Global Ethics in the Contemporary Age - Program, Critique, and Deconstruction

Abstract

Ethics as Foreign Policy: Britain, the EU and the Other. By Dan Bulley. Oxford: Routledge, 2009. 192 pp., $140.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-48361-2). The Ethics of Global Governance. By Antonio Franceschet. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. 205 pp., $49.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-651-4). In The Twenty Years’ Crisis , E.H. Carr identified the challenge of dealing with the moral problem of IR: “The place of morality in international politics is the most obscure and difficult problem in the whole range of international studies” (Carr 2001, p. 135). In this review article, I engage with the claims of two recent works on international ethics, Dan Bulley's Ethics as Foreign Policy: Britain, the EU and the Other , and Antonio Franceschet's (ed.), The Ethics of Global Governance . Both books are important contributions to the debates that surround global ethics in the post 9/11 international environment. Prompted by the author's fascination with former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's declaration that Britain would henceforth have a foreign policy with an “ethical dimension,” Dan Bulley attempts to apply the insights of continental philosophy, in particular the concept of deconstruction, to the ethical dimensions of foreign policy discourse within Britain and the EU. The author states that his aim is “to draw out the conception of ethics as foreign policy in a British and EU context and then examine whether it works in its own terms.” The means by which he wishes to accomplish this feat is deconstruction, an interpretive strategy designed to “reveal the complexity and the contradictions within what one strives to enact and make possible” (p. 5). Bulley is anxious to stress that deconstructive readings do not take place distinct from reality, but rather that “Reality” can only ever be textually constituted. Whether or not British or European agents were acting ethically or not is unimportant for the author as a) we cannot know the “reality” of their intentions or the “true” nature of their acts and intentions and b) the author wishes to demonstrate that British and European claims to the ethical deconstruct (i.e., how …