WEEK 3 - 20 OCTOBER: DEMOCRACY AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

 LEARNING OUTCOMES
This week's session is dedicated to the role of democracy promotion in global
governance and international security. Liberal internationalists claim that
democracies do not fight each other, therefore generating a 'democratic
peace' across the world. We will critically assess this claim, and explore the
successes and failures; the legitimacy and legality of 'Foreign Imposed Regime
Change' in recent decades.

By the end of this week you will:

 become familiar with theories of 'democratic peace', 'liberal

internationalism' and the empirical features of global democracy-
promotion.
 understand the interaction between liberalism, democracy and
'good governance' in international relations
 learn about specific historical cases of 'liberal peace-building'

 Lecture Handout

 Slideshow

 Lecture 3: Part I

 Lecture 3: Part II

 Lecture 3: Part III

 PRE-SESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
It is essential that you read and take notes on the core readings
accompanying this pre-sessional activity. Write down now any queries or
things you'd like to raise ahead of our live seminar session, and wherever
possible post them on the seminar group message board before the seminar.

Read Clausen, Maria-Louise and Peter Albrecht (2021) ‘Interventions since the
Cold War: from statebuilding to stabilization’ International Affairs, 97(4): 1203–
1220 and consider the following questions:

 What is the 'liberal peace' and has the Global North been
successful at maintaining it in the post-Cold War period?
 What have the various phases of 'liberal peacebuilding' involved
and what explains their changing nature?

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  Is there a relationship between democracy and security sector
reform (SSR)?

 Barnett, M. ‘Building a Republican Peace: Stabilizing States After

War’, International Security, Vol. 30, No.4, pp. 87-112.

Cawthra, G. and R. Luckham, eds (2003) Governing Insecurity: Democratic

Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional
Democracies (London: Zed Books , 2003).

Chua, A (2004) World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds
Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (London: William Heinemann).

Downes, A.B & J. Monten, ‘Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime

Change Rarely Leads to Democratization’, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 4,
2013, pp. 90-131.

Owen IV, J. (2002) ‘The Foreign Imposition of Domestic

Institutions’, International Organization, Vol. 56, No.2, Spring, pp. 375-409.

Simmons, B., Dobbin, F. and Garrett, G. (2006) ‘Introduction: The International

Diffusion of Liberalism’ International Organization 60/4: 781-810

READING

No readings found.

 LIVE SESSION
 LIVE SESSION

Tuesday 19 Oct 2021 19:30 - 21:00

This event is in the past.

Remember you can always check your full timetable on My Birkbeck!

 POST-SESSION ACTIVITIES NOTES AND GLOSSARY

 Summarise your lecture and seminar notes in a format that will
allow you to compile a set of revision notes at the end of the module
 Add any diffcult concepts or ideas to the module Glossary -
where possible, including your own definitions

 Once Upon a Time in Iraq

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This BBC series is available on IPlayer for the coming months. It offers many
insights that tie in with our discussions on the globalisation of democracy

Global Politics, Governance and Security

Democracy and Global Governance
(19 October 2021)

I. Global Politics and The ‘Third Wave’ of Democratisation

 The End of the Cold War and the promises of global democracy: The
disjuncture between globalisation and democracy (Held) requiring a
cosmopolitan democracy.
 Democracy promotion and transnational activism/advocacy: global
governance and global civil society. Change and Transformation in
Global Politics: Revolution as the ‘sixth great power’. (eg case of Arab
Spring)
 The Problem of Failed States: democratic governance and global security.

‘Globalization is leading to a world in which crosscutting and overlapping governance

structures and processes increasingly take private, oligarchic forms; where hegemonic
neoliberal norms of economic freedom and personal autonomy are delegitimizing both
democratic governance in general and the credibility of those who try to make democracy
work, and in which democratic states are losing the policy autonomy and capacity necessary
for transforming what the people want into concrete outputs. The result is the emergence of a
range of often ad hoc public and private governance structures undermining the democratic
state from both above and below, leading at best to a durable disorder of overlapping and
competing institutions. This uneven multilayering of authority will increasingly go hand in
hand with a fragmentation of identities, the alienation of a growing number of individuals and
groups from democratic political processes and the erosion of the idea of the public
interest’(Cerny, 1997).

II. Government Before Governance: Democracy, Markets and the State

 Conceptions of Democracy: representative/competitive

(Schumpeter), participatory/republican (Rousseau),
deliberative/discursive (Habermas), cosmopolitan (Held)
 In all these there is an assumption of a separation between state
and civil society – a distinction between the public and the private,
or politics and economics
 The modern sovereign territorial state, with its accompanying
notions of rule of law, public order and representative government
has been the conventional locus of democracy. Crystallised in
Europe during the long sixteenth century, the Westphalian state is
deemed to be the cornerstone of international order.
 Yet the modern state-system has been far from democratic and
orderly: systematic disenfranchisement of various social groups
and peoples (women, peoples of colour, workers, religious/ethnic
minorities) has through centuries delivered transnational
movements and revolutions seeking recognition, justice and
equality.

