Models of Democracy


The features of republicanism distinctively contributing to modern democratic politics
By Michele Boselli

According to David Held, author of Models of Democracy, there are nine such models developing from classical times to the present, the first three of them relevant to this discussion: classical democracy, protective republicanism, and developed republicanism. The author introduces each of these models by analysing the respective (a) principles of justification of democracy; (b) key institutional features; and (c) general socio-economic conditions of the time. Therefore, it comes spontaneously to compare how the conceptual framework of the republican variants related to the first, classical model, and in what they differ from it and between them.

In doing so, it will greatly help an insight in the political thought of four philosophers from the late middle age to the late XVIII century: Marsilius of Padua (1275-1343), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in respect of developmental republicanism; and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) for protective republicanism. If such a disproportionate  representation would be unjust in a football match or, indeed, a democratic poll, it is not the case with philosophy, for Rousseau was influenced by Machiavelli who in turn was himself influenced by Marsilius.

First of all, what is democracy? A commonly accepted definition, based on the word’s meaning, is “the rule of the people by the people”. Its origin is in the first century BC in the city-state of Athens and its justification is that “Citizens should enjoy political equality in order that they be free to rule and be ruled in turn” (Held), although it must be noted that citizenship was restricted to a small number of males – women and slaves were excluded from this direct participation in public life. It was, however, “an intense experience presupposing a high level of education by the citizens” (Skinner) which would end with the decline of Athens and the rise of Rome.

In providing his account of (protectively) republican Rome, Held uses the works of Latin historian Titus Livius. His Ab Urbe Condita Libri is the glorification of republican Rome, with a certain pessimism on its fate. The books were grouped in decades and the first decade will be examined by Machiavelli in his Discourses fifteen centuries later as the foundation of protective republicanism.

In the renaissance, in fact, Rome was to be a model of protective republicanism in the same way Athens was to be for developmental republicanism. The difference between the two is summed up by Held in extreme synthesis: “In the broadest sense, developmental theorists stress the intrinsic value of political participation for the development of citizens as human beings, while protective theorists stress its instrumental importance for the protection of citizens’ aims and objectives”.

Native of Padua like Titus Livius, Marsilius had great importance as a political writer of his age. In the Defensor Pacis Marsilius draws his inspiration from Aristotle, but in certain points he distances himself or even overcomes him or as perhaps the first writer who clearly distinguishes the executive power from the legislative one. Given the originality of the writer it is worth to know the intellectual atmosphere in which he lived. After the death of Romano d’Ezzelino the Commune of Padua had adopted policies that we would now call anticlerical, and had vegun with the Holy See an open fight, which echoes were not yet extinguished during Marsilius adolescence. The ecclesiastical prerogatives, including exemption from taxes, had been abolished and, according to Marsilius, it was also up to the people to designate the magistrates who had the duty to execute the laws. 

In respect with the classical model, the main feature that Marsilius innovates is the above-mentioned differentiation between legislative and executive powers, while the main feature of continuity remains the eligibility to democratic public life, or citizenship, still restricted to few people and no women at all. Size of the republic is also another important feature of economy. In both antiquity and late middle age democracy applies to small communities, but that will change. The establishment of the nation-state in the second half of the past century represents a second stage for democracy, and according to Held the making of the European Union could be seen as an attempt to a third, supranational one. Obviously these changes do not happen like turning a switch, but gradually: a first step from stage one to two was made by Machiavelli and his form of protective republicanism.

In his Discourses on the first ten books of Titus Livius, the Florentine author teaches the republics the ways in which they can durably expand, nearly always arguing with examples drawn from the Roman history, holding in little or no account the differences between the age of republican Rome and his own times. His vision of republicanism is protective because his main concern is the protection of citizens' objectives and interests: "[Machiavelli] anticipated certain dilemmas of liberalism, but resolved them ultimately in a profoundly anti-liberal way, by granting priority to the preservation of society by whatever means necessary" (Held).

We can see now, as enlightenly exemplified in Models of Democracy, how Machiavelli's protective republicanism descends from ancient Rome and its historians in the same way in which Marsilius' (and later Rousseau's) developmental republicanism is inspired by the ancient Greek polis and its philosophers. The main feature that differentiates protective republicanism from the developmental one and the classical model of democracy is that, while these latter require a direct participation of citizens in public meetings, in the former it can be "achieved via different possible mechanisms in a balance of power [...] linked to a mixed constitution or mixed government" (Held).

According to professor Quentin Skinner of the Cambridge University, this is a conceptual shift from the fundamental civic duty to overcome self-interest, where the citizen is not distinguishable from the government, to a system where different groups compete to protect their own interests, up to our days with citizens considered as consumers. In his conversation with Held, Skinner highlights how this model of democracy is linked to the Hobbesian concept of negative liberty: "I am free simply whenever I am not interfered with in my pursuit of my various chosen goals". By contrast he quotes the political writer James Harrington (1611-77, author of the Commonwealth of Oceana), in arguing that freedom is not just a matter of action but status as well: "I am unfree not only if I am coherced but if am placed in a position of dependence". There is a lack of independence if the only thing I have to offer is labour, the reasoning goes, thus the difference between the negative liberty of being free from the law and being freed by the law, in helping myself part of the government.

