Governing Globalization : Challenges for Democracy and Global Society

If the global society is to survive and thrive, the world’s populations must determine how they will govern their accumulating interdependencies across all areas of human concern. This book advances a theory of governance for democratic societies, based on the competing power structures of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy.

The expanding interdependencies of the world’s diverse and divided populations have created a world society. To rule these fractious peoples, the democracies advance solutions to three imperatives of governance—Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). For Order, the democracies institutionalized the global state; for Welfare, a global market system; and for Legitimacy, popular rule, resting on the moral principles of the freedom and equality of all humans. The book develops globalization as the emergence of a global society; presents a theory of governance predicable of all human societies, revolving around competing OWL imperatives; and identifies fundamental flaws in the democratic solutions to global governance. To ensure that the democratic promise survives and thrives, the volume calls for fundamental reforms of the democratic project as prerequisites to deter and defeat formidable anti-democratic adversaries: authoritarian states, religiously informed regimes opposed to open societies; nihilistic social movements; self-styled terrorists, and vast transnational criminal networks. Either the democracies hang together or they hang separately.