Cosmopolitan Global Politics 0754638243, 0754640264, 0754642763, 2004018319, 9780754642763, 9781138273498

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COSMOPOLITAN GLOBAL POLITICS

Ethics and Global Politics Series Editors: Tom Lansford and Patrick Hayden Since the end of the Cold War, explorations of ethical considerations within global politics and on the development of foreign policy have assumed a growing importance in the fields of politics and international studies. New theories, policies, institutions, and actors are called for to address difficult normative questions arising from the conduct of international affairs in a rapidly changing world. This series provides an exciting new forum for creative research that engages both the theory and practice of contemporary world politics, in light of the challenges and dilemmas of the evolving international order. Also in the series International Environmental Justice A North-South Dimension Ruchi Anand ISBN 0 7546 3824 3 Understanding Human Rights Violations New Systematic Studies Edited by Sabine C. Carey and Steven C. Poe ISBN 0 7546 4026 4

Cosmopolitan Global Politics

PATRICK HAYDEN Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2005 Patrick Hayden Patrick Hayden has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hayden, Patrick Cosmopolitan global politics. - (Ethics and global politics) 1.Internationalism 2.Cosmopolitanism 3.Globalization Political aspects 4.World citizenship 5.World politics 21st century I.Title 327.1'7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hayden, Patrick, 1965Cosmopolitan global politics / by Patrick Hayden. p. cm. -- (Ethics and global politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-4276-3 1. Cosmopolitanism. 2. Internationalism. 3. Human rights. 4. International relations--Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Globalization. 6. World citizenship. 7. Environmental protection. I. Title. II. Series. JZ1308.H39 2004 172'.4--dc22 2004018319 ISBN 9780754642763 (hbk) ISBN 9781138273498 (pbk)

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Contents List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction

vi vii 1

1

The Meaning of Cosmopolitanism: Themes and Variations

11

2

Human Rights and the Foundation of Cosmopolitan Global Politics 37

3

War, Peace, and the Transformation of Security

67

4

Cosmopolitan Justice and Accountability for Crimes Against Humanity

95

5

The Environment, Global Justice and World Environment Citizenship

121

Conclusion

153

Bibliography Index

157 171

List of Tables 2.1

Change in the Global Human Rights Regime, 1945–2000

55

3.1

Comparison of Traditional and Human Security

73

Acknowledgements I am indebted to a number of friends and colleagues who have stimulated and encouraged various aspects of this project over the past several years. In particular I wish to thank Mark Evans, Bryan Hilliard, Tony Lang, Tom Lansford, Darrel Moellendorf, Chamsy el-Ojeili and Paul Voice. I also want to express my appreciation to Victoria University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for providing me with a Faculty Research Grant so that I might see this project to fruition. Additionally, I wish to thank my colleagues, especially Pat Moloney and Kate McMillan, at the Political Science and International Relations Programme at Victoria University for their scholarly support. Kirstin Howgate, my editor at Ashgate, has been, as always, helpful and supportive. Finally, I want to express my deep love and gratitude to my wife, Katherine, and my daughter, Zoë, who in their own ways have inspired hope for a better future.

For Katherine and Zoë, with love and hope

Introduction In the globalized world in which we live, events in one corner of the planet can have an immense effect upon the fortunes of others far away and not at all involved in those events …. This state of affairs should remind us that as we affect the fate of one another, we also have a common responsibility in the world …. Together, we all live in a global neighborhood and … we need a globalization of responsibility as well. Above all, that is the challenge of the next century. – Nelson Mandela (2000: 34–5) But if the self-understanding of governments only changes under the pressure of an altered domestic climate, then the crucial question is whether, in the civil societies and political public spheres of increasingly interconnected regimes … a cosmopolitan consciousness—the consciousness of compulsory cosmopolitan solidarity, so to speak—will arise. – Jürgen Habermas (2001: 112)

Two conceptual approaches to international relations and global politics have dominated political thought in the modern era. One, which has been especially dominant in both academic thinking and policy-making is the school of political realism or realpolitik. For this approach domestic and international politics is nothing more than a struggle for power and the enhancement of a state’s status relative to other states. The second, more principled approach is that of liberalism. For liberalism international relations involve not simply the capacity of states to act, but more particularly the capacity of states to act in accordance with a commitment to values such as freedom, equality, justice, progress, democracy and peace among states. This second conception was central to the construction of international politics during the twentieth century, having a strong influence on the formation of international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, the proliferation of international law and the expansion of the free market system. Yet in contrast to the state-centric approaches of realism and liberalism the final decade of the twentieth century saw political theory take a strong cosmopolitan turn. Increasingly arguments have been advanced that global politics should be seen in terms of universal principles that challenge the presumed moral supremacy of

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territorial boundaries and which favour instead the welfare of humanity generally. According to cosmopolitanism global politics should focus first on the interests or welfare of persons wherever they may reside rather than on the interests of states as such. The aim of this book is to examine the emerging contours of the cosmopolitan approach to global politics and the consequent implications of this approach for the manner in which questions to do with the humanitarian possibilities of global politics are normally approached and understood within contemporary international political theory.1 My discussion focuses particularly on cosmopolitanism, not only because of the mounting interest it has drawn, but also because the elaboration of this conceptual approach allows us—in ways that the two more prominent traditions of realism and liberalism do not—to reconsider the basis of global politics from an inclusive, humanitarian perspective better suited to the processes of radical change sweeping through our increasingly globalized world. The final decade of the twentieth century was a time of significant change in world politics. While the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communistbloc states of Eastern Europe signalled the end of Cold War ‘great power’ rivalries, the 1990s also witnessed the horrors of genocide left unchecked; the virulence of ethnonationalist extremism spawning ‘ethnic cleansing’; the dramatic rise in the number of individuals and groups caught in the flows of refugees and internally displaced persons; the continued degradation of the planetary environment; the social devastation wrought by the continued escalation of the AIDS pandemic, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; and the ever-widening gulf between the wealthy and the poor, the latter constituting an expanding majority of the world’s population. The start of the twentyfirst century brought fresh tragedies on a human scale with the world now seemingly convulsed by a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a global ‘war on terrorism’ in the aftermath of the shocking events of 11 September 2001. Since 11 September media headlines, academic debate and international affairs have been dominated by issues of terrorism, the global ‘war on terror’ and the US-led invasion of Iraq, the latter undertaken in order to depose an unpredictable and dangerous regime ostensibly on the brink of employing weapons of mass destruction for terroristic purposes. These are indeed very important issues that raise difficult questions, especially concerning the justifiable use of force and the protection of innocent persons from grave threats to their security and well-being. But what is involved in questions about both the proper resort to force and the protection of the rights and lives of persons anywhere is a deeper matter concerning what the values and norms of global politics and international political morality ought to be. In many ways then it is only right that world attention has been captured by the terrible spectacle of global terrorism as a threat to humanity. Yet this virtually exclusive focus on terrorism and the ‘war’ against it has come at a high cost, namely that we are in danger of losing sight of the very thing which we would like to protect from harm: humanity itself. The recent

Introduction

3

single-minded fixation on combating terrorism has constricted our moral and political horizons, and fostered fear, pessimism and a seemingly desperate return to the world of political realism. Despite the fragile nature of global politics however, the current state of affairs is neither necessary nor inevitable, and it fails to exhaust existing and emerging opportunities for the formation of robust, humanitarian political aspirations and practices. In an effort to make sense of how to respond to many of the dramatic changes that will continue to affect global politics in the twenty-first century, and to chart the paths that it ought to take, alternative analytical and normative concepts must be devised and employed. In this book, I will be advancing the ideal of cosmopolitanism as the most compelling candidate for reconceiving global politics and challenging conventional wisdom in a world that increasingly knows no boundaries. To anticipate the discussion developed in Chapter 1, cosmopolitanism refers to the view that all human beings have equal moral standing within a single world community. More specifically we can distinguish two strands of cosmopolitanism: moral cosmopolitanism and legal (or institutional) cosmopolitanism. Moral cosmopolitanism holds that all persons stand in certain moral relations with one another by virtue of the fact that they are all members of a universal community. All persons possess equal moral worth deserving of our respect, and certain obligations of justice with regard to other persons place constraints on our conduct. Legal cosmopolitanism contends that a global political order ought to be constructed, grounded on the equal legal rights and duties of all individuals. The emphasis here is on creating or transforming institutional schemes so as to provide concrete procedural and organizational mechanisms dedicated to securing and protecting the human rights of all persons. Despite the basic distinction drawn here, moral and legal cosmopolitanism share a commitment to at least three fundamental tenets: (1) individualism, in that individual human beings are the ultimate units of concern; (2) universality, in that all human beings possess equal moral status; and (3) generality, in that persons are subjects of concern for everyone, that is, human status has global scope.2 Consequently moral and legal cosmopolitanism are compatible and may be combined in mutually complementary fashion so as to give weight to the ideal of ‘world citizenship’.3 Based on this multidimensional description I suggest that we can best understand cosmopolitanism as both an ethical and a political project. As an ethical project it seeks to establish the extent and content of, and justification for moral obligations concerning the well-being of every individual person. As a political project it is intimately connected with debates about the appropriate form of political community, schemes for legal institutions and procedures, and practices of humanitarian assistance on a global scale. The chapters in this book seek not only to offer some arguments in support of the cosmopolitan ethicopolitical project but also to

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demonstrate some ways that this project is already taking shape in the norms and practices of contemporary global politics. The concept of cosmopolitanism has traditionally been used to contest social and political values, beliefs and practices that privilege moral partiality, national interests and the division of the world into seemingly autonomous state units, and for this reason it has tended to be aspirational— or in the eyes of critics, ‘utopian’—given the historical dominance of political realism and other varieties of statism. However as the world has become more interconnected and interdependent some scholars have extended the concept beyond its aspirational status and posited the existence of an ‘incipient global polity’ (Scholte 2004: 212).4 This global polity is not to be confused with a world state or government, but it does suggest the emergence of a realm of organized social and political life in which governance is becoming a transnational phenomenon effectively spreading across borders and being transmitted through various actors at levels from the local to the global. For this reason it may be argued that cosmopolitanism has shifted from being merely desirable to being plausible. In this new global context the first principles provided by cosmopolitan theorists can help us to think about how to collectively formulate and implement policies and norms that are attuned to new forms of responsibility to the global public interest. Furthermore the globalization of political life associated with the emerging global polity moves beyond the sense of greater connectedness between state-based actors identified with liberal (or neoliberal) institutionalism, and embraces the growing engagement with and influence of suprastate, substate and nonstate actors. This engagement and influence has transformed traditional understandings of international relations away from exclusivist state-centrism towards a more inclusive conception of the world as an interconnected whole. Consequently these shifts in thinking about the global nature of contemporary social and political life require a move away from conceiving the terrain of contemporary political experience in terms of international politics in favour of global politics (McGrew 1992). David Held expresses the position of global politics thus: The idea of global politics calls into question the traditional demarcations between the domestic and the foreign, and between the territorial and the nonterritorial, found in modern conceptions of ‘the political’…. Global problems highlight the richness and complexity of the interconnections which now transcend states and societies in the global order. Moreover, global politics is anchored today not just in traditional geopolitical concerns—trade, power, security—but in a large diversity of social and ecological questions…. In many parts of the world the notion of global politics corresponds much more closely to the character of politics than do obsolete images of politics as simply state and interstate relations. There are now multiple spheres of politics and authority…. At the core of these developments is the reconfiguration of political power. While many states retain the ultimate legal claim to effective supremacy over

Introduction

5

what occurs within their own territories, this should be juxtaposed with, and understood in relation to, the expanding jurisdiction of institutions of global and regional governance and the constraints of, as well as the obligations derived from, new and changing forms of international regulation (Held 2004: 365–7).

Contributing to the emergence of the nascent global polity and thus, I suggest, to the increasing relevance of cosmopolitanism are three important constitutive factors or conditions: globalization, global governance and global civil society. The literature on globalization is vast and focuses both on globalization as a general phenomenon and on specific aspects of globalization. David Held defines globalization as the ‘stretching and deepening of social relations and institutions across space and time such, that on the one hand, day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by events happening on the other side of the globe and, on the other, the practices and decisions of local groups or communities can have significant global reverberations’ (Held 1995: 20). This definition implies that there are two related phenomena taking place, the first being that ‘many chains of political, economic and social activity are becoming world-wide in scope’ and the second being that ‘there has been an intensification of levels of interaction and interconnectedness within and between states and societies’ (Held 1995: 21). For Ulrich Beck globalization ‘denotes the processes through which sovereign national actors are criss-crossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects for power, orientations, identities, and networks’ (Beck 2000: 11). Held’s and Beck’s definitions of globalization thus point to both an intensification of cross-border interactions and a growing interdependence between national and transnational actors through a ‘deterritorialization’ whereby social spaces, distances and borders lose some of their previously overriding influence as political, cultural, social and economic relations become more global over time (Scholte 2001: 14–15). Accompanying these changes, of course, have been other notable aspects of globalization such as the integration of markets through trade, investment and information flows, the rapid spread of technologies such as the Internet, mobile telephone systems and satellite communications which allow people on different sides of the globe to communicate instantaneously, and the escalation of environmental issues which respect no borders such as depletion of the ozone layer, transboundary pollution and global warming. In short globalization denotes ‘the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of social interaction’ particularly across the key domains of the economic, the environmental and the political (Held and McGrew 2002: 1). Globalization entails not only the intensification of interactions and interconnections that have led to the ‘shrinking’ of our world, but also the emergence of a system of global governance that seeks to regulate and

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manage various areas of transnational activity. A detailed description of global governance is offered by the Commission on Global Governance: Governance is the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest…. At the global level, governance has been viewed primarily as intergovernmental relationships, but it must now be understood as also involving nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), citizens’ movements, multinational corporations, and the global capital market. Interacting with these are global mass media of dramatically enlarged influence…. The enormous growth in people’s concern for human rights, equity, democracy, meeting basic material needs, environmental protection, and demilitarization has today produced a multitude of new actors who can contribute to governance (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 2–3).

This description involves a number of important claims, in particular that the movement towards global governance initiated by the creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions (International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or World Bank) at the close of the Second World War has gradually become less statecentric as the capacity of states to effectively govern the range of issues that extend beyond yet intersect their territorial boundaries has declined. In addition a host of nonstate actors including nongovernmental organizations, activist groups, the mass media and economic institutions have become increasingly influential in traditional political forums, and have also helped to shape global decision-making and policies through transnationallynetworked forms of organization that operate outside of and supplement formal state and interstate functions and settings. This is not to suggest that the state is disappearing or becoming irrelevant, but that it is now enmeshed within horizontal and vertical networks of multiple suprastate, substate and nonstate actors whose roles and contributions to global governance can no longer be confined or limited to the boundaries and dictates of the nationstate. Consequently global governance refers to a more inclusive, noncoercive process of regulation resulting from the disaggregation of governmental and intergovernmental powers and functions onto nonstate sectors for the purpose of devising and implementing global norms, principles, rules and institutions (Slaughter 1997, 2004). In the process of more inclusive forms of governance spreading across the globe, John Gerard Ruggie points out that ‘a global public domain is emerging, which cannot substitute for effective action by states but may help produce it’ (Ruggie 2003: 95). This global public domain is commonly referred to as ‘global civil society’ and is widely regarded as playing a central role in fostering global governance. Civil society can be defined as

Introduction

7

‘the realm of interaction, institutions, and solidarity that sustains the public life of societies outside the worlds of economy and state’(Alexander 1993: 797). More specifically it is ‘the realm of organized social life that is voluntary, self-generating, (largely) self-supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules’ in which individuals act collectively and publicly ‘to express their interests, passions, and ideas, exchange information, achieve mutual goals, make demands on the state, and hold state officials accountable’ (Diamond 1996: 228). Civil society thus indicates a realm of cooperative public engagement and social relations that involves individuals acting collectively yet who are separate or autonomous from the state. In the context of globalization civil society has assumed a significant global dimension on the basis of transnational networks of nonstate actors, especially NGOs such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam International and Doctors Without Borders whose memberships, common purpose and organizational activities have spread across national borders. Global civil society has served not only as a source of governance per se, but more importantly as a force for good global governance through dissemination of information, formation of open forums for dialogue and debate, and advocacy of greater democracy, transparency and accountability in governmental and multilateral institutions.5 In this way global civil society or global public spheres can help to prevent the powerful from ‘owning’ power privately. Global publics imply greater parity. They suggest that there are alternatives. They inch our little blue and white planet towards greater openness and humility, potentially to the point where power, whenever and wherever it is exercised across borders, is made to feel more ‘biodegradable’, a bit more responsive to those whose lives it shapes and reshapes, secures or wrecks (Keane 2003: 174).

The convergence of globalization, global governance and global civil society thus constitutes an incipient global polity within which the idea of world or global citizenship has been put into play. World citizens act as concerned individuals and members of global civil society by among other things, becoming informed about the tendencies of globalization and helping to steer global governance in desirable directions. World citizens exhibit a consciousness that global goals can be promoted and that globalization and global governance are susceptible to change through the cooperative efforts of transnational networks and coalitions. Thus world citizenship conveys the development of a cosmopolitan public sphere consisting of transworld solidarities and ‘the building of transnational networks that are based upon a global consciousness, the idea that there is a wider world over and above separate states and national societies, and that individuals and groups, no matter where they are, share certain interests and concerns in that wider world’ (Iriye 2002: 8). Within this emergent ‘global

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community’ world citizenship serves as the expression of cosmopolitan ideals being put into practice through multiple levels of governance that constitute globalization not only from above but also from below, thereby ‘building a stronger feeling of identity with the sufferings and aspirings of peoples, a wider “we”, as well as a series of narrower identities arising from the interplay of local/global identity chains’ (Falk 1995: 89).6 The rapid progress in the growth of globalization, global governance and global civil society has raised hopes for a more just world, even amidst the various fears and concerns that some aspects of these phenomena have also provoked. The hopes are that the emergence of cosmopolitan global politics will not only promote the fulfilment of basic human rights but will also lead to increased democracy, human development and sustainable forms of human coexistence with the natural environment, as well as to reshaped international relations characterized by peaceful cooperation and mutual understanding. This book seeks to employ the concept of cosmopolitanism both to support these expectations and to chart some of the ways that they are coming to shape our world and become embodied in global politics. A necessary first step is to clarify the concept of cosmopolitanism. This is done in Chapter 1, which introduces different views of cosmopolitanism and provides a contextual framework for the remainder of the book by outlining some of the more prominent ideas, arguments and approaches of the cosmopolitan tradition. Chapter 2 presents a discussion of the historical development of the idea of human rights, including the formation of the global human rights regime following the Second World War. It also contains two case studies that briefly examine how transnational social movements have utilized human rights to contribute to what can be regarded as developmental processes within the cosmopolitan ethicopolitical project. Chapter 3 concentrates on the transformation of the notion of security away from the statist conception of national security towards the cosmopolitan conception of human security. As a consequence of this transformation there is a need to rethink the connection between peace and security, and ways of ensuring respect for human dignity and well-being while undermining traditional forms of militarism. An argument based on the human right to peace and a stringent version of just war theory spells out an alternative approach to protecting human security. Chapter 4 turns to the need to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity in order to vindicate our cosmopolitan obligations towards other persons as equal members of the global human community. It then examines the case of the recently established International Criminal Court as an example of ‘cosmopolitan law-enforcement’, that is, the application of cosmopolitan norms in legal and political practice. Finally Chapter 5 considers the intersection of environmental issues with cosmopolitan concerns. It describes the rise of the idea of sustainable development as well as several weaknesses with this idea, and suggests that the concept of environmental justice provides a more satisfactory approach to addressing

Introduction

9

ecological problems which is congruent with the values of cosmopolitanism. The chapter concludes with a survey of global environmental governance and the idea of world environmental citizenship as a component of global civil society. With this in mind it would be prudent of me to note that this book is not meant to provide a complete picture of global politics, nor are its arguments about the cosmopolitan ethicopolitical project intended to be exhaustive. Yet as should become evident in the chapters that follow, I hope to present a clear description of the nature and origins of cosmopolitanism, highlight some of the important ways that cosmopolitan values, norms and principles have made inroads into international relations and world affairs, and defend the claim that cosmopolitanism be given greater weight in our understanding of and active engagement with the multiple dimensions of the new kinds of politics occurring in our increasingly globalized world. The disclaimer above notwithstanding then, the book does determinedly call into question both the pessimistic tone of current international affairs and the realist charge that cosmopolitanism is ‘utopian’ and therefore irrelevant. While cosmopolitanism unlike realism refuses to relinquish the power of moral and political imagination to envision the world as it ‘ought to be’, it is nonetheless capable of directing and applying its robust normative vision within an understanding of how the world ‘really is’. For this reason and in light of the transformative potentials of contemporary global politics, it is best to describe cosmopolitanism as ‘realistically utopian’.7 The extension of cosmopolitan norms and principles into national and transnational politics is consistent with the reality of the world in which we live and remains well within the social and political possibilities of our global age. Yet this application of cosmopolitan norms and principles also seeks fundamentally to improve or perfect our established institutions and practices, and in doing so manifests a cautious but resolute optimism about the potentials for human innovation and progressively constructing a more just, peaceful and sustainable world than the one which currently exists. Notes 1 2 3

4 5

I use the term ‘international political theory’ inclusively to encompass the convergence of political theory, political philosophy and international relations theory. I derive these three tenets from Pogge (2002: 169) and Barry (1999: 35–6). O’Neill (2000b: 186–202) offers a useful discussion of how moral cosmopolitanism should be complemented by what she calls institutional cosmopolitanism. Beitz (1994: 123–36) and Pogge (2002) also make a distinction between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. See also the essays collected in Ougaard and Higgott (2002). High-profile examples of the role of global civil society would be NGO participation—both formal and informal—and protest at the World Trade

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Cosmopolitan Global Politics Organization (WTO) ministerial meetings especially since the 1999 Seattle conference, and the World Social Forum (WSF) held annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil (and in Mumbai, India in 2004). The WSF motto is ‘Another World is Possible’ and its aim is to provide an open meeting place ‘where groups and movements of civil society’ can engage ‘in building a planetary society centred on the human person’. Nearly 75 000 people from around the world participated in the 2004 WSF meeting. Consult the WSF web site online at http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/home.asp. For a very useful and extended discussion of citizenship in a globalized world see Dower (2003). I adapt this phrase from Rawls (1999b).

Chapter 1

The Meaning of Cosmopolitanism: Themes and Variations Cosmopolitanism in its modern form is the systematic articulation of three basic premises. The first is that individual human beings are the ultimate units of moral and political concern. Other entities such as collective groups may also be the subjects of our concern of course, but ultimately it is the individual person who deserves our most basic consideration as a moral being. The second premise, whose modern theoretical articulation is known as universalism, is that all human beings possess equal moral status. Not only are individual persons the ultimate unit of concern, but also no morally relevant distinctions can be made between persons as moral beings. All persons everywhere are equally entitled to the same human status. The third premise is that persons are subjects of concern for everyone, that is, human status has global scope. In other words no one can exempt themselves from their obligations to respect the equal moral status of all other human beings. These three thoughts yield the idea that we owe duties of justice to all the persons of the world, and thus that political morality and practice should focus most fundamentally on the interests or welfare of persons as such. The history of cosmopolitanism has been the attempt to formulate these thoughts both in detail, and in response to the changing forms of human association. The concrete ways in which the cosmopolitan premises should be explained, and the question of which conditions and preconditions are required for their realization have been intensely debated for several centuries. Indeed the early contributions to the discussion go back to ancient Greece. It is my contention that in order to understand cosmopolitanism and its present position in the world one must have an awareness of the most important debates about the meaning of cosmopolitanism, a notion of the core features of cosmopolitanism relevant for today’s world, and an understanding of how various theorists have conceived cosmopolitanism and responded to their predecessors and critics. Thus each of these elements is addressed in this chapter through a consideration of three significant ‘moments’ in the history of the cosmopolitan tradition: Stoicism, Kantian cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan democracy.1 The aim is merely to introduce the important themes and contributions in order to provide context for more in-depth treatment of contemporary issues in subsequent chapters.

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Classical Roots Although cosmopolitanism has received its most serious attention in the years since the end of the Cold War, cosmopolitan thinking can be found as early as the fourth century BC. It was Diogenes of Sinope (c. 400–323 BC) who possibly pronounced what has come to be regarded as the most representative statement of the cosmopolitan sensibility. When asked where he came from Diogenes is reputed to have replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 65). Diogenes’ sentiment influenced the philosophy not only of fellow Cynics but even more so that of Stoics such as Zeno of Citium (342–270 BC), Chrysippus of Soloi (c. 280–207 BC), Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD), Epictetus (c. 55–135) and Marcus Aurelius (121–180). Some have suggested that Socrates predates Diogenes as the first prominent classical thinker to consider himself a ‘world citizen’. Montaigne, for instance, wrote: Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens’, but ‘The World’. He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot (Montaigne 1958: 116).

This might seem an odd claim to make given that Socrates famously refused to escape punishment of death since voluntary exile from Athens struck him as a violation of his deepest duties of citizenship to the beloved polis. Nevertheless it is true that Socrates subscribed to the metaphysical unity of the cosmos which binds together gods and human beings, and the belief that this oneness of the universe transcends political affiliation. Plato makes this position clear in the Gorgias when he has Socrates make the following statement: Wise men say, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and men are bound together by communion and friendship, orderliness, temperance, and justice, and it is for this reason they call this Whole a Cosmos, my friend, and not intemperate disorder (Plato 1984: 297).

While Socrates and Plato (and later Aristotle) embraced the polis as the ideal form of political community, the Cynics expressed disdain for the conventions of Greek civic life and the corruption of political power disingenuously masked by a calculated appeal to rationality. Diogenes is well known for his eccentric behaviour—such as residing in a tub, walking about with a lit lantern in broad daylight and sleeping in temples—and for declaring his independence from wealth, status, luxury and of course any particular country or polis. For the Cynics, the trappings of conventional society corrupt human existence and undermine the pursuit of a virtuous life

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conducted in accordance with nature. Simplicity and self-sufficiency culminating in an extreme individualism characterise the Cynic ethical system. Diogenes thus represents a ‘citizen of the world’ or kosmopolitês in a negative sense, as someone who rejects his society and its laws and customs, and who is at home anywhere in the world because his well being depends solely upon his own freedom and self-mastery. Despite the fact that the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, was inspired by the Cynics, the ethical philosophy he initiated regarded the life of virtue as being consistent with both self-mastery and social existence. While the works of Stoics range over an impressively wide area of study including logic, rhetoric and physics, it is in the sphere of ethics that they make their most important and distinctive mark. As with the other major Greek philosophers the attainment of virtue, that is, rational action consonant with human and physical nature, is the chief end of life. Virtue consists in bringing one’s actions into conformity with the general laws and order of the universe. The image of harmony which this position evokes is not coincidental for, in some respects similar to the Cynics, the Stoics regard happiness as the composure and peace of mind that results from a rational self-control that liberates the individual from dependence upon both contingent external circumstances and violent or passionate emotions. Thus an ethically good life is one in which human rationality is made to conform to the rational order of nature. From this theoretical framework emerges the idea of the law of nature, that is, a universal moral law that corresponds to the rational capacities of all human beings. The human capacities for reasoning provide the grounds for fellowship in a world community: Perhaps, though, we should examine more thoroughly what are the natural principles of human fellowship and community. First is something that is seen in the fellowship of the entire human race. For its bonding consists of reason and speech, which reconcile men to one another, through teaching, learning, communicating, debating and making judgements, and unite them in a kind of natural fellowship.… The most widespread fellowship existing among men is that of all with all others (Cicero 1991: 21–2).

Yet the Stoics did not believe that this theory of virtue justified a withdrawal from public life, to the contrary, it called for measured social and political engagement. This is because human society constitutes an end of the moral duty of the individual. The human capacities for reasoning can only be fully developed within society and the freedom of the individual requires a further harmonization of interests in the community. For this reason law assumes a central role in Stoic doctrine, particularly in the thought of the later Roman Stoics. Law serves the important function of providing a common standard of conduct for all, and it serves as a rational ordering of life to which all can subject themselves. In other words, law operates as a unifying force helping to connect all persons together into a

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whole, a moral and political community in which all strive for the same end. In this way individual interests are rightly subordinated to the general welfare by means of regulated social relations. Such is the basis of justice. Indeed for Cicero the virtues (or duties) of justice and benevolence are two of the fundamental bonds which keep human society unified under the banner of ‘one eternal and unchanging law’ of nature ‘valid for all nations and all times’ (Cicero 1928: 211). Elsewhere Cicero writes: Therefore all men should have this one object, that the benefit of each individual and the benefit of all together should be the same. If anyone arrogates it to himself, all human intercourse will be dissolved. Furthermore, if nature prescribes that one man should want to consider the interests of another, whoever he may be, for the very reason that he is a man, it is necessary, according to the same nature, that what is beneficial to all is something common. If that is so, then we are all constrained by one and the same law of nature; and if that also is true, then we are certainly forbidden by the law of nature from acting violently against another person (Cicero 1991: 109–10).

In the tradition of Cicero, Marcus Aurelius therefore asks: If mind is common to us all, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth. For in what other common government can we say that the whole race of men partakes? And thence, from this common City, is derived our mind itself, our reason and our sense of law, or from what else? (Marcus Aurelius 1990: 24).

Because humans are intended to associate with one another in a society regulated by law and justice the Stoics recommend that individuals ought, for the good of themselves and others sharing a common existence, take part in the political life of society. However the Stoic conception of the ideal political community surpasses the various limitations associated with existing forms of government, offering a vision of a polity that transcends national borders and is inclusive of all persons. The kosmopolitês, devoted to the pursuit of the human good, must no doubt find the sphere of the conventional polity to be far too limited and would therefore prefer to think and act in terms of a world community or kosmopolis. In the words of Seneca: Let us take hold of the fact that there are two communities—the one, which is great and truly common, embracing gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our state by the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of our birth (Seneca 1987: 431).

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Crucially the Stoics did not believe in the mutual exclusion of the local and the world communities, and thought it both possible and desirable for individuals to consider themselves citizens of their local communities as well as citizens of the world. If all humans are as rational beings equal, then all humans together form a single community. Reason and the laws of nature transcend national boundaries to provide a universal order to which all belong as component parts (Marcus Aurelius 1990: 25). In a striking image, Marcus Aurelius compares the world as a single society composed of all human beings and their local communities related together to a ‘highest City’ which forms one community through the relatedness of all its households (Marcus Aurelius 1990: 21). For this reason affirms Plutarch, ‘We should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbours’ (Nussbaum 1997: 52). Consequently the Greek prejudice against foreigners exhibited even by Plato and Aristotle was antithetical to the Stoic point of view, since the ideal of citizenship of the world requires a much more tolerant attitude towards the accident of birth than the exclusive attachments fostered by the narrowly drawn laws and constitution of any particular polis. As Marcus Aurelius declared, ‘Live as on a height; for here or there matters nothing, if everywhere one lives in the Universe, as in a city’ (Marcus Aurelius 1990: 95). The kosmopolitês must regard all other persons as sharing the same nature and moral worth: ‘For no single thing is so like another, so exactly its counterpart, as all of us are to one another’ (Cicero 1928: 329). Even though the Stoics did not offer any specific proposals as to what a world community might look like, in a strongly political sense they were the first to exhibit a consistent and deliberately cosmopolitan philosophy committed to the concept of the essential unity of humanity and to a moral sensibility that extended beyond the confines of the polis to encompass all humankind as a whole. Modernity and Kant The greatness of the Stoic philosophy consists in its assertion that the whole of humanity forms a single community and therefore that all persons possess a moral status equal to our own. Its weakness arises from the fact that it remained little more than a general ethical world view which failed to offer any concrete conception of the norms, agents, and institutions of a global political community. All the same, the influence exerted by Stoic philosophy on subsequent attempts to develop cosmopolitan systems of thought was very great. This influence is particularly apparent in the works of numerous intellectuals identified with the Enlightenment and the emergence of modernity. Indeed the work of the eighteenth-century philosophes can be rightly regarded as constituting something of a revival of Hellenistic Stoicism’s cosmopolitan ideals.2

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An illuminating example is provided by Denis Diderot’s reception of David Hume, the paragon of the Scottish Enlightenment, upon Hume’s arrival in Paris in 1763. Writing to Hume, Diderot noted in praise: ‘My Dear David, you belong to all the nations of the earth and you never ask a man for his place of birth. I flatter myself that I am like you, a citizen of the great city of the world’ (Schlereth 1977: 1). Diderot’s self-identification as a cosmopolite or citizen of the world also found expression in his article on ‘cosmopolitain ou cosmopolite’ in the renowned Encyclopédie, where he claims, following Montesquieu: ‘I prefer my family to myself, my country to my family, and the human race to my country’ (Schlereth 1977: 47). Montesquieu himself stated: ‘If I know of anything advantageous to my family but not to my country, I should try to forget it. If I knew of anything advantageous to my country which was prejudicial to Europe and to the human race, I should look upon it as a crime’ (Schlereth 1977: 191). Numerous further examples of such cosmopolitan sentiments can be found in the writings of prominent Enlightenment figures ranging from Francis Bacon, to Voltaire, Schiller, Montaigne, Thomas Paine and John Locke. For Paine, champion of the ‘rights of man’, a ‘great nation’ is one ‘which extends and promotes the principles of universal society; whose mind rises above the atmosphere of local thoughts, and considers mankind, of whatever nation or profession they may be, as the work of one creator’ (Paine 1945: 256). And in a passage that resonates with the convictions of Cicero, Locke argues: The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker … [a]nd being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses (Locke 1993: 117).

This appeal to the fundamental unity of humanity and to the natural law of reason is, as it was with the Stoics, a characteristic feature of Enlightenment thought. Even with the emergence of the modern nation-state in Europe following the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia the concomitant development of public international law and ascendance of the belief in natural rights provided strong cosmopolitan limitations to the concept of sovereignty. For Enlightenment cosmopolitans the state could not be viewed as an abstract and isolated entity divorced from its ‘natural’ connection to the universal society of states and shorn of its responsibilities to the rest of humanity. The Swiss jurist and diplomat Emmerich de Vattel makes this position clear in his classic work on international law, The Law of Nations (1758):

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The universal society of the human race being an institution of nature herself, that is to say, a necessary consequence of the nature of man,—all men, in whatever stations they are placed, are bound to cultivate it, and to discharge its duties. They cannot liberate themselves from the obligation by any convention, by any private association. When, therefore, they unite in civil society for the purpose of forming a separate state or nation, they may indeed enter into particular engagements towards those with whom they associate themselves; but they remain still bound to the performance of their duties towards the rest of mankind. All the difference consists in this, that having agreed to act in common, and having resigned their rights and submitted their will to the body of the society, in every thing that concerns their common welfare, it thenceforward belongs to that body, that state, and its rulers, to fulfil the duties of humanity towards strangers, in every thing that no longer depends on the liberty of individuals; and it is the state more particularly that is to perform those duties towards other states…. Since the object of the natural society established between all mankind is—that they should lend each other mutual assistance, in order to attain perfection themselves, and to render their condition as perfect as possible,—and since nations, considered as so many free persons living together in a state of nature, are bound to cultivate human society with each other,—the object of the great society established by nature between all nations is also the interchange of mutual assistance for their own improvement, and that of their condition (Vattel 1857: 11–12).

We can see from the foregoing sketch how the Enlightenment strain of cosmopolitanism had in many respects such a strong affinity with the Stoic tradition. Yet despite the extensive appeal to individuals’ consciousness of our common humanity found throughout the writings of the philosophes and other related thinkers, it is with the work of Immanuel Kant that we find the most serious attempt to apply a modern mode of cosmopolitan thought to questions of politics. Kant’s approach to cosmopolitanism is based on a rigorous integration of his moral, legal and political philosophy. Undeniably this unification of the moral, legal and political in Kant’s thought is what elevates the cosmopolitan tradition in the modern era from a basic ethical sensibility to a genuinely global political project. For this reason as well, an appreciation of his cosmopolitan project requires a review of his moral theory and its political implications, albeit necessarily condensed. Kant’s deontological moral theory is based on his conception of practical reason, that is, the rational human capacity of practical deliberation. For Kant practical reason constitutes the autonomous source of moral principles and values. In other words practical reasoning about morality consists of the noninstrumental deliberation about and prescription of moral laws conducive to the realization of human freedom. In fact the relationship between freedom and practical reasoning consists of the exercise by humans of their autonomous rationality. The structure of this relationship is revealed in the form of the imperative characteristic of the functioning of practical reasoning. In particular Kant contrasts hypothetical imperatives, commands concerning a course of action regarded as a means to some other end, and

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categorical imperatives or commands concerning a course of action regarded as necessary irrespective of any particular end. Whereas the hypothetical imperative is merely conditional upon the end that is desired, the categorical imperative is conceived as unconditionally ‘in itself good’ and thus ‘as objectively necessary’ in its own right (Kant 1997: 25). This insight leads Kant to his famous formulation of the categorical imperative as an expression of the unqualified moral goodness found only in the ‘good will’, which is the autonomous human disposition or volition to fulfil the requirements of duty for the sake of duty, that is, out of rational respect for the moral law itself (Kant 1997: 7–8). As portrayed by Kant the good will thereby represent a universal disposition that all human beings are capable of exhibiting and acting upon, and the categorical imperative provides the basis for moral principles that are valid for all persons anywhere. Kant offered several formulations of the categorical imperative, the highest of all moral principles, and these are known as the ‘formula of universal law’, the ‘formula of humanity’ and the ‘formula of autonomy’. The first formula states: ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (Kant 1997: 15). By this formula Kant means that the principle of our action must be universalizable or, stated otherwise, that it must possess the form of a law which admits of no exceptions and is therefore universal. The formula of humanity is expressed as follows: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ (Kant 1997: 38). The foundation of this principle is the only unconditional or objective end that is necessarily shared by all human beings, namely, ourselves and all other persons conceived as rational beings. Consequently this formulation of the categorical imperative expresses a moral law to respect humanity as an intrinsic rather than relative value. The final formulation of the categorical imperative manifests the idea ‘of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law’ (Kant 1997: 39). This principle expands on the concept of human beings as rational agents by emphasizing that the universalized maxims or laws on which we act are self-made or ‘self-legislated’ and thus self-imposed. What this reveals is that the self- legislating will is in fact the autonomous will which chooses for itself actions that are consistent with the value of humanity. Obeying a moral law simply on the basis of some external incentive or sanction (for example, fear of punishment) renders the will ‘heteronomous’, bound solely to the commands of others. In effect then, the more that one acts in ways consistent with the value of humanity, the greater one’s freedom. Taken as a whole the three formulations of the categorical imperative lead Kant to develop the conception of an ideal moral community called the ‘kingdom of ends’. The kingdom of ends is ‘a systematic union of various rational beings through common laws’ and an individual is a member of the kingdom of ends ‘when he gives universal laws in it but is also himself

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subject to these laws’ (Kant 1997: 41). The kingdom of ends therefore provides an ideal conceptual basis for the notion of a political community composed of free and equal human beings, each person being regarded as a legislative citizen who freely participates in making the laws of the community, the content of those laws being directed towards the full realization of the dignity of every other member of the community. For this to be so each individual’s will or actions must be subject to its own limiting condition, that is, the value of humanity, in order that the freedom of each individual can be consistent with the freedom of everyone else. This respect for autonomy leads Kant to contend that each human being possesses an innate or natural right to freedom: ‘Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), in so far as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity’ (Kant 1996: 30). This natural right to freedom implies the natural right to equality, since any restriction on the freedom of the individual must be applicable universally and thus consistent with the principle of reciprocity or equal treatment. Kant expressed this last point in terms of the ‘universal principle of right’: ‘Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law’ (Kant 1996: 24). In his account of the nature of civil society Kant follows the general contours of the social contract tradition. While individuals are thought to exist in a prepolitical state of nature this state of nature was not, as with Hobbes, a condition of war per se. It was however, a situation of insecurity with regard to the rights of the individual and as a matter of justice it was necessary for persons to leave the state of nature and form a society in which there exists a power of public, coercive law. It is through the system of law and its coercive force that individual rights, and of course individual freedom and equality, are effectively recognized and possessed (Kant 1996: 89–90). Furthermore a state or commonwealth is precisely an association of individuals united under a system of public law and thus under the ‘rightful condition’ of justice. Each just state contains three authorities that constitute its ‘general united will’ or basis for government—the legislative, the executive and the judicial—and which are organized according to the principle of the separation of powers (Kant 1996: 90–91). In essence Kant presents the core political principles of the modern ideal of limited constitutional government based on the rule of law, according to which the state is intended to provide the necessary conditions for the realization of individual rights. Kant’s argument goes even further in that he argues that the republican form of government is the most legitimate embodiment of the constitutional state. This is because the republican constitution assumes the freedom of individual citizens as the basis for the exercise of state power and provides

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for an autonomous rule of law independent of the interests of will of any particular person or class of persons. The key functional element to the republic is a representative system of government within which all individual citizens through their delegates have the opportunity to exercise their right to freedom by participating in the creation and enforcement of the laws of their state (Kant 1996: 112–13). In this way the state acts in the name of the people. The idea of the republican constitution also occupies a central role in one of Kant’s most celebrated political works, Perpetual Peace (1795). In Perpetual Peace Kant argues that states must adopt republican constitutions as a prerequisite for establishing a rule of law to regulate their external relations and thereby replace the international state of nature characterised by conflict with a system of international law leading to a lasting and just peace. Kant presents his argument in the form of a proposed treaty between states consisting of six ‘preliminary’ and three ‘definitive’ articles. In explaining the first definitive article of perpetual peace Kant articulates the three principles that he considered as foundational of the republican constitution: A republican constitution is founded upon three principles: firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of society (as men); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens). It is the only constitution which can be derived from the idea of an original contract, upon which all rightful legislation of a people must be founded. Thus as far as right is concerned, republicanism is in itself the original basis of every kind of civil constitution, and … it is the only constitution which can lead to perpetual peace (Kant 1991a: 99–100).

