Multilateral Dimensions of Republican Thought

Abstract

Abstract This chapter analyses the important implications of republican thought for the conception of a multilateral legal order. It conceives republican multilateralism as the institutional form individual republics can create together without compromising the fundamental principle of self-government, and by which they jointly realize the goals of civic republicanism and republican government in a more coherent manner. It proposes a certain type of multilateral integration as the republican alternative to cosmopolitanism. Following a precise description of multilateralism, it focuses on three thematic clusters in which republican thought makes a substantial contribution to multilateralism: the systemic consequences of the domestic republican structure of Member States of the multilateral system; the theory of ‘democratic peace’ among republics and the overcoming of the ‘security dilemma’ of international relations among republics; and the citizenship of individuals and peoples understood as constitutive of an equitable multilateral order.