European Integration and Immigration by Third-Country Nationals: The Obduracy of the National Border

Introduction

For the early French Revolutionaries, the concept of the nation did not serve as a vehicle for territorial states’ exclusionist practices. Neither did they conceive of national identity primarily as a criterion by which to distinguish between «us» and «them». For them, the concept of the nation gave expression to the radical idea of an inclusive political community based the concept of popular sovereignty, equality and unalienable rights. However, the territoriality of global political organisation led to a different role for nationalism on the global political stage than which could have been foreseen by the early Revolutionaries. Contemporary nationalism is defined by the very distinction between «us» and «them» and its original promise of individual rights and freedoms often seems to be in direct contradiction with everyday reality. I will argue below that the reason for this has to be sought at least partly in the process of territorialisation. Territorialisation, a process that links political authority to clearly delimited space, has led to the notion of sovereignty as an abstraction that links state, people, identity and territory in a way that is presented as natural and inextricable. National citizenship is thus seen as the primary political identity, while the adjective national has simultaneously acquired a pre-political aureole on account of stubborn myths of the shared blood and history of the «people» that underpin the concept of popular sovereignty. As a result, the territorially fixed population has become one of the foundations of the concept of sovereignty. Consequently, the modern state guards its territorial boundaries jealously and strictly, especially with regard to the movement of persons, because «when the rules for differentiating between the inside and the outside become blurred and ambiguous, the foundations of sovereignty become shaky.»

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The Obduracy of the National Border