Karthik Shankar

Patrick Geddes, the Scottish city planner said “Think globally, act locally”. That is a very apt statement with regard to the philosophy of global citizenship. Today, with globalization, there is a deeper understanding that the daunting challenges of poverty eradication, sustainable development and religious extremism, among many others, are all inter-connected global complications, rather than insular issues that are confined to a single region.

The idea of global citizenship, as it exists today, is a culture, rather than a political movement codified by laws. Global citizenship encompasses social, cultural, political and economic change. Being a global citizen means taking a more socially-conscious view of the world, by focusing on events beyond our borders. For instance,how consumerism in our country may be satiated by slave labour in another country or why universal human rights should not be the privilege of citizens in first world democracies, but that of everyone around the globe.

None of this is more apparent than in the case of the Nigerian political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who fought against the exploitation of the Ogoni people by the Nigerian government. The authorities were selling away tribal land rights to oil companies like the Dutch-owned Shell, which in turn, was trying to keep up with America’s oil demands. Saro-Wiwa was later executed by the Nigerian government in 1994. This case of gross human rights violation reveals the complex web of relations that exists in our world and how everyone from the Nigerian government to the multi-billion corporations, and even the person buying oil at a gas station thousands of miles away, were responsible for it.

Global citizenship could be acquired through life experiences such as education, multiculturalism, and working professionally in various countries.

It is important to note that being a global citizen doesn’t mean abandoning other identities – gender, race, sexual orientation or culture. It simply means approaching issues from a macro, rather than micro, perspective.Global citizenship also doesn’t replace national citizenship but complements it. It takes away the irrational and jingoistic elements of patriotism, and supplements it with a more mature and pragmatic outlook on the world. Indians in New York or Dubai can feel as connected to their roots as someone living in Mumbai. They become part of a diaspora that represents the country abroad and projects its identity and values to people across the world.

The problem with global citizenship as it exists in its current iteration is that it is a philosophical movement. It needs a lot more structure and support to become a potent political movement. When identities become stronger, they usually get supported with governance structures. The problem is that no self-professed global citizen can affect change while being part of their country’s governance structures. They have to do it outside the mechanisms of government. What individuals around the world can do is build up a community based on global citizen values.

Humans have always lived by the concept of shared identities. Whether it’s a country or a marginalized minority, the concept of community is extremely important. What global citizenship does is simply expand those ideas from identities, rooted in linguistic, cultural, regional or social norms, and expand it to include anyone from around the globe. This is a potent idea, but it’s also an idea that tends to displace myriad groups, each one of whom gets their mileage from these partisan beliefs.

For instance, India has been a melting pot of cultures across the centuries and even today, has one of the most diverse pools of languages, cultures and customs in the world (not to mention the gene pool!). This co-existence of so many different groups of people has not been seamless as clashes, based on religion and ethnicity, are common even in India of 2014.

However, there has been a sea of change. India’s economic fortunes were revitalized after 1991, and today our communities are based on economic interdependence in major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. These communities find their commonalities in an education system, based on pluralism, English as a common language, and shared hopes and dreams.

Even when it comes to cross-country pollination, technology has erased a lot of these artificially-enforced borders. Today, citizens can vote from other countries, carry dual citizenship, or participate in political conversations, anywhere around the world. These privileges obviously don’t exist for a vast majority of the world’s citizens, but it is a change that is taking place exponentially, and in time, promises to upend our conceptions of citizenship and political processes.

The problem with global citizenship as it exists in its current iteration is that it is a philosophical movement. It needs a lot more structure and support to become a potent political movement.

Moreover, our information age is responsible for dismantling a lot of the age-old structures that prop up bigoted beliefs. An enforced lack of information was responsible for maintaining these power structures that kept barriers between various communities.

For instance, the Nazi propaganda-based machinery against the Jews during the time of the Third Reich was aimed at justifying its horrific atrocities against the community. While that sporadic access to information continues today in a several countries across the world (North Korea is one notable example), for the most part, it has become increasingly difficult to keep a cap on information reaching the public.

