HP: International or planetary democracy was first discussed in the 1940s when the United Nations was founded. During the Cold War years, the topic was all but forgotten. However, in the 1970s, when the Third World demanded a New International Economic Order, it was declared that ‘all states are judicially equal and, as equal members of the international community, have the right to participate fully and effectively in the international decision-making process in the solution of world economic, financial and monetary problems’ (UN, 1975: Article 10). That was the heyday of state sovereignty. The 20th-century spread of state sovereignty can be conceived as an outcome of the first coming-together of humanity under the rule of industrializing capitalism and the European empires that represented themselves at home, as it were, as ‘national sovereign states’. The institution of state sovereignty seemed, during and in the immediate aftermath of the process of decolonization, to provide a legitimate platform for fighting the imperial rule and capitalist exploitation that the majority of humanity experienced outside the core regions of the world economy (cf. Linklater, 1990: 67–72). Hence, in the 1970s, world democratic aspirations were articulated in terms of inter-state relations. The topic of planetary democracy re-emerged in the 1980s with the rise of the globalization discourse and, a little later, the end of the Cold War. In particular, your works on critical theory, democracy and state theory in the 1980s, and related early attempts to question the connection between democracy and the state such as John Burnheim (1986), resulted in the theory of cosmopolitan democracy. This theory was first outlined in your essay ‘Democracy, the Nation-state and the Global System’ (Held, 1991) and developed further in the book Democracy and the Global Order (Held, 1995). These have been extremely important openings. Yet, it also seems to me that the model of cosmopolitan democracy is based on a rather selected set of