The sentimentalities of an author nearing the end of his writing career are very relevant to the subject-matter of this work. My first book was completed thirty-five years ago and, inter alia, questioned the legitimacy of nationalism. It is very possible that the nation-state is the worst of all political systems, as Churchill said of democracy, except far all the others. I have never, however, believed that the ideology of nationalism, which has been the nation-state's credo for some two centuries now, is anything but pernicious.

The alternatives of a world state with its attendant personal status and attitudinal stance of the world citizen have been accorded little serious practical consideration. In tmth, there are enormous difficulties associated with these ideas. Even so, the concepts of a universal state and of world citizenship have been discussed and commended for nearly two and a half millennia. The dream of a politically unified mankind refuses to fade into complete oblivion. Indeed, in recent decades the dire threats of total war, nuclear holocaust and ecological catastrophe have revivified interest in the cosmopolitan political solutions to the dreadful potential fates the human race has devised far itself.