Toward Global Democracy: Thoughts in Response to the Rising Tide of Nation-to-Nation Interdependencies

Accompanying the growing intensity of globalization, nation-to-nation interdependencies are on the rise, meaning that events and decisions in one nation increasingly have effects in other nations. At times, these interdependencies are negative, such as a recession that travels to North America after the onset of an economic bust in the Far East. Yet although nations’ destinies are increasingly interconnected, their populations do not communicate with one another prior to making collective decisions, although those same decisions might negatively impact another nation. National democratic institutions are generally designed in ways that only allow citizens to vote in elections and to send representatives to legislatures, allowing no guarantee that the views of foreign populations will be considered. In fact, no national democracy has ever allowed foreigners to vote or send voting representatives to its legislature.

In light of increasing interdependencies among states, it has become important to design a system of global democracy. Such a system could provide national populations with opportunities to communicate with one another that would allow them collectively to minimize negative interdependencies. Without a new design, national populations will continue to impose their will (or the effects of their decisions) on other nations, in turn reducing their potential for national autonomy.

In this article, I discuss the possibility of designing an international democratic system. Since my project is to design institutions, it differs from the work of such scholars as Anne-Marie Slaughter. Slaughter has written extensively on how nations influence and create interdependencies with one another at the global level, noting the interlocking effects on legal and political structures and relationships. She focuses on describing events occurring at the global level, whereas mine is a normative project, attempting to re-design the operations of the global level. She, for example, argues that “the state…is disaggregating into its separate parts, functionally distinct parts. These parts—courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures—are networking with their counterparts abroad, creating a dense web of relations that constitutes a new, transgovernmental order. Today’s international problems— terrorism, organized crime, environmental degradation, money laundering, bank failure, and securities fraud—created and sustain these relations.” Slaughter thus documents trends and phenomena occurring at the global level. My approach, while in factual agreement with Slaughter about increasing interdependencies, has a prescriptive turn. My approach suggests new structures—new institutions—designed to deal effectively with the rise of nation-to- nation interdependencies.

One way to move to a more legitimate international legal system that addresses the rise of interdependencies is to facilitate national populations’ communication with one another. In other words, greater communication helps to move toward a democracy that includes the populations of all nations, linking them together. Indeed, there is a growing scholarly literature pointing to the need for a democratic conception of international relations and law, supplemented with the fact that a tide of democratic change has swept the world. As represented in the quotation above, the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas laments the absence of international democracy, after the great historical quest nations have undergone to achieve national democracy. Why not then consider democratic structures as a basis for international governance?

Several international relations theorists, political philosophers, and democracy scholars have attempted to reorient the literature on international relations, and contemplate the institutional implementation of international democracy. These include David Held, Thomas Franck, Michael Reisman, and Habermas. Michael Barkun in the 1960s and Joseph Weiler in 2000 cautioned scholars not to “adopt national or domestic analogies” as a starting point or explanatory model for the international level; scholars generally disregard this advice.

In light of these points, the goal of this article is to make design proposals to democratize the international level in the same way as Franck, who refers to international design as “rethinking structure.” The renowned social science philosopher Mario Bunge points out that the project of institutional design presupposes an understanding of the problems of current institutions, and that it is an “imaginative yet potentially feasible vision of society” that allows for advancements in social relations.

Although I say that I intend to explore institutional design, it is most definitely not my intent to evaluate all our contemporary “international” structures, indicate their problems, and recommend some possible proposals that could potentially stimulate alternative designs of the international system. In other words, while the ultimate goal is to design a complete, justified, and democratic set of international institutions, this article is meant solely to start the engine, rather than arrive at a final destination. And, as a starting point I argue that any design proposals for international democracy should preserve the autonomy of nations, yet allow the world’s national populations to communicate with one another.

The most typical, yet perhaps least realistic, institutional design suggestion is to establish a world government or single global assembly. Rather than develop a democracy for all nations in a single global assembly, it might be more appropriate to develop democracy by linking (either among or between) national populations without bringing them together under a single roof, where smaller nations might be overwhelmed by larger ones and prompted to cede their sovereignty. Linked national populations, by contrast, have the opportunity to “look into each other’s eyes.” This distinction might at first seem to be trivial, but after working and reflecting on this question for over a year, I consider this linkage of populations to be a key requirement for institutional design. Elucidating this notion is the goal of this article.

In Part I, I describe what I mean by interdependencies, and then describe what type of legitimacy and structural criteria are required to begin to think about international institution design.

In Part II, I first describe the two design criteria I use when thinking about democratic international institution design; the first is that the autonomy of nations should be preserved, and the second is that the division, referred to most notably by Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss as “bifurcation,” that separates the populations of nations from each other should be reduced or eliminated. In Part II.B, I describe some of the more prominent paradigms of international democracy, and evaluate their potential to address the design criteria set out in the preceding section. I conclude with Habermas’ public deliberation model of democracy and use it as a guide to inspire democratic institution design.

Finally, in Part III, I discuss several design proposals. I begin by exploring ways to conceive of international systems, and conclude that the development of a system that respects the political and cultural autonomy of nations, while still permitting active and productive connections linking nations’ populations, should be the general goal of international institution design. These ideas should be seen as a starting point, a work in progress, to begin to think about alternative international institutions.