Democratic disengagement: toward Rousseauian global reform

Abstract

What are the moral costs of democratic trade with dictatorships, and what action these costs demand of our elected governments? This article develops as a Rousseauian answer the idea that democracies ought to boycott corrupt dictatorships and establish themselves collectively as an autarkic bloc, in order to reform not others but themselves. I articulate the basis for this democratic disengagement, first through a reconstruction of Rousseau's social contract, as seeking to replace corrupt dependence with egalitarian interdependence between citizens. I then examine the potential for egalitarian interdependence between democracies that treat their citizens equally as collectively sovereign, contrasted with corrupting cooperation between democracies and dictatorships, which distorts democracies’ values, specifically by making them complicit in despots’ theft of their peoples’ resources. Ending this corruption requires disengagement, elaborated here first against liberal objections and then against skeptic criticism.

Liberal Integrity and Foreign Entanglement

“…A prominent normative argument emphasizes that at least some dictators ought not be recognized as legitimate vendors of natural resources, because they cannot claim valid authorization to sell these resources from their peoples—the real owners of state property. In the lack of such authorization, at least some dictators should be seen as stealing state property from their people, and corporations based in liberal democracies who transact with these dictators should accordingly be seen as trafficking in stolen goods (see, e.g., Pogge, 2001; 2008; Wenar 2008; 2011, Nili 2011a; 2011b; 2011c; 2013a; 2015a; 2015b). Most philosophers who have discussed natural resource trade with dictators have accordingly taken it for granted that this trade ought to be reformed and that the challenges involved concern institutional design, rather than any normative conundrums (see, e.g., Macedo 2003, 1732; Heath 2005, 198; Freeman 2006, 251).…”

Fairness and Justice in Natural Resource Politics

“…To make these claims (especially the latter) concrete, consider the conflicting moral principles underlying, on the one hand, Beitz's proposal for a global redistribution of natural resource wealth, and on the other hand, the various proposals made in recent years to end the essentially neocolonial practice under which dictators enjoy customary rights to sell their state's natural resources to any willing buyer (Pogge, 2002: Chapter 6;Nili, 2011aNili, , 2011bWenar, 2011). There are clearly conflicting normative principles at play here: The reform of dictators' "resource privilege" emphasizes the idea of national ownership over natural resources, an idea that the Beitzian argument wishes to undermine.…”

Utility contra utilitarianism: Holbach’s international ethics

“…Holbach, who reacted against Rousseau’s critique of dependence as a source of corruption, clearly rejects the conclusions of the Genevan philosopher. Against the conception of autarky defended by Rousseau (Nili, 2011), dependence, Holbach argues, is natural, and states cannot hope to strive for the autonomy required by Rousseau’s republicanism or by the ‘Westphalian’ – a term that Holbach does not use – state system. Holbach’s thought is in sharp contrast with an international relations theory that values state sovereignty as an absolute principle, and contemporary critics of the Westphalian system make similar points to Holbach when they argue that this system is unrealistically (and perhaps ahistoristically) based on an absolutisation of autonomy as a model for states (Krasner, 1995–1996: 115).…”