What has come to the forefront of academic discussion is the question whether or not the concept of sovereignty should still have its place within political and legal vocabulary. These discussions about the interrelation between sovereignty and statehood are being led by jurisprudential and empirical social science scholars today. While the jurisprudential discourse asks to what extent the process of global legal developments challenges the decision-making competences of the state, the empirical social and political science debate explores the organizational competences of the state in the transnational constellation.
The consequences of these debates are that from a jurisprudential and empirical social and political science perspective, political-theoretical evaluation of the transnational constellation turns into a questionable project, because the evaluation criteria are not informed sufficiently about the state of decision-making and organizational competences. Due to this absence, on the other hand, the jurisprudential and empirical scientific approach suffers from an unreflected use of political-normative evaluation criteria. Therefore, the central question my paper wants to elaborate on is how to consider the results of jurisprudential and empirical research on sovereignty from a political-theoretical perspective and make them productive for a reconfiguration of the foundations of political normativity?
I will argue that contemporary normative Political Theory suffers from four biases while considering and criticizing the state of democracy in the age of global governance. Those four biases are
1. A temporal bias with regard to the democratic moment
2. A formal bias with regard to the form of the political subject
3. A moral bias with regard to the notion of the general will
4. And a spatial bias with regard to territoriality
In order to consider adequately the meaning of the word “democratic” within the wording „Global Democratic Governance“, Political Theory has to free itself from these four biases.
