Transboundary associations as agents of boundary transformation

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, the boundaries of democratic polities have been increasingly contested in the field of democratic theory. The theoretical discussion has focused on the philosophical norms that should demarcate the boundaries of democratic constituencies. This article defends and explores an alternative approach that, instead of focusing solely on theoretical norms, theorizes democratic processes of boundary-making. This alternative approach addresses the multiplicity of intertwined boundaries bounding demos and agents capable of transforming and democratizing these multiple boundaries. I characterize a category of agents who democratize symbolic everyday boundaries as transboundary associations. The democratization of the symbolic boundaries of everyday interactions is a necessary condition for the democratization of formal boundary-making, since in democratic orders and societies, institutions cannot simply impose boundaries on people. Transboundary associations produce sites for incipient democratic politics that transcend current institutional and symbolic boundaries, producing possibilities for reciprocal boundary-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• boundaries
• borders
• democratization
• associations

1. Introduction

In this article, I theorize what it means to democratize the boundaries of democratic communities. To do so, I develop a conception of transboundary associations. By transboundary associations, I mean collective agents that produce democratically potential connective sites for transboundary interactions. In contrast to existing accounts of democratization, my focus is on processes in civil society that can foster transformations. When transboundary associations produce new sites of interaction and successfully democratize the norms of those interactions, participants’ changing affiliations and relationships can transform and democratize institutionally maintained boundaries. This is not to deny the importance of institutions and new institutional designs, but to emphasize the importance of transboundary encounters for learning and transforming the ordinary lifeworld and its relations.

To contextualize and develop my argument, I compare Brian Milstein's and Étienne Balibar's accounts of the democratization of boundary-making. A common element in their work is a shift from a simplistic understanding of boundaries as clearly defining interiors and exteriors to a more nuanced conception. They share a view that boundaries between polities are produced in continuous transboundary interaction and emerge from transboundary negotiations over belonging and identity. However, their normative conceptions of politics differ. Milstein emphasizes, drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory, the rational discourses and Balibar the insurgent activism.

Milstein's discourse theoretical conception lacks an analysis of non-discursive practices of democratically potential immanent agents that transgress boundaries. Balibar, on the other hand, emphasizes agents of civil disobedience and bypasses more ordinary forms of interaction that transform boundaries. I argue, then, that we need to emphasize and theorize the agents that democratize boundaries in ordinary interaction. In doing so, I focus here on ordinary encounters rather than extraordinary events in order to better understand the ways in which participants actually transcend the current boundaries of participation and belonging.

In the first section, I introduce the democratic boundary problem in order to situate my discussion in a larger context. I continue to discuss processual approaches to boundaries and reconstruct how Milstein’s analytical shift from focusing on philosophical principles for defining boundaries to democratic boundary-making has advantages compared to ideal-theoretic solutions and theories of partisanship. In the third section, I discuss Balibar’s work. I argue that in comparison to the discourse on theoretical models, Balibar’s analysis of borders – especially his discussion on internal borders – expands the understanding of the politics of boundary-making by explaining the multiplication of boundaries. The terms ‘boundary’ and ‘border’, Balibar uses the later term, can be thought of as designating different entities. In this article, however, I use them as interrelated concepts because borders are among the boundaries that define political communities and most border scholars argue that we cannot fully distinguish between geographic borders, membership boundaries, and symbolic social boundaries since they are intertwined and influence each other (Scott 2020, 5). In the fourth section, I focus more closely on considering the possibilities of transboundary associations in democratizing boundary-making by transforming existing boundaries. By sketching a category of transboundary associations, I introduce democratizing practices in civil society by characterizing a certain category of associations that are crucial in democratizing boundary-making, but cannot be completely derived either from discourse theoretical or radical democratic models of politics.

2. Norm-based and processual approaches to the boundary problem

The question of how to define the boundaries of democratic constituencies has become a central issue in political theory. The so-called ‘democratic boundary problem’ refers to the observation that democratic theory cannot provide answers to how the boundaries of democratic collectives should be drawn. For example, Frederick E. Whelan (1983) argued that it is impossible to have a democratic process before there is a people - i.e. a collective, often called the demos¹ that exercises political rule in a democratic way. Thus, the boundaries of a people cannot be decided democratically. Instead, the collective must be presupposed, because the constitution of a demos precedes the initiation of any democratic process.

Contemporary thinkers have mostly either attempted to solve the problem through normative theory or insisted on the insolvability of the problem (Donahue and Ochoa Espejo 2016). The first approach tries to solve the problem by offering theoretical principles that should guide the demarcation of the boundaries of democratic collectives. Over the past twenty years or so, two theoretical principles of democratic inclusion have gained widespread support: the all-affected and the all-subjected principles. In their simplest forms, these principles state that all individuals who are either affected or subjected by a decision or exercise of power should be included in the decision-making body (e.g. Arrhenius 2005; 2018; Erman 2014; Fraser 2008; Goodin 2008; 2016).

It is unclear, however, how such theoretical solutions should inform actual disputes and how any of the principles would be applied in real situations. Secondly, even if the boundaries of democratic collectives could be delineated by such principles, we would still have to address various problems of internal boundaries. Internal boundaries are as essential to democratic orders and practices as external ones since exclusion by internal norms and practices is an equally important issue for democracy. I will deal with this more in section three.

