Global Democracy:
a world-systems perspective
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
https://irows.ucr.edu
University of California, Riverside
Terry Boswell
Sociology
Emory University
(draft
v. 7-4-02) 6817 words
Abstract: This essay is on the
concept of global democracy. We discuss the historical development of the
concept of democracy and the material bases for the possible emergence of a
democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth in the future. We
confront the problem of contested meanings of democracy, the roots of the
modern concept in the European Enlightenment, the problem of Eurocentrism in the
formulation of a global philosophy of democracy, the relationship between
capitalist globalization and antisystemic movements and the need for
globalization from below.
To be presented at the RC 35 session on “Conceptual Innovation:
Methods and Contexts,” World Congress of Sociology, Brisbane, Australia,
Tuesday 13:30-15:15, July 9, 2002. Thanks to Pat Loy for helpful comments on an
earlier draft. This paper is available at:
https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/intsoc02b/intsoc02b.htm
A
useful conceptualization of global democracy requires both an astute political
philosophy and a deep understanding of the historical and structural processes
of institutional development. This paper addresses emerging debates among
counter-hegemonic critics of capitalist globalization and presents an approach
that is intended to be helpful to those who wish to construct a more democratic
and egalitarian world society. The approach we develop employs the comparative
world-systems perspective.[1]
For many modern citizens global democracy simply means the
addition of more and more national democracies – parliamentary governments in
which fair elections decide the political leadership of state. This is the
subject of most of the democratization literature. But we will argue that global
democracy needs to mean much more than this if real progress is to be made. We
contend that the peoples of the world live in a single social system, and that
decisions about what will happen in that system are the relevant foci for
understanding the meaning of global democracy. Democracy means that the
majority of the people have say over the decisions that affect their lives.
When the problems are global, the democracy should be global, meaning that the
majority of the people of the Earth should have a say.
Our
approach questions the idea that parliamentary democracy in single states, even
when most of the states in the world-system have this kind of political system,
adds up to global democracy. Some states are much more powerful than others,
and their policies affect people all over the Earth. We call this the problem of global vs. single-state democracy.
The
second focus of our essay is on the issue of the contested nature of the idea
of democracy. Here we will note that the definitions of democracy have
themselves been issues of political struggle both within the discourse of the
European Enlightenment and in the discourse about Eurocentrism. Our goal is to
move toward the formulation of a global consensus about the meaning of the idea
of popular democracy. This requires drawing on knowledge of this history of
political struggles all over the Earth, and an understanding of the historical
development of human societies over the last 12,000 years.
The
democratization literature has mainly studied how and why some societies have
been able to institutionalize parliamentary systems for the peaceful transition
of power by means of popular elections. This is a very important literature and
much has been learned about the conditions that are favorable for stable
parliamentary regimes. The world-systems perspective points out that it has
been successful core capitalism that has been the main support for
institutionalizing parliamentary systems. The core countries of Europe, the
United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and India are the most
successful cases. The rest of the world has had a difficult time
institutionalizing parliamentary democracy, though there have been recurrent
waves of democratization in the parliamentary sense (Markoff 1996). The main
reason for this is that the hierarchical division of labor between the core and
the periphery concentrates greater resources in the core, making alliances
between potentially competing elites and cross class alliances
more stable because there is a bigger pie to share. In peripheral countries the
struggle to control the state apparatus is more often violent because it is the
only game in town. To be sure there are
exceptions, and trends. Many semiperipheral and peripheral national societies
have been able to achieve at least the trappings of parliamentary democracy,
especially in the latest wave.
We do
not wish to minimize the important differences between formally democratic
regimes that operate according to the law versus lawless and arbitrary authoritarian
regimes. Achieving formal parliamentary democracy and the rule of law are huge
gains for people who have not had them in the past. But we do wish to point out
that formal parliamentary democracy, even in those societies in which is it
most heavily institutionalized, is not necessarily the best of all possible
worlds.
