Multitude

Abstract Critics of globalization in the 1990s argued that globalization undermined democracy. Whether globalization was understood as something fundamentally new, or as the latest example of imperialist assertions of national interests by strong states in the global system, globalization threatened the sovereignty of the nation‐state. Since democracy in the modern era has been premised on the idea of national self‐determination – the idea that a national people should be self‐governing – the threat that globalization posed to the sovereignty of the nation‐state meant, in turn, a threat to democratic self‐determination; a threat, that is, to democracy.