Global democracy and the democratic minimum: Why a procedural account alone is insufficient

Academic discourse

Over the past decade, global democratic governance has established itself as a field of study that combines disciplines such as International Relations, Political Philosophy and International Law. Research centres and programmes on global democracy have been launched at universities in various countries. ² As the new field of study is essentially based on the assumption that global governance should become more democratic, the spread and institutionalization of research centres and programmes on global democracy suggest that a norm of democratic governance has emerged within academia. If such was not the case, the topic would be much less attractive as a selling point for the work of research institutions or a means to acquire research funding.

Research in the field of global democracy usually combines two sub-fields. First, it engages political theory and political philosophy in an effort to clarify whether and how we can adopt the idea of democratic governance to the specific context of world politics; the aim of this strand is to better understand what democracy can reasonably mean in a global political context. A stylized overview such as this one cannot do justice to the nuances of this sub-field, but besides some general scepticism about the possibility to scale-up democracy to the world level (Dahl, 1999), most of the more optimistic voices can be subsumed under the labels of cosmopolitan and discursive democracy. ³ The former put a particular emphasis on the rule of law (and hence on formal constitutions), on representative decision-making institutions and on the strength of accountability chains that link decision-makers to decision-takers (Archibugi, 2008; Held, 1995; Marchetti, 2008). In contrast, the latter emphasize that institutions and their decision-making processes are embedded in social and political discourses that structure the formation of political opinions and decisions. As a result, adherents to discursive approaches stress a need for ‘discursive designs’ that ensure that decision-making builds on a balance between competing discourses on a given issue of political decision-making (Dryzek, 2006, 2008; Smith and Brassett, 2008).

As a second field of inquiry, the more empirically oriented literature evaluates the democratic quality of existing international institutions and explores how these institutions can be rendered more democratic. This strand includes a vast literature on the EU and its alleged ‘democratic deficit’, but increasingly also on global political institutions such as the WTO, the UN or the international climate change regime. An examination of this literature reveals a strong focus on institutional design. Reform proposals commonly include the reforms of voting schemes — for instance in the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank — and greater access for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to enhance the inclusiveness of international institutions; an enhanced role for national parliaments or international parliamentary bodies to strengthen accountability; or measures to enhance the transparency of decision-making in international organizations (Dingwerth et al., 2011). Contributions to the academic discourse about global democracy often routinely note the structural conditions under which global democratic operations must necessarily operate, notably, vast economic inequality that comes with unequal access to political institutions. Yet while such conditions are frequently deplored as an obstacle to full democratization, they rarely become a cornerstone for discussions about global democracy itself. ⁴

This focus on institutional aspects of decision-making is exemplified in Thomas Zweifel’s (2005) International Organizations and Democracy: Accountability, Politics and Power. As one of the few comparative analyses of the democratic performance of international organizations to date, Zweifel (2005) evaluates international organizations in terms of seven criteria — appointment, participation, transparency, reason-giving, overrule, monitoring and independence — all of which refer to institutional aspects of decision-making in international organizations. Other studies use similar frameworks. For instance, the 32 academic texts I have reviewed in a recent textbook chapter on the democratic legitimacy of the WTO point to a broad range of democratic deficits, ranging from the lack of transparency of informal ‘Green Room’ negotiations among powerful WTO member states to insufficient access for civil society organizations, weak parliamentary oversight over WTO negotiations or the excessive length of accountability chains that defies democratic control. Some of the texts also discuss the limited negotiation capacities of small developing countries as a democratic deficit, for instance when they point out that some states do not have permanent WTO missions in Geneva or can only send small delegations with comparatively little expertise on the often very specific issues to international trade negotiations. Overall, reform proposals tend to centre around abolishing informal negotiations, strengthening parliamentary oversight, enhancing NGO access, opening the proceedings of the dispute settlement to the public or providing additional funding and training for developing country delegations. Taken together, and much in line with the more general debate about global democracy, these proposals suggest that the democratic deficit of the WTO could be significantly reduced if the member states were to adopt the appropriate institutional reforms (Dingwerth et al., 2011: 112–156).

The frameworks we use in academia are practically relevant since our own discourses can become politically powerful in several ways. On the one hand, academia and politics are linked through a revolving door effect that unfolds when academics become practitioners and consult international organizations. Amartya Sen’s involvement in developing the UN Development Program’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Index (HDI), John Ruggie’s role as Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and as the intellectual mastermind behind the Global Compact, Jan Aart Scholte’s engagement with the IMF (Scholte, 2009), or the publications of the UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks (Reinicke and Deng, 2000) whose authors have moved back and forth between politics and academia are examples of this direct link between academia and international politics. On the other hand, the campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) draws explicitly on the works of David Held ((1995) Democracy and the Global Order), Otfried Höffe (Democracy in an Age of Globalisation) or Richard Falk (Towards a Global Parliament) (Bummel, 2010). It thereby points to a second, indirect link between scholarship and political practice. This link lies in the legitimizing role that academic research plays in political communication.

