Building Global Democracy

This two-part paper discusses developments at the beginning of the 21st century, using the comparative world-systems perspective to see disturbing similarities, and important differences, between what happened during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century and what seems to be happening in the early 21st. We then use this perspective to consider possible scenarios for the next several decades. In Part One, published in the preceding issue, we considered the major challenges of massive global inequalities, ecological degradation, and a failed system of global governance in the wake of US hegemonic decline. In Part Two that follows, we discuss the major structural alternatives for the trajectory of the world-system during the 21st century, positing three basic scenarios: (1) another round of US economic hegemony based on comparative advantage in new lead industries and another round of US political hegemony-instead of supremacy; (2) collapse: interstate rivalry, deglobalisation, financial and economic collapse, ecological disaster, resource wars, and deadly epidemic diseases; and (3) capable, democratic, multilateral and legitimate global governance strongly supported by progressive transnational social movements and global parties, semiperipheral democratic socialist regimes, and important movements and parties in the core and the periphery.

It critically assesses the European Union's (EU's) almost messianic mission to promote its successful project of liberal democracy, and the ways in which the EU seeks to teach others about its meaning while refusing to aspect learn about alternative forms of political organisation in different contexts. It discusses the implications of such a narrow framing of EU conceptions of liberal democracy, drawing on extensive fieldwork carried out in Palestine and Egypt in September 2007 and March 2008, respectively. The article argues for a new framing of political transformation in the Middle East. It concludes by employing Aletta Norval's notion of aversive democracy to highlight the need for recognition of crucial aspects of political change that stem from what is emerging in the Middle East.

When faced with speculative pressure on their currencies, policymakers often delay devaluations by spending billions of dollars in defense of a given exchange rate peg, only to succumb and devalue their currency later on. Using a political economy approach we argue that the interaction of distributional concerns, cognitive limitations, time-consistency problems, and institutional structures can keep governments from implementing the economically optimal policy response. We argue that distributional concerns often lead to a 'bias' in favor of currency defense as long as market pressures are mild. The political incentives to initially delay devaluations can be exacerbated by institutions that either increase the size of interest groups vulnerable to depreciation or give policymakers incentives to adopt a short time-horizon. Once market pressure becomes strong, however, the politically salient alternative to not depreciating becomes raising interest rates rather than just running down reserves. This acts as a wake-up call that changes perceptions of the underlying distributional considerations and hence the political trade-off between the costs and benefits of an exchange rate defense. As the coalition of devaluation-proponents grows, the likelihood of a devaluation increases. We illustrate our argument by discussing the salient distributional issues and their interaction with domestic institutions in four brief case studies.

Notwithstanding the challenges of poverty and a political economy of underdevelopment, the post-colonial State in the Commonwealth Caribbean has been able to sustain a consistent record of commitment to democracy, 'free and fair' elections and open party electoral competition. However, the dominant view that the Caribbean represents an oasis of democratic stability in the developing world has suffered irreparable damage given widespread corruption, institutional inertia, open challenge to the State and clear structural deficiencies even while elections are conducted in an atmosphere of seeming freeness and fairness. It is clear therefore that democracy is under challenge in the region and that inadequate attention has been paid to bolstering its democratic content. However, recent decisions by the judicial system against sitting prime ministers and governments portend well for the overall health of democracy in the region in spite of its numerous challenges. Further, democratic consolidation is evident given the efforts that have been made to correct some of the democratic deficits.

Is Chinese "soft power" really transforming the world? Joshua Kurlantzick and Yale University Press provide us with a neat, definitive answer: yes. In 2007, Kurlantzick published a book entitled Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transformingthe World. Looking closely at the period from approximately 1999 to 2006 (virtually all his sources were published during those years), Kurlantzick makes the following case. The prestige of the United States and its relations with China were not going well. There was the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, followed by an unpopular war in Iraq launched by an increasingly unpopular U.S. president (George Bush). The glory days of the Clinton presidency were over. With respect to Sino-American bilateral relations, there was the U.S. missile strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and then the nasty spy plane incident off the coast of Hainan in 2001. At approximately the same time, China was becoming an extremely important world economic force. For the first time in its modern history, China was a major actor in international relations and had plenty of money to spend on upgrading its global prestige and influence. "Since most economists," Kurlantzick asserted, "project that China's economy will continue to expand between 7 and 10 percent per year, Beijing can continue its rapid growth in trade" (p. 94).

Despite its increasing importance in contemporary political philosophy and its central role in international human rights law, there has been significant resistance among political theorists and philosophers to the idea that there is a moral human right to democracy. In John Rawls's late political philosophy of international justice and in the views of many who are sympathetic to his position, the idea that there is a moral human right to democracy is vigorously rejected.1 Other major recent treatments of human rights have either rejected the human right to democracy or shied away from making arguments one way or the other.2 One key concern animating the opposition to a moral human right to democracy is that the assertion of such a right in international society conflicts with the rights of peoples to collective self-determination. Some peoples, it is asserted, reject democracy or the equality on which it is founded, and because of this rejection, the recognition of a human right to democracy imposes on them a set of norms alien to their political cultures. Another concern, articulated in popular writings, is that new democracies often violate the basic moral rights of citizens. This worry about a tyranny of the majority suggests a strong conflict between democracy and other basic rights.

