The Ethics of Global Governance 9781626370159

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The Ethics of Global Governance

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Ethics OF Global Governance

THE

edited by

Antonio Franceschet

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2009 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2009 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The ethics of global governance / Antonio Franceschet, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-651-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. International relations—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. International organization—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. International cooperation—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Civil society—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Franceschet, Antonio. JZ1306. E884 2009 172'.4—dc22 2008048409 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Ethics, Politics, and Global Governance Antonio Franceschet

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Contesting Sovereignty Samuel M. Makinda

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Liberalism and the Contradictions of Global Civil Society Cecelia Lynch

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Democratic Ethics and UN Reform Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti

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The Ethical Limits of Democracy Promotion Tom Keating

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Humanitarianism and the Use of Force Catherine Lu

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Feminist Ethics and Global Security Governance Fiona Robinson

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The Ethics of Global Economic Governance Jacqueline Best

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Environmental Ethics Richard A. Matthew, Heather Goldsworthy, and Bryan McDonald

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Power and Responsibility in the Global Community Craig N. Murphy

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Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported in part by an International Studies Association (ISA) Workshop Grant. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided a grant through Acadia University to support research assistance. W. Andy Knight and Tom Keating were generous mentors when I conceived the project while a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. Craig N. Murphy provided useful feedback on the first draft of the chapters; I am grateful that he has enriched the book with his own thoughts on the ethics of global governance. I am similarly grateful to the other contributors for their intellectual commitment and professionalism. Susan Franceschet provided excellent advice and support; as usual, I could not have done it without her. —Antonio Franceschet

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1 Ethics, Politics, and Global Governance Antonio Franceschet

Global governance is a commonly used concept encompassing a number of institutions, forces, and trends in world politics. Within its purview are organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO); the globalization of production, trade, and finance; the activism of transnational social movements (some opposed to globalization); multilateral efforts to halt global warming; and challenges to state sovereignty in the face of humanitarian crises. Few are against the need for global governance—and indeed for better forms of such governance—but many disagree about the more specific analytical and ethical issues and problems that it suggests. In recent years the global governance literature has become more sophisticated, as many have sought to clarify the concept and situate it within disciplinary debates and established socioscientific methodologies (see, for example, Ba and Hoffmann 2005; Barnett and Duvall 2005a; Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006). However, the place of ethics in global governance has not received much attention. In an important article, Craig N. Murphy (2000, 789) argues that global governance is both “poorly done” and “poorly understood,” and that moral problems and crises at the heart of world politics are typically misdiagnosed and unchallenged by scholars and political leaders. This book responds to these intellectual and moral challenges by analyzing ethics in global governance politics. The central argument guiding this and the following chapters is that ethical reasoning and moral norms are part of the political constitution of global governance and that, within that context, ethics is vital to challenging and changing the political realities and problems of world order. This book is not intended as an exercise in moral philosophy, but it draws upon the vocabulary and concepts of various ethical theories and perspectives as applied to global governance issues. Arguments and justifications about what is right and wrong, good or bad, in ethical terms are 1

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discussed in the context of issues such as sovereignty, power, inclusion, responsibility, legitimacy, rights, democracy, self-determination, care, fairness, and equity. Ethics is central to global governance because the actors and authority structures of world politics are motivated, justified, challenged, and criticized in relation to such ethical principles and objectives. The question of how best to understand and solve the moral dilemmas that challenge actors and authority structures cannot be answered by moral theory alone; an ethics separated from the realities of politics, however contested, is useless in practical terms. By the same token, one cannot understand the exercise of power, the dilemmas of decisionmaking, and the problematic outcomes of global governance politics without an ethical conscience and imagination. A politics separated from ethics, however demanding and intractable the moral dilemmas we face, is unacceptable and dangerous. Thus, ethics and politics are neither categorically dichotomous nor identical activities. Rather, they are symbiotic and mutually constitutive. Each is an essential domain of responsibility and obligation for human beings; both pose no easy solution to the demands of human interrelatedness. Ethics is treated by many political analysts as extraneous to the central dynamics of global governance (see Frost 2004), however. Theoretically, mainstream realist and liberal approaches to world politics marginalize or overlook the importance of ethics to global governance. Realists have assumed an ethical vacuity at the heart of world politics. Ethics is “window dressing” or merely something to adorn or cover up what one has accomplished by the use of power without any regard for right and wrong. From this vantage point, justice in global governance, as with all politics, to cite Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic (1968, 15), is merely about “the advantage of the stronger.” Theoretically, then, realism typically treats ethics as a separate domain from politics (see, for example, Morgenthau 1985, 12–17). Moreover, realism’s materialist view of power and politics prevents an appreciation of the significance of ethics because outcomes are viewed as a result of calculations based on material interests rather than ideational or normative considerations. (International ethics developed as a separate subfield in international relations because of the negligible weight given to ethical reality by realists.) Neoliberal institutionalists share realism’s materialist view. They treat liberal ethical values—such as peace, human rights, and democracy—as superior and desirable objectives; yet these objectives are viewed as separate from the political world of power and interest among egotistical states (see Keohane 1984, 247–259). The contributors to this book challenge this mainstream tendency to separate material forces from ethical reasoning; ethics is fundamental to understanding how and why actors deal with the material forces they confront.

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Analytically, the mainstream approaches to global governance tend to associate politically significant and determinative behavior with states, excluding nonstate actors from their frameworks. Although neoliberal institutionalists appear to create more theoretical space for ethics than do realists, as mediated by international institutions and regimes, they share a state-centric focus with realists, and thus limit the analytical scope of relevant behavior to states and their conduct within international organizations. The contributors to this volume view global governance as a broader site of politics, including not just sovereign states, but also international organizations, civil society organizations, and social movements. Normatively, many liberal approaches assume that because global governance is about managing collective problems of interdependence and globalization, it must be “good.” However, such an assumption prevents scrutiny of existing power hierarchies in world politics and the distributive effects of the political economy of global governance arrangements. Additionally, the absence of mechanisms for interest articulation, participation, or accountability is generally viewed as a serious problem (Buchanan and Keohane 2006), but existing global governance mechanisms are viewed by many liberals to be ethically sound, if in need of some adjustments and tinkering (see Slaughter 2004). By focusing on ethics, this volume provides a more complete picture of global governance politics. If ethical reasoning and moral norms shape, direct, and even discipline or limit global governance politics, then ethical analysis is vital to understanding the various relations, impacts, and sites of domination in world politics. Additionally, by engaging in ethical reasoning and reflection on which moral norms matter and why, in addition to which ones ought to be respected, why, and how they should inform the political sphere, the scholars in this volume contribute to an ongoing debate about the contemporary world order and the directions and changes required to challenge and improve global governance. Nonetheless, the authors here do not forward a shared or substantive ethical perspective on global governance. Indeed, there are some tensions, differences, and even disagreements among some of the chapters about, for instance, whether cosmopolitan or universalist principles can and ought to be the basis of global governance politics. All agree, however, that ethics matter to the politics of global governance and that, in the various issue areas examined, these politics require ethically motivated reform. Global governance, argues Murphy (2000, 799), is “a site, one of many sites, in which struggles over wealth, power, and knowledge are taking place.” This introductory chapter locates ethics on the terrain of this political site and then in relation to the subsequent chapters on state sovereignty, civil society, the UN, democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, human security, the global economy, and the environment.

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Ethics in the Politics of Global Governance The idea of “governance without government” is a persistent theme in thinking about global politics over the past two centuries (see Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). Even without a centralized world state, that is, even in a context of anarchy—viewed by realists as an amoral realm—political actors have been motivated by the pursuit of fundamental moral objectives. Moreover, these actors have sought to deliberately and consciously steer global politics toward the realization of values such as security, order, justice, freedom, and individual rights.1 In this section, I argue that ethics has constituted the discourse and practice of global governance in gradually more complex ways. As this governance has become more intricate and extensive, ethics has also informed more critical and reflexive views about the moral legitimacy of global governance practices. Rather than examining the political impact of ethics, my aim is to reveal the premises of four paradigmatic moral visions that inform reasoning about the purposes of global governance. In doing so, this chapter builds a context from which the subsequent chapters of this volume flow; those chapters engage in analyses of specific global governance actors, institutions, and issues in ways that link questions of moral vision with outcomes, problems, conflicts, and dilemmas. There are four paradigmatic moral visions of global governance politics: • An ethics of reform—to liberalize and civilize the states system • An ethics of responsible governance—to provide adequate governance on a global basis • An ethics of cosmopolitan community—to govern for humanity rather than in the interests of particular states or groups • An ethics of critique—to challenge and transform global governance as a site of power, domination, and/or bad governance These visions are not mutually exclusive or contradictory although some tensions may exist among them. The purposes of global governance, the agenda of institutions such as the UN, and the interests that ought to be served are questions that have been framed differently in each of these general visions. An Ethics of Reform For much of the past two hundred years, global governance has been conceived as the project of reforming the states system so as to prevent violent conflict and war among states. This has given global governance a clear direction or purpose, one that aligns with the liberal vision of world politics.

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If global governance referred simply to the exercise of influence or control on a worldwide or intercontinental scale, then the European empires of centuries past would qualify as global governing institutions. Similarly, if the concept was simply about involuntary mechanisms that guide interstate relations in one direction or another, but without any clear moral purpose or end, such as the balance of power, then global governance would be coeval with the sovereign states system (see Holsti 1992). But neither empire nor the balance of power, as particular forms of politics operative at the global level, are typically counted as manifestations or instances of global governance. To speak of global governance, then, is never to simply describe an objective reality that unfolds apart from human choice; it is not a natural state of affairs or inevitable status quo. To speak about global governance is, as Marie-Claude Smouts (1998, 88) states, “an intellectual and ideological choice,” but it is also, as with human agency in general, a moral choice. The modern states system and capitalist social relations emerged hand in hand in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, liberal reformers like Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, among others, put forward the early moral case for global governance (see Aksu 2008; Murphy 1994). Such governance was conceived as the need to develop practices and institutions that could ameliorate the moral failings of the states system’s politics in ways that allowed the moral strengths and rights of individuals to flourish. For such thinkers, global governance is conceived as a projection or application of the ideals and dynamics of liberal domestic politics to the corrupt or defective politics of European states (see Hoffmann 1995, 160). Liberal reformers articulated the need for norms, laws, and institutions as rational means to mitigate, prevent, and ultimately eliminate war and violence. Here global governance is viewed as morally superior to the whims of unfettered sovereign states and the vagarious balance of power. In discussing the states system’s failings, however, liberal advocates of global governance have rejected centralized global or supranational coercive authority. The sovereign state per se is not, in this vision, the only institutional source of war and injustice. Indeed, actual sovereign states are the frequent victim of other states’ realpolitik and imperialist ambitions and policies. Such ethical concerns clearly remain salient today, particularly for states in the developing world that have been subject to interventions and imperialism by powerful states. Thus, and as the chapters by Samuel Makinda and Tom Keating suggest, sovereignty is a defensible value, one that offers a protective barrier against abuse and violence; it is also constitutive of the most widely shared norms of global governance. If world government and imperial hierarchy are rejected forms of politics, what remains? International organizations, law, multilateral or collective decisionmaking, and diplomacy are instruments that, as surrogates to world government, ought to mitigate war and violence among states. Much

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like a division of powers or checks and balances within a liberal polity, such practices allow for the settlement of conflicts without violence. However, such governance mechanisms are often liable to fail according to skeptics like Stanley Hoffmann (1981, chapter 1). States may simply use such legal and diplomatic practices to justify their own unilateral, self-serving actions. Global governance institutions do not, then, achieve complete transcendence of the politics of the states system (Hoffmann 2003). Yet they do provide an opportunity for states to develop gradually a common moral vocabulary in a multilateral process. In such a process, unilateral and self-seeking intent and behavior are made more obvious and are more easily framed as corrosive to the international community’s ethical standards. Also, as Murphy argues (1994), by moderating and smoothing over conflicts, particularly among states in the industrial age, the ethics of reforming the states system supports the expansive dynamics of capitalist markets across borders. The chauvinist tendencies of states acting to protect their particular ingroup against the threat of the out-group is offset by a wider set of crosscutting, bourgeois interests in peace and prosperity. Global governance, then, is driven by the ethical vision and interests of liberal political ideology (see Barnett and Duvall 2005b, 5). States are important, leading players in the ethics of reform. In the aftermath of systemwide wars and in light of pressure from societal voices, both domestic and transnational, states have created organizations such as the League of Nations, the UN, and, regionally, the European Union (EU). A commitment to norms of nonaggression, the pacific settlement of disputes, and collective security are at the core of such organizations. Human rights and humanitarian norms play an important role inasmuch as states have made a causal connection between enshrining the value of human dignity and international peace and security. Built on the legacies of nineteenth-century humanitarian and antislavery movements, states have consented to a broad array of human rights norms and laws in the aftermath of World War II (Forsythe 2000). States also recognize the importance of economic and social cooperation as a means of harnessing the collective benefits of trade and commerce. As Jacqueline Best’s chapter in this volume shows, economic liberalism has been the dominant perspective of the industrialized states that have created and championed world economic organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the WTO. Global governance and positive, deliberate state decisions and actions go hand in hand in the ethics of reform vision. A corollary to the centrality of states in this moral vision is that failures of global governance are also the failures of states. States are unwilling or unable to commit to the appropriate cooperative norms and institutions, mired as they are within a recalcitrant political reality. Yet a serious controversy among global governance advocates is whether global governance

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institutions can coerce or impose values such as peace, human rights, and economic prosperity by overriding or challenging state sovereignty. Within the ethics of reform vision, a tension between “pluralist” and “solidarist” conceptions of international order has divided global governance advocates and scholars.2 Pluralists tend to emphasize state consent and the necessity of restraint and forbearance in essentially domestic matters. Solidarists, by contrast, argue that sovereignty is not absolute and that communitywide values may warrant direct action and intervention. Pluralist thinking is more tolerant or patient in the face of certain state failures, depending on their gravity. Solidarists see global governance as a means of responding to violent threats to values such as democracy, human rights, and human security. The chapters by Makinda on state sovereignty, Cecelia Lynch on civil society, Keating on democracy promotion, and Catherine Lu on humanitarian intervention engage the controversy between pluralist and solidarist visions differently. For pluralists, the efficacy of global governance ultimately depends on state consent for legitimacy that, in turn, depends on a variety of political conditions that cannot be taken for granted. As Keating shows, states and populations may not trust other states or international institutions—often with good reason. Power and calculations of national interests are inevitable brakes on progress. Nationalist ideology is a powerful force that limits internationalist sentiments and, within multinational states, can cause conflict and disorder. The pacifying dynamics of industrial capitalism are far from guaranteed in that they rely on a host of other political conditions. Pluralists point to these limitations on global governance as reasons for a “nonperfectionist” ethics of reform. Although the ultimate goal is to remedy the moral failings of the states system, neither analysts nor decisionmakers should assume that global governance will transcend that system altogether (see Hoffmann 2003). Moreover, global governance cannot solve every moral problem put on the agenda, from human rights abuses to environmental degradation. Most important, global governance actors need to consider the likely impact of decisions; the possibility of doing more harm and creating greater disorder through moral zeal remains as large a problem, if not larger, than doing nothing (see Jackson 2000). For pluralists, then, the ethics of global governance must work largely within certain limits of the politics of the states system. Solidarists argue that a common morality exists prior to and autonomous from the states system (Wheeler 2000). Indeed, states have acted on the basis of this morality—both unilaterally and collectively, and with or without the support of civil society organizations—to stop states and situations from offending a minimum standard of humanity. As Lu’s chapter demonstrates, human rights abuses and humanitarian crises create demands for global governance that suspend the default norm of nonintervention. The mandate of global governance is not simply to moderate inter-

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state violent conflicts but to reduce severe threats to humanity more broadly. Thus, a solidarist version of an ethics of reform views the legitimacy of global governance institutions and actors in a more demanding light. The failure to confront evils that are within the power of the international community to prevent threatens the liberal project of reforming the states system. If liberal global governance overlooks the fundamental interests of the actual individual victims of widespread starvation or genocide, then whose interests does it truly serve? It is not moral perfectionism, then, or zeal to solve each and every problem that underlies a solidarist vision of reform. It is, rather, recognition that global governance politics takes place in a human community, as well as a community of sovereign states. An Ethics of Responsible Governance Global governance is also viewed as a process of creating and strengthening the authoritative capacities of governing agents worldwide. Fundamental political objectives like security, order, justice, and welfare are conventionally the responsibilities of governments. But the capacity of states to provide these goods is questionable. As Makinda’s chapter argues, states are constituted as territorial authorities and consequently lack the legitimate right to unilaterally control issues and events outside of their borders. However, transnational issues such as trade, health, migration, and the environment affect the interests of states and societies. These issues also create mutual concerns and transnational solidarities among citizens worldwide, as Lynch’s chapter on global civil society shows. Since at least the eighteenthcentury advent of public unions—regulating such things as postal and telegraph communications, and rivers and waterways—global governing institutions have authorized a variety of actors to solve problems that states cannot independently address (Claude 1971; Murphy 1994). Reflecting this interest, the solving of governance problems in a world polity has been a salient ethical vision of global governance (see Weiss 2000). Global governance here pushes beyond the territorialist and statist assumptions of traditional liberal international reform to the states system. The central moral problem is not simply providing an improved framework for interstate relations or, as with the solidarists, defending fundamental moral values from direct attack. Instead, the objective is to close the regulatory gaps in world politics that allow political, social, and economic problems to go unresolved. Although stemming war, violence, and abuse among and within states remains important, such issues are shaped by other political, social, and economic factors. While early liberals like Kant (1991) thought that industry, commerce, and a cosmopolitan civil society would curtail absolutist and bellicose states, these same forces have historically created pressures for, and have demanded, a much greater role for global

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governance institutions. They have also led to more purposeful norms and networks of cooperation among and across states and societies (Slaughter 2004). David Held and Anthony McGrew (2002, 8) capture the essential concerns of an ethics of responsible governance: Given the absence of world government, the concept of global governance provides a language for describing the nexus of systems of rule-making, political coordination and problem-solving which transcend states and societies. It is particularly relevant to describing the structures and processes of governing beyond the state where there exists no supreme or singular political authority. Theoretically, it is much more than simply a descriptive term: it constitutes a broad analytical approach to addressing the central questions of political life under conditions of globalization, namely: who rules, in whose interests, by what mechanisms and for what purpose?

The questions Held and McGrew pose are traditionally believed to be relevant only in relation to the domestic social context. For instance, John Rawls’s well-known view that there is a “second contract” among states— distinct from and thinner than a primary social contract domestically—illustrates traditional liberal reformism (Rawls 1999). By contrast, an ethics of responsible governance vision argues that political authority and responsibility are being relocated and dispersed in ways not captured by Westphalian assumptions about state sovereignty. As Fred Halliday (2000, 19) writes, “We already have a many-layered global governance system, and indeed one of the central issues is to overcome, through reform, the defaults of a system that has been up and running for several decades. The question is how to make this governance system more effective, more just, and more responsive to the changing international system.” Similarly, James N. Rosenau (1997, 175) argues that a changing international system creates new realities and pressures that empower an array of actors and create a constellation of problems and dilemmas: Fragmenting countries, troubled economies, fragile polities, and restless publics . . . highlight the normative implications of the ever greater civic responsibilities that turbulent conditions are imposing on individuals and the ever sharper choices leaders have to make between the whole group and the subgroup, between order and autonomy, between centralized power and decentralized authority. Individuals, leaders, and societies may be capable of facing up to these challenges, but it remains to be seen whether they can cope with the unfamiliar normative challenges that have arisen in the widening space of the domestic-foreign Frontier.

Rosenau’s “Frontier” refers to governance problems and issues that are neither wholly domestic nor international but rather are deterritorialized in ori-

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gin and impact. In a responsible governance framework, the institutions and actors of global governance gain some autonomy from the logic of the states system. States do not disappear but rather become pieces that fit in a larger, multilevel puzzle with other systems, such as the global economy, world information and communications technologies, the global environment, and a wide range of intergovernmental, transnational, and private actors. Within an ethics of responsible governance vision there are no easy, uncontested answers to ethico-political problems. Indeed, there is plenty of room for disagreement about the questions posed by Held and McGrew regarding “who rules, in whose interests, by what mechanisms, and for what purposes?” Each question points to different interests, dilemmas, and tradeoffs. For example, favoring nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to deliver humanitarian and development aid, to assist in postconflict reconstruction, and to conduct human rights monitoring may prove effective, particularly if states or the UN have limited resources. However, how democratically accountable are NGOs? Do they reflect the interests of outsiders and of Western states or broader, impartial interests? Do they undermine self-determination and the capacity of indigenous civil society actors in target societies? Another example is UN Security Council expansion. Increasing the number of permanent member states may increase legitimacy and geographic representation, but may decrease effectiveness and the capacity to respond to actual humanitarian emergencies. Dilemmas such as these are discussed in the chapters by Makinda, Lynch, Keating, and Lu. In sum, an ethics of responsible governance widens the range of relevant governing authorities and the moral issues that require political action. An Ethics of Cosmopolitan Community The ethics of reform and of responsible governance is often motivated by a broader cosmopolitan vision. As discussed, solidarist reformers argue that global governance ought to promote and be responsive to obligations that we have to individuals as individuals rather than to accommodating the interests of sovereign states. As well, advocates of an ethics of responsible governance, such as David Held (2005), invoke cosmopolitanism when answering the question about whose interests global agencies should serve. An ethics of cosmopolitan community vision is therefore not a rival or alternative to the two visions discussed above. It is instead a substantive justification for such frameworks. An ethics of reform and responsible governance is required precisely because of the moral and, increasingly, the sociological unity of the human community (Beck 2006). Cosmopolitanism provides content for the ethics of global governance that challenges the default particularism of the states system, as well as the

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harmful effects of the global market (see Pogge 2002). Although cosmopolitan thought predates these historic realities, with roots in antiquity, a distinctly modern, progressivist cosmopolitanism developed in Enlightenment Europe (Schlereth 1977; Kleingeld 1999). For example, Kant enthusiastically endorsed the transnational solidarism felt across the continent about the French Revolution. In his view, the mere idea of a state founded on citizen equality, liberty, and individual rights had universal validity. His condemnation of the war system springs from his view that it violates and destroys individual humanity and the teleological perfection of the species. Similarly, Marx’s revolutionary socialism is premised on a cosmopolitan vision of the human species’ emancipation from capitalist productive relations. Human equality and autonomy from the destructive effects of market relations are universal and general (rather than national) goals. Reflecting these intellectual legacies, an ethics of cosmopolitan community views global governance as a means of serving the interests and needs of individuals qua world citizens. In turn, as Patrick Hayden (2005, 7) writes, “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.” Global governance institutions, norms, and activism are influenced by cosmopolitan sentiment and are also a means—but not the only means—by which duties to humanity are discharged. In 1795, Kant foresaw such sentiment: “The peoples of the earth have . . . entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere” (Kant 1991, 107–108). In an era of global markets, nuclear weapons, and world pandemics, Rosenau (1997, 180) echoes the same point two hundred years later: global governance is a response to the “feeling that the well-being, perhaps even the fate of the species, is at stake and that some kind of action has to be taken.” As Murphy (2002, 177–178) suggests, the history of global governance has been influenced by “high cosmopolitanism,” a sentiment that encourages governments to “risk resources in new liberal internationalist projects” such as banning inhumane weapons like landmines and creating international criminal courts. The ethics of transcending moral particularism invariably involves changes and challenges to the concrete and particularistic politics of states and intergovernmental organizations (Franceschet 2002). Perhaps ironically, states have created intergovernmental organizations such as the UN to “save succeeding generations” of “peoples” from the brutality of states, to use the Charter’s most cosmopolitan flourish. States have also created human rights and humanitarian norms and standards that entrench indi-

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vidual rights on a global scale. Leadership by liberal states and a desire for legitimacy have motivated states in this regard. By adopting the cosmopolitan language and values of transnational solidarity groups and NGOs—such as antislavery, peace, and women’s movements—states have built expectations that global governance must serve a community of humankind. The chapters by Makinda, Lynch, Archibugi and Marchetti, and Lu investigate the importance of cosmopolitanism in motivating global governance; and the chapters by Keating, Robinson, and Best call into question political agents’ and institutions’ use of the cosmopolitan vision to justify particular policies. An Ethics of Critique Murphy’s argument that global governance is poorly understood and poorly done illustrates a fourth vision, an ethics of critique. Global governance has emerged and developed in a context of reflexive modernity; actors have the capacity to question international institutions and practices that fall short of their stated ethico-political purposes. They also have the power to challenge and reframe the dominant moral norms of global governance. Each of the three ethical visions previously discussed has been contested by analysts and actors drawing on an ethics of critique, which is a broad vision that supports a range of responses, from critical liberalism to more radical Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and ecological approaches. The common denominator among these critical frameworks is the idea that global governance is a moral-political issue and not simply a solution. The chapters in this book share in this critical orientation to global governance, each in its own way. An ethics of critique has led critical liberals to question the assumptions of earlier thinkers in the internationalist tradition. The legalistic and reactive conflict resolution tools of global governance, the kind that flow from Kantian and Wilsonian assumptions, seem dangerously quaint and irresponsibly weak in an era of mechanized warfare and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as Makinda’s and Lu’s chapters illustrate, the strong focus on state sovereignty can be highly problematic in a context of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Similarly, the assumption that commerce and free trade lead to peace and prosperity has been challenged by more reflexive and critical liberals. Particularly after economic crises, such liberals have questioned the laissez-faire assumptions of global governance and have advocated measures to humanize global capitalism (Murphy 1994; Murphy 2002, 178; Richardson 2001). As Best’s chapter shows, liberals, from John Maynard Keynes to Joseph Stiglitz, have challenged classical and neoliberal assumptions about global economic governance. Such critical liberals do not dispute the reformist ends or purposes of global governance. Rather, they have questioned the capacity of unreconstructed global governance to deliver these moral ends.

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More radical variations on the ethics of critique reveal and contest the ideological and political functions of global governance in relation to hegemony and inequality in world politics. Gramscians have argued that global governance institutions and norms have helped to manage the conflicts in globalizing capitalism to the benefit of particular states and transnational classes (see Cox 1986; Murphy 1994; Gill 2005). Feminists have argued similarly with regard to gender hierarchy in world politics (see Rai and Waylen 2008). Fiona Robinson’s chapter on security governance and human security develops this line of argument. Poststructuralists have argued that global governance both constitutes and conceals the power relations that control difference and dissidence (see Dillon 2004; Dillon and Reid 2000). Among these perspectives is the view that global governance has not simply failed to reform the pathologies of the states system, as early liberals had hoped; rather, global governance plays a vital role in creating and augmenting power relations and structures that disadvantage some to the benefit of others (see Lederer and Müller 2005). An ethics of critique is based, then, on a moral obligation to uncover, identify, and challenge the ways in which global governance negatively affects the subordinate and the marginal in world politics. Such an obligation requires analysts and actors to question the liberal and cosmopolitan visions of global governance and to confront how hierarchy is produced and maintained. *

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These four visions are not an exhaustive map of the ethics of global governance. However, they demarcate the most salient and characteristic motivations for global governance. These frameworks do not instruct exactly how particular issues and dilemmas in global governance ought to be solved. Nonetheless, they do provide a structure within which the relevant actions can be examined. There may be coherence between visions, such as an ethics of responsible governance and of cosmopolitan community; but depending on a number of contextual factors, there may be discord and tension between, for example, the practices constituted by an ethics of reform and the confrontational politics animated by an ethics of critique. Ethics can be a unifying but also a divisive force in the politics of global governance. The chapters that follow investigate these dynamics in more specific terms.

Organization of the Volume Any study of the ethics of global governance needs to take into account the central agents and institutions of world order. Chapters 2 through 4 are about state sovereignty (Samuel Makinda), global civil society (Cecelia

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Lynch), and the United Nations (Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti). These chapters analyze how global governance actors and institutions are constituted, challenged, and changed by ethical norms. They also illustrate the moral tensions and dilemmas that continually reshape the political dynamics of global governance. Sovereignty, emancipation, human rights, peace, democracy, and (economic) justice are moral values to which states, intergovernmental organizations, and civil society actors are all dedicated. Yet the meaning of these goals is not always obvious or uncontroversial; moreover, these goals do not receive equal moral weight by various actors. Nevertheless, global governance has provided a framework for developing a common ethical vocabulary among agents and for processes of moral learning and socialization. Thus, states and other actors have constantly engaged in redefining the norms attached to sovereignty, and the UN has been a forum in which democratic legitimacy and the rule of law have become public standards for global political life. Civil society actors have not just agitated for access to this global political life to press for various moral causes; they have become direct participants in the tasks of governance. As some civil society actors become partners or co-agents with states and intergovernmental organizations, they have encountered dilemmas and criticisms about their actions (not least from other nonstate actors from civil society with different ethical perspectives). In this way, civil society actors, not unlike states and intergovernmental organizations, are not just empowered by new opportunities in global governance, they also face profound constraints and limits on their agency. Although state sovereignty and global governance are frequently held as contrary (if not contradictory) terms, Samuel Makinda’s chapter asserts otherwise. Without sovereignty, global governance would be incomplete; without global governance, sovereignty would be unintelligible. Makinda analyzes the ethical implications of three distinct conceptions of state sovereignty: juridical, empirical, and popular. Each of these claims to state authority depends upon global governance institutions, rules, and norms. Juridical sovereignty implies that the state is not subject to hierarchical or external authority except that of international law. However, international society confers the status of sovereignty to independent political units; states depend on global governance for recognition. Empirical sovereignty refers to a state’s ability to control the people, resources, and institutions within its territorial borders. Internal governing capacity is influenced profoundly by global governance institutions, particularly in the case of weaker or dependent states in the global political economy. Finally, popular sovereignty rests on the notions that (1) all people are equal and entitled to fundamental freedoms and (2) government legitimacy rests on consent of the governed. Makinda argues that the history of global governance has seen various attempts to uphold and contest political power through the sover-

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eignty ideal. Most recently, a contest has reemerged in which popular sovereignty is counterpoised against juridical and empirical sovereignties as the basis for international legitimacy. Drawing on a solidaristic ethic of reform, Makinda argues that sovereignty today is made ethical when it enhances global human emancipation. Sovereign states exist alongside, are influenced by, and interact regularly with civil society actors. Cecelia Lynch argues that civil society actors are embedded in and indispensable to the politics of global governance. The conventional image of civil society actors, one that they actively reinforce, is that of the moral conscience and ethical activist in global politics against the narrow, selfish interests of states and market actors. Lynch shows how this image, while not entirely untrue, is far more complicated and contingent upon political, ideological, and economic factors than is often recognized. Civil society actors are in fact divided and constrained by the discourses that constitute the dominant liberal democratic ideological spaces in which they operate. Although not all such actors share the Western, humanist, secular, and, above all, liberal ethical values that dominate global governance, the ones that do are accorded greater status and access in terms of mediating and managing the problems of global governance. By the same token, whether it be in relation to peace and security, humanitarianism, or economic justice issues, civil society actors are frequently torn between managing the ethical problems of global governance and taking a more critical stance against the dominant political structures in place. Lynch suggests that the extent to which civil society actors can successfully challenge or transform the institutional features of global governance is not a given reality. In some issue areas, civil society actors can at best ameliorate the worst effects of the pathologies of global governance; in other instances, however, such actors can exploit the openings and contradictions within global governance to critique and to disrupt extant power relations. The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization comprised of sovereign states but with significant openings for civil society actors. Founded on the basis of the pragmatic policy concerns of states after World War II, but also on wider objectives like peace, human rights, and economic and social development, the UN is caught between realpolitik and the ethics of cosmopolitan community. Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti argue that an effective institutional order in favor of peace, human rights, and economic and social development presupposes another ethical value: democracy. It is not simply democracy within separate states and societies that is of significance, however, but also democracy among and within the global, intergovernmental, and transnational bodies that increasingly affects the lives of individuals around the world. Archibugi and Marchetti analyze the democratic potential of the UN and also the necessity of going beyond the dominant liberal democratic paradigm, which is not just statist but hege-

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monic—with Western states imposing, sometimes by force or coercion, democratic requirements on weaker states. Recent efforts to reform the UN have the potential to improve the organization in light of democratic criteria, such as the rule of law, controlling the use of force, and protecting vulnerable individuals from state abuse. However, Archibugi and Marchetti propose a much more ambitious agenda of improving democratic participation in the UN. Although there are many obstacles and entrenched interests that would resist this cosmopolitan project, coalitions of civil society actors and enlightened governments could bring about more significant democratic openings for individuals to influence the governing forces that affect their lives. With regard to such forces, there are a number of specific and salient ethical problems and issues that consume the actors and institutions of global governance. Chapters 5 through 9 analyze the ethics of global governance ethics in that the authors critically assess the morality of applying ethical ideas and norms to concrete issues and problems. Democracy promotion in postconflict and postauthoritarian states and societies (Tom Keating); humanitarian protection of civilians through military force (chapters by Catherine Lu and Fiona Robinson); management of the global political economy by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Jacqueline Best); and the global environment (Richard Matthew, Heather Goldsworthy, and Bryan McDonald) are political problems that offer no easy solutions. Nonetheless, global governance is commonly defined by the idea that such problems can and need to be solved by actors who possess good ethical intentions. These chapters show, however, that a critical analytical impulse— an ethics of critique—is required to check and limit the default liberal, optimistic attitude in global governance, one that, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin (2002, 172–173), holds that all good things must come together. Among other things, the ethical perspectives of dominant groups often fail to take into account alternative moral understandings and cannot subordinate or assimilate difference and otherness. Global governance politics, like all politics, finds no easy moral answers to the puzzle of how best to frame actors and issues in the modern and, increasingly, postmodern condition. Tom Keating argues that democracy promotion by global governance institutions and actors, including sovereign states, intergovernmental institutions, and civil society organizations, is fraught with ethical difficulties. Distinguishing between the norm of democracy and the norm that democracy ought to be promoted by outside actors, Keating offers a far more cautious approach to cosmopolitan obligations than Archibugi and Marchetti. In practice, Keating suggests that the norm of democracy promotion in global governance has not typically improved democratic participation or augmented and improved citizens’ participation in determining their life conditions. To the contrary, outside actors have intervened in target states to promote democracy in ways that favor outside interests over those of local

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self-government. While democracy is a worthwhile ethical objective, Keating argues that we need to question whether democracy promotion is the inherently moral practice many assume given the poor and paternalistic way it has been conducted. Catherine Lu argues that, although one should remain critical and skeptical of the way that states and other global governance actors have coupled humanitarian objectives with military force, nonintervention as a general doctrine is not an ethically plausible stance in today’s world order. To be neutral in the face of politically induced humanitarian disaster is ultimately to side with the stronger, belligerent forces who seek to destroy members of rival populations. Nevertheless, Lu recognizes that there are numerous ethical dilemmas in saving vulnerable groups in conflict zones. She outlines the problems and challenges of applying humanitarian force in the areas of legal authorization, operationalizing and applying force, and the impact of force on the politics of both domestic and global governance. Lu contends that humanitarian intervention practices are shaped by the politics of the existing states system and global governance mechanisms. These limiting factors should shape our expectations about what humanitarian force can accomplish; however, she also suggests that we should judge the current practices of the UN and states against a more modest set of pragmatic ethical criteria. Lu argues that the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) concept provides a general and positive framework for improving global governance practice, although there are no guarantees about the future directions for humanitarian intervention in light of the limited and imperfect nature of global politics. Fiona Robinson analyzes the gendered assumptions underlying liberal approaches to human rights and humanitarian intervention. In contrast to Lu, she argues that the “human security” and R2P concepts in the global governance of security and intervention reflect a narrow and flawed ethics. Drawing on an alternative view, a feminist ethics of care, Robinson exposes the way in which a particular, masculinist conception of individual rights and militarism is wrongly cast as a universal solution for the world’s victims of violent conflict. She argues that abstract and individual rights, and the use of military force to vindicate them, do not address the root causes of human suffering; this is because liberals and cosmopolitans wrongly understand such problems in a “moment of crisis” rather than as part and parcel of an unequal and stratified world order. Robinson argues that we should look at the world through a different ethical lens, one that recognizes the role of women as caregivers in a context of mutual vulnerabilities that are constituted by global power imbalances. A feminist ethic of care is a nonpaternalistic ethic of solidarity that grounds the obligation to assist in a broader project of transforming world order. In contrast to liberal rights–based approaches, the virtue of caring in politics is that it transcends the problematic dichotomies

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between the needy and the strong and between so-called victims and saviors. Violations and suffering are instead countered on a continuing, day-to-day basis and by caring people rather than in a reactive and violent way by elites who possess little understanding of daily life at the margins. Jacqueline Best examines the role of ethics in relation to international economic institutions’ governance of the global economy. Although such institutions have typically depicted their policies in technocratic and ethically neutral terms, they have more recently embraced a moral discourse. On the one hand, Best argues that there is greater potential for improving global economic governance by making the ethical substance of economics more explicit and apparent. Here she notes the trouble with the common assumption, shared by a number of contemporary liberal political theorists, that economics is an ethically neutral realm. Such an assumption is not only out of step with classical economic thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes; it also fails to recognize that economics is constituted by judgments about autonomy and solidarity, universality and difference, and individuality and social responsibility. Best illuminates how ethical judgments on the priority of such values were fundamental to the construction of sequential waves of global economic governance: laissez-faire liberalism, embedded liberalism, and neoliberalism. On the other hand, Best is cautious and skeptical about the moralization of global economic policies by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. She argues that there is a danger that these institutions are using ethical discourse instrumentally to depoliticize highly contentious policies. Richard Matthew, Heather Goldsworthy, and Bryan McDonald argue that environmental ethics has the potential to shape global governance politics. They suggest, however, that at present the impact of environmental ethics has been minimal; only the concept of sustainable development has made some inroads in global governance rhetoric and practice. Environmental ethics shares with global governance the idea that the most significant world problems cannot be solved within a territorialist framework of egotistical sovereign states. However, global governance has historically supported a humanist assumption that continued industrial expansion and progress is possible without concern for the environmental costs. Matthew, Goldsworthy, and McDonald suggest that the key virtue of environmental ethics—the knowing and the respecting of nature—should be mainstreamed not simply into the typically known problems of pollution and global warming, but in all aspects of global governance policy. As examples, they demonstrate that issues not typically associated with the environment, in particular food safety and security and microfinance in the developing world, have ecological implications that should not be ignored. The greening of global governance requires, then, not just adding nostrums like sustainable development to the discourse of global governance institu-

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tions, but thinking about the impact of global governance solutions on the multiple systems that sustain human life. Craig Murphy concludes the volume with an argument to recast the central ethical problem of global governance: how to deal with a single, global human community of fate. Historically, the solution to the reality of human interrelatedness in a world of diverse values has been to keep societies sufficiently separate if not distant. Realists, for instance, argue that prudent statecraft can mediate an estrangement of human societies and, on occasion and up to a point, help to avert, mitigate, and manage violent conflicts. Until the twentieth century at least, when the means of physical destruction threatened to wipe out the species, solutions premised on maintaining a given physical and political distance between societies remained plausible. However, the same forces—political, economic, and social—that have erased the territorial buffers between each industrial society’s destructive capabilities have also created mutual vulnerabilities and insecurities among human populations in virtually every other area. Globalization has meant that, in Murphy’s words, “we can no longer walk away” from each other. Certainly the development of international institutions, international law, and global civil society has fostered a workable (if contentious) ethics to cope with the problems of a single, global community of fate, argues Murphy. Yet these ethical solutions, as the other contributors to this volume also show, are often not enough. Murphy stresses that globalization and global governance are heavily determined to serve the values and interests of the powerful, and to manage the oppositional demands and claims against the powerful. He contends that the ethics of global governance ought to foster a different sense of responsibility than has prevailed among the most powerful agents in global society, particularly the United States. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the ethics of the powerful should not simply be conceived as the duty to wield one’s own power more responsibly; more radically, such an ethics ought to be about giving up and ceding power. To whom should power be ceded and on what basis? Murphy acknowledges that philosophers and political scientists still need to develop answers to these questions, and state leaders are loathe to view political responsibility in such terms. As a starting point, however, he suggests that we reframe the ethics of global governance as a process of reducing the gap between the wide “circle of influence” and the much narrower “circle of concern” that characterize the most powerful agents in world politics. Efforts to persuade the powerful to relinquish some of their vast influence over the single, global community of fate, and to allow global governance actors the authority and resources to address the wider concerns of the global community would not be easy. Yet, as Murphy suggests, such a bold ethical strategy is a far more plausible solution to the problem of human interrelatedness today than simply “walking away” from the “other.”

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Notes 1. See Jackson and Sørensen (2007, 6) on the importance of certain fundamental objectives, such as security, order, justice, and welfare, to theories of international relations. 2. The distinction between pluralist and solidarist conceptions of international society is commonplace in English School or International Society approaches. See, for example, Jackson (2000) and Wheeler (2000).

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2 Contesting Sovereignty Samuel M. Makinda

State sovereignty has always had a close association with global governance. The relationship between the two is sometimes complementary, but at other times it is antagonistic. States, international organizations (IOs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which constitute the main actors in global governance, design their agenda, programs, and policy actions in relation to their understanding of state sovereignty. While states often pursue policies and strategies that are geared toward enhancing their sovereignty, IOs, NGOs, and individuals prefer to operate in conditions where state sovereignty does not constrain what they consider to be their legitimate activities. Whatever the nature of the relationship among these actors at any particular time, sovereignty and global governance need each other for survival. As global governance implies acceptance of both states and nonstate agents as legitimate actors, it effectively provides a platform from which nonstate actors contest some understandings of state sovereignty. Legitimacy is primarily about the authority to take action. However, as R. B. J. Walker (2000, 23) has argued, while “there is obviously no shortage of agencies claiming authority, neither their capacities to act nor their capacities to sustain the legitimacy of their actions are as clear-cut as they would have us believe.” This lack of capacity to sustain legitimacy ensures a continuing contest between states and nonstate actors in global governance. Contesting state sovereignty through global governance carries with it some ethical implications. This is partly because state sovereignty has traditionally enacted a demarcation line between citizens and humankind, between nationals and aliens, and between relativism and universalism. State sovereignty often marks the dividing line between inclusion and exclusion, which could also have implications for emancipation and oppression, and for empowerment and disempowerment (Linklater 1998, 46–76). This chapter explores an ethical basis for contesting sovereignty within 21

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the context of global governance. Its main hypothesis is that there is a dialectical relationship between state sovereignty and global governance. That is, sovereignty enables and, at the same time, seeks to undermine global governance. At the same time, global governance is partly constituted by norms, rules, and institutions that include sovereignty. Without sovereignty, global governance would be incomplete. Similarly, without global governance, sovereignty would be unintelligible. It is with a view to exploring this dialectical relationship that I suggest a framework for contesting sovereignty. While sovereignty has been challenged frequently in various contexts, not all challenges to sovereignty have ethical implications. I argue that contesting sovereignty has ethical significance if it has the potential to enhance global human solidarity and to advance the cause of human emancipation and empowerment. The rest of this chapter is divided into five parts. The first provides a brief reinterpretation of sovereignty. The second part looks at the debate on the relationship between sovereignty and war/security. The third analyzes the debate on the relationship between sovereignty and internal governance. The fourth part examines the debate on the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. The fifth concludes by returning to the relationship between sovereignty, ethics, and global governance.

