The last month or so I've been toying with the idea of World Citizenship. What does it mean? What are its possible ramifications and its charter for people, especially different kinds of people--what would be its implications and its parameters? What conditions would have to be met in the world before the idea and identity of "World Citizenship" would come to be taken seriously, even acted upon in a manner that is comparable to how people treat national citizenship? 

First, it strikes me as somewhat self-evident that effective world citizenship would depend upon the achievement of a global culture, and an effective structural integration of a world system, which would provide the basis and context for such identification to take place. To promote it in any other form or fashion would be out of context so to speak, and ultimately, futile. But there is also the sense that in a closed world new ideas can be dangerous, as they form possibilities in people's collective imagination for new realities that did not previously exist. Therefore, let me talk further about world citizenship.

If we are to believe the notion of an unfolding General Systems Revolution occurring globally, inexorably in the structure of the long run, in spite of the increasing violence and potential for global holocaust, then perhaps the notion of world citizenship should not be so remote or distant in our imaginations than expected.

We can identify some of the symbolic and ideological parameters involved in the definition of World Citizenship. First I think there is acknowledgement of a meta-ethical paradigm of universal human rights and responsibilities--I would extend this to a larger framework of natural rights and responsibilities, but perhaps this is going to far for some people. Second, I think the issue of the cultural relativity of values, symbolic ideologies and worldviews needs to be taken thoroughly into account, with the idea of developing frameworks for mediating between different cultural orientations in an effective manner. It is obvious that a world system would have to be completely secular, not just in a religious or sectarian sense, but in a larger cultural interpretation of reality. I suggest that a systems based framework provides such a neutral, value free manner of looking at the world and defining things like cultural values and orientations. Third, I see the emergence of a global culture, or meta-culture in time that will effectively replace at many levels traditional ethnocultural or ethno-national cultural orientations.

Providing symbols and symbolic structures of common world identity would be an important component of this--a world flag for instance, a logo, a set of charters like a world constitution or a bill of rights, etc. I personally do not buy very much into such symbology, but I think for many ritual and crowd situations especially such symbolisms are necessary and important to achieving common social identification.

World citizenship cannot just be made the symbolic and behavioral provenience of a privileged or sumptuary elite. If it is not relevant and meaningful to the working poor of the rest of the world, then from a social standpoint it remains a meaningless form of identification. It should not be just another form of social stratification writ large that serves to separate people off from one another based upon their access to resources and their sense of power and privilege in the world.

In hindsight of dealing firsthand with the social contradictions of contemporary American society, for instance, I would assert that the guarantee, protection and uncompromising assurance of genuine political equality for all people is the most important thing to achieved in the realization of world citizenship. If we cannot create and foster a context by which political equality can be gained for all people in the world, we have no chance for creating a world that will be in the long run open, safe and secure for all people. We must remember, political equality occurs even when there is social or economic stratification. A case can be made at international trials of tyrants and their henchmen who commit large scale social atrocities that the notion of political equality is part and parcel to the notion of a doctrine of universal human rights and responsibilities, and that even if it is hardly ever realized or enforced, such a notion still implicitly applies to all situations in life by which we become ultimately judged by our actions in relation to other people.

An implicit framework of global political equality of all individual human beings extends by "domestic analogy" to larger organizational frameworks, and this becomes the basis for the paradigm of International Law governing the relations of nations to one another. If we seek the heart of this framework, I believe it rests in the human capacity to be aware of and empathize with the suffering of others, to project onto others not only what is bad, but what is good, within ourselves. Acknowledgement and acceptance of the political equality, or at least the potential political equality, of all human beings derives ultimately I think from the comprehension and sentience of the spiritual equality of human beings, a sense that transcends religious ideologies or all other symbolic preoccupations.

Mandating global political equality as the basis of world citizenship is perhaps a minimal paradigm of social integration. The emphasis upon achievement of other forms of equality, as social and economic equality, is asking too much of human systems, and presents too rigid a structure in efforts to implement these ideals.  The results are less than desirable, and there comes a point of trade-off between realization of political equality on one hand and realization of social or other forms of equality on the other. Realization of blanket social equality, or alternatively the kind of communal equality that has replaced political equality in the US, leads to the imposition of double-standards and, in the long run, to the loss of genuine political equality. This is not to say that achievement of some kind of social or economic equality in the world is not desirable, but that the tradeoff is really one between efficiency and equality. I see the achievement of global political equality, in principle if not completely in practice, to be more realistic and achievable, than a vision of a world in which everyone has the same wealth, etc. Human society is a society of individual organized on the basis of their differences, we are not a society of clones or insects, and can never be.