ABSTRACT
There exists a disquieting disconnect between the almost universal advocacy of democracy as the sole legitimate way that domestic society can be organized and intense resistance from leading state actors to any steps taken to democratize the ways in which global governance in its present forms is constituted and administered.1 The contrast is particularly striking as between the political language that has been used by the current American political leadership in the course of the Bush presidency, which has made its signature claim to moral leadership in the world depend on its supposed championship of democracy, while at the same time displaying an active hostility toward democracy as it might inform global governance. The neoconservative version of this disconnect is more explicit than a similar “democratic gap” that existed earlier, and was especially characteristic of the Clinton presidency, which also made support for the spread of democracy on the national level an essential element of its foreign policy (what it called “enlargement”). As with Bush, Clinton also was not supportive of civil society efforts to open up the United Nations (UN), or global governance more generally, to the impact of democratizing pressures. An inquiry into global democracy proceeds against this background of understanding.
