One way to approach open borders is to liberalize migration rules in existing policies. Another is to found new polities with open borders, along the lines of what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “cities of refuge,” or what economist Paul Romer has advocated under the name “charter cities” (only with open borders). This post proposes a constitution for an imaginary City of Refuge.

It may seem silly to write a constitution for an imaginary city, yet there is a long tradition of doing so, going back to Plato’s Republic. This post, however, does not outline an ideal state starting from first principles. I don’t believe in an ideal state. The state is, at best, a sad necessity for fallen man, and a good constitution can never substitute for a virtuous citizenry. Most constitutions fail. In a sense, all constitutions fail, for even the US Constitution, perhaps the most successful in the world, has been largely eviscerated by the judiciary, giving rise to a regime quite inconsistent with what the US Constitution really authorized. Yet constitutions matter, too.

The below constitution, then, is a kind of draft of what the Constitution of a City of Refuge might look like. It is meant as a spur to the imagination and the critical faculties. It should be read with the following fictional yet plausible background in mind. Imagine that the continuing development of worldwide moral consciousness gives rise to a belief that the right to emigrate is a fundamental human right, which the international community has an obligation to guarantee. But countries still don’t want to do by opening their own borders. Instead, they resolve to create an archipelago of Cities of Refuge around the world. The international community will negotiate with particular countries to carve out small pieces of land from their territories and develop them as Cities of Refuge, perhaps in return for various benefits, including military guarantees of territory, fiscal aid and debt forgiveness, rights to migrate for their own citizens, representation on important international bodies, perhaps merely because they hope the City of Refuge will be a hub of development with positive spillovers, as Hong Kong was for China. Initially, Cities of Refuge would be founded in relatively undeveloped, unpopulated land. The international community would build infrastructure, and they would be populated by migrants. The below constitution would serve as a kind of template, which would be adapted to local conditions and then adopted as the Constitution of a new City of Refuge.

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City of Refuge, Constitution

Section I. Framework and Basic Law

Governmental Stakeholders

Governance in the City of Refuge will be based on power-sharing between:

(1) a Coalition of External Agencies;

(2) a Republic, from the Latin res publica, meaning “public affairs,” whose role is to make the city self-governing;

(3) a Host Country government.

The Coalition of External Agencies would include stakeholders like the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, representatives of donor countries, and might include private corporations, universities, churches, and other religious or secular non-governmental organizations. Its composition is expected to vary over time and to be a subject of continuing negotiations between donor governments and the representative bodies of the Republic. The Coalition of External Agencies, whatever its membership, is to be regarded as the representative of the international community, entrusted with developing the city of Refuge, in order to realize the global right to emigrate by ensuring that everyone has somewhere that they can emigrate to.

The Republic, a semi-democratic polity entrusted with giving the City of Refuge a self-governing character, is described in Section III. It will not be considered a “sovereign” polity, but it will have primary responsibility for setting public policy and providing public goods. All taxes collected on the territory of the City of Refuge will go to the Republic.

The Host Country will be held to enjoy formal sovereignty over the territory of the City of Refuge, but to have relinquished most of its rights temporarily to the Coalition of External Agencies and to the Republic. After the pre-agreed Term, the territory of the City of Refuge will revert to the full sovereignty of the Host Country, as Hong Kong reverted to China. The Host Country will also have the right and duty to monitor the treatment of its own nationals on the territory of the City of Refuge, so as to ensure that their natural rights are respected. It shall not, however, use this right and duty as a pretext for seeking special privileges for its own nationals, but rather, shall seek to ensure that its own nationals enjoy all the natural rights that the Republic and the Coalition of External Agencies respect in all persons present in the City of Refuge. Any concession made to the rights of Host Country nationals shall be deemed to be enjoyed equally by non-nationals of the Host Country.

Currency

The US dollar will be legal tender for all debts in the City of Refuge. Other currencies may be used for transactions by mutual consent of the transactors.

Languages

English, and the principal language of the Host Country, will be the chief languages of public business, education, and culture.

Basic administration of justice

One of the premises of the City of Refuge is that natural law exists, and that its content has been elucidated by international human rights law, the English common law tradition, and to some extent other traditions, but is also evident to mere enlightened common sense. Natural law will be regarded as more fundamental than, and not overridable by, positive laws promulgated by any Governmental Stakeholders.

Both on the basis of natural law, and as the fundamental premise of its Constitution, the City of Refuge will be bound to respect the right of all persons to freedom of movement. The person and “property in possession” of every human being is to be held sacrosanct, where “property in possession” includes objects physically on someone’s person or kept in a person’s abode and used frequently. It does not include ownership of land or financial assets.

Constitutionally specified details of implementation of the principle of freedom of movement are as follows. The Republic may declare up to 20% of the physical territory of the City of Refuge “gated,” and exclude Sojourners and/or Residents from it. In addition, up to 60% may be privately owned, but physically accessible via public land/easements, and requiring only the permission of the private owner to enter it. And at least 20% must be strictly public, in the sense of no physical exclusion.

The Coalition of External Agencies will initially be tasked with enforcing natural law, i.e., preventing physical violence against persons and theft of property in possession. Later, the Republic may choose to supplement this service with their own administration of justice. This Constitution hereby instructs Sojourners, Residents, and Citizens to disobey the positive laws established by the City of Refuge whenever they violate natural law, and on the other hand, to adhere to natural law even when it is not reinforced by positive law. Individuals’ first allegiance must be to the right, and not to the law. Inasmuch as the Coalition of External Authorities and the Republic fail to secure persons against physical violence or theft, self-defense measures by individuals or groups shall be considered authorized by this Constitution.

The status of Citizen within the Republic is limited to persons who show an understanding of the basic principles of the Republic, and have sworn an oath to uphold them. In particular, Citizens shall not advocate restriction of immigration, on pain of forfeiture of Citizen status.

