The literature on deliberative democracy has recently taken a welcome pragmatic turn, exploring how conceptions of normatively ideal deliberation might inform macro-level institutional design in order to incrementally improve the quality and democratic credentials of political deliberation (Dryzek Reference Dryzek2008; Parkinson and Mansbridge Reference Parkinson and Mansbridge2012; Kuyper Reference Kuyper2014a, Reference Kuyperb, Reference Kuyper2015). This more pragmatic ‘deliberative systems’ approach holds out considerable promise for thinking about global governance.
However, the task of normatively-informed institutional reform is more complex than it appears at first sight. There is reasonable consensus on what ideal deliberation should entail but the vision is demanding (Habermas Reference Habermas1987; Cohen Reference Cohen1989; Chambers Reference Chambers1995; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010). There are tensions between different aspects of deliberation and a variety of ways in which real-world debate might deviate from the ideal. Institutional reforms designed to remedy particular defects may improve some aspects of deliberation whilst impairing others. I argue that, if we are to advance the project of the incremental deliberative democratization of global governance, we need to face the resulting tensions and make trade-offs between different normative preferences explicitly in the context of what is politically feasible.
I particularly highlight a neglected problem with existing institutions of global governance springing from the fragmentation of global policy-making into separate functional issue areas, each governed by its own institution or regime complex (one regime for trade, another for finance, others for labour and the environment). The dominant approach to global deliberation tends to see this fragmentation as positive for cosmopolitan (functional, rather than territorial organization unsettles state centrism) and republican reasons (multiple institutions reduce the danger of global domination) (Bohman Reference Bohman2004, Reference Bohman2007; Fraser Reference Fraser2014). However, I argue that functional fragmentation can alter deliberation by isolating technocratic issue-oriented framings of problems from more holistic public debate. Resulting decisions may suffer from epistemic defects and impaired political legitimacy. Epistemically, if trade policy (for example) is treated as a stand-alone technical issue, there is a risk that the externalities trade decisions have for labour, environment, or development policy will be systematically undervalued. Politically, isolating decisions into ‘technical’ silos may make it more difficult to connect up debate with legitimate public concerns in ways that increase public confidence in the responsiveness of political institutions.
There are analogous problems at state level where technical debate takes place amongst isolated arms of the domestic executive. However, these problems can partially be mitigated by the legislature, which exposes executive decisions to more holistic debate and provides a channel for the public to raise political and normative concerns springing from ‘technical’ decisions (Habermas Reference Habermas1996). There is no obvious counterpart to the legislature at the international level, yet the impact that absence may have for the social integration of ‘technical’ global decisions has not been sufficiently discussed in the literature on global democracy.Footnote 1
Indeed, the dominant cosmopolitan–republican perspective on global democratization has tended to see functional fragmentation as actively positive because of its promise to unsettle irrational nationalism without resorting to a potentially dominating world state. However, there is a risk that institutional design driven by these considerations may swing too far in the direction of using technical agreement to overcome state rivalry, making it more difficult to articulate difference and forge connections between elite debate and the more holistic concerns of the public sphere. The potential for this kind of trade-off is why it is so important to be aware of the delicate balance between different aspects of the deliberative ideal, which need to be held in tension.
The paper begins by introducing the deliberative systems approach, with particular emphasis on the way it highlights tensions within the deliberative ideal. I then turn to a review of the emergent literature on deliberative global governance to highlight the promise of the deliberative systems approach and draw out the ways in which cosmopolitan and republican preferences have encouraged enthusiasm for functional fragmentation. In the central part of the paper, I make the case for the risks of functional fragmentation, drawing on a combination of Jürgen Habermas’s theory and some examples from global economic governance. I conclude with a brief indication of how different institutional arrangements might seek a better balance between cosmopolitanism, republicanism and the need for the social integration of functionally fragmented decisions.
Incremental ‘deliberative systems’ reform and tensions within the deliberative ideal
The pragmatic ‘systems’ turn in the deliberative democracy literature is a response to the most prominent critique of the deliberative paradigm, which is that its normative content is too demanding to have practical political purchase.Footnote 2 This criticism is perhaps unfair to the extent that deliberative democrats are engaged in ideal normative theory. Nonetheless, if (as most scholars argue) democratic deliberation is to be a ‘regulative ideal’ – one that guides real-world critique and practice – it is reasonable to ask how exactly the deliberative ideal is to relate to practical projects.
The deliberative systems approach takes up the challenge of practical relevance by attempting to reduce the demands on particular deliberators or institutional venues. Systems theorists suggest a division of deliberative labour across a range of institutions which, together, form a deliberative system that can approximate the deliberative ideal (Parkinson and Mansbridge Reference Parkinson and Mansbridge2012). This deliberative systems approach opens the way to a more pragmatic, incremental conception of deliberative democratization across a deliberative system. Rather than hoping to leap to ideal deliberation, we might pursue incremental institutional reforms that gradually remedy deliberative defects in the system as a whole, guided by the deliberative ideal (De Burca Reference De Burca2008; Kuyper Reference Kuyper2014b, Reference Kuyper2015).
The systems approach encourages us to unpick the different elements of the deliberative ideal. In doing so, it divides up the highly demanding tasks of ideal deliberation into more plausible elements. However, it also raises questions about how the different elements of deliberation might fit together normatively and institutionally (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012). In what follows, I highlight two tensions that are central to the deliberative literature and an important part of what is at stake when I discuss functional fragmentation later in the paper.
First, the deliberative literature brings together two opposed normative ‘moments’: one rational-integrative and the other inclusive-agonistic. The integrative pole presses the case for reaching agreement through sustained processes of mutual justification that alter preferences as individual desires confront one another, whilst seeking some kind of ‘common good’. Here deliberative democrats argue against an overly competitive view of democracy as political struggle between permanently incompatible interests, dealt with through aggregative or majoritarian procedures (Gutman and Thompson Reference Gutman and Thompson2004; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010). They seek, as far as possible, to hold open the possibility that rational debate can produce something more genuinely inclusive. Deliberation’s agonistic pole, though, is concerned about majoritarian institutions precisely because they threaten to create integrative ‘solutions’ that do not work hard enough to identify differing perspectives and interests before reaching a ‘decision’. Apparent consensus may reflect dominant framings of the ‘problem’ that must be unsettled by the inclusion of less powerful actors, to ensure deliberation is genuinely democratic. This may require interventions that sit uncomfortably with traditional conceptions of ‘rational’ debate (story-telling, explicit reference to feelings and emotions, etc.) (Young Reference Young2002; Bächtiger et al. Reference Bächtiger, Niemeyer, Neblo, Steenbergen and Steiner2010). The process of deliberation is about identifying, expressing, and clarifying differences as well as about seeking consensual solutions. Whilst these two poles are not necessarily contradictory, there is obvious tension between them and they need to be kept in careful balance.Footnote 3
Second, there is a related practical tension between the aim of fully rational deliberation and that of broad-based public legitimation. Research that seeks to create ideal deliberative fora has tended to conclude that good deliberation requires a small scale. Much attention has been devoted to ‘minipublics’ in which randomly or representatively sampled groups of citizens stand in for the wider demos during intensive deliberation. Minipublics are attractive because they encourage ordinary citizens to become informed about an issue and debate it deliberatively, engaging their ‘best’ (most rational and collectively oriented) selves in decision-making.Footnote 4 However, (sampling aside) deliberation may not produce outcomes that the broader public has good reason to accept, precisely because the process of deliberation changes participants (by providing new information, giving them new expertise and requiring them to integrate different perspectives and achieve compromise) (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012; Lafont Reference Lafont2015). There may be a tension between seeking to engineer technically ‘ideal’ deliberation on the one hand and creating the broad-based legitimacy that comes from shared public reasons on the other.
