En el presente artículo, se sostiene que el actual escenario internacional se ha caracterizado por una profunda interrelación, y la integración emerge como una estrategia de inserción global de relevancia, especialmente para países como Chile. Esta integración no es sólo económica sino que también incluye el movimiento de personas. No obstante, la integración y la movilidad de personas se ven afectadas por los prejuicios y las desconfianzas, lo que se ha reflejado en el fenómeno migratorio peruano en Chile. Desde esta (...) perspectiva, la construcción de un marco institucional para alcanzar mayores grados de integración de los inmigrantes peruanos en Chile, no sólo requiere avances en el ámbito económico-laboral, sino que también en el área educacional-cultural, promoviendo una educación basada en la interculturalidad, capaz de marcar el camino hacia una mayor tolerancia e integración entre ambas sociedades, y así superar quiebres históricos, como lo fue la Guerra del Pacifico. (shrink)

Can a liberal state exclude illiberal immigrants in order to preserve its liberal status? Hrishikesh Joshi has argued that liberalism cannot require a commitment to open borders because this would entail that liberalism is committed to its own demise in circumstances in which many illiberal immigrants aim to immigrate into a liberal society. I argue that liberalism is committed to its own demise in certain circumstances, but that this is not as bad as it may appear. Liberalism’s commitment to its (...) own demise is merely a reflection of the fact that it must take into account the rights of outsiders, not just the rights of existing citizens, and of the fact that circumstances of injustice can sometimes leave liberal societies with no correct choice. (shrink)

Michael Dummett, philosopher and social critic, is also one of the sharpest and most prominent commentators and campaigners for the fair treatment of immigrants and refugees in Britain and Europe. This book insightfully draws together his thoughts on this major issue for the first time. Exploring the confused and often highly unjust thinking about immigration, Dummett then carefully questions the principles and justifications governing state policies, pointing out that they often conflict with the rights of refugees as laid down (...) by the Geneva Convention. With compelling and often moving examples, On Immigration and Refugees points a new way forward for humane thinking and practice about a problem we cannot afford to ignore. (shrink)

This chapter argues that people have a human right to immigrate to other states. People have essential interests in being able to make important personal decisions and engage in politics without state restrictions on the options available to them. It is these interests that other human rights, such as the human rights to internal freedom of movement, expression and association, protect. The human right to immigrate is not absolute. Like other human freedom rights , it can be restricted in certain (...) extreme circumstances. Outside these circumstances, however, immigration restrictions are unjust. Having presented the argument for a human right to immigrate, the chapter responds to objections from distributive justice, culture and scarcity. (shrink)

This article by David Miller is widely considered a standard defense of the (once) conventional view on immigration restrictionism, namely that (liberal) states generally have free authority to restrict immigration, save for a few exceptions.

"Immigration," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 715-17, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press.

This article asks whether states have a right to close their borders because of their right to self-determination, as proposed recently by Christopher Wellman, Michael Walzer, and others. It asks the fundamental question whether self-determination can, in even its most unrestricted form, support the exclusion of immigrants. I argue that the answer is no. To show this, I construct three different ways in which one might use the idea of self-determination to justify immigration restrictions and show that each of (...) these arguments fails. My conclusion is that the nature and value of self-determination have to do with the conditions of genuine self-government, not membership of political society. Consequently, the demand for open borders is fully consistent with respect to self-determination. (shrink)

This book explores the constraints which justice imposes on immigration policy. Like liberal nationalists, Ryan Pevnick argues that citizens have special claims to the institutions of their states. However, the source of these special claims is located in the citizenry's ownership of state institutions rather than in a shared national identity. Citizens contribute to the construction and maintenance of institutions, and as a result they have special claims to these institutions and a limited right to exclude outsiders. Pevnick shows (...) that the resulting view justifies a set of policies - including support for certain types of guest worker programs - which is distinct from those supported by either liberal nationalists or advocates of open borders. His book provides a framework for considering a number of connected topics including issues related to self-determination, the scope of distributive justice and the significance of shared national identity. (shrink)

Suggests that illegal immigrants should be offered a path to citizenship.

