In writing on “The Democratic Character of Judicial Review” Eugene Rostow commented that democracy “is a slippery term,” and it is doubtless wise to avoid a firm definition. The existence of a free, democratic system of government creates, in the words of Ivor Jennings, “an atmosphere of freedom which is more easily felt than analyzed,” and it is possible to speak of parliamentary institutions, of second chambers, of free elections, of fair elections, of judicial review (in one form or another), of the protection of human rights, of transparency, and of freedom of information as the attributes of democracy which would command attention. At the same time, the emphasis on any of these attributes could vary significantly, and there can be major differences of view as to the precise machinery necessary to achieve them. Amid the many constitutional changes undertaken or mooted in the United Kingdom since 1997, there is ample evidence of the foot dragging that occurs when the ground seems much more shaky than originally contemplated; it would be misleading to ignore such evidence in the context of trends towards globalization.

Despite various positive achievements, ranging from incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights to varying schemes of devolution under legislation of 1998, there has been disappointment in several areas. Initial plans for greater open government were welcomed, but later legislative proposals were more restrictive; implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 2000 has, even so, been delayed. At the outset of negotiations concerning the FOIA, there was a gesture towards globalization in the acknowledgment that the United Kingdom could learn from the experience of “mature fellow democracies” such as Sweden, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, and the FOIA of 2000 still reflected considerable overseas influence. Changes in the voting system for the Westminister Parliament were confidently expected after a measure of proportional representation was introduced for the devolved assemblies in Edinburgh, Belfast, and Cardiff, the introduction of proportional representation in elections to the European Parliament, and publication, in 1998, of the Report of the Independent Commission on the Voting System. The Commission had been charged with recommending for Westminister the best alternative “system or combination of systems” to the existing “First Past the Post” (FPTP) system of election, with the expectation that the matter would be put to the British electorate in a referendum. One of the criteria emphasized by the Commission was that of fairness to voters, and the electoral systems of other countries—including the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Israel, Italy, France, New Zealand, Australia, India—were described. It was accepted that the United Kingdom shares FPTP with Canada and the United States, but no referendum has yet been held or planned on whether we should retain that system. The Commission did make this comment:

The United States is of course the most powerful democracy in the world, with an impressive record of world leadership for nearly the past sixty years. On the other hand it is a presidential and not a parliamentary system in the British sense (which may be good or bad but weakens the comparison), its level of participation in elections, at barely 50% for Presidential elections and only 37% in the last mid-term Congressional elections, is appallingly low, and some would say that its system of government has not recently been a great advertisement for democratic maturity.

What, then, of the second chamber of Parliament at Westminster—the unelected House of Lords? After the House of Lords Act 1999, which severely curtailed the hereditary element, there was a Report of the Royal Commission in 2000 that produced 132 recommendations and led to expectations of widespread reform of the second chamber. Delay followed, and it was only in November 2001 that a White Paper appeared, opening with the Prime Minister’s words that a “credible and effective second chamber is vital to the health of Britain’s democracy.” This fresh contribution by the Government spoke of removing the hereditary element completely, of reemphasizing the constitutional preeminence of the House of Commons, of retaining a legislative, deliberative, and scrutinizing role for the House of Lords, of modestly extending the powers of the second chamber in secondary legislation, and of organizing its composition to allow for a majority of nominated members and a minority elected element. Conscious once again of comparative guides, the Government stressed that directly elected second chambers are not common elsewhere: the “idea that the directly elected US Senate is the norm against which others should be judged is wrong. It is a component of the interlocking federal arrangements within the USA.” Even so, the proposals on composition were not widely welcomed and there was widespread support for a larger elected membership. New legislation is unlikely for some time yet.

