Countries, migration, and existence
Branko Milanovic's provocative thoughts on the nation-state miss something...federal
Branko Milanovic dares to ask an important question:
using the results of the Gallup poll that show the percentage of people who desire to move out of their countries, we find that in the case of unimpeded global migration some countries could lose up to 90 percent of their populations. They may cease to exist: everybody but a few thousand people might move out. Even the few who might at first remain, could soon find their lives there intolerable, not least because providing public goods for a very small population may be exceedingly expensive.
So, what?—it could be asked. If Chad, Liberia and Mauritania cease to exist because everybody wants to move to Italy and France, why should one be concerned: people have freely chosen to be better off in Italy and France, and that’s all there is to that. But then, it could be asked, would not disappearance of countries also mean disappearance of distinct cultures, languages and religions? Yes, but if people do not care about these cultures, languages and religions, why should they be maintained?
This couldn’t be asked by anyone else, so kudos to him for asking it. I think his provocation misses the mark. Milanovic frames it in terms of migration and nation-states: “why shouldn’t Liberians just move to France?” In doing this, he tackles the very foundation upon which the current world order rests: state sovereignty.
Milanovic is right to attack the idea of state sovereignty, and he’s treading on grounds plowed by Hayek and Mises during the interwar years, but he gets everything oh-so-wrong by suggesting migration as a prescription for the ills of our Westphalian world. The problem with this approach to abolishing national sovereignties is that it actually strengthens the case made by national sovereigntists for the continued sanctity of their states. Who in Italy or France is going to want 90% of Liberians to migrate to their country? And — in the minds of Italians and the French - this call for mass migration into their countries, by a left-wing economist, is just further proof that borders need to be tightened and migration needs to be throttled.
Yet the problem remains: up to 90% of people living in Global South nation-states want out of those states. Free and open migration is just but one prescription that would solve this problem, and it’s not a very good one. It would alienate the vast majority of people living in European nation-states, and it wouldn’t solve the problems in Global South nation-states that cause people to want to migrate in the first place. Milanovic actually touches upon a second — and far more feasible - prescription to this problem in the same piece when he writes:
no one in his or her right mind would argue that people from the Appalachian in the US should not be allowed to move to California because the average income in the Appalachia might go down. In fact, both the average income in California and in Appalachia might go down, and both inequalities in the Appalachia and California might go up, and yet the overall US income would rise and US inequality would be less.
Milanovic mistakenly refers to the United States as a nation-state, but its underlying constitutional order is an interstate system rather than an independent nation-state. The fact that an Appalachian can move to California unimpeded is only a fact because the states of California and Appalachia (West Virginia? Ohio?) are united in a federal union. It is this federal pact that Milanovic and others who are worried about global inequality should focus on. Instead of urging on a mass migration of unimaginable scale, and suggesting that the disappearance of Global South cultures is a necessary prerequisite for mass migration, Milanovic and other Leftists who are focused on inequality should advocate for a federalist world.
If done right — if Global South nation-states federated under the Madisonian constitutional order and joined contemporary US states in their union - then not only would nation-statism in the Global South be abrogated, but the urge of 90% of a nation-state’s population to flee their country and migrate to another one would dwindle, as the self-governing institutions of New England would gradually be implemented in these new “states.” The people in these new “states” would have cultures that evolve and change and eventually disappear, but it would be on their own terms, as members of a federation, rather than forced upon them by a Westphalian state system that benefits old member states at the expense of new ones. This, to me, is far more libertarian and far more feasible than calling for mass migration and suggesting that some cultures aren’t worth the costs.