Three major lines of inquiry and debate have occupied the minds of many contemporary political philosophers studying democracy. Amid widespread soul searching over how to help reinvigorate civic engagement, liberals and civic republicans have argued extensively about the proper balance between individualism and community as dual priorities in public life. Amid striking advances in global economic interdependence, communications technology, and the spread of democracy around the world in the aftermath of the Cold War, social and political theorists have debated the feasibility and desirability of cosmopolitan models of democracy and citizenship. Alongside both of these debates, many democratic theorists have clarified how robust models of public deliberation, fulfilling imperatives of public reason as well as citizen inclusion, can help refine standards of democratic legitimacy.
As much as these various topics are intertwined, relatively few texts have brought them together into direct dialogue. Two recent books, however, endeavor to bridge the gaps and cast new light especially upon how the republican precept of nondomination, coupled with strong channels of public deliberation, offers inspiration for cosmopolitan democracy to progress in the coming years. In Solidarity, Hauke Brunkhorst provides a sweeping intellectual history of principles of democratic equality with an eye toward redeploying these ideals in the name of a new global polity. In Democracy Across Borders, James Bohman proposes that public deliberation ought to advance globally in multiple, overlapping communities that render a “decentered” model of democracy inclusive and responsive to everyday citizens. Taken together, these complementary books provide scholars with historical insight and also greater clarification of the relevance of the “public sphere,” a concept frequently employed by Jürgen Habermas and his many followers.
Both authors share common ground by placing much weight upon nondomination and universal inclusion of all citizens, especially in the processes of shaping legislative agendas and establishing the terms of political cooperation, as key pillars of democratic legitimacy within any political community. Bohman emphasizes the ways that contemporary scholars, such as Phillip Pettit, have associated republicanism with nondomination, and then builds a compelling case that “the democratic minimum must be deepened and expanded to include humanity as the most basic political status” (p. 115). Bohman also argues that fixed national boundaries fail to provide even a necessary, let alone sufficient, condition for democracy (p. 175).
Brunkhorst, meanwhile, traces the roots of solidarity to preliberal understandings of civic friendship in ancient Athens; duty, obligation, and “joint liability” in Roman jurisprudence; and universal brotherhood, including love of enemies and foreigners, in early and medieval Christianity. In his historical exposition, Brunkhorst focuses especially on the late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the French Revolution in particular, as pivotal in advancing a conception of republican solidarity. According to Brunkhorst, this conception, for the first time in history, left behind hierarchy and subordination, breaking a “premodern circle of freedom and servitude,” and thereby moving toward individual freedom and democratic empowerment (pp. 72–73). As he puts it, the French Revolution marked an important shift in the normative horizon of citizenship from the state citizen to the “world citizen” and transformed “the old ideas of civic solidarity and love of neighbor into the practical project of an egalitarian and self-determined solidarity among strangers” (p. 76).
The credo of 1789, Brunkhorst maintains, is best pursued in the present day with a universal ethic envisioning humanity as interconnected and prescribing adherence to liberal principles and respect for human rights. While he extols the recent rise in activity among transnational advocacy networks and social movements, he is also concerned that postmodern solidarity in the global era might emerge as less empowering than the 1789 version, and ultimately he argues that solidarity ought to find validation primarily through the rule of law and court decisions that override oppression and reinforce the normative concerns of civil society actors. Although Brunkhorst quite clearly and appropriately emphasizes this essential link between political and social activism and the validating role of binding court decisions—combining “communicative power” with “administrative power” and adjudication (p. 161)—his book does not go much further in elaborating, in practical terms, how constitutionally secured pathways for public influence and deliberation actually might be cemented more solidly within the present configuration of national and international governing institutions. Here, the Bohman volume, in some respects, picks up where Brunkhorst leaves off, by making the case that transnational federalism has the potential to strengthen democracy within as well as beyond national borders.
Perhaps the most striking difference in approach between Brunkhorst and Bohman revolves around the extent to which the dêmos should be conceived as pluralistic, especially within any formative global public sphere. Bohman takes great care to formulate the necessity of conceiving of democracy in terms of “multiple dêmoi”—meaning that in practice, democracy in a formative global polity should proceed across overlapping local, national, continental, and international communities and jurisdictions collaborating with one another in tandem, and with all citizens retaining the power to initiate deliberation and set the rules that will guide political activity. Brunkhorst, on the other hand, sticks with the singular term “demos” even when it might serve him well to adopt a more decidedly plural perspective. Even when Brunkhorst refers to transnational protest movements, he seems to consider them as operating within a single public space and sets aside questions about diffusion or decentralization that Bohman identifies as essential to resolve in developing democracy beyond the nation-state. Whereas Brunkhorst does not appear to worry so much about the exact contours of public space or institutional design, so long as the voices of civil society campaigners and protest movements are heard and accounted for properly by governing institutions, Bohman is heavily preoccupied by such matters. Much of the Bohman volume painstakingly outlines how transnational democracy—a term that Bohman prefers to “cosmopolitan democracy,” on grounds that it denotes more layers of interaction between mass publics and governing institutions (p. 44)—ought to emerge, in principle, by means of legal and political decentralization and power dispersion. He argues that the republican vision of nondomination, within individual nation-states as well as across them, requires nothing less.
