Global Political Justice

Terry Macdonald, Miriam Ronzoni

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351565448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Scholarly debate on the subject of global justice has been overwhelmingly focused so far on the socio-economic aspects of justice. Much less attention has been given to those political aspects of global justice concerned with arrangements for public decision-making and the collective exercise and control of power. This gap is not adequately filled by literatures on global democracy, either, since these do not incorporate sufficient analysis of whether the democratic institutions that deliver political justice within states can achieve the same result when dealing with the very different forms of power and political agency that structure the domain of global politics.

This collection brings together scholars from across the disciplines of political theory, normative ethics, and International Relations to undertake a fresh examination of some fundamental theoretical questions about the nature and significance of global political justice. Contributors tackle several dimensions of this complex theoretical topic, exploring questions about: the relationship of global political justice to other normative standards like 'legitimacy', 'democracy', and 'socio-economic' justice; the nature of global 'public power' and the prospects for global political community; the justice and continued significance of traditional ordering principles of sovereignty and territoriality; and the relevance of standards of political justice (like political equality) to the regulation of international violence and principles of just war.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Introduction: the idea of global political justice

Terry Macdonald^a and Miriam Ronzoni^b

^aSchool of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia
^bCentre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’, University of Frankfurt, Germany

Introduction

The past 30 years have witnessed the flourishing of normative international political theory as a new field of research with its own agenda, debates, and methodological disputes. While there is increasing acceptance of the idea that global institutions require justification just as much as domestic ones, there is still wide disagreement about whether the specific normative standards for building and justifying institutions should be identical, or even roughly equivalent, in these two political domains. Developing a better understanding of what is distinctive about the problems raised by the global political order, and which conceptual and methodological approaches are best suited to address them, thus represents one of the most pressing challenges in this theoretical field.

Much discussion on these topics has been framed as debate about appropriate standards of ‘global justice’ – reflecting the wider dominance of the concept of ‘justice’ as a lens for normative political theorizing since Rawls. Moreover, the global justice literature has been overwhelmingly focused to date on questions about the distributive aspects of justice, such as: what is a just global distribution of the world’s resources? Is inequality as significant a normative problem globally as it is domestically? Less attention has been given to questions about how the global political order (through which the production and distribution of goods is institutionalized) is itself to be constituted – most fundamentally, how power and conflict are to be managed and institutionally channelled in securing the background conditions for particular social and economic relationships and distributions, and how cooperative arrangements for collective decision-making and action should be structured to facilitate this process. Given that practical dilemmas concerning the institutional management of power, conflict and political cooperation have played a central role in shaping both the history of international politics over the last century, and intellectual agendas of international relations scholarship during that period, it is perhaps surprising that they have not achieved comparable prominence in normative debates about global politics.

The aim of this collection is to take some steps towards remedying this neglect. Some aspects of these questions have been tackled already within literatures on global democracy, and this work has contributed a rich set of theoretical ideas that can help to direct the analyses developed in this collection. However, we believe that tackling these questions exclusively through the conceptual lens of democracy – beginning with some normative ideal of this, and asking how it can best be realized in the global domain – circumscribes too narrowly the range of normative questions about the global political order that are opened to critical scrutiny. It assumes from the outset too much of what we believe needs to be investigated – namely what range of institutional arrangements might be justifiable, and what methods of justification will be most appropriate, in the global context.

For our purposes here, we therefore adopt the more general concept of global justice as a starting point for our analysis, and we label the narrower bundle of political questions and challenges we wish to focus on as constituting the topic of global political justice. Whether and how democratic institutions should play a role in the realization of global political justice then remains an open question for our contributors to explore. We also note that the concept of ‘justice’ itself is not beyond critical interrogation, and we accordingly adopt the concept of global political justice more as a common point of departure from the focus on distributive issues than as a fixed analytical framework; as such, our contributors are invited to consider, where appropriate, whether the concept of ‘justice’ – as distinct from, say, ‘legitimacy’ – does in fact provide the most suitable lens for normative analysis of the institutional management of power, conflict and political cooperation within the global political order. Finally, the contours of the value of legitimacy itself are controversial – should we conceive of it as a weaker moral standard than justice, or as a value with its own distinct normative content? Our contributors were invited to address this conceptual issue, as well.

In applying the label of global political justice to our topic, we mean to contrast ‘political’ justice mainly with ‘distributive’ justice, but we recognize that the line separating these categories is far from clear. Since our primary aim in this collection is to make progress in thinking about substantive problems of global political justice – that is, questions about the justice of specific political practices and institutions, and the normative standards by which they are regulated – we must provide at least a preliminary account (a working agenda, as it were) of which practices, institutions, and normative standards we regard as characteristically political. In this introduction, we attempt to demarcate more precisely what we take to be political about global political justice, and to clarify the relationship between our topic and a set of related methodological and normative debates (on global ‘democracy’, political ‘realism’, and ‘non-ideal theory’), which in different ways draw political problems about power, conflict and cooperation into theoretical analysis of global justice. In the course of doing so, we also hope to highlight some reasons for viewing the topic of global political justice as one of great significance, and deserving of greater attention than it has so far received.

