Abstract
How can democracy be suitably formulated in face of the more global character of contemporary society? Modern ideas and practices of ‘people’s rule’ (whether in a statist or a cosmopolitan mode) fall short as frameworks for global democracy. Statist approaches to global democracy have a host of behavioural, institutional, historical and cultural problems. Modern cosmopolitan approaches do better in addressing contemporary social changes, but are deficient in terms of their globalist tendencies, often oversimplified notions of political identity, limited cultural reflexivity, usually tame responses to resource inequalities and anthropocentrism. To address these shortcomings one might explore an alternative of ‘postmodern global democracies’ built around principles of transscalarity, plural solidarities, transculturality, egalitarian distribution and more ecologically framed ideas of political rights and duties.
Introduction
Democracy — rule by, for, from, of, to and with the people (ever the nuance of prepositions) — is widely embraced as an indispensable quality of a good society. For a host of ethical and practical reasons, it is deemed right that ‘the demos’ should, itself, take the decisions that shape its joint circumstances and common destinies. All affected persons should have due say in the governance of their mutual situations (Dewey, 1927; Näsström, 2003). If that general principle is accepted, then ‘people’s rule’ is as relevant to global spaces (i.e. when shared conditions and futures have a planetary dimension) as it is to national, local and other arenas of collective life.
How can democracy be realized in a world, of the kind that is currently emerging, where social relations have more pronounced global aspects? Moreover, how might democracy operate in that more global world when, as now unfolds, power and resources become less concentrated in Europe and North America? And what would global democracy mean when, as already transpires, ‘the people’ involved inhabit highly diverse cultural contexts? That is the puzzle for the present article.
Social relations have in recent decades acquired a more pronounced global character. People have become substantially more interlinked with one another on a planetary scale: through communications, consciousness, ecology, finance, health matters, military affairs, organizations, production chains, travel and more. While it is certainly important not to exaggerate the extent of contemporary globalization, it is equally misguided to deny it. Across the various areas of social life, global connections have obtained historically unprecedented quantities, scopes, frequencies, velocities, intensities and impacts (Scholte, 2005: chs 2, 3).
The expansion of global connections has gone hand in hand with increased efforts to govern global affairs. Rules and regulatory processes have proliferated in attempts to bring greater order and direction to planet-spanning public concerns. Countless formal measures, informal norms and overarching discourses for governing transplanetary relations are now formulated and implemented through complex networks that variously combine national states, suprastate (regional and global) bodies, substate (local and provincial) agencies, nonofficial (market and civil society) arrangements and multistakeholder constructions. While nothing suggests the arrival of a unitary centralized world state, a substantial complex of diffuse transscalar and transsectoral governance of global affairs has developed and looks likely to undergo continued growth (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Reinicke, 1999–2000; Scholte, 2010).
In most conceptions of a good society, governance operates with the consent of the governed. A major source of such legitimacy is democracy, whereby deliberation and decision-taking are open to any and all persons whose lives and livelihoods are implicated (Scholte, 2011b). Thus a society with pronounced global dimensions, such as emerges today, would preferably develop ideas and practices of global democracy to guide its regulatory activities. Yet what forms could ‘people’s rule’ take in respect of transplanetary affairs? How can the publics who are affected by one or the other global issue participate in and exercise control over relevant policy decisions? It is often argued that contemporary globalization has unfolded in deep tension with democracy. How could this major obstacle to a good (more global) society be overcome?
Such questions have generated a notable recent scholarship on ‘global democracy’, as well as related ideas of ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘transnational’ democracy. (See the more than 600 publications catalogued at BGD, 2011b.) The debates to date have offered two main formulas for democratic governance of global relations. One of these paradigms, here called statism, argues that global democracy is best achieved through multilateral collaboration among democratic nation-states. A second broad perspective, here called modern cosmopolitanism, maintains that global democracy is optimally realized by elevating pillars of Western liberal democracy (such as citizenship, human rights, civil society and representative government) from the national to the global level.
As the following parts of this article indicate, each of these two models has severe flaws, so prompting a search for alternative conceptions. Exploring one such different avenue, the latter half of the article proposes a third orientation, here dubbed postmodern global democracies. This reinvented conception of global democracy goes beyond both statism and modern cosmopolitanism, with core principles of transscalar geography, plural solidarities, transculturality, egalitarian distribution and eco-ship.
As with most ambitious and boldly expressed arguments, significant qualifications and disclaimers are warranted and best acknowledged at the outset. First, the present discussion is limited to a normative reflection. To be sure, evaluation and prescription should be informed by, and coherent with, an analytical-explanatory theory. However, it goes beyond the constraints of a journal article to detail that larger knowledge frame. Interested readers can find these matters elaborated in other writings (Scholte, 1993, 2005: ch. 4).
Second, the threefold distinction of statism, cosmopolitanism and postmodern global democracies is, like most typologies, somewhat stylized. The classification does not aim to do justice to every nuance of each thinker on global democracy. The intention is rather to identify core principles, emphasize key contrasts and highlight crucial choices. Hopefully sufficient qualifications are woven into the analysis, so that complexities remain duly recognized and straw persons are avoided. However, any taxonomy invariably brushes over some subtleties in order to underline main differences.
Third, the present discussion is an exercise in general theory rather than specific policy. Although the following pages do make reference to various concrete experiences for illustrative purposes, the article defers more detailed consideration of how to enact broad principles in particular institutional designs and political strategies. What concrete measures are required? Which agents would drive the change, and how? These more practical considerations would of course be necessary before the conceptual formulations developed below can be fully meaningful. However, the philosophical reflections introduced here also merit attention in their own right and could help to guide practical initiatives concerning global democracy.
A fourth important qualification concerns time frame. Sceptics might object that the vision of postmodern global democracies outlined here is ‘idealistic’ and ‘utopian’ in current circumstances. Yet the purpose of the present contemplation is not to propose an immediately and fully realizable formula. Certainly, as the latter part of the discussion indicates, intimations of postmodern global democracies can be read into a number of contemporary situations, thereby suggesting that relevant new practices are already available on a modest scale. However, with respect to implementation, the article mainly operates on a longer time horizon of several generations.
