The Global Responsibilities of Liberal Democracies AVIA PASTERNAK Political theorists and practitioners are increasingly interested in the international responsibilities of Western liberal democracies with regard to a wide range of urgent problems, from global poverty to humanitarian crises or global pollution. The research I propose will address the question of the international responsibilities of liberal democracies using an innovative approach: investigating what obligations are generated by core liberal democratic values. My investigation will fill a substantive gap in current debates about global justice, and deepen our understanding of our global responsibilities. International Justice in Current Literature Existing normative accounts of global justice are roughly divided into two rival worldviews: social-liberalism and cosmopolitan-liberalism (Beitz, 1999). These worldviews disagree on whether states have a duty to solve problems that occur outside their borders, such as global poverty or humanitarian crises, and - if so - at what cost (e.g. Beitz, 2000; Buchanan, 1999; Rawls, 1999 78-83, 105-23; Walzer, 2002). Despite their considerable differences, however, both views share a common lacuna: they do not consider the particular normative international responsibilities of liberal democracies as democracies. Rather, both views rest on the implicit assumption that in principle all states, whether democratic or not, are subject to the same moral requirements at the international level. Empirical accounts of international relations portray a somewhat different picture: here we find that liberal democracies develop distinct norms of behaviour at the international level, especially in their interactions with other liberal democracies. For example, the ‘democratic peace’ thesis argues that democracies do not engage in war with each other (Doyle, 1996 especially 7-20). Others describe the thick institutional and judicial networks that are created between democratic polities (Slaughter, 2000), or the special political relations that are created between democracies in particular regions of the world (Fournier, 1999). My research is less concerned with the empirical validity of these accounts (which has been contested for example in Alvarez, 2001 and Layne, 1996). Rather, I will examine the normative value of such behaviour. More specifically I ask whether liberal democracies, in light of their own political values, have moral reasons to adopt certain norms at the international arena, with regard to other liberal democracies and to non-democratic states, and if so what these norms are. D.Phil. thesis: Civic Responsibility in the Face of Injustice The proposed research builds upon my doctoral thesis, the main task of which was to define the civic responsibilities of citizens in liberal democracies for injustices committed by their governments. I distinguished between three types of responsibility for such injustices: moral responsibility (when the agent is blameworthy for the injustice) liability (when the agent owes compensation for the injustice) and counteractive responsibility, namely when the agent has the duty to put an end to an ongoing injustice. Following that I offered an account of the types of responsibility that democratic collectives bear for their governments’ policies, and an account of the types, level and sources of the responsibility shared by individual citizens. In the final part of my thesis, which is the most pertinent for the current research programme, I explored the legitimacy and necessity of international sanctions against ‘unjust liberal democracies’. I argued that liberal democracies form a transnational community amongst themselves, and that consequentially they have both the right and the obligation to monitor each other’s behaviour, and to sanction liberal democracies that violate core democratic

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norms. I developed this argument into a paper entitled Sanctioning Liberal Democracies, which is forthcoming in Political Studies. This paper has already gained a wide audience, and I was invited to present it at the Institute of Applied Ethics at the University of Hull, at the Royal Institute of Philosophy at Roehampton University and at the Department of Politics at the University of York. It has also been the subject of a lively discussion on the academic blog Crooked Timber, and the considerable interest it has generated attests to the relevance of the topic for contemporary affairs. The conclusions of my doctoral thesis with regard to the responsibility of democratic citizens for the unjust policies of their government will potentially play an important role in my postdoctoral research. If I find that liberal democracies have special global duties in light of their democratic values, I will be able to draw conclusions about the extent of the shared responsibility of individual citizens in contemporary liberal democracies for global injustices. This question is under-explored in current accounts of global justice and collective responsibility. Research Outline

