Miriam Ronzoni

Two conceptions of state sovereignty and their implications for global institutional design

Social liberals and liberal nationalists often argue that cosmopolitans neglect the normative importance of state sovereignty and self-determination. This paper counter-argues that, under current global political and socio-economic circumstances, only the establishment of supranational institutions with some (limited, but significant) sovereign powers can allow states to exercise sovereignty, and peoples’ self-determination, in a meaningful way. Social liberals have largely neglected this point because they have focused on an unduly narrow, mainly negative, conception of state sovereignty. I contend, instead, that we should more closely consider the positive aspects of sovereignty, understood as the capacity to maintain internal problem-solving capacities and make meaningful discretionary choices on a range of national issues.

Life is not a camping trip – on the desirability of Cohenite socialism

In Why Not Socialism?, GA Cohen defines socialism as the combined application of two moral principles: the egalitarian principle and the principle of community. The desirability of a social order organized around these two principles is illustrated by the ‘camping trip’ example. After describing the fundamental features of the camping trip scenario at reasonable length, Cohen argues that the desirability of such a social model is nearly self-explanatory, concluding therefore that the most significant challenges to socialism lie in its feasibility. This article argues that the desirability of the camping trip model as an appropriate ideal for society is less obvious than Cohen acknowledges. To argue my point, I shall compare the camping trip with another social practice that is equally small sized and characterized by strong emotional ties among its members, but in which the conditions of what I shall call ‘goal-monism’ and discontinuity in time do not hold, namely, the family.

Introduction: the idea of global political justice

Introduction The past 30 years have witnessed the flourishing of normative international political theory as a new field of research with its own agenda, debates, and methodological disputes. While there is increasing acceptance of the idea that global institutions require justification just as much as domestic ones, there is still wide disagreement about whether the specific normative standards for building and justifying institutions should be identical, or even roughly equivalent, in these two political domains. Developing a better understanding of what is distinctive about the problems raised by the global political order, and which conceptual and methodological approaches are best suited to address them, thus represents one of the most pressing challenges in this theoretical field. Much discussion on these topics has been framed as debate about appropriate standards of ‘global justice’ – reflecting the wider dominance of the concept of ‘justice’ as a lens for normative political theorizing since Rawls. Moreover, the global justice literature has been overwhelmingly focused to date on questions about the distributive aspects of justice, such as: what is a just global distribution of the world’s resources? Is inequality as significant a normative problem globally as it is domestically? Less attention has been given to questions about how the global political order (through which the production and distribution of goods is institutionalized) is itself to be constituted – most fundamentally, how power and conflict are to be managed and institutionally channelled in securing the background conditions for particular social and economic relationships and distributions, and how cooperative arrangements for collective decision-making and action should be structured to facilitate this process. Given that practical dilemmas concerning the institutional management of power, conflict and political cooperation have played a central role in shaping both the

What is a Free State? Republican Internationalism and Globalisation

This article addresses an underexplored area of investigation within the global justice debate: To what extent does globalisation structurally undermine the freedom of states? And if it does, what type of injustice does this constitute? It is argued here that a republican theory of freedom as non-domination is better equipped than existing cosmopolitan and social liberal accounts to explain the systemic connections between domestic, international and global injustice. The forms of unchecked power that globalisation sets off create new opportunities for the domination of states – by other states as well as by non-states actors. And when citizens live in dominated states, they are themselves exposed to domination. The upshot is a normative analysis of the global arena that attributes a central role to states, yet is deeply critical of the status quo.

Global Tax Governance: The Bullets Internationalists Must Bite – And Those They Must Not

Abstract Under conditions of high capital mobility, states are pressurised into various forms of tax competition to attract or retain capital and investors. When this occurs, the capacity of domestic institutions autonomously to generate fiscal policies is constrained. What exactly, if anything, is unjust about this phenomenon? This paper argues that tax competition puts particular pressure on internationalists, who must acknowledge that its occurrence makes our obligations of global justice more demanding, and that such obligations require supranational institutions in order to be discharged. However, to the extent that tax competition is unjust from an internationalist point of view, this is due to the specific harm it does to states. Thus, the paper makes three contributions to the literature: it shows that (1) tax competition has an impact on the demandingness of internationalist obligations of justice; (2) discharging such obligations commits internationalists to accept a higher level of supranational institutionalization than is currently acknowledged; yet (3) both the specific content of such obligations, and the kind of supranational regulation that is needed to discharge them, differ from those which cosmopolitans support. In sum, there are some cosmopolitan bullets which internationalists must bite, and others which they should continue to resist.