Within
the European Enlightenment discourse there has long been a contest between
representative formal democracy and popular social democracy. Bill Robinson
(1996) characterizes “polyarchy” as a contest managed by contending elites to
legitimize regimes based on huge inequalities. The now-dominant definition of
democracy in the West is a definition that separates political rights from
economic rights and that legitimizes and sustains private property in the major
means of production. More populist and direct versions of the idea of democracy
challenge the radical separation between political and economic rights, and the
exclusion of economic democracy from the realm of legitimate contentions. Thus the kind of democracy that has become
hegemonic in the modern world-system is the kind that is most congruent with
capitalism. It protects private owners
of the major means of production from claims on their property and profits by
narrowly defining the proper terrain of rights.
Polyarchy
undercuts social democracy and defines certain claims as outside the bounds of
rational discourse based on a narrow political philosophy that has evolved from
the conservative branch of the European Enlightenment discourse. The leftist
versions –- anarchism, socialism, and communism – have been vanquished and
proclaimed dead in the celebration of the “end of history” and the victory of
capitalistic democracy.
The
critique of Eurocentrism has also challenged the hegemony of the polyarchic
definition of democracy. Many of peoples of the colonial empires had indigenous
forms of small-scale political regulation that allowed people in local
communities to have input in decisions that were made in matters that affected
their lives. In the contemporary popular resistance to globalizing corporate
capitalism many voices are reasserting the authenticity and value of these
traditional political institutions (e.g. Shiva 2002). However “backward” and
inegalitarian these traditional political institutions may seem to the Western
democracies, that they are resisting global corporate capitalism is making them
newly popular with their dispossessed constituencies.
During
the nineteenth century movements that mobilized people around ideas of
community self-reliance were often responses to the calamities of rural market
integration that combined with droughts and famines to produce the huge and
disastrous “late Victorian holocausts” during the great wave of capitalist
globalization of the late nineteenth century (Davis 2001). These indigenous
movements often employed millenarian ideologies in which the “good king” was to
return or the powers of the universe were expected to intervene to destroy the
invading railroads and the white devils that were held to be throwing the
natural balances of the universe awry. Self-reliance movements in the Brazilian
Northeast, the Philippines and the American West rediscovered local autarky as
a protective mechanism from disruptive global market forces and threatening
technologies far beyond their control.
Much of
the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism has assumed that it was the ideology
of the European Enlightenment that was a main tool in the colonial subjugation
of the Third World by European states. And so the assertions of rights, the
separation of church and state, and other elements of European thought have
sometimes been rejected as so many relics of domination. But it was not liberal
ideology that caused so much exploitation and domination. The Europeans were
able to dominate and exploit because they had better gunships and other
technologies of power that concentrated capitalism had enabled them to develop.
The values of liberty and equality were fine values, but they were conveniently
put aside as European imperialism expanded. Indeed these very values have
proved to be valuable tools of resistance in the hands of the subjects of
European colonialism and neocolonialism.
The
first point to make is that democracy is not a European invention and neither
has it been a European monopoly. The European civilizational claim that
democracy was an invention of the classical Greek city-states is full of
contradictions. The economies of most of the Greek city-states were based on
slavery (Bollen and Paxton 1997), while the polities of nomadic foragers, which
are everywhere on Earth the ancestors of all peoples, were egalitarian systems
in which all adults participated in making the important collective decisions.
Over the last twelve thousand years
most of the regions on Earth experienced a process of the emergence of
hierarchical social structures in which elites came to dominate and exploit the
masses of peasants and workers. But the struggle over control has never ceased,
and indeed the cycles of rise and fall that characterize all hierarchical
systems, illustrate the basic conflict over control that is the contest of
democracy. This is not the place to
detail this history, but to discuss how we can draw from it to build a more
democratic future.
