The problem of a world state: A conflict of global identity in theory and practice

The term ‘political legitimacy’ is unfortunately ambiguous. One serious source of confusion is the failure to distinguish clearly between political legitimacy and political authority and to conflate political authority with authoritativeness. I will distinguish between (1) political legitimacy, (2) political authority, and (3) authoritativeness. I will also articulate two importantly different variants of the notion of political authority. Having drawn these distinctions, I will argue first that political legitimacy, rather than political authority, is the more central notion for a theory of the morality of political power. My second main conclusion will be that where democratic authorization of the exercise of political power is possible, only a democratic government can be legitimate. Another ambiguity is also a source of confusion. Sometimes it is unclear whether ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a descriptive or a normative sense. In this article I am concerned exclusively with legitimacy in the normative sense, not with the conditions under which an entity is believed to be legitimate. However, a normative account of legitimacy is essential for a descriptive account. Unless one distinguishes carefully between political legitimacy, political authority, and authoritativeness, one will not be clear about what beliefs in legitimacy are beliefs about.

The Law of Peoples

Within contemporary legal and political philosophy there is nothing more unpopular than defending a world state. It seems food for thought for writers like Huxley or Wells, but not a topic that deserves serious philosophical reflection. Fortunately, there are exceptions to this general rule. Theorists such as Höffe, Cabrera, Deudney and Yunker defend a version of a multilayered minimal world state – a model based on the dual principles of federalism and subsidiarity. The focus of this article is on the very fragile balance that proponents of this model have to keep between a simultaneous need for centralization and decentralization. On the basis of a critical analysis of the work of these theorists, it is argued in this article that the safeguards these authors defend to prevent a bloating of government themselves contain a tendency to hierarchical centralization. While some form of world state might be necessary to cope with the challenges posed by globalization, it is essential to discuss the shape and competences of the world state much more critically and in more detail than has been the case in the past.

Katzenstein's contribution to European political theory continues to resonate – even though the shift in scholarly work has moved in new directions, and the capacity for ‘flexible adaptation’ is under duress. When questions of power in the global system arise, the approach can account for issue-areas unanticipated by the author when the theoretical framework was introduced. Small States in World Markets still maintains a position on our reading lists, as a baseline for theory integrating comparative and international politics.

Non-Citizen Rights in ASEAN: The Need to Chart a New Course

This essay explores the thermonuclear dilemma in a timeless and universal philosophical context – a purely epistemological plain. Drawing upon ideas from Rousseau, classical realists such as Morgenthau and Niebuhr, and contemporary thinkers such as Bent Flyvbjerg, this essay first explores the theoretical possibilities of a world state; secondly, it explores the possibilities for transformation and mechanisms of change; and thirdly, it reflects upon some philosophical concerns with regard to contemporary opportunities and imminent difficulties. Ultimately, the essay argues that the thermonuclear dilemma is the existential premise for international politics and should therefore be at the forefront of any theorizing of international politics.

Responsibility Incorporated

This volume of Wight’s collected works brings together various writings concerning the political philosophy of international relations. Wight identified three traditions of thinking about international politics since the sixteenth century—Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism, which have become well known thanks to his 1991 posthumous volume, International Theory: The Three Traditions. The current volume includes several works on the same ‘international theory’ theme, some previously published and some never-before-published, with ‘Is There a Philosophy of Statesmanship?’ in the latter category. This volume also includes three essays by Wight on the causes and functions of war in international politics. Wight prepared several papers on legitimacy in domestic and international politics, and this volume features five never-before-published papers on this theme. Wight qualified his orderly analyses of traditions of political philosophy, the causes and functions of war, and principles of domestic and international legitimacy by drawing attention to unpredictable ‘wild card’ factors such as fortune and irony in his paper in this collection entitled ‘Fortune’s Banter’. Unintended, unexpected, and ironical consequences abound in international politics, despite efforts to master the dynamics of history. In view of the many factors behind events, including economic and demographic developments, Wight expressed qualifications about the role of ideas. He nonetheless concluded that ‘in historical retrospect, the philosophies of statesmen do seem observably to colour their policies’.

Introduction This book attempts to examine the workings of international politics from the viewpoint of a group of states - and in some degree their people - which are at the bottom of any conventional ordering of global power, importance and prestige. International relations has tended, understandably enough, to look at the world from the viewpoint of its most powerful states. It has been developed as a subject of study in the major capitalist states, and has been directed largely towards helping them to manage the demands of an increasingly complex international system - most obviously through the avoidance of war, but also through the management of the global economy and in other ways. Its dominant focus during the era of the Cold War was on the relationship between the superpowers, with a secondary but still important emphasis on relations between other industrial states such as those of Western Europe. Even the study of ‘north-south’ relations characteristically had a heavy emphasis on north-south relations, often within the context of superpower competition, rather than on southnorth ones. Yet most of the world's states - and in the context of this book, notably those of sub-Saharan Africa - are poor, weak and subordinate. Most of the people in them are poorer, weaker and more subordinate still. International politics affects these states and people in ways that often differ appreciably from the ways in which it affects the people and governments of more powerful states.

