A Liberal Theory of International Justice (review)

This is a tightly argued book structured around the central claim that "the right to political self-determination is an irreducibly collective moral right held by legitimate states and groups that are willing and able to become legitimate states."¹ The book unpacks this claim and draws from it a series of (at times unexpected) conclusions that place it squarely in the arena of international justice. Most of the chapter titles confirm this interest: Secession,² International Criminal Law,³ Armed Intervention and Political Assassination,⁴ International Distributive Justice,⁵ and Immigration and Membership.⁶ These are all topics of heated debate among theorists of international affairs and law. None of them by themselves suggest the "liberalism" of the book's title. The just cited central claim about political self-determination in fact suggests a conservative approach to the issues raised, for the right to political self-determination of states goes at least as far back as the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Still, the main arguments in this book are liberal ones.

That liberalism emerges once we see what the authors (who are philosophy professors at Georgia State and Washington University, respectively) mean by the adjective "legitimate," used twice in the above claim. A legitimate state, the authors hold, "is one that adequately protects its constituents' human rights and respects the rights of all others; it performs what we call the 'requisite political functions.'"⁷ These functions would seem to be those used in international law and affairs. However, the discussion in the chapters shows that for these authors the real and most important test of a state or a group that aspires to be a state is if it adequately protects the human rights of "its constituents and respects the rights of all others."⁸ The protection of human rights within a state's borders and as a foreign policy goal is the hallmark of a legitimate state. This is what makes this theory of international justice a liberal one. The authors have joined a growing group of theorists (like Alan Buchanan and Charles Beitz) who want to integrate respect for human rights more fully into traditional international law and justice, where these individual rights do not have a ready home plate to run to. Contemporary theorists of international justice sort themselves out in how they mix these two ingredients: the macro rights of states and the micro or human rights of individuals. Looking at the mix in this book, I recommend it highly, for the authors have come up with a very intriguing recipe for mixing these two poles of present-day international justice.

The uniqueness of their recipe comes from the apparent conflict between asserting the primacy of human rights in international affairs (which is a radical, or at least, liberal idea), and asserting "the irreducibly collective moral right of political self-determination"⁹ held by certain groups, which, because it is a collective right, steers the book in a conservative direction. As the book's jacket tells us: "This book advances a novel theory of international justice that combines the orthodox liberal notion that the lives of individuals are what ultimately matter morally with the putatively antiliberal idea of an irreducibly collective right of self-governance."¹⁰ That is an accurate description. The book's novelty comes to the reader in at least three ways. First, the authors do a good job keeping the two apparently contradictory claims going and playing them off against each other in each of their chapters. Second, the book is novel because there are very few arguments that are drawn from the history of international law and affairs, as one might expect. Instead, the arguments are drawn from political theory generally and from hypothetical examples that the authors construct for their readers' benefit. Third, the book is novel in that it follows a fairly rigorous deductive structure, with Chapter Two defending the claim that there indeed exists an irreducibly collective moral right to self...