The bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think: It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices, that constrict them. [Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Footnote 1]
What is at stake
Few nations equal the political and economic misery of Equatorial Guinea. Its current misery began in 1979, with the usurpation and consolidation of power by Teodoro Obiang, a despot who has declared himself ‘the country's God’ while systematically torturing political prisoners. But it got much worse in 1995, when the discovery of huge oil reserves made Equatorial Guinea Africa's third-largest oil exporter – good news for Obiang who ‘literally owns the economy’ (Ayittey Reference Ayittey2010), and very bad news for his victims. As Leif Wenar writes:
Because of the huge influx of oil money, Equatorial Guinea now has the fourth-highest average income in the world…yet Obiang…has recently spent 55 million of these petro-dollars adding a sixth private jet to his fleet [while] three-quarters of the country's people are malnourished, and the majority of its citizens survive on less than what one could buy in the United States with $1 a day. (Wenar Reference Wenar2008, 6–7)
It is quite easy to understand, then, why the Freedom House Index, for example, considers Equatorial Guinea ‘one of the most corrupt countries in the world’. (Freedom House 2010, 218) Far from condemnation, however, Obiang's ‘increasing capacity to buy diplomatic influence’ through oil (United States Senate report 2004, 47) has earned him steady ties with the United States, including convivial meetings with the then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and photo opportunities with President Obama – all this while American corporations purchase two-thirds of Equatorial Guinea's oil, directly from the dictator (Wenar Reference Wenar2008, 6–7).Footnote 2
What is morally at stake in such transactions? At one level, the answer seems straightforward. If one accepts the idea that a state's resources belong to its people, then by trading with characters like Obiang, democratic governments and corporations become materially complicit in massive-scale theft, if not de facto armed robbery. To take an analogy, as individuals, we legally cannot profit from mafia crimes – we cannot purchase goods we know the mob obtained violently, and if we do we become complicit in felony, potentially landing us in prison for years.Footnote 3 The case does not seem morally different when our elected governments conduct, and allow our corporations to conduct, business with de facto sovereign mafias around the world, landing 600-million oil barrels on US shores alone, every year (Wenar Reference Wenar2008, 25).Footnote 4
At another level, however, things are not that simple. There is a complex moral calculus here that the charge of complicity only highlights: the balance between others’ condition and our own moral standing. On the one hand, we usually think that taking part in a crime is simply inherently wrong on our part, independently of the crime's effect on others. On the other hand, especially when it comes to the world's poor and oppressed, our moral intuitions naturally lead us to look at others rather than ourselves. Our chief moral concern is to alleviate their plight.
This outward-looking focus is, unsurprisingly, the veritable consensus of the contemporary (largely liberal) debate on ‘global justice’.Footnote 5 This consensus has been particularly evident in three core assumptions underlying the discussion of democratic ‘sanctions’ vis-à-vis odious regimes. First, the chief aim of traditional sanctions is to induce reform in the target countries.Footnote 6 Second, the very term ‘sanctions’ connotes the assumption that a prima facie right is only temporarily being suspended here: the regime in question has some basic entitlement that is only revoked in order to eventually increase others’ well-being. Third, specifically with regard to trade, implicit in the sanctions discourse is the notion that absent exceptional circumstances, each country's ‘right to be traded with’ must be honored.
My purpose here is to contest these views and the outward focus they reflect, in the name of an inward look seeking our own change. This change requires what I will call democratic disengagement: democracies, I will argue, ought to boycott – to completely stop recognizing, to sever all economic, diplomatic, and military ties – dictatorships and establish themselves collectively as an autarkic bloc, in order to reform not others but themselves.
The idea that ‘sanctions’ do not have to be outward oriented might appear, upon inspection, rather intuitive, as is the notion that no one has a ‘prima facie’ duty to trade with anyone – no rights are being infringed in remaining autarkic. But the overall position is still heterodox, calling for radical global reform not in order to achieve any moral vision for the world, but only for our own sake. It thus seems useful to recruit past inspiration in order to construct this distinctive view of the present, and render coherent the legitimacy of autarky, the inward look at democracies’ own moral standing, and the conviction that trade with oppressors jeopardizes this standing. I argue that we can find such inspiration in Rousseau.
Influenced by his seemingly obsolete proposals of autarky to Corsica and Poland, and by the scattered nature of his remarks on international affairs, the literature on Rousseau's International Relations (IR) thought (notably scant in comparison with the IR literature on Kant, for example) has rarely brought out its distinctive elements. Rousseau has been usually cast as hopelessly inconsistent or – more frequently – seen as yet another representative of the realist tradition.Footnote 7 The first stage of this article (first, second and third sections) argues that these interpretations not only misread Rousseau, but also deprive us of a rich normative framework for assessing contemporary democratic conduct. Far from outdated seclusion, Rousseau's social contract can be seen as supporting a form of interdependence grounded in equality, a form that can in principle be extended to the relations between nations. We can settle the apparent contradictions in Rousseau's IR thought by understanding it, through such egalitarian interdependence, as inward-looking: Rousseau's demand is that the supposedly enlightened societies first enlighten themselves by truly respecting egalitarian values, domestically and internationally. Global reform thus begins with self-reform.
