Citizen of the World

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

Recently, I’ve had the great privilege of traveling abroad. I’ve been to Italy, Spain, Japan a couple of times, England, Scotland… So I’ve been pulling out my American passport a lot lately. And every time I present it to a customs official, I always get nervous. I honestly think it’s meant to make you nervous. There is something inherently fraught and maybe even a little ugly about the ritual of presenting your passport and that this little booklet you’re carrying around with you, whether it says you’re from the United States or Japan or Haiti, confers so much power. I can’t stand the idea that your value as a person could be determined by the fact of where you were born. But the minute you’re asked to show your passport, it’s obvious that’s how the world works, especially when billions of people live in countries whose passports grant them little to no meaningful access to the rest of the world. While an estimated 850 million people do not even have the documents necessary to prove their nationality or legal existence, which is why we wanted to share this story from the podcast, Far From Home, by frequent 99PI contributor Scott Gurian. 

A while back, Scott sat down with someone who deliberately surrendered his official nationality, including his passport, and began issuing what he believed was a better form of identification. We’ll let Scott take it from here. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Back in October of 2024, on the eve of the presidential election, Donald Trump held a giant political rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. And one of the warm-up speakers was his soon-to-be political adviser, Stephen Miller. In a fiery speech, Miller expressed what would soon become the through line of the country’s new anti-immigration policy. 

STEPHEN MILLER: America is for Americans and Americans only! 

SCOTT GURIAN: The rise of people like Stephen Miller shows that we are living in an era when nationhood and national identity seem to matter more than ever. But it’s kind of strange because, at the same time that fascists in America and elsewhere are trying to get us all to think in terms of nations, we’re dealing with all these global problems like pandemics, climate change, and AI. Meanwhile, technology in the 21st century often makes it easy to ignore things like nationality and national boundaries all together. Therefore, I know this might sound sort of radical, but if it ever made any sense, the entire concept of the nation state can sometimes seem kind of quaint and outdated for the modern world. 

This is a story of one man who reached all these conclusions himself more than 75 years ago, way ahead of his time. His name was Garry Davis, and I went to interview him back in 2009, when he was 88 years old. According to my directions, Garry’s house was in South Burlington, Vermont, in the United States of America. But as soon as I pulled into his driveway, I noticed a sign next to his front door, proclaiming it “Sovereign World Territory.”

SCOTT GURIAN: Hi, it’s good to meet you. Sorry, I’m running a few minutes behind here… 

SCOTT GURIAN: He came up to me, pointed out that I was standing on planet Earth, and asked me to present my World Citizen card. I didn’t have one, so thankfully he decided to waive the requirement. Then he led me into his living room, where we’d sit for the next five hours, talking about a choice he made when he was 26 years old in 1948. It was a simple act that took just a minute to perform, but it would make the rest of his life really complicated. Over the next six decades, he’d be detained and imprisoned countless times, dragged off the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, and gain millions of followers, all while confronting bureaucrats who had absolutely no idea what to do with him. What set this chain of events into motion was Garry’s decision to stand before a guy in a gray suit at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, put his hand on a Bible, and read a couple of lines off a sheet of paper. 

GARRY DAVIS: “I hereby swear that I desire to make a formal renunciation of my American nationality, and pursuant thereto, hereby absolutely and entirely renounce my nationality in the United States and all rights and privileges thereunto, and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to the United States of America.”

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry’s life journey that led him up to that point was pretty unexpected. You see, growing up in the 1930s and ’40s, he had a lot going for him. He was born into privilege to a wealthy Philadelphia family whose car was a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. His father, Meyer Davis, was a famous bandleader at the time. This is his orchestra you’re hearing right now. Family friends included Ethel Merman and Bob Hope. As a young man, Garry was a rising Broadway star who once performed as an understudy to the famous actor Danny Kaye. Then came World War II. Garry was drafted into the Army Air Corps and trained to pilot a B-17 bomber. The experience had a profound impact on him. 