Military

A military force will be developed under the tutelage of the United States military and other donor countries, with which it is anticipated that it will be allied. Its function is not only the defense of the City of Refuge, but to serve as a rapid-response force for UN peacekeeping and other military tasks of general benefit to mankind and international peace, in the hope that its heroic exploits should redound to the glory of the City of Refuge. The military shall be primarily composed of Citizens of the City of Refuge, but shall have the right to recruit internationally as well in order to maximize professionalism and combat effectiveness.

Section II. Legal Status of Persons

Persons in the City of Refuge will be classified under three legal statuses, Sojourner, Resident, and Citizen, as described below.

Sojourner. Any person present in the City of Refuge who is not a Resident or a Citizen is a Sojourner.

Resident. In principle, any person whose life is centered in the City of Refuge, in the sense that the matrix of their human flourishing is located in it, should be considered a Resident. The Republic should maintain registries of Residents and establish processes for people to acquire Resident status, e.g., one year of physical presence in the City of Refuge, a declaration that the City of Refuge is their abode, evidence of familial and/or friendly connections, livelihood, etc. But it may sometimes be ascertainable that a person possessed Resident status who had not gone through the registry process, if a person was objectively resident in the City of Refuge at a given time. It is not to be regarded as at the discretion of the Republic or the Coalition of External Agencies to grant or withhold Resident status.

Citizen. Citizenship depends on informed, explicit consent to a social contract, which includes both duties and privileges, and consists in participation in the self-governing system of the Republic. The title of Citizen may be conferred in honorary fashion on children of Citizens up to a certain age, but the full rights of Citizens depend on a moderate proficiency in English and the Host Country language, knowledge relevant to civic participation as ascertained by examination, and obedience to natural and positive law. Furthermore, men, but not women, are required to serve in the armed forces of the City of Refuge in order to become full Citizens.

It is hoped that Citizen status will come to be regarded as normative for long-term Residents of the City of Refuge, and as a peculiar honor, but, on the other hand, that Citizen status will not be so economically advantageous that it will be sought primarily for mere economic gain. The Republic has the right to define how people will be admitted to Citizenship, but the criteria for Citizenship should not include race or kinship, religion, or place of birth.

Rights:

Of Sojourners. Sojourners have a right to integrity of their physical person; to rent housing; to work for wages, though they may be subject to special taxes; to buy goods that are deemed to contribute to their objective flourishing; to the retention of property they carry on their person or keep in rented housing and use frequently; to freedom of speech and religion; and to such minimal freedom of contract as the authorities may deem to arise directly from natural law.

Of Residents. Residents have a right to own land and financial assets, including bank accounts with deposit insurance, backed by the Republic and/or the Coalition of External Agencies. They will enjoy a greater right to freedom of contract than Sojourners do, in that they may use forms of business organization established by statutory law. The general welfare of all Residents is to be regarded as a major governance objective for the authorities of the City of Refuge. In particular, the Republic and the Coalition of External Agencies should seek to secure low unemployment, universal primary education, and significant economic opportunity for Residents. Furthermore, the City of Refuge should provide passports to Residents and seek to secure for its passport-holders, through diplomacy, generous immigration access to other nations. The Coalition of External Agencies, in particular, is tasked with seeking to secure international mobility for City of Refuge passport holders.

Of Citizens. Citizens will have guaranteed access to the gated areas of the City of Refuge, and will have the rights of voting and full civic participation in the Republic. Other rights, such as tax exemptions, tax dividends, free education, etc., may be granted to Citizens by the Republic.

Section III. The Republic’s Legislative Bodies

In addition to natural law, a considerable body of positive law is deemed necessary, for the provision of public goods, the regulation of externalities, and the securing of the general welfare. Moreover, to discern the requirements of natural law, and to implement them administratively, is a demanding task. For this purpose a legislature is instituted.

The legislature of the Republic will consist of two bodies: the Assembly and the Senate.

THE ASSEMBLY. The Assembly will consist of 1% of the Citizens at any time, or 1,000 persons, whichever is less, chosen randomly and not by election. As with jury duty in the United States, participation in the Assembly is mandatory for Citizens, should the random selection fall on them. Certain excuses may be allowed for, but an unreasonable refusal to serve in the Assembly is grounds for revocation of Citizen status. Assembly members will be paid the median wage, and may appeal for up to five times this amount if they can show they would have earned more. Assembly duty will last for a minimum of one year. Assembly members who wish to do so may stay on for another year can stay on as non-voting but paid members, who will help to instruct the next Assembly in their duties and influence its deliberations.

The Assembly’s job is to consider petitions originated by Citizens or Residents and approve them, by a supermajority of two-thirds, or reject them. It may also amend them in a fashion consistent with the original intent of the petition, so as to facilitate their implementation. To be considered by the Assembly, petitions need the signatures of at least 1% of the Resident population, or 1% of the Citizen population, and should not violate the natural law or the Constitution. Assembly members may not initiate petitions for consideration during their own terms, but may register petitions for consideration by the next Assembly. The normative procedure for considering petitions is majority vote by all Assembly members. If there are too many petitions for Assembly members to read, the normative procedure for prioritizing them will be by number of signatures, but the Assembly can adopt another procedure if it so chooses.

THE SENATE. The Senate will consist of at least one hundred persons. If one hundred persons meeting the criterion of Senator as described here, enough persons to fill the number will be provided by the Host Country and the Coalition of External Agencies. Thus, for example, if only twenty active Senators derived from the Citizenry of the City of Refuge exist, forty will be appointed by the Coalition of External Agencies, and forty by the Host Country.

The Senatorial Qualifying Exam will be held annually, open to anyone who is interested, Citizen, Resident, or Sojourner. It will be a test of generally but civically-relevant knowledge, resembling the Foreign Service Exam used by the US government to recruit diplomats, but adapted to the particular needs of the City of Refuge. The Coalition of External Agencies, the Republic, and the Host Country will have joint responsibility for its preparation. Its contents are not to be regarded as arbitrary, but rather as objectively representing the best thought and knowledge attained by mankind on civic matters. A high score on this exam will be one of the criteria for attaining the senatorial office.

