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Louvain, Public Sphere—1

DDemocracy and a Practical Public Sphere Beyond the State??1

Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel

1. The changing context of global politics

People used to say that beyond domestic politics was lay the world of

international politics: thus (that was the basis for the title of Kenneth Waltz’s

book, which celebrated the bipolar world, just as dusk was settling on it

celebrated the bipolar world just in time).2 “International politics” was the label for

a mix of relations between and among states and for the institutions (always of

contested significance) built by those states. Students of international politics

disagreed deeply There were deep disagreements about about the right way to

understand that the world of international politics—with between realists , with

their emphasizsing on the underlying distribution of national power and interest;

Bullians , who believed arguing that relations among states were always set

within a constraining “social element” of common norms, rules and values;

second image theorists holding , who argued that the internal forms of regimes

matter to conduct of international politics; and regime theorists arguing , who that

saw the norms associated with regimes as rule-governed regimes fostering

1 Respectively, Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Maurice T. Moore Professor of Law, Columbia University. This paper draws on material from three joint essays: our Wade Lecture on “Democracy Beyond the State?”, Washington University, St. Louis, April 2005; “Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (forthcoming, fall 2005); and “Administrative Law and Global Politics,” Journal of International Law and Policy (forthcoming).2 Kenneth Waltz, The Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979);


cooperation among states. But there was considerable agreement about the

main elements of the object of inquiry.

Something There is now broad (though not at all universal) agreement that

something very different now seems to be is happening: now, call it the condition

of “global politics,” marked by proliferation of political settings beyond domestic

boundaries that are not reducible to states and their voluntary interactions (at

least if esp. when we understand “voluntary” as a persisting trait of a relationship,

and not simply an observation about historical its origins): a proliferation that

expands the range of relevant political actors, while shifting our changes our

understanding of political units themselves (human rights as setting limits on

westphalian sovereignty was a maybe the first first step, but not the last) and of

relations among them., as well as the relations between and among them.

Moreover, it is clear that the world of global politics comprises a great diversity of

circumstances and cultures, and that however we define that diversity and

pluralism—dispersion of life chances, as well as political, cultural, religious,

ethnic, linguistic diversity—it extends well beyond anything we find within any

single political society.

What are some of the elements of global politics? They include—with no

pretence either to completeness or precision—the following:

(1) Economic integration—as measured by communication and

transportation costs, trade and trade dependence, and movements of

capital—has made the global economy a substantial presence in the

economic lives of virtually all states.


(2) Cultures, economic circumstances, and political institutions and

traditions vary widely, and much more widely between states than within

them.

(3) While states remain essential players, to a considerable and growing

extent, rule making, as well as rule elaboration and application—

especially in the arena of economic regulation, but also in areas of

security, labor standards, environment, rights, food safety standards,

product standards among others—is taking place in global settings that,

even if established by states (and many regulatory functions are

provided by private or public-private bodies), conduct their activities of

making, elaborating, and applying rules activities with some de facto

decision-making independence from their creators.

(4) The rules made in those settings are consequential for the conduct and

welfare of individuals, firms, and states, in part because they provide

standards for coordinated action and in part because national rule-

making itself proceeds subject to rules, standards, and principles

established beyond the national level.

(5) Whatever the origins of these rule-making bodies, they are expected—

by states, firms, individuals, and organizations—to continue to exist and

to make consequential decisions, so that agents (including states, firms,

and non-governmental organizations) and movements need to take them

into account in making decisions and pursuing goals.


(6) Even when rule-making and applying bodies lack their own independent

power to impose sanctions through coercion, they have the capacity to

encourage conduct by providing incentives and permitting the imposition

of sanctions; moreover withdrawing from them may be costly to

members (if only because of the sometimes-considerable loss of

benefits).

(7) Those settings of global rule-making are the focus of a transnational

politics of movements and organizations—and not only an

intergovernmental politics between states—that contest and aim to

reshape the activities of supra-national rule-making bodies. Those efforts

work in part through protest, in part by representing interests to those

bodies, and in part by advancing norms, values, and standards of

reasonableness—that is, by suggesting potential elements of a global

public reason that might serve as a common ground of argument in

assessing the practices and performances in global politics.3

Global politics is thus not an occasional matter of sparse agreements;

while the ground is changing quickly, it seems to be enduring and institutionally

dense,4 featuring coordination and relatively autonomous administration (rule-

making). Putting (3)-(6) together, Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart have argued

3 Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John Ruggie, “Taking Embedded Liberalism Global: The Corporate Connection,” in David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, eds., Taming Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4 Confining attention to intergovernmental organizations with permanent administrative staffs, the world’s least integrated country is a formal member of 14 organizations, and virtually all other countries are formal members of more than 100 organizations. In addition, there are agreements that establish rights and obligations but do not create administrative capacity. See Shanks, Jacobson, Kaplan, “Inertia and Change.”


that, even in the absence of a global state exercising authority over a territory,

there is now a relatively autonomous space of global administration: “the

classical dichotomy between an administrative space in national polities

and inter-state coordination in global governance.” In their view: “The rise

of regulatory programs at the global level and their penetration of domestic

counterparts means that the decisions of domestic administrators are

increasingly constrained by substantive and procedural norms established at the

global level; the formal need for domestic implementation then does no longer

provide for meaningful independence of the domestic from the international

realm. At the same time, the global administrative bodies making those decisions

enjoy too much de facto independence and discretion to be regarded as mere

agents of states.”5 In short, they describe an emerging regulatory state, with

potentials for de- as well as re-regulation—but without the state.

Functionally specific, but loosely bounded institutions: addressed to

particular problems but problem spill over (e.g., environment, security, migration);

Networks of governmental agencies, in which the participants coordinate policy

with only loose constraints from their home states (Slaughter);

NGOs and networks of NGOs focused on particular issues: activists across

borders, transnationalism (global politics from below), where NGOs implement

policy (providing basic goods such as health and education, under contract with

governments or international organizations; play a role in generating, deepening,

and implementing transnational norms; help both to advance and to block

5 Benedict Kingsbury, Nico Krisch, and Richard Stewart, “The Emergence of Global Administrative Law,” Journal of International Law and Policy (forthcoming).


international agreements; they coordinate with international actors to promote

domestic change (boomerang effect); and encourage transparency.

Public/private international standard setting, with World Bank, for example, as

coordinator, forum

Moreover, all of these developments are internalized within states, which make

policy and decisions pursuant to international agreements and norms—including

the responsiveness of courts to constitutional courts on other jurisdictions, and

their role as elements in an emerging system of global administrative law.

The upshot of all of this is a new Global politics, which includes not just efforts

Moreoverat sustained, coordinated policy-making—now adding in (7)—that

relatively autonomous space, is the focus of increasinglybut the routine political

activities and contestation that surrounds institutions and networks; and the

associated discourse about how global politics and rule-making this politics

should be conducted, and its relation to domestic politics. So we have something

new—global politics without a global state.

