Citizenship Education and Globalization

Abstract

Globalization and citizenship are terms that have become part of public as well as academic discourse. Neither is new and both are ‘contested’ concepts because they involve inter alia arguments about politics, identity, rights, status differentiation, equality and inequality. The notion of citizenship goes back at least to ancient Greece. The Athenian city-state males who populate Aristotle’s The Politics are distinctive citizens who share a privileged status. They are differentiated from others within and outside the state by the qualities and characteristics required by their status and by the rights and conditions without which it would not be possible for them to perform the role of citizen (Hindess, 1993). The notion of globalization also involves ideas about the status and rights of citizens but on a global rather than city or nation state basis. The notion of a ‘fearful spectre’ of global capitalism sweeping all national politics and culture before it is at least as old as Marxism. For Ulrich Beck (2000a) globalization is a current ‘scare-word’ said to point not to an end of politics but to its escape from the categories of the nation state, and even from schema defining what is ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ action.