Vol. Special Feature: Democracy 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 authoritarianism 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 democracies 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, liberal democracy'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