Slow theory: Taking time over transnational democratic representation

Ethics and Global Politics

Volumn 4, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 1-18

  Saward, Michael ^a  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Democracy and representation; Slow movement; Slow politics; Slow theory; Transnational representation

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955970314     PISSN: 16544951     EISSN: 16546369     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3402/egp.v4i1.6416     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. J. Dryzek, A. Bachtiger, and K. Milewicz. 'Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens' Assembly', Global Policy 2, no. 1 (2011), 33-42.
2. Note in particular that I do not try to make this sketch fit into anything so grand as a theory of 'global democracy' that, like any such theory, would require at a minimum an account of rights and their constitutionalisation, a conception of citizenship, an account of justification and of institutions that follow from that justification.
3. R. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) remains, arguably, the all-round best offering of a theory of democracy in this full respect.
4. M. Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
5. See http://www.mkgallery.org/exhibitions/andrew_cross/.
6. VIA has no accompanying publication but for a comparable work, see A. Cross, An English Journey (London: Film and Video Umbrella and the John Hansard Gallery; accompanied by DVD '3 Hours from Here', accessed 10 February 2011.
7. H. Rosa and W.E. Scheuerman, eds., High-Speed Society (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).
8. Democratic theory is clearly one area of work within the larger category of political theory. A number of the following comments may apply to the broader category, but since my immediate concern is to develop theoretical tools to illuminate issues of democracy in transnational spaces I confine my claims to that area.
9. See G. Andrews, The Slow Food Story (London: Pluto Press, 2008).
10. Compare N. Gane, 'Speed Up or Slow Down: Social Theory in the Information Age', Information, Communication and Society 9, no. 1 (2006), 20-38.
11. F. Schaffer, Democracy in Translation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
12. J. Paley, 'Toward an Anthropology of Democracy', Annual Review of Anthropology 31, (2002), 469-496.
13. Research subjects may be regarded as co-creators in two broad senses: (1) their influence on theoretical perspectives can be acknowledged, and (2) they can be brought into the research processes as collaborators.
14. Latour reminds us that it is not only human actors but other living creatures and 'things' that may form a part of politically considerable 'assemblages'. See B. Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public', in Making Things Public, eds. B. Latour and P. Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 4-31.
15. D. Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988), 575-599.
16. M. Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
17. A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1956).
18. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
19. D. McIvor, 'The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity', Polity 43, no. 1 (2011), 58-83.
20. H. Rosa, 'Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society', in High-Speed Society, eds, 77-122.
21. Rosa and Scheuerman;W. Scheuerman, 'Citizenship and Speed', in High-Speed Society, eds. Rosa and Scheuerman, 287-306.
22. J.S. Fishkin and R.C. Luskin, 'The Quest for Deliberative Democracy', in Democratic Innovation, ed. M. Saward (London: Routledge, 2000), 17-28.
23. A. Gutmann and D. Thompson, 'Democratic Disagreement', in Deliberative Politics, ed. S. Macedo (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 243-280.
24. D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
25. I.M. Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 267.
26. P. Sloterdijk and G. Mueller von der Haegen, 'Instant Democracy: The Pneumatic Parliament®', in Making Things Public, eds. B. Latour and P. Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 952-957.
27. See C. Geertz, Available Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
28. The implied speeds of fast theory can be gleaned, for example, in the way that Held's Democracy and the Global Order has no index entries for Brazil, China, or India. There is no discussion of language or indigeneity as crucial facilitators or exemplars of difference. It is reasonable to ask what assumptions about (what we might call) sufficient global sameness underpin such work. Who-what type of person, speaking what kinds of language, with what sorts of values can be said to be (sufficiently) part already of a 'global order'?.
29. N.S. Mauthner and A. Doucet, ' "Knowledge Once Divided Can Be Hard to Put Together Again": An Epistemological Critique of Collaborative and Team-based Research Practices'. Sociology 42, no. 5 (2008), 971-985.
30. Q. Skinner, 'The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics', Political Theory 1, no. 3 (1973), 287-306.
31. K. Shaw, 'Whose Knowledge for What Politics?' in Review of International Studies (2003), 119-221, at 210.
32. Paley, 'Towards an Anthropology of Democracy', 471-74.
33. This perspective provides a further reason to prefer the term 'transnational', which refers not to global or even international, but is a more flexible notion referring to practice or action 'across nations'.
34. A. Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009).
35. Saward, The Representative Claim.
36. M.E. Keck, 'Governance Regimes and the Politics of Discursive Representation,' in Transnational Activism in Asia, eds. N. Piper and A. Uhlin (London: Routledge, 2004), 43-60.
37. C. Gould, 'Structuring Global Democracy: Political Communities, Universal Human Rights, and Transnational Representation', Metaphilosophy 40, no. 1 (2009), 24-41.
38. S. Tormey, 'Not in My Name': Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation', Parliamentary Affairs 59, no. 1 (2006), 138-154.
