Page 238 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

224 Globalization and Democracy

forums and legislative bodies ” (Habermas, 1996 : 136). He sees social
movements in civil society which distil and transmit problems in an ampli-

fied form to the public sphere as especially important in these forms of
communication.
Habermas ’ s original understanding of the public sphere, and its subse-
quent development, was based on “ methodological nationalism ” : it was
developed entirely within the framework of the nation - state. Can delibera-
tive democracy be scaled up to make sense of the democratizing activities
of social movements in global civil society? Nancy Fraser has suggested
that if deliberative democracy is to make a contribution to democratizing
globalization, a global sphere must be institutionalized in such a way that
it fulfils two main conditions. First, it must enable democratic discussion

between “ all affected ” by a particular issue. Second, it must have political
efficacy. At the national level, the public sphere is effective to the extent

that it communicates the issues and principles agreed upon in wide -
ranging discussion across different sites in the media into formal, proce-
dural political channels. The practical work of translation is done,
according to Habermas, by the media, but also by national elections,
opinion polls, and referenda. In this way, principles agreed upon by “ all
affected ” are translated into concrete policies and laws (Fraser, 2007 ).
Although talk of a global public sphere is quite common now in discus-

sions of globalization and democracy, it is extremely difficult to imagine
either of these conditions becoming a reality at the global level. First, there

is the difficulty of unifying discussion across territorial borders. In fact,
within territorial borders, media audiences are increasingly dispersed and
fragmented in comparison with nation - wide audiences previously formed
in relation to a handful of newspapers and TV and radio broadcasters,
which were often dominated by a single national public broadcasting
system. Satellite broadcasting does make it possible for the world to see
and hear the same events at the same time. Global media events, like the
release of Nelson Mandela from Robbens Island and the terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center in New York, are broadcast live on news
channels around the world, interrupting mainstream programming and
creating, for a brief period, a unity amongst TV and radio audiences (see
Dayan and Katz, 1992 ; Couldry, 2003 ). There are surely also debates
going on at various times about the same events around the world; there
is no doubt that the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq by the US and its
allies has been talked about everywhere. There is even some interest in
the media in translating how events are interpreted in different ways
across different settings; the meaning of the election of Barack Obama
for Americans, and also for people in Britain and around the world was