|
Can
Cosmopolitical Democracy Be Democratic?
Nadia Urbinati
What
follows is a critical reading of cosmopolitical
democracy, or cosmopolitanism as a project
of global government. I use the term “criticism” in its theoretical and
analytical sense though, not polemical. I do not question, and in fact I share the aspiration to
make the economic and political global order more just and respectful of
the life and dignity of the world’s inhabitants. The Kantian maxims commanding us to seek peace and respect
human rights have enriched classical cosmopolitanism with a
practical goal all are responsible for realizing. Post-Kant, the burden of proof is on those who want to
argue against cosmopolitan civil rights. My main objection to cosmopolitical
democracy is its translation of the Kantian maxims into the
project of devising global decision-making set of procedures that
are actually the province of nation-state sovereignty. My criticism interrogates in the name of democratic
premises the cogency and desirability of making the cosmos into a
unified political space. Theorists
of cosmopolitical democracy do not simply claim for democracy
“within” and “between” states. Much more radically, they argue for constructing a
supranational political body endowed with the power of
legislation, administration, and military intervention/coercion.
Cosmopolis is a
project of centralization and unification of power, not
decentralization or mere cooperation. It adds power to the already existing loci of power.
Thus, despite their pledge of allegiance to Kant’s plane
of perpetual peace, theorists of cosmopolitical democracy de facto
violate the Kantian lex
aurea according to which cosmopolitan rights entail the
containment of political power, not its supererogation. Recognizing
the value and essence of a rights-based democracy should alert us
to the anti-democratic risk contained in the idea of a spaceless democracy. As
Jürgen Habermas has recently argued, postnational democracy can
hardly aim at more than “weak forms of legitimation” to retain
a democratic character.
The
European Paradigm of Cosmopolitan Democracy
Cosmopolitanism is a composite family of ancient
lineage. Its liberal
humanist branch is rooted in classical Stoicism and the modern
doctrine of natural rights. Its
neo-liberal branch has grown from the theory of the free market
and the liberation of civil society from the fetters of feudalism
and state absolutism. Thus
cosmopolitanism can mean the aspiration for global justice and the
universalization of human rights, as well as an uncritical
celebration of globalization. Their differences notwithstanding, both liberal and
neo-liberal cosmopolitanism see national sovereignty as an
obstacle because it resists outside interference and obstructs
transnational exchange and/or cooperation. In their humanist, liberal, and economic versions, scholars
of different disciplines, countries, and political orientation
share remarkably similar cosmopolitan ideals. Liberal cosmopolitanism is itself a cosmopolitan
phenomenon.
“Democratic cosmopolitanism” presents an interestingly
different case, however.
Democratic
cosmopolitanism bills itself as a political response to the
acknowledged fact of globalization. Unlike its neo-liberal counterpart, however, it does not
see globalization as a natural like and self-regulating
phenomenon. As an
ideal, democratic cosmopolitanism represents the reluctance of
politics to capitulate in the face of the so-called
‘spontaneity’ of global economic competition. It reaffirms the power of associated individuals and
peoples to shape their lives.
Thus despite its affiliation with the “utopian” legacy
of perpetual peace, its aspiration to reassert the place of
politics puts democratic cosmopolitanism in the camps of Rousseau
and Hegel. Not
because, like Rousseau and Hegel, it opts for autonomous sovereign
city-republics or nation-states, but because in its proponents’
eyes, the liberty envisioned by global civil society falls short,
and they aspire to create a space for political liberty at the
global level. They
make their case in the name of citizenship, not simply of
humanity. And they propose cosmopolitan political institutions in the
name of citizenship as a status, not simply as a symbolic or moral
value.
So
it is their view of the relationship between civil society and
politics that distinguishes the various interpretations of
democratic cosmopolitanism. In
one view, democracy’s natural place is civil society; in the
other, the political realm. The former approach shares a liberal
anti-coercive view of politics and interprets democracy more as a
civic culture of association, participation and mobilization than
as a political process of decision-making. This is Richard Falk’s position.
Falk's writings convey a deep discontent with the
state form
of political life. His
theoretical and ideal background is libertarian insofar as it
stresses one particular aspect of democratic action, the one that
values spontaneous public practice from below. Here civil society is the most genuine place of
participation and freedom because it resists organized power, and
above all state power. Cosmopolitan
democracy is identified with a postmodernist view of democracy as
post-state based.
