Common Sense Philosophy/Chapter 10
Chapter 10: The Nation-State Trap -- How Borders Became Sacred
The Accident That Became an Axiom
Consider a thought experiment. You are born. You have done nothing, chosen nothing, earned nothing. You emerge into the world helpless, screaming, entirely dependent on others for survival. And in the first seconds of your existence, before you have formed a single thought or made a single decision, the most consequential fact of your life has already been determined: where you were born.
If you were born in Oslo, you can expect to live approximately 83 years, receive a world-class education at no cost, enjoy universal healthcare, move freely across dozens of countries, and retire in dignity. If you were born in Juba, you can expect to live approximately 58 years, face a one-in-eight chance of dying before age five, receive little or no formal education, be confined within borders you cannot legally cross, and spend your life in conditions that would be considered scandalous in the country a few hours' flight to the north.[1]
This is the birth lottery. It is the single most powerful determinant of life outcomes on earth -- more powerful than intelligence, talent, effort, or character. And it is entirely arbitrary. The infant born in Oslo did nothing to deserve Norway. The infant born in Juba did nothing to deserve South Sudan. Both are equally human, equally innocent, equally deserving of a chance at a decent life. Yet the system of sovereign nation-states that governs the modern world treats these two lives as if they belong to different moral categories. The Norwegian child is entitled to the accumulated wealth, institutions, and opportunities of one of the richest societies in human history. The South Sudanese child is entitled to nothing beyond whatever their failed state can provide.
This arrangement is so familiar that it has become invisible. We do not question it any more than fish question water. The nation-state is the organizing principle of modern political life, the fundamental unit of international relations, the entity to which individuals owe their primary loyalty and from which they derive their primary identity. It is the container within which democracy operates, the framework within which justice is conceived, the boundary within which solidarity is practiced. To question the nation-state is to question the ground we stand on.
And that is precisely what this chapter intends to do. Not because nation-states are without value -- they have provided security, identity, and governance to billions of people -- but because the uncritical acceptance of national sovereignty as a moral absolute has become one of the great obstacles to human flourishing. The nation-state system, in its current form, is a machine for concentrating opportunity within arbitrary boundaries and excluding the majority of humanity from the benefits of civilization's achievements.
How Borders Were Made
The borders on today's map are not natural features of the landscape. They are political artifacts, drawn by particular people at particular times for particular reasons -- usually involving conquest, negotiation between colonial powers, or the aftermath of wars. The contingency of current borders is so extreme that it deserves extended examination, because the mythology of the nation-state depends on treating these accidents as if they were organic expressions of deep cultural reality.
Consider Africa. The borders of virtually every African nation were drawn at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where European colonial powers sat around a table and carved up a continent they barely understood. They drew straight lines through the middle of ethnic groups, combined traditional enemies within single territories, and split coherent cultural communities across multiple colonies. The Somali people were divided between British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, French Somaliland, Ethiopian Ogaden, and Kenya's Northern Frontier District. The Maasai were split between British Kenya and German Tanganyika. The Ewe found themselves in both British Gold Coast and French Togoland.[2]
When independence came in the 1960s, the new African states inherited these colonial boundaries and, under the principle of uti possidetis juris, declared them sacrosanct. The Organization of African Unity -- later the African Union -- made the inviolability of colonial borders a foundational principle, not because those borders made sense but because redrawing them would open a Pandora's box of competing territorial claims. And so the lines that a handful of European diplomats drew on maps in a Berlin conference room in 1884 became the permanent boundaries of sovereign nations, complete with national flags, national anthems, and national identities that did not exist before the Europeans invented them.
The story is not fundamentally different elsewhere. The borders of the Middle East were largely drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which a British diplomat named Mark Sykes and a French diplomat named Francois Georges-Picot divided the Ottoman Empire between their two empires by drawing lines on a map -- lines that created Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine as political entities. The borders of South Asia were drawn in haste by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never visited India, in a matter of weeks in 1947 -- a partition that displaced 15 million people and killed between one and two million.[3] The borders of Central Asia were drawn by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, deliberately designed to divide ethnic groups and create dependent, manageable republics.
