## 1. Globalization in the History of Ideas



The term globalization has only become commonplace in the last three
decades, and academic commentators who employed the term as late as
the 1970s accurately recognized the novelty of doing so (Modelski
1972). At least since the advent of industrial capitalism, however,
intellectual discourse has been replete with allusions to phenomena
strikingly akin to those that have garnered the attention of recent
theorists of globalization. Nineteenth and twentieth-century
philosophy, literature, and social commentary include numerous
references to an inchoate yet widely shared awareness that experiences
of distance and space are inevitably transformed by the emergence of
high-speed forms of transportation (for example, rail and air travel)
and communication (the telegraph or telephone) that dramatically
heighten possibilities for human interaction across existing
geographical and political divides (Harvey 1989; Kern 1983). Long
before the introduction of the term globalization into recent popular
and scholarly debate, the appearance of novel high-speed forms of
social activity generated extensive commentary about the compression
of space.



Writing in 1839, an English journalist commented on the implications
of rail travel by anxiously postulating that as distance was
"annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were,
shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense
city" (Harvey 1996, 242). A few years later, Heinrich Heine, the
emigre German-Jewish poet, captured this same experience
when he noted: "space is killed by the railways. I feel as if
the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris.
Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea's
breakers are rolling against my door" (Schivelbusch 1978, 34).
Another young German emigre, the socialist theorist Karl
Marx, in 1848 formulated the first theoretical explanation of the
sense of territorial compression that so fascinated his
contemporaries. In Marx's account, the imperatives of capitalist
production inevitably drove the bourgeoisie to "nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections
everywhere." The juggernaut of industrial capitalism constituted
the most basic source of technologies resulting in the annihilation of
space, helping to pave the way for "intercourse in every
direction, universal interdependence of nations," in contrast to
a narrow-minded provincialism that had plagued humanity for untold
eons (Marx 1848, 476). Despite their ills as instruments of capitalist
exploitation, Marx argued, new technologies that increased
possibilities for human interaction across borders ultimately
represented a progressive force in history. They provided the
necessary infrastructure for a cosmopolitan future socialist
civilization, while simultaneously functioning in the present as
indispensable organizational tools for a working class destined to
undertake a revolution no less oblivious to traditional territorial
divisions than the system of capitalist exploitation it hoped to
dismantle.



European intellectuals have hardly been alone in their fascination
with the experience of territorial compression, as evinced by the key
role played by the same theme in early twentieth-century American
thought. In 1904, the literary figure Henry Adams diagnosed the
existence of a "law of acceleration," fundamental to the
workings of social development, in order to make sense of the rapidly
changing spatial and temporal contours of human activity. Modern
society could only be properly understood if the seemingly
irrepressible acceleration of basic technological and social processes
was given a central place in social and historical analysis (Adams
1931 [1904]). John Dewey argued in 1927 that recent economic and
technological trends implied the emergence of a "new
world" no less noteworthy than the opening up of America to
European exploration and conquest in 1492. For Dewey, the invention of
steam, electricity, and the telephone offered formidable challenges to
relatively static and homogeneous forms of local community life that
had long represented the main theatre for most human activity.
Economic activity increasingly exploded the confines of local
communities to a degree that would have stunned our historical
predecessors, for example, while the steamship, railroad, automobile,
and air travel considerably intensified rates of geographical
mobility. Dewey went beyond previous discussions of the changing
temporal and spatial contours of human activity, however, by
suggesting that the compression of space posed fundamental questions
for democracy. Dewey observed that small-scale political communities
(for example, the New England township), a crucial site for the
exercise of effective democratic participation, seemed ever more
peripheral to the great issues of an interconnected world.
Increasingly dense networks of social ties across borders rendered
local forms of self-government ineffective. Dewey wondered, "How
can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay
in place?" (Dewey 1927, 140). To the extent that democratic
citizenship minimally presupposes the possibility of action in concert
with others, how might citizenship be sustained in a social world
subject to ever more astonishing possibilities for movement and
mobility? New high-speed technologies attributed a shifting and
unstable character to social life, as demonstrated by increased rates
of change and turnover in many arenas of activity (most important
perhaps, the economy) directly affected by them, and the relative
fluidity and inconstancy of social relations there. If citizenship
requires some modicum of constancy and stability in social life,
however, did not recent changes in the temporal and spatial conditions
of human activity bode poorly for political participation? How might
citizens come together and act in concert when contemporary
society's "mania for motion and speed" made it
difficult for them even to get acquainted with one another, let alone
identify objects of common concern? (Dewey 1927, 140).