Reinterpreting Sovereignty Virtually every modern understanding of sovereignty is based on a reinterpretation or misinterpretation of the Westphalian concept. Some interpretations are historically grounded and explain the evolution of the concept from the seventeenth century or before. Other accounts of the concept are ahistorical, ignore the contradictions in the principle and practice of sovereignty, and give the false impression that sovereignty has always been understood in the same way throughout the ages. Given the fact that there is substantial literature that explains how sovereignty has evolved, this chapter avoids the historical treatment of the concept, but reiterates that sovereignty needs to be regarded as a historically contingent institution (Bartelson 1995; Philpott 2001; Walker 1993). Consistent with our concern with the ethics of global governance, this chapter delineates three types of sovereignty that have different implications for human emancipation and empowerment. The first, juridical sovereignty, is based on the notion that the state has no other authority over it except that of international law. Although many states claim sovereignty as if it was their inalienable right, juridical sovereignty is conferred on the states by international society. In this sense, global governance reconstructs juridical sovereignty. If, for any reason, international society decides that a

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particular state should not remain juridically sovereign, it can take away that state’s juridical sovereignty. This happened in the early 1970s when the great powers masterminded the denial of juridical sovereignty to Taiwan and its subsequent removal from the UN in order to admit the People’s Republic of China. The notion that international society can deny juridical sovereignty to a member state of the UN points to the existence of some tension between state sovereignty and global governance. For the purposes of this chapter, I associate juridical sovereignty with issues of war, order, and security. The second type of sovereignty, empirical, is based on the understanding that states have, or should have, the ability to control the people, resources, and institutions within their borders. Empirical sovereignty is not directly conferred on the states by international society. It is largely demonstrated through a country’s capacity to manage its affairs. For example, Taiwan, which has been denied juridical sovereignty, is empirically sovereign. The Taiwanese government is elected popularly and exercises jurisdiction over a specified territory. The fact that Taiwan’s specified territory is recognized and respected by other states suggests that international society plays a role in the way empirical sovereignty is exercised. In some cases, there have been splits between juridical and empirical sovereignty. For example, Cambodia’s juridical sovereignty in the 1980s was exercised by the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK), which was based outside the country, while its empirical sovereignty was exercised by the Heng Samrin government that controlled about 80 percent of the country. The CGDK, which included the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot who had killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, occupied Cambodia’s UN seat until the early 1990s (Makinda 2001, 401–419). The Cambodian situation helped to undermine claims by some analysts and policymakers that sovereignty is absolute, indivisible, and inalienable. The role of the great powers and the UN in the division of Cambodia’s sovereignty between the CGDK and the Vietnamese-supported Heng Samrin government throughout the 1980s is an example of how global governance manages and reconstructs sovereignty (see Tom Keating’s chapter in this volume on the ethics of global governance institutions’ efforts to reconstruct target states’ empirical sovereignty according to democratic ideals). While I associate empirical sovereignty with internal governance, it is shaped by global governance. The third type of sovereignty, popular sovereignty, is predicated on the claim that all people are equal and entitled to fundamental freedoms, and that governments control them only with their consent. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the General Assembly in September 1999 that by popular sovereignty he meant “the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the Charter of the UN and subsequent interna-

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tional treaties” (UN Press Release 1999). (The application of democratic principles to the UN itself is examined by Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti in this volume.) While some commentators have associated the origin of popular sovereignty with Kofi Annan and his predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali, this form of sovereignty can be traced back to John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Emmerich de Vatel. In the twentieth century, Harold Laski (1917) and Hersch Lauterpacht (1945) also advocated popular sovereignty. Moreover, before Boutros-Ghali and Annan, former UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar had claimed in April 1991 that sovereignty needed to be reassessed in response to “the shift in public attitudes towards the belief that the defence of the oppressed in the name of morality should prevail over frontiers and legal documents” (UN Press Release 1991). Thus, popular sovereignty rests on the recognition of human rights. This suggests that human rights and state sovereignty, both of which are important elements of global governance, need not be antagonistic; they should be regarded as two sides of the same coin. These three forms of sovereignty have coexisted for centuries and the meanings attached to them have evolved in response to the changing norms of global governance. There were brief periods in the past when popular sovereignty came to the fore, as was the case following the 1789 French Revolution. However, due to the fact that the global legal infrastructure privileged the other two forms of sovereignty, little attention was given to popular sovereignty. With the recognition of the importance of globalization forces and the rise in the significance of human rights, especially since the 1990s, a contest has reemerged between juridical/empirical sovereignty and popular sovereignty. It is a contention between older and newer approaches to governance. If juridical, empirical, and popular sovereignty are different sides of the same coin, it is plausible that tipping the balance on one side might result in the reconstruction or transformation of political communities, which could have implications for human emancipation and empowerment.

Sovereignty, War, and Security Modern juridical sovereignty emerged during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which was concluded through the treaties of Westphalia. This renders juridical sovereignty a product of war. It also emerged at the same time as modern international law and was an integral part of the then new international legal order. So, sovereignty has its roots both in war and in global governance. Juridical sovereignty is also a product of anarchy, namely the assumption that there is no supranational authority that rules over a sovereign state. Like sovereignty, anarchy has a long history and has

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evolved in response to the changing norms of global governance. Moreover, as Alexander Wendt (1992) has observed, it is international society that constructs anarchy, which ultimately makes it a product of global governance. Anarchy, in turn, has implications for war and legitimizes certain approaches to security. On the one hand, juridical sovereignty, war, anarchy, and the traditional approach to security have the potential to undermine the ethical bases of global governance. On the other hand, there are possibilities of reconstructing these same forces to serve the causes of human emancipation and empowerment. War may be fought for various reasons, some of which may undermine or enhance opportunities for human emancipation. For example, when Iraq launched a war against Iran in 1980 in violation of international law and the UN Charter, it was taking an action that undermined some rules of global governance. Iraq sought to take advantage of political chaos in Iran to acquire territory, namely sovereign control over the Shatt al-Arab waterway (King 1987). By the time this war came to an end in 1988, many Iraqis and Iranians had lost their lives, several Middle Eastern countries had been destabilized, the environment had been severely damaged, and the Iraqi government had used chemical weapons against its own citizens. This war not only undermined the rules of global governance, it was also not aimed at enhancing opportunities for human emancipation and empowerment. However, not all wars have been like the Iraq-Iran war. For example, the UN has had a complex relationship with war, which could be explained in at least three ways. The first is that World War II led to the construction of the UN in 1945. The victorious countries were determined to establish the UN and other international regimes that would ensure peace, security, and prosperity. In this sense, the UN, which is an important actor in global governance, is essentially a product of war. The second is that the UN was established to eliminate the conditions that lead to interstate wars and thereby help to enhance the forces that might lead to human emancipation. The preamble of the Charter claims that the UN was established to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Moreover, Article 1(2) of the Charter says the principal purpose of the UN is to maintain international peace and security. The UN also pursues other programs, such as peacebuilding, peacemaking, conflict prevention, poverty alleviation, and sound environmental management, in efforts partly to improve the human condition and partly to discourage war. Thus, the fear of war has prompted the UN to establish programs that can broaden the scope of human freedom and empowerment. The third is that the UN has occasionally authorized war in order to rescue people from famine, starvation, and oppression or to maintain international peace and security (see Catherine Lu’s and Fiona Robinson’s chapters on humanitarian force and feminist ethics in this volume). UN-authorized

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war generally takes the form of peace-enforcement operations, which were authorized for several contingencies, including Korea in 1950, Iraq in 1990, Somalia in 1992–1995, Haiti in 1994, and East Timor in 1999. By doing so, the UN has used war as an instrument for improving human conditions. Thus, the UN has demonstrated that through global governance, war or the fear of war can be reconstructed to serve ethically sound goals. Outside the UN framework, analysts attribute war to different things depending on their ideological or paradigmatic lenses. For example, some analysts from the English School of international relations claim that war is an international institution that is supposed to serve international society as a whole. According to Hedley Bull (1977), war, like diplomacy, the balance of power, and international law, is a pivotal institution of international society. Bull considered war to be a central feature of international society and claimed that it was war and the threat of war that determined the shape and rules of international society. He argued that war was not the only determinant of the nature of international society, but that it was so basic that even terms such as great powers, alliances, spheres of influence, balances of power, and hegemony were scarcely intelligible except in relation to war and the threat of war. Thus, from the English School perspective, war is an integral part of global governance (Makinda 2002). However, some analysts view war as an instrument through which states pursue their selfish national interests. Realists generally view war as a means of pursuing national interests, and any war that does not serve a clear national interest is not worth fighting. Within this framework, war legitimizes the “traditional” approach to security, which is considered statecentric because it is often explained in terms of state survival, territorial integrity, and self-help in an anarchic global environment. The traditional approach to security is, at the same time, regarded as external-oriented because it focuses on being prepared to address threats that emanate from outside the state, such as military aggression from another state. This approach to security is considered military-based because it often prescribes military solutions to security threats. Thus, the traditional approach to security has been associated with protecting states and their ruling elites against violence, war, and the threat and use of force. For example, Kenneth Waltz (1979, 111) claims that to “achieve their objectives and maintain their security,” states “must rely on the means they can generate and the arrangements they can make for themselves.” In his view, security, and the entire structure of the international system, is based on brute force. Similarly, Stephen Walt (1991) claims that “the main focus of security studies” is “the phenomenon of war.” Accordingly, he defines security studies as “the study of the threat, use, and control of military force” (212). Walt argues that security studies explore “the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the use

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of force affects individuals, states, and societies, and the specific policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent, or engage in war” (212). In essence, proponents of the traditional approach to security seek to restrict the application of the term “security” to interstate war and the application of military force by sovereign states. They construct security in terms of an exclusive, sovereign community, whose imperative is to suppress or eliminate difference in order to achieve sameness. They view security in terms of political communities that seek to destroy, exclude, repress, or deny the humanity of the “other” in order to live in harmony. This approach to security is ethically unappealing on several grounds. First, it rejects, instead of embracing, diversity and differences. Second, it seeks to protect insiders while discriminating against outsiders. Third, it privileges citizenship over humankind and global human solidarity. Thus, the traditional approach to security is predicated on egoism of the state, the ruling elite, and citizenship. To broaden the ethical bases of global governance, this approach to security, and the juridical sovereignty that underpins it, ought to be contested. The way forward is to reconstruct juridical sovereignty and security to serve the needs of human emancipation and empowerment. As a move in this direction, Ken Booth (1991, 313–326) has defined security as emancipation, arguing: “Emancipation means freeing people from those constraints that stop them carrying out what freely they would choose to do, of which war, poverty, oppression and poor education are a few.” Similarly, Peter Vale (1993, 23–27) has adopted a critical social theory perspective through which he examined security in South Africa in terms of emancipation. Others have applied the feminist framework to the examination of security (see Fiona Robinson’s chapter in this volume; Hudson 2005; Tickner 1992). To some extent, these, and similar, perspectives serve as the starting points for contesting and reconstructing juridical sovereignty.

Sovereignty and Governance Like juridical sovereignty, modern empirical sovereignty dates back to the treaties of Westphalia in 1648. However, it has evolved in response to the changing norms of global governance. Currently, empirical sovereignty refers to a government’s ability to exercise legitimate control within a specified territory. While this form of sovereignty is often taken for granted in well-established societies, some developing states have been found to have juridical sovereignty without its empirical component. These are countries that Robert Jackson (1990) has described as quasistates. For example, Somalia, which is recognized internationally as a sovereign state, has had no national government since 1991. As a result, many of the serv-

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ices that are taken for granted in most countries, such as hospitals, schools, postal services, banks, and a professional civil service, do not exist. Indeed, at the time of this writing there is no national government or national army in Somalia that can provide security for the people and guarantee their freedom. Thus, empirical sovereignty is about internal governance. Governance, in turn, has evolved to the point where governments do not simply exercise control. They are expected to do so in partnership with civil society, the corporate sector, and other sections of society. Moreover, governments are supposed to be accountable to the people they rule. This implies that in modern political communities (with the exception of authoritarian states), people have leverage over the control that governments exercise. The Commission on Global Governance (1995, 2) has claimed that governance is “a continuing process through which conflicting and diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken.” From this perspective, the term “governance” describes the structures, rules, and institutions that people have established for managing their political, cultural, economic, and social affairs. Governance has also been used to refer to formal and informal sets of arrangements. For example, Goran Hyden (as cited by Eriksen 1998) has defined governance as “the conscious management of regime structures with a view to enhancing the legitimacy of the public realm.” The term “governance” has also been used to imply that the management of public policy cannot be left to governments alone. Therefore, village associations, women’s organizations, ethnic networks, and other NGOs may be involved in decisionmaking processes. Notwithstanding Article 2(7) of the UN Charter, which prohibits intervention in matters that are “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction” of states, external authorities, such as the UN and the EU, often provide guidance on how sovereign states may conduct their internal governance. What is “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction” of states is increasingly being contested as a result of the growth of international norms and regimes since 1945. Indeed, many analysts explicitly or implicitly suggest that global governance has had an impact on understandings of empirical sovereignty (Weiss and Gordenker 1996; Murphy 1994; Diehl 2001; Wilkinson and Hughes 2002). Any pressure from external sources or from civil society organizations within a state constitutes a challenge to the traditional view of empirical sovereignty. It also suggests that the legitimacy of government decisions, including those on foreign and security policies, is judged, in part, by the level of consultations policymakers have had with civil society organizations and other stakeholders. If the pressure that the stakeholders exert on internal governance is directed toward institution building, the generation of new norms, and the management of societal change and transformation, it

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can possibly tip the balance in favor of human emancipation and empowerment. Thus, by focusing on influencing the directions of internal governance, civil society organizations and other global governance actors can reconstruct sovereignty and thereby create possibilities for the pursuit of ethically sound policies. There are, however, various types of governance: bad governance, cooperative governance, corporate governance, global governance, and good governance, among others (see Woods 1999; Weiss 2000). Since the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF have used the term “good governance” to refer to a particular type of political and economic order underpinned by a neoliberal ideology. Although in the 1990s the IMF and the World Bank had incorporated a requirement for good governance as part of its structural package, they had only narrowly defined it in terms of governmental efficiency and the absence of corruption. It was not until 1999 that they broadened the definition to include governmental transparency and accountability, increased popular participation in the policymaking process, and the building of democratic institutions. Hence, for the World Bank and the IMF, good governance is associated with the spread of liberal democracy, leaner bureaucracies, accountability, transparency in governments, and free markets. “Good governance” is sometimes used as the opposite of arbitrary and self-seeking rule, corruption, and cronyism, which have been endemic in some governments of developing countries. However, the World Bank and the IMF’s version of good governance has also had undesirable features, which have caused considerable pain to people in Africa and other developing countries. Some aspects of good governance emphasized by the World Bank and the IMF have raised serious ethical questions. For example, is it morally acceptable for policymakers in developing countries to give export crops priority over food crops? Is it ethical for poor states to spend large portions of their income on debt repayment while their own people are starving? Why should the new generations of Africans, for instance, meet the cost of debts that can be blamed on both the borrowers and lenders in the earlier period? There are no simple answers to these questions, but they point to the need to interrogate sovereignty and some of the programs designed to buttress it. They also point to the way global governance can have negative impacts on the livelihoods of people in developing countries unless it is carefully calibrated to enhance human emancipation. Empirical sovereignty and internal governance have the potential to enhance or diminish opportunities for human emancipation and empowerment. Their capacity to enhance emancipation is partly dependent on a people’s ability to hold governments accountable. The legitimacy of governments should be assessed in terms of their ability to provide basic necessities such as shelter, food, education, and health to those who cannot afford them.

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Contesting empirical sovereignty is ethically significant if it involves activities that require governments to enact public policies that widen the scope for human freedom, gender equality, respect for the rule of law, and sound environmental management. This way, empirical sovereignty may be reconstructed so that it contributes to ethically sound governance. Such a system of governance needs to contribute to the promotion of human rights.

Sovereignty and Human Rights In the immediate post–World War II era, various groups in developing countries helped to focus attention on the relationship between human rights and state sovereignty in their struggles for self-determination. Self-determination, which is a group right recognized in international law, subsequently laid the foundation for sovereign statehood in the newly independent countries. Thus, the imperative for freedom, self-rule, and human rights were key factors in the construction of new sovereign states, especially in Africa and Asia. Under these circumstances, it is logical to argue that state sovereignty and human rights, especially in the developing world, are organically related. Moreover, as human rights are an integral part of global governance, it is plausible to argue that global governance played a role in the construction of sovereign statehood in the developing world. However, this has not stopped dictators in developing countries from claiming that global governance, and especially international regimes on human rights, are a threat to their state sovereignty. One definition of human rights is that they are entitlements of human beings by virtue of their humanity. They are claims that individuals make against states, societies, organizations, or other human beings, and this means that they should not be taken away by the state. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international instruments governing rights, human rights are based on the moral imperative that all people are equal, irrespective of their gender, race, nationality, color, religion, political conviction, or ethnic origin. Natural rights theorists believe that people have the same rights, which are inalienable and inherent. Human rights also imply obligations or responsibilities toward each other. For example, the African Charter of Human and People’s Rights, which came into force in 1986, refers to obligations in Article 27(2) when it says that “the rights and freedoms of each individual shall be exercised with due regard to the rights of others, collective security, morality, and common interest.” The state, with its totalizing ambition, has also played a role in giving meaning to human rights. However, most states are primarily self-interested, which has meant that their positions on human rights issues are not always consistent. For example, the meaning and significance that state pol-

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icymakers attached to human rights during the Cold War, in the immediate post–Cold War era, and following the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, were markedly different. According to Michael Perry (1998), the idea of human rights consists of two parts. The first is that every human being is inviolable. The second is that certain things ought not to be done to human beings whatever the circumstances, and certain things ought always to be done for them. Perry argues that the assertion that every human being has “inherent dignity” is ineliminably religious, and that there is no intelligible secular version of it. He insists that this claim can cohere with a nonreligious cosmology. This view of human rights differs from that of constructivists, who aver that rights are socially constructed and historically contingent. For instance, Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler (1999) and Jack Donnelly (1999), in different ways, argue that human rights have to be seen as social constructs. Whether human rights are natural or social constructions is not something that this chapter debates. What I am interested in is that human rights are based on the principles of equality, fairness, freedom, and justice. They also help to expand social bonds or human solidarity beyond national boundaries. Most important for purposes of this chapter, human rights provide the road to human emancipation and empowerment. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the most significant step in efforts to universalize rights. In its preamble, the Universal Declaration drew a link between human rights and ethics when it stated that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights” of all peoples was “the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” The impetus for the Universal Declaration was the brutality of World War II, and especially the extermination of Jews. International society’s response to the Holocaust was to establish the Nuremberg tribunal. This was a normative and ethical development in at least four respects. First, Nuremberg placed human rights in the domain of global politics. Second, it helped redefine aspects of morality at the global level. Third, for the first time in history it gave coherence to the idea of crimes against humanity, in which individuals, rather than governments, were held responsible for war atrocities. The idea of crimes against humanity stems from the assumption that each human being has a duty to other human beings, and this underlines an important ethical dimension of human rights. Fourth, the establishment of the Nuremberg tribunal demonstrated that it was necessary to address egregious violations of human rights through global governance mechanisms. The imperative to eliminate anti-Semitism eventually developed into a global struggle against racism and for racial equality. The struggle for racial equality was most vividly demonstrated in global efforts to end the system of apartheid in South Africa, which succeeded in the early 1990s. A com-

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mitment to end racial discrimination is essentially a proclamation that all human beings are equal. Therefore, it was not surprising that the fight for racial equality was followed by efforts to achieve the rights of women, minorities, and children. For liberal scholars and policymakers, the post–World War II period was the beginning of a new global moral order based on the equality of all peoples. Nuremberg and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were important initial steps in the construction of a new base for global governance. It was also the beginning of systematic efforts to establish a basis for addressing the welfare, security, and basic needs of human beings outside national boundaries. These efforts were consolidated through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966. These two instruments and the Universal Declaration constitute what is called the International Bill of Rights. The International Bill of Rights, in turn, arguably laid the foundation for promoting the reconfiguration of modern political community. The crucial point about these normative developments is that human rights are a discourse that promotes human freedom, justice, solidarity, and equality beyond national boundaries. They may operate within states, but are not confined by national boundaries. Human rights provide the language, theory, and institutional contexts through which people aspire to demonstrate their responsibilities toward others beyond national boundaries. However, the meaning and significance that policymakers attach to human rights vis-à-vis other issues varies in accordance with the structure of international society and the prevailing norms of global governance. For example, Western countries did not accept development as a human right until the 1990s. Indeed, the US government voted against the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development. Several other Western countries abstained. More recently, the West has caught up with the developing world and now considers development as a human right. Following the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action asserted that “democracy, development, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.” Moreover, the end of the Cold War has enabled policymakers in the West to distance themselves from dictators in the developing world and to give adequate consideration to civil and political liberties. However, in the “war on terror” after September 2001, the United States and many other states have tried to undermine not just human rights, but international law as a whole. Thus, under present conditions, human rights, and the global governance structures that promote them, have to be understood against the backdrop of the totalizing effects of the state and the so-called war on terror.

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In emphasizing the centrality of the state in the future of human rights, David Forsythe (2000, 3) argues: “Even if human rights are thought to be inalienable, a moral attribute of persons that the state cannot contravene, rights still have to be identified—that is, constructed—by human beings and codified in the legal system.” Apart from the issue of self-determination mentioned earlier, the evolution of human rights since the 1940s has highlighted their relationship with the state at several levels. First, the UN Charter suggests that human rights are important for international peace and, therefore, expects its member states to give them adequate consideration. Second, it is mainly the UN member states that have negotiated and signed human rights treaties. Third, countries from the global North and South have used human rights to try to advance their national interests or to resist external influences, by emphasizing different types of rights. Fourth, individuals and NGOs have campaigned to deepen or broaden the human rights agenda and, through this, they have sought to limit the power of the state over human beings. Fifth, through its totalizing strategies, the state has sought to equate human rights with the privileges of citizenship. As a result, many countries have deprived refugees of their rights as human beings without acknowledging that they are doing anything wrong. The advance of human rights and, in particular, their potential for human emancipation requires constant efforts to contest sovereignty and limit the totalizing effect of the state. Just as self-determination underpinned the establishment of modern sovereign statehood in developing countries after World War II, global governance has the potential to reconstruct sovereign statehood throughout the world in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion Sovereignty and global governance constitute each other, but their capacity to produce ethically sound policies cannot be taken for granted. Sovereignty has the potential to both enable and undermine the pursuit of ethically sound policies. It also has the potential to both weaken and strengthen global governance. However, sovereignty is an integral part of global governance, without which global governance would be substantially different. Moreover, while some analysts have claimed that globalization forces and the emergence of strong civil society organizations have threatened state sovereignty, sovereignty is partly responsible for the emergence of globalization and civil society organizations and can coexist with them. Whether sovereignty brings about human emancipation and empowerment, or oppression and disempowerment, depends on how it is reinterpreted and reconstructed by global actors, including states, international organizations, NGOs, multinational corporations, and individuals.

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As Thomas J. Biersteker (2002, 163) writes, “It is best to think of the meaning of sovereignty in terms of a continual contestation practice, with some agents pushing the boundaries and frontiers of legitimate practice, and others resisting and countering at every turn.” One way of contesting and reconstructing sovereignty for the purpose of enhancing global human solidarity is to view it as three subsets—juridical, empirical, and popular—that have different ethical implications. These three subsets or categories, which can be traced back many centuries, correspond respectively with war and security, governance, and human rights. If the contesting of sovereignty is to be of ethical significance, these three categories of sovereignty need to be deconstructed and reconstructed with a view to enhancing human emancipation and empowerment.

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3 Liberalism and the Contradictions of Global Civil Society Cecelia Lynch

Civil society actors are involved with every facet of political, economic, social, and cultural life—health; humanitarianism; the environment; peace and conflict; local, national, and transnational governance; human rights; wealth distribution; and cultural, including religious, practices.1 Consider the following: • The United Nations, the US government, and many other states channel much of their assistance aid through NGOs, depending on them to provide food and shelter to refugees, medical care to victims of bloody conflict, and early warning of new conflicts. • NGOs are central participants in UN agency meetings on humanitarian crises. • Local, national, and transnational civil society groups provide critical services, from healthcare and housing to legal assistance and even plumbing and electricity, in both the developed and the developing world (e.g., a complex of US NGOs provides much of postKatrina aid in the US Gulf Coast; Hezbollah provides education and health care in south Lebanon). • Almost all religious denominations have created NGO offshoots that work locally, transnationally, or both. • Western-based, transnational NGOs, as well as locally based NGOs in the third world, provide an increasing percentage of employment opportunities, and funds and work in-kind from local and transnational civil society actors comprise a considerable proportion of gross domestic product (GDP).2 • Masters programs in international affairs increasingly focus on training for nonprofit employment as well as more traditional diplomatic and business careers. • Billionaires and celebrities draw attention to the plight of the 35

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world’s poor by creating foundations to create new programs through transnational and local NGOs, which must compete for funding from them. • Planning and advocacy to maintain, improve, or change international economic structures and social welfare institutions always occurs with social movement and NGO participation, whether it be at UNsponsored conferences, the World Economic Forum, or the World Social Forum. Civil society actors thus represent a growing and indispensable part of global governance in the twenty-first century. Their activities have become deeply embedded in national as well as transnational governance practices. Yet, as discussed in this chapter, on issues of economic justice and peace and security, civil society actors on the global level take steps to achieve their goals in ways that create tensions within their own moral paradigms and conflicts between themselves and other actors who do not share these paradigms. I argue that these tensions and conflicts are shaped by the contradictory discourses within economic and democratic liberalism and by whether these actors’ ethics promote a mediating role between these discourses or a challenge to them. As a consequence, it is critical to examine and understand the ethical positions taken by civil society actors in different parts of the world, as well as the ethical implications of their actions, which do not necessarily amount to the same thing. I first look at paeans and criticisms of civil society actors in global governance. Second, I situate these actors in the context of economic and democratic liberalism to show how it shapes contradictory tendencies in actors’ practices toward states and markets. Third, I examine two central areas of global governance in which civil society actors and campaigns play a central role: economic justice, and peace and security. I look at both the contributions and tensions embodied in civil society actors’ practices and ethics in these domains. I conclude by reflecting on the ethical implications of several scholarly trends that evaluate civil society actors on the global level.

Paeans and Criticisms Assessments and critiques of civil society actors tend to run along three axes. The first axis concerns their relationship to the state. This relationship has several components: civil society actors’ views regarding state power and responsibilities, their work supporting or undermining the state, and their bureaucratic procedures for accountability and governance. The second axis concerns the relationship of civil society actors to national and

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transnational economic forces. This relationship also has several components: the degree to which they view market globalization as good, inevitable, or bad, and whether and how they work to redress poverty and problems of healthcare and education. The third axis concerns their relationship to transnational ideologies, organizations, and beliefs. These can include commitments to religious beliefs of various kinds, secularisms, and ideologies related to democracy, cosmopolitanism, or communitarianism. More often than not, more than one of these axes intersects in scholarly assessments of civil society groups. Cosmopolitans who celebrate the increasing numbers of national and transnational civil society actors tie a commitment to go beyond nationalist values to ideals of global democratic participation and a reduction in state power (see Archibugi and Marchetti in this volume; Held and Koenig-Archibugi 2003). Activists who work for human rights and environmental causes or oppose market globalization also tend to see a decline in state power as desirable, and the latter also advocate the elimination or restructuring of some international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO (Edwards and Gaventa 2001; Cavanagh and Mander 2004; Fisher and Ponniah 2003; Prokosch and Raymond 2002; Broad 2002). Several prominent economists have become global spokespersons for redressing poverty and providing global healthcare by resorting to technological and multilateral solutions that rely on advocacy by NGOs (Sachs 2005; Stiglitz 2006; Sen 1999). However, there are a number of critical concerns about NGOs. Critics focus on their naiveté in designing public campaigns or attempting to provide humanitarian assistance in an apolitical fashion. Moreover, as Antonio Donini (1998) notes, NGOs are part and parcel of the privatization of relief, where NGO bureaucracy and institutional interests lead to a greater emphasis on funding their own organizations than on long-term programming for recipients. Many have also questioned NGOs’ democratic accountability (Hancock 1989; de Waal 1997; Rieff 2002; Wenar 2006; Easterly 2007). Others criticize civil society actors who are motivated by a strong ideological component. Western-based NGOs devoted to promoting democracy are disparaged for being too tied to US government foreign policy goals, while organizations based in areas such as the Middle East that provide healthcare and educational services are condemned for engaging in military action to unseat governments and/or occupation forces (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas). Attention to religious groups tends to emphasize the propensity of these organizations to act violently (e.g., in the Middle East) or dogmatically (e.g., in US politics or in promoting Christianity abroad). Taken as a whole, these critiques of civil society actors focus on whether they act rationally, efficiently, and in conjunction with government bureaucracies, whether they are accountable to publics, and whether they advocate expanding their ideological reach.

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Liberal Economic and Political Discourses While each of these assessments captures aspects of the relations between civil society actors and global governance, situating the activities of civil society groups in the context of economic and political liberalism helps in understanding the broader implications of their ethical stances. Civil society actors are a critical component of global governance in large part because economic and democratic liberal discourses enable, encourage, and even require their participation. It is important to note that civil society actors are not new to the liberal era. Religious groups and institutions, crafts guilds, and other spontaneously constructed social groups have long acted in the public sphere, often but not always separate from government and “official” institutions. Yet liberal discourses from the nineteenth century to the present emphasize the role of civil society in ever-expansive ways. Civil society is a key concept in the evolution of modern political theory concerning both the state and governance. Nineteenth-century conceptions of civil society, from G. W. F. Hegel to Karl Marx, focused on its integrating, mediating role vis-à-vis the state and economy. Civil society referred to liberal associational forms that either integrated the political and economic functions of the state with voluntarism, or mediated political struggles while reflecting bourgeois economic interests. While for Hegel civil society’s mediating role was an essential and positive component of state construction and integration, Marx viewed the development of civil society organizations as working in the service of capitalist economic power relationships. Antonio Gramsci’s early twentieth-century conceptualization, in contrast, bifurcated civil society’s voluntarism into either hegemonic or counterhegemonic blocs (Gramsci 1971; Knox 1978; Cohen and Arato 1992; Lynch 1998). The hegemonic bloc integrated social life into the dominant consciousness, while the counterhegemonic bloc represented new forms of association and consciousness that could engender revolutionary change (Gramsci 1971; Cox and Sinclair 1996). Civil society analysis inspired by Michel Foucault suggests that civil society is incorporated into governance practices through implicit agreement by offering individuals and groups “involvement in action to resolve the kind of issues hitherto held to be the responsibility of authorized governmental agencies” (Sending and Neumann 2006, 657). These individuals and groups must, however, “assume active responsibility for these activities . . . [and carry them out] in accordance with the appropriate (or approved) model of action” (657). The resulting “governmentality” no longer treats civil society actors merely as objects to be governed but rather as both objects and subjects of governance.3 This means that civil society actors—when they act responsibly— become part of the mechanisms of governance necessary to contemporary political life. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the ever-proliferating

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number and role of civil society actors. Instead, we should understand that they have become integral to the new rationality of governance consolidated over the past twenty years. Such theories of civil society and governance are implicated in global politics in critical ways. Hegel, Marx, and Foucault each highlight the role of civil society actors in integrating social life into existing statist and internationalist economic and political projects (though in different ways), while Gramsci postulates that the development of counterhegemonic blocs of civil society groups can challenge the very foundations of those projects and institute new practices. Hegel and Marx take opposing moral positions on the worth and possibilities of civil society actors, while Gramsci embraces counterhegemonic possibilities. Foucault, however, is concerned less with articulating an ethical imperative and more with emphasizing the techniques and mechanisms of power that give rise to these actors and integrate them into the practices of modern liberal and, today increasingly, global governance. A closer examination of civil society groups’ ethics vis-à-vis the liberal state and economy demonstrates the validity of both the mediating and governmentality conceptualizations of civil society actors. But, while the development of solid counterhegemonic blocs that could radically transform liberal political and economic practices tends to elude liberal civil society actors, this closer examination still demonstrates openings for disrupting dominant power relations and processes. Liberal discourses that shape the actions and ethics of civil society groups emphasize the developmental progress (moral, political, economic) of the modern individual subject. They also emphasize the ability of human agents to resolve problems through science and reason. These emphases align with both mediating and governmentality conceptualizations of civil society actors. Civil society actors, however, advocate and give assistance from a range of ethical motivations. Many groups view themselves as promoting ethics of cosmopolitan humanitarianism and egalitarianism or political, economic, and/or cultural justice, rather than of liberal individualism. Of course, liberal individualism is generally compatible with cosmopolitan humanitarianism (see Calhoun 2007). It is also compatible with many interpretations of justice, although other conceptions challenge it (Hutchings 2004). The interaction of liberal discourses with the ethics of civil society actors helps to explain phenomena such as the prioritization of civil and political rights over economic and social ones, the development of new international legal institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) (which attempts to bring individual perpetrators of crimes against humanity to account, especially perpetrators at the highest ranks of government), the promotion of the ballot box to ensure individual political participation, faith in bootstrap mechanisms for poverty reduction, and technological solutions for health and humanitarian crises.

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Yet some civil society groups also attempt to deconstruct and move beyond these forms of governance to create openings for new possibilities. We need to examine in more detail how civil society actors check or upset the power of liberal and illiberal governments and transnational economic actors, expand democratic debate on contentious issues, and/or advocate new norms and practices, to understand just what their relationship with states and markets means for the ethics of global governance. Especially since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the most recent phases of globalization, industrialized as well as less-developed states have encouraged civil society organizations to take over much of the provision of humanitarian relief and social welfare (e.g., the Bush administration’s “faith-based initiative,” the Clinton administration’s funding of humanitarian NGOs through the US Agency for International Development [USAID], and the encouragement of NGO work by third world countries). Transnational economic and financial institutions also work with civil society groups on programs such as promoting limited debt relief, reforming trade practices, and eradicating extreme poverty. But state and market institutions have attempted to shut out or marginalize other civil society discourses that pose stronger challenges to liberal discourses and ethics. The following section examines the intersection of liberal discourses with the contemporary practices and ethics of civil society actors.

Ethical Configurations of Civil Society Actors Economic Justice How do liberal discourses play out in debates, campaigns, and programs for economic justice? Neoliberalism and market globalization became the catchwords for liberal global economic projects in the early 1990s. These discourses relied on three claims: that global market forces are the most efficient providers of public as well as private goods, that governments can no longer afford to provide public services themselves, and that states are powerless to stop the onward march of globalizing market forces (Lynch 1998). Given the demise of the Soviet Union by 1991, market liberalism became the only way to structure aid to third world countries through Western governments and IO (World Bank, IMF) mechanisms. The push to globalize liberal trade and finance in the third world and former socialist states also had implications for the West, where neoliberal programs for unregulated financial markets increasingly justified the dismantling of state social welfare institutions. As a result, both first world and third world governments happily encouraged NGOs to take over more and more assistance programs to provide to the poorest segments of wealthy societies, as well as

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to create and run aid projects that substitute for social welfare in many third world countries. Civil society actors developed a range of answers to these developments. Both locally based and transnational NGOs responded to increasing needs for social assistance. As the Charity Commission (2006) notes, NGOs implement projects in a huge range of areas; importantly, NGOs provide a reach that governments often do not have (whether geographically or with marginalized communities)—their creative ideas and local solutions are critical in the development debate, and often support policy shifts such as good governance and anti-corruption. . . . Indeed, development—broadly understood—may not be sustainable without a growing body of effective NGOs operating in an increasingly strong sector.4

Many of these groups and movements see themselves as devoted to alleviating suffering and providing much-needed dignity to the world’s poor, rather than as merely smoothing the rough edges of liberal governance techniques. In fact, many civil society organizations view their own financial and programmatic contributions as insufficient and advocate for larger government roles in the provision of social welfare (Lynch 1999a). Moreover, many engage in advocacy to reform global market practices, including the rules of international economic institutions. For example, the debt relief movement, which originated in Jubilee 2000, pushed governments of developed states to commemorate the year 2000 as a “jubilee year” (following Jewish and Christian scriptures) when third world debts would be forgiven by first world countries and international financial institutions, requiring a temporary suspension of the central rules of international finance. Jubilee 2000 enjoyed considerable success in bringing the issue of crushing third world debt to the forefront of international economic debates. As a result, debt relief has become a constant in international economic discussions. The question is no longer whether to forgive debt, but how much debt to forgive, through what mechanisms, and with what controls it should be carried out. Still other civil society actors regard any type of reform as insufficient and, for that reason, ultimately immoral, given the gross income, health, employment, and educational inequities present in the world. Many of these groups came together in the mid-1990s to combat the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the creation of the WTO, and thus oppose market liberalism outright. These actors, led by groups such as the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), coalesced into a transnational antiglobalization movement. In previous work I have articulated a worry that this movement’s normative challenge to global market mechanisms was overly romanticized and therefore insufficient (Lynch 1998). Yet, the antiglobalization movement has continued to strengthen in several fora, most notably in protests against IMF, World Bank, and especially WTO lib-

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eralization mechanisms, held outside of the hotels where annual meetings of these institutions take place. Despite their radical identity, major policy proposals of antiglobalization civil society actors range from reforming the WTO, IMF, and World Bank institutions to abolishing them. The events of September 11, 2001, in the United States temporarily quieted the antiglobalization movement’s challenge to liberal market institutions, but the movement soon regrouped to focus on countering the concentration of economic power displayed at the World Economic Forum (WEF), held annually in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF, which convenes leading figures in businesses and governments, represents “an annual celebration of globalization” (Friedman 1996, A15). Antiglobalization activists created the World Social Forum (WSF), a huge and inchoate series of meetings held at the same time as the WEF but always at a venue in the third world. The purpose of the WSF is to connect civil society activists in an explicit attempt to demonstrate that alternatives to economic liberalization, along with programs to improve healthcare, education, and the environment, can be created and implemented (Grzybowski 2006; Fisher and Ponniah 2003). In other words, the antiglobalization movement of civil society organizations attempts to challenge and usurp rather than mediate the discourses of economic liberalism.5 While the media frequently lump civil society actors from Jubilee to the IFG under the rubric of “antiglobalization activists,” pragmatic and ethical tensions often occur among these types of civil society organizations. Such tensions illustrate the pressures exerted by liberal discourses to promote mediating rather than revolutionary actions and ethics. For example, Oxfam, long considered one of the more grassroots humanitarian and development groups working in the third world, sends representatives to the WEF to plan reforms with liberal elites. Oxfam currently touts its access on the “About Us” section of its website, stating, “We work with poor people. . . . We influence powerful people” (Oxfam 2007). Critics of globalization also have ambivalent relationships with celebrity promoters of Jubilee 2000 and the debt relief movement. As one critic charges, the British Commission for Africa (which includes Bob Geldof) assumes “that free trade and privatization are somehow the key to liberation for Africans,” although the same critic believes that “the commitment toward ending the debt and fighting in African poverty is genuine” (Rodino 2005). The civil society actors who discuss the world’s problems at Davos operate within the parameters of liberal capitalist discourse, and forge relationships with world leaders such as the UN Secretary-General and the British prime minister. The organizers of Davos, however, do permit limited debate about economic reforms. For example, it is acceptable for celebrities such as Bono, another regular WEF participant, to call repeatedly for governments to meet aid targets and give billions more for AIDS relief in

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Africa. But critiques of capitalism and the market must remain acceptably within the boundaries of liberal economic discourse. Thus Friends of the Earth announced in 2003 that, while it would attend the WEF, it would also continue to act as co-organizer of “The Public Eye on Davos,” because “Only a few critical voices are heard inside the WEF’s annual meeting and it is far from a balanced platform where all stakeholders are represented.” The Public Eye on Davos, created in 1999, charges that the WEF facilitates economic globalization with little if any accountability or transparency (Friends of the Earth 2007). But some NGOs have been disinvited to the WEF after criticizing market globalization too strongly, including Focus on the Global South, Public Citizen, and Friends of the Earth. According to the Financial Times, “the Forum says it is not inviting organizations that contribute only negative views and do not support its ‘mission’ to narrow global divisions” (de Jonquieres and Yeager 2002). Thus, critiques of capitalism and the market must remain acceptably within the boundaries of liberal economic discourse. Another example that illustrates both the limitations placed on contemporary calls for economic justice and the ethical tensions they embody is the ONE campaign, whose stated mission is “to make poverty history,” which has absorbed much of the debt relief movement in the United States. Founded in 2004 when a group of activists including Bono brought together liberal and conservative US Christians, the ONE campaign is an umbrella organization of faith-based and antipoverty organizers that lobbies the government to give an additional 1 percent of the federal budget to foreign aid. The campaign (over)uses the “one” moniker in ways that fulfill the liberal individualist stereotype: “We commit ourselves—ONE person—ONE voice—ONE vote at a time—to make a better, safer world for all” (One 2007). In addition to calling for a 1 percent increase in foreign aid, this campaign advocates fulfilling the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)6 in order to “eradicate extreme poverty within our lifetime.” Much of the rhetoric of this campaign is designed to meet the concerns of liberal individualists who might be persuaded by bootstrap approaches to poverty relief. “Even those who tend to dislike big government solutions to problems and to prefer tax cuts to increasing the federal budget should stop and consider whether the ONE campaign makes a moral claim upon us that transcends the usual political squabbles,” argues one evangelical minister (Roberts 2007). Other, “progressive” signatories of the ONE campaign demonstrate the limits of its liberal rhetoric as well as the ethical tensions it embodies. For example, the Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran churches published an Ecumenical Study Guide to encourage their adherents to support the MDGs out of motivations based on Christian traditions of charity, justice, solidarity, and accompaniment (Evangelical Lutheran Churches 2006): “Charity is

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a temporary response to human need,” while “Justice is a permanent solution to human need.” The guide also quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: “On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring” (15). The quote from King is part of the move from charity to justice, which entails “solidarity and accompaniment.” These two terms were developed by Latin American liberation theologians during the 1970s and 1980s to promote the more radical restructuring and redistribution of wealth and power that King in his final years articulated powerfully (Lynch 2000). In the Ecumenical Study Guide, however, these terms lose much of their radical inspiration. “Solidarity is also called accompaniment. It can involve fasting in solidarity with the hungry; living a life that seeks to embody good stewardship of God’s creation and its resources; volunteering one’s time and talent in the service of charity and justice; and praying daily for justice and reconciliation throughout the world God sent his Son to save.” The major activity recommended by the guide is adherence to the ONE campaign, which involves lobbying Congress and the executive branch to increase the foreign aid budget. Activists at the WSF, in contrast, explicitly link poverty and disease to the structures of economic and military power, and target “the greed and blackmail of the multinational corporations supported by the governments of the rich countries” in their “determination to fight against the concentration of wealth, the proliferation of poverty and inequalities, and the destruction of our earth” (Fisher and Ponniah 2003, 346). Despite the criticism that the WSF represents its own variant of liberal activism (activists attend who are privileged enough to be able to afford the time and travel expenses; the forum, as a talkfest, has only rhetorical results), the critique of liberal discourses is much more direct than that of the ONE campaign. Civil society actions working to reduce poverty and equalize opportunity thus provide an interesting example of the range and limitations of the ethics that are possible in the contemporary liberal context. Linked to the mediating role played by some civil society organizations vis-à-vis political and economic power is the faith in technical solutions to health and political problems. For example, over the past few years much of the attention paid to the AIDS pandemic in Africa has moved to a renewed focus on eradicating malaria. Campaigns such as Malaria No More (http://www.malarianomore.org) appeal to donors by stating, “You can save a life, today, for just $10.” This money purchases an insecticide-treated bed net for a recipient in sub-Saharan Africa. The campaign promotes the liberal

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faith in rational progress: “Unlike many diseases, malaria is both preventable and treatable and every person, even with a small amount of support, can literally save lives” (emphasis in original). Humanitarian NGO representatives acknowledge that malaria is the new HIV/AIDS because it seems possible to solve the problem through relatively simple and available methods.7 Peace and Security Issues of governance and democratic accountability also intersect with civil society actions on peace and security issues. Moreover, where peace and economic justice issues intersect, new ethical tensions become evident. For example, humanitarian actors sometimes consult with Western and third world governments in providing relief aid, though many of these same governments enact economic policies that contribute to instability, thereby increasing calls for humanitarian assistance. Liberal discourses of democratic accountability also shape the contemporary work of many civil society actors on peace and security, including efforts to stabilize conflict zones, institute democratic practices such as multiparty voting, and bring war crimes perpetrators to account. For some civil society organizations, the intersection of economic justice and peace and security issues contains irresolvable ethical tensions, while for others, recognizing this intersection results in more explicit opposition to dominant forms of both economic governance and militarism. As this volume goes to press, a seemingly intractable conflict has erupted again in Somalia, causing bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of new refugees, and destruction of homes and livelihood. Any UN or NGO regional meeting on Somalia (listed on UN or NGO websites) includes both transnational and local NGOs and UN agencies such as the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The Somali case illustrates the trend after the end of the Cold War for newly energized civil society actors to participate actively in addressing the humanitarian consequences of conflict. The reopening of this conflict has spawned a Somalia NGO Consortium to incorporate Somali civil society groups (of women, students, mosques, intellectuals, youth, businesses, sports authorities, and many others), presumably to facilitate the distribution of aid as well as to plan for the creation of workable and accountable postconflict governance mechanisms. This consortium alone includes at least 850 groups, almost all of them locally based (Somalia Civil Society 2007). The transnational humanitarian NGOs that flood such conflict zones to provide emergency assistance advocate a nonpolitical ethic, attempting to remain neutral in order to provide safety, shelter, food, and medical supplies. But, despite their attempt to remain apolitical, they frequently find themselves caught up in locally based factionalisms. In the Somali case, it is cur-

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rently unclear how local civil society actors participate in conjunction with transnational humanitarian organizations and UN offices, whether the local groups work from a common understanding of the conflict, and what the ties between local and transnational groups mean for the latter’s attempts to remain neutral in the conflict. In other cases, involuntary involvement in political conflicts can grow over time. For example, Médecins Sans Frontières finally withdrew from refugee camps outside of Rwanda in the mid-1990s out of concern that its medical work in Hutu-majority camps was abetting ethnic cleansing more than it was saving lives. It is impossible, therefore, for humanitarian groups to have no effect on political balances of power at the local, regional, and increasingly global levels. Humanitarian groups also differ in their allegiance and willingness to work with either UN or state (such as US) policy. The US and other Western governments channel much of their own humanitarian assistance through NGOs. The dependency on government funding, combined with the US-led “war on terror,” has complicated the relationship of some humanitarian groups with those they seek to aid. Some US-based groups insist that they act independently of the US government even though they receive funding from USAID. Others complain they are perceived as government agents by local populations even when they refuse all US government assistance (Lynch 2000). The desire to remain apolitical stems from the belief that aid should be provided to everyone in need, as well as the belief that people need to work out their own solutions to conflict. When civil society actors such as Médecins Sans Frontières withdraw from a conflict situation because they feel they cannot escape politicization, they do so with great anguish given their self-ascribed moral obligation to help all who are in need, regardless of political or other affiliations. The increasing recognition by NGOs that their actions are complicit in ongoing political struggles has led many to embrace an ethic of “Do No Harm.” Articulated in the early 1990s by international and local NGOs collaborating in the Local Capacities for Peace Project, this ethical stance recognizes the complexities of the relationship between aid and conflict. Participants in the initial pilot projects state that their “most important single finding” (emphasis in original) is that Do No Harm enables us to identify programming options when things are going badly. In fact, many people involved . . . say that for some time they have been aware of the negative impacts of some of their programs but that they thought these were inevitable and unavoidable. Do No Harm is useful precisely because it gives us a tool to find better ways—programming options—to provide assistance. (Anderson 2004, 2)

The recognition of complexity and adverse effects combined with the continued determination to save lives that is embodied in this ethic is laudable

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and demonstrates the reflexive practices of humanitarian NGOs. At the same time, however, the very phrase, “do no harm,” also presents an obvious irony in that it calls into question the possibility of achieving the underlying motivation for humanitarian action writ large, which is the desire to do good and the belief that it is possible. Some civil society groups based in the West explicitly agree with the normative goals of US and other Western government policies that promote liberal democratic practices. These groups favor democratization because of the belief that conflict resolution depends on the ability of a local populace to vote in multiparty elections and prosper through private ownership and investment. But interesting tensions arise when “democratization” processes move in directions opposed by these civil society actors and governments. A prominent example of these tensions within liberal discourses on democratization (as well as a significant departure from Western NGOs’ attempted apolitical stances) concerns civil society actors’ positions on recognizing the Palestinian government. Western-based civil society actors have in recent years taken increasingly explicit sides in the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict. One manifestation is the phenomenon of fact-finding tours of the Holy Land. “Progressive” Christian groups align with Palestinian activists to “see for themselves” and report back to their congregations on the hardships of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, while conservative Christians work with Zionist Jewish organizations to send church groups to support Israel (World Council of Churches 2007). But in 2006, Hamas, labeled a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States, won democratic elections and hence the right to form the new Palestinian government. The progressive Christians thus tend to support recognition of a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, while conservative Christians, who also support US policy in the region, approve of Israel’s stance in rejecting recognition. Similarly, transnational civil society groups on the left of the political spectrum view the nationalization of oil and other major industries by Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government as an admirable example of standing up to the power of economic liberalism, which should be emulated by other poor countries. Mainstream democratization think tanks, however, have difficulty reconciling Chavez’s electoral success with his challenge to liberal markets. A final interesting example of the way liberal discourses shape contemporary civil society actions on peace and security concerns the push to punish perpetrators of war crimes through the creation of the ICC. The ICC, following the precedent set by the Nuremberg trials after World War II, moves the focus of international law away from state perpetrators to individuals, embodying the principle that individuals who act to promote war crimes and crimes against humanity must be held responsible and punished for their actions (Falk 2003; Lynch 1999b; Struett 2004). The ICC thus priv-

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ileges an ethic of individual responsibility and accountability over other possibilities such as the recovery of communally recognized “truth” and “reconciliation.” Civil society actors have articulated and embraced both strategies of punishment and of communal and state reconciliation, but increasingly they recognize the tensions between them. Not only is “truth” difficult to define for a collectivity, but those who confess to crimes usually obtain amnesty in return, which precludes punishment. However, attempts to punish perpetrators of severe human rights violations can drag on for many years and still not result in hoped-for reconciliation. Both the ICC and the truth and reconciliation commissions, like previous civil society–led attempts to constrain the use of force and violence, also reflect the liberal tendency to treat political issues as technical ones that can be resolved. For example, in order to determine whether war crimes have occurred, judges must agree on definitions of racial and ethnic categories as well as calculations of numbers of people tortured and killed. Yet these allegedly “technical” issues remain unresolved because scientific rationalities and procedures conflict. As Richard Wilson (2006) and John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond (2006) respectively show, definitions of race and calculations of deaths have proven problematic for the Rwandan tribunal as well as for attempts to create a tribunal for Darfur. Truth and reconciliation commissions also embody their own representations of rationality. They are founded on the assumption that it is possible to construct a faithful and accurate history of a conflict, that perpetrators will confess their crimes, and that forgiveness can occur and result in healing postconflict societies. The difficulties of articulating communal truths and “healing” devastated societies, along with current attempts to punish perpetrators of crimes, open up ethical tensions between the individual and society that are seemingly irresolvable in the context of contemporary liberal discourses. Some civil society actors work to achieve peace and security by opposing the military power of powerful states rather than by efforts to strengthen the ICC or remain apolitical in providing humanitarian assistance. US-based groups opposing the war on terror and war in Iraq, as well as transnational and local groups involved in the WSF, link statist military practices to economic power and control. In so doing, they articulate a critique of the state and the “neoliberal order” that attempts to transcend contemporary liberal discourses. The 2001 manifesto of the WSF, for example, proclaimed that “This war [at the time, against Afghanistan] reveals another face of neoliberalism, a face which is brutal and unacceptable. . . . Opposition to war is at the heart of our movement” (Fisher and Ponniah 2003, 347). But the contemporary peace movement against the US-led war in Iraq also demonstrates tensions. Many groups participating in this antiwar coalition explicitly link the Bush administration’s insistence on continuing the war to its

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interests in controlling Iraqi oil reserves and maintaining permanent military bases in the country. These groups are motivated to challenge this logic, not only by the horror of lives lost (both US and Iraqi) in the war, but also by a critique of inequality. This inequality is perpetuated for them by a hegemonic project that unethically perpetuates conflict in an attempt by powerful state actors to control recalcitrant social groups. Others in the antiwar coalition, however, retain the belief that the overall liberal project of instituting democratic practices is a good one, but they argue that the project has not worked in this case (largely because the local population has been unreceptive) and therefore the United States must extricate itself from an unproductive conflict. The contemporary peace movement, therefore, like civil society actions on market liberalism, demonstrates a range of ethical stances vis-à-vis liberal states’ democratization projects.

