Democratizing Globalization, Globalizing Democracy: An Interview with Jan Aart Scholte

Interview by Dennis Soron

Jan Aart Scholte is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University, where he also serves as Acting Director of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation. Prior to coming to Warwick, he taught at the University of Sussex, Brighton and the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Aside from his many articles, book chapters, and reports, Dr. Scholte is author of Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave, 2000; 2nd Edition Forthcoming in 2005) and International Relations of Social Change (Open University Press, 1993), co-author of Contesting Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and editor of Civil Society and Global Finance (Routledge, 2002). He has two new books on the immediate horizon: Civil Society and Global Democracy, forthcoming from Polity Press in 2005; and the Encyclopedia of Globalization (co-edited with Roland Robertson), to be published by Routledge in 2006. A scholar of considerable learning and expertise in many domains of globalization studies, Scholte's current research focuses on questions of democratizing the governance of globalization. At present, Scholte is also an active member of the Steering Committee of the Globalization Studies Network.

Photo: Permission provided by Jan Aart Scholte


What is 'Global' About Globalization?

Aurora: Perhaps we should begin our discussion with a bit of conceptual clarification. As you've argued on various occasions, 'globalization' is one of the most ubiquitous buzzwords in today's political vocabulary, but it is typically employed in very loose and imprecise ways. As a result, our use of this term often tends to collapse together and conflate a number of different historical trends and developments. In your view, what is the best way to conceptualize globalization?

Jan Aart Scholte: For me, the most helpful and distinctive way of thinking about globalization is as a process of increasing transplanetary connections between people. By 'transplanetary', I mean a situation in which people anywhere on the planet may have quite direct connections with each other, no matter where on earth they may happen to be located. This restricted meaning, I think, helps us to capture what is characteristically 'global' about globalization.

So often, as you just mentioned, 'globalization' gets conflated with other notions and other terms that, although important, we actually have other vocabulary to cover. Thus, globalization is not simply about 'international' relations between territorial units such as nation-states. Similarly, it is not intrinsically about policies of economic liberalization; nor is it the same as Americanization or westernization. All of these other attributes can be connected to globalization, but the process of globalization itself is about increasing connections between people on a transworld basis.

Aurora: What implications does this definition have for the way that we periodize globalization? Some people, for example, have claimed that the historical roots of globalization are to be found in the centuries-old process of European colonialism and the expansionary dynamics of capitalism itself. Your conceptualization of globalization seems to imply that it is a much more recent historical process.

Jan Aart Scholte: You're quite right: people will have different ideas about the periodization and history of globalization, depending on the different definitions that they might employ. If you define globalization as westernization, for instance, then indeed you might trace it back to imperialism and colonization over a period of several hundred years. Or, if you take globalization to mean liberalization - that is, the removal of state-imposed controls on the movement of goods, money, ideas and people between countries - then you might say that we witnessed a lot of globalization in the 19th Century, followed by a period of retreat, and then by a resurgence of globalization in recent decades. If you take the idea of globalization to mean increasing transplanetary or transworld relations between people, however, then the overwhelming increase in these kinds of 'supra-territorial' connections has occurred over the past fifty or sixty years.

Aurora: In your writings, you seek to steer clear of the 'economic reductionism' of some analyses of globalization, arguing that it has been determined by a range of 'co-dependant' factors not reducible to economics alone. While this approach may make sense on a theoretical level, doesn't it also risk downplaying the dominant historical influence that capitalist economic interests and imperatives have had on the shape and direction of 'actually existing globalization'?

Jan Aart Scholte: There are different ways of conceptualizing causality in respect of social relations generally and in regard to globalization as a specific process of social history. Many critical theorists have found it most convenient to adopt a historical materialist approach that reduces the motor of globalization to certain underlying transformations in capitalist development.

