World Citizen: Garry Davis vs. National Borders

In September 1948, when delegates to the new United Nations met at the grand Palais de Chailot in Paris, a twenty-something American wearing the flak jacket of a bomber pilot pitched a tent on the Palais steps. Guards descended and angrily ordered him to leave, but he politely declined. I’m no longer in France, the young man explained, eyes twinkling. I’m standing on “international territory.”

     As a crowd gathered, so did the world press. With days the name of this pilot-turned-peacenik, Garry Davis, was known around the world. Newsreels captured a mounting drama that featured curious crowds, inspired celebrities and perplexed authorities.

     When a reporter asked Davis what he was about, he replied, “I’m a world citizen.” With that simple assertion a global movement was born.

     Garry Davis was part rebel, part performer and completely original, a world-class Don Quixote who for more than half a century jousted at one of the biggest windmills of all – nationalism. It was a wild ride that took him around the world, in and out of 34 jails, and across countless frontiers.

     After renouncing his US citizenship as an anti-war protest, camping out in Paris, and crashing a UN session to deliver a speech, Davis launched his first major organizing project, a registry for world citizens. More than a million people responded to the call. Forced out of France, he next went on tour, stateless and without documents. This time thousands of people turned out to meet him and local governments passed supportive resolutions.  Yet, over the next few years he was also repeatedly thrown in jail and deported.

     In 1953, for example, while he was appearing as an actor in a London stage production of Stalag 17, the show closed unexpectedly when the Queen died, and Davis found himself without a visa. A kindly magistrate gave him an idea: build a home on public property. But he was arrested anyway and taken to Brixton prison.

     Officials there laughed at first when Davis wrote to the new Queen. But they had to eat some crow when she responded with a thank you note. She would not step in, Her Majesty explained. But she did appreciate his situation.

     Three years later, wearing a homemade uniform and carrying a “World Passport” he had printed himself, Davis traveled to India. Necessity was helping him to become adept at intimidating low-level bureaucrats and exploiting the local media. His discussions with border officials were often hilarious, exposing the arbitrary rules and artificial boundaries of nations. But once inside country, he shifted focus to study with a Buddhist guru. The break also helped clarify his mission and prepare him for the next phase of the journey.

     At this point, for Davis, world government already existed. After all, he had announced its formation in a 1953 declaration. Before a small audience in Ellsworth, Maine, he had called it the World Government of World Citizens, and explained that its legitimacy was based on three laws – one God, one world, and one humankind. And although he was only one person, all humans were potential world citizens. They just needed to “claim their rights and assume their responsibilities.”  Yet Davis also understood that many more people would have to reach the same awareness before things began to change.

     In the early years, the tactics Davis used sometimes put not only his freedom but his life at risk. A year after his stay in India, for instance, Davis was almost shot before he could show his passport in Germany. It happened in Berlin after he left his bicycle near a barbed wire fence that separated East from West. Crawling under the wire in a pre-dawn mist, he was caught by several gun-toting police, arrested, interrogated, and ultimately put on a train to West Germany.

     As the scenery passed he could not help but remember another view of the same countryside --- from the cockpit of his bomber during the war – and also what the experience had taught him. “We are born as citizens of the world,” he realized. “But we are also born into a divided world, a world of separate entities called nations. We may regard each other as friends, and yet we are separated by wide, artificial boundaries.”

     Garry Davis spent the rest of his life trying to change that. One of his main strategies was to develop and issue documents, including the extraordinary World Passport. Recognized on a case-by-case basis by more than 100 countries – and officially by a handful – the passport has evolved into a convincing document in seven languages, issued to at least a million people over the years. Davis often argued that the right to travel, outlined in the passport, was grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

     Just as important as the fundamental right involved, however, was knowing how to use tools like the passport and other identity documents. As explained in Passport to Freedom, a book we co-authored in 1991, many nations have accepted World Passports and other documents issued by the World Service Authority, the non-profit organization Davis founded. But step one in effectively using them is to know what you are talking about. “The official, as part of the machine, knows little more than his narrow function and the regulations on which it is based. When you ask questions, you shift the burden of responsibility.”

