Globalization both challenges and reconstruct the idea of democratic citizenship

By Michele Boselli

Historically, the concept of citizenship runs parallel to that of democracy and evolved accordingly through the centuries. In Athenian classical democracy, citizenship – that is the right to participate in decision-making by voting on major issues affecting people’s lives – was only granted to males on the basis of military duty and individual property. This kind of citizenship returned together with democracy itself since the emergence of the nation-state from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, still limited to men as it was a right granted in exchange of the duty of defending the nation-state.

But in the twentieth century, two epochal changes took place. In the first half of the century the industrialization of warfare in the two major conflicts led to the extension of citizenship to categories, including women, previously marginalised because useless to military purposes (although the successive development of military doctrine towards nuclear warfare and professional armies would in turn make the equation between citizenship rights and military duties a thing of the past).

Secondly, but equally important, the phenomenon known as globalization, i.e. the exponential intensification of the internationalization of the production and the exchanges due to the extraordinary technological leaps in communication and transportation. Thanks to the substantial equilibrium in the levels of life in the industrialized countries conforming themselves to common models, the big multinational companies more and more frequently adopt strategies on a planetary scale. For these companies, globalization means aiming at achieving a critical volume of their activities by trying to be present simultaneously in North America, Europe and South-East Asia/Pacific. By launching new products at the same time in all these three poles of development, they also reduce costs for research because of fewer products for more markets.

The aim of this essay will be to assess ho globalization shakes the foundations of democracy as we got used to know it in the framework of the liberal democratic, territorial nation-state, or, as radical political scientist Robert Cox writes in The Transformation of Democracy? (page 66), to explore the chances of recomposition of civil society (“the intermediate layer between the state and the individual citizen”, Cox, p. 61-62), after globalization has caused its decomposition.

The editor of the above-mentioned book, Anthony McGraw, offers us an insight of the implications of this phenomenon through six examples (pages 7-12) in the economic, financial and environmental spheres, which I have taken the liberty to merge, update and summarize as follows:

-         in economy, failure in the harvest of a particular crop in a far away country translates in higher prices in our local supermarket, as well as the decision by another far away government to ban a British agricultural product affects the livelihoods of British agricultural communities.

-         In finance, a “domestic” decision by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to raise interest rates in the eurozone can lead to more expensive mortgages for households in the UK, despite the latter not yet participating in the European single currency; or a decision by an American financial company or institution to change a given country’s credit rating will have immediate, concrete consequences for the people in that country.

-         In the environment, most worrying of all, deforestation in the Amazon in order to make room for hamburger-manufacturing bovines, will have long-term environmental consequences well beyond Brazil’s sovereign territory, up to the point that another huge problem such as electricity generation in the UK causing acid rain in Scandinavia becomes in comparison a minor, “regional” problem, where the administrative distinction between a domestic and an international matter looks relatively easier to sort out between nearly-bordering countries.

Indeed, the environmental problems are the most disturbing aspects of the transnationalisation of politics and economy. In chapter 4 of The Transformation, David Goldblatt argues that scientific knowledge is so unevenly distributed between state and civil society, production and consumers, experts and the public, that the determination of environmental public policy is systematically unbalanced towards the interests of polluters rather than the general public. The globalization of environmental problems transforms the conditions of democracy in the liberal democratic state because the environmental “community of fate” (the notion that constituencies of voluntary agreement are the communities of a bounded territory or state) is much larger than any single nation, but nations retain a de facto veto through inaction, while the international institutions that have emerged are not yet democratically constituted. Therefore, Goldblatt concludes, global environmental problems require a cosmopolitan model of geo-governance, which brings us to chapter 10 of another book, Models of Democracy, where such model is discussed by David Held.

According to Held, nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal democracy revolved around the ballot box as the mechanism for the citizens as a community to express political preferences and the nature of a relevant “community of fate” is contested in presupposing that it rightly governs its own future. This idea is challenged by the nature of globalization and the issues confronted by the modern nation-state. National communities no longer exclusively plan their actions and policies, and their governments no longer determine alone what is right or wrong for their citizens. Therefore, “if state sovereignty is no longer conceived as indivisible but is shared with international agencies and if territorial and political boundaries are increasingly permeable, the core principles of liberal democracy – that is self-governance, the demos, consent, representation, and popular sovereignty – are made distinctly problematic” (McGraw 1997, p.12).

In Held’s account of the cosmopolitan model, the only feasible, alternative development of this state of affairs is seen in the deepening and extending of democracy towards a “cosmopolitan democracy”. The foundation of such model of democracy are found in a set of civil, political, economic and social rights and obligations, in order to provide shape and limits to democratic decision-making.