Hans Schattle, the author of The Practices of Global Citizenship, makes the observation that global citizenship could be acquired through life experiences such as education, multiculturalism, and working professionally in various countries. It is telling that he anointed education as an important tool towards building global citizenship. Education is the earliest exposure children have to the values and political philosophy of global citizenship.

This requires us to drastically expand the scope of our textbooks. While mathematics and science are, for the most part, uniform across most grades, and education systems across the world, history, geography and civics textbooks are far less so. Indian textbooks focus overwhelmingly on Indian history without checking in on events across the world, which could illuminate shared experiences while civic textbooks focus on country-specific activism, rather than making it part of a shared ethical practice (Schattle, 2008).

A lot of education today has an ideological basis. Textbooks in Australia play down the immense damage caused by early governments to the cultures of the aboriginals. UK textbooks obscure Britain’s atrocities in India while Indian and Pakistani textbooks each have their own interpretation of the event leading up to the partition and the fallout, which later happened.

The reason is clear. It’s because children are a country’s biggest assets and also the most susceptible to such biased points of view. It is important to develop an education system that emphasises similarities rather than differences between various cultures. Facts don’t have to be obscured, but they can also be used to make a point about history not repeating itself, with regards to country or community relations.

Education systems need to take an open-minded and a liberal look at the events that make up our collective history. For instance, the U.S. policy of divide and rule in the Middle-East is responsible for some of the dictatorial regimes that have popped up there and the insurgency groups that rose up to counter them. Similarly, heavy-handed Indian policy in Kashmir might have, at least partially, exacerbated the reign of fundamentalist groups there. All this is not an easy stance to take, but it allows students to look at history as a two-sided story, rather than an impermeable set of facts.

Another important aspect that education has to emphasize is on-the-field education. Study abroad programs are invaluable for those who wish to experience a new culture, but even within a country, using education to awaken social consciences in students can make them better citizens. For the large part in India, schools targeting the middle-class are designed to hermetically seal students within a bubble of elitism.

Engagement with the outer world and the problems of rural India are sorely lacking. This requires more than just occasional mandated community outreach programs. Schools need to embed these values in education by admitting students from heterogeneous economic and cultural backgrounds, making civic engagement a long term and continuing part of learning, and increasing students’ access to people with diverse life experiences and points of view.

Education can also incentivize children to take up change-maker roles in transnational organizations, such as the United Nations or Amnesty International, as opposed to governmental roles where they might only be able to affect change in their own country. They are also more likely to build the base for future transnational organizations that focus on grass-roots level global citizenship. Writer Ron Israel (Israel, 2013)explains that the key issue with governance at the global level is that it is in the hands of the representatives of sovereign states and technocrats with very little power vested in the hands of the citizens themselves. This leads to a sense of alienation from the global governance arena.

Those who believe that global citizenship has no place for ancient religious values, might find Jamie Creswell’s paper Education and Global Citizenship: A Buddhist Perspective(Creswell, 2013) fascinating. Creswell lays out that the qualities of compassion and empathy, tenets of Buddhism, are exactly the kind of values that global citizenship seeks to harness. Prosperity, with peace after all,is a concept that is as old as the sun. Global citizenship, hence, can be considered as a repackaging of new age moral values with none of the Puritanism, normally associated with religion.

Hans Schattle condenses the concepts of global education succinctly in his book. These are awareness, responsibility, participation, cross-cultural empathy, personal achievement and international mobility. Clearly, education is the key to introducing these concepts to students. It can create awareness among students about various problems facing the world, inculcate a sense of responsibility in them to tackle these issues, push them towards engaging with the solutions to these problems by participating, empathize with people across different cultures(Green, 2012), strive to make them better citizens, and finally allow them to move across the world and fit in like a part of a missing jigsaw piece.

As Nelson Mandela said “Education is the most powerful tool, which you can use to change the world.” This is an extremely astute statement when it comes to global citizenship. If global citizenship is the end result, then education is the means. Yet, despite such efforts, institutional infrastructure that supplements these kinds of values with action is a long way off. Till then, education has to be the tool that creates the army and the machinery!

Karthik Shankar
Student, SRM University,
Chennai, India