The light slants into the room, warming the pale wooden desks. Twenty-five pairs of eyes, each with a different latticework of family stories, are fixed on an interactive whiteboard where a digital world map pulses with interconnected arrows. The teacher, a woman with calm gestures, speaks of interdependence. She explains that the water they drink is linked to melting glaciers on a distant continent, that the cotton in their t-shirts has a story that begins in a field under a different sun, that the algorithm ordering their favorite videos is fed by data extracted from every corner of the planet. The stated goal is noble, unassailable in its rhetoric: to shape individuals aware of belonging to a broader human community, to equip them with the tools to decipher the world's complexity, and to inspire them to act for the common good. This is the public face of Global Citizenship Education (GCED), a pillar of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda. A smiling, rational, enlightened face. It promises not just knowledge, but a mission: «to assume an active role in facing global challenges and contributing to a more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, and secure world». It presents itself as the antidote to national egoism, prejudice, and the short-sightedness that is killing us. Who, in good faith, could object? And yet, beneath the polished surface of this universal pedagogical proposal, darker and deeper questions stir, questions that touch the exposed nerve of sovereignty, identity, and individual freedom. Where does understanding the world end and the encoding of a specific moral response to it begin? Is building the «global citizen» an act of emancipation or the latest, most sophisticated form of planet-wide social engineering?
The Architecture of an Ideal: From Classrooms to Global Compacts
The conceptual framework is vast and meticulously constructed. It is not a simple chapter in a civics textbook, but a «lens through which to rethink all of education». Its purpose is to instill specific knowledge, skills, values, and behaviors. The list has the aseptic tone of a policy document, but its scope is revolutionary:
- Knowledge of human rights, sustainability, global inequalities.
- Skills like critical thinking, taking multiple perspectives, non-violent conflict resolution.
- Values of respect, empathy, justice, fairness.
- Behaviors aimed at active engagement for the «collective good».
The institutional architecture supporting this vision is imposing. UNESCO is its intellectual headquarters, having developed global recommendations and standard-setting frameworks. Networks like the UNESCO Associated Schools connect over 12,000 institutions worldwide. The 2030 Agenda, with its Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, legally commits member states to promote «global citizenship education». Universities, like the Ana G. Méndez University in Puerto Rico, act as global hubs to disseminate this knowledge. In parallel, instruments like the UN Global Compact direct the same message to the private sector, calling on companies to base their operations on ten principles ranging from human rights to anti-corruption. The language is always one of unity, shared responsibility, partnership. «Neither Governments nor the private sector can tackle corruption alone,» it states, evoking the image of a humanity finally united in facing its problems. It is a powerful vision, drawing on ancient philosophical concepts like the African ubuntu («I am because we are») or the Andean sumak kawsay (living in harmony). The proposal is to replace an exclusive belonging—the national one—with an inclusive, layered belonging: one can be a citizen of a city, of a state, and of the World, without one dimension canceling out the others. A new humanism for the age of connectivity.
Yet, every act of construction implies a choice about what to include and what to exclude, about what shape to give the raw material. Education is never neutral. It is always a political act, in the highest and most dangerous sense of the term. When a framework of values is presented not as one among many possible cultural perspectives, but as the necessary foundation for the planet's survival, the line between education and indoctrination becomes thin, transparent as glass, and just as sharp.
The Real that Resists the Ideal: Modern Slavery and the Failure of Governance
And here, the polished surface of the ideal cracks, crumbling before the raw, undeniable materiality of the present. For while classrooms discuss interdependence and responsibility, the International Labour Organization, Walk Free, and the International Organization for Migration publish numbers that carry the heavy weight of historical shame. In 2021, 50 million people were living in conditions of modern slavery. Twenty-eight million in forced labour, twenty-two million in forced marriage. An increase of ten million souls in chains in just five years. These are not abstract concepts. They are bodies. They are the hands of a migrant worker on a construction site in the Gulf, whose passport has been confiscated. They are the body of a girl sold and resold in a European brothel. They are the life of a child in a cobalt mine. Eighty-three percent of forced labour occurs in the private sector. Migrants are three times more likely to end up in these conditions. Slavery, the reports tell us, «is the antithesis of sustainable development» and thrives precisely «in upper-middle or high-income countries».
