GLOBAL

CITIZENSHIP
Global Citizenship
Global Citizenship refers to the rights, responsibilities and
duties that come with being a member of global entity as a
citizen of a particular nation or place. The idea is that one’s
identity transcends geography or political borders and that
responsibilities or rights are derived from membership in a
boarder class: “humanity”.
Global Citizenship
In general usage, the term may have much the same
meaning as “world citizen” or cosmopolitan, but it also has
additional, specialized meanings in differing contexts.
Various organizations, such as the World Service Authority,
have advocated global citizenship.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
In education, the term is most often used to describe a
worldview or a set of values toward which education is
oriented.
Example: the priorities of the Global Education First
Initiative led by the Secretary- General of the United
Nations.
The term “global society” is sometimes used to indicate a
global studies set of learning objectives for students to
prepare them for global citizenship.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
1. Global Citizenship Education
 Beginning to supersede or overarch movements
such as multicultural education, peace education,
human rights education, Education for sustainable
Development and international education.
 Has been linked with awards offered for helping
humanity.
GCED Common Perspectives:
•Critical and transformative perspective
GCED can be taught from a critical and transformative
perspective, whereby students are thinking, feeling, and
doing. In this approach, GCED requires students to be
politically critical and personally transformative. Teachers
provide social issues in a neutral and grade-appropriate way
for students to understand, grapple with, and do something
about.
GCED Common Perspectives:
•Worldmindedness
Graham Pike and David Selby view GCED as having two
strands. Worldmindedness, the first strand, refers to
understanding the world as one unified system and a
responsibility to view the interests of individual nations with
the overall needs of the planet in mind. The second strand,
Child-centeredness, is a pedagogical approach that
encourages students to explore and discover on their own
and addresses each learner as an individual with inimitable
beliefs, experiences, and talents.
GCED Common Perspectives:
•Holistic Understanding
Founded by Merry Merryfield, focusing on understanding
the self in relation to a global community. The perspective
follows a curriculum that attends to human values and
beliefs, global systems, issues, history, cross-cultural
understandings, and the development of analytical and
evaluative skills.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
2. Global Citizenship as Used in Philosophy
It refers to a broad, culturally- and environmentally-inclusive
worldview that accepts the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
3. Global Citizenship as Used in Psychological Studies
 Studies of the psychological roots of global citizenship have found
that persons high in global citizenship are also high on the
personality traits of openness to experiences and agreeableness
from the Big Five personality traits and high in empathy and caring.
 Oppositely, the authoritarian personality, the social dominance
orientation and the psychopathy are all associated with less global
human identification
 Individuals’ normative environment and global awareness predict
global citizenship identification.
 Normative environment: cultural environment in which one
is embedded contains people, artifacts, cultural patterns
that promote viewing the self as a global citizen)
 Global awareness: perceiving oneself as aware,
knowledgeable and connected to others in the world.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
4. Global Citizen is Used in other aspects: Geography, Sovereignty,
and Mere Citizenship
At the same time that globalization is reducing the importance of
nation-states, the idea of global citizenship may require a redefinition
of ties between civic engagement and geography. Face-to-face town
hall meetings seems increasingly supplanted by electronic “town
halls” not limited by space and time. Another interpretation of given
by several scholars of the changing configurations of citizenship
becomes a changed institution; even if situated within territorial
boundaries that are national, if the meaning of the national itself has
changed, then the meaning of being a citizen of that nation changes.
 

