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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book provides a highly original account of the changing meaning of democracy in the contemporary world, offering both an historical and philosophical analysis of the nature and prospects of democracy today.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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For T. G. and J. B. T.
Copyright © David Held 1995
The right of David Held to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1995 by Polity Pressin association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Reprinted 1996, 1997, 2002, 2004, 2007
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CONTENTS
Preface
PART I INTRODUCTION
1 Stories of Democracy: Old and New
1.1 Models of democracy
1.2 Democracy, globalization and international governance
1.3 The limits of democratic political theory and international relations theory
PART II ANALYSIS: THE FORMATION AND DISPLACEMENT OF THE MODERN STATE
2 The Emergence of Sovereignty and the Modern State
2.1 From divided authority to the centralized state
2.2 The modern state and the discourse of sovereignty
3 The Development of the Nation-state and the Entrenchment of Democracy
3.1 War and militarism
3.2 States and capitalism
3.3 Liberal democracy and citizenship
4 The Inter-state System
4.1 Sovereignty and the Westphalian order
4.2 The international order and the United Nations system
4.3 The states system vs. global politics?
5 Democracy, the Nation-state and the Global Order I
5.1 Disjuncture 1: international law
5.2 Disjuncture 2: internationalization of political decision-making
5.3 Disjuncture 3: hegemonic powers and international security structures
6 Democracy, the Nation-state and the Global Order II
6.1 Disjuncture 4: national identity and the globalization of culture
6.2 Disjuncture 5: the world economy
6.3 The new context of political thought
PART III RECONSTRUCTION: FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY
7 Rethinking Democracy
7.1 The principle of autonomy
7.2 The terms of the principle of autonomy
7.3 The idea of a democratic legal state
8 Sites of Power, Problems of Democracy
8.1 Democratic thought experiment
8.2 Power, life-chances and nautonomy
8.3 Power clusters
8.4 Seven sites of power
9 Democracy and the Democratic Good
9.1 The democratic public law
9.2 The obligation(s) to nurture self-determination
9.3 Ideal, attainable and urgent autonomy
9.4 The democratic good
PART IV ELABORATION AND ADVOCACY: COSMOPOLITAN DEMOCRACY
10 Political Community and the Cosmopolitan Order
10.1 The requirement of the democratic good: cosmopolitan democracy
10.2 Democracy as a transnational, common structure of political action
10.3 New forms and levels of governance
11 Markets, Private Property and Cosmopolitan Democratic Law
11.1 Law, liberty and democracy
11.2 The economic limits to democracy?
11.3 The rationale of political intervention in the economy
11.4 The entrenchment of democracy in economic life
11.5 Forms and levels of intervention
11.6 Private property, ‘access avenues’ and democracy
12 Cosmopolitan Democracy and the New International Order
12.1 Rethinking democracy and the international order: the cosmopolitan model
12.2 Cosmopolitan objectives: short- and long-term
12.3 Concluding reflections
Acknowledgements
References and Select Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
There is a daunting challenge facing democratic theory and practice today The key traditions of democratic thinking, above all those which stem from republicanism, liberalism and Marxism, appear to be severely strained in the face of major twentieth-century developments. Among these developments are to be counted the dynamics of a world economy which produce instabilities and difficulties within states and between states which outreach the control of any single polity; the rapid growth of transnational links which have stimulated new forms of collective decision-making involving states, intergovernmental organizations and international pressure groups; the expansion and intensification of transnational communication systems; the proliferation of military technologies and arms as a ‘stable’ feature of the contemporary political world; and the development of pressing transnational problems – involving, for instance, environmental challenges like acid rain, damage to the ozone layer and the ‘greenhouse effect’ – which do not acknowledge national boundaries and frontiers.
Moreover, the form of international governance which dominated world politics for over four decades – the Cold War international system – has disintegrated; no alternative has yet developed, while debates about alternatives have all too often been stymied by old state interests and strategic concerns. However, with the end of the geopolitical divisions created in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new fluidity has been established in international affairs which heralds the possibility of a new fluidity in political thought. These circumstances present significant opportunities for the establishment of an international order based upon the principles of constitutionality and democracy – opportunities which need to be grasped if the current revival of sectarian politics and of the use of force, evidenced in the resurgence of right-wing politics in Europe, the intensification of racism and the spread of ethnic and political separatism throughout the world, are to be checked.
While democratic theory has debated at length the challenges to democracy that emerge from within the boundaries of the nation-state – for instance, the development of mass bureaucratic parties, the preoccupation of parties with their own particular ends and ambitions, the fragmentation of political power, the problem of ‘overloaded government’ – it has not seriously questioned whether the nation-state itself can remain at the centre of democratic thought. The rapid growth of complex interconnections and interrelations between states and societies – often referred to as the process of ‘globalization’ – along with the intersection of national and international forces and processes pose questions that remain largely unexplored. These centre on the challenges to democracy deriving, on the one hand, from the world political economy and the web of relations and networks which stretch across national borders and, on the other, from the divergence that sometimes exists between the totality of those affected by a political decision and those who participated in making it (however indirectly) within a democratic state.
If democratic theory is concerned with ‘what is going on’ in the political world and, thereby, with the nature and prospects of democracy, then a theory of democratic politics today must take account of the place of the polity within geopolitical and market processes, that is, within the system of nation-states, international legal regulation and world political economy. The pursuit of political knowledge on old disciplinary grounds is not adequate to this task. For too long the concerns of political theory, political economy, international relations and international law have been kept separate, with persistently disappointing outcomes. Significant beginnings have been made in recent times to reintegrate elements of these disciplines, but a great deal of ground remains to be covered. At issue is rethinking the nature, form and content of democratic politics in the face of the complex intermeshing of local, national, regional and global relations and processes.