As the courts of law face the challenges of globalization, much remains to be done in improving democratic institutions and democratic accountability. The justice system is itself under scrutiny, and once again external models are important. In March 2001, for instance, there appeared a Report on Tribunals that examined a host of administrative tribunals or agencies other than ordinary courts of law, with the emphasis on efficiency, fairness, coherence, public understanding, and compatibility with the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights as to independence and impartiality. The jurisdiction of the seventy or so categories of tribunal discussed extended to such areas as taxation, social security, mental health, immigration, employment, school admissions, criminal injuries compensation, and pensions. Globalization is reflected in the work of the Immigration Appellate Authorities, which hear appeals from refusal of asylum or of permanent residence in the United Kingdom, and it is also reflected in parts of the Report concerned with Information Technology, devolution within the United Kingdom, and the system of administrative justice created at federal level in Australia through innovative and important statutes of the 1970s. The work of the Council on Tribunals, which currently supervises over eighty tribunals and other agencies, including the Civil Aviation Authority, the Director-General of Fair Trading, the National Lottery Commission, and the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority, was also considered and endorsed. In its latest Annual Report, the Council spoke of the importance of overseas contacts, not least “to gain insight into how different legal and administrative systems tackle the problems with which we are concerned,” and referred to the visit of a Russian delegation and to a major conference on administrative justice, hosted in Quebec by the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals.

Also issued in 2001 was the Review of the Criminal Courts of England and Wales, conducted by Lord Justice Auld. Full account was taken of experience in Europe generally and in North America, and public responses and perceptions were—as in the Leggatt Report—carefully examined. Historical misconceptions about jury trial were also exposed: there is no “right” to jury trial, neither under Magna Carta, nor as a “constitutional entitlement” as in the United States and Canada, nor as a result of incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Lord Justice Auld rejected any democratic element in jury service, and he saw no justification for moving to the U.S. system of jury challenges. As for “perverse verdicts,” when juries allegedly disapprove of the law or of particular prosecutions in apparent “dispensing” verdicts of “not guilty,” they are seen as a “blatant affront to the legal process” and to efforts to combat crime. Much of the general discussion on these and other matters, in a lengthy and detailed Report, could cross frontiers and add to the impact of globalization. Both the Leggatt and the Auld Reports remind us of the volatility of legal systems as they adapt to new and shared challenges and problems.

I identify two partly interrelated domains for exploring this topic. One domain is the ways in which the state actually participates in governing the global economy, notwithstanding expanded deregulation and privatization, and notwithstanding the growing authority of non-state actors. The question becomes one of detecting the specific type of authority/power this participation might entail for the state vis-à-vis global actors and processes. Further, if the state indeed has such authority, or could in principle have it, the question is whether that authority can be a bridge to a politics of the global for citizens—who are, after all, still largely confined to the national domain for the full exercise of their powers.

If national state participation in setting up the legal and institutional infrastructure for globalization does indeed contain a set of channels for citizens to demand participation in global politics, including the right to demand accountability from global actors, then the formal and informal capabilities of citizens to do so, as well as their disposition to do so, become crucial. This is the subject of the second domain. The organizing question is: to what extent citizenship, even though highly formalized, might actually be less finished as an institution than its formal representation indicates. What happens when we begin to think of this highly developed institution as something akin to an “incompletely theorized” form? Can recognition of these features help us detect the extent to which the institution might change (i.e. go partly and in very specific ways beyond its national confinements)? I am particularly interested here in the possibility that citizenship might find institutional groundings inside the nation-state that would allow citizens to participate in global politics. My concern is then not so much in the de-territorializing of the institution which lies at the heart of post-national conceptions of citizenship, including prominently the human rights regime, as it is in the denationalizing of specific features of citizenship arising out of the changes in state institutions themselves. These changes are briefly described in the first section.

It will clearly be impossible to do full justice to each of these subjects. The purpose is rather a mapping of the broader structures evident today that might be useful in situating the question of global democratic governance within a more complex and diverse set of institutional domains than is usually allowed. I should add that though the treatment of the subject is partial and brief in this lecture, it is based on a large multiyear project and hence rests on considerable evidence and research.

With the explosive growth of NGOs of all scales and varieties that has occurred since 1945, we are witnessing a massive transformation in the nature of global governance. Such growth has been fueled by the connected development of the U.N. system, and, more particularly, by the increasing global circulation and legitimization of discourse and politics of “human rights.” Resolutions adopted by the U.N. Security Council and various international agencies and meetings show that new forms of sovereignty have come into place alongside older, territorialized forms. These new forms legitimize the right of interference and intervention, identifying a deterritorialized sovereignty that migrates around the globe to sites of “crisis” and humanitarian disaster.

