3 - Corporations as governments

Summary

Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It depends on powerful pressure groups – the banks and multinationals – which are not subject to any democratic control … Democracy has become a pawn to the dictates of globally volatile capital. So can we really be surprised when more and more citizens turn away from such blatant scams … and decline to vote?

Günter Grass, Essay on VE Day, The Guardian, May 7, 2005

Introduction

In this chapter, we take up one of the most hotly debated topics in many societies around the globe, namely the role of corporations in the governance of citizenship. The suggestion that governments have ceded authority and that now ‘corporations rule the world’, as the title of a popular book suggests (Korten 2001: 354), is by now fairly commonplace. However, it is important to question the veracity of this claim and, indeed, to explore its implications for citizens and for citizenship more generally.

The idea that corporations have taken over from governments is fuelled by a number of phenomena and at different levels. Recent invigoration of the debate, for instance, came from questions about the role of private security organizations in fuelling the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. In Europe, in a similar vein, corporations are increasingly perceived as being more powerful than national governments in tackling the most salient social issues for their citizens, most notably persistently high levels of structural unemployment (Grahl and Teague 1997).