ABSTRACT In recent decades, we have witnessed a growing mismatch between systemic interdependencies and political structures as well as political identities, calling for strategies to cope and create new systems of policymaking above and beyond the nation state. In this context, the traditional bounded concept of citizenship has increasingly been put into question. The paper asks whether multilevel conceptions of citizenship can offer a response to the double challenge of both, broadening access to rights and deepening civic practices so that democratic citizenship will assert its meaning and importance. The reflections focus on the EU context and elaborate paths for the further (federal) development of EU citizenship. Since EU citizens’ rights are (partly) decoupled from national membership, traditional unitary conceptions of citizenship must be reconsidered. While recognizing a particular tension between federal structures of decision-making and democratic self-determination the article attempts to develop democratic minimum standards for federal citizenship in compound polities such as the EU. Within this frame, a variety of democratic practices and traditions can be explored, and democratic citizenship be deepened.

ABSTRACT Many who defend immigration restrictions do so on the grounds that communities have a right to seek to preserve their cultures. The importance of preserving culture is said to reside in the meaningful connections that individuals form with their fellows and places. We ask what conclusions regarding immigration can be drawn from appeals to the importance of culture. We focus our argument on the search for meaning as a motivating factor prompting immigration and call migrants who do so for this reason ‘cultural migrants.’ We argue that human beings share the need to create meaningful relations. The ‘fellow creatures ethic’ that we develop thus puts culture at the centre of our argument. Contrary to critics of open borders, however, we argue that, in recognition of our shared humanity, we should show hospitality to potential immigrants and share the world with them physically. This is because such migration leaves it possible for current residents to continue developing their meaningful relationships, whereas closed borders prevent this for immigrants. We argue that the preservation of culture does not outweigh this quest for cultural meaning. Sharing the world with fellow creatures involves acknowledging the risk – indeed inevitability – that cultures continually change.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the methodological debate in political theory about political realism and political moralism can be reconstructed as an analytical framework that can be applied to specific cases. The realism/moralism distinction, which is often debated at a high level of abstraction, is re-examined through the lens of the concrete case of Quran burnings in Sweden and Denmark in 2023, which led to significant political and security crises. By analysing the Danish government’s response to these events, this paper reconstructs realism and moralism as analytical categories and explores how they as such can be employed to understand and explain the political dynamics in the case. The paper aims to operationalize the realism/moralism distinction in concrete methodological terms, and to show its practical relevance as such in political analysis. The operationalization and application furthermore reflect back on the understanding of realism as a category of reasons and suggests that realist reasons, as reconstructed here, stand in a close relation to political power.

ABSTRACT Jakob Huber’s brilliant new reading of Kant’s Doctrine of Right begins with a simple Kantian observation: human beings sharing the surface of the earth cannot avoid interacting with one another. Using this observation to frame Kant’s mature political thought, Huber illuminates Kant’s ‘grounded cosmopolitanism’, distinguishing it from earlier readings and vindicating a ‘global standpoint’ that recognizes everyone’s ‘right to be somewhere’ while obliging us to seek ‘mutually justifiable terms of co-existence’. In this essay, I survey Huber’s account and suggest some extensions to it. Limits to the application of the idea of shared earth dwellership, especially across time and between different modes of political organization, are in tension with the revolutionary implications of the Kantian notion that we are always engaged with everyone across the surface of the planet. I argue that the distinction between state and non-state peoples is used here in a way that Kant’s own argument for the ideal of universal right relation pushes against, and I argue that this account of the ideal of universal right relation points towards something even more basic than concurrent earth dwellership: shared earth dwellership across time.

ABSTRACT This special issue consists of four articles, contributed by David Owen; Désirée Lim, Sahar Akhtar and (as co-authors) Mollie Gerver, Miranda Simon, Patrick Lown and Dominik Duell. These contributions address issues related to migration policies with the aim of bringing normative theories of migration and discrimination into dialogue. These theories describe the various types of discrimination inherent in the domestic and global migration systems, as well as assess arguments, pro et contra, about whether these forms of discrimination are permissible.

