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Global justice, national responsibility and transnational power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2011

DAVID OWEN
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Abstract

This article focuses on David Miller's recent and influential study National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007). After outlining Miller's methodological commitments in the book, the article offers an interpretation of the major aspects of Miller's case against ‘Cosmopolitan egalitarianism’ before focusing especially on the issue of migration and refugees. Here the article argues that while membership of a nation is (under certain conditions) of intrinsic value, it is not the only thing that is of intrinsic value – friendship, family and other practices can also be sources of intrinsic value – nor is it necessarily the most important. It is therefore not clear, the article argues, why an account of global justice that seeks to take seriously the existence of national communities on the grounds of their intrinsic value, should propose rules of justice concerning freedom of movement that entail the de jure privileging of the value of national community over other sources of intrinsic value. The article concludes by assessing how Miller's arguments can support the movement from mere ‘distributivism’ towards political justice, towards an account that more adequately integrates agency, responsibility and power into our account of global justice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 36 , Special Issue S1: Evaluating Global Orders , October 2010 , pp. 97 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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References

1 Miller, David, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . All references to Miller in the main text will be to this book unless otherwise specified.

2 Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar .

3 Forst, Rainer, Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit (Frankfurt/Main, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007), p. 260Google Scholar .

4 Caney, Simon, Justice Beyond Borders: Towards A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 See Caney, , Justice Beyond Borders, p. 277Google Scholar . Notice also that if one adopts a distinction between fundamental and regulative principles of distributive justice, then while it clear that Miller is a contextualist about regulative principles of distributive justice, it is less clear that he is so about fundamental principles. Thus, on one reading, the distinction between weak and strong forms of cosmopolitanism that plays a crucial role in Miller's argument (see section II below) may be construed as a distinction between an invariant fundamental principle (roughly, ‘every human being is equally an object of moral concern’) and contextually variable regulative principles derived from it; although, on another plausible reading, Miller may simply be situating the principle of equal moral concern as a fundamental constraint on substantive theorising rather than as a fundamental principle from which substantive principles are contextually derived.

6 See Carens, Joseph, ‘Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders’, review of Politics, 49 (1987), pp. 251–273CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective’, in Barry, B. and Goodin, R. (eds), Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and Money (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)Google Scholar .

7 Scheffler, Samuel, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar .

8 See, for example, ‘Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 16 (2008), pp. 371–390CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

9 See Habermas, Jurgen, The Inclusion of the Other (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002)Google Scholar and Mason, AndrewCommunity, Solidarity and Belonging (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

10 Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford, Oxford University, 1995)Google Scholar .

11 Miller, , On Nationality, pp 161–165Google Scholar .

12 Moreover if, as seems likely, many (perhaps most) of our co-nationals do endorse the value of nationality but endorse it as a result of institutional recognition of special obligations to co-nationals (legal, educational and otherwise), we can at the very least legitimately raise the question of whether or not such endorsement is ideological in the critical sense of this term. The logical gap between ‘instrinsically valued’ and ‘intrinsically valuable’ facilitates this question and the identity-forming powers of institutional modes of recognition encourage it.

13 Though I differ from Forst in wishing to ground this right in a political rather than a moral standpoint.

14 Relevant considerations of which have been acutely addressed in Byers, Michael, Custom, Power and the Power of Rules: International Relations and Customary International Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999); 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , his edited collection The Role of Law in International Politics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar and his edited collection with Nolte, Geog, US Hegemony and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar .

15 Neither of these assumptions is very realistic but let that pass.

16 See, for example, Tully, James, ‘The Struggles of Indigneous People for and of Freedom’, in Ivison, Duncan et al. (eds), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 36–59Google Scholar and, for relevant background, Anaya, S. James, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar .