Democracy and political boundaries

If democracy implies political equality, in the sense that everyone has roughly the same opportunity to influence political decisions, we may ask: ”Who are included among ‘everyone’?” In other words, if ”democracy” is government “by the people”, who are included among “the people”? This may be called ”the boundary problem in democratic theory”. The problem is not what actually existing peoples actually govern, or ought to govern, themselves, but what sovereign collectives or self-governing groups of people there ought to be. Of course, it may be true that some actually existing sovereign states ought to be sovereign states, but this cannot be taken for granted. It is not self-evident. Maybe Sweden ought to be a sovereign state, but another possibility is that it is rather Scandinavia, or the European Union or the southern half of Sweden, that ought to be a sovereign state. Again, it is possible that exactly those individuals who are now legally entitled to vote in Swedish parliamentary elections are the same as those who ought to be legally entitled to vote and in this sense to govern themselves, but it is not obvious that the real world is in this way morally ideal. Democratic decision making can indeed occur in many different contexts, e.g. in business corporations, labor unions and other organizations or committees. However, in this paper my main focus is upon political collectivities, such as sovereign states or federations. For example, the problems I have in mind are such as the proposed secession of Quebec from Canada, the relation of Sweden to the European Union, the possible transformation of the EU into a federal state like the USA, the position of Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the German reunion after the Cold War, the requirement that Kosovo should become independent from Serbia-Montenegro, the relation between Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and Great Britain, the future political