The pursuit of the following questions is central to this enterprise: is the idea of democratic politics progressively comprised by the intersection of national and international forces and pressures? Is the notion of national self-determination becoming an anachronism in a world of interconnected political authorities and power centres? What is the contemporary meaning of citizenship and citizenship rights? Is the principle of territorial representation the single most appropriate principle for the determination of the basis of political representation? Are there duties beyond borders? If so, what are the political and legal implications of these duties? How should agencies that cut across nation-state boundaries be regulated? What is the appropriate level of democratic control – the local, national, regional, global?
Democratic political theory has to be rethought, and along with it the actual underlying principles and practices of democratic politics. The explosion of interest in democracy in recent times has all too often left unquestioned whether democracy must be conceived as liberal democracy, whether democracy can only be applied to ‘governmental affairs’ (and not to the economic, social and cultural realms as well), and whether the most appropriate locus for democracy is the nation-state. These terms of reference are all critically addressed in this book. By examining how the conditions of democracy are changing on national and international levels, and by rethinking some of the central principles and concerns of democratic theory, it is hoped it is possible to reconfront the problems faced by democracy in the contemporary global order.
Democracy and the Global Order is divided into four parts. Part I addresses why conventional accounts of the nature and meaning of democracy will no longer do, and introduces the issues which inform the volume as a whole. Part II offers an analysis of the nature and the development of the modern state. Different state forms are explored and an explanation is offered for why the liberal democratic nation-state became the predominant form of the modern state. Key stages in the formation of the international order – the states system and the United Nations Charter framework – are then examined and a map is provided of the dense network of regional and global relations in which states and societies are enmeshed. Against this background, the changing role of the nation-state, and of the idea of a national democracy, is assessed. It is argued that, in an era in which the fates of peoples are deeply intertwined, democracy has to be recast and strengthened, both within pre-established borders and across them. The particular conditions which created the impetus to the establishment of the liberal democratic nation-state are being transformed and, accordingly, democracy must be profoundly altered if it is to retain its relevance in the decades ahead.
How democracy might be altered within borders, on the one hand, and across them, on the other, are the subjects of, respectively, parts III and IV. Unlike part II, which offers an historical and empirical analysis of the changing form and context of the modern state, part III engages in a reconstruction of some of the core concepts of political theory. It begins by examining the tensions between the idea of the modern state, as a circumscribed system of power which provides in principle a regulatory mechanism and check on rulers and ruled alike, and the idea of democracy, as a political association in which citizens are able to choose freely the conditions of their own association. Among the matters raised are questions about the proper form and scope of supreme political power; the conditions and limits of democratic participation; and the legitimate range and scope of democratic decision-making. The case is made that democracy entails a commitment to what I call the ‘principle of autonomy’ and a set of ‘empowering rights and obligations’ – rights and obligations which must cut across all those sites of power, whether rooted in politics, economics or culture, which can erode or undercut autonomy, for individuals and groups. Such a principle and set of rights and obligations create the possibility of what is referred to as a ‘common structure of political action’. Such a structure, it is suggested, needs to be entrenched and enforced in a ‘democratic public law’ if it is to be effective as the basis of a fair and circumscribed system of power. I explore lines of argument which seek to show how the ideas of democracy and of the modern state can be coherently linked through the notion of a ‘democratic legal order’ – an order which is conditioned and shaped by democratic public law in all its affairs.
Part IV elaborates this position. In particular, it argues that democracy can only be adequately entrenched if democratic public law is enacted in the affairs of nation-states and in the wider global order – that is, as cosmopolitan democratic law – and if a division of powers and competences is recognized at different levels of political interaction and interconnectedness. I contend that democratic politics needs to be reshaped at local, national, regional and global levels, for each of these levels is appropriate for a different set of public problems and issues. Thus, a democratic political order must embrace diverse and distinct domains of authority, linked both vertically and horizontally, if it is to be a creator and servant of democratic practice. The discussion focuses on the idea of a cosmopolitan model of democracy, and its short- and long-term implications. Such a model, it is maintained, provides a basis for thinking that democracy might become an enduring and stable framework for the politics of our times, although the obstacles to the realization of it are formidable. However, the nation-state was not built in a day, and cosmopolitan democracy, assuming for a moment that it can find a broad range of advocates, will certainly not be either!
In the preparation of this book many friends and colleagues have provided invaluable support and criticism of earlier drafts, among others, Daniele Archibugi, Richard Falk, David Goldblatt, Joel Krieger, Anthony McGrew, Jonathan Perraton, Quentin Skinner and Rob Walker. I am indebted to them all. I should also like to acknowledge the support and inspiration I have had from an older and a younger generation: from my father, Peter Held, and from my children, Rosa and Joshua Stanworth Held. In addition, I have been aided in numerous ways by Michelle Stanworth, who provided many sharp commentaries on the text as it developed and much encouragement throughout. Julia Harsant, Gill Motley, Nicola Ross, Fiona Sewell, Pamela Thomas and Rhona Richard also contributed to the production of this volume; I am extremely grateful for their help. Finally, I want to mention the generosity advice and constructive criticism I have received on this book and over the years from my friends Anthony Giddens and John B. Thompson, to whom this volume is dedicated.
DH
January 1995
Part I
Introduction
1
STORIES OF DEMOCRACY:OLD AND NEW
Democracy seems to have scored an historic victory over alternative forms of governance. Nearly everyone today professes to be a democrat. Political regimes of all kinds throughout the world claim to be democracies. In an age in which many traditional ways of resolving value disputes are treated with the utmost caution – especially those which appeal, for instance, to other-worldly teachings, or to doctrines about the natural order of rank and hierarchy, or to claims about the proletarian interest – it seems as if political choices can only begin to be adequately recognized, articulated and negotiated in a democracy. Democracy bestows an aura of legitimacy on modern political life: laws, rules and policies appear justified when they are ‘democratic’. But it was not always so. The great majority of political thinkers from ancient Greece to the present day have been highly critical of the theory and practice of democracy. A widespread commitment to democracy is a very recent phenomenon. Moreover, democracy is a remarkably difficult form of government to create and sustain. The history of twentieth-century Europe alone makes this clear: fascism, Nazism and Stalinism came very close to obliterating democracy altogether.
