- ISBN: 9781501312007 | 1501312006
- Cover: Hardcover
- Copyright: 2/25/2016
Today's unprecedented levels of human migration present urgent challenges to traditional conceptualizations of national identity, nation-state sovereignty, and democratic citizenship. Foreigners are commonly viewed to be outsiders whose inclusion within or exclusion from “the people” of the democratic state rests upon whether they benefit or threaten the unity of the nation.
Against this commonly-held view, this book traces the historical development of the concepts of sovereignty through the thought of philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau in order to argue that the foreigner, and foreignness as such, are better understood as originary and ineliminable structural features of democracy that can never be purged or assimilated. Without calling for an end to the sovereign self-determination of the state, the structural necessity of foreignness to democracy shatters the links among nationality, citizenship, and democratic rights. Thus, foreignness provides the basis for a post-nationalist cosmopolitanism that challenges democratic states to remain open to its foreign others as the very meaning of democratic citizenship is perpetually re-imagined in ways that guarantee all human beings-foreign or otherwise-to belong to a political community.