The article's second stage (the fourth, fifth and sixth sections) applies this inward-looking perspective to the democratic treatment of dictatorships. Egalitarian interdependence legitimizes cooperation between democracies but fundamentally rejects democratic trade with dictatorships. Democracies share the ‘logic of equality’ (Dahl Reference Dahl2000, 10) – they respect their citizens as equals and collectively sovereign, through a rule of law equally binding on all, and elections that are free and fair. Manifestly undemocratic regimes, in contrast, are not legitimate partners as they do not treat their citizens as equals or sovereign. Trade with such regimes implicates our governments in the violation of other peoples’ right to democratically control national resources, the material basis of their egalitarian interdependence.Footnote 8 Against this background, I advance disengagement as a Rousseauian idea; basic humanitarian duties aside, I argue that each democracy must disengage, cease its own complicity in dictators’ massive-scale embezzlement as a matter of inherent rightness, independently of the desire to see improved conditions for others. After developing the proposal against likely liberal objections, I turn in the final section to anticipate skeptic responses, pertaining to moral motivations, collective action problems, and material interests.
Before moving to the discussion itself, I should note several conceptual points. I believe that Rousseau's IR theory has been understudied and often misunderstood – that is the main reason why I spend much time, particularly in the first stage, on Rousseau's texts. However, these textual foundations are consciously geared toward present purposes. The cogency of the contemporary argument matters more than my precise fidelity to what ‘Rousseau (might have) meant’.
This prioritization requires ‘relaxing’ Rousseau's stringent demands at certain points;Footnote 9 however, importantly, not with regard to democracy. Endorsing Rousseau's attacks against governments that claim moral pedigree solely because of elections,Footnote 10 I stress that the supposedly ‘just’ democracies ought to morally transform themselves – domestically, by progressing from legitimacy to the higher threshold of justice, and globally by refusing to cooperate with regimes that are not only unjust but, much more basically, also illegitimate.
Finally, this distinction between justice and legitimacy as a lower threshold also connects with the scope of disengagement. Contemporary democracies are legitimate even if many of them are manifestly unjust. Elections do not suffice for justice, but that does not render them meaningless, and that is why regimes that have ‘incomplete’ elections should be differentiated from those that do not respect the ballot at all. Flawed democracies are different from outright dictatorships.Footnote 11 The Rousseauian view targets only the latter.Footnote 12 Yet at the same time, it sees all dictatorships – all regimes that reject basic democratic procedures, particularly free and fair elections – as illegitimate and thus as falling in principle under the scope of disengagement. Contra Rawls, for example, under the Rousseauian view there are no ‘decent hierarchies’.Footnote 13 Specifically, ‘distributive dictatorships’ that spread benefits from national resources to their people might be less pernicious than ‘depriving dictatorships’ like Obiang's; however, they still deprive their people of democratic control over these resources, which the Rousseauian position considers vital for collective autonomy. Part of my effort in what follows will therefore be to establish the idea that even if depriving dictatorships are the most urgent concern, our relation to distributive dictatorships’ illegitimate control over national resources remains a problem. Yet much stage setting is required before this conclusion, starting with Rousseau's basic concepts.
Benign amour propre and egalitarian interdependence
Any attempt to make Rousseauian notions relevant for a profoundly interdependent world must first address the prevailing view, according to which a ‘political choice between self-sufficiency and interdependence’ (Roosevelt Reference Roosevelt1990, 7) is indispensable for any Rousseauian conception. It is useful to trace the roots of this supposed choice all the way to Rousseau's domestic theory, and specifically to the distinction between amour propre and amour de soi. Under the classic interpretation of Rousseau, this distinction is rather dichotomous. Amour de soi, the natural type of love, involves a necessary concern for self-preservation, an inward look regarding the individual's most fundamental, natural needs. Amour propre represents the complete opposite, a dangerous, degrading type of love as vanity that turns outward and demands others’ confirmation as a precondition for the individual's sense of self-worth. This form of love arises from corrupt civil society, not directly from human nature. It jeopardizes human dignity by making the individual dangerously dependent, subservient to others’ views, generally causing ‘all the mutual damage men inflict on one another’ (SD, 73).
Yet this is not the only possible reading. Several interpreters of Rousseau have suggested that amour propre should be taken as a more complex concept rather than the simple malignant opposite of the benign amour de soi. Amour propre can itself be divided into two versions. While one is indeed of the corrupting type that Rousseau vilified, the second version of amour propre is a much more positive one. Far from subjecting the individual to others’ opinion and cultivating distorted relations of dependence, this amour propre merely entails a demand for equal respect from others. Seen in this light, amour propre does not have to be a core of an unequal society – it can in fact be the exact opposite. This perspective was famously taken by Kant, adopted by prominent Rousseau scholars such as N. J. Dent and Frederick Neuhouser, and explicitly incorporated into the Rawlsian reading of Rousseau. In his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, for example, Rawls emphasizes
In its natural, or proper, form amour-propre is a need which directs us to secure for ourselves equal standing along with others and a position among our associates in which we are accepted as having needs and aspirations which must be taken into account on the same basis as those of everyone else…Needing and asking for this acceptance from others involves giving the same to them in return. For, moved by this natural amour-propre, we are ready to grant the very same standing to others, and to recognize the rightful limits that their needs and rightful claims impose on us, provided – and this is essential – our equal status is accepted and made secure in social arrangements. (Rawls Reference Rawls2007, 198–199)Footnote 14
Adopting such a perspective, we can see Rousseau's social contract itself as a form of dependence that reaffirms our humanity instead of degrading us. This is the dependence that stands behind Rousseau's call to ‘extend amour propre to other beings’, thus allowing us to ‘transform it into a virtue’ (E, 252).Footnote 15 This legitimate dependence gives distinct meaning to Rousseau's definition of the social contract's aim – creating ‘a form of association that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force, and by means of which each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’ (SC, 1.6.4).