Citizens who excel on the Senatorial Qualifying Exam, and who have previously served in the Assembly, may be nominated for candidacy to the Senate, either by citizen petitions, by the Assembly, or by the Coalition of External Agencies. Citizens will not solicit nomination to the Senate unless the Senate has fewer than one hundred active members, but may be still be nominated to the Senate by the genuinely independent initiative of others. There shall be no limit on the number of active Senators who may serve at any given time.

Having been nominated, candidates for senatorial office will then be presented to the Citizenry in annual elections, along with a statement of their philosophy of government, prepared by the candidates. Senatorial elections are the only occasion when Citizens will vote. The vote will be conducted on majoritarian lines, with this modification: votes will be weighted so that men, collectively, and women, collectively, have equal weight. Senatorial elections will not be adversarial. Rather, voters may approve or reject each senatorial candidate separately.

Persons elected as Senators of the City of Refuge shall retain that rank permanently as an honorary title. However, the voting privileges and salary of Senator shall be conditional on continuous residence in the Republic and regular attendance at Senate meetings, as well as other conditions of conduct that may be stipulated by the Assembly as fitting for the dignity of a senator. A total senatorial salary will be split equally among all active senators.

Rules about senatorial conduct cannot be retroactive. They are to be regarded as under the arbitrary discretion of the Assembly, and not as arising from natural law. For example, the Assembly might rule that senators must not work in the financial sector, deal in lewd art, divorce their spouses, or possess more than $1 million in net worth. However, rules of conduct for senators must not violate freedom of religion, e.g., it should be regarded as unconstitutional to require a senator to trample on the Cross. Moreover, senators whose lifestyles are inconsistent with newly promulgated rules can ask for a three-year reprieve as that adapt to new expectations. Also, if rules of conduct require senators to spend money, e.g., to maintain a lifestyle of peculiar dignity and decorum, they may document their expenses and require compensation from the Republic.

In addition to approving petitions, senators can award up to 10% of the Republic’s tax revenue, at their own discretion, as public monuments and beautification of the City, as well as awards for inventions, achievements in poetry and the arts, military heroism, and other great services to the City.

Section IV. Public Finance

Basic government functions in the City of Refuge will be guaranteed by the Coalition of External Agencies, as a last resort, but deemed primarily the responsibility of the Republic. The Republic will not be authorized to borrow, but must pay for spending out of current revenues or by selling accumulated assets.

Spending. The Republic will dedicate funds to agencies or classes of persons, while funds permit. If funds are available, in the form of tax revenues or saleable assets, funding commitments will be met in full. If funds are insufficient, they will be met proportionally. Prioritizations may be set in place, such that some dedicated funding will be paid in full before other categories of dedicated funding begin to be paid.

Taxes. Residents and Sojourners shall be subject only to indirect taxes, which may include wage taxes, rent taxes, car taxes, tariffs on international trade, financial transactions taxes, taxes on bank accounts, user fees for government services, land taxes, excise taxes and luxury taxes, corporate taxes, and sales taxes. Income and wealth taxes on Residents and Sojourners will be deemed impermissible, as an excessive invasion of their privacy.

By contrast, Citizens will be required to report their incomes and net worth annually to the Republic and pay income and wealth taxes. In return, they may be exempted from indirect taxes and made eligible for social insurance, subsidized education, and other benefits.

Budget process. Budget proposals may originate through petition or be proposed by the Assembly or the Coalition of External Agencies, but their passage is ultimately the responsibility of the Senate, to be exercised in a fashion consistent with the framework of law established through the petitionary process. The Senate shall not have an obligation to pass budgets annually. Rather, as long as revenues are sufficient to cover expenses, taxes will be collected and dedicated funds paid out by whatever rules are in place. The Senate may, however, change the taxing and spending rules at any time, if such changes command the assent of two-thirds of active Senators. If revenues fall short of expenses, the Senate shall be obligated to revise the taxing and spending rules so that dedicated funding obligations can be met. In this case, a simple majority suffices to make changes to the budget.

Laws and mandates passed through the Assembly and the petition process which involve changes in budgetary rules will be incorporated into the taxing and spending rules which comprise the budget. However, the Senate can defund such laws and mandates if it deems such changes desirable from a budgetary perspective. In that case, after a reasonable lapse of time, they shall be considered null and void.

Excess revenue. If revenue exceeds spending, the surplus will be used to purchase US Treasury bonds, or whatever asset the Senate shall deem suitable, up to a threshold, initially set to $5 million. Excess revenue above this amount will be divided equally and paid out to Citizens. The threshold may be raised or lowered with the consent of the Senate and the Assembly.

Section V. Education and Public Discourse

Freedom of conscience, speech, and religion will be recognized as fundamental principles of the City of Refuge.

The primary role of government in education will consist in scheduling regular public examinations, equally available in English and in the Host Country language. Such exams will be part of the basis for determining eligibility for Citizen status, and for senatorial candidacy, but they should also be developed and administered in such a fashion that they are regarded by private sector employers as valuable indicators of human capital.

Compulsory education in publicly-provided schools will be regarded as a violation of the right to be educated in a manner consistent with one’s beliefs. If the City of Refuge chooses to educate children at the public expense, it must do so through a voucher system, so that the ideological content of education may be determined in the marketplace of ideas and not by government fiat. However, the City may disqualify schools from the receipt of voucher funding on grounds of underachievement on public examinations of objective knowledge.

The Constitution of the City of Refuge will make no commitment to neutrality among opinions, religions, worldviews, etc. On the contrary, it will leave Governmental Stakeholders free to give law and policy an educative function, and to seek to shape public opinion, e.g., through publicly financed and administered news media. The City has a positive right to express its own views and opinions, but not a negative right to suppress the views or opinions of others. There shall be no censorship of opinions and views.

