Together with David Held, Archibugi has been a key figure in the development of cosmopolitanism and of cosmopolitan democracy in particular, namely the attempt to apply some of the norms and values of democracy to global politics. He has advocated substantial reforms in international organizations, including the United Nations and the European Union. He has criticized the G7, G8 and G20 summits as undemocratic and urged for more transparent gathering for global politics. He has also taken position against a League of Democracies arguing that the same demands will be better served by a democratic reform of the United Nations. Archibugi is among the promoters of a directly elected World Parliament, and a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations.
Global Justice
Supporter of the individual responsibility of the rulers in the case of international crimes, Archibugi has also actively supported, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the creation of an International Criminal Court, collaborating both with the jurists of the UN International Law Commission and with the Italian Government. Over the years, he has become increasingly skeptical for the inability of international courts to incriminate the strongest. He therefore endorsed other quasi-judicial instruments for human rights protection such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the Opinion Tribunals.
Globalization of innovation
Archibugi developed a taxonomy of the globalization of technology with Jonathan Michie, where they distinguish among three main devices of transmission of know-how: international exploitation of innovations, global generation of innovation and global collaborations in science and technology. As Chairman of an Expert Group of the European Research Area on international collaboration in science and technology, he has pointed out that the demographic decline in Europe, combined with the lack of vocation of youngesters for hard sciences, will generate a dramatic shortage of qualified workers in less than a generation. This will jeopardize the standard of livings of Europeans in key areas such as medical research, information technologies and knowledge intensive industries. Archibugi has urged for substantial revisions to European immigration policy in order to accommodate at least two million qualified students in science, engineering from developing countries in a decade.
As a scholar of the business cycles, Archibugi combines the Keynesian perspective derived from his mentors Federico Caffè, Hyman Minsky and Nicholas Kaldor with the Schumpeterian perspective derived from Christopher Freeman and the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex. By combining the two perspectives, Archibugi argued that to get out of a crisis, a country must make a major effort to enter into emerging industries. In the absence of entrepreneurial spirit in the sector private, the public sector must develop the managerial capacity to exploit scientific and technological opportunities, also to safeguard public goods. This acquires more relevance in front of major events, including the environmental crisis and the economic crisis created by Covid-19.
