---
bibtex: @article{abizadeh2012,
title={On the demos and its kin: Nationalism, democracy, and the boundary problem},
author={Abizadeh, Arash},
journal={American Political Science Review},
volume={106},
number={04},
pages={867--882},
year={2012},
publisher={Cambridge Univ Press}
}
---
Arash Abizadeh 2012
Abizadeh defines the boundary problem as "determining who is a member of the collectivity that legitimately exercises political power" or "What is the prepolitical ground for determining the boundaries of the human collectivity that legitimately exercises power (and over whom power is legitimately exercised)" p868
His argument is "once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a prepolitical ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory." p867
"My thesis is that only a recognition that the demos is in principlesiple unbounded can yield a coherent theory of democratic legitimacy." p868
Democratic theory seeks "to legitimize political power by rendering it compatible with the freedom of those over whom it is exercised." It is "a self-referential theory of political legitimacy...[whose] principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised." p867
"Self-referential theories necessarily combine two questions that are in principle distinct....question of legitimacy...[and]...the question of boundaries" p867
"The striking feature of self-referential theories is that a second question must consequently be addressed before the question of legitimacy can be determinately answered. " p867
So "if legitimization requires ... prepolitical grounds, then the grounds for adjudicating those boundaries ... must also be prepolitical..." but "...it is impossible consistently and jointly to solve the two problems that self-referential theories combine." p868
The descriptive question ask "what legitimates political power in a particular society?" the normative question asks "what legitimizes political power as such, by reference to a rationally defensible principle of legitimacy?"
Cultural nationalism relies on ethnic considerations pp869-873
"We need to know who is legitimately in or out because self-referential doctrines purport to furnish a ground for legitimizing political power, and constituting political boundaries is one of the most important ways in which political power is exercised over persons" p873
"Thus political power is legitimized not by tradition, not by virtue, not by genealogy, but by the demos itself." .... "Specifying the ground for democratic legitimacy therefore clearly re- quires specifying both (a) what procedures give legiti- mate expression to the people’s collective will and (b) who the people in question is." p874
"It is a problem that arises precisely because the democratic principle of legitimacy is not only self-referential, but also constitutively political: It assumes that the ground of legitimacy is the people’s politically expressed collective will, itself some function of individual members’ wills."p874
"If laws must be the outcome of certain kinds of procedures, then the democratic legitimacy of the laws governing the procedures themselves seems to face the same kind of infinite regress as boundaries." p874 "Which political procedures legitimately articulate the will of the people cannot itself be wholly determined by interrogating the people’s will." p875
Social contract theory is an "utter failure as a response to the boundary problem..." because "civic boundaries pose an externality problem" on outsiders and require the consent of everyone. "Boundaries require not just consent, but serial consent." p875
"bounded demos thesis -- the fact that the people is bounded is given prior to the exercise of political power and independent of any individual’s will." ... "For these theorists, the boundary problem is supposed to demonstrate that legitimizing particular boundaries requires turning to a principle external to democratic theory itself" p876
"un-boundedness of subjection -- the act of constituting boundaries circum- scribing political rights is always an exercise of power over both insiders and outsiders that, by the very act, purports to disenfranchise the outsiders over whom power is exercised" p877
The Schumpter response: "If having boundaries is necessarily presupposed by the democratic exercise of political power, then any particular boundary will do: The particular boundary may be arbitrary, but drawing it somewhere is not, and that is all there is to it "
"I take it that democracy is better understood as an attempt to legitimize the collective and political exercise of power." Given the fact of power, the demos is prepolitically unbounded and can be settled by a global demos (???) p880
"Almost all existing theories assume that democratic polities have the right unilaterally to regulate their own membership" ... but ... " the unbounded demos thesis presumptively implies the contrary" pp880