The
political approach to democratic cosmopolitanism, on the contrary,
is much more attentive to the actual and potential relationship
between civil society and the sphere of political institutions.
It acknowledges social movements and non-governmental
organizations as fundamental components of global democracy but it
also believes that in the absence of institutionalized procedures
of decision and control, social movements and NGOs can hardly be
made democratically accountable. The writings of Daniele Archibugi and David Held approach
cosmopolitan democracy from this perspective, and envision
international political organisms empowered to enact enforceable
legal collective decisions in response to globalization and human
rights violations. Their cosmopolitanism rests on the assumption
that civil society lacking the generality of citizenship will
revert to a ‘state of nature’ where liberty thrives at the
expense of equality and economic power at the expense of justice.
As the Eastern European states’ exit from Communism
demonstrates, a healthy civil society and secure individual
freedoms need a legal and governmental system that enjoys
institutional autonomy from social interests and operates under
rules of impartiality and rational efficiency.
Thus the aim of a world-polis is to promote a
democratic global society, a goal that in Falk's mind is
achievable instead by the autonomous initiative of self-governing
social actors and movements. Cosmopolitical democracy
reflects the belief that peoples should have the legal and
political means to assert and exercise their influence over their
natural and social environment.
As
a cultural phenomenon, the
political branch of democratic cosmopolitanism is largely
European in character, both in its deliberative-discourse version
(Habermas)
and in its political-institutional one (Archibugi and Held.)
In both cases, the moral justification for a global
democratic order is derived from the Kantian premise that a degree
of association among the peoples of the world is needed to protect
human rights and successfully oppose and prevent their violation.
Both conceive a postnational democratic order as the most
advanced answer to the challenge posed by the erosion of nation-state
sovereignty and the international/domestic order set up by the
Westphalia Treaty. Whereas
in the past, international issues were “inter-state” issues,
or “boundary matters” resolved “by pursuing reasons of
state, backed, ultimately, by coercive force,” today, the source
of contemporary international issues are most of the cases transnational
actors that states are more and more unfit to face. “Overlapping
spheres of influence, interference and interest create dilemmas at
the center of democratic thought” because democracy has been
associated with the state form.
The
erosion of state sovereignty visibly accelerated with the end of
the Cold War equilibrium and two concomitant factors. First, a centrifugal dissemination
of non-political powers as an effect of the extraordinary
expansion of financial and communication networks beyond the
borders of the states. Second,
a centripetal process of political integration among European
countries. Both are
phenomena of transnationality but point in very different, if not
opposite, directions: the former points to a restriction of the
role of politics, while the other points to a new assertion of
function of politics. The
European Union is the paradigm of the political approach to
democratic cosmopolitanism.
The
European integration actualizes the century old ideal of radical and
democratic European intellectuals to make their continent the
laboratory of a world order alternative to other hegemonic models:
first national-socialism, then communism, and presently a
deregulated global capitalism.
The European Union is the daughter of the vision of a peaceful
continent inhabited by democratic nations that inspired European
intellectuals beginning with the age of the Enlightenment and the age of the
democratic revolutions of 1848. As a subterranean current, this vision linked together
Kant’s cosmopolitan liberalism, Condorcet's democratic
universalism, and Giuseppe Mazzini’s
cosmopolitan law of nations.
The European political integration gives this old idea a
new rebirth, and, furthermore, inspires theorists of democratic
cosmopolitanism. The institutional and legal networks that have
been enveloping European states and peoples since the 1950s have
served as the template for a bolder view of transnationality and
pacifism.
It is no coincidence that the pioneers of both cosmopolitical
and postnational democracy are mainly European.
Twentieth
century Europe has witnessed both the most tremendous cosmopolitan
civil war and, as an effect, the renaissance of the ideal of cosmopolitan perpetual peace. It
has also witnessed the extraordinary event of a military victory
(1945) that sought legal justice in order to win a total and
indisputable legitimacy over all the peoples of the continent,
including the defeated. It
sought a kind of legitimacy that might and military victory alone
could not deliver. The
defeat of Nazi-fascism could not have been total if it were only
military. Both the
rule of might and the
rule of law defeated Nazi-fascism. Of the two, the latter has become the backbone of European
democracy and the democratic thought, and above all of the process of
continental unification.