For political philosophy, These changes registered and explored in a new

writing

Global civil society literature (esp. focused on movements built across national

borders, addressing issues of human rights, environment: global politics from

below, World Social Forum)

Keohane on breakdown of the club model (with small number of leading states

making deals) as range of states and nonstate players expand, and more broadly

on accountability,


Global administrative law: claim is that rules made by international bodies (WTO,

ILO, Kyoto, Basel) affect citizens and firms directly, and there is now a distinctive

body of law—global administrative law—beginning to regulate the procedures by

which these rules are made and revised. Contrast is with international law, which

regulates relations among states, and administrative law, which regulations

regulatory rule making domestically

Ruggie on global informal public sphere,

Slaughter on the transformative effects of networking by government agencies

(creating global capacity while transforming sovereignty

Taken as a whole the this new context of global politics has placed puts three large,

closely related normative issues on the table: first, what are the appropriate forms of

governance for global politics, and in particular what is thewhat place might of

democratic norms have in governance beyond the state? Second, how are we to

understand the nature and content of the rights engendered by new forms of global

politics. And third, ; and third, are there norms of access to basic goods or of distributive

justice that apply in the world of global politics? Though much of the recent most

interesting philosophical writing about issues of global justice has focused on the third of

these—in particular, on whether egalitarian distributive justice has as much normative

force globally as domestically—the normative discourse that is already part of the world

of global politics focuses with equal intensity on the first and second as well. And we, we

will will concentrate here on the first two (not for reasons of relative importance, but

simply to keep the presentation tractable), with a particular focus at the end on the issues


about democracy: about how the context of global politics might induce a new form of

public sphere, demos, and democracy, but without a global state..

2. Two conventional responses to these unconventional developments

Though there is little doubt among participants and close observers that there is

something fairly called a new global politics is a new historical phenomenon,

clashing theoretical responses—particularly in normative political thought— to

these developments remain curiously wedded to conventional ideas.

One pole is defined by a

At one pole a form of political Ccosmopolitanism that transposes the idea of

unitary sovereignty from the state to the world. In this view emerging global

politics is finally breaking down the artificial barriers that divide individuals from

one another; individuals are all at last emerging as equal citizens of the world,

and the emerging global politics is providing the settings in which they are finally

treated as equal citizens of the world (perhaps to be perfected by a global state).

At the second pole, At the other pole, Statist/Nationist views argue the

key actors in global politics are still states because states, or other communities

with shared political culture, remain the key providers of the basic good of

security or because states remain the principal site of enforced obligations. Thus

while the new world of global politics is more complexly organized, the agents in

the new world of global politics are still bounded collectivities not individuals.s.


Taken together these views suggest, implausibly, that whether the world

governance is on the verge of radical change (cosmopolitanism) or very far from

it (statism), our familiar ideas of sovereignty will continue to provide the axial

principles of politics..

The roots of an alternative are But cosmopolitanism is either a moral

commitment to equality that is too abstract to have any real purchase on the

issues of governance, rights, distribution; or, when it descends from this

abstraction, it descends into implausibility because it is too far removed from the

settings of global politics. Just projects the familiar image of the European

welfare state on the blank screen of the global polity.

Statist and nationist views implausibly suppose in contrast that global politics, with its

forms of interdependence and cooperation by itself changes nothing on norms of

governance, rights, distribution. The norms for global politics, on these views, are a

conjunction of a humanitarianism that applied equally in a world of relatively

independent states—imposing an obligation to protect everyone from human disaster—

plus whatever political agents voluntarily agree to.

3. The political view open-ended/contestable implication

This quick review of responses slights a potentially important suggested by the

idea, advanced by John Rawls, that “the correct regulative principle for a thing

depends on the nature of that thing.” intellectual development within it: the

reemphasis, under the pressure of events, of what Tom Nagel has called this


calls the “political view” of justice, drawing the terms from Rawls’ account .

Generically stated, tof his view—with roots in Rawls’s idea of a political

conception of justice. The main idea is that —says ( (as against what has been

called “monism”) there is no set of basic moral principles from which we can

derive both moral requirements for individuals and principles for associations and

institutions. Instead, and in particular, norms of justice—beyond the

humanitarianism that binds us even in the absence of any organized cooperation

—apply to us only when we stand in certain kinds of relations, and the content of

the principles vary according to the nature of the relations.

that there is no single principle or small set of normative principles that

apply to all settings that call for individual or collective decisions: that social and

political philosophy are not simply applied moral philosophy. On the political view,

the regulative principle(s)—the appropriate norms and principles—for a form of

cooperation depend(s) on features of the form of cooperation to which the

principles apply. Some variants of this view, such as systems theory (and

arguably Walzer’s Sphere’s of Justice) assume that various domains of life have

natural, correlative regulatory principles: different spheres, different principles.

But a more plausible version says that of the political view is that working out the

right principles is more complicated and depends depends in part at least ofn a

view about the nature of the relations and of the problems to be solved, rather

than fixed features of this or that problem-solving domain, or of the good that a

domain distributes, or our moral or political nature, that set conditions on the

regulative principle. The idea that we need to fashion an appropriate response to


our problems with the materials presented by the situations (including the

relations) in which they arise—that no such appropriate response is antecedently

given and awaiting discovery—is one way to summarize the general idea of

constructivism, and the political view is a species of that general conception.

In a recent essay on global justice, Nagel endorses Some

contemporary writers (most notably, Nagel in a recent essay on global justice)

endorse this constructivist political-constructivist view in the generic form just

stated, but then presents a truncated application of it, which issues immediately

in a reaffirmation of a strong from of statism, according to which the existence of

a state is necessary and sufficient to trigger any norms beyond

humanitarianism’s moral minimum.. With the compression required for current

purposes the argument goes like this:

There could in theory be (infinitely) many constellations of norm-

generative relations, with corresponding norms of justice, on the notional

continuum between humanitarianism and a world state that makes all

humanity subject to the same Hobbesian sovereign and equally entitled to

authorize its conduct.

But, according to Nagel, the only situation that actually triggers new norms

of justice is the one in which we are all subject to a common sovereign,

which has the power to coerce our conduct and whose conduct we are

seen as authorizing—only when we are subjects in law’s empire and in

citizens in law’s republic. Here, the involvement of will associated with the


combination of coercion and co-authorship issues in new, demanding

requirements of egalitarian justice.

And given the evident impossibility of achieving Hobbesian sovereignty on

a world scale, neither the increase in global inter-dependence, nor the

increasingly explicit efforts to co-ordinate response to the higher order

effects of this globalization, are justice-generative.

In short: extra rempublicam nulla justitia.