It is at this point that we begin to approach the cosmopolitan centre of Kant’s moral and political thought. With Perpetual Peace Kant takes aim at the excesses of realism and its emphasis on power and conflict within an enduring condition of anarchy and insecurity. In contrast Kant proposes a system of international justice based upon robust principles of international and cosmopolitan law designed to constrain states’ powers—but not their freedom—in a manner analogous to the normative order of the republican constitution. In an earlier work Kant offered a dramatic description of the failure of international realism to secure lasting peace: Nowhere does human nature appear less admirable than in the relationships which exist between peoples. No state is for a moment secure from the others in its independence and its possessions. The will to subjugate the others or to grow at their expense is always present, and the production of armaments for defence, which often makes peace more oppressive and more destructive of internal welfare than war itself, can never be relaxed. And there is no possible way of counteracting this except a state of international right, based upon enforceable public laws to which each state must submit (by analogy with a state of civil or

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political right among individual men). For a permanent universal peace by means of a so called European balance of power is pure illusion… (Kant 1991b: 91–2).

Kant’s principles of international right or justice encompass three overlapping components of public law: municipal or civil law (ius civitatis), international law or the law of nations (ius gentium), and cosmopolitan law (ius cosmopoliticum) (Kant 1991a: 98–9). Each of the three definitive articles of Kant’s proposal for perpetual peace deal, in turn, with these three constituent components of the juridical framework of public law as a whole. The first definitive article, as noted above, stipulates that each state ought to adopt a republican form of civil constitution while the second definitive article instructs that a federation of free states should be formed, so as to secure the rights of each nation. Thus municipal or civil law concerns the internal politics of states as they construct a domestic order consistent with the freedom and equality of their citizens, while the law of nations is the body of international law which regulates the external relations between independent and equal states. Moreover, the law of nations is to culminate in the formation of a treaty-based federation and appropriate international organizations in order to strengthen the cohesion between just states within a sphere of freely agreed upon binding law and institutions of governance. The third definitive article requires the creation of a cosmopolitan law intended to guarantee the right of ‘hospitality’, a ‘universal right of humanity’ to all individuals (Kant 1991a: 99–108). Kant’s conception of a federation of free states is not to be confused with advocacy of a world state or world government. This is an important distinction to take note of since cosmopolitans have often, and usually mistakenly, been assumed to be proponents of a world state. Yet cosmopolitanism is not inherently opposed to the state per se or to its modern version in the form of the nation-state. Rather cosmopolitanism is generally concerned to develop varied modes of governance—from the local to the global—with the goal of facilitating the rights and interests of individuals qua human beings. Indeed states may be one mode of governance well suited to this end, and Kant’s notion of the republic in fact moves well beyond admitting a merely instrumental role for constitutional government in suggesting that such governments are morally necessary for the realization of individual rights and the formalization of systems of justice. Therefore the federation of free states would consist of a progressively expanding international society or ‘league’ of independent states which have nevertheless voluntarily consented to binding constraints on their sovereignty—especially laws prohibiting war—for the good of all nations and peoples therein. This conception of a federation of free states clearly resonates with many of the developments in international law and organizations from the last half of the twentieth century and, as we will see in the final section of this chapter, with some of the significant dimensions of global governance associated with processes of globalization.

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The importance of constraining state power receives additional emphasis with Kant’s notion of cosmopolitan law as that aspect of public law concerned with the status of individuals across international boundaries. In his discussion of the third definitive article Kant explains what the right of universal hospitality means: … hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. He can be turned away, if this can be done without causing his death, but he must not be treated with hostility, so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be in …. He may only claim a right of resort, for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface (Kant 1991a: 105–6).

The right to hospitality amounts to a universal entitlement to travel and attempted entry into the various states of the world but not to settlement, the latter being a limited right dependent upon agreement between specific individuals and states. It is in effect both a natural and legal right that guarantees freedom of movement, social intercourse and commerce between different peoples on the moral basis of the more fundamental unity of all human beings conceived as a single community spread across the commonly shared surface of the globe. ‘In this way’, writes Kant, ‘continents distant from each other can enter into peaceful mutual relations which may eventually be regulated by public laws, thus bring the human race nearer to a cosmopolitan constitution’ (Kant 1991a: 106).3 The cosmopolitan constitution is a body of law that codifies the rights and obligations of all persons and states, and is universally binding. In this way Kant’s conception of cosmopolitan law embodies the universalism of his moral theory while seeking the formal codification of individuals’ fundamental rights irrespective of their nationality, ethnicity, social status or religious beliefs. The robustness of Kant’s cosmopolitanism thus clearly reflects his comprehensive integration of the moral, the legal and the political, in demonstrating that respect for human dignity—as expressed in the categorical imperative—ultimately requires both a just domestic sphere and a just world order regulated by international and cosmopolitan law. As a result Kant advances the cosmopolitan vision of a universal community of humankind by building upon the Stoic ethical sensibility and guiding it into the domain of actual political processes and juridical organization.4 Globalization and Cosmopolitan Democracy In response to recent arguments in support of cosmopolitan justice and the expansion of global governance, Danilo Zolo has produced a series of articles and books that subject both cosmopolitanism and global governance

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to hostile criticism. For Zolo, cosmopolitanism and its cognate concepts of world citizenship, global civil society and transnational democracy are little more than ‘empty rhetoric’, the product of utopian ‘wishful thinking’ and of ‘limited desirability’ (Zolo 1997: 133, 153). As a self-proclaimed realist, Zolo is sceptical of humanitarian motives and firmly believes that states are the only entities that possess legitimate political power and the protection of their sovereignty and autonomy, under a traditional conception of international law, is the best possibility for a minimalist framework of world order (Zolo 1999). Cynically, Zolo poses the question, ‘Can any cosmopolitan project ever be anything other than an inherently hegemonic and violent undertaking?’ (Zolo 1997: 15). In dismissing cosmopolitan projects as utopian Zolo upholds such concepts as the balance of power and strong state sovereignty to refute any possibility of ‘true legitimacy’ for the UN and other similar international organizations, much less for the transnational civic networks of global civil society. Zolo’s position, which ultimately refuses any attempt to apply ethical criteria to international relations, represents but one extreme example of neorealist ideas that characterize resistance to cosmopolitanism and which have been employed to reject proposals for the construction of a more robust and democratic system of global governance. This position seems to be completely at odds with the worldwide call for democratic reform of international organizations and greater inclusiveness in global governance that has been most visible since the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle. Indeed participation in the creation of government policy that some citizens enjoy in the internal affairs of their respective countries and the accountability provided by democratic elections do not extend similarly to international affairs, leading to widespread concerns about what is referred to as the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance. In much of the current literature on globalization there is widespread agreement that the existing system of global governance is deficient in many fundamental respects, however there is less consensus as to whether a more legitimate system of governance is possible and as to what normative principles should have an effect on its institutional design (Held and McGrew 2002a: 13). Of particular concern is the erosion of state power by the forces of globalization which has weakened the Westphalian form of international governance—the current ‘self-regulating’ order of the states system—leaving it poorly equipped to deal with global problems. The theory of cosmopolitan democracy developed by David Held, Daniele Archibugi and others outlines a project for multiple layers of democratized governance (from the local to the global) that among other goals attempts to resolve the shortcomings of global governance, in particular the perceived deficit of democratic legitimacy. Archibugi, an advocate of what he calls ‘cosmopolitical democracy’, explains:

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Cosmopolitan Global Politics Above all, what distinguishes cosmopolitical democracy from other such projects is its attempt to create institutions which enable the voice of individuals to be heard in global affairs, irrespective of their resonance at home. Democracy as a form of global governance thus needs to be realized on three different, interconnected levels: within states, between states and at a world level (Archibugi 2003: 8).

As demonstrated by the work of Zolo, however, the theory of cosmopolitical or cosmopolitan democracy is not without its detractors, with authors from liberal internationalist, realist and other perspectives offering pointed criticisms of the alternative cosmopolitan normative project and vision of the future. Nevertheless Archibugi as well as Held and Anthony McGrew agree that there is a general consensus about the existence of democratic deficiencies in the current international system. In the normative literature on global governance the present system of global governance is regarded as distorted in so far as it reflects a hierarchy of power at the international level which too frequently promotes the interests of the most powerful states and global social forces at the expense of the majority of the world’s inhabitants (Archibugi 2003: 8). Indeed the agenda for international action and cooperation is often set by those very global powers with few other motives than the advancement of their own immediate interests. Distorted global governance therefore is ‘a product of the mutually reinforcing dynamics of the inequalities of power between states; the structural privileging of the interests and agenda of global capital; and the technocratic nature of the global policy process’ (Archibugi 2003: 8). As such any role that global governance can have in achieving human development through poverty reduction and the provision of both welfare and human security often is marginalized by the self-interested considerations of the realist power system. Held and McGrew emphasize the paradox between the stated goals of global governance which since the end of the Second World War and the advent of the UN Charter include human security and development, and the reality of the evolution of international affairs which have seen the widening of both global inequalities and social exclusion, along with the burgeoning of military conflicts. They contrast this situation with the considerable success of public and private agencies in promoting economic globalization suggesting that ‘the structural constraints on global governance apply more strongly to its redistributive than its promotional functions’ (Held and McGrew 2002a: 14). In Held’s and McGrew’s opinion this paradox provides an illustration of how the current system of global governance privileges its market enhancing functions over its market correcting ones, an imbalance that has perhaps only grown in the wake of the recent expansion of neoliberal ideas (Held and McGrew 2002a: 14). These failures of the current system of global governance are compounded by a persistent democratic deficit. The new supranational

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layers of governance created by nation-states seeking to promote or regulate the effects of globalization generally have few mechanisms of accountability accessible to the general population; these global institutions are for the most part accountable only to states and operate according to nondemocratic principles (disproportionately to any population size) (Singer 2002: 75–7). Other influential global actors, whether from the private sector (transnational corporations) or from civil society (nongovernmental organizations), also are often unaccountable to or unrepresentative of a variety of members of international society. This democratic deficit of global governance has far reaching consequences, notably in terms of its impact on economic development where a system of elite governance detached from responsibility to the general population frequently rules in its own favour leading to increased poverty and inequality. As Archibugi notes, ‘This is the true deficit of democracy: the existence of organized transnational interests far removed from any popular mandate’ (Archibugi 2003: 9). Elsewhere Archibugi stresses that: few decisions made in one state are autonomous from those made in others. A decision on the interest rate in Germany has significant consequences for employment in Greece, Portugal and Italy. A state’s decision to use nuclear energy has environmental consequences for the citizens of neighbouring countries. Immigration policies in the European Union have a significant impact on the economic development of Mediterranean Africa. All this happens without the affected citizens having a say in the matter (Archibugi 1998: 204).

Held asserts that some of the reasons behind both the failure of global governance in terms of achieving security and development, and the democratic deficit can be found in the impact of globalization on the nationstate. In Held’s account globalization is ‘shifting the patterns of powers and constraints which are redefining the architecture of political power associated with the nation-state’ (Held 1995: 135). At the international level Held discerns significant ‘disjunctures’ between the idea—vital to the current system of global governance—of supreme state sovereignty and the world economy, international organizations, regional and global institutions, international law, and military alliances which operate to shape and constrain the options of individual nation-states (Held 1995: 99). These disjunctures reveal a set of forces which: combine to restrict the freedom of action of governments and states by blurring the boundaries of domestic politics, transforming the conditions of political decision-making, changing the institutional and organisational context of national polities, altering the legal framework and administrative practices of governments and obscuring the lines of responsibility and accountability of national states themselves (Held 1995: 135).

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In Held’s view both the autonomy and the sovereignty of the nation-state are being undermined under conditions of globalization by assorted transnational actors and forces. The prerogatives attached to state sovereignty, the fundamental underpinning of the international system from the perspective of post-Westphalian realism, are called into question as these are increasingly being taken up by other nonstate based agencies. As such the effectiveness of the Westphalian system of global governance—the system of relatively isolated states—is being eroded by a multilayered apparatus with entities at both regional and international levels corroding the traditional national power base. Indeed Held asserts that the existing system of global governance has failed to provide either sufficient or effective democratic mechanisms of political coordination and change. The Westphalian model with its ‘core commitment to the principle of effective power—that is the principle that might eventually makes right in the international world’—and the assertion of the absolute sovereignty of the state is at odds with any possibility for ‘sustained democratic negotiation among members of the international community’ (Held 1995: 268). Furthermore the hierarchical structure of the states system itself has been disrupted by the emergence of influential transnational actors and forces. By contrast Held views the UN as a potential forum for democratic deliberation about pressing international questions but regards it as having so far failed to achieve this capacity due to its lack of credibility as an agency influenced (and most especially funded) to a large extent by the most powerful states (Held 1995: 88). In addition Held notes that although the end of the Cold War offered the possibility of a ‘new international order’ based on the extension of democracy across the globe and increasingly peaceful international relations, this potential remains largely unfulfilled as demonstrated by the crises in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Many UN initiatives in conflict management and resolution—initiatives which in Held’s opinion have been ‘all too often contested, reactive and under-funded’—face languishing in committee chambers and eventual defeat. For Held ‘the prospect is raised of an international community torn apart by the plurality of identities, of international public affairs as a quagmire of infighting among nations and groups wholly unable to settle pressing collective issues’ (Held 1995: 268). Under these circumstances Held asserts the need for the creation of a global democratic polity and culture, the only framework in which the ideals of autonomy and democracy can be fully realized. The cosmopolitan model of democracy seeks to expand the levels of participatory politics and means of accountability through an adaptive ‘system of diverse and overlapping power centres, shaped and delimited by democratic law’ (Held 1995: 234). Despite the deficiencies of the existing system of global governance, Held is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for cultivating cosmopolitan democracy, especially considering that some cosmopolitan ideas are already in the centre of post-Second World War legal and political developments.

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Unfortunately the institutions that have developed from these have too often formed a compromise with the preexisting world order by accommodating strong state sovereignty and the balance of power at critical points in world affairs. The cosmopolitan project for global governance is, then, an attempt to connect normative cosmopolitan theory to cosmopolitan institution building (Held 2002: 317). Hence the first step towards making the cosmopolitan model of democracy real would be to develop the UN system to live up to its Charter (in which Held finds many cosmopolitan ideals at odds with the current international order) entailing among other things, implementing ‘key elements of the UN Rights Conventions, enforcing the prohibition of the discretionary right to use force, and activating the collective security system envisaged in the Charter itself’ (Held 1995: 269). Then the Charter would have to be extended, for instance by making a near consensus vote in the General Assembly a legitimate source of international law, modifying the Security Council system of representation to allow for adequate regional accountability and amending the Security Council’s veto arrangement with particular reference to the powers of Permanent Members. The main point would be to cultivate the rule of law and its impartiality—thus challenging the current prevalence of double standards (one for ‘Western’ countries and another for the rest of the world)—in the realm of international affairs. These changes alone would not suffice to fully incorporate democracy into international affairs however, as this governance system would … remain a state centred model of international politics, and would lie at some distance … from an adequate recognition of the transformations being wrought in the wake of globalization—transformations which are placing increasing strain on both the Westphalian and Charter conceptions of international governance (Held 1995: 270).

More generally the priority is to establish components of what Held calls ‘cosmopolitan democratic law’ which is ‘a democratic public law entrenched within and across borders’ (Held 1995: 227). The normative foundation of cosmopolitan democratic law is what Held refers to as the ‘principle of autonomy’. This principle requires that all individuals have the ability to participate in political decisions that directly impact upon them. Held formulates the principle as follows: [P]ersons should enjoy equal rights and, accordingly, equal obligations in the specification of the political framework which generates and limits the opportunities available to them; that is, they should be free and equal in the determination of the conditions of their own lives, so long as they do not deploy this framework to negate the rights of others (Held 1995: 147).

Held argues that because of globalization there is an increasing number of decisions made at the domestic, regional and global levels that affect the

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citizens of various states without their participation in any meaningful sense. Not only are decisions being made at these various levels but the decisionmaking is also dispersed among a number of sites comprised of both public and private entities. According to Held this situation means that in the future, if not already, the state model will not suffice to safeguard the autonomy of each individual and by implication, the functioning of democracy itself. If democracy is to function effectively there needs to be an entrenchment of democratic autonomy and institutions at all levels that impact on the civil, political and social rights of individuals. This entrenchment involves significant restructuring of the state system in so far as the state is not the only site of power affecting the citizen and therefore should not be the only democratically organized institution. Rather there are seven ‘sites of power’—the body, welfare, culture, civic associations, economy, coercive relations and organized violence, and legal and regulatory institutions—within and across political communities that ‘mould and circumscribe’ people’s life chances and their ability to participate and ‘share in public decision-making’ (Held 1995: 173). For Held it is imperative that these sites of power, in addition to the state itself, be democratically based which would require the implementation of democratic procedures and institutions at a number of interconnected levels, from that of the workplace to that of global governance. As a result cosmopolitan democratic law entails a transnational, common political structure founded on the principle of autonomy. This common political structure would incorporate not only existing international law (suitably revised) but also a system of cosmopolitan law which focuses on facilitating and consolidating individual autonomy and not simply interstate relations; both of which would parallel the growth of a global or transnational civil society capable of holding political authority to account and galvanizing social change. As with Kant, Held also conceives of cosmopolitan law as a domain of law that is distinct from, yet complementary to the international law made between states and which consists of clusters of rights and obligations that entitle people to participate as autonomous agents in the regulation of those associations to which they belong. Cosmopolitan democratic law can be entrenched, for instance, by extending the reach of international courts and assemblies, and changing the constitutions of national and international assemblies to reflect overlapping sets of empowering rights and obligations. Moreover Held also envisages the widespread use of transnational referenda and the establishment of a global democratic assembly (a global parliament) which might operate alongside the UN system as a ‘second chamber’ to complement the General Assembly. Although only a framework setting institution, the global ‘people’s assembly’ could become an ‘authoritative centre for the examination of those pressing global problems which are at the heart of the very possibility of the implementation of cosmopolitan democratic law’, such as health and disease, food supply and distribution,

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global warming, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the instability of global financial markets (Held 1995: 274).5 Held’s plan also includes the strengthening of civil society and regional organizations (such as the European Union) as well as democratization at various sites of power including those of the global political economy (for which he suggests the foundation of a new coordinating economic agency at regional and international levels). Finally Held also argues that the institutional framework for a new democratic international order cannot be conceived without the means of effective law enforcement. To provide the system with coercive powers he suggests the establishment of a permanent, independent and international military force.6 Held’s project of democratizing global governance in accordance with cosmopolitan principles faces the challenge of scholars, political movements and current policymakers that approach the international sphere from competing perspectives. In particular the model of cosmopolitan democracy is at odds with the proponents of realism and, to a lesser degree, liberal internationalism, and for this reason ideological and pragmatic opposition fundamentally endangers its realization. In the first place, while there are some similarities between the two theories, liberal internationalism poses a challenge to Held’s model because it is the dominant discourse of the post-Cold War world order. For Held and McGrew liberal internationalism’s importance derives from its claim to what world politics can be, namely, a state of peace, thus providing the principal intellectual alternative to realism. Unlike the latter, it offers a deliberately normative project for international governance that has had a strong influence on shaping the current world order. As with the cosmopolitan democracy model, liberal internationalism offers an account of the possibility of the transcendance of power politics (most notably the anarchy problematic) in international relations. The primacy that liberal internationalism attaches to peace arises from a conviction that the achievement of human freedom is feasible only in the absence of war or the conditions that give rise to war. As McGrew explains, because ‘conflict and war are endemic features of a system of states in which sovereign states seek to maximize their power’, liberal internationalism maintains that it is only through ‘the governance or transcendence of power politics that the necessary conditions for the promotion and realization of human freedom can be effectively achieved’ (McGrew 2002: 267–8). The central explanatory logic of the liberal internationalist argument is expressed in the notion of the ‘virtuous circle’ which encapsulates the assumptions of liberal internationalism’s project for global governance. This notion asserts that the ‘mutually reinforcing dynamics of transnational economic integration, the diffusion of liberal democracy and the growth of international governance creates the conditions for an expanding liberal zone of peace in which war increasingly becomes an irrational or unthinkable instrument of interstate politics’ (McGrew 2002: 268).

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Extensive commentary has developed around the idea of a ‘democratic peace’ as a consequence of liberal internationalism’s focus on enhanced modes of international cooperation driven by economic liberalization and globalization.7 Hence the liberal internationalist project for global governance, although similar to that of cosmopolitan democracy, is less ambitious in that it works in the current international order without seeking to change it in as radical a manner. Liberal internationalism regards the economic status quo as the primary vehicle for increasing development and peaceful relations between states, and fails to articulate a conception of cosmopolitan democratic law that would entrench public participation and accountability in the economic, as well as social and political spheres. In the circle of Western liberal democracies this project is to some extent already achieved, as demonstrated by claims emanating from some that the ‘end of history’ is nigh (Fukuyama 1992), which clearly is a markedly different perspective from that of Held’s strong criticism of the democratic lacunas of the current international order. These divergences from Held’s theory are the source of strong opposition to the cosmopolitan democracy model for global governance. In particular one can identify a trend emanating from a specific school of thought within liberal internationalism which is pushing the international system away from cosmopolitan democracy. This trend is set against the framework of structural liberalism which seeks to show the importance of hegemony in determining the world order. In explaining the origins of the current postCold War multilateral order, structural liberalism highlights the importance of the specifically ‘commercially liberal’ character of United States hegemony. The purpose of structural liberalism is to show that the liberal ideals of freedom can only be achieved in a world order dominated by great powers which are committed to a neoliberal capitalist international order, as is the case at present with the US hegemony. For structural liberalism, then, competition and the promotion of national interest are just as central to international relations as is interdependence (Deudney and Ikenberry 1999). The consequence of this theory is an account of global governance that is incompatible with the more innovative dimensions of cosmopolitan democracy. This divergence is apparent in the current international context, which with a liberal state dominating the states system is in conformity with the structural liberalist ideal. The liberal character of American hegemony ostensibly allows the US the capacity ‘to employ institutions to lock in a favourable order’ while simultaneously being in an ‘advantaged position to exchange restraints on its power for institutional agreements and to trade off short-term gains for long-term gains’ (Ikenberry 2001: 5). As a democratic state it is also in a strong position to legitimize to its citizens an international institutional order which in theory restrains its power, but in practice gives it control over other less powerful states that join these institutions. This is clearly the case in the rhetoric that has emanated from the White House in recent years. Successive administrations seem to have been effectively

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committed to an international society which is merely a ‘society of states’ while officially championing the cause of international institutions that are meant to promote democracy. These institutions—the UN Security Council in particular—allow the US to wield its power more easily over states over which otherwise it would have little control, which would seem to contradict the purported goal of promoting democracy in the international system. This disjuncture is highlighted further by the recent rejection of the International Criminal Court, which Jason Ralph explains by the fact that ‘America’s commitment to global democracy is quite clearly limited by its commitment to statehood’ (Ralph 2003: 209). At the heart of current American foreign policy, Ralph claims, is the affirmation of supreme state sovereignty, a mistrust of ‘world society’ and an unwillingness to empower it in ways that cannot be controlled by Washington (Ralph 2003: 207). Thus the use of a universalist rhetoric of the primacy of democracy and freedom is merely the legitimating veil behind which the US pursues its power politics in the international system. This leads to the conclusion that as long as the position of the world’s sole superpower is to promote state sovereignty over democracy in the international system then the project of international democratic governance will face difficult challenges in moving forward. Held himself recognizes the severe backlash of entrenched economic and geopolitical interests (citing the case of the George W. Bush administration) as a problem for the realization of cosmopolitan democracy (Held 2002: 320). The prominence of statism with regard to the international system is also employed as an argument against cosmopolitan democracy in the realist tradition. In this framework the fundamental presupposition is that the international system is anarchic: there is no legitimate authority to which sovereign states are subordinate. As such there is a fundamental difference between domestic and international affairs. Realism regards the state as the principal actor in international affairs; the state is also sovereign and national security is its principal concern. In this ‘self-help’ international system concern with security means that power is vitally important, hence states must be continually attentive to changes in the balance of power between states and the effects of these changes on their respective interests. The presence of other actors at the international level, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), does not affect the fact that national governments still make the primary decisions regarding economic and political matters; states still set the rules within which other actors function, and they use their considerable power to influence economic and political outcomes (Gilpin 2002: 237–40). Consequently the main objection of realism to any project of (democratizing) global governance is the problem of power. In the realist framework power politics are the permanent condition of the human being (Buzan and Held 1998: 387–8). If power ultimately lies in the hands of individual nation-states, how can a suprastate authority be created unless all

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the states of the international system consent to giving up at least a considerable degree of their sovereignty? If these states are primarily selfinterested, what could ever move them to do so? At the very least if most of the governments in the world do indeed operate with realist assumptions (even if these assumptions are not necessarily valid) then any project of global governance, including the cosmopolitan democracy one, faces the possibility that any efforts to constitute a network of rules and institutions for the consensual regulation of global issues will at best be devoid of any kind of genuine normative content or will at worst fail to be implemented at all. The realist perspective identifies the fact that the normative project of cosmopolitan democracy relies on the goodwill of all individual nationstates, yet rejects this fact on the grounds that the current context of international relations would give no reason for states to give up their sovereignty. This is particularly evident in the case of authoritarian regimes which in general will not even concede to a change of government at the domestic level. Despite the successes of the ‘third wave’ of democratization since the early 1970s,8 realists suggest that this democratizing trend is fragile and likely to be reversed (Leftwich 2002: 269), a position opposed once again to any prophetic notion of the ‘end of history’. Realists, although they do not advocate a normative project for the international system, generally foresee a world closer to the description evoked earlier of a quagmire of infighting among nations than to a cosmopolitan democracy. Hence Barry Buzan, in a discussion with Held regarding the international system, concedes that the world may come to resemble the cosmopolitan model in the sense that there might be a disaggregation of sovereignty (with political authority existing at multiple levels), but only in the most developed and democratic countries of the Western world. Power politics will of course still be present and as such this part of the world order will resemble a ‘neomedievalism’. In the rest of the world this will not be the case. Weaker states will struggle in the face of the power of this new geographical order, indeed liberal democratic states have shown their propensity to wage war on ‘different’ states leading to the failure of the latter (for example, Afghanistan). According to Buzan, there would be a number of ‘quite substantial unstable zones’ opening up and becoming semipermanent features of the system without any political structures at all except for ‘some kind of reversion to warlordism, tribalism or gangsterism, or combinations thereof’. Hence, in Buzan’s view, there would be two extreme situations at the international level: a highly organized and highly developed ‘Western’ world, and some zones of anarchy (Buzan and Held 1998: 396–7). It is clear, then, that from the quite different perspectives of liberal internationalism, realism and cosmopolitan democracy there is a general consensus—supported by dissimilar reasons and leading to competing prescriptive claims—that global governance has to some extent failed thus

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far to achieve greater human security and development. The model of cosmopolitan democracy is a comprehensive normative project calling for the extension of democracy to the international level to make up for the perceived failings of the nation-state in the face of globalization. However it is faced with challenges from the alternative ideological positions represented by liberal internationalism and realism. These divergent perspectives are the sources of criticism and activities at the global level which undermine the cosmopolitan democracy project and threaten its intended goals of advancing human freedom and security, and increasing global acceptance of participatory politics as the best form of governance. Hence it is a fragile project dependent upon the conviction of those working towards its realization in the face of entrenched interests and political modalities. With this in mind Richard Falk eloquently assesses the future prospects of cosmopolitan democracy: Of course leadership styles based on hierarchy and authoritarianism remain potent realities…. But what gives promise to the vision of cosmopolitan democracy is the legitimation of democratic ideas of governance on a universal basis, the embodiment of these ideas in human rights as well as in specified global instruments, the democratic implications of nonviolent approaches to resistance and reform, most of all the deeply democratic convictions of transnational initiatives that have begun to construct the alternative paradigm of a global civil society. We can expect many ebbs and flows, many relapses and pitfalls, endless discussion about the failure and character of democracy, and yet the cumulative drift of the normative project has been and remains dedicated to the deepening and the expansion of democracy in relation to all fields of human endeavour (Falk 1995: 254).

Conclusion Cosmopolitanism means ‘world citizenship’ and implies membership on the part of all individuals in a universal community of human beings as moral persons. A more precise definition is somewhat difficult to formulate because, as this chapter has attempted to show, cosmopolitanism is a dynamic concept that has acquired different nuances and emphases over the course of time. Much of this dynamism comes from changes in society— from the classical polis to the forces of globalization—as well as from the different interpretations by theorists of the consequences of those changes for the cosmopolitan tradition of moral and political thought. With the different ways of emphasizing cosmopolitan principles and the complexity of national interests, and the implications of radical political transformation, it is not surprising that the meaning of cosmopolitanism continues to be the subject of often intense debate.

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Yet for the purposes of the remainder of this book we need to indicate a conceptual framework that provides a clear identification of what cosmopolitanism essentially is in today’s world and in the context of global politics. Therefore in light of the analysis of this chapter, where does the project of establishing cosmopolitanism as a viable alternative to liberal internationalism and above all, to realism, now stand? Based on the three cosmopolitan ‘moments’ examined here, there are three elemental characteristics to the core of cosmopolitanism which help to demarcate its guiding principles with regard to the status of contemporary and future global politics: moral universalism, juridification and institution building. The first characteristic reflects both the Stoic idea of the worldwide community of human beings and Kant’s argument that our fundamental rights as well as our obligations towards others know no borders. While it may be difficult to identify with or cultivate a sense of solidarity with humanity as a whole, impartial recognition of the rights and welfare of all persons constitutes a potent ethical perspective applicable to humanity as such. Cosmopolitans accept and embrace the fact of human diversity yet that diversity exists within and across communities that expand ultimately to the widest circle of humankind. No matter what other attributes each of us possesses we all qualify for equal membership in the universal human community and ‘neither race nor nation determines the value of a human being’s life and experiences’ (Singer 2002: 154). The second characteristic lies in the emphasis on the juridicopolitical grounding of moral universalism within the public sphere through the codification and extension of right within the overlapping spheres of domestic, international and cosmopolitan law. Human rights are paramount moral claims to certain basic liberties, needs and interests to which all human beings as individuals and members of the human community are entitled. Yet such claims must be treated as juridical norms embedded within public legal orders if they are to be effectively secured, recognized and exercised through the full spectrum of social interactions upon which human existence depends. Given the increasing global interconnections characteristic of globalization, in addition to the moral value of the dignity of individual human beings, the juridification of humanitarian norms must also become progressively more global.9 When taken together, moral universalism and the progressive juridification of humanitarian norms express the cosmopolitan belief that individuals and political communities have moral obligations not only to compatriots, but also to members of other societies in the form of both the wider society of states and the universal community of humankind. The second elemental characteristic leads directly to the third, in so far as the worldwide expansion of humanitarian legal norms and juridical systems implies the institutionalization of such norms beyond the boundaries of nation-states. The third characteristic of cosmopolitanism thus refers to the necessity of constructing an institutional basis for an effective cosmopolitan

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public sphere. Cosmopolitan global politics aim to reform the institutional framework that currently organizes international relations in order to promote the conditions necessary for the realization of an effectively functioning cosmopolitan law, and for the implementation of innovative solutions to pressing social issues of global scope. Global institution and regime building through legally regulated public initiatives ideally leads to a process of governance manifested at a variety of levels and produces an integrated political system operating from the local, to the national, to the global. Ultimately cosmopolitan global politics aims to create a set of supranational institutions that gives material expression to the normative and juridical principles of cosmopolitan justice, as articulated in the introduction to this chapter. The following chapters aim to examine some of the ways in which the construction of a regulative cosmopolitan political framework is already being composed. Notes 1 2 3

I employ the term ‘moments’ in light of the essay by Fine and Cohen (2002). An excellent treatment of this period of moral and political theorizing is contained in Schlereth (1977). Kant goes on (pp. 106–7) to condemn unjust practices of international relations, such as European colonial domination, that fail to live up to the standards of cosmopolitan law: If we compare with this ultimate end the inhospitable conduct of the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial states, the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great. America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc. were looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native inhabitants were counted as nothing …. And all this is the work of powers who make endless ado about their piety, and who wish to be considered as chosen believers while they live on the fruits of iniquity.

4 5 6 7 8 9

Martha Nussbaum (1997b) provides a useful discussion of the influence that Stoicism had on Kant. For a useful discussion of the possibility of creating a global people’s assembly along these lines, see Falk and Strauss (2000). See Patomäki (2003). See, for example, Doyle (2000) and Russett (1993). See, for example, Huntington (1991) and Whitehead (2002). I borrow the concept of ‘juridification’ from Jürgen Habermas, who uses the term to refer to the growth of overlapping spheres of modern law. The extension of public law represents a positive normative concern for individual rights, universalism and juridifying the process of democratic legitimation, although of course the growth of law also raises problems related to the expansion of administrative powers. See Habermas (1987) and (1996).

Chapter 2

Human Rights and the Foundation of Cosmopolitan Global Politics Among the most important developments since the last half of the twentieth century has been the emergence of a new law and politics of human rights. Indeed a statement often repeated in recent years both in scholarly circles and in the mass media is that we now live in an ‘age of human rights’ (Bobbio 1996). The reasons for this statement are simple: in a relatively brief period of time a large number of declarations, treaties, organizations, institutions, commissions and networks created for the purposes of promoting and defending the rights of individuals have sprung up across the globe. The swift progress of human rights in global politics has raised hopes for a better world; the expectations are that human rights will promote political liberties, lead to the enhancement of the social bases of human welfare and increased security, as well as to international relations characterised by peaceful cooperation and constructive interdependence. The formal system to which these expectations have given shape consists of the contemporary international human rights regime. In a now classic definition formulated by Stephen Krasner, regimes are conceived as ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1983: 2). The contemporary international human rights regime has developed concurrently with and under the auspices of the United Nations system and constitutes a set of norms, institutions and procedures that most states now accept as binding to at least some degree. Consequently the international human rights regime represents what is perhaps the most significant development of cosmopolitics in the current phase of human history. When we use the language of human rights, make a donation to a human rights organization or experience the sense of shock that comes from viewing human rights atrocities televised on the evening news, we tend not to think much about the many principles, norms, rules, institutions and procedures that make possible the very existence of the international human rights regime. But this regime has a long and rich history of theories, ideas, values and contexts behind it. The story of the human rights regime’s evolution is one of a process of invention and reinvention, especially over the past half century in which individuals and groups have appealed to the idea of human rights in order to respond to varying social and political

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conditions and to help shape the world in which they live. It is this notion of the human rights regime as a socially constructed system—that is, as a moral and political project devised by human beings that shapes and constrains actors’ expectations and behaviour, and whose meaning and scope are subject to change in global politics—which informs this chapter.1 The first section highlights some of the more important theoretical milestones along the developmental path of contemporary human rights with an eye toward connecting the idea of human rights to cosmopolitanism as conceptualised in the preceding chapter. This section is followed by a brief survey of the UN and the formation of the global human rights regime following the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The third section examines some of the specific ways that human rights have been realized in global politics, including how transnational social movements have utilized human rights to contribute to what can be regarded as broadly cosmopolitical developmental processes. Theorising the Origins of Human Rights: a Brief History The contemporary human rights regime and the conception of universal human rights embodied within it is built upon a long history of political and philosophical theorising about the rights and duties of individuals and communities. The historical development of the concept of human rights intersects in significant ways with the cosmopolitan tradition surveyed in the previous chapter. This is because the idea of human rights ‘has from the outset been universalist in aspiration and global in its scope of operation’ (Beetham 1999: 137). This is not to say that all theoretical interventions in the history of social and political thought about rights are compatible with cosmopolitanism. Yet the contemporary concept of human rights, at least in regard to its scope and content, now has clear cosmopolitan components and is perhaps the most powerful expression of cosmopolitanism in the realm of global politics. One of the earliest ethical traditions to have shaped the character of modern thinking about human rights is that of natural law. Natural law doctrine is grounded in ancient Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christian scripture, and Roman moral and legal thought. Major representatives of the classical natural law tradition include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Aquinas. In its basic form natural law theory holds that there are immutable higher laws of nature (of both the universe in general and human nature) that often are thought to exist as part of the law of God. These laws constitute objective prescriptions about right conduct. Through their use of reason, a common faculty endowed to all human beings, humans are able to access and act in accordance with the universal values of natural laws and thereby bring about the moral and political order required for the common good. Natural law thinkers thus hold that human beings share a common ability to distinguish

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right from wrong and that humans can deduce rules of moral conduct consonant with the universal nature of right and wrong. While the early natural law theorists did not have a clearly defined notion of human rights, they did lay the groundwork for thinking about the essence of being human as a moral good often formulated around the concept of justice. Plato formulated an influential argument for the realization of human rational capacities in accordance with the nature of the good through his conception of social justice as various classes performing their proper functions and of individual justice as the proper functioning of the parts of the soul (Plato 1993). Similarly Aristotle suggested that because humans are by nature political animals they are capable of attaining their highest good only in a just state conceived as a form of natural association that serves the public interest of all. In the political community the telos of human good can only be achieved through the rational pursuit of collective interests guided by the most proper means formulated in the laws of a mixed government or polity. ‘Rightly constituted laws’, Aristotle argued, ‘should be the final sovereign’ and therefore should bind all equally whether governed or governing (Aristotle 1996: 127). In the just polity the rule of law guarantees both the obligations and rights of citizens, most fundamentally the rights to property and to participation in the public life of the community. Justice is then conceived by Aristotle juridically as consisting of either punishment or compensation for violation of citizens’ rights. Because Aristotle defined rights only in a restricted legal sense the rights of citizens were thought to vary across the different types of governments or constitutions that he identified. Cicero also contributed greatly to the theory of natural law, arguing that individuals have an obligation to respect their fellow human beings and that the laws of all political communities are legitimate only in so far as they conform to the higher law of nature. Thus an ethically good life is one in which human rationality is made to conform to the rational order of nature. In this way ‘right reason’ enables individuals to discern which human laws are compatible with the universal norms of natural law and which will therefore best promote the good of the commonwealth (Cicero 1928: 385–7). The Stoic ideal of a universal moral law binding upon all people influenced the development of classical Roman law and its notion of ius as what is objectively right. In the early Roman era, culminating in the initiative of Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, there emerged a classificatory scheme distinguishing between natural law (ius naturale) applicable to all creatures, positive civil law (ius civile) binding upon the members of particular municipalities, and positive law of nations (ius gentium) binding upon all humans through the rules and institutions that are shared in common across all nations (Boucher 1998: 184–5; Tuck 1979: 7–9). While the law of nations is conventional in comparison to natural law, it was nevertheless viewed as being informed by the objective norms of right and wrong embodied in the rational precepts of the laws of nature. The idea

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of ius gentium thus contributes to the development of the modern idea of a universal legal community constructed to enshrine and protect what is ‘right’ for humanity. Aquinas extends many of these points in his definition and classification of types of law. Aquinas defines law in general as a rule of human action determined by reason directed towards the common good shared by all humans (Aquinas 1988). He then distinguishes four forms of law—eternal law, natural law, divine law and human law—that are fundamentally related and inform the basic moral task of human beings: to do good and avoid evil. For Aquinas this task is the first precept of natural law. This precept is most importantly articulated in the system of posited human law in so far as human law embodies principles intended to promote justice and to guide political communities in fulfilling the common good of their members. Famously Aquinas declared that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’ and therefore fails to be morally binding. Tyranny is then defined as a form of political rule that acts contrary to the public good and perverts the course of justice. The sixteenth-century Thomist theologian and jurist, Franciso de Vitoria, amplified Aquinas’ views on law and facilitated the emergence of modern international law from the earlier tradition of ius gentium (Vitoria 1991). For Vitoria the norms of justice apply impartially to all humans regardless of where they live. Moreover he argued that the concept of ius is to be defined in two ways: first as that which is naturally or objectively ‘right’, and second as a subjective potential or power, that is, as ‘a right’. In short Vitoria paves the way for the emergence of the idea of natural rights—understood as the natural and personal power of individuals to claim that which is theirs by right (most importantly property as dominium)—from the natural law tradition. And because the law of nations is thought of by Vitoria as a body of norms derived at least in part from natural law that applies impartially to all peoples, it necessarily incorporates recognition of the natural rights of individuals as morally equal beings. Beginning in the seventeenth century the theory of natural law became secularized. The Dutch legal philosopher and diplomat Hugo Grotius, for example, advanced the argument that natural law can be regarded as independent of God. According to Grotius natural law is a dictate of ‘right reason’ in conformity with the rational and sociable nature of humanity, and the core doctrine of natural law is the right to self-preservation possessed equally by all individuals (Grotius 1925). Right reason includes the power of judging what is right, which is defined by Grotius as one of the moral qualities or powers essential to human nature. Grotius described these powers as rights, an interpretation that was to have a profound affect on later theorists. In this way Grotius helped initiate modern thinking about human rights by associating rationality with the idea that each person has rights simply by being human and therefore possessing a rational and sociable nature. In so far as Grotius emphasized characteristic traits of human behaviour as constituting the ground of natural law, it became possible to

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conceive of the essential condition and requirements of human being without depending upon theological presuppositions about God’s existence. Grotius also advanced the evolution of international law by claiming that the law of nations was a specifically human form of ‘volitional’ law constructed specifically for the purpose of regulating the external relations of states. Crucially Grotius argued that because the law of nations emerges through the voluntary agreement and will of states, all states are obligated to observe the terms of the body of law—including security of the natural rights of individuals and the sovereignty of states—to which they have consented. Agreement to abide by the rule of law thus helps to ensure a system of peaceful international association and respect for the rights of other individuals and states. The idea of reason, and of its proper use in thinking about correct human conduct, therefore becomes primary for the modern theorists who developed the insights of the natural law thinkers into a second significant concept, that of natural rights. Natural rights theory proposes that some essential feature common to all persons such as rationality grounds certain inherent rights in human nature. Typical of the natural rights attributed to humans by the theorists of the early modern period, such as Thomas Hobbes and especially John Locke, are those to life, liberty, property and happiness. A core idea of natural rights theorists, then, is that there are some basic or fundamental rights that we have simply because we are human beings. Because all persons everywhere share the essential attributes which make us human the rights that belong to us naturally are also universal. In Hobbes’s major work of political theory, Leviathan, he famously describes an amoral, prepolitical stage of human social development, a ‘state of nature’, where people live independently under conditions of suspicion, insecurity and conflict (Hobbes 1996). Hobbes argues that several motives including fear of death and the desire to have the material goods needed for a condition of welfare cause people to create a political society by means of a social contract. The basis of the social contract is natural law, which Hobbes identifies through a lengthy list of specific laws of nature that serve as rational precepts for the maintenance of social order flowing from selfinterested prudence. For Hobbes the source of natural law consists in the fundamental natural right to life of each person, ‘the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature’ (Hobbes 1996: 91). In order to escape the state of nature and create a government however, all persons must agree to mutually transfer their right (ius) of absolute liberty (as absence of constraint) to a political sovereign—the state or Leviathan—which is then empowered to enforce security by punishing those who violate the agreement to obey the laws (lex) of society. Although Hobbes conceives of the sovereign as the supreme authority it is important to note that the power of the sovereign is derived not from the divine right of kings but from the natural right of the people through the event of the social contract.