     Other steps include remaining cool, going to the top of the chain of command as soon as possible, always assuming you are right, keeping track on your paperwork, choosing the right words, looking good, and remaining firm. It’s basic, but solid advice for anyone forced to deal with arbitrary authority. That said, over the years Davis refined the approach into a long-running piece of political performance art that he repeatedly took around the world.

     In April 1984, for example, he arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. At this point Davis was already in his 60s and could look like an elder statesman if he wished. Determined as ever, he was nevertheless detained after a mind-boggling exchange and told he could not enter the country. The next night, however, when the authorities attempted to put him on a return flight, he protested so effectively that the captain threw him off the plane.

     A day later he escaped from detention and went downtown for public interviews at a daily newspaper.

     When he was caught, the Japanese put Davis in detention, then on a plane for Seattle. There he was told that he would be placed on trial for entering the US illegally. He was now classified as an “excludable alien,” the officials claimed. It was beginning to look like he was trapped in a Kafka-like tale.

     Two weeks after setting out for Japan, Davis stood before a US immigration judge. Both governments were refusing to admit him. ‘Quite a dilemma,” mused Judge Jones. But before he could decide how to handle the convoluted case, a telex arrived from Washington, DC. The news was almost inconceivable: Davis’ entire file had somehow been “lost.”

     As a result the Seattle case was closed and the world citizen was free to go.

     Five years later Davis was back in Japan. This time he opened an office in Tokyo and helped many undocumented workers and Chinese students who were fleeing repression. For them the World Passport and other documents meant proof of identity, access to a job, or a way to get from one place to another.

     During this extended visit, Davis met the Japanese Prime Minister and had a private, personal talk with Andrei Sakharov. The Cold War was winding down then, and the Soviet Union would soon dissolve. Like Davis, Sakharov had reached the conclusion that it was time to move beyond nationalism and create a democratic world government.

     After more than a year of looking the other way, however, Japanese Immigration eventually decided to pounce and had Davis arrested in July 1990. He was jailed for several weeks and questioned each day by the same immigration official who had handled his original case more than five years earlier. Gradually, Davis managed to convince this man his claim to world citizenship made sense. The Japanese deported him anyway.

     When Davis landed in Los Angeles in August 1990, he fully expected to be arrested again. This time he was handled a letter instead. It announced that the Secretary of State had unilaterally decided to classify him as a “parolee in the public interest” and let him go.

     During this period Davis moved to Vermont, a safe haven that remained his home for the rest of his life. However, he never stopped fighting for his vision for a world without borders. In July 2013, just a week before he died on July 24, just shy of 92 years old, Davis was still finding ways to spread the word. At this point NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was trapped in a Moscow airport after his US passport was revoked. For Davis the response was obvious: the World Service Authority would issue him one.

     The World Passport may not have reached Snowden*, but Davis made his point one last time. “All we're doing is conforming to the idea that human rights must be protected by law," he told reporters. "The world passport opens the door. Anyone can get it; everyone is a human being, everyone has a right to travel.'"

* It did reach contacts in Russia near Snowden, according to WSA's David Gallup, but whether Snowden received it wasn't confirmed.

Greg Guma knew Garry Davis for more than 20 years, co-authoring and editing two of his books, Passport to Freedom: A Guide for World Citizens and Dear World: A Global Odyssey. A memorial service for Davis was held at Burlington City Arts in Burlington, Vermont on January 5, 2014.

The Emergence of World Citizenship

Proposals to prevent war and enlarge human freedom have been advanced for centuries. Even before the industrial revolution transformed aggression from a regional tragedy into a global threat, philosophers and politicians looked beyond the borders of their own nations.

     In 1792, for the French revolutionist Jean Baptiste du Val-De-Grace, the answer was a World Republic that would place human rights above the rights of individual states. Three years later, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a similar but more modest plan: a confederation of nations. Urging world citizenship and freedom of movement, he envisioned a “covenant of peace” would some day make national conflict obsolete.

