Democratic inclusion

Rainer Bauböck in dialogue

Rainer Bauböck

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Rainer Bauböck is the world's leading theorist of transnational citizenship. He opens this volume with a question that is crucial to our thinking on citizenship in the twenty-first century: who has a claim to be included in a democratic political community? Bauböck's answer addresses the major theoretical and practical issues of the forms of citizenship and access to citizenship in different types of polity, the specification and justification of rights of non-citizen immigrants as well as non-resident citizens, and the conditions under which norms governing citizenship can legitimately vary. This argument is challenged and developed in responses by Joseph Carens, David Miller, Iseult Honohan, Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, David Owen and Peter J. Spiro. In the concluding chapter, Bauböck replies to his critics.

Part I
Lead essay

1
Democratic inclusion: a pluralist theory of citizenship¹

Rainer Bauböck

1. Introduction

Who has a claim to be included in a democratic polity? This has been a vexing question for political theorists as well as legislators and judges. Philosophers have tried to make the problem go away by adopting one of two contrasting strategies.

The first response is that democratic principles cannot resolve the problem and therefore we have to accept the historical contingency of political boundaries and the powers of nation-states to determine themselves who their citizens are. To be sure, most contemporary political theorists have added some critiques of current state practices or suggestions why some categories of individuals cannot be legitimately excluded from citizenship. Yet they often have done so starting from the premise that the context within which the question needs to be addressed is the international system of states as we know it.² The problem is thus reduced to allocating territory and people to states in a way that does not challenge their boundaries and claims to self-determination.

The second response is to stick to a democratic principle and to use it for undermining the legitimacy of existing political boundaries. If boundaries are historically contingent, then they do not have deep moral significance and can also be radically questioned for the sake of democratic inclusion. Some theorists argue that the only democratically legitimate demos is a global one (Goodin 2007); others suggest that the demos ought to change depending on who will be affected by a particular decision (Shapiro 2000); still others regard democratic inclusion principles as norms that allow us to contest exclusion while not necessarily providing positive guidelines on how to construct alternative boundaries (Benhabib 2004, 2006; Näsström 2007).

The theoretical debate thus seems stuck between positions giving priority either to existing democratic boundaries or to principles of democratic inclusion that potentially challenge the legitimacy of all boundaries. But this standoff suggests already that there is something wrong in the way the debate has been framed. Since inclusion conceptually presupposes an external boundary, a theory of legitimate inclusion claims depends on a theory of legitimate boundaries. In other words, there is no point arguing for the right of individuals to be included in a particular demos if the legitimacy of that demos itself is either blindly accepted as a contingent result of historical processes or fundamentally rejected based on inclusion claims that are per se incompatible with drawing legitimate political boundaries.

The other reason for revisiting the democratic boundary problem after forty years of debate³ is that it simply does not go away in democratic politics even if philosophers try to conjure it away in democratic theory. Boundary and inclusion questions are among the most contested practical problems in contemporary democratic states. The rise of these problems on political agendas is arguably a result of democracies becoming more liberal and less self-confident in asserting quasi-natural boundaries of nation, territory and language. If the liberal transformation of democracy has contributed to making the boundary problem politically more salient, then the diagnosis that there is no cure for the problem that democratic theory can provide would be very bad news indeed.

Focusing on recent years in Europe alone, here is a small sample of events in which problems of democratic inclusion and boundaries have come up and had to be addressed by courts, legislators or by citizens in the election booth: the massive global trend of extending voting rights to citizens living abroad and a comparatively weaker European and Latin American pattern of letting non-citizen residents vote in local elections; an ongoing standoff between the European Court of Human Rights and the British government about the exclusion of criminal offenders from voting rights; the introduction of conditional ius soli in Germany in 2000 and Greece in 2010/2015⁴ and the abandoning of unconditional ius soli by constitutional referendum in Ireland in 2004; the widespread introduction of language and civic knowledge tests as a naturalization requirement for immigrants in Europe since the late 1990s; the 2010 Rottmann decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union that member states have to take EU law into account when withdrawing nationality and the more recent moves in several EU states to deprive citizens joining a terrorist organization of their nationality; the Scottish referendum on independence in November 2014 and the nearly simultaneous rejection by the Spanish government and Constitutional Court of a similar referendum in Catalonia. All these decisions rely implicitly on contested ideas about democratic boundaries and membership claims. Normative theories of democracy need not be prescriptive in the sense of proposing specific answers for each of these issues, but they should at least be able to spell out the principles that ought to guide decisions. Yet many of the contributions to the democratic boundary debate seem keen to avoid this test.

