Geography, Sovereignty, and Citizenship
Global citizens may redefine ties between civic engagement and geography. The town hall meetings of New England and other regions of the U.S. seem increasingly supplanted by “electronic spheres” not limited by space and time. This heralds a potentially startling new mechanism in participatory democracy.
Absentee ballots opened up the way for expatriates to vote while living in another country. The Internet may carry this several steps further. Voting is not limited by time or space: you can be anywhere in the world and still make voting decisions back home.
Most of U.S. history has been bound up in equating geography with sovereignty. Thompson (1996), writing in the Stanford Law Review, suggests that we can do away with residency and voting in local elections. Frug (1996) even suggests that alienation in the way we regard our geography already creates a disconnect between it and sovereignty. If we are not entirely “home” at home, do boundaries make any difference anymore? This is not just an academic question, but one rife with rich and disheartening social and political possibilities. Global citizens float within, outside and through these boundaries.
Read more about this topic: Global Citizenship
Famous quotes containing the word citizenship:
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)