Constellations Volume 12, No 4, 2005. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Interaction-Dependent Justice and the Problem of International Exclusion Raffaele Marchetti The Problem of International Exclusion Political history can be interpreted as a long journey marked by battles for the equal right to participate in the decision-making process of political life; that is, for political enfranchisement. Indeed, the description of the development of polit- ical life over the centuries coincides for a significant part with the description of the fights for the inclusion of those political subjects who were kept apart in a subaltern status. Differences of social class, ethnicity, gender, and skin color have long represented insurmountable barriers deployed to exclude people from polit- ical and social power. Social categorizations of ethnic and religious minorities, indigenous peoples, women, the elderly, homosexuals, the young, the poor, and, by proxy, future generations, were used as exclusionary mechanisms to maintain a condition of political deprivation. These ostracized individuals consequently suffered a disadvantaged and profoundly unjust life in comparison with those endowed with full political membership, and with lives thus almost invariably characterized by a high degree of social vulnerability, those so dispossessed were motivated to advance claims to redress their political entitlement. And so they struggled for political inclusion. 1 ‘Foreignness’ constitutes another typical category of exclusion, and unlike those previously mentioned, despite the intense criticism under which the priority traditionally granted to fellow citizens over aliens has recently come, it is a cate- gory that is still powerfully effective in discriminating between included and excluded individuals. In fact, the very idea of a self-defining group implies exclu- sivity, i.e., the existence of public characteristics effectively delimiting the boundaries of a community. Every such society needs to assume a selective crite- rion in order to self-define its jurisdictional constituency, thus simultaneously keeping out non-members. The demarcation of group identity entails drawing a line between those who are in and those who are out, between those individuals who are recognized as equal and those who are treated unequally. Such a mecha- nism of limited inclusion creates a system of social exclusion shaped according to differing spheres of justice, the thresholds of which depend on the scope of application of the principle of impartiality. 2 The degree of impartiality that each group applies in its relationship with aliens thus represents a good indicator of the degree of inclusion of non-members. 3