Global Citizenship – Towards a Definition

Global Citizenship – Towards a Definition

Taso G. Lagos
Copyright protected under Taso G. Lagos. Permission to cite should be directed to the author.

Abstract: Global protest activity is on the rise. Demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, Genoa in 2001 and in dozens of other sites brought activists together from around the world and localized global issues in unprecedented ways. These and other activities suggest the possibility of an emerging global citizenry. Individuals from a wide variety of nations, both in the North and South, move across boundaries for different activities and reasons. This transnational activity is facilitated by the growing ease of travel and by communication fostered by the Internet and telephony. While it is hard to quantify these numbers, or to give global citizens a legally defined political status, these qualifications do not obviate the existence and influence of transnational activists seeking new institutional forms in an interdependent world. We examine global citizens as active political, social, environmental or economic agents in an interdependent world in which new institutional forms beyond nations are beginning to emerge. Introduction: By itself, citizenship has certain legal and democratic overtones. Conceptually, it is wrapped up in rights and obligations, and in owing allegiance to a sovereign state whose power is retained by the citizenry but with rights that are shared by all members of that state. We distinguish “citizen” from “national” or “subject,” the latter two implying protection of a state. Citizenship, as it has come down to us via the ancient Greeks and Romans, via the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions, is tied into the emergence of members of a polity with specified privileges and duties. To speak of a

“citizen” is thus to speak of individuals with distinct relationships to the state, along with the social status and power these relationships imply. The lift the citizen concept

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