Challenges to Global Citizenship

In recent decades, globalization is a term that all of us are familiar with. The ideas behind global citizenship are recognized by most of the people. However, it is not always easy to take actual practices regarding to the attainment of global citizenship.

 

In the article “Theorizing Global Citizenship”, a several barriers to the attainment of global citizenship were identified. For example, is it possible for us to have global citizenship prior to national citizenship? The differences between national governance and global governance are national governance usually focus on their own narrow national interests and only maintain their own national identity. For global governance, they foster a global identity and regards universal human rights as an important issue. A typical example is China, where people only have own national identity, seldom have an open mind to foster a transnational identity. In some communist countries where human rights are not sustained, how can we expect the people to develop a de-facto double citizenship in a global sense? The lack of human rights are also affected by poverty, the world is surrounded by problems like scarcity and economic inequalities, it is impossible to develop global identity if we cannot solve the issues, however, there is a certain level of difficulties in eliminating the poverty, this cause one of the main obstacles for the attainment of global citizenship.

 

In the article, “Education for Global Citizenship and Social Responsibility”, Education is also another challenge that for us to be a global-level citizen. My own educational experiences did not allow me to understand or reach the global issues before joining this course, I seldom contribute or participate in the world actively. I only encountered knowledge from textbooks in high school and seldom have global consciousness on what is really happening in the world. However, after I came to Australia to have university and go travel in different countries, personal experiences allows me to have a new perspective and lead me to question or evaluated the new information I came across. In my opinion, I would agree that formal education is the foundation for us to develop global consciousness, however personal experiences and active engagement and participate would be more important.

 

Travelling is also a self-education process which one may develop its own perspective of global sense. However, we should learn how to travel as a traveler rather than a tourist. Daniel Vera has raised some good points of defining what the difference is between travelers and tourists. Tourists are like most of the people, they join customized tourists tours, live in luxury hotels and have good food. But travelers are global citizens or inherently engaged citizens and will look into the culture of the place beyond their comfort zone.

 

Most of the people rarely experience the culture in a truthful perspective during travel. For me, the one of the first time I’ve been a traveler is when I came to Australia. I came to Australia three years ago for studying, and I’ve experience the unique culture and beliefs here and participate freely in Australia’s national life. I found out that the culture have a big different from my home country, Australia is more peaceful and people are more polite, they all have a spirit of equality and freedom of speech and I’ve learnt how to understand other person and try standing in his/her shoes.

Travelling is civic engagement where we can learn how to engage with a variety of communities and allows us to develop new connections, relationships or sensibilities. It gives us an opportunity to explore within ourselves and understand our values.