Global Political Theory E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Philosophers have never shied away from interrogating the nature of our obligations beyond borders. From Hobbes to the international lawyers Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and of course Kant, modern philosophy has always attempted to define the nature and shape of a just international order, and the types of mutual obligations members of different political communities might share. In today's hyper-connected world, these issues are more important than ever and have been an impetus to a political theory with global scope and aspirations.
Global Political Theory offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge introduction to the moral aspects of global politics today. It addresses foundational aspects of global political theory such as the nature of human rights, the types of distributive obligations that we have toward distant others, the relationship between just war theory and global distributive justice, and the legitimacy of international law and global governance institutions. In addition, it features analyses of key applied moral debates in global politics, including the ethical aspects of climate change, the moral issues raised by the mobility of financial capital, the justness of different international trade regimes, and the implications of natural resource ownership for human welfare and democratic political rule. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, this accessible and lively book will be essential reading for students and teachers of political theory, philosophy and international relations.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Contributors
Preface
Introduction: Globalization, Global Politics and the Cosmopolitan Plateau
Introduction
1 Sources of the Debate: The Globalization of Politics
2 The Shape of the Current Debate
3 Plan of the Book
References
Chapter One: The Point and Ground of Human Rights: A Kantian Constructivist View
1 How To Think About Human Rights
2 The Point of Human Rights
3 The Ground of Human Rights
4 Constructing Human Rights
References
Notes
Chapter Two: Global Distributive Justice: The Statist View
1 Statism: Definitions and Implications
2 Statism: Questions and Difficulties
3 Three Forms of Statism: Community, Cooperation and Coercion
4 Conclusions
References
Chapter Three: Global Distributive Justice: The Cosmopolitan View
1 What is Cosmopolitan Distributive Justice?
2 Arguments for Cosmopolitan Distributive Justice
3 Distributive Principles
4 Four Cosmopolitan Reforms
5 Conclusion
References
Note
Chapter Four: Global Political Justice
Introduction
1 Global Political Justice: Understanding the Key Questions
2 Democratic Institutional Models of Global Political Justice
3 Non-Democratic Institutional Models for Advancing Global Political Justice
4 Conclusions: Towards a More Integrated Research Agenda on Global Political Justice
References
Notes
Chapter Five: The Legitimacy of International Law
1 The Concept of Legitimacy
2 The Instrumental Argument for International Law's Legitimacy
3 Non-Instrumental Arguments for International Law's Legitimacy
4 Why Care About Legitimacy?
References
Notes
Chapter Six: Legitimacy and Global Governance
Introduction
1 The State Consent Theory of Legitimacy
2 The Democratic Account
3 The Virtues and Problems of the Meta-Coordination View of Legitimacy
4 Conclusion
References
Note
Chapter Seven: Just War and Global Justice
Introduction
1 Just Cause for War: Orthodox versus Cosmopolitan Approaches
2 (Global) Justice and Rightful Enforceability
3 Global Justice and the Just Cause for War: A Framework
4 Just War and Global Justice: Reaching Equilibrium
5 Conclusion
References
Notes
Chapter Eight: The Associativist Account of Killing in War
Introduction
1 Grounding Associative Duties
2 The Gravity of Associative Duties
3 Operationalizing Associative Duties
4 Restricting the Associative Duty to Protect
5 Conclusion
References
Notes
Chapter Nine: Territorial Rights
Introduction
1 For and Against the Territorial State
2 Theories of Territory
3 Challenges to the Idea of Territory
References
Notes
Chapter Ten: Natural Resources
1 The Distributive Justice Perspective
2 The Power Perspective
References
Notes
Chapter Eleven: Fairness in Trade
1 Personal and Institutional Fairness
2 Obligations of Personal Fairness
3 Revolutionary Duties?
4 Normative Political Philosophy
5 Principles
6 Personal Fairness in Practice
References
Notes
Chapter Twelve: The Ethical Aspects of International Financial Integration
1 Integration of What?
2 The Promise of International Financial Integration
3 International Financial Integration in a Fragmented World
4 Looking Beyond the Balance of Payments
5 Conclusion
References
Notes
Chapter Thirteen: Political Theory for the Anthropocene
Introduction
1 The Anthropocene
2 Political Theory as We Know It
3 Agency
4 Responsibility
5 Governance
6 Legitimacy
7 Concluding Remarks
References
Notes
Chapter Fourteen: Generations and Global Justice
Introduction: Comparing or Combining?
1 Duties to the Future vs. Duties to Today's Global Poor
2 Inherited Duties vs. Duties to Today's Global Poor
3 Population Ageing and Replacement Migration
4 Conclusion
References
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Table 1
List of Illustrations
Figure 1 Legitimacy from concept to judgment
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © David Held, Pietro Maffettone 2016
The right of David Held and Pietro Maffettone to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8517-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8518-2(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Held, David, editor. | Maffettone, Pietro, editor.
Title: Global political theory / edited by David Held, Pietro Maffettone.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046789 (print) | LCCN 2016006792 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745685175 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745685182 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780745685205 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745685212 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: International relations–Moral and ethical aspects. | International economic relations–Moral and ethical aspects. | International organization–Moral and ethical aspects. | International cooperation–Moral and ethical aspects. | Globalization–Political aspects.
Classification: LCC JZ1306 .G655 2016 (print) | LCC JZ1306 (ebook) | DDC 172/.4–dc23
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Contributors
Michael Blake is Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Director of the Program on Values in Society, at the University of Washington, Seattle. His recent works include Justice and Foreign Policy (2013) and Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration? (with Gillian Brock, 2014). His main research interests are in global distributive justice and the ethics of migration policy.
