A meaningful discussion about the democratic limit or boundary is only now beginning. In South Africa, the political transition from apartheid to democracy keeps running up against the substance of ‘the people’. In the absence of any traditional unifying principles (of language, culture, religion, race, and so on), the identity of South Africans is elusive. We might note too that much of the cosmopolitan literature on democracy appeals to a shift in scale, from the territorial state to the world, or globe, or even planet. Yet, says John Agnew, such appeals have important consequences for democracy without properly theorising them. He argues that:

The merit of Chantal Mouffe's work is that she has recently broached the question of the democratic limit with a view, precisely, to theorising it. She argues that democracy always entails relations of inclusion exclusion that speak to a notion of the political frontier (Mouffe, 2000: 43). One of the key problems of democratic theory, she suggests, has been its inability to conceptualise such a limit (p. 43). This has not, until recently, seemed an urgent task. The reason, one can imagine, is largely political. The figure of the citizen has, historically, been deemed either a resident of a nation or of the world, so that nation–world are the two poles that have exhausted the democratic imaginary.

Yet over the last two decades, both identities have become increasingly unsettled. In the first place, the collapse of ‘really existing’ socialist states and the associated crisis of Marxism have disturbed the prospect of internationalism. In the second, feminist and multicultural critiques of the nation have inspired thinking about new forms of political community. More and more, writers have been drawn together around the notion of cosmopolitanism. It is in this context that there is growing interest in a principle of political demarcation, a principle of the frontier, that can simultaneously discriminate between citizens and non-citizens, but in a way that is not discriminatory.