World Passport

Garry Davis

1953, USA

Issued by the World Service Authority, an administrative arm of the World Government of World Citizens, founded in 1953 by Garry Davis.

A world without borders might be a fiction but former military pilot Garry Davis attempted to make this a reality. His wartime experiences had convinced him that the idea of the nation-state was the cause of war, and world government was the road to peace. In May 1948 he walked into the US embassy in Paris to surrender his American passport and declare himself to be a ‘citizen of the world’. He began travelling the globe with a self-issued World Passport. Despite being arrested 32 times, his journey continued.  

While the World Passport is not universally recognised, a few countries have officially accepted it, including Burkina Faso and Ecuador. Davis believed that a World Passport would be an important step towards bringing humans together, creating a symbol of “the fundamental oneness and unity of the human community”. More than half a century later, hundreds of thousands of people have a World Passport, such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.