Given these connections, it matters how the democratic deficit is described in the academic literature and what kinds of cures scholars invent for the deficits they identify. As the literature on the EU, the WTO and the UN illustrates, it is fair to assume that much of the academic global democracy literature shares two core features: first, a general understanding that governance beyond the state should be democratized; and, second, that the best way to do so is through reforming existing institutions.

International governance

Beyond academia, a norm of democratic governance has also emerged in international governance itself. This norm can be traced in calls for democratic reforms of international organizations as well as in the latter’s responses to such calls. As in academic discourse, the main focus lies on procedural or institutional aspects of democratic governance.

Calls for democratic reforms of international institutions are not limited to debates among academics, but have also shown up forcefully on the political agenda (Zürn et al., 2012). The campaign for a UNPA is a case in point. It draws support from civil society organizations, from national parliamentarians and from former as well as current diplomats, judges and other state officials. The Argentinean Senate has formally positioned itself in favour of a UNPA, and several hundred parliamentarians worldwide have signed the campaign appeal. The former chair of the Green Party in Germany, Claudia Roth, comments that ‘a global parliament would be well suited to make the United Nations more democratic and more transparent’; and former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali holds that ‘the world needs a parliament’ (Boutros-Ghali, 2009; UNPA Campaign, 2008, 2009, 2010).

Besides the UNPA campaign, the Global Accountability Report issued by the One World Trust has received significant attention. Claiming to assess ‘the world’s most powerful organizations’ in terms of transparency, participation, evaluation and complaint and response mechanisms, the three reports issued between 2006 and 2008 have triggered responses from many of the 90 organizations assessed by the report authors, as well as from stakeholders that engage with these organizations (One World Trust, 2006, 2007, 2008; for a critical response, see NGO Forum on ADB, 2007).

More systematically, a recent comparative study of legitimation discourses involving the EU, the G8 and the UN similarly shows that democracy constitutes an important normative yardstick for evaluating the performance of international institutions. Based on a comparative content analysis of newspaper discourses in four Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the US) from 1998 to 2007, the authors show that international institutions are evaluated in terms that are commonly used in evaluations of national political systems. For national political systems and for the EU, about 25% of all evaluative statements reported in the media discourses examined in the study are thus based on democratic input criteria; for the G8 and the UN, the number is only slightly lower (Nullmeier et al., 2010).

In response to public demands for democratic reforms, at least the large and publicly visible international organizations have devised public communication strategies in which they link many of their own activities to democratic values such as inclusiveness, transparency or accountability. What is important here is that international organizations targeted by global democracy activists rarely deny the validity of the claim that they should be organized democratically. Rather than seeking to convince their critics that democracy is the wrong standard for evaluating the performance of an international organization, their communication strategies are geared towards demonstrating that their organization is in fact organized in a much more democratic way than the critics seem to assume. The claim that international organizations should be democratic is thus largely taken for granted by both speakers and target actors.

To give an example, anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 prominently figured a banner with two bold arrows, the first one with the label ‘WTO’ pointing to the left, and the second one with the label ‘Democracy’ pointing to the right. The message was simple, but powerful: the WTO and democracy are incompatible. To move towards the WTO therefore means to move further away from democracy. The WTO reacted to this critique in several ways, some of which directly engage with the democratic deficit charge. At a WTO meeting in Doha, then Director-General Mike Moore (cited in Strange, 2011: 254, note 55) stated:

No other body is as directly run by Member governments, or as firmly rooted in consensus decision-making. What the consensus rule embodies is the right to sovereignty, free choice, self-government — in other words ‘democracy’ in its most basic sense. The WTO does not tell governments what to do. Governments tell the WTO. All decisions — from the creation of the GATT to last year’s launch of the Doha Development Agenda — have been taken collectively by the member governments themselves. No decision is taken unless all member governments agree, effectively every Member — from the largest to the smallest — has the power of veto. Even the enforcement of rules is undertaken by the members themselves. Sometimes enforcement includes the threat of sanctions but those sanctions are imposed by members not by the organization. These are all features of a highly democratic organization and system.… It is not a ‘world democracy’ — in the sense of being a government of the world’s people — but it is the most democratic international body in existence today.

