Nicolas Guilhot and Ann Florini appear to have hold of rather different parts of the democratic elephant: While the two books are not in direct dialogue with each other, they do provide quite different accounts of some closely related phenomena. Guilhot regards transnational “democracy promotion” and its agents—the World Bank, the U.S. state, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, think tanks—as engaged in the propagation of a neoconservative economic and political agenda around the world. Florini is much more charitably disposed toward a putative global democracy and its proponents, and indeed maintains that unless states, corporations, NGOs, international governmental organizations, and citizens in general are integrated into activism on its behalf (as well as on behalf of other goals), global and national futures look rather bleak.

The Introduction to The Democracy Makers lays out Guilhot's central claim: “Democracy and human rights, once weapons for the critique of power, have now become part of the arsenal of power itself” (p. 8). Democracy activists have become “double agents” with links to both “hegemonic” capitalist formations and progressive causes (though these latter links are thoroughly downplayed), a claim Guilhot asserts equally against conventionally Gramscian analyses that exaggerate the coherence of these formations, and analyses of advocacy networks that become “entirely captive to the viewpoint of the[se] actors” (p. 18) and give undue weight to the power of their ideas.

The six chapters that follow are of varying quality. The first and longest explains contemporary “democracy promotion” in the United States as the second iteration of an earlier (1950s–1960s) collaboration between a liberal internationalist American foreign policy establishment and left-wing anticommunists (the “State Department Socialists”) to found institutions to compete with the communist international. The original fruit of this collaboration, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, foundered in scandal in the late 1960s, and Vietnam pushed a temporary wedge between the Left and the U.S. state. But the anticommunist Left—which Guilhot effectively delimits as the acolytes of Max Shachtman—had already begun a “collective conversion” (p. 32) to the Right, so that when the “project of a global democratic campaign … resurface[d] in the 1980s” (p. 51), again primarily as an anticommunist tactic, it was primed for collaboration once more.

This is the book's strongest and most careful chapter, but it is not wholly persuasive. Guilhot seems to think he has identified the roots not only of Reaganite but also of contemporary neoconservative democracy promotion. But even if the members of the anticommunist Left overlapped to some degree with the personnel of the Reaganite version, today's democracy promoters seem to have quite different and diverse origins, both neoconservative and progressive. And Guilhot's evidence for even the Reaganite version of the claim is somewhat slight. For instance, he names only six Shachtmanites (three mentioned almost nowhere else in the book) who had anything to do with the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a crucial democracy promoter, for Guilhot—and too few of the really big names were involved, even those who had earlier been Congress for Cultural Freedom supporters (Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, Irving Kristol). One might also question the extent to which any Shachtmanite Reaganites/neoconservatives could really qualify as double agents: By the 1980s, their countervailing progressive affiliation would appear to have become seriously etiolated.

The book contains two institutional histories, one of the NED and one of the World Bank. The choice of the NED makes sense: It was created under Reagan, and it spends money, the federal sourcing of which is not obvious, to promote democracy. Now, it may be true that the NED favors “politicians or groups falling in line with the general purpose of U.S. foreign policy” (p. 85), though I am inclined to think that Guilhot overstates the single-mindedness of the institution, which is composed of several autonomous, even mildly antagonistic, branches. Even so, with an annual budget of “between $15 and $35 million” (p. 86), and as “by no means the only or even the most important organization involved in ‘democracy promotion’” (p. 32), it is difficult to see what generalizations can plausibly be made about other U.S. democracy promoters on the strength of his analysis of the NED, never mind their European counterparts (which, inexplicably, get extremely short shrift). The World Bank chapter charts the Bank's apparent retreat from neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus in the nineties, and the adoption of its “good governance” agenda. Guilhot maintains that the turn to good governance remained “tightly connected to the imposition of neoliberal economic orthodoxy” (p. 192), represented mainly a form of structural adjustment for polities as opposed to economies (p. 210), and enlarged rather than revised the Washington Consensus (p. 214). These claims could well be right, but the parts of the chapter in which they are made proceed at breakneck speed, and they never rise beyond assertions.

