ABSTRACT
In an unexpected detour to Nuremberg on one of his German visits, Homi Bhabha, the North American-based Indian postcolonial theorist, felt a compelling urge to reflect on the past: ‘What story do you tell when you realize that barbarism and civilization are too often linked by an open sewer running with blame and blood and tears?’1 How does one engage the idea of the global while fully acknowledging the recent past and concurrently providing an ethical compass to rehabilitate our present and the future? How does one offset the reflex of ‘methodological nationalism’ in the social sciences to build more accurate accounts of the collective involvement of an ensemble of actors, structures and processes in configuring both our present and our future?2 ‘We’ are all to account for the past, the ongoing present and the ensuing future.3 I treat this premise as an initial point of departure that frames this brief inquiry into the idea and corresponding practices of global citizenship. Beginning with an audit of some existing scholarship on a cluster of similar
ideas – global publics, transnational civil society and world citizenship – I examine the rationales and heuristic clues advanced to access the idea as well as evidence that points to its existence if in somewhat embryonic form. At the outset it is important to ask if global citizenship is first of all a desirable global ontology and second, if desirable is it feasible or as some have argued already in play? I contend that the world we inhabit requires us in the interests of collective survival and well-being to come to terms with the notion of global citizenship while briefly examining what are to my mind some of the more exciting developments within the social sciences that might provide us some useful slants of emphases while preparing us all for such an engagement. I caution that, similar to other ambitious blueprints, global citizenship may prove to be another synonym for hegemony and it is important therefore for different social and political constituencies to constantly and critically re-evaluate the term, its meaning and substantive content. In this context, the accountability and autonomy of civil society groups assume paramount significance.