Beyond rhetoric, international organizations have also taken a number of practical steps to render their decision-making more inclusive, transparent, accountable and/or deliberative. The WTO has improved its relations with civil society organizations and broadened the range of information it makes available to the public. As a result, the once criticized transparency policies of the WTO are now lauded by some as a role model for other international organizations (Steffek and Kissling, 2006), with similar developments reported for other international organizations such as the Asian Development Bank (Uhlin, 2011). More systematically, studies have documented a significant expansion of civil society access in most international institutions over time (Tallberg et al., 2013) as well as an expansion of transparency and oversight mechanisms among international institutions (Grigorescu, 2007, 2010). Even though many of these institutional reforms may be motivated by strategic concerns (Raustiala, 1997; Tallberg et al., 2013), normative concerns for democracy have been invoked as one important driver of these processes. Alexandru Grigorescu’s studies about transparency rules within and oversight of international organizations thus find that both are positively correlated with the extent of democratic membership in an international organization. As for the mechanism at work, Grigorescu suggests that ‘the spread of oversight mechanisms in intergovernmental organizations is partly due to the application of domestic democratic norms, such as the norm of accountability, to the supranational realm’, notably, through the internalization of democratic norms by state representatives (Grigorescu, 2010: 875). Similarly, Jan Aart Scholte (2012a: 315) observes that consultations with civil society organizations have acquired the status of a standard of appropriateness for international organizations. Considered a ‘sine qua non of global governance’, they are no longer exclusively conducted under a cost–benefit calculus but have become a part of the organizational routines of many international organizations.

Transnational governance

Finally, references to democratic norms and values are a relevant legitimation resource not only in international, but also in transnational, governance. In relation to both rhetoric and actual practice, many transnational governance organizations thus make strong efforts to portray themselves as a more democratic and more efficient alternative to their bureaucratic and cumbersome intergovernmental counterparts (Dingwerth, 2007). The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), for instance, is governed by its members; it has an open membership policy; and it has introduced a system of weighted voting that grants equal voting rights to its environmental, economic and social chambers on the one hand, and to the Northern and Southern members of each chamber on the other hand. Other transnational governance organizations have stakeholder assemblies or base their decisions on regional consultations with affected communities. And most transnational governance organizations make a large amount of information available to the public and actively seek public comments on important draft decisions.

The reasons why transnational governance organizations adopt democracy-related elements in their organizational designs are manifold. In some cases, their members may hold deep convictions that such a way of organizing themselves is most appropriate. This was, for instance, the case when environmental groups gathered to found the FSC in 1992. In other cases, the reasons may be instrumental, as when relevant audiences demand transparency or when organizations fear difficulties in securing either funding or compliance if they are perceived as less ‘democratic’. And in other cases again, the reason may simply be uncertainty about which organizational model is best — and in situations of uncertainty, it is often reasonable to do what most others do.

At least in some issue areas, we can, however, observe that a norm of democratic governance has emerged in relation to transnational governance. In sustainability governance, a standard model of transnational rule-making can thus be discerned. A comparison of 13 organizations in this field concludes that the adoption of similar governance models — models that are relatively costly in terms of money, time and autonomy — occurs at least partially in response to a norm that specifies what it means to be a good standard-setter on sustainability issues. This norm becomes manifest in the creation of a meta-organization called the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance. In this organization, 19 transnational rule-making organizations join forces to implement a Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards — a code that, once again, includes elements of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability and deliberation (Bernstein and Cashore, 2007; Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2009).

Beyond sustainability, values such as inclusiveness, transparency, accountability or deliberation have also been identified as central to the legitimation of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). While the organization initially relied mostly on technical expertise and independence to legitimate its own role as a transnational standard-setter, more recent studies reveal that the notion of due process has become more central over time in justifying what the organization is and does (Richardson and Eberlein, 2011). This notion emphasizes transparency, accountability, consultation and responsiveness and thus has a clear rhetorical connection to democratic norms and values. The organization prides itself on having ‘the best developed external stakeholder engagement capabilities amongst 30 of the world’s most powerful global organisations’ and being ‘a high performer in … transparency’, two assessments that are based on the 2007 Global Accountability Report issued by the One World Trust (IFRS Foundation, 2007). Similarly, it states that ‘in fulfilling its standard-setting duties the IASB follows a thorough, open and transparent due process of which the publication of consultative documents, such as discussion papers and exposure drafts, for public comment is an important component’ (IFRS Foundation, 2010).

In conclusion, international as well as transnational organizations are confronted with the normative claim that their decision-making structures should adhere to democratic values such as inclusiveness, transparency or accountability. The targets of such claims rarely deny the validity of the claim itself and attest, in their own rhetoric, to the existence of a social norm that ties the legitimacy of transboundary governance organizations to their ‘democratic’ credentials. As one reviewer of the original manuscript rightly notes, neither the fact that international organizations adopt a democratic rhetoric, nor the observation that their democratic rhetoric is focused on procedures rather than substance, should come as a surprise. The appeal of democracy, paired with a lack of clarity about what the term may reasonably mean in relation to international institutions, makes democratic rhetoric an attractive component of the legitimacy claims of international organizations. And in contrast to the substantive dimension, procedures can be controlled relatively well by the organization itself and often at moderate costs, not least since the decoupling of formal procedures and actual institutional practice allows organizations to draw legitimacy gains even from symbolic or cosmetic changes (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). In short, as democracy has become a (if not the) central term for legitimating political authority in the 21st century, we should indeed expect international organizations to be among those who seek to define that term in line with their own interests.

