Youth G20: between global citizenship and sustainable development

I strongly believe that new generations have the ability to change the world: we spoke about this in the past on this blog. I never thought that the Generation Y, the Millennials’ one, was made of lazybones, actually, quite the contrary. I always come across talented youngsters eager to do something meaningful, like those Italian kids that attended the Youth G20 – a summit involving young people from all around the world that took place last July in Sydney.

Delegates from nineteen different nations showed up, brave under 30s who had the will to fight the financial crisis and to look for new ways to grow. They are the future of this country: even though the national dimension could perhaps be reductive for them, they are global citizens, therefore they will build their future in this ever-increasingly connected and united world.

Many issues were brought to the delegation’s attention – youth employment incentives, investing in the technology field, the fight against corruption and bribery – yet what struck me the most was the importance given to global citizenship with an international work visa proposal. After all, it’s just natural that things would turn out this way: the generation of those attending the Youth G20 has been brought up in a world of crumbling barriers, for them borders have increasingly less reasons to exist. At the end, we all belong to mankind. Some people realised it in time, such as Albert Einstein: when asked to which race he belonged to, he replied “to the only race I know, the human race”.