ABSTRACT
Faced with rising threats from Russia and China, along with unmet needs for global public goods (GPGs) like climate stability, security from terrorism, freedom from cybercrime, and a fair global system for immigration, policymakers in democratic governments are scrambling to find a way to strengthen cooperation among their nations. The range of current proposals illustrates the same dilemmas that, starting a century ago, prompted visionary politicians and scholars to conclude that only a world order with a democratic and transnational institution at its core could combine the multicultural legitimacy and preponderance of power needed to bring more nations to support the same system. This chapter reviews five recent initiatives, including proposals to globalize NATO, to add a parliamentary assembly to the UN, to form a loose alliance among rights-respecting states to support international rules, with a D10 group at its core. While some variant of the D10 proposal may increase legitimacy and leverage and be able to operate by consensus, it would remain quite limited in representation even in its best incarnation. UN reform, by contrast, would be widely inclusive but powerless. None of these proposals consolidate sufficient decision-making and enforcement powers in a transnational organization that would be sufficiently multicultural: These proposed forums for cooperation among democracies would either be too big to operate by consensus or too limited in national membership to be fully legitimate and assure aspiring democratic nations in the global South and Asia that they have a status equal to older democracies. Only a league of democracies with consolidated powers can solve this fundamental problem.
