Building a Democratic Multi-Level Order beyond the State. Opportunities and Challenges from the Point of View of Complementary Democratic Memberships

In view of globalisation and global or regional governance, the question of how a transnational democratic order might and should be construed has become subject to extensive debate: Can and should it function as an extended federal order, characterised by nested jurisdictions, or as a flexible network of overlapping and intersecting institutions and publics? Citizenship or rather democratic membership promises to provide a fruitful perspective on these discussions, because it connects the relations individuals hold towards other members of a democratic collectivity with those they have towards political institutions. It thereby allows for combining the perspective of individual members of a political order with that of democratic institution building. From this point of view, one of the central questions of democratic institution building beyond the state is whether citizenship can be pluralised and, if yes, how an order of plural democratic memberships should be constituted. By means of a critical reappraisal of the contributions of Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib and James Bohman, the paper establishes the notion of complementarity, introduced by Niels Bohr, as a fruitful perspective on these issues. Understanding multiple democratic memberships as complementary, i.e. as necessary but contradictory complements of each other – which conforms to the logic of democratic decision-making itself rather than to notions of belonging or identity – provides a means to understand the relation between memberships as well as to derive guidelines for democratic institution-building. Thus, the normative ideal of complementary memberships helps us to conceptualise plural democratic memberships in different jurisdictions which each contribute to the efficacy and, above all, legitimacy of the political order in its entirety. At the same time, however, the tensions and contradictions between particular memberships constitute challenges and call for a deliberate institutional management of these particularities. The issue of how to define the different contexts of democratic memberships as well as their relations to each other impose themselves as subjects for further debate. Against this backdrop, the competing institutional configurations of nested, overlapping and intersecting democratic memberships discussed in the literature are to be evaluated. The notion of memberships’ complementarity allows us to recognize structural commonalities as well as institutional differences, between the models and to judge their strengths and weaknesses as elements of multi-level orders of multiple democratic memberships. Thus, the notion of complementary memberships opens up a fruitful perspective for further research on democratic institution-building concerning its normative foundations as well as its specific institutional design.