The dominant theory of democracy used to be a sovereignty theory. A “people” would consist of a bounded group, all of whose members would have equal rights to discuss and decide the issues that came before them. Such groups might be nation-states bounded by international borders, but they might also be organizations or associations; they were sovereign to the extent that they could make decisions about categories of issues. They would thus exercise what the French Revolutionary theorist Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the ancients,” meaning the right “to deliberate, in a public space, about war and peace, to ratify treaties of alliance with foreigners, to vote laws, pronounce decisions, examine the accounts, actions, and management of officials, to compel them to appear before the whole people, to accuse them, to condemn or acquit them.”

Two problems arise for all such sovereign groups: 1) they may not have a legitimate moral basis to exclude outsiders from their decisions, and 2) they may not have actual control over the situations that they confront. For example, the US may not have a legitimate moral justification to exclude Germans from influencing our government’s surveillance policy, which also affects Germany; and the US government cannot control capital markets or pollution flows that cross its borders.

These problems have become more severe and more evident in a highly interconnected world. A traditional justification for the sovereignty theory presumed that nation states could safeguard the interests of their own members without impinging often on others. But, as my friend Archon Fung writes, “If there once was a time when the laws of a nation-state could adequately protect the fundamental interests of its citizens, many argue that such time is past.” He and others argue that we should shift from a sovereignty theory to a “theory of affected interests,” or at least add the latter to our understanding of democracy.

Continue reading →