ABSTRACT
Whether cosmopolitan3 or national, many democratic theories suffer nowadays from a territorial bias that prevents them from accounting properly for the new democratic reality in Europe. Even though most theories have realized the necessity of post-national4 democracy, although they have acknowledged the tyranny of national paradigms of democracy and hence developed new models of post-national democracy and although the “demos without ethnos” thesis has now gained extensive support, the relevant democratic polity and hence the relevant democratic subject in most cosmopolitan democratic theories remains a territorial one. It has indeed long been recognized as the paradox of the democratic polity that the modern democratic polity is both constituted and constrained by prepolitical territorial boundaries (Benhabib, 2004, ch. 4; Whelan, 1983; Offe, 1998). The problem, however, is that territorial boundaries of democracy exclude many non-citizens’ interests, which are affected by domestic decisions, and therefore conict more and more with political equality and with the inclusive nature of democracy. Despite increasing evidence of the so-called “deterritorialization of politics” at the global level (Held et al., 1999, p. 32; Held, 1995a, p. 237) and of the porosity of national boundaries, the territorial boundaries of democracy are still held to apply to regional and cosmopolitan democracy.5 Supranational polities, whether regional or global, are thought of as overlapping territorially delineated national entities and as sharing in part at least the same constituencies, thus simply adding another layer of territorialized democracy rather than opening national democracies or other non-state, albeit territorially distinct, polities to one another along functional instead of territorial lines only.6
