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DraftComments Welcome
Intergenerational Democracy:Environmental Insecurity as Intergenerational Domination
James BohmanSaint Louis University
Most citizens in existing democracies assume that their polity will remain
democratic, if not for centuries, at least for the foreseeable future. Most framers of
constitutions assume that the framework that they formulate will be inherited by future
generations, even as they very often make it possible for future generations of citizens to
respond to any imperfections and change the constitution through the amendment
process. Except in these moments of revision, the workings of democracy are often
thought of in remarkably atemporal ways. We the People, or more often our
representatives, are able to decide authoritatively for present and the future. So
conceived, the democratic political community is doubly bounded: spatially by the
borders of the demos and temporally by those who now are now assembled. Such a
narrow temporal interpretation implies that democracies are a succession of independent
generations. While any generation may know some of the their predecessors and their
successors, more distant past and future generations are often thought to lie outside of the
political community. While we have concerns for the lives of our children and their
children, the temporally narrow scope of the political community makes it possible and
under certain circumstances (such as global warming) very likely that the current
generation dominates future generations. Such domination may even make it difficult for
future generations not only to live well but also to inherit the democratic constitution.
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It might be thought that intergenerational democracy falls directly out of the idea
of self-rule. However, an adequate treatment of the problem of intergenerational
domination demands a transformation of many current understandings of self rule,
including concepts such as popular sovereignty. These difficulties are structural in two
respects. First, democracy, especially majoritarian democracy, is inherently biased
toward the present. Given this bias, the greater the temporal distance between present and
future generations, the less likely it is that the interests of the latter will be taken into
account. Furthermore, simply because of the arrow of time is directional, an enormous
asymmetry of power exists between present generations on the one hand and past and
future generations on the other. When coupled with myopia and other institutional
failures, this temporal bias of democracy can result in the tyranny of thepresent, a
problem that is only exacerbated by the preeminence of aggregative decision making.
This bias is not merely a version of the tyranny of the (present) majority, which always
disadvantages a segment of the present political community and potentially leads to the
domination of some citizens over others, but also the lives and well being of people in the
future political community. If they are dominated, then the overall prospects of fulfilling
the democratic ideal are greatly diminished. Rawls, for example, argues that any
democratic conception of justice must include a provision for the just claims of future
generations precisely because of the peculiar features of democracy and majority rule.1
Any argument for an intergenerational conception of democracy must consider at
least four main issues, each of which comprises a step in my overall argument. First, the
protective effects of democracy from domination seem limited, even in existing
democracies, to those who are citizens. When this status is defined in a temporally and
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spatially restrictive way, citizens may come to dominate noncitizens both inside and
outside their borders and generations. Second, in light of the possibility that democracies
can dominate future generations as they do noncitizens, some version of Burkes view of
a political community as a partnership across generations should be extended in a variety
of ways; for example, popular sovereignty can only be made intergenerational if each
generation regards itself, in Burkes terms, as the temporary possessor of democratic
power and thus will not act as its entire master. Against various objections, I argue that
such a partnership is not metaphysically impossible. Third, when this limitation of
temporary possession of democratic power is violated, not only are future generations
subjected to domination by those who are supposed to be trustees of democratic
institutions so too are many living citizens. They are insecure in their nondomination, and
this lack of security extends, most importantly for our purposes, to rights and entitlements
to natural resources that can only be attained in practices of intergenerational
management that see the inherent relationship between the natural environment and
human well being. The insecurity of democratic nondomination can be avoided only if
each generation has both forward- and backward- looking rights and obligations to other
generations (and not simply to past and future individuals). As a shared form of freedom,
environmental security is that no spatial or temporal demos assert some final authority
over the past, the present and the future. Next I consider the more minimal claim that
security is an instrumental benefit of democratic nondomination, including environmental
security from the effects of climate change.
Democracy, Nondomination, and Security
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I have argued that certain forms of democracy are temporally biased, such as
those with the provision that the electorate should have the final say about the choice of
the current regime who in turn may or may not be able to enact just and effective
legislation to deal with long term social problems. As Rawls puts it, the choice here is
simply that such a regime is as a practical matter more likely to be right than a
government empowered to override its wishes.2 The reason why in a democracy must
take just claims of future generations into account is that democracy is an imperfect
procedure. For example, they may enact laws the cause irreversible harms and thereby
perpetuate grave injustices to future generations that may not have occurred in other
forms of government. We could call such harms intergenerational domination, and it is
important to know that without principles of intergenerational justice democratic
procedures cannot rule out this possibility.
We can add to this assessment of democracy if we go beyond its decision
procedure and examine its many benefits, both instrumental and constitutive. The
constitutive benefits are tied to the status of citizenship as a way to realize freedom and
equality. Prominent among the instrumental benefits of democracy related to citizenship
are many of the basic forms of security, which, among other things, result from
possessing the ability to avoid the great ills of domination. Indeed, two of the most well-
known social scientific generalizations about democracy concern the absence of two such
evils: war and famine.3The relative absence of these two great causes of human suffering
can be tied to the operation of distinctive features of democracy. Without some fine-
grained explanation of the mechanisms that produce these benefits, there is no reason to
believe that these generalizations have always held or will always hold in the future.