Peter Dietsch is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Montreal, and directs the ethics and economics research axis at the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRE). He is the author of Catching Capital: The Ethics of Tax Competition (2015), co-editor, with Thomas Rixen, of Global Tax Governance: What is Wrong with it and How to Fix it (2016), and author of numerous journal articles. His research interests lie at the intersection of political philosophy and economics, with a particular focus on questions of income distribution as well as on the normative dimensions of economic policies.
Marcello Di Paola teaches Global Justice and Sustainability Theories at LUISS University in Rome, where he is affiliated with the Centre for Ethics and Global Politics. He writes on climate change and the Anthropocene, with a focus on the role of individuals in the face of complex global issues. He has recently co-edited Canned Heat: the Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change (with Gianfranco Pellegrino, 2014).
Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. He is co-director of the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, of the Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’ and Member of the Directorate of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Bad Homburg. His work in moral and political philosophy focuses on questions of practical reason, justice and toleration. His major publications are Contexts of Justice (2002), The Right to Justification (2012), Toleration in Conflict (2013), Justification and Critique (2013), The Power of Tolerance (with Wendy Brown, 2014), Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification (with Replies by Critics; 2014) and Normativität und Macht (2015).
Axel Gosseries is Maître de recherches at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium), Professor at the University of Leuven (UCL, Hoover Chair) and a Franz Weyr Fellow (Czech Academy of Science). He is the author of Penser la justice entre les générations (2004), the co-editor of three books, including one on intellectual property issues (2008), and another on issues of intergenerational justice (2009), and of more than 50 articles and chapters in philosophy, law and economics. He works in the field of political philosophy, especially on issues of intergenerational justice and on the respective role of states and firms.
David Held is Master of University College and Professor of Politics and International Relations, at Durham University. Among his most recent publications are Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing (2013), Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (2010), Globalization/Anti-Globalization (2007), Models of Democracy (2006), Global Covenant (2004), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (1999) and Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (1995). His main research interests include globalization, changing forms of democracy, and regional and global governance. He is a Director of Polity Press, which he co-founded in 1984, and General Editor of Global Policy.
Aaron James is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy (2012) and numerous articles on metaethics, moral theory and political philosophy. He has been an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, and a visiting professor of philosophy at New York University.
Dale Jamieson is Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Affiliated Professor of Law, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, and Chair of the Environmental Studies Department at New York University. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London, and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. His most recent books are Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed – and What It Means For Our Future (2014), and, with the novelist Bonnie Nadzam, Love in the Anthropocene (2015), a collection of short stories and essays.
Seth Lazar is a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is the author of Sparing Civilians (2015) and editor of The Morality of Defensive War (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (2016). His work has appeared in journals such as Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Besides the morality of war, his research interests include the ethics of risk and the foundations of associative duties.
David Lefkowitz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and founding coordinator of the programme in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond, Virginia. His research interests include the morality of obedience and disobedience to law, analytical questions in the philosophy of international law, and topics in international ethics such as secession and the just conduct of war. He has published papers in numerous journals, including Ethics, Legal Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy and The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, as well as chapters in The Philosophy of International Law, The Oxford Handbook on the Sources of International Law and several other edited collections.
Terry Macdonald is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Melbourne, having previously held positions at Merton College, University of Oxford, the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University, and Monash University. She is the author of Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation Beyond Liberal States (2008) and co-editor of Global Political Justice (with Miriam Ronzoni, 2013). She has published further on topics of global democracy, legitimacy and political justice in journals including Ethics & International Affairs, Political Studies, European Journal of International Law and European Journal of Political Theory. She currently serves as an associate editor of the journal Global Governance.
Pietro Maffettone is Lecturer in Global Politics and Ethics in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. He received his BA from La Sapienza (Rome) and his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He works on global justice, ethics and international affairs, and contemporary moral and political philosophy.
David Miller is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford, and an Official Fellow of Nuffield College. Among his published books are On Nationality (1995), Principles of Social Justice (1999), Citizenship and National Identity (2000), National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007), Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (2013) and Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (2016). Besides theories of territory, his research interests include social and global justice, human rights and immigration.
Darrel Moellendorf is Cluster Professor of International Political Theory at the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, and Professor of Philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002), Global Inequality Matters (2009), and The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (2014). He co-edited Jurisprudence (with Christopher J. Roederer, 2004), Current Debates in Global Justice (with Gillian Brock, 2005), Global Justice: Seminal Essays (with Thomas Pogge, 2008) and The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics (with Heather Widdows, 2014). He has been a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Senior Fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Goethe Unviersität-Frankfurt and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Bad Homburg) and the recipient of NEH (USA) and DAAD (German) grants.
Margaret Moore is a Professor in the Political Studies Department at Queen's University, Ontario. She is the author of A Political Theory of Territory (2015), Ethics of Nationalism (2001) and Foundations of Liberalism (1993). Her main current interests are territorial rights, issues of historic injustice, global justice and the relationship between just war, secession and rebellion.
Laura Valentini is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests lie in contemporary political theory, with a particular focus on international normative theory, methodology in political theory, and democratic theory. She is the author of Justice in a Globalized World: A Normative Framework (2011) and of several articles on international and domestic justice. She is a co-founder of The Global Justice Network and a co-editor of the online journal Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric.
