Originally published on the CGS blog on March 4, 2014.
What does it mean to be a global citizen?
A citizen of the world, or cosmopolitan, is someone who values the equality of all people regardless of where they’re born. Where the modern civil rights project has worked to provide for the civil, legal, and social equality of people regardless of race, sex, class, religion, sexual preference, disability, and more, a cosmopolitan wants to say that there’s another group of people who are just as equal as everyone else: all the people who live or were born outside the borders of their state. People aren’t morally responsible for the place in which they’re born any more than they’re responsible for their race, how tall they are, or whether they can jump up and down on one foot while singing “Row Your Boat.” We all belong to one vast community of humans in addition to each of the smaller communities we belong to, and that most populated community matters just as much as our families, neighborhoods, cities, provinces, and nations.
The central tension here, though, is between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, or in a multi-national state like the United States, as a tension between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Rather than owing special respect to our fellow citizens in the nation-state, the cosmopolitan believes that moral worth belongs equally to all, regardless of nation, state, or ethnicity of origin. In global politics since the 17th century, the main unit of concern has been the nation-state, so saying that you care about individuals at the global level is somewhat radical.
Cosmopolitanism doesn’t require that you reject emotional ties to loved ones, to neighbors, or even to reject patriotism altogether. It just means that when it comes to considering the moral questions of public policy, you take into account the effect your actions and policies have on both the human beings inside your state and those outside it. If war is on the line, the life of a compatriot and the life of a foreigner are just as valuable. If considering a policy that will improve the lot of people within your own borders but impoverish those outside it, the policy will need to be rejected. If you’re building a factory that’s going to produce pollution that goes downwind into another country, the lives affected are just as valuable as if the pollution affected citizens of your own state instead.
What makes you a citizen of the world? Is it the way you act as a consumer, or the way you allocate your charitable giving? It’s those things, but it may also involve electing leaders in your political institutions who value humanity and who will work toward a just global order, who fight human rights abuses, or, even in local institutions like city and county offices, work for environmental sustainability and remember that your community is one of many in a vast, interconnected world.
And the government of the United States (or your country/state if you’re reading this from abroad) can also help you be a cosmopolitan, or it can at least act in cosmopolitan ways.
When states value cosmopolitanism, they respect the human rights of people at home and abroad. They avoid war and when they do engage in military action, it is limited and minimizes casualties to the full extent possible, both civilian and military, for both sides of the conflict, such that strategic aims are achieved with minimal loss of life. States and leaders who are acting like cosmopolitans seek to reduce global poverty, eliminate threats to global security, and seek equal representation in global forums for people of all national, ethnic, and regional backgrounds. States acting in a cosmopolitan way will be more likely to invest in and work with international and especially global institutions as these will provide opportunities for people to provide input into global problems and to seek redress regardless of their place of origin or the power of their state.
Whether international institutions can live up to being truly cosmopolitan is another matter entirely. Some institutions may serve just the interests of global elite despite allegedly having a global scope; some may have membership limited to states rather than actual people, thus preventing anything like a genuine global citizenship in which people can participate. Or they might be so hung up in international politics that it is difficult for them to provide justice where it is desperately needed. But for international institutions to be cosmopolitan, and to be worthy of your support as an individual and through the leverage of your state, they at least need to allow the participation of people from all over the world with a fair process for deciding who is included and who is excluded (it is possible and desirable, after all, that a person convicted of violating human rights would be excluded from an institution tasked with the preservation of human rights). If these institutions meet some guidelines, including more than this minimum perhaps, we can start to think of them as being worthy outlets for the cosmopolitan moral acts we want to undertake at either the personal or state level, and we can act collectively as a global polis, perhaps.
This, of course, is just a sketch of what it means to be a cosmopolitan or to use cosmopolitanism as a guideline in your moral outlook. I anticipate dealing with this more fully in future posts, with reference to current events.
But the main question for this post is: are you a global citizen? Do you think people in North Korea are worth just as much morally as people from Kansas? If they are, then how do you justify the great disparity in outcomes between someone born in Boston and someone born in Mogadishu? And what can we do to make it better?
The answers aren’t easy but the questions are worth asking.