The reading of this famous passage as introducing benign amour propre is closely tied to the view of social interdependence as underlying the very basis of Rousseau's thought. Rousseau's contract, as Joshua Cohen emphasizes, ‘assumes conditions of social interdependence’ (Cohen Reference Cohen1986, 276). Rousseau acknowledges that the true needs and interests of individuals demand others’ involvement; the reciprocal cooperation between society's members stems from their equal recognition of this dependence. That is why the contract's fundamental question is not the Hobbessian question; Rousseau does not ask
What sort of society would rational, asocial, and purely self-interested individuals agree to…His question is [rather]: What form of association would socially interdependent individuals agree to if they were interested in protecting their person and goods and in being free? (Cohen Reference Cohen1986, 283–284, italics in the original)Footnote 16
Combining the benign reading of amour propre with the social interdependence reading, we arrive at the following proposition: dependence cannot be rejected as such, since it is unavoidable. Accordingly, the goal of the social contract is not to abolish dependence per se, since this is impossible; the goal is rather to replace illegitimate dependence with interdependence between citizens who share a commitment to ‘moral and legitimate equality’ (SC, 1.9.8). I shall name this reading of the social contract egalitarian interdependence. In what follows, I try to show why, despite obvious limitations, it is possible to think about egalitarian interdependence at the international level.
Between the domestic and the international
Using egalitarian interdependence in the international context requires, first, a look at Rousseau's own thoughts on the gap between the international and the domestic. Rousseau is acutely aware of the deep disparity between international anarchy and domestic sovereignty. This disparity makes humanity ‘forever unstable. Man to man we live in a civil state and subject to law, [while] people to people each enjoys natural freedom; which at bottom makes our position worse than if these distinctions were unknown’ (SW, 5).
One can read this statement as extremely demanding. Even if, hypothetically, we would have achieved the ideal society, even if we enjoyed rational liberty by following self-imposed law inside our borders, we would still need to aspire for more beyond these borders, since in such conditions we would still be merely
Living both in the social order and in the state of nature…subject to the inconveniencies of both without finding security in either. It is true that the perfection of the social order consists in the union of force and law. But for this to be so, law must guide force; whereas according to the ideas of princes about their absolute independence, force alone, speaking to citizens in the guise of law and to foreigners in the guise of reason of state, deprives the latter of the power and the former of the will to resist, so that everywhere the vain name of justice only serves as a shield for violence. (SW, 5)
Two opposing conclusions can be drawn from this passage. The first is a realist, pessimist acceptance of this state of affairs as inalterable. The second is a determination to transform it completely, probably through the introduction of some form of confederative republic ensuring ‘perpetual peace’. The perspective offered here rejects the first, realist option while pursuing a very nuanced and limited version of the second, meant to stop democracies’ complicity in the perpetuation of the ‘shield for violence’.
Although many IR scholars have been reading Rousseau as a quintessential realist, there are significant differences between Rousseau and standard realist thinking, which become evident especially once one avoids the tendency, rightfully attacked by Michael Williams, to treat Rousseau's ‘writings on international politics in almost complete abstraction from his theory as a whole’ (Williams Reference Williams2005, 52). First, Rousseau does not believe in the balance of power. This balance yields wars, even if only occasionally, and Rousseau has nothing but contempt for war. In The State of War, Rousseau introduces the ‘social state’ with the accusation that ‘we shall see men united by an artificial concord, assemble to slaughter one another, and all the horrors of war arise from the efforts made to prevent them’ (SW, 21). This might be the picture of ‘men as they are’; however, it cannot be the picture of ‘the laws as they might be’ (SC. 1.1), since in most practical terms continued wars between states are the worst alternative. Tragic as Rousseau's thought often is, it does not necessarily lead us to accept the realist ‘tragedy of great power politics’ as inalterable (Mearsheimer Reference Mearsheimer2001).Footnote 17 Rousseau treats domestic tranquility and international anarchy as a troubling ‘mixed condition’, in which whichever ‘system one prefers, by doing either too much or too little of it we have done nothing, and we have placed ourselves in the worst state possible. This, it seems to me, is the genuine origin of public calamities’ (SW, 6).
The possibility of changing this condition can be found in Rousseau's indictment of humanity's failure to disentangle itself from this ‘worst state of all’. Rousseau sees the inability to establish binding international law, and international cooperation more broadly, as stemming not from real but from perceived state interests – a second crucial disagreement with realism. In the Considerations on the Government of Poland, for example, Rousseau insists that ‘all this fine theorizing about the interest of princes is a child's game which makes sensible man laugh’ (PO, 15.1). The predominance of false interests is the core reason why international cooperation remains elusive. Considering Saint-Pierre's project, which aims for ‘perpetual peace’ through a confederacy, Rousseau asks the rhetorical question:
…if its advantages are so certain, why is it that the sovereigns of Europe have never adopted it? Why do they ignore their own interest, if that interest is demonstrated so clearly…if this means were as efficacious as you pretend, is it conceivable that they should be less eager to try it…That they should prefer a thousand delusive expedients to so evident an advantage? Yes, without doubt, that is conceivable… (SPP, 89)Footnote 18
Here Rousseau moves to introduce the distorted form of amour propre as the underlying cause for the failure to cooperate. He rejects with much sarcasm the idea that rulers rebuff international cooperation because of their true interests, since this assumes
that their wisdom is equal to their ambition, and that the more keenly they desire their own interest, the more clearly do they see it. The truth [however] is that the severest penalty of excessive self-love is that it always defeats itself, that the keener the passion the more certain it is to be cheated of its goal. Let us distinguish then…between real and apparent interest. The former…is demonstrated in [Saint-Pierre's] project. The latter is to be found in the state of absolute independence which frees sovereigns from the reign of law only to put them under that of chance. They are, in fact, like a madcap pilot who, to show off his idle skill and his power over his sailors, would rather toss to and fro among the rocks in a storm than moor his vessel at anchor in safety. (SPP, 89–90)
The ‘showing off of power,’ malign amour propre as the distorted pursuit of others’ approval, is therefore intrinsically related both to absolutist rule and to the lack of international cooperation.
