Decolonizing Democracy: National Sovereignty and Methodological Nationalism in Democratic Theory

The return of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency has accelerated the reconfiguration of the international order in an unusually chaotic and compressed period. In the first six months of his second term, Trump has threatened to make Canada the United States’ 51st state, vowed to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland by military force, and declared his intention to take over Gaza and transform it into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” These provocative statements have been accompanied not only with sweeping demands on both longstanding allies and adversaries—particularly in matters of trade, security, and foreign policy—but in some instances by military action and the imposition of escalating tariffs. In their wake, the rise of a “new economic geography” has brought buzzwords like imperialism and sovereignty back into the Global North’s public discourse with renewed urgency. While critics lament the erosion of the liberal international order, concerns about the global decline of democracy have intensified. The mounting threats to national sovereignty and rising fears of democratic backsliding—arguably the defining political anxieties of our age—are deeply intertwined. Yet discussions of the relationship between these two phenomena have tended to focus primarily on how nationalistic calls to restore sovereignty have been mobilized to fortify support for illiberal populism. We emphasize instead the need to look at the largely underexplored, reverse dimension of the relationship. That is, we argue that the structure of international political economy, and its impact on national sovereignty, is a crucial determinant in shaping the achievement, quality, and robustness of domestic democratic governance. In this article, we advance this argument by making three claims, one conceptual, one methodological, and one prescriptive. First, conceptually, we argue that, in a world of nation-states, the enforcement and achievement of national sovereignty is a fundamental precondition for any definition and operationalization of democracy. If political processes within nation-states are substantially and coercively influenced by foreign actors, then the degree and quality of national sovereignty is a crucial democratic fault line. This means that assessing the democratic credentials of a given society cannot solely focus on its domestic institutional configurations and practices. Rather, any serious analysis of democracy’s exercise, operation, and quality, must foreground the hierarchical and coercive, that is, imperialist nature of the global political order. Elections, protected individual rights, and other institutional aspects of democracy are, of course, important, but they can only ensure democratic self-governance when societies are also protected from external coercive forces and interference. This relates to our second, methodological claim: namely, that comparative politics’ commitment to methodological nationalism — the assumption that the nation-state form is the basic, most relevant unit of analysis in the study of political phenomena—constitutes a major shortcoming in the subfield’s ability to understand democratic processes in a global context. Insofar as methodological nationalism prioritizes domestic-level factors and internal logics, we contend that it assumes as a unit of analysis what is actually a variable – the sovereign nation-state. That is, the degree to which domestic factors and internal logics are insulated from external actors is not something that can be assumed but is something that is achieved to varying degrees across place and time, and therefore, must be studied. Methodological nationalism takes this level of sovereignty to be exogenously given, rather than endogenous to global political and economic processes. We suggest the methodology of assuming sovereign nations either underplays or misidentifies the hierarchical and coercive nature of the global political order, and its implications for democratic politics. Finally, prescriptively, we advocate for a critical political economy approach to the comparative study of democracy and democratization. While a broad category, critical approaches to political economy, which foreground the problems of imperialism, putting the hierarchical nature of the global distribution of power back at its analytical center. We contend that such an internationalist understanding of this phenomenon, which centers questions of power, disrupts methodological nationalism and enables us to better conceive of and engage with the relationship between national sovereignty and democracy, particularly in the Global South. By adopting this approach, we arrive at a very different set of conclusions about what democracy looks like in practice, the conditions required for its realization, and, therefore, the criteria used to assess a regime’s democratic credentials. From this perspective, we argue that cases often celebrated as democratic or meaningfully democratizing, like “successful” Third Wave transitions, appear less so when one considers the ways in which their domestic institutions, buttressed by and biased toward, powerful international actors, concentrate effective power amongst political and economic elites (both nationally and internationally) and coercively shape enduring socioeconomic inequalities inimical to democratic transformation. On the other hand, we contend that not all regimes that pursue the illiberal defense of national sovereignty in a coercive and hierarchical global system should automatically be dismissed as anti-democratic, as the pursuit of such means may still reflect a genuine commitment to upholding deeper democratic principles. We conclude by asserting that it is precisely by analyzing the imperialist nature of global political economy, and taking into account its adverse impact on the prospects for democratic transformation, that we propose the need to study and appreciate democratic experiments that operate beyond the confines of liberalism. In so doing, we contend that this article meaningfully advances a research agenda committed to decolonizing the study of democracy.