     Diplomats and statesmen struggled with formulas for transnational order for the next century. Finally, in 1899, at the urging of Czar Nicholas, an agreement – The Hague Treaty – was reached between 24 states. Recognizing that modern warfare and weapons posed a threat to humanity, these nation-states pledged at least to attempt the settling of their differences through “pacific methods” rather than force and violence.
     Ten million people died during World War I anyway. The massive violence of that conflict was a sign that few nations could ignore. 
     In the aftermath, the League of Nations was established. Like plans before it, however, the League was complex and largely ineffective, burdened with responsibilities while deprived of real authority. Despite human rights declarations dating from 1789 in France, the League still represented only states, with no mention of the sovereignty of ordinary people. Within four years of its creation, it began to split into hostile alliances.
     During the next World War, at least 60 million people died, more than half of them civilians, and in 1945 the “nuclear age” crashed into existence when atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. The nature of war had become global and the survival of humanity was now at stake. Yet the nation-state war game continued unabated. By this time, the idea of some global authority could no longer be shrugged off. The possibility of nuclear warfare made the choice clear: global coordination or oblivion. But what kind?
     The United Nations, also launched in 1945, was more like a forum than a government. It could not legislate on worldwide problems, nor enforce its views through any means but military action. Its members, all nation-states, still remained absolutely sovereign, free to make treaties or declare war without a nod to the UN.
     Over the next half century, whenever UN decisions or Charter provisions stood in the way of some “national” agenda, they were ignored. As the Cold War gave birth to a nuclear arms race, as more than 50 armed conflicts between nations “great” and “small” created millions more victims, it became apparent that this latest attempt to create peace through a confederation of nations was a sterile and often deadly exercise. War, deprivation and torture gave grim daily testimony to the fact that the UN was largely powerless to protect and promote peace or human rights. 
      So long as the nation-state’s self-imposed amnesia persists, wars are inevitable. Like previous attempts to “rationalize” conflict without a fundamental transfer of sovereign power, the UN can only succeed in rare cases, when armed conflict no longer serves the selfish interest of the belligerents. Mainly, it is a hostage of the system it is expected to transform.
     But if the confederal approach isn't the form of “higher authority” that can break nationalism’s spell, moving us to a workable and democratic world order, what will?

Declaring World Citizenship

We live in a geocentric world of nation-states, preoccupied mainly by “national” problems of the economy, society and politics. No matter where we live, for most of us the “nation” is the center of our political universe – the point around which revolve other nations and, supposedly, the rest of the world.
     Our attachment to our nation, whether by birth or adoption, is not merely legal; it is profoundly emotional. Yet when nations deal with other nations, these attachments are given no weight. In the “international” context, the individual is nowhere to be found. Yet all nations claim to represent the very people they so often ignore. And ironically, most nations actually claim to derive their very legitimacy from their citizens. But if the people themselves are truly the source of each nation’s authority, it follows that the highest authority is humanity as a whole.
     In any case, the power of nation-states certainly doesn't make them the only legitimate participants in decision-making. In a world threatened by war and injustice, responsible citizenship means a powerful assertion of humanity’s sovereignty. As Thomas Paine put it, “individual human beings, each in his or her own personal and sovereign right, enter into a compact with each other to produce any government.”
     For such a higher authority to become a reality, however, a new compact is also needed, a global civic contract that transcends the national paradigm. The good news is that such a contract already exists, both naturally and legally.
     Founded by Garry Davis in 1948 and formally established in 1953, the world citizens movement is both an extension of the individual and an expression of humanity as a whole. It grows from your sovereignty and mine, and from our shared commitment to each other’s protection and survival. It is a horizontal network based on natural rights and the human rights affirmed by national constitutions and international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is also “vertical,” the political expression of a world community by those who recognize the limits of the planet itself.
     In 1945, while observing delegates at the founding of the UN in San Francisco, E.B. White wrote: “Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part.” World citizens make the second choice. 
     At the start, declaring yourself a world citizen was often symbolic, a way to embody a new transnational civic identity, one adopted by millions of people who registered as world citizens beginning in 1949. Gradually, however, it became more: an embryonic structure for the evolution of a global movement. An administrative arm, the World Service Authority, was established in 1954, and began to identify people from all corners of the planet, issuing documents to anyone who pledged allegiance to the new global compact.
     In the decades since then, world citizens have worked to overcome the psychological barriers imposed by the polarized nation-state system. For example, the movement and the documents used by world citizens expose the anti-democratic core of most nation-states. But for many people – especially refugees and other victims of nationalism – world citizenship is more basic. For them, it means global political asylum.
     Today the world continues to endure the incessant roar of chaos and conflict. But the primary causes of the chaos are nation-states themselves. Appeals to nationalism won't solve the problem. They are the problem.

