Political membership can become more mobile without making political authority territory-free
Imagine a busy intersection.
Cars approach from four directions.
Pedestrians cross.
A bus stops nearby.
Shops line the street.
Now imagine that every person at the intersection belongs to a different political network.
One driver follows one traffic code.
Another follows another.
A third recognizes a different police authority.
The problem becomes obvious.
Some rules cannot depend only on which political network a person has chosen.
They have to apply to everyone in the same place.
This is why a World Citizen Society does not require the disappearance of territory.
Political membership can become more mobile.
Political authority cannot become entirely placeless.
Territory and Membership Are Different Questions
The World Citizen framework challenges the idea that nationality acquired at birth should permanently determine political membership.
But that does not mean rejecting territorial government.
Two questions need to be separated.
Who belongs to the political community?
And:
Where does a political authority exercise its ordinary jurisdiction?
The framework changes the first more radically than the second.
Ordinary political membership moves toward durable residence rather than inherited nationality.
But many public rules still need a territorial field of application.
The central distinction is:
Territory defines the ordinary jurisdiction. Residence defines the ordinary route toward membership.
Some Problems Attach to Place
Many public problems are inseparable from physical location.
Everyone using the same road needs to know which traffic rule applies.
A building on one parcel affects neighboring properties.
A factory may pollute the surrounding air or water.
Roads, sewage systems, parks, emergency services, policing, housing rules, and much infrastructure concern people occupying the same physical space.
These problems cannot be solved simply by allowing each individual to select a different governing authority.
Place creates shared problems.
Shared problems sometimes require common territorial rules.
That does not make every public function territorial.
It establishes a narrower point:
some public authority must remain territorially grounded.
Can Politics Begin Online?
Recent proposals make the challenge clearer.
Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State begins from digitally organized communities rather than a conventional contiguous territory.
But the final model is not literally territory-free.
A network state is eventually supposed to acquire an archipelago of physical territories distributed across different places and seek political recognition.
That is revealing.
A political community may begin online.
Its members may be geographically dispersed.
Its organization may be digital-first.
But once it deals with housing, land, roads, physical security, infrastructure, and relations with surrounding governments, place reappears.
Even a cloud-first political community eventually confronts physical territory.
Another proposal, Bruno Frey and Reiner Eichenberger’s Functional, Overlapping and Competing Jurisdictions, or FOCJ, asks why every public function must be bundled into one territorial government.
Different functions may be handled by overlapping jurisdictions.
That insight is useful.
But it does not follow that every function can be detached from territory.
Traffic law, land regulation, policing, and other coercive rules still require clarity about which authority governs a particular place.
Functional government can supplement territorial government.
It cannot make every public function voluntary.
Territory Does Not Mean Birthright Membership
Territorial government can remain even when inherited membership becomes less important.
A person may move from one territorial community to another.
They may enter lawfully.
They may establish durable residence.
Over time, residence can become the basis of equal political membership.
Territory therefore remains relatively stable while membership becomes more open to change.
A community can govern a territory without claiming that equal membership in that community must be inherited through ancestry or birthplace.
The place remains.
The people who may become members need not be permanently fixed by birth.
Territory Gives Democracy a Practical Object
Territory also gives democratic accountability something concrete to govern.
Residents need to know which institutions are responsible for the streets they use, construction rules, emergency services, schools, public spaces, and local environmental conditions.
If responsibility is divided among too many overlapping bodies, it can become difficult to know who is answerable when something fails.
A territorial political community therefore needs more than elections.
It needs meaningful authority.
It needs administrative capacity.
And it needs resources appropriate to its responsibilities.
Otherwise self-government exists mainly on paper.
But Territory Can Also Exclude
There is an opposite danger.
Territorial authority can itself become an instrument of exclusion.
Imagine that a community formally accepts freedom of movement.
It does not close an immigration checkpoint.
But it adopts housing and land-use rules that make it extremely difficult for newcomers to live there.
Entry remains legally possible.
Practical settlement becomes nearly impossible.