In my own work, I certainly take on board and stress that certain turns in contemporary capitalist development have been vital and crucial to large-scale accelerated globalization as we've experienced it in the last fifty or sixty years. I don't think, however, that economic reductionism is a helpful way of thinking about globalization and other social processes. Economic relations are always at the same time political relations; they are always at the same time also cultural, psychological, and ecological relations. The idea that you can somehow pull out and extract the economic dimension of a social act and make it the determinant of the other dimensions strikes me as being overly simplistic.

When analyzing globalization, why would we say that the capitalist economic driver comes before the political and regulatory framework? Why would we say that economics comes before our knowledge structures, our imagination of the world, and our culturally defined ways of life? Why would we say it comes before, and wholly determines, our constructions of identity and the bonds between people?

Can we say that all the psychological, cultural, and political aspects of globalization processes are entirely effects and in no way causes? I don't think so. It would make for a much more convenient and handy understanding, certainly - a parsimonious explanation; it would also make our responses to globalization, our understanding of how to act in relation to it, much simpler to formulate. But I'm afraid that I don't go along with that.

Aurora: Discussions of globalization to date have been largely polarized between those who see it as a fundamentally new reality that has somehow rendered the nation-state powerless, and those who see it as a process that has actually relied upon a strengthening, consolidation and extension of traditional state powers. Where do you stand in these debates about globalization and the state?

Jan Aart Scholte: Your construction of the argument is quite right. We had a period, especially in the early- to mid-1990's, in which a number of well-publicized authors argued that globalization meant the 'end of the state', the 'decline of the state', the 'dissolution of the state', the 'transcendence of the state', and so on. The basic notion here was that the territorial national state had reached its historical sell-by date with the arrival of globalization, and was now on its way out. In turn, from the mid-1990's onwards, other thinkers reacted to such exaggerated claims of a state in decline and dissolution, arguing that states actually were as healthy as ever, as strong as ever, and unchanged.

I think that our understanding of the state under conditions of globalization is beginning to move beyond these earlier polarized positions. Increasingly, in my work and that of many others, the emphasis is upon both the continuity of the state as such, and changes in the role and features of the state. From this perspective, globalization has not so much brought about the end of the state as given rise to a different kind of state - one with a number of attributes that we didn't see with the state before.

One example here is that national states today in a globalizing world often answer to constituents and stakeholders beyond their own national population and national citizens - to global capital and global capitalist elites, for instance, or to various other global issue groups, including transworld social movements on occasion. Looking at the contemporary state, we can see that it is practicing sovereignty in very different sorts of ways than in the past. Sovereignty, as traditionally understood, implied the state having absolute, supreme, unilateral, comprehensive authority over its territory and the population living there. That kind of sovereignty has now been eclipsed. People today talk about "shared sovereignty", "joint sovereignty", "pooled sovereignty", and so on - but this changes the notion of sovereignty so much that I'm not sure that it is appropriate to use that term anymore. In any case, sovereignty in the traditional Westphalian sense is no longer an attribute that any state - even the strongest state - can hope to aspire to.

There are also arguments currently underway about how the state has changed in terms of the effect that globalization has had on its welfare programs, its military behaviour, and so on. But the general point of the more nuanced thesis that has begun to emerge is that globalization doesn't bring an end to the state, but changes the state. The interesting thing is to track these changes, while at the same time also recognizing that globalization does not affect all states the same way. All states are not equal. So, for instance, the consequences of globalization on the state for Canada, as compared with Bhutan or the USA, may be very different indeed.

Democracy Transformed

Aurora: Much of your recent work with the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation(CSGR) has focused on the issue of democratization - specifically, the current efforts of civil society groups to promote greater democracy in the global economy. Can you explain your working definition of democracy, and your sense of its role as a lodestar for progressive struggles right now?

