World government is once again being taken seriously. For decades the target of ridicule, some form of institutionalized global decision making may be inevitable. As the proposition wins broader acceptance, scholars are coming to more closely explore the modalities of world government and the place of democracy within it. The enhanced profile of new actors in globalization's wake has magnified the challenge. Amid conditions of deep instability, isolating elements of a new decision-making architecture is a formidable theoretical task.

This book supplies a valuable contribution to a growing literature. It starkly characterizes instability in global decision making as a battle between democratic globalizers (in the form of social movements) and transnational neoliberals (corporations and their allies). In this account, underdog democratizers “work toward a vision of globalization based on cooperation and inclusion” against dominant neoliberal agents who “want to subordinate societies and states to market forces” (p. 5). International institutions supply the key locus for this power struggle, and the neoliberals are winning out as such entities as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization advance market-oriented, consumerist values at the expense of the collective public interest. Jackie Smith presses a “Lilliputian strategy” (p. 197) to “reclaim” the United Nations as the institutional alternative to international economic structures and to prioritize human rights over the ideology of consumerism.

The book is highly persuasive on the need to bring social movements into the institutional architecture of global decision making. Existing institutional modalities of global decision making fall short along a democracy metric insofar as they exclude nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). State-based representation of individuals at the international level is crude at best, attenuated through multiple layers of national government. Citizens do not select national representatives to international institutions. Intergovernmentalism shuts out many voices. Moreover, states have an inherent interest in insulating their power and discretion from international regulation. That tendency will further distort citizen preferences, even assuming that those preferences could otherwise be aggregated through national processes. State-centric models of global governance do not adequately connect the individual to the global.

Legitimacy, argues Smith, hangs in the balance. In this respect, international institutions need NGOs. Those bodies that wield power while shutting out NGOs should be resisted. The 1999 ministerial meeting of the WTO is the watershed in this story, when social activists took to the streets of Seattle to protest the trade organization's failure to take deliberative account of human rights, labor rights, environmental protection, and other noneconomic values. It was Seattle that brought the consolidating powers of the WTO into sharp popular relief as an institution suffering from a serious democracy deficit. WTO legitimacy will be limited to the extent it continues to exclude NGOs from formal participation.

Smith is surely correct that institutional space must be made for social movements in global governance. That may already be happening, in formal public institutions as well as in increasingly salient nongovernmental processes. In recognition that their legitimacy depends on it, the agents of neoliberalism have had to reach out to NGOs. That is happening in international financial institutions, more or less. The World Bank, for example, has an “inspection panel” through which NGOs are able to challenge Bank policies. The secretariat at the WTO has sought to build various bridges to the NGO community, and its dispute-resolution arm has asserted its power to consider the views of NGOs (although this move provoked vigorous state member dissent). The WTO's decision in the 1998 Shrimp-Turtle case, meanwhile, mitigated trade values with environmentalist ones.

NGOs have also been exercising impressive extrainstitutional power. The book gives us glimpses of this power, with respect, for instance, to “direct action” on climate change (pp. 135–36). But the phenomenon is broad and amenable to systemization. Leading NGOs have leverage with corporate actors to the extent that they command sympathetic constituencies that can vote with their wallets. In this respect, consumerism has been harnessed to advance social values. Consumers are willing to pay more for goods whose production conforms with social values. NGOs are thus positioned to influence consumer behavior. When the major NGOs talk, corporations now understand that they have to listen. In the face of thinning profit margins, corporations are sensitive to NGO agendas. This dynamic has resulted in negotiated regimes, in the form of labeling regimes and codes of conduct, that are affecting corporate behavior on the ground.

Social movements, in other words, are already democratizing global governance. NGO leaderships have secured access to decision-making processes. That challenges Smith's dichotomous vision of rival networks and asymmetric power, with the forces of good at serious material disadvantage. Take Smith's twinning of the World Social Forum and the World Economic Forum. The WEF, popularly associated with host town Davos, is held out as a “fraction” of the neoliberal network, where the WSF is celebrated as “a model for expanded citizen participation in the global polity” (p. 206). But the Davos meeting is not comprised exclusively of corporate executives and their governmental allies. It has also included leaders of major NGOs, among them (in 2007) the top professional staffers of Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Earth Policy Institute, Oxfam, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and Civicus: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. NGO leaders are invited to participate because they are powerful. NGO leaders in turn see Davos as an opportunity to build dialogue with market actors in ways that advance a social values agenda.