A 2025 study by political scientist Alexander Sahn found that, during the Great Migration, greater racial diversity in non-Southern U.S. cities led cities to permit multifamily housing on less land—evidence consistent with exclusionary zoning being used to preserve racial segregation.
That does not mean zoning itself is illegitimate.
Communities may have genuine reasons to regulate density, safety, infrastructure, environmental impact, or land use.
But territorial authority should not become a substitute border.
A residence-based system of political membership cannot work if communities can recreate exclusion through unjustified barriers to housing and settlement.
The question must remain:
What legitimate problem does the restriction address, and is there a less restrictive way to address it?
Territory identifies jurisdiction.
It does not create a license for local domination.
Some Problems Need Different Scales
Territorial government is necessary, but no single territory fits every problem.
A river crosses borders.
A rail system may serve several cities.
Pensions may need to remain portable when people move between countries.
These are not merely theoretical possibilities.
The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine dates back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and coordinates navigation on a river crossing several political jurisdictions. It describes itself as the oldest international organization in modern history.
The European Union offers another example.
Its social-security coordination rules do not replace all national systems with one European welfare state. Instead, they coordinate national systems so that movement across borders does not automatically erase insurance periods or many benefit entitlements.
The point is simple.
The institution should match the problem.
A river may require a river-wide institution.
A pension system may require cross-border coordination.
Neither example requires transferring every political function to the same higher authority.
A Mixed Architecture
The World Citizen framework therefore combines:
a territorial core + functional institutions
Territorial communities handle ordinary place-based government.
Other institutions address problems whose geography or structure crosses those boundaries.
This avoids two opposite mistakes.
One is to assume that every political problem should remain local.
The other is to assume that every cross-border problem requires moving general political authority upward.
Neither follows.
Political structure should follow function.
Cross-border coordination also does not require a general world sovereign. Institutions can be given authority limited to the particular function that justifies them.
Conclusion
A more mobile political order does not have to become a placeless one.
Some public problems attach to place.
They need clear territorial authority.
But territorial authority creates its own danger when it becomes a means of excluding outsiders or protecting inherited advantage.
The answer is neither to abolish territory nor to treat territorial sovereignty as unlimited.
It is to separate jurisdiction from inherited membership.
Territory defines the ordinary jurisdiction.
Residence defines the ordinary route toward membership.
Beyond that territorial core, institutions can operate at the scale their functions require.
The territory stays. Membership becomes more movable.
The goal is not to eliminate place.
It is to stop treating place of birth as destiny.
Notes
The distinction between territorial jurisdiction and residence-based political membership is developed in The World Citizen Society. The framework’s core formulation is: “Territory defines the ordinary jurisdiction. Residence defines the ordinary route toward membership.”
Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State (2022) describes a digital-first political community that ultimately seeks an archipelago of physical territories. The example is relevant precisely because the model does not eliminate physical territory.
Bruno S. Frey and Reiner Eichenberger develop the FOCJ model in The New Democratic Federalism for Europe: Functional, Overlapping and Competing Jurisdictions (Edward Elgar, 1999).
Alexander Sahn, “Racial Diversity and Exclusionary Zoning: Evidence from the Great Migration,” The Journal of Politics 87, no. 4 (2025): 1302–1318. The study finds evidence consistent with exclusionary zoning being used to preserve racial segregation during the Great Migration.
The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine traces its institutional origins to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and continues to coordinate Rhine navigation across states.
EU social-security coordination provides a different example of functional cross-border institutions. National social-security systems remain distinct while common rules coordinate coverage, aggregation of relevant periods, equal treatment, and exportability of many benefits.
For an important foundation of polycentric governance, see Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout, and Robert Warren, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,” American Political Science Review 55, no. 4 (1961): 831–842.
Further Reading
For the argument that borders are themselves institutions shaping opportunity, see “Thomas Piketty: Property, Borders, and the Structure of Inequality.”
For the problem of unequal migration pressure and local capacity, see “What If Too Many People Want to Move to the Same Place?”.
For the distinction between cosmopolitan coordination and a centralized world state, see “Kant and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Right.”
For the full institutional design, see Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society: Political Freedom, Democratic Choice, and the Institutions of a New Society.
