We Are The Citizens of Nowhere
In her speech to the 2016 Conservative Party conference, British Prime Minister Theresa May pointedly said:
“…if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”
May is currently leading her government to implement a nationally divisive break of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Nationalist sentiment here serves political expediency and despite the fact that a British Prime Minister turned her back on centuries of Enlightenment values of the sort that made Britain the place where the Industrial Revolution began and appeared to embrace rhetoric that pays lip service to that most vile of all antisemitic texts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion my focus is not on politics or Brexit.
May has gone from defending the EU as Home Secretary to bashing it as British Prime Minister charged with delivering Brexit so where she really stands from a principled point of view is something that I will leave for you, the reader, to decide.
The people I connect with through my devices, are as real to me as the people outside the walls of the house I am in.
What I am really concerned with, the focus of this post, is on the hard reality that the regressive rhetoric of politicians across the globe seems to deny. Globescan, an organization that’s been carrying out surveys since 2001 to determine how citizens of different nations feel about their place in the world, noted that their April 15 2016 survey was the first time that a global majority leant towards “global citizenship”.
It is easy here to generalize, to cite statistics of how free trade is helping spread wealth to every country or how the sharing economy is making the world smaller bringing people closer to each other or even how technology is breaking down every possible barrier you can imagine, if we use it. But all of this is academic. Knowledge that’s there to be had but not directly felt. At least, until you access it, that is.
So what’s more important to me, right now, is that even as I am sat in a room where I have been for almost 12 hours today, staring at a screen and chasing down a tight deadline, my mind, lost in work, also holds thoughts about people I have never met. My feelings are engaged with their concerns. And my day, seemingly contained within the sterility of a laptop screen and a desk, is still full of engagements and interactions, thoughts shared, jokes started, stories told, fears allayed, ideas swapped and tips given.
The people I connect with through my devices, are as real to me as the people outside the walls of the house I am in.
What May and her ilk truly don’t get is that communities are no longer wholly dependent upon location to form their identity, shape their values and acquire substance and, as such, are subject to a dynamic that goes beyond local constraints. When a sizeable proportion of people in a country have contacts and friends across the globe what makes them feel part of that country is a sense of ethics, ideas and concerns that come under human values.
We all, of course, care when the politicians in charge of our immediate world push legislation that’s likely to negatively affect the community we do live in, make our cities more hostile or place further societal pressures on the fragmented demographics that each country now boasts. But we also care what happens in communities that we’re not physically part of because they are the places where people who are our friends, reside in.
We are the citizens of nowhere not because we don’t matter but because some of those in power cannot understand us and fail to connect with us.
It’s not so much globalization creating a “one culture” as people forging connections with other people, an acknowledgement that once the layers marked as “unknown” are brushed away through contact and experience, the connections we make are nationality-agnostic. We are, right now, part of a massive cultural experiment. Even as the world around us appears to shrink back into its shell, we reach out and connect, share fears and concerns. Offer help and support. Spread happiness where we can.
We are the citizens of nowhere not because we don’t matter but because some of those in power cannot understand us and fail to connect with us. Our relative quietness makes them feel that we are easy to threaten, soft targets to bully, quick to overlook, isolated and therefore easy to brush aside.
We’re not.
We are skilled in living in two worlds: digital and remote, real and immediate. We are natives of both. We understand how to network, plan, organize and implement strategies. We value truth and equality, transparency and accountability above lies and divisions, greed and hunger for power. When we are pushed we quietly think about how to overcome the obstacles that we face. We are many. And we are never alone.
As citizens of nowhere we are everywhere. Threaten us at your peril.
I write a lot about the things I see as I fly around the world as part of my job. Find me on Twitter or join me on Google+.