This relation between economic equality and civil rights such as liberty and justice brings us to Rousseau's contribution to modern political thought, which goes beyond reviving ancient traditions of democracy, up to the point that Held maintains that his originality and distinctiveness make him the exemption to the rule of representing a model with a school of thought rather than a single thinker. Instead, the whole conceptual framework of developmental republicanism is summarised in the Genevan philosopher (perhaps only perfectioned in Mary Wollstoncraft's later contribution on women's participation) because "his account of the core republican ideas is among the most radical, if not the most radical, ever developed, and it is linked to a new view of the rights and duties of the citizens" (Held).

Rousseau fought with the general convinctions of his century with the myth of the natural goodness of men and the moral superiority of wild men on the civilised ones, of the ancient on the modern ones. Since the state exists and it cannot be destroyed because it is impossible that men return to life in the forests - he asks himself in the Social Contract - under which conditions can the State comply with the laws of reason and justice? The answer is: since in the state of nature individuals exercise sovereign rights over themselves, they would give up these rights to the collectivity and in return participate to the formation of the general will, that of the State, which in this way would be organised in a way to guard the interests of the majority of the citizens. According to this reasoning, the only legitimate government would be direct democracy, where legislative power belongs to the entire body of the citizens, who are also entitled to the designation of the persons in charge to execute the laws (notice the analogy with Marsilius). In short, Rousseau does not accept that the collectivity can delegate its powers to an elective assembly.

Bram Gieben helps us to better understand Rousseau by posing three questions which I have taken the... liberty to attach what would be the relevant answer by David Held:

1. Where did sovereignty reside, and how was it exercised? "Sovereignty originates in the people, and it ought to stay there [...] The considered exercise of power by citizens is the only legitimate way in which liberty can be sustained".

2. What were the features of Rousseau's account of "assembly politics"? "People can easily meet together and can easily know the rest" (but this means to be content with the city-state and indeed Rousseau is, enthusiast of his Geneva).

3. Where do the problems arise in the account of the difference between liberty and independence? "Liberty consists less in acting accordingly to one's own pleasure, than in not being subject to the will and pleasure of other people" (this is not Held's answer but Rousseau's himself).

Only one element is missing in Rousseau's developmental republicanism, but is fundamental: women, or "the gendered conception of citizenship", as Held writes in introducing Anglo-Irish writer Mary Wollstonecrft. In her most important book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, she attacked the educational restrictions that kept women in a state of ignorance and slavish dependence. She was especially critical of a society which encouraged women to be docile and attentive to their looks to the exclusion of all else: "It would be an endless task to trace to variety if meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel that reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charm and weakness".

Wollestonecraft describes marriage as "legal prostitution", adding that women "may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent". Her ideas were truly revolutionary and cauused tremendous controversy. She argued that to obtain social equality society must rid itself of the monarchy as well as of the church and the military hierarchies. Her views even shocked fellow radicals in maintaining that the rights of man and the rights of women are the same thing.

In conclusion, with Mary Wollstoncraft women see the light at the end of a tunnel of male-dominated politics, adding this fundamental element to Rousseau's arguing for equality after a slow extension of citizenship, and the consequent right to participate to public life, to a broader realm of categories of people.

I am aware that Gieben puts citizenship (its restriction) firmly among the features of contnuity, but in a perhaps optimistic view I see that even in Marsilius' times "Citizenship extends to the ranks of men with taxable property, born or resident for a long period in their city" (Held).

Thanks to Rousseau and Wollstoncracft modern political science begins "to take more seriously - as Skinner says about citizenship in conclusion of his conversation with Held - the claim of democracy being the government of the people by the people".
The most important similarities and differences between the competitive élitist and the pluralist models in contemporary democracy

By Michele Boselli

The competitive élitist and the pluralist models of democracy were conceived between the end of the XIX century and the first half of the XX. The latter wouldn’t have been born without the former, in that obviously bearing similarities with it, and didn’t stop to develop into neo-pluralism until recent decades, in that marking significant differences with competitive elitism and even pluralism itself in its original form.

The aim of this discussion will be to elaborate on these similarities and differences. In doing so, before reaching conclusions it seems appropriate to summarise the two models with the help of the philosophers, sociologists and economists who best represent them: among elitists, Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), Max Weber (1846-1920) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950); and among pluralists  Robert Dahl (1915-). According to the competitive élitist theory, every political system is ruled by a political élite or élites. It was Sicilian social scientist Gaetano Mosca who first introduced this model, along with his fellow Italian contemporary sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), whose work was later developed by Schumpeter and Dahl into the pluralist model. Mosca defined democracy as a system in which competing elites are formally chosen or rejected by electors. However, he was convinced that members of Parliament were not actually elected by the people, but rather by their friends who arranged for them to be elected.

This is, in short, Mosca’s concept of élitism, a competition heavily relying on the nature of an organisation (the “friends”) which is nothing less than the bureaucracy described by one of the founding father of sociology, Max Weber, in what is perhaps his most important theory, Weber was the first to introduce the idea that modern political systems are becoming more and more similar among them because they all endure a process of bureaucratisation.

Bureaucracy’s special features include storing information on a vast scale and the fragmentation of functions according to the specialised abilities of experts. In this respect it is worth to recall the work of Roberto Michels (1876-1936), another Italian sociologist, who developed Weber’s thoughts on bureaucracy into the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”: if a form of organisation is necessary for effective action in society, that organisation unavoidably demands a bureaucracy and those bureaucracies, again unavoidably, concentrate power at the summit of a hierarchy, where few people control information, communication and finances. It is a fascinating theory about the civil servants controlling a given organisation ignore or distort the wishes of its membership. It basically is a development of Weber’s account of bureaucracy, and to Weber we go back in our discussion.