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When considering famines Sen argues that behind these positive generalizations is the
protective reach of democracy, 4 and thus a kind of security that is directly tied to the
unique workings of democratic institutions. The rule of law might be an alternative
explanation, but, as Sen argues, starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.5
Famine prevention could then be gained through fairly simple democratic mechanisms of
accountability such as competitive elections and a free press that distribute effective
agency among citizens more widely than in their absence. Environmental security, or the
security of entitlements and rights related to the contributions of natural resources to
human well being, might also be part of instrumental benefits the protective reach of
familiar democratic institutions of free and open communication and a robust public
sphere in which the awareness of the consequences of various policies and laws can
shape the opinions of citizens. Do this form of security and the protective reach of
democracy extend across generations?
The single clearest contemporary example of harming future generations and
doing irreversible damage is global warming, the consequences of which are likely to be
very bad and very difficult to reverse given how long such gases remain in the
atmosphere. The interglacial period has lasted for roughly ten thousand years, with
temperature fluctuations of only about one degree Celsius. Given economic growth and
business as usual, the expected rise in temperature are 2.7 by 2050 and as much as 4.7 by
2100 even without taking into account feedback effects from warming itself. Although
predictions of this sort are fraught with uncertainly, within a few decades the global
average temperature will be higher than at any time since Homo Sapiens first evolved.6
Among the predicted consequences will be the rise in sea levels, causing massive
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flooding in unprotected river deltas such as in Bangladesh, mass migrations of people,
summer drying in central areas of food production, increase incidence of various
diseases. We can expect then that global warming will kill large numbers of people,
shorten the lives of many others, and cause large scale displacement of people over the
next century. Even given uncertainty, prudence alone would suggest policies to reduce
greenhouse gases for much the same reasons that we buy flood and earthquake insurance.
While our children and our childrens children will likely be affected, the most serious
consequences emerge for even later generations. On what basis do we have an obligation
to prevent these harms from happening? Certainly, if these predictions are even close to
being accurate, there is at least the very least strong moral obligation to prevent them
from happening. Since public goods and bads are at stake, political institutions must be
the primary actors. Given that every increment of greenhouse gases is bad for the
atmosphere as a whole, these are not just public bads, but also global bads and so require
transnational coordination in order to mitigate and limit global warming.
The guiding idea that most people who have not read Derek Parfit have about
these obligation is that we owe it to all those people who will suffer great harms if we
continue to pollute the atmosphere, who plausibly have a right to a safe environment, not
to suffer premature morbidity, and so on. Such a justification is problematic not merely
because there may or may not be such rights, but because it misstates the harm that is
involved: it is not the violation of any particular right, however intuitively plausible that
may seem, but rather that the present generation in this instance dominates future
generations and in so doing disregards their interests in continuing their just and
democratic institutions. The claim that there are some putative rights for future
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individuals also raises the nonidentity problem, the force of which is that we cannot owe
this obligation to particular future individuals.
The nonidentity problem is often thought to show a contradiction in the very
idea of obligations to future people. To use an example from John Broome, suppose we
accept that we have an obligation to curb travel in richer countries. That would mean that
a generation of people would marry different people and then have different children. In
this and similar cases, after some decades nearly all the people living would be different
individuals from those who will be living if we continue to pollute in our present
profligate way. It would seem then that we do not have an obligation to control pollution
because of obligations to particular persons. For some the argument entails, falsely, that
we have no obligations to future generations at all. However, it does not follow, since to
lack one kind of obligation does not mean we have no obligations. With respect to
climate change we have obligations to future generations. Thus, the rights that are at
stake are not to individuals butgenerations in either of the two scenarios. Similarly, the
point of a just savings rate across generations is not merely to increase wealth or well-
being, but to make it possible for the next generation to have just and democratic
institutions. The harm in this case is the harm of intergenerational domination; the
generation that does nothing in the face of global warming dominates future generations
by disregarding their interests as a future, temporary possessor of power in democratic
institutions.
In the context of democracy, the obligations are intergenerational, and the present
generation, if it fails to act, arbitrarily shifts the costs and burdens of global warming to
future generations. It is more than mere unfairness; it is usurping the powers and choices
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of future citizens. In the same way, France imposed huge costs on Haiti after its
successful slave revolt, and in this way continued its domination of Haiti for generations
through institutional failures. It is because of the structural possibility of such
intergenerational nondomination that the current generation must act in such a way to
enable future generations to sustain just and democratic institutions. This means that the
current generation share sovereignty with future generation, primarily by refraining from
injustices that undermine the inheritance of democratic institutions. This right applies
collectively to any future generation as such, whoever they are, to have the status of a self
governing demos that is able to exercise their non-exclusive sovereignty by extending to
future generations the same protective reach of democratic institutions that they enjoy.
