Democracy Beyond the State: The European Dilemma and the Emerging Global Order

Paper prepared for the Carnegie Council by Louis Pauly, February 2000.

Abstract

States and citizens within the European Union are now far along in a vast experiment involving an attempt to use the dynamism of market-capitalism to secure fundamental social and political objectives. Those states began that experiment as democracies. A key question for the imminent future is whether their citizens will find themselves still in democratic systems if that experiment succeeds. Such a question also faces the citizens of democratic states outside of Europe as they are now embarked on their own not dissimilar attempts to reap the economic gains associated with the world-wide spread of a decentralized form of capitalism, a form now conventionally evinced by the word "globalization." We therefore set out consciously to place the European case into a broader theoretical and empirical context. In particular, we compare the contemporary European dilemma with an incipient democratic dilemma in North America.