International Citizenship

Abstract

The nineteenth century, as far as the development of children’s rights and citizenship is concerned, can be seen as what Milne (2008) refers to as the ‘prehistory’ to the present. As we have seen, there were sweeping changes to child protection and controls on the age of sexual consent, amongst other aspects of children’s status. However, it was during the twentieth century that these developments really accelerated. Drawing on the social context of religious zeal, philanthropy, paternalism, feminism, socialism and the developing sciences of psychology, psychiatry and paediatrics, the ‘children’s rights movement’ became internationalised. It is with this, and an internationalising context of human rights, that children’s citizenship is intertwined. We have moved from a nineteenth-century world of nation states setting the agendas to one in which states are enmeshed with each other. With such issues as climate change and the series of financial crashes, among others, the nation states’ citizenship systems are no longer able to cope with global issues (Held, 2010). The following discussion takes a very European-focussed viewpoint, and, while one must be suspicious of European colonialism, the discussion of rights in this chapter only traces their origins in the West, not necessarily a final endpoint of dominion. It must also be acknowledged that the history of concern with individuals and individual rights, while present in a tradition of European thought, is rooted equally in other discursive cultures. For instance, India is the largest democracy precisely because democratic ideas were already embedded in its culture preceding the British Empire; democracy and rights were not necessarily imposed upon India by a hegemonic West (Held, 2010).