Even the borders of Europe, which appear more "natural" and historically grounded, are the products of specific wars, treaties, and political decisions. Germany's current borders date from 1990. Poland has been geographically relocated three times in the last three centuries. Finland was part of Sweden until 1809 and part of Russia until 1917. Belgium has existed as a state only since 1830. Italy was unified only in 1861. The idea that European nation-states represent ancient, organic communities rooted in immemorial tradition is a fantasy that would not survive five minutes of historical scrutiny.
The point is not that borders are meaningless. They structure governance, organize economies, define legal jurisdictions, and provide frameworks for democratic participation. The point is that they are contingent -- products of historical accident rather than moral necessity -- and that the identities built on top of them are constructed, not natural. Recognizing this contingency is the first step toward evaluating whether the current border system serves humanity well or poorly.
The Manufacture of National Identity
If borders are contingent, the identities associated with them are even more so. The nation -- the sense of shared belonging that gives the nation-state its emotional power -- is, as Benedict Anderson famously argued, an "imagined community." It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know, meet, or even hear of most of their fellow members, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.[4]
Anderson's insight is not that nations are "fake" or "unreal." Imagined communities are as real as any other human institution -- as real as universities, corporations, or religions. The insight is that nations are made, not found. They are produced through specific mechanisms: shared language (often imposed through compulsory education and the suppression of dialects and minority languages), shared history (always selective, always mythologized), shared symbols (flags, anthems, monuments, holidays), and shared enemies (the neighboring nation, the immigrant, the foreigner).
The process by which states manufacture national identity is well documented. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen traces how the French state, between 1870 and 1914, transformed a population that spoke dozens of different languages and identified primarily with their village, region, or religion into "Frenchmen" -- through compulsory education in standard French, military service, road construction, and the deliberate creation of national symbols and ceremonies.[5] Similar processes occurred in Germany under Bismarck, in Italy under the Risorgimento, in Japan under the Meiji Restoration, in Turkey under Ataturk, and in virtually every other modern nation-state.
The machinery of identity manufacture includes:
Education. National school curricula teach children a particular version of history -- one that emphasizes the nation's achievements, minimizes its crimes, and portrays its existence as natural and inevitable. American children learn about the Founding Fathers, not about the genocide of Native Americans as a foundational act. Japanese children learn about the Meiji modernization miracle, with considerably less emphasis on the Rape of Nanking. Chinese children learn about the "century of humiliation" and national rejuvenation, framed in ways that serve current political purposes. Every national education system is, among other things, a machine for producing patriots.
Military service. Conscription has historically been one of the most powerful tools of national integration. It takes young men (and increasingly women) from diverse backgrounds, strips them of their local identities, and reconstitutes them as members of a national fighting force. The shared experience of military training -- the uniforms, the rituals, the shared suffering, the emphasis on the nation as the object of supreme loyalty -- creates bonds that transcend regional, ethnic, and class differences. It also creates the assumption that dying for the nation is the highest form of civic virtue, an assumption that serves the interests of the state far more reliably than it serves the interests of the citizens who do the dying.
Media. National media create a shared informational environment in which citizens of the same nation consume the same news, follow the same stories, and develop the same preoccupations. This function, once performed by national newspapers and state broadcasting, is now complicated by the internet and social media but has not disappeared. National media ecosystems continue to frame issues in national terms and to reinforce the sense that the nation is the relevant unit of political concern.
Sport. International athletic competition -- the Olympics, the World Cup, the various continental championships -- functions as a ritualized form of nationalist display. Citizens who would never fight for their country will paint their faces in national colors and weep when their team loses. The emotional power of international sport is a testament to the depth of national identification -- and a reminder that this identification is, at bottom, an identification with a team rather than a principle.
Enemies. Nothing manufactures national solidarity more efficiently than an external enemy. When citizens feel threatened by outsiders, they rally around the flag, subordinate internal differences to collective defense, and grant their leaders expanded authority. Political leaders throughout history have understood this mechanism and exploited it ruthlessly. The war on terror, the anti-immigration panic, the demonization of rival nations -- these are not merely political strategies. They are identity-production mechanisms, devices for strengthening national cohesion by manufacturing fear of the other.
The result of this sustained identity production is that most people, most of the time, experience their national identity as natural, given, and primary. They feel French, or American, or Chinese, or Nigerian, in the same way they feel their age or their gender -- as a basic fact about themselves rather than as a social construct that was deliberately produced by specific institutions for specific purposes. This naturalization of national identity is the greatest achievement of the nation-state and also its most insidious effect, because it makes the arbitrary appear inevitable and the contingent appear necessary.