Leif Wenar holds the Chair of Philosophy and Law at the School of Law, King's College London. His book is Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence and the Rules that Run the World (2016).
Danielle Zwarthoed is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Montreal. She is the author of Comprendre la pauvreté. John Rawls, Amartya Sen (2009) and has contributed to Theory and Research in Education and the Review of Economic Philosophy. Her main research interests include intergenerational justice, the political philosophy of education, and migrations.
Preface
This book explores the main topics in, and approaches to, global political theory. The acceleration of globalization since the 1980s has fundamentally challenged the thought that normative political ideas can be confined to the internal life of states. Partly as a result of this transformation of the political landscape, global political theory, in the last three decades, has attracted an increasing amount of attention within the broader fields of moral and political philosophy.
This original and comprehensive volume aims to provide a conceptual map of contemporary global political theory. Its authors include many of the most prominent scholars who have worked in the field as well as important emerging voices. The collection offers theoretical contributions to the most significant research topics in global political theory and international ethics more broadly. The themes covered include: global distributive and political justice, human rights, just war theory, trade, capital mobility, territorial rights, natural resources, climate change and intergenerational justice.
Many edited volumes have appeared in recent years on specific aspects of global political theory. However, we think that none of these fully capture the fact that global political theory is increasingly becoming part of the core curriculum for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in moral and political philosophy. We have thus attempted to construct a book that can be used for both research and teaching purposes. The number of original essays (15, including the editors’ introduction) and the conceptual progression of the chapters make this collection an ideal basic text for a course on global political theory. At the same time, the fact that the contributions are all originally developed for this volume means that scholars and research students alike will find the book relevant to their work.
As for all successful collective endeavours, cooperation and mutual learning have been at the heart of our experience acting as editors of this collection. The responsiveness and positive engagement, not to mention the intellectual acumen, that all the contributors brought to the table for the whole duration of the project has been remarkable. Over the past two years, we have not so much been in charge of a task as part of a global philosophical conversation. For this, we are delighted and grateful.
Last but not least, we would like to thank Polity, and especially Louise Knight, Pascal Porcheron and Sarah Dancy, for their moral and material support and, most of all, for their unflinching patience. Publishers have the daunting task of reconciling academic delays with real world pressures. The graciousness and professionalism shown by Polity, in this and many other respects, has been outstanding. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the research assistance of David Van-Rooyen and thank him for all his hard work.
David Held and Pietro Maffettone
Durham, 2016
Introduction: Globalization, Global Politics and the Cosmopolitan Plateau
David Held and Pietro Maffettone
Introduction
Philosophers have never shied away from interrogating the nature of our obligations beyond borders. From Hobbes to the international lawyers Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel, and of course Kant, modern philosophy has always attempted to define the nature and shape of a just international order, and the types of mutual obligations members of different political communities might share.
However, it is also fair to say that, in the past four decades, topics related to global politics have occupied a central part of the philosophical debate. Why is this? It is of course impossible to articulate fully the precise contours of an intellectual shift of this magnitude. Yet we believe that at least one part of the story pertains to the globalization of political relations. The argument offered, in the first section of this introduction, is that the globalization of politics should be seen as an important contributing factor to the increased attention that philosophers have paid to the moral aspects of global affairs. The deep forms of social, economic and political interdependence that characterize globalization have pushed the disciplines of moral and political philosophy to find a central place for the normative aspects of world politics.
In the second section, we move to the current debate in global political theory. This debate has reached what we call a cosmopolitan plateau. Moral cosmopolitanism has come to articulate the boundaries of reasonable disagreement in global political theory. We trace what we take to be the most important implication of this cosmopolitan plateau, namely, the commitment to basic human rights. We also note that agreement on basic human rights has not evolved into widespread acceptance of a single approach to global political and distributive justice. We go on to describe what we see as further significant trends in the debate, including its move towards more applied and specialized discussions, and the attempt to cross-fertilize global political theory with more traditional areas of international ethics such as just war theory. Finally, in the third section, we provide a brief overview of the contributions to the volume and how these fit into the conceptual framework developed in sections 1 and 2.
1 Sources of the Debate: The Globalization of Politics
Globalization and global politics
Globalization can best be understood if it is conceived as a spatial phenomenon, lying on a continuum with ‘the local’ at one end and ‘the global’ at the other. It involves a shift in the spatial form of human organization and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction and exercise of power (Held et al., 1999). Globalization embraces at least four distinct types of change. First, it involves a stretching of political, social and economic activities across frontiers, regions and continents. Second, globalization is marked by the growing magnitude of networks and flows of trade, investment, finance, culture and so on. Third, globalization can be linked to a speeding up of global interactions and processes, as the development of worldwide systems of transportation and communication increases the velocity of the diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital and people. And, fourth, it involves the deepening impact of global interactions and processes such that local events can come to have enormous global consequences. In this particular sense, the boundaries between domestic matters and global affairs become fuzzy. In short, globalization can be thought of as the widening, intensifying, speeding up and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness.
