Ethics, Justice and International Relations

Peter Sutch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134571581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This topical and timely book critically explores contemporary liberal international relations theory. In the fifty years since the declaration of human rights, the language of international relations has come to incorporate the language of justice and injustice. The book argues that if justice is to become the governing principle of international politics, then liberals must recognise that their political preferences cannot be the preconditions of global ethics. The hierarchy of international political ethics must be constructed afresh so that the first principles of justice are accessible to all agents as political and ethical equals.
This book will be essential reading for students and scholars in politics, international relations, political theory and ethics.

1 Setting the scene

International relations as political theory

If one were to sketch a history of the development of international politics one might date its codified beginning at 1648, the beginning of its crisis in 1914 and chart its demise over the fifty years that followed 1945. There would, of course, be debate over the precise dating of the most important events but nevertheless this sketch would not be thought of as particularly controversial.¹ While any empirical claim that we now live in a post-international world is untenable, the philosophical and political claims that we should accept post-internationalism as the way forward or that we have developed (or are developing) a transnational politics are both respectable and commonplace. In fifty years there has been a radical move away from an international system that took over three hundred years to develop.²

The recent history of what Held terms the United Nations system has begun, and has proceeded with remarkable rapidity, to erode some of the central features of an international system that takes the territorial nation-state as the dominant unit of analysis in international politics. Globalisation is the watch-word of contemporary empirical and theoretical analysis that argues forcefully that political practice is leaving the Westphalian order behind.

Information, pollution, migrants, arms, ideas, images, news, crime, narcotics, disease, amongst other things, readily and frequently flow across national boundaries. In addition, global transport and communications infrastructures, from airlines to the internet, facilitate the emergence of global and transnational networks linking peoples and organisations in different parts of the world.³

Increasingly the problems facing the international system transcend or cut through national boundaries leaving political units whose sole concern is sovereign autonomy unable to deal with the most pressing problems. The myriad of accounts of the political consequences of globalisation offer a variety of opinions on the theme of change and disjuncture which are all empirically straightforward and rarely contested. One particularly prominent theme in both the empirical analysis of globalisation and the philosophical and theoretical treatment of international relations theory is interconnectedness. The exploration of this theme, an idea with a great deal of observable weight behind it but also a huge and contested literature concerning its consequences for international politics, must form an important part of any examination of the construction of an international community

Without delving too deeply into the complexities of the arguments surrounding globalisation, arguments tangential to the aims of this book, it is important to distinguish between the relatively uncontested facts of international politics and the much contested treatment of these facts. Held and McGrew each develop five points about current trends in international politics. Held focuses on five major disjunctures in international theory that are at the centre of conceptual and political disputes. He focuses on:

1 The increasing force and scope of international law, focusing particularly on the increased acceptance of human rights as a universal boundary upon state action and upon the recent surge of transnational environmental legislation.

2 The internationalisation of political decision making, focusing on the upsurge in international governmental organisations (such as the UN, EU, IMF, the World Bank and UNESCO) and international non-governmental organisations (the Red Cross, Amnesty, Greenpeace etc.).

3 The proliferation of military power that means a) that military action is more often a global problem rather than a state's private decision and b) that the hegemony of the superpowers is necessarily eroded and dispersed into IGOs such as NATO and WTO.

4 Cultural globalisation and the fact that the state no longer has the monopoly on culture production. Media proliferation and transnational communications infrastructures combined with increased migration has dissolved the notion of the homogenous ethnic and cultural ‘Nation’.

5 The globalisation of the world economy. The globalisation of production and international finance has developed a transnational market that no single nation-state can advantageously or successfully control.⁴

These empirical observations are rarely disputed and translate into McGrew's more generalised ‘distinctive attributes’ of the contemporary international system that can be summed up as increased and established interconnectedness.⁵ None of the above is particularly controversial and even the ensuing claims concerning the decline or development of the concept and practice of state sovereignty such as Held's comment that:

[a]ny conception of sovereignty which interprets it as an illimitable and indivisible form of public power – entrenched securely in individual nation-states – is undermined. Sovereignty itself has to be conceived today as already divided among a number of agencies – national, regional and international – and limited by the very nature of this plurality.⁶

are rarely disputed. It is clear that contemporary international politics has moved away from the idea that whatever a state might do in international politics is perfectly legitimate.