The unabated proliferation of high-speed technologies is probably the
main source of the numerous references in intellectual life since 1950
to the annihilation of distance. The Canadian cultural critic Marshall
McLuhan made the theme of a technologically based "global
village," generated by social "acceleration at all levels
of human organization," the centerpiece of an anxiety-ridden
analysis of new media technologies in the 1960s (McLuhan 1964, 103).
Arguing in the 1970s and 1980s that recent shifts in the spatial and
temporal contours of social life exacerbated authoritarian political
trends, the French social critic Paul Virilio seemed to confirm many
of Dewey's darkest worries about the decay of democracy.
According to his analysis, the high-speed imperatives of modern
warfare and weapons systems strengthened the executive and debilitated
representative legislatures. The compression of territory thereby
paved the way for executive-centered emergency government (Virilio
1977). But it was probably the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who
most clearly anticipated contemporary debates about globalization.
Heidegger not only described the "abolition of distance"
as a constitutive feature of our contemporary condition, but he linked
recent shifts in spatial experience to no less fundamental alterations
in the temporality of human activity: "All distances in time and
space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by places, places
which formerly took weeks and months of travel" (Heidegger 1950,
165). Heidegger also accurately prophesied that new communication and
information technologies would soon spawn novel possibilities for
dramatically extending the scope of *virtual reality*:
"Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film as
if they stood this very moment amidst today's street
traffic...The peak of this abolition of every possibility of
remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and
dominate the whole machinery of communication" (Heidegger 1950,
165). Heidegger's description of growing possibilities for
simultaneity and instantaneousness in human experience ultimately
proved no less apprehensive than the views of many of his
predecessors. In his analysis, the compression of space increasingly
meant that from the perspective of human experience "everything
is equally far and equally near." Instead of opening up new
possibilities for rich and multi-faceted interaction with events once
distant from the purview of most individuals, the abolition of
distance tended to generate a "uniform distanceless" in
which fundamentally distinct objects became part of a bland
homogeneous experiential mass (Heidegger 1950, 166). The loss of any
meaningful distinction between "nearness" and
"distance" contributed to a leveling down of human
experience, which in turn spawned an indifference that rendered human
experience monotonous and one-dimensional.


## 2. Globalization in Contemporary Social Theory



Since the mid-1980s, social theorists have moved beyond the relatively
underdeveloped character of previous reflections on the compression or
annihilation of space to offer a rigorous conception of globalization.
To be sure, major disagreements remain about the precise nature of the
causal forces behind globalization, with David Harvey (1989 1996)
building directly on Marx's pioneering explanation of
globalization, while others (Giddens 19990; Held, McGrew, Goldblatt
& Perraton 1999) question the exclusive focus on economic factors
characteristic of the Marxist approach. Nonetheless, a consensus about
the basic rudiments of the concept of globalization appears to be
emerging.



First, recent analysts associate globalization with
*deterritorialization*, according to which a growing variety of
social activities takes place irrespective of the geographical
location of participants. As Jan Aart Scholte observes, "global
events can - via telecommunication, digital computers,
audiovisual media, rocketry and the like - occur almost
simultaneously anywhere and everywhere in the world" (Scholte
1996, 45). Globalization refers to increased possibilities for action
between and among people in situations where latitudinal and
longitudinal location seems immaterial to the social activity at hand.
Even though geographical location remains crucial for many
undertakings (for example, farming to satisfy the needs of a local
market), deterritorialization manifests itself in many social spheres.
Business people on different continents now engage in electronic
commerce; academics make use of the latest Internet conferencing
equipment to organize seminars in which participants are located at
disparate geographical locations; the Internet allows people to
communicate instantaneously with each other notwithstanding vast
geographical distances separating them. Territory in the sense of a
traditional sense of a geographically identifiable location no longer
constitutes the whole of "social space" in which human
activity takes places. In this initial sense of the term,
globalization refers to the spread of new forms of non-territorial
social activity (Ruggie 1993; Scholte 2000).



