Conceptualizing Politics

absurdum reasoning rather than mere denial; if obligations require reciprocity, it is 
manifest that we can enter none toward a partner who does not yet exist and will 
therefore never be able to exhibit his or her reciprocating performance. More pow-
erful seem however to be the unconscious denial mechanisms, such as the refusal 
to stand up to threats perceived as too big to manage or terrifying.
12
 Thoughtless 
confidence in nuclear deterrence or shortsighted belief in ‘national security’ to the 
tune of old, state-centric realism belongs here too.
Connected with the denial mechanisms, but not identical to them, is the grow-
ing inability to come to terms with fear, an important cog in political mechanisms 

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The globalised world  147
as seen in Chapter 3. Far from rejecting any fear as irrational and dangerous, the 
appropriate attitude to lethal challenges is a reasonable fear that takes stock of the 
real size of the threat and designs viable measures to meet it, while falling into 
neither catastrophism nor the phobic fear that targets heretics, strangers and mar-
ginal groups as culpable by imagined causation of the fearful phenomena. Due to 
psycho-social mechanisms we cannot examine here, such as narcissism, reasonable 
fear has retreated in the globalised world giving leeway to indifference and fatalism 
or moving the attention to other, real or fantasised targets: joblessness, migrants, 
but also vaccinations causing autism, chemtrails controlling minds. In short, even 
rational constructs such as policies for the global world do not work politically if 
they cannot mobilise beneficent emotions aimed at protecting ourselves and those 
we care for. Real actors do not act on rational choice patterns alone, rarely do so 
primarily, and sometimes not at all (cf. Epilogue).
This is not say that political communication as it is cannot but block the trans-
formation of global threats ascertained by science into challenges that politics can 
work upon. I rather want to point out specific difficulties that must be taken into 
account and possibly modified if the philosophical or religious motivation against 
the threats burdening the present and future life of humankind is to generate politi-
cal identity and action.
Let us now come to democracy and consider its troubles caused by both economic 
globalisation and global/lethal challenges. Under the first, due to the merger of 
demos and ethnos and the exclusive national dimension of this regime, democracy 
has lost much of its power, since important matters for its decision making are 
now pre-formed by decisions made at the global level by markets, large global 
corporations and international institutions, whose legal legitimacy is only indirect 
and partial (only some of their officials are appointed by democratic governments). 
National sovereignty, whose management is periodically subject to electoral veri-
fication in democratic countries, has lost chunks of its realm by giving them away 
either to impersonal market dynamics or to international bodies.
Lethal challenges can undo one of the hidden presuppositions for democracy 
as the most fair and advantageous method of conflict resolution to work: a high 
relative stability of the social and natural environment in which democratic societies 
live and reproduce themselves. This has been guaranteed so far and never put into 
question; change has unfolded, for example from the agrarian-industrial stage of 
early capitalism to the present service economy, but at a low pace over generations, 
and societies were able to adapt, though not without pains. Whatever majority may 
have come out of the elections, that environment could be expected not to be sig-
nificantly or irreversibly damaged or upset; the successive majority or coalition may 
have had something (at worst, the damages of an unsuccessful war) to redress, but 
not to restart in a waste land. This stability is no longer a safe and implicit assump-
tion (and that presupposition, which was in fact obvious, needs to be investigated 
and found to be absent). Change affecting global commons can happen at high 
speed; ten years from the Manhattan Project to the establishment of a balance of 
terror, a few decades between the discovery of global warming and the increase of 

