  For Held (1995), cosmopolitan democracy is clearly continuous with democracy, at least in form, as it is realized within states. Not only does Held show how international society is already thickly institutionalized well beyond the systems of negotiation that Habermas makes central, he further recognizes that “individuals increasingly have complex and multilayered identities, corresponding to the globalization of economic forces and the reconfiguration of political power.” Such potentially overlapping identities provide the basis for participation in global civil society, in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and in other transnational civil associations, movements, and agencies that create opportunities for political participation at the global level. Held's approach thus has three enormous advantages: an emphasis on a variety of institutions; a multiplicity of levels and sites for common democratic activity; and a focus on the need for organized political actors in international civil society to play an important role in a system of global democracy. For all these advantages, the self-legislating demos reappears in Held's explicitly Lockean insistence that “the artificial person at the center of the modern state must be reconceived in terms of cosmopolitan public law.” In order to reconstitute the community as sovereign, Held argues that the demoi must submit to the will of the global demos: “cosmopolitan law demands the subordination of regional, national and local sovereignties to an overarching legal framework.” 