The Citizen as Other: The Case from Within for Cosmopolitan State Duties and Freedom to Migrate

Abstract

This article considers a novel frame for state duties towards ‘others’ and towards migrants. Existing literature on the cosmopolitan role of the state and on the foundations of a right to migrate links relevant duties to principles of no harm to outsiders, other-regardingness, or hospitality. This article explores the possibility that we should rather justify relevant duties from the perspective of citizenship and from within the social contract between state and citizen. It advances a three-step argument in support of the idea that the state, in discharging its responsibilities to ‘others’, ought to be guided by the perspective of the duties it owes to its own citizens to fulfil the cosmopolitan value of their condition. The perspective ‘from within’ that the article thus proposes sheds novel light on the global role of the sovereign state and on the meaning of cosmopolitanism. In reconciling the former with the latter, it nudges the theory of cosmopolitan sovereignty out of an impasse. And it ultimately makes room for a conception of migration as freedom.