Politics & Power Quote by Susan George

The question lands like a dare: if democracy is the badge modern states wear to prove they’re legitimate, why does it stop at the border where the biggest decisions increasingly get made? Susan George, speaking as an activist, isn’t theorizing for sport. She’s diagnosing a structural mismatch between power and accountability in a globalized world where trade rules, debt regimes, climate policy, and corporate leverage often outrun national parliaments.

Her move is deliberately historical. By invoking the 18th century, she reminds us that “democracy” wasn’t a natural upgrade that arrived with enlightenment vibes; it was a contested engineering project built against entrenched interests. Kings didn’t politely hand over authority. Institutions had to be invented: representation, checks and balances, public scrutiny, legitimacy through consent. The subtext is blunt: today’s transnational governance is stuck in a pre-democratic phase, dominated by technocrats, creditors, and opaque forums that make binding decisions without a demos robust enough to discipline them.

The rhetoric works because it reframes “international democracy” from utopian slogan to practical continuity. If we already accept that power needs democratic constraint inside states, it becomes harder to defend a global order where power is real but accountability is optional. “That’s our problem” is the tell: not a plea to elites, but a call to organize across borders, build new forms of representation, and treat sovereignty less as a shield and more as a tool that must evolve with where power lives.