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Globalization and the Future of Democracy
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
David Held |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
A fundamental change in the relationship between citizens and policymakers has been provoked by the growing influence of transnational organizations, international sociopolitical movements and global health concerns. David Held, of the London School of Economics, outlines a cosmopolitan model of democracy, questions the relevance of current political boundaries and predicts the need for nation-states to relinquish much of their sovereignty in order to preserve the democratic rights of the people they govern. |
 n the liberal democracies, consent to government and legitimacy for governmental action are dependent upon electoral politics and the ballot box. Yet the notions that consent legitimates government, and that the ballot box is the appropriate mechanism whereby the citizen body as a whole periodically confers authority on government to enact the law and regulate economic and social life, become problematic as soon as the nature of a "relevant community" is contested. What is the proper constituency, and proper realm of jurisdiction, for developing and implementing policy with respect to health issues such as AIDS or BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), the use of nuclear energy, the management of nuclear waste, the harvesting of rain forests, the use of non-renewable resources, the instability of global financial markets, the reduction of the risks of chemical and nuclear warfare? |
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| The reform of the UN that is currently contemplated by the most powerful countries is focused on efforts to include other powerful countries. | |
National boundaries have traditionally demarcated the basis on which individuals are included and excluded from participation in decisions affecting their lives; but if many socio-economic processes, and the outcomes of decisions about them, stretch beyond national frontiers, then the implications of this are serious, not only for the categories of consent and legitimacy but for all the key ideas of democracy. At issue is the nature of a constituency (how should the proper boundaries of a constituency be drawn?), the meaning of representation (who should represent whom and on what basis?), and the proper form and scope of political participation (who should participate and in what way?). As fundamental processes of governance escape the categories of the nation state, the traditional national resolutions of the key questions of democratic theory and practice are open to doubt. |
Rights and obligations
Against this background, the nature and prospects of the democratic polity need re-examination. I have argued elsewhere that an acceptance of liberal democratic politics, in theory and practice, entails an acceptance of each citizen's equal interest in democracy; that is, a recognition of people's equal interest in self-determination (David Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 1995: part III). Each adult has an interest in political autonomy as a result of his or her status as a citizen with an equal entitlement to self-determination. An equal interest in political autonomy requires, I have also argued, that citizens enjoy a common structure of political action. A common structure of political action entails a shared enjoyment of a cluster of rights and obligations. This cluster of rights and obligations has traditionally been thought of as entailing, above all, civil and political rights and obligations. Again, elsewhere, I have argued that this cluster has to bite more deeply than civil and political rights alone; for the latter leave large swathes of power untouched by mechanisms of access, accountability, and control. At stake, in short, is a recognition that a common structure of political action requires a cluster of rights and obligations which cut across all key domains of power, where power shapes and affects people's life-chances with determinate effects on and implications for their political agency. |
I think of the cluster of rights and obligations that will create the basis of a common structure of political action as constituting the elements of a democratic public law. If power is to be held accountable wherever it is located--in the state, the economy, or cultural sphere--then a common structure of political action needs to be entrenched and enforced through a democratic public law. Such a notion, I believe, can coherently link the ideas of democracy and of the modern state. The key to this is the notion of a democratic legal order--an order which is bound by democratic public law in all its affairs. A democratic legal order--a democratic Rechtstaat--is an order circumscribed by, and accounted for in relation to, democratic public law. |
The idea of such an order, however, can no longer be simply defended as an idea suitable to a particular closed political community or nation state. We are compelled to recognize that we live in a complex interconnected world where the extent, intensity, and impact of issues (economic, political, or environmental) raise questions about where those issues are most appropriately addressed. Deliberative and decision-making centres beyond national territories are appropriately situated when those significantly affected by a public matter constitute a cross-border or transnational grouping, when "lower" levels of decision-making cannot manage and discharge satisfactorily transnational or international policy questions, and when the principle of democratic legitimacy can only be properly redeemed in a transnational context (see Held, 1995: chap. 10). If the most powerful geopolitical interests are not to settle many pressing matters simply in terms of their objectives and by virtue of their power, then new institutions and mechanisms of accountability need to be established. |
Cosmopolitan democracy
In the context of contemporary forms of globalization, for democratic law to be effective it must be internationalized. Thus, the implementation of what I call a cosmopolitan democratic law and the establishment of a community of all democratic communities--a cosmopolitan community--must become an obligation for democrats; an obligation to build a transnational, common structure of political action which alone, ultimately, can support the politics of self-determination. |
