The Boundary Problem and the Ideal of Democracy

Abstract

Democracy presumes a collective, a group of individuals, who are in a specific sense self-governing or selfdetermining. The problem of who should be included in this collective and thus take part in the collective democratic decision-making, what is sometimes called the boundary problem in democratic theory, is an increasingly pressing political problem in light of growing asymmetries between rule-makers and rule-takers in a globalized world. Even though Robert Dahl was correct to note that virtually none of the great political philosophers of the Western canon paid much attention to the boundary problem, the same cannot be said about today's debate. For democratic theorists and political philosophers, this problem is presently one of the more debated questions in political theory. While the boundary problem can (and has) been approached in a variety of ways pleading to moral theory, through which democracy is justified instrumentally for realizing some other normative ideal, e.g. justice, the present paper is a contribution to this debate with the intent to hold on to the ideal of democracy -that is, where democracy as collective self-determination (the 'rule by the people') is intrinsically justified 1 as the ultimate foundation of legitimate authority. 2 It is sometimes claimed that we cannot approach the boundary problem from within democratic theory, as it were, since such an ideal must presuppose a 'demos' in order to execute 'kratos'. At the same time, it would be quite disturbing if normative democratic theory could not offer any guidance whatsoever in this matter. Broadly speaking, we can discern two different approaches to this problem in democratic theory. On the narrower exogenous view, the boundary problem is considered to be a question to which democratic theory is not supposed to offer an answer. In other words, it is seen as external to democratic theory. Starting out from already existing borders, the basic question is rather which conditions must be fulfilled in order for an arrangement to qualify as democratic. On the broader endogenous view, by contrast, the boundary question is seen as internal to democratic theory in the sense that answers to this question also rest on democratic theory. 3 While there seems to be no reason to demand that democratic theory must always answer the boundary question in order to do some proper normative work, philosophers and political theorists interested in the boundary problem tend to agree on the broader view.A basic presumption of this paper is that to the extent that we wish to hold on to democracy as a normative ideal when approaching the boundary question about justified inclusion (henceforth the 'B question' for simplicity), whatever solution we come up with, it must be compatible with the basic conditions of democracy (answering what is henceforth called the 'C question', i.e. what conditions must an arrangement fulfill in order to be democratic?). That is to say, since there are many possible boundary questions to be asked in normative space, concern...

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