last blog

In this week’s reading, the authors talk about the concept of cosmopolitan democracy, which is a response to globalization that forces us to rethink our political society in accordance with our democratic ideals. Held’s model of democratic governance tends to be detached from what is going on in different contexts of the globalizing world and does not account for the transformation process toward cosmopolitan democracy. In addition, it is largely based on the European’s perspectives and experiences and thus may not generalize to the other parts of the world. The authors continue on to define the concepts of globalization and civic public spaces and discuss the effects of neoliberal globalization in countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The authors explain that neoliberal globalization has strengthened only the elites, while declining the middle class, lowering the standard of living, and increased poverty. I think it is going to be interesting to see the interactions and effects of more and more countries becoming democracies, especially because the countries in the Mercosur region seem to be faring poorly. The authors state that Mercosur was created by “diplomats and economists” and most of the decisions of these regions were clearly economistic. If countries such as these are continued to run purely for economic incentives, it is inevitable that they will perish in the future. I think it would have been interesting if the authors would have compared more regions of the world as well, because this notion of cosmopolitan democracy could have been expanded even further.