Rawls is thus fundamentally correct, not because there is a right to democracy as such but
because of the unique character of democratic institutions the rule through imperfect
procedures such as majority rule. Just as we cannot allow that the sacrifices of a few can
be outweighed by the advantages enjoyed by others, we cannot say that the benefits to the
present generation can outweigh the loss of freedom of those in the future. Or, we might
think of it as Aristotle did as refraining frompleonexia, that each generation must refrain
from denying the next that which is due to them.
The typical democratic solution to the general problem of domination--political
inclusion--does not easily extend the protections of democracy temporally, since
democracies are now clearly among those who harm and dominate past and future
generations. Because of intergenerational domination, many of those democracies are
now insecure in many different ways, leaving both transition and future generations
vulnerable to domination by the past, by our generation, whose degradation of the
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environment violated the stricture that it must regard itself as the temporary possessor of
democratic power. But how can past, present and future generations be brought into a
partnership in democratic decision making?
On the Supposed Impossibility of Intergenerational Democracy
For many, the idea of an intergenerational democracy is a nonstarter. It asks us to
think the impossible. There are two main objections. The first we may call metaphysical.
Whatever the causal influences and normative inheritances of other generations, the
democratic community exists only in the present, among those who are citizens now.
Even if we regard them as part of our community (say because they are in some way
immortal), it is said, neither the past nor the future are part of the electorate, nor can they
participate in decisions made at a time when they do not exist. The second set of
objections is more practical. Given the lack of possible reciprocity between generations
as they become more and more remote, it is difficult to imagine that people will sacrifice
in the present for benefits which will only be experienced in the future. It would be
rational, they say, to discount the value of such benefits, especially if there are pressing
concerns that need to be addressed in the current generation. Or, as Al Gore has put it,
The past whispers, while the present shouts.7 This argument is the temporal equivalent
of a common objection to cosmopolitanism: our obligations are always to those near and
dear. Both of these arguments miss the real issue, since they fail too address those
asymmetries of power that make it possible for the present to dominate past and future
citizens. They ignore other temporal facts: allgenerations are vulnerable to domination,
since every generation is a future to some past and a past to some future.
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Others argue against giving the natural environment such a prominent place
within democratic deliberation. This bias is pervasive in economics, particularly when it
is concerned with issues and policies related to well being. The problem is not simply that
measures of wealth focus on production and consumption indices, but that even to
broader measures of well being, such as the UN Human Development Index, focus
entirely on current well being. However much such indices represent improvements over
previous measures, such as GDP, their emphasis on the present leaves out the important
contributions of the natural environment to human well being. The environment
contributes most directly to long term processes of change and development, so that its
degradation directly affects the security of democratic institutions and individual well
being. There is a high correlation between poverty and environment degradation,
particularly in areas where people depend on the natural provision of many valuable
goods, such as fertile soil, drinkable water, and other basic necessities, which Parttha
Dasgupta aptly calls ecological services. Indeed, large migration from the countrywide
to urban areas most often occurs when local common-property resources degrade to the
point where life at home is impossible.8 According to Dasgupta, when forests and
watersheds suffer degradation and the environment loses biodiversity and resilience, the
poorest in a society suffer the most due to their more direct dependence on such
environmental services. Because of these blind spots in our understanding of the role of
nature in human well being and because our tendency to discount future well being due to
the assumption that economic growth always increases rather than decreases over long
time spans, democracy does not necessarily ensure environmental security in the same
way that it is to security from war and forms of political indifference such as famines.
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How might we solve this more general problem of intergenerational domination?
One possibility is a partnership among generations to be created constitutionally, as when
the constitution binds each generation to respect the well being of the future. Just as
Ulysses allows himself to be bound to the mast, democracy might seek to require that
each generation not to dominate the future by temporally limiting its effective political
power. Such worries may lead them to adopt the Stephen Holmes and Jon Elsters view
that constitutions act as precommitments, so that the constitution is Peter sober, while
the electorate is Peter drunk.9 This precommitment, however, is not a stable a device of
political self-limitation, since subsequent generations may as Thomas Jefferson did, reject
these commitments as domination of the past. Because a constitution is not a suicide pact,
such shackles can be undone for republican reasons. When self-limitation is thought of
involving longer time scales and past and future actors, precommitments create an
intergenerational game of competing interests, in which asymmetries between past and
future assure that there is no credible mechanism to ensure compliance. The present wins,
since future benefits may be discounted relative to present costs.