We do not agree with those who see all states as equally
exploitative. It has become fashionable among many critical intellectuals, in
their understandable reactions against mainstream functionalism, to paint all states
as parasitic. We think that it is important to recognize the gains that have
been made in recent centuries – the abolition of slavery, the extension of
political rights to women and to men of no property, rights to education, and
the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992). These elements of democracy should
not be denigrated, though neither do we agree with those who paint the
contemporary national democracies as the best of all possible worlds. Hierarchies
have been necessary for the coordination of ever-larger and more complex
societies, and societies that are less hierarchical (or smaller) have had to
erect their own hierarchies or perish in the struggle with more hierarchical
societies. And so all societies on Earth have undergone state-formation or have
become incorporated into existing states.
The emergence of capitalism in
Europe was the outcome of a very long process in which commodification and
commercialization had been developing within the tributary empires of
Afroeurasia. The semiperipheral capitalist city-states in the interstices of
the tributary empires were the main protagonists of commodification. A virulent
and geographically concentrated form of capitalism blossomed in Europe and
facilitated Europe’s extension of peripheral capitalism to the rest of the
world. This institutional evolution eventually led to the emergence of modern
democracy in the core of the Europe-centered system because capitalist law and
price-setting markets legitimate individualism and political equality. Successful core capitalism has expanded the
size of the middle classes within core countries, and this has made
parliamentary regimes based on electoral contests for executive office an
institutionalized reality. But at the same time that this polyarchic democracy
has become embedded within the core, the expansion of core/periphery
inequalities and the continuing underdevelopment of peripheral societies have
created huge inequalities within peripheral societies, where small elites
control state power in order to exploit the large majority of very poor people.
This is the main way in which the capitalist world-system has acted to block
the emergence of democratic regimes in peripheral societies.
The
waves of democracy over the past two centuries (Markoff 1996) have extended
polyarchy to many countries in the periphery and the semiperiphery. Robinson
(1996) is right to criticize the limitations of “low-intensity democracy” as a
sham that covers continuing exploitation and marginalization of the poor
majorities in most of these countries. But it should also be mentioned that
even limited democracy is better than no democracy. Those peripheral and
semiperipheral countries that are still living under conditions of harsh and
lawless authoritarianism, including those with a only a fig leaf of electoral
democracy, badly need the limited progress that comes with polyarchy
(Chase-Dunn, Jonas and Amaro 2000).
Capitalist Globalization
We
understand the historical development of the modern world-system in terms of
the evolution of institutions. These key institutions: commodity production,
technology and techniques of power, have been shaped by tremendous struggles.
These include conflict among contending powers and between the core and the
periphery over the past six centuries as Europe rose to hegemony and capitalist
globalization expanded in waves of commodification and integration.
The
story of how global orders have been restructured in order to facilitate
capitalist accumulation must be told in deep temporal perspective in order for
us to understand how the most recent wave of corporate globalization is similar
or different from earlier waves of globalization. Of particular interest here
is the phenomenon of world revolutions and increasingly transnational
antisystemic movements. In order to comprehend the possibilities for the
emergence of global democracy we need to understand the history of popular
movements that have tried to democratize the world-system in the past.
Of
particular relevance here is the story of the nineteenth century and its tsunami
of capitalist globalization under the auspices of British hegemony.
Transnational antisystemic movements, especially the trade union movement and
the feminist movement, emerged to contend with global capitalism. Workers and
women consciously took the role of world citizens, organizing international
movements to contend with the increasingly global organization of an emergent
global capitalist class. Political and
economic elites, especially finance capitalists, had already been consciously
operating on a global stage for centuries, but the degree of international
integration of these reached a very high level in the late nineteenth century.[2]
The British created the Concert
of Europe after defeating Napoleon, an alliance of conservative dynasties and
politicians who were dedicated to the prevention of any future French
revolutions. The Royal Navy suppressed the slave trade and encouraged
decolonization of the Spanish colonies. The English Anti-Corn Law League’s
advocacy of international free trade (carried abroad by British diplomats and
businessmen)
was adopted by most European and American states in the
middle of the century. The gold
standard was an important support of a huge increase in international trade and
investment (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000; O’Rourke and Williamson
1999). The expanding Atlantic economy,
already firmly attached to the Indian Ocean, was accompanied by an expanding
Pacific economy as Japan and China were more completely and directly brought
into the trade and investment networks of Europe and the North America.
