A growing number of progressive intellectuals now claim that the transnational character of many present-day political tasks overwhelms the existing capacities of liberal democracy. The ongoing internationalization of capitalist production and financial markets, unparalleled movements of immigrants and refugees across borders, the spectre of ecological disaster: the global character of each of these problems allegedly cries out for new forms of global political coordination. In this view, the marriage of liberal democracy to the nation-state severely limits its ability to grapple effectively with the most pressing dilemmas of our times. Transnational problems call out for transnational solutions, and only an invigoration and concurrent democratization of supernational political authority offers a reasonable chance of stemming liberal democracy's decay in the face of recent global trends. Proponents of this thesis, including Jürgen Habermas, typically argue that we can only maintain the historic achievements of liberal democracy (including the welfare state) if global regulatory devices can succeed effectively in countering transnationally based structural pressures on existing liberal democratic political institutions. For Habermas and many others, we can only `catch up' to the transnational character of present-day political problems by strengthening international devices while simultaneously bracing their liberal democratic features.

Although much can be said in defence of this position, in my view it both overstates the novelty of the quandaries faced by contemporary capitalist liberal democracy and understates their tenacity. The main reason for this is that even critical discourse on globalization and liberal democracy misses the significance of the most important conceptual innovation of the globalization debate within recent social theory, the idea of a compression of space and time. Globalization involves much more than the rise of global financial markets or the emergence of novel environmental problems; it also pertains to a fundamental shift in the space and time horizons of human experience in our century, driven in the final analysis by economic and political mechanisms that pose a direct challenge to the most defensible features of modern liberal democracy. I hope to demonstrate the centrality of the idea of a compression of space and time for democratic theory by arguing that this recent addition to the conceptual paraphernalia of social theory sheds fresh light on an ominous trend within twentieth-century political development: virtually everywhere within the `advanced' liberal world, legislative and parliamentary power has experienced a decline, whereas executive and administrative institutions have tended to gain poorly defined grants of substantial legislative power. The concept of the compression of space and time not only helps explain the relative impotence of many contemporary legislatures, but suggests that liberal democracy's present ills represent more than a sudden or unprecedented development. The recent losses of democratic sovereignty lamented by Habermas and others are simply the latest chapter in a gradual erosion of democratic legitimacy directly linked to the revolutionary implications of the `shrinkage' of time and space long evident within capitalist liberal democracy. By placing the concept of the compression of space and time at the centre of democratic theory, we can begin to refocus critical thinking about globalization on a series of vital questions often ignored.

For those familiar with recent discourse about liberal democracy, a surprising discrepancy becomes apparent. Despite normative liberal theory's impressive recent revival, a growing body of empirical literature continues to document the depth of both familiar and novel pathologies exhibited by liberal polities. Although many progressive-minded political and legal theorists today celebrate liberalism's virtues as a political and legal philosophy, their empirical-minded colleagues increasingly have been forced to turn their attention to worrisome trends in `real-existing' capitalist liberal democracy.

Toward a permanent state of exception?

Take, for example, the status of elected popular legislatures. Although generally ignored by recent liberal political theorists and philosophers, a vast empirical literature documents the manner in which legislatures, even in the most stable and robust liberal democracies, have undergone an often dramatic erosion of political influence in our century. Although it would be unfair to criticize contemporary parliaments by comparing them unfavourably to (mythical) idealized models of their nineteenth-century predecessors, there can be little doubt that the elected legislature's role in our political systems today is substantially more modest than that originally sought by the mainstream of classical liberal theory (the American Founders, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill). Little freewheeling deliberation goes on within the halls of the legislature; parliamentary decision-making often amounts exclusively to ratifying decisions made elsewhere, including transnational bodies (the World Trade Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement, European Union) possessing at best minimal democratic legitimacy. Most important, perhaps, administrative agencies now exercise significant law-making functions, and bureaucratic decrees often take on greater de facto significance than parliamentary general laws. Albeit extreme, a recent example from South America illustrates some of the perils at hand:

Peru is considered a democracy because it elects a president and a parliament. In the five years after an election, though, the executive has been known to make 134,000 rules and decrees with no accountability to the congress or the public. After elections, no ongoing relationship exists between those who make decisions and those who live under them.4

The sources of these tendencies have been exhaustively analysed by political scientists and sociologists. But one of them is of special significance here. Liberal democracy has increasingly blurred the dividing line between `normal' and `exceptional' or emergency powers. One only needs to turn to a revealing 1974 report by the United States Senate - hardly a bastion of radical critics of contemporary liberal democracy - to gain a sense of the depth of the problem. As two American senators soberly noted in their introductory comments, the United States as of 1974 had

on the books at least 470 significant emergency powers statutes without time limitations delegating to the Executive extensive discretionary powers, ordinarily exercised by the Legislature, which affect the lives of American citizens in a host of all-encompassing ways. This vast range of powers, taken together, confer enough authority to rule this country without reference to normal constitutional processes.

