Is Democracy Possible, Part Ii: Cosmopolitan Ideas and the Problem of Global Political Community

Abstract

A decade or so ago, John Burnheim wrote a monograph with the title Is Democracy Possible? in which he argued in favor of Athenian institutional forms at the global scale. While persuasive in its institutional reasoning, he glossed over several aporias of democratic poltiical theory that are now increasingly exposed by globalization. In this paper, I examine some of the aporias of mainstream democratic theory in terms of the options proposed by cosmopolitan democracy, but with the intent of exploring the site of global political community that the latter seems to presuppose. I examine how liberal democratic theory within the nation state tries to defend itself from the apparent cosmopolitan threat; I then explore some of the significant challenges to cosmopolitan democracy. In an Appendix, I attempt an exercise in utopistics, and provide a narrative of an imagined global political space, mainly with a view to enlarging the discussion on rethinking the political project beyond the nation-state through an act of creative story-building.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, global democracy, utopia