ABSTRACT
Universal moral principles applicable beyond the moral boundaries set by ethnicity expand the moral universe. Universalist thought persisted throughout the history of the European states with notions of virtue, theology, of government, and science. Law and morality are rooted in both universalism—Christendom for Europe, Shintoism for Japan, Judaiism for Israel, or Shiite Islam for Iran, and in the morality of ethnic roots as these evolved within the ethnic group’s own “national” culture. Traditionally, the moral order has been, an ethnic concern or at most a religious “community.” Particularism and universalism are two sides of the same coin that of humankind’s capacity to invent the means for its own survival. The Hobbesian relations among states assumed by cultural nationalism have had to be curtailed by international agreements and an emergent form of suprastate authority. Instead of a misguided cultural Darwinism practiced by putatively pure ethnic states, real world developments have shifted unit boundaries.
