On Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014
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Tully, James. "On Global Citizenship." On Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 3–100. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544827.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 10:32 UTC. Copyright © James Tully 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 1 On Global Citizenship J a m e s T u l l y 1. Introduction: Global citizenship as negotiated practices ‘Global citizenship’ has emerged as the locus of struggles on the ground and of refl ection and contestation in theory.1 Th is is scarcely surprising. Many of the central and most enduring struggles in the history of politics have taken place in and over the language of citizenship and the activities and institutions into which it is woven. One could say that the hopes and dreams and fears and xenophobia of centuries of individual and collective political actors are expressed in the overlapping and confl icting histories of the uses of the language of citizenship, the forms of life in which they have been employed and the locales in which they take place. Th is motley ensemble of contested languages, activities and institutions constitutes the inherited fi eld of citizenship today.2 1 For an introduction to this broad fi eld see H. Anheier, M. Glasius, M. Kaldor and F. Holland, eds, Global Civil Society 2004–2005 , London: Sage, 2004; L. Amoore, eds, Th e Global Resistance Reader , London: Routledge, 2005; J. Brodie, ‘Introduction: Globalization and Citizenship beyond the Nation State’, Citizenship Studies 8 (4): 323–32, 2004; N. Dower, An Introduction to Global Citizenship , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003; N. Dower and J. Williams, eds, Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction , New York: Routledge, 2002; D. Held and A. McGrew, eds, Th e Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate , 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity, 2003; C. McKinnon and I. Hampsher-Monk, eds, Th e Demands of Citizenship , London: Continuum, 2000. 2 I m e a n b y ‘ fi eld’ the fi eld of human action, the fi eld of academic research and the ecological fi eld in which these are carried on. Similarly, ‘language of citizenship’ refers to the broad range of vocabularies or discourses of citizenship practices, policies and theories. 99781849664929_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd781849664929_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 3 33/3/2014/3/2014 44:48:32:48:32 PPMM 4 On Global Citizenship Th e language of ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ and the activities, institutions and processes to which it refers and in which it is increasingly used, while more recent than citizenship, comprise a similarly central and contested domain. Globalization has become a shared yet disputed vocabulary in terms of which rival interpretations of the ways humans and their habitats are governed globally are presented and disputed in both practice and theory. It thus constitutes a similarly contested fi eld of globalization. When ‘globalization’ and ‘citizenship’ are combined they not only bring their contested histories of meanings with them, their conjunction brings into being a complex new fi eld that raises new questions and elicits new answers concerning the meaning of, and relationship between, global governance and global citizenship. When we enquire into global citizenship, therefore, we are already thrown into this remarkably complex inherited fi eld of contested languages, activities, institutions, processes and the environs in which they take place. Th is conjoint fi eld is the problematization of global citizenship: Th e way that formerly disparate activities, institutions, processes and languages have been gathered together under the rubric of ‘global citizenship’, becomes the site of contestation in practice, and formulated as a problem in research, policy and theory, to which diverse solutions are presented and debated.3 Th e reason why the uses of ‘citizenship’, ‘globalization’ and ‘global citizenship’ are contestable, rather than fi xed and determinant, is, as Wittgenstein classically argued, because there is neither an essential set of necessary and suffi cient criteria for the correct use of such concepts nor a calculus for their application in particular cases. Th e art of understanding a concept like ‘global citizenship’ is not the application of a universal rule to particular cases. Rather, the uses of such complex concepts in diff erent cases and contexts do not have one set of properties in common, but – from case to case – an indeterminate 3 For this approach see J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key , 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, volume I, chapters 1 and 3. 99781849664929_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd781849664929_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 4 33/3/2014/3/2014 44:48:32:48:32 PPMM On Global Citizenship 5 family of overlapping and crisscrossing ‘similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that’. What ‘we see’, therefore, is not a single rule (defi nition or theory) being applied in every case, but, rather, ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss- crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’. 4 A language user learns how to use a concept by apprenticeship in the practice of use and discrimination in everyday life, by invoking (defeasible) similarities and dissimilarities with other cases and responding to counterarguments when challenged, and thereby gradually acquiring the abilities to use language in normative and critical ways in new contexts. 5 Since the use of concepts with complex histories ‘is not everywhere circumscribed by rules’, Wittgenstein continues, ‘the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier’. 6 It is almost always possible, to some indeterminate extent, to question a given normal use, invoke slightly diff erent similarities with other historical uses or interpret a shared criterion diff erently, and argue that the term can be extended in an unexpected and unpredictable way, which is nevertheless ‘related’ to other, familiar uses, and to act on it (and sometimes the act precedes the argumentation for the novel use). 7 Use, and therefore meaning, is not the application of a transcendental or offi cial theory of citizenship. It is an indeterminate spatio-temporal ‘negotiated practice’ among partners in relations of dialogical interlocution and practical interaction in which the possibility of going on diff erently is always present.8 Th is pragmatic linguistic freedom of enunciation and initiation – of contestability and speaking otherwise – within the weighty constraints of the inherited relations of use and meaning is, as we shall see, internally related to 4 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; for an exploration of this account of learning and understanding language see Tully, Public Philosophy I, chapter 2. 5 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , p. 75. 6 Ibid., 68. 7 Ibid.; note also p. 75. 8 See J. Medina, Th e Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity , Albany: SUNY Press, 2002, pp. 141–94; J. Medina, Language , London: Continuum, 2005, pp. 139–67. 99781849664929_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd781849664929_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 5 33/3/2014/3/2014 44:48:33:48:33 PPMM 6 On Global Citizenship a practical (extralinguistic) freedom of enactment and improvization within the inherited relations of power in which the vocabulary is used. 9 It is the reason why the history of citizens and citizenship is not the unfolding of some transhistorical defi nition that the grand theories claim it to be. It is not the endless repetition of the same formula, stages of historical development towards a predictable end, an instrument controlled by the hegemonic class or the dialectical overcoming of antagonistic forces. Unfortunately for theorists and fortunately for human beings, it is precisely the unpredictable ‘deeds and events we call historical’. 10 Th e creation of the conjunction ‘global citizenship’ could be seen as a prime exemplar of the innovative freedom of citizens and non- citizens to contest and initiate something new in the practice of citizenship. Th e multiplicity of contests that extend citizenship into the fi eld of globalization (conceived formerly as a realm of predictable historical processes impervious to civic action), could be construed as the initiatory act of global citizenship that opens a new fi eld of possibilities of another, more democratic world. While partly true, the actual existing inherited fi eld of global citizenship is much more complex, and the possibilities of initiating and carrying on civic action much more contextually situated within the fi eld, than this abstract formulation could unintentionally lead one to believe. If we wish to become eff ective global citizens then there is no alternative to undergoing the apprenticeship of learning our way around this complicated fi eld and coming to acquire the practical abilities of thinking and acting within it and the critical abilities of seeing the concrete possibilities of going beyond its limits. Th is exploration of the fi eld is thus an apprenticeship manual in becoming who we can be – local and global citizens. 9 Th is contextual freedom of enunciation and enactment (words and deeds) is an aspect of civic freedom (Subsection 5). 10 H. Arendt,