Imagine a nurse who receives a job offer from a hospital across the border. The hospital needs her skills, and she wants to work there. She hopes, in time, to settle and make that country her political home.
Then the country’s legislature tightens the rules for admission. She cannot enter. The decision may alter her life, yet she had no vote in the election that produced the legislature and no recognized place in its political deliberations.
People who already belong to the country voted. Why should anyone else have a say?
That seems natural if democracy begins with a settled people. Yet a border also tells outsiders what they may not do, and the state stands ready to enforce its command.
In his 2008 essay, Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders, political theorist Arash Abizadeh challenged the assumption that citizens alone are entitled to decide such rules. His argument matters to World Citizen Theory because it brings democracy to a question that democracy has often treated as settled in advance: who gets to decide the boundaries of the political community?
The Decision at the Border
In a familiar account of democracy, elected representatives decide immigration policy for the political community. But this assumes that the people entitled to decide the rules can be identified without asking whom the rules govern.
Consider the nurse outside the border. A refusal of admission is not merely a private person’s refusal to invite someone into a home. It is an official rule backed by the state’s power. A person who enters without permission may be stopped, detained, or removed, depending on the law. Border rules are addressed to people who are not yet members.
Abizadeh’s argument begins with this exercise of coercion. In democratic theory, political power cannot claim legitimacy merely because the people exercising it approve of their own decisions. Its exercise must be justified to those subject to it. If border controls subject foreigners to coercion, why should foreigners be excluded at the outset from the process that determines those controls?
Abizadeh adds a second argument, which he calls the unbounded demos thesis. The demos means the people whose participation gives democratic decisions their authority. But a people cannot democratically decide who belongs if it must already know who belongs before taking the vote. This is democracy’s boundary problem: an existing electorate cannot invoke its own authority as the justification for excluding everyone else. Abizadeh rejects the idea that those to whom democratic justification is owed must, by definition, have a fixed boundary. This does not abolish distinct political communities; their boundaries themselves require justification.
The result is demanding. Existing citizens cannot simply declare an unconditional right to control the border unilaterally. The border regime must also be democratically justified to outsiders. Who is entitled to make a rule enforced against someone else?
More Than a Right to an Explanation
The phrase democratic justification can sound modest. One might imagine a government explaining its immigration policy to the rest of the world, publishing reasons, and then proceeding exactly as before.
That would not capture Abizadeh’s claim.
He argues that foreigners subject to a border regime have a claim to democratic participation in the political processes through which that regime is determined. The question is not only whether their interests are considered. It is whether they have standing as participants rather than remaining objects of decisions made by others.
An elected government may consider outsiders’ interests while reserving every decision to citizens. Benevolence does not resolve the problem of unilateral rule.
Abizadeh also distinguishes two kinds of boundary. A territorial border regulates movement into a state’s territory. A civic boundary determines who counts as a member. His criticism of unilateral control reaches both. The question of who may join a political community is therefore already present in his work; it would be inaccurate to portray him as concerned with physical entry alone.
Nor does his argument establish that all borders must immediately open. He distinguishes the substance of admission policy from the legitimacy of the process determining it. His discussion favors borders that remain open to some movement—porous, in his terminology—while recognizing that particular restrictions might be justified under certain conditions.
His institutional conclusion is substantial. Legitimate border policy must be jointly controlled by citizens and foreigners, or authority may be delegated to a state through democratic institutions that give outsiders standing. He calls for cosmopolitan democratic institutions, but these need not mean one world government. His examples range from global institutions to multilateral arrangements among particular countries and transnational participation in domestic border-policy decisions. The question is not merely whether a country supplies good reasons. It is who has a place in the political process where reasons are weighed.
From Border Participation to Foot Democracy
World Citizen Theory approaches political belonging from another direction.
In The World Citizen Revolution, I distinguish the freedom to choose one’s rulers from the freedom to choose one’s political community. Civic revolutions expanded the first. They left the second far more constrained. In The World Citizen Society, this second dimension of political freedom is developed through Foot Democracy: individual political-community choice, requiring not only Exit but meaningful Entry and a credible path toward membership.
Abizadeh and I therefore begin with different questions. He asks whether existing citizens can democratically impose border rules on outsiders without giving them a role in determining those rules. I ask why individuals, who may help choose those who rule them, have so little power to choose the political community under whose rule they will live.
Abizadeh’s concern with civic boundaries already reaches membership; the difference lies in what each theory makes central.
Suppose foreigners participate in deliberations over a country’s entry rules, but the resulting policy allows almost no one to enter and acquire secure membership. Participation in a decision about exclusion is not itself the freedom to choose a political home.
Conversely, a country might admit people readily while its citizens alone determine the rules. Greater freedom of entry would not answer Abizadeh’s question about who legitimately decides.
These examples expose two questions: Who may help decide the rules of entry, and how much freedom do individuals actually have to choose and join a political community?
The second question explains why I call Foot Democracy a political freedom. Seeking another political home concerns the political power to which a person will be subject and the community in whose decisions that person may participate.
Our institutional starting points also differ. I do not think that securing individual political-community choice requires establishing a single world authority over admission. Reciprocal agreements, regional arrangements, and reforms within particular communities could gradually make Entry more secure. Abizadeh’s multilateral and transnational alternatives could contribute to that process. But his central question remains who has legitimate authority over the rules; mine also concerns what effective freedom of membership those rules create.
