Global justice, foreign policy, and the law of peoples: a Rawlsian defence of the Commonwealth

ABSTRACT

Ever since its entrenching of a fundamentally political mission with the Harare Declaration in 1991, the relevance of the modern Commonwealth has been fiercely contested. Not only has its organisational purpose been questioned but its efficacy in delivering its democratic goals continues to be undermined as well. This article seeks to relocate the debate to within the spheres of political philosophy and normative international relations theory and argues that a defence of the Commonwealth can be found in John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples. This defence, however, is conditioned on and accompanied with a proposal for an open enlargement foreign policy which furthers the Commonwealth’s commitment to global justice.

KEYWORDS:

• global justice
• John Rawls
• foreign policy
• political philosophy
• normative IR theory
• the law of peoples

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. On a theoretical level, peoples are distinct from states but because ‘peoples [act] through their governments’, on a practical level these can often be the same, and in the case of liberal democracies these are the same. (Rawls, 1999, p. 23).

2. This argument does not immediately reject a cosmopolitan account of global justice, but – in recognition of the Commonwealth’s current position – the Commonwealth does not have the capacity to deliver the distributive obligations according to a cosmopolitan model, so it is at least now a Rawlsian organisation.