ubiquitous and fundamentallyXuid in character? How might it ever succeed
in carefully regulating the exercise of administrative power?
Some of Habermas’ recent writings on transnational democracy conWrm
the basic soundness of this concern. He has recently relied on a distinction
between ‘‘democratic procedures whose legitimacy rests on the grounds that
they are fair and open to all, and democratic procedures defended on the
grounds that both deliberations and decisions have suYciently rational
character’’ (Fine and Smith 2003 , 476 – 7 ). This distinction arguably parallels
the general tendency to overstate the practical diVerences between participa-
tion and deliberation, as well as downplay the centrality of the actual (delib-
erative) participation of those concrete subjects aVected by whatever norm or
rule is under scrutiny in favor of the potentially misleading imagery of
anonymous and subject-less deliberation. To put the point polemically (and
rather crudely): if legitimate deliberation can be anonymous and somehow
subject-less, perhaps we need not worry too much when actual deliberative
input possesses a relatively limited participatory basis. In Habermas’ own
words:
democratic procedure no longer draws its legitimizing force only,indeed not even
predominantly, from political participation and the expression of political will, but
rather from the general accessibility of a deliberative process whose structure grounds
an expectation of rationally acceptable results. (Habermas 2001 a, 110 ; emphasis
added)
Many intergovernmental negotiating and transnational decision-making
bodies lack the former. According to Habermas, they possess the latter,
however. That is, they lack signiWcant popular participatory input via con-
ventional state forms, yet they nonetheless ground ‘‘an expectation of ration-
ally acceptable results’’ and thus can perform, with some degree of success,
what we might describe as usefulepistemicfunctions, in the sense of gener-
ating ‘‘rationally acceptable results’’ (Habermas 2001 a, 110 ; Fine and Smith
2003 , 476 ). They:
raise the information level and contribute to rational problem solving because they
include diVerent parties and often adhere to arguing as a decision making procedure
and not voting and bargaining. To various degrees such bodies inject the logic of
impartial justiWcation and reason giving into transnational bodies of governance.
(Eriksen and Weigard 2004 , 251 )
For this reason, Habermas concludes, the supposedly ‘‘weak’’ legitimation
of some transnational bodies, when understood in light of his model of
critical theory 101