Domination can also extend from the present to the past, effectively breaking the
intergenerational partnership of a continuous democracy. Past injustices may be regarded
as closed by the current generation, since those who suffered these injustices, in virtue of
being dead, are no longer considered true members of the democratic community and
thus unable to demand recourse. Similarly, future injustices can be justified in the same
way, since such injustices only affect potential people whose very existence depends on
our actions. This might lead citizens to delay sacrifices to halt global warming, the worst
impacts of which will be felt only by future generations who as a result will be limited in
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their range of choices and in their well-being freedom. Thus, precommitments do little to
change the conflicts among generations by trying to remove them from the purview of
democratic decision-making. If such conflicts are taken to be part of democracy that
requires of itself that future generations as such can make legitimate claims, then the
structural difficulties of generational temporality must be addressed head on: popular
sovereignty must be practically realized in a different way, as pooled or shared across
generations, in order that the manifest injustices of intergenerational domination be
avoided.
It is instructive to turn first to the intergenerational significance of the past,
perhaps because interaction between past and future generations seems unavoidably
mediated by the present. In fact, the past often has political claims upon the present,
usually related to past injustices and harms. But such claims are always intergenerational,
in the sense that they are as much about the future as the past. Intergenerational
democracy requires that the past is not closed, at least in the sense that those living in the
present can make legitimate claims based on ongoing domination in the present. This
means that dealing with claims of past generation can change the polity in the present.
Indeed, the very attempt to close the past inevitably reopens it democratically and
potentially creates a novel past from which new claims of justice may emerge. This has
been the case in New Zealand, where treaty violations are not merely matters of the past,
but now seen as ongoing into the future. Intergenerational democracy thus resists closure
and finality within the democratic community, leaving it open to change in both temporal
directions as deliberators construct the ongoing relations between past, present and
future. The atemporal character of current democracy is actually a form of temporal bias
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which entrenches enormous asymmetries of power among generations. If the past of a
democracy is closed in cases of intergenerational domination, then so is its future.
I have already discussed the need for majoritarian democracy to accept legitimate
intergenerational claims to justice, particularly those which have to do with
intergenerational domination. decide as the sovereign, each with final authority. This
might be justified by a particular conception of self-rule, in which the people are the
authors and subjects of the laws. This interpretation might be thought to be sufficient for
the nondomination of each generation because of its final authority. But this kind of
independence is rather narrow and limited in scope. However admirably political equality
is expressed by this idea of the self-legislating People, an atemporal understanding of the
subjects of the law cannot be sufficient for nondomination. As Dennis Thompson puts it,
even if no values except popular sovereignty were at stake, the principle cannot give any
particular majority final authority.10Since the claims of future sovereigns are
undervalued in current, it is not surprising that they are left to fend for themselves,
despite the fact that many decisions not only pose significant constraints on the future but
are may last for many generations or even be irreversible.
The democratic bias in favor of the current generation might simply be reversed
by appealing to some intertemporal majority principle. But since future generations will
inevitably outnumber the present generation, then over the course of the democratic
processes taken as a whole, the bias would simply shift to the future, imposing undue
burdens on the present. In order to overcome these epistemic difficulties, Thompson
proposes that citizens see themselves as part of a temporal series of sovereigns, in which
the form of future democracy is left open. Nonetheless, given the ways that the present
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generation can still affect future democratic sovereigns, each generation should
institutionally represent future sovereigns by acting as trustees of the democratic
process.11Each generation is thus entrusted to hand democracy on to the future
sovereign people, allowing them to exercise competent control. The notion that the
present generation is a trustee holding past, present and future sovereignty in trust, is an
appropriate development of Burkes idea of an intergenerational polity. However, this is
not captured by a representational device, particularly in the form of a third party
representation (or Tribunate for Posterity on the Roman model of the protector of the
plebs) which seeks to protect the general interests of the future.
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This Tribunate is not an
intergenerational solution at all, but a way of dividing power among the current
generation and hoping that it makes some difference to the future. Instead, each
generation as a whole is a trustee for future generations in their deliberation. Rather than
some proxy, the future is part of the indefinite audience to which the public addresses its
justifications, giving them a similar political status in present deliberation.
Thompsons approach recognizes all the metaphysical difficulties in representing
the future and accepts that third party representation (or a variety of some such offices,
devices and strategies) is the only feasible proposal. While the epistemic limits he
discusses certainly hold for representatives of the future who simply cannot know the
interests of those whom they represent, the proper solution should aim to give statuses to
the present which can be incorporated in a variety of institutions; as has already been
done with respect to claims made for past injustices. It should be similarly possible in the
present to make basic claims in light of manifest future injustices, as I am trying to for
forms of domination that undermine basic environmental security and well being
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freedom. The public availability of many such claims made on behalf of the past and the
future is not anything mysterious. While our political community has a stronger sense of
the reality of the future than the past, the Maori and others are more genuinely
intergenerational political communities, which could see sovereignty as always de facto
in the present, but regard it normatively as essentially shared across time. The presentist
bias of current democracy is thus a social rather than a metaphysical fact, and many
democracies now are seeking to rectify past wrongs. But the recognition of claims to
justice is not the only way in which sovereignty ought to be shared. There are also
instrumental benefits of democracy that cannot be achieved without recognizing the inter-
temporal character of sovereignty. This aspect of democracy should also serve to develop
a fuller account of intergenerational domination.
