The expanding interdependencies of the world’s diverse and divided populations have created a world society. To rule these fractious peoples, the democracies advance solutions to three imperatives of governance—Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). For Order, the democracies institutionalized the global state; for Welfare, a global market system; and for Legitimacy, popular rule, resting on the moral principles of the freedom and equality of all humans. The book develops globalization as the emergence of a global society; presents a theory of governance predicable of all human societies, revolving around competing OWL imperatives; and identifies fundamental flaws in the democratic solutions to global governance. To ensure that the democratic promise survives and thrives, the volume calls for fundamental reforms of the democratic project as prerequisites to deter and defeat formidable anti-democratic adversaries: authoritarian states, religiously informed regimes opposed to open societies; nihilistic social movements; self-styled terrorists, and vast transnational criminal networks. Either the democracies hang together or they hang separately.

"Globalization has extended conflicts, contradictions, and benefits from the nation-state to global spaces and back again. This multilevel process has also introduced new challenges and benefits to the local and the global. The central concern of this work is how globalization affects local and global human existence and how the benefits of order, welfare, and legitimacy (OWL) in political, social, and economic domains can be fortified. The book endorses an economically and politically liberal position in which liberal capitalism and democratic rule of law are to be reinforced locally and more systematically extended globally. To accomplish this, a “concert of states” is recommended. The approach is analytical rather than normative, and the book stakes out its claims clearly and thoroughly. But by pragmatically focusing primarily on OWL, the questions of justice are minimized. Globalization is more than a practical matter of governance—it is also a normative force with questionably moral material effects. Addressing the congenital violence many argue is built into the modern, liberal democratic order and is often at the root of much resistance to Westernized globalization may be hindered by such an approach. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - CHOICE