Why do we need a more political theory of global justice?

At first glance it might seem puzzling for us to suggest that the global justice literature is not now sufficiently ‘political’ in focus, given that recent debates on global distributive justice have mushroomed to a large extent as a response to the observation that we are now in what can be called the global ‘circumstances of politics’ (Bohman 2004, Laborde 2010). As Cécile Laborde (2010, p. 50) characterizes these political circumstances, they involve ‘complex new forms of unchecked arbitrary power exercised across national borders: more and more people are vulnerable to decisions made from afar, anonymously, and over which they have little control’. Much literature on global distributive justice recognizes that distributive duties across borders arise largely because global inequality is produced through institutionalized forms of power that are problematic and therefore call for justification. In other words, the fact that global justice has become such a prominent topic of investigation to begin with reflects a widespread acceptance of some underlying assumptions about the political character of the existing global order.

The claim that the current global order constitutes a political sphere in the relevant sense is closely associated with (one or both of) two more specific observations. On the one hand, the kinds of social conflicts typically in need of institutional ‘taming’, and the kinds of shared social problems typically solved through collective political decision-making institutions, now occur beyond sovereign territorial boundaries; consequently, we confront the problem of how to overcome these social conflicts and challenges through the development of new political institutions at the transnational and at the global level. On the other hand, many problematic forms of power are already being exercised at those levels. As in domestic contexts, these forms of power, from a normative perspective, call for justification and control, so as to make them capable of gaining widespread acceptability among those subject to and called upon to support them (linked to what some call ‘legitimacy’) and/or capable of achieving fuller moral justifiability (what many call ‘justice’).

Such claims about the political character of the global order have become very prominent in recent debates about global justice because of the implications they may have for our thinking about the scope and content of duties of distributive justice across borders. But these claims raise another important question that has so far received less theoretical attention: to the extent that we agree we are in the ‘global circumstances of politics’ and confront a global political order in need of justification, why do we not investigate the normative credentials of this underlying political order directly (rather than merely making assumptions or assertions about these matters as a preamble to normative theorizing about our duties of global socio-economic justice)? We believe that we should do so: there is a need to investigate more directly and systematically which features of the global order call for distinctively political forms of normative critique and institutional response, and to consider what should follow from this for our practical attitudes and decision-making in relation to these.

To some readers it may not yet be entirely clear how we take these questions of global political justice to be problematically sidelined from mainstream distributive theories of global justice. After all, this body of work has deep roots in a theoretical literature on justice originating with Rawls, who himself claimed his account of justice to be fundamentally political in a certain sense. So it may help for us to explain further how the theory of political justice we are concerned with here is distinct from the political theory of justice for which Rawls is so well known. Much has been written about the sense in which Rawls’s theory of justice can best be understood as political in character – by Rawls himself in his Political Liberalism (1996), and by two decades of subsequent commentators. We cannot attempt to survey or add substantially to this vast literature here; instead we want to highlight one quite general feature of Rawls’s political theory of justice which helps to illuminate the distinction between the kinds of political problems central to Rawls’s analysis, on the one hand, and the kinds of political problems we wish to bundle under the heading of political justice, on the other.

At a very general level, we can say that Rawls’s theory of justice is political in the sense that it takes a particular kind of political society, or political order (in the case of his Political Liberalism, a democratic society operating within the institutional framework of a liberal state) as the starting point for the theoretical enterprise. The liberal-democratic political order provides a starting-point for Rawls’s theory in two fundamental senses. First, the liberal-democratic political order is assumed as a background condition in identifying the practical political problems that the theory of justice is tasked with solving: the fundamental institutions constitutive of the liberal-democratic political order are called the ‘basic structure of society’, and the practical focus is placed on the problem of how socio-economic burdens and benefits should be distributed within and through this institutional structure. Second, the liberal-democratic political order, and the fundamental political values that underpin it (the ‘public political culture’, in Rawls’s terms), are taken as building blocks for the method of normative justification itself that identifies and validates a particular conception of justice (as the ideals of public reason and overlapping consensus, and more generally the idea of a ‘political, not metaphysical’ conception of justice, suggest).

A significant consequence of this kind of approach to the theory of justice is that the fundamental constitutive features of the political order itself – the set of practices and processes that constitute its basic institutions and social fabric, and the relationships of power that sustain them – is placed beyond the critical jurisdiction of the theory. For if the basic institutional and social features of the political order are to serve as firm foundations for the theory of distributive justice (as part of the ‘public political culture’ of liberal-democratic states which constitutes Rawls’s methodological starting point in Political Liberalism), then they must be taken in some sense as fixed, and not themselves presented as primary targets for critical normative interrogation in the theory. As a result, proceeding with a theory of justice that is political in the Rawlsian sense (a theory of justice that is ‘political’ as distinct from ‘metaphysical’, as Rawls puts it) turns out to discourage systematic theorizing about justice that is political in the different sense of investigating the justice or injustice of an underlying political order – its constitutive institutions, and underlying social norms and relationships of power.