Yet even if we accept all this as a valid description, can we derive any prescription from Rousseau? Pierre Hassner, for example, insists that the answer is no: Rousseau is irrevocably torn between the ideal secluded community, on the one hand, and, on the other, the strong sense that ‘the philosopher himself cannot be content with the freedom and peace of the [isolated] virtuous community, not only because of their fragility in a warlike and corrupt environment, but because his own compassion and indignation cannot accept confinement within the borders of his city’ (Hassner Reference Hassner1997, 202). Here, however, I suggest that we can render coherent and relevant Rousseau's IR thought, once we read it as leading to a very specific type of international cooperation, one based on equal respect, both domestically and internationally.
This position begins with a key passage in which Rousseau stresses, in typically dramatic fashion, the gap between the ideal of domestic social order and the chaos of war outside this order:
I open books on right and on ethics, I listen to the scholars and jurisconsults and, moved by their ingratiating discourses, I deplore the miseries of nature, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order, I bless the wisdom of public institutions, and console myself for being a man by seeing that I am a citizen. Fully instructed about my duties and happiness, I close the book, leave the class-room and look around me; I see unfortunate peoples groaning under an iron yoke, mankind crushed by a handful of oppressors, a starving crowd overwhelmed with pain and hunger, whose blood and tears the rich drink in peace, and everywhere the strong armed against the weak with the power of law…I raise my eyes and look afar. I see a scene of murders, ten thousand men slaughtered, the dead piled up in heaps, the dying trampled underfoot by horses, everywhere the image of death and dying…so this is the fruit of these peaceful institutions. Pity, indignation well up in the depths of my heart. Ah barbarous philosopher! Come and read us your book on the field of battle! (SW, 1–2)
Hassner understands this passage as implying ‘that all efforts towards the good and legitimate society, including Rousseau's own in The Social Contract, are vain and obscene as long as war and oppression are not eradicated everywhere’ (Hassner Reference Hassner1997, 203). This interpretation associates Rousseau with a classic perpetual peace argument. Rousseau, according to Hassner, is ‘foreshadowing Kant in proposing the solution of peace through law’. To support this claim, Hassner quotes how Rousseau affirms the need and benefit of a federation of nations; the fact that Rousseau ‘immediately betrays his lack of confidence in the likelihood of such a universal federation’ is for Hassner further proof of the contradictions inherent in Rousseau's IR thought (Hassner Reference Hassner1997, 203).
Against this interpretation of Rousseau as an inconsistent proto-Kantian, another, quite different reading can be posited, focusing on cosmopolitan enlightenment itself as the main object of Rousseau's moral fury. War and oppression only serve to emphasize the huge gap between the ‘talk of philosophers’ and real life at the domestic and at the international level. It is only in the ‘books on right and on ethics’ that there is a civil order that establishes ‘peace and justice’, and that these are the philosophers’ books is indicated already in the very beginning of Rousseau's indictment: it is the philosophers who fail to see that man's predicament has nothing to do with any ‘miseries of nature’ (SW, 12). Hassner understands Rousseau as saying that domestic peace is unsatisfying as long as there is no world peace; however, one can discern a more complex argument here: the ‘mixed state’ may involve domestic order and international anarchy, but Rousseau's frustration is not, or at least not mainly, the result of a contradiction between a domestic ideal and a terrible international reality. This frustration derives already from a fraudulent social contract inside the state itself, a contract established when ‘All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty’ (SD, 99).
For Rousseau, any perpetual peace project is bound to fail if it looks only outwards, assuming, as the philosophers do, that a just domestic order already exists and that the problem is solely with the world. The philosophers cannot achieve domestic justice to begin with, since they understand society and man in the wrong way; they conflate the imposed social contract with the just contract of egalitarian interdependence – corrupted men with truly equal citizens. Yet the laws of the fraudulent contract, imposing the domination of the rich over the poor, represent only a particular or corporate will.Footnote 19 Such domination does not provide me, as a citizen, with a ‘will I can share, regarding myself under any description:’ (Stilz Reference Stilz2009, 76) such a state of affairs does not accord me equal respect since it reflects nothing of the general will. Instead, it forces one person to serve another. This is the exact opposite of the situation of a free people, which obeys only its own laws (SC, 1.8.3; Rousseau Reference Rousseau2001, 261). The latter condition is autonomy. The former, which the philosophers mistakenly celebrate, is slavery.Footnote 20 Therefore, the philosophers might be ingratiating themselves in thinking that they had left the barbarians behind, but the laws they celebrate hold little improvement in man's moral constitution, neither domestically nor internationally.