In this conception, the nation state "withers away." But this is not to say that states and national democratic polities become redundant. There are many good reasons for doubting the theoretical and empirical basis of claims that nation states will disappear. Rather, withering away means that states can no longer be, and can no longer be regarded as, the sole centres of legitimate power within their own borders, as is already the case in diverse settings. States need to be articulated with, and relocated within, an overarching democratic law. Within this framework, the laws and rules of the nation state would be but one focus for legal development, political reflection, and mobilization. For this framework would respecify and reconstitute the meaning and limits of sovereign authority. Particular power centers and authority systems would enjoy legitimacy only to the extent that they upheld and enacted democratic law. |
Thus, sovereignty can be stripped away from the idea of fixed borders and territories. Sovereignty would become an attribute of the basic democratic law, but it could be entrenched and drawn upon in diverse self-regulating realms, from regions and states to cities and local associations. Cosmopolitan law would demand the subordination of regional, national, and local sovereignties to an overarching legal framework, but in this framework associations would be self-governing at different levels. A new possibility is anticipated: the recovery of an intensive and more participatory democracy at local levels as a complement to the public assemblies of the wider global order; that is, a political order of democratic associations, cities, and nations as well as of regions and global networks. I call this elsewhere the cosmopolitan model of democracy--it is a legal basis of a global and divided authority system, a system of diverse and overlapping power centres, shaped and delimited by democratic law (Held 1995 and Held, Models of Democracy, 1996). However the model is specified precisely, it is based upon the recognition that the nature and quality of democracy within a particular community and the nature and quality of democratic relations among communities are interlocked, and that new legal and organizational mechanisms must be created if democracy is to prosper. |
In this system of cosmopolitan governance, people would come to enjoy multiple citizenships--political membership in the diverse political communities which significantly affect them. They would be citizens of their immediate political communities, and of the wider regional and global networks which impacted upon their lives. This cosmopolitan polity would be one that in form and substance reflected and embraced the diverse forms of power and authority that operate within and across borders and which, if unchecked, threaten the emergence of a highly fragmented, neo-medieval order. |
Prospects for democracy
It would be easy to be pessimistic about the future of democracy. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism; they include the fact that the essential political units of the world are still based on nation states while some of the most powerful socio-political forces of the world escape the boundaries of these units. In reaction to this, in part, new forms of fundamentalism have arisen along with new forms of tribalism--all asserting the a priori superiority of a particular religious, or cultural, or political identity over all others, and all asserting their sectional aims and interests. In addition, the reform of the UN that is currently contemplated by the most powerful countries is focused on efforts to include other powerful countries, above all, Germany and Japan. This would consolidate the power of certain geopolitical interests, but at the expense of many other countries which have some of the fastest rates of economic growth and some of the largest populations. I believe position to be unsustainable in the long run. |
But there are other forces at work which create the basis for a more optimistic reading of democratic prospects. An historical comparison might help to provide a context for this. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was marked by civil conflict, religious strife, and fragmented authority; the idea of a secular state, separate from ruler and ruled, and separate from the Church, seemed an unlikely prospect. Parts of Europe were tearing themselves to pieces and, yet, within 150-200 years, a new concept of politics became entrenched based around a new concept of the state. |
Today, we live at another fundamental point of transition, but now to a more transnational, global world. There are forces and pressures which are engendering a reshaping of political cultures, institutions, and structures. First, one must obviously note the emergence, however hesitatingly, of regional and global institutions in the twentieth century. The UN is, of course, weak in many respects, but it is a relatively recent creation and it is an innovative structure which can be built upon. It is a normative resource which provides--for all its difficulties--an enduring example of how nations might (and sometimes do) cooperate better to resolve, and resolve fairly, common problems. In addition, the development of a powerful regional body such as the European Union is a remarkable state of affairs. Just over fifty years ago Europe was at the point of self-destruction. Since that moment Europe has created new mechanisms of collaboration, human rights enforcement, and new political institutions in order not only to hold member states to account across a broad range of issues, but to pool aspects of their sovereignty. |
Furthermore, there are, of course, new regional and global transnational actors contesting the terms of globalization--not just corporations but new social movements such as the environmental movement, the women's movement, and so on. These are the "new" voices of an emergent "transnational civil society," heard, for instance, at the Rio Conference on the Environment, the Cairo Conference on Population Control, and the Beijing Conference on Women. In short, there are tendencies at work seeking to create new forms of public life and new ways of debating regional and global issues. These are, of course, all in early stages of development, and there are no guarantees that the balance of political contest will allow them to develop; but they point in the direction of establishing new modes of holding transnational power systems to account--that is, they help open up the possibility of a cosmopolitan democracy. |
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