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

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Philippe C. Schmitter

Whereas, established democracies in Europe and North America--precisely because they can no longer blame their deficiencies on the threat of a systemic rival and because their populations are much more deeply imbued with normative expectations about how democracy should perform--are much more likely to be challenged in their existing practices. My hunch is that, once this contestation begins in earnest, it will focus on the distinctively "liberal" components of these "real-existing" democracies:

1. their exclusive emphasis on the individual citizen and on individualism, substantive and procedural as well as methodological;

2. their commitment to voluntarism in the form and content of political participation, as well as in the recruitment of politicians;

3. their fixation with territorial representation and partisan competition for providing the only legitimate links between citizen and state;

4. their indifference to persistent and systemic inequalities in both the distribution of benefits and the representation of interests.

5. their confinement to the bounds of national state institutions as well as liberalism's (tacit) complicity with nationalism.

In this article, it is the fifth component that concerns me. Put bluntly, if the future well-being of liberal democracy depends on the future well-being of the sovereign national state in strictu sensu, then it is in deep trouble.

No need to panic however. As Robert Dahl has argued so cogently, democracy has already gone through several revolutions in practice, often without its proponents being fully conscious of doing so (Dahl, 1989; Downs, 1987). All it will take this time are sufficient pressures from below in the form of an institutional crisis and adequate "politicological" imagination from above to come up with new rules and to disguise them behind old norms.

The Specter of Globalization

If there is one slogan that (almost) everyone seems to have hit upon to comprehend the opportunities and threats posed by these discordant and disrhythmic changes in the scale of production, reproduction, communication, identity and authority, it is globalization. Politicians and scholars, active citizens and passive spectators, foreigners and natives all invoke its omnipresence and omnipotence when trying to make sense out of the multitude of uncertainties that surround them.(7) Its impact seems profoundly ambivalent. To some, it offers an unprecedented opportunity to expand systems of governance and accountability beyond the confines of the national state; to others, the threat must be met with a reinforcement of the protection and exclusion offered by national democracy.

We are told that, by its nature, the impact of globalization is systemic and, hence, mediated through all sorts of more familiar processes and interactions. To invert the famous phrase of de Lampedusa: "much seems to remain the same, but is really changing." One can sense its presence behind many concrete manifestations, but cannot measure it independently or separate out its discrete effects. Even worse, globalization might not even exist in any material sense, but if enough people (and, especially, enough highly placed and resourceful people) believe that it is present and potent, then, it will produce a significant effect by anticipated reaction. For example, a given firm may actually face steeply rising costs if it moves abroad and have no intention of doing so, but if it can convince its interlocutors that the threat to do so is credible, globalization will have had its impact. Or, a given government may claim that it has to follow some unpopular policy because international markets demand it--whether or not it might have wished to do so for quite other reasons. At its most extreme, the mere specter of globalization is enough to convince the citizenry that "their" democracy has no choice and that "their" collective action in favor of another policy will only be futile or counterproductive.