Benjamin R. Barber is an internationally renowned political theorist, and a distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos where he is President of CivWorld, the international NGO sponsoring Interdependence Day and the Paradigm Project. Benjamin Barber was Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University for 32 years, and then Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at The University of Maryland. He consults regularly with political and civic leaders in the United States and around the world, and for five years served as an informal consultant to President Bill Clinton – chronicled in Barber's book The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House published in paperback by Columbia University Press in 2008. Benjamin Barber's 17 books include the classic Strong Democracy (1984), the international best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld (1995 with a post-9/11 edition in 2001, translated into twenty-seven languages); and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, published in 2007 in the United States and in seven foreign editions.
From the founding of early modern nation-States, to quite recent times, democracy has been tethered to national communities and sovereign States in ways that lend popular government its efficacy and legitimacy. Rooted in the social contract, and producing forms of sovereignty and rule-making that are popular, democracy has permitted peoples around the world to govern themselves – if not directly, then through chosen representatives meeting in parliamentary assemblies to pursue common goods and the popular will.
However, since the end of the Second World War when the sovereign nations of Europe abandoned their long history of unilateralism and reciprocal hostility that were products of their sovereignty, and instead sought ways to pool that sovereignty in the name of cooperation – and when global trade began to steal from national parliaments their capacity to govern financial and labour markets – we have been living in a new world of interdependence where our challenges and problems are global. Yet – and this is the crucial modern dilemma – though the challenges are global, our democratic remedies remain national and parochial.
At a time when democracy is more widespread than ever, the problems faced by humankind – crime, drugs, prostitution, runaway markets, public health perils, weapons of mass destruction, environmental deterioration, labour migration, terrorism and war – have become global and are less susceptible than ever to democratic regulation and control. Sovereignty and with it, democracy, are at risk. This diminution of sovereign power has been exacerbated by the success of a potent neo-liberal ideology, which in the last thirty years has effectively deployed strategies of marketization and privatization on the Reagan/Thatcher model in ways that have delegitimized government ("part of the problem, not part of the answer") and sanctified so-called "free markets" (not always very free or competitive, but certainly private and beyond regulation).
Although neo-liberal rhetoric is directed against "big government" and "welfare bureaucracy", its victim has often been the ideals and practices of democracy itself. At the very moment when globalization is removing many of the most important public goods from sovereignty's compass, the very idea of public goods is under assault within nation-States in ways that further cripple citizens and parliaments alike.
"In the first world, many young people do not even bother to vote"
Adding to this dilemma, thirty years of neo-liberal celebration of markets and criticism of government have generated a deep cynicism about politics and a distrust of government, and these have morphed into cynicism about popular sovereignty and a distrust of democracy itself. Democracy's high point in terms of its spread may as a consequence also be its low point in terms of its reputation. In the first world, many young people do not even bother to vote and the word "politics" sometimes seems to have become a dirty synonym for corruption, while in the developing world we have seen many societies (e.g. Zimbabwe) moving backwards rather than forward.
Europe remains a model of democratic pooled sovereignty, but it too suffers from a "democratic deficit", and critics complain that it has been more successful economically than politically. In many places, the displacement of governments by markets has replaced the ideal of the citizen with the ideal of the consumer – shopping as a surrogate for politics. This erosion of public liberty and our capacity to use common power to address common problems makes dealing with interdependence and globalization even more difficult.
These challenges to democracy require responses from citizens and their representatives alike. It is not enough for citizens to blame the politicians they elect for failing them! It demands an adjustment to the realities of interdependence, The fate of democracy depends not on the size of the challenges facing it, but on the size of the political will deployed to take on the problems. In other words, as always, it depends on us.
What can politicians and citizens offer to help democracy survive?
- Acknowledge the brute facts of interdependence and globalization and seek approaches to democracy that are appropriate to collaboration and interdependence. In a world where the problems are global, democrats must find a way either to globalize democracy or democratic globalization, or they are likely to find themselves facing global anarchy (and global force and fraud) without possessing global tools to take them on.
- Recognize that representative government, although a remarkable invention that allows democracy to function in large-scale, complex societies where direct participatory self-government is no longer possible, wins its victory to some degree at the price of the "iron law of oligarchy". Representatives quickly lose touch with their electors and can morph into elites more wedded to their own culture of power than to the public good.
- Restore the balance between free markets and democratic institutions: both democracy and capitalism work best in tandem, when competition, entrepreneurship and inventiveness are assured by markets, but justice, law and stability are guaranteed by democratic regulation and oversight. There have been times when statist ambitions have stultified markets and encroached on private liberty. But in our time, market fundamentalism has stultified democracy and encroached on public liberty. The balance needs to be reset.
- Strengthen civic education in the setting of interdependence, where citizenship is understood to require both local participation and global responsibility – "glocality" is a useful neologism to capture the needs of citizens whose participation tends to be local but whose responsibilities are ever more global.
- Reinforce the idea that responsibilities are the twin of rights, so that citizens' obligations start but do not end with voting. For democracy is measured less by the achievements of the leadership than the willingness of the citizenry to accept responsibility for governance.
- Utilize the new digital technologies and the world wide web as tools of civic engagement and civic education across borders. Democracy is founded on effective communication, and while the world is more disparate and complex than ever, we have new tools that until now have been used primarily for commerce, but which cry out to be used for civic information and democratic engagement. Global citizens need global modes of communication: the Internet beckons!
- NGOs, foundations, multinational companies, universities and social movements have begun to establish the global civic infrastructure we need. Democracy grows bottom-up and is grounded in civil society and engaged citizens participating in civic life. Democracy without borders means citizens without borders, and citizens without borders are possible only when there is civil society without borders. Social capital is produced by engaged citizens: when it is globalized, transnational democracy becomes possible.
- Look to international organizations of the United Nations system and the International Financial Institutions (World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank) as potential instruments of democratic globalization. These institutions tend to represent the sovereign nations that created them rather than the international ideals in whose name they were established. But they are controlled by democracies, and can be put to democratic purposes if their constituent members choose to do so. The Security Council is more important than the Secretary-General's office, and the WTO serves financial interests rather than social justice, only because its members choose to treat it that way.
- Among international organizations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union plays a special role since it provides for information exchange and cooperation among democratic parliamentarians themselves. It has a special responsibility for thinking through the dilemmas of how to globalize democracy in an era of global challenges when archaic sovereign States still affect to be the key players.