Conclusion In sum, while civil society actors have long existed, their number and kind continue to expand, as do their implications for the ethics of global governance. Liberal modernity’s emphasis on individualism, economic liberalism, and specific conceptualizations of democratic practice creates many ethical tensions between civil society actors who support and those who oppose liberal discourses. And actors’ attempts to reform and/or resist liberal practices create additional tensions when groups find they cannot realize their goals. These practices and the assumptions they embody also enter into scholarly work on civil society actors. It is not especially helpful to argue, as E. H. Carr (1939) famously did seventy years ago, that civil society actors and the scholars who study them promote an ideal harmony of interests that is both false and potentially dangerous. While Carr’s polemic reflected a fear of the power of social forces that was typical of his time, he did not see that civil society actors were becoming symbiotically ingrained in processes of global governance and could not foresee that this trend would intensify enormously in the late twentieth century. More important, however, Carr was unable to distinguish among the variety of practices and ethical positions that he labeled sweepingly as promoting an unrealizable utopia (Lynch 1999b). The conceptualizations of civil society actors from Hegel to Foucault are more helpful in understanding these actors’ roles as mediators and facilitators of the mechanisms of contemporary liberal governance. Foucault’s concept of governmentality, as Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann (2006) point out, articulates well the function of civil society actors as both subjects and objects of governance. But, as Foucault himself liked to insist,

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the mechanisms and techniques that maintain power relationships are always both formidable and fluid, containing inconsistencies and challenges that can transform them anew (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991). Bringing the agency and ethics of civil society actors back into global governance demonstrates this fluidity, as well as the range of ethical thinking about the possibilities of economic justice and peace that currently exists in the context of contemporary liberalism.

Notes 1. Civil society actors important to global governance today include NGOs; transnational, national, and local social movements; and religious organizations. Some include business groups in their definition of civil society. 2. The NGO sector, “a key player” economically, often comprises “about 5% of a country’s GDP” (Charity Commission 2006). It is difficult to quantify the inkind work of NGOs but one attempt includes volunteer workers in the nonprofit sector in a cross-section of countries (see Salamon 2006). 3. See Burchell, Gordon, and Miller (1991) for analysis of the governmentality concept. 4. For a comprehensive study of development policy over time, see Murphy (2006a). 5. Critics of the World Social Forum dispute its intent as well as its ability to engender counterhegemonic ethics and discourses (Rasheed 2007). 6. The MDGs include: (1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; (2) Achieve universal primary education; (3) Promote gender equality and empower women; (4) Reduce child mortality; (5) Improve maternal health; (6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; (7) Ensure environmental sustainability; and (8) Create a global partnership for development with targets for aid, debt relief, and trade. 7. Interviews, November 2006 and May 2007. The existence of this campaign does not mean, however, that HIV/AIDS has disappeared from the civil society radar screen. Nor does it mean that eradication of malaria is as simple as the campaign indicates. For example, Cameroonian NGO and clinic representatives told me that many people do not want to use white nets because they can symbolize death. One NGO is experimenting with blue nets, but as of this writing the supply is too small.

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4 Democratic Ethics and UN Reform Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti

Contemporary society is affected by a democratic schizophrenia. On the one hand, democracy is more and more accepted as the source of legitimate power. But, on the other hand, this is confined to the borders of individual states. This contradictory situation is partly due to the West’s inconsistent behavior. Freedom and democracy have been offered, suggested, and sometimes even imposed on other countries out of a genuine (yet paternalistic) attitude (see Tom Keating’s chapter in this volume). But freedom and democracy have also provided ideological cover to protect the self-interests of Western states to the detriment of so-called enemies of freedom and civilization. The history of colonialism and imperialism shows that too often the West has proclaimed the ethical truths of democracy for itself while denying and suppressing them in other states and societies. Can a genuine interpretation of democratic ethics be deployed in an inclusive way to open up the global decisionmaking processes and global governance mechanisms rather than to exclude and dominate? The cosmopolitan project aims to investigate theoretical and political avenues for developing an inclusive and democratic alternative to the present international system. The fundamental democratic principle requires that public decisions have to be taken after consultation with all individuals who would enjoy or suffer the public consequences of those decisions. The best political tool to guarantee the possibility of influencing public decisions in any sphere of action is political participation. Participation across borders is thus a key element for reforming the outdated political and diplomatic structures of the states system and to enhance global governance. At every level of global governance politics, individual agents lack opportunities to participate, to consent, and to control the political, economic, and social outcomes that affect their lives. A democratic system at the global level is thus an imperative. A fundamental principle of justice demands a strengthening of today’s 51

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transnational institutions of democracy, with the intention of creating more inclusive mechanisms of democratic self-legislation. This chapter analyzes and applies democratic ethics in ways that transcend the traditional intrastate and territorial limits of global governance. Above all, we argue in favor of recognizing citizens as cosmopolitan stakeholders that are entitled to rights in a number of different political spheres beyond national borders. The cosmopolitan democratic ethics that we advocate here supports a multilayered theory of democracy and, as a consequence, the reform and creation of new global governance arrangements. In particular, we analyze democratic ethics in the context of the most important global governance organization, the UN. Section one analyzes the significant but limited effect of democratic ethical norms on the creation and evolution of the UN. While originally created for furthering the rule of law, peace, cooperation, and human rights, the UN never managed to pursue consistently such aims. The founding states, whether democratic, Western, or not, have resisted the full implementation and progressive development of democratic ethics in global politics, both before and after the Cold War. Section two outlines the reasons why a democratic ethics confined to territorial states necessarily fails in an era of intensive transnational relations and intergovernmental cooperation. Although applying democracy to global governance organizations faces obstacles, the skepticism of traditional democratic theorists like Robert Dahl is unwarranted and counterproductive in light of new political possibilities that we articulate. Section three outlines cosmopolitan principles that dovetail with and support a democratic transformation of global governance at the UN by examining the most significant reform proposals recently formulated by intergovernmental commissions and civil society organizations. Our conclusion examines some of the strategic issues related to implementing democratic reforms at the UN.

The United Nations: A Democratic Endeavor The UN is the product of a democratic endeavor generated in the aftermath of World War II. While previous attempts to construct a viable world organization, such as the League of Nations, failed, the momentum offered by the end of the war and the widespread desire to prevent the repetition of such atrocities proved to be the right occasion for major powers to implement an old ideal. The original idea of an international organization that could prevent bellicose relations is indeed much older than the UN. From the seventeenth century on, various projects for international peace provided intellectual reference for inspired politicians genuinely aiming at world, possibly perpetual, peace (see Archibugi 1992; Heater 1996; Murphy 1999). The idea of a world organization devoted to peace emerged within Western lib-

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eral democracy as part of an overall effort of democratic states to regulate cooperation at the international level. The democratic ideal of international peaceful relations was complemented by a number of key innovations in international politics, such as a system of human rights and a ban on unilateral war. Aiming to protect human rights and to foster cooperation on international problems, the UN Charter contains a number of innovative principles of international law that create a radical shift in international normative praxis toward a confederal model. A first major step in this direction, based on the idea of collective security, consists of the limitation of the unconditional right of states to resort to the use of force by devolving this right to the UN (Article 2). A second deviation from classic international law is the adoption of a majority vote on issues concerning peace and security (albeit one qualified by the voting of the Security Council, giving veto power to the permanent five—or P5—council members) (Articles 18 and 27[3]). Finally, a further relevant departure from previous international practice is the legal supremacy of the Charter over any other subsequent international treaty (Article 103). The Charter encouraged three new international norms. The first was a more extensive scheme of cooperation to safeguard peace and security, to solve common problems, and to sustain common values. Second, a broader notion of common values grounded in core principles such as human rights became the justificatory basis of international action. Third, the UN adopted a more robust norm regarding the responsibility of the organization to enforce compliance; the failures of entirely “soft” forms of compliance in the League of Nations were lessons learned (Hurrell 2001). The new legal system generated by these changes was meant to affect the authority of state sovereignty, as understood within the classic intergovernmental model (see Makinda in this volume). This was the democratic ideal underpinning of much of the discussion that took place at the founding UN conference in San Francisco in 1945; nonetheless, the Charter reflected a number of pragmatic concerns and negotiations among a variety of states. The establishment of the UN was only possible thanks to intense political negotiations with nondemocratic regimes (Schlesinger 2003; Kennedy 2006). In particular, the diplomatic and geopolitical agreement between liberal (yet colonial) powers and the communist countries, especially the Soviet Union, proved to be essential for the establishment and consolidation of the organization (Ziring, Riggs, and Plano 2000). Realpolitik bargaining among states produced a number of compromises that damaged the democratic ideal. The first major consequence was the stall of any significant human rights operation in the organization during the Cold War. This was mainly due to the Security Council’s right to veto any decision that could affect the “domestic” sphere of any world power. A second major consequence was the acceptance of a restrictive interpretation of the right to self-

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determination via state sovereignty that was used to limit the scope of human rights’ application. Beyond these political constraints, the UN also suffered a number of hypocrisies that severely limited its actual capacity to govern international affairs. The first hypocrisy concerns Western democracies. While the United States, France, and the United Kingdom have genuinely thought of the UN as a system to extend their own constitutional frameworks, they retained their right to stop any decision in the Security Council against their direct interests. This contributed to an aura of mistrust in the organization considered by many other states as a Western creature. The second hypocrisy concerns developing and socialist countries. While accusing the UN of insensitivity to the needs of weaker nations, most of these governments failed to apply democratic principles domestically. Despite its democratic promise, the UN’s credibility and capacity to live up to stated principles of good governance were seriously eroded by its member states. The gap between the UN’s very wide mandate and the limited resources and volatile support of its more powerful members has created a number of crises. Unless one believes in political miracles, it would have been naive to think the UN would succeed more often than not at fulfilling its mandate. Yet a stream of columnists and politicians (including those who have consistently opposed any increased resources and capacity) have found it fashionable to announce the UN’s death. We heard this gloomy statement during the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Rwanda, the NATO bombing in Serbia, George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s assault on Iraq, and after major terrorist attacks. The UN’s death, moreover, has been proclaimed with anger and desperation by all those groups seeking protection from injustice: from Chechen separatists and peoples in Darfur to the Kashmir and Tamil minorities and landless peoples in Kurdistan and Palestine. Disappointment in the UN is particularly acute in the aftermath of the Cold War precisely because of high hopes that the organization would become a much more important power center after decades of seeming impotence. After secret meetings where Khrushchev and Kennedy, Brezhnev and Nixon, Gorbachev and Reagan redrew the boundaries of the world, the end of the bipolarity and superpower dueling was to be replaced with a wider project of controlled cooperation and global liberalization. The winner of the Cold War, the United States, was to take a pivotal and dominant role in revitalizing the UN in a “new world order” of global liberalization, democratization, and peace. In recent years, many states and world public opinion at large have responded to the shortcomings of the UN by engaging in reform discourse. An ambitious project has been envisaged: making the UN the central institution in the international scenario and, in so doing, filling the unbearable current gap between the assigned tasks and its actual power as an institution.1 Within this trend, there have been a plethora of experts’ commissions

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in charge of elaborating multilateral perspectives compatible with the political and economic interests of the West and not necessarily detrimental to the rest of the world. Retired politicians spent their time traveling from one independent commission to another, relaunching, from their new position, those audacious proposals they regularly shelved when in power. Relying on conservative skepticism, realist commentators noted with sophisticated arguments, however, that such hopes were naive. Why should the winners of the Cold War altruistically renounce the booty of the war with the Soviet Union? By their actions, these same states invoking reform have not demonstrated a commitment to the requisite political changes needed to augment and improve the UN’s democratic performance in global governance. In particular, there was no reason to expect that the new unipolar world power would opt for multilateralism and democratic inclusion for both powerful and powerless players. Boutros Boutros-Ghali learned this when attempting to affirm a more active role for the UN: his mandate as UN Secretary-General was not renewed—for the first time in the history of the organization—primarily because of US opposition (see Boutros-Ghali 1999, chapter 1).

The Democratic Challenge Until recently the effects of human actions were mostly contained within a defined territory; most people could influence (and be influenced by) the lives of a limited number of other people. The relationship between responsibility and vulnerability was thus far more legible, and one could, for the most part, reasonably expect to maintain the integrity of this relationship through domestic democratic political channels. The present situation is different: by intensifying the level of global interaction, the current world system pushes beyond the traditional limits of the relationship between rulers and ruled, with the effect of loosening the moral and political ties of accountability. In principle, the democratic correspondence between rulers and ruled should be public, universal, and all-inclusive in order to preserve individual autonomy. Such congruence should cover all the relational dimensions in which individual life is embedded, that is, one should be in a position to self-legislate within one’s entire range of activities. Having the possibility of choice at the local level is self-defeating if it is not complemented by the equivalent possibility of a voice in the decisionmaking and frame-setting processes at the national level. Issues such as the environment or the spread of infectious diseases clearly show how ineffective a local policy can be when it is not integrated into a wider sphere of action (see Matthew, Goldsworthy, and McDonald in this volume). Applying democratic princi-

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ples only within the territorial state is, at best, a partial and, at worst, a selfdefeating effort in light of the different domains and multiple levels that affect individuals. Such circumstances consequently compel us to confront demands for inclusive moral responsibility and envisage new political mechanisms of social liability. Since social action is spread over distinct, yet overlapping, spheres of conduct, democratic accountability is only possible through recognition of the political system as multileveled and all-inclusive. From a normative perspective, the inclusion of vulnerable agents in public and impartial decisionmaking and frame-setting processes at the international level represents a unique chance to improve the democratic legitimacy of the entire political system, both domestically and globally. The widely accepted creed of democracy remains fundamentally flawed unless it is complemented with an international dimension of democratic participation. Three political problems have put the problem of democratizing the UN and other international organizations at the front of the political agenda. First, the intensification of internationalization and globalization in recent decades has made the UN system more visible, thus increasing demands for accountability and participation. The distance between rulers and ruled has widened. Second, the heterogeneity of the ruled has also increased significantly insofar as such diverse political agents as individuals, groups, and states all claim recognition at the global level. Third, pressures for UN reform emerge from the tensions between the organization’s statist and territorialist basis (favoring a one state, one vote formula) and the idea that the UN should represent people as individuals (i.e., one person, one vote) (Bienen, Rittberger, and Wagner 1998, 290). Applying the democratic model to international institutions entails a consistent implementation of democratic accountability at each level of action, be it local, regional, national, or global. Accordingly, the major democratic challenge that lies ahead of the UN in the current system of global governance consists of the enlargement of political participation parallel with and yet beyond the state; such participation would be a means of guaranteeing peace and security and the protection of human rights (Marchetti 2006a, 2006b). Beyond the different interpretations of global governance, a major normative question arises concerning the legitimacy of these global institutions and their relation to democratic theory. In particular, such institutions allocate unaccountable political power to various global agents while excluding others (Woods 2000, 217). New social actors, from individuals to nongovernmental organizations, to multinational corporations, have an increased role in international affairs (Pianta and Silva 2003; Macdonald and Macdonald 2006). And yet these new would-be-global or quasiglobal political actors are effectively excluded from international decisionmaking mechanisms.

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International exclusion occurs when political agents are deprived of their direct institutional entitlements to influence public decisions at the international and global level. At the moment, this is nowhere more visible than at the boundary between national and international jurisdictions concerning political participation. Increasingly, decisions taken in one country affect people in other countries who are not able to express their consent because of their subaltern status as nonfellow, ergo disenfranchised, citizens (Held 1995; Archibugi, Held, and Köhler 1998). A state-based political system remains an unsatisfactory framework for self-determination in relation to transborder interests, such as those embodied by nonnational or transnational political agents like migrants, people of transborder religions, minorities, workers, and so on (Scholte 2004, 22; Marchetti 2005). As individual and social existence is increasingly spread over a number of different domains, a common social framework and an updated conception of multilevel political agency is needed to bring together this diffusion of engagement. In the absence of such a framework, the social and political existence of individuals would be fragmented and exclusionary; any pursuit of a good life would most likely be self-defeating. In response to this, cosmopolitan theories propose the enlargement of political participation to include new social subjects in transnational politics (Archibugi 2008; Marchetti 2008a). A new system of cosmopolitan democracy can be envisaged. Following David Beetham (1999) and Norberto Bobbio (1991), democracy can be defined according to three basic requirements: nonviolence, political participation and control, and political equality. The advantage of such a definition is to be general enough to include most normative conceptions of democracy. Can these basic democratic requirements be applied within international organizations and in global governance generally? In Table 4.1 we compare how such democratic principles are currently embodied in intergovernmental organizations and how they could be expanded and deepened through democratic reform. The notion of democracy as embedded within international and transnational organizations, and at the UN in particular, remains controversial. A prominent advocate of democracy, Robert Dahl, recently restated his objections to applying such principles to global institutions (1999, 2001). One of these objections could be labeled the restricted-size argument. Following classical writers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau, Dahl argues that it is difficult to expand a democratic polity beyond a certain size. The larger the state the smaller the weight each single vote has in proportion to the total of the voting lot—consequently, the less democratic the state is (Dahl and Tuftle 1973; Dahl 1999). Three counterarguments can be used to refute Dahl. First, as already made clear by federalist writers, the right size of a republic is not at all clear: if we stick to the original ideal of a republican society, states such as the United States, Russia, or Brazil, or indeed most

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Table 4.1

Democratic Principles and International Governmental Organizations

Basic Principles

Current Application in IGOs

Nonviolence

Commitment of member states Enforcement of the nonviolence to address international principle through: conflicts peacefully and to • compulsory jurisdiction of use force for self-defense international judicial power (for only example, the International Court of Justice, ICJ) • individual criminal responsibility for international crimes • humanitarian intervention to guarantee the security of peoples threatened by democide or genocide

Political control

Control exercised by member governments Publicity and transparency of acts Norms and procedures codified in international treaties, covenants, charters, and statutes Formal equality of states Equality of citizens in terms of rights sanctioned by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Political equality

Proposed Democratic Reform of IGOs

Expanding political control through a World Parliament, the InterParliamentary Union (IPU), and other peoples’ representatives Opening IGOs to global civil society and its NGOs Monitoring of national governments by cosmopolitan institutions Equality of states on a substantial rather than formal basis (involvement associated to the share of stake held) Political equality among citizens according to a minimal list of rights and duties (cosmopolitan citizenship) Direct participation in world politics through a directly elected World Parliament

Source: Archibugi 2008, 138.

contemporary states, are structurally inadequate for any form of democratic government. Second, the currently interdependent state of global politics makes it unlikely that individuals are affected only by decisions within their community; individuals’ life circumstances are affected by decisions made outside of a particular democratic community. In light of this, excluding the possibility of enlarging democratic participation beyond state borders seriously hampers the very same principles of democratic accountability and equality. Third, we should be aware how the political preferences of each individual currently pass through a long process of delegation before they are represented in the international arena: first from the citizen to a national representative (such as a Member of Parliament or MP), second from an MP to the government, and only finally from the government to the public arena of international organizations and other global fora. Institutional arrangements remaining as they currently are, the relative weight of individual preferences would be even more modest compared with a more direct form

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of global democracy in which individuals directly vote for their representatives. Dahl articulates an alternative set of criteria for a democratic polity, which he believes are unlikely to ever be applied successfully to global governance institutions like the UN. Although he is correct to suggest that any form of global democratic governance needs to be evaluated by such criteria, we are more optimistic about the possibility of applying a democratic ethics beyond the state. Table 4.2 compares Dahl’s democratic criteria with

Table 4.2

Robert Dahl’s Democratic Criteria Applied to International Governmental Organizations

Dahl’s Democratic Criteria

Possible Extension to IGOs

“Final control over important For some areas it is possible to envisage elected officials government decisions is (for example through a World Parliament). Elected exercised by elected officials.” officials can also be appointed for activities where IGOs have a strong territorial activity (health, food, refugees). “These officials are chosen in The electoral principle may be applied at various levels. free, fair and reasonably Other forms of democratic participation could also be frequent elections.” conceived. “In considering their possible Since freedom of expression is often repressed by choices and decisions, citizens authoritarian governments, IGOs could also protect have an effective right and individual freedom of expression and provide the opportunity to exercise instruments to exercise it. extensive freedom of expression.” “Citizens also have the right and Information and media are still largely national in scope. opportunity to consult Attempts to generate a regional or global alternative sources of public opinion have had limited effect. But media are information that are not increasingly under the pressures of globalization and under the control of the they are globalizing even without explicit political government or any single direction. New information and communications group of interest.” technologies, moreover, provide a variety of information channels that are more difficult to keep under government control. “In order to act effectively, National political life could also be expanded at the citizens possess the right and transnational level. Political parties, trade unions, opportunities to form political and NGOs already have linkages across borders and associations, interest groups, they are already increasing their significance. competitive political parties, Strengthening global institutions may also lead to a voluntary organizations, and reorganization of political interests and delegation. the like.” “With a small number of The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights already permissible exceptions, such sanctions individual rights. A cosmopolitan as transient residents, all adults citizenship, even if granted by states (as in the EU who are subject to the laws case), may extend political equality to the inhabitants and policies are full citizens of the planet and strengthen their rights vis-à-vis their who possess all rights and governments. opportunities just listed.” Sources: Dahl 2001, 28; Archibugi 2008, 135–136.

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what we consider feasible within international organizations. The most obvious institution for implementing such democratic principles at the global level is the UN. As the central intergovernmental institution of the current international institutional order, and having a nearly universal constituency, the UN undoubtedly constitutes the first target of any reform for global democracy.

Cosmopolitan Political Principles and UN Reform: From Theory to Practice According to the cosmopolitan project, the UN should be the fulcrum of a global legal and political system. In order to achieve this status, the organization needs to gain authority though legitimacy; to gain such legitimacy it needs to adhere to shared democratic values. Enhancing democracy in the UN requires reform on the basis of three additional principles: legality, transparency, and enhanced participation. Applying these principles in a cosmopolitan fashion will support the democratic ethics of nonviolence, political control, and political equality. Legality Some argue that international law is a doormat made to be trampled on. Despite this, international law is a constitutive and regulative reality in world politics. All international organizations, beginning with the UN, exist because there is, though imperfect, an international law. Despite the absence of automatic sanctions for transgressors, this international law is foundational for any civil interaction. Law remains the key democratic mechanism to implement a nonviolent order, even when it is violated. The relationship between democracy and international law extends further: with democracy as the dominant regime type globally today, the hypocrisy of democratic states disregarding the global rule of law should become more difficult to sustain. Citizens will ask why they must respect the rule of law if their states fail to do the same. Transparency The democratic principle of political control requires transparent public decisionmaking so that citizens can hold public authorities to account (minimally by rewarding or punishing governments at elections). Already to a degree, the UN is a forum where governments are expected to publicly and reciprocally declare and announce their actions. The traditions of secret diplomacy and pacts by subsets of states have been nominally rejected although such practices have not disappeared. Decisions are still wrapped in

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the cloak of “reason of state” and, as with the United States and Iraq in 2003, intelligence that can be cited but not shown. The farce of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has proved how little correspondence exists between secrecy in foreign policy and the interests of the citizens. Within this context, the UN is one of the institutions that, at least partially, contributes to the dismantling of this well-orchestrated smokescreen, for it could allow, if fully empowered, public opinion to have a better grasp of international affairs and consequently to assess freely the specific political cases. Enhanced Participation UN reform requires enlarged participation if it is to be inclusive enough to meet the demands of democratic ethics. Equal participation is a complex matter at the UN: the Charter recognizes sovereign equality and rights but then immediately violates this principle by investing the undemocratic veto power in the Security Council. The current institutional structure has to be changed. But even if the Security Council’s veto norm was modified and decisions over security granted uniquely to the General Assembly (GA), the procedure would still be utterly undemocratic. This is because, on the one hand, a large number of states do not have internal democratic voting systems and therefore vast sectors (perhaps the majority) of their population would be excluded from representation and, on the other hand, even the currently “democratic” states would deprive their minorities, be they national or transnational, from representation. Concerning the latter democratic states, furthermore, a serious problem of accountability remains, insofar as the multiple steps of delegation weaken the actual possibility of their national constituencies to control the work of their governments. Finally, the situation would still be one of formal “equality” between the representative of San Marino, with a constituency of 20,000 voters, and the representative of India, with a constituency of 1 billion, which negates the democratic rule of “one person, one vote”: the will of one citizen of San Marino would count as much as would the will of 50,000 Indians. Democracy would still remain in the far distance. *

*

*

How can these three political principles be inserted into a process of democratic reform of the UN? Here we move from the ethical dimensions of democratic theory to practice. Debate and proposals for UN reform are as old as the organization. There are five principal areas that reform advocates generally target: (1) enlarging the Security Council and abolishing the P5 states’ veto power; (2) creating an Assembly of the Peoples that would be juxtaposed with the GA of member states, thus creating direct representative links between the UN

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and the world’s citizens in addition to balancing the power of member states; (3) strengthening the global judiciary by expanding the jurisdiction of the ICJ, in addition to supporting the recently created ICC; (4) increasing the UN’s financial resources and political capabilities to achieve its mandate in coordinating a response to human rights violations; and (5) reformulating the UN’s peace mandate in ways that more adequately address the changing requirements of peacekeeping and peace enforcement (see Pines 1984; Baratta 1987; Archibugi 1995; Imber 1997; Falk 2005; Zweifel 2005). To these five typically envisaged reforms to the UN we add the idea that a democratized UN will encourage and play a key role in domestic democratization. Democratizing global governance at the UN is an alternative political strategy to the current trends in exporting democracy (see Keating in this volume). Rather than forcing poor countries to embrace the democratic creed through bombing, the UN’s democratization could prove that a society of free peoples is tolerant and inclusive of those people struggling for self-government. Moving from ideals and proposals to political practice is often elusive. It comes as no surprise, then, that great expectations for democratizing the UN have so far been disappointed. The grand reform projects presented in 1995, on the UN’s fiftieth anniversary, went ignored. Similar proposals at the Millennium Summit in 2000 also evaporated. Just slightly less disappointing, the 2005 summit held on the sixtieth anniversary resulted in only modest reforms.2 Nevertheless, serious democratic reform of the UN would go well beyond the targets that the organization has thus far set. Despite these failures the continued formulation of reform proposals continues to animate the debates of foreign ministries, civil society organizations, and— we hope ultimately—world public opinion. In what follows we outline the most suggestive of recent reform proposals and link them to the cosmopolitan democratic ethics discussed above. With respect to the Security Council, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 2005 report, In Larger Freedom, recommends increasing the number of members in order to make the body more representative (United Nations 2005, 42–43). From civil society, Socialist International suggests enlarging the Security Council by giving seats to regional organizations such as the EU and the African Union (AU) (Socialist International 2005). Furthermore, Socialist International suggests that the veto power wielded by the permanent members of the Security Council should be restricted to certain areas only and, eventually, abolished altogether (2005, 23–24). Sadly, the past fifteen years of resistance and rivalries among states has made Security Council reform very unlikely. Excessive focus on this aspect of the UN should not eclipse radical reforms in other, perhaps more feasible, areas. For instance, much can be done to reform the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) (O’Donovan 1992; Ul Haq 1995; United Nations

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1995). Socialist International suggests a two-step reform strategy: In the short term ECOSOC should act as a coordinator of policy dialogue among the different international economic institutions. In the longer term, however, they propose an altogether new Economic, Social, and Environmental Council with status equal to the Security Council (Socialist International 2005). Such a renewed Council would have a mandate for actions such as strategic coordination and assessing the performance of the specialized agencies; the supervision of global public goods; and managing not only economic and social problems but also the environment, development, and debt issues. Obviously, such a Council should also be empowered with greater economic resources and be open and inclusive to regional organizations and civil society representatives. Humanitarian intervention is another key area that requires immediate reform. Too often the absence of a reliable UN structure to prevent and react to humanitarian crises has left the issue to the discretion of powerful member states (see Lu in this volume). Such states decide whether and how to intervene, not simply on the basis of altruism but, predictably, for strategic self-interest. In the case of Rwanda in 1994, the UN opted for nonintervention precisely because it lacked independent capacities and because of the unwillingness of major powers. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report, The Responsibility to Protect (ICISS 2001), created a conceptual vocabulary that represents a crucial redefinition of the UN’s mandate. The report rejects conclusively the anachronistic notion of absolute sovereignty but also invests a duty to respond by the international community within the legal and moral framework that has gradually developed in the UN Charter era. Subsequent reports have endorsed the doctrine, including that of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (United Nations 2004a) and Annan’s In Larger Freedom (United Nations 2005). At the September 2005 UN Millennium Plus Five summit, the heads of state and government also endorsed the concept of R2P, although without creating a definite means of implementing humanitarian intervention in practice (Bellamy 2006). A key feature of the R2P doctrine is the concept of responsibility to rebuild shattered societies. Reflecting this, the Secretary-General urged the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission (United Nations 2005, 31; Zedillo 2005) and this has been established. Reforming the GA has also received attention (Strauss 1999). Democratizing the UN should include revising the structure of the Assembly to allow inclusion of nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and regional organizations. The High-Level Panel and the UN–Civil Society Relations panel chaired by Fernando Enrique Cardoso (United Nations 2004b) are among those who have advocated such forms of engagement. Many important recent UN events, including the “informal interactive hearings of the GA with non-governmental organizations, civil

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society organizations and the private sector” held in 2005, can be seen as the first steps in this direction. If such a forum becomes institutionalized and regular it will become a possible nucleus for a Parliamentary Assembly. Unfortunately, the hearings held in 2005 have been discontinued, stopping a very interesting attempt to bridge the GA and global civil society. In the future such an assembly should be organized annually and simultaneously with the plenary session of the GA. Three innovative proposals have been raised recently to more generally fill the democratic deficit at the UN. On the one hand, following the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) model of triple representation (government, unions, and enterprises), proposals for national representatives to be nominated both by governments and national parliaments have been formulated. On the other hand, alternative proposals have been forwarded for national legislators to take part in the UN. Most radically, a third option supported by many NGOs is for an “Assembly of Peoples” created alongside the GA. Such an elected assembly would offer a place for representation of NGOs, local institutions, and, more generally, for organized civil society. Human rights and migration are also key themes in current UN reform proposals. The recently established Human Rights Council is undoubtedly a step forward toward more effective protection of human rights. Time is still needed, however, to assess its efficacy. On migration, since November 2003 the creation of a fully political UN agency specifically dedicated to the theme of migration (beyond the current International Organization on Migration, IOM) has been invoked, and a High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development has been set up with modest results (United Nations 2006). Further development in this direction could lead to the creation of a World Migration Organization, an ideal target to pursue in order to increase international cooperation and secure a humane and effective migratory regime (Ghosh 2000). Table 4.3 outlines possible UN reforms in relation to the democratic and cosmopolitan principles discussed in the previous sections.

Table 4.3

UN Reforms and Cosmopolitan Principles

Democratic Principles

Cosmopolitan Principles

Nonviolence

Global rule of law

Political control

Global transparency

Political equality

Global participation

UN Reforms • • • •

Peacebuilding commission Human rights council Peoples assembly Economic, social, and environmental council • Security Council reform • UN migration agency

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Conclusion To conclude, what strategies ought to be adopted to help realize these shorterand longer-term goals? First, democratizing the UN should be viewed as concurrent with, and not as entirely separate and distinct from, democratization within specific troubled states and regions. Certainly many UN member countries are far from reaching a minimum democratic threshold internally. However, membership in a democratic UN could help promote regime change in authoritarian member states. Democratization of the UN has to run in parallel to the democratization of single countries. The presence of international organizations inspired by democratic values will influence the domestic structure of the member states (see Pevehouse 2002). By favoring civil society contact from below and by fomenting democratic groups, the UN could constrain and erode the power of autocratic regimes and this would in turn contribute to the process of its own democratization. Second, two extreme yet prevalent attitudes toward UN reform should be rejected. One is an antisystemic perspective that views any deepened coordination of international policies at the UN as a dangerous threat to absolute national sovereignty. The other, more insidious, attitude to be rejected is that international organizations should be administrative devices for the convenience of national governments, rendering the UN a mere technical secretariat, a paper pusher for decisions taken elsewhere. Neither of these perspectives supports democratic global governance and the political, multilateral, and reformist strategy advocated here. Third, looking at the nature of the proposals, and above all at the institutions advocating them, it can be noted that the themes raised more than a decade ago by a small group of political utopians or specialized technocrats have today been adopted by much more authoritative institutions. UN reform is no longer a Gregorian chant sung only by few diplomats: the language and the proposals advanced by visionary global movements has affected the entire establishment, media, and public opinion. This, however, does not mean that substantial changes are near. In order to become reality, these reforms need to be supported by political action. The so-called great powers, the P5 Security Council member governments, are almost inevitably inclined to a conservative attitude in defense of the status quo. Consequently, a democratization of the UN needs a much greater coalition of political actors. Recent experience, and in particular the establishment of the ICC and the approval of the Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines, shows that changes in international norms are possible only when a mixed coalition is formed among selected like-minded governments and transnational civil society organizations. In particular, it is difficult to think that the ICC and the Ottawa Treaty could have been approved without the active role of committed governments such as Italy and Canada. A “small steps” strategy within

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which civil society and state actors pursue specific reforms while keeping open the possibility of opting out or joining in at different moments is key. In this vein, civil society campaigns represent an important, yet insufficient, condition for producing institutional changes at the international level (see Lynch in this volume). It is thus necessary for global civil society to find partners among governments ready to support such initiatives. As an example, Socialist International has recently become an important player for UN reform, encouraging the governments headed by its member parties to support actively its proposals. Former secretary of Socialist International, Antonio Gutierrez, has personally taken part in the campaign Reclaim Our UN promoted by the Italian Peace Roundtable. The Brazilian government of Ignacio Lula da Silva has close ties with the WSF. The Spanish government of Rodriguez Zapatero, through the initiative for the Alliance of Civilizations, is also active at the time of writing. The EU is an important potential actor for UN reform. The complex experiment of European democracy is an institutional example for many other macroregions in the world. The European role in the international arena is not based on coercion, but rather on common interest and incentives. In the international arena, Europe often acts as a balancing force against US hegemony. Despite internal divisions, European governments could present a common strategy to foster a more active UN role (Telò 2007). Above all, it is to be hoped that vibrant world public opinion will produce the beneficial effect of awakening the people of the United States, who have too often listened to the sirens of empire (della Porta 2007). The potential for the United States in this regard should not be underestimated. After all, the US peace thinker William Ladd made some far-sighted proposals in the 1840s for the creation of a Congress of Nations as a legislative body and an International Court as a judicial body. The UN General Assembly and the ICJ were much more developed implementations of such proposals. Ladd also stated that conditions were not present for a world executive power, and that this should be left in the hands of world public opinion, which he graciously and optimistically called “the Queen of the world.” For many decades the Queen has been a silent sleeping beauty. But she will eventually awake. The times are now ready for her to take the place she deserves in the affairs of our planet.

Notes 1. The most authoritative statement in favor of democracy has been former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Democratization, released on December 30, 1996, just the day before he left office (Boutros-Ghali 1996). 2. Major achievements were the creation of a new Human Rights Council and a Peacebuilding Commission. However, the jury is still out on how effective they will be.

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5 The Ethical Limits of Democracy Promotion Tom Keating

One of the questions confronting the contemporary global order is how individuals in different communities can exercise effective control over, or have adequate input into, the decisions that affect them. The question has been posed at the local, national, and global levels. A different but related question is how we, as outsiders, assist or coerce others to adopt political ideas and practices that we think are most beneficial for them. These are not new questions, but the attention given to democratic practices—and, more significantly, the promotion of democratic practices in other countries around the globe—has become a prominent feature of global politics. Many have embraced democracy as the preferred method for governing national societies (Karatnycky and Ackerman 2006). Many have also adopted the view that the promotion of democracy through various forms of intervention is ethically justified as it supports the proliferation of democratic governance throughout the globe. This chapter provides a critical examination of the ethics of democracy promotion. Unlike Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti in the last chapter, I do not address directly the ethics of democratic governance and its contribution to an ethics of global governance. Instead I investigate the ethical issues arising from the policies and practices of governments and institutions promoting democracy in other countries. The argument advanced here is that interventionist practices designed to promote democracy do not always serve that objective. Problems arising from the methods employed to promote democratic change, the interests and priorities of intervening states and institutions, the lack of commitment and capabilities on the part of intervening parties, the lack of local knowledge, and the prominence given to external sources of expertise and legitimation often undermine the ability and desirability of outside interventions to create and sustain democratic practices. Democracy promotion has been presented by institutions, govern67

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ments, and civil society organizations as a desirable, if not necessary, opportunity to support the political rights of peoples in other societies. This has been confirmed in resolutions of many institutions including the UN. It is based on the twin assumptions that democracy is the preferred system of governance and that outside institutions, governments, and civil society organizations have the right knowledge, the commitment, and the capabilities necessary to instruct and support governments and citizens on how to bring about democracy. Democracy promotion is widely viewed as a good thing, an ethical practice and a positive contribution to a more ethically informed global governance. The considerable amount of activity that has been given over to democracy promotion demonstrates the popularity of the exercise. The mere existence of these activities and political and popular support among Western governments and their publics, however, does not mean that democracy promotion has always been an effective practice or that it has been undertaken in an ethical manner. Indeed the experience of democracy promotion to date raises concerns about its effectiveness and raises significant questions about its ethics. Moreover, the increased attention that institutions of global governance, the UN, international financial institutions, and regional organizations such as the EU and the Organization of American States (OAS) have given to democracy promotion, often under the guise of “good governance,” raises questions about the ethics of global governance. The issue here is not democracy per se but its promotion by states and global governance institutions. One must distinguish between the norm of democracy as a form of government that enhances individuals’ opportunities to exercise a degree of control over the policies that affect them from a norm of democracy promotion that validates intervention by outside powers. Indeed, the latter may not necessarily advance the former. While democracy promotion is not intrinsically or inevitably ineffective and/or unethical, its implementation to date raises a number of ethical concerns analyzed in this chapter. Of particular concern is the degree of control exercised by outside actors in target states, the limited resources these outsiders commit to democracy promotion, the role of force and coercive sanctions, the lack of historical and political knowledge about target states, and the mix of ulterior motives with so-called ethical or altruistic interests that characterize the politics of democracy promotion. This chapter finds that, as practiced to date, democracy promotion has not reflected an ethically sound system of global governance. The ensuing analysis comes in two parts. First, I discuss the causes and political circumstances surrounding the shift to democracy promotion in global governance since the end of the Cold War. Second, I put forward a number of reasons to question the ethical soundness of extant democracy promotion practices in global governance.

