Will Kymlicka & Wayne Norman eds. OUP 2000

Chapter 2

James Tully

University of Victoria

Recall that in this famous conclusion to the Preface of the Philosophy of Right Hegel advances two closely related claims about the relation between political philosophy and political practice. First, only when an organised form of political life has come to maturity and grown old can it be given adequate expression by means of philosophical reflection. Philosophy ‘appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed’.[2] Second, at the same time, this philosophical reflection is provoked by a new and different form of political life coming into being out of the old. While the philosopher cannot help but notice this dawning activity, for it renders the present problematic and gives rise to critical reflection, she or he cannot grasp it adequately because it is different from, and often disruptive of, the shape of life in its twilight which he or she paints so perspicuously in shades of grey. To use Hegel’s example, while Plato adequately articulated the mature Greek political and ethical life in the Republic, he noticed but failed to understand adequately an emerging style of politics that ‘was breaking into that life in his own time’ and which would change the old ways forever.[3] This was ‘a deeper principle’, the ‘free infinite personality’: that is, the new form of political and ethical life based on parrhesia - modes of questioning oneself and other citizens exemplified by Socrates.[4] Plato failed to understand adequately the new way of being political not only because it was new and inchoate, but also because he tried to ‘master’ or comprehend it in the concepts appropriate to the old, and thus ‘did fatal injury to the deeper impulse which underlay it’.[5] He could see what Socrates had introduced only ‘as a longing still unsatisfied’ - not as a principled mode of being open to philosophical comprehension.[6]

We are in analogous situation today with respect to the puzzling kinds of democratic activity that are emerging in the context of globalization. We can see that they embody ‘a longing still unsatisfied’ but when we try to reflect critically upon them we misunderstand because we tend to characterise and seek to ‘master’ them in the concepts, theories and traditions that are appropriate to democratic practices and institutions which have come to maturity and grown old over the last two hundred years and in which we ourselves think and act. Alternatively, as Hegel explains, if we try to grasp and anticipate what is happening here and now in some new normative vocabulary, this too is bound to fail since we cannot ‘jump over Rhodes’; transcend our contemporary world.[7] The result is groundless and idle speculation about the future, ‘the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where’, and ‘where anything you please may, in fancy, be built’. [8]

Certainly these two genres of contemporary political thought - the re-inscription of the new in terms of the old and the idle speculation about the future - are common enough, especially at the beginning of a new millennium. Nevertheless, since the time of the young Hegelians a third school of political philosophy has developed in response to Hegel’s conservative pessimism about understanding what is happening right now and has established itself on the rough ground between his two extremes. From Kant’s 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?, Marx, Nietzsche and Weber to Arendt, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Taylor, Giddens, Connolly and Skinner among others, this form of critical reflection on the present seeks to understand a new and problematic way of acting or language game (class struggle in the workplace, post-Christian ethics, the ascetics of capitalist behaviour, an enigmatic aspect of freedom) neither in terms of the dominant, cut and dried political institutions and traditions nor of some new and fanciful vocabulary, but, rather, in terms of a relation of difference, of dissimilarity, relative to the dominant institutions and their traditions of thought. ‘What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’, as Foucault succinctly summarises this whole orientation.[9] This careful, back-and-forth reciprocal elucidation of an unsettling political activity of the present in terms of its difference from, as well as similarity to, the prevailing forms of political thought and practice not only discloses the anomalous activity in a distinctive light; it also shows up these old forms, not as the taken-for-granted horizons in which we must understand the new, but as partial limits that the new activity may enable us cautiously to modify and venture beyond.[10]

While this intermediate tradition has learned from and adapted Hegel’s historical approach and taken his advice to remain as close as possible to contemporary experience (abjuring the temptation to jump over Rhodes), it never the less rotates his orientation 180 degrees around the fixed axis of our real need. Rather than comprehending and reconciling the new and problematic activity from the twilight of the old, this approach uses the dawning light of the novel activity to free ourselves from the sedimented conventions of the old (se déprendre de soi-même), to some limited and relative extent (égarement), in order to think differently (penser autrement).[11] By this form of philosophical investigation (askesis), one is able to ‘test’ in ‘what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory’ (the dominant institutions and their traditions) ‘what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints’ and to what extent it is possible ‘to go beyond them’ (de leur franschissement possible): ‘to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’. [12]

Such an approach is difficult, precarious and uncertain. It has neither the security and comfort of reaffirming and legitimating our most familiar and mature institutions and traditions of political thought nor the excitement and media fame of hurling bold conjectures at the world at large. Any reciprocal elucidation is relative, contextual, partial, and defeasible, and, therefore, open to continual reworking - a ‘sketch’ in Wittgenstein’s sense rather than a ‘theory’. We are thus always in the position of beginning again. Yet, in compensation, it is the orientation that has some chance of rendering aspects of the present world to which we belong a little less unclear, enabling us to find ourselves within it and perhaps even to go on. While Hegel is right to say that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk, Bill Reid, the great Haida artist, reminds us that the raven of Haida Gwaii - the universal indigenous symbol of our ability to modify our ways of being human relative to our past and become other than we are - takes flight at dawn; indeed brings the dawn into being and so sets the scene.[13] In sum, then, the defining temperament of this enlightenment orientation, suspended between the owl’s respect for and deep attachment to what our great teachers and predecessors have achieved and the raven’s curiosity and always unsatisfied longing for what lies on our horizons, is perhaps expressed well by Nietzsche in the last paragraph of Daybreak, written in Genoa in 1880-81:[14]

This approach can be applied to some aspects of the puzzling forms of political activity that have emerged in a variety of sites in the context of contemporary globalization. Section One distinguishes two kinds of practices of government and democracy (and two corresponding uses of the terms ‘government’ and ‘democracy’) woven historically into our ways of ruling and being ruled (thus not ‘the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where’). One, the ‘restrictive’ sense of ‘government’ and ‘democracy’, refers to the mature and predominant practices of government and democracy typical of representative democratic nation states, their institutions, and the traditions of understanding in which they are described, operated and evaluated. The other, the ‘nonrestrictive’ sense of ‘government’ and ‘democracy’, refers to the less prominent practices of government and democracy that do not conform to the typical practices of representative government and democracy and so cannot be understood adequately in terms of theories and traditions of representative government. Yet, by reciprocal elucidation, these nonrestrictive practices have the capacity to throw light on a range of political activity in contemporary globalization. I will refer to the former as, interchangeably, ‘restrictive’ or ‘representative’ and to the latter as ‘nonrestrictive’ or ‘extensive’ practices of government and democracy, and to the class of both types as simply practices of government and democracy.