American Ginseng was harvested in the Middle Atlantic states as an important
commodity that could be traded for Chinese manufactures rather than having to
resort to payment in silver.
The nineteenth century wave of
capitalist globalization was massively contested in a great globalization
backlash. The decolonization of Latin America extended the formal aspects of
state sovereignty to a large chunk of the periphery. Slave revolts, abolitionism and the further incorporation of
Africa into the capitalist world-system eventually led to the abolition of
slavery almost everywhere. Within Europe socialist and democratic demands for
political and economic rights of the non-propertied classes strongly emerged in
the world revolution of 1848.
An
important aspect of our model of world-systems evolution is the idea of
semiperipheral development (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 5). We note that
institutional development in premodern world-systems occurred because
innovations and implementations of new techniques and organizational forms have
tended to occur in societies that have semiperipheral positions within larger
core/periphery hierarchies. Semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms conquered adjacent
core polities to create larger paramount chiefdoms. And semiperipheral marcher states conquered adjacent core states
to create larger and larger core-wide empires (e.g. Chin, Akkad, Assyrian,
Achaeminid Persians, Alexander, Rome, Abbasid Caliphate, etc.) And
semiperipheral capitalist city-states (Dilmun, Phoenician Tyre, Sidon, and
Carthage; Venice, Genoa, Malacca, etc.) expanded commercialized trade networks
and encouraged commodity production within and between the tributary empires
and peripheral regions, linking larger and larger regions together to
eventually become the single global economy of today.
The modern hegemons (the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth
century, the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and the
United States of America in the twentieth century) were all formerly
semiperipheral nation-states that rose to the position of hegemony by
transforming the institutional bases of economic and political/military power
in response to challenges from contenders forhegemony and challenges from
popular movements contesting the injustices of capitalism and modern colonial
imperialism. The modern world-system has experienced system-wide waves of
democracy rather than separate and disconnected sequences of democratization
within individual countries (Markoff 1996). These waves have tended to start in
semiperipheral countries and the institutional inventions that have diffused
from country to country have disproportionately been invented and implemented
in semiperipheral countries first (Markoff 1999). Both the Russian and Chinese
Communist challenges to capitalism emerged from the semiperiphery.
The
worker’s movement became increasingly organized on an international basis during
the nineteenth century. Mass production
made working conditions increasingly similar for industrial workers around the
world. Labor organizers were able to make good use of cheap and rapid
transportation as well as new modes of communication (the telegraph) in order
to link struggles in distant locations. And the huge migration of workers from
Europe to the New World spread the ideas and the strategies of the labor
movement. Socialists, anarchists and communists challenged the rule of capital
while they competed with each other for leadership of an increasingly global
antisystemic movement that sought to democratize the world-system.
The
decline of British hegemony, and the failure of efforts after World War I to
erect an effective structure of global governance, led to the collapse of
capitalist globalization during the depression of the 1930’s, culminating in
World War II. In our perspective capitalist globalization is a cycle as well as
a trend. The great wave of the nineteenth century was followed by a collapse in
the early twentieth century and then a reemergence in the period after World
War II. The global institutions of the post World War II order, now under the
sponsorship of the hegemonic United States, were intended to resolve the problems
that were perceived to have caused the military conflagrations and economic
disasters of the early twentieth century. The United Nations was a stronger
version of a global proto-state than the League of Nations had been, though
still a long way from the “monopoly of legitimate violence” that is the
effective center of a real state.
