Key Points

• Globalization has encouraged increased direct transborder collaboration between provincial and municipal governments.

• Globalization has brought a major expansion of suprastate regulation by global governance agen­cies.

• The private sector takes an active role in contem­porary global governance, e.g. through supervi­sory agencies, think-tanks, foundations, and advisory councils.

• With great diversity of organizational form, issue-focus, and tactics, global social movements inject much dynamism and innovation into con­temporary world politics.

The Challenge of Global Democracy

We have now seen that globalization has encour­aged a shift in governance of the world away from a single focus on the states-system to a multi-layered complex of rule-making and order creation where no location is sovereign. Politics now lacks a clear centre of command and control of the kind previously provided by the Westphalian state. In addition, considerable initiative in the construc­tion of norms is now found outside public-sector bodies, namely, in market agents and social move­ments. What do these developments imply for democracy?

Democracy—rule by the people—is widely regarded to be the central legitimating ethic of modern governance Although definitions of democracy and mechanisms to achieve it have shown considerable diversity from one country and time period to the next, there is a broad and fairly solid consensus in today's world that good governance means democratic governance. Hence before closing this chapter it is appropriate to ask a critical normative question, namely, what is happening to democracy in the contemporary global­izing world?

At first glance globalization might seem to offer possibilities for enhancing democracy. As we saw earlier, globalization has been unravelling state sov­ereignty, and there has always been a fundamental tension between sovereignty and democracy. Sovereignty implies comprehensive, supreme, unqualified, and exclusive power, whereas democ­racy is generally presumed to rest on limited, dis­persed, conditional, and collective power. Even where governments are popularly elected, there remains a potentially dangerous concentration of power in the state. To this extent the removal of sovereignty ought, in principle, to present oppor­tunities for increasing democracy.

Regrettably, however, globalization has thus far as often as not made things worse. Contemporary post-sovereign governance is strewn with demo­cratic deficits. The state, global governance agen­cies, the market, and global social movements all suffer from shortfalls in respect of popular participation and access, consultation and debate, inclusion and representativeness, constitutionality and accountability.

Globalization and the Democratic State

Some enthusiasts have assumed that globalization and democratization would be two sides of the | same coin. Adopting this perspective, liberalists lave celebrated a worldwide wind of democratic change in the late twentieth century with the col-apse of apartheid, communism, and other one-party systems. However, multiparty competition has not by itself provided a guarantee for greater popular participation in and control of the state. Countless governments continue habitually to vio­late human rights in the current time of global­ization. Meanwhile even those states who receive top ratings from Amnesty International rarely con­sult their populations specifically on global pol­icies. For example, citizens rarely have any significant say in a state's decision whether or not to adopt an IMF structural adjustment programme. Moreover, even were the state fully to involve its residents in these matters, national governments often, as we have seen, have limited control over global flows. To this extent the state does not offer the means to secure the popular will in relation to global capital, global ecological problems, and so on. Democratically run government has to be sup­plemented, perhaps even replaced, by other instru­ments and institutions.