In recent political theory, much attention has been paid to a basic problem of democratic politics: democracies cannot determine their own boundaries democratically. Although theorists such as Robert Dahl, Seyla Benhabib, and David Miller understand this problem to be exclusive to democratic theory and practice, I argue that it is not. Drawing upon the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and
... [Show full abstract] Sieyès, I argue that democracy’s boundary problem is a particular expression of a paradoxical tension within modern ideals of sovereignty. Once this is understood, we can look to the history of sovereign statehood as a model for, or warning against, different ways to dissolve transnational versions of democracy’s boundary problem. Inspired by Carol Gould, Étienne Balibar, and Bonnie Honig, I suggest that in order for democracy to outlive modern forms of sovereignty, the boundaries of democracies must become and remain sites of active democratic contestation.