Insecure Democracy and Intergenerational Domination
In order to understand intergenerational domination, we might first examine
Philip Pettits notion of domination as the dominators capacity to interfere on an
arbitrary basis in the choices of another. Pettit includes among these capacities financial
clout, political authority, social connections, communal standing, informational access,
ideological positions, cultural legitimation and the like.13 But the capacity to interfere is
not a necessary condition for domination, precisely because such a capacity can be
exercised by a nonmastering interferer (55), such as a government that acts in
accordance to the rule of law and also tracks the opinions and interests of those who are
interfered with. In order to avoid domination, I must enjoy a secure and resilient form of
noninterference, and thus must be in a position where no one has that power of
arbitrary interference and I am correspondingly powerful (69). These powers derive
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from the status of being a citizen, the great benefit of which is the possession of the
power to prevent certain ills from happening (69). Given the myriad sources of
domination, agents must be very powerful indeed. The ability to plan ones life and to
live it is impossible when one is dominated, so that not to be free in this way is to live
without the security that we associate with a worthwhile human life. Nondomination is a
condition for such security. In this section, I discuss the idea of environmental security as
a necessary condition possessing the power to prevent great ills from happening across
borders and generations. Environmental insecurity is a clear indicator of intergenerational
domination.
Pettits conception of domination is thought of primarily in terms of the relations
among individuals. This runs afoul of the non-identity problem. What is needed is a more
institutional understanding of domination, and a nonmastering interferer is a good
definition of pooled sovereignty. In the context of democracy, I propose that domination
is the use of authoritative normative powers to impose obligations and change
entitlements without recourse or remedy. In light of this requirement, Pettit argues that a
suitable legal regime (35) is necessary for nondomination in the sense that these rights
and duties, or normative statuses more generally, do not depend on the good will of
others. Democracy itself is then the joint exercise of these powers and capacities, so that
no one is under the control of any given individual or group of citizens. Such powers
must be redefined jointly and creatively when the circumstances of domination change.
While current citizens can by use of the normative powers of citizenship resist the
imposition of obligations, the suitable legal regime that would be necessary for
intergenerational nondomination would permit agents such as judges or representatives,
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to act on behalf of future generations just as they have acted on behalf of the present
generations who still suffer under past harms. What is the legal equivalent for the future
harms?
The clearest analogy for the legal recognition of the valid claims for future
generations is international law, broadly understood. The key to the analogy is that the
sovereign accepts obligations to others outside of the political community, and not
merely for strategic reasons but precisely for the sake of justice and to create conditions
of mutual recognition and nondomination. But this often means that the agreement to
such laws demands restrictions on sovereignty and the acceptance of the valid claims of
others that are not members of the sovereign people but are extraterritorial and thus
outside the current political community. The acceptance of these claims is not based
merely on contingent benefits, but on the recognition of valid claims outside the political
community is a requirement of justice. It is also because of a concern for justice that there
ought to be an explicit recognition of legal claims and status both outside and inside the
community. Among the people who have no status and thus cannot prevent being
dominated include illegal immigrants and squatters, prisoners and illegal enemy
combatants, and all others who can make no claims to justice or right because there is no
one to whom they may appeal their appeal. Even if they do not have the authorial status
of democratic citizenship, their legal status as persons give them an important editorial
capacity to revise decisions and policies that deny their rights and the worth of their
freedom. But if we consider the possibility of the domination of noncitizens by citizens
that is now a pervasive fact of modern societies, then it is clear that many of these powers
and liberties must be shared by all within a republican polity. Without shared liberties,
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both citizens and noncitizens are insecure in their own nondomination qua persons.
Without this legal dimension, freedom from domination remains irreducibly contingent
across important spatial boundaries. This kind of extraterritorial legal protection could
also recognize the temporal contingencies of nondomination.
The problem of insecurity crosses borders in a similar sort of way. Environmental
security is now a global public good, so that conceptualizing security in terms of
sovereign states no longer illuminates the scope of the issues. Environmental security
with regard to global warming is shared, in the sense that it is achievable only if all
possess it. Thus, from the perspective of shared freedom the natural environment
contributes to well being in the same way that a safe epidemiological environment
contributes to health. In the case of global warming, environmental security applies
across political communities, and thus is worsened because of the lack of effective
collective action. Issues of environmental security are truly global problems that cannot
easily be solved by the current state system that seeks to protect the sovereignty of its
members. It is not clear that the exercise of authority by a global sovereign would be any
more effective.
