Linking Fates Together: Democratic Imaginaries and Global Public Space

Melissa S. Williams

University of Toronto

The rise of a more global world has stimulated new democratic imaginaries: different ideas of what democracy could be. However, these new conceptions of politics are as yet underdeveloped. In particular, disagreement reigns about the location of the governance structures that should be rendered more democratic as well as the modality of political action that should be adopted to enhance global democracy. It is argue here that new democratic practice for a more global era would be best furthered with a combination of modalities applied simultaneously across several scales of activity.

Contemporary globalization has given rise to new democratic imaginaries. In contrast to older conceptions of citizenship that informed nation-building throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the new formations do not assume a territorially bounded political community. These deterritorialized imaginaries have generated new languages of, for example, ‘global’, ‘transnational’ and ‘diasporic’ citizenship. Such ideas express new understandings of shared fate that can orient political engagement and generate demands for democratic accountability. However, it remains unclear what kinds of political agency would enable these altered forms of political community to generate democratic legitimacy.

One axis of disagreement about how to give substance to global democracy relates to the location of the governance structures that should be rendered more accountable and responsive. For example, should strivings for global democracy concentrate on global governing institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank? Or should political energies in these times of globalization remain focused on strengthening democratic processes and rights protection at the level of the national, territorially bounded state? Or should politics look to the subnational and local level for the realization of rights and democratic accountability in global affairs? How does democracy-building at one of these sites (global, national and local) relate to democracy-building on the other scales of governance? Are these complementary or conflicting processes?

A second axis of disagreement concerns the modality of political action that will yield the greatest enhancements of global democracy. For example, some activists pursue oppositional politics that seek to reveal and resist unjust concentrations of power in existing governance arrangements. Others believe in the possibilities of reform and concentrate on maximizing the democratic potential of established institutions. A third category of activists judge that existing institutions are irredeemably corrupt, being grounded in a self-interested individualism that is endemic to both capitalism and the liberal state. These transformational forces seek to enact a prefigurative politics that realizes new forms – or revitalizes traditional forms – of democratic community. As with the issue of locations, questions arise whether these different modalities of political engagement are fundamentally at odds or whether they can be complementary.

The argument advanced here is that political agency in the current age of globalization can best promote democratic legitimacy by working across scales and using a combination of modalities. In this approach to global democracy the state remains key, and activists would be ill-advised to abandon the national state as a focus of efforts to enhance democratic accountability. At the same time there is no reason to insist that the national level should be the exclusive site of democratic activism. Indeed, the dynamics that produce democratic change at the national level are frequently intertwined with activism on global and local scales. Likewise, there is no contradiction in principle between pursuing democracy in different modes, and indeed democratization needs a pluralistic approach that combines resistance, reform and transformation. Critical scholarship can help to reveal in more detail the interactive relationships between the various sites and forms of political engagement, thereby helping activists to make strategic choices as to where their energies to promote global democracy might be best invested.

Download / Print a PDF version  |   Send us feedback on the above

<Back                   Next>