Social liberals and liberal nationalists often argue that cosmopolitans neglect the normative importance of state sovereignty and self-determination. This paper counter-argues that, under current global political and socio-economic circumstances, only the establishment of supranational institutions with some (limited, but significant) sovereign powers can allow states to exercise sovereignty, and peoples? self-determination, in a meaningful way. Social liberals have largely neglected this point because they have focused on an unduly narrow, mainly negative, conception of state sovereignty. I contend, instead, that we (...) should more closely consider the positive aspects of sovereignty, understood as the capacity to maintain internal problem-solving capacities and make meaningful discretionary choices on a range of national issues. (shrink)

Under conditions of high capital mobility, states are pressurised into various forms of tax competition to attract or retain capital and investors. When this occurs, the capacity of domestic institutions autonomously to generate fiscal policies is constrained. What exactly, if anything, is unjust about this phenomenon? This paper argues that tax competition puts particular pressure on internationalists, who must acknowledge that its occurrence makes our obligations of global justice more demanding, and that such obligations require supranational institutions in order to (...) be discharged. However, to the extent that tax competition is unjust from an internationalist point of view, this is due to the specific harm it does to states. Thus, the paper makes three contributions to the literature: it shows that tax competition has an impact on the demandingness of internationalist obligations of justice; discharging such obligations commits internationalists to accept a higher level of supranational institutionalization than is currently acknowledged; yet both the specific content of such obligations, and the kind of supranational regulation that is needed to discharge them, differ from those which cosmopolitans support. In sum, there are some cosmopolitan bullets which internationalists must bite, and others which they should continue to resist. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that most prominent normative theories on immigration neglect a critical dimension of the migratory phenomenon, a neglect that blinds them to important rights that, under some circumstances, immigrants ought to have as a matter of justice. Specifically, the paper argues that these theories fail to appreciate that the children of immigrant families, regardless of whether they were born in their parents’ country or in the host country, should benefit from educational rights addressing needs that are particular to (...) their situation. These children may be forced to move between these two countries. This situation generates an obligation for both states to act jointly to provide educational opportunities so that these children are fully conversant with both cultures and in both languages. Put succinctly, then, we argue that since children of immigrant families lack any certainty of permanent residence in the host society owing to the threat of deportation and the precarity of their legal status, host and home societies bear the duty to offer an education that allows them to be functional in both societies. (shrink)