Voltaire commented with much sarcasm that upon reading Rousseau's Second Discourse he felt an urge to walk on ‘all fours’, mocking Rousseau's idealization of primitive nature.Footnote 21 Rousseau seems to tell the reader that insofar as corrupt modern society generates hideous wars, the ostensibly ‘civilized’ modern man is indeed not much of an improvement in comparison to primitive times. Disdaining nature means an inability to see that it is civil society that corrupts us, since there is a transfer ‘to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society’ (SD, 50). If we cannot grasp the root of our problems, we certainly cannot solve them. Instead, we come to see unjust laws and war itself as predetermined and legitimate. This is ‘barbarous philosophy’, and it remains barbarous no matter how cultivated and sophisticated we think we have become.Footnote 22
Moral progress, then, begins not with an outward look on the deficiencies of the world in contrast to our supposed achievements, but rather with a focus on improving our own conduct – both domestic and global. This improvement has to be based not on a Hobbessian lament of the miseries of nature, but rather on the understanding that our own corruption is the core of the problem. Given this understanding, we can design laws that establish egalitarian interdependence between citizens, instead of maintaining an unjust situation in which some are dominated by others. We need, in other words, to replace malign amour propre of vanity with a benign one of equal recognition. In doing so, we can arrive at more than a Hobbessian order, a prevention of war of all against all. Rather, we undertake, like Rousseau's legislator, a whole-scale ‘moral transformation’ of society (SC, 2.7.3). That is the basis of moral progress both within and beyond our borders. Under this reading, the domestic and the international are interrelated in a more subtle way than Hassner's Kantian-inspired view admits. Instead of ‘redeeming’ distant others, Rousseau's emphasis is first and foremost on an inward look – on the need to redeem oneself, unlike the ‘enlightened’ philosophers who, Rousseau argued with his usual provocation, ‘go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them’ (E, 39).Footnote 23
This inward focus, I will argue below, necessitates at the international level a break away from certain regimes. However, this focus does not mean that any form of engagement with other societies is illegitimate. Rousseau's thought, I now turn to show, can inspire cooperation between democracies that are committed to seeking – even if they do not (yet) achieve – a just social contract, and that respect the basic equality of their citizens as collectively sovereign.
Egalitarian interdependence between states
The idea of cooperation between democracies begins from Rousseau's claim that the only way to avoid the inherent dangers of the ‘mixed state’ is ‘to be found in such a form of federal government as shall unite nations by bonds similar to those which already unite their members, and place the one no less than the other under the authority of the law’ (SPP, 55).Footnote 24 Under the interpretation offered here, the international and domestic bonds are similar since both are based on equal respect and a legitimate interdependence. This is true also since all societies involved are equally (‘one no less than the other’) placed under the authority of a legitimate law – law following from autonomous will as expressed by a truly sovereign community.
This reasoning can be compatible with Rousseau's advocacy of autarky, since the latter must be understood in a certain, circumscribed context. First, Rousseau knew that already in his time, isolation was nearly impossible, and this made the Poles and Corsicans exceptions rather than the rule. Second, an autarkic solution is still extremely vulnerable in terms of corrupt(ing) amour propre, insofar as relations between competing states always rely on relative evaluations of power, prestige, and influence. Third, Rousseau recommends autarky to Poland and Corsica in the context of the deep corruption, which, as he sees it, is engulfing their neighbors. It is this corruption that makes cosmopolitan reality dangerous and degrading.Footnote 25
Cosmopolitan ideals, in contrast, are not flawed by definition, at least in the minimal sense of some affinity and concern for non-compatriots. Values shared across borders are not necessarily a problem. Given the right type of society, formed by the right social contract, appropriate values can be shared between states as a basis for legitimate interdependence. As Helena Rosenblatt sharply puts it, ‘Rousseau attacked cosmopolitanism not because he did not espouse the humanitarian principles it was supposed to promote, but because he thought it was a sham’ (Rosenblatt Reference Rosenblatt2008, 59).Footnote 26 The problem for Rousseau is that in the Europe he sees before his eyes, supposedly cosmopolitan values are nothing but a masquerade for a malign amour propre, vanity in its crudest form:
There are no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen, nowadays, regardless of what people may say; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same morals…All will do the same things under the same circumstances; all will declare themselves disinterested and be cheats; all will speak of the public good and think only of themselves; all will praise moderation and wish to be Croesuses. (PO, 3.3)
What makes a federative project different from this sarcastic description is that in the desired federal arrangement, the values that function as a dead letter in a corrupted Europe will receive true meaning, standing at the fore of the association of states that aim for domestic justice. This does not in any way mean that national character is cast aside: sure enough, national institutions give each people their distinct identity (PO, 3.2). However, alongside this national particularity, shared values between states can still exist – the ‘uniting bonds’ of an egalitarian social contract.
All this allows a nuanced reconstruction of Rousseau's anti-cosmopolitanism. The dangers dependence poses to societies that aspire to be just are not present at all times and circumstances. They are true insofar as the other society is corrupt, as was the case from Rousseau's perspective when he advised Poland and Corsica. Under such circumstances, the citizen of the virtuous community must be ‘harsh’ toward foreigners, not because they do not belong to the same kinship, but because the foreigners are not citizens – ‘they are only men’ (E, 39) who are bound to be corrupt.
Rousseau preached autarky also to avoid importing this corruption through commerce. Such fears might seem outdated: few nations today, surely among developed democracies, seek to completely disengage from the world; most countries in fact wish to do the exact opposite. Accordingly, for the Rousseauian perspective to have contemporary relevance, two things need to be shown: first, that the Rousseauian view allows us to qualify as illegitimate manifestly undemocratic regimes that do not take seriously any ‘egalitarian bonds’; second, that by trading with these regimes, democracies are seriously corrupting themselves in a concrete and morally urgent way, which requires inward-looking disengagement. Both of these claims can be associated with the idea of democratic control over national resources, to which I now turn.