Another interesting theory derived from Weber’s work and relevant to our discussion on elitist bureaucracy is that on the “convergence thesis”, claiming that systems apparently very different such as those of the Soviet Union and the United States become increasingly similar because of the expansion of bureaucracy. This is a concept shared by Schumpeter in analysing how the huge size of modern industry determines a convergence between socialism and capitalism because of the need of bureaucratic management in both models of society.

Schumpeter’s pessimistic view of democracy (he didn’t trust humans as being able to act rationally) was that the ordinary citizens should not have any further role in the decision-making process other than taking part in periodic elections to choose between political parties, one or other team of competing leaders. In reinterpreting democracy as a system in which rival élites of party leaders vied for power through election, Schumpeter was to become the link between Weber and Dahl (see below), between the competitive élitist and pluralist models.

Indeed, his thought could well be seen as the common ground between the two models of democracy we are examining here: we begin to see what in my opinion is the most important similarity between the competitive élitist and pluralist model (which follows): differently from previous models such as, for example, the Marxist one, they do not tend to describe what should be the best model, nor to construct an example of what they wish to be the model, but they rather take a photograph of the existing model. As David Held explains in his Models of democracy:

“Like Weber and Schumpeter, their [the pluralists’] goal was to be ‘realistic’ and ‘objective’ in the face of all those thinkers who asserted particular ideals without due attention to the circumstances in which they found themselves. Since the pluralists’ critique of such thinkers is similar in many respects to the critical treatment offered by Montesquieu, Madison, Mill, Weber and Schumpeter, the focus below will be on the pluralists’ positive understanding of democracy”.

Among the many pluralist thinkers, each with its version of the pluralist model, Held chooses as the most representative a political scientist, Robert Dahl, who has in the last five decades dominated the international discussion on democracy for making its definition closer to the Western political system by developing the idea of poliarchy. The root of this word is Greek, meaning the rule of the many, rather than the rule of the people as in democracy. It is a concept invented in order to describe the conditions of modern democracies, in which society is managed by interest and pressure groups with common goals and the government merely plays the role of mediator among them.

By studying the dynamics of power and influence in small American communities, Dahl came to the conclusion that a pluralist political system has several centres of power and sources of authority, rather than a single regulator. The government shares power with several other entities such as trade unions, industrial associations and business organisations, the administrative bureaucracy, interest groups and pressure groups (based on gender, class, religion, ethnicity…), and non-governmental organisations lobbying for the environment, human rights and civil liberties, etc.

Another original feature of pluralist theory derived from the study of community power is that a low rate of participation in democratic process is not necessarily regrettable. On the contrary, apathy in political involvement could even be seen as healthy in meaning trust by the people in those who govern them, while history shows that escessive participation often coincided with undesirable phenomena like fanaticism in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and communist Soviet Union.

David Truman (1913-), who shares with Dahl one of the longest ever memberships of the American Political Science Association, adds to the theory the explanation on how stability can be achieved in such a dispersive decision-making system: actually, “only the highly routinised governmental activities show any stability”, he writes in The Governmental Process, while organised interest groups may only play segments of the whole structure, each of them being too weak to impose its “tiranny” (a concept of society fragmentation that Truman owes to Madison).

Pluralists like Dahl e Truman agreed with Schumpeter that the distinctive feature of democracies is the method of selection of politicians, but here ends the similarity and begins the difference: in fact, they broadened Schumpeter’s and Weber’s ideas to apply them to a multiplicity of social actors, using the same conceptual framework to show how the concentration of political power in the hands of competing élites was not inevitable. What follows is a summary of other similarities and differences that I have noticed between the two models, in David Held’s presentation of them.

Similarities:
-         Both models find their principle of justification in the need to obstruct the emergence of exceedingly powerful political factions and leadership;
-         Among their key features, the two models share the principle of a healthy electoral competition between rival political élites and at least two parties;
-         Again among their key features, both models value the independence of a well-trained bureaucracy as a fourth pillar along the classical tripartition of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary (and the system of checks to balance their powers).

 Differences:
-         On an eminently philosophical dimension, pluralist Dahl maintains that the legitimacy of a political system ought to originate from “the depths of political culture”, while according to Schumpeter the simple acceptance of a competitive electoral system means a belief in its legitimacy.
-         Analogously, together with fellow pluralists Dahl insisted that democracy is firmly berthed in the harbour of society’s consensus, hence no politicians would be successful in leaving a lasting impression unless in tune with a nation’s political culture; on the other hand, before him Schumpeter stressed instead the profound impact on democratic politics made by the direction given by competing (and competent) élites;
-         Last in this list, but probably the most noteworthy, is a feature of polyarchy limpidly explained by Held: “The democratic character of a regime is secured by the existence of multiple groups or multiple minorities. Indeed, Dahl argued that democracy can be defined by ‘minority government’. For the value of the democratic process lies in rule by ‘multiple minority oppositions’, rather than in the establishment of the ‘sovereignty of the majority’. Weber’s and Schumpeter’s scepticism about the concept of popular sovereignty was justified, albeit for reasons different from those they themselves gave”.