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The Rise of Global Democracy Promotion Democracy promotion has been a recurring practice among some Western governments for many years. One can find examples of the practice in the era of European colonization and in the foreign policy of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Democracy promotion was also used by the United States and other Western powers after World War II in Germany and Japan, and by the EU in Spain and Portugal in the 1980s. Democracy promotion has, however, taken on greater prominence since the end of the Cold War, assuming popularity in the United States, the UN, among EU member governments and other regional organizations such as the OAS, and in the foreign policies of many smaller governments such as Canada, where its adoption in the early 1990s marked a notable shift from a tradition of nonintervention. The shift in policy for many of these governments and institutions to a more interventionist approach, applying political conditionalities to promote or coerce democratic reforms, was a response to both systemic and domestic factors. Democracy promotion can be viewed as one of the outcomes of the ending of the Cold War. One of the earliest and most pervasive conclusions derived from the collapse of communism was the vitality and value of liberal democratic regimes. Adding a sense of legitimacy to the policies of Western states was the success of indigenous democracy movements in various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In adopting democracy promotion as a foreign policy priority, Western governments were “supporting genuinely popular and intellectual demands” (Leftwich 1993, 610) in states that were swept up in the “tide of democratic change” (Rustow 1990, 74). Arguments linking democratic polities and peaceful international relations were advanced by academics and policy officials. Western governments responded to the opportunity. USAID launched a “democracy initiative” in the early 1990s and saw its budget rise dramatically (Diamond 1995). For Britain, other states making changes toward increased “pluralism, public accountability, respect for the rule of law, human rights, and market principles” were to be “encouraged,” while those that failed to make these alterations would not be supported in their “folly” (Gillies 1996, 26). The governments of Canada, France, Germany, and the Nordic countries also became more active in promoting democratic development in their foreign policies. For some, it was a natural extension of the increased concerns that domestic publics had displayed for human rights practices in other countries. The end of the Cold War not only convinced Western governments of the universality of their values and practices, it also encouraged challenges to traditional norms of state sovereignty and nonintervention in the political and economic practices of other states. It also provided an opportunity for

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Western governments to recommend more intrusive measures in support of such practices. “The end of the Cold War . . . increased the international freedom of Western democracies to place new conditions of their own choosing on non-Western authoritarian states which are in no position to bargain” (Jackson 1995, 52). In this vein, governments began to attach “political conditionality” to their relations with non-Western states, viewing it as a legitimate intervention in the domestic affairs of these states. Whether recipients and donors could agree on the meaning of legitimate intervention was a relevant but untested premise as the practice increased. It was also extended to regional and global institutions that were led by Western governments into designing more substantive codes of conduct for member governments and allowing more intrusive measures to promote these codes (see Knight 2007; Pauly 1999). The end of the Cold War was in part both a source of change and a reflection of a broader trend toward democratization in many parts of the world. Democracy promotion was also encouraged by arguments about the link between governance and economic development. While the evidence of a link between democracy and economic development is mixed at best (Gillies 2005), political practices were increasingly seen during the 1980s as a key factor influencing the economic performance of developing states. Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) began adopting “good governance” as a policy objective about this time. The concept of good governance first appeared in the World Bank’s 1989 report on conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. The report argued that Africa’s development problems derived from a “crisis of governance” and the failure to “exercise political power to manage a nation’s affairs” (Leftwich 1993, 610). The key to development, then, was for those states that already had “good governance” to assist others in establishing it at home. Underlying the adoption of good governance policies by both multilateral organizations and Western states was a general acceptance of a new orthodoxy in which the economic reforms required by structural adjustment programs (SAPs) were married to political reforms along the lines of Western-style democracy. SAPs had been in place since the late 1970s and, within a decade, the conditions included in SAPs had become widely adopted as standard requirements for receiving funding from both multilateral organizations and states. Most often the conditions required the privatization of state-owned industries, the deregulation of markets, a reduction in government spending, and a devaluation of exchange rates. What was new in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the addition of political and government practices as part of this development discourse. Included in the range of required political reforms were some or all of the following: the adoption of the rule of law, the creation of representative institutions, accountable

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and responsible public administration, and respect for human rights. In contrast with earlier development thinking, political change was no longer viewed as a product of economic development but had to precede it. Effective economic reforms and full participation in the global market necessitated the adoption of liberal democratic institutions and practices. Thus, to establish a proper environment for the market to operate efficiently both economic and political reforms were necessary. These ideas and the consensus that supported them in the early 1990s struck a responsive chord in many Western capitals (see Knight 2007, 630). The policies of Western governments were incorporated into the policy declarations and practices of regional and global institutions and thus formed the bases for a more substantive norm of state sovereignty (see Makinda’s chapter in this volume). The UN became more directly involved in democracy promotion after the end of the Cold War with SecretaryGeneral Boutros Boutros-Ghali noting that the UN had received more than fifty requests for election monitoring between 1992 and 1994 alone. The UN and some of its specialized agencies, such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP), have maintained an active role in democracy promotion activities since, focusing primarily on capacity building and election monitoring and support (see Murphy 2006a). UN member governments made the link between democracy, development, and legitimacy a part of the MDGs set out in 2000. Subsequently, in 2005, the UN established a democracy fund (UNDEF) to support civil society organizations working in this area (Fenton 2006). In addition to its activities in Spain and Portugal, the EU has also incorporated democracy promotion as one of the key features of its Common Security and Foreign Policy initiative and as part of its enlargement process involving governments in Eastern Europe. Perhaps most prominently, the OAS adopted a democratic charter through the Protocol of Washington in 1992 that effectively identified “representative democracy . . . as the sole legitimate political system within the Americas” (Cooper and Legler 2006, 28). We thus find that institutions have not only legitimized the norm of democracy, but also that of democracy promotion and have played an active role alongside Western governments in imposing substantive standards on states and societies throughout the globe. These various initiatives at the level of national governments and regional and international institutions raise the question of whether there is an emerging norm of democratic governance and, if so, whether national governments are obligated to support this norm through democracy promotion activities. It is clear that efforts have been made to develop an international norm of democratic practice that, once entrenched, would serve as a source of obligation for states and institutions. The Canadian government, for one, actively pursued international support for a norm of democratic governance in the early 1990s. Through interventions in the OAS, along

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with Latin American governments such as Chile, the Canadian government advocated for and secured the adoption of the Santiago Declaration on democratic governance and the establishment of the Unit for the Promotion of Democracy (now known as the Department for the Promotion of Democracy). Under these provisions the OAS initiated interventions in Haiti and later Peru and Venezuela in efforts to reestablish democratic legitimacy in these countries (see Cooper and Legler 2006). Canadian officials also advocated for the adoption of the Harare Declaration at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings in 1991 and its implementation measures in the Millbrook Action Program. These measures were subsequently used against the Nigerian government in 1995 and again in 2003. The creation of the Community of Democracies lent an additional degree of legitimacy to the idea of a democratic norm. As one democracy promotion enthusiast proclaims, “Democracy as an international norm is stronger today than ever, and democracy itself is widely regarded as an ideal system of government. Democracy also has near-universal appeal among people of every ethnic group, every religion, and every region of the world” (McFaul 2004, 148). The development of these norms has also given greater weight and legitimacy to the role of both outside governments and international organizations as the legitimate authority on democratic standards (an issue discussed at greater length below). There has been a considerable amount of variation in the methods used to promote democracy. Fernando Tesón (cited in Cooper and Legler 2006, 3) distinguishes between soft, hard, and forcible interventions and all have been apparent in the democracy promotion activities of Western governments. Andrew Cooper and Thomas Legler, among others, distinguish between unilateral and multilateral approaches. They also distinguish between what they call club multilateralism, a “resolutely state-centric” approach, and networked multilateralism that “encourages a heightened degree of mobilization by diverse actors, both state and non-state” (Cooper and Legler 2006, 19). The instruments used by governments and institutions to promote democracy have generally focused on incentives and punishments, principally distributed though bilateral and multilateral aid programs to other governments designed to encourage them to adopt or maintain democratic procedures including greater participation by civil society organizations, free media, and electoral politics. There has been a degree of diversity across national governments and multilateral institutions in the specific strategies that have been used, although the general focus remains democratic development. In a comparative review of various programs, Diane Ethier summarizes the focus of different agencies. The World Bank, for instance has emphasized good governance characteristics, including “the administrative and fiscal decentralization of the state and the reinforcement of dialogue between the state and civil society, and the reduction of

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military expenditures” (Ethier 2006, 108). The UN has generally restricted its work to election-related processes. W. Andy Knight describes UN activities as generally confined to standard electoral assistance activities such as overseeing international election monitors and technical assistance with less frequent major electoral missions where the UN assumes responsibility for the entire electoral process (Knight 2007). The UNDP, however, tends to work more closely with civil society and key agents of democratic change in societies going through the process of democratic transition (Murphy 2006a). With respect to governments, Great Britain has focused more on human rights, whereas the Canadian government has emphasized a combination of good governance, electoral and judicial reform, and civil society building, with most of the resources devoted to promoting accountable public institutions, political freedoms, and democratic practices such as elections and support for political parties and free media, among other activities (CIDA 2006). As Margot Light (2001, 82) notes: The USAID’s Democracy Initiative aims to foster competitive political systems; strengthen the rule of law and respect for human rights; strengthen civil society; and promote greater accountability of political institutions and ethical standards in government. . . . The democracy component of the EU’s programmes similarly endeavours “to contribute to the consolidation of pluralist democratic procedures and practices as well as the rule of law” by strengthening the activities of non-governmental bodies, as well as supporting “the acquisition of and application of knowledge and techniques of parliamentary practice and organization” and “transferring expertise and technical skills about democratic practices and the rule of law.”

In all of these cases, there is a strong commitment to essentially recreate democratic models already in existence in the West. A review of European and Canadian assistance programs in support of democracy in Ghana led Gordon Crawford to conclude: “It is clear that such ‘civil society strengthening’ is focused on a narrow sub-set of CSOs [civil society organizations], ones that most resemble Westernized NGOs and aim both to influence government policy and to keep a watchful eye on state activities” (Crawford 2005, 585; see Lynch’s contribution to this volume). This mirrors the role commonly assumed by CSOs in Western societies. Importantly, international organizations have adopted democratic criteria as a prerequisite for assistance and even, in some instances, for membership.

Questioning the Ethics of Democracy Promotion As suggested earlier, democracy promotion has a long history. Despite this, it is not always apparent that lessons have been learned. Today, as in years

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past, the assumption is that external actors have the solutions to other people’s problems and the template for the transition to democracy. The assumption also implies that these outsiders have solutions that only they can provide. The opinion was clearly expressed by Lord Milner in his history England in Egypt: “We do not want to stay in your country for ever. We don’t despair of your learning to manage decently your own affairs . . . you need to be shown what to do . . . you also need to practice doing it” (cited in Howard 1991, 27). A century later it appears the initial US plan for reforming the post-Hussein Iraqi government is an exaggerated version of such an approach. As Charles Tripp (2004, 548) notes, Under this plan, the new Iraqi constitution, the representative institutions and the machinery of government would all be subject to close US supervision and control, gradually involving Iraqis in the process, but on a kind of probation. The time-scale for this was leisurely, in that it would be a number of years before the Iraqis enjoyed full sovereignty. More seriously and, as it turned out, detrimentally to the plan, the implication was that the Iraqis could not be trusted to rule themselves until the US had ensured that democratic institutions were up and running—and that Iraqis committed to the project were in key positions of power.

The assumption informs many different types of intervention and democracy promotion. As David Chandler claims, there is wide ideological agreement in the West in support of this assumption: “whether of liberal internationalist or neoconservative beliefs, it seems obvious that international bureaucrats can develop better laws than the people who live in post-conflict countries or their representatives. After all, they argue, those elites caused the misrule that ‘forced’ the internationals to take over, and the people did themselves few favours by voting such elites in or accepting their rule” (Chandler 2006a, 169). Another concern that is evident in democracy promotion activities is an apparent predisposition to view the local state as problematic. For example, Crawford finds that “democracy is narrowly conceived by the EU, being more concerned with limiting state power than extending popular control, consistent with hegemonic neo-liberalism” (Crawford 2005, 572–573). Local authorities lack the interest or capacity to reform, and thus outside agents, usually in the form of global or regional institutions, must undertake the responsibility for guiding the democratization process (see Chandler 2006b, 478). This is perhaps not surprising since state power has, in many instances, been a force of repression and a significant obstacle to democratic politics in the past. Yet it does raise the question of what democratization is all about. For, clearly, in attempting to give people a greater opportunity to have effective input into the decisions that affect their lives, they must also be in a position to empower an authority to make such decisions and, for most practical purposes, that authority would be a local state.

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Democracy promotion, as conducted by regional and global institutions, has at times taken on the characteristics of surveillance discussed by Stephen Gill (2002). Such practices tend to reinforce the idea of “shared sovereignty” whereby states are legitimated as much (if not more) by external entities than they are by domestic publics (Krasner 2005). Interventions to promote democracy inevitably interfere in the political process in societies undergoing reform. This is defended by democracy promoters as necessary in order to ensure that reforms are carried through and there is not a resort to conflict or political oppression. Yet by interfering in the political process, outsiders inevitably distort local interests, resources, and power. In response, interveners tend to encourage a more technical or bureaucratic approach to reform, one that seeks to limit the play of power and of politics. The depoliticization of democratic politics has characterized much of the intervention that has taken place. Such an approach is problematic at a number of levels. It removes processes and policies from local politics. As Chandler writes, “law that is disassociated from the political process of consensus-building and genuine social need is more a rhetorical statement of policy intent than a law of the land” (Chandler 2006a, 169). Not only does the outcome lose a degree of legitimacy and credibility, and hence effectiveness, but it also denies citizens the opportunity to experience and learn from the process of managing conflicting interests. There is also the matter of accountability given the extent to which the process of democratization has been designed by an outsider and its implementation continues to rest with that outsider—an outsider who has no direct stake in the country affected and can abandon the country whenever it loses interest or runs out of funds. The assumption, however, is that their authority and legitimacy for conducting the democratization process is their very disinterestedness. The prominence of external standards raises questions about the whole idea of democratization. In practice, government “of the people and by the people” is often concerned as much about their international credentials and external support as by their domestic ones. This is reminiscent of Robert Jackson’s view of quasistates whose sovereignty is defined by external sources of support (Jackson 1990). But while such quasidemocracies maintain the formal trappings of democracy for their international supporters, the individual citizens have little effective control over those in power. Yet many democracy promoters continue to rely on elections as one of the key credentials in determining the legitimacy of democratic regimes. A review of democracy promotion by a group of Canadian government officials describes this problem aptly although perhaps uncritically: One implication seems to be that international legitimacy is coming to be seen perhaps far less in terms of sovereignty in the traditional sense, involving a national government’s ability to exercise effective control over

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Indeed, governments recognize and appear to accept the growing importance of being evaluated and legitimized by this group of international standard bearers. As the Chilean ambassador to the UN in 2001 said: “The immense majority of countries in the region are concerned . . . with the international legitimacy of their political regimes” (cited in Community of Democracies 2001, 8). Moreover, externally imposed or coerced governments, even if derived through some sort of local electoral politics, often lack legitimacy. As Chandler (2006a, 44) writes: The states of Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia, for example, may have formal sovereignty and elected governments but their relationship of external dependency means that the domestic political sphere cannot serve to legitimize the political authorities or cohere their societies. This form of statebuilding is, in fact, even more corrosive of the authority of the nonWestern state than earlier policies which sought to bypass or marginalize the state.

It is commonly assumed that outside governments and institutions have both the resources and necessary political will to support the extensive commitment involved in democracy promotion. One persistent problem in assessing the ethics of external intervention in the domestic affairs of other states and societies is the matter of capability and commitment. However, as John Agresto states, “The problem with democracy building is that . . . we think democracy is easy—get rid of the bad guys, call for elections, encourage ‘power-sharing’ and see to it that somebody writes a bill of rights” (quoted in Chandrasekaran 2006, 286–287). Such facile assumptions appear to be endemic to contemporary interventionist practices and they often prevent the necessary ethical debate and reasoning on whether outside actors should be taking action in the first place. Having made a commitment to help people secure political control, these same people would be placed at risk if such support were withdrawn. This is especially true in postconflict situations. Short-term commitments of material and political resources have created situations where the uncertainty of future support drives the democratization process regardless of conditions on the ground. As Marina Ottaway (2003, 316) notes: “A two-year period became codified as the length of time needed to prepare postconflict elections, no matter what the initial conditions were.” Timetables seldom correspond with real democratization. As the

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International Crisis Group notes in a report on Afghanistan: “Implementation risks being approached too much as a bureaucratic matter of ticking off a formal checklist rather than a serious commitment at a high political level— Afghan and international—to do the tough work necessary to build a state genuinely based on rule of law” (International Crisis Group 2006). The assumption that outsiders are best suited to address the lack of democracy in other societies not only overstates the competence and commitment of external agents, it also runs the risk of undervaluing the capabilities of local actors. Moreover, it neglects the critically important role that these local actors must play if democracy is to take root and become sustainable over the long term. External agents have seldom displayed the long-term commitment that is so often needed to foster democratic change. (Historically Japan and Germany are uniquely important exceptions to this and other dimensions.) Reliance on external actors for determining the timing, scope, and nature of reform ignores or understates the extensive, often traumatic, histories of these societies and the inability of outsiders to comprehend, let alone wrestle with, these entrenched local nuances. Rory Stewart’s (2006) Prince of the Marshes presents a telling account of the complexity of local politics in Iraq and how it interfered with his and others’ efforts to direct the implementation of reforms. Similar stories are apparent in Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and other places as well (on Afghanistan, see Ghani and Lockhart 2008; Chayes 2006). The lack of local knowledge presents a formidable barrier to the elaborate plans of outside governments and institutions. At the level of principle, democracy makes sense only if and when local actors assume responsibility for democratic control. Outsiders cannot do this for them and run the risk of impeding or distorting local actors’ opportunities to assume them. As Craig Murphy notes, outside agents of change also generate resentments among local populations, as they did in East Timor where “despite hard work and good intentions, the UN’s direct rule generated deep resentment among the Timorese” (Murphy 2006a, 341). The UN mission in Haiti encountered similar problems. Not all interventions to promote democracy involve as much direct rule as did the UN’s involvement in Timor, but the need to respect and reinforce local participation is critically important regardless. A contrasting view is presented in the work of the UNDP as discussed by Murphy. Here we find global institutions playing, at times, a significant enabling role in fostering democratic change. In situations such as Indonesia, the work of the UNDP speaks of the potential role that global institutions can play. The work of the UNDP, or in the case of Peru, the OAS, demonstrates the potential for democracy promotion efforts to yield tangible results that support more effective democratic reforms on the ground (see Murphy 2006a; Cooper and Legler 2006). For this to work, however, requires a greater role for organizations willing to facilitate rather than to manage change, and to leave local actors with both

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the space and some measure of capacity to support objectives they define as both desirable and achievable and then live with the results. Governments have viewed democracy promotion as serving a variety of foreign policy interests. Democracy has been promoted to sustain peace; to protect national security; to facilitate open markets; to cultivate friendly states; and to respond to domestic demands for a more ethical foreign policy, among others. How are we to assess the ethical commitment of national governments operating with mixed motives and how do such motives affect their ability to deliver democracy? Nicholas J. Wheeler (2000), among others, argues that interests are an inevitable part of a state’s behavior in global politics, yet the existence of interests need not compromise the pursuit or achievement of moral objectives. The problem that this creates, however, is that competing interests are not always or necessarily compatible with democratization. Security concerns, for example, are widely seen to have become more prominent in many countries around the world after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, just as they did throughout much of the Cold War. Democracy promotion, in turn, is seen as one way of dealing with the increased security threat arising from failed states. From this vantage point, democratic governments are to be encouraged to reduce the threat that nondemocratic regimes might pose to Western states. As Crawford (2005, 572–573) writes, for example, “The EU’s interests in Africa focus less on democracy promotion and more on the perceived burdens and security threats to Europe arising from political instability and conflict. In other words, the EU is driven more by its self-interests than by the norms and principles of democratic governance.” The Canadian government has given a higher priority to security in Afghanistan, maintaining that it is a necessary prerequisite to democratization. A more pressing concern is the economic interests involved in democracy promotion. Democracy promotion advocates and practices too often narrowly define democracy in relation to the establishment of markets. The link between markets and democracy has been salient to democracy promotion efforts by Western governments. The view is clear in the US government’s 2002 National Security Strategy that identifies “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise” (United States of America 2002, ii). Crawford identifies this as the central feature of European efforts to promote democracy in Ghana specifically, and Africa more generally. “Examination of three elements of the democracy assistance agenda—decentralization, public sector reform and civil society—suggests intent to promote a limited form of democracy, one oriented at challenging state power and sustaining economic liberalization rather than extending popular participation and control” (Crawford 2005, 594). This suggests that there is a package of reforms that governments must adopt of which democracy is but only a part. It is evident that one reason for

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the popularity of democracy promotion in the post–Cold War environment has been an opportunity for Western governments to solidify the prevalence of like-minded governments in the international system, to discourage the development of alternative political and economic models, and to secure a more open global economy. It is not at all clear that those who promote democracy would consider engaging in a process that in the end would mean a loss of control. As Chandler (2006a, 488) has persuasively argued, democracy promotion as it has been practiced, and not just by the EU, is very much about external control: It is assumed that the EU has risen above the politics of state interests and that, as a post-national or post-political constellation, it is capable of judging upon and acting in the interests of “every individual” regardless of which state they happen to be a citizen. The EU is granted the right to decide which states are failing or denying rights to their subjects and which people deserve support or intervention in their name. This is, in effect, a right of unilateral intervention. The doctrine of “human security” imposes a duty or “responsibility” of intervention which legitimizes intervention independently of the consensus-building mechanisms of the UN, one which ultimately relies on power rather than traditional interstate mechanisms of international law. What appears to be a radical relation of empowerment and capacity building is, at heart, a new relationship of trusteeship or dominion.

Constraints imposed by international agreements and institutions limit the ability of local democratic forces to establish democratic control over local conditions. Whatever one’s views on globalization, it is evident that in the contemporary era there are a myriad of norms, rules, institutions, and practices that permeate national borders and complicate, if not undermine, the ability of citizens to exercise control over local and national politics. The net effect is to severely limit the extent and efficacy of democratic politics (see Archibugi and Marchetti in this volume). How ethical is it to promote democratic practices when international conditions impede a government’s ability to respond to the demands of its public? There needs to be a certain consistency in one’s position if one is to retain any credibility. For instance, the return of the democratically elected Jean Bertrand Aristide to his rightful place as the president of Haiti in 1994 was only possible once Aristide agreed to abide by the IMF conditions established during his time in exile. This effectively prevented Aristide from pursuing the economic reforms that brought him to power in the first instance. Having been constrained by forces of globalization and an increasingly intrusive global legal order, states are further compromised by democratization programs that hold them to account to international standards, agencies, and authorities. In these arrangements, it matters less that citizens have an opportunity to select a government, for the government is

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incapable or disinclined to respond to their demands. Democracy becomes a pro forma exercise of electoral politics along timetables and with procedures set by outside powers and with no truly effective popular control. One could say that such practices point not to the problems of democracy promotion in principle, but to the ways states have ignored the ethical principle to serve more narrowly defined interests or other interests, but it calls into question the very principle of democratic control. Another consideration that needs to be addressed is the priority that should be given to democracy promotion over other areas such as poverty alleviation, peace, and even human security. As Ottaway (2003, 320) writes, “There can be little disagreement about the desirability of democracy as a solution to the problems of war-torn countries.” This may make sense in the long term, but peace, an end to the violence, a return to personal security, and then some attention to economic security might all be other important objectives in a postconflict situation. Many postconflict situations are rife with various sorts of rivalries. These are not necessarily the best situations in which to promote more active participation in the political process. Moreover, the demands on a government are far greater in a postconflict situation, but more difficult for any government to address, let alone one that might be divided as new democracies are more likely to be. Others have expressed concerns that the amount of attention devoted to elections is misguided because of their potential to divide societies along ethnic, religious, racial, or other identity-based lines, and/or encourage extremist policies. As Amy Chua argues (2003, 275), “Democratization cannot be reduced to shipping out ballot boxes for national elections—a process almost calculated to maximize ethnic politics in deeply divided societies. Ballot boxes brought Hitler to power in Germany, Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe, Milosevic to power in Serbia.” Experiences in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Haiti, among others, suggest that democratic procedures are not always possible or effective in the midst or aftermath of conflict. Indeed efforts to promote democratic practices may actually make short-term measures to address social and economic problems more difficult to achieve. In these circumstances is it desirable to give preference to democratic procedures over practices that may alleviate human suffering? In 2006, the people of the Palestinian territories elected a new government. The response from many Western governments was to immediately withdraw financial assistance as a punishment for electing a government that was viewed as a terrorist organization in some sectors. Later in the same year, the people of Nicaragua went to the polls with a warning from their US neighbor of economic difficulties if they were to support Daniel Ortega in the presidential elections. They promptly went ahead and elected Ortega. More than thirty years earlier, Henry Kissinger had questioned the choice of democratic voters in Chile with these memorable words: “I don’t

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see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” In 2001 the people of Austria gave electoral support to the radically nationalist party led by Jörg Haider who was subsequently included in a coalition government. The response of the EU was to put Austria on notice and suspend certain diplomatic contacts. Clearly these examples and others demonstrate that support for democracy does not always mean support for the people’s right to select whomever they wish. Indeed interveners are seldom willing to accept Abraham Lincoln’s dictum: “Elections belong to the people. It is their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” If democracy is to be effective it means that people in positions of power lose some degree of control. While democracy promoters have generally viewed this as a favorable development within many developing democracies, they are less comfortable when such practices challenge their own privileged position and interests. Democracy promotion can lead to governments with which one disagrees, but these governments are no less legitimate than if they had been accorded a mandate from the people. Yet to interfere with the outcome calls into question the norm of democracy itself.

Conclusion The promotion of democracy by Western governments and international institutions emerged in the late twentieth century as an opportunity to enlarge the number of liberal democratic regimes with the potential to develop a more progressive international order populated by states committed to civil liberties and human rights. From the start, such efforts were tarnished by a mix of motives and a limit on the capacity and commitment of outside powers to work for real change. Moreover, structural conditions have severely affected the capacity of many governments throughout the world, thus limiting the effectiveness and credibility of democratic controls at the local and national levels. As concerns about security intensified in the aftermath of September 11, the commitment to democracy was further compromised at the same time that institutional support for procedural democratic norms became more widespread and entrenched. The end result has been a strengthened international norm in support of a mostly procedural and ineffectual democratic practice. Democracy promotion may be an ethical act in support of a more ethically informed pattern of global governance, but this would be different than the democracy promotion that we have seen to date and would likely lead to a very different form of global governance as well. Ottaway (2003, 321) writes that “the international community needs to rethink its approach,

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starting not from what the ideal end goal should be, but from what can realistically be achieved with the human and financial resources that are likely to be available and taking into consideration the real distribution of power that exists in the country.” Thomas Carrothers (2004, 263) goes even further in suggesting that the end goal itself may need to be adjusted. All of this means that decades of extremely hard work are ahead on the democracy promotion front. Helping countries turn democratic forms into democratic substance is a deep, broad task. It will entail greatly sharpening existing forms of aid. And it demands going far beyond conventional aid to take on issues such as reducing entrenched concentrations of economic power; activating and politically integrating poor, marginalized sectors (even if their political views and demands do not match the international community’s standard development model); and rejuvenating stale, often deeply problematic, political elites. Such tasks will require not only more resources but, just as importantly, more flexibility and risk taking in the use of what resources are put to work. And they will require a greater level of interventionism, better ties between the political and economic sides of development aid, and almost an entirely different set of expectations about the timescale of the efforts needed and the kind of results that can be reasonably expected.

I have argued that the expanded role for regional and global institutions in the promotion of democracy has significant implications for global governance and raises important ethical issues about the direction global governance practices will take in the future. One effect of the increased involvement of global institutions in democracy promotion has been the relocation of legitimation for some national governments who turn to these institutions rather than domestic publics for political approval and economic support (Chandler 2006a). The contemporary practices of global institutions is worrisome because they offer both too much and too little—too much in terms of intrusive standards regulating the policies and activities of states and too little in terms of material support to enhance these states’ capacity to respond to the demands of their societies. Another concern is the added responsibility this transfers to institutions of global governance while diminishing the responsibility of local actors including both states and civil society groups. In assuming responsibility for democracy there is little to indicate that institutions or their member governments have been willing to invest the institutions with the necessary resources that would enable them to exercise that responsibility effectively. Outside global governance actors have exaggerated the priority to be given to democracy in a period where the local state is often lacking authority to respond meaningfully to popular demands. They have also exaggerated their capacity and commitment to provide democracy for others. A more ethical set of global governance actions would refrain from impeding a peo-

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ple’s ability to establish their own priorities. It would also mean tackling other tasks beside democracy promotion that would improve people’s lives, from alleviating poverty to addressing climate change. Democracy promotion should be an ethical practice. Democracy promotion should provide people with the opportunity and capacity to exercise more effective control over the decisions that affect their lives. This would, in turn, provide a wider network of democratic states and democratic practices in support of global governance. Amidst a few successes, democracy promotion in practice has too often taken a different direction. It has invested outside states and institutions with the authority and capacity to determine what constitutes legitimate democratic governance in the contemporary global order. It has done this in ways that at times have constrained local governments and discouraged, if not impeded, their ability to secure legitimacy from their own domestic publics. Democracy promotion has also served the interests of the promoters as often as those of local communities. As security and economic interests prevail among interveners over normative commitments to the democratic process, democracy promotion leaves states and individuals with nominal power over an emasculated local authority more interested in securing the approval of external democracy promoters than forging the substantive state-societal relationship on which real democracy is based. It has done this in an ad hoc fashion that has failed to provide the necessary resources and knowledge over the long term such that democratic options have a real chance to flourish in a sustainable fashion. In the absence of measures to remedy these failures, it is necessary to adopt a more skeptical view of the promise of democracy promotion in supporting more ethical global governance.

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6 Humanitarianism and the Use of Force Catherine Lu

An arguably necessary but inherently problematic aspect of contemporary global governance consists in the practice of “humanitarian intervention,” or the use of military force by states to stem human suffering from politically induced catastrophes such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and other similar crimes against humanity.1 The end of the Cold War was a morally challenging and ambitious time, and witnessed the emergence of an explicit, if controversial, politics and practice of humanitarian intervention. The highly mixed experiences and outcomes of developing this practice since the early 1990s have ensured that the ethics of humanitarian intervention remains a lively debate among intellectuals, civil society activists, policymakers, and various publics. Despite the shift in focus toward combating terrorism after the attacks of September 11, 2001, ongoing humanitarian crises unfolding in places such as Darfur mean that the community of states—still the dominant agents engaged in the use of force in world politics, as well as global civil society, especially human rights and humanitarian aid organizations—continue to wrestle with the thorny ethical challenges raised by humanitarian intervention. This chapter is concerned with two tasks. One is to analyze the ethical and political implications of joining humanitarianism with the use of force in contemporary world politics. Does the development of a practice of humanitarian intervention, grounded in the concept of an international responsibility to protect endangered populations, signify a revolutionary and morally progressive change in the way states do international politics, especially the ways and reasons that they use force? Or are critics of R2P

Select portions of this chapter are reprinted with permission from Catherine Lu, “Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Ambition and Political Constraints,” International Journal 62, no. 4 (2007): 942–951.

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and humanitarian intervention right to worry that their endorsement will only make it easier for powerful states to violate international norms of territorial integrity and nonintervention against weaker states, “resurrecting a new imperial ‘duty of care’ on the basis of the human rights discourse of victims, abusers and international saviours” (Chandler 2006c, 241)? How has the wedding of humanitarianism and military force affected traditional humanitarian action and humanitarian organizations engaged in various zones of crisis? The second task of this chapter is to identify and explore ethical challenges that arise before, during, and after humanitarian interventions. The first area of controversy appears before any use of force takes places, and surrounds the question of authorization. Given contemporary global conditions, how should the use of force for the purposes of human protection be authorized? Should authorization rest solely with the UN Security Council? Furthermore, who should be authorized to conduct humanitarian interventions? For example, what concerns and problems lie behind the claim by the African Union (AU), endorsed by the international community, about the need to devise an “African solution” to the ongoing crisis in Darfur? The second set of ethical controversies pertains to the operationalization and conduct of humanitarian interventions. How can authorized interventions be conducted effectively if great powers cannot be counted on to commit the necessary political and military resources? Assuming the capabilities problem is solved, should humanitarian interventions operate according to the standard principles of humanitarianism—impartiality and neutrality—or are these inappropriate for humanitarian interventions? The third set of ethical concerns relates to the evaluation of such interventions, especially their contribution to the quality of postintervention politics. What is the relationship between such interventions and the problem of establishing political stability in the aftermath of politically induced humanitarian catastrophe? What goals can be achieved through the use of force, and how do these goals relate to wider long-term objectives, such as promoting political stability or transformation? The focus of this chapter is the ethical challenges raised by some of the most extreme nonideal circumstances to befall humanity. Some might argue that focusing on the ethical challenges of reacting to such circumstances through military force is a misguided way to pursue the moral improvement of global governance. The report of the ICISS (2001, xi) that first formulated the R2P doctrine also asserted that prevention “is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect [and] more commitment and resources must be devoted to it.” The 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, while endorsing a version of R2P, also recognized that “development, peace, security and human rights are mutually reinforcing” (Article 72, UNGA 2005, 21), implying some acknowledgment that humanitarian

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catastrophes do not develop overnight in a social, political, or economic vacuum. If this is the case, however, the practice of humanitarian intervention may reveal deeper failures in the institutions and practices of global governance, including an international failure to eliminate root causes and enact proactive and preventive measures—coming too little and too late, the persistence of humanitarian interventions may be more indicative of regressive rather than progressive global governance. Indeed, if one locates the causes of humanitarian crises in the global order itself, humanitarian intervention against ruthless, irresponsible, or negligent domestic tyrants can at best treat symptoms but not causes. Focusing on the ethics of humanitarian intervention under this view betrays a faulty moral and causal assumption that humanitarian catastrophes “have everything to do with the dictator, the warlords, or the ethnic rivalries, and nothing to do with us in the Western democracies” (Tirman 2003/2004). In this vein, some in the ethics of critique (see Franceschet in this volume) might argue that the most important conclusion of any ethical inquiry into the practice of humanitarian intervention must be to challenge its legitimation as a component of global governance (see, for instance, Robinson in the next chapter). Although I am sympathetic to this view (Lu 2006, 156), I tend to think now that an overreliance on “explanatory cosmopolitanism” is misguided.2 That is, even if a reasonably humane and just global order were to develop, it would not be able to guarantee that there will never be outlaw states, civil wars, state failure, or politically or socially organized atrocities against vulnerable populations. Explanatory cosmopolitanism creates the illusion that if only global governance could be morally perfected, the evils of outlaw states, civil war, and state repression or collapse would disappear, and we would have no need to consider the thorny ethical challenges raised by the use of force for purposes of human protection. As Alexander Wendt (2003, 491) has pointed out, however, even if a world state with “a global monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence” were to develop, enforcement mechanisms would not be superfluous, but would need to be institutionalized, since there is always the possibility of violations by outlaw states and groups. John Rawls (1999, 36) has similarly argued that a wellordered society of peoples in nonideal circumstances would need to develop institutions, mechanisms, and practices for dealing with outlaw states and for addressing dire cases of large-scale human rights violations, “by economic sanctions, or even by military intervention.” Once we acknowledge the persistence of the nonideal in human political orders—domestic, international, and global—the vexing ethical and political challenges of humanitarian intervention cannot be avoided.3 At the same time, critics are right to dispel the naive assumption that coupling humanitarian objectives with the use of force automatically makes the latter

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more legitimate or ethically less problematic. In the following sections of this chapter, I explore the political and ethical problems generated by the unlikely wedding of humanitarianism with the use of force—for the community of states as well as for the human rights and humanitarian communities— before moving on to discuss specific challenges related to the authorization, operationalization, and evaluation of humanitarian interventions. Clarifying these political and ethical challenges should help us to assess more soberly the moral significance, potential, and limits of the R2P doctrine and the practice of humanitarian intervention as features of contemporary global governance.

Humanitarianism, Power, and Politics Once upon a time, the concept of R2P and the practice of humanitarian intervention it entails held out the promise of a more humane, responsive, and responsible global order. By the 1990s, humanitarian intervention symbolized a break from the Cold War’s geopolitical rivalry and self-aggrandizing motives for using force (see Lu 2006). A humanitarian intervention was supposed to be a military action that was motivated by humanitarian concerns rather than geopolitical or self-aggrandizing aims. Moral ambition in the form of human protection rather than territorial ambition and economic gain were to guide the use of force in the post–Cold War world. In its most morally naive form, the practice of humanitarian intervention was supposed to signify the triumph of human solidarity over national interest, of (selfless) morality over (power) politics. This image of humanitarian intervention partly stemmed from a conception of humanitarianism underlying the concept and practice of humanitarian action in world politics. Humanitarian action, in the form of providing various kinds of emergency relief such as food and medical attention to distressed populations, originated as a response to political conflict that degenerated into war. While states employed their armies to advance various political ends, humanitarian actors aimed to alleviate the consequent suffering of soldiers and civilians in a neutral, impartial, and independent manner. Humanitarians did not take sides in the political conflict at hand; instead humanitarian action was supposed to transcend or at least be apart from those violent politics. The role of humanitarian action was to inject minimal standards of humanity in wars that were started by states. The concept of humanitarian intervention, however, challenges the posited divides between humanitarianism, power, and politics that have structured the concept and practice of humanitarian action. Most obviously, the centrality of states to the practice of humanitarian intervention means that unlike humanitarian action, humanitarian intervention cannot be con-

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ducted independently from interstate politics; rather, the practice is more likely to reflect the character of that politics. Furthermore, because humanitarian intervention requires states to adopt human protection as a political goal, humanitarian aims become politicized or part of the political agenda of individual states and, therefore, part of political disputes between states. The politicization of humanitarian goals means that they can become sources of political conflict and can act as triggers for war, or the use of force in world politics, a development that directly contradicts the original opposition between humanitarian action and the use of force. The irony is that the practice of humanitarian intervention can generate precisely the conditions and circumstances that the practice of humanitarian action was developed to alleviate. In addition, this type of intervention blurs the standard roles and responsibilities expected of humanitarian and state actors. Instead of their traditional rivalry, some militaries and their commanding states may become allies with human rights and humanitarian organizations in the struggle to protect vulnerable populations from egregious harm. Former British prime minister Tony Blair (1999) painted a picture of his country’s military as the new humanitarians in his 1999 speech on the doctrine of the international community: “Our armed forces have been busier than ever— delivering humanitarian aid, deterring attacks on defenseless people, backing up UN resolutions and occasionally engaging in major wars as we did in the Gulf in 1991 and are currently doing in the Balkans.” Similarly, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper praised the Canadian military’s humanitarian work in Afghanistan, including the construction of roads, bridges, schools, and medical facilities (The Globe and Mail, August 19, 2007). When states engage in humanitarian action, however, their efforts are rarely politically disinterested, neutral, or impartial in intention or effect. Indeed, despite the moralistic rhetoric about defending values and fighting evil, Tony Blair injected national interest among the vital issues that need to be considered in response to any humanitarian catastrophe.4 The politicization of humanitarian ends has made humanitarianism vulnerable to instrumentalization by states—especially so-called liberal democratic ones—for their own political ends, or in their ongoing political conflicts. For example, humanitarian concerns appeared in the justifications of both the invasions of Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2003). Humanitarian interventions may not only instrumentalize humanitarian ends, but also humanitarian means. Intervening states have attempted to boost their own legitimacy by requiring overt support from humanitarian organizations delivering humanitarian assistance, and instrumentalizing and regulating how and where they operate in a variety of ways. In the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, the US government made its funding of humanitarian agencies conditional on their agreement to display

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the US flag (American Council for Voluntary International Action 2003). Furthermore, by earmarking funds for specific cases, states have been able to direct where humanitarian assistance goes. Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, have received far more funding from humanitarian agencies relying on donor governments, while places suffering from comparatively worse humanitarian crises, such as Sudan and Congo, have received comparatively much less humanitarian assistance.5 When states’ militaries have acted alongside or in partnership with human rights and humanitarian organizations it has precipitated anguishing debates within the latter communities (Kennedy 2004). Not only have soldiers become humanitarians, but some human rights and humanitarian organizations have also become warriors, openly calling for or supporting armed intervention and advocating political change in certain circumstances (Roberts 2001, 188). As Michael Barnett has observed, humanitarian organizations have become self-consciously politicized, becoming players in the political process advocating for political change, rather than remaining apart from political conflicts and playing only an ameliorative part. Barnett (2005, 734) notes that as humanitarian workers “become increasingly implicated in governance structures, they find themselves in growing collaboration with those whom they once resisted.” Becoming players in the politics and practice of humanitarian intervention, however, has put into question the commitment of human rights and humanitarian organizations to the standard principles of humanitarianism—independence, impartiality, and neutrality. Indeed, when states conducting humanitarian interventions engage in humanitarian action, they typically jeopardize humanitarian assistance operations, because target populations and political actors involved in the conflict have difficulty separating the delivery of humanitarian assistance from the political and military agents of the intervention. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF 2002) thus criticized the US military’s airdrops of “humanitarian food rations” in Afghanistan in 2002: “Dropping food alongside bombs put humanitarian action in question and danger, and raised doubts among the population as to the real goals and actions of international humanitarian NGOs.” Human rights advocacy groups such as Human Rights Watch continue to press the community of states to endorse and operationalize the R2P principle and, by implication, the practice of using force for the purposes of human protection—invariably bringing them closer to the politics of the states carrying out such operations. Humanitarian relief organizations, however, in order to reach distressed populations and protect their workers from politically motivated attacks, have felt a need to distance themselves from states engaged in humanitarian interventions and such advocacy efforts and to emphasize their commitment to standard humanitarian principles. In a recent press release on the current crisis in Darfur, for example, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF 2007) notes that it

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“remains worried about the increased confusion between political action and impartial humanitarian assistance in conflict situations and reaffirms its will to remain independent, impartial, and neutral in order to be able to provide assistance to those most in need.” The struggles of humanitarian organizations should remind us that the practice of humanitarian intervention, even when authorized by the UN Security Council, is typically not received by target governments or populations as signifying the disinterested use of force for politically impartial and neutral purposes. To acknowledge that humanitarian interventions are inherently political is not a strike against their moral legitimacy or necessity in dire cases. The important question is, what kinds of politics has the practice served to create, foster, or maintain? Do the military interventions conducted since the end of the Cold War indicate movement toward a transformed international politics that prioritizes a “responsibility to protect” endangered populations? In fact, interventions (and noninterventions) since the end of the Cold War in situations of humanitarian catastrophe reveal at best the pursuit of modest moral ambitions within strict political constraints (East Timor 1999 and Sierra Leone 2002) and, at worst, either the instrumentalization of humanitarian justifications for other more partisan interests (Afghanistan 2002 and Iraq 2003) or near total indifference to evident humanitarian catastrophe where capable states could see no demonstrable narrow national interest (Rwanda 1994 and Sudan since 2004). The empirical reality seems to be that uses of force by coalitions of states—either unilaterally, through regional organizations, or through the international community via the United Nations—have not adequately tracked humanitarian interests or concerns. Most problematic is the degree to which humanitarian interventions, even those authorized by the UN Security Council, have tended to rise and fall with the will of the militarily dominant powers. Adam Roberts (2006, 82–83) has noted that the UN has no capacity to wage war for the purposes of human protection, especially in cases where consent is not forthcoming from the target state: “States, it appears, are still indispensable as mechanisms for the effective use of force.” More specifically, Jane Boulden (2001) has observed that UN peace-enforcement operations have relied on the United States, or other permanent members of the Security Council, such as the United Kingdom and France. In the absence of great power interest, international interventions with a credible humanitarian rationale typically suffer from deficient resources, and this chronic undersupport of UN-mandated missions has produced ineffectual peace enforcement, with all its problematic political and humanitarian consequences (Boulden 2001, 130–133). As Roberts (2006, 91) has noted, the minimal political will that translates into a minimal commitment of resources makes intervening forces vulnerable to attack, and the invariable losses they incur only serve to further dampen political commitment: “When such states are primarily

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concerned with limiting their losses and with exit strategies, they almost invite opponents to attack them.” The contemporary practice of humanitarian intervention (and nonintervention), far from disciplining the use of force by powerful states toward humanitarian ends, seems largely to follow the preferences of the hegemon, regardless of the strength of the humanitarian case for or against intervention. Boulden (2001, 132) notes the problematic implications of this pattern for UN-mandated humanitarian interventions: The power of US involvement and the UN reliance on the United States for military support in peace enforcement operations creates a situation in which decisions made by the United States, for or against involvement, and the nature of US involvement, can have a more significant impact on the outcome of the mission than any action or decision taken by the United Nations. This situation constrains UN decision making, and makes it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of US decision making.

These empirical realities of the contemporary politics of humanitarian intervention makes it difficult to view current practice as ushering in a revolutionary change in the way that states, especially the great powers, conduct international politics. Given these observations it is understandable that some regard international debates about the ethics of humanitarian intervention cynically. As David Chandler (2006c, 237) has described this line of criticism: “talk of ethics and shared values is merely a smokescreen: international interventions can be fully explained through attention to the self-interested motives of power and economic gain.” Cynicism is rarely morally constructive, but proponents of R2P must meet the challenge and consider what, if anything, can be done to improve the practice of humanitarian intervention. In the following section of this chapter, I explore some ethical and political challenges that need to be confronted regarding the authorization, operationalization, and evaluation of humanitarian intervention as a contemporary practice in global governance.

