The performance of global democracy : parody and/as the political

Abstract

The article develops a critical analysis of the debate on global democracy. Departing from common post-structural IR critiques of global democracy as (merely) a metaphor of escape that entrenches many of the sovereign logics it claims to contest, we explore what it would mean to engage the discourse of global democracy as an ongoing performative practice. After briefly outlining the relative positions of liberal reformist and cosmopolitan democrats – we argue that more attention can/should be paid to the ontopolitical foundations of global democracy. Drawing from William Connolly and Judith Butler, it is argued that fundamental (democratic) limits of the discourse are overlooked/re-produced, and even in the more ambitious cosmopolitan positions. Ontopolitical closures in relation to a problematic global scale and the universal assumption of individual agency/rights highlight the necessity of democratising ‘actually existing’ discourses of global democracy. We explore these ideas via a discussion of the cultural governance of global trade and resistance to it, especially via the activities of a UK based anarchist group called The Space Hijackers. By deploying parody the Space Hijackers can contribute to the debate on global democracy by provoking reflection upon fundamental assumptions about globalisation and ethics in everyday situations. They therefore problematise and subvert the problematic subjectivity of the ‘global-individual’ in a manner that might (but does not necessarily) allow for the imagination of alternative possibilities. The importance of this argument is that it resists the tendency of poststructural scepticism with regard to ethical discourses of global democracy, while retaining what is so promising: a turn towards singularity and imagination. Parody does not solve all problems, what could? But it does offer a modality within which subjects can imagine and act creatively with regards to the everyday closures of global democrac