Conceptualizing Politics

equality of what (outcomes, resources, capabilities or something else)?
• 
equality for whom?
This second question, already mentioned in this book with reference to human-
kind at large or future generations, is becoming again very significant because of a 
number of factors, from regional instability and war to climate change, which have 
unleashed mass migrations that are predicted to become a stable factor in future 
world politics. Most of the principles and proposals mentioned above are indeed 
focused on the citizens of the rich or relatively rich host countries and need to be 
rethought in light of the circumstances of mass migration. Otherwise, the notion of 
citizenship, so far somehow overburdened with the rhetoric of rights and empow-
erment, risks losing its shine and becoming a keyword of exclusion and division. Its 
destiny is also overshadowed by its polysemic nature: it means the trove of rights, 
entitlements and duties connected with being in general citizen of a polity, but 
also owning the national and exclusive citizenship of a specific country. Finally, in 
this case globalisation and lethal challenges question or even debunk doctrines that 
were conceived within the framework of the nation state without paying attention 
to the limited truth of statements made under this condition.
Equality, we saw, is not an uncontested value, and is for sure more contested than 
liberty, also because it can, in certain circumstances, collide with liberty. To take 
it for incontestable while not taking the doubters’ points seriously is a sectarian 
attitude that does not reinforce the credibility of egalitarianism. Outright opposi-
tion to equality is expressed only by Nietzsche and other elitist thinkers who are 
contrary to it, to democracy and socialism.
7
 Fascist ideologies built on this elitism,