Republicanism and Global Justice

Abstract

The republican tradition seems to have a blind spot about global justice. It has had little to say about pressing international issues such as world poverty or global inequalities. According to the old, if apocryphal, adage: extra rempublicam nulla justitia. Some may doubt that distributive justice (as opposed to freedom or citizenship) is the primary virtue of republican institutions; and at any rate most would agree that republican values have traditionally been realized in the polis not in the (oxymoronic) cosmopolis. The article sketches a republican account of global non-domination which suggests that duties of distributive justice are not bounded to the institutions of a single society. In particular, it argues that republicans have good reasons to seek to curb those global inequalities which underpin what I call capability-denying domination.

What is a Free State? Republican Internationalism and Globalisation

“…First of all, several republicans follow cosmopolitan democrats in their near-exclusive focus on the institutional question of global governance, with relatively less interest in substantive questions of economic justice. By contrast, a plausible republican international theory must be able to put forward both institutional and substantive proposals (in this, we follow Laborde [2010] and Lovett [2010b].…”

“…In other words, they must enjoy what we call 'basic non-domination' (Laborde, 2010), understood as the capacity to set up and maintain a republic in the first place. This, it is worth noting, includes the power to make mistakes and arrange their own affairs in ways that deviate from optimal non-domination (within limits, which we shall briefly address at the end of this section).…”

‘An Ever Closer Union Among the Peoples of Europe’: Republican Intergovernmentalism andDemoicratic Representation within the EU

“…Paradoxically, though monetary union itself may have overstepped what a republican intergovernmentalism could legitimate, the crisis might justify quite generous if temporary transfers between member states in order to sustain their equal capacity to remain self-governing (Laborde 2010). However, exploring this avenue falls outside the scope of this article.…”

Domination, global harms, and the problem of silent citizenship: toward a republican theory of global justice

“…Thus, destitution is certainly one of the great causes of vulnerability to domination and injustice across the whole spectrum of possible forms. Thus, obligations to act so as to overcome such domination lead to capability failure, so that the core of a republican motivation for distributive justice remains (see also Laborde 2010). Regardless of the strength of other causal claims about global inequalities, it is clear that destitution itself makes those who suffer from it vulnerable to many manifest forms of domination and injustice.…”