International Politics

In a recent post about unfair epistemic authority, Macarena Marey suggests that

In political philosophy, the centre is composed of the Anglophone world and three European countries…

One can think of “the center” in terms of people or of topics. Although Marey’s post is clearly about philosophers not philosophies, and I agree with her, one can also address the issue of “the centre” about philosophies.

For my part, I wonder the opposite: how come political philosophy is not Euro-centric? If Anglophone and European philosophers dominate the field, as indeed they do, why doesn’t European politics dominate political philosophy, too?

My point is not that European politics should dominate political philosophy, but that it is surprising that it does not. First, because philosophers often sought solutions to the political problems of their time (think of Montesquieu or Locke on the separation of powers; of Paine and Burke debating human rights during the French Revolution  etc.). Second, because the European Union is a political innovation on many respects; had a philosopher presented the project (“imagine enemies at war pooling their resources”), it would have been dismissed as utopian. Finally, because EU is a complex organization which deals with enough topics that it is hard not to find yours. Topical, innovative, and complex – but not of interest for European hegemonic philosophers: is this not puzzling?

You doubt. But how would political philosophy look like if it was Euro-centred? Certainly, renewed — by philosophical views tested at the European level or inspired by the European institutions. For example, there would be philosophical analyses of “new” topics such as:

•  Freedom of movement – a founding freedom of the European union over the last 70 years. Surprisingly, there is not a single philosophical treaty on this freedom today (although freedom of speech, of assembly etc. are well represented); all philosophical studies reason as if it were natural to control immigration, as if open borders were an unrealistic utopia – in short, as if the EU did not exist (neither Mercosur‘s or African Union‘s institutions).
• Distributive justice between states or within federal states – a political reality since the 1950s or earlier. But since the 1970s, philosophers have been praising Rawls, Walzer, and others who argue that redistribution between states is not a matter of justice (no reviewer have ever asked them whether the existing European/international redistribution was unjust etc.).
• Justice of extending / fragmenting states and federations of states – today, cosmopolitanism is considered in opposition to nationalism, not to regionalism or federalism; secession/ unions are under-discussed in theories of justice or critical race theory; there are more philosophical studies on just wars than on peace etc.

Many other sources of philosophical renewal are not specific to the European Union but could have been be activated if political philosophy was Euro-centric. For example, international aid has been institutionalized since the WWII (as I have briefly shown here), but prominent philosophers reason about its justice as if it did not exist. Less prominent philosophers should adapt to the existing terms of the debate.

In short, if political philosophy was a little more Euro-centric, its questioning would be renewed and more realistic. If it is not, the problem of political philosophy is not “Euro-centrism” but “centrism” tout court: we tend to organize around a few “prominent philosophers” and their views rather than around originality, pluralism, and truth.

Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily?

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One of the lessons of Branko Milanovic’s work on global inequality has been the realization that location, and perhaps more pertinently, nationality, is a more important explanation of how well and badly off people are than class is. Citizens of wealthy countries enjoy a “citizenship premium” over the inhabitants of poor ones that exists because they have access to labour markets and welfare systems that their fellow humans largely do not. Of course, there’s a sense in which this global difference also represents a class difference, with many of the workers simply located elsewhere while the residual “proletarians” of the wealthy world enjoy a contradictory class location (to repurpose a term from Erik Olin Wright). While it might be that world GDP would increase dramatically if barriers to movement were removed, as some economists have claimed, the relative position of the rich world poor depends upon those barriers being in place. Or to put it another way, free movement could make many poor people much better off and might not make the rich world poor any worse off in absolute terms, but it would erode their relative advantage. And people, however misguidedly care about their relative advantage.

What kind of politics would we expect to have in rich countries in a world like ours, if people were fully cognizant of this citizenship premium? I suspect the answer is that we would expect to see stronger nationalist movements seeking to preserve the advantage of members of the national collective over outsiders and correspondingly weaker parties based on class disadvantage within those countries. Which is, in fact, the tendency we do see in many European countries where traditional social democracy is struggling badly at the moment. In those same countries we might also expect to see some voters who are unthreatened by freer movement, or by the rise of new powers in the world, being more open to a more cosmopolitan politics and more preoccupied by other issues such as climate change and the environment. And this is, in fact, what we do see.

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Reading about the recent military coup in Myanmar, I’ve seen the view that Biden’s criticism of the coup is undermined by the fact that the pretext for the coup, a supposedly stolen election, was exactly the same as that raised by Trump and the Republican Party in response to Biden’s 2020 election victory.

There’s a problem in this reasoning which is easy to see, but harder to resolve. It makes intuitive sense to say that the United States should not point fingers at other countries when it has the same problems itself. But it seems strange to say that, having just defeated an attempt to overturn a democratic election in his own country, Biden is in some way disqualified from criticising a similar attempt in Myanmar.