Approaches that conceive of the problem as unsolvable instead insist on the boundary problem as productive for democracy. Insolvability is thought to generate and enable ongoing practices of democratic contestation and justification. These approaches conceive of the constitution of a democratic collective as a complex and fluid process rather than based on an established set of norms and are therefore better equipped to deal with internal boundaries. The main problem with this category of approaches is how to assess the justification of boundaries when they are deeply contested, since we do not have shared normative principles or interpretations of them as regulative ideals against which to compare the legitimacy of boundaries.

Thus, we can distinguish between approaches that advocate theoretical principles of inclusion and approaches that emphasize the processual aspect of boundary-making. As an example of this distinction, Jonathan White and Lea Ypi (2017, 442) contrast norm- and contestation-based approaches to the demos. The former aims to settle the democratic boundary problem theoretically, whereas the latter approach conceives the boundary problem as unsolvable at the level of theory. According to them, both approaches are problematic when taken alone. While norm-based approaches depoliticize the problem by claiming to solve it through philosophical analysis, contestation-based approaches, in contrast, over-politicize the problem by claiming that every kind of contestation is of value (ibid.: 443, 447). They propose that a theory of partisanship can offer a third option that accommodates valuable features from both the norm- and contestation-based approaches. In their theory of partisanship, the boundaries of people are claimed to be always contested, but the contestation should lead to institutionally mediated and legitimated norms through political parties. They claim that democratic political parties aim to justify their conceptions of people for their constituencies when contesting their votes, and then implementing those conceptions of peoplehood through legitimate channels of jurisdictional institutions (ibid., 448–454).

A problem with such theories of partisanship is that even though political parties may aim to democratize boundary-making and transgress the present boundaries of constituency, political parties are often, as Markus Patberg (2020, 151) notes, part of ‘the state apparatuses’.² Traditional political parties are tied to the institutions and constituencies of nation-states and are therefore likely to be biased towards the current state borders and conceptions of citizenship. In other words, associations, such as political parties, that are specifically attached to state practices are at risk of becoming, as Iris Marion Young (2000, 194–195) expresses it, ‘another layer of bureaucracy’, that is to say ‘ … their independence from state imperatives, and therefore their ability to hold state institutions accountable to citizens is threatened.’ Furthermore, it is the rights and interests of non-citizens that are most often threatened in boundary issues, people who are not part of the political parties’ constituencies, and to whom parties thus have no legal responsibility to justify their decisions.

A broader processual approach can be found in the work of Seyla Benhabib. She is also skeptical about the idea that the boundary problem can be solved philosophically without leaving place for actual processes of justification. She does not either commit herself to one particular political subject, such as the democratizing force of parties. She has criticized the all-affected and the all-subjected principles as unsuitable as general principles of democratic inclusion. According to Benhabib, advocates of those principles ignore the importance of the processual element of democracy. Benhabib argues that:

Membership in a demos is more than being either affected by or subjected to coercive power. It involves a commitment over time to cooperation with a specific human community, as well as a sense that one's own moral good and public-political voice are bound up with, although never exclusively, or even primarily, the fate of that human community. (Benhabib 2011, 165)

Benhabib emphasizes the link between democracy and a cooperative community, referring to a democratic polity, which is a ‘pluralistic unity, composed of many communities, and held together by a common democratic legal, political, and administrative apparatus’ (ibid, 189).

Furthermore, following David Owen (2012), Benhabib claims that we need to distinguish between first- and second-order polities. The former refers to a bounded democratic polity, and the latter to a looser ‘demotic’ community that engages in moral discourses about the justification of the boundaries of legal and administrative first-order polities (Benhabib 2011, 160). According to Benhabib, the latter question of who should be included in a bounded democratic people ought to be discussed continuously by all concerned.³ Benhabib calls these discourses democratic iterations. In such discourses, civil society actors and citizens mediate how universal human rights norms, including those concerning boundaries of membership, should be contextualized in particular polities (Benhabib 2004, 176).

I turn to Milstein, who has also argued that the circularity of the boundary problem cannot be fully resolved by philosophical analysis, but who has offered a more formal discourse-theoretical account of how boundaries of demos might be justified in transboundary discourses. Milstein shares Benhabib's view on first- and second-order polities, but sees Benhabib's account as leaning too easily toward a cosmopolitan conception of the people and argues that his two-level conception of the demos is better suited to considering possible discrepancies between institutional and participant narratives of the demos (Milstein 2017, 738).

Milstein's (2017) two-level conception of the demos conceives of the demos as having a dual structure. First, the demos is an institutional entity defined by norms. Second, the justification of these institutional norms depends on the reciprocal exchange of reasoning at the level of the participants. Milstein's distinction between the second and third person perspectives of a demos is helpful because democratic theory has traditionally perceived democratic peoples and their boundaries from a single sovereign perspective (Milstein 2017, 731). That single perspective has long been the administrative perspective of the state, as states have historically been powerful entities in gathering and coercing people under their administration. Following Milstein, we can see how the participants themselves negotiate the boundaries and institutional third person perspective of a people, rather than perceiving the people solely as a collection of individuals united by a coercive power.

