From Self-Legislation to Self-Determination: Democracy and the New Circumstances of Global Politics

Abstract

It is a distinctive feature of the global political order that democracy is no longer confined to nation-states, characterized by extensive and overlapping constituencies. It is important to think of the significance of these developments for individuals’ self-determination, which may be undermined in different ways. Here it is argued that democracy must serve to delegate power to complex units of decision making which favour self-determination. Contestability is part of this form of self-determination, allowing forms of politics to emerge based on the democratic rights and powers of self-determining, non-dominated citizens.

Keywords:

• self-determination
• self-legislation
• democracy
• domination
• global justice

Notes

1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

2 J. Dewey, “The Public and its Problems,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 2, 1925–1953: 1925–1927, Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and The Public and its Problems, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 325–7.

3 Dewey argues: “the old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy” is apt only if it aims at what is genuinely novel (“The Public and its Problems,” 319).

4 See P. Pettit, “Freedom as Antipower,” Ethics 106.3 (1996): 576–604.

5 J. Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 8.

6 Dewey, “The Public and its Problems,” 325.

7 I. M. Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.

8 See M. Warren, “Beyond the Self-Legislation Model of Democracy,” Ethics & Global Politics 3.1 (2010): 53.

9 C. Sabel, “Constitutional Orders: Trust Building and Response to Change,” in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. J. R. Hollingsworth and R. Boyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 159.

10 J. Tully, “The Unfreedom of the Moderns in Comparison to Their Ideals of Constitutional Democracy,” The Modern Law Review 65.2 (2002): 217.

11 Joseph Weiler points to the case of Gayusuz vs. Austria that went to the European Court of Human Rights and led to the extension of social security benefits to third country nationals. See J. Weiler, “An ‘Ever Closer Union’ in Need of a Human Rights Policy,” European Journal of International Law 9.4 (1998): 719.

12 On the democratizing role of the EU with respect to human rights, see J. Bowman, “The European Union's Democratic Deficit: Federalists, Skeptics, and Revisionists,” European Journal of Political Theory 5 (2006), 191–212. On the rights of immigrants to political participation in the EU on republican grounds, see I. Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002), 238–9.

13 M. Dorf and C. Sabel, “The Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism,” Columbia Law Review 98.2 (1998): 292.

14 C. Sabel and J. Cohen, “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy,” in Private Governance, Democratic Constitutionalism and Supranationalism (Florence: European Commission, 1998), 3–30. For a more direct application to the EU, see J. Cohen and C. Sabel, “Sovereignty and Solidarity: EU and US,” in Governing Work and Welfare in the New Economy: European and American Experiments, ed. J. Zeitlin and D. Trubek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). My description of the OMC as a deliberative procedure owes much to their account.

15 See J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 12.

16 For one such attempt, see D. Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

17 Onora O'Neill, Bounds of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Bohman

James Bohman is Danforth Professor of Philosophy and Professor of International Studies at Saint Louis University, Missouri, in the United States. His research focuses on deliberative and transnational democracy. He is the author of Living without Freedom: Republican Cosmopolitanism and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007) and Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996), as well as the editor of Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (with W. Rehg, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997).