Second, theorists conceive of globalization as linked to the growth of
social *interconnectedness* across existing geographical and
political boundaries. In this view, deterritorialization is a crucial
facet of globalization. Yet an exclusive focus on it would be
misleading. Since the vast majority of human activities is still tied
to a concrete geographical location, the more decisive facet of
globalization concerns the manner in which distant events and forces
impact on local and regional endeavors (Tomlinson 1999, 9). For
example, this encyclopedia might be seen as an example of a
deterritorialized social space since it allows for the exchange of
ideas in cyberspace. The only prerequisite for its use is access to
the Internet. Although substantial inequalities in Internet access
still exist, use of the encyclopedia is in principle unrelated to any
specific geographical location. However, the reader may very well be
making use of the encyclopedia as a supplement to course work
undertaken at a school or university. That institution is not only
located at a specific geographical juncture, but its location is
probably essential for understanding many of its key attributes: the
level of funding may vary according to the state or region where the
university is located, or the same academic major might require
different courses and readings at a university in China, for example,
than in Argentina or Norway. Globalization refers to those processes
whereby geographically distant events and decisions impact to a
growing degree on "local" university life. For example,
the insistence by powerful political leaders in wealthy countries that
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank recommend to Latin
and South American countries that they commit themselves to a
particular set of economic policies might result in poorly paid
teachers and researchers as well as large, understaffed lecture
classes in Sao Paolo or Lima; the latest innovations in
information technology from a computer research laboratory in India
could quickly change the classroom experience of students in British
Columbia or Tokyo. Globalization refers "to processes of change
which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs
by linking together and expanding human activity across regions and
continents" (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton 1999, 15).
Globalization in this sense is a matter of degree since any given
social activity might influence events more or less faraway: even
though a growing number of activities seems intermeshed with events in
distant continents, certain human activities remain primarily local or
regional in scope. Also, the magnitude and impact of the activity
might vary: geographically removed events could have a relatively
minimal or a far more extensive influence on events at a particular
locality. Finally, we might consider the degree to which
interconnectedness across frontiers is no longer merely haphazard but
instead predictable and regularized (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt &
Perraton 1999).



Third, globalization must also include reference to the *speed*
or *velocity* of social activity. Deterritorialization and
interconnectedness initially seem chiefly spatial in nature. Yet it is
easy to see how these spatial shifts are directly tied to the
acceleration of crucial forms of social activity. As we observed above
in our discussion of the conceptual forerunners to the present-day
debate on globalization, the proliferation of high-speed
transportation, communication, and information technologies
constitutes the most immediate source for the blurring of geographical
and territorial boundaries that prescient observers have diagnosed at
least since the mid-nineteenth century. The compression of space
presupposes rapid-fire forms of technology; shifts in our experiences
of territory depend on concomitant changes in the temporality of human
action. High-speed technology only represents the tip of the iceberg,
however. The linking together and expanding of social activities
across borders is predicated on the possibility of relatively fast
flows and movements of people, information, capital, and goods.
Without these fast flows, it is difficult to see how distant events
could possibly posses the influence they now enjoy. High-speed
technology plays a pivotal role in the velocity of human affairs. But
many other factors contribute to the overall pace and speed of social
activity. The organizational structure of the modern capitalist
factory offers one example; certain contemporary habits and
inclinations, including the "mania for motion and speed"
described by Dewey, represent another. Deterritorialization and the
expansion of interconnectedness are intimately tied to the
acceleration of social life, while social acceleration itself takes
many different forms (Eriksen 2001; Rosa 2013). Here as well, we can
easily see why globalization is always a matter of degree. The
velocity or speed of flows, movements, and interchanges across borders
can vary no less than their magnitude, impact, or regularity.



