries, the modern state, and new cosmopolitanism
• Part III Identity, belonging, and global citizenship on location
• Index