Introduction
Democracy: One or Many?
In November 1989, the wall separating East and West Berlin, that massive symbol of the Cold War, was breached, and Germany was reunited by a conservative prime minister, Helmut Kohl. Also in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department, declared in a much-read article that not only had the “West” won the Cold War but also that the victory of Western liberal democracy marked “the end of history.” More specifically, Fukuyama suggested that the post-Enlightenment ideological conflict between liberalism and its major alternative (socialism) was over, and liberal capitalism, grounded in the doctrine of free trade and political democracy, would shape the global future.1
Skip ahead to the beginning of the new millennium. In his inaugural address for his second term in 2004, President George Bush declared: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.”2 At first glance there was nothing terribly unusual about such a statement; U.S. presidents since Woodrow Wilson have articulated the American global project similarly, as part of an “exceptionalist” presumption integral, seemingly, to American cultural and political identity. But in the post–Cold War era, and driven by the desire to transform the end of (modern ideological) history into the beginning of a triumphant “American century,” a number of advisers to President Bush insisted on the need to grasp the historical moment for a “muscular” form of global liberalism, even if this meant imposing U.S.-style democracy, particularly in strategically sensitive regions of the world (e.g., the Middle East). From this perspective (paradoxes aside), the strong imposing democracy on the weak was considered legitimate, strategically and philosophically, in the quest for a stable, ordered, global environment in which a U.S.-inspired political and cultural value system and a commitment to free-market economics might indeed incline the global future toward such a “democracy.”
In fifteen years, thus, the mainstream discourse of democracy in the United States had shifted significantly, from a celebration of freedom from (perceived) intellectual and political oppression to the global clarion call for regime change. Accordingly, in his State of the Union address in 2004, President Bush proposed doubling the budget for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a government-funded organization created by the Reagan administration in 1983 as part of a global Democracy Project, initially tasked with “creating” democratic societies in the U.S. image in places where this image had become tarnished (e.g., in Latin America). The NED has been authorized and funded by Congress since 1983. Its aim is “democracy promotion” throughout the world.3
At least two other articulations of the democracy-promotion theme have become influential in the contemporary period. One is derived from an important intellectual source known as democratic peace theory.4 Inspired initially by two influential articles on Kantian liberalism and its impact upon international relations by Michael Doyle,5 and afforded a measure of “scientific” credibility in the works of behavioralist political scientists, such as Bruce Russett, democratic peace theory argues that since liberal-democratic states do not go to war with one another they are foundational in any project designed to create the systemic conditions in which capitalist markets might flourish and a range of associated social freedoms and political liberties might become possible.6 We engage the issue of democratic peace theory and its significance for orthodox political discourse on global democracy in chapter 5.
The second and even more influential invocation of the democracy-promotion theme has a related but somewhat different origin but is very much aligned with an orthodoxy that represents the socialist age as historically and intellectually over and that celebrates the age of market freedom, individual liberty, and capitalist democracy. Derived from the strict economic rationalism of the 1920s Austrian school and given more accessible and familiar dimensions by Nobel Prize winners such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, this neoliberalism has become integral to the orthodox democratic debate since the 1980s. Since this time, and most powerfully invoked as part of the Washington Consensus during the 1990s, the neoliberal perspective on democracy has taken on hegemonic status in global affairs. As Milton Friedman insisted in the 1960s and 1970s, the connection between capitalist free markets and democracy is direct and logically insurmountable—free markets require social and political liberty in order that individuals are free to (rationally) choose the means to their economic ends—and this means/ends process is only available to all within a genuinely free-market environment.7 Political participation, in this context, is necessarily of the minimalist variety (e.g., self-interested rationality in the ballot box) with more direct “economic” behavior of much greater significance. This is an issue for detailed analysis in chapter 2.
