Search Results

This chapter examines how the enlarged EU is likely to respond to three major economic challenges: Will the enlarged EU attempt to bridge the internal development gaps by flexible policies stimulating growth or by central redistribution from Brussels? Will the enlarged EU cope with the challenge of global economic competition by opting for more institutional differentiation or central regulation? Will it try to insulate itself from poor and unstable neighbors or try to govern them? In all three cases, the enlarged EU is more likely to embrace the neo-medieval rather than the neo-Westphalian alternative.

This chapter starts by briefly introducing debates concerning the global challenges we face in the 21st century, particularly the political challenge. It describes the primary focus of the book, which is the extent to which the inherited anarchical society of sovereign states can provide a practically viable and normatively acceptable framework for global political order in an era of globalization. In contrast to the technocratic and interest-driven literature on global governance and institutionalism, the book emphasizes and illustrates the threefold nature of the challenge facing international society: the need to capture shared and common interests, to manage unequal power, and to mediate cultural diversity and value conflict. It is argued that the difficulty of finding a legitimate form of global politics capable of meeting these three challenges together makes the problem of order a quintessentially political problem. An overview of the succeeding chapters is provided, and the central arguments and theoretical underpinnings of the analysis are discussed.

Seeks to draw the main implications of the previous analysis. It argues that, in recent decades, rather than being under immediate threat, the welfare state in most Western nations has been approaching steady state, with expenditure levels that are unlikely to change radically in coming years. In aggregate terms, the biggest remaining divide is between high spending social security and state services of the states of Continental Western Europe and the poverty-alleviation states of the English-speaking world. The book concludes by arguing that, despite convergence at the aggregate expenditure level, different families of nations have distinctively different welfare state priorities and different problems.

Any global political theory must start by asking whether there are in fact universal moral values, and this chapter addresses precisely this question. Section I engages in a conceptual analysis of the terms ‘moral universalism’ and ‘cultural relativism’. Sections II–V then critically examine four arguments for moral universalism, finding three unpersuasive and one (the ‘General Argument for Moral Universalism’) more promising. Sections VI–XIV analyse nine challenges to moral universalism that argue for cultural relativism; none of these, it is argued, is persuasive, since some rest on implausible assumptions or misconceive the nature of universalism, while others, on closer inspection, have claimed that they rest on moral universalism. Section XV summarizes the overall case made for moral universalism.

Having argued, in Ch. 2, that there are universal moral values, the next logical step is to ask what these universal moral values are; this question is pursued in Chs 3 and 4, which consider arguments for two different types of universal value and link together to provide an analysis of what universal principles of justice should apply at the global level. This chapter examines claims that there are universal principles of civil and political justice, that is, those principles that specify what rights people have to what freedoms, and argues for universal human rights to certain civil and political liberties. It is arranged in 13 sections: Section I presents an analysis of human rights, since this term plays a central and important role in a plausible account of civil and political justice; Section II puts forward a general thesis about justifications for civil and political human rights; this is followed, in Sections III–VII, by an analysis of four cosmopolitan arguments for human rights that criticizes three of them but defends the fourth; Section VIII considers an alternative non-cosmopolitan approach to defending civil and political human rights, presented by John Rawls in The Law of Peoples (1999b); the next three sections (IX–XI) of the chapter explore misgivings about civil and political human rights, including the objections that such human rights are a species of imperialism and do not accord sufficient respect to cultural practices (IX), produce homogeneity/uniformity (X), and generate egoism/individualism and destroy community (XI); Section XII considers a further objection—the realist charges that foreign policy to protect civil and political human rights is in practice selective and partial and a cloak for the pursuit of the national interest. Section XIII summarizes the overall case made for civil and political justice.

Having argued, in Ch. 2, that there are universal moral values, the next logical step is to ask what these universal moral values are; this question is pursued in Chs 3 and 4, which consider arguments for two different types of universal value and link together to provide an analysis of what universal principles of justice should apply at the global level. This chapter examines what universal principles of distributive justice (if any) should be adopted. It is arranged in 14 sections: Section I presents a conceptual analysis of the nature of distributive justice; Section II makes some preliminary points about the nature of cosmopolitan accounts of distributive justice and the general nature of the reasoning underlying these; Sections III–V then analyse three types of arguments for cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice, and Section VI reflects on these, and suggests and defends four principles of cosmopolitan distributive justice; Sections VII–VIII consider objections (counter-arguments) to cosmopolitan concepts of distributive justice, some of them outlined by John Rawls in his account of international justice and others by nationalist political thinkers such as David Miller; Sections IX–XI examine three nationalist claims about the nature of distributive justice, all of which emphasize the moral relevance of persons’ membership in nations, while Sections XII–XIII investigate two realist claims (XII–XIII). Section XIV sums up the findings of the chapter.