GARRY DAVIS: That was a whole reassessment of my role in life. How dare they put me in this role? How humiliating to my soul, my moral character, my profession… Everything you learn in kindergarten is being thrust aside and now you’re a killer in the name of the nation. But you’re not prepared for that. You’re not prepared to even think about that. There’s no education for that, at least there wasn’t for me. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Flying bombing raids over Brandenburg and losing his older brother, Bud, to a German torpedo caused him to re-evaluate not just his participation in the war, but his identity as an American citizen. 

GARRY DAVIS: I said, “There is something intrinsically wrong with society, and I’m not going to play this game anymore.” So that started me on a whole wave of thinking about how not to play the game without going to a desert island, you know, and canceling out. 

SCOTT GURIAN: He started reading about philosophy and history and studying the law. Eventually, he concluded that the only way to prevent future wars was for people to remove themselves from the system that creates the us-versus-them mentality. So, after a year of planning and strategizing, Garry decided to act. 

GARRY DAVIS: I walked into the U.S. Embassy on May 25th, 1948, and I asked to renounce my nationality. Well, everybody was appalled, of course. “We’re here to protect you.” You know, I said, “No, you can’t protect me. You didn’t protect my brother. And you didn’t protect anybody outside that I killed.” And so forth. So finally I convinced them. 

SCOTT GURIAN: The U.S. State Department says just a few thousand Americans a year give up their citizenship. So, Garry’s action was kind of unusual to begin with. What made it even stranger was that he wasn’t becoming a citizen of any other country. 

GARRY DAVIS: They said, “Okay, Mr. Davis, now you’re a stateless person. And you have something that belongs to us.” I said, “What’s that?” “The United States passport. Please give it to us.” So then the fun began. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry left the embassy and went to the local office of the Associated Press to tell his story to the world. Then he went back to his hotel room to try to get some rest, but word had gotten out, so the phone began ringing constantly. First it was United Press, then Reuters, then the International News Service, all asking him for interviews. As I sat in Garry’s living room listening to his stories, I asked him to show me a scrapbook of press clippings from the days that followed. 

GARRY DAVIS: These are U.S. stories… Philadelphia News, May 27th, 1948. This went all over the press. 

SCOTT GURIAN: What does this headline here say? 

GARRY DAVIS: “Young citizen of nowhere must live there, too.” See, the journalists had a lot of fun with me. I mean, here was a big story. It was unique. It was personal. It was political. It was active. The guy was on the line himself. It wasn’t just a theory. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Did people see it as a publicity stunt? 

GARRY DAVIS: The publicity stunt didn’t come into play simply because of the renunciation. “This guy’s giving up United States citizenship? That’s not a publicity stunt.” It threw in a counterlight–the so-called theory that everybody wanted to be a United States citizen. Everybody was trying to get into the United States after the war. Here’s a guy who gives up his United States citizenship. What is he? Is he a crackpot? Is he a clown? What’s his motivation, in other words? We want to find out more of who he is and what his real reasons are. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry attempted to answer some of these questions by releasing a statement explaining his action. 

GARRY DAVIS: “In the absence of an international government, our world politically is now a naked anarchy. Two global wars have shown that as long as two or more powerful sovereign nation states regard their own national laws supreme and sufficient to handle affairs between nations, there can be no order on a planetary level. This international anarchy is moving swiftly toward a final war. I no longer find it compatible with my inner convictions to contribute to this anarchy and thus be a party to the inevitable annihilation of our civilization by remaining solely loyal to one of these sovereign nation states. I should like to consider myself a citizen of the world.”

SCOTT GURIAN: To be clear, this wasn’t an entirely new or original concept. Many notable individuals throughout history, including Socrates, Charlie Chaplin, and more recently Barack Obama have called themselves world citizens. But Garry took this idea to another level. For the rest of his life, he’d be a free agent operating by his own set of rules and without any sort of roadmap or instruction manual. 

