Human beings find their dignity and honor in their identities. In the modern world, for various reasons, the most powerful form of identity has become national or ethnic identity. It is this that makes nationalism a more powerful force in shaping feelings and determining the structures of our world than even the great ideologies and religions. This fact is often obscured because we conduct political debate in terms of philosophies, whether they concentrate on economic arrangements or on constitutional structures: The confrontations are posed in terms of capitalism and socialism, democracy and totalitarianism, liberalism and Marxism. These are not, of course, unimportant issues, but they operate mostly within the matrix of the nationstate. The common assumption is that each state should have its nation and each nation its state.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is convening a World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (WCARRD) at FAO headquarters in Rome from July 12 to 20, 1979. This will provide a unique opportunity— perhaps the last, best chance—to come to grips with a problem that has long been crying out for an aggressive, well-planned attack.

The trends are disastrous. The hour is already late. With each passing day some 200,000 more people are added to the world population, mostly to the poor nations to swell the ranks of their destitute.

On September 2, 1945, the Vietnamese Communists raised their red flag in Hanoi to proclaim the independent Republic of Vietnam. The group that saluted the flag included the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and American officers in uniform.

On April 30, 1975, the last helicopter of an evacuation airlift rose from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. As the Americans fled Saigon, forces of the North Vietnam Army entered the city and renamed it Ho Chi Minh. South Vietnam ceased to exist as a separate state; the last official vestiges of American participation in a disastrous, losing war disappeared; and the Communists of North Vietnam consolidated their control over the entire country.

In the early hours of Wednesday, April 4, 1979, the engimatic life of ex-Premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ended by a hangman's noose, at the express direction of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, whom Bhutto a few years ago had lifted from virtual obscurity to be his. chief of staff. Pakistan's most formidable politician died after a nineteen-month legal battle over charges that he had conspired to murder a political opponent. The death watch for Bhutto may be over— but not the turbulence in Pakistan.

Carved out of British India in 1947, Pakistan was created in response to Muslim nationalism articulated by a visionary lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. To date the country is still struggling to validate its creation.

During the Indian Emergency a cartoon appeared in a Sri Lanka newspaper that depicted two Gandhi-capped congressmen in conversation, one of them saying: "The thing I really miss is lecturing the Western nations on how to run a democracy." If there has been resistance in the past to Indian lectures, there is now widespread openness to learning from India's nineteen-month Emergency. There may be lessons for all countries that claim to be democratic.