Global Social Movements and Democracy

In contrast to the marketeers, other commentators have looked to global social movements as the way to secure democracy in the contemporary globaliz­ing world. It is certainly the case that global civic activism has shown impressive growth in recent decades. In particular, globalization has provided opportunities for women, disabled persons, les­bians and gay men, and indigenous peoples to mobilize to a degree that was generally unavailable to them in Westphalian territorial politics.

However, these gains for democracy need to be kept in perspective and set against other pro­foundly undemocratic features of contemporary global social movements. For one thing, only a very small proportion of the world's people has been directly involved in these initiatives. The vast dis­possessed majority of humanity lacks the funds, the language skills (or translation facilities), access to the Internet, and other resources on which the influence of global social movements depends. As a result, this activism has for the most part remained the preserve of a narrow, mainly white, and over­whelmingly middle-class population residing chiefly in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. In spite of recent increases, fewer than 15 per cent of the NGOs with consultative status at the UN are based in the so-called South. Moreover, in the South as well as the North, members of global social movements are generally self-elected and follow no formal procedures to ensure transparency of their operations and accountability towards those whom they claim to serve.

In sum, then, democracy is in a precarious posi­tion across all areas of contemporary governance. In the present-day globalizing world, the construc­tion and implementation of rules occurs mainly through elite competition rather than through rep­resentative, let alone participatory, democracy. At the moment it is unclear whether and how democ­racy can be realized in the emergent globalized future. Hence imaginative rethinking of democracy is arguably the prime task facing political theory today.

Key Points

• Globalization makes it impossible to achieve democracy solely through the state.

• Global governance agencies suffer from severe democratic deficits.

• Global governance by the market implies deep inequalities and the rule of efficiency over democracy.

• Global social movements, too, generally have shaky democratic credentials.

Conclusion

This opening chapter has, like the rest of the book to follow, indicated that globalization has changed, and continues to change, the nature of world pol­itics. The character and extent of those changes are much debated. Analysts are deeply divided when it comes to definitions, measurements, explanations, prognoses, and moral assessments of globalization. Indeed, many of my colleagues in the field of International Relations will disagree with parts or the whole of the argument put forward in this chap­ter. However, it is clear that we today face some dif­ferent issues and dynamics of world affairs. It will not do to study 'international relations' in the way of earlier generations of students.

To recapitulate, I have suggested that contempo­rary history is witnessing a significant shift in the spatial character of world politics. In addition to the old geography of places, distances, and borders, we now have an extensive global dimension in which certain circumstances are effectively placeless (i.e. they can occur anywhere on earth), distanceless (i.e. they can cross the planet in no time), and bor­derless (i.e. they can move between countries unhindered by state frontiers). The accelerated spread of global phenomena since the middle of the twentieth century has had a number of important implications for patterns of governance. On the one hand, globalization has rendered the old core principle of sovereignty unworkable, although the state nevertheless continues to play a key role in the regulation of social life. On the other hand, global­ization has encouraged the growth of a number of other aspects of authority and rule in world politics, including transborder substate relations, suprastate laws, regulatory initiatives by market institutions, and the campaigns of global social movements.

Thus students of International Relations today need to explore the workings of world governance as a whole. We cannot, following the traditional pattern, automatically take the state and the states-system as the starting point of investigation. Nor can we assume, complacently, that old models of sovereignty and democracy will provide our salva­tion in a globalizing world. Assuring democracy in post-sovereign governance is one of the key chal­lenges in the construction of global security for the twenty-first century.