Explanation:
The world looks a lot more unified on old maps. Maps of today look more like mosaics, like the fragile Earth fell off a shelf and had to have its broken bits pieced back together. You can forget sometimes how new these lines and borders are.
The United Nations headquarters in New York City displays two maps in its lobby. One map is called ‘The World In 1945’. This is the year the UN was founded. The map is a rainbow of colors. Big chunks of blue represent the few nation-states that belonged to the UN at the beginning. Bits of red and tan and yellow and green spread around the map represent places that did not belong to the UN. Many of these non-blue regions were classified as dependent: ‘Territories administered under a League of Nations mandate;’ ‘Territories which by 1949 were under the United Nations Trusteeship System.’ Others were not even countries. ‘The World In 1945’ was a world of empires.
The other map is called ‘The World Today.’ The World Today map, by contrast, is all blue. Only a bare handful of non-member red and yellow spaces remain, most of them faint specs that float around in the open space of sea. Since 1945, the number of people around the world who have been able to call themselves citizens of independent countries has increased exponentially. As a result, the UN maps have gotten bluer and bluer. It is the dream of the United Nations that ‘The World Today’ could, one day, be entirely blue — a world of independent sovereign nations, united under a single hue.
The UN map of member nations vexed Garry Davis to his dying day (which happened to be July 24). This is to say that Garry Davis was vexed not only by the UN but by nations. Davis was no fan of empires either. But borders were his enemy of choice. Garry Davis was a lifelong promoter of the One World movement, which sought to unite all humanity under one universal set of laws that would be based on fundamental human rights. Garry Davis did not invent the One World movement. Philosophers and poets and emperors alike have imagined an Earth united. “As long as there are sovereign states possessing great power, war is inevitable,” wrote Albert Einstein in a letter to World Federalists in 1949. “There is no salvation for civilization or even the human race other than the creation of a world government.”
When, in 1948, Davis walked into the American Embassy in Paris and publically renounced his American citizenship, he became the One World Government’s most prominent modern advocate. In this, Garry Davis was a man out of time. The 20th century — especially after World War II — was the century of the nation-state. Of everything that will come to define the 20th century in the books of tomorrow, this fact may be the most lasting. It’s a fact that Garry Davis thought about, and railed against, for 65 years. “We are born as citizens of the world,” Davis wrote in Passport to Freedom: A Guide for World Citizens. “But we are also born into a divided world, a world of separate entities called nations. We regard each other as friends and yet we are separated by wide artificially created barriers. Whatever we may think of one another, each one of us on this planet is designated as ‘alien’ by billions of his or her fellow humans. The label applies to everyone who does not share our status as a ‘national citizen.’ And many millions of us, despite our religious, ethnic or racial kinship, are forced to wear another label: ‘enemy.’”
