Critical Horizons

A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

ISSN: 1440-9917 (Print) 1568-5160 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycrh20

James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From

Dmos to Dmoi

John Rundell

To cite this article: John Rundell (2009) James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From
Dmos to Dmoi, Critical Horizons, 10:1, 141-147

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/crit.v10i1.141

Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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Reviews

James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From Dmos to Dmoi (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007), hardback, 978-0-262-02612-3, 228 pages, $35.00/25.95

James Bohmans Democracy Across Borders is contextualized by the developments

that have occurred in the early part of the twenty-rst century and which con-
tinued in the same manner as the last century closed as a period caught in
a tension between internationalization and regionalization. This period trans-
formed the boundaries of, and the relations between nation states, their citizens
and non-citizens.
Internationally, this period is marked by continuing processes of economic
growth, crisis and decline through the internationalization of the division of
labour and nancial markets, the increasing although not ambivalent use of
trans-national bodies for making economic and political decisions, assumed
cultural homogeneity, and the internationalization of social problems such as
concerns for the environment and crime. Regionally, this period is marked by
processes that originate from increasing demographic changes, population move-
ments and the formation of new diasporas and include conicts concerning
solidarity and identity that have occurred in the old and newly dissolving and
forming states in the post-Cold-War era, cultural diversity, the political dynamics
between national and regional areas, the politicization and extension of catego-
ries of rights, as well as the formation of new fundamentalisms that have been
articulated terroristically.
The eect of these processes may be increased or decreased territorial sov-
ereignty, increased or decreased military conict or cooperation, increased or
decreased cultural diversity. In other words, so the arguments go, a new map is
being drawn in which external tensions between nation states, and internal ones
between nation states and their citizens are being replaced by tensions between
internationalization and regionalization.1

1. Neil J. Smelzer, Problematics of Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 10(1), April 2009, 14152
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142 REVIEWS

However, an assessment put only in these terms minimizes a more complex

set of congurations, and it is James Bohmans ability to address such complex-
ity that is the strength of his excellent book. One part of the complexity of the
contemporary conguration, as Democracy Across Borders implies, is to throw into
relief the active role that nation states have in pursuing their interests, underwrit-
ing the processes of internationalization and globalization that have occurred,
and responding to these. What is often overlooked, as has been commented on
elsewhere, is a transformative capacity that nation states have in adapting to
external shocks and pressures by invoking, often, new forms of governance and
policy formation.2 Moreover, strong versions of the so-called globalization thesis
also underestimate the role of nation states in forming types of governed inter-
dependence3 through such trans-state institutions as the United Nations, the
European Union, or even international treaties, conventions and forums.
Equally and more importantly, though, Bohmans major argument addresses
and theorizes the active role of citizens and non-citizens as political actors in
both national and trans-national contexts in contesting these state and trans-
state arrangements, and thus forming new and expanded democratically political
institutions. In this wider historical and geographical context, one can talk about
the development of specically democratic forms and institutional patterns that
are part of, but parallel to the formation of nation states. Bohmans task is not
to posit and theorize a democracy beyond borders, but one:

across borders; democracy across borders means that borders do not mark
the dierence between the democratic inside and the nondemocratic out-
side of the polity, between those who have the normative power and com-
municative freedom to make claims to justice and those who do not. It
is not a democracy of a single community, but one of many dierent
communities.4

These democratic developments and institutional patterns include citizenship

and non-citizenship based rights and sovereignties, identity, forms of democratic
participation and decision-making, and publicity. In Bohmans terms, democ-
racy is that set of institutions and procedures by which individuals are empow-
ered as free and equal citizens to form and change the terms of their common
life, together, including democracy itself .5

2. Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State Governing the Economy in a Global Era (Cambridge:
Polity, 1998).
3. Ibid.
4. James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From Dmos to Dmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007), 12.
5. Ibid., 45.

