2002 a)? Might not its ubiquity in Habermasian theory suggest the existence
of a deeper conceptual weakness?
A certain conceptual slippage plagues Habermasian accounts of delibera-
tive democracy. The problematic implications of that slippage are especially
evident in recent discussions of transnational democracy.
Typically, Habermasians start with a bold account of the normative under-
pinnings of legitimate decision-making. In this account, only those norms are
legitimate when agreed to in a process of deliberation having the following
attributes:
( 1 ) participation in such deliberation is governed by norms of equality and sym-
metry; all have the same chances to initiate speech acts, to question, to interrogate,
and to open debate; ( 2 ) all have the same right to question the assigned topics of
conversation; and ( 3 ) all have the same right to initiate reXexive arguments about the
very rules of the discourse procedure and the way in which they are applied
(Benhabib 1996 , 70 ).
If applied to the global arena, this normative ideal would probably have
revolutionary consequences. It seems to require the reconWguration of global
political and economic power so thatevery oneof the planet’s billions of
inhabitants might possess equal and uncoerced chances to determine, via
free-wheeling deliberation resulting in a binding rule, the character of any
decision inXuencing his or her activities. Not surprisingly, writers like Iris
Young and David Held rigorously pursue this normative intuition by advo-
cating fundamental alterations to the distribution of economic resources on
the global level. But one might legitimately wonder whether even their
sensible reform proposals ultimately would suYce given the shocking in-
equalities plaguing present-day material conditions. Nor is it startling that
some Habermasian deliberative democrats consequently embrace ambitious
models of cosmopolitan democratic government, where supranational for-
mal institutions would take on many tasks presently exercised by the nation
state. Given the transnational character of countless forms of human activity,
such institutional aspirations would appear to make eminent sense.
At the same time, immediate problems present themselves to defenders of
this approach. It seems fundamentally utopian given present economic and
political conditions. Can anyone really imagine the United States peacefully
surrendering its dominant military position within the international state
system, or for that matter the privileged rich countries acceding to a funda-
mental global redistribution of economic resources? Thus far, they have
aggressively resisted even relatively modest (and relatively inexpensive)
critical theory 95