Rejection of ‘the national’ as the basis of political identity

This position is here taken as represented by the French philosopher Etienne Balibar, and his rejection of what he calls ‘national-republicanism’. His argument as set out in his recent book8 is that the community of the nation-state is essentially exclusionary. This is most clearly visible in the way it treats immigrants. Balibar suggests that the issue of immigration shows that the abstract universalism of national-republicanism can never be realised in practice.