The Participation of States and Citizens in Global Governance

The pursuit of global democratic governance cannot be confined to global institutions; national state institutions and nation-based citizens need to be part of this project. In this lecture, I want to map a variety of mechanisms and dynamics that can be seen as part of an architecture for democratic participation by state institutions and citizens in global governance. Crucial to my analysis is the notion that the global is multi-scalar: it does not take place only at the self-evident global scale, but also at the national and sub-national scales.

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.