Nehru, Internationalism, and World Union: An Anticolonial Approach to Global Democracy

Democratic theorists have long argued that some form of global democracy is needed to close the gap between “rule-makers” and “rule-takers” in global governance and legitimize global decision-making. Some, such as Daniele Archibugi and David Held, have gone so far as to propose a democratically elected world assembly. Yet a persistent criticism of global democracy is that a functioning democracy requires solidarity or a shared identity amongst its participants. Without trust, mutual concern and what David Miller calls “sympathetic identification”, talk of global democracy is at best premature and at worse dangerous. The basis for solidarity or shared identity of the relevant kind is often construed as a shared culture, which does not exist at the global level. Therefore, advocates of this view tend to suggest more conservative ways to improve global governance such as relying on existing international law and treaties as well as NGOs to regulate state behaviour. In this paper, I turn to Nehru’s writings and speeches on internationalism to suggest a different approach to global democracy, one that neither forecloses its possibility nor denies the importance of solidarity. While Nehru is often known as India’s foremost anticolonial nationalist, lesser known is his lifelong support for what he called a “democratic world union”. As a socialist anti-imperialist, Nehru believed that a democratic world union capable of global redistribution and co-ordination was the only hope for addressing the root causes of imperialism. To this end, he also thought that a global solidarity was essential. But Nehru offered a different diagnosis of the difficulty in attaining such solidarity. For him, the primary obstacle was not cultural pluralism but persistent subordination of historically oppressed populations within a global political hierarchy. As long as international law and organizations remained instruments of the powerful for subordinating others, “narrow nationalism[s]” would only grow stronger and undermine the emergence of a cosmopolitan solidarity. These claims are grounded in Nehru’s experiences in the Indian anticolonial struggle, during which he witnessed how subordination shapes people’s moral psychology. For Nehru, the primary challenge of building global democracy was cultivating an internationalist outlook among the very agents who had good reason to retreat from global political integration and cooperation. Nehru’s response, in turn, was to foster cosmopolitan solidarity in the very process of contesting one’s subordination. To this end, he worked to internationalize national politics and forge transnational coalitions. Drawing from these ideas, I argue for an anticolonial approach to global democracy. I argue that the sceptics’ conservative approach is inadequate to address the problem of global political subordination, while cosmopolitan democrats’ idealist approach is insufficiently attentive to the realities of power that predictably undermine institutions such as world assemblies. Instead, Nehru prompts us to think of a grounded approach to democratizing global governance that emphasizes counterhegemonic political empowerment as an essential tool for resisting subordination while also fostering a cosmopolitan solidarity that paves way for a future global democracy.