European democratic theorists are at the cutting edge of
efforts to resist international “realism” and to disassociate
democracy from “national interest.” Just consider the
theoretical trajectories of the two most important contemporary political
theorists, the American John Rawls and the German-European Jürgen
Habermas. The former
ties universal principles of right and liberty to the
national-constitutional pact in a way that has become
progressively stronger, and has culminated in a theory of
international justice and security firmly anchored to
national-territorial states. The latter ties those principles to a
“discourse-theoretical understanding of democracy” that in and
of itself configures a de-nationalized view of democracy. In Hegel’s language, one might say that Habermas’
deliberative democracy is the philosophical reflection and
consciousness of the political trajectory of European integration
after World War Two. His model is theoretically predisposed to envision a
postnational legal order and a postnational democratic public
sphere in a way that Rawls’ is not. By the same token, the European Union is predisposed to
become the paradigm for cosmopolitan democracy in a way that
United States is not. “…the EC has had the bold idea of
disconnecting nationality from citizenship, and this idea may well
evolve to a general principle which ultimately transforms the
ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship into a reality.”
The
cosmopolitical version
of cosmopolitan thought radicalizes the European paradigm and
makes it into an ideal criterion for the entire globe. It does so by
challenging the process of financial and economic globalization from the perspective of a
world citizenship whose affiliation transcends cultural belonging
and territorial specificity, and aims at achieving a political status.
Rather than proposing a revision of the post-French revolution model of
democracy, political cosmopolitanism constitutes a radical
revision of it. This is what distinguishes Held’s and
Archibugi’s approach from Habermas’. Cosmopolitical democracy and postnational democracy differ
in respect to the form and depth each ascribes to the association
of the peoples of the world. Their differences spring from
different judgments about the role of the nation-state and
sovereignty in
the processes of both domestic and international democratization.
Habermas
faces the challenges of globalization from the perspective of the
emancipatory experiences “articulated in the ideas of popular
sovereignty and human rights.” He poses the problem of how to legitimate postnational
democratic decisions and norms without creating a “civil [as
political] solidarity” at
the global level. “Civic
solidarity is rooted in particular collective identities;
cosmopolitan solidarity has to support itself on the moral
universalism of human rights alone.” Unless we change the
definition and practice of democratic self-determination (or
citizenship) we cannot make a spaceless cosmos the home of
democracy because “[a]ny political community that wants to
understand itself as a democracy must at least distinguish between
members and non-members.” Implicitly
(and perhaps unwillingly) echoing Carl Schmitt’s paradigm, Habermas
seems to admit that democratic
self-determination cannot exist without the “inside”/
“outside” dialectics. [12]
Unlike liberal universalism, democratic universalism refers
to a specific demos made up of people who are united by something
more concrete than humanity and reason. This is why anyone can claim to be a citizen of the world,
but no one can claim to be, say, an American citizen without being
one. The
institutional analog of citizenship is ‘power’ and
legal-political obligation, not mere moral duty. The thoroughly voluntary character of cosmopolitan
citizenship is matched by its lack of a direct political
recognition and legitimation.
This
is why Habermas situates himself part in the tradition of Schmitt
(or Rousseau) and part in the tradition of Hans Kelsen since he proposes to bind
cosmopolitan law to a kind of normative legitimacy without however grounding
it in
an anterior political identity. Cosmopolitan democratic legitimacy has multiple,
interconnected sources: democratic states that give birth to
agreements and conventions along with a global public sphere
populated by non-governmental organizations and a global critical
public opinion grounded in circuits of communication. The cosmopolitan horizon utilizes, and in fact stresses
democracy’s deliberative character, but drops the ambition of
becoming political in the way “particular collective identities”
are political.
At most the world can become a ‘community’ devoid of
‘sociological’ or concrete subjects and inhabited by legal
persons each state commits itself to acknowledge and respect.
The precondition for this multi-layered system of
legitimation and control is the gradual democratization of states
and their civil societies. This
legalistic (via states-jurisdiction) plus
public opinion solution is the most advanced option a democrat
should hope for at the global level. It recognizes the inherent complexity of normative
frameworks and the integration of political status (citizenship)
and legal status (legal personhood), where the former remains
territorial and the latter gives birth to the multiplicity of
legal and public instances comprising the institutions of the
international order.
Quite appropriately, scholars have equated this
postnational network of overlapping authorities and multiple
loyalties with a neo-medievalism.
