ABSTRACT
In a statement to the International Monetary and Financial Committee, Lawrence Summers calls for the modernisation of the IMF, arguing that central to the achievement of this task is a more representative, transparent and accountable organisation (Summers 2000). Kofi Annan too has called for ‘greater participation and accountability’ in the United Nations system. Beyond the cosmocracy, the language of democracy also informs the demands of many progressive social forces, such as Charter 99, in their campaigns for more representative and responsive global governance. As the rhetoric of democracy increasingly finds expression in proposals to reinvent global institutions, most dramatically in the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, the challenge of ‘good governance’ now confronts global governance. On the other hand, for Robert Dahl, among others, such laudable aspirations are simply Utopian in that ‘we should openly recognise that international decision making will not be democratic’ (Dahl 1999:23). Underlying Dahl’s scepticism is a reasoned argument that, despite globalisation and the diffusion of democratic values, the necessary preconditions for democracy remain largely absent in the international public domain: a domain which lacks the normative and institutional requirements of a properly functioning polity, and one in which might still trumps right. Herein lies a curious paradox: for in an era in which democracy has increasingly become the global standard of good governance it is judged inappropriate, by many of its strongest advocates, as a principle to be applied to international governance.