At a time when international humanitarian processes are proliferating in militarized contexts the world over, it is imperative that we take time to reflect on the theoretical foundations, as well as the practical consequences, of such interventions. This is a perilous but necessary exercise, forcing us to consider the complex relationship between humanitarian organizations, international institutions, and specific segments of local élites. This paper addresses the ways in which the humanitarian-military apparatus constructs the logic behind its interventions, how interventions are carried out, and how they impact the local scene. It aims to identify the means by which institutional categories and interventions are transferred into this local political sphere and canonized as models of governance.

My work is specifically concerned with the post-war and post-communist Balkan territories and the assemblages that crisscross those territories. From 1991 until the crucial months of the war, the international presence in Albania and Kosovo was active at various institutional levels. The true agents of military-economic-humanitarian action were the various international organizations, agencies, foundations, and NGOs, whose operations were shaped by a temporality of emergency. These agents espouse the legitimacy of the right of interference, the rhetoric of institution building, and a Western, neo-liberal, forced democratization of the southeastern European frontier. The power they wield is real, and is superimposed onto bureaucratic procedures and lengthy intergovernmental negotiations.

The title of this paper—Contract of Mutual (In)Difference—seeks to draw attention to a central feature of our age that has gained prominence over the past ten years: the coexistence, within the same territorial perimeter, of two opposed modes of sovereignty. One of these is tied to a territorial configuration such as the nation-state, religion, or ethnicity. The other, which has resulted from the proliferation of non-territorialized forms of power and governance, such as the complex military-humanitarian apparatus, is deployed, legitimized, and imposed according to a planetary logic in “crisis” situations by an international “humanitarian” rule of law.

This discussion draws on fieldwork conducted in Albania and Kosovo since 1997, which has allowed me to travel behind the lines, so to speak, of the humanitarian apparatus. My argument is that military forces and multi- and bilateral organizations are transforming into a new form of transnational domination.

I will begin by describing the convergence between military and humanitarian forms of intervention, and the role of NGOs as operators of a new military-humanitarian form of governance. I will show that the forms of governance that are expressed through NGOs can be understood as a new form of sovereignty, at the intersection of biopolitics and “bare life,” which is apparent in the way that international intervention manages bodies according to humanitarian categories. Finally, I will discuss how, in the aftermath of the humanitarian war in Kosovo, this new sovereignty has left behind a residue of humanitarian forms of governance, even as it moves to new sites of intervention.

Conflicts in Africa have typically been rooted in struggles for political power, ethnic privilege, national prestige, and scarce resources. Currently, the vast majority of disputes are domestic in origin. Often, even interstate conflicts are reflections of domestic politics. Governments going through difficult times commonly intervene in conflicts in neighboring states as a means of deflecting public anger away from themselves. As a result of the numerous conflicts raging in Africa, it remains host to the largest population of refugees and displaced persons of any continent. Too many Africans are trapped in conditions of grinding poverty, face daily violence and abuse, suffer under corrupt and oppressive regimes, and are condemned to live their lives in squatter settlements or rural slums with inadequate sanitation, schooling, and health facilities. All of these factors contribute to conflict, poverty, instability, and misery. Underlying the prevalence of conflict in Africa is a crisis of governance and poverty leading to a scramble for resources. Good governance would make a major contribution to the reduction of conflict and poverty. It would do this by creating an environment conducive to sustainable development, thereby reducing poverty—the root cause of many African conflicts. Development seeks to expand choices for all people—women, men, and children of both current and future generations. Development would promote the economic, social, civil, and political realization of human rights through the elimination of poverty and the promotion of human dignity and rights, and by providing equitable opportunities for all through good governance.

Human rights and sustainable development are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. In conditions of prosperity, conflicts are less likely to arise and more likely to be resolved quickly and peacefully if they do arise. As the Secretary General of the United Nations has observed: “[i]n a country where those who hold power are not accountable, but can use their power to monopolize wealth, exploit their fellow citizens and repress peaceful dissent, conflict is all too predictable and investment will be scarce. But in a country where human rights and property rights are protected, where government is accountable, and where those affected by decisions play a part in the decision-making process, there is real hope that poverty can be reduced, conflict avoided, and capital mobilized both at home and from abroad.”

