Democracy in New Spaces

In this paper, I want to compare current debates about transnational democracy with theoretical controversies during the second democratic transformation. Both debates focus on the question of how democratic (or republican) practices, institutions, and values can be transferred from smaller to more expanded political areas. Just as the concept of ‘republic’ had been disassociated from its strong connection with small communities and transformed into ‘representative government’ in large nation-states in the late 18th century, there are now many attempts to break the tight relation between the concept of ‘democracy’ and the nation-state to enable democratic government at the supranational or even the global level. This leads to a re-conceptualizing of ‘democracy’ that is as fundamental as the transition from the direct to the representative concept of democracy. I am mainly interested in the conceptual strategies and theoretical moves by which scholars try to reconfigure the very meaning of democracy. The paper is divided into three sections. I start by examining the adaptation of republican government to a large nation-state, particularly by focusing on the authors of the Federalists Papers and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. The current discussion about global or cosmopolitan democracy has dimensions and ramifications that are almost impossible to overlook. Therefore, I present this debate only in a pointed and il-lustrative way by distinguishing between the strategy of transference, the strategy of constitutionalization, and the strategy of a deliberative redescription of democracy. I will show that only the second and third strategies can give a convincing answer to the post-national challenge of democracy. In the final section, I will summarizes the findings of this article through highlighting three analogies between the conceptual strategies of Sieyès and the authors of the Federalist Papers on the one hand, and contemporary strategies to redescribe democracy on the other.