privilege face-to-face political interaction (e.g. town meetings or mass dem-
onstrations), deliberative democracy seems well-suited to exploit the virtues
of relatively abstract forms of potentially cross-border communication. For
this reason as well, it oVers a fruitful starting point for theorizing about
postnational democracy.
Despite this common starting point, Habermasian deliberative democrats
take diVerent roads in their approaches to globalization. Although the story is
more complicated than I can acknowledge here, those roads ultimately
mirror the tensions in Habermas’ own discussion.
Echoing Habermas in his more radical moments, some of his sympathizers
oVer a vision of global (deliberative) democracy resting on the realization of
ambitious new forms of transnational democratic decision-making subject to
global civil society, to be undertaken in conjunction with a plethora of radical
social and economic reforms. In this version of transnational deliberative
democracy, new formal institutions can be successfully established at the
global level. Furthermore, the ‘‘commanding heights’’ of those institutions
can be rendered directly subordinate to deliberatively derived communicative
power. Thus, Iris Young argues that ultimately only ‘‘global institutions that
in principle include or represent everyone’’ (Young 2004 , 11 ) represent the
best institutionalization of the deliberative-democratic intuition that ‘‘dia-
logic interaction’’ can generate regulations that ‘‘take account of the needs,
interests, and perspectives of everyone’’ (Young 2004 , 3 ). 3 Given ‘‘the in-
creased density of interaction and interdependence’’ of our globalizing uni-
verse, deliberative democracy—to be achieved in part by strengthening as
well as democratizing the UN—is the only way to assure the legitimacy of
‘‘more global-level regulation of security, human rights, trade regulation,
[and] development policy’’ (Young 2004 , 4 ; also Young 2000 , 271 – 5 ). Young
links her defense of transnational deliberative democracy to the necessity of
attacking the stark poverty that still plagues humanity, observing that trans-
national deliberative democracy is destined to founder if poverty continues to
prevent the meaningful political involvement of hundreds of millions of our
fellow prospective global citizens (Young 2004 , 8 ).
Notwithstanding its many diVerences vis-a`-vis Young’s ideas, David Held’s
widely discussed model of a ‘‘cosmopolitan democracy,’’ which has been
3 Of course, Young has been highly critical of some important features of Habermas’ own account
of deliberation (Young 2000 ). This is also true of other authors discussed in this chapter. However, I
do believe that they all share enough of Habermas’ general approach to be fairly described as
‘‘Habermasian.’’
critical theory 91