Seen in a broader perspective, however, the democratic yardstick complements rather than replaces existing yardsticks for real-world evaluations of international institutions (see also Nullmeier et al., 2010), and some empirical observations also suggest that the power of democratic norms is limited, not least since the acceptance of democratic norms has come under pressure in many societies in the wake of the current financial and economic crisis. Internationally, powerful states such as China or India strongly oppose granting civil society organizations more access to international institutions, and in justifying and conducting the ‘War on Terror’, global democracy norms play only marginal roles. Clearly, there is thus a plurality of legitimation discourses in international politics of which the democratic deficit discourse is only one. This plurality notwithstanding, evidence supports the observation that deviations from the ‘global democracy norms’ sketched above — like deviations from human rights norms — often require a public justification from international institutions.

The general argument

The sketch of the global democracy norm as it manifests itself in contemporary political discourses is based on the assumption that the concept of democracy can be broken down into individual dimensions of democratic governance such as inclusiveness, democratic control or discursive quality (Dingwerth, 2007: 12–36). Yet disaggregating the concept of democracy does not resolve the issue of definition. If we conceive of ‘democratic governance’ as appropriate opportunities for those affected or under the authority of international decision-makers to participate in decision-making, exert control and engage in sincere and open deliberation about different policy options, then the task of specifying democracy as a persuasive normative standard requires us to ask two further questions: first, what do inclusiveness, democratic control or discursive quality really mean if we take them seriously as core dimensions of democratic governance? And, second, what are the structural preconditions for them to be realized?

Let us look at transparency for a moment. Transparency is often treated as an important prerequisite for democratic accountability. Spelled out in a little more detail, it can be conceptualized as ‘the extent to which individuals who may be significantly affected by a decision are able to learn about the decision-making process, including its existence, subject matter, structure and current status’ (Dingwerth, 2007: 30). The ability to learn about a decision-making process — say, the current round of WTO negotiations — implies that decision-makers make available information about that process in a timely manner. And this is, in fact, what global democracy activists are demanding and what international organizations are doing in response to these demands. So far, so good. But the ability to learn about the decision-making process also requires that those to whom information is made available can do something with that information — that they can understand it, evaluate it in terms of their own interests and act upon it if necessary. If they cannot, transparency is one-sided and largely meaningless. Now, with illiteracy rates in some parts of the world exceeding 50%, with Internet access virtually unavailable in others and with language skills, economic knowledge and political education distributed extremely unevenly across the globe, realizing transparency in a meaningful normative sense is indeed a far-fetched dream. And what is more, hardly any of the global democracy activists are working to turn this particular dream into reality.

The same holds true for inclusiveness and discursive quality. While these concepts demand that representatives of affected communities can meaningfully participate in negotiations and deliberations, global democracy activists are often satisfied when international institutions expand the level of access for the members of organized civil society. Yet studies of international negotiations — for instance on world trade or climate change — consistently show that the real issue is not access for civil society, but rather the hugely unequal capacities of governments to represent their constituencies in negotiations.

In the case of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), developing countries for instance not only encountered difficulties in analysing their own CDM potentials and lacked trust in external studies, two factors that by themselves inhibited many developing countries from taking a strong position. In addition, they also suffered from the absence of private sector involvement and a lack of awareness at the domestic level. Although climate change is likely to have significant impacts on developing countries, it is thus rarely perceived as a priority by domestic audiences — not least because what will be in 2050 or 2100 is not, and cannot be, a primary concern for many citizens in these countries. Because of the absence of domestic debate, developing countries have frequently entered negotiations with a ‘hollow mandate’. In contrast to most industrialized countries, they have pursued a rather defensive negotiation strategy that puts them at a disadvantage (Chasek, 2001; Frost, 2001; Gupta, 1997; Sjöstedt and Spector, 1993).

While a normatively persuasive standard rooted in democratic theory and the emergent social norm of democratic global governance focus on similar values — namely, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability and deliberation — there are thus important differences between the two. Most importantly, the emergent social norm demands reforms in the institutional design of international organizations — the establishment of a UNPA, abolishing the veto in the UN Security Council or an end to Green Room negotiations in the WTO — whereas a normative standard derived from democratic theory would need to ask for measures that address the deeper level of structural preconditions for realizing democracy at a world scale. These differences are in kind rather than in degree. A normatively persuasive standard does not demand more of the same, but rather something other than the emergent social norm of democratic global governance.

The democratic minimum: Why subsistence, health and education are relevant for global democracy

So what does global democracy demand? Three areas that do not yet figure prominently on the agendas of global democracy scholarship and activism stand out for their immediate relevance for the democratic process. These areas are subsistence, health and education.