The answer to this question is to recognise that Biden does not speak for “the United States”, but for the party he leads. To the extant that his party supports democracy in the US, it is naturally aligned with supporters of democracy everywhere, and against supporters of dictatorship, both at home and abroad. Conversely, Trumpists in the United States are naturally aligned with dictators everywhere and opposed to democrats (with both small and capital “D”).

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A guest post by David Owen (University of Southampton).

T. Alexander Aleinikoff & Leah Zamore, *The Arc of Protection: Reforming the International Refugee Regime*, Stanford University Press, 2019.

This book is a bold attempt to rethink the requirements of an international protection regime for forced migrants as well as a significant challenge to the view I recently proposed in my own book (reviewed [here](https://crookedtimber.org/2020/02/19/an-important-new-book-about-refugeehood/) by Chris Bertram). Combining a revisionist history of the international refugee regime and a call for a contemporary widening of that regime, it traces proposes a set of principles and practices of protection that the authors take to be adequate to challenges of our current circumstances.

That the international refugee regime is far from well-functioning is hardly a controversial judgment and Aleinkoff & Zamore begin by sketching out the character of its failure and the relationship of that failure to the shift to thinking of refugees in humanitarian terms. As they rightly note, the 1951 Refugee Convention is much more focused than current humanitarian practice on rights and on the integration of refugees – as social, economic and even political agents – into their states of residence. Their reconstruction of the post-WW2 emergence of our current refugee regime provides the basis for the pivotal claim of the book, which is a rejection of what they term ‘the Modern Standard Picture’ (MSP) of refugee protection according to which (1) citizens are entitled to the protection of their basic rights by their home state, (2) a refugee is someone whose home state has failed to protect them so that they have had to flee from it and (3) international protection is a surrogate or substitute for the responsibilities of their home state implemented through the protection of another state. MSP is a widely held view (my own work may be seen as a version of it) but they argue that it cannot make sense of the focus of the Refugee Convention on overcoming obstacles to the rebuilding of refugee lives in the host state by establishing requirements on host states to provide some rights in forms equivalent to those enjoyed by citizens and the remainder in the form enjoyed by the most favoured immigrants: ‘if international protection is a surrogate for anything, it is the inability or unwillingness of the host state to protect and assist refugees in their territory’ (p.51). The simple but radical redirecting of the focus of refugee protection onto the obligation of the international community to provide the rights and resources for refugees to be able to rebuild their lives, to enjoy agency and welfare wherever they are, provides the basis on which their argument and proposals stand.
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[The below text is a short memo I presented for a workshop on a left-liberal financial foreign policy for the US last week.]

The US left is starting to come to grips with the relationship between democracy and inequality. This builds on a variety of academic work over the last several years – most prominently Thomas Piketty’s book, but also work by other academics such as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman – which maps the growth in wealth and income inequality across rich countries, and how marked it has been in market-liberal countries such as the US. But these are no longer academic debates: they are being taken up by politicians within the Democratic party, creating a new dynamic of intra-party competition. Proposals by left-leaning politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are not only notable in themselves, but in how they are shifting the center of gravity, so that more centrist politicians too are taking them up. [click to continue…]

A piece of mine that was published a few months ago that might be of interest to some, especially recent political events in the US.

A …tacit assumption lurks behind calls for the U.S. president to consider how best America can stabilize the global system: that the United States not only wants to help stabilize the international economy but that it can do so. The dominant mode of rhetoric assumes that the key causal relationship runs from U.S. influence to possible solutions for the problems plaguing the global economy. However, there is another way to think about the evidence. What if the key causal relationship does not run from U.S. hegemonic influence to global economic problems, but the other way around? What if global economic problems are imposing ever greater limits on the influence of the United States, and indeed any other putative hegemon that might replace it?

Here, the diagnosis might be as follows—that the great age of economic cooperation of the post–World War II period is the product of a historically unique conjuncture of high growth rates, and of available forms of cooperation that offered readily achievable rewards. We have no warrant to believe that these will continue forever; indeed they might already be abating. Global economic growth may be sputtering as it reaches hard limits…

Furthermore, there is some reason from the work of Thomas Piketty and
others to think that the extraordinary growth rates of recent decades are a historical aberration from earlier times, and may not continue indefinitely into the future. Finally, the low hanging fruit of straightforward tariff reductions have mostly already been plucked. Future economic agreements will have to settle instead for more dubious gleanings from the higher and more inaccessible branches. In such a world, it is unlikely that the incoming U.S. president can do very much to solve global problems. Instead, his or her main task might be to adjust as best as possible to international economic difficulties. Aspiring hegemons will find it far easier to increase economic cooperation and secure global stability in a world where there is reasonable economic growth and cooperation than in a world of stagnant growth and few distributional benefits. We may be moving from the former world to the latter.

