National borders mask that the excluded outside is constructed by, and inside, the state

Evidence

Further examples of this paradoxical method of order could be mentioned. It helps to produce, for instance, the identity and authority of an ‘individual’ nation-state. One could think of a particular case in the modern Middle East, of a state whose existence is contingent upon maintaining a radical difference between itself and the identity of those outside it. The outside must be represented as negative and threatening, as the method of maintaining meaning and order within. The outside, in this sense, is an aspect of the inside. On closer inspection, moreover, the same opposition is found at work within the state, between what belongs to the outside and what belongs within. The authority and self-identity of the nation-state, like that of the city and the colonial world, are not stable, circumscribed conceptions but internal boundaries of hierarchical separation which must constantly be policed. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 520

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mitchell’s overall argument about the ‘meta-physics’ of representation and to postcolonial theory on the nation-state’s constructed externality.