In the economic, political and cultural integration of our planet, known as globalization, the undeniable trend is for the democratic decision-making process to move further and further from the people it is meant to provide representation for. With local forms of democracy done away with, the ‘global democratic system’ descends into true mob-rule.
Democracy (as well as Social Democratic Welfarism) works best in small(ish) homogenous communities, where the fundamental elements of society, such as values, culture, life-style, etc, are more or less shared. In very heterogenous societies, where such consensus is non-existent, the democratic process gets bogged down in deciding issues surrounding the fundamental, founding principles and the more practical political issues are ignored or at least not attended to with the same vigour and competence. When the fundamentals are shared, then so also are the interests of different groups in society (for example the poor, workers, women, etc) in greater consensus. For an effective, functioning democracy, this is of great importance. When there is consensus surrounding the ‘fundamentals’, they can be left at the background and do not become political issues. A good analogy for this would be the learning of the grammar of a language: when you don’t know it, you will struggle with punctuation and many times will write the same thing in several differing ways. Once you know the grammar, you can forget about the grammar and focus more on the substance of your writing.
Globalization integrates previously independent markets, which then assume common rules and regulations and are governed and controlled by a common political body. Out of the individualist perspective democracy remains intact and unscathed, for what has changed? Everyone will still have their vote, one might argue. But such an argument can only be presented when one ignores collective interests and loyalties, which differ from place to place, from one locality to another. These interests are drowned utterly in such behemoths as the “democratic” European Union. Each Estonian of age, for example, is able to vote in the Euro-parliamentary elections, and thus give their individual input as before, but how will collective Estonian interests be represented, or the collective interests of Tallinn-dwellers for that matter, when such a small nation only makes up a fraction of the total population of the Union? Also, a trend worth noting is that the further decision-making moves away from the actual locality, the less interest there is in voting. 80% of legislation presented to the Finnish Eduskunta comes from Brussels, yet less than half vote in Euroelections.
As the possibility for pursuing local collective interests diminishes, at the same time the traditional ethnic and cultural boundaries and loyalties, that in the past determined (globalist would say: restricted) markets, are being watered down and broken by seemingly ethnopluralist, but ultimately individualist phenomena such as multiculturalism. I don’t think we will see much genuine multiculturalist policy from European decision makers in the future, as the trend seems to be gradually edging towards a more assimilationist approach. Can you say United States of Europe?
