I agree with the latest article on this list about democracy losing its relevance at the national level. National governments are very strongly disciplined these days by the requirements of international finance. For instance credit rating agencies like Moodys and Poors give sovereigns assessments based on their viability along business lines, and this affects the value of their currency and the rate they have to pay for loans and finance more generally. This means that parties are dragged, by these financial forces, into a narrow techicist approach to the economy, and these forces leave little room for maneuvre for the parties involved, and thus little difference for the various political parties in the positions they can take up. Thus elections stop being a real choice for the people. This is precisely the argument Monbiot makes in his call for a global parliament. His work is in turn partly based on the research of people like the Network Institute for Global Democritization (NIGD.) Whatever the case, it seems clear that a fairly radical shakeup of the world order is required for democracy to become meaningful again, and for human kind to be able to set a meaning, purpose and direction to its overall collectivity. It is also required in order to deal with issues on the global scale, such as environmental issues. It is interesting to note that a sense of 'humanity' might be traced back to an emergin sense of the 'the world.' One of the early images associated with this are the images of the earth taken form space. this image also coincides with a sense of global environmental consciousness, in terms of all humanity living on the same planet, and thus being subject to the consequences, collectively, of what is doem to that (this) planet. Roger Scruton may be right in saying that this has not overtaken nationalism yet, but he is complacent in the extreme (as conservatives often are) to tacitly assume that it will never do so, at least not in the forseeable future. This shift might come fairly quickly, if climate change becomes a pressing collective problem which we cannot overlook without placing 'humanity' at risk. It is amusing to note that some radicals are calling for more of what the American government claims to be spreading. This is an important reminder that Democracy is not a clear term, and that it is to be found not in the abstract, but in the concrete arrangements that people actually enact. In my opinion it is crucial to ask: Do these arrangements really give the majority of people more control over their day-to-day lives, both individually and through collective action? Bear in mind this includes choices about how you work, how your children are schooled, how your public places feel, and weither you feel any participation and control in the life of the wider community. Again, in reply to the right, there is no clear evidence that either the nation or the market has ever really delivered this effectively: The land of the free still works 50 to 60 hour weeks, and the 'free markets' of the Anglo Saxon world witness astounding rates of economic bondage and unfreedom, for some of the richest countries of the world. I think it is there that one can find the differences between radical and establishment glosses of democracy: The continuous expansion of substantive freedoms for the global majority.