There are, of course, a range of alternative perspectives to this global orthodoxy that effectively reject this neoliberal logic and are inherently skeptical of the U.S.-led democracy-promotion project. At the more moderate end of this alternative spectrum, social democrats, mainly in Europe, have articulated their concerns with neoliberal globalism and any forceful imposition of democratic freedoms. This has seen a renewed interest in “cosmopolitan democracy” in which a broader, more humane form of liberalism underpins an image of the global future founded not just upon economic rationality and “market” democracy but also on a concern for human rights and international law and the democratizing influences of a range of global civil-society institutions. As David Held puts it, “The possibility of democracy today must be linked to an expanding framework of democratic institutions and procedures.”8 This is a view supported by others, such as Jan Aart Scholte, who emphasizes the need to make international organizations democratically accountable as part of an expanded arena of global governance.9
The works of Jürgen Habermas have been significant in shifting this critical literature onto more radical terrain, primarily via the development of the theory of “discursive democracy,” in which orthodox strictures concerning notions of rationality and rational action are loosened somewhat from their instrumentalist and strategic parameters and reconceived in terms of an emancipatory thematic that offers hope for democratic dialogue across borders, cultures, and ideologies.10 A similar purpose infuses the contribution of scholars such as Andrew Linklater, whose work resonates with critical concerns about the possibility for new forms of democratic identity in the age of neoliberal globalization, as intellectual and territorial borders break down and as a democratic ethic emerges within the global community.11 Another dimension of this multilevel citizenship ethos is to be found in the work of William Connolly, in terms of the notion of “agonistic democracy,” which refuses to reduce the complexity and multiplicity of democracy in globalization to a single form, focusing instead on the tensions and ambiguities that promote global/local forms of a democratic ethos.12
Over the past two decades or so, increasingly radical forms of democratic theory and practice have also become part of the political and intellectual landscape. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the meanings and practices associated with democracy around the world are in many respects defying TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) in favor of more heterogeneous and heterodox, multiple and critical realities. Some brief examples might indicate the nature and variety of this heterodox response:
We investigate these and related themes in more detail in chapters 3 and 4.
The point, for now, is that democracy is being thought about and practiced in a range of ways in the contemporary era, some of which we have already noted: as U.S. geostrategic globalism, as hegemonic neoliberal political economy, as radical alternatives to neoliberalism and U.S. dominance, in grassroots and indigenous movements seeking to create or sustain social and political collectivism, as the participatory struggles of ostensibly liberated peoples (from structural and ideological imperialisms), and at the heart of a liberal cosmopolitanism concerned to infuse the global status quo with humanitarian and ethical dimensions.
This, we suggest, is not at all surprising, even in an age where TINA principles are invoked to essentialize and universalize particular forms of political and economic organization. Indeed, to propose there can be no “real” alternatives to the current hegemony of theory and practice on democracy is to miss the point regarding the intellectual and political process by which hegemonic reality is created and sustained. More precisely, it ignores the always temporary, contested, and unstable nature of hegemonic power and the political and intellectual flux associated with struggles for hegemony.15 In the current context, most specifically, it ignores the contestation and contestability concerning the very meaning of democracy that is evident in so many spaces and places in the current era and that underpins and directs a range of alternative democratic practices.
This is not to suggest that “anything goes” in relation to alternative democratic meanings and the various democratic resistances to the global status quo. In principle, democracy is, for example, effectively incompatible with racism, Fascism, Soviet-style socialism, fixed social hierarchy, and religious and political fundamentalisms. There is, nevertheless, a good deal of nuance left in the contestation over democracy as a politics of becoming—as both an aspiration and a practice—carried out in conditions of social and political struggle, or, as Marx put it, as the distinctive actions of people struggling to govern themselves, albeit under conditions not of their own choosing. “Democracy” remains a contested concept, in spite of the attempts to naturalize and globalize particular forms and practices.
A cursory view of the multiple invocations of democracy in political theory can be seen to reflect this contestability. “Democracy” invokes (1) a type of constitution that embodies popular sovereignty—rule by all of the citizens as opposed to rule by one (monarchy, tyranny) or by a few (aristocracy, oligarchy); (2) a form of government that refers to two fundamental governmental principles, representation and majority rule; (3) a type of society in which, as Tocqueville described America, a relative equality of the condition of the citizenry and a spirit of individual freedom and equality prevail; (4) a way of making decisions that stresses deliberation, rational debate, and dialogue; (5) an ethos as a way of orienting one’s life ethically amid the inevitable agonism of political life in multicultural and pluralist societies; (6) as an ideal and ideology as in the triumphalist discourses of global democracy promotion mentioned above. This is not an exhaustive list, but the sociolinguistic diversity concerning the meaning of democracy attests to the contestability and instability of any attempt to naturalize or globalize a particular kind of democratic regime—including the neoliberal version of democracy promoted so confidently by advocates of the global free market since the 1980s.
In the remainder of this introduction, consequently, we seek to illustrate further this conceptual instability in the contemporary notion of a globalized democracy.
