Abstract

Even as democratic sovereignty and globalization are increasingly seen as incompatible in theory, this chapter argues that, in some important realms, they are proving compatible in practice. As tariffs have fallen to negligible levels, trade agreements among rich countries have come to focus on reconciling regulatory differences. In many sectors, novel forms of cooperation have emerged that allow trade partners deliberately to investigate and learn from one another’s practices, eventually recognizing the equivalence of regimes that are not strictly identical—and in the process extending domestic political oversight to relations among states while often heightening domestic accountability. The emergent institutions of regulatory equivalence suggest a practical, if partial, possibility for realizing Kant’s “negative surrogate” or federation of democratic republics, growing incrementally through voluntary association, as a substitute for a global state.