Internationalizing Neorepublican Democracy

• In Event: Immigration and Justified Borders

Abstract

Two features of the contemporary world challenge neorepublican democratic theory. First, political communities are heterogenous: they are constituted by individuals other than citizens. This includes refugees, permanent residents, ‘skilled’ temporary migrants, and regular visitors. Together, they form a growing class of people with interests in a country without equal power to control how its governed. Second, the actions of any state have significant consequences beyond its borders. Labor regulations, tariffs, and anti-trust law in one nation affect the economies of other nations.
Both features create circumstances that escape the central condition of neorepublican freedom. This condition is that interference by the state is non-dominating to the extent people have equal control and influence over it. Put another way, neorepublican freedom hinges on the equal ability to express one’s politics through institutional channels that affect policy. Politically heterogenous communities and the international consequences of policy make this difficult to achieve.
Neorepublicans have answered this challenge in two ways. The first scales principles of domestic governance—participatory rights, equality among citizens, and meaningful representation—up to the international realm. It conceives of international bodies before which each state is equal, much like citizens before their government. The second asks for some form of political rights, short of citizenship, for migrants. I argue that both answers are inadequate.
The first is inadequate because representative international governance doesn’t address internal political heterogeneity. It presumes that freeing a state from external domination frees those who live within it. This elides the fact that each state is constituted by mixed communities where all individuals do not share the same political status. Further, it misses that most people have good economic reasons to move across borders. Strengthening neorepublican democracy, then, requires engaging the fluidity of the citizen-body within each state, not merely equalizing relationships between them.
The second answer fairs better. Offering easy paths to political rights for migrants makes them less vulnerable to domination. But in stopping short of granting citizenship to all residents within a state, the answer foregoes the condition of civic equality upon which nondomination depends. Rather, it institutes a political hierarchy incompatible with it.
I argue that a better response for neorepublicans is to embrace an internationalist democratic theory. This means embracing a general right to move across borders and loosening the requirements of citizenship within each state. I offer three reasons for this. First, the possibility of migration has become a necessity of self-rule. This is because the vital political and economic interests of people are dispersed across borders. Second, the neorepublican assumption that political communities are relatively stable no longer holds. ‘The People’, today, are in flux—they migrate more than ever before. Rights tied to closed citizenship no longer serve as effective protection against domination for a growing number of people. Finally, rights to migrate can also protect citizens from domination. They create powerful incentives for states to democratize and entrench participatory rights.
Broadly, I hope to demonstrate that questions of migration are fused to the central tenets of neorepublican democratic theory, in contrast to being their application to the margins. My arguments take seriously the internal demands of neorepublicanism, and are offered in the spirit of strengthening its core tenet—that people must have a say in how they are governed.

Author

• Tejas Rajkotia Luthra, Duke University