2 April, 1979

I am delighted and honored to be invited to address this meeting, especially under the format of international week.

As I was wondering how to go about addressing this meeting I was thinking of all the speakers who address students throughout the country and especially at commencement exercises and probably ever since the bomb exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in 1945 - which is a little bit before your time,- and how they would weary the students with the ideas of the crises which face all of us in the 20th century.

Then, of course, they invariably tell you to go out into the world, that world which they have loaded up with crises, with wisdom and courage and then they sit down rather smugly as if they had settled all your problems.

Well, I'm not going to do that, I am not going to follow that line. On the contrary, what I am going to do is point out our common enemy, enemy number one, yours, mine and that big word, human-kind's, and then I am going to tell you what to do and how to cope with that enemy in down-to-earth terms. Well, that's a rather presumptuous undertaking, I realize. But, the times don't permit double-talk any more and they don't permit double-think as George Orwell pointed out in "1984."

As I talk, of course, you are all aware of radioactive gasses, iodine gasses spewing out of a nuclear center near Harrisburg. This is happening now. This is a symbol, a very potent, dramatic symbol of the urgency of the message I am here to give you today. This is a symptom of an age which began in 1945, which is known generally as the nuclear age. The same reactor which is near Harrisburg near Three Mile Island is in a Trident submarine, in many Trident submarines, and if these ever follow the same course, or the melting of the core in these Trident submarines, they would sink to the bottom of the ocean. They would pollute with radioactivity hundreds of miles and they would be there for 250,000 years.

Another way of pinpointing the urgency, in 1945 the United States government spent eight and a half billion dollars on armaments; that's about 918,00 dollars an hour. But in 1979 the U.S. will spend about one hundred, twenty six billion dollars on armaments which raise the ante to about 1.5 million dollars every hour. The total world military budget is about four hundred billion dollars; that adds up to 4.5 million dollars every hour. So, in the hour that I've been allotted to speak to you about world peace, the nation-state world will have moved four point five million dollars closer to world holocaust, and every hour you can tick it off like clockwork is another five million dollars closer to the end of the human story. We have no time to waste.

For today, I want to tell you about a new beginning for world peace, and a beginning that does not start and cannot start with nations, but with you and me. You see, when peace is discussed, it seems to have nothing to do with you and me, and it's discussed all the time from podiums, from lecture platforms, from pulpits; but it's always peace between nation states, peace between the USSR and the USA, peace between Vietnam and China, peace between Israel and the Arab states, peace between, between, between the nation-states, ad nauseam. But peace between equally sovereign nation-states so long as the right to wage war is not outlawed by a higher government once and for all is an illusion, and a travesty. It's merely a momentary absence of overt hostilities, as the hostility seethes underneath.

There was a voice in the past whose centennial we are celebrating this year, who ushered in the nuclear age with that famous equation which changed our world: E=MC2. I am speaking, of course, of Albert Einstein. He wrote in his later years:

Then the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, U Thant, who had a bird's eye view of what was going on in the entire system of the United Nations, wrote in 1963,

When Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the moon's surface, took his little Minolta camera and pointed it back at his home planet, he took that magnificent picture, the earthscape, while we were all there. U Thant later commented on that. He said:

Then in direct contrast, when writing of the obligations of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, he said,

Then we move up to the present. Nothing changes, the present Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, writes in his 1978 report that in the present political circumstances the United Nations is seldom, if ever, in a position to enforce its decisions and has little means of making them effective in the face of determined opposition. Then we wonder, does the present Secretary-General Dr. Waldheim know what is required? Well, it would appear so because in the same report he says,

So, once more, world government is advocated; now by the U.N.'s top civil servant.

What does Jimmy Carter think of all this? What does he think is required for world peace, the leader of the world's mightiest military force who promised to decrease military spending if he were elected? Is he ignorant of the necessity of world government as a condition for world peace?

Well, I was in London on January 21, 1977 and I picked up the London Times and read the following:

You never heard that, you never read that, because it never got back to the United States. It came through the Voice of America a day late, so it was cold news. It never came back.

