The Earthlings Declaration
of Self-Determination

For thousands of years human identity was defined by place of birth, ethnicity, religion and language. States, in turn, were built on the same shared principles: a monopoly on the use of force, control of territory and a machinery of coercion.

This model has not changed in thousands of years. The forms of power shifted from slavery to feudalism to bureaucracy, but the essence stayed the same. Power served as an instrument of coercion, and the individual remained an object of control, denied any means of governing his own life.

Wars and institutions

As industry and the economy grew, the ties between states became more tangled. Trade, technology and finance wove their interests together, yet did not remove their conflicts - they only sharpened them. The more closely some states cooperated with one another, the fiercer their struggle against others became. The First World War showed where this path leads, and the Second showed that the lesson had not been learned.

In an effort to prevent the catastrophe from recurring, intergovernmental institutions were created: the UN in 1945, the Bretton Woods system in 1944, and dozens of international treaties in the second half of the twentieth century. They were built with structural limits, in which each state defends its national interests and veto mechanisms block critical decisions. Within this whole arrangement, ordinary people are denied any say in matters that bear directly on their lives.

The structural gap is not that humanity has no representation at all, since states formally speak on behalf of their citizens. The gap lies elsewhere. People have no mechanism for direct collective participation in planetary matters other than through the mediation of states.

The predictable result of this arrangement is the systematic violation of international law, with treaties revised unilaterally. Institutions created to prevent wars have proved unable even to slow the slide toward new ones.

Ideologies and division

These institutions could not overcome the central rift of the twentieth century, in which ideologies were valued above life. They split the world into irreconcilable camps, each side certain that it alone held the truth. Communism against capitalism, democracy against totalitarianism. Abstract concepts came to matter more than actual people. Millions died for ideas imposed on them.

This division worked its way into the very structure of society. Ideologies turned the political system into something resembling a religion. Parties fight for power, the opposition opposes power by default, and citizens are set against one another. Politics stopped solving problems and became a contest for control.

This logic of confrontation shaped the economy as well, built on competition without equal starting conditions, where success depends less on effort than on initial access to resources. The banking and financial systems turned into multi-layered structures for draining money more efficiently through stock markets, derivatives and other secondary instruments. They exist to sustain an outdated model and to keep concentrating capital.

System failure

In an age of global challenges, from armed conflicts and hunger to the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence, this civilizational model has run its course in its present form. No single state can solve these problems on its own, and the international institutions built eighty years ago are proving unequal to them. The world has grown unpredictable and the situation is slipping out of hand. The cause lies deeper than any single crisis: it is in the very design of this model.

Billions of people find themselves in a brutal race for survival not of their choosing, powerless to change anything. Their will is ignored. They remain hostages to decisions they had no part in making. Such a model inevitably breeds hierarchies and confrontation, and the order it maintains rests on the threat of violence.

History has known attempts to break out of this vicious circle. After revolutions and upheavals, democracy was born as a compromise between absolute power and chaos. The idea was simple. Citizens delegate authority to elected representatives for a fixed term. Those representatives gather in parliaments and give voice to the will of those who elected them.

The reasoning seemed sound. Large groups of people cannot make joint decisions by shouting in the squares. There was no technology for the direct participation of millions in decision-making. Representation looked like the only way out.

What we ended up with, though, was a continuation of the same old system of taking power away from each person. Only now it happened voluntarily, without violence. Citizens handed over their will and their freedom, receiving in return the illusion of participation: the right, once every few years, to choose who would make decisions for them.

The nature of power

Power is not merely the ability to coerce. It is a monopoly on defining reality. Whoever holds power decides for everyone else what is just and what is unjust, what is lawful and what is criminal. People do not simply live under the control of power. They live inside a picture of the world that power has made.

The separation of powers into branches, constitutions, human rights - all of these are attempts by power to limit itself from within, through a system of checks and balances.

Yet practice shows how systematically ineffective these mechanisms are. Corruption at the highest levels of power, conflicts of interest, opaque decision-making. All of these recur in political systems regardless of any formal institutional guarantees. Even in states with mature democratic traditions, control is tightening and civil liberties are weakening.

Democracy has turned into a market of influence. Election campaigns demand enormous financial resources, available mainly to corporate capital. Lobbying structures gain privileged access to the legislative process. While it formally keeps the principle of "one person, one vote," the system in fact runs on the principle of "one dollar, one vote." This is a consequence of how representative democracy is built.

Public debt as a systemic indicator

Almost every state in the world has accumulated public debt comparable to, or greater than, its annual GDP. A paradox arises: an institution created to manage the resources of society systematically spends more than it can provide.