Against this backdrop there has been a marked change in the nature and shape of political life. The distinctive form this has taken can be characterized as the emergence of ‘global politics’: the increasing reach of political networks, interaction and rulemaking activity, formal and informal. Political events and/or decision-making can become linked through rapid communications into complex networks of political interaction. Associated with this ‘stretching’ of politics is an intensification of global processes such that ‘action at a distance’ permeates the social conditions and cognitive worlds (i.e. the ways in which meaning is constructed) of specific places or communities (Giddens, 1990: ch. 2). The idea of global politics challenges the traditional distinctions between the domestic and the international, territorial and non-territorial, inside and outside, as embedded in conventional conceptions of interstate politics and ‘the political’. It also highlights the richness and complexity of the processes and connections that link states and societies in the global order. Moreover, global politics today is anchored not just in traditional geopolitical concerns, but also in a large diversity of social, economic and environmental questions. Climate change, pandemics, financial instability and terrorism are among an increasing number of transnational issues which cut across territorial jurisdictions and existing political alignments, and which require international cooperation for their effective resolution.
People, nations and organizations are enmeshed in many new forms of communication, which range across borders. The digital revolution has made possible virtually instantaneous worldwide links, which, when combined with the technologies of the telephone, television, cable, satellite and jet transportation, have dramatically altered the nature of political communication. The intimate connection between physical setting, social situation and politics, which distinguishes most political associations from premodern to modern time, has been ruptured.
The development of new communication systems generates a world in which the peculiarities of place and individuality are constantly represented and reinterpreted through regional and global communication networks. But the relevance of these systems goes far beyond this, for they are fundamental to the possibility of organizing political action and exercising political power across vast distances (Deibert, 1997). For example, the expansion of international and transnational organizations, the extension of international rules and legal mechanisms – their construction and monitoring – have all received an impetus from these new communication systems, and all depend on them as a means to further their aims. The present era of global politics marks a shift towards a multilayered regional and global governance system, with features of both complexity and polycentricity.
The changed landscape of global politics
A number of trends can be identified within the changed landscape of world politics. First, there has been a notable trend involving the integration of the national and the international political spheres (Milner, 1998; Slaughter, 2004). The relationship between national governments and international bodies is no longer unilinear, but rather shaped by overlapping pressures coming from all sides (domestic constituencies, international organizations, global civil society, etc.). From global trade rules to intellectual property rights, from the global financial crisis to climate change, issues are posed for many levels of politics. A second trend that can be observed since 1945 is the emergence of powerful nonstate actors in the development of transborder governance. Nonstate actors such as international nongovernmental organizations, multinational companies and even individuals have always been active agents in political debate, but the manner in which they influence international politics has changed in significant ways (Haas, 1991; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Betsill and Corell, 2008). For instance, through the direct lobbying of global governance bodies, nonstate actors shape political debate internationally, in turn impacting the behaviour of states from both above and below. Today, the emergence of nonstate actors creates a more complex governance system than one made up of traditional principal–agent relationships between states and purely intergovernmental organizations. This can potentially pose problems of governance fragmentation, but it also broadens the platform for political deliberation and debate (Risse-Kappen, 1995; Anheier et al., 2006; Betsill and Corell, 2008).
Third, there has been a shift in how regulation and governance are enforced. The diverse forms of global governance produce diverse types of regulation intended to influence and delimit the behaviour of states. Traditionally, compliance in international agreements is linked to the possibility of sanctions that penalize violators in order to ensure appropriate conduct. Increasingly, however, trends can be detected that ensure that rules are enforced through alternative means such as voluntary arrangements and initiatives, as well as international standards that are adhered to by actors because of their reputational and coordinative effects (see Kerwer, 2005). Of course, these types of regulation are not sufficient in and of themselves to solve the problem of compliance and enforcement as a spiral of global bads, from global financial market instability to climate change, continues to grow.
Fourth, overlapping with these trends, there has been a proliferation of new types of global governance institutions in the postwar era, and especially since the end of the Cold War (Hale and Held, 2011). These are not multilateral, state-to-state institutions, but instead combine various actors under varying degrees of institutionalization. In some areas of global governance, these kinds of institutions rank among the most important (see Held and Young, 2011). This development has added to the growing polycentricism observed in many areas of global governance. A polycentric approach can have advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it can mean that more issues are addressed in effective ways – through specialized bodies qualified to regulate and govern a specific issue area. On the other hand, it can exacerbate institutional fragmentation.
As demands on the state increased following the end of the Second World War, a whole host of policy problems emerged that cannot be adequately resolved without the cooperation of other states and nonstate actors. Accordingly, individual states on their own can no longer be conceived of as the appropriate political units for either resolving many key policy problems or managing effectively a broad range of public functions. Globalization has eroded the capacity of states to act unilaterally in the articulation and pursuit of domestic and international policy objectives; political power, in short, has been reconfigured.
In this context, the traditional questions of political philosophy gain a new inflection. Since early modern times, it has typically been assumed that the political good is inherent in the state. Sovereignty, democracy and social justice, among other concepts, have been deeply contested, but within a fixed normative framework bound to the territorial political community. Yet, with the reconfiguration of political power, further issues arise. In a world of complex interdependence, where social and political processes spill across borders, not only do activities in one country impact others, but they can also escape the control of individual states altogether. What is the appropriate jurisdiction for handling transnational forces and impacts? What is the meaning and relevance of sovereignty, democracy and social justice when some of the most pressing issues of our times pose existential threats, and require new forms and types of cooperative and collective action amongst states; something which they typically have not been good at. Who gets what, where and how, and who the relevant agents are – local, national, regional, global – takes on a new urgency.
Unpacking these concerns has led political philosophy to engage broadly with the global political domain. As we will see below, the links between globalization and the emergence of global political theory defy a formulaic presentation. However, it is still possible to affirm that globalization has challenged the basic framework in which political concepts have been traditionally developed, and in so doing opened up the possibility for a wide array of moral and political concerns and arguments to be developed and discussed.