But there is a third possibility: that the kinds of interdependence,

cooperation, rule-making characteristic of global politics trigger—even in the

absence of a state—normative demands that are greater than humanitarianism

but may yet fall short of the full measure of egalitarian principles. As a general

matter, we think that this third possibility is right, and that a normative idea of

inclusion, both procedural and substantive, is central to the domain of global

justice. Conceptions of global justice offer ways to address the three questions

mentioned at the end of the previous section: they offer accounts of fair

governance, human rights, and fair distribution (including access to such basic

goods as health and education); competing conceptions can be understood as

advancing alternative accounts of what inclusion demands—of the kind of

respect and concern that is owed by the variety of agencies, organizations, and

institutions (including states) that operate on the terrain of global politics, and of

how a particular conception of rights, governance, and access to resources

provides the respect and concern that is due.


A common name for the normative requirements on governance

(processes of rule-making) arising from organization of inter-dependence and

cooperation is accountability (including transparency, reason giving, ex ante

hearings and ex post review, standing for those affected). And once there is a

rationale for norms more demanding than humanitarianism on the governance

side, there is also a case for norms more demanding than humanitarianism on

the outcome side: that is, for claims to basic rights and a fair distribution of

benefits and burdens—though as I mentioned earlier, we will be concentrating

here on governance (in section 4) and rights (in section 5).

3. New Directions

On this formulation, there are two fundamentally different associative settings

which are associated with distinct normative standards. On the one hand,

humanitarian norms are binding on us even in the absence of any overarching

institutions of social cooperation. On the other, the special setting of the state—in

which coordination is achieved through a central authority, which enforces a

common set of rules for all—is required for the distinctive demands of justice,

which require treating all subject to the rules as equals. The essential idea is that

only the existence of a state—understood as achieving coordination through a

coercive authority that enforces uniform rules on all in a territory—triggers a set

of norms over and above the pre-institutional requirements of humanitarianism.

So the state emerges a unique normative tripwire, bringing us from the world of


humanitarian concern to the world of justice; nothing short of a global state

changes the normative terrain at all.

But the case for the state as the unique normative tripwire is not

compelling, unless we make strongly Hobbesian assumptions about social

possibilities. Hobbes’s case for the special normative significance of the state—

no state, no law, no justice or injustice, indeed no right or wrong at all—

depended on his background conviction (itself driven by his understanding of

human nature and the circumstances of cooperation) that we face only two really

distinct and stable social possibilities: anarchy with its state of war or a central

and consolidated authority, with uniform rules for all subject to the authority.

Hobbes’s thesis is that, with no superintending state, we can have no

coordination at all, and therefore no norms of justice (or humanitarian norms, for

that matter). Absent that conviction about social possibilities, there might be—as

in a Lockean state of nature or in the world of global politics—not simply mutual

interdependence but lots of coordinated activity, guided by group decisions,

made through formal and informal institutions, around which settled expectations

congeal. And if all of that is in place, then why insist that the unitary sovereign

state is the unique normative tripwire? Absent Hobbes dismal thought—that in

the absence of consolidated sovereignty, we live in constant fear of attack, and

are unable to reply on anyone but ourselves—why assign the state that kind of

prominence in normative thought, as if justice will only roll down like the waters

and righteousness like a mighty stream after the state builds the dam?


To exploit fully the constructivist insight associated with the political

conception, then, we need to suppress the Hobbesian reflex—that coordination

and consequential rule-making require a state of a familiar kind—, state the

distinctive coordination problems posed by global politics, and inquire whether

there are regulative principles—including principles of governance—suited to

those forms.

Take first the distinctive problem. We just saw that global politics reflects

profound heterogeneity in the normative and factual terrain: and even in its

current, limited form, it addresses (however imperfectly), through more or less

institutionalized settings, urgent problems across a wide span of domains

(trades, security, environment, rights, health, education…), each of which is itself

extremely diversified (by North/South, gender, culture, and so on), and,

moreover, builds expectations (both defacto and normative) of continued such

address, through coordinated activity.

Solutions to each of these problems require public goods which that are

best provided when they are tailored to the circumstances of the individuals and

groups to whom they are addressed. Determining what these public goods are,

and how to provide them in particular cases, requires constant learning, which in

turn requires organizational innovation. (And, to forestall a concern by

anticipating a later point: the learning requires global comparison, even if the

tailoring focuses on local circumstance.) Contrast such new, elusive public goods

with traditional generic ones, conceived within states, whose nature and utility is


taken to be self evident to all potential beneficiaries—so self evident, indeed, that

each is tempted to free ride on the willingness of the others to finance them

The provision of such particularized and changing goods is in turn

dependent on cooperation among (specialized subgroups) of providers and

recipients, and expectations about providing goods build up around forms of

cooperation. Such cooperation, in turn, invariably gives rise to political contest:

disagreements about best solutions, and about proper ways of determining

acceptable solutions, as well as disagreements about the distribution of benefits

(though we should resist the familiar temptation to think that politics begins and

ends with distributive issues, as if everything else about the provision of public

goods was somehow technical, and a matter for extra-political expertise). Hence,

given defacto interdependence among a wide range of differing people and

groups, Hobbesian, one size for all sovereignty is unworkable and undesirable,

but so too is pre-political cooperation understood as mutual adjustment in light of

strategies of others, rather than coordinated decision-making.

So what is normatively needed desirable is a form of governance or

decision making, with corresponding powers of coordination, enforcement

authority and surrounding expectations, which builds on existing forms of global

politics, and both makes problems of mutual adjustment explicitly subject to joint

control byaccountable to the diverse, concerned parties, and is capable of

producing outcomes responsive to their various and changing needs. We say

that the form of governance needs to be accountable to concerned parties and

responsive to them because these (abstractly stated) norms express the idea of


inclusion, and seem appropriate to existing global politics, with its mix of

interdependence, coordinated decision-making in the provision of basic public

goods, and expectations of continued such provision. Even if more exacting

demands of egalitarian justice are not called for, the regulative principles

appropriate to existing forms of global politics surely are more demanding than

the (already-demanding and endlessly breached) requirements of

humanitarianism.

We call the form of governance that fully embodies these principles, while

promising the mix of local tailoring and global learning suited to the provision of

the relevant public goods “deliberative polyarchy.”6

4. Deliberative Polyarchy

Deliberative polyarchy is shaped by mutually re-enforcing moral and practical

concerns. Its appeal to the actors ofwithin global politics (and national politics as

well) is precisely to create the prospect of a legitimate—accountable and

responsive, thus more inclusive— form of problem solving under conditions of

diversity so extreme as to seem to preclude either broad effectiveness or general

legitimacy. We first set out the structuring ideals of deliberative polyarchy and

then show how this mode of governance can well survive in a world that often

operates on other principles.

