Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, p. 143:
There is something of a tyranny of idea in seeing the political divisions of states … as being, in some way, fundamental, and in seeing them not only as practical constraints to be addressed, but as divisions of basic significance in ethics and political philosophy.
I like to call Sen’s “tyranny of idea” the United Nations Fallacy. I’m delighted to see him ride one of my hobbyhorses.
There are, more formally, two fallacies: (1) analytical nationalism and (2) normative nationalism. Analytical nationalism takes states as basic units of explanatory and comparative significance. This error leads to absurdities like comparing social indicators of geographically immense, populous, diverse nation states, such as the U.S. or China, with those of tiny principalities and island states, such as Liechtenstein or Tuvalu. Normative nationalism takes states as basic units of significance in social morality. This error tends to cause us to overlook the immense importance of questions about the justice of the principles that determine inclusion and exclusion in political and economic institutions. So we worry about whether relatively poor people in rich nations are rich enough for our tastes rather than about whether the global system of borders and passports wrongfully traps the world’s poorest people in places with corrupt, immiserating institutions.