The Foreigner

The figure of the foreigner has recently fallen into disrepute. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a foreigner is simply a person who comes from a different country. Contemporary political discourse, in contrast, assimilates the foreigner to illegal immigration, undocumented migrants, border crossing, and border patrol. Related terms such as ‘stranger’, ‘alien’, and ‘outsider’ fare no better, as they are often derogatively opposed to citizen, national, and native. Despite its recent reputation, the canon of political theory often associates the foreigner with what can be called (drawing on Abbé Sieyès’s classic formulation) constituent power. Whereas constituent power stands for the people’s faculty to create and recreate the basic structure of a polity, the canon furnishes the foreigner with the task of laying the foundations of such polity. Rather unexpectedly, the canon assigns the figure of the foreigner a key role: to perform as an external lawgiver or founder of a political community.