The right to exclude is how the weakened nation state demonstrates its remaining power.

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: Balibar’s ‘intensive universalism’ names the mechanism by which egalitarian states justify exclusion through anthropological difference.