The expanding interdependencies of the worlds diverse and divided populations have created a world society. To rule these fractious peoples, the democracies advance solutions to three imperatives of governanceOrder, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). For Order, the democracies institutionalized the global state; for Welfare, a global market system; and for Legitimacy, popular rule, resting on the moral principles of the freedom and equality of all humans.
The book develops globalization as the emergence of a global society; presents a theory of governance predicable of all human societies, revolving around competing OWL imperatives; and identifies fundamental flaws in the democratic solutions to global governance. To ensure that the democratic promise survives and thrives, the volume calls for fundamental reforms of the democratic project as prerequisites to deter and defeat formidable anti-democratic adversaries: authoritarian states, religiously informed regimes opposed to open societies; nihilistic social movements; self-styled terrorists, and vast transnational criminal networks. Either the democracies hang together or they hang separately.
Edward A. Kolodziej is Emeritus Research Professor of Political Science and Former Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Globalization has extended conflicts, contradictions, and benefits from the nation-state to global spaces and back again. This multilevel process has also introduced new challenges and benefits to the local and the global. The central concern of this work is how globalization affects local and global human existence and how the benefits of order, welfare, and legitimacy (OWL) in political, social, and economic domains can be fortified. The book endorses an economically and politically liberal position in which liberal capitalism and democratic rule of law are to be reinforcl£†