The Coming of Age of Global Democracy?: An Introduction
ronald tinnevelt2008, year: 2008
Even if we could find an agreement concerning the appropriate degree of centralization, however, the question would remain: what constitutional goals such an international order should pursue? Should it primarily oversee the enforcement of basic human rights and perhaps the 'juridification' of international relations? Or should it also attempt to "govern"-in a democratic way-over economic and environmental affairs, and perhaps even over social and cultural issues? That is, should the final aim be to mirror the classical nation-state, or not? Looking at the fierceness with which the democratic deficit of WTO law, IMF governance or the Security Council's use of force has recently been discussed, this is a highly relevant question. Independent of the lack of institutional advances, the de facto political integration of the world seems unstoppable. Many people, moreover, are dedicated to making the global setup more 'legitimate', mostly by making it mirror more closely the political institutions of the classical nation-state. But can the same type of legitimacy really be recreated at levels beyond the nation-state? Are we able to export "democratic principles and practices […] from the domestic to the regional or global level" (Cabrera 2008, 223)? In short: is some form of democracy across and beyond national borders possible at all? Some authors are fairly pessimistic in this regard. Robert Dahl, for instance, famously argued that global institutions "are not and are not likely to be democratic" (1999, 32). Others, such as Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss (2000; 2001), are more optimistic and propose a series of institutional reforms to democratize our world order. For them the idea of 'democracy beyond borders' 3 is a litmus test for our basic ideas about democracy. In this special issue, a number of renowned political philosophers and social scientists critically examine the assumptions behind the democratization of global politics and offer different models of global democracy. In this introductory contribution, we will briefly indicate why global democracy has become such a hotly debated issue within political theory, and survey some of the theoretical challenges and objections that proponents of global democracy often encounter.