First, democracy requires a minimal level of subsistence or human security. Without the guarantee of subsistence rights, decisions about the future course of political activity — and most notably decisions that have a longer time horizon — are almost certain to be taken by those who can afford to take part in political life and to think about what alternative political decisions may imply for their own interests in a more distant future. As indicated, the politics of climate change are a good example of where today’s decisions have significant implications for the future of political communities, but where the ability to deliberate about what world we want for 2100 is constrained for those communities for which a major concern is how to survive today. Whether the reason is absolute poverty or war, the effect is a high risk of exclusion from political decision-making that occurs not through formal rules, but through structural or situational circumstances. If my argument is correct, what follows is that global democrats must work harder to promote a minimum level of human security where such a level has not yet been achieved.

One important clarification is in order: to claim that guaranteeing a minimum level of human security is a prerequisite for democracy is not to claim that we should care about human security primarily or even exclusively because of its role in making democracy possible. The claim for a right to subsistence is morally convincing on its own terms so global democrats should care about it even if it was unrelated to their interest in democratizing global governance (Shue, 1996). ⁵ At the same time, subsistence rights do constitute an important structural prerequisite for democracy because those who need to secure their mere survival or live in zones of war will often be unable to engage in the political process. In other words, the absence of a minimum level of human security is one important mechanism of exclusion. If democratization is about limiting the most consequential forms of political exclusion, then taking global democracy seriously implies taking human security seriously. In this regard, the observation that there is at least some progress on Millennium Development Goals 1A (to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than USD1.25 a day) and 1C (to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger) is relevant not only in terms of development and human rights, but also in terms of the substantive preconditions for global democracy (Center for Global Development, 2013).

Second, health is an integral element of global democracy. Health is a precondition for participating in political life — or, in David Held’s words, ‘the condition of all agency and of the pursuit of autonomy’ (Held, 1995: 194). Just like subsistence, health-related rights can be thought of as normatively justified on their own terms. It is morally right to expand health services in least developed countries not because it enhances global democracy, but because access to healthcare improves the chances of individuals to pursue autonomy and live a decent life (Nussbaum, 2000; Sen, 2008). But democracy is nevertheless enhanced through reducing health risks and providing healthcare. The reason is that health is ‘“regulative” of other spheres of activity, in that [it involves] conditions that can deeply constrain the capacity of any one group or individual to prosper within other spheres (including politics)’ (Saward, 1994: 10). In other words, health rights are central to democracy because a society in which the members of one group face much greater health risks than the members of other groups is likely to suffer from structural exclusion of the former.

World society is such a society. On a global scale, health risks and access to healthcare are distributed extremely unevenly. A good indicator for the health gap between the First and Third Worlds is the WHO’s estimated age standardized death rate. According to WHO data for 2004, this rate is about 10 times higher for Zimbabwe (3561 per 100,000) than for Japan (361 per 100,000) if we take all causes and both sexes into account. Restricting the list of death causes to communicable diseases, maternal, perinatal and nutritional conditions — in other words, to those causes that many Western industrialized countries have acquired the ability and resources to control — the gap between the best performer (New Zealand, 14.7) and worst performer (Zimbabwe, 2597) rises to factor 176 (WHO, 2010). Recent improvements in global access to safe drinking water attest to the possibility of achieving significant improvements in relation to health rights (WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, 2010; see also Center for Global Development, 2013, for MDG progress data on child mortality and maternal mortality). As a result, realizing global democracy in a normatively meaningful way requires us to invest in mitigating the health risks and improving access to health services for the worst off.

Third, education can also be characterized as ‘regulative of other spheres’ (Saward, 1994: 10). As a recent collection of studies shows, education — rather than wealth — is a key determinant of political participation. ‘In countries of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia’, Anirudh Krishna (2008: 9) summarizes the study, ‘poor people … participate in democratic activities no less (and sometimes more) than other citizens’. In contrast to conventional wisdom, this observation holds for a range of different engagements, ‘including campaigning, contacting, protesting, and other time- and resource-intensive forms’ (Krishna, 2008: 10). Yet while disparities in terms of wealth do not seem to affect participation levels, differences in education levels do. The empirical studies collected in the volume thus consistently show that those who are more educated participate more often in democratic activities (Krishna, 2008: 13). Since they identify literacy and primary education as particularly relevant, the study is optimistic in relation to both (Krishna, 2008: 15):

Education among the poor of developing countries is much higher for the younger generation compared with their mothers and fathers and especially with their grandmothers and grandfathers. And this acquisition of the ability to read and write gives to these younger generations of poorer people a greater ability than their forebears to negotiate and make sense of the written world, a world in which both contemporary states and markets operate. Previously mostly impenetrable by poor people, democracy is now better understood by them, and they can be better engaged with it.

