Diss. Recht Bern, 1922.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Chicago, Department of History. / Also available on the Internet.

It is now taken for granted that the globe is divided into mutually exclusive territories, each of which belong to a particular community. To be a political community, it is thought, means to have sole possession of a piece of the Earth’s surface and to have complete authority over that land. Yet the history of political thought has little to tell us about when and how this conception arose. I argue that the first complete statement of this doctrine of the territorial state emerged with Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations in 1758. Vattel’s doctrine synthesized three ideas which had been developing in the genres of natural law and the law of nations since the Peace of Westphalia: the state was supreme over its territory; it possessed independent moral personality; and it was tied to a permanent human community. This dissertation recovers the ideological resources of territorial state formation by tracing the philosophical roots of these ideas in Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, and Christian Wolff. I argue that although Vattel’s doctrine would appear as an ideal type, it was in fact provincially rooted in the narrow context of former dynastic fiefdoms in the Holy Roman Empire. I reach this conclusion through a spatial contextualist method of reading canonical texts in the natural law and law of nations traditions. I find that the shared linguistic practices that emerged to conceptualize and defend territorial states often relied upon assuming preexisting communities who laid claim to the land as their ‘native country.’

Today, some twelve million immigrants are unlawfully present in the United States. What response to this situation does Christian theology suggest for these immigrants and those who receive them? To this question about the status of immigrants before the law, the theological literature lacks an understanding of how federal U.S. immigration law developed, and it lacks a robust theological account of the governance of immigration. To fill this gap, the thesis presents three stages in the formation of the laws that designate some immigrants as aliens unlawfully present or illegal aliens, drawing out the moral argumentation in each phase and responding with moral theology. In the first stage, non-citizens were called aliens in U.S. law. In response to the argument that aliens exist as a consequence of natural law, Christian teaching indicates that immigrants are not alien either in creation or for the church. In the second stage, the authority of the federal government to exclude and expel aliens was established, leaving those who do not comply to be designated illegal aliens. To the claim that the federal government has unlimited sovereignty over immigration, interpretations of the Christian Scriptures respond that divine sovereignty limits and directs civil authority over immigration. In the third stage, legal reforms that were intended to end discrimination between countries allowed millions from countries neighboring the U.S. to become illegal aliens. These reforms turn out to be unjust on philosophical grounds and unneighborly on theological grounds. While federal law classes many as aliens unlawfully present in the United States, Christian political theology indicates that immigrants are not alien, the government of immigration is limited by divine judgment, and nationals of neighboring countries deserve special regard.