The master's thesis examines the boundaries of the political community with an emphasis on political membership, specifically on the principles and practices of the integration of foreigners, immigrants and newcomers, refugees and asylum seekers into existing political communities or sovereign states. The modern sovereign state system has organized membership within one main category: national citizenship. National borders thus classify some people as members and others as foreigners. The example of migration shows that the contradictions of modern Western countries oscillate between the policy of protecting territorial sovereignty, particularistic national identities, and the universalist policy of human rights, which is supposed to be implemented beyond the country's borders, but remains trapped in policies of territorial demarcation. Does this mean that interest in national culture overrides our duty to work for global justice? It is difficult to imagine an international legal order that does not follow the principle of justice. Namely, justice infuses positive legal rules with value and legitimacy. Even if the idea of auctoritas, non veritas facit legem2 may not have lost its reality, at least on an ideological level, it must be adapted to the concept of freedom and human dignity, which belongs to an individual by birth, and regardless of national borders. Even if citizenship has important legal consequences for a person, it must not be decisive for the enjoyment of human rights.
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