Globalization of Democracy and

 Conditions for Democratic Community in the 

Glocalized World*

Marian Kempny

Democracy is not an alternative to the other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself ..., [it is] a name of a life of free and enriching communion

      John Dewey, quoted by B. Barber, Strong Democracy, 1984

 

Introduction: Globalization and democracy - possible intersections

         Both globalization and democracy are concepts of the highest order of generality and notoriously contested in their meanings. This paper certainly does not aim at an exhaustive analysis of either: still not very modestly it tries to tie some elements of democratization discourse with what might be called a cultural globalization register. Consequently, my intention is not to provide an overview of the basic interpretative frames that are imposed on democracy/democratization phenomena by the social sciences practitioners and theorists, but rather to show why cultural globalization and democracy matter intrinsically to each other.

         This is why, at the outset I will provide a brief recourse to the three main approaches to the study of democracy and globalization possible interfaces. The first approach, which might be attributed to those students of democracy who deal with the issue in question from the world-system perspective, implies a focus on democratic transformations as an emerging global wave determined by macrorationality of economic, social, or political factors coming into play under globalized conditions.

         To begin with, one can quote Adam Przeworski who distinguishes between two major strategies of the research on a growing global wave of re-democratization. On the one hand, macro-oriented comparative works focus on objective conditions and speak the language of causal determination; whereas on the other micro-oriented studies tend to emphasize the strategic behavior of political actors embedded in concrete historical situations. [1]  

         The first approach implies that democratic transformations are determined by different economic, social, or political conditions but they are accounted for in reference to the global logic of the world-system. Authors who utilize a global linkage in their analysis offer prima facie evidence that the recent democratic transitions are not isolated, coincidental, or randomly distributed in time or space. Despite their shared conviction regarding the global or world-system nature of the democratic transitions, they diverge significantly in their designation of a global mechanism [2] .

         At the same time, the question of how globalization can constitute a catalyst for the transition to democracy is often rephrased as the issue of coming to terms with the developing process of globalization by different types of political communities. Accordingly, political theorists have come out with a bunch of models of democracy, which supposedly suit better than the others the conditions of contemporary society. To mention just a few, the work of Jurgen Habermas put forward a model of deliberative democracy [3] , the post-structural tradition begot the theory of radical democracy developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and focused upon the negotiation of identity and difference within democratic societies, finally David Held et al. [4] have constructed the model of cosmopolitan democracy in order to explore the possibility of democratic global governance.

         In fact, it is only Held who addresses directly the problem of the implications of the unfolding process of globalization for the prospect of democratic political community and proposes its sociologically sensitive model. [5] Yet Held focuses his attention mainly on reconstruction of already existing formal institutions at the international and transnational levels. [6] No doubts, as well, his concern is to make them more globally oriented and more democratic, hence more congruent with the normative model of cosmopolitan democratic governance he advocates.

         Somewhat paradoxically, his theory leads to regarding the individual as the basic unit of cosmopolitan democracy which implies in turn that the future belongs to a democracy of individuals, not of groups [7] . At the same time there is a gap in his analyses as far as the cultural preconditions of democracy are concerned.

         A cultural aspect Held emphasizes is that values and judgments of individuals are nowadays influenced by a complex web of meanings produced as the outcome of 'global cultural exchanges'. It directs our attention to a third domain of democracy - globalization intersections, namely to the issue of the relevance of cultural globalization for democracy crafting. The idea of cultural globalization as a framework that allows for elucidation of specificity of distinct contemporary forms of democracy will be elaborated in what follows.

         In this context the principal intellectual challenge becomes to link global processes with those apprehensible in sociological or anthropological categories that show how those processes influence the daily experiences of both those who rule and those who are ruled in the globalizing world. Seen from this angle the three types of approaches mentioned above have contributed in many various ways to new thematizations of democracy and also have explained multivocality of the discourse of democracy/democratization that results in a disharmony of views voiced both by 'nonprofessionals' and those who turned studying democracy into their bread and butter activity.

On globalization of democracy - mixed voices

         It goes without saying that the central imaginary of politics nowadays is that of 'democracy'. This very term legitimates political regimes across the world on the edge of the third millennium. One can even claim that there is no dictatorship today that does not consider itself to be democratic.