Deliberative systems advocates have argued that the systems approach can help with these tensions, making the deliberative enterprise more plausible. So, for example, Kuyper argues that ‘representatives’ within a deliberative system may be held to different normative expectations, depending on their role in that system. Interest groups engaged in public debate need to be truthful and respectful but not necessarily non-partisan and oriented to the common good, so long as the system as a whole ensures decisions made fulfil the latter criteria. Interest groups developing partisan positions may assist the agonistic-inclusive aspect of deliberation (by helping actors with a particular identity or interest to articulate what public questions mean from their perspective); while the decision-making body towards which interest group activity is directed needs to be structured to ensure the rational-integrative side of the deliberative ideal (reconciling these different preferences and views, as far as possible, in a form of common life that offers equal consideration to all) (Kuyper Reference Kuyper2016).
However, whilst one can imagine institutions working together in this way, designing institutions that actually succeed in doing so presents considerable challenges. Indeed, in some ways, the deliberative systems approach displaces demands from individual actors onto institutional design (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012). How can institutions be related to one another so that the different elements of deliberation are given appropriate weight? Bohman calls for ‘a variety of overlapping and mutually checking procedures, each formulated according to its contribution to the division of decision-making and epistemic labour with the deliberative system as a whole’ (Reference Bohman2012) but as Parkinson notes, that solution is ‘underspecified as it stands’ (Reference Parkinson2012). How do we know how much weight different kinds of deliberative input have had in producing overall outcomes? Hoping that competition will filter for the best argument seems naïve in non-ideal contexts contaminated by power. In contrast, relying on a final site of decision-making that is structured democratically and informed by diverse deliberation displaces problems onto the final decision-makers (how do we know they appropriately weighted the diverse deliberative inputs, rather than privileging local over cosmopolitan perspectives or elites over more ‘grounded’ public opinion?) (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012).
In the context of a pragmatic incremental approach to deliberative democratization (De Burca Reference De Burca2008; Dryzek Reference Dryzek2008; Kuyper Reference Kuyper2014a, Reference Kuyperb), these are design challenges rather than fatal flaws. The aim is not to craft the perfect institution, rather to remedy as many defects in current deliberation as possible, in an ongoing iterative process of institutional design. There are limits to what can be achieved, so we can expect results to compromise the deliberative ideal to some degree. Rather than detracting from faith in the deliberative ideal, pointing up tensions within it facilitates a clear-eyed attention to the compromises that will need to be made in order to realize it as effectively as possible. So, when crafting institutions that encourage debate oriented toward the common good, it is important to do so in a way that does not close down difference. Equally, some balance needs to be struck between technically sophisticated, arduous, deliberation, and public inclusion. The literature now needs to shift the focus from advocating the potential of the systems approach to pragmatic questions about institutional design as we approach the limits of what can be resolved and need to make hard choices between available second-best options.
Deliberative systems and the new global governance
Pragmatic, incremental versions of the deliberative systems approach hold out considerable promise for thinking about democratizing our increasingly significant and complex institutions of global governance.
As global regulation has expanded to cover a wider range of issues, including many that extend to ‘behind the border’ domestic regulation (Rosenau Reference Rosenau1992; Braithwaite and Drahos Reference Braithwaite and Drahos2000; Zürn Reference Zürn2004; Drezner Reference Drezner2007; Kuo Reference Kuo2008), the need for democratic legitimation has grown (Zürn et al. Reference Zürn, Binder and Ecker-Ehrhardt2012). At the same time, the level and complexity of interactions between different institutions has grown. Global governance has always had a ‘systemic’ character (in the sense used in the deliberative systems literature). Global institutions have always had to rely on states for implementation and enforcement, leading to complex interactions between domestic and global politics (Baker Reference Baker1999; Hameiri and Jones Reference Hameiri and Jones2015) but the complexity of interactions is increasing. Alongside formal inter-state negotiations, regulation is also now produced by multiple overlapping technical committees derived from diverse parts of the domestic executive, the private sector, or some combination of the two (Cutler et al. Reference Cutler, Haufler and Porter1999; Slaughter Reference Slaughter2005; Torres Perez Reference Thirkell-White2006). The rules produced are sometimes formally accepted in treaties but are more often soft-law, relying on adoption by states, incentivized on the basis of normative/epistemic authority or their ability to provide a focal point for coordination (Abbott and Snidal Reference Abbott and Snidal2000).
The growing complexity and openness of this institutional environment offers some potential for deliberative democratic reform (Steffek Reference Steffek2003; Germain Reference Germain2005; Bäckstrand Reference Bäckstrand2006; Baker Reference Baker2009; Erman and Higgott Reference Erman and Higgott2010; Germain Reference Germain2012) but also presents difficulties.
The relative absence of formal hierarchy in global governance means governance can only take place through some level of persuasion (and therefore response to criticism). Institutions’ requirement for legitimacy should create a concern to develop persuasive justifications and democratic deliberation provides a means to do so (Steffek Reference Steffek2003). Transparency of deliberation can incrementally improve institutions’ democratic credentials (Nanz and Steffek Reference Nanz and Steffek2004). Publicity tends to require justifications addressed to a wide audience, employing reason and argument rather than coercion. Public justifications involve claims that institutional decisions serve the common good and thus establish a kind of discursive accountability (Germain Reference Germain2004). Claims to provide universal benefit are inherently open to challenge from groups excluded or disadvantaged by policy choices: public justifications are only effective to the extent that they can be publicly redeemed in the face of criticism, through reasoned justification.Footnote 5 Transparency and publicity of deliberation within institutions (the ‘strong’ public sphere), then, begins to provide an opening for external public debate, deliberation and scrutiny in the ‘weak’ public sphere constituted by individuals, civil society organizations, academia, and media. There are signs that growing pressure for legitimation is already encouraging institutions to become (somewhat) more transparent and open to public debate and civil society input, facilitating these kinds of dynamics (Steffek Reference Steffek2003; Germain Reference Germain2005; Bäckstrand Reference Bäckstrand2006; De Burca Reference De Burca2008; Baker Reference Baker2009; Erman and Higgott Reference Erman and Higgott2010; Germain Reference Germain2012; Zürn et al. 2012).
