Thanks to Schalom Libertad who, round at Bob's place, is discussing my brief remarks on national sovereignty. I defended the principle of sovereignty on the grounds that it represents a 'band[ing] together for mutual protection, the sharing of other social aims, resources and facilities, and the voluntary pursuit of common cultural ways'. Schalom makes a number of criticisms: that I overlook the 'gulf between rich and poor', the 'raw inequality', over which states preside; that I subscribe to a 'Rousseauian fable', with no historical basis, about a consensual banding together; and that I overlook the exclusionary side of 'a community of individuals sharing a common territory' (my phrase). In fact, I don't, I don't and I don't.
To say of a group of people that they have common interests in being protected and organizing their common life is not to say, to think or to imply that there are not also interests which divide them. I am well aware of these. But I don't believe that those on the bottom end of these divisions have no stake in the common life of the societies they inhabit.
I also don't believe - nor have I ever - that the societies we live in (most of them) were formed by way of a Rousseauian or other original contract in which people freely came together. Nonetheless talking of the members of a community banding together is an acceptable and widely used figure of speech for registering the premise that they do indeed have certain consensual aims in common.
Though I did not explicitly mention the exclusionary side of particularistic communities, I am of course aware of it. But it is an inevitable consequence of the universal human right to belong to collectivities that are smaller than the totality of the human race. So are families also exclusionary in the same way, and families, too, are OK by me. The only question of interest about the exclusions Schalom has in mind is whether they are just ones or not - a question I don't intend to embark on here other than to say that not all of them are unjust.
Schalom taxes me, finally, over the 'completely abstract character' of what I wrote. To this charge I'm content to plead somewhat guilty: he's taking issue with a paragraph of mine of fewer than 200 words; so gimme a break already. But for someone levelling the charge of abstraction, Schalom himself is remarkably short about the alternative modes of collective organization available, either immediately or within some realistic future, that could adequately replace the principle of national sovereignty and its institutional embodiments.