The answer to Africa’s conflict and development quagmire lies in establishing democratic governance in African countries. This calls for a critical examination of the question of governance in Africa, with a view toward identifying the obstacles to its development and toward possible approaches to developing systems of governance that give political space to all groups, thereby avoiding conflict and political instability. The most important legal instrument in the scheme of good governance is the national constitution. Thus, a major part of the answer to Africa’s present predicament lies in the development of constitutions by African countries that will stand the test of time, and that will deliberately structure national institutions in such a way as to ensure that a capable state is created. In the past two decades, Africa has been the scene of constitutional changes unmatched on the continent since the end of European colonialism in the 1960s. In 1989, only five African countries could be described as democracies, but today well over three-quarters of the countries in Africa have adopted democratic systems of governance. However, in many of these countries the advances in democracy, though real, remain fragile and in need of strengthening. Reversals in such countries as Zimbabwe remind us that we should not become complacent and assume that democracy has taken hold on the African continent. Further, the tragedies in Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Congo graphically illustrate the horrendous consequences of failed constitutional arrangements. The future of democracy in Africa is predicated on the development of viable constitutional arrangements that set up practical institutions within which to conduct the business of governance and which foster an environment where peace and development can flourish. Such arrangements will ensure that the exercise of governmental authority is conducted in a predictable, responsible, and legally regulated way, to the satisfaction of civil society and society at large.

This article considers, in the context of globalization, the challenges facing Africa in the democratization process. It first considers security and causes of conflicts in Africa, the economic condition of Africa, and the relationship between governance, conflict, and development. It then seeks to identify some of the key issues that must be addressed in the process of developing durable African constitutions, and the conditions under which constitutions should be developed if they are to be acceptable to the people of the country they are intended to govern. The article argues that good governance can endure only in conditions of relative economic prosperity and development. In conditions of extreme poverty, democracy cannot prosper. To the extent that the process of structural adjustment has increased poverty in Africa, it has undermined the process of democratization and made it much more difficult.

The international system, in which nation-states are the key players, is going through a period of transformation. The phenomena of democratization, economic globalization, environmental degradation, and regional integration are creating a global transformation that is shaping the future of the nation-state, as well as the future of the international system. Describing the challenges of global transformation, Robert O. Keohane argues that the “key problem of world order now is to seek to devise institutional arrangements that are consistent both with key features of international relations and the new shape of domestic politics.” In his presidential address to the 2000 American Political Science Association Meeting, Keohane further asserted that “the effective governance of global issues will be dependent upon interstate cooperation and transnational networks.” Global transformation means that the traditional international regimes that were built by the power of states and interstate relations have become ineffective institutions, especially in regard to global environmental issues. In dealing with global environmental issues, global solutions “require local approaches when global environmental crisis results from both the aggregation of local resource decisions and from the impact of the global political economy on local communities.” This raises the question of whether transnational environmental regimes that are designed to foster interstate cooperation and transnational networks, such as the MRC and ICPR, are desirable or effective forms of governance for global environmental issues that are simultaneously linked to the local context.

Within these transnational regimes, there are three layers of governing institutions: local institutions composed of individuals and industries, national institutions in each member state composed of ministerial and municipal governments, and transnational institutions made up of national delegations at the transnational level and other non-state actors such as donors and non-governmental environmental organizations. These layers are institutionally interconnected in the governance process. Within each layer, issues, interests, and actors shape political processes. The presence of these issues, interests, and actors in each layer, as well as the strength of networks among them, creates a dynamic political process. I will define this whole process as the “governance process.” Though governance by governments of states has traditionally been the study of international affairs, governance nowadays is a phenomenon of managing and networking issues, interests, and actors to produce transparent actions in process and to achieve the stated goals of regimes. This paper, in an attempt to develop a model that explains how democracy can function in transnational environmental governance, examines issues, interests, and actors in MRC and ICPR regimes.