Section Two summarizes how the practices of representative government and democracy came to predominate and appear universal, necessary and obligatory, but now occlude understanding of anomalous forms of government and democracy, doing ‘fatal injury’ to the principles underlying them. Section Three sets out a number of dimensions of contemporary political globalization that have rendered the present problematic and given rise to critical reflection. Section Four surveys the extent to which these changes can be understood in terms of the owlish language of representative government and democracy, in its unmodified and modified forms. Section Five suggests how other aspects of global politics can be defeasibly characterised and analyzed only in comparison to extensive practices of government and democracy.

1. Two Types of Practices of Government and Democracy: Restrictive and Extensive

In this quotation from a short, synoptic text written two years before his death (1982), Foucault looks back over 25 years of studying the history of practices of government in which Europeans have constituted themselves as subjects engaged in coordinated interaction and summaries two major findings of his research. First, ‘the forms and the specific situations of the government of men [and women] by one another in any given society are multiple’: that is, the ‘practices of government’ and the ‘forms of subjects’ of each practice come in a multiplicity of forms. The ways in which men and women are governed, govern themselves, and respond to and modify forms of governance in families, schools, churches, militaries, corporations, markets, bureaucracies, unions, voluntary organizations, municipalities, indigenous nations, provinces, states, federations, international regimes and organizations, the United Nations, and global systems criss-cross and overlap in complicated but nonetheless analysable ways. Second, while the multiple practices of government have proliferated since the Reformation - from the consolidation of absolutist states in the early modern period to the formation of representative democratic nation-states in the modern period - they have tended to be elaborated, rationalised and centralised, either directly in the form of, or indirectly under the control of, the institutions characteristic of representative nation states. The process of progressive governmentalization, then, is the historical process by which the restrictive practices of government - representative government - have come to maturity and predominance, tending to bring most forms of government under their auspices in practice and also in theory (what might be called the owl of Minerva effect).

Using David Held’s classification of historical forms of globalization into early modern (14^th-18^th century), modern (19^th-20^th century) and contemporary (1945-21^st century), my thesis is that one feature of contemporary political globalization is a new trend towards the dispersion of practices of government and democracy.[16] It has two major aspects. The first and more familiar is the dispersion of standard practices of representative government so they are no longer centralised in nation states and a Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. It is this aspect Held refers to when he speaks of ‘political globalization’, ‘multilayered governance and the diffusion of political authority’ and ‘cosmopolitan democracy’.[17] Moreover, the dispersion of political authority in these ways does not displace the long term trend of governmentalization across all three periods, but co-exists with it. It can be seen as a modification of governmentalization in the restrictive sense, since many of the characteristics of representative government remain, while others, such as centralization, sovereignty, and uniformity, are amended and qualified by the dispersion. For example, the global human rights regime qualifies rather than displaces the regime of sovereign nation states and is itself a development out of the juridical practices of representative nation states. The modification of sovereignty in the contemporary period has also enabled us to see that the actual history of representative governments has been much less centralized and uniform than the prevailing political theories presume.[18] Accordingly, this aspect of dispersion can be understood by modifying the mature and dominant traditions of representative government from within, as long as one takes a ‘critical’ (raven-like) rather than ‘regulative’ (owl-like) attitude to some characteristics of these traditions while holding the others firm. Call this the modified owlish or Hegelian aspect of contemporary political globalization (Section Four).

The second aspect of this trend is the dispersion of extensive practices of government within and across representative nation states. This is not a separate trend, but one that criss-crosses with the former, often forming two aspects of the same institutions: to recollect, ‘they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another’. Moreover, this global process of nonrestrictive governmentalization also can be seen as a modification of an early-modern and modern set of processes: namely, the persistence and proliferation of non-representative practices of government since the Reformation and the Dutch army reforms. Recall that the contribution to the understanding of modernity offered by Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Dreyfus, Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Connolly and Taylor has been to elucidate a multiplicity of practices of government which shape our identities and modes of interaction in ways that cannot be understood in the predominant traditions of political thought because they are different from and obscured by the more prominent practices of representative government (or by the more prominent features of these practices).[19]. Accordingly, the second aspect of contemporary political globalization can be elucidated by comparison with this body of work, and by contrast with the great theories of representative governments and their prominent institutions. Call this the modified raven aspect of contemporary political globalization (Section Five).

Most of the dispersed practices of government are not democratic. Many are bureaucratic, authoritarian or systemic. They coordinate the interaction of the participants predominantly ‘behind their backs’, without their say, through the market, bureaucracy or the functional intermeshing of the unintended consequences of their actions. They are on the face of it ‘systems’ rather than ‘practices’ insofar as the participants are more ‘patients’ or ‘subjects’ than ‘agents’ or ‘citizens’.[20] Furthermore, despite the evidence for an uneven and forward-and-backward trend to ‘democratization’ (formal representative democracy), the spread of institutions of representative democracy to many decolonising peoples after 1960 and 1989, the development of supranational regimes such as NAFTA and the EU, the increase in power of transnational corporations, the weakening of representative governments and social democratic practices under neo-liberalism, and the underfunding and bypassing of the democratic institutions of the United Nations have been accompanied by the distribution of decision-making and implementation powers to non-democratic local, regional and global institutions, ‘indirect infrastructural’ rule, and an emergent system of ‘nodes in a global network’, for what appears to be a net global democratic deficit. [21]

Nevertheless, the dispersion of practices of government has been met by popular struggles which seek to alter them. The second half of my thesis is that these struggles are of two types, corresponding to the two types of practices of government. The first type are struggles of and for democracy in the restrictive, representative sense: to make non-representative practices of government democratic in the representative sense (or make practices of representative government more representative) or to bring them under the control of dispersed representative-democratic government institutions (local, regional, national, global and the UN) in traditional ways. The second type are struggles of and for democracy in the extensive sense: to bring extensive practices of government under some new form of democratic control by the participants or to link them up in novel ways with representative institutions. These struggles are ‘democratic’ in the extensive sense just insofar as the participants in any practice of government struggle to be heard and to negotiate to some extent the relations of power which govern their conduct. The forms of these second type of democratic struggle in non-representative practices are closely related to the specific and diverse character of the practices of government in which the struggles occur and so do not conform to the dominant models of representative-democratic activity.

To illustrate with an example taken up in Section Five, citizens struggle to bring global forest companies under the democratic control of representatives in provincial and federal parliaments, the democratic institutions of their customers in Europe, Asia, and the UN. At the same time, local and global concerned citizens and NGOs confront these multinationals on specific logging sites: to negotiate face-to-face, to challenge their immediate forest practices, hiring practices and ecological claims, the way gender is governed in their company, their responsibility to local and the global communities, to value-added industries, their stance towards Indigenous peoples, their shareholders, and the like. The also illustrates the point that these two distinct types of democratic activity are not separate but often occur in the same nexus of dispersed practices of government.

