Terry Macdonald

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

Boundaries beyond borders: Delineating democratic 'peoples' in a globalizing world

The problem of delineating the legitimate boundaries of self-governing polities is a perennial one for democratic theory. As Frederick G. Whelan observed two decades ago, democratic boundaries are often ‘a matter of continuing controversy and conflict’; indeed, ‘boundary-drawing, and the determination of political membership, are perhaps the most fundamental political decisions’. In the 20 years that have passed since Whelan’s valuable contribution to the debate, increasing attention to the phenomenon of ‘globalization’ has generated a new range of political and normative arguments with implications for the democratic boundary problem. This article takes stock of these new contributions to the boundary debate, and develops a theoretical framework for evaluating the legitimacy of democratic boundaries in our increasingly globalized world.

Global public power: thesubjectof principles of global political legitimacy

This paper elaborates the concept of global public power as the subject of principles of political legitimacy in global politics, and defends it through a critical comparison with other concepts widely employed to depict this regulative subject: states, global basic structure, and global governance. The goal underlying this argument is to bring some greater unity and integration to conceptual understandings of the subject of principles of political legitimacy within analyses of global politics, and in doing so to frame a broader research agenda for locating in practice the concrete political agencies and institutions that are appropriate targets for demands of political legitimation under the prevailing empirical conditions of global pluralism.

What's So Special about States? Liberal Legitimacy in a Globalising World

Throughout the history of liberal thought, questions about political legitimacy concerned with the protection of individual rights and the entrenchment of democratic public decision making have typically focused on the structure and conduct of state-based institutions. Normative political theorists have so far said less, however, about the prospects for achieving liberal legitimacy via new non-state forms of political organisation involving powerful actors such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs). The goal of this article is to present a preliminary theoretical assessment of the prospects of non-state institutions for delivering liberal political legitimacy in the context of globalisation. It asks: is there anything special about the various institutional forms associated with ‘states’ and ‘sovereignty’, or should these be superseded by some new public institutional order more suited to our era of globalisation? It is argued that while certain institutional characteristics of states will remain essential for achieving liberal political legitimacy in a globalising world, state-based institutional forms will be unable to deliver such legitimacy alone. Non-state forms of regulation and democratic decision making are increasingly essential for securing political legitimacy in a globalising world, but they have certain inherent weaknesses relative to state institutions. In light of this, global political legitimacy could perhaps best be achieved through the development of hybrid regulatory and democratic institutions, with selected characteristics of both state and non-state institutional forms. Questions about how best to develop such hybrid institutions should therefore receive more attention than they have done so far from normative political theorists.

Institutional facts and principles of global political legitimacy

How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative ‘principles’ in political life be responsive to social ‘facts’? In this article, I answer this question by sketching a contextualist methodology for identifying and justifying principles for guiding international institutional action, which is based on an original account of the regulative role and conceptual structure of principles of political legitimacy. I develop my argument for this approach in three steps. First, I argue that a special non-utopian category of normative political principles has the regulatory role of helping solve collective action problems that emerge in practice among actors engaged in shared institutional projects. Next, I argue that analysis of such normative political principles can be helpfully framed by what I call a collective agency conception of political legitimacy. Finally, I draw out the implications of these claims to show how the content and justification of normative political principles should vary across institutional contexts, in response to a particular set of motivational and empirical social facts. This contextualist methodology has useful applications to international politics insofar it can help to account for the widespread intuition that standards of political legitimacy for institutions may vary both across domestic and international levels and among international institutions operating in different functional domains.

Global Democracy: A Symposium on a New Political Hope

The idea that the values and norms of democracy can also be applied to global politics is increasingly debated in academe. The six authors participating in this symposium are all advocates of global democracy, but there are significant differences in the way they envision its implementation. Some of the contributors discuss if and how substantial changes undertaken by states, mostly in their foreign policies, may also generate positive consequences in global politics. Other contributors address the nature of the international arena and the possible reforms it should undergo starting with the reform of international organizations. The debate combines theoretical aspects with normative proposals that could also be advanced in the political arena and offers a wide range of perspectives on the attempts to achieve a more democratic global political community.

The liberal battlefields of global business regulation

The global justice movement has often been associated with opposition to the broad programme of ‘neoliberalism’ and associated patterns of ‘corporate globalisation’, creating a widespread impression that this movement is opposed to liberalism more broadly conceived. Our goal in this article is to challenge this widespread view. By engaging in critical interpretive analysis of the contemporary ‘corporate accountability’ movement, we argue that the corporate accountability agenda is not opposed to the core values of a liberal project. Rather, it is seeking to reconfigure the design of liberal institutions of individual rights-protection, adjusting these for new material conditions associated with economic globalisation, under which powerful corporations alongside states now pose direct and significant threats to individual rights. This activist agenda is, therefore, much less radical in its challenge to the prevailing liberal global order than it may initially appear, since it functions to buttress rather than corrode many core normative commitments underpinning the liberal political project.

Introduction to special issue: Real-world justice and international migration

In this article, we introduce the project developed in this special issue: a search for principles of ‘real-world’ justice in international migration that can offer practical guidance on real political problems of migration governance. We begin by highlighting two sources of divergence between the principal topics of theoretical controversy within literatures on migration justice and the animating sources of political controversy within real national and international publics. These arise first in the framing of the problems on which normative theory is purported to offer guidance, and second in the character of the normative reasons that are invoked as grounds for settling the controversies. In response to these divergences, we propose that the development of action-guiding normative theories of international migration can be supported with resources from broadly ‘realist’ approaches to political theory. We outline three key dimensions in which the ‘real-world’ theoretical approaches developed in this collection of papers connect up with important themes in the wider theoretical literature on political ‘realism’: first, a problem-centred methodological strategy; second, a focus on the value of political legitimacy; and third, a commitment to reconciling systematic engagement with real political problems and circumstances with a critical normative orientation towards political problems.

Political legitimacy in international border governance institutions

In this article, I address the question: what kind of normative principles should regulate the governance processes through which migration across international borders is managed? I begin by contrasting two distinct categories of normative controversy relating to this question. The first is a familiar set of moral controversies about justice within border governance, concerning what I call the ethics of exclusion. The second is a more theoretically neglected set of normative controversies about how institutional capacity for well functioning border governance can best be achieved, concerning what I call the constitution of control of international borders. I argue that progress can be made in resolving controversies of the latter kind by applying a new normative theory of political legitimacy, distinct from the moral theories of justice routinely applied to ethics of exclusion controversies. On the ‘collective agency’ model of political legitimacy that I propose here, principles of political legitimacy have the regulatory role of combating complex collective action problems that may otherwise impede an institution’s collectively valuable functions. Through applying this theory, I sketch some provisional prescriptions for the design of international border governance institutions that may follow from the demand for strengthening their political legitimacy.

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