I insert here a text containing a proposal, which is currently nothing more than an hypothesys, even if these lines have been spreading in some zones of the planet, in some environments.

I underline that my being the Representative to the United Nations of IRU - International Romani Union - does not mean that such a text involves in any case the political responsability of such an organization, and it is currently a personal contribution of mine.

Comments and messages will be wellcome.

Paolo Pietrosanti

PROJECT FOR A NON-TERRITORIAL REPUBLIC OF THE ROMANY NATION

The world lacks points of balance. There is nothing in this statement which is not patently obvious to us all. After the collapse of the Cold War balance, which governed the world for decades, with extremely high costs, there is no sign that a new balance is emerging. It seems that there are no values, ideas, or social and cultural impulses strong enough to bring people together.

The Cold War balance had, and continues to have, a high cost. Hundreds of millions of people were deprived of civil and human rights and, as a result of famine and war, of their lives. In reality, none of this has yet disappeared.

But the world had a point of balance, a tragic and murderous point of balance. Today this is no longer true. And nothing seems capable of governing, let alone stopping, the dozens of armed conflicts which rage throughout the planet, throughout the global village. The planet, which is already a village in which everyone knows what is happening almost everywhere, is unable to govern its conflicts. It is devoid of rules or mechanisms capable of bringing conflicts to contexts other than the battleground. And the situation is all the more terrifying in that everyone knows, in the global village, what happens to those involved in a destiny that is increasingly common. The proliferation of conflicts and wars is only one of the aspects of this situation. This is not the appropriate place to analyse the problem: but an example related to another fundamental aspect of the life of the planet may be illuminating, and may highlight even more clearly the lack of rules suitable for the present-day world. It is a well-known

fact that CFC gases damage the ozone layer that protects the earth from dangerous solar rays. There are international treaties on the subject which limit the use and production of such gases. But there are many countries which do not respect these treaties. Among them is China, with its population of over one billion people. We - say the Chinese - are in a phase of economic growth. We know that CFC gases are dangerous, but to produce fridges without CFC would cost too much, and we need fridges to improve the living standards of our people. You West Europeans and Americans have produced CFC gases for decades and have used them to refrigerate whatever you wanted. Now you have discovered the costs of not respecting the environment, and you are asking us to pay the price after worrying about your own convenience for decades. We will think about CFC gases when all the Chinese people have a fridge. We will not be the ones to pay the price of your destruction of the environmental resources of the planet.

Can we blame the Chinese for this attitude? Hardly. The planet has a single environment which can only be governed by common directives. But this is not what happens.

There is no point of balance. A balance which could be constituted by law, by rules. That is, institutions and authorities capable of applying rules and law.

International law has failed, simply because it has never really been law.

According to the most banal and fitting definition, law is a rule established at a given historical moment by an authority legally endowed with the power to do so, with a sanction for those who do not respect the law and a recognized authority with the power to impose the sanction laid down. International law is structurally different, and for this reason has never really worked.

Only in the last few months has the planet and the United Nations system furnished itself for the first time with a jurisdictional institution able to impose sanctions on individuals, irrespective of states and their consent. With the creation of the international tribunal on the war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, the planet has furnished itself with a court of justice, created through the agreement of single states but endowed with the power to pronounce sentences above and beyond the desires of single states. It is the first true juridical institution which operates not only at national level. Providing that its proceedings are given effective support by the member states of the United Nations, this institution can be the starting point for international, or supranational law: a framework of rules which asserts itself through force of law as a superordinate entity with respect to national institutions and bodies.

The tribunal on the former Yugoslavia is a forerunner of the permanent international tribunal on crimes against humanity, on which the United Nations is working, which would assume the power to sit judgement on any offence coming under this heading, taking over from the jurisdiction of single states.

These moves are literally revolutionary: they open up extraordinary possibilities that are absolutely unprecedented in the history of the planet.

For institutions of this type, the title "international institutions" is probably inadequate. We should already be talking in terms of supranational, or ultranational law.