Deliberative polyarchy is, obviously and to begin with, deliberative, and that

means that . Ddecision- making works throughis by the politics of mutual reason-

6 See Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy,” European Law Journal (1997), and [[our EU paper]].


giving. Essentially, the point of deliberation is to subject the exercise of collective

power to reason’s discipline, to what Habermas famously described as “the force of

the better argument,” not the advantage of the better situated.7 : Questions are

decided by argument about best ways to address problems, not simply exertions of

power, or expressions of interest, or bargaining from power positions on the basis of

interests. More particularly, the The aim is to find solutions that others can

reasonably be expected to support as well—or at least to acknowledge the

relevance and importance of the supporting reasons. The point of deliberative

democracy is not to do away with power, whatever that might mean; it is not simply

to subject power to the discipline of talking, because talking is not the same as

reasoning (consider verbal assaults, threats, insults, racial slurs, lies, blowing

smoke, cheering, exchanging pleasantries, exploring common experiences); nor is it

simply to reason together, because reasoning together may have no effect on the

exercise of collective power.

In deliberative polyarchy, deliberation is situated: the . The actors are

presumed to know a good deal about their current dilemmas. But they also know ,

but relatively relatively little about the implications, for themselves or others, of the

solutions possibilities from which they choosingamongst which they are choosing.

Aware of these bounds on their knowledge, they aim to find measures that address

their immediate problems while suggesting next steps and allowing evaluation of

choices so far. Their uncertainty, under which they operate, moreover, and the

consequent need for mutual learning, makes it costly, often prohibitively so, to

game the information they provided; and limits on the strategic use of information

7 See Juergen Habermas [ref].


make it more difficult to pursue self-serving solutions. Because of this prudent

forbearance deliberation’s normative requirement—of finding solutions that others

can reasonably be expected to embrace as well—is easier to meet. The normative

and the practical may be happily congruent.

Though the choices in thise situated deliberation of polyarchy are informed by

the facts as known and addressed to solving specific problems step by step,

deliberative polyarchy is neither a form of technocracy nor a familiar type of

incremental reformism. Technocratic reasoning focuses exclusively on selecting the

best means to achieve well-defined goals. In dDeliberative polyarchy is founded in

part on the idea the actors’ goals are too broadly and diversely defined to allow for

technocratic means-end calculations. Thus situated deliberation acknowledges,

indeed underscores, that all complex practical problems—from trade and security to

organizing schools and transportation, providing clean water and public safety,

allocating health care and ensuring the agedensuring fair compensation—are

political in the sense that they implicate a range of distinct values, that reasonable

people disagree about the precise content of and weights to be assigned to those

values, and that some form of collective decision is needed despite these

disagreements, and that a normatively desirable way to make such collective

decisions is by a process in which participants offer reasons that others can be

expected to acknowledge, even as they disagree about how the variety of relevant

reasons add up.

By incrementalism, we mean reform through adjustment at the margin, and

only there: the idea is that the best you can do is to make the best of the current


situation, taking the background situation itself as unalterable. Though deliberative

polyarchy proceeds step by step, the steps it takes may be cumulatively

transforming—differing choices of means to purse variously interpreted ends leads

to an improved understanding of ends, and reinterpretation of these through

subsequent specification of means, and so on. Proceeding by way of their (variously

interpreted) principled problem solving, the actors can thus transform the constraints

on their actions, and their own views of what constitutes a legitimate constraint.

What makes deliberative pIncrementalism as applied to reform means

adjustment at the margin, and only there: Incrementalism is this sense assumes that

the best you can do is to make the best of the current situation, taking the situation

itself as unalterable. Though deliberative polyarchy proceeds step by step, using

each one suggest the next, the steps it takes are cumulatively transformation—

differing choices of means to purse variously interpreted ends leads to re-

characterizations of ends, and reinterpretation of these through subsequent

specification of means, and so on. Proceeding by way of their (variously interpreted)

principled problem solving, the actors can thus transform the constraints on their

actions, and their own views of what constitutes a legitimate constraint.

Polyarchy polyarchic is its use of

s situated deliberation within and among decision-making units and deliberative

comparisons across those units to enable them to engage in a mutually

disciplined and responsive exploration of their particular variant of common the

problems. It resembles federalism insofar as it authorizes yet limits diversity, and

anarchy insofar as it does away with an ultimately authoritative center; but it is a


novel form of each precisely because of its resemblance to the other. Polyarchy

addresses a dual problem: i) comparable problems, arising in different settings,

need solutions deliberatively appropriately tailored to those settings, and; (ii)

solutions in each setting need to be subjected to the pressure of deliberative

comparison with solutions adopted in the others so that all reflect understanding

of what was done elsewhere, and why.

Put another way, while differences in the location circumstances in which

problems arise suggest a need for differences in solution, the commonality of

problems indicates a need to test and ddiscipline local solutions against those

adopted elsewhere: the aim is not to achieve uniformity, but to pool information,

identify best practices, and compare solutions across locations. Thus the basic

architecture of deliberative polyarchy is to have situated deliberation within and

among local distinct decision-making units.

For the individual decision-making units, diversity implies that decision-

making in each needs to be friendly to local experimentation in the policy area in

question, drawing on local knowledge and values. As each unit is distinct, none

does best by simply copying solutions adopted by others, though they may do well

to treat those solutions as baselines from which to move, or at least as providing

some information about possibilities. Local problem solving is well-suited to bringing

the relevant local knowledge and values to bear in making decisions. Deliberative

participation helps because it encourages the expression of differences in outlook,

and the provision of information more generally.


But the same concern for a form of decision-making that it is attentive to

unexplored possibilities and unintended consequences requires

institutionalization of links among local units—in particular, the institutionalization

of links that require separate deliberative units to consider their own proposals

against benchmarks alternatives provided by other units. A natural place to look

for promising alternatives—including alternatives previously unimagined in the

local setting—is in the experience of units facing analogous problems. So we

need deliberative coordination: deliberation among units of decision-making

directed both to learning jointly from their several experiences, and improving the

institutional possibilities for such learning—a system with continuous discussion

across separate units about current best practice and better ways of ascertaining

it. The idea of deliberative polyarchy is thus to have a mix of flexibility for

adjustment to distinct conditions along with a discipline of comparison/learning

that respects a norm of accountability..

In describing deliberative polyarchy we have proceeded so far as though

situated deliberation was the modal form of political decision-making, and largely

ignored the mix of power and interest that is commonly considered the essence

of politics. Deliberation is about addressing problems through mutual reason-

giving, and people are not always prepared to listen to reason. So here we want

to indicate some important ways in which deliberative polyarchy may well be less

vulnerable to disruption than the widespread idea of politics as power and

interest suggest.


Take first the apparently-attractive flexibility (not uniformity) of polyarchic

solutions. The open-ended standards associated with flexibility may be seen as

invitation to letting powerful decide the rules. An important reason to favor rigid,

uniform rules is to cabin the exercise of power; by sacrificing such rules on the

altar offor flexibility, the deliberative view may be seen as revealing an

intellectually touching touching but practically dangerous naïvete about power.

