Western Values in International Relations

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-87
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Constitutional Government ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Western Values ◽  
International Morality

This essay presents the three main traditions of thinking about international relations in Western societies since the sixteenth century, with particular attention to the ‘middle ground’ between extremes. These extremes are typified by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes at one pole, and Kant and Wilson at the other. The via media is associated with the development of constitutional government and the rule of law, as represented by thinkers such as Grotius and Gladstone. The essay illustrates the differences among these three traditions by analysing their distinct positions concerning international society, the maintenance of order, intervention, and international morality. ‘Western values’ are most effectively supported by thinkers and leaders who neither deny the existence of international society nor exaggerate its foreseeable prospects for gaining greater cohesion and strength. The middle course—the mainstream of the ‘Western values’ tradition—respects moral standards and sees moral challenges as complex, instead of regarding them as simple or nonexistent.

An Anatomy of International Thought

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Independent States ◽  
International Anarchy ◽  
International Thought

International relations encompass three aspects: international anarchy, with sovereign states recognizing no political superior; routine interactions in diplomatic, legal, and commercial institutions; and moral solidarity, with cultural and psychological links more profound than those of politics and economics. Thinkers who underscore international anarchy regard the idea of international society as fictional. Hobbes, for example, maintains that the only remedy for anarchical competition is to make a contract for a ruler or an assembly to take power and act to ensure security. Grotius and other thinkers who emphasize the extensive informal, legal, and customary interactions in international affairs highlight humanity’s sociability and its potential for constitutionalism and the rule of law. Kant and others anticipate the vindication of humanity’s potential for peace through the deepening of the material and moral interdependence of people around the world. This may come about through uniformity of independent states in standards of virtue and legitimacy or through the political and moral unification of humanity.

The humanitarian aspect of the Melian Dialogue

1993 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 30-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. B. Bosworth
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
Western Values ◽  
International Morality

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars (usually comfortable citizens of a colonial empire) who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’.

Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide: The Twentieth Century Experience. By Howard Ball. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999. 288p. $35.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 228-229
Author(s):  
Richard Falk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Society ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
University Of Kansas ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Current Period ◽  
Augusto Pinochet

There is little doubt that an abiding feature of international relations in the current period is the struggle to extend the rule of law to crimes of state. The 1998 detention in Britain of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, in response to a request for extradition issued by a Spanish judge, gave prominence to this quest. This development was further reinforced by the campaign to establish a permanent inter- national criminal court, which eventuated in a treaty signed in Rome by about 120 countries two years ago and is on its way to securing the 60 ratifications needed to bring it into force. Organized international society is far from the end of this journey; powerful governments, including our own, are not ready to submit their citizens or leaders to international procedures of accountability.

LEGAL ESSENCE OF ANCIENT PROVERBS AND SAYS AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Dranishnikova ◽  
Ivan Semenov
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Status Position

The national legal system is determined by traditional elements characterizing the culture and customs that exist in the social environment in the form of moral standards and the law. However, the attitude of the population to the letter of the law, as a rule, initially contains negative properties in order to preserve personal freedom, status, position. Therefore, to solve pressing problems of rooting in the minds of society of the elementary foundations of the initial order, and then the rule of law in the public sphere, proverbs and sayings were developed that in essence contained legal educational criteria.

International ethics and international law

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Nardin
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
International Ethics ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Ethical Significance

In this paper I am going to argue a familiar but still controversial thesis about the relation between international ethics and international law, which I would sum up in the following list of propositions:First, international law is a source as well as an object of ethical judgements. The idea of legality or the rule of law is an ethical one, and international law has ethical significance because it gives institutional expression to the rule of law in international relations.Secondly, international law—or, more precisely, the idea of the rule of law in international relations—reflects a rule-oriented rather than outcome-oriented ethic of international affairs. By insisting on the priority of rules over outcomes, this ethic rejects consequentialism in all its forms.

Hedley Bull, states systems and international societies

1987 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Watson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Values ◽  
System A ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Hedley Bull ◽  
Regular Contact

Hedley Bull's contribution to the theory of international relations is considerable; and nowhere more acute than in the distinction which he made between the concept of a system of states and that of an international society. His definitive formulation is set out in Chapter I of The Anarchical Society. ‘Where states are in regular contact with one another, and where in addition there is interaction between them sufficient to make the behaviour of each a necessary element in the calculations of the other, then we may speak of their forming a system.’ ‘A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.’

scholarly journals The absolute power of the sovereign, bureaucracy, democracy and constitutional government in the works of Slobodan Jovanovic

Balcanica ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 399-434
Author(s):  
Vojislav Stanovcic
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Constitutional Government

The papers discusses the views of Slobodan Jovanovic (1869-1958) on several phenomena of Serbia?s political and institutional development in the hundred years between the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 and the fall of the Obrenovic dynasty in 1903, and on different political systems, looking at the sources on which his thought drew upon, the ideas he was guided by and the theoretical framework of his legal and socio-political thinking. His major work, a legal theory of the state, as most of his other writings, was his own contribution to what he held to be a national mission, the building of a modern state based on the rule of law.

scholarly journals Does Higher Religiosity Translate into Higher Institutional Quality? Evidence From 98 Countries

SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824401986580
Author(s):  
Ayse Y. Evrensel ◽  
Itai Sened
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Institutional Quality ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
Government Effectiveness ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Regulatory Quality ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Corrupt Behavior ◽  
Government Benefits

This article examines whether individuals’ higher moral values stemming from higher religiosity lead to higher institutional quality at the country level. Based on the data from World Values Survey (WVS, 1980-2014) with 343,440 respondents, the results indicate that higher religiosity is associated with lower justifiability of corrupt behavior such as cheating on taxes, receiving false government benefits, and taking bribes. However, at the level of 98 countries from which the respondents in the WVS stem, higher religiosity seems to have an adverse effect on institutional quality as measured in corruption control, executive constraints, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and the rule of law. Therefore, higher religiosity and moral standards at the respondent level may not translate into higher institutional quality at the country level. We discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy.

scholarly journals Breaking Up the Unity of the World: Peter Fitzpatrick’s Conception of Responsive Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 174387212097533
Author(s):  
Johan van der Walt
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Short Article ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

This short article on Peter Fitzpatrick’s conception of “responsive law” analyzes the ambiguous temporality that Fitzpatrick discerned in modern law. On the one hand, law makes the claim of being fully present and therefore already and completely contained in itself. This aspect of law reflects the law’s claim to “immanence,” that is, its claim of always being able to rely strictly on its own operational terms without having to take recourse to any consideration not already contained within itself. It is this aspect of law that renders the ideal of the “rule of law” feasible. On the other hand, the law’s claim to doing justice to every unique and therefore every new case also demands that it takes leave of that which is already settled within it. This aspect of law can be called its “imminence.” The imminence of the law concerns the reality that law always finds itself on the threshold of that which has not yet been said and must still be said. The article shows how Fitzpatrick relied on Freud’s concept of the totem to explain the “wondrous” unity of its immanence and imminence.

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