ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, Jürgen Habermas has directed his critical acumen to the many challenges posed by globalization for democracy. Habermas’ starting point is eminently political. Like many other principled democrats, he worries that the ongoing process of globalization threatens popular sovereignty at the local and national levels, where it alone has been more or less successfully established. As nation-states fi nd themselves enmeshed in complex and increasingly dense networks of supranational decision making (e.g., the EU, WTO, or IMF), existing forms of political participation seem ever more remote from political and economic decisions “negotiated under asymmetrical relations of power” but having far-reaching ramifi cations. A committed social democrat, he also shares the worries of many on the left that globalization undermines the capacity of the welfare state to mitigate capitalism’s harshest features. Conversant in the most advanced empirical research, he notes that national governments “still enjoy a range of options in policy areas that have an immediate impact on the covariant relationship between levels of employment and social welfare.”1 Nonetheless, globalization tends to lead to reductions in corporate tax rates and a general shrinkage of public fi nances. At the very least, it remains unclear whether small or medium states can realistically “withstand a creeping assimilation to the [neoliberal] social model being foisted upon them by the currently dominant economic regime.”2