Globalization and global political theory
There are at least four ways in which globalization has impacted upon normative debates. These, it should be stressed, are not presented here as part of a systematic intellectual history of the debate. Intellectual history is difficult, and we have, accordingly, more modest ambitions. Further, the links between globalization and global political theory are clearly mediated by several cultural, political and intellectual trends that defy a mechanical or formulaic reconstruction. To name just a few: the end of the Cold War, the emergence of the human rights regime and of the responsibility to protect doctrine, and the spread of democratic ideas, etc. Instead, our aim is simply to suggest that the globalization of politics is an important contributing factor to the increased significance that global political theory has gained within the wider discipline of moral and political philosophy.
First, globalization has intensified global and regional patterns of exchange (political, economic, cultural) and thus has made us aware that our actions have implications that do not stop at our own borders, but have wider and more far-reaching effects.
Second, globalization has accelerated the emergence of global collective action problems. Yet, it has also contributed to a new sense of urgency about establishing global cooperation to address them. It is appreciated that to do nothing about financial market risks, terrorism in the Middle East or climate change, among many other global challenges, is to encourage enormous instabilities and to invite lasting damage to the fabric of our institutional lives. There has been the realization that our overlapping collective fortunes require collective solutions – locally, nationally, regionally and globally. And there has also been a widespread acceptance that some of these challenges, if unaddressed, could be apocalyptic in the decades to come.
Third, globalization has increased our awareness of distant suffering. This may seem like a trivial point, but it should not be underestimated. From a purely causal perspective, awareness of a given situation is a necessary condition of our ability to do something about it. But there is more to it than the latter idea suggests. Awareness of suffering, especially through the kind of visual awareness that modern telecommunication technologies allow, can play an important part in the development of empathy and, paraphrasing Peter Singer, in expanding the ‘moral circle’ (Singer, 2002).
Fourth, globalization has also made us aware of the fact that we can do something about the plight of those who live very far from us. How much we can do for ‘distant strangers’ is of course a matter of great controversy. Witness the endless debates on the effectiveness of humanitarian and development aid. However, most would accept that our role should not be limited to that of spectators, and that passivity in the face of the suffering of distant others is unacceptable.
The four aforementioned points can be given a more precise interpretation if we look at them through the lenses of the traditional concerns highlighted in moral and political theory. The first and second elements relate to the traditional Rawlsian idea that cooperative activities generate benefits and burdens and that these burdens and benefits have to be distributed in a non-arbitrary fashion. In a similar way, drawing from a broadly democratic perspective, the first and second elements have highlighted the great array of issue areas in which power is exercised without clear accountability mechanisms, and the associated potential for political and economic domination that unaccountable power inevitably generates. The third element, increased awareness of distant suffering, creates the possibility for empathy, which, at least according to a broadly Humean tradition, is a key factor in motivating individuals to act morally. The fourth element, our ability to affect the life prospects of distant individuals, reinforces the motivational pull of empathy by signalling that normative ideas can have significant implications for the real world. Furthermore, the fourth element also partially shapes our reflections about the nature of our moral universe, as it implies that our relationship with distant strangers can be a source of genuinely normative obligations, that is, obligations that specify a set of actions and policies that we may realistically try to implement.
In this section, we have provided an account of the key features of the globalization of politics. Furthermore, we have traced the basic elements that explain the links between globalization and global political theory. Globalization is an important element in explaining the emergence of a political theory with global scope and aspirations. The characterization of the fundamental features of this new philosophical debate is the aim of the next section of the introduction.
2 The Shape of the Current Debate
The cosmopolitan plateau
Ronald Dworkin once famously wrote that all contemporary political philosophy rested on egalitarian foundations (1986: 296–7). Libertarianism, utilitarianism and liberal egalitarianism, the most influential approaches to moral and political philosophy, can all be seen as providing different interpretations of what it means to treat persons with equal respect and concern. The idea of moral equality, in Dworkin's own words, provided ‘a kind of plateau in political argument’ (1983: 25).
Something similar can be said about the debate in global political theory. Here, we can say that we have reached a cosmopolitan plateau (see Blake, 2013a). Of course, the term ‘cosmopolitan’ can be interpreted in several ways. Its history is particularly rich and goes back at least to the Stoics (Brown and Held, 2010). For the latter, human beings are better understood as citizens of the world rather than of territorially defined political communities. A second distinctive phase in the history of the term is represented by the Kantian understanding of the universality of human reason. In the Kantian picture, all human beings are part of a shared community, the community of moral argument. In more recent times, the term has also been used to refer to a wide array of approaches, ranging from the cultural, to the legal, to the political. However, the most influential of the contemporary understandings of the term is not related to culture, political institutions or international law. Rather, it relates to our understanding of the moral status of human beings.
Thomas Pogge has provided the most influential definition of moral cosmopolitanism:
Three elements are shared by all cosmopolitan positions. First, individualism: the ultimate units of moral concern are human beings, or persons – rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious communities, nations, or states. The latter may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens. Second, universality: the status of ultimate unit of moral concern attaches to every living human being equally – not merely to some subset, such as men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims. Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of moral concern for everyone – not only for their compatriots, fellow religionists, or suchlike.
