1 Blackwater Worldwide, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

2 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 28Google Scholar .

3 Ingeborg Maus, in ‘From Nation-State to Global State, or the Decline of Democracy’, trans. Ingram, James, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory, 13:4 (2006), pp. 465–484Google Scholar , also draw the attention this legal distinction when interpreting Kant's conception of global justice.

4 For example, it is unclear whether the realisation of Rawls's ‘Society of Peoples’, which proposes a statist response to questions of global justice, necessarily involves the establishment of a public global authority of sorts or whether it is in principle sufficient that each one of the states (‘liberal’ and ‘decent’ peoples) individually abides, in its foreign policies, by the liberal principles (ideas and ideals) as put forward in the Law of Peoples. (See Rawls, Law of Peoples, p. 37.) It seems fair to say that Thomas Nagel's revisions of Rawls's theory in ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 33:2 (2005), pp. 113–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar also does not include a clear, ideal justification for the global authority. A similar puzzle arises in relation to the cosmopolitan theories of Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge and Kok-Chor Tan. These cosmopolitan theories distinguish themselves from Rawls's statism by using the wellbeing of individuals rather than societies (states or peoples) as the ultimate unit of analysis in considerations of global justice. Nevertheless, they do not make much headway with regard to settling the question of the status of the global authority. See, for example, Pogge, Thomas, ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23 (1994), pp. 195–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and World Poverty and Human Rights (London: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 91–118 and 168–195Google Scholar . See also Tan, Kok-Chor, Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000)Google Scholar . For example, see Part III: ‘International Distributive Justice’, in Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 125–176Google Scholar ; and ‘Human Rights and the Law of Peoples’, in Chatterjee, Deen (ed.), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 193–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Finally, despite his focus on international law and global institutions, Allen Buchanan also fails to address the ideal question of why we need public institutions in the first place. See his Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar .

5 Kant's account of justice is found in the ‘Doctrine of Right’ in the Metaphysics of Morals. This text is found in Gregor, Mary J. (trans. and ed.), Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar . I provide a fuller interpretation of Kant's account of domestic private right in ‘Kant's Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations: Why Justice is Impossible in the State of Nature’, Kantian Review, 13:2 (2008), pp. 1–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

6 Kant's main three writings on issues of global justice are ‘On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice’ (PP), ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ (TP), and the ‘Doctrine of Right’ in The Metaphysics of Morals (DR). The core challenge facing Kant interpreters concern dealing with the fact that he appears to be contradicting himself in his main texts on the issue. For example, there are some passages in each text, where Kant seems to argue that global justice is in principle impossible without a world state with a permanent monopoly on coercion (DR 6: 344, cf. 351, 354f; PP 8: 358, 379; TP 8: 310). Yet, in both PP and DR Kant appears to argue the contrary, namely that global justice cannot require a world state, but only requires a voluntary world republic (or ‘league of nations’). Kant appears to give several reasons – some principled and some pragmatic – why global justice cannot require a world state (DR 6: 344, 345f, 351); (PP 8: 354; 8: 355f). Further interpretive complexity is added by some passages where Kant seems to say that a world state is in theory necessary, but in practice it is impossible and, consequently, all we can establish is a voluntary world federation (DR 6: 350; PP 8: 367; TP 8: 310f) Finally, in PP, Kant famously argues that states, due to their mistaken understanding of the right of nations, will in practice (‘in hypothesi’) wrongly reject what is true in theory (‘in thesi’) (PP 8: 357, cf. 312). I engage Kant's own text more carefully in ‘Diversity and Unity. An Attempt at Drawing a Justifiable Line’, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie/Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (ARSP), 94:1 (2008), pp. 1–25Google Scholar .

7 Until recently it commonly presupposed that according to Kant and the Kantian position, the public authority was needed simply because it constitutes the more efficient means of ensuring peace. Consequently, whether a world state with a monopoly on coercion or a system of independent states was seen as an empirical question regarding which system is more likely to bring peace about. Doyle, Michael W., ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs 1/1’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11/12:3/4 (1983), pp. 205–235 and 323–353Google Scholar and John Rawls (1999) famously pursue the statist line of argument. According to Doyle, liberal states have proven themselves less likely to go war against one another, and for both Doyle and Rawls, the aim is to identify which foreign policies liberal states should adopt in order to secure world peace. In contrast, Carson, Thomas in ‘Perpetual Peace: what Kant Should Have Said’, Social Theory and Practice, 14:2 (1988), pp. 173–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Axinn, Sidney in ‘World Community and Its Government’, in Kneller, Jane and Axinn, Sidney (eds), Autonomy and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 119–129Google Scholar , argue that in our nuclear times, a world state with a monopoly on military power is more likely to secure world peace.

8 See Kant in DR 6: 345f on this point.

9 In Kant's DR the former account is found in ‘Public Right. Chapter II. The Right of Nations’ (6: 343–51), whereas the latter account is found in ‘Public Right. Chapter III. Cosmopolitan Right’ (6: 352–3).