At the same time, the levels of literacy and education remain low in a number of countries and hence tend to systematically exclude some communities from participating in those democratic institutions that exist at different decision-making levels. Adult literacy rates for the year 2008 are thus below 50% in six sub-Saharan African countries (Gambia, Benin, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ehtiopia and Chad) and below 60% in two large South-Asian countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh) as well as two Arab states (Mauretania and Morocco) (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2010). Moreover, young adult (15–24 years) rates are higher than adult rates for several countries, suggesting that educational progress is not simply achieved as a result of generational change. According to the Education for All (2010) Global Monitoring Report 2010 commissioned by UNESCO, illiteracy remains ‘the most neglected of all education goals, with about 759 million adults lacking literacy skills today’. Moreover, primary education has faced a setback in several developing countries as a result of the global financial crisis, thus partially thwarting earlier efforts at ensuring ‘education for all’. In addition, aid commitments to basic education are reported to have fallen by 22% in 2007. In sum, the Global Monitoring Report concludes that 72 million children were out of school in 2007 and that ‘in twenty-six countries, 20% or more of young adults have fewer than two years of schooling and, in some countries, including Burkina Faso and Somalia, the share is 50% or more’ (Education for All, 2010: 1).

Building on the insight that education is regulative of other spheres of activity, a very simple conclusion that Krishna and Booth (2008: 149) draw for domestic democratization can be extended to global politics:

Those who wish to promote democracy would wisely invest in promoting education. Reducing illiteracy, by enhancing information and promoting self-esteem, will encourage … more democratic actions among mass publics. Such a strategy would most likely strengthen democracy more directly and efficaciously than the myriad approaches now in vogue.

To summarize, my argument is that if Ted Turner gave another billion to establish a Global Democracy Foundation, we should invest that money not in a global parliament, but in promoting human security, health and education for the most vulnerable members of global society. I am aware that many observers would see this as an investment not in global democracy, but in global justice or development. That is right in as much as these are indeed investments in global justice and development. Yet it is wrong in as much as it suggests that global democracy and global justice (or development) are unrelated. More precisely, my argument is based on the idea that the institutions of global democracy remain hollow if a sufficiently large share of the citizenry cannot make effective use of them, for instance, because they lack a minimum of subsistence, health or education to engage in the political process. In the following section, I discuss possible challenges to that idea.

Is the argument new?

The argument that (global) democracy builds on substantive conditions is not new. In fact, many of the ideas I present are already present in one of the foundational works of the academic global democracy discourse, David Held’s (1995) Democracy and the Global Order. In that book, Held (1995: 190–201) sketches the contours of a ‘democratic public law’. Beyond civil and political rights, Held’s discussion also includes health rights, social and economic rights, and cultural and pacific rights. ‘If any of these bundles of rights is absent from the democratic process’, he maintains, ‘it will be one-sided, incomplete and distorted’. Robust primary political rights — as for instance the right to vote or the right to form an association — are insufficient because ‘unless other rights clusters are recognised there will be significant areas in which large numbers of citizens … will not be able to take advantage of these equally in practice’ (Held, 1995: 190–191).

Held is cautious to note that democracy should be conceived not as an ‘all-or-nothing affair’, but rather as a ‘continuum across which particular rights within clusters will be more or less enforced, and different clusters will be more or less entrenched [emphasis in original]’ (Held, 1995: 191). In relation to international organizations, it is evident that the democratic deficit is at least as significant — and I would argue, much more significant — in relation to the social, economic and health clusters than in relation to civil and political rights laid down in the constitutional arrangements of international organizations. Nevertheless, most reform proposals discussed in later chapters of Democracy and the Global Order refer to the institutions of global governance, and subsequent works in the tradition of cosmopolitan democracy almost completely sideline the socio-economic preconditions for global democracy (Archibugi, 2008; Archibugi et al., 2012; Marchetti, 2008). ⁷ Overall, Held’s focus on different clusters of rights is central, but it has not figured prominently in either the reception of his book or the body of literature that has subsequently built a whole field of study on that book, including Held’s own publications. Overall, my argument is therefore less about novelty and more about recovering an old insight, namely, that, as global democrats, we need to take the informal structures that produce exclusion much more seriously. ⁸

Beyond Democracy and the Global Order, my argument resonates with recent works on a republican theory of global justice. With their primary interest in non-domination, republican theories of justice lean more towards procedural than distributive conceptions of justice. Essentially, this means that justice is what communities agree on in the absence of domination. Even though their focus is on citizen rights and democratic constitutions, some proponents of republicanism have stressed that ‘republicans, insofar as they are committed to non-domination, have reasons to combat poverty and destitution’ (Laborde, 2010: 53). Why? Because, as Laborde argues, much in line with my argument in the previous section, ‘there are absolute resource preconditions (nutrition, basic health care and education) without which individuals cannot function as citizens at all’ (Laborde, 2010: 53). ⁹

Republican theories provide a middle ground between egalitarian and statist approaches to global justice. In contrast to egalitarian approaches, they do not conceive of an unequal distribution of resources as in need of justification per se, but only in so far as it leads to domination. In contrast to statist approaches, they do not restrict moral duties towards citizens of other states to the duties of charity, but rather to the scope of basic rights that are required for free and collective decision-making to function properly. In providing this middle ground, republican theories of justice reveal one important way in which global democracy and global justice are linked to each other. At the same time, the observation that authors such as Laborde discuss their works primarily in the context of the global justice literature supports the general impression that contemporary debates about global democracy tend to operate as if democracy and (minimal) justice were unrelated. ¹⁰

