Exclusion from citizenship demonstrates sovereignty’s force at low cost.

Evidence

Etienne Balibar has remarked that in this time of a single supranational power, it is through the right to exclude that the weakened nation state ‘demonstrates (at low cost) the force that it claims to hold and at the same time reassures those who suspect its destitution.’ In the ‘intensive universalism’ of contemporary nation states, Balibar argues, ‘anthropological differences’ become the reason to exclude. If all citizens are entitled to equal rights, then those who are considered unequal by virtue of pathological, sexual, or cultural difference can be summarily excluded from citizenship on the grounds that they pose a threat to the nation. The racism of empire treats differences between cultures and traditions as insurmountable; racial hierarchy becomes in this way an effect of culture, an outcome of what are considered immutable cultural differences. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 55

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Balibar’s ‘intensive universalism’ as the mechanism by which equal-rights states still exclude on grounds of anthropological difference.
• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s sovereign power and to the logic that equal-rights regimes use exclusion to affirm membership boundaries.