Citizenship and democracy beyond the nation-state?

Citizenship and the welfare state

The Athenian model notwithstanding, liberal democracy with universal individual rights was inconceivable in a precapitalist society. First, social hierarchies were formed through personal dependencies. Unlike in capitalism where individuals are formally free and equal (albeit substantively unfree and unequal), in precapitalist society, the notions of freedom and equality were altogether nonexistent. Second, laws were particularistic. Different persons, or groups of people, were subject to different laws and had different sets of rights and obligations. This situation precluded the basic presupposition of the equality and universality of individual rights. But the fulfillment of these latter conditions did not automatically bring about democracy, that is, the regime of equal participation in collective decision making.

Although Marshall’s theory of citizenship lists political rights and social rights as separate and historically noncontemporaneous phenomena, from the point of view of the working classes, the classic carriers of democracy (Therborn, 1977), the two sets of rights were intertwined. Since the rise of industrial capitalism, the political struggle of the working classes aimed at winning the right of protection from the whims of the market. The bourgeoisies were not necessarily democratic, although they favored constitutional states (Poggi, 1978). Thus, while “civil” rights were welcomed by the bourgeoisie, the democratic impulse was essentially socialistic. The objective of protective social legislation, and of defensive working-class organizations, such as trade unions, was to interfere with the disruptive effects of the market mechanism, especially in the market for labor-power (Polanyi, 1944). Democracy appeared to the bourgeoisie as a threat to its class interests. In most of the nineteenth century and part of the early twentieth century, suffrage was kept narrow in order to exclude from the political arena those groups whose interests might conflict with the maintenance of capitalism (Hobsbawm, 1962). Historically, the most consistently prodemocratic class and the invariable agent of democracy has been the working class (Huber et al., 1993).

Capitalism survived democratization. Democratic states proved capable of regulating the market without violating the fundamental principles of capitalism. As the states responded to working-class demands, the latter became incorporated into the political system. This accommodation was made easier with the help of nationalist ideology. Belonging to a political community through association with a centralized state, and thereby taking on a national identity, also implied the status of citizenship with political rights, as well as duties. The nation signified the modern community, and the state presumably unified and represented the nation.

Initially, nation and class were two competing identities, but the former became dominant when the socialist impulse of the working classes dissolved into and merged with nationalism. Nationalism acquired a meaning beyond national identity; it implied participation in popular sovereignty. Nationalism became the dominant ideology of solidarity (Breuilly, 1982; Dyson, 1980; Hobsbawm, 1975; Seton-Watson, 1977). Hence, one may say, contrary to received wisdom, that the socialist movement of the nineteenth century actually became successful. Working-class struggles that Marxism claimed to represent won at least partial success by the end of the same century and bore fruit in the twentieth century. Socialist movements were overtaken by nationalism as they achieved their objectives to make the nation-states responsible for the protection of the working (and other popular) classes (see Carr, 1945: 18–23). ¹ The creation of the welfare state won the working classes over to nationalism; they began to identify with their respective nation-states, which gave them rights and entitlements as citizens. ² With the institution of the welfare state, the national community of citizens had been created (Tilly, 1996; Turner, 2000).

While the protectionist (and redistributionist) “welfare” state became a nearly universal model, it did not everywhere manifest itself in liberal democratic form. Thus, both Bismarck’s and Nazi Germany were variants of the centrally regulated welfare state, and so were both the post–New Deal “capitalist” United States and the “communist” Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). ³ The same was true for Third-World “populism.” While those countries that may be called the “semiperiphery” pursued import-substitution policies, which included some measure of income redistribution in order to expand the domestic market, those in the “periphery” pursued some kind of “socialist” redistribution models. ⁴ Thus, the existence of a political community may be necessary for participatory democracy, but there is no necessary reason for a community to be politically organized as a liberal democracy. The emphasis in authoritarian regimes is typically on the sense of community and on the paternalistic protection of its members. Thus, popular masses may have “social” (i.e. welfare) rights, but without “political” or even “civil” rights. But in all cases, whether based on a social-democratic compromise or a state–corporatist cooptation between the masses and dominant classes, populist welfare rights are legitimized by reference to nationalism and citizenship.