Jan Aart Scholte: For me, democracy is a core value, one that is essential to both human dignity and a good society. In the most general sense, democracy is about rule by the people. Democracy means people taking collective decisions that shape their joint destiny. It means people taking decisions with equivalent opportunities for participation, including the right not to participate. It is about people having the capacity to take joint decisions in an open fashion, so that everyone knows what's going on, everyone knows what the options are, and everyone knows what everyone else is thinking about things. And it is a situation in which people also act in collective responsibility for their decisions and their actions. Democracy is a responsibility as well as a right.

Of course, this is a very generic notion of democracy. Modern liberal democracy is one way of enacting those general principles of collective, open, free, equal, responsible public decision-taking. But liberal democracy - with its focus on periodic, multi-party, competitive elections to representative institutions and the various citizen rights linked to those kinds of processes - is a very particular cultural / historical manifestation of democracy. Rule by the people can be done in many different ways.

In this regard, I think that it is an error to claim - much like the Bush administration is doing today in Iraq - that one particular cultural and historical model of democracy equals democracy itself. Democracy is far more variable than this. Throughout history, we've known many different forms of democracy. So, we face a question today as to whether a globalizing world is one in which we have to rethink fundamentally what democracy means and how it might be practiced.

Aurora: For neoliberal ideologues such as Thomas Friedman and Milton Friedman, economic liberalization is virtually synonymous with democratization - both in the sense that a market economy is thought to be a prerequisite for political democracy, and in the sense that the market itself is seen as a democratic mechanism responding to the preferences of "sovereign" consumers. In contrast to this optimistic view of global economic integration, you've pointed to the emergence of a number of serious "democratic deficits" in recent years. Could you elaborate upon this for us?

Jan Aart Scholte: I first want to take issue with the notion of market-generated democracy. If we look back at what I was just suggesting were generic features of democracy, then it becomes clear that market democracy is a contradiction in terms. In practice, the marketplace is not an arena where all people have equivalent opportunities for participation and engagement. It is a place with enormous hierarchies of opportunity based on the country or region you live in, on class, income, gender, race, age, and so on. Many social structures determine that the market is not a place of equal opportunities for participation, so the notion that a market situation is democratic in that sense is quite mistaken.

Regarding the democratic deficits in contemporary globalization, I would offer a diagnosis based on three dimensions. The first relates to individual citizens and their overall ignorance of both globalization and how it's governed. You cannot have a democratic situation - that is, one in which people are determining the decisions that shape their destiny in a collective, equal, free, open and responsible fashion - if people don't have a clue about what their condition actually is.

Beyond the question of citizen ignorance, the second major area of democratic deficits relates to the problem of institutional process. By this, I mean that the ways that policy decisions about globalization are taken - whether in national states, local governments, regional institutions or global governance bodies - are far from democratic, and lack meaningful opportunities for democratic participation and accountability.

Thirdly, there are severe barriers of social structure that prevent people from having equivalent opportunities for democratic participation. Genuine democracy is undermined in situations where, as in our own world, there are arbitrary hierarchical social structures of gender, of race, of country, of class, of age, of urban or rural region, of culture, and so on, that determine that some people have much more voice, many more chances for awareness, participation and control than others. Today's globalization is riven with all three of these problems - that is, citizen ignorance, institutional process, and social-structural hierarchies - and this is what makes it such an incredibly undemocratic situation.

Aurora: You've said that traditional liberal democracy, in the sense of a territorially based form of sovereign government, is in a state of serious crisis. In your view, is liberal democracy in this traditional sense being or likely to be supplanted by some form of "global" democracy? If so, how can meaningful democracy be conceived of, let alone actually practiced, on such a vast global scale?

Jan Aart Scholte: Two general critiques can be brought against liberal democracy in our contemporary globalizing world. The first critique focuses on the manifold ways in which liberal democracy is not working properly - how it is being overrun by special interests, how people are disengaged from politics, uninterested in political parties and not voting, how the democratic process is abused and distorted by money, oligarchy and a host of other serious problems. This implicitly assumes, of course, that you could make liberal democracy work as the model for global democracy, as long as you removed the problems just mentioned and got it to work right.