The deliberative theory of democracy, and with it discourse theorists such as Benhabib and Milstein, emphasize the role of discursive processes in legitimating norms. Any institutional norm concerning the boundaries of a community must be supported by real people who negotiate their relations as equals. This does not mean, of course, that everyone in the real world will share the same vision of community. What Milstein argues instead, drawing on the tradition of discourse theory, is that the democratic legitimacy of boundaries depends on the communicative freedom of participants on both sides of the boundary: ‘[t]he communicative freedom necessary to legitimate a boundary presupposes the communicative freedom necessary to effectively challenge the boundary, and vice versa’ (Milstein 2017, 739). By communicative freedom, Milstein refers to the idea that participants have the reciprocal power to assess the validity of norms, in this case norms about the boundaries of the demos.

Milstein's approach has advantages over the primary ideal-theoretical solutions of the all-affected and all-subjected principles. First, it shifts the debate from legitimate democratic boundaries to democratic boundary-making. This shift is already apparent in Benhabib's approach but is made more explicit by Milstein. Along with this shift, it is possible to consider how actual boundaries can be democratized by facilitating reciprocal discourses between members and non-members (Milstein 2017, 730). Second, it recognizes the importance of actual discourses for democratic legitimation. In democratic practices, participants understand each other as having equal authority over their norms. Norm-based principles of inclusion view people from the perspective of a single outsider, as it is the use of power by institutions that creates the categories of people known as ‘affected’ or ‘subjected’.

Finally, Milstein's shift from rightful boundaries to boundary making is more in line with what border studies and anthropologists have argued about boundaries. Anthropologist Fredrik Barth's (1969) seminal work argued that boundaries are not produced or maintained internally by isolated groups, but in interaction with other groups. This is why ethnic boundaries can persist in what Barth called ‘poly-ethnic social systems,’ in which people constantly ‘cross’ these boundaries and members of an ethnic group do not all share the same characteristics. Building on Barth's work on the boundaries of ethnic groups, Milstein argues: ‘[f]ar from denoting the limits of meaningful interaction, boundaries are mechanisms that structure interaction and are themselves saturated with meaning’ (Milstein 2015, 135). Similarly, the boundaries of a demos are produced in a broader interaction that structures our political life. The conflicts in this interaction, between different understandings of the demos and its boundaries, cannot be resolved by applying a philosophical norm that is ambiguous and not universally accepted (see also Näsström 2011). Thus, as Milstein argues, any norm that defines boundaries worthy of being called democratic must be contextualized and grounded in actual boundary-making discourses.

3. The problem of internal boundaries

Milstein's thesis of two levels of demos recognizes the possible conflicts between the institutional and the participant perspectives. Balibar's work on borders, on the other hand, reflects more explicitly the inevitable conflicts between different participant perspectives. These conflicts arise from the fact that the social sphere is full of boundaries produced by the participants themselves. Moreover, not all participants in boundary-making necessarily have democratic intentions. Even if the formal boundaries of a demos are justified in democratic institutions, the social sphere itself may be hierarchically structured, and thus the formal demos itself would be divided into different categories of people with different possibilities and intentions for participating in socio-political life.

Balibar's work on borders captures how the bordering of a community occurs in multiple places and through multiple actions. This multiplication of borders produces degrees of membership that are maintained by internal borders, as borders have both internal and external functions (Balibar 2010). It also means that the boundaries of even a formally delimited demos are multilayered due to the intrinsic character of border-making. I call this the problem of the internal boundaries of the demos. When we approach actual boundary-making, we must recognize that there is not just one boundary between the demos and outsiders. In a formal sense, of course, there are jurisdictional boundaries between members and non-members in democratic orders, but everyday actions and discourses both create additional layers on that formal membership and make the boundaries multidimensional. Thus, in reality, the democratic boundary problem is rarely a one-dimensional question of who is included or excluded.

Balibar's work on Fichte's concept of ‘internal borders’ is an ambitious attempt to capture the symbolic and internal character of borders between two polities. Fichte argued that the internal borders or frontiers of a bounded polity are those of a common language.⁴ The concept of internal borders has played an important role in Balibar's thinking. The term is ambiguous and has different meanings, but is related to the symbolic understanding of borders that produce internal exclusions in societies (Stoler 2020). The standard use of external state borders as defining the boundaries of the community does not capture the process of ‘ … reduplication of external borders in the form of ‘internal borders’ … ’ (Balibar 2004, x).

Balibar attributes to Fichte the idea that in the world of nation-states ‘ … a border can actually separate communities only if it ‘withdraws’ and is redrawn within a space that is moral and intensive … ’ (Balibar 2017, 287). He means that a border between two constituencies or polities cannot endure if it is merely a geographical line or a legal norm, without support from more substantive normative ideas about what the border delimits, as ‘ … no political border is ever the mere boundary between two states, but is always overdetermined and, in that sense, sanctioned, reduplicated, and relativized by other geopolitical divisions’ (Balibar 2002, 79). In this way, borders produce what Balibar, following Fichte, calls ‘invisible borders’ that are ‘situated at everywhere and nowhere’ (ibid: 78). These so-called invisible borders emerge as common-sense ideas of belonging to a national or other socio-political collective and are reproduced through various acts that intensify relations between members of the imagined (e.g. national, cultural, or ethnic) collective, often by excluding persons who are seen as others.