However, the complexity of contemporary networked global governance raises difficult questions about how the inputs of different actors can be organized in ways that approximate the deliberative ideal. Transparency and openness are necessary but not sufficient conditions for democratic deliberation. In non-ideal circumstances, actors often need more incentive to respond to deliberative input than purely the power of better arguments (Bächtiger et al. Reference Bächtiger, Niemeyer, Neblo, Steenbergen and Steiner2010; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010; Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012).
From a democratic perspective, the most powerful citizen lever currently is to cut-off state cooperation through domestic veto, sometimes coordinated across jurisdictions. Greater publicity and transparency facilitate contestation and contestation provides some bite to deliberative accountability. However, contestation and resistance relate to deliberation imperfectly. In an ideal world, potential resistance might encourage institutions to deliberate more inclusively to head off challenges. However, contestation is more likely to lead to gridlock, limiting the provision of global public goods. It also encourages exercises of power rather than persuasion and, to the extent that domestic ratification is the most promising site for resistance, may work against cosmopolitanism.Footnote 6
It would be preferable to design institutions that underpin deliberative accountability in a more functional way, so that global publics could democratically influence the decision-making process itself. In addition to the democratic advantages, there are potential political pay-offs as institutions leverage their legitimacy to enhance their effectiveness.
How we might move beyond publicity and transparency in an attempt to do so is the primary challenge. It is clear that reforms will involve some combination of opening up the ‘strong’ public sphere of decision-making to a wider range of actors and/or strengthening the transmission belt between the decision-making ‘strong’ public sphere and the external ‘weak’ public sphere.Footnote 7 However, there are a very large variety of institutional ways in which these goals might be pursued.
Cosmopolitan republicanism and functional fragmentation
In looking at goals beyond transparency and publicity, the IR literature has understandably been particularly concerned with cosmopolitanism, with attempts to mitigate the distortions to rational deliberation that spring from state-centric political organization. Given the dominating potential of anything like a global state, though, many theorists also adopt a republican preference for institutional pluralism and fragmentation to avoid concentrations of power. Republican and cosmopolitan preferences tend to come together in a call for multiple institutions, organized functionally rather than territorially (Germain Reference Germain1997; Linklater Reference Linklater1998; Dryzek Reference Dryzek2006; Bohman Reference Bohman2007; Zürn and Faude Reference Zürn and Faude2013; Fraser Reference Fraser2014). Unfortunately, as we will see, this preference points toward institutions that bring together elite decision-making and popular debate in particular ways that inadvertently encourage functional fragmentation. Later in the paper, I will argue that functional fragmentation risks the dominance of narrow technocratic perspectives on problems that link poorly with the kind of more holistic debate that takes place in weak public spheres; that it tends to favour the rational-integrative poll of deliberation over the agonistic-inclusive one and deliberative quality over public inclusion.
From a cosmopolitan perspective, multiple institutions with different functional remits can help to break the current fixation on territorially-bounded communities.Footnote 8 Cosmopolitanism is a key motivation for enhancing global governance, for both defensive and optimistic reasons. Defensively, it is a response to the perceived weakening of nation states’ ability to use public power to control transnational private interests (Fraser Reference Fraser2014)Footnote 9 and the corresponding weakening of domestic public spheres. If nation states cannot control their (particularly economic) destiny, the national public sphere’s potential for emancipation is limited. As interdependence grows, more decisions will have consequences beyond borders and there is greater need for governance that transcends the nation state.
Optimistically, the increasing globalization of political activity is seen as an opportunity to establish a more just and inclusive cosmopolitan public sphere, unimpaired by atavistic nationalism (Linklater Reference Linklater1998; Habermas Reference Habermas2001, Reference Habermas2008a, Reference Habermasb). To the extent that the primary obstacles to the provision of global public goods are entrenched state interests, institutions designed to downplay state interests may promote rational collective solutions (Slaughter Reference Slaughter2005; Steffek Reference Steffek2015). More ambitiously, we might eventually be able to expand the scope of global political action to include a greater concern with global justice (Linklater Reference Kuo1998; Fraser Reference Fraser2009).
Introducing institutions explicitly designed to manage problems at a regional or global level should, in itself, help to reframe deliberation towards an explicit acknowledgement of cross-border impacts. The existence of a global institution may stimulate global debate, global civil society and advocacy organizations, particularly if the institution is open to public input. Institutional design might further promote deliberation that is less nationally focused by limiting deliberators’ accountability to national-level politics or through recruiting technocratic representatives who share a common (transnational) technical understanding of the issues.
Cosmopolitan preferences have led some writers to propose something like a global state but most are uncomfortable with the uniformity and unconstrained power that would imply. There is therefore an important strand of republican thought (best represented by James Bohman’s work) that favours multiple institutions because they work towards freedom and non-domination and because more institutions have epistemic advantages over fewer (Bohman Reference Bohman2004, Reference Bohman2007). Similarly, Kuyper has argued that legal pluralism has democratic potential, since the existence of different fora allows the possibility of conceptualizing issues in different ways. He points to debates within the regime governing intellectual property. Developing countries were able to use arguments developed as part of World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Development Agenda to alter the balance between intellectual property rights and public health concerns, moderating the more IP-friendly focus that initially triumphed within the WTO. If there had only been one forum, Kuyper argues, this would not have been possible (Kuyper Reference Kuyper2014a).