In conclusion, and as an attempt to answer the essay’s question, on which of the examined models I consider to provide the more convincing picture of contemporary democracy, it is quite obvious to point at the more recent and developed model, in its neo-pluralist version, because it is easy to recognize in it an important element which in our era of globalization we have grown used to: the increasing influence of corporate capitalism over the other actors of pluralism. This represents another difference between the competitive élitist model and pluralism in its newer, neo-pluralist variant. Neo-pluralist author Charles Lindblom (1918-) writes:

Because public functions in the market system rest in the hands of businessmen, it follows that jobs, prices, production, growth, the standard of living, and the economic security of everyone all rest in their hands. Consequently, government officials cannot be indifferent to how well business performs its functions. Depression, inflation, or other economic disasters can bring down a government. A major function of government, therefore, is to see to it that businessmen perform their tasks.

Therefore, a government will follow a political agenda that is polarised towards corporate business, causing erosion of parliamentary politics and the marginalisation of those excluded from the political agenda itself. This is, in extreme synthesis, what neo-pluralism differentiates itself in earlier pluralism. It is somehow ironic, although hardly surprising in consideration of the foreseeable counterattack of conservative forces, that the dissolution of pluralism into crystallised schools of neo-pluralist thought was the consequence of the 1968 social movement and the political polarisation subsequent to it, for it was precisely the 1968-69 social unrest in Europe and North America to highlight all the limits of a pluralist theory which reached its climax of popularity between the 1950s and the 1960s. Neo-pluralist thinkers adjusted their theories. For example, in spite of being an admirer of free market economy, Lindblom himself grew increasingly uncomfortable in respect of the asymmetries of power that he witnessed in favour of big corporate business.
Industrialized warfare and the fighting of total war are central to the explanation of democratisation in Europe and the USA

By Michele Boselli

War is not only among the six explanatory factors of democratization discussed in Democratization by David Potter and David Goldblatt, but according to this latter it is even one of the two most important along with the economic development and other consequences of capitalist industrialisation, the other four explanatory factors being: social divisions (for example the emergence of urban working classes, or gender inequality); the shape of their relationship with state and political institutions; civil society (balancing the power of the state by empowering previously excluded classes); and finally political culture and ideas, although this is a factor related to education and values such as religion which is questionable in having been highlighted, disputed or ignored by different schools of thought.

Speaking of schools of thought, the aim of this essay will be to discuss the relation between war and democracy from both the structural and transitional theories approaches, which complement each other well in providing a picture of the long-term factors in which conditions for democratisation mature (the structural theory), and the short-term igniting elements that in such historical and social environment trigger an acceleration in the democratisation process (the transitional one). In describing the struggle for democratisation between two opposing coalitions (authoritarian and democratic), the structural theory is particularly useful in identifying which social group under what circumstances will be member of such coalitions, while short-term transition theory identifies “who can get the upper hand in creating, manipulating and implementing institutional change once the decision to embark in a period of democratisation is taken” (Goldblatt).

Among structural theorists, Swede Goran Therborn is the one who takes more account of the impact of war in explaining democratisation. According to him, national mobilisation in war play an important role in how democratisation could be obtained, and this is demonstrated by the crucial acceleration received by processes of democratisation after both world wars. Indeed, historians view the First world War as one of the major turning points in history, the end of the “long XIX century”, that was so called because it was a period of change begun in the 1760s with the industrial revolution and the French and American revolutions.

During the long century, along with the strengthening of the nation-state (in the case of America the establishment of a new one), wars lasted longer, became more expensive to undertake and required a much broader social mobilisation. But those who were expected to fight for a nation were unwilling to do so without something in return, without some say in the running of the state. Therefore, the bigger the mobilisation of large numbers of soldiers, the greater the probability for more representative government as the outcome for the winning states, and even more so for the losers, as Goldblatt says:

“The First World War is pivotal in the history of democracy, in that it accelerates the processes of democratisation which are already occurring inside nation-states, for example Italy and Britain. In addition, it shatters the legitimacy of political power of the old authoritarian regimes that existed in Austria, Hungary and Germany, and were holding up against the forces of democratisation prior to this”.

However, this was not bound to last, and the first part of the following “short XX century” ending with the collapse of communism in 1989, that in the interwar-period of 1919-1939, saw the crisis of modern democracy and the rise of fascist and nazist dictatorships in most of  Europe. In order to explain this catastrophic failure of democratisation, the introduction of transitional theory is needed because it suits the analysis of short-term contingent factors rather than longer-term structural factors. According to the main transitional theorist, Dankwart Rustow, transition to democracy requires an essential background condition (an established nation-state), then a phase pf preparation, followed by a deliberate decision to institutionalise democratic procedures, and finally habituation. It is this last phase that he former empires of central Europe lacked because the war caused socio-economic and political earthquakes which damages lasted over a decade, thus contributing to the unprecedented crisis of the 1930s. furthermore, not only the socio-economic and political structures of the countries involved were dramatically changed, but also the sense of security necessary for a gradual transition to a sound democracy was destroyed, and the effort to restore stability in Europe with a Treaty of Versailles humiliating for Germany, far from ending the threat of future wars laid the foundations for a second, more destructive ear in 1939.

Democracy, in short, “is born of conflict, even violence, never as a result of simply peaceful evolution” writes Goldblatt in Democratisation referring to the transitional theory, and elaborates: “war is ambiguous: while it can accelerate democratisation, the consequences of war and defeat can retard democratisation”. David Potter agrees: “international war has been associated with both democratisation and authoritarianism”.

