Antonio Franceschet

Sovereignty and freedom: Immanuel Kant's liberal internationalist ‘legacy’

This article explores a fundamental division among contemporary liberal internationalists regarding the relationship between state sovereignty and the goal of freedom. The article suggests that, in spite of his popular status among a wide variety of contemporary liberal international theorists, Immanuel Kants political philosophy is an extraordinarily ambiguous ‘legacy’ because of the dualistic doctrine of state sovereignty to which he subscribed. Kants thought is committed to state sovereignty while providing the grounds for a profound critique of its existence. The reason that sovereignty is ambiguous in Kants political theory is that it is justified by his bifurcated understanding of human freedom.

Theorizing state civil disobedience in international politics

Illegal state actions are sometimes interpreted as civil disobedience. Yet, liberal theorists insist that, to count as such, states must intend to reform the systemic imperfections of the international legal order. Moreover, states must have the capacity to engineer such reforms responsibly. These requirements result in an elitist conception of international civil disobedience because weaker states cannot refashion the key rules of the international legal order. By introducing a broader conception of resistance than found in existing theory, I show how weaker states can still engage in civil disobedience. A conceptual framework of two types of power supports my argument: constituent power and destituent power. If state action were expressed through these two types of power, then more states and more types of illegal action would count as examples of civil disobedience.

Kant, International Law, and the Problem of Humanitarian Intervention

International law has one principal mechanism for settling the legality of humanitarian interventions, the United Nations Security Councils power to authorise coercion. However, this is hardly satisfactory in practice and has failed to provide a more secure juridical basis for determining significant conflicts among states over when humanitarian force is justified. This article argues that, in spite of Immanuel Kants limited analysis of intervention, and his silence on humanitarian intervention, his political theory provides the elements of a compelling analysis on this topic. Five components of Kants roadmap towards perpetual peace and an eventual world republic give conditional support for humanitarian intervention even in imperfect juridical conditions. This support is conditional on the achievement of juridical progress within and among states and has implications for the development of cosmopolitan citizenship. From Kant we learn that, ultimately, humanitarian intervention should become a matter of coercive law enforcement rather than an ethical question of ‘saving strangers’.

The Politics of Global Legalism and Human Security

Abstract This article argues that human security discourses and initiatives are made intelligible by the politics of applying legalism to global politics. Human security projects like the International Criminal Court, the Ottawa Treaty on landmines, and coercive interventions like Kosovo are shaped, mobilised, but also limited and constrained by the wider problematic of the legal constitution of global politics. Although human security has been the justification for efforts to liberalise and humanise politics through law, it has also been associated with exceptionalistic and non-universal legal relationships that reinforce the interests of the most dominant actors in global politics. As a result, human security runs the danger of becoming an instrument of hegemony. Nonetheless, the article also argues that there are always progressive political openings in the politics of a global rule of law that can facilitate a wider conception of human security than has been pursued since the mid-1990s.

Cosmopolitanism, sovereignty and the theory of European integration: A Kantian contribution

This article claims that Immanuel Kants unique international thought can contribute to theorising about European integration. The specific nature of this contribution is the lesson that cosmopolitan aspirations and the continued existence of autonomous states should not be viewed as mutually exclusive, but are the fundamental terms with which the process of integration must negotiate continually. The approach of the article is to assemble the essentials of a Kantian framework in order to accomplish two things: (1) an evaluation of the dominant strands of existing integration theory; and (2) to supplement philosophically those emerging refinements to integration theory that wish to conceive of the dialectical relationship between cosmopolitan purposes and the principle of state sovereignty. The article concludes by noting the limits to the type of liberalism that undergirds the Kantian framework, and further suggests that the twentieth century tradition of integration theory may actually have something im...