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The first of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government also presents a critique of the doctrine of divine right (Locke 1988). The Second Treatise advances Locke’s positive theory concerning the origin, extent and end of civil government. Locke, like Hobbes, begins his account with a description of the prepolitical state of nature, but in Locke’s view the state of nature is not ‘nasty’ and ‘brutish’ as Hobbes believed. Instead, Locke contends that the actions of people are constrained by natural law defined as the manifestation of human reason which restricts the egoism of pure self-interest and promotes more sociable forms of conduct. In the state of nature according to Locke, all persons are obligated to preserve their lives, their liberty and their possessions—Locke’s three basic natural rights to life, liberty and property—and moreover to assist others in doing the same. Inevitably however, the difficulties of enacting the precepts of natural law given the disorder found in the state of nature engender a desire to form a government. Through the mechanism of the social contract a government is created when everyone agrees to transfer their rights to execute the law of nature to a political authority. An important difference between Hobbes and Locke emerges at this point. For Locke the voluntary transfer of natural right to the sovereign is partial whereas for Hobbes it is absolute. People consent to obey the government only in so far as it effectively protects and guarantees their individual rights thereby enhancing their freedom; if it fails to do so or actively violates their rights the people are released from all ties of obedience and may rightfully overthrow that government. It is for this reason that Locke suggests that governments are essentially moral trusts established to govern for the public good and to provide collective protection of the rights of the members of the political community. Governments that either fail to protect or violate the rights of the people (or trustees) thereby breach the terms of the social contract, forfeit the authority given to them, and may be removed or reformed. Locke therefore increases the natural rights recognized in social contract theory and uses those rights to establish the supremacy of the people and to limit the authority of the government. From this perspective Locke supplies many of the ingredients for the modern political theory of liberalism and its emphasis on autonomy in the spheres of individual belief and action. While early natural rights theorists identified only a limited number of general rights, what is most notable about their doctrine is that those rights are understood to exist prior to and independently of any given political society. As such natural rights are inalienable, that is, they can be neither surrendered to nor conferred by government. Politically this notion coincided with the novel idea that the purpose of government is to protect the natural rights of its subjects, such that political authority is legitimate only in so far as it respects those rights. Clearly the ethical and political views of the natural rights tradition motivated, to varying degrees, the beliefs and actions of those at the fore of the revolutionary democratic struggles in France and America during the eighteenth century, struggles

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fuelled by ‘self-evident’ truths regarding the rights inherent to the nature of each individual. For example, the influence of Lockean theory is apparent in the following statement from the American Declaration of Independence (1776): We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) enumerated several principles similarly inspired by the doctrine of natural rights such as the following: 1 Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good. 2 The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. 3 The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. 4 Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law. The French Declaration and subsequent documents such as the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution (1791) articulated a variety of additional specific rights and liberties that were to be protected from the abuses of state power, such as freedom of religion, expression, the press, assembly and the rights of criminal defendants. In arguing that all humans possess certain natural rights that cannot be taken away from them natural rights theorists helped to specify two more related ideas, namely, equality and freedom, which have since played a prominent role in the elaboration of the concept of human rights. While equality can have several different meanings, in a fundamental sense the concept of natural rights implies that all humans are morally equal and therefore they possess equally the same basic rights. Early political expressions of the moral claim to human equality are found in the American

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Declaration of Independence which asserts that ‘all men are created equal’, and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which states: ‘All men are by nature free and equal in respect of their rights.’ Thomas Paine, a vocal advocate of the American Revolution, published The Rights of Man in 1791 as a revolutionary condemnation of tyranny and a recommendation that only democratic governments founded on the natural ‘rights of man’ are able to secure peace and justice in light of the equal moral status of all human beings. For Paine the prepolitical moral equality of all humans dictated that the ‘rights of man’ were universal in nature and belonged to all persons wherever they may be (Paine 1988: 171). Paine also noted that the idea of equal rights implied corresponding duties, in that such rights can only be secured as long as individuals were also obligated to respect the rights of others. While the precise character and conditions of equality vary from one theorist to another it seems at minimum to require that all persons be treated in a similar fashion out of respect for their rights. For natural rights theory, therefore, a conception of what human beings are like ‘by nature’ leads to a conception of how they ought to be treated. For this reason natural rights are often thought of as moral rights, that is, as general moral claims or entitlements that exist independent of formal recognition in a legal system; they are rights that all humans ought to have recognized. Critics have pointed out of course that even as such assertions of human equality have been made numerous individuals, such as women and assorted ethnic and religious groups, in fact have been treated unequally. One of these important critics was Mary Wollstonecraft who vigorously argued that all persons, men and women alike, possess the power of reason (Wollstonecraft 1975). Because reason is the source of the dignity and moral worth of human beings the equal possession of reason requires the equal moral worth of women and men. Consequently it is a violation of the dignity and worth of women to deny them social and political equality and the same rights as men. Wollstonecraft’s exposure of the hypocrisy of the idea of the rights of ‘man’ thus contributed significantly to moving the discourse of natural rights which had traditionally overlooked the historical inequality and marginalization of women toward becoming a discourse of human rights. Subsequently the language of equal moral rights has been effectively employed by individuals and groups in order to justify eliminating whatever arbitrary inequalities under which they suffer. Freedom or liberty is a strong complement to the idea that all people are equally entitled to fundamental rights. Generally speaking, freedom connotes an ability to act on one’s own choices and suggests an absence of constraint on one’s actions. Freedom is relevant to a theory of natural rights because those rights cannot be realized if our conduct is so constrained or obstructed that we are unable to act in order to pursue their fulfilment. The freedom to choose one’s own way of life, for example, is basic to most if not all theorists in the natural rights tradition. Liberty is often subtly

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distinguished from freedom by being defined as the specific use of freedom for some good, advantageous purpose or end. Thus as in the US Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, natural rights are in many cases designated as particular liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to own and exchange property, and freedom of religion. The underlying perception is that absolute freedom is not compatible with the respect and protection of the rights of all; at least some minimal constraints are needed to give equal consideration to each person’s rights. Immanuel Kant presented an influential moral and political theory that combines the concepts of reason, equality and freedom into the idea that human beings are ‘ends in themselves’ (Kant 1996, 1997). Because we are rational people able to choose our own ends, we should not be treated merely as means but respected as autonomous persons. Kant suggested that a civil state is justified on the basis of a social contract that expresses the conception of humanity as an end in itself. In a just government—and for Kant this required a republican constitution—the rights of humanity are secured, establishing a reciprocal obligation on the part of each citizen to respect the rights of everyone else (Kant 1991a: 99–102). Thus some limitations on freedom do exist through the rule of law and the state’s right to punish, but these limitations are legitimate since they actually increase freedom by prohibiting and redressing the types of wrongs characteristic of the lawless state of nature. For Kant, then, the value of legitimate government is that it guarantees our basic right to freedom and provides us a foundation from which to acquire other rights. From this brief history it is clear that the concept and discourse of natural rights contributed most significantly to thinking of rights as components of a cosmopolitan political morality. Such rights eventually were conceived as being universal in scope and as being the equal entitlements of individuals regardless of the specific historical, political and social context in which they lived. For this reason the language of natural rights helped to introduce the primary cosmopolitan principles of universalism, egalitarianism and individualism into the heart of modern debates about the moral status of human beings in domestic and global politics. Despite criticisms of the concept of natural rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—by such diverse thinkers as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx—the idea of the inherent rights of all human beings continued to appeal to expanding groups of theorists and activists, laying the foundation for the contemporary theory and practice of human rights. Nonetheless it was not until the widespread atrocities of the Second World War catalysed public opinion and the political action taken by world leaders that the contemporary global human rights regime began to take formal shape.

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The Global Human Rights Regime The contemporary philosophical and political dialogue on human rights has been greatly influenced by the natural rights tradition. Although the natural rights perspective has often been criticized by various competing theories it is nevertheless generally regarded as the primary precursor of contemporary human rights doctrine and remains an important concept in philosophy, politics and law. As mentioned above, Burke, Bentham and Marx strongly disapproved of the idea of natural rights. They argued that rights can make sense only if they are regarded as the result of political legislation, sovereign rule and positive law. Positivist legal theory for instance, came to view rights as presuppositions of domestic and international law rather than as imprescriptible natural rights. Criticisms of natural rights theory tend to focus on the claim that such rights are ‘self-evident’, pointing to the epistemological difficulty of determining norms that are deduced in some way from an objective, independent moral reality. Another criticism commonly levelled at natural rights theory is that it presupposes a more or less static human ‘essence’ as the foundation for such rights. However it is far from certain that natural rights must be read in such a strong metaphysical sense since such rights are treated as the socially recognized and protected moral claims of all persons. More pertinently the critic of natural rights faces the difficult problem of explaining the obvious moral deficiencies of many existing legal systems and of the positive rights generated by those systems without having recourse to any source of justification other than already established political authority and the systematic injustices possibly embodied therein. In the aftermath of the Second World War natural rights theory became central to the renewed attempt to protect humanity from the atrocities promulgated by unrestrained political machinations and unjust laws divorced from critical ethical and moral foundations. The general conception of human rights that had emerged by the start of the twentieth century was of a small set of political, civil and economic rights held by individuals upon which states were not supposed to infringe. Yet the specifically universalist and more broadly cosmopolitan characteristics of the idea of human rights were constricted in practice. While the idea of human rights played an increasingly important role in the domestic politics of a number of states from the time of the American and French revolutions its influence in international relations was minimal. There were some exceptions of course, such as the various treaties to abolish the slave trade (1862, 1885, 1890) and the Geneva (1864, 1899, 1907) and Hague (1899, 1907) Conventions setting out the obligations of states to allow for the provision of humanitarian assistance to sick, wounded and captured soldiers. In addition the International Labour Organization was established following the First World War for the purpose of developing labour regulations intended to protect workers’ rights, and the League of

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Nations introduced limited measures to protect ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities in a few parts of Europe. Yet there was little by way of a formal trend on the part of governments collectively to establish and enforce a system of internationally recognized human rights laws. This situation changed dramatically because of the horrific events associated with the Second World War, most particularly the organized murder of millions of innocent civilians by the Nazi government of Germany. Prior to the end of the Second World War, even before the full extent of Nazi atrocities became widespread public knowledge, the leaders of the democratic states fighting against the Axis coalition of Germany and Japan portrayed their efforts as attempts to halt the spread of totalitarian threats to freedom and human rights. In January 1942, the Allied governments adopted the ‘Declaration by United Nations’ in which it was asserted that defeating the Axis powers was ‘essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice’ (Nickel 1987: 1). One year earlier while speaking to the US Congress in his State of the Union Address President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed: In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way— everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception—the moral order…. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. (Ebenstein 1947: 81)

The ‘four freedoms’ identified by Roosevelt became the basic standards for the formal elaboration of international human rights undertaken by the United Nations following the Second World War. The United Nations was founded in 1945 when fifty-one of the world’s states sent representatives to San Francisco to establish a new collective-security organization which would replace the defunct League of Nations. The Preamble to the UN Charter explains that the fundamental objectives of the UN are to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ and to ‘reaffirm faith in

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fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’. In addition Article 1 of the Charter states that the UN is also intended to achieve ‘international cooperation in … promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’. This point is emphasized further in Article 55 which directs members to promote ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion’. Articles 56, 62 and 68 provide for the undertaking of cooperative action and the establishment of commissions to promote respect for and observance of human rights. All of these provisions are qualified by Article 2 (7) of the Charter which states that nothing in the Charter shall authorize the UN to intervene ‘in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state’. This controversial stipulation is intended to protect state sovereignty, yet it is crucial to recognize that the human rights provisions in the Charter and the expansive human rights regime developed subsequent to the formation of the UN have contributed to vigorous debates about and challenges to the nature and scope of sovereignty in a world that has become increasingly committed to the ideal of universal human rights. Moreover the inclusion of Article 55 in the Charter, which creates a binding obligation on all members of the UN to promote respect for and observance of human rights, thereby indicates that human rights are no longer only a matter of domestic concern but have become central to the very structure of the modern system of world politics. Although the Charter refers to human rights in several places it does not define what those rights are. Thus one of the first tasks the United Nations assumed was to produce a document that would specifically stipulate international human rights norms. The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt was established for the purpose of drafting an international bill of rights (Glendon 2001). The work of the CHR resulted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which was presented according to its preamble as a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’.2 The UDHR was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Because the UDHR is a resolution and not a treaty, it is not legally binding. However over time the Universal Declaration has become a part of customary international law. In addition the UDHR has been supplemented by two treaties that give human rights binding force in international law, both of which were adopted by the General Assembly in 1966 and entered into law in 1976: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The influence of the idea of natural rights is evident in contemporary human rights theory and law. For instance the Preamble to the UDHR begins by stating that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and

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inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world ….’ Article 1 of the same document asserts: ‘All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ Human rights are often delineated according to three stages. Under this scheme civil and political rights are defined as firstgeneration human rights, and economic, social and cultural rights are defined as second-generation rights. More recently a third generation of human rights has been articulated. These third-generation or ‘solidarity’ rights are thought to include development, a healthy environment and peace.3 The concept of generations of human rights serves some analytical and pragmatic purposes in helping to identify the character and content of different types of rights yet it is important to recognize the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights.4 Human rights embody aspects of both negative freedoms such as freedom from government intervention in the quest for human dignity, and positive freedoms, that is, rights to just governmental intervention in the quest for human dignity.5 Civil and political rights are sometimes characterized as ‘negative’ rights in so far as they entail the freedom of individuals from governmental interference. Economic, social and cultural rights are generally characterized as ‘positive’ rights in so far as they require the promotion of governmental policies designed to create the social conditions that enable individuals to flourish. It is clear though that the realization of civil and political rights often requires state intervention in order to guarantee the participatory rights of individuals while the progressive realization of economic, social and cultural rights requires safeguards to protect against the possible abuse of individual rights by the actions of government. Third-generation rights are typically characterized as rights that inhere in groups and not merely individuals. The concern for solidarity rights stems from the recognition of the broad common interests of humanity especially to certain basic conditions of life that are indispensable to the promotion of human dignity and well-being and to the effective fulfilment of other human rights. It is possible to identify four basic concepts from the natural rights tradition which have informed the contemporary idea of human rights as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 1 The equality, dignity and worth of each individual (Article 1). 2 The right of liberty to pursue the quest for human dignity against the abuse of political authority (Articles 2–21). 3 The right to basic necessities in order to ensure an existence worthy of human equality and dignity (Articles 22–27). 4 The obligations and responsibilities of individuals, states and the international order to ensure these rights for all (Articles 28–30).

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These basic conceptual and normative points have been formalized in a number of conventions and declarations in what is collectively referred to as the International Bill of Human Rights. The International Bill of Human Rights consists of the human rights provisions of the United Nations Charter, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two Covenants of 1966 on Civil and Political Rights, and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The moral and political principles declared in the UDHR provide the basis for a global consensus on the basic norms of universal human rights. This consensus was affirmed clearly in Article 2 of the Proclamation of Tehran issued by the participants at the 1968 International Conference on Human Rights which acknowledges that the Universal Declaration ‘states a common understanding of the peoples of the world concerning the inalienable and inviolable rights of all members of the human family and constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community’.6 The first of the UDHR’s thirty articles states that all humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights, an obvious cosmopolitan premise which informs the document as a whole. Article 2 further entrenches this premise as it asserts that all persons are entitled to the rights and freedoms set forth in the UDHR ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’. In short all persons are entitled to human rights simply by virtue of the fact that they are human beings. Articles 3 through 21 of the UDHR provide a substantive list of civil and political rights. Article 3 affirms the rights to life, liberty and security of the person, while Article 4 forbids slavery, the slave trade and servitude. Article 5 prohibits torture and other ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Articles 6–12 address a host of legal rights including equality of all persons before the law, proscription of arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, and the presumption of innocence until proved guilty. Articles 13–15 emphasise that everyone has the right to nationality, to freedom of movement within each state, to leave and return to one’s country, and to seek in other countries asylum from persecution. Article 16 states that all men and women of full age have equal rights as to marriage. Articles 17–20 acknowledge everyone’s right to property, to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression, and to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. Article 21 states that all persons have the right to take part in the government of his or her country, and introduces a presumptive right to democratic governance in so far as the ‘will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government’ as ‘expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage’. Articles 23–27 identify several basic economic, social and cultural rights. Article 23 asserts that everyone has rights to work and to equal pay for equal work, to just and favourable conditions of employment, to form and join

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trade unions, and to social protection, such as welfare, against unemployment. Article 25 states that everyone is entitled to rest and leisure, in the form of reasonable limitations on working hours and periodic paid holidays. Articles 25–26 declare that all persons have a right to a standard of living adequate for their health and well-being which includes food, clothing, housing, medical care and social security, as well as a right to free education ‘in the elementary and fundamental stages’. Article 27 recognizes the rights of all to participate in the cultural lives of their communities. The remaining provisions of the UDHR—Articles 22 and 28–30—offer guiding statements in support of the aims and scope of the Declaration, emphasising that everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which human rights and fundamental freedoms may be realized, and that national effort and international cooperation are crucial to the realization of rights indispensable for the dignity and development of the human person. They also state that individuals owe reciprocal duties to their communities for the purpose of respecting the rights and freedoms of others, and that no state, group or person has a right to engage in any activity destructive of the rights and freedoms articulated in the UDHR. According to the terms of the International Covenants, which are binding treaties that legislate what the Universal Declaration has declared, states undertake to respect and ensure the full complement of rights first articulated in the UDHR. The dominant themes in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are equality (equal treatment, equal protection of the law, equality of opportunity) and nondiscrimination on the bases of race, colour, sex, language, religion, opinion, origin, birth or status. In connection with nondiscrimination, members of minorities within states also are granted the rights in community with other members of their group to enjoy their culture, practice their religion and use their language. According to the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, states are supposed to take steps ‘individually and through international assistance and cooperation … to the maximum of their available resources … with a view to achieving progressively full realization … by all means, including legislative measures’ toward the fulfilment of the following rights: to work; to just and favourable conditions of work, including leisure; to join trade unions and to strike; to social security; to social protection of the family, mothers and children; to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care, social services, especially in the events of unemployment, sickness, disability, old age, or any other lack of livelihood beyond one’s control; to standards of physical and mental health; to education and training; and to take part in the cultural life of the community and benefit from any scientific progress therein. Again, the themes of equality and nondiscrimination are dominant in this Covenant. According to the standards for civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights laid out in the UDHR and the International Covenants, human rights are taken to be international and universal. In addition human

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rights are thought to be inviolable entitlements; in other words, they are supposed to work as normative trumps having priority when in conflict with other norms, values or goals. The rights articulated in the International Bill of Human Rights are also viewed as mutually supporting and protective of a range of interrelated and equally important categories or generations of goods.7 Moreover human rights are thought to imply advantages for individuals and groups, as well as obligations on an individual’s society and any other pertinent actor anywhere in the world. One of the major consequences of holding that human rights are international can be seen in the formal recognition that human rights are both international standards and a matter of international concern and are no longer only a matter of individual states’ domestic jurisdiction. By adhering to the UN Charter states are obligated to recognize the universality of human rights. Not only is the Universal Declaration considered an authoritative interpretation of the rights provisions of the Charter, it is also considered customary law since it is claimed in principle that all governments must now ensure the enjoyment of all the rights of the Declaration irrespective of whether they are parties to any other formal agreements. To put it another way, the universality of recognition and obligation on the part of every state and the universality of the applicability of rights standards to every human being is presumed in international human rights law. The International Bill of Human Rights aims not only to help establish the legal, political and economic climates in which individual freedom and equal dignity can flourish, but also to help protect the individual against governmental excesses everywhere. Following the massive atrocities committed during the Second World War it was argued that existing national protections for rights were deficient and that additional international protection was necessary. It was believed that some of the gross violations of rights carried out during the war period might have been prevented had an international system of protection been in place. Given the international nature of human rights however, it is still the case that human rights are to be implemented as rights enjoyed under the constitutional-legal system of domestic society. Indeed one of the primary reasons that an international law of human rights was promulgated was to induce states to rearrange their constitutional-legal systems in order to achieve the domestic guarantee of basic human rights. The aim of international human rights law, then, is to secure the universal acceptance of the whole range of rights and the substantive, universal enjoyment of normative standards in their integrity (Henkin 1981: 24–5, 259). When differences between national and international standards do exist, the latter are supposed to supplement national rights and in that way secure the same rights for all persons even though they live within different domestic systems. With the production of these formal human rights agreements the international political system has increasingly recognized that the rights and dignity of each human being ought to be respected and protected. Just as important, it is now the case that

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violations of human rights by governments are considered matters of international action and concern, justifying investigation, diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, criminal prosecution and perhaps, military intervention. While not an exhaustive listing, other specialist UN agencies relevant to the human rights regime include the Economic and Social Council, the Commission on Human Rights, the Human Rights Committee and the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is a principal organ of the UN and as established by Article 61 of the Charter, consists of fifty four member states elected to three year terms by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) (O’Donovan 1995). Under the terms of Article 62 of the Charter, ECOSOC may call for international conferences, make or initiate studies, prepare draft conventions for submission to the UNGA, and make recommendations to the UNGA in order to promote respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all. Two important procedures established by ECOSOC are based on its resolutions 1235 and 1503. Resolution 1235, adopted in 1967, empowers the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to investigate complaints about human rights violations in specific countries, and to report and make recommendations to ECOSOC which are also made public. Resolution 1503, adopted in 1970, permits the CHR to receive private communications or petitions from any individual, group or nongovernmental organization (NGOs) concerning allegations of human rights violations. The CHR may then appoint independent experts or an investigative committee with the consent of the state against which the allegations were made and subsequently submit a final report to ECOSOC which is made public. The Commission on Human Rights was established by ECOSOC in 1946 and is composed of fifty three member states elected to three year terms (Alston 1995: 126–210). Its first major accomplishment was, with Eleanor Roosevelt as chair, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The responsibilities of the CHR are wide ranging including the preparation of studies, recommendations and draft legal standards in the form of declarations and treaties, such as the International Covenants of 1966. As mentioned above, the CHR also serves as an investigative body under the auspices of ECOSOC as well as the General Assembly. Due to its broad mandate the CHR has created a large network of subsidiary bodies such as subcommissions, working groups, independent experts and special rapporteurs. In conjunction with ECOSOC the Commission also selects numerous nongovernmental organizations for consultative status which allows NGOs to attend UN and CHR meetings and submit documents relevant to the Commission’s deliberation. In doing so the CHR has greatly contributed to the growing influence of NGOs within the UN human rights system and contributed to the creation of productive partnerships between

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UN members and nongovernmental organizations concerned for the protection of international human rights. The Human Rights Committee (HRC) was established by Article 28 of the ICCPR and the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) was established by a mandate of ECOSOC in 1985 (Opsahl 1995; McGoldrick 1994). Both the HRC and the CESCR serve as supervisory bodies for the two International Covenants. In the case of the HRC which consists of eighteen independent experts elected to four year terms and who serve in their personal capacity rather than as state representatives, its responsibilities are to monitor the progress of states’ compliance with the ICCPR, to consider private petitions from individuals regarding alleged violations of their rights as set forth in the first Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, and to address matters relating to the abolition of the death penalty as directed in the second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR. The CESCR is basically analogous to the HRC. It too is composed of eighteen independent experts and is responsible for monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and issues annual reports on its findings to ECOSOC. Unlike the HRC however, the CESCR is not able to make use of a formal mechanism for receiving individual petitions. Finally, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) was established in 1993 following the recommendation that emerged from the UN World Conference on Human Rights that was held in Vienna that same year. The High Commissioner is appointed to a four year term by the UN Secretary General with the approval of the General Assembly and occupies the office on the basis of his or her personal capacity rather than as a state representative. The High Commissioner is empowered to address matters relating to the full spectrum of human rights primarily through providing advisory assistance to states about human rights, coordinating human rights activities and disseminating information throughout the UN system, facilitating the activities of UN public information and education programmes, and engaging states in dialogues intended to promote respect for internationally recognized human rights. Based on the extensive institution-building, development of implementation and enforcement mechanisms, policy coordination, and promotion and protection activities associated with contemporary human rights practice, Table 2.1 provides a concise picture of the rapid growth of the global human rights regime—from a declaratory to a strong promotional regime—since the end of the Second World War. Global Movements for Human Rights: Two Cases From the end of the Second World War the promotion and protection of human rights has rapidly assumed increased global salience. This has

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Table 2.1

55

Change in the Global Human Rights Regime, 1945–2000 1945

1960

1975

1990

2000

Global Regime

None

Declaratory

Promotional

Strong promotional

Strong promotional

Norms

None

Guidelines

Standards with exemptions

Global norms with exemptions

Authoritative global norms

Procedures

None

Weak promotion

Promotion

Strong promotion / monitoring

Strong promotion / monitoring

Source: Adapted from Jack Donnelly (2003: 130–31)

affected not only the domestic and international conduct and policies of states, but also the practices and influence of a constantly expanding range of nongovernmental organizations, advocacy groups, research institutes, and social movements committed to an assortment of human rights causes. This complex network of governmental and nongovernmental human rights groups constitutes a genuinely transnational social movement committed to cosmopolitan human rights principles (Risse et al. 1999). It is no exaggeration to suggest, then, that since its adoption in 1948 the Universal Declaration has become ‘the moral touchstone for all claims at the international level’ (Franck 1985: 232). Indeed, in the Final Declaration and Programme of Action produced at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, more than 170 states endorsed the universality and indivisibility of human rights first articulated in the UDHR, confirmed the legitimacy of the global human rights regime, and reaffirmed the idea that ‘it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms’. Consequently, there is now ‘not a single nation, culture or people that is not in one way or another enmeshed in human rights regimes’ (Morsink 1999: x). The transnational human rights movement has helped to expose numerous human rights violations around the world and to promote fundamental human rights and freedoms, often by publicising critical issues and problem areas and thereby raising the profiles of both specific human rights causes and the global human rights regime. A brief discussion completes this section, providing examples of two significant efforts by the transnational human rights network to address serious human rights violations or deficiencies in the scope of the human rights regime—that of apartheid and

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racial discrimination, and that of women’s rights and gender discrimination. This discussion is necessarily selective and therefore it will not examine a host of other successful attempts at mobilising and organizing various human rights actors across borders and with transformative implications for global politics.8 In a tragic irony the same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted also witnessed the electoral victory of the Nationalist Party in South Africa. Although racial discrimination had already been firmly entrenched throughout South African society from the time of Dutch colonisation in 1652, the Nationalist Party assumed power on the basis of its policy of apartheid—the formal and systematic organization of society according to official policies of racial separation, discrimination, and domination propagated by a white minority government. The nationalist government quickly mobilised to consolidate its power and introduced legislation designed to provide the foundation of the apartheid system. Some of the arcane laws passed during the first few years of the regime included the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, forbidding marriages between whites and nonwhites; the Immorality Act of 1950, criminalising sexual relations between whites and nonwhites; the Population Registration Act of 1950, requiring the registration of every person at birth according to strict racial categories (white, coloured, Indian and black); the Group Areas Act of 1950, designating residential zones according to race; and the Natives Resettlement Act of 1954, allowing for the forced removal of blacks from white-designated land. These and other laws deepened and extended previous racist legislation that restricted black ownership of land to thirteen percent of South Africa’s total area even though blacks constituted approximately eighty percent of the population, segregated public facilities including schools, reserved certain privileged jobs and prescribed higher rates of pay for whites, and restricted the movements of nonwhites through a notorious system of pass laws which required those over the age of sixteen to carry pass or ‘reference books’ consisting of identity papers and employment records. All of this resulted in the prosecution of millions of blacks, coloureds and Asians for violations of pass laws, the entrenchment of extreme economic inequalities designed specifically to advantage whites, and the relegation of blacks to inferior townships on the edges of white urban areas and to remote and desolate rural areas designated as ‘tribal homelands’ for particular ethnic groups amongst the African population. Resistance to apartheid on the part of the nonwhite communities was to a large degree inspired by the human rights ideals articulated in the Universal Declaration, an inspiration reflected also in the aims of social and political equality and self-determination embraced by the emerging national independence movements appearing across Africa, Asia and Latin America during the period of decolonisation following the Second World War (Mandela 1995; Ebrahim 1998). In 1952 the African National Congress

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(ANC), later led by Nelson Mandela, and the South African Indian Congress initiated a Defiance Campaign against the pass laws. Thousands defied the laws and in response the apartheid government introduced new criminal offences and penalties directed against those who refused to obey the pass laws. In December of 1952 the UN General Assembly established a Commission on the Racial Situation in the Union of South Africa which issued a report the following year stating that the policies of apartheid were ‘contrary to the whole doctrine repeatedly and firmly upheld by the United Nations’ and unjustifiably reduced the majority of the population ‘to a humiliating level of inferiority which is injurious to human dignity and makes the full development of personality impossible or very difficult’.9 While the Nationalist government ignored the Commission’s findings, the liberation movement continued to refine its vision of a free and nonracial democratic South Africa based on equal rights for all. Following a nationwide consultative process, on 26 June 1955 the Congress of the People consisting of more than three thousand people representing some two hundred organizations across the colour line, adopted the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter served as a blueprint for the liberation movement and constituted ‘a set of principles for the foundation of a new South Africa’ (Mandela 1995: 170). The Charter included in its principles that the ‘rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex’; that all people ‘shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions’; that all ‘shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose’; that ‘the law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to meet together, to publish, to preach, to worship and to educate their children’; and that all ‘shall be free to travel without restriction’ (Ebrahim 1998: 415–19). Unfortunately the Nationalist government reacted predictably, arresting many leaders of the liberation movement. Nelson Mandela and one hundred fifty-five other political leaders were arrested in December 1956 and put on trial for treasonable conspiracy, a capital offence. The trial lasted for more than four years but in the end all of the defendants were acquitted after the state failed to prove that the ANC and other organizations of the liberation movement sought to overthrow the government by violence. The apartheid regime itself was not above the use of indiscriminate violence however, as events just before the end of the Treason Trial demonstrated. On 21 March 1960, massive yet peaceful anti-pass demonstrations were staged across the country including the small township of Sharpeville just south of Johannesburg. There the police force fired on demonstrators, killing sixtynine blacks and wounding more than four hundred, many of them children. Rioting and protests spread across the country in response to news of the massacre and the government consequently declared a state of emergency and banned both the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress, forcing Mandela to continue his activities covertly while evading arrest.

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Photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre were printed on the front pages of newspapers around the world, further exposing the violent racism of the Nationalist regime. In addition the UN Security Council passed a resolution on 1 April 1960, which condemned the ‘policies and actions’ of the South African government responsible for the ‘killings of unarmed and peaceful demonstrators’ and called upon the government ‘to initiate measures aimed at bringing about racial harmony based on equality in order to ensure that the present situation does not continue or recur, and to abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination’.10 This was followed in November 1962 by a General Assembly resolution that denounced the Nationalist government’s ‘determined aggravation of racial issues by enforcing measures of increasing ruthlessness involving violence and bloodshed’.11 Significantly the UNGA resolution expressed recognition of the fact that the apartheid regime was able to maintain its hold on power by, in part, drawing upon economic trade and diplomatic relations with other countries. Accordingly, the resolution requested all UN members to take measures such as breaking off diplomatic relations with the Republic of South Africa, closing their ports to all South African ships, refusing landing and passage facilities to South African aircraft, boycotting South African goods, and refraining from exporting goods—including arms and ammunition—to South Africa. Moreover the resolution also established a Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid of the Republic of South Africa to report to the Security Council and UNGA, and to ‘keep the racial policies of the Government of South Africa under review’. While a number of states did comply with the terms of the UNGA resolution particularly in terms of limiting arms sales and shipments to South Africa, the Nationalist government nevertheless was able to continue to entrench its power and policies. The result was continually escalating cycles of repression, violence and resistance across South Africa. The brutality of the regime was typified by the arrest of Nelson Mandela who in 1964 was sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Robben Island. Further efforts to condemn, sanction and isolate the South African government continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as the expulsion of South Africa from the International Olympic Committee in 1970. In 1965 the UNGA adopted the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination which entered into force in 1969. This treaty to which more than 170 states are parties, proscribes any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

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In 1973 the General Assembly also adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which entered into force in 1976.12 This landmark convention declared that: Apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination … are crimes violating the principles of international law, in particular the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and constituting a serious threat to international peace and security.

The same year that the Apartheid Convention entered into force another defining moment in South Africa’s tragic history occurred. In June 1976 peaceful demonstrations by black schoolchildren in the township of Soweto against the compulsory introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black schools were met by violent opposition on the part of the police. The demonstrations soon spread across the rest of the country and in the aftermath hundreds of black youths had been killed and thousands detained by the government security forces. In a related event Steve Biko, founder of the South African Students’ Organization and prominent leader of the Black Consciousness movement, was arrested and murdered by security forces while in detention in September 1977. The combined effects of the police violence in response to the Soweto Uprising and Biko’s death proved to be a catalyst for world outrage about and transnational activism intent on helping to dismantle the apartheid regime. Across Europe and North America during the 1980s anti-apartheid demonstrations added to the pressure of international condemnation of the apartheid system. In 1983 the UN General Assembly once again issued a resolution denouncing the ‘racist regime of South Africa’ and its ‘inhuman policies’ and reaffirming ‘that apartheid is a crime against humanity’.13 The resolution further called for concerted action on the part of ‘the international campaign against apartheid’—involving states, the UN and its various agencies, journalists, labour unions, educational institutions, churches, and multinational corporations—in order to exert continued economic and political pressure against the regime particularly through exclusion from the international community, an oil embargo, and comprehensive economic sanctions. The resolution thus prompted multinational corporations— including Coca-Cola, General Motors, IBM, Citibank and Barclays Bank— to withdraw their funds and institutional investments from South Africa, an initiative mirrored by a divestment movement on university campuses designed to pressure universities into severing their financial links with any corporations doing business in the country. By the late 1980s the combined efforts of the transnational anti-apartheid movement and the internal liberation struggle had severely weakened the ability of the South African government to implement and enforce its policies effectively (Black 1999).

