The Reform of the United Nations: Institutional Models and Political Proposals

The paper discusses global democratic deficit through the examination of a number of major institutional models and political proposals, and offers recommendations for a world federalist reform of the UN. The paper begins by delineating the problem of international exclusion and by analysing three institutional models: intergovernmentalism, global governance, and cosmopolitan governance. Then two principal proposals for reforming the UN, which are advanced by the UN and by global civil society, are discussed. In showing that both the institutional models and the political proposals under scrutiny fail to tackle the issue of global democratic participation properly, the paper offers an alternative political-institutional project able to satisfy the requirement for global democracy. In line with a multilayered conception of political agency, this examination adopts a radical democratic perspective in which the possibility of participation in the process of self-legislation is offered back to citizens. In this vein, the democratic prerogatives of cosmopolitan citizenship for a more direct and participatory membership at the world institutional level of political life are illustrated. In the context of globalized politics, this normative interpretation of cosmopolitan political agency requires a federal reform of global political institutions, in particular of the United Nations.

Raffaele Marchetti, La riforma delle Nazioni Unite: modelli istituzionali e proposte politiche in "TEORIA POLITICA" 2/2005, pp , DOI: