Sojourners and Survivors: Two Logics of Constitutional Protection

Abstract

Liberal political analysis is ordinarily based on a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and an assumption that domestic politics is the proper arena for democratic self-determination. But self-governing citizens have never exhausted the cast of characters who populate liberal states. Living alongside them there are often domestic aliens – permanent residents who are subject to the law, and may be protected by it, but who do not participate in making it. Refugees and remnants also inhabit liberal states. Whether citizens or not, they tend to bear the historical consciousness of victims or potential victims wherever they may live. A correlative fact is that in many now-liberal societies the meaning of citizenship itself is indelibly marked by the “missing” – the emigrant and the exile, the expelled and the extinct. Such identities – and the historical presence or absence of individuals who claim them – are generally regarded as messy details in the state-centered conceptual framework that dominates liberal political thought.