         Especially with the fall of communism thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama started to herald the triumph of liberal democracy. Undoubtedly, seen in procedural terms in the last several decades, the world has experienced a democratic revival. Annual reports of Freedom House Survey Team indicate that Western-type democracies have extended considerably. In the mid-1970s, over two-thirds of all states could reasonably be regarded as authoritarian. This percentage has recently fallen dramatically to less than one-third. [8]

         Interestingly enough there is a contention as to when a real breakthrough happened. As it were, democratization in Greece, Spain, and Portugal begot a scholarship that focused on the historical and cultural distinctiveness of the respective cases. Then, in the 1980s, several Latin American countries embarked on the transition to democracy. A new 'transitional' literature connected these events to those of the 1970s. When that set of democratizations was joined (in the late 1980s and 1990s) by South Korean, Taiwan, Eastern Europe, and even South Africa, the 'Third Wave' thesis was born formulated by Samuel Huntington. [9]

         He dates the beginning of the third wave of democratization to 1974, when the remaining fascist regimes in Europe were overthrown. However seen from the point of view of the global world-system it seems that the main change was triggered off by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sequel of largely peaceful Central and Eastern Europe revolutions in 1989.

         Especially in the case of the new East European democracies a rich and diverse literature has been produced that addressed the antecedents and causes of the democratic transitions. It is clear that at the same time this late phase of the 'Third Wave' coincides in political theory with an emerging discourse on a crisis of territorial democracy and attempts at creating models of global governance. [10]  

         Moreover, as it is reiterated again and again the extension of the aspiration of peoples to be governed on the basis of democratic criteria, epitomized in the demand to obtain the right to participate in the government of their political communities through the medium of elected representatives, could clash nowadays with globalization that places significant constraints on nation-state ('domestic') democracy in various ways. Seats of power, authority and decision-making are supposed to shift beyond the borders of individual nation-states.

         Additionally, it is widely acknowledged that the really existing 'domestic' democracies look like the 'real socialism', which the East and Central European societies experienced until very recently, and they don't work as expected. The debates over the crisis of representative democracy and the soaring support for xenophobic political forces in the West goes nowadays hand in hand with the surge of ethnonationalist tensions in the democratizing countries of Eastern Europe. There is a host of evidence of deficiencies and flaws today's democracy could lament upon: the declining electoral turnouts, the increase in the volatility of party political allegiances, all of this leading to apathy, cynicism, and withdrawal of individuals to the havens of privacy. [11] To put it in a put shell, on one hand, democracy is celebrated; on the other, there is growing concern about how it works in practice.

         Consequently, the two narratives of democracy are prevalent - a triumphant narrative of liberal democracy and an account of the shortcomings of democracy. In other words, a story of liberal, procedural democracy defeating its foes in the end of the 20th century clashes with a very different story that concentrates on the omissions of democracy. 

         This ambivalence can be also traced in recent social scientific accounts of democracy. Although political scientists and political sociologists are concerned above all with the study of empirical conditions within which democratic regime could operate, it becomes clear that attempts at conceptualization and normative justification of adopted theories of democracy is much a part and parcel of the booming democracy's scholarship.

         Thus, the discussion of prospects for democracy in existing conditions of globalized world has to be also empirical and normative at the same time. Besides, the answer given to the question - what constitutes a democracy? - predetermines as well as problematizes a range of possible conclusions as far as the globalization--democracy relationship is concerned. Out of various pervasive perplexities that are bound up with it in this paper I will dwell mainly upon the issue of boundaries and inclusiveness of the political community in the age of welcoming the boundary-crossing and difference.

'Globalization' as a cultural paradigm

As one can justifiably argue that the question of democracy has been nowadays globalized, at the same time, 'globalization' itself as a concept and a set of fundamental socio--political--economic processes is embroiled in many controversies. Hence, the question arises what sort of the 'globalization' models enables us to enrich a discourse on democratization already being good in progress.