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In 1989 F. W. de Klerk replaced P. W. Botha as President of the republic. Soon thereafter de Klerk initiated secret negotiations with Nelson Mandela intended to develop a framework for the gradual dismantling of the apartheid system. In February 1990 de Klerk announced that the ban on antiapartheid organizations was to be eliminated, that political prisoners— including Mandela—would be freed, and that the state of emergency would be lifted (Mandela 1995: 556). Over the next three years meetings between the government and representatives of all the major liberation organizations under the designation of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa led to the drafting of an interim Constitution to serve as the basis for the first post-apartheid government. The first nonracial, universal-suffrage election in South Africa’s history occurred on 26–29 April 1994, resulting in a landslide victory for the ANC. Nelson Mandela was appointed as president of the new democratic South Africa, serving for a five year term during which he advocated reconciliation between and respect for the human rights of all South Africans. The interim Constitution was replaced by the permanent Constitution in 1996, with the latter regarded by many as being ‘the world’s leading example of a transformative constitution’ (Sunstein 2002: 224). This is because the Constitution’s Bill of Rights explicitly incorporates all three ‘generations’ of human rights, ranging from traditional civil and political rights to socioeconomic rights (such as rights to housing, health care, food, water, social security and education) to solidarity rights (such as the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources).14 Consequently, in rejecting its violent and racist past the new democratic South Africa has sought, in the words of its Bill of Rights, ‘to promote the values that underlie an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom’. Another important transnational movement in contemporary global politics and human rights concerns the treatment and status of women. The universal character of human rights requires that all human rights be secured equally for men and women. Unfortunately women around the world are still consistently denied many of their rights simply because of their gender. This is true not only in many developing countries where traditional social roles and cultural values often conflict with the ideals of gender equality, but also in industrialised nations where women are discriminated against in both overt and covert fashion. Violations of women’s human rights take many forms: women have less access to education and training, so that illiteracy is much higher among women than men; women are paid less than men for the same jobs and the majority of the unemployed are women, leaving them in a subordinate social and economic status; and women continue to be subjected to violence resulting in physical, sexual and psychological harm, in the home (domestic abuse), the workplace (sexual harassment), the community (rape, prostitution, slavery), and by the state (abuse in prisons and rape as a form of political violence or genocide). While steps have been

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taken to address the specific problems facing women in their search for equal rights, such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, violations of the rights of women continue to be a common affront to their human dignity. As with racism and racial discrimination, a global human rights regime directed towards the elimination of sexism and discrimination based on grounds of sex has developed in the wake of the formation of the United Nations. The preambles to both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration affirm the ‘equal rights of men and women’ and Article 2 of the UDHR (as well as the ICCPR and ICESCR) further entrenches equality without regard to sex in the principle of nondiscrimination. The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was established by ECOSOC in 1946 and its first chair was Bodil Begtrup, who had also helped to draft the UDHR while serving as Denmark’s representative on the Commission on Human Rights (Morsink 1999: Chapter 3). The CSW consists of forty five member states elected by ECOSOC to four year terms. Its primary functions are to prepare reports and recommendations to ECOSOC for the purpose of monitoring women’s rights in the political, economic, social and educational domains, and to make recommendations to ECOSOC on urgent problems concerning women’s rights which require immediate attention. One of the earliest results of CSW activities was its contribution to the drafting of the Convention on the Political Rights of Women which entered into force in 1954 and is the first international treaty specifically directed to protecting women’s human rights, particularly universal suffrage and the equal rights of women to participate in politics and hold public office. CSW was also a motivating force behind the ‘mainstreaming’ of genderrelated issues into all policies and programmes in the United Nations system. Its efforts in this regard led to the United Nations General Assembly declaring the Decade for the Advancement of Women between 1975 and 1985. During this period three World Conferences on Women were held in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). A significant product of these conferences was the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1979.15 This treaty, which entered into force in 1981 and to which nearly 180 states are parties, condemns ‘any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex’ which impairs the ability of women to exercise their human rights and requires states to take ‘all appropriate measures, including legislation, to ensure the full development and advancement of women, for the purpose of guaranteeing them the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men’. The treaty is comprehensive in scope and includes articles that cover such concerns as political participation and women’s rights to vote, employment, healthcare, education and nationality. Article 17 of CEDAW established a Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The CEDAW Committee consists of twenty three independent experts elected to

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four year terms who serve in their personal capacity rather than as state representatives. Its responsibilities are to monitor the progress of states’ compliance with CEDAW, and to make recommendations to ECOSOC with regard to the promotion of CEDAW and specific issues related to CEDAW articles (Shalev 2000). A fourth World Conference on Women and a concurrent NGO Forum were held in Beijing in 1995. The conference and forum were attended by nearly fifty thousand people including state representatives and delegates from UN agencies, intergovernmental organizations and NGOs. Under the theme of ‘Action for Equality, Development, and Peace’ the conference was highly successful in raising international awareness of deeply entrenched social, cultural, economic and political practices—in both the private and public realms—which perpetuate inequality and discrimination against women. Given the pervasiveness of such practices, the conference delegates adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action to express the integral place of women’s rights within the global human rights regime and to call for widespread changes in values, attitudes and priorities throughout all levels of public, private and nongovernmental sectors of society. Consequently the Declaration and Platform of Action focused on the necessity of viewing women’s rights as embedded within a broader context of social justice and called for strategic action across the following ‘critical areas of concern’:16

• • • • • • • • • • • •

the persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women; inequalities and inadequacies in and unequal access to education and training; inequalities and inadequacies in and unequal access to health care and related services; violence against women; the effects of armed or other kinds of conflict on women, including those living under foreign occupation; inequality in economic structures and policies, in all forms of productive activities and in access to resources; inequality between men and women in the sharing of power and decision-making at all levels; insufficient mechanisms at all levels to promote the advancement of women; lack of respect for and inadequate promotion and protection of the human rights of women; stereotyping of women and inequality in women’s access to and participation in all communication systems, especially in the media; gender inequalities in the management of natural resources and in the safeguarding of the environment; persistent discrimination against and violation of the rights of the girl child.

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The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 1995 and the UNGA subsequently mandated that the Commission on the Status of Women undertake a programme of review and appraisal of progress with respect to the Platform for Action. The result of this programme was a special session of the General Assembly—called Women2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the Twenty-first Century—held in 2000 and organized as a five year follow-up to the Beijing conference. At the conclusion of the special session the UNGA adopted a ‘political declaration’ that emphasises the obligations of states to implement effectively the Platform of Action, so as to develop a ‘national and international enabling environment’ capable of ensuring ‘the realization of societies in which both women and men work together towards a world where every individual can enjoy equality, development and peace in the twenty-first century’.17 The status of women clearly has become a central issue in contemporary global politics.18 This has not always been the case and many critics have pointed out that national and international politics as well as traditional political theories have excluded women by failing to recognize that the pervasive occurrence of inequality, discrimination and sexual violence in the lives of countless women around the globe are serious violations of universal human rights. Not only are various cultural beliefs and practices harmful and unjust to women—of which many practices are traditionally features of the domestic realm to which women are too often exclusively relegated—but also the abuses that many women suffer are often unrecognized in political and legal systems characterised by discriminatory and unequal power relations (Peterson and Parisi 1998). In this way women and the human rights to which women are entitled have too often become marginalised or excluded both socially and politically, informally and formally. In addition to the concern with the general social and political status of women a number of specific violations of women’s human rights have been the focus of attention in recent years. One of the more prominent of these has been the campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM refers to the partial or full removal of the female genitalia through one or more of the following procedures: clitoridectomy, which involves excision of the prepuce (clitoral hood) and is often referred to as ‘female circumcision’; excision of the prepuce as well as the clitoris and partial or total excision of the labia minora; and infibulation, which involves excision of the prepuce, clitoris, labia minor and majora, followed by stitching together the two sides of the vulva leaving only a small opening to permit the passage of urine and menstrual blood (Toubia 1995). FGM procedures are typically conducted on girls between the ages of four and eight and commonly are performed without anaesthesia, while the girl is held down by adults and cut with tools such as knives, razor blades, scissors, a tin lid or shards of glass.19 The World Health Organization has estimated that the

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most common type (nearly 80 per cent) of FGM is excision of the prepuce, clitoris and labia minora, and that approximately 15 per cent of FGM cases entail infibulation. The World Health Organization has also estimated that roughly 2 million girls and women are subjected to FGM procedures each year, with most of these procedures occurring in Africa but also across many Muslim countries of the Middle East and Asia and in parts of Latin America. FGM is regarded by proponents as a respected cultural practice viewed by many traditional communities as an important initiation rite and as a beneficial method for controlling women’s sexual desire and ensuring female abstinence until marriage. However the potential physical and emotional effects of FGM can be severe. Not only can the procedures cause intense pain but they may also result in shock, haemorrhage, chronic infections in the kidneys, urinary tract and reproductive tract, infertility, susceptibility to HIV infection and, of course, death. In addition, lasting damage to the genital area leads to painful sexual intercourse and childbirth, and may also induce psychological effects such as anxiety, terror, humiliation and betrayal. Because of the acute risk to women’s health and well-being that FGM poses, and the fact that the procedures are conducted largely without the consent of the girls being operated on, the practice of FGM began to garner serious attention during the late 1970s at the time of the UN’s Decade for the Advancement of Women. Numerous activists, scholars and nongovernmental organizations pointed out that a traditionally ‘private’ custom such as FGM is in fact a public practice embedded within and justified by societal norms and institutions which perpetuate violence against women and inequality in gender roles. In response, in 1983 the UN directed its Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities to undertake a study of FGM and its effects on the lives of women. It was noted that FGM could not be justified simply on the basis of it being a customary cultural practice and that the attempt to do so ran counter to Article 5 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women which declares that states will take measures to ‘modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’. Further international pressure was brought to bear on the matter with the adoption of the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women which condemns gender-based violence ‘both in public or private life’, and the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action which calls on governments, NGOs, the media and the private sector to develop preventive programmes ‘for both men and women that emphasize the elimination of harmful attitudes and practices, including female genital mutilation’. As a result of intensive international attention and pressure FGM has been criminalised in a growing number of countries

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and some women have been granted asylum as refugees on the grounds that the practice of FGM in their home countries constitutes a form of acute persecution which violates their fundamental human rights (Rahman and Toubia 2000). Conclusion The two cases of the transnational human rights network at work discussed in this section could be easily supplemented by many additional examples— concerning for instance, campaigns on behalf of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, victims of torture, child labourers, the enslaved, and refugees—which have been able to command virtually universal support. These and other pressing issues have been increasingly addressed through the inherently cosmopolitan theory and practice of human rights which, in turn, has contributed to the emergence of an expanding humanitarian outlook in global politics. This is not to suggest that all human rights ideals have been translated into practice, that enforcement of human rights standards is always effective and adequate, and that the discourse of human rights never meets with resistance. Clearly the promotion, implementation and protection of human rights has been less than perfect, and much more must be done in these areas before one can claim unequivocal success for the global human rights regime. Yet it is also evident that the human rights regime has made astonishing progress in an incredibly short period of time and that the concept of human rights has been adopted as the universal moral-political discourse of our age. Human rights have therefore become the foundation of contemporary cosmopolitics in so far as the global regime integrates the three elemental characteristics of moral universalism, juridification and institution building. The theory and practice of human rights has transformed the way in which global politics is conceived and put into action. Individual human beings whatever their race, gender, nationality or sexuality, are now justly regarded as equal members of a common moral, legal and political community, given tangible expression through the formation of a global network of agencies, institutions and organizations constructed for the purpose of shaping human lives in a more cosmopolitan direction. Consequently the globalization of human rights has become the cornerstone of the project of cosmopolitan global politics. Notes 1 2 3

See Jack Donnelly (1999). The UDHR and other human rights documents can be consulted in Steiner and Alston (1996). On third-generation rights see UNESCO (1980) and Marks (1981).

66 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Cosmopolitan Global Politics On the dangers of employing the metaphor of successive generations of human rights, see Wellman (2000). See the useful discussion of how the ideas of positive and negative freedoms intersect with the natural rights tradition in Habermas (1994). Online at http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/b_tehern.htm. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted by the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights, emphasized that human rights are treated as ‘indivisible and interdependent and interrelated’ (Paragraph 5). For useful illustrative discussions of contemporary human rights struggles, see Drinan (2001), Dunne and Wheeler (1999), and Falk (2000). I take up the issue of genocide and other gross human rights violations in Chapter 4. Report of the United Nations Commission on the Racial Situation in the Union of South Africa, A/2505 and Add.1 (1953). UN Security Council Resolution 134, 1 April 1960, Doc. S/4300. UN General Assembly Resolution 1761, 6 November 1962. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, UN General Assembly Resolution 3068 (XXVIII), 30 November 1973. UN General Assembly Resolution 38/39, 5 December 1983. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996, adopted on 8 May 1996 and amended on 11 October 1996. General Assembly Resolution 34/180, 34 UN GAOR Supp. (No. 46) at 193, UN Doc. A/34/46. Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Fourth World Conference on Women, 15 September 1995, A/CONF.177/20 (1995) and A/CONF.177/20/Add.1 (1995), Chapter 3, Section 44. UN General Assembly Resolution, S-23/2, 16 November 2000. See, for example, Grimshaw et al. (2001), and Ashworth (1999). World Health Organization, ‘Female Genital Mutilation: Report of a WHO Technical Working Group, 17–19 July 1995’, (unpublished document WHO/FRH/WHD/96.10), Geneva, 1996, cited in Amnesty International, ‘Female Genital Mutilation: A Human Rights Information Pack’, online at http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/femgen/fgm1.htm.

Chapter 3

War, Peace, and the Transformation of Security The lessons learned from international politics in the post-Cold War era and the nature of global conflict today compel us to accept an important fact: it is impossible to protect and enhance human freedom and well-being exclusively through the traditional paradigm of national security. The security of the individual human being must also be taken into consideration. International political theory and practice must come to accept this global reality since all too often the best laid plans for achieving state security have come at the cost of an increase in human suffering, fear and deprivation. Government policies, especially those of rampant militarism, intended to protect territorial integrity and state power from the perceived threats of outside forces often negatively affect the lives of individuals within single states and increasingly throughout regions and the globe as a whole. The security of the human person requires the promotion and protection of core values, and the reconstruction of local, national, and international social environments and political relations which favour increased safety, freedom and well-being. More particularly what is required is a new global outlook: an approach that recognizes the highly interdependent nature of human life across political and territorial boundaries, and the growing irrelevance of the traditional conception of state sovereignty as an end in itself. Integrating cosmopolitanism with the concept of human security may best represent this new global outlook. Cosmopolitanism claims that we owe duties of justice to all the persons of the world and thus that normative theories of global politics should focus first on the interests or welfare of persons rather than of states. For this reason cosmopolitanism is most basically contrasted to the traditional state-centric or realist approach to international relations. While statism requires noninterference into the affairs of other states in order to protect the sovereignty of autonomous states, cosmopolitanism holds that state sovereignty is legitimate only in so far as it promotes fair principles of justice (which requires respecting persons and their rights). According to cosmopolitanism respect for state sovereignty per se provides no reason not to intervene when necessary, for example, to prevent humanitarian disasters and gross human rights violations. Thus cosmopolitan theorists have advanced various arguments intended to contest realism and its apparent

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insensitivity to the causes and effects of humanitarian injustices in which states are often complicit. Human security is a concept that has emerged in recent years from the work of critical international political theorists and policymakers, and has far-reaching implications for global activity beyond the realm of the classical conception of national security. The human security approach has both ethical implications for how we conceive our obligations towards other human beings and legal or institutional implications for assessment and management of threats to human safety and freedom. For this reason the concept of human security intersects usefully with the cosmopolitan project. For cosmopolitans as well as human security advocates the traditional claims to sovereignty and nonintervention on the part of states are being supplanted in international relations by a norm of humanitarian assistance driven by the human rights and security interests of individuals. This chapter first reviews the emergence of the concept of human security and its meaning and implications for challenging the dominant realist paradigm of state security and that paradigm’s rationale for the state’s monopoly on violence. The discussion then moves to a consideration of what constitutes a threat to security under the human security framework, threats which include many of the policies and actions pursued by the statist national security agenda. From there an argument is advanced in support of the idea of a human right to peace, this right serving as a core component of a cosmopolitan formulation of human security. Finally the chapter concludes by considering how a constrained version of just war theory can provide us with a framework for thinking about how we ought to respond to some of the most severe threats to human security while doing justice to the human right to peace. Changing Security Paradigms The modern theory and practice of international relations has been dominated by political realism, an approach that is committed to a unified view of power and national security as defining of the political world. Realism and its more recent manifestation as neorealism has a long history which includes major figures such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Reinhold Niebuhr, E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. The varied and complex contours of this history fall beyond the purview of this chapter. Here we are concerned only with the basic way in which realism as embodied in conjunction with the Westphalian inheritance of state sovereignty has shaped the contemporary security paradigm of world politics. This paradigm assimilates several of the following basic premises of realism: states are the primary actors in the world’s political system; states seek power as a means and as an end to ensure their survival in an anarchical world; power is defined in terms of the possession of resources

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and military might; states are rational, egoistic actors in so far as they pursue what is in their own best interests; and state interests are driven primarily by the necessity of national survival. In a realist international system states are concerned only to further their own interests and interstate cooperation is carried out only instrumentally and provisionally. In such a system relatively weak international institutions are the result of governmental practices based on the current distribution of power and states’ attempts to maintain or improve their relative ranking. Realists contend that states rarely join or comply with regimes that are not in their national interest, defined by the need to acquire, maintain and exercise power. In Hans Morgenthau’s words, ‘The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power’ (Morgenthau 1954: 5). International politics thus constitutes a competition over the balance of power and a continual effort to achieve national security in a world that is conceived as being inherently insecure. Somewhat paradoxically war and other forms of state-organized violence are regarded as the most effective instruments with which to assure national survival. This last point is made abundantly clear by a representative of twentiethcentury realism: ‘In international society all forms of coercion are permissible, including wars of destruction. This means that the struggle for power is identical with the struggle for survival, and the improvement of their relative power position becomes the primary objective of the internal and external policy of states. All else is secondary’ (Spykman 1942: 18). Realists often base their pessimistic view of interstate relations on a similarly pessimistic view of human nature. The egoism of states is merely a reflection of the egoism of individuals, for whom self-interest is the overriding passion. The corruption and ‘wickedness’ of human nature make conflict and insecurity inevitable features of human existence. Here Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature as a ‘war of all against all’ finds its expression in the supposedly anarchic structure of international relations. While the anarchy of the state of nature can be restrained by establishment of the sovereign state, the relations between states still occur in an ‘anarchical society’ due to the absence of an international hierarchical political authority (Bull 1977). The international order, it is thought by realists, necessarily consists of a system of independent, self-interested states, each assuming the worst about the others and seeking to ensure its survival in a dangerous, self-help world. Realists reject the possibility of any positive conception of long-lasting peace in the circumstances of international relations conceived as anarchic. The best that can be hoped for is a tenuous balance of power, that is, the maintenance of an ordered society of states brought about through the incessant contestation of opposing forces in world politics. In this system sovereign states—which in the abstract vary only in terms of their functional capacities—continually find themselves in a perpetual ‘security dilemma’.

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In the search for protection from other states’ potential aggression each state seeks to enhance its power, that is to say its military capabilities, either through its own means or with the limited assistance of allies and coalitions. Yet by doing so other states then perceive themselves to be threatened and consequently strive to further enhance their own power. The result is a vicious circle without resolution where security and insecurity are locked together in a self-perpetuating loop (Herz 1951). Each state is simultaneously thought to be a guardian of security and a threat to security, and an atmosphere of mistrust or fear clouds world politics. Because traditional security politics takes as its referent the state, the scope of security is limited to threats from other states. These threats are primarily of a military nature although they may include economic, environmental and cultural threats as well. The aim of national security policy is to secure the well-being of the state as such, that is, its sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence and domestic order. If the state is territorially secure, realists contend, then the individuals living in that state necessarily are secure as well. The desired balance of power is struck when the potential or actual violence and coercion embodied in each state is capable of being met by the retaliatory force of other states. In this way however violence is structured into the very functioning of the international system.1 Given the realist paradigm of international politics as a struggle for power, it can be argued that the traditional national security paradigm is inherently deficient as a means to actually obtain the desired end of security. In a world structured around the dictates of political realism an international system based on the relative distribution of military and economic strength is better characterized not in terms of security, but in terms of global insecurity. The world of the realists’ making is marked by the instability of power struggles, the casual resort to armed conflict, the pursuit of narrow self-interests, the hyper-production of weaponry, and the callous indifference towards the interests of persons beyond (and perhaps even within) the borders of each state. The limitations of the traditional view of security have become a central concern in security studies and international political theory since the end of the Cold War. In 1991, the Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance issued a report that recognized ‘challenges to security other than political rivalry and armaments’ and called for a ‘wider concept of security, which deals also with threats that stem from failures in development, environmental degradation, excessive population growth and movement, and lack of progress towards democracy’ (Stockholm Initiative 1991: 2–3). Three years later this wider concept of security was described as ‘human security’ in the United Nations Human Development Report 1994. As defined in the Report, human security includes ‘safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease, and repressions’, as well as ‘protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life’ (United Nations 1994: 23). The Report also list four essential characteristics of human

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security: (1) it is a universal concern, relevant to people everywhere; (2) its components are interdependent, reflecting global interconnectedness; (3) it requires greater attention to prevention rather than intervention after the fact; and (4) it is people-centred, not state-centred (United Nations 1994: 23–4). In 1995, the new concept of human security was portrayed in cosmopolitan terms in the Commission on Global Governance’s report, Our Global Neighbourhood, which stressed that the concept of global security ‘must be broadened from its traditional focus on the security of states to include the security of people and the planet’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 78). More recently the independent Commission on Human Security, co-chaired by Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen, published its report. The report stresses that ‘attention must now shift from the security of the state to the security of the people’ so as to ‘protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfilment’ (Commission on Human Security 2003: 2, 4). The more expansive formulation of human security represents a radically different approach to security from that offered by the traditional realist security paradigm. The fundamental difference in orientation between the two approaches is that for the traditional paradigm security means the protection and welfare of the state per se, whereas for the new formulation security means the protection and welfare of the individual human being. While the classical paradigm clearly is realist in that it is narrowly preoccupied with the state and national security interests, the human security paradigm is consistent with cosmopolitanism in that it adopts a more comprehensive approach concerned in the first instance with persons and threats to their existence and dignity. It should be noted that the human security paradigm does not suggest that national security becomes irrelevant; rather it becomes embedded within a wider framework of interests that takes the quality of life of the individual human being and the justice of fundamental social institutions as primary components of security viewed holistically. Along with the end of the Cold War and its ‘great powers’ rivalry, the past decade has seen increased recognition of a number of phenomena associated with globalization which challenge many of the norms enshrined in the Westphalian system. The entrenchment of global capitalism; the internationalisation of telecommunications and media; the explosive growth of supranational organizations and transnational corporations; the intensified flows of people, fashions, drugs, weapons and culture across borders; and the rise of global terrorism all have undermined the traditional claims that the state alone is able to guarantee the physical security, order, and integrity of a given territory and of the people who reside within it. It seems that not only is the state not as ‘self-reliant’ as it is portrayed to be by realists, but also that recent changes in the international system and how world politics are conducted—which include processes and agents of integration as well as fragmentation—demonstrate a plethora of challenges

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to the very existence of individuals and communities which are incapable of being addressed on the basis of the state-centric assumptions of the national security paradigm. Given the institutional and processual transformations occurring in conjunction with globalization, appealing to realist orthodoxy as a basis upon which to construct genuinely secure modes of human existence has become increasingly implausible. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there are strong reasons for believing that, in Harold Laski’s words, ‘Sovereignty is incompatible with the interests of humanity’ (Laski 1925: 64). Former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, who became well known for his advancement of the human security concept during his diplomatic career, captured the cosmopolitan character of human security when he observed that threats to human security are those that ‘strike directly home to the individual’ and ‘largely ignore state boundaries’. Such threats are often violent and systemic in nature, and require ‘action and cooperation at different levels—global, regional and local—if they are to be tackled effectively’.2 Human security concerns transcend the traditional statist confines of national security and tend to focus on elimination or prevention of the causes of threats to human security. The types of threats identified with the human security concept include armed conflict, ethnocultural violence, genocide, terrorism, violent crime, slavery, government repression, discrimination, environmental degradation, deprivation of basic needs, underdevelopment, and the spread of small arms, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. In sum, for the human security concept the core threats are those that present a clear and consistent (and sadly preventable) danger to ‘human life and dignity’ (UNDP 1994: 229). Another way of putting these last points is that human security ‘recognises that an individual’s personal protection and preservation comes not just from the safeguarding of the state as a political unit, but also from access to individual welfare and the quality of life’.3 Consequently the human security approach is concerned with both direct and indirect violence, or organized and ‘structural’ violence, none of the forms of which can be understood in exclusively national or territorial terms and many of which are exacerbated by the statist biases of conventional international politics. In addition to the commonly recognized forms of direct violence (such as international and domestic war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing) other forms of direct violence (including slavery, physical abuse, crime and terrorism) along with forms of structural violence (such as political repression, discrimination, and the lack of food, water and basic health care) are all identified as critical threats to personal safety, well-being and dignity. Table 3.1 presents a comparison of the different emphases of the traditional and human security paradigms. Because the new security paradigm places the individual’s well-being and dignity within the context of humanity rather than the sovereign state, the

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Table 3.1

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Comparison of Traditional and Human Security Traditional Security

Human Security

Vision of World Order

Sovereign territory

Transborder, global

Key Referent

States

Individuals and communities

Source of Threats

External threats

External and internal threats

Types of Threats

Direct violence

Direct and structural violence

Core Security Values

State power, territorial integrity

Individual well-being, safety, dignity

Means of Governance

Military competition, political hegemony

Sociopolitical, socioeconomic, environmental cooperation

Means to Security

Unilateral militarization, prudential alliances, ‘balance of power’

Diplomatic, technological, scientific, humanitarian, multilateral governance

Normative Scope

Exclusive, restricted, partial

Inclusive, comprehensive, universal

normative focus of realism gives way to that of cosmopolitanism. The security referent is no longer the citizen of a particular sovereign state but all persons understood as ‘members of a transcendent human community with common global concerns’ (Falk 1995: 40). Security is not the domain of a privileged few but the entitlement of all human beings. Neither is the goal of security simply the preservation of the state (or the society of states), rather it is the preservation of human well-being. The normative focus also shifts from that of power struggles and unilateral militarism as the means by which to obtain national security, towards recognition that genuine security can only be ensured through multilateral efforts aimed at evading or curtailing war and other forms of direct and indirect violence, protecting human rights, and providing the social and environmental resources needed for a safe and dignified human life. In short, human security is inseparable from conditions of peace.

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Human Security and the Human Right to Peace The concept of security, it was argued above, has been traditionally defined through a nationalistic-militaristic paradigm primarily as the military defence of the state involving various forms of direct and structural violence. With the end of the Cold War and the intensification of globalization this realist conception of security has become less pertinent. The concept of human security offers the possibility of an alternative, cosmopolitan interpretation of security, first and foremost by taking people rather than governments or national territory as its point of reference. This more inclusive interpretation of security takes as its fundamental goal protecting people from a range of nonviolent and, especially, violent threats to their lives, well-being and dignity. Given the transformation of the security paradigm it is necessary to identify new concepts that will help to provide content to the human security approach, and provide a basis from which to develop a deeper understanding of specific threats to both human security itself and the ways to realize the goals of human security. In this section the argument is made that a human right to peace is a justifiable and necessary cornerstone to the further elaboration of the human security framework. Adopting a human rights approach to human security is useful for several reasons. First, human rights are fundamental moral norms that aim to protect people from severe and pervasive threats to their well-being such as oppression, domination and exploitation. Second, human rights are also internationally recognized legal norms and thus provide specific and enforceable protections of individuals’ important interests, liberties or powers. Third, human rights are universal in the sense that all persons possess human rights simply because they are human beings; human rights therefore are applicable to all societies. Consequently given their cosmopolitan character and the fact that they function to prevent or minimize many of the critical threats to personal safety, well-being and dignity, human rights provide a normatively and pragmatically appropriate basis from which to advance claims to human security. One of the more promising attempts to link human rights and security is that developed by Henry Shue. Shue bases his argument on the concept of basic rights. For Shue there are three ‘basic rights’ namely universal rights to liberty, subsistence, and security. These rights are basic Shue contends, because ‘the enjoyment of them is essential to the enjoyment of all other rights’ (Shue 1996: 19). Shue grounds his concept of basic rights on a critique of the distinction between negative and positive rights, a distinction often appealed to in order to suggest that civil and political but not economic rights are genuine human rights. Shue argues however that human rights are functionally interdependent and that the negative-positive dichotomy is ‘intellectually bankrupt’ (Shue 1996: 6). This can be understood when considering the right to security in its most basic sense. The right to security

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requires both forbearance and positive action in order to be implemented effectively. Governments are required not only to refrain from direct and indirect violence against the individual but also to actively take measures to protect individual liberty and well-being from such threats. As Shue notes: ‘A demand for physical security is not normally a demand simply to be left alone, but a demand to be protected against harm. It is a demand for positive action … a demand for social guarantees against at least the standard threats’ (Shue 1996: 38–9). Shue makes a strong case for the high priority of security rights—along with subsistence and liberty rights—based on the argument that such rights must be effectively implemented in order for the exercise of other rights to be possible. By this Shue means that the implementation of basic rights supports our enjoyment of other human rights by making violations of those other rights less likely.4 The right to freedom of expression for instance could not be effectively exercised without the right to be protected from arbitrary arrest, that is, a fundamental right to personal security. One cannot genuinely enjoy freedom of expression without protection against the abuse of political authority, such protection helps to prevent violations of one’s other rights. Because ‘threats to physical security are among the most serious and—in much of the world—the most widespread hindrances to the enjoyment’ of other rights, it follows that ‘everyone is entitled to the removal of the most serious and general conditions that would prevent or severely interfere with the exercise of whatever rights the person has’ (Shue 1996: 21–2). Basic human rights may be defined, then, as paramount moral claims that every person has to an indispensable minimum level of treatment— including various freedoms, protections and benefits—needed for the viability and security of human life, and to which all human beings are entitled. The claims of right-holders impose correlative duties, such that human rights are violated when duty-bearers fail to fulfil their correlative duties without good cause. As Shue points out the duties correlative to basic rights are both negative and positive. Indeed the duties correlative to human rights are actually of three kinds, although each kind manifests negative or positive duties which attach to different duty-bearers in varying circumstances: (1) negative duties to avoid depriving right-holders of the objects of their rights; (2) positive duties to protect right-holders from being deprived of the objects of their rights; and (3) positive duties to aid rightholders when avoidance and protection have failed (Shue 1996: 51–64). Thus the correlative duties associated with basic security rights include a duty to avoid harm, a duty to protect from harm, and a duty to aid those threatened with harm. From the basic rights perspective it is possible to argue for the right to the highest attainable standards of peace for all. Embedding human rights—and the right to peace in particular—within a broader discourse of human security is both necessary and useful for dealing with some of the most

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serious consequences of war, conflict, and other violent and pervasive threats to human existence. Indeed the human right to peace can prove to be a valuable normative asset in trying to resolve human security crises and in justifying and guiding a wide range of security principles and programs. The idea that peace is a condition conducive to the realization of basic human rights has been formally recognized since the adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945, where it is stated that the purpose of the UN is ‘to maintain international peace and security’. In subsequent international instruments we find similar expressions on the contribution of human rights to peace. For example the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) provides in the Preamble that recognition of ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. Further references to the relationship between the preservation of peace and security and the protection of human rights are to be found in various other resolutions and declarations. However all of these documents share the view that the recognition and implementation of human rights will aid in creating conditions conducive to the emergence of peace. They do not speak of the right to peace per se. We do not find an explicit reference to peace as a human right until the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (article 23.1), which asserts that ‘All peoples shall have the right to national and international peace and security.’ In 1984 the UN General Assembly approved the succinct Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace. In four points the Declaration provides (1) that the peoples of our planet have a right to peace, (2) that the preservation of the right of peoples to peace and the promotion of its implementation constitute a fundamental obligation of each state, (3) that ensuring the exercise of the right of peoples to peace demands that the policies of states be directed towards the elimination of the threat of war and the renunciation of the use of force in international relations and (4) that all states adopt appropriate measures at both the national and international level to implement the right of peoples to peace. The concept of the right to peace suggests the right of persons to conditions of peace and security is indispensable to living a fully human life. It is my contention that the human right to peace is best defined as a right to a secure and nonviolent world, meaning a world that is not destructive of the central human capabilities characteristic of a safe and secure existence. Research on peace often distinguishes between ‘negative’ peace which denotes the absence of direct violence such as during a cessation of hostilities, and ‘positive’ peace which denotes the elimination of indirect forms of violence and the construction of just social institutions that guarantee equal opportunity, a fair distribution of power and resources, equal protection, and impartial enforcement of law. Proponents of the concept of positive peace—in much the same fashion as advocates of human security—usefully point out that mere absence of the direct violence of war does not preclude the presence of various forms of indirect or structural

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violence within a society (Galtung 1996). What we might call the comprehensive conception of peace integrates both its negative and positive characteristics, and thus focuses on both minimising the occurrence and effects of conflict and developing a just basic structure of society in order to diminish violent conflict’s underlying causes.5 We can describe the normative condition of comprehensive peace as ‘not the mere absence of fighting, but peace-with-rights, a condition of liberty and security that can exist only in the absence of aggression itself’ (Walzer 1997: 51). From the human security and peace approach it is possible to expose some of the structural practices that are the source both of threats to human security, and of violations of basic human rights. For example a state might not formally be at war either externally or internally but its social, cultural and legal institutions may be structured according to discriminatory beliefs and policies that deny basic rights and access to education, employment or health care to certain individuals. In cases where social practices deny education, housing, the opportunity to work or to participate in governance because of race, religion, sex and so forth, great psychological, social and economic harm is being done to human beings even if bombs and bullets are not being used. Such ‘unjust social arrangements’, as John Rawls has noted, ‘are themselves a kind of extortion, even violence’ (Rawls 1999: 302). Because both direct and indirect violence are the cause of many threats to a safe and secure human existence the human right to peace is concerned most fundamentally with security from armed conflict, whether domestic or international, and the structural violence associated with political oppression, domination, exploitation and state terrorism. Given this, peace can be equated with the absence—to the highest attainable standard—of direct and structural violence. Crucially then, the human right to peace is not to be equated with absolute pacifism in so far as there are, under some strict conditions, limited and justifiable uses of force. Specifically these are for purposes of protecting the human rights of individuals against serious harm caused by wars of aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity, and similar forms of widespread violence and gross injustice. I will return to this issue in the following section. As with the broader human security paradigm, direct and structural threats to human well-being and dignity are the primary focus of the human right to peace because the most severe effects of political violence are death, dislocation, harm to physical and mental health, and loss of freedom. Severe threats to human well-being such as chemical and biological weapons, landmines, and torture not only kill, but maim, disfigure, shorten a person’s life, cause permanent physical and emotional disabilities, and lead to temporary or recurring illness. Violent threats to human security also extend beyond the traditional limits of physical health and affect aspects of what Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum call the ‘central human capabilities.’ These capabilities are functions characteristically performed by human beings and ‘are so central that they seem definitive of a life that is truly

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human’ (Nussbaum 1999: 39). Without the availability of these capabilities, Nussbaum writes, ‘we would regard a life as not, or not fully, human’ (Nussbaum 1999: 41–2). While Nussbaum and Sen present somewhat different sets of human capabilities, the core capabilities that each identifies include the capability to survive and live a healthy life; to be knowledgeable; to enjoy a decent standard of living; to participate in the life of the community and shape one’s social, political and economic environment; to exercise civil and political freedoms; and to be secure from violence.6 The capabilities approach crystallizes many of the norms of human security and the comprehensive conception of peace. In particular the capabilities approach reminds us that human rights are not merely about having or not having certain things or commodities, but more importantly about the quality and condition of existence itself (Sen 1999a: 6–11). The capabilities approach thus points to some basic aspects of human security critical to the human right to peace, namely those that pertain to avoiding unnecessary harm and to securing the possibility of a minimally good human life for all persons. A minimally good human life means that all people should have at least their basic capabilities protected from direct and indirect violent harm, whatever else they have and pursue.7 For example having to live without access to adequate educational facilities, without the opportunity to freely express one’s opinions, or without the possibility of participating in political governance might not destroy one’s physical health but each deprivation would seriously harm critical aspects of human functioning, cause humiliation and assault one’s dignity. Consequently the human right to peace seeks the progressive elimination of forms of direct and indirect violence that create significant risks of killing people or depriving them of the possibility of a minimally good, secure and peaceful life defined in terms of the central human capabilities. Endorsing Shue’s claim that ‘everyone is entitled to the removal of the most serious and general conditions that would prevent or severely interfere with the exercise of whatever rights the person has’, the human right to peace describes the level of protections against and the removal of conditions of unjust violence that individuals should be able to claim or demand of the state. From the basic rights perspective the human right to peace incorporates both positive and negative attributes. With respect to the duties of individuals and governments then, it should first be recognized that persons (whether in their private or public capacities) and institutions have a duty to refrain from activities that generate unacceptable levels of direct or structural violence. Governments clearly must refrain from activities that give rise to serious threats of violence to human life and well-being such as abstaining from the further production of weapons of mass destruction. Yet such ‘negative’ actions require major changes in public policy, law and administrative practice—such as reducing their stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and binding themselves to the obligation to never use such

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weapons—which are the outcome of ‘positive’ intervention. An effective system of security rights also requires that citizens have the power to prosecute violators, whether public or private, and seek adequate legal remedy. Realizing this aspect of security rights entails largely positive action such as providing impartial investigative and judicial institutions. In the transnational domain the interaction of forbearance and assistance in regard to human security and peace is equally clear. For instance international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should refrain from loaning money to states that will produce major risks of violence to human well-being, such as facilities that can produce weaponsgrade nuclear materials, while supporting projects that strengthen the capabilities of individuals to participate in political, economic and social life, to improve their life chances, and to secure their physical and emotional well-being. While alternative forms of protection (the laws of war) and other currently recognized rights (the rights to life and nondiscrimination) address a number of the problems associated with human security, they do so only in piecemeal fashion and fail to provide an integrated and comprehensive defence of the claim to peace per se. However without a guarantee of the protection of the right to peace understood holistically as possessing both negative and positive components, a fully human life of dignity is virtually impossible given the generalised, pervasive insecurity created by the traditionally-realist organization of the state system and the militaristic values its promotes. With the emergence of the human security paradigm there is growing recognition that the fundamentally realist nature of the security system of states has negative consequences for the quality of human life which reach well beyond the battlefield casualties of war. The promotion of military interests at the expense of peoples’ interests erodes the social conditions needed for cultivating the central human capabilities and generates structural threats to personal dignity and security.8 Technological developments underlying the proliferation of relatively inexpensive, mass-produced weapons have contributed to the creation of major, direct violent threats to human security and well-being. Globally military expenditures amounted to approximately US$794 billion in 2002, an increase of roughly 14 per cent over 1998 expenditures. The largest spender in 2002 was the United States, whose US$351 billion expenditure accounted for 43 per cent of the world total, followed by Japan, France, China, and the UK whose combined expenditures account for another 19 per cent of the world total. World military expenditure in 2002 accounted for 2.5 per cent of world GDP and was US$128 per capita.9 Although military expenditure and arms production had declined since the end of the Cold War, reaching its post-Cold War low in 1998, since 1998 world military expenditure has increased by 2–3 per cent per year. The combined sales of the top ten US defence contractors also have increased during this period and in 2001 amounted to US$67.4 billion.10 This figure

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alone is more than the amount of Overseas Development Assistance provided by all of the developed countries combined in 2002, totalling US$57 billion. Conventional weapons, particularly small arms and light weapons, are the major items exchanged in the global arms market, which is subject to minimal control and provides for massive illicit weapons trafficking. Small arms kill an estimated 500 000 people every year, injuring many times more (Graduate Institute of International Studies 2002: 155).11 In the past decade alone more than four million people have been killed in violent conflicts and there were more than 37 million refugees and internally displaced persons around the world as a result of war or mass violence (World Bank 2000). In 2002 there were 21 major armed conflicts in 19 locations throughout the world. Violent conflict including war, genocide and ethnic violence destroys property, disrupts economic activity, and diverts resources from education, social welfare and health care. Disease and illness spread rapidly during conflict as refugees travel and mass into urban areas and temporary camps. During recent conflicts approximately 90 per cent of the victims have been civilians—the vast majority of them women, children and the elderly—and post-conflict deaths are overwhelmingly civilian as well, due to the destruction of productive facilities and collapse of public infrastructure, leading to reduced access to health care, sanitary food and water, and increased incentives to resort to violence for survival.12 When violent threats reach this level of severity the security and wellbeing of many people are significantly degraded. Few critical threats to human security cause such extensive and large-scale damage to the welfare of so many individuals and communities and exacerbate humanitarian crises. Yet the very existence and persistent occurrence of inter- and intrastate violent conflict is typically accepted as a common feature of modern society and is rarely viewed as the violation of a specific human right. Even in an apparently less severe case such as when a government denies its citizens the opportunity to organize peacefully and to express themselves freely, substantial harm to people’s well-being is caused by repression of this sort. This is not to say that every person living in these states is physically harmed in a direct sense. Nevertheless the indirect effects of state repression on the central human capabilities are extensive and farreaching. The long-term emotional, mental and physical trauma caused by political oppression and social marginalization are well documented and constitute a persisting legacy of violent conflict which undermines the quality of life for many survivors of such conflict.13 The effects of structural violence are not trivial. State repression kills some people, injures and shortens the lives of others, and causes emotional and material suffering. While the basic interests in life, health and a minimal level of welfare are identified for protection by a number of existing human rights instruments such as the two International Covenants, war and structural violence are significant and frequent threats to human security interests that are not yet protected by a human right to peace. Consequently

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the human right to peace aims to protect people against direct and structural violence and their consequences, in their entirety as systemic problems and not merely as isolated instances of otherwise acceptable domestic and international activities. The history of the security system of states demonstrates that the traditional conception of security has been consistently prioritized over the comprehensive conception of peace. For this reason it is no longer adequate to employ an obsolete security discourse that renders peace invisible as an afterthought to militarism, or marginalizes it as the merely contingent outcome of the pursuit of militaristic policies. The explicit inclusion of a human right to peace is a necessary requirement for the human security paradigm to be realized. As with other human rights, the human right to peace can be codified in international and domestic law with established mechanisms of enforcement. Thus the human right to peace must be taken much more seriously in our globalized world because the pervasiveness of violence in daily life ‘is a major source of insecurity today for people everywhere around the globe’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 131). The logic of state conflict and violence entrenched in the international system has direct consequences that reach across all borders and affect all persons. In order to promote security throughout the world and protect the right of all persons to a secure and peaceful existence, several principles should be adopted to guide future political and legal developments:14

• • • • •

The primary goals of global security policy should be to prevent conflict and war and to maintain the integrity of the planet’s life-support systems by eliminating the economic, social, environmental, political and military conditions that generate threats to the security of people and the planet, and by anticipating and managing crises before they escalate into armed conflicts. Military force is not a legitimate political instrument, except in selfdefence or under multilateral, collective security measures taken for humanitarian purposes. The development of military capabilities beyond those required for national defence and humanitarian action is a potential threat to the security of people. Weapons of mass destruction are not legitimate political or military instruments. The production and trade in arms should be controlled by the international community.

