Mainstream WeeklyOne might say, for example, the major corporations represent national interest ‘what is good for General Motors, is good for America’. Indeed, the corporate responsibility that is the lack of accountability or representation, is common refrain in many protests. The concept of the public goods and services were thus developed in the light of a legal theory that considered the public as patrimony of the state and the principle of general interest as an attribute of sovereign.
Whereas the tradition of the domestic law like ‘contract’ was between the private individual and the state, the Westphalia Treaty (1648) of international law, the contract was among nation-states. Privatization is the central component of the neo-liberal ideology that determines the strategy of the major powers that rule over the global economy.
The ‘public’ that privatized by neo-liberalism are generally property right which is previously controlled by the state. There is great expansion of private property into the realms of life through patent, copy rights and other legal instruments. In recent years, we have witnessed numerous legal developments that increases the power of social control by eroding ‘private’ rights. In United States, for example, women rights to abortion have been argued and sustained primarily in the name of privacy, now becomes a public issue. Legislation in the USA such as the USA Patriot Act, expanded the right of government to conduct surveillance over population since security must in the final instance come before all else, there is no ‘private’.
So, in the social, in the other words, the tendency is to make everything public and thus open to government surveillance and control. Considering the social democratic arguments that claim democracy is threatened by globalization which defines globalization usually strictly in economic terms. Some argued that economic globalization is actually a myth with anti-democratic effects. The trans-national corporations are still rising. But the vast majority of trade today is not really global but takes place merely doing North America, Europe and Japan.
The social democrats argue instead that nation-states can and should assert their sovereignty and take greater control of economy at national and international levels. The social democratic position is the one that was most seriously undermined by the events from the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks to the war on Iraq.
The end of the cold war was supposed to be the ultimate victory of democracy. But today the concept and practices of democracy are everywhere in crisis. Even in the United States the central institution such as electoral systems have been seriously drawn into question. In many parts of the world, there is barely the presence of democratic systems of government. During cold war divide, the concept of democracy tended to be defined strictly in terms of anti-communism. Global democracy will have to mean something different than what democracy meant in the national context throughout the modern era.
In addition to greater economic development, they envision globalization bringing a great democratic potential primarily due to new relative freedom from the rule of nation-states. The state of global war seems to have made globalization inevitable (especially in terms of security and military affairs. Since 9/11 terrorist attack, the increased pressure of war has polarized the positions and subordinated the need for democracy to concerns of security and stability. This gives us for logical categories dividing those who think it is an obstacle on both left and right.
Is there something ‘private’ to sovereignty internationally? This is particularly true, for example, in discussions that focus on the question of human rights, which has in many ways taken greater role against or despite the power of nation-states. The new global governance similarly relies on the relative decline of the sovereignty of nation-states as their condition of possibility that excludes private aspects of public international law. These arguments generally asserts that globalization foster democracy because U.S. hegemony and the expansion of capital. Other hold that the US political system and the ‘American way of life’ are synonymous with democracy and thus the expansion of U.S. hegemony is expansion of democracy.
The US government emphasizes that its global interventions are not based merely on national interests but rather on the global desire for freedom and property. Does USA carry ‘white man’s burden’? There is a debate among conservatives who view current US global hegemony as the rightful heir to the benevolent European imperialist projects and other who view US global rule as a radically new and exceptional historical situation. In all these cases, the traditional values or social institutions need to be protected and the natural interest is preserved against the threats of globalization.
It makes modern project of democracy remained unfinished. Modern revolution did not immediately institute the universal concept of democracy even within the national space. The exclusion of women, the propertyless, the non-white and others negated the universal pretext of ‘everyone’. In fact, this universal notion of democracy, has never yet been instituted, but it has served not withstanding as a goal toward which modern revolutions and struggles have intendent.
First, democracy would have to be constructed from below in a way that could neutralize the states’ monopoly of power. Second, socialist movements recognized that the separation between political representation and economic administration was a key to structure of oppression. They would have to find a way to make the instruments of political power coincide democratically with the economic management of society.
