Nations, Sovereignty, and Democratic Legitimacy: On the Boundaries of Political Communities

Abstract

It is now quite widely acknowledged that the conventional modern Western conception of the polis — namely, liberal democracy embedded in a sovereign territorial state — faces powerful challenges. State autonomy is either eroded or inflected by increasing integration into international regimes, sub-state regionalization, capital mobility, the resurgence of minority nationalisms, and civil society networks, among other things. One must be careful not to blur the varying nature of those phenomena, to overestimate their impact on the state, or to underestimate the part played by states themselves in the internationalization of governance (see, for example, Wolf, 1999). Yet it seems indisputable that some diffusion of power actually characterizes the current era. This has led to significant debates on states as the primary locus of constitutional authority.