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It is precisely here that Bohmans book makes its major and signicant impact.
As he intimates, the idea of the sovereignty of the nation state and of trans-
national arrangements is informed by three counter-posing traditions. In one,
the consolidation of power in a single entity is prioritized, whilst in a second, the
codication of law or juridical sovereignty is. Moreover, the formation of state-
centred unitary power, together with increasing principles and practices of juridi-
cation, is accompanied by an increasing sensibility to the territorial integrity of
the nation state. In terms of territoriality, the nation state is identied as being
constituted by boundaries that are xed and regulated juridically both internally
and in terms of inter-state relations. This administered territoriality denes those
who belong or dont belong to this nation state. Nationhood only sits comfort-
ably with an idea of sovereignty that is dened as juridical and administrative
power and is territorial in scope. This dimension can be termed the juridico-
territorial nation state, and it typies the modern state at its rawest.6
However, as Bohman points out, there is another form of sovereignty, the one
that pertains to an idea of federal republican rulership that stems from the demos
and that takes the form of democratic rule. In other words, juridical and terri-
torial sovereignty is contested by this tradition of civic or republican sovereignty,
which is viewed as a rulership of power based on the idea of the non-inheritable
and non-transferable sanctity of the people who rule over the state.7
Moreover, where democracy is instituted it is done so not only as an idea of
rulership, but also as a value. As Bohman states, [democracy] is intrinsically
justied to the extent that it is constitutive of human political rights and non-
domination, and not merely the means to attain those ends.8 In other words,
this value is articulated as one pertaining to a common humanity that lies beyond
the specicity of juridical territoriality. It is the value of cosmopolitanism, and
is a way of talking not only about participatory government, but also of what
might be termed the interdependencies of the political from a normative point
of view.9 Moreover, as Bohman makes clear, this value or normative horizon
can be articulated in conventions and treaties such as the 1948 United Nations

6. Ibid., 136; J. Rundell, Tensions of Citizenship in an Age of Diversity: Reections on Territoriality,

Cosmopolitanism and Symmetrical Reciprocity, in Blurred Boundaries Migration, Ethnicity,
Citizenship, R. Baubck & J. Rundell (eds), 32041 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) and Strangers,
Citizens and Outsiders: Otherness, Multiculturalism and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary in Mobile
Societies, Thesis Eleven 78 (August 2004), 85101.
7. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 512; see also P. G. A. Pocock, Virtues, Rights and Manners:
A Model for Historians of Political Thought, in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political
Thought and History, Chiey in the Eighteenth Century, 3750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
8. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 54.
9. Ibid., 100105.

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant

of Civil and Political Rights.
In the light of these distinctions between territoriality, sovereignty and democ-
racy, a cleavage is forged, historically, in which people come to live in, or between,
three worlds: citizens of a territorial state, who are simultaneously subjects of its
law; real, or potential, sovereigns and rulers of it; and citizens of the world or citi-
zens of trans-national polities.10 In other words, sovereignty has been redened
along at least three axes: from the vantage point of the territoriality of the nation
state, and the modern conditions of rulership and cosmopolitan citizenship.
In the context of the internationalization of political arrangements and deci-
sions it is the juridical-territorial version of the nation state that is immediately
thrown into relief and tested. This is where internationalization or governmental
interdependence usually enters the picture, even if non-government organiza-
tions as well as nation states are involved. The trans-state organizations through
which governmental interdependency is articulated often become the main frame
for the responses to and mediation of the arrangement and decisions that are
made.
There can be at least two ways of looking at the formation and articulation
of trans-state organizations in the context of not only addressing crises, but also
the nature of political discourse, argument and policy formation in contexts such
as the United Nations, the European Union, or free trade agreements. From the
position of a governmental interdependence that is framed by a realpolitik, these
institutions can be viewed as historically contingent power gurations that fol-
low the model of classical inter-state relations in which diplomacy is a substitute
for war.11 The intergovernmental institutions become the formal and formally
recognized arenas for the negotiations of both inter-state and intra-state conicts
and crises. The rules of the game here are simply disputes involving procedures
and the formation of a consensus.12
However, as Bohman goes to great length to argue, in the recent history of
inter-state relations a cosmopolitan model has visibly emerged alongside the
realpolitik found in the trans-national institutions. It is this activity of the trans-
nationalization of the political that provides an umbrella for the development of
international protocols and systems of justice. As Bohman argues cosmopolitian-
ism provides a radicalizable basis for the development of nation state interde-
pendency which is more than a juridical mediation between nation states.13 As