Part I lays out the theoretical puzzles that form the essence of this paper. Part II discusses the Issues, Interests, and Actors Network (IAN), employing insights from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University—Bloomington. Part III discusses the current states of the Mekong and the Rhine in brief. Part IV applies the IAN framework tool to break down and analyze governance processes mainly of the Rhine regimes. Finally, I conclude with remarks on democracy and transnational environmental governance in three layers of transnational regimes in the Rhine and in the Mekong River Basins.

Great public controversy has surrounded the efforts of these governments, despite the fact that they were elected because of their commitment to reducing the role of government and to freeing the private sector from regulatory “shackles.” The governments of Alberta and Ontario were indeed re-elected on the basis of such a commitment. Particularly in Ontario, the public controversy has translated into a barrage of legal challenges. Until very recently, however, the courts were rarely receptive to proceedings aimed at preventing the government from carrying through with its policies.

This paper makes two broad inquiries: First, what role do Canadian courts play in constraining government exercises of this kind? Second, how, if at all, did or should public law adapt or respond to the new realities? We present two general theses. First, the opportunities for using the courts to constrain governments in the initiation of these policies have been, and may well continue to be, very restricted. Only if the Supreme Court of Canada espouses the philosophy that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is more of a social charter than has generally been supposed will the door open to more broad-based questioning of such government actions. Second, the prospects for any dramatic reshaping of the general principles of public law as a means of constraining the implementation of these policies and policing their possible fallout are equally unpromising.

The first conclusion is based primarily on the absence to this point of any strong or pervasive set of constitutional norms that operates to restrict governments and legislatures in the legislative effectuation of mandates for deregulation, privatization, and downsizing. The second hypothesis is founded on the unwillingness of Canadian courts to provide a substantive check on the exercise of executive power. It is also derived in part from three rather different and, to an extent, reassuring observations. First, in many instances, the reconfigurations within government have not in reality taken the affected areas outside of public law principles. Second, existing principles of general or common law have at least some capacity to police the way in which a “liberated” sector operates. Third, some domains of public law appear to contain the potential for growth and, as such, have at least limited capacity for providing extended bases for accountability when a new regime misfires in a way that harms individuals.

In their recent book Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make the claim that: “Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.”

In this lecture I want to consider what Hardt and Negri mean by this claim, what they have in mind when they assert the emergence of a new, global order with a “new logic and structure of rule,” and what implications their analysis might have for students of international law. To bring these issues into focus, I propose to set them against the background of earlier meditations on the relationship between imperialism and international law and on the significance of the colonial encounter in the construction of international legal ideas, concepts and categories.

But first I think it might be helpful to dwell a little on Hardt’s and Negri’s central concept, announced already in the fashionably monoverbal title of their book. For empire is, of course, a term that has many different referents and many different inflections, and if we are to grasp the analysis put forward by Hardt and Negri, we need to be in a position to see how their conception of empire carries forward or departs from other ways of understanding the term. Indeed, we need to be ready not only for comparisons with other ways of understanding empire, but also for comparisons with its similarly polyvalent cognates and affiliates: imperialism, colonialism, and their respective variants.

“Globalization” has become a buzzword in recent years, in part because it has so many important dimensions. Culture is globalizing as the ideas, styles, and technologies from each society infiltrate others on a continuous basis. The economy is globalizing as money moves without hindrance across borders, and goods, services, and workers seek to overcome protectionist barriers. Environmental globalization occurs as scientists and policymakers increasingly understand the planet’s ecosystems and the ways in which environmental mismanagement in one region affects other regions. Politics is globalizing as governments and societies make greater efforts to influence each other and as internal tensions in one country spread to neighbors.

“Governance” is an apt term for describing decisionmaking processes that are less formal than a government. Although no international government exists in a world of notionally sovereign nation states, global governance certainly does exist, and these processes have grown deeper in recent decades. One of the key challenges of governance is siting authoritative decisions at the proper level to coincide with the scope of the problem being addressed. The proper level in economic or environmental terms might not match the governmental units available for making and implementing decisions.

