In an article at The Freeman, “Bring Back the Gilded Age” (part 1 and part 2), I argue that the Great Stagnation is a result of the exhaustion of the technological legacy of the Gilded Age, of which I claim that:

In the decades before World War I, sometimes called “the Gilded Age,”  institutions in America and Europe were more conducive to progress than they are  today. Old bonds of class and custom had lost most of their power to lock people  into traditional roles. Absolutist and arbitrary government had lost ground to  the rule of law. The limited-liability corporation had taken shape and was in  the ascendant. In short, capitalism had taken command. But socialism, communism,  progressivism, fascism, the welfare state, migration control, and other bad  ideas that bedeviled the twentieth century were still young and weak. The result  was a mighty wave of betterment of the human condition whose momentum carried it  well into the twentieth century—long after the eclipse of the nineteenth-century  liberalism that had set the wave in motion.

One of the features that made the Gilded Age more conducive to progress was open borders:

4. Open immigration. “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled  masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore /  Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me / I lift my lamp beside the  golden door.” The famous Statue of Liberty poem, written by Emma Lazarus in  1883, is still sometimes quoted with some patriotic feeling, but modern America  is unworthy of it. Not only does the United States turn away the vast majority  of applicants for immigration visas, but it especially discriminates against the  poor, homeless, huddled masses whom the Statue of Liberty welcomes in the poem,  in favor of the highly educated. In the Gilded Age, though, it described a  reality. Not only the United States but all of the world’s leading countries  kept their borders almost entirely open to immigration then, not so much out of  generosity, as because the bad idea that it is somehow acceptable to exclude  peaceful migrants by force from a country through a comprehensive passport  regime had not yet darkened the mind of man.

Considering that the United States was absorbing so many low-skill  immigrants at that time, the statistics probably understate the superiority of  U.S. economic performance in the Gilded Age, since productivity statistics do  not even capture the jump in productivity that occurs when a person from an  impoverished country in eastern and or southern Europe joined the population of  the much wealthier United States. But immigrants also contributed to U.S. growth  in several ways. First, then as now, some of the leading entrepreneurs, like  Andrew Carnegie, and inventors, like Nikola Tesla, were immigrants. Nowadays,  many advocate discrimination in favor of “high-skill” immigrants, but Carnegie  was not “high-skill” when he arrived: He was born in a poor weaver’s cottage in  Scotland. Immigrants also supplied a mass workforce and a mass market for  factory-produced goods. A great theme of nineteenth-century capitalism was the  drive for cheapness, as goods once enjoyed by the rich became affordable for the  masses. Today, the world’s poor are kept out of America, so it’s harder for  American capitalists to make fortunes by serving them.

It occurred to me after I sent the article to press that Henry Ford and Norman Borlaug might serve as symbols of innovation with and without open borders. The two men are arguably the greatest benefactors of mankind in the last 150 years or so. Ford, by mass-producing automobiles and bringing them within reach of the common man, was the single most important contributor to the upsurge in living standards which occupied the first few decades of the 20th century. Borlaug invented disease-resistant and high-yielding strains of wheat that vastly increased food production in many developing countries, and thereby averted the major famines that would have occurred due to population growth, without these increases in agricultural productivity. Borlaug has been called “the man who saved a billion lives.” But here’s the crucial difference: Ford was financed by venture capital, and ended up an extremely rich man; Borlaug worked with governments and private charities, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and as far as a little online research has revealed, he never got rich. Why not? Because when poor people can come to America, as did millions of immigrants who became Ford’s customers, they become a lucrative mass market; but when they are scattered all over the world and living under governments whose respect for property rights is imperfect, you can’t make much money by serving them. Borlaug is a more appealing figure than Ford for not being in it for the money. But free-market capitalism with sophisticated property rights protection incentivizes individual effort and private capital to benefit the public. See my post “Innovation and open borders” for more on this.

Tyler Cowen explains, in a post about a new paper on the effects of migration, why he does not favor open borders:

And no I do not favor open borders even though I do favor a big increase in immigration into the United States, both high- and low-skilled.  The simplest argument against open borders is the political one.  Try to apply the idea to Cyprus, Taiwan, Israel, Switzerland, and Iceland and see how far you get.  Big countries will manage the flow better than the small ones but suddenly the burden of proof is shifted to a new question: can we find any countries big enough (or undesirable enough) where truly open immigration might actually work?