These kinds of cosmopolitan and republican preferences are not confined to the explicitly deliberative-democratic theoretical and normative literature. The same normative concerns are reflected in an important subset of the more empirically and policy-oriented literature on global governance, most prominently Slaughter’s New World Order. The new networked governance is contrasted with Westphalian global governance, which is seen as a power struggle between narrowly self-interested nation states. Complex multi-level networked governance, by contrast, improves the cumbersome process of treaty-making, mired in power politics. Decisions are less likely to be taken by government personnel behind closed doors. Expert-dominated deliberation and private sector involvement encourage technical debate rather than power politics. Public processes create formal requirements for regulations to be justified on the basis of the public interest. Public–private interaction involves consultative processes in which comments are solicited and, often, published online, opening them to academic and media scrutiny. Soft-law regimes’ lack of coercive power means they are only enforceable where consent is achieved, encouraging rational consensus. Overall, fragmented institutions dilute power politics and encourage neutral technical deliberation in the public interest, boosting the power of the better argument.Footnote 10
Although I have considerable sympathy with both cosmopolitan and republican preferences, thinking in purely those terms risks blinding one to alternative normatively relevant considerations. State-centric thinking and the risk of global domination are both dangers to global democratic deliberation. However, when attempting to remedy those defects we risk creating new problems. Since the defining problem of global governance is seen as the fixation with national interests, it is particularly tempting to emphasize solutions toward the rational-integrative pole of the deliberative ideal at the expense of the agonistic-inclusive pole. The risk is that, in order to downplay interstate politics, institutions seek to ‘remove’ politics altogether by forging ‘technical agreement’ as a way to prevent inter-state deadlock. In doing so, they may throw out the democratic baby along with the nationalist bathwater.
Habermas and the dangers of functional fragmentation in global governance
In this section, I draw on Habermas’s writing on national-level democracyFootnote 11 to argue that functional fragmentation is a particular danger for contemporary democracy and then use examples from global economic governance to demonstrate the potential for structures of global governance to exacerbate the problem. Habermas’s account is partly interesting because it makes the substantive case about the dangers of functional fragmentation. It is also methodologically interesting in providing a sophisticated argument about how institutional design can shape the character of deliberation. For Habermas we don’t just need to ‘add’ civil society to formal elite debate. We need to do so in a way that shapes both the weak and strong public spheres and the interaction between them.
Habermas is a central inspiration for deliberative democrats, but normative theorists have tended to be more attracted to his abstract philosophical work on deliberation than to his social-theoretical writing. In the wake of the turn to deliberative systems, normative theorists increasingly note that more could be learnt from his more practical Between Facts and Norms (1996) (see, e.g., Chambers Reference Chambers2012; Erman Reference Erman2012; Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012). Habermas’s work anticipates the deliberative systems approach in explicitly addressing the division of deliberative labour across different parts of the modern democratic state. He also goes further than most deliberative systems theorists in discussing how the different sites of deliberation fit together and exploring tensions between them. His relationship to early Frankfurt School critical theory, with its concerns about technocracy and instrumental rationality, has made him more sensitive to concerns with technocratic domination than some deliberative democrats emerging from a modified liberal tradition.Footnote 12
Before moving to Habermas’s work, two caveats are in order. First, Between Facts and Norms discusses national-level democratic politics. I explore Habermas’s work to draw out the normative functions performed by domestic institutional arrangements, postponing discussion of global governance until later in the section. Second, Habermas’s concern with technocracy draws on a German sociological tradition rooted in the early Frankfurt School and German systems theory (particularly Luhman). For those coming to debates about deliberative systems from analytical philosophy, these views may seem alienating. One does not need to be a wholescale convert to Frankfurt School or systems theory, though, for the argument made to hold. All that is necessary is an appreciation that technical expertise can lead to particular framing of issues and language for debate that connects poorly to wider populations. In the context of a rising tide of populist politics that, amongst other things, rejects claims to political expertise, that should not be a difficult position to accept.
Habermas, technocratic fragmentation and instrumental rationality
Habermas’s conception of deliberative democracy shares much with the mainstream deliberative tradition discussed in the first part of the paper. He argues that rational, open, and inclusive public debate improves policy and can imbue citizens with a sense of ownership over government action and public law. However, his conception of public political deliberation has a particular twist springing from his relationship to Frankfurt School critical theory. Not only does public involvement create a sense of ownership, it alters the character of deliberation and debate, working against technocratic instrumental manipulation and toward the generation of ‘communicative power’.
He argues for:
a radical-democratic change in the process of legitimation [which] aims at a new balance between the forces of social integration so that the social-integrative power of solidarity – the ‘communicative force of production’ – can prevail over the powers of the other two control resources, ie, money and administrative power, and therewith successfully assert the practically oriented demands of the lifeworld (Habermas 1992c, 444).
What does that mean exactly? Habermas is a social theorist, concerned not simply with political power but with broader questions of how society is ordered and reproduced. For Habermas, the political system provides one kind of social integration amongst others. It comes into play when informal sources of social integration become overburdened by the complexity and fragmentation of modernity (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 318). But what kind of social integration is possible under modern conditions?
With the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity, forms of social integration were radically altered. There were emancipatory aspects to this change. Renewed faith in reason undermined old forms of domination justified through religion, heredity or ‘nature’. However, Habermas’s Frankfurt School forebears observed that new freedoms created doubts about our ability to forge agreement on the good life, while human beings’ ability to manipulate, manage, steer, and control continued to advance. The danger was that instrumental rationality, which treated nature and increasingly humans as ‘objects’ to be manipulated, would triumph, with the result that public debate would be captured by technocratic discourses of steering, efficiency, and system maintenance, excluding issues of ethics, art or the search for emancipatory change.
Much of Habermas’s intellectual energy has been devoted to developing reasons for a less pessimistic reading of Enlightenment thought (Habermas Reference Habermas1971, Reference Habermas1987). He has sought to rehabilitate a more holistic conception of ‘reason’ than means-ends rationality. For Habermas, the Enlightenment not only ushered in new forms of technical understanding but also more rational ways of thinking about ethics. Post-enlightenment ethical injunctions need to be justified through reasons in ways that are in principle universal. If we are presented with a normative injunction, we are entitled to ask ‘Why?’ and expect to receive a reasoned answer as to why norm-compliance will improve society for the benefit of all. The more people have engaged in this kind of exchange of reasoned debate over particular normative propositions, the more confident we can be in the injunction concerned. Through this normative exchange, we test and clarify reasons for compliance with normative injunctions and these reasons can then provide actors with internal motivation for social coordination. Habermas calls this form of coordination ‘communicative action’.
Habermas does not argue that all social integration can or should be carried out through communicative action, however. There is still a place for the technical social engineering that worried his Frankfurt School predecessors, which Habermas calls ‘systems steering’. The distinctive character of communicative action in Habermas’s work, and therefore the distinctive role of the public sphere, emerges most clearly in comparison with ‘systems steering’.