While freedom of conscience, speech, and religion are recognized as fundamental rights, Citizenship is not a right, but a privilege, and may be made conditional on expressed opinions. The right of the Republic to regulate the speech of its members, arising from the principle of freedom of association, will be used in only two respects:

1. Citizens shall not advocate the violation of the human rights of others, in particular the freedom of migration which is the City’s raison d’etre.

2. Citizens shall not assert a right of the City of Refuge to secede permanently from the Host Country.

Any Citizen who is found to have expressed these forbidden opinions may be stripped of Citizenship. The Coalition of External Agencies shall be primarily responsible for the disqualification of Citizens who advocate restrictions of migration or violation of human rights. The Host Country shall be primarily responsible for the disqualification of Citizens who advocate secession.

Section VI. Dissolution

At the end of the pre-agreed period, the City of Refuge will revert to the sovereignty of the Host Country, which may choose to what extent it will maintain the institutions that have evolved in the meantime, or assimilate them to its own internal institutions. However, the Host Country agrees to permit all Citizens and Residents of the City of Refuge to become citizens of the Host Country at this time, on equal terms with existing citizens.

If, at the time when reversion to full Host Country sovereignty is scheduled, the Coalition of External Agencies deems that the Host Country has refused to guarantee the continued right of residence of inhabitants of the City of Refuge, it may postpone the reversion of the City of Refuge to Host Country, until such time as the Host Country has provided such guarantees.

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It is fascinating to think about what kind of society would emerge in the framework of a Constitution like this. I don’t know of course, but I have a few guesses.

Imagine Singapore juxtaposed on a UNHCR-administered refugee camp. I think Cities of Refuge would tend to be a little like that. Smart policy, foreign aid, and entrepreneurial migrants would generate a lot of economic growth, but masses of desperate people would be difficult to absorb comfortably. You might see skyscrapers next to shantytowns.

There would be an eccentric element in the population, misfits and outputs from all over the world, dangerous or innocuous. It would be a mecca for market-dominant minorities, as well as for NGOs and international humanitarian types– another interesting juxtaposition.

A romantic element in the population would be international couples who had trouble getting visas to one another’s countries.

Universities would love it, because they could attract students from all over the world, without needing to worry about processing visas. In general, there’d be a lot of learning and self-improvement. MOOCs would do brisk business.

Culturally, the mixture of people of so many backgrounds would be discombobulating, as well as stimulating. However, a cultural center of gravity might be created through a fusion of (a) an international Americanized bourgeoisie with (b) a large influx of Host Country nationals. Others could assimilate to this culture, but there would be large pockets of unassimilated immigrants from particular regions. All in all, the cultural landscape would be rather clannish and segregated. Nonetheless, I don’t think it would be too difficult to secure civil peace and make the interaction of races and cultures fruitful rather than hostile.

The Cities of Refuge would attract religious communities persecuted in their homelands, and would become centers of Christian missions as well.

There would be enormous economic inequality in the City, but not so much among Citizens. Some very rich tax refugees would settle in the Cities of Refuge, but might prefer not to become Citizens because they would then be subject to income and wealth taxes, as well as Assembly and (for men) military service obligations.

Much depends on whether Citizens would really come to feel pride in their City, and in the attainment of various offices and honors within it. But I think they would. Human beings thirst for recognition, and I think many a downtrodden refugee would be greatly moved and inspired by a chance to be called Citizen of a famous City, and to have a real role in its self-governing constitution– much more of a role, indeed, than the typical citizen of a Western democracy enjoys.

head contests of Republican against Democrat, or Labor against Conservative. The frequent need for supermajorities would make mere partisan victories rather hollow. Note that the rules for joining the Senate tend to impede political ambition, since one can’t be elected Senator without serving in the Assembly, and that depends on random chance. The Constitution is designed to encourage government by a consensus among ordinary Citizens, as opposed to competition among elites. In my view, the combination of ethnic fractionalization with democracy tends to be disastrous precisely because democracy is divisive, and while fomenting divisions can be usefully stimulating when there is sufficient pre-existing homogeneity, it is dangerous when the population is already fragmented. So my Constitution is designed to foment not division, but consensus.

The Citizens themselves may amount to a kind of elite. They are likely to be a minority of the resident population, more rooted and better educated. That they receive direct transfers out of excess tax revenues will give them a strong incentive to run the City of Refuge in a way that fosters wealth creation and keeps government small. Participation in the military and the Assembly will strengthen their attachment to the Republic, and their knowledge of its procedures.

All these guesses may be far off the mark, but one thing I can say with confidence. A passport-free Charter City would be a fascinating place.

The “sanctity of borders” has been the central doctrine of the post-Cold War world order. It is very topical because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine which seems to have taken place on February 27, 2014. For the record, Putin has denied that Russian forces seized Crimea, claiming the pro-Russian forces are local militias. The US State Department has provided evidence that Putin is lying. As an intermittent Russia watcher, my impression is that words have an instrumental rather than a veridical function for Putin, and have little value as evidence for anything except what he thinks it is in the interests of Russian power to fool the world into believing at a particular moment. Be that as it may, the Crimea crisis is a dire threat to the global principle of sanctity of borders.

I have a schizophrenic attitude to the “sanctity of borders.” On the one hand, as I put it in the title of a previous post, “The Modern Borders Regime Was Designed to Secure International Peace,” which I just reread. It’s worth rereading now. Both there and in an earlier post, “Deepening the Peace,” I argue that the Wilsonian world order that, in the course of the 20th century, gradually succeeded in partitioning the world into sovereign democratic or pseudo-democratic nation-states with well-defined borders, has been (since World War II) strikingly successful in maintaining peace. I derived these ideas some time back from an excellent book by Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (but the book is really about the 20th century). For evidence on the world’s growing peacefulness in general, see the Human Security Report and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (I find the latter book obtuse in many ways, but it musters the evidence convincingly.) I think the “sanctity of borders” as a principle of international relations is a crucial factor explaining the world’s unprecedented peacefulness.