The twentieth century was thus marked by the domination of state-regulated economies. The “welfare state” in the West, “central planning” in the Eastern bloc, and the “populist state” in the Third World, each with a different degree of planning and state ownership, involved the regulation of the economies on behalf of the working and other popular classes in order to protect them from unemployment and absolute impoverishment. All interventionist states aimed to achieve industrialization, full employment, and a downward redistribution of income. The twentieth-century notions of citizenship (with or without liberal democracy) were therefore closely tied to the welfare state. Since the 1980s, however, globalization trends have begun to undermine these state-regulated modes of political economy and contributed to the weakening of the state-centered national community, whether of the liberal democratic or of the illiberal and nondemocratic kind.

Globalization and identity politics

The nation-states, which had begun to regulate their domestic economies and protect the welfare of their citizens in the early twentieth century, found some of their powers undermined by globalization at the end of the same century. They could no longer independently maintain full employment, sustain economic growth, and preserve redistributionist policies (Harris, 1986; Mittelman, 1996). The disenchantment from the nation-state led to the emergence of alternative forms of community and was manifested in the rise of “new social movements,” which cut across class divisions in society and began to address issues of cultural identity. The twentieth century witnessed the rise and decline of the welfare state and, together with it, the rise and decline of the national community formed around it. The notions of citizenship and democracy began to move toward such issues as recognition of authentic identities and acceptance of cultural diversity (Harvey, 1989; Steinmetz, 1994; Turner, 2000; Wilmsen and McAllister, 1996).

Accompanying this redefinition has been the tendency to conceptually anchor democracy within “civil society” rather than the state (Gellner, 1994; Keane, 1988; Shils, 1991). As the conditions for the existence of democracy in the age of globalization declined, the idea of civil society was promoted. “Multiculturalism” and the “right to be recognized” became the catchwords of the struggle for the empowerment of “civil society” at the expense of the state. Even in the United States, a nation of immigrants, where multiculturalism and civil society have always been at the forefront of political discourse (as Tocqueville observed back in the nineteenth century), one may still observe the shift from the notion of assimilation as a virtue in the middle decades of the twentieth century to that of hyphenated identities in the 1980s (Brubaker, 2001; Goldstein and Rayner, 1994; Hughes, 1993; Polenberg, 1980). These trends have been much more pronounced in the rest of the world, where, whether through immigration or the rediscovery of autochthonous ethnic identities, “culture wars” have dominated political thought and struggle (Klausen, 2005; Parekh, 2000), and sometimes have even degenerated into civil war and ethnic genocide, as in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Africa.

A divisive form of identity politics, ranging from regulation of speech to ensure “political correctness” to ethnic wars that broke up what used to be unified nation-states, swept the globe in the 1990s and forced a redefinition of the received notions of democracy toward the recognition of identity rights. The welfare rights of the working class became secondary (Fraser, 1995; Phillips, 1997; Wood, 1995). The inherent conflict between “civil rights” and “social rights” was already acknowledged by Marshall (1964: 87ff.). For example, “minimum wage” regulation, designed for the protection of the dispossessed citizens, interferes with the “freedom of contract” between the propertied and the propertyless, where both are conceived as equal individuals endowed with the same set of civil rights. Hence, the promotion of civil society may be a thinly concealed promotion of the capitalist market mechanism at the expense of state regulation. The promotion of “civil society” and of “identity politics” is perhaps not a fourth stage in the development of citizenship rights, but rather a retraction of Marshall’s third stage, that is, a retrenchment of social welfare rights.

Although cultural rights need not be incompatible with welfare rights, their promotion through a civil society discourse first became fashionable with reference to the crisis and collapse of central planning under communism, and subsequently to the crisis and dismantling of the welfare state (Kumar, 1993; Seligman, 1992; Wood, 1995). Favoring “civil society” at the expense of the “state” implied a decline in the social welfare role of the state. For example, the World Bank and other international financial institutions began to emphasize the significance of nongovernmental organization (NGO) activity in the developing world, so that they would bypass the state and either undermine or replace its welfare-related activities (White, 1999). The civil society, it was suggested, could both undertake developmentalist or welfare functions and become a platform for the self-organization of society as a democratic community.