Corrupting trade: the contemporary version
Democratic control of national resources and democratic legitimacy
In a world without a global sovereign, distinct sovereigns must control distinct resources. The Rousseauian view takes this fact as a given, since it joins the vast majority of contemporary global justice theorists, including ardent cosmopolitans, in rejecting a global leviathan, if nothing else due to the fear of repression and violence: world government could be established ‘only through violent means, which would be dangerous for humanity…It would perhaps do more harm in a moment than it would prevent for centuries’ (SPP, 100).Footnote 27
National property follows from this rejection of world government. Property requires enforcing authority, and without global enforcement separate sovereign states are needed to protect separate territories – and the property they encompass – ‘with all the common force’. Rousseau lamented the first marking of a distinct territory as exclusive property, but also considered this marking inevitable and lasting, ending the Second Discourse with an explicit rejection of any attempt to return to the pre-possessive state of nature (SD, 84, 125). Rousseau's practical proposal regarding property is accordingly future, rather than past-oriented. The idea is to transform appropriation from a mere natural fact into legitimate property that is the result of moral legislation: we must ‘distinguish clearly’ between ‘possession which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupant, and property which can be found only on a positive title’ (SC, 1.8.2; see also 2.6.2). Thus, only the body-politic, the maker of positive law, has the authority to define which individuals will own what, how, and why (SC, 1.9.6, 1.9.7).Footnote 28
Yet it is exactly because Rousseau does not believe that individuals meaningfully ‘own themselves’ without a body-politic that the body-politic itself must assert prior control over all the resources it regulates. In relation to other societies, the state controls all of the resources encompassed within the national territory:
with regards to its members, the state is master of all their goods by the social contract which serves as the basis of all rights within the state; but with regard to other Powers it is master of all of its members’ goods…by the right of the first occupant which it derives from private individuals…it is intelligible how individuals’ combined and contiguous pieces of ground became the public territory. (SC, 1.9.1, 1.9.5)
However, from a Rousseauian point of view the rights resulting from this control must stand not only against foreigners, but also, crucially, against rulers. No declaration conflicts more strongly with Rousseau than the absolutist ruler's ‘I am the state’. ‘None of the canonical political theorists’, as Bryan Garsten recently emphasized, ‘defended the sovereignty of the people more insistently than Rousseau did’ (Garsten Reference Garsten2009, 93). The sovereignty of the people means that they ‘are’ the state, not the individuals wielding effective power – indeed, that is precisely why Rousseau's work was so ‘dangerous for the monarchy’ (Roosevelt Reference Roosevelt2009, 108) of his time.Footnote 29 This means that when the people own the state's resources, these resources clearly do not belong to another people, but they do not belong to the government either. Mexican oil belongs to the Mexican people, not to the United States, but also not to the Mexican President. German coal belongs to the German people, not to the French, but also not to the German Chancellor. National resources belong to the sovereign, not to the government. The government, Rousseau makes clear, is the ‘mere officer’ of the sovereign people, not the sovereign itself; popular sovereignty is inalienable (SC, 3.1.6).
The immediate implication of this insistence is the definition of democracy as a standard of legitimacy. Peoples ruled by regimes that do not take elections and the rule of law seriously cannot freely decide on their political status, just like they cannot decide how to use their resources. Someone else – a dictator, a military junta, a royal family, or civil warriors – decides for them. Rather than ‘self-determination’, this is a manifest denial of collective autonomy that cannot morally oblige anyone: ‘To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most it is an act of prudence. In what sense can it become a duty?…Let us agree, then, that force does not make right, and that one is only obliged to obey legitimate powers’ (SC, 1.3.1, 1.3.4).
Rousseau is unequivocal that ‘the people subject to the laws ought to be their author’ (SC, 2.6.10). It follows that for a people to meaningfully govern themselves they must enjoy at least minimal democracy, especially the democratic rule of law. As Gerring and others stress, ‘while a limited rule of law has been successfully established in some authoritarian states, it is usually difficult to maintain and can never – by definition – bind the ultimate decision makers’ (Gerring et al. Reference Gerring, Bond, T. Barndt and Moreno2005, 336). That is exactly what Rousseau would not accept. Rousseau's ‘dream of democracy’, as James Miller puts it, saw it as ‘the true order of legitimate laws’ (Miller 1984, 202). In addition, the only laws that are legitimate are those that apply equally to all citizens: ‘the law’, Rousseau emphasizes, ‘can very well state that there will be privileges, but it cannot confer them on any one by name’ (SC, 2.6.6; see also SC, 3.10.10). A law that is not binding upon specific individuals is therefore no law at all. It is mere coercion. There are no legitimate laws – or meaningful self-government – without democratic procedures.Footnote 30
It is pivotal to bear in mind here the distinction between procedural democratic legitimacy and substantively just outcomes. From the Rousseauian perspective, the identity of the decision makers is prior to the decisions’ quality. The first concern is that the people, the right agents, rule, much before the aspiration that ‘the best decisions’ will be taken: ‘A people is in any case always master to change its laws, even the best of them; for if it pleases to harm itself, who has the right to prevent it from doing so’ (SC, 2.12, 2).Footnote 31 Specifically with regard to national resources, the immediate concern is therefore that they will be controlled only by those with legitimate authority, prior to and independently of the question of how the benefits from these resources will be used.
