Introduction

Even leading globalizers—that is, proponents of the continued liberalization of the global economic order occupying positions of influence in either the public or private domain—now concede that in its failure to deliver a more just global economic order, globalization may hold within it the seeds of its own demise. As James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank, noted in an address to the Board of Governors of the Bank in October 1998, ‘… [i]f we do not have greater equity and social justice, there will be no political stability and without political stability no amount of money put together in financial packages will give us financial stability’. An economic system widely viewed as unjust, as Ethan Kapstein recently argued, will not long endure. These views, of course, are not new. Adam Smith himself acknowledged in Wealth of Nations that no society could survive or flourish if great numbers lived in poverty.

If globalization in some instances exacerbates, and in other instances gives rise to, new forms of injustice, then the meaning and scope of justice is no longer selfevident. Nor indeed are the means by which it is to be achieved. We are thus forced to consider again the nature of justice. But it must be a conception of justice that relinquishes the Westphalian co-ordinates. If the territorial boundaries of politics are coming unbundled, to use Ruggie's evocative phrase, then it is inevitable that our conceptual images of politics will become similarly unbundled.