There is another critique that goes further, though, and would assert that even if you got liberal democracy to work on its own terms, it would not be an adequate model and framework for global democracy. Why? For one thing, because it is based in a particular cultural and historical experience that is alien to and doesn't answer the democratic spirit in a number of other cultures. In this sense, the shape of global democracy would need to be subject to far more intercultural negotiation and adjustment than it has been to date.

In more technical terms, we would inevitably face questions about what sort of liberal democracy could possibly work on a transworld scale even if we accepted it as the basic model. We don't have transworld political parties, nor do we have a clear idea of what kind of voting regime would be workable. One person, one vote? One country, one vote? What kind of representation would there be? By country? By social group? How would we run a global election? We seem to have enough trouble getting the election done properly in Florida, let alone on a world scale. These technical questions lead us to ask, on a deeper level, whether our current notion of liberal democracy, based as it is in a particular historical and cultural context, actually speaks to a democratic construction on a world scale - something I have severe doubts about.

Democratizing Globalization: Agents and Strategies

Aurora: The slogan "another world is possible" has become a point of convergence for a number of different progressive movements in recent years. However uplifting this phrase may be rhetorically, it also begs the question of how the transition to "another world" is to actually be accomplished. For many in progressive circles today, "global civil society" has come to be seen as the privileged agent of democratic change. In light of your recent research on the topic, could you discuss what you take to be the possibilities and limitations of global civil society as a democratic force?

Jan Aart Scholte: Perhaps one of the first democratizing moves to make, as we move away from the notion of a neoliberal model as the single answer for the entire world, is to begin saying that "other worlds are possible" rather than "another world is possible." It would be a terrible mistake if we moved from the dictatorial imposition of one neoliberal model to an alternative model which would equally be singular and imposed. I would hope that as we move towards "another world", we are actually thinking about how plural worlds can coexist at a time when we can no longer hide behind buffers of distance and borders.

That said, we come to the question of civil society activity as a means of creating those "other worlds" and of doing so in a democratic fashion. It does seem to me that collective citizen action in trade unions, NGOs, faith-based groups, community associations, and so on, is a way to mobilize citizens and bring them into direct and active engagement with globalization, with shaping it and reshaping it. Civil society activity does provide great possibilities for increasing public awareness about globalization, stimulating public debate about it, and providing channels and opportunities for public participation in global politics. Civil society groups have also helped to make the governance of globalization more transparent, more open, and more visible to us as citizens, and have (although still to a rather limited extent) encouraged greater accountability in the governance of global relations. Finally, civil society groups have also pushed for a redistribution of resources that might begin to create a more level playing field in global politics and reduce some of those arbitrary structural hierarchies of opportunity that I talked about earlier. This all suggests the very promising potential of civil society activity as a force for democratizing globalization and helping to create other worlds.

We need to be cautious on at least two counts, however. First, the scale of citizen action through civil society associations has not been nearly as great as we might hope. Indeed, there needs to be a lot more of this type of action before we can begin to have serious political effects and fully realize the democratizing potentials of civil society that I just mentioned. Beyond the matter of scale, one also cannot assume that civil society activity is inherently democratizing. In fact, you can find some real limits to democratic practice within civil society activity itself. Civil society groups are not always open and accessible. They're not always places where there's free debate and opportunity for participation by all. Often at times, civil society activity can be as middle-class, white, urban-centred and male-dominated as social relations in general.

So, there is nothing that sets civil society apart from society at large and automatically makes it a more equal or democratic space. Likewise, civil society activity is not always transparent to the wider population, and very often groups don't pay much attention to their own accountability even as they seek to push for greater accountability among governing authorities. In short, there is a lot to be done in terms of the democratization of civil society activity itself.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there are lots of circumstances in the wider society that limit what civil society groups can do - the challenges presented by unsympathetic government authorities, for instance, or by a mass media that fails to cover civil society activity or covers it badly when it does. On top of all this is the continual problem of securing sufficient resources for civil society groups to pursue their activities. Sometimes, civil society associations also face unreceptive political cultures. In Canada, for instance, the prevailing political culture generally encourages civil society activity in comparison with places like Egypt or Russia, whose established ways of doing politics are not so hospitable to civil society activity.

