At the membership register, the open question is who counts as a member whose conditions the political community is accountable to, and whether the community holds discretion over the boundary it draws between its own and everyone else. Two layers of the dispute have to be separated, because the framework concedes ground on one and holds ground on the other.

The communitarian objection presses the harder version, and Walzer states it directly. In *Spheres of Justice* (1983, ch. 2, 'Membership'), membership is itself the first good a community distributes (the good that conditions every other distribution) and communities hold qualified self-determination over admission, because the shared meanings that constitute who 'we' are come from inside the community rather than being imposed from outside it. On this reading, a thesis that the community *owes* membership to all whose conditions obtain overrides the communal self-determination that gives membership its meaning in the first place. Haslanger (*Resisting Reality* 2012) supplies the complementary pressure from the other side: a boundary that presents itself as natural is socially constructed, and treating it as a brute fact launders contingent exclusion into apparent necessity.

The membership dispute sharpens at its cross-border form, where the boundary layer pulls in opposite directions. David Miller (*National Responsibility and Global Justice* 2007; *Strangers in Our Midst* 2016) presses the communitarian objection into immigration directly: a self-determining political community holds a presumptive right to control its own membership and admission, grounded not in Walzer's shared meanings alone but in the value of national self-determination and the public culture that sustains it, so a thesis obligating the community to extend its substrate to all whose conditions obtain overrides a control the community legitimately holds. From the opposite pole, Joseph Carens (*Aliens and Citizens* 1987; *The Ethics of Immigration* 2013) presses the egalitarian objection: birthright citizenship in an affluent polity is the modern analogue of feudal privilege, and the liberal-egalitarian commitments Carens works from push toward open borders rather than toward a community-paced extension, so that any pacing constraint on admission threatens to reproduce the arbitrariness of birthright those commitments were meant to dissolve. The two positions bracket the framework from both sides: Miller disputes that the substrate-extension obligation is owed against the community's control at all, while Carens disputes that the community may pace the extension rather than simply open to it. Each names something the framework grants (that self-determination over the meaning of membership is genuine, with Miller and Walzer, and that the drawn boundary does not track moral standing and cannot by itself justify exclusion, with Carens, though the framework reaches that on the structural grounds of [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) rather than from the moral arbitrariness of birth) and each presses a strong form the framework does not concede: that the genuine self-determination extends to refusing the substrate the recognition mechanism derives as owed, or that the arbitrariness of birthright dissolves the productive-contact conditions that pace how fast recognition can in fact be extended. Whether the boundary is a control the community may exercise against the obligation (Miller, Walzer) or dissolves into an open-borders requirement no pacing may constrain (Carens) is the cross-border axis the membership dispute turns on.

A second layer disputes not who counts but what community-constitutive recognition requires. The cyber-utopian / networked-community defense (Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks* 2006; Shirky, *Here Comes Everybody* 2008) reads mediated infrastructure as capable of carrying genuine community-constitutive recognition without a face-to-face base. Rawlsian political liberalism (Rawls, *Political Liberalism* 1993) reads the polity as requiring only an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice, not the thicker mutual-recognition base [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds; to require population-scale recognition accuracy is, on this reading, to import a comprehensive doctrine into the political conception's neutrality.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the opposite destination on several independent grounds. The classical political tradition (Augustine's *civitas*; Aquinas's common good; Hegel's *Sittlichkeit*) located the binding force of belonging in metaphysical participation but tracked a real mechanism of mutual recognition with institutional weight; Nussbaum's *affiliation* capability (*Women and Human Development* 2000; *The Cosmopolitan Tradition* 2019) maps the same territory in analytic terms. The deliberative-democratic tradition reads the public sphere of face-to-face encounter as constitutive infrastructure of legitimacy, and the social-capital tradition (Putnam, *Bowling Alone* 2000; Klinenberg 2002, 2018) documents the non-substitutability of that infrastructure.

The dispute the section frames is therefore twofold: whether membership is a good held under communal discretion (Walzer; Miller at the border) or a floor the community's own grounding does not exempt from extension, and, in its cross-border form, whether that floor may be community-paced against the productive-contact conditions or must open further than any pacing allows (Carens); and whether the face-to-face base is substitutable by mediated or overlapping-consensus arrangements (Benkler and Shirky; Rawls) or is the non-substitutable ground that mutual recognition at scale structurally requires. What membership the community owes (including the cross-border substrate extension, with the concession-then-part answering Miller and Carens by name) is settled by the structural-necessity derivation in [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) itself; the base's non-substitutability and what community-architecture must deliver are derived at [§9.2.2](<9.2.2 What is Required.md>), drawing on the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) mutual-recognition mechanism; the pace, sequencing, and division of labor of cross-border extension are adjudicated at [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>), where direction-recognition sets who paces the extension rather than the boundary's current holder. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.2 Belonging](<9.2 Belonging.md>) | [9.2.2 What is Required](<9.2.2 What is Required.md>) →
