Citizen of the World

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.