The “prospects for democracy” is a broad topic that scholars are addressing in distinct ways. A central concern is the viability of democracy in changing configurations of world politics. Free elections are essential to democracy; yet democracy requires more than that. In his monumental analysis of Democracy in America in 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville discovered the vital role of political and civil associations in informing and sustaining democracy.

The importance of such participation to national democracy is now recognized and promoted by international organizations. For example, the World Bank reports that “[i]ncreasing opportunities for voice and participation can improve state capability. . . .” The U.N. Commission on Human Rights states that at the national level, “the widest participation in the democratic dialogue by all sectors and actors of society must be promoted in order to come to agreements on appropriate solutions. . . .” The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has extolled the value of “active participation” at the national level in which there is “a role for citizens in proposing policy options and shaping the policy dialogue—although the responsibility for the final decision or policy formulation rests with government.”

Although the democratic value of a contestation of ideas at the national level is an accepted nostrum today, the extension of that principle to the international level remains controversial, even in an era of globalization. The debate is not about freedom of speech; few would deny that an individual should be able to advocate ideas outside of his country, or to engage in discourse with foreign government officials and private individuals. Rather, the debate is about whether there is a democratic imperative in giving individuals opportunities to participate in global governance. Such opportunities can be justified for their contribution to national democracy. As Susan Marks has explained, “democracy cannot flourish in nation-states unless efforts are made to democratize the processes of transnational and global decision-making as well.” Unbounded participation can also be justified for its contribution to multilateral decisionmaking. Boutros Boutros-Ghali has observed that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), parliamentarians, and international lawyers act at various levels of the international system as “mechanisms of democracy.” A recent U.N. Human Development Report stated that “[o]ne big development in opening opportunities for people to participate in global governance has been the growing strength and influence of NGOs—in both the North and the South.”

Opening opportunities for people is the theme of this article, which is divided into four parts. Part I examines the concept of democracy at the international level, and finds that some democratization already ensues. Part II looks for the roots of this phenomenon, and postulates that it originated in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. Part III suggests that this key event should be called a global constitutional moment. A brief Part IV concludes.

The fact that, in the search for strategies to strengthen the legitimacy of the exercise of public authority, beyond the state, democratization of the inter- and supranational institutions has so far received the most attention must not make us lose sight of the fact that there are other approaches to legitimizing acts of public authorities. Some of these are related to the concept of democracy or, depending on how democracy is defined, are an essential part of democracy, like transparency and accountability. Others are independent of democracy, but nevertheless relevant means to establish legitimacy. Thus, the paper will proceed as follows. Part I provides a concise overview of the development of the concept of legitimacy and its present understanding. Part II will deal first with the issue of transnational democracy as a means to legitimize the exercise of public authority beyond the state, and then with alternative strategies or approaches to the legitimation of transnational public authority. A concluding section will argue that both transnational democracy (or at least elements of it) and alternative approaches are necessary gradualist and reformist ways of coping with the problem of legitimizing the increasingly important and effective exercise of public authority beyond the state.

I identify two partly interrelated domains for exploring this topic. One domain is the ways in which the state actually participates in governing the global economy, notwithstanding expanded deregulation and privatization, and notwithstanding the growing authority of non-state actors. The question becomes one of detecting the specific type of authority/power this participation might entail for the state vis-à-vis global actors and processes. Further, if the state indeed has such authority, or could in principle have it, the question is whether that authority can be a bridge to a politics of the global for citizens—who are, after all, still largely confined to the national domain for the full exercise of their powers.

If national state participation in setting up the legal and institutional infrastructure for globalization does indeed contain a set of channels for citizens to demand participation in global politics, including the right to demand accountability from global actors, then the formal and informal capabilities of citizens to do so, as well as their disposition to do so, become crucial. This is the subject of the second domain. The organizing question is: to what extent citizenship, even though highly formalized, might actually be less finished as an institution than its formal representation indicates. What happens when we begin to think of this highly developed institution as something akin to an “incompletely theorized” form? Can recognition of these features help us detect the extent to which the institution might change (i.e. go partly and in very specific ways beyond its national confinements)? I am particularly interested here in the possibility that citizenship might find institutional groundings inside the nation-state that would allow citizens to participate in global politics. My concern is then not so much in the de-territorializing of the institution which lies at the heart of post-national conceptions of citizenship, including prominently the human rights regime, as it is in the denationalizing of specific features of citizenship arising out of the changes in state institutions themselves. These changes are briefly described in the first section.