This is partly why I have hitherto been skeptical of the peace case for open borders. While prima facie plausible, it seems empirically false. The Golden Age of Open Borders ended in World War I. The closed borders post-WWII era was much more peaceful. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but the fact that the data seem to show the opposite of what the peace case would predict, makes it seem unpromising.

Now, to immigration restrictionists, “the sanctity of borders” has another meaning: borders are morally significant lines which individuals cannot cross without wronging all the inhabitants of the nation whose territory they have entered. Either governments per se, or the people through their governments, have a kind of collective right in the entire territory of a nation, which undocumented immigrants violate. Governments act justly when they restrict immigration, regardless of what their reason may be or whether they have any reason at all. There is no right to migrate; on the contrary, nations enjoy a right, analogous to private property rights, not to be migrated into without their (suitably defined) consent. Thus borders are sacred.

“Sanctity of borders” in this sense, I deny. I think it lacks moral or philosophical justification, and the belief in it is immensely harmful to human welfare. Governments do not really enjoy this right. When they act on their belief that they do, they act wrongly. The world would be a better place if they correctly understood that they do not have this right, that on the contrary there is sometimes a right and in any case a liberty to (peacefully) migrate which governments may justly infringe only in exceptional cases.

Is my rejection of “sanctity of borders” against international migration inconsistent with a favorable attitude to “sanctity of borders” in international relations. No. The reconciliation is easy: I could simply assert that governments have a right to defend their borders by force against armed invaders, and a duty not to send armed invaders into other countries, but that they do not have a right to deny entry to peaceful immigrants who intend only consensual and rights-respecting interaction with a country’s current and lawful residents. Maybe I would assert that. But I would qualify my support for sanctity of borders in other ways. And here my opinions track those of many “liberal internationalists” in the foreign affairs community.

There have been many instances of humanitarian intervention by Western democracies since the end of the Cold War, including: Rwanda; East Timor; Sierra Leone; Yugoslavia, and in particularly the 1998 war in Kosovo; and most recently, the 2011 intervention in Libya. All these wars tend to violate the principle of “sanctity of borders,” in the sense that military forces cross an international border without consent of the recognized, sovereign government of that country. Is it hypocrisy, then, to object to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, or of Ukraine in 2014, on the ground that it violated “the sanctity of borders?” No, but the sanctity of borders must be qualified. It could be restated:

(1) “No government should send military forces across the sovereign borders of another, not having been attacked, unless this is necessary to prevent a massive human-rights violation, such as genocide or ethnic cleansing, currently in progress [humanitarian intervention], and to prevent such a crime is the government’s only important motive [disinterestedness].”

That would justify the war in Kosovo and some others, but not the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If we want to justify that too, we could offer the following:

(2) “No government should invade another country that has not attacked it, except to prevent extreme human-rights abuses or remove a totalitarian regime; furthermore, it should do so without intent of annexation or economic exploitation, without partition except as a last resort to prevent human rights violations, with fair advance warning, multilaterally and with the active support of other nations, and with a domestic record that gives it a credible chance of establish a rights-respecting regime in place of that which is removed.”

Principle (2) would justify the West’s humanitarian interventions, as well as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but condemn Russia’s invasions of Ukraine and Georgia. But am I just moving the goalposts? Is principle (2) actually rightin some fundamental moral sense? Does it allow too much, in authorizing so many interventions? Does it forbid too much, condemning some military interventions that are really justifiable?

For example, in Ukraine, Russia acted non-transparently and without fair warning, by stealth and surprise, in a situation where no major human rights violations were taking place, without a credible chance of establishing a rights-respecting regime because they don’t have one at home, with what seems to be an intent to partition Ukraine, and likely with an intent to annex Crimea. Yet Russians could make a plausible cause that the majority of the population of Crimea wants to be partitioned from Ukraine or even annexed to Russia (there may be a referendum about this in Crimea). Why shouldn’t the will of the Crimean majority decide whether the country is to be part of Ukraine or not? And why shouldn’t Russia help the Crimean majority attain its goals?

I think the best answer is that a world order based on a qualified sanctity of borders, as expressed above in Principle (1) or Principle (2), has proven itself quite effective in maintaining international peace. But that answer is not fully adequate, because man does not live by peace alone, and in all sorts of other ways, the contemporary world order is not conducive to the flourishing of much of the human race. The world order based on “sanctity of borders,” which Putin is now vigorously subverting, though impressively peaceful, has never been particularly rational or just. There was vast economic inequality between rich and poor nations. Totalitarian dictators like Saddam Hussein, whom the West had power to overthrow, were left in power, to the infinite detriment of their abject peoples. The 2003 invasion of Iraq has mitigated this problem a bit, but has not no way to guarantee people against getting trapped in a totalitarian nightmare regime. Many borders were drawn in a highly arbitrary fashion. Some states were rigged to fail by a disadvantageous geography or ethnic makeup. Ukraine, though far from the least fortunate of the world’s countries, is a good example of the arbitrariness of established borders, and the harm they do. There was never any very good reason for predominantly Russian Crimea to be part of Ukraine. It was a historical accident.

There have always been lots of plausible reasons to renegotiate all sorts of borders all over the world. Borders had to be treated as “sacred” precisely because they were so arbitrary and indefensible. We can’t offer a good reason why Crimea should be part of Ukraine, because there isn’t one and never was. Nor, for that matter, is there a good reason why Chechnya should be part of Russia, or Taiwan part of China, or why most of the borders in Africa should be as they are. But start to redraw them, and you open a Pandora’s box.

