Deconstructing Global Citizenship

Book excerpt: The success of individual nation states today is often measured in terms of their ability to benefit from and contribute to a host of global economic, political, socio-cultural, technological, and educational networks. This increased multifaceted international inter-dependence represents an intuitively contradictory and an immensely complex situation. This scenario requires that national governments, whose primary responsibility is towards their citizenry, must relinquish a degree of control over state borders to constantly developing trans and multinational regimes and institutions. Once state borders become permeable all sorts of issues related to rights earned or accrued due to membership of a national community come into question. Given that neither individuals nor states can eschew the influence of the growing interdependence, this new milieu is often described in terms of shrinking of the world into a global village. This reshaping of the world requires us to broaden our horizons and re-evaluate the manner in which we theorize human personhood within communal boundaries. It also demands us to acknowledge that the relative decline of Euro-American economic and political influence and the rise of Asian and Latin American states at the global level have created spaces in which a de-territorialized and a de-historicized notion of citizenship and state can now be explored. The essays in this volume represent diverse disciplinary, analytical, and methodological approaches to understand what the implications are of being a citizen of both a nation state and the world simultaneously. In sum, Deconstructing Global Citizenship explores the questionofwhether a synthesis of contradictory national and global tendencies in the term “global citizenship” is even possible, or if we are better served by fundamentally reconsidering our ideas of “citizenship,” “community,” and “politics.”