In his thought-provoking chapter David Held argues that we need to rethink our traditional, state-centric understanding of democracy in a more cosmopolitan direction because the forces of globalization are gradually eroding the territorial, Westphalian conceptualization of political community upon which it is based. I agree with Held on both counts. However, I think he does not emphasize sufficiently the role that the institution of sovereignty will play in channeling the impact of globalization, creating path-dependencies which raise both empirical and normative questions about the possibility of cosmopolitan democracy. If a non-territorial democracy does evolve, for the forseeable future it seems much more likely to be a democracy of states than of individuals, an “international” rather than “cosmopolitan” democracy, and this might even be normatively acceptable in a way that an analogous democracy at the domestic level based on groups is not.

I have divided my remarks into two parts, focusing first on how we get from the here of a world of sovereign states to the there of a nonterritorial democracy, and then on some normative issues that arise when we get there.

From here to there

Held's chapter, and the book on which it builds (Held 1995), offers a strong and nuanced account of the many forces in the late twentieth century that are eroding purely territorial conceptions of political community and creating transnational “communities of fate.” However, saying that national conceptions of community are being eroded by globalization is not the same thing as saying that transnational ones are being created.