Democracy as Human Rights

Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization

Michael Goodhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415951777
• eBook ISBN: 9781135431952
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is global democracy possible? The most prominent institutional manifestations of this concept-the UN, WTO, IMF and World Bank-have been skewered as cloistered anti-democratic institutions by anti-globalization activists. Meanwhile, proponents of globalization advocate reforming these institutions to make them more transparent.

Michael Goodhart argues that both views fail to recognize the complex link between modern democracy and the sovereign state and the degree to which globalization challenges the modern conceptualization of democracy. Original and historically informed, Democracyas Human Rights provides a carefully argued theory of democracy in which traditional representative government is supported by global institutions designed to guarantee fundamental human rights.

PART

I

The Limits of Modern Democracy

CHAPTER

1

States of Confusion

Many scholars, activists, politicians, and citizens perceive that globalization poses an imminent and serious threat to democracy. Impressionistic evidence of this threat is certainly powerful: transnational corporations (TNCs) seem ever more able to evade the reach of state regulation. The policies and activities of the IMF and WTO frequently interfere in what many regard as the sovereign affairs of states, constraining states' autonomy in promoting a global corporate or free-trade agenda. Some critics even allege that these and other institutions are actively antidemocratic, either designed or destined to undermine democratic rule.¹ Financial turmoil in Southeast Asia and Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century, which many observers attribute to speculative short-term capital flows and reckless private lending, and the devastating effects of IMF-backed structural adjustment programs in much of the developing world, seem to confirm that the will of the people is increasingly subject to the whim of the market. Nowhere is this impression more firmly held, ironically, than in the rich countries of the West. Fears of capital flight and low-wage job competition, and of the declining standards of living, lax environmental protection, and curtailed social provision linked with them, fuel a backlash against free trade and encourage growing hostility toward immigrants. The irony is that while much of the world sees globalization as the new face of Western capitalism and imperialism, citizens of the Western democracies nonetheless feel themselves terribly aggrieved by it.

While the view that globalization threatens democracy is widely shared, scholars have had a hard time establishing the nature and extent of the threat on firm empirical grounds. Much of the evidence is ambiguous or controversial; numerous skeptics reject the entire debate as “globaloney” while others suspect that globalization is little more than rhetorical or ideological cover for a neoliberal economic agenda. Our seeming inability to make sense of globalizations empirical realities perpetuates this controversy, and the high degree of uncertainty surrounding the entire debate has led some prominent scholars of democracy to suggest that political theorists can probably contribute little of use to the debate on globalization.²

I am not convinced that this view is correct. I shall argue in this chapter that much of the confusion arises because we are asking the wrong question, at least with respect to democracy and globalization. The usual question—how does globalization affect democracy?—requires that we quantify globalization's effects and measure them against some (invariably controversial) historical baseline, inviting precisely the sort of empirical uncertainly just described. Framing the inquiry this way makes it a question about globalization; democracy apparently becomes a dependent variable. Upon closer inspection, however, democracy drops out altogether. Most contemporary arguments purporting to analyze how globalization affects democracy actually study globalization's effects on states. I shall argue that this conceptual slippage reflects an unquestioned assumption that the state is democracy's natural and appropriate container, that they fit together unproblematically. Although the close historical connection between state and democracy enjoys the warrant of history, conflating them leads to analytic confusion and contradiction, crippling efforts to understand globalization's consequences for states and for democracy.

This conceptual confusion, I contend, suggests that we need to ask a different question: Why does globalization affect democracy? This question concentrates our critical attention on democracy rather than on globalization, generating a wide range of further puzzles and problems much more within the bailiwick of political theory. Most significantly, it forces us to interrogate the presumed natural fit between democracy and the state. Once we challenge this presumption, it becomes plain that the relationship is much more complex and much more problematic than we are wont to realize.

How Does Globalization Affect Democracy?

There are probably as many definitions of globalization as there are students of it; the term “can refer to anything from the Internet to a hamburger.”³ Scholars cannot even agree whether globalization exists, much less what it might mean or imply. Though globalization is most frequently discussed in economic terms, it is also described as a postmodern development, a sociocultural process, a political transformation, and an ideological construct. We can identify eight themes or commonplaces that recur throughout the vast literature on the subject (remembering that critics disagree about them adamantly).

1. Market integration: the integration and expansion of markets in goods and capital, sometimes described as interpenetration of markets. Trade has expanded tremendously, and the opening of financial markets and unleashing of vast flows of capital initiated by this expansion are often described as new or unprecedented.
2. Technological developments: the advances in technology, especially information and communications technology, that facilitate rapid movement of capital, people, and ideas. The Internet, satellite communications and cellular telephony, and continuing innovations and efficiencies in transportation are often mentioned.
3. Expansion/internationalization of governance and regulatory capacities: the growing role of international governance organizations (IGOs) and TNCs in governance activities in a variety of policy areas. Critics complain that this expansion and internationalization of governance place it beyond public and democratic control, undermines sovereignty, and weakens and delegitimizes states.
4. Declining policy and regulatory role of the state: the diminishing policy autonomy of states and their inability to remain effective actors in international political and economic affairs. Markets constrain or dictate state policy, especially fiscal and economic policy; rapid capital flows and speculation against currencies can destabilize and even wreck national economies.
5. Homogenization of global culture/cultural imperialism: the spread of a single (American) popular culture, primarily through the mass media. Many worry that this process destroys local/indigenous cultures, reducing culture to just another commodity for sale in the global marketplace.
6. Shrinking/accelerating world: the acceleration and intensification of various transnational ties and interactions help to “shrink” the planet, minimizing the importance of distance as relations deepen and multiply across borders, largely through faster and easier communication. Enhanced communication strengthens ties among tribal, familial, and ethnic groups scattered across continents and facilitates the development of transnational classes of professionals and bureaucrats. Social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries become more fluid. These connections are sometimes described as an emerging global civil society (GCS).
7. Fragmentation or localization: the trend toward ethnic revivalism, reinvigorated nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and other local patterns of identification and organization. Fragmentation is the flip side of global integration; terms like fragmegration or glocalization indicate this dialectical relationship. Localization might reflect increasing cultural assertiveness in societies emerging from the shadow of colonialism or nascent resistance to changing cultural or economic imperatives.
8. Neoliberalism: ideologically, the conviction that capitalist markets and market forces are natural, efficient, and adequate mechanisms for allocating and redistributing resources, wealth, and income and that an economic system governed by market forces constitutes human freedom. Politically, neoliberalism refers to a set of policies including privatization, deregulation, lowering corporate taxes, interest rate liberalization, competitive exchange rates, decreased capital controls, and secure property rights—the so-called Washington Consensus.⁴