A fifth key preliminary note concerns methodology. To the extent that the following analysis offers something distinctive on the subject of global democracy, that novelty probably results largely from the alternative research approach adopted. Most existing literature on global democracy has emanated from: (a) introspective intellectual debates, with few steps to engage practitioners; (b) the field of political theory, with little relation to other academic disciplines; (c) sites in Europe and North America, excluding non-Western locales; and (d) middle-aged urban professional white men, themselves situated at the core of structural power. The present article certainly engages with mainstream scholarship, as the references indicate, and the writer himself holds most cards of social privilege. Importantly, however, the argument builds on 15 years when the author deliberately directed less attention to detailed debates of Western political theory, in order to concentrate mostly on conversations about global democracy with hundreds of activists, entrepreneurs, journalists, officials and politicians — as well as researchers from multiple fields of study — across all world regions and across wide cultural diversities (BGD, 2011a; Scholte, 2004, 2008, 2012). This broader cultural, geographical, intellectual and vocational scope of research generates different perspectives from conventional academic enquiry. The alternative methodology might arguably also promote a democratization of the conceptualization of global democracy.
Finally, to be explicit about the politics underpinning this article, the aim is most definitely to encourage transregional, transcultural, transdisciplinary action-oriented explorations of postmodern global democracies. Although the proposed reinvention is far from fully worked out in the pages that follow, the five cornerstones set out below offer promising possibilities to reformulate debates beyond tired oppositions of realism-versus-liberalism and communitarianism-versus-cosmopolitanism. More radical innovations in the knowledge and practice of global democracy are urgently needed, particularly in the face of a rapidly restructuring world order. Postmodern global democracies may seem to some readers to be an uncertain and even risky proposition; however, to limit the range of vision to established paradigms could be to forfeit meaningful people’s rule in contemporary society.
Statism and its problems
A statist vision suggests that people’s rule in global affairs is best realized through multilateral collaboration among democratic nation-states. Some of that collaboration can be formally institutionalized in international law and intergovernmental organizations, as occurs for example in the World Trade Organization (WTO). In other cases the collaboration can be informal through transgovernmental networks of ministers and officials, such as the Group of Twenty (G20) (Djelic and Sahlin-Anderson, 2006; Slaughter, 2004). Whatever the precise form of the coordination arrangements, the crucial point in a statist vision of global democracy is that each participating nation-state meets democratic standards vis-a-vis its own citizens.
Statist conceptions of global democracy can be traced back to the Wilsonian programme of world order in the early 20th century, with its aim to promote national self-determination (outside the overseas colonies of the day, that is) and then to unite such democratic states in a League of Nations (Knock, 1992). More recently a number of theorists have suggested in a statist vein that democracy beyond the state is not a problem so long as democracy within the state is secure (Keohane et al., 2009; Moravcsik, 2004; Pevehouse and Russett, 2006; Tan, 2008). Likewise, the Community of Democracies (CD), an intergovernmental organization founded in 2000, has conceived of global democracy as ‘a global network of democratic countries’ (CCD, 2011; see also Archibugi, 2008a; CD, 2011).
Certainly many states have on multiple occasions advanced collective self-determination in global politics. The host of examples include the promotion by various states of decolonization, the criminalization of slavery and numerous other steps to empower marginalized groups such as persons living with disabilities, ethnic minorities and women. However, statist approaches to global democracy — that is, strategies that seek to accomplish global democracy through territorial national governments alone — have critical defects. These shortcomings can be discussed under the four headings of behaviour, institutional design, social structure and culture.
With regard to behaviour, the actions of modern democratic states on global affairs have normally failed to involve much, if any, popular participation and control. Thus regulation of matters such as arms proliferation, climate change, financial flows and the Internet have usually figured only peripherally, if at all, in national elections. Only in Switzerland has membership of global intergovernmental organizations been subject to national referendum (Sheehan, 2006). Likewise, national parliaments have generally exercised at best incidental and shallow scrutiny of their state’s involvement in global governance (Round, 2004). Moreover, states have normally been represented in global regulatory processes by professional bureaucrats who are far removed from the daily lives and concerns of most of the national population (Kerr, 2001; Pauly, 1997). Then states — including major states in particular — have often taken actions that impact beyond their borders without fulfilling democratic accountability to affected people in those external areas (Voices without Votes, 2009). In short, states that embrace a democratic constitution for their national order tend to exhibit weak democracy in their handling of global issues. And this conclusion arises even when taking liberal national democracy on its own terms. More critical theories such as feminism and poststructuralism of course question the democratic credentials of the modern liberal state itself (Burchell et al., 1991; De Sousa Santos, 2007b; Pateman, 1988).
Other deficiencies in the statist formula of global democracy arise when the institutional design of state-based global governance arrangements fails to meet democratic criteria. For instance, a number of key intergovernmental bodies have not offered membership to all of the states whose populations they affect. Examples include the G20, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). On other occasions state-based global governance has been marked by glaring arbitrary inequalities, including veto power for five states in the United Nations Security Council and votes based on capital subscription in a number of intergovernmental financial institutions. Meanwhile various global governance arrangements that were initially created by states have with time acquired substantial power over their (especially weaker) member states (Barnett and Finnemore, 1999; Reinalda and Verbeek, 1998), and such power generally operates with little or any participation and control by the affected people. The relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and most states of sub-Saharan Africa offers one example in this regard. Likewise, small island states whose very existence may be threatened by global warming have little say in the United Nations climate change regime.
More severely still, statism fails as a formula for global democracy because several of its key premises do not match up with core social structures of the contemporary world. For one thing, statism assumes that social geography is defined predominantly if not wholly by country domains; yet problems of a more global world also unfold in transborder realms across countries, as well as in local spheres within countries (Johnston et al., 2002; Lefebvre, 2009). In addition, statist conceptions presume that all governance of global affairs proceeds from, or is under the control of, states; yet recent decades have witnessed a considerable growth of relatively autonomous regulatory activities through suprastate, substate, private and multistakeholder channels (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Criekemans, 2010; Hall and Biersteker, 2004; Hallström and Boström, 2010). Statist notions furthermore assume that ‘the people’ in global politics always and only take the form of a nation; yet collective identities and solidarities in today’s world may also be expressed in various nonterritorial guises, such as ‘peoples’ based on class, faith or sexual orientation (Scholte, 2005: ch. 7). In sum, then, a statist approach to global democracy presupposes structures of geography, governance and identity which may have broadly prevailed in the middle of the 20th century, but no longer hold two generations later.
Finally, in addition to the behavioural, institutional and deeper structural problems already noted, statism fails as a model for global democracy on cultural grounds. The modern state (and intergovernmental organizations and transgovernmental networks comprised of modern states) sit uncomfortably with the life-worlds of many people who are implicated in global politics. For example, many indigenous groups have experienced the modern state to be a purveyor of cultural imperialism as much as a source of democracy (Howard, 2003; Maybury-Lewis, 2001). The cultural fragility of the colonially imported modern state is also regularly apparent in much of Africa and the Pacific (Jackson, 1990). In addition, the secularism of the modern state can sit uneasily with religious faith in some circles (Demerath and Straight, 1997). Thus statism questionably assumes that modern national territorial government integrates smoothly into, and is democratically meaningful for, every political culture in the contemporary world.
