Vol. Special Feature: for Better or Worse 77 2012

Democracy's Global Future

By Melissa S. Williams

I. Democracy's Current Predicament Two decades ago-- after the wave of transitions from to democracy in Latin America; after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union; after the fall of apartheid in South Africa -- it was possible to tell a triumphal story about democracy's global future. The horrors of the twentieth century had taught humanity that the only decent and sustainable form of political organization was a constitutionally limited, democratically accountable state, governed by the rule of law, based on a market economy, its social conflicts channeled through the orderly competition of organized political parties. This, as Francis Fukuyama boldly declared, was the "end of history;" it was only a matter of time until, country by country, region by region, human societies arrived at their proper destination. At one level, the story still seems plausible. Around the world, surveys show that most ordinary people have a positive attitude toward democracy and think it is a better form of government than the alternatives. Many of the most autocratic regimes drape the mantle of democracy over their claims to authority, and put on some show of popular elections. The power of the word "democracy," we might think, will eventually produce demands from the people that their governments live up to the label. The popular overthrow of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt gave new notice to autocrats everywhere that sham democracy may not be enough to secure their hold on power.In Burma, the regime's imperfect step toward free and fair elections last April helped redeemAung San SuuKyi's courageous perseverance in democracy's cause, as apartheid's end redeemed Mandela's sacrifice, and the British departure from India redeemed Gandhi's. But even as we celebratedemocracy's progress in displacing tyranny, we should also hope that Western in their current state do notmark the end-point of this process. Over the last forty years, there has been a clear decline in voter turnout in most established democracies, reflecting citizens' disaffection with the formal institutionsof representative government. Some of this disaffection with modern democracy is understandable. Today, 's promise of social mobility is no longer believable.Since the 1980s, income inequality in many advanced democracies has grown to staggering levels. In the United States, inequality is as severe now as it was in the first decades of the 20th century. Middle class parents can now expect their children to be worse off than themselves, and the middle class itself is shrinking across advanced industrial democracies. As is particularly clear in the American case, where no one bothers anymore to deny the influence of money on elections, unequal wealth translates directly into unequal political power. Meanwhile, the global financial crisis has worsened national debt loads, and tax cuts for the wealthy are held in place as austerity measures dismantle the welfare state. In Europe, sovereign debt crises hollow out national democracies' capacity to respond to rising unemployment, while European institutions, still too weak to frame a common fiscal policy, remain in democratic deficit. The ongoing Eurozone crisis highlights democracy's larger predicament in the current era of transnational and global interdependence: the collective challenges we face do not map onto the democratic institutions we have. Under circumstances of economic globalization, states have limited capacities to control their own social, economic and environmental conditions. Long before the 2008 financial crisis, many democratic states joined the "race to the bottom," hollowing out their welfare states in the name of maintaining their economic competitiveness in a globalized economy. Global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have tremendous power to set the parameters for domestic economic policies. The environmental consequences of rapid global economic development over the last several decades, including climate change, do not respect state borders, even where there is a democratic will to pay the economic costs of addressing them. International labor migration and refugee flows challenge states' capacities to control their own populations. In sum, globalization disempowers sovereign democratic citizenries by moving fundamental choices about their social, economic and political systems well beyond their reach. Globalization generates unprecedented challenges of human living-together - new forms of human vulnerability in the forms of scarcity, risk, exploitation and inequality - without simultaneously generating the institutionalized channels through which people can mobilize to exert control over their circumstances. If every state on the planet were to become a full-fledged constitutional democracy, democracy's global future might still fail toshine. In an international system of sovereign states, powerful states set the rules of the game for the institutions that shape the global economy and constrain the options that weaker states can pursue. Democratic states tend not to go to war with each other, it is true; but that does not mean that they do not seek to dominate one another economically. And since even powerful states cannot wholly control the flow of international financial and investment capital, or easily capture tax revenues from these sources, a future in which all states are democratic would not necessarily lessen economic elites' influence over political decisions. In a world of democratic states, the world as a whole would still be profoundly unequal. One answer to this conundrum is to create global institutions capable of regulating the global economy, the global environment, and global population flows, and to make them democratic. This is the dream of cosmopolitan democracy. For some, the dream is a nightmare, as it would require a world state with such high concentrations of power that it would as readily become a global tyranny as a global democracy. Cosmopolitans respond that democratized global institutions do not necessarily entail a state-like structure at the global level. Rather, they would formalize the redistribution of some of the state's sovereign powers to multiple orders of international and transnational organization