National Governments, Global Citizens

This may seem like a pipedream, but something along these lines has already been happening for a while. The global campaign for debt relief for poor countries was led by non-governmental organizations that successfully mobilized young people in rich countries to put pressure on their governments.

Multinational companies are well aware of the effectiveness of such citizen campaigns, having been compelled to increase transparency and change their ways on labor practices around the world. Some governments have gone after foreign political leaders who committed human-rights crimes, with considerable domestic popular support. Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development, cites the example of a Ghanaian citizen providing testimony to the US Congress in the hope of convincing American officials to pressure the World Bank to change its position on user fees in Africa.

Such bottom-up efforts to globalize national governments have the greatest potential to affect environmental policies, particularly those aimed at mitigating climate change – the most intractable global problem of all. Interestingly, some of the most important initiatives to stem greenhouse gases and promote green growth are the products of local pressures.

World Resources Institute President Andrew Steer notes that more than 50 developing countries are now implementing costly policies to reduce climate change. From the perspective of national interest, that makes no sense at all, given the global-commons nature of the problem.

Some of these policies are driven by the desire to attain a competitive advantage, as is the case with China’s support for green industries. But when voters are globally aware and environmentally conscious, good climate policy can also be good politics.

Consider California, which at the beginning of this year launched a cap-and-trade system that aims to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. While global action remained stalled on capping emissions, environmental groups and concerned citizens successfully pushed for the plan over the opposition of business groups, and the state’s Republican governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed it into law in 2006. If it proves a success and remains popular, it could become a model for the entire country.

Global polls such as the World Values Survey indicate that there is still a lot of ground that needs to be covered: self-expressed global citizenship tends to run 15-20 percentage points behind national citizenship. But the gap is smaller for young people, the better educated, and the professional classes. Those who consider themselves to be at the top of the class structure are significantly more globally minded than those who consider themselves to be from the lower classes.

Of course, global citizenship will always be a metaphor, because there will never be a world government administering a worldwide political community. But the more we each think of ourselves as global citizens and express our preferences as such to our governments, the less we will need to pursue the chimera of global governance.

Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.

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