But however warranted this fear may be in some settings, as a general

proposition it simply reproduces the reflex, Hobbesian assertion that anarchy,

now in the form of an invitation of the more powerful to master the less powerful,

is the sole alternative to uniformity. Yet deliberative polyarchy creates, through

peer review of local exercises of discretion, a means for constraining power

without recurring to rigid rules. Rolling rules, standards as rebuttable

presumptions regarding acceptable solutions—new forms of flexible formalization

[Elaborate].

But safeguarding ongoing deliberation is only one of the tests, and

perhaps not the greatest, that deliberative polyarchy must meet. Deliberation can

fail to get off the ground at all if one party, for example, thinks it can get by its

power a result it could never obtain by reasonable argument. Or deliberation,

once begun, can fail because the parties, having moved far from their initial

divisions, discover a new divide that cannot be bridged, in the relevant time, by

argument. These are of course real possibilities—all too real. A commitment to

deliberation cannot not require commitment to the belief that collective decision-

making through mutual reason-giving is always possible.


It may be necessary to resort to destabilization, threats, and open conflict,

then, as answers to actors who won’t reason in good faith. But saying “if you

don’t listen to reason, you will pay a high price” is not a subtle joke—“I will give

you a reason you can’t refuse”—nor does the resort to power defeat the idea of

deliberation: people may need to be forced to listen to reason. As a

consequence, there may need to be an acceptable balance of power in the

background of deliberative polyarchy, if deliberation is to be a real possibility (a

point we return to). But it is equally true that once people do listen to reason, the

results need not simply reflect the balance of power that led them to be willing to

listen and defeated their previous imperviousness. So paying attention to power

and threats to exercise it doesn’t reduce deliberation to bargaining. To suppose

otherwise is like thinking that if you need to trust your math teacher in order to

learn how to do a proof then there is nothing more to proof than trust.

[[Not sure that this stuff is needed at all.]] To be sure, discussion, even

when it is founded on reasons, may not—and often does not—issue in

unanimous agreement. So even in a deliberative democracy, collective decisions

must often made be made through voting, under some form of majority rule.

Indeed, deliberation may work better when participants do not (as in a jury

setting) feel the pressure to adjust their views for the sake of consensus—as if

attention to reasons ensured convergence of judgment, disagreement revealed

bias or incapacity, and reasonable people cannot disagree on complex practical

issues.


It may be argued, however, that the prospect of majority rule reintroduces

power as a basis of decision: because collective decision-making concludes with

a vote, participants—anticipating that final stage of resolution—will not have any

incentive to deliberate in earlier stages, and instead will strategically seek allies

for their position, and focus on counting heads rather than weighing reasons.

But the decision rule may not drive process in so direct a way. Even if all

parties know that, at the end of the day, heads may be counted, they are unlikely

to be able to predict which decisions will end in head counting. And the

predictability of outcomes aside they may still may accept the importance of

finding considerations that others acknowledge as reasons: they only need

accept that something other than a resolution that advances their antecedent

interests matters to them. They may, for example, believe that reason-giving is

an important expression of respect, or the right way to acknowledge the

collective or public nature of the decision. If they do, they will be willing to

deliberate in the stages leading up to the vote even when they know a vote is

coming. In short, the objection supposes that, once voting is in prospect,

interaction must turn strategic. But this view is no more than plausible than the

obverse claim that moral advantages and possible mutual gains from deliberation

eliminate all strategic maneuvering.]]

In arguing that global politics in the form of deliberative polyarchy may be

resilient in the face of disparities of power, however, we may be ignoring a much

greater issue about power that defeats the entire idea of a functionally-

differentiatedspecific, deliberative-polyarchic, global-political architecture,


cooperation, with no a superintending state in the background: military

aggression by actors indifferent to an international order of any kind, or, more

generally, the problems of security that are commonly said to dominate global

politics and determine their traditional, statist shape. After all, the standard

argument against the binding power of moral or legal constraints in international

relations, and for the view of world politics as an anarchical war of all against all

—aan anarchical, self-help system dominated by concerns about security—is

precisely the threat of military force. Facing this threat, or fearing they will,

nations must defend themselves by accumulating power. But with no clear

standard of when power is sufficient, and no bright line between defensive and

offensive forces, secure defenses themselves can look like a project of

aggression; so universal prudence—a product either of the nature of states or of

the competitive pressures they are subjected to—keeps the international order

on the brink of conflict, and undermines normative constraints on state action.

Moreover, because resources can translate into power, there is always suspicion

about cooperation because of concerns about the distribution of the gains from

cooperation.

Worse yet, as each state prepares to defend itself, it concentrates power

internally, creating, where one did not already exist, a centralized, unitary

sovereign to act with the necessary decisiveness in the battles to come (war

makes the state as much as the state makes war). On this view, absent a global

state with the power to enforce its will against all possible challengers, the

international order will remain an anarchy, and the anarchy will create actors who


will resist (with reason) normative constraint and cooperation abroad and

regularly reassert a more consolidated form of sovereignty at home.

But this structural realist account is misleading, in two ways. First, it

misstates seems mistaken about the substance of currently the dominant present

ssecurity issues. There is much warfare, and horrific killing by regular and

irregular forces. But the protagonists of military action today are much more likely

to be non-state actors—armed ethnic groups, often operating across national

border; transnational leagues of religious fundamentalists—than nation states.

And it is a bad strategic error to assimilate this dispersed, networked enemy to

the familiar image of the enemy Leviathan. More fundamentally, even if non-state

enemies could be ultimately shown to be under the controlling influence of one or

more states, the decentralization of their financing, logistics, strategizing and

tactical operations mean that effective defense against them requires not

centralization, but networked decentralization on the lines of deliberative

polyarchy: the way to detect and defeat the plots of a dispersed enemy is to

constantly pool and evaluate, within and across nations the efforts of many,

independent efforts to identify and neutralize threats. (see Richman, Jeff Cooper

on CIA). This time, at least, the response to the security threat is very arguably to

re-enforce the drift towards novel forms of deliberate decentralization of the

polyarchic type.

More broadly, we are skeptical—for familiar reasons—about the structural

realist’s account of the iron logic of global politics in a world with states. That

account does not survive the relatively-robust finding that regime type does


matter (the democratic peace theory) or the observation that rational conduct

depends on beliefs that agents have about one another or the general fact that

equilibria are generically multiple. Together, these considerations undercut the

case for the conclusion that there is a single form of global politics, dominated by

security issues that swamp all norms and possibilities for mutually beneficial,

functionally specific cooperation. Security matters, but it need not produce the

preoccupation with power, absence of normative constraint, anxiety about the

distribution of the benefits of cooperation, or internal consolidation associated

with the realist argument.