while keeping other powers strong at the level of the state. In fact, this process is already under way in some domains of international law. The International Criminal Court, for example, embodies the international agreement that sovereign power is not a license for governments to commit gross human rights violations within their borders.Cosmopolitan democracy would require the radical reform of the international institutions we already have, as well as the creation of new ones. It would require abolishing permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, for example. It might require a directly elected World Parliament, perhaps as a new chamber within the UN. It would entail democratizingglobal financial institutions, in the first instance by ensuring that poorer nationsare fairly represented in their decision making bodies. Some reforms would targetregional and transnational institutions such as the European Union and ASEAN, making them more accountable to the peoplemost affected by their decisions. Cosmopolitan democracy comes under two main lines of attack. The first is that it is simply unrealistic. In the current international system, states hold the power and they will not willingly give it up. We can see this very clearly from the conduct of powerful states in the current international order. The United States has repeatedly refused to join major international agreements that would limit its sovereign power, including the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and, until very late in the day, the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It goes beyond wishful thinking to expect that the United States, or China for that matter, will ever voluntarily relinquish its permanent veto in the Security Council. The second line of criticism cuts into the very idea of global democracy. Since there is not a global demos, a world-wide "imagined community" (to borrow Benedict Anderson's famous phrase), there can be no global demokratia, rule by the people. Humanity is so deeply divided by differences of language and culture, critics argue, that it would be meaningless or absurd to create global institutions for democratic accountability. There are also problems of scale. How strongly would individuals be attached to a democracy that gave them one seven-billionth of an influence over political decisions? These difficulties are already visible in Europe, where turnout for European elections is lower than in national elections and has steadily declined over the years. Cosmopolitan democracy without a global demos would be a top-down initiative with little practical meaning for the great mass of human beings to whom it gave a nominal vote. Given the realities of globalization, a global future for democracy -- one which is both feasible and appealing, at least -- does not lie simply in the spread of democratic government across nation-states, or simply in the democratization of global and transnational institutions. Over the long run, both of these dimensions of global democratization are necessary for democracy to have a meaningful global future. But neither maps out the path from where we are now to a world in which those who wield political power are accountable to those whom it affects. Instead, the pathway toward democracy's most promising global future wends its waythrough the spaces in between the national and the global, in transnational flows of democratic energy that mirror the transnational structures of global economic and political power and call them to account. This pathway cannot yetbe mapped. It is being forged by millions of individual citizens around the world as they deploy the same digital technologies that have sped economic globalization, while also exercising their traditional democratic freedoms of speech, association, and voting. Through their actions, they offer a glimpse of an "imagined community" on a global scale, one whose members remain deeply rooted in their own national political cultures but see their futures as tightly interlinked. They are, perhaps, early forerunners of a global demos. ＊ II. The Transnational Flow of the Democratic "No" In one image, a young man aims a slingshot at the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant, a David pitted against an industrial Goliath. In another, a Japanese woman wears an anti-pollution mask, one arm draped protectively over her pregnant belly. "OUR POWER CAN STOP THE NUCLEAR POWER," the first flyer reads. On the second, there is a medley of messages: "We are pregnant with fear of radiation." "Fukushima is everywhere." "We are the 99%" These were two of the flyers circulated on the internet to advertise a political demonstration on March 11, 2012, the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the tsunami it generated, and the ensuing meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant operated by TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. Demonstrators gathered at a city landmark and marched to another, four kilometers away. They carried a hand-made banner reading, "Sayonara Nukes," beat drums, blew on horns. "TEPCO 1%, We 99%," one placard blared in vivid yellow, red and black. The rally didn't take place in Tokyo, or Kyoto, or any other major Japanese city. It was in New York, co-organized by Japanese anti-nuclear activists and activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was one of dozens of demonstrations around the world expressing solidarity with the growing Japanese anti-nuclear movement on the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. In the months since the anniversary demonstrations, Japanese citizens' demands for public accountability following the Fukushima disaster have grown into a major movement to wean Japan from its reliance on nuclear energy. In July, when nuclear power production resumed after a post-crisis shutdown, an estimated 170,000 Japanese citizens protested in the streets of Tokyo, the largest demonstration in the last 50 years of Japanese democracy. Through their words and actions, the demonstrators affirm one key claim of the Diet's recent report on the disaster while disproving another. They agree that the disaster was a product of collusion between corporate producers, industry regulators, and government officials. But they angrily reject the report's conclusion that this collusion was not assignable to particular actors