It is not clear how the decline of the state in favor of the market and of civil society would enhance democracy. Indeed, as the regulatory institutions of the state have been undermined, the areas of freedom for transnational capital (TNC) have expanded. But the domination of the global market by TNC does not even promote the “freedom of choice,” much acclaimed by neoliberals, let alone democracy (Barber, 1995). There is therefore a potential conflict between civil society and democracy. If the state’s provision of social welfare rights is an element of democratic citizenship, then the abandonment of that realm to the “civil society” of NGOs and to a market dominated by TNC would necessarily imply a decline of citizenship and democracy (Burchill, 2000: 286; Linklater, 1998: 32). If the state is indifferent to the needs of the people, then it has denied its democratic responsibility.

The same may be said about the rise of the “human rights” discourse to the stature of a new “ruling ideology” (Ignatieff, 2001; see also Turner, 1993b, 1994). Human rights now include the recognition of authentic identities, alongside the classical (liberal) freedoms, such as the freedom of expression, assembly, and property. Mixing apples and oranges, the call for the empowerment of civil society at the expense of the state jointly promotes private enterprise and cultural diversity. It would certainly be facile to see the concept of “human rights,” thus defined, as a pretext to promote the entry of TNC into diverse markets, but it is also repeated often that where there are “human rights,” there are also political stability, market predictability, and hence, conditions that are overall conducive to business. There seems to be an elective affinity between the position of those groups that emphasize cultural diversity (and presumed “authenticity”) and the position of TNC pursuing global markets.

Globalization has not ended the sovereignty of the nation-state or necessarily condemned it to extinction but only constrained or transformed its powers in certain realms. In the age of “welfare,” capital relied on the nation-state, which in turn promoted a Keynesian compromise with the demands of the working class (Bowles and Gintis, 1986; Harris, 1986). In the age of globalization, however, capital is so mobile transnationally that the nation-state, now dependent on it, competes with other nation-states in order to attract it and promotes favorable conditions that are often at the expense of the working classes. The global mobility of capital has robbed the working classes of their bargaining power. Nation-states may still pursue development policies, but, with the rise of global manufacturing systems, this pursuit has shifted from inward-oriented policies, which aim to build a strong domestic market, to outward-oriented ones, which aim to deepen integration into the global economy and gain a better position in it (Gereffi, 1994, 1995). Nation-states are often forced or encouraged to court TNC. ⁵ Therefore, TNC-led globalization does not necessarily lead to the end of the nation-states, as is sometimes claimed. On the contrary, the presence of multiple nation-states may even be preferable in order to promote competition for the most favorable conditions (Picciotto, 1991). TNC ultimately aims to escape regulation, and hence, its interests converge with the new concept of democracy that promotes “human rights” as opposed to welfare, “civil society” as opposed to the state, and “cultural identity” as opposed to class.

The creation of the “national” community initially meant the displacement of tribal, religious, ethnic, linguistic, and other (often inaccurately called “primordial”) communities, and the redirection of political and ideological loyalties from the latter to the former. The nation-state often suppressed claims of intra-national diversity and pursued a policy of homogenizing the population around a unified identity. The decline of the nation-state’s welfare function more blatantly revealed its oppressive character and led to renewed claims of ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, mostly in order to build alternative social networks. The calls for human rights and civil society have particularly resonated in those areas of the world, such as the “communist” bloc or the Middle East, where nation-states had been particularly oppressive. In the Middle East, for example, Islamists joined forces with the self-proclaimed “liberals” in order to oppose the homogenizing powers of the nation-state. A politics of identity that challenged the secular–nationalist ideology of the state was perceived as a procivil society and hence a prodemocratic movement (Gülalp, 1997; Navaro-Yashin, 1998). But a civil society organization may very well be internally hierarchical, and the free operation of civil society (always defined as to include the market) may (or, even, must) lead to inegalitarian outcomes. These possibilities are most likely in the absence of a countervailing force on behalf of the community, enforced through a democratic and interventionist state (Wood, 1995). Globalization generates a proliferation of identities and authenticities (cf. Barber, 1995), but it also leads to a new kind of homogenization through the universalization of commodity culture. The newly asserted ethnic identities often tend to become marketable commodities.

The hasty conflation of democracy with the freedoms of civil society ignores the fact that democracy (a regime of mutual obligations), unlike freedoms (defined negatively), is ultimately a form of rule and hence requires the existence of some kind of formal political organization that is held accountable. As a system of collective responsibility, democracy is ideally represented and regulated by the state. But this new conceptual model of anchoring democracy within civil society does not clarify who must be held responsible for regulating, and if necessary countering, any power differentials that may arise. Civil society is potentially the realm of inequality without communal responsibility. Therefore, it is in the state, and not the civil society, that democracy can be realized. Democracy requires a state, although not all states are necessarily democratic.