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Just War Theory and the Use of Force in Responding to Human Security Threats I suggested above that the argument in support of the human right to peace was not to be equated with pacifism, in so far as there are certain limited instances in which it is morally justifiable to resort to force. I think the most useful approach to identifying when the employment of military force is justified as a last resort is that of just war theory. What can just war theory contribute to the goals of human security and the human right to peace? Given the mutually supportive aims of human security and the human right to peace, it may seem paradoxical to appeal to just war theory at this point. How can a theory that provides any degree of legitimacy to warfare be in any way compatible with human peace and security? This question, it must be admitted, points to a tension at the very heart of just war theory—a tension between the dual ambition to on the one hand limit war and on the other hand legitimate war. Yet this tension arises not from a fatal contradiction in just war theory but instead from the nature of modern warfare itself. In order to make sense of this claim we should first briefly review the fundamental tenets of just war theory before then turning to look at the nature of war and how just war theory might help us to resolve some of the problematic implications of contemporary conflict for human peace and security. In traditional just war theory there are two basic categories of norms: jus ad bellum, the justice of the cause of resorting to war to begin with, and jus in bello, the justice of the means or conduct of war once it has begun. Recent work in just war theory points to the need to consider a third category, jus post bellum, the justice of the cessation of hostilities and the subsequent transition from war to peace (Orend 2000, 2002). Given these three categories a comprehensive analysis of the just use of military force will consider whether warfare is justly begun as well as justly fought and concluded. While it cannot be expected that the criteria of just war theory will always be applied accurately and fairly, the criteria nevertheless provide us with a reasonable framework for discriminating between just and unjust uses of military force. The three categories and their criteria are as follows: 1 Jus ad bellum a Just cause: the war must be fought in a just cause. b Right intention: states must have the right reason and proper motivation for going to war, which excludes war for personal or national gain, or for some other hidden purpose. c Legitimate authority: the war must be declared publicly and waged exclusively by the competent authority having the right to do so. d Last resort: recourse to war must be a last resort. e Likelihood of success: those engaging in war must have a reasonable hope of success.

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f

Proportionality of the ends of war: the damage and harm that the war ultimately entails must be judged proportionate to the injustice which occasions it. 2 Jus in bello g Discrimination: combatants must distinguish between military targets and civilian populations, and noncombatants must be immune from attack. h Proportionality of the means of war: all military actions taken in war must be reasonably expected to produce benefits that outweigh the expected harms or costs. 3 Jus post bellum i Proportionality and publicity: a just peace settlement should be measured and reasonable, as well as publicly proclaimed. j Rights vindication: the aim of the peace settlement should be to secure those basic rights whose violations triggered the justified war. k Discrimination: distinction ought to be made between the leaders, soldiers, and civilians of a country when setting the terms of a peace settlement, to avoid the application of unfair and punitive measures against the civilian population. l Punishment: leaders and soldiers—on all sides of the conflict— responsible for rights-violating aggression, crimes against humanity and war crimes should be held accountable and be subject to fair trials and proportionate punishment. m Compensation and rehabilitation: financial restitution may be mandated, subject to proportionality and discrimination, and the reform and reconstruction of an aggressive, rights-violating regime may be permissible. The structure of comprehensive just war theory presupposes the priority of jus ad bellum to jus in bello and just post bellum. In other words, the three sets of norms are placed in serial order, with jus ad bellum lexically prior to jus in bello and just post bellum. This means that the just resort to military force must satisfy the norms of jus ad bellum before the norms of jus in bello and just post bellum come into play. The serial order thereby ensures consistency between and coherency throughout the three just war categories to prohibit the trading off of norms. While a war may be justly begun it is conceivable that it will be unjustly fought or unjustly terminated. The justness of any given war therefore must be determined in light of the complete set of norms and the failure to satisfy one set of norms will preclude judging the war as a whole to be just. It should be kept in mind that no single principle by itself offers sufficient justification for the use of military force. Rather the criteria are taken as individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a war to count as just. For instance while a just cause is a necessary condition for the resort to war, it is not itself a sufficient condition. A state may rightly go to war only when

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all the remaining jus ad bellum conditions are met as well. Thus simple failure to meet any particular one of the criteria may warrant a judgment that the resort to war is unjust, conversely satisfying all of the criteria may warrant a judgment that the resort to war is just. Nevertheless even if sufficient justification exists the criteria ought to be understood primarily as imposing negative constraints on war. This proviso means the decision to go to war does not become mandatory simply because all jus ad bellum conditions are met, it means only that going to war is a permissible last resort. The purpose of the criteria is not to justify war in the sense of fostering or promoting it but only in the sense of defending morally what would otherwise be prohibited. In this way just war theory serves as the underlying normative foundation for corresponding rules and obligations embodied in international humanitarian law and the laws of war. Thus the first necessary jus ad bellum condition that must be satisfied begins with the concept of just cause. Traditionally this has meant that a state considering going to war must identify an injury received, most notably aggression directed at its territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Injury might also arise when the human rights of innocent citizens are violated in some systematic and severe way, even in another state. Acceptable just causes therefore include self-defence from aggression, reclaiming people and territory wrongly seized or threatened by an aggressor, and defending or rescuing the innocent from gross violations of their human rights. A second and closely related criterion that must be satisfied is that of right intention. Most fundamentally the principle of right intention means that a state must not only have the right cause to resort to armed force, it must also have the proper motivation which is to achieve the just cause. A state may not use the concept of a just cause to prosecute a war for some secret end(s) incompatible with the cause such as for purposes of material gain derived from the capture of territory and resources, or to exact revenge based upon religious or ethnic hatred. In addition right intention demands that a state must, prior to prosecuting war, commit itself to upholding all the other just war criteria. Since the end of the Second World War the dual influence of just cause and right intention has led to a general proscription of all first use of force or wars of aggression. Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter, for instance, states that ‘All members shall refrain … from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.’ Thus under the Charter the threat or use of force is illegal except in circumstances of self-defence and the collective use of force by the organization itself for the purpose of securing a just cause. Offensive aggression thus constitutes an illegal, immoral and unjustified use of force which provides an acceptable rationale for resorting to defensive war against the aggressor. Notably the proscription of offensive aggression also provides a constraint on the possible abuse of the principle of just cause. In other words the actual presence or imminent threat of overt aggression is a

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prerequisite to the just use of armed force; a mere suspicion about the possible occurrence of violence is insufficient justification. The principle of the proportionality of the ends of war is intended to ensure that the good or end intended by war outweighs both the evil that induced the war and the evil that will result from the war itself. This principle clearly requires a consequentialist assessment of the foreseeable harm that likely will be caused by resorting to armed force in so far as states must consider how their actions will affect their own citizens as well as the citizens of other states. If serious doubts exist as to whether the good that is generated by the use of force will be greater than the harm caused then war should be avoided. Requiring a reasonable chance of success supports the principle of proportionality in so far as the human costs of prosecuting a war should not be disproportional to the political objective being sought. A military campaign that has a high likelihood of failure will simply add additional misery to the harm caused by the initial aggression. The principle of last resort adds additional emphasis to the previous point. It stipulates that war may be undertaken only when all good-faith efforts to resolve the conflict through diplomacy, arbitration and other means which fall short of armed force have failed. Together these three criteria aim to limit the suffering and destruction that inevitably accompany war. The significance of the in bello principles is that they require continual adherence to the norms of just war theory. While a state may be justified in initiating war by satisfying the ad bellum criteria it is quite possible that the same state could violate the norms of jus in bello during the course of war. If a state were to conduct war in violation of the in bello criteria its claim to be prosecuting a just war would be discredited. Consequently a war must be fought justly in order to be just in a complete sense. During the conduct of war the principle of discrimination (also known as the principle of noncombatant immunity) demands that no act of war may be intentionally directed at noncombatants. This condition clearly is intended to protect innocents from being targeted militarily either as direct ends or as indirect means to some further ends. The norm of noncombatant immunity was codified in Articles 22–28 of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and in Articles 48–58 of the 1977 First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions.15 The basis of the principle of discrimination is a moral distinction between combatants whose activity purposefully contributes to aggression or the imminent threat of aggression, and noncombatants who do not purposefully or actively contribute to aggression. Failure to draw this distinction implies that all persons regardless of their guilt or innocence are legitimate targets and, moreover that there are no meaningful moral and legal constraints on the conduct of war. If this were the case however there would then be no basis for distinguishing between just and unjust, or legal and illegal wars. The resultant moral vacuum would undermine any claim to justice by both sides in a conflict.

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A vital implication of the in bello principles (reinforced by the ad bellum criteria) is that all nuclear weapons (and indeed all other weapons of mass destruction as well) must be regarded as completely illegitimate. It might be countered that the claim that governments have a duty not to have and use nuclear weapons conflicts with the duty to protect one’s citizens or human beings more widely as a corollary to the right to self-defence. However the principle of self-defence is not unlimited and is constrained for example by humanitarian laws of war derived from the just war principle of noncombatant immunity. Under the jus in bello tradition discrimination between combatants and noncombatants is intended to prevent intentional harm to innocent persons not involved in attempting to harm others. While even conventional warfare presents a very real threat of harm to noncombatants, conventional weapons at least offer the possibility of a discriminate response to aggression. On the other hand nuclear weapons due to their awesome destructive power, produce huge numbers of indiscriminate casualties. Because of their very design and purpose the use of nuclear weapons evidences intentional, indiscriminate harm directed at noncombatants. For these reasons the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction can never be just. Clearly the purposes of jus post bellum criteria are to ensure the integrity and continuity of the norms of just and legitimate war, and to cement and consolidate the conditions upon which to (re)build a just and stable peace. Parties to the conflict must take responsibility both for their roles in the events leading up to the conflict and for their necessary contributions in the aftermath, in order to construct a more secure and just environment for the exercise of basic human rights and the protection of individual and community liberty and well-being. The measures implied by the jus post bellum criteria are consistent with the goals of human security and include establishing a legitimate rule of law, retraining the police and judiciary, disarming and demilitarizing the armed forces, holding accountable perpetrators of mass atrocities, rebuilding damaged societal infrastructure, and contributing to the formation of mechanisms for rehabilitation and reconciliation. Turning now to the question of the nature of war, it should first be noted that war is a social institution. War may be defined as the controlled and organized use of force undertaken by political authorities and other organized groups exhibiting a functioning chain of command. War must be understood therefore not simply as the outcome of ‘natural’ or ‘spontaneous’ aggression but as a ‘socially defined’ form of mass killing (Shaw 2003: 16). It is a ‘complex collective activity’ involving two or more actors and directed by a consciously organized social power for the purpose of destroying ‘the power of an enemy and its will to resist’ (Shaw 2003: 18–19). As a complex social institution war requires the recruiting and training of soldiers; the development and production of weaponry; the devising of strategy, tactics and command structures; the deployment and

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direction of armed forces; and the specification of targets and objectives; all carried out within an intricate web of rules, norms, and beliefs that distinguish war as a legitimate social practice from other illegitimate forms of killing. In short war ‘is premeditated violence, precisely the kind that is most illegitimate in non-war social relations’ (Shaw 2003: 21). These last points indicate another significant feature of war, namely that its general legitimacy actually rests upon deeper, yet less settled grounds of justification. This is because killing—including the forms of mass killing characteristic of war—has come to be regarded as legitimate only in so far as it satisfies a justifiable exception to more fundamental prohibitions against killing. While it is not possible to explore the intricacies of this matter here, it can be said nevertheless that most if not all moral and legal codes reflect the belief that killing is reprehensible and wrong except in special cases of exception to widely held prohibitions. Such exceptions may include the classic case of self-defence, judicial execution, just revolt or rebellion against despotic rule and of course, just war. What is significant is that any case of killing that claims to meet one of these exceptions must be justified. For purposes of this discussion the point to take from this is that any particular war including its aims and methods, requires justification if it is to be regarded as legitimate by the wider public. This has become especially true given the extensive development of the laws of war, international humanitarian law and human rights law during the twentieth century. Following the massive destruction of the First and Second World Wars, and the revelation of such atrocities as the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, the international community has become increasingly concerned to question the legitimacy of war and to place progressively greater legal and moral constraints around the justifiable resort to force and conduct of war. Yet it is here that we arrive at the source of the tension between the limitation and the legitimation of war that I mentioned at the beginning of this section. The tension that is confronted in just war theory does not arise from the theory itself, rather it arises from the larger social context in which killing is both a proscribed and justifiable activity. Just war theory merely reflects humanity’s struggle between its awareness that war embodies what is otherwise senseless, repugnant slaughter and destruction, and its recognition that at times the violence of war may be justified on the basis of reasonably necessary exceptions to the norms against killing. As remarked above the justification of war on the basis of just war criteria is not intended to foster or promote war but only to defend morally what would otherwise be prohibited. Thus the tension faced by just war theory derives from the fact that the justification of any particular war expresses both deep reservations about the use of political violence and the emerging consensus that human security is frequently more threatened than protected by military force. Therefore even a just war is not to be regarded as a good thing per se but as the lesser of two evils. These reservations are reflected in the

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continued reduction of permissible exemptions to the proscription of war under international law. For this reason it is becoming increasingly difficult to mount satisfactory justifications for war, and just war theory is perhaps the most stringent justificatory framework currently available for defending the exceptional necessity of war given specific, human security-threatening circumstances.16 The exceptions to the general prohibitions against the use of armed force are of primary concern here, in particular the need to respond to serious, existing or imminent threats to peace and human security such as unjustified aggression, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and mass atrocities including extreme, rights-violating political violence and state terrorism. To permit such threats to go unmet—for instance, because of a commitment to pacifism—is to allow an even greater injustice than the sometimes necessary evil of war to triumph over the rights of persons to peace and security. If we understand pacifism to be a thorough rejection of all war then it will not accept the possibility that any war can be just.17 One of the central pacifist criticisms of war including those that conform to just war criteria is that it inevitably involves the killing of innocent persons, and the killing of innocents is presumptively wrong.18 It may well be the case that all war does result in the killing of innocents—and history would seem to support this conclusion—yet it does not necessarily follow that killing innocents thereby undermines the case for the justice of any particular war. More specifically, the pacifist argument fails sufficiently to account for the prospect that there may be some circumstances in which the possibility or actuality of killing innocents is outweighed by the realization of a greater good. The types of threats to human security previously mentioned arguably constitute greater evils than the use of military force in response to them, and failure to resist or prevent them would therefore perpetuate injustice through an act of omission. Moreover there seems to be a relevant moral distinction to be made between the intentional killing of innocents which is prohibited by just war theory (as a violation of noncombatant immunity for instance), and the unintended deaths that result from a just war viewed as the least worst option. Just war theory is not oblivious to the tragic moral costs associated with the killing of innocents, but it would counter that pacifism by failing to take forceful action when necessary against the most extreme forms of human injustice, would itself be unjustifiably complicit in the harm or deaths of innocent victims. Just war theory proposes neither a categorical sanction of military force nor a categorical condemnation of it. Rather, it suggests that the demands of justice—which include protecting vital human rights and security interests—must be met in certain unfortunate circumstances by the properly measured and constrained use of armed force.19 The complete and permanent elimination of violent conflict is not only highly unlikely, but also disregards the continued existence of persistent and serious threats to human security which can only be resolved, at least in part,

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through the appropriate use of force. Therefore the argument I have offered in support of human security and the right to peace is grounded in a conception of ‘just peace’ rather than pacifism. Just peace is a stringently normative position which requires the presence of basic social and political institutions committed to principles of justice such as fairness, equality, respect, tolerance, opportunity, democratization and the protection of human rights. While just peace maintains a preference for nonviolent mediation, negotiation, arbitration and resolution of disputes it also recognizes, unlike pacifism, the legitimate use of force in certain limited cases where violence must be used to resist and abolish extreme instances of injustice such as genocide and other gross violations of human rights.20 Crucially the appeal to a rigorously defined just war framework contributes to further limiting the scope for legitimate military activity while recognizing the responsibility to protect human beings from unjustified cruelties, harms and serious threats to their security. This responsibility to protect can be encapsulated in Shue’s duties to avoid harm and to protect and aid those whose security rights are threatened. The concept of the responsibility to protect was perhaps first articulated by the Commission on Global Governance. In Our Global Neighbourhood, the Commission argued that ‘the international community has an obligation to take action in situations where the security of people is imperilled’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 85). That action may include the use of force as a last resort, ‘justified on the basis of the violation of the security of people’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 93). The Commission maintained that ‘sovereignty can no longer be used to shield gross violations of the security of people from international action’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 92). The concept of an ‘obligation to take action’ has been more recently and expansively explored by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in its report, The Responsibility to Protect. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty suggests that the concept of the ‘responsibility to protect’ is a legitimate, evolving norm in international relations which should supplant the ‘right to intervene’ approach to security crises. This is because a focus on the right to intervene is detrimental in at least three important respects: First, it necessarily focuses attention on the claims, rights and prerogatives of the potentially intervening states much more so than on the urgent needs of the potential beneficiaries of the action. Secondly, by focusing narrowly on the act of intervention, the traditional language does not adequately take into account the need for either prior preventive effort or subsequent follow-up assistance, both of which have been too often neglected in practice. And thirdly, although this point should not be overstated, the familiar language does effectively operate to trump sovereignty with intervention at the outset of the debate: it loads the dice in favour of intervention before the argument has even begun, by tending to label and delegitimize dissent as anti-humanitarian (ICISS 2001: 16).

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In contrast, the cosmopolitan perspective of the responsibility to protect ‘implies an evaluation of the issues from the point of view of those seeking or needing support, rather than those who may be considering intervention’ (ICISS 2001: 17). Consistent with the three-fold duties associated with the basic human rights approach, the responsibility to protect includes three integral components: (1) the responsibility to react to an actual or apprehended human catastrophe, (2) the responsibility to prevent it, and (3) the responsibility to rebuild after the event. The comprehensively humanitarian dimensions of the responsibility to protect therefore extend beyond the ‘traditional, narrow perception of security’ in order to address threats to human security that ‘deeply affect and involve individual human beings in fundamental ways’ (ICISS 2001: 15). For this reason, the potential use of military intervention for human protection purposes is an obligation borne by states and the global community in order to protect ‘the security of people against threats to life, health, livelihood, personal safety and human dignity’ (ICISS 2001: 15). Therefore what is suggested here is that any legitimate military action can only be justified from a cosmopolitan perspective that integrates human security and the right to peace with the criteria of just war theory. Contrary to realist assumptions such a perspective regards war as generally illegitimate and requires strong justification for particular instances of warfare as genuinely humanitarian exceptions to an otherwise comprehensive interdiction of the use of military force.21 As a humanitarian exception armed conflict should only be recognized as legitimate in so far as it is undertaken not for the purpose of enhancing a state’s power or furthering its ‘national interests’, but to protect the rights of fellow human beings and restore a secure and peaceful social order. The resort to armed force ought only to be contemplated and undertaken in the name of humanity—as the universal community of all persons conceived as equal rights-holders—and not of states per se. Just as we can acknowledge the wrongness of crimes against humanity, so too can we admit the rightness of acting on behalf of humanity. While states may function as the primary actors in a legitimately just conflict any threat or use of force must be governed by universally binding principles, and states—particularly the major powers—should accept that the threat or use of force must be part of an integrated, usually multilateral strategy (such as with a UN Security Council resolution specifying a clear mandate and detailing the arrangements under which force will be used) employed in conjunction with nonviolent diplomatic, political and economic mechanisms. Conclusion In the aftermath of the Cold War the international landscape has undergone dramatic transformations. Crucially our conceptions of sovereignty and

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security have changed. The declining emphasis on respecting state sovereignty at any cost has allowed for a greater emphasis on humanitarian norms to develop, including that of a global responsibility to intervene to protect or rescue people from severe threats to their security. This ‘new solidarism’ (Wheeler 2000: 285) is reflected in Kofi Annan’s statement regarding the evolving norms of sovereignty and humanitarian intervention: State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined—not least by the forces of globalisation and international co-operation. States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa. At the same time individual sovereignty—by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties—has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights. When we read the charter today, we are more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them…. This developing international norm in favour of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter will no doubt continue to pose profound challenges to the international community. In some quarters it will arouse distrust, scepticism, even hostility. But I believe on balance we should welcome it. Why? Because, despite all the difficulties of putting it into practice, it does show that humankind today is less willing than in the past to tolerate suffering in its midst, and more willing to do something about it (Annan 1999: 49–50).

The explicit articulation of a cosmopolitan conception of human security and a corresponding right to peace is a positive development in global politics inasmuch as it decentres the state in our understanding of the human community and delegitimizes offensive war and organized violence as the generally accepted means for the ‘continuation’ of realist politics. I have argued that just war theory when defined in suitably narrow fashion helps to contribute to our thinking on issues of human security in several ways. First, it provides a stringent normative framework for a reasonable justification of the resort to force. Second, it enables us to conceptualise significant moral and legal constraints on war and thus on the powers of states to wage war, thereby displacing the use of force from the statist paradigm of security. Third, it contributes to the deligitimation of unjust wars, that is, military actions undertaken for any purposes other than human security. Finally in so far as it provides a justificatory basis for the increasing demilitarization of society, it may influence the progressive and just pacification of global politics. As long as the types of human wrongs that present the gravest threats to human security continue to haunt the global community, there remains a need to be able to respond effectively so as to protect the rights and wellbeing of individuals. Indeed given the occurrence of genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacres and other such injustices, few things have done more harm to the global community’s ‘shared ideal that people are all equal in

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worth and dignity than the inability of the community of states to prevent these horrors’ (Evans and Sahnoun 2002: 100). This need to prevent and protect people poses a genuine dilemma for humanitarian morality and politics in so far as many of the military capabilities required to defend and to aid vulnerable persons can also be the source of threats to human life and welfare. Yet the existence of this dilemma need not lead us either to apathy or to cynicism. The nexus of human security, the right to peace, and just war theory offers a resolution to the traditional security dilemma both by challenging the realist rationale for aggressive militarism, and by supporting the emergence of global security structures and processes guided by the humanitarian norms of just peace. In the final analysis the prospect of achieving a genuinely secure world rises or falls with the possibility of replacing the realist national interest-based security paradigm with a cosmopolitan person-based paradigm. Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8

Rousseau dramatically condemned the structural violence of the interstate system organized according to a realist balance of power in his essay ‘The State of War’. See Hoffman and Fidler (1991). Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada, ‘Notes for an Address by the Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to a Meeting of the Mid-America Committee “Global Action, Continental Community: Human Security in Canadian Foreign Policy”,’ 9 September 1998, online at http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/english/news/statements/98state/98_051e.htm. George MacLean, ‘The United Nations and the New Security Agenda’, conference paper (8 May 1998) online at http://www.unac.org/Canada/ security/maclean.html. James Nickel suggests that Shue’s argument is best interpreted as making the claim that ‘effective protections of security are strongly supportive of many other rights’ rather than the claim that ‘general protections of security are necessary to the implementation of every other right’ (Nickel 1987: 103). The basic structure of society is, according to John Rawls, the complex consisting of the major political, social and economic institutions of society and the state. See Rawls (1999), Chapter 1. Sen’s work on the concept of human capabilities has been particularly significant in the creation of a new, ‘people-centred’ paradigm of human development, providing the conceptual foundation of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Reports since the early 1990s. For an accessible introduction to his work in this area see Sen (1999b). See also Nussbaum and Sen (1993). In Chapter 5 I return to the topic of the capability approach to human development. For an alternative discussion of the possibility of generating a list of goods valuable to all agents, see Pogge (1999). A clear example of the supremacy accorded to military interests is the United States government’s recent approval of a record defence budget totalling more

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19

20

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than US$400 billion for 2004, up from the 1999 budget of US$276.7 billion. The requested US defence budget for 2005 is US$420.7 billion. Center for Defense Information, online at http://www.cdi.org/budget/2004/. The source for all information in this section is SIPRI (2003). Department of Defense, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports. ‘100 Companies Receiving The Largest Dollar Volume Of Prime Contract Awards: Fiscal Year 2002’. Available online at http:/www.web1.whs.osd.mil. See also the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. New York, 9–20 July 2001. Online at http://disarmament.un.org:8080/cab/smallarms/index.html. See World Bank (1997); UNDP (1998); and Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett (2001). These issues are surveyed in Carnegie Commission (1997). A significant effort to document the traumatic effects of state oppression and violent conflict is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report (1998), which includes extensive testimony by both victims and perpetrators of political violence. The following principles are adopted from Commission on Global Governance (1995: 84–5). The texts of these documents can be found in Roberts and Guelff (1999). This is not to deny that some new justificatory framework will emerge that will supersede just war theory, and lead to new theories of conflict and the possibility (or impossibility) of any longer justifying the aims and means of war. There are, of course, different kinds of pacifism and assorted justifications for them. The point here, though, is that pacifism is in general opposed to any use of military force and thus to the idea of just war. For more on this issue see Teichman (1986). See Holmes (1989: 189). An even more severe form of pacifism might argue that killing any human being, whether innocent or guilty, is morally impermissible. The position argued for here may be regarded as pacificism, or conditional pacifism, as opposed to absolute pacifism. Yet a conditional form of pacifism that admits the exceptional necessity of resorting to armed force in order to protect human security and peace basically amounts to a stringent version of just war theory. See Carnegie Commission (1997: xxv–xxvi). For a justification of humanitarian intervention on the basis of a human rights liberalism see Smith (1999). On this point see also Tesón (1998). Tesón (1998: 111–12) argues for a modified Kantian view recognizing a limited right of humanitarian intervention, according to which ‘force may only be used in defense of persons, not of states as such’. Under this scheme force will ‘sometimes have to be used against non-liberal regimes as a last resort in self-defense or in defense of human rights’. Two issues should be mentioned here. First, there are relevant and significant forms of nonmilitary intervention for humanitarian purposes that can go a long way towards alleviating many sources of human security crises. The context of this chapter, however, concerns the justification of military force for humanitarian purposes. Such purposes may extend beyond intervention and

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Chapter 4

Cosmopolitan Justice and Accountability for Crimes Against Humanity Writing in the aftermath of Adolf Eichmann’s dramatic prosecution in 1961 for his role in the Nazi genocide, Hannah Arendt suggested that the ‘need for a [permanent] international criminal court was imperative’ (Arendt 1963: 270). For Arendt, Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem symbolized the unfortunate triumph of national interests over the demands of universal justice. In Arendt’s analysis the Eichmann trial was flawed for a number of reasons, most notably because the Israeli government rejected the possibility of establishing an international criminal tribunal, claiming for itself the competence and jurisdiction for trying Eichmann. In the end Arendt notes the failure of the Israeli court consisted of the fact that it represented ‘one nation only’ and misunderstood Eichmann’s crimes as being inherently against the Jewish people rather than against humanity itself, that is, ‘against the human status’ (Arendt 1963: 268–70). As the subsequent occurrence of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes in countries as diverse as Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and East Timor starkly testifies, the relevance of a permanent international criminal court to contemporary global politics and international relations is undiminished more than forty years after the Eichmann trial. In addressing the issue of the international community’s responsibility for the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity—and more broadly for upholding respect for international humanitarian norms—we can appeal to the notion of ‘cosmopolitan law-enforcement’ (Kaldor 1999: 124–31). Cosmopolitan law-enforcement, Mary Kaldor suggests, is a hybrid between soldiering and policing in which military force is transformed and utilized less for Clausewitzean purposes of defeating an enemy state and consolidating state power and more for humanitarian purposes of protecting civilians from atrocities. Central to this new use of force is the ‘enforcement of cosmopolitan norms, i.e. enforcement of international humanitarian and human rights law’ (Kaldor 1999: 124–5). According to Kaldor, cosmopolitan law-enforcement is to be grounded on ‘an alliance between local defenders of civility and transnational institutions which would guide a strategy aimed at controlling violence’. This alliance essentially amounts to a combination of cosmopolitanism ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, integrating political, economic and military components:

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Cosmopolitan Global Politics It would operate within a framework of international law, based on that body of international law that comprises both the laws of warfare and human rights, which could perhaps be termed cosmopolitan law…. Since the new wars are, in a sense, a mixture of war, crime and human rights violations, so the agents of cosmopolitan law-enforcement have to be a mixture of soldiers and policemen (Kaldor 1999: 10–11).

The basic insight underlying the idea of cosmopolitan law-enforcement is that the growth of international humanitarian and human rights norms has coincided with recognition that intervention into the internal affairs of states is justified for the purpose of ending or preventing large-scale human rights violations and suffering. In short the traditional claims to sovereignty and nonintervention on the part of states are being supplanted in international relations by a norm of humanitarian assistance driven by the human rights and security interests of individuals. Such humanitarian assistance can include not only military intervention, food relief and medical aid, but also post-conflict social reconstruction, police protection, and the capture and prosecution of war criminals (Kaldor 1999: 125). One significant aspect of cosmopolitan law-enforcement is that it appears to represent not merely a formal response to threats to international security, but rather a deepening human response to the suffering of other persons, despite their status as distant strangers beyond our borders (Wheeler 2000). As discussed in the preceding chapters, cosmopolitanism has become an increasingly important perspective in normative political and international relations theory. In contending that all human beings have equal moral standing within a single world community, both moral and legal cosmopolitanism propose that protecting and securing the human rights of all individuals requires satisfying certain corresponding obligations of justice with regard to all the persons of the world. Consequently, both moral and legal cosmopolitanism support the creation or transformation of institutional schemes so as to provide concrete procedural and organizational mechanisms dedicated to securing and protecting the human rights of all persons. For these reasons I have suggested that we can best understand cosmopolitanism as a combined ethical and political project. As an ethical project it seeks to establish the extent of, content of and justification for moral obligations with respect to persons around the globe. As a political project it is intimately connected with debates about the appropriate form of political community, schemes for legal institutions and procedures, and practices of humanitarian assistance given the existence of duties of global justice. The aim of this chapter is to extend the discussion of cosmopolitan lawenforcement into the domain of transnational criminal justice and consider how we might understand trials for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity as serving broadly cosmopolitan values and objectives. The proposition that trials for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity

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can and should be conducted for cosmopolitan purposes and to advance the cosmopolitan political project raises two important questions which guide the discussion in this chapter. The first question is a theoretical and normative one: What is the theoretical basis for the use of such trials in support of cosmopolitan purposes and how compelling is cosmopolitan thought in providing such a justification? To address this question, I will provide an argument grounded in cosmopolitan morality which advances robust claims concerning our universal humanitarian obligations to others. The second question is more empirically oriented, namely what constitutes a cosmopolitan legal order and how might it function with regard to transnational criminal justice? Here I will argue that cosmopolitan morality has to be complemented with cosmopolitan law in order to generate specific political and institutional actions committed to securing justice in the event of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. To provide some context for this part of the argument I will first discuss how contemporary human rights and humanitarian law represent a nascent system of cosmopolitan law, and then examine how the recently established International Criminal Court represents the continued development of that system. Thus the point of departure of this chapter is the moral justification for the claim that all persons, and by extension our political societies, have an obligation to contest the impunity that historically has shrouded perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity. What ought to be done when such injustice is unleashed upon our fellow human beings? Clearly it would be best if these terrible events were prevented from occurring in the first place. There are many questions to be asked and debated about how genocide can be prevented, how vulnerable populations can be protected and how virulent forms of racism can be countered. Yet in the following pages I shall simply try to reason why a strong case for criminal prosecution of perpetrators in the name of humanity is so imperative. Therefore what follows can be read as an elaboration of the moral vision implied by these lines from the Preamble of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: Conscious that all peoples are united by common bonds …. Mindful that during this century millions of children, women, and men have been victims of unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity [the Parties to this Statute affirm] that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished.1

Cosmopolitan Morality The justification of the use of transnational law-enforcement, including a permanent criminal court, for cosmopolitan purposes rests on the claim that

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individuals—the cosmopolitan unit of concern—are bound together in humanity as a single moral community which provides the basis for relations of obligation among them. In order to begin fleshing out this claim this section will discuss, first, what the trajectory of cosmopolitan thinking has to say about the moral community and, second, what duties and obligations are argued to inhere in such a moral community including those that would underwrite the use of cosmopolitan law-enforcement in the interests of humanity. In doing so this section will draw together several of the themes addressed in previous chapters. Here it may help to recapitulate some of the fundamentals of cosmopolitan morality as mentioned in Chapter 1. Cosmopolitan ideas have a long history, reaching back to the Stoic notion of a global human community or ‘cosmopolis’ based upon the equal worth of each and every human being. This core idea of classical cosmopolitanism contains the concept that each person is a ‘citizen of the world’ and owes allegiances, first and foremost ‘to the worldwide community of human beings’ (Nussbaum 1996: 4). For the Stoics human nature was understood to be a part of cosmic nature and the claim that persons were citizens of the world expressed the idea that each individual has a primary moral affiliation with the rest of humanity. Thus classical cosmopolitanism had stronger moral rather than political connotations. Territorial boundaries typically established through political coercion and violence were viewed as historically arbitrary and morally insignificant (Barry 1999: 36–40). The formation of discrete political communities functioned to obscure the more fundamental ‘community of the whole of humankind’ to which the individual first belongs (Heater 1996: xi). The moral worth of the individual preexists his or her membership in a single political community and our behaviour, subject to a code of natural law, ought to reflect consciousness of this fact. This main point is reflected in Cicero’s claim that ‘all men should have this one object, that the benefit of each individual and the benefit of all together should be the same … [therefore] we are certainly forbidden by the law of nature from acting violently against another person’ (Cicero 1991: 109–10). Classical ideas about world citizenship were later taken up by a number of Enlightenment scholars, most notably Kant. A central principle of the Enlightenment was that rational human beings embodied universal moral agency conveyed through universal moral laws and natural rights. Kant for instance develops a version of cosmopolitan morality that appeals to a moral conception of all persons as free and equal. For Kant a moral conception of the person is that of a free and equal rational being recognized as an autonomous member of the kingdom of ends. Moral persons are autonomous and free to choose, and are thus ends in themselves. The categorical imperative provides a rule of respect for human freedom, that is, respect for the right of all persons to determine their own ends, which is clearly expressed in the formulation known as the principle of humanity: ‘So

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act as to treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means’ (Kant 1959: 46). In many ways Kant can be regarded as the foremost Enlightenment proponent of a cosmopolitan order based on freedom and equality. Kant was convinced of the necessity of establishing a cosmopolitan world order because violence and war undermine freedom, equality and even justice itself (Kant 1970: 231-2). In order to achieve ‘perpetual peace’ states must recognize cosmopolitan morality not only internally but externally, as a principle of humanity. The kingdom of ends was for Kant, a ‘universal community … where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (Kant 1959: 107). Contemporary cosmopolitanism draws its inspiration from both the classical and Kantian traditions.2 While the ideas of equal moral worth, individual autonomy and universal moral community remain central themes, contemporary cosmopolitanism addresses a wider range of complex issues such as globalization and development, international distributive justice, and humanitarian intervention. Contemporary cosmopolitans tend to embrace a principle of egalitarian individualism as a core element of universal social justice, which would necessitate widespread reform of many domestic, regional and global socioeconomic policies and institutions. Many contemporary cosmopolitans see the greatest potential for cosmopolitanism in the spread of democratization and an accompanying cosmopolitan public sphere within and across state boundaries, through which some tangible version of world citizenship is to be achieved by applying democratic principles to the international realm (Held 1995; Archibugi 2000). While contemporary cosmopolitans are sceptical about ideas for a world government or world state they nevertheless challenge the traditional supremacy of the state system. The significance of state boundaries is increasingly unsettled as globalization provides for escalating public and private interactions and transnational flows of people, money, technology and culture, as well as disease, drugs, arms and pollution. The fundamental insight that animates contemporary cosmopolitanism is that ‘justice is owed to all regardless of location or origin, race or gender, class or citizenship’ (O’Neill 2000a: 45). Thus contemporary cosmopolitan morality continues to advance cosmopolitanism’s persisting concern to be morally inclusive of all individuals including those who reside beyond our own states. However contemporary cosmopolitan theorists generally avoid appeals to natural law or other such supposedly objective metaphysical truths in order to ground their claims and instead prefer to offer normative justifications for understanding cosmopolitan morality and justice. At bottom cosmopolitan morality aims to justify a structure of claims about moral obligations and rights including the content of those obligations and rights, and those to whom obligations and rights are owed. It begins with the first-order activity of specifying principles that all could reasonably assent to regarding the conduct of persons and groups. This first-order activity is

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then supplemented by the second-order activity of setting out principles for evaluating and holding accountable the rules and practices of social institutions (Pogge 2002: 170). In the remainder of this section, I discuss some key elements of what might be morally justified in terms of our rights and obligations to other human beings considered as equal members of the same moral community. To begin we can consider the basis for a cosmopolitan framework of moral obligations and accountability. I believe the case for a cosmopolitan morality is best articulated through the concept of human rights. While human rights are to be understood ultimately as political and legal standards, as I shall argue in the next section, we should view them first as moral claims that provide the basis for a global ethic. As we have seen, cosmopolitan theorists have held consistently that all individuals are moral beings. The idea of universal human rights is premised on the ideal that all persons are free and equal, regardless of the society into which they happen to be born, and the purpose of human rights is to respect, protect and promote the freedom and equality of all persons everywhere. Universal human rights refer then to two basic normative concepts. First, persons are regarded as free and equal in worth and dignity. Second, they are considered to be entitled equally to certain fundamental rights needed to ensure an existence worthy of human equality and dignity. These normative concepts are expressed in the first sentence of Article 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ As we have seen, human rights are to be defined as general moral claims that every person has to a basic minimum level of treatment including various freedoms, protections, and benefits needed for the viability and security of human life and to which it is believed all human beings are entitled. The claims of right-holders impose correlative duties such that human rights are violated when duty-bearers fail to fulfil their correlative duties without good cause. The duties correlative to human rights are both negative and positive. Human rights should be understood both as positive principles invoked by moral agents to aid and cooperate with other individuals in securing, protecting and promoting the full realization of their rights claims, and as negative principles not to impede or coerce other individuals from participating in securing, protecting and promoting the conditions in which individuals will be enabled fully to realize their rights claims. Henry Shue has usefully pointed out that the duties correlative to human rights are actually of three kinds, although each kind manifests negative or positive duties which attach to different duty-bearers in varying circumstances: (1) negative duties to avoid depriving right-holders of the objects of their rights; (2) positive duties to protect right-holders from being deprived of the objects of their rights; and (3) positive duties to aid rightholders when avoidance and protection have failed (Shue 1996: 51–64). The

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prescriptive force of the idea of human rights therefore arises from the assertion that all human beings are moral equals whose claims to be entitled to decent treatment generate universal obligations to act justly towards others. In this way human rights provide specific content to the concept of cosmopolitan morality. The discourse of human rights affirms that all persons have equal moral status, that each person is obligated to respect that status and that entitlement to what is due to humans is universally shared. Clearly cosmopolitan morality does not attach any intrinsic moral significance to states or to compatriots, which is not to say that either one is morally irrelevant. States may be instrumentally valuable (in varying degrees) and, depending upon their ability to satisfy the demands of the full scope of justice and protect the interests of individuals, compatible with cosmopolitan morality (Moellendorf 2002: 172).3 Nevertheless cosmopolitan theories have been sharply criticized on this point.4 Briefly I would like to address this criticism in order to expand on the discussion of our obligations under cosmopolitan morality. The views presented by Darrel Moellendorf in Cosmopolitan Justice provide a particularly useful point of entry into this matter. Moellendorf maintains (2002: 30–38) that the background conditions which inform our duties of justice consist of two basic types of association. On one hand the fact of common political association gives rise to special duties of domestic justice in so far as there are certain claims that can be made on us by compatriots but not noncompatriots. On the other hand the fact of global economic association, in so far as it regularly affects the highest order moral interests of persons globally, gives rise to general duties of global justice such that there are certain claims that can be made on us by noncompatriots.5 Critics of cosmopolitanism often contend that the theory goes awry because it is necessarily committed to favouring the primacy of general duties of global justice, whereas these critics suggest that special duties of domestic justice—and thus partiality to compatriots—are primary. This conclusion is mistaken however. While the political associations of compatriots give rise to duties between them that are not the same as those that arise from global economic associations between noncompatriots, it also should be recognized that duties to compatriots and duties to noncompatriots are not inherently opposed and thus always in conflict. Rather, because of the current circumstances of justice in which individuals’ identities, interactions and relationships are no longer simply located within the borders of a single state, all persons hold membership in multiple economic, social, cultural and political associations, each of which generates different yet frequently overlapping duties. Consequently the realm of our duties of justice is inclusive rather than exclusive. Duties to compatriots and duties to noncompatriots form a single whole of various, nested obligations. Duties to noncompatriots do not necessarily trump duties to compatriots and vice versa. In other words neither duties of global justice nor duties of domestic justice are primary in some a priori way. Instead both

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kinds of duties form the complete realm of our duties of justice. In principle the duties of global and domestic justice may supplement and even reinforce one another. Unfortunately critics of cosmopolitanism fail to recognize the complementarity of domestic and global justice, and therefore attach little if any importance to duties of global justice. It may indeed be the case that claims of general and special morality will conflict but there is no justification for holding that one set of claims must always override the other in such situations. In the event of competing claims which occurs ‘when fulfilment of both requires drawing on the same stock of resources’ (Moellendorf 2002: 49), it is possible to resolve the conflict between them by considering the claims in light of such factors as economic and political feasibility as well as background commitments of justice—to principles such as fairness, equal respect and fair equality of opportunity, and to actions such as securing, protecting and promoting human rights.6 Resolution therefore may require fulfilling one kind of claim but not the other, fulfilling one at the expense of the other, fulfilling both partially or fulfilling both claims fully (Moellendorf 2002: 49). The point to take from this is that occasionally and regretfully we are required to privilege the claims of one group over another, but only for appropriate reasons of justice and not because special and universal obligations are incompatible in principle. In general though we are obligated to fulfil all claims required by justice in so far as that is possible which means that it is morally impermissible to limit the scope of justice solely to the domestic realm. In short we ‘have duties of justice to those persons whose moral interests are affected by our business of living’ (Moellendorf 2002: 45) regardless of distance or national boundaries.7 This last point clearly captures the growing awareness that all of us belong simultaneously to interdependent local, domestic, regional and global associations and have basic human interests—as well as obligations directed towards the satisfaction or protection of those interests—which share common ground. Mervyn Frost adopts a similar position with regard to certain forms of association giving rise to basic duties towards others. Most fundamental, Frost suggest, is the form of ‘open and borderless’ association characteristic of global civil society. In global civil society there are no ‘borders distinguishing insiders from outsiders’ since it is ‘open to all who would enter’ (Frost 2002: 162). Global civil society is a social institution of a unique kind. Although it does not have a determinate authority structure it is nevertheless constituted by the social relationships of rights-holders who enter it ‘by learning what is involved in claiming rights for oneself and what is involved in respecting basic rights in others’ (Frost 2002: 162). In other words, it is a realm of social interaction that we join through participating in the normative practices of constituting and recognizing one another ‘as bearers of equal packages of rights … which we take one another to have simply as people: we do not accord them only to people of a certain race, family, religion or ethnic group’ (Frost 2002: 156).