Having argued in Chs 3 and 4 that there are cosmopolitan principles of civil and political justice and cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice, one is logically led to the question, ‘if one affirms cosmopolitan principles of justice, what kind of political framework (political structures) should one accept— a system of states, or of global political institutions, of autonomous nations (including even statehood)? This chapter seeks to answer these questions. It is arranged in 17 sections: Section I provides a conceptual analysis of some possible political frameworks; the following six sections (II–VI) consider cosmopolitan approaches to the question of how political power should be institutionalized (II), present three possible approaches—intrinsic, right-based, and instrumental (III–V), and examine the nature of the political framework offered by these three approaches (VI); Sections VII–XI analyse five challenges to the cosmopolitan political proposals, first, those voiced by statists (including both realists and those who affirm the ‘society of states’) (VIII–X) and, second, those voiced by those sympathetic to the idea of a global civil society (XI); Sections XII–XVI evaluate four nationalist claims that any defensible account of political institutions should grant autonomy to nations (provide national self-determination), and they aim to defend a cosmopolitan political programme—one in which there are democratic supra-state institutions charged with protecting people’s civil, political, and economic rights—and to rebut the challenges of statists and nationalists or to show that they can be accommodated by cosmopolitans. Section XVII summarizes and concludes that, overall, a cosmopolitan political order should grant a very heavily qualified role to national self-determination.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse a number of prominent views concerning the nature of a just war and, having criticized them, to outline the account of a just war that follows from a cosmopolitan perspective. It explores different philosophical approaches at a general level, analysing their accounts of when war may be waged (jus ad bellum) and how it may be waged (jus in bello). To do this it begins, in Section I, with some methodological observations, and then, in the next three sections (II–IV), examines several leading perspectives on the nature of just war: Sections II and III explore Michael Walzer’s influential treatment of this subject in Just and Unjust Wars (1977), criticizing in particular his account of jus ad bellum and his derivation of rules of jus in bello; Section IV analyses Terry Nardin’s state-centric account of just war in Law, Morality and the Relations of States (1983). The following four sections (V–VIII) turn to more cosmopolitan perspectives: Section V outlines the general structure of a cosmopolitan theory of just war; Sections VI and VII examine particular cosmopolitan accounts of some aspects of just war, analysing utilitarian and deontological approaches; and Section VIII criticizes the utilitarian and deontological accounts given in the previous two sections, outlining an alternative cosmopolitan rights-based approach that avoids the objections levelled against these two theories. Sections IX–XI analyse realist misgivings about both traditional and cosmopolitan conceptions of jus ad bellum (IX) and jus in bello (X); and Section XI summarizes and concludes.

This chapter considers the challenges to social citizenship resulting from greater diversity and inequality in a more globalized world. Migration has led to tensions in social provision in many western countries. Globalization and labour market change have generated greater inequality, and opportunities for social mobility seem to be declining. These changes generate substantial and growing challenges to the stability of welfare states. Evidence from recent studies, however, indicates that the problems can be addressed, provided that governments are willing to show political leadership and pursue policies that redistribute resources on a citizenship basis to mitigate inequalities and offer equal access to opportunities across all social groups.

For a number of reasons the reframing of social citizenship has been pursued more rapidly in the UK than in most other countries, so that national experience offers a useful object lesson in the strengths and weaknesses of rational actor reforms in the European context. This chapter analyses the reframing process in detail under successive governments, paying attention to the institutional structure of government departments, the part played by the Treasury, and the understanding of the challenges by the chief policy actors. It discusses the logic of policy reform in official documents and shows how rational actor assumptions predominate. The problems identified in relation to the new policies are chiefly to do with the difficulties of structuring incentives appropriately and of establishing a level playing field for equal opportunity policies. The issues that provider incentives may focus on the competitive advantage of their particular agency rather than public benefit, social inclusion may receive little support, and the value basis of social trust may be damaged receive insufficient recognition.

The conclusion emphasizes more general patterns that were identified in the comparative analyses. If due account is taken of the specifics of economic changes and national policy legacies, the variation among the responses of individual countries is far from random. In each of the periods covered by the study, there were distinct groups of countries facing similar policy challenges that would have called for similar responses. And even though the increasing internationalization of the economic environment has narrowed the range of economically viable national policy choices, we are able to show that in each of these groups, one or more countries did in fact have the institutional capabilities and the policy discourses that allowed them to move “from vulnerability to competitiveness” without abandoning their normative aspirations or jeopardizing the democratic legitimacy of their governments.

This chapter discusses how patients can recognize life's ‘surplus of meaning’. It discusses facet nine, which is more concerned with the ‘unsaid’ and the ‘unsayable’ of this study than the spoken. Facet nine also acknowledges the right of patients to maintain silence and admits the possibility of interpretative oversights. Two challenges of facet nine are also discussed.

This chapter defends the political approach with its ideal of socially responsible science against five important challenges. The first—the epistemological challenge—suggests that the more a practice is concerned with knowledge, especially technical knowledge, the more it should be free from societal control or oversight. The second—the historical challenge—points to the dire social as well as epistemic effects that have resulted from societal interference with science—for example, those that occurred in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany or Galileo’s Italy. The third—the sociological challenge—emphasizes the cognitive and social norms institutionalized in science that ensure the advancement of science and the fourth—the economic challenge—emphasizes the socioeconomic progress that results from this advancement in the absence of societal interference. Finally the fifth—the political challenge—insists that scientists have a right to freedom of research and that societal interference with science infringes on that right.

This study of peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine faced several methodological challenges: it had to define P/CROs, draw on both social movement and third‐sector theory, develop research tools to obtain data about P/CROs valid for regional and international analyses, and simultaneously understand P/CROs as a class with common attributes and appreciate differences amongst them. P/CROs are a new organizational classification, different from “peace movement organizations,” an existing classification. The study analyzed P/CROs from three perspectives: social movement theory, third‐sector theory, and the institutional theory of organizations. Four main findings emerged: (1) foreign funding was central to all P/CROs; (2) charismatic leadership was crucial; (3) almost all P/CROs became more professional and formal over time; and (4) while P/CROs played no direct role in the resolution of their respective conflicts, they made important indirect contributions. In particular, P/CROs helped to “sell” future settlements and agreements to their populations. Issues for further research include the preconditions for the emergence of P/CROs, and the assimilation of social movement and third‐sector research.