39. Recent analyses of accountability in global or transnational politics feature: R.W. Grant and R.O. Keohane, 'Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics', American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005), 29-43.
40. J. Rubenstein, 'Accountability in an Unequal World', Journal of Politics 69, no. 3 (2007), 616-632.
41. And L. Montanaro, 'The Democratic Potential of Self-Authorized Representatives', American Political Science Association Annual Conference (2008).
42. Each offers a valuable discussion of potential new approaches to the issue. However, the focus is on organizations or groups with distinct memberships or constituencies, downgrading questions of constituency-creation by representative claimants or their supporters (though Montanaro is a partial exception). Issues of representation as selective portrayal and struggles over visibility-crucial both to claims and identifying possible new constituencies (see Saward, The Representative Claim) are largely set aside, leading, for example, to a lack of attention to crucial claims around religion and indigeneity. This work seeks to model dilemmas and sketch taxonomic answers rather than explore the dynamics over time of the fate of representative claims. Even asking, for example, 'who is the accountability-holder?' is to look to an ordered snap-shot world of conceptually clear roles in order to proceed with taxonomic analysis-rather than asking what claims may give rise to demands for accountability and how do these change over time?.
43. This is not to deny that the dynamics of representative claim-making are also evident outside the state within nation-states (in civil society).
44. See, for example, R. Dahl, 'Can International Organizations be Democratic? A Sceptic's View', in Democracy's Edges, eds. I. Shapiro and C. Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19-36.
45. And A. Rehfeld, 'Towards a General Theory of Political Representation', The Journal of Politics 68, no. 1 (2006), 1-21.
46. M. Castells, 'Global Governance and Global Politics', PS, January (2005): 11, 13.
47. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 255.
48. The appropriate constituency consists of those people who are spoken to and spoken about by the claimant, plus those who recognize their interests as being invoked in the claim. The membership of these two groups may be distinct or it may overlap.
49. There may be a case for arguing that a bias on the observer's part towards express consent rather than assumed silent or otherwise passive forms is appropriate. This case would be based on the fact that people may be conditioned or socialised into acceptance of, for example, representative claims due to lack of educational opportunity or independent sources of information. This point reinforces the importance of considering the conditions under which members of appropriate constituencies make judgements of claims for and about them.
50. J.J. Mansbridge, 'Rethinking Representation', American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (2003), 515-528.
51. R.E. Goodin, 'Global Democracy: In the Beginning', International Theory 2, no. 2 (2010), 175-209.
52. Gould writes: 'I think that it is faulty to seek such a global demos and globalized public sphere, and that it is an impoverished view of transnational democracy that would see it as entailing a world government replacing all smaller forms of associations. In fact, I would suggest that the emerging multiplicity of transnational public spheres and their overlapping nature might actually make possible a richer, and potentially more democratic, form of transnational association'.
53. See Gould, 'Structuring Global Democracy', 25.
54. Held, Democracy and the Global Order.
55. J.S. Dryzek and S. Niemeyer, 'Discursive Representation', American Political Science Review 102, no. 4.
56. D. Castiglione and M. Warren, The New Ecology of Democratic Representation (University of Exeter, 2009).
57. J. Bohman, 'Introducing Democracy Across Borders: From Demos to Demoi', Ethics and Global Politics 3, no. 1 (2010).
58. Dryzek and Niemeyer, 'Discursive Representation', 482.
59. Bohman seeks 'to redefine democracy so as to make it appropriate to transnational settings'. He seeks to define a new 'democratic minimum' that enables a description of a new form of 'transnational democratic order' based in part around the idea of multiple demoi rather than a single demos. This is a traditional take on democratic theorising creating the ideal feasible model and then seeking out its institutional counterparts with a new transnational twist. Bohman, 'Introducing Democracy Across Borders'.
60. Castiglione and Warren note the inadequacy of traditional models of representation in the 'new ecology of democratic representation', including the challenges of dealing with nonterritorial, transnational, and non-electoral representative claims. They rightly also note that we need 'ways of judging the democratic credentials of representative claims' (The New Ecology of Democratic Representation, 2009, 14). Focusing on this aspect of their work, they stress the importance of accountability where more conventional electoral authorisation is lacking.
61. Acceptance also has the advantage of being more clearly temporally continuous rather than episodic and is not wedded to a notion of more or less fully constituted groups.
62. J. Rosenau, 'Governance in a Globalizing World', in The Global Transformations Reader, eds. D. Held and A. McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
63. The approach to transnational democratic representation that I have outlined has something in common with the efforts of Bray to set out a 'pragmatic cosmopolitan' alternative to the cosmopolitan and deliberative approaches associated with Held and Dryzek respectively.
64. See D. Bray, 'Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism: A Deweyan Approach to Democracy Beyond the Nation-State', Millennium 37 (2009), 679-715.