Session 9

David Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 1995, pp. 1-27
Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance
Chapter One, Stories of Democracy: Old and New
Summarizers note: For those of you who cringe when you see words put in quotes, Im sorry but this
guy loves them! I just kept everything he had in quotes in order to stay as close to the text as possible.
Although democracy seems to have scored an historic victory over alternative forms of governance, a
widespread commitment to democracy is a recent phenomenon and the creation and maintenance of
democracy is remarkably difficult form of government (as evidenced by serious threats to it such as
fascism, Nazism, Stalinism). Liberal democracy has been championed as the agent of progress, and
capitalism as the only viable economic system. People have even proclaimed the end of history
(Fukuyama, for example) as ideological conflict is being steadily displaced by universal democratic
reason and market-oriented thinking.
The author takes issue with the preceding view, citing various inadequacies:
There are distinctive liberal traditions with different conceptions of the individual agent, autonomy,
rights and duties of subjects, and proper nature and form of community.
The celebratory view of liberal democracy neglects to explore whether there are any tensions and/or
contradictions between the liberal and democratic components of liberal democracy. (e.g. the
liberal preoccupation with individual rights and the democratic concern the regulation of individual and
collective action - for public accountability.)
There is more than one institutional form of liberal democracy, making any appeal to a liberal position
vague at best.
In order to take a step towards the specification of a historical and theoretical framework for the analysis
of democracy and the global order, this introductory chapter seeks to:
1. Examine the development of different models of democracy and their conditions of application
2. Explore the meaning of democracy in the context of the progressive enmeshment today of states
in global and regional networks
3. Consider a number of leading approaches to the understanding of international and transnational
phenomena
1.1 Models of Democracy
In democratic theory, there is a deeply rooted conflict over whether democracy should mean some kind of
popular power (a form of politics in which citizens are engaged in self-government and self-regulation) or
an aid to decision-making (a means of conferring authority on those periodically voted into office). This
conflict has given rise to three basic variants or models of democracy.
1. Direct / participatory democracy a system of decision-making about public affairs in
which citizens are directly involved.
This system is commonly thought to be based on Athenian democracy (although research has
shown that some of the key conceptual and institutional political innovations can be traced to
older civilizations in the East). Nonetheless, the political ideals of Athens equality among
citizens (although slaves and women were not considered citizens), liberty, respect for the law
and justice have been taken to be integral to Western political thinking, and therefore Athens is
a useful starting point. The Athenian city-state did not differentiate between state and society
because it was ruled by citizen-governors. Claims of the state were given priority over those of
the individual citizens. Classical republicanism in the early Renaissance reconceptualized Greek
democratic thought by noting that civic virtue was highly fragile, subject particularly to corruption if
dependent solely upon the political involvement of one major grouping (the people, the
aristocracy, or the monarchy). The core of classical republicanism was that the freedom on a

