If rights say what every person is owed, the next question is who counts as one of the people a community has to answer to. This pillar's answer is that the line a community draws between its own and everyone else does not settle who has moral standing: the person on the far side of the border is the same kind of being, with the same needs, and the reasoning that grounds care inside the line does not get to stop at it. So what crosses the border is the floor (the conditions for a decent, agency-bearing life), not any particular culture, faith, or form of government, which stay the receiving community's own. The other half of belonging runs close to home: the neighbors you can actually see, sit across from, and argue with in person are the ground-level fabric political life is built on, and a community that lets that fabric wither loses the ability to recognize itself accurately. Belonging is membership in both directions at once: who a community owes, and the lived ties through which it knows who it is.

Belonging is what the right to life ([§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)) articulates at the membership register. It was established at [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) that the right to life, read at the depth where life actually subsists, is already a right to the conditions of life-as-agency; this section asks who counts as a member whose conditions the political community is accountable to. The framework's answer is structural: the structural reciprocity [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality) grounded does not stop at the boundary the community has drawn between its own and everyone else. It runs across that boundary on the same logic that grounded it inside the boundary.

The boundary between one group of people and another is imaginary in the structural sense at issue. The framework is not denying that national borders, jurisdictional lines, and institutional memberships exist as conventional facts; Defense ([§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>)) and Enforcement ([§9.12](<9.12 Enforcement.md>)) treat the protective architecture those conventions support as legitimate constitutive infrastructure. The denial is narrower: the conventions are not load-bearing for moral standing. The body across the boundary is the same kind of body as the body inside it: an organism that persists, occupies space, and depends on sustained throughput to keep persisting. They are all people; they are all organisms; they all need support. The structural-reciprocity binder [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) supplies does not read the boundary the community drew; it reads the conditions on either side of it, and finds the same conditions.

The right to belong follows. It is not a privilege the community extends to some and withholds from others on the basis of the imagined boundary. It is the right to life of [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) carried through to the political-membership register: where life-as-agency requires participation in a political community, the community owes recognition as members to all bodies whose conditions the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) argument tracks. The community sets boundaries about what its members will not have done to them; it does not set boundaries about whose membership in the species, or whose claim on the support that members of the species require, counts. *Community* is the word for the institutional form belonging takes once the subjects who must coordinate number not in twos but in millions; it is a word inside *belonging*, not a separate section beside it. *Community* is not one scale. The reasoning that names community as the institutional form belonging takes once coordination runs to the millions did not specify which millions: a neighborhood, a city, a province, a nation-state, and a supranational body are each a *political community* on this definition, nested inside one another, each doing recognition work at a different population size. The framework does not owe a single scale a privileged claim to the word. What it owes is a rule for which scale a given question belongs to, and the rule is already implicit in what recognition accuracy requires: a decision belongs at the smallest scale whose membership includes everyone whose conditions the decision touches and who has, at that scale, standing to correct it when it goes wrong. Push a decision to a scale broader than the harm it produces, and the people best positioned to notice a failure and act on it lose standing to the people least positioned to notice it. Push it narrower than the harm's actual reach, and it externalizes onto people the deciding body owes recognition to but excludes from the deciding. Federalism, devolution, and subsidiarity are institutional names for satisfying this rule at different points along the scale; the framework does not derive a specific arrangement of them — that remains, like the rest of civic-infrastructure design, underdetermined where multiple architectures satisfy the constraint — but it does derive the constraint itself, and the constraint runs through every nested community named above, not only the outermost one a law happens to be written at.

*The extension is substrate-only.* When the recognition [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounded crosses the boundary the community had drawn between its own and everyone else, what crosses is the substrate (the conditions for life-as-agency the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) derivation tracks) and only the substrate. Cultural expression (the made vehicles through which a community carries its own perspectival readings of the structures it lives among, [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>) Art), religious practice, language, custom, governance form, and the locally-varied institutional architecture through which a receiving population organizes its own political life do not cross. The framework extends the floor, not the ceiling. This is what distinguishes structural extension from imposition. Imposition crosses with content: a way of life is brought in to displace another. Substrate-only extension crosses with capacity: the conditions for any way of life are made available where they have been missing, and the receiving population's values are not changed because the values are not what crossed. What crossed is the structural means by which the values the population already holds (survival, support, the conditions of its own cultural reproduction) become operationally available where the prior arrangement was producing scarcity, displacement, or coerced migration. Substrate-only extension is harder to repudiate (there is less to repudiate) and structurally less invasive at the cultural register the receiving population's autonomy occupies. The substrate-only-extension logic runs symmetrically at the domestic register, where the structural case is most acute. The participation-conditions floor extends to Black Americans, Indigenous nations within settler states, and other internal populations on the same logic that runs across national boundaries: substrate (the conditions for life-as-agency) crosses with the recognition obligation, while content (cultural expression, governance form, communal practice) does not. The empirical record on this substrate-only extension (the capacity-versus-content comparison across postwar reconstruction and the functionalist tradition, the domestic substrate-extension-then-withdrawal of Reconstruction and the broken-treaties record, and the arrears framing of the obligation) is set out at [§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>) (Mills, *Black Rights / White Wrongs* 2017, and Coates, 'The Case for Reparations' 2014, develop the canonical analytic engagements; reparative-policy implications developed at [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)). Productive-contact conditions have historically been structurally undermined by segregation patterns (FHA redlining 1934–1968; pre/post-Brown school resegregation; Jim Crow and post-Jim-Crow occupational stratification); integration-as-policy is the institutional infrastructure that supplies productive-contact conditions where segregation has prevented them.

