Transnational Democracy in Critical and Comparative Perspective: Democracy's Range Reconsidered

This title was first published in 2003.This text brings together two themes of enormous current intellectual and emotional impact: democracy and its institutional forms and the globalization of economic, social and cultural affairs. The volume pursues the meaning of transnational democracy through an examination of the sources of novel democratic potential at multiple levels, from the local to the global. To a very great extent, this task depends upon a critical analysis of state and nation formation, state-level democratization and transnational social movement emergence. In engaging these complex issues, the authors find themselves drawn into intellectual and geographic territories as diverse as European institutional and intellectual history, North American and European trade agreements, Canadian constitutionalism, African state-society relations and debates regarding the democratic peace. While the coverage is global in its attention to transnational institutions and international non-governmental organizations for instance, it is also genuinely regional, as it seeks out - and critically assesses - the potential building blocks for a more appropriately democratic future in the varied forms that the institutionalization of globalization assumes around the world.