Held
and Archibugi propose going beyond this, though. They propose to create a new political status of world
citizenship independent of the mediation of states. Moreover, they want citizens to be represented in a world
parliament; they propose instituting an international criminal
court with effective enforcement power, and reforming the United
Nation Security Council so as to transform it into an effective
executive organ and propose citizens to be represented in a world
parliament. Finally, they propose the creation of a
military and civilian peace force “at the disposal of the
Security Council.”
Even if they
do not call for the overcoming of states, their cosmopolitical
order resembles very much to a state-like sovereign.
Furthermore, the
institutional design they propose seems to be a quasi state but with a low
democratic standard because its parliament is supposed to hold
only a consultative function and no checking power over the
Council.
This
unbalanced power relation confirms the fact that the
cosmopolis project is inspired first of all by the prospect of
military intervention and coercion (for human rights protection).
Whereas existing intergovernmental institutions are ruled
by principles of non-intervention and multilateralism
(intervention being an exception), the new Cosmopolitical
executive (the reformed Security Council) should be empowered to “compel”
members to comply with the basic norms (Universal Declaration of
Human Rights) and, moreover, to decide to use military force
against those among them that transgress the Declaration. The
existing model has a negative or preventive function, but the new
model should have a positive and active power.
The discretionary power of the world executive, while it
poses serious problems of democratic deficit, is the undesirable
but predictable consequence of a political (thus active as interventionist) cosmopolitanism. This explains Archibugi’s insistence on the need to
compensate for the inherent limits of a nationally based
citizenship, and finally his strategic rhetorical use of a
negative picture of the state. His
strong criticism of state sovereignty and his alarmist sense of
the deterioration of the international arena in the light of the
demise of the Cold War equilibrium, reveal both his impatience
with Kant’s perspective of
the longue durée, and
his interventionist inclination.
The Violation of the
Kantian Model
Archibugi is unclear about who should take the initiative to
overcome the existing world disorder
and open the way for cosmopolis. He appeals to the peoples within states to mobilize and
demand global democracy. However,
at the moment peoples en
masse have been more active in signaling the crisis of the
existing state order than in advancing a postnational democratic
alternative. The
lessons of the violent dissolution of the federation of Yugoslavia
or the milder regional chauvinism in Northern Italy are that
peoples have precipitated the erosion of federative sovereignty in
favor of a state form that is truly mono-ethnic and more exclusionary.
It
is perhaps the awareness of the discrepancy between people’s
potential and people’s actual liberal-democratic role that induces
Archibugi to seek more selective company. What was true two centuries ago remains true today:
cosmopolitical democracy is inspired not by the masses but by the
tiny minority of intellectuals who try to educate public opinion
and influence “the politicians sitting at the negotiating
tables.” The philosophes are
the enlightened minds that feel responsible for, and are able to
foresee, “often centuries in advance,” the new order and
propagate it among rulers and ruled.
In a kind of Jacobean vein, theorists of
cosmopolitical democracy hope for a bottom-up movement while de
facto proposing a top-down strategy.
Intellectual
aspiration for a world order modeled according to the principles
of a “perpetual peace” is neither new nor original. In fact it was the most audacious expression of the
universalistic ideals of the Enlightenment and a consistent
liberal proposal. The
moral foundations of the many schemes for a perpetual peace are to
be found in the contractarian justification of political authority
and the theory of natural rights. That only consent can give political power legitimacy is
the logical conclusion of the assumption that the individual has a
value in herself, and in fact is the primary source of value in
relation to which all other goods –material and symbolic—
ought to be judged and esteemed. Modern cosmopolitanism sprang from liberalism.
Its normative principle entails the limitation of the
prerogative of political power. It proclaims individual rights and pertains to the sphere
of justice. It
aspires to subject politics to morals by transforming political
power from might to legality. Its natural referees are courts of justice rather than
parliaments. As Kant
argued, cosmopolitan civil rights refer to the legal sphere not
the spheres of the good and politics. Indeed, the legal sphere entails rights rather than
philanthropy, and concerns politics only insofar as it demands
that states limit their jurisdiction so as to make the surface of
the earth relatively open to individuals’ choices to move
without abjuring their national belonging.
