Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order

From an academic point of view, the topic of this chapter is placed within the domain of Intelligence Studies which is a sub-field of International Relations and Strategic Studies. Although the domain of intelligence has been characterized in the past as a “missing” and an “underdeveloped and under-theorized” dimension (Andrew and Dilks 1984: 1; Jervis 2007: xix; Scott and Jackson 2004: 1), nowadays intelligence literature has mushroomed, its quality has been considerably improved and it is an established, dynamic and legitimate interdisciplinary field of scholarship (Gibbs 2007: 58; Konstantopoulos and Doga 2015; Rudner 2009: 111; Stafford 1988: 238).

Cyberspace is a socio-political and technological domain with unique characteristics. Cyberspace transcends territorial and legal boundaries and is mostly owned and managed by the private sector. The fact that states are unable to secure cyberspace on their own, forces them to develop cooperative mechanisms with other states and international organizations, but also with the private sector. This reality raises a number of issues regarding the most effective model of governance. Viewing cyberspace as a global commons, balancing between state sovereignty and the fragmentation of cyberspace, debating between multilateral governance and multi-stakeholderism and establishing cyber norms, sketch a rather complex picture of cyberspace governance. The cases of ITU, ICANN, IGF and NETmundial offer us a pragmatic insight into the power politics of cyberspace. Cyberspace is a geopolitical arena, where states compete with each other, but are also being challenged by the private sector.

A growing number of theoretical and empirical studies is actually devoted to the interaction between the democratic organization of modern societies and the economic institutions that stimulate sustainable growth. Classical Political Economists also had some particularly elaborated positions concerning this issue. We present here the arguments that John Stuart Mill has advanced in defense of the model of representative Democracy that benefits economic progress. Mill’s ideal system of plural voting aimed to extend the right to vote to every adult person—male or female—by avoiding at once the oppression of one class by another, through the balance of opposing sectional interests. Moreover, Mill insisted that the material conditions for individual and social improvement should concur with a self-sufficient and self-restrained, not by an affluent society. Democratic Governance of this conflict-less quasi-egalitarian society should be participatory and representative, two conditions that guarantee individual self-development, in a way that liberates individual genius and mental energy as the best means to promote social improvement.

"Development policy is a lively and controversial area of academic discourse. It is too often assumed that policies and institutions that prevail in the West will be automatically and universally suited for developing countries. But as Ha-Joon Chang (2002b) and others have pointed out, the successfully developed countries did not themselves follow the standard ‘neoliberal’ prescriptions of free trade and democracy as they began to take-off economically. Britain, the United States and other developed countries were both protectionist and relatively undemocratic, for much of the nineteenth century.

Germany’s post war economic system is typically referred to as a Social Market Economy. Both the Social Market Economy and the so called “economic miracle”, that is the rapid economic recovery following the devastating World War II, are almost part of the charter myth of Germany’s post war society. Walter Eucken, the perhaps most prominent intellectual mentor of the Social Market Economy, postulated a broad range of interdependent effects of the various political and economic institutions on the degree of a country’s level of both prosperity and freedom (Eucken 1952). While he remained somewhat vague on the question as to how close this interdependence might be and as to what the causal relations were, most commentators argued that liberal economic and political institutions would be both stable and prosperity enhancing only when operating hand in hand, thereby reinforcing each other. Perhaps the most frequently considered interdependence between institutions is the one between the institutional setting of a market economy on the one hand and that of a democratic polity on the other.

The idea of implementing an economic and a social system simultaneously within the “free market economy”, the so called “Social Market Economy” (Soziale Marktwirtschaft), is of German origin. Alfred Müller-Armarck was used the term “Soziale Marktwirtschaft” for the first time in a publication “Wirtschaftslenkung und Marktwirtschaft” (Planned Economy and Market Economy), but it is a product of the European culture as well. This can be seen in the following:

Social Market Economy (SME) has been the economic order in Germany since 1948. Its establishment was not an easy task. Germany was more a land of cartels than of a real market economy. The shift to SME was confronted with support (USA) and impediments (France, UK) on the side of the Western Allied Forces. Moreover, it met opposition from national parties, enterprises and its associations, trade unions and in early stages skepticism from the majority of the citizens. The reasons for the great success of SME and its broad acknowledgement is not restricted on Germany. The realization of SME was a core determinant for the successful European integration. Moreover, the theoretical foundations of SME have been contributing essentially to the modern theory of liberalism. One can even say: SME can be regarded as the only concept of liberalism which is globally applicable.

The groveling crisis that plagues Greece and that is deeply embedded in the European crisis, which is itself rooted in a more global setting of economic and political crises, reveals the complexity of the relationship between economy and democracy. It also shows how fragile both are and how deeply entrenched in politics are the questions raised and the solutions proposed.