The nation-state, however, can no longer contain the conditions for democracy. The nation-state’s increasing failure to sustain the institutions that support welfare policies urges us to rethink democracy beyond the borders of the nation-state. Globalization challenges the nation-state framework in ways that force us to reconsider the two basic assumptions of democracy as we know it:

Group rights and democracy

The nation-state framework defines the political unit in terms of territory. Yet, even supposing that this definition had a semblance of validity for the early modernizers, however incomplete, the cardinal principle of nationalism for the late-comers has been the urge to make the (ethnically or linguistically defined) “nation” coincident with the borders of the sovereign state (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1992; cf. Brubaker, 1992). This urge was further inscribed into the notion of the right to national “self-determination.” But what appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century as a progressive and democratic principle for the “emerging” nations has, during the course of the twentieth century, been the motive for what is now called “ethnic cleansing,” a concept that challenges the wisdom and desirability of the coincidence between nation and state. Moreover, we are now living in a postcolonial world where the national liberation struggles of Third-World people have mostly given way to the migration of Third-World masses to the ex-colonial centers of the world, thus further complicating the question of the coincidence between ethnicity and sovereignty. A primary source of the calls for the recognition of diversity and multiculturalism lies in this demographic reality (Tambiah, 2000).

There is a tension between the projects of assimilation and multiculturalism. Pursuing assimilation, as in the French concept of citizenship, borrowed by Turkey, for example, may result in the suppression of distinct local cultures and the enforcement of a singular straitjacket on all members of a given nation-state. But asserting the cultural “authenticity” of people often implies the presence of a unique character that is only transmitted by blood ties and cannot be generalized to others. Combining this assumption with the pursuit of a nation-state may result in a concept of citizenship that is exclusive to a particular ethnic or religious group, as in the German or Israeli examples. Finally, seeking coexistence while retaining the essentialist claims, cultural authenticity may result in a divided political entity that not only belies the concept of a unified nation-state but may even degenerate into civil war, as, for example, in Lebanon. The problem ultimately seems to originate from the “universalist” assumptions of the modern nation-state. The assumption that there is (or should be) uniformity and homogeneity between equal citizens in the public realm paradoxically generates a system of social inequality, because the imperative to leave particularities behind in order to join the public sphere in effect portends exclusion for those who do not fit the normative ideal defined by the culturally (or racially) dominant elite.

The assertion of distinct cultural identities and the making of particularistic demands have therefore occasionally culminated in proposals for legal plurality within a single political community (Connolly, 1991b; Goldberg, 1994; Gutmann, 1994; Hirst, 1994; Kymlicka, 1995; Parekh, 2000). Yet, while it is necessary to recognize ethnic, gender, religious, and other such differences in society (collectively described as “cultural diversity”) in order to avoid forcing everyone into the single mold defined by powerful elites, the solution should not be the recognition of group rights on a collective basis. This solution simply moves the assumption that the individual belongs to a homogeneous collectivity from the national to the subnational level. The granting of group rights means that rights are not identified with reference to individuals but with reference to communities and thereby reinforces those communal identities that have once been contingently (or even arbitrarily) determined. This not only ignores the rights of persons as independent individuals but may actually contribute to their suppression.

Defining the individual as a member of another imaginarily homogeneous community, now below the national level, and endowing that community with rights of autonomy, leave the rights of the individual unprotected against any possible oppressive practices within the communal hierarchy. In a society of multicultural pluralism, moreover, any number of those distinct cultural groups might be authoritarian. In such a case, the idea of preserving authenticity could readily turn into a license for insular authoritarian cultural practices. The relativistic alternative to universal individual rights may therefore easily degenerate into what has been called “tribalism” (Antonio, 2000), where different groups have different sets of rights and are insulated from the larger society in their own particularities. Regulating cultural diversity through legal plurality does not engender participatory democracy. It gives priority to the cultural norms of the group over the rights of the individual. Ultimately, it assumes incommensurability between groups of individuals. Pluralism in this sense is not the same thing as democracy. A premodern example of this model existed in the “millet” system of the Ottoman Empire (Braude and Lewis, 1982).