This article questions the use of immigration as a tool to counter global poverty. It argues that poor people have a human right to stay in their home state, which entitles them to receive development assistance without the necessity of migrating abroad. The article thus rejects a popular view in the philosophical literature on immigration which holds that rich states are free to choose between assisting poor people in their home states and admitting them as immigrants when fulfilling (...) duties to assist the global poor. Since the human right to stay is entailed by values that feature prominently in the philosophical debate on immigration, the article further contends that participants in that debate have particular reason to reject the popular ‘choice view’ and endorse the alternative position presented in the article. (shrink)

Austrian immigration authorities frequently reject the family reunion applications of immigrant workers. They justify their decisions not only on legal grounds but also on the basis of their own often prejudiced judgements of the applicants' ability to `integrate' into Austrian society. A discourse-historical method is combined with systemic-functionally oriented methods of text analysis to study the official letters which notify immigrant workers of the rejection of their family reunion applications. The systemic-functionally oriented methods are used in a detailed analysis (...) of a sample of rejection letters while the discourse-historical method allows this analysis to be intertextually connected to other related genres of discourse and strategies of argumentation, and to the history of post-war immigration in Austria generally. (shrink)

Approximately 47 million Latinos currently live in the United States, and nearly 25 percent of them are undocumented. The USA is a very different country from just a generation ago – culturally, socially, and demographically. Its presumed core values have been transformed largely by the changes wrought by immigration and ethnicity. A multicultural society has, in 2008, elected a multicultural president. This article examines immigration discourse, framed in terms of fear and security, and the evolution of the US (...) immigration policy. Latino immigration is presented as a force that has shaped the nation's past and continues to shape the economic, demographic, and cultural future of the United States. Psychological barriers to the social integration of immigrants are also explored. This article concludes that government policy makers should encourage a more tolerant, multicultural society by integrating Latino immigrants into the social, economic, and political fabric of the nation. (shrink)

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand currently apply health requirements to prospective immigrants, denying residency to those with health conditions that are likely to impose an “excessive demand” on their publicly funded health and social service programs. In this paper, I investigate the charge that such policies are wrongfully discriminatory against persons with disabilities. I first provide a freedom-based account of the wrongness of discrimination according to which discrimination is wrong when and because it involves disadvantaging people in the exercise of (...) their freedom on the basis of morally arbitrary features of their identity. Discrimination is permissible, I suggest, when it is necessary to advance a valuable exercise of the discriminating agent’s freedom. I then apply this account to the case of social cost health requirements. Against critics of these requirements, I argue that it is sometimes permissible for states to discriminate against prospective immigrants with disabilities. States may do so, I suggest, when such discriminatory treatment is necessary to prevent an increase in rates of mortality and/or morbidity amongst citizens. Alongside critics of social cost health requirements however, I argue that existing policies are likely a form of wrongful discrimination insofar as they are too broad to satisfy this standard. (shrink)

Unlike natural-born citizens, many immigrants have agreed to undertake political obligations. Many have sworn oaths of allegiance. Many, when they entered their adopted country, promised to obey the law. This paper is about these agreements. First, it’s about their validity. Do they actually confer political obligations? Second, it’s about their justifiability. Is it permissible to get immigrants to undertake such political obligations? Our answers are ‘usually yes’ and ‘probably not’ respectively. We first argue that these agreements give immigrants political obligations. (...) We then argue that getting immigrants to undertake such obligations is morally wrong. This is because it makes immigrants’ political obligations more burdensome than those of natural-born citizens. We conclude that the practice of getting immigrants to undertake such obligations should be abolished. (shrink)

Normative reflection on the ethics of migration has tended to remain at the level of abstract principle with limited attention to the practice of immigration administration and enforcement. This paper explores the implications of this practice for an ethics of immigration with particular attention to the problem of bureaucratic domination. I contend that migration administration and enforcement cannot overcome bureaucratic domination because of the inherent vulnerability of migrant populations and the transnational enforcement of border controls by multiple public (...) and private actors. The implication is that even if restrictive immigration policies are permissible in principle, the attempt to enforce them leads to injustices that make them ethically unacceptable in practice. (shrink)

It is not a fundamental human right to live wherever one would most like to be. We have to ask when a state should admit people not its citizens wishing to enter and settle within its territory. To exclude someone from entry to a country where he wishes to settle infringes his liberty. When anybody's liberty is infringed or curtailed the onus of proof lies upon those who claim a right to infringe or curtail it, other things being equal. This (...) paper argues that there are two reasonable grounds for refusing entry to would-be immigrants. First, in order to avoid genuine overpopulation; and second, to protect vulnerable cultures being submerged by large numbers of people of a more robust culture. Neither of these restrictions applies in the case of Britain and the paper concludes by demanding an immediate liberalisation of immigration laws and immediate public recognition by government of the benefits of immigration and determined discouragement of xenophobic propaganda against it. (shrink)

Within the immigration debate, libertarians have typically come down in favor of open borders by defending two main ideas: i) individuals have a right to free movement; and ii) immigration restrictions are economically inefficient, so that lifting them can make everyone better off. This entry describes the rationale for open borders from a libertarian perspective (in part by analogy to the debate around minimum wage laws). Three main objections within the immigration literature are then discussed: i) the (...) view that states may restrict immigration to protect the interests (e.g. jobs) of their domestic needy; ii) the claim that restrictions are justified as a means of preserving culture; and iii) the influential argument that the right to freedom of association entails a right to exclude. These arguments are well-known, and I describe some of the compelling responses to be found in the recent literature. The essay then turns to more neglected critiques. The first concerns how liberal regimes should think about immigration from countries where the dominant norms are illiberal. The second examines the idea that political and economic institutions are sensitive to immigration policy, especially in the long run. Both of these critiques approach the topic from a non-ideal theory perspective, emphasizing the “public choice” dimensions of immigration policy. The entry closes by suggesting that this form of critique is especially important for open-borders libertarians to respond to given their general commitments to non-ideal, non-romantic theorizing in the context of government institutions and policy. (shrink)

By what moral standards must nation-states select immigration policies? A central contention of Immigration Justice is that the justice of an immigration policy can be ascertained only through consideration of the pervasive, systematic, and unjust inequalities engendered by the institutions that constitute our social world. Immigration policies affect people primarily as members of social groups demarcated from each other by members’ gender, race, and class. For this reason, this book argues that states’ selection of immigration (...) policies is a matter of structural justice, defending the cosmopolitan principle that immigration policies are not just if they avoidably harm social groups that are already unjustly disadvantaged. Via this principle, Immigration Justice challenges the three most widely-held views on immigration justice among philosophers, political theorists and the general public: the moral sovereignty of states view, on which states have moral discretion to select immigration policies by criteria of their own choosing; nationalism, on which states morally must choose immigration policies that promote the national interest; and open borders, the view that states morally ought to eliminate virtually all restrictions on immigration. Instead, this book argues, just immigration policies vary among states in accordance with a variety of contextual factors influencing their consequences for disadvantaged social groups. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the fundamental normative issues underpinning immigration policy. Economists, political scientists and philosophers address issues such as the proper role of the state in supporting a particular culture, the possible destabilization of the political and social life of a country through immigration, the size and distribution of economic losses and gains, and the legitimacy of discriminating against potential immigrants in favour of members of the resident population. The need for serious philosophical consideration (...) of this subject is beyond question. This volume should advance discussion in an area of great practical as well as philosophical importance. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently argued that policies aimed at reducing human fertility are a practical and morally justifiable way to mitigate the risk of dangerous climate change. There is a powerful objection to such “population engineering” proposals: even if drastic fertility reductions are needed to prevent dangerous climate change, implementing those reductions would wreak havoc on the global economy, which would seriously undermine international antipoverty efforts. In this article, we articulate this economic objection to population engineering and show how it (...) fails. We argue, first, that the economic objection paints an inaccurate picture of the complicated relationship between demographic change and economic growth, and second, that any untoward economic effects of fertility reduction can be mitigated with additional policies. Specifically, we argue that supplementing fertility reduction with policies that facilitate the emigration of younger people from developing nations to developed nations could allow for both global reductions in GHG emissions and continued economic stability. Further, we show that moral arguments against such unprecedented increases in immigration are unsuccessful. We conclude that population engineering is a practical and morally justifiable tool for addressing the twin evils of climate change and global poverty. (shrink)

Abizadeh has argued that because border controls coerce would-be immigrants and invade their autonomy, they are entitled to participate in the democratic institutions that impose those controls. In reply, the author distinguishes between coercion and prevention, shows that prevention need not undermine autonomy, and concludes that although border controls may restrict freedom, they do not give rise to democratic entitlements.

