Cultural Imperialism and 'Democratic Peace'

Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 59-75

  Audard, Catherine ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Cosmopolitan writers; Cultural relativism; Democratic peace; Imperialism; International conflicts

Indexed keywords

EID: 84891315902     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470776612.ch4     Document Type: Chapter

References (28)

1. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 (hereafter LoP). The 1993 version of LoP appears in S. Freeman, ed., Rawls Collected Papers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 (cited hereafter as CP).
2. Note that already in A Theory of Justice (hereafter TJ), 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, his conception of conscientious refusal was discriminating. 'What is needed then,' he wrote, 'is not a general pacifism, but a discriminating conscientious refusal to engage in war in certain circumstances' (TJ: 335). This, in my view, is one of the strong points of his conception of international justice.
3. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000;
4. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979 and 'Rawls's Law of Peoples', Ethics, 110/4 (2000): 669-96;
5. Allen Buchanan, 'Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World', Ethics, 110/4 (2000): 697-721;
6. Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989;
7. Kok-Chor Tan, 'Liberal Toleration in Rawls's Law of Peoples', Ethics, 108/2 (1998): 276-95, and Justice without Borders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
8. John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake, London: Routledge, 1995;
9. Barry Hindess, 'Neo-Liberal Citizenship', Citizenship Studies, 6/2 (2002): 127-43.
10. Stanley Hoffmann, 'Dreams of a Just World', New York Review of Books, 42 (1995): 52-7. 'This overlapping consensus is really just a modus vivendi among quite different models of society' (p. 54).
11. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 104, and Rawls, LoP, p. 10.
12. Rawls, CP, p. 144.
13. Political Liberalism (hereafter PL), New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. xxvii.
14. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, London: Macmillan Press, 2000, p. 136.
15. In the first version of The Law of Peoples, one could note a morally superior undertone in the way Rawls formulated the ambitions of a reasonable Law of Peoples. 'Our first duty,' he writes, 'is to leave the state of nature and submit to the rule of a reasonable and just law . . . Another long-run aim is to bring all societies eventually to honour that law, to be full and self-standing members of the society of well-ordered peoples and to secure human rights everywhere' (CP, pp. 556-7).
16. In LoP (p. 50), Rawls gives a detailed account of both conditions in a domestic liberal situation. But how might this apply to a non-liberal situation where these institutional conditions do not obtain? We are left with only subjective conditions, beliefs and allegiances, and this is where the argument is failing. Only moral domination can make up for the missing democratic institutions. This gives strength to the cosmopolitan view that only democratic regimes can be the basis for real stability and peace in international relations.
17. On these alternatives to Rawls's overlapping consensus, see E. Picavet and C. Arnsperger, 'More than Modus Vivendi, Less than Overlapping Consensus', Social Science Information, 32/2 (2004): 167-204.
18. Tan, 'Liberal Toleration in Rawls's Law of Peoples', p. 289.
19. It is very interesting that the two great nations that see themselves as 'universal Republics', France and the United States, should be so blind to that confusion and incapable of distancing themselves from these myths inherited from their two very different revolutions. A measure of scepticism and humility here would be welcome but is rarely the case among political philosophers. For an exception, see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français, Paris: Le Seuil, 2004.
20. See LoP, pp. 51-4 for the debate between historians on democratic peace.
21. Kant, Political Writings, p. 99.
22. Kant, Political Writings, pp. 100-2: 'None of the so-called "republics" of antiquity employed such a (representative) system and they thus inevitably ended up in despotism.' Rawls has no possibility to make such a distinction because his view of liberalism is too close to the American historical experience.
23. See Chris Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p. 61, on liberal internationalism and Continental political theory.
24. For an analysis of this distinction, see David Reidy, 'Rawls on International Justice: A Defence', Political Theory, 32/3 (2004): 291-319, esp 298.
25. On 'explanatory nationalism' and its critique, see Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, pp. 139-44 and Tan, Justice without Borders, pp. 70-2.
26. Buchanan, 'Rawls's Law of Peoples', p. 701.
27. Reidy, 'Rawls on International Justice: A Defence', p. 305.
28. For a discussion of the duty of assistance, see John Tasioulas, 'Global Justice without End?', to appear in The Legacy of John Rawls, Lisbon University Press, 2005.