Day 231, Year of #Mygration: Migration in the Age of National State

This article explores the historical and contemporary relationship between migration and the global international order. More specifically, it explores the relationship between migration and the constitution of nation-states. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the article argues that migration (and more often than not, forced migration) was one of the fundamental technologies through which the nation-state and thus, the global international order were produced.  

Whilst most analyses of historical and contemporary migration acknowledge that the emergence, consolidation and global dominance of the nation-state have produced unprecedented numbers of migrants and refugees, they pay considerably less attention to the manner in which the nation-state and the global international order have (and could have only) come into being through processes of migration.  

The article begins from the premise that it is not simply the nation form that has had a constitutive effect on contemporary migration, but that it is, in fact, the racialization and naturalization of the nation, or in other words, the emergence and coming into dominance of a particular kind of nation that ushers in a profound transformation in the manner in which migrants and refugees are constructed and governed. This article first analyzes the emergence and transformation of the nation form in Europe and the subsequent consolidation of this ‘national order of things’. Second, it attempts to show how population movements, exchanges, and shuffles—in short, migration—was at the center of the technologies through which this ‘national order of things’ was constructed. The article ends with the argument that this global international order continues to delimit the field of possibilities available to migrant populations, and structure the manner in which migration is thought about, governed and practiced.