World without borders? Reflections on the future of the nation-state

The particularistic character of the political world, the separation of political communities into poleis, territorial-states or nation-states, has always provoked the universalist criticism of borders as artificial and incompatible with universal humanity. Such demarcations were even suspected of being one of mankind's greatest evils. Edmund Burke, for example, wrote in his A Vindication of Natural Society – a response to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality – that “this artificial division of mankind, into separate societies, is a perpetual source in itself of hatred and dissention among them'. © 1999, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.