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Democratising the global order: from communicative freedom to communicative power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2010

JAMES BOHMAN
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Abstract

While there is much discussion of the need for democracy in transnational institutions, there is less discussion of the conditions for their democratisation. To address this deficit, a general account of democratisation is necessary. I propose that democratisation is dependent on the joint realisation of two conditions: communicative freedom and communicative power. Democratisation thus requires, first, publics and associations in which communicative freedom is realised on the one hand; and, second, institutions that link such freedom to the exercise of communicative power to decision making on the other. In order for these conditions to be met, civil society must be expanded into the public sphere. The transformation of communicative freedom into communicative power can be promoted only by institutions that recognise the decisional status of publics, which in turn depend on civil society to generate the deliberative benefits of the plurality of perspectives. Communicative power is not merely spontaneously generated through publics, but also through publics expressly formed through democratic institutional design.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 431 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

1 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), pp. 296–7.

3 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and (ed.), M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), section 6.3. See also Otfried Höffe, Kant's Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.

4 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Vol. I, p. 241.

5 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in H. Reiss (ed.), Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 119.

6 Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 38.

7 Regimes in this sense are ‘sets of implicit and explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors' expectations converge in a given area of international relations.’ See Stephen Krasner, ‘Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables’, in S. Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 2.

8 Molly Cochran, ‘The Normative Power of International Publics: The Case of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1919–1925’, American Political Science Association 2008 Annual Meeting, pp. 3–4.

9 See Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 164.

10 See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

11 Peter Smith and Elizabeth Symthe, ‘Globalization, Citizenship and Technology: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment Meets the Internet’, in F. Webster (ed.), Culture and Politics in the Information Age (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 183.

12 See Bina Agarwal, ‘Conceptualizing Environmental Collective Action: Why Gender Matters’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 24 (2001), pp. 283–310.

13 Randall Germain, ‘Financial Governance and Transnational Deliberative Democracy’, Review of International Studies, 36:2 (April 2010).

14 For an analysis of these phenomena, see Brooke Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Part I.

15 See Alison Jaggar, ‘Arenas of Citizenship: Civil Society, State and the Global Order’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7 (2005), pp. 3–26.

16 Neera Chanhoke, ‘How Global is Global Civil Society?’, Journal of World-Systems Research (2005), pp. 355–71.

17 See Archon Fung, ‘Recipes for Public Spheres’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 3 (2003), pp. 338–67.

18 For an argument that the principle of institutional differentiation (rather than subsidiarity) promotes optimal deliberation, see James Bohman, Democracy across Borders (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), ch. 4.

19 Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel, ‘The Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism’, Columbia Law Review, 98 (1998), p. 292.

20 See Charles Sabel and Joshua Cohen, ‘Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy’, in Private Governance, Democratic Constitutionalism and Supranationalism (Florence: European Commission, 1998), pp. 3–30. For a more direct application to the EU, see Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, ‘Sovereignty and Solidarity: EU and US’, in J. Zeitlin and D. Trubek (eds), Governing Work and Welfare in the New Economy: European and American Experiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). My description of the OMC as a deliberative procedure owes much to their account.

21 Charles Sabel, ‘Constitutional Orders: Trust Building and Response to Change’, in J. R. Hollingsworth and R. Boyer (eds), Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 159.

22 Joseph Weiler points to the case of Gayusuz versus Austria that went to the European Court of Human Rights and led to the extension of social security benefits to third country nationals (p. 719). See Weiler, ‘An “Ever Closer Union” in Need of a Human Rights Policy’, European Journal of International Law, 9 (1998), pp. 658–723.

23 On the democratising role of the EU with respect to human rights, see Jonathan Bowman, ‘The European Union's Democratic Deficit: Federalists, Skeptics’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5 (2006), pp. 191–212. On the rights of immigrants to political participation in the EU on republican grounds, see Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 238–9.

24 See John Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p. vii.