In order to see how this separation between control and benefits produces a distinctive global approach, we need to connect the Rousseauian inward look on our own morals, developed earlier, with the three interrelated points made here: the identification of the body-politic as the legitimate owner of the state's resources, the insistence on democracy as a standard of legitimacy, and the strong separation between government and the sovereign people. The accumulated result is this: our role in other peoples’ lack of democratic control over national resources is a moral problem, independently of others’ material conditions. I now turn to elaborate this argument.
Democratic integrity and the lack of democratic control
As collectively sovereign citizens, we are deeply implicated in the violation of other peoples’ right to control their national resources – the material basis of their egalitarian interdependence. Our governments take part in this violation by recognizing violent usurpers as legitimate in controlling their populations’ resources. This legitimacy is granted simply because the usurpers secure de facto political power: under customary international law, as Thomas Pogge accuses,
any person or group exercising effective power in a national territory – regardless of how violently they came to power and how badly they exercise it – is recognized as entitled to act on behalf of its people: to sell their resources, to borrow and sign treaties in their name, and to import the means of internal repression. (Pogge Reference Pogge2010, 177)
This is perhaps the most lucid contemporary demonstration of how ‘the strong are armed against the weak with the power of law’. No dictator or corrupt oligarchy should be able to legitimately sell a nation's resources simply because it controls the means of violence: ‘Force is a physical power; I fail to see what morality can result from its effects’ (SC, 1.3.1). The idea that any group or person who is violent enough can trade a nation's resources at its own discretion rests on what Rousseau would consider a plainly implausible view of the social contract: ‘between a man and a people, the following speech will always be equally absurd. I make a convention with you which is entirely at your expense and entirely to my profit, which I shall observe as long as I please, and which you shall observe as long as I please’ (SC, 1.4.13, italics in the original). Such absurdity cannot be the basis of any legitimate authority to sell national resources. Individuals cannot become legitimate owners of national resources simply because they have enough guns. Violent persons equipped with force are simply those – private persons – who happen to be able to kill. Our governments have no justification in treating these persons as legitimate representatives of their people: ‘when scattered men, regardless of their number, are enslaved to a single man, I see in this nothing but a master and slaves, I do not see in it a people and its chief…that man, even if he had enslaved half the world, still remains nothing but a private individual’ (SC, 1.5.1).
There is, then, an obvious moral problem here. But how we should address it is less obvious. It is here that the Rousseauian inward look shows its distinctiveness. The widespread consensus in liberal global theory is outward looking. Under this consensus, as noted at the outset, reform of dictators’ trading privileges should be undertaken if and where it will promote others’ political and economic conditions. The Rousseauian view, in contrast, insists that we ought to disengage from dictatorships independently of others’ prospects: our own moral integrity obliges us to stop recognizing oppressors as legitimate sellers of their peoples’ resources. We must stop violating other nations’ rights to democratically control their resources simply because one's concern for one's own moral integrity obliges one to ‘respect rights on which his own are founded’ (SC, 1.4.10).
The concrete implications of this inward look are rather direct. Each democracy has in principle a strong duty to completely withdraw any recognition of severely oppressive regimes – to boycott all regimes that manifestly reject free and fair elections – and to outlaw trade with such regimes within its jurisdiction. This duty of democratic disengagement has certain riders. It also has certain priorities – clearly not all corrupt dictatorships present equally urgent moral hazards. Finally, preliminary steps are required to make disengagement feasible in some cases (steps whose pursuit consequently becomes itself a duty). But the call to disengage, no matter how qualified and moderated it must be in practice, nonetheless stands. I now turn to elaborate how, by anticipating normative and empirical objections.
Democratic disengagement – anticipating objections
Normative objections
I begin with normative criticisms. One such criticism might be that by advocating disengagement the Rousseauian perspective gives excessive weight to our ‘clean hands’, while our main concern should be others’ welfare. This objection, while intuitive, is misguided. First, most if not all global justice theorists have given up utilitarian accounts that postulate a duty to accord equal weight to the condition of non-compatriots, if nothing else because of their implausible implications, such as a supposed duty to give up all of our goods not necessary to our very subsistence for the sake of the world's poor (cf. Singer Reference Singer1972).Footnote 32 As the discussion below will show, the Rousseauian perspective takes very seriously the survival of the poorest. Yet such concern is very different from establishing as our main duty a need to cater to the overall condition of non-compatriots. From the Rousseauian point of view, the latter duty is the exclusive ‘virtue of sovereigns’,Footnote 33 and since (as above) a global sovereign seems an unlikely prospect, concern for overall condition remains a purely domestic affair, as arguably reflected in the fact that even committed cosmopolitans focus today on much more minimal goals.Footnote 34
A more significant objection to the Rousseauian view is that it is too counter-intuitive with regard to its view of autocracies. Specifically, the claim here is that by focusing on control the Rousseauian perspective cannot conceptualize the difference between autocracies where benefits from national resources do reach the people and those that do not channel any benefits to the population. Yet this claim problematically bestows legitimacy on autocracies solely because of their distributive outcomes. Painting an overly sunny picture of such ‘distributive dictatorships’ fails to distinguish between respect for citizens’ autonomy and the promotion of their material interests. Especially from a Rousseauian point of view, the ‘interest in freedom’ (Cohen Reference Cohen1986, 276) of both an individual and a community must be seen as far broader and more fundamental than their merely material concerns. The empirical phenomenon of regimes that rely on their distributive outcomes to maintain power does not reduce the potency of these charges. A government that cannot be replaced by ballots, only bullets, does not respect a people's right to collective autonomy, even if its decisions reflect concern for the people's material well-being. Rather, such government is based on the untenable assumption that rational adults are not competent enough to govern themselves, that the people can be legitimately obliged to obey anything other than ‘their own will’ (SC, 2.4.8).