Contemporary Challenges Authorization A longstanding controversy surrounding the practice of humanitarian intervention has to do with how such interventions are legitimized. Who can claim the authority to justify the use of force against a sovereign state, even if it is to protect populations from egregious political acts? The community of states addressed this issue at the 2005 UN World Summit, and affirmed

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an international responsibility to protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and similar atrocities. In Article 139 of the Outcome Document, the society of states affirmed that, through the United Nations, it bears the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. (UNGA 2005, 30)

While some, mainly Western, politicians, international lawyers, human rights activists, and humanitarian organizations have talked of a revolutionary shift in international debates about the legitimacy of the use of force in response to politically induced humanitarian catastrophes, we are far from a world in which crimes against humanity “never again” take place. Indeed, in our time, large-scale atrocities—publicly labeled “genocide”—can continue essentially unabated for years.6 As has been noted by several analysts, the political struggle to build consensus on R2P in the Outcome Document resulted in substantial dilution of the doctrine as it was originally conceptualized in the 2001 report of the ICISS (Welsh 2006; Bellamy 2006). The consensus reached among states emphasizes the responsibility of states for the welfare and protection of their own citizens, and sets the threshold for the use of force quite high—a government must “manifestly fail” to ensure human protection. Furthermore, any use of force for human protection must be authorized through the UN Security Council, which will decide “on a case-by-case basis,” implying that decisions should not be interpreted as precedent setting, or contributing to an endorsement of a general doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The 2005 version of R2P certainly reflects contemporary concerns about how states—especially the United States—have used force in the wake of September 11. Most states are not in a position to mount military operations against other states—and many with blemished human rights records may fear becoming targets of powerful states that may abuse a general R2P doctrine to justify self-serving military interventions. The emphasis on the UN Security Council as the appropriate institution of authorization, and the reluctance to endorse a general doctrine of humanitarian intervention, can be viewed as attempts by the community of states to discipline the use of the force and to prevent the instrumentalization of the R2P doctrine, especially by a global superpower that prefers to be its own judge. At the same time, powerful states such as the United States worry that a

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general endorsement of R2P and any specification of criteria for intervention would, on the one hand, obligate them to commit human, military, and economic resources to areas of no particular relevance to their national interest and, on the other hand, hamper their ability to use force according to their own judgments of appropriateness or necessity. It may be true that the 2005 statement on the R2P “has done little to increase the likelihood of preventing future Rwandas and Kosovos” (Bellamy 2006, 145–146), but perhaps it is misguided to expect that any formulation of the R2P doctrine, including the 2001 ICISS report, can guarantee its proper interpretation and application. The main barriers lie not in the wording but in the state of international politics that produced the wording. Principles and laws do not interpret or apply themselves. Furthermore, on a subject as morally complicated as humanitarian intervention, any formulation of an R2P doctrine will necessarily include a diversity of legitimate but potentially conflicting ethical considerations. For this reason there may be sound moral reasons to adopt a case-by-case approach, given the uniqueness of different cases and types of political dysfunction. The fact that a case-by-case approach can be manipulated in a self-serving fashion by target governments, potential interveners, or powerful states to suit their respective political agendas reflects not a problem of wording or principle, but a problem of the character of the political agents involved in the deliberations and the political conditions in which they operate. The development of norms, principles, laws, and institutions cannot eliminate the necessity of good political judgment for their proper interpretation and implementation. John Stuart Mill (1984, 122) arrived at this insight when considering the problem of attempting to establish a liberal political order through external intervention, arguing that “unless the spirit of liberty is strong in a people, those who have the executive in their hands easily work any institutions to the purposes of despotism.” Similarly, without a sufficient political commitment on the part of states, especially the most powerful ones, to combat genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity, no institutional rule, mechanism, or procedure is likely to work properly to ensure human protection from these evils. How the 2005 R2P statement will be interpreted and applied will thus depend on the character of interstate politics. One key feature of contemporary political conditions is that virtually none of the five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, or the United States—individually or collectively can be counted on to make appropriate political judgments with regard to the protection of endangered populations. Indeed, powerful states have either blocked efforts to authorize humanitarian interventions in cases of genuine necessity (such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide), or they have circumvented the Security Council and used humanitarian arguments to justify or boost support for

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uses of force in problematic cases (such as the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003). These circumstances produce distinct legitimation challenges for the UN Security Council as the main body responsible for interpreting the R2P doctrine and authorizing humanitarian interventions. One challenge is that the Security Council’s decisions may be procedurally legitimate, but not produce morally legitimate responses to humanitarian crises. The other challenge is that powerful states may engage in self-authorization or seek other arenas of authorization (for example, NATO or public opinion), bypassing Security Council authorization procedures. The second challenge partly arises as a response to frustrations generated by the first challenge, but clearly creates its own set of problems. Since both challenges stem from problematic judgments and exercises of power by the P5 states that control the Security Council, what measures might enhance the likelihood that Council authorizations of humanitarian interventions will be both procedurally and substantively legitimate? In the ongoing Darfur crisis, one alternative has been to focus on building up the mandates and capacities of regional organizations to address humanitarian crises. African political leaders granted the AU, in the 2002 Constitutive Act, the right “to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity” (Article 4h). In an accompanying Declaration to the Act, African leaders noted, “The international community has not always accorded due attention to conflict management in Africa, as it has consistently done in other regions” (quoted in Bellamy 2006, 157). It is not at all clear, however, that regional international organizations such as the AU, composed of neighboring states and their militaries, are inherently likely to be disinterested in their deliberations or more sympathetic to the plight of endangered populations. The reliance on a regional solution to the case of Darfur has perhaps served only the interests of AU members and, of course, provided a convenient excuse for the continued indifference of the rest of the international community. Roberts (2006, 91–92) has identified another measure to enhance Security Council deliberations: the inclusion of testimony from nonstate organizations such as UNHCR. In previous work, I suggested that a team of government, international organization, and NGO representatives could comprise an adjudicative panel that determines whether a military intervention is necessary and justified in any particular case. The idea is that the incorporation of nonstate representatives in the decisionmaking structure of the Security Council would make it less possible for the P5 states to evade or distort their humanitarian responsibilities by obscuring or manipulating the facts of the case (Lu 2006, 153). While such a development would not likely be initiated or welcomed by most states, humanitarian aid organizations may also be reluctant to promote such a development, fearing a com-

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promise of their independence, neutrality, and impartiality with respect to the political crisis at hand. In the end, there may be no substitute for good international political leadership and judgment. Without these, institutional mechanisms for authorizing humanitarian interventions will remain purposefully defective, while the authority of extra-institutional responses to unfolding humanitarian crises will be highly contested, given the deep political, economic, and ideological divides that pervade the landscape of international relations. Operationalization Even in cases where humanitarian interventions have received proper authorization, significant ethical challenges arise in the operationalization and conduct of such interventions. As noted earlier, even military interventions that have been authorized by the UN Security Council tend to rise or fall with the participation of a powerful state. That is, appropriately authorized uses of force for the purposes of human protection have been difficult to operationalize in the absence of great power—usually US—involvement. In the case of Darfur, while powerful states with special influence (China, Russia, the United States) have the capability to intervene (militarily, economically, and politically), they suffer from a deficiency in commitment to the R2P principle; they are either indifferent to the case or have other economic and political interests that are served instrumentally by nonintervention. Reliance on these powerful states to address the humanitarian crisis facing over two million Darfuris has therefore resulted in numerous Security Council resolutions, but very little in the way of material commitment toward an effective intervention force. Even the move toward a regional solution, consisting of the current AU force, is heavily dependent on external support, given the impoverished capacities of AU member states. It is, of course, no accident that at least one of the militarily dominant powers is usually involved in any humanitarian intervention. Typically, only they possess the troops, military equipment, and resources to mount an effective military intervention. While powerful and capable states often lack the appropriate commitment to the R2P principle, other states that endorse the principle generally lack the capabilities to deploy troops or mount effective military interventions. Canada, for example, has been at the forefront of political efforts to promote the R2P doctrine as a guide for international practice, but the Canadian military has not developed sufficient resources or capabilities to mount effective humanitarian interventions. The successful operationalization of the R2P principle in contemporary political conditions thus suffers from various principle-capability gaps. Given the defective leadership of the P5 states, and given that the UN is unlikely to develop its own warfighting capabilities in the near future, it is

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other states that must assume the responsibility of developing such capabilities. As Roberts (2006, 93) has put it, “A key . . . question concerns the extent to which UN member states generally will prepare their armed forces for coercive operations under UN auspices: failure to do so will merely perpetuate the unhealthy reliance on a very few states—principally the USA, UK, and France—to do the UN’s military work.” States committed to R2P would need to support either the UN developing its own warfighting capabilities or acquiring such capabilities, perhaps collectively, themselves. Furthermore, democratic states such as Canada and Australia, and members of the EU, need to engage in internal democratic debates about the development and use of their military resources and personnel to support UN-mandated humanitarian interventions. Endorsing the R2P principle without any commitment to developing the capabilities that would allow for its effective operationalization is a recipe for perpetuating the failure of humanitarianism evident in contemporary global conditions. Assuming humanitarian interventions can be successfully authorized and equipped, there remains the ethical challenge of devising appropriate mandates and rules of engagement for such missions, especially in cases where consent is not forthcoming from the target state or where intervening forces are likely to meet hostile and violent opposition. Both Boulden and Roberts have shown that many situations of politically induced humanitarian disaster defy the mandates of traditional UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Roberts (2006, 92) argues that, “In such cases, the notions of neutrality, impartiality, and the non-use of force (all of which have been associated with peacekeeping) are not necessarily appropriate.” Boulden (2001, 137) similarly grapples with the difficulty of achieving impartiality: “There is no escaping the fact that the involvement of the United Nations in these situations alters the equation of the conflict. The United Nations becomes a participant in the conflict, with its own political goals associated with the pursuit of international peace and security.” In contexts where a regime, militant groups, or warring factions aim to produce civilian suffering, or aim to violate ceasefire agreements, an intervention that seeks to be neutral and impartial to the political conflict at hand amounts to a nonintervention. The assumption that nonintervention produces neutrality, however, is misleading; nonintervention in such situations does not have neutral consequences for the suffering population and, in effect, amounts to letting the stronger or more ferocious party dictate the course of events or the political settlement. The dilemma faced by the United Nations in such situations is profound. The UN is not a global Leviathan with independent coercive powers to regulate and discipline member states when they violate fundamental rules of universal morality. Rather, whatever powers and responsibilities the UN may have or may acquire depend on the agreement and cooperation of

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states. From its inception through the era of decolonization, in order to remain an international organization with universal state membership, the UN needed to affirm the principles of sovereign equality and independence. Respect for these principles commits the UN to a stance of impartiality or neutrality with respect to the internal politics of its member states. Partly for this reason, UN efforts to address politically induced humanitarian catastrophes place an emphasis on obtaining the consent of the target government for any UN-mandated mission involving the deployment of military troops. For example, although the Security Council has authorized a stronger, hybrid UN-AU intervention force to protect civilians in Darfur, it has not been fully deployed because of objections from the Sudanese government, which has been implicated in civilian atrocities. The price of impartiality toward the government of Sudan is thus paid in civilian suffering, undermining the UN’s expressed commitment to the R2P principle. The difficulty for the UN is that the use of force—even when it is for the purpose of human protection, and even when it is authorized by the Security Council— can never be neutral or impartial with respect to the political conflict into which it is injected. The inescapable fact, then, is that humanitarian interventions cannot be disinterested, neutral, or impartial—the use of force is inherently political and “inherently controversial” (Mayall 2006, 140). This acknowledgment does not mean that humanitarian interventions are never necessary or morally justified. The important question, in terms of evaluating humanitarian interventions, is what kinds of political developments can such interventions serve to create or support? Evaluation What should we expect humanitarian interventions to achieve? And what do they actually achieve? Answering these questions is necessary to form accurate assessments of the moral significance, potential, and limits of the R2P doctrine and the practice of humanitarian intervention as features of contemporary global governance. A general answer to the first question is that we should be mindful of the limited goals that can be achieved through the use of force. Humanitarian interventions may have the immediate effect of saving lives, but they typically do little to change the underlying domestic and international political, social, or economic dynamics that precipitated the humanitarian crisis. Saving lives is a minimal, though morally significant, outcome; as an achievement, it should not be confused with establishing a well-functioning society or accountable, responsible, and responsive government. The use of force to prevent or halt humanitarian disaster may help to create conditions of possibility for political transformation, but it can no

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more effect that transformation than a police intervention alone can change a dysfunctional interpersonal relationship or abusive family into a wellordered one. Roberts (2006, 82) has observed that humanitarian interventions in the 1990s did succeed in stemming massive refugee outflows and allowing displaced persons to return to their homes: “However, the interventions have not had an especially impressive record of achieving a stable political order.” The ICISS version (2001, 39) of the R2P doctrine includes an international “responsibility to rebuild” and provide assistance for establishing “a durable peace, and promoting good governance and sustainable development.” The rationale is that meeting such postintervention obligations would “help ensure that the conditions that prompted the military intervention do not repeat themselves or simply resurface” (39). To the report’s credit, it identifies and attempts to address potentially problematic consequences of a postintervention international presence, including the erosion of state competence, authority, and sovereignty, and “unhealthy dependency on the intervening authority” (44), damaging local capacities and undermining the economy. The most significant difficulty of coupling the comprehensive task of political reconstruction or transformation with the use of force to halt humanitarian catastrophe, however, is that worries about assuming more comprehensive responsibilities may serve as a “major disincentive” for potential interveners to become involved at all, jeopardizing the likelihood of achieving even the most minimal moral objective of saving lives. The perverse consequence of conflating humanitarian intervention with political reconstruction or democracy building (see Keating in this volume) is that humanitarian catastrophes stemming from the worst political conditions, such as state collapse, will least likely encourage any interventionary efforts. In an ideal world, international interventions, military and otherwise, would be able to fix all varieties of domestic dysfunctions, but in our nonideal world, there will likely be situations that defy the most well-meaning and well-mannered efforts of the international community (and also cases of less altruistic, opportunistic interventions that would give credence to fears of neocolonial imperialism). Whether or not the UN and intervening states can contribute positively or effectively to the goals of political stabilization and transformation is likely to be highly context dependent, making it difficult to endorse a general, thick set of postintervention obligations. In many cases, states embarking on humanitarian interventions should aim for the very limited objective of stemming a major humanitarian disaster, albeit temporarily and with little or no guarantee of success at changing the domestic or external sources of instability. Engaging in “pragmatic humanitarianism—doing what is politically possible in particular circumstances” and accepting the need “for the UN and individual intervening countries to

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cut their losses” may be “unheroic” (Mayall 2006, 140), but if a pragmatic humanitarian intervention attains the minimal moral objective of saving lives, it may still be morally preferable to nonintervention. The upshot of this argument, however, is the need to acknowledge the limited outcomes that are likely to be obtained through engaging in the practice of humanitarian intervention. In most cases, such interventions will not be able to resolve the underlying conditions that prompted them. Since the ICISS report is right that the long-term objective of the international community must be to prevent humanitarian crises from repeating themselves or simply resurfacing, the operationalization of the R2P through the practice of humanitarian intervention should be viewed as a strong, sometimes necessary, but always peripheral measure, rather than a centerpiece of international efforts to promote accountable, responsive, and responsible domestic governance. Humanitarian interventions therefore should serve as exceptional complements to broader diplomatic, economic, and social efforts aimed at resolving the root causes of conflict. Lacking the latter range of political efforts, humanitarian interventions, even when they are successfully authorized and adequately equipped, may become morally and politically ineffectual and meaningless.

Conclusion The ideal of “never again” has two variations. One is a maximal ideal of a world in which the various political dysfunctions that precipitate humanitarian crises cease to exist; in such a world, genocides, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity would never again appear, eliminating altogether the need to consider the ethics of the use of force to stave off such humanitarian disasters. The second variation is more sober: it is a minimal ideal of a world in which political dysfunctions still exist, but their destructive manifestations in the form of genocide and other mass atrocities are never again met with global indifference or resignation. The R2P doctrine and the practice of humanitarian intervention belong potentially in the minimal account of the “never again” ideal. That is, the development of such a principle and practice may contribute to the achievement of a minimal moral ideal in world politics, that politically induced humanitarian catastrophes such as genocide and other mass atrocities are not tolerated, but resisted by capable agents of the international community.7 The contemporary state of global governance fails to achieve this minimal moral ideal: the international community has trouble authorizing and operationalizing humanitarian interventions in genuine cases of humanitarian emergency, and powerful states have instrumentalized humanitarian ends and means for their own political designs. In these conditions, it is incum-

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bent on the advocates of humanitarian intervention and the R2P doctrine— in the community of states and global civil society—to assess rigorously the actual political consequences of their operationalization, in order to form an accurate judgment, rather than a fanciful projection, of their contribution to the moral improvement of domestic and global governance.

Notes 1. I agree with Simon Caney (2005, 227–231) that this is a restrictive notion of “humanitarian intervention,” and that the term could be broadened to encompass a variety of coercive actions (military and nonmilitary) by external agents in response to human rights violations. Certainly, ethical imperatives exist to respond much more comprehensively to human rights violations, before they reach an egregious level, and in ways that are not restricted to the use of force. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “humanitarian intervention” to refer to the main subject of this chapter—a specific type of international practice consisting of the use of military force by states to address large-scale politically induced humanitarian crises. See also Lu (2005 and 2006, 137–140). 2. I am adapting a phrase and argument by Alan Patten (2005) about global poverty. Patten argues that even if the global economic order were regulated by principles of fairness, domestic governments may not implement fair internal rules of distribution, creating a need at the international level to continue to think in terms of helping the poor. 3. Of course, this is not to argue that the current challenges of humanitarian intervention will remain constant. As Rawls (1999, 90) observed, the specific conditions of our world “affect the specific answers to questions of nonideal theory”; this implies that changing conditions will lead to different challenges and affect the possibility and appropriateness of different types of responses. 4. As Blair (1999) remarked, “And finally, do we have national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.” The other vital questions he raised were just cause, last resort, prudence, and long-term postintervention commitment. 5. This paragraph draws from arguments in Lu (2006). 6. Former US secretary of state Colin Powell, speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated on September 9, 2004: “We concluded—I concluded— that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility—and genocide may still be occurring” (Washington Post, September 10, 2004). 7. A minimal moral ideal of global governance would include, in addition to human protection from genocide and mass atrocity, the eradication of global poverty, environmental protection and conservation, and the general realization of human rights—understood as a “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” (United Nations 1948). I agree with Joshua Cohen (2006, 226), however, that human rights are only “a proper subset of the rights founded on justice”; my account of a minimal moral ideal of global governance thus does not include a right to democracy, understood as an egalitarian ideal.

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7 Feminist Ethics and Global Security Governance Fiona Robinson

For analytical purposes, recent history can be divided into two distinct time periods with respect to global security governance: the period following the Cold War and the period since September 11, 2001. Broadly speaking, the first period saw the growth and development of the notion of human security or the idea that the individual is the primary referent of security. This initial period also legitimated new practices and norms of humanitarian intervention premised on the idea of an international “responsibility to protect” (see Lu’s chapter in this volume). Since September 11, a second period has emerged, one that returns to a militarized and state-centric conception of security that has subordinated individual human rights in the name of fighting terror and that has, in the wake of the Iraq war, challenged the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. While analytically useful, this temporal dichotomy obscures the subtle workings and politics of the norms, institutions, and practices of global security governance. Moreover, it is necessary to look inside the dominant and conventional narratives about global security governance to understand how they have created and perpetuated hegemonic discourses that silence alternatives, particularly feminism. Although advocates of the human security approach—especially those in the UN system and the independent Commission on Human Security—have made efforts to highlight genderbased inequality and violence, there remains a default commitment to a universalist human rights framework. This framework ignores the contributions of feminist ethics in conceptualizing security—not only for women, but for all people in the context of families and communities around the world. This chapter analyzes human security and humanitarian intervention as key political sites in global governance and from the perspective of feminist ethics. Part one contrasts conventional accounts of global governance with the concepts and analysis of feminists. Conventional accounts suffer from what Cynthia Enloe (1996) calls the underestimation of power. Feminist 103

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ethics, by contrast, brings critical attention to how normative structures and discursive power sustain existing patterns of gender relations and other forms of inequality. Moreover, feminist ethics have a moral ontology based on the relationships that inhere within particular social-moral systems (Walker 1998). I argue that a feminist “ethics of care” provides an alternative ontological and ethical lens through which to examine the moral debates about human security and humanitarian intervention. From this feminist perspective, security is viewed not as a situation enjoyed by (or granted to) isolated individuals; rather, security is the result of interdependence and relations of care that occur within communities and because of the role of women and others as caregivers. In light of this feminist reconceptualization of the ontology and ethics of security, the “problem” of humanitarian intervention also appears differently than in conventional accounts. The standard narrative of intervention as a matter of “saving strangers” (see Wheeler 2000) in exceptional and urgent situations is challenged by a feminist perspective. Rather than encouraging us to only save distant strangers, a feminist ethics of care encourages continuous solidarity with, and care for, people across the globe and in the context of ongoing threats to their existence. Part two of the chapter explores the limitations of the human security and R2P concepts. Although there are different connotations attached to human security (see Hampson et al. 2002), a common denominator is an individualistic discourse of human rights (Commission on Human Security 2003; ICISS 2001; Axworthy 2001). As such, human security obfuscates interdependence as a feature of human life and the extent to which both power and insecurity are experienced relationally. With regard to humanitarian protection, the ICISS, relying heavily on a human security framework, seeks to go beyond reacting to crises. Yet while the report advocates prevention and postconflict rebuilding, it does not address the root causes of many humanitarian emergencies. In the end, then, the R2P concept accepts and mobilizes traditionally militarist solutions to particular, historically rooted and culturally situated crises. Moreover, despite its cosmopolitan rhetoric, the ICISS report relies on an inside/outside dichotomy of communitarian loyalties versus individual rights (see Walker 1993). In doing so, it overlooks many widespread forms of moral and social exclusion—including gender exclusion—that result from the alignment of elite interests with global capitalism in contemporary global governance. By contrast, I forward an ethics of “caring solidarity” based on a critical, feminist ethics of care as the foundation for a critique of this exclusion and an alternative ethics of global governance. Thus, part three of this chapter argues that the moral ideas and frameworks of the dominant security discourses limit our understandings of the problems that exist and the potential solutions. The key terms of the human security and R2P discourses—rights, autonomy, responsibility, and protection—are all understood in the context

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of a “moment of crisis” and thus they ignore the permanent background to insecurity and humanitarian crises. This background exists before, during, and after the conflict, and is played out not by isolated individuals seeking to claim their rights, but in relationships of responsibility—in households, refugee camps, factories, hospitals, chronic care facilities, community meetings, schools, and daycares. Attention to the complexity of conflict and postconflict situations and the role of women and caregiving in those contexts exposes the inadequate and gendered ethics of the contemporary global governance of security and intervention.

Ethics and Power in Global Governance There has been surprisingly little academic study of ethics in global governance. Much of what has been written assumes a problematic perspective on the role of power in relation to ethics. An example of this is Mervyn Frost’s (2004) “Ethics and Global Governance: The Primacy of Constitutional Ethics.” Frost restates his earlier argument (1996) about international ethics as constitutive; this view holds that actors are constituted as such within a range of diverse social practices, all of which have built into them specific sets of values or ethical codes (Frost 2004, 54–55). For this view, ethical analysis of global governance involves asking whether the ethics underpinning the practices of democratic and democratizing states are compatible with those underpinning global civil society (62). Frost is optimistic that current global governance practices are ethical because they are, in his view, premised on fundamental values, especially the value of individual autonomy (63). Frost also claims the ethics immanent in global governance should not be reduced, as is often the case with realists and critical theorists, to merely instrumental tools of the powerful (42). A critical feminist approach radically opposes this understanding of the ethics of global governance. First, it rejects the simplistic understanding of global governance as a process of the democratization of states around the world. Instead, global governance is seen as the result of a shift from state/government to multilayered governance, not only of states and markets but also of interstate relations and security (Rai 2004, 579). While global governance is certainly shaped by struggles of nonstate actors against the consequences of globalization (see Lynch’s chapter in this volume), it is also defined by the discursive and material power of the world’s most powerful states, aligned toward the needs of a gendered global capitalist economy (Rai 2004, 580; see also Cox and Sinclair 1996). This alignment, which has been described as the “politics of convergence,” is most visibly manifested in the rules and institutions governing the global capitalist economy. Those same rules, however, are integral in governing noneconomic aspects

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of global governance, including the discourses and politics of human security and humanitarian intervention. Moreover, a focus on power is essential for understanding both the nature of morality and global governance. Critical approaches to ethics are concerned with how moral argument and discourse can serve to support or disrupt existing structures and relations of power. Furthermore, analysis of power relations is necessary not only for critique of existing social-moral systems, but also for the development of accounts of their transformation. In other words, understanding the nature of material and discursive power relations is imperative if one is to determine the nature and limits of ethical possibility, in particular, how deep-seated moral understandings may be transformed over time to become less exclusive. Feminist political science has recently approached global governance with a more critical conception of power (see Rai and Waylen 2008). This complements the work of feminist ethics on the relationship between morality and different forms of power. Margaret Walker (2003, 105) writes that feminism provides “unprecedented theoretical understandings on the moral meaning of relations of unequal power.” The feminist theorization of the morality of unequal power challenges the focus of traditional moral theory on reciprocal exchanges. By contrast, feminist understandings of “power over,” “responsibility for,” and “dependency on” compel us to “see our moral being in terms of varied relations, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, immediate and highly mediated, to others” (Walker 2003, 105). From the perspective of a feminist ethics of care, for example, dependency and vulnerability are incorporated into the concept of a “normal” subject (Sevenhuijsen 1998, 146). Thus, this approach to ethics eschews the tendency of traditional moral theory to shunt to the bottom of the agenda relationships between those who are clearly unequal in power—including parents and children, and large states and small states. As Annette Baier (1994, 120) argues, a complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why we should act and feel toward others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetries and shifting and varying intimacies. This kind of moral philosophy, moreover, may be more helpful concerning the design of institutions structuring those relationships between unequals (28). Furthermore, a feminist ethics of care regards caring activity as fundamental to human life. While care is often assumed to involve reciprocal and nonconflictual feelings of love, empathy, and involvement among equals, empirical research into the lived experiences of those in relations of care demonstrates the need to grapple with the moral questions that arise from conflicting views of needs, as well as the inherent difficulties of situations of dependency, vulnerability, and major differences in the possession of power resources (Sevenhuijsen 1998, 84). As Selma Sevenhuijsen (147) points out, the ethics of care is a form of political ethics because relations of

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care take place in, and also constitute, the political in situations of communal interaction, collective deliberation, and decisionmaking. As well, all societies make political decisions about caring, including who will do it and under what circumstances. Feminist moral theory also poses serious challenges to both the ontological and moral basis of individual autonomy celebrated by Frost. The concept of autonomy, that is, of isolated, self-reliant moral selves, does not adequately reflect social reality in most communities around the world. Feminists argue that this ontology obscures particular experiences of women, women who are more likely to define themselves in and through their relations with children and other family members—including the elderly or chronically ill—or with friends or members of their communities rather than in terms of autonomy. Feminists add, however, that the picture of “autonomous man” not only distorts the experiences of women but all peoples given the nature of interdependence. An ethics based solely on an ontology of autonomy ensures that moral thinking on global governance remains in the realm of the ideal rather than rooted in social reality. Frost’s claim that autonomy is a universal value overlooks its more particular origins in the moral, political, and economic traditions of Western liberalism. Indeed, his assertion that global governance is ethical if it shares the values of autonomy assumes that all those being governed share this value and that it provides a good moral foundation upon which to make policy to improve their lives. In contrast to Frost, I suggest that thinking about the ethics of global governance must involve an interrogation of the discursive and material power behind the dominant norms, ideas, and institutions that currently guide and shape our world. As Shirin Rai (2004, 592) argues, gendered readings of global governance ask who is being governed, in whose interests, and how; as such, these readings provide insights into the exclusions that define the study of global governance. A feminist ethical approach also concentrates on how gendered power intersects with and is shaped by relations of race and ethnicity, as well as structures of economic, geopolitical, military, and discursive power. It does this in order to determine how and why it is that global governance upholds a particular set of rules and norms, and why other values and moral ideas are hidden and denigrated. The feminist moral theorist is not engaged in dictating moral rights and wrongs from a privileged epistemological position; rather, she is committed to critical analysis of how social-moral systems may exclude and oppress certain groups, and to an evaluation of when, and under what circumstances, changes to dominant moral values toward greater inclusion may be possible. Moreover, as a moral orientation, the feminist ethics of care provides two distinctive departures from conventional analyses of global governance. First, it reminds us that care—as a social and moral practice—is a

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fundamental part of human life. It demonstrates that this part of our lives is not simply private or personal, but that it is clearly political. What care looks like in any given society is in large part a function of direct political decisions about the allocation of resources, as well as an indirect manifestation of political culture and social norms (including and especially gender norms). But this does not limit the relevance of care ethics to policy areas traditionally considered feminine such as health and childcare. On the contrary, when care is seen as an integral part of what it means to be human, as a feature of active, democratic citizenship—then a wide range of issues and policies must be reshaped to take this shift into account. This includes not only local or national domestic policy, but also global economic and social policy and, importantly, foreign policy with respect to security and intervention. Second, in contrast to traditional rights-based or Kantian moral theory, the ethics of care relies on a narrative structure of moral understanding. Rather than applying universal moral principles to cases, narrative structure rests on the idea that a story is the basic form of representation of moral problems (Walker 1998, 68). This means that any attempt to solve a moral problem requires knowledge of the “characters,” their relationships, their histories, and their identities. A narrative approach questions the possibility of generating universal moral principles that may be used to justify particular policy responses to crises of human security in the nonideal context in which they are actually experienced.

A Feminist Analysis of Human Security and Humanitarian Intervention Security is not an objective or given condition. It is an intersubjective and constructed aspect of human experience and politics (see Campbell 1998). Feminists among others have used discourse analysis to examine how security is constructed through gendered language and symbols. Discourse analysis helps reveal how the construction of security is a form of governance. A particular type of discourse analysis, genealogy, has been used by feminists to determine the ways “knowledge” and “truth” are used in discursive practices (Hutchings 2000; Milliken 1999). More particularly, moral genealogy involves historical investigation of the discursive construction of “moral truths” or what Kimberly Hutchings (2000, 122) calls “ethical necessity” (based on gendered identities, concepts, and values). The method of moral genealogy may be combined with analysis of what is called subjugated knowledge, or the examination of how dominating discourses exclude or silence alternatives and how this is resisted by these other discourses (Milliken 1999, 243). Feminist methodology and epistemology do not

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assign essential value or ethical primacy to women’s values. Instead, they are derived from the ontological claim that moral reality is embedded in relationships and that such relationships are constructed by gendered relations of power (Hutchings 2000, 125). These ontological commitments to relationality and intersecting structures of power reveal both the silencing of women and the ways alternative moral knowledge may offer new approaches to moral problems that will directly address the real lives of many women and feminized “others.” A feminist approach allows one to trace the development of human security and humanitarian intervention as gendered discourses of global governance. The period following the Cold War was characterized by its commitment to the “new interventionism” (Hawthorn 1999, 148); during this time, the UN Security Council’s interpretation of international peace and security expanded to authorize humanitarian interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti (Bellamy 2005, 34). Indeed, Alex Bellamy (2005, 34) argued that this period saw the development of a degree of consensus around the idea that “states have a moral right to intervene to save strangers in supreme humanitarian emergencies.” Closely connected to interventionism is the emergence of human security. Traced to the 1994 Human Development Report, which stated that “human security is not a concern with weapons—it is a concern with human life and dignity” (UNDP, quoted in Nuruzzaman 2006, 291), the approach shifts attention from the state to the individual as the primary referent of security and broadens the sources of insecurity beyond direct military threats. In seeking to understand security “comprehensively and holistically,” the human security approach serves as a counter to the “selfish pursuit of state or elite security” (Hudson 2005, 163). Moreover, because the individual becomes the primary referent of security, and the state is seen as a potential threat, the realization of individual human rights is often regarded as the analytical and substantive key to achieving human security.1 A human security approach is congruent with many aspects of feminist theory and ethics. For decades, feminists have challenged the realist assumption that national security is a sufficient objective. Indeed, advocates of human security acknowledge the essentially feminist point that states do not necessarily create security but are, in reality, one of the most profound sources of the insecurity faced by individuals. In other words, the causes of insecurity are not reducible to external attack to a state’s territorial integrity or government. Threats may come from economic, social, environmental, and other sources, and they also may come from the government itself. The shift to a discourse of human security has, however, been problematic from its most significant departure from feminism—its gender blindness. As Lene Hansen (2000, 306) argues, the “absence of theorization of genderbased security demonstrates that what is at stake is not whether the concept

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of security should be expanded or not, but how certain threats achieve such a political saliency that they become the subject of security policies.” Similarly, Charlotte Bunch and Mary Robinson argue that the human rights focus of human security should include a “feminist human rights lens” to emphasize the particular threats to security faced by women. As Robinson (2005, 311) suggests, simply being a woman is itself a risk factor. Poverty, lack of property and reproductive rights, political exclusion, and violence against women are common for many women and derive from their unequal position in most societies (Bunch 2004, 32–33). The 2003 Report of the Commission on Human Security integrates gender-based inequality and violence into its discussion of threats. It also recognizes that women are often responsible for holding family and community together and have, in that regard, played important roles in addressing armed conflict and poverty (32–33). However, the report fails to explore fully the complex issues of bodily integrity that women have identified as critical to their intimate security: reproductive rights and violence against women (32). As Bunch argues, women should be taken up in human security dialogue as a “subject or constituency” so that issues that predominantly affect women are addressed. Not all feminists would accept the essential universalism of the human security and human rights framework, however. Bunch’s continued reliance on individual human rights—albeit women’s individual human rights—is problematic if the goal is to understand how people actually experience threats to their security and how these threats are actually played out in the context of real, lived experience. As Heidi Hudson (2005, 157) argues, there is a danger that “collapsing femininity and masculinity into the term ‘human’ could conceal the gendered underpinnings of security practices.” Recognizing that gender is intertwined with other identities such as race, class, and nationality, Hudson (158) makes a case for more fluid, contextbased interpretations of security where particular experiences are linked to wider regional and global structures and processes. This perspective highlights the exclusivity of the universal, masculinized “human” in human security, and suggests that a more context-based approach may open up space for a feminist understanding of security as relational. Thus there are some significant tensions between the individualistic and cosmopolitan premises of human security and a feminist ethics of care. Human security emphasizes a shift from the state to the individual as the primary referent of security; that individual, moreover, is defined only in the cosmopolitan sense as a “human being,” possessing fundamental, individual, human rights. As Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler (2004, 19) argue, what is required in order to achieve human security is the “growth of a cosmopolitan moral awareness such that we come to empathize with and respond to the sacrifices made by those fighting for basic rights in repressive regimes.” A

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feminist ethics of care doubts that a cosmopolitan, individualistic ontology can adequately equip moral agents to empathize with those in other contexts. Moreover, cosmopolitan individualism offers little prospect for challenging the status quo that causes insecurity. Indeed, as Mohammed Nuruzzaman (2006, 299) argues, human security is about incremental reforms: “The human security paradigm, in the name of policy recommendations, attempts to reform the existing system and, like the realist security paradigm, supports the prevailing social order and hence the socially powerful.” The discourse on the R2P shares the shortcoming of the human security discourse. Moreover, it accepts rather than challenges the militarism found in the status quo arrangements of security governance. A limited commitment to change is evident in the 2001 report of the ICISS. While the authors eschew the term “humanitarian intervention,” they describe the kind of intervention with which they are concerned as “action taken against a state or its leaders, without its or their consent, for purposes which are claimed to be humanitarian or protective” (ICISS 2001, 13). While the report proposes military intervention as a last resort, justified only when “every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis has been explored,” its primary goal is to determine the conditions under which military intervention may be accepted as morally, legally, and politically justified. Indeed, the sections on prevention in the report are vague and general, including things such as the “promotion of civil society,” the establishment of “more favorable trade terms,” or even “tackling economic deprivation” (24–26). International support should take the form of “development assistance,” and “efforts to provide support for local initiatives to advance good governance, human rights, or the rule of law” (21). No detailed theoretical or policy framework is offered for these transformations, other than the general emphasis on the delivery of individual human rights. In particular, the emphasis is on holding states accountable to international human rights norms, instruments, and institutions, such as the ICC (17). I argue that unstated but implicit in this report is the impossibility of addressing the enormous root causes of conflict, and the inevitability and ultimate necessity of military intervention as a form of governance, once socalled prevention options have been exhausted (ICISS 2001, 21). Thus, in spite of shedding the term “humanitarian intervention,” the focus of attention in the report easily slides back to the problem of when, and under what circumstances, military intervention will be necessary. Rather than representing a paradigm shift, the R2P advances a view of humanitarianism that is, ultimately, still highly militarized. Despite the emphasis on the “responsibility to prevent,” there is little recognition in the report of the need for innovative theoretical and policy tools that will surely be necessary if lasting, meaningful transformation is to occur. While there may, indeed, be situations where military intervention may appear unavoidable, we must bear in

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mind the costs of violence for societies. As Iris Marion Young (2003, 258) has argued, violence not only harms individuals, but it makes their lives difficult to carry on as before. Violence tends to escalate beyond the specific and limited intentions by producing violent responses. Even if used to promote ideals that can be defended as morally right, violence is always, necessarily, destructive even if used by legitimately authorized public officials (262). Thus, according to Young, “it is incoherent to have a general rule according to which established institutions may routinely engage in violent acts, which can make acts of violence morally acceptable.” Instead, each case—each story of suffering—must be analyzed morally on its own terms, with full knowledge of the participants involved, the history of the crisis, and its relationship to wider global structures and processes. Militarism is a gendered ideology. It assumes that armed force is the ultimate resolver of tensions and that, in times of crisis, those who are feminine need armed protection (Enloe 2004, 219). Moreover, while militarism and violence cannot be associated with an “essential” masculinity, they may be linked to a particular vision of masculinity that became predominant in Western culture during the twentieth century. This hegemonic masculinity is not determined by some natural characteristics; rather, it is created by social practices (see Whitworth 2004, 155). Just as Sandra Whitworth has questioned the use of individuals (mostly men) trained to fight wars in order to conduct peace missions, the logic of militarized humanitarianism is challenged by feminist gender analysis. This must mean not simply inserting a gender analysis into the existing theories and policies surrounding humanitarian intervention; rather, it must mean transforming existing approaches and practices based on an ethics of intervention “not grounded quite so brutally in a politics of violence and exclusion” (Orford, quoted in Whitworth 2004, 186). This gender analysis extends to thinking seriously about questions of agency in the human security and R2P approaches. I argue that these approaches retain a dichotomized, gendered view of agency. For instance, Dunne and Wheeler (2004, 18–19) identify one set of agents as those who are charged with “delivering basic rights” (the litmus test for human security). Such agents include states and global civil society actors such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, and CARE. On the other side of the dichotomy are the “victims of global politics at the center of our academic inquiry” (20, emphasis added). Similarly, the ICISS (2001, 19) report claims that the R2P implies an “evaluation of the issues from the point of view of those seeking or needing support.” In so doing, it “refocuses the international searchlight back where it should always be: on the duty to protect communities from mass killing, women from systematic rape and children from starvation” (20). The use of the term “victims” in Dunne and Wheeler’s case for human

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security constructs a dichotomy between the providers of security (the agents) and the recipients of security (the victims). These victims, moreover, are discursively and normatively constructed as gendered and raced; they are constructed in opposition to the “heroic subjects” of humanitarian interventions, which possess the attributes of hegemonic masculinity—“a white masculinity obsessed with competitive militarism and the protection of universal (read imperial) values” (Orford 2003, 67). Surely a “multidimensional approach to agency,” to use Dunne and Wheeler’s words (2004, 18–19), should at least include those who experience existential threats to their security on a day-to-day basis. Surely it should at least allow them to give voice to their own experiences of insecurity and the particular contexts of “sexism, racism, classism and violent nationalism” in which their insecurity is experienced (Stern 2006, 192). Yet while human security is often understood broadly to include what I call the permanent background of economic, environmental, and societal insecurity, the “humanitarian” construction of human security relies on a reductionist conception of the provision of personal security rights at the moment of violent military conflict. While the ICISS report attempts to foreground prevention and rebuilding as important elements of humanitarianism, the primary problem to be worked out in the report is when, and under what circumstances, military intervention is legitimate and justified. While many ethicists remind us that current and undoubtedly future circumstances will repeatedly force us to make this decision (see Lu in this volume), I would stress that the pressure to provide an ethical principle that can generate a response to this question should be resisted. No ethical principle or set of principles—cosmopolitan or communitarian—exists to provide us with an ethical framework that can be applied to all such humanitarian crises. More promising is the narrative approach of a feminist ethics of care that, by contrast, addresses moral problems as stories with complex histories and characters in relations.

The Permanent Background to Security and Humanitarian Crises A feminist analysis of the ethics of security governance reveals the problems and limits of the masculinized, individualist/universal ontological assumptions of traditional ethical approaches to global governance. Despite the recent shift to nonmilitary security threats and responses to humanitarian crises, the inevitability of violence remains inescapable in the R2P discourse. This, in turn, entails the continued pouring of our moral and political energies into the “moment of decision,” while hoping that attending to human rights will be sufficient to achieve human security in the longer term.

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The reliance on dominant discourses of universal human rights in human security obscures from view the nature, causes, and consequences of insecurity for many of the world’s women, their families, and their communities. Even a broadened understanding of security that includes analysis of the causes and consequences of economic insecurity will remain blind to gender considerations as long as it remains wedded to an ontology of individualism that ignores the centrality of relationships and social context. In this era of accelerated speed and scope of global trade and investment, states compete fiercely to provide a low-cost economic environment that is attractive to investors. This has often meant the relocation of production processes to the global South, where regulations are minimal and wages and working conditions are poor. It is largely women who have taken up these new “opportunities” in export sectors, which has meant long hours working outside of the home. Moreover, while social programs are under fire from fiscally conservative regimes all over the world, the power of international financial institutions in developing countries has meant that the erosion of state-run welfare provision is felt the hardest there. It is women—already overburdened with labor responsibilities—who provide the necessary care when the state fails to do so.2 But even the traditional security concerns of violent conflict and its aftereffects have enormous, usually untold, implications for relationships of care and for the nature and amount of necessary carework. Events and circumstances such as deaths of family members; internal displacement and refugee situations; personal injury, illness or disability as a direct result of conflict; unemployment or extremely low incomes; inadequate medical care and nutrition; mental and emotional trauma resulting in increased substance abuse, domestic violence, and family conflict—all of these increase the burden of women’s carework (Najafizadeh 2003). These situations are made worse when societies must cope with the effects of environmental disaster or health pandemics. Rarely is explicit consideration given to how the hundreds of thousands of injured, disabled, abandoned, emotionally traumatized, and acutely or chronically ill will be cared for, and by whom. As well as trying to address the obvious problems of how to reduce infection and mortality, states with already high HIV infection rates must face the challenges of how to raise huge numbers of orphans, while at the same time addressing the needs of those adults and children who are already infected (Heyman 2003, 1). Moral consideration of the adequacy of provision of care needs and the distribution of carework—who cares for whom and under what circumstances—provides an alternative lens from which to view the ethics of global security governance. This approach to security pushes us to address questions of responsibility and needs provision; however, it does so in a way that challenges the dominant assumptions about the site and sources of that

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provision, revealing relations of power that are gendered and raced, and that disrupts established dichotomies between public and private, global and local. Moreover, seeing security relationally allows us to recognize that, in most cases, one individual’s security cannot be conceptualized, or achieved, in the absence of the sustained attentiveness and responsiveness of some particular others. Quite simply, a relational approach to security demands that we accept the overwhelming importance of good care in preserving and sustaining life. Thus, a coherent, useful theory of human security must start with the claim that human security can only be realized through adequate physical and emotional care; all societies must recognize that decisions regarding the provision of care are not fringe “women’s issues,” but are a matter of life and death, and hence of the highest priority. Moreover, I argue that, as an immediate human security priority, the following conditions with respect to women must be recognized and addressed: their undervalued and unremunerated caring labor and their life-sustaining agency as workers and caregivers; their lack of access to care services, including health and education; and their vulnerability with respect to violence and poverty. In the light of this regrounding of human security, feminist ethics may also provide an important alternative lens through which to view the ethics of humanitarian intervention. Neta Crawford (2002, 429) suggests that an ethics of care might “help us sort out exactly when and how to intervene to help others in a way that is welcome and not idiosyncratic.” Specifically, she suggests that an ethics of care could help to promote an attitude that “arrests the potential paternalism in the discourse and practice of humanitarian intervention” (430). Elsewhere she adds that an ethics of care may be a good starting point for thinking about how to discharge our cosmopolitan responsibilities with both alacrity and respect (in Farer et al. 2005, 233). Yet there are obstacles to thinking about our relations with distant strangers in terms of an ethics of care, due largely to the association of care with intimate relations between particular persons. However, feminist moral and political philosophers have argued that care ethics are political and globally relevant.3 One way of thinking about care in the global context involves employing the idea of solidarity as a social correlate to caring relations to individual others. Carol Gould (2004, 66), for example, shows that through much of the twentieth century solidarity was tied to labor movement contexts or to socialism and there is no inherent reason to limit solidarity narrowly to such contexts. Selma Sevenhuijsen (1998, 147) has developed this idea of solidarity as the political expression of care: “The notion of solidarity gives political meaning to care and to mutual commitment.” Solidarity, in this sense, provides an alternative to the justice paradigm, based on mutual exchange and reciprocity. This solidarity does not presume the norms of equality as sameness or autonomy; rather, it recognizes human connectedness and vulnerability as the norm, and asks what

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needs to be done to ensure that people are enabled to give and receive care adequately. As Sevenhuijsen writes, “the feminist ethics of care points to forms of solidarity in which there is room for difference, and in which we find out what people in particular situations need in order for them to live with dignity” (147). An ethics of caring solidarity should be particularly salient in the context of humanitarian intervention. First, the relational ontology of this approach— which emphasizes human interdependence and mutual vulnerability—overcomes the dichotomies between the needy and the strong, victims and agents, objects and subjects in the construction of categories in humanitarian intervention. Combined with the revised view of security described above, this approach also destabilizes the inside/outside dichotomy by pushing theorists and policymakers to look at the state of care within their own societies. Finally, it breaks down the distinction between crisis and normality, putting the very idea of humanitarian intervention in question.4 Thus, from this perspective, crises requiring responses are not limited to ethnic or tribal conflicts within failed or failing states, but may exist in “normal” times within the borders of powerful states. The crisis of Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 is illustrative. The actual physical crisis of Katrina and its effects required “intervention” from the state; the indecision, reluctance, and lack of will demonstrated by the Bush administration in responding to this crisis parallels that of powerful Western states when faced with situations like that of Rwanda in 1994, and Darfur at the time of this writing. This calls into question the assumption that the reluctance to act is based on a realist, statist, or communitarian morality, which is disinclined to extend the scope of its moral obligations beyond its own borders. Rather, it suggests, by contrast, that what is at work is a powerful alignment of elite interests toward the needs of a gendered, global capitalist economy; this alignment is just as happy to ignore systemic gender oppression, poverty, and human suffering in the United States as it is in Sudan. Katrina laid bare for the world to see the shocking poverty, inequality, and racial and gender divisions that characterized—in normal times— parts of the city of New Orleans. A moral framework of caring solidarity would transcend the statist, militarized, gendered discourse of humanitarian intervention and would push theorists and policymakers to address the state of care in normal times both within Western liberal democracies and in states in the global South. Thus, greater attention would be focused on the permanent background to identified humanitarian crises in order to better understand how gender relations, as well as those based on religion, ethnicity, culture, race, and class, affect the real, day-to-day lives and security of people. A narrative, rather than a principled approach to moral judgment would demand attention is paid to the particularities of different humanitarian emergencies, including

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the relationship between the situations and wider social, economic, and geopolitical relations and processes. Violent conflicts and their effects would have to be seen within the wider, ongoing context of neoliberal economic restructuring in order to more clearly understand their effects on the security of people, especially, but not exclusively, on women and their families. Research on carework in particular contexts allows us to see care not as a women’s issue but as the political manifestation of our moral responsibilities toward our shared well-being and security. This includes understanding how, and under what circumstances, the burden of carework is increased, how relations of power determine how responsibilities for that burden are assigned, and how mobilizing around care can disrupt the totalizing logics of both patriarchy and capitalism.5

Conclusion In contrast to the assumptions underpinning the human security and R2P approaches to global security governance, I have argued that a feministinspired solidarity of caring provides a better account of the ethics of global governance. Emphasizing care and carework at the local, national, regional, and global levels recognizes the relational nature of human existence and that vulnerability and mutual dependence are normal features of moral and political life. Placing these issues squarely in the public realm—as public, not private concerns—will begin to address the endemic gender, racial, and class inequalities that currently govern how carework is provided, as well as identifying who is responsible for caring for whom, and under what conditions. Where states cannot cope with the burden of care—in many subSaharan African countries, for example—responsible global, social, and economic policies must be put in place to deal with both the root causes and the immediate effects of the crises of care. By looking through the lens of an ethics of caring solidarity, the way care is perceived would be transformed. From this perspective of feminist ethics, care can no longer be regarded as a private matter or a fringe or peripheral women’s issue within politics. Rather, care would become central to our understanding of human life and what it means to live that life with dignity. Indeed, it is even possible to imagine caretaking in the kind of moral and political role that rights currently occupies. The idea of human rights and security—an enormously powerful force for social, political, and moral change, yet an equally powerful force for exclusion—would thus no longer dominate moral discourse in world affairs; the legalistic, masculine, Western-dominated discourse of rights, as illustrated in the human security and R2P doctrines, would necessarily be revised if the language of caring solidarity were allowed to enter the debate. Moreover, I argue that making

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the provision of care more adequate and equitable—especially for children, the elderly and infirm, the chronically and acutely ill and disabled—and reducing the burden of care on women, especially women of color from developing countries, is a good place to start in the journey toward the goal of a more equitable distribution of resources globally. Policy geared toward this kind of provision necessarily moves away from the driving imperative of neoliberalism both in terms of states’ own domestic policies and policies on global trade and development emerging out of the institutions of global economic governance. Only this, I argue, can begin to mitigate some of the root causes of human insecurity and violent conflict leading to humanitarian emergencies.

