Global Justice in East Asia

Hugo El Kholi, Jun-Hyeok Kwak, Hugo El Kholi, Jun-Hyeok Kwak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000764116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As a fascinating study of global justice in Asia, this book presents a series of contributions reflecting upon the conditions of a greater involvement of East Asian traditions of thought in the debate on global justice.

Including chapters on diverse issues such as global social inequalities, human rights practice and the functioning of international institutions, this book examines the political cultures of East Asia in order to help political theorists better appraise the distinctiveness of non?Western ideas of justice. Confirming the persistence of a strong social ethos, the contributions also demonstrate the long-lasting influence of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism in shaping East Asian public conceptions of justice.

Bringing much needed non-Western voices to the global justice debate, this book will appeal to students and scholars of politics, law and philosophy, as well as activists involved in the global justice movement.

Part 1

Critical reflections on parochialism and Western-centrism

1 Liberal internationalism, intervention, and moral imperialism¹

Kok-Chor Tan

Introduction

Some observers worry that liberal internationalism greases the path for military international intervention. These critics need not affirm the extreme position that no intervention is ever permissible. They can allow, for instance, that international intervention to counter a clear case of genocide is permissible if not even mandatory in some respect. Their worry is that liberal internationalism’s commitment to universal individual rights and freedom sets a standard for state legitimacy that many states in the world today fail to meet. Accordingly, liberal internationalism makes the just cause for intervention a condition that is very easy to meet. At least, so a critic might warn against.²

Liberal internationalism itself is a complex position that admits of variations within it. One extreme version can be called “liberal cosmopolitanism” which requires that all countries internally meet the basic liberal standards of rights and freedoms if they are to be in good standing in the international order. Liberal cosmopolitanism, thus, takes individuals in the world as such to be the basic unit of liberal justice regardless of their citizenship. States are legitimate or not depending on how successfully they meet the liberal rights and liberties of their own citizens.³ Another version that lies toward the other end of the liberal internationalist spectrum is what we can call “liberal statism.” Unlike liberal cosmopolitanism, liberal statism takes the fundamental liberal principles to apply among states rather than directly to individuals in the world at large. In this respect, states are the basic moral actors, and liberal principles regulate their conduct toward other states as well as the background international institutions against which they interact with each other. But even the statist version of liberal internationalism is committed to the protection of basic human rights and holds that state sovereignty is contingent on states providing for the conditions of the realization of basic rights, such as the right to security and subsistence (Shue 1990).

Thus, while liberal cosmopolitanism seems especially vulnerable to the charge of interventionalism, liberal internationalism as a general position faces this objection. For the purpose of this chapter, the internal contest between cosmopolitanism and statism need not detain us. Quite independently of the kind of moral political commitments that liberal cosmopolitanism or liberal statism affirms, the basic theme of this discussion is that there is a space between a state’s legitimacy, on the one side, and the permissibility of external actors to intervene in that state, on the other. That is, liberalism does not entail some form of liberal interventionism.

Before proceeding, I clarify that the aim of this chapter is not to provide a defense of military intervention. I take it for granted that there are conditions under which military intervention is permissible (and even obligatory in extreme cases). My aim is to assuage concerns that liberal internationalism (or liberal cosmopolitanism) is interventionistic. Military intervention is hardly the standard way by which values are to be promoted or even enforced internationally, and there are moral conditions on when going to war is permissible that apply independently of any particular theory of international justice. It is also worth noting that discussions on the moral conditions of permissible intervention do not show that interventions will be effectively carried out in all cases where they are permissible. Nor does the discussion of the ethics of intervention imply that the necessary global institutional arrangements or global power relations required for the consistent and impartial performance of intervention are already present. That these moral standards are at present poorly enforced, unevenly applied, or without institutional backup does not mean that there are no such standards.⁴

