Collective self-government and the internationalization of politics: An alternative neo-republican take

The internationalization of politics engages democratic nation-states in on-going processes of collective decision-making at the international level. The primary aim of this paper to reconsider four established conceptions of democracy in light of the challenges that follow from this internationalization. In particular, I consider what, if anything, these conceptions offer for the democratization of international politics and how they evaluate the impact of internationalization on the workings of established national democracies. The paper departs from an analytical reconstruction of the likely responses of a communitarian and a liberal conception of democracy, the way that these conceptions reflect on the prospects for democracy beyond the nation-state and what this reveals about their underlying understanding of democracy per se. I then turn to republican thinking that has had a notable upsurge in recent democratic thought, with also a particular regard to the internationalisation of politics (see, most notably, the collections edited by Buckler, North and Shorten for EJPT (2010) and by Besson and Martí (2009)). The dominant neo-republican approach follows – what Philipp Pettit (2013) has characterized as – the Italian-Atlantic (Machiavelli-Madison) tradition of republicanism which has the concern with non-domination at its centre. In critique of this line of thought, I rather maintain that the alternative, Franco-German (Rousseau-Kant) republican tradition offers a much sharper diagnosis of the challenges posed by the internationalisation of politics. This tradition departs from the central value of collective autonomy, defined as the capacity of a political community to be able to exercise choice over the collective arrangement it adopts and to do so, indeed, as a collective in the sense that all members feel that they are effectively part in the choices thus made. In light of this tradition, the internationalisation of politics comes to pose a twofold threat to democracy: 1) the conditions of collective self-determination are unlikely to be met at the international level and 2) the internationalization of politics may actually undermine the continued performance of collective self-determination at the national level. I add, however, that the Franco-German republican tradition is anything but defeatist. Exactly the way that this tradition has put the reconciliation of individual autonomy with collective autonomy at the centre of its thinking holds out the promise that a further reconciliation of these two with some sense of international autonomy need not be precluded. At the same time, this line of argument suggests that the realization of some sense of autonomy at the international level is inevitably a function of its effective guarantee at the national and the individual level.