Now 53 cents out of every budget dollar today, as you probably know, goes for past, present, future wars. I am talking about the U.S. budget. Later on Jimmy Carter said up at the United Nations on April 29th, last year our national security in this complicated age requires more than military might. The choice is not which superpower will dominate the world; none can and none will. The choice instead is between a world of anarchy and a world of law. This is incredible; it goes on and on. I could read statements of dozens and dozens of national leaders, from Winston Churchill on, who talk about the necessity of world law for world peace. On paper, they are all for world law, even the generals.

Well, back in 1948, after I had fought in World War II as a bomber pilot, I discovered to my amazement the horrifying truth that the national official world, all the officials in the nations, including all the diplomats - and the diplomats of course are used to mouthing very glorious phrases about unity and brotherhood and so forth - are in fact unable to move beyond the very same murderous institution of the nation-state which gives them sustenance.

Their idea of defense is like a man who puts bombs in his own cellar and then has a system of controls by his bed in order to ward off burglars. Of course, when the bombs become nuclear, which has given rise to the phrase of "overkill" then the madness is complete. So I realized in 1947 that my relationship, and this goes for every one of us if you are a national citizen, with the nation-state, with the U.S.A. in particular, was no longer the social contract of the textbooks but it was actually a suicide pact with my fellow citizens. True, I was spared in WWII and I deeply regret and mourn the fact that my own brother was not, but not only would I not be spared in World War III but neither would my species.

I read a marvelous book published in 1945 by Emery Reves called The Anatomy of Peace in which Reves opened my eyes as to how I was thinking about the world. He pointed out that we thought and we were taught to think nation-centrically rather like in the Ptolemaic era when everybody thought that the sun revolved around the earth. Along came Copernicus and said "It ain't so" and Copernicus was considered a heretic. Everybody thinks about the world as if it's revolving around its own nation; if you are an American citizen it revolves around Washington, D.C., if you are a Soviet citizen the world revolves around Moscow, etc., if you are a Frenchman, Paris, an Englishman, London.

We do not think globally and we are not taught to think globally. This gives you the dawning realization that you are living, really, in an Alice-in-Wonderland political situation where you are governed by an institution which grew up in an age when the horse and buggy were the fastest means of transportation, when hand tools, and gun powder prevailed, when agriculture was the main occupation, when distances between people were measured in terms of weeks and localities and distances between countries, of course were measured in months. I remember reading once when George Washington turned to his Secretary of State, I think it was Jefferson, and said, "We have to get in touch with Ben Franklin," - who was their ambassador to France - "We haven't heard from him in a couple of months; we have to write him a letter." It was very slow in the days when the nation-state was founded.

Then, along comes the 20th century, along comes the car, the railroad, the airplane in 1907, and it was even before that the radio was developed. Suddenly we had an implosion of time and distance; suddenly the world collapsed in on itself. There were no frontiers in terms of communication and you were in a new ballgame. At that point we should have realized that if we were to survive and continue we had to reorder our thinking about politics, that politics had to meet the new conditions of the one communicative world which was now a dynamic fact in the twentieth century.

Well, this did not happen, as we all know. The nation remained; the nation fought its wars; the nation maintained its frontiers. Nationalism was a very strong force in the world and for me it was a shock to realize back in 1947 that the entire frame-work, the governing framework, in terms of world peace, was obsolete.

Then the great question remained: what do you do, how do you think; if your nation is not interested in your survival, who is? Well, then it comes down to yourself, and that is the real shocker because then you realize that world peace depends on you. That it is your responsibility and it is your choice and that everything that is going on revolves down upon the individual making some very hard decisions about his/her immediate survival, in immediate and historic terms. Now this may be a startling thought to you, but the reasoning is unassailable. It all hangs on one word; the word is "sovereignty."

A nation claims to be sovereign and this, my friends, is a wholecloth lie. A nation is not sovereign. The original conception of the meaning of sovereignty is the sovereignty of the individual and then the community in which the individual lived, ethnically. Now "sovereignty" is a very easy word to define; it simply means choice. But nations have no choice anymore. Nations are glued, locked into a system where they can't budge and one of the greatest proofs of it is Vietnam where the United States could not launch any of its missiles, any of its nuclear weapons and had to move out. The same thing with the Soviet Union. These are two giants locked in a titanic rigor mortis with each other, in what we call a geodialectical situation, unable to move.

