ABSTRACT
The notion that there is a potential conflict between universal and particularist principles in the normative grounding of relations between political communities is well established in the literatures of political theory and international relations theory, and in the practices of international society. The first approach that merits consideration denies relevance to cultural pluralism on the grounds that we have available in the norms of international society a set of principles which are not culturally specific, but, on the contrary, offer a basis for co-existence between states and cultures. The whole area of normative international relations theory has only been subjected to systematic exploration in the last twenty-five years, which, of course, is not to say that writers before the modern age have nothing to say about the matters, while the normative implications of cultural pluralism have received even less attention than such a time span might imply.
