1 Calhoun, C., ‘The class consciousness of frequent travellers: Towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in Archibugi, D. (ed.), Debating cosmopolitics (London: Verso, 2003)Google Scholar ; cf. Held, D., Models of democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 18Google Scholar .

2 Whelan, F. G., ‘Democratic theory and the boundary problem’, in Pennock, J. R. and Chapman, J. W. (eds), Liberal democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 13–47Google Scholar . However, democratic theorists have long been interested in the problem of how to legitimately constitute the demos. See, for example, Näsström, S., ‘What globalization overshadows’, Political Theory, 31 (2003), pp. 808–834CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

3 Dahl, R. A., After the revolution? Authority in a good society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar .

4 For example, see Abizadeh, A., ‘Democratic theory and border coercion: No right to unilaterally control your own borders’, Political Theory, 36 (2008), pp. 37–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Agné, H., ‘A dogma of democratic theory and globalization: Why politics need not include everyone it affects’, European Journal of International Relations, 12 (2006), pp. 433–458CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Christiano, T., ‘A democratic theory of territory and some puzzles about global democracy’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 37 (2006), pp. 81–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Goodin, R. E., ‘Enfranchising all affected interests, and its alternatives’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35 (2007), pp. 40–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Gould, C. C., Globalizing democracy and human rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Gould, C. C., ‘Self-determination beyond sovereignty: Relating transnational democracy to local autonomy’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 37 (2006), pp. 44–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; López-Guerra, C., ‘Should expatriates vote?’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 13 (2005), pp. 216–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Moore, M., ‘Cosmopolitanism and political communities’, Social Theory and Practice, 32 (2006), pp. 627–658CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Moore, M., ‘Globalization and democratization: Institutional design for global institutions’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 37 (2006), pp. 21–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Marchetti, R., ‘A matter of drawing boundaries: global democracy and international exclusion’, Review of International Studies, 43 (2008), pp. 207–224Google Scholar ; Näsström, ‘What globalization overshadows’.

5 The principle features in both cosmopolitan democracy and deliberative models of transnational democracy. See Held, D., ‘The changing contours of political community: Rethinking democracy in the context of globalization’, in Holden, B. (ed.), Global democracy: Key debates (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 17–31Google Scholar ; Verweij, M. and Josling, T. E., ‘Special Issue: Deliberately Democratizing Multilateral Organizations’, Governance, 16 (2003), pp. 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Dryzek, J. S., ‘Transnational democracy’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), pp. 30–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; McGrew, A., ‘Transnational democracy: Theory and prospects’, in Stokes, G. and Carter, A. (eds), Democratic theory today: Challenges for the 21st century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)Google Scholar .

6 Locke, J., Second treatise of government (Project Gutenberg, 2005 [1689]Google Scholar ), {http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7370}, chap. VIII:§95.

7 Rousseau, J.-J., The social contract or principles of political right (The Constitution Society, 2005 [1762])Google Scholar , {http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm}.

8 Shklar's, Judith ‘liberalism of fear’ is a useful expression of such a sceptical view of politics. Shklar, J. N., Political thought and political thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar .

9 Saward, M., ‘A critique of Held’, in Holden, B. (ed.), Global democracy: Key debates (London: Routledge, 2000).Google Scholar ; cf. Zürn, M., ‘Global governance and legitimacy problems’, Government and Opposition, 39 (2004), pp. 260–287CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

10 Kant, I., Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984 [1795]), p. 24Google Scholar .

11 Sangiovanni, A., ‘Global justice, reciprocity, and the state’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35 (2007), pp. 3–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar , Eckersley, R., ‘From cosmopolitan nationalism to cosmopolitan democracy’, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 675–692CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

12 Arrhenius, G., ‘Vem bör ha rösträtt? Avgränsningsproblemet i demokratisk teori’, Tidskrift för politisk filosofi, 9 (2005), pp. 47–63Google Scholar .

13 Held, D., Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)Google Scholar .

14 Nozick, R., Anarchy, state, and utopia (Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar .

15 Waldron, J., Law and disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 344Google Scholar ; Barry, B., Culture and equality: An egalitarian critique of multiculturalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2001)Google Scholar .