This is less an exercise in prediction than in stealing a method from Gene Wolfe (he mentions it in one of his collections; I can’t remember which) for writing science fiction stories and applying it to policy articles. Wolfe’s recommendation is to take the world, change just one important variable, and then see what happens. What I do in the piece is to take the existing elite consensus about trade, benign US hegemony etc, and change just one factor, assuming that economic stagnation acts upon US political ability and will rather than vice versa. The result may or may not be closer to the truth, but it does, I think, plausibly demonstrate the fragility of this consensus to changes in the underlying parameters.

The other day, [an article by Chris Deerin](http://capx.co/its-official-western-politics-is-now-defunct/), a writer for the Scottish Daily Mail, appeared on my twitter timeline, retweeted and endorsed by several people I respect. The article argued Trump and Brexit mean that “liberal progressives” have lost and that “the model that has more or less dominated Western politics for the past three decades is defunct. It could not be more dead.” “We” misused that hegemony and are responsible for our own downfall:

> We used our hegemony to take down barriers and borders, to connect and build, to (yes) line our own pockets and smugly luxuriate in the goodness of our ideas and intentions. Meantime, we forgot about those who weren’t able to take part, who weren’t benefiting, to whom free trade and open borders meant greater hardship and uneasy cultural compromises. Or, let’s be honest, we didn’t forget – we just chose to conveniently ignore. We stopped asking for their permission, ploughed on through the warning signs, and fell off the end of the road.

Now “liberal” is a funny old word, mostly used as an insult these days by the Jacobin crowd on the one hand and conservatives on the other. Still, I can’t help but feel that my politics is being condemned here as infeasible and dead whilst wondering whether it is in fact true that I’ve enjoyed such “hegemony” for the past 30 years, because that certainly doesn’t gel with my experience.
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In an op-ed in the Financial Times, the economist Branko Milanovic [advocates that](https://next.ft.com/content/2e3c93fa-06d2-11e6-9b51-0fb5e65703ce) in order to fight global poverty, we should introduce explicit systems of differentiated citizenship in wealthy countries under which immigrants (and their children? and their children’s children?) would be entitled only to a reduced package of rights. He argues that we should

> redefine citizenship in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all. Restricting the citizenship rights of migrants in this way would assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries. As happens currently in the Gulf states, migrants could be allowed to work for a limited number of years, or to work only for a given employer, or else be obliged to return to their country of origin every four or five years. They could also be made to pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration. Despite such discriminatory treatment, the welfare of migrants and their families would increase, while native populations would not be made to share their entire premium with incomers.

*Gastarbeiter* with second- or third-class status, perhaps forever. Now, I’ll say one thing for this proposal, which is that it would formalize something that currently exists, since in all wealthy countries there exists a layer of poor people (including many migrants) who enjoy only semi-citizen status (as [Elizabeth Cohen has documented](http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/political-theory/semi-citizenship-democratic-politics) ). And this layer, though many individuals pass through it and come out the other side, looks like a permanent feature of our societies. Up to now, however, few people have thought of this, and the consequent denial of rights to individuals and their vulnerability to domination and exploitation, as a good thing. Milanovic wants us explicitly to abandon the liberal and democratic principles of legitimacy that those who are subject to the laws of a society should (in time in the case of migrants) get to have the right to make those laws. In doing so, he goes far beyond similar proposals (for example [from Martin Ruhs](http://www.priceofrights.com/) that have been explicitly temporary in nature and have largely focused on labour-market rights. Milanovic’s lack of commitment to the norms of liberal democracy also comes across in the fact that he holds up illegitimate and tyrannical states, such as the Gulf kleptocracies, as models for his proposed policy. Part of what’s going on here is the economist’s perspective on policy, which just focuses on net improvements in well-being or utility, with income serving as a proxy, and which doesn’t, therefore, see human beings as possessed of basic rights which it is impermissible to violate. Rather, all and any rights can be sacrificed on the altar of income improvement, just in case someone is poor and desperate enough to make a deal (who are we, paternalistically, to stop them?). The road to hell is paved with Pareto improvements.