‘Systems’, for Habermas, are social entities that are steered on the basis of their own technical logic, rather than through communicative coordination; they operate ‘behind the back’ of agents’ active choices. The archetypal system, in this sense, is the economy. Economic coordination takes place through the price system, mediated by money, rather than through self-conscious collective social coordination.Footnote 13 To the extent that the economy requires administrative steering, we rely on experts with a particular epistemic understanding of how the economy functions, including a system-oriented language and set of intellectual tools (neoclassical economics). These experts are often conceived of as ‘technicians’, determining the appropriate means to ends that are largely decided outside the system (in economics, particularly, the overall efficiency of resource use, measured in terms of market prices).
Habermas accepts that systems are an efficient way of coordination that works more simply than the arduous process of forging agreement through communicative action. The cognitive demands placed on citizens, if they were required to master the technical requirements of the full range of state activity, would overburden their capacity to participate politically. Delegating some social integration to market steering and an administrative bureaucracy is unavoidable. However, systems-oriented forms of coordination are very much a problematic second best.
The most obvious problem is that coordination ‘behind people’s backs’ does not create the feelings of ownership and consent that are central to Habermas’s views of what makes social integration, including state power, robust. However, there is an additional problem that comes from the functional fragmentation characterizing ‘systems steering’, which is that it creates a blinkered view of particular problem spaces that tend to underplay or ignore the externalities they produce for other areas of policy or social life. Familiar critiques of neoclassical economics provide a helpful illustration particularly relevant to my argument here.
Most famously, Karl Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1957) emphasizes the extent to which conceptions of the economy as a self-contained, self-regulating system are built on a problematic fiction. Markets can only hope to behave in the manner expected of them in orthodox models in societies that have been carefully engineered to support them. The kind of social engineering involved creates social externalities that have to be resolved elsewhere in social systems. To take a simple example, standard economic models assume ‘labour’ is a commodity that can be reassigned between different firms, sectors, and geographical locations. In reality, labour is carried out by human beings who will have to readjust their self-image, lifestyle, relationships, reproductive practices, etc. to make this work. Economics only sees ‘labour’. Workers risk becoming ‘objects’ for manipulation rather than autonomous subjects with some sense of ownership over decisions that affect them.
For all its problems, the modern capitalist economy has proven to be extraordinarily good at creating certain kinds of social coordination and resource allocation. Economic reasoning, then, has its place. However it should be a tool for promoting social welfare in accordance with societies’ normative self-understanding, not an end in itself. Systems logic should not be able to escape from and dominate goals that have been agreed through communicative action and cannot do so without ultimately damaging its own legitimacy. State administration is crucially reliant on the normative resources and informal social integration provided by the informal public sphere, with its connections to holistic human lived experience. It is only in the context of the unrestricted communication of the lifeworld that society can stage sufficiently wide-ranging and expressive debate about its own self-understanding and articulate collective identity and need perceptions (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 307).
For Habermas, then, the public sphere is not just about ensuring democracy represents an inclusive range of citizens or about exposing policy to the wide-ranging critique that comes with public scrutiny. It is a place where a particular kind of debate can take place. It provides a space where fragmented ‘interests’ can be brought together into embodied human beings with a social lived experience, who can debate what kind of social life they wish to share.
Habermas and institutional design for systems integration in the contemporary nation state
In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas adopts a pragmatic position that has much resonance with the deliberative systems approach. Whilst he has a normative preference for communicative action over systems steering, he acknowledges that perfectly communicative solutions are unavailable, so systems steering has an important role to play. The issue is to craft a workable institutional balance that does its best to maximize the benefits and minimize the dangers of each form of social coordination.
The relationship between systems steering within the executive and communicative action in the public sphere involves a particularly important compromise, to balance the requirement for public inclusion with the technical complexity of modern government. How can we best maximize the influence of communicative action, without undermining the technical quality of law or overtaxing citizens’ ability to deliberate?
Anticipating the ‘systemic turn’ in the deliberative literature, Habermas’s account portrays distributed (in his terms ‘subjectless’) public deliberation as part of a complex institutional whole, in which reasonably legitimate governance emerges from interactions between a wide range of deliberative venues. Part of the story is about the channels through which relatively free-flowing debate in the public sphere can be brought to bear on austere systems-oriented deliberation in the executive. Additionally, egalitarian features of the legislature help to mitigate inequalities within the public sphere and to promote public debate that takes place on the basis of proper information and good reasons. The weak and strong public spheres thus shape one another.
The legislature is at the heart of the compromise that emerges. It acts as a place for the translation of different systems-oriented codes into ordinary language and for exposing technocratic, fragmented decision-making to the more holistic orientation of the public sphere.
the legal code not only keeps one foot in the medium of ordinary language, through which everyday communication achieves social integration in the lifeworld; it also accepts messages that originate there and puts these into a form that is comprehensible to the special codes of the power-steered administration and the money-steered economy (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 81).
The legislature provides a hinge between administrative power and the public sphere by providing a common language and an institutional venue to host the interplay between administrative decision-making and public debate. It also disciplines the public sphere, to redress inequalities and improve deliberative quality.
The public sphere’s task is, in some ways, familiar. It is a place where ‘the publicly organised contest of opinions between experts and counter-experts [is] monitored by public opinion’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 351), so that experts’ views of problems, conditioned by their orientation to particular systems, do not prevail at the citizens’ expense. However, Habermas’s ‘lifeworld’ approach pays particular attention to the public sphere’s ability to identify the social and political aspects of apparently ‘technical’ problems.
Civil society needs to ‘ferret out’, identify and thematize latent problems and feed them into the parliamentary system in a way that disrupts existing governing routines. The public sphere must then:
Amplify the pressure of problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but also convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with possible solutions, and dramatize them in such a way that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 359).
Often this will require the creation of a sense of crisis that forces the legislature to take notice of otherwise routine activities of the core administration. Perceptions of problems that take on a conflictual turn engage the attention span of the citizenry, and this is particularly effective when controversies ignite around normative aspects of policy. The result is a politicization of problems in ways that force the administrative complex to cede its ‘technical’ authority to the more publicly accountable parliamentary regime, which alone is authorized to deal with normative (as opposed to instrumental) issues. In these circumstances, the legislature uses its constitutional authority to lend political power to the public sphere.
This kind of political intervention requires informal and spontaneous organization within the public sphere. ‘The currents of public communication are channelled by mass media and flow through different publics that develop informally inside associations. Taken together, they form a ‘wild’ complex that resists organization as a whole’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 307). Some voices will therefore find it easier than others to acquire influence. However, ‘the political influence that the actors gain through public communication must ultimately rest on the resonance and indeed the approval of a lay public whose composition is egalitarian’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1996, 363–64).