This article offers a critical analysis of David Miller’s proposal that liberal immigration policies should be conceptualized in terms of a quasi-contract between receiving nations and immigrant groups, designed to ensure both that cultural diversity does not undermine trust among citizens and that immigrants are treated fairly. This proposal fails to address sufficiently two related concerns. Firstly, an open-ended, quasi-contractual requirement for cultural integration leaves immigrant groups exposed to arbitrary critique as insufficiently integrated and unworthy of trust as citizens. (...) Secondly, the focus on national culture instead of citizenship obfuscates the close link between political membership and political trustworthiness. An examination of two models of interpersonal trust, affective and cognitive,shows that there is no room for the mid-way position associated with a quasi-contract. The effect of grounding political trust in a shared national culture instead of democratic institutions is to normalize the domination of immigrants and citizens alike. (shrink)

This paper raises two objections to the freedom of movement argument from the perspective of nonideal philosophy: the argument cannot provide a means for establishing admissions priorities when all prospective immigrants cannot be admitted and it ignores alternative grounds for moral claims to admission in the context of histories of injustice. I develop an alternative admissions-guiding principle that assigns strong moral claims to admission to certain prospective immigrants based on a global extension of the no-harm principle. It claims that a (...) society must admit prospective immigrants if admission is necessary either to prevent that society from harming those immigrants or to compensate immigrants whom it has already harmed. States must fulfill these duties before they may legitimately use immigrant admissions policy in service of other national goals, including the advancement of economic interests. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a philosophical analysis of family-based immigration. This type of immigration is of great importance, yet has received relatively little attention from philosophers and others doing normative work on immigration. As family-based immigration poses significant challenges for those seeking a comprehensive normative account of the limits of discretion that states should have in setting their own immigration policies, it is a topic that must be dealt with if we are to have (...) a comprehensive account. In what follows I use the idea of freedom of association to show what is distinctive about family-based immigration and why it ought to have a privileged place in our discussion of the topic. I further show why this style of argument neither allows states to limit nearly all immigration nor requires them to have almost no limits on immigration. I conclude by showing that all states must allow some degree of family-based immigration, and that this is a duty owed not to ‘outsiders’ seeking to enter, but rather to current citizens. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Political Equality and Moral Equality Cosmopolitanism and Open Borders Partiality and Restrictions on Immigration Conclusion.

There are now over 1.1 million people overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with about 33,000 detained in jails and federal detention centers around the country at any particular time. The average detention time is two months, but some are detained for much longer periods. Since its inception, one hundred and twenty one deaths and countless cases of medical neglect have occurred. Given its secrecy, and lack of accountability and oversight, it is not clear how many of these (...) deaths are the result of grossly inadequate medical care. ICE is a branch of a government agency in a democratic country, thus the citizens on whose behalf it allegedly operates have an obligation to ensure that it operates in conformity with the fundamental principles of justice on which this nation was founded. ICE is a young and rapidly growing bureaucracy with little oversight. It operates using a mix of federal, state, local and private centers, many of which are penal institutions. It has a history of serious abuse, and even when it operates in conformity with its penal standards, it inflicts additional harm onto vulnerable people, especially asylum seekers and parents of minor children. It thus requires our constant vigilance and concern. Our immigration policies and detention practices are deeply troubling, but until we elect to reform them, we have a special obligation to the vulnerable populations that we house in ICE detention. (shrink)

According to the traditional state sovereignty view in the ethics of immigration literature, societies have a great deal of latitude in determining and implementing their immigration policies. This view is typically defended by appealing to the rights of members of societies, for instance to political self-determination. Opponents of the view have often criticized its partiality to members, arguing that nonmembers can also make stringent demands on societies to be admitted and given the same treatment in matters of (...) class='Hi'>immigration policy as other nonmembers. In this paper, I take a different approach to responding to the state sovereignty view. I argue that even if we grant the premise that the rights of members generally trump the rights of nonmembers in matters of immigration policy, societies are greatly constrained in setting their immigration policies by considerations of domestic justice. The considerations that I focus on involve relationships between members and nonmembers that hold due to a shared quality or set of qualities on the basis of which members identify with nonmembers. The argument appeals to premises and principles that defenders of the state sovereignty view are committed to but concludes that this view cannot serve as a satisfactory framework for the normative assessment of immigration policies. (shrink)

