CIAO DATE: 02/03

An E-Parliament to Democratize Globalization: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Abstract

Human beings have struggled for centuries to gain control of their own destinies, particularly to shape the political decisions that affect their lives. By the late twentieth century, nearly 60 percent of the world's people had achieved democratic governance. But now, because of interdependence and globalization, people living in national democracies have begun to lose their grip on decisions that affect them. Throughout the world, many decisions impacting citizens of one country are made by people living outside their country or by impersonal market forces that are not accountable to anyone and that often subordinate the needs of many people to the prosperity of a few.

As political, economic, environmental, and military interdependence increase, ungoverned cross-border interpenetrations produce increasing levels of frustration and conflict. People in most countries yearn for more direct, effective, life-enhancing decisions by political authorities, but authorities lack the means and the will to render decisions that will more fully meet human needs. People around the world face a democratic deficit in decisionmaking, an action deficit in addressing global problems, a resource deficit in meeting their needs and sustaining the biosphere, and a vision deficit in nurturing human solidarity.

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