Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction: How Might We Live? Global Ethics in a New Century
- Individualism and the Concept of Gaia
- Bounded and Cosmopolitan Justice
- Globalization From Above: Actualizing The Ideal Through Law
- A More Perfect Union? The Liberal Peace and the Challenge of Globalization
- International Pluralism and the Rule of Law
- Towards a Feminist International Ethics
- Contested Globalization: The Changing Context and Normative Challenges
- Universalism and Difference in Discourses of Race
- Does Cosmopolitan Thinking Have a Future?
- Individuals, Communities and Human Rights
- Thinking About Civilizations
- Index
Contested Globalization: The Changing Context and Normative Challenges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction: How Might We Live? Global Ethics in a New Century
- Individualism and the Concept of Gaia
- Bounded and Cosmopolitan Justice
- Globalization From Above: Actualizing The Ideal Through Law
- A More Perfect Union? The Liberal Peace and the Challenge of Globalization
- International Pluralism and the Rule of Law
- Towards a Feminist International Ethics
- Contested Globalization: The Changing Context and Normative Challenges
- Universalism and Difference in Discourses of Race
- Does Cosmopolitan Thinking Have a Future?
- Individuals, Communities and Human Rights
- Thinking About Civilizations
- Index
Summary
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.
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- How Might We Live? Global Ethics in the New Century , pp. 131 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001