Global Citizenship - Ruth Bergen

What does it mean to be a global citizen? A quick search of the term ‘global citizen’ on a certain distinguished British red-top brings up articles on subjects as ‘varied’ as the importance of ethnic minorities learning ‘British values’, anti-terror legislation and ASBOS. A more positive, and arguably the most widespread manifestation of global citizenship is an increasing awareness that our lives are inextricably linked to the lives of people across the world. This most often translates, for those who can afford it, into buying fair-trade bananas and chocolate, choosing a bank that invests money ethically and reducing our environmental footprint. Welcome to the autumn edition of the Development in Action magazine. Our theme this issue is central to the aims of development in action. We are all global citizens, whether we want to be or not; but the question of how to be a constructive and responsible one is a complex one.

Citizenship education in British classrooms is soon going to be a key issue as the extended schools policy tries to address both social and educational challenges.

Whether fundamentalism leads to religious discrimination or vice versa, it is unquestionable that understanding and tolerance tackles both these problems. Pupils need to learn how global trade, migration and politics shape the ‘global community’. They need to learn how nations can develop their financial, social and environmental stability, whilst maintaining equality. They must be taught the history of religion, the reasons for conflicts, and the way tolerance and communication can achieve peace.

Is this possible? Well, it is a task that seems almost as daunting to educators as the task of achieving sustainable development seems to those working directly in this field.

But is global citizenship only about re-shaping our consumption to limit the negative impact we have on the lives and environments of people in the majority world? Does it work? The share of the market taken up by Fair Trade produce is increasing every year; in 2005, €1.1 billion globally was spent on FT goods, suggestion that greater numbers of people are making ethical consumer choices. However the work of Women Working Worldwide (WWW) suggests that it will take more than switching to Dubble chocolate to make significant changes to the lives of workers. WWW works with workers and trade unions in Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia to try to ensure safe, fair, sustainable employment practice.

More people are making an ethical choice, but how much do the lives of workers worldwide change?

In the UK, this involves lobbying supermarkets and the government to ensure ethical procurement practice. The organisation has found that whilst supermarkets are happy to sign up to the principle of ethical trading, they continue to push the business risks associated with international trade down the procurement chain to the worker. They are therefore happy to insist, on paper, that workers are given regular breaks and safe working conditions. However they are unwilling to change their own practices, for example placing orders for produce 24 hours before delivery is expected, or changing orders according to the previous day’s sales, which contribute directly to undermining fair employment practice.

Note also that whilst we seem happy to change our consumption habits when it comes to ‘luxury’ items such as chocolate and bananas, our global citizen responsibilities have not stretched as far as a wholesale rejection of mobile phones or laptops. This is despite the fact that an essential component of both is coltan, a mineral that has been key in maintaining funding from Rwanda and Uganda for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s long-running civil war (it is estimated that 1,000 people a day die in the DRC from war-related factors). As global consumers, we have some influence over the rights of workers in global supply chains, and we should celebrate the fact that increasing numbers of people are buying Fair Trade. But exercising ethical consumer choice is only going some of the way to making us good global citizens.

At the heart of the fair trade movement is a belief in equal rights – that workers, no matter where they are, have the right to work in safe, sustainable conditions to produce goods for our markets. Our definition of global citizenship, in order to make a fundamental challenge to the structural causes of poverty across the world, may need to give greater emphasis to the defence of human rights and the extent to which global citizens everywhere have equal access to the same rights, a position which obliges us to go further than changing our brand of chocolate bar.

We need only look as far as our own back yards to see that some global citizens are more equal than others. A refugee coming to the UK is initially classed by the UK Home Office as an ‘asylum seeker’, until it is satisfied that the person has a valid reason for claiming asylum in the UK, only then, according to UK legislation, does the person become a ‘refugee’. Under the outgoing asylum system, asylum seekers have waited as long as 6 years to find out whether they are allowed to stay in the UK. In that time, there are a number of things they are not able to do, including:

- work

- receive more than 2/3 of benefits other UK (global) citizens receive

- live without the fear of early morning visits from police to take them to a deportation centre

- know they can settle in the UK and therefore start to come to terms with the trauma they experienced

Some of the outcomes of this are that once refugees get their official leave to remain in the UK, the work hiatus on their CV is so long that it is a substantial barrier to finding work. Whilst a number of refugees report a sense of empowerment from being able to get themselves and their families out of danger, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and other forms of mental illness are exacerbated by prolonged uncertainty about their futures and difficulties dealing with Home office bureaucracy. Until they can prove they conform to a definition of a refugee acceptable to the Home Office, refugees’ rights to a sustainable livelihood and security are suspended, often for many years.

A traditional warm welcome in India

Access to rights is often gendered. So for refugee women it can be much more difficult to prove that they have a valid reason to claim asylum in the UK. Asylum seekers are required to disclose all aspects of their case at their initial interview, otherwise information may not be taken into account. It can be particularly difficult for women to discuss or evidence traumatic events such as rape. This is exacerbated by the fact that this may have been perpetrated by a person in a position of authority and the woman is required to discuss the event to a home office official, also in a position of authority. In global supply chains, gender stereotypes can place barriers to women accessing equal pay for work of equal worth. Work that women do is often conceptualized as an extension of their so-called ‘natural’ domestic functions, and therefore considered ‘unskilled’, and so is less well paid. Women find themselves siloed into particular roles, such as harvesting fruit and vegetables or sewing buttons on shirts, and paid less than their male colleagues who are spraying pesticides or using pressing machines.

Underlying much of the unequal access to rights accorded to certain groups is a political and public discourse that seeks to classify groups as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’. So our distinguished red-tops focus not on the right to humanitarian protection, but on the need to work out which asylum seekers are ‘genuine’, and perpetuate a sense that ‘newcomers’, who haven’t earned their rights by paying their taxes (can rights therefore be bought?), are winning in a ‘competition’ for what are portrayed as limited resources – from access to jobs and housing to benefits. This is mixed in with a fear of terrorists, and of anonymous ‘others’ portrayed for example, in films like Black Hawk Down and Children of Men, which do little to promote a sense of solidarity between global citizens.

Rights, then, are to be accorded to those we have decided are ‘deserving’ and to whom we are able to relate. Refugees are only deserving if, in the process of fleeing their country, they have managed to amass enough evidence to prove that they were really facing persecution and they can present this argument in a succinct, well-structured fashion upon arrival in the UK. We’re happy to give our support to the Fair Trade farmer, because we believe they have earned it through hard work - note the parallel between the hard-working Fair Trade farmer, and the ‘hard-working families’ referred to so often by Gordon and Tony - but our choice of goods ensures we are not required to make fundamental challenges to our lifestyles, such as losing our mobile phones.

Global citizenship has the potential to challenge this discourse. If equal access to rights is placed at the heart of our definition of global citizenship, it may encourage us to make more difficult ethical consumer choices. More importantly however, it may allow us to begin to deconstruct the notion of ‘deserving/ undeserving’ poor and prevent the erosion of a public and political commitment to the defence of human rights. In place of a discourse which focuses on the necessity of conforming to a particular, negatively-defined notion of good citizenship, we could build on the achievements of the Fair Trade movement and develop a perspective which emphasizes equality of rights for all ‘global citizens’, whether they are on Fair Trade farms or coming to the UK to flee persecution.

References:

www.globalissues.org, www.women-ww.org www.fairtrade.org.uk, www.asylumaid.org.uk (Women’s Resource Centre, see particularly work on UK Gender Guidance in the asylum system)