Citizen of the world

Do you really consider yourself citizen of the world? In the actuality there have been many attempts to achieve this utopist idea, in which every person feels identified with every person all around the world. This idea seems ridiculous when even in the smallest scale of society there are important differences. In a family, one sibling can have totally different ideas compared to his other sibling, one can be completely religious, who really practices and professes his ideas, and the other can be liberal and with free thinking and act accordingly to what he believes and not what some determined doctrine establishes. These differences can cause many disputes and arguments that will cause a sense of individuality and separation rather than a sense of community and union. If these differences appear in small and close circles, how can we think that it is possible for all people around the world to feel they have a similar way of thinking and the same ideas?

The European Union is an example of a group of nations trying to be unified, and for the citizens of the countries who take part of this union to feel European rather than French, Italian, Spanish etc. by making a single coin, by standardizing the education for all the member countries etc. But how well has this worked? The European Union has had problems concerning migration, racism and it almost collapsed by the external debt of Greece. This attempt to try to level the countries has obviously a tendency to fail due to economic differences, if even in a single country there are economic disparities between regions like north or south; without doubt there will be differences in several countries. And If we consider other aspects rather than just economic factors we can see that there are many impediments to extend the idealistic idea of the European Union, one of the most important is religion, because there is big diversity of religious ideas which inevitably cause social problems, and who has enough right to decide which religion is the correct one, which countries should or should not enter the union. There are many obstacles for this utopian world to be realized.

So it is clear that there’s a lot of diversity, as someone once said: “a mosaic of particularities”, with a large number of different languages, religions, cultures and traditions. Rather than trying to make one big society with similar ideas and ways of thinking, we should focus on learning how to respect the differences, because to what point do the “citizen of the world” has the right to intervene and affect particular social traditions.