Before the publication of this book, the author was well known to political theorists through a wide-ranging series of articles on topics in global justice, some of them reprised here together with new material and set within an overall normative framework. Mathias Risse terms this framework “pluralist internationalism” (p. 2). Schematically viewed, this framework sets Risse’s approach apart from two powerful trends in contemporary theories of global justice. One is cosmopolitanism, initiated in recent political theory by Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations (1979), a view that relations among people in different political societies are subject to the same requirements of distributive justice as the relations among co-citizens. The other is a view now especially associated with Thomas Nagel’s article, “The Problem of Global Justice” (Philosophy and Public Affairs 33: 2 [2005)]: 113–47); the view that the requirements of distributive justice apply only within state borders, though states are constrained by certain other considerations in their treatment of one another. Against both of these positions, Risse maintains that there are indeed distributive principles that apply between states, but that these are not of the strongly egalitarian kind that—broadly following Rawls (p. 11)—he takes to apply within political society.

The approach is a “pluralist” one because it rests on five “grounds of justice” (pp. 3–20) rather than a single one: co-membership in a state, shared humanity, the collective ownership of the earth, membership in global relations, and participation in the global trading system. An important distinction is made between “relational” grounds (the first and the last two of these) and “non-relational” grounds”—shared humanity and common ownership of the earth, which do not depend on being part of any organized scheme. The book systematically explores what these varied grounds imply for justice. Risse’s claims about state membership and the common ownership of the earth are particularly likely to be controversial.

Only state membership is said to give rise to egalitarian requirements. Unlike Nagel, however, Risse does not rely exclusively on the fact of coercion in order to make this claim about the “normative peculiarity” of states (pp. 10, 24). He relies, rather on a set of features of state membership that are jointly necessary (p. 50)—not only the fact of being subject to coercion but also the directness and pervasiveness of coercion (pp. 26, 39), combined with facts about the cooperative relations and reciprocity among those who are subject to it (pp. 37–40, 74–78). Together, these features, unlike the elements of coercion and cooperation that one undeniably finds in global relations, give rise to what Risse terms “a default position for an equal distribution of primary goods” (p. 39).

However, states are also subject to the requirements arising from common ownership of the earth, an idea that is developed in part by way of a close engagement with the work of Hugo Grotius—an unusual and welcome example of historical sophistication in contemporary political theorizing—and applied in a highly original way to a wide range of topics. These include access to pharmaceuticals, labor law, immigration policy, responses to environmental problems, and unfair and exploitative relations arising from existing trade regimes. Despite the fact that Risse rejects global egalitarianism, it could hardly be said that his proposals leave the world as it is. Again following Rawls, he describes his view as a “realistic utopia” (p. 322).

Nevertheless, it seems certain that it is from the cosmopolitan side that Risse’s book is likely to meet the strongest resistance. This is so for at least three reasons. First, while the argument for the normative peculiarity of states may be more satisfactory in relying upon joint conditions rather than on any single premise, it may also lay itself open to multiple objections. Global relations may well have some or all of the jointly necessary conditions for special normative relevance, involving forms of coercion, cooperation, pervasiveness, and so on, and to the extent that they do, we will be led towards a spectrum of institutions and processes on which no one level is entirely “peculiar.” To that extent, it is not clear that if the full requirements of egalitarianism do not apply across the board, some of them may. And so, the question would become one of working out not where they do or do not apply but how much of them apply and where. We would not be led to the full cosmopolitan program, but may be led closer to it than Risse’s binary approach suggests. Second, while the argument from common ownership of the earth leads us very far and in various directions, as noted above, it may not be clear that it should not lead us still further. For that idea is said to lead only to a universal right to the satisfying of basic needs (pp. 110–12), i.e. to a threshold notion. Risse offers a defense of his basic-needs view, but the very powerful idea of common ownership, once introduced, is obviously one that can inspire interpretations of varying degrees of radicalness. Even if it is true that they fall short of requiring full equality (pp. 122–24), surely it is plausible that they will include critiques of the gross comparative inequalities that collide so sharply with the idea that the earth’s resources are an initial common possession. Third, more cosmopolitan critics are likely to react to Risse’s view that requiring distributive equality on a global scale is more “demanding” than requiring it domestically (p. 10). For this places us on the difficult and contested terrain of the ideal and the non-ideal, and it may be difficult to justify taking a stand at this exact point of demandingness, given that, as Risse himself notes, ideal theory should “guide” us even in a non-ideal world (p. 367).

But if Risse’s argument thus offers several points of entry for cosmopolitan critique, his book lays down a basic challenge to cosmopolitans in a most interesting chapter on what to make, normatively, of the existence of states. Cosmopolitans make much of the arbitrariness, and hence (in their view) the moral meaninglessness, of national membership. Building upon an earlier point that the fact that something’s origin is morally arbitrary does not make it morally irrelevant (p. 289), Chapter 16 suggests that cosmopolitans practice a sort of bad faith in voiding states of moral significance while saying little if anything about what an alternative world without states would be like. Pace John Lennon, the chapter contends, we cannot even imagine it. The chapter’s argument is subtle: There are no basic reasons either to rid the world of states or to create them if they did not exist, but they do exist, and we cannot just think them away by ignoring the moral pressures that their very existence creates. This challenge is only one of many in this deeply provocative, closely argued, and impressively many-sided book.