Now that we have taken the broad picture of democratisation in Europe up to the Second World War, it will be worth to discuss the peculiar democratisation on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, characterised by a unique feature that made it different from the European experience: the presence of a consistent minority of African-Americans. As in many European countries, women remained excluded from American politics until the First World War, but African-Americans long after. The American War of Independence of 1776 had no impact on their status and the Reconstruction after the Civil War of 1861-65, when Northern military triumph put an end to slavery and officially made slaves citizens, left them still marginalised, segregated in special walks of life and not allowed to take part in the primary elections to choose the candidates of the Democratic party dominant in the South (on the ground that primaries were an internal affair of a private body), because the former slave owners emerged as its political leaders. Even in Washington, at federal level, African-Americans did not find allies in Northern politicians because procedures in the Congress which effectively handed control to the very racist white Southerners, und unwillingness by their Northerner party members to bother them risking losing elections.

The conditions to prepare the exit from this dead-end situation were laid with the mass migration of African-Americans from the agricultural Southern states (in particular Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina) to the industrialised states of the North (Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC) during the period between the two world wars, when President Roosevelt’s New Deal determined a coalition of liberal interests (rise of labour, more federal government) in opposition to the South. A further step ahead was again war: African-American servicemen fought a Second World War which was, among other, against racism, and their segregation in the Army became an apparent contradiction. Finally, a charismatic black leadership was found in the person of Martin Luther King, preacher of Gandhian non-violence, and the outrage for the brutal repression by the police in his civil disobedience actions, for the first time broadcasted by television to the whole nation, led to the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of 1964-65.

In conclusion, we have seen how wars have been central explanatory factors of democratisation in the Western World, where the dominance of liberal democracy is a military achievement as well as the result of economic growth. In particular, the First World War indicated in liberal democracy an alternative to authoritarian monarchies; the Second World War had a tremendous impact in restoring the long-term trend: the future of European democracies hung on its outcome, both in the Western world and in Eastern Europe, where it left a legacy of totalitarism; and finally it was the developing dynamics of the Cold War against that communist authoritarianism which has a decisive impact on the course of democratisation in the countries examined, for example in the exclusion from government of radical actors to the advantage of moderate ones in the German and Italian democracies of the late 1940s and those of Portugal and Spain thirty years later; or, again, in the inclusion of African-Americans in US politics. Here is a final synthesis of these phenomena in David Goldblatt’s words:

“The First World Ward, the Second World War and the Cold War have been enduring major factors in shaping and forcing struggles for democratisation. Perhaps the most important thing, though, about the fight of those immense, industrialised wars, is that politicians and ruling élites simply cannot ask their citizens to fight industrialised wars while simultaneously excluding them from some kind of share in political power”.


The concept of “statist” systems adequately explain the slow progress of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East

By Michele Boselli

“There is a widespread illusion shared by the leaders in the North and the South which pretends to believe that economic development produces in itself a virtuous circle that leads to freedom and democracy. But this not true or so automatic. And I believe, as the Indian economist and Novel-prize laureate Amartya Sen, that the exercise of the fundamental civil and economic liberties in a clear framework of the rule of law, far from being an optional is an essential component of development”..

With these words, on 25 March 2002, former European Union Commissioner for humanitarian aid Emma Bonino introduced the central and most stimulating part of her lecture at the American University in Cairo on the necessity to globalise democracy and human rights. Bonino continued her dissertation citing another economist, Chilean Hernando de Soto, in order to demonstrate how the poor populations of the underdeveloped nations would indeed have the resources to escape hardship, but they are prisoners of poverty because of bureaucracy, corruption and uncertainty of right.

The considerations that follow aim to reflect on the issue of the statism obstructing democracy in two regions, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, usually regarded as exceptional in comparison with the process of democratisation in the rest of the world. As John Wiseman explains in chapter 11 of Democratisation, a statistic relation is universally recognised between the level of economic development and the presence (or absence) of democracy, but this relation “is not so automatic”, as Bonino said in her lecture.

In it, bureaucracy, corruption and uncertainty of right are presented as the factors which obstacle the economic development in the Third World. In the recently published UNDP’s (the United Nation’s Development Programme) Arab Human Development Report 2002, these factors are identified as freedom deficit, imposed ignorance and women’s condition. In both works, it impresses the similarity between Bonino’s first sentence (“There is a widespread illusion [that] economic development produces in itself a virtuous circle that leads to freedom and democracy”), and the report’s conclusion: “a virtuous circle [has to be created] in which economic growth favours the human development and vice versa” (as reported in the Corriere della sera, 3 July 2002).

It is true that there are African countries particularly deficient on natural resources, but there are other countries rich of natural resources, where the economic development has been precluded by a very bad administration: political élites used bureaucratic structures to reward their clients in order to conserve their support. In one word: clientelism, which has led to the swelling of an enormous apparatus, unproductive and corrupt. Obviously damaging the economic development.

It is interesting to observe that this has happened in equal measure independently by the ideological model which different African countries inspired themselves to during the Cold War. In countries following the socialist model, nationalisations were the instrument for the state to control the economy, but in capitalist countries the statist domination was no different in forcing aspirant entrepreneurs seeking licences of import/export, foreign currency, grants and contracts, etc., through the government’s Caudine Forks.