Abraham Newman and I have a piece in the new Foreign Affairs, discussing the Safe Harbor decision, and arguing that it’s really an example of the US finding some of its own preferred extraterritorial rules being used against it. Since Foreign Affairs allows me to put the whole piece up for a few months, here’s the full text for anyone who’s interested …

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On June 10^th the Washington Post’s editorial page chastised Congress for “making free trade difficult”. Champions of Trade Promotion Authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) continue to label all skeptics as “opponents of free trade.” Many skeptics actually favor free trade, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership appears to be less about “free trade” and more about domestic regulatory harmonization. The post-WWII trade regime has been very successful in its aims of reducing tariffs and barriers to trade, expanding global market access, and integrating new players into the global trade regime. The spectacular economic rise of countries such as China, India, and Brazil is testament to the value of the trade route to lift millions out of poverty.

The House may vote on Trade Promotion (“Fast Track”) Authority (TPA) as early as Friday, June 12^th. The Senate has already voted in favor of TPA and Obama has been working hard to get skeptical House Democrats on board to support it. If the House grants Obama TPA, it ties its hands to an “up or down” vote on TPP with no possibility for amendment. There is much at stake and citizens and representatives need to know who is drafting it, what it means for US democracy and sovereignty, and the effects it will have on public health. [click to continue…]

My apologies for the delay in posting the second half of my reply to the symposium. I was traveling. Let me repeat at the outset my deep appreciation for the insightful comments provided by the contributors to this symposium. This is the sort of exchange that makes intellectual life rewarding. Given the delay since the original postings, I did not want to assume that readers of this post would remember what was said in the earlier ones, and I’ve tried to write this in a way that will be intelligible on its own. I take up here the six contributions that I did not discuss in the previous post. I’ll begin with David Owen, Michael Blake, Kieran Oberman and Ryan Pevnick, all of whom have related concerns. At the end, I’ll discuss the posts by Brian Weatherson and Patti Lenard.

In various, sometimes overlapping ways, David, Michael, Kieran and Ryan have raised questions about my theory of social membership. To recall (or, for those who have not read the book, to summarize), the central claim of that theory is that immigrants become members of society over time and their social membership gives them a moral claim to most of the legal rights that citizens enjoy and eventually to citizenship itself. It is important to note, however, that I do not start with a general theory of social membership that I try to justify on the basis of abstract principles and then apply to particular issues. Rather I start with the actual practices of democratic states and ask whether these practices seem to make moral sense. It is only after I have explored arguments about particular practices that I try to show that the idea of social membership is a common thread in many of these arguments. Moreover, my theory of social membership is not presented as a full account of why immigrants are morally entitled to legal rights. I contend that immigrants also have claims to legal rights based on the duty of every state to protect the human rights of anyone within the state’s jurisdiction and based on other considerations like reciprocity and proportionality as well. I think that this way of doing political theory “from the ground up” differs from the approach of some of my interlocutors, especially Kieran and Ryan. My approach is likely to be less systematic and involve more balancing of competing considerations, but I think that it is more closely connected to ordinary moral views, even when, as in the open borders chapters, it leads to radical conclusions.
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Over the last year, there’s been a lot of writing about Edward Snowden (I’ve contributed a fair amount to the genre myself). Most people have discussed either the question of (a) whether domestic NSA surveillance in the US is appropriate and whether it is breaking US law, or (b) the purely political consequences of international surveillance. There’s been relatively little discussion of whether there is a problem _in principle_ with international surveillance, and most of what there has been has concerned the question of whether or not privacy is a [universal](http://justsecurity.org/2668/foreigners-nsa-spying-rights/) [human](http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/11/should-u-s-law-protect-the-privacy-of-foreigners-abroad/) [right](http://justsecurity.org/3128/rights-ben-wittes-failure-imagination/). But the recent Der Spiegel revelations combined with some earlier material points to a narrower but very troubling set of problems for liberal democracies. Cross national cooperation between intelligence services has exploded post-September 11. This cooperation is not only outside the public space but, very often, isn’t well known to politicians either. Such cooperation in turn means that intelligence services are in practice able to evade national controls on the things that they do or do not do, directly weakening democracy. [click to continue…]

The first part of our symposium on Joseph Carens’s The Ethics of Immigration is now concluded. While we wait for Joe to compose his reply, here’s an index of the contributions:

• Chris Bertram Some worries about Carens’s democratic consensus
• Ryan Pevnick The theory of social membership
• Brian Weatherson Movement within and between states
• Kenan Malik Communities, social anxiety and open borders
• Kieran Oberman Right arguments, wrong order
• Michael Blake Social membership and territorial rights
• Patti Lenard Democratic equality and internal movement
• David Owen On social membership
• Speranta Dumitru Is Carens still advocating open borders
• Sarah Fine The argument from democratic principles
• Phillip Cole On method
• Jo Shaw So what does The Ethics of Immigration tell us about the European Union?

Update: Joe Carens’s replies in two parts: Part One and Part Two.