One of the more arbitrary borders in the world was that between Iraq and Kuwait, and just for that reason, the Gulf War of 1991 was so important for establishing the principle of “sanctity of borders.” That war, with full UN backing, embodied more than any other the principle of “collective security” which the US had been seeking to establish as the basis of the world order since Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The League of Nations had embodied it, rather naively and ultimately without success. The United Nations had embodied it, but UN processes quickly got caught up in Cold War realpolitik and didn’t work the way they had been intended. But suddenly, in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, a UN-backed US-led genuinely global coalition applied overwhelmingly force to reverse an act of aggression. The very arbitrariness of the border thus defended clarified that it was precisely the principle of sanctity of borders, i.e., of any internationally recognized border, that was being established. It was a watershed. To this day, the world is full of little countries with little militaries that go unafraid among the nations. They have confidence in collective security, in the US-led UN-based world order, in international law. It was the 1991 Gulf War, above all, that made that possible. Meanwhile, however, humanitarian intervention has been undermining the principles of that world order. In particular, the 1998 war in Kosovo, leading to its declaration of independence in 2008, and the 2003 war in Iraq, undermined it.

The Iraq War of 2003 had a justification in international law: Saddam had committed himself to letting the international community verified that his country was free of WMDs, then he’d kicked out the weapons inspectors. UN Resolution 1441, authorizing the use of force, was passed. But there was still something lawless about the way the war was initiated. For one thing, the US administration said that it wanted UN authorization, yet would intervene with or without it. The US administration didn’t seem to be reacting to anything Iraq had just done. In that sense, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a “war of choice.” There was certainly a humanitarian argument for overthrowing what everyone recognized to be a brutal totalitarian tyranny. But Saddam’s Iraq wasn’t engaged in genocide just then. The invasion of Iraq was part of a broader, much-misunderstood response to 9/11, and in that respect it was effective: Al-Qaeda was lured into a deadly trap. But to accept that as a reason to violate “Iraq’s sovereignty” was to set a dangerously ambiguous precedent, easy to manipulate and turn in sinister directions. The US wasn’t disinterested the way it had been in Kosovo or East Timor, and that made it more dangerous. The “sanctity of borders” was certainly violated in the sense that an international frontier was crossed by armed force, and the ex post justification, that a people was being liberated from tyranny, could easily turn into a program for wars all over the world, since there are plenty of genuinely tyrannical governments left standing. On the other hand, there was no question of the US annexing Iraq, and it didn’t partition it either. In that sense, the sanctity of borders was respected. But it was nonetheless a blow to the principle.

In the spring of 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, and this was recognized by many countries around the world including the US and most of western Europe. Russia was on the side of Serbia, a fellow Orthodox Slavic nation, and it’s probably in reaction to this that Russian-backed separatists in South Ossetia, a province of the US-allied Republic of Georgia, grew more active… and a war took place in August 2008. How exactly this occurred isn’t entirely clear, since Russia is an unfree and secretive country. The outcome was that Russia occupied two provinces of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and supported their declarations of independence, which however have gone almost entirely unrecognized by the rest of the world. But while Russia didn’t procure international recognition for its new occupied territories, it didn’t face any real consequences either.

Obama came into office and immediately sought to “reset” relations with Russia, as if the breakdown in relations were the US’s fault. I think this basically reflects Obama’s uncritical, knee-jerk rejection of the legacy of the Bush administration. Obama appeased Russia by withdrawing plans to create a missile defense complex in Poland, among other things. To my mind, the “reset” was a huge mistake on the part of the Obama administration, and it’s the main reason why Russia has now occupied Crimea. Russia paid no price for its aggression in Georgia, so now it has done it again, on a larger scale. The West could have done plenty to punish Russia without going to war: boycott the Sochi Olympics, expulsion from the G-8, sending arms to Georgia, a military buildup along the Russian border, targeted sanctions, trade restrictions. It could have boycotted the 2014 Sochi Olympics, or agitated for them to be moved elsewhere, a blow to Russian prestige. It should have done all that, but it might not have worked, and it might have risked escalation into war. What made it difficult, though, was that Russia’s position– that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should be separated from Georgia because their populations seemed to want to– was morally plausible. At any rate, to risk war with Russia for such a dubious cause would have seemed odd.

Now, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the West finds itself in a position something like what it faced with Hitler in 1938. This is not a polemical reductio ad hitlerum, but an analytical device and a mnemonic. Putin resembles Hitler enough that Hitler’s career sheds light on Putin’s. Hitler and Putin came to power in countries bitter about losing major wars. Each was fiercely indignant about the fall of the former regime. (Putin has called the Soviet breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.”) Both rose in the context of a struggling democracy which they proceeded to eviscerate, clamping down on political parties and press freedom and imprisoning opponents. Both spread anti-Western attitudes through official propaganda.

By late 1938, Hitler had an impressive record of bloodless conquests. He had remilitarized the Rhineland, contra Germany’s agreements in the Versailles Treaty; executed an Anschluss or union with Austria, which was then confirmed by “referendum”; then occupied the Sudetenland, a majority-German region of , this time with the active support of France and Britain, which were hoping to sate Hitler’s territorial ambitions to avoid war; and then occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. None of this had met armed resistance, and naturally it did much to fuel Hitler’s popularity in Germany. Note that all of these early Hitlerian victories could plausibly be defended in terms of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. The West had greatly strengthened Hitler by letting him achieve all of this so easily. But what was the alternative? As long as Hitler had a plausible moral justification for his moves, however legally unacceptable they may have been, it was hard to muster the moral will to go to war with him. And so the rules of international legality were eviscerated, and a new system of incentives developed, and countries began to align themselves with Hitler. If Britain and France had fought in 1936, it would have been an easy win. By waiting to 1939, they almost handed Hitler the world on a platter.

