©Cheneval/University of Zurich/12.08.04
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1
Conceiving Constitutional Conditions of Equality: Cosmopolitanism and
Multilateral Democratic Integration
Francis Cheneval
Associate Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Zurich, Switzerland
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Paper to be presented at the 100
th
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Chicago, September 2-5, 2004, Panel 42-13: Globalizing Democracy? Human Rights and
Economic Justice in the World Economy
1. Introduction
This paper tries to elaborate the normative grounds of multilateral democratic integration (MDI)
as an emerging geopolitical system. The underlying assumption is that the two basic structures of
politics, the territorial state and international organization, are undergoing a slow but steady
process of integration (Rosenau 1997). Multilateral democratic integration can be understood as
the ideal type of the functionally differentiated constitution of incongruent territorial hierarchies
through institutionalized cooperation and integration between democratic states. It implies
increasingsupranational legislation, jurisdiction and regulation. The entire process happens in the
context of cultural globalization leading to the diffusion of expectations of basic standards of
good governance, as well as hyphenated and hybrid identities. It also happens in the context of
the increased movement of people, goods, capital, and services. The process blends domestic and
intergovernmental structures through their linkage to supranational modes of decision-making
and jurisdiction. So far, MDI is a geographically limited network of overlapping and territorially
incongruent organizations, not an overarching global system. In the world at large, it coexists
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Convention