Transnational Power, Coercion, and Democracy

Abstract

In this paper, I want to consider some directions for transforming transnational power from a power over people's lives to something more democratic. This issue is posed concretely by the development of economic and technological globalization led by large transnational corporations that move freely around the world, new multilateral institutions like the WTO and the IMF, emerging forms of cross-border political linkages and also new global threats of violence and environmental degradation. We can observe that these contemporary developments have not been accompanied by democratic control or even accountability of new political, social, and economic institutions to the people operating within them, despite the modes of transnational communication that this globalization may introduce. The question before us, then, is whether transnational forms of social, political, and economic power can become more responsive to people's individual and collective decisions, such that the institutions can facilitate people's power to act together rather than exercising power over them. But in order to deal with the question of how this transformation might occur, we need a clearer understanding of the nature of transnational power, and even more basically of power itself. This will also entail distinguishing power from coercion, with important implications for understanding the forms that transnational democratic governance might take. These implications concern the degree to which democratic transnational power has to be exercised through coercive means or instead whether it can operate in a way more congruent with people's equal freedom and their social cooperation, rather than depending so heavily as at present on either state power or juridical supremacy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)