Against this background, it is unsettling that some recent political commentators have proclaimed (by means of a phrase borrowed most notably from Hegel) the ‘end of history’ – the triumph of the West over all political and economic alternatives. The revolutions which swept across Central and Eastern Europe at the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 stimulated an atmosphere of celebration. Liberal democracy was championed as the agent of progress, and capitalism as the only viable economic system: ideological conflict, it was said, is being steadily displaced by universal democratic reason and market-orientated thinking (see Fukuyama, 1989, 1989/90; cf. Held, 1993a, 1993b). But such a view is quite inadequate in a number of respects.
In the first instance, the ‘liberal’ component of liberal democracy cannot be treated simply as a unity. There are distinctive liberal traditions which embody quite different conceptions from each other of the individual agent, of autonomy, of the rights and duties of subjects, and of the proper nature and form of community. In addition, the ‘celebratory’ view of liberal democracy neglects to explore whether there are any tensions, or even perhaps contradictions, between the ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ components of liberal democracy; for example, between the liberal preoccupation with individual rights or ‘frontiers of freedom’ which ‘nobody should be permitted to cross’, and the democratic concern for the regulation of individual and collective action, that is, for public accountability. Those who have written at length on this question have frequently resolved it in quite different directions. Furthermore, there is not simply one institutional form of liberal democracy. Contemporary democracies have crystallized into a number of different types, which makes any appeal to a liberal position vague at best (see, for example, Lijphart, 1984; Dahl, 1989). Moreover, they have crystallized at the intersection of national and international forces which have profoundly affected their nature and efficacy. To neglect these issues is to leave unanalysed a wide spectrum of questions about democracy and its possible variants.
This introductory chapter seeks to address this lacuna, first, by examining the development of different models of democracy and their conditions of application; secondly, by exploring the meaning of democracy in the context of the progressive enmeshment today of states and societies in regional and global networks; and thirdly, by considering a number of leading approaches to the understanding of transnational and international phenomena. The result, it is hoped, is a step towards the specification of an historical and theoretical framework for the problems and issues addressed in the volume as a whole.
1.1 Models of democracy
Within the history of democratic theory lies a deeply rooted conflict about whether democracy should mean some kind of popular power (a form of politics in which citizens are engaged in self-government and self-regulation) or an aid to decision-making (a means of conferring authority on those periodically voted into office). This conflict has given rise to three basic variants or models of democracy. First, there is direct or participatory democracy, a system of decision-making about public affairs in which citizens are directly involved. This was the ‘original’ type of democracy found in ancient Athens, among other places. Secondly, there is liberal or representative democracy, a system of rule embracing elected ‘officers’ who undertake to ‘represent’ the interests or views of citizens within delimited territories while upholding the ‘rule of law’. Thirdly, there is a variant of democracy based on a one-party model (although some may doubt whether this is a form of democracy at all). Until recently, the Soviet Union, East European societies and many developing countries were committed to this conception. The following discussion deals briefly with each of these models in turn. Although it offers a guide to what will be familiar territory to some readers, it develops concepts and issues which will be drawn upon in later argument.
The active citizen and republican government
Athenian democracy has long been taken as a fundamental source of inspiration for modern Western political thought. This is not to say that the West has been right to trace many elements of its democratic heritage exclusively to Athens; for, as recent historical and archaeological research has shown, some of the key political innovations, both conceptual and institutional, of the nominally Western political tradition can be traced to older civilizations in the East. The city-state or polis society, for example, existed in Mesopotamia long before it emerged in the West (see Bernal, 1987; Springborg, 1992). Nonetheless, the political ideals of Athens – equality among citizens, liberty, respect for the law and justice – have been taken as integral to Western political thinking, and it is for this reason that Athens constitutes a useful starting point.
The Athenian city-state, ruled as it was by citizen-governors, did not differentiate between state and society. In ancient Athens, citizens were at one and the same time subjects of political authority and the creators of public rules and regulations. The people (demos) engaged in legislative and judicial functions, for the Athenian concept of citizenship entailed their taking a share in these functions, participating directly in the affairs of ‘the state’.1 Athenian democracy required a general commitment to the principle of civic virtue: dedication to the republican city-state and the subordination of private life to public affairs and the common good. ‘The public’ and ‘the private’ were intertwined. Citizens could properly fulfil themselves and live honourably only in and through the polis. Of course, who was to count as a citizen was a tightly restricted matter; among the excluded were women and a substantial slave population.
The Athenian city-state – eclipsed ultimately by the rise of empires, stronger states and military regimes – shared features with republican Rome. Both were predominantly face-to-face societies and oral cultures; both had elements of popular participation in governmental affairs; and both had little, if any, centralized bureaucratic control. Furthermore, both sought to foster a deep sense of public duty, a tradition of civic virtue or responsibility to ‘the republic’ – to the distinctive matters of the public realm. And in both polities, the claims of the state were given a unique priority over those of the individual citizen. But if Athens was a democratic republic, contemporary scholarship generally affirms that Rome was, by comparison, an essentially oligarchical system (Finley, 1983, pp. 84ff). Nevertheless, from antiquity, it was Rome which was to prove the most durable influence on the dissemination of republican ideas.
