Abstract
Once the bias of methodological nationalism is recognized, the next step is to describe the world in ways that do not unduly privilege the nation-state. This chapter offers resources from the social sciences that help us to break the spell of methodological nationalism. It surveys scholarship in transnational history, transnationalism, mobility, and border studies that provides categories other than the nation-state that play a decisive role in understanding migration. This literature provides a richer and more diverse account of borders that has normative implications which have not received sufficient attention among normative theorists.
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Notes
- 1.
As I discuss in the next chapter, corporations and private property holders continue to exercise enormous power over people’s movement, in many cases expelling people from land enclosed closed off for development, homes (e.g., during the sub-prime housing crisis), or neighborhoods (e.g., shuffling people without housing into the least desirable areas of the city where they can be ignored). In many cases, private individuals hold others captive through contract and labor law (this is true of much temporary and domestic labor around the world which in some cases becomes a form of slavery) (McCarthy 2014). These private entities derive their authority from the state that enforces exclusions, expulsions, and evictions with police and sometimes soldiers. Even though private actors lack the ultimate authority to police movement, they continue to exercise extraordinary power.
- 2.
Here Beck echoes for Michael Billig’s (1995) phrase “banal nationalism.”
- 3.
- 4.
I use “border” and “boundary” interchangeably. Some scholars distinguish between borders and boundaries, for example, confining “border” to political borders and seeing boundaries as symbolic and social frontiers. However, there is no consistent distinction between the two across disciplines. Moreover, I believe a firm distinction between the two obscures the ways in which political, social, economic, and symbolic processes interact to establish borders (or boundaries). Insisting on a sharp distinction oversimplifies and in some cases misleads us about the nature of borders/boundaries.
- 5.
Italics in original.
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Sager, A. (2018). Breaking the Nation-State’s Spell. In: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65759-2_3
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