There is, therefore, already a process of evolution, still in progress, which is meeting with resistence from national governments. However, as long as the United Nations system, or the juridical or pseudo-juridical system of the United Nations, is tied to the will of single states, as well as to the right of veto, whose practise is now less oppressive only due to the changes in the political situation, we cannot properly speak in terms of international law.

Efforts to uphold the new international law are, however, considerable and constant. They are meeting with strong opposition, but they are proceeding.

Although they are not yet adequate for the needs of the present-day world.

In analyses of the structure of the world, the existence of the state, of states in their current form, as the almost exclusive subjects of international law or pseudo-law, is never called into question. The great and dramatically significant phenomenon of the present-day world is constituted by the progressive, physiological weakening of the force and therefore the value of the state. Of the state as a unity of population and territory, that is: the state which we know and experience every day. This process of weakening does not directly involve the concept of the state. This seems to be untouchable, unchangeable. The whole juridical or pseudo-juridical framework of relations between the communities called states is founded on the assumption of conditions that no longer exist. States as sovereign entities, in co-operation with other sovereign bodies of equal level, capable of intervening in the mechanisms of the economy, now exist only in the imagination - a deeply-rooted image which is therefore difficult

to replace with a realistic, objective vision. The economy is now global: this is patently obvious. The significance of states and their confines was, until very recently, as a framework of institutions and rules intended to govern a territory and, with varying degrees of rigidity, exchanges which took place in this territory; in a territory which produced much of the wealth of the country governed by the state. This is quite evidently no longer the case. In the ambit of the world economy, which is extremely inter-connected, the relation between territory and economic activity is increasingly weak, although in the transition from agricultural to industrial economy it had maintained its fundamental value: a close and vitally important link with the territory, in which even factories maintained the fundamental need to relate to the territory in which they were built. This is no longer the case. In Europe, every night there are deals to the value of $3m billion, while the people sleep. The relation between eco

nomy and territory has been subverted, and the very significance of the state as we know it, and its role, have also consequently been subverted.

The great challenge of the present-day world is to adapt the law and rules of cohabitation to the new shape of the planet. The institutional structures which currently exist belong to a world which no longer exists. While the economy moves on (and, whether we like it or not, it does move on), the other forms of human activity are stationary, increasingly unsuited to the needs of a world which has changed. Politics, understood as an activity aimed at regulating the relations between persons and social groups, is disappearing. While politics, whether democratic or otherwise, has governed the fate of humanity up to now, keeping in view the faces of those who control the levers of political power, now power has completely changed in appearance.

Although it is unlikely that history has come to an end, as some people claim, there can be no doubt that politics has come to an end, or that it is nearing its end: at least, that is, the capacity to establish rules on the part of a visible power operating in a given territory.

There have been considerable efforts, as I mentioned above, towards the strengthening of international law or, to be more precise, towards the transformation of that which is called international law in a system which contains only the most fundamental characteristics of law, those that are essential in order to be able to speak in terms of law.

Law must and can be the new point of balance of the planet, of cohabitation between the people of the planet.

Efforts are being made, then, but the images brought to us every day by the media demonstrate the insufficiency of law as it exists today at international level, and its consequent incapacity to respond to the evident needs of humanity. There is no law if it is not cogent, if its application is nothing but the product of political mediation between sovereign states. In short, there is no law if there is no superordinate authority (this is also true of penal law) endowed with authority and jurisdiction, with the power and the instruments to ensure that its decisions and pronouncements are respected.

