The specific message of ‘with and without us’ reveals the danger of entrenching the existence of categories of people who have a ‘natural’ privilege in occupying a certain space, merely by their nationality. It accepts the fixing of some people as citizens or nationals and some people as migrants, categories or subjectivities that thereby become understood as natural and inevitable. These categories are certainly useful in some respects, particularly in activists’ everyday struggles, and we cannot do without them. But the point remains that the practice of critical analysis – i.e. praxis – must be to caution against the habits of the everyday acceptance of why things are the way they are. Here, the ‘natural’ aspect of the privilege of nationality is constructed – and needs to be maintained – by the illusion and ideology of national borders in a liberal context that allows for economic rationality and utilitarianism.

Specifically, it seems logical to this ideology that where and to whom one is born should determine what resources and conditions one should survive in – justified legally by the respective principles of ius solis and ius sanguinis for determining nationality rights. The anti-immigrant rhetoric in most European countries today reinforces and restricts these principles. However, in other contexts such as North America, as Jessica Evans reminds us, indigenous peoples are ‘internal outsiders with a prior claim to both jus solis and jus sanguinis’ and yet ‘access to the state and to the right for a state of their own’ remains denied to them. In both contexts, however, xenophobic and exclusionary rhetoric finds refuge in the cataclysmic sense of emergency where everybody is meant to accept that the world is dying, resources are limited and cannot be shared, and, crucially, (European) Christian culture is threatened. Thus, people should stay where they are and deal with the lot they were given, whether this means war, famine, persecution, discrimination, colonial theft and trauma, unemployment, lack of healthcare, and more. What this implies is the erosion of the principle of solidarity. Although this principle, when coupled to Western liberal ideals, has often led to the worst of liberal interventionism’s civilising missions, it remains a cornerstone of basic human decency and co- existence, and of socialist politics. It therefore must be protected from European liberalism’s securitisation, retrenchment and paranoia.