Freedom of Association Is Not the Answer

Abstract

Cosmopolitan liberals have long argued that, contrary to prevailing practices and assumptions, there is a tension between liberal principles, on the one hand, and the coercively enforced borders and exclusive membership practices that are familiar features of nation states, on the other hand. In that vein, it has become common to emphasize the liberal commitments to universalism and moral equality and to highlight the moral arbitrariness of birth place in order to question the relevance of borders in relation to a person’s rights and opportunities. It is notable, too, that liberal principles are often regarded as the universalist antidote to the more particularist or exclusionary tendencies of the other features (sovereignty, nationality, democracy) that make up the modern state. This is one of the reasons why Christopher Heath Wellman’s article “Immigration and Freedom of Association” is so novel and interesting: Wellman puts forward what appears to be a distinctly liberal case for the state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants. As Wellman points out, we must not overlook the potentially exclusionary implications of the liberal commitment to freedom of association. There is a widespread and apparently uncontroversial view of the relationship between free-