Possibilities and Limits of Multiple Democratic Memberships

Processes of globalisation as well as institutions of global or regional governance do not only challenge democratic self-determination within and across different jurisdictions, but question core principles of democratic theory. Situated at the intersection of discourses on democracy, justice and citizenship, a conception of democratic membership which encompasses the relations individuals hold towards political institutions as well as towards other members of a democratic collectivity promises to provide a valuable perspective for addressing these challenges. Due to the proliferation of political institutions beyond the state, one central question that arises is whether citizenship can and should be pluralized, i.e. whether one person can and should hold more than one democratic membership in different jurisdictions of different kinds and sizes. The paper discusses this question from the combined perspectives of democratic membership and democratic institution-building. It starts out from recent theories of a future democratic order of multiple memberships by Habermas, Bohman and Benhabib. It then develops its argument by reconstructing current citizenship debates, not least the discussions about the citizenship of the European Union. Sketching possibilities as well as tensions a multiplication of memberships will encounter, the paper presents the original concept of complementarity developed by Niels Bohr as a fruitful perspective for analysis. Understanding multiple memberships as complementary, i.e. as necessary but nevertheless contradictory complements of each other, does not only help to structure the debates on citizenship or to critically relate the different proposals for institutionalizing multiple memberships. As it highlights the basic gains as well as challenges of pluralising democratic memberships, which exceed questions of identity, and calls for a differentiation between their substance, subjects and contexts. Thereby, it provides a fruitful perspective for future thinking about and research on possible institutional orders of plural democratic memberships.