Global Democracy and its Difficulties

Anthony J. Langlois, Karol Edward Soltan, Anthony J. Langlois, Karol Edward Soltan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135971199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The political project of extending democracy to the global level is seen as the next major challenge for proponents of democracy. This volume considers some of the difficulties which need to be overcome for this extension to take place. The issues discussed include:

• Philosophical and theoretical questions about the nature of democracy and the justification of its values
• Pressing political considerations, such as the crucial role of elections in democracy promotion
• Legal developments, such as the role of international law and judicial networks
• The nature of the global political space as democratization brings challenges to the ways in which systems have traditionally been organized

Global Democracy and its Difficulties will appeal to a range of academics, scholars and students who work across fields such a political theory, international law, comparative politics and political economy. It will be of particular interest to those with an interest in the political, economic, legal and moral aspects of democratization.

1 Introduction: the difficulties of global democratization

Anthony J. Langlois

It may be safely claimed that democracy has a secure place in global politics as the leading normative framework for governing people. This should not to be confused with the suggestion that the global population is seamlessly moving towards democratic rule. One of the main themes of this volume, as our title suggests, is that movement towards democracy at the global level is difficult. It faces many obstacles – ideologically, practically and intellectually – indeed, the question of what it means to move towards “global democracy” is one that has no definitive answer. Nonetheless, the idea of democracy has come to play a crucial role as a legitimizer of political rule around the globe, to the extent that even those regimes which have no intention of acting democratically adopt the language and many of the external trappings of democracy. Such exhibitions are cold comfort to those who exist under degrees of authoritarian rule. But this phenomenon is a significant if perverse indicator of the power of the democratic idea – an idea which goes back to noble and foundational beliefs about the equality of all persons, and their right to live freely and on their own terms in equitable and peaceful relationships with their neighbors.

However, talk of democracy is cheap and often does not recognize the difficulty of achieving and maintaining a democratic society. Nor does talk recognize the difficulties that will face any society which wants to transition to a democratic form of government or, indeed, which has such a transition imposed upon it from the outside. The platitudes of democracy are very easy to articulate – whether those doing the talking are presidents or prime ministers, NGO representatives, academics, global bureaucrats or others. By contrast, building institutions, effecting cultural change, providing justification for changing ways of acting and thinking, educating people, securing the material resources necessary for democracy, sustaining the impetus for reform in adverse conditions – these tasks and the many more that are necessary for genuine and lasting democratic change are hard tasks of the first order.

Three challenges for global democracy

Despite democracy’s status as a normative framework for government and governance, there is, nonetheless, a very significant set of ideological or public relations challenges that must be faced. For many people, the abstract arguments about the virtues of democracy win the day without question. And yet, both within many established democracies and in discourses of international politics, there is much skepticism about the practice of democracy.

In many states that are considered leading democracies – for example, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia – there is considerable concern about the extent to which citizens are alienated from democratic processes. Voters are said to be apathetic and disengaged. Arguments are made about the way in which forms of corporatism and cronyism have taken politics away from the people. In many critiques, the presiding mass consumer culture is said to play a key role in reducing the citizenry to a pacified and dim-witted collective pawn in the hands of rich and powerful elites. To the extent that people think about their political representatives, they think of them as captive to various powerful actors, distant and untrustworthy – far from the democratic ideal of citizens’ representatives engaged in deliberative processes of democratic self-government.

In global politics there is an equally marked contrast between the way in which democracy is praised as a norm, and the skepticism about the meanings of the term and the motives of those using it in the day-to-day practices of the international arena. We could consider, for example, the role of democracy in such international organisations as the United Nations. For many observers, the ambiguities associated with the role of the UN in international politics make any attribution of democracy farcical. On the one hand, there is the problem that many member states are not themselves democratic. On the other hand, there are complex institutional questions about what a genuinely democratic UN might look like – for example, the question of how we should deal with the conflict that is set up by the democratic “one state one vote” framework in a context where states are not even remotely equal in population size. China and India have populations of well over a billion. Some states with equal voting rights on the floor of the UN General Assembly only have tens of thousands of citizens. However, such institutional questions will remain for many a moot point for as long as the internal governance mechanisms of individual states are not structured according to democratic principles.