Taken together, I may claim novelty for the argument that global democratic governance has acquired the status of a social norm in both academic and political circles, but that the content of that social norm deviates significantly from what a persuasive normative standard of global democracy would look like. My claim that such a standard would need to include issues such as subsistence rights as well as equality in access to education and health differs from the standards that are most commonly applied in the global democracy debate, but it is not novel in itself. It builds on the works cited above and thus mainly serves to excavate important elements of democracy from the focus on formal institutions under which they have been buried for some time.

Does democracy produce the welfare state or does the welfare state produce democracy?

In democratizing political systems, some things must come first. Historically, one could argue, the institutions of democracy preceded — and promoted — greater welfare, greater justice and greater capabilities for a larger share of the citizenry of many nation states. In analogy, in democratizing global politics, we may not need to wait until ‘each and every individual has the capacity to participate’, but have confidence in the transformative power of formal democratic institutions.

The most elaborate discussion of this argument is Matthias Koenig-Archibugi’s (2011) assessment of whether global democracy is possible. Koenig-Archibugi discusses a range of factors that are assumed to be conducive to democracy at the national level and asks whether any of them are also necessary conditions for a transition to democracy. For the purpose of the argument I have presented above, two conclusions drawn from his study are particularly relevant. First, in relation to absolute poverty, Koenig-Archibugi (2011: 528) observes that since ‘many countries crossed the threshold of democracy despite extremely low per capita incomes’, global poverty ‘does not in itself forestall the transition to a democratic global polity’. Yet, he notes, ‘the perpetuation of poverty would endanger its consolidation’. Second, in relation to economic inequality, Koenig-Archibugi (2011: 529) summarizes that ‘economic inequality may affect negatively the quality of democracy, but having the same degree of inequality that one finds at the global level has not prevented a number of countries from developing and maintaining democratic political institutions’.

While these findings are an important challenge to global democracy scepticism, they do not necessarily contradict my argument that global democrats should invest in promoting the resources that are required at the individual and community level to effectively participate in political decision-making. First, the argument that poverty has not prevented some states from making a transition to democracy builds on indices of democracy that usually focus on formal institutional criteria. It essentially means that poverty has not prevented the transition from authoritarian rule to formal democratic institutions. This observation does not challenge my argument unless it could be shown that such formal democratic institutions have in turn led to a reduction of absolute poverty, thereby turning formal citizenship into effective citizenship. Moreover, the second argument that ‘economic inequality may affect negatively the quality of democracy’ is broadly in line with my argument although I am primarily interested in the share of those living below the ‘democratic minimum’. This minimum can be thought of in absolute as well as relative terms and hence only indirectly relates to inequality.

In sum, my argument is less about the conditions for a transition to the formal institutions of democracy and more about improving the democratic quality of the system of global governance we currently have. In relation to such improvements, we can only speculate on what formal institutional reforms would add to effective citizenship for those communities that face the most significant constraints to participate or exert control over political decision-making. But I find it plausible to assume that direct measures to lift those below the democratic minimum above the threshold are at least as useful as the reform proposals that currently dominate the agenda of global democrats.

This does not mean that institutions are irrelevant. On the contrary, the comparative democratization literature on which this particular challenge draws shows that they matter a great deal. Yet what matters most may not be the ‘undemocratic’ structure of international institutions, but the weakness of mediating institutions in many developing countries. In the words of Krishna and Booth (2008: 152, 154):

Political parties, local governments, NGOs, and other civil society organizations … are often weak to virtually nonexistent, especially in rural areas of developing countries, where large parts of the poorer populations reside. Under such circumstances, citizens are considerably handicapped in terms of access and information.… In poorer countries, converting subjects into citizens requires building — and making widely known and easily accessible — institutional links in the middle, which can facilitate information and promote accountability between citizens and public officials.

Taking into account how social democratic parties enabled the working class to participate in Western democracies, Krishna and Booth thus hold that ‘contextually appropriate institutional solutions, at lower and middle levels of the organizational chart of democracy, are urgently required’. Yet, they continue, ‘unfortunately, institutional questions are not frequently investigated at these levels’ (Krishna and Booth, 2008: 254). In pointing to this weakness, the authors refer to the study of democracy in developing countries, but their conclusion seems as relevant in relation to global democracy.

Is this global democracy scepticism in a guise?

