Democracy's Trojan horse

National Interest, The, Summer, 2004 by John Fonte

JUST BEFORE the new century began, Marc Plattner, co-editor of the influential Journal of Democracy, wrote of the brave new globalized world coming into existence:

   A borderless world is unlikely to be a
   democratic one. For while the idea of "world
   citizenship" may sound appealing in theory,
   it is very hard to imagine it working successfully
   in practice, Indeed, some aspects of
   globalization, "point to a long range danger
   to democracy."

While Plattner is uneasy about these developments, other observers, such as Strobe Talbott, largely discount the risks. An entire industry of transnational agencies and non-governmental organizations is pushing forward changes designed either to deny or override the national sovereignty of democratic states against surprisingly muted or inchoate opposition. Taken together, these changes amount to a serious political and intellectual challenge to democratic sovereignty vested in the liberal democratic nation-state.

It is a distinctly new challenge. Until now, democrats have faced two major opponents: pre-democrats and anti-democrats. The pre-democrats, adherents of some form of ancien regime (of throne, altar, tribe or clan), have been mostly vanquished over the past several hundred years. Since 1917 three anti-democratic ideologies have presented an alternative vision to liberal democracy: first Nazism/fascism, then communism, and today militant Islam or Islamism.

The radical Islamist threat is both deadly and serious, and it could last for a considerable period of time. Islamists might gain powerful weapons and thereby cause much death and destruction. Nevertheless, it is in the highest degree unlikely that they will in the end conquer liberal democracy.

Yet the 21st century could well turn out to be not the democratic century, but the "post-democratic" century--the century in which liberal democracy as we know it is slowly, almost imperceptibly, replaced by a new form of global governance.

The ideology and institutions already exist in embryonic form and are developing rapidly. The philosophical basis for global governance begins with the premise that all individuals on the planet possess human rights. International law is the paramount authority that determines those rights, while international agreements establish and expand new rights and norms. International institutions (for example, the UN, the International Criminal Court and the World Bank) monitor, adjudicate, negotiate, cajole and administer the international agreements and laws in varying degrees. International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claim to represent "global civil society", or the "peoples" of the planet. And the NG0s work with international institutions and participate in international conferences helping develop the new norms for global governance. Moreover, global governance is not really "international", but "transnational" in the sense that it is not concerned strictly with relations between nations, but with political arrangements above and beyond nation-states. Indeed, it could also be described as "post-international."

The global governance regime is promoted and run by complimentary and interlocking networks of transnational (mostly Western) elites including international lawyers, international judges, NGO activists, UN and other international organization officials, global corporate leaders, and some sympathetic officials and bureaucrats from nation-states. These transnational elites are, for the most part, ideologically compatible. They could be described as "transnational progressives" (many are "Sixty-Fighters") supporting what they perceive as "progressive" causes across national boundaries (that is, supporting the "other", the oppressed, minorities and opposing the death penalty, unilateral military action by the United States, and so on). (1) Denationalized corporate elites who are non-ideological, but seek economic advantage, often have a symbiotic relationship with the transnational progressives. Global governance is not to be confused with world government. Nation-states (both democratic and undemocratic) continue to exist, but their authority is increasingly circumscribed by the growing strength of the global institutions, laws, rules, networks and ideological norms noted above.

Unlike democratic sovereignty, global governance can provide no straightforward answers to the most important questions of political science (Who governs?, Where does authority reside? How is legislation enacted?). In a democracy, authority resides in a self-constituted people ("government by consent of the governed"). These self-governing people choose their rulers through elections and can replace them if they are not responsive to the people. The people limit the power of rulers through a constitution and basic laws. Bad laws can be changed by elected national legislatures.

In theory, human rights and international law are the moral basis for the global governance regime, but both of these concepts are fluid, porous and constantly "evolving." They are, at any given moment, what transnational elites tell us they are. NGOs participate in the writing of global treaties alongside democratic and non-democratic governments, but they are essentially pressure groups, elected by no one and responsible only to themselves. Nor are the other elites, the international lawyers, judges, activists and officials who participate in the global governance system responsible or accountable to any self-governing "people." How can these rulers be replaced? How can "the governed" repeal bad laws and regulations that their "governors" have imposed upon them? Global governance provides no democratic answers to these questions.