The bottom line is that the conservative position is pro-citizenship and the libertarian position, as I understand it, is anti-citizenship. ~James Poulos

Raimondo would quibble with defining that as “the libertarian position,” but otherwise I think James is right.  Fundamentally, the disagreement between James and Will Wilkinson (and between myself and Wilkinson in the past) centers on a few basic things: we think citizenship entails certain rights and privileges non-citizens do not receive, and we think national sovereignty is a legitimate element of political organisation and the enforcement of it is a proper function of national governments.  Further, we think that such a government can both legally and morally deny to non-citizens the rights and privileges that citizens possess, because non-citizens have no necessary or inborn claim on the goods of another polity, just as American citizens have no such just claim on other polities.  While I can’t speak for James, I would say that this is because people have rights only as citizens of a particular polity, and that the actual polity to which Americans belong at present is a nation-state (albeit one that maintains certain forms and fictions of being a confederation of several states), while “human rights to movement and free association” as such do not exist.    

Now Wilkinson is confused by people who would prefer to privilege smaller, more local communities, but who also insist on affirming national sovereignty.  Of course, were we to call for establishing a “tightly-knit gemeinschaft” we would be confronted by Wilkinson, champion of the leveling and expansive nation-state that transcends the petty bonds of region and town, because as sure he today deems the nation-state the vehicle of arbitrary limitations on these “rights” he would have made the same argument on behalf of the centralising nation-state 150 years ago, and the logic of his position is one that favours ever-larger political entities governed by ever-more remote, centralised political authorities, lest we have any untoward rubes somewhere denying someone “access” to the goods to which they are allegedly morally entitled.  The implied profusion of rights and the attacks on institutions as barriers or threats to those rights must necessarily lead to the empowerment of a superior authority that will check and police the lower authorities in order to guarantee these “rights,” and so each additional “human right” is another invitation for a central or continental or, eventually, global government to step in and “protect” individuals from one another and from their more local authorities.   

As Dr. Fleming observed quite correctly in The Morality of Everyday Life, the more rights we assert the more power we must give to an authority to adjudicate disputes over those rights.  Thus, as ever, the pursuit of liberty through the weakening of intermediary institutions subjects the individual to the remote, centralised power of a distant government over which he will have negligible influence, and it is, of  course, always wrapped in gauzy sentimentality and liberal use of epithets such as “chauvinist.”  For my part, I would sooner defend national sovereignty than support the weakening and undermining of it in the name of internationalism or moral do-gooding, because the nation-state serves as the smallest-scale form of political organisation capable of resisting worse and more pernicious transformations of our country.  Nation-states that lose or abandon their sovereignty for the sake of some transnational politics or moral goods eventually lose control over their own futures, since they yield meaningful control over most major policy decisions to higher levels of authority and will never be able to recall it once given.