Who Decides? The Transnational Self-Determination

Abstract

We are living at a time of profound changes in the history of humanity, with the unusual situation that certain ways of organizing life in common are becoming unusable faster than our ability to invent others. The aging of concepts is more rapid than our ability for replacement. My proposal in this chapter consists of making a brief comment about what we could call the Westphalian world, drawing our attention to the ways in which it is currently breaking boundaries, and suggesting a principle that will allow us to think of the classic principle of democratic self-determination in present-day circumstances. I conclude by asserting that we must reconstruct the idea of self-determination under current social and political conditions, within the environment of current complexities. The difficulty of the matter consists of safeguarding the normative nucleus of democracy—the self-government of the people—in a deterritorialized or transnational world.