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Twentieth-Century Representative Democracy and the Democratic Legitimacy of the United Nations

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Pluralist Democracy in International Relations

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought ((PMHIT))

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Abstract

I begin this chapter by reviving David Mitrany’s critique of democratic welfare states. In this telling, citizens were accustomed to nationalist conceptions of political community and to the depoliticising effects of an uncontrolled bureaucracy. Pluralism’s earlier bearer of hope, European trade unions, stopped demanding further democratic participation and instead used their new position within the state to pursue sectional interests. Mitrany shifted his attention to non-governmental organisations and theorised functional participation and representation as a means to redemocratise the welfare state and United Nations (UN) specialised agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization or the World Bank. Mitrany was highly sceptical of the development discourse and the rise of modernisation theory amongst UN officials and the top-down managed reform of African and Asian states.

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  1. Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

    Leonie Holthaus

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  1. Leonie Holthaus
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Holthaus, L. (2018). Twentieth-Century Representative Democracy and the Democratic Legitimacy of the United Nations. In: Pluralist Democracy in International Relations. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70422-7_8

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