Like
the basic rights to property and life, cosmopolitan “civil”
rights are claimed in the name of a pre-political entity, that is
to say the individual --“but the right
to visit, to associate, belongs to all men by virtue of their
common ownership of the earth’s surface.” As such, they are
conceived as a claim against
the unrestrained power of states. They are not “political
rights.” For them
to be respected, all states should include them in their legal
codes and make them into positive public law. This would allow individuals to claim for them and appeal
to justice for their enforcement. Just as with the bills of right within national
constitutions, cosmopolitan civil rights imply self-constrain on
the part of political power.
Kant’s
model for a perpetual peace had a negative
character in the sense that its purpose was to prevent states from
exercising their sovereignty outside or against the basic moral
principle of individual rights. If Kant did not propose a world government it was because
his aim was not to bypass states but to induce them to cooperate
voluntarily and thus to accept restraints on their power. Hence his conclusion that if all states complied with the
consent legitimacy proviso –if they became republican— they
would be complying with cosmopolitan civil rights. Peace is imperative.
Kant implies that the permanent possibility of war is
responsible for autocracy. In
a life threatening scenario, the defense of security justifies an
excessive use of force and the adoption of exceptional means that
can also violate individual rights (nomos)
in order to guarantee survival (bios.)
The enactment of the Patriotic Act by the American government
to cope with terrorism validates Kant’s
paradigm that national security (and thus peace) is prerequisite of
cosmopolitan civil rights.
Kant’s perpetual peace was a
project of liberty (because it was a project of security) not
democracy. It was a
project of political containment, rather than political building.
This becomes clear once we remember that Kant resorted to
the logic of an invisible hand explanation or a philosophy of
world history in order to justify his model. He chose a longue durée
perspective and did not call on political actors to take direct
initiative to enact a legal world order. Nor did he think, like contemporary theorists of
cosmopolitical democracy, that “voluntary association” among
states should give some the power to sanction others. He believed that as economic, moral and communicative
global interaction and moral interdependence among individuals
developed, states would gradually proceed toward a form of legal
integration that would not compromise their sovereignty. This meant that no one state could have more power than
another. Mutual
agreement requires an equal
distribution of power among the associate states. Kant’s logic was exactly the same as the one he employed
to explain the hypothesis of the original social contract by which individuals
exited the state of nature and created the commonwealth.
Theorists of
cosmopolitical democracy violate the Kantian model on three
counts. First, they question the idea that the democratic
transformation of states should come first. Indeed, while they are impatient with Kant’s longue
durée, they don’t want “to make people democratic against
their will.” ‘Starting from the top’ (from the creation of
cosmopolitical institutions) seems to them less
“paternalistic” than expanding democracy by interfering with
states’ domestic politics. However, it is unclear why should they worry about being
paternalistic if they deny the principle of nation-state sovereign autonomy.
Second, they do not think that democracy “within
states” will be an enough strategy to bring about democratic
“between states” and a world order more respectful of human
rights.
However, it is counterintuitive to think that global
citizenship and cosmopolitical institutions would be democratic if a portion of world citizens lives
under non-democratic regimes, or if not all states have become
democratic. Would the Unites States be still a democratic
federal republic if
some of its state members were not democratic? Finally, theorists of cosmopolitical democracy defy
Kant’s equality proviso and underestimate the fact that
within an international scenario dominated by one nation-state
that holds a quasi imperial power, cosmopolis would be not only
impossible, but moreover dangerous. Indeed, it would either be hegemonized by the strongest
(thus creating an empire rather than a cosmopoliticalorder), or
it would need to mobilize an extraordinarily great power in order
to subject the stronger.
In either case, there would hardly be room for peace and a
cosmopolitical democracy. “Viewed historically, Kant’s
reticence concerning the project of a constitutionally
organized community of nations was certainly realistic” and
sensitive to the political condition of Europe after the French
revolution.
Contemporary theorists of cosmopolitical democracy seem to
lack Kant’s realism when they aspire to be more assertive and
politically interventionist. Their project is deaf to Eighteenth century warnings about
the despotic potential of a world government.
Sovereignty
Surrendered and the "Vices" of Parliamentary Democracy
Retained
The two main challenges undertaken by cosmopolitical democracy are
territorially localized political power and globally diffused
economic power. Its
proponents argue that states are powerful enough to harm their
subjects but insufficiently powerful to protect their own people
from the harm wrought by the new global actors. While economic globalization does not erode the coercive
power of the state, it gravely diminishes states’ power to
pursue a politics of social justice. The paradox of our time, Archibugi and Held argue, is that
the extraordinary escalation of economic globalization tends to
make all states less democratic, or rather to reduce their
potential for a broader democratic politics. This paradox induces them to long for something more than
“inter-state” democracy. Archibugi proposes an international power endowed with
enough strength to “interfere in domestic affairs,” something
that coordination among autonomous states, even democratic ones,
cannot allow.
As the argument goes, while there is no certainty that the
Kantian strategy would change the nature of international
relations, there is no doubt that it would not
change the logic of the international order because national
sovereignty would still prevail. The expansion of the geo-social space (global civil and
economic society) calls for the
construction of an expanded geo-political space. As a consequence, the traditionally circumscribed space
within which democracy has been contained all along demands
radical change.
Theorists
of cosmopolitical democracy base their proposals on a strong
critique of the state form. States
are “the world’s major depositories of power” responsible
for a coerced national, cultural and religion homogenization.
“It is states that have armed forces; control police; mint
currency; permit or refuse entrance to their lands; states that
recognize citizens’ rights and impose their duties.”
However, it is unclear, and Archibugi does not clarify, why
these state’s prerogatives are a negative fact, above all if one
thinks that the alternative could be private corporations or
churches minting currency and refusing entrance to their lands.
The emancipation of the legal and political power of the
state from patrimonialism and religious hegemony or fundamentalism
should be carefully
disassociated from the long history of the arbitrary use of force
and the law that have been perpetrated by state rulers throughout
the centuries. In
this regard, bureaucratic emancipation from feudal rule and
subsequent democratic constitutionalism represented a true
revolution in the structure and form of the state (and a positive
one), not merely an
“evolution.” By
the same token, the welfare state transformation of the democratic
states has not merely been an additional “instrument of
service” states used to mitigate what they are, that is a
“tool of domination.”
Archibugi’s
picture suggests that it is the link between democracy and
“national interests” that vitiates democracy. “It can be argued that it is consistent with the
interests of the French people for a democratic French government
to carry out nuclear experiments in the Pacific Ocean, if all the
advantages go to France and the radioactive waste only harms
people in another hemisphere.” Hence, his conclusion that a global government involving
“the world’s citizens” would be able to rid democracy of the
selfishness it inherited from the nation-state. It is unclear, though, why and how a French or an Italian
citizen would overcome his national selfishness in voting for a
global parliament. Does
cosmopolitical citizenship entail national or cultural identity self-forgetting?
The
source of the problems I have been posing rests on the
interpretation of sovereignty adopted by theorists of
cosmopolitical democracy. Archibugi
refers to sovereignty as an all-powerful and absolute entity.
While this view may perhaps be functional to his
justification of cosmopolitical democracy, it is very problematic
and objectionable. Sovereignty
inhabits an international juridical order and a permanent
relationship of inter-state recognition. It is difficult to even talk of sovereignty apart from the
grammar of the international norms sovereignty inhabits. The conceptual pair “inside”/”outside” designates a
dialectical back and forth between states and the international
order, rather than a barrier segregating two distinct spatial
dimensions. The
international order is not an empty space located outside states,
in which atom-like states fluctuate and conflict like in the
Epicurean void, but an organism of norms and conventions comprising each and every state,
outside of which states are unthinkable.As per Kelsen, “the legal order of each State, each
national legal order, is organically connected with the
international legal order and through this order with every
national legal order, so that all legal orders merge into an
integrated legal system.” [34]
According to this legal, and thus relational, conception of
sovereignty, each state exists within a delimited normative order
(or a reflexive system within which its state is, so to speak,
mirrored in the other). Because it implies the presence of others, state sovereignty,
like individual sovereignty, is de facto always limited. This is the very condition of its existence.
How would a cosmopolitical order situate itself in relation
to this comprehensive network of norms? Would it be an additional
agreement that obligates states morally and legally, or would it
be a super-political decision-making entity that rules over states
and, if necessary, against them? In the latter case, the cosmopolitan order would be a state
like entity that lacks any
peer to relate to, and would become a truly unlimited sovereign, which
is just as difficult to imagine at the global level as it is in
the case of single states.
What
makes the idea of cosmopolitical democracy so problematic is the
nature of the global scene. As
a political space, the global scene comprises interrelated issues
rather than an integrated demos. Issues, not citizens, are or can become global.