It is this latter kind of political theory of justice – theory that investigates the justice or injustice of an underlying political order, rather than the distributive patterns within it – that we are here calling theorizing about of political justice. This kind of theory is not (necessarily or only) political in its theoretical foundations (though it might be that too), but rather is political in the practical target of its normative investigation – that is, in the nature of the subject it is aiming to regulate with its substantive normative principles of justice.

At the present time, questions about political justice, understood in these terms, arise with greater urgency at the level of global politics than in domestic contexts – for the simple reason that the fundamental constitutive features of the political order are much less stable and more deeply contested in the global case. In the case of domestic theories of justice focused on the problem of how to distribute social burdens and benefits among citizens of a settled liberal-democratic political order, members of this group generally accept the overarching liberal-democratic political order as legitimate or justified, and this acceptance is relatively stable. At the very least, this stable political acceptance of the political order ensures that a theory of justice taking elements of this order as foundational axioms will have a certain pragmatic value in facilitating a workable political consensus on normative principles to regulate the common political life of this group of citizens. In the global case, however, there is not a political order in place with a comparable level of political stability and wide acceptance among participants, which could be invoked in an equivalent fashion to provide foundations for an analogously political theory of global justice.

Disanalogies between domestic and global political orders arise at three levels in particular. First, normative inquiry and justification cannot begin in the global case with the assumption of consensus about the boundaries or definitive features of the political community or demos – as Rawls begins with the assumption of a settled ‘closed society’ in his domestically-focused Theory of Justice (1999) – since the criteria for delineating political communities of different kinds, and according them special forms of political recognition and normative status, is itself a matter of significant controversy. Second, we cannot begin in the global case with an assumption of consensus about the appropriate political subject of principles of justice (as Rawls begins in his Theory of Justice with the stipulation of the ‘basic structure of society’ as subject) since there is very little clarity as to what range of institutional forms should count as part of this structure in the global case, in the absence of both: 1) a strong and stable world state, or constitutional equivalent that could supply a firm institutional core; and 2) a clear account of which forms of transnational power should be bound by institutional regulation to begin with. Third, we cannot even begin with the assumption of a shared commitment to the liberal-democratic norms of individual liberty and equality (as Rawls does in his Political Liberalism), because these basic political values do not attract anything close to the same degree of endorsement on a global scale as they do within stable liberal-democratic states, and – more fundamentally – because it is not yet clear that democratic institutionalization is what the global order requires (this is one substantive question that a theory of global political justice should investigate).

An important implication of this is that a theory of justice focused on the global domain cannot take a settled underlying political order for granted – as a political foundation for the theory – to the same extent as this seems to be appropriate in many domestic contexts. This means that questions about the structure of the underlying political order must themselves be subject to direct normative scrutiny, as a starting point for a theory of global justice. As part of this, the theory of global political justice needs to confront questions about the implications of disagreement on these fundamental matters – that is, about the just scope and character of political community, the just structure of fundamental political institutions, and the justification of fundamental political values. Disagreement on these matters is likely to have particular significance for normative thinking about the justification of global arrangements for practical decision-making about the control and channelling of power, and the management of collective decision-making processes, since conventional normative and institutional solutions to these problems (such as various democratic models) sometimes presuppose agreement on, or at least stable solutions to, these matters as a starting-point for their justification and design, and it is not altogether clear how these should fare where such agreement or stability has not been established.

The claim that political questions of this kind should be at the forefront of debates about global justice can be augmented by considering how central such questions have been to the real-world political dilemmas, conflicts, and projects that have shaped international history over the last century, and to the themes central to the work of the empirical scholars of international relations who study this political domain. The normative ideas that have driven both institution-building projects in international political practice, and intellectual agendas in international relations scholarship, have been most centrally preoccupied with the political problems of achieving international order and cooperation in the face of significant moral disagreement, conflicts of material interests, and the abuse of political power (particularly in relations among states, but also increasingly in the decision-making structures and activities of powerful international organizations and non-state actors). It is this shared set of political preoccupations that unifies otherwise divergent ‘Realist’ literatures on the stabilizing and disciplining effects of an international ‘balance of power’, ‘Liberal Internationalist’ literatures on the conditions for international cooperation and the rational design of institutions, and ‘Constructivist’ and ‘English School’ literatures focused on understanding the sociological and historical processes through which particular international orders are created, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: the idea of global political justice
• 2. Global actors and public power
• 3. Global public power: the subject of principles of global political legitimacy
• 4. Two conceptions of state sovereignty and their implications for global institutional design
• 5. Assessing the global order: justice, legitimacy, or political justice?
• 6. Creating cosmopolitans
• 7. The injustice of territoriality
• 8. Cosmopolitan justice and the league of democracies
• 9. On the concept of climate debt: its moral and political value
• Index