One should not, however, confuse the issue of relativism inherent in a system of legal plurality with “affirmative action” policies, which fall within universalistic democratic norms. The fundamental reason that a group struggles for particularistic rights is that members of the group have been discriminated against due to membership in that group, which typically has distinct ascriptive attributes and generally experiences a differential social status (Gutmann, 2003). If persons are subjected to experiences not originating from their individual achievements but from their group identities, then an obvious solution would be to protect the rights of all individuals regardless of their group identity, and thereby prevent discrimination. This may necessitate the intervention of the state on behalf of the oppressed or disadvantaged groups. Such intervention in favor of historically oppressed groups (such as women or ethnic and racial minorities) is similar to the intervention of the welfare state on behalf of the dispossessed or the unemployed. Affirmative action policies safeguard the participation of the disadvantaged groups as equal members of the national community. Hence, contrary to critics who portray affirmative action as a policy of restricting the access of deserving individuals to certain positions by administrative fiat, it is (in principle) a policy of inclusion. It aims to draw into the realm of equality those segments of the population that have historically been denied access. It is the responsibility of the democratic state to protect those citizens who have traditionally been excluded. Affirmative action policies conform to this idea of democracy, although their pursuit is not necessarily limited to democratic states.

How to reconcile affirmative action with the notion of individual rights, since affirmative action necessarily targets a well-defined group of people? The answer seems to lie in recognizing the social and historical malleability of what are called “cultural groups.” Instead of fixing and freezing identity groups into the political system, diversity could very well be recognized through individual rights. Individuals would be free to form alliances and associations based on their changing social needs and/or identities. Any given person combines an indefinite number of socially significant characteristics: ethnicity, gender, race, language, religion, class position, professional status, age, physical ability, sexual orientation, political and philosophical orientation, and so on. This list is actually open-ended because there may be dimensions of identity that are not socially significant or even conceivable now, but may become so in unexpected ways in the future. But even if we were able to confine them to a manageable number, two issues would still remain unspecified: (1) What is the order of significance between these different dimensions of identity for the society at large? and (2) Which one or several of these dimensions will real individuals choose to identify themselves by at any point in time? Answering these questions from above, and once and for all, will simply not do. Inscribing such answers into the political system will prohibit individuals from choosing whether they wish to associate with others along one given dimension or another, or not at all. It will also not allow for the emergence of new identity formations in accordance with the specificities of a given social structure and its change over time. It will reduce the complexity of every person into a single dimension (or a hierarchy of dimensions), which is (are) not even necessarily of his or her own choosing.

If “cultural” diversity were to be granted as individual rights, it would then be up to individuals themselves whether to exercise them—and they would now do so without fear of exclusion from the larger society or from participation in the political process. They would also determine with whom they wish to associate, depending on their personal priorities with regard to the combination of the socially significant characteristics that they believe they have. These characteristics, moreover, may change over the course of a lifetime. Needs associated with age are a paradigmatic example of the point made here, since age is biological and yet it inevitably changes over time. It illustrates that a biological factor (which is deemed immutable and thus often informs the politics of race and gender) can nonetheless be the basis of a fluid and changing set of interests. Clearly, the significance of this particular factor, in relation to other socially significant characteristics that one may have, will most certainly depend on where one is in the life cycle. A person’s needs and interests are bound to change with biological age, leading one to identify with different sets of social and political priorities as one moves through life.

With identity rights granted individually, those that freely associate with each other would be able to determine collectively what they feel they need and would negotiate collectively with others in a deliberative process. What is best for them would not be determined from above. Groups would not be fixed and frozen, but would form freely in collaboration with those in similar circumstances and in negotiation with those in different circumstances. This way, no individual would be excluded or discriminated against because of their seemingly peculiar “cultural” characteristics, as long as they willingly participate in the collective and deliberative democratic process. This stipulation is important to counter yet another danger of granting “collective cultural rights” from above. It is conceivable that the protection of the presumed cultural rights of a particular group may precisely be at the expense of the rights of individuals belonging to another group. If, for instance, men wished to preserve their own culture of “machismo,” it would simply be impossible to protect the rights of a woman subjected to that male culture. The claim of preserving cultural specificity cannot be sufficient grounds for granting rights that are specific to a particular social group. Rights have to be universal, and they have to be granted to individuals regardless of their group affiliations.

