In recent debates about democracy beyond the state, this metaphoric beyond remains unclear and all too often unquestioned. It often only refers to processes of collective binding decision making that seem to take place outside the classical realm of nation-state politics, but to the contrary these processes are quite often very directly linked to state officials, their bureaucratic interaction, legal exchanges, expert meetings, international agreements, personal contacts and trans-state norm concretizations etc. Such observations question both, first the classical understanding of a unified almost sovereign nation-state and second the separation between this entity and the mystical sphere (inter, trans- or supranational), the beyond. The aim of this paper is to make conceptually sense of these developments in regards of state and democratic theory. It will argue that only the reconstruction, coming from the history of ideas, of the core concepts of the democratic nation-state, with which it has been described so far, enables us to observe their recent emergence on very different levels of the multi level system of global politics. The complex interconnections between these different levels and different core concepts then may lead to a heterogeneous and fragmentized conceptual understanding of multiple statehoods and also leads away from the mystical metaphor of being beyond the entity of the state. In the next step, such an understanding of the recent form of the state also poses questions and dilemmas for democratic theory that has connected itself closely to the institutions, processes and descriptions of the single nation-state. To unfold the dilemmas that arise out of such a more decent understanding of the state as multiple statehoods, e.g. the problem of being inside or outside different communities and different legal claims, the question of the undivided democratic subject, exclusion and inclusion mechanisms and the dilemma of universal norms and their partial institutionalization, can be a starting point for a post nation-state but not a post state democratic theory.