Very often the political-bureaucratic élites were the ones to benefit of their control on the state in order to develop their own business. In this way the political power preceded and made possible to gain economic power through the control of the means of production. Moreover, there statal of bureaucratic middle class were structurally weak because in competition along personalised ethnic, religious and linguistic lines: these “weak” authoritarianism explains why the model of authoritarian economic development successful in Asia failed instead in Africa.

But with the end of the 1980s and the Cold War – which coincided with the post-independentist periods and during which the USA and the USSR demonstrated to be very generous with the friendly regimes regardless of how they opposed their citizens -, Africa found itself in an even more marginal position. The disengagement of the superpowers meant for the African dictators the lack of external support against oppositors inside, after a decade in which their regimes endured an increasing crisis of legitimacy.

In fact, on top of the political reasons (abuse of human and civil rights) causing the alienation on immense slices of population, exasperation rose for the economic failure of these regimes, which justified the closure of political confront precisely because such closure was claimed to assure a prosperity and economic development which didn’t come. At the same time, the conditions imposed by international economic and financial institutions for investment and economic aid forced a reduction of the role of the state in the economy, and subsequently its ability to earn clientelist consent through the distribution of favours, leaving the increasingly vulnerable authoritarian regimes exposed to the internal pushes towards democratic restructuration.

Coming now to the analysis of these processes in Middle East countries, in chapter 13 of Democratisation Simon Bromley  explains that there are three main structural parameters in order to classify and distinguish them: their social structure at the moment of the formation of the modern state; the impact of international factors like their historical relationship with foreign powers; and finally the availability of resources for the state, in particular in countries which have been large producers of oil from the post-war period onwards. Based on these criteria we can classify Middle East countries in the three following groups.

The authoritarian, nationalist and modernising regimes of Egypt, Iraq and Syria, which followed the path undertaken before the Second World War by two big non-Arab countries in the region: Turkey and Iran. These authoritarian-modernising regimes were founded on a nationalist development firmly guided by the state, aimed at overthrowing influence and the old social classes: the city notables and tribal chiefs who dominated the political life by the clientelist distribution of benefits to the peasants and other workers who in turn provided them political support. Egyptian President Nasser described this state of affairs in 1957, after taking it over:

“What is democracy? We were supposed to have a democratic system during the period 1923 to 1953. But […] landowners and Pashas ruled our people. They used this kind of democracy as an easy tool for the benefit of feudalism. You have seen the feudalists gathering the peasants together and driving them to the polling booths. There the peasants would cast their votes according to the instructions of their masters […]”

in a second category of regimes, such as the Jordan monarchy and the Lebanese consociativism, the absence of oil as well as of a landed class made the role of the state more limited in controlling society, therefore allowing a relatively higher degree of political pluralism. In Lebanon in particular, consociativism provided for the allocation of political seats proportionally to the main religious groups.

Finally, there are purely rentier regimes such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which not only lacked a landed class but did not even show any meaningful socio-economic force before the formation of the modern state, and developed almost exclusively on the oil income. The limited social basis of these regimes and the fact that the state takes control the entire resources explains why there was no room for the emergence of independent forms of political participation.

This state pf affairs, in which great part of the entrances of the state were not generated from productive activities of the population, implied a representativeness and legitimation very different from the cases in which states tax the productive activities of their citizens: according to the (reversed) principle of “no taxation without representation”, to the states that do not even need to develop representative institutions.

Moreover, the oil factor and the Arab-Israeli conflict determined in the region a huge interest by the superpowers: by the Soviet Union in encouraging a communist economy and a single-party system; on the other hand the USA in discouraging reforms for fear of losing access to oil fields, but in doing so reinforcing the authoritarian regimes.

Simon Bromley and, to a lesser extent, the author of chapter 14 of Democratisation, Nazih Ayuby, do not support a supposed Middle East’s exceptionality in the process of democratisation. According to them, the exceptionality is only in the times and the fragility of the democratisation process, but not in its absence or rejection in comparison with other regions of the planet. The diversity is rather the one identified by Bonino in the opening: in the Middle East the relationship between socio-economic modernisation and the development of liberal democracy is neither so automatic or so simple.

This is demonstrated by the opposite examples of Saudi Arabia, which has achieved high levels of modernisation since a long time, but failing any meaningful democratisation, and on the other hand Turkey, which began to move towards a satisfactory level of democratisation before catching up with the standards of modernization commonly belied necessary.

If Kemalist Turkey between the two world wars was to be of inspiration to the authoritarian regimes of Egypt, Iraq and Syria, these were very different from it and instead more similar to Lebanon in lacking the landed class overthrown by the revolutionary nationalists in the three above-mentioned countries.

That’s why the role of the state in the economy turned out to be more limited. For Lebanon and Turkey the absence of a revolutionary mobilisation also meant indifference to the Soviet model of planned economic development, and above all was crucial for both these countries the lack of oil which instead determined the underdeveloped representativeness in the rentier states. The outcome was an appreciable degree of separation between the state and the control of the economic resources, allowing a certain margin of political manoeuvre: where capitalist development happened outwith the rigid control of the state, bourgeoisie and working class gave birth to independent organisations which began to develop into a civil society.