There is no institution, international or domestic, empowered to declare a state financially insolvent. Bankruptcy, in the sense applied to other legal persons, does not exist for states.

People who took no part in the decisions to borrow pay for their consequences. Their children inherit debts they had no hand in creating and cannot refuse.

An asymmetry of accountability. Legal systems are built on the principle that liability is inescapable. Codes and statutes set out in exhaustive detail the duties of citizens and the penalties for failing to meet them. The mechanism of accountability works without fail in one direction only: from the citizen to the state.

In the opposite direction this mechanism is absent. The state does not account to its citizens for the causes and consequences of its debt. Citizens have no legal instrument by which to demand such an accounting or to challenge decisions to borrow.

In systemic crises - defaults, devaluations, the erosion of savings - responsibility is laid on particular officials, parties or outside circumstances. The state as an institution stays beyond the reach of accountability.

The burden of the consequences falls on citizens alone, through inflation, taxes and cuts to their guarantees. Yet without their consent and without compensation.

The defeatist narrative

Corruption, organized crime, inflation, economic inequality, social polarization, the decay of health care, the erosion of justice, the political apathy of citizens. Wars, arms races, economic crises, the inability to withstand global threats.

The existence of these problems is not denied. But instead of admitting a systemic failure, two justifications are offered.

The first: there is no alternative. The state in its present form is the only possible way to organize society. Democracy is imperfect, but humanity has come up with nothing better. This idea is repeated so often that it is taken as an axiom.

The second: human beings are corrupt by nature. People are selfish, aggressive, incapable of organizing themselves. Without outside control, coercion and punishment they will destroy one another. Power over them is therefore a necessary evil.

Both ideas are a defense mechanism of the system. They render criticism pointless: why change what has no alternative? Why free those who are incapable of freedom?

Both ideas are refuted by practice.

The problem is not human nature. The problem is that any institution cut off from the direct participation of citizens sooner or later loses touch with reality and destroys itself. Reforming such a system from within is extremely difficult, because it will reproduce itself through any change.

The root of the problem lies in two structural flaws built into the design itself.

The first: people are stripped of real freedom and legal standing. The mechanism of representation turns them into statistics and into an electorate that has to tick a box once every four years. Between elections their voice carries no weight. They cannot affect the processes under way, and their participation is reduced to a token ritual.

The second: division and confrontation are built into the very foundation of this system. There is no consolidated civil society; in its place stand parties, factions, lobbies and interest groups. People are divided on every possible level: politically, economically and ideologically. They do not act as a single civic whole, cannot arrive at a shared position, and cannot coordinate to resolve matters vital to their lives. The system does not merely permit this division - it is built on it and sustains it in order to preserve itself.

Three tasks for real change

First. To give the individual back his legitimacy, freedom and standing - and not just symbolically. Participation in collective life should not end with a rare vote followed by years of silence.

Second. To create the conditions for a consolidated civil society, one able to act as a space of conscious solidarity and shared responsibility.

Third. To give this collective legal and institutional capacity. It must be able to take part in governance, to influence processes, and to develop its own forms of coordination as an organized community with recognized legitimacy.

For centuries these tasks were all but impossible to accomplish. Representative democracy remained the only available answer, for all its limits.

Today that arrangement is ceasing to be the only option. Means are appearing that make it possible to build new forms of participation, transparency and agreement. It therefore becomes possible to add a further "module" to the system in the shape of a "constructive civil society," founded on solidarity, agreement and shared responsibility. This is needed not as opposition to the existing system but as its extension, an improvement of its functions and capacities.

Two solutions are needed to carry this out, addressing the two flaws described above: one legal and one technological.

To build a constructive society, citizens of different countries must be able to come together in a form capable of attaining the status of a subject of international law. That form is a people. Not a social movement and not an association, but a people, is what can hold this status.

We therefore propose to create a new planetary people - Earthlings.

The name reflects the most basic fact that unites all people: we are born on one planet. Earthlings is not a metaphor or a literary image but a legal category to which the Earthlings have a well-founded claim: a people forming around a shared planetary belonging and shared values.

The Earthlings people

Earthlings is a voluntary, non-violent, non-territorial form of collective self-determination, complementary to states, uniting people through a planetary identity, shared values and institutionally verified participation.

Characteristics of the Earthlings people

Voluntariness. No one can be compelled to become an earthling. Joining and leaving the people are free acts and entail no renunciation of citizenship or of national or cultural belonging.

Universality. Membership is open to people regardless of nationality, race, religion, sex, social status or place of residence.

