Building Capacity for Intercultural Citizenship

Changing national boundaries, migration and mobility, multinational residence, and the cross-border flow of refugees are challenging traditional views of citizenship. The term “intercultural citizenship” is coined to refer to a definition based more on affiliation with a cultural group than on legal ascription to a nation state. The implications of citi-zenship based on belonging carry some of the same rights and responsibilities as legal citizenship, but in addition they include 1) conscious identification with chosen groups; 2) acceptance of responsibility for sustaining the commonweal in a variety of ways; 3) development of flexible perceptual boundaries that allow for multiple group identifica-tions; and 4) participation in the group coordination of meaning and action that consti-tutes the maintenance of a living culture. Three major factors in building capacity for intercultural citizenship are explored: 1) capacity for empathy, which involves over-coming the golden rule and its assumption of similarity to embrace the platinum rule and the assumption of difference; 2) capacity for mutual adaptation, which generates virtual third cultures, or forms of communicative intersectionality; and 3) capacity for intercultural ethicality, which demands that judgments be made among viable alterna-tives revealed by empathic perspective-taking