These two types of democratic struggle are internally related to the multiplication and dispersion of practices of government definitive of contemporary political globalization. The struggles over how employees are governed in dispersed practices, how they relate to the environment broadly defined, and their effects on local and global communities are internal to the logic of the organization and dispersion of these practices of government. They cannot be understood or analyzed without taking into account the agonism between the attempts to govern the participants in a specific way and the responses to that mode of governance. Just as the development of capitalism and representative democracy are not autonomous historical processes, but involve and are shaped by the extensive struggles of workers and consumers over the practices of production and the restrictive struggles of citizens and representatives over the practices of government; so too contemporary political globalization is not composed of processes in which humans are powerless. The processes are partly constituted by the two types of democratic contestation. Therefore, the dispersion of practices of government and the democratic struggles over them have to be understood together. Foucault summarizes the general methodological point in the following way:[22]

These two types of struggle also can be seen as modifications of early modern and modern forms of struggle. The first are a continuation of struggles for representative democracy, suitably modified to fit the dispersed character of practices of government in political globalization. They are struggles for ‘democratization’ as it is standardly defined in the literature. These in turn can be understood in the suitably modified owlish terms of comparison with the dominant theories of representative democracy over the last two hundred years, as Held has shown.[23] The second are a continuation and modification of the more specific contests for democratic control in extensive practices of government since the early modern period. These struggles are heterogeneous because they are tailored to the specifics of the practice they challenge and seek to modify. Light can be shed on the dawning, non-representative democratic activities involved in contemporary globalization by means of raven-inspired analogies and disanalogies with accounts of modern, non-representative democratic struggles.[24]

Although this two-path approach to political globalization from the perspectives of both the owl and the raven may seem obvious, Hegel’s Preface forewarns us that it is seldom followed. First, processes of globalization are often analyzed systemically, as if they unfold independently of contingent human action. Second, even when the exercise of democratic freedom vis à vis dispersed practices of government is taken into account, it tends to be construed in the categories of representative democracy and its traditions of interpretation, or as ‘movements’ that are on their way to becoming familiar forms of representative democratic politics (parties, interest groups, labour organizations, struggles for rights, and so on). This modified Hegelian mode of understanding is accurate for one aspect of contemporary political globalization, but it has a tendency to overreach its limits and claim to comprehend both aspects of political globalization, thus doing ‘fatal injury’ to the other. When the limitation is noticed, the auspices of restrictive governmentalization remains so hegemonic that the response is either to ignore what the dominant representative theories fail to explain or to treat the extensive practices of government and democracy as not really democratic at all, and to treat their traditions of interpretation as illegitimate or incoherent (as the response to Foucault’s research amply illustrates), as if there could be nothing new under the sun. To see how this limited understanding of our present has come to seem the bounds of political reason itself - as if this resting place is as far as we could fly - we need to review how the concepts and practices of government and democracy have come to be restricted to representative government and democracy.

2. Practices of Representative Government and Democracy

The prevailing practices of representative government and democracy in capitalist societies developed in the early modern and modern periods. They include some combination of the following types of institution: institutions of formal legislators or representatives elected by citizens in a multi-party competition, the rule of law and public procedures, a system of administrative bureaucracies to execute the laws uniformly, a judicial system to interpret, review and apply them, a distinction between public and private, a public sphere of free speech, assembly and dissent, a military accountable to the representative institutions, and a constitution that lays down the division of powers among institutions and federal units and the political, civil and social rights and duties of citizens and groups.[25]

Representative government and democracy in turn is seen as the system of government appropriate to, and the most legitimate form of, a modern nation state. The process of governmentalization in the restrictive sense refers to the gradual colonization of early modern absolutist states by the practices of representative government and democracy. The modern nation state is defined in terms of a national democratic community of citizens and a geographical and bounded territory. The community of citizens has the capacity to elect and hold accountable their representatives and the representatives have the capacity to make law and policy to govern their constituents’ major affairs within their geographically bounded territory. Each nation state is in turn sovereign. The political world consists of a system of sovereign representative nation states, the Westphalian system, named after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 even though several of its features did not come into widespread practice until the modern period.[26]

Prior to the eighteenth century ‘democracy’ was used extensively as a term of abuse to refer to the ‘people’ assembling together and demanding a direct voice in the specific manner they were governed in any practice of government. Athenian democracy and early modern local ‘revolts’ stood as exemplars of this disruptive form of popular activity. Most of the canonical political theorists of the early modern period, as Bernard Manin reminds us, saw representative government as directly opposed to democracy. They condemned democracy as popular, contentious, headless, licentious and ill-suited to large modern states. By the early nineteenth century, the struggles between defenders of democracy and representative government were over and ‘democracy’ as a term of approval came to be routinely predicated of ‘representative’ government as the modern form of government appropriate to large commercial societies, thereby covering over the earlier struggles. [27]

‘Democracy’, as Kant puts it in his distinctive manner of presenting his side of an argument as the universal and necessary truth, ‘in the proper sense of the term, is necessarily a despotism’, and every ‘form of government that is not representative is properly speaking without form’.[28] The restriction of ‘democracy’ to ‘representative democracy’ and representative democracy as the only legitimate form of government is perhaps best codified by Thomas Paine. In his influential Rights of Man he states: [29]

With Benjamin Constant’s famous speech of 1819, The Liberty of the Ancients as Compared with that of the Moderns, the semantic restriction was completed. Representative democracy is not only presented as the sole, legitimate form of government appropriate to the sociological conditions of large, capitalist states, but any unsatisfied longing for other, extensive forms of democracy is depicted as romantic nostalgia for Athenian democracy or utopian speculation and is said to lead in practice to the Terror.[30]

A complementary restriction of the term ‘government’ occurred during the processes of governmentalization of the early modern and modern periods. In the sixteenth century, ‘government’ was widely used to characterise any relation of power and authority in which the conduct or action of a person or group is guided by the conduct or action of another, whether this involves the practice of caring for children, educating pupils, mastering servants and apprentices, governing wives, caring for souls or the poor, or governing subjects and representatives in parochial, royal, county, regional and national practices of government. That is, government in the extensive sense refers to any form of guiding the conduct of others and the range of possible actions the others may take up in response:[31]

Consequently, a central concern of political writers was to sort out the various practices of government; not to confuse them or to purposefully collapse them into one canonical form, as Locke typically reminds his readers in 1689:[32]

Although the equipment employed in practices of government, the purposes for which human activity is coordinated in diverse associations, and the modes of comportment or identities the governed and governors bear in the multiplicity of overlapping games of government are various, as Locke illustrates, what they have in common is that the conduct of the governed is not determined but ‘free’. As Foucault puts it, by ‘this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized’.[33] The range of possible action, between ‘domination’ at one extreme (where movement is determined) and direct ‘confrontation’ between adversaries at the other (where a relation of governance gives way to a relation of revolt), is what Foucault referred to earlier as the strategic ‘freedom’ with which participants act within any practice of government. This freedom is ‘democracy’ in the extensive sense: the exercise of the abilities of the governed to negotiate the way their conduct is guided.

