"This is a most timely, intelligent, well-written, and absorbing essay on a central and painful social and political problem of out time."--Sir Isaiah Berlin"The major achievement of this remarkable book is a critical theory of nationalism, worked through historical and contemporary examples, explaining the value of national commitments and defining their moral limits. Tamir explores a set of problems that philosophers have been notably reluctant to take on, and leaves us all in her debt."--Michael WalzerIn this provocative work, Yael Tamir (...) urges liberals not to surrender the concept of nationalism to conservative, chauvinist, or racist ideologies. In her view, liberalism, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection, and choice, and nationalism, with its emphasis on belonging, loyalty, and solidarity are not irreconcilable. Here she offers a new theory, "liberal nationalism," which allows each set of values to accommodate the other. Tamir sees nationalism as an affirmation of communal and cultural memberships and as a quest for recognition and self-respect. Persuasively she argues that national groups can enjoy these benefits through political arrangements other than the nation-state. While acknowledging that nationalism places members of national minorities at a disadvantage, the author offers guidelines for alleviating the problems involved using examples from currents conflicts in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe.Liberal Nationalismis an impressive attempt to tie together a wide range of issues often kept apart: personal autonomy, cultural membership, political obligations, particularity versus impartiality in moral duties, and global justice. Drawing on material from disparate fields--including political philosophy, ethics, law, and sociology--Tamir brings out important and previously unnoticed interconnections between them, offering a new perspective on the influence of nationalism on modern political philosophy. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary work on the nature of borders and society has enriched and complicated our understanding of democracy, community, distributive justice, and migration. It reveals the cognitive bias of methodological nationalism, which has distorted normative political thought on these topics, uncritically and often unconsciously adapting and reifying state‐centered conceptions of territory, space, and community. Under methodological nationalism, state territories demarcate the boundaries of the political; society is conceived as composed of immobile, culturally homogenous citizens, each belonging to one and only one (...) state; and the distribution of goods is analyzed according to a stark opposition between the domestic and the international. This article describes how methodological nationalism has shaped central debates in political philosophy and introduces recent work that helps dispel this bias. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

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)

International migration is increasing not only in absolute terms but also as a percentage of the global population. In 2019, international migrants made up 3.5 per cent of the global population, compared to 2.8 per cent in the year 2000. Over the past two decades, a philosophical literature has emerged to investigate what justice requires with respect to these vast migrant flows. My article criticizes much of this philosophical work. Building on the work of Charles Mills, I argue that the (...) terms in which many Anglo-American philosophers presently debate migration justice neglect and even obscure consideration of the ways in which current migration flows may be shaped by Euro-American colonialism and neo-colonialism. Such exclusions produce systematic biases in much of our philosophical literature. To develop less biased understandings of migration justice, I propose that Anglo-American philosophers should revise our methods and our conceptual frameworks to enable exploring the possible extent and ethical implications of colonial and neo-colonial influence. This is one part of the much larger task of decolonizing our political philosophy. (shrink)

Many of us take it for granted that states have a right to control the entry and settlement of non‐citizens in their territories, and hardly pause to consider or evaluate the moral justifications for immigration controls. For a long time, very few political philosophers showed a great deal of interest in the subject. However, it is now attracting much more attention in the discipline. This article aims to show that we most certainly should not take it for granted that states (...) enjoy a moral right to exclude would‐be immigrants. It is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. And if we cannot find adequate justifications for the existence of such a right, then we need to re‐evaluate the very backbone of current approaches to immigration policy. The paper begins with an overview of the existing academic debate about the extent of the right to freedom of movement. Next it introduces three arguments in support of the state’s right to exclude would‐be immigrants which draw on claims about the collective right to self‐determination. Finally it outlines three important challenges faced by these arguments in support of the state’s right to exclude. (shrink)

Alison Jaggar recommends a radical break with a dominant approach to the philosophy of immigration shared by both liberal cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists. This paper is intended as an exploration of Jaggar’s conclusions and as an attempt to carry them further. Building on her critique, I argue that the characteristic questions asked by both cosmopolitans and nationalists appear inappropriate when seen against the political reality of immigration. In the last part of the paper, I argue that liberal nationalist contributions in (...) particular have problematized immigration and immigrants in ways not fundamentally different from those seen on the racist right. (shrink)

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, (...) socialism, welfare capitalism, andlibertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. (shrink)

The political theory of migration has largely occurred within a paradigm of methodological nationalism and this has led to the neglect of morally salient agents and causes. This article draws on research from the social sciences on the transnationalism, globalization and migration systems theory to show how methodological nationalist assumptions have affected the views of political theorists on membership, culture and distributive justice. In particular, it is contended that methodological nationalism has prevented political theorists of migration from addressing the roles (...) of non-state agents and of transnational economic, social and political structures. These agents and structures contribute to the asymmetrical distribution of goods and opportunities and thus have important implications for debates about migration and distributive justice. (shrink)

This chapter looks at the history of US citizenship and immigration law and argues that denying admission or citizenship status to certain groups of people is closely correlated to a denial of whiteness. On this account whiteness is not a fixed or natural concept, but instead is a social construction whose composition changes throughout time and place. Understanding whiteness in this way allows one to see how white supremacy is not limited merely to instances of racism or ethnocentrism, but can (...) also include instances of xenophobia. On this account, whiteness is more analogous to a braid of three interwoven strands: the racial strand (e.g., science, biology, or phenotypes), the ethnic strand (e.g., culture, customs, or heritage), and the national strand (e.g., territory, sovereignty, and citizenship). In emphasizing one or a combination of these strands, whiteness can be granted to social groups that previously were denied full white status, while at the same time it can be rescinded from groups that at different times and different places might have been considered (if only provisionally) white. Understanding whiteness in this way is important for dealing with issues of immigration and citizenship because it lets us see how nationality and xenophobia play a role in the construction of whiteness and thereby how terms like illegal help to reify the status of certain persons, including natural born citizens, as perpetual foreigners (i.e., non-whites). (shrink)