7) Supra-national forums and authorities will continue to be established, in order to deal with various aspects of global economic and personal relationships, and their effectiveness in mediating conflict will depend upon whether they are perceived as legitimate and just by those over whom they assert jurisdiction.

If these assumptions are correct, the American experience may prove instructive. The United States is one of the most diverse countries in the world; the forging of political community has occurred in the face of vast differences and continuing tensions among multiple religious, ethnic and racial groups.  While there is considerable room for improvement, and substantial basis for criticism, the United States may nevertheless provide a template for achievement of a stable and just world order. This is not because the liberal democratic worldview is necessarily morally superior to others (any discussion of morality is beyond the purview of this article), but because it has proved to be a practical and useful mechanism for mediating claims among competing worldviews.

In the remainder of this comment, I will define the fundamental elements of liberal democratic theory, discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and consider what its application to global governance might look like.

                                                II. The Liberal Paradigm 

Liberalism has been defined as “a principle of political organization that accords individuals the freedom to navigate a course of their own design, constituted by self-elected plans and purposes.” (Beiner 1996)  William Galston has suggested that liberal societies are characterized by a strategy that minimizes coercion (Galston 1991), and Ronald Dworkin has defined liberal constitutionalism as “a system that establishes legal rights [to self determination] that the dominant legislature does not have the power to override.” (Dworkin 1995:2) 

Liberal theory accords to individuals the broadest moral authority over their own lives consistent with the maintenance of public order. So long as individuals do not act in ways that harm the persons or property of others, they are to be free of state coercion[1]. Liberalism thus rests upon a view of the world that separates—as many cultures do not—the public from the private. Liberal theory distinguishes between the communal and the personal; with respect to communal behaviors, it further distinguishes between public activities that are governmental, and communal actions taken through voluntary associations, which are considered private. Although the historic distinction between public and private is being substantially eroded by the practice of government subcontracting (Kennedy 2000), the distinction remains a bedrock of liberal democratic theory. Libertarians would limit the role of government to the conduct of activities requiring the use of state coercive powers: controlling crime, waging war, levying taxes, enforcing private agreements (Boaz 1997). They would leave other activities of a communal nature to civil society, which is composed of churches, mosques, synagogues, arts organizations, private charities and a multiplicity of other voluntary associations and nonprofit corporations (Tocqueville 1835,1956; Putnam 2000). 

Having defined spheres of human activity in this way, liberalism (at least initially) fostered a definition of justice based upon a concept of “negative” liberty, a conception that accorded great importance to liberty and individual autonomy, which were in turn defined as the right to be free of governmental constraint. That economic or personal factors might operate to constrain autonomy as dramatically as any government edict was seen as unfortunate, but beside the point. The point was to limit power.   

This original understanding has been criticized as representing a cramped view of human rights and so strict a libertarian paradigm no longer describes American political reality. However, the importance of negative liberty and the high priority assigned to limitations on government power continue to inform liberal public policy.[2] Legislative bodies in the United States have constantly struggled against the limits imposed on government in the American system, and in many cases, so-called “positive rights” which were not included in the original U.S. Constitution have subsequently been extended by statute.[3]

A negative approach to the exercise of public power posits government as a neutral arbiter among citizens who are legal equals. There are many problems with such a “neutral” system, not least the fact that it does not address systemic inequalities, does not recognize the absence of a level playing field. Indeed, there are many justice issues that simply fall outside the paradigm of negative liberty as conceived by the liberal state.  An even more fundamental problem is that neutrality is not experienced as neutral by those who hold comprehensive doctrines. For such “seamless garment” believers, no system that fails to recognize the supremacy and impose the mandates of their own belief system can ever be legitimate.

Within the western liberal tradition, communitarians, like the socialists and communists before them, complain that a neutral state that places process above substance and sees individual moral choice as a private rather than public concern, fails to meet the universal and human need for meaning. They contend that liberal theory suffers from an “impoverished vision of citizenship and community” (Sandel 1996). Communitarians and other critics of liberalism take issue with the most fundamental commitment of liberal democracies: that persons should be free to set and pursue their own ends, in accordance with their own values. They argue that freedom, properly understood, is “freedom to do the right thing” and that political community, in order to be experienced and sustained as a true community, must insist upon a shared telos, an agreement on moral ends (Mulhall & Smith 1992; Sandel 1996). In this view, it is more important that those ends be the correct ones than it is that they be freely chosen.[4] 

To those of a less authoritarian bent, a system of government neutrality and negative rights has one overriding virtue: it makes the use of power to enforce conformity largely illegitimate.

Liberal democrats further argue that liberalism does endorse ends: liberty, individual autonomy, equality before the law, tolerance. The American Bill of Rights has been referred to as a moral code (Kennedy 1997). Liberalism begins with respect for the value and uniqueness of each individual, and requires behavior consistent with that respect, notably tolerance for those who differ. Liberal political theory values a unity that can accommodate diversity (Kymlicka 1996); and affirms the belief that society is strengthened and enriched by a multiplicity of voices and a constant testing of moral and political theories. To allow the state to prescribe a particularistic moral code or to impose political uniformity would violate the conscience and insult the personhood of citizens and would engender resentments ultimately dangerous to continued social stability and civic peace.