ABSTRACT In Political Self-Deception, Galeotti considers (and rebuts) two ‘realist’ objections. Galeotti’s realist argues that there is no need for the overly complex concept of self-deception, since self-serving lies and manipulation are descriptively and normatively sufficient; and that in any case, deception in democratic politics is sometimes justifiable. In response, Galeotti offers explanatory, moral, and normative reasons why self-deception is a helpful concept in international politics: it helps us better understand the political reality of deception, and guides us in how to avoid or mitigate it. In this comment, I wish to revisit the realist objections, and to provide a more nuanced and more robust version of them. In doing so, I raise questions about the relationship between self-deception and the failure of political judgement, about the moral evaluation of deception in democratic politics, and about the normative implications of Galeotti’s analysis for political responsibility and for prophylactic measures.

ABSTRACT In Political Self-Deception, Galeotti carves out valuable space for the analysis of behaviour on the part of political leaders that lies between straightforward deception and honest mistakes. In these comments I consider whether the concept of self-deception can travel from the political to the academic arena, to illuminate problems in how political theorists treat empirical data in the course of their normative work. Drawing on examples from the literature on the social bases of self-respect, I show that political theorists too are vulnerable to the motivationally biased treatment of data. I suggest that this problem can helpfully be located on the same broad terrain Galeotti outlines, between lying and mistakes. I also identify some potential analogues, for the academic sphere, of Galeotti's proposed remedies for political SD. The paper goes on to reflect on how Galeotti herself employs empirical evidence in developing her account of self-deception. In particular, I challenge the empirical basis of her assumption that political self-deception is significantly more predictable, and therefore preventable, than political lying. My discussion seeks to show that, in addition to its intended contribution to the study of political deception, Political Self-Deception offers a valuable perspective on recent debates about the place of empirical evidence in political theory. However, approaching the book from this methodological angle reveals, in turn, some weaknesses in the empirical foundations of one of Galeotti's own key normative claims.

ABSTRACT This article engages with Julian Culp’s Democratic Education in a Globalized World from the perspective of political philosophy in a global world. The focus is on liberalism. From this angle, Culp’s book entails three important claims. The first is that a right to basic education on the global level exists, i.e. a right to education for everybody independent of one’s nation state. The second claim is that the implementation of this right is not a task for each nation state alone but of world society as a whole. This implies that countries that are able to provide more than basic education to its citizens have a duty to redistribute part of their excess resources to help poor countries secure basic education for their citizens. Culp’s third claim, relevant to the liberal project, is on the kind of education that is supposed to go global. This education should be free-standing, that is, based on political as opposed to perfectionist arguments. This contribution agrees with the first claim, is sceptical regarding the second one, and disagrees with the third one.

ABSTRACT It is often argued that states do not have any special obligations towards economic migrants, and that skills-based selection of migrants is morally unproblematic. In this paper, I argue that even if one does not endorse special obligations towards economic migrants, there are good reasons to be critical of skills-based selection due to its effect on the citizens in the country they are migrating to. I introduce the issue of the impact of migrant selection on domestic populations by considering Blake’s arguments against racial selection in immigration. He argues that racial selection is wrong because ‘[…] making a statement of racial preference in immigration necessarily makes a statement of racial preference domestically as well’. In this paper, I consider whether a similar case can be made against selecting migrants based on their marketable skills. I begin with a short overview of skills-based selection and some of the normative arguments put forward in favour of it, before considering Blake’s argument. Thereafter, I show how Blake’s example of race differs significantly from selection based on skills, in part due to the nature of identification with race and skills. However, I argue that the effects of skills-based selection on domestic population also need to be considered in any normative argument proposing such migration regulations. These effects include changes in our evaluations of equality and citizenship, negative impact on the social bases of self-respect, as well as specific disadvantages for segments of society and a negative effect on social mobility.