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  The relationship between democracy, capitalist markets and the
state has therefore been much more complex than a 21st century
liberal narrative would allow: capitalism has expanded through
colonialism and dictatorship as well as democratisation; while
democratic struggles have often been against the state and market.

‘Modern Capitalism, for Weber, is defined by the rational (deliberate and systematic), pursuit of profit
through the rational (systemic and calculable) organization of formally free labour and through rational
(impersonal, purely instrumental), exchange on the market, guided by rational (rule-governed,
predictable) legal and political systems. Ascetic Protestantism is characterised by rational (methodical)
self-control and by the rational (purposeful) devotion to rational (sober, scrupulous) economic action as
rational (psychologically efficacious and logically intelligible) means of relieving the intolerable
pressure imposed on individuals by the rational (consistent) doctrine of predestination’ (Rogers
Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality, 1984).

III. Global Governance and Global Civil Society

It is with this background that notions of global governance and global civil
society erupted into scene during 1990s.

Global Governance aims to address question: Who or what provides security,

prosperity and well-being?
 Rule: Global Change and the Location of Authority. Here contrast is
between Government and governance: formal, hierarchical authority,
legitimised by law and police powers vs. shared goals implemented
through informal, often non-governmental mechanisms of ‘soft law’
 Regulation: administering cross-border flows through international
regimes, multilateral organisation, inter-state cooperation.
Democratisation of international institutions (UNSC Reform).
 Legitimacy: transferring authority to non-state actors and a global
public opinion. Adding ‘input’ legitimacy to ‘output’ legitimacy.

… And Global Civil Society?

 Civil Society and the Market: capitalism and the private sphere Civil
Society as ‘second family’. Social movements and the ‘third sector’.
 Global civil society as a democratic force:
- Pluralising Dynamics and Functional Proliferation:
global civil society as a ‘partner’ to global governance.
- Transparency: The role of codes of conduct,
benchmarking, rating agencies and league tables on
global affairs. The question of influence without
accountability, especially in private authority.
- Humanitarian ‘islands of civility’ in context of state
collapse and civil war.
- Transnational Advocacy: the role of ‘naming-and-
shaming’. The 1997 Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel
landmines. The ‘grafting’ of AP landmines onto existing
legislation and emulation as a form of ‘norm-cascading’.

‘Global civil society organisations have emerged as powerful and influential force on the world stage, affecting as
they do both domestic and international policies, deciding as they do the fate of some authoritarian governments at

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least, and laying down agendas as they do. They not only have the power of influencing international public
opinion and mobilising against policies that they consider undesirable, they do so in ways that are sensationally
visible and therefore effective.’ (Chandhoke, 2003).

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 IV. Exporting Democracy?: the case of Iraq
 2003 invasion seen by many powerful actors (in Neo-Conservative Washington as
well as among European cosmopolitans) as an opportunity for democratisation of
greater Middle East. Weberian conception of state sovereignty combined with
Schumpeterian view of democracy to deliver vision where democracy, prosperity and
security reinforce each other.
 Historical model was post-war reconstruction in West Germany and Japan ie.
democratisation through occupation. Challenges here revolved around endogenous
enforcement of democracy – that is, weakness of local counterparts, militarisation of
democracy-promotion and ‘liberalisation before institutionalisation’.
 International Organisations invoked and to certain extent mobilised in the
reconstruction effort, but Realpolitik of ‘heavy-lifting’ (US as hegemonic power)
became apparent despite attempts at ‘hybrid’ rule through combination of security,
institution-building and development.
 Outcome of these tensions was paradoxical reinforcement of what Weber labelled as
patrimonial, rather than bureaucratic form of rule: territorially fragmented, politically
sectarian and sociological segmentary society: ie a failed or collapsed state.

‘Three unexpected empirical developments have undermined belief in the assured stability of liberal
democracy in its traditional heartland of North America and Western Europe, not to speak of
democratic hegemony around the world. First, as Larry Diamond has chronicled, there has been a
long "democratic recession": For each of the past thirteen years, more countries have moved away
from democracy than have moved toward it. Second, as Roberto Stefan Foa and I have shown, large
numbers of people seem to have fallen out of love with liberal democracy: In countries from the
United Kingdom to Australia, citizens have grown both more critical of liberal democracy and more
open to authoritarian alternatives. Third, and perhaps most important, populist forces intent on
challenging the most basic rules and norms of liberal democracy have risen across a great swath of
democratic countries. While these developments are closely interrelated, each presents a distinct
challenge to the triumphalist assumptions of what is rapidly coming to seem like an earlier age’.
(Mounk, 2020: 28)