Notes 1. While most conceptualizations of human security share the characteristics noted above, it is important to recognize the internal diversity within the human security approach. Institutionally, human security is widely associated with the UN—especially the UNDP’s 1994 Human Development Report, which offered a vision of security focused on individuals and groups rather than states, and encompassed the dual goals of “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want” (Timothy 2004, 19). At the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan reiterated these goals, sparking the idea of an independent Commission on Human Security. This commission, underwritten by the Japanese government, produced its final report, Human Security Now, in 2003. It focuses on people as the main stakeholders in ensuring security and proposes a framework based upon the protection and empowerment of people (Ogata 2004, 25). A number of national governments— notably Canada, Japan, and Norway—have been instrumental in developing the human security idea and promoting policy change in line with human security goals. The approach has been developed further in the international relations discipline with perspectives on human security classified as either narrow, that is, focusing on political and military violence, or broad, including a range of complex issues, such as poverty, disease, health, and the environment (Owen 2004). Scholars of human security are influenced by a wide variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including critical theory (Dunne and Wheeler 2004; Booth 1991, 2005), critical international political economy (Thomas 2000; Thomas and Wilkin 1999), and liberalism (Axworthy 1997, 2001). 2. On the relevance of care and carework in the context of globalization and the global political economy, see Robinson (2006a, 2006b). 3. For an excellent recent discussion of the global, social, and political relevance of care ethics, see Virginia Held (2006). On the ethics of care and normative international relations theory, see Fiona Robinson (1999). 4. For an excellent analysis of the problematic nature of the concept of humanitarian intervention, see Chris Brown (in Farer et al. 2005). 5. For example, in Mehrangiz Najafizadeh’s analysis of women’s carework in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, she explores the intersection between economic transition and the consequences of war in order to understand fully both the crisis of care that emerged and the advocacy and agency of Azeri women in responding to this crisis (Najafizadeh 2003).

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8 The Ethics of Global Economic Governance Jacqueline Best

The classic texts in international ethics treat economic theory as essentially neutral. Taking a “toolbox” approach to economic theory, liberal moral philosophers often seek to change economic policy by redistributing economic goods without questioning the economic assumptions upon which the existing system is built and through which it is justified.1 The tendency to treat economics as a neutral toolbox is also particularly strong in international relations scholarship because of a double denial of ethics that has long constituted the field. The separation of the international from the domestic constitutes the first, more familiar, denial of ethics. The line that divides the inside of the sovereign state from the outside also defines the international as a space in which ethics is impossible, treating international relations theory as an amoral science (Linklater 1990; Walker 1993). Yet there also exists a second, less familiar, denial of ethics that is constituted by the separation of economics from politics. This second denial treats the economic realm as one governed by its own universal laws, immune from the vagaries of politics and knowable through the objective analysis of economics. Neither denial is inevitable. In international ethics, there has been considerable energy devoted to challenging the first of these denials by demonstrating how the international and its theories are informed by ethical assumptions. Less attention has been devoted to the second of these denials.2 Yet economics is not simply a neutral toolbox that can be used in different ways; its tools—the different, often conflicting theories that make up the discipline and the policies that it helps to shape—also contain specific moral assumptions. In this chapter, I develop the beginnings of a counterthesis to the double denial: a double affirmation declaring, first, that economics is informed by ethical assumptions and, second, that theorists of ethics must take economics seriously.3 I take a look at the ethical assumptions implicit in the theories and practices of global economic governance— international efforts to manage finance, trade, investment, and develop119

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ment—and trace their historical evolution and recent trends. In discussing the contemporary system, I focus on the central role played by the two major international financial institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. These institutions are particularly appropriate objects of analysis, not only because of their significant impacts on many ethically pressing issues such as poverty, development, and political and economic sovereignty, but also because of their increasing self-reflexivity about the ethics of their own practices in recent years, as they have begun to justify their recent policy changes in explicitly political and moral terms (Best 2005a). Thinking about ethics internationally poses certain challenges not necessarily present for those focusing solely within the boundaries of the nation-state. Once we move beyond the more familiar ethical dilemmas that confront us in our local and national communities, we are faced with a far wider range of different values and beliefs. We are also confronted with questions of boundaries and connections: where, if anywhere, do we draw the lines around communities of moral concern? Are our ethical responsibilities to someone in another part of the world the same as those for someone in our country or family? What is the nature of our moral connections with other human beings? Are our differences from one another also of moral value and, if so, how do we weigh them against the things that connect us? In the most general terms, these are questions about the moral value of universality and difference—the relationship between what we share as human beings and what distinguishes us as different individuals and groups. We must also recognize the centrality of this tension between universality and difference in the political economic realm. This means being attentive to both common economic needs and diverse values and experiences. In concrete terms we might, for example, identify extreme poverty, exploitation, and hunger as universal economic (even if not exclusively economic) ills, and meaningful work and a capacity to subsist as economic goods. We might also, however, recognize the multiplicity of different ways such common goals can be obtained, individually and collectively, and the different priorities that individuals and groups may accord to specific economic goals in relation to each other and to other objectives. Similarly we might value economic self-sufficiency, both individual and collective, as a moral good while also recognizing a more universal responsibility to ensure a decent standard of living for all. Global efforts to govern economic processes and relations must always seek to reconcile tensions between the moral appeal to universality and the counterclaim of the respect for difference. Any global economic regime will try to pursue certain universal goods, such as international financial stability or an open trading regime, while at the same time recognizing the different priorities and values of the many communities and individuals that are its members. Similarly, international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank base much of their legitimacy on their claim to the universality

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of their policies and the economic theories on which they are based; yet they must also respond to an extraordinary diversity of different local political, economic, and social practices and priorities. These tensions can produce enormous conflict and ultimately threaten the institutional order if they are not addressed. We should not, therefore, be surprised if the various institutions of global economic governance have historically relied on implicit moral assumptions and sometimes turned to explicit moral arguments to justify their policies and support their claim to legitimacy. Moreover, if we take a closer look at these moral claims, we may also begin to gain a richer understanding of the logic underpinning particular governance policies and their normative, as well as positive, implications. This chapter is divided into four main parts. First, I examine some recent attempts to develop a moral framework for global economic governance, suggesting that the major liberal perspectives tend to overresolve the tension between universality and difference either one way or the other. Second, I propose an alternative approach, sketching some initial guidelines for an ethics of economic governance that recognize, without entirely resolving, the competing claims of universality and difference. Third, using these preliminary ethical guideposts, I discuss the historical role of ethics in economic theory and practice, tracing its evolution in classical laissez-faire, Keynesian, and neoliberal economic orders. Last, I turn to the contemporary era and focus on the recent shift in the ethics of economic governance entailed in the IMF and World Bank’s changing discourse and policies on conditionality and country ownership. I conclude by considering both the nature of this recent shift and its implications for global ethics. I suggest that throughout much of the history of international economic governance, the tendency has been to resolve the tensions between universality and difference in a way that either subordinates difference as inferior or assimilates it into a rigid conception of economic and ethical universality. This is most notably the case in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century’s laissez-faire system of economic governance and in the neoliberal regime of the late twentieth century. Recent policy changes at the IMF and World Bank do possess the potential to redefine the relationship between universality and difference and achieve a better balance between these two fundamental values. Yet, in their present form, these new policies are actually working to reinscribe these same patterns by appropriating and instrumentalizing ethics for economic ends.

Liberal Approaches to Global Economic Ethics Contemporary moral philosophers have sought to respond to the tensions between the appeals of economic universality and difference in various ways. In international ethics, the most influential debate relating to econom-

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ics has been about distributive justice. On the one hand, cosmopolitan philosophers such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have emphasized the universality of global economic principles and responsibilities. Seeking to internationalize John Rawls’s “difference principle,” Beitz (1979) has argued that our moral responsibility to redistribute wealth in favor of the least welloff extends well beyond the bounds of the nation-state. Pogge (2002, 104–108) has also argued for the creation of a global resources dividend to redistribute wealth from the affluent to the poor, arguing that while there may be instances where international and domestic contexts justify different moral principles, the fundamental principles of economic justice should apply in both domestic and international contexts because economic realms are increasingly inseparable and because developed states and international institutions bear a measure of direct responsibility for global poverty. John Rawls, on the other hand, has taken a more communitarian approach to the global distributive justice debate. He explicitly rejects the idea of applying his domestic theory of justice internationally, arguing: “Although I think the difference principle is reasonable for domestic justice in a democratic society, it is not feasible as a way to deal with the general problem of unfavorable conditions among societies” (Rawls 1993, 75). Instead, Rawls proposes a much less demanding “duty of assistance.” He rejects a duty of redistribution on the grounds that states are largely responsible for their own economic success or failure: “I would conjecture that there is no society anywhere in the world—except for the marginal cases— with resources so scarce that it could not, were it reasonably and rationally organized and governed, become well-ordered” (Rawls 1999, 108). Although Rawls’s domestic theory of justice places the individual at the center of the moral universe, his international “law of peoples” takes peoples, or states, as the principal moral agents. As such, states not only bear primary responsibility for their own economic well-being, but also, in their political and cultural diversity, constitute a moral good that is to be valued in its own right. On the one hand, cosmopolitan theorists including Beitz and Pogge have challenged the sufficiency of Rawls’s duty of assistance, pointing out that global economic influences have become so strong that it is impossible to treat a state as solely responsible for its own economic success or failure (Beitz 2000; Buchanan 2000; Pogge 1994). Rawls’s emphasis on the value of political pluralism, on the other hand, raises important questions about the extent to which cosmopolitan economic principles are indeed universal or are instead a kind of comprehensive doctrine being imposed by the developed states on the underdeveloped. Each theoretical approach thus tends to overresolve the tension between universality and difference in favor of one or the other. The cosmopolitan claims of universal economic principles may erase valuable differences, while Rawls’s insistence on states’ responsibility

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for their own economic failures may condemn them to continuing inequality. In doing so, these theories run the risk of reproducing the kind of relationship that Westerners have practiced since their earliest encounters with the New World:4 the cosmopolitans may end up trying to assimilate economic difference into a homogeneous universal order, while Rawls’s policy tends to subordinate such differences through the reproduction of inequality.5 Neither fully succeeds in treating others as different but equal. At the same time, both approaches to ethics place considerable emphasis on the principles and outcomes of economic justice—the appropriate principle of justice and distribution of wealth—without paying much attention to the process involved in getting there. Yet in practical terms, the pursuit of economic justice is likely to remain an ongoing process toward an evolving ultimate objective. A principle of distributive justice or a duty of assistance do not tell us very much about how to go about putting them in place. Thomas Pogge is the most concrete in developing his proposed institution for redistributing wealth. Yet even he suggests that the actual changes to the economic system likely to be necessary are minor and can be worked out by the economists—as if such adjustments to the economic system were merely technical rather than acutely political and, as I argue below, moral problems.6

An Alternative Approach to Universality and Difference As useful as such abstract proposals and thought experiments can be, I propose a different approach to the challenge of developing an ethics of global economic governance. The process of building a more equitable global economic order is as important as the end result. By process, I mean not only the actions that are undertaken along the way, but also the institutions that are created or reformed and—crucially—the ideas that are used. If there are few neutral technical solutions to our economic challenges, if economic theory itself is contested and economic decisions often involve tradeoffs between one set of interests and another, or one value and another, then the process through which we make decisions and develop the knowledge to interpret and assess such problems is going to matter. Those developing such processes of ethical governance are also going to have to negotiate the tensions between universality and difference— seeking to identify the things that we share in common while also respecting the value of those that we do not. Achieving this dynamic balance without slipping into the twin dangers of assimilation and subordination will not be easy and will not have a single set of prescriptions to guide it. It might be possible, however, to develop some initial ethical criteria to assist in the development of such a mode of ethical economic governance. Before

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I examine the historical role of ethics in economic governance, it is therefore worth sketching some possible guidelines for assessing past and present practices. First, the context in which global economic governance occurs is significant and should be recognized by any ethical approach. That context is characterized by ambiguity and power. The international political economic realm is complex and full of uncertainty. Global economic flows are often unstable and unpredictable. The economic theories that seek to make sense of them are contested and changing. Economic decisions are characterized by conflicting values and interests. And economic actions are always informed by partial and subjective interpretations of what is going on in this complex environment. The essential ambiguity of the context within which economic governance occurs is ethically relevant because it requires an approach that recognizes the limits of its own understanding of the problems at hand; in other words it requires a certain humility and flexibility in the face of political economic ambiguity.7 At the same time, that same global context is informed by power relations. The most significant of these, of course, is the enormous imbalance in power between the industrialized and the least developed states, an imbalance that manifests itself in asymmetries of resources, knowledge, and bargaining power. Beyond this imbalance, there are also many other relations of power, both enabling and constraining, at different levels, cutting across national boundaries and involving different actors including NGOs, corporations, and international organizations. An ethics of global economic governance must recognize the pervasive role of such power relations; it must integrate and respond to such political challenges rather than ignoring or seeking to transcend them. Second, a global economic ethics should be based on an ontology that recognizes both the individual and the social as meaningful moral subjects. Many economic issues of moral concern are about individuals’ suffering, dignity, or capabilities, and our economic institutions, ideas, and actions must respond to these individual claims. At the same time, however, many of the processes that produce such economic suffering or joy are inescapably social. Unemployment, underdevelopment, economic growth, and poverty-reduction, to name a few, are all complex social phenomena that have significant ethical implications. Moreover these social processes cannot be reduced to an aggregation of individual actions; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The social has a moral value of its own, for by working together to resolve collective challenges individuals are thereby also transformed into something greater than they were. Yet the claims of the social and the individual can sometimes be in tension with one another, and we must be wary of appeals to the common good eclipsing the needs of the individual. An ethics of global economic governance must work to bal-

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ance these two ontological and ethical claims, recognizing both the individual and the social as morally significant.8 On the basis of that dual ontology, we can also discern a third set of ethical criteria: a set of ethical relations that seek to balance the value of autonomy with the call of solidarity. In the global economic context, autonomy means being able to determine one’s own economic priorities, make decisions on that basis, and ultimately make a living. That kind of autonomy is important not only for individuals but also for political communities of different kinds that may share common objectives and values. Yet no individual or community exists in a vacuum; the social nature of our political and economic existence also imposes on us certain ethical obligations of solidarity with others. Individual and social responsibilities cut across one another in complex ways: an individual, her family, her political community, and international actors and forces may all share some responsibility for her economic wealth or poverty. A global ethics must recognize and respect this complexity. Finally, in responding to these different claims, an ethics of global economic governance must work to balance the principles of the appeal to the universality of our experiences as human beings with respect for our many differences. Each of the above-mentioned ethical concerns helps to shape the nature of this final pair: the ambiguous nature of the international context calls for a flexible approach to universality, while the centrality of power urges caution in embracing difference for its own sake. A dual ontology that values the individual and the social recognizes the universal nature of both experiences while at the same time noting the differences in the way that they are lived. Solidarity speaks to the universality of our common bonds with others, while autonomy encourages us not to overstate or impose them on others. What emerges from this exploration of some of the guideposts for an ethics of global economic governance is a conception of the ideals of universality and difference that does not see them as opposites but rather as an agonistic pair. We need to understand universals not as absolutes but as regulative ideals or, as William Connolly (2002, 12) suggests, treat such standards as “indispensable constructions rather than either disposable fictions or natural kinds.” At the same time, we need to apply the same care in defining differences, resisting the temptation to treat them as essential and timeless and recognizing that they are not only contested but also marked by signs of interconnection. Together, these criteria will not provide us with a moral blueprint for governing global political economic relations. They will, however, provide some guidance in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of past and present strategies of global governance. Moreover, by exploring the evolution of the current international economic ideas, institutions, and practices, we may begin to flesh out these initial sketches and develop a more

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concrete sense of what a critical global ethics of economic governance might look like.

A Short History of Economic Ethics If we are to understand and assess the ethical dynamics of contemporary economic governance, we need to be able to compare them to previous regimes. Although the international financial institutions’ explicit preoccupation with ethics is relatively novel, economic theory and the practice of governance have always been informed by ethical assumptions, whether in the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the nineteenth century, the Keynesianinspired postwar order, or the more recent neoliberal era. To trace the roots of the contemporary system, we need to look back to the late nineteenth century, when the classic laissez-faire regime was in full swing.9 The international institution that typified this era was the gold standard, a financial convention that existed without any official organization but that played a very powerful role in shaping the economies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gold standard was, at least on the surface, a relatively simple mechanism: its central operating principle was that all currencies should be freely convertible into gold at a fixed rate. This meant in practice that different currencies could also be freely exchanged for one another, so that individuals and businesses could easily move their capital from one state to another without government interference. This was a classic liberal international economic regime based on the principle of laissez-faire—a belief that the economy was best served if it was left alone to regulate itself without government interference. It was a self-equilibrating system in which the market resolved any imbalances between debtor and creditor states through the automatic movement of gold: if a state spent more on imports than it earned through exports, its gold reserves would decline, leading to domestic economic contraction, which would, in turn, reduce demand for imports and ultimately make exports cheaper, reequilibrating the balance of payments.10 The advantage of the gold standard was that, at least initially, it fostered global economic stability by facilitating trade and investment. Its disadvantage was it tended to produce domestic economic and political instability as economies were forced to tolerate recessions and depressions in order to adjust to the demands of international financial stability (Best 2005b, chapter 3; Eichengreen 1996). This was an international economic system that sought to reconcile the tensions between universality and difference in a way that strongly favored universality: classical economists believed that the economy was governed by universal laws that were everywhere and always the same because they were based on the rational self-interested behavior of market actors. It was

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further believed that these laws were not only positive but also normative; they produced a stronger economy and a more peaceful political system that would ultimately benefit all. The moral philosophy underpinning the regime was based on a highly individualistic ontology that, following Adam Smith, placed the individual at the center of its moral universe. Smith (1993, 129–130) argued that an individual engaged in private enterprise “generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . He intends only his own gain, and he is . . . led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society” (emphasis added).11 This philosophy suggested that the general good could never be pursued as an end in itself, but was instead a by-product of individual action, so that there was little need for action by the state or other institutions to pursue the interests of society as whole. This was a system that placed considerable value on the autonomy of individuals and their capacity to act freely in the economic realm. Yet there was little attention to the need for a different kind of collective autonomy to enable political communities to govern themselves and protect the population from the often devastating swings of the business cycle produced by the movement of capital in an open global economy; such efforts were associated with the protectionist mercantilists that the liberal economists had fought to hard to defeat. At the same time, the benefits of individual autonomy under this liberal economic order were limited to those fortunate enough to live in a small group of core states; this was, after all, an era characterized by colonization as well as by liberalization, a paradox nicely captured by the British policy of “free trade imperialism.”12 Whether in the affluent North or the colonized South, domestic policy autonomy was seen as unnecessary in large measure because of the considerable faith placed in the universal rationality of the market economy. This was not a philosophy that saw the economy as an ambiguous and often unstable environment, but rather one that believed in its lawlike automaticity. This faith, in turn, was due in part to a tendency to disregard the political dimensions of economic life and to pay little attention to the winners and losers in this global economic system. Yet, in time, the losers began to fight their perennial fate as the ones who had to give up their livelihoods as domestic economies endured regular recessions in order to keep the global system going. Such political conflicts only intensified the uncertainties of the global economic system and it gradually collapsed, unable to sustain the pressures of two world wars and the Great Depression. In the aftermath of those great political and economic crises, world leaders sought to build a more formal system of economic governance that would avoid such dangerous instabilities. Many saw the laissez-faire system itself as partly responsible for the depression and the subsequent political

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strife that helped to precipitate the war. The Bretton Woods institutions were part of a new regime of global economic governance that sought to balance the goals of international economic openness with those of domestic policy autonomy and political stability—a system that John Ruggie (1982) has described as embedded liberalism. The two major institutions in this postwar order were the IMF, which was to ensure monetary stability and to help with short-term balance of payments crises, and the World Bank, which was designed to meet longer-term development needs. As one of the architects of this financial order, John Maynard Keynes’s ideas played a key role in the institutions’ early history. Keynes was not hesitant in articulating his views in explicitly moral terms. In 1933 he had published an article that challenged the laissez-faire system in no uncertain terms: “The decadent international but individualist capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods” (1933, 761). By the early 1940s, as discussions about the creation of a new postwar international economic order began, Keynes was finally in a position to try to create an institution that he believed would be more just and virtuous, as well as delivering the economic goods so badly needed for reconstruction. Keynes’s economic theory was based on a far more social ontology than that adopted by his classical predecessors. He argued that economic actors were not in fact perfectly rational, but instead relied on social conventions to make intelligent guesses in a radically uncertain economic world; he also pointed to the role of “animal spirits” or the wild swings of optimism and pessimism that often characterized the market (Keynes 1964, 316–317). In such an ambiguous economic environment, problems like unemployment and poverty could only be resolved collectively through an active state that sought to correct for the limits of the market (377–381). On the international stage, this meant not only that international institutions were essential to regulate global capital flows, but also that they should seek to empower domestic governments to enable them to create their own domestic welfare systems. The Bretton Woods era was, therefore, significantly different from its laissez-faire predecessor—both in economic and in ethical terms. Although, as I discuss below, it was far from achieving its potential, this theoretical and practical approach to ethics at least sought to achieve a better balance between universality and difference. It recognized the existence of common economic concerns and sought to develop a universal international institution capable of fostering an open economic system in which goods could be freely traded without fear of the kind of retaliatory tariff wars that had marked the interwar years. At the same time, the Bretton Woods regime recognized the validity of economic pluralism and, at least initially, supported what Keynes (1933, 763) had earlier described as states’ “favorite experi-

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ments” in economic policy. Part of this balance was achieved through the ambiguity of the Bretton Woods agreement itself, which allowed the IMF a certain leeway in applying the universal rules enshrined in its articles. The Bretton Woods institutions were based on a principle of solidarity, providing assistance to states in need of short- or longer-term financial assistance rather than forcing them to adjust domestically through painful recessions as had been the case in the past. And while this economic system was linked to a broader political and intellectual “invention of the social,” it also placed considerable emphasis on the moral value of the individual.13 In practice, however, the ethical, political and economic aspirations of the Bretton Woods regime were never entirely realized. The reasons for this failure are many and complex. They include the facts that US policymakers were able to significantly amend Keynes’s initial vision for a more generous international financial order, as well as the continuing conflict surrounding and within the IMF and World Bank between Keynesian and classical ideas and policies. Yet the Keynesian approach was also, to some extent, responsible for its ultimate failure, for it consistently underestimated the role of power and politics in the international order. Moreover, although this was the era of decolonization and state-led development, the institutions never lived up to their potential in tackling global inequalities between North and South. As these two institutions gradually shifted their attention from assisting industrialized economies to recover from the war to helping poor countries with their needs for finance and development, they continued to place faith in a technical and apolitical approach to economic difficulties. This trend became particularly pronounced—and problematic—as the Keynesian postwar approach was eclipsed by the new neoliberal governance approach in the 1980s.14 With the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the rise of Milton Friedman and other monetarists in economics, the global economic system took another significant turn—this time back to many of the same policies and principles that had characterized the earlier laissez-faire era. At the World Bank, this shift was heralded by the shift to structural adjustment lending, which provided states with access to general rather than project-tied funding in return for a growing list of “structural” changes to their domestic economies. At the IMF, where conditions had been placed on loans beginning quite early on in the institution’s history, they became increasingly numerous from the 1970s onwards. In the 1980s, the IMF also embraced its own version of structural conditionality, which again sought to make more profound reforms to domestic economies. In both cases, the structural reforms were aimed at achieving broad normative goals: the idea was to enable poor countries to make the changes necessary to achieve sustainable economic growth, which was seen as both an important end in itself and a means to other social and political goods.

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This new global economic regime was a decidedly universalist one, based on a belief in the universal value of free-market policies. The Washington Consensus, as it came to be known, was first developed to address the difficulties that Latin American countries faced in dealing with their debt crises, but was soon applied throughout the developing world.15 Privatization, financial and trade liberalization, low inflation, tax reform, and balanced budgets were the new policy watchwords, replacing the Keynesian preoccupation with full employment. Above all, the state was to get out of the business of managing the economy as far as it was humanly possible. Although its proponents generally denied the ethical assumptions implicit in their prescriptions, representing them as neutral and technical, this economic strategy was based on a moral philosophy that was highly individualistic. Not only was the individual’s freedom of choice the paramount value—the individual was all that really existed. This ontological individualism was articulated most succinctly by Margaret Thatcher herself when she insisted, “There is no such thing as society,” but was also clearly present in Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s influential economic writings.16 This approach to economic governance did not entirely ignore the value of solidarity; the international financial institutions continued to provide short- and long-term assistance to countries in need, if only with significant conditions. In theory, this economic philosophy also embraced individual autonomy, placing significant importance on economic choice. Yet, this was also the era in which the problem of poverty dropped well down the list of the World Bank’s priorities, suggesting that autonomy was conceived as an abstract goal rather than being pursued as a concrete reality for the many still living in absolute poverty around the world. At the same time, there was little effort to foster local or national policy autonomy as a means to constructive economic ends; as in the nineteenth century, it was assumed that one set of economic values and practices were appropriate for all. This was a regime that ignored the lessons of the Great Depression and believed that the market was truly rational and unambiguous and that politics could be neatly separated out from economics by keeping the state out of the economy. As the processes of international economic governance have evolved, so have the ethical assumptions that helped to shape and justify them. In each of these successive eras—the early laissez-faire regime, the Keynesian Bretton Woods era, and the more recent neoliberal system—we can trace the interplay between the ideals of universality and difference and their impact on economic ideas and practices. The Keynesian era came closest to striking a balance between the pursuit of a cautious universality and the respect for difference; yet even this system ultimately failed, in large measure because of its belief in the possibility of separating politics from economics and thus in finding technical solutions to what are often difficult social, political, and moral problems. At each of these moments—particu-

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larly the classical and neoliberal orders—it is also possible to see the twin dangers of assimilation and subordination: too often, different economic values and priorities have been treated as signs of backwardness or disorder rather than as legitimate choices, as these international institutions so often end up imposing a universal set of principles when the toleration or even the active fostering of diversity would ultimately have created a more ethical global order.

A New Global Ethical and Economic Era? The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed yet another shift in global economic governance strategies and in the moral assumptions that underpin them. Like its classical predecessors, the neoliberal system and the assumptions it was based on have been tested by significant crises—this time the twin development and financial crises of the 1990s. By the mid1990s, it became clear to World Bank leaders that the 1980s had not been a great success in development terms. Although some Asian economies, most notably India and China, had been able to reduce overall poverty levels, for Africa it was a decade in which ground had actually been lost.17 The IMF, in turn, was struck by a series of major financial crises including monetary shocks in Europe, Mexico, and, finally and most devastatingly, in East Asia. In the aftermath of these various crises, both the IMF and World Bank underwent a certain amount of soul-searching, encouraged by both academic and civil society critics. IMF leaders called for a new international financial architecture better able to withstand the instabilities and uncertainties of a globalized economic order. The World Bank, in turn, has implemented a series of new policies designed to reform its approach to development. Both institutions’ efforts have been marked by a new tendency to frame their reforms in explicitly moral terms, as their leaders have sought to characterize their goals as a means of “civilizing globalization,” and fostering a new “global ethics” (see Camdessus 1999; Köhler 2002a). What then is the moral vision underpinning these new reform initiatives? Does it respond to the economic and ethical failings of the neoliberal system, or does it reproduce them? These are the questions that I try to answer in this final section of the chapter. The World Bank was the first institution to begin pulling back from the hard-line neoliberalism of the 1980s. Under the leadership of Barber Conable, the Bank began to return to its earlier emphasis on poverty reduction, particularly with the publication of its 1990–1991 World Development Report entitled “Poverty,” a trend that continued under his successor, Lewis Preston (World Bank 1990).18 Throughout the early 1990s, the Bank was also subject to considerable external criticism. Conservative critics, includ-

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ing a number of influential members of the US Congress, saw the institution as expensive and unnecessary in a world in which private capital could do a better job than a public institution and argued for scaling back the Bank’s operations accordingly. Critical NGOs, however, condemned the Bank for being too narrowly market-oriented in the structural conditions they imposed on borrowing states. James Wolfensohn, who took up the leadership of the Bank in 1995, sought to respond to both sets of criticisms in a series of major policy initiatives over the next decade, including the Partnership Initiative, the Knowledge Bank, and the Comprehensive Development Framework.19 These policy changes at the Bank were not only a response to political pressures from left and right but also to changes in research thinking at the institution. Bank research began to raise questions about the efficacy of its coercive approach to imposing conditions, suggesting that reform programs that were not “owned” by developing country governments were rarely successfully implemented. Joseph Stiglitz contributed his own impetus to these changes when he became chief economist at the World Bank in 1997. In a number of influential lectures and policy papers, Stiglitz (1998a, 1998b) set out to challenge the status quo approach to development, arguing for a new paradigm for development and a move toward a post–Washington Consensus. Drawing on his Nobel Prize–winning economic research into the problems of asymmetric information and market failure, Stiglitz argued the importance of building effective institutions rather than assuming that the market alone can foster adequate development. At the same time, he placed considerable emphasis on the importance of individual autonomy, arguing, “At the heart of development is a change in the ways of thinking and individuals cannot be forced to change how they think” (Stiglitz 1998b, 20). Although Stiglitz’s direct influence on Bank policy was ultimately limited by both internal and external opposition—most notably by US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers—his ideas did help to shape the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) initiative at the institution and the Bank’s more general focus on participatory development.20 With its emphasis on “partnership,” “country-ownership,” and “results focus” and “long-term holistic” development, the CDF seeks to return greater control and responsibility for development in the hands of poor countries, while at the same time pursuing longer-term social and institutional transformation rather than only narrow economic development. One of the principal mechanisms for pursuing this development strategy is the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), which is, at least in theory, developed by the borrowing country and agreed to by the Bank and IMF as a basis for their development strategy. The International Monetary Fund, in its turn, has introduced a number of policy changes in response to the financial crises of the 1990s. The

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Fund’s focus has been primarily on ensuring that the institution is able to prevent such crises in the future or, at the very least, respond more effectively to them. To that end, the IMF called for greater transparency in global and domestic financial markets, arguing that one of the central causes of the financial crisis was the insufficiency of information provided to financial markets. More transparent international financial markets, Fund leaders argue, requires more transparent domestic institutions: the IMF has also picked up on the new emphasis on institutions and sought to encourage domestic reform by developing a new series of international standards and codes designed to establish “best practices” in twelve different issue areas (IMF 2004; IMF and World Bank 2003). IMF leaders like Michel Camdessus and Horst Köhler have argued for the importance of these reforms, not only on the grounds of efficiency but also by appealing to the idea of global fairness. Such standards and codes, they suggest, will provide a new set of “universally accepted rules and standards” (Köhler 2002a) to ensure that states and investors are on a “level playing field” (Köhler 2002b) and can function in a “civilized environment” (Camdessus 1999). At the same time as they have introduced these measures designed to stabilize the global financial system, the Fund’s leadership has also introduced a number of policy changes designed to address the institution’s relationship with its poorest member countries. The IMF has made poverty reduction an explicit part of its mandate for the first time in its history. Much like their counterparts at the World Bank, IMF researchers have begun to raise serious concerns about the efficacy of loan programs that are not owned by borrowing states’ governments. There has been considerable debate within and around the institution about the relationship between country ownership and conditionality, with a growing number of scholars and policymakers suggesting that the increase in policy conditions in the 1990s may ultimately have proven counterproductive in achieving domestic policy reforms (Erbas 2003; James 1998; Khan and Sharma 2003). It is in this context that the Fund’s managing director, Horst Köhler, proposed the “streamlining” of conditionality, an initiative guided by four basic principles: parsimony in the number of conditions, tailoring those conditions to a country’s specific situation, coordinating effectively with the World Bank and other donors, and country ownership of the policy reforms, which is to be fostered through active participation of the borrowing government in the formulation of the program (IMF 2002, 2003). In spite of the many differences between the recent IMF and World Bank initiatives, there are some striking similarities, not only in the strategies being employed by these two institutions but also in the ethical assumptions that underpin them. Both institutions are attempting to redefine the relationship between universality and difference in a way that differs from both the neoliberal approach of the 1980s and the Keynesian approach

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that preceded it. If we return to the four pairs of ethical guidelines discussed above, we can begin to determine first the form and then the implications of this transformation. One of the main traits that distinguishes this new approach to economic governance from its immediate predecessor is its return to recognizing society as well as the individual as economically and ethically significant. With their new emphasis on the central role played by institutions in the economy, both IMF and World Bank representatives have begun to recognize the importance of collective mechanisms for ensuring economic growth and stability. The World Bank has moved further in this direction in its adoption of the concept of “social capital,” which the Bank defines as “the norms and networks that enable collective action,” a kind of social cohesion that is “critical for poverty alleviation and sustainable human and economic development” (World Bank 2004). At the same time, the individual—as consumer, investor, or entrepreneur—remains central to both institutions’ governance strategies. The new emphasis on poverty reduction is, above all, about helping poor individuals rather than poor states. The World Bank, moreover, now argues for the importance of fostering individuals’ empowerment by increasing their capacity to make choices and achieve their goals (World Bank 2006a)—an approach that has clearly been partly inspired by the ethical thinking of Amartya Sen (1999). These two institutions thus appear to have replaced their singular focus on the individual with recognition of the interdependence between the individual and society as agents of economic development. Thus Stiglitz (1998b) argues, “In the end, the transformation of society entails a transformation of the way individuals think and behave.” Yet this new conception of their interrelationship remains functional—even technical. Institutions are important because they can resolve market failures and reproduce a perfectly functioning market economy. Social capital is important insofar as it can be used to mitigate the risks and difficulties of economic development. The term “social capital” is itself quite revealing, reducing as it does social relationships to a store of economic value. The individual is also something of a cipher in this new approach to economic development. There is considerable attention paid to the importance of developing the right incentives in the form of regulations and institutions to ensure correct individual behavior. Individuals must be taught to “think and behave” differently; they cannot be forced to do so as sought by the old approach to development; they must be channeled through a range of regulations and provided with the incentives necessary to change their way of thinking and acting. Although this strategy is clearly well intentioned, it does evoke the image of a rat in a maze. The individual and the social thus remain rather instrumental categories in this new approach to global economic governance. The concrete relations among individuals and societies in this global

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governance strategy are more explicitly ethically informed: characterized by both solidarity and autonomy. In fact, both Horst Köhler and Michel Camdessus, successive managing directors of the IMF, called explicitly for the twin principles of “solidarity” and “responsibility” (IMF 1997; Köhler 2002a). Solidarity in international economic governance has come to be defined in terms of aid and policy convergence. Both the IMF and World Bank have called for developed states to pledge 0.7 percent of GDP toward foreign aid—a significant increase from current levels. At the same time, IMF leaders have sought to justify their new global standards and codes by pointing to the need for policy reforms in developing states as a form of solidarity in an increasingly globalized world in which the actions of one state can have significant effects on its neighbors (IMF 1997, 294). Calls for developing economies’ “responsibility” and “ownership,” however, speak more to the value of autonomy—the belief that poor states should have greater say over the policies that they adopt in order to adjust to global pressures and that they should, as a result, take more responsibility for their successes and failures. These two principles are often presented as something of a quid pro quo: in return for greater solidarity in the form of financial assistance, developing states are to agree to take more responsibility for making domestic policy changes designed to integrate them into the global economy. If there is genuine country and civil society ownership of plans for economic reform, developing countries and their population could decide how to meet these goals—and even the extent to which they wanted to pursue such objectives. The evidence to date, however, raises serious questions about whether these goals are being met. There is little question that the early implementation of the PRSP process was flawed; even some members of the IMF Executive Board have suggested that, in the early days, the reports were written in Washington (IMF 2007a). Since then, there has been some indication of progress in the implementation of the strategies; however, it is not clear that the views of poor people are being regularly integrated into policy programs, nor that the scope of debate over policy alternatives veers far from traditional neoliberal prescriptions (UNCTAD 2002; see also IMF 2004). Has these institutions’ appreciation of the global context of economic governance changed? It does seem clear that both institutions have at least moderated their earlier optimism about the political and economic context within which efforts at governing the global economy must operate. Although Stiglitz’s criticism of the Washington Consensus is not representative of the economic mainstream of opinion within the IMF and World Bank, his institutionalist economics has been very influential. World Bank and Fund documents pay significantly more attention to the potential for market failure and emphasize the challenge of uncertainty and insufficient

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information. These shifts may not represent a wholehearted embrace of the pervasiveness of ambiguity in the international economic system, but they are a significant step down that path and away from the assumption that the market is automatically self-initiating and stabilizing. Fund and Bank documents have also begun to pay more attention to the problem of politics. For example, the PRSP approach used by both Fund and Bank is inherently political: it imposes on developing states an obligation to involve their citizens at various levels in a discussion about the kinds of policies to be adopted to reduce poverty.21 The focus on ownership inherent in this and other new policies recognizes that political support and legitimacy are essential for Fund and Bank policies’ success. Yet, although many of the new initiatives point to a growing recognition of the central role of politics, they also reveal a continuing blindness to the inequalities of power. The concept of partnership adopted by the Bank belies the highly unequal nature of the relationship between debtor and creditor, in which the poorer countries have few of the resources necessary to come to the table as a genuine partner. Similarly, the IMF language of a “rule-governed order” and of “level playing fields” ignores the underlying historical and structural inequalities that mean affluent states will be much better able to take advantage of these rules than poor ones. More broadly, the IMF and World Bank’s new initiatives can be understood as an effort to rearticulate the relationship between universality and difference in international economic governance. The institutions continue to place significant emphasis on the universality of economic experiences and values. This can be seen most clearly in the institutions’ joint development of a wide range of universal standards and codes designed to represent best practices in key economic policy areas, which all states are to adopt (IMF and World Bank 2003; Köhler 2001). The standards are based on Western economic practices and tend to emphasize the importance of reducing the role of the state in the economy. This policy initiative, which is primarily focused on emerging market economies, is based on the assumption that there is one best set of economic practices that can be usefully adopted by all states, regardless of their individual historical and political circumstances and their diverse values. There is nonetheless some evidence of a move to place greater emphasis on the diversity of local experience. IMF staff members are urged to pay more attention to the local political and economic dynamics and to tailor their newly streamlined conditions to these diverse contexts rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. The move from structural adjustment policies to PRSPs was also intended to create more room for local participation and variation. To date, however, the evidence on the success of this effort to respect local difference is not encouraging, particularly at the IMF: recent reports from the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office—on the

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Fund’s role in sub-Saharan Africa and its exchange-rate evaluation function—raise concerns about the institution’s ability to respond to the particular needs of local contexts (IMF 2007b, 2007c). Although the Fund claims that it does not have a cookie-cutter approach to policy advice, it nonetheless does tend to provide general policy advice without tailoring it to individual circumstances (IMF 2007d). Not all of the new policies are similarly one-sided. The new emphasis on poverty as a universal ill, combined with the effort to develop local strategies for addressing it, is one example of the constructive way such universals can be combined with a recognition of difference. Yet although they are open to letting poor people develop their own strategies for alleviating poverty at the margins, these institutions continue to believe that economic principles themselves remain immune to local variation and can instead be modeled on Western economic priorities and practices.

Conclusion On balance, it appears that there is a new ethos underpinning the recent changes in IMF and World Bank policies. What is interesting about this shift is its rather misleading appearance. At first glance, based on the rhetoric of both institutions, it would appear to be quite a significant shift—perhaps even a return to the Keynesian era with its emphasis on solidarity and the social and its careful balance of universality and difference. On a closer investigation, the practical results, at least to date, of these changes appears to be very limited, suggesting very little change from the individualistic neoliberal era of the 1980s. It takes a third, more careful analysis to reveal that there have in fact been some significant changes in the political and ethical logic of these new policies. There has been some attempt by both institutions to respond to the challenges of difference by tailoring their policies to specific circumstances and involving different states and sometimes even communities in the formulation of policy. Yet there remains a profound faith in the universality and timelessness of a singular and Western conception of economics. The social has returned as a valid subject of analysis and moral concern, but in an impoverished and instrumentalized form. The individual’s identity and needs have been defined more richly than the narrow calculus of economic utility, but the individual has also become an object of more subtle and constant discipline. There has been some movement toward greater global solidarity in the form of financial aid and at least more rhetorical commitment to the value of individual and state autonomy. Both institutions have also begun to recognize the pervasiveness of ambiguity and politics in the global economy, but have stopped far short of address-

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ing the power imbalances that continue to shape the practices of global economic governance. This turn of events points to the significant practical implications of ethical assumptions in the realm of international economic governance. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the ongoing battle over the direction of global development, it will take place in part in the realm of ethics: however explicit or implicit, questions of the moral significance of the individual and the social, the relative importance of autonomy and solidarity, and the appropriate balance between universality and difference will always be at stake in debates over the evolution of these institutions. These institutions’ move into more explicitly ethical and political terrain opens up the possibility of challenging them on their commitment to truly engage with the social dimensions of economic life and to push forward on solidarity, autonomy, and the reduction of poverty. Yet, to date, the effects of this policy shift at the Bank and IMF do raise significant concerns. Because the overwhelming majority of their researchers and staff continue to treat neoclassical economics as universal and incontestable, efforts to respond to diversity, however well-intentioned, tend to assume that differences are marginal or temporary diversions from the path to economic orthodoxy. Even if the means have become somewhat more flexible, in the form of more carefully tailored and owned conditions, the ends remain the same. Rather than fostering a genuine dialogue about what is universal and different about our economic needs and values, this approach has the effect of reproducing the historical pattern of subordinating and assimilating difference. Although the IMF and World Bank have expanded their scope into these more explicitly political and ethical domains, they have continued to think about and act on them in narrowly economic terms. One of the principal effects of the recent reforms has thus been to depoliticize what were once potently political and moral concepts: social relationships, political debates, and appeals to solidarity and autonomy have largely been reduced to a series of incentives designed to produce efficient economic outcomes. If ethics were invoked in the Keynesian post–Great Depression era to justify the new global approach to economic governance, and denied in the neoliberal era in the name of technical neutrality, they have now been appropriated and instrumentalized as a means to greater economic efficiency. Ironically, this instrumental conception of ethics is not unlike the approach to ethics that we often witness in international relations: challenging the first denial of ethics, international ethics theorists have long criticized mainstream international relations scholars for treating international relations as neutral and assuming that ethics is an optional extra that is essentially separate from the real world of politics; yet some of these same international ethics theorists apply this same standard to international eco-

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nomics, treating it as a realm that is only contingently (rather than fundamentally) ethical. International economics, like international relations, is already characterized by ethical assumptions. Moreover, we cannot simply treat ethics as something that can be added or subtracted, and rendered as a useful supplement to an underlying neutral theory of economics, as these international institutions have sought to do. Scholars of economic governance need to take ethical analysis seriously, and international ethics scholars need to pay more attention to the realm of economics. For it is only by understanding the economic dimensions of global ethical dilemmas and the ethical dimensions of economic challenges that we will develop the capacity to imagine and ultimately fight for a more ethical world.

