Who can become a global citizen?

Global citizenship is about how each one of us can develop a common understanding of our responsibilities to one another in the process of defining our new world. Following a conference at TCDC, Prof. Dani W. Nabudere from Afrika Study Centre in Mbale reflects

The recently organised conference on the theme “On becoming a Global Citizen” by the MS training centre TCDC in Arusha, Tanzania, was a rousing success. Not so much because it enabled us to develop a consensus about how to become a global citizen, but rather because it enabled us to grapple with the issue itself and try to understand it.

The conference kicked off very well with the keynote paper presented by Prof. Jassy B. Kwesiga, a member of the policy advisory board of TCDC and the executive secretary of the Development Network of Indigenous Voluntary Associations (Deniva). In his presentation, Prof. Kwesiga emphasised that the important issue is the need for “citizens to demand participation in order to transform the world”.

Kwesiga argued that globalisation should be managed from below, which was possible if civil society could e.g. educate and learn in order to strengthen existing global structures, which promote global citizenship such as the World Social Forum and a possible ‘World Parliament’.

The immediate challenge is a need to draw a distinction between neo-liberal economic globalisation and people-propelled globalisation that is based on human, spiritual and cultural struggles for solidarity between peoples and countries across the globe.

In this respect, there is need for historical reflection on what has been achieved in these struggles and what remains to be done in order to move to higher objectives. The struggles, which became dominant in the period 1960-70, have produced the ‘reflective revolutions’ that led to the first use of the concept ‘globalisation’. Therefore, globalisation is a peoples’ achievement.

Other issues that were problematised from the keynote speech and which ran throughout the conference were concepts such as citizenship, civil society, and participation. It was asked whether citizenship is a legal concept or new ideas. The issue was also raised what we really meant by civil society: Those of us active in NGOs or the wider public? In short, the question was frequently asked: Who are we and what is our identity as development workers?

The concept of participation was also interrogated: Who ensures that the dis-empowered people and communities participate and why? Why is participation important and who decides what is important?

The principal of the TCDC, Ulla Godtfredsen, raised challenging questions concerning the issue of becoming a global citizen. She asked whether the people who are so marginalised that they hardly have voice in their own community or country “can be called global citizens”, and whether it is reasonable “to expect them to assume any global responsibility?”

These questions became significant as the debate proceeded and we tried to grapple with the issue of becoming global citizens.

These questions seemed to have arisen out of the way the MS understands the concept ‘global citizenship’. Ulla Godtfredsen had earlier quoted the MS Manifesto: Global citizens are people who are “not only inhabitants in their own country, but (are also) active co-citizens in their own society” as well as “being committed beyond their own community and nation state to work for global equity”.

It appears that MS believes that everyone has the right and obligation to become a global citizen since global citizenship “in turn leads to rights as well as obligations”. Therefore a “vital part of global citizenship is to know one’s rights and other’s peoples’ rights and to be able to uphold them”.

The quotations raised issues of the importance of civic education and other forms of formal and non-formal education. It is a consciousness arising out of learning that could capacitate people to act in order to become global citizens.

Prof. Ruth Meena’s in her presentation stressed that while globalisation has created a borderless world, it has also created new borders, widened distances to others, and redefined new social relations and identities. She argued that these developments have resulted in a new global power map, and suggested that the concept global citizenship was elusive and needed to be questioned more deeply.

The debate on the whole suggested that becoming a global citizen is a process rather than a status or a fixed condition. It is a struggle to become better informed about others so that together we can define and order our new world-defining. The process enables people to define their new responsibilities, duties and rights, which can be enjoyed and defended together as a global community.

In this sense global citizenship is not a dilemma nor is it a puzzle. Its realisation depends on our increasing awareness of its necessity as the only way that we can all survive as a human community.

This realisation turns out to be the very issue we are supposed to be concerned with as global activists. We must, together with our communities, work towards the emergence of this new world in which all of us are “empowered” as equals in a world based on equity, enjoying rights, but also accepting new responsibilities set for ourselves that are based on a new global ethic of shared responsibility and shared rights.

 The letter has been shortened by the editor.