Globalization, which had its modern origins in the capitalist expansion of the nineteenth century, has reached a level of development that challenges the sovereign independence, power, and authority of the nation-state, the primary actor in international politics for the last three hundred years. In so doing, it undermines popular sovereignty as traditionally understood in contemporary democracies. In his book, Michael Goodhart provides a tightly reasoned analysis of globalization's challenge to sovereignty and democratic theory, and puts forward a provocative redefinition of democracy that, he argues, can withstand globalization, even flourish in a globalized world.
Goodhart reminds us that state sovereignty is a period piece that arose out of the shambles of collapsing medieval political thought. Its origins reflected the new realities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the church's hierarchical and functional system of rule in Europe gave way to secular territorial states governed mostly by monarchies. The Westphalian system provided order internally, with the state mediating the relationship between the individual and the world. State sovereignty provided the moral justification first for the monarch to rule within established borders, and then, following the American and French Revolutions, for the people to rule. Goodhart advises his readers that modern political thought succeeded because the older worldview did not match reality any longer (p. 39). Theories of state sovereignty and subsequent democratic theories provided better explanations of new institutions and relationships.
The author argues that globalization, by striking at state sovereignty, threatens popular rule within democracies, and in so doing uncovers the weaknesses of modern democratic theory in a growingly borderless world. He writes: “Modern political theorists have long taken for granted that the sovereign state is the site of politics…. [T]his assumption extends to most thinking about democracy as well” (p. 20). The author reasons that despite its claim to universal application, the social contract theory assumes a finite citizenry within specified borders, with no authority for popular rule beyond the state's territory.
Goodhart ably describes the two general responses of those seeking to save democratic theory from the threat of globalization: the communitarian or nationalist rejection of globalization, attempting to keep global forces at bay, and the cosmopolitan project to democratize politics at the transnational level. The first approach he labels impractical. The second he finds in error theoretically, whether it comes in the form of enlarging the idea of popular sovereignty by somehow democratizing existing global institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, or alternatively promoting emergent global civil society as the new global democracy.
In their place the author argues for reconceptualizing democracy, emphasizing its human rights tradition specifically as “a political commitment to universal emancipation through securing the equal enjoyment of fundamental human rights for everyone” (p. 5). Citing the long struggle to end subjection—from the Levellers and Thomas Paine to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass—Goodhart suggests that at the heart of democratic theory is the demand for equality and freedom. He contends that these values have resonance in a world with disappearing borders and should constitute the core of democracy in the era of globalization. He proposes setting aside some traditional elements of what we think of as democratic life, arguing that we must give up “on the ideas of citizenship and popular rule as we know them” (p. 91) and judge generally accepted democratic institutions (legislatures, local governments, etc.) and procedures (pluralist politics) on the basis of their efficacy in securing rights. The “fundamental” rights that Goodhart believes must be secured are legion, including not only civil and political rights but also the social, cultural, and economic rights so often asserted by peoples in the developing world, as well as a spectrum of rights that include “equal access to public benefits and services … affordable access to health care, a living wage, a decent education [and] the right to choose one's own lifestyle” (pp. 143–46).
The author makes a forceful statement on the need to promote emancipation through expanded human rights as part of any democratic theory. He asserts that democracy as human rights (DHR) “is concerned with an end, not with any particular institutional method or procedure for ensuring it” (p. 150). Goodhart admits that achieving DHR will require “nothing less than the transformation of political culture” (p. 156). But therein lies the problem. For this reader, his diagnosis of the problem is flawless, his attention to sovereignty's growing inutility in the poststate era is well worth serious reflection, and his clarion call for human rights, equality, and freedom for everyone is a good reminder of what so much of democratic theory is about. But his prescription—democracy as emancipation through securing human rights—leaves as many quandaries as it provides answers. Within the state, democratic theory's rich tradition has also been about who rules and how, about governmental limits, and, importantly, about the role of law. It has spoken to means as much as ends, maybe more so. Yet, Goodhart addresses these concerns by implying that they are only instrumental to the final goal. And his solution is not based on the recognition of emerging institutions and habits of communal life but on the herculean task of transforming existing political culture globally.
At the international level, the author's prescriptions seem far from the reality. To his credit, he gives lengthy attention to the promotion of democracy at the United Nations and to the human rights agenda of that institution and of other intergovernmental organizations (pp. 182–90). However, in the case of the UN and most democracy-promotion actors, the mantra has not been “democracy as human rights,” but rather “democracy is a human right” (see Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Democratization, 1996, and Kofi A. Annan, “Democracy as an International Issue,” Global Governance 8 [April–June 2002]: 135–42). The current trend is to prop up “failed” territorial states and introduce Lockean models of democratic practice.
As for global civil society, Goodhart overstates what its advocates claim. Most of its supporters see global civil society as a movement toward a more democratic and ordered international system, not as accomplished fact (Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society, 2003; Michael Edwards, Civil Society, 2004). Probably the best interpretation of the interconnections among global civil society, international organizations, and the construction of rights and democracy in the new era can be found in the works of Jürgen Habermas, but Goodhart does not address Habermas and his theories. Like Goodhart, Habermas argues that the legitimacy of democratic decisions in a society or organization arises from popular sovereignty exercised within the Rousseauian constraints of equality and freedom (“Popular Sovereignty as Procedures,” in James Bohman, ed., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, 1997). Unlike Goodhart, Habermas maintains that the surge in transnational organizations encouraged by the porosity of globalization allows for an emergent participatory democracy through civil discourse about serious issues on an integrated global/local network, leading to democratic will- and policy-formation (Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, 2004). International organizations are not yet at the center of a developed cosmopolitan democracy, but they are increasingly people centered rather than state centered. The plethora of transnational actors today in global civil society provide what Habermas calls the “nodal points” in the international communications network, providing a vibrant democratic process that is then transformed into legitimate democratic policy in the public sphere of global governance, encouraging global consensus on the fundamental rights about which Goodhart writes (Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discursive Theory of Law and Democracy, 1996, p. 373).
If, as Goodhart asserts, political theory's value lies in providing a reasonable explanation of political realities as we find them, it seems that Habermas's rendition of democracy and human rights in the era of globalization more nearly matches the nascent realities of globalized politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That does not mean, however, that the author's reasoned argument for emancipatory politics should be taken lightly. The broadening of human rights, both in meaning and application, is at the center of a democratic global agenda. Goodhart makes a strong case for pushing that agenda to its limits.