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political community rested upon its accountability to no authority other than that of the community
itself. Self-government and the right of citizens to participate within a constitutional framework
which creates distinct roles for leading social forces was all important. A citizen in both classical
republicanism and Greek democratic thought was someone who gave judgment and held office
participation in public affairs. It would be difficult to locate this type of citizen in modern
democracies, except maybe as representatives or office holders. It would also be hard to
imagine this type of democracy in industrial societies marked by high degrees of social, political,
and economic differentiation. Last paragraph in this section discusses how the rise Christianity
shifted the source of authority and wisdom from this-worldly to other-worldly representatives
with the citizens whose active judgment is essential displaced by the true believer.
2. Liberal/representative democracy a system of rule embracing elected officers who
undertake to represent the interests of views of citizens within delimited territories while
upholding the rule of law.
Modern liberal theory sought to justify the sovereign power of a state while justifying limits on that
power the battle to balance might and right, power and law, duties and rights. States must have
a monopoly of coercive power in order to provide a secure basis on which family life, religion,
trade, and commerce can prosper, but by granting the state a regulatory and coercive capability,
the state also could and often did deprive citizens of political and social freedoms.
Representative democracy attempted to overcome the problem of balancing coercive power of
the state and liberty. The liberal concern with reason, lawful government and freedom of choice
could only be upheld properly by recognizing the political equality of all mature individuals. The
democratic consitutional state, linked to other key institutional mechanisms (like the free market),
would resolve the problems of ensuring both liberty and authority. Through the 17 th century,
democracy was associated with the gathering of citizens. By the early 19 th century it was thought
of as the right of citizens to elect representatives (hence removing the practical limits on how
large a democracy could be). With universal suffrage, liberal democracy took on its distinctively
contemporary form: a cluster of rules and institutions (including elected government; free and fair
elections with equal weight for each citizens votes; universal suffrage; freedom of conscience,
information, and expression; right of adults to oppose their government and stand for office;
associational autonomy) permitting the broadest participation of the majority of citizens in the
selection of representatives who alone can make political decisions decisions that affect the
whole community. The consolidation of this type of democracy is relatively recent (only in the
closing decades of this century has democracy been securely established in the West and widely
adopted in principle as a suitable model of government beyond the West.)
3. One-party democracy / Marxism - a system where state is an extension of civil society,
reinforcing the social order for the enhancement of particular interests. 1
For Marxists, the great universal ideals of liberty, equality, and justice cannot be realized simply
through the free struggle for votes in the political system and the free struggle for profit in the
market place. The capitalist economy inevitably produces systemic inequality and massive
restrictions on real freedom. The liberating potential of political equality is curtailed by inequalities
of class. Political emancipation is only a step toward human emancipation the complete
democratization of both society and the state. Marxists critique liberal democratic societies based
on its own promises: 1) supposed political participation is counterbalanced by a largely passive
citizenry (large numbers who dont vote); 2) supposed accountable government is
counterbalanced by the erosion and displacement of parliamentary institutions by unelected
centers of power; and 3) supposed freedom to protest and reform is counterbalanced by
substantial structural constraints on state action and, in particular, on the possibility of the
piecemeal reform of capitalism. Marx envisaged the replacement of the liberal democratic state
with the commune structure - a pyramid structure of delegative democracy. In the MarxistLeninist model, the transition to socialism and communism necessitated professional leadership
of a disciplined cadre of revolutionaries to organize the defense of the revolution against counterrevolutionary forces, plan the expansion of the forces of production, and to supervise the
1

The author notes that some people would not call Marxism a democracy at all.

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reconstruction of society. The author critiques the one-party model of democracy because it
underestimates the contributions of social structure, collectivity, agency, identity, and interest to
politics. It also does not promote discussion, debate, and competition among differing views.
Democracy, the state and society
The author argues that a defensible account of the proper meaning of democracy must acknowledge the
importance of a number of fundamental liberal and liberal democratic tenets: the centrality of an
impersonal structure of public power, a constitution to help protect and safeguard rights, and a diversity
of power centers within and outside the state. He believes that authors have failed to explore the
conditions for the possibility of political participation and the set of governing institutions capable of
regulating the forces that actually shape everyday life. We must ask how and why one particular type of
power political power crystallized and became embedded in the state, and how and why democracy
came to be associated with this site of power, above all others. How it was that democracy became
synonymous with liberal democratic government needs clarification, as do its consequences on collective
decision-making and the nature of accountability. Also, the problems of democracy extend beyond state
borders.
1.2 Democracy, globalization, and international governance
Theorists of democracy have assumed a symmetrical and congruent relationship between political
decision makers and the recipients of political decisions. However, regional and global
interconnectedness contests the traditional national resolutions of the key questions of democratic theory
and practice. National communities by no means exclusively make and determine decisions and policies
for themselves, and governments by no means determine what is appropriate exclusively for their own
citizens. Decisions made by quasi-regional and quasi-supranational organizations (EU, NATO, IMF, etc.)
diminish the range of decisions open to national majorities. Given greater connectedness, one must ask
questions. What is the relevant constituency? To whom should decision makers be accountable?
Territorial boundaries demarcate the basis on which individuals are involved in and excluded from
participation in decisions affecting their lives, but the outcomes of these decisions often stretch beyond
national frontiers. The implications of this on democracy are considerable for consent, legitimacy, nature
of constituency, meaning of representation, proper form and scope of political participation, relevance of
the democratic nation-state, etc.
The developments putting pressure on democratic polities are often referred to as part of the process of
globalization. The author defines globalization as the stretching and deepening of social relations and
institutions across space and time such that day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by events
happening on the other side of the globe and the practices and decisions of local groups or communities
can have significant global reverberations. Globalization implies two phenomena. 1) Many chains of
political, economic, and social activity are becoming world-wide in scope. 2) There has been an
intensification of levels of interaction and interconnectedness within and between states and societies.
There is a striking paradox about the contemporary era: More and more nations and groups are
championing democracy just at the moment when the very efficacy of democracy as a national form of
political organization appears open to question. As substantial areas of human activity are progressively
organized on a global level, the fate of democracy, and of the independent democratic nation-state in
particular, is fraught with difficulty.
The meaning and place of democratic politics and of the contending models of democracy have to be
rethought in relation to overlapping local, national, regional, and global structures and processes. A new
agenda will have to be created for democratic theory and practice in order to rethink democracy in relation
to the interconnectedness of states and societies in the global system. This new theory of democracy
must offer an account of the changing meaning of democracy within the global order and of the impact of
the global order on the development of democratic associations.
In the modern age, there are many determinants of the distribution of power, many power centers, and
authority systems within and across states and thus the bases of politics and of democratic theory must
be recast and the meaning and nature of power, authority, and accountability reexamined. The author