16 But this oversimplifies matters: Consider, for example, people who benefit from welfare services without contributing to their production. Those people might still have legitimate claims to participate in deciding on such issues. Furthermore, benefiting from political decisions might indirectly create a right to participate in their making, if people who receive public goods by the cooperative efforts of others have an obligation to do their fair share by obeying the law. David Mapel argues that situations where public benefits cross borders demonstrate why this fairness account of obligation is insufficient (Mapel, D. R., ‘Fairness, political obligation, and benefits across borders’, Polity, 37 (2005), pp. 426–442)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

17 Tännsjö, T., ‘Future People, the All Affected Principle, and the Limits of the Aggregation Model of Democracy’, in Rønnow-Rasmussen, T., Petersson, B., Josefsson, J. and Egonssson, D. (eds), Hommage à Wlodek: Philosophical papers dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund University, 2007)Google Scholar .

18 Shapiro, I., Democratic Justice (London: Yale University Press, 1999)Google Scholar .

19 Some suggest that basic human rights provide the baseline criterion for inclusion: Political institutions and decisions affect you in the sense relevant for democratic inclusion if they have an impact on your basic human rights. See Gould, Globalizing democracy; Gould, ‘Self-determination’; Held, D., ‘Democratic accountability and political effectiveness from a cosmopolitan perspective’, Government and Opposition, 39 (2004), pp. 364–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Caney, S., Justice beyond borders: A global political theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . However, human rights do not provide a clear-cut, uncontroversial standard of affectedness, and it seems implausible that democratic inclusion would ever be a sufficient redress for violations of basic human rights.

20 Saward, ‘A critique of Held’.

21 Marres, N., ‘Issues spark a public into being’, in Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar .

22 Dewey, J., The public and its problems (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988 [1927])Google Scholar ; Lippmann, W., The phantom public (London: Transaction, 1993 [1927])Google Scholar , Lippmann, W., Public opinion (Project Gutenberg, 2004 [1921]), available online at: {http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6456}Google Scholar .

23 Schumpeter, J. A., Capitalism, socialism and democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 245Google Scholar .

24 Dahl, R. A., Democracy and its critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), chap. 9Google Scholar .

25 Whelan, ‘Democratic theory’.

26 Furthermore, it might be difficult to reach agreement on what the issue is, since constructing the policy problem is a political issue in its own right. For example, Brian Barry disputes Iris Marion Young's claim that women exclusively should control ‘reproductive rights policy’, noting that already this terminology takes for granted what is at stake: whether abortion is entirely a question about a woman's right to control her fertility: ‘Whether or not some issue affects only the member of a certain group is itself normally a matter of controversy, and that controversy is itself one on which everyone can properly take a position.’ (Barry, Culture and equality, p. 303.)

27 Goodin, ‘Enfranchising’. The all-affected principle is also indeterminate in another way, because it seems to assume that causation and responsibility can easily be determined too, and that such causal responsibility grounds moral obligation. But there are many issues and problems that escape nation-state borders and which thus might require transnational governance, without being clearly caused by a particular group of decision-makers. For instance, David Held cites the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a paradigm case of an issue that suggests a border-transgressing political community of stakeholders. But who are the decision-makers responsible for the epidemic whom those affected should hold to account? Where the responsibility for cause or solution is dispersed and diluted over many different actors, the all-affected principle seems even more difficult to apply. And, as Robyn Eckersley (‘From cosmopolitan nationalism’, p. 681) argues, ‘in seeking to establish culpability via a direct or indirect causal connection between perpetrators and victims, this [cosmopolitan] approach displaces the simple appeal to our common humanity as the motivator for institutional change. If no causal connection can be shown, or if the causal connection appears weak and tenuous, then there is no residual argument to suggest that those with the capacity to assist should still take responsibility anyway.’

