CIAO DATE: 11/2008
July 1999
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
The advance of globalization has involved additional governance capacity at supranational levels and thereby raised concerns about democracy, which has traditionally been based on the nationstate. For the most part, these governance arrangements take the form of intergovernmental fora, where nation-states are the principal players. In some policy areas where globalization is more pronounced, such as international finance, governance appears to feature some autonomous institutional development. Autonomy may come in the form of a relatively strong international organization with a mandate anchored in international law such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), or of the institutionalization of norms and values that give the intergovernmental forum an autonomous and distinct global perspective. As Held (1995) has observed, democratic theory has assumed that the nation-state is the relevant decision-making unit. The migration of political authority to supranational levels thus has the potential to undermine long-standing democratic arrangements.1
In recent years a number of political theorists have begun to address this problem and have proposed changes in the theory and practice of democracy. The concept of cosmopolitan democracy, most throughly developed by David Held, has been the most prominent innovation (Held 1995; Archibugi, Held and Köhler 1998). Cosmopolitan democracy would involve the expansion of democracy in new global sites of power, through the expansion of the role of global civil society, and reforms to existing international organizations and law. For some theorists, there are certain advantages for democracy in constructing new institutions in international settings in which the heavy hand of the state is relatively weak, such as the decentralized and often informal international regimes which regulate particular issue areas and industries (Dryzek 1996:87). Rosenau (1998:38) suggests that "a decentralized world of diverse and multiple rule systems" provides openings for the development of functional equivalents at the international level to territorial democracy. Archibugi (1998:200) adds that the “endogenous fabric” of existing arrangements furnishes opportunities for building up democracy in a “bottoms up” manner. Others such as Robert Dahl (1999) are much more pessimistic.
This essay seeks to contribute to this important new area of research by highlighting the problem of institutional variation across the emerging sites of supranational authority. The theoretical work on cosmopolitan democracy has so far tended to treat these sites as institutionally similar, shaped by system-wide changes such as economic globalization or the emergence of global civil society. We argue that this theoretical tendency takes insufficient account of the wide variation in the character of international institutions that have been constructed already and on which new institutions will need to be based. We argue further that this variation is due not only to differences in the pace of globalization across issue areas. It derives as well from variations in the relative importance of two related but often underestimated challenges to democracy: the increased international importance of private authority and of technical authority. It is important, therefore, to develop criteria for democracy that can be practically applied to the very different institutions, which we are likely to continue to see across supranational sites of authority.
We develop these arguments in four steps. In the first section, we discuss democracy and the three challenges posed to it. In the second section we develop a specific critique of Held’s notion of cosmopolitan democracy. Third, we review institutional developments in the international system and stress the importance of their variation across issue areas, linking this to the challenges to democracy. In the final section of the paper, we suggest a set of criteria for assessing the degree of democracy at a given site of supranational decision-making, and apply these criteria to two rather different policy areas, financial services and agricultural policy.
Resource link: International Institutions, Globalisation and Democray: Assessing the Challenges [PDF] - 89K