Fourth, even though analysts disagree about the causal forces that
generate globalization, most agree that globalization should be
conceived as a relatively *long-term process*. The triad of
deterritorialization, interconnectedness, and social acceleration
hardly represents a sudden or recent event in contemporary social
life. Globalization is a constitutive feature of the modern world, and
modern history includes many examples of globalization (Giddens 1990).
As we saw above, nineteenth-century thinkers captured at least some of
its core features; the compression of territoriality composed an
important element of their lived experience. Nonetheless, some
contemporary theorists believe that globalization has taken a
particularly intense form in recent decades, as innovations in
communication, transportation, and information technologies (for
example, computerization) have generated stunning new possibilities
for simultaneity and instantaneousness (Harvey 1989). In this view,
present-day intellectual interest in the problem of globalization can
be linked directly to the emergence of new high-speed technologies
that tend to minimize the significance of distance and heighten
possibilities for deterritorialization and social interconnectedness.
Although the intense sense of territorial compression experienced by
so many of our contemporaries is surely reminiscent of the experiences
of earlier generations, some contemporary writers nonetheless argue
that it would be mistaken to obscure the countless ways in which
ongoing transformations of the spatial and temporal contours of human
experience are especially far-reaching. While our nineteenth-century
predecessors understandably marveled at the railroad or the telegraph,
a comparatively vast array of social activities is now being
transformed by innovations that accelerate social activity and
considerably deepen longstanding trends towards deterritorialization
and social interconnectedness. To be sure, the impact of
deterritorialization, social interconnectedness, and social
acceleration are by no means universal or uniform: migrant workers
engaging in traditional forms of low-wage agricultural labor in the
fields of southern California, for example, probably operate in a
different spatial and temporal context than the Internet entrepreneurs
of San Francisco or Seattle. Distinct assumptions about space and time
often coexist uneasily during a specific historical juncture (Gurvitch
1964). Nonetheless, the impact of recent technological innovations is
profound, and even those who do not have a job directly affected by
the new technology are shaped by it in innumerable ways as citizens
and consumers (Eriksen 2001, 16).



Fifth, globalization should be understood as a *multi-pronged*
process, since deterritorialization, social interconnectedness, and
acceleration manifest themselves in many different (economic,
political, and cultural) arenas of social activity. Although each
facet of globalization is linked to the core components of
globalization described above, each consists of a complex and
relatively autonomous series of empirical developments, requiring
careful examination in order to disclose the causal mechanisms
specific to it (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton 1999). Each
manifestation of globalization also generates distinct conflicts and
dislocations. For example, there is substantial empirical evidence
that cross-border flows and exchanges (of goods, people, information,
etc.), as well as the emergence of directly transnational forms of
production by means of which a single commodity is manufactured
simultaneously in distant corners of the globe, are gaining in
prominence (Castells 1996). High-speed technologies and organizational
approaches are employed by transnationally operating firms, the
so-called "global players," with great effectiveness. The
emergence of "around-the-world, around-the-clock"
financial markets, where major cross-border financial transactions are
made in cyberspace at the blink of an eye, represents a familiar
example of the economic face of globalization. Global financial
markets also challenge traditional attempts by liberal democratic
nation-states to rein in the activities of bankers, spawning
understandable anxieties about the growing power and influence of
financial markets over democratically elected representative
institutions. In political life, globalization takes a distinct form,
though the general trends towards deterritorialization,
interconnectedness across borders, and the acceleration of social
activity are fundamental here as well. Transnational movements, in
which activists employ rapid-fire communication technologies to join
forces across borders in combating ills that seem correspondingly
transnational in scope (for example, the depletion of the ozone
layer), offer an example of political globalization (Tarrow 2005).
Another would be the tendency towards ambitious supranational forms of
social and economic lawmaking and regulation, where individual
nation-states cooperate to pursue regulation whose jurisdiction
transcends national borders no less than the cross-border economic
processes that undermine traditional modes of nation state-based
regulation. Political scientists typically describe such supranational
organizations (the European Union, for example, or United
States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) as important manifestations
of political and legal globalization. The proliferation of
supranational organizations has been no less conflict-laden than
economic globalization, however. Critics insist that local, regional,
and national forms of self-government are being supplanted by
insufficiently democratic forms of global governance remote from the
needs of ordinary citizens (Maus 2006; Streeck 2016). In contrast,
defenders describe new forms of supranational legal and political
decision as indispensable forerunners to more inclusive and advanced
forms of self-government, even as they worry about existing democratic
deficits and technocratic traits (Habermas 2015).