(1992: 48–9; emphasis in original)
Pogge's definition reminds us of what it means to assign a certain status to human beings as moral agents. Most importantly, though, it provides a framework for our political discussions; and it is a framework that is accepted by all those who participate in the conversation of global political theory. It is important to stress the latter point. Some will inevitably complain that a term or label that includes all participants in a given debate may not be particularly useful (Blake, 2013a: 35–7), since it fails to identify any form of serious disagreement. To the contrary, we think that the terminology and the underlying concept that lies behind it still have something to contribute. Namely, they help us delineate the boundaries of reasonable disagreement within our moral debates in a way that is philosophically consistent. They act as a screen to filter the range of plausible moral approaches to the moral understanding of the global political domain. To illustrate, the cosmopolitan plateau tells us that to subscribe to forms of value collectivism, or to deny the equal moral status of all human beings, implies that one's views are beyond the boundaries of reasonable disagreement and thus have no standing in the debate about the moral bases of global politics.
The implications of the cosmopolitan plateau
Of course, to be committed to moral cosmopolitanism is to be committed to a very abstract moral outlook. What are the political and moral implications, if any, of such an outlook? The most important political implication of the cosmopolitan plateau is, in our view, the commitment to basic human rights (e.g. those specified by international legal documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Basic human rights have come to articulate the normative focal point of global political theory. They constitute the most important benchmark (though of course not the only one) for the evaluation both of internal and external state conduct, for the actions of global governance institutions, for the norms and principles that constitute international and transnational regimes, for the policies of multinational corporations and for the behaviour of political leaders and public officials. Or, in Henry Shue's words, they articulate what he calls the ‘moral minimum’, ‘[t]he lower limits on tolerable conduct, individual and institutional’ (1996: xi).
The universal support for basic human rights is best described as an overlapping consensus. This is so for two reasons. First, because to some extent all approaches to the justification of human rights rely, directly or indirectly, on the importance of individual interests, and on the respect that is owed to the basic moral status of human beings (see Vlastos, 1984; Valentini, 2012). In other words, basic human rights are considered by all as deriving, at least in part, from a shared set of ‘shallow’ but common foundational commitments. The latter implies that emphasis on human rights is not a mere ‘convergence’.
Second, however, it is an overlapping consensus because conceptualizations of human rights vary. In the first instance, the common foundational commitment is, as we have just stated, ‘shallow’. One can get at this conclusion by asking the following question: what exactly is meant to ground respect for the moral status of human beings? Utilitarians, Kantians and Christians would give decidedly different answers; answers that they would insist go to the heart of their characterization of normative ethics. In a similar way, there is no agreement on how to understand the grounds and justification of basic human rights. Do they reflect the requirement to protect basic needs (Miller, 2012)? Are they drawn from a broader capability framework (Sen, 2005)? Are they to be understood as standards for the articulation of membership in a political community (Cohen, 2004)? Are they an emergent practice in international society to place limits on the internal and external sovereignty of states (Beitz, 2010)? Or are human rights simply a subset of our most fundamental moral rights, which protect the most important human interests (Griffin, 2008)? Or, as Rainer Forst suggests in the opening chapter of this book, do they act as a tool in the emancipatory struggle to end humiliation and to recognise the equal social and political standing of all human beings (see also Buchanan, 2013)?
Of course, these debates have implications for the concrete lists of rights that different authors see as ‘real’ human rights (see Buchanan, 2013). Yet, they have not, so far, affected agreement across the whole spectrum of theoretical approaches on the fact that a core set of basic human rights is justified and that their protection should constitute the most urgent moral imperative for global political action. Such core entitlements include at least basic rights to political representation (though not necessarily to a fully democratic system), rights against basic forms of discrimination, rights connected to freedom of conscience, religion and expression, and rights to basic subsistence.
At the same time, however, the cosmopolitan plateau has not generated the same type of consensus when it comes to global distributive justice. The best way to characterize the debate is to see the disagreements about global distributive justice as disagreements about the extent to which accepting the idea of moral cosmopolitanism should have implications, beyond respect for basic human rights, for how human beings should be treated. More specifically, the central question, much as for domestic political philosophy, is to what extent notions of equal moral status demand specific forms of equal treatment in the global political context (Blake, 2013a: 41). Put differently, disagreements about global distributive justice should be seen largely as family disputes over different ways of understanding the implications of a broadly liberal outlook for how persons should be treated at the global level.
We shall not proceed to review the different accounts of global distributive justice, nor shall we proceed to a full articulation of the basic differences between them. To do so in the space of a short introductory chapter would be impossible. Furthermore, both topics are developed in the chapters that follow in this volume (see especially Moellendorf's and Blake's contributions). We will instead limit ourselves to two general remarks.
First, something about terminology. The usual terms used to describe the different positions in the debate about global distributive justice are ‘cosmopolitans’ for those who believe in the extension of demanding egalitarian conceptions of justice beyond the state, and ‘statists’ or ‘nationalists’ for those who favour the restriction of egalitarian distributive principles to special forms of association such as the state or national communities. However, as we have claimed above, the term ‘cosmopolitan’, if understood as ‘morally cosmopolitan’, encompasses all participants to the debate. So it is more accurate, following Michael Blake (in this volume), to call those who are usually labelled cosmopolitans tout court as ‘cosmopolitans about distributive justice’.