This fact is reflected in the very vocabulary employed by
scholars of globalization. Quite
understandably, they prefer the word “governance” to
“government.” Governance
entails an explicit reference to “mechanisms” or
“organized” and “coordinated activities” appropriate to
the solution of some specific problems. Unlike government, governance refers to specific “policies”
rather than general “politics” because it does not entail a binding
decision-making structure.
Its recipients are not “the people” as a collective
political subject, but “the populations” that can be affected
by global issues such as the environment, migration or the use of
natural resources. Global
governance is represented by a network of associations and
interest groups; it relies on specific abilities and expertise,
and refers to specific audiences and publics. In a word, its actors are united as a result of the
problem(s) they are affected by and that they aim at solving. Interest groups, not the “citizens of the world,” are
their multiple agencies. The
desire for efficiency, security, justice and better organization
drives the resolution to set up oversight bodies to screen
decisions in particular vital areas. But these imperatives do not require a cosmopolitical
government. They
indicate the need for democracy “within states” and “between
states” and the adoption of incentives to facilitate the
democratic transitions of non-democratic states or to impede
authoritarian involution of weak democracies.
Moreover, they require the reform of international economic
and financial institutions, which must be more responsive to the
actual needs of world’s populations, and the evolution of
international norms regulating modalities of global economic
justice.
In
conclusion, let me briefly mention a further set of problems that
theorists of cosmopolitical democracy must approach with great
care, as Robert Dahl has effectively and convincingly argued.
The word democracy may be used to define both a form of
government as well as a political practice of participation, and
finally a moral ideal and general criterion or value. In its descriptive sense, democracy denotes a system of
rules of the game that set and regulate the inclusion, whether
direct or indirect, in the decision making process of those who
are supposed to obey the law, and the procedures according to
which decisions are made, checked, implemented, and revised.
So in this sense democracy refers to voting and electoral
selection, entails majority rule, and presumes a view about what
and how representation should represent, whether interests or
persons. In any case,
democracy is directly tied to the state.
As
the name of a political practice and a value, however, the word democracy has
a prescriptive meaning enriched by moral content in that it gives
participation a formative and educative function. The value of the theory of public deliberation –which
encompasses both the moment of decision and the process of consent
formation and expression of opinions –is that it captures the
complexity of democracy. It
allows us to refer to democracy as a comprehensive world
incorporating politics and civil society, government and social
movements, political rights and civil rights, and the autonomous
decision of a political community to deal with the problems it
deems relevant to the maintenance of its democratic constitution.
The theory of deliberative democracy recognizes and
justifies the role of public criticism and action on all the
domestic and global decisions taken. This is the rationale for postnational democracy.
However,
although theorists of cosmopolitical democracy refer to the
deliberative view in order to justify their proposals, they apply
de facto the descriptive definition when they tie democracy to
state-like global institutions for decision-making practices.
They propose to globalize parliamentary democracy and even
political parties. They
don’t clarify how, given their reasonable dissatisfaction with
the functioning of state-based democracies, a world order would be
able to make democracy work better. Indeed, extension of territory has been a key factor
contributing to the unsatisfactory performance of representative
democracy. When
representation and political parties are transferred to the world
level –as Archibugi proposes—all the ‘vices’ that have
plagued modern parliamentary democracy since its inception would
predictably be transferred along with those institutions.
These ‘vices’ include the problem of how to make
elected representative accountable, how to resist the
potential for the development of an elected oligarchy, and the
growth of hierarchical structures of consent formation.
As the process of European integration shows, the extension
of democracy beyond state borders implies the following
unavoidable paradox: it allows for more participation, but can
also give rise to a proliferation of powers that de facto decrease
the chance of an effective control and coordination, and finally
participation itself.
Wouldn’t “the citizens of the world” just legitimate
an extraordinarily powerful distant elite that is exceptionally
free from control? Theorists
of cosmopolitical democracy should take Dahl’s admonishment
seriously on the obstacles to democratic accountability, and thus
the risks of an unchecked delegated politics, that a global
extension of the political space would necessarily engender.
A “democrat” cannot “in good conscience support
such delegation of power and authority by democratic countries to
international organizations and institutions….To speak in this
case of ‘delegating authority’ would simply be a misleading
fiction useful only to the rulers.”
[Nadia
Urbinati is an associate professor of political theory at Columbia
University. Her most
recent books are Individualismo
democratico (Rome, 1997) and Mill
on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government
(The University of Chicago Press, 2002.) She is presently working at a new project on democratic
representation.]