Now, differences. First, Russia’s relative power is much less than Germany’s was. Second, whereas Russia is an authoritarian semi-dictatorship which has increasingly stifled dissent, it is not a totalitarian regime like the Nazis or the Soviet Union. Consequently, Russian public opinion is less crazy. Russians have more access to international news. Third, there isn’t a Russian ideology in the way there was a Nazi ideology. Fourth, Putin was less ruthless in establishing his regime. And I doubt that we’re on the brink of World War III. But the dilemma the West faces is similar to what it faced in 1938: either plunge into a nasty, dangerous confrontation that could lead to war for the sake of a not particularly just cause (keeping the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, or Crimea in Ukraine), or let the central stabilizing principle of the international order be eviscerated, and live in Putin’s world.

Bryan Caplan asked for predictions about Ukraine. I’ll offer a few. For now, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine looks unpopular in Russia. If Crimea secedes in some fashion, which it probably will, I doubt that Putin’s gambit will be so unpopular a year from now. I think Russians are afraid of the reactions of the West, but the West’s reaction will be feeble enough that, in Russians’ eyes, events will prove Putin right. Putin will be strengthened at home. Meanwhile, a few other things will happen:

• Other secessionist movements around the world will be emboldened. They will behave more provocatively, and start to look for foreign patrons.
• Demand for nuclear weapons will increase. Crimea will persuade many that nuclear weapons are the only real security in Putin’s world, and also, and worse, that they allow a nation to engage in aggression with impunity. I was tempted to say “fifteen nuclear powers by 2020,” but I don’t know enough about the supply side. Maybe nuclear weapons are too difficult for some regimes to get. But more will want them.
• Military spending will rise in many countries.
• Many regimes will try to alter the ethnic “facts on the ground” in their favor, burdening human rights in pre-emptive strikes against possible secession movements.
• If Crimea’s independence is widely recognized, Taiwan will start to use it to bolster the case for their independence. This raises the probability of a China-Taiwan war.
• The trend towards declining violence documented by the Human Security Report will stall or go into reverse.

Now, all this is causing me to reassess the peace case for open borders. Until now, I had been skeptical because the status quo seemed to be doing so well. But now it looks like the status quo may be breaking down. There’s a civil war in Syria which no one knows what to do about. In view of the empirical regularity that democracies do not fight each other, the global spread of democracy was an encouraging sign for the future of world peace. But democracy seems to be in decline. Democracy failed quickly in Egypt. The Pax Americana seems to be giving way to a more chaotic period of interregnum.

And so, let me suggest that it would be useful if open borders, the right to migrate, could be deployed in a somewhat opportunistic factor as a means to peace. Consider the case of Ukraine. One reason Russians care so much about Ukraine is that Kiev is so central to Russian history. It was where Russia began. Russians want to have access to it. If Ukraine joins NATO and the EU, immigration restrictions will probably be tightened in ways that make it harder for Russians to live and work there, or even to travel there. It’s not really clear why Russians should have less right of access to a place important to their culture and history like Kiev, than Americans have to a place important to our culture and history, like New York. Might it not help to reconcile Russians to Ukraine’s absorption into Europe, if their right to live and work in Ukraine were recognized and guaranteed? In principle, Russians’ right to live and work in Ukraine is separable from Moscow’s right to rule Ukraine.

Again, consider the situation of a Russian-speaking voter in Crimea, faced with a referendum on separation from Ukraine and incorporation into Russia. One major benefit of becoming part of Russia is that he will gain the right to live and work in Russia. This is quite valuable, since Russia is both big– many options– and richer than Ukraine. While it might seem even more valuable to have the right to live and work in Europe, (a) that is not being offered at the moment, and (b) for a Russian-speaking Crimean, the cultural transition would be much harder. Now, suppose arrangements could be made, such that Crimeans would be part of a free migration zone which includes Russia, so that Russians could move to Crimea and live and work there, while Crimeans could live and work in Russia. That might make it easier to reconcile pro-Russian Crimeans to the cancellation of a referendum on independence.

Indeed, if Ukrainians could all along have been an overlapping zone of free migration between Russia and Europe, such that Ukrainians could live and work in either Russia or Europe, and Russians and Europeans could live and work in Ukraine, need the tensions into Ukraine ever have come to this pass? Europe-oriented Ukrainians could be confident that the influence of Europe would be sustained, while Russia-oriented ones would not fear being cut off from their homeland.

At bottom, the trouble with Ukraine is not that her people can’t get along with each other, as that the sovereign democratic nation-state model just doesn’t fit it very well. Some other arrangement is needed to avoid conflict, which combines integration and fluidity with the autonomy of regions and ethnic communities, and which recognizes and gives institutional protections to the links Ukrainians feel to different communities beyond Ukraine. The state sovereignty model is too crude to accommodate these needs.

If we’re entering a more chaotic era, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It will probably be more violent: that’s just reversion to the historical mean. Minimizing violence was one thing that the late 20th-century Wilsonian world order did exceptionally well. But it may also be more creative, more just, and/or more interesting. As we muddle through, the single most important thing we can do is to advance individual rights on any front we can. Formal, democratic, constitutional processes may become less important, and hopefully some powers, such as the power to restrict migration, will be taken out of their hands. Protection of human rights should not be the responsibility only or primarily of sovereign states towards their own citizens, but churches and all sorts of civil society organizations and of conscience, as well as international organizations, should find ways to do it, and existing states should probably start doing it for people other than their own citizens. Apologies if this is vague, but it’s my dim glimpse of what may be in store for us.

Tyler Cowen is a remarkable thinker. He is a sponge for information and a great summarizer, categorizer, and synthesizer thereof. It is a service in which our age, with its sprawling clamor of disparate thought, greatly needs. Perhaps Cowen’s gifts are inseparable from his compulsive moderation, which often spills over into muddle-headedness. Cowen couldn’t be such a good listener if he didn’t give muddle-headed people a hearing. If he was as lucid and logical a thinker as Bryan Caplan, he’d see through nonsense too quickly and wouldn’t have the patience to read/blog it so that we don’t have to.