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attempts to do this and argue that the concept of legitimate power must be separated from its exclusive
traditional association with states and fixed national borders and that the conditions of its successful
entrenchment depend on an international framework of political life. He does not mean to abandon the
modern state, but that democracy can only result from a nucleus of democratic states and societies and
that national democracies require an international cosmopolitan democracy if they are to be sustained
and developed in the contemporary era. Democracy must be extended and deepened within and
between countries for it to retain its relevance in the future.
1.3 Limits of democratic political theory and international relations theory
The context of the modern polity has altered in many important respects over time, raising questions
about the validity and continuing relevance of some of the core concepts of modern political thought (such
as sovereignty, liberty, representative democracy, etc.). Neither democratic theory nor international
relations (IR) theory provide the conceptual resources necessary because democratic political theory of
both the 19th and 20th centuries regarded the world beyond the state as a given and the sovereignty of
the state was rarely questioned. Although the early modern theorists of international society (Grotius
and Kant for example) did seek to develop an understanding of the state in the context of the society of
states, these contributions were often lost to political theory as a whole.
Much of this century has been dominated by the realist tradition (also referred to as statist). This
tradition is almost exclusively concerned with how the global states system conditions the behavior of
individual states. Within realist political theory, the interplay of internal and external forces remains largely
unexplored. The state is conceived of as a sovereign, monolithic entity whose primary purpose is to
promote and defend the national interest. The state is a means to secure national and international order
through the exercise of national power. The state is taken for granted, with its goals assumed and little or
no internal differentiation among its elements.
Some attempts to consider seriously the modern state within its web of global interconnectedness can be
found in the rather diffuse literature which has its philosophical roots in the liberal-idealist tradition in
international relations. The common thread of this tradition is the assumption that increasing global
interconnectedness is transforming the nature and role of the state in the global system. This
transformationalist literature portrays the modern state as trapped within an extensive web of global and
complex interdependence, which has dramatic implications on sovereignty, autonomy, and accountability
of the state. But this literature does not present a convincing or coherent account of the modern state - it
tends to exaggerate the erosion of state power in the face of globalizing pressures and fails to recognize
the enduring relevance of the modern state, both as an idea and as an institutional complex, in
determining the direction of domestic and international politics.
Many of the same developments that gave rise to the transformationalist critique of realism also
provided a stimulus to radical approaches to international relations, such as world systems theory and
neo-Marxism, which have dealt with the globalization of capital. These approaches discuss the modern
states limited autonomy from the dictates of transnational capital or from the structural requirements of
the global capitalist order. States are thus conceived as partially autonomous political entities. However,
many neo-Marxist analyses fail to explore the independent dynamics of the state system and assess its
relation to the operations of the world capitalist economy.
The traditional literature of democratic political theory and the existing frameworks of IR theory have
complementary limitations limitations which must be overcome if a satisfactory understanding of the
nature and prospects of democratic political power is to be achieved. There cannot be an account of the
modern democratic state any longer without an examination of the global system and there cannot be an
examination of the global system without an account of the democratic state.

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