Debate over the implications of globalization for democracy and its various dimensions has been growing rapidly in recent years. In Altered States, Valerie Sperling focuses on a key dimension of this process, accountability. This crucial concept is, however, notoriously hard to define and operationalize, except perhaps in already democratic political systems that are deeply institutionalized and where clear legal standards have evolved over time. And challenges of both defining and ensuring accountability in other types of systems are multiplied in the context of globalization. Sperling does an excellent job of tracing these difficulties in a number of contemporary contexts, both within states and on the uneven and underdeveloped transnational level. The picture is not a pretty one, and despite the spread of accountability norms and some practices, the overall image is one of increasing hazards and blockages. The author suggests ways that transnational accountability can be strengthened; nevertheless, these appear to be more in hope than in expectation.

The main strength of the book lies in Sperling's choice of different issue areas through which to examine the topic: economic globalization, political globalization, transnational military forces, transnational judicial institutions, and transnational civil society. She rightly eschews the overuse of the concept of “globalization,” seeing it as misleading in light of the uneven cross-border and domestic trends involved. In this sense, the subtitle appears somewhat ironic, as there is little in the way of the real globalization of accountability to be found in any of these issue areas. At the same time, however, transnational trends and linkages are crucial not only in increasing and reinforcing the limited and fragmented forms of accountability she identifies but also, ironically, in undermining and even reversing progress on this front.

According to Sperling, economic globalization, the subject of the longest chapter in the book, has basically failed on several levels. Within states, for example, neoliberalism and economic liberalization, while “positively correlated with democratization,” has also been accompanied by growing income inequality: “[T]he rise of free market reforms may well amount to an unequal distribution of political accountability among the citizenry of individual countries” (p. 28). “Markets, on their own,” she argues, “do not necessarily promote democratization or accountability … nor are markets themselves accountable institutions” (p. 31). Neoliberal economic policies “have a demobilizing effect on collective action” and “ignore popular suffering” (pp. 32–33). Sperling is no less critical of international economic institutions, which operate at a further remove from democratic accountability. Her more-or-less detailed subsections on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, multinational corporations, the North American Free Trade Association, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and labor unions are even less hopeful, despite the real but limited success of her main positive example, the World Bank's Inspection Panel.

Political globalization is even less supportive of the growth of accountability. Unfortunately, there is little discussion of what political globalization means as such, except to delve into detailed case studies of (mainly) failures of the United Nations in Cambodia and of the UN and the European Union in Bosnia. In the latter case, for example, international institutions themselves, in attempting to deal with ethnic conflicts, have in many ways deepened the ethnic divides and actually undermined the kind of democratic accountability Sperling favors by, for example, entrenching an electoral system that reinforces those divides. Perhaps the most hopeless of the trends she describes is the rise of transnational military forces, mainly private military companies (PMCs) but also international peacekeepers. She comments: “Although the use of transnational (and even private) military force can stabilize frail states, PMCs are more likely to undercut than to strengthen the ties of accountability between citizens and their governments, and transnational military forces in general lack accountability to the populations with whom they interact” (p. 159)—“even in rule-of-law states” (p. 219) where they can undermine the very concept of public goods.

One would have thought that transnational judicial institutions would be more effective in increasing accountability, but their impact is extremely limited and can be counteracted by powerful state interests. The chapter on this subject focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between the Russian state and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Although a few individuals and isolated jurisdictions within Russia have incorporated into their practices the critiques embodied in ECHR decisions (and there are not too many such decisions), these critiques remain outside the mainstream, and enforcement is almost nonexistent. One of the key problems here, of course, is that courts themselves are not democratic as such, but meant to be above politics. They may spread useful liberal practices in limited circumstances, but not so much through accountability per se as through the substance of their decisions.

Finally, transnational civil society—touted by so many authors as the seedbed of democratization and accountability—does not come off much better, despite its supposed “passports of moral suasion” (p. 279). Reliance on foreigners and donor-driven political organizing often, in point of fact, undermine the accountability of states to their own people, especially the poor and underrepresented. As with domestic interest and pressure groups, transnational advocacy networks and other NGOs are hardly representative of the population; they often get into bed with governments and international institutions in return for being granted various privileges and roles in domestic politics and service provision, and represent what Sperling calls “elite” or “leisure” advocacy, which “does little to further the sense of empowerment and citizenship necessary to hold states accountable and promote democratization over the longer term” (p. 318).

Much of Sperling's critique is predictable, given that states still exercise “sovereignty” despite globalization, and that international institutions are essentially the products of and handmaidens of states, as well as being bureaucratically weak, divided, and elitist themselves. The main strength of the book is in the richness of the descriptions contained in each chapter. However, the weakness is that the author does not really come to grips with the theoretical and analytical questions she herself raises, nor does she run them consistently through the case studies. There is no analysis of “the globalization of accountability” here. She does, however, sporadically raise three significant issues, even if she unfortunately does not deal with them systematically: grassroots activism, citizenship, and pluralism.

As for the first of these, grassroots activism, Sperling's main critique even of the more promising developments with regard to accountability is that they are distant from the underlying problems. Only where the people in a particular locality or state get involved—there is little analysis of transnational grassroots activism as such, if it exists to any great extent—does pressure from, for example, international courts, international economic institutions, NGOs, and the like create effective pressures for not only increased accountability but also further democratization. Most of the time their activities simply do not take into account what people on the ground really want. Therefore, however well-meaning their proponents, accountability is often just a red herring that can even detract from the political processes involved. Policymaking may be more effective if it is unaccountable, of course—a long-standing question in the history of political philosophy. But these implications are not really dealt with here.

Sperling's greatest hope for increasing accountability is the development of a “transnational consciousness—or awareness—of injustice” and a “cosmopolitan citizenship” (pp. 325 and 329), but these concepts are vague and left to the last few pages of the conclusion.

Finally—and this is unfortunately the most undeveloped underlying theme—Sperling at several points asserts that the real issue is not democracy or accountability as such but pluralism. Pluralism for Sperling is apparently a crucial precondition for the others. Without a tolerant pluralism, an acceptance of the legitimacy—and public value—of peaceful competition and coalition building, and a political system at both domestic and transnational levels that incorporates grassroots activism and nurtures cosmopolitan citizenship, different groups will simply jockey for absolute power, exclude opponents, and use transnational networks and institutions to underpin and reinforce their domination. Accountability is, therefore, a dependent variable, with pluralism as the independent variable. But Sperling does not explicitly frame her analysis in this way, and the book suffers from this lack. While it thus addresses important topics and contains much of value, it comes up short as a theoretical account of its core problem, the globalization of accountability.