ABSTRACT
This paper argues in favor of a dual form of the demos in the liberal polity.2 One demos is dened by formalized membership and decision-making procedures, the other by open public deliberation. Liberal nationalism seems to emphasize the formal and nite (national) aspects of the demos as it considers the basic structure a closed social system (Rawls, 1993; see Yack, 2001). Deliberative democratic theory emphasizes the epistemic virtues of deliberative procedures and considers public deliberation a necessary element of the procedural notion of the demos and of popular sovereignty (e.g., Cohen, 1996 and 1997; Elster, 1998; Habermas, 1996a and 1998; Bohman, 1998). As I will try to show, the two conceptions of the demos are linked and they both imply that the authoritative demoi of liberal democratic states are not totally separate and not mutually exclusive. The national demoi are bounded and open at the same time, and the transnational public spheres are enacted by the demoi. This in turn strengthens the argument that interstate communicative action and integration can be embedded in legitimation processes even under conditions of formally separate demoi (Risse, 2000; Mitzen, 2005). This embeddedness, however, is not just due to reason-giving of governments, but essentially the reason-giving of an intra-and transnational community of common sense.