The limits of intervention⁵

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls asks if there are conditions under which military intervention to protect individuals against the tyranny of their own state is permitted. He writes, “Is there ever a time when forceful intervention might be called for?” (Rawls 1999, 94 n 6). Rawls’s own response is that if “the offenses against human rights are egregious and the society does not respond to the imposition of sanctions, such intervention in the defense of human rights would be acceptable and would be called for” (94, my italics).⁶ In such cases, a “people’s right to independence and self-determination is no shield from that condemnation, nor even from coercive intervention by other people in grave cases” (38, my italics). Thus it is not just human rights violations that will trigger the consideration for intervention. Only “egregious” or “grave” cases of violations provide a just cause for war. Moreover, the presence of a just cause (though necessary) is not a sufficient condition for a justified intervention/war for Rawls, as is the case for most just war theorists. Other conditions will have to be met, such as the lack of responsiveness to non-military measures (what is often loosely labeled the “last resort” condition), to note the additional requirement that Rawls himself identifies in the above quotation. But my main point for now is that, for a liberal internationalist like Rawls, violations of human rights as such do not present a just cause for intervention; only “egregious”, “grave” violations count as such a cause. Human rights violations are not as such triggers for intervention; only extreme cases of human rights violation provide a probable cause.

So, even on Rawls’s brand of liberal internationalism, where basic human rights set the standards of state legitimacy – in the sense that states that violate basic human rights are regarded as “outlaw states” and without good standing in the Society of Peoples – violations of basic rights per se do not raise the case for intervention or other military actions such as blockades (in the form of encompassing economic sanctions). A society that fails to protect basic human rights forfeits its status as a member in good standing in the Society of Peoples, but what the appropriate response is on the part of the international society is a separate matter. As Rawls puts it: “What to do on these questions is, however, essentially a matter of political judgment and depends upon a political assessment of the likely consequences of various policies” (93). The fact that a basic principle of international justice – that of not violating basic human rights – has been offended against by a state is no reason for taking a particular kind of enforcement action against that state. We have to evaluate the seriousness of the violation, the urgency of the situation, the available range of responses, and their respective potential consequences to determine the right and effective course of action, and here the exercise of good judgment is indispensable.

In sum, just because liberal internationalism regards the respect and protection of human rights as a minimum condition of legitimacy, it does not follow that any systemic violation of basic human rights by a state justifies outside intervention against it. While respect for human rights sets the benchmark for legitimacy, only egregious or grave violations of human rights count as a just cause for intervention. Failure of legitimacy does not mean permission to intervene. Furthermore, if limiting the just cause for military action to “grave” violations is not already stringent enough, other moral requirements must be met under most just war theories for the use of force to be fully justified. Some of the conditions commonly proposed include requirements such as last resort (as noted by Rawls), proportionality, and reasonable success. What is worth noting is that the common moral conditions for justified intervention and war do not derive specifically from liberal morality. Instead they derive from more general ethical theories and moral theories of war.⁷ As long as one accepts some notion of basic individual entitlement (on whatever philosophical grounding) to life, security of persons, bodily integrity, there can be convergence on some conception of just cause along the lines of Rawls. And the appropriateness of using military force to defend basic human rights from egregious violation (Have we met the proportionality requirement? Is this a reasonable last resort?) is assessed by reference to general moral ideas and just war theories, not the principles of liberal morality as such. A liberal internationalist is not any more interventionist than other conceptions of global morality that affirm some idea of the inviolability of persons and the moral necessity of war in extreme situations. Liberal internationalism, at least in the version offered by Rawls, does not open the floodgates to intervention but is in fact in line with common morality on this matter.⁸ To put the essential point in a different way, while liberal internationalism defines the standards of international justice and legitimacy, how these standards ought to be enforced is defined by more general just war theories. With regard to justice, liberals and nonliberals will definitively disagree; with regard to when it is morally acceptable to wage war to defend one’s ideal of justice, liberals and nonliberals need not disagree.