Because of this constructive nature of borders, border scholars have begun to use terms such as ‘bordering,’ ‘borderwork,’ and ‘borderscapes’ to denote the processual constitution of political borders and to capture the role of borders in constituting communities (e.g. Brambilla 2015; Rumford 2013; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019). These concepts aim to capture the multiplied acts of bordering in the social sphere.⁵ In particular, informal acts of bordering affect people differently depending on their social location (Balibar 2002, 81). In practice, therefore, it is difficult to speak of a demos as a unified subject when all actual formal demoi are fractured by internal borders. Bordering is done by urban planners, teachers, employers, and property owners as well as by border officials. The actual bordering of a community can occur, for example, when employers discriminate against certain human groups. Such actions impede the possibilities of reciprocal boundary-making and often partially exclude people from the collective without giving them the means to challenge this exclusion.

Balibar has not explicitly offered a reading of the democratic boundary problem discussed in the second section. We can, however, notice how his discussion of internal borders, and borders more generally, enriches the understanding of boundary-making. Geographical borders and acts of bordering are the means by which social and political boundaries are imposed. Borders are affirmed and sustained by ideas of belonging, and we can say, following Balibar, that material borders and acts of bordering produce social boundaries: ‘[i]t is borders, the drawing and the enforcing of borders, and thus interpretations and negotiations that ‘make’ or ‘create’ peoples, languages, races, and genealogies’ because borders are ‘ … deeply rooted in collective identifications and the assumption of a common sense of belonging’ (Balibar 2010, 316). If a boundary is not also drawn at a symbolic and a moral level, it loses its meaningfulness. An obvious example would be the border between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War. The border was dismantled, and even considerable efforts to militarize it could not undermine the idea of a unified Germany.

According to Balibar, borders are configuring the world in complex ways. Powerful ideas ‘invested’ in state borders produce different degrees of citizenship and belonging. These invested ideas are norms related to the reproduction of a particular community, and Boonen in his reading of Balibar contends that a ‘ … deviation from such norms can determine a lack of access to certain rights, it can also lead to a lack of access to all of the powers and capacities of a full citizenship … ’ (Boonen 2022, 922). For example, according to Kapoor and Narkowicz (2019), in the United Kingdom, a principal reason for the refusal of a citizenship application is the applicant’s ‘bad character,’ and in practice this criterion is particularly applied to non-white residents.⁶ Boonen also describes how the exclusion from citizenship, and thus formal membership, is not the only way to exclude people from a demos:

[i]f the channels of democratic participation in representative institutions or civil society are blocked for these people, if their civil rights are regularly infringed by police, or if they are structurally excluded from the job market, we cannot say that they are full citizens. (Boonen 2022, 922)

Thus, a demos is in practice produced through formal and informal norms of membership and belonging that determine the degree that one is part of a particular community.

By highlighting the internal functions of external jurisdictional borders, it is possible to observe how political boundaries are not located at the edges of national societies but in the middle of transboundary interactions. Border areas have traditionally been conceived of as the meeting places of distinct cultures. In fact, Balibar’s work provokes us to recognize that regions far away from regional borders can be considered borderlands (Balibar 2009) also in the sense that these boundary-making and bordering acts potentially occurring anywhere in the social sphere affect the composition of demos. In her reading of Balibar, Ann Laura Stoler (2020, 109) describes how internal borders are ‘[e]merging at the ‘heart of civic space,’’ and so ‘they may create an invisible geography marking out who can walk which streets without feeling ‘out of place,’ who can stand on a street corner without being suspect, narrowing down the spaces one has the right to inhabit, or in which one can feel “at home”.’

This brings us to Milstein's (2017, 740) claim that ‘the legitimacy of demotic boundaries’ depends on ‘the effective freedom to contest them.’ Formal boundaries, according to Milstein, should be legitimated in actual discourses. In other words, boundaries should reflect the will of people on both sides of the boundary, and therefore nonmembers should have necessary formal rights to contest boundaries. In practice, boundaries are rarely deliberated in reciprocal relationships, since every boundary produces norms that both include and exclude people from participation. On the other hand, Balibar emphasizes insurgent activism as a way to challenge exclusionary norms, but his approach places too much emphasis on extraordinary acts. It is difficult to overstate the role of activism, but activism benefits from the solidarity and support of allies created in more ordinary encounters. Even though most supporters of the cause would not become activists themselves, support from a broad front helps the cause. For this reason, in the next section, I consider the characteristics of agents that can democratize boundaries when considering the persistent problem of internal boundaries.