A Global Response

It doesn't require much, certainly not the surrender of any personal  freedom, the renouncing of “national” citizenship, or disloyalty to the nation of one’s birth. World citizenship simply replaces allegiance to an outdated political system that emerged in the 18th century with a modern global contract that recognizes the dynamic interdependence of our time.
     We are linked across many artificial frontiers; communication, science, commerce and ecology don't recognize borders. In these areas and more, we already have one world. Many barriers are crumbling. World Citizenship makes our politics more consistent with reality.
     To help build the movement, the World Service Authority responds to the needs of world citizens not only by issuing documents such as birth and marriage certificates, visas and passports. It has also sponsored study commissions, established a court and experimented with a monetary system.      
     The World Court of Human Rights was established in France by a General Assembly of World Citizens in 1972. A provisional statute for the court was drafted, and later the World Judicial Commission was set up to handle preliminary complaints filed by world citizens. The International Court of the Hague only handles cases between sovereign states, and only if both parties agree to the litigation. The UN Commission on Human Rights is powerless to help individuals when their interests and the arbitrary will of a nation-state collide.
     World citizens, whose exercise of their human rights can contravene existing “national laws,” need a new kind of court, one grounded on the legal defense of global rights and accessible to all. As the first Chief Justice of the World Court, Dr. Luis Kutner explained upon accepting the post, “The international community has come to realize that human rights are not an issue to be left solely to the national jurisdiction of individual states. These rights obviously need protection at a higher level within the framework of international law.
     Over the years, a number of study commissions have also been formed to deal with specific issues. Experts, all advocates of a just and democratic world order, have been recruited to pursue research in areas such as health, space, culture, economics, women, education, forestry, political asylum, communication and cybernetics.
   The World Passport remains the most widely used document, a practical symbol and a useful tool for travelers. Contributors to the WSA's Refugee Fund have made it possible to issue passports for free to thousands of refugees and war victims, at least half of them women and children.
     In sum, world citizens constitute a self-empowered global community of sovereign individuals who support an emerging body of “common world law,” including human rights covenants, the Stockholm Environmental Declaration and the Nuremberg Principles. This is not a parallel government or a supra-national federation. It's a meta-government of free human beings.

Written with Garry Davis for Passport to Freedom: A Guide for World Citizens

A Global Contract: The Case for World Citizenship

By Garry Davis and Greg Guma

Bold proposals to prevent war and enlarge the scope of human freedom have been advanced for centuries. Even before the industrial revolution transformed aggression from a regional tragedy into a global threat, philosophers and politicians began to look and think beyond the borders of their nations.

For the French revolutionist Jean Baptiste du Val-De-Grace, the answer, in 1792, was a World Republic that would place human rights above the rights of individual states. All peoples would have cultural autonomy, he imagined. Three years later, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a more modest plan: a confederation of nations. Urging world citizenship and freedom of movement, Kant hoped that a “covenant of peace” would ultimately make national conflict obsolete.

Throughout the next hundred years, diplomats and statesmen struggled with formulas for transnational order. Finally, in 1899, on the initiative of Czar Nicholas, an agreement – The Hague Treaty – was reached between 24 states. Recognizing that modern warfare and weapons posed a threat to all humanity, these nation-states pledged at least to attempt settling their differences through “pacific methods” rather than force and violence.

Ten million people died during World War I anyway.

The massive violence of that conflict was a sign that few nations could ignore. In the aftermath, treaties outlawing war were signed, and the League of Nations was established. Like confederal plans before it, however, the League was complex and largely ineffective, both burdened with responsibilities and deprived on real authority. Despite human rights declarations dating from 1789 in France, the League still represented only states, with no allusion in its charter to the sovereignty of ordinary people much less humanity. Within four years after its creation, it inevitably began to split into hostile alliances.

