Cosmopolitan Democracy - Origin and Development

Origin and Development

The victory of Western liberal states ending the Cold War inspired the hope that international relations could be guided by the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. In the early 1990s, a group of thinkers developed the political project of cosmopolitan democracy with the aim of providing intellectual arguments in favour of an expansion of democracy, both within states and at the global level. While some significant successes have been achieved in terms of democratization within states, much less has been attained in democratizing the global system.

In different forms, the necessity to expand democratic procedures beyond the nation-state has been supported by political philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and sociologist Ulrich Beck.

Criticisms of cosmopolitan democracy have come from realist, marxist, communitarian and multicultural perspectives. Democratic theorist Robert Dahl has manifested his doubts about the possibility to expand significantly democracy in international organizations, as he believes that democracy diminishes with size. Opponents of Dahl's approach point to the fact that bigger countries are not necessarily less democratic. For example, there is no correlation between voters' turnout and population size, in fact voter's turnout is smallest in countries with less than 100,000 citizens.