The first people who have identified themselves as world citizens are the Stoic philosophers (see Zeno of Citium). World citizens are people who transcend the geopolitical divisiveness inherent in the national citizenships of the various sovereign states and countries. By refusing to accept a patriotic identity dictated by any national government, they assert their independence as citizens of the earth, the world, or the cosmos.

The perspective of a world citizen has affinities with an existentialist philosophical outlook in that world citizens:

• do not want to be categorized by any artificially imposed categories

and/or

• wish to identify themselves first and foremost as human beings and then by any groupings to which they may seem to belong.

Flag of the United Nations

Some world citizens may also:

• work for a reformed, strengthened, yet sufficiently decentralized United Nations which represents and responds to the will of the people of the world, more than to intergovernmental hagglings, and adheres to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, similar to a federal system on the national scale

and/or

• work toward other developments to strengthen a common identity and harmony between their fellow world citizens on the planet, while respecting local and national loyalties and diversity.

World citizens are not limited to any specific faith or ideology, but will often adhere to the following:

Beliefs

• freedom from all national, racial, and religious prejudices
• belief in the basic equality of all sexes

Support for

• democratic globalization
• elimination of poverty
• international auxiliary languages
• uniform system of weights and measures
• universal currency
• universal education
• universal health care

Some proposed means to promote the value of world citizenship

• Promotion of the concept and its implications in public schools among students toward their building a sense of world identity and building support among them for the development of and progressive adherence to justly constituted global institutions and international law, just as national identity and loyalty has historically been promoted in most if not all countries
• Advocacy of the concept in media, drawing attention to the perceived inadequacy of attempts to rally people together sustainably solely under a national flag or identity

A list of some famous persons who have identified themselves as world citizens

• Socrates
• Zeno of Citium
• Diogenes of Sinope
• Erasmus
• Bahá'u'lláh
• Thomas Paine
• Bertrand Russell
• Linus Pauling
• Lord Boyd Orr
• Eugene V. Debs
• Garry Davis
• Albert Einstein
• Jules Verne
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Charles Chaplin