We do not have to look very far to understand the need for true law, for law that is cogent and adequate for the world in which we now live and work; we do not have to look very far to understand the urgent need to transform international law as it exists today. We need only look at the European Union. The EU is going through a period of deep crisis, a political crisis, a result of the refusal of the member states to give up a part of their sovereignty. The European Union is an example of non-democracy: power is firmly in the hands of the governments and the government bureaucracies, over which the citizens have no power or control. The European Union, which is about to hold its fourth universal elections, is still lacking in the foundations of political democracy, whose highest point in the history of humanity has been achieved in the member countries themselves. The only process taking place in the European Union is that leading to a reduction of the level of political democracy: the more the Union is sove

reign on economic matters, the less the citizens have the power of democratic control over the decisions which concern their lives. Europe is reinforcing and expanding its powers in economic policy, and these powers are concentrated more and more in the hands of the governments, with a reduction of the powers of the parliaments elected by the citizens. In Western Europe, there is a clear regression in the democracy of structures and institutions, fortunately limited by the fact that the powers of the single states are still extremely strong. The European dream has evaporated, it seems. Paradoxically, therefore, due to the way the European institutions operate at present, democracy is assured by the non-Europe, because the more the institutions of Europe gain in strength, the less Europe is democratic from an institutional point of view, especially in view of the fact that the European Union seems to have abandoned any prospect of a real federal system.

We might conclude that a united Europe is now, perhaps, an anachronism: unsuited to the institutional needs of today's world.

We do not need to have millenarian tendencies to reach the conclusion that the lack of points of balance will lead to flare-ups whose intensity and gravity are now almost impossible to imagine. And while any balance of a pseudo-institutional nature has been lost, serious social imbalance remains: the hunger and famine, the epidemics, and the poverty which kills millions and millions of people every year. The end of the Cold War balance is leading to the gradual collapse of rules which are not founded exclusively on economic factors. There is an interesting fact which is worthy of consideration: the second reason for the transfer of money in today's world is constituted by emigrants sending money to their home countries. More than oil or food, it is the earnings of emigrants which moves money in the world.

However, what is needed here is not an economic analysis but a general and very superficial analysis of a number of facts, leading to the need for points of balance, or rather to the identification of this need, which is a need for law, as the fundamental need in the present-day world.

Perhaps more than ever before, the co-existence of people is not governed by rules but by the economy and trade. In the absence of democratic rules and powers. And this is the end of democracy. The end of the most formidable system of authoritarian power brings with it the end of democracy, which existed in some areas of the world only thanks to a tragic and extremely costly balance, but a balance which was able to govern relations.

Nationalism is re-emerging and gaining in strength, physiologically and almost predictably. And the more the territory in which the various political sovereignties operate is reduced, the less they are truly sovereign, whether or nor they are democratic.

There is therefore an urgent need to look for new forms of organization of the societies and the society of the global village.

What agent or element can lead to a new balance? A world war? A social cataclysm? Uncontrolled emigration? The affirmation of law, of rules, of the authority of rules, of new democratic and juridically binding rules must be the new point of balance, the new possible source of balance to replace the tragic and failed balance that supported us until very recently.

A HYPOTHESIS

At this point I could describe the end point of a process of gradual acquisition of international juridical institutions. But what matters more is the starting point, which I will outline here in a deliberately limited and superficial manner.

The starting point could be an initiative capable of obtaining consensus in itself and of highlighting the need for further steps in the same direction. The first step must make the lack of international law and of rules and institutions very clear. The hypothesis is based on a step: a first initiative which will not only affirm but also demonstrate in itself the need to transform the framework of international institutions to suit the new realities. This means initiating actions which will impose reactions and which will render inevitable the conception and implementation of new forms of organization of people in state entities, institutions and communities.

There is a people which is a nation and which does not have a territory: the gypsies. It is not the only people without a recognized territory and without a state; but the difference and the great capacity to be ahead of its time of the gypsy tradition and history lie in the fact the the Romany people has never wanted a territory, even though there are millions of Romanies in the world. The hypothesis can be formulated as follows, briefly, in that it is simply a hypothesis for further work and action: The hypothesis is that of the proclamation of the Romany Republic.

If it were proclaimed, a non-territorial Romany Republic would cause a series of chain reactions which will have to be foreseen and planned for.

The Romanies join together in a state, without claiming any territory, forming institutions that do not clash with those that already exist, at least in the initial phase, and ask for recognition as a Nation from the United Nations, as the Palestinians have done. But without claiming a territory, because the gypsies have never been tied to a territory, except to that of the whole world.