What Cowen seems to mean, is that any rich country that opened its borders to unlimited immigration would get swamped. As an advocate of taxing immigration, I find this objection easy to respond to. Israel and Taiwan are special cases because they face immediate national security threats from groups that contest the sovereignty of the government in the territory it claims, so I’ll set those to one side. In general, I do recognize threats of violence as a legitimate, albeit rare, reason to restrict immigration. But Switzerland and Iceland will serve as suitable examples. So, what would happen if Switzerland taxed immigration but eliminated all quantity restrictions, and while making it clear from the start, of course, that immigrants would not be eligible for public welfare benefits, and had to pre-imburse the government for the costs of deporting them if they became destitute (see DRITI for details). Answer: the living standards of native Swiss would skyrocket. Swiss entrepreneurs would thrive, building factories galore and scoring massive export success in Europe on the strength of their lower labor costs. The Swiss government would enjoy an enormous surge in tax revenue, and would pour out generous largesse on Swiss citizens, thus raising the living standards even of those who aren’t entrepreneurs, or for that matter even those who lose their jobs to immigrants, as many Swiss would. Swiss households would also enjoy an abundance of cheap domestic servants, who would raise their standard of living still further. Against this, the Swiss would see far more poverty in their country (against which the border currently serves as a blindfold), but if they are enlightened, this would trouble them no more than poverty in developing countries does now. In fact, it would trouble them less, because they would have the moral satisfaction of knowing that they were not exacerbating world poverty through the closure of their borders, but on the contrary, that, occasional mistakes aside, all those hordes of impoverished immigrants were bettering their condition relative to what it would have been at home, else they would not have come.

Cowen is smart enough to figure all this out for himself. The communication failure occurs because we mean different thing by “open borders.” I mean simply that immigrants will be allowed to enter the country physically, and allowed to work. Not that they will reside there on equal terms with citizens, subject to the same tax rules for example. Certainly not that they will have access to the vote, which is a separate issue, or to welfare benefits, which I would strongly object to. Perhaps he would favor the DRITI approach to open borders, I don’t know. It seems as if taxing immigration, and keyhole solutions generally, are not on Cowen’s radar screen. I don’t particularly blame him for that: it seems like the more sophisticated ways of talking about open borders which have been developed in the conversations at this site haven’t filtered out into the mainstream yet. But that’s a shame, because it would be much more interesting to hear Cowen’s response to the sophisticated case to open borders. I don’t learn anything from comments like those above.

Cowen continues:

In my view the open borders advocates are doing the pro-immigration cause a disservice.  The notion of fully open borders scares people, it should scare people, and it rubs against their risk-averse tendencies the wrong way.  I am glad the United States had open borders when it did, but today there is too much global mobility and the institutions and infrastructure and social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring.  Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs.  (The clever will note that this problem is smaller if all wealthy countries move to free immigration at the same time, but of course that is unlikely.)

It’s possible that open borders weaken the pro-immigration cause by making it look scarier. In several years of advocating open borders, though, I’ve never had the impression that any of my interlocutors actually came to favor more restrictionist policies than they had before. The worst that happened was that some people seemed to become more self-conscious and articulate in their opposition to open borders, but if anything they seemed to stake out policy positions on immigration far to the left of the mainstream, in their effort to fend off my open borders advocacy while still feeling they have some claim to the moral high ground. For example, someone might say: Yes, we should take in all the immigrants we can handle, but not open borders, that’s crazy! “All the immigrants we can handle” is major progress compared to the mainstream. In this case, open borders advocacy might serve to expand the Overton window. See the post “How persuasive are open borders advocates? The case of Bryan Caplan” for more analysis of this.

There are a number of ways that open borders advocates might be helping the pro-immigration cause. For one thing, immigration advocates like Tyler Cowen can attack us in order to make themselves seem reasonable and moderate, while still supporting greatly increased immigration! For another, people who are aware of the case for open borders, even if they don’t come out in favor of it themselves, may start to feel less of a need to say “… but we do need to control the borders” as the bookend of a defense of amnesty for undocumented immigrants, or more high-skilled immigrants, or whatever. The more we become known, the less people will be able to say “everyone agrees we need to control the borders.”

Mainly, though, Cowen’s remarks make me really wish we could raise the level of debate. It would be nice if we didn’t have to explain ad nauseam that the fact that “social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring” is of no relevance, because of course any plausible open borders policy would involve denying immigrants most or all access to welfare, and of course it’s stupid to object to that on humanitarian grounds, since immigrants wouldn’t come here unless it made them better off. It would be nice if Cowen would feel the need to clarify his attitude to taxing migration and keyhole solutions.