This essay attempts to show that the diagnosis that there is no theoretical answer to the democratic boundary problem that would allow us to address its real-world manifestations is wrong. It takes the practical political manifestations of the boundary problem seriously by proposing that democratic inclusion principles must not only satisfy theoretical criteria, such as compatibility with broader principles of justice and democracy, internal coherence and answers to objections raised by rival theories, but also practical criteria that show how the proposed inclusion principles allow the boundary problems arising within democratic politics to be addressed.

My strategy is to argue that there is not a single principle of democratic inclusion but several principles, and that it is important to distinguish their different roles in relation to democratic boundaries. I also argue that polities into which individuals can claim to be included are of different kinds and it is equally important to distinguish the types of polity addressed by such claims. I do not argue, however, that there is an open-ended variety of inclusion principles or of kinds of polities and that inclusion always depends on context. That would be banal and undermine any effort at theorizing. The basic principles of democratic inclusion are limited and so are the basic types of democratic polities, and in my discussion I will reduce each of them to three. Such ideal-typical generalizations allow for identifying contexts where mixed principles apply or where polities are of mixed types.

The core normative argument of this essay is developed in section 3, where I discuss the principles of including all affected interests (AAI), all subject to coercion (ASC) and all citizenship stakeholders (ACS). I claim that these principles are not rivals but friends. They complement each other because they serve distinct purposes of democratic inclusion. Before this, I consider the general “circumstances of democracy” that consist in normative background assumptions and general empirical conditions under which democratic self-government is both necessary and possible. Section 4 contextualizes the principle of stakeholder inclusion, which provides the best answer to the question of democratic boundaries of membership, by applying it to polities of different types. I distinguish state, local and regional polities and argue that they differ in their membership character, which I identify as birthright-based, residential and derivative respectively. My conclusion is again that these are not alternative conceptions of political community but complementary ones. Each supports the realization of specific political values (of continuity, mobility and union) and taken together local, state and regional polities form nested democracies with multiple citizenships for all their members.

2. The circumstances and contexts of democracy

2.1 Diversity and boundaries

So how should we think about democratic boundaries? Neither as quasi-naturally given and beyond contestation, nor as features of a non-ideal world that we set aside when discussing what justice requires in an ideal world. Instead, we should think of boundaries as belonging to the circumstances of democracy. In his theory of justice, John Rawls defined the circumstances of justice as “the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary” (Rawls 1999: 109).⁵ We can describe political boundaries in the same way as belonging to the normal conditions under which democracy is both empirically possible and normatively necessary. Without claiming that these two conditions exhaust the circumstances of democracy, I suggest that democracy would not be necessary in the absence of a diversity of interests, identities and ideas, and would not be possible in the absence of boundaries.

In a society where all shared the same interests, a single collective identity as members and the same ideas about the common good, democracy would be pointless, since collectively binding decisions could be adopted unanimously or be taken by each individual on behalf of all others without any need for a procedure that aggregates their political preferences.⁶ Democracy is a system of political rule that provides legitimacy for collectively binding decisions and coercive government under conditions of deep and persistent diversity. Political ideologies that consider diversity as a non-ideal condition to be overcome through a transformation of society are therefore always potentially hostile towards democracy. This goes for orthodox Marxism and its ideal of a communist society without religion or economic competition as well as for nationalism and its ideal of matching the boundaries of cultural and political communities (Gellner 1983).

Boundaries are necessary background conditions for democracy for at least three reasons. First, without political and jurisdictional boundaries, democratic decisions would have indeterminate scope. This would be true even if every human being were included in a single global polity, since there would then still be a political boundary between human beings and other animals that could potentially be included.

Second, in the absence of political boundaries there is no distinction between intra- and inter-polity relations. This distinction is, however, constitutive for the political as a distinct sphere of human activity. Carl Schmitt's (1927/2007) friend–enemy dichotomy is just an extreme and implausible version of this distinction. Hannah Arendt expresses the democratic version of this argument:

A citizen is by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory … Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality. The establishment of one sovereign world state … would be the end of all citizenship. (Arendt 1970: 81–82)

Third, the existence of boundaries is a precondition for the democratic feedback mechanisms of voice and exit (Hirschman 1970). In the absence of any boundary, exit is by definition impossible. While easy exit may weaken the incentives for voice (in Hirschman's original “hydraulic model”), the absence of any possibility of exit fatally undermines the effectiveness of voice. A polity without boundaries is like a spontaneous crowd that has no addressee for voice, since it does not have collective procedures for counting votes and taking decisions.

These three arguments...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series editor’s foreword
• Part I Lead essay
• Part II Responses
• Part III Reply
• Index