We must also reflect on the international politics and policies of states that are internally democratic. Such a discussion cannot be held at our historical juncture without consideration of the contemporary Iraq war – a war that has been given post hoc justification as a war of liberation from authoritarianism, a war to bring democracy and human rights to the beleaguered people of Iraq. At the time of writing, the war in Iraq is not going well. The new democratic government is unable to govern the country, and fails most standard criteria for democratic legitimacy. The “democracy” which Iraq now experiences is a public relations horror story for the legitimacy of democracy and Western democratization efforts not just in Iraq, but also elsewhere in the Middle East and even globally. Regardless of the arguments for and against the war, Iraq has become the latest and perhaps – given recent developments in global communications trends – the most significant ideological war zone for ideas about the desirability of democracy. One of the war’s most damaging effects has been the way in which it has aided and abetted those who set out to discredit democratic forms of political association. Of the difficulties faced by those wishing to persuade people of an alternative democratic way of governing, the winning of hearts and minds has become that much more challenging because of mistaken policies on the part of those who, in name, are the world’s leading exemplars of democracy.

A second key set of difficulties for global democracy has to do with the practicalities of creating and managing transitions to democratic practice. Democracy is a great and noble idea, but it is not something which can be effected overnight. A functioning democracy is a very complex web of institutions, and these have to be formed and crafted – a word used advisedly here, because of its connotations of time, effort and care. Yet more fundamentally, a democratic society is one made up of people who, both individually and collectively, know how to utilize their democratic institutions to govern themselves. In a context of transition, in the very best of circumstances, people need education, information and cultural change in order to move from one set of governance arrangements to another.

Transitions to democratic forms of organisation do not take place in a vacuum. Context is a key variable for the success or failure of reform efforts. The fortunes of democratic reformers and the continuing viability of achieved reforms are tied very closely to the circumstances of individual cases. It is very difficult to provide formulaic generalizations to the effect that this or that set of policy prescriptions will foster democracy without also being closely attentive to the broader political, social, economic, religious and cultural context.

From this point of view, democracy is a very fragile affair. An example that demonstrates this vividly is the situation of East Timor – the world’s newest state, and one born out of intense violence following years of authoritarian occupation by Indonesia. While the will for democracy in East Timor is strong, it is nonetheless the case that this small, desperately impoverished nation, relies fundamentally on the support of others to maintain itself economically and socially. It is dependent on the international community through organisations like the UN, and through direct support from countries like Australia (police and military resources, for example, have consistently been sourced from Australia). There is a constant threat of destabilization – the realization of which would, in all probability, see the end of the hard-won democratic freedoms that the East Timorese presently enjoy.

The earlier example of Iraq is also a case of the practical difficulties experienced in a transition to democracy. The most salient feature of the situation in Iraq, on this point, is the apparent lack of prior engagement by US authorities with what it would mean to transition Iraq from being an authoritarian dictatorship to being a fledgling democracy. It is not an overstatement to say that the Bush administration appeared to think that a whole society could be seamlessly transformed into a middle-America style democracy once the regime in Baghdad was toppled. This form of idealism fails fundamentally to understand that the effective functioning of a democratic polity is based on a foundation of social capital and institutional design which has been painstakingly fought for and maintained against the many socially corrosive features of the broader political landscape. As I indicated earlier, many social scientists express concern that these socially corrosive forces are operative in well established democracies. The task, then, of establishing effective democratic institutions in societies which do not have a history of successful democratic organisation must not be underestimated.

A key issue to be considered in the practice of democratic transformation is the broader international environment. Social capital and the willingness of populations to embrace democratic reform are crucial factors. However, the presence of these factors can be undermined by outside forces. Global political and economic structures are of great significance here in providing an environment which will be conducive to democratic success. But such structures are notoriously hard to change, and often provide perverse incentives for ambitious people to sidestep democratic processes. These incentives may undermine democratic reforms even in the pursuit of what would seem to be the legitimate interests of many societies, societies which are struggling to secure their survival while simultaneously desiring to hold on to hard-won democratic institutions.