• Tension among Local, National, and Global Forces

An interesting feature of globalization is that, while the world is
being internationalized, it’s also being localized at the same time.
the world shrinks as the local community takes on greater and
greater importance. this is reflected in the term globalization, a
portmanteau of the words “global” and “local”. Mosco (1999)
noted this feature and saw the growing importance of
technopoles. If this trend is true, it seems global citizens may be
the glue that holds these separate entities together. putanpother
way, global citizens are people who can travel within these
various boundaries and somehow still make sense of the world
through a global lens.
• Globalization Citizenship as Used in Human Rights
 
The lack of universally recognized world body can put the initiative
upon global citizens themselves to create rights and obligations.
Rights and obligations as the rose at the formation of nation-states
are being expanded. Thus, new concepts that accord certain
“human rights” which arose in 20th century are increasingly being
universalize across nations and governments. this is the result of
many factors. Couple this growing awareness of our impact on the
environment, and there is the rising feeling that citizen rights may
extend to include the right to dignity and self-determination. If
national citizenship does not foster these new rights, then global
citizenship may seem more accessible.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
 
On December 10, 1948 the United Nations General Assembly
adopted Resolution No. 217-A (111), also known as “The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Article 1 states that “All human beings are born free and
equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and
conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of
brotherhood.”
Article 2 states that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and
freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any
kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other
opinion, national o social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the
political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or
territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent,
trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of
sovereignty.”
Article 13(2) states that “Everyone has the right to leave any
country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
As evidence in today’s modern world, events such as the trial of
saddam Hussein have proven what British jurist A. V. Dicey said in
1885, when he popularized the phrase “rule of law” in 1855.
Dicey emphasized three aspects of the rule of law:
 
1. No one can be punished or made to suffer except for a
breach of law proven in an ordinary court.

2. No one is above the law and everyone is equal before the

law regardless of social, economic, or political status.
• Global Citizen (or World Citizen)
 
A global citizen is a person who places global citizenship above
every nationalistic or local idealities and relationships.
 
 Diogenes of Sinopec (412 BC), who is the founding father of
the cynic movement in Ancient Greece. Diogenes was asked and
said: “asked where he came from, he answered: ‘I am a citizen of
the world (comsmopolites)’”. This was a ground-breaking concept
of a global citizen because the broadest basis of social identity in
Greece at the time was either the individual city-state of the
Greeks city-state or the Greeks (Hellenes) as a group.
The Tamil poet kaniyanpoongudran wrote in purananuru, “to us all
towns are one, all men our kin.” In later years, political philosopher
Thomas Paine would declare, “my country is the world, and my
religion is to do good.” Today, the increase in worldwide globalization
has led to the formation of a “world citizen” social it has been
suggested that a world citizen may provide value to society by using
knowledge acquired across cultural contexts.

Albert Einstein described himself as a world citizen and supported

the idea throughout his life, famously saying “nationalism is an
infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
 Garry Davis, who lived for 60 years as a citizen of no nation, only
the world. Davis founded the World Service Authority in
Washington, DC, which sells World Passports, a fantasy passport to
world Citizens.

 In 1956 Hugh J. Schonfield founded the Commonwealth of World

Citizens, later known by its Esperanto name
“mondcivitanaRespubliko”, which also issued a world passport; it
declined after the 1980s.
• Mundialization (French, mundialisation)
 
As a philosophy, this term seems to be a response to globalization’s
“dehumanization through planetarization”, as quoted from Teilhard de
chard in. The early use of the term mundialization was the safe to the
act of a city or a local authority declaring itself as a “world citizen” city
by voting a charter stating its awareness of global problems and its
sense of shared responsibility. The concept was promoted by the self-
declared world citizen Garry Davis in 1949, as a logical extension of the
idea of individuals declaring themselves world citizens, and promoted
by Robert Sarrazac, a former leader of the French resistance who
created the Human Front of world citizens in 1945.
The first city to be officially mundialised was the small French city of
Cahors (only 20,000 in 2006), the capital city of the Department of Lot
in central France, on 20 July 1949. Hundreds of cities mundialised
themselves over a few years, most of them in France, and then it
spread internationally, including to many German cities and to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Earth Anthem
 
Shashi Tharoor, an author, feels that an Earth Anthem sung by
people across the world can inspire planetary consciousness and
global citizenship people. This author suggests that the students
of this course should write the lyrics of an Earth Anthem with
musical Composition.