Abstract
The digital revolution is creating new risks, together with multiple opportunities for communication, commerce and political participation. What Ulrich Beck described as the world risk society and – from another perspective – Jürgen Habermas calls the “postnational constellation” is a challenge to our concepts of society and democracy. Digitisation is pushing this development towards a new dimension that allows us to speak of the “digital constellation”. Social relations are denser across borders and continents; what happens there matters here, as if it were happening on our own doorstep. New kinds of risks are arising as a side-effect of the increasing use of information technologies, while the internet also offers – for the first time – an infrastructure that makes formerly unrealistic concepts of cosmopolitan democracy (David Held) a real option. This includes the establishment of a constitutional framework for normative processes aiming at, among other global challenges, effectively managing cyber-risks at national, supra-national and global levels in a coherent way. Multilevel Constitutionalism is proposed as a means of providing a normative theory for conceptualising the constitutional structure of a layered system of governance that ensures a maximum degree of self-determination for the individual and, thus, for the democratic legitimacy of decisions made at each level, from local to global. Thus, the constitution for democratically legitimate action at the global level does not question democracy at other levels, but should be complementary, based upon functioning states, and designed to deal with issues that are beyond their reach, including cyber-security.
Highlights
The digital revolution is a revolution affecting all our societies, one which is creating great opportunities and great risks
Talking about risk management today necessarily involves explaining what the new risks in this digital society are before considering the tools and processes to deal with these risks, and this seems interesting in a constitutional theory and law perspective
We need to understand what we mean by the terms “risk” or “risk society”, and what the concept of “Digital Society” denotes
Summary
The digital revolution is a revolution affecting all our societies, one which is creating great opportunities and great risks. Is my first proposition: As we talk about the new risks that are being created by digitisation, which, in turn, is creating a multitude of opportunities regarding governance at large, we have to deal with a new kind of risk in a new kind of “constellation”, to use a term coined by Jürgen Habermas Developing his concept of “postnational constellation”,1 the internet today is carrying us one step further to what I would call the “digital constellation”. The global dimension of the internet and, of the risks it entails for digital society at large is comparable to the global dimension of other great challenges like climate change, mass migration, nuclear power, genetic engineering or international terrorism. Some thoughts on this will be presented in Part II of this paper
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