Iran is a perfect example where Jimmy Carter had no control over what happened. In Iran, the Shah was so-called propped up. Eight billion dollars worth of weapons went into Iran with another 9 or 10 billion on top of that described, and that is all down the drain.

Nations cannot act any more in terms of service to their individuals, to their citizens. And yet we give our sovereign, complete loyalty as human beings to particular nations in this century of instant communication and one world with no frontiers. So the exercise of our sovereignty becomes the key to world peace, and only you and I can exercise sovereignty. Only you and I can choose.

Now this is the essence of democracy, in fact, in a spiritual sense, this is the truth that will set you free. You choose your own spiritual identity; you choose it; it is not imposed on you at birth. This is the knowledge that gives power, etc. You can say it any way you want. In fact, this is the essential human right: to choose your own political identity, to choose your own status, in a sense. This is choice, sovereignty, keep that in mind. This is the essence of world citizenship.

Well, I discovered this back in 1948; I don't know why it was me. I was influenced I think when I was your age by an article or essay of Emerson, called Self Reliance - probably some of you have read it - and one sentence stood out, which I have never forgotten,

Somehow in those days, with no major problems, I kind of accepted that as a motto. On another level, on a spiritual level, I was influenced by one phrase in the Lord's Prayer, that a lot of us say every Sunday, and that phrase was

Though I not religious in an orthodox sense at all, that phrase struck me as being a very powerful evidence of the link-up between that which was beyond me and my ability to exercise that power. It was a mandate; that's what I am saying.

So, back in '48 during the Berlin airlift - a very dramatic event - the media was pushing the idea of a "causa bella" if the U.S. pushed an armored column into East Germany to help the people in Berlin. In my sensitive mood at that time I was very excited about this and thought this was going to be the end of the world. The bombs were getting bigger, they were now nuclear, etc., and I was in the reserves in the Air Corps and didn't want to find myself flying over Moscow in a B-57 or whatever dropping nuclear bombs on my fellow citizens over there. So I was in a very sensitive state for this idea, for world citizenship, and I knew that my survival now depended upon my sovereign, self-identification with every other single human being on the planet. This is the way I was thinking and I still think this way. The reason for that was that we were all indissolubly bound to one another. They were saying back in 1945 after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that war has now become total. War changed its dimension at that point and at that time many of the people and the intellectuals and the scientists were saying, "OK, that's it. We can't afford war anymore because it's total. There are no winners so we can't afford it. We've got to rise out of that," and so forth.

Out of the ashes of that came the stillborn, sterile United Nations, which was merely an extension of the League of Nations - which was not a government - based on collective security, equally sovereign nations still maintaining the right to wage war.

So, if war was total, obviously peace was total. That's what Einstein was saying, and that's what Schweitzer was saying, and that's what Gandhi was saying. Then Wendell Willkie wrote a book, One World or None, and then, of course, in later years along came Bucky Fuller and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and then there was Utopia or Oblivion and so forth. Now it has become rather standard. Every politician gets up and talks about the inter-dependent world economic order, but back in those days I actually opted for that, for One World. My action was very simple. I simply chose a new identity: World Citizen.

I walked into the Embassy in Paris and raised my right hand and said, "OK. count me out. I can't be an exclusive national citizen any longer." After I dropped my right hand after taking what they called the "Oath of Renunciation" nothing had really changed. I was still the same person. I thought to myself, so much for the myth of national sovereignty.

Now of course from all the practical standpoints this was a very irrational act. To go from United States citizen to stateless was considered crackpot and some people called me even things a little less complimentary. My father cabled me and said, "You've done the worst thing you could do; you can't travel anymore." Of course I was one passport lighter. That was the only change; I did not weigh as much.

