Global democracy is a project to make global political governance more democratic. It is based on the idea that global problems require global solutions, and that global governance needs democratic mechanisms to overcome the limits of purely national politics. It is a form of cosmopolitanism that goes beyond nationalism and focuses on the idea that human beings are the ultimate units of moral concern and have the right to exercise equal control over their shared destinies.
It is a vision that has generated a wide range of intrinsic claims and specific proposals, but it also faces a number of persistent criticisms. It is not possible to survey all these criticisms here, but two core issues deserve special attention.
The first is that the global democracy ideal is largely unfeasible. The second is that it fails to adequately address the problem of power. Within the normative discipline of international relations (IR) theory, there is growing recognition that questions of power and conflict have been relegated to the sidelines by proponents of global democracy.
The Global State of Democracy report and its accompanying thematic papers show that the world’s democracies face significant challenges. They are confronted by an increasingly complex global political landscape shaped by the changing roles and structures of (supra)national institutions and organizations, shifts in geopolitical power and the rise of new global phenomena such as climate change, migration and urbanization. In addition, rising inequality and social polarization undermine democratic processes by skewing political representation and reducing the vital moderate centre of the electorate.
