The ‘Open Society’ and Attitudes to Transnational Migration: A Process Sociological Approach to Liberal Democratic Anxieties

This chapter contrasts two approaches to social ontology that are relevant for discussions in normative international political theory about how states manage transnational migration. The first approach, developed by Karl Popper, has characterised both Cold War and contemporary political thinking, through the binary of ‘open society’ liberal democracies that favoured obligations to individuals, against ‘closed society’ dictatorships that valued commitments to state-society. The second approach, from the process sociology of Norbert Elias, shifts the language around transnational migration to understand the convergence of moral obligations to both individuals and society. Process sociological studies of attitudes toward transnational migration in the United Kingdom (UK), Australia, and Germany show how existing social concerns interweave anxieties about moral obligation and social stigma. The chapter concludes with the example of Angela Merkel’s 2017 New Year Speech that confronts the moral apprehensions around transnational migration.