Democratization through transnational publics: Deliberative inclusion across borders

Abstract

Even as cosmopolitanism became distinctly political in the eighteenth century, many cosmopolitans remained deeply suspicious of the world state, which they saw as a form of universal monarchy and empire. Because of the deeply undemocratic character of current international political authority, many democratically minded contemporary cosmopolitans have turned to the democratizing forces of transnational civil society in order to challenge the emerging globalized forms of domination. However important transnational associations and movements have been to many social struggles, they do not always promote the conditions for democracy. And even when they do, they provide at best only one dimension of the process of transnational democratization. In this chapter I argue that the formation of publics is more central than civil society to achieving the necessary conditions for democratization, precisely because publics enable the emergence of communicative freedom across borders, which is central to challenging potentially dominating forms of authority. Ultimately, the task of a transnational democracy of whatever form is to connect such communicative freedom to institutionally realized powers of citizenship. My aim here is to take the first steps towards a positive theory of transnational democratization by looking at the ways in which its fundamental preconditions have been transformed by global interconnectedness and by certain relatively recent technological phenomena, to which global publics are a response. First and foremost, I have in mind two relatively uncontroversial social conditions that have long been widely identified across many different modern theories of democracy: first, the need for a rich associative life of civil society; and, second, the existence of the communicative infrastructure of the public sphere that permits the expression and diffusion of public opinion. I use the term "public sphere" in a technical sense that begins with Kant and has been developed further by Habermas (1989). A public sphere does not simply consist of the res publica of the institutions of government, but is rather a sphere of a particular sort of communication characterized by three necessary conditions. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.