Tens of millions of people clearly related by roots, culture, and a common ethnic group claim the right to be recognized and represented as a nation, or as a state, without a territory. No-one will be able to object that there is no room on earth for a new state, because the gypsies do not want a territory, and they want to open a debate in the world on the adequacy of the current form of the state in relation to the present-day world. We gypsies want a state, a republic, but without a territory and without borders.

The aspiration to be represented is universally recognized as legitimate, as is shown by the history of the last few years. There is a great contradiction to show the world: the gypsies are a people, a nation, which is not recognized as such, and wants to be. Without having to bend to the need to claim a territory to have this legitimate aspiration recognized. They form a republic, with a parliament, a constitution, a government, a diplomatic corps...

There is already the example of the Knights of Malta, who are recognized and have diplomatic relations, despite being a state-like entity without a territory. But the example of the Knights of Malta only helps to a limited extent, as you might imagine.

The Jewish people have obtained a state, and the Palestinian people is obtaining a state, after in any case being a state-like entity recognized by the United Nations, and not only bilaterally, despite not having a territory. The gypsies do not want a territory, for such an aim is unsuited to their history and their culture. But it is unthinkable that they be represented by states which for the most part reject them and emarginate them; the gypsies want a state, a nation, without a fixed territory. They want a recognized status.

The gypsies are of gypsy nationality. The new gypsy state will have its passports, recognized on the basis of international law. The citizens of the various states who are gypsies, resident in many different countries, will carry the passport of the gypsy state, and will not be able to do military service in a country of which they are not citizens, for they will not only ask for the recognition of their right to a national identity and gypsy nationality, but also to gypsy citizenship.

This will not prevent gypsies from doing military or civilian service: they will ask to do military or civilian service in the framework of the United Nations peace-keeping forces. These are now formed of troops lent to the United Nations by individual states. One of the greatest advances in the strengthening of the United Nations is precisely the fact that troops are independent of member states and entirely dependent on the United Nations. Once they are citizens of a non-territorial gypsy state, the gypsies can claim the right to carry out their military service in the international peace-keeping forces, as the police of the world, with all that this implies.

The gypsy people must furnish itself with democratic institutional and constitutional structures, that is a parliament and a government, which do not dominate a territory but represent a nation and a people in the world. And also diplomatic and consular structures. It is easy to imagine the explosive effect of such an approach in the face of the re-emergence of nationalism which is currently developing in an exclusively dangerous and damaging way. In the re-emergence of nationalism, the gypsies take the path of the re-emergence of nationality, of the right to national identity, which becomes an enormous cultural provocation of great civil and moral value. Explosive, and capable of challenging the entire present-day framework of international institutions: a framework which, among other things, renders the gypsies one of the most emarginated peoples.

The initiative of the gypsies would have an explosive impact, for the very reason that for the first time a request for national identity would be directed in such a way as to make the world create institutions that would diminish the centrality of the national state: A national, and therefore legitimate claim would lead to the requeest for new institutions leading to a reduction of the anachronistic power of states.

The gypsies' interest in carrying out such an initiative is clear, and there is no need to discuss it at length: it suffices to say that they would have representation and a guarantee in a world which, at best, emarginates them and relegates them to the lowest position in the social scale, precisely because they have lacked a state-like body to represent and defend them.

The gypsies, like the Italians or the Germans, form an ethnic group, a nationality, with their own language and culture, wherever they happen to be. It is now necessary, once again, to make clear the fundamental difference between the concepts of nationality and citizenship: the former indicates the individual's membership of an ethnic group, the latter his membership of a community endowed with juridical rules, of a state-like body which is recognized as such. The most terrible massacres of democracy and justice, and of human life, have almost always been the result, at least in Europe, of the desire to make the two concepts come together in ethnically homogeneous nation-states. The gypsies, much more than any other people, have paid for this tendency, in the forgotten pogroms which have often led the world close to the disappearance of the gypsy nation as such.