Liberals also challenge the notion that human community must be defined politically. They assert that political communities, in common with religious communities, ethnic groups, professional or fraternal organizations, and any number of other associations that are meaningful to their members, are partial communities, and that their utility in promoting justice rests upon the fact that they provide room for competing allegiances.

           

“Freedom-promoting social orders are, it appears, pluralistic; societies

            of partial allegiances in which groups endlessly compete with each other

            and with the state for the allegiances of individuals, and in which individuals

            loyalties are divided among a variety of crosscutting (or only partially

            overlapping) memberships and affiliations.

            Liberalism needs community life, therefore, and it needs community life to be

            constituted in a certain way. Liberal statecraft should aim for a complex, cross-

            cutting structure of community life in which particular group-based allegiances

            are tempered by other, competing group allegiances and by a state representing a

            common, overarching, but partial, point of view that gives everyone something in

            common.” (Macedo 1996:255)

             

 Societies and governments are not the same things. Governments are one mechanism among many for the expression of social values and communal aspirations, and liberals warn that there is substantial danger in reposing all moral authority in a coercive state. If the goal of political community is unity without uniformity and diversity without culture war, tolerance for the divergent lifestyles and diverse values of multiple communities is both a tool and an end.

Liberal democrats also make another, more practical argument: there is no reasonable alternative to state neutrality, unless one wishes to use the state’s coercive power to impose ends endorsed by the majority upon unwilling minorities. John Rawls defends the liberal enterprise by positing an “overlapping consensus” of shared limited goals (Rawls 1993). The complex framework he establishes rests in part upon a central insight: every time you add a goal that government is to enforce, you introduce a new source of conflict. In the United States today, we have deep divisions over numerous such issues. The right to enjoy the proceeds of one’s own labor conflicts with taxation that redistributes money for social ends; the right of a woman to control her own body conflicts with the religious belief of many that abortion is murder; the right of government to wage war encounters the resistance of those who believe all wars to be immoral. There are numerous other examples. No society or government can avoid such conflicts, no matter how respectful of individual autonomy, but liberal democracies are obliged to minimize them by restraining the state from intruding too much into the realms that have been defined as private.  The classic formulation of this principle is that with which this section began: government intervention is warranted only when one citizen threatens harm to the person or property of another (Nozick 1974). While the United States and the world’s other liberal democracies have long since moderated that simple libertarian principle, often for reasons that are sound and even more often for reasons that are specious and worrisome, I would argue that it is a formula with much to recommend it as an approach to global peace. As Marc Stier has recently described the liberal strategy for avoiding conflict,

“Neutrality about the good is, for liberals, also central to their strategy for  preserving internal peace. Liberals hold that we can reduce political and social conflict if we place certain matters beyond the bounds of political decisionmaking. Extreme and dangerous political conflict, the kind that leads to civil wars, results when governments prevent some citizens from pursuing ends of fundamental importance to them. When governments respect our rights, though, people are free to make decisions for themselves about these matters. Thus conflict about divisive issues is prevented. This strategy of avoidance is one of the prime ways in which liberals hope to keep the peace. Of course, some people may be frustrated because they cannot attain their own ends by using the power of the state to restrict what other people say and do. The liberal expectation, however, is that people would rather have their own freedom protected than interfere with the freedom of others, if only because they recongnize that an illiberal regime might at some point turn against them.” (Stier 2000:3)

As a rapidly shrinking world enters the Twenty-First century, these questions are no longer theoretical. Sophisticated communications are fast creating the “global village” foreseen by Marshall McLuhan. Global markets are emerging, creating new geopolitical realities. As Thomas Friedman has noted,

“Unlike the cold-war system, which was largely static, globalization involves the integration of free markets, nation-states and information technologies to a degree never before witnessed, in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and countries to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever.”

(Friedman 1999: 42)

Alfred Aman has described the implications of so unprecedented a phenomenon

“The end result of these new networks of investment, finance and production is that they help to create relatively integrated markets for their products and they produce new, multiple sets of relationships or economic networks that transcend the geography of states…..As a result, new bodies of global and international law are developing to address issues that are neither wholly domestic nor wholly international.”  (Aman 1998:781-82)

This global integration has both positive and negative implications. In terms of diminishing armed conflicts of the sort that the world has previously known, I would argue that global markets are emphatically good. Countries don’t bomb places where their citizens own real estate; they don’t wage war on those who purchase their goods and services.  It has been said, and not entirely in jest, that no wars occur between countries that both have McDonalds (Barber 1999).

But even if it is true that global communication and a global economy are making conventional war less likely, the absence of armed conflict between nation-states is not same as peace, and certainly not the same as a just peace. In such a world, it is still possible (and perhaps even likely) that the strong will dominate the weak, that the gap between haves and have-nots will widen, and that the new dialectic will be tribalism against globalism (Barber 1995). By tribalism, Barber means the resistance of insular religious or ethnic comprehensive cultures to the seemingly inexorable march of global capitalism. Such resistance proceeds largely from a fear of cultural imperialism, fear of having one’s ethnic group or tribe or even one’s nation swallowed up and replaced by a pallid, all-encompassing western materialism. We are already seeing the emergence of terrorism and local insurrection as the new warfare, fought by those who believe that they are thereby protecting their cultural or national or ethnic autonomy against an emerging, westernizing world culture.