It is an irony of contemporary globalization that at the very moment sovereignty is supposedly waning, discourse about sovereignty is proliferating like never before. What sovereignty may have lost as an organizing principle of international relations it has regained as an object of international political theorizing. Adam Lupel's book reflects this trend at the same time that it redirects attention away from state sovereignty and to questions of popular sovereignty and the constitution of democratic authority.
Globalization and Popular Sovereignty is an insightful and sustained study of the concept of “popular sovereignty” and the challenges posed to it by globalization. The book's central contention is that traditional models of popular sovereignty are inadequate for the task of conceiving democratically legitimate forms of global governance. The meaning of popular sovereignty must, consequently, be rethought if it is to remain relevant as a principle of democratic authority in an age of transnational politics—something clearly committed to by Lupel.
The book is divided into eight chapters. The first two chapters introduce the author's argument, offer definitions, and provide historical context. The next three are detailed studies of liberal, republican, and deliberative traditions of popular sovereignty, as found in the work of Locke, Rousseau, and Jürgen Habermas, respectively. Chapters 6 and 7 critically engage recent efforts by Habermas and David Held to adapt democratic principles beyond the nation-state. The concluding chapter presents an alternative set of principles to guide further thinking on the subject.
The history of popular sovereignty, Lupel tells us, has developed out of the relation between “the effervescent power of the people,” on the one hand, and the need for “secure, authoritative, legal structures,” on the other (p. 10). We have now entered a new chapter of this complex history, as porous community boundaries and de facto structures of transnational governance undermine both conventional notions of “the people” and notions of “sovereignty” as a structure of final authority (p. 6). By tracing the contingent ways in which shifts in the concept of sovereignty have occurred in the past, Lupel hopes to better understand how to push beyond the concept's current limits.
In the Lockean model of popular sovereignty, as the author renders it, the people are sovereign in the sense that they are the constitutive authority upon whose ongoing consent government relies for its legitimacy. They are not sovereign, however, in the sense of being directly involved in governance decisions. After the moment of founding, the people exercise their sovereignty in a strong sense only through acts of rebellion. According to Lupel, global transformations challenge this liberal paradigm by adding new layers of governance that are constituted beyond the domain of citizens and in a way that is “removed from public processes of consent and majority decision-making” (p. 37).
The republican model of popular sovereignty is also threatened by globalization, albeit for slightly different reasons. In Rousseau's vision of popular sovereignty, not only do the people constitute the political order; they also actively participate in its governance. It is, in Lupel's words, “a participatory, world-making concept of sovereignty” (p. 45). It is also, however, a vision that is inherently limited by the need for substantive forms of social homogeneity. This sort of homogeneity is undercut when social inequalities and cultural diversity grow too great and when external forces intervene in domestic contexts, as is the case with global interdependence among large, complex societies.
Habermas's deliberative model of popular sovereignty ostensibly reconciles liberal and republican models by locating popular authority not in the image of “the people” as a macro subject exercising a general will but, rather, in democratic procedures and in communicative power dispersed intersubjectively in the strong publics of government and the weak publics of civil society. The participatory character of the model helps avoid the antidemocratic dimensions of the liberal model, while its decentered character helps avoid the totalizing dangers of Rousseau's general will. Nevertheless, despite its greater suitability for transnational politics, the deliberative model still depends upon the existence of strong deliberative publics capable of making binding, authoritative decisions. These are largely absent at the supranational level. This constraint leads Lupel to explore more proposals for a more explicitly cosmopolitan political order.
At the core of Lupel's rethinking of popular sovereignty is what he calls “the problem of cosmopolitan founding.” By this, he refers to the tension between the need to root democratic legitimation in particular communities, on the one hand, and the desire for a cosmopolitan politics with universal designs, on the other. He uses the cosmopolitan writings of Habermas and Held to illustrate this problem. Whereas Habermas's arguments about constitutional patriotism, postnational constellations, and European constitutionalism may offer a way to extend popular sovereignty beyond the nation-state, such a vision nonetheless remains anchored to the particular constitutive authority of European peoples, with their shared histories, values, and experiences. Held's political cosmopolitanism falls short for the opposite reason. It entails a universal vision of cosmopolitan democracy that lacks sufficient grounding in any particular constituent authority. Although Held's model of global democracy would allow democratic autonomy and self-determination at lower levels, at the global level it requires a common cosmopolitan political culture and an implausible shared commitment to cosmopolitan public law.
Having laid out the problem of cosmopolitan founding, Lupel presents a principle of “transnational popular sovereignty” as a way to grapple with it. Presumably, what sets transnational popular sovereignty apart from conventional forms of popular sovereignty is its focus on constitutive processes. On such a reading, popular sovereignty pertains not to preconstituted final authorities but, rather, to the processes whereby authority is brought into being. Transnational popular sovereignty entails the dual process of constituting transnational governance institutions and democratizing their authority. Adopting a reformist, antiutopian perspective, Lupel argues that the task is not a wholesale design of a new institutional architecture; it is, rather, to articulate the principles by which we can evaluate evolving decentered systems of global governance as they unfold (p. 141).
Ultimately, this book is stronger in its analysis of the competing traditions of popular sovereignty and in its characterization of globalization's implications for those traditions than it is in constructing a convincing alternative. While provocative, the discussion of transnational popular sovereignty is underdeveloped. The book also tends to overemphasize the constitution of authority, while neglecting popular sovereignty's role in deconstituting illegitimate and encrusted forms of authority. In this regard, the author provides only glimpses at popular sovereignty's more radical potential. Further, he tends to equate popular sovereignty with democracy as such. This is controversial and needs to be explained and defended, rather than merely asserted. Additionally, with core chapters on Locke, Rousseau, and Habermas, the book does not stray far from well-trodden pathways of democratic theory.
Still, this is a work of serious political theory. Even if the source material is familiar, Lupel tackles his subject matter with considerable insight and analytic clarity. The book also makes a valuable contribution simply by bringing these canonical traditions of popular sovereignty into conversation with one another in a single, neatly organized text. The fact that it does so adds depth and nuance to the claim that globalization is undermining popular sovereignty. For these reasons, the book should be considered a resource for students and teachers alike.