UPDATE: Welcome Marginal Revolution readers! Here’s Tyler’s post linking to us. His comment:

On open borders, Nathan Smith responds, but I consider it a surrender.  What he calls “open borders” I call “not open borders.”  Price and quantity are dual.

Do we agree then? Good!

The comment “price and quantity are dual” is a masterpiece of laconic insight-cum-evasion. Here’s a way of unpacking it that stresses the insight part. In trade economics, it is often claimed that quotas are equivalent to tariffs, because limiting the quantity of imports via quotas and raising the price of imports via tariffs have the same economic effects. However, this is true only if the right to import under the quota is auctioned off. The same logic can be applied to immigration. See my post “Auctions, tariffs, and taxes” for more analysis of these distinctions.

I added “-cum-evasion” because a reader might, just possibly, get the impression that what Cowen calls my “not open borders” position is the same as the status quo. In fact, not only is DRITI not the status quo, but the policy of auctioning visas, which could arguably be considered equivalent on the ground that “price and quantity are dual,” is also very far from the status quo.

At any rate, if you’re interested in parsing these distinctions between “open borders” and “not open borders,” in defining and refining the concept of open borders, and classifying the arguments for it and the objections to it, you’ve come to the right place! I daresay that no one on the web does that better than we do.

I’ve been working on a book about marriage lately (links to draft chapters here) and it gave me the idea for an imperfect but somewhat useful marital metaphor for the world’s nation-states. See the related Nation as family page.

Imagine a prosperous but diverse trading city, in which people of many cultures mingle, resulting in a rather weak sense of community. A good deal of sex takes place, much of it in the context of marriages, which are arranged and managed quite differently by the different cultural groups that mingle in the city. It is widely noticed, however, that in spite of these variations, marriage tends to make people a bit more productive and a bit happier, and especially, that it provides a kind of private social insurance, with spouses serving as first responders for each other in emergencies, and providing income support during unemployment spells. Also, marriage is good for the rearing of the young. A paternalistic regime comes to power and takes these conclusions to extremes by setting a target of universal marriage and pursuing it with a kind of blind, bludgeoning determination. It adopts the slogan “marriage is a buddy system for life,” and determines that everyone must have a “buddy.” Mate choice is regarded as desirable in principle and occasionally even eloquently extolled by the regime’s leaders, but the bureaucrats are given orders to register certain numbers of marriages and end up doing it in slapdash fashion just to fill their quotas, first registering cohabiting couples as married, then roommates, and finally neighbors. Children are matched to “parental” homes in the same brusque manner, and soon the whole population of the city has been sorted officially into “families,” though not all of them know about it at first. A raft of new “family values” laws impose basic norms of familial togetherness, from cohabitation and mutual financial support to birthday presents and family pictures. In some cases, citizens are physically forced to leave their homes and enter those of new “spouses” whom they’ve barely met. More often, though, noncompliant citizens are merely denied access to government-issued documents which are now required for purchasing goods and services from formal sector businesses. Hunger soon reduces noncompliance to a minimum.

Superficially, a new familial order has been established. And a surprising number of the new shotgun marriages turn out well. With a little adaptation and give-and-take, couples find a pleasant modus vivendi, and are glad that the government solved the dating game problems for them. Of course, since couples who praise the regime’s policy sometimes get preferences for better jobs, housing, and other perks in the state-influenced sectors of the economy, these reports of marital happiness may not all be sincere. Such mutually happy couples do not seem, in any case, to be a majority, yet pretty good evidence emerges that in most of the shotgun marriages, at least one spouse is fairly happy with the arrangement, since the new laws have allowed some people, by chance, to “marry up” with people who would have been “out of their league” before. Perhaps the most common adaptation to the new laws is a kind of marital tokenism, where spouses do the bare minimum to comply with the laws, and generally lead parallel lives and ignore each other. In the worst cases, some couples descend rapidly into vicious feuds over assets that end in violence and even murder, which sometimes occurs right out in the public street in broad daylight. Such incidents create an outcry, and the regime reluctantly allows partial separation and divorce on an irregular and discretionary basis when it can’t find feasible ways to force people to stay together. There is no doubt that venerable old familial customs, birthdays and wedding rings and family vacations, etc., are regarded with some cynicism now that they are state-coerced. Still, the old family vacation spots are busier than they used to be.