Additionally, the legislature disciplines the ‘wilder’ aspects of the weak public sphere. The legislature operates as a ‘sluice’ through which social power must pass in order to be converted into administrative power. Institutions guarantee that raw social power (either populist or corporate) cannot be converted directly into administrative power. Habermas argues that the public sphere is always already damaged by unequally distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication which interfere with the neutrality of public debate. Institutions, including the discipline of universal suffrage, can partially compensate for this by creating requirements for neutral public deliberation.
Global economic governance, functional fragmentation, and technocratic dominance
Habermas’s account of state politics demonstrates the normative importance of social integration and provides us with an exemplar of how to think about its institutional relevance in systemic terms. In his account, institutional design enhances the systems-integration role of the public sphere through: the role of universal suffrage in moderating the power imbalances present within the public sphere; the legislature’s role as a place of translation between different systems perspectives; and the legislature’s ability to lend its normative power to an informal public sphere that tries to disrupt the everyday technocratic administration of the legislature with ethico-political concerns emerging from the lifeworld. However, the institutional fix is a fragile second-best, embodying a kind of productive tension between the public and administration, mediated by the legislature. Institutional design works toward balance but does not guarantee it. An awareness of the nature of the compromise, though, points to the places where critical oversight may be particularly important and future incremental improvements necessary. This kind of account, then, can both inform debate about institutional reform and direct social critics to areas of decision-making that are likely to require particular democratic attention.
The political and institutional environment for global governance is significantly different, requiring different institutional fixes. In the international context, the integration-agonism and technical-public tensions within the deliberative ideal are bound up with cosmopolitan and republican concerns. As we saw in the previous section, cosmopolitan and republican theorists see functional fragmentation as a way to break up state centrism whilst avoiding power concentrations. The problem is that doing so tends to encourage functional fragmentation and technocracy, while there is no global functional equivalent to the legislature to promote systems integration in an environment open to the weak public sphere.
From a deliberative systems perspective, national-level legislatures do play a political role in global governance. Formally, states must consent to global rules, generally negotiated by members of the domestic executive, who are accountable to the legislature. However, there are barriers to legislatures performing their social integration role ‘from below’. Accountability to legislatures is not the same as legislators’ ability to deliberate. At best, deliberation takes place between members of the executive, representing the interests of their nation as a whole: the chain of representation from citizens, through the legislature, to negotiators from the executive branch is a long one. More importantly, members of different domestic executives come together as advocates for their national interest seen through the lens of their technocratic expertise. They then deliberate with others who represent different national interests but have broadly the same technical outlook. Agreements are reached that legislatures will feel strong pressure to ratify. In any case, as I argued above, veto through non-ratification is a sub-optimal form of influence from a cosmopolitan deliberative perspective.
There is plenty of empirical evidence from global economic governance that Executive dominance enhances the power of systems-based forms of steering and decision-making over broader social concerns (Torres Perez Reference Thirkell-White2006). Not only is global deliberation carried out in functionally isolated systemic silos but the outcomes of global deliberation can then give extra weight to the administrative side of the domestic administrative-public balance.
For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was deliberately designed to insulate ‘technocratic’ deliberation from politics. Country representatives on the institution’s Executive Board must be drawn from finance ministries or central banks and are employed by the institution, rather than their home governments. Staff recruitment is dominated by PhDs in economics from Anglo-Saxon Universities. Arguments within the institution only carry credibility when articulated in the language of neoclassical economics and supported by numerical data (Momani Reference Momani2005; Thirkell-White Reference Sunstein2005a; Chwieroth Reference Chwieroth2014). Relationships between the IMF and borrower countries have also privileged the domestic Treasury as interlocutor relative to other parts of borrower governments, despite the fact that loan conditions are increasingly wide-ranging, covering everything from military spending to anti-corruption policy and levels of social spending (Independent Evaluation Office 2004). The Fund has sometimes explicitly acknowledged its role as ‘scapegoat’, allowing countries to implement policies that their Treasury ministers see as essential but that domestic constituencies find difficult to accept.
Andrew Baker’s writing on the G8 process has highlighted the dangers of what Sunstein calls ‘enclave deliberation’. Deliberation amongst narrow groups can result in a dynamic in which limited argument pools and social effects increase participants’ confidence in their own opinions, shutting out alternative points of view (Sunstein Reference Streeck2002; Baker Reference Baker2007). G8 finance ministers have reinforced one another’s views of what good macroeconomic policy looks like. Their collective international agreement has lent them authority domestically, assisting in domestic struggles to redefine macroeconomic management in a neoliberal direction (Baker Reference Baker2000).
Formal accountability encourages fragmented deliberation in the systems-dominated language of economics-oriented segments of the executive. This kind of institutional organization also shapes the norms of debate within the institutions, in which certain issues are excluded and regarded as externalities to be dealt with elsewhere in the system of global governance (Park and Vetterlein Reference Park and Vetterlein2012). For example, until Michel Camdessus’ tenure during the 1990s, the IMF spent decades arguing that distribution and poverty were not issues it should be concerned with, as they didn’t fall within its mandate (Nowzad Reference Nowzad1982). It does now have some formal interest in poverty reduction but continues to argue that economic and social rights are not part of its mandate (Thirkell-White Reference Thirkell-White2013). US Executive Directors, in their testimony to Congress, have described how they can only introduce non-economic issues into IMF debate by framing them in the language of neoclassical economics (Thirkell-White Reference Thirkell-White2005b). Similar considerations have shaped the way the World Trade Organisation (WTO) deals with environmental issuesFootnote 14 and have contributed to the difficulties of including labour rights within the trade regime.
These framings have an important impact on policy. The Basel Committee looks at banking regulation purely through the lens of financial system stability, without considering impacts on employment and the real economy. The IMF considers poverty reduction or debt sustainability only within the fiscal constraints it believes are conducive to global financial stability, relegating concerns of interstate or social justice (Thirkell-White Reference Thirkell-White2013). The WTO sees trade liberalization as a goal in itself, rather than as an instrument to promote prosperity (Rodrik Reference Rodrik2001).
Representation within the ‘strong’ public sphere of multilateral institutions, then, is considerably skewed. Rather than deliberation amongst representatives of ‘global publics’, there is deliberation amongst systems-oriented representatives of economic sections of the domestic executive. In addition to the well-understood dominance of strong states over weak ones within these institutions (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2000; Woods Reference Woods2000; Underhill and Zhang Reference Torres Perez2008), we witness the dominance of a particular understanding of the world, framed in narrowly economic terms. There is no central institution to bring together economic concerns, to ensure that, for example, the policies of the IMF and World Bank are compatible with those of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) or United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Additionally ‘German’, ‘American’, or ‘Brazilian’ national interests pursued within these institutions tend to embody a particular neoclassical economic conception of national interest that may not be shared by wide segments of the domestic population and are not coordinated with more holistic concerns.
