Global Citizenship in the Age of Global Connectivity

On the surface, ours is a globalized world. We can travel half way across the world without having to leave the comfort of our living rooms, we can have discussions about music or movies with people who don’t even speak the same language thanks to the abundance of online translation tools, and we can witness a revolution by simply refreshing our Twitter feeds. Today, it is much easier to envision a world globally connected through technology. Yet, if you have watched tv, surfed the web, or even read the newspaper (who does that these days, anyway?) in the last week or two, chances are you also witnessed at least one instance of the seemingly eternal “us” against “them” debate. Why should we care about the notion of “global citizenship” if differences in race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and gender seem to prevail even in the face of increased global connectivity?

"The Cosmopolitan" - A Literary Magazine from the late 19th Century. Is "cosmopolitanism" a mere fiction?

There is a kind of detachment to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s account of cosmopolitanism in the documentary The Examined Life that makes me pause and think about this question. He treats cosmopolitanism almost as self-evident. Using his personal experience, he suggests that cosmopolitanism is better than its alternatives (universalism and cultural relativism) because it unifies humanity while respecting difference, but he doesn't enunciate how it accomplishes this difficult task. The fact that he is at an airport, the quintessentially global non-place, also contributes to the overall sense of nonchalance. Such a position doesn't seem to do justice to the urgency I see in modern and contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, to the need of find answers to why we should care about global citizenship.

One of the most prominent (and definitely the most prompt) modern political theorists, Immanuel Kant, wrote Toward Perpetual Peace in the late eighteenth century to articulate the conditions in which citizens of different nations can exist under conditions of, well, lasting peace. The lynchpin of his sketch was this strange notion of “cosmopolitan right.” In addition to the rights individuals had as citizens of a state, and the rights states had in relation to other states, all individuals had a right to universal hospitality. This meant that if an individual were to find herself in foreign territory, she couldn’t be greeted with hostility. Since all individuals (this even included individuals who belonged to non-European nations, which made Kant somewhat of an exception among his contemporaries) shared a “universal state of mankind,” Kant argued that this hospitality should be a basic regulating principle of relations between individuals who belonged to different nations.

Whether or not you think the right to universal hospitality is sufficient to create a peaceful order among individuals of different nations (hint: I don't, but that's a topic for another post), the notion that there is a political right that governs the relations between individuals all over the world is a striking formulation of the moral and political components of global citizenship. We need to think about cosmopolitanism and about global citizenship because our sociopolitical existence is not limited to the boundaries of the nation-state. These nation-states do not exist in a cultural vacuum; our differences are valuable but not incommensurable. As fellow members of the universal state of mankind, we have the right to be greeted with hospitality when we find ourselves outside the boundaries of our nations. Simultaneously, we have the obligation to extend that hospitality to others.

How can we fulfill this obligation if all we encounter are articulations of difference? This Gawker post was one of the most recent (and rare) displays of what I think of as the core principles of cosmopolitanism - a shared humanity and a responsibility to accommodate difference by virtue of this humanity- within a realm marked by images, videos, articles, and sound bites that perpetuate how different we are from one another, and by discussions of how some of us are inherently better, more honorable, more respectable than others. Regardless of our personal commitment to cosmopolitanism, notions of cosmopolitan right and global citizenship matter because they allow us to think critically about any discourse that highlights the incommensurability of our differences, and remind us of the inclusive potential of globalization.