It is soon noticed that the new marriage policy has led to a revival of male headship within the household. The regime didn’t plan this. If anything, it had a preference for gender equality. But it soon claims the new trend as a victory. Its story is that people are “revealing a preference” for traditional gender roles, and soon male headship is incorporated into its pro-family propaganda. What gives this plausibility is that relatively few wives in the newly-traditionalist marriages speak out publicly against their new, more subordinate role. On the contrary, when asked, they usually express confidence in their husbands’ headship. Later, when the regime starts promoting male headship, wives start echoing the regime’s own rhetoric on the subject. Yet many people begin to hear through private channels, and some investigations by foreign journalists and academics seem to confirm, another explanation of wives’ apparent contentment, namely, intimidation. The regime insists on marital togetherness and permanence, and is pretty scrupulous about respecting marital privacy, so, with women’s exit option taken away, and with little recourse against domestic violence, the brute fact of men’s superior physical strength shaped power dynamics within marriages. Wives don’t dare to badmouth their husbands in public. Not that all these wives are being beaten. Often mere threats suffice to keep wives in line. That said, no one doubts that wife-beating has made a comeback, and the regime tries to counter-act this sinister trend with even more propaganda about marital love and harmony. Anyway, the view that male headship reflects intimidation rather than “revealed preference” never manages to become mainstream, simply because it is now politically incorrect to treat married couples as separate individuals with diverging interests. That violates the principle of family togetherness.

As time passes, the regime has quite a few successes to boast of. To start with, marriage as social insurance is working for a lot of people. Since spouses are co-owners of each other’s assets, they each have a little extra income during times of illness or unemployment. Overall, there is less crime and poverty on the streets, because spouses police and support each other. On the other hand, some families experience impoverishment, which the regime blames on “exploitation” by wealthier families, but which on closer examination seems to reflect a prisoner’s dilemma situation in which each spouse is trying to sponge off the other. Why work, when you can go out and spend your spouse’s income instead? Some countries seem to be in a race to sell off assets and spend the money before the other does. Whether the city’s lack of community has been mitigated is difficult to say. There is certainly less diversity in family arrangements, and probably less cultural diversity generally, due to the comparative conformism of the family model the state has imposed on society. Prostitution has plunged as prostitutes have been married off, but a kind of underground economy has appeared, not so much in sex per se, as in romance, in trysts and liaisons and love letters and serenades, in roses smuggled into girls’ rooms by night, that sort of thing. There is a lot of nostalgia for the past. In particular, family life used to have a poetic charm and fascination, and a moral substance, which it has not completely lost, but which now seems rare and less spontaneous.

And there has been a sharp rise in equality, driven in large part by whether families work well or are dysfunctional. The older families, the families that date to the years before the new regime, tend to be the most flourishing and successful. They have the happiest home lives, which spills over into greater productivity in all walks of life. A few old families and many of the new families are trapped in bitter quarrels and feuds that they now can’t escape from. They fall into low productivity, poverty, and long-term welfare dependency, with intermittent domestic violence. Public opinion pities them, but mutters sotto voce that it’s their own fault.

Time to decode the metaphor. For families, read nation-states. For male headship, reading authoritarianism and totalitarianism. For domestic violence, read civil war and ethnic cleansing, as in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan. For birthday presents and family pictures, read flags, national anthems, etc. For family vacation spots, read the Olympics, the World Cup, etc. For divorces, read Czechoslovakia, Malaysia/Singapore, Kosovo, the Soviet Union. For token marriages, read countries like Canada and Belgium that lack a unified national identity. For lucky spouses who got married up, read southern Italy vis-à-vis northern Italy, or Congo vis-à-vis resource-rich Katanga, or Iraq via Iraqi Kurdistan. For the regime, read Woodrow Wilson, 1918, the Fourteen Points, the doctrine of national self-determination, the UN, and generally the whole contemporary world order that partitions the world into sovereign nation-states.

Before 1914, most of the world was not organized into nation-states. Where national identity definitely existed, e.g., among the British, French, Germans, Americans, Japanese, etc., it was organic, deeply rooted in history. These were nations united by some of the following: language, race, religion, historical memory, legal customs, co-citizenship in an established polity, literature, cuisine, philosophical and other ideas. The mix varied but the basis for unity was substantial. Each of these nations had a good deal to love and take pride in collectively, and they did love and take pride in it collectively. They were like couples in a more-or-less happy marriage, together because they wanted to be, even if it is a valid objection to the metaphor, that marriages are consensual in a way that nations aren’t, even in the best of cases. But it was probably true of most English, that they felt English and wanted to be English; of Americans, that they felt American and wanted to be American; of most Germans, that they felt German and wanted to be German, etc. That still is true, probably, of the countries of which it was true in 1914.