## 3. The Normative Challenges of Globalization



The wide-ranging impact of globalization on human existence means that
it necessarily touches on many basic philosophical and
political-theoretical questions. At a minimum, globalization suggests
that academic philosophers in the rich countries of the West should
pay closer attention to the neglected voices and intellectual
traditions of peoples with whom our fate is intertwined in ever more
intimate ways (Dallmayr 1998). In this section, however, we focus
exclusively on the immediate challenges posed by globalization to
normative political theory.



Western political theory has traditionally presupposed the existence
of territorially bound communities, whose borders can be more or less
neatly delineated from those of other communities. In this vein, the
influential liberal political philosopher John Rawls described bounded
communities whose fundamental structure consisted of
"self-sufficient schemes of cooperation for all the essential
purposes of human life" (Rawls 1993, 301). Although political
and legal thinkers historically have exerted substantial energy in
formulating defensible normative models of relations between states
(Nardin and Mapel 1992), like Rawls they typically have relied on a
clear delineation of "domestic" from "foreign"
affairs. In addition, they have often argued that the domestic arena
represents a normatively privileged site, since fundamental normative
ideals and principles (for example, liberty or justice) are more
likely to be successfully realized in the domestic arena than in
relations among states. According to one influential strand within
international relations theory, relations between states are
more-or-less lawless. Since the achievement of justice or democracy,
for example, presupposes an effective political sovereign, the lacuna
of sovereignty at the global level means that justice and democracy
are necessarily incomplete and probably unattainable there. In this
conventional realist view of international politics, core features of
the modern system of sovereign states relegate the pursuit of western
political thought's most noble normative goals primarily to the
domestic arena (Mearsheimer 2003.) Significantly, some prominent
mid-century proponents of international realism rejected this
position's deep hostility to international law and supranational
political organization, in part because they presciently confronted
challenges that we now typically associate with intensified
globalization (Scheuerman 2011).



Globalization poses a fundamental challenge to each of these
traditional assumptions. It is no longer self-evident that
nation-states can be described as "self-sufficient schemes of
cooperation for all the essential purposes of human life" in the
context of intense deterritorialization and the spread and
intensification of social relations across borders. The idea of a
bounded community seems suspect given recent shifts in the
spatio-temporal contours of human life. Even the most powerful and
privileged political units are now subject to increasingly
deterritorialized activities (for example, global financial markets or
digitalized mass communication) over which they have limited control,
and they find themselves nested in webs of social relations whose
scope explodes the confines of national borders. Of course, in much of
human history social relations have transcended existing political
divides. However, globalization implies a profound quantitative
increase in and intensification of social relations of this type.
While attempts to offer a clear delineation of the
"domestic" from the "foreign" probably made
sense at an earlier juncture in history, this distinction no longer
accords with core developmental trends in many arenas of social
activity. As the possibility of a clear division between domestic and
foreign affairs dissipates, the traditional tendency to picture the
domestic arena as a privileged site for the realization of normative
ideals and principles becomes problematic as well. As an empirical
matter, the decay of the domestic-foreign frontier seems highly
ambivalent, since it might easily pave the way for the decay of the
more attractive attributes of domestic political life: as
"foreign" affairs collapse inward onto
"domestic" political life, the insufficiently lawful
contours of the former make disturbing inroads onto the latter
(Scheuerman 2004). As a normative matter, however, the disintegration
of the domestic-foreign divide probably calls for us to consider, to a
greater extent than ever before, how our fundamental normative
commitments about political life can be effectively achieved on a
global scale. If we take the principles of justice or democracy
seriously, for example, it is no longer self-evident that the domestic
arena is the exclusive or perhaps even main site for their pursuit,
since domestic and foreign affairs are now deeply and irrevocably
intermeshed. In a globalizing world, the lack of democracy or justice
in the global setting necessarily impacts deeply on the pursuit of
justice or democracy at home. Indeed, it may no longer be possible to
achieve our normative ideals at home without undertaking to do so
transnationally as well.