The U.S. Consul there in Paris considered me just one more ex-G.I. weirdo with a new bag. He asked me, "Why are you doing this?" I replied, "Well, the United States can't protect me anymore." I'll never forget, he looked at me and said, "Well, I'm new here, maybe you're right. " Anyway at that point I did not know how to act. How does one act as a world citizen? I found out I didn't have to act at all; I just made the statement and then started to react.

The first thing that happened was the French Government came to me and said "Get out!" They told me to leave; I said where shall I go and they said, "Anywhere you like; just don't annoy us." Then I said, "I haven't got a passport," and they said "That's not our problem, just go!" Here was a real Catch-22 situation. That is a situation which faces literally millions of people of today.

Rather miraculously for me the "Dead Sea" opened and the United Nations came to the rescue. Well, at least not the United Nations but a little planetary soil, "international territory" which was the site upon which the U.N. in Paris was situated. It was land surrounding the Palais de Chaillot. Of course I did not have anyplace else to go, prison was behind me. So, I got my sack and went up to the United Nations site which they called "international territory," and that began what might be called the "World Citizenship Movement."

The image of one little guy claiming global political asylum to this United Nations, the assembled might of the world, seemed to appeal to the French public if not to the French government. Of course, the U.N. Secretariat was even more annoyed than the French Government, especially since I had some World Citizen Identity Cards printed at that time. I was going to present them to the delegates as they came in. They did not like that at all; they had to get rid of me because that was too embarrassing to have delegates of nation-states identified as world citizens.

So after six days of living in that open air apartment, as it were, at the request of the U.N. Secretariat the French government came into this little "international country," picked me up by the scruff of the neck and reimported back into France - a distance of about ten feet. This was exposing the ridiculousness of frontiers actually. The French press, plus the press of the world was there and, literally, an idea was launched by virtue of this almost accidental happenstance where I was caught in the right position at the right time.

I wasn't alone anymore; post-war Europe then was experiencing an identity crisis. After the war there is an immense sigh of relief and a willingness to forget it and go back to normal living. There was a tremendous reservoir of good will which was lying around waiting to be expressed.

World-citizenship - bang - came in and hit that core, that point in history where there was fertile soil ready for an idea to take root. So, in the next six months literally hundreds of thousands of people wrote to me in Paris saying "Wonderful idea. I want to be a world citizen, too. Sign me up!"

These details, incidentally, are spelled out in a book that I wrote called, My Country is the World which is available. The first result was an institution called The International Registry of World Citizens which we founded in 1949; this registry was actually the beginning of a global electoral machine. Our whole political program - we did not have anything more than this, we did not want anything more - was to elect one delegate per million population. This delegate would be mandated to be a member of a World Constitutional Convention. In fact, this is what we spelled out at the U.N. on November 22, 1948, in an interruption from the balcony. We called the U.N. "an illusion of political authority."

Five years later, after we had more than 750,000 people registered as world citizens which represent more than the population of twenty sovereign nations in the United Nations, after I had been taken from Brixton Prison in London where I spent nine weeks, then brought to New York, I was forced into the United States against my will. I saw a very important civil rights lawyer who said, "Well, you've registered all these citizens, and you call yourself a world citizen, now is the time to put this into a form which has to be recognized by governments. In other words you have enough mandate to declare your own government."

So on September 4, 1953, from the city hall of Ellsworth, Maine, we made the declaration of World Government. Now this declaration was the beginning of a new initiative for world peace! As embryonic as it was, as ridiculous as it was, as irrational and, in many terms, as impractical, still it was a nucleus. It was an embryonic beginning which allowed others then to come to the framework which was universal.

It had another significance. Historically it was redeeming the pledge of the founding fathers of the United States who, in the tenth amendment of the Constitution referred sovereign decision-making power back to the people. I sometimes talk to international law students and I ask them what the tenth amendment says. Nobody knows. Very few Americans have read the Constitution much less the Bill of Rights. Much less do they know the tenth amendment which is called the "Sleeping Giant." Even constitutional lawyers don't know why it's there; but it's ticking away to be used only in times of crisis. It simply provides that all powers not delegated to the Constitution nor prohibited to it by the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

This is a very extraordinary amendment, because it is saying first of all that the Constitution itself is limited. It is not a Bible; it's not a document which takes into consideration every single problem which is going to come down the time track for all time. For their descendents, it's saying, "You're going to have problems," and this is the insight of the founding fathers. I think it was probably Tom Jefferson himself who insisted on this - who is saying "You're going to have problems which this Constitution is not going to take care of so we are going to provide a constitutional escape-hatch so that you, as a sovereign people, the source, the inheritors of the sovereignty, the pristine sovereignty which began this government, you can act constitutionally."

