| Chapter 1: | The Domestic Analogy |
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finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgement and a ground for action … Every political thinker who wishes to make an appeal to his contemporaries is consciously or unconsciously led to posit a finite goal.11
It is important, however, to be attentive to how concepts are used. Thus Keohane, the pragmatist, does not refer to himself as a realist. On the contrary, he has made his academic career by criticizing the realist school in international relations. On the one hand, adherents of (modern) pragmatism and of (classical) democracy respectively disagree on whether electoral accountability ought to be replaced by something more flexible. On the other, realists confront idealists on the question whether interests or ideas are the driving force in world politics. Champions of global democracy are all idealists. But pragmatists can be either idealists or realists.12
For me, then, the “finite goal” is the institution, at the level of the planet as a whole, of a type of democracy resembling that found today within the nation-state. Removing from the concept of democracy the right of the people to hold the governors to account drains the word of its normative charge. Those who seek to do so fail to understand “the impossibility of being a … realist.” To abandon the original purpose of a concept is to alter its content. Giovanni Sartori has pinpointed the matter: “Now, to change a word is not simply to change a word: it changes meaning.”13 Abandoning the domestic analogy means abandoning the democratic tradition itself.
The most common pragmatic proposals involve arrangements of the following kind (see table 1).
I do not regard these proposals as irrelevant. But if the sole focus is on the pragmatic and on the short term, one risks losing sight of the original vision of accountability on a global scale. Certain crucial questions for the long term may be overshadowed.