The Passport as Instrument of Control
The passport is perhaps the purest expression of the nation-state's power over individual movement, and its history reveals how recently that power was consolidated. For most of human history, people moved freely across territories. The idea that a government could prevent its citizens from leaving, or foreigners from entering, is a modern innovation. Medieval merchants traveled across Europe with letters of introduction but no standardized identity documents. The Ottoman Empire allowed relatively free movement throughout its vast territory. Even in the early modern period, border controls were sporadic and porous.
The modern passport regime dates essentially from World War I, when belligerent states imposed passport requirements to control the movement of populations, prevent espionage, and regulate labor markets. After the war, these supposedly temporary measures became permanent. The League of Nations attempted to standardize passport formats, and by the mid-twentieth century the passport had become the universal instrument by which states controlled human mobility.[6]
Today, your passport determines where you can go, how you will be treated when you get there, and whether you will be admitted at all. A holder of a German passport can visit approximately 190 countries without a visa. A holder of an Afghan passport can visit approximately 30. This disparity is not based on any assessment of the individual -- their character, their intentions, their potential contribution -- but solely on the accident of their nationality. The German passport holder may be a convicted criminal. The Afghan passport holder may be a brilliant surgeon. The border does not care.
The passport system creates a global apartheid in which the citizens of wealthy nations enjoy freedom of movement while the citizens of poor nations are effectively imprisoned within their borders. This is not a metaphor. For a citizen of Eritrea or North Korea, the inability to leave is literal imprisonment. For citizens of poor nations more generally, the inability to migrate legally to places where their labor would be more productive and their lives more secure is an invisible wall that condemns billions of people to lives far worse than they could otherwise live.
The defenders of this system generally offer three arguments: sovereignty (states have the right to control their borders), security (open borders would enable terrorism and crime), and economics (unrestricted immigration would overwhelm host countries' labor markets and social services). Each of these arguments has some force, and none of them is sufficient to justify the current regime.
The sovereignty argument is circular: states have the right to control their borders because states are sovereign, and states are sovereign because they control their borders. It tells us that the current system exists. It does not tell us that it is just.
The security argument is empirically weak. The vast majority of immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at rates equal to or lower than native populations.[7] Terrorism, while real, accounts for a tiny fraction of violent deaths and is far more effectively addressed through intelligence and law enforcement than through border closure. And the countries with the most open borders in the world -- the Schengen area of Europe -- are among the safest on earth.
The economic argument is more complex, but the consensus among economists is that immigration is a massive net positive for both host countries and origin countries. The economist Michael Clemens has estimated that the elimination of barriers to labor mobility would roughly double world GDP -- the largest single gain available from any policy change.[8] The reason is simple: labor is far more productive in rich countries than in poor countries, due to differences in institutions, capital, and technology. When a worker moves from a poor country to a rich country, their productivity increases enormously, benefiting themselves, the host country's economy, and (through remittances) their country of origin.
Immigration as the Moral Blind Spot of Liberal Democracies
The most striking feature of contemporary liberalism's engagement with borders is its inconsistency. The philosophical tradition that claims to believe in universal human rights, equal dignity, and the moral irrelevance of morally arbitrary characteristics has, for the most part, simply refused to apply these principles to the question of who is allowed to cross which borders.
The philosopher Joseph Carens has pressed this point with devastating clarity. In his 2013 book The Ethics of Immigration, Carens argues that from the perspective of liberal democratic theory, borders are morally analogous to feudal privilege. In a feudal system, your station in life was determined by the accident of birth into a particular class. Modern liberal democracies rejected this system on the grounds that individuals should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by characteristics they did not choose. But citizenship in a wealthy nation is precisely such a characteristic -- determined entirely by birth, carrying enormous advantages, and defended by the same people who claim to believe that birth-based privilege is unjust.[9]
Carens is right. The tension between liberal universalism and immigration restriction is not a minor inconsistency. It is the central contradiction of contemporary liberal democracy. The same political tradition that abolished slavery, extended the franchise to women, dismantled legal racial segregation, and established the principle that all human beings are born with equal rights maintains a system in which the single most important determinant of a person's life chances is the accident of where they were born -- and defends that system vigorously against anyone who suggests that it might be unjust.
