REALITY has been communist for a few years now. The Cold War was won by capitalism, but current events are imposing problems that place care for the communal rather than care for the individual at the center of our concerns. Globalization is often associated with privatization (with economic liberalization or the movement of certain goods and services toward the marketplace), but it can also be understood as an increase in what is public, the fact that societies are more interdependent. The political agenda is now full of common problems, of universal public goods. I am not talking about a battle of ideas but of actual combat, of realities that push their way forward against the inertia of isolated and immediate interests.
Public goods are one of the most fundamental problems of our societies today, and we know that the strategies used to confront them must also be common. Problems like environmental pollution, climate change, and the exploitation of natural resources, financial integration and the risks associated with it, global inequality, and the population explosion, global crime that is manifested in drug and weapon trafficking, these are all questions that have become part of the political agenda. Increased integration of the global economy accentuates them and modifies the context in which they must be handled. Complex global systems, ranging from the financial to the ecological, connect the fate of local and distant communities. One’s own security dissolves into general security: everyone depends on everyone else, the security of any one person is in direct proportion to the security of others, whether they are nearby or far away. We are increasingly interested in what happens to other people because we believe that will help us identify possibilities and threats for ourselves as well. We already have concrete experience in the areas of security, the economy, and the environment that prove the clumsiness of only pursuing things for ourselves; these experiences suggest the need to learn to make use of cooperative intelligence.
Common sense is imposed, which is more political discovery than epistemological category: once we realize how intermingled our self-interest is with other people’s interests, we see how important it is to understand these connections as soon as possible.
The logic of interdependence presents new difficulties for nation-states, modifying our goods and our public spaces. This points toward the goal of a politics of humanity. In other words, it suggests that humanity as a whole (whatever that may be) can act as a whole and that we must configure a level of governance that corresponds with the nature of universal common goods that are asserted with increasing insistence in the delimited spaces of globalization.
NEW INTERDEPENDENT PUBLIC GOODS
When the first theories about globalization were formulated a few years ago, some authors tried to minimize the novelty of that phenomenon by signaling that other moments of recent history had been characterized by strong internationalization and economic integration. The argument arose from comparing our current situation with the period from 1870 to 1913, the “golden age of the international economy.” It is an observation that contains its share of truth, but it overlooks the protectionism of the age and the fact that business flowed through colonial channels and was, therefore, not at all similar to our reticulated reality. It also fails to keep in mind that economic integration at that time was organized in a vertical fashion, with simple, hierarchical connections, between sovereign states, without any international institutional framework. At that moment in history, it was possible to have close involvement between nations and even reciprocal causal relationships, but there was not, strictly speaking, interdependence in the sense we understand it today.
The most telling indicator of the fact that we find ourselves in another reality nowadays is the radicalness with which the logic of interdependence situates us in the face of common public goods of humanity and the global risks to which we are equally vulnerable. Public goods are those goods whose benefits—or costs, in the case of public bads—potentially affect all people, countries, and even generations. The clearest case is the global environment, but there are others such as knowledge, health, peace and security, financial stability, market efficiency, the conservation of biodiversity, and access to water. This is the ambiguous logic of interdependence: trade and financial flows make economic crises have widespread effects, even upon the most robust economies. For example, lax criteria when it comes to food security can create problems in other parts of the world because of tourism and exportation; ease of communications also facilitates tax evasion, money laundering, and drug trafficking. For public goods, the principle defined as “the triangle of publicness” is valid: consumption, benefits, and decision-making procedures must be public (Kaul et al. 2003).
Large political affairs have been almost completely dissociated from the defining framework of the states in three ways: by the creation of the problem (who or what type of behavior causes a particular problem), the impact of the problem (who suffers what type of negative effects), and the solution to the problem (who is responsible for its resolution and in what way) (Mayntz 2009, 74). The origin, the impact, and the solution of certain problems (problem generation, problem impact, problem coping) do not coincide with the limits of traditional unity as represented by societies that are organized in states. All of it defines a framework of interdependence or mutual dependency that implies shared vulnerability.
To understand this new situation, we need to understand the implications of the modern nation-state and current challenges that are demanding a profound transformation of it. The success of the modern political system—which is usually said to have begun with the Peace of Westphalia (1648)—is attributed to two conquests that mutually reinforced each other. In the first place, there is the ability of states considered individually—their endogenous structures, processes, and institutions—to effectively organize public space and provide public goods
in the domestic sphere, at the same time as they neutralize exterior interferences and protect society from what economists call “exogenous shocks.” The second conquest is the ability of states
in the plural to develop a system of rules, norms, and practices that limit or regulate direct conflict between them and reinforce a series of lasting common resolutions that arise out of their inevitable interaction (treaties, business agreements, monetary systems, and the like). Because of these two abilities, states have been in the position to organize internally and to temper the inevitable external “anarchy” that is derived from their sovereignty.
Both abilities are, then, made more fragile by globalization: states are not in any condition to guarantee the internal public goods that they promised, and the mere juxtaposition of sovereign states is not enough to guarantee external public goods. In the face of both objectives, we are all failed, insufficient states. The states and the system of sovereign states have serious difficulties when it comes to promoting stability, security, prosperity, and other specifically collective goods. States can no longer guarantee many public goods that they used to provide since they have been shaped transnationally or are supplied by the markets.
We are now modifying the idea we had about public goods, which were until recently connected with state sovereignty, which was responsible for guaranteeing them. We are slowly becoming more conscientious that these goods are not divisible between states. For example, the environment, security, economic stability, and symbolic goods (essentially human rights) cannot be managed sovereignly without causing serious negative consequences. Global crises or global risks affect not only the most directly concerned national communities, but the whole of humanity, because of the chain of consequences or side effects. To the extent that they are common goods of humanity, public goods stop being only sovereign goods. International conferences on some of these matters are proof that we are conscious that their management surpasses the abilities of sovereign states. Even regarding the states’ principal abilities, like defense and security, states find themselves challenged as the legitimate provider of those collective goods. At the same time, the power to establish and maintain the global order has been fragmented or is shared by the states.
From the point of view of what we can accurately denominate “the common public goods of humanity,” sovereignty is not in any condition to resolve the principal problems that affect us. An isolated, unilateral political stance makes no sense for the majority of these problems. Fundamental decisions are no longer adopted at the national level, where the only decisions being made are frequently on incidentals. On commercial, monetary, fiscal, or social matters, decisions have become profoundly interdependent, which establishes a way of governance that implies not only a reinforcing of intergovernmental coordination, but also the creation of mobilizing spaces and the representation of interests, of discussion, and of public debate that transcend national territories and sovereign ways of thinking.
In this manner, the principle of responsibility is imposed on the principle of autonomy. The states are forced to recover spaces of action in exchange for agreeing to enter into the game of shared power. Vulnerability in the face of new risks is not something that modifies only legal sovereignty, but also operational sovereignty, in other words, the capacity of the states to assert themselves in ordinary political affairs (Reinicke 1998, 56). Although principles and declarations are maintained through traditional inertia, the reality is that states have long since exchanged sovereignty for power.
Mutual exposure to global risks regarding security, food, health care, finances, or the environment reinforces our interconnection and contributes to the configuration of humanity as a new subject that is constituted not on a metaphysical level, but on the fact of interdependence. Thinking about ourselves as one unique humanity has nothing to do nowadays with a monistic and authoritarian totality; we live in a united but not singular world, interrelated but not homogenized. It is a question of thinking about common existence without falling into global indifference or the universalization of the local community (Pulcini 2009, 277; Cerruti 2007, 169). A politics of humanity should not presume a transposition of old monisms on a global scale, but the opportunity to think of the political subject with inclusive but not totalizing categories.
THE GOVERNANCE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM
The relationship between markets and politics is especially problematic since capitalism has been converted into a global force devoid of the moderating powers of the nation-state. If governing the economy has never been an easy task, global capitalism seems to be literally ungovernable, beyond our control.
Globalization is making the task of governing the markets more difficult, in the first place, because it has created a fundamental inconsistency between, on the one hand, the global reach of economic and financial transactions and, on the other, the local reach of rules and regulations, which exposes nation-states to management incompetence for global crises. The capabilities of the nation-state have been limited while necessary capabilities have not been transferred to global institutions. The disparity between globalized markets and national political systems is a challenge for the global political economy. The governing of capitalism will be impossible as long as the instruments of governance remain limited to nation-states and their fragmented and easily circumvented supervisory capabilities.
The second reason is the opacity of the financial system and its complicated formulations that escape state control, making supervision and responsibility difficult. We are immersed in a network of nontransparent risks through credit instruments and a massive system of shadow banking that conceals transactions, protects the lack of transparency, and covers with a veil of ignorance a large portion of the financial system operating beyond banking supervision and national regulation. All of this has made global capitalism into an economic system that is very prone to crisis, with a level of instability and uncertainty that has no precedents in human history. It is extraordinarily vulnerable to systemic risk (Roubini and Mihn 2011, 210).
The challenge presented by the two-pronged reality of deterritorialization and a lack of transparency is huge. We must conceptualize economic policies articulated by a model of governance for very complex systems, with highly dense interactions and elevated technological sophistication. The first thing that is required is a good analysis of the interaction between economics and politics and a good diagnostic of the current economic crisis.
We need to confront, from the beginning, a paradox that has left us perplexed and that explains the current powerlessness of governments. We could, without worrying about the details that will need to be filled in later, say: the market has failed, but that has not led to a strengthening of the states. How do we explain this situation and the consequences it has for what we should do in the future?
The financial crisis has destroyed the myth of freely self-regulating markets. The market cannot produce its own preconditions—for example, the rule of law, the institution of private property, or the prevention of monopolies—and for that reason, it needs the regulatory power of politics. This need is even more urgent at a time when globalization has increased market instability, especially the volatility of the financial markets. In this context, there are possibilities and spaces for the governing of the marketplace that, although they are limited, would allow the political system to safeguard its long-term interests both from society and from the economy. Markets depend on an institutional framework and this is where politics can act: making economic transactions easier or more difficult according to institutionally designed political objectives.
However, the collapse of the markets does not imply a neo-Keynesian return of the state. The global economic crisis smashed the budgets that believed in the self-regulatory stability of the markets, but it has not confirmed the superiority of politics or the state (since they have been unable to limit credit, regulate financial innovations, limit public debt, or prevent the opacity of the banking system). The states are not in a strong position regarding the decisions they should make in order to escape the crisis. The states’ ability to govern is ever more subject to international dependence and global constrictions regarding what has come to be called “disaggregated sovereignty” (Slaughter 2004, 266): the spread of power in a multilevel political construction, with states that have lost power and many of their prerogatives (especially regulatory authority), in the midst of powerful flows and transnational networks. Sovereignty is no longer an absolute category but a concept that designates the abilities that are available in a context of mutual dependence.
The efforts of democratic societies to control markets and externalities by intervening directly in the economy have been of very little use. The lesson we must draw from this experience is that the political governance of capitalism is more complicated and should be more indirect in order to establish a balance between the autonomy of the economic system and the framework of political orientation. While Adam Smith famously demanded that states provide “peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice,” the demands are now more complex and sophisticated. The sooner we abandon the tone of moralizing simplicity that is searching for responsible parties and calling for a generic change of values, the sooner we will address the task of understanding and governing an especially complex reality.