When Wilson and his successors imposed nation-state organization on the whole world– to be sure, not entirely by force, not without some buy-in from those being reorganized, but the persistent American ideological bias was a crucial factor in the geopolitical reinvention of the world– they imposed a model that often didn’t fit very well. Wilson at any rate, and I think most of his American successors as well, were impelled to act this way in large part because of their ideas about political legitimacy. Wilson would not even negotiated with Austria-Hungary; he would not uphold empires. For that matter, even the British, Dutch, French, and other European imperialists found themselves in a rather embarrassing position, since by 1914, they were democrats at home, and believed in democratic principles, which their imperialism violated. Nationalism had some influence among colonial subjects of these empires, too, of course– how could it not, since many of the local elites were European-educated?– but so did other ideas, and anyway, the empires weren’t typically overthrown by revolutions from below. More often than not, the transition out of colonialism was initiated as much by the colonizer as the colonized, and was often hasty and slapdash. The adulation of “democracy” in the 20th century implicitly carried with it a program of reorganizing the world into nation-states, for rule of the people requires a people. It was axiomatic that each geographical area onto which the accidents of realpolitik and imperial exhaustion had deposited sovereignty ought to be a democracy. Tanzania ought to be a democracy. Rhodesia ought to be a democracy. Congo ought to be a democracy. Wilson thought he was “making the world safe for democracy,” but he ushered in a new age of authoritarianism, because democracy depends on a certain solidarity among the people, and that doesn’t magically arise when a people gets lumped together into a nation.

National identity has its good and bad sides. People have many identities: I am American, but also professor, Christian, Orthodox, Californian (at present), free-market conservative, Republican (sort of), Harvard grad, GMU grad, Notre Dame grad, English speaker, lover of Dostoyevsky, writer, musician, economist, lover of the outdoors. There is no particular reason why I should prioritize being American over my other identities, nor why Americans should form a polity rather than Californians or English speakers or Christian. Indeed, I regard my Christian identity as by far the most important, and my membership in the Body of Christ as far more real and important than my American nationality. In principle, I could be American by nationality, but not loyal to the American republic, or loyal to the American republic without being American by nationality. I happen to regard the American polity as a pretty good arrangement of things, and am not inclined to break it up, or secede from it, or subordinate it comprehensively to a larger polity; but not all national polities work so well as the American republic, and many people in this world might have good reasons to want their nations broken up, or subordinated to some larger polity, or to secede from a polity, or emigrate from it. The point is, you can’t take for granted that it’s there, or that it has some constant meaning over the surface of the earth. The peoples of some countries don’t feel patriotic love for the entity that the geopolitical order has assigned them to as subjects. The rulers of those countries may wish that they did feel patriotic loyalty, and perhaps it would be a good thing if they did. Even if that is the case, it does not follow that it would be the best thing. If people could love one thing more, should it be their country? Or mankind? Or their families, cities, churches or other religious communities, ethnolinguistic groups, civilizations, continents?

The regime in the parable ought simply to allow the faux, forced marriages to be dissolved. The geopolitical order shouldn’t dissolve all nation-states, probably not even the dysfunctional ones. Here the analogy is inexact. Rather, it should seek to open the world’s borders to immigration. Organically strong nation-states would still retain their identities. Dysfunctional nation-states would still be on the map, but people wouldn’t be chained into them, and they would be opened up to many new and salutary influences.

This post is linked to this book project, see Googledocs version here. I argued in a recent post that “the modern borders regime was designed to secure international peace,” and since, in fact, the post-WWII era has been an era of unprecedented international peace (though there has been quite a bit of civil war and/or totalitarian violence within countries), a tentative judgment seems to be warranted that it has been quite successful in achieving that important goal. This success comes at a high cost, however, namely: almost inconceivably extreme inequality in every aspect of the human condition.

One of the strangest features of the contemporary world order is that the roughly 200 countries in the world, excepting a few marginal cases where sovereignty is disputed, enjoy a kind of juridical or official equality, even though in every practical respect they are extremely unequal.

Start with geography. Russia is the world’s largest country by territory, followed by Canada, the United States, China, and Brazil. At the other extreme are countries like Israel, Lebanon, Luxembourg, and Singapore, and poorer countries like Swaziland, Lesotho, and Brunei. El Salvador has less than 1/400th the area of the United States. Some small countries enjoy geographical advantages such as good ports, natural resources, pleasant climate, or open borders with the EU, but others do not, such as tiny, landlocked, malarial Rwanda, do not.