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This ‘moderate’ conception of cosmopolitan morality presented here allows for commitment to the basic tenets of cosmopolitanism coupled with recognition that our obligations to other human beings include both compatriots and noncompatriots.8 And the effective satisfaction of those obligations requires that we carefully analyze and explore the mutually reinforcing connections between duties of different kinds as mediated by our standing as equal rights-holders. I would now like to add another distinction to the account of duties presented here, namely that between perfect and imperfect obligations. Discussions of imperfect obligations or duties within international affairs reach back at least to Emmerich de Vattel and Samuel Pufendorf and include major figures such as Kant and John Stuart Mill. There are however variations in how perfect and imperfect obligations are conceived, and differences in opinion as to whether imperfect obligations are in fact problematic for a theory of global justice. Pufendorf for instance argues that human beings form communities in both separate domestic states and a global society of states. In the former individuals associate in closer ways that give rise to special duties while in the latter the obligations that bind individuals are weaker and less strictly binding. Nevertheless members of specific domestic communities still are members of the larger human community and are obligated to abide by the universal moral standards of natural law such as the precept that we should not harm but help each other, which constitute ‘a kind of kinship’ and ‘general friendship’ within humanity (Pufendorf 1934: 9). In the absence of coercive international law enforcement Pufendorf asserts perfect rights and duties are to be found only in the domestic sphere, whereas imperfect or unenforceable rights and duties are found in the international sphere. This is because international relations lacks the kind of coercive authority guaranteed by domestic political institutions and thus obligations to others beyond our borders do not rise to the same level of perfection as obligations to our fellow nationals. Imperfect obligations still require us to attempt to promote the conditions of sociability and an ‘improved existence’ within the human community, but such obligations rest upon ‘friendship’ rather than strict duty (Pufendorf 1991: 68–76). Similarly Kant maintains a distinction between perfect and imperfect duties that corresponds generally to duties correlative to rights that are enforceable by public law and duties correlative to virtue that are ‘enforceable’ only by personal choice. In other words perfect or ‘narrow’ duties are juridical and therefore cannot admit of any exception to the rule of law while imperfect or ‘wide’ duties such as benevolence are ethical and therefore depend upon the will of the individual as to whether or not they will be performed as one’s freely chosen end. Thus fulfilment of imperfect duties is ‘merit … but failure to fulfil them is not itself culpability … but rather mere deficiency in moral worth’ (Kant 1996: 133). Despite this distinction however Kant urges us to ‘bring wide obligation as close as possible to the concept of narrow obligation’ (p. 154) so as to make ‘the

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right of humanity, or also the right of human beings, one’s end and in so doing widen one’s concept of duty beyond the concept of what is due’ (p. 153). Consequently Kant alludes to the desirability of closing the gap, as it were, between perfect and imperfect obligations by making our basic duties to other human beings both binding in conscience and enforceable juridically. As I mentioned above, the human rights core of cosmopolitan morality generates both negative and positive duties—and both to compatriots and noncompatriots—to desist from conduct violating human rights and to assist in actions that protect and secure human rights. What the normatively positive duties specify, then, is that we act to establish those social conditions and institutions which are able to provide for the acquisition and secure possession of at least the most vitally important human rights entitlements. This obligation is of particular importance in regard to institutions designed to ensure the rule of law, to rectify through judicial means those injustices which violate the rights of individuals, and to punish those responsible for such injustices. It is clear that in considering the fulfilment of our duties of cosmopolitan justice we are sometimes confronted with competing claims which require us to choose between them. It is crucial to recognize however that even where circumstances are such that we are able at that particular time to fulfil only one claim, we are not then completely exonerated in the future from fulfilling the other competing claim(s). Being capable of fulfilling only one claim does not ‘let us off the hook’ with respect to the other claim (Evans 2003: 30). Rather we are still under an obligation to do something at some time in order to create the conditions necessary to satisfy the outstanding claim. From this perspective the issue is one of seeking conditions conducive to the progressive mutual reinforcement of special and universal obligations. One way to characterize this situation is to say that when right-holders already possess the objects of their rights those rights are attended by perfect obligations on the part of duty-bearers to refrain from action which compromises or violates those rights and to contribute positively to their continued secure possession. In such cases there are identifiable agents— including specific individuals and institutions—that bear explicit obligations towards right-holders. When right-holders are not yet in possession of the objects of their rights then imperfect obligations of assistance are generated. It is important to note that on the particular interpretation offered here the quality of imperfection derives from the absence of suitable social and political conditions as well as specific agents with explicit responsibility towards particular right-holders.9 Imperfection thus reveals the presence of some form of injustice with regard to the fulfilment or enforcement of basic human rights. Nevertheless some obligation still exists, namely the obligation to assist in or support the development of the appropriate social and political conditions and effective

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institutions capable of satisfying unfulfilled claims of justice. In other words the difference between perfect and imperfect obligations is a matter of degree rather than of kind and the duty here is to act in order to perfect what are otherwise imperfect obligations to close the gap between them. A fundamental point that follows is that due to the absence of determinate duty-bearers, responsibility for perfecting imperfect obligations falls upon all of us, that is, upon humanity as a whole. Each of us as members of the general moral community of humanity bears some kind of positive responsibility to act to help develop the specific social practices and institutions through which the requirements of cosmopolitan justice can be met. The current lack of those practices and institutions cannot justify apathy, indifference or some other failure to act. To the contrary it is that very absence which triggers our duties to transform the circumstances which render imperfect obligations imperfect.10 Failure to do so implies that humanity as a whole shares general culpability for the continued presence of grave injustice that goes unremedied.11 Towards Cosmopolitan Law The preceding argument was intended to show that the challenge to cosmopolitan morality is to convert imperfect obligations into perfect obligations, that is, to translate our moral obligations under the terms of global justice into actual political practice. If imperfect obligations permit exceptions then this opens the door to conceiving such obligations as merely supererogatory—to be discharged only if and to whatever extent some agent chooses to do so as an optional act of ‘charity’. While we can realistically admit that existing background conditions sometimes make it necessary to choose between competing human rights claims, I have also argued that justified claims which go unfulfilled on any particular occasion do not then suddenly lose their obligatory force. Rather the obligations have been rendered imperfect because of those conditions, such as a shortage of resources or finances, or lack of will on the part of extant political agencies and leadership. In such situations the obligations then become those of correcting the relevant deficiencies in background conditions in order that the obligations may be perfected and thereby discharged by identifiable agencies and agents at the appropriate time. Perhaps the best way to characterize this process of conversion is that of institutionalizing imperfect obligations. In essence it is a process of translating cosmopolitan morality into cosmopolitan law. Whereas perfect obligations can be conceived as those that have been institutionalized to the degree that definite duty-bearers and lines of responsibility to correlative right-holders exist, imperfect obligations are those that are still lacking proper institutionalization with regard to definite duty-bearers and lines of responsibility. Under such conditions right-holders can be said to exist, but

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the proper policies and agencies capable of and responsible for ensuring the acquisition and secure possession of the objects of right-holders’ claims do not. In order for obligations of justice to be met those obligations must be institutionalized along with their corresponding rights. For this reason the rights and duties of cosmopolitan morality need to be formally instituted in a juridical system of cosmopolitan law. A system of legal rights and duties will impose binding negative and positive obligations upon pertinent agents, and establish conditions for redress and punishment in the event those obligations go unfulfilled without good cause. In so far as they can be enforced by law imperfect obligations begin to lose some of their imperfection and gain a greater degree of perfection.12 The structure of rights and obligations—both moral and legal—most often discussed in the context of contemporary cosmopolitan theory concerns issues of distributive justice and claims about global redistribution. This is undeniably a matter of pressing importance, and one which a number of authors have addressed with admirable clarity. My concern here however is with those gross violations of human rights that have come to be associated with calls for the prosecution and punishment of perpetrators of such grave abuses, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. In the remainder of this section I will briefly describe how the emergence of the system of international human rights law and that of international humanitarian law can be viewed as a gradual conversion of imperfect into perfect obligations, of cosmopolitan morality into cosmopolitan law. The historical record provides grim testimony of humanity’s moral and political failure to perfect its responsibilities with regard to genocide and crimes against humanity. All too often the imperative ‘never again’ has fallen on deaf ears at critical moments. Nevertheless some positive steps have been taken in recent years. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, cosmopolitan tendencies are evident in the international human rights regime. The UDHR for instance asserts that ‘All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ International human rights law aims not only to help establish the legal, political and economic climates in which individual freedom and equal dignity can flourish, but also to help protect the individual against governmental excesses everywhere. Following the massive atrocities committed during the Second World War, the creation of the UDHR was motivated by the belief that existing national protections for rights were deficient and that additional, international protection was necessary, including an international system for the prosecution of perpetrators of gross violations of rights (Schabas 2000). Human rights therefore are ‘part of what is involved in being a member of the moral community’ and include ‘forms of inviolability in the status of every member of the moral community’ (Nagel 1995: 85). According to the Preamble of the UDHR and the discussions of the Third Committee of the

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UN General Assembly in 1948, the atrocities of war and genocide are additional justifications for prescribing the international system of human rights and generating a global consensus on human rights norms. The modern laws of war which govern the interactions between combatant forces and between combatants and noncombatants during times of armed conflict are contained in a number of treaties that have developed over more than a century, beginning with the Geneva Convention of 1864.13 Further conventions under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1925 and the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1929, 1949 and 1977 built on the work of the original 1864 convention. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols aim to limit military action to what is militarily necessary during war, guided by universally-recognized principles of proportionality, discrimination and humanity. Conferences in The Hague also produced several conventions in 1899, 1907 and 1954 regulating the initiation and conduct of war and the protection of cultural monuments. Moreover the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals broke new ground in humanitarian law by prosecuting Nazi and Japanese officials not only for war crimes but also for the new category of ‘crimes against humanity’.14 The novelty and significance of this new crime was due to the fact that a universal moral concept—that of humanity as a collective moral and legal entity against which crimes can be committed and through such acts is degraded and violated—was incorporated into positive international law. As Arendt noted (1963: 272), this concept refers to ‘an altogether different community’ than that of the nation-state and is, properly speaking, the human community violated by the crime of genocide. The notion of crimes against humanity was further entrenched in international law with the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It is clear that contemporary humanitarian and human rights law are not, strictly speaking, systems of cosmopolitan law. Within the current international order and the structure of international law states are still regarded as the primary political and legal agents. Nevertheless the convergence of humanitarian and human rights law has injected a strong cosmopolitan ethic into the processes and rules of global politics. State sovereignty no longer is regarded as sacrosanct: the conduct of states as well as of individuals is constrained by the institutionalization of human rights and other humanitarian norms, individual human beings are now formally recognized as ultimate units of concern, all persons are professed to hold equal moral status and the international community has obligations to all right-holders everywhere. Obviously the practical realization of international humanitarian and human rights laws and duties is far from perfect. But the significance of this system’s evolution is that it offers reasonable evidence that previously imperfect obligations are constantly in the process of being perfected. Gradually the cosmopolitan vision of a world

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community grounded on a conception of all human beings as moral persons is extending its reach and impact.15 In order to enable the secure acquisition and protection of human rights, the moral rights and obligations of individuals must be institutionalized in such a way that gives them legal status to which relevant agents can be held accountable and for which agents can be prosecuted in the event of egregious rights violations. Global implementation of human rights and humanitarian duties should not be dependent upon the continuance and convenience of national power and interests; it requires a firm commitment to cosmopolitan norms and rules by the actors involved, including individual citizens, civil society associations, NGOs, states, and regional and international organizations such as the European Union, the African Union and the United Nations. Through the strengthening of cosmopolitan norms, the elaboration of stronger international legal principles and the setting aside of national self-interest based solely on the pursuit of power, the security of individuals’ human rights claims can be greatly enhanced.16 For global principles, rules and norms to be politically significant they cannot be merely a reflection of national self-interest, rather there must be a sense of being bound despite countervailing self-interest. This sense of being bound arises out of concern for the rights of all persons and encompasses a corresponding sense of obligation to which those rights give rise. For this reason the implementation and protection of human rights should provide a constraint on national self-interest for the benefit of all human beings. The further task is to continue reform of the current system and to develop the institutions and implement the policies that will bring about the type of global protection of all persons wherever they may be that cosmopolitan justice requires. In the following section I examine the development of the International Criminal Court as an example of how cosmopolitan justice continues to progress in practice. Connecting Moral and Legal Cosmopolitanism: the Case of the ICC Significant injustice in the forms of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity continues to be suffered by the human community. Prominent recent examples of gross injustice in the forms of genocide and crimes against humanity include the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Between 1991 and 1999 civil war, ethnic cleansing and other human rights abuses tore apart the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Throughout Croatia and especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, millions of people were forcibly displaced from their homes. Brutal fighting and repression including violent expulsion, mass rape and genocidal murder resulted in the deaths of more than 250000 people.17 Numerous atrocities such as the use of concentration camps throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, sniper and rocket attacks on Sarajevo, and the massacre by the Bosnian Serb Army of approximately

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8000 unarmed Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, were fuelled by the Serb nationalist goal of creating a ‘Greater Serbia’ from land ‘cleansed’ of Croats and Muslims (Kaldor 1999: 44–68; Power 2002: 391–442). Between 1998 and 1999 further massacres and ethnic cleansing occurred in the formerly autonomous province of Kosovo, again resulting in a massive wave of refugees and estimates of around 5000–10 000 Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbian forces.18 In Rwanda approximately one million people were systematically slaughtered over a one hundred-day period between April and July 1994. The genocide was carried out by security forces and armed militias—most notoriously the Interhamwe (‘those who attack together’) and Impuzamugambi (‘the single-minded ones’)—loyal to the ethnic majority Hutu government. Most of the victims belonged to the minority Tutsi population but Hutu moderates including Prime Minster Agathe Uwilingiyimana were targeted as well (Power 2002: 329–90; Gourevitch 1998). The genocide’s ostensible trigger was the death of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, whose plane was shot down on 6 April as it approached the Kigali airport. Militant Hutus claimed that Tutsi rebels had assassinated Habyarimana and that the assassination is what prompted the carnage in response. However it became known that extremist members of the government had already orchestrated a ruthless strategy of genocide in order to eliminate threats to their power which they then systematically implemented on the occasion of Habyarimana’s death. Both of these cases resulted in the creation of ad hoc criminal tribunals. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) located in The Hague, was established by UN Security Council Resolution 827 of 25 May 1993, making it the first ever international war crimes tribunal.19 The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) located in Arusha, Tanzania was established the following year by UN Security Council Resolution 955 of 8 November 1994.20 The ICTR is the first international court charged specifically with prosecuting crimes of genocide, although both tribunals are mandated to prosecute crimes against humanity and war crimes as well. The ICTR has issued indictments against more than 70 individuals and on 4 September 1998 sentenced Jean Kambanda—Prime Minister of the government during the genocide—to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes against humanity, the first such criminal sentence in history. The ICTY has indicted more than 80 individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Among those prosecuted was Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic, commander of the forces that attacked Srebrenica, who was found guilty of genocide and war crimes on 2 August 2001. Slobodan Milosevic, former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is presently in the custody of the court and being tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Milosevic is the first head of state to be prosecuted for such crimes. Most recently the former president of Serbia, Milan Milutinovic, surrendered to the ICTY on

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20 January 2003 and will face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. While the establishment and work of the two tribunals has contributed greatly to the cause of international justice, numerous limitations exist with the ad hoc approach to holding accountable those responsible for grave violations of humanitarian and human rights law. Both the ICTY and ICTR for instance, have been able to indict only a very limited number of perpetrators and have apprehended even fewer. Financial restrictions, lack of cooperation by national authorities, and the absence of political will to apprehend and hand over suspects contribute to this problem. As creations of the UN Security Council the tribunals rely for their establishment on the particular political interests of the states on the Council, especially the permanent veto-holding members. For this same reason there is no guarantee that future tribunals will be established when the need arises. The ICTY and ICTR also are constrained in terms of reach and scope as their mandates empower them to investigate and prosecute crimes committed in one region only and in a narrowly defined time period. Furthermore since they are established after the events in question ad hoc tribunals are unable to act in advance to address suspected or anticipated violations of humanitarian and human rights law, which also undermines their deterrent effect. Given this it seems clear that the ad hoc system is not sufficient for adequately addressing the needs of global justice. However it seems equally clear that the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) will be better able to contribute to a global system of justice and individual accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity. On 17 July 1998, 120 states voted in favour of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing the world’s first permanent international criminal tribunal.21 On 11 April 2002 the sixtieth country ratified the Rome Statute and the Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002. Elections of the ICC’s first bench comprised of eighteen judges were held from 3 to 7 February 2003, the Inaugural Meeting of the Court was held in The Hague on 11 March 2003, and the Court’s first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, was elected on 21 April 2003. Several features of the ICC offer hope that it will function as an effective institution which embodies some of the important principles and norms of cosmopolitanism. First, and most fundamentally the ICC is an independent treaty-based institution separate from although affiliated with the UN system, including the Security Council. As a strong and independent Court the ICC will be less susceptible to the political machinations of Security Council members and its ability to prosecute will not be compromised by Security Council vetoes. As a negotiated treaty-based institution the Court is the product of global dialogue, communication and consensus. The treaty itself was the culmination of an inclusive process initiated in 1990 when the UN General Assembly requested that the UN International Law Commission (ILC) draft a statute for a permanent International Criminal Court, which the ILC

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submitted in 1994 (Bendetti and Washburn 1995: 3). During the next four years numerous preparatory meetings were held involving not only states’ representatives but also a coalition of nearly 1000 nongovernmental organizations, the Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC).22 While the NGO Coalition did not have a vote on the Rome Statute, the CICC exerted a considerable influence during the ICC negotiation process— primarily by providing vital information and analyses, convening working groups, promoting education and awareness, and fostering discussion and debate—and participated with delegates at the Rome Conference between 15 June and 17 July 1998. The role of the NGO community was so significant that observers noted ‘Without the NGO community, the ICC treaty might not have been concluded’ (Chayes and Slaughter 2000: 241). This inclusive and deliberative process which allowed the voices of individuals and nonstate actors throughout global civil society to be heard in international affairs assures greater legitimacy and universal status for the norms and practices of the ICC and represents a significant example of the changing nature of global politics and the search for justice (Glasius 2002; Linklater 1999: 473–82). Second, the ICC has an extensive reach and scope. As stated in Article 5 of the Rome Statute, the Court has jurisdiction over war crimes, the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression, effective as of 1 July 2002.23 While no crimes committed before that date are within the Court’s jurisdiction, from the time it entered into force it is no longer temporally bound with respect to its operations as are the ICTY and ICTR. Thus the ICC possesses inherent jurisdiction within state parties over the essential core crimes of international humanitarian and human rights law and it will be prepared to investigate and prosecute individuals at all times. Article 6 of the Rome Statute follows the 1948 Genocide Convention in its definition of the crime of genocide and authorizes prosecution for the act of genocide as well as conspiracy to commit genocide, attempted genocide, public incitement to commit genocide and complicity in genocide. Article 7 covers a broad range of crimes against humanity that expands upon violations recognized by the Nuremburg Charter and the ICTY and ICTR including acts of murder, extermination, forcible deportation and transfer of a population, enslavement, torture, rape, forced disappearance of persons, and apartheid. Article 8 addresses war crimes. Incorporating established international law, for example the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the ICC’s jurisdiction includes wilful killing, torture or inhumane treatment, unlawful deportation, intentionally targeting civilian populations, use of poison weapons or gases, rape, slavery, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property. Two major developments here are, first, that the Court’s jurisdiction covers war crimes committed in both international and internal armed conflict and, second, that the official capacity of the individual does not attract immunity from prosecution. It is no defence to

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genocide or crimes against humanity that the individual was acting under an order from a superior or the government.24 The scope and exercise of the Court was and still remains a matter of some controversy. The United States in particular has been vehemently opposed to the notion of an international criminal court with universal jurisdiction and an independent prosecutor.25 While the US proposed that the UN Security Council exercise control over the Court’s jurisdiction, as it does with the two ad hoc tribunals, the negotiations at the Rome Conference led to a multifaceted mechanism for triggering criminal investigation and prosecution. The Court can exercise jurisdiction under any of the following conditions: (1) a state party refers to the Prosecutor a situation in which it is suspected a crime has taken place (in accordance with Article 14 of the Rome Statute); (2) the Security Council refers to the Prosecutor a situation in which it is suspected a crime has taken place (in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter); (3) the Prosecutor initiates proceedings on the basis of reliable information received from states, UN organs, international and nongovernmental organizations, and so forth (in accordance with Article 15 of the Rome Statute). Thus the Prosecutor has proprio motu powers, that is, the power to initiate investigation. In the event the Prosecutor decides to undertake investigation of a case, authorization for continuing the investigation must be obtained from the Pre-Trial Chamber composed of three judges. An additional feature affecting the Court’s jurisdiction is the inclusion of the principle of complementarity. Article 17 of the Rome Statute states that the Court shall rule a case inadmissible when it is being or has been genuinely investigated or prosecuted by a state that has jurisdiction over it. The exceptions to this rule are when a state is ‘unwilling or unable’ to genuinely investigate or prosecute a case and, in the event that a trial has already been completed, when the outcome is the result of a trial not conducted under fair, independent and impartial conditions (that is to say, is a ‘sham’ trial). In essence the ICC is regarded as complementary to domestic judicial systems. It might be argued that the principle of complementarity dilutes the ICC’s strength as a potential cosmopolitan institution. But this need not be the case. If we refer to the previous discussion of cosmopolitan morality it will be recalled that duties of global justice and duties of domestic justice are neither necessarily incompatible nor opposed, rather they can be complementary to each other. On this matter then, it is arguable that the principle of complementarity will help strengthen both domestic and global justice. Under the Rome Statute for instance, states are taken to be responsible not only for prosecuting suspects within their jurisdiction but also for ensuring that their systems of criminal law are consistent with international law. Therefore they must incorporate genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes into their domestic systems, which enables their courts to exercise universal jurisdiction over these crimes.26 However, the ICC has a right to intervene and prosecute in the event that a state fails to

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satisfy its obligations under the Statute. In this way global justice and national justice supplement and reinforce one another.27 Finally while there are many more pertinent details about the ICC than can possibly be discussed here, it should be noted that the ICC will gain greater moral, political and legal legitimacy in two additional ways. First, as a permanent treaty-based institution that retains independence from both state parties and the Security Council, the ICC can avoid the charge directed occasionally (and perhaps cynically) at the ICTY and ICTR that those ad hoc tribunals were established merely to carry out a form of ‘victor’s justice’. This charge will have little credibility—if it had any to begin with—since the Court’s investigations and prosecutions will be neither contingent upon prior approval by the Security Council nor merely retrospective in their reach. This should allow the Court to apply fair and impartial justice and cultivate trust in its proceedings. Second, the permanent nature of the Court will enable it to act as a more effective deterrent to future wrongdoing. Given the fact that the Court will be in continuous operation it is reasonable to conclude that it will serve as a greater deterrent to those who might otherwise be tempted to commit war crimes and other egregious human rights abuses. Knowledge that the ICC is constantly empowered to prosecute and punish such crimes may deter individuals from acting with a sense of impunity and thereby decrease the occurrence of future atrocities. Given the above it is worth remarking that the ICC offers several challenges to the traditional prerogatives of state sovereignty even though the jurisdiction of the Court technically only applies to states that have consented to the Rome treaty. These challenges are important since, as Bruce Broomhall has observed, the experience of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals reveals that only a ‘marked decline in respect for sovereignty’ as traditionally conceived will make international criminal prosecution effective (Broomhall 2003: 154). Appeals to absolutist conceptions of sovereignty reduce the efficacy of international or cosmopolitan law-enforcement. This is because consistent enforcement is unlikely to occur within a state-centric system unless there is a complete (or virtually complete) convergence of state and international interests or a marked decline in state-centrism (Broomhall 2003: 58). The first challenge of which to take note then is that on closer inspection the ICC has implicit jurisdiction over nonconsenting states, that is, states which have not become members to the Rome Statute. This of course was a concern of the states that did not sign the treaty and which objected to it on the basis that it constituted a threat to national sovereignty, authority and control. Yet how can the treaty-based ICC exercise any kind of jurisdiction over nonconsenting states? The answer is that the Court does not exercise any jurisdiction over states per se but over individuals. As Broomhall notes, ‘the Statute would be addressing the responsibility of individuals, and would not be imposing on States as such’ (Broomhall 2003: 81). Because of the Court’s jurisdiction

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over individuals it can prosecute nonparty state nationals where the crime is committed on the territory of a consenting state.28 In other words the ICC may impose jurisdiction over accused criminals who are citizens of a nonparty state even without the consent of that state. Article 25 of the Rome Statute provides jurisdiction over natural persons under the principle of individual responsibility, while Article 26 stipulates that the Statute applies equally to all individuals regardless of official capacity or diplomatic immunity. While individual responsibility is not a new concept in international law, it is evidence of a wider movement away from the state-centric preoccupation of traditional international law. While nineteenth century international law was characterized by the categorization of states as legitimate subjects and individuals as objects of international law, the move towards individual responsibility (accompanied by the emergence of human rights and humanitarian law) represents a change in focus that is a sign of global transformation towards a more cosmopolitan conception of world law (Held 1995: 101). The International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg was the first official recognition of individuals as subjects with obligations that extended beyond those owed to the state. For the first time Nuremburg ‘pierced the veil of State sovereignty, making individuals directly responsible as individuals under international law for the acts they carry out in the name of the State’ (Broomhall 2003: 21). The very principle of individual responsibility suggests a reduction in state sovereignty because individuals now have obligations not only to domestic law but also to a ‘higher’ international law, and because they can no longer hide behind the shield of immunity of state agencies. In essence Nuremburg confirmed the primacy of universal humanitarian norms in international law over domestic law (King 2001). In taking up the principle of individual responsibility as a cornerstone of its mandate the ICC provides for permanent recognition of our status as citizens of the world. Individual responsibility is eroding the monopoly of states over their citizens and requiring, at the very least, that states share authority over their citizens with a supranational body. Moreover it is important to emphasize that the ICC’s focus on the individual compromises state sovereignty at the level of obligations. The obligations between states and the ICC are very one-sided. States parties have a number of obligations to the ICC as set out in Part 9 of the Rome Statute, while the ICC has few if any obligations and is not required to ‘give’ anything to states. This is because the ICC’s obligations are not to states but to the state’s subjects—that is, to individuals and the protection of their human rights from the most horrendous atrocities known to humanity. There is another level at which the ICC has the capacity to challenge the sovereignty of nonstate parties. This arises from the fact that the Court has jurisdiction over nonparty states when the UN Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter has referred the matter to the ICC. The primary responsibility of the Security Council under the UN Charter is to

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maintain international peace and security. Thus it is recognized that the Security Council has universal jurisdiction for this purpose. For this reason it is possible to interpret the extraterritorial jurisdiction potentially exercisable by the Court as a delegation of universal jurisdiction over core crimes, which states are free to exercise. Universal jurisdiction has been called the ‘antithesis of unabridged national sovereignty’ (King 2001: 281). This is because universal jurisdiction—the basis on which Eichmann was prosecuted by Israel—is a principle of international law permitting states to apply their laws to an act even if it occurred outside their territory, perpetrated by a nonnational and not harming that state’s nationals (Sadat 2001). Universal jurisdiction is predicated in the idea that certain crimes offend the interests of all humanity and are violations of jus cogens (peremptory norms of customary international law) (Broomhall 2003: 10–11). Since the Nuremburg trials it has been an accepted norm of international law that with respect to the establishment of international criminal tribunals, ‘states may do together what any one of them could have done separately’ (Sadat 2001: 251). Consequently, the foundation of the Rome Statue may be viewed as delegated universal jurisdiction with a ‘state consent regime’ layered over the universality principle. This would make the delegation of universal jurisdiction to a supranational body not only a reduction in sovereignty but also a recognition of the universal impact and nature of genocide and crimes against humanity. While universal jurisdiction has been formally recognized since Nuremburg, the ICC is the first permanent and multilateral treaty-based mechanism for the prosecution of crimes that offend us all. Another challenge to sovereign prerogatives posed by the ICC arises from the principle of complementarity. This principle, it will be recalled, concerns the allocation of jurisdiction between domestic courts and the ICC in the sense that the ICC is to be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions. This means that unlike the ICTY and the ICTR, the ICC is not the primary court for determination of the offences within its jurisdiction. The complementarity provision of the Rome Statute while still respecting the authority of domestic legal jurisdictions, nevertheless significantly influences state sovereignty. This is because it is within the ICC’s jurisdiction to determine the adequacy of state forums. The ICC can investigate the domestic legal system to determine jurisdiction, particularly where the ICC believes the domestic courts are unable genuinely to prosecute. If the ICC chooses to exercise this power it will illustrate a clear incursion into state sovereignty. The right of the ICC to determine admissibility therefore is a powerful advance for international law, in so far as the admissibility provisions implicitly create a mandatory treaty-based universal jurisdiction (Broomhall 2003: 106). The customary form of universal jurisdiction discussed above is a permissive or ‘imperfect’ right in that states, while having the power to prosecute are not compelled to do so. However the provisions of the Rome Statute move in the direction of the

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perfection of such a right by making prosecution mandatory since failure to prosecute domestically will activate the jurisdiction of the ICC. Finally as mentioned already, the principle of complementarity necessitates alignment of domestic substantive law with international law. Thus states parties and in some circumstances nonparty states will be required to adopt the crimes of the Rome Statute into domestic law. If states parties do not incorporate Rome Statute offences into domestic law, those parties will have difficulty convincing the ICC that they are genuinely able to prosecute, thereby potentially triggering ICC jurisdiction.29 Clearly this aspect of the complementarity principle also impinges upon the traditional absolute law-making authority of sovereign states and contributes towards an environment of state accountability that stretches beyond territorial borders.30 As Broomhall notes, states are now under increasing pressure to justify and account for domestic decisions (Broomhall 2003: 5). Conclusion I have argued that establishing and supporting a permanent International Criminal Court is both morally and politically necessary in order to satisfy either perfect or imperfect cosmopolitan duties. In other words the reform of international law in order to accommodate the norms and practices of the ICC as a global institution is obligatory as part of the process of securing and protecting the human rights of all. This conclusion is grounded on several components of an argument for cosmopolitan justice. First, humanity is ultimately bound together as a single moral community with shared and equally-valued rights and obligations. Thus we have negative and positive moral obligations not only to compatriots but to noncompatriots as well. Second, cosmopolitan morality includes a normative commitment to progressively convert imperfect into perfect obligations by developing new global institutional schemes committed to the enforcement of all individuals’ rights. Human rights and obligations are to be institutionalized in such a way as to give them universal legal status to which governments can be held accountable and for which individual perpetrators can be prosecuted. In this way enforcement becomes more than a matter of morality alone. Third, these global institutional schemes must include a permanent world criminal court that embodies cosmopolitan principles—such as the promotion of individual persons rather than states as ultimate moral subjects—and which prosecutes and punishes those responsible for egregious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. Viewed from the perspective of cosmopolitanism as an ethical and political project, not only can the permanent ICC help to protect individuals against gross violations of their human rights, it also can contribute to the development of a humane system of global governance that takes seriously the equal moral standing of all human beings.31 As an institution dedicated

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to the interests of the entire human community and not simply the particularistic interests of states or compatriots, the ICC can act in accordance with and contribute to the promotion of global justice. Consequently I believe the ICC has great potential to defend and advance essential cosmopolitan values and objectives. By introducing new rules, standards and mechanisms of accountability into the global political system and prosecuting those responsible for mass atrocities, the ICC represents the constructive pursuit of a form of cosmopolitan law-enforcement that does justice to the imperative expressed by Arendt more than forty years ago. Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9 (1998). See, for example, Barry (1998) and (1999); Beitz (1979); Jones (1999); Moellendorf (2002); Nussbaum (1996) and (2000); and Pogge (2002). The claim that states may be compatible with cosmopolitan justice is not meant to suggest that states are necessary for cosmopolitan justice. One implication of this claim is that the legitimacy of any given state may be assessed in terms of the degree to which its system of justice is consonant with cosmopolitan morality. Doing so would lead us to reformulate the nature of state sovereignty. Thus the compatibility of states with cosmopolitan justice assumes, in the words of David Held (1995: 233), that states ‘would be “relocated” within, and articulated with, an overarching global democratic law’. See, for instance, Bell (1993); Himmelfarb (1996); MacIntyre (1984); and Miller (2000). A similar argument in terms of ‘cosmopolitan economic membership’ is made by Jordan and Düvell (2003), esp. Chapter 4. Amartya Sen (1999b), Chapter 3, provides a useful discussion of practical reasoning and the role of ‘informational bases’ in the process of evaluating and making judgments between competing principles of justice. An obvious consequence of this argument is that aiding noncompatriots cannot be passed off as merely a supererogatory matter. This position clarifies for instance that cosmopolitanism and patriotism are not mutually incompatible. Moellendorf (2002: 48) and Scheffler (1999) suggest that their versions of cosmopolitanism are ‘moderate’ in this way. For interpretations similar to the one offered here see Evans (2002, 2003) and Sen (1999b: 230–31). I am indebted to Mark Evans for pointing me in the direction of this interpretation. Other relevant arguments utilizing this distinction can be found in O’Neill (1988) and (2000b). Feinberg (1980: 143–58) also discusses the role of perfect and imperfect duties with regard to human rights claims. This argument is compatible with Moellendorf’s critique (2002: 38–9) of what he refers to as justice-positivism’s limiting strategy. On the idea of collective responsibility extending to all of humanity, see Arendt (2003: 146–55).

118 12 13 14

15

16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

Cosmopolitan Global Politics This is not to say that fulfilling duties of cosmopolitan justice will ever be perfect as such, merely perfected. For the following, consult Reisman and Antoniou (1994); see also Best (1994). The Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) sitting at Nuremberg contained the following definition of crimes against humanity in Article 6 (c): ‘[M]urder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated’ (Steiner and Alston 1996: 100). It is also worth recalling both that the international system of states is itself a historically specific form of institutionalization of various aims, values, and shared practices, and that this system is susceptible to transformation now and in the future. An excellent and extensive discussion of developing the types of institutional mechanisms advocated by the present discussion can be found in Held’s (1995) account of a cosmopolitan democratic law implemented within the context of a reformed United Nations system, especially chapters 10, 11 and 12. See Kaldor (1999: 31); ICTY Prosecutor Report to the Security Council (1999); Power (2002), Chapter 12; US Department of State (1999), available online at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Reports/homepage.html. ICTY Prosecutor Report to the Security Council (1999); Power (2002), Chapter 12; US Department of State (1999); and Central and East European Law Initiative of the American Bar Association and the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000), available online at http://shr.aaas.org/kosovo/pk/toc.html. UN Document S/Res/827 (1993). UN Document S/Res/955 (1994). For a thoughtful and personal account of the ICTY and ICTR as contributing to a robust system of international justice, see Goldstone (2000). At the final vote on the Rome Statute there were 21 abstentions and 7 votes against the treaty. The states that voted against the treaty were China, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Sudan, and the United States. The CICC’s website can be accessed online at http://www.iccnow.org/. The crime of aggression, which was not included within the jurisdiction of the ICTY and ICTR, has suffered definitional problems. At the time of the approval of the Rome Statute it was decided that the Court shall eventually exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression ‘once a provision … defining the crime and setting out the conditions under which the Court shall exercise jurisdiction’ has been drafted and approved by the state parties at a review conference. Rome Statute of the ICC, Article 5.2. Rome Statute of the ICC, Articles 8.1, 8.2, and 33. After coming to power the George W. Bush administration moved quickly to withdraw US support for the ICC and formally retracted the US as a signatory to the Rome Treaty on 6 May 2002. Since that time the administration has vigorously pursued bilateral ‘Article 98’ immunity agreements with other states that would exempt each other’s citizens from the Court’s jurisdiction.