4. Democratization and transboundary associations

Next, I sketch an account of democratizing transboundary associations in order to characterize certain kinds of associations and movements that produce sites to foster democratic community formation in the ordinary lifeworld. Discussions of the democratization of borders tend to focus on institutions, as formal rights are necessary to secure communicative freedom for members and non-members alike (e.g. Benhabib 2004; Fraser 2008; Milstein 2017; Ahlhaus 2020, 220ff.) or on insurgent activism (e.g. Balibar 2015; Celikates 2019; Schwiertz 2021). While institutions and formal rights are certainly needed to democratize the formal deliberation of membership boundaries, and while insurgent activism can rightly politicize boundary disputes, we can also identify agents that are capable of expanding reciprocal transboundary interaction in the ordinary lifeworld and breeding solidary bases for activism. By reciprocal interaction, I simply mean an interaction that foster participants equal inclusion and belonging to social sphere. Such interaction is not synonymous with deliberation, but also includes opportunities to engage with others as peers in various non-discursive ways. When transboundary associations succeed in creating more reciprocal interaction, such associations can bring about institutional change and invent incipient ideas of new institutional possibilities. However, their role is not limited to enabling institutional change; they also initiate the transformation of informal norms of everyday interaction.

A demos emerges when participants interact as equals. Institutions and formal rights are often necessary but not sufficient to enable reciprocal interaction, since much depends on the patterns of behavior discussed in the last section and produced by the participants themselves in their everyday life. Drawing on Habermas’ discourse theory, Milstein (2017) rightly emphasizes the rationalization of formal boundary-making, but does not pay enough attention to the agents and their non-discursive antecedent practices that enable the rational negotiation - and thus the democratization - of boundaries in everyday life. Identifying the characteristics of such agents is an important task, as it would help to identify the immanent forces that produce incipient democratic possibilities for formal boundary-making. Milstein normatively approaches second-person perspectives as rational exchanges of reasons (Milstein 2017, 735), but such rational exchanges are often the result of meaningful non-deliberative encounters that motivate people to recognize each other as rational participants. Balibar, on the other hand, identifies democratizing agents but places too much emphasis on activism, arguing, for example, that democratic values ‘have to be imposed by the revolt of the excluded’ (Balibar 2014, 207). A transboundary association does not always start as a rational claim-making in Milstein’s sense, or as an insurgency in the way Balibar claims. Democratization can also mean that people learn to live together as equals. Such learning happens in ordinary everyday life as well as in rational deliberation or insurgent collectives.

I will next introduce examples to demonstrate the importance of ordinary interaction to democratic orders and boundary-making. Much of the literature on boundary-making has concentrated on extraordinary events such as the refugee march (Celikates 2019; Schwiertz 2021) and the so-called Scarf Affair (Benhabib 2006). It is, however, rare that singular events change the attitudes and exclusive solidarities that produce hierarchical boundaries in social and political interaction, even if those events politicize and publicize boundary struggles. Jeremy Waldron once commented on the emergence of transnational norms in this way:

A norm’s transformation can be described as democratic, not because a change was approved by people voting as equals, but because the change emerged from the dynamics of ordinary life in relation to which there have been no problematic or invidious exclusions. Our theory of this is as yet undeveloped. (Waldron 2006, 97)

I partially agree with Waldron. While there are no dynamics of ordinary life that lie outside problematic power relations, there are processes where hierarchical and excluding relations are revealed and transformed by participants. Collective agents that create meaningful and civil connections across currently hierarchical and exclusionary boundaries also have the potential to produce new and more reciprocal norms of transboundary interaction. In this context, I focus on such agents as transboundary associations.

First, transboundary associations create new sites of transboundary encounters where participants from different sides of the border can learn from each other's experiences. Transboundary associations cannot transgress boundaries without creating sites where participants from different sides of the boundary encounter each other. To successfully transgress boundaries, these sites must be marked by reflective forms of civility. This means that the sites of encounter do not reproduce hierarchical norms of existing interaction, but have the potential to lead to self-transformation of the participants. In other words, participants should be willing to reflect on the prevailing norms and practices of society. Second, in order to qualify as a democratizing force, these produced sites must be more democratic than the surrounding society (Balibar 2015, 128), meaning that the sites are more open to the inclusion of participants and respectful of different viewpoints and ways of life than within the hegemonic spheres of political and social interaction. Thus, the transboundary associations discussed here transform boundaries by creating new and more reciprocal social relations across and beyond previously hierarchical internal and external borders.

The screenplay ‘Pride,’ which premiered in 2014, publicized relatively unknown events that took place during the 1984–1985 British miners’ strike. A London-based support group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) began rallying support for the striking miners. In the homophobic environment of 1980s Britain, LGSM's support aroused suspicion among the media, the miners, and the labor movement. Although LGSM raised a significant amount of money to support the strikers, the consequences of LGSM's actions were also notable in other ways, as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) eventually helped to put LGBT rights on the Labour Party's agenda at the 1985 conference. The interviews in the short documentary ‘All Out! Dancing in Dulais,’ conducted by LGSM members, illustrate how contacts and meetings between the groups increased their understanding of each other's situations. For example, members of the mining community in Dulais mentioned their previous prejudices, stating that they were waiting to meet ‘a bunch of weirdos,’ but emphasized the ‘insight into other's way of life’ fostered by these encounters (LGSM 1986; Kelliher 2014, 245).