Classical republicanism received its most robust restatement in the early Renaissance, especially in the city-states of Italy (see Rahe, 1994). The meaning of the concept of ‘active citizenship in a republic’ became a leading concern. Political thinkers of this period were critical of the Athenian formulation of this notion; shaped as their views were by Aristotle, one of the leading critics of Greek democracy, and by the centuries-long impact of republican Rome, they recast the republican tradition. While the concept of the polis remained central to the political theory of Italian cities, most notably in Florence, it was no longer regarded as a means to self-fulfilment (see Pocock, 1975, pp. 64–80). Emphasis continued to be placed on the importance of civic virtue but the latter was understood as highly fragile, subject particularly to corruption if dependent solely upon the political involvement of any one major grouping: the people, the aristocracy or the monarchy. A constitution which could reflect and balance the interests of all leading political factions became an aspiration. Niccolò Machiavelli thus argued that all singular constitutional forms (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy) were unstable, and only a governmental system combining elements of each could promote the kind of political culture on which civic virtue depends (see Machiavelli, 1983, pp. 104–11). The best example of such a government was, he proclaimed, Rome: Rome’s mixed government (with its system of consuls, Senate and tribunes of the people) was directly linked to its sustained achievements.
The core of the Renaissance republican case was that the freedom of a political community rested upon its accountability to no authority other than that of the community itself. Self-government is the basis of liberty, together with the right of citizens to participate – within a constitutional framework which creates distinct roles for leading social forces – in the government of their own common business.2 As one commentator put it, ‘the community as a whole must retain the ultimate sovereign authority’, assigning its various rulers or chief magistrates ‘a status no higher than that of elected officials’ (Skinner, 1989a, p. 105). Such ‘rulers’ must ensure the effective enforcement of the laws created by the community for the promotion of its own good; for they are not rulers in a traditional sense, but agents or administrators of justice.
In Renaissance republicanism, as well as in Greek democratic thought, a citizen was someone who participated in ‘giving judgement and holding office’ (Aristotle, 1981, p. 169). Citizenship meant participation in public affairs. This definition is noteworthy because it suggests that theorists within these traditions would have found it hard to locate citizens in modern democracies, except perhaps as representatives or office holders. The limited scope in contemporary politics for the active involvement of citizens would have been regarded as most undemocratic (see Finley, 1973b). Yet the idea that human beings should be active citizens of a political order – citizens of their states – and not merely dutiful subjects of a ruler has had few advocates from the earliest human associations to the early Renaissance (see chapters 2 and 3).3
The demise in the West of the idea of the active citizen, one whose very being is affirmed in and through political action, is hard to explain fully. But it is clear enough that the antithesis of homo politicus is the homo credens of the Christian faith: the citizen whose active judgement is essential is displaced by the true believer (Pocock, 1975, p. 550). Although it would be misleading to suggest that the rise of Christianity effectively banished secular considerations from the lives of rulers and ruled, it unquestionably shifted the source of authority and wisdom from this-worldly to other-worldly representatives. During the Middle Ages, the integration of Christian Europe from the Eastern Atlantic seaboard to the Balkans came to depend above all on two theocratic authorities: the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. There was no theoretical alternative to their account of the nature of power and rule (Bull, 1977, p. 27; cf. Black, A, 1992). Not until the end of the sixteenth century, when it became apparent that religion had become a highly divisive force and that the powers of the state would have to be separated from the duty of rulers to uphold any particular faith, did the nature and limits of political authority, law, rights and obedience become a preoccupation, from Italy to England, of European political thought (Skinner, 1978, vol. 2, p. 352).
Liberal representative democracy
This preoccupation became the hallmark of modern liberal theory, which constantly sought to justify the sovereign power of the state while at the same time justifying limits on that power. The history of this attempt is the history of arguments to balance might and right, power and law, duties and rights. On the one hand, states must have a monopoly of coercive power in order to provide a secure basis on which family life, religion, trade and commerce can prosper. On the other hand, by granting the state a regulatory and coercive capability, liberal political theorists were aware that they had accepted a force that could, and frequently did, deprive citizens of political and social freedoms.
How this dilemma was addressed in early-modern political theory is explored in chapter 2, which sets out the scope of the early formulation of the concept of political sovereignty and the idea of the modern state, alongside rival accounts of these notions found in the work of Bodin and Hobbes, and Locke and Rousseau. However, important as these accounts were to the development of the discourse of the modern state, it was not until later that a new model of democracy was fully articulated – liberal representative (or simply representative) democracy – by those who subsequently became known as liberal democrats. For the latter, representative democracy constituted the key institutional innovation to overcome the problem of balancing coercive power and liberty. The liberal concern with reason, lawful government and freedom of choice could only be upheld properly by recognizing the political equality of all mature individuals. Such equality would ensure not only a secure social environment in which people would be free to pursue their private activities and interests, but also a state which, under the watchful eye of political representatives accountable to an electorate, would do what was best in the general or public interest. Thus, liberal democrats argued, the democratic constitutional state, linked to other key institutional mechanisms, particularly the free market, would resolve the problems of ensuring both liberty and authority.
Two classic statements of the new position can be found in the philosophy of James Madison and in the work of one of the key figures of nineteenth-century English liberalism: Jeremy Bentham. In Madison’s account, ‘pure democracies’ (by which he means societies ‘consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person’) have always been intolerant, unjust and unstable (Madison, 1966, no. 10, p. 20). By contrast, representative government overcomes the excesses of ‘pure democracy’ because regular elections force a clarification of public issues, and the elected few, able to withstand the political process, are likely to be competent and capable of ‘discerning the true interest of their country’.
The central concern of Madison’s argument is not the rightful place of the active citizen in the life of the political community but, instead, the legitimate pursuit by individuals of their interests, and government as a means for the enhancement of these interests. Although Madison himself sought clear ways of reconciling particular interests with what he called modern ‘extended republics’, his position signals a clear shift from the classical ideals of civic virtue and the public realm to liberal preoccupations (1966, no. 10, pp. 21–2). He conceived of the representative state as the chief mechanism to aggregate individuals’ interests and to protect their rights. In such a state, he believed, security of person and property would be sustained and politics could be made compatible with the demands of large nation-states, with their complex patterns of trade, commerce and international relations (see Krouse, 1983, pp. 58–78).