Lastly, the idea that the flow of benefits to the population confers legitimacy upon a regime has implausible implications for democracies’ own domestic affairs, also following what was said above. If ‘distributive dictatorships’ acquire legitimacy because of where the revenue from national resources goes, then the United States could be seen as less legitimate than Saudi Arabia, for instance: it could be argued that the Saudi much more than the American people enjoy the benefits from their state's resources. However, it is usually thought that democracies are more legitimate than distributive dictatorships, precisely because legitimacy rests in process (democratic control) rather than outcomes (benefits). Our relation to an illegitimate process thus remains a problem.
Now, this is not to say that others’ material conditions do not matter. It is indeed more urgent, both morally and practically, to attend to cases where oppressors deprive the people not only of control, but also of the benefits from national resources. However, this is not a concession to the outward-looking view. The reason for greater urgency is that while in the case of distributive dictatorships we are involved in the general infringement of legitimate control, when it comes to ‘depriving dictatorships’ our governments and corporations are complicit in oppressors’ much more damning crime of massive-scale theft, if not de facto armed robbery.
I began with one particularly vivid example of such robbery, yet the man-made ‘resource curse’ goes far beyond Equatorial Guinea. This curse has dominated the lives of children from Uzbekistan to Sierra Leone, where up until a decade ago insurgents ‘recruited child soldiers to scare much of the population away from the country's rich diamond fields with a brutal campaign of shootings and machete amputations’; it has been lethal in Sudan, where the regime's income from petroleum sales has continually funded atrocities in Darfur; and is still lethal in Congo, where women are raped with bayonets by militiamen who fight ‘over the minerals used to make chips for cell phones and laptops’ (Wenar Reference Wenar2008, 6–7).
The Rousseauian view maintains the hope that by forbidding their corporations from buying such illicit goods democracies will also contribute to the breaking of the resource curse's vicious cycle. Yet at the same time, the Rousseauian perspective also insists that democracies’ duty to stop buying stolen property exists independently of such hoped outcomes. One's duty not to commit a crime holds regardless of whether the crime will go on without one's involvement. And the fact that democratic governments and corporations are committing a serious crime can hardly be disputed here. Purchasing stolen goods with full knowledge that they are stolen is not a trivial offense (cf. Nili Reference Nili2011b), and surely oil corporations, for instance, cannot pretend that they had ‘not heard’ about rulers like Obiang robbing their people for decades. Democracies, then, ought to disengage from severely oppressive regimes in order to stop their own corruption. Having established this inward-looking duty normatively, I now turn to defend it empirically, arguing that alongside deep philosophical problems, engagement with dictators has no clear advantages in promoting the conditions of the oppressed.
Disengagement – the empirical aspect
The main empirical challenge to the Rousseauian inward look is likely to come from the direction of Montesquieuian ‘capitalist peace’ arguments.Footnote 35 Engagement, rather than disengagement, is advocated here: by promoting global doux commerce, the argument goes, we gradually transform aggressive and oppressive regimes into peaceful collaborators who care for their population and through economic interaction also benefit ours.
The first problem with this picture is normative. To reiterate the claim made in the introduction, there is no developed contemporary theory that elevates trade with other regimes, let alone tyrants, to the level of a moral duty, and particularly not when complicity in theft is one of the key components of this trade. The engagement argument itself does not provide any such theory. Even if it could be shown that trade benefits the material interests of ‘everyone involved’ (almost always a group impossible to define), this is not in itself a moral argument. An economist might predict that a millionaire could offer to purchase my house for a price that is ten times its listed value, and use the land to build a business that will generate revenue a hundred times larger, thus making everyone better off economically. But this is not a moral justification for why I can be coerced into selling the house to the millionaire. Empirical predictions say nothing about right and wrong without a moral theory motivating them.Footnote 36
Yet even on a more straightforwardly empirical level, the engagement thesis fails to convince.Footnote 37 The main reason is that it confuses the consolidation of fledging democracies with severely oppressive regimes in which, as depicted above, the customary laws of global commerce often support not a ‘spirit of law’ but rather oppressors’ primary concern, emphasized by Rousseau already long ago: ‘that the people be weak, wretched, and never able to resist them’ (SC, 3.6.5).
Now, the objection might arise that through patient engagement, dictatorships ‘eventually’ transform. Yet, normatively, there is again no moral theory here, and specifically no theory explaining why we ought to pursue change in other regimes. Sure enough, it will be an extremely positive development if all of the world's societies were to enjoy free and fair elections and rule of law. But there is a huge gap between approving of something and seeing it as a duty to bring it about. Perhaps that is why most contemporary philosophers demand that we refrain from forcing regime change upon others. The Rousseauian perspective, as should be obvious by now, complies with this demand.
There is also an epistemic difficulty. Having only one world, we cannot ‘hold everything else constant’, and compare different global conditions so as to see their varying impact on domestic politics. This fact joins the problem of scale: there are too many forces at play in the global economy, and too many complex equilibrium effects, for us to isolate specific global forces and say that they impact domestic institutions in determinate ways.Footnote 38 Therefore, it is very hard to show that democratic trade is a key cause of economic and political progress that is distinct either from other global factors or from a myriad of domestic ones. Correspondingly, where reform does not take place, it is also hard to prove that engagement has clear advantages over