As underlined at the outset, the preceding critique of statist visions of global democracy does not deny the many contributions to collective self-determination that many national governments have made — and could continue to make — for many peoples in respect of transplanetary concerns. Indeed, various reforms could upgrade the performance of state-based democracy in global politics, especially in regard to some of the behavioural and institutional shortcomings described above (Patomäki and Teivainen, 2004: Part I). However, these adjustments to state activities and state-based global regulatory bodies would not come easily, as decades of unsuccessful struggle to reconstruct the UN Security Council illustrate. Moreover, even if these reforms were realized, they could not resolve the deeper structural and cultural contradictions set out above. Hence, while the state can certainly play a part in realizing people’s rule in a more global world, global democracy cannot begin and end with the state and inter-state relations.
Modern cosmopolitanism and its problems
Recognizing intractable inadequacies in statist approaches, many contemporary theorists and activists have explored alternative roads to global democracy. Much of this innovative thinking has occurred in a frame of modern cosmopolitanism that has undergone considerable revival since the 1990s (Brown and Held, 2010; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). Building on earlier modern thinking by the likes of Vítoria, Kant and Marx — as well as world federalists of the 20th century — these conceptions take the planet and its total human population as the unit of society alongside, if not ahead of, the country and its national populace (Calhoun, 2008; Scheffler, 1999; Waldron, 2000). Ideas of cosmopolitan democracy thereby address social geography beyond country containers and collective identities beyond nations (Fraser, 2009; Habermas, 2001; Linklater, 1998). These conceptions also acknowledge regulatory processes beyond states, for example, with notions of ‘multi-level governance’ (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Enderlein et al., 2010) and aspirations for world government (Cabrera, 2010b; Craig, 2008; Tännsjö, 2008).
Broadly speaking, modern cosmopolitan visions of global democracy elevate the framework of Western liberal democracy from the country/state/national arena to a planetary scale (Archibugi, 2004, 2008b; Held, 1995). Thus, for example, various writings in a modern cosmopolitan vein have suggested that principles of modern citizenship can be suitably transposed from the national to the global sphere (Cabrera, 2010a; Heater, 2002; Hutchings and Dannreuther, 1999). Similarly, modern cosmopolitanism holds that global human rights can offer a foundation for global democracy, much as a bill of rights enshrined in a national constitution is meant to guarantee public participation and control in state-based democracy (Gould, 2004; Jacobs, 2007: chs 14, 15). Likewise, much as modern liberal political theory has extolled the virtues of national civil society and a national public sphere as arenas of democracy vis-a-vis the national state, so modern cosmopolitanism celebrates the democratizing potentials of global civil society and a global public sphere vis-à-vis global governance (Fraser, 2007; Kaldor, 2003; Keane, 2003). Whereas liberal democracy through the state rests largely on the competitive election of people’s representatives in national legislatures, a number of modern cosmopolitans have proposed that global plebiscites, global parliaments and global political parties would provide a cornerstone of democratic accountability in suprastate governance (Monbiot, 2003; Patomäki, 2011; Strauss, 2005).
Principles of modern cosmopolitanism have made some headway in practice as well. A host of global human rights instruments have obtained legal force since the 1940s (Marks and Clapham, 2005; Montgomery, 1999). Particularly since the 1990s, most global governance institutions have developed rituals of consultation with civil society associations (Scholte, 2011a; Steffek et al., 2008). Various proposals have circulated for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (Kauppi et al., 2007; UNPA, 2011), and in 2001, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) actually had five members of its board elected through a global ballot on the World Wide Web (Klein, 2001). Several initiatives have also experimented with informal transplanetary plebiscites to consult ‘global public opinion’ on one or the other policy concern (Global Vote, 2011; Stark, 2010).
Modern cosmopolitanism has certain decided strengths over statism as a vision of global democracy. In particular, this approach recognizes that social geography today involves more than countries, that contemporary governance involves more than states and that political solidarity now often involves more than nations. Moreover, principles and practices of citizenship, human rights, civil society and representative assemblies could well play a part in global democracy, especially if they are interpreted with flexibility and creativity across diverse contexts. However, in other ways, modern cosmopolitan responses to the shortfalls of statist conceptions of global democracy do not go far enough. Indeed, modern cosmopolitanism contains its own deep-seated flaws, mainly as related to geography, social psychology, culture, economy and ecology.
With regard to geography, modern cosmopolitan visions of global democracy tend to replace the country-centrism of statism with a spatial globalism. That is, modern cosmopolitanism normally focuses on ‘the global level’ as an arena that is distinct from regional, national, local and immediate spheres of social relations. From such a perspective, global democracy becomes a question of bringing public participation and control to a global tier of regulation (such as the United Nations). Likewise, the focus is on a global level of citizenship, a global level of human rights, a global level of civil society and a global level of plebiscite and parliament. Yet democratic governance of global issues arguably needs to involve people not only as they walk the corridors of global organizations, but also as they live in households, workplaces, districts, provinces, countries and regions. Thus, for example, democratic reform of the UN, the G20, ICANN and so on would not be fully effective if it were not accompanied by concurrent democratization at other ‘levels’ such as regional, national and local government. Some modern cosmopolitan writers recognize this point in principle, but they normally do not then go on to address democracy in these ‘lower’ domains. Nor has this approach systematically explored the mutual constitution of democracy across scales of political activity.
With regard to social psychology, modern cosmopolitanism tends to replace the nation-centrism of statism with a universalist conception of ‘the people’. In other words, modern cosmopolitans tend to assume that ‘the demos’ in global affairs mainly involves the human species as a single political community. Yet identities and solidarities in contemporary global politics are generally far more complex than this. Global problems do not always affect every human being on earth; nor do global developments affect all persons in the same ways and to the same extents. True, ‘the people’ in global politics might sometimes define themselves in universal terms when, say, climate change or infectious disease has potentially far-reaching consequences for every human inhabitant of earth. However, even on these occasions, differential impacts might prompt ‘the people’ in global democracy also to identify themselves partly on class, gender, racial or territorial lines. Then there are other circumstances in global politics where ‘the people’ might construct their interests and struggles in terms of age, caste, diaspora, disability, religious conviction or sexual orientation (Adam et al., 1998; Cohen, 2008; Hardtmann, 2009; Levitt, 2007). Hence, contrary to modern cosmopolitan suppositions, political solidarity in global affairs can take multiple forms in addition to that of humanity as a whole. Indeed, a universalist conception of the global demos can be misleading when propositions that disproportionately favour certain constituencies are presented as being in the equal interest of all humankind. Examples of such Western-centric hegemonic universalism include global laissez faire and English as a global lingua franca (Ives, 2010).
