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In an ideal type of democracy, the public should shape its own destiny. But such democracy is rarely available. However, a society not striving for it happens to be less worthy and also dangerous to live in. Practice of democracy is culturally and historically contingent. Globalisation has brought significant shifts in the mode of governance.
Democracy and globalisation both presently are at odd with each other. Both suffer from several inherent deficiencies. The conventional liberal democracy based on a territorial state is not an adequate formula for rule by the people. On other side, the decision-taking processes that govern globalisation suffer from shortfalls of public participation and accountability.
Besides these inadequacies, there is widespread ignorance among citizens, the media and legislature about globalisation. This has severely restricted the possibilities of democratic regulation of governance of trans planetary relations. Deeply entrenched structural inequalities hardly permit citizen involvement in the governance of globalisation. There is a great need of evolving a variant of post-territorialist and post-statist democracy.
Already there are many limits of statist liberal democracy. Contemporary globalisation has further weakened liberal democracy grown around state. Democracy came up when people grouped themselves as distinct nations living in discrete territories, ruled by sovereign states made them subject to popular control.
Globalisation pushed statist democracy to over 117 countries by 1998. But there have been other forces like the student activists, NGOs, rebellion etc. But democracies in many of these countries are only skin-deep and lack real credentials. In many countries, democracies have not proved culturally appropriate. Formal democracies are inherently deficient. Democracy requires more than multiplicity of political parties, periodic elections, legal provisions of civil rights, or neutral bureaucracy.
All these are low-intensity democracies. Territorially grounded democracy cannot serve a state where many social relations are substantially supra-territorial. Global democracy requires to be more than a democratic state. It cannot control its jurisdiction’s involvement with global flows. It needs ideational transformation. The contemporary ‘public’ of a country is not more confined to the nation-state. The ‘public’ or the ‘people’ have many sides, domestic and outside. Globalisation has undermined conventional frameworks of liberal democracy. Its mode of governance has moved from statism towards polycentrism.
A people unaware of this situation cannot pursue meaningful self-determination. They are ignorant of the issues, concepts, principles, policies and the working of globalisation. They know little about globality and it governance. Even the activists confuse the IMF with the World Bank. Formal education at lower and higher levels has no provision for teaching the students on globalisation.
School and university curricula have generally prepared young people poorly for global citizenship. Universities still neglect globalisation and its polycentric governance. ‘Global studies’ are usually put along with ‘international studies’. Print, audio and visual journalism do try to raise citizen awareness in these matters. Big conferences on major global challenges find a passing mention in the media. Journalists themselves are poorly educated on global mattes. Only the globally organised big business exploits liberalisation and privatisation in the communication sectors.
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They give prominence to news opposite of globalisation. Only Internet is making some positive contribution, but its approach is still very limited. Civil society associations have certainly made efforts for the common man to understand the global problems and policies related to them. They organise teach-ins, lectures, symposia, colloquia, workshops discussion groups, round tables, artistic performances and road shows. In some countries, they have built up publicly accessible libraries and documentation centres.
These have been done only in modest proportions. They lack resources to sustain long-term programmes of large-scale citizen education on global affairs. Rulers have a democratic duty to educate the governed about their governance: what policy decisions are taken on global issues, at what time, where, by whom, from what options on what grounds, with what expected results and with what supporting resources.
Citizens should have ready access to all such information. Elements of confidentiality and secrecy must be minimum. The IMF and the WTO have launched elaborate websites, along with huge arrangement for press releases newsletters, reports, pamphlets, audio-visual productions, in-person contacts, and public exhibitions. However, governments remain tight-lipped about their dealings with global governance agencies and global corporations. Trans-governmental relations stand outside of public eye.
They hardly know that many private regulatory schemes are important for various aspects of global communications, global finance, global investment and global trade. Many governance agencies fall short of effective transparency with respect to their dealings on globalisation. Documents released by governance institutions are opaque for the uninitiated owing to their overwhelming use of technical terms, obscure acronyms, professional jargon and other specialised vocabulary.
