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COPYRIGHT 2000 Professors World Peace Academy
This paper examines the relationship between democracy, human rights, and peace through the concept of a law of peoples developed recently by John Rawls. By means of the law of peoples, Rawls seeks to extend his theory of justice internationally and define the proper role of human rights. The author argues that, because Rawls assigns different sets of rights to liberal and non-liberal societies in order to accommodate cultural pluralism and political realism, the law of peoples is unable to identify and provide the conditions required for a lasting international peace. Instead, a more cosmopolitan account of international justice, inspired by the work of Immanuel Kant, is needed to provide a normative foundation for a world order that aims at perpetual peace.
Recent global political events point toward the need to give serious philosophical attention to the relationship between human rights, democracy, and peace. While each of these ideals has independently enjoyed expanding recognition since the end of the Second World War, there has also been widespread reluctance to assert a necessary linkage between them. Much of the reluctance stems from the persistent tension that exists in the international system between the universality of human rights and the traditional primacy of state sovereignty. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) seeks to establish minimum standards of treatment for the citizens of all states, the claims of sovereignty--including those to non-democratic and illiberal forms of government--have often trumped the practical implementation of rights intended to guarantee those standards. True, the end of the Cold War and the decline of some authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia have generated great er willingness to speak of the benefits gained by linking democracy and human rights. Yet political reality continues to fall well short of the assertion contained in Article 21 of the UDHR, that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government."
In this paper I shall discuss some of the work of John Rawls and Immanuel Kant in order to argue for the more normatively ambitious claim that international human rights and democratic government require one another. Without denying that this claim entails serious practical and theoretical difficulties that cannot be fully addressed much less resolved here, my position is that both democracy and human rights are at risk unless each includes the other. Moreover it is my contention that world peace provides the substantive context for promoting such deep linkages between democracy and human rights. In the end, just democratic governments and sustainable human rights cannot be realized without stable peace, and a stable peace is made all the more possible by an international system composed of democratic governments committed to human rights for all.
RAWLS ON INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY AND THE FRAMEWORK FOR JUSTICE
Rawls, perhaps the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century has recently tackled the issue of connecting human rights and political democracy. In his most recently published work, The Law of Peoples (1999), based on an earlier (1993) essay with the same title, Rawls argues that it is possible for a general liberal theory of justice to be extended internationally and in this way to form the basis for a universally recognized basic human rights minimum. Additionally Rawls suggests that this scheme of international justice, called the "law of peoples," is an improvement on other liberal theories dealing with human rights because it would be acceptable to non-liberal societies as well as to liberal societies. For Rawls, this acceptability is important because it would help maintain the internal sovereignty of states and thereby contribute to national security. To begin, I consider the adequacy of Rawls's important theory.
The question that motivates The Law of Peoples is how a workable political conception of justice can be applied to the international system without requiring that all societies be liberal or democratic. Such a concession is necessary, Rawls contends, because the predominant realism of the existing world order privileges state sovereignty. The challenge, of course, is how to reconcile strong state autonomy with the moral obligations generated by human rights. To meet this challenge Rawls envisions a global "original position" in which representatives of liberal states deliberate in order to select the appropriate principles of justice, first, for themselves domestically and, second, for the international political society of liberal states. The principles derived from this contractual procedure would, Rawls contends, be endorsed on due reflection by the agents to whom they are supposed to apply, in this case liberal "peoples."
Although Rawls claims to make a distinction between peoples (or nations) and states, he specifies that the terms of the law of peoples can be accepted and observed only through the exercise of the rights and capacities belonging to states. Peoples are understood by...
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