Global Ethics, Australian Citizenship and the “Boat People” – a symposium

Our era is marked by profound conflict between two different conceptions of citizenship, and we can be certain that this conflict will increase. The first of these belongs to the Westphalian interstate order, and it is an exclusion-ary nationalist conception of citizenship; the second belongs to a post-Westphalian interstate order, and it is oriented in terms of a cosmopolitan ethic of human rights. I will argue here that the first conception forecloses issues of justice for people who attempt, as asylum seekers and refugees, illegally to enter countries. The second conception opens up an inclusive norm of global citizenship that would permit these issues to be defined and tackled by the international community. The Westphalian interstate order originated in the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War between warring European states in 1648. The Treaty became the basis of the principle of modern national sovereignty that evolved over the next three centuries. The Treaty con-cluded a hundred years of religious wars by making the sovereign of each state responsible for the subjects of that state. In international law that is based on Westphalian principles, these subjects are regarded as belonging to the sovereign’s domain, and, in this sense, as part of the sovereign’s prop-erty. In international law, the basic principle regulating relationships between states is that of ‘non-interference’. This means that another state cannot interfere in what is thereby constituted as the ‘domestic ’ affairs of a state referring as these do to how a sovereign conducted itself in relation to its subjects. The only context in which one state can call another state to account in how it treats people is if the latter mistreats subjects of the first state who are either temporarily or permanently resident in the second. On Westphalian principles, the status of persons is conflated with their mem-bership of a state, and this poses problems for people who are unable t