We’ve all seen how pollution in one country will ignore borders and affect others. We’ve seen the ‘race to the bottom’ conditions our clothes are made in on our screens. Food prices in our supermarkets jump at the sign of declining crop yields elsewhere. Pensions schemes go missing when oil leaks occur across the ocean.
But methods of dealing with interdependency are almost always nationalist, if not symbolically multilateral.
Global citizenship is the concept of reversing this by recognising that we all have responsibilities and indeed Rights as inhabitants of the same physical space. Advocates such as Benjamin Barber believe that there are common human values that are the most natural ones and that we should therefore form our own common
mental space as well.
The concept of the nation-state can be seen as being in temporary fashion since our leaders sat down at the Congress of Vienna relatively very recently in 1814. Whereas they would form the most ideal system for collecting taxes, most incomes now come from transnationals and welfare states are being wound up. Ethnicity no longer explains their organisation but rather opens the door to old-tested sentiments of racism.
Are nation state-based agreements really the best way for committing to MDGs?
The root cause of seeing what are interdependent problems through merely national eyes is, arguably, how our education is organised.
Having attended and taught in schools in different countries, we can all see how history lessons are conveniently adapted and prejudices instantly formed. I am sure that I was taught that the UK was the first country to have a (albeit unwritten) constitution whereas I later discovered it to be Poland whilst studying there.
So what about deconstructing this tendancy by encouraging more teachers and journalists to travel, make living abroad as easy as it is to transfer our money, and give us a clearer picture of how to deal with development without clouding prejudices?
This way would free us from our national glasses and give the developing world a greater say in their development by identifying new links between us that overcome nationality and media bias.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2008-Spring/full-Barber.html