GARRY DAVIS: Being neutral, my position was outside the framework of the laws of the nations. It was very exciting, you know, wondering what’s gonna happen now. What’s the French government going to say? 

SCOTT GURIAN: The answer came quickly. Given that he was now undocumented, French officials gave him a deadline to get out. But without a passport, where could he go? Traveling anywhere was sure to be difficult. But just as Garry was considering his options, he had a stroke of luck. 

GARRY DAVIS: The day that I was supposed to be out of France was September 11th, 1948. That was the day that the General Assembly of the United Nations took over a little part of Paris at the Trocadéro, and it was declared international territory. It was the only place I could go, actually, without going to jail or without going to another nation and facing the same problem that I faced in France. So, I went to the United Nations. I made a press statement saying, “I’m your first citizen. I have to live here.”

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry and some friends camped out on the front steps calling for world citizenship as a path to lasting peace, something the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed to uphold. Officials didn’t know quite what to do with them. Then, that November, Garry managed to gain access to one of the General Assembly’s meetings, and he used the opportunity to draw attention to his cause. 

NEWSCASTER: An incident that reflects the mood of an impatient world interrupts proceedings at the United Nations Assembly… 

GARRY DAVIS: All the press was there and we had huge lights and we had the balcony box wired up so that it could take our speech. 

GARRY DAVIS (NEWSREEL): I interrupt! I interrupt…

GARRY DAVIS: All the delegates were on the floor. Eleanor Roosevelt–you know, with her headphones–they’re wondering where this voice is coming from. 

NEWSCASTER: Mr. Vyshinsky looks on as the interrupter, Garry Davis, self-styled first citizen of the world, is hustled out. 

GARRY DAVIS (NEWSREEL): I speak to the people! Shall I speak? Will you let me? 

GARRY DAVIS: I said, “I interrupt in the name of the people not represented here. The nations you represent divide us, separate us, and lead us to the abyss of World War III. What we need is one government for one world. And if you don’t do it, step aside, we’re going to do it ourselves.” We had screaming headlines the next day. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Those headlines were seen by people around the world. Authors and intellectuals like Richard Wright, Albert Camus, and even Albert Einstein spoke out on Davis’ behalf. And he began receiving letters from supporters near and far. Remember, the war had just recently ended, and memories of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust were still fresh in people’s minds, especially there in Europe, so folks were eager to hear what Garry had to say. Less than two weeks after his storming of the UN, he gave a speech in a Paris auditorium and 20,000 people showed up. Many of them expressed interest in his movement. So he got to work creating something they could actually join. 

FRENCH NEWSCASTER: [IN FRENCH] During this time, in a Parisian hotel, the citizen of the world, Garry Davis, is getting organized…

GARRY DAVIS: We set up a registry of world citizens. We hired a hall and we started issuing a world citizen card. And that was the first thing. We were IDing a whole new constituency, a world constituency. It was a new language. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Though Garry Davis no longer had a nationality, he still considered New York his home. So, he returned to the U.S. Embassy and managed to convince authorities to let him migrate back to his native land. After arriving, he got married, had a kid, went back to acting, and tried returning to his pre-war life. But his heart just wasn’t into it. 

GARRY DAVIS: I was making good money in show business. And I had so many offers, and I gave it all up. I left the top show in Broadway after three days of rehearsal. And I told the producer, “I’m sorry, Horace, I can’t be in this show because I got to work for world peace.”

SCOTT GURIAN: Unsure of what to do next, he struggled with how to navigate life as a stateless individual. 