In parallel with this view, Bentham held that representative democracy ‘has for its characteristic object and effect … securing its members against oppression and depredation at the hands of those functionaries which it employs for its defence’ (1843, p. 47). Democratic government is required to protect citizens from the despotic use of political power, whether it be by a monarch, the aristocracy or other groups. The representative state thus becomes an umpire or referee while individuals pursue in civil society, according to the rules of economic competition and free exchange, their own interests. The free vote and the free market are both essential, for a key presupposition is that the collective good can be properly realized in most domains of life only if individuals interact in competitive exchanges, pursuing their utility with minimal state interference. Significantly, however, this argument has another side. Tied to the advocacy of a ‘minimal state’, whose scope and power need to be strictly limited, there is a strong commitment to certain types of state intervention: for instance, intervention to regulate the behaviour of the disobedient, and to reshape social relations and institutions if, in the event of the failure of laissez faire, the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not achieved – the only defensible criterion, Bentham held, of the public good.
From classical antiquity to the seventeenth century, democracy, when it was considered at all, was largely associated with the gathering of citizens in assemblies and public meeting places. By the early nineteenth century, in contrast, it was beginning to be thought of as the right of citizens to participate in the determination of the collective will through the medium of elected representatives (Bobbio, 1989, p. 144). The theory of representative democracy fundamentally shifted the terms of reference of democratic thought: the practical limits that a sizeable citizenry imposes on democracy, which had been the focus of so much critical (antidemocratic) attention, were practically eliminated. Representative democracy could now be celebrated as both accountable and feasible government, potentially stable over great territories and time spans (see Dahl, 1989, pp. 28–30). It could even be heralded, as James Mill put it, as ‘the grand discovery of modern times’ in which ‘the solution of all difficulties, both speculative and practical, would be found’ (quoted in Sabine, 1963, p. 695). Accordingly, the theory and practice of popular government shook off its traditional association with small states and cities, opening itself to become the legitimating creed of the emerging world of nation-states. But who exactly was to count as a legitimate participant, or a ‘citizen’ or ‘individual’, and what his or her exact role was to be in this new order, remained either unclear or unsettled. Even in the work of John Stuart Mill ambiguities remained: the idea that all citizens should have equal political weight in the polity remained outside his actual doctrine, along with that of most of his contemporaries (see Held, 1987, ch. 3).
It was left by and large to the extensive and often violently suppressed struggles of working-class and feminist activists, frequently in complex coalitions with other groups (notably, sectors of the middle class), to accomplish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a genuinely universal suffrage in some countries (see Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, 1992). Their achievement remained fragile in places such as Germany, Italy and Spain, and was in practice denied to some groups, for instance, many African-Americans in the US before the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. However, through these struggles the idea that the rights of citizenship should apply equally to all adults became slowly established; many of the arguments of the liberal democrats could be turned against existing institutions to reveal the extent to which the principles and aspirations of equal political participation remained unfulfilled. It was only with the actual achievement of citizenship for all adult men and women that liberal democracy took on its distinctively contemporary form: a cluster of rules and institutions permitting the broadest participation of the majority of citizens in the selection of representatives who alone can make political decisions, that is, decisions affecting the whole community.
This cluster includes elected government; free and fair elections in which every citizen’s vote has an equal weight; a suffrage which embraces all citizens irrespective of distinctions of race, religion, class, sex and so on; freedom of conscience, information and expression on all public matters broadly defined; the right of all adults to oppose their government and stand for office; and associational autonomy – the right to form independent associations including social movements, interest groups and political parties (see Bobbio, 1987, p. 66; Dahl, 1989, pp. 221 and 233). The consolidation of representative democracy, thus understood, has been a twentieth-century phenomenon; perhaps one should even say a late twentieth-century phenomenon. For it is only in the closing decades of this century that democracy has been (relatively) securely established in the West and widely adopted in principle as a suitable model of government beyond the West.
Marxism and one-party democracy
The struggle of liberalism against tyranny, and the struggle by liberal democrats for political equality, represented a major step forward in the history of human emancipation, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels readily acknowledged. But for them, and for the Marxist tradition more broadly, the great universal ideals of ‘liberty, equality and justice’ cannot be realized simply by the ‘free’ struggle for votes in the political system together with the ‘free’ struggle for profit in the market-place. Advocates of the democratic state and the market economy present these institutions as the only ones under which liberty can be sustained and inequalities minimized. However, according to the Marxist critique, the capitalist economy, by virtue of its internal dynamics, inevitably produces systematic inequality and massive restrictions on real freedom. The formal existence of certain liberties is of little value if they cannot be exercised in practice. Therefore, although each step towards formal political equality is an advance, its liberating potential is severely curtailed by inequalities of class.
In class societies the state cannot become the vehicle for the pursuit of the common good or public interest. Far from playing the role of emancipator, protective knight, umpire or judge in the face of disorder, the agencies of the liberal representative state are enmeshed in the struggles of civil society. Marxists conceive of the state as an extension of civil society, reinforcing the social order for the enhancement of particular interests. Their argument is that political emancipation is only a step towards human emancipation; that is, the complete democratization of both society and the state. In their view, liberal democratic society fails when judged by its own promises.
Among these promises are, first, political participation, or general involvement mediated by representatives in decisions affecting the whole community; secondly, accountable government; and thirdly, freedom to protest and reform (Bobbio, 1987, pp. 42–4). But ‘really existing liberal democracy’, as one Marxist recently put it, ‘fails to deliver’ on any of these promises (Callinicos, 1991, pp. 108–9). For it is distinguished by the existence of a largely passive citizenry (significant numbers of eligible citizens do not vote in elections, for example); by the erosion and displacement of parliamentary institutions by unelected centres of power (typified by the expansion of bureaucratic authority and of the role of functional representatives); and by substantial structural constraints on state action and, in particular, on the possibility of the piecemeal reform of capitalism (the flight of capital overseas, for example, is a constant threat to elected governments with strong programmes of social reform).