A democracy need not ignore the internal diversity of a social and political collectivity (Benhabib, 2002). But a political arrangement based on group identity is necessarily intolerant, because it assumes an essential quality that is incommensurable, nonnegotiable, and exclusive. Although, as opposition movements, identity politics may be, and indeed have been, useful in identifying the structural conditions that at any point in time create systematic inequalities between groups in society, they are not a democratic basis on which a project for power could be built. It is easy to see that if an identity movement successfully gains power, such as in a religious fundamentalist regime, then the outcome is bound to be exclusionary and nondemocratic.

Debates on multiculturalism and differential rights in society were particularly intense during the 1990s (Benhabib, 1996). These debates have revealed the problematic character of multiculturalism, as previously prescribed, and of the need to reconcile the universal principles of liberal democracy with the different needs and legitimate demands of diverse social groups (Gutmann, 2003). The notion of “difference” needs to be disaggregated so that we may distinguish between those differences that are better eliminated in order to achieve equality, such as class, and those that are better kept, such as language (Phillips, 1999). Indeed, multiculturalism contains a dangerous element of essentialism for failing to acknowledge the social construction of identities (Antonio, 2000; Appiah, 2001; Benhabib, 2002). In “social thought, public discourse, and public policy,” multicultural differentialism appears to be in decline (Brubaker, 2001: 532; see also Isin and Turner, 2008: 11).

As already indicated, the collapse of the nation-state framework in the early stages of globalization led to a search for alternative networks of solidarity in the form of identity politics. An alternative seems to lie in the broader concept of “human rights,” the endorsement of which, as opposed to the radical claims of identity politics, may allow for the reconciliation of cultural diversity with liberal democracy. But human rights is by definition a global concept, and its enforcement is currently pursued at the global level through the imposition of its norms by supranational institutions on individual nation-states. In the received form of democracy, the nation-state is held responsible for assuring inclusive political participation. As deepening globalization has revealed the need for a supranational set of institutions that regulate the global economy and provide participation, welfare, and recognition rights on a global level, the relevant questions have become the following: What form will democracy take in the age of globalization? Will there be a new structure of citizenship and democracy transcending national boundaries?

Global democracy

By challenging the nation-state, globalization has also been challenging the received framework of citizenship and democracy, which remains confined to the territorially circumscribed nation-state (Connolly, 1991a; Held, 1991; Von Bredow, 1998). While the nation-state is still the pertinent unit for democracy, globalization has been weakening its sovereignty on a number of levels. Two have already been mentioned: the increasing difficulty with which nation-states can fulfill their welfare obligations to citizens and the multicultural challenges raised in the name of upholding civil society against the centralized and “oppressive” modern state, which ruptures the imagined homogeneity of the national community. We have also suggested that these two issues indicate the need for supranational institutions that safeguard welfare and recognition. There is also a third level on which the nation-state has been losing ground. As soon as the formally independent nation-state became the universal norm in the second half of the twentieth century, supranational institutions began to be created that to a certain extent appropriated the sovereignty of individual nation-states. These institutions include, in addition to the regulatory agencies of the global economy, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which seem to serve the interests of TNC, a whole gamut of multinational political and legal organizations from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United Nations, and multinational treaties from the European Covenant of Human Rights to the Kyoto Protocol (Held, 1991: 212–222; Slaughter, 2003).

Regardless, as far as political representation at the global level is concerned, nation-states are still the relevant units for the negotiation of transnational issues. Despite the growing multiplicity and complexity of the institutions of global governance, the political actors that engage in these treaties and organizations are still the formally sovereign nation-states. While, for example, legitimation of political power is more and more based on the transnational concept of human rights, these rights are still granted and regulated by individual nation-states. Thus, individual citizens may have begun to seek their human rights in the global arena, often in the form of demanding protection from their own sovereign states, but they can do so only in so far as their nation-states have signed on to the requisite covenants. Moreover, even if they are party to such conventions, ultimately, the nation-state “is the authority through which human rights legislation is enforced” (Benhabib, 2008: 19; Isin and Turner, 2008: 13). The resilience of the nation-state form in the face of this trend toward the creation of a global system of governance generates tensions that complicate the presuppositions of democracy.

