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Moving Beyond Borders: Freedom of Movement in and between States

Freedom of movement is a matter of individual freedom rather than only a tool for addressing global distributive injustice. Freedom of movement has normative value whether or not it concerns interstate borders. Migration, in the sense of interstate relocation, is a subcategory of movement, which can involve travel, temporary relocation or permanent relocation--a brief walk, or a move halfway around the world.
My argument about freedom of movement has two essential elements: first, that freedom of movement has noninstrumental value, not only instrumental value, and that it deserves more weight and attention than liberals usually give it; and second, I justify this and its implications by emphasizing the cross-scalar connections between local and global movement and showing that the difference between internal and interstate movement is not as significant as is usually assumed to be. Freedom of movement is proposed as a unit of concern and a matter of degree, with principles and restrictions functioning in parallel at both levels. The cohesive account of liberal freedom of movement offers the chance to think about people moving and staying as one overarching category. This challenges the characterization of migration as anomalous and captures the chance to treat like cases alike.
Chapter Two makes an argument for freedom of movement as a noninstrumental liberal value to which the normative weight of the instrumental value of freedom of movement is added. Chapter Three explores small-scale movement in the countryside and the city and proposes a stronger valuation of freedom of movement particularly vis-à-vis private property rights. Chapter Four considers theoretical and legal arguments involving intrafederal movement in the United States and Germany and compares intrafederal exit to exit from the state. Chapter Five considers several free movement regimes in Europe to draw out the similarities between interstate, intrafederal, and local movement. Throughout these chapters I show that there are many legitimate ways in which freedom of movement can and should be restricted at the internal level, but this is not sufficient to conclude that interstate movement can be arbitrarily restricted. / Government

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/13064992
Date January 2014
CreatorsTivig, Andrea
ContributorsRosenblum, Nancy Lipton
PublisherHarvard University
Source SetsHarvard University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Rightsclosed access

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