The Bretton Woods institutions
– the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund— were originally intended
to promote Keynesian national development rather than a globalized market of
investment flows. Free trade was encouraged, but important efforts were made to
track international investments and to encourage the efforts of national states
to use fiscal policy as a tool of national development. The architects of the Bretton Woods
institutions were chary about the effects of volatile waves of international
capital flows on economic development and political stability because of what
they perceived to have been the lessons of the 1920’s. The restarting of the world economy after
World War II under the aegis of the Bretton Woods institutions and U.S. support
for relatively autonomous capitalism in Europe and Japan succeeded
tremendously. But the growing power of unions within the core, and the
perceived constraints on U.S. fiscal and financial interests imposed by the
Bretton Woods currency regime, along with the oil crisis of the early 1970s led
the U.S. to abandon Bretton Woods in favor of a free world market of capital
mobility. The “Washington Consensus” was basically Reaganism-Thatcherism on a
global scale – degregulation, privatization, and reneging on the “social
contract” with core labor unions and the welfare state. The IMF was turned into
a tool for imposing these policies on countries all over the world.
This
U.S./British-led neo-liberal regime of global capitalism
(Reaganism-Thatcherism) was a reaction to the successes of the Third World and
the core labor movements, not in achieving true global democracy, but in
getting a somewhat larger share of the profits of global capitalism. The attack on the institutions of Keynesian
national development (labor unions and the welfare state), was also a delayed
response to the world revolution of 1968 in which students, women, environmentalists,
Third Worldists, indigenous peoples, democracy movements, and radical parts of
the labor movement had critiqued and resisted the inadequacies of the welfare
capitalism and business unionism from the Left. The New Right appropriated some of the ideology and many of the
tactics of the 68ers, -- demonstrations, civil disobedience, guerilla armies,
drug financing, mobilization of subnations, etc. These tactics have come back to haunt the powers that be. In the
recent wave of “blowback” organizations and ideologies formerly supported by
the U.S. CIA as instruments against the Soviet Union (e.g. Al Qaeda) have
turned against their former sponsors, employing dirty tricks to besmirch
symbols of global power and to murder innocent bystanders in the heart of the
core.
We
contend that the current historical moment is similar to the end of the
nineteenth century. Like British hegemony, U.S. hegemony is declining. Contenders for global economic power have
been emerging in German-led Europe and in Japan-led Asia. Popular movements and
institutions have been under attack, especially since the rise to ideological
hegemony of the neo-liberal “globalization project.” Anti-systemic movements are struggling to find new paths for
dealing with capitalist globalization.. New communications technologies such as
the Internet provide possibilities for creating coordinated and integrated
movements in favor of global democracy. The liberating potential of decentered
and democratized communications is great. But cheap interactive and mass
communications also facilitate increasing differentiation and specialization of
political mobilization, which can undercut efforts to promote inter-movement
coordination. We hold that the Internet will be, on balance, a liberating
force, but the big gains in movement integration will probably come as a
response to the economic, political and ecological disasters that globalized
capitalism is likely to produce in the not too distant future (Chase-Dunn
2002b).
We
expect that the current resistance to global capitalism will in large part take
the form of local self-reliance, the revitalization of diverse cultural forms
and the rejection of the cultural and technological totems of corporate
capitalism. Thus the characterization of the recently emergent protest
movements (Seattle, Genoa, etc.) as “anti-globalization” movements is partially
correct, but it is misleading. Self-reliance may take forms that are
progressive or forms that promote divisions among the people based on
ethnicity, nation or race. We want to
point out that self-reliance by itself is not an adequate strategy for
transforming capitalism into a more humane and sustainable social system.
Rather the building of self-reliant communities needs also to organize with a
coordinated movement of “globalization from below” that will seek to reform, or
create de novo, world institutions that will promote social justice and
environmental sustainability.
Imagining Global Democracy
This
means imagining global democracy. What might global democracy look like? And
how could we get from here to there? A
consideration of global democracy must confront two main issues: huge and
growing inequalities within and between countries; and the grave problems of
environmental sustainability that capitalist
(and Communist) industrialization has produced.