International(IST) citizenship: Canada and the international criminal court

This article explores the possibilities and limits of an ethical foreign policy in the context of a changing world order. A useful ideal expressing this possibility is ‘good international citizenship’. This normative standard is one that resonates with the self-understandings of foreign policy-makers who pursue ‘humane internationalism’. It has recently been suggested, however, that this ideal also provides a standard against which to measure such governments’ actual performance in realizing declared ethical goals (Wheeler and Dunne 1998). This insight is important because it suggests a role for civil society, both domestic and transnational, in rendering the foreign policy-making process more accountable and consistently applicable towards ethical goals. The ideal assumes that the moral ends governments publically endorse are not mere rhetoric, but contested norms that can be deployed against state decisions, actions, and omissions. In other words, there is a large measure of internal legitimacy at stake with states committed to ethical foreign policy agendas. In this article we argue for the importance of an additional, yet under-theorized, element of good international citizenship: the ability and willingness of states to deploy creatively moral norms vis-à-vis other states. Adapting the concept of ‘norm entrepreneurship,’ developed recently by social theorists of global politics, we claim that good international citizenship also entails the use by states of moral ideals to create powerful ‘coalitions of the willing’ around ‘high-minded’ causes.1 The achievement of a Statute for an International Criminal Court (ICC) is a useful case for exploring the connection between ethics and foreign policy through the concept of good international citizenship. We demonstrate that Canada’s commitment to and diplomatic skill in reaching a strong, independent, and permanent court for individual international crimes – against the objections of the United States – can be interpreted in light of good international citizenship. To be clear, our aim is to provide a normative account of foreign policy generally and then to illustrate it with a specific and limited example – it is not, therefore, an argument about the intrinsically ‘ethical’ character of Canadian foreign policy. Nevertheless, Canada has long considered itself an adherent of the core principles of international law. Its recent efforts to join together with like-minded states in an attempt to consolidate international humanitarian and 51

The International Criminal Court’s Authority Crisis and Kant’s Political Ethics

The International Criminal Court (ICC) faces a profound authority crisis. This article explores the underlying conditions and ethical implications of this crisis in light of Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) political theory. The ICC’s authority crisis is twofold: First, having been constructed as a purely legal actor, the Court’s inevitable role in politics has undermined perceptions of its legitimacy. Second, having been constructed as a supranational substitute for domestic legal authority, the ICC has been subverted by other, political branches of the state, such as the executive. These problems have been particularly salient in Africa where states have vociferously challenged the Court’s investigations and prosecutions. Kantian political ethics show that the ICC’s authority crisis is an intractable moral problem that must be addressed collectively and coercively by sovereign states acting upon a larger, cosmopolitan duty to enforce universal rights.

Rethinking states in international politics: Introduction

Now more than half a millennium since its invention, the sovereign state still dominates international political theory. Not long ago, Alexander Wendt observed that “states still are at the center of the international system, and as such it makes no more sense to criticize a theory of international politics as ‘state-centric’ than it does to criticize a theory of forests for being ‘tree-centric’” (1999: 9). Our minds inhabit the state. Whether we follow Wendt’s social constructivist path or head in some other direction, international political theorists tend to dwell on the trees and in the forest. At times constraining, at others liberating, thinking about the state is a political and ethical activity. If we take the state for granted, then our decisions and actions reflect a thoughtless choice. To accept the state as a permanent, timeless theoretical axiom in the discipline’s stories and science risks eliminating our responsibility to imagine better political worlds. But there is an opposite worry: If we disregard the state, pretending that it does not house our daily activities and mental states, then we are also helpless. If we fail to sharpen our accounts of the state’s origins, evolution, and contemporary effects on the world, then we settle for the powerlessness that comes from ignorance. As an idea, as a practice, and as an ideological project, then, we should not just think about the state— we should rethink it. The articles in this symposium rethink specific aspects of sovereign statehood. We each deliberately approach the enormity of the state—its manifold presence in the world— by focusing on a particular theoretical problem of state practice. Thus, our symposium does not presume a massive gap in theoretical knowledge about the state. Rather than offering another panoramic view of the forest, one that would rival grand theorists such as Wendt, the four articles that follow are bounded portraits of sovereign statehood. Each author rethinks the dominant, liberal conception of statehood. Without plumbing the metaphysical depths of the state’s corporate agency, the articles isolate four types of state action: existence, caring, disobedience, and outlawry. Together, these activities

Cosmopolitan Ethics and Global Legalism

This article analyses the legal and ethical dimensions of the wide gap between commitments to universal human rights and the reality of their widespread and systematic abuse, particularly as related to poverty and inequality. The argument put forward is that, properly conceived, global legalism, that is, the quest to apply the rule of law across and among states and societies, and cosmopolitan ethics, both support restricting harms imposed on weak and vulnerable individuals worldwide by an unjust institutional order. Therefore, those who have tended to value either a global rule of law or cosmopolitan ethics independently have good reason to pursue their requirements together. The article also considers the problem of legalism and cosmopolitanism being used by powerful agents in global politics to enhance their prerogatives and their freedoms from legal and ethical restraints.

The Foundations of Kant’s Reform Project: Politics and Morals

The wonder expressed in this statement is the inspiration of Kant’s critical philosophy. This “awe” is explicitly divided here by the two distinct forces that, when subjected to his scrutiny, form the main elements of a unique political philosophy. The individual occupies a special place in the cosmos because he or she is both a finite being that is determined by the laws of nature and a subject of the supersensible moral law. However, whereas the laws of nature are mechanical and cannot respect any phenomena or beings as ends, the moral law obligates human subjects to act on principles that enshrine men and women as dignified ends.