Max Weber’s insight went to much deeper level of the problem. According to him, in every complex system of the management of society one cannot speak of politics (democratic representation) without speaking of social democracy. Thus, representation remained an essential organ of the mediation and expression of social interests in every complex system of the management of society. The U.S. presidential election of 2000 which was decided by the controversial recount of votes and intervention of the Supreme Court is only the most visible example of the crisis of representation through electoral institutions. Even the United States, throughout the world are often not so much expressions of ani-Americanisms as they are grievances against the lack of representation.
The World Bank and IMF, for example, which have in the past decades become the object of increasingly large protest, might be said to represent the interests of the entire global economy, are conceived as representing the interest of the host nation of region. But this is almost exclusively what we called earlier a patriarchal form of representation with minimal control of the nation.
Here, we can recognize at least three fundamental principles of private/ public dichotomy in modern democracy that seems to have been bear their former meaning. These are ‘no power’ without representation’, the separation od power’ and the freedom of expression.
The universal applicability of human rights cannot be realized as long as it has no legal institutional structure and relies instead on the dominant nation states. The international tribunal to persecute war-crimes and crime against humanity constitute a second level of legal institution beyond national legal structure that broadened the public sphere of international structure.
The Nuremberg Tribunal that persecuted leaders of Nazi regime set the precedent and International Criminal Tribunal establish to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda and Yugoslavia (1990s), makes private affairs of particular national affairs ‘public’. Similarly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) enforcement power also extremely weak. In 2002, a much more powerful institution, the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) was established. Despite the limitation ICC indicates the possibility of a global system of justice that serves to protect the right of all equally.
Recently, neo-liberalism has shifted its center of gravity from the focus on commercial law and international business to question of military intervention, regime change and nation-building. The various grievances about the lack of rights and justice in the global system, we enumerated and make it clear that new institutions of justice must be independent from the control of nation-states.
After gaining a respect for private property and sense of liberty, the sovereign nations are capable of sustaining internal democracy. Such proposal is based on what scholars in international relations call the domestic analogy--- that is the analogy between the internal structures of the nation state and structure of international system. Today, the basis for political analysis and proposition is not the individual but rather the common, that is the set of bio-political productive relations.
The fact that bio-political production is at once economic and political, that it directly creates social relationship, is not only has economic value but also work of politics. In this sense, economic production and recognition would coincides. The collaborative network of production would suggest a framework for new institutional structure of globe. A type of bio-political struggle involves the control of knowledge. Now, Scientific knowledge has become part of economic production to such an extent that the dominant economic paradigm has shifted from the production of material goods to the production of life itself.
As we saw the genetic material and even life forms are increasingly becoming private property through the use of patent. This is an economic issue first in the sense that it assigns profit and wealth and second it often restricts the free use and exchange that is necessary for development and innovation. It is also clearly a political question and a question of justice because ownership of this knowledge is systematically concentrated in the wealthy countries of North to the exclusion of global south.
Global political reform thus becomes something like making the world power structure more like expanding the US model to a global scale. The practices of unilateralism and exceptionalism that we discussed earlier undermine any international or global form of democratic representation.
Today’s proponents of democracy are met by the same skeptical argument. Democracy may have been possible in the confines of the modern nation-state, but in the extensive territories of our globalized world, is utterly absurd. The more substantive notion which is omnipresent in these internal proposals is ‘accountability’ which is often paired with the notion of ‘governance’. Sovereignty in all its forms inevitably poses power as the rule of one and undermines the possibility of a full and absolute democracy. The projects of democracy must today challenge private/ public dichotomy as a precondition for establishing world order. Here, we can discover the project of ‘Another world is possible’—a world beyond sovereignty.
(Author: Dr. Sunita Samal. (Political Commentator), author of ‘Feminist Turn: Foreign Policy and Morality: Perspectives on United States’, (2023) Published by Asian Press Books, Kolkata)
References:
1 Hannah Arendt (1963) ‘On Revolution’, New York: Viking.
2 Joan Tronto (1993) ‘Moral Boundaries’, New York, Routledge.
3 Helen Stacey ‘Relational Sovereignty’, Stanford Law Review, 55, No.5, May 2003.
4 Hans Kelsen (1945) ‘General Theory of Law and State’, Harvard University Press.
5 M. Hardt and A. Negri (2004) ‘Multitude’, New York: Penguin.