With regard to culture, mainstream cosmopolitanism is, like statism, embedded in a particular life-world, namely, that of Western-modern rationalism. Proponents of modern cosmopolitanism might suppose that their paradigm of global democracy has roots in a universal ‘human nature’, but like any other perspective, this vision has a culturally and historically specific genealogy. Western-modern notions of citizenship, human rights, civil society and representative government are not ‘natural’ conditions, but the product of a particular place and time. By uncritically promoting the universalization of these ideas, modern cosmopolitans can unwittingly perpetuate an unhappy long-running world-historical saga of Eurocentric imperialism (Lander, 2009; Pagden, 2000). Modern cosmopolitan writings rarely if ever acknowledge that indigenous epistemologies, religious life-worlds, Confucian mindsets or postmodern knowledges could have anything to offer regarding global democracy, even though large proportions of humankind today inhabit such other cultural frames (Halapua and Halapua, 2009; Mostafa, 2009; Xu et al., 2009). This is by no means to say that modern cosmopolitanism has no merits and that ‘the West’ has no role in building global democracy; but it is to suggest that Western knowledge should engage in transcultural dialogue with other understandings, rather than impose itself on others (Mouffe, 2009).
With regard to economy, modern cosmopolitan conceptions of global democracy have often downplayed the material circumstances of veritable collective self-determination. Democracy involves equivalent opportunities for all affected persons to participate in and exercise control over societal regulatory processes. Liberal political theory has tended to interpret this precondition in narrow terms whereby all members of a polity enjoy equality of civil and political rights. However, as others have long stressed, effective democracy also requires socioeconomic justice, including a relatively even distribution of material resources across ‘the people’. Economic inequalities are already glaring enough within most countries, thereby compromising national democracies. Yet these gulfs are still more extreme across planetary spaces, as calculations of a global Gini coefficient have demonstrated (Milanovic, 2005). True, some modern cosmopolitans have stressed the importance of poverty alleviation on a global scale, so that all of humanity obtains an acceptable level of material welfare (Held, 2004; Pogge, 2002). A few others have taken a further step of advocating progressively redistributive global taxation (Patomäki, 2001). However, movement towards global-scale social justice as a basis of global democracy implies more far-reaching transformations of political economy than modern cosmopolitan arguments have generally contemplated (Kurasawa, 2007).
With regard to ecology, modern cosmopolitanism has paralleled statism in its anthropocentrism. In other words, both of the principal models of global democracy on offer to date have, on a modern pattern, separated ‘society’ from ‘nature’, thereby neglecting to integrate their vision of people’s rule into an embrace of the overall web of life (Lander, 2009). Such an omission would seem unsustainable at a time of severe global ecological fragility. Surely global democracy cannot be constructed without consideration of today’s unprecedented ecological pressures. Against this backdrop, certain thinkers have recently proposed notions of ‘intergenerational democracy’, ‘earth democracy’ and ‘Gaian democracies’ (Holden, 2002: 93–103; Madron and Jopling, 2003; Shiva, 2005). However, ecological thinking has found little or no place in modern cosmopolitan argumentation (Hayden, 2005: ch. 5; Linklater, 2006), let alone in ideas of cosmopolitan democracy more particularly.
By highlighting these geographical, social-psychological, cultural, political-economic and ecological shortcomings, the preceding critique does not conclude that modern cosmopolitanism has nothing to offer a project of building global democracy. In particular, this reaction against statism has the merit of recognizing contemporary transformations in social structures of geography, governance and collective identity. Moreover, as elaborated later, concepts of global citizenship could contribute to a reinvented global democracy, especially if political rights and duties were reformulated to include an ecological dimension. Likewise, ideas of global human rights could retain an important place in global democracy, particularly if they were reformulated beyond a particularistic Western-liberal conception so as to incorporate more cross-cultural notions of life with dignity (Panikkar and Panikkar, 1982; De Sousa Santos, 2002). In addition, ‘civil society’ could contribute to global democracy if it were understood not as a collection of modern bureaucratic citizen organizations (‘NGOs’), but in a transcultural sense as a political space outside official circles where people attempt through collective deliberation and action to shape societal rules (Hann and Dunn, 1996). Suprastate parliaments might also have a role in global democracy in those situations where the affected people judge such institutions to be effective channels for popular participation and control. However, a more transformative vision of global democracy would not regard modern representative assemblies to be a necessary condition for, let alone the total extent of, people’s rule in global politics. Indeed, experience with elected macro-regional parliaments as spurs to democracy (e.g. in Central America and Europe) has been disappointing to date, and global legislatures could well elicit even less popular engagement.
Postmodern global democracies
So, what to do if the main offerings of political theory to date fall short of something that could with confidence be termed ‘global democracy’? One response could be to give up and conclude that ‘global democracy’ is an oxymoron (Dahl, 1999; De Wilde, 2011; see also Koenig-Archibugi, 2010). In this vein, some ‘anti-globalization’ voices have argued that people’s rule is only possible in local spaces or, at a maximum extent, national arenas (Conway and Singh, 2011; Hines, 2000). These critics maintain that democracy can only be salvaged through ‘de-globalization’, that is, undoing the increased transplanetary social connectivity that has developed over recent decades and unravelling most global-scale governance (Bello, 2005).
Yet such a prescription seems unviable, given the enormous forces that have pushed contemporary social relations into expanded global spaces. How to deny global ecological changes and global infectious diseases? How to return to 1950 levels — let alone 1850 levels — of global awareness and global exchanges? Even if judged desirable, major rollbacks of air travel, telecommunications, transplanetary capital flows, global entertainments and so on appear most improbable. Hence, if deepened global relations are here to stay for the foreseeable future, a conclusion that global democracy is untenable would surrender the field to global oligarchy. Such an outcome — which contradicts most notions of a good society — must be resisted.
The imperative is, then, to develop principles and practices that could take global democracy beyond both statism and modern cosmopolitanism and in the process avoid many of the shortcomings of these mainstream conceptions. In this vein, some activists have in recent years experimented with novel spaces such as the World Social Forum (Sen et al., 2004; Smith et al., 2007; Teivainen, 2002). Meanwhile, certain thinkers have brought ideas of ‘deliberative democracy’ to global politics, although most formulations of that concept have not made a radical break with conventional notions of civil society and the public sphere (Dryzek, 2006, 2010; Smith and Brassett, 2008). Other theorists have introduced vocabulary of ‘cosmopolitanisms’ (in the plural), ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’, ‘anarcho-cosmopolitanism’ and ‘grassroots globalism’ (Gabay, 2008; Mertes, 2003; Mignolo, 2000; Pollock et al., 2000; Rao, 2010). These labels may be suboptimal inasmuch as they could still resonate with the globalism and universalism that, as seen above, compromise modern cosmopolitanism. However, the appearance of this new terminology indicates that a search is on to develop novel frameworks for global democracy (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Marcos, 2001; Mouffe, 2005).