The tensions originate from the organizing principle of the nation-state, regardless of whether it is democratic. In principle, the sovereignty of the nation-state is limited to the people living within its territories, but this sovereignty is exclusive and indivisible: the nation-state is not answerable to any outside power. The quality of its democracy is then determined by the degree to which it is answerable to its own people. But, whether democratic or not, citizens are obligated to abide by the laws of their nation-state and cannot appeal to the laws of another. Nation-states, in turn, mutually recognize one another’s sovereignty and, in principle, do not interfere in one another’s “internal” affairs. These normative principles actually approximated the reality of the European interstate system, as established in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), until roughly the middle of the twentieth century (Held, 1993: 27–32). Today, although the nation-state formally remains sovereign, the substance of sovereignty is often institutionally shared by different global actors. This situation resembles the premodern structure of fragmented sovereignty, where political authority typically issued from multiple layers of crisscrossing sources (Held, 1991: 223–227; Nye, 2002: 54).

While this shrinkage of absolute territorial sovereignty may be a good thing for the citizens of an oppressive nation-state, provided they can successfully appeal to outside sources of authority for protection, its broader implications for democracy, in general, are more ambiguous. In a system of multiple sources and layers of authority, who will be held responsible for the well-being of the citizens of a given nation-state? Conversely, in a system of transnational institutions that share state sovereignty, who exactly makes up the community to which these institutions may be held accountable? The nation-state model is unable to meet the needs of a global order. It cannot contain the structures of sovereignty in a global system where national borders become less and less relevant to people’s lives, or may even become hindrances rather than facilitators to the pursuit of the collective social good. Even though today we speak of universal human rights and their political enforcement at the global level, we do not yet have the institutional structures for the creation and deliberation of these transnational norms in participatory fashion. Benhabib (2008) argues that cosmopolitan norms may enhance “popular sovereignty” at the expense of “state sovereignty” (pp. 21–24). This may be true, but where will power be concentrated at the global level and who will exercise it?

Could Immanuel Kant’s idea of “cosmopolitan citizenship” be a model (see Bohman and Lutz-Bachman, 1997; Linklater, 1998) for global citizenship and democracy? Unlikely, for such a system would require the creation of political institutions that regulate the affairs of those global citizens, including, first, the formal identification and recognition of their citizenship status, with all the attendant rights. Indeed, whether democratic or not, a global sovereignty is needed to regulate the global order (Hoffman, 2003). As Benjamin Barber (1995) succinctly explains,

The conundrum on which the very idea of a transnational or international institution is founded is that the truly global institution depends on the cooperation of sovereign states whose sovereignty necessarily circumscribes its every move … International institutions are consequently impotent as autonomous entities because of national sovereignty but are also impotent in the absence of national sovereignty; for without the agency, the goodwill, and, most critically, the capacity for armed intervention of the hegemons on which they depend, they cannot operate at all. (p. 227)

The United Nations, for example, cannot be a model for global democracy with its current structure, because it takes the nation-states that comprise it, rather than “world citizens,” as the relevant units of representation (Held, 1993: 32–37). Membership in the United Nations only requires formally independent state sovereignty, and is not contingent on the character of the political regime. Dictatorships and democracies, or autonomous and dependent states, sit side by side to negotiate global affairs as equal members in the United Nations. The one important inequality built into the current structure of the United Nations, that is, the existence of a Security Council with five permanent members, each bearing the veto power, is a remnant of the international balance of powers at a specific point in history. But even if this feature was abolished to grant absolute equality to all members of the United Nations, equality would have been granted to naturally unequal units of population, as well as of economic and military power. Citizens of a small nation-state would thereby have a stronger representation than the citizens of a populous nation-state. The “one-person-one-vote” logic of liberal democracy cannot be transplanted to global affairs. A “one-state-one-vote” rule in an organization such as the United Nations would not necessarily engender global democracy (Archibugi and Held, 1995; Nye, 2002: 104–110).

Could a global power, such as the United States, for example, perform the role of democratically regulating the global order? Clearly, the same contradiction, as noted above for the United Nations, between the anachronistic nature of the nation-state system and the needs of a cosmopolitan order would still apply. In order for a nation-state to rule the world, it would have to become an empire (defined as the extraterritorial domination of one nation by another), even if it were internally democratic. For, within the current norms of democracy, that government would only be answerable to its own citizens. How will citizens of other nations have a say in its policies? The foreign policy choices of the US government currently affect the life chances of citizens of other nations around the world—in many instances, far more than the domestic policies of their own governments, whether democratically elected or not. One could therefore easily make the case that US presidents, whose elections are closely watched worldwide, should also be voted on by a worldwide electorate! The problem with this scenario, however, in addition to those raised in discussions of other similar scenarios, ⁶ is that the mandate of such an electorate would necessarily engender a disproportionate concentration of power in the hands of the “world president,” even if it were delivered “democratically.”