During the next World War, at least 60 million people died, more than half of them civilians, and in 1945 the “nuclear age” crashed into existence when atomic bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities. The very nature of war had become global. The survival of humanity was now at stake. The nation-state war game, however, continued unabated. By this time, the concept of world government could no longer be shrugged off as some utopian novelty. The possibility of nuclear warfare made the choice all too clear: global order or oblivion. But what kind of order?

The United Nations, launched within that same fateful year, 1945, was more like a forum than a government. It could not legislate on worldwide problems, nor enforce its views through any means but military action. Its members, all nation-states, still remained absolutely sovereign, free to make treaties or declare war without a nod to the UN.

National citizenship had become a collective suicide pact.

Over the next four decades, whenever UN decisions or Charter provisions stood in the way of some “national” desire, they were routinely ignored. As the Cold War gave birth to the nuclear arms race, as more than 50 armed conflicts between nations “great” and “small” created millions more victims, it became all too clear that this latest attempt to create peace through a confederation of nation-states was no more than a sterile exercise in futility. War, deprivation and torture gave grim daily testimony to the fact that the UN was virtually powerless to protect and promote peace or human rights. Could it be any other way? Was it even possible for sovereign nations to surrender the right to “defend” themselves through war?

Writing as the United National Charter was being designed in 1945, Emory Reves provided an answer: war was avoidable only if some “higher” legal order was imposed. In Anatomy of Peace, he explained:

“The real cause of war has always been the same. They have occurred with a mathematical regularity of a natural law at clearly determined moments as a result of clearly definable conditions… 1. Wars between groups of men forming social units always take place when these units – tribes, dynasties, churches, cities, nations – exercise unrestricted sovereign power. 2. Wars between social units cease the moment sovereign power is transferred from them to a larger or higher unit…In other words, wars always ceased when a higher unit established its own sovereignty, absorbing the sovereignty of the conflicting smaller social units.”

So long as the nation-state’s self-imposed amnesia persists, wars are inevitable. Like previous attempts to “rationalize” conflict without a fundamental transfer of sovereign power, the UN can only succeed in isolated cases, when armed conflict no longer serves the selfish interest of the belligerents. Mainly, it is a hostage, politically and financially, of the system it is expected to transform.

But if the confederal approach is not the form of “higher authority” that can break nationalism’s spell, moving us to a workable and democratic world order, what is?

Responsible Global Citizenship

We live in a geocentric world of nation-states, preoccupied mainly by “national” problems of the economy, society and politics. No matter where we live, for most of us the “nation” is the center of our political universe – the immovable point around which revolve other nations and, supposedly, the rest of the world.

Our attachment to our nation is not merely legal; it is profoundly emotional. Yet when nations deal with other nations, these attachments are given no weight. In the usual “international” context, the individual is nowhere to be found. Still, all nations claim to represent the very people they so often ignore. Ironically, most nations actually claim to derive their very legitimacy from their citizens. But if individuals, the people themselves, are truly the source of each nation’s authority, it follows that humanity as a whole rather than any nation is the highest source of authority.

The accumulated power of nation-states does not make them the only legitimate participants in global decision-making. In a world threatened by war and injustice, “responsible citizenship” can only mean a powerful assertion of humanity’s ultimate sovereignty. As Thomas Paine explained it, “individual human beings, each in his or her own personal and sovereign right, enter into a compact with each other to produce any government.”

For a higher authority to come into being, therefore, a new compact is needed, a global civic contract that transcends the national paradigm. The good news is that such a contract already exists, both naturally and legally.

The World Government of World Citizens, which was established in 1953, is both an extension of the individual and an expression of humanity as a whole. It grows from your sovereignty and mine as world citizens, and from our commitment to each other’s protection and survival. It is a horizontal network based on natural rights and the human rights affirmed by both national constitutions and international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is also “vertical” as the political expression of a world community by those who recognize only the geographic limits of the planet itself.

