Dev on Prod Cut

One might feel at ease being at home. As everyone knows, mother tongue and family networks may not make life less onerous, but they do make access to certain things much easier. A Japanese colleague living in London once told me that he couldn’t eat British vegetables, and that his wife had to buy vegetables freshly delivered from Japan at the Japan Centre in Leicester Square. But he still didn’t feel at home, because when he went to meetings at the university, even though he worked in a Japanese Studies department, the standpoint was always British or pan-European. In the end he decided to go back to Japan, where he felt at home. Another friend’s mother loved the old Bahnhof in Stuttgart; after her death, as a native German, he managed to acquire a stone from the Bahnhof and used it as a gravestone for her. For an immigrant living in Germany, such a gesture would be nearly impossible because the amount of bureaucracy one would need to go through would be too exhausting.

This is not something that Immanuel Kant could have imagined, because the great philosopher of cosmopolitanism never left Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia). According to Kant, world citizenship grants a “right of resort” or right to hospitality. He argued that the earth is shared by everyone, and that one should have the right to visit other countries and be welcomed as a guest. And he was quite right: the earth shouldn’t be regarded as someone’s private property, and one ought to have the right to wander on this planet without being harmed or arrested. Even if one is refused entry to a country, it should not be done with hostility.

However, the concept of world citizenship is still built upon an opposition between home and non-home, internal and external. Today, the right of visitation (to non-home, external nations) is contested by the ownership of all kinds of resources including natural and human resources, and a foreigner’s activities are limited to sightseeing and shopping. The concepts of the border and the visa, inventions in the name of national security, are grounded upon the concept of private property and the household. In many modern Western states, a good citizen is a good taxpayer; naturalization is evaluated according to the amount of tax and pension one has paid. Today we have tourists who are not entitled to work in foreign countries, but who have the right to travel—provided that their passport, the symbol of the status of their Heimat, is strong enough. The Japanese, for instance, have the right to visit more than one hundred and ninety countries without a visa, while Afghans in 2023 could go to no more than thirty countries.