Rather
than drawing the blueprint of a global utopia and then arguing the fine points
it makes more sense to learn from the heritages of earlier efforts to do what
we are here proposing. Utopias may be
useful for those who are unable to imagine any possible improvement over
existing institutions. But they also function to delegitimize efforts to make
social change because they usually appear to be unattainable. A more useful
approach is to imagine an historically apt next step, one that the relevant
constituencies can agree is a significant improvement and that is plausibly
attainable.
Global
democracy means real economic, political and cultural rights and influence for
the majority of the world’s people over the local and global institutions that
affect their lives. Local and national
democracy is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. Global democracy
requires that local institutions and national states be democratic and
democratic institutions of global governance.
We basically
support the proposals for radically reforming the United Nations and for
establishing an institutional framework for global finance proposed by
Camilleri, Malhotra and Tehranian (2000).[3]
Their principles and thoughtful step-by-step proposals for democratizing global
governance address most of the issues quite well. We agree with the principle
of subsidiarity, which decentralizes control to the local level over all
issues that can be effectively resolved at that level (2000: 46). This
principle is similarly applied to the national and international regional
levels, so that global-level institutions deal with problems that can only find
effective solutions at the global level.
Camilleri, Malhotra and
Tehranian (2000: 25) also abjure the term “global government” and prefer terms
such as “interlocking institutions” and “international regimes” for describing
global governance. We see the political sensitivities involved in this choice
of terms, and we agree that it is important to use language wisely. There is a
lot of resistance to the idea of an emerging world state because people
understandably fear that such an institution might become an instrument of
repression or exploitation. But we are concerned that careful rhetoric might
obscure or paper over issues that need to be confronted explicitly. It is
arguably true that the main reason that the United Nations has been largely
ineffective at stopping interstate warfare is that it is not a state in the
Weberian sense – a monopoly of legitimate violence. International law is
not truly law according to Weber because it is not backed up by
institutionalized sanctions.
Our position is that the human
species needs to establish a global government that is legitimate, effective
and democratic. This does not require the centralization of everything. As
stated above, we agree with the principle of subsidiarity in which everything
that can effectively be left to local, national, and regional bodies should be.
But inequality, environmental problems, population pressure and peace are all
global problems that can only be effectively solved by a democratic global
government with the power to enforce the law.
Thus, reforming the United Nations must move in the
direction of the establishment of a democratic global government. This is in
the interest of all the people of the Earth, but especially the dispossessed.
The Westphalian interstate system has allowed powerful capitalists to
repeatedly escape the institution controls that have emerged from antisystemic
movements that have sought to protect workers and communities from
exploitation. Only a democratic world state can produce institutions that can
guarantee social justice.
We also
support the establishment of new institutions to provide a framework for global
financial relations that can support local and national development, and
increased oversight of these by the United Nations (Patomaki, Teivainen and
Ronkko 2002). And we see a need to go beyond polyarchy at both the national and
the global levels.
As
pointed out above, we are not satisfied with polyarchy (parliamentary
democracy) at the national level. We contend that real democracy must address
the issue of wealth and property, rather than defining these as beyond the
bounds of political discourse. This said, we can also learn much from those
failed experiments with collective property that were carried out in the
socialist and Communist states in the twentieth century. State ownership works well for
infrastructure, such as health and education, but for the production of goods
and services, even when the state is itself truly democratic, this creates
grave economic problems because of the problem of “soft budget constraints.”
This is because firms are usually bailed out by the state for their budget
mistakes, and they respond to state rather than consumer demands. In order to achieve a modicum of efficiency
large firms need to compete with one another in markets, but even more
importantly they should compete for financing by showing that they can make a
profit. We support John Roemer’s (1994) advocacy of a kind of market socialism
in which ownership shares of large firms are distributed to all adult citizens,
who then invest their shares in a stock market that is the main source of
capital for large firms. All citizens receive a set number shares at the age of
majority and when they die their shares revert to the public weal. So there is
no inheritance of corporate property, though personal property can be
inherited. Firms, large and small, produce for markets and labor is rewarded in
competitive labor markets. Small firms can be privately owned. This kind of market socialism equalizes
income, though some inequalities due to skill differences will exist. The
economy will still be a market economy, but the democratic state will provide
security, due process, and oversee the redistribution of corporate shares
across generations.
