Reconsidering Democracy in the Context of Globalization: A Comparative Examination of Held’s Liberal-Democratic

Abstract: The cluster of phenomena designated by the term “globalization ” brings about challenges to our previous conceptions of democracy. For, both practices and theories of democracy up to very recent decades have assumed to have a territorial and institutional basis anchored to the nation-states, while the current process of globalization seems undermining the nation-states. Hence, if democracy will be a viable idea in our age, it should be re-considered by taking account of the fact that our historical reality forces us to incorporate a transnational dimension to democracy to a degree non-witnessed in the previous human history. Likewise, we witness the emergence of “theories of transnational democracy ” in the contemporary literature. Inspired by Anthony McGrew’s categorization, I think that there are two basic versions of theories of transnational democracy. These are transnational republicanism and cosmopolitan liberal-democracy. The former is a “bottom-up ” theory of democratization linked to the older tradition of civic republicanism, while the latter emphasizes the institutional conditions of democracy and highlights the vital importance of the rule of law and constitutionalism rather than direct political participation. In this paper, I wil