ABSTRACT
As the global instability caused by climate change places heightened stress on democratic societies, there is the danger that autocracies, exploiting the spectacle of consent as an effective substitute for electoral democracy, will continue to proliferate. More than seventy-five years after the founding of the United Nations, authoritarian regimes and parties leveraging the spectacle of consent remain a serious threat to the practice of electoral democracy in every part of the world, in spite of the fact that the promised universalization of democratic principles was a central theme in the promotion of the United Nations in 1945 and the right of citizens to representation through competitive elections was enshrined in Article 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Regimes that rely on the spectacle of consent as a substitute for competitive elections most often appeal to national security by exploiting symbols and rituals that reenforce group identity and national pride. Because the UN Charter has been shaped by the Westphalian paradigm of the sovereign nation state, it functions more as a theater for the spectacle of consent than as a forum for democratic debate and the concerns of individual citizens. The creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly in which a significant portion of delegates would be directly elected by citizens via secret ballot could help to liberate the UN from the conformist culture of nationalism and create a new forum for more dynamic debate and democratic accountability on a global scale.
