Suchergebnisse

Throughout the history of liberal thought, questions about political legitimacy concerned with the protection of individual rights and the entrenchment of democratic public decision making have typically focused on the structure and conduct of state-based institutions. Normative political theorists have so far said less, however, about the prospects for achieving liberal legitimacy via new non-state forms of political organisation involving powerful actors such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs). The goal of this article is to present a preliminary theoretical assessment of the prospects of non-state institutions for delivering liberal political legitimacy in the context of globalisation. It asks: is there anything special about the various institutional forms associated with 'states' and 'sovereignty', or should these be superseded by some new public institutional order more suited to our era of globalisation? It is argued that while certain institutional characteristics of states will remain essential for achieving liberal political legitimacy in a globalising world, state-based institutional forms will be unable to deliver such legitimacy alone. Non-state forms of regulation and democratic decision making are increasingly essential for securing political legitimacy in a globalising world, but they have certain inherent weaknesses relative to state institutions. In light of this, global political legitimacy could perhaps best be achieved through the development of hybrid regulatory and democratic institutions, with selected characteristics of both state and non-state institutional forms. Questions about how best to develop such hybrid institutions should therefore receive more attention than they have done so far from normative political theorists.

The global justice movement has often been associated with opposition to the broad programme of 'neoliberalism' and associated patterns of 'corporate globalisation', creating a widespread impression that this movement is opposed to liberalism more broadly conceived. Our goal in this article is to challenge this widespread view. By engaging in critical interpretive analysis of the contemporary 'corporate accountability' movement, we argue that the corporate accountability agenda is not opposed to the core values of a liberal project. Rather, it is seeking to reconfigure the design of liberal institutions of individual rights-protection, adjusting these for new material conditions associated with economic globalisation, under which powerful corporations alongside states now pose direct and significant threats to individual rights. This activist agenda is, therefore, much less radical in its challenge to the prevailing liberal global order than it may initially appear, and since it functions to buttress rather than corrode many core normative commitments underpinning the liberal political project. Adapted from the source document.

Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a democratic global order. Instead, global public power can best be characterized as "pluralist" in structure. Some recent commentators have argued that if global democratization is to succeed at all, it must proceed along a trajectory beginning with the construction of global sovereign institutions and culminating in the establishment of representative institutions to control them. This paper challenges this view of the preconditions for global democratization, arguing that democratization can indeed proceed at a global level in the absence of sovereign structures of public power. In order to gain firmer traction on these questions, analysis focuses on the prospects for democratic control of corporate power, as constituted and exercised in one particular institutional context: sectoral supply chain systems of production and trade. It is argued that global democratization cannot be straightforwardly achieved simply by replicating familiar representative democratic institutions (based on constitutional separations of powers and electoral control) on a global scale. Rather, it is necessary to explore alternative institutional means for establishing representative democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.

Macdonald, T. ; Marchetti, R.: Introduction. - S. 13-18 Macdonald, K. ; Macdonald, T.: Democracy in a pluralist global order: corporate power and stakeholder representation. - S. 19-43 Steffek, J.: Public accountability and the public sphere of international governance. - S. 45-67 Gastil, J. ; Lingle, C. J. ; Deess, E. P.: Deliberation and global criminal justice: juries in the International Criminal Court. - S. 69-90