To some extent, it is also fair to say that the terms have outlived their usefulness (see Blake, in this volume). Most cosmopolitans about distributive justice concede that allegiance to specific forms of political associations create strong distributive obligations. Conversely, most statists and nationalists would agree that while demanding comparative principles may not apply beyond borders, this does not entail that other less demanding duties of justice do not apply (e.g. sufficientarian duties of justice). The usefulness of these labels, thus, does not lie in their ability to demarcate strongly divergent accounts of global distributive justice. ‘Cosmopolitan about distributive justice’ and ‘statist’ or ‘nationalist’ are not sharp lines in the current philosophical debate. We have, nonetheless, decided to stick to the labels for two reasons. First, while they do not stand for strongly opposing worldviews, cosmopolitanism about distributive justice and statism or nationalism can still be taken to articulate different standpoints in the debate. Put differently, while the difference between the two accounts is not necessarily sharp, the terms still allow us to see what different authors decide to emphasize about distributive obligations beyond the remits of territorially bounded political communities. Moreover, the terms have now acquired historical significance insofar as a great deal of our past and present discussions have been framed through them.
Second, it should be noted that while differences between cosmopolitans about distributive justice and statists or nationalists have been extensively explored in the literature, a number of central issues remain, in our view, under-researched. For example, most of the debates about global distributive justice have concerned the content, grounds and scope of distributive principles, yet there has been much less focus on their relative strength or priority. To illustrate, statists are committed to the idea that comparative distributive principles only apply between co-citizens of a political association like the modern state. However, they are usually also committed to the idea that other, possibly sufficientarian, duties apply beyond borders. How exactly should one characterize the order of priority between these two types of duties? Should they be lexically ordered? Should we give priority to associative obligations towards co-nationals or to the basic needs of foreigners? If so, to what extent? These are, to be sure, difficult questions to answer. And it would be unfair to say that no attempts have been made to provide guidance in answering them (see for example Miller, 2012: ch. 7). Yet, it is also fair to say that, given their importance, they certainly deserve more attention.
Political justice and legitimacy
Debates about distributive justice do not exhaust the remit of global political theory. Similar disagreements and controversies to the ones that characterize the debate on distributive justice are replicated in debates that deal with what we can call global political justice (see Macdonald and Ronzoni, 2012). The distinction between distributive justice and political justice is not clear-cut, and the two obviously overlap. To illustrate, a given ‘currency’ of distributive justice (e.g. Rawls's primary goods) may be partly defined by access to equal rights, including rights to political participation, which, in turn, has implications for the range of permissible forms of political organization. Yet, in our view, the distinction is useful in contrasting questions of institutional design and evaluation from questions relating to specific distributive patterns and about the nature of the goods that are to be distributed accordingly. In this context, we can think of distributive justice as broadly concerned with the patterns of distribution for a range of ‘currencies’, while political justice refers to the wider question of the institutional context in which such distribution should take place. It follows that we can think of global political justice as a set of normative conceptions meant to specify the institutional architecture of global politics.
The central question in global political justice pertains to the very shape that global politics should take. Should we opt for a system of separate political communities close to those we presently experience, or should we favour some form of radical reshaping of the current system? On the one hand, according to a broadly statist outlook, a reformed state system (a system in which states are internally well ordered and take their international obligations seriously) could, in principle, be just (see Sangiovanni, 2007). It could represent, in Rawls's words, a ‘realistic utopia’, something towards which we could be reconciled morally speaking. On the other hand, some cosmopolitans argue for deep revisions to the idea of territorial sovereignty (see Pogge, 1992; Held, 1995), while others go as far as advocating the creation of a world state (Cabrera, 2006). As with arguments about global distributive justice, the labels ‘cosmopolitans about global political justice’ and ‘statists about global political justice’ do not map precisely on particular or predetermined answers to these questions. More specifically, while all statists are committed at least to the pro tanto justifiability of a reformed state system, not all self-defined cosmopolitans are necessarily committed to superseding all forms of territorially defined political communities (see Valentini, 2011).
The issue of global political justice is conceptually close but nonetheless distinct from the issue of legitimacy. Both questions refer to institutional architecture broadly understood. However, at least according to a widely shared intuition, questions of legitimacy are different from questions of justice. At its most basic, the difference between the two lies in the fact that legitimacy seems to allow more latitude, so to speak, compared to justice. In other words, legitimacy is often thought to be a less demanding standard of evaluation for institutions and political arrangements. Justice is about what we think is ideal, while legitimacy is closer to what we think we can accept morally speaking: institutions may be considered to be legitimate even if we do not deem them to be fully just. Legitimacy is also intimately related to the kind of attitudes that one should adopt towards a given institution, namely, the standing that we give to its commands, and the extent to which we consider institutional directives to be authoritative. To say that an institution is legitimate is, at a minimum, to say that one has weighty reasons to comply with its directives (see Buchanan and Keohane, 2006; Buchanan, 2013).
Within the framework of global political theory, the question of legitimacy can be articulated in the following way: what kinds of principles and values should be used as standards of evaluation for international, transnational political and economic institutions? Here too, the literature has developed a series of canonical answers. We will not review these approaches (but see Lefkowitz; Macdonald; and Held and Maffettone in this volume). Instead, we wish to highlight that all of them share something in common, namely, the refusal to accept a background picture in which states are sovereign in the traditional Westphalian sense of the term, and consequently, see their international obligations as only justifiable through voluntariness or consent. To paraphrase Rawls (1999), we now live in a (normative) world where states are no longer considered the originators of all their powers. The upshot is that it is untenable to evaluate international institutions and regimes through the lenses of state consent alone.