This book is a critique of Cambridge School Historical Contextualism as the currently dominant mode of history of political thought, drawing upon Michael Oakeshott’s analysis of the logic of historical enquiry. While acknowledging that the early Cambridge School work represented a considerable advance towards genuinely historical histories of political thought, this work identifies two major historiographical problems that have become increasingly acute. The first is general: an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the key concept of pastness necessarily presupposed in historical enquiry of all kinds. The second is specific to histories of political thought: a failure to do justice to the varieties of past political thinking, especially differences between ideology and philosophy. In addressing these problems, the author offers a comprehensive account of the history of political thought that establishes the parameters not just of histories of ideological thinking but also of the much disputed character of histories of political philosophy. Since rethinking history of political thought in Oakeshottian terms requires resisting current pressures to turn history into the servant of currently felt needs, the book offers a sustained defence of the cultural value of modernist historical enquiry against its opponents. An important work for political theorists, historians of political thought and those researching intellectual history, the philosophy of history and proposed new directions in contemporary historical studies.

The 'Good Governance' Crusade in the Third World: A Rich, Complex Narrative - Magic Wand or Smoke Screen

Journal Article The insecurity dilemma: national security of Third World states Get access The insecurity dilemma: national security of Third World states. Edited by Brian L. Job. Boulder, CO, London: Lynne Rienner. 1992. 257pp. Index, ISBN 1 55587 267 0. William Gutteridge William Gutteridge 1Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 68, Issue 4, October 1992, Pages 726–727, https://doi.org/10.2307/2622737 Published: 01 October 1992

In the past few years, after 50 years on academic margins the debate on a world government (or world state) is renewed. Traditionally it is followed by aversion toward world state, nowdays called globoscepticism. The paper focuses on classical liberal thinkers of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their views on a world state, that have been rooted in early federal peace proposals and analyses of modern political thinkers (Rousseau, Bentham, Cobden, Mill, Smith, Mill). The author points out on Kant?s ?federalism of free states?, to show it did not imply support for world state but improved international law. Also, it is confirmed that globoskepticism of the classical British liberals, or their distrust of a world organization, arises from general liberal distrust of a big state political organization. The classical liberal attitude has been abandoned by new liberal internationalists at the beginning of the twentieth century, but classical liberal doctrine continues to have both an academic influence and practical outcomes.

Abnormal Justice

How truly global are international politics? Are the causes of war within the international system uniform across regions and times? Standard analyses of the sources of conflict in the international system assume they are and seek out general patterns across enormous all-dyad data sets. Understandably, collection of detailed information about the contexts of different times or places is impossible when one must gather data about a million observations. hypotheses evaluated against the evidence contained in these data sets almost never allow for the possibility of regional or temporal context being important. general theory underlying such analyses is almost always based on the experience of the Western, or at best developed, world and is assumed to offer insights into timeless and placeless realities of world politics. When researchers do investigate their claims within an international subsystem, they unfortunately most often restrict themselves to consideration of the great powers.1 In the course of such analyses we have learned a lot about widely important correlates of international conflict. But we have ignored the questions raised above. In short, we do not know how truly global international politics are. We do not know if the causes of war are similar across regions or times. We have failed even to ask. Others do ask. More accurately, others assert that the general patterns international relations (IR) researchers claim exist based on their all-dyads analyses do not really exist. area specialists' complaints that It doesn't happen that way in Madagascar are only the most pedestrian of such instances. Far more pertinent are arguments specifying why Western-biased Great Power-based IR theories are of limited applicability in other spatial or temporal domains. For example, with respect to neorealism's fundamental concept of security, Mohammed Ayoob (1991:263) writes: The application of this historically conditioned definition of the concept of security to the analysis of Third World situations has, however, created major conceptual problems. This is so because the three major characteristics of the concept of state security as developed in the Western literature on international relations--namely, its external orientation, its strong linkage with systemic security, and its binding ties with the security of the two major alliance blocs-are, if not totally absent, at least thoroughly diluted in the Third World. Thus, the explanatory power of the concept, as traditionally defined, is vastly reduced when applied to Third World contexts. In a volume about Africa in the international system, Christopher Clapham (1996:3) contends: relations has tended, understandably enough, to look at the world from the viewpoint of its most powerful states ... Yet most of the world's states . . . are poor, weak and subordinate. Most of the people in them are poorer, weaker and more subordinate still. International politics affects these states and people in ways that often differ appreciably from the ways in which it affects the