(DOWNLOAD) "Global Democratization: Soup, Society, Or System?(Essay)" by Ethics&International Affairs " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Global Democratization: Soup, Society, Or System?(Essay)
- Author : Ethics&International Affairs
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 297 KB
Description
The prospects for global democracy are starting to receive serious attention from scholars and political reformers alike. Working on the premise that global electoral democracy is not feasible, I will identify and compare three emerging ways of thinking about democracy in global politics--ways that I refer to as a soup, a society, and a system. Briefly, a soup refers to the proliferation of democratic practices within existing patterns of international politics; a society has a set of constitutive norms and discourses that might be more or less democratic in their content, production, evolution, and interchange; and a system is composed of differentiated and ordered components linked to the production of collective outcomes, and might therefore seem the obvious objective when it comes to democratic innovation in international politics. However, system is not necessarily a higher-order concept than society, because it may lack the depth of shared understanding and degree of solidarity that "society" can connote. And sometimes the requirements of a system may be so at variance with existing practices that it is more feasible to think in terms of soup or society. Soup, society, and system are basically frames for the interpretation and evaluation of practices (ranging from transnational social movement activism to international negotiations, to the operation of networks, to the decisions of states). But they also contain the seeds of programs for future democratic development. Robert Keohane points out that "the conditions for electoral democracy ... do not exist on a global level," but this only means that "rather than abandoning democracy, we should rethink our ambitions." (1) Fortunately, contemporary democratic thinking is not tied exclusively to elections, and much of it emphasizes instead a communicative aspect of democracy. This paper therefore undertakes analysis rooted in the communicative and, in particular, deliberative aspects of democracy, within which legitimacy is sought through the participation of those affected by a collective decision (or their representatives) in consequential deliberation about that decision. A deliberative orientation sharpens productive understandings of what both "society" and "system" can mean in global politics, in the form of a deliberative society and a deliberative system.