*The extension is required, not optional.* This section grounds membership in the structural reciprocity [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) supplies, and that reciprocity reads no boundary. A population that has the substrate and a neighboring population that does not is in possession of conditions the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) argument did not exempt from extension. The per-issue voting [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) develops is therefore voting on *how* the extension proceeds (at what pace, through what infrastructure, with what division of labor across receiving and originating communities), not on *whether* the extension obtains. The reverse direction is what would require justification: a structural account that derived the right-to-life as already including subsistence and then exempted neighbors from the extension would be running the derivation halfway and stopping where it became politically uncomfortable.

Walzer's *Spheres of Justice* (1983, ch. 2 'Membership') presses the objection from the communitarian side: membership is itself a distributed good (the first good a community allocates) 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 the 'extension is required' thesis overrides the communal self-determination that gives membership its meaning. The framework grants what Walzer's account gets right: membership in the thick sense (shared identity, cultural belonging, the 'we' a community constitutes) is a good with distributive structure, and its meanings are not for outsiders to set. That is precisely what the substrate-only commitment protects: content does not cross, so the thick membership Walzer is concerned to defend stays under communal self-determination. Where the framework parts from Walzer is on whether the *substrate* (the conditions for life-as-agency [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) tracks) is among the goods communal discretion governs. It is not, because the recognition [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds reads no boundary: the body across the line is the same kind of body, and the floor it needs is not a good the community distributes at its discretion but a condition the community's own grounding does not exempt from extension. Walzer's distributive-discretion point holds at the content register, where the framework already locates communal self-determination, and does not reach the substrate register, where the recognition obligation runs regardless of where the boundary was drawn.

The same dispute has been joined directly in the ethics of immigration, and the framework's position sits between its two poles. David Miller (*National Responsibility and Global Justice* 2007; *Strangers in Our Midst* 2016) presses Walzer's objection into immigration specifically: a self-determining political community has a presumptive right to control admission, grounded in the value of national self-determination and the public culture that sustains it, so an obligation to extend the substrate to all whose conditions obtain overrides a control the community legitimately holds. The framework grants Miller what it granted Walzer (self-determination over the meaning of membership and the public culture that carries it is genuine, and nothing in the extension touches it, because content does not cross) and parts on the same line: the control governs the thick membership and its culture, not the substrate, which the recognition [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds does not exempt from extension whatever the boundary. From the opposite pole, Joseph Carens (*Aliens and Citizens* 1987; *The Ethics of Immigration* 2013) presses the egalitarian objection that birthright citizenship in an affluent polity is the modern analogue of feudal privilege, so that liberal-egalitarian commitments push toward open borders rather than toward a community-paced extension. The framework reaches Carens's conclusion (that the drawn boundary does not track moral standing and cannot by itself justify withholding the substrate) but on its own ground rather than his: the substrate crosses because the recognition [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds reads no boundary, not because the allocation of life-chances by birth is morally arbitrary, and the framework need not take on the luck-egalitarian premise to get there. Where it parts from Carens is on what follows. That the boundary does not justify withholding the substrate is no argument against pacing the extension: how fast the substrate can actually be extended is bound by the productive-contact conditions the base requires to function ([§9.2.2](<9.2.2 What is Required.md>); the hardening dynamic at [§9.2.4](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)), so an extension that outran those conditions would defeat the recognition it was discharging. The pace is constrained structurally, not held back by a discretion the framework has already denied. Where Miller would let the community refuse the substrate and Carens would dissolve the pacing that lets the base absorb the extension, the framework owes the substrate (against Miller) at a pace its own functioning conditions set (against Carens), with the how (pace, infrastructure, division of labor) adjudicated through the direction-recognition system of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>).