The usual response is that the analogy between citizenship and feudal privilege is misleading because citizens of democratic nations are entitled to self-governance, which includes the right to decide who joins their political community. This is a serious argument, and it captures something real about democratic self-determination. But it has limits. The right to self-governance is a right of individuals to participate in collective decision-making. It is not a right to hoard the benefits of geographical and historical accident. When the "self-governance" of wealthy nations functions primarily to exclude the global poor from opportunities available to those lucky enough to be born on the right side of a line drawn by colonial diplomats, the democratic argument for border control begins to look less like a principled defense of self-governance and more like a sophisticated rationalization of privilege.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his writings on cosmopolitanism, has argued for a form of universal moral concern that does not require the abolition of particular loyalties but refuses to treat them as the ultimate horizon of moral obligation. "We can be patriotic," Appiah writes, "as long as we are not patriots for whom the nation is all."[10] The cosmopolitan position does not deny that special ties -- to family, community, nation -- generate special obligations. It insists that these special obligations do not exhaust our moral duties. We owe something to our compatriots. But we also owe something to the stranger dying on the other side of a border that we did not draw and they did not choose.
The practical implications of this argument are not as radical as they may initially appear. No serious cosmopolitan philosopher advocates the immediate abolition of all borders. What they advocate is a shift in the default moral presumption: from "exclusion is the norm and inclusion requires justification" to "inclusion is the norm and exclusion requires justification." The burden of proof should be on those who wish to prevent a human being from crossing an imaginary line, not on the human being who wishes to cross it.
The Absurdity of Birth-Lottery Nationalism
Let us examine the emotional structure of nationalism more carefully, because it is emotion, not reason, that gives the nation-state its hold on human loyalty.
Nationalism asks individuals to feel pride in the achievements of people they have never met, to feel shame for the failures of people they have never known, and to feel solidarity with millions of strangers whose only connection to them is the contingent fact of shared citizenship. It asks a factory worker in Detroit to feel a deep bond with a hedge fund manager in Manhattan, while feeling no comparable bond with a factory worker in Monterrey -- despite the fact that the Mexican worker's life circumstances, daily experience, and material interests are far more similar to the Detroit worker's than the Manhattan financier's.
This is not merely irrational. It is irrational in a way that systematically serves the interests of the powerful. Nationalism encourages workers to identify with their employers rather than with workers in other countries. It encourages citizens to blame foreign competitors for economic problems caused by domestic policy. It encourages voters to support military expenditures that benefit defense contractors while opposing foreign aid that benefits the world's poorest people. Nationalism is, among other things, a machine for persuading ordinary people to act against their own interests in the name of an imagined community that does not, in fact, serve them particularly well.
Consider the emotional logic of patriotic pride. When an American says "I am proud to be American," what exactly are they proud of? They did not choose to be born in America. They did not create America's Constitution, build its infrastructure, write its literature, develop its technology, or win its wars. They happened to emerge from a particular womb in a particular jurisdiction. Being proud of your nationality makes about as much sense as being proud of your height or your blood type -- it is a characteristic you did nothing to achieve.
The counterargument -- that patriotic pride is really pride in the values and institutions that the nation represents -- is interesting but problematic. If you are proud of democracy, you should be proud of democracy wherever it exists, not only in your own country. If you are proud of freedom of speech, you should champion it in every nation, not only your own. The moment your "pride" becomes specifically national -- the moment you are proud of American democracy as opposed to democracy per se -- you have shifted from a principled commitment to a tribal identification.
This tribal identification has consequences. It makes it emotionally easier to accept that your nation's bombs killed children in another country, because those children were not "ours." It makes it easier to accept that your nation's trade policies impoverish workers in another country, because those workers are not "ours." It makes it easier to accept that your nation's immigration policies condemn refugees to suffering and death, because those refugees are not "ours." Nationalism does not merely organize loyalty. It organizes indifference. It creates a moral hierarchy in which the lives of compatriots count more than the lives of foreigners, and it does so not on the basis of any principled argument but on the basis of an accident of birth.
The Dark History of Nationalist Ideology
If the emotional logic of nationalism is troubling in its ordinary operations, it becomes catastrophic when intensified into the ideology of ethno-nationalism -- the idea that the nation should be defined by ethnic, racial, or cultural homogeneity.
