The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics

The claim I want to make in this article is, in short, first, that democratic theory for the most part has seriously neglected the temporal preconditions of liberal democracy and, second, that it therefore fails to adequately grasp some fundamental aspects of the crisis of democratic self-determination in the contemporary global age. In its first part, the article seeks to demonstrate that the history of modernity is an ongoing process of social acceleration and that most of the phenomena we currently grasp under the concept of “globalization” can in fact best be understood as instances or consequences of the latest wave of social acceleration. In the second and main part of this article, the consequences of this acceleratory character of modernity for the plausibility, legitimacy and possibility of political democracy are systematically explored. The main argument is that the speed-up of society at first enabled and supported democratization, but beyond a certain critical threshold, the reverse effect occurs: the speed of social change and the dynamics of socioeconomic development threaten to undermine the proper functioning of democracy. Thus, it is my claim that democracy only works properly within a certain time- or “speed-frame” of social change. From this, I conclude that what is called for in the Age of Globalization is a new critical theory of acceleration, the contours of which I briefly sketch out in the third and last part of this essay.