Suppose, then, we accept provisionally both that eliminating power

disparities is not a precondition to deliberation and that security concerns will not

turn swamp global politics into another occasion for the expression of national

power and interests, and that elimination of power disparities is not a

precondition to deliberation. Still, Nonetheless the reduction of these imbalances

of power surely favors deliberative polyarchy, if only by reducing the occasions

for recourse to open threats of the sort, deliberate or else, and the risk of

violence attached to them. Hence the deliberative- polyarchic project for global

politics y must be attentive attends to the background balance of power, within

which deliberation is set. Actual arrangements must provide some basis for

confidence that joint reasoning will actually prevail in shaping the exercise of

collective power. So discussion that expresses the deliberative ideal must, for

example, operate against a background of free expression and association, thus

providing minimal conditions for the availability of relevant information. Equally, if


parties are not somehow constrained to accept the consequences of deliberation,

if “exit options” are not foreclosed, it seems implausible that they will accept the

discipline of joint reasoning, and in particular to reasoning informed by the

democratic idea of persons as equals.

54. Deliberative Polyarchy and Human Rights

This discussion of deliberative polyarchy as an basic architecture of

accountability in global politics connects to the issue of human rights—the

second issue of global justice that we mentioned earlier—and suggests a

distinctive understanding suggests an understanding of human rights as basic

open-ended conditions of membership or inclusion in a social-political

arrangement, where the substance of membership and the entitlements which

must be protected if people are to have their membership interests taken into

account develop reciprocally and iteratively: claims of right reshape membership

and development of membership founds further articulation of rights, and so on.

Thus, just as for Dewey the public becomes conscious of itself in devising

legitimate joint action in response to problems arising from unforeseen

interdependence, so in global politics rights to membership reflect, and shape,

the members awareness of their joint participation in deliberatively polyarchic

arrangement. Human rights from this perspective are thus neither the natural

rights that individuals are sometimes said to have in a pre-institutional or pre-

political state of nature; nor are they equivalent to the full set of rights associated

with justice in a societythe right of political participation that has been called “right


of rights” of citizens in an already well constituted democracy.8 [this graph needs

more work]

The core or baseline of these membership rights are simply those rights

that individuals have as constitutive rights in deliberative polyarchy. Thus in

establishing its own membership requirements (associated with its conditions of

reasoning, information pooling, comparison, and so on) deliberative polyarchy

defines rights that are often coextensive with human rights understood as

membership conditions in distinct political societies. These human rights of

deliberative polyarchy include the rights of association and expression (as well as

rights against torture, arbitrary imprisonment, etc.); they are both substantive

(e.g., the right to bodily security) and procedural ( rights of expression and

association). All are abstractly described and differently applicable to different

conditions, and none is specified in detail as in a rule book.

Further specification of these rights is itself a responsibility of deliberative

polyarchy, which requires situated deliberation within and among decision

making units to devise a more determinate scheme of rights that is both sensitive

to the constitutive requirements of deliberative polyarchy and that elaborates the

abstract rights in ways that are suited to circumstances. So there is no fixed

content of human rights (any more than there is fixed content of basic

constitutional rights in contemporary democracies, which embrace, for example,

8 For further discussion, see See Joshua Cohen, "Minimalism About Human Rights: The Most We Can Hope For?," Journal of Political Philosophy 12:2 (2004): 190-213; and “A Human Right to Democracy?”, in Christine Sypnowich, ed., The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).


very different understandings of the scope and limits of views of freedom free of

expression).

The open character of membership rights invites a first, institutional

objection to their practicality. In highly developed legal systems the elaboration of

rights is chiefly the province of courts; and judicial elaboration produces detailed

rules, with the advantage of enforceability by traditional means, and the

disadvantage—especially burdensome in the deeply diverse circumstances of

global politics—of one-size-fits all solutions. (Are international lawyers really the

best defenders of local interests and judgments? Doesn’t insistence on uniform

content disempower local efforts to give them content) The alternative to detailed

rules is said to be hortatory standards, too broad to be enforced and so not really

rights at all.

But just as deliberative polyarchy builds on the experience that there are

ways of learning from and , disciplining and flexibly formalizing the most

promising results of diverse local experience with regulation, so it builds on the

same capacities to articulate rights in way that avoids the rigidity of false

precision without evaporating into generalities. As in the case of destabilization,

cCourts or tribunals can play a role in moving other actors to organize the

necessary deliberation, and monitoring their results. [example from debates in

labor law? In any case elaborate]

But even if we think that local deliberation, subject to disciplines of

deliberative polyarchy, suffices for defending ands further articulating the content

of rights, there remains a second concern that rights themselves may not be


suited to some contexts of global politics. The worry here is that the reasons

rights express are particular to liberal political cultures, and thus that human

rights, including human rights as understood in deliberative polyarchy, is an

intolerant imposition. This concern is misguided. Rights may of course express

the liberal ideas of individuals as autonomous choosers and the obligation to

protect the autonomy of their choices. But that is not all they express. Other, very

different ideas of personhood and its correlative obligations and immunities may

also be interpreted as empower individuals to contest authority in defense of their

dignity; and the idea of rights, understood as the entitlements of membership,

can express these variants of individual empowerment as well.

Thus in Confucian views, for one example, identity is relational,

responsibilities are defined by roles, and the good person is one who discharges

all the obligations associated with the relations defined by her position in life. The

good official in this system is one who uses authority to enable others to meet

their obligations; the objectionable official is one who affronts the dignity of all by

using authority selfishly, so endangering the fragile balance of duty and

obligation. In Islamic cultures, for another, individuals are God’s vicegerents,

obligated to enact the complex rules of divine law, and charged with executive

responsibility for ensuring that others do so as well. But interpretation of the

divine law or its application, even authoritative interpretation, is always in

principle fallible and so contestable. Otherwise the interpreting authority could be

thought to be blasphemously confusing a believer’s idea with the divine word.

What is essential is that different views endorse the idea of treating individuals as


worthy members of a grouping with ultimately contestable mutual obligations,

and provide them the legitimacy to claim the protections required for such

treatment.

6.5. Democracy?

But what about democracy? Does the extension of deliberative polyarchy to

global politics amount to a form of democracy beyond the state? It is easy to feel

the pull of two different answers: that democracy has no application outside a

world of law and central authority, and the legitimacy of global rule-making must

be democratic. Resisting both pulls, we think The that the answer is

indeterminate in two ways: because of , both because of conceptual

indeterminacies associated with idea of democracy, and because of and because

of real uncertainties surrounding the possible evolution of global politics, even if it

takes a deliberative polyarchic form.deliberative polyarchy.

Lets start on the conceptual side. Our On the conceptual side: our

understanding of democracy has a range of elements, some of which are shared

by deliberative polyarchy and some of which are not, and it is not clear . Not clear

how to assess the balance.

