Is there a meaningful way in which we can talk about global citizenship in the contemporary context?

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

9 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

01/15/2009

Category :

Social studies

Sub category :

Sociology

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Summary :

Introduction.
1. The actual and cumulative process of globalisation.
2. The context of globalisation and a new sphere for political theory.
The very meaning of 'global citizenship'.
1. A real philosophical and political concept?
2. Plato and Aristotle's political theories.
3. Plato and Aristotle: Citizenship as the privilege of capable men.
Stoicism and a totally different definition of citizenship.
1. Cosmopolitanism.
2. The founding ambiguity of the concept of citizenship.
3. Why the nation-state institution that uses other nations as 'constitutive others'.
Nationalism: Reinforcing the will of minorities to defend their identity.
The outstripping of the nation-state by other supranational forces and actors is likely to rehabilitate cosmopolitanism as a concept.
An irreversible opening of national economic territories.
A new embryonic framework of supranational regulation.
Conclusion.
Bibliography.

Abstract

In his famous address at the Sorbonne in Paris, Albert Einstein laid ironically the stress on the very limits of the concept of "global citizenship". Indeed, even though the process of globalisation of trade, science or more generally speaking "culture" have unquestionably aroused international and, above all, supra-national common stakes, the sentiment of belonging to a country and the concrete exercise of rights and liberties have remained fiercely linked with the concept of the nation-state, that is to say "territoriality". The major problem is that, in the actual and cumulative process of globalisation -nevertheless still restrained to certain domains, above all economic-related -, the concept of citizenship itself has appeared changing and even versatile insofar as it has been equally used by antagonistic actors (defenders of Anglo-Saxon economic liberal theories and alter-globalisation defenders, pro-EU and sovereignists, liberal intellectuals and nationalists...) with different meanings and different purposes. So because citizenship has always been a concept liable to different definitions and interpretations, the context of the outstripping of the nation-state has led to a certain "speculation" that had created an immense gap between those who claim that being a Man is enough to be called a "citizen of the world" as a part of the "cosmos" (the rationally organised universe) and those, at the other extremity of the spectrum, who argue that cosmopolitanism is an empty utopia with the absence of global, supranational political institutions and common rights and duties.