2119 – The Year Global Democracy Will Be Realized By Leif Lewin

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion … Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.⁴

That the league itself should be democratically structured was in the air. The most radical proposers maintained that divisive issues should be taken out of the hands of the nation-states and instead made the responsibility of a world government and of an international parliament. The latter body, it was argued, would serve far better in this regard than the various national powers—and better than the compromised great powers, in particular—had done. The principle of the equal worth of all individuals applied at the global level, too: democratic self-government on a planetary scale was therefore an imperative.⁵ Although this idea has ever met, as mentioned, with far-reaching skepticism, it lives on to this day; indeed, its proponents contend that globalization has made the idea of a democratic world order timelier than ever. David Held, to mention one of the idea’s most indefatigable champions, argues that humanity’s common problems need to be tackled through a combination of centralization and decentralization. On the one hand, centralization is needed in order to ensure the inclusion and fair treatment of all people. Yet on the other hand, decentralization is also necessary in order to maximize each person’s opportunity to influence the social conditions that shape his or her life. Held has proposed a system of global citizenship on the grounds that all human beings are in a fundamental sense equal, and so deserve equal political treatment “irrespective of the community in which they were born or brought up.”⁶

Democracy is not, it bears noting, the same thing as democratization. The latter, namely, is a process. It starts with the guarantee to all citizens of the most fundamental rights (such as equality before the law)