Thus, deliberative polyarchy shares some features with and is is iin some

obvious ways different from the democratic practice with which we are familiar: (i)

conventional democratic practice operates in the setting of state with a legal

system, and serves to authorize the state’s law and policy making. Democracy,

as conventionally understood and practiced, is about how authorizing the state to


exercise its will powerexercise its authority. But deliberative polyarchy is not a

form of rule-making that does not operates in the shadow of a single state.

Moreover, (ii) democracy institutionalizes a kind of equality. Thus universal

political rights, political competition, and the connection between electoral victory

and control of government can be seen as providing a link between the interests

and opinions of equal citizens and the exercise of power. Deliberative polyarchy

does not have such organized linkages between equal persons and outcomes.

And furthermore, (iii) the existence of a central authority establishes a

public, institutional focus for the formation of a common identity as a people and

for debate—both informal and formal—that shapes public opinion about the

proper exercise of political power, which opinion is connected (more or less

loosely) to political power through formal politics. In conventional democracy, in

short, we have a demos—arguably formed by democracy itself, rather than given

by history and culture—whose “rule” gives democracy its name. But it is an open

question whether deliberative polyarchy is associated with a demos. It obviously

does not presume an antecedent demos, but neither does conventional

democracy. Can we expect it to form a demos through its own operations? We

return to this later.

The case that it deliberative polyarchy is a form of democracy turns on

three features, associated with democratic values of accountability, participation,

and persuasion, all of which depend on the deliberativeness of deliberative

polyarchy. Because deliberation is a kind of persuasion, we will focus here on

issues of accountability and participation.


First, thenas we emphasized earlier, the architecture of deliberative

polyarchy establishes forms of responsiveness and accountability, through its

requirements of local deliberative problem solving and comparisons with practice

in other settings: part of the case for deliberative polyarchy is that it responds to

norms of accountability and responsiveness that are, on the constructivist

argument, suited to the context of global politics, and help to ensure inclusion.

Each of these is locally accountable and responsive, and the linked system of

deliberation makes each local body accountable and responsive to interests and

judgments elsewhere. The accountability is not electoral, but it does connect

problem solving to both local interests and opinions and those held elsewhere—

in the limit, to global interests and opinions. Deliberative polyarchy is, in short, a

way to systematically pool a wide range of ideas and experiences: it thus

creates, in effect, a dispersed public political-policy discussion across different

locations, and it disciplines solutions in each location by reference to that broader

discussion—so influence extends across locations not through a uniform solution

established by a regulatory center, after inputs from different locations, but by

establishing standards elsewhere that others need to consider, and with full

expectation that there will be such mutual consideration.

Consider the emerging regulatory arrangements of the international trade

system housed in the World Trade Organization (WTO), which closely

approximates some elements of the system of EU governance, although it is of

course less well developed. Architecturally the similarity is this: Both the EU and

the WTO anticipate that the freedom of (regional or international) trade they seek


to foment will frequently conflict with, and need to be modified to accommodate a

wide range of normative concerns embodied in the domestic laws and

regulations of member states trading in the relevant markets. Both, furthermore,

permit members states to make domestic rules that inhibit trade on condition that

the inhibiting rules adequately reflect the relevant regional or international

standards. Thus the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

(SPS)—which applies to agricultural, health and safety regulation—and the WTO

Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement—which has been interpreted to

apply to a broad range of domestic regulation not covered by the SPS—require

that the trade-inhibiting rules, animated for example by a concern to protect

public health or ensure product safety, have a “basis” in international standards.

To show that a basis exists, in the relevant, sense, states must either use those

standards or show through an acceptable rule-making process that the domestic

rules are a reasonable departure from those standards, motivated, for example,

by an assessment of health risks.9 Put another way, membership in the WTO is

not equivalent to an agreement to substitute the particular, national rules with the

general laws of efficient commerce. Rather, member states agree to remake their

rules, in domain after domain, in light of the efforts of all the others to reconcile

their distinctive regulations with general standards in whose determination they

participate and that are assumed to be attentive to the interests of others

elsewhere.

9 The TBT (along with SPS) “represents as big a paradigm shift to international economic law as, say, the prohibition on the use of force and the introduction o the Security Council with binding resolution and police powers represented within the classical world of international law.” These agreements produce “an internationally determined normativity.” Henrik Horn and Joseph H. H. Weiler, European Communities—Trade Description of Sardines: Textualism and its Discontent” [[ref]], 2005. p. 250. See also, Howse, “New Device,” and Joanne Scott [[reference]].


But this architectural similarity masks an important difference between the

EU and WTO regulatory regimes that bears on the likelihood of the latter to

produce a democratizing effect. The processes, fora, networked agencies and

other institutions that set standards in the EU routinely revise those them through

peer review informed by the experience of implementation. Civil society actors as

well as governments can increasingly rely on a body of EU administrative law to

protect certain rights to participate in, or at least be informed of, these

deliberations; and it is, again, these features of EU administrative governance

that produce a democratizing effect.

The practice of the international standard setting bodies that produce the

rules in which trade-relevant domestic regulation of WTO members is more

various. In some cases the arrangements are the same because the same

standard setting bodies are active at both the regional and global level. Thus

within the SPS-WTO framework the Codex Alimentarius Commission has global

responsibility for setting standards for commodities, codes of practice and

maximum limits for additives, contaminants, pesticides, residues and veterinary

drugs. Both the EU and its individual member states are parties to the Codex, as

well as the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) (which itself cooperates

closely with the Codex); and from the standpoint of the leading national food

safety administrations, such as the Dutch, the EFSA and the Codex form part of

the same regulatory network.

Other domains, such as forestry, lack officially recognized standard-setting

bodies. NGO and industry sponsored codes of good practice tend of compete in


such areas; and even though the evidence suggests that such competition

encourages higher standards, a self-interested group could in theory established

a code of its own liking and offer this as a “basis” for domestic rule-making to

complicit governments. The magnitude of the democratizing effect depends on

the balance between international standard setting bodies that are accountable

and not to peer review, and the pressures to move towards or away from such

accountability. Research on such questions is likely to become a focal concern of

the study of global regulation, where the debate about deregulation and re-

regulation in the EU setting is now starting to be replayed in discussion about the

WTO.

Second, on the issue of participation: assume that arrangements of

deliberative polyarchy form in distinct areas of concern. In the case of labor

standards, for example, imagine a coordinated system of monitoring that would

certify monitors to conduct audits of firms (also subject to independent audit), and

also require that monitors report back their findings to the “super-monitor”

constituted by international organizations such as the World Bank and

International Labor Organization, together with international NGOs and

international trade union confederations. This umpire organization would monitor

the monitors, conduct inspections to verify their integrity, assure the

comparability of monitoring data and methods, and make results publicly

accessible. Firms that depend on consumer loyalty would be eager earn high

grades. They would pressure less visible suppliers, and suppliers of suppliers, to

follow suit. Activists, consumer groups, analysts, and journalists would use


information to define acceptable behavior, press for improvements, and push the

monitors to improve their methods and their standards. And the same will be true

in other areas as well. Assuming a norm of transparency, as well as protections

of rights to associate and speak—all very substantial assumptions, of course—

deliberative polyarchies, once constructed, will become the focus of debate and

pressure from organizations that already exist to influence policy in these areas,

as well as new organizations that see new opportunities for influence. That is, as

arrangements of deliberative polyarchy crystallize, they become the focus of

political activity.

