ABSTRACT
Today leading political theorists believe that globalization constitutes a threat to modern democracy by undermining its foundations: state sovereignty and national identity (Tully 2002; Rosanvallon 2006: 189-234). Since most of these theorists would like to save democratic institutions and practices without sliding back into nationalist nostalgia, they have explored a variety of ways to widen the scope of democratic governance beyond the boundaries of the state. Yet these efforts have been constantly compromised by what looks like an insurmountable problem. If democratic governance presupposes a community in order to be legitimate, global governance cannot be democratically legitimate since there is no corresponding community at the global level that could bestow it with legitimacy. But this problem is neither new nor specific to the global level. In order for any political authority to be legitimate in democratic terms, it must be based on the actual or hypothetical consent of a people or community. But since the identity of that people or community is difficult to account for in terms themselves democratic, most theories of democratic legitimacy issue in paradoxes that cannot be satisfactorily resolved by modern political theory (Doucet 2005). As Van Roermund (2003: 41) has eloquently put this problem, ‘self-representation never seems to capture the self that is representing itself’.