The strategy of reinvention pursued here focuses on addressing each of the five main shortfalls of modern cosmopolitanism identified above. The resultant alternative could perhaps suitably be called postmodern global democracies. Such a vision is ‘postmodern’ in terms of its fuller accommodation of structural transformations that are currently taking social relations substantially beyond modern patterns: for example, of country-centred geography, state-centred governance and nation-centred identity. (Others who have invoked the label ‘postmodern’ in discussions of reconstructed global democracy — albeit not on quite the same grounds as here — include De Sousa Santos (1998) and Hardt and Negri (2004).) Meanwhile, ‘democracies’ is designated in the plural so as to convey an expectation that diverse contexts would generate multiple concrete forms to implement the principles that are laid out in the following pages.
In summary, the vision of postmodern global democracies set out here suggests that, with respect to geography, global democracy be constructed on a principle of transscalarity that avoids both the country-centrism of statism and the globalism of modern cosmopolitanism. With respect to identity, postmodern global democracies builds on a principle of plural solidarities that avoids both the nationalism of statism and the universalism of modern cosmopolitanism. With respect to culture, the alternative proffered here promotes a principle of transculturality that avoids the refusals to engage with diversity that mark both statism and modern cosmopolitanism. With respect to political economy, postmodern global democracies entails a principle of egalitarian transplanetary redistribution that is usually absent in both mainstream approaches. With respect to ecology, the suggested postmodern framework invokes a principle of eco-ship that avoids the anthropocentrism of both established models of global democracy.
Some of these points resonate with parts of other recent journeys into alternative constructions of global democracy. For example, Hardt and Negri’s conception of multitude with its ‘many peoples’ (2004: xiv) and Mignolo’s notion of ‘diversality’ (2000: 745) largely echo the principle of plural solidarities highlighted here. Mouffe’s (2008) preference for a ‘multipolar’ rather than a cosmopolitan world order speaks to some of the ethics of transculturality suggested here. Several recent reflections on ecological democracy were cited earlier. Hence, as ever, no thesis is entirely new.
However, the formulation of ‘postmodern global democracies’ elaborated in the following pages seeks to take the project of reinvention further. The argument consolidates, systematizes and extends ideas that have entered into circulation elsewhere, as well as adding new ingredients and mixes. In particular, the perspective combines geographical, social-psychological, cultural, economic and ecological aspects in a more holistic transformative vision. The resulting greater clarification and specification of premises can hopefully help other theorists and practitioners in their strivings to remake global democracy.
Transscalarity
To begin with a first cornerstone, then, transscalarity is a ‘postmodern’ way to imagine and enact political space. This principle rejects modern constructions whereby democracy is pursued in respect of discrete spaces at one or the other level. On such a pattern, statists have centred democracy on a national level, whereas modern cosmopolitans have centred democracy on a global level. Other privileging of a given level has occurred when feminists have suggested that democracy begins in the immediate sphere, when localists have centred democracy efforts on a district level and when regionalists have centred democracy on, for example, an African or European level.
Taking a contrary approach, transscalar democracy treats all such spheres as aspects of one social space and focuses on the interconnections among the various dimensions. Spaces are appreciated in a relational rather than an essentialized sense (Pries, 2010). There is no separation of the international and the domestic, or of the global and the local. Transscalar politics address the global, regional, national, local and immediate arenas simultaneously and in fluctuating combinations. From this perspective, democracy is not achieved at one or the other geographical ‘level’, but through fluid mobilizations across scales.
Moreover, since the concept of transscalarity regards social space in holistic terms, it avoids the modern penchant to identify a primary level of political action. A transscalar approach rejects the notion of hierarchies among (artificially separated) spaces. No scale — whether immediate, local, national, regional or global — is a priori privileged as being intrinsically more relevant, more powerful or more democratic than others. In particular, postmodern global democracies would refuse a subsidiarity principle, as arises in many accounts of ‘multi-level’ politics (Føllesdal, 1998). That premise assumes that ‘the lowest level’ is ipso facto more democratic. Yet in practice some national states and global social movements can manifest considerably more people’s rule than certain local orders. In addition, a veritably transscalar perspective would avoid the vocabulary of ‘transnationalism’, inasmuch as that name continues to privilege the national sphere as the primary reference point (Khagram and Levitt, 2007; Tarrow, 2005; Vertovec, 2009). For all its emphasis on crossing spaces, trans nationalism still highlights the national, whereas the term trans scalarity avoids naming — and implicitly elevating — any particular scale.
Instead of centring on any level, democratic activism in a postmodern mode is always alert to opportunities (as well as dangers) in every arena and combination of arenas. Transscalar strategies also take into account that the pattern of those possibilities and perils across spheres is not fixed and so needs continual reassessment. At one moment it might be opportune to combine interventions in global and subnational governance institutions, while at another moment those same venues might present obstacles, so that attention would better turn to sites on other scales such as households and regional social movements. In short, transscalarity prescribes that democracy promoters should engage with whatever assemblage of scales that offers the greatest prospects of recognition, respect, voice and influence for a given public in a given situation.
Transscalar democracy is appropriate for a mode of governance that has in recent times become increasingly transscalar. Again, the holistic and relational term is invoked rather than ‘multi-level’, with its connotations of separate and hierarchically arranged tiers (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Enderlein et al., 2010). Public policy is today generally handled through networks that interconnect agencies with respective global, macro-regional, national, micro-regional and local jurisdictions and constituencies. Thus, for example, finance is governed through a host of global agencies such as: the International Accounting Standards Board and the IMF; macro-regional arrangements such as the euro area and the CFA franc; treasuries and central banks on a national scale; substate bodies such as the Alberta Securities Commission; and in certain cases local alternative currency schemes. Transscalar governance similarly marks everything from competition policy to crime control, public health and sport. If regulatory processes have a transscalar character, then efforts to make them democratic would suitably be transscalar too.
Of course, transscalar democracy poses significant challenges. For example, transscalar governance networks give power many places to hide, with the result that democratic movements can struggle to locate and pin down responsible decision-takers. Indeed, most people are not accustomed to think and act in transscalar terms and so probably are tested — at least initially — to conduct effective mobilizations on this basis. Moreover, it can be difficult and costly to coordinate campaigns across multiple spaces. To this extent, transscalar politics could favour those who are better resourced — and thereby reinforce existing power inequalities.
