Rethinking World Parliament: Beyond the Indeterminacy of International Law

Abstract

It is often assumed that global democracy will manifest itself as a world parliament. But what is a world parliament: a sovereign legislative body or just a place to talk? I argue that apart from the task of coordinating activities of functional systems, a world parliament can be a response to the indeterminacy of international law. As “possessive individuals”, sovereign states owe apparently nothing to international society, yet the rights and duties of sovereignty and consequent relations between states are necessarily conceived also in supranational terms. I situate the new proposal about world parliament in an open-ended vision of an evolving world civilisation, the global layer of which is organised along functionalist-democratic lines but requires coordination, common will-formation, and rules and principles of (meta-)governance.