Johann Gottfried Herder, writing in the late eighteenth century, is often credited with the philosophical foundations of modern nationalism. Herder argued that each Volk (people) possessed a unique Volksgeist (national spirit) expressed in its language, customs, and culture, and that the highest form of human flourishing required each Volk to develop its character freely within its own political framework.[11] Herder's intention was pluralistic and anti-imperialist -- he believed that every culture had value and that no culture should be forced to conform to another. But his framework contained a dangerous implication: that the natural unit of political organization is the culturally homogeneous nation.
This implication was radicalized across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a series of catastrophic political projects. The logic was always the same: if the nation is defined by shared culture, language, and descent, then those who do not share these characteristics do not belong. And if they do not belong, they must be assimilated, expelled, or destroyed. The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans, the Rwandan genocide, the partition of India -- all were carried out in the name of national purity, the idea that the state should be the political expression of a single ethnic or cultural group.
Even in its less extreme forms, ethno-nationalism systematically oppresses minorities. The Kurds -- a nation of approximately 30 million people -- have been divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and subjected to persecution in all four countries, because their existence as a distinct people contradicts the nationalist mythologies of the states that rule them. The Rohingya of Myanmar, the Uyghurs of China, the Roma of Europe, Indigenous peoples on every continent -- all are victims of the nation-state's demand for homogeneity within its borders.
The civic nationalist alternative -- the idea that national identity should be based on shared political values rather than shared ethnicity -- is an improvement but not a solution. Civic nationalism works tolerably well in countries with strong democratic traditions and diverse populations (the United States, France, Canada). But even in these countries, the civic ideal is perpetually threatened by nativist movements that insist on a more "authentic," more exclusionary definition of who belongs. And the civic nationalist model still treats the nation as the primary unit of moral concern, still privileges the interests of citizens over non-citizens, and still relies on borders to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
Toward a Post-National World Order
If the nation-state system is the problem -- or, more precisely, if the treatment of national sovereignty as a moral absolute is the problem -- what are the alternatives? The history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries offers several imperfect but instructive experiments in post-national governance.
The European Union. The EU remains the most ambitious experiment in transnational governance in human history. It has created a common market, a common currency (for most members), a common legal framework, freedom of movement for nearly 450 million people, and institutions of supranational governance -- the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Court of Justice -- that exercise real authority over member states. The EU has not abolished nation-states, but it has demonstrated that sovereignty can be pooled, that borders can be opened, and that peoples with long histories of mutual slaughter can build cooperative institutions that make war between them virtually unthinkable.
The EU's achievements are real and should not be minimized. That France and Germany, which fought three devastating wars between 1870 and 1945, are now so deeply integrated that armed conflict between them is unimaginable is one of the greatest political achievements of the modern era. That a citizen of Latvia can live, work, and vote in Portugal without any bureaucratic obstacle is a practical demonstration that the nation-state need not be the final horizon of political community.
But the EU also illustrates the limits and difficulties of post-national governance. It suffers from a "democratic deficit" -- its institutions are perceived as distant, technocratic, and insufficiently accountable to citizens. It has struggled to develop a common identity capable of generating the solidarity that national identity provides. And it has been severely tested by crises -- the euro crisis, the migration crisis of 2015, Brexit -- that revealed the fragility of transnational solidarity when it conflicts with national interests.[12]
Regional cooperation in Asia and Africa. ASEAN, the African Union, and Mercosur represent less ambitious but still significant experiments in regional cooperation. ASEAN, in particular, has developed a distinctive model of consensus-based cooperation that has maintained peace among its members for decades -- a remarkable achievement in a region that experienced devastating conflicts in the mid-twentieth century. The African Union, despite its limitations, has developed frameworks for collective security, human rights monitoring, and economic integration that represent genuine advances over the purely sovereign model.
Global governance institutions. The United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the World Health Organization, and the various multilateral treaties and conventions that govern everything from nuclear weapons to climate change represent an emerging architecture of global governance that coexists with, and to some extent constrains, national sovereignty. This architecture is weak, inconsistent, and often captured by the interests of powerful states. But it exists, and its existence demonstrates that purely sovereign governance is already insufficient for the challenges facing humanity.