So far, I have generally been talking in terms of formal multilateralism. As global governance has become more pervasive and ambitious, though, it has also become less formal, more transparent and open to a wider range of actors (Germain Reference Germain2004; Dryzek Reference Dryzek2006) albeit unevenly (Braithwaite and Drahos Reference Braithwaite and Drahos2000; Mattli and Woods Reference Mattli and Woods2009). Whilst no deliberative democrats have discussed functional integration as a systemic problem, there are fleeting acknowledgements of the potential problems of technocratic dominance in the literature. Bohman (Reference Bohman2010) argues that civil society can bring different perspectives to bear and Dryzek assigns civil society a central role in enunciating different ‘discourses’ that challenge global hegemony (Bohman Reference Bohman2004; Dryzek Reference Dryzek2006).Footnote 15
What has been under-explored is the institutional channels through which the weak and strong public spheres are brought together. Dryzek and Bohman cite examples of civil society success in preventing the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and altering the terms of debate around both developing country debt cancellation (Jubilee/Drop the Debt) and the shape of the WTO Doha round (Seattle protests). It is certainly possible for civil society to play this role, however some important caveats are in order.
These high profile examples are probably exceptions rather than the rule (Braithwaite and Drahos Reference Braithwaite and Drahos2000; O’Brien et al. Reference O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte and Williams2000). More importantly from our institutional perspective, most of these campaigns produced successes by working primarily through national politics (Busby Reference Busby2007) (drawing institutional support from the legislature) and playing into other existing disagreements between states (Helleiner and Cameron Reference Helleiner and Cameron2006). They are primarily examples of contestation, rather than co-deliberation. Finally, and particularly importantly, global civil society influence tends to be fragmented as issue-specific NGOs dominate engagement with particular international organizations. Even where processes are informal, producing soft law with significant public consultation, NGO influence may be distinctly limited. The process for setting out a second Basel Accord for global banking regulation, for example, produced a number of consultation documents with open calls for public commentary (Germain Reference Germain2004). However, the overwhelming majority of submissions were from financial sector institutions or regulators, with fewer than 5% coming from citizens’ groups or independent academics (Underhill and Zhang Reference Torres Perez2008). Even in the wake of considerable politicization of financial governance following the recent crisis, engagement with Basel III was similarly limited.Footnote 16
Given its highly technical nature, the Basel process is a particularly difficult target for broad-based social steering. The strength of development NGOs has meant that alternative views to the hegemonic perspectives of the IMF and World Bank are better articulated. However, even in the development context, a contest between development NGOs and the Bretton Woods institutions has not necessarily been the most productive for broad-based deliberation.Footnote 17 Debate has tended to polarize between neoliberal strategies for economic growth on the one hand and welfare or rights-based views on the other, with little middle ground on which to discuss alternative growth strategies (Kanbur Reference Kanbur2001; Wade Reference Unger2001). Here, it is perhaps particularly relevant that attempts to introduce ‘participation’ into the IMF and World Bank’s policy process preferred to engage NGOs and technocrats, without initially including domestic legislatures. Here Habermas’s emphasis on the role of NGOs as one part of the weak public sphere is instructive: organizations within civil society are important for articulating the concerns of the lifeworld but they should be closely embedded in a broader public conversation both outside and inside formal institutions.
Overall, although civil society may still be able to confront technocratic systems steering with alternative perspectives, global institutional arrangements tend to work against that happening. Standard cosmopolitan and republican programmes for institutional reform provide no discussion of possible institutional remedies for the problem of functional fragmentation and, inadvertently, tend to encourage moves that will compound the problem.
Global institutional design for systems integration?
So far I have highlighted the normative relevance of systems integration and suggested that existing global institutions and prominent proposals for governance reform both do little to support it. I did that by drawing on a contrast with Habermas’s account of how systems integration operates in the modern state. One conclusion might be that we should return to ‘more democratic’ state-based governance. However, my argument is not that systems integration should trump other deliberative values like cosmopolitanism and republicanism but rather that it should be weighed against them when imagining and evaluating competing institutional possibilities.
For practical applications, normative weighting will require subtle judgements. However, for illustrative purposes it is useful to begin with some extreme possibilities. Returning to the state would radically privilege systems integration over cosmopolitanism, depriving us of the possibility of global coordination or, more ambitiously, global justice. Another logical possibility would be an electorally democratic world state. That would privilege a cosmopolitan outlook and integrated decision-making over republican preferences for pluralism, checks and balances, creating a significant risk of political domination.
Having ruled out extreme solutions, we see that practical reforms must aim at some kind of second-best balance between normative preferences. The relative normative importance of cosmopolitan, republican and integration goals cannot be specified a priori. Rather it will depend on issue area. Some ‘systems-oriented’ technical decisions will have more social externalities than others (Steffek Reference Steffek2015), just as some issues require cosmopolitan global regulation more urgently than others. Additionally, normative preferences will need to interact with a political assessment of the practical outcome of institutional reforms and their feasibility. It is beyond the scope of this paper to specify particular institutional reforms – a corollary of the pragmatic instrumentalist approach is that ‘one size fits all’ reform solutions are unlikely (Kuyper Reference Kuyper2014a). However, some broad outlines of possibilities are important to establish the significance and potential of the kind of approach I have been advocating.
From a systems integration perspective, three broad lines of attack seem promising: creating an integrative body, open to public input, at the post-national level; attempting to improve social coordination through inter-institutional links; or boosting the role of national-level politics to foster social integration ‘from below’.
Habermas’s preference is for the first possibility. He looks to a strengthened European parliament, making the EU more like his vision for state-level politics (Habermas Reference Habermas2015). Much regulation would be done at the regional level, with regional institutions negotiating with one another where necessary (and global bodies handling ‘less contentious’ issues, such as pure technical coordination and widely accepted human rights) (Habermas Reference Habermas2008b). There are two main weaknesses to this approach. First, it’s Eurocentrism limits its cosmopolitan appeal. Regional bodies elsewhere have not developed in the same way (Hutchings Reference Hutchings2007) and it is unlikely they could negotiate with the EU as equals. Second, there are empirical questions as to whether the EU is capable of becoming more democratic in this way.Footnote 18
A less ambitious track might be to look at improving links between the global institutions we have. In the only article I am aware of to systematically address the issue of global functional fragmentation as a problem, Zürn and Faude (Reference Zürn and Faude2013) argue that functional fragmentation need not be a problem in itself, rather it raises issues of institutional coordination that need to be addressed. Faude’s writing, in broadly a systems tradition, suggests global institutions already mutually adapt to divide up jurisdictions. However, that does not deal with the issues of deliberation, accountability and connection to the public that concern me here. In Kuyper’s example, cited above, more holistic perspectives on intellectual property rights developed in one institution were able to have some influence over the generally more conservative WTO intellectual property regime (Kuyper Reference Kuyper2014a, Reference Kuyperb). As Kuyper acknowledges, though, this kind of forum shopping is also a tactic that can be used by powerful actors to avoid social constraints on their economic preferences (an obvious example is the progressive marginalization of UNCTAD relative to the WTO). The problematic history of IMF-World Bank interaction and the limited practical effect of formal requirements for the international financial institutions to coordinate with the ILO suggest that considerations of relative institutional power will be particularly important. To date, republican-oriented theorists advocating pluralism have not done enough to address questions of political power. In any case, bringing together institutions in this way without connecting up with actual publics is plainly a second-best solution. This strategy, then, would need considerable institutional innovation, though there is no fundamental reason to think it can’t be pursued (as a first step one might, for example, imagine policy review by a minipublic designed to seek out externalities produced by institutional decisions by forging new connections with civil society groups not normally consulted).