Two other chapters review the rise and fall of modernization theory and the emergence of democratization studies. They are designed to show how political science provided intellectual cover for the earlier and later democracy promotion projects, and in turn benefited from increased prestige and access to power and resources, but they are also obviously in part the refashioned residue of the dissertation literature review at which the book began, and fit a little awkwardly into it. Another chapter briefly surveys recent “social constructivist” or “idealist” international relations scholarship on human rights activism, and predictably, finds it simplistic both methodologically—it reifies ideas—and substantively—it fails to recognize that human rights activists and those who study them also perpetuate the hegemonic project. (One could ask this question at almost any point in the book, but it seems particularly apt here: Is every hegemonic project ipso facto a bad one?)

After the fairly dense prose and generally unrelenting abstraction of The Democracy Makers (it is no surprise to see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—separately—provide two of the book's three blurbs), the clearer writing and concreteness of The Coming Democracy is very welcome. At the beginning of the book, Florini lays out the standard globalization-gone-awry and globalization-done-right scenarios, and claims that what will make the difference between them is governance: “all the ways in which groups of people collectively make choices” (p. 5). Unfortunately, she claims, governance practices lag world developments by about 50 years, structured as they are to deal with interstate war between hard states, rather than the more novel, decentralized, global problems facing an increasingly post-Westphalian world. Several possible solutions turn out to be nonstarters: A world state is “a truly bad idea” (p. 11), globalization has progressed too far to allow a resurrection of impermeable nation-states, and market mechanisms face familiar collective action objections. Some “more imaginative” (p. 14) option is required. Florini plumps for some sort of global democratic arrangement for activist cosmopolitan constituents, the accountability of which is guaranteed by a technology-enabled transparency.

The second chapter argues that technological developments have dramatically increased the amount and availability of information about corporations and states, which makes possible their “regulation by revelation” (p. 34)—that is, accountability enforced by fears about the consequences of the disclosure of damaging behavior. Furthermore, Florini suggests that some actors may, to prevent more damaging third-party disclosures about them, choose to become more transparent, and in so doing establish transparency as a normative expectation for others of their ilk. But, as she notes, unless people actually “interpret and act on the information revealed” (p. 38), transparency will not change state or corporate behavior, and the historical record is not encouraging about the propensity of nation-state citizens to care about events beyond their borders. Hence, Chapter 3's examination of the potential for a “global we”—a civically minded and cosmopolitan, postnational constituency. In fact, the chapter is composed mostly of short overviews of the findings of evolutionary psychology about human association and theories of nationalism, and only in its closing pages does it present some very scanty evidence for the emergence of such a constituency. Florini clearly believes that the information revolution can transform the world as printing transformed Reformation Europe, but whereas “Europe was ready to be transformed” (p. 2), it is not obvious that our world, and its inhabitants, are similarly ready.

These early chapters constitute the theoretical framework of the book, and much of the rest of it investigates how the duties of governance in a globalizing, potentially transparent world might—as they must—be distributed among governments, corporations, and civil society. These chapters are sometimes unfocused—it is not clear, for example, what the chapter on government's potted history of the state actually adds to the analysis—and there is a large amount of overlap between them. But they are generally instructive and present a number of useful minicase studies. Florini is quite adamant that all three sectors will have to play roles in globalized governance, and that civil society, sometimes regarded as a panacea, is in fact in need of revelatory regulation itself. Two further chapters provide very sobering assessments of the challenges that the coming democracy will face in the economic and (especially) environmental realms, but also some reasons to think that the sort of broad, transparent cooperative governance the book advocates may provide the necessary solutions. The final chapter is a little disappointing. It presents a conjectural retrospective from the year 2020 of the broad developments that brought about a world in which globalization's positive form had mostly come to pass. Quite apart from being a little fanciful, Florini seems here to abandon her characteristically clear-eyed realism in favor of some (albeit lightly) rose-colored spectacles.

Ultimately, readers of both books might feel a little shortchanged. Guilhot's genealogical critique of democracy and human rights promotion fails to show that it is the hegemonic project he claims it to be, and readers looking for the “rules” that the subtitle of Florini's book promises will find little about them or the nitty-gritty of mechanisms and institutions of global governance in it. Nonetheless, both books make clear that the “making of democracy” is a project that demands our critical attention.