GARRY DAVIS: So I went to the top civil rights lawyer in New York. I told him, “I’m not a citizen here. I’m not an immigrant. I’m not a visitor. What is my status?” And they had a full staff meeting on that. And they said, “You’re not really here. Legally, you are not here. Physically, you’re here. And the government has recognized you physically. Therefore, not being within the framework of the United States law, you have been recognized by the United States government as a sovereign, like the Iroquois Indians. So you’ve got nationhood within you. You call yourself a world citizen? And you have all these people out there as world citizens? How can you be a citizen without a government?” They said, “You gotta declare your government. Once you declare the world government, then you can do a lot of things. First of all, you can issue your own documents, your own money… You can declare war on the United States, and then the United States will beat you, and then it has to take care of you for the rest of your life.” They had a field day. You know, these were lawyers kind of having fun. This was a new problem, which they never had. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry gave this some thought and decided to follow their advice. On September 4, 1953, he formalized that registry of supporters he had created while he was in Paris and founded the World Government of World Citizens. He opened an office in New York and hired some staff and interns to carry out the day-to-day running of the government via a non-profit organization called the World Service Authority. And they started issuing documents, including birth and marriage certificates, international Residence permits, and political asylum cards for people who contacted them requesting help. So at this point, I had to ask Garry the question that’s probably on your mind right now, which is some variation of: Can they do that? I mean, here you have this guy who decided he wants to form a new government that anyone can join and he’s printing official-looking credentials for people to present to border guards and bureaucrats. Were these documents actually legitimate? 

GARRY DAVIS: Well, is the United States legitimate? Is war legitimate? You know, turn the question around. Who is to say what is legitimate? Is not my claiming to be who I am legitimate? If you’re in a desert island alone, are you legitimate? You’re the government. You’re the citizenry. You’re alone! Do whatever you want. But you see me coming along in a raft, and you say, “Well, we’re together now. We form a community.” Then we legitimize the community. How do governments start in the first place? They don’t start with governors. Governments started by people deciding to have a government, to legitimize themselves within a community. 

SCOTT GURIAN: But enough with the philosophizing. From a legal perspective, Garry told me that, yes, the work of his new world government was entirely legitimate because it was based on the Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a UN document describing the rights and freedoms of all people. 

GARRY DAVIS: Now the first article that we’ve taken is Article 13, Section 2, which is an article on freedom of travel, which says everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. But what is a country? Tom Paine said, “My country is the world.” And when you think that you can get around the world in two days today, you can say, “Well, really, the world is a county at this point.” So we need a document based upon freedom of travels. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Hence the creation of the World Passport, printed in seven languages, including the made-up universal language of Esperanto. 

SCOTT GURIAN: So it’s made to look like any other passport typically issued by a nation state that someone would have. 

GARRY DAVIS: Yeah, it’s a document which they can look at, and it IDs you completely. But it’s just not a national passport. This is all important for the guy on the frontier because this is the way they operate, you see? It’s for him. It’s not for us. We don’t believe in passports. We think they’re stupid. In fact, many times I say, “Look, our passport is a joke. It’s a joke on them. Whereas your passport–your national passport–is a joke on you.”

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry said he thinks the whole process of making someone get a stamp and a little book in order to cross an imaginary border is really dumb. But by creating his own passport, he was basically thumbing his nose at the establishment and saying, “See? I could play this game too.” Now, in case you’re thinking that Garry just started the world government as a form of political theater, I should explain that he saw his organization as serving a real need. You see, many of the letters he and his colleagues received, especially in those early days, came from refugees who were stateless themselves. But unlike Garry, they didn’t choose to end up that way. 

GARRY DAVIS: They needed a document to say who they were. They couldn’t get it from the nation. There are huge refugee camps outside of Djibouti or in the Sudan and so forth. And the people–families–are living under tents in the heat. Now the United Nations is not issuing them documents, but the World Service Authority is. 