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148  World politics and the future of politics
GHGs in the atmosphere up to 444 parts-per-million CO
2
 equivalent (+60% com-
pared with pre-industrial levels). Politics in general and democracy in particular, 
have so far proven incapable to match these challenges in an energetic and timely 
way. Wrong decisions, significantly postponed decisions as well as omissions (such 
as the refusal – upheld for decades – to put global environmental challenges on the 
agenda) can spoil the natural environment more than it is already, and contribute to 
the cause of irreversible damages. Some critics of democracy go as far as to suggest 
that, due to its procedures and pace, this regime is structurally unable to meet the 
speed of technological progress and its consequences for the shape of societies and 
individual destiny. For all these reasons, the converging assault of economic globalisation 
and lethal challenges seems to erode the truth of democracy’s claim to be the regime 
in which human beings can best and effectively take their lot into their own hands. 
Paralysis is not a good foundation for credibility.
This credibility is also under stress from another corner. A further claim made by 
democracy used to be the identity between voters and those affected by their deci-
sions, a guarantee for everybody not to see burdens resulting from decision taken by 
others fall on his or her shoulder. This pillar of democracy’s legitimacy is now shaken 
by the circumstance that democratic decision-makers of today have been making 
decisions, or endorsed omissions, that constitute a grave prejudice to the life condi-
tions of future generations. The inability shown by democracies in the past decades 
to forcefully address the nuclear, as well as the climate threat, can disavow their 
claim to ensure equal consideration for everybody’s rights, since this finds applica-
tion only among contemporaries; and this could be seen as the worst case of the 
short-termism affecting them anyway, as we saw in Chapter 5. Needless to say that 
future generations are not here and will never be present to make their protest heard, 
but living generations, first and foremost the youth, have already begun to perceive 
democratic short-termism as going against the promises of democracy and its legiti-
macy. Whether steps taken in the second decade of the new century, such as the Paris 
climate deal, can be taken as signs of a new effort by democratic and other regimes 
to combine time universalism and space universalism, also involving non-democratic 
countries in the cooperation, is, at the time of writing, too early to say. Should this 
effort be successfully pursued, it will have to find sooner or later an institutional 
anchorage, an example – just an example – of which could be an ombudsman check-
ing new legislation and major administrative acts with respect to their consequences 
on future generations and alerting parliament and public opinion whenever dangers 
are to be expected.
13
 But whatever institutional innovation will only work if embed-
ded in a changed political and ethical culture as sketched in this chapter; and this 
still fledgling force of change cannot be said to receive much support and inspiration 
from today’s political philosophy in most of its many versions.
14
Putting together what we saw in Chapter 5 with the troubles of democracy 
under global and lethal strains, it seems fair to say that democracy as a concept, as 
well as many of its local applications, are in need of a profound revision, while demo-
cratic triumphalism is misplaced. This revision, including its timing, is important if 
democracy is to remain the alternative to dictatorship and populism, as we saw at 

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The globalised world  149
the end of Chapter 5. The people’s choice for democracy, as the time between the 
World Wars has shown, cannot be taken for granted; reversal is possible wherever 
democracy proves unable to come to terms with unprecedented challenges.
This book does not offer any recipe as to how to perform that revision. Unlike 
other political philosophers, I do not regard this discipline as tasked with constitu-
tional engineering, which is rather up to political actors to engage in, while facing 
needs for reform or revolution in any given situation. A critical attitude that limits 
itself to find conceptual names for thus far untold problems, threats and alternatives, 
and highlights false or obsolete solutions – similar to the highlighting of the ‘nega-
tive side’ in Hegel’s dialectics – is more conducive to productive inventions and 
agreements than the issuing of blueprints for a better or perfect world.
Notes
  1  Two names are to remember in this field of research: the French historian Fernand Brau-
del (1902–1985) and the American sociologist and historian Immanuel Wallerstein.
  2  So defined later in 1989 by the economist John Williamson.
  3  Defining exactly what we mean by terrorism and describing its evolution is not an easy 
business and cannot be pursued here.
  4  See Cerutti 2012.
  5  A typical case of international regime, the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) 
is a voluntary association among 35 countries aimed at preventing the proliferation of 
military missile technology.
 6  According to the Democracy Index compiled by The Economist (2016, 41–42), out of 
167 countries only 12% consist of full democracies (the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian 
countries plus Germany), while 35.9% are flawed democracies, 22.2% hybrid regimes 
and 30.5% authoritarian regimes. Freedom rather than democracy is measured in the 
Freedom House 2015 report, which rated 46% free, 28% partly free and 26% not free. 
These figures are to be taken purely as an indication, while the parochial Anglocentric 
assessment criteria remain questionable.
  7  This is available in Chapter 1 of Cerutti 2007.
  8  See Sagan and Waltz 2003.
 9  His The Strategy of Conflict (Schelling 1962) has been for the rationalization of nuclear 
deterrence, a contribution to humankind’s survival as long as abolition is not possible, what 
Machiavelli’s Il Principe was for the conceptualization of politics in Renaissance Europe.
 10  This was according to Thucydides (Book I, 23) the mechanism – sustained by fear – that 
ignited the Peloponnesian war; on fear cf. Chapter 3, §2.
 11  For all of the questions addressed in this and the following section the full argument is 
developed in Cerutti 2007, Chapter 5, §§2–3. See also Pogge 1994.
 12  In refined philosophical terms this inability has been analysed by Günther Anders in the 
first decade of the atomic age as the ‘Prometheic gap’ consisting of lack of imagination 
and emotional involvement in front of a potential nuclear holocaust, see Anders 1956.
 13  This question is detailed and existing solutions are shown in Cerutti 2015.
 14  Cf. Chapter 10, in particular §3.