ABSTRACT
In a recent book, Jürgen Habermas has diagnosed a rift between two contemporary views of foreign policy, manifested in the perspective of the US government and those of its allies, on the one hand, and those of the remaining European states on the other. In the wake of the Iraq war, he sees the ‘West divided’ between a unilateralist perspective committed to implementing ethical values and a multilateralist perspective committed to furthering international law. In this chapter, I want to give this thesis some historical depth by spelling out some political and philosophical background to what appear to be related perspectives in two earlier writers in the liberal tradition. I will first sketch Habermas’s distinction, then move on to give a comparative presentation of what appear to be two of its eighteenth-century paradigms in the writings of Bentham and Kant. In order to bring out their positions on a wide and characteristic range of questions, I discuss their work under the two headings of ‘ideal theory’ and ‘non-ideal theory’. This is, of course, an anachronistic distinction to project onto Bentham and Kant, introduced into political theory by John Rawls. But although neither in Kant nor in Bentham do we find distinct segments of their work arranged to correspond to the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, their ideas on foreign policy can be usefully organized into those covering the relations among ‘well-ordered’ states and those covering the relations between ‘well-ordered’ and ‘non-well-ordered’ societies, the latter being either non-state peoples or extreme forms of ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states. I close by asking what light, if any, the agreements and differences between Bentham and Kant can throw on today’s
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In the main essay of his 2004 collection Der gespaltene Westen (The Divided West), Jürgen Habermas asks whether today there remains a chance for a ‘constitutionalization of international law’ (Habermas, 2004: 113). By a ‘constitution’ of international law, Habermas means a highest-order legal framework for international political action, geared to the functional regimes of international security and human rights. Such a ‘cosmopolitan constitution’ is meant to be a halfway house between a permanent, but loose, contractual mode of coordination among states and a fully fledged world republic, equipped with the competence to assume control of further policy areas. Although a cosmopolitan constitution of international law is thought to express a permanent commitment of its constituting members – states and individuals – to a just and peaceful world order, it is not meant to provide for world-government any more than for a global monopoly of force. Habermas goes on to sketch what he takes to be the two main contemporary Western approaches to foreign policy, only one of which is compatible, in his view, with the constitutionalization of international law. On the one hand, Habermas sees the strategy of the US as that of an imperial power fuelled by the wish to see a ‘liberal world ethos’ implemented. On the other hand, he sees the outlook of a variety of multilateralist actors concerned with the legal development of a cosmopolitan world order. Habermas asks whether the latter strategy is about to be replaced by the former and whether the ‘juridification [Verrechtlichung] of international relations ought to be replaced by their ethicization determined by a superpower’ (Habermas, 2004: 115).