28 Tännsjö, ‘Future People’.

29 Held, , Democracy and the Global Order, p. 237Google Scholar .

30 Saward, ‘A critique of Held’.

31 Cf. Kuper, A., Democracy beyond borders: Justice and representation in global institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 15ffGoogle Scholar . See also, Abizadeh, ‘Democratic theory’; Moore, ‘Globalization and democratization’.

32 Dryzek, J. S., Democracy in capitalist times: Ideals, limits and struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar .

33 Although Held sometimes talks about cosmopolitan democratic reform as a project of building new political institutions around his ‘seven sites of power’, the concrete proposals for international reform that he puts forward seem more based in a layered territorial state logic (Dryzek, ‘Transnational democracy’; Saward, ‘A critique of Held’; Coleman, W. D. and Porter, T., ‘International Institutions, Globalisation and Democracy: Assessing the Challenges’, Global Society, 14 (2000), pp. 377–398)Google Scholar .

34 Whelan, ‘Democratic theory and the boundary problem’, p. 19; Dahl, , After the revolution? p. 64Google Scholar .

35 Scheuerman, W. E., ‘Cosmopolitan democracy and the rule of law’, Ratio Juris, 15 (2002), pp. 439–457CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

36 Coleman, and Porter, , ‘International Institutions’; Keohane, R. O. and Nye, J. S., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1977)Google Scholar .

37 Held, D., ‘Kan globaliseringen regleras? Att återuppfinna politiken’, in Amnå, E.; (ed.), Bör demokratin avnationaliseras? (Stockholm: Fakta info direkt, 1999)Google Scholar .

38 Saward, ‘A critique of Held’, p. 38.

39 Cf. Chandler, D., ‘New rights for old? Cosmopolitan citizenship and the critique of state sovereignty’, Political Studies, 51 (2003), pp. 332–349CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

40 Agné, ‘A dogma’, cf. Agné, H., Democracy reconsidered: The prospects of its theory and practice during internationalisation: Britain, France, Sweden, and the EU (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2004)Google Scholar .

41 Goodin, ‘Enfranchising’.

42 Beckman, L., ‘Citizenship and voting rights: Should resident aliens vote?’, Citizenship Studies, 10 (2006), pp. 153–165CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

43 Agné, , Democracy reconsidered, p. 59Google Scholar .

44 Näsström, ‘What globalization overshadows’.

45 Hellström, A., Bringing Europe down to earth (Lund: Lund University, 2006)Google Scholar .

46 Lippmann, ‘Public opinion’, chap. XVII:4.

47 Arrhenius, ‘Vem bör ha rösträtt?’.

48 Kymlicka, W., Modern politisk filosofi (Nora: Nya Doxa, 1995), p. 38Google Scholar .

49 Pogge, T. W., ‘How to create supra-national institutions democratically: Some reflections on the EU's “democratic deficit”’, in Føllesdal, A. and Koslowski, P. (eds), Democracy and the EU (Berlin: Springer, 1998), pp. 161–185Google Scholar .

50 Dahl, , Democracy and its critics, p. 148Google Scholar .

51 Hurley, S. L., ‘Rationality, democracy and leaky boundaries: Vertical vs. horizontal modularity’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), pp. 126–146CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

52 Agné, ‘A dogma’.

53 Agné defines autonomy as ‘the possibilities of an actor – individual or collective – to take action in regard to itself while free from domination by other actors’ (Agné, ‘A dogma’). That is, the more and the more different actions an actor can perform, the more autonomous it is. Cf. Abizadeh, ‘Democratic theory’; Marchetti, ‘A matter of drawing boundaries’.

54 Abizadeh, ‘Democratic theory’, p. 49.

55 Abizadeh, ‘Democratic theory’.

56 Kuper, Democracy beyond borders.

57 Arneson, R. J., ‘Democracy is not intrinsically just’, in Dowding, K. M., Goodin, R. E. and Pateman, C. (eds), Justice and democracy: Essays for Brian Barry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 40–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

58 Cited in Arneson, ‘Democracy is not intrinsically just’.

59 Dahl, , Democracy and its critics, p. 122Google Scholar .

60 López-Guerra, ‘Should expatriates vote?’, p. 220; Habermas, J., The inclusion of the other: Studies in political theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), chap. 9Google Scholar .