Throughout the modern period ‘government’ gradually came to be restricted to the formal institutions of representative government in the so-called ‘public’ sector and the broader use of ‘government’ fell into disuse. The modern disciplines of political science and political philosophy, with their restrictive focus on the public institutions of representative government and democracy, augmented this trend. Moreover, as Weber and Foucault have shown, the range of democratic free play in the multiplicity of practices of government came to be restricted as forms of control and reflexive monitoring of thought and behaviour were introduced to train, coordinate and predict activity in detail.[34] These techniques of control changed the character of practices of government, as Hubert Dreyfus explains:[35]

Practices of control became integrated into larger systems of markets and bureaucracies. For reasons of efficiency and time constraints, attempts to negotiate their organization was seen to be inappropriate, both in the form of unsuccessful large-scale planning in socialist countries and even in the more moderate form of social democracy and welfare liberalism, at least among neo-liberals. Finally, when moderns challenged the ways their conduct is regulated in extensive practices, they too expressed their demands in the language of control, speaking of participants’ ‘self-management’ and ‘self-control’ more than ‘self-government’ and ‘democracy’. To paraphrase Hegel, with this final semantic shift the process of formation of government and democracy exclusively as representative government and democracy has been completed.

The singular and contingent historical assemblage of modern representative government and democracy is the political world painted by the owl of Minerva in grey in grey as universal and necessary from the Philosophy of Right to the latest modern political theory. It is now being challenged and modified in the course of contemporary political globalization in two distinct ways.

3. Contemporary Political Globalization and Global Governance

Following Held, globalization can be thought of as:[36]

This means, first, that globalization is a cluster of uneven, hierarchical and unpredictable processes of interregional networks and systems of interaction and exchange; not a singular condition or a process of global integration. Second, global interconnectedness weaves networks of relations between communities, states, international institutions, NGOs and multinational corporations. The networks form processes of ‘structuration’ - the product of both individual and group actions and the cumulative interactions among agencies and institutions. Globalization, third, occurs across all domains of social life. Fourth, global processes deterritorialize and reterritorialize socio-economic and political space so it is no longer co-terminus with established legal and territorial boundaries. The twentieth century has experienced a shift from the direct, territorial forms of control characteristic of the long age of European and American imperialism to new forms of non-territorial imperialism based on control of peoples and markets by indirect, infrastructural control. Fifth, the organization and reach of power is expanded so the concentrated sites and exercise of power are increasingly at a distance from the subjects and locales which experience the consequences. The major domains of social life enmeshed in contemporary globalization are politics, organised violence, global trade and markets, global finance, corporations and global production networks, the movement of peoples, cultures and nations, and the environment. [37]

Contemporary globalization is altering modern representative politics by the globalization of politics, or, as Held terms it, ‘global politics’. These are forms of politics that do not fit neatly into the modern categories of either national or international politics:[38]

Global politics disaggregates the central feature of modern representative government; that the national representative government governs the affairs of a territorially bounded community of fate and that community holds its representatives accountable for the power exercised over them. Peoples are dispersed in overlapping communities of fate and political power is shared, dispersed, overlapping, contested and battered by a range of forces and agencies.

Global politics has given rise to ‘global governance’. Global governance is not the institutions of modern representative governments or of the international system of nation-states but is, nonetheless, a modification and expansion of them to govern global politics. The United Nations, the World Trade Organization, non-governmental organizations, the political power of multinational corporations, social movements, local, regional, federal and supra-national governments, international regimes, the global human rights regime, and global legal regimes are well-known examples. They embody the shift from ‘territorially based politics’ of the modern era to the ‘emerging era of global politics and multilayered global and regional governance’.[39] In several respects, global politics and global governance can be compared to the messy overlapping of practices of government in the late medieval period prior to the early modern consolidation of centralized European states.

4. Unmodified and Modified Representative Practices of Government and Democracy

I will now sketch how the problematization of the present by global politics can be understood in the light of the two approaches laid out in Sections One and Two: unmodified and modified representative government and democracy, and unmodified and modified extensive government and democracy. First, as Held stresses, modern representative government and democracy persist into the contemporary era despite their decentring by global politics and the uneven emergence of multilayered global governance. The clichés of the ‘end of sovereignty’ and the impotence of representative national government in an era of globalization, fashionable among many neo-liberals and post-moderns, underestimate the resilience of practices of modern politics.[40]

For example, it is true that countries such as Canada lost considerable control over macro-economic policy because they became publicly indebted to and dependent on global capital during the period of welfare liberalism. None the less, the irony of neo-liberal deficit and debt reduction is that north Atlantic countries are now less dependent on global capital and thus more able to exercise the democratic powers over economic policy that neo-liberals and hyper-globalisers claim they no longer hold. There is little in global economic processes that now impede, say, job creation policies. Only traditional constraints on representative will formation impede such policies and the rise of social democratic governments in Europe has shown that these can be overcome.[41]

Second, processes of globalization in the various domains affect different regions, sectors and peoples differently. The increased ability of capital to exit in response to economic policy, for example, only holds for certain areas of the economy. It is difficult to see how services, agriculture, education, fisheries, tourism, health-care, retirement industries and the like can move. Moreover, these uneven processes do not determine public policy. They are, or can be, mediated through representative democratic discussion and debate, and this explains many of the differences in policy across OECD countries. Even the uncontrolled flow of global financial capital could be governed by traditional co-ordination of nation states to implement a Tobin tax.

