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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 554
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WCL 554 April 2007
'Everyone needs an identity'
Over ten years ago, a leading Swedish world federalist, Einar Hellbom of Stockholm, wrote a piece sent to me by another Swedish world citizen, Lars-Gunnar Ekegärd. It was as follows:
“Many immigrants and refuges suffer from not having any solid identity. They have left one country with its culture and its language and religion and now they live in another surrounding, to which they have not been fully assimilated. They need a new identity.
“Why not also as world citizens?
“The concept of world citizenship ought to be on the agenda of all social workers and psychologists when they meet immigrants who feel uncertain of their identity. Articles on the significance of World Citizenship ought to be published in their professional journals and debated by all media in the sections on culture. Convinced world citizens can often be helpful to uncertain persons in distress only by starting a friendly conversation.
“It is easy to answer the question: 'From which country do you come?' when I get the question: 'Where are you at home?'. My answer is clear: 'I am a World Citizen, who is living in Sweden'."
This should be a thought-provoking call to international social workers and functionaries, some of whom have wrestled with the problems of refugees and stateless persons for decades. There have been notorious cases of hapless folk being compelled to camp out in airports for months or years; of others condemned to sail endlessly, like the legendary Dutchman, in boats from which they were never allowed to disembark. Lack of official papers meant that they were, in the eyes of bureaucrats, "non-persons".
The situation is not new: after the first World War, many refugees had sometimes to be issued with Nansen-passports; and the United Nations has on occasions given temporary travel papers to such people. But these are always in the way of being temporary expedients. The underlying assumption has always been that every human beings can be corralled into a state, there obedient or at least subject to a government. The United Nations, that "trade-union of governments" has rarely, if ever, challenged that assumption.
That is not good enough: it needs to be not only challenged but repudiated.
Unless we rid ourselves of the dangerous nonsense of dividing the entire human race into political (and military) groups that we persist in calling "nations" but are in fact states. Sometimes nations, often conglomerations of peoples and tribes , they exist in international affairs as states and only so can they be come entitled to membership of the United "Nations". Not until we recognize that their subjects are in fact world citizens shall we be secure; because our world today is too small for continuing indulgence in the luxury of wars and other international conflicts. We shall destroy ourselves, either in war or by failing to unite to deal with the urgent dangers of over-population and climate change.
So... let us recognize any person who, for whatever reason, is left without the papers that nationalist officialdom demands, as a world citizen. That is not only respectable but it is also more appropriate and fitting for a world where it is the nationalists whose quarrels are putting all at risk. The refugees may well be suffering the same delusions as their persecutors, but giving them a status would be the first step in their personal recovery and in time would further the better future for all of us.
John Roberts
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