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26 27

28 29 30 31

Under threats that the US will cut off military assistance to states which do not signed such agreements—on the basis of the ‘American Servicemembers’ Protection Act’—more than eighty countries have done so (as of June 2004). The Bush administration has argued that the US will prosecute any Americans suspected of war crimes or crimes against humanity and thus that an international court such as the ICC is unnecessary. Given the complementarity principle, however, it is unclear why the US would need to present the situation as one that can only be addressed by either the ICC or the US legal system, since the two need not be mutually exclusive. It seems more likely that the Bush administration intends the ‘Article 98’ agreements to serve as little more than blanket immunity for US citizens from international prosecution. A prominent example of the appeal to universal jurisdiction would be the Spanish government’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt in 1999 to extradite former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. A related issue which cannot be pursued here concerns the potential desirability of conducting judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings (such as truth commissions) in domestic settings in response to state-sponsored injustice. It may be the case that domestic approaches, at least in some cases, can help facilitate such desirable goals as social reconciliation and democratic transition. This possibility lies at the heart of the United State’s objection to the ICC. See Scharf (2000). One reason for this is that prosecution without clear nonretroactive criminal provisions might be seen as ‘victor’s justice’ and as a breach of the rule of law. It is important to note that this requirement is not unique to the Rome Statute since the ratification of international treaties often requires alignment of domestic law with international law. For a comprehensive discussion of humane global governance and institutional reform, see Falk (1995).

Chapter 5

The Environment, Global Justice and World Environment Citizenship As a result of a number of global environmental threats becoming increasingly evident over the past three decades, a transnational environmental movement involving a wide range of actors united by a shared ethic of preserving the environment has emerged. During this same period management of the global environment has arisen as a major concern in world politics and environmental matters have assumed a growing importance for international relations scholars and practitioners (Vogler and Imber 1996). An indication of the significance now attached to environmental issues can be gathered from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent Millennium Report to the UN General Assembly in which he describes the new global agenda as aiming to secure ‘freedom from want, freedom from fear, and the freedom of future generations to sustain their lives on this planet’.1 The manifestation of environmental globalization can be regarded as a consequence of the ‘thickening’ of environmentally-centred linkages between state and nonstate actors around the world, which has occurred largely as a result of mounting concerns about the very possibility of sustaining human life in the face of severe threats to the planet’s environment (Held et al. 1999; Clark 2000). Previous chapters highlighted some of the possibilities associated with human rights and human security as transformative political discourses for the pursuit of cosmopolitan values that in important ways are challenging the traditional prerogatives of state sovereignty. Yet an emphasis on human rights and human security does not preclude recognition of the significance of ecological issues such as the loss of biodiversity, climate change, air and water pollution, and food and resource scarcities within the scope of a global politics informed by cosmopolitanism. Indeed such issues challenge traditional perspectives on national or state security and compel us to recognize that ecological security is a core component of the cosmopolitan human security approach discussed in Chapter 3.2 For too long many have assumed that human rights and environmentalism are contradictory concerns. However it is clear that human rights claims are predicated on the continued existence and functioning of life-sustaining ecosystems and resources that are now under severe threats and pressures. Furthermore global environmental degradation poses one of the most significant ecological security risks humanity faces and forces us to consider

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the complex ways in which environmental problems intersect with humanitarian problems such as conflict over land and scarce resources, forced displacement and refugees, the destruction of indigenous cultures through environmental exploitation, the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS in less developed and marginalised countries, and so forth. Moreover the possibility of a cosmopolitan world community only takes shape assuming the presence of a safe and healthy environment. The wellbeing of all human beings depends crucially on how we organize our societies in respect of the planetary environment within which our lives are sustained. For all these reasons a focus on cosmopolitanism cannot mean turning our backs on the environment. This chapter considers the issue of environmental degradation from a cosmopolitan perspective. The first section examines the emergence of the idea of sustainable development, advancing a critique of this idea in so far as it has been interpreted and implemented in such a way as to neutralise the progressive aspects of its content with regard to fundamental issues of social justice. The second section then connects this critique to a more suitable normative and analytical framework, that of environmental justice. The concept of environmental justice creates a bridge between environmental degradation and the social and political contexts that not only give rise to such degradation but also manifest its effects on human well-being, particularly for the world’s poor and marginalised. This section is followed by a survey of global environmental governance and the transnational environmental movement, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of the concept of world environmental citizenship as a vital component of contemporary cosmopolitan global politics. Sustainable Development and the Turn Towards Global Justice Since the UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in June of 1972, the notion of sustainable development has become central to the elaboration and understanding of contemporary international environmental law and policy. As the twenty-six principles embodied in the Stockholm Declaration adopted at the UNCHE make clear, the numerous ecological crises threatening the planet demand that questions of economic development are integrated with issues concerning protection of the environment. Principle 4, for instance, states: ‘Man has a special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat which are now gravely imperiled by a combination of adverse factors. Nature conservation including wildlife must therefore receive importance in planning for economic development.’3 Despite such recognition however, the Stockholm Declaration did not offer a formal definition of what is now referred to by the phrase ‘sustainable development’. The subsequent adoption by the UN General

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Assembly of the World Charter for Nature in 1982 provided further support for the general principles and attitudes of environmental conservation expressed in the Stockholm Declaration.4 Yet it was not until the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, entitled Our Common Future, that sustainable development received its first clear articulation and gained increasingly widespread attention. As drawn up by the members of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), the Brundtland Report defines environmentally sustainable economic development as that which can ‘ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Moreover, ‘sustainable development requires meeting the needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life’ (WCED 1987: 8). Soon after the Brundtland Report appeared the WCED established the Experts Group on Environmental Law. The purpose of this group was to formulate a substantive account of the notion of sustainable development, paying particular attention to the identification of deficiencies and the articulation of proposals with respect to international law, and economic and social policy. The Experts Groups was especially concerned with clarifying complex issues concerning the legal rights and responsibilities of development as necessitated by an awareness of the limits of the earth’s natural resources. The group’s final report elaborated a host of carefully constructed legal principles intended to assist the effective transformation of ‘all States individually and collectively’ towards the goal of sustainable development and environmental protection.5 Little was done to implement the legal principles suggested by the Experts Group however, until the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) or ‘Earth Summit’ held in Rio de Janeiro. Indeed as the title of the conference suggests this gathering was seen as the most significant attempt yet to address the linkage of the environment and economic development. More specifically one of the primary concerns of the Earth Summit was to evaluate problems raised by the dual need to protect the environment and enable developing nations to strengthen their economies and improve their standards of living. This was not an easy task however, given the considerable differences expressed by the conference’s participants. While many of the industrialised nations argued for more stringent environmental protection along with continued economic growth, the majority of developing nations insisted that their precarious economic development—and thus the exploitation of their natural resources—could not be imperilled by an undue emphasis on environmental protection. Despite these differences a consensus was achieved which enabled the participants to adopt three non-legally binding instruments: (1) the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; (2) Agenda 21 (which lays out prescriptions for sustainable development in the twenty-first century); and (3) the Authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on

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the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of All Types of Forest (or the Forest Principles).6 The conference also resulted in the signing of two global treaties—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity—as well as the establishment of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), a body intended to assess and monitor progress in the implementation of Agenda 21 and to promote dialogue and build partnerships for sustainable development with relevant governmental and nongovernmental actors (Birnie and Boyle 1995: 658–65). It is widely accepted that sustainable development has attained the status of the common, regulative idea intended to guide present and future environmental law and policy at the national and international level. The centrality of sustainable development is reflected in the fact that the ten-year follow up conference to the Earth Summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa in August and September 2002, had the title ‘World Summit on Sustainable Development’. I would suggest that despite the key status attained by the idea of sustainable development there are good reasons to adopt a critical stance towards the concept of sustainable economic development, particularly when it comes to considering its implications for the demands of global justice which emphasize the good of humanity over the narrow interests of states and multinational corporations. By examining some of the core themes of sustainable development it should become clear that the concept gives insufficient weight to matters of social injustice, economic exploitation, and the link between ecologically unsound practices and poverty. Principle 1 of the Rio Declaration proclaims: ‘Human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature’ (Birnie and Boyle 1995: 10). Despite the central role assumed by the idea of sustainable development in recent years it is not yet clear from our discussion what the term entails. The Brundtland Report defines sustainability as follows: In essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations (WCED 1987: 46).

A review of the major agreements and statements produced in support of sustainable development enables us to identify (illustratively rather than exhaustively) the following four central elements that are thought to be entailed by the concept of sustainable development, but which are generally in tension with one another and perhaps even internally contradictory.

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First, any conclusions concerning the idea of sustainable development remain subordinate to a framework which favours state and commercial interests. Consider Principles 2 and 3 of the Rio Declaration: Principle 2: ‘States have … the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies’ as long as this exploitation does not ‘cause damage to the environment of other States or other areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction’. Principle 3: ‘The right to development must be fulfilled so as to meet equitably developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations’ (Birnie and Boyle 1995: 10–11).

These principles express two apparent rights: (1) that of state-based exploitation, in so far as the natural environment is regarded as little more than an economic resource to be utilized as any sovereign state sees fit; (2) that of development, in so far as this is assumed to be industrial and economic growth using neoliberal economic policy paradigms. The idea of the right to development began to emerge in the early 1970s when less developed or ‘Third World’ countries sought to negotiate reforms of the world political economy around issues of trade, finance, aid and investment for the purpose of effecting an international redistribution of resources. By the mid-1980s however, arguments in support of reform of the international economic system began to be overshadowed by the structural adjustment approach favoured by the more powerful Western states (Rosas 1995: 247–56). Structural adjustment programmes were introduced as conditions on loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that required developing countries to modify their economic policies in order to cut public spending, place limitations on wages, increase incentives for exports and devalue currency (UNRISD 1994: 2–3). Nevertheless in 1986 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Right to Development, Article 1.1 of which states that ‘the right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized’.7 The 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action reaffirmed the right to development in Article 1.10: The World Conference on Human Rights reaffirms the right to development, as established in the Declaration on the Right to Development, as a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights. As stated in the Declaration on the Right to Development, the human person is the central subject of development. While development facilitates the enjoyment of all human rights, the lack of development may not be invoked to justify the abridgement of internationally recognized human rights. States should cooperate with each other in ensuring development and eliminating obstacles to

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development. The international community should promote an effective international cooperation for the realization of the right to development and the elimination of obstacles to development. Lasting progress towards the implementation of the right to development requires effective development policies at the national level, as well as equitable economic relations and a favourable economic environment at the international level.

While both the Declaration on the Right to Development and the Vienna Declaration suggest the need for substantive reform of the world economic system inclusive of resource transfer obligations between rich and poor countries, and emphasize the centrality of human development to the right to development, these innovative features have been either diluted or explicitly rejected in subsequent years as the economic growth model of development has remained dominant (Shue 1995). The notion of human development was introduced into international debates by the United Nations Human Development Report 1990, as an alternative to the narrower conventional concept of development as simple economic growth. As defined in the Human Development Report 2003: Human development is about people, about expanding their choices to live full, creative lives with freedom and dignity. Economic growth, increased trade and investment, technological advance—all are very important. But they are means, not ends. Fundamental to expanding human choices is building human capabilities: the range of things that people can be. The most basic capabilities for human development are living a long and healthy life, being educated, having a decent standard of living and enjoying political and civil freedoms to participate in the life of one’s community (UNDP 2003: 28).

I will return in the following section to the idea of human development as the expansion of human capabilities and function. In contrast to the notion of human development the economic growth model conceives and measures development in terms of increases in gross national product (GNP) per capita as compared between the GNPs of different countries. If the GNP of a country increases then it is considered to be ‘developing’ relative to industrialized countries with the highest GNPs. This approach is problematic in at least two significant ways. First, increases in aggregate GNP per capita tell us little about how wealth is being distributed and put to use within a country, and thus whether this increase is accompanied by enlarged disparities of wealth internally which may result in lower standards of living for the majority of the population (Little 2003; Sen 1999). Second, development predicated on economic growth fuelled by industrialization renders imperative the exploitation and consumption of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, and leads to increased pollution of water, air and land, consequences which harm rather than assist human development.

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A second core element of the concept of sustainable development is that the current framework within which international instruments concerning sustainable development are advanced places heavy emphasis on state sovereignty over natural resources. This is in agreement with customary principles and practices of public international law. As with Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration, international environmental instruments incorporating the idea of sustainable development explicitly affirm state sovereignty. For instance, Principle 1 (a) of the Forest Principles announces that ‘States have the sovereign and inalienable right to utilize, manage and develop their forests in accordance with their development needs and level of socioeconomic development’.8 While sovereignty over resources is granted the status of an inherent or ‘inalienable’ right, state sovereignty in this respect is supposedly subject to the obligations incurred under international law although the extent of those obligations may be taken to be quite minimal. An effect of this statist orientation towards natural resources is to reinforce the misguided idea that each state not only has control over its own resources but is also solely responsible for its own development. As a third element, Principle 3 of the Rio Declaration also points to two other important aspects of the concept of sustainable development, namely, equity and intergenerational responsibility. These two aspects are emphasized as well in Principles 5 and 8 of the Rio Declaration. Principle 5 declares: ‘All States and all people shall cooperate in the essential task of eradicating poverty as an indispensable requirement for sustainable development, in order to decrease the disparities in standards of living and better meet the needs of the majority of the people of the world.’ Principle 8 calls for the eventual elimination of unsustainable patterns of production, consumption and population growth in order to achieve ‘a higher quality of life for all people’ (Birnie and Boyle 1995: 11). Sustainable development, it is argued, can only be achieved if each generation bears responsibility for the continued protection and functioning of ecosystems for future generations, and if worldwide poverty and other social disparities are eradicated. The proposal that issues of equity and environmental integrity must be intrinsically linked is the most progressive aspect of sustainable development theory and corresponds with the several of the recommendations of the WCED in the Brundtland Report as mentioned above. In view of the issues raised above, the fourth and final core element is that sustainable development is regarded as including the notion of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. As expressed in Principles 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Rio Declaration, both developed and developing nations share the responsibility to protect, conserve and restore the environment, but this responsibility weighs differently according to whether states are more developed or less developed. This differentiation of responsibilities has two facets: First, it is recognized that more developed or industrialised nations contribute most greatly to environmental degradation and possess the

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economic and technological means to begin to actively redress this degradation. The United States for instance, is the world’s biggest greenhouse polluter, responsible for 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions despite having only 4 per cent of the world’s population, while also having the world’s largest economy in terms of GDP.9 Despite this fact the George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty drafted in 1997 according to which industrialized nations agreed to reduce substantially their emissions of greenhouse gases. Second, less developed nations are also acknowledged as contributing in their own ways to environmental degradation but are held to have less financial and technological capability of responding to such problems. Consequently the achievement of a global and equitable version of sustainable development requires a greater transfer of resources from developed to developing nations in order to, so to speak, ‘level the playing field’. Aspects of the first, third and fourth core elements entailed by the concept of sustainable development seem to challenge the traditional limitations placed around matters of justice in international relations. In particular they bring to our attention that programmes intended to protect the environment often disregard the differential benefits and burdens that arise between societies and generations. Consequently doing justice with regard to the aims of such programmes would require a fair distribution of these benefits and burdens. It would be unjust, for example, to continue to maintain burdens disproportionately greater for poor peoples than for rich ones, and benefits disproportionately greater for the already advantaged than for the disadvantaged. It would appear then that the idea of sustainable development is one that is explicitly intended to further the goal of greater justice across the planet. Yet it is also an idea constrained by internal tensions or limitations that arise from the fact that it remains firmly entrenched in the terrain of state interests and the economics of consumerism. These tensions at the heart of the concept of sustainable development weaken the perception that the natural environment ought to be protected, thereby leaving the potentially progressive elements of sustainable development largely squandered. For the most part this is a consequence of the primacy assumed by economic development in the phrase ‘sustainable development’. Although the idea of sustainable development is promoted as the preferred paradigm for environmental action within the context of the international system, it is absurd to ignore the fact that in the absence of global regulation international capitalism is inherently unsustainable. Economic development, no matter how closely it is wrapped in ‘green’ language, is by definition under global capitalism predicated on the expansion of commodity production and thus the continued intense consumption and exploitation of the earth’s resources.

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Our natural environment is considered by the crude growth and consumption paradigm of economic development to be little more than a standing reserve whose only purpose is to provide resources for human exploitation. A conceptual framework and economic system which strictly divides humanity from nature and posits nature as an object merely for human use is most likely unable to support the kinds of changes in value and belief that are needed to address effectively the extent of global environmental degradation and thus extend the scope of justice across the entire planet. If the interdependencies of human and nonhuman life are to be genuinely recognized, future environmental institutions and treaties must resist the temptation to extract human concerns from their broader natural mooring and elevate them to a separate and inherently superior status, such as with a right to economic development that would trump all environmental concerns properly situated with regard to human well-being. As I discuss in the following section, recent attempts at articulating principles that integrate human and environmental rights seem to be a positive effort in this direction. The narrow cost-benefit approach that lies behind uncontrolled economic exploitation of the environment also poses problems for the laudable goals of intergenerational responsibility and equity included in the idea of sustainable development. While the emphasis on intergenerational issues is intended to temper the kind of short-term thinking characteristic of our conventional practices of uncontrolled exploitation of the environment, exploitation nevertheless retains a prominent place within sustainable development. It is no accident that Principle 4 of the Rio Declaration states that environmental protection constitutes only a ‘part’ of the development process. On the one hand, it must be asked whether the sense of justice conveyed by the inclusion of intergenerational concerns can be adequately served by the belief that more economic growth is the answer to the world’s environmental problems. On the other hand, the question arises as to how justice can be served if developing nations are unable to obtain a standard of living suitable to a healthy and secure life, that is, if the current social and economic inequities between North and South remain firmly entrenched. Nearly half of humanity, 2.8 billion people, must survive on less than US$2 per day and nearly a fifth of the world’s population must live on less than US$1 per day (World Bank 2002: 1).10 The inequitable distribution of wealth structured into the global economic system is the primary cause of such drastic poverty in the less developed countries, for example US$200 billion is transferred annually from the South to the North in the form of debt repayment while private capital investment and overseas development aid from the North to the South have decreased since 1990—to the point where aggregate development aid in 2001 totalled only one-quarter of the amount that poor states paid as debt repayment—a fact which should strike us as perverse (UNDP 2002: 202). Unfortunately this difficult situation is one of the most complex issues confronting those who are concerned with

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safeguarding the environment. It should be acknowledged however, that the constant growth and consumption model of development which asserts that poorer nations eventually will be able to match the current economic status of the most wealthy nations and that the richest nations will be able to maintain and even raise their current national incomes will have to be revised in favour of the view that a more equitable redistribution of wealth with respect to the planet’s fragile environmental limits is most desirable economically, ecologically and humanely. Indeed this redistribution may occur whether we would like it to or not. This last point was made in the Founex Report on Development and Environment, the published result of an international experts meeting held in Founex, Switzerland in June 1971, which warned that, due to such factors as the steadily increasing pressure of population growth and uncontrolled pollution, the planet’s natural resources will be exhausted if the entirety of the world’s population is raised to the current (and continually expanding) standard of living of the richest nations. That means of course that the standard of living now enjoyed in the most developed nations will not be ‘sustainable’ for them into the future, nor does it constitute an achievable goal for the developing nations (UNEP 1981). Given the massive inequalities in the present global distribution of resources recourse must be made to some redistributive claims as required by the duties of justice. One such claim can be made in light of John Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. In his well-known theory of justice as fairness Rawls proceeds on the belief that justice is the primary and indispensable virtue against which the laws and institutions of society must be assessed (Rawls 1999a: 3). Given the indispensable status of social justice, a society’s laws and institutions must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust even though they may be good or proper according to some other criteria. The same may be said of the world community, particularly given the systematic interconnectedness and interdependency of the globalized political system and the extensive global impact of environmental destruction and pollution. The most fundamental principles of justice are designed to regulate the distribution of fundamental rights and duties, advantages and burdens, assigned to individuals by the rules of society. Clearly both individual societies and the global society have patterns of inequality that persist over time and systematic ways of allocating people to positions within their hierarchies of power, status and money. Because of these structural allocations of advantages and disadvantages, without the application of adequate principles of justice many aspects of the basic structure responsible for arbitrary inequalities would remain unaffected. A fundamental aim of justice as fairness is to ensure the existence of a just system of institutions. One argument that highlights the importance of these structural inequalities concerns what Rawls calls ‘fair equality of opportunity’ which he distinguishes from ‘formal’ equality of opportunity (Rawls 1999a: 73–8). Formal equality exists when no laws unequally restrict the opportunities of

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anyone to acquire such social goods as wealth, income or powers of office. However formal equality of opportunity does not concern itself with inequalities of life prospects that stem from unequal starting places in society. Thus under a scheme of formal equality of opportunity if two equally motivated and equally talented individuals start from unequal social positions it is likely that they will achieve unequal levels of wealth, income or powers of office. Consequently persons with equal talents and motivations will not have equal life prospects or expectations. In contrast, fair equality of opportunity exists when persons with equal talents, abilities and motivations have the same or similar life prospects or expectations of attaining positions involving certain levels of income, wealth and powers of office, regardless of the social position each is born into. This requires certain institutions designed to mitigate the influence of social position on individual attainment and thus to equalize life prospects regarding the attainment of income, wealth, or the powers of office for individuals with similar abilities and motivation. For example if two similarly talented and motivated individuals happened to be born into radically different circumstances such that one of them had access to adequate educational facilities and housing as well as clean water, air and food while the other did not, the resulting disparity in life prospects could be lessened by the equal provision of basic education, housing, and a clean and safe environment. What this means is that the basic structure of society generates, in conjunction with natural and social contingencies, conditions which can be the source of significant injustices. Consequently the basic structures of domestic and global society must be regulated to eliminate as much as possible such injustices. While the interrelationships between globalization and social justice are complex, it is nonetheless possible to recognize that there exists interdependent economic (as well as political, social and cultural) activity that produces substantial aggregate benefits, and a pattern in which international and transnational institutions (multinational corporations, international and transnational trade and investment, property rights over national territories and their resources) distribute those benefits as well as burdens. Yet global interdependence as it has functioned in the market framework preoccupied with economic growth has coincided with ever widening gaps between rich and poor countries, political inequality and inequality of opportunities among the members of different countries and, domestically, gaps between upper and lower income classes (Eichengreen 1999). Thus, while the process of globalization carries with it significant interdependencies including a reduction of barriers to the flow of goods, services, finance, people and communications, it also entails increasing gaps in economic, social, political and environmental standards within and between states which must be addressed by the world community. Given the interdependencies of peoples throughout the world generated by globalization, it has become imperative that principles of social justice

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are applied globally. The shared fates and interests of persons extend beyond political boundaries as economic, environmental, social, cultural and political life becomes increasingly global. These considerations lead to the conclusion that in a world where state boundaries do not constitute the limits of social goods and bads, the confinement of principles of social justice— such as fair equality of opportunity—to the domestic sphere has the effect of unfairly burdening poor countries and poor classes therein, thereby contributing to avoidable suffering. In characterizing sustainable development as a way of balancing ecosystem protection with the familiar rules of the global economic system we sacrifice strong consideration of the global aspect of social justice to the notion of simple conformity with the status quo of international political economy. Doing so leaves in place the basic global structures that operate to reproduce existing patterns of power, wealth, privilege and inequality. Calling for deep structural reforms in line with egalitarian distributive principles is certainly more complex than an insistence on straightforward economic development and is sure to be an unfavourable position among the affluent.11 Yet the principle of intergenerational equity and responsibility is one which calls for a strong sense of fairness when considering how the requirements of justice are to be balanced within and between generations. It is perhaps also the only way to ensure that both environmental and economic preservation can be fulfilled. Consequently I suggest that the discourse of sustainable development should give way to a discourse of sustainable or environmental justice. Finally mention should be made of the role played by continued reliance on the inviolability of state sovereignty. This is a complex issue due to the historical emergence of independent nation-states following the Second World War. For many of the less developed nations sovereignty over their natural resources is an integral part of their demand for self-determination and an equal status in international law and negotiation. Thus at UNCED for example, the developing nations negotiated with the view to protecting their right to development according to their internal interests and needs. Yet there is a strong tension between state sovereignty as enshrined in traditional international law and the moral responsibility enunciated in international environmental instruments that states not cause environmental damage which reaches beyond their own borders, a tension that currently resolves itself in favour of the individual state. It is arguable, then, whether a system which privileges state sovereignty over global environmental concerns can adequately address the problems facing the planet and its inhabitants as a whole and, concomitantly, whether such a system can lead to the actualization of justice across state boundaries. Not only does an overly statist international system make it incredibly difficult to create the ecological norms and consensus needed for a genuinely global response to environmental issues, but also to implement global agreements and guide active and effective compliance. These require

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a reduced emphasis on the territorial and particularistic assumptions that underlie state sovereignty, and a greater emphasis on the creation of democratic coalitions composed of numerous local, regional and multinational actors operating outside the narrow state-driven model, who are empowered to help design and implement environmental policy that is not simply applied from the top down. While the idea of sustainable development represents a step in the right direction toward the goal of establishing a global response to the urgent problems of planetary environmental degradation, to uphold economic growth per se as the guiding principle by which to address environmental issues as a whole is inadequate. Thinking about justice—and particularly of environmental justice as an integral component of global justice—can no longer be confined within the boundaries of nation-states. From Sustainable Development to Environmental Justice Environmental justice begins from the recognition that marginalisation of the environment and marginalisation of poor communities, most often those of ethnic or racial minorities, are strongly linked together and stem from common attitudes and practices dismissive of basic principles of justice. Environmental injustice issues therefore connect problems of racial and ethnic discrimination with those of socioeconomic inequality, which are intersecting problems affecting a vast percentage of the world’s population. According to the 2002 and 2003 editions of the Human Development Report:

• • • • • • • •

Incomes are distributed more unequally across the world’s people than in the most unequal countries. The richest 5 per cent of the world’s people receive 114 times the income of the poorest 5 per cent. The richest 1 per cent receive as much as the poorest 57 per cent. Global inequality increased between 1987 and 1998. On a per capita basis the Gross Domestic Product of the world’s least developed countries declined by more than 10 per cent during the 1990s Per capita incomes fell in 54 countries during the 1990s, with most of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In the early 1990s children under five were 19 times more likely to die in sub-Saharan Africa than in rich countries—and today, 26 times more likely. Poor women and girls are hurt disproportionately by environmental degradation, often because they are responsible for collecting fuel, fodder and water.

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About 1.7 billion people, a third of the developing world’s population, live in countries facing water stress (defined as countries that consume more than 20 per cent of their renewable water supply each year).

In short, these and other statistics reveal that ‘many environmental problems stem from poverty—often contributing to a downward spiral in which poverty exacerbates environmental degradation and environmental degradation exacerbates poverty’ (UNDP 2002: 123). Environmental justice refers to this connection between environmental concerns and social justice. The concept of environmental justice emerged initially from the work of scholars and activists in the United States which documented the disproportionate economic burdens and health risks found in poor communities and especially communities of colour, associated with the siting of rubbish, landfill, hazardous and toxic waste facilities and polluting industries, and the unequal distribution of environmental benefits, resulting in a lack of access to clean land, water and air (Bryant 1995; Hofrichter 1993). Environmental justice has expanded upon this initial focus in two key ways: First, it has moved ‘beyond racism to include others (regardless of race and ethnicity) who are deprived of their environmental rights’ and therefore are most vulnerable to the impact of environmental problems, ‘such as women, children and the poor’ (Cutter 1995: 113). Second, it has moved beyond the context of local communities within a single state to recognition that environmental injustice associated with those in lower socioeconomic groups is a feature of the global context of the international system.12 The result has been a shift in or addition to the discourse of environmentalism, which is no longer merely an issue of resource conservation and wildlife preservation but also a social and political matter of global justice, equity and rights with regard to all persons everywhere and their quality of life. While it is not the purpose of this chapter to rehearse arguments for and against anthropocentrism and biocentrism (or ecocentrism) within the context of environmental ethics since these have been comprehensively conducted elsewhere,13 the environmental justice argument is admittedly anthropocentric in so far as it focuses on human beings as the proper subjects of justice and on their claims to rights and fairness within systems of political morality. Nevertheless, environmental justice need only be considered as adopting a ‘weak’ version of anthropocentrism for two reasons. First, admitting human beings as the proper subjects of justice does not mean that nonhumans cannot also be a locus of moral concern. Second, its concern with human health and well-being is grounded in the recognition that the quality of human life is inseparable from the quality of the supporting ecosystems upon which human life depends; there is no need to presume a strict ontological distinction between human beings and the environment in which they live. It is quite possible, then, to defend

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pragmatically the aims of environmental justice while holding stronger biocentric beliefs. In comparison economic rationality not only regards nonhuman nature solely in instrumental terms, as resources to be exploited in the service of economic ends, but also human beings in general, as instruments to be utilized in the service of those same ends.14 Within the market paradigm of economic rationality human needs, health and wellbeing are insufficient grounds for legitimating basic human rights claims vis-à-vis the environment. On the one hand, then, a narrow conception of environmentalism that focuses solely on the protection of the nonhuman natural environment leads to an extreme biocentrism which fails to account for the interests of humans in general and the rights of individuals in particular. On the other hand, an equally narrow focus on the merely instrumental value of the environment for human use leads to an extreme anthropocentrism which fails to take into account potentially noninstrumental dimensions of ecosystems (such as the aesthetic, religious/spiritual, cultural and psychological) and the extent to which human life is dependent upon the environment in ways which transcend its mere exploitation as an economic resource. The environmental justice approach charts a balanced path between these extremes, accepting that the environment is not completely reducible to an economic instrumentality but that it is also fundamentally inseparable from human existence and interests. As Kristin Shrader-Frechette notes: ‘What affects the welfare of the planet affects us all’ (Shrader-Frechette 2002: 6). For this reason environmental conditions and sociopolitical conditions reflect an interpenetration which renders it imperative to challenge practices that degrade these conditions, and the burdens of economic development must not be ‘shifted to the poor and the powerless’ such as indigenous peoples and citizens of developing nations (Shrader-Frechette 2002: 6). Environmental injustice often operates behind a supposedly politically neutral screen like mainstream economic development theory which justifies concentrating the economic harm from ecologically damaging practices in poor communities and countries. A clear example of this approach is manifest in an internal memo written in 1991 by Lawrence Summers, who at the time was vice president and chief economist at the World Bank and is now president of Harvard University, in which Summers states: ‘Shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging the migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries] …? [T]he economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable …. Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted’ (Robbins 1999: 233–6). The position expressed in Summers’ memo exemplifies a disturbing tendency in economic instrumentalism to regard life and human well-being in poorer, marginalised countries as having minimal relative value and thus as suffering less harm compared to the more highly valued life and well-being of those in wealthy countries. Proponents of environmental justice raise the question as to the moral

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legitimacy of permitting a supposedly politically neutral mechanism such as the market to commodify globally disproportionate environmental and consequently human harm, especially between the countries of the North and South. Market driven economic policies incorporating international trade and resource flows and development projects such as nuclear and hydroelectric power facilities are inseparable from disparities in the costs and health consequences borne predominantly by poorer countries, and therefore are hardly politically neutral. For this reason it is argued that environmental degradation and economic as well as political inequality cannot be disaggregated. Environmental justice therefore focuses attention on the inequities— whether distributive or procedural—and disproportionate burdens borne by poor communities and countries that arise from the inclusion of what arguably are morally irrelevant features such as race, ethnicity, economic status and political power, in environmental decision making (Bullard 2001: 8). Distributively, conventional practices have led to situations in which those who most benefit from the exploitation of natural resources and advantageous siting of harmful facilities and by-products such as toxic waste have not sustained burdens commensurate to those benefits. The unequal distribution of the burdens and benefits associated with environmental siting policies and practices can undermine fair equality of opportunity, as discussed in the previous section. Procedurally, those who traditionally have least benefited from conventional environmental practices have also been burdened incommensurately by disparities in the formulation, adoption and implementation of policies and strategies intended to improve the environmental conditions in which they must live, thereby limiting their access to and capacity for participating in environmental and economic decision-making. As Cole and Foster note an important aspect of environmental justice ‘is the element of democratic decision-making’, and current ‘processes have not been effective in providing meaningful participation opportunities for those most burdened by environmental decisions’ (Cole and Foster 2001: 16). All of this amounts to a violation of the condition of fairness underlying deliberations regarding principles of justice according to which basic fairness demands that the interests of all persons as human beings be given equal consideration in various decision-making processes that may have a significant affect on those interests (Hunold and Young 1998). In this move to connect environmental quality with human equality the notion of environmental justice gives due consideration to issues of intraand intergenerational justice, inasmuch as the inequitable distribution of environmental harms affects both individuals in poor and marginalised communities around the world at present and also future generations and communities (Agyeman et al. 2002). One of the significant lessons to take from the environmental justice perspective is that effective solutions to many ecological problems cannot be formulated in isolation from the relief

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and eradication of poverty from the local to the global levels. Hence ‘sustainability’ assumes a much broader meaning than is implied by the narrower conception of sustainable development, one focused on ensuring equality and a satisfactory quality of life—not simply standard of living— for all persons in a just and equitable manner within the limits of supporting ecosystems (Agyeman 2002: 51). Of course while public policies should be aimed at preventing harm before it occurs whenever possible, whenever necessary government action and resources should be directed towards redressing existing inequities and increasing quality of life for all through means that are socially just. While the exact content of what environmental justice entails is open to plural interpretations it has often been framed in terms of basic rights, in particular the right to a healthy environment implied by the right to life. Environmental rights should be understood to encompass both substantive and procedural rights. Substantive environmental rights include the right to clean air and water, the right to be protected from environmental harm, and the right to natural resources used and managed according to environmentally sound practices. Procedural environmental rights which enhance and protect our ability to claim substantive rights include the right to be fully informed about the potential affects of environmental hazards, the right to participate in democratic procedures for policy-making and decision-making concerning such hazards, the right to consent to policies and decisions reached, and the right to complain about existing conditions, standards and policies.15 Environmental human rights contribute substantive moral and political entitlements to the doctrine of sustainable development, and the coupling of sustainable development with environmental justice leads to a more adequate perspective which might be referred to as sustainable justice. Sustainable justice reframes the discourse of sustainable development around notions of justice, rights and equity. Without the inclusion of principles of environmental justice into the discourse and practice of sustainable development, narrowly instrumental conceptions of economic development may end up overriding the requirements of justice and fair social practice. These prima facie obligations of the requirements of sustainable justice consist minimally of the equitable distribution of environmental benefits (goods) and burdens (bads) and equal environmental human rights irrespective of morally irrelevant features such as race, ethnicity and economic status. A sustainable justice approach thus advocates a more comprehensive understanding of the need to transform the social contexts that underlie and produce environmental injustice, and a long-term consideration of the ways that the capacity to pursue politically, economically and ecologically sound policies can be enhanced through local-global linkages. In this way it can contribute to a heightened sense of global responsibility and equity such as in the case of the notion of world environmental citizenship discussed in the following section.

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Furthermore the discourse of environmental rights adds depth to the notion of a basic right to life intrinsic to human development, in so far as it emphasises the importance of quality of life above and beyond bodily survival (Hamm 2001). It suggests that human beings are not only entitled to live in conditions free from unreasonably adverse forms of environmental degradation, but that we have responsibilities both to protect others from such degradation and to utilize, manage and transform the earth only in ways that do not create unacceptable (and disproportionate) risks to the well-being of others. Being attentive to these environmental dimensions of human development helps to ensure that all persons have a fair share of safe and sustainable resources and are not disproportionately disadvantaged by the effects of environmental policies, thereby respecting the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Because the planetary environment is our means of survival, fair equality of opportunity within the framework of global sustainable justice must encompass concern for disparities in the basic structure of society which negatively impact human health and well-being, and thereby create unjust inequalities in life chances. The effects that human actions have on the environment have a necessary connection to concomitant effects on humans individually and collectively, now and into the future. These last points can be enlarged by the idea of human capabilities advanced by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, first mentioned in Chapter 3. The idea of capabilities has had a large influence on human development theory and practice, particularly so because of its focus on quality of life as a key determinant in defining human development (Nussbaum and Sen 1993). Rather than focusing on ‘utility’—whether defined as preference satisfaction, happiness, desire-fulfilment or income— as the basis for judging a person’s condition and interests, the capabilities approach centres on a person’s well-being and his or her ‘advantage’ or freedom to achieve well-being (Sen 1999a: 1–3). In short, the capabilities approach is concerned primarily with what people can do rather than simply with what they have or what they are satisfied with. In his work on development economics and ethics Sen contends that development in all societies and particularly in poorer countries on the ‘periphery’ depends upon the simultaneous removal of major sources of unfreedom and the expansion of substantive freedoms (Sen 1999b: 3–11). Major sources of unfreedom include ‘poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states’ (Sen 1999b: 3). Types of substantive freedoms include political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees and protective security (Sen 1999b: 10). While the narrower conception of development in conventional economic theories measures development in terms of income (economic growth), Sen’s theory contends that the conventional approach offers a poor measure of the quality of people’s lives.