Continuing to move, albeit laboriously, towards the consolidation of a liberal democracy, Turkey demonstrates that Islam does not constitute in itself a barrier to democracy (thus causing depression to the advocates of a monoreligious European fortress). We are reminded of that by today’s news of the resignation of Turkey’s Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, whom I met in 1993 along the then Prime Minister Tansu Ciller (a woman) to gain their support for the establishment of an International Criminal Court on former Yugoslavia.

There are today Islamists convinced that the Muslim shura is roughly the equivalent of modern democracy, in giving people the right to choose who represent and govern them, as well as the right to practice free thought and the rights of opinion and opposition, accepting therefore the contemporary concept of political party. Indeed, since in many Arab countries Islamists constitute the main opposition groups, they have become actors in the very same process of democratisation. In Algeria the Muslim movement is undemocratic, but its rise has revealed the equally undemocratic character of the government.

More generally, in the whole region the increase of these movements is not due to technological contents but it rather goes interpreted as a reaction to the total statal occupation of the economy. Only time will tell us if Islamists will become a democratisation force in the long term. Meanwhile, it can certainly be concluded that “statist” systems adequately explain the slow progress of democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Reference:
- David Potter et al., Democratisation, Polity Press Cambridge and The Open University
- Emma Bonino, We need the Globalization of Human Rights and Democracy, American University in Cairo, English Public Lecture Series, Cairo 25 March 2002
- Rima Khalaf Hunaidi et al., Arab Human Development Report 2002, UNDP as reported in the International Herald Tribune, 2 July 2002, Corriere della sera, 3 July 2002, and The Economist, 6-12 July 2002


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


Do the European Union and the United Nations offer new forms of democratic governance?

By Michele Boselli

I certainly do agree that the EU and the UN offer new forms of democratic governance, for they are the most significant among few editing institutions that can be developed into new models of democracy in the globalization age, otherwise we would have to give up hope altogether that democracy will continue to thrive in human history by deepening where it already exists and expanding where it doesn’t yet. The European Union in particular is a unique, unprecedented experiment in the history of democracy, in being neither a nation-state nor, or not yet, a (con-)federation of nation-states, but rather a new form of democratic governance that we contemporary Europeans have the extraordinary opportunity to build and shape. Indeed, the term “governance”, rather than government, used in the formulation of the question hints to a much broader system than traditional governments, a system in which civil society interact with the institutions in order to fill the much-debated democratic deficit of the European Union.

Why does the EU suffer a democratic deficit? Usually, democratic governments are in a strong position in terms of legitimization because they enjoy the consent of the people who have elected them and through periodical elections have control of a system where politicians are responsible and encouraged to take into consideration their needs. In Governing the European Union, Christopher Lord summarizes in just two the main attributes of the democratic system of government, in which people essentially must be able to: (a) control the decision makers acting on their behalf; and (b) exercise such control on an egalitarian basis. The EU lacks a source of authority in popular sovereignty and the European Parliament is the key existing institution we must refer to when measuring democracy in the EU. Although it was conceived to reflect national communities more than the citizens of Europe (as the over-representation of smaller member states demonstrates), and initially had a little more than symbolic functions, over the years it has acquired more powers towards other European institutions and their policies. Parliaments usually have two main ways of exercising control over executives: the power to appoint or dismiss important office-holders, which is weak in the case of the European Parliament, and the power to grant or withdraw financial resources through legislative authority, which by contrast is quite significant in the EP: on some supranational issues it even has the power of co-decision with the Council of Ministers. There are, however, two deficiencies in this system: the most obvious is that supranational issues are confined in the first, Community-pillar of the Union, so that it has no power of law-making or control on the second (defense and foreign affairs) and third (justice and home affairs) intergovernmental pillars.

European federalists, or supranationalists as opposed to intergovernmentalists, advocate for a stronger European Parliament, the direct election of the President of the Commission (or indeed the President of Europe) and, last but not least, the introduction of Europe-wide, Swiss-style referenda on particular matters to involve citizens in the consensus-building process. in other words: the realization at regional (European) level of the cosmopolitan model of democracy discussed by David Held in chapter 20 of his Models of Democracy. Cosmopolitan democracy has several sources of participation instead of a single territorial basis: a pan-European Parliament, national assemblies, sub-state authorities and social movements offering alternatives to the de-democratizing effects of economic globalization. this is the trend bound to prevail, as over the time in the EU there has been a shift "from the indirect towards the more direct mode of legitimization; from performance as virtually the sole criterion towards issues of democracy and identity; from inter-European élites to national populations as the addresses of legitimacy claims" (Bentham and Lord, in Bromley et al, 2001, p. 301).

Cosmopolitan democracy, however, is not the only model contemporary political thinkers have articulated for the future of democracy, but "it combines aspects of both radical communitarism and liberal-internationalism" (McGraw, 1997, p. 252). the latter has its remote origin, as the name suggests, in the thinking of enlightment philosophers and liberal-democratic models from John Stuart Mill's developmental democracy to Robert Dahl's poliarchy, essentially supporting change through gradual reform of existing institutions. thus they foresee democratization at the global level by the creation of a People's Assembly (initially constituted by national MPs) and a Forum representing civil society, both associated with the UN General Assembly; and an Economic Security Council along the existing one. Radicals, on the other hand, rejects reform in favour of a new, alternative model implying a profound transformation of the present organization of socio-economic relations and the relevant existing institutions. Founding their theory on the political tradition beginning with Rousseau, then Marx, up to contemporary New Left, they propose a model of direct and participatory democracy known as demarchy, where representation is no longer linked to a specific territory but derives by common interests of a community, for example in transport, environment, health, education, etc. "[It] is a 'bottom-up' theory [...] of 'human governance' which is grounded in the existence of a multiplicity of 'communities of fate' and social movements as opposed to the individualism of liberal-internationalism [...]" (McGraw, 1997, p.249).