This difference between the two authors is especially striking when their reflections on Europe are compared. It is no surprise that Bohman and Brunkhorst both examine the European Union as the most advanced prototype of a global polity in the making, as well as an exemplar of the sorts of lingering shortcomings that persist in transnational democracy and public deliberation. To this day, the European Union agenda-setting and legislative processes remain driven largely by national governments and bureaucratic elites, with few direct links between everyday citizens and EU decision makers. While Bohman sees the EU as a laboratory poised to correct this deficiency by moving toward transnational federalism (pp. 145–46, 157–58), thereby implementing the notion of “multiple dêmoi” with a collection of overlapping, interconnected publics or peoples, Brunkhorst continues to cast the EU as a dêmos in the making—as a singular public or people writ large.
To be sure, the authors seem to share a common agenda regarding Europe: to help inspire, if not facilitate, a sustained, genuinely trans-European public debate, a goal that many scholars, like Will Kymlicka, have written off in recent years as unattainable. But between the two authors, Bohman's decentered approach would seem to offer a more feasible route for the European Union, as a “highly differentiated institutional structure” (p. 55), to emerge from the deliberative doldrums. At least within the confines of the European Union, Bohman's concept of multiple dêmoi comes across as more textured, more grounded, and more plausible than Brunkhorst's more amorphous “solidarity among strangers,” which, though holding the potential to accommodate pluralism and differentiation, never seems to shake off the possibility of dismissal as either a contradiction in terms or as too legalistic and watered down to be meaningful to those who would associate solidarity mainly with “thicker” notions of shared identity and communal spirit. Ultimately, in fact, the Brunkhorst book is focused not so much on solidarity but on democracy. In this regard, Brunkhorst makes a convincing case that democratic legitimation builds solidarity, while undemocratic rule destroys solidarity, especially when otherwise “normatively effective constitutional regimes” lose their way (p. 74).
Brunkhorst's lively and richly sourced historical narrative, and his frequently blunt observations regarding the present weaknesses of the embryonic global public sphere—with citizens essentially reduced to the “politics of appeal” and mere contestation and opinion formation, rather than deliberation and decision making—complement Bohman's more abstract theorizing. While much of his text is meticulously structured and conveyed, Bohman goes too far in narrowly framing his perspective as “republican cosmopolitanism.” At the outset of his book, Bohman makes it clear that he wishes to highlight a republican ideal of nondomination, rather than a liberal ideal of noninterference (pp. 8, 17–18). However, a great deal of what he advocates throughout the book—and especially his overarching concern for implementing human rights standards—can be situated just as squarely within cosmopolitan liberalism. Classifying human rights within any political community as universal; upholding the rule of law and unequivocal commitments to liberty, justice, and equality; safeguarding minority rights; championing the rights of all human beings, especially immigrants and noncitizens, to make legal and political claims within any given polity, on their own behalf as well as on behalf of others; warding off any slippery slope toward tyranny—all of these are core liberal tenets, which Bohman repeatedly labels exclusively as “republican.” And a key thesis of the book—that the standard of a democratic minimum must be enlarged to include all humanity—certainly flows from liberalism as well as republicanism.
While Bohman seems to leave cosmopolitan liberalism out in the cold, Brunkhorst seems more willing, refreshingly, to treat republicanism and liberalism as compatible theories in the global project of strengthening democratic legitimacy and public deliberation. Bohman seems to recognize as much; as he notes toward the end of his book, democracy carries both the legal capacity to “protect the rights of those who are juridical subjects under its laws” and the political capacity to “empower its citizens to actively change their circumstances” (p. 180).
All in all, Brunkhorst and Bohman each offer many worthwhile insights into how ideals related to democratic empowerment and universal inclusion have proceeded throughout history, and how models of transnational (or cosmopolitan) democracy have the promise to reconfigure political relationships among citizens and governing institutions, especially when it comes to bolstering parliamentary representation and opportunities for unmediated influence and communication among and between everyday citizens and government officials. While neither book contains much specific commentary on the current state of affairs with respect to global governance, both authors seek to harness political theory in hastening the advance of democracy, at all levels—and in turning weaker public spheres, especially within civil society, into stronger deliberative public spheres. The nascent global public sphere, then, serves as a corrective to largely unfettered global capitalism. It also heightens the profile, across all government arenas, of everyday people alongside administrative elites and “experts” in the face of perceived erosion in democratic responsiveness within even the more established constitutional democracies. Both books make clear, in short, that a meaningful expansion in the scale of democracy can emerge only with a more fundamental transformation in the content of democracy.
