8 Introduction recognised as being important to individuals’ capabilities, but this is dynamic and, as such, need not lead to communitarianism or nationalism, for example. Finally, this book adopts a background assumption of ‘modest cosmopolitan ism’. Liberalism’s core commitments to equality, liberty, and solidarity, alongside universalism and individualism, neither entail nor are entailed by ‘cosmopolitan ism’. Instead, cosmopolitanism is a matter of scope. For example, some key liberal theorists narrow the scope of the equality, liberty, solidarity, even of the uni versalism, so that they function only within a limited group. For others, this repres ents a major problem,23 while still others see it as trivial.24 Structural cosmopolitanism is the position that it is necessary to promote a world State.25 Empirical cosmopolitanism, meanwhile, argues that the world in fact is (or could be) run as a world State.26 This book adopts a moral cosmopolitan stance. That is, it holds that if a liberal metric is to be adopted, then absolutely all people must be included within it, while recognising that people may relate to the liberal framework(s) in different ways including through noncitizenship. Moral cosmopoli tanism need not translate to either structural or empirical cosmopolitanism. To be useful, any such approach must be empirically accurate about how the world is and adopt a realistic picture of how it could be. However arbitrary they may be, national States are important to people. Flag-waving at sports matches and ‘national’ events, mobilisation around national politics, and self-identification with national States, all demonstrate that people currently do care about national States, and often associate themselves with them emotionally, even fighting for them when they are threatened or still to form. The State (and the nation-State, when it is so defined) is privileged by the power it has to reinforce commitment. Acknowledging the importance of nations and States to people must come alongside a critical re examination of nations’ apparent necessity, their connection with States,27 and the implications of this for noncitizenship. The world just is currently divided into States. Resources, political representa tion, social services, just are currently largely organised along State lines no matter how arbitrarily or unjustly they arose. This neither means that they should be organised this way, nor that this way of the world should not be contested, but it 23 Phillip Cole (2000) Philosophies of Exclusion, Edinburgh University Press, at p. 154; Lea Ypi (2008) ‘Justice in Migration: A Closed Borders Utopia?’ pp. 391–418 in Journal of Political Philosophy 16(4). 24 John Rawls (1999) The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press. 25 Luis Cabrera (2010) The Practice of Global Citizenship, Cambridge University Press. This could also be a way to understand Seyla Benhabib’s approach, as presented in Seyla Benhabib (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens, Cambridge University Press, though in a later book she shows how the seeds of this are perhaps already there; see Seyla Benhabib (2011) Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times, Polity. 26 Andreas Bummel (2010) The Composition of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations, Committee for a Democratic U.N. 27 Benedict Anderson (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism New Edition, Verso; Katherine Tonkiss (2013) Migration and Identity in a PostNational World, Palgrave Macmillan.