To claim, for example, that questions of distributive justice have no
standing in the making of foreign affairs represents at best empirical
naivete about economic globalization. At worst, it constitutes a
disingenuous refusal to grapple with the fact that the material
existence of those fortunate enough to live in the rich countries is
inextricably tied to the material status of the vast majority of
humanity residing in poor and underdeveloped regions. Growing material
inequality spawned by economic globalization is linked to growing
domestic material inequality in the rich democracies (Falk 1999; Pogge
2002). Similarly, in the context of global warming and the destruction
of the ozone layer, a dogmatic insistence on the sanctity of national
sovereignty risks constituting a cynical fig leaf for irresponsible
activities whose impact extends well beyond the borders of those
countries most directly responsible. Global warming and
ozone-depletion cry out for ambitious forms of transnational
cooperation and regulation, and the refusal by the rich democracies to
accept this necessity implies a failure to take the process of
globalization seriously when doing so conflicts with their immediate
material interests. Although it might initially seem to be
illustrative of clever *Realpolitik* on the part of the
culpable nations to ward off strict cross-border environmental
regulation, their stubbornness is probably short-sighted: global
warming and ozone depletion will affect the children of Americans who
drive gas-guzzling SUVs or use environmentally unsound
air-conditioning as well as the future generations of South Africa or
Afghanistan (Cerutti 2007). If we keep in mind that environmental
degradation probably impacts negatively on democratic politics (for
example, by undermining its legitimacy and stability), the failure to
pursue effective transnational environmental regulation potentially
undermines democracy at home as well as abroad.



Philosophers and political theorists have eagerly addressed the
normative and political implications of our globalizing world. A
lively debate about the possibility of achieving justice at the global
level pits representatives of cosmopolitanism against myriad
communitarians, nationalists, realists, and others who privilege the
nation-state and moral, political, and social ties resting on it
(Lieven 2020; Tamir 2019). In contrast, cosmopolitans tend to
underscore our universal obligations to those who reside faraway and
with whom we may share little in the way of language, custom, or
culture, oftentimes arguing that claims to "justice at
home" can and should be applied elsewhere as well (Beardsworth
2011; Beitz 1999; Caney 2006; Wallace-Brown & Held 2010). In this
way, cosmopolitanism builds directly on the universalistic impulses of
modern moral and political thought. Cosmopolitanism's critics
dispute the view that our obligations to foreigners possess the same
status as those to members of particular local and national
communities of which we remain very much a part. They by no means deny
the need to redress global inequality, for example, but they often
express skepticism in the face of cosmopolitanism's tendency to
defend significant legal and political reforms as necessary to address
the inequities of a planet where millions of people a year die of
starvation or curable diseases (Miller 2007; 2013; Nagel 2005). Nor do
cosmopolitanism's critics necessarily deny that the process of
globalization is real, though some of them suggest that its impact has
been grossly exaggerated (Kymlicka 1999; Nussbaum *et al*.
1996; Streeck 2016). Nonetheless, they doubt that humanity has
achieved a rich or sufficiently articulated sense of a common fate
such that far-reaching attempts to achieve greater global justice (for
example, substantial redistribution from the rich to poor) could prove
successful. Cosmopolitans not only counter with a flurry of
universalist and egalitarian moral arguments, but they also accuse
their opponents of obscuring the threat posed by globalization to the
particular forms of national community whose ethical primacy
communitarians, nationalists, and others endorse. From the
cosmopolitan perspective, the tendency to favor moral and political
obligations to fellow members of the nation-state represents a
misguided and increasingly reactionary nostalgia for a rapidly
decaying constellation of political practices and institutions.



