Conclusion

Abstract

In the last chapter, we have referred to media orchestrated moral panics and a ‘populist, exclusionary, nationalist discourse’. A critique cast in such terms is clearly referencing the taken-for-granted cosmopolitanism of a ‘liberal thought-style’ that is founded on an unequivocal commitment to the sanctity of all human individuals qua their humanity. This vision which is shared by liberals, social democrats, and indeed much of the conservative spectrum of Western democratic politics is the progressive legacy of the Enlightenment and ideas articulated by Locke, Rousseau, Paine, and above all by Kant. The frame of analysis that sociologists adopt also usually takes universal humanity as its point of reference (Elias 2012), though some sociologists remain embedded in a ‘methodological nationalism’. This contrasts markedly with ‘state thinking’ which as an organizational unit takes the bounded nation as its raison d’être.