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Pathways to global democracy? Escaping the statist imaginary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2013

ADRIAN LITTLE  and
KATE MACDONALD
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Abstract

Critics of global democracy have often claimed that the social and political conditions necessary for democracy to function are not met at the global level, and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. Such claims are usually developed with reference to national democratic institutions, and the social conditions within national democratic societies that have proved important in sustaining them. Although advocates of global democracy have contested such sceptical conclusions, they have tended to accept the method of reasoning from national to global contexts on which they are based. This article critiques this method of argument, showing that it is both highly idealised in its characterisation of national democratic practice, and overly state-centric in its assumptions about possible institutional forms that global democracy might take. We suggest that if aspiring global democrats – and their critics – are to derive useful lessons from social struggles to create and sustain democracy within nation states, a less idealised and institutionally prescriptive approach to drawing global lessons from national experience is required. We illustrate one possible such approach with reference to cases from both national and global levels, in which imperfect yet meaningful democratic practices have survived under highly inhospitable – and widely varying – conditions.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 789 - 813
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2013 

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References

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48 In making this point, these cases serve a purely illustrative purpose, and we could have chosen other cases with these same characteristics to make our point. However we certainly don't claim that these cases are ‘representative’ of any broader set of relevantly similar cases; indeed, recognition of the idiosyncratic nature of individual cases is central to our argument.

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