|
Editorial of june 2000 "We do not lock ourselves inside the walls of a city but we get in touch with all the world and we adopt the Universe as our homeland" - Seneca, The Rest of soul As we are or we want to be citizens, then our principal duty should be the unification of mankind. And the difference between citizenship from other factors of unification is its free assent. Citizens are bound to each other by a common and free adhesion, instead of being linked by an individual subjection to an authoritarian power. Religious movements rarely give the place to the freedom of consciences. And the ethnical and linguistic credo of nationalisms (the "volk" is a nation with one language, one culture and one land) is quite narrow-minded. On contrary, nations that have been based on Citizenship have the political will to integrate many persons with different political, ethnical and religious characteristics. They just have to accept some common values. Nationalisms base often on a random membership to an ethnical or a linguistic group. Then, we EXIST like citizens, but we only BORN in a nation. Citizens' identities have been based on many different values in history. These values should be just not quite strict and sometimes quite vague : then a lot of different communities could embrace them, without having to let much of their particularities. The Greek states were awfully chauvinist and bellicose, though they were the first models of Citizenship. However, the Greek civilisation evolved from the City-State to an hellenistic empire more or less politically divided but always culturally unified. Then the koyné (this culture of the City) could spread in all the Mediterranean area. We can assert without exageration that during the 2nd century B.C, to be a Greek meant above all to reside in a town with gymnasiums and schools of philosophy. Information and its diffusion, the communication between people that are geographically and cuturally distant, form the conditions of world citizenship today. Technological mutations in the 20th century have ever been accused of making a cold world where Humanism should be banned. Then, it could seem paradoxal to affirm that the access to technological culture (or the exclusion from it) is today a criteria of citizenship. But citizenship is an act of existence that imposes not only a personnal choice but an access to a certain way of life. So, there is no citizenship in ignorance, pauperization and the impossibility for a person to think itself like a subject of rights and duties. Our technological world is a privileged world, comparing with the Third World or the "under-developped" countries. In Europe we call this technological world the "Western World", but it is not right to name case of Japan that belongs of course to our techno-informative civilisation, in the same way. I remember many towns in Turkey (a country I know quite well) : Istanbul, for example, where we can pass quickly from a developped and "westernized" world (Taksim, Harbiye) to the gecekondu (shantytowns) where the level of living and education is quite the same as in the poorest countries. And do not forget our metropolis, where in a same space we met some "well-informed" citizens and these who are excluded from the knowledge of the world. No, the borders of our civilisation are not more than geographical borders. So in our time, the standard of living and the access to the last ways giving to us richess and technology made the Citizen, since for being a citizen of the world, we shoud wander through this world as easily as our homeplace. Sandrine Alexie
|