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41 NOMOS: Am. Soc'y Pol. Legal Phil. 67 (1999)
Equality of What among Whom? Thoughts on Cosmopolitanism, Statism, and Nationalism

handle is hein.journals/nomos41 and id is 79 raw text is: 2 EQUALITY OF WHAT AMONG WHOM? THOUGHTS ON COSMOPOLITANISM, STATISM, AND NATIONALISM DEBRA SATZ At the end of Jean Renoir's film The Grand Illusion, two French prisoners of war are escaping from German troops over the Alps into Switzerland. They have become exhausted and can no longer outrun their pursuers. As the German soldiers raise their guns to deliver their final shots, one soldier suddenly notices that the Frenchmen have crossed into neutral Switzerland and thus cannot now be killed legitimately. Which side of the state's territorial line the two prisoners in Renoir's film are on seems to me to be irrelevant to both the jus- tification (or lack) we have for shooting them and the duties that we have to aid them. Humanity's claims are international. This is no mere theoretical point. I lost many family members during the Holocaust because of the side of the line on which they resided, whereas other relatives were saved because, living a few kilometers away, they were on Russian soil.' I believe that neither nationality nor state boundaries, as such, have moral standing with respect to questions of justice. Call this the cosmopolitan thesis (CT). CT is a potentially powerful claim given that the level of material inequality between nations 67

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