10. Ibid., 4555.

11. Karl von Clausewitz, War, Politics and Power, E. M. Collins (trans. and ed. with intro.) (Washington
D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1962), 83.
12. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 13744; David Ingram, Exceptional Justice? A Discourse
Ethical Contribution to the Immigrant Question, Critical Horizons 10(1) (2009), 130.
13. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 145.

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he notes, cosmopolitanism entails the development and expansion of trans-state

and international public spheres in which, minimally, dissenting voices can be
heard, and, maximally, all issues are open to debate, discussion and deliberation.
Deliberation is democratized only when it acts in the contexts of broader and
multiple publics, that facilitate interaction between various constituencies, col-
lect information, make policy alternatives and comparisons available.14 Trans-
national federated cosmopolitanism thus assumes, like democracy generally, a
vibrant tension between democratic institutions and public spheres, located
regionally, nationally and trans-nationally. It is here that nation states, their citi-
zens and their representatives can exist in another mode other than procedural
indierence or one-dimensional nationalism. In this way, the idea of democratic
citizenship shifts from one concerned with, and constituted by a national polity
(demos), to one concerned with and constituted by a set of arrangements in which
a trans-national democratic polity or demoi begins to emerge.15
However, this cosmopolitan image is more than simply a claim for the increased
participation of a trans-national citizenry in publicpolitical life as either opin-
ion-makers or real or potential sovereign rulers. As Alexis de Tocqueville argues,
for example, in Democracy in America the immanent trend towards the centrali-
zation of the state (as well as intra-state bodies, as Bohman notes) is countered
by a variety of dierentiated and independent public agencies. An important
point about de Tocquevilles analysis is that this counter-trend of dierentiated
publics has been institutionalized as a federalist model that builds in a per-
manent tension between centrifugal and centripetal dynamics of power.16 This
centrifugal movement represented by federalism is the basis for a possible fur-
ther radicalization of democratic political institutions and their cultures through
the concept of demoi, and it is this radicalization that Bohman proposes in his
Democracy Across Borders especially in his chapter Reforming the Transnational
Polity: Deliberative Democracy and the European Union.17
There are two sets of issues that Bohman develops here, that is, the nature of
the decentralization of powers and democratic forms, and the nature of the inter-
dependencies of these powers and forms, both of which go to the heart of images
of modern politics when confronted with the issues of cultural, social and politi-

14. Ibid., 155; see also Bohman, The Public Sphere of the World Citizen, in Perpetual Peace Essays on
Kants Cosmopolitan Ideal, James Bohman & Mathias Lutz-Bachmann (eds) (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997), 187; J. Cohen, Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos,
International Sociology 14(3) (1999), 24568.
15. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 13545.
16. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volumes 1 & 2 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990);
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 2535); John Rundell,
Democratic Revolutions, Power and The City: Weber and Political Modernity, Thesis Eleven 97
(May 2009), 8097.
17. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 13570.

