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The United States, Moral Norms, and Governing Ideas in World Politics: A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Cathal J. Nolan
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Abstract

Nolan reviews three works describing the influence of ethics on modern international relations, namely Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of the Warlord States (Dorothy V. Jones); The Age of Rights (Louis Henkin); and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs (Robert W. McElroy). All present timely academic and historical arguments for existing opportunities to bring ethics into world politics. Jones and Henkin concern themselves most with moral principles involved in establishing international law and organizations, while McElroy discusses the same issues from the unique perspective of U.S. foreign policy. Nolan gives full recognition to the traditional role of democratic states, particularly the United States., in shaping the moral norms of the international system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through ethics that are Western in origin but certainly not in their inherent content.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 7 , March 1993 , pp. 223 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1993

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References

1 See Link, Arthur S., ed., Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar; on the extraordinary post—World War II period, see the important new history by Leffler, Melvyn P., A Preponderance of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and compare the essays in Hodge, Carl C. and Nolan, Cathal J., eds., Shepherd of Democracy? America and Germany in the Twentieth Century (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 Hence, it is noteworthy that similar minorities provisions were not placed in the treaty with Germany, despite East European protestations about a double standardGoogle Scholar.

3 On the complex question of the Minorities Treaties and the new Poland, see Brecher, Frank W., Reluctant Ally (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 25–41Google Scholar. On the earlier dispute with Russia, see Cohen, Naomi, “Abrogation of the Russo—American Treaty of 1832,” Jewish Social Studies (January 1963), 3–41Google Scholar; and Nolan, Cathal J., “The United States and Tsarist Anti—Semitism, 1865–1914,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 3 (November 1992), 438–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For supporting documentation on these points see Nolan, Cathal J., Principled Diplomacy: Security and Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 181–206Google Scholar.

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