Civilizing and Democratizing Globalization: Limits and Scope in Contemporary Society

The hyperglobalizers claimed that contemporary globalization is associated with new limits to politics and the erosion of state power. But globalization has not only triggered or reinforced the significant politicization of a growing array of issue areas but is also accompanied by an extraordinary growth of institutional arenas and networks of political mobilization, surveillance, decision-making, and regulatory activity across borders. Thus, globalization does not prefigure the 'end of politics’ so much as its continuation by new means. The prospects for civilizing and democratizing globalization are thus not so bleak as suggested by hyperglobalizers. However, there are some profound intellectual, institutional, and normative challenges that it presents to the existing organization of political communities. The political communities are in the process of being transformed. At the heart of this lies a growth in transborder or transboundary political issues and problems that erode the distinctions between domestic and foreign affairs, internal political issues and external questions, the sovereign concerns of the nation-state, and international considerations. States and governments face issues like AIDS, BSE, the spread of COVID-19, the use of non-renewable resources, the management of nuclear waste, diaspora cultures, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which can not easily be categorized in traditional political terms, that is, domestic or international. Global transformations have affected the concept of political community and in particular, the concept of the democratic political community, which often gets split into ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spheres of political life. The effective power is shared, bartered, and struggled over by diverse forces and agencies at national, regional, and global levels. The present paper aims to analyze the prospects of civilizing and democratizing contemporary globalization in terms of its scope and limits.