Marx himself envisaged the replacement of the liberal democratic state by a ‘commune structure’: the smallest communities, which were to administer their own affairs, would elect delegates to larger administrative units (districts, towns); these in turn would elect candidates to still larger areas of administration (the national delegation) (Marx, 1970a, pp. 67–70). This arrangement is known as the ‘pyramid’ structure of ‘delegative democracy’: all delegates are revocable, bound by the instructions of their constituency, and organized into a ‘pyramid’ of directly elected committees. The post-capitalist state would not, therefore, bear any resemblance to a liberal, parliamentary regime. All state agencies would be brought within the sphere of a single set of directly accountable institutions. Only when this happens will ‘that self-reliance, that freedom, which disappeared from earth with the Greeks, and vanished into the blue haze of heaven with Christianity’, as the young Marx put it, gradually be restored (1844).
In the Marxist-Leninist account, the system of delegative democracy is to be complemented, in principle, by a separate but somewhat similar system at the level of the Communist Party. The transition to socialism and communism necessitates the ‘professional’ leadership of a disciplined cadre of revolutionaries (see, for example, Lenin, 1947). Only such a leadership has the capacity to organize the defence of the revolution against counter-revolutionary forces, to plan the expansion of the forces of production, and to supervise the reconstruction of society. Since all fundamental differences of interest are class interests, since the working-class interest (or standpoint) is the progressive interest in society, and since during and after the revolution it has to be articulated clearly and decisively, a revolutionary party is essential. The party is the instrument which can create the framework for socialism and communism. In practice, the party has to rule; and it was only in the ‘Gorbachev era’ in the Soviet Union (from 1984 to August 1991) that a pyramid of councils, or ‘Soviets’, from the central authority to those at local village and neighbourhood level, was given anything more than a symbolic or ritualistic role in the post-revolutionary period.
Democracy, the state and society
What should be made of these various models of democracy today? The classical participatory model cannot easily be adapted to stretch across space and time (see Held, 1987, chs 5 and 8). Its emergence in the context of city-states, and under conditions of ‘social exclusivity’, was an integral part of its successful development. In complex industrial societies, marked by a high degree of social, economic and political differentiation, it is very hard to envisage how a democracy of this kind could succeed on a large scale without drastic modification (see Budge, 1993; and chapter 12 of this volume).
The significance of these reflections is reinforced by examining the fate of the conception of democracy advocated by Marx and Engels and their followers. In the first instance, the ‘deep structure’ of Marxist categories – with its emphasis on the centrality of class, the universal standpoint of the proletariat, and a conception of politics which is rooted squarely in production – ignores or severely underestimates the contributions to politics of other forms of social structure, collectivity, agency, identity, interest and knowledge. Secondly, as an institutional arrangement that allows for mediation, negotiation and compromise among struggling factions, groups or movements, the Marxist model does not stand up well under scrutiny, especially in its Marxist-Leninist form. A system of institutions to promote discussion, debate and competition among divergent views – a system encompassing the formation of movements, pressure groups and/or political parties with independent leaderships to help press their cases – appears both necessary and desirable. Further, the changes in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 seem to provide remarkable confirmatory evidence of this, with their emphasis on the importance of political and civil rights, a competitive party system, and the ‘rolling back of the state’ – that is, the freeing of civil society from state domination.
In the chapters which follow, therefore, I shall argue that a defensible account of the proper meaning of democracy must acknowledge the importance of a number of fundamental liberal and liberal democratic tenets. Among these are the centrality, in principle, of an ‘impersonal’ structure of public power, of a constitution to help protect and safeguard rights, and of a diversity of power centres within and outside the state, including institutional fora to promote open discussion and deliberation among alternative political viewpoints and platforms (see chapters 3 and 7 especially). However, to make these points, I shall also contend, is not to affirm any one liberal democratic model as it stands. For by focusing on the proper form and limits of government, liberal democrats have failed to explore and specify adequately, on the one hand, the conditions for the possibility of political participation and, on the other, the set of governing institutions capable of regulating the forces which actually shape everyday life. The requirements of democratic participation, the form of democratic control, and the scope of democratic decision-making are all insufficiently examined in the liberal democratic tradition (see chapters 7–9).
Accordingly, if a justifiable account of democracy is to be established, it is not enough to inquire into the proper principles and procedures of democracy and of the liberal democratic state, important though this is. An inquiry into the conditions of enactment of these principles and procedures is also necessary; that is, an inquiry into the character and dynamics of different types of power and their impact on democratic arrangements. Such an investigation must ask how and why one particular type of power – political power – crystallized and became embedded in the state, and how and why democracy came to be associated with this site of power, above all others. How it was that democracy became established as, and became almost synonymous with, liberal democratic government needs clarification, as do the consequences of this for collective decision-making and the nature of accountability. At issue, it will be seen, is an attempt to understand the nature of the modern state, its reach over social and economic affairs in a given territory, and the implications of this for the form and efficacy of democracy. However, democracy has another side which also requires specification if its contemporary meaning is to be grasped fully. The problems of democracy extend beyond state borders.
1.2 Democracy, globalization and international governance
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries theorists of democracy have tended to assume a ‘symmetrical’ and ‘congruent’ relationship between political decision-makers and the recipients of political decisions. In fact, symmetry and congruence have often been taken for granted at two crucial points: first, between citizen-voters and the decision-makers whom they are, in principle, able to hold to account; and secondly, between the ‘output’ (decisions, policies and so on) of decision-makers and their constituents – ultimately, ‘the people’ in a delimited territory.
Even contemporary critics of modern democracies have tended to share this assumption; following the narrative of democracy as conventionally told, they have thought of the problem of political accountability as, above all, a national problem. Representative structures are, they hold, insufficiently responsive to their citizens; and, in discussing various forms of direct democracy, or in interpretations of the continuing relevance of republicanism, they place emphasis on making the political process more transparent and intelligible, more open to, and reflective of, the heterogeneous wants and needs of ‘the people’ (see Macpherson, 1977; Barber, 1984; Pateman, 1985).
