Mathias Risse
Our world has become ever more interconnected politically and economically, a global society still based on local territorial sovereignty, but whose fate is ever more influenced by transnational and transgovernmental networks, structures aptly called the global political and economic order. This order contains new associative structures -- institutions, regimes, movements whose character is normative because they generate demands on individuals and institutions. Political thought must be responsive to the associative conditions under which it is formulated: in particular, questions of justice address who can legitimately make claims on whom, and, at least according to a family of views that I favor, the answers depend on what associative structures there are. If so, the guiding question for understanding “Justice and Sovereignty in the New Global Order” is which associative relations that are, or in the future may be, contained in that order generate norms of justice. Part I of this study offers accounts of two norm-generating relationships, one quite exclusive and one including all of humanity. The exclusive relationship binds together individuals in one state. The all-inclusive one is the relationship of being co-owners of the world’s resources. An area of application is immigration: how much access must states grant given that states per se are legitimate, but also given that their territory is part of the resource-base collectively owned by humanity? Part II explores the new global order, assessing what structures hold in addition to those two. My starting point is an investigation of whether international trade generates norms. Yet individuals and institutions are not just tied together by trade-regimes, but also through structures embodied by the UN, World Bank, IMF, etc., whose norm-generating role also needs to be explored. Part III looks at the extent to which the global order satisfies the duties of justice and discusses a claim one sometimes hears from globalization opponents, namely, that that order harms the poor. My general answer is that the global order does much better on this score than opponents allow.