Notes 1. As I will discuss below and have argued in greater length elsewhere, these moral philosophers include John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, and Charles Beitz. See also Best (2006a). 2. In spite of the fact that the second denial of ethics is implicated in the first, neorealists and neoliberals both use economic theory to bolster their appeals to positivist neutrality (see Waltz 1979; Keohane 1984). 3. For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between economics and ethics, and the different ethical assumptions implicit in micro- and macroeconomics, see Best and Widmaier (2006). 4. On Europe’s encounter with the New World and its treatment of difference, see Pagden (1993) and Todorov (1982). On its reverberations in international political economy, see Inayatullah and Blaney (1999) 5. For a fuller discussion of these tendencies in liberal theorists, see Best (2006a). 6. As I have discussed elsewhere (Best 2006a), this assumption about the neutrality of economics can be traced back to Rawls’s own theory of justice and its neoclassical assumptions about individual rationality and the role of the state. 7. Elsewhere I have provided a much more extensive discussion of the role of ambiguity in international economic governance (see Best 2005b). 8. Such an approach would seek to resist the dominant dichotomy between cosmopolitan and communitarian moral ontologies. For a thoughtful feminist critique of these two perspectives, see Robinson (1999). 9. For discussions of the longer historical evolution of international financial governance, beginning in the sixteenth century, see Germain (1997) and Langley (2002). 10. The classic articulation of this self-equilibrating system is David Hume’s (1752) price-specie flow mechanism. Some scholars have suggested, however, that the system depended on significant coordinated government and central bank activism in practice (see, for example, Drummond 1987). 11. Of course, Adam Smith’s own ontological individualism was embedded in a more complex and explicit moral framework than his modern-day followers tend to assume. He was, after all, a moral philosopher as well as an economist. 12. I have discussed this paradox and its parallels with the contemporary era elsewhere (Best 2006b).

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13. On the invention of the social, see Donzelot (1984). Keynes’s continuing very liberal emphasis on the importance of the individual as the key moral and economic agent is particularly apparent in the final chapter of his General Theory (1964). 14. The reasons for the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime in the early 1970s and its eventual replacement with the neoliberal system are complex (see Best 2004; 2005a, chapter 5; Helleiner 1994). 15. The term “Washington Consensus” was coined by John Williamson (1990). 16. Thatcher’s comments were made in a Woman’s Own interview in 1987. She later elaborated on the statement suggesting, “I went on to say: There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first” (Thatcher 1995). 17. The UNDP’s 2003 Human Development Report describes the 1990s as “a decade of despair” for many countries, noting that some fifty-four states were poorer in 2003 than in 1990 (UNDP 2003, 2). 18. See Kapur, Lewis, and Webb (1997, 27–46) for a discussion of the Bank’s approach to poverty reduction under Conable and Preston. 19. Although I discuss the Comprehensive Development Framework briefly in this chapter, see Pincus and Winters (2002) for an excellent analysis of the full range of recent World Bank initiatives. 20. Summers’s opposition in fact ultimately led to Stiglitz’s departure from the Bank in 2000 (see Wade 2001, 2002). 21. See Piron and Evans (2004) for a thoughtful study of the political dynamics of PRSPs.

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9 Environmental Ethics Richard A. Matthew, Heather Goldsworthy, and Bryan McDonald

Since the late twentieth century a subfield of environmental ethics has emerged to reinforce the idea that ethics matters at the global scale. Environmental ethics challenges the domestic/international and inside/outside dichotomies (see Walker 1993) by focusing on the reality of the nonterritorial basis of nature, both human and nonhuman. Environmental ethicists have provided the most insistent image of a planet that is ecologically connected and interdependent in ways that have little congruence with political boundaries. They have also argued that, due to unsustainable and destructive human practices affecting the planet’s ecology, there is an urgent need for better forms of governance that are more respectful of this interconnected reality. To be effective, such governance must be global in scale and scope. The translation of environmental ethical theory to political practice has occurred through global governance mechanisms; however, global governance has adopted but one, partial strand of a much richer and variegated body of ethical thought (see Young 2001). After about two-and-a-half decades of research and debate, a concept rooted in environmental ethics, sustainable development, has become central to official diplomatic and legal efforts to save the environment. The key moment in this process is unquestionably the adoption of Agenda 21 by the international community at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. Additionally, and in light of the mounting scientific and economic evidence about the magnitude of global environmental change, a number of other more specific instruments have made for an impressive network of environmental governance instruments, including: the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Basel Convention, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and many other agreements. In these areas, the norm of sustainable development has had significant traction in influencing new and important directions in global governance. 141

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However, in this chapter we argue that the resources of environmental ethics have a potentially much broader and more radical contribution to make in the politics of global governance institutions, practices, and values. Rather than just sustainable development, we suggest that the ethical virtues of respecting and knowing the natural world offer a promising way to deal with the environmental consequences of the manifold aspects of political, economic, and social relations in world politics. Ultimately, future efforts to make global governance more ethical will require a greater respect and knowledge of the environment; for too long, global governance politics has been utterly indifferent to the environmental impacts of industrialization, growth, and progress on nature (both human and nonhuman). This chapter first gives an overview of the main elements of environmental ethics. Second, we analyze the limited impact of such ethics in the politics of global governance and the importance of applying the virtues of knowing and respecting nature to areas not typically viewed as having an environmental reality. Here we outline two case studies, food security and microfinance, that are typically divorced from the environmental in mainstream approaches to global governance. These case studies show a more general point, namely, that sustainable development, as broad and perhaps amorphous a norm as it is, is insufficient to bring environmental ethics to the vast range of ways global governance politics impact nature. Our conclusion suggests how environmental ethics can be made more central to the ethics of global governance.

An Overview of Environmental Ethics From the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, the basic building block of the discipline of economics was the circular flow model. It is a simple model that shows payments flowing from firms into households in return for labor and capital, and payments flowing back from households into firms in return for goods and services. In its most influential formulation, the circular flow model did not include nature, but in the second half of the twentieth century, natural resource economists began to revise the model. They placed it in the broader context of nature and added arrows that showed natural resources and energy drawn into production processes and waste and pollution discharged back into nature during the production and consumption of goods. Over time, the circular flow model has grown more complex by including a complex set of relationships within society and between society and nature. Analogously, one might suggest human rights as the most basic building block of international ethics. Although principles related to state sovereignty and just war are significant, it is hard to conceive of international

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ethics without human rights at its center (see, for example, Makinda’s chapter in this volume). Not surprisingly, central to environmental ethics is the argument that a healthy or clean environment is a human right, together with various attempts to extend the logic of rights across time to include future generations, and across space to include nonhuman nature. The origin of environmental ethics is an open question, but many of its historical milestones are well-defined. While histories generally mention St. Francis of Assisi, and everyone in the field is familiar with the contributions of people like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldo Leopold is probably the individual most commonly identified as the symbolic father of environmental ethics. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold (1949) introduced his famous “land ethic.” For Leopold, human welfare depends on the health of the natural environment and we therefore need to think of ourselves as belonging to a community that includes the land and its nonhuman inhabitants. Against this background, Leopold argues that we have a moral obligation to understand the land and to act in ways respectful of how it functions and what it needs to be healthy. Leopold’s land ethic, with its moral injunctions to know the land and to respect the land, did not become broadly influential until the contemporary environmental movement emerged in the 1960s. The work of Rachel Carson (1962) expressed many of the elements that would be woven into the field of environmental ethics: outrage at the thoughtless violence against nature perpetrated by humans trying to maximize their material well-being; profound reverence for the vitality, power, beauty, and vast dimensions of nature; and concern about how human acts—such as spraying insecticides—could not only hurt nonhuman species but also transform nature into a threat to humans themselves. Toward the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, a stream of influential work was published that affirmed and expanded upon these themes of reverence, connectedness, violence, ignorance, and responsibility and forged the goals and vocabulary of environmental ethics. A number of influential ideas were introduced during this early phase of development. Lynn White Jr. (1967) argued that Christianity, democracy, and Western science had combined to construct a worldview that regarded nature as nothing more than raw material to be transformed into commodities by societies that were significantly outside and above nature. Garrett Hardin (1968, 1974) introduced the tragedy of the commons and lifeboat ethics concepts. The first suggested that in the absence of government, that is, in common areas like the oceans, there was no incentive to harvest sustainably—much of earth’s bounty was bound to be overexploited. The second suggested that as we breached the carrying capacity of the planet, we would no longer be able to help people suffering from want or we would find ourselves in danger. In other words, helping the world’s destitute was

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like adding too many people to a lifeboat. It was putting everyone at risk and would have to stop. Paul Ehrlich (1968) underscored the Malthusian dangers of recklessly increasing population on a planet with finite resources. Barry Commoner (1971) wrote of a “closing circle” wrought by technologies destroying nature. Donella Meadows (1972) prepared a report on the “limits to growth.” In Turtle Island, the poet Gary Snyder (1969) described the ecological sensibility of indigenous cultures, an attitude that E. F. Schumacher (1973) also attributed to Buddhism in works such as Small Is Beautiful. For all of these writers, mass industrial society, prone to war and violence, dependent on equating human well-being with consumption, and utterly illiterate from an ecological perspective, was destroying the majestic web of life that had evolved over billions of years and suffocating itself in its own waste and excess. For many, the solution was to be found in a return to small, self-sufficient, moderate, ecologically sensitive, and spiritually profound communities. Murray Bookchin (1971, 1982), who popularized the concept of “social ecology,” wrote extensively through the 1970s and 1980s about the virtues of a radical, green, communitarian anarchism. In 1971, J. Baird Callicott (1989), another founder of the subfield, offered perhaps the first course in environmental ethics at the University of Wisconsin. The year 1973 saw two major contributions—the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973) introduced the concept of “deep ecology,” and Christopher Stone (1974), as part of an effort to curtail deforestation in California, raised the question, “If nature is morally considerable, then do trees have legal standing?” Tom Regan and Peter Singer (1976) published another landmark book, Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Three years later the journal Environmental Ethics was founded; the subfield had been secured. During the 1980s and 1990s, the subfield grew rapidly. While there is no standard way of representing it, we can briefly delineate its key features by considering two general orientations. In the first, the anthropocentric perspective, nature is generally packaged as a human right. In the second, the biocentric perspective, humans are woven into a web of life that is itself a moral subject and that possesses rights independent of human perception and valuation. Among the contributions of the anthropocentric view are the idea of a clean environment as a human right (UNEP 2004), concerns about environmental justice and racism (Bullard 1979, 1993), a focus on moral obligations to future generations (Partridge 1990), the concept of ecofeminism (D’Eaubonne 1974; Merchant 1980), and the recognition that people value nature for aesthetic, spiritual, and other reasons that are not easily assigned an economic value or analyzed using economic tools (Rolston III 2002). The biocentric view has also made a number of distinct contributions to

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the development of environmental ethics (Wilson 1992). These include the concept of animal rights (Singer 1990; Regan and Singer 1976), the Gaia hypothesis and related images of the world as an interconnected web of life (Lovelock 1979; Capra 1996), and the concept of deep ecology (Naess 1973; Devall and Sessions 1985). All of these thinkers argue that nature possesses an intrinsic value independent of human beliefs, consciousness, and practices. A vigorous and enduring debate has taken place between these two loosely organized, and often overlapping, camps. Biocentric views have been challenged as bourgeois, insensitive to real human needs and accomplishments, and dependent upon a type of knowledge that requires a godlike intellect, while anthropocentric views have been criticized as ecologically uninformed and unable to justify their own moral boundaries. The subfield has also been the target of more general critiques (Guha 1989; Ferry 1992). These general critiques express skepticism about what this subfield adds to ethics that cannot be achieved within a fully humanist human rights framework. Critics are concerned about where radical doctrines like animal rights lead and voice concern about the sort of activities environmental ethics may justify—such as the violent actions of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and Earth First! Critics are also quick to note that the principal authors of environmental ethics tend to have romantic views of wilderness and exotic species, while at the same time benefiting enormously from the safe, free lifestyles they are able to lead inside those societies that produce the most, consume the most, and have caused the most global environmental change—such as Australia, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Guha 1989). Some of the writings in this subfield have received considerable attention by, among other things, demanding more wilderness, promoting animal rights, expressing a willingness to sacrifice people for endangered species or ecosystems, and exploring the social taboo against sex with animals. Such unconventional positions may make it easier to dismiss environmental ethics altogether. Consider, for example, Peter Singer’s (2001) essay “Heavy Petting,” in which he states that “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.” This triggered responses such as, Singer “has gotten tired of defending killing disabled babies and has now started defending something completely different: bestiality” (Vanderkam 2001). The same angry response to environmental ethics writ large is evident in the very influential study by Luc Ferry (1992), The New Ecological Order, in which he argues that we gain nothing by embedding humans in a larger moral subject called

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nature and lose much—specifically, we lose the culture of humanity that makes our status within nature utterly unique. Environmental ethics clearly has a wide array of moral perspectives. However, a much narrower range of its concerns has been typically applied to global governance politics.

Environmental Ethics and Global Governance In Code of Peace, Dorothy Jones (1989) argues there are universally understood ethical principles that are focused on the particular challenges of world politics. Based on a review of international documents developed during the twentieth century, she argues that these principles have been carefully crafted to address real problems in the world. She argues that these documents reveal a total of eleven principles that she describes as a “code of peace,” or what we might now call a form of global governance. One of these, a relative newcomer still vying for global acceptance, is “protection of the environment” (xii). Jones expresses no doubt that it makes sense to incorporate the environment into the ethical code of global governance. Where Jones is more ambivalent is on the question of whether or not these ethical principles matter in practice. The narrow version of the question we are interested in is: Do environmental ethics matter to global governance? The answer is not a simple one, but there is no doubt that the environment has been inscribed into the practices and norms of global governance. This was emerging as Jones wrote, and it was explicitly formalized shortly thereafter when state and nonstate actors met in Rio in 1992 to accept the concept of sustainable development as an organizing principle of world order. Three Earth Summits (Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992, and Johannesburg 2002), the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), along with the rapid expansion of international environmental law are key developments. Moreover, sustainable development explicitly includes an ethical dimension—it can only take place within the space defined by ethics, ecology, and economics. Yet it is very hard to measure the impact this norm has had. Ten years after Rio, in the run-up to Johannesburg, assessments of progress toward sustainable development were overwhelmingly circumspect if not frankly critical. It is difficult to measure the impact of ethical principles in global governance practice. This is also the case with sustainable development because of the concept’s ambiguity. Although sustainable development springs from environmental ethics, the concept can be made more or less radical in light of two distinct ethical foundations within the broader tradition. From the perspective of biocentric ethics, it is hard to see how sustainable development has made a desired impact on practice. Indeed, biocentric environmental thinking has much more in common with non-Western ethico-political

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thought; this does not mesh well with the dominant norms of global governance. An anthropocentric conception of sustainable development, that is, preserving the environment for human purposes, has been much more powerful. However, it is difficult to determine whether it is environmental ethics or, perhaps much more powerfully, the norms of human rights that give sustainable development its existing traction in global governance. To a large degree, anthropocentric environmental ethics is a gloss on human rights (see Matthew and Wapner 2006); it simply states that humans need food, energy, water, and so on, to live, and so will our children. There are, however, two insights shared by the anthropocentric and biocentric versions of environmental ethics that might become more directly relevant to global governance if they can be shown to be of value in addressing real-world issues: the moral injunctions to know nature and to respect nature. In other words, the core insights of Leopold, which have informed much of the activity of the past fifty years, are a distinctive feature of environmental ethics that are not captured in human rights but could guide decisions and other actions. For example, what exactly would it mean to interact with nature in ways that are fair and do not undermine the right to life? At a minimum, we would have to understand how nature works. In an era of rapid global environmental change, this is not an easy task. How can we know a nature that is changing in ways we cannot fully predict? Given that our knowledge is always going to be incomplete, and in some ways is deteriorating as climate change renders local knowledge about things like monsoons less and less secure, what decisionmaking processes for land or water or energy use are fair? We would also need to acknowledge that the operations of nature are transboundary operations. How, then, do we cultivate morally informed respect toward such operations? If we think of the revised circular flow model, the one that includes extracting resources from nature and expelling waste back into nature, then we immediately see there is a serious problem in that some people can extract more resources than others from the global stockpile and can also displace their waste into areas others inhabit. This seems intuitively unfair. It also appears to be something that could only be resolved through the mechanisms of global governance. The following two cases seek to tease out how the incorporation of the core insights of environmental ethics into global governance might be desirable and viable.

Environmental Ethics and Food Security The ways people satisfy their need for food is a significant contributor to the impact humans have on the environment. Since the early 1970s, efforts to increase food production have been the main driving force behind land

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clearance and resulting pressure on land resources; agricultural practices are closely linked to problems such as degradation and increased salinization of soils, increased stresses on water resources, impacts on water quality from agricultural runoff, and the development of antibiotic resistant microbes (UNEP 2002). Agriculture remains a vital sector of the global economy and a significant source of employment and livelihood. While agriculture accounts for only 4 percent of global GDP, 41 percent of the world’s labor force is occupied in agriculture (CIA 2007). In the United States, “food production makes up nearly 10 percent of the US Gross Domestic Product. It generates nearly one trillion dollars in cash receipts and employs one in eight American workers” (Flynn 2004, 113). The complex web of relations involved in growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, and consuming food, often called the global food system, is faced with a number of challenges in the twenty-first century. In this section, we consider how environmental ethics and its injunctions to know and respect nature are relevant to the global governance of the food system. Two challenges are paramount: the first is a series of institutional challenges related to the structure of the food system and access to food; the second is a set of challenges related to the process of global environmental change. Institutional Challenges to the Food System One of the major goals of global governance efforts to optimize the food system has been to assure food security. As defined by the UN’s Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action, “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (Rome Declaration 1996). Efforts to achieve food security face a number of institutional challenges, including provision of sufficient food for all people, assurance that all people have access to food, implications of shifting patterns in food production and consumption, and concerns about the safety and security of the global food system. The right to food has been a cornerstone of many of the foundational agreements of global governance. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which included in Article 25 the statement that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food” (United Nations 1948). The 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights declared “the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,” and outlined “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food” (United Nations 1966).

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The importance of meeting the needs of growing human populations in ways that contribute to environmental sustainability and rural development was highlighted in Chapter 14 of Agenda 21, which was adopted by more than 175 governments at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (United Nations 1992). Again, a right to food was reaffirmed in the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security: “the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger” (Rome Declaration 1996). In addition to continued recognition of the right to food, these documents elaborate and provide useful yardsticks for judging food security. Food must not only be available, it must be “adequate,” “safe,” and “nutritious” (FAO 2001). According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world produces sufficient food to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 1998). The global food system, “produces 17 percent more calories per person than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase” (FAO 2002, 9). Looking ahead, FAO also believes world agriculture would be able to continue to feed the projected population of the world without “putting excessive pressure on prices or the environment” (9). For many undernourished people in the world, hunger comes not from a lack of sufficient food, but from the fact that they are too poor to access the food they need (Sen 1981; FAO 2002; World Bank 2006b). While global aggregate projections of food availability might leave the impression that hunger and malnutrition are diminishing threats, by early 2008 the world was again turning its attention to the persistent challenges of food security and insecurity. Media organizations, policymakers, international agencies, and NGOs were confronting the complex ways that institutional factors and processes of global change interact to cause food insecurity, including: rising demands for resource-intensive products like meat; growing consumer purchasing power in countries such as China and India; changes and variability in climate and severe weather events that devastated harvests in many parts of the world; high oil prices that increased the costs of producing and transporting food and raised costs of inputs like fertilizers and pesticides; and speculation in commodity markets as investors seek safe harbor from volatile credit and real estate markets. Some experts believe food security has been impacted by efforts to promote biofuels from sources such as corn, which, ironically, may have little impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHS) but reduces the amount of food available for humans (FAO 2007; Ki-moon 2008; Begley 2008). The impacts of rising food prices were not felt just in the pocketbook, but also in rises in crime and civil unrest. Internationally, rising food prices contributed to rioting and unrest in a number of countries, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt,

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Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Yemen (New York Times, April 17, 2008). The net impact of processes of global change on the food system has been the creation of a global food network filled with pockets of abundance and scarcity. This food network does not map clearly onto many of the traditional state-based or North/South models of the world; there are undernourished people in developed countries and overnourished people in developing countries (World Bank 2006b). Tackling the challenge of malnutrition now involves addressing the needs of people who do not consume sufficient calories each day, people who consume too many calories, and the many people who consume a sufficient amount of calories but receive inadequate nutrition from their diets. The challenge of assuring food security has also been affected by shifting patterns of human habitation (UNPD 2001), the introduction of genetic modification (Lambrecht 2001), a growth of interest in environmentally sustainable agricultural methods (Mougeot 2005; Pollan 2006), and changing patterns of wealth and food consumption (Nierenberg 2003). While the food system is largely a means to provide safe and healthful food, it is a major connector between many different peoples and places and can also be a vector for the transmission of disease. Recent events—including the 2001 anthrax incidents in the United States, the rapid emergence and global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, and the ongoing attention to the potential danger of a global avian influenza pandemic—have raised awareness of the continued threat to human health and well-being from infectious diseases (National Intelligence Council 2000; Garrett 2001; Brower and Chalk 2003). Concurrently, a growing awareness of the interaction between health and malnutrition has emerged: “Malnutrition magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria” (World Hunger Education Service 2006). Diseases can also have a tremendous impact on the availability of food and the economic health of agricultural systems. In 2003, for example, one-third of global meat exports (6 million tons) were affected by an animal disease outbreak, causing an estimated $10 billion in losses to farmers (FAO 2004). While the global food system generally provides safe and nutritious foods, high-profile cases of food contamination (Hennessy et al. 1996; CDHS 2007) have raised awareness of potential vulnerability to accidental contamination and actors with nefarious intentions (Nestle 2003; Flynn 2004). Governing the global food system involves a broad and complex set of questions related to how people get access to food, what kinds and how much food they eat, and the resulting environmental impact and sources of threat and vulnerability that emerge from the process of feeding the world’s population. Such institutional challenges are not the only challenges faced by the food system. The failure to create a global food system that meets the

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needs of people in an environmentally sustainable way has been a significant contributor to processes of global change that now threatens to have widespread impacts on the ecological foundations of the food system. Global Environmental Change and the Food System The global food system is also facing a set of challenges related to processes of global environmental change. As discussed above, environmental ethics includes a great deal of discussion about the importance of knowing and respecting nature. Studies of the environment have provided great examples of the danger and damage that can occur when ways of living stray too far from what ecological conditions will tolerate. For example, in the United States, the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was produced by unsustainable agricultural practices (Worster 1979). The prospect of relatively rapid (in a geologic, if not political, timeframe) environmental changes makes the already difficult tasks of knowing and respecting nature much more difficult. In April 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, “observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases” (IPCC 2007, 1). Impacts of these changes are expected to be widespread and felt in a wide range of systems and sectors including water resources, health, and food production. Yet the impacts from climate change will not be equally distributed. While Africa and Asia will face increasing levels of water scarcity, compromised food production, and impacts to coastal areas that could reduce fisheries and tourism revenues, regions like North America face possible 5 to 20 percent increases in agricultural yields (IPCC 2007). To be certain, areas that experience benefits from climate changes will also face costs, but it is unlikely that the wealthiest people and places on the planet will be impacted as severely as the poorest people and areas of the planet. This disparity reveals a great irony in the social impacts of climate changes in that the people who will be most impacted by them are not the people whose lifestyles are contributing the most to the factors driving climate change. People in Africa, already faced with great challenges, will be unlikely to benefit from longer growing seasons in the northern latitudes or newly navigable northern shipping lanes and newly extractable mineral deposits that become accessible as ice sheets recede. This disparity highlights a responsibility on the part of those countries that have contributed most to climate change to help those who will be most impacted learn how to mitigate and adapt to the changing natural systems around them. Processes of global change will make the effort to develop a sustainable global food system more difficult, but they also highlight the importance of such efforts. How people grow, transport, and consume food contributes

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significantly to the impacts on our environment. Improving the sustainability of the systems we use to meet the basic human need for food would help us be more responsive to the instrumental challenges facing the food system and could also provide increased resiliency in the face of processes of global change. A useful guiding standard comes from Aldo Leopold (1949, 224–225), who suggests we should “examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The challenge of creating a sustainable food system is by no means simple, for it must be mindful of human needs, sensitive to current and future ecological conditions, and able to navigate the eddies of a complex system of global governance in a time of great turbulence and change.

Environmental Ethics, Microfinance Services, and Sustainable Development Another ethical concern receiving attention in global governance is the distribution of the world’s economic wealth, an issue closely related to food security and, more broadly, global environmental conditions. It is widely acknowledged that the inequitable distribution of wealth and large-scale poverty are intimately linked to environmental degradation (WCED 1987). Unfortunately, global governance institutions and their mandates, such as the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, often place separate emphases on economic growth and environmental sustainability, and the two are not generally addressed together when looking for ethical solutions to global problems. However, we contend that global governance cannot be successful in addressing poverty or environmental degradation if the two issues are taken as separate. A reconceptualization of environmental ethics to include questions of wealth and poverty would be beneficial to action in global governance, economic development, and ethical ecological development. The World Bank (2005) reports that nearly three billion poor live on less than $2 a day; over one billion “very poor” live on less than $1, many of whom rely heavily on the natural environment for both subsistence and income. The natural environment can influence the well-being of this large majority in many direct and indirect ways; health and nutrition have already been discussed here. As mentioned, persistent environmental conditions and continuous modifications influence the ability of many to eat and drink, be healthy, find energy sources on a daily basis, and stay safe from natural disasters (Poverty-Environment Partnership 2005). We know that a majority of the world’s poor depend directly on agriculture for subsistence and income, and the share of total income derived from natural resources is highest for

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the poorest of the world (Bishop and Mehrotra 2004). In low-income countries, environmental wealth makes up approximately 26 percent of national wealth, twice as much as in developed countries (Poverty-Environment Partnership 2005). Poverty mapping shows, however, that the poor live on marginal land with low-quality or degraded resources and in areas with high risk of natural disasters and catastrophic environmental events. With few exceptions, these environments are expected to become even less productive as climate change progresses (Poverty-Environment Partnership 2005). Thus over time the populations that rely most immediately on natural resources for their livelihoods will face not only restricted access to common property resources and limited ownership rights (UNEP 2004), but also resource scarcity and reduced quality. These environmentally induced threats to human security present particularly difficult ethical problems for global governance by exacerbating worldwide inequalities in income, food security, and baseline health, and again bringing into question the inside/outside dichotomy of governance by emphasizing the interconnectivity of all states and beings. Those facing the greatest burdens to health, nutrition, and livelihood from environmental degradation—the world’s poorest—are not those most responsible for the problem. Instead, the poor suffer the consequences of the habits of the rich. For global governance to answer a call to ethical and fair action, this discrepancy of spoils and punishments for environmental degradation must be addressed through policy. For example, those causing the degradation must be made responsible for mitigating its effects and be held accountable for a proportionate level of compensation to those facing the effects. Also problematic is that the preferred solutions within global governance institutions to these problems of poverty and environmental degradation are often at odds. The goal to reduce poverty by spreading economic growth, for example through the provisioning of financial services to the world’s poor, may not be commensurate with the goal to assure environmental sustainability by preserving and protecting natural resources. This is especially true when the poorest populations (those most in need of poverty alleviation programs) are also those most dependent on the health of the environment in some of the most ecologically degraded locations on Earth. Thus it seems global governance is stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding the ethical implications of two of its primary goals. This does not have to be the end of the discussion, however. By addressing poverty and environment together in concert rather than as separate issues, global governance could translate sustainable development theory into ecologically sound economic development practice. A revitalization of environmental ethics could inform discussions of not only what is environmentally ethical, but also what is appropriate for poverty alleviation and global governance as a whole. As described earlier in this chapter, the discourse of environmental

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ethics has its roots in Thoreau, Leopold, Carson, and others. Over time it has come to emphasize certain issues, including preserving wilderness and extending rights to nonhumans (Lovelock 1979; Devall and Sessions 1985). In a sense, these are the issues that are clearly particular to environmental ethics—in which it has a discursive advantage. But while these genuinely are important questions of environmental philosophy, they are of limited immediate relevance to the interactions between the large majority of the world’s population and nature every day. Most of the world interacts with the environment on a subsistence basis, reliant on nature to provide ecosystem services, subsistence, and income. Their relationship is largely one of utility rather than recreation. The current emphasis of environmental ethics does not focus on this kind of human livelihood dependence, but largely concerns itself with the rights of nonhuman biota and abiota (biocentrism), particularly in more developed countries, leaving behind questions about how the natural environment can be ethically addressed in situations of abject human poverty. This is a particularly peculiar oversight considering that the populations in most intimate and frequent contact with nature are the non-Western poor—precisely those that are absent from so much environmental ethics theory and discussion. However, if reframed to incorporate real-world problems outside of the global North, environmental ethics could be a valuable tool when developing methods of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. As currently structured, the canons of environmental ethics have little applicability to those struggling with environmental degradation and poverty in the developing world. Those populations that rely heavily on the natural resource base are not able to know nature and protect nature in quite the way the founders of environmental ethics would prescribe. These populations are prompted to use resources in ways that may be exhaustive in order to procure subsistence and income immediately, with less emphasis on future resource productivity. When meeting basic needs is of great importance, the edicts of environmental ethics are difficult to follow—nonhuman nature is, by necessity, used to meet requirements of nutrition, shelter, energy, and medicine, and conservation and reverence for nature are overshadowed by pressing obligations. If environmental ethics cannot engage with such a widespread and pressing real-world problem as poverty, one that is intimately tied to environmental quality, its relevance and applicability comes into question. However, the core tenets of environmental ethics, such as developing a knowledge base about natural systems and their cycles, are crucial to poverty alleviation due to its interconnection with environmental services. For instance, thinking cyclically about both the environment and poverty, rather than linearly, is key to sustainable development. The focus must not be on continuous growth, but on responsible growth, which may involve periods

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of no growth at all. Also, economic and sustainable development must be shaped in each situation by the unique cultural and ecological factors of the setting. Environmental ethics stresses the interdependence of all aspects of a niche, and this emphasis is also crucial to ethical development and governance. The needs of the population must shape the answers to their problems rather than searching for turnkey solutions. Unfortunately, these basic principles that lie at the root of environmental ethics theory often get lost and are not fruitfully applied when developing tools of poverty alleviation or global governance as a whole. An example of one such tool of poverty alleviation—one very much in favor with global governance organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations but that has thus far not engaged with environmental principles—is microfinance. Microfinance is represented by its practitioners and its proponents as morally inclined and uniquely designed to alleviate poverty by bringing credit and financial services to those who have historically been left out of commercial banking, specifically the poorest of the world (Ledgerwood 1999). The majority of activity in the industry is microcredit, or the provisioning of very small loans, most often to groups of women in developing countries (Morduch 1999). These loans are intended to help clients start and grow small enterprises, usually trade or domestic production of some kind. These loans come with strict regulations, however, such as rapid repayment schedules and very high interest rates by Western standards. The microfinance industry has reported rather remarkable success over the last three decades of its development. By the end of 2005 over 113 million clients had been reached and loan repayment rates over 95 percent were consistently reported (Daley-Harris 2006; Morduch 1999). Microfinance has been touted as a durable tool of poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment that avoids the pitfalls of traditional multilateral aid programs (Armendáriz and Morduch 2005), and the industry has received growing attention in the popular media in the last several years, particularly following the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. The success of the field may be widely lauded, but it has thus far been rather narrowly defined. Much of the emphasis has been on short-term return on investment rather than long-term viability, and little impact assessment has been routinely conducted. However, based on initial indications, it seems the industry could accomplish much in the way of improving quality of life if it were to broaden its conceptual niche beyond an economic paradigm. It is our contention here that if the industry is to achieve its stated goal of increasing depth of outreach to the poorest of the poor, and do so over the long term, it must be cognizant of, and come to incorporate, the principles of knowing and respecting nature. It must develop a focus on environment that understands the importance of natural resources in the lives of its clients and the

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relationship between environmental degradation, food insecurity, and poverty. Environmental ethics and poverty alleviation projects, particularly microfinance, have much to learn from one another. Environmental ethics can learn the importance of focusing on issues of human poverty related to environment—moving away from biocentrism and the perspective of nonWesterners, the large majority of whom are actually the most directly dependent on nature. Microfinance and other economic development programs can learn the value of thinking cyclically and coming to know an environment and its parameters before creating change and striving for continuous growth, which may create destruction in the end. Though it has not been articulated as such, environmental sustainability is a part of the moral package of global good microfinance is attempting to achieve; therefore, the environment must become part of economic development projects’ ethical considerations to truly improve the lives of those in most need.

Conclusion In 1994 Vaclav Havel (1994, A27) wrote that the “planetary civilization to which we belong . . . has essentially only globalized the surface of our lives.” That same year Michael Walzer (1994) wrote Thick and Thin, in which he distinguished between the thick and carefully constructed moral life of a community, forged over generations and operationalized through a web of institutions, beliefs, values, and practices, and the also important but qualitatively thinner sense of morality that we share across communities—a common desire for justice and freedom, for example, even though these things will differ in practice, or a universal revulsion at genocide. Environmental ethics is trapped in the dilemma defined by these two thinkers. In the world so many environmentalists idealize—of small, ecologically sound communities—moral injunctions to know and respect the land are easy to apprehend, flesh out, and act upon. On a global scale, knowing the nature of the planet is like knowing the planet’s population— full of hard-won content that is nonetheless remarkably abstract. And yet, if there is any area in which the globalization of our world is not superficial, it must be the environment, which connects us all through its vast systems of climate, hydrology, energy, evolution, and the rest. It may be possible for a small community to come to a satisfactory moral agreement about the allocation of education, or the collection of taxes, or the status of gender, or the age of consent, without any discussion with the rest of humankind. But it is no longer possible to know one’s land, or respect it, as a bounded territory independent of the ecology of the planet. If global governance is to be more than a thread running across the “sur-

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face of our lives,” it must incorporate a global land ethic. It must find a way to know and respect nature in the planetary processes and particular habitats through which it is endlessly expressing—and revising—itself. What it means to green global governance, to reconcile it with an environmental ethics, is at an early stage of development. However, we suggest that the following points are integral to future ethical theory and practice: • Sustainable development is a moral imperative, and global governance should seek to coordinate human activities to optimize their sustainability. • People have a right to environmental security, and those who violate this right by wasting resources or displacing waste should be required to provide compensation. • This right is intergenerational, and—though we cannot specify the optimal configuration of natural and other capital that ought to be left to the next generation, let alone the ones that follow it—we should be cautious in transforming the natural capital that we understand least and are least prepared to reproduce. • All of the above depend upon global ecoliteracy, an understanding of the ecology of the planet and of our niches within that grand ecology, and hence the world has a moral obligation to educate. Above all, it seems to us that environmentalists need to work to reconcile the ethical principles that they have generated with other issues—such as poverty alleviation—that are key to global governance.

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10 Power and Responsibility in the Global Community Craig N. Murphy

Because most of us are neither enlightened beings nor saints, thinking about ethical issues is always a bit of a pain in the neck. Sure, ethics provides the same intellectual challenge and fun of any other branch of philosophy—the exhilaration and trepidation when first viewing a tough problem, the thrill of the chase when trying to work it out, and the immense satisfaction at finding a solution. Unfortunately, with ethics, that is not the end of it: a nice, neat solution to a tough intellectual problem can be followed by a terrible letdown if we have argued ourselves into doing some things differently in our everyday lives. It is no fun to realize that now we are going to have our gnawing, fussy conscience bugging us to drop some comfortable habits that we had earlier ignored. Nevertheless, despite the discomfort that will result, there are cases to be made for greater attention to the ethics of global governance. This chapter makes one of those cases. I argue that within the last generation—or, at the most, within the last century—we have been confronted with the ethical problem of how to deal with a single, global human community of fate. It is a problem that scholars of international relations (IR) are forced to confront, even when we attempt to limit our attention to questions of what is. Because the ethical problem is fundamentally new, we are not very skilled at confronting it, but we have tools from other realms of ethics, and from IR, that help us, as the earlier essays in this book reveal. Ethics is about knowing and achieving the good. We can use the conceptual scheme proposed by Antonio Franceschet—or the related schemes that are often used to describe the field of IR—to outline a range of answers to the question, “What is the nature of ‘the good’ that global governance should serve?” The fact that there are multiple answers to that question may lead us to develop the kind of ethics proposed by Martha Nussbaum (2006), an ethics for the relations among deeply interconnected societies that, nonetheless, do not share fundamental values. However, Nussbaum’s solu159

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tion to the problem of the ethics of global governance still leaves issues unaddressed. Most of them have been addressed, in different ways, by the chapters in this book. Here we have insights that allow us to provide a coherent account of the origins of fundamental differences between communities—an account that does not privilege the ethics of one community over another— and we have guides for citizens and governments that preserve the real tensions in the coherent ethical positions that exist in the world. This final chapter concludes by suggesting one additional element that should be included in any ethics of global governance: attention to the power of the privileged, the power of those whose values have been privileged by the forces that have pushed all of us into a single global community of fate, including, perhaps, guidelines for how, and to whom, to give that power up.

We Can No Longer Walk Away My argument is that the fundamental ethical issue faced by global governance is how human communities that do not share fundamental values should interact with one another. For most of human history (say, the first ninety thousand of the approximately one hundred thousand years of this history) the ethical solution was similar: If a deep division developed within a community of hunter-gatherers, the groups with fundamentally different values could simply move away from one another. Migration was not only the basic mode of “international relations” among human beings throughout most of existence, it was also a nonviolent and difference-preserving way to deal with fundamental ethical conflicts. Things changed when the political economy changed. Settled agricultural societies could not simply pick up and walk away without causing great suffering to the community that was forced to move and to any communities that they displaced, as the history of the North American colonies of European dissenters reminds us. IR realists have long argued that their perspective (which some claim to be as old as human settlement) provides an answer to the fundamental ethical questions raised by a world of settled communities. Hans J. Morgenthau’s portrait hangs in the main room of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for good reason.1 In a world of settled societies, the realists assure us, communities with fundamentally different moral values can preserve their difference by separating themselves from each other and then wisely managing any further relations. That requires statesmen to have (1) an appreciation of their own society’s values, (2) a careful and detailed understanding of the range of different worldviews embraced by other societies, and (3) a deeply realistic understanding of the degree to which their own values cannot be forced on others.

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Thus, not surprisingly, at the end of World War II, George Kennan, the realist architect of containment, warned US policymakers against championing democracy in a world in which US citizens, a tiny minority, controlled half of the world’s wealth. A truly democratic world would reallocate some of that wealth (a fact that Americans were unlikely to accept), which meant that the rest of the world would view US leaders as hypocrites. 2 Twenty years later, Morgenthau (1965) challenged US leaders to distinguish at least four different kinds of “communist states,” most of which were not fundamentally antagonistic to the United States. (It was in the early 1940s that realist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr [1987, 251] penned his most famous words, those about having the wisdom to distinguish between conditions that can be changed and those that cannot.) We no longer live in Niebuhr, Kennan, or Morgenthau’s world. Ours is not a world in which only the actions of statesmen link the fates of the people of China to the fates of the people of Russia or to the fates of the people of the United States, the other wealthy capitalist states, and their African, Asian, and Latin American colonies and neocolonies. Today, Western European transport depends on Russian oil, US households depend on Chinese products, and Chinese livelihoods depend on African oil and consumer spending everywhere. Economic globalization has made the world one place. Economic globalization has led to political globalization and to the demand for the institutions of global governance. That governance is needed to establish and maintain the physical and technical infrastructure of the global economy: the global transportation and communication systems as well as the industrial standards, protections of intellectual property, and rules of trade, money, and finance. That governance is also needed to manage the opposition to globalization that comes from groups that benefited more under the older, less internationalized economy and from those who benefit the least from industrial capitalism (industrial workers, governments and people in the less-industrialized world), and all those who were less-advantaged in previous economic orders and who remain less-advantaged under the industrial system (women, historically disadvantaged ethnic groups, and the other living beings with whom we humans share the planet). The problem of the ethics of global governance might be easier if we understood and agreed upon the sources of this globalization, but we do not. We can point to technologies—telecommunications and aerial bombardment—that have linked us into a single global community of fate for almost a century. Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (“Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew/From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue”) appeared in 1896; in 1911, Italy turned science fiction into reality with its colonial-era bombardment of Libya (Lindqvist 2001).

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Even before that, the telegraph had provided instantaneous communication for a tiny global elite. Those scholars who emphasize that industrial capitalism encourages technological innovation and pushes firms to seek new markets and cheaper inputs abroad see this mode of production as the motor force. Some US realists see the hegemony of the United States as the force of globalization and the major provider of global governance (Mandelbaum 2005) or a major force behind what global governance we have (Drezner 2007). Other scholars see capitalism as having entered a new phase in which a global capitalist class has become the leading protagonist in world history (Robinson 2004). Each of these views suggests a slightly different moral actor as the one responsible for globalization, and, hence, for global governance that is needed as a result. Yet, there is some convergence among these theories. The wealthiest of US citizens may be forgiven for thinking that all fingers point to them, even if the larger circle of responsibility might include all those with influence over the governments of military powers and all who are part of this privileged global social class.

Toward an Ethics of Global Governance Unfortunately, however we define them, the actors responsible for globalization have few intellectual tools they can use to help them understand their global responsibilities. What is often considered the greatest recent work of moral and political philosophy in the Western tradition, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), assumes that communities of shared influence and shared fate do not extend beyond the borders of the nationstate. In the 1970s, when Rawls’s book was published, if privileged Westerners wanted to think about global responsibilities, they had to look to religion (which usually counseled an unrealistic intolerance of fundamental differences in values), or to science fiction. The Star Trek television series, created by Gene Roddenberry, a US bomber pilot in World War II, imagined the creation of a UN-like federation of technologically advanced societies dedicated to scientific progress and no longer in the thrall of capitalism. The Federation’s “Prime Directive” was to avoid intervention in any society that had yet to pass a major technological threshold—one equivalent to the ability to threaten civilians of other societies with massive destruction from the air. In his dystopian novels, beginning with A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr., another World War II bomber, imagined the new technologically globalized world as subject to repetitive cycles of nuclear destruction. His books seemed to counsel that humanity could be preserved only in monastic communities like those that maintained Western knowledge

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throughout the Dark Ages. At the same time, Kurt Vonnegut, a victim of Allied bombing rather than a bomber himself, never resolved the question of global ethics at the center of most of his dark comic novels.3 Certainly, by the 1970s, there were scholars of international relations who attempted to do some of the intellectual work necessary to create a theory of justice relevant for a globalized world. Consider the World Order Models Project (WOMP). Yet that project (and some similar, if less grandly conceived research programs) had little impact. Realists complained that they underrepresented the diversity of fundamental values that divided the world and they provided few mechanisms for coping with the diversity that they did uncover (Wilkinson 1976, 332). One of the main WOMP organizers, Richard Falk (1978, 531), was so hurt by the sharp criticism he received from a prominent liberal scholar of international law that he complained of being sold out by his friends. Nevertheless, the diversity of opinions about the global good (the “dissensus” that WOMP embraced) assured that even IR empiricists would have to face ethical questions. For example, when Edward Azar tried to measure international cooperation by asking an international group of scholars and policymakers to rank a series of typical events, he found that the “experts” could not agree among themselves. In fact, his undergraduates did a better job (Azar and Havener 1976). Some of the graduate students on Azar’s research team suspected that the finding was explained by the fact that the typical events that he asked his experts to scale reflected his own, largely liberal, understanding of the global good. Azar was a scholar (and a onetime advocate) of pan-Arabism and his events all looked like markers on the way to forming a single nation-state. Perhaps, without being conscious of it, he had taught his undergraduates that that was exactly what “international cooperation” meant. In my first teaching job, at Wesleyan University, I organized my introductory course around some WOMP themes and, near the end of the semester, gave my students the task of ranking a set of international cooperative events that reflected some of the goals shared by the WOMP authors, especially the idea of fostering cultural difference. The Wesleyan students proved themselves expert in identifying different levels of international cooperation using this metric.4 At the time, I was convinced that WOMP’s somewhat sloppy celebration of cultural difference was preferable to the kind of unconscious liberal imperialism that lay right under the surface of so much of mainstream IR. Nevertheless, as was clear even in the 1970s and 1980s, it would be difficult to create a working system of international governance based on the WOMP ideals; perhaps we would have to make do with realists’ time-honored prescriptions of prudence. In the ensuing decades, as globalization has made the issue ever more critical, philosophers have turned to the problem, addressing it with the

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intellectual rigor that the attempts to unify the WOMP studies lacked. Martha Nussbaum’s (2006, 315–323) work is some of the most instructive. Given the disagreements on ultimate ends—the fact that underlies the WOMP celebration of cultural difference—Nussbaum argues for a limited but powerful form of global governance, one that leaves wide room for the development of quite different societies. Although Nussbaum does not point to the connection, her principle is quite similar to that of “subsidiarity,” the principle that matters should be handled by the lowest-level competent authority. The principle began as a part of late-nineteenth-century Catholic social teaching—a reaction to both the tyranny and the alienation created by the industrial system. Nevertheless, subsidiarity has a fairly long secular history as one of the principles increasingly central to the EU. Samuel Makinda’s chapter in this book is compatible with both the EU’s iterative practice of trying to give content to the principle of subsidiarity and with Nussbaum’s preference for a limited form of global governance that preserves difference. Yet, in significant ways, Makinda’s argument is more satisfying. Makinda is much clearer than Nussbaum about the sources of fundamental value differences. He honors liberal values as well as the more conservative, communitarian reactions to liberalism that have emerged in every part of the world. His amplification of the traditional arguments about the sources of sovereignty helps us recognize that there are conflicts of principle that cannot be resolved in any simple way. If popular sovereignty, a liberal value, were all that was at stake, we might quickly agree on the structure of some kind of global democratic state. However, it is the more traditional idea of sovereignty, as rooted in the traditional structure of society, that creates our worries about maintaining cultural difference in the first place. Moreover, the mutual constitution of societies—their mutual recognition and protection—must form the base of any system of global governance that attempts to preserve difference. In that way, the EU’s iterative moves toward greater democracy and more shared sovereignty—all the stopping and starting on the way toward a more united Europe—are a model for what may be the only way that global governance can form. It is also for that reason that one of the major sources of understanding relevant to the ethics of global governance comes from the actual practice of forming international institutions, not just the powerful institutions of Europe but those in all regions of the world, and global institutions as well. In a recent paper (Murphy 2006b), I argued that the experience of the UN system—especially of the UN’s work in the field, which has overwhelmingly been in the developing world—both reinforces the case that Nussbaum makes for her Ten Principles for the Global Structure and suggests some ways her argument should be amended. One of the great strengths of this current volume is the degree to which the authors have used debates about

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the UN’s work in specific fields to inform the analysis of what global governance should entail. This is, of course, a central task of Daniele Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti’s chapter, but it also makes up part of the argument in almost every other chapter, especially in Jacqueline Best’s discussion on global economic governance and Richard Matthew, Heather Goldsworthy, and Bryan McDonald’s chapter on environmental governance. An ethics of global governance must, of course, deal with more than accommodating fundamental differences of culture and values, which has been a central theme in the history of international institutions; it must also provide guides for the positive action of citizens and governments to achieve those ends that most of us share. We would expect that, over time, such guidelines would become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated. Many of the chapters in this book demonstrate this trend: they reflect syntheses that are more sophisticated than those that informed discussions of international governance a generation ago. For example, in the two decades after World War II, realists like Kennan and Morgenthau would tell US policymakers to be a bit wary of their missionary impulse to promote democracy globally, but it would be safe to say that many of their arguments were little more sophisticated than the thinking that underlay Star Trek’s Prime Directive. Now, a generation later, we have Tom Keating’s much more informed critical reflection on the practice of democracy promotion as the background to an argument that is as close to the case for the Prime Directive as anyone today is willing to make. Despite his criticism of democracy promotion, Keating clearly shares the concern about the fragility of public interest in fighting for the freedom of others that appears in many of the other chapters. Similarly, throughout this book, there is a subtle debate about what our compassion demands of us when confronting questions of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. Catherine Lu’s tempered positive evaluation of the “responsibility to protect” concept provides a clear illustration of how far a generation of reflection and practice has taken us from the simple noninterventionism of the early UN.

