The Future of Democracy: Could It Be A Matter of Scale?

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Philippe C. Schmitter

ONE element that may well determine the future of democracy is whether its institutions will prove themselves capable of adapting to changes in the scale of economic, social, and cultural relations. Recent decades have witnessed some dramatic and unprecedented transformations in how individuals and groups organize their systems of production, interact and communicate with each other and identify the collectivities to which they belong. Moreover, contrary to the basic model that has so long been dominant in our theorizing about these matters, these scalar relationships are not coincident--either territorially or functionally. Increasingly, the scales of production, reproduction, communication, identity, and authority are different. They overlap in very complex ways that do not reinforce each other and produce a distinctive national society. Hence, it is becoming very difficult to govern these relations in any predictable fashion--least of all, one that is accountable to the preferences of the citizenry.(1)

Democracy has always had a peculiar relationship with scale. For a long time, it was considered to be appropriate only for very small, spatially compact and economically self-sufficient units. Subsequent "inventions" in voting procedures, representation, federalism, mass enfranchisement, proportionality, subsidiarity, checks and balances, devolution of powers, separation of public and private spheres, property and civil rights, etc. all helped to break this barrier and make a thoroughly transformed practice of democracy compatible with much larger and more interdependent units.

These inventions, however, strengthened not weakened one very central feature of "enlarged democracies"--namely, their relation to the sovereign national state (SNS). So much so that innumerable authors have argued that modern-liberal-political democracy is only possible within the confines of that very peculiar political unit.(2) Sub-national and supra-national units, whatever their size, complexity or salience, can never be "truly" democratic. Either they are too dependent upon a SNS to make decisions relative to the preferences of their citizens or they are too subject to the need for unanimous agreement among their SNS members. In short, virtually all theories of democracy presumed a significant degree of autonomy and a significant communality of identity on the part of those empowered to make decisions binding on everyone and that was only thought to be possible within the confines of the SNS.(3)

One glaring weakness of this postulate is the complete absence of any democratic theory of what constitutes a legitimate SNS--not to mention, any theory about how one might be democratically produced. For the existing SNS units are not only very disparate in size and capability. Virtually none of them has come into being through a process involving widespread citizen consultation and explicit consent. Certainly in Europe, where this type of political unit originated, the SNS has been much more the product of civil and international wars or dynastic accidents and marriages than anything resembling democratic collective choice. Most of its SNS existed before democracy was even a possibility and in the few recent cases where new ones have been created after democracy was available for this purpose, its procedures were not used.(4)

As for those parts of the world that were on the receiving end of Euro-centric stateness, they usually had to struggle by force of arms against these imperial powers in order to acquire their own stateness, and this was hardly conducive to democracy during or after national liberation.(5)

The Health and Well-Being of the Sovereign National State

All of this ties the future of democracy firmly to the future health and well-being of the sovereign national state. Needless to say, this is most problematic where the SNS involved is of recent vintage, having been carved out of the collapse of a multi-national empire, and where its assertion of coincident authority comes simultaneous with its effort at democratization. The future of these neo-democracies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is, first and foremost, contingent upon their inhabitants reaching an agreement upon a common identity and territory. Only once they have decided (usually non-democratically) where the borders should run and who is entitled to be a national citizen, can they expect to get on with the business of deciding how these citizens can cooperate and compete to hold their rulers accountable within a given national space. Fortunately, most of the neo-democracies in Southern Europe, Latin America and Asia had inherited an acceptable common identity and territory and were able to concentrate initially on coming up with a mutually acceptable set of rules.(6)

Elsewhere, when asked to comment upon the future of democracy, I argued that, far from being as secure and unchallenged as suggested by Francis Fukuyama, it was more likely to "increasingly tumultuous, uncertain and eventful" (Schmitter, 1997). Moreover, I ventured the unfashionably Euro-centric opinion that most of these future challenges will come from within the more established liberal democracies rather than from the fledgling neo-democracies. With few exceptions, the latter are "condemned" for the immediate future to remain democratic whatever their performance or level of citizen satisfaction, given the absence of any credible rival form of autocracy. And, even if some of them do fail and revert to the status quo ante, they are only likely to have a local effect.