SCOTT GURIAN: And believe it or not, these passports and other documents that Garry and his team of ragtag visionaries created actually worked some of the time. Garry told me the story, for example, about the time members of the Ogoni tribe from southern Nigeria reached out asking for help. After protesting the Shell Oil Company’s environmental destruction of their land, they had to flee across the border to a refugee camp in the neighboring country of Benin. They didn’t have any identity documents, though, so the world government made passports for close to 2,000 of them, which they were then able to use to obtain visas to get out. There was also the young, conscientious objector who successfully avoided registering for the draft through some clever letter writing, claiming that his citizenship in the world government forbade him from joining the American military, and the woman in Uganda caught in a bind when her country’s dictator decided to expel her and other members of the country’s Indian minority. 

GARRY DAVIS: We received an urgent telegram saying that one of the mothers–the Indian mothers–had given birth at the Uganda airport. So what the baby needed was an immediate birth certificate because they were going to be picked up the next day by a British plane. And I got on the typewriter and wrote out the first world birth certificate and went to a stationary store and put a seal on it and so forth. And I got it in the mail at five o’clock and got down to that airport the next day. And the plane came in. The captain of the plane said, “Where’s the baby’s documents? We can’t take anybody without documents.” And the mother handed him the document that I had just typed out on my typewriter. Well, the baby was in the mother’s arms, of course. So, the captain accepted that; he had to accept that. And the plane flew to Heathrow. And that was the document upon which that baby got into UK with the mother. 

SCOTT GURIAN: In the decades that followed, the world government has continued its work, issuing more than five million legal documents, including nearly one million passports. They say that Ecuador and five African countries have offered official recognition at one point or another. And according to copies of passport stamps and visas people have sent them, nearly every other country in the world has also accepted these passports for travel, on at least a few occasions. While some of these might be instances where the border guards simply weren’t paying close attention to the pieces of paper in front of them, the world government contends that the fact that their passports have been honored thousands of times over the years is proof that these can’t just all be mistakes. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that for every instance where people have had success using these documents, there are many other times when they haven’t worked as intended. Some critics have charged over the years that the world government is in the business of selling false hope to undocumented individuals, given that the legal recognition and acceptance of World Passports and ID cards is unpredictable and by no means guaranteed. An organization spokesman said, however, that simply providing people with papers gives them some degree of human dignity. Garry, for his part, had little sympathy for anyone who said his documents like the World Passport were little more than novelty items. 

GARRY DAVIS: Does it work? You know, I have to say to you, no, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. I work. I’m the citizen. The documents do nothing. It’s a tool. A hammer does nothing unless you pick it up and know how to use it. My consciousness works, and I’m conscious of who I am. That’s the only thing that works. We say that to everybody who calls us. “We’re not doing anything, really, except giving testament to who you are.” 

SCOTT GURIAN: In other words, he said people can’t simply present a World Passport at a national border and expect to breeze through immigration the way they might with a national passport. They need to stand up for their rights and know the right things to say to convince the border guard to let them through. 

GARRY DAVIS: Did you claim to be a world citizen? Do you know anything about the Declaration of Human Rights? Have you read any of my books? You know, you’re on that front line. You’re the guy who gets out there and talks to these idiot officials. If you ever learn how to talk back to them, then they’re gonna put you down. They’re gonna humiliate you every time. Then you’re going to write to me or call me and say, “I paid for that passport and it doesn’t work.” When people say your passport doesn’t work, you say, “Well, I went to India with the first passport, Number 00001. And I left India three months later with 17 visas on my first passport. Don’t tell me that passport doesn’t work.”

SCOTT GURIAN: But even Garry, who is well-versed in international law and had all the best legal arguments at his disposal, had mixed success. Over the years, by his own account, he was imprisoned 34 times in nine different countries for trying to exercise what he saw as his right to freedom of travel as a world citizen. Sometimes it was because his passport was outright rejected. Other times he was initially allowed to enter a country but then later arrested. Since he disagreed with the concept of nation states, there were also instances where he crossed the border by riding a bicycle on a path through the woods instead of going through an official crossing. So he’d get in trouble for that. 

