If we look back at the history of modern democratic regimes since the inaugural moment of the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century, it becomes clear that the link we spontaneously establish between democracy, popular sovereignty and self-legislation was by no means self-evident for the actors of these Revolutions, nor for the theorists to whom they ascribed, particularly (in the case of the French Revolution) for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The decisive factor in the "democratization of democracies" was not the principle of self-legislation, but the demand for equality, in the name of which struggles for civil, political and social rights were waged throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
This observation compels us to give the figure of the individual subject of rights a central importance in interpreting the nature of modern democracy. Contrary to the mistrust that social critics generally harbor towards this figure, as well as towards the related notion of "subjective rights" (both of which are assumed to belong to the conceptual arsenal of liberal individualism), it should be recognized as the true political innovation of the modern age. The fact that the individual as such, and not by virtue of any community affiliation, can claim rights, presupposes the eradication of the legal status distinctions of past centuries. The demand for equal rights, which has been the driving force behind the "democratization of democracies", is the product of the monopolization by a territorial power (the modern State) of the ability to make and guarantee the law.
All the phenomena - economic, legal and political - that we now refer to as "globalization", signify the end of this monopoly. The future of democratic citizenship is becoming problematic because of the plurality and heterogeneity of the instances of power with which individuals and groups of individuals claiming rights are confronted. If the territorial organization of state power is what has enabled the individualization of the subject of law, it is also what has nationalized citizenship. The question is whether these two products of state sovereignty are so intimately linked that they can only survive together, or whether on the contrary it is possible to invent a non-national citizenship without sacrificing this specific form of political subjectivity, whose core is the subject of law, and with it the emancipatory resources attested by the last two centuries of our history.