Now some may note that unlike the liberal internationalism of the sort Rawls advances, liberal cosmopolitanism is more demanding and therefore more prone to intervene. As noted, liberal cosmopolitanism defends a form of liberal internationalism that takes liberal principles to have global validity and application for all societies. But this worry is misplaced. As modest versions of liberal internationalism are subject to and limited by the general conditions of justified war (limiting conditions that are themselves not specifically liberal) in terms of how liberal values are to be protected and when intervention is permitted, so cosmopolitan versions of liberal internationalism are similarly morally constrained. A liberal cosmopolitan may have a more exacting requirement for state legitimacy, requiring that all states protect and respect certain individual liberal rights and freedoms. But this does not mean that any state that fails to reach this liberal standard of legitimacy is straightaway a fair target for intervention. The limiting conditions for going to war apply to the liberal cosmopolitan position as well. These are basic moral conditions that precede and are normatively prior to liberal cosmopolitan principles. Indeed, it will be hard to defend an intervention for the purpose of, say, defending the liberal freedom of expression. Leaving aside the fact that even liberal morality allows for different interpretation of the scope of this freedom, military intervention solely to protect such a liberal right will not by any stretch of the imagination meet the last resort and proportionality conditions for just military action. Liberal cosmopolitanism may be more critical of nonliberal societies than liberal statism, but it is not therefore more interventionistic.

But there is, however, a different kind of worry that liberal cosmopolitanism seems more vulnerable to than liberal statism. This is the concern that it might be morally interventionistic or, to put it in another way, more morally imperialistic. That is, its demands that states respect and protect the liberal rights of their own citizens can come across as an external moral imposition, indeed an imposition of a political morality that is typically associated with the West. This is a worry that should give liberal cosmopolitans some pause given the history of Western colonialism and imperialism. I will turn to this concern with moral imperialism next.

Moral imperialism

Liberal internationalism, especially its cosmopolitan version, has a universalistic moral stance. It affirms and promotes a rather substantial morality, a morality that is typically said to be Western or at least Western in origin, in a world order that is culturally pluralistic and diverse. Does this amount to a kind of “moral imperialism”? I will attempt to assuage these concerns with the following observations.⁹

First, liberal internationalism (including liberal cosmopolitanism) does not just attempt to impose a particular conception of justice globally, but it attempts to extend that conception based on moral reasons that it believes to have broad appeal and that all can potentially come to share. It is the case that liberal cosmopolitanism requires a critical stance and response toward nonliberal states and will advocate for a conception of global justice that declares in principle that nonliberal states are unjust. In this sense, it exerts significant institutional pressures on nonliberal states to reform. But moral criticism and urging reform by appeal to justice per se is not disrespectful if the critic is prepared to give reasons for her stance. To put it curtly, moral imperialism implies an unreasoned imposition of a moral position. Liberal internationalism does not simply impose but argues for its morality.

Thus, if what is objectionable about moral imperialism is that it involves the imposition of a particular moral view on others without giving them reasons they can potentially come to accept, cosmopolitanism is not objectionably imperialistic. What cosmopolitanism advocates is the more modest stance that it can be part of an acceptable liberal foreign policy to critically engage decent societies over matters of domestic political organization and to use measures like trade incentives to motivate reform. But critical engagement is a two-way street, and liberals have the responsibility to attend to and respond to arguments from the other side. Accordingly, liberals will occasionally have to revise their original evaluations if critical dialogue reveals that the critics have failed to properly appreciate the facts. More significantly, it means that liberals will have to continually work on their defense of individual equality, to come up with new and better arguments in light of new challenges and counterresponses. If moral imperialism is the smug imposition of a moral view on others without listening to what they have to say, cosmopolitanism need not be a form of moral imperialism.

Responsiveness to the counterarguments from the other side implies also that liberal states have to accept criticisms of their own particular domestic practices and either provide reasoned arguments for these or revise or eliminate these practices. The cosmopolitan ideal, even though it is a globalized account of liberal justice, does not presume that all liberal states are, in practice, fully just and beyond rebuke. Problems of racism, economic inequality, overexploitation of the environment are some examples of failings within many liberal states that are subject to both internal and external criticisms. And allowing for outside criticisms can sometimes help identify problems that internal critics for reasons of cultura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Critical reflections on parochialism and Western-centrism
• Part 2 Contextual appraisal
• Part 3 East Asian insights into global justice
• Index