When I first learned about Garry Davis a number of years ago, I was intrigued. So, I actually sent away for one of his World Passports. But it’s been sitting in a drawer ever since, and I’ve never tried using it myself because–I’ll be honest–while I really appreciate the concept of a world without borders, I’m not an activist for the cause. I mean, it’s not something that I feel so strongly about that I’d be willing to risk being detained for hours or even days in some foreign country’s airport and missing my flight. When I’m traveling, I usually just want to get to my final destination without engaging in political and philosophical arguments with border guards along the way. I mentioned to Garry that I had one of his passports but never used it, and he called me a coward. I understand why he sees it that way because, for him, this was a cause worth devoting his life to. 

GARRY DAVIS: I’ve taken my case up to the Supreme Court. They didn’t hear the case, but when the Supreme Court denies your writ, that means the lower court decisions prevail. But all the lower court decisions were that I was an excludable alien, but they couldn’t exclude me. 

SCOTT GURIAN: There’s nowhere they could send you to. 

GARRY DAVIS: They don’t know where they can send me. 

SCOTT GURIAN: So Garry was basically in a stalemate with the U.S. Government, living out his life in his humble home there in South Burlington, Vermont, despite existing in a sort of legal limbo. 

GARRY DAVIS: One journalist went to the immigration department. She asked, “What is Garry Davis’ status?” And his answer was: “Garry Davis is a legal fiction.” [LAUGHS] That means I don’t exist. If that’s not proof of the power of an individual, that according to the United States–according to all the nation states–if you claim to be a world citizen, you become a legal fiction that they can’t deal with you… But you’re still existent. 

SCOTT GURIAN: In addition to issuing passports, birth certificates, and ID cards, Garry’s world government has created a legal department to provide support for document holders whose paperwork is denied. They’ve established a Sovereign Order of World Guards that anyone can join. And they’ve even printed their own stamps and world money. 

GARRY DAVIS: This is our world treasury here. 

SCOTT GURIAN: He pulled out a box. 

GARRY DAVIS: As a world citizen, I decided that we need a new currency. The currency is called the Mondo. M-O-N-D-O. And this money is based upon energy. Where is the greatest source of energy? It’s the sun, obviously. Buckminster Fuller says there’s more energy poured on the Earth by the sun in five minutes than humanity uses all year. These are kilowatt dollars. This is a peace currency. You can’t fight wars with it. So look at the immediate trust that it’ll have. I get a lot of letters for people to donate money. I always put this money in, and I explain it with a sheet. “This is world money. You want a donation from a world citizen? This is what you’re gonna get.” [LAUGHS] Now I haven’t gone into the markets and started using it at this point, but that’ll come. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Garry passed away in 2013 at the age of 91, and he was active until the end. Shortly before his death, he mailed a world government passport to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and also to fugitive national security contractor Edward Snowden, who’s been living in Russia since his U.S. Passport had been revoked. Garry Davis’ view of political boundaries was not that they shouldn’t exist, but rather that they don’t exist. He said they’re a legal fiction we’ve all come to believe in, and by placing himself outside the realm of the nation state, he’d thereby rendered them obsolete. For Garry, the idea of world government was not some far-out utopian vision, but, rather, an idea rooted in pragmatism. He said we’re all world citizens, but it’s up to each of us whether we want to recognize that fact. 

When I first met Garry at his home there in Vermont, he told me about a recent trip he had taken to visit his kids who lived in Montreal. Coming back, he arrived at the U.S. border, as usual, with only his world government passport. At first, immigration refused to let him pass. It was the same bureaucratic showdown he’d faced many times over the years. Garry told them that their borders were ridiculous. He said that the sun shined the same on both sides of their imaginary line and that he was just going from one part of the world to another. Eventually, they relented. “Get out of here,” they said. “Go home.”

