ABSTRACT
In this chapter, i try to understand the specificity of contemporary migrations with respect to past migrations, knowing that the latter have been a regular feature of human history at all times. These new migrations fall into the supposedly post-national era of exhaustion of the national state and of its sovereignty, according to some scholars. However, the national state is still there, but with transformed characteristics aligned along the whims of the global market. We then examine sovereignty at earlier times, especially after the decolonisations of the 1960s and in the Nonaligned movement, as well as today in the postsocialist era after 1989, when international interdependence in globalisation reduces state sovereignty’s ambitions, although it is formally still claimed. Sovereignty is now accompanied by general “post truth” confusion and depoliticisation, by the closure of borders in the EU and elsewhere, and by the rejection of immigration by the states as well as by a (bigger?) part of public opinion and of society.