Free trade agreements (FTAs) have become an essential part of the corporate effort to establish a global infrastructure suitable to its contemporary accumulation dynamics. Because they establish and reinforce patterns of economic activity that are destructive of majority interests, they should be opposed. This article scrutinizes one agreement: the Korea-U.S. FTA. It examines the motivations that led to its negotiation, the content of the agreement, and the arguments U.S. government officials and institutions have made in support of its ratification. It concludes with a critical evaluation of the efforts of U.S. and Korean opponents of its ratification and a call for a new organizing strategy.

"By the end of Russia's regime transition to democracy (1991-2001), Russia displayed a mosaic of different sub-national regimes. A number of economic, social, and cultural factors have been investigated to explain how the sub-national regime transitions produced such heterogeneous results. This article intends to contribute to the debate by focusing on the role of the European Union (EU) in the democratic regime transition in the regions of Russia and, in this context, explores the international dimension of sub-national regimes. The main question raised in this article is what was the role of the EU, if any, in the formation of different outcomes of sub-national regime transitions? The analysis is based on a quantitative study that is combined with a number of interviews assessing the EU's impact on sub-national regime formation in Russia during the period of regime transition. The article explores the international dimension in sub-national regime change in Russia while controlling for a number of social, economic, and cultural variables. It argues that the EU has indeed contributed to the process of democratization in the regions of Russia. The approach developed in this article arguably has implications for both area studies and studies of democratization"

"As patterns of global governance have undergone significant changes over time, there is a need for new theoretical concepts that are less oriented towards formal hierarchies and give more emphasis to social processes. A framework, however, that takes account of complex interactions and tangling relations bears the danger of losing analytical power. The article addresses the question of the extent to which complexity theory can overcome this problem by combining scientific rigour with contextual sensitivity. A dynamic mechanistic approach is explored that addresses the underlying processes that generate new collective patterns based on changed actor constellations and relational orders. An activator-inhibitor interaction model is introduced as a framework for analysing the multi-level processes that drive international change, using the example of climate protection. Global governance is theorized as it grows within the system fleshing out a new logic of collective action based on decentralization and clustering."

The privatization of war-making - especially in regard to the waging of the war on terror - is well documented, but there are other emerging markets for the burgeoning 'private security industry'. In fact, the war on drugs represents one of the most potentially lucrative market opportunities for what has been called the 'narco-carceral complex', an industry that is uniquely positioned to profit from the drug war, and is financially self-interested in the perpetuation of this war. This is consistent with the 'disaster capitalism complex', itself an extension of Eisenhower's 'militaryindustrial complex'. Add to this the sociological notion of 'moral panic', especially concerning the role of the press and the promotion of fear as a useful tool in the overall militarized response to the 'crisis', and there exists a situation that has potentially disastrous consequences for those who are not standing to gain by the perpetuation of the wars on terror and drugs as for-profit endeavors.

Counter-terrorist internment is generally rejected as illegitimate from a human rights perspective. However, while the practice of counter-terrorist internment has long resulted in the infringement of human rights, this article argues that the concept of internment holds some potential for legitimacy. This potential can only be realized if four legitimacy factors are fully embraced and complied with: public justificatory deliberation, non-discrimination, meaningful review, and effective temporal limitation. Outlining these factors, this article imagines a system of internment that is legitimate from a human rights perspective and can serve both real and pressing security needs, and rights-based legitimacy needs.

There have been several cross-national studies published in the world polity theoretical tradition that demonstrate the beneficial impact of international nongovernmental organizations. However, these studies neglect the role of domestic nongovernmental organizations. We address this gap in the literature by conducting a cross-national study that considers the impact of both international and domestic nongovernmental organizations on deforestation. We use data from a sample of 60 nations for the period of 1990 to 2005 . We find substantial support for the world polity theory that higher levels of both types of nongovernmental organizations are associated with lower rates of deforestation. We expand the analysis to test a political opportunity structure hypothesis that democracy enhances the ability of nongovernmental organizations to deal with the causes of forest loss. In doing so, we find that international and domestic nongovernmental organizations tend to decrease forest loss more in democratic rather than in repressive nations.

This paper considers what happens in advanced industrial economies like that of the US, where traditional redistributive economic policies and programs have fallen out of favor, yet forces of crisis, which radicals once predicted would usher in a new, more egalitarian and democratic era, are well attenuated. It is argued that, paradoxically, as the growth potential of corporate capitalism declines and traditional redistributive mechanisms weaken, new spaces are opening up in which new, democratized forms of ownership and control of wealth are slowly emerging. After describing these developments, the paper explores the long-run possibilities and prospects their evolution may entail.