but was a product of a Japanese culture of "reflexive obedience, ... reluctance to question authority, ... devotion to 'sticking with the program,'...groupism, and ... insularity." Reflexive obedience and a reluctance to question authority are not obvious among the tens of thousands of Japanese citizens who have joined the demonstrations, or the millions who have signed a petition calling for the elimination of nuclear power in Japan. Some are now calling this movement a "Hydrangea Revolution." Like the plant's elegant clusters of many individual flowers, the movement unites citizens in a display of common purpose, blooming in June and July. Japan's protesters now join the democratic movements that have sprung up around the world since the December 2010, when Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest economic conditions and government brutality. His desperate act launched Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution," then the Egyptian Revolution, the first swellings of a waveof surprisingly non-violent pro-democracy movements across the Arabic-speaking world: the Arab Spring. In Europe, drawing inspiration from the Arab Spring, protests over the economic crisis in Portugal and in Spain broke out within a few months of the initial protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square. The links between these dispersed protests were often very explicit. In Spain, protesters in the movement named themselves "Los Indignados" ("the indignant"). They focused on the ever-shrinking economic prospects of the younger generation, declaring, "Somostodos Mohamed Bouazizi" ("We are all Mohamed Bouazizi"). Connecting Spanish austerity measures to Eurozone conditions for a Greek bailout, demonstrators in Madrid carried signs saying, "Be quiet, the Greeks are sleeping!" Greek protests erupted shortly afterward. Some protesters carried a banner reading, "We've woken up! What time is it? It's time they left!" Another sign said, "Be quiet! The French are sleeping!" By the fall of 2011, the spirit of democratic resistance had spread to the United States. Occupy Wall Street 's now-famous slogan, "We are the 99%," expressed disgust at the taxpayer-funded bailouts that sheltered financial elites from the subprime mortgage crisis they created, leaving intact the economic structures that have generated extremes of inequality that the United States has not seen since the Gilded Age. Renaming New York's Zucotti Park "Freedom Square" in honor of the Egyptian and Tunisian protesters (tahrirtranslates as "freedom"), Occupy protesters awakened a nation-wide frustration with social inequality and the capture of the political system by economic elites. Occupy encampments sprang up like mushrooms across the United States, Canada, Europe, and around the world. In 2012, the protests have continued, erupting in new forms and places. In Quebec, "le printempsd'erable" -- the "Maple Spring," a word play on "le printempsd'Arabe" -- erupted as students protested the provincial government's announcements of increases in university tuitions. These protests grew in reaction to government legislation restricting rights of public assembly, gaining sympathy across the country and internationally. In Mexico, the "primavera mexicana,"a movement also dubbed "#Yosoy132" after the Twitter hashtag used by protesters, continues to draw tens of thousands of citizens into the streets, demanding democratization of the political system and of the media. From the Jasmine Revolution to the Hydrangea Revolution, the protesters' targets for political reform have been local or national in scale. The Arab Spring aimed at replacing and with democratic institutions that would be more responsive to the people. European protests have focused on austerity measures and unemployment. Although its critics have admonished Occupy protesters for their lack of focus, the common thread of the protests has been the critique of an American social and political order in which the richest get richer and the rest get poorer. In Japan, the protests have gradually broadened out from their initial focus on public mismanagement of the disaster to failures of regulation, to collusion between government and industry, and now, increasingly, concerns over social inequality and to a more generalized lack of political responsiveness to public opinion. In Mexico, the focus is on the PRI's control over electoral processes and national media. While the movements' goals have been distinctive to their national contexts, their themes have also been remarkably constant across locations, demanding democratic accountability from political elites, criticizing the capture of political power by economic and technocratic elites, and expressing anger at growing inequality and dwindling opportunities for younger generations. The protests are addressed to economic and political elites at the local or national level, but they are simultaneously pitched on a global and transnational register. The ubiquitous Guy Fawkes masks that crop up in all the movements, nominally the symbol of the anarchist "Anonymous" movement, have come to symbolize a broader, more diffuse critique of the economic order that protesters commonly identify with the current form of global capitalism. Protesters explicitly cross-reference one another not only through these serious forms of political complaint, but also through the festive spirit of the demonstrations that energizes them and encourages wider public support. They are playful and creative, beginning with the names that resonate withone another in an ever-shifting echo: the Arab Spring becomes le printempsd'erable and la primavera mexicana; Los Indignados in Spain mirrors the KínimaAganaktisménonPolitón("indignant citizens' movement") in ; the Jasmine Revolution morphs into the Hydrangea Revolution. Serious and playful protest tactics have also diffused from site to site. Most of these movements have been explicit in upholding principles of nonviolence. In Montreal, thousands of people joined in the chorus of beating casseroles -- kitchen pots --in rhythm with one another, night after night, across the city's neighborhoods. A method of popular protest that has erupted from time to time in Spain, Argentina and Chile, the casseroles protest in Quebec inspired an artful music video that quickly went viral. In May and June of this year, solidarity demonstrations