Global Democracy and Power Politics

Global democracy is a global normative ideal in which citizens are guaranteed an equal democratic stake in governing institutions that shape world life. Proponents often invoke cosmopolitan or liberal values such as inclusiveness, equality, popular control, transparency, accountability, deliberation, and human rights. These values, they argue, should guide a global democracy in an ongoing process of institutional change rather than demanding a specific end-point to pursue.

Amongst these intrinsic arguments, the most common are those that emphasize epistemic, problem-solving, justice-based, and/or legitimacy-based reasons for pursuing global democracy. They point out that current arrangements of global governance lack the capacity to tackle major issues in a globally-integrating world—climate change, spread of infectious diseases, volatile financial markets, enormous poverty rates, and unjust supply chains, just to name a few.

Another pillar of this approach is instrumentalist, and it seeks to promote global democracy as the means for achieving desired outcomes such as peace, prosperity, or environmental sustainability. While there is some evidence that global democracy can achieve these outcomes, there is also considerable doubt and debate about its actual effects.

A core issue with the broader project of global democracy is that it tends to ignore power politics, and especially the desire of states to maximize their absolute and relative power in world politics. This conflicting dynamic directly undercuts the cosmopolitan ideals upon which many global democrats predicate their models of global democracy. Consequently, there is considerable room for future research on how to address this challenge in both the normative and the empirical realms of global democracy.