If we can take any lesson from the current state of the crisis, it is that neither the market alone nor isolated state authority is capable of establishing the type of complex regulatory framework necessary to confront the opacity, volatility, and uncertainty that characterize the functioning of global finances. This means that the governing of the markets should not be understood as a simple strengthening of governments in the face of markets. The global financial system is too important and has too many consequences for it to be abandoned to the control of private organizations, and too complex and sophisticated to be managed by public institutions. For that reason, the goal consists in configuring a mixed system of governance that includes components of self-organization and public supervision. We must have a hybrid method of exercising authority in those cases in which neither public nor private authorities can go it alone because, fundamentally, public authorities lack knowledge and private authorities lack power.
Authoritative modes of governing are not very effective in the global marketplace. Although it is true that we should improve the power of global institutions, we should not forget that many of the components of governance are not an exercise of power, but a group of incentives that are realized through rational argument, the expectation of mutual benefit, or the fear of damaging reputations. That is why, in addition to regulatory institutions with regional or global scope, it is very important to have “watch-dog” entities like Transparency International, consumer organizations, and diverse social movements that observe matters globally. We talk about the global governance of capitalism precisely to refer to a complex system in which there are elements of self-regulation, global institutions, state authority, procedures for cooperation, and informal regulations that come from international business or global monitoring associations.
I would like to summarize these possibilities of market governance into five tasks on which politics can take the lead: (1) improve regulations; (2) work on systemic risks; (3) strengthen cognitive capacities; (4) institutionalize the protection of the future; and (5) guarantee social coherence.
(1) In the first place, it is a question of understanding that we are faced with a problem not of more regulation but of better regulation. Market function can be just as undermined by excess as by a lack of liberty, by too much or too little regulation. In the current globalized world, what most weakens the market is inadequate regulation. Poor regulation can have negative effects, as has been the case with the establishment of shadow banking systems or procyclical dynamics.
It does not make any sense for us to once again put into place a new cycle of regulation and deregulation; the global, financialized economy of the knowledge society requires a new approach. There is no guarantee that regulation will prevent future crises when we fail to understand their function and improve their governance, by making use of innovative procedures rather than the kind of thinking that makes us oscillate between deregulation and control.
(2)
The principal source of the renovation of global economic governance comes from
paying attention to systemic risks. The most important challenge that contemporary society has when it comes to governing markets is the management of systemic risks. This is a responsibility that cannot be left in the hands of economists and financial actors; it is a task for the political economy and the theory of governance. In an interconnected world, there is an increase in unintended systemic effects. The financial crisis has made it dramatically apparent that the growing global interdependence of a great number of actors can result in adverse systemic effects. The evolution of the crisis, its potential for economic self-destruction, and the perplexity of experts have substantiated the ideas of those who have interpreted it as a crisis caused by systemic ignorance, not asymmetrical information (Skidelsky 2009). Systemic risks call on public interest and political responsibility to establish regulatory provisions capable of preventing them. In questions of systemic gravity (financial matters, environmental affairs, pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and so on), private self-government is important but insufficient to handle such risks.
A systemic risk is a risk of vicious circles that destabilize interconnected markets. Systemic risks arise from an opaque interaction between “layered and leveraged components of a concatenated compound” (Willke and Willke 2012, 35). We find ourselves here in a maze of broad side effects belonging to a new capitalism that is characterized by the complex interplay of components, which gives rise to unexpected combinatory effects.
The attention to systemic issues presupposes a radical makeover of our point of view and our governmental procedures, which are shortsighted about everything that is not immediate and concrete. We should be concerned about this catastrophic linking, not about the bad intentions of individuals as much as the fatal interactions of the system. When regulatory focus is placed exclusively on singular actors, governance becomes blind to systemic turbulence. Of course, this turbulence has its origin in particular actions, but these actions become avalanches when a series of chain reactions is placed in motion within a financial system that is not designed to prevent them. This altered point of view is what the United States Treasury Department invoked after the crisis broke out: “regulators did not take into account the harm that large, interconnected, and highly leveraged institutions could inflict on the financial system” (U. S. Treasury 2009, 5).
