This article interprets interview-based research to reveal an incongruity between coinciding discourses of the twenty-first-century global marketplace and aspirations to universal equality, both contained within the claim that American university students must study abroad to become "global citizens." It argues that there are deep tensions between two very different images of what citizenship entails--one treats education as a zero-sum means towards the maximisation of a specific set of bounded interests, while the other pictures education as a site of deliberation. It then reassesses both in light of an ethic of paradoxical self-critique to which both inadvertently lay claim.