So my declaration of World Government actually was redeeming the pledge of the founding fathers who allowed this constitutional escape hatch. This is the only constitution in the world that does so, which is why you have really an extraordinary opportunity as U.S. citizens to do in fact what the founding fathers themselves did although they had no benefit of constitution.

So what then did they actually do? They created a higher citizenship out of thin air to which they then gave their sovereign allegiance and in so doing they protected their own local or state citizenships; Virginian, Pennsylvanian, Kentuckian, etc. Jefferson, in fact, wrote in 1790:

Here again is a confirmation of what I am talking about, the sovereignty of the individual, the essence of the democratic principle.

This is newly stated now, these things are brought up to date, Article 15, section 2, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights takes this idea of sovereignty, puts it into a framework of 1948, and allows the individual, in other mandates, to choose his or her own government.

Does anybody know what Article 15, section 2, of the UDHR is? All right, it says:

It is rather extraordinary. Years and years ago, a couple hundred years ago you were "born" into a religion; you were a Jew, a Catholic, you were Protestant, you were a Moslem because you were "born" a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant. Now we say no, the individual can choose his religion. But, choosing your own government? Changing your own nationality? This is new, but it makes as much sense as choosing your own religion. If a government does not please you, you choose another government.

A government is supposed to provide service, it is supposed to protect you. Suppose it does not provide a service; suppose it does not protect you? Must you remain under the aegis of that government? This is not citizenship, this is serfdom; this is to be a subject. But, the declaration of world government was even more than this; it was essentially a declaration of world peace. You see, by renouncing my exclusive national citizenship I had literally disarmed myself from the nation-state system. In other words, no national leader could speak for me, no national leader can speak for me now. Yes, they can put me in prison as they have done twenty seven times. In fact, if I go back to France I go to prison for two years and if I go back to Switzerland there is an order of arrest out for me....not because I have done anything wrong, but because I am doing something right.

I gave up my killing when I took off my uniform as a bomber pilot. But when I became completely harmless and put into institutional form what I was doing, I was blowing the whistle on the state that maintains the right to be violent. You see, a government is a monopoly of violence and a man who insists that he will not fight, that he will not be used, in any way, not as an object of fear of another person, not as a threat to another person, becomes a threat to the state and he must be controlled. I was declaring myself a microcosmic world peace. This is what you can do. This is fulfilling an ancient prophecy - "Turning Swords into Plowshares" -which Jimmy Carter, Mr. Begin, Mr. Sadat were quoting last Tuesday on the White House lawn and which people continue to quote ad nauseam.. Then up go the military budgets. But how do you turn swords into plowshares? If in fact you go and read the Isaiah quote, as I did a couple nights ago, it is not nations turning swords into plowshares, it is individuals turning swords into plowshare. Go back and read it as it is very interesting. It's how I got this idea. When you become a citizen of World Government, you are personally taking the sword and breaking it or remaking it into a plowshare.

You are making world peace! What happens if millions of us do the same thing? What is going to happen to 129 congressmen up there on the hill who are in a committee for "World Peace through Law?" What is going to happen to parliamentarians all over the world who are also for world law? They are going to say: "Hey, some new politics to get on to." These guys are pros, these people are professional politicians who are not going to move until there is a constituency. A constituency is you and me, that is what we are building: a world, a global civic constituency now. So, I was fulfilling that prophecy I had discovered almost accidentally. I give myself no credit for this, I just happened to be there, happened to stumble onto it.