(3) Governments should improve cognitive capacity and evolve toward a form of political decision-making based on knowledge. Good governance depends on decisions being supported by expert knowledge and legitimated democratically. In a knowledge society, there is greater demand that decisions are based on knowledge, in other words, more on cognitive considerations than on value judgments, which does not mean that politics must sacrifice its function in the face of experts but that politics itself must adopt a style that is more cognitive than normative.
Financial transactions, models, and derivatives have become very sophisticated, and their consequences are difficult to anticipate. If regulators do not understand them, then they certainly cannot regulate them. In fact, regulating institutions are continuously soliciting the advice of the best risk professionals. Regulatory authority will only be the result of collaboration and not the exclusive and stable recourse of governments.
Timothy Geithner, former Secretary of the Treasury for the Obama administration, said in 2008: “We need to build a system that is safe against uncertainty, against ignorance, against the failure to identify the future source of crisis” (2008, 5). However, the true epistemological revolution that the current economic crisis demands is, instead, abandoning the assumption of exactitude and the recognition that governing is managing ignorance, assuming the uncertainty that comes from governing complex systems.
There is an element of inevitable opacity in contemporary capitalism that has to do with emerging phenomena or hard-to-foresee systemic results. Paradoxically, it is less difficult to recognize this ignorance than to be ostentatious about certainty. “Nothing undermines openness more surely than certainty. Once we feel as if we have ‘the answer,’ all motivation to question our thinking disappears. But the discipline of systems thinking shows that there simply is ‘no right answer’ when dealing with complexity” (Senge 1990, 281). Previous (and some current) errors related to the economic crisis show exactly how this inclination to not consider the ignorance that accompanies financial risks affects particular risk strategies and interaction between various sectors of the financial system.
(4) Governments should be long-term protectors who are in charge of institutionalizing the protection of the future through foresight, responsibility, precaution, and sustainability.
In many aspects, contemporary society depends on the ability of its actors and systems to go beyond the perspective of the short term and commit to medium- and long-term projects. The shortsightedness of the financial strategies that made certain technologies possible has endangered other values that are very important for the economy, such as the stability of currency. The experience of the crisis encourages us to modify our relationship with time and with various types of decisions. It would be a question of transforming myopic short-term rationalities into viable futures, acting strategically instead of responding to immediate demands or reacting to short-term necessities.
(5) One of politics’ essential roles is the promotion of the coherence of the social whole, especially when we are within a form of capitalism that has lost its sense of belonging to society, its place in a social context, and its obligations toward society.
The ability of markets to govern themselves is fundamental to the distributed intelligence that characterizes modern and functionally differentiated societies by virtue of their professional expertise, specialized knowledge, and technological instruments. Social subsystems need this autonomy since there is no central summit or hierarchy capable of controlling everything. However, this self-governing has some limits, particularly the limits that derive from market failures and excessive negative externalities such as, for example, the incongruence between strategies of maximization in the short term and sustainability in the long term (Stiglitz 2010, 15). In differentiated societies, social subsystems are very specialized and concerned only with their own matters (the economy, science, health, and culture), which creates problems of integration and general coordination. There is a proliferation of heterogeneous logics (profitability, truth, assistance, innovation, and so on), which sometimes puts social coherence at risk. This is where politics has the inescapable responsibility to coordinate and integrate.
When certain actions can have cumulative effects or present systemic risks, then it is a question of something sufficiently relevant in social terms so that it is not abandoned to private responsibility, whether by people or by organizations. These are the limits, in my judgment, of trusting everything to corporate social responsibility, no matter how important that may be. If it is a question of “social” responsibility, its definition inevitably constitutes a formative act of political will.
The conclusion we can reach from all this is that the double challenge for the global governance of capitalism consists in bridging the gap between territorial regulatory institutions and global economic groups, on the one hand, and the gap that still exists between traditional bureaucratic modes of organizing regulation and the necessity of configuring highly sophisticated and expert models and regulatory processes, on the other.
