ABSTRACT
The ‘freedom’ of citizens, unlike freedom in nature, is in the right to help create their form of government and the laws by which they abide. Since each person gives up the same ‘natural rights’ in return for participation in community decision-making, all people are – on an equal basis – both citizens and subjects of the state. There is one aspect of the vision of democracy that needs to be clarified, it seems to me. That is the connection between political and economic ‘democracy’. The roots of democracy are deep and spreading fast: East, West, North and South, including among the people of the Arab world. The Charter of the United Nations is, as its name implies, a contract among the nations, not between the people and the nations. It remains to be established that people, rather than nations, are ultimately ‘sovereign’ if there is to be a world democracy.
