Abstract
The bias of methodological nationalism has distorted how people understand migration. Methodological nationalists imagine the world as a set of homogenous societies bounded by impermeable national borders. Mobility within state territories is mostly unremarked, whereas mobility across international borders is seen as pathological. In recent decades, social scientists have mounted formidable criticism of these biases, but political philosophy has not assimilated them. This chapter argues that political philosophers need to become aware of how the nation-building has affected the categories that we use to understand the world and to recognize the many ways that sub-, supra-, and transnational borders affect mobility. This task requires breaking down disciplinary silos and recognizing that mobility is a normal and laudable feature of the world.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase “methodological nationalism” is in some ways unfortunate, given that one of the problems with methodological nationalism is that it has led theorists conflate the nation and the state, ignoring how many states have more than one national community and how many nations inhabit more than one state. Indeed, one of the earlier criticisms of methodological nationalism was made by Anthony Smith who contended that it led to the neglect of nationalism in part because social theorists largely treated the nation as a “given” (Smith 1983: 26).
In some respects, “methodological statism” would be a more perspicuous term. Be that as it may, most of the literature refers to methodological nationalism.
- 2.
Joseph Carens’ influential writings on the ethics of migration, especially in his recent Ethics of Immigration (2013), can be placed in both camps. Sometimes he presupposes an international order of sovereign states with the right to significantly restrict immigration and enquires into the limitations of this right; in other places he argues for open borders using cosmopolitan presuppositions.
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Sager, A. (2018). Introduction. In: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65759-2_1
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