How social democrats may become reluctant radicals: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Wolfgang Streeck's Buying Time

The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards the exacerbation of rent-based wealth inequality, whereas Streeck suggests that capitalism and democracy are ultimately incompatible. A striking feature of these two contributions is that their authors are social democrats, not Marxists or radical anti-capitalist thinkers. In this review article, I illustrate how the combination of social democratic convictions and the acknowledgment that capitalism cannot be tamed generates interesting tensions between the diagnosis offered by the two monographs and the solutions that are proposed. I end the piece by raising two remarks on the implications that this tension might have for normative political theory. On the one hand, it is time for theory to do more work on political action and agency. On the other, liberal egalitarian theorists might have to acknowledge that they are in the same predicament as Piketty and Streeck: social democracy is their ideal, yet it is perhaps unattainable. If this is the case, liberal egalitarians might be committed to adopt a more confrontational attitude towards capitalism: they might have to become reluctant radicals.

The European Union as a demoicracy: Really a third way?

Should the EU be a federal union or an intergovernmental forum? Recently, demoicrats have been arguing that there exists a third alternative. The EU should be conceived as a demoicracy, namely a ‘Union of peoples who govern together, but not as one’ (Nicolaïdis). The demoi of Europe recognise that they affect one another’s democratic health, and hence establish a union to guarantee their freedom qua demoi – which most demoicrats cash out as non-domination. This is more than intergovernmentalism, because the demoi govern together on these matters. However, if the union aims at protecting the freedom of the different European demoi, it cannot do so by replacing them with a ‘superdemos’, as federalists want. This paper argues that demoicracy does possess distinctive normative features; it claims, however, that an institutional choice between intergovernmentalism and federalism is necessary. Depending on how we interpret what the non-domination of demoi requires, demoicracy will either ground a specific way of practicing intergovernmentalism or a specific form of federalism. It cannot, however, ground an institutional model which is genuinely alternative to both.

Introduction: Normative dimensions of the European crisis

The project of European integration is arguably currently facing its deepest crisis since its inception. In less than 10 years, what looked like a steady process of political enlargement, institutional consolidation, and economic convergence has come to a halt (or has even shown signs of backsliding). The project is now threatened in its very existence. This is true both for the Eurozone and for the European Union (EU) more generally. The global financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of the Eurozone governance structure to exogenous shocks, and highlighted the problem posed by deep economic discrepancies between member states. The crisis has brought into focus the profound and often adverse consequences that current forms of economic and financial integration have for the adequate functioning of both domestic and supranational institutions. Responding to these difficulties, some significant changes have been made to the Eurozone’s mechanisms – initially in the form of conditional lending to indebted Eurozone member states, and subsequently through the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, the incorporation of evermore stringent rules regarding national debt levels and deficits, and the implementation of debt-brakes through the Fiscal Compact. The Eurozone, however, continues to struggle to find the right balance between further integration on the one hand and protection of the diversity of welfare state arrangements and democratic institutions of individual states on the other.

Republicanism and Global Institutions: Three Desiderata in Tension

Recently, republicans have been increasingly arguing that the ideal of nondomination can ground both a more plausible account of global justice and better insights for global institutional design than liberal egalitarianism does. What kind of global institutions, however, does nondomination require? The essay argues that a global institutional blueprint based on the republican ideal of nondomination is a multifaceted endeavor. Republican institutions should aim to fulfill three different desiderata: 1) avoiding excessive concentration of power; 2) bringing informal asymmetrical power under institutional control; 3) furthering an active, vigilant citizenry. The three desiderata often pull in different directions. At the global level in particular, they do not converge on a verdict over whether we should switch to a cosmopolitan institutional order, stick to a world of states, or opt for something altogether different. As a result, there is no straightforward pathway leading from the vindication of nondomination as the central principle of global justice to a clear vision for a global institutional order. The issue is, instead, a matter of careful balancing.

Global Political Justice

1. Introduction: the idea of global political justice 2. Global actors and public power 3. Global public power: the subject of principles of global political legitimacy 4. Two conceptions of state sovereignty and their implications for global institutional design 5. Assessing the global order: justice, legitimacy, or political justice? 6. Creating cosmopolitans 7. The injustice of territoriality 8. Cosmopolitan justice and the league of democracies 9. On the concept of climate debt: its moral and political value