GOVERNING DELIMITED SPACES
Conflicts and disasters are highly inconvenient, but have at least some positive features. They have an integrative approach because they reveal that there is no choice but to find global solutions, something that is not possible without perspective, institutions, and global norms. What is occurring is, in fact, an involuntary politicization of the risk society, because risks, when they are well understood, pressure societies toward cooperation. Disasters challenge limits, national agendas, and the self-sufficiency of systems; they distort priorities and force enemies to establish alliances. Threatened common spaces mean space for action, coordination, and common responsibility. This often leads to the discovery that unilateral strategies are excessively expensive and that cooperation presents solutions that are more efficient and long lasting. Cooperation modifies the perception of risks, reduces uncertainty, and affords information to the actors.
In this regard, we need to develop a whole new cosmopolitan understanding of common goods, sharpening our sensibility toward the effects of interdependence and thinking in terms of a public good that cannot be managed alone, but requires multilateral coordinated action. The true emergency of our time is to civilize globalization or make it cosmopolitan, carrying out a true “politics of humanity.” Creating a politics of humanity means configuring strategies to reflexively self-limit social agents to benefit their own interests. From the cultural point of view, it means getting civilizations and cultures to understand the dependency that connects them to other cultures for their self-definition and the enrichment that the processes of transfer, exchange, and hybridization presume. From the political point of view, it implies the search for a new way of articulating public interest in an area whose scale and significance we barely recognize.
Within this panorama, although many people continue to believe that governments are the central actors in world politics, there is a growing consciousness that the functions of governance are exercised through a variety of institutional forms and, in certain contexts, governments are not necessarily the most important actors (Held and McGrew 2002). At the same time, the reality confronting states is being radically transformed. The traditional conception that viewed states as unitary, egotistical actors that coexist in an anarchic environment corresponds with the “realistic” theory of international relations, according to which the interests of states are predetermined. Given this conception, states are only capable of conceiving their inclusion in globalization as part of a zero-sum game, conflictive by definition, and only acceptable in a strictly interstate framework. But both aspects—the autarchy and the predetermination of its interests—are intimately connected and have been placed into question from the moment when the interdependence of the problems they need to resolve has become more evident.
It has been revealed that the state by itself (even the most powerful one) does not have the critical dimension in the age of globalization. It is a question of abandoning the idea of negative sovereignty (the absence of external interference) in favor of the positive sovereignty that prepares states to act and collaborate both domestically and internationally (Jackson 1990, 26). The current idea of international competitiveness between states is incompatible with the treatment of global problems, and for that reason, we should advance toward a cooperative model. It is a profound paradigm shift since we are accustomed to thinking within a multipolar world, in other words, a world of noncooperative rules of force. Perhaps the idea of interdependence, as a substitute for or corrector to sovereignty, leads to discovering all of humanity in peoples and buying into the idea that some practices more than others facilitate the development of common goods. Today we are more conscious that the price of convergence diminishes and the price of solitary conduct tends to rise. At the same time, it is increasingly difficult for the pursuit of one’s own interests to not also imply benefits for others.
These circumstances are demanding something more than the mere juxtaposition of state interests. They point to global governance or, to put it another way, a politics of humanity. The label “international community” covers a partially realized reality in an ambiguous way: international conventions, the progress of multilateralism, the profusion of organisms with a global reach. The imperfect structure of international institutions is also evident. Some of them have a solid center where decisions are made while other states remain on the margin. What we really have, then, is incomplete integration into a world that unites in technological, economical areas and even in certain products and cultural styles. This same world reveals itself to be particularly illiterate when it comes to its political and legal articulation. Contrary to the expectations of the neofunctionalists and others, economic integration has not generated a parallel process in the political arena. The demand for global governance is growing because of increasing interdependence in the economic, military, and environmental realms. These new circumstances demand that we give a true political dimension to the cosmopolitanization that actually exists, which is made up of domination and unilateralism.
We currently find ourselves in a political void to some extent, where the state, as a traditional place of order and government, is not capable of confronting some of the fundamental problems it is facing, while the global framework of governance is weak. Delmas-Marty (2010) affirms that we are living at a historic point in time in which sovereignty is overrun and pluralism is contested. At the same time, the value of public goods cannot be effectively established by markets and requires particular collective decisions as well as certain regulatory frameworks. Given the increasing interdependence of problems, there is an ever-growing demand for elaborating transnational forms of regulation. A transition is being produced that is moving us from classic forms of intergovernmental cooperation to international institutions that are more intrusive in national spaces and that, for that reason, require new forms of legitimation.
However, global governance does not consist in a hierarchical management structure. The process of global governance is not the imposition of one level over another but the articulation, often fragile and conflictive, of diverse levels of governance. We are not about to create an inclusive system in which global decisions are adopted, nor, in view of the complexity of the problems at hand, does that seem desirable. In place of a “worldocracy” that coordinates the distinct tasks that belong to an integrative process, there will be multiple regional institutions that act autonomously to resolve common problems and produce different public goods (Schmitter 1999). We will not have a world government but a system of governance formed by institutionalized regulatory agreements and procedures that demand certain behaviors without written constitutions or constitutions that wield hard power. This is the sense in which governance can be defined as the ability to do certain things without the ability to order them, in other words, a type of authority, rather than jurisdiction (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992, 250). “What prepares an actor to obtain other actors’ agreement in a disintegrating world is an interdependent convergence of necessities rather than a constitutional requirement that assigns supreme authority exclusively to states and national governments” (Rosenau 1999, 297). The result of all this is more of a destructuralized battleground than a formal negotiation. There is a possibility for participatory intervention, but there could also be some kinds of pressure or hegemony.
Some people have looked skeptically at the possibilities of globalizing the law, solidarity, or politics, calling attention to the political difficulties of these goals. Avishai Margalit, for example, wonders what electorate could achieve these goals since “the cosmos has no politics,” lacks a political body, does not vote or decide (Margalit 2009). In contrast to that observation, we can be assured, in the first place, that the difficulties of politics in the domestic sphere are just as challenging; there are many problems of governability there too. The politics of humanity need not be more difficult than, for example, the politics of national citizens, when these communities were not yet constituted or now that societies are more fragmented. There is, additionally, an objection in principle against thinking that politics cannot be carried out on a different and unprecedented sphere from previously constituted spaces. Certainly, the majority of political problems have not had, at the time of their emergence, either the subject or the procedure needed for their resolution. Politics always has a “constituent” dimension; the decision-making subject is constituted when the problem arises and not the other way around. There is even the possibility of a democracy without demos, as is the case with the current European experiment.
It is not true that the processes of interdependence lead to an extinction of politics (also understood as the end of ideologies or even the end of history), as is celebrated from the neoliberal point of view or bemoaned from the point of view of classic sovereignty. Quite the opposite, in fact. If politics is the articulation of forms of coexistence on the global plane, we have the task of political reinvention similar to the invention of political communities throughout history. It is a question now of how we should coexist, how to organize ourselves, and what our reciprocal obligations are in the context of the profound interdependence generated by globalization. In that way, globalization does not have any reason it must necessarily be a process of depoliticization. Those who think that way do not understand that current challenges consist in extending democracy beyond the nation-state. Democratization within our societies should be extended to delimited spaces and transnational processes. We have the opportunity and the challenge of disconnecting political legitimacy from its connection to limited spaces.
Globalization presents many restrictions for politics, but it does not mean its end and may mean the beginning of a new era for politics. As Beck (2002, 364) says, it is not that politics has died, but that it has emigrated from classic delimited national spaces to interdependent global scenarios. Although the regimen of global governance is not directed by the mode of politics belonging to nation-states, politics has a genuine task both for the structural elaboration of that regimen and for the configuration of corresponding decision-making processes.