The tendency to make the concepts of nationality and citizenship coincide, upheld during the course of history, was the main cause of the wars of the past, and is the main cause of the wars of today, the most notorious and widely covered of which is the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The unification of the notions of the state and of the nation has governed the world since the last century, producing fundamental and historically comprehensible changes; in the framework of the overall development of history, however, these changes now prevent the evolution of the institutions and the rules of cohabitation between peoples from matching the development of the other aspects of human activity.

It is now necessary, therefore, to rethink the relationship, also in conceptual terms, between the notions of the state and of the nation, just as the widespread desire to achieve the unity of populations gathered together under governments is felt with such force. The self-government and self-determination of peoples are now regaining extraordinary force, which would not necessarily have to be directed towards the constitution of sovereign state powers if the institutional framework of the world allowed different forms of power from those which now seem to be sought for and exercised. If we think about it, the notion of the state is one of the very few concepts that has remained unchanged for many centuries.

This is a proposal, rather than a project. It is a working hypothesis. It is a bare outline, a draft project, which we can work on. We can call on dozens of international jurists, universities, foundations, and intellectuals from all over the world, and also on governments.

At international level, the importance of the nation is not necessarily exclusive: it is the nation, rather than the state, which can and must be important. But for now, the state and the nation can co-exist: at least because of the fact that the gypsy nation has no representation and is not a recognized body, a reason which is far from unimportant.

This is the challenge, initially a cultural challenge, which can open a great worldwide debate on the state, and above all on the need for law, real and cogent, and for authorities endowed with democratic power at world level.

The wars which are raging throughout the world have broken out in places where nations or nationalities do not have representation; they are not represented by a state because there is no state, or because they are the minority in a particular state.

The plan is to study the way to unleash and highlight the need to create law, true international law; and to give the gypsy people credit for having given the world the new point of balance constituted by law, by the rules of the global village, as a new value and a new balance.

The Romany people can therefore become the vehicle of a great advance in the world, a great process of affirmation of the need for law and rules, by claiming nothing more than what other peoples are claiming, but at the cost of thousands and thousands of victims and terrible destruction. Starting out from their own need, from the right of the gypsy people, like all peoples, to bring about the recognition of an identity that has been negated, so often in the history of the Romany people with the negation of life itself. The creation of international law, of truly international and no longer inter-state law, will be affirmed due to the legitimate claim of a people which wants its identity to be recognized, like all other peoples, but which does not want a territory; which needs law and rules in order to exist.

The relationship between territory and the population which inhabits it, as I mentioned earlier, has changed completely, since the territory is no longer the exclusive source of the resources of the community which inhabits it. The administration of territory is gradually changing in nature, and we are already seeing the far-sighted experiments of countries in which the right to vote in the election of mayors and town councils, for example, is no longer reserved to those people who are citizens of the country in which the town is situated, but is extended to all residents, whatever their nationality or citizenship. This is one of the foundations of a form of administration which is not centralized, but based on strong local autonomy, whose government involves the people who live and work there and not, in an increasingly multi-ethnic society, on nationality. We belong to cities in which there are increasing numbers of people from different ethnic groups, and we belong to our own ethnic group wherever people

who form that ethnic group reside.

The plan is inevitably federal in nature, with strong local autonomy, balanced by the different national groupings.

But there is no point here going any further into a plan which has to be built up from scratch, with the enormous commitment and reflection necessary. We must now set to work, starting out from the evident need of the gypsies and from the less evident, but equally pressing need of the whole world.

We must start out, however, from a profound debate among the Romany people. A debate which must involve the most authoritative thinkers. A wide debate without excessively rigid deadlines, for there can be no rigid deadlines for such an ambitious plan.

In short, we must work in silence, at least until, with the contribution of the intelligence and the experience of the many experts who have worked on similar issues, we decide whether the plan is practicable, and how it might be practicable.

The interests which such an idea might arouse, interests of all types, are numerous. It is up to all of us to gather them together, in an initiative which is ambitious but also vital. What is important is to reflect freely on the plan; and to find informal seats in which it can be discussed, involving the many people who will undoubtedly want, and be able, to match a cultural or academic interest with an active contribution of ideas and planning.