A normative foundation for statism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cosmopolitans have argued that coercive statism – the view that egalitarian distributive obligations only exist between co-citizens – is under-motivated. Conversely, republican theorists have argued that the state should remain a primary focus of global justice, relying only upon contingent features of states and the global order. This paper argues for an understanding of freedom as non-domination that grounds both coercive statism and the republican primacy of sovereign states in accounts of global justice. It argues that distributive equality – both political and economic – are uniquely triggered by membership in a state-like polity due to the necessarily unmediated and direct nature of sovereign political authority. Distributive equality is, according to this account, constitutive of freedom in the face of a particular kind of coercive political power. This offers a response to cosmopolitans by showing that distributive equality is a necessary feature of justified state power and undergirds the republican position by showing that the global order is a secondary site of distributive justice. That is, the global order ought to maintain interstate non-domination and help states with domestic equality but need not aim at global political and economic equality.