Peace, Justice and International Order: Decent Peace in John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples

201 Pages·2014·0.601 MB·English

by  Annette Förster (auth.)

Peace, Justice and
International Order
Decent Peace in John Rawls’
The Law of Peoples
Annette Förster
Peace, Justice and International Order
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Peace, Justice and
International Order
Decent Peace in John Rawls’
The Law of Peoples
Annette Förster
Lecturer and Research Associate, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
© Annette Förster 2014
Foreword © Chris Brown 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-45265-8
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First published 2014 by
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Contents
List of Figures viii
Foreword by Chris Brown ix
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Abbreviations xiv
1 Introduction 1
2 Practical Relevance of a Realistic Utopia 8
3 Why Peoples, Not States: Why States, Not Peoples? 19
4 A Typology of Political Regimes 38
5 International Justice and the Principles
of the Law of Peoples 62
6 The Society of Peoples: A Union
of Well- Ordered Societies? 96
7 Decent Peoples and the Real World 111
8 Decent Peace in The Law of Peoples and Beyond 127
9 Peace, Justice and International Order: A Conclusion 153
Notes 161
Bibliography 170
Index 181
vii
List of Figures
7.1 Identification of aspiring decent societies 118
viii
Foreword
The publication of A Theory of Justice in 1970 established John Rawls
as the most important Anglo- American political philosopher since
John Stuart Mill, and soon a thriving community of political theorists
devoted to interpreting, clarifying and sometimes criticizing this com-
plex text emerged. One line of criticism that emerged immediately,
for example in Brian Barry’s path- breaking study The Liberal Theory
of Justice (1973), concerned Rawls’ acceptance of a clear distinction
between the domestic and the international. To rehearse briefly what is
by now a very familiar story, Rawls is concerned to develop an account
of just institutions for a society, and employs the notions of a contract
arrived at in the Original Position under a Veil of Ignorance in order
to construct the terms under which individuals would enter such insti-
tutions; these terms it is claimed would comprise the most extensive
equal political liberties possible, and two principles of social justice,
fair equality of opportunity and the ‘difference principle’ which states
that inequalities are acceptable only if they work to the advantage of
the least advantaged in society. This provides an account of justice in a
bounded community, which is assumed for the purposes of the theory
to be a self- contained society which individuals enter at birth and leave
by dying, a society which is a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage.
Relations between such societies are to be determined by a second con-
tract made by their representatives – they would agree, Rawls says, to
political principles analogous to political liberty, that is the traditional
principles and practices of international society and international law:
non-aggression, n on- intervention and so on, but not to principles of
global distributive or social justice. There would be no international
difference principle. The reason he argues thus is because, employing
his definition of a society, there is no world or international society,
therefore no basis for global social justice.
The distinction between the international and the domestic which
Rawls repeats here is characteristic of Realist and English School
accounts of international order, and of contract theorists from Thomas
Hobbes to the present day, but it was unwelcome to the community of
justice theorists brought into being by Rawls’ work. For most of these
theorists from Barry onwards, it was simply perverse to argue that con-
siderations of distributive justice stopped at the water’s edge – a theory
ix