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The Democratic Minimum: Is Democracy a Means to Global Justice?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

James Bohman
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I argue that transnational democracy provides the basis for a solution to the problem of the “democratic circle”—that in order for democracy to promote justice, it must already be just—at the international level. Transnational democracy could be a means to global justice. First, I briefly recount my argument for the “democratic minimum.” This minimum is freedom from domination, understood in a very specific sense. Employing Hannah Arendt's conception of freedom as “the capacity to begin,” the form of nondomination sufficient for the democratic minimum is the capability to initiate deliberation and thus democratic decision-making processes. My point in developing this argument further concerns the political form of a transnational polity: its citizens enjoy the democratic minimum as members of various demoi. In the case of the European Union, this leads to a potential for democratic domination. I call this the demoi problem, a difficulty that holds for any multilevel polity, for bounded as well as transnational political communities. Second, I argue that such domination is overcome so long as the capacity to initiate deliberation is distributed among various units and various levels. The democratic minimum could fail to obtain not only because individuals or groups are dominated by nondemocratic means, but also because they are dominated democratically to the extent that the demos of one unit lacks the normative power to initiate deliberation and thus is subordinated to others.

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Articles
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Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 101 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2005

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References

1 Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works, 1925–1927, Vol. 2 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 325Google Scholar.

2 Young, Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On the first, see Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986Google Scholar); on the second, see, among others, Doyle, Michael, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Parts I and II,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, nos. 3 and 4 (1983Google Scholar). These two fairly robust generalizations concerning the absence of famines and the promotion of peace offer evidence for democracy as a means to justice.

4 See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, ch. 1. For a range of accounts that see deepening democracy in terms of new forms of participation, see Fung, Archon and Wright, Erik Olin, eds., Deepening Democracy (London: Verso, 2003Google Scholar).

5 Several attempts have already been made to work out such a conception, although they are either too weak or too strong to fill this role. For Allen Buchanan and Philip Pettit, the democratic minimum (or its conceptual equivalent) is tied to notions of the accountability of authority or the “tracking” of public interests. On tracking, see Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 88Google Scholar. On accountability understood as a democratic minimum for protecting human rights, see Buchanan, Allen, Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 146Google Scholar. These democratic criteria are too weak and could be fulfilled even in the presence of domination and in the absence of the ability to initiate claims in deliberation.

6 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), p. 479Google Scholar.

7 See Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 129Google Scholar. As he puts it: “Just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom. The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or knowledge; but provided he does not curb their liberty, or at least curbs it less than may other regimes, he meets with Mill's specification of the greatest possible liberty” (p. 129). Notice that democracy need not be judged just because it would equalize or maximize all forms of liberty. Political equality developed in terms of nondomination is a threshold concept; the threshold would not be met when some have so much more political capabilities and resources than others so as not to require cooperation with all citizens.

8 Besides Sen's work on capability failure, see Thomas Pogge's treatment of extreme destitution as the violation of human rights. Pogge, Thomas W., World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002Google Scholar).

9 See Pettit, , Republicanism, p. 88 ffGoogle Scholar.

10 See Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination, ch. 3.

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13 See Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 19Google Scholar off. For republican federalists, “the creation of stable international relations and of successful commercial networks—both now regarded as prime moral objectives of government—could only ever be the product of political liberty” (p. 290).

14 Frug, Gerald, City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999Google Scholar), ch. 6.

15 Frug, , City Making , p. 5Google Scholar.

16 Dahl, Robert, “Federalism and the Democratic Process,” in Pennock, J. R. and Chapman, John W., eds. Liberal Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 95Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 103Google Scholar.

18 Such a historical approach is defended by Buchanan in Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination, ch. 5. This argument could be developed further with a different account of the democratic minimum; as it stands, it only partially fulfills the necessary conditions for making a multiunit polity democratic enough to be a means to justice.

19 Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988 ), pp. 356ffGoogle Scholar.

20 Habermas, Jürgen, “ Why Europe Needs a Constitution ,” New Left Review 11 (S2001 ), pp. 5 – 6Google Scholar.

21 See Tully, James, “Introduction,” in Tully, James and Gagnon, Alain, eds., Multinational Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5ff.Google Scholar; and Bohman, James, Public Deliberation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996Google Scholar), ch. 4.

22 See Weiler, Joseph H., ‘A Constitution for Europe? Some Hard Choices,” Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 4 (2002), p. 568CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Weiler puts the difference this way: “The Quebecois are told: in the name of the people of Canada you are obliged to obey. The French or the Italian or the Germans are told: in the name of the people of Europe, you are invited to obey” (p. 569). Against Weiler's notion of voluntary acceptance, it might be better to say: You are invited to amend the constitutional framework, to find the appropriate reflective equilibrium in which it is possible for you to obey.

23 See Pogge, Thomas W., ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (1992), pp. 48–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kuper, Andrew, ‘Rawlsian Global Justice,” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (2000), pp. 640–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As argued by early modern proponents of transnational federalism, such as Turgot, Diderot, and Price, such a multiunit and dispersed system was to provide checks on the corruption of republics through colonialism.

24 Hurley, Susan, “Rationality, Democracy, and Leaky Boundaries,” in Shapiro, Ian and Hacker-Cordon, Casiano, eds. Democracy's Edges (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 274Google Scholar. Here and earlier in her Natural Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989Google Scholar), Hurley argues that borders can be more or less democratic, in terms of promoting epistemic values of inquiry and the moral value of autonomy as constitutive of democracy.

25 See Hurley, Susan, Natural Reasons, p. 348Google Scholar.