It will clearly be impossible to do full justice to each of these subjects. The purpose is rather a mapping of the broader structures evident today that might be useful in situating the question of global democratic governance within a more complex and diverse set of institutional domains than is usually allowed. I should add that though the treatment of the subject is partial and brief in this lecture, it is based on a large multiyear project and hence rests on considerable evidence and research.

Given the range of institutions involved in these transnational developments as well as their profound social effects, globalization emerged as a theme across a wide horizon of disciplines, including law, occasioning a broad spectrum of institutional analyses, theoretical assessment, and critical engagement. The first issue of the IJGLS took the measure of these developments in various institutional sectors in different parts of the world, publishing a set of papers from a three-day symposium at the Indiana University—Bloomington School of Law, the first in a series of annual agenda-setting conferences at the Law School. The participants in these conferences, as well as the scores of authors who have volunteered their papers for publication over the years, including the authors of student notes and book reviews, have made the journal a comprehensive international, multidisciplinary forum for the analysis of and critical debate over the processes of globalization and their externalities. In this project, the support of the Law School and Indiana University has been indispensable—and so, too, have been ten generations of exceptionally talented and dedicated student editors.

In this anniversary issue, we continue to look forward—to what has emerged as the most important externality of globalization: the democracy deficit. With one exception, the articles are based on the authors’ contributions to the tenth Global Legal Studies symposium at the Law School on April 5 and 6, 2002. Saskia Sassen’s keynote address introduces the volume. Sassen examines the relationship between globalization and citizenship, envisioning the possibilities for a new accountability of global economic actors through national institutional arrangements. Following the keynote, the articles are grouped into three Parts. The articles in Part I (by Jost Delbrück, Steve Charnovitz, and Paul Craig) focus on international and supranational institutions of governance, asking whether a transnational demos is possible, and—from different perspectives—considering the prospects for global democratic legitimacy. In Part II, the articles (by Alfred Aman, Sir David Williams, Janet McLean, David Mullen and Antonella Ceddia, John Dernbach, and Tun Myint) turn the lens the other way, examining the impact of globalization on domestic law and, in particular, the consequences of recent developments in national public law for globalization. Their country foci differ, as well as their substantive foci; however, their common theme is the significance of national law in the pragmatics of globalization—and their shared implication that the democracy deficit might be addressed through domestic institutions as well as through new transnational arrangements. But states are not the only actors in transnational or global processes. In Part III, the authors (Muna Ndulo, Mariella Pandolfi, and Ugo Mattei) examine specific contexts in which a democracy deficit is a product of the asymmetrical or fragmentary relationship between states and non-state actors—structural adjustment in Africa (Ndulo), humanitarian NGOs in Bosnia and Kosovo (Pandolfi) and the Americanization of global markets and law (Mattei). These circumstances are distinct in important and obvious ways; however, each of the authors looks to the emergence of new or stronger national institutions as sites of resistance and recuperation. The volume concludes with an essay by Susan Marks, on themes of globalization, imperialism, and sovereignty, based on her address as the Law School’s Snyder Lecturer on March 7, 2002. And so the volume comes full circle, having considered the democracy deficit as a serious negative externality of globalization—and the prospects for addressing the democracy deficit through local, national, and transnational institutions. Significantly, the perspectives and the proposals vary; together, they make a richly informed and highly imaginative critical dialogue, and set a provocative agenda for future research and innovation. Their sophistication is above all in their aspirations—not for one world government, but for a world where no person’s value is discounted by government in the name of globalization’s imperatives. Our contributors look to citizenship, scholarship, and the articulation of global and national institutions for fresh source materials as they develop new proposals for understanding and addressing the democracy deficit as we know it today. As we go to press, and look ahead to the next ten years, one can only hope that the aspirations behind these essays will not soon date them.