Abstract
The downfall of East European communism triggered hopes of a third, global wave of democracy. Driven by the spread of free markets and new information technologies, liberal democracy appeared as the only game in town. Closer inspection on the interplay of globalisation and democracy during the last two decades advises more caution. First, the globalisation of democracy can mean different, not necessarily complementary things: a rising number of states on the transition to democracy; the rise of post-national institutions with the European Union as a paradigm; or the democratisation of international organizations as a step towards a cosmopolitan democracy. Second, it is not at all evident that the globalisation of capital underpins the spread of democracy. Setbacks are not only to be observed in several ‘new democracies’, notably in the post-Soviet area. Also in the West, market-conformism has subverted the meaning of democracy, while the global financial crisis exacerbated the EU’s democratic deficit. Given these conditions, cosmopolitan democracy seems a more distant hope.
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Notes
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From The World Bank 2002: 23.
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Giddens 2003: Chap. 5. This is a remarkable swing of opinion, since, before 1989, Giddens drew intimate connections between modern state power, industrialised warfare and sophisticated techniques of surveillance, which could easily lead to a new totalitarianism (s. Giddens 1985: 295–312). The recent cooperation between the Chinese regime and western internet-firms to filter out sites containing words like “democracy” or “human rights,” but also the tight surveillance of internet and phone communication by western security agencies indicates that Giddens’ earlier thesis should be reconsidered.
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Diamond 2002. Carothers concluded that the “transition paradigm” also failed on a theoretical level and diagnosed an “authoritarian rebound” (Carothers 2002, 2004). McFaul 2002 rejected the concept of a “Third Wave” because quite a few “transition countries” entered the path towards a postcommunist dictatorship. These assessments are confirmed by the latest empirical surveys. Freedom House not only diagnoses an “authoritarian dead-end” in the Former Soviet Union but also points to regressive developments in South-East and Central Europe where “Hungary poses the most serious problem” (Freedom House 2012: 6–8).
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This voluntaristic assumption may have led Diamond, who had speculated a few years earlier (1996) that the Third Wave of democracy may already be over, nevertheless, to serve the US attempt to promote democracy in Iraq as an advisor.
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The precarious status of civil rights inside the EU and, especially in this context, the critical importance of juridical and parliamentary control of the EU-system became evident in May 2006 when the European Court declared the agreement of the European Commission and the European Council to hand over personal data to the US authorities illegal. More generally, the construction of a European citizenship remains hybrid, since the corresponding rights given by the constitutional treaty are to be guaranteed by the member states.
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Müller, K. (2013). Global Democracy. Promises and Delusions. In: Merle, JC. (eds) Spheres of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_3
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