Self-determination. The Earthlings people affirms its right to collective self-determination and steadily builds the grounds for good-faith legal dialogue, functional participation and possible forms of international engagement.

Governance. The architecture of the people is oriented toward direct participation, transparent procedures and the prevention of any concentration of power in the hands of particular groups.

Non-territoriality. The Earthlings claim no territory and do not seek to replace states. This is a transnational form of association, acting across borders and compatible with the diversity of existing legal and cultural belongings.

Purpose. The Earthlings are formed to build a space of agreement and cooperation among people, one in which planetary responsibility becomes a practice rather than a declaration.

Peaceful coordination. The Earthlings are formed as a space for developing peaceful planetary coordination, in which reaching agreement is preferred to hostility and shared security stands above the logic of permanent confrontation.

What fundamentally sets the Earthlings people apart from any other form of association is that belonging is defined by a shared system of values, the verified identity of each member and the people's own institutions of self-government.

The legal foundation of the Earthlings people rests on two operative norms of international law: freedom of association and the right of peoples to self-determination. Both norms are in force; their application to a voluntary non-territorial people is a question the law has not yet had to decide. We acknowledge this openly and answer it the way such questions have always been settled: by practice.

Freedom of association is the undisputed individual right of every person. In exercising it, people form a durable community with a shared self-awareness, a collective will and its own institutions - that is, a people. The right of peoples to self-determination belongs to a community already so formed: it is a consequence of a people that has taken shape, not the material out of which one is assembled. Those who join the Earthlings do not come out of a legal vacuum - each already belongs to a people for whom this right is recognized. The lawfulness of the Earthlings' actions does not turn on how the dispute over their peoplehood is resolved: it rests on freedom of association; what accumulates is status, not permission to act.

On this basis the Earthlings people declares the exercise of its collective right to self-determination - a fundamental right recognized by international law as the foundation of the free existence of peoples. Such an association deserves good-faith legal consideration, and any restrictions placed on it should be judged by the tests of legality, necessity and proportionality, not by the unfamiliarity of the form itself.

The legal basis of freedom of association

Freedom of association is established as an individual right in a range of instruments, none of which sets out an exhaustive list of the permissible forms or aims of association:

The right is worded openly - as the freedom to associate "with others" - and limits neither the aim nor the form of association. Nothing in it forbids people who have freely associated from founding, specifically, a people. Freedom of association protects the constitutive act itself. From there the question stands as it does for any people: the law does not establish peoples and keeps no register of them - no people in history has ever passed through a procedure to have its existence recognized; whether a people exists is determined from its marks when a concrete legal question arises. The Earthlings build their institutions so that these marks can be verified at any moment.

The legal basis of self-determination

The right of peoples to self-determination is established in the foundational documents of international law:

The evolution of international law

International law develops through texts and through practice alike: when an institutional reality becomes convincing enough, recognition follows. The precedents that show international law able to accommodate new forms of collective existence are examined in Legal Justification.

This self-determination is directed not at separation but at addition. Separatism turns the right to self-determination against the state, laying claim to part of its territory and sovereignty; the Earthlings turn the same right in the opposite direction - toward the voluntary association of people across borders. An earthling does not leave the people of his birth and takes nothing from his state - he adds one further belonging, a planetary one. It is non-territoriality that places the Earthlings outside the reservation on territorial integrity: one cannot encroach on what one does not claim. Nor does the law contain any prohibition on the emergence of new peoples - every people now in existence came into being at some point.

The self-determination of a people begins with the individual. The Earthlings people is created so that, on matters of planetary scale, a person is a participant and not the object of other people's decisions. For the first time an ordinary person gains a direct voice in affairs that cross the borders of states and that no single state resolves on its own.

A person has the right to be the author of his belonging, not merely its bearer. Belonging to the Earthlings is his own choice, and through it he gains what an individual has almost never had: the chance to take part in deciding common questions on equal footing with others, above the country of his birth and his social position.

Functional legal personality

International legal personality is not necessarily tied to territory. It can be defined by purpose and function. The Sovereign Order of Malta has held no territory since 1798, yet it maintains diplomatic relations with roughly 112 states and takes part in the UN as an observer. The Holy See retained its legal personality even in the years when it held no territory at all. In both cases the basis is the purpose for which the subject exists, not the land it holds.

The Earthlings people follows the same path. It does not claim statehood and does not build one. It rests on its purpose, and on the practice, trust and good faith that accumulate over time.

The scope of tasks

The world has become planetary in fact but not in its level of coordination. The economy, technology and risks long ago ceased to be merely national, yet decisions are still made within the borders of individual states. There are questions that no single state can resolve on its own, and these are precisely what the Earthlings people takes up:

• the prevention of armed conflicts and the easing of tensions;
• the protection of the environment and the biosphere;
• the rights of future generations;
• ethical limits on technology, including artificial intelligence.

