Chiara Raucea

How Do We Make Liberal Democratic Law Together? Remarks on Van der Walt’s Notion of a ‘Diffuse We’ In the last section of the article ‘Rawls, Habermas and Liberal Democracy,’ Van der Walt introduces the notion of a ‘diffuse we’ to delineate the role that constituent power plays in his account of liberal democratic law. This contribution raises questions about Van der Walt’s understanding of a liberal democratic community as a plural self. The first part of the article reviews some of the core passages of his The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law to highlight the different accounts of the unity of a liberal democratic community, which Van der Walt rejects. The last part of the paper questions the (epistemic) conditions under which the ‘diffuse we’ proposed by Van der Walt can socially cooperate and express a shared commitment to be bound by liberal democratic norms.

The substance of citizenship: is it rights all the way down? This paper examines how the distribution of social goods within a political community relates to decisions on membership boundaries. The author challenges two renowned accounts of such a relation: firstly, Walzer’s account according to which decisions on membership boundaries necessarily precede decisions on distribution; secondly, Benhabib’s account, according to which membership boundaries can be called into question on the basis of universalist claims. Departing from both accounts, the author concludes that actual changes in the pool of participants in practices of creation and exchange of social goods pressure a political community to redefine its distributive patterns and, accordingly, the boundaries of its formal political membership. This claim will be supported by the analysis of threshold cases decided by the EU Court of Justice, in which EU citizenship is invoked with the atypical purpose of granting rights to a specific group of non-formal members.