This data is not a glitch. It is the symptom of a systemic paradox. On one hand, the UN apparatus promotes a model of global citizenship based on responsibility and respect for rights. On the other, the global economic architecture that those same states and companies (which sign the Compacts, which adhere to the Principles) sustain and profit from, systematically produces and tolerates the radical denial of every right, of every citizenship, of every humanity. The Ten Principles of the Global Compact—from respecting human rights to abolishing forced labour—resound as an ironic and distant echo in the opaque supply chains that feed our consumption. Global citizenship education teaches youth to «become proactive agents of change», but what real levers of power do these global citizens have against the flows of globalized financial capital and geopolitical interests? Their action is often confined to the sphere of ethical consumption, volunteering, digital activism—noble forms of participation that do not scratch the decision-making centers where the rules of the game are set. We risk creating a generation of globally citizens who are morally aware but politically impotent, educated to feel the weight of the world but not to lift it, because the tools to do so—political sovereignty, democratic control over the economy—have been progressively hollowed out and transferred to technocratic, uncontrollable spheres.
Programmed Subjectivity: Between Emancipation and Adaptation
The heart of the dilemma, then, lies not in the declared intentions, which can be and often are sincere. It lies in the mechanics of subtle power. What happens when a system—that of global governance—promotes an education that has as its explicit goal the creation of ideal subjects for that very same system? GCED aims to shape individuals who are «resilient,» «adaptable,» «collaborative,» capable of solving «complex problems». These are undoubtedly valuable qualities. But read through a critical lens, they are also the perfect qualities of the neoliberal subject: flexible, mobile, devoid of conflictual roots, who internalizes responsibility for systemic crises (from climate change to inequalities) as a problem of individual conscience and behavior to be corrected, rather than a matter of structure and power to be dismantled. The emphasis is placed on «acting» and «contributing». But acting how? Contributing to what? The frame of reference is already given: the Sustainable Development Goals. A list certainly agreeable in many of its points, but still a political agenda negotiated among governments, not the product of global democratic deliberation. The ideal global citizen is not the rebel who questions the pillars of the temple. They are the well-trained, empathetic, and multicultural technician, committed to repairing its cracks.
This is where the specter of a new, soft social orthopedics arises. Traditional national education forged the citizen-subject, tied to a history, a territory, a duty towards the nation-state. Global citizenship education risks forging the citizen-stakeholder, a subject whose primary loyalty is to an abstract set of «universal values» and «global processes,» whose identity is deterritorialized, and whose role is to manage, optimize, and mitigate risks (environmental, social, economic) within the existing system. Their duty is no longer to a concrete homeland, but to the survival and improvement of the «planet» as a system. In this sense, the concern that this is a project to create «global citizens under the guidance of the United Nations, without rights and with many duties» grasps a real tension. Rights, in their legal and political concreteness, remain anchored to nation-states—and there they are systematically violated. Duties—of sustainability, responsible consumption, tolerance, action for the common good—are instead internalized as a global moral imperative, a burden that weighs on the shoulders of the individual. Power shifts: from the exercise of force and law to the administration of life and the formation of consciences. You don't need iron chains when you can have chains of concepts.
The alternative, however, is not a return to myopic nationalism or a rejection of education about the world. That would be cultural and political suicide. The problem is not global consciousness, which is a necessary achievement. The problem is its institutionalization in a top-down pedagogical project, emptied of conflict and divorced from a real project of redistributing power. True global citizenship is not memorized in a training module. It is born from concrete solidarity, from strikes, from boycotts, from the defense of commons, from disobedience to unjust laws, from rooting oneself in a community fighting for its autonomy. It is a feeling that rises from below, not a program imposed from above. Perhaps the most urgent task is not to create the global citizen suited to the world we have, but to foment the global rebel capable of imagining and fighting for the world that could be. A world where interdependence is not the excuse for a soft and totalizing governance, but the basis for a free federation of sovereign peoples, where rights are concrete and duties are chosen, not imposed. Where the word «citizen» is not preceded by any adjective, because it recovers, simply, its fullest and most dangerous meaning: the one who has a part in the city, and therefore the right to govern it and to transform it.
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