Globalization changes whom we depend on. I believe that, over time, it will also change what we demand from political membership.
In the final chapter of The World Citizen Revolution, I wrote: “Still, I believe that the World Citizen Revolution will occur.”
I did not mean that history guarantees it. The book itself explains why institutions can resist change, why movements fail, and why a reform can be reversed. That sentence expresses my judgment, not a finding established by the preceding chapters.
In the book, I gave a reason: civic revolution greatly expanded people’s power to choose their rulers, yet political membership remains a major relationship they have little power to choose. [1]
Here I add a second reason. I believe the economic relationships people value will increasingly cross national boundaries, making that inherited constraint more visible. When people can choose whom to work with, trade with, invest with, and learn from, they may question why their political membership remains so heavily determined by birth.
Economic Relationships No Longer Follow Nationality
Consider a small manufacturer. A supplier in another country may offer better components than a nearby firm. A foreign customer may value the product more than customers at home. A programmer may find her most productive collaborators thousands of miles away. A nurse may find that her skills meet a need across a border that is poorly rewarded where she was born.
In none of these choices is nationality the deciding factor. The relevant questions are about skill, price, reliability, trust, opportunity, and human relationships. Sometimes the best partner is a fellow national. Sometimes not.
The important change is the widening set of people among whom useful relationships can be formed.
Artificial intelligence may widen that circle further. Speech translation already makes conversations possible across languages that once required an interpreter. In a study of one large online marketplace, improved machine translation increased exports by an estimated 10.9 percent within the setting examined. That is evidence that a language barrier can have economic consequences, not a prediction for world trade. [7]
As language barriers fall, more people may form friendships, marriages, and families across nationality lines. People should be free to choose their partners according to their own preferences. No one owes another person affection because they share a passport. Yet a family formed across borders soon encounters public rules: whether spouses may live together, what financial requirements they must meet, and whether the place where their children grow up can become a secure political home. Britain, for example, raised the usual minimum income requirement for new partner-visa applicants in April 2024, with exceptions and transitional rules. [8] Whether AI will weaken national loyalties is uncertain. What matters to my argument is that relationships formed freely across borders can expose the continuing power of inherited nationality over people’s lives.
The World Trade Organization’s research describes an economy linked by trade and international production, while also documenting pressures toward fragmentation. The World Bank’s study of migration emphasizes that movement can generate large gains when people’s skills and attributes match opportunities elsewhere, although benefits and costs vary among migrants and receiving communities. These findings do not prove the World Citizen Revolution. They establish a more modest starting point: national borders do not reliably mark the limits of mutually beneficial economic relationships. [2][3]
Modern economic life is not perfectly global. Many jobs require physical presence. Distance, language, regulation, transport, family obligations, and familiarity still matter. Some trade has become politically contested, and not every region shares equally in its gains.
My argument does not require all economic relationships to become international. It requires only that more people repeatedly encounter opportunities in which the nationality of a partner matters less than the value of the relationship. Those encounters can change how people understand their freedom to choose.
Political Membership Still Largely Follows Birth
We can change employers, customers, and business partners, often with difficulty but without asking whether we were born into the same national community. Changing our principal political community is different.
Where may a person enter and remain? Which government may remove that person? Where can that person become a full political member, vote, and help determine the rules under which a life is lived? Birth, descent, and nationality still shape the answers powerfully.
I call the resulting structure the Nation-Based Feudal Order. The term identifies a structural role played by inherited political status. It does not claim that today’s citizens are medieval lords, that migrants are serfs, or that modern nation-states are literally feudal institutions. The comparison concerns how an initially unchosen status continues to organize important choices and inequalities. [1]
An economic contract and political membership are not the same kind of relationship. A government must provide public goods, security, adjudication, and institutions through which residents govern themselves. A community cannot be reorganized as casually as a commercial partnership. Democratic self-government remains indispensable.