It is easy to see the effects of the absence of such security: there is a strong
negative correlation at work between environmental degradation on the one hand and
poverty on the other hand. One explanation offered by economists is that the poor
degrade their resource base, since they discount the future at high rates for the sake of
current income. But the alternative explanation is based on the failure of current
institutions to supply the needed security of the rights and entitlements for poor citizens
to secure their commonly held natural resources, such as water and grazing land that they
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have often managed sustainably for centuries. As Partha Dasgupta argues, the loss of
such entitlements and rights is most often due to political instability, a direct cause of
environmental degradation.14 The entitlements here are not rights to ownership, but the
rights of access to and to the intergenerational management of environmental resources,
in the absence of which there is no assurance that more powerful actors will not
expropriate the commons and deny existing rights to their use by local communities.
With the degradation of the local resource base, local people then lack the well being
freedom that enabled them to sustainably use these resources and preserve them for
future generations.
The insecurity of the well-being freedom of local groups is directly related to the
domination of future generation through the shift in the long run away from the commons
to more industrial, resource-intensive technologies of resource management. Such
substitutions prove very costly, in comparison to other solutions, as the large financial
difference between the preservation of the watershed for New York City and the the
otherwise necessary filtration systems shows.15 These institutional shifts no longer
provide environmental security to the worst off. They also permit the domination of the
these groups for the indefinite future by denying the inheritance of property rights based
on sharing a resource (rights of use) as opposed to practices based on private ownership.
They dominate the future to the extent that these resources are further degraded by new
practices that employ industrial extraction of natural resources and the substitution of
resource intensive technologies that restrict the options and opportunities of future
generations. The self-defeating negative feedback relationships exist in this case as they
did with regard to other temporary forms of security that are achieved through
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domination. Attempts to control the Mississippi river watershed industrially, for example,
have led to less, rather than more, environmental security.
Given the kinds of ecological effects that human beings are now capable of
wreaking on their shared environment, the potential for domination with the resultant
insecurities exists at many different levels. Environmental security crosses borders, and
the state system has not been effective in creating the capacity to regulate climate change
and other long term processes across borders. Most of all, among the many problems of
environmental security as a public good follow upon processes of global warming, the
effects of which will surely produce more domination, even as the states and the current
state system are unable to control them. It is also true that the greatest insecurity will be
felt several generations in the future as they worsen and become irreversible as the
atmosphere is not longer able to regenerate itself. As Barry Holden correctly argues,
global warming requires extending democracy and popular control both spatially and
temporally, since it affects all the people of the world.16 Here we must remember that
popular control can be dominating, and hence its expansion must be aimed at making
well being freedom more robust across generations and institutional levels. Robustness
here is here a measure of the security of right and entitlements, and their multiple
realizations across various levels makes them more secure; in the example of resource
degradation discussed above, rights and entitlements at the state and the local levels often
work against each other. Rather than positively making each more secure, rights of use
are undermined by legally rights of ownership. Environmental security is a global public
good, in which none have the freedom to live in a secure environment unless all have it,
so that the global people is a community of sharing the same fate and atmosphere.
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Given that security in republican terms is a shared freedom analogous to a public
good, how should we think of the new framework for global popular control? One way to
share freedom is to think of the global demos as the basis for a new framework for
nondomination, supported by the emerging human political community that is established
in global institutions of security, whether they are concerned with war, the environment
or grave violations of human rights. But such a spatially global demos does not
necessarily expand the temporal dimensions of democratic sovereignty, and thus they
leaves intergenerational domination unresolved. In the case of environmental security we
see numerous intersecting and interacting futures, all of which have claims to make upon
those global institutions that pool sovereignty in order to gain security. As the case of
those dependent on the local commons shows, what is needed is something more like a
conception ofdemoi rather than a global demos, so that global democracy, too, will not
act as an intergenerational dominator. In the face of global warming, a democracy of a
singular demos may well make us less rather than more secure. In order to overcome
insecure democracy, a democracy of demoi is required more than a global demos,
however important global level institutions are for environmental insecurity.
Even if it is clear that sovereignty must be pooled and that security is a public
good held across generations, it is not clear how to institutionalize these relationships
temporally. It seems clear that some form of trusteeship in both temporal directions is
necessary; at the same time, the presentist bias of current democracy seems to undermine
such a possibility. The issue is as much structural as it is epistemic. Thompsons
conception of a Tribunate does not fundamentally address the structural causes for the
presentist bias of democracy that undermine trusteeship. Nor does it make much sense to
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have biased institutions and expect some representative of the past or future to be able to
effectively make claims on their behalf, or even to know what their interests are. Here the
focus should be on nondomination; we can assume that domination is a cause of great ills
experienced by future generations. Thus we might think of transnational institutions as
providing a certain analogy. The European Union establishes a transnational polity, rather
than a system of representation; and thus, a transgenerational democracy cannot simply
establish an embassy for future generations. The EU offers a political order that allows
for a positive feedback relationship of pooled sovereignty that enables democratization to
occur, in which it is precisely the transnational-level institutions that enhance democracy
at the lower levels. With such mutual interaction across levels and locations, a highly
differentiated polity works not merely in policy areas, but also in creating a regime of
human rights that can multiply realize the powers of citizenship and make them more
rather than less robust.