On these questions the Earthlings people seeks for the individual the right to be heard - a voice in the discussion, not power over the decision. Its support is the recognized idea of the common heritage of humankind, already in force for the deep seabed and outer space: it admits the interest of humanity as a whole yet grants no one power over these domains.

Limits

The Earthlings people does not compete with states for power and lays no claim to the functions of public authority. It does not replace states or supplant their institutions. It acts across borders as an additional layer of coordination, strengthening agreement rather than displacing what already exists. And it speaks only for those who have joined it voluntarily, not for all of humanity.

The Earthlings people continues the path opened by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. That document spoke to a world that had lived through the catastrophe of war. Today humanity faces challenges its authors could not fully foresee: the digital revolution, deep planetary interdependence, and technological systems that bear on human existence itself.

The Earthlings do not undo the achievements of human rights and do not propose to replace them with another system. On the contrary, they seek to extend that normative horizon to a global age, in which the fate of the individual is ever more closely bound up with digital infrastructures, transnational risks and decisions that reach beyond any single state.

New dimensions of Earthlings dignity and participation

The Earthlings people is united around values that are universal and inalienable:

The Earthlings people is governed through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) - a digital infrastructure for collective decision-making.

Principles of governance

Equality of the vote - every verified earthling has one vote; its weight does not depend on capital, reputation or merit.

Openness of the process - proposals, discussions and voting results are open to scrutiny by all members.

The right of initiative - any earthling has the right to put forward proposals, raise questions and take part in working out decisions.

Delegation - on specialized questions, a vote may be delegated, revocably, to those with the necessary competence.

Protection against capture - the architecture of governance must reduce the chance that control concentrates in the hands of narrow groups and must keep attempts at influence transparent.

Evolution - procedures and rules may be changed by a supermajority decision (67%) while the fundamental core of the Declaration is preserved.

Through the DAO the Earthlings make decisions about the development of infrastructure, the allocation of resources, partnerships and forms of representation. Mechanisms for resolving disputes and protecting the rights of members are built into the system of governance.

For the Earthlings, technology is only a tool. We combine ordinary (Web2) and decentralized (Web3) infrastructure, choosing each means for the task at hand. Web3 is used where it is constitutionally necessary: for the verifiable uniqueness of a member, for protecting the founding corpus against substitution, and for voting without monetary cost. Registration, the register of members, correspondence and the web interface run on ordinary means.

Together these make four layers of a single system: identity (SBT), governance (DAO), incentives (EC) and coordination (the platform). Each vote is tied to a biometrically confirmed earthling, and economic weight is kept separate from the political vote.

None of these systems can secretly steer a person's behavior, entrench distinctions of caste, or turn participation into a form of submission.

This Declaration is the founding document of the Earthlings people. It sets down the values of the Earthlings, the grounds of their existence and the direction of their development. This Declaration is not open to amendment: no vote, no majority and no body has the power to rewrite its text. What may develop is its interpretation, the procedures of its application and the norms derived from it - without touching the Declaration itself.

The immutable core

Human dignity, the freedom of the individual, the right to life, planetary solidarity, care for the planet and the refusal to concentrate power make up the immutable core of the Declaration. These principles cannot be repealed by any vote, passing interest or derived document.

Any attempt to remove or replace this core would mean the creation of a new entity that is not the Earthlings people.

This design is a standard construction of constitutional law, not a peculiarity of Earthlings: unamendable cores (lawyers call them "eternity clauses") protect Germany's Basic Law and the constitutions of France and Italy; their purpose is everywhere the same - to keep an order from being abolished by its own democratic means. The people's right of revision is not withdrawn but moved to a mechanism of last resort: the code of Earthlings is open, and re-founding that reproduces the infrastructure is recognized as a legitimate continuation (see the Transition Period Roadmap).

Protective mechanisms

The structure of the Earthlings people rules out its turning into a commercial corporation, a state body, a political party, a religious organization or a paramilitary formation.

The basic principles of the Declaration are set down in the Charter of the Earthlings and serve as the standard with which the whole architecture of governance, development and representation of the Earthlings people must conform.

Mechanisms of adaptation

The procedures of governance, the practices of implementation and the derived norms may evolve by a supermajority decision (67%), provided that such changes do not contradict the Declaration and do not touch its fundamental core.

This high threshold protects the Earthlings from impulsive changes, opportunistic drift and capture, while preserving the capacity to develop and adapt in the face of future challenges.