This paper contributes to the question of the relationship between democracy and economic inequality in ancient Greece by developing a realistic population and income model for late classical Athens. The model is evidence-based, although hypothetical in many particulars. It aligns with other evidence suggesting that economic inequality in late classical Athens was low by historical standards. While no causal argument is made here, the model is consistent with the hypothesis that democracy tended to lower economic inequality over time, in part through progressive taxation. The model also helps to explain Athenian social stability: poorer Athenians, including many slaves, were beneficiaries of a system that enabled most Athenians to live well above the level of bare subsistence. Some slaves had some chance of earning their way out of slavery by, in effect, purchasing themselves. While taxation could be disruptively heavy for some estates, the overall tax burden on wealthy Athenians, as a class, was not high enough to trigger elite-level revolutionary cooperation against the democratic regime.

There is a substantial and growing literature on the emergence of joint–stock companies (Lawson 1993; Bowen 2006; Leeson 2009; Robins 2012; Roy 2012; Kyriazis et al. 2015; Vlami 2015 amongst others) their operations and a discussion of specific aspects, as for example, the principal-agent problem (Carlos 1992; Carlos and Stephen 1996) or their influence on history, such as the expansion of European states in Asia and their transformation into empires (Boxer 1965; Rodger 1997, 2004; Gaastra 2003; Krishna 2014).

Political economy has researched both autocracy and the emergence of democracy. Autocrats are modelled as state proprietors using taxes and public expenditure to maximize personal consumption subject to the constraints of spending on their own security, on transferring resources to their supporters and on public services to increase output and therefore tax revenue. In studying democratisation the literature examines how and why a typically hereditary and enfranchised elite extend various legal protections and voting rights to the poorer classes of the population. However, research has ignored the fact that in the transition to representative government some countries retained their kings, and therefore a hereditary privilege, as head of state in the form of constitutional monarchy, while others adopted republican orders and abolished the monarchy. Since her foundation modern Greece has swung from monarchy to republic back to monarchy and then republic. What factors does political economy suggest to explain this varied pattern and the demise of monarchy? This is the question addressee by the present study.

When the economic crisis erupted in Greece in 2009, the view that prevailed was that its causes were idiosyncratic in the sense that they had to do with the structure of the Greek economy and the economic policies of Greek governments, at least since the country’s entry into the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 2002. On account of the available evidence, this view was quite convincing and Greece became the black sheep of the world, because of the risk its imminent bankruptcy represented for the stability of the Euro, and hence, the wider international financial system. But shortly afterwards, the economic crisis engulfed Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, i.e. countries of the European periphery with much stronger fundamentals than Greece, and experts started to suspect that some more systematic forces were amiss. So they turned their attention to the study of the shocks these countries experienced from ascending to the Eurozone and, of the economic policies they had adopted to deal with them or because of them.

The chapter offers a critical appraisal of the perspectives over European integration in terms of new governance and particularly networks. This specific case of regional integration has anyway raised intriguing issues, regarding the content and role of democracy, legitimacy, accountability and representation. The road leading to a networked European entity or a networked democracy might still be long, although networked processes or functions have already entailed serious consequences, both practically and normatively. Consequently, democracy appears to be the inevitable—albeit complex—guide during the respective course. In this framework, it is imperative to distinguish between the recognition of the feasibility per se of a post-majoritarian or post-liberal democracy and the correspondence of the emerging European realities to the relevant criteria. Simply put, the current literature tends to emphasize the challenges that the EU poses for political theory or organization as well as for (representative) democracy. This needs not to be refuted, but it still needs to be analyzed dialectically with the fact that democracy itself (however complex or even ambiguous) sets challenges, not to be taken lightly, for the emergence of the euro-polity.

Valery called Europe the “Asian Cape of the European province”. Where does this province stand today? A Europe that has been the Europe of currencies and today of the single currency, is still not as always, the continuation of a marginalized, individualized Europe, always and still at the mercy of a permanent euro-organizational anarchy?

An essential element of a truly democratic society is the degree of civic engagement it exhibits. The paper draws on the relevant literature to pinpoint the notion, dimensions and determinants of civic engagement and it then moves to explore the issue empirically. In particular, it examines the level and determinants of young people’s civic engagement in Greece, analysing more than 2000 questionnaires which are collected from students of the University of Thessaly. Civic engagement is assessed along three dimensions, civic, electoral and political voice, taking into account whether people actively participate in associations, offer voluntary work to non-governmental organizations, display buttons, signs or stickers, protest, sign petitions and boycott. In addition, the paper explores what drives such a behaviour. After controlling for sociodemographic factors, age, gender, family environment and income, the research finds that sociality (i.e. the intensity of social connections), altruism and political ideology affect students’ civic participation.

In recent years, the geopolitics of energy, especially oil and gas, intruded heavily upon the international political agenda, as energy was transformed from a pure economic issue to a political one (Mingst 2008, p. 276). The geopolitical/geostrategic dimension of energy security in particular has made a spectacular return in world politics. Increasingly more countries have recognized the importance of incorporating energy security more systematically into foreign policy by developing various tools of promoting their strategic goals in this regard.