Who Are the Enemies of the Global Citizens?

Global Citizens envision a world of vibrant nations, united by global institutions, working together to solve common problems and to preserve the peace of the world. A century from now, if the perspective of Global Citizens prevails, war shall no longer be a scourge on humanity, disease and poverty will be but unpleasant memories, and the true potential for our species can finally be unleashed.

It's a beautiful vision. Unfortunately, it has enemies. The story of the 21st Century is likely to the struggle between the Global Citizens and those who will stop at nothing to see their vision of the world defeated.

Who are the enemies of the Global Citizens? Let's look at a few of them.

1. The Dictators. There are dozens of nations around the world that are ruled with an iron fist by individuals or small groups who have set themselves up as autocratic tyrants. Most of the Arab world, Central Asia, and much of Africa remain under the thumb of the Dictators, who ruthlessly exploit the human and material resources of their nations for their own self-aggrandisement. Generally speaking, the Dictators grow rich while their people starve.

The Dictators fear the Global Citizen vision, which upholds the idea of maximum freedom for all the people of the world. Concerned only with power, the Dictators will do anything necessary to maintain their positions, and deny their people basic freedoms and human rights as a matter of course. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of waging genocide against his own people in Darfur. Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan (a recipient of American military aid) has been known to execute political dissidents by boiling them alive. In the case of all the dictators, ideas such as freedom of the press or fair elections are a pipe dream.

The Dictators, sad to say, have enablers in many democratic Western nations, include wealth corporations who seek business deals with them in order to gain economic access to valuable natural resources. Many Western governments also provide military aid to the Dictators to further short-sighted strategic aims.

2. Radical Islamists. Al Qaeda and its affiliates and sympathizers remain, even nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, a potent enemy of Global Citizens. Their radical and medieval interpretation of Islam, a perversion of that great religion, makes them ferocious enemies to modernity. Democracy, human rights, and religious toleration are subjects worthy of derision to them, and they have nothing but contempt for the values of Global Citizens.

The problem with the Radical Islamists is that they cannot be deterred, since it is only possible to deter a person who fears his own death. Nor can they be defeated in a military sense, any more than organized crime can be. Their funds must be cut off and their leaders killed or apprehended, but in the long run, they can only be defeated in a war of ideas.

3. American Neoconservatives. This sinister segment of the American foreign policy establishment emerged during the 1970s and reached the peak of its power during the Bush Administration. Although sidelines by the election of President Obama in 2008 and discredited by the disaster in Iraq, they still retain substantial influence in Republican circles in the United States, and they are far from finished.

The most prominent names are familiar to anyone who follows the foreign policy of the United States: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, William Kristol, and many others. The movement claims to be the defender of the world's democracies, but what it really seeks (as is apparent from studying its own writings) is American hegemony over the globe. This was a concept that would have been firmly rejected by the Founding Fathers of the United States, who envisioned their creation as a republic, rather than an empire.

The American Neoconservatives disdain the United Nations and have constantly sought to undermine global institutions like the International Criminal Court. They tend to ignore the existence of the European Union, as if anything even hinting at supranationalsm is offensive to them. Motivated by a strange combination of free and a lust for power, they pursue an American foreign policy based on military strength and a rejection of internationalism.

4. The Nationalists. I'm not referring here to people like the Scottish National Party or Bloc Québécois, who are perfectly capable of being Global Citizens, but to those people in Russia, China, and some other countries who still want to play the Great Power game. Whether we're talking about China establishing a military presence in the Indian Ocean and aiming missiles at Taiwan or Russian forces invading the independent nation of Georgia and threatening Ukraine in disputes over natural gas, these Nationalists act as though the world today is pretty much the same as it was in the middle of the 19th Century.

Russian and Chinese Nationalists play a dangerous game. In the Nuclear Age, major powers can no longer operate in the same manner that they did before 1945, because the rules changed the moment the first nuclear weapon was detonated. It will only be through collective security, provided by strong global institutions, that the nations of the Earth will avoid a self-inflicted nuclear disaster, which is otherwise inevitable.

These groups entirely reject the perspective of Global Citizens, looking to their own interests and either unable or unwilling to see the human race as a collective whole. When the story of the 21st Century is written, we can only hope that the historians are able to write about their complete defeat, after which humanity could begin to move into what Winston Churchill called the "broad, sunlit uplands."