In 1945, while observing delegates at the founding of the UN in San Francisco, E.B. White wrote: “Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part.” World Citizens are those who make the latter choice.

In a more practical sense, World Government is an outgrowth of the world citizenship movement that began in the late 1940s. As the start, it was simply a tool, a way to embody the transnational civic identity that was being adopted by the many people who registered as world citizens beginning in 1949. Gradually, however, it became more: an embryonic structure for the evolution of a global civism. Once its administrative arm, the World Service Authority, was established in 1954, the first full phase of work began. The WSA began identifying people from all corners of the planetary community, issuing documents to those who pledged allegiance to this global government.

In the years since that beginning, WSA and World Government have aimed to overcome the psychological barriers imposed by the polarized, dualistic nation-state system. In one sense, its very existence and the documents used by its citizens expose the anti-democratic core of most nation-states. But for many people – refugees and other outcasts of the system – its value is more basic. For them, World Government means global political asylum.

Elements of various religious teachings and democratic theories converge in the conceptual framework of World Government. It represents a holistic way of thinking about oneself and the planet. The deeper one goes, the more profound the potential transformation can be.

Today our world remains deafened by the roar of chaos and conflicting loyalties. But once the possibility of an alternative can be envisioned, it becomes clear that the primary causes of the chaos are the nation-states themselves. National governments cannot solve our problems. They are the problem.

How World Citizenship Works

It does not demand the surrender of any freedom, the renouncing of “national” citizenship, or any disloyalty whatsoever to the nation of one’s birth. Rather, world citizenship replaces the anachronistic political system that emerged in the 18^th century with a global contract that recognizes the dynamic interdependence of our time.

We are already linked across artificial frontiers; neither mass communication, science, commerce nor ecology recognizes national borders. In these areas and more, we already have one world. All types of barriers are crumbling. World Government makes our politics more consistent with reality.

As it has evolved, the World Government of World Citizens has responded to the needs of its citizens not only by issuing documents such as birth and marriage certificates, visas and passports. It has also begun to establish other basic organs of government: study commissions, a court, political party, police force and monetary system. The World Court of Human Rights, for example, was established in France by a General assembly of World Citizen in 1972. A provisional statute for the court was subsequently drafted, and still later the World Judicial Commission was set up to handle preliminary complaints filed by world citizens. The International Court of the Hague, we discovered, only handled cases between sovereign states, and only if both parties agree to the litigation. The UN Commission on Human Rights is powerless to help individuals when their freedom and the arbitrary will of a nation-state collide.

World citizens, whose exercise of human rights can contravene “national laws,” need a new kind of court, one both grounded on the legal defense of global rights and accessible to all. As the first Chief Justice of the World Court, Dr. Luis Kutner explained upon accepting the post, “The international community has come to realize that human rights are not an issue to be left solely to the national jurisdiction of individual states. These rights obviously need protection at a higher level within the framework of international law.”

Over the years, a variety of study commissions have also been formed to deal with specific global problems. Experts, all advocates of a just and democratic world order, have been recruited to pursue research in areas such as health, space, culture, economics, women, education, forestry, political asylum, communication and cybernetics.

Unlike most governments, which are heavily in debt, World Government is self-financing. Citizens who request services pay modest fees to cover the operating expenses. The World Refugee Fund and World Citizens Legal Fund have assisted many refugees, displaced persons and political prisoners, and helped to finance legal cases for world citizens whose rights have been violated, or who face prosecution under national laws.

The World Passport remains the most widely used document, a practical symbol and a useful tool for travelers. Contributors to the Refugee Fund have made it possible to issue passports for free to many refugees and war victims, half of them women and children.

In essence, world government is a sustainable and self-sufficient community of sovereign individuals who have given their prime allegiance to an emerging body of “common world law,” including various human rights covenants, the Stockholm Environmental Declaration and the Nuremberg Principles. It is neither a parallel government nor a supra-national federation. It is a meta-government of individual human beings.

Garry Davis founded the world citizen movement in 1948. Greg Guma and Davis co-authored two books, including these excerpts from Passport to Freedom: A Guide for World Citizens.