The encounters between LGSM and the Welsh mining community in Dulais are an example of a transboundary association whose actions intentionally and unintentionally created sites where participants transgressed and transformed internal boundaries of socio-political participation. Attitudes towards oppressed minorities do not change overnight, and the LGSM had its problems with inclusion (Kelliher 2014, 247). However, the sites and dialogical connections created by such associations can gradually change the attitudes that maintain internal boundaries, in this case excluding both LGBT people and striking miners from full rights of a citizen. The miners better understood the experiences of LGBT minorities after experiencing police brutality themselves during the strikes, and as a result, two groups with different common denominators found a common language to speak about the oppressive characteristics of Thatcher's government in both their informal and more formal meetings. This would not have been possible without the actual meetings and the initiative taken by the LGSM to approach the strikers.

In contrast to theories of partisanship, the example demonstrates how self-transformations of participants established NUM and LGSM as allies that could further LGBT rights within the British labor movement. The Labour Party, as a part of the established institutions, was not the initiator of the transformation but certain fragments within the broader labor movement struggled together to change the party’s stance on the LGBT questions. Diarmaid Kelliher’s (2014, 2017) brilliantly shows how ordinary encounters and discussions changed the attitudes of both miners and members of the LGSM. Both groups had prejudices against each other, but were willing to encounter the other with respect. Thus, the potential of more informal transboundary encounters to transform the norms and create unexpected allies is worth to be considered. Coalition politics often necessary for institutional changes benefit from ordinary encounters creating new bases for solidarity.

LGSM's most active period during the strike was short, but transboundary associations may have a longer existence. The Scottish Refugee Council (SRC) was founded in 1985 to raise awareness of the Scottish asylum system and refugees’ various standpoints. The Council's current Chief Executive, Sabir Zazai, himself a former asylum seeker from Afghanistan, has spoken on many occasions about his experiences both as a refugee and as a charity leader. Zazai has emphasized the importance of welcoming communities, arguing that ‘[e]veryday integration happens in the heart of our community, in our post offices, bus stops, libraries and faith institutions’ (Mathieson 2021). The discourse of integration may have its limits, but a welcoming culture produced collectively by local communities that are not just made up of ‘natives,’ as well as associations like SRC, can foster the attitude that each newcomer has ‘a huge wealth of talent and ability’ (Armour 2017) and ‘[w]hen they prosper, we all do well’ (Mathieson 2021), to quote Zasai. SRC engages in several activities, but most importantly, it collaborates with local communities and refugee advisory groups to better understand people's concerns and opinions. SRC shares the information it gathers from its work in local communities with refugees and also reviews its activities after periods of intensive consultation with refugee advisory groups.

A shared trait of LGSM and SCR is that they work to find common ground for transboundary interactions. I argue that such transboundary associations are crucial to creating understanding of other’s point of view, and therefore transforming solidarities and boundaries. As Benhabib (2018, 32) has asserted, a democratic culture must foster the ability to understand the other's point of view, and that is what I claim transboundary associations can accomplish. Institutions can secure reciprocal formal rights, and insurgent activism can politicize societal problems (see Celikates 2019), but the creation of transboundary sites of civility is a political practice that transforms boundaries through everyday practices.

I propose that democratizing transboundary associations may be claimed to have at least three particular functions. First, they have what Inéz Valdez calls a connective function (Valdez 2019, 165–167). Valdez uses the term to describe how so-called counter-publics connect. In LGSM’s case, it may be possible to speak of two connected counter-publics. However by transboundary associations I refer to a broader category of movements that connect associations or gather persons together across symbolic or institutional boundaries. In the case of SRC for instance, refugee communities are connected to local publics, which cannot be defined as counter-publics. Secondly, they have a civility function. This entails that democratically potential sites transgressing the current boundaries are always marked by civility. Without civility, boundaries may be transformed, but only in hierarchical or unilateral fashion. Civility does not, however, mean the already assumed good manners of the social sphere, but a more reflective respect toward others (see Táíwò 2020). In other words, by civility, I refer to the reflective and inclusive attitudes and practices of respect toward others that may be categorized, in the absence of a better term, as reflective civility. Mutual understanding and the ability to take in the viewpoint of the other are possible only if people treat each other with respect. Consequently, as people use their everyday practices and resources to bridge boundaries (cf. Lamont and Aksartova 2002), democratization can begin when someone opens their house to strangers, as happened for example in Dulais.

Thirdly, it is not enough that participants connect and treat each other momentarily with respect, but also that they learn from encounters. In this sense, transboundary associations have an educative function. That does not mean that the participants should intentionally educate or teach each other, but that encounters take such a form that the connective sites are environments of learning. John Dewey’s (see 2004, 20) work on education is illustrative in this respect. The social sphere can function as a medium for learning and particular environments ‘strengthen certain impulses’ (ibid: 17). Learning about societal boundaries cannot happen without actual encounters (connectivity) across these boundaries and strategies of reflective civility are necessary for encounters to be safe and respectful for all participants. Transboundary associations may fail and often will, but they still create chances for understanding others and how societal boundaries affect their lives. In Dewey’s words ‘ … more numerous and varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond … ’ (ibid, 93).

