Climate change, species extinction, infectious diseases, trade piracy, internet hacking, terrorism, war, trafficking in drugs, weapons and slaves, etc.  There are no lack of deadly serious problems that cross national borders in our contemporary world.  Indeed, these problems, substantially driven by our increasingly intertwined economies, define our age as global, and call for global citizens.  

There are currently four types of actors that act legally across national borders:

1. National governments facilitate or hinder international trade, cultural and educational exchanges, and diplomatic relations.   
2. Inter-governmental bodies like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Criminal Court, establish and seek to enforce transnational laws.
3. Multinational businesses like Walmart, Samsung, Toyota, Saudi Aramco, Apple and many others seek profits abroad.   
4. Transnational NGOs like the Red Cross, Greenpeace, Gates Foundation, Amnesty International, Avaaz and religious associations mobilize people to pursue common goals across borders.

Each of these actors can make our international problems better, or worse, and advance the public interest or special interests.  Whether they do one or the other always depends in no small part on the number and character of their agents.  This fact raises a fundamental challenge for our global age: how do we nurture the global citizens who can drive our international institutions to tackle our common problems, and serve the public interest?

Our world needs more global citizens, yet citizenship is too often defined in national terms.  Governments of course routinely define and enforce citizens’ rights and responsibilities in national terms.  On a world scale though, the United Nations has representatives from its member countries, but it doesn’t have citizens.  

We are not at the stage in world history when people consider themselves first as citizens of the Earth, and second as citizens of their countries.  Hopefully, we will one day reach that stage because that perceptual shift — along with enforced equal rights and responsibilities as global citizens — would go a long way toward building a more just and peaceful world.  At this time though, given the serious transnational problems we face, we can move toward that more just and peaceful future by nurturing global citizens more systematically.     

There are, of course, countless local to international organizations and campaigns doing their level best to engage ordinary people in varied public issues, from community health initiatives to coordinated climate change demonstrations across the world.  There are, however, far fewer organizations working systematically to nurture global citizens.

At their best, global citizens are active, informed, resourceful, wise and good.  They are active in connecting with others to better understand their world, and to address its needs and problems.  They are informed about our world’s geography, history, economy, politics and culture.  They are resourceful because they can think creatively, applying limited resources to meet social needs and solve public problems.  They are wise because they understand human weaknesses and strengths, and use this to democratically design more effective, peaceful and just institutions.  They are good because they put the interest of the world’s people ahead of their personal, group or national interest.  Clearly, this is an ideal of a global citizen, but ideals give us something to aspire to, and work for.  

In modern times though, people across the world are “entangled yet detached,” to borrow the phrase of the contemporary American philosopher, Michael Sandel.  We are entangled because our decisions as workers, consumers and voters often shape the lives of strangers near and far, especially if one lives in the most powerful nations.  We are detached because we are most often unaware of the many complex ways our lives are intertwined, and we feel few if any obligations to those outside our family and friends, let alone strangers beyond our borders.  Further, the widely prevailing and assumed way to live worldwide entails work, play and rest, but little if any citizenship beyond local charity, periodic voting, and military service.       

More and more schools are developing international curricula because they understand that future citizens must be able to think and act across borders.  But NGOs, if not also governments, inter-governmental bodies and multinational businesses, need to pick up where schools inevitably leave off, at the end of the school day and at graduation, to create manifold and attractive opportunities for people to engage with the world.  

Global citizens are not born.  They’re made.  Global citizenship is not a phase or fashion.  It’s our future.  And it’s time we built that future.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D.  
Founder, Learning Life    

(c) Paul Lachelier 2016.  All rights reserved.  

Learn about Learning Life’s new Citizen Diplomacy Initiative here.  

Update: Since January 2016, Learning Life, the educational nonprofit I founded, has been developing a Citizen Diplomacy Initiative that follows on the dialogues I organized at Stetson University in 2009 and 2011.  The Initiative nurtures peace and family and youth development through live, international, family-to-family dialogue and collaboration.  Learn more here.

In 2009 and 2011, as a professor at Stetson University in Florida, I organized unusual live, two-hour, international, video dialogues.  The first occurred on November 20, 2009 between Stetson students and students at the University of Paris 8 in France, and discussed the role of government in modern societies.  The second occurred on October 18, 2011 between Stetson University students and students at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.  This second live video dialogue discussed the role of media in social change in light of the Egyptian revolution that overthrew the long-time President Hosni Mubarak earlier that year.  Participants in each dialogue posed questions to each other while I and a fellow faculty member at the partner university abroad moderated, and interpreters on both sides translated as needed. 

The following brief promotional clips of each dialogue produced by Stetson University give a sense of the live dialogues.  For further explanation of my motivation in organizing these dialogues, see my newspaper column published in Florida’s Deland-Deltona Beacon on December 14, 2009, after the French-American dialogue. 

2009 French-American video dialogue

2011 Egyptian-American video dialogue

Dialogues for a Better World

© Paul Lachelier 2009.  All rights reserved.

On Friday, November 20, 2009 something extraordinary happened at Stetson.

About fifty students, faculty, staff, and observers gathered together in Stetson’s Lynn Business Center to dialogue about the role of government in modern societies.  This alone would be unremarkable if it were not for their dialogue partners: about 25 French university students and their faculty leader sitting in a room at the same exact time over four thousand miles away at University 8, in Paris, France.

Throughout human history, political, business and cultural elites have had a virtual monopoly on dialogue with the wider world, and they have frequently used it to advance their interests.  Of course, some ordinary people and the poorest have had contact with the foreign, but their contact has too often been impelled by survival or strife.  This basic inequality in engagement with the wider world still holds true today, but very recent technological advances raise the possibility of a better world.

Clearly, technology is not the answer to all our problems.  Moreover, technologies like nuclear weapons and guided missiles raise the possibility of annihilation rather than progress.  Yet camera-equipped cell phones and the internet have empowered even some of the poorest people across the world to connect with family, friends and strangers, document material misery and violent oppression, and improve life on earth.

But there is another, less commonly used new technology the potential of which still lies largely untapped: videoconference.  While the rudiments of videoconference technology have been in existence since the 1930s, the technology did not become widely available in the world’s most technologically advanced nations until the 1990s.  More and more schools now use videoconferencing to educate their remote students, but videoconferencing’s capacity to connect ordinary people from across the world in live dialogue on issues that matter remains underdeveloped.

In a modern world which too often feels foreign, dangerous and out of the control to ordinary people, live videoconference dialogues can help nurture greater connection, understanding, tolerance, trust, and cooperation.  International dialogue is particularly valuable in our post-9/11 world, when terrorism too easily turns strangers into threats and foes.  We cannot rely strictly on government leaders or other elites (e.g., Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and other philanthropists) because as many contemporary elites understand, most social problems demand the engagement of ordinary people.

Of course, international videoconference dialogues are not panaceas, and in isolation they may have little lasting impact.  But if repeated and supported with other cost-efficient means to strengthen international connections between ordinary people (e.g., email discussion lists, facebook.com and other networking instruments), videoconference dialogues can help address and perhaps even prevent social problems.

I welcome wider community participation in upcoming Stetson dialogues.  I believe these live international dialogues can simultaneously nurture Stetson’s local and global connections by assembling interested local community residents, Stetson students, faculty and staff, and our dialogue partners abroad.  More widely, universities and colleges across the world – as institutions with communicative capabilities, and a devotion to learning and understanding – can play a key role in addressing international problems and advancing peace if they systematically and ambitiously pursue learning through global dialogue.

The destiny of the world depends on dialogue.