But these differences do not answer the question of why birth should remain the dominant gatekeeper to another political home. A person may build a life among people of many nationalities and still be told that only one country, assigned through birth, is the presumptive place of secure political belonging.
That is the mismatch I expect economic globalization to make increasingly visible.
When Economic Freedom Meets Political Boundaries
How could an economic relationship become a demand for political reform?
It need not happen when a contract is signed. The change may come years later, when a person’s daily life has moved but political status has not.
A worker accepts a job abroad. The employer benefits from the worker’s skill; the worker benefits from the opportunity. The worker rents a home, pays taxes, learns local practices, and raises children. Yet a change in immigration rules could threaten the family’s residence, and years of contribution may not lead to equal political standing.
Or imagine two people who build a business across borders. They can select suppliers and customers internationally, but their ability to live near one another, or to participate in the government making rules for their work, depends on nationality-based permissions. Economic cooperation has become easier than political membership.
Neither example means the individuals will necessarily demand Foot Democracy. They may seek a more secure visa, a bilateral agreement, or administrative reform. They may be satisfied with commercial freedom while retaining national membership at home.
Still, repeated experiences can change the question people ask. At first, the complaint may be: Why is this permit so difficult? Later it may become: Why can the government decide so much of my life on the basis of the nationality I received at birth?
That is the possible passage from an economic inconvenience to a political claim.
Foot Democracy names the freedom to choose a political community through meaningful departure, entry, and membership choice. Leaving alone is not enough if another community cannot realistically be joined. Nor is permission to work enough if durable residents must remain politically subordinate.
In The World Citizen Society, I argue that durable residents must be able to secure equal political standing in the community where they live. [4]
The causal argument here is narrower: as more people see political borders obstructing relationships they have freely and profitably formed, some may recognize political-community choice as a freedom worth demanding. Recognition must still become public argument, organization, and effective reform. An economic incentive does not cast a vote or write a constitution by itself.
Economic Liberalization Is Not Political Equality
Economic interests do not automatically support political equality. A company may benefit from foreign workers while opposing their participation in government. Those who gain from globalization may seek greater freedom for themselves without supporting the same freedom for others.
Earlier essays examined the conditions under which these interests might support wider political reform. The distinction matters here because the World Citizen Revolution cannot depend on economic advantage alone.
There is another danger: people with wealth may gain access to citizenship through investment while others remain excluded. In 2025, the European Court of Justice ruled against Malta’s investor citizenship scheme under EU law. The judgment does not prohibit every form of investment migration, but it illustrates a legal limit on treating citizenship as a commercial transaction. [9] Political-community choice must not become a privilege reserved for those who can afford to buy it.
The people directly affected may demand equal standing for reasons unrelated to their profitability. Their dignity is not earned by the profits they produce. The freedom of the person, not the convenience of the market, remains the aim.
The Strongest Objection
There is a serious objection to my expectation.
People can become economically connected to the world without wishing to change their political allegiance. They may choose foreign partners for work while choosing their home country for family, language, culture, memory, and shared public life. National belonging can be a source of trust and solidarity. Democratic self-government requires more than a network of profitable transactions.
I accept this objection. The freedom to choose a political community must include the freedom to remain in one. Foot Democracy is not a demand that everyone abandon nationality or migrate. People who value their national community may have sound reasons for staying, even when they gain from global trade.
There is a harder version of the objection. Globalization may strengthen border control instead of weakening it. People facing import competition or economic insecurity may seek protection from their national government. Political leaders may blame foreigners for changes caused by several forces at once. The gains from openness may be concentrated, while its costs fall on particular workers or towns.
Research on trade shocks has found persistent local adjustment costs and, in some settings, increased political polarization. Dani Rodrik has argued that globalization can generate political backlash, including nationalist responses. These are not minor exceptions to an inevitable progressive trend. They challenge any simple claim that economic integration creates cosmopolitan political preferences. [5][6]
Why, then, do I continue to believe?