I had discovered the key to turn moral principle into dynamic political action in the 20th century. The door is open. Now the World Government is growing; we've got 50,000 citizens who are all over the world. There is no president; I am not the president. I am a coordinator, that's all. We have no elections yet because we haven't got enough people yet...That's down the track. You are invited to join this new and peaceful government.

What you're doing is simply adding a higher civic commitment to that which you already possess. You're not asked to give up any thing, the founding fathers did not give up anything. They just added a higher loyalty. They verticalized citizenship and by doing so, as I said, they protected what they already had.

Our administrative agency issues all our documents. This document, this passport actually is mandated by Article 13, Section 2, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is the Declaration that Jimmy Carter keeps talking about to get Soviet Jews out of Russia. This is the article:

It's a document which is recognized by an increasing number of nations. We don't get as much feedback as we want, but we have evidence of over a hundred countries who have visaed this document on a case-by-case basis. Six countries have given us letters saying they recognize it on a de jure basis.

This is how law builds up: citizens doing things. We have ID cards, we have birth certificates. Many people are asking us for our birth certificates now. Why? What is a birth certificate? It's the first social document; the first official document. When we are first born we receive a rubber stamp on our backside saying we are American, or Ghanian, or Rhodesian, or what have you. This locks us into the nation-state system. But nobody decided where he was going to be born; nobody decided the color of his skin. We are born from a female womb and we are born into the world community. So, we should have a human birth certificate and from that human birth certificate all our identity documents should flow.

You see how they get us with documents? I've been a victim of documents, nationalistic documents. In fact, in many countries this document is very difficult to get, that is, a national passport. In certain countries it costs an arm and a leg. In Ghana, for instance, you have to have 300 dollars up front before you can have the application form. In Turkey it costs about $750 to get a Turkish passport; in other countries the national passport does not mean anything anyway. On a Rhodesian passport you can go from Rhodesia to South Africa, or Switzerland and the Swiss don't let you out except to return to Rhodesia because nobody recognizes Rhodesia.

In certain countries, you better not go with a U.S. passport. Because you are a U.S. citizen you are responsible for everything Nixon did, for Watergate, etc. It's built in, you see.

The editor of the Wall Street Journal in London would not leave England without his WSA passport because when he goes to Africa on an assignment he does not take out his British passport in Khartoum. Why? Because they are liable to put him away, I mean this is the week that Numieri is not seeing eye to eye with Prime Minister Callahan. So, every British citizen that comes off the plane gets put away.

This is the document game. I'm not for passports at all; I hate passports, I think they are ridiculous. But I gave my own up and for five years I was bouncing from jail to jail. Everybody knew who I was but they said, we've got to control you, you've got no documents and if you've got no document then we have nothing we can put our little rubber stamp on. If we can't use our rubber stamp then how do you expect us to get paid at the end of the month? So when you go up to the frontier and this man in uniform says, " Passport," you let him function. You present to him a passport which is really not so much a passport as an anti-passport. This again is based upon the idea of sovereignty, it's your document, it's your passport.

O.K. for the refugee, of course, the identity crisis is really horrendous. We deal with many, many refugees throughout the world. This document will cost you thirty-two dollars, but it does not cost the refugee anything because he does not have $32. We deliver half our documents free and we have identified refugees from all over the world, literally. From Djibouti, Laos, Vietnam , Sudan, Mozambique, Angola, you name it! Whenever there is a surge of refugees, we know it, because we get hundreds and hundreds of letters from these refugees saying, "Please send us these documents because we are without any papers whatsoever and that is being a non-person."

We have had cases where people come up after they have been thrown out of the Horn of Africa in this war of Somalia and Ethiopia, where they have lost everything, their possessions, their farms. They finally get to Djibouti - a former French colony; it's a basket case. It's a little sovereign state now 80% unemployed with one town and a desert. The town is a kind of ghost town because the first thing the Somali's did is cut the railroad from Addis Ababa to Djibouti and that's all the work they had. But when these refugees get there, they need everything, of course, including water and food and the rest of it. The first thing the guy on the frontier asks them is, "Papers!" "There's nothing behind me but war, what do you want? My name is Ahmil Abdul Mohamad Aziz." He responds, "I don't know that, I don't know who you are. You say you are that," and so forth. The refugee says everybody knows me in my village and the guard says, "Papers." The refugee is in rags but because he cannot present a paper they put him in a camp and he writes to us in desperation and says he wants a world passport. He becomes a world citizen and he goes immediately from the bottom of the social heap to the top.

