According to Kant's Concept of Global Justice
According to Kant, the quality and benefits of interactions is enhanced if they include both domestic and global authorities. It is important that the society identifies problems that cannot be solved without the participation of global authorities. The society should also acknowledge that a localized public monopoly can easily be established using force while coercion cannot be applied at the global stage. Kant\u2019s inferences are evident in today\u2019s world when one takes a keen interest in relations, law and order at the national and international levels. Kant\u2019s concept of global justice is well manifested in today\u2019s relations at the domestic and global levels.
Why International Bodies are Considered Weaker than Individual Countries
Varden (2043) poses the question on why an international body like the United Nations is regarded as weaker than individual countries such as the US, UK, Russia, and China. Countries have on several occasions attempted to enhance world peace and understanding by forming international bodies. The assumption made in each case is that the bodies will have a stronger collective voice than any of its individual members. The first attempt to form such an organization came in the 1920s with the formation of the League of Nations. Countries hoped that the organization would lead efforts to negotiate towards collective security of the world and enforce laws towards disarmament of nations whose capacity to make war was beyond mere protection of its citizens. However, the League of Nations failure was eminent and it came with the eruption of a world war. While international bodies grow weaker, individual nations have been competing to stamp their authority in multilateral and unilateral settings (Northedge 23). Since these countries have more power and resources than the UN, it becomes challenging to whip them into acting according to the consensus established under agencies of the United Nations.
The Challenge of Collaboration between the UN and Individual Countries
Both the UN and individual countries claim to have common interests: working towards the enhancement of economic social and political justice and human rights (Doyle and Sambanis 3). Despite claiming to have a common goal, these organizations have not been able to collaborate efficiently. The existence of a strong public authority that brings together all concerns of sovereign nations has remained elusive. The view of global justice from the perspective of political liberalism is a more recent theory that covers domestic and transnational matters from the perspective of scholars who lived in the 20th and 21st centuries (Knight and Alpaslan, 502).
Political Liberalism and Global Justice
Ideas on political liberalism in global justice were first advanced by Charles Larmore and John Rawls on the basis of the capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. Joseph Raz and Stuart Mill had attempted to replace existing world religions with autonomy and utility. According to Nussbaum, Mill and Raz were right because the interaction between ethics and religion provided a basis for acceptance of various forms of political morality; a situation that creates an environment where equality and liberty are at threat. There is a need for narrow and thin conceptions of values to ensure that countries and individuals respect diversity. It is evident that nations have failed to agree on many issues of international concern because of their inability to inhabit various forms of political morality. Each country believes that it has justifiable grounds to act according to the will of its leaders, even in instances where it violates the common position agreed upon collectively by all the members.
Extending Political Liberalism from Local to Global Matters
According to Nussbaum (68), the idea of political liberalism has failed to extend from local to global matters. However, the argument above is more compelling in multilateral and bilateral scenarios than locally. Gonzales (128) argues that liberal philosophers are too ambitious by expecting that global systems can be controlled in laboratory settings. This argument insinuates that organizations such as the United Nations are too large to be predictable. Morgenthau (3) undertook analysis of discourses on the Second World War. He noted that despite the nations having joint experiences in the course of the war, their accounts do not have indications of failure or shortcomings from their sides. He notes that the most famed accounts of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries were written by Europeans. Language barriers resulted in situations where the views of non-Europeans were stereotyped and manipulated to fit the European narrative.
History's Influence on Multilateral and Bilateral Relations
Morgenthau (3) noted that contrary to the popular belief among scholars that multilateral and bilateral relations are influenced by interests, most countries' allies and enemies are determined by history. The European state system has come to dominate the world through colonialism. As noted above, the Europeans had the ability to control discourses on issues of international importance. Manipulation of other people's views resulted in widespread approval and admiration of the western state system that emphasizes secularism (Chulov n.p). However, not all people across the world agree with ideas of secularism in governance. ISIS, for instance, is a contemporary organization that has tried to resist tendencies by citizens of countries in the Arab World to replace religion with concepts of utility and autonomy in governance. Such organizations have existed in many backgrounds and have had widespread dominance and approval despite not being reliable representations of the local traditional systems. Eickelman (137) notes that early caliphate systems such as Abbasid, Umayyad, and Rashidun empires promoted peaceful coexistence, direct democracy, and equal human rights for individuals with total disregard to their religious backgrounds. According to
The Power of Writers Outside the West
Spivak (13) notes that the development in transport and communication has given individuals from the rest of the world an opportunity to give their accounts of key social, political, and economic issues without being subject to misinterpretation by powerful nations. With this power, writers outside the west have come up with a concept known as Eurocentrism, which was subsequently taken up by philosophers and international relations scholars. The concept emerged from the study of the Philosophy of European Enlightenment. The philosophy maintained that high standards only existed in Europe and that it was the responsibility of European governments to traverse the globe and suppress local cultures by spreading their own (Martin 3). Eurocentrism is slowly losing its power with developing economic, social, and political prowess by countries outside the European region and its traditional ally system. In the book How the West Came to Rule, Anievas explains how being at the center of human history has given countries in the West the privilege to control the rest of the world. Anievas (3) notes that the greatest tool for international dominance is strong social relations. It helped the west spread their idea of capitalism beyond Europe.
Global Authority and National Dominance
Global authority has been reduced to national dominance. Countries are spreading their authority to other nations by ensuring that the latter embrace their culture and political ideologies. This scenario explains how European countries used Eurocentrism to spread capitalism. Countries are stamping their dominance by spreading their localized public monopoly to the global scale.
Works Cited
Anievas, A., " Nişancıoğlu, K. (2018). How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. Pluto Press.
Chulov, Martin. "Isis: the inside story." The Guardian 11 (2014): 2014.
Doyle, Michael W., and Sambanis, Nicholas. Making war and building peace: United Nations peace operations. Princeton University Press, 2006.
Eickelman, Dale F. "Who gets the past? The changing face of Islamic authority and religious knowledge." Geographies of Knowledge and Power. Springer, Dordrecht, 2015. 135-145.
Gonzales, Angela A. "Gaming and displacement: Winners and losers in American Indian casino development." International Social Science Journal 55.175 (2003): 123-133.
Knight, Mark, and Alpaslan, O÷ zerdem. "Guns, camps and cash: Disarmament, demobilization and reinsertion of former combatants in transitions from war to peace." Journal of Peace Research 41.4 (2004): 499-516.
Martin, Lisa L. Democratic commitments: Legislatures and international cooperation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Morgenthau, Hans, and Politics Among Nations. "The struggle for power and peace." Nova York, Alfred Kopf(1948). Northedge, Frederick Samuel. The League of Nations: its life and times, 1920-1946. Leicester University Press, 1986.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg eds." Urbana: University of Illinois Press (1988).
Varden, Helga. "A Kantian conception of global justice." Review of International Studies 37.5 (2011): 2043-2057.