Because political belonging need not be a choice between preserving one’s national attachments and permitting other people to choose theirs. A society can retain languages, cultures, collective institutions, and borders while changing the rules under which a person may enter, settle, and become an equal member. The World Citizen Revolution is not a project to abolish every political community. It is a project to make political membership less captive to the circumstances of birth.
A political backlash can delay reform for decades. It may even reverse rights already won. But immigration restrictions do not necessarily end the economic relationships that lead people to move. A community may continue to depend on foreign workers while resisting their political inclusion. Some workers will build families and lasting lives where they work. Their presence can keep raising a question that temporary labor arrangements cannot settle: how long should people remain subject to a community’s laws without a secure place in its political life?
The answer may be prolonged exclusion. Backlash could prove stronger than demands for reform. I cannot rule that out. But as long as these relationships persist, so may the reasons to challenge inherited membership rules. That continuing source of political demands—not an assumption that every backlash must fail—is why I retain my expectation.
Still, I Believe
The reason I gave in The World Citizen Revolution begins with an unfinished freedom: civic revolution enlarged the choice of rulers but left individuals with little choice over political membership. That is not proof of the next change. The economic argument developed here offers a second reason for expecting pressure toward it: increasingly valuable relationships cross nationality lines, while political membership still treats nationality as a principal boundary.
I expect that disparity to become harder for some people to accept. They will not all make the same demand, and the first reforms may be modest. Some will seek easier entry, others secure residence, others political equality. Opposition will be strong. Economic advantage may be pursued without equality. Progress can reverse.
Yet I believe the number and significance of relationships formed beyond inherited national boundaries will continue to give people reasons to ask why their political community must remain so difficult to choose. Over time, that question may reach beyond particular permits and exceptions to the rules of membership themselves.
I cannot tell readers that the World Citizen Revolution is certain. I can tell them why I expect it.
Still, I believe that the World Citizen Revolution will occur.
Notes and Sources
[1] Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Revolution, Chapters 30, 33–34, 38–39, especially p. 199. The cited statement of belief occurs within Chapter 39, not as the book’s last sentence. The original reason concerns political membership’s remaining resistance to individual choice after civic revolution; the economic mechanism in this essay supplements it. Books.
[2] World Trade Organization, World Trade Report 2023: Re-globalization for a Secure, Inclusive and Sustainable Future. Discussion of trade integration and fragmentation; no claim that integration necessarily changes political membership.
[3] World Bank, World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies. Benefits, costs, and institutional conditions for cross-border movement.
[4] Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society, especially Chapters 3–5, on Meaningful Entry, Resident Sovereignty, Resident Equality, and secure membership. Books.
[5] David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade” (2016); David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure”, American Economic Review 110, no. 10 (2020): 3139–3183. Findings concern particular contexts, not universal responses.
[6] Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization” (2017; published 2018); “Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism”, Annual Review of Economics 13 (2021): 133–170.
[7] SeamlessM4T research team, “Joint Speech and Text Machine Translation for up to 100 Languages”, Nature (2025); Erik Brynjolfsson, Xiang Hui, and Meng Liu, “Does Machine Translation Affect International Trade? Evidence from a Large Digital Platform”, Management Science 65, no. 12 (2019): 5449–5460. The 10.9 percent estimate concerns exports in the platform setting studied, not global trade or national identity.
[8] UK Home Office, “Net Migration Package Delivered as Family Visa Tightened” (April 11, 2024); “Financial Requirements if You’re Applying as a Partner or Spouse”. The general threshold rose from £18,600 to £29,000, subject to exemptions, alternative routes, and transitional treatment.
[9] Court of Justice of the European Union, Commission v Malta (Citizenship by Investment), Case C-181/23, judgment of April 29, 2025. The judgment concerns Malta’s investor citizenship scheme under EU law, not all forms of investment-based residency.