That is not at all to say that NGOs enjoy resource parity with their corporate counterparts. But an important element of the NGO world is decidedly not Lilliputian. Smith notes that many democracy activists do their advocacy work outside their regular work hours without compensation (pp. 30, 66). Many others do draw salaries as activists, in some cases at competitive levels. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, was paid almost $400,000 in 2007. Many NGOs have large organizational budgets. In 2007, for example, Greenpeace International had total income of more than 200 million Euros. That may pale beside the revenues of major transnational corporations, but it translates into substantial advocacy firepower nonetheless.

Smith does not discretely address the importance of these major NGOs. In the rival networks model, such NGOs could be assigned to the neoliberal side of the global battleground. That would be a plausible move: Elite NGOs are deeply entwined with the neoliberals on various levels. The largest individual donor to Human Rights Watch, for example, made a fortune through a California savings and loan institution. The boards of major NGOs often include top executives of neoliberal institutions. These cannot all be “defectors” from neoliberalism, as Smith describes George Soros (who, while he devotes time and money to democratizing campaigns, continues to work in the financial markets). Top NGO directors mix with neoliberal elements in social settings, think tanks, and academic contexts; many have the same institutional pedigrees as their capitalist counterparts.

Ultimately, though, it is hard to dismiss top NGO professionals as neoliberal agents. They confront corporate interests on a social values basis, and they have secured changes in corporate behavior. Only a small slice of this activity will be confrontational in the sense of Seattle. Given the leverage of major NGOs (as the organizational manifestation of social movements), however, direct confrontation is no longer necessary for advancing a social values agenda. There may be rival networks at play here, even if one accounts for the NGO elites. But there are already common spaces in which they engage one another as repeat players, through processes of negotiation and resolution as well as more direct forms of conflict. As Smith acknowledges in the context of climate change, bottom-up climate-change reform efforts “might eventually find support in the neoliberal network” (p. 136).

Those spaces of engagement remain underinstitutionalized, with attendant risks of private decision making. NGOs and corporate interests can do backroom deals, in which NGOs agree to desist from “naming and shaming” campaigns in return for corporate acceptance of NGO demands. That activity may be nontransparent. NGOs may be bought off. Agreements may not be adequately monitored, giving rise to “greenwash” and its equivalent in other sectors. NGOs themselves suffer accountability problems. These pathologies all point to the need for some form of public institutionalization.

In Social Movements for Global Democracy, Smith points in that direction well, though more to the end of enhancing NGO power than of formalizing it. She centers the United Nations, and the General Assembly (UNGA) in particular, as the best vehicle for global democratization and for reining in international financial institutions (which are already formally subject to UNGA authority) (p. 191). Given the General Assembly's organization along state lines, that call is at least in tension with the book's opening lament on the shortcomings of state-based representation in the international system, and indeed Smith retreats to acknowledge that “social change advocates must look more to the state as a solution to the problems they address” (p. 231). However controversial that position might be at the World Social Forum, it is a sensible one: The state remains the most powerful global actor, and in most cases states will be a necessary part of any answer. The General Assembly, on the other hand, might not be the best arena in which to mobilize states to the end of global democratization. Its premise of sovereign equality, in which San Marino gets the same single vote as China, is at the level of the individual severely undemocratic. Given its history of ineffectiveness, it would be helpful to have a roadmap to reclaiming the Assembly in the name of world government.

That is by no means to dismiss the United Nations as a platform for advancing global democracy. Smith makes note of proposals for a “People's Assembly” by way of affording more direct citizen representation at the United Nations, a putative international third estate alongside the state-based Security Council and General Assembly on the model of the European Parliament. The prospect may remain in the category of thought experiment, but with NGOs as the channel (and the experience of NGO gatherings parallel to UN-sponsored world conferences, which Smith rightly highlights), it is one that merits further exploration, for it would elide the inherent deficits of state-based representation.

The book is less charitable with respect to the UN Global Compact, another emerging model in which corporations and NGOs engage under the UN's institutional umbrella. It is a form of “bluewash,” Smith argues, through which corporations morph the UN “from a threat to an investment opportunity” (p. 77). That may be premature, given the participation of such NGOs as Amnesty International, Global Witness, and the Rainforest Alliance, at the same time that an effort to harden social responsibility standards through a “UN Norms for Business” initiative, which is being run out of the Human Rights Council and has garnered the energy of Harvard's John Ruggie, may in fact prove a more fruitful path to corporate accountability.

In the face of tremendous institutional instability at the global level, one cannot expect a clean take on the future of world government. Yet Smith's concluding call to “seek friends among enemies” offers a sound starting point for new thinking (p. 241). Social movements and neoliberal entities will have to engage, even as their interests conflict. The question is what space will best serve the interests of democracy, and this book supplies a useful guide as that enormous undertaking enters its takeoff phase.