Nevertheless, contemporary democratic forces deny transscalarity at their peril. Popular struggles that continue to focus on a particular level (whichever it might be) are unlikely to achieve effective participation and control in global politics, as power will invariably slip off to other, less monitored sites. More positively, transscalar strategies can also open up new possibilities for global democracy. For instance, when multiple sites of governance are relevant to an issue, it arguably becomes less likely that authorities can ignore public concern, as experience with HIV/AIDS has illustrated. Moreover, democratic movements can ‘shop around’ across scales to find the most amenable forum and promote the most empowering responses to their grievances (Severino and Ray, 2010).
Transscalar democracy can be observed in various recent concrete developments. For example, the World Social Forum has since 2001 convened interconnected deliberations globally, regionally, nationally and locally. Some new modes of labour activism have undertaken initiatives that concurrently involve immediate workplaces, national coalitions and global coordinations (Munck and Waterman, 1999). The peasant mobilization La Vía Campesina has organized itself as interlinked global, regional, national, provincial and village formations (Borras et al., 2008; Desmarais, 2007). Also in the vein of transscalarity, various civil society actors have used so-called ‘boomerang’ tactics to reach out from local sites to global arenas in order to reverberate back on national policy (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; see also Osterweil, 2005; Waddell, 2011). In each of these cases and more, contemporary democratic activism is not centred at any level, be it the immediate circle or the local community or the micro-regional domain or the nation-state or the macro-regional apparatus or the global institution. Rather, transscalar democracy works holistically across spatial dimensions treated as a single political field.
Plural solidarities
Along with a reconstructed approach to social space, a second suggested core move in a turn from modern to postmodern framings of global democracy involves an alternative approach to questions of political identity. A principle of plural solidarities gives postmodern global democracies a different way of understanding and enacting ‘the people’. Both statism and modern cosmopolitanism presume that ‘the demos’ rests in one fixed way of collective being and belonging. In the case of statism, the single mould of ‘the public’ is said to be the national community, whereas modern cosmopolitanism assumes that political subjects hold an overriding affiliation with a universal community of humankind.
In contrast, a notion of postmodern global democracies suggests that an individual can embrace multiple solidarities and that the relative weights of these attachments can fluctuate depending on the situation at hand. The shift from modern to postmodern global politics therefore involves a move from the singular dêmos to the plural dêmoi (Bohman, 2007). Postmodern global publics have ‘many faces’ (Mignolo, 2000: 745).
For one thing, in postmodern global democracies a political subject can have both a national and a species affiliation. Thus a person could align with a national public in respect of, say, language policy and at the same time espouse species solidarity in respect of, say, disaster relief on the other side of the earth. A postmodern formulation does not demand, in the vein of conventional modern political theory, an either/or choice between communitarian nationalism and cosmopolitan universalism (Miller, 1995). Rather, this alternative framework allows for an interplay of both tendencies, with their relative weights shifting in accordance with the issue in question.
More than this, postmodern global democracies allows that the same individual could simultaneously hold several national identities. These nations can relate to existing territorial states (e.g. French, Indian, Nigerian) or they can include nations that lack their own state (e.g. Basque, Naga, Ogoni). Contemporary globalization has also facilitated greater political activism in national diasporas (e.g. Palestinian, Tatar, Zimbabwean). Thus national solidarity has a considerably more complex character in postmodern frames of global democracy as compared with the neat coincidence of nation, country and state that has been presumed and pursued in modern politics.
More complicated still, in postmodern global democracies the same political subject can, along with one or more national identities, also affirm several nonterritorial solidarities. That is, species affiliation with humanity as a whole is not the only possible form of transborder solidarity in global politics. It is equally if not more possible to affirm nonterritorial affinities related to age, caste, class, disability, faith, gender, indigeneity, race, sexuality or vocation (Antrobus, 2004; Rahier et al., 2010; Wilmer, 1993; plus sources already cited). In the vein of such ‘minoritarian cosmopolitans’ (Pollock et al., 2000: 582), one witnesses inter alia global women’s movements, global professional associations and global religious bonds.
Postmodern practices of plural solidarities are already evident in many areas of contemporary global politics. For example, more and more states now permit multiple national citizenships, and several states (e.g. Bolivia, South Africa) have in recent constitutions legally recognized a plurality of nationalities within their jurisdiction. Substate ethnic mobilizations have proliferated and intensified across the world and are now widely viewed as something to be accommodated rather than repressed. Diaspora networks have become more active than ever (Cohen, 2008). Other global affiliations have formed around the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN), Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI), Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). At the same time, putting into practice solidarity across global humankind, appeals for humanitarian relief have generated unprecedented responses.
An appreciation of plural solidarities is also reflected in some recent institutional developments of formal global governance. For example, most intergovernmental, transgovernmental, interregional and translocal bodies have, particularly since the 1990s, elaborated arrangements to consult with non-national constituencies such as faith groups, indigenous peoples, women, workers and youth. In addition, diverse publics have recently gained formal representation in global governance with a burgeoning of so-called ‘multistakeholder’ arrangements (Hallström and Boström, 2010; Macdonald, 2008). Instances where non-state peoples have obtained board membership include the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) (Brown, 2009; Scoones, 2010). Much more reconstruction of official governance would be required in order more fully to embody a principle of plural solidarities, but modest moves in this direction are evident.
Transculturality
Regarding the principle of transculturality, postmodern global democracies departs from both statism and modern cosmopolitanism in the way that it handles epistemological pluralism. Across the planet, people ‘know the world’ in highly diverse ways (De Sousa Santos, 2007a; Foot et al., 2003; Katzenstein, 2010; Mozaffari, 2002). To entail veritable collective self-determination, global democracy must be practised in ways that are meaningfully democratic within each of these multiple life-worlds. How can this be done? One needs either to find a common denominator across the diversity or, if such a shared ‘superculture’ is not available, to negotiate through multifarious life-worlds in ways that leave all concerned experiencing the circumstances as being democratic in their own terms.
Neither statist nor modern cosmopolitan approaches to global democracy offers viable answers of this kind. On the contrary, each in its own way sidesteps the issue of cultural diversity. Statist formulas imply that democratic national governments can ‘leave culture at home’ when they engage with one another, so that global governance itself is a culturally neutral arena of diplomats and technocrats. Yet diplomacy and technocracy do have specific cultural content and tend to subordinate and exclude other ways of knowing. Meanwhile, mainstream cosmopolitanism assumes that, with ‘development’, all cultures will and should be subsumed in a (superior) Western-modern life-world marked by secular, anthropocentric, techno-scientific, instrumental, individualist rationalism. Yet much of contemporary humanity feels alienated in and by Western modernity, and so does not experience collective participation and control in that cultural frame. Thus both statism and modern cosmopolitanism contradict global democracy in that they arbitrarily deny recognition, respect, voice and influence to people who live outside Western-modern terms of reference.
