Cosmopolitanism and radical democracy: is a symbiosis possible to deepening democracies?

Abstract

Globalization, with the interdependencies and transnational processes associated with it, has generated new challenges for contemporary democracies. On many occasions, these processes generate a certain “democratic emptying”, by producing a loss of control of many political decisions, as well as questioning elements associated with representativeness, accountability or the legitimacy on which these decisions rest. All of this also reduces the degrees of autonomy and sovereignty of the political communities delimited by the States, thereby generating different tensions. One of the theoretical approaches that have attempted to address this problem has come from the cosmopolitan democracy. However, this vision has maintained a distant and critical relationship with other theoretical proposals that also seek to strengthen democracy. This is the case of radical and plural democracy, which has pointed out the limited capacity of cosmopolitan proposals to broadening and deepening democracy, as it is based on a rational-liberal and Western approaches. This article analyzes whether there is an inherent incompatibility between cosmopolitan democracy and radical and plural democracy or whether, on the contrary, it is possible that both proposals can find spaces for theoretical exchanges that allow articulating more democratic and inclusive responses to the challenges posed by globalization.