Thinking about Democracy “in” Globalization
Democracy is traditionally imagined as contained within states, as a bounded community legitimated by a particular constitution of popular sovereignty and a self-contained governmental apparatus. Conversely, globalization generally refers to reterritorializations of social life in more distant relations that cross, transcend, and subtend national and state borders. Globalization, in this regard, is comprised of spatially expansive and indeterminate networks whose vectors of power operate at speeds that undermine the spatial and temporal forms of social relations that make democracy possible. Consequently, both as concepts and historical phenomena, democracy and globalization are most often thought to be effectively independent of one another, not as having historically constituted and infused one another. However, this dichotomy of inside (democracy) and outside (globalization) is false. Just as the dichotomy between the state and the international system belied the complexity of the mutually constitutive relations of states and international orders,16 the dichotomy between democracy and globalization acts to narrow our understanding of a complex arena of reciprocation and symbiosis. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson indicates, the modern print media was essential to the formation of both the nation-state and the international system as it informed, educated, and created ties among diverse people within and across states. Similarly, the new age of digital media, with its more fluid networks of communication, would seem to hold out new possibilities for democratic “imagined communities” within and across national borders.17 More obvious examples of this intersection of inside/outside are evident in, for example, the shared fate of global citizens confronted with environmental problems requiring something more than “national” interests to solve them or peoples in many parts of an economically interdependent world having to face together the implications of global commodities networks and the global division of labor in contemporary capitalism.
In these cases, and many more, it becomes clear that rethinking democracy and its relationship to globalization is a necessary and important feature of any contemporary analysis of twenty-first-century politics at all levels, from the individual to the state to the global. As indicated above, the dominant neoliberal framing of this relationship promotes a particular view of it, which suggests that a limited “liberal” form of democratic society can be successfully transferred to a global form as long as the more socially radical dimensions of the democratic tradition can be subordinated to the logics and dictates of global capitalism. This particular image of democracy “in” globalization, we suggest, is too narrowly ideological to be successfully applied for long in a diverse and volatile global context. Thus, while neoliberal theory and practice has been accorded hegemonic status since the 1980s, we argue in this book that both in thought and action it is effectively blind to the vulnerable and unstable nature of its hegemonic rule and to the multiple and heterodox forms of democratic response, both local and global, that its ideological narrowness is provoking.
Globalization, Democratic Instability, and Calls for Change
All political and social formations presume particular configurations of space and time. Democratic political formations are no different. Democracy presumes a bounded community that enables distinctions between citizens and noncitizens and that enables a sense of a unified “people” to form and that liberal democracy has assumed continuity with the modern territorial state. We develop this theme in more detail later in emphasizing how democratic regimes are constituted by particular configurations of inclusion and exclusion—their “domestic” inside being constituted significantly by their “foreign” outside.18 It stands to reason thus that the more intensive and extensive flows of people across state borders in the contemporary era of globalization will lead to important reconfigurations of inside and outside, domestic and foreign. Accordingly, we do not think of globalization as “outside” of democratic domesticity (as the “international” has traditionally been represented) but as an increasingly integral feature of everyday social life around the world that is prompting a range of conceptual and structural tensions in the workings of democracy as the imperatives of global capitalism create new institutional and politico-cultural relations.