Aurora: For many activists and thinkers today, the struggle against the anti-democratic thrust of globalization has become associated with the project of re-localization. In this view, achieving a greater level of democracy is of a piece with recovering and empowering "the local" - securing greater community control over economic resources, developing immediately accessible structures of democratic participation, fostering a sense of solidarity out of place-based identities and traditions that globalization has undermined, and so on. How do you feel about this valorization of the local as the key site of democratic action?

Jan Aart Scholte: As a move towards small-scale social organization, localization strikes me as sensible and democratizing. In small-scale structures, people have better chances of contact, communication, access, and control. That said, I wouldn't want to romanticize the local. You can have local mafias; similarly, your local bureaucrat can be just as distant, untransparent, and authoritarian as an IMF official in Washington, DC. There is nothing holy about the local.

Another caution is that, in a globalizing world, there is no way we can reduce the process of governance to local governance alone. We need coordination across wider spaces than the local in order to address issues like climate change, global health issues, global migration flows, global money flows, global financial flows, and global trade. Although some of the implementation and adjustment of global and regional rules can be made at local level in line with local circumstances, we can't ultimately have a world without substantial global and regional regulation existing alongside national and local governance. By all means, we should try to make everything as local as possible, but we should not see the local as a panacea or believe that everything local by definition will be good.

As a footnote to this, we also perhaps need to rethink what we actually mean by "local". In a globalizing world, where we can be in very immediate contact with other people and places on the earth through the internet, telecommunications, air travel and more, we might conceive of the local as a form of small group solidarity that is expressed through connections other than those based on simply having dwellings in the same district. Indeed, we might come to a supra-territorial or non-territorial notion of locality, premised upon the solidarities between people who have commonalities in terms of their disability, their gender, their hobbies, or other nonterritorial bases for identity and community. In this way, we might think of the local itself in deterritorialized terms.

Aurora: The next question has to do with the extent to which you think existing global institutions can be democratized. There has been a great deal of debate in activist circles in recent years, for instance, about whether the WTO should be "fixed or nixed", whether the IMF and World Bank should be reformed or abolished, and so on. In your view, is it credible to believe that such institutions - which have historically functioned primarily as tools of the powerful and enforcers of capitalist property rights - can be transformed into vehicles for achieving progressive goals?

Jan Aart Scholte: My own view is that we don't really have an option to "nix". To the extent that we have a more global world, we need more global regulation and governance of that world. In a situation such as ours, where a working form of global anarchism doesn't seem to be an immediate prospect, the idea of disbanding the WTO, of dissolving the IMF, of closing the United Nations, and removing other transworld governance institutions is unfeasible and unwise. If you accept that we are not on the verge of a full-scale social transformation that would allow us to move towards a non-bureaucratized form of governance for a post-capitalist world, then the task at hand is reform - preferably far-reaching and ambitious reform - of global institutions and global regulations.

Under current circumstances, we are thus faced with the task of "fixing" rather than "nixing". This is not to underestimate the sheer scale of the job that needs to be done in fixing existing institutions. Nor is it to say that we're ever going to end up with beautifully crafted global governance institutions that entirely and unreservedly serve the causes of human security, social equality, and democracy. I don't have any illusions about that.

Perhaps the best parallel to draw upon here is the national welfare state of an earlier period. In its own time, the national state has been substantially reformed and even transformed from an agent that grossly served the interests of big capital and capitalist elites, to an instrument for making national capital somewhat more socially accountable, redistributing resources. and working more in the greater public interest. If the state in a national territorial space was able to be reformed to bring about some (and I don't say total, but some) more progressive control and direction of capital, then global governance institutions could likewise possibly be reformed in a similar fashion. This type of democratic reform, of course, is an object of great long-term intensive struggle. It is not something that happened overnight in relation to the state, and it won't happen with ease in relation to global institutions either.

