How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Global System

Abstract

Democracy Beyond Borders: Justice and Representation in Global Institutions. By Andrew Kuper. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 238 pp., $74.00 (ISBN: 0-19-927,490-8). The sharpest divide within the field of political theory may be the one that separates those theorists oriented to external conditions and those concerned primarily with internal landscapes. Karl Marx is probably the prototype externalist, preferring to reform human communities by rearranging the conditions under which people live and think. John Rawls is the latest in a long line of political philosophers (dating from Plato and moving through Immanuel Kant) who stress the reform of attitudes and beliefs as the locus of reconciliation and social harmony. The dichotomy is often muted in contemporary liberal and democratic thought. Rawls (1996, 1999b), for example, offers principles of justice to govern attitudes, but these principles can be represented or instantiated only by institutional arrangements within liberal democracies. Thus their powers of internal reform are linked to the realization of particular institutions. Still, the traditional challenge is binary. Do we reform the structures that inhibit our best instincts regarding cooperation, or do we target the citizens who are the carriers of these instincts—educating them, for example, in civic virtues and reasonableness within liberal traditions? Andrew Kuper is located decisively in the former camp. In Democracy Beyond Borders , he advances an ambitious set of proposals for reforming the institutional arrangements that have roughly expressed the liberal and democratic sentiments in Western thought since the contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He justifiably criticizes the current state of affairs with respect to globalization and the world as such. According to Kuper, the historical linkage of liberalism and democracy to the state has compromised these theories and practices as the state has become a minor, porous, or reconstructed player in politics. This narrative is a familiar one. Concepts and theories crafted in one set of historical conditions may not be suitable for …