A similar divide characterizes the ongoing debate about the prospects
of democratic institutions at the global level. In a cosmopolitan
mode, Daniele Archibugi (2008) and the late David Held (1995) have
argued that globalization requires the extension of liberal democratic
institutions (including the rule of law and elected representative
institutions) to the transnational level. Nation state-based liberal
democracy is poorly equipped to deal with deleterious side effects of
present-day globalization such as ozone depletion or burgeoning
material inequality. In addition, a growing array of genuinely
transnational forms of activity calls out for correspondingly
transnational modes of liberal democratic decision-making. According
to this model, "local" or "national" matters
should remain under the auspices of existing liberal democratic
institutions. But in those areas where deterritorialization and social
interconnectedness across national borders are especially striking,
new transnational institutions (for example, cross-border referenda),
along with a dramatic strengthening and further democratization of
existing forms of supranational authority (in particular, the United
Nations), are necessary if we are to assure that popular sovereignty
remains an effective principle. In the same spirit, cosmopolitans
debate whether a loose system of global "governance"
suffices, or instead cosmopolitan ideals require something along the
lines of a global "government" or state (Cabrera 2011;
Scheuerman 2014). Jurgen Habermas, a prominent
cosmopolitan-minded theorist, has tried to formulate a defense of the
European Union that conceives of it as a key stepping stone towards
supranational democracy. If the EU is to help succeed in salvaging the
principle of popular sovereignty in a world where the decay of nation
state-based democracy makes democracy vulnerable, the EU will need to
strengthen its elected representative organs and better guarantee the
civil, political, and social and economic rights of all Europeans
(Habermas 2001, 58-113; 2009). Representing a novel form of
postnational constitutionalism, it potentially offers some broader
lessons for those hoping to save democratic constitutionalism under
novel global conditions. Despite dire threats to the EU posed by
nationalist and populist movements, Habermas and other
cosmopolitan-minded intellectuals believe that it can be effectively
reformed and preserved (Habermas 2012).



In opposition to Archibugi, Held, Habermas, and other cosmopolitans,
skeptics underscore the purportedly utopian character of such
proposals, arguing that democratic politics presupposes deep feelings
of trust, commitment, and belonging that remain uncommon at the
postnational and global levels. Largely non-voluntary commonalities of
belief, history, and custom compose necessary preconditions of any
viable democracy, and since these commonalities are missing beyond the
sphere of the nation-state, global or cosmopolitan democracy is doomed
to fail (Archibugi, Held, and Koehler 1998; Lieven 2020). Critics
inspired by realist international theory argue that cosmopolitanism
obscures the fundamentally pluralistic, dynamic, and conflictual
nature of political life on our divided planet. Notwithstanding its
pacific self-understanding, cosmopolitan democracy inadvertently opens
the door to new and even more horrible forms of political violence.
Cosmpolitanism's universalistic normative discourse not only
ignores the harsh and unavoidably agonistic character of political
life, but it also tends to serve as a convenient ideological cloak for
terrible wars waged by political blocs no less self-interested than
the traditional nation state (Zolo 1997, 24).



Ongoing political developments suggest that such debates are of more
than narrow scholarly interest. Until recently, some of
globalization's key prongs seemed destined to transform human
affairs in seemingly permanent ways: economic globalization, as well
as the growth of a panoply of international and global political and
legal institutions, continued to transpire at a rapid rate. Such
institutional developments, it should be noted, were interpreted by
some cosmopolitan theorists as broadly corroborating their overall
normative aspirations. With the resurgence of nationalist and populist
political movements, many of which diffusely (and sometimes
misleadingly) target elements of globalization, globalization's
future prospects seem increasingly uncertain. For example, with
powerful political leaders regularly making disdainful remarks about
the UN and EU, it seems unclear whether one of globalization's
most striking features, i.e., enhanced political and legal
decision-making "beyond the nation state," will continue
unabated. Tragically perhaps, the failure to manage economic
globalization so as to minimize avoidable inequalities and injustices
has opened the door to a nationalist and populist backlash, with many
people now ready to embrace politicians and movements promising to
push back against "free trade," relatively porous borders
(for migrants and refugees), and other manifestations of globalization
(Stiglitz 2018). Even if it seems unlikely that nationalists or
populists can succeed in fully halting, let alone reversing,
structural trends towards deterritorialization, intensified
interconnectedness, and social acceleration, they may manage to
reshape them in ways that cosmopolitans are likely to find alarming.
Whether or not nationalists and populists can successfully respond to
many fundamental global challenges (e.g., climate change or nuclear
proliferation), however, remains far less likely.