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Can Democracy Survive Globalization?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Benjamin R. Barber
Benjamin R. Barber*
Affiliation:
Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, and Whitman Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Extract

Democracy is far less fragile than we sometimes imagine. Although hard to establish, it is remarkably robust and is corrupted only by dint of persistent effort. Yet, as Rousseau wrote of freedom, once lost, democracy is nearly impossible to regain. Today, the forces of democracy face a new source of corruption all the more sinister because it appears so innocuous, often even identifying itself with the liberty it undermines. Having survived the nation-state and in time subordinated it to its own liberal purposes, can democracy now survive globalization? Only if democracy is globalized.

At present, the encompassing practices of globalization have created an ironic and radical asymmetry: we have managed to globalize markets in goods, labour, currencies and information without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the free market's indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional ‘box’ that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 2000 , pp. 275 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2000

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Footnotes

*

This is the text of the Government and Opposition/ Leonard Schapiro Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on 4 May 2000.

References

1 The insider is Joseph Stiglitz, Clinton’s first-term Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and more recently the Chief Economist of the World Bank, in his extraordinary essay ‘The Insider: What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis’, The New Republic, 17 April 2000. After describing the IMF as staffed by ‘older men … who act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden’, Stiglitz asks ‘did America — and the IMF - push policies because we believed the policies would help East Asia or because we believed they would benefit financial interests in the United States and the industrial world? And, if we believed our policies were helping East Asia, where was the evidence? As a participant in these debates, I got to see the evidence. There was none’.

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15 Joseph Stiglitz writes: ‘In theory the (IMF) supports democratic institutions in the nations it assists. In practice, it undermines the democratic process by imposing policies. Officially, of course, the IMF doesn’t “impose” anything. It “negotiates” the conditions for receiving aid. But all the power in the negotiation is on one side.’ Stiglitz, Joseph, ‘The Insider: What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis’, The New Republic, 17 04 2000.Google Scholar