Making Global Governance Public? Habermas’s Model for a Two-track Cosmopolitan Order

Abstract

Over the past decade or so there have been various calls for ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ democracy — most notably, perhaps, by David Held (Held, 1995 and 2004). Sometimes these calls are based on empirical and quasi-functional claims about the supposed trends of globalisation, the increasing obsolescence of the nation state and Westphalian order, and the need for democratic politics to ‘catch-up’ (Habermas, 2001, 58–112). One influential theorist, Alexander Wendt, has even spoken in this context of the ‘inevitability of a world-state’ (Wendt, 2003). More often, however, the calls for global democracy invoke various normative arguments — about justice, fairness, autonomy, or the further expansion of democratic rights (Brock, 2009). Some of these normative approaches look more promising than others. However, here I want to bracket these normative considerations in order to consider a different argument for cosmopolitan democracy — one that explores its relation to an emergent international (or global) rule of law, on the one hand, and a rapidly developing global public sphere, on the other.