Recognized direction has to be coordinated across a population to translate into action. Community derives from [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) (Morality), specifically from the mutual-recognition mechanism [§8.12.2](<8.12.2 What is Required.md>) grounds, with [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) (Reasoning), [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) (Knowledge), [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) (Meaning), and [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) (Will) as the capacities mutual recognition runs on, and [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) (Identity) as the condition membership specifically presupposes: that there is a persisting, identifiable subject to be recognized as the same member across encounters. Recognition at the base is not just recognition of a body present now but of a continuant who was here before and will be here again; without the identity condition [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) supplies, the membership relation has no subject to attach to. Mutual recognition at population scale is what [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounded morality in: subjects who persist, occupy distinct positions, and meet across asymmetric exchange. Community is the institutional and infrastructural form mutual recognition takes at the *base*: the face-to-face encounter between particular subjects, the standing relationship across repeated encounters, and the local institutions that hold those encounters. No participant arrives at that base ready-made. Each is fed, kept safe, cared for, and formed into someone able to recognize others through labor and sustained relationships someone else performs. That work is not a private background fact. It is collective investment in the people civic life later depends on. The form of care remains open — many family and household forms can sustain it — but the function is not optional: every child needs stable, repeated recognition from committed others, and the political community must support the conditions under which that care can occur. The mediation layer the base scales into (newspapers, broadcast, the digital information environment) is treated separately in [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) (Information). The two registers are jointly constitutive; this section develops the base itself, and what happens when the mediation layer is offered as a substitute for it is developed at [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>).

The people you can see, sit across from, run into at the store, and disagree with face-to-face are not optional extras to political life. They are the base layer political life runs on. Putnam (2000) documented the long decline of US civic infrastructure across the second half of the twentieth century (the membership clubs, congregations, bowling leagues, and local associations through which the face-to-face base had been maintained) as the empirical setup for what happens when the base is lost.

A school board meeting where parents who disagree about curriculum spend two hours in the same room and leave with a shared sense of what each is actually worried about (even without resolving the disagreement) has done recognition work that a year of online comment threads on the same topic does not produce. The shared room let each side update its model of the other against a person, not a profile. That is what recognition accuracy means in practice, and it is what the section's structural deposits are written to protect.

Two structural deposits land in this section.

*The face-to-face base is non-substitutable.* The face-to-face register is what makes recognition at population scale empirically tractable: shared local conditions, embodied presence, accountability across the full register of social cues, recognition across difference at the level [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) takes to be load-bearing. Digital infrastructure can hold recognition once the base makes it available, but cannot supply what the base makes available; a population that has lost its face-to-face civic infrastructure cannot recover recognition accuracy by adding digital infrastructure. The non-substitutability is structural in the same sense the framework treats other constitutive floors, not a preference, and not nostalgia for older institutional forms, but a feature of what mutual recognition consists in once it scales beyond the two-person case [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) begins from.

The mechanism is modal-field updating ([§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>)). Without face-to-face contact, people often rely on stereotypes to imagine the lives of an out-group. Sustained, equal-status, cooperative contact replaces those placeholders with lived evidence: daily detail, small failures, recognizable kindnesses, and the actual variety of other people's conditions. Over time, later encounters are guided less by stereotype and more by that accumulated experience. Tolerance is not a posture taken up by an effortful body against its own wariness; it is the affective output of a body whose field has been updated by exposure with the right structure. Conversely, where contact is brief, unequal, or conflict-laden, the field updates in the opposite direction: the encounter installs evidence consistent with the threat hypothesis, and the body's wariness on subsequent encounters fires harder rather than softer. The contact-hypothesis literature (Allport 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp 2006 meta-analysis across 515 studies) confirms exactly what the modal-field account predicts: contact under productive conditions updates the field; contact under unproductive conditions reinforces the prior. The historical inversion follows in the same form: ancestral populations whose modal fields were calibrated to a genuine resource-competition environment, where the threat-from-the-neighboring-group branch carried real probability mass, fired wariness adaptively, not because the bodies were morally defective but because the field reflected the conditions the bodies were inside. What has changed for most modern populations is the conditions, not the machinery. Until exposure updates the field, the inherited calibration still fires; integration policies are, mechanically, the institutional infrastructure that supplies field-updating exposure at scale.

