ABSTRACT
There is a widespread popular belief that globalization has undermined the traditional system of territorial state authority and perhaps imperilled the very possibility of meaningful governance (Ohmae 1991; Zürn 1995). Others have argued that the novelty and extent of globalization should not be overstated and that individual nations remain very much in control of their own destinies (Hirst and Thompson 1996; Wade 1996; Garrett 1998). Somewhere between these two positions one finds arguments that the effects of globalization are substantial, but that they are largely manageable through an emerging system of global governance. This nascent new world order comprises international institutions devoted to resolving global issues at the level of high politics (Haas et al. 1993; Keohane 1998), and an increasingly dense web of transgovernmental relations among the courts, regulators and agencies of disaggregated states engaged in solving similar issues at the level of low politics (Slaughter 1997). The globalization debate thus involves two primary dimensions: discerning the current intensity and future trajectory of transnational exchange, and ascertaining the need for, and performance of, advanced institutional structures which populate the new world order and mediate how these exchanges affect national sovereignty. Assumptions about these two dimensions in turn underpin accounts of various forms of global democracy, including normative claims made about its appropriateness and inevitability, as well as suggestions for how it should be institutionally configured (Held 1995).