ROMAN MARS: When we come back, I talk with Scott about the work of Garry’s world government today. Stay tuned. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So I’m back with Scott Gurian, who originally produced that story for his podcast, Far From Home. Scott, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Thanks so much for having me, Roman. 

ROMAN MARS: So this is all from an interview that you did with Garry nearly 20 years ago. So, I wanted to get a bit of an update from you. You mentioned that the organization that Garry founded, it’s still around. What is their mission today? Like, how has it changed since Garry’s death? 

SCOTT GURIAN: So, I actually spoke to David Gallup, who’s the president and general counsel of what’s they’re now calling the World Citizen Government. And he says the organization has kind of broadened their focus a little bit since Garry’s death. When he was around, you know, they were just kind of very insular. And Garry, in retrospect, was really opinionated. He could be difficult to work with at times. He just wouldn’t have patience for people who didn’t exactly agree with his vision of how the world should work. So, I think in some senses, Garry’s death kind of freed up the organization to pursue things a little bit differently. Nowadays, they’re working with other organizations more. In specific terms, some of the things that the World Citizen Government is focusing on nowadays is they’re working on advocating for the creation of a world court of human rights. And they’re also trying to expand the movement to a younger audience. They’re creating these world citizen clubs at a bunch of high schools and college campuses all over the place. 

ROMAN MARS: Nice. Are they still making world government passports? 

SCOTT GURIAN: Oh, yes, definitely. Yeah, they’ve now issued about a million of them, as well as a number of other identity documents. So there is still a demand and they’re still fulfilling that need. 

ROMAN MARS: And do they work? I mean, do they work without the power of Garry behind them, you know? 

SCOTT GURIAN: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. And I touched on this a little in my piece. So the World Citizen Government says that 189 countries have recognized the passport on a case-by-case basis. And they say there’s a small number which, at one point or another, have given de facto recognition. They’ve sent letters saying that we officially recognize this. Though in many of those cases, it’s been years ago and it’s unclear whether they still do. The world government says the only way that they have of knowing for sure if their passports are working is when users of the passports send them back stamps. Well, they send photos. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh! 

SCOTT GURIAN: Yeah. It really does work, believe it or not. I know it’s hard to believe, but no, people send back stamps and they say they’ve collected thousands of these over the years. Border guards issued, you know, passport stamps, as well as work permits and visas, in the world government passport. So these documents are honored in many cases.They told me this one case of this businessman who had been traveling all over Latin America with his World Passport. He sent it into the World Citizen Government because he was so successful using it that he had run out of space. He needed more pages. They were just really impressed. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s amazing. So who are the people who are applying for world government passports today? Is it all people like you that are just like, “Oh, this would be a fun thing to have,” or people who really need some kind of documentation? 

SCOTT GURIAN: From what I hear, it’s a mix. As always, there are just people who are uncomfortable with the current system, who want a second form of ID, people from certain nationalities who might face hostility in certain parts of the world because of where they’re from, or people serving in some kind of role, like working with an NGO–international aid workers–where their primary identity is helping people around the world not to their individual nation state. So they want this kind of world government passport. But then, you know, there are also people who really desperately need it, who need some form of ID, like refugees and stateless individuals fleeing persecution, violence, or natural disasters. You know, after the war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, the World Citizen Government tells me they got tons of letters and emails on both sides of the conflict–people trying to escape and that didn’t want to be conscripted to fight in the military. They’ve also heard from lots of people in the Palestinian territories. And then we should mention, in addition to issuing identity documents, they also provide free legal advocacy to refugees and stateless people around the world. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, wow. So, listening to Garry, his vision of a world without nation states sounds pretty fanciful. And I think one of the things that also comes to mind is a one-world government also sounds like maybe that might be worse. I don’t know for sure, I’ve never seen it. I mean, at some point, if you have a world government, you have to decide how that government functions. And do they have a concept of that? Is it democratic? Is it autocratic? 