But the problem, for defenders and critics alike of modern democratic systems, is that regional and global interconnectedness contests the traditional national resolutions of the key questions of democratic theory and practice. The very process of governance can escape the reach of the nation-state. National communities by no means exclusively make and determine decisions and policies for themselves, and governments by no means determine what is appropriate exclusively for their own citizens (Offe, 1985, pp. 286ff). To take some topical examples: a decision to increase interest rates in an attempt to stem inflation or exchange-rate instability is most often taken as a ‘national’ decision, although it may well stimulate economic changes in other countries. A decision to permit the ‘harvesting’ of the rainforests may contribute to ecological damage far beyond the borders which formally limit the responsibility of a given set of political decision-makers. A decision to build a nuclear plant near the frontiers of a neighbouring country is a decision likely to be taken without consulting those in the nearby country (or countries), despite the many risks and ramifications for them. A decision by a government to save resources by suspending food aid to a nation may stimulate the sudden escalation of food prices in that nation and contribute directly to an outbreak of famine among the urban and rural poor. These decisions, along with policies on issues as diverse as investment, arms procurement and AIDS, are typically regarded as falling within the legitimate domain of authority of a sovereign nation-state. Yet, in a world of regional and global interconnectedness, there are major questions to be put about the coherence, viability and accountability of national decision-making entities themselves.
Further, decisions made by quasi-regional or quasi-supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) diminish the range of decisions open to given national ‘majorities’. The idea of a community which rightly governs itself and determines its own future – an idea at the very heart of the democratic polity itself – is, accordingly, today deeply problematic. Any simple assumption in democratic theory that political relations are, or could be, ‘symmetrical’ or ‘congruent’ appears unjustified (see chapters 4–6).
If the inadequacy of this assumption can be fully shown, issues are raised which go to the heart of democratic thought and practice. The idea that consent legitimates government and the state system more generally has been central to nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal democrats (Hanson, 1989, pp. 68–9). The latter have focused on the ballot box as the mechanism whereby the individual citizen expresses political preferences and citizens as a whole periodically confer authority on government to enact laws and regulate economic and social life. The principle of ‘majority rule’, or the principle that decisions which accrue the largest number of votes should prevail, is at the root of the claim of political decisions to be regarded as worthy or legitimate (cf. Dahl, 1989, chs 10 and 11). But the very idea of consent through elections, and the particular notion that the relevant constituencies of voluntary agreement are the communities of a bounded territory or a state, become problematic as soon as the issue of national, regional and global interconnectedness is considered and the nature of a so-called ‘relevant community’ is contested. Whose consent is necessary and whose participation is justified in decisions concerning, for instance, AIDS, or acid rain, or the use of non-renewable resources, or the management of transnational economic flows? What is the relevant constituency: national, regional or international? To whom do decision-makers have to justify their decisions? To whom should they be accountable? Further, what are the implications for the idea of legitimate rule of decisions taken in polities, with potentially life-and-death consequences for large numbers of people, many of whom might have no democratic stake in the decision-making process?
Territorial boundaries demarcate the basis on which individuals are included in and excluded from participation in decisions affecting their lives (however limited the participation might be), but the outcomes of these decisions often ‘stretch’ beyond national frontiers. The implications of this are considerable, not only for the categories of consent and legitimacy, but for all the key ideas of democracy: the nature of a constituency, the meaning of representation, the proper form and scope of political participation, and the relevance of the democratic nation-state, faced with unsettling patterns of relations and constraints in the international order, as the guarantor of the rights, duties and welfare of subjects.4 Of course, these considerations would probably come as little surprise to those nations and countries whose independence and identity have been deeply affected by the hegemonic reach of empires, old and new, but they do come as a surprise to many in the West.
It could be objected that there is nothing new about global interconnections, and that the significance of global interconnections for democratic theory has in principle been plain for people to see for a long time. Such an objection could be developed by stressing that a dense pattern of global interconnections began to emerge with the initial expansion of the world economy and the rise of the modern state (see Wallerstein, 1974a; Anderson, P., 1974a). Four centuries ago, as one commentator succinctly put it, ‘trade and war were already shaping every conceivable aspect of both domestic politics and the international system’ (Gourevitch, 1978, p. 908). Domestic and international politics are interwoven throughout the modern era: domestic politics has always to be understood against the background of international politics; and the former is often the source of the latter. Whether one is reflecting on the monarchical politics of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries (the question of whether, for instance, the king of France should be a Catholic or a Protestant), or seeking to understand the changing pattern of trade routes from East to West in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and the way these changed the structure of towns, urban environments and the social balance), the examination of patterns of local and international interdependence and interpenetration seems inescapable (Gourevitch, 1978, pp. 908–11).
These considerations are concisely reflected in a classic study of diplomacy in Europe, On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes, published by Callières in 1716. As he wrote:
To understand the permanent use of diplomacy, and the necessity for continual negotiations, we must think of the states of which Europe is composed as being joined together by all kinds of necessary commerce, in such a way that they may be regarded as members of one Republic, and that no considerable change can take place in any one of them without affecting the condition, or disturbing the peace, of all the others. The blunder of the smallest of sovereigns may indeed cast an apple of discord among all the greatest powers, because there is no state so great which does not find it useful to have relations with the lesser states and to seek friends among the different parties of which even the smallest state is composed. (1963, p. 11)
The complex interplay between state and non-state forces and actors is hardly a new or recent development: it would be quite misleading to maintain that political thought today faces a wholly novel set of political circumstances (Bull, 1977, pp. 278–80).
