ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to treat both cosmopolitanism and patriotism, as boundary discourses in a more nuanced and less unsuspecting sense. It explains fashionable theorization of borders as precisely a key component of understanding contemporary social and political change, not of shaping and directing it to normatively desirable ends. Cosmopolitanism and patriotism are described as boundary discourses for one more reason: because there should be limits. In setting such limits within their own province, cosmopolitanism and patriotism further set limits on each other's justificatory and motivational scope. Badiou's symbolic figure of the Thermidorean will helps to make the connection between domination, colonialism, land, property, securitization, and absence of virtue more apparent. Colonialism demonstrates that the historical moral debt created by past understandings and handlings of lawless border crossing, overlooked with the opportunities offered by mobility, ought not be neglected. Connections of colonialism and border crossing is widely held in most general and educational political philosophy.