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Global governance has been suffering from democratic deficit. Democracies are poorly equipped with tools, techniques and measures to deal with trans-planetary and supra-territorial connectivity and globalisation. Democracies lack processes to conduct polls of the affected public. There are sample public opinion surveys by polling agencies, but have no place in activating democratic participation in global politics. Official public referenda do not figure, save in Switzerland, in the governance of globalisation.
Questions of globalisation find so mention in parliamentary and presidential elections. Most of the supra-state institutions operate without elected popular representatives. Macro-regional parliamentary organs, NATO, ASEAN, IMF or WHO, are not directly elected. Technical means to conduct trans-planetary ballots are currently not available.
Even global political parties, like the Socialist International, are not equipped to launch intercontinental electoral campaigns. Even various private regulatory mechanisms in the governance of globalisation have operated without any kind of public polls. Elected representative legislative institutions also do not exercise democratic oversight of the governance of globalisation. Only some members of parliaments monitor certain aspects of the regulation of global relations. Often legislative assemblies escape their duties and overlook global matters.
Devolution of governments has not yielded greater democratic oversight of global governance. Regulation of global regimes does not come in treaty form, and thereby it escapes the need for legislative approval. Governments take decisions on global questions without consulting the legislatures.
It is difficult to obtain official documents on global subjects. Few parliamentarians bring personal expertise to do their job on global issues. There are few professional researchers and advisers to help and guide them. There are some instances of increased legislative activism concerning globalisation: the Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE), 1989, Parliamentarians for Global Action, 2004, Parliamentary Conference on the WTO, 2000 etc. However, such bodies lack number, influence and regularity. Rules to govern trans-planetary connections have proliferated without involvement from popularly elected assemblies.
On the judicial side, avenues to obtain justice are generally not available in the governance of global issues. Citizens normally cannot take grievances regarding global affairs to their national and local tribunals. Courts cannot pronounce on the activities of the state outside its territory or on the activities of supra-state authorities. Global courts are either absent or unavailable for direct citizen’s petitions concerning the governance of globalisation.
The International Court of Justice in the Hague considers cases brought only by states. The same holds true for the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism. There are no official avenues even for public inspections, independent evaluations, and investigations by authorities. Accountability remains modest. Open, outside, independent, published assessment of the performance of the global bodies is lacking.
Civil society associations encourage citizen participation in policymaking on global issues, both from the inside and from the outside, but their activism remains modest. These groups have sometimes fallen short of democratic standards of participation and accountability in their own practices.
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Only a small proportion of the world’s population participates in citizen mobilisation. These civil society organisations have small membership and nominal involvement (payment of subscription only). The larger public rally behind a campaign only on a short-term and ad hoc basis. NGOs are mostly the preserve of relatively small number of full-time professional activists.
They lack democratic credentials in their own behaviour. They are run on top-down managerial authoritarianism. In some cases, their jet-setting staff has little touch with their notional beneficiaries as they fly from one global conference to the next elsewhere. They rarely hold regular, independently monitored elections of their officers. They do not publish independent evaluations of their actually conducted activities.
Some of them are not public interest organisations, but fronts for governments, political parties and corporations. There is lack of transparency about who they are, what objectives they pursue, where their funds originate, how they reach their policy positions, how they happen to continue etc. However, some of their leaders do challenge their own democratic practices. Their critical voices demand more participation, transparency and accountability in their own ranks.
Technocracy wins over democracy in the governance of globalisation. Regulation of global affairs often rests with bureaucrats who are largely insulated from public inputs and public controls. Some officials cherish ‘depoliticisation of global governance’ at their own levels. They consider themselves as objective experts who operate global regimes most efficiently without ill-informed public interference. However, some civil society consultation has been built into a number of global policy-making processes.
Accredited organisations do participate in many global governance convocations and inject citizen voices into policy processes on global issues. Some of the activists accept invitations to join state delegations to such events. Civil society associations also arrange public meetings where citizens can express concerns and make proposals regarding globalisation. Other meetings take the form of noisy rallies, marches, petitions, campaigns and boycotts.