Cosmopolitan rights and state obligations

Many respected and prominent accounts of justice have cosmopolitan aspirations, yet provide a poor basis for thinking about the demands of justice in a globalising world and especially for thinking about economic justice. Typically they endorse some account of cosmopolitan principles of justice, then assume without argument, or without sufficient argument, that the primary agents of justice must be states. Other agents and agencies are seen as secondary agents of justice, whose contribution to justice is regulated, defined and allocated by states. These approaches to justice are cosmopolitan in assuming that justice is owed to all human beings, wherever they live and whatever their citizenship, yet anti-cosmopolitan in assuming that many significant obligations stop or vary at state or other boundaries.

There are tensions, and perhaps incoherencies, in thinking that anti-cosmopolitan institutions such as bounded states and their subordinate institutions can shoulder primary obligations of cosmopolitan justice. On the surface, states are fundamentally ill-suited and ill-placed to secure or strengthen justice beyond their own borders. Their primary responsibilities are to their own maintenance and to their inhabitants. Historically the states that have secured a measure of justice beyond their borders – pax Romana, pax Britannica, pax Americana – have generally been imperial states that exercised power beyond their borders, or obliterated certain borders, or made them more porous in certain respects. These facts are so obvious that it is remarkable that anyone should see the pursuit of justice for those beyond their borders as a primary task of states. And, of course, many have made no such assumptions. Unlike cosmopolitans, would-be realists about international relations have always argued that states should do nothing about injustice beyond their borders, except where it is important to their own survival and interests.

The lamentable but strong evidence that states have failed to secure justice, and in particular economic justice, beyond their borders should not surprise us. Although ‘humanitarian interventions’ to curb major violations of human rights have become more numerous since the ending of the Cold War, even massive violations do not always lead to intervention (and there can be good prudential reasons for refraining: non-intervention in Chechnya or in China would be wholly realistic). Even when there has been intervention it has often been late or ineffective, or both (consider former Yugoslavia or Somalia).