across Canada, and in New York and Berlin, featured pot-banging, and downloads of a casseroles iPhone app increased markedly in Quebec, the U.S. and Spain. Occupy Wall Street's "human microphone," a democratic innovation made necessary by New York City's requirement that groups get a permit to amplify sound in public space, had a surprisingly infectious appeal, and was taken up in Occupy demonstrations across the United States last fall. In the diffusion of the language and practices of new forms of democratic engagement, the movements give life to a new, horizontal, networked political imaginary that is, all at once, local, national and global. The interplay across democratic protest movements suggests a growing consciousness that the quality of democratic institutions at the national level is not just a function of political dynamics within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Globalization has to this point been mostly a function of the actions of increasingly globalized financial, economic, and political elites. With these new interconnected movements, a democratic "no" to decisions of these elites has also become globalized. ＊ III. Global Democracy Begins at Home More than a decade before the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, transnational social movements formed as a challenge to the power structures of globalized capitalism, particularly as organized through the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. One strand of these movements, the so-called "anti-globalization" movement, focused on declining unionization and the relocation of manufacturing jobs from the global North to Asia and the global South. These elements were prominent in the anti-WTO demonstrations in the "Battle in Seattle" of 1999, as well as in laterdemonstrations against the G8 and other gatherings of world political leaders. Another strand, commonly called the "alter-globalization" or "global justice" movement, focuses on the social impact of structural adjustment policies, the environmental impact of aggressive resource extraction, and the survival of indigenous cultures and economies in the global South. The latter is most clearly represented by a network of environmental, women's, labor, indigenous and other social movement organizations. Together, these form the World Social Forum, which first met in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and continues to meet annually as a counterpoint to the annual meeting of global economic elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland each January. The face-to-face and digital networks formed by the anti- and alter-globalization movementslaid much of the groundwork for the current wave of democratic protests. Many of the activists involved in the former have also been engaged in the latter. What, then, is different about the current wave of protests? For one thing, the organizations involved in the alter-globalization movements position themselves primarily in opposition to multinational corporations and transnational economic bodies. They act as "citizens of the world," challenging global inequality and the power imbalances in global institutions between the world's have and have-not societies. In the new democratic movements, individuals position themselves primarily as citizens within their own countries, protesting national inequalities and aiming for reforms in national political institutions. They act as Tunisian, Egyptian, Spanish, Greek, American or Japanese citizens, not as citizens of the world. When Occupy Wall Street protesters declare, "We are the 99%," few pause to consider that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population, has more than 25 percent of the world's wealth. At the same time, the shows of solidarity and interconnection across the national movements reflect a growing consciousness of linkages between economic inequality, environmental challenges, and shortfalls in democratic accountability world-wide. In contrast to many of the participants in the alter-globalization movements, protesters in the new wave of democratic movements are not opposed to capitalism as such. But increasingly, they are opposed to capitalism as it is, in which the benefits of growth fail to "trickle down" to the middle and working classes, and the ecological consequences of growth threaten the planet's capacity to sustain humanity. As a counterpoint to the alter-globalization movements, the new protests suggest that democracy's global future must begin at home, by holding national political elites democratically accountable for the policy decisions they make both in the domestic and in the international realms. There is good sense in that suggestion, since the institutional mechanisms of democratic accountability that have evolved within the modern constitutional state are far more robust than anything the United Nations, the World Bank, or the IMF can offer in the foreseeable future. Many have cherished the hope that Europe would serve as an exemplar for bridging national to supra-national democracy, a thin shred of which remains alive so long as the union survives. Last spring, when German protesters in Occupy Frankfurt held up banners stating, "We are all Greeks," they demonstrated a form of solidarity befitting European citizens, a willingness to make sacrifices in order to cement a common future with other Europeans. A truly European demosmay be unlikely, but it is not impossible. In the meantime, democracy's advocates have reason to address their claims for accountability to the governments that are, by design, responsible to them. So perhaps democracy's global future begins at home, where citizens reclaim their streets and public squares and reinvigorate their public institutions. But the wisdom of the alter-globalization movements is that strengthened national democracy cannot be the end of the story. The risks humanity faces -- of economic collapse, of environmental catastrophe, of pandemic disease, of a looming global food crisis and the social unrest it would bring -- are risks that flow directly from the interdependence that globalization has wrought. The transnational flow of democratic power that is now coursing from protest to protest around the world gives us some reason to hold onto the possibility that we might have it in us to address these global risks together, and to do so democratically.