There is of course a very large question—analogous to questions about

conventional democracies, with substantial inequalities of resources—about the

extent to which opportunities for influence on such arrangements will be equal,

even if we assume transparency, and protections of expressive and associative

liberties. But part of the story is participation by non-state organizations that bring

some competence to the discussion of specific problems. Of course participation

by groups with special competences naturally prompts concerns about the

representativeness of those organizations, and therefore about the

democraticness of the decisions they reach. How can the outcomes plausibly be

represented as the result of a process in which people participate as equals?

The force of this concern may be fueled by a conception of participating

organizations as representing the interests of a group. But a deliberative

polyarchy may change the way that groups organize and understand their role in


local problem-solving bodies that are parts of a deliberative network. Because

problem-solving is deliberative, groups organize not simply to defend the

interests of members, but because of distinctive views about how best to solve

problems, views that themselves emerge from local discussion. Assuming, once

more conditions of transparency and openness to pressures under conditions of

expressive and associative liberties, democraticness may be fostered by

ensuring that deliberation takes appropriate considerations into account.

Putting these points together, we think that there is no easy [[Something

here on persuasion as basic to design]]

No easy way to say whether the facts of accountability/responsiveness,

participation, and persuasion make the scheme democratic, and outweigh the

dimensions on which deliberative polyarchy evidently does not conform to

democratic principles.

But the democraticness of deliberative polyarchy is not simply

conceptually open, but also—more fundamentally—really open as well, and

maybe reality will help to resolve our conceptual troubles. Thus consider again

the idea of democracy as a rule by a people. However we understand the notion

of a people—whether as a body of citizens who are authors of and subject to a

set of common laws and institutions, or a body that shares a common societal or

political culture—democratic arrangements institutions are not simply a way for a

people to express its judgments: those institutions also help to form the identity of

a people and the opinion that is, at least in our idealizations of democratic


politics, expressed through elections and then legislation. The people who rule

need not, in short, preexist the institutions through which they rule.

The history of the nation-state is famously the history of the interaction or

co-evolution of the nation—the demos—and the state in each sovereign country.

Early state institutions channeled nationalism, and coursing nationalism

redirected the institutional embankments through which it ran. Persistent

differences in national systems of political representation (consociational or neo-

corporatist as against pluralist or majoritarian) and of provision of social welfare

(the Bismarkian welfare state linking benefits to occupation history contrasted

with the Nordic Folkehjem providing universal benefits to all citizens) remind us

that the nation state could and did become very different things because of the

particularities of these interactions.

Could there, then, be a comparable formation of a global public fostered

by as a consequence of persisting global politics—with a relatively autonomous

administrative space, associated forms of mobilization and political discourse—

organized as deliberative polyarchy? It depends.

Suppose there emerges, in extension of current forms of global rule-

making, a form of global governance that makes rules and vindicates rights—a

form of governance understood to have significant impact on the fate of

individuals—but that this emergence occurs without recourse to the hierarchical

apparatus of the classic nation-state. Instead it occurs through the mutual

accountability of deliberative polyarchy, and an associated global public sphere

that includes persons and peoples the world round in decisions that mattered to


them without making them citizens of a cosmopolitan state? Suppose in

particular a deepening of global administration in a wide range of areas of human

concern, including security, health, education, environment, and conditions of

work and compensation. Suppose, too, that such global rule-making is

increasingly accountable: preceded by hearings, shaped by participation of

affected parties, subject to review, defended by reference to what are commonly

cognized as reasons, while also attentive to the differences of local

circumstance. And suppose that accountable administration has a substantial,

constructive impact of human well-being, and that its rule-making activities

reduce the current global dispersion in living standards—in mortality, morbidity,

income, education, housing, access to clean air and water, transportation,

communication—by leveling up, not down, or, less ambitiously, that these

activities help to reduce the current levels of human destitution. Suppose, finally,

that that impact is widely perceived, and that that perception leads to support for

the continued operation of those arrangements—more participation and greater

willingness to comply.Suppose that deliberative polyarchy spreads to a wide

range of areas of human concern, including security, health, education,

environment, and conditions of work and compensation. Suppose, too, that

deliberative polyarchic arrangements have a substantial, constructive impact of

human well-being, and that they reduce the current global dispersion in living

standards—in mortality, morbidity, income, education, housing, access to clean

air and water, transportation, communication—by leveling up, not down.

Suppose, in addition, that that impact is widely perceived, and that that


perception leads to support for the continued operation of those arrangements—

more participation and greater willingness to comply.

Couldn’t this all be true? Isn’t this a possible evolution of global

politics, even without a global state?

And if it were true, isn’t it plausible that dispersed peoples might come to

share an identity as common members of an organized global people, and not

only in the humanitarian sense that all are human beings on the same planet, nor

only in that we are all interdependent. More than that, our fates—despite our

cultural and linguistic differences—would be deeply and self-consciously shaped

by accountable rule-making that depends both on local debate and on global

comparisons. We would not belong to a single central state, with uniform rules

and rights for all, and global politics would not be defined around a competitive

process for control of that center. But accountable processes of global

administration would play a large role in shaping our lives. And if such common

identity were to emerge—though not as offspring of a conventional political

authority and an organized contest for control of it—then we would have a global

demos: an unusual demos, to be sure, an imagined community requiring newly

capacious acts of imagination, but with sufficiently many of the indicia of a people

to make sense of talk of a global democracy without a global state.To the extent

that this is true, dispersed peoples might come to share an identity as common

members of an organized global people, and not only in the traditional

humanitarian sense that we are all human beings on the same planet, nor only in

that we are all mutually interdependent. More than that, our fates would be


deeply and self-consciously shaped by arrangements of collective decision

making that depend both on local debate and on accountable global

comparisons. We would not belong to a single central state, with common rules

for all, and a competitive process for control of that center. But the linked

processes of deliberation would play a large role in shaping our lives. And if such

common identity were to emerge—though not because of a single political

authority and a contest for control of it—then we would have the demos of a

global democracy.

Maybe.

So whether deliberative polyarchy is a form of democracy beyond the

state but suited to the world of global politics depends. And it what is depends

depends on is not simply on our analytical judgments decisions about how best

to extend our current political concepts to new and unanticipated new cases, but

on the deeply uncertain evolution of global politics itself.

some title - columbia university and a... · web viewbut saying “if you don’t listen to reason,...

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