Nonetheless, with all due respect, I must remark that a recent post in which he goes after Bryan Caplan as a “False Cosmopolitanite” is singularly demonstrative of the inferiority of Cowen’s philosophical and logical acumen relative to Caplan’s. Caplan hasn’t responded to it yet– perhaps he won’t, either because he’s busy or because it would be so embarrassingly easy– but I think I have a pretty good idea what his response might be. Cowen writes:

Enter the intellectuals, whom I call The False Cosmopolitanites… The intellectuals… push for marginal moves toward a stronger cosmopolitanism, even though in a deconstructionist sense their inflated sense of superiority and smugness, while doing so, is its own form of non-cosmopolitanism… Sailer can skewer The False Cosmopolitanites, who serve up a highly elastic and never-ending supply of objectionable, fact-denying, self-righteous nonsense… Embedded in all of this, Caplan is more particularistic than he lets on, embodying and glorifying a form of upper-middle class U.S. suburban culture of which I am personally quite fond. Sailer is… a non-conformist and smart aleck who plays at the status games of The False Cosmopolitanites.  Sailer insists on relativizing and deconstructing The False Cosmopolitanites, which is fine by me, but at the same time he overestimates their power and influence…

There is not the slightest inconsistency between “embodying and glorifying a form of upper-middle class US suburban culture” and favoring open borders. Cowen’s critique is a complete, unmitigated nonsequitur. No reconciliation of Caplan’s two positions (pro-suburbia and pro-open borders) is really needed, but if he felt the need to dispel any slight persuasive force Cowen’s remarks had on weak-minded readers, Caplan could answer in either or all of the following ways.

1. Open borders will not disrupt the upper-middle class suburban culture of which he is fond. There’s little reason to think it would lead to more crime. If it did, the boost to GDP from open borders would easily fund a few more police. Many immigrants might integrate pretty easily into upper-middle-class suburbia, but if it takes soaring new tenements and sprawling shantytowns to house the immigrant multitudes, there will be plenty of land on which to build those while leaving room for a lot of upper-middle-class suburbia, too.
2. Open borders will, moreover, give more people access to the American suburban life Caplan is so fond of. If Caplan thinks so highly of middle-class suburbia in America, by all means let’s try to give as many people as possible access to this fortunate existence.
3. Even if open borders did threaten the American suburban lifestyle, it is not in the least inconsistent to say that protecting that lifestyle is not an adequate motive for immigration restriction policies that is by far the greatest cause of dire poverty in the world. Americans probably wouldn’t need to sacrifice suburban comfort to accommodate open borders, but if they did, that would be a small price to pay for the global gains that could be expected.

Doubtless, there are counter-arguments to all these claims, but that’s beside the point. If Caplan believes (1), (2), and/or (3), Cowen’s suggestion that Caplan is a “False Cosmopolitanite”– inconsistent– for being pro-suburbia and pro-open borders, fails.

Whether or not Caplan, or open borders advocates generally, are guilty of “smugness” or an “inflated sense of superiority” is entirely beside the point. Really, we all have better things to do than talk about the tone in which the arguments are stated. Our business is to evaluate their truth. Are governments justified in using force to prevent peaceful migration, or not?

The answer to that question has nothing to do with whether one is “cosmopolitan” in the sense of liking multicultural art, or having foreign friends, or liking foreigners, or thinking that all cultures are equally valuable or anything of the sort. It is entirely consistent to think most foreigners are morally inferior to Americans and still think we ought not to coerce them to stay in foreign countries. For that matter, it would be eminently consistent to support open immigration because one thinks most foreigners are morally inferior to Americans, in hopes that exposure to the moral influence of American society will improve them.

I doubt that Cowen could even define his terms “particularist” and “cosmopolitan” in a minimally satisfactory way. The suggestions that being “smug” is “non-cosmopolitan” and that “glorifying suburbia” is “particularist” suggest that whatever Cowen means by the terms is so stultifyingly subjective that they couldn’t do any real work in any sensible argument about open borders. Is my meta-ethics of universal altruism plus division of labor “cosmopolitan?” I do insist that we should ultimately place equal value on the welfare of foreigners. But I am not at all “cosmopolitan” in the sense of airy detachment from “particularist” cultural traditions: on the contrary, I’m a Christian, and support open borders partly from Christian reasons. But then, does the fact that Christianity is global and universalistic religion– Jesus said to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19)– make me cosmopolitan again? Such questions are unanswerable and fundamentally silly.

Cowen says that “Sailer insists on relativizing and deconstructing The False Cosmopolitanites, which is fine by me.” Why is it fine by him? We intellectuals have a primary duty to truth. Part of that duty includes taking the claims of other scholars seriously, answering argument with argument, not engaging in ad hominem attacks and low blows against one another’s motives. Cowen should know better than to approve of Sailer “relativizing and deconstructing” Caplan.

By the same token, calling Caplan a “False Cosmopolitanite” ought to be beneath Cowen. Has Caplan ever claimed to be “cosmopolitan” in any sense, let along Cowen’s strange subjectivist sense? If he hasn’t claimed to be a Cosmopolitanite, he can’t be a false one. In general, while I often disagree with Caplan– I find his “common-sense case for pacifism” very naïve, for example– “false” is a very inapt description of him. On the contrary, much of his charm lies in his extreme ingenuousness. But the “False Cosmopolitanite” label is especially fatuous because Cowen’s concept of “cosmopolitan” is so confused, and its logical connection to open borders, for or against, so non-existent.

Cowen says that his “perspective is a synthetic one,” but the post is calculated to give “synthetic perspectives” a bad name. There can be a conflict between synthesizing and seeking truth. In this case, Cowen’s attempt to be a sort of hybrid of Bryan Caplan and Steve Sailer yields a singularly muddled contribution to the debate. Tyler Cowen must try harder to think clearly.