Is This Really Democracy?
There is a serious objection to my use of the word democracy.
Democracy is usually understood as collective self-government. The members of a community decide their common affairs. If a person chooses to leave one community and apply to another, is that not simply individual liberty rather than democracy?
I think the distinction matters, but it does not settle the issue.
Hand Democracy concerns how people participate in governing a political community. Foot Democracy concerns their freedom in relation to the political community that governs them. The two freedoms are not identical, and neither can simply replace the other.
Yet both concern an individual’s relation to political power. Abizadeh grounds democratic legitimacy in personal autonomy: coercion demands justification because it intrudes on people’s capacity to direct their lives. I believe that the same value supports a further claim. If it matters that coercion be justified to me, it also matters whether I can choose the political order under which I will build my life. This is my extension of his argument, not a conclusion that follows automatically from it.
This does not mean that a person’s wish to join automatically overrides residents’ rights. Political communities maintain public institutions and undertake enduring responsibilities. Individual choice must be considered alongside them.
The existing community’s authority over entry cannot be assumed to have unlimited priority: its rules reach people excluded from the decision about who may decide.
The Strongest Objection: A People Must Govern Itself
A defender of national self-determination may respond that a political community needs authority over membership. Admission affects public services, political representation, and the community’s direction. Residents may reasonably want to preserve institutions they have built together.
This objection should not be dismissed as hostility toward foreigners. It raises a genuine problem for democratic government. Abizadeh anticipated it. He argues that self-determination may justify some domestic say over border policy and certain restrictions, but does not generally establish a right to control and close borders unilaterally. He also considers narrowly specified protection for vulnerable minorities as a possible exception.
David Miller pressed a different challenge in 2010. Preventing someone from entering one country, he argued, closes one option while leaving others open. That is prevention, not necessarily the kind of coercion that gives rise to democratic entitlements. Abizadeh replied that border regimes operate through threats of state force, not only physical prevention. In his account, coercive threats as well as coercive acts intrude on autonomy and require justification. Whether other destinations are genuinely available also matters to Foot Democracy: Exit without meaningful Entry offers little real choice.
The disagreement turns on what the state does when enforcing admission rules and what follows democratically from that power.
Even if we accept Abizadeh’s criticism of unilateral control, further questions remain. How much say should outsiders have, and how can residents retain meaningful self-government? Abizadeh does not assume that every person in the world should cast an equal vote on every national admission law. He considers differentiated participation according to the importance of entry for those concerned, with special weight potentially given to residents. The precise institutional design remains open.
Foot Democracy faces another difficulty. Choice is not meaningful if existing members may refuse every application at their sole discretion. Yet self-government cannot mean accepting every claim regardless of institutions, resources, or rights.
For my part, a meaningful opportunity to seek admission, transparent reasons for refusal, and an effective way to challenge a decision are possible starting points. They do not replace Abizadeh’s demand for political participation, nor do they alone secure membership. They could, however, begin to limit arbitrary exclusion without transferring every admission decision to a single global authority. Basic human rights cannot be erased by a majority vote, and the receiving community’s responsibilities remain real. These are proposals for further institutional work, not settled rules of World Citizen Theory.
The hard question is how both forms of political freedom can become effective without allowing either to destroy the other.
What Abizadeh Helps Us See
Abizadeh refuses to treat the existing electorate as the final answer to democratic legitimacy. Outsiders are not merely people about whom a country decides; they are people upon whom it exercises power.
We share the challenge to the idea that nationality alone settles who has political standing in decisions about borders. But Foot Democracy asks for more than a voice concerning an existing border regime. It asks how the individual can acquire an effective freedom to choose and secure membership in another political community.
Entry must be possible in practice, membership must not remain indefinitely insecure, and political equality cannot be reserved forever for those whose nationality was determined by birth. These are my institutional goals, not outcomes established by Abizadeh’s 2008 argument.
Institutions meant to protect political-community choice should not ignore the voices of those seeking to exercise it.
Democracy Beyond the Existing Demos
Return to the nurse who hoped to work and settle across the border. The legislature’s decision may have been supported by a majority of existing voters. That fact alone does not answer Abizadeh’s question about her standing in the decision. And even if she could participate in making the rules, we would still need to ask whether they leave her a genuine path to another political home.
Abizadeh shows why democracy cannot take its existing boundaries for granted. Foot Democracy asks what political freedom would mean if individuals could challenge not only the rules drawn at those boundaries, but the inherited limits on their ability to cross them and belong.
Democracy should not concern only how people govern the political community to which they already belong. It should also confront how much freedom they have to choose that community in the first place.
References
- Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 37–65. Author-hosted full text. DOI: 10.1177/0090591707310090.
- David Miller, “Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh,” Political Theory 38, no. 1 (2010): 111–120. Publisher.
- Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Legitimacy and State Coercion: A Reply to David Miller,” Political Theory 38, no. 1 (2010): 121–130. Author-hosted full text.
- Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Revolution, especially Chapter 39 (the author’s judgment about political-community choice).
- Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society, especially Chapters 2–4 (Hand Democracy, Foot Democracy, Entry, and membership).