The Social Contract in the Global Era

The purpose of this research paper is to examine the extent to which states engage in the proposed idea of a currently forming international social contract and what effect have institutions had on this development. More specifically, the paper will examine the extent to which the development of international institutions has catalyzed the evolution of an international social contract wherein states voluntarily participate in a contract that provides security but requires rights. Just as Rousseau described how individuals relinquished certain freedoms that they once had in the state of nature, in order to build a secure environment for themselves within the city-state, it will be shown that modern nation states are engaging in a very similar type of behavior. Through the use of international institutions states are beginning to minimize risk for themselves by forming a type of international social contract whereby they give up freedoms in order to provide security. The main reason for a state to engage in an international social contract is that they will eventually establish a legitimate political authority that can provide a system of hierarchy to counteract the anarchy that exists in the current international system.

The process of preconceiving liberal democratic values and re-institutionalizing them for a global world calls for nothing less than a new enlightenment. Such a global enlightenment should aim to civilize the increasingly brutal world of global economics, just as the eighteenth century Enlightenment began the process of civilizing the absolutist post-Westphalia states. It is within this context that it is argued that the decline of the state and the shifting basis of political legitimacy justify humanitarian 'intervention', particularly to prevent the oppression of those whose consent has not been sought by those in power. Indeed, as the walls around sovereign states break down, the term 'intervention' seems less and less appropriate and loses much of its normative stigma. Western legal, constitutional and political theory have been built on the assumption that most polities are 'strong states'; that is, states that largely pass the Austinian test of sovereignty according to which most legal and political issues arise, and can be resolved, within the state'? Such states emerged in Western Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia when the horrors of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) convinced many that the greatest danger in international affairs was intervention in other states. The new states were initially highly authoritarian-an authoritarianism that was supposedly justified by the fear of internal chaos. Such states were civilized by the North Atlantic Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and by social democrats in the nineteenth century. Enlightenment liberals insisted that states had to justify themselves to their citizens by furthering citizens' rights and by becoming accountable to the citizenry. Initially the mechanism for accountability was the right to revolution proposed by Locke and applied on this side of the Atlantic. Accountability mechanisms were refined through democratic legislatures and administrative law. Social democrats sought to extend the range of rights the growing state secured for its citizens. Those who did not seek millenarian revolution seemed to adhere to an essentially Whig theory of history, of constant improvement towards a common endpoint in which the rights secured by liberal democratic societies were expanded and the number of such societies increased. What all theories assumed was the existence of a strong state. The debates were about what values should be applied to its governance – liberty, equality, rights, citizenship, democracy, community, welfare and the rule of law. A range of recent trends, which are popularly labeled 'globalization', have rocked the assumption that a world of strong sovereign states was the natural condition to which humankind was evolving. The 350 years since the Treaty of Westphalia can be seen in

This an assignment regarding nationalism and it's consequences

Antipode, 2011

The state seems to be back again. In the face of the current economic and environmental crises, the “constitutive incompleteness” of the capital relation (Jessop 2000: 325)—that is, its tendency to permanently undermine its own conditions of reproduction—has been ...

This article offers a critical perspective on one of the central concepts of IR and the English School of IR in particular, namely the concept of international society. It argues that the moral agency of international society and its ‘naturalness’ were affirmed simultaneously with the marginalization of the concept of societas designating contractual political relations. The article traces the concept of contracted societas back to the work of Hugo Grotius, an acclaimed founder of the ‘international society’ tradition. By placing Grotius’ use of the concept in the context of ancient and early modern discussion of political alliances and partnerships, it demonstrates that politically contracted societas was no less conventional and important than the Stoic universal human society. However, this alternative societas had to be abandoned in the debates over the rival theories of social contract and the law of nations. The inherent sociability arguments, which were used to undermine a Hobbesian explanation for social contract or to question the very idea that society results from contract, found no place for societas contracted for a particular political purpose. The identification of such contingency in the history of the concept provides grounds for reopening the closure of the present conceptualizations of international society.

Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 2001

This article explores state socialisation by the European Union (EU) towards 15 partner states in the EU’s neighbourhood. By analysing the instances where partner states have accepted invitations to ‘align’ their national positions with Declarations made by the EU under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) during the period 2007-2015, the article explores the extent to which the EU’s foreign policy-making has expanded. The argument is made that that EU’s foreign policy does have effects outside the EU and identifies under what conditions socialisation of the partner states is more likely to occur. In order to do the latter, the article adjusts and adds nuance to constructivist theories of state socialisation by adding a third type of socialisation to the two established by Checkel (2001; 2005) that accounts for fluctuations and changes over time.

International Affairs, 1999

Conventional accounts of justice suppose the presence of a stable political society, stable identities, and a Westphalian cartography of clear lines of authority--usually a state--where justice can be realised. They also assume a stable social bond. But what if, in an age of globalisation, the territorial boundaries of politics unbundle and a stable social bond deteriorates? How then are we to think about justice? Can there be justice in a world where that bond is constantly being disrupted or transformed by globalisation? Thus the paper argues that we need to think about the relationship between globalisation, governance and justice. It does so in three stages: (i) It explains how, under conditions of globalisation, assumptions made about the social bond are changing. (ii) It demonsrates how strains on the social bond within states give rise to a search for newer forms of global political theory and organisation and the emergence of new global (non state) actors which contest with states over the policy agendas emanating from globalisation. (iii) Despite the new forms of activity identified at (ii) the paper concludes that the prospects for a satisfactory synthesis of a liberal economic theory of globalisation, a normative political theory of the global public domain and a new social bond are remote.

The state is central to the study of international relations and likely to remain so into the foreseeable future. State policy is the most common object of analysis. States decide to go to war. They erect trade barriers. They choose whether and at what level to establish environmental standards. States enter international agreements, or not, and choose whether to abide by their provisions. Even scholars who give prominence to nonstate actors are typically concerned with understanding or changing state practice (for example, Keck and Sikkink 1998). International relations as a discipline is chiefly concerned with what states do and, in turn, how their actions affect other states. Similarly, states are a common unit of analysis in theories of international relations. Many analysts focus on states and their interactions to explain observed patterns of world politics. The state is fundamental to neorealism (Waltz 1979) and

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov. Series VII: Social Sciences • Law

The state is that form of organization specific to human society even today, although several thousand years have passed since it was set up in the Ancient Orient. Over time the concept of state has evolved, perhaps even sometimes didn't evolve, on the contrary, it has certainly undergone complex adaptations generated by the challenges that have arisen over different historical periods, as well as by historical, political, social, economic, cultural phenomena, etc. Nowadays, globalization is a phenomenon or even a complex process generated by a multitude of causes, shared, more or less, by human society, but whose existence and effects can neither be ignored nor denied. In this briefly presented context, are witnessing the encounter of two different concepts, perhaps even antagonistic, concepts, namely the state, and globalization. These two concepts and more had to find a way to live together. We ask ourselves, however, whether this coexistence between the state and globalizati...