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Prospects for Transnational Citizenship and Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Daniel M. Weinstock
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Abstract

Many political theorists believe that the extension of democratic institutions beyond the nation-state would inevitably be deleterious to the possibility of meaningful citizenship and to the functioning of democratic institutions. It is argued here that many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 2001 , pp. 53 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2001

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References

1 For different accounts of civility, see Kingwell, Mark, A Civil Tongue (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995Google Scholar); and Carter, Stephen, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1998Google Scholar).

2 This conception of citizenship is spelled out clearly in Taylor, Charles, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Rosenblum, Nancy, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989Google Scholar).

3 Miller, David, “Bounded Citizenship,” in his Citizenship and National Identity (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), p. 95Google Scholar.

4 On this point see, for example, Young, Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar).

5 Rosenblum, Nancy, Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998Google Scholar).

6 Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 24Google Scholar. For a fuller account of the theory of “complex equality” upon which Walzer draws here, see his Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1982Google Scholar).

7 Ibid. Similar arguments are provided by David Miller in “National Self-Determination and Global Justice,” in Citizenship and National Identity:, and in “Justice and Global Inequality,” in Hurrell, Andrew and Woods, Ngaire, eds., Inequality, Globalization, and World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

8 I have questioned the appropriateness of consensus as a goal of deliberative democracy in diverse societies in my “Saving Democracy from Deliberation,” in Beiner, R. and Norman, W., eds., Canadian Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar).

9 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963Google Scholar).

10 “Brutus,”“Essays,” in Dry, M., ed., The Anti-Federalist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 114Google Scholar.

11 “The Federal Farmer,”“Letter III (October 10, 1787),” in ibid., p. 44.Google Scholar

12 Robert Dahl has shown that the limits in terms of size for participatory democracy are very quickly reached. For example, he calculates that if each and every member of a “polity” of 10,000 (the size of a small town) were to have a ten-minute say on a single issue, the meeting required to hear everyone out on that issue would take 208 eight-hour days—625 days if they each had a half hour. Dahl, Robert, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 107Google Scholar.

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14 For an interesting discussion of the principle, see Pogge, Thomas, “Creating Supranational Institutions Democratically: Reflections on the European Union's ‘Democratic Deficit,’” Journal of Political Philosophy 5, No. 2 (June 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For doubts about its realizability in the European context, see Offe, Glaus, “The Democratic Welfare State in an Integrating Europe,” in Greven, Michael T. and Pauly, Louis B., eds., Democracy Beyond the State: The European Dilemma and the Emerging Global Order (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000Google Scholar).

15 Scheuermann, William, “Reflexive Laws and the Challenges of Globalization,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (September 2001), p. 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Habermas, Jürgen, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 352Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 358Google Scholar.

18 See Kymlicka, Will, “Citizenship in an Era of Globalization,” in his Politics in the Vernacular (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

19 Grimes, Barbara F., ed., The Ethnologue: Languages of the World., 14th ed.(Internet Edition); available at http://www.sil.org/ethnologueGoogle Scholar.

20 For an account of the issues of distributive justice that arise in this context, see Philippe Van Parijs, “If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You Speak English?” unpublished ms., 2001Google Scholar.