It is in trying to work out how to deal with many of the practical problems which face the political project of global democratization that one realizes the crucial nature of the intellectual or theoretical problems which are involved with the task. One way of seeing this is to consider what model people have in mind when they think of global democratization. The most common model, perhaps, would be that which is built upon our experience of how international politics is presently institutionalized. The global population is divided by fate and coincidence into nation states, some of which are democratic, many of which are not. It’s a simple step to see global democratization as consisting of changing the governance mechanisms for those states which are not democratic. The Iraq war fits snugly into this way of thinking.

While it is desirable for those states which are not democratic to become so, the task of thinking about global democratization has become immeasurably more complex than this picture suggests – it is a picture which fails to engage with the extraordinary changes to global politics which have been wrought by globalization. The fundamentally important intellectual challenges for democratization concern establishing what sort of model should succeed the older state-centric or Westphalian model of international relations. This challenge is brought about by a recognition that the structures of international politics have undergone radical change in recent decades as the process of globalization has entered new and unprecedented phases. The interesting questions concern how we should apply the ideas of democracy to the new and often very different institutional, social, economic, cultural, religious – and above all, and embracing all of these – political forms of our contemporary period.

Many of the issues which confront proponents of global democratization, then, are not just about how we deal with and mitigate the effects of anti-democratic, illiberal regimes. They are also about to what extent, and in what fashion, we might be able to extend the idea of democracy to the features of governance – as well as those of government – which exist in a globalized world. Here we are faced with very complex practical problems which, very quickly, also become complex intellectual puzzles. The very complex patterns of governance and interdependence which have grown up in a globalizing world make many of our conceptions of democracy redundant. Arguments about democracy can no longer be based on a model where a whole range of self-governing states cooperate together about how to manage those decisions which mutually affect one another. In today’s world, many key decisions being made by non-state agents in one part of the world affect large numbers of people in another part of the world. Traditional notions of state-based parliamentary democracy have little purchase on the fates of these people, even were they all to be living in democratic regimes.

Any advance in the political project of global democratization will have to be an advance grounded in a significant and ongoing intellectual reappraisal of that task. Intellectual sobriety is always needed to avoid the ideological pitfalls that can beset the political project of global democratization. The practical work of promoting global democratization, however, very clearly gives rise to complex theoretical questions, and these questions need to be subject to significant debate and discussion in order for the best way forward to be developed. This book has been written with the hope of fostering this sort of debate.

Discussing the difficulties of global democracy

Now we will discuss some key questions which arise when considering the chal lenges of global democratization. The questions that we will consider are grouped into a number of sections. These range from specific arguments about the difficulties facing the international system as a whole and those difficulties arising for individual states, to discussions of the most fundamental kind about the philosophical underpinnings and justifications of global democracy and associated norms and values.

Democracy and institutional complexity

Karol Edward Soltan begins this volume with a visionary statement of what we should be aiming for when we discuss the concept of global democracy. Soltan argues that global democracy itself is not sufficient. To be attractive and sustainable, global democracy must be structured by additional characteristics, and these are derived by Soltan from his idea of moderation. Moderation includes three key elements: a form of moral pluralism; an orientation which recognizes the power of human destructiveness and positions itself to overcome this destructiveness; and a commitment to reason, with the corollary that deliberation is a key means of progress. This idea of moderation is militant in that it has ambitious intellectual and political goals: the advance of global democracy.

Is this a realistic prospect? Soltan does not deny that this is a tall order, but he argues that his concept of a mature democracy helps to make this project feasible. A key element of what it means to be a mature democracy is a movement from the simple to the complex. If we imagine global democracy along the lines of a classical simple demos with straightforward group solidarity and majori-tarian decision-making, then clearly there are insurmountable obstacles to global democracy. Soltan argues that many of our discussions about global democracy do proceed on these terms – as if the simple demos is the only possible demos. By contrast, he encourages us to allow for complexity – of institutions, of procedures, and of demoi.

These forms of complexity are to be wedded with an idea of complex global legitimacy, an idea which reflects the complexity of democracy in modern constitutional democratic states. At the center of the practice of these states – and Soltan argues that this should also be at the center of normative understandings of complex democracy – is the process of the delegation of decision-making. Delegation is driven, he argues, by an imperative for legitimacy enhancement and this, in turn, is responsive to the complex forms of social organisation which exist both within states and also at the international level. Soltan argues that the trend towards delegation can be seen everywhere, both within states and at the international level, and he argues that it can usefully be seen as part of a movement towards a moderate politics.