The Problem of Giving Up Power Lu makes it clear that R2P will only have consequence if it is taken as a moral guide for citizens and for governments throughout the world, not just as a guide for the major military powers, who are likely in fact to be those who most often impede the specific actions based on that principle. Similarly, Nussbaum’s (2006, 315) first principle for global governance is that the responsibility for fostering the global good exists at all levels. Her primary focus is on governments; her point is that—even given the merits of subsidiarity—policymakers at all levels need to be cognizant of the

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impact of their actions for the human community and the planet: Even the school board and the town council should be acting with the global good in mind. This same idea is extended by the kinds of nonstate agency analyzed by both Cecelia Lynch and Fiona Robinson; power and responsibility for the global good do not stop at the boundary between formal and informal political actors. It is also important to remember the special responsibilities for some created by the unequal distribution of power. I agree with those scholars who argue that economic globalization is largely the consequence of decisions made by a small and privileged stratum. Even those who do not agree will admit that the economic benefits of globalization have been decidedly unequal, and that the resulting global concentration of wealth has led to a global concentration of power. This is part of the reason that Nussbaum’s principles include a strong demand that corporations play a central role in serving the global good and that the wealthier regions of the world need to give about 2 percent of their income to the poorer regions, about an eightfold increase from the situation today. Yet even these special responsibilities of the powerful may not go far enough. Most in the wealthiest countries have reason to worry about situations where our decisions may affect the fate of people we have neither paid attention to nor devoted any concern. Most Americans know that the votes cast for US president in 2000 (and our acceptance of the Supreme Court’s decision about the outcome) had a great deal of impact on the stability of the unelected governments of Iraq. Unlike most citizens of my country, I also know now that the votes cast for US president in 2000 had a great deal of impact on the stability of the elected government of Haiti, although I did not know that at the time. That makes me suspect that our votes had similar impacts in other parts of the world. I also know that the purchasing decisions I make have some influence over the lives of many people at a great distance. I have done some research on the concrete links in a few sectors— I can say some very precise things about how my decision to buy one or another chocolate bar is likely to affect cocoa farmworkers—but in most cases, I have little clue about what the impact might be. The general problem for the privileged in our increasingly unequal world is that our “circle of influence” is always greater than our “circle of concern.”5 If we recognize this as a problem, there are solutions, at least theoretical ones: Julius Nyerere used to argue that Tanzanians should be allowed to vote for the US president since whoever held that office had much more influence over their lives than he ever had. For a US president to recognize the force of that argument (as Jimmy Carter has, but only after he left office) may require accepting that, in a fundamental way, he is not separate from people in Tanzania and that he is enjoined to use his power responsibly.6

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Yet, even Carter rarely makes the general argument that the only way the world’s privileged can act responsibly—even on their own terms—is by giving up their influence to people who can pay sufficient attention, so that circles of concern can match their circles of influence. This is a general argument for real democratization, globally, for exactly that condition that George Kennan felt it would be foolish, or hypocritical, for Americans to advocate, because real democracy would mean giving up real wealth as well as real power.

Notes 1. Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs president Joel H. Rosenthal (2004) explains its significance. 2. William I. Robinson (1996) quotes Kennan, quite appropriately, at the head of his massive study of the US promotion of limited democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. 3. Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five begins with his experience as a US prisoner in Dresden when the militarily insignificant city was firebombed by the Allies. 4. The experiment is discussed as part of a longer article on the similarity between WOMP ideas and some “traditional” ideas about intersocietal cooperation that some observers believed to be typical in some parts of Africa (see Murphy 1980). 5. Phrases taken from the Mormon business guru and ethicist Stephen Covey (1990). 6. These cases are outlined in Murphy (2005, 182–188).

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The Contributors

Daniele Archibugi is a director at the Italian National Research Council in Rome; professor of governance, innovation, and public policy at the University of London, Birkbeck College; and honorary professor at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy, coeditor of Globalising the Learning Economy, and editor of Debating Cosmopolitics. Jacqueline Best is associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Uncertain Economies: The Politics of Ambiguity in International Financial Governance, as well as journal articles and book chapters on the ethical underpinnings of the international economic system. Antonio Franceschet is associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Kant and Liberal Internationalism: Sovereignty, Justice, and Global Reform, as well as articles and book chapters on international theory, ethics, and law. Heather Goldsworthy is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She is also a research associate with the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs, and an affiliate of the Department of Women’s Studies at UCI. Her research interests include environmental and human security, microfinance, and feminist theory. Tom Keating is professor of political science at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Canada and World Order and coeditor of Building a Sustainable Peace (with W. Andy Knight). He has published articles and book chapters on Canadian foreign policy and the ethics of democracy promotion. 189

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Catherine Lu is associate professor of political science at McGill University. She is the author of Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private. She has published articles and book chapters on various issues in international ethics, including humanitarian intervention. Cecelia Lynch is associate professor of political science and international studies, as well as director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Strategies for Research in Constructivist IR (with Audie Klotz); Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics; and coeditor, with Michael Loriaux, of Law and Moral Action in World Politics. She has published in the areas of international relations theory, social movements, religion, ethics, peace, and security. Samuel M. Makinda is professor of politics and international studies and chair of security, terrorism, and counterterrorism studies at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. He is coauthor of The African Union: Challenges of Globalization, Security and Governance, as well as articles and book chapters on international theory, global governance, and security. Raffaele Marchetti is lecturer in international relations at LUISS University and John Cabot University, Rome. He received the 2005 ISA– Lawrence S. Finkelstein Award on International Organization, and he is the author of Global Democracy—For and Against: Ethical Theory, Institutional Design and Social Struggles. Richard A. Matthew is associate professor of planning, policy, and design, and associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. He is coeditor of Landmines and Human Security: International Politics and War’s Hidden Legacy, as well as articles on environmental politics and security. Bryan McDonald is assistant director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. He is coeditor of Landmines and Human Security: International Politics and War’s Hidden Legacy (with Richard Matthew and Kenneth R. Rutherford). Craig N. Murphy is M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College. He is the author of The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? as well as other books, chapters, and articles on global governance.

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Fiona Robinson is associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She is author of Globalizing Care: Feminist Theory and International Relations, as well as articles and book chapters on feminist theory, globalization, and human rights.

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Accountability, 43; democratic, 45, 75; good governance and, 29; moral ties in, 55; of nongovernmental organizations, 37 Activism: ethical, 15; global governance, 11 Afghanistan, 48, 76, 77; humanitarian assistance in, 90; intervention in, 77; security in, 78 African Charter of Human and People’s Rights (1986), 30 African Union (AU), 62, 95, 96; and need to devise an “African” solution to Darfur, 86 Agenda 21, 141, 149 Agriculture, 147–152 AIDS relief, 42–44 Alliance of Civilizations, 66 Amnesty International, 112 Anarchy, 4; history of, 24; international society and, 25; juridical sovereignty and, 24–27; as product of global governance, 25 Animal Liberation Front (ALF), 145 Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Regan and Singer), 144 Annan, Kofi, 23, 24, 62, 63 Anti-Semitism, 31 Archibugi, Daniele, 12, 14, 15, 51–67, 165 Aristide, Jean Bertrand, 79 Assembly of Peoples, 64 Austria, 81 Authority, supranational, 24–27 Azar, Edward, 163

Basel Convention, 141 Beitz, Charles, 122 Best, Jacqueline, 6, 12, 16, 18, 119–139, 165 Blair, Tony, 42, 54, 89 Bono, 42, 43 Bookchin, Murray, 144 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 24, 55, 66n1, 71 Brazil, 66 Brezhnev, Leonid, 54 British Commission for Africa, 42 Burkina Faso: food unrest in, 149 Bush, George W., 40, 42, 48, 54 Callicott, J. Baird, 144 Cambodia: empirical sovereignty in, 23; Heng Samrin government in, 23; juridical sovereignty in, 23 Camdessus, Michel, 133, 134 Cameroon: food unrest in, 149 Canada, 65; democracy promotion by, 69, 71–73, 78; humanitarian intervention by, 89; lack of resources for humanitarian intervention, 96; promotion of responsibility to protect (R2P) concept, 96 Capitalism: critiques of, 43; global, 12, 13; humanization of, 12; individualist, 128; industrial, 161; laissez-faire, 126–128, 130; liberal, 42; productive relations of, 11 Cardoso, Fernando Enrique, 63 CARE, 112 Carson, Rachel, 143

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Carter, Jimmy, 166, 167 Charity Commission, 41 Chavez, Hugo, 47 Chile, 72, 80 China: lack of commitment to responsibility to protect (R2P) concept, 96 Civil society, 7; actions on peace and security, 45–49; antiglobalization movements and, 42; consultation with policymakers, 28; cosmopolitan, 8; critiques of actors in, 36–37; developmental progress of individuals and, 39; emphasis on ability to resolve problems through reason, 39; ethical configurations of actors in, 40–49; in evolution of modern political theory, 38; global, 8, 11, 13, 35–50, 105; liberalism and, 35–50; mediating role of, 38, 39; organizations, 3, 16, 41, 68, 73; partnership with government by, 28; in politics of global governance, 15; transnational groups in, 35 Climate change, 151 Clinton, Bill, 40 Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, 23 Code of Peace (Jones), 146 Cold War: democracy promotion as outcome of, 69; distancing of West from dictators in developing countries and, 32; end of, 32; and humanitarian intervention, 85; human rights and, 31; United States win in, 54 Colonialism, 51, 69 Commission on Global Governance, 28 Commission on Human Security, 103 Commoner, Barry, 144 Commonwealth Heads of Government, 72 Communitarianism, 37 Community of Democracies, 72 Conable, Barber, 131 Conflict: ethical dilemmas in, 17; family, 114; humanitarian consequences of, 45; impartial humanitarian assistance in, 91; management of, 13, 19; nationalism and, 7; political, 46, 89; root causes of, 111; settlement without violence, 6; violent, 4, 17, 19 Congo: humanitarian assistance in, 90

Constructivism, 31 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 141 Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), 141 Corruption, 29 Cosmopolitanism, 10, 37, 51; citizens and, 52; enhanced participation and, 61; enlargement of political participation in, 57; explanatory, 87; “high,” 11; importance in motivating global governance, 12; legality in, 60; obligations of, 16; political principles of, 60–64; principles, 64tab; progressivist, 11; transparency and, 60–61 Courts, criminal, 11 Crimes against humanity, 85; individual responsibility in, 31, 47, 48 Cultural justice, 39 Currency: convertibility, 126; exchange, 126 Darfur, 54, 85, 95, 96, 101n6 Debt: crises, 130; forgiveness, 41; relief, 40, 41, 43; third world, 41 Decisionmaking: collective, 5; dilemmas of, 2; effects on other countries, 57; exclusion from, 57; meaning given human rights by, 32; multilateral, 5; national level, 55; nongovernmental organizations and, 28; participation in, 29, 51, 67; political, 107; public, 51 Democracy: cosmopolitan, 57; defined in relation to establishment of markets, 78; defining, 57; enhanced participation and, 61; enhancement of individual’s opportunities in, 68; ethical limits of promotion of, 67–83; as exercise of electoral politics, 80; initiatives, 69; institutions of, 52; legality and, 60; liberal, 29, 52–53; limited form of, 78; moral norms and, 2; narrow conceptions of, 74; nonviolence and, 57, 58tab, 64tab; norms of, 16; outside interests and, 16–17; political control and, 57, 58tab, 64tab; political equality and, 57, 58tab, 64tab; as preferred system of governance, 68; representative, 71;

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Index requirements of, 57; role of force and coercive sanctions, 68; as source of legitimate power, 51; spread of, 29; among states, 15; theory of, 52; transition to, 74; transparency and, 60–61; universal appeal of, 72; validation of intervention in, 68; western, 54 Democracy promotion, 7, 16, 17, 37, 67–83; assumptions on what is best for other states, 77; civil society in, 78; compromising of states by, 79; to cultivate friendly states, 78; decentralization in, 78; and democratic elections of unsanctioned leaders, 80–81; economic interests in, 78; external control in, 79; to facilitate open markets, 78; foreign policy interests in, 78; given priority over other needful areas, 80; incentive/punishment instruments, 72; mixed motives for, 78; as outcome of end of Cold War, 69; popularity of, 79; in postconflict situations, 80; to protect national security, 78; public sector reform in, 78; questioning ethics of, 73–81; reliance on external actors in, 77; role of, 69–73; surveillance in, 75; for sustaining peace, 78; uncertainty of future support in, 76; by United States, 69 Development: aid, 10; economic, 70, 71; as human right, 32; participatory, 132; rural, 149; social, 15; sustainable, 18, 141, 142, 146, 147, 152–156 Diplomacy: mitigation of war and, 5; secret, 60; used for self-serving actions, 6 Discourse: developmental, 70; ethical, 18; hegemonic, 103; liberal capitalist, 42; liberal economic, 38–40, 43; moral, 18; political, 38–40 Dust Bowl, 151 Earth First!, 145 Earth Liberation Front (ELF), 145 East Timor, 77; humanitarian intervention in, 91; war in, 26 Ecofeminism, 144 Economic: ambiguity, 124; cooperation,

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6; decisions, 124; development, 70, 71; discourse, 38–40, 43; ethics, 126–131; flows, 124; global governance, 119–139; globalization, 43; institutions, 18, 40; justice, 14, 36, 39–45, 122, 123; liberalism, 6; liberalization, 42, 78; organizations, 6; pluralism, 128; policies, 18; power, 42, 44; prosperity, 7; reform, 70; self-sufficiency, 120; stability, 126; theory, 119, 126 Economy: capitalist, 105; global, 10, 79; market, 127; open, 79; political, 3, 16 Egalitarianism, 39 Egypt: food unrest in, 149 Ehrlich, Paul, 144 Elections: conflict resolution and, 47; monitoring, 71, 73; multiparty, 47; popular, 23; in postconflict situations, 80 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 143 Environment(al): climate change and food system, 151–152; ethics, 141–157; food security and, 147–152; global, 10; as human right, 143; impact of industrialization on, 142; justice, 144; management of, 25; microfinance and, 152–156; population increase and, 144; protection of, 101n7 Environmental Ethics (journal), 144 Ethics: biocentric, 144–146; of care, 17, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 115; of caring solidarity, 104, 116; of cosmopolitan community, 4, 10–12; of critique, 4, 12–13; democratic, 51–66; double denial of, 119, 139n2; economic, 126–131; economic institutions and, 18; environmental, 18, 141–157; of external intervention, 76; feminist, 17, 103–118; and global governance, 1–19, 105–108, 119–139; international, 2, 105, 119, 120; of intervention, 112; land, 143; marginalization of, 2; microfinance and, 152–156; nonpaternalistic, 17; political impact of, 4; politics and, 4–13, 106; and power, 105–108; of the powerful, 19; in promoting democracy, 67–83; of reform, 4–8; of

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responsible governance, 8–10; of solidarity, 17 Ethiopia: food unrest in, 150 Ethnic cleansing, 12, 85, 93 European Union (EU), 62; Common Security and Foreign Policy initiative, 71; democracy promotion by, 68, 69, 79; interests in democracy promotion, 78; narrow conception of democracy by, 74; regional creation of, 6; and UN reform, 66 Factionalism, 45 Faith-based initiatives, 40 Falk, Richard, 163 Feminism, 12; and gender hierarchies, 13; global security governance and, 103–118; human security and, 109; rejection of simplistic understanding of global governance, 105 Feminist: analysis of security and humanitarian intervention, 108–113; ethics, 17, 103–118; political science, 106; security framework, 27 Ferry, Luc, 145 Focus on the Global South, 43 Food security, 147–152 Foucault, Michel, 38, 49 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), 141 France: democracy promotion by, 69; reliance on for UN coercive operations, 97; self-interest in United Nations, 54 Franceschet, Antonio, 1–19, 159 French Revolution, 11; popular sovereignty and, 24 Friedman, Milton, 129, 130 Friends of the Earth, 43 Gaia hypothesis, 145 Geldof, Bob, 42 Gender: equality, 50n6; exclusion, 104; hierarchies, 13; and humanitarian interventions, 17; inequality, 103; norms, 108; power and, 107, 115; relations, 104; violence and, 103 Genocide, 12, 93 Germany: democracy promotion by, 69; elections in, 80 Ghana, 73, 78

Global Environmental Facility (GEF), 146 Globalization, 1; celebration of, 42; civilizing, 131; criticisms of, 42; economic, 43; market, 37, 40; political, 161; political life under conditions of, 9 Gold standard, 126 Goldsworthy, Heather, 16, 18, 141–157, 165 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 54 Governance: civil society and, 28; control and, 28; cooperative, 29; corporate, 29; crisis of, 70; defining, 28; democratic, 67–83; domestic, 17; economic, 12; and economic development, 70; empirical sovereignty and, 23; good, 29, 68, 70, 72; internal, 23; legitimacy, 14; liberal, 49; multilayered, 105; in postconflict situations, 80; provision of public and private services in, 40; security, 13, 103–118; sovereignty and, 27–30; types of, 29 Governance, global, 1; and anarchy, 25; assimilation and subordination in, 123–126; changing norms of, 27; civil society and, 15, 35–50; conflict resolution tools of, 12; context of, 124; critical conception of power in, 106; economic, 119–139; emergence in context of reflexive modernity, 12; environmental ethics and, 18, 141–157; ethics and, 1–19, 105–108; greening of, 18; hegemony and, 13; human rights and, 30; impact of force on, 17; industrial expansion in, 18; institutions of, 16; limitations on, 7; mainstream approaches to, 3; microfinance and, 152–156; moral ideal of, 5, 101n7; as moral-political issue, 12; need for sovereignty in, 14; negative impacts of, 13, 29, 30; ontology of, 124; pluralist order, 7, 20n2; political dynamics of, 14; political economy of, 3; politics and, 1–19; power and responsibility in, 13, 105–108, 159–167; regressive, 87; relationship to state sovereignty, 21; responsibility to protect (R2P) concept and, 17; solidarist order, 7,

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Index 8, 10, 20n2; steering, 11; territorial limits of, 52; and threats to values, 7; universality and difference in, 121–131; and violations of human rights, 31 Gramsci, Antonio, 13, 38 Great Depression, 127, 130 Gutierrez, Antonio, 66 Haider, Jörg, 81 Haiti, 72; elections in, 79; food unrest in, 150; intervention in, 26, 77, 109 Hamas, 37, 47 Harare Declaration, 72 Harper, Stephen, 89 Havel, Vaclav, 156 Hayek, Friedrich, 130 Hegel, G. W. F., 38, 39, 49 Hezbollah, 35, 37 Holocaust, 31 Humanitarian: aid, 10; crises, 1, 7, 17; intervention, 63; norms, 11; protection of civilians through force, 16; relief, 40 Humanitarian intervention, 7, 85–101; apolitical, 37; authorization for, 86, 92–96; and blame for catastrophes, 87; commitment of resources to, 86; and commitment to human rights, 90; conduct of, 86; in democracy promotion, 67, 68, 70; effect of US decisions on, 92; ethical challenges in, 86, 87; ethics of, 76; evaluation of, 86, 98–100; feminist ethics and, 103–118; gendered assumptions of, 17; goals of, 86, 98; and the hegemon, 92; humanitarian organization support in, 89–90; impartiality in, 97; indifference in, 91; interference in political processes by, 75; justifications for, 91; legitimacy of, 91, 92–96, 103; limited outcomes of, 100; militarily dominant powers and, 91; national interest and, 88–92; norms of, 103; operationalization of, 86, 96–98; political nature of, 91; and power and politics, 88–92; practices of, 17; reform of, 63; refugee outflows and, 99; as response to failure to eliminate root causes of conflicts, 87; responsibility to rebuild

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and, 99; restrictive notion of, 101n1; rules of engagement in, 97; as “saving strangers,” 104; soft/hard/ forcible, 72; and UN Security Council, 94–95; use of force and, 85–101; validation in democracy, 68 Humanitarianism: cosmopolitan, 39; militarization of, 111; politicization of, 89; pragmatic, 99 Human rights, 6, 147; abuses, 7; centrality of state in future of, 33; constructivism and, 31; defining, 30; development as, 32; evolution of, 33; and global governance, 30; and global politics, 31; individual, 109; and international ethics, 142–143; migration and, 64; monitoring, 10; and national interests, 33; neoliberal view of, 2; obligations of, 30; popular sovereignty and, 24; and privilege of citizenship, 33; promotion of, 30; protection of, 56; respect for, 71; self-determination and, 30; sovereignty and, 30–33; United Nations and, 33; violations, 101n1; and war on terror, 32, 33 Human Rights Council, 66n2 Human Rights Watch, 90 Hume, David, 139n10 IMF. See International Monetary Fund Imperialism, 51; free trade, 127 India: food unrest in, 150 Individualism, 49; liberal, 39 Indonesia, 77; food unrest in, 150 In Larger Freedom (Annan), 62, 63 Institutions: building, 28, 29, 132; changed by ethical norms, 14; constraints imposed by, 79; control of, 23; cosmopolitan, 58tab; democratic, 29, 52, 68; development of, 19; dismantling, 40; economic, 18, 40; financial, 40, 41, 68, 114, 120; global governance, 1, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16; intergovernmental, 16; international, 37, 41, 56, 68, 82, 114, 120, 126; of international society, 26; legitimacy of, 56; multilateral, 72; regional, 71, 82; representative, 70–71; restructuring, 37; social welfare, 36; transnational, 40, 52; trust for, 7; use of cos-

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mopolitan vision by, 12; of world order, 13 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), 151 International Bill of Rights (1966), 32 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), 63, 86, 93, 94, 99, 100, 104, 111 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), 32 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), 32, 148 International Criminal Court (ICC), 39, 47, 48, 65 International Crisis Group, 77 International Forum on Globalization (IFG), 41 International Labour Organization (ILO), 64 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 6; ethics of practices of, 120; financial crises and, 131; good governance and, 29; legitimacy of, 120–121; management of global political economy by, 16; monetary stability and, 128; moralization of global economic policies by, 18; policy changes at, 121, 132, 133; poverty reduction and, 133; protests against, 41; reform of, 42, 131; restructuring of, 37; solidarity and responsibility in, 135; structural adjustment and, 129 International relations, 119; English School, 26; ethics as subfield in, 2 Inter-Parliamentary Union, 58tab Iran: war with Iraq, 25 Iraq, 76, 77; humanitarian assistance in, 90; interest in oil reserves in, 49; reform of post-Hussein government in, 74; US war in, 48, 95; war as hegemonic project in, 49; war with Iran, 25 Israel, 47 Italian Peace Roundtable, 66 Italy, 65; food unrest in, 150 Ivory Coast: food unrest in, 150

Justice: and “advantage of the stronger,” 2; charity and, 44; civil society and, 36; cultural, 39; distributive, 122, 123; domestic theory of, 122; economic, 14, 36, 39–45, 122, 123; environmental, 144; principals of, 51; theory of, 139n6, 163

Johannesburg Earth Summit (2002), 146 Jones, Dorothy, 146 Jubilee 2000, 41, 42

Makinda, Samuel, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12–15, 21–34, 164 Malaria, 44, 45, 50n6

Kant, Immanuel, 5, 11, 108 Keating, Tom, 5, 7, 10, 12, 16, 17, 67–83, 162, 165 Kennan, George, 161, 165 Kennedy, John F., 54 Keynes, John Maynard, 12, 18, 128, 129, 140n13 Khnmer Rouge, 23 Khrushchev, Nikita, 54 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 44 Kissinger, Henry, 80–81 Köhler, Horst, 133, 134 Korea: war in, 26 Ladd, William, 66 Landmines, 11 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 24 League of Nations, 6, 52, 53 Legitimacy: authority to take action and, 21; of government decisions, 28; moral norms and, 2, 91; sustaining, 21 Leopold, Aldo, 143, 147, 152 Liberalism: critical, 12; democratic, 36; economic, 6, 36, 47; embedded, 18, 128; global civil society and, 35–50; laissez-faire, 18; market, 40, 41, 49; Western, 107 Liberalization, 127; economic, 42, 78; financial, 130; global, 54; trade, 130 Liberation theology, 44 Lincoln, Abraham, 81 Local Capacities for Peace Project by, 46 Locke, John, 24 Lu, Catherine, 7, 10, 12, 16, 17, 85–101, 162, 165 Lula da Silva, Ignacio, 66 Lynch, Cecilia, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 35–50, 165

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Index Malnutrition, 150 Marchetti, Raffaele, 12, 13, 15, 51–67, 165 Market(s): “animal spirits” in, 128; capitalist, 6; commodity, 148, 149; critiques of, 43; deregulation, 70; domestic, 133; economy, 127; establishment of, 78; failure, 132, 135; financial, 40, 133; free, 29, 130; global, 11, 37, 40, 41; liberal, 40, 41, 47, 49; operation, 71; rationality, 130; relations, 11; selfish interests of, 15; speculation, 148, 149 Marx, Karl, 11, 38, 39 Marxism, 12 Matthew, Richard, 16, 18, 141–157, 165 Mauritania: food unrest in, 150 McDonald, Bryan, 16, 18, 141–157, 165 Meadows, Donella, 144 Médecins Sans Frontières, 46, 90 Microfinance, 18, 152–156 Migration, 8, 160; human rights and, 64 Militarism, 17 Mill, John Stuart, 94 Millbrook Action Program, 72 Moral: basis of autonomy, 107; conscience, 15; discourse, 18; exclusion, 104; genealogy, 108; global order, 32; legitimacy, 91; norms, 1; obligations, 13; particularism, 11; problems, 108; reality, 109; strength, 5; systems, 106; tensions, 14; theory, 108; theory on reciprocal exchanges, 106; thinking, 107; truths, 108; values, 14; vocabulary, 6 Morality: common, 7; defining globally, 31; and different forms of power, 106; nature of, 106; universal, 97 Morgenthau, Hans, 160, 161, 165 Movement(s): antiglobalization, 41, 42; antislavery, 6; debt relief, 41; environmental, 143; humanitarian, 6; labor, 115; peace, 48, 49; social, 1, 3, 36, 50n1 Mugabe, Robert, 80 Multilateralism: club, 72; networked, 72 Murphy, Craig, 19, 159–167 Naess, Arne, 144 Nationalism: as cause of conflict, 7 National Security Strategy (2002), 78 Nature: anthropocentric perspective,

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144, 145; biocentric perspective, 144, 145; Dust Bowl, 151; intrinsic value of, 145; nonterritorial basis of, 141; as raw material for commodities, 143; respect for, 151–152; as threat to humans, 143; value of, 144; violence against, 143 Neoliberalism, 18, 40, 48, 74, 121, 126, 131, 139n2; ideology of, 29; materialist views in, 2; state-centric focus, 3 Nicaragua, 80 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 161 Nixon, Richard, 54 Nongovernmental organizations: concerns over, 37; decisionmaking and, 28; deliverance of humanitarian/ development aid by, 10; democratic accountability of, 37; “Do No Harm” ethic of, 46, 47; emphasis on funding their own organizations, 37; employment opportunities in, 35; and global governance, 50n1; gross domestic product and, 50n2; humanitarian, 45; local, 35, 41, 45; Local Capacities for Peace Project by, 46; participation in UN agency humanitarian meetings, 35; and privatization of relief, 37; religious denominations and, 35; and state sovereignty, 21; tied to US foreign policy goals, 37; transnational, 35, 41, 45; and UN relations, 63, 64; violent actions from, 37 Nonintervention, 17 Norms: cooperative, 6; of democracy, 16, 68; ethical, 14; gender, 108; global governance, 11, 27; humanitarian, 6, 11; human rights, 11; international, 53; moral, 1; of nonaggression, 6; social, 108 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 41 Nuremberg tribunal, 31, 32, 47 Nussbaum, Martha, 159, 164, 165 Nyerere, Julius, 166 ONE campaign, 43, 44 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): good governance and, 70 Organization of American States (OAS), 68, 69, 71, 72

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Organizations: civil society, 3, 7, 16, 40–42, 68, 71, 73; and democracy promotion, 68; democratic criteria and, 59tab; distancing from states engaged in humanitarian interventions, 90; faith-based, 43; humanitarian, 46, 90, 91; intergovernmental, 11, 14, 15; international, 3, 5, 21, 45, 95; media, 148, 149; multilateral, 70; regional, 62, 68, 95; religious, 50n1; transnational, 46; transnational civil society, 35; women’s, 28; world economic, 6 Organizations, nongovernmental. See Nongovernmental organizations Ortega, Daniel, 80 Ottawa Treaty, 65 Oxfam, 42, 112 Paine, Thomas, 24 Palestine, 47, 54, 80 Paternalism, 51, 115 Peacebuilding Commission, 66n2 People’s Republic of China: United Nations admission, 23 Perez de Cuellar, Javier, 24 Peru, 72, 77 Philippines: food unrest in, 150 Pluralism, 7 Pogge, Thomas, 122, 123 Political: authority, 9; change, 71, 90; chaos, 25; community, 32; conditionality, 70; conflict, 46, 89; decisionmaking, 107; discourse, 38–40; economy, 3, 16; equality, 57, 58tab; ethics, 106; exclusion, 110; globalization, 161; justice, 39; liberal ideology, 6; objectives, 8; oppression, 75; participation, 39, 51, 56, 57; pluralism, 122; power, 56; preferences, 58; principles of cosmopolitanism, 60–64; reality, 1, 6; reform, 70; rights, 39; stabilization, 99 Politics: of convergence, 105; corrupt, 5; democratic, 74; ethics and, 4–13; gender hierarchies in, 13; global, 1–19, 31, 78, 112; international, 53; interstate, 89; liberal approach, 2, 5; local, 77; postintervention, 86; realist approach, 2; rejected forms of, 5; world, 1

Politics, world: domination in, 3; “governance without government” and, 4–13; liberal view of, 4; power hierarchies in, 3; regulatory gaps in, 8 Pol Pot, 23 Poststructuralism, 12, 13 Poverty, 128; absolute, 130; alleviation, 25, 101n7; eradication, 50n6; extreme, 43, 50n6; global, 101, 101n7; links to economic power, 44; microfinance and, 152–156; relief, 43; women and, 110, 115 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, 132 Powell, Colin, 101n6 Power: discursive, 104, 105, 107; economic, 42, 44, 48; and ethics, 105–108; exercise of, 2; gendered, 107, 115; giving up, 19, 165–167; in global governance, 105–108; hierarchies, 3; imbalances, 124; legitimate, 51; limiting, 74; material, 2, 105, 107; military, 44, 48; moral norms and, 2; over, 106; political, 56; redistribution of, 44; relations, 13, 106, 115, 124; state, 37, 74; underestimation of, 103; unequal, 106 Preston, Lewis, 131 Privatization, 42, 70, 130 Production: capitalist, 11; globalization of, 1; relocation of, 114 Protectionism, 127 Protocol of Washington (1992), 71 Public Citizen, 43 Racism, 31, 32, 144 Rawls, John, 122, 123, 139n6, 162 Reagan, Ronald, 54, 129 Realism: anarchy and, 4; and management of conflict, 19; marginalization of ethics in, 2; materialist view of power in, 2; state-centric focus, 3; views of war, 26 Reality: new, 9; objective, 5; political, 1, 2, 6; social, 107 Reason: resolving problems through, 39 Reclaim Our UN campaign, 66 Reform: adoption of rule of law, 70; economic, 70; ethics of, 3, 4; global market practices, 41; liberal international, 8; policy, 135; political, 70; public sector, 78; of responsible gov-

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Index ernance, 4; of state systems, 8; structural, 129; tax, 130; trade practices, 40; United Nations, 16 Refugees, 35, 99 Regan, Tom, 144 Relativism, 21 Report of the Commission on Human Security (2003), 110 Responsibility to protect (R2P) concept, 17, 63, 85, 86, 93–96, 100, 101, 104, 111, 112, 165 Rights: abstract, 17; adequate standard of living, 148; animal, 144, 145; of children, 32; civil, 39; to food, 148, 149; gendered, 17; group, 30; historical contingency of, 31; individual, 4, 5, 11, 12, 17; minority, 32; in “moments of context,” 105; moral norms and, 2; natural, 30; political, 39; reproductive, 110; security, 113; socially constructed, 31, 39; universalization of, 31; of women, 32 Rio Earth Summit (1992), 146 Robinson, Fiona, 12, 13, 16, 17, 103–118, 166 Roddenberry, Gene, 162 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 24, 57 Russia: lack of commitment to responsibility to protect (R2P) concept, 96 Rwandan conflict, 48, 54; indifference to, 91; lack of intervention in, 63 St. Francis of Assisi, 143 A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 143 Santiago Declaration, 72 Schumacher, E. F., 144 Secularism, 37 Security: anarchy and, 25; civil society and, 36; collective, 6, 53; as constructed aspect of experience, 108; defining, 27; elite, 109; environmental, 156; feminist framework for, 27; food, 18, 147–152; governance, 13, 103–118; human, 13, 17, 80, 103, 106, 109–111, 114, 153; individual as primary referent, 109; intimate, 110; military solutions to threats to, 26; peace and, 45–49; personal, 113; providers of, 113; recipients of, 113; rights, 113; sovereignty and, 24–27; state-centered conception of, 103;

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state-centric, 26; threats to, 110; traditional approach to, 26, 27, 114; values of, 4 Self-determination: human rights and, 30; moral norms and, 2; right to, 54; transborder interests and, 57 Sen, Amartya, 134 Senegal: food unrest in, 150 Sierra Leone: humanitarian intervention in, 91 Singer, Peter, 144, 145 Smith, Adam, 5, 18, 127, 139n11 Snyder, Gary, 144 Social: action, 56; assistance, 41; capital, 134; capitalism, 5; contract, 9; cooperation, 6; development, 15; ecology, 144; exclusion, 104; invention of, 129; liability, 56; movements, 1, 3, 36, 50n1; norms, 108; practices, 105, 112; programs, 114; reality, 107; responsibility, 18; rights, 39; systems, 106; teaching, 164; theory, 27; welfare, 40, 41 Socialism, 115; revolutionary, 11 Socialist International, 62, 63, 66 Society: international, 26; mass industrial, 144 Solidarism, 7, 8, 10; transnational, 11 Solidarity: as accompaniment, 44 Somalia: conflict in, 45; humanitarian intervention in, 77, 109; lack of government in, 27–28; nongovernmental organizations in, 45; war in, 26 Somalia NGO Consortium, 45 South Africa: security in, 27; system of apartheid in, 31–32 Sovereignty, 1, 5, 7, 12, 14, 21; absolute, 63, 65; as barrier against violence, 5; challenges to, 7; contesting, 21–34; as defensible value, 5; empirical, 14, 23, 27, 28; enhancement of global human emancipation and, 15; evolvement of, 22; governance and, 27–30; human rights and, 30–33; juridical, 14, 22–24, 27; moral norms and, 2; national, 65; need for global governance by, 14; overriding, 7; popular, 14, 15, 23–24; principle and practice of, 22; reinterpreting, 22–24; security and, 24–27; shared norms of, 5, 75; war and,

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24–27; Westphalian concept, 22, 24, 27 Sovereignty, state: emancipation/oppression in, 21; enabling/undermining global governance, 22; inclusion/ exclusion in, 21; reinterpreting, 22–24; relationship to global governance, 21–34 Soviet Union: demise of, 40; in United Nations, 53 Spain, 66 Star Trek (television), 162, 165 State(s): ability to control territory, 14; absolutist, 8; association with global governance, 3; authoritarian, 70; authority outside borders, 8; brutality of, 11; as cause of insecurity for individuals, 109; centrality to practice of humanitarian intervention, 88–89; and citizen equality, 11; commitment to cooperative norms, 6; community of, 85; consent for legitimacy, 7; constituted as territorial authority, 8; democratic, 53; dependence on global governance for recognition, 14; developing, 70; disappearance of, 10; and ethics of reform, 6; failure, 7, 87; and human rights, 6, 30; industrialized, 6; modern system of, 5; multinational, 7; outlaw, 87; particularistic politics of, 11; postconflict, 16; power, 74; “reasons of,” 61; resources, 10; “second contract” among, 9; self-interest of, 15, 30; sovereign, 5; survival, 26; transnational issues and, 8; use of diplomacy for self-serving actions, 6 Stiglitz, Joseph, 12, 132, 134, 135 Stockholm Earth Summit (1972), 146 Stone, Christopher, 144 Structural adjustment programs, 70 Subsidiarity, 164 Sudan, 98; humanitarian assistance in, 90; indifference to, 91 Summers, Lawrence, 132 Taiwan: denial of juridical sovereignty to, 23; empirical sovereignty in, 23 Ten Principles for the Global Structure (Nussbaum), 164 Thailand: food unrest in, 150

Thatcher, Margaret, 129, 130, 140n16 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 24 Thoreau, Henry David, 143 Trade: collective benefits of, 6; free, 12, 42, 127; globalization of, 1, 114; liberalization, 130; peace and, 12; reform, 40; rules of, 161 Transparency, 43, 133; global, 64tab; good governance and, 29 Truth and reconciliation commissions, 48 Turtle Island (Snyder), 144 Unions: public, 8 United Kingdom: democracy promotion by, 69, 73; reliance on for UN coercive operations, 97; self-interest in United Nations, 54 United Nations: assistance aid through nongovernmental organizations by, 35; authorization for war by, 25, 26; civil society actors in, 15; demands for accountability from, 56; democracy promotion by, 52–55, 63, 65, 68, 69, 71; democratic challenge to, 55–60; democratic ethics and, 51–66; democratic potential of, 15; disappointment in, 54; establishment of, 25; gap between mandate and resources, 54; hegemonic paradigm of, 15–16; humanitarian intervention mandates, 92; human rights and, 33; hypocrisies of, 54; improvement of democratic participation in, 16; limited resources of, 10; peace enforcement programs, 91; peacemaking/ peacebuilding programs, 25; poverty alleviation by, 25; as product of World War II, 25; reform of, 16, 51–66; requests for election monitoring, 71; resentment of direct rule in democracy promotion programs, 77; responsibility to enforce compliance, 53; secret meetings in, 54; state creation of, 6; tensions between statist and territorialist bases in, 56 United Nations Charter, 25, 28, 53, 63 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), 141, 149 United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development (1986), 32

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Index United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 71, 73, 77 United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 62–63 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 146 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 148, 149 United Nations General Assembly, 61; reform of, 63 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 45, 95 United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG), 43, 50n6, 152 United Nations Millennium Plus Five Summit (2005), 63 United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, 63 United Nations Rome Declaration on World Food Security, 148, 149 United Nations Security Council, 53, 54, 61, 91, 93, 109; authorization of humanitarian interventions, 95; expansion of, 10; reform of, 62; responsibility for interpreting R2P doctrine, 95 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 30, 31, 32, 59tab, 148 United Nations World Food Summit Plan of Action, 148 United Nations World Summit (2005), 92 United States: assistance aid and nongovernmental organizations, 35, 46; democracy promotion by, 69; faithbased initiatives in, 40; and international law in war on terror, 32; nongovernmental organizations in, 35; normative goals in assistance, 47; reliance on for UN coercive operations, 97; and responsibility to protect (R2P) concept, 96; self-interest in United Nations, 54; war in Iraq, 48, 95 Universalism, 21 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 40; democracy initiative of, 69, 73 Uzbekistan: food unrest in, 150 Values: common, 53; conflicting, 124; ethical, 2, 15; of human dignity, 6;

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imperial, 113; imposition of, 7; of international peace, 6; intervention and, 7; justice, 4; moral, 14; realization of, 4; security, 4; shared, 92; specific sets of, 105; threats to, 7; universal, 113; unshared, 160; women’s, 109 Vatel, Emmerich de, 24 Venezuela, 47, 72 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993), 32 Violence: cost of, 112; domestic, 114; escalation of, 112; inevitability of, 113; militarism and, 112; against nature, 143; sovereignty as barrier against, 5; against women, 110 Voluntarism, 38 Vonnegut, Kurt, 163, 167n3 Walzer, Michael, 156 War: acquisition of territory through, 25; anarchy and, 25; authorization for, 25; ban on, 53; crimes, 85; institutional sources of, 5; as instrument for improvement of human conditions, 26; interstate, 27; mechanized, 12; mitigation through diplomacy, 5; opposition to, 48; realist view, 26; reasons for, 25; sovereignty and, 24–27; among states, 4; on terror, 32; unilateral, 53; in violation of UN Charter, 25 War on terror, 85, 103; opposition to, 48 Washington Consensus, 130, 132, 135, 140n15 White, Lynn, Jr., 143 Wolfensohn, James, 132 Women: as caregivers, 17; ethics of care and, 103–118; lack of access to care services for, 115; organizations, 28; particular experiences of, 107; poor working conditions of, 114; poverty and, 110; rights of, 32; threats to security faced by, 110; undervalued labor of, 115; violence against, 110. See also Feminism; Gender World Bank (WB), 6; Comprehensive Development Framework, 132; critiques of, 131, 132; development needs and, 128; ethics of practices of, 120; financial crises and, 131; good governance and, 29, 70, 72;

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Knowledge Bank, 132; legitimacy of, 120–121; management of global political economy by, 16; market orientation of, 132; moralization of global economic policies by, 18; Partnership Initiative, 132; policy changes at, 121; protests against, 41; reform of, 42, 131; restructuring of, 37; social capital and, 134; solidarity and responsibility in, 135; structural adjustment and, 129 World Conference on Human Rights (1993), 32 World Economic Forum (WEF), 36, 42, 43 World Health Organization (WHO), 45

World Order Models Project (WOMP), 163, 164 World Parliament, 58tab World Social Forum (WSF), 36, 42, 44, 48, 50n5 World Summit Outcome Document (2005), 86 World Trade Organization (WTO), 6; opposition to, 41; reform of, 42; restructuring of, 37 Yemen: food unrest in, 150 Yunus, Mohammad, 155 Zapatero, Rodriguez, 66 Zimbabwe: elections in, 80

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About the Book

Ethics is treated in this provocative book not as a set of rules, nor as a topic for philosophical discussion, but as an inescapable and necessary aspect of political life. The authors analyze the ethical controversies that are central to global governance as states and other actors navigate a complex world order. Covering the gamut of fundamental issues—sovereignty, the role of civil society, UN reform, democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, human security, the global economy, the environment—they offer the reader a deeper understanding of the significance of ethics in the politics of global governance and at the same time provide a fresh perspective on contemporary dilemmas in international relations. Antonio Franceschet is associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Kant and Liberal Internationalism: Sovereignty, Justice and Global Reform.

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