The global health of democracy has never been more shaky. According to International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD), the number of democratically backsliding countries has hit a record high, with most of them also experiencing other indicators of deterioration, such as a growing trend toward censorship, the politicization of the judiciary and the manipulation of media, restrictions on civil liberties and minority rights, or the proliferation of corruption. The emergence of credible alternative models of governance – most visibly in the form of populists and nationalists – has compounded the crisis. Worse still, the pandemic has given legitimacy to the time-honoured tactics of authoritarian regimes, whose strategies include the exploitation of the media, disproportionate or illegal repression of protest and the politicization of public institutions.
Global democracy is a political ideal that holds that global decision-making should be subject to the same democratic standards as decisions made at the local level: participation, representation, equality, accountability and deliberation. It is a model with several important moral foundations, typically rooted in a liberal and cosmopolitan ideology, but often also in virtues such as fairness, autonomy or non-discrimination.
However, achieving this goal is no simple task. A first problem is that most current international organizations – such as the World Bank, the UN and the WTO – lack democratic legitimacy, because they operate with opaque, secretive procedures, and a large proportion of their members are not elected by any kind of popular vote. Moreover, the power to shape policy is mostly delegated to a small group of nation-states.