         Globalization metaphorically means that our world is continuously shrinking to become a 'single place' whereas the awareness of this fact is expanding. [12] The notion itself bears upon '... all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society'. [13]

         However, current geopolitics is perceived rather in terms of changes that replicate tectonic movements, joining or separating societal segments like sections of terrain along a fault line. On the one hand, conjunctive movements are exemplified by the recent formation of supranational economic or political entities like the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, World Bank, or World Trade Organization, and the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On the other, the fragmentation of the former USSR and the tragedy in the Balkans exemplify dispersal, together with a large catalog of ethnic separations. At the same time, political reorganization in the face of secessionist tendencies and the clamor for recognition of multicultural diversity made by subnational groups has become ever more insistent and ever more threatening to global integration.

         That is why, Gaddis [14] like many other recent theorists, maintains that globalization subsumes both economic expansion, which includes 'integration, interdependence, multilateralism, openness and interpenetration' and political fragmentation which, conversely, involves 'disintegration, autarchy, unilateralism, separatism, and heterogeneity.' Undoubtedly, both of oppositional tendencies can be easy subsumed under a master process: globalization.          

         Clearly a drawback of such conceptions is their focus on political and economic dimensions at the expense of cultural one. At the same time a cultural perspective doesn't imply that culture alone is the conceptual key that unlocks globalization's inner logic. Its specificity requires rather to examine why, it is cultural practices that supposedly lie at the heart of globalization of democracy.

         My answer given to such a question will indicate the role of cultural experience, or mechanisms of culture, in understanding maybe not the huge transformative processes of our time (especially those of political transformations) but a less conspicuous empirical conditions of social life in the modern globalized world. As I see it, a basic and relatively uncontentious comprehension of globalization is that of complex connectivity. This notion of connect ivy is found in one form or another in most contemporary approaches to the study of globalization. [15]

         To provide a typical example Tony McGrew speaks of globalization as 'simply the intensification of global interconnectedness' and enumerates the multiplicity of linkages it implies:

'Nowadays, goods, capital, people, knowledge, images, crime, pollutants, drugs, fashions and beliefs all readily flow across territorial boundaries. Transnational networks, social movements and relationships are extensive in virtually all areas from the academic to the sexual'. [16]

Recent sociological, cultural studies, or anthropological accounts abound in similar formulations emphasizing 'interconnections', 'networks', 'flows' [17] . An important point to make in this connection is that the linkages spoken about exist in a number of different modalities, which vary from the institutional relationships to the idea of the increasing 'flows' of goods, information, people and technology across national borders, to the more 'concrete' modalities of connection supplied by 'wiredness' of electronic communication systems (like satellite televisions or the internet).

         What all this confirms is some degree of consensus on the empirical reality that globalization refers to. In a word, globalization is about the intricate network of connections that binds human practices, experiences, and political, economic or environmental fates of humanity together. As Anthony Giddens defined globalization: 'the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa'. [18]

         It is such a connectivity that forces us to look for metaphors able to capture as much as possible elements of complexity. This is also seen in the case of cultural globalization which usually is defined in terms of 'flows' and 'hybrids' of mostly mediatized cultural patterns, representations, and images. Nevertheless, I fully endorse the claim made by John Tomlinson [19] that the principal task of cultural globalization theory is, setting apart understanding the sources of this condition (e.g. the eclipse of distance by proliferating networks of electronic communication), to interpret the implications of cultural 'flows' for the various spheres of social existence.

         This brings us to one of the central issues in globalization studies, namely that of the relationship between the local and the global. As connectivity reaches into localities, it transforms local lived experience but it also confronts 'locals' with a world in which their lives and fates undeniably are bound together in a single global frame. As a result, local experience has to be raised to the horizon of a 'single world', if we are to understand it. As one can put it, 'phenomenal worlds' of individuals, although situated locally 'for the most part are truly global'. [20]

         In other words, cultural impact of globalization first and foremost comes out of the transformation of localities themselves. 'Local life' still remains the broad order of human existence that continues to dominate even in a globalized world. What has changed, however, is that everyday meanings have become dislodged from their 'anchors' in the local environment, and sheer places have lost their power to define the terms of human existence. In addition, globalization is transforming the local order by causing distant events and powers to penetrate our local experience.