Finally, where the other two paths prove inadequate, we might seek to improve legislative scrutiny over the executive’s international negotiating positions to strengthen the legislature’s integrative effect from below. The introduction of compulsory consultation requirements into the formulation of IMF and World Bank programmes in low-income countries as part of the PRSP process provides one (albeit imperfect) example of the latter approach (De Burca Reference De Burca2008). Legislative scrutiny throughout negotiation processes, rather than simply at the ratification stage, might be another. The risk here (echoing my discussion of veto politics above) is that it might produce anti-cosmopolitan effects. Whether the trade-off is acceptable or not would depend on how important it was for the particular issue to be dealt with globally on the one hand and the detrimental impact on deliberation that doing so through global institutions might have on the other. One notional test might be whether we would be happy with the equivalent issue being delegated to a wholly independent agency with no legislative oversight at the domestic level. If not, the case for global regulation would need to be particularly strong.
These possible pathways are not mutually exclusive but might serve to re-enforce one another, alongside a broader deepening of engagement between global institutions and an emergent global civil society. Part of the promise of the deliberative systems approach, with its multifaceted awareness of the elements making up the deliberative ideal is that it opens up a wider range of potential interventions than simply calling for greater ‘openness’.
Conclusions
Functional fragmentation presents an under-recognized problem for global democratic deliberation. It creates inadvertent institutional barriers, inhibiting efforts to connect up technocratic deliberation within global bureaucracies with the more holistic concerns of global publics. From the perspective of ideal democratic theory, one might pass over this problem as part of a general ‘lack of democracy’ that could be eliminated were we to deliver effective citizen control on an equal basis. From an incremental deliberative systems approach, though, we are a long way off delivering ideal global deliberative democracy with citizen control (if such a thing is even possible). What we can do is pick away at the kinds of deliberative defect that are amenable to remedy in an attempt to improve the functional and normative credentials of global governance. From that perspective, functional fragmentation represents a distinct problem for deliberation requiring analysis, critique and institutional response in its own terms.
The relative absence of institutional support for social integration in global governance reduces the degree to which issue-specific technocratic framings of problems are challenged by being brought into contact with other areas of administration (labour, industrial policy, health, social policy, or the environment). The ‘national interest’ that is represented within institutions is similarly fragmented in ways that may impair the potential for compromise or solidarity across borders. Additionally, following Habermas, I have argued that the weak and strong public spheres shape one another. A fragmented strong public sphere tends to promote fragmented civil society organizations oriented toward particular issue areas. Equally, the absence of a global legislature with the normative authority to speak for a ‘global public’, weakens the institutional resources available to public actors to challenge the global administrative status quo when it comes into conflict with important normative or ethical imperatives springing from the lifeworld. Issue fragmentation within the strong public sphere of global institutions can also re-enforce fragmentation at state level and within global civil society.
As with the other well-established defects of contemporary global governance such as parochial epistemic nationalism and global power imbalances, it is unlikely that institutional reform can fully eliminate the resulting problems (particularly in the short term). Having a global democratic politics around issues that have a wide impact but are both technically complex and contentious is an inevitable challenge. Nonetheless, identifying the problem at a theoretical level, as I have done here is still important. Doing so highlights an important area for critical scrutiny in the policy processes and outcomes of existing institutions. It opens the space for empirical investigations of ways in which the problems of functional fragmentation might be ameliorated in specific contexts and it highlights an additional consideration that needs to be incorporated into grander designs for future global governance as a whole.
Drawing attention to functional fragmentation is particularly important because the cosmopolitan and republican concerns that dominate the theoretical and policy literature on global deliberative governance create temptations to inadvertently exacerbate fragmentation. The promise that ‘technical’, (or even ‘rational’ in some broader sense) universal consensus might overcome pervasive divisions in global politics and society is understandably appealing, particularly in a discipline that has been so dominated by realism, but there is an ever present risk of upsetting the delicate balance between agonism and integration that lies at the heart of deliberative theory.
Whilst there is much potential for incremental reform to improve the deliberative quality and inclusiveness of global governance, evaluating incremental reforms needs to be done carefully, bearing in mind a wide range of possible deliberative consequences. In an environment of decidedly imperfect democracy, institutional reforms are likely to involve difficult compromises between different normative goals including cosmopolitanism, deliberative equality, publicity, social integration, and republican checks and balances. As Eva Erman has argued, the ‘piecemeal’ reform of global democracy cannot be done by concentrating on isolated aspects of the normative conditions for global democracy (transparency, or cosmopolitanism, or accountability, or publicity). There is no guarantee that piecemeal improvements to components of democracy will enhance overall democratic outcomes at the system level (Erman Reference Erman2012) since, as we have seen, improvements in some aspects may produce negative consequences elsewhere. Institutional reform is therefore a highly challenging intellectual exercise in which pragmatic reforms need to be assessed against a sophisticated holistic understanding of the democratic criteria at stake in the system as a whole.
The incremental deliberative systems project remains attractive. Its incrementalism allows due respect for ongoing collective uncertainty about what global governance could or should be. It’s political pragmatism and emphasis on going revisability point to plausible reforms that are not paralysed by an ongoing awareness that outcomes are imperfect (Unger Reference Underhill and Zhang1997; Bohman Reference Bohman2007; Schick Reference Schick2018). Yet it needs to be carried out with due awareness of the range of complex trade-offs involved in institutional design.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for International Theory, Patrick Hayden, Anthony Lang Jr, Chamsy El Ojeili, Kate Schick and especially Emily Beausoleil for helpful comments and feedback on earlier drafts.
