World Citizenship
Discussion
By Liav Orgad:
"About 70 years ago, an American peace activist named Garry Davis created a registered concept of “world citizenship.” A naïve enterprise at its infancy, this concept looks more realistic today for three reasons.
The first reason is global interconnectedness. The Internet has profoundly changed the notion of public space. About 50 percent of the world population uses the Internet and global Internet use is consistently growing—from 16 percent in 2005 to 48 percent in 2017. 71 percent of the world’s youth population (15-24) uses the Internet, 94 percent in the developed world (ITU, 2017). 2.3 billion people use smartphones, almost one-third of the global population. Facebook and WeChat in China have an estimated 3 billion users together. Internet technologies and cloud computing enable people to establish digital IDs, which could eventually become recognised as an international legal personality, be connected with one another, disentangled from physical borders, and act at a distance.
The second reason is identity. Ever since Aristotle, membership in a political community denotes an identity of some kind. Shared identity is a cornerstone of citizenship—it creates a sense of community and a commitment toward a common good (Joppke, 2010). While the idea of global citizenship goes back to ancient Greece—the Greek philosopher Diogenes is credited to be the first to define himself as “a citizen of the world” (Nussbaum, 1994)—it is only in recent years that a transformation of consciousness from local to global identities has been identified. Recent polls reveal that people are increasingly identifying themselves as global, rather than national, citizens. For example, a 2016 BBC World Poll shows that 56 percent of the respondents consider themselves, first and foremost, as “global citizens,” rather than national citizens (GlobeScan, 2016). A 2016 World Economic Forum Survey indicates that the vast majority of young people identify themselves first as “human” (40.8 percent) and “citizens of the world” (18.6 percent), while national identity only comes third (13 percent) (Global Shapers Survey, 2017; Global Shapers Survey, 2016). National identity remains central, but, particularly in emerging economies, a perception of global social identity is on the rise (Buchan et al., 2011). For the first time in history, a large percentage of the world’s population places global identity above any national or local identities; there is a growing sense of a global community that transcends national borders.
The third reason is responsibility, a central component of a republican conception of citizenship. In a republican view, members of a political community share public responsibilities to promote a common good and confront common challenges. Today, more than ever, human beings face common global challenges and human activities have a cumulative effect on the global scale (Dower, 2003). Although there are no global individual responsibilities, at least not in the legal sense, private individuals are increasingly showing global responsibility in different policy areas (food consumption, global warming, animal rights) by taking actions (e.g., buying organic food, recycling, becoming a vegetarian) based on free choice and without state coercion. Some of the global challenges have become urgent and cannot be adequately addressed on the national level. By showing global responsibility, even if limited and with a weak sense of agency, individuals are participating in activities whose scope and target audience go beyond national boundaries. The changing public opinion thus goes hand in hand with changes in individual actions motivated by a sense of global political responsibilities."
(https://globalcit.eu/cloud-communities-the-dawn-of-global-citizenship/)