This response raises questions about Jack Donnelly’s argument for the “relative universality” of human rights. It shows that Donnelly’s reliance on the terms relative and universal dulls many of his sharp analytic points and in some instances leads to inconsistencies in his account. This response also contends that in defending the relative universality of human rights Donnelly obscures or mischaracterizes the bases of their legitimacy. It concludes by arguing that human rights are neither relative nor universal and shows how abandoning this vocabulary would improve our theoretical understanding of them.

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Human rights and global democracy are widely assumed to be compatible, but the conceptual and practical connection between them has received little attention. As a result, the relationship is under-theorized, and important potential conflicts between them have been neglected or overlooked. This essay attempts to fill this gap by addressing directly the conceptual relationship between human rights and global democracy. It argues that human rights are a necessary condition for global democracy. Human rights constrain power, enable meaningful political agency, and support and promote democratic regimes within states, all of which are fundamental elements in any scheme for global democracy. The essay explores the normative and conceptual bases of these functions and works out some of their institutional implications.

The ''new sovereigntists,'' a prominent group of scholars and policymakers, articulate a widely held view that global governance is inherently undemocratic because it undermines popular sovereignty. Problems with their argument notwithstanding, we argue that they identify a real and serious tension. We also argue, however, that the vision of democracy as popular sovereignty that they advocate is becoming incoherent and untenable in an era of increasing interdependence. Conceptions of democracy anchored in popular sovereignty depend for their legitimacy on empirical conditions that no longer obtain. What we call the new sovereigntist challenge for global governance is to develop an alternate conception of democracy that avoids the logic and forms of popular sovereignty at the global level while still respecting and promoting democracy and democratization within states. We outline one such alternative here.The ''new sovereigntists'' (Spiro 2000) are a group of American scholars, intellectuals, and policymakers who view the emerging international legal order and system of global governance with consternation. 2 They regard global governance as inherently undemocratic because it violates popular sovereignty and undermines constitutional government by ceding legislative authority to unelected and unaccountable entities. They also believe that a constitutionally established, popularly sovereign state must make protecting and promoting its citizens' interests its top foreign policy priority-a priority that involvement with global governance can obstruct. Finally, the new sovereigntists insist that many global normative commitments are incompatible with popular sovereignty, inviting the insidious creep of extra-constitutional, sovereignty-eroding international law.While unique in their emphasis on American constitutionalism, the new sovereigntists articulate a commonplace understanding of democracy as ''rule by the 1 Part of the work on this article was completed while Michael Goodhart was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; he gratefully acknowledges the Foundation's support. The authors are also grateful to Dan London, to Daniela Donno-Panayides, and to several anonymous readers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this essay.2 Prominent figures in this group include

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