This moderate politics is to be supported by a cultural transformation of modernity that would enhance civic forms of solidarity. Soltan calls for the development of a universal civilisation which would be a pluralistic mosaic of legitimate ends underpinned by a complex system of institutions which, in turn, honors the values formulated in human rights declarations and similar global documents. Soltan recognizes that such a goal requires a political instrument. Here he has in mind a globally organized self-limiting social movement, on a broadly Gandhian model, which he terms Global Solidarity. This movement would have as its goal resistance to the forces of human self destruction; it would be incrementalist in method, and would aim to harness reform pressures from below and above – the embodiment of moderation. Global Solidarity would be self-limiting in that it eschews violence, and is thus absolutely prohibited from taking political power. Soltan concludes by considering again the question of whether this is a realistic aspiration – whether such an organisation might have any chance of existing. He does this by considering the similarities and differences between his proposal and the already existing organisation the World Social Forum. He concludes that among these seekers of an alternative world to the one we now have, the moderate style of global democracy promotion seems weaker than desirable.

Paul Dragos Aligica reminds us that thinking about democracy in a global world is a task which must be future(s)-oriented. He counsels us to self-consciously speculate about the future with “the long view”, a macro-sociological heuristic device which can help provide a stable historical interpretive framework for our proposals regarding global institutional developments and reforms. Democratization is one of the tendencies that is interpreted through the use of “the long view”; Aligica focuses his study of democratization around the notion of a “democracy of nations”, a notion which has functioned as a key ideal in international relations and one which generates restless efforts to institutionalization. The long-view framework shows us that this ideal is a construct of modernity, not at all a natural state of affairs, and helps to raise important questions about the viability of the ideal; these questions can have implications for how we might push for institutional development in the present.

Aligica argues that the “democracy of nations” ideal, while being a key structure in thinking about international affairs, is not necessarily as viable as has often been thought. A key part of his argument is the way in which the ideal clashes with many of our other key ideas about the international arena – in particular, the asymmetry which exists between states, and the role of power in international politics. He develops his analysis by drawing on the work of Mitrany, who characterizes international politics as a realm of legal principles which are never practiced and actual practices that have never been legalized. Aligica argues that contemporary developments, especially the role of the United States as sole superpower and hegemon, push these tensions to an extreme and also endanger the capacity of national and international institutions to deal with them.

The situation, however, is more complex than this dichotomy suggests because of the rise of actors and institutions other than the state – the state is no longer assumed to be, in either theory or practice, the optimal form of social organisation or the ultimate locus of decision-making. This development simultaneously has two effects. One is that it opens up the possibility of new avenues for the idea of democratization in international politics, avenues via new forms of governance, regulation, accountability and institutional design. The second is that it makes the hitherto key notion of a “democracy of nations” even less likely to find institutional form than in the past. That idea, argues Aligica, has been exhausted. He suggests that we live at a critical juncture where the institutional imagination may be able to make a difference. This means that, rather than continuing to muddle through with legal fictions and political realities which never meet, we may be able to take hold of the new forms of political community which are developing and mould them in such a way that democratic principles are institutionalized in the evolving international arena.

Democracy, sovereignty and the global economy

With the contribution from Michael Goodhart we move to considering the ways in which globalization provides imperatives for reconceptualizing the practice of democracy. Goodhart suggests that most of our familiar ways of thinking about democracy at the global level have a shared failing: they continue to operate in a conceptual space which is shaped by the modern nation state. Goodhart recognizes that the literature on global democracy is voluminous and that many authors have contributed important institutional models for how democracy might work at the global level. His critique, however, is that while these models have registered the need for institutional innovation and development, this work is still being done in a normative context structured by the modern sovereign state and the Westphalian state system.

Goodhart takes us through three steps in making this argument. Firstly, he is concerned to be clear about the connection between democracy and sovereignty. While many theorists view this connection as merely contingent and empirical, Goodhart argues that the development of democracy within the conceptual matrix of the modern nation state means that our key normative ideas associated with democracy are fundamentally shaped by sovereignty – modern democracy, says Goodhart, is a theory of sovereignty, lexically demonstrated by the use of the term “popular sovereignty”. The advance of globalization, however, undermines many of the empirical regularities and normative structures associated with sovereignty, includin...