Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the Present

Abstract

Those who have gone before me in giving the Martin Wight Memorial Lecture have been persons of great distinction; I am ill prepared to follow the example they have set. Among them Herbert Butterfield and Michael Howard sought to give us an account of the relations of states with one another, and of governments with their subjects, in which the claims of morality and of practical necessity are in some degree balanced. Each believed that, though ethics and the context of power in which sovereign states must live make demands on government that will never be fully compatible, serious thought and wise policy must nevertheless strive to reconcile them. In that conviction I follow my predecessors. I cannot hope to match the eloquence with which they defended their conviction that a pure philosophy of right and a philosophy in which expediency is everything are equally, and necessarily, incomplete. My hope can be only to add a modest rider to their reasonings. Let me state summarily my conclusions, before I try to present the thoughts that have led me to them. It is commonly supposed that there is at present only one legitimate type of government: at the close of the twentieth century liberal democracy is the only political regime that passes ethical muster. Other regimes may be justified as stages on the way to liberal democratic institutions, or as unavoidably imperfect approximations to them; but liberal democracy alone can be fully legitimate. As Francis Fukuyama put it in a hyperbolic statement of this now orthodox view, liberal democracy is 'the final form of human government'. I I will not dispute the great virtues of democratic institutions; but I wish to suggest that democracy is justified by the human needs that it serves, and that these are complex, have varying degrees of importance in different circumstances and are sometimes conflicting. Governments are legitimate in so far as they meet the needs of their citizens. Those that fail in this will be judged by