The path toward a more just world order does not require -- and should not require -- the immediate abolition of nation-states. What it requires is a fundamental shift in moral orientation: from the assumption that national interests are primary and international cooperation is optional, to the assumption that human interests are primary and national structures are instrumental -- useful insofar as they serve human flourishing, subject to reform insofar as they do not.
Concretely, this means:
First, radical reform of the global migration regime. Not necessarily open borders tomorrow, but a system in which the default is the right to move and the burden of proof falls on those who wish to restrict movement. This could begin with dramatic expansion of legal migration channels, the creation of international labor mobility agreements, and the recognition that migration restrictions impose enormous costs -- both on the individuals prevented from moving and on the global economy that is denied their productive contribution.
Second, strengthening international institutions. The United Nations Security Council, with its five permanent members wielding veto power, is an anachronism that reflects the power configuration of 1945, not the world of the twenty-first century. Reform of the Security Council, expansion of the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction, binding enforcement mechanisms for international environmental agreements, and genuinely democratic global governance structures are not utopian fantasies -- they are practical necessities for a species facing global challenges that no nation can address alone.
Third, the development of post-national identities. This does not mean the destruction of national cultures, which are sources of meaning, beauty, and belonging. It means supplementing national identity with broader identifications -- as Europeans, as Asians, as Africans, as human beings -- that generate solidarity beyond borders. The environmental movement, the human rights movement, and the global scientific community already demonstrate that transnational solidarity is possible. The question is whether it can become powerful enough to counterbalance the centripetal pull of nationalism.
Fourth, global redistribution. The extreme inequality between nations is both a cause and a consequence of the border regime. Wealthy nations restrict immigration in part because their citizens do not want to share their prosperity. But this prosperity is not purely the product of national virtue. It is also the product of colonial extraction, favorable geography, historical accident, and a global economic system that systematically advantages the already wealthy. A just world order would include mechanisms for redistributing wealth across borders -- not as charity but as justice.
Conclusion: The World Beyond the Map
The nation-state was, in its historical context, an enormous advance over what preceded it. It replaced the arbitrary rule of monarchs and empires with (in its better versions) democratic self-governance. It provided frameworks for law, security, and collective action that enabled unprecedented human flourishing. It created the political communities within which modern democracy became possible.
But the nation-state was never the end of history. It was a stage in the ongoing development of human political organization -- a stage that, like the city-state before it, will eventually be transcended by larger and more inclusive forms of governance. The question is not whether this will happen but when, and how much unnecessary suffering will be inflicted before it does.
The argument of this chapter is not that nations are worthless or that patriotism is a sin. The argument is that the treatment of national borders as sacred, of national sovereignty as absolute, and of national interest as the ultimate criterion of political action is irrational, unjust, and increasingly dangerous. A rational civilization would treat its borders as administrative conveniences, not as moral absolutes. It would judge its institutions by how well they serve all human beings, not only its own citizens. It would recognize that the birth lottery is no more a legitimate basis for distributing the benefits of civilization than the feudal lottery that preceded it.
Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense inspired the title of this book, understood this. "My country is the world," he wrote, "and my religion is to do good."[13] Two and a half centuries later, this remains the most rational -- and the most radical -- political statement a human being can make.
The next chapter examines an obstacle that is, in some ways, even more insidious than nationalism: the permanent temptation of authoritarianism.
- ↑ United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2021/2022 (New York: UNDP, 2022). Life expectancy and development data for Norway vs. South Sudan illustrate the point starkly.
- ↑ See Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
- ↑ Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).
- ↑ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6.
- ↑ Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
- ↑ John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Torpey's study remains the definitive history of how states monopolized the "legitimate means of movement."
- ↑ Alex Nowrasteh, "Immigration and Crime: What the Research Says," Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 816 (July 2019). Multiple studies across different countries confirm that immigrants are not disproportionately criminal.
- ↑ Michael Clemens, "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 3 (2011): 83-106.
- ↑ Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Carens first made this argument in his seminal 1987 article "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders."
- ↑ Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), xvi.
- ↑ Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-1791). Herder's influence on nationalist thought is analyzed in Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).
- ↑ See Jan Zielonka, Is the EU Doomed? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), and Ivan Krastev, After Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
- ↑ Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), Part I. Paine's cosmopolitan commitments are analyzed in Jack Fruchtman, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).