If this introductory sketch of prevailing conditions in international politics is uncontroversial it is unique in attaining this status. For at this point academics and practitioners begin to disagree fervently on some empirical questions concerning how the international system has changed but more often on the normative and theoretical questions about how we should account for and respond to such changes. Even the terminology becomes disputed. Is, for example, the term ‘globalisation’ loaded? Does it not obscure a priori cosmopolitan principles, principles that are themselves philosophically contestable? As Williams notes:

To what extent does globalisation erode sovereignty? Or is the endlessly shifting concept of sovereignty reconstituted and reformulated in a manner likely to maintain its centrality in international relations? … The death of the state has often been reported in international relations. Globalisation is the latest in a long line of assassins.⁷

Rather than talk of globalisation some theorists (mainly realists and communitarians) prefer to talk of interdependence, a conception of interconnectedness that is more reticent about (and in some cases openly hostile to) the idea that the state is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the practice and norms of international relations. Again Williams, in ‘Rethinking Sovereignty’, draws out the central aspects of the dispute.

One way of thinking about this difference is to define interdependence as interconnectedness which erodes the effectiveness of national policy and threatened national autonomy. … A key feature of globalisation as already outlined is interconnectedness, not unlike interdependence, which stresses mutuality, globalisation also refers to the possibility of dependence. Crucially, the conceptualisation of globalisation refers to the reordering of time and space. Interdependence theorists have focused on the internationalisation of international relations whereas writers within the paradigm of globalisation argue for a more global society.⁸

This division of concerns in international relations theory features in most of the debates and finds its most useful expression, I will suggest, within the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate in normative international theory. What is at stake here is not simply the empirical data concerning how individuals and associations are interconnected but the normative pressure such data can legitimately exert upon the authority of the arguments and practices surrounding sovereignty and human rights. Put simply the most pressing questions facing us today focus upon whether a realist or communitarian (state-oriented) international politics or a more universalist or cosmopolitan (perhaps human rights-oriented) international politics is best suited to the contemporary situation.

Despite the controversies surrounding the concept one thing is clear, interconnectedness is a theme that requires examination. All sides of the debate surrounding interconnectedness stress the dangers and possibilities of the development of this social phenomenon. The potential globalisation of a liberal order is often contrasted with the unevenness of globalisation that promises integration but threatens fragmentation. The basic ethical principles of the dominant liberalcosmopolitan position are not universally shared, particularly outside of the more powerful, economically developed western states. Yet as McGrew notes ‘political and economic elites in the world's major metropolitan areas are much more tightly integrated into and have much greater control over global networks’.⁹ This well-charted political phenomenon combined (importantly in the view of this work) with the philosophical crisis in liberal foundationalism threatens the optimism of many commentators. The questions facing liberal scholars and practitioners who believe that the prevailing international political climate offers the requisite conditions for the removal of ‘power theory’ from the centre of international political analysis and its replacement with universally justifiable normative argument are manifold. A new-found awareness of the particularity of ‘our’ ethico-political position combined with the historical dominance of that position in world politics obliges us to consider carefully what is necessary to the development of a just international community. The central, if general, question of current attempts to understand the implications of the last fifty years of international history is simply ‘given that the international system has developed leaving agents and agencies interconnected in ways unimagined by the Westphalian system of international politics what rights and duties have we incurred and how must we rethink international politics in order to enact them?’

Understanding interconnectedness

Given the centrality of interconnectedness it is necessary to find a way to conceptualise and analyse the impact of this concept on international relations theory. There are a number of competing accounts of the debate surrounding interconnectedness and a wide variety of positions within these accounts. However, it is clear that the debates surrounding the changing shape of world politics go far beyond the empirical.

All four of the principal thinkers examined in the following chapters accept that interconnectedness is a feature of a changing international political scene. Walzer argues that interconnectedness leads to the (transient) instantiation of universal rights to life and liberty;¹⁰ Frost believes that interconnectedness is leading to the transposition of the norms of sovereignty a...