Every time you hand your passport to a customs official, there’s something inherently fraught about it. That little booklet confers enormous power depending on where you were born, and billions of people live in countries whose passports grant them little to no meaningful access to the rest of the world. An estimated 850 million people don’t even have documents to prove their nationality.
In an episode of his podcast Far From Home, frequent 99pi contributor Scott Gurian sat down with a man who reached his own conclusions about all this more than 75 years ago. In 1948, a 26-year-old former Broadway actor and WWII bomber pilot named Garry Davis walked into the US Embassy in Paris and renounced his American citizenship. He wasn’t becoming a citizen of another country. He was becoming, as he put it, a citizen of the world. The act made him stateless, undocumented, and suddenly very interesting to the international press. He camped on the steps of the United Nations, stormed the floor of the General Assembly, and drew support from people like Albert Camus and Albert Einstein. Then he founded the World Government of World Citizens and started issuing his own passports.
Those passports, printed in seven languages including Esperanto, have been used by everyone from Nigerian refugees fleeing persecution to a businessman who traveled Latin America so successfully he ran out of pages. They’ve also gotten plenty of people detained. Davis himself was imprisoned 34 times in nine countries. He died in 2013 at 91, and the organization he founded (now called the World Citizen Government) has issued roughly a million passports and continues to provide legal advocacy for refugees and stateless individuals worldwide.
Far From Home is an immersive travel and culture documentary podcast where Peabody award-winning journalist Scott Gurian reports stories from places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. This story also appeared on B-Side Radio and Backstory Radio.
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Thank you for this episode Roman.
There’s a lesser-known follow-on to his “world citizen” vision you might find interesting.
In the late ’70s/early ’80s, Davis worked with my father-in-law, Norman Kurland, who served as his Director of World Economics. (In the early ‘70s, Norm had been Washington counsel and chief lobbyist for ownership economist Louis Kelso, helping introduce the first legislation establishing employee stock ownership plans.) Together, Davis and Kurland explored how the economic empowerment of every world citizen could underpin global citizenship.
At Davis’s request, Kurland developed the Abraham Federation: a proposal to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and broader conflicts throughout the world) through a new model for a nation, uniting every citizen as a direct owner of new productive assets, infrastructure, and natural resources. of productive assets.
They presented this internationally as a practical path toward Davis’s vision of a functioning and just global society. I last spoke with Davis at the Bucky Fuller Centennial Celebration, where these ideas were still very much alive.
If you’re ever looking for a follow-up angle—how “world citizenship” could democratize economic as well as political power—this might be it: https://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-abraham-federation/
Best, Rowland Brohawn
PS – I still treasure my 10 Mundo bill.
I love this show, and this episode was as well crafted as any other. I couldn’t help, however, to feel slapped across the face by the apparent level of privilege unawareness, which can be offensive by itself. I say apparent because I believe it is not so. Nonetheless, the fact that renouncing US citizenship is a brave and difficult thing that only white, middle-aged men in business suits can afford to do should have been explicitly addressed.
I get that there is no time for every disambiguation, and I agree otherwise with what was said, even would have liked for you to take it further beyond into more challenging territory. Thanks.