States Are Not Basic Structures: Against State-Centric Political Theory

Abstract

Contemporary political philosophy often operates on a ‘two-tiered’ theoretical treatment of global politics, on which domestic political systems and the principles governing their internal dynamics constitute one tier, and on which the relationships between states and governing multinational institutions constitute a second. One way of grounding and justifying this approach, preferred by Rawls, is called constructivism. Constructivists describe the world as containing specific domains and domain-types of political and social interaction, and relativizes principles of justice to important versions of these—states, in the case of contemporary two-tiered political philosophy. In this paper I argue against the specifically Rawlsian account of uniting these three commitments (two-tiered political theory, constructivism, and statism) and gesture towards a general argument against the coherence of this bundle of views.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Henry Richardson, Madison Powers, Helena de Bres, Attila Tanyi, and Abigail Higgins.

ORCID

Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0936-8680

Notes

1 Blake and Smith use the term ‘two-tiered’ in discussion of Rawlsian views of international distributive justice. I use this term to describe the division of political principles and modes of an analysis into a domestic tier and a global tier, though some of what I say here may apply to certain ways of theorizing local-national and local-global distinctions as well: Blake and Smith, ‘International Distributive Justice’.

2 Blake and Smith use the term ‘two-tiered’ in discussion of Rawlsian views of international distributive justice. I use this term to describe the division of political principles and modes of an analysis into a domestic tier and a global tier, though some of what I say here may apply to certain ways of theorizing local-national and local-global distinctions as well. Blake and Smith, ‘International Distributive Justice’.

3 Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice,’ 142–43; Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights; Julius, ‘Nagel’s Atlas’.

4 This characterization is Meckled-Garcia’s, from Section A of ‘On the Very Idea of Cosmopolitan Justice’.

5 Cohen and Sabel also take note of the conceptual distance between the statist pole of Nagel and Rawls and its strongly cosmopolitan anti-pole, though in response to Nagel rather than Rawls: Cohen and Sabel, ‘Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia?’ 152–53.

6 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 7.

7 Ibid., 6–7.

8 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 6.

9 Ibid., 6.

10 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 6.

11 Rawls, ‘The Basic Structure as Subject,’ 159.

12 Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 11.

13 Ibid., 40.

14 Powers and Faden, ‘What Structural Injustice Is,’ Section 6.1.

15 Barua, ‘Military Developments in India, 1750–1850,’ 599.

16 See Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Ch. 3, esp. Sec. 3.1 and 3.2.

17 Guo and Kliesen, ‘Oil Price Volatility and US Macroeconomic Activity.’

18 Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, ‘The China Shock,’ 224.

19 For a thorough discussion of rights externalism, see Chapter 1 of Rights, Race, and Recognition. I think Darby’s account is right, but I don’t rehearse his arguments here.

20 Mottley, ‘Statement by Hon. Mia Amor Mottley’.

21 I am indebted to Abigail Higgins for this point.

22 I am indebted to Attila Tanyi for this point.

23 Raghavan, ‘Inside the Brutal but Bizarrely Bureaucratic World of the Islamic State in Libya’; ‘What Makes Boko Haram Run?’

24 ‘One Chart Puts Mega Tech’s Trillions of Market Value into Eye-Popping Perspective: MarketWatch’; ‘Germany GDP’.

25 Barwise and Watkins, ‘The Evolution of Digital Dominance,’ 1, 28–29.

26 Anderson, Private Government, 37–41.

27 Cabral gives this definition in the speech called ‘National Liberation and Culture’: ‘The principal characteristic, common to every kind of imperialist domination, is the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of the productive forces.’ He also elaborates: ‘Now, in any given society, the level of development of the productive forces and the system for social utilization of these forces (the ownership system) determine the mode of production.’ The political constitution that Rawls stresses the importance of is absent here, but, as economic organization and the scheme of property are central aspects of the basic structure, domination of the ‘historical process’ as characterized by Cabral would likely entail domination of whatever ‘basic structure’ might be taken by two-tiered theorists to exist in the boundaries of the dominated society: Cabral, Return to the Source.

28 In explaining why he does not intend to give a universal or global account of justice in his categorization of justice as fairness (‘justice as fairness’ is his characterization of the justice of the domestic tier of politics), Rawls explains that he ‘assumes Kant’s view (‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795)) is correct and that a world government would be either an oppressive global despotism or a fragile empire torn by constant civil wars’. This essay as a whole argumentatively engages with this point: Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 13.