This study explores how Asian American experiences are depicted in four high school U.S. history textbooks and four middle school U.S. history textbooks used in Virginia. The analytic framework was developed from the scholarship of collective memories and histories of immigration in Asian American studies. Content analysis of the textbooks suggests the overall narrative of Asian American history in U.S. history textbooks aligns with the grand narrative of American history, that is, the “story of progress.” This major storyline of (...) Asian Americans – that they suffered from nativist racism and discrimination for a long time, overcame these obstacles through their hard work and efforts, and achieved the American dream – fits well into the master narrative of American progress, highlighting the process of their belonging to the U.S. as citizens. This storyline misrepresents the realities and diversity among Asian ethnic groups and their migration histories as well as the fluid nature of their identities across national borders. These findings stress the continued challenges in representing Asian American experiences as well as other marginalized groups in U.S. history textbooks. (shrink)

Michael Dummett, philosopher and social critic, is also one of the sharpest and most prominent commentators and campaigners for the fair treatment of immigrants and refugees in Britain and Europe. This book insightfully draws together his thoughts on this major issue for the first time. Exploring the confused and often highly unjust thinking about immigration, Dummett then carefully questions the principles and justifications governing state policies, pointing out that they often conflict with the rights of refugees as laid down (...) by the Geneva Convention. With compelling and often moving examples, On Immigration and Refugees points a new way forward for humane thinking and practice about a problem we cannot afford to ignore. (shrink)

“Nationalists” argue that illegal immigrants have no claim to health benefits. “Humanists” say access to care is a human right and should be provided to everyone. Neither view is adequate.

This article focuses on two questions regarding the movement of persons across international borders: (1) do states have a right to unilaterally control their borders; and (2) if they do, are migration arrangements simply immune to moral considerations? Unlike open borders theorists, I answer the first question in the affirmative. However, I answer the second question in the negative. More specifically, I argue that states have a negative duty to exclude prospective immigrants whose departure could be expected to contribute to (...) severe deprivation in their countries of origin. Countries have a right to unilaterally control their borders, but their exercise of this right is constrained by the demands of morality. (shrink)

Over the last few years, an increasingly sophisticated literature devoted to normative questions arising out of the enforcement of immigration law had developed. In this essay, I consider what sorts of constraints considerations of justice and legitimacy may place on the enforcement of immigration law, even if we assume that states have significant discretion in setting their own immigration policies, and that open borders are not required by justice. I consider constraints placed on state or national governments, (...) constraints on enforcement by substate governments, and constraints on the actions of individuals. I show that there are significant limits on what states may do and what they may require substate governments and individuals to do, in enforcing their immigration laws, but that these constraints are not clearly incompatible with significant state discretion in setting immigration policy. Nonetheless, consideration of justice in enforcement is necessary for any complete normative account of immigration. (shrink)

How can we ameliorate the current immigration policies toward Mexican people immigrating to the United States? This study re-examines how the development of scenarios assisted South Africa to dismantle apartheid without engaging in a bloody civil war. Following the scenario approach, we articulate positions taken by different interest groups involved in the debate concerning immigration from Mexico. Next, we formulate a set of scenarios which are evaluated as to how well each contributes to the well-being of the populace (...) both of Mexico and of the United States. The South African scenario model has proven to be an effective tool in times of political disagreement. It fosters a common language among competing groups, non-hierarchal communication among groups, and acknowledgement of the concerns of each group involved. (shrink)

Populists in the EU often call for restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights. These calls are often demagogic and parochial. This paper aims to show what exactly is both distinct and problematic with these populist calls from a normative point of view while not necessarily reducible to demagogy and parochialism. The overall aim of the paper is not to argue that all populists call for such restrictions nor to claim that all calls for such restrictions are populist. The (...) purpose of the paper is rather humble. It only aims to show that populist calls for restrictions on EU immigrants’ access to welfare rights are characterised by two normatively problematic arguments that target two different subsets of the citizenry: what I dub for the purpose of this paper the moralists and the immoralists. It is the way populists address these two subsets of the citizenry, as well as the fact that they could simultaneously appeal to the concerns of both groups, that makes populist approaches to welfare rights both conceptually distinct to other approaches as well as potentially politically appealing to a more diverse population of voters. (shrink)

