Global Justice and Global Democracy.

What is globalization? And how should our political institutions respond to it? This dissertation formulates and answer to both these questions by relating the ideas of three Enlightenment thinkers to three elements of globalization: globalizing democracy to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, international law to Immanuel Kant and international trade to David Hume. Through a close reading of these authors, the dissertation asks whether globalization is democratic and how it could be, whether it is legal and how it could be, and whether it leads to increased prosperity as well as how it could do so.

In Rousseau’s ideas of democracy, it finds a justification for tying democracy to the institutions of representative democracy in the state. Even though there is a radical promise in democracy where each person in the world shares power equally between them, our inability to distinguish our group interest from what is in the interest of all requires us to practice democracy through a shared set of institutions that gives each person an equal vote. Any attempt to move away from these state institutions signals a decline in democratic accountability and democratic participation, so that the promise of global democracy must remain unfulfilled.

In Kant’s ideas on law and morality the dissertation however finds a way to make good on the global democratic promise by reframing it. Rather than giving each person an equal vote and an equal share of power, the international extension of law can give each person equal rights. I analyze how Kant transforms the global democratic ideal to the ideal of a universal law between us, and how it is possible for our international order to conform to the ideal of such a universal law. Rather than imposing a shared human rights standard through international institutions like the UN, I argue that Kant advocated a world of equally sovereign states. When each state is recognized as sovereignly equal to every other, no persons and no states coerce each other, so that it becomes possible for the law in every state to mutually adjust itself to the law in every other state. When we stick to ideal of sovereign equality, the ideal of a universal law can be constructed through what Kant called ‘cosmopolitan right’, or through voluntary global exchange and cooperation.

In Hume’s ideas on international trade and exchange, I further explore what can spur such cosmopolitan exchange and cooperation. While international law makes it possible for a universal law to arise voluntarily, international trade can positively motivate us construct a universal law between us. Because, as I argue through a reading of Hume, economic exchange generates a relation of mutual benefit between distant strangers, it provides an incentive to interact beyond borders. When properly regulated, international trade moreover provides a way to alleviate global poverty by making poor economies more prosperous. I however also argue that international exchange is only mutually beneficial and able to alleviate poverty when it takes into account both Kant’s ideal of sovereign equality as well as Rousseau’s ideal of statist representative democracy. Even though international trade constructs relations to strangers and alleviates poverty through growth, it distributes these overall benefits unequally. The recognition that all states are sovereignly equal, and the recognition that all persons have equal voting power in a democracy can correct this unequal distribution of benefits, by distributing them equally within states.

As a whole, the dissertation thus finds that globalization is best understood through the ‘co-originality’ of democracy, international law and international trade, and that a reading of Rousseau, Kant and Hume can help us see this. Each ideal needs the other two to fulfill its universalist promise, and this philosophical exploration of democracy, international law and international trade models how globalization works. How globalization should work can also be understood through this reading. The dissertation finds three principles of ‘global justice’ that make globalization just. Principle 1 specifies the priority of sovereign democracy, so that no cross-border coercion should exist between sovereign states. Principle 2 demands legal cooperation between states, so that the mutual adjustment between systems of state law can voluntarily conform to the ideal of a universal law. Principle 3 then advocates that each state maximizes its share of international trade as a share of its economy and that it gives priority to (global) worst-off under international trade. As there is a ‘lexical priority’ between these principles, the first takes precedence over the second and the third, so that in case of war, peace becomes more important than mutual adjustment and trade, and so that when peace and cosmopolitan interaction are possible, the fair distribution of the benefits of international trade becomes most important.