To provide greater empowerment of diverse life-worlds, a paradigm of postmodern global democracies could adopt a principle of ‘transculturality’. This approach differs from ‘multiculturalism’, a perspective that tends to divide a society into neatly circumscribed groups (by faith, nationality, race, etc.) and then to prescribe ways that cultures separated on these lines can coexist in mutual tolerance (Kymlicka, 2001; Taylor, 1992). In contrast, transculturality holds that maps of life-worlds are substantially blurred, with considerable diversity within and mixture across purported cultural categories. In this vein, the term ‘transculturality’ is also preferred over ‘interculturality’, inasmuch as the latter vocabulary could be read to imply relations between discrete groups (‘inter’-‘cultures’).
As understood here, politics of transculturality have five main pillars: recognition of complexity; celebration of diversity; cultivation of humility; promotion of listening; and pursuit of reciprocal learning and change. As just described, recognition of complexity entails an appreciation that culture is not manifested in neatly bounded and mutually exclusive populations (Pieterse, 2004). In global politics as actually lived, culture involves intersections and mixes rather than discrete groups (of whatever kind). Postmodern global democracies accepts and accommodates this epistemological complexity, rather than trying to box political subjects into artificially homogeneous cultural categories (‘Asian’, ‘Islamic’, ‘Western’, etc.).
A second cornerstone of transculturality, celebration of diversity, suggests that, in a viable global democracy for contemporary society, epistemological pluralism is not only recognized, but also positively embraced and actively promoted. For postmodern global democracies, cultural difference is not regarded as a problem for, let alone a threat to, people’s rule. Rather, exploration of diverse life-worlds is seen as an opportunity to develop new insights, to open wider potentials, to discover alternative answers. With this promotion of multiple paths, political subjects in postmodern global democracies are invited to craft modes of participation and control that offer them a sense of meaningful involvement. In many if not most cases, diverse democratic practices towards the same global issue can be pursued side by side in complementary fashion. It is not necessary — and, on the contrary, it is anti-democratic — to force all global democracy into asingle cultural mould, be it a world parliament, indigenous storytelling or jihad. Indeed, the coexistence of multiple democratic practices stimulates debates about the meaningof democracy, and without such ongoing provocations, any would-be democracy can degenerate into empty ritual.
True, situations arise where culturally diverse expressions of democracy could clash in global politics: where different understandings of human dignity, collective participation and responsible authority contradict one another. In these circumstances, a politics of transculturality prescribes an initial response of humility. Instead of immediately presuming the superiority of their own position, parties to transcultural communication and negotiation acknowledge that they each have severely limited comprehension of contrasting life-worlds. Awe at one’s ignorance of most human experience, and wonder at the sheer scope of human creativity, can check impetuous dismissals of contrary cultural positions. In this vein, postmodern global democracies could adapt the Pacific islands concept of noa. This notion designates the capability and responsibility of parties in conflict to enter their mutual conversations with maximal detachment of their perceptions, thoughts and feelings from prior commitments and a predetermined agenda (Halapua and Halapua, 2009). Certainly, humility in postmodern global democracies entails an abandonment of any and all ‘civilizing missions’ whereby a self-designated ‘advanced culture’ absorbs supposed ‘backward peoples’ (Childs, 2003). In particular, Western rationalism becomes one party to global dialogues rather than the universal reference point and historical instructor (Chakrabarty, 2000).
Humility facilitates a fourth cornerstone of transculturality in postmodern global democracies, namely, that of listening. Capacity to listen across diversities is a key skill in postmodern global democracies that has been strikingly underdeveloped in modern global politics. Indeed, the ability to listen is arguably as important for global democracy as knowledge of legal instruments and policymaking processes. Veritable listening goes beyond polite nods (while one is mainly preparing one’s own next words). Transcultural listening entails concentrated attention that more fully hears, empathizes with and responds to the other. This deeper listening not only enlarges a listener’s understanding of their interlocutor’s experience of democracy, but also increases reflexive awareness of their own cultural position. On this basis parties are better equipped to develop actions on global issues that show respect and care for epistemological diversities and leave space for others to pursue different responses with which they may be more comfortable.
Finally, transculturality presumes that building global democracy is a process of ongoing reciprocal learning and change among diverse life-worlds. In a postmodern conception, societal knowledge frames — including the symbols and rituals of democracy — are not static ‘traditions’. The inevitable interplay of diversities generates continual cultural reconstructions. A transcultural outlook not only appreciates this dynamism, but positively welcomes the creative potentials offered by mutual transformations. It is understood that history — and global democracy within history — does not converge on an endpoint: whether of a statist, modern-cosmopolitan or any other design. Postmodern global democracies, too, would be an interlude en route to other forms of people’s rule.
Egalitarian distribution
The preceding two cornerstones of postmodern global democracies — plural solidarities and transculturality — have highlighted ideational aspects of an alternative paradigm of people’s rule in contemporary society. However, democratic governance of global affairs also has material facets. If political subjects are to pursue effective participation and control in a more global world, then it is not enough that their various identities and epistemologies are acknowledged. In addition, this recognition-in-principle must be complemented with a political economy that provides all parties with roughly comparable resources to exercise involvement in global affairs.
Indeed, many of the previously discussed solidarities in global politics have been formed substantially around shared experiences of material subordination. Economic marginalization has helped to forge global political mobilization among Dalits, indigenous peoples, peasants, persons living with disabilities, urban poor, women, young people and so on. In principle, democratic struggles for socioeconomic justice could also involve global-scale alliances across such groups (Bullard, 2005; Byrd and Jasny, 2010). Such cross-sectional coalitions have already appeared inter alia at the World Social Forum and in the global campaign to cancel the debts of low-income countries.
In postmodern global democracies, the distribution of resources would need to be such that all constituents have broadly equivalent opportunities to exercise voice and influence (Bardhan et al., 2006). Legal and moral equality of the affected persons are not enough for veritable democracy unless they are accompanied by a certain material equality. This is not to require that every member of global publics has access to exactly the same types and amounts of resources. However, it is to emphasize that substantial material inequalities generally translate into political marginalization of those with fewer means, and in turn such political subordinations tend to perpetuate if not deepen the material inequalities.
This correlation between economic resources and political possibilities has prompted many struggles for modern state-centred democracy to seek a progressive redistribution of resources across the relevant country’s population. In Western Europe and North America, underclasses used universal suffrage and labour mobilizations to promote the development of redistributive welfare states. In much of Eastern Europe and Asia, the advent of communist ‘people’s democracy’ went hand in hand with land reform. Twentieth-century decolonization struggles rested largely on promises (often poorly fulfilled in practice) of socioeconomic justice. Recent democratic rejuvenations in Latin America have involved redistributive agendas in Bolivia, Brazil and elsewhere. Likewise, current democratic strivings in Africa and the Middle East have generally targeted the kleptocracy of existing authoritarian regimes. To be sure, different democracy movements conceive of ‘fair distribution’ in different ways, accord it different priorities and pursue it with different strategies. Yet the general objective of greater socioeconomic equity has been so consistent as to seem integral to modern national democracy.
It therefore appears incongruous that, as noted earlier, modern cosmopolitan visions of global democracy have on the whole underplayed economic dimensions of the question. Why would equitable distribution of resources across a public be less vital when democracy involves supranational spaces? The development of postmodern global democracies presents an opportunity to correct this neglect. Postmodern global democracies could embrace a host of concrete measures for progressive global-scale redistribution: for instance, alternative currencies, changes to global regimes of intellectual property and taxation, deconsumption by global middle classes, equitable tourism, fair trade schemes, and a globalized universal basic income (Aliprandi, 2010; Bowes, 2011; Frankman, 2002; Patomäki, 2001). The precise measures to pursue are a matter for further deliberation, but the principle of egalitarian global distribution is indispensable for meaningful people’s rule in global affairs.
Eco-ship
Yet it is not enough that postmodern global democracies build on and extend the concern with socioeconomic justice that has marked modern democracy of the nation-state in the 20th century. In addition, this alternative paradigm would embed democracy in a concern with ecological integrity, something that has been decidedly absent in modern constructions of public participation and control. Such ecologically attuned democracy would envelop social democracy within a consciousness of, and care for, the full web of life.
Criticisms of the ecologically destructive logics of modernity have been enunciated since the early days of rationalist social relations with their anthropocentric, techno-scientific, instrumentalist orientations (De Jonge, 2004). However, the full implications of these critiques could be downplayed so long as modernity did not test the carrying capacities of planet earth. Yet these limits became strikingly visible in the 1980s with dangerous levels of stratospheric ozone depletion. Since then the urgency has escalated with global-scale climate change, urbanization, losses of biodiversity, growing pressures on energy and mineral supplies, prospective shortages of fresh water and arable soil, and possible redefinitions of life itself with rapidly developing biotechnology and nanotechnology.
The ecological durability of the planet will become still more strained as the human population reaches 9 billion by 2050, or some 10% of homo sapiens who have ever lived (BBC, 2011). Moreover, these unprecedented numbers of people will live longer and have unprecedented technological capacities to make unprecedented demands on the natural environment. In this situation, a perpetuation of modern blindness to ecology (as reflected also in modern democratic practices) could create enormous damage, perhaps even to the point of undermining the conditions that make human life possible. Hence, habits of isolating democracy from ecology must be reversed.
Full elaboration of a postmodern construction of global ecological democracies lies beyond the scope of the present discussion, but two general starting points can be identified here. The first is a need to undo the modern separation of society from nature, as reflected in practices of democracy-outside-nature that characterize both statism and modern cosmopolitanism. The life-worlds of various classical societies and many indigenous peoples show ways in which social relations can be steeped in ecological awareness and sensitivity. Postmodern global democracies could likewise reinvent people’s rule so that it is conducted in the frame of, and with deference to, the overall living world.
Such deference requires a second ecologically oriented reconstruction of social relations, namely, from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. Modernity — and modern democracy within this social formation — has rested on an implicit premise that the rest of nature exists to serve the human project. Reflecting anthropocentrism, modern citizenship has constructed the rights and duties of the political subject as a question for relations among human beings alone, without regard to their situation within wider nature. Indeed, historically as well as etymologically, the term ‘citizenship’ is derived from the city, a human settlement that is deliberately situated outside and above ‘the state of nature’. Seeking to replace anthropocentrism with biocentrism, some Amazonian peoples have coined the term florestania (‘forestizenship’) to designate a polity where rights are due and duties are owed in the context of a whole living world (Maldonado, 2009). The current ‘plurinational’ government of Bolivia, with a strong base in indigenous peoples, has sought to bring its ‘Law of Rights of Mother Earth’ to the United Nations and other global forums (Bolivia at UN, 2011). Postmodern global democracies could likewise be practised within a frame of ‘eco-ship’, in which human rights were delimited by ecological needs, and human obligations were framed in a context of ecological care.
Conclusion
This article has explored how ‘people’s rule’ could be aptly conceptualized in the face of contemporary, more global social relations. It has been argued that the two principal visions of global democracy on offer in mainstream thought — namely, statism and modern cosmopolitanism — each has severe inherent limitations. A critique of these approaches has formed a springboard to develop an alternative conception termed postmodern global democracies. Such a perspective urges that governance of global affairs could be suitably democratized around principles of transscalar geography, plural identity, transcultural knowledge, egalitarian economy and holistic ecology. Table 1 compresses these three models and their main distinctions into a stark snapshot.
Paradigms of global democracy in summary.
Of course, the argument developed in this article is far from finished. For one thing, a fuller account of postmodern global democracies would need to expand further on each of the five main pillars, as well as on the relationships between them. In addition, subsequent elaborations would need to integrate the vision of people’s rule presented here into a wider conception of a good society. In the process, one would have to consider the connections (and confront possible trade-offs) between democracy and other core values such as material well-being, moral decency and peace. Moreover, the present writing has only skimmed over questions concerning the concrete institutional operationalization of the principles of postmodern global democracies. Also deferred in the current discussion is a strategic analysis of forces in the contemporary political scene that favour and oppose a promotion of the proposed vision. Yet these further considerations would take this article to book length and more. The more modest objective of the present exercise has been to think through core principles of global democracy and thereby lay the groundwork for more extensive analysis and action.
And this further work on reinventing global democracy is vital. Social structures and power alignments in world politics are shifting. These far-reaching transformations call for commensurate radical reconstructions of democracy that go beyond both statism and modern cosmopolitanism. Such a move — involving as it does an interrogation and revision of various first principles — is not always comfortable. However, as said at the outset, the failure to rise to challenges of reinventing global democracy could deeply compromise the future of democracy itself.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Particular thanks for conversations and inspiration go to colleagues in the Building Global Democracy programme as well as Eva Erman, Peggy Levitt, Heikki Patomäki, Teivo Teivainen and anonymous reviewers for EJIR. Feedback on earlier versions of this article has also been gratefully received from audiences at the Catholic University Leuven, Gothenburg University, the London School of Economics, the United Nations Association of Scotland, the University of Birmingham, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Durham, the University of Helsinki, the Université Paris-Ouest/UNESCO and the University of St Gallen.