Finally, note that while the aforementioned question is, in our view, central, it has not received the attention that it deserves within mainstream debates. The global political theory literature has poured considerable amounts of ink on the scope of egalitarian distributive principles, yet, with the exception of debates addressing the desirability of global democracy (see Held, 1995; Marchetti, 2008) it has paid comparatively less attention to the more specific questions pertaining to legitimacy and institutional design (but see Buchanan and Keohane, 2006; Christiano, 2011, 2012). Nonetheless, the reasons to address the topic in greater detail are pressing. The number and range of activities that are shaped or regulated by international and transnational institutions has skyrocketed in the last five decades. Moreover, their role and the pervasiveness of their influence in the internal politics of most nation-states is widely acknowledged. The question of their legitimacy, not simply how they should be optimally designed in order to be congruent with the demands of justice, is thus of central importance.
Further trends in global political theory
So far in this introduction, we have suggested the idea of a cosmopolitan plateau in global political argument. We have seen that the shared acceptance of a broadly cosmopolitan moral landscape, one that considers individuals as moral equals, has translated into a shared commitment to basic human rights, although it has not managed to create consensus on global distributive and political justice. Finally, we have highlighted the relative neglect that questions of legitimacy have suffered in global political theory. In the final part of this section, we explore further significant trends within the debate.
One of the most important discernible trends is undoubtedly the move towards the application of the global political theory approach to diverse issues. While the initial stages of the debate in global political theory were mostly concerned with shared foundational questions, such as the grounds and content of our obligations towards distant strangers and, to a lesser extent, their strength compared to our obligations to co-nationals and co-citizens, the current debate has fragmented into a variety of issue areas.
The number of topics that are addressed by scholars working within the broader framework of global ethics has considerably expanded. To name just a few areas: the justification of trade regimes (James, 2005; Risse, 2007); the distribution of the costs associated with climate change mitigation and adaptation (Caney, 2012; Jamieson, 2014); the nature and justification of territorial rights (Stilz, 2011; Nine, 2012; Ypi, 2014; Moore, 2015); the justifiability of state borders and immigration restrictions (Abizadeh, 2008; Wellman, 2008; Blake, 2013b); the relationship between global justice and future generations (see Gosseries and Zwarthoed in this volume); the ownership of natural resources and its relationship with the resource curse (see Wenar, 2008, and in this volume); and the international intellectual property regime and its relationship to access to health (Pogge et al., 2010).
A second and related trend in the literature is the move towards more applied forms of analysis, closely associated with a specific domain of political activity or with specific empirical problems. Examples include the moral assessments of the current system of capital mobility (James, 2012; Dietsch in this volume); the implications of tax competition for effective tax sovereignty and self-determination (Ronzoni, 2009; Dietsch and Rixen, 2014); the proper aim of structural adjustment programmes (Barry, 2011); and the evaluation of specific global economic institutions such as the WTO (Moellendorf, 2005; Maffettone, 2009). The contributions to these applied debates, it can be noted, show considerable awareness of the underlying empirical complexity that pertains to the technical aspects of the specific topics they address. This is, in our view, one important way in which philosophers can stay closer to where most of the action is, that is, closer to existing political debates and the concerns of policymakers.
A third trend concerns what we here call the cross-fertilization of different areas of the traditional concerns of international ethics. Up until recently, for example, the relationship between just war theory and global political theory has been neglected. Instead, starting with Terry Nardin's work (2004, 2006) we have witnessed a progressive rapprochement between these two areas of inquiry, with specific points of contact pertaining to the relationship between the principles of just war theory and different accounts of distributive justice (see Fabre, 2012; Valentini in this volume), associative duties (Lazar, 2013, and in this volume), and authority and legitimacy (Estlund, 2007; Ryan, 2011).
The cross-fertilization between just war theory and global political theory broadly construed is something to be welcomed for two reasons. The first concerns the potential for interdisciplinary work. To illustrate, according to a widely accepted understanding of justice, the latter concerns enforceable entitlements. Justice, at least when conceived as the first virtue of social and political institutions, is related to what we think we can reasonably impose on others, not simply what we think is commendable in the abstract (see Valentini, 2013). In the same way, principles of jus ad bellum are often thought to provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for resorting to the use of force at the international level. Thus, the two topics overlap at least insofar as they both require us to investigate the circumstances in which we can reasonably use force or coercion to change or sanction an agent's behaviour. The second reason to welcome this work on cross-fertilization is the potential for restoring the importance of our concerns for war and peace. If we accept, following Rawls (1999), war as one of the great evils of human history, it is crucial to never lose sight of its relevance for global politics and its moral appraisal.
Finally, while we have discussed consolidated or emerging trends in global political theory, it is also important to highlight what, in our view, is missing in this material. The cosmopolitan plateau and all the work on global justice have not generated an equally important body of work on international toleration. One of the most visible features of the global political domain is the great diversity of cultures and political traditions. Yet, global political theorists have not fully developed their views on how exactly to relate to such diversity. The attention that pluralism has received in domestic moral and political philosophy (witness the debate on political forms of liberalism or on multiculturalism) has not been replicated in global political theory (but see Tan, 2000; Blake, 2013c).
With the exception of Rawls's account of international toleration (1999), a great deal of global political theory works under the assumption that the only possible way of organizing political society is according to a fully liberal democratic model. This is, in many respects, an attractive ideal for those who share a commitment to liberal values. However, its implications should not be downplayed. To shape every political community according to liberal values requires strong arguments to the effect that no other form of political organization is morally acceptable. Unless these arguments are developed in greater detail, the spread of liberal values cannot straightforwardly be regarded as a form of moral progress.
