The institution of the European political space: EU borders, freedom of movement, and the status of refugees

This chapter analyzes the tension between citizens’ right to security and the state’s ethical obligation to those who find themselves in the condition of refugee. It focuses on the rights of non-citizens in democracies and the normative foundations of the modern state’s right to regulate migration. The chapter explores ways of conceiving of a European political space based upon the principle of freedom of movement without thereby enhancing the process of the externalization of borders which would thus strengthen exclusion. Representative political space is created plurally throughout political participation in a representative system, and is thus defined as representative democracy. Thomas Hobbes was the first to formulate, in his natural philosophy and his politics, both a theory of mechanical movement and of political movement.