Democratic boundary transformation depends on participants who, voluntarily and with democratic intentions, cross boundaries that are fracturing and problematic for the demos. Compared to many formal organizations, self-organized collective agents are flexible in adapting their activities to connect people across internal and external boundaries. In contrast to self-organizing agents, states establish transboundary organizations in water management to coordinate cooperative access to waters that are territorially divided between countries (GWP 2017). These organizations typically have a specific agenda, such as the restoration of a river. Transboundary associations are not similarly organized from above as the mentioned organizations. The formers succeed in changing symbolic and institutional boundaries precisely because they connect people who voluntarily promote transboundary forms of civility. In other words, self-organization makes transboundary associations more flexible in producing new and ever-changing sites of interaction. They do not have to follow existing norms and practices, but can construct new, more democratic ones.

In complex social systems with fragmented public spheres, social movements become ‘laboratories of new experiences’ in the processes of everyday life (Melucci 1989; Keane and Meir 1989, 6). Transboundary associations are a prime example of such laboratories because they foster encounters in which new meanings of boundaries and transboundary interactions are ‘tested’ and produced. Without strictly defined political programs, participants in transboundary associations transform their behavior to produce new norms of interaction by challenging ‘the dominant codes of everyday life’ (ibid.). Internal and external boundaries of participation and belonging, based on the norms of interaction present in the social sphere, are an example of the types of dominant codes that transboundary associations transform through such processes of everyday life. The aforementioned civility function of transboundary associations entails new, transformed norms of politeness (Táíwò 2020, 1080).

By a transboundary site, I mean any connecting physical or virtual place that fosters civility and transcends the hierarchical symbolic boundaries that otherwise impede the potential for participation. For example, the School Strike for Climate movement produces a transboundary network of students who have limited political rights due to their age to voice their concerns about climate issues. Schools and other physical and virtual spaces can become sites for demonstrations where students transcend the current boundaries of political participation. Students participating in the walkouts do not have a common political program, but this movement connects individuals and different local associations to a larger movement that demands action from adults and decision-makers located within different institutionalized boundaries. Its demands urge decision-makers to see themselves as part of a global demos capable of action. It seems to me that the movement aims to reconfigure the boundaries of the demos in at least two ways. First, it empowers minors with partial political rights, and second, it insists that humanity is only capable of responding to global warming as a global demos. In this way, age limits on political participation and global hierarchies between states are simultaneously challenged.

The democratization of boundary-making and transformation is a never-ending process, and different strategies can reduce the strength and impact of oppressive symbolic and institutional boundaries. While democratization can be the result of formal institutional deliberations or insurgent acts, I have emphasized here the importance of everyday acts and encounters in producing reciprocal transboundary relations. Transboundary associations, through their long-term reflexive activity, produce new transboundary alliances and norms of interaction. Many of these norms are not the result of rationally motivated deliberation, but emerge from unexpected encounters between strangers. The encounters generated by transboundary associations enhance the participants’ understanding of each other's situations. Thus, in cases of transboundary associations, participants share a reflective attitude of civility. This civility in turn creates new spaces for democratic politics. Therefore, it can be said that by democratizing symbolic boundaries in everyday life, we also prepare the ground for institutional changes.

People today are part of multiple overlapping demoi, and therefore the dichotomies of internal and external boundaries or domestic and international spheres of interaction are sometimes misleading. If the dichotomy between domestic and transnational spheres of interaction is taken for granted, it would be easy to dismiss the examples I have discussed as local or domestic forms of activism that merely aim to make contemporary national societies more inclusive. Two points need to be made against such an interpretation. First, various forms of inequality are not only a local phenomenon, even though they are most often challenged by local actions. In the case of the LGSM and the Welsh mining community, for example, it is important to note that the homophobia or class-based inequalities they opposed are not unique to British society, but exist everywhere. Local associations do not always explicitly proclaim their links to transnational coalitions, but they are nonetheless, at least on a symbolic level, part of a broader movement against exclusions typical of many contemporary human societies. Second, even if the new practices and norms that emerge are local, they can inspire and educate participants elsewhere through the global circulation of communication. The School Strike for Climate is an excellent example of this. After Greta Thunberg's protest outside the Swedish parliament went public, the strikes spread around the world.

The World Social Forum (WSF), founded in 2001 to counter neoliberal globalization, could be another more transnational example of transboundary association. The events of the WSF provide a forum for alternative ideas and perspectives on globalization. However, the WSF has been criticized for its reification of colonial relations and for being primarily a space for Western NGOs (e.g. Lovera-Bilderbeek 2020). Much of the potential success of transboundary associations depends on how they are capable to address such hierarchies in how we relate to one another. If the problems can be ‘named and explored’ (Conway 2011, 232) and connections made to discuss and address them, this creates space for imaginaries that transcend the current political order and borders of the world. Thus, the WSF has the potential to provide venues for encounters across linguistic, cultural, and institutional borders that may later lead to transboundary associations focused on specific border disputes and transformations.

The WSF does not aim to act as a transnational demos, but it is evident that as a connective space it is producing associations that transcend the current boundaries and have the potential to transform the perception of the demoi. Janet Conway and Jakeet Singh (2009, 74) point to the WSF as a non-deliberative space that is an example of how ‘ … communication, convergence, solidarity and cooperation can be more effectively fostered through spaces of encounter that are non-deliberative … ’ in the sense that the WSF does not seek consensus or binding decisions. Instead, the WSF offers participants a transnational space for self-organization and connection (ibid.: 68).

