Philosophy in the Contemporary World

Volume 15, Issue 1, Spring 2008

The Ethical Threshold
Democratic Supranational Governance as a Necessary Condition for Non-Neocolonial Globalization

For the economic and political processes being brought about in the name of the current wave of globalization to be ethical, they must avoid recapitulating the processes of the previous wave of globalization: colonialism. The paper discusses the logic of colonialism and a minimum requirement that the current globalization would have to fulfill in order to finally and definitively overcome the colonial structures inherited from the previous globalization: it must be democratic. It is argued that supranational democratic structures are, thus, key to definitively overcoming colonialism, and a necessary condition for non-neocolonial globalization; without such structures, globalization is neocolonial and, therefore, unethical.