Moreover, as Castells in particular underscores, cultural and migratory processes of globalization involve the multiplication of identities and loyalties and these engender demands for policies of multiculturalism and multinationalism throughout the multilayered governments in response. It ‘appears that our [contemporary] societies are constituted by the interaction between the ‘net’ and the ‘self’, between the network society and the power of identity’.[42] Nevertheless, the globalization of individual and collective identities has not diminished loyalty to the (multicultural and multinational) representative nation state except in the cases of outright secession (which are also cases of unmodified modern politics). In Canada, 80 per cent of Quebecers continue to value and care about their Canadian identity alongside their Quebec identity. The proliferation of supranational political associations such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement have not generated supranational political communities of fate that replace or even seriously challenge the traditional national communities within. In most case, citizens see whatever representation they have in these larger associations as the representation of their national community. Canadians do not see themselves as part of a larger North American ‘community of fate’ but, rather, as members of the federal community of Canada which in turn is in this larger non-communal association.[43]

The widespread dissatisfaction with and cynicism towards the potency of representative government does not seem to be the effect of globalization. Rather, it appears to be caused by the traditional faults in the practices of modern representative government themselves. The high cost of running for office; the failure to represent women adequately and to represent the growing cultural diversity of the electorate; the inequities of the ‘first past the post’ system of elections; the lack of proportional representation and the representation of territorial (riding) identity to the exclusion of all other identities; the impotence of backbenchers and parliamentary committees as decision-making power becomes concentrated in tiny elites; the abuse of party discipline and orders in council; and the absence of open democratic deliberation in parliaments are faults that have been well-documented by countless studies and royal commissions. Such fault render representative government unresponsive to democratic will formation and so open to manipulation by the elites who serve to gain by disempowering representative institutions under the rhetoric of globalization as a process that does not allow for democratic negotiation. Whether modern representative governments remain effective and retain the allegiance of their citizens will depend more on the successes of traditional reform movements in correcting these imperfections than on contemporary globalization.

If we turn to the institutions of global governance that are emerging in response to global politics, many of them can be seen either as modified versions of the practices of modern representative government (such as global human and environmental rights, the EU and the proposed peoples’ chamber of the UN) or as non-democratic concentrations of power that are sites of struggle for democratization in the representative sense (such as multinational corporations and NGOs). These are instances of the aspect of contemporary political globalization described in Section One as ‘the dispersion of standard practices of representative government so they are no longer centralised in nation states and a Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states’. Held’s global project of cosmopolitan democracy is perhaps the best known and most promising example of this modified owlish orientation towards contemporary political globalization. In addition, he mentions two other approaches that are extensions and modifications of the traditions of interpretation of modern politics, ‘liberal internationalism’ and ‘radical republicanism’.[44]

The projection of three traditions of modern political thought on to global politics and governance does bring to light aspects of them and the struggles to democratise them. Nevertheless, it is important not to treat them as if they constitute a comprehensive way of understanding global politics, for this would be to misunderstand and do fatal injury to other forms of global governance and democratic activity. There are two distinct types of limitation of these three schools of modern political thought.

The first limitation is that they do not modify their own traditions enough in reflecting on global representative politics. They tend to project contingent features of modern representative government and democracy on to contemporary global politics and so misunderstand what is new in global practices of representative government. Recall that two equal principles underlie all the mature practices of modern representative government and democracy and give them their legitimacy: representative popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The tension distinctive of modern politics is the permanent difficulty of preserving the equality of these two principles: of ensuring that the people rule themselves through their representatives and so subject themselves to laws of their own authorship, and, at the same time, that these practices of representative democracy are carried out in accord with the rule of law. [45] As a result, there is always a reciprocal, back-and-forth movement between a provisional rule of law and a continuous process of its democratic discussion and reform.

Cosmopolitan democracy does not treat both principles equally, but gives priority to the rule of law. It ‘attempts to specify the principles and the institutional arrangements for making accountable those sites and forms of power which presently operate beyond the scope of democratic control’.[46] Cosmopolitan theorists work out, by a process of solitary reflection on the European history of representative government and democracy, and then project globally, prior to any exercise of representative popular sovereignty in fora of democratic dialogue, a cosmopolitan public law that lays down the preconditions of global practices of democracy. This overrides the equality of the principle of representative popular sovereignty, which requires that any cosmopolitan public law needs to be democratically discussed and agreed to by those subject to it, or their representatives, if it is to be legitimate.[47]

If the two principles are treated equally, then the extension of the rule of law and representative democracy to global politics will necessarily involve democratic discussion of the forms that the rule of law and democracy should take in the multiplicity of practices of governance, not once and for all, but over all time. In virtue of cultural diversity, a host of contextual factors, and the overlapping of communities, governments and identities, the legitimate processes of contemporary global constitutionalism and democratization are not predictable and cannot be specified or comprehended beforehand. There is always a range of possible free actions available to the participants. Thus, even in the attempts to understand political globalization in the modified terms of representative government and democracy, only the underlying principles, and not the more specific institutional forms these principles have taken in the early modern and modern periods in the West, should be projected on to global politics if what is really going on is to be understood.[48]

The second limitation of the modified owlish approach is that it does not help us to understand what was described in Section One as the second aspect of contemporary political globalization: the dispersion of extensive practices of government within and across representative nation-states. This is the subject of the following section.

5. Unmodified and Modified Extensive Practices of Government and Democracy

Gathering together the features introduced in Sections One and Two, any coordinated form of human interaction is a practice of government because it involves reciprocal, multiple and overlapping relations of power and authority in which the actions of some agents guide the actions of others. A relation of governance does not act directly on the agents, unmediated by their own thought and action, as does a relation of force or violence, but on their action. As a consequence, those over whom power is exercised are recognized and guided to the very end as agents who are free: that is, for whom a whole field of possible actions is available in the course of being guided. At the two limits of this field of freedom in relations of governance are sedimented structures of domination, in which freedom is reduced to a minimum by force or habituation (as in a prison system), and the background possibility of confronting the relation of governance as a whole and seeking to overthrow it (as in a revolution). No one in a practice of government stands outside relations of governance: the mode of conduct by which one agent guides another is itself the product of being guided by others (as the professor who guides a pupil in the practice of education is herself a professor in virtue of being educated by others and the ways in which she acted freely in that relationship; by her interaction with the freedom of her pupils; and so on across the many relational identities the participants bear).

Any practice of government, then, involves three complex elements: techniques of government, strategies of freedom, and modes of conduct. ‘Government’ in the extensive sense refers primarily to the first or technological side. It comprises, Mitchell Dean enumerates, [49]

The second element, strategies of freedom or ‘democracy’ in the extensive sense, refers to the ways in which the participants question, negotiate and modify en passant the specific techniques of government: that is, the forms of knowledge, systems of communication, organisation of roles and tasks, and modes of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services and their effects. The third element, modes of conduct, comprises the coordinated interaction that results from the interplay of the first two elements: what the participants do and the way they do it.[50]

Modern theorists of extensive practices have brought to light whole areas of government and democratic freedom in modern societies that the dominant traditions have bypassed. These practices of government and democracy take place outside the public boundaries of representative government and democracy, either in the private realm or beneath the features of representative practices that standardly figure in modern political theories. Marx’s specific analysis of struggles over the length and organization of the working day in nineteenth-century British factories is a classic example of the former.[51] This type of struggle commonly has been understood in two generalized ways in the modern period. Either they are struggles for socialism (direct confrontations over the relations of production by means of revolution) or struggles for social democracy (labour-management negotiations over unionization, the conditions of work, and entrenchment of social and economic rights by means of strikes and the formation of social democratic parties). The social democratic understanding of such struggles has become predominant, especially with the decline of socialism after 1989 and the rise of social democratic parties in the 1990s. As a result, the rise of new social movements in the contemporary period, in response to both modern and global politics, has tended to be conceptualised and analysed in terms of the social democratic struggles and their tradition of interpretation.[52] While this unmodified form of general analysis does capture aspects of contemporary democratic struggles over extensive practices of government, it tends to construe them as all of one kind, as a social democratic variation on familiar struggles for representative government and democracy (unmodified or modified) and so to overlook and misunderstand their three distinctive features.

