Security, sovereignty, and international migration: The economic and societal dimensions of trading state grand strategy

The close of the twentieth century witnessed tremendous changes—politically, economically, technologically, and socially. Have these developments changed the security dilemma faced by states, and if so, in what ways? Whereas the “golden age of security studies” has been dominated by neorealism's focus on systemic power distribution, Richard Rosecrance suggests that the current system is dominated by the logic of the trading state. Under a trading state system, both the way power is measured and the grand strategy employed to maximize relative power have been significantly altered. Control over flows (trade & capital) has become more important than territorial acquisition or the accumulation of stocks. However, material factors are not the only referent objects of the modern security problematique. Stephen Walt suggests that states respond to perceived threats rather than power differentials alone. While trading state liberalism promotes a grand strategy of openness and globalization, it also engenders threats to traditional societal identities. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that international relations will be driven largely by conflicts regarding culture and identity. How do societal threats figure into the grand strategy of trading states? Utilizing a comparative case study method including the United States, Britain, France and Germany (1945–present), the evidence presented in this dissertation suggests that grand strategy is largely contested domestically through migration policy, an issue which lies at the nexus of this political tension between economics and identity. I identify those factors related to International migration that generate societal insecurities and show how states craft grand strategy in order to maximize economic gains while concurrently seeking to diffuse perceptions of societal threat. The empirical evidence makes clear that identity figures into the grand strategy of modern states as both a referent object of security in its own right, and well as a political constraint on the degree and dimensions of openness states may pursue. Incorporating IR, economic, and social theories, this paper presents a new theoretical framework of grand strategy that goes beyond the trading state model and augments the purely economic rationalism of “embedded liberalism.”...