1. Democratic values in existing accounts of global justice In this section I will examine the explanatory role of democratic values in contemporary views of global justice. I will provide a thorough examination of cosmopolitan-liberal and social-liberal accounts of the international responsibilities of political communities, focusing in particular on the role of the political values of these communities in determining such normative principles. My current hypothesis is that neither social-liberals nor cosmopolitanliberals take this factor into account. To give two examples: In The Law of Peoples John Rawls (a social-liberal) prescribes a single set of international principles of justice to be adopted by all nations (or ‘peoples’), regardless of whether they are liberal-democratic or not (Rawls, 1999b 36-42). From the other side of the debate, Thomas Pogge argues in World Poverty and Human Rights that wealthy Western nations are implicated in world poverty because of their contribution to an unjust global order (Pogge, 2002 196-204). This argument potentially applies to both democratic and non-democratic wealthy nations, leading to the conclusion that Pogge too pays little attention to democratic political values as an important consideration in determining the nature and scope of the international responsibilities of states. I will similarly explore other leading accounts of global justice and the extent to which they take political culture and values into consideration. 2. Democratic values and international relations This section will explore several core democratic values, in order to understand whether and how they generate norms of international behaviour. I will focus in particular on three such values, which I believe have important implications for the foreign policy of liberal democracies at the global level: (1) the belief in an expansive set of human and democratic rights; (2) the belief in democracy as an expression of political self-determination; and (3) the idea that democracy is constituted upon some notion of liberal toleration. The main task of this section will be to explore these values in depth, and to determine the international responsibilities (or lack of them) that each of them dictates for liberal democracies. I will examine each of the core democratic values with regard to three main areas of global justice: (1) Liberal democracies’ treatment of other liberal democracies: Should they, for example, intensify their institutional and legal connections, and develop means to monitor each other’s compliance with democratic norms in order to preserve democratic rights at home and abroad? Or should they avoid moving in that direction in order to protect one another’s political self-determination? (2) Liberal democracies’ treatment of

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other political communities (democratic and non-democratic) which are in a state of material deprivation: Do they have a democratic obligation to help political communities in need, in light of their belief in human rights? (3) Liberal democracies’ treatment of non-democratic political communities, in which democratic and even human rights are not respected: Do liberal democratic have a democratic obligation to intervene in the internal affairs of other states, and even to promote democracy in the world? Can such a policy be reconciled with the value of liberal toleration? The latter set of questions has become increasingly stark since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I will draw on recent discussions on the subject (e.g. Applebaum, 2005; Goldsmith, 2003). 3. A critical assessment: The global responsibilities of liberal democracies This section will propose a model, or models, of the global responsibilities of liberal democracies. Currently I can offer two alternative hypotheses: The first, which I began to explore in my paper Sanctioning Liberal Democracies, is that we can stipulate a single normative model of democratic responsibilities in all three aforementioned areas of global justice. The Second hypothesis is that the core democratic values lead to conflicting conclusions with regard to the normative obligations of liberal democracies at the international level. If that is the case, then quite possibly different democratic traditions, which place importance on different core democratic values, will also understand their normative international obligations differently. If so, my research will delimit the divergent normative models of international behaviour of existing democratic traditions, and serve to explain some of the discrepancies in the foreign policy of current democracies in the world. Whether the research affirms one of these conclusions or develops an alternative one, it will contribute to the study of global justice by assessing existing normative accounts of the global order (e.g. Held, 1995 221-38; McGrew, 2001); by determining the role that liberal democracies should play at the international arena; and by contributing to debates on particular problems of contemporary international politics such as the legitimacy of international sanctions and humanitarian interventions.

References: Alvarez, J. E. (2001) 'Do Liberal States Behave Better: A Critique of Slaughter's Liberal Theory', European Journal of International Relations, 12(2), 183-246. Applebaum, A. (2005) Forcing a People to be Free RWPO5-066. Faculty Research Working Paper Series, School of Government, Harvard University Beitz, C. (1999) 'Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism', International Affairs, 75(3), 515-29. _______ (2000) 'Rawls's Law of the Peoples', Ethics, 110, 669-96. Buchanan, A. (1999) 'The Internal Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention', The Journal of Political Philosophy, 7(1), 71-87. Donnelly, J. (2003) Universal human rights in theory and practice, Ithaca ; London, Cornell University Press. Doyle, M. W. (1996) Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs. in M. E. Brown, S. M. Lynn-Jones and S. E. Miller (eds) Debating the democratic peace. Cambridge, Mass ; London: MIT Press, pp. 3-57. Fournier, D. (1999) 'The Alfonsian Administration and the Promotion of Democratic Values in the Southern Cone and the Andes', Journal of Latin American Studies, 31(1), 3974. Goldsmith, J. (2003) 'Liberal Democracy and Cosmopolitan Duty', Stanford Law Review, 55(5), 1667-96. Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Cambridge, Polity.

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Layne, C. (1996) Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace. in M. E. Brown, S. M. Lynn-Jones and S. E. Miller (eds) Debating the democratic peace. Cambridge, Mass ; London: MIT Press, pp. 157-201. McGrew, A. (2001) Transnational Democracy. in A. Carter and G. Stokes (eds) Democratic Theory Today: Challenges for the 21st Century Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 269-94. Pogge, T. (2002) World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, Cambridge, Polity Press. Rawls, J. (1999) The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Harvard University Press. Slaughter, A.-M. (2000) Government Networks: the Heart of the Liberal Democratic Order. in G. H. Fox and B. R. Roth (eds) Democratic governance and international law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155-98. Walzer, M. (2002) 'The Argument about Humanitarian Intervention', Dissent, 49(1), 29-37.

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