Aurora: This last question touches upon the recent work that you and your colleagues at CSGR have been doing on the theme of democratizing the global economy. Over time, it seems our democratic imaginations have become increasingly impoverished, especially with regard to economic life. The traditional socialist vision, for instance, was of a democratic economy based on communal ownership of resources, collective social planning, and cooperatively managed workplaces. Today, our aspirations seem largely limited to mild regulatory measures that might soften or humanize free market capitalism to some degree. In your view, what type of economic democracy should we aspire to?

Jan Aart Scholte: We are emerging from a period of relatively untrammeled neoliberal globalization in which, as you say, a democratic imagination was largely lost and, in many cases, democracy was effectively reduced to a question of consumer choice in the marketplace or a periodic vote in an election. So, if we want to try to move away from this situation, what do we do?

As you say, some strategies are very mildly reformist - so mildly reformist, in fact, that they don't change very much at all. Corporate social responsibility schemes might fall into this category, to the extent that they are meant to bring something of a more human and socially sustainable face to global capitalism without resorting to more ambitious and stringently enforced types of official regulation.

I myself would advocate a far broader and more thorough program of reform that is about creating social-democratic institutions at a regional and global level. This might mean globally redistributive taxation; it might mean creating global environmental organizations, global gender organizations, global anti-trust mechanisms, global competition authorities. All told, the goal would be to establish a social-democratic form of global governance capable of taking us forward in a far more ambitiously reformist direction.

This is still, however, a heavily western vision that may not be the kind of reformist program that suits all of the various world's peoples, cultures and civilizations. So, I would say that this kind of agenda, which is one that I bring forward from a particular western social-democratic experience, would be one that itself had to be negotiated, renegotiated, and perhaps transcended and dropped altogether in the global discussion about what a more just and secure human future would be.


Dennis Soron was a researcher with the Neoliberal Globalism and its Challengers Project at the University of Alberta. He was also, among other things, a sessional lecturer with the Sociology Department at the University of Alberta, a faculty member of Athabasca University's Master of Arts in Integrated Studies, and the editor of the Parkland Post. He has since moved on, and is now working at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario.



General Links

CSGR: Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (University of Warwick):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/

The Global Studies Research Network:
http://onglobalization.com/

A Comprehensive List of Scholte's Past and Forthcoming Publications:
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/publications/scholte/

"Democratizing the Global Economy: The Role of Civil Society" (2004)
CSGR report prepared by Scholte with the assistance of a number of international collaborators:
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/publications/englishreport.pdf/

Online Articles and Working Papers by Scholte

"Globalization and Governance: from Statism to Polycentrism" (2004):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/2004/wp13004.pdf/

"What is Globalization? The Definition Issue - Again" (2002):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/2002/wp10902.pdf/

"Governing Global Finance" (2002):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/2002/wp8802.pdf/

"Civil Society and Democracy in Global Governance" (2001):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/2001/wp6501.pdf/

"Global Civil Society: Changing the World?" (1999):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/1999/wp3199.pdf

"The WTO and Civil Society"(1998; with Robert O'Brien and Marc Williams):
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/1998/wp1498.pdf/

"Global Capitalism and the State" (1997):
http://ams.hi.is/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2624266.pdf

Article published Fall 2004

Aurora Update

Dr. Scholte is currently Professor, Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg (since 2013).

For updates, current activities, visit his website at: https://globalstudies.gu.se/english/about-us/staff?userId=xsjana

 

Updated March 2018


Citation Format

Soron, Dennis. (2004) Democratizing Globalization, Globalizing Democracy: An Interview with Jan Aart Scholte Aurora Online