ABSTRACT
A literature search offers a plethora of ideas, all anchored in a common call on citizens to awareness, that is, for citizens to be attentive to the developments in the world, to be outraged by injustices, and to participate in politics in order to effect change both locally and globally. At first glance, these are objectives that deserve endorsement. Being aware, being engaged, and acting together with fellow humans on the world’s diverse issues carry a cosmopolitan promise otherwise absent in calls to power and identity fuelled by mercantilist nationalism or competitive and often predatory capitalism. A close inspection, however, reveals that the concept of global citizenship, like the popular discourse itself, is fraught with tensions. 3
The tension that is most fundamental is found in the concept’s affinity with modern territorial citizenship. The concept is still bound up within the state-territorial order of the globe and
rests on the authenticity claims regarding citizen subjects. It searches for global citizenship in the trappings of the state-territorial order, whether in international governmentality or nongovernmentality instead of looking into transitions from the order or the outright transgressions of the order. It rests on the ideal of citizen subjects’ presumed abilities and willingness to act as transnational actors. To put it simply, the ideas on global citizenship are still bound up in the local-global antimony anchored in Cartesian territoriality. What is needed is an approach that situates citizen agency under prevailing planetary conditions, which are neither purely local nor decidedly global but rather transversal – an interactive totality in which new forms of political agency militate, even if they are as yet concealed, waiting, as Deleuze puts it, to emerge:
we know that things and people are always forced to conceal themselves, have to conceal themselves when they begin. What else they could do? They come into being within a set which no longer includes them and, in order not to be rejected, have to project the characteristics which they retain in common with the set. The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of development, when its strength is assured.
