A World of Superflous People: Globalisation and Democracy
A World of Superflous People: Globalisation and Democracy

Summary/Abstract: The problem of the fabled denominator that used to encumber classical political economy has made its appearance in the recent (political science) global political economy as a genie let out from a bottle by the contemporary realism and mercantilism, that the structure of the contemporary world will not let back in. The trends in the development of the globalised world cannot be reconciled with its globalisational politics without a clear liberating and harmonizing strategy of its leading national/market democracies. Without such a strategy, globalisation and democracy cannot be linked because they cannot find the classical common denominator. The mercantilist/realistic concepts of its identification cannot but fail since by definition they start from the pluperfect structure of the separate world of developed nation-states – but forget about their assumptions and the context – and, amazed, time and again they undermine their own efforts and the survival itself. The same happens with the imperial endeavours of the leading nation-state: it does not manage to be both, so eventually it may well be neither. The alternative scenarios of the world political and politico-economic development included in our project will show that the possible successful strategy of globalisation and democratization (and its substitutes) have to start from completely novel analytical assumptions. Only one of them is formally old but substantially entirely new: an increasingly unavoidable planetary denominator whose variations enable if not entirely successful but at least viable planetary politics of human and democratic development. Both in Croatia and abroad, the fundamental criterion of successful developments and harmonized policies will be the question: are there superfluous people, regions, ideas? If there are, then in no time all people, all regions and all ideas are going to become superfluous.

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