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Democratic practices exist in politics within and beyond individual states. To date, however, it is only the democratic practices within states that have been analyzed in search for causal explanations of political outcomes, for example, peace and human rights protection. Having established the problematic nature of this situation, the purpose of this article is to explain why the situation emerges in political science and then to suggest a strategy to overcome it. The lack of attention to global democracy, or democracy beyond the state more generally, in explanatory theory is suggested to depend on prevalent but unnecessary conceptual delimitations of democracy which contradict standard assumptions about international politics. Those contradictions can be avoided, however, by defining democracy as rule by the largest group. It is argued that the concept of rule by the largest group, while protecting traditional virtues of democracy such as freedom and equality of individual persons in politics, allows scholars to describe a wider range of international practices than have been available for empirical research based on the dominating conceptions of democracy in normative and empirical literatures. Most fundamentally, it frees future research on the effects of democracy beyond the state from a key risk of self-contradiction.

International politics has often been viewed as a brutal place where might trumps right and where, as a consequence, questions of democracy are irrelevant to ask. In the last decades, however, scholars and political leaders have increasingly suggested that elements of democracy exist in governance beyond individual states. If this is so, how does democracy beyond the state shape international politics? This article suggests conceptual preliminaries for theorising consequences of democracy beyond the state in general and their implications for problems of peace and conflict in particular. The purpose is twofold: first, to begin reconstructing existing normative democratic theory into an explanatory perspective sensitive to international politics; second, to indicate how this new perspective is able to explain empirical observations pertaining to conflict and cooperation among states; international institutions; foreign policies; human rights protection; and the violence of transnational terrorist networks.

Scholars of democratic theory and international political economy often disagree over the effects of globalization on state autonomy. Yet, each approach pays minimal attention to the contributions of the other to their common object of study. In an effort to remedy this situation, I identify the premises and procedural habits of each approach which tend to make it appear irrelevant to the other, and then adjust them to remove the appearance of irrelevance without impairing the integrity of each approach. The argument is illustrated by observations from Britain, France and Sweden in recent decades.

Globalization, foreign intervention, and failed states have drawn new attention to theoretical issues of how political orders and communities can be legitimately founded, and what it means for a people to be self-governing. In this article, I will challenge an argument in this debate saying that the founding of new political orders is always in some sense illegitimate insofar as it cannot be decided democratically. In opposition to this view, I will suggest that the founding of political orders is legitimate even from a democratic point of view when decided together by people within as well as beyond the boundaries inherent in the foundation. In case of persisting disagreement over boundary issues, political decisions can still derive democratic legitimacy from global procedures that are equally inclusive of everyone capable of contesting those decisions. Elaborating on the implications of this argument, I will also reject the notion that foreign interventions for establishing democracy are themselves necessarily illegitimate or undemocratic.

AbstractThis paper presents an argument as to why democratic states are unable to delegate authority to international organizations. Influential attempts to justify democratically such international bodies as the European Union by means of delegation are found to be untenable. At a more general level of theorization, it argues that the theory of delegation as involving the recoverability of delegated authority leaves us unable to identify democratic reforms for international organizations. As a remedy to the latter problem, the article proposes an alternative theory of democratic 'delegation'– one that applies equally well to national and to international politics.