Next, take population, which ranges from China and India, with over 1 billion people each, to Fiji, Comoros, Reunion, and Bhutan, with less than 1 million each. Some metropolitan areas, like New York City, have much larger populations than many countries. Small countries are not necessarily at a disadvantage relative to large ones, but at best they provide less scope for the development of a complex division of labor internally, and are more dependent on the global economy to meet their needs.

There is enormous variation among countries in population density as well. At one extreme (leaving out a few very small states) is Bangladesh, with 950 people per square kilometer. The United States, with about 30 people per square kilometer, is towards the other extreme, though plenty of other countries are still more sparsely populated, including some as fortunate as Australia (2.5), and as unfortunate as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (8). The data do not particularly suggest that population density is either good or bad for economic development or political freedom. The most crowded countries include flourishing Hong Kong and Singapore as well as impoverished Bangladesh and the benighted Gaza Strip. The most thinly peopled include Nordic and Anglosphere countries as well as much of sub-Saharan Africa. Still, population density does profoundly affect people’s lives, even if it’s not clear whether the typical net impact is good or bad.

Moving to indicators that are more clearly correlated with human welfare, there are now more than 20 countries where life expectancy is over 80– in Monaco it is almost 90– and most countries have life expectancies over 70. Yet at the other extreme there are a handful of countries, all except Afghanistan located in Africa, where life expectancies are under 50. Some of this reflects geography– sub-Saharan Africa has one of the most dangerous disease environments in the world– but crime, political violence, and public health policy are also important factors. Perhaps the most famous indicator that varies strikingly across countries is GDP per capita. This can be measured in different ways, which affect the ranking of countries and the range of variation slightly, but all the extant lists place a few small countries like Qatar, Luxembourg, Norway, Hong Kong, and Singapore near the top, with the US as the wealthiest large country, big Western European nations like Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain a little below the US, most of post-communist Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East in a broad middle-income range, and sub-Saharan Africa dominating the bottom of the list, with a few others like Haiti, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Yemen mixed in. Whatever measure is used, a handful of countries have GDP per capita of less than $1,000 per year, while at the other end of the spectrum national incomes are above $80,000 per year. The richest countries enjoy average incomes over 100 times larger than the poorest. Of course, there is a lot of income inequality within countries as well.

Politically, the countries of the world range from liberal democracies where people confidently enjoy freedoms of speech and religion and broad scope for political participation, to totalitarian regimes like North Korea, or repressive and authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, where freedom is tightly curtailed, and where most people have no opportunity to influence public policy, and everything in between. Nowadays, most countries are nominal democracies, but Central Asia, for example, is dominant by de facto dictatorships where the media are tightly controlled by the government and state power is used to prevent the emergence of political competition. Some constitutions, like that of the US, enjoy a deep legitimacy and near-veneration from people across the political spectrum, and provide real limits on the way elected officials exercise their power. Other constitutions, like that of the Russian Federation, can be manipulated at will by leaders like Putin, whose authority is really personal rather than constitutional in nature, based on a combination of personal charisma with force and fear. According to Freedom House, 118 countries qualified as genuine electoral democracies in 2013, while 47 were classified as Not Free.

Countries vary greatly in the degree to which they honor the rule of law, as opposed to being fraught with political and administrative corruption. Corruption is difficult to measure, but one NGO that attempts to do so is Transparency International, which finds the lowest levels of corruption in Canada, Australia, and the Nordic countries; somewhat higher levels in the US, Britain, Japan, France, and Germany, as well as Chile and Uruguay in Latin America; moderate levels in Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, as well as China and India; and the worst corruption in most of the former Soviet Union along with several countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Such extreme variations among the sovereign states of the world make their juridical equality seem odd at best, if not a kind of absurd play-acting. Indeed, one may wonder how such wildly various entities can be instances of the same category. If we use the word “country” or “sovereign state” or “nation” to describe the US, how can the same word also be applicable to an entity as totally different as Togo, or Turkmenistan, or Sao Tome and Principe? However, some legitimate categories do include entities very different in size, strength, and other features. Mammals, for example, vary in size from the mouse to the whale, in speed, from the sloth to the cheetah, in intelligence, from lemmings to humans, but they’re still mammals. Why? What makes a mammal a mammal? Features like hair, sweat glands, and milk to nourish young define mammals vis-a-vis reptiles and birds. Maybe size, prosperity, and institutional quality in nation-states are like color and size in mammals: interesting, but irrelevant to whether an entity is included in the category or not. After all, an American doesn’t think his nationality would change if his country annexed some new territory, or suffered an economic recession, or developed serious problems with political and administrative corruption. Is there some other essence that gives meaning to nation-states, such that the juridical equality of nation-states isn’t a mere historical accident or the geopolitical fancy of an unusual historical epoch, but recognizes instances of a type of social reality independent of the constructs of international law.