In philosophical debates about immigration, one of the most prominent arguments asserts that a state’s citizenry has a right to unilaterally control its territorial borders by virtue of its right to self-determination. This is the self-determination argument. The present article demonstrates that this argument is internally undermined by the Coercion Principle, according to which all persons subjected to coercive political power are entitled to an equal say in exercising that power. First, whichever way the self-determination argument identifies the relevant (...) self-determining self, it is bound to rely on the Coercion Principle. Specifying the self politically involves appealing to the Coercion Principle, as it is a core principle of democratic theory. Alternatively, specifying a pre-political self fails to circumvent this problem, as a similar issue arises further down the argumentative line, when inferring the right to unilaterally control borders from the right to self-determination. Finally, since border controls coerce would-be immigrants, this reliance on the Coercion Principle renders the self-determination argument self-defeating. (shrink)

The notion that immigrants have a right to immigrate to the U.S. appears to conflict with the government’s or citizens’ property rights. Michael Huemer has given one of the most interesting and provocative arguments on immigration in years. It turns the dominant view on its head. Unfortunately, the argument fails. U.S. citizens own land, individually, collectively, and via their government. For immigrants to gain a right to enter on it, Huemer must think that the landowners have lost their rights (...) to their land, the landowners’ rights are overridden, or the landowners’ rights are undermined. He does not show that any of these are true. A separate issue and one not discussed here is whether it is a wise policy to reduce or end immigration to the United States. (shrink)

Do states have the right to prevent potential immigrants from crossing their borders, or should people have the freedom to migrate and settle wherever they wish? Christopher Heath Wellman and Phillip Cole develop and defend opposing answers to this timely and important question.

Standard economic models predict large economic gains from liberalized immigration. However, those models assume that immigrants would have no effect on the causes of economic prosperity in destination countries. Immigrants could reduce the quality of economic institutions in destination countries, thus undermining the economic gains from liberalized immigration. This paper uses an epidemiological model to investigate how heterogeneously distributed immigrants affected the economic institutions of American states over the 1980–2010 period under the assumption that institutions are highly responsive (...) to changes in the immigrant population. We find that state economic institutions do not change much in response to immigrants. (shrink)

U.S. immigration law has excluded noncitizens likely to become a “public charge” since 1882. When the Trump administration proposed a new Rule expanding the interpretation of that exclusion in 2018, over 55,000 people wrote public comments. These comments, overwhelmingly opposed to the change, are the subject of Rachel Fabi and Lauren Zahn’s insightful article in this issue of The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. The themes they identify resonate with the history of the public charge exclusion, which has (...) always reflected a tension between two aims of American governance — to provide for those in need of assistance, and to shape the nation’s citizenry according to ideals of self-sufficiency. (shrink)

In her book, The Ethics and Mores of Race, Naomi Zack offers her readers a critical and historical examination of philosophical ethics. This comprehensive and illuminating examination of philosophical ethics concludes by yielding twelve requirements for an ethics of race. While these twelve requirements are not in-themselves an ethics of race, the hope is that these requirements will be sufficient to finally allow us to explicitly engage in ethical treatments of race. My view is that Zack’s argument is basically on (...) solid footing, but that her exposition she does not pay enough attention to the issue of immigration. This is not to say that Zack ignores the issue completely, but to say that, much like the issue of slavery (although very different in many important ways), immigration has historically played an important role in the construction of “whiteness,” in particular in the establishment of “white privilege,” and in the perpetuation of “white supremacy.” So similar to the way slavery is specifically prohibited by requirement 8, I believe that the issue of immigration merits its own specific “requirement of content” within the lager set of requirements for an ethics of race. (shrink)

Democracy has difficulties with the rights on non-voters (children, the mentally ill, foreigners etc). Democratic leaders have sometimes acted ethically, contrary to the wishes of voters, e.g. in accepting refugees as immigrants. The remarkable story of resettlement of the Displaced Persons of Europe after World War II is a case in point.