         To describe the character of this process Ronald Robertson has coined the term 'glocalization' [21] . Robertson argues against a tendency to perceive globalization as involving large-scale macro-sociological issues and processes which at the same time neglects the way in which globalization is localized. His basic claim is that globalization always takes place in some locality, while at the same time locality as a particular place is itself produced in discourses of globalization.

         Furthermore, according to Robertson, it is the term 'glocalization', which in its original connotation means 'a global outlook tailored to local conditions', that better than 'globalization' sums up the inter-relations of the global and the local. In brief, globalization is not just a question of the growing interdependence, but also of opening up the cross-cultural production of meanings, self-images, representations, modes of life typical of various groups and individuals.

         As Robertson holds, one should not see globalization simply as linking already existing localities together, such that the integrity of each place is invaded and subjected to the homogenizing effects of global culture with its products, images and ideas, but to the contrary as a deliberate reinforcing heterogeneity by re-production of locality from within the locality itself as a way of taking advantage of the global patterns.

         An important consequence of such a culturally attuned approach is spelled out by Urlich Beck: 'Globalization - which seems to be the super-dimension, appearing at the end from outside and overshadowing everything else - can be grasped in the small and concrete, in the spatially particular, in one's own life, in cultural symbols that all bear the signature of the "glocal"'. [22]

         This stance corresponds with a different model of cultural globalization exploring global\local intersections developed by Arjun Appadurai. First of all, his framework affirms and theorizes the distinctive logic of a cultural sphere, economy and politics. In an attempt to grasp the uneven nature of globalization processes Appadurai put forward a framework describing disjunctures among economic, political and cultural realities by making up a five-dimensional model of 'scapes', i.e. global cultural flows encompassing the following categories: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. [23]

         By 'ethnoscapes' he means 'the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live' [24] such as tourists, immigrants, exiles, refugees, and other groups on the move. In turn by 'technoscapes' he understands the cross-border movements of new and old technologies, the development of both mechanical and information carries, i.e. both machines and computers. 'Finanscapes' stand for the flow of global capital that occurs in various ways beyond control of any individual nation-state.

         Building on deep disjunctions among these three, Appaduarai holds, are 'mediascapes' and 'ideoscapes'. The former concern both the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information and also the image-centered, narrative strips of reality from which imagined worlds are fashioned. They provide repertoires of pictures and stories from which ethnoscapes, in particular are constructed. The latter are similarly based on images and narratives, but they have to do with the ideologies of nation-states and ideological counter-movements.

         They are loosely based upon on the political meta-narrative in which terms like 'freedom', 'rights', 'democracy' are frequently invoked, but they are organized differently according to the ways in which different nation-states and sub-national groups have used them. [25]   Appadurai put a special emphasis on the role of the imagination in social life in the era of globalization. That is why, in Appadurai's words, the suffix 'scape' is used to indicate

...that these are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision, but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflicted very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements... These landscapes thus, are the building blocks of what, extending Benedict Anderson, I would like to call "immagined worlds," this is the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. [26]

 

Appadurai's 'scapes' and 'flows' are directed toward mobile forms of social life. At the same time Appadurai makes clear that globalization is hardly decoupled with locality. He is really persuasive in his analyses of the ways by which the production of locality takes place within the context of global technological communications and the emergence of 'virtual communities' which span the globe. In his opinion, however, in the global era the task of locality production becomes increasingly difficult to accomplished as communities are no longer anchored or moored to particular places. [27]

    Inevitably, the question arises as to the consequences of Appadurai's arguments for defining globalization--democratization interplay. His conviction is that despite of the disjunctive nature of cultural flows, which generates acute social problems, there is a emancipatory, democratic potential in the role that the imagination plays in social life. He maintains that it is visible especially 'where the imagination [...] works across national lines to produce locality as a spatial fact and as a sensibility...' [28] . It results in dynamic social forms constituting 'localized transit points for mobile global forms of civic and civil life' [29] that usually evade attention of social scientists. In fact, Appadurai's model remains underdeveloped and doubts may be raised whether with such a model of cultural globalization at hand one may contribute a valuable perspective on contemporary democratization. Nevertheless, it reveals that it is by focusing on the interface between the global force field and selected points of reference - the local level - that the concept of 'domestic' (territorial) democracy may be enriched.