Yet if we consider what makes the world’s leading nations feel like nations, then look for the same phenomena elsewhere, we will find almost as much inequality among juridical nations in their resources for nationhood, as we did in size, wealth, and institutions.

Take history. A country like France can trace its history, after a fashion, at least to the High Middle Ages, to Joan of Arc (1412-1431) and St. Louis (1214-1270), and arguably even further back, to Charlemagne (742-814) or the Frankish kingdom of Clovis I (466-511). England can trace its history back to William the Conqueror (1028-1087) at a minimum, and since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 has enjoyed unbroken domestic peace under a constitution that has evolved a good deal but has never been abrogated or overthrown. Spain has been Spain since the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, though some Basques and Catalans wish it wasn’t, and its territory hasn’t changed much since the expulsion of the Moors in 1492. Portugal, which became an independent nation in the 11th century and expelled the Moors, establishing its modern borders, in 1250, can claim to be the oldest territorially stable polity in the world. Germany’s historic basis as a polity is much shallower: it was united by Bismarck only in 1870. Long before that, there was the Holy Roman Empire, which however was founded by Charlemagne, a Frank, had territories in Italy, and never bore much resemblance to a German nation-state. Further east, there was a powerful Polish kingdom in medieval and early modern times, which, however, vanished from history in the 18th-century Partitions, only to be restored to independence after World War I when other countries defeated its major enemies and chose to recognize it because they believed in national self-determination, then was conquered first by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviets, who made it a satellite state, and finally it received genuine independence when the Soviets under Gorbachev lost their will to repress, before being absorbed into the EU in 2004. In short, all the nations of Europe can look back to some sort of national history as a precedent for their modern incarnations as nation-states, but these vary greatly in how well they can serve as a basis for national pride or national identity, and in how promising they are as precedents for success. Also, the territories on which these national histories played themselves out rarely coincide with the modern national borders within which countries have to live, giving rise to irredentist temptations.

Some other parts of the world, such as India, China, and Japan are as well-endowed with the historical resources for modern nationality as are the countries of Europe, but others are not. Most borders in the Middle East and Africa are legacies of colonialism, with many modern African borders having been drawn at the Congress of Berlin in the 1880s, by the Europeans who were then carving up Africa in an orgy of imperial aggrandizement. The division of Spanish America into Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, etc. has to do more with historical accidents during and after the wars of independence from Spain, than with any fundamental social reality or any deep aspirations of the people. The United States, an unusual case, has a powerful basis for national unity in its collective memory of its war for independence against Great Britain, and its commitment to freedom and democracy embodied in its 18th-century Constitution. The basis for national unity in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand seems somewhat weaker, particularly given their much longer affiliation with Great Britain, whose monarch is still the head of state in these countries. One gets the sense that to be an American is to have a creed to live by, whereas to be a Canadian is rather convenient and advantageous.

Or take race. Of course, since World War II, it has gradually become more or less politically incorrect to take race into account at all. But in the past, people have usually cared a good deal about ancestry, so that to be a German, say, was to have German ancestry. Indeed, this was still more or less the case until a reform of German citizenship law in 1999. In some places the idea that nationality could be acquired, or could be a matter of politics or law or personal choice as opposed to blood, still strikes people as paradoxical. We might suppose, then, that a good basis for national unity is the genetic homogeneity of a country’s people. In fact, genetic diversity varies greatly among nations, with some Andean countries being the most genetically homogeneous, some sub-Saharan African countries the most genetically diverse, and North America and Europe somewhere in the middle. Bolivia, then, might be a nation-state in a real, genetic sense, but what about Kenya?

