Abstract
The article will address this question and will attempt to give it sound answers. In order to do so, the article will tackle the following issues: What are national interest and global justice, and what have been their relations so far? What are the challenges concerning their reconciliation, in general and today? In the current situation, what are the benefits that could be generated by such a reconciliation? How could it happen and what the chances for this to happen?
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Notes
For a good introduction to the notion of national interest, in general and the contemporary context, consult Robert Chaouad, “Le paradoxe de l’intérêt national”, in RIS. La Revue Internationale et Stratégique (Paris, No. 105, spring 2017).
On this question, Jean-Marc Coicaud, “The Paradoxical Perception of Contemporary Democracy, and the Question of its Future”, in Global Policy Journal (University of Durham and John Willey & Sons, forthcoming, February 2019).
This evolution is not the one that all countries have followed in recent years. For example, if globalization has meant for a number of Western countries the denationalization of their economy and industry, this has not been the case for China. To the contrary, globalization has been very good to China in the sense that the Chinese government has been able to embrace it in the context of a national project, of a form of post-communist “nation-state building.”
Hence the need to create enemies.
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
In a way the Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang has offered a Chinese alternative to the Western theories of global justice in The Tanxia System: An introduction to the philosophy of the World Institution (China Renmin University Press, 2011).
David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2012), Mathias Risse, On Global Justice (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2012); David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge, Polity Press 2010); Richard W. Miller, Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2010); Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2009); Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin (eds.), Global Basic Rights (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2009); Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf (eds.), Global Justice: Seminal Essays (St Paul, MN, Paragon House, 2008); Thomas Pogge and Keith Norton (eds.), Global Ethics: Seminal Essays (St Paul, MN, Paragon House, 2008); Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005); Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg and Marc A. Stern (eds.), Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21stCentury (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999).
Aristotle: “…how completely unreasonable it would be if the work of a statesman were to be reduced to an ability to work out how to rule and be master over neighboring peoples, with or without their consent. How could that be a part of statecraft or lawgiving, when it is not even lawful in itself? To rule at all costs, not only justly but unjustly, is unlawful, and merely to have the upper hand is not necessarily to have a just title to it.” (Book VII, ii, 1324b22, p. 397), and: “To say that a state has trained itself in the acquisition of power with a view to ruling its neighbors—that is no ground for calling it happy or applauding its lawgiver.” (Book VII, xiv, 1333b26, p. 435), in The Politics, translated into English by Thomas Alan Sinclair and revised by Trevor J. Saunders (London, Penguin Books, 1992).
Ibid, Book VII, xv, 1334a11, p. 437.
Chris Brown, Terry Nardin, and Nicholas Rengger (eds.), International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 27.
Mencius, Book 1, Part A, translated by D. C. Lau (London, Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 3-14.
Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 40.
For more on the traditional Chinese view of the world, see John King Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1968).
There is more than one West in the West, and more than one non-West in the non-West.
On these issues, see Jean-Marc Coicaud. Beyond the National Interest: The Future of UN Peacekeeping and Multilateralism in an Era of U.S. Primacy (Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007).
On these principles and their relations, see, for example, Antonio Cassese, International Law in a Divided World (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 6.
For more on this topic, consult Jean-Marc Coicaud, « Deconstructing International Legitimacy » , in Jean-Marc Coicaud and Hilary Charlesworth (dir.), Fault Lines of International Legitimacy (New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Ibid..
For a detailed analysis of this issue, Jean-Marc Coicaud, Beyond the National Interest: The Future of UN Peacekeeping and Multilateralism in an Era of U.S. Primacy (op. cit.).
Ibid.
When countries are on top, they favor opening up. When they are on the defensive, they favor establishing barriers. Today, as globalization has been very good to China, China is presenting itself as a supporter of open economy. This does not mean, of course, that it is in favor of absolute openness. Like other countries, it combines selective and self-serving openness with selective and self-serving closeness. In this regard, it is ironic that at the time Western powers negotiated China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), especially the USA, they thought that by China joining the WTO, China would become the market of the West (the US) and that it would become like the West (democratization). Yet the opposite has occurred. The world has become China’s market, and the Chinese regime has been strengthened. On the dialectic of closed and open societies from a philosophical perspective, see Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London, UK, Routledge, 2011).
In industrialized countries, a form of « national contract » has existed between major corporations and the public sector. Of course, this contract did not concern all relations between the private sector and the public sector. This contract was made possible and illustrated by some sort of economic nationalism. One of the characteristics of contemporary capitalism is that this contract has now more or less disappeared in many developed countries, weakening in the process the national industrial network (deindustrialization) and the capacity of the political sector to influence national life. The emergence of populism is one of the products of this state of affairs.
Mireille Delmas-Marty, Aux quatre vents de la mondialisation. Petit guide de navigation sur l’océan de la mondialisation, Paris, Seuil, 2016, p. 93.
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I thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their comments. I also thank Daniel Schlein for helping to make the text clearer.
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Coicaud, JM. Does it Make Sense to Try Reconciling the National Interest and Global Justice Agendas?. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 12, 211–231 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0246-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0246-7