The words were like a beacon. A constellation. Like arcane parchment, a conscious remnant from some ancient heart.
Reaching forth from the outward-facing spine of the book, the title might as well have been incandescent.
Far left. Top shelf.
“Citizen of the World.”
For years, it was as if the words, with their nuance, were reaching out with a solemn, patient, and subtle request – “remember me.”
It was that title, an expanded concept of a citizen that worked its way into my imagination and further into my heart to stay.
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Be it Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Mill (among others), the idea of the citizen has been explored with reverence for multiple millennia.
With perceptive eyes, the title of citizen can be seen as something amazing, full of opportunity and promise in countless places, and akin to belonging, part of an extended civic family. As citizens of something greater than ourselves, we are part of a continuing legacy, growing together, as both contributors and beneficiaries who co-author both individual and collective futures together.
There are also important, interlocked dimensions of citizenship such as legal, political, social, and ethical while balancing the emphasis on the individual and acknowledging the wider community.
Citizenship further blooms to life when informed, active, engaged, and purposeful.
Here in Canada, the basis of citizenship includes jus soli (“right of the soil”, including anyone born in Canada) and jus sanguinis (“right of blood”, where one is born abroad to a Canadian parent, up to one generation of descendency) with reasonable limits. Another basis is naturalization where citizenship is granted to immigrants following a process of learning, residency, and commitment.
Whether born into legacy of an evolving state, or whether someone has studied its heart and make the decision to be part of such an extended family, each path to citizenship is special.
When these paths lead to opportunities for each man, woman, and child to be free to pursue the beauty of their dreams and develop their fullest potential, something meaningful has taken root in these places where citizens call home (especially where the best of ideas flourish such as pluralism, dialogue, debate, and openness to learn).
Canada’s citizenship laws remind us that belonging can come by soil, by blood, or by choice – but beyond the state lies another belonging.
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What does a Citizen of the World mean?
Well-travelled?
Multilingual?
Perhaps it’s more – a lesson beautifully tethered to the noble title – this being extended belonging, community, and far-reaching global family.
A whisper urging us to look outward—past our borders, past our divisions—toward the bigger human story.
This concept does not mean abandoning (or diluting) the deep pride that comes with one’s national citizenship. Nor does does it sacrifice the substance of gentle patriotism to globalism, uniformity, or sentiment. Rather, it’s an added layer of recognition. While our roots are firmly planted in the soil of home, our branches naturally extend into the wider human family. In this sense, global belonging is not a substitute for Canadian (or any) citizenship, but a sentiment of shared humanity that strengthens, rather than weakens, the bonds of home and abroad.
In reflection, we live within a beautiful paradox.
On one hand, we are the human family. The human family is an inescapable fact no matter how it is parsed, partitioned, or separated.
On the other hand, we are individuals within the human family (whereas I don’t know what’s best for my neighbour and visa versa).
Both are universal truths – individuals within the human family.
Our cultures, heritages, language, religious or spiritual beliefs, political vantage points, and identities are somewhere between the two and each lend to who we are in a wonderful complexity.
However, history whispers a lesson that continues to be taught until learned.
If those elements become more important (and overtake) who we are as the human family or who we are as individuals, division readily awaits.
Perhaps the Citizen of the World is a cohesion, a bond, an anchor, and a keystone acknowledging a global community while preventing (at last lessening) divisions which tend to beget more divisions – especially at home.
Perhaps acknowledging the overarching human family as just as real as the citizenries to which we inherit (or that we reach for in terms promise and opportunity) is a balanced path to deal more compassionately with one another.
Perhaps the roads to increased peace and justice in our world begins with also seeing each other as family, as relatives, with common humanity, especially in times of division.
More real than any sense of “us” and “them”,
More factual than any expression of “our people” and “their people”,
More profound than any difference in politics, in belief, group identity, creed, or opinion,
More promising than where one’s family originated, settled, once called home, or call home today,
More transcendent than any partisan or party, ideology, or race,
Stronger than any language barrier, nationalism, tribalism, sect, or separation,
Deeper than division, there is the human family first.
– Robert Horton is an educator, author, orator, and linguist. He is a member of Rainy River First Nations.