10 Other non-prudential interpretations that deal with issues of global justice include Dodson, Kevin E., ‘Kant's Perpetual Peace: Universal Civil Society or League of States’, Southwest Philosophical Studies, 15 (1993), pp. 1–9Google Scholar ; Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight’, in Bohman, James and Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias (eds), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: the MIT Press, 1997), pp. 113–153Google Scholar ; Höffe, Otfried, Kant's Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace, trans. Newton, Alexandra (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2006Google Scholar ; Kleingeld, Pauline, ‘Approaching Perpetual Peace: Kant's Defence of a League of States an his Ideal of a World Federation’, European Journal of Philosophy, 12:3 (2004), pp. 304–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Kokaz, Nancy, ‘Institutions for Global Justice’, in Weinstock, Daniel (ed.), Global Justice, Global Institutions (Calgary: University of Calgary University Press, 2007)Google Scholar ; Pogge, Thomas, ‘Kant's Theory of Justice’, Kant-Studien, 79 (1988), pp. 407–433CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Williams, Howard L., ‘Back from the USSR: Kant, Kalingrad and World Peace’, International Relations, 20:1 (2006), pp. 27–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

11 This is an argument that is particularly important for countries with contested borders, such as Norway. Norway is involved in many of the controversial international disputes concerning borders on Svalbard, the Arctic and offshore borders in the North Atlantic Ocean, and the Barents Sea. Norway typically follows the relevant rulings of the International Court of Justice in these matters, and yet a lot of the theoretical and public officials' analyses of these matters are undertaken in realist and increasingly neoliberal terms. A drawback of these analyses is that they only partially grasp why Norway find it so important to look to the international authority when formulating its own national policies, including its foreign policies, regarding these matters. The partial reason stems from prudence – as a small nation, Norway has no option but to work with other political forces when pursuing its interests. The argument presented here is not antithetical to or incompatible with prudential reasons, but it maintains that the commitment to the ICJ can also be seen as a consequence of Norway's general commitment to function as a liberal legal system. Which reason is actually operating depends on the extent to which Norway is able to function as a public authority, of course. But the main point here is that liberal institutional commitments to right are fundamentally incompatible with unilateralism and consequently insofar as liberal states progress, they will be increasingly resistant to use unilateralism in their global interactions.

12 Involuntary visitors are refugees. States can justify their territorial monopoly on coercion only if it is consistent with everyone's innate right to freedom. Hence, though a state need not give permission to everyone wanting to enter its territory, it cannot turn away those who have nowhere safe to go. If it does, then the state's use of coercion is irreconcilable with its own foundation, since such exclusion is irreconcilable with the refugee's innate right to freedom – it would not be reconcilable with everyone's right to exist somewhere. Moreover, even as the state lets the refugee across its border, there arises the problem that until the refugee has obtained legal status as a citizen, the particular state in which she is living is not her public authority. The state in representing the general will of the people does not thereby represent her will. Therefore, until citizenship is conferred, the state does not fully representing the refugee. On this account, it is in recognition of these kinds of problems of reconciling a state's monopoly on coercion with a visitor's innate right to freedom that current states have instituted the UNHCR (The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees: {http://www.unhcr.org/basics.html}. This global public institution represents both states and refugees, and it is the means through which states and refugee interaction are made rightful. In addition, of course, the UNHCR deals with other non-ideal situations, such as by trying to set up safe places for refugees, by regulating any other non-state interaction with refugees, and by facilitating their transition to permanent new homes in new states. Finally, it follows that the public authority will seek to maintain a global peacekeeping force as required to stabilise and assist currently stateless peoples as they (re)build their just states. No state's military can fulfil such a role (ideally), since it cannot (in principle) act on behalf of the stateless people; only a global public authority can. Moreover, because the public authority cannot command anyone to risk their lives in such peacekeeping missions, the UN must maintain its peacekeeping force purely by voluntary means.

13 The International Criminal Court's (ICC) {http://www.icc-cpi.int/}, in contrast, is a means of securing just punishment on behalf of defenceless persons and peoples – or persons and peoples who, in effect, are stateless and hence deprived of protection by a just state. It is therefore a non-ideal measure in that it enables rightful punishment of aggressive, violent behaviour that otherwise cannot be punished (since one of the parties exists in the state of nature). It should therefore, if things go well, be incorporated into the UN structure proper. This seems consistent with how the founding document of the ICC makes it clear that even though the ICC is currently independent of the UN (Article 2, ‘Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court’, downloaded from ICC's homepage on 17 Feb. 2010), ‘The Court shall be brought into relationship with the UN through an agreement to be approved by the Assembly of States Parties to this Statute …’.

14 I believe the charitable reading of Cavallar, Georg, Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999)Google Scholar ; Dobson (1993), Habermas (1997), Höffe (2006), Kleingeld (2004), Kokaz (2007), Maus (2006), and Pogge (1988, 2009) agree with me that according to Kant rightful solutions to conflicts in interstate relations and in relations between states and foreigners require the institution of a global public authority. The main differences are as follows: Dobson and Höffe argue that Kant's ideal reasons for not establishing a global authority with a monopoly on coercion should be rejected and instead our aim for the global authority should be what Höffe calls a ‘minimal state’. Habermas and Pogge, in contrast, argue that the considered Kantian position defends an overlap between domestic, regional, and global spheres of sovereignty. Maus uses the point to support her view that global justice requires that just states always remain independent of one another, even though they ought to use global institutions like the Court of Justice to settle their disputes. Cavallar, Kokaz and Kleingeld, in turn, use these ideal arguments for the necessity of the global authority as providing further support for their developmental conceptions of the world federation with some limited coercive powers. In contrast I have argued that the global public authority is the only rightful authoriser of coercion regarding interstate relations (though the individual just states do the actual enforcing) and that the global peacekeeping force is limited to the protection of stateless individuals. Finally, I have argued that the choice to partake in other states' and stateless peoples' conflicts is a choice that ultimately lies with each state's individuals.

15 I provide an interpretation of this public right argument to Kant's ‘Doctrine of Right’ in ‘Kant's Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy: How Public Right “Concludes” Private Right in ‘The Doctrine of Right’’, Kant-Studien (forthcoming).