The Overlapping Crises of Democracy, Globalization, and Global Governance

Abstract

The British political scientist David Held sees another kind of triangular crisis, connected to the preceding one, in which the crises of democracy, of globalisation and of global governance all overlap, producing a state of gridlock that threatens the former world order, the principles of democracy and global cooperation. According to Held, the institutions (what others call the ‘liberal order’, the base of Rodrik’s triangle) of the post-war world enabled interdependence to grow as new countries joined the global economy, a virtuous circle that could not last because ‘it set in motion trends that ultimately undermined its effectiveness’. Now multipolarity, the assertions of sovereignty by the great powers and the decline of the West make it more difficult to arrive at agreements on global governance, when the problems are more complex, ‘penetrating deep’ into domestic politics, including the conflict generated by those who are left behind in societies. For Held, the gridlock ‘freezes’ problem-solving capacity in global politics, whether the problems be commercial or geopolitical in nature, as is evident in parts of the Near East and elsewhere, something that in turn unleashes waves of refugees who affect the domestic politics of recipient countries. Held’s contribution is a precise summary of the crisis of democracy that he and his co-authors have described at length in Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (2013) and Beyond Gridlock (2017). His argument is that the global system of representative democratic states is now locked into a vicious cycle (“gridlock”). While it was initially a virtuous system after World War II, it produced a set of processes that transformed democratic globalization into a vicious system. He gives four reasons for this. The system now undermines democratic cooperation and freezes problem-solving capacity. He describes this gridlocked system in terms of four self-reinforcing stages of non-cooperation. This is a “crisis of democracy, as the politics of compromise and accommodation gives way to populism and authoritarianism.” In the conclusion, he cautions that we are heading down a path that is similar in several respects to the 1930s. He does not discuss ways forward in this brief paper, but he does so in Beyond Gridlock.