*     *     *

One way or another the emphasis of the cultural globalization theories on such features of contemporary social reality as global connectivity of economic, political, and cultural processes in the scale of the globe, its coupled extraterritorial and local grounding, the disembedness of community and its remooring provides an important corrective to the dominant orientation of the students of democracy which is mainly focused with the nation-state level as a site of democracy-driven politics. These theories also problematize the autonomy of the widely accepted model of the nation-state and both introduce so-called global democracy as well redefine local community as a site of democracy to turn it into a significant component of the model of democracy. 

Sitting democracy: community under globalized conditions

Sociological theory abounds in statements about the significance of community as a cornerstone of society. Only slightly paraphrasing allegorical language, widely in use, communities are the heart, the soul, the nervous system, and the lifeblood of human society. Communities are to provide mutual support and love in times of celebration and in times of crisis. There are also pragmatic reasons for banding together. Communities can help get things done. People are infinitely more capable when they work together than when they work on their own.

     It is obvious that in a globalized world envisioned in such a way concept of community is obsolete in many ways and needs to be updated to meet today's challenges with democratization in the lead. The old or 'traditional' community was often exclusive, inflexible, isolated, unchanging, monolithic, and homogeneous, and based on face-to-face interactions. A new community that is defined in a diametrically opposite way needs to be fashioned from the remnants of the old. This need for a new community is strengthened by the globalization processes and made explicit by some theories of democracy. For example, according to David Held's model of cosmopolitan democracy:

'A new possibility is anticipated: the recovery of an intensive and more participatory democracy at local levels as a complement to the public assemblies of the wider global order; that is, a political order of democratic associations, cities, and nations as well of regions and global networks. [It is] based upon the recognition that the nature and quality of democracy within a particular community and the nature and quality of democratic relations among communities are interlocked.' [30]

Clearly, his argument is based on distinction between formal democracy and substantive one. The former consists in free elections, accountability of rulers through different modes of representation, the rule of law, and civil or political liberties, whereas the latter indicates genuine participation in rule by all (or majority) of individuals moored in a particular political community.

    It seems clear that in order to assess the plausibility of Held's model, the breakdown of traditional social solidarities and the uprooting of the community epitomized in the slogan about the 'decline of community' should be examined in the context of globalized conditions of contemporary complex societies. As seen from above it is the focus on cultural globalization that gives rise to the notion of hybridity and creolization, which assume that cultures flow into one another and mix as the 'glocalization' model concludes [31] . Like in the economic globalization process finally we have to do with a culturally hybridized world shaped by massive migration, media mediated social interaction, etc. Needless to say that when one takes all of this seriously then one has to endorse that we have moved now "from place to flow, from spaces to streams, from organized hierarchies to disorganization". [32]

       To my mind, then, what is needed in order to scrutinize the supposition about the communal site of democracy is to reconsider the image of loss of foundations, de-centering, de-stabilization, de-territorialization of communities in the contemporary world. As a result, my question is that of what globalization defined in cultural terms means for localized (sited) democracy as a domain of democratic participation. There is a host of literature written to describe and identify criteria of what constitutes 'democracy' at the local level or what explain effective democratic political participation [33] . Hence, my own analysis will be focused on the features underlying recent transformation of community relevant for democratic polity shaping to become a collective agency in the fragmented world.

The emphasis on agency/community interplay was made salient prior to the globalization debate by the interpretive turn within anthropology, and with its basic works such as Anthony Cohen's book on "The symbolic construction of community" [34] . While Cohen reinvested  community in the local, in the immediacy and intimacy of face-to-face relations, he strongly rejected any presumption that the mutual recognition of membership  in a community carried with it homogeneity of views or interests. Cohen cautioned against conflating the shared forms of communality and cultural  expression with the multiplicity of meanings that could be invested in these forms. Where communities had previously been reified as a distinct type of social entity - a unified, homogeneous whole - Cohen argued that unity and homogeneity were features of communities-as-symbolised, as much as communities-as-lived.                                

