The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, while hardly the first acts of terrorism the world has experienced, were a wake-up call for Americans to the reality that even the powerful and the rich are vulnerable in the new world of interdependence, and that they can no longer feel secure in the absence of a system of global security. This is a chastening revelation and one that calls for new ways of understanding and behaving in a world linked together by forces of interdependence that mandates cooperative civic action. It means that the human race, for all its many compartments, is aboard a single vessel, and either it stays afloat and we all stay dry, or it founders and we all drown.
One of the disturbing ironies of the post-cold-war world is that despite the seeming triumph of market democracy, many people feel more powerless than ever before, even in prosperous parts of the world. Terrorism itself is a diabolical expression of powerlessness, and inequality is actually growing as global wealth is increasing. The United States Government has responded with understandable fear, but as a consequence has focused on military and intelligence "solutions", including preventive war, while neglecting prescriptions for dynamic democratic change—what might be called "preventive democracy".
The CivWorld Citizens' Campaign for Democracy, a project of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, is a call to action—an appeal for interdisciplinary work across the boundaries of theory and practice that issue in meaningful civic action for a more democratic planet. It calls on citizens of the world, of every ethnic, cultural, political and economic background, to work bottom-up against the global inequities that divide the world and against the fundamentalisms—whether hyper-religious or hyper-secular—that are violently and viciously intolerant of those who do not share their convictions. The Campaign empowers people to see themselves and act as global citizens locally, nationally and internationally.
It begins with the idea that citizens, rather than Governments, are the principal agents of democratic change and that the bottom-up citizenship which drives local democracy must also drive global democracy.
The signature document of the CivWorld Campaign is the Declaration of Interdependence, which builds on the traditions established by the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, the United Nations Charter and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
The inaugural "Interdependence Day" was celebrated on 12 September 2003 in Philadelphia (United States), and Budapest (Hungary), as well as at several college campuses throughout the United States. It symbolized a "day after" the day of destruction and reflected resilience, renewal and hope, as well as a determination to create a world free of both terrorism and the conditions of despair, rage and hopelessness that breed terrorism. The Day focused on the civic and cultural imagination of citizens as the medium that creates a common humanity, and included events defined by common imagination.
Because both the Declaration and the Interdependence Day are intended to generate and reflect a sense of global citizenship, and because citizenship and democracy rest crucially on education, the CivWorld Campaign also includes a school curriculum component aimed at middle and secondary school students, as well as colleges and universities, who were invited to act as lead participants in the Day's events. CivWorld aspires to offer alternatives to war as a response to terrorism and the conditions that permit it to survive. As democratic nations rarely make war on one another, they also rarely breed international terrorism. In the long term, forging a democratic global spirit founded on education of all the world's children offers a way to foster both safety and liberty. From this perspective, the CivWorld Campaign rests not on traditional idealism but on the new realism that recognizes the human race is likely to survive together or not at all.
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