The founding moment of the EU, as articulated by Spinelli and others, was
intergenerational, in which the experience of the war by multiple generations demanded
the transformation of democracy beyond individual states. Thus present can be a trustee
for democracy, ensuring not merely that democracy is possible in the future, but that it
rule itself in such a way so as not to dominate the past or the future, so that it cannot
envisage a future in which it is the past dominating the present. The transnational public
must see itself as communicating across time with the future, who form part of the
indefinite audience to whom the present owes justifications, with whom it shares basic
liberties. Thus we can see security as a kind of primary good, as that public good that any
generation at any temporal location would seek if it attempts to realize self rule. Or, to
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use Rawls first principle, each generation must see to it that the future is able to make
use of the fair value of its liberty.
Two objections can be made against such a conception. One might think that
simple guardianship is superior to pooled intergenerational democratic control over the
environment. One might also argue that a world divided into many separate
intergenerational communities or peoples is superior to a global democracy ofdemoi.
Both alternatives simply reinforce existing patters of democratic domination. The
alternative that I am advocating here is temporal as well as spatial cosmopolitanism in the
consideration legitimate claims to the protective reach of democracy.
One might argue that actual democratic control over decisions that make such
security possible is not necessary. Sen argues that the people do not need to exercise
democratic control over such decisions as whether to live in an epidemic-free
environment, so long as the levers of control are systematically exercised in line with
what we would choose and for that exact reason.17 Once we introduce the possibility of
generational conflicts, it is doubtful that generations would choose a policy for the exact
same reason. Similarly, Pettit does not require that people actually deliberate when
decisions are made for just those reasons that all could accept. In many democracies, he
argues, some decisions are depoliticized to the extent that control over them is handed
over to independent commissions so long as the conditions of hypothetical mutuality and
simultaneity can reasonably be expected to be met.18 In addition, Thompson and Holden
think that independent commissions and other such bodies can often best represent the
interests of future generation, who cannot themselves vote or in any way exercise control
over who will represent them and their interests. For all of these arguments, such
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commissions are antimajoritarian devices that are not necessarily democratic; they give
democratic control over to an independent body precisely to omit democratic power.
This argument for the limitation of democracy fills an obvious gap in representation, but
without correcting the presentist bias of current democracy and ignores the benefits of
actual deliberation in testing alternative and novel futures. Such forms of depoliticized
deliberation would ultimately reinforce current biases, since it does not necessarily see its
task as the achievement of environmental security for all demoi.
Actual deliberation in the present about global warming has many undeniable
benefits over guardian checks on the system of representation. By participating in public
deliberation, citizens could better assess the threats to environmental security, the need
for immediate and long term actions, and the degree to which sacrifices in the well being
of the present generation are involved. Because policies related to the means to achieve
the reduction of greenhouse gases require deliberation by citizens themselves to confer
legitimacy, a better form of trusteeship would be the use of minipublics that cut across
various demoi. In this way, actual transnational deliberation has the further benefits of
diversity, so that the gains, losses, and sacrifices are put in a longer context in which the
future is anticipated.
The second objection raises the issue of the nature of an intergenerational political
community. Avner de Shalit argues that communities must meet three main conditions:
interaction among people in everyday life, cultural interaction, and moral similarity.19
While the first of these conditions cannot be met except in the present, the future people
can meet the second condition of community. Much as traditional conceptions of
democracy are rooted in the state, this conception of community is based on the nation as
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a cultural entity. This allows us to see the future generations as consisting of those born
into similar cultural and moral circumstances as we are in the present. But this conception
of community only recreates the current problem of environmental security, which these
communities must share without the help of de Shalits two conditions. That all human
beings are affected by global warming, the moral similarities with the future are not
based on a shared tradition or culture. A recurrent feature of democracy is the idea that
democracy will be better and more extensive in the future. For this reason, Burkes idea
of an intergenerational partnership is much richer, to the extent that it makes explicit the
relations to the past and future that are constitutive of any just political community.
However, his conception of an intergenerational community is often too backward-
looking, to the extent to which it emphasizes continuity with the past. But if democracy
requires that no generation has final authority, then both the past and the future must be
seen as in a partnership subject to continuous change and renegotiation in both directions.
Without this openness, temporal bias is reintroduced and the potential for domination by
the past over succeeding generations is a real possibility.
