A CASE FOR WORLD CITIZENSHIP

A movement for World Citizenship does exist, and practically every country in the world, including the United States, has granted visas to the holders of its passport. These are people who wish to enlarge their national identity to include the whole world.

But how do we come to feel about a particular identity in the first place? Quite simply, we are raised and later trained to absorb the values of our community. We grow up speaking a particular language. Our families belong to a particular religious affiliation. We grow up among people who have similar physical characteristics: hot climates produce dark-skinned people; cold climates produce fair-skinned people. And then there is everyone in between.

Geographically we may be mountain people or coastal people or inhabitants of prairie lands or jungles. This will be conducive to the development of different lifestyles. Mountain people may thrive in their inaccessible fastnesses; coastal people may cross the waters and develop commerce; prairie people may develop agriculture if the land is good; and if it is poor, they may raise cattle and become nomads. I don’t know much about what jungle people do – but we do know that we all came out of Africa.

In short, people grow up differently and they build distinct civilizations on their common lifestyles and belief systems – but there’s the rub: other people, because of their local circumstances, develop different lifestyles and belief systems. As a result, they tend to call each other barbarians. Then there is the little matter that everyone, going back to the animal kingdom, is territorial, and this justifies using cultural differences to assert superiority, invade, conquer, and enslave.

As tribes have coalesced into states and even empires, the justifications to invade and occupy territories have evolved as well. We have all heard about Pax Romana in our history classes, and Rudyard Kipling’s poem about “the white man’s burden” to justify British colonialism – while the French called their colonial occupations “the mission to civilize.” How different is it nowadays to invade countries to “spread democracy”?

The United Nations Organization was created to mitigate such tendencies by offering a legal charter to protect small nations against large ones, and to offer a platform for open debate and considered decision making. It is in that spirit that “world citizenship” is understood. Is it utopian to think of our tiny planet as one world – a world that can be organized into an encompassing community with a system of international laws, rather than the primitive might of empires or the irrational belief systems long since discredited by science?

Maybe it is utopian. Empires are good at disguising their raw power and at using the people’s irrational belief systems to the empire’s own advantage: it’s called “divide and rule.” How else can the few rule the many – especially now that the whole world is their oyster? The United Nations is not ruled by its General Assembly but by a handful of pre-chosen states known as the Security Council. Organizations like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or the Trans-Pacific Partnership give business and financial interests a legal right to supersede the interests and priorities of nation states. This takes decision making altogether out of the hands of people who voted for representative governments or thought they did.  Where does this leave the well-intentioned “world citizen”?

So now instead of lording it over people because they look different or worship different gods, some people claim the right to run the lives of others because those others are sort of “left behind” by events. They haven’t figured out how to game the stock market or trade commodities or profit from real-estate bubbles or engineer computer systems… And of course, just raising kids or just healing people or just building bridges and factories and even mining the old-fashioned way has become obsolete. Even offering their bodies as cannon fodder is being phased out by automatic killing machines. Clearly all those people stuck in ghettoes, or deserts, or jungles, are expendable.

It’s in the name of all those people that I make the case for world citizenship and a voice in the world community.