Third, some might interpret my reading as global democracy scepticism that either builds on or simply adds another twist to earlier arguments made by Robert Dahl (1999), Andrew Moravcsik (2004) or Seymour Martin Lipset (1959). While Dahl holds that international organizations cannot be democratic because of the sheer size of the global community and the excessive length of accountability chains that connect citizens to international institutions, Moravcsik’s argument is that we do not need to democratize international institutions since they essentially function like technical agencies for specific tasks that, at the domestic level too, are shielded from the influence of the citizenry for very good reasons. Finally, Lipset’s argument is that a certain level of economic development is a prerequisite for democracy so that some polities — and in this case the global polity — would simply not be ready for democracy.

On Dahl, I am sympathetic to the idea that we should ‘be wary of ceding the legitimacy of democracy to non-democratic systems’ (Dahl, 1999: 33). In many ways, this wariness is what the democratic deficit discourse is all about. Yet while many adherents to that discourse would be inclined to ‘cede the legitimacy of democracy’ to international organizations such as the WTO or the UN if only the latter abolished the Green Room negotiations, allowed for greater access for NGOs, made more of their documents available online or established a parliamentary assembly, I see the real democratic deficit elsewhere, namely, in the structural inequalities that lead to informal yet effective exclusion from the global political process. As this ties global democracy more closely to global structural change than to institutional reform, it makes its attainment more difficult, but not impossible.

With Moravcsik, I agree that there is not currently a strong need to further democratize the formal institutions of international governance. It is, however, important to note that, despite its title, Moracvsik’s article is based on an assessment of the institutions of European rather than global governance and only devotes a few sentences on the final page to governance beyond Europe. Yet generalizing from the EU to global governance is of little use since the democratic minimum is guaranteed for most citizens in the former, but not in the latter. As a result, I share with Moravcsik the view that we do not currently need to democratize the formal institutions of global governance, but I do not share his conclusion that global governance therefore does not suffer from a major democratic deficit.

Finally, the idea that economic development is insufficient in some parts of the world to allow for a transition to democratic institutions at the global level fails to capture my argument since — once more — my concern is not with a transition to democracy, but with improving the quality of democracy. This quality suffers most severely from structural exclusion but this does not mean that such exclusion cannot be remedied. Taken together, my position is therefore best described as democratic realism rather than democratic scepticism.

Is democracy as it is described here a valuable aim?

Finally, some might take issue with the way in which democracy is conceived in this article. Such a critique may come from two different corners. First, some readers may wish to challenge the ‘separability thesis’ on which both the emergent social norm of global democratic governance as well as the normative standard on which I base my own argument build. Eva Erman (2012) has thus argued that it is normatively problematic to conceive of democracy as an aggregate concept composed of different democratic values like inclusiveness, transparency, accountability and deliberation as this neglects the inherent connections among those values. Labelling an improvement in the transparency record of an international organization as a democratization might thus overlook the possibility that performance on other dimensions declines, that it is so low that one cannot reasonably speak of democratic procedures in a meaningful sense or that the level of transparency itself remains effectively low because it cannot be seen in isolation from the other values. In short, it is therefore fundamentally misleading to conceive of democracy as an aggregate of different democratic values.

Again, I do not think this critique poses a significant challenge for my argument. Rather, while I stress the benefits of disaggregating the concept of (global) democratic governance, Erman points to the possible downsides. To be sure, conceptual disaggregation may lead some observers to conflate transparency or inclusiveness with democracy. But it can also lead others to identify more clearly how different democratic values relate to each other, to what extent they are in conflict and how such conflicts should be resolved in particular circumstances. So conceptual disaggregation per se is not the problem — it is rather how we deal with it, and, here, Erman’s cautionary note is certainly warranted. Moreover, the elements of the ‘democratic minimum’ I propose are relevant in relation to virtually any dimension of democratic governance discussed in the literature. And in many ways, I argue — largely within Erman’s logic — against a more common ‘separability thesis’, namely, the idea that we could think about formal democratic procedures without also thinking about the informal socio-economic preconditions for them to work properly — or, to put it more succinctly, that we could separate democracy from justice.

Last, but not least, a frequent critique of proposals for global democracy is that they are biased towards Western conceptions of good political order, which they seek to uplift to a global scale (Scholte, 2012b). Obviously, even a critical engagement with the predominant conceptions of global democracy to which this charge is most commonly addressed cannot guarantee that the arguments I put forth are themselves free from a bias towards the political culture in which the views that inform these arguments have been formed. To this last challenge I therefore only have two modest answers: first, those who have engaged more strongly with non-Western ideas about a good global order include economic inequality as one of several key dimensions of global democracy (Scholte, 2012b: 17–18). This provides at least some confidence that a focus on the socio-economic preconditions of global democracy might also be attractive to non-Westerners. Second, the main thrust of my argument is critique from within. This internal critique is meant to fill an important gap in a global democracy debate which is indeed primarily informed by a conception of democracy that builds on Western experiences. Yet getting one’s own conception of democracy right seems important for entering into dialogue with (or defending one’s own conception against) alternative visions of a good global order. At the same time, internal critique does not render external critique obsolete, regardless of whether such critique is itself informed by Western or non-Western alternatives to the ideal of Western democracy.