An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope. By its terms democracy seems to take the existence of units within which it operates for granted. It depends on a decision rule, usually some variant of majority rule, but the rule's operation assumes that the question “majority of whom?” has already been settled. If this is not done democratically, however, in what sense are the results that flow from democratic decision rules genuinely democratic? A chicken-and-egg problem thus lurks at democracy's core. Questions relating to boundaries and membership seem in an important sense prior to democratic decision-making, yet paradoxically they cry out for democratic resolution.

One need not consider such extreme cases as Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, or the West Bank for evidence supporting this contention, though they surely do. Arguments about the legal status of Turkish “guestworkers” in Germany, removing full British citizenship from members of the Commonwealth, or denying public education to the children of illegal immigrants in California are all challenging to think about as matters of democratic politics partly because they render problematical assumptions about who constitutes the appropriate demos for majoritarian decision. Indeed, virtually every aspect of a country's policies dealing with immigrants or minorities can be shown to involve this paradox in some way. Democratic theorists often acknowledge the existence of the difficulty, but surprisingly little headway has been made in dealing with it to date.