First, the terms ‘conduct’ and ‘comportment’ are meant to draw attention to a broad range of human action and interaction. Extensive democratic struggles are not only over the explicit rules, norms, the exchange of public reasons or the deliberate means of gaining consent in a practice of government. They are at least as much over the pre-reflective yet non-mechanical modes of comportment - thought and action - that constitute the forms of subjectivity (identities and roles) of the participants in their circumspective coping which make up the vast majority of the coordinated interaction of any practice of government, from a family to a multinational.[53] Similarly, ‘techniques of government’ refer just as much to the background ‘processes of subjectivization’ and infrastructural governance at a distance by which participants acquire the dispositions or abilities manifested in their specific modes of conduct. By focusing on abstract principles and deliberative reasoning, modern theories of representative government overlook these processes that occur, not only in market and bureaucratic practices, but also in public practices, beneath the threshold of the formal features of law and democracy. Here, conduct is often governed by immanent norms of efficient interaction and reflexive monitoring rather than laws and representatives. For example, the pre-reflective orientation to nature, each other and themselves that the participants are guided to acquire by participation is often one of ‘resources to be enhanced, transformed and ordered simply for the sake of greater and greater efficiency’, yet all this occurs beyond the reach of modern representative government and democracy.[54]

An illustration of this phenomenon is the widespread politics of identity and struggles over recognition. Struggles over recognition began in the modern period but they have become intensified and dispersed in the contemporary period by the globalization of cultures and migration.[55] These struggles are over legal, political and constitutional recognition, either in institutions of representative governments or modified institutions of multilayered global governance. Notwithstanding, they are also struggles over racist, heterosexist, xenophobic and other non-recognizing and mis-recognizing modes of comportment that hold enormous structures of social and economic inequality in place despite the formal workings of law and democracy. Such pre-reflective modes of interactive conduct can continue even after the formal recognition of cultural, ethnic, gender and other differences is achieved through group rights, federal structures, equity policies and non-discrimination laws. The effective strategies of democratic freedom in such cases are counter-practices such as diversity training in the practices of government in which racist and sexist conduct is learned and internalized. Here, as David Owen argues, the specific ‘politics of voice’ of the participants, rather than the abstract politics of principles, is indispensable to calling into question, addressing and altering unjust practices of social cooperation.[56]

Unless the practical activity is addressed, the recourse to the remedies of representative government and democracy often further entrenches structures of domination as they regulate and alter them. As Taiaiake Alfred argues, a particularly tragic example is the struggle of indigenous peoples in Canada to free themselves from the practice of internal colonization by legal, political and constitutional means. Instead of freeing indigenous peoples from this long-standing structure, the struggle for recognition has tended to reproduce it in an altered and ameliorated form without effectively challenging, negotiating and modifying the forms of deeply sedimented colonial conduct of both non-indigenous and indigenous peoples which sustain it. If indigenous peoples are to foster and manifest an indigenous way of being in the world, then the appropriate strategy of freedom is not only formal self-government. It must also be the concrete counter-practice of ‘self-conscious traditionalism’ to modify and pass beyond the colonial modes of conduct in both representative and extensive practices of government [57]

The second distinctive feature of extended practices of government and democracy is the specific strategies of democratic freedom - of questioning, negotiating and modifying relations of governance. These disputation strategies take a multitude of forms. Some aim to move the dispute to courts and parliaments, in either institutions of modern or global governance, and others conform to the model of labour-management negotiations. However, as practices of government are dispersed in processes of political globalization and neo-liberal policies of downsizing and contracting-out, many disputes do not conform to these prototypes and are not brought under the control of representative governments in familiar ways.[58] Rather, they are taken up and resolved on site, in a manner that conforms to the specific practice in question. An entire field of activity comprised of all these more or less autonomous disputes has come into being in the contemporary era and is now called ‘dispute resolution’. In addition, a new discipline has arisen to study disputes and their resolutions and to educate specialists to facilitate, mediate and arbitrate, or to educate those engaged in the negotiations to resolve it themselves. The rapidly expanding practices of dispute resolution and their accompanying academic discipline are separate from the practices of representative government and their accompanying disciplines of political science and political theory.

These activities of disputation and resolution are new forms of democracy in conditions of political globalization. They are unique in the following respects. First, the disputation is over a practice-specific relation of governance. Consequently, the way the existing relation is called into question, the forms of participation and argumentation involved in negotiation and resolution, and the amendment agreed-upon, implemented, and monitored are all grounded in and tied to the conditions of intelligibility of the practice of government in dispute. That is, the agents involved are embedded in the world of the relations of power and authority of the practice; they exercise, appeal to, and present their pros and cons in the forms of practical reason and expertise of the practice from which they speak; it is their very identities as participants in the practice that are at risk; and the resolution is always defeasible (open to future challenge). In all four respects, Dreyfus points out, democratic disputation and resolution in extensive practices of government contrasts with the models of democratic deliberation in the public sphere in modern political theory. In these models, negotiation is supposed to be free of power, based on public reasons and abstract principles, disengaged argumentation over a generalisable norm, and resolved by an impartial consensus. The result is an ‘disengaged discussion’ of ‘an array of principles’ divorced from practice; whereas actual learning and resolution emerge from ‘rootedness in particular problems’ and ‘the expertise acquired by risking action from a particular perspective and learning from one’s successes and failures’ in the context of ‘power, partisanship and local issues.’[59]

The third and final distinctive feature of extensive practices of government and democracy is their location as nodes enmeshed in local and global networks. As we have seen in Section Three, contemporary practices of government are linked through the global politics of communications and information to complex networks:[60]

Taking up this challenge for Canada, Steven Rosell argues that the ‘methods of organizing and governing that were developed for a world of clearer boundaries and more limited flows of information’ in the modern period are being transformed by the emergence of networks and the resulting ‘restructuring of corporate and public bureaucracies; shifting boundaries between different sectors of society and levels of government; a growing interest in direct participation in decision-making; and new challenges to the legitimacy of many traditional institutions’.[61]