However, it is one thing to claim that there are elements of continuity in the formation and structure of modern states, economies and societies, quite another to claim that there is nothing new about aspects of their form and dynamics. For there is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the development of particular trade routes, or select military and naval operations or even the global reach of nineteenth-century empires, and, on the other hand, an international order involving the conjuncture of: dense networks of regional and global economic relations which stretch beyond the control of any single state (even of dominant states); extensive webs of transnational relations and instantaneous electronic communications over which particular states have limited influence; a vast array of international regimes and organizations which can limit the scope for action of the most powerful states; and the development of a global military order, and the build-up of the means of ‘total’ warfare as an enduring feature of the contemporary world, which can reduce the range of policies available to governments and their citizens. While trade routes and empires could link distant populations together in long loops of cause and effect, these links took a substantial period to establish and were only maintained with some difficulty (see Abu-Lughod, 1989). They were heavily dependent on face-to-face communication and, in its absence, on the direct movement of people, goods and messages using (what we would now consider) very slow systems of transportation and communication. Up to the 1830s, for example, a letter posted in England took between five and eight months to reach India, and an exchange of letters could take up to two years if affected by the monsoon seasons (see Thompson, 1995, ch. 5). By contrast, contemporary developments in the international order link people, communities and societies in highly complex ways and can, given the nature of modern communications, virtually annihilate distance and territorial boundaries as barriers to socio-economic activity.
Developments putting pressure on democratic polities are often referred to as part of the process of ‘globalization’. Although the use of the term globalization will be subject to qualification later (see chapters 5 and 6), globalization can be taken to denote the stretching and deepening of social relations and institutions across space and time such that, on the one hand, day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by events happening on the other side of the globe and, on the other, the practices and decisions of local groups or communities can have significant global reverberations. Accordingly, globalization can be conceived as ‘action at distance’ (see Giddens, 1990). The particular form of action at distance that is of concern here is engendered by the stretching and deepenir of relations across the borders of nation-states and at increasing intensity.
Globalization, thus interpreted, implies at least two distinct phenomena. First, it suggests that many chains of political, economic and social activity are becoming world-wide in scope. And, secondly, it suggests that there has been an intensification of levels of interaction and interconnectedness within and between states and societies (see McGrew, 1992a, pp. 1–28). What is new about the modern global system is the stretching of social relations in and through new dimensions of activity – technological, organizational, administrative and legal, among others – and the chronic intensification of patterns of interconnectedness mediated by such phenomena as modern communications networks and new information technology. Politics unfolds today, with all its customary uncertainty and indeterminateness, against the background of a world shaped and permeated by the movement of goods and capital, the flow of communication, the interchange of cultures and the passage of people (Kegley and Wittkopf, 1989, p. 511).
There is, accordingly, a striking paradox to note about the contemporary era: from Africa to Eastern Europe, Asia to Latin America, more and more nations and groups are championing the idea of ‘the rule of the people’; but they are doing so at just that moment when the very efficacy of democracy as a national form of political organization appears open to question. As substantial areas of human activity are progressively organized on a global level, the fate of democracy, and of the independent democratic nation-state in particular, is fraught with difficulty. In this context, the meaning and place of democratic politics, and of the contending models of democracy, have to be rethought in relation to overlapping local, national, regional5 and global structures and processes.
If the case for rethinking democracy in relation to the interconnectedness of states and societies is established successfully, a new agenda will have been created for democratic theory and practice. It is important to be clear about the meaning of ‘new’ in this context. The agenda will not be new in the sense of being without precedent; others before have sought to understand the impact of the international order on the form and operation of domestic politics within democratic states. Others before have also sought to set out the normative implications of changes in the international order for the role and nature of democratic government. Nor will the agenda be new in the sense that traditional questions of democratic theory will be wholly displaced. On the contrary, questions will remain about the proper form of citizenship, the nature of individual rights and duties and the extent of participation and representation, for instance. But the agenda will be new to the extent that the case is made that a theory of democracy (whether focused on empirical or philosophical concerns) requires a theory of the interlocking processes and structures of the global system. For a theory of democracy must offer, it will be maintained, an account both of the changing meaning of democracy within the global order and of the impact of the global order on the development of democratic associations. Democratic institutions and practices have to be articulated with the complex arena of national and international politics, and the mutual interpenetration of the national and international must be mapped. Political understanding, and the successful pursuit of democratic political theory, are dependent on the outcome of these tasks.
In an age in which there are many determinants of the distribution of power, many power centres and authority systems operating within and across borders, the bases of politics and of democratic theory have to be recast. The meaning and nature of power, authority and accountability have to be re-examined. In what follows, I seek to do this and to argue that the concept of legitimate political power or authority has to be separated from its exclusive traditional association with states and fixed national borders, and that the conditions of its successful entrenchment depend on an international framework of political life, given form and shape by what I call ‘cosmopolitan democratic law’ or simply ‘cosmopolitan law’ (see chapters 10 and 11). I hasten to add, to avoid misunderstanding, that this does not entail abandoning the modern state as such – it will be with us for the foreseeable future – but rather coming to appreciate it as an element in a wider framework of political conditions, relations and associations. It will be argued, ultimately, that democracy can result from, and only from, a nucleus, or cluster, of democratic states and societies. Or, to put the point differently, national democracies require an international cosmopolitan democracy if they are to be sustained and developed in the contemporary era. Paradoxically, perhaps, democracy has to be extended and deepened within and between countries for it to retain its relevance in the future. The chapters which follow provide, if they are compelling, an account of the form and limits of this new democratic project.
1.3 The limits of democratic political theory and international relations theory
The starting point of part II of the volume – the formation of the modern state – requires clarification. Ideas such as sovereignty, liberty and representative democracy, and the embodiment of these notions in institutions, laws and procedures, still carry with them the marks of their earliest formulation during the epoch in which the modern nation-state was being forged. Accordingly, if the nature and limits of the modern polity – that is, its ‘reach’ within territorial boundaries and its ‘stretch’ across them – are to be understood, it is important to grasp this historical context. However, the context of the modern polity has altered in many important respects over time, raising questions about the validity and continuing relevance of some of the core concepts of modern political thought. Part II addresses these changing conditions while parts III and IV unfold their implications for contemporary political theory and practice.
