The flows of economic globalization highlight the tensions among marketing logic, sovereignty, and human rights. What this comes to reveal is the fact that a fully enclosed border becomes impractical, that is, the functionality of the sovereign state in terms of controlling the border has met its predicament. Under globalization, how will the new global political community maintain its core values such as freedom, human rights, democracy and justice, as the notion of sovereignty is no longer viewed in terms of a unitary nation?

The recent debates on the impact of globalization upon the nation-state increase among political scientists in the past decade. However, there still lacks systematic investigation on the relation between globalization and democracy. This article aims to fulfill this theoretical gap. Firstly, democracy is analyzed as three forms: liberal, social democratic and deliberative democracy. Given the different forms, the development of modern democracy is based on the territorial-bounded nation-state. The impact of globalization on democracy is channeled via the nation-state.