Abstract
Advocates of expanding democracy beyond the current Westphalian system of sovereign nation states can find some valuable precedents in the history of cosmopolitan political thought from ancient times to the present. Within this long history, the proposals for constructing a democratic federation on a world scale that emerged in response to the advent of nuclear weapons in the mid-twentieth century deserve special examination. In light of recent advances in communication technology, some of these proposals have become more plausible, and may offer new tools for addressing the problem of climate change in the twenty-first century.
“If you think in terms of people divided up into countries, you won’t follow me. The idea of countries is going by the boards. Young people are getting wonderfully uprooted and they're too strong to get sucked into this ‘country’ crap.”
Buckminster Fuller
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Deese, R.S. (2019). Supranational Democracy. In: Climate Change and the Future of Democracy. Environmental Challenges and Solutions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98307-3_7
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