There is, however, an alternative: a global association of democracies, following in the cosmopolitan spirit of the French Revolution. ⁷ If democratic participation requires a well-defined community, while a community implies a restricted membership (and, hence, exclusion), then how are we to define the democratic community beyond the nation? Second, by what criteria are we to measure the commonality between the members of that community? The answer in this case would be that global democracy requires at least a common inclination toward, and a common language of, negotiation and participation. This condition, it seems, would meet Joseph Nye’s second objection noted previously. ⁸ Despite internal disputes that originate from differential economic powers, presumed civilizational conflicts, the oft-cited “democratic deficit” (owing to leadership by technocratic elites, who sidestep the participation of the masses, in the building of its institutions), and many other such imperfections, the European Union actually constitutes a step in the direction of a model for a transnational project of democracy (see, for example, Bexell et al., 2010: 88). Democratic norms in this union are spread by invitation, by the attraction of membership in an exclusive club (Gülalp, 2006). If built on a global scale, the community in such an association of democracies would be formed not along the lines of imaginary (and divisive) national identities, but around the universal principles of equality, freedom, and political participation (cf. Delanty, 2008).

Concluding thoughts

Recent literature registers an important dimension of citizenship under conditions of globalization: the growing existence of resident noncitizens (“aliens”) due to large-scale international migration. These clearly “non-national” segments of society deepen the separation not only between the “nation” and the “nation-state” but also between civil, social, and political rights (see Bosniak, 2006). They pay taxes, but are not represented, for they cannot vote. They have civil rights, but may be subjected to deportation on minor technicalities. Their long-term presence complicates the received notion of community, for although they share a life with citizens, they are not uniformly considered as true members. As already noted, in the nation-state model, rights are universal, but only for those who are members of the community, which on the basis of the received model excludes long-term resident aliens. In the face of large-scale global migration, the parity between the two dimensions of citizenship (rights and identity) becomes difficult, if not impossible, to sustain (Bosniak, 2006). Thus, while in the age of the welfare state, the question was the integration of class into citizenship (as rights), in the age of globalization, the question appears to have become the integration of “foreigners” into citizenship (as communal identity) (Joppke, 2008: 37).

Can community be defined in another way, if not in terms of some “primordial” and hence exclusive characteristic, such as religion or ethnicity, or in terms of the basic liberal principle of residence? For instance, can the logic of a democratic association of nation-states, such as in the context of building a democratic cosmopolitan order, be applicable within a nation-state? The implication of this would be that a democratic community with universal rights must be composed of democratic citizens. But how could a polity guarantee that condition? Would those members of the polity with nondemocratic tendencies be deprived of citizenship? While this may seem a far-fetched question, the fact is that, in the face of massive immigration particularly from Muslim countries, many European nation-states have now adopted citizenship tests that presumably aim to measure the democratic commitment of the applicant for naturalization (Joppke, 2008: 43–45). Paradoxically, this new trend in favor of enforcing the “democracy” test, following the fears related to 9/11, has reversed a recent trend toward assimilation and easier naturalization (cf. Brubaker, 2001). But how is that test consistent with the practice of automatically granting citizenship to those members of community who acquire the status by virtue of birth, either within the territory or via familial ties? Should democratic nation-states periodically test their citizens’ commitment to democratic norms or perhaps require a test of everyone who reaches a certain age?

Finally, with regard to global democracy, while normative theorizing about it at an abstract level is one thing, quite another is the currently available mechanism of global participation in decision making (cf. Held, 2010). While there may be optimism, such as regarding the democratic potential of transnational civil society and the supranational regulation of human rights, there are also numerous pitfalls due to the limited constituency to which these institutions are answerable or the distance between the elites in charge of these institutions and the masses of the people. In short, the picture of those transnational actors on which a model of cosmopolitan democracy may be currently based appears to be mixed with regard to the standards of participation and accountability (Bexell et al., 2010).