SCOTT GURIAN: Yeah, it was definitely democratic, they would say. But Garry–he himself didn’t really focus on, like, the actual form the government would take and the elected representatives. He kind of left that to others. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, he was just a provocateur and just like, “This is not working, but we’ll figure out something else.” But figuring out how many electors are brought into a thing. Who wants to do that? 

SCOTT GURIAN: No, they clearly said Garry was not a communist. He was not an anarchist. I mean, there wasn’t a political ideology behind it, like an ism, that you would think of. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, there’s this way in which the lack of specifics can be really useful. Like, we’re recording this in the immediate aftermath of the ICE surge in Minneapolis. And there are border patrol secret police of masked people without warrants who are violently detaining and sometimes killing people. There’s broader waves of mass deportations in the United States and travel restrictions. And I love how Garry’s attitude kind of resets the conversation a little bit. The common rhetoric is that the border is broken. We have to do something to fix it. And no matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, you still say those kind of talking points and that there’s these nuances to approach these things. And I just love that there’s someone standing there saying a statement that I completely agree with, which is like, “I could not give less of a [BLEEP] about your documentation and immigration status as a human.” Like, I can’t even imagine caring about it. And I like that there’s someone out there just saying that. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’re so used to having identity documents and passports that we just take them all for granted. And Garry’s just totally outside of that framework, just saying that we need to get rid of this whole system and, like, “Why are you putting more value in this document than a human being in front of you? And you’re putting way too much importance on the papers they have.”

ROMAN MARS: I love that he’s asking the question. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Yeah. I think the other point I’ll make is that, as Americans, we’ve historically been pretty spoiled when it comes to travel. There’s, I think, close to 200 countries in the world, and our American passports allow us to go to a large portion of those without having to get a visa ahead of time. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we’ve had the privilege of having our own world passport most of the time. Effectively, we can travel the world. Just the other people cannot. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Yeah, but President Trump recently signed this ban for dozens of countries seeking to visit the United States. And so in response, some of those nations have actually started making it more difficult for Americans to visit. And several countries in Africa now completely prohibit ordinary Americans from visiting. I think Americans are kind of getting a taste of what it’s been like for people in the rest of the world. And I guess you could say that Garry’s notions of being world citizens are more important now than ever. 

ROMAN MARS: So I have one final and most important question. Do you still have your World Passport? 

SCOTT GURIAN: I do. 

ROMAN MARS: Have you ever tried to use it? 

SCOTT GURIAN: It’s expired now. I haven’t gotten a new one, but this is my World Passport. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh yeah, it looks like a passport. 

SCOTT GURIAN: I mean, this was issued a number of years ago, so it looks a little hokey. This is the way they used to do it where it’s actually written in calligraphy with a photo stamped in here. The newer ones, they assure me, are much more professional looking, where everything is printed on the plastic and they have scannable RFID chips and everything. And the passport actually came with a little booklet of the UN Declaration of Human Rights because, as Garry would say, the passport by itself is meaningless. It’s like a hammer. You need to know how to use it. So, you just can’t take the passport. You bring this with you to make all the right arguments to the border guards so hopefully they’ll accept it. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s awesome. Well, Scott, it was such a fun story. It was such fun talking to you. I really appreciate it. 

SCOTT GURIAN: Thank you so much, Roman. I appreciate it as well. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Scott Gurian for his podcast Far From Home. Other versions of this story also appeared on the programs B-Side Radio and Backstory Radio, with additional editing respectively by Tamara Keith and Jess Engebretson. Our version was edited by Joe Rosenberg, remixed by Martín Gonzalez, and intro and outro music by Swan Real. 

If you found Garry Davis’s story interesting, we’ll have a link to the Far From Home website, where Scott has provided show notes, including videos of Garry, more information about the World Government, as well as many other stories from around the world. Honestly, it’s hard to think of anyone who has put the power of the American passport to more use than Scott. Go check it out. 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

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