However, cosmopolitans, liberal-internationalists and radicals all share some common ground: they all accept that globalization challenges democracy as we know it, and they are consequently engaged in its deepening and broadening in the direction of global governance, but they all reject the idea of a world government. They are therefore belonging to the family of transformationalists, as opposed to the realist one, which believes that globalization in nothing new under the sun and simply proposes to tackle this challenge by transposing in a world government the analogous centralization and strengthening of the US government one century ago, when it faced a similar challenge by the growth of businesses, albeit on a national scale. Realists seek to improve the efficiency of the UN by making it more responsive to the interests of the great powers, which are the organization's main financial contributors, while the distinctive approach of cosmopolitans, liberal-internationalists and their vision of reform (or alternative) towards geo-governance clashes with the veto and financial power of the hegemonic states. Moreover, in the United Nations, as the institution of global governance par excellence, the situation is more complicated than that in the EU because of its global, rather than regional, scale, and by the fact that not all its member-states are consolidated democracies, let alone that in many cases democracy is a concept that do not even cross their governments' minds.

The two key issues creating tension between reform of the UN and its democratization, the financial one and the Security Council's composition and power of veto (so that the five major powers block reform), are not independent from each other but related between them, as Mark Imber exemplifies:

The city of New York spends more money trying to keep the peace on its streets than the UN has to spend on keeping the peace throughout the world. Now, what the statistics tell us is that there is an enormous gap between the UN expectations and the UN ability to deliver. I would therefore suggest that the true test of any reformer who approach the UN [...] is to ask them if they are prepared for the UN to take some independent financial resources of some kind [...] This would require the member states to go through a major change of conscience about the difference between whether they are prepared to regard, in the post-cold war world, the UN as remaining within restricted intergovernmental and limited for that it is now, which ultimately the Security Council powers can control, or whether the major powers are prepared to experiment with geo-governance in a more genuinely open form, in which case they should not be afraid of major international organizations taking certain independent financial powers...

For example, the most significant argument for adding Germany and Japan to the current five permanent members of the Security Council is that they are big financial contributors to the UN budget. But adding them (who were excluded as losing powers of the Second World War) would open the way for similar claims by other countries, on the basis of (a) military might (possession of nuclear weapons); and/or (b) industrialization and wealth, like Germany and Japan but other members of the G8 as well; and/or (c) sheer demography, the most notable case being India. But then Pakistan would claim the same treatment in "virtue" of possessing the atomic bomb, and another de facto nuclear power should be admitted: Israel. Italy would demand to be taken aboard as the only big European country left out, and Canada as the only one left out from the G8. Now that we have this North-biased Security Council (Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, UK, US, the current five in bold), the most obvious candidates to re-address the North-South balance would probably be Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico and Nigeria. But such 17-member Security Council is still unsatisfying: what about Argentina, Iran, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine...?

It is interesting to note that two EU member-states have permanent seats in the Security Council: Britain and France. It is difficult to imagine these two former super-powers coming to terms with their diminished role in representing less than one per cent each of the world population and relinquish their seats in the Security Council to the British Commonwealth and the European Union respectively. However, it is possible to imagine a third European seat belonging to the EU as a whole (minus Britain and France) rather than to its single member-states. Another permanent seat would be assigned to Africa (or Sub-Saharan Africa if simpler), thus forcing big countries such as Nigeria and South Africa to pool their foreign policies, this in turn hopefully leading to a greater co-operation in other fields and, ultimately, an African Union or United States of Africa. Even more likely to work would this model be in South America, where a common market already exist, while it will probably be more difficult to convince Arab nations to pool their efforts with Asian Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. The resulting 11-seat Security Council (Sub-Saharan Africa, Arab/Muslim, Asean, China, EU, France, India, Mercosur, Russia, UK, US) would reflect a more balanced picture of contemporary world, with a relatively lighter European presence (27% instead of 40%), and still keeping the majority of consolidated democracies at no less than 55%, so that the power of veto could be abolished and resolutions taken by majority or qualified democracy of eight members.

This may seem a fantasy, but it "should be emphasized that it is a fantasy to imagine that one can advocate democracy today without engaging with the range of issues elaborated here", concludes Held about cosmopolitan democracy (Models, p.356). Ten years ago the International Criminal Court, a pillar in the cosmopolitan vision of democracy, was a fantasy too; but today, after having being recently ratified by the required number of at least 60 countries (thanks to the great effort of Non-Governmental Organizations under the umbrella of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court), it actually took off. And this little exercise of mine in the Security Council composition shows how the development of the European Union towards a new form of governance is needed not just for the sake of democracy in the EU itself, but it will be greatly beneficial for the United Nations as well, in paving the way for the new model of cosmopolitan democracy and setting an example for regional governance in other continents.

Reference:
- Bromley, et al., Governing the European Union, Sage Publications 2001
- Held, Models of Democracy, Polity Press 1996
- McGraw et al., The Transformation of Democracy?, Polity Press 1997