Anyway, I am taking too much time: Wind-up! ...I just want to mention two other things. There is one other article in the Universal Declaration which is a mandated for an election. It's Article 21, section 3, which says,

Well, this is a mandate to hold an election for a World parliament. Actually, it has been sitting there on the shelf now for 31 years and nobody has used it. Five years ago Willie Brandt, who was the former Chancellor of West Germany, the former head of the Social Democrat Party, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, makes a statement saying he was a candidate for the European Parliament. Everybody was shocked, has he gone mad? There is no European Parliament. Willie Brandt tosses his hat into a political ring which does not exist - no machinery for it. It implies that citizens can vote beyond their nation? Heresy! This is upsetting the whole business of national sovereignty and this is Willie Brandt saying it! This June all the citizens of the Common Market will vote for direct representatives to the European Parliament. I say that history books will show Willie Brandt's courage in stepping out and saying I am a candidate for something that does not exist, but I am a candidate because we need it, signaling a political milestone which finally lead to the creation of a European Parliament.

Well, my friends, I am a candidate, too. I am a candidate for World Parliament. Why? First of all, I have no government except the World Government, which is empirical, so I am asking for your vote.

According to this mandate now you have the right to vote, because you have the right in this article. "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.." We've printed World Ballots. Unfortunately I did not bring any with me but you can write the World Services Authority in Washington, D. C. and we will send you a ballot. You don't have to vote for me. I am a candidate but you can draft Doug here; anybody can be candidate for World office.

Here is a World Ballot which simply says that as a citizen of the world I hereby perform my fundamental civic right and duty outlined above by voting for a direct World Representative to represent me in matters of common concern for the general good.

Now you can be a U.S. citizen and still do this. Nothing in your citizenship precludes this; in fact, again, going back to the tenth amendment it mandates it. You see these are new ideas which are standard, which can be done, which are not impractical. All we have to do is do them, right from where we sit.

Now, the last thing I want to talk about is economics which is very important. Article 17 of the UDHR says that "Everyone has the right to own property." To own property alone as well as in association with others and nobody shall arbitrarily be deprived of his property. Property is a very important part of a free society. Our forefathers understood that the ownership of property was essential to a free society; the reason was very simple, because power follows property. When you monopolize property, as we do today, you monopolize power. The ownership of property means the individual is economically independent and politically free. A citizen as opposed to being a serf or a subject. So that economic justice - this is part of our program - is very much part of world citizenship. It implies the democratisation of capital or that which produces wealth. Now since the writings of Karl Marx, economic justice has been recognized as vital to a free society. So you've got societies now which claim to be devoted exclusively to the so-called "planned" societies; you've got "free enterprise" societies which also have a primitive claim to economic justice based upon the free play of market forces. The truth, however, is that economic power, in both free and planned societies, is highly concentrated and both are totally comprised by the nationalistic political world which spend about 90% of the world's gross national product on armaments.

The concentration of wealth here in the United States is very well known. Six percent of the population owns about 50% of the wealth producing capital; ten percent owns 80%. Well, this is tremendous gross imbalance. In Russia it is about the same if you replace capital, monopolistic capitalists with the Communist Party which represents about one percent of the population which owns the entire means of production. Now, it's only by considering economics globally that you begin to see a light through this haze. Only by viewing the world as an economic situation, one situation, can the principle of economic justice be really applied. For one thing, the horrendous waste of the nation-state system itself would be gradually eliminated. This means armaments, embassies, consulates, frontiers, the diplomatic corps, the spy systems, the whole paraphernalia of the nation-state. I know this sounds terribly utopian but still it is anachronistic and does not add anything to your pocketbooks, in fact, it takes it away.

The choice is ours: World citizenship or world chaos!

Thank you for your attention.