Bibliography:
Archibugi, Daniele
“Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy,” in Daniele Archibugi,
David Held & Martin Kőhler, eds., Re-imagining
Political Community, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, pp.
198-228.
Archibugi, Daniele. “Cosmopolitical Democracy,” New
Left Review, 4, July-August 2000: 137-50.
Archibugi, Daniele, Held,
David, and Köhler, Martin. Introduction to Re-making Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy,
pp. 1-8.
Bobbio, Norberto. Democracy and Dictatorship, trans. Peter Kennealy, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1989, pp. 133-55.
Bobbio, Norberto. “Democracy
and the International System,” in Daniele Archibugi and David
Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1995: 17-41.
Brennan, Timothy.
“Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” The
New Left, 7, January/February 2001:75-84.
Bull, Hedley. The
Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Chandler, David
“’International Justice’,” New
Left Review, 6, November/December 2000:55-66.
Cohen, Jean, L. “Changing
Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos,” International
Sociology, 14 (1999):245-68.
Dahl, Robert. “Can international organizations be
democratic? A skeptic’s view.” In Democracy’s
Edges, ed.
Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999,
pp. 19-36.
Doyle, Michael. “The New
Interventionism,” Metaphilosophy,
32 (2001): 212-35.
Dryzek, Jonh S. Deliberative
Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dunn, John. “Situating
Democratic Political Accountability,” in Adam Przeworski, Susan
C. Stokes, Bernard Manin, eds., Democracy,
Accountability, and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999, pp. 329-43.
Falk, Richard. On
a Human Governance: Toward a New Global Politics, University
Park, PA, 1995.
Falk, Richard. “The United
Nations and Cosmopolitan Democracy: Bad Dream, Utopian Fantasy,
Political Project,” in Re-imagining
Political Community, pp. 309-31.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Kant’s
Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years’ Historical
Remove,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Study in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran
Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1999:167-201.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Three
Normative Models of Democracy,” in The
Inclusion of the Other, pp. 239-52.
Habermas, Jürgen. “On the
Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and Democracy,” in The
Inclusion of the Other, pp. 253-64.
Habermas, Jürgen. “The
Postantional Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The
Postnational Constellation: Political Essay, trans. Max Pensky,
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001:58-112.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Why
Europe needs a Constitution,” New
Left Review, 11, September/October 2001: 3-26.
Hawthorn, Geoffrey. “Running
the World Through Windows,” New
Left Review, 5, September/October 2000:101-10.
Held, David. Democracy
and the Global Order: From the Nation State to Cosmopolitan
Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press: 1995.
Held, David. “Democracy and
Globalization,” in Re-imagining
Political Community, pp. 11-27.
Held,
David. “The transformation of political community: rethinking
democracy in the context of globalization,” in Democracy’s
Edges, pp. 84-111.
Holmes, Stephen, and Sunstein,
Cass R. The Cost of Rights:
Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, New York-London: Norton, 1999.
Hurrell, Andrew. “Global
Inequality and International Institutions,” Metaphilosophy,
32 (2001): 34-57.
Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual
Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991:93-130.
Kelsen, Hans. General
Theory of Law and State, trans. Anders Wedberg, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945.
Kymlicka, Will. Politics
in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Pogge, Thomas. “Achieving
Democracy,” Ethics &
International Affairs, 15 (2001): 3-23.
Pruess, Ulrich K.
“Citizenship in the European Union: a Paradigm for Transnational
Democracy?,” in Re-imagining Political Community, pp. 138-51.
Pzreworski, Adam. Democracy and the market: Political and economic reforms in Eastern
Europe and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
Rosenau, James N. “Governance
and Democracy in a Globalizing World,” in Re-imagining
Political Community, pp. 28-57.
Thompson, Dennis. “Democratic
Theory and Global Society,” Journal
of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999): 111-25.
Urbinati, Nadia. “’A Common
Law of Nations’: Giuseppe Mazzini’s democratic nationality,”
Journal of Modern Italian
Studies, 1 (1996):197-222.
Waldron, Jeremy. “Minority
Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in Will Kymlicka,
ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995:93-121.
Wheeler, Brett R. “Law and
Legitimacy in the Work of Jürgen Habermas and Carl Schmitt,” Ethics
& International Affairs, 15 (2001):173-83.
Zolo, Danilo. Cosmopolis:
Prospects for World Government, trans. David McKie, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1997.
|