By the end of the eighteenth century the plural language of liberty was under widespread attack, denounced by radicals as a denial of innate human rights and a tool of monarchical despotism. This evolution was partly powered by the consolidation of nation-states that picked up speed in the sixteenth century, but this centralization was long incomplete. In this situation the terms “liberties” and “privileges” were almost universally regarded as equivalents, even by so radical a movement as the English Levellers of the seventeenth century. The dissolution of this equivalence took place in France, first as the monarchy’s political and fiscal shenanigans sapped people’s faith in the system, and then as the Revolution mounted a full-scale attack on privilege as a source of inequality and despotism. Supporters of the Revolution followed its lead, but the old language still played a role in Britain and Germany, a reminder that the old language, even with its equivalence of liberties and privileges, long persisted in fostering self-government and resisting oppression.

Although liberty has been valued in various ways in many times and places, only in Europe did it become a central preoccupation before the nineteenth century, and a subject of widespread public reflection. Appeals to liberty and concerns about it found expression in two idioms: a singular one that harked back to Rome and Greece, and regarded liberty as universal or innate; and a plural one associated with the overlapping jurisdictions of ‘feudal’ society that saw liberty as an assemblage of separate rights or privileges (often taken as synonyms), attributed sometimes to custom and sometimes to higher authorities that granted them. Although distinct, the two languages were seldom seen as in tension before the eighteenth century. The chapter examines their relations in different contexts and concludes by noting that the very pervasiveness of claims to enjoy, embody, or represent liberty led to a recognition of how easily invocations of it could become rhetorical tools to justify control over others, leading to Machiavelli’s incisive reflections on the dialectical relations between liberty and domination.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.