Just as extensive practices of government are in global networks, so too are the strategies of democratic freedom which challenge them. The conduct of everyone in a network is affected directly or indirectly by the nodal practice of government, from suppliers of capital, goods, services and information to consumers and all those affected by the practice, its products and ‘externalities’, and thus they are ‘participants’ directly or indirectly. The ability to organize a disputation strategy across this governing network is essential to challenging the infrastructural practices of government at a distance that operate along the technological side of the network. Consequently, the organization of strategies of freedom in practices of government enmeshed in contemporary global networks is different from modern forms of representative and extensive democratic organizations. These three distinctive features of democratic freedom in contemporary political globalization - conduct, dispute resolution and networking - can be illustrated by a brief sketch drawn from environmental politics.[62]

First, an environmental dispute often begins when a specific practice of coordinated interaction is called into question by some of the participants. What they challenge is the way in which their activity is organized to act on the environment, either directly, in production, distribution and consumption, or indirectly, in the ways services obliquely affect the environment. For example, a multinational forestry company is confronted on one of its sites by employees or people affected by its practices. Their argument is that the way their action is governed leads them to relate to and act on the environment in a destructive manner, and thus needs to be changed.

The initial response to such a challenge is to deny that the way private sector corporations are organized to act on the environment is a legitimate issue of discussion. The time and efficiency constraints of the global market and the autonomous development of technology do not allow for a range of possible relations to the environment. These global processes determine the relation beyond negotiation. The practices of the company can be limited from the outside by the institutions of modern representative governments and international agreements, but not modified by the participants from the inside. To overcome this reply, the activists have to present plausible arguments that the challenge is itself a legitimate (extensive) democratic action, that the present relation to the environment is really destructive and could be otherwise, that local communities would not be adversely affected by the change, and a host of other legitimate concerns. This involves networking with a wide range of persons with specific expertise in the company, local communities affected, global economics, academic communities, and global communities of concerned specialists. Moreover, they need to organize another local and global network of people who are able to force the company to the negotiating table and to keep them there, from workers who want a clean environment for their children to consumers in distant countries who want environmentally benign products and investment portfolios.

The on-site negotiations are similarly complex and global, involving a range of stakeholders with a wide variety of concerns and modes of argumentation: non-unionized and unionized workers, the local Indigenous peoples with their land claims, the local community, tourist industries, logging companies and their suppliers and investors, environmental activists, various academic specialists, local and national political representatives, and experts in dispute resolution and implementation. The negotiations are in turn connected almost instantaneously to other similar negotiations across the globe at other sites and in various legal and political institutions. These negotiations are not free of power or disengaged. They are complex, strategic-communicative dialogues involving a wide range of knowledge and forms of argumentation, enmeshed in the very relations of power and identity formation that are at issue, and shot through with constraints of time, knowledge, partiality, inequality and conflicting interests.[63]

One of the aims of such negotiations is to bring the forest practice under the control of representative institutions and international laws.[64] This strategy is necessary and laudable in the long term, but it is insufficient. The general laws and regulations do not change the environmentally destructive form of conduct and identity formation from the inside; only the participants themselves, engaging in the democratic activity of disputing and modifying their modes of conduct, can do this. Environmental legislation can be watered down in distant representative institutions and manipulated, ignored and rolled back in practice by powerful economic interests. Finally, the contemporary trend to the global regulation of the environment appears to be ineffective and to go along with the disempowerment of local participants and their practices of democratic disputation and monitoring of the implementation of specific resolutions.[65] Therefore, for such strategies of freedom to be effective, the participants must not only develop unique forms of networking for the phases of initiation, negotiation and resolution of disputes. They must also develop permanent networks to bind the immediate company and infrastructural agents to the implementation and review process of any resolution.

In conclusion, this chapter is a defeasible sketch of some forms of democracy in the context of contemporary globalization. Much of it will have be revised as humans exercise their strategies of freedom in these circumstances over the twenty-first century. Other Canadian political philosophers ‘will fly farther’. Still, it has been possible to go some distance in adumbrating features of democratic practices that the owl and raven have in store for the twenty-first century. In deference to Hegel, the principle underlying the new and puzzling ones remains unclear, yet it appears to be an unsatisfied longing for a certain kind of democratic freedom of self-government. It seems to be a longing for concrete freedom within the diverse practices of government in which we find ourselves; a freedom to question and modify them en passant. From the perspective of my limited vantage point, the freedom of modern politics, defined in relation to representative popular sovereignty and the rule of law, appears in retrospect to be one particular form that this concrete democratic freedom of self-government can take, rather than the comprehensive understanding of human freedom, as it has been painted throughout the modern period. If freedom is indeed an always unsatisfied longing, then we can reasonably expect democracy to be widely practiced in more diverse forms in the contemporary period.

If there is to be a distinctive Canadian political philosophy in the twenty-first century, as there has been in the twentieth, it may well be a philosophy in motion, a philosophy that plays a mediating role in networking the cautious experiments with modifying our forms of conduct in practice with the constructive criticism of forms of knowledge and expertise in the academy. This would be a philosophy that combines the wisdom of owl, who seeks to understand who we are and where we have come from, with the transformative ways of the raven, who is endlessly curious about where we are heading. And, if such political philosophers are exceptionally fortunate, they too may fly as far as their great Canadian teachers and predecessors, such as C. B. Macpherson and Charles Taylor.[66]