61 Dahl, Democracy and its critics.

62 López-Guerra, ‘Should expatriates vote?’.

63 Beckman, ‘Citizenship and voting rights’.

64 Habermas, J., ‘Remarks on legitimation through human rights’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 24 (1998), pp. 157–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

65 A colonial power imposing a legal system on a colony springs to mind as an illustration of such illegitimate exclusion (of the colonials subject to the law) and inclusion (of colonial power legislators not themselves subject to colonial law).

66 On the other hand, just like that version of the all-affected principle requires citizens to be equal and uniform, so that they cannot shield themselves from being affected by political decisions, equality before the law may require that citizens are fairly equal in socio-economic terms: ‘in a society characterised by great inequality, the rich and poor do not enjoy genuine equality before the law. Laws will often impact differently on people, depending on their wealth and income’ (Bertram, C., ‘Global justice, moral development, and democracy’, in Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (eds), The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75–92)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Furthermore, even legislation approximating Rousseau's requirement that all laws be general in form may serve narrow interests (Goodin, R. E., ‘Institutionalizing the public interest: The defense of deadlock and beyond’, American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), pp. 331–343)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

67 See, for example, Brunkhorst, H., Solidarity: From civic friendship to a global legal community (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar ; Habermas, J., Der gespaltene Westen: Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004)Google Scholar ; Tännsjö, T., ‘Cosmopolitan democracy revisited’, Public Affairs Quarterly, 20 (2006), pp. 267–331Google Scholar .

68 Brunkhorst, H., ‘Globalising democracy without a state: Weak public, strong public, global constitutionalism’, Millenium: Journal of International Studies, 31 (2002), pp. 675–690CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Held, D. and McGrew, A., ‘The end of the old order? Globalization and the prospects for world order’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 219–243CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Held, D., ‘Law of peoples, law of states’, Legal theory, 8:1 (2002), pp. 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

69 Brunkhorst, , Solidarity, p. 129Google Scholar .

70 Brunkhorst, , Solidarity, p. 130Google Scholar ; cf. Teubner, G., ‘Global Bukowina: Legal Pluralism in the World Society’, in Teubner, G. (ed.), Global Law Without a State (Brookfield: Dartmouth, 1997), pp. 3–15Google Scholar .

71 Hence, just as the all-affected principle usually is thought to concern burdens rather than benefits of political decisions, the subject-to-the-law principle might be taken to focus on the negative aspects of being subject to law, and similarly resonates with a sceptical view of politics.

72 Cf. Nagano, T., ‘A critique of Held's cosmopolitan democracy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 5:1 (2006), pp. 33–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

73 Zürn, M., ‘Law and compliance at different levels’, in Zürn, M. and Joerges, C. (eds), Law and governance in postnational Europe: Compliance beyond the nation-state (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

74 The principle thus suggests a counter-argument to the so-called no demos thesis, which claims that EU democracy is futile in the absence of a pan-European demos.

75 Thompson, H., ‘The modern state and its adversaries’, Government and Opposition, 41 (2006), pp. 23–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

76 Cohen, J. L., ‘Whose sovereignty? Empire versus international law’, Ethics & International Affairs, 18 (2004), pp. 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; cf. G. Teubner, ‘Global Bukowina’; Teubner, G., ‘Societal Constitutionalism: Alternatives to State-Centered Constitutional Theory?’, in Joerges, C., Sand, I.-J, & Teubner, G. (eds), Transnational Governance and Constitutionalism (Portland: Hart, 2004), pp. 3–29Google Scholar .

77 Cohen, ‘Whose sovereignty?’.

78 Leydet, D., ‘The ideas of 1789 or solidarity unbound: A sceptical appraisal’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 32 (2006), pp. 799–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

79 Brown, C., ‘The borders of (international) political theory’, in O'Sullivan, N. (ed.), Political theory in transition (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 190–208Google Scholar .

80 Näsström, ‘What globalization overshadows’.