There has always been tension and the potential for instability in democratic systems, of course. Indeed, from its very beginnings, democracy was considered replete with such characteristics. Plato argues (in book 8 of the Republic) that democracy cannot lead to stable, lasting institutions because it allows too much freedom to individuals who are not responsible or knowledgeable enough to create political and social stability. Rather, democracy, as Plato understood it, creates a “democratic man” who believes himself free to live any kind of life he chooses, most often without regard for the public good. Because of this freedom, however, democracy will inevitably deteriorate into anarchy and tyranny as the masses seek security and public order and give their support to any talented demagogue who promises them stable and secure government. The Platonic specter of anarchy, disorder, and ungovernability through “too much democracy” and his solution based on political elitism have continued to shape much conservative thinking on modern democratic theory.19
In the modern liberal era (post–seventeenth century), nevertheless, the idea of representative government, together with the notion of the rationally acting individual capitalist as the personification of “hidden hand” stability and public order, appeared to resolve the tensions between the ever-expanding desire for democratic freedom and the concerns for social and political tranquility. And the achievements of liberal-capitalism have been significant in this regard. Democratic agency was manifest, for example, in the often-intense struggles for inclusion and justice by marginalized populations within liberal-capitalist states. Democracy for these groups—women, workers, the poor, slaves and former slaves, immigrants—often meant a way to a better life and relief from the indignities and oppressive conditions fostered by entrenched immiseration and prejudice. But representative government, centered on liberal individualism and market logic as the ultimate public goods, never fully absorbed the social and political desires of modern democratic subjects. This was most powerfully evident in the world-changing eras of the eighteenth century (e.g., the French Revolution) and the nineteenth century (e.g., the Industrial Revolution). In the contemporary era of global neoliberalism, it remains evident as alternative forms of democratic political subjectivity—agitating for democratic worker control, infused with issue-specific activism, or driven by new forms of citizen forums—increasingly challenge the boundaries of liberal representative democracy, perceived as fundamentally inclined toward political elitism and economic exploitation. It is very evident, too, in the attempts to expand the Bolivarian Revolution and pink-tide phenomenon in Latin America into organizations of democratic regionalism; in the village, town, and city collectivism of Kerala, India; and in the subaltern political associations within and across poor communities in South Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere. In all of these places, and many more, the calls for a more meaningful democracy and a change to the poverty and social injustice have been heard.
Other voices from within the broader liberal tradition have been heard also challenging democratic orthodoxy. These appeals for a cosmopolitan world order and for new forms of transnational democratic constitutionalism tend to share the broad concerns, about the rich getting richer and the poor, poorer, that characterize much critique from the global South, but they emphasize, too, some of the major structural discontinuities now apparent between representation and democratic political activism under globalization—a discontinuity that has become more pronounced as far-reaching policy decisions are taken in international organizations and transnational corporations whose decision-makers are not democratically accountable through the representative system and whose economic and political interests are often directly at odds with the great majority of state-based citizens.
Of concern, too, in this regard, is the compression of time and space associated with democratic governmentality in a globalized world order. Aristotle argues that, above all, democratic citizenship requires leisure because serious deliberation among groups of people takes time. Democratic citizenship, he thus concludes, must be restricted to wealthy men who can afford the time to leave the household for extended periods of time, which of course, rendered women, slaves, and metics (resident aliens) unsuitable for democratic citizenship. Aristotle’s fifth-century-BCE restrictions on the composition of the citizen body are no longer acceptable, of course, but his concern about the issue of time as intrinsic to the process of democratic deliberation has become an issue of analytical significance again at a moment when governments, corporations, and individual citizens increasingly measure achievement and success in terms of blinding speed—of instantaneous communication, of electronic wizardry concerning deliberations over people, money, and global crises. For some, indeed, the movement toward a “global village” centered on extraordinary advances in communication technology is the harbinger of a new age of global democracy.
We acknowledge the positive dimensions associated with the compression of time and space integral to the “global village” notion while keeping in mind, more firmly, the interests this new time/space continuum mainly serves—global capitalism and political elitism—and the democratic deficiency this situation necessarily implies. We discuss this theme and “cosmopolitan” responses to it later in the book when we address the problems of democratic governability under globalization as it relates to a range of contemporary issues—for example, the rapid movement of people across borders and associated questions of inclusion/exclusion and of democratic citizenship. At other moments in the book, albeit indirectly, we touch on the fundamental question in all of this—the question of what precisely democracy might mean in a globalized age of blurring techno-speed and “casino capitalism.”20
This, however, is not a book on democratic theory but a theoretically informed account of democracy “in” globalization. Thus, our focus is on how specific democratic regimes in the age of globalization are taking the new conditions into account and how new democratic imaginaries are forming. In chapter 1, we touch on some of the ways in which democracy has been imagined up to the present day, via a series of historical vignettes that situate democratic theory and practice in specific times and spaces. Chapter 2 looks more directly at the present and globalized neoliberal democracy, exploring its intellectual antecedents and the ways, in practice, it seeks to order the global world through a managerial and limited form of “market” democracy. Chapters 3 and 4 look at how neoliberal democracy as a global form has generated critical challenges in ostensibly very different parts of the world (Latin America, Africa, India, and post-Soviet Russia), primarily in the form of alternative democratic movements invoking the need for political emancipation and social justice rather than just economic forms of “liberty.” Chapter 5 turns to questions of how the current global order is prompting a widespread reassessment of democratic community beyond state boundaries. Chapter 6 then presents several more radical challenges to traditional democracy in the form of non-statist democratic experiments.