Democracy and the state
The problem with much of the analysis of democracy is that it assumes that
democracy is a form of the state. Yet it could well be argued that there is a
contradiction between the idea of the ‘rule of the people’ and an institution claiming
a monopoly of legitimate force for a particular territory.
This is not to deny that the more liberal the state the better, or that states which
have the rule of law, regular elections and universal suffrage are preferable to states
which do not. A liberal society has to be the basis for democracy: it is necessary,
although not sufficient. Thus to the extent that, for example, Singapore does not
allow its citizens to freely express themselves, it is undemocratic.
We want to argue that what makes a liberal society ‘insufficient’ is that it still
needs a state, and the state, it could be suggested, is a repressively hierarchical
institution that excludes outsiders and uses force to tackle conflicts of interest.
Conservatives who complained that democracy is incompatible with the state are
right. You cannot be said to govern your own life within the state. When the supreme
ruler of the moon was told, as H.G. Wells recalls, that states existed on earth in
which everybody rules, he immediately ordered that cooling sprays should be applied
to his brows (Hoffman, 1995: 210).
Dahl, in fact, has argued that when individuals are forced to comply with laws,
democracy is to that extent compromised (1989: 37). If you vote for a particular
party through fear of what might happen to you if you do not, then such a system
cannot be called democratic. Liberals have argued that a person cannot be said to
act freely if they are threatened with force: yet the logic here points to a position
that Dahl does not accept. If force is incompatible with self-rule, then it follows
that the state cannot be reconciled with democracy. The use of force against a small
number of people – something that no state can avoid – makes the idea of self-
government problematic. This is why the notion of democracy as a form of the
state is not self-evident, and it could be argued that this assumption weakens
David Held’s otherwise persuasive case for a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’. Held
acknowledges that the concept of democracy has changed its geographical and
institutional focus over time. Like Dahl (1989: 194), he accepts that the notion of
democracy was once confined to the city-state. It then expanded to embrace the
nation-state, and it has now become a concept that stands or falls through an
acknowledgement of its global character.
Since local, national, regional and global structures and processes all overlap,
democracy must take a cosmopolitan form (Held, 1995: 21). Held argues (as,
indeed, Dahl does) that people in states are radically affected by activities that occur
outside their borders. Whether we think of the movement of interest rates, the profits
that accrue to stocks and shares, the spread of AIDS, the movements of refugees
and asylum seekers or the damage to the environment, government is clearly
stretching beyond the state.
What obstructs the notion of international democracy, Held argues, is the
assumption that states are sovereign, and that international institutions detract from
this sovereignty. The position of the USA under the Bush leadership (alarmingly
reinforced rather than undermined by the reaction to the appalling events of 11
September 2001) was rooted in the archaic belief that institutions that look beyond
the nation-state are a threat to, rather than a necessity for, democratic realities.110 Part 1 Classical ideas