1. G.H. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) 13.
2. Ibid., 12-13.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Ibid., 10. Hegel argues that despite this lack of philosophical comprehension, Plato’s peculiar ‘genius’ somehow enabled him to present a political theory that never the less ‘turned’ on the revolutionary principle Socrates embodies (Ibid., 10). This back-handed compliment seems to be a desperate attempt by Hegel to save his account of philosophical understanding. A simpler explanation is that there is another mode of philosophical understanding of the present, outlined below, which Plato exhibited in the to-and-fro movement of his dialogues.
7. Ibid., 11.
8. Ibid., 10, 11.
9. Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?", Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1994) 303-320, 305.
10. Although I draw on the later work of Foucault in the following paragraph to characterise this historical approach of reciprocal elucidation, it is shared in different ways by the Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) sections 122, 130-133, Charles Taylor, ‘Comparison, History, Truth’, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 146-65, William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). This school of political philosophy is examined in David Owen, ‘Orientation and Enlightenment’, Foucault Contra Habermas, ed. Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999) 00-00, and Tully, ‘To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’, Ibid., 99-140.
11. Michel Foucault, ‘Modifications’, The Use of Pleasure, tr. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) 3-13. For the importance of this short text, see Arpad Szakolczai, Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-works (London: Routledge 1998) 53-60.
12. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, 315, 316, 319.
13. Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, The Raven Steals the Light (Vancouver: Douglas and MacIntyre, 1989).
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) section 575, 228.
15. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 208-226, 224.
16. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) 78-81. I am deeply indebted to the great work of David Held and his fellow researchers on historical forms of globalization and the trends towards cosmopolitan democracy.
17. Held, Global Transformations, 32-86. For ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, see David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Kohler, eds. Reimagining Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
18. See Michael Keating, ‘So Many Nations, So Few States’, Struggles for Recognition in Multinational Societies: The Search for Justice and Stability in Belgium, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom and the European Union, ed. Alain-G. Gagnon and J. Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) chapter 1.
19. For an introduction to these philosophers of practices see Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
20. For Habermas’ useful distinction between a practice and a system, or, rather, the practical and systemic aspects of an organised form of human cooperation, see Schatzki, Social Practices, 89-90.
21. David Potter, David Goldblatt, Margaret Kiloh, Paul Lewis, eds. Democratization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). For a brief summary, see Held, Global Transformations 46-49, and 39-45 for the shift from direct imperial to indirect ‘infrastructural’ rule in the 20^th century. For the metaphor of ‘nodes [of mostly non-democratic power and authority] in a global network’, rather than representative nation states in an international system, see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 4 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), especially vol. 3, End of Millennium 335-360.
22. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 303-320, 317.
23. Held’s work on ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ is the best example of this extension and modification of traditional representative democratic theory to understand and evaluate the first type of democratic struggles and the way in which they may be shaping dispersed practices of representative government. For a complementary analysis, see Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
24. Characteristics of non-representative democratic struggles are discussed by Foucault in ‘The Subject and Power’, 211-12 and ‘What is Critique?’ in What is Enlightenment? ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 382-99.
25. See David Held, Models of Democracy, second edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
26. Held, Global Transformations, 35-39, 78-80. The development of the system of sovereign states and representative governments is treated in more historical detail in Democracy and the Global Order.
27. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
28. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983) 107-144, 113-14.
29. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992) 142. Compare Held, Democracy and the Global Order 119.
30. Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients as Compared to that of the Moderns’, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 308-28.
31. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, 221.
32. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) section 2, p.286.
33. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, 221.
34. The classic studies are Foucault, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977) and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially 159-76.
35. Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa and Fernando Flores, Disclosing New Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) 26.
36. Held, Global Transformations 16.
37. Held, Ibid., 27-8, 430-31. A chapter is devoted to each of the domains of globalization. I have also drawn on the work of Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World (London: Macmillan, 1997) and Gilbert Rist, The History of Development (London: Zed, 1997).
38. Held, Ibid., 49-50. Held’s analysis draws on the ground-breaking work of R.B.J. Walker, Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
39. Held, Ibid., 49-77, 80-1, 442-4. See also The Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Held, ‘Democracy and Globalization’, Re-imagining Political Community, 11-27, and James Rosenau, ‘Governance and Democracy in a Globalizing World’, Re-imagining Political Community, 28-57.
40. Held, Global Transformations, 444.
41. For these examples, see Will Kymlicka, ‘Citizenship in an Era of Globalization: Commentary on Held’, Democracy’s Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 00-00.
42. Castells, End of Millennium, 352.
43. For Canadian and European examples, see Gagnon and Tully, ed.., Struggles for Recognition in Multinational Societies.
44. Held, Global Transformations 448.
45. These two equal principles are articulated and discussed by Jurgen Habermas, ‘On the Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and Democracy’, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and P. De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) 265-90, and John Rawls, ‘A Reply to Habermas’ The Journal of Philosophy, XCII, 3 (March 1995) 109-78. They are accepted by Held, Democracy and the Global Order 147.
46. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 190-201. The justification for the unilateral imposition of a cosmopolitan public law is that its rights and duties are the preconditions of the exercise of popular sovereignty, of democratic deliberation. But, for a law to be a legitimate precondition of modern politics it must itself be subject to democratic deliberation, or else the principle of popular sovereignty is not given equal weight.
47. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 159-218. Liberal internationalism and radical republicanism also project specific features of their traditions of representative government on to global governance.
48. I have discussed this approach to contemporary constitutionalism and democratization in Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a brilliant analysis of European Union constitutionalism along similar lines, see Jo Shaw, ‘Constitutionalism in the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy 6, 3 (August 1999) 00-00. Cosmopolitan democracy could accept this modification without losing its most important features.
49. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality (London: Routledge, forthcoming). The quotation is from the manuscript. Dean provides an excellent analysis of the governmentality approach.
50. The analysis of practices in terms of these three complex elements and its critics are discussed in Tully, ‘To Think and Act Differently’, 94-100.
51. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, tr. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977) chapter 10, 340-416.
52. For an excellent overview and defense, see Edward Broadbent, ‘Social Democracy or Liberalism in the New Millennium’, paper delivered at Simon Fraser University, February 1999. The rights that Held builds into the cosmopolitan democratic public law are an extension to global governance of the three classes of rights of the social democratic tradition (Democracy and the Global Order 192-93).
53. See Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992) 60-87, Schatzki, Social Practices, 133-67, and Connolly, Why I Am Not an Secularist, 19-47, 137-62, 163-88.
54. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World 338 and Disclosing New Worlds, 1-15. For ‘processes of subjectivization’ see Tully, ‘To Think and Act Differently’, 126-29.
55. Held, Global Transformations, 283-375. See also Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism and the New World Order (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994).
56. David Owen, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Conversation on Justice’, Political Theory (August 1999) 00-00. See also, Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) 141-75.
57. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999) 55-73, 80-88.
58. For example, the new ‘partnerships’ among public, volunteer and private sector institutions.
59. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds, 77, 86-88.
60. Castells, End of Millennium, 350-51.
61. Steven A. Rosell, Renewing Governance: Governing by Learning in the Information Age (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999) The quotation is from the back cover.
62. I have discussed the following example in more detail in ‘An Ecological Ethics for the Present’, Government for the Environment, ed. Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low (London: Macmillan, 2000) 00-00.
63. For the dilemmas of these complex forms of negotiation in contrast to the standard models, see Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 38-74, and Tully, ‘To Think and Act Differently’, 137-39.
64. Cosmopolitan democracy is a good example of this long term strategy to entrench environmental regulation at the local, national and global levels of governance.
65. See Ralph Nader and L. Wallach, ‘’GATT, NAFTA and the Subversion of the Democratic Process’, The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Towards the Local, ed. Jerry Mander and E. Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Books, 1996) 92-107, and Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low, Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology (London: Routledge 1998) 175-83.
66. I wish to thank David Laycock and David Owen for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter.