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Moral Agency and International Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Chris Brown
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Abstract

There is no body that has the legal right to exercise agency on behalf of international society (IS), even though the notion of “society” encapsulated in IS is, in principle, close to that conveyed by bodies such as clubs and associations that can be represented by, for example, a board of directors or governing committee. Some have argued that the UN or the Security Council can exercise agency on behalf of IS, but in view of the “underinstitutionalization” of IS in the UN, a more interesting possibility is that groups of states may authorize themselves to act on the behalf of IS as “coalitions of the willing.” However, the contrasting experience of the Gulf War of 1990/91 and the Kosovo campaign of 1999 suggest that the degree of ideological coherence of the coalition in question is an important variable here - in 1999, NATO was able with some plausibility to represent the wider international society because of its commitment to certain core democratic values, while in 1991 the Gulf War coalition could only act conservatively in restoring the status quo because of its diverse nature.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 2001 , pp. 87 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2001

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References

1 See Chomsky, Noam, World Orders, Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994Google Scholar) and The New Military Humanism (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1999Google Scholar); and Pilger, John, “Under the Influence: The Real Reason for the United Nations' Role in East Timor Is to Retain Indonesian Control,” Guardian, September 21, 1999Google Scholar.

2 International society is the master-concept of the “English School.” See Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

3 The notion of an international society as opposed to an international system is explored in Brown, Chris, “International Theory and International Society: The Viability of the Middle Way,” Review of International Studies 21, No. 2 (1995), pp. 183–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 This distinction is set out in Nardin, Terry, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983Google Scholar).

5 Blair, Tony, “Doctrine of the International Community” (speech given in Chicago, April 22, 1999Google Scholar).

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11 The best discussion of this issue is Wheeler, Nicholas J., Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001Google Scholar).

12 Habermas, Jürgen, “Bestialität und Humanität: Ein Krieg an der Grenze zwischen Recht und Moral,” Die Zeit, April 29, 1999Google Scholar.

13 A representative realist position might be Gray, Colin, “No Good Deed Shall Go Unpunished,” in Booth, Ken, ed., The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimension (London: Frank Cass, 2001)Google Scholar, also published as a Special Issue of the International Journal of Human Rights 4, Nos. 3 and 4 (2000). The present author's essay “A Qualified Defence of the Use of Force for Humanitarian Reasons” is in the same volume.

14 See Ignatieff, Michael, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000Google Scholar).