Page 236 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

222 Globalization and Democracy

political agenda through a variety of interventions including popularizing

scientifi c findings, UN conferences, widespread publicity in the mass
media and on the Internet, and global demonstrations, including the Live
Earth concert in 2007. He sees the way in which climate change has now
become a major policy issue for governments across the world as “ policy
changes as a result of changes in the public mind ” (Castells, 2009 : 334).
Although the democratic principles of deliberative globalization are rarely
spelled out except by political theorists, they clearly underpin claims of
this kind: democratizing globalization involves global social movements
stimulating public debate across global civil society, and then NGOs
translate principles agreed upon there into pressure on IGOs.
Deliberative democracy involves the justification of decisions taken by

citizens together with their representatives. Decisions should be univer-

salizable; they can be justified only by reasons that could not reasonably
be refused by anyone seeking fair terms of cooperation. It is not accept-

able that elites should themselves invent justifications for their decisions,
as this might well involve nothing more than the rationalization of injus-
tice. Deliberative democracy must be dialogical: “ all affected ” by a par-
ticular decision should be involved in the discussion of whether laws and
policies truly do recognize the issues that are at stake for everyone. In this
sense, deliberative democracy is both procedural and substantive. It is

procedural in that it specifies how legitimate decisions are to be reached:
in addition to aggregative dimensions of democracy (principally the
adding up of individuals who are in favor of a particular program or
policy that characterizes voting for political parties), “ all affected ” must
be able to engage in discussion of universalizable decisions as free and
equal individuals. Deliberative democracy is also substantive in that con-
ditions must be created so that individuals can genuinely participate and
reach consensus in this way. To some extent, deliberative democrats share
agonists ’ suspicion of consensus: it is only where the better argument has
prevailed, rather than the formation of public opinion by bribery or
threats, that agreement is genuinely democratic (see Benhabib, 1996 ;
Gutman and Thompson, 2004 ; Bohman, 2007 ).
The organizational form through which deliberative democracy is insti-
tutionalized is the public sphere. Habermas ’ s work on the public sphere
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the inspiration for ideals of
deliberative democracy. In The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere , he argued that the societies and clubs set up in London and else-
where in Western Europe at that time provided social spaces for the
rational criticism of state practices by informed outsiders. They nurtured
the ideal of the public sphere – never fully realized – that free and equal