Conclusion
Unless modified to become a global and intergenerational democracy based on
pooled sovereignty and shared freedom from domination, modern democracy suffers two
deficits with respect to its own sustainability. The first is that the asymmetries of power
between the present and future and past generations are endemic to its bounded forms and
lead unavoidably to domination. This domination undermines the continued existence of
democracy over time, since the future generations may not be able to exercise their
capacities for political freedom and well being freedom. I have discussed various biases
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built into current democratic practice that lead to deficits in problem solving and in the
capability of democracies to see their own tendency toward domination. Some devices of
trusteeship are better than others in helping to achieve intergenerational democracy
without the costs of guardianship. Trusteeship requires the broadening of the temporal
horizon of decision making so as to exclude costs and obligations that future generations
could reasonably reject. However, without being guided by a larger conception of pooled
sovereignty and intergenerational partnership, representation by itself is insufficient to
overcome pervasive biases and potential for domination. The European Union would not
achieve security from war simply by having each Member State represent foreigners in
some particular office or body.
Many have remarked that environmental problems such as global warming
demand extending the scope of democracy across both space and time: given that these
problems are truly global; and they are also intergenerational. Understood in terms of the
requirements of nondomination, these extensions of democracy are quite similar, if in
different registers. Both are solved only if democracies understand and overcome their
potential to be dominators of their own citizens, of other democracies and of past and
future generations.Along with sovereignty, the capacity to initiate deliberation about the
terms of democracy itself must also be distributed among various units, levels and
generations. Without this sort of institutional structure, current circumstances make
democracies insecure and subject to temporary possessors of democratic power that act as
their entire master. Political inclusion has worked to make visible the claims of the past to
justice. With respect to the future, we, the temporary possessors of pooled democratic
sovereignty, are the greatest threat to their well being freedom and environmental
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security. To achieve the security that comes from nondomination, the current generation
of any democracy should not view itself as a final authority or master of the whole.
These arguments concerning the intergenerational public good of security do not
exhaust the possible justifications for intergenerational and transnational democracy. It
could also be thought to be instrumentally valuable to the extent that intergenerational
democracy is a necessary means to achieve particular valuable ends or to avoid terrible
evils. Some of the worst evils can be addressed by new forms of political and
environmental security, both of which may be the result of domination. In the case of
such forms of domination, the case for intergenerational democracy is much clearer even
than for transnational democracy. The metaphysical impossibility arguments can be given
a positive, practical twist: even in a fully intergenerational democracy, the generations
cannot for obvious metaphysical reasons be mutually and simultaneously together in an
act of self-constitution. Given that in both cases there are many valuable intersecting and
overlapping forms of political order for promoting nondomination, a democracy of demoi
makes sense spatially and temporally. When a democracy declares itself to be the final
sovereign authority, it cannot as a dominator realize unavoidably shared goods such as
freedom and security. The first step in any argument for intergenerational democracy is to
abandon the assumption that democracies cannot be dominators. In the temporal case,
this domination begins at home, in this generation that has produced insecure and
unsustainable democracy. A secure and sustainable democracy is on my account a matter
of achieving intergenerational nondomination.
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1Notes
Rawls, Theory of Justice, 296.
2 Rawls, Ibid.3
As Russett puts it: Depending on precise criteria, only twelve to fifteen states qualified as democracies at the
end of the nineteenth century. The empirical significance of the rarity of war between democracies emerges only
in the first half of the twentieth century, with at least twice the number of democracies as earlier, and especially
with the existence of perhaps sixty democracies by the mid-1980s. See Bruce Russett, Grasping the
Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 20.
4 Sen,Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 184.
5 Amartya Sen,Poverty and Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), p. 165-166.
6 See John Broome, Counting the Cost of Global Warming(Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1993), 13.
7 Barry Holden,Democracy and Global Warming(London: Continuum, 2004), 59.
8 Partha Dasgupta,Human Well Being and the Natural Environment(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
192.
9 See Barry Holden.Democracy and Global Warming, 67; Holden thinks introducing policies to curb global
warming is a form of self-limitation and hence precommitment. See Stephen Holmes, Precommitment and the
Paradox of Democracy, in Constitutionalism and Democracy, ed. J. Elster and R. Slagstad (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 199.
10 Dennis Thompson, Democracy in Time: Popular Sovereignty and Temporal Representation, Constellations
12 (2005), 246.
11 Thompson, 248.
12 Thompson, 256-257.
13 Philip Pettit,Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 52. All references in this paragraph are
to this work.
14 Dasgupta,Human Well Being and the Natural Environment, 113.
15 See G. Chinchilnisky and G.M. Heal, Economic Returns from the Biosphere, Social Choice and Welfare 13
(2996), 231-257. The difference in cost is large, with $8 billion for technologies of filtration and only 300
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million for watershed preservation.
16 Holden, 117.
17 Amartya Sen,Inequality Reexamined(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 65.
18 Philip Pettit, Depoliticizing Democracy, inDeliberative Democracy and its Discontents, ed. S. Besson and J.
Marti (London: Ashgate, 2006), 96.
19 Avner De Shalit, Why Posterity Matters (London: Routledge, 1995), 22