From other instances, we know that self-organized transnational linkages have been critical for local movements and communities to counter powerful corporations and institutions,⁷ as well as to establish contacts that transform ideas of boundaries and communities. For example, contacts in a variety of movements and contexts facilitated the political unification of Europe (see Pegg 1983), which have later led to a new transnational polity in the form of the European Union. Wolfram Kaiser's (2007, 65–66) work illustrates how the thematic and ‘not overtly political’ transnational networks in Christian Democratic circles created contacts that were crucial for the interwar and postwar dialogues of European political unification.⁸ Such large-scale boundary transformations and the establishment of new transnational polities often require successful convergence and transboundary associations in different contexts and social and political movements.

Transboundary encounters facilitated by transboundary associations can lead to self-transformation of the participants. Small proportions of the world's population participate continuously in formal decision-making, and the incipient democratization of borders is likely to occur more often in non-institutionalized interaction than in real or imagined formal institutions. Transboundary associations vary in size and scope, and thus in the issues of inclusion and exclusion they are addressing. For example, the democratization of the functions and meanings of state borders requires that participants interacting across a particular border come together in various movements and sites to create potential for formal transnational cooperation approved by the majorities.

5. Conclusion

My discussion has aimed to enrich the debate on the democratic boundary problem by showing that boundaries are a complex phenomenon. In order to think about how actual boundary making could be democratized, we need to identify characteristics of agents that can foster democratically potential transboundary interaction. Only then can we identify immanent, democratically motivated agents that aim to transcend and transform boundaries. Rather than applying theoretical principles, these agents reveal different boundaries of social and political participation and negotiate how they should be conceived so that participants have a meaningful place in demoi. Thus, these associations have both revealing and constructive functions. They disclose boundaries and aspects of them that are problematic and hinder the autonomy of participants. Constructively, they aim to approach others with whom they can change the boundaries in question.

I have attempted to show that there is a specific category of associations that produce incipient forms of more reciprocal transboundary interaction and can democratize boundary making in everyday interaction. Scholarly debates about the boundaries of democratic polities move too quickly to reconstruct norms and institutions, or overemphasize the role of activism in democratizing boundaries. Boundaries emerge from multiple everyday actions, and their transformation is often a horizontal process in those same contexts where they emerge and are maintained.

I suggested that in thinking about how boundaries might be negotiated more democratically, much more attention should be paid to the specific forms of interaction produced by transboundary associations. These associations connect participants across current boundaries and can lead to lasting changes in everyday interaction. Encounters are necessary for participants to understand and learn from others. Thus, transboundary encounters reveal the problems associated with specific boundaries and can lead to the invention of new ways of living together.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Kristian Klockars for his comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Demos is derived from ancient Greek and is used in the debate about the democratic boundary problem as a synonym for democratic collective or people. Demoi is a plural form that refers to the simultaneous existence of parallel and overlapping democratic collectives or peoples.

2 Patberg's (2021) discussion of ‘extraordinary partisanship’ attempts to overcome some of the problems associated with theories of partisanship, but the limited role that Patberg gives to extraordinary parties makes it difficult to see how they would generate transnational forms of democratic boundary-making. According to Patberg, extraordinary parties are ‘specifically established for the purposes of a constitutional project’ (193–194). Thus, these parties have a specific constitutional agenda, not a broader goal of democratizing boundary-making.

3 Benhabib (2011, 159–160) contrasts the discourse principle and the all-affected principle. She claims that the former is a principle of moral justification, and the latter is a principle of political inclusion. Thus, in discourse theory committed to the discourse principle, all norms should be justified to the all-affected, but this does not mean that people should be included in formal decision-making processes in any polity that affects them.

4 Fichte wrote that: ‘ … the first, original and truly natural frontiers of states are undoubtedly their inner frontiers. Those who speak the same language are already, before all human art, joined together by mere nature with a multitude of invisible ties; they understand one another and are able to communicate ever more clearly; they belong together and are naturally one, an indivisible whole’ (Fichte 2008, 166).

5 See also e.g., Longo (2018) and Laine (2021) for a discussion of the increasing securitization of borders and its implications for bordering practices.

6 In addition to national narratives, narratives about shared values can create boundaries inside communities. This happens when certain values are defined as ‘ours’. This process of internal bordering in relation to values is aptly described by Yuval-Davis: ‘[e]mancipatory ethical and political values can be transformed, under certain conditions, into inherent personal attributes of members of particular national and regional collectivities (Britain, the West) and, thus, in practice become exclusionary rather than permeable signifiers of boundaries.’ (Yuval-Davis 2006, 212–213)

Thus, in democracies that formally are committed to equality between persons, exclusions are often produced in informal ways. An illustrative example is the narrative that certain ‘foreigners’ and citizens with foreign backgrounds do not share ‘western values’ of human rights and democracy.

7 See, for example, Khagram (2002) for a discussion of how local activists and people managed to stop internationally funded dam projects in the Narmada Valley in India by campaigning and networking across national borders.

8 For a discussion of how these connections lead to cross-border cooperation between Christian Democratic parties in France and Germany, see also Wolkenstein (2020).