"Scepticism about the possibility of a democratically governed global polity is often rooted in beliefs about 'necessary conditions'. Some democracy scholars consider a transition to global democracy to be incompatible with necessary conditions for democratic governance, while some International Relations scholars consider it to be incompatible with necessary conditions for international structural change. This article assesses hypotheses and evidence about democratic transitions within states and transformations in the interaction among states and concludes that arguments based on necessary conditions are not compelling. This suggests that global democracy may be unlikely but it is not impossible."

"Jakob Vestergaard has produced one of the most telling analyses of the international financial architecture by deploying a broadly Foucauldian framework that invokes a novel description of neo-liberal governance, one organized around discipline, conditional exceptions and the pursuit of a 'proper economy'. This review both welcomes but challenges some of Vestergaard's analysis. In so doing it explores further the paradoxes of liberalism and the fate of sovereignty in the current international context."

"The purpose of this article is to critically interrogate, from a feminist perspective, the manner in which the politics of dissent, in general, and the collective practices that constitute it, in particular, have been portrayed and conceptualized within the field of social movement theory (SMT). To this end, the first part of the article offers a brief sketch of Political Process Theory, one of the most well-established conceptual frameworks within the field, before moving on to examine its impact on prevailing depictions of the 'global justice movement', often taken as the exemplar of contemporary dissent in this field of study. The second part then goes on to develop a critical review of this narrative, along with the theoretical commitments that sustain it, based on field research into the collective practices of feminist anti-globalization activists. Turning to feminist scholarship for help, the article concludes by elaborating on an alternative way of conceptualizing what activists do and how they do it."

"Post-conflict peacebuilding is failing, according to both its critics and its advocates. By way of solutions, proponents seek more of the same, whereas opponents argue for a radical shift. Both contain parts of a possible solution to the lack of local legitimacy that stigmatizes interventions, many of which descend into violence within five years and few of which produce democracies. This article advances the idea of a 'popular peace' that refocuses liberal institution-building upon local, democratically determined priorities deriving from 'everyday lives', in addition to internationally favoured preferences (such as metropolitan courts and bureaucratic government). This is hypothesized to better confront the prevailing legitimacy lacuna, create social institutions around which a contract can evolve and generate the foundations upon which durable peacebuilding may grow."

"The nature of political power has changed with the advent of modern information technology while our theories and metaphors to understand it remain wedded to earlier periods. This article begins with a discussion of some of the work done by databases in domestic and world politics. In particular, it introduces the political effects of contemporary data-management practices through short examples of terrorist information databases, the 2008 Obama campaign's database, as well as biometric databases deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia. This leads to a consideration of the finite applicability and relevance of the widespread metaphor of the Panopticon to these kinds of cases. Given the limitations of such an image, the concept of digital power and the political metaphor of Cuntz's Tower are proposed. Digital power foregrounds the importance of machines for contemporary sovereignty while moving beyond ocular-centric notions of surveillance. Cuntz's Tower illustrates the power of identification and sorting in addition to the Panopticon's emphasis on self-discipline. This article acts as an initial ground-clearing exercise for more extensive analyses of databases in domestic and world politics."

"Why, at the end of the 20th century, should capital markets have served to transfer resources from emerging markets to those which are more developed? Mr. Bernanke's interpretation-that the global imbalances reflected a Savings Glut in the East fueled by fear of financial crisis-has been challenged for neglecting dis-saving in the West. As we show, these contrasting perspectives can be combined in a stochastic two period, two bloc model: one bloc, the "East," has a precautionary saving incentive due to future income uncertainty, while the other, the "West," experiences a bubble and, because it smoothes consumption, runs a current account deficit. The tractable global model we use, which relaxes the conventional assumptions of a representative agent and unbiased expectations, shows how a significant resource transfer can be effected with relatively small changes in global interest rates."

"Several scholars argue that systemic global trends are pulling individuals not only upward toward the global level, but also downward to the local level; the result is a potential loss of authority for the state ( Ferguson and Mansbach 2004 32. Ferguson , Yale H. and Richard , W. Mansbach . 2004 . Remapping Global Politics: History's Revenge and Future Shock , Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . [CrossRef] View all references ; Rosenau 1990 82. Rosenau , James N. 1990 . Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity , Princeton : Princeton University Press . View all references ). Their theory of "fragmegration" can provide a causal mechanism for why longstanding grievances may erupt into civil war at a particular time. While increased global exposure does provide both states and individual citizens with tremendous benefits, sudden "shocks" of globalization can overwhelm a state's capacity to offset the negative impacts of globalization, thus weakening a state's capacity to deal with rival polities for the allegiance of its citizens. The present study conducts a cross-sectional logistic regression with discrete duration analysis to test the impact of globalization shocks on the onset of civil wars between the years 1970-1999. The results demonstrate that increasingly dramatic changes in the level of global integration are associated with an increased risk of civil war onset."