Three Principles and Three Levels of Democratic Inclusion

Speaker

Prof. Dr. Rainer Bauböck  holds a chair in social and political theory at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute. His research interests comprise normative political theory and comparative research on democratic citizenship, European integration, migration, nationalism and minority rights

Abstract

The first part of this paper discusses what I call the “circumstances of democracy” and the principles of including all affected interests, all subject to coercion and all citizenship stakeholders. The upshot of my argument is that these principles are not rivals but friends. They complement each other because they serve distinct purposes of democratic inclusion. The second part explains how especially the interpretation and implementation of the third principle depends on the nature of the polity to which it is applied. I distinguish state, local and regional polities and their constitutive principles of citizenship, which I identify as birthright, residential and derivative membership. The conclusion is again that these are not alternative conceptions of political community but complementary ones. Taken together, local, state and regional polities form nested polities with multiple citizenship for all their members.

Perspektiven der Moderne

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