ABSTRACT
This is the context. While the rhetoric differs, the borders of liberal-democratic nationstates are increasingly hardening, at least for certain categories of non-citizens.
2. The faces of the other I begin with these contextualizing examples not simply as critique, but in the first instance to note that the practices and projections have become more vexatious and contradictory, both for those who move and those who administer their moving. Whatever the intentions or national ethos of the countries in question, their treatment of asylum seekers as a category has become simultaneously more abstract, more ugly and more concerned to project an image of the state as being a ‘good international citizen’3 – a fascinating metaphor in this instance that extends the concept of ‘citizen’ beyond the homeland or polis. In the second instance, developed further into the essay, the same examples will be used to argue that given the globalization of people movement the nation-state has reached the limits of responding though unilateral or even regional multilateral arrangements (a´ la Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘Malaysia Solution’). Without having a way of adequately responding to the contemporary movement of people, the settler states are caught between humanitarian self-projection and bureaucratized self-protection. That is, for all of their humanitarian concern – some of which is deeply believed in relation to actual individuals who are seen to suffer – when it comes to categories of persons, the countries of the USA, Canada and Australia have become caught up in an instrumentally rational process of desperately defending their borders against certain kinds of embodied movement. Border control is now given effect by a mode of organization framed by instrumental rationality, even as the vision of engagement is projected by a rhetoric of humanitarian concern and good policing.4 The effect is brutal; the affect is intended to be comforting – at least to those citizens already at home inside the borders.
