Abstract

It is a special privilege for me to have my book, Democracy across borders, discussed by insightful critics, all of whom in one way or another have contributed to emerging thinking about democracy, globalization, and international institutions. But it is also a privilege to have it discussed in this particular journal, which I see as a very good example of a transnational (rather than international) space for reflection and communication on matters of global politics. It is transnational, at least in part; not just because of what is discussed here, but also because of the norms that underlie its public form of communication: the norm of open access by which some of the barriers for the exercise of communicative freedom across borders are removed. Such communicative spaces did not exist even 10 years ago, although some people were already attempting to find new ways to realize communicative freedom. Other scholars may have objected that scholarly discussion should not be conducted this way, that it violated established norms of the profession and would always be marginal. However, those making such objections realized that the idea of open access would be potentially transformative, allowing the emergence of new publics and creating a dynamic process by which the norms of communicative freedom would be realized and strengthened by new institutions. Such a process might be described as transnationalization, a process that fills out the communicative infrastructure on which novel publics are based and through which they can reconstitute themselves for a variety of political purposes. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 71-84. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4855