           In other words, the power of symbolisation is that it masks internal contradictions

or incoherencies within the community, presenting a public face of communal unity. The symbolic construction of community, then, presents bounded homogeneous unity in the face of - because of - the fragmentation of social reality. The last decades have been characterized by an increasing enthusiasm for moving the study of community to transnational fields of social relations: community without place. One could argue that in some ways, as social researchers have become more footloose in the globalized world, the concept of community, collectivity, or collective identity has become not less but more crucial.

         At the same time, it is hard to overlook that it is current processes of globalization

epitomized by such categories as "disembedding" [35] and "collapse of spatial boundaries" [36] that has prompted us to look for a non-local, non-spatially grounded notion of community. In a more metaphorical way of parlance - globalization indicates that speed and acceleration (exterritoriality and ability to travel light) take over from territory as the major diversifying factor. [37]

         From this point of view, communities are rarely defined, or confined, territorially. This can raise in turn the following questions: what concept of community is an effective or accurate vehicle to convey the interactions among populations dispersed over space and time?  What are the political and epistemological pitfalls of ungrounding the idea of community from its local moorings? What happens to collective allegiances when they are attached to sporadic, contingent episodes rather than ongoing relations? These are but a few of the questions, which are inspired by introducing a globalization framework to the community study.

    In what follows I will show only some issues the student of community has to cope with nowadays. Above all, as there has been a little attempt, to reflect on the nature of community under globalizing conditions in the comparative context of democratization, so I'll be trying hard to outline a research agenda to deal with this predicament.

         First of all, though the need for new approaches towards community and locality under globalized conditions is conspicuous, the ways this need is articulated varies widely. Due to the focus of my paper a dimension along which I will arrange my analysis of this variety comes down to the organization of public space as a constitutive factor as far as community notion is concerned. In this connection, one could refer to Paul Virilio's thesis about the 'end of geography' which implies the end of community "as we know it" and ask: Don't the globetrotter elites and the travelers of cyberspace have more in common with each other (without forming what Toennies would agree to call a 'Gemeinschaft') that they do with the 'local community' suggested by their postal (not e-mail) address?; or, to what if any extent the ideas embroiled in interpersonal exchange, that flesh and blood of 'local community', stand a chance of competing with their freely flowing, floating and drifting counterparts, which ignore distance and nullify time?

             However, as I have argued above, cultural globalization does not mean devaluation of locality, or more generally, of the territory itself as the frame of cultural distinction and collective identity. [38] Furthermore, it is a reiterated frequently thesis that because of the reaction to globalization the global age is also "the age of community" [39] . Under globalized conditions, the construction of 'community' in a specific locality cannot any longer be analyzed on the assumption that the local is prior, primordial, and more "real". Global processes among which the globalization of communication [40] is not of least importance also produce local solidarities and imaginings. Moreover, the process of 'lifting off' cultural experience from locality especially due to technically mediated nature of interaction and communal feelings of being-in-common influences the very nature of the community's 'public sphere' and re-defines the relation between public and private domains. 

             Here we have reached a point in which the question of significance of these processes of community being disembedded and reconstituted on a non-local, non-spatially bounded basis for democracy crafting should be posed. It is useless to deny that what is required is to redefine basic concepts of territorial democracy in order to keep pace with the changing world. But what does it imply for the work of democracy defined after Bauman as a 'practice of continuous translation between the public and the private'? [41] Where the process of 'reforging private problems into public issues and recasting public well-being into private projects and tasks' is supposed to take place?

             The adoption of the work of Appadurai, Hannerz as well as Albrow and the others urges us to reconsider the way social relations are tied to locality. Unfortunately, what is left obscure is the nature of public space or place in such concepts as "socioscape", "sociosphere" or "milieu" [42] . It is especially evident while adopting Schuetznian model of life-world and his concept of community as symbolically constructed life space in order to investigate the production of the social world under globalized conditions.