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cal diversity what Tully terms strange multiplicity or diverse federalism.18

Bohman terms this strange multiplicity, republican federalism or heterar-
chy.19 Bohman, for example, uses this term in order to highlight the diculties
that the European Union faces in moving from a democratic form that is con-
ned to the conjunction of nation and polity (a national demos) to a polity that
is trans-national in character, has no intrinsic national or democratic subject
qua the People but must invent institutions that circulate political power in
open-ended ways. In discussing the possibility of federated, trans-national demoi
Bohman brings together two strands of democracy and federalism in ways that
buttress and extend each. Taking the European Union as his paradigm case for
transformations in contemporary democracy, Bohman argues that it is possible to
envisage a simultaneous change in both its vertical and horizontal arrangements,
the result of which would be that power could circulate throughout an extended
polity in a number of diverse ways. As he says in the context of his complex argu-
ment, the outlines of which can only be alluded to here:

Federal institutions are necessary not only to organize such a dispersed

and diverse process, but also to create the multiple channels of inuence
and communication that enable the deliberation across multiple perspec-
tives needed for a large and diverse polity to be peaceful and democratic.
The democratic legitimacy of these enabling and intermediary institutions
is thus more indirect, and depends upon the standards, objectives and
membership conditions that make the EU a polity with a normative legal
framework. In both dispersed and federal institutions, testing and decision-
making powers are separated more clearly than in typical federal states.20

The vertical arrangements refer to the capacity for legal and institutional for-
mation and testing of politics, policy and social questions through a multi-level
system of courts, committees and commissions, which includes the European
Court of Justice.21 These vertical arrangements are embedded in an increasing set
of horizontal ones that include not only larger and more diverse public spheres
but also the transformation of parliamentary representation from national prin-
ciples to cosmopolitan federalism, which enable all residents throughout the
European Union to be eligible to vote and stand for oce, rather than just
national citizens.22 In both arrangements the value of cosmopolitanism comes

18. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
19. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 162.
20. Ibid., 166.
21. Ibid., 1645.
22. Ibid., 1625.

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into play through which political and juridical claims for participation and ruler-
ship, and not only rights can be tested. These claims are articulated informally in
public spheres from where they originate, formally in constitutions, treaties and
conventions, and are open to conict, interpretation and expansion.23
As Bohman indicates in Democracy Across Borders, a cosmopolitan demo-
cratic federalism builds a permanent tension between centrifugal and centripetal
dynamics of powers through the decentralization of its politics, and thus general-
izes this tension throughout all geographic regions that constitute trans-national
states and their demoi.

References

Arendt, H. 1973. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bohman, J. 1997. The Public Sphere of the World Citizen. In Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kants
Cosmopolitan Ideal, J. Bohman & M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds), 179200. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bohman, J. 2007. Democracy Across Borders: From Dmos to Dmoi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clausewitz, K. von 1962. War, Politics and Power, E. M. Collins (trans. and ed. with intro.). Washington
D.C.: Regnery Gateway.
Cohen, J. 1999. Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos. International
Sociology 14(3): 24568.
Ingram, D. 2009. Exceptional Justice? A Discourse Ethical Contribution to the Immigrant Question.
Critical Horizons 10(1): 130.
Pocock, P. G. A. 1985. Virtues, Rights and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought. In
his Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiey in the Eighteenth
Century, 3750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rundell, J. 1998. Tensions of Citizenship in an Age of Diversity: Reections on Territoriality,
Cosmopolitanism and Symmetrical Reciprocity. In Blurred Boundaries Migration, Ethnicity,
Citizenship, R. Baubck & J. Rundell (eds), 32041. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Rundell, J. 2004. Strangers, Citizens and Outsiders: Otherness, Multiculturalism and the Cosmopolitan
Imaginary in Mobile Societies. Thesis Eleven 78 (August): 85101.
Rundell, J. 2009 (forthcoming). Democratic Revolutions, Power and The City: Weber and Political
Modernity. Thesis Eleven 97 (May): 8097.
Smelzer, N. J. 1997. Problematics of Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Tocqueveille, Alexis de 1990. Democracy in America Volumes 1 & 2. New York: Vintage Books.
Tully, J. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Weiss, L. 1998. The Myth of the Powerless State Governing the Economy in a Global Era. Cambridge:
Polity.

John Rundell, School of Philosophy, Anthropology & Social Inquiry,

University of Melbourne

23. This part of Bohmans argument has also been discussed in Rundell, Democratic Revolutions.

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