Democracy Without Sovereignty: The Global Vocation of Political Ethics
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In the Pythagoras, Plato reminds his audience of how men were saved from annihilation by Prometheus who gave them the knowledge of fire and the arts—only to potentially fall victim of each other through incessant war. Zeus (as always!) cleaned up the mess by giving men a foundation for co-operation and for governing themselves. He entrusted Hermes with two gifts for men: aidos (respect, restraint, shame, reverence, awe) and dike (justice or rightfulness), ‘in order to serve as the norm for cities and link men through ties of friendship’. These gifts were to be bestowed on all, not just on a small elite. Thus, for Plato, who explores in the Pythagoras the very foundations of experimental democracy in Athens, Zeus did not choose to give men formal laws or institutions, a list of permitted or banned actions, but a relationship to law and polis. As Socrates tells his companion in Plato’s later Minos, Zeus may have taught law-makers but he himself did not make law. This chapter will therefore argue that as we embark on a new age of governance between all mankind, these Platonic lessons need to be revisited anew. In our view, if, in a localised context, a political ethics à la Plato must emphasise behavioural guidelines above specific institutions or strict rules of action, this is all the more the case in a context where aidos and dike must be pursued not only between men and women, but between groups, nations and transnational associations. In the current, experimental stage of global governance, we believe that such an ethics ought to take central stage. In this spirit, our essay challenges the notion that legitimate global governance should be conceived primarily in terms of the proper allocation or delegation of authority to global institutions. The inter-dependence of the local, national and global in today’s world, as well as the connections between different realms of global governance (eg, trade and human rights, investment and environment), means that it is impossible to protect and promote democratic politics through a stable division of competences between local and national ‘democratic’ institutions and global institutions, or by restricting the mandate of particular global institutions to an agreed ‘subject matter’. Instead, as we discuss below, we need to focus on the manner in which power is exercised by diverse agents in global sites of decision and deliberation, some highly institutionalised and others better characterised as informal networks. Assessing and hopefully shaping the conduct of agents in global sites of governance in accordance with a political ethics of democracy offers considerable promise as an alternative—or perhaps complementary and mutually reinforcing—approach to legitimacy. In this essay, we start by revisiting the principles of subsidiarity and supremacy in the EU context to argue that they should be understood as guiding principles of ‘transnational democracy’, ie, as a horizontal reading of sovereignty transfer—their import for the global level, in other words, is more heuristic than legalistic. Second, we make the general case for a global political ethics, by arguing that neither strict reliance on indirect accountability, in other words a limited reading of ‘subsidiarity’, nor simply granting ‘supremacy’ to international law, can ‘buy’ legitimacy at the global level. Third, we review the story of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in this light by focusing on both the illusion from below—technical expertise—and the illusion from above—constitutionalisation—that have underpinned their fifty-year history. We deal with these illusions by turning to architectural reform and its limits, before, finally, suggesting the outlines of the kind of transnational ethics we have in mind.
Source Publication
The Shifting Allocation of Authority in International Law: Considering Sovereignty, Supremacy and Subsidiarity: Essays in Honour of Professor Ruth Lapidoth
Source Editors/Authors
Tomer Broude, Yuval Shany
Publication Date
2008
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L. and Nicolaïdis, Kalypso, "Democracy Without Sovereignty: The Global Vocation of Political Ethics" (2008). Faculty Chapters. 862.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/862
