Between Global Citizenship and Empire: Toward a Political Conception of International Order

In: https://doi.org/10.7916/D8HM56F3

Abstract

"Since the Cold War, debate in the West over the future of the international order has fixated upon the discourse of moral liberalism. Moral liberals envision a liberal democratic world order, focus on the individual, and invoke the need to secure universal human rights—derived variously from naturalistic, consensus, and functional theories, and construed generally to mean claims to human security (i.e., freedom from fear and want)—as justification for interventionist responses, and to claim moral high ground (i.e., "just war") in the international arena. During the 1990s and 2000s, two positions within this discourse—the cosmopolitan and the hegemonic—bifurcated the vast majority of Western statesmen, policymakers, and informed citizens participating in public political discussion. While both cosmopolitan and hegemonic moral liberals intend to advance the type of humanitarian internationalism described above, they differ in the means they propose and the concretized institutional ends they seek. The schism staged a "choice" for denizens of the West to resolve."--from page 58