Recognition is grounded ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) in subjects who occupy *distinct* positions and can be reached *across asymmetric exchange*: the encounter with a subject whose perspective the recognizing subject cannot directly access and must infer across the interface between them. Two conditions are jointly required: that the other appears as genuinely *other*, bringing a position the recognizing subject does not already hold; and that the exchange is *asymmetric*, meaning something is at stake across it that the encounter has not pre-selected. The face-to-face encounter preserves both: the neighbor across the table brings their full social position into the room, and the encounter runs across it without a filtering layer. What happens when the mediation layer compresses both conditions is developed at [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) (Information).

*Civic infrastructure is collective investment in the same register as the legal system or the public-health system.* Libraries, community centers, neighborhood-scale civic institutions, third places: these constitute the face-to-face base any subsequent information-environment design has to build on. They are not a discretionary subsidy whose absence the rest of the system can compensate for. Where they are dismantled, the base on which mediated discourse depends erodes; where they are sustained, the base is available for the mediation layer [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) develops to answer to. The framework derives the constitutive role; specific funding architectures, ownership rules, and design choices remain underdetermined where multiple architectures satisfy the constraint. The infrastructure must be distributionally and accessibly equitable to perform its structural function: differential access to libraries, community centers, and third places across populations is structural-inequality reinforcement at the belonging register, and historical disinvestment has been racially stratified (library-hour reductions in Black-majority neighborhoods, public-pool closures during desegregation, third-place loss in deindustrialized formerly-segregated neighborhoods); ADA-compliant venues, interpretation, childcare-friendly design, and transit access are structural conditions of the base rather than accommodations added on top.

The two deposits describe civic infrastructure from the side of what is lost when it fails. The positive account runs in the other direction. When the face-to-face base is intact, subjects can do something unavailable where the base has degraded: they can be wrong about their neighbors and correct it. That correction mechanism is what the whole arrangement depends on. A subject who encounters a neighbor at a community meeting, across a fence, or in a third place brings a model of the neighbor's conditions and orientation; the encounter updates the model against what the neighbor actually is. The update is what recognition-accuracy means in practice. A population with that update mechanism intact brings real conditions to the direction-recognition system of [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>). The base is not one component of the political community alongside others. It is the condition under which the recognition every other component depends on stays tethered to anything real.

The classical political tradition reached for what this section recovers structurally. Augustine's *civitas* (the city understood as the body of mutual belonging), Aquinas's common good, Hegel's *Sittlichkeit* (ethical life as institutionalized shared practice), and the long Christian and Jewish lineages that named community as the body in which persons hold each other in being: each was tracking a real mechanism of mutual recognition and locating its binding force in a metaphysical participation that was supposed to back the mechanism up. (The structural function these traditions tracked is the *affiliation* capability Nussbaum develops in *Women and Human Development* 2000 ch. 1 and *The Cosmopolitan Tradition* 2019 maps as the analytic territory.) The Inversion is the same one §6 ran on the divine attributes: the binding force the tradition located in a transcendent ground is what mutual recognition is doing in plain view, once the being is correctly identified as the field of mutually exposed subjects rather than as a being beyond them. Communion in the recognition sense is real, demanding, and constitutive of what subjects can do together, answerable to the conditions [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) already established, not to a backup ontology. The modern republican tradition's articulation of the public sphere as the base of legitimacy (Habermas [1962] 1989) is treated at [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) (Information), where the mediation layer's role in maintaining or undermining the face-to-face base is the chapter's concern.

Two contemporary positions deny the face-to-face-base-non-substitutability reading at its premise. Cyber-utopian and networked-community defenses (Benkler 2006; Shirky 2008) rightly note that mediated communities can produce real recognition; Rawlsian political liberalism (Rawls 1993) rightly notes that citizens need not share a comprehensive doctrine. The framework grants both points, then narrows the claim. The non-substitutability thesis concerns population-scale political-community recognition: the kind [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) requires for direction-recognition to read the population's actual conditions. Dispersed sub-population communities and overlapping consensus can help, but neither replaces the face-to-face base that keeps recognition tethered to the full population.

What the derivation does not pick. It does not specify civic-infrastructure funding architectures, community-investment programs, or local-institution designs. It derives the constraint (that the face-to-face base must function as a population's mutual-recognition mechanism at the level [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) takes to be load-bearing) and leaves implementation underdetermined where multiple architectures satisfy the constraint. Where multiple framework-compatible architectures remain, the choice falls to [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation) and to the design literatures the implementation question belongs to.


- [9.2.1 What is Disputed](<9.2.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.2.2 What is Required](<9.2.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.2.3 What is Predicted](<9.2.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.2.4 What is Confirmed](<9.2.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.2.5 What is Concluded](<9.2.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [9.1.5 What is Concluded](<9.1.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.2.1 What is Disputed](<9.2.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