Again, take language. A country like Norway has a common language that sets it apart from the rest of the world, which its inhabitants overwhelmingly speak. Speaking Norwegian is highly correlated with Norwegian citizenship. The United States more or less has a common language in English, though an estimated one in five Americans speaks a language other than English at home, including many who were born in the US; but this common language does not set Americans apart from all non-Americans, since English is also the prevailing language in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, and has many native speakers in South Africa, and has an enormous number of second-language speakers worldwide. Meanwhile, in India, there is no language that is spoken by a majority of the inhabitants. Hindi is the most widespread first language, with 41%; English plays a dominant role in commerce and government but is spoken well only by an elite. Yet India enjoys a certain genuine national solidarity, as an ancient civilization with three millennia of history to look back on, and especially, with the religio-cultural legacy of Hinduism to draw on as a source of identity. Countries like Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and other African nations are linguistically fragmented without the benefit of civilizational union.

Other candidates could be tried, such as religion, culture, political ideology, and so forth, but it begins to seem clear that the notion that the world is comprised of 200 or so nation-states is a fiction, because these nation-states have nothing in common. They are in no sense, except the superficial juridical one, the same type of entity.

When a person is born into the world today, their situation in life is in large part determined by their place of birth. They may be born into a free, prosperous, liberal-democratic nation-state, of which they are recognized as valuable members, and in the context of which they are invited to work out the stories of their lives. They may be born into so-called “countries” that are little more than historical accidents, of which they are seen as citizens only in international law and not in the eyes of most other members of those nations, countries where the rule of law is lacking, countries fraught with corruption, countries almost destitute of opportunity, where their rights are not respected. Nationality is an asset or a burden individuals are born into without their consent, and a source of enormous inequality among people. People often profess to believe in egalitarianism, in “all men are created equal,” in the desirability of treating everyone equal, of securing equality of opportunity and perhaps a certain degree of equality of condition, etc., etc. It is hard to see how one could justify regarding statements of this kind as anything but the most ludicrous hypocrisy if they are not understood to imply an urgent determination to do something about the inequality of nations. Or to be more exact, to do something about how the comprehensive dissimilarities of the entities labeled sovereign nation-states in international law gives rise to huge inequalities in the opportunities of individuals to flourish.

When one considers this vast inequality in every dimension, to the point of complete incommensurability, of the world’s “nation-states,” a certain conclusion may dawn on one which is difficult to articulate, but let me put it this way: any moral claim which is indexical with respect to countries is presumptively invalid.

What does that mean?

First, the word “indexical.” Indexical words have meaning relative to the speaker. When I say “I,” I mean “Nathan Smith”; when you say “I,” you mean _______. When I say “my wife,” I mean Catherine Smith; when you say “my wife,” you either refer to some other woman, or a failure of reference occurs because there is no such entity. When I say “my house,” I am referring to a certain green country cottage off of highway 99; “my state” is California; “my city” is Fresno (I suppose); “my church” is the Orthodox Church; “my profession” is economics professor; and so forth. You could utter all those phrases, too, but you would refer to different entities. Non-indexical expressions such as “Fresno” and “California” and “the first president of the United States” and “petunias” mean the same thing regardless of who utters them.

An indexical moral claim is a moral claim that contains indexical objects, e.g., “one ought to be faithful to one’s wife,” or “one ought to obey one’s parents.” For me, the claim “one ought to be faithful to one’s wife” means that I ought to be faithful to Catherine Smith, but for my friend Seth, it means that he ought to be faithful to a different woman, named Lauren as it happens. “One ought to obey one’s parents” means that I ought to obey Steven and Merina Smith; it does not mean I ought to obey Brent and Sharman Wilson, though it does mean that my friend Seth ought to obey those people. (Never mind whether the moral claims are true. I’m simply explaining what I mean by an indexical moral claim.)

Moral claims that are indexical with respect to countries would include “one ought to love one’s country,” “one ought to know something about the history of one’s country,” “one ought to seek to understand the laws of one’s country,” “one ought to be loyal to one’s country in wartime,” “one ought to stand ready to serve one’s country at need,” and so on. Now, I think there are plausible arguments for these and many other moral claims for an American, and they might cross-apply to Germans, British, French, Japanese, and many other well-constituted nations. But I think the radical differences among the nation-states defined in international law are such that none of them can be generalized. “One ought to be content to stay in one’s country if no foreign country wants you as an immigrant” is a plausible moral claim– for an American. It does not follow that the same claim has any force for anyone whom international law classifies as a subject of Burma, or China, or Mexico.

In particular, “social contract” type arguments can’t be cross-applied to all the world’s “countries” indiscriminately. In spite of Michael Huemer’s exceedingly lucid and largely valid argumentation in The Problem of Political Authority, I feel that tacit social contract arguments do have some force in legitimizing the government of the United States. But to treat most other countries in the world as social contract-based regimes is a travesty.