Macropolitica

I nodi della politica globale

Stefano Petrucciani

• Publisher: Mimesis Edizioni
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9788857566337
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nell'età della globalizzazione, gli Stati e le organizzazioni politiche si trovano ad affrontare sfide inedite, come per esempio quella del riscaldamento globale, di fronte alle quali le risorse teoriche del pensiero politico moderno si rivelano inadeguate. È necessaria perciò una nuova riflessione, che sia capace di confrontarsi con le domande pressanti che le contraddizioni del mondo contemporaneo pongono alla filosofia politica. Per esempio: abbiamo diritto di opporre barriere alla libera circolazione delle persone in un mondo che è sempre più unificato per quanto riguarda gli assetti economici, tecnologici e comunicativi? Quali giustificazioni ci sono per il fatto che l'esser nato in una parte del mondo piuttosto che in un'altra condanni alcuni (gli sfortunati per nascita) a vivere in ambienti assolutamente più disagiati e precari? A questi e ad altri interrogativi tentano di dare una risposta i testi raccolti in questo volume.

Parte prima
Migrazioni, cittadinanza,
giustizia globale

Rainer Bauböck

Democratic Inclusion.
A pluralistic theory
of citizenship1

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 it2. 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, Benhabib 2006, Näsström 2007).

The theoretical debate seems thus 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 boundaries2.

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 recent 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 their 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 to address the boundary problems arising within democratic politics.

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 generalisations 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 part three where I discuss the principles of including all affected interests, all subject to coercion and all citizenship stakeholders. 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. Part four 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 cir...

Table of contents

• MIMESIS / Filosofia politica
• Parte prima Migrazioni, cittadinanza, giustizia globale
• Parte seconda Conflitti, terrorismi, transizioni
• Filosofia politica