This
model of public market socialism incentivizes technological change and
efficiency without producing increasing inequalities. It would probably work
well, especially in the core countries for which Roemer has intended it. But
when we think about the global economy there are certain problems that are not
addressed in Roemer’s model. One of the
main problems in the global economy is the huge difference in productivity
between core and peripheral labor. This
is why labor standards in international economic agreements are anathema to
workers and unions in peripheral countries. A single worldwide minumum wage standard sounds good, but it would tend to
function as a protectionist agreement for core workers, and undercut the
ability of peripheral firms and workers to sell their products in core markets.
Wage and other standards have to take into account local conditions, but their
enforcement is the key to preventing the race to the bottom pursued by many
transnational corporations. The real solution to this is to raise the level of
productivity of peripheral labor. So global democracy needs to structure
institutions that can do this. Banning child labor worldwide while supporting
the children’s families to speed the demographic transition would be a giant
first step in this direction.
This is
why we need effective institutions of global governance. Anti-globalization
cannot simply dismantle such institutions as the World Bank or the
International Monetary Fund. They must either be reformed (democratized and
empowered) or they must be replaced. Market socialism in the core will not be
enough. A movement for economic democracy in the core needs also to mobilize
for economic democracy at the global level.
Support
for both more democratic national regimes and global socialist institutions is
likely to come from the semiperiphery.
We expect that some of the most potent efforts to democratize global capitalism
will come out of movements and democratic socialist regimes that emerge in
semiperipheral countries. As in earlier epochs, semiperipheral countries have
the “advantages of backwardness” – they are not already heavily invested in the
existing organizational and political institutions and technologies – and so
they have the maneuverability and the resources to invest in new institutions.
Peripheral countries could also
do this, but they are more completely dependent on the core and they are not
able to mobilize sufficient resources to overcome this dependency. The
semiperiphery, especially the large semiperipheral countries such as Mexico,
Brazil, Argentina, India, Indonesia and China, have opportunities that neither
core nor peripheral countries have. If a democratic socialist regime is able to
come to state power by legal means, and if this regime has the political will
to mobilize the popular sectors in favor of democratic socialism, an experiment
in one or another version of market socialism could be carried out. We expect
that regimes of this type will in fact emerge in the near future as the options
of kowtowing to the megacorps or demagoging the popular sectors (Chavez in
Venezuela) become more obviously bankrupt.
The smaller semiperipheral countries
(South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa, Israel) may also opt for democratic
socialism, but we expect that these will only be able to do so after earlier
efforts have been made in the large semiperipheral countries. Much also depends
on what happens in the contest for hegemony. Continued U.S. primacy will likely
strengthen the resistance to democratizing global governance, while the rise of
the European Union, which has stronger social democratic traditions, will
likely provide greater core support for democratizing global institutions and
for emerging democratic socialist movements in the semiperiphery.
The semiperipheral democratic
socialist regimes will be the strongest organizational entities that can forge
the links among the global antisystemic movements and produce a network for
bringing forth the institutions of global socialism. Globalization from below
and the formation of global socialist institutions will need to be facilitated
by an organized network of world citizens. We have adopted the name given to
such a confederation by Warren Wagar (1996) – the World Party. But this is not
a party in the old sense of the Third International – a vanguard party of the
world proletariat. Rather the World Party we propose would be a network of
individuals and representatives of popular organizations from all over the
world who agree to help create a democratic and collectively rational global
commonwealth. The World Party[4]
will actively recruit people of all nations and religions and will seek to
create the institutional bases for a culturally pluralistic and socially just
and ecologically sustainable world society.
This is what we mean by global democracy.
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