As the report systematically outlines, a vast range of open-ended emergency delegations of power to the executive concerned not only war-preparedness and natural disasters, but many areas of economic regulation. Even during peacetime, the American president since 1945 has exercised substantial discretion to settle strikes, initiate price controls, limit exports, deal with the exigencies of the so-called drugs war, and counteract unwanted immigration. Nor have recent years witnessed a reversal of those trends that encouraged Senators Church and Mathias to conclude their 1974 report with the observation that `[e]mergency government has become the norm' within the United States. In fact, the American senators downplayed the extent of the problem by excluding a detailed comparative analysis of other liberal democracies from their report. What makes the trend toward `rule by exceptional power' all the more disturbing is how ubiquitous it has become within liberal democracy. Substantial comparative evidence describes similar trends at work in many other liberal democracies this century, despite major differences in legal culture and institutions.

The story of the rise of rule by exceptional power is a complicated one. But the American case suggests that at least two interrelated processes have been at work. Most important, the definition of what constitutes an `emergency' has taken on ever broader contours within our century. For most of the nineteenth century, the employment of emergency powers (in the Anglo-American legal tradition, especially martial law) was generally limited to situations in which the polity faced a relatively direct and unmediated physical threat: for example, invasion, rebellion or civil war. But this definition has been expanded in at least four steps. First, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, martial law in the United States often served, in the words of a contemporary political scientist, as a `household remedy' in the battle to squelch so-called `labor unrest'. That is, martial law was widely used to smash unions and strikes; the sole connection to an earlier, more limited understanding of martial law stemmed from the fact that labour disputes during this period often involved bloody physical conflict. (Of course, a main cause of bloodletting was often the employment of martial law itself.) Second, expansive delegations of exceptional authority were increasingly granted the executive even when the polity faced no immediate threat of an attack or `unrest' on its territory, but where the polity was involved in a military conflict abroad - for example, in World War I, and then again during the Korean War. A further step then entailed separating the idea of an emergency situation from any actual military conflict or violent disorder whatsoever. In this vein, exceptional powers in the area of economic management first arose during wartime, but they rapidly expanded during economic crises that political actors described as constituting dire `emergencies' on a par with military invasions or armed rebellions: President Roosevelt gained vast delegations of special authority by declaring the economic crisis of 1929 an `emergency' requiring far-reaching forms of highly discretionary executive action.

Last but not least, we can spot a recent trend toward preventive or preparatory emergency powers. The American Congress since mid-century has exhibited a willingness to increase executive prerogative even when no immediate threat (military conflict, civil unrest or economic crisis) was apparent, in order to prevent or at least prepare for (hypothetical) future threats. In this manner, the US president during the Cold War acquired an array of exceptional powers justified in part by the spectre of a prospective military conflict with the Communist world. Similarly, repeated reliance on exceptional powers within the economic realm has often been legitimized by their alleged necessity in order to ward off a repeat of the disastrous economic crisis of 1929. Many regulatory institutions that first arose as an immediate response to the `economic state of emergency' of the 1920s and 1930s soon gained a more or less permanent status; their extension was conceived as a necessary device in the battle to prevent similarly disastrous economic developments.

Given this broadening of the definition of an emergency, it is hardly surprising that the scope of executive emergency power has increased by leaps and bounds. Initially limited to a relatively narrow set of activities, exceptional powers, as noted in the US Senate report mentioned above, have come to concern a huge array of activities now defined as essential to `national security'. Although it remains unclear why, for example, a 1970 postal strike represented a national emergency justifying the president's intervention, or why 1980s' exports of non-military goods to US allies constituted a direct threat to the USA, in both cases American presidents were able to rely on extensive emergency powers to halt actions allegedly inconsistent with American national security.

Such trends hardly suffice to demonstrate that liberal democracy has evolved into an authoritarian state form. Vital checks on the operations of exceptional powers continue to function more or less effectively, and elected legislatures perform indispensable functions in the United States and elsewhere. By the same token, the surprisingly far-reaching use of emergency powers in contemporary liberal democracy shows clearly that its most democratic and responsive elements - elected legislatures - are increasingly reduced to a junior partner in a political system dominated by executive and administrative decision-makers. Although exceptional powers have yet to become a permanent state of affairs, many liberal democracies have taken ominous steps towards doing just that.

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