Climate Change and Cosmopolitan Citizenship
Climate change has made us all into cosmopolitans – “citizens of the world” – whether we recognize our civic allegiance or not.
What does it mean to share the obligations of citizenship with all of humanity? Two and a half millennia ago, when Diogenes of Sinope identified himself as a kosmopolitēs, he was denying allegiance to any organized polis, rejecting the rights and privileges along with the civic responsibilities of his fellow Sinopeans. Cosmopolitanism was for Diogenes the absence of social membership and the baggage that accompanies it. He claimed freedom from cultural conventions and cultivated a detachment from its human communities.
In the context of global climate change, the impossibility of this type of detachment forces upon us a different sort of cosmopolitanism, however reluctant we may be to admit it.
Let me explain.
All of us share a common and imperiled resource on which our basic survival and further welfare depends. Wherever we are, regardless of the insignias on our passports or balances in our bank accounts, the greenhouse gases that we emit accumulate in the same atmospheric sink. The heat-trapping gases that we release recognize no national borders, and the harm that the increasing atmospheric concentrations of these gases are expected to cause likewise disregards political boundaries. When we contribute to this problem, the nest that we soil is not only our own. It is shared by everyone, and all are affected by what we do.
If the causes and consequences of climate change were more geographically bounded, we could appeal to enlightened self-interest in addressing the problem. Picture a world in which greenhouse gases only affected their countries of origin. Nations that wished to avoid the predicted hazards could choose to accept the costs associated with greenhouse gas abatement, and those that did not share this desire could avoid these costs. Each of us could choose whether or not to soil our own nests – and be subject to the requirement that we live with the consequences of our decisions.
But climate change is not like this. Purely self-interested motives are not likely to be available, and our national efforts will be likewise frustrated. All is not lost, however. The sort of civic responsibility that has been marshaled to promote nationalistic projects can be mobilized on behalf of efforts to mitigate climate change, albeit in a different form.
We are forced by the nature of climate change as a global environmental problem into considering what it means to be a citizen, not of one country or another, but of the world. Our obligations of citizenship are in this case as common as the atmospheric resource that we share, and which we have together imperiled. We must all do our part to advance the global common good.
What does it mean to be a global citizen? We need not model ourselves upon the example of Diogenes, who in calling himself a cosmopolitan denied membership in any human community. Regarding ourselves as cosmopolitan citizens, with interests in common with our fellow inhabitants of this fragile planet, is not inconsistent with our also having allegiances to smaller communities, political or otherwise. The wider obligations of global citizenship supplement rather than supplant our more local memberships. This multilevel citizenship is a product of the world in which we live, with its problems, challenges, and opportunities arranged along multiple scales. A great many of our choices have localized effects and justify our political organization around smaller units than the whole of humanity. The scale of our concerns dictates the boundaries of the political communities that must address them, and thus the scope of citizenship affiliations that inform them.
What climate change has made clear is that none of us can retreat into a hermit’s cave, withdrawing from the world and the relationships that bind us to others. When I decide to drive rather than bicycle to work, or keep the thermostat warmer than I really need in the winter or cooler in the summer, my actions contribute – albeit in a very small, but nonetheless real, way – to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and thus to the manifold predicted social and ecological hazards that are expected to result from it. The combination of my causal responsibility and the vulnerability of others makes for the sort of relationship between all of humanity that civic republican virtue has historically been developed to address.
The alternative to accepting these duties of cosmopolitan citizenship is neither some greater individual freedom nor some more extensive national sovereignty. It is rather to deny the sense in which we are the beneficiaries of civic duties that have been recognized by others and to embrace injustice and irresponsibility under the pretext that we have no such relationships. It is to take from the community without giving back, to use environmental services without doing our part to maintain them. Ultimately, it is to exploit the benefits of citizenship without accepting its responsibilities.
In a world in which climate change binds us together as it has, we are all global citizens. The only question is whether we will accept this fact and become good ones.