    In brief, his theory of the structure of individual life-world classifies men's field of action into a social, temporal and spatial dimension, the structures being grounded in the difference between familiarity and unfamiliarity. Thus, a person's 'primordial' field of action is centered on his\her corporeality and is spatially organized into zones of one's range of action (so-called umwelt, mitwelt, etc.) as well as temporally organized into the worlds of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. The spatial dimension of the field of action means the division into zones of intimacy and anonymity. All this implies a selective structuring of the surrounding world according to these zones. [43]  Glocalization inevitably redefines such a dynamic interplay between individuals and their related environment by making the boundaries of spatial zones of intimacy fuzzy and permeable.

      At the same time, at the community level the attempts made by individuals to mark the internal structure of 'their' reality through different kinds of symbolization and categorization illuminates the meaning of the community for community members, thus creating a 'cosmonion' (i.e. a symbolically constructed collective life space). Needless to say, when spatial zones of intimacy and anonymity that decide about individual life-worlds are influenced by the global media coverage or by more targeted media (like e-mail and internet), the flows from distant evens, places and cultures alter the community's life space as well. Instead of the direct interaction and communication of group members, we have to do with audiences that all over the world might nowadays join symbolically "others" located in remote areas when exposed to the same media events, but it is doubtful whether this leads to sharing among them the idea of belonging to a larger supraterritorial community and generates a potential to activate 'spectators' to act as a lived community of action.

          For some authors such processes imply the fragmentation of community space, the shrinkage and disappearance of public space, separation and segregation (especially a deep divide between exterritorial elites and the rest of population is underlined). It leads to envisioning the community as a territory stripped of public space that provides no room for norms and values being debated or the 'local opinion' being formed. [44] Nevertheless, a counter-argument might be put forward in this context, namely one should explore whether cultural globalization and in particular new locally-based technologically advanced media (so-called target media - like local cable TV or local e-mail networks) may facilitate new associations within civil society, new kinds of local 'public stage' (instead of Habermasian public sphere), new modes of social and political participation, and more participative forms of local democracy.

         Furthermore, such cultural phenomena as the putative emergence of a sense of global citizenship, a sense of belonging connected with rights and duties in a community extending beyond local or even national borders lead to a transformation of the 'public sphere' as well as the other aspects of territorial democracy based on local allegiances and loyalties, on embeddedness in a relatively isolated social setting. There is a wide range of issues to be explored in this domain. For example, the prospects for 'democratic community' should be examined in terms of relevance of mediatization of local life that might result in a re-imagining of community. The research that will examine what effects electronic networks might have on the way that members 'imagine' their local community, and how they might transform and invigorate patterns of civic activity and democratic participation seems to be needed [45] . Then, the question whether a chance for territorially-based communities to survive with the introduction of new locally-based technologically advanced media gains not only theoretical importance. Such a framework allows explaining some current tendencies - but the diagnosis whether the community all over the world tends to become globalized and deterritorialized must be handled with care.

End remarks

To conclude briefly, the question of communal sitting of democracy under globalized condition calls for taking up the issue whether the mediatization of local life might bring about of a re-imaging of community - a transformation in people's sense of belonging, entitlement, obligation and agency with respect to their often de-territorialized communities. But mediatization is only one aspect of a multifarious change caused by globalization that appears to be not 'out there' but a sort of 'in here' phenomenon patterning the ways on which the circumstances of local life and the individual life-worlds are constructed. As another outcome of glocalization might serve a mechanism of blurring distinctions between belonging and non-belonging (or multiply belonging) of the people 'on the move' to various political entities [46] . The redefinition of democracy that accommodates various shades of difference instead of clear-cut divisions is also a demand nowadays and the need for the reworking of the basic issues for the democracy scholarship connected with the definition of citizenship, or the boundaries of political community in the globalized world, follows suit.

         Undoubtedly, then, the globalization processes have been transforming the conditions under which territorial democracies operate, hence it is the exploring of a variety of cultural factors connected with globalization-cum-glocalization that shape political communities as  'democracy sites' seems to be required. At the same time, cultural globalization only while grounded empirically at both supranational and local community poles, and connected by verifiable linkages, with consequences observed over time, might potentially become the touchstone conceptual frame for revealing how democracy and cultural change could induce intrinsically each other.