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While overall ‘wealth’ in the world defined as GDP variables may be increasing, for vast numbers of the world’s population this wealth too often fails to translate into what people can positively achieve. Consequently Sen argues that freedom or free agency is constitutive of development, that is, substantive freedoms are among both the ends and the means of human development. From this perspective capabilities refer to individuals having the resources and the opportunities to achieve the ends or goals that they have reason to value. Sen refers to an achievement that realizes a person’s capabilities in terms of ‘functionings’ or what a person is able to actually do with his or her capabilities (Sen 1999b: 74–6). Capabilities thus can be defined as substantive freedoms ‘to achieve alternative functioning capabilities’ or real opportunities to promote one’s ends, and functionings can be defined as achievements or what one actually does with the capabilities that one has. All persons, then, have a ‘capability set’ which contains alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for them to achieve. For Sen the assessment of a person’s freedom is defined by his or her capability set. Moreover the capability perspective is ‘inescapably pluralist’ in that some functionings are more important than others and functionings also are valued differently both personally and socially, indeed ‘“choosing” itself can be seen as a valuable functioning’ (Sen 1999b: 76).16 One of the critical points to take from Sen’s argument is that capabilities cannot be understood simply in a formal sense. In other words opportunities or freedoms to achieve cannot be realized without adequate resources that enable individuals actually to do or be, that is, to function. But by ‘resources’ is meant broadly whatever makes functionings—actual achievements—possible, which is irreducible to utility measures such as income statistics. It is quite possible for a person to possess wealth for instance, and also to lack sufficient education, or access to information, or the opportunity to vote or otherwise participate in social and political decision-making, which thereby devalues her capabilities and inhibits her functionings. Even more pertinent to our concerns here is the fact that converting resources into a satisfactory quality of life is influenced by environmental conditions, which are in turn influenced by social conditions. Human health and well-being, as noted by the environmental justice approach, are directly influenced by the combination of environmental and social factors in ways that are either unjust and destructive of human capabilities or just and supportive of capabilities.17 In the context of environmental justice the appropriate response to ecological problems has to include concerted efforts to make environmental, political and socioeconomic policies and practices less destructive of human capabilities, and to achieve sustainable functionings that are dependent upon supporting ecosystems which have not been sacrificed to a primary focus on luxury consumption and unlimited economic growth. This requires a careful integration of substantive basic

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entitlements and inclusive, democratic procedures for all people. Designing capability-friendly—and therefore environmentally-friendly—processes and policies will help to convert formal rights into real ones, in terms of what people are actually able to do and to be as a result of the enhancement of their capability-sets. Global Environmental Governance and World Environmental Citizenship As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the transnational environmental movement and the importance attached to global environmental problems have occurred mainly as a result of the recent emergence of a number of well-publicized global environmental threats. Environmental organizations in both developed and less developed countries have increased the profile of these threats and have helped to move them onto political agendas by putting pressure on influential actors and institutions. For this reason, and in light of the types of concerns focused on by environmental justice discourse, global environmental change is best understood as a social rather than physical phenomenon. This is because what has occurred is not simply dramatic change in the natural environment but more significantly the growth of an environmental consciousness, which realizes the limits of human exploitation (of both the earth and other human beings) and seeks to preserve the environment as the support system necessary for human existence (Lipschutz and Meyer 1996: 20). The emergence of environmental consciousness is, then, very much the result of the ‘rediscovery’ of human dependence on our natural surroundings, which has been masked by the modern scientific and technological illusion that nature can be mastered in a process of unlimited human expansion (Falk 1995: 252). Therefore, although the transnational environmental movement is due in large part to a number of world ecological threats becoming increasingly evident, the development of a shared global ethic seeking to limit human exploitation of the earth and the human costs of such exploitation is an important indicator of a transformative cosmopolitan politics. Largely as a result of the emergence of the transnational environmental movement and its shared global ethic, environmental globalization is rapidly occurring. David Held defines globalization as the ‘stretching and deepening of social relations and institutions across time and space’, a result of which is that local activities increasingly are influenced by events across the globe, while practices of local groups can have global influence (Held 1995: 20). As William C. Clark argues, if environmental globalism consists of ‘the existence of a rich network of environmentally mediated linkages among actors at multicontinental distance’, then it is unequivocally a feature of global society. He suggests as well that if, using Held’s definition,

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environmental globalization is the ‘thickening’ of the linkages of environmental globalism then this process is well under way (Clark 2000: 101–2). Clark outlines three groups of environmental linkages that have noticeably increased in the past few decades, focused on what he calls the ‘environmental stuff’ dimension of globalism, namely, the flows of materials (such as hazardous materials, toxic wastes and ‘greenhouse’ gases) and biota around the globe, environmental ideas, and environmental governance. He cites increases in the variety, strength and density of long distance relationships among actors, the number of actors involved in those relationships, and the velocity of change in society that these relationships help to induce as persuasive proof of environmental globalization. Clark uses the phrase ‘globalization of stuff’ to denote the way in which flows of energy, materials and organisms throughout the natural and human environments link the actions of people in one place with people at a distance. Clark and others contend that it is necessary to understand the earth as a system that involves a vast number of complex interactions and linkages which are irreducible to a linear cause and effect conception of actions in the environment (Clark 2000: 57; Blackmore and Smyth 2002: 204). The flows of energy around the earth mean that disturbances to the planet’s energy at one place can augment and create a large-scale impact in a number of other places. In addition flows of materials, which include those relocated by intercontinental transport as well as gases and particles that flow through the atmosphere, link together people in different places. Finally, biotic linkages such as the movement of pests or diseases can have significant and devastating affects on human populations and their supporting ecosystems. Because the earth’s environment functions as a complex system there has always been a degree of globalism in the ways in which relationships between humans are mediated by environmental linkages. However as a result of the increase in the world’s population, consumption of resources and greater economic interdependence, these linkages have thickened considerably (Clark 2000: 87–94). Another way in which people around the world are linked in the transnational environmental movement is through the spread of environmental ideas. Given the growing awareness of the extent of interconnectedness in the global environment as well as the emergence of pressing environmental problems at the global level, it is not surprising that there is widespread demand for global environmental policy and management to ensure that environmental degradation is minimised and reversed as much as is possible. For example Richard Benedick, the US negotiator for the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, described the need for a ‘new paradigm’ which explicitly recognized that no state or single group of states can effectively solve many environmental problems of the contemporary world, and instead promoted global cooperation as the essential means to address those problems (Czempiel 1992: 250). Subsequently collaborative efforts between state and

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nonstate actors to advocate good environmental practices, as well as a substantial amount of international research, monitoring and assessment have taken place in order to develop consistent policies on addressing global environmental threats. These initiatives have benefited greatly from the enhancement of communications technology which allows the latest scientific findings to be publicized worldwide and enables environmental ideas and issues to appear almost simultaneously on social and political agendas around the world. Foremost among the environmental ideas which have spread widely and have had much influence are, of course, those relating to the concepts of sustainable development and environmental justice which seek to integrate developmental and economic initiatives with environmental concerns. The third significant component of environmental globalization is the thickening of linkages between actors as a result of the emergence of a complex system of global governance aimed at addressing global environmental problems. Global governance refers to ‘collective actions to establish international institutions and norms to cope with the causes and consequences of adverse supranational, transnational, or national problems’ (Väyrynen 1999: 25). Global governance involves both governmental institutions and nongovernmental organizations in the collective making of rules and exercising of power at the global level but unlike the formal system of government, global governance is not necessarily backed by police powers (Rosenau 1992: 4). Ernst-Otto Czempiel’s description of governance as the ‘capacity to get things done without the legal competence to command that they be done’ emphasizes the lack of coercive power inherent in the definition of governance as distinct from government (Czempiel 1992: 249). Young further defines global governance as the management of complex interdependencies among an extensive network of actors who are engaged in interactive decision-making and take actions that affect each others’ welfare (Young 1996: 2). The system of global environmental governance thus includes both formal treaties and the institutions created to implement them, as well as less formal norms and rules that both constrain and enable actors’ behaviour without necessarily being backed by strong coercive powers (Lipschutz and Meyer 1996: 249). The transnational environmental movement is characterized not only by the search for collective and cooperative solutions to global environmental problems, but also by the diversity of actors involved. Although some have argued that as a result of the emergence of international regimes the state would have less power, the state remains highly influential in the governance of the environment. States alone have formal coercive power over their citizens, they negotiate the international legal instruments which form the basis of global environmental governance, and they adopt international trade and financial policies which affect the environment both directly and indirectly (Porter and Brown 1996: 2). Intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme play a

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significant role in environmental governance as they perform a wide variety of functions and have influence on states and other governmental organizations. Private actors have also become involved in the transnational environmental movement, with a number of domestic and multinational corporations adopting environmental considerations into their operations, and through the formation of international umbrella organizations such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The sector that has undergone the most significant transformation, however, is that of public nongovernmental actors. Especially since their extensive and high-profile involvement at the Rio Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, NGOs have grown rapidly in number and exert increasing influence on global environmental politics (Clark 2000: 100). Therefore although the state still plays a central role in global governance of the environment, other actors have also taken on substantial roles in world environmental politics. Out of this general background of global environmental governance another notable feature that has evolved is the emergence of networks which involve large numbers of diverse actors united by their interest in a specific issue or project. These vast networks constitute what is now referred to as ‘global civil society’ and engage like-minded actors from different levels and sectors of society from the local to the global. As Mary Kaldor notes, ‘global civil society is in the process of helping to constitute and being constituted by a global system of rules, underpinned by overlapping intergovernmental, governmental and global authorities’ (Kaldor 2003: 2). These civil society networks are defined as global because the actors, in addition to being from numerous different countries, are involved in international forums, conferences and debates, and are globally linked through networks, communications and a shared ethic aimed at preserving the environment and rectifying social harms connected with environmental problems. Global civil society is fundamental in dealing with global environmental problems, as it involves local practices which are linked globally and which therefore make shared global practices plausible (Lipschutz and Meyer 1996: 49–60). These types of networks have developed in other fields of governance such as human rights and they are especially crucial in the environmental field, as without both global and local action taking place the transnational environmental movement would be rendered ineffective. However in order to answer more fully the question of whether the transnational environmental movement provides a good example of global governance it first must be asked how to measure effective governance. Oran R. Young outlines several different dimensions of effectiveness of global governance. The most important measure is whether the problems that motivated the creations of the system of governance are being addressed adequately and whether progress is being made in their solution. Linked to this measure but not always identical to it is the extent to which the goals of a regime are attained over time. In addition both ‘behavioural effectiveness’ which Young defines as the extent to which a regime causes its members to

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alter their behaviour and comply with the requirements, and ‘process effectiveness’ which is the extent to which the provisions are implemented within the relevant political units are important. Finally, ‘evaluative effectiveness’ denotes the extent to which a regime operates in an efficient and equitable manner (Young 1996: 8–14). Each of these facets of effectiveness can be used to analyze the efficacy of the transnational environmental movement as a system of global governance. The traditional method of dealing with global environmental problems has been the creation of regimes which establish a system of rules, standards and procedures for each area of concern. These regimes are based on multilateral agreements out of which institutions designed to implement the negotiated provisions are formed (Porter and Brown 1996: 16). Different environmental regimes have proved to be widely divergent in terms of solving the environmental issue they were intended to address. An example of a regime which has been widely cited as bringing about measurable improvement is the ozone regime. This regime is based on the 1985 Framework Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer that defined the means by which actors would cooperate in reducing emissions, which was followed up in 1987 by the Montreal Protocol that outlined concrete reduction targets. These targets have been largely complied with, and between 1987 and 1996 there was an 85 per cent reduction in the worldwide consumption of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) (Simonis and Bruhl 2002: 108–9). The ozone and other environmental regimes generally are effective governance mechanisms in that the problems they aim to solve are diverse in character and require specialized institutional responses. However a common criticism is that there is a lack of coordination between the various regimes and thus the overall governance of environmental issues becomes too fragmented and responsibilities are spread too widely (Juma 2002: 44). Consequently although some regimes have been successful in reducing the pressure placed by humans on the environment, environmental degradation continues at a rapid pace and the system of global governance as a whole cannot yet be regarded as entirely effective in solving the problems it was designed to address. In an effort to counteract the fragmentary nature of separate environmental regimes the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established after the UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in 1972 to coordinate existing efforts in protecting the environment (Simonis and Bruhl 2002: 105). Although it plays a significant role in directing the attention of states to environmental problems and suggesting solutions, UNEP has been criticised as inadequate because it has limited resources, no executive authority or coercive power, and relies completely on the actions of states to implement its directions (Juma 2002: 44). Despite its shortcomings, which are due primarily to structural deficiencies of the inter-state system, UNEP has filled a highly visible role in seeking to catalyse changes in human perceptions about the environment,

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ensure widespread legitimacy of global environmental governance, and build consensus between industrialised and developing countries in devising cooperative norms and policies. The extent to which the goals of a regime are fulfilled can be distinguished from the effectiveness of that regime in solving problems. There is often a substantial difference between the degree of regulation that needs to be enforced in order to halt environmental degradation and the actual provisions of a regime which are negotiated by various actors. For example although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that the world’s greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to 60 per cent of the 1990 levels if the earth’s climate system is to be stabilised, the agreed target of reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases for the years 2008–12 outlined in the Kyoto Protocol is an average of only 5.2 per cent (Simonis and Bruhl 2002: 110). The goals set by a regime are often limited by state actors adhering to a narrow conception of national interests who are thus unwilling to make necessary changes to their own policies and practices. While the goal of the UN Conference on the Environment and Development in 1992 was to take a long-term global approach to sustainable development, the negotiating stances of the participating countries were largely determined by their short-term economic and political interests (Simonis and Bruhl 2002: 104). Although there are real differences that need to be addressed, especially between the North and the South, actors also need to be willing to revise their conception of the interests at stake in order to ensure that regime goals adequately address environmental problems. In order for environmental regimes to operate most effectively states must comply with the measures agreed upon and there must be compliance mechanisms to enforce against those who do not comply. Only a few regimes have specific enforcement mechanisms and those which do exist are largely cooperative in nature, where signatories are bound to support a noncomplying state so that it can meet its obligations. Under the Montreal Protocol for instance, countries are questioned on the reasons for their noncompliance and a joint effort is made to identify ways to ensure future compliance, which might include measures such as sanctions, cancellation of benefits and formal admonitions, or more supportive measures such as financial and technology transfers (Simonis and Bruhl 2002: 120–21). The lack of strong enforcement mechanisms included in international regimes has been the subject of much criticism, as not all states comply with the established rules and noncompliance does not always lead to corrective action being taken. Therefore although there has been a reasonably high rate of compliance with regimes, stronger enforcement mechanisms need to be built into regimes so that they can operate more effectively. Moreover the transnational environmental movement will only be effective if the policies decided at the global level are implemented at national and local levels as well. In assessing the implementation of regulations by states it is important to recognize that states are affected by

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different combinations of internal economic and political factors, which result in varying levels of ability and motivation to participate in the transnational movement (Porter and Brown 1996: 13). Local action is crucial in solving environmental problems and a positive step towards encouraging more grassroots participation is the Local Agenda 21 movement, which aims to implement sustainable development practices at the local level. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit, calls upon the world’s municipal administrations to enter into a dialogue with their citizens, public organizations and the private sector, in order to better implement sustainable development provisions locally. Ten years after Agenda 21 was adopted, more than 6000 municipalities have embarked on this process.18 Clearly there has been a significant amount of coordinated local-global action based on the diffusion of environmental ideas and a shared ethic of sustainability and environmental justice, and as a result the transnational environmental movement has contributed to the creation of global civil society. While there have been some positive steps taken to make certain that global policies are adopted at local levels, ongoing efforts still are needed to ensure that citizens around the world are informed and motivated to protect the environment and thereby contribute to human development. As part of this process it is extremely important that in light of the insights offered by environmental justice, governance of the environment is regarded as equitable by all parties involved. Because many global environmental problems can be traced to the industrialized countries of the North, it is only fair that they assume a greater burden in helping to rectify these problems consistent with the global principle of fair equality of opportunity and the global nature of environmental threats.19 The Brundtland Report makes clear that the world’s political communities are bound by common interests in regard to the environment and are in need of reaching common solutions: National boundaries have become so porous that traditional distinctions between local, national, and international issues have become blurred. Policies formerly considered to be exclusively matters of ‘national concern’ now have an impact on the ecological bases of other nations’ development and survival. Conversely, the growing reach of some nations’ policies—economic, trade, monetary, and most sectoral policies—into the ‘sovereign’ territory of other nations limits the affected nations’ options in devising national solutions to their ‘own’ problems (WCED 1987: 312).

By linking human-centred development with environmental protection and incorporating sufficient incentives to make participation by developing countries achievable and attractive, it may be possible for the countries of the North and South to find even more common ground. The principle of common but differentiated responsibility anchored in many multilateral environmental agreements should also be given greater support in local,

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national and international environmental policies. Other means of making global environmental governance more equitable include debt cancellation and financial and technology transfers which enable developing countries to comply with regulations. While differing needs and capacities must be kept in mind, the transnational environmental movement has sought to make regulations equitable and therefore meaningful for both developed and developing countries. Although systems of global environmental governance have not yet made major progress in solving environmental problems, important building blocks have been put in place in the organization of the transnational environmental movement. The most encouraging aspect of this movement is its contributing role in the emergence of global civil society in which networks of actors spanning different levels and different sectors of society are linked by their shared concern for the environment and human development, which results in local groups taking action based on globally embedded ideas. For this reason it is possible to speak of a consolidation of cosmopolitan and environmental values and ideals into a new conception of ‘world environmental citizenship’ as a dynamic moral-political dimension of global civil society. World environmental citizenship can be viewed as a component of the more general cosmopolitan conception of world citizenship. The idea of world citizenship, as discussed in Chapter 1, refers to the individual as a member of the wider community of all humanity complementary to whatever other political communities, such as the state, of which he or she is a member. Membership in the community of humanity implies some form of identity with and commitment to the other members of that community, and to the well-being of that community as a whole. World environmental citizenship arises from an ethical concern for the social, political and economic problems associated with the environment and humanity’s dependence upon it, and from a recognition of our global responsibilities for the human condition in light of humanity’s interconnectedness with the environment. Thus the world environmental citizen is concerned about the common good of the human community and places particular emphasis on the fact that we are all citizens belonging to both local environments and a single global environment. One of the first attempts to define environmental citizenship was offered by Environment Canada, the department within the Government of Canada that manages environmental affairs: Environmental citizenship is a personal commitment to learning more about the environment and to taking responsible environmental action. Environmental citizenship encourages individuals, communities and organizations to think about the environmental rights and responsibilities we all have as residents of planet Earth (Environment Canada 1993: 1).20

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More recently the United Nations Environment Programme launched a new Global Environmental Citizenship Programme. According to UNEP the aim of the Global Environmental Citizenship Programme is to ‘assert the differentiated rights and responsibilities of various sectors of society and promote informed actions to protect life on Earth’.21 More specifically the Programme functions to broaden its constituencies beyond state governments both by facilitating the participation of major environmental groups and NGOs such as Greenpeace, Earth Action and Friends of the Earth in global environmental governance; and by strengthening links between UNEP, governments and global civil society. The universalist values and aspirations contained in the conception of world environmental citizenship may have found its fullest expression yet in the Earth Charter, which was officially launched at the Peace Palace in The Hague on 29 June 2000. The Earth Charter is the culmination of a decadelong consultative process that involved prominent political figures, individual experts, national committees, intergovernmental organizations, and domestic and international NGOs. It is therefore the result of global civil society as a constructive partner in global governance. The impetus for the Earth Charter came from the 1987 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development report Our Common Future which called for the creation of a new global charter that would set forth the fundamental principles of sustainable development. Following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio calls for the drafting of a new charter increased, and in 1997 an Earth Charter Commission was formed with an Earth Charter Secretariat established at the Earth Council in Costa Rica. Ultimately the mission of the Earth Charter initiative transcended earlier conceptions of sustainable development and led to the adoption of a platform of global environmental justice in order to ‘establish a sound ethical foundation for the emerging global society and to help build a sustainable world based on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace’.22 A number of the Earth Charter’s principles give clear expression to the idea of world environmental citizenship:

• • • • •

2 (a): Accept that with the right to own, manage, and use natural resources comes the duty to prevent environmental harm and to protect the rights of people. 3 (a): Ensure that communities at all levels guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms and provide everyone an opportunity to realize his or her full potential. 3 (b): Promote social and economic justice, enabling all to achieve a secure and meaningful livelihood that is ecologically responsible. 4 (a): Recognize that the freedom of action of each generation is qualified by the needs of future generations. 6 (c): Ensure that decision making addresses the cumulative, long-term, indirect, long distance, and global consequences of human activities.

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9 (a): Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international resources required. 9 (c): Recognize the ignored, protect the vulnerable, serve those who suffer, and enable them to develop their capacities and to pursue their aspirations. 10 (a): Promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations. 10 (b): Enhance the intellectual, financial, technical, and social resources of developing nations, and relieve them of onerous international debt. 13 (a): Uphold the right of everyone to receive clear and timely information on environmental matters and all development plans and activities which are likely to affect them or in which they have an interest. 13 (b): Support local, regional and global civil society, and promote the meaningful participation of all interested individuals and organizations in decision making.

Finally, the Preamble to Earth Charter concludes by declaring: To realize these aspirations, we must decide to live with a sense of universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole Earth community as well as our local communities. We are at once citizens of different nations and of one world in which the local and global are linked. Everyone shares responsibility for the present and future well-being of the human family and the larger living world.

Conclusion These examples demonstrate that the idea of world environmental citizenship already has been exercised as an emerging identity within global civil society and that the state is no longer the only important actor in global affairs. World environmental citizens—as individuals and members of voluntary associations and networks of organizations—conceive of themselves as active and responsible members of planet Earth, participate in public decision-making regarding environmental policy, and promote values and ways of life conducive to the health and well-being of their fellow citizens of overlapping local and global environments. The responsibilities attached to world environmental citizenship derive from a commitment to sustaining the environment in light of the fact that the quality of the global ecosystem translates directly into the quality of human life, and from an understanding that without a healthy, sustainable environment it will become increasingly difficult to provide for the basic needs and human

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development of future generations. The activities of world environmental citizens also help to contribute to enlarging debates about humanity’s proper place in the environment; to making more informed choices, policies and laws that affect the environment; and to subjecting to scrutiny the behaviour of states, international organizations and transnational corporations. All of these activities further advance the aims of environmental justice as an integral component of global governance, most importantly by improving the effectiveness of global environmental governance and securing the substantive and procedural environmental rights of all persons everywhere. Consequently the idea of world environmental citizenship urgently reminds us that we must promote the rights and responsibilities consistent with an environmentally just social and political order at the local, national and regional levels if we are to build an effective, truly global cosmopolitan politics. Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, statement to the General Assembly on presentation of his Millennium Report, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, 3 April, 2000, UN Doc. SG/SM/7343, GA/9705; cited in Clark (2000: 101). For more on the idea of ecological or environmental security as a challenge to the state-military security paradigm, see Dalby (2002), Dyer (1996), HomerDixon (2001), and Pirages and Degeest (2003). ‘Declaration of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 5–16 June 1972,’ in Birnie and Boyle (1995: 1–8). ‘World Charter for Nature, 28 October 1982,’ in Birnie and Boyle (1995: 15–20). Experts Group on Environmental Law of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987: 7). See Birnie and Boyle (1995: 9–14), and the Report of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, UN Doc. A/CONF. 151/26/REV.1, Vols I-III (1992). UNGA Resolution 41/128, annex, 41 UN GAOR Supp. (No. 53) at 186, UN Doc. A/41/53 (1986). See UN Doc. A/CONF. 151/PC/WG 1/L.18/Rev. 1 Decision 2/13 (1992). See the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). It should be noted that the figures given do not correspond to what US$1 or US$2 would buy when converted into local currency, but the equivalent of what they would buy in the United States. Therefore the figures amount to much less—more than 50 per cent less—in terms of actual income (or Purchasing Power Parity) given prevailing market exchange rates. Such a recommendation for a radical redistribution of resources from the North to the South was made by the World Commission on Development, North-

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South: A Strategy for Survival (The Brandt Report) (London: Pan Books, 1980). 12 For a helpful analysis of the relationship between domestic and international levels of environmental justice, see Anand (2004), esp. pp. 9–19. 13 See Attfield (1999: 27). Attfield defines anthropocentrism as ‘the traditional view that only human beings and their values and interests matter’, biocentrism as the position that ‘recognises the moral standing of all living creatures’, and ecocentrism as the view that ‘regards ecosystems and the biosphere as having moral significance independent of that of their members’. 14 In Marxist terms this would refer to the commodification of the earth as ‘natural resources’ and the commodification of human beings as ‘labour power’. 15 For more detailed discussions of environmental rights, see Dommen (1998), Hancock (2003), and Shelton (1991). See as well the ‘Draft Declaration of Principles on Human Rights and the Environment’ in Hayden (2001: 669–74). 16 As discussed in Chapter 3, Nussbaum specifies a set of ten fundamental human capabilities. 17 Both Sen and Nussbaum offer powerful analyses of the influence of environmental, political and socioeconomic factors that negatively affect women’s well-being and agency, especially in terms of health care, education, life expectancy and, correlated to this, infant mortality. See Sen (1999b), esp. Chapters 4 and 8, and Nussbaum (2001). 18 See the web site of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), the coordinating body for Local Agenda 21, online at http://www.iclei.org/. See also Simonis and Bruhl (2002: 114–15). 19 See the discussion of global warming in Moellendorf (2002: 97–100). 20 Also found online at http://www.ec.gc.ca/water/en/info/pubs/mountain/ e_contnt.htm. 21 UNEPNews (April 1999), online at http://www.rolac.unep.mx/cronica/ing/ pn0499i.htm. 22 ‘Mission of the Earth Charter Initiative’, The Earth Charter Initiative (2002), online at http://www.earthcharter.org.

Conclusion It has been said that ‘The true progress of political thought lies in the cultivation of imaginative powers’ (Hobhouse 1918: 150). It has been one argument of this book that the cosmopolitan tradition of moral and political thought historically has sought to embody this characteristic and that such a ‘cultivation of imaginative powers’ is sorely needed by international political theory and practice today. In the era of globalization we are confronted with the profound challenge of harmonizing our moral principles and political institutions with the growing interpenetrations and interconnections between individuals, states and societies. As the world becomes increasingly integrated the conceptual framework of the Westphalian system—predicated on the idea of absolutely sovereign states existing and exercising their power autonomously—no longer accurately represents the contemporary social, political and ethical scene (if it ever did). Consequently we are faced with the task of comprehending and regulating a nascent global polity consisting of a complex enmeshing of individual, state and nonstate actors, and classical state-centric assumptions about the pursuit of national interests unfettered by the constraints of justice, accountability and legitimacy beyond borders are untenable in global politics today. Cosmopolitanism, I have argued, is the most suitable ethicopolitical theory for our times. By way of conclusion let me briefly review the different aspects of the discussion put forward in the preceding five chapters. Chapter 1 presented several of the most significant versions of cosmopolitanism within moral and political thought, from its classical roots through Kant to contemporary theories of cosmopolitan democracy. In this first chapter we began by casting a critical gaze on the bias towards partiality, conflict and statism in international theory and underscoring the work of some thinkers who have pushed beyond conventional understandings of the relationships between individuals and political communities and the attendant scope of justice and moral concern. Cosmopolitanism, it was noted, provides a fundamentally different normative focus to international political theory than do liberal internationalism and, especially, realism, by placing individual human beings at the centre of global politics. Cosmopolitanism’s assertion that all individuals exist as equal members or ‘world citizens’ of the universal community of human beings leads to a focus on three elemental characteristics of the cosmopolitan project that are applicable to global

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politics today: moral universalism, juridification of basic rights, and transnational institution and regime building. With these preliminaries in place Chapter 2 turned to the matter of human rights, portraying the theory and practice of human rights as providing a genuinely universal ethicopolitical discourse and instrument for facilitating the enhancement of human freedom, welfare and security. I discussed the developmental path of the idea of human rights and elaborated on the emergence of the global human rights regime as an important transformation of the international order. This transformation is manifested not in the destruction or elimination of state sovereignty, for such clearly is not the case, but rather in the modification of sovereignty so as to make it more congruent with the basic rights of human beings. The human rights norms embodied in the global human rights regime thus have contributed to the reshaping of states’ behaviours and expectations, thereby helping to constructively change the context and content of global politics in a broadly cosmopolitan direction. The second chapter also discussed two case studies in order to highlight how the struggle for human rights has ‘humanized’ conceptions of domestic legitimacy and established local, regional, international and transnational networks supporting the entrenchment of universal human rights norms. Based on the preceding account of human rights as the foundation of cosmopolitan global politics, in Chapters 3 and 4 I examined several ways that the traditional prerogatives of state sovereignty might be further reshaped in order to better respect and protect the dignity and well-being of persons. The key points discussed in Chapter 3 were the deficiencies of the traditional conception of national security, the cosmopolitan nature and scope of human security, the defence of a comprehensive conception of peace that addresses the underlying structural factors contributing to violence within a state system dominated by realism, and the need to properly constrain military force in order to limit its use to exceptional human security crises. The responsibility to protect the rights of fellow human beings identified there was then taken up in Chapter 4 in terms of the obligation to prosecute genocide and other crimes against humanity. Adopting the model of cosmopolitan law-enforcement, I argued that the ‘perfection’ of humanitarian duties correlated to the basic rights of others requires us to supplement the juridification of human rights with institution building in the form of the permanent International Criminal Court. If the responsibility to protect is to be realized for the end of greater human security, then the ICC must be empowered to effectively act upon the principle of individual criminal liability by prosecuting perpetrators of the worst offences against the human status, thereby translating cosmopolitan morality into cosmopolitan law. Chapter 5 suggested ways in which treating issues of global environmental degradation must be regarded as integral to the cosmopolitan ethicopolitical project and its focus on human well-being. Not only does

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environmental degradation pose significant risks to human security and cause or exacerbate humanitarian crises but, conceived positively, humanity in all of its dimensions is necessarily dependent upon the planetary environment. The interpenetration of humanity and the environment means that the condition of one necessarily affects the condition of the other. While sustainable development discourse has emerged as a step in the right direction towards recognizing the dependence of human beings upon the environment, I argued that this discourse suffers from a misapplication of the concept of sustainability: it is not economic development per se that should be rendered sustainable, but human life, well-being and dignity. While economic development (of a certain kind) clearly is one means towards the end that is sustainable human life, it is just that, a means and not an end in itself. By instead making environmental justice a central value in political justification, a conception of human development incorporating substantive and procedural environmental rights can be advanced which seeks to remedy social and economic disparities and environmental problems that negatively affect quality of life. It is this concern with ‘sustainable justice’ that animates many of the values and activities of the transnational environmental movement and the sense of world environmental citizenship found throughout much of global civil society. To sum up, then, the standard criticism frequently directed at cosmopolitan principles of morality and justice is that these principles are naïvely utopian in that they fail to correspond to political reality and are incapable of implementation. My basic aim in this book has been twofold: first, to set out and defend some of the fundamental principles of cosmopolitanism and, second, to describe some of the ways that these principles have served as the basis for, and have been taken up and extended by a developing system of global governance and global civil society. Because the incipient global polity is a dynamic phenomenon and the processes of its expansion and development are ongoing, we cannot assume that cosmopolitan trends in global politics will continue to progress. It is likely that there will be many setbacks and the emergence of regressive tendencies—such as the reversion to conventional power politics, militarism and rights-violating behaviour already witnessed in the ‘war on terrorism’— which challenge the egalitarian and humanitarian principles of cosmopolitanism. Yet if the arguments in this book are at all convincing, then we may rightly question whether such tendencies, rather than the considerable normative power and political vision of cosmopolitanism, are in fact naïvely utopian and out of touch with contemporary world affairs and growing appeals to shared global norms and practices attuned to the vital needs and dignity of individuals. Whether or not global politics will become truly cosmopolitan remains to be seen. However, this book has sought to make clear that far greater progress in that direction has been made than cynical realists would care to admit. The cosmopolitan turn in political theory opens our eyes to a host of transformative possibilities for

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constructing a more peaceful, democratic and sustainable world in which all people achieve their basic rights and enjoy full human security and development.

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Index accountability 23, 25–7, 30, 100, 110, 116, 117, 153 Afghanistan 26, 32 Agenda 21, 123, 124, 146, 151 AIDS 2, 122 Amnesty International 7 Annan, K. 91, 121 anthropocentrism 134, 135, 151 apartheid 111 Archibugi, D. 23–5 Arendt, H. 95, 107, 117 Aristotle 12, 15 autonomy 18, 19, 23, 26, 27, 28, 99 basic needs 72, 149 Beck, U. 5 biocentrism 134, 135, 151 Bosnia 26, 108 Bull, H. 69 Bush, G. 31, 118, 119, 128 capabilities 70, 76–81, 92, 126, 138, 139, 151 capitalism global 71, 128 Carr, E. H. 68 categorical imperative 18–19, 22, 98 choice 19, 103 Cicero 12, 14, 16, 108 citizenship 15, 99, 122, 137, 155 environmental 147–50 global 7 world 12, 23, 33, 98, 99, 147 civil society 6–7, 17, 19, 25, 29, 102, 108, 143, 149 Clark, W. 140–41 climate change 121 Cold War 2, 12, 26, 29, 30, 67, 70, 71, 74, 79, 90

Commission on Global Governance 71, 89 community global 7–8, 90, 91 international 26, 81, 87, 89, 91, 95, 97, 107, 126 moral 13, 18, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 116 political 3, 12, 13, 14, 19, 96, 98 world 3, 13, 14, 15, 22, 34, 96, 122, 130, 131 compatriots 34, 101, 103, 104, 116, 117 cosmopolitan law-enforcement 8, 94, 95, 96, 98, 113, 117, 154 cosmopolitanism 11–35, 67, 71, 73, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 110, 116, 117, 121, 122, 153, 155 defined 3–4, 33–5 moral 3, 96 legal 3, 96 crimes against humanity 77, 83, 90, 95–7, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 118, 154 Czempiel, E.-O. 141, 142 debt cancellation 147 democracy 1, 6, 7, 8, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 70 cosmopolitan 11, 22–33, 153 global 31 liberal 29 democratic deficit 23, 24–5 development 8, 16, 24–5, 30, 32, 70, 81, 86, 87, 91, 92, 97, 99, 104, 108, 116, 122–40, 146–50, 155, 156 human 8, 24, 92, 126, 138, 146, 155 sustainable 8, 122–33, 137, 142, 145, 146, 148, 155 Diogenes 12, 29 disarmament 93

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Earth Charter 148, 149, 151 East Timor 95 ecocentrism 134, 151 Eichmann, A. 95, 115 Enlightenment 15–17, 98, 99 environment global 14, 121, 122, 132, 140–150 equality of opportunity 130–132, 138, 146 ethnic cleansing 2, 8, 88, 95, 108, 109 European Union 25, 29, 108 Falk, R. 33 freedom 1, 13, 17, 18–22, 25, 29, 67, 68, 75–7, 91, 98, 99, 100, 106, 121, 126, 138, 139, 148, 154 Frost, M. 102 Fukuyama, F. 30 future generations 121, 123, 125, 136, 148, 150 gender 99 general duties 101 Geneva Convention 85, 107 genocide 2, 8, 72, 77, 80, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 97, 106–9, 111, 112, 115, 154 global civil society 6–8, 23, 28, 33, 102, 111, 143, 147–9, 155 global governance 5–6, 21, 22–32, 116, 119, 142, 143 144, 148, 150, 155 global parliament 28 global politics 4, 34, 35, 95, 107, 111, 122, 153–5 global warming 5, 29, 151 globalization 5–8, 21, 23, 24–7, 30, 33, 34, 71, 72, 74, 99, 121, 131, 140–42, 153 Habermas, J. 1, 35 harm 13, 16, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 103, 124, 126, 135, 136, 137, 148 hegemony 30, 73 Held, D. 4–5, 23–32, 99, 117, 140 Hobbes, T. 19, 68, 69 human rights 6, 33, 37–65, 67, 68, 73–8, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104–8, 110, 111,

113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 125, 135, 137, 143, 148, 154 humanitarian assistance 3, 68, 96 humanitarian intervention 91, 93, 94, 99 humanitarian law 84, 86, 87, 97, 106, 107, 114 Hume, D. 16 ICC (International Criminal Court) 8, 31, 97, 108, 110–19, 154 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 6, 31, 79, 125 indigenous peoples 135 individualism 3, 13, 99 inequality 25, 130, 131–3, 136 injustice 35, 77, 83, 88, 89, 97, 104, 105, 108, 119, 124, 133, 134, 135, 137 institutions global 25, 35, 69, 71, 76–9, 89, 92 transnational 95, 131 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 109, 110–16, 118 international law 1, 16, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 88, 96, 103, 107, 111, 112, 114–16, 119, 123, 127, 132 international order 26, 27, 29, 30, 69, 107, 154 international relations 1, 4, 8, 9, 23, 29–30, 35, 67–9, 76, 95, 103, 121, 128 Internet 5 just war theory 8, 68, 82–92 justice 11, 13, 14, 19, 20–21, 35, 67, 68, 71, 76, 82, 85, 88, 89, 95–7, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110–13, 116–19, 122, 128, 129, 130, 132–8, 142, 148 distributive 99, 106, 148 environmental 8, 122, 133–40, 146, 150, 151, 155 global 96, 101, 102, 103, 105, 110, 112, 113, 117, 124, 133, 134

Index Kaldor, M. 95, 96, 143 Kant, I. 17–22, 28, 34, 98, 99, 103, 104, 153 Kosovo 109, 118 law of nations 21 League of Nations 1, 107 liberal internationalism 29, 30, 33 liberalism 1, 30, 93 liberty 16, 17, 74, 75, 77, 86 Locke, J. 16 Machiavelli, N. 68 Mandela, N. 1 McGrew, A. 23, 24, 29 militarism 8, 67, 73, 81, 92, 155 militarization 73 Mill, J. S. 103 minorities 133 modernity 15 Moellendorf, D. 101, 102 Montesquieu, C. 16 Morgenthau, H. 68, 69 national interest 4, 30, 33, 69, 90, 92, 95, 145, 153 nation-state 6, 16, 21, 25, 26, 31, 33, 34, 107, 132, 133 natural law 16, 98, 99, 103 natural rights 16, 98 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) 6–7, 25, 108, 112, 142, 143, 148 nuclear weapons 72, 86 obligations imperfect 103–107 moral 34, 96, 99, 100, 105, 116 perfect 106, 116 Our Common Future 123, 148 Our Global Neighbourhood 89 pacifism 77, 82, 88, 89, 93 Paine, T. 16 partiality 4, 101, 153 patriotism 117 peace 1, 8, 13, 20, 21, 29, 30, 68, 69, 74–83, 86, 88–93, 99, 115, 148, 154

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comprehensive conception of peace 77, 78, 81 conditions of 73, 76 peoples 12, 20, 21, 22, 35, 76, 79, 91, 97, 125, 128, 131 Pinochet, A. 119 Plato 12, 15 Pogge, T. 92, 100 pollution 5, 99, 121, 126, 130 poverty 24, 25, 124, 127, 129, 134, 137, 138 public sphere 1, 7, 34, 35 Pufendorf, S. 103 quality of life 71, 72, 80, 134, 137–9, 155 racism 97, 134 Rawls, J. 77, 130 realism 1, 3, 4, 20, 26, 29, 31–4, 67–70, 73, 153, 154 reciprocity 19 refugees 2, 80, 109, 122 responsibility 1, 4, 25, 86, 89, 90, 95, 104, 105, 113, 114, 117, 122, 127, 129, 132, 146, 149, 154 global 91, 137 Rousseau, J.-J. 92 Rwanda 26, 95, 108, 109 Second World War 6, 24, 26, 84, 106 security collective 27, 81 human 8, 24, 33, 67, 68, 70–92, 121, 154, 155, 156 national 8, 31, 67, 68–73, 154 self-determination 132 Sen, A. 71, 77, 78, 117, 138–40 Seneca 12, 14 Shue, H. 74–5, 78, 89, 100 slavery 72, 111 Socrates 12 solidarism 91 solidarity 1, 7, 34 South Africa 56–60, 93 sovereignty 16, 21, 23, 25–7, 31, 32, 67, 68, 70, 84, 89–91, 96, 107, 113–15, 117, 121, 127, 132, 133, 154

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state of nature 16, 17, 19, 20, 69 statism 4, 31, 67, 153 Stoics 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 98 sustainability 124, 137, 146, 155

direct 72, 76 indirect 72, 73, 75, 77, 78 structural 72, 73, 77, 78, 80, 92 Voltaire 16

terrorism 29, 72, 77, 88, 155 global 2–3, 71 Third World 125 Thucydides 68 tolerance 89 torture 77, 111 tyranny 138

Walzer, M. 77 war 2, 19–21, 29, 32, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80–99, 106–13, 118, 119, 155 war crimes 83, 95–7, 106–12, 119 well-being 2, 3, 8, 67, 70, 72–80, 86, 122, 129, 134, 135, 138, 139, 147, 149, 151, 154, 155 Westphalia, Treaty of 16 Westphalian system 26, 71, 155 women 80, 97, 133, 134, 151 rights of 60–65 World Bank 6, 79, 80, 93, 129, 135 world government 21 world order 22, 27, 29, 30, 32, 99 world society 31 world state 4, 21, 99 WTO (World Trade Organization) 23, 31

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 72, 93, 126, 129, 134 UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) 130, 144, 148 United Nations 1, 6, 70, 71, 76, 84, 92, 93, 108, 118, 124, 125, 142, 144, 148, 150 universalism 11, 22, 34, 35, 154 USA 30, 31, 79, 80, 93, 112, 118, 119, 129, 141, 150 Vattel E., 16, 17, 103 violence 28, 68–70, 72, 73, 74, 76–81, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 99, 154

Yugoslavia 95, 108, 109 Zeno 12, 13 Zolo, D. 22–4