In practice, this can be achieved with the creation of parliaments at regional – for example in Latin America and Africa on the model of the European Parliament -, and global level. The role of these assemblies should be strengthened so that their decisions become recognised as legitimate independent sources of regional and international regulation. As a second measure running parallel to parliamentary, representative democracy, the model introduces direct democracy in the form of general referenda across nation-states, with constituencies defined according to the nature and scope of controversial transnational issues. Third, “the influence of international courts [should] be extended so that groups and individuals have an effective mean of suing political authorities for the enactment and the enforcement of key rights, both within and beyond political associations” (Held, 1996, p.355).

This latter is particularly important in relation to the legal rights and duties affecting states and individuals in connection with the deployment of force, which brings us back to the linkage between military duty and citizenship rights. We have already seen that democracy has been linked to war since its origins in ancient Athens, where citizens were also warriors and citizenship implied the duty to fight. Again, in the American and French revolutions, citizens were expected to fight for their country. Later, this connection was renewed when social groups expected citizenship rights in return for wartime contributions. And until recently, an updated model of democratic citizenship made rights to employment, housing, education and welfare the other side of military service. According to Martin Shaw (in McGraw, 1997, chapter 2) this linkage has been broken because the military in a nuclear age no longer requires mass conscript armies.

But Donna Dickenson (in McGraw, 1997, chapter 2) slightly disagrees, arguing that the link between military duties and citizenship rights is less important than it seems. In classical Athens, she writes, citizenship was rather defined in the terms of ownership of the means of independent living, and the same goes for seventeenth-century England with a similar model of democracy linking democratic citizenship and the property of a person. “Only recently have women begun to own their persons [and] the campaign against female genital mutilation shows that this struggle is going on” (Dickenson, in McGraw, 1997, p.115). the widely accepted explanation is that mass mobilization for war gave women, just like the other social groups previously marginalised, democratic rights of citizenship. What happens, then, Dickenson asks herself rhetorically, when the state no longer requires the military efforts of its citizens, be they males or females? The answer is: the feminization of citizenship.

“The feminization of citizenship results when men are no longer required to bear arms as a basis for citizenship in a post-military age, combined with the accession of women to political participation as they come to control their own bodies” (Dickenson, in McGraw, 1997, p.116). this poses women in an extraordinary position by giving them the opportunity to contribute to the reconstruction of citizenship in the global age with an original vision, due to the fact that along the centuries they were forced to experiment with public identities different from the dominant one. They have been granted citizenship relatively recently in history, thus they may be more open to consider transformation towards new forms of participatory democracy.

In conclusion, if citizenship loses meaning as we know it today, how can we reconstruct this concept in order for democracy to continue to thrive? First, the problem is to build new broad channels of civic participation in decision-making at regional and global levels, in order to counter the citizens’ apathy towards politics, their feeling of powerlessness and resignation to the incompetence, when not corruption, of politicians: “What we have got now in the United States is one party, two names. We’ve got Republicans and Republicans Lite”, John Pilger quotes the American black leader Jesse Jackson summing up a concept articulated by British academic Peter Gowan as “a New Democracy run by strong capitalist proprietors funding the political process and offering electors a choice of leaders who share their opinions on most things but have different styles of leadership” (Pilger, 1998, p.67-98).

Secondly, but equally important just as the broadening of democracy is as important as its deepening, democracy has to become transnational, but the world lacks the globalization of rights and liberties. Without freedom and democracy it is certainly possible to have an astonishing economic growth for a certain period of time, but it is not possible to talk about development and in particular about human development. Here, hope resides in transnational social movements such as those concerned with environment and feminism in particular, which are committed to search “alternative ways of producing and consuming and an alternative world view that would combine social equality and biospheric sustainability with a more substantively participatory democracy” (Cox, in McGraw, 1997, p.68).

Sadly, one doesn’t know who is accountable to ask for, who to address in relation to this whole sphere of missing globalization, that of the rights and freedoms, because there is not a relevant international institution such as, from the economic point of view, there are the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These can be perceived as bad or good and are certainly in need of reform, but at least they exist. As far rights, freedom and democracy are concerned, there are no international binding institution with the task to check and enforce the respect of the conventions and treaties on the rights and the duties linked to citizenship in the framework of democracy. The Uruguay round has given birth to the WTO, whereas the conventions on human rights have produced no permanent institution. Today, however, this knowledge and the necessity for a sort of WDO, a “World Democracy Organization”, are widely felt, but there is not yet an adequate institutional answer by the nation-states.

Reference:

- Bromley, Globalization and the sovereignty of the nation-state, Open University 2001

- Held, Models of Democracy, Polity Press Cambridge 1996

- McGraw et al., The Transformation of Democracy?, Polity Press Cambridge 1997

- Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage 1998