No neat typology of these claims, trends, and developments is possible; many overlap or intersect, and each may contain a mix of empirical, normative, and ideological claims. Moreover, there is a good deal of disagreement about just how new and significant globalization really is. First, flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas among societies are as ancient as societies themselves.⁵ Similarly, as colonial monopolies like the Dutch and British East India Companies demonstrate, transfers of capital and resources among societies under corporate auspices are themselves centuries-old phenomena; powerful corporations are no newcomers to the sphere of global governance. Moreover, technological innovation in transport and communication—from Roman highways to steam railways—has long fostered social and economic integration. When considered with the history of cooperation and coordination among political authorities in almost every imaginable area of human endeavor, the “changes” associated with globalization hardly seem new, much less revolutionary. Many critics reach precisely this conclusion, intimating that much of the uproar about globalization is hyperbole. Second, critics also maintain that existing levels of economic integration (variously measured) may only now be approaching levels seen at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁶ They also cite the continued strength of states, including their active role in shaping and controlling emergent IGOs, as evidence that claims about integration and the erosion of sovereignty are vastly exaggerated. On this view, commonly associated with the neorealist school of international relations theory, the continued preeminence of states in international politics shows that no fundamental change has (yet) occurred. Taken together, these objections prompt us to question whether there is any such thing as globalization.

Ongoing disagreement about what globalization is has not preempted a wide-ranging discussion of its effects on democracy; if anything, the disagreement has intensified debate on this subject. The most frequently cited threats to democracy include: decreasing policy autonomy, especially economic policy; increasing demands for policies to counter the adverse effects of open trade, coupled with states' increasing inability to provide such a safety net; erosion of sovereignty, mainly through ongoing shifts of legal, regulatory, and governance authority to IGOs; declining living standards and reduced social and economic rights; and, corporate capital's growing ability to elude government control and regulation. That many of these “effects” of globalization are nearly indistinguishable from the most common definitions of it attests to the high degree of confusion reigning in the field.

Globalization's purported effects on democracy are often conceived as democratic deficits or disjunctures. Global governance appears increasingly undemocratic as nonstate agencies like IGOs and TNCs assume greater roles and state autonomy and sovereignty decline. There are really two distinct but closely related hypotheses here. First, there is a claim about the limited competence of the popular or democratic will as realized and executed through state-based democratic institutions. This is mainly a claim about the scope of global political problems relative to state jurisdiction. I prefer to use the term disjunctures exclusively for this kind of problem. David Held describes these disjunctures as occurring “between the idea of the state as in principle capable of determining its own future, and the world economy, international organization, regional and global institutions, international law, and military alliances which operate to shape and constrain the options of individual nation-states.”⁷ In short, global politics and state-based political institutions do not “match up,” and the resulting disjunctures represent areas in which states have incomplete or inadequate political control. These disjunctures limit the effective reach of democratic decision making; IGOs created to remedy these disjunctures seem to drain control and authority from democratic institutions.

The second claim involves the growing number of governance functions performed by such international actors as IGOs and TNCs, which are not subject to traditional democratic controls. I prefer to use the term democratic deficit to describe such cases.⁸ The worry here is that a larger and larger share of the important decisions impacting citizens of democratic states are made by institutions that are opaque, unaccountable, and unrepresentative, or even, as in the case of the European Union, insufficiently transparent, accountable, and representative.^* Democratic deficits, then, describe shortcomings in existing governance institutions, while disjunctures refer to shortcomings in the scope and effectiveness of existing democratic institutions; deficits are normative claims about the (il)legitimacy of existing governance regimes, while disjunctives identify the empirical and conceptual limits of state-based democratic governance.

To recapitulate: scholars analyzing democracy and globalization typically concentrate on how globalization affects democracy. The usual answers include restrictions on policy autonomy, erosion of sovereignty, destabilizing flows of transnational capital, and the activities of unaccountable corporations and governance agencies, among others. All of these claims are contestable and contested: whether and to what degree policy is really limited (or more limited than it has been historically) by international financial concerns; whether sovereignty really is eroding and what the mechanism of that erosion might be; how important and how unprecedented current flows of global capital are; how powerful corporations and international agencies really are vis-a-vis states; and how permanent we should consider any recent trends and developments, are all fiercely debated.

States of Confusion

These controversies aside, there is something odd about the entire debate —or at least, about the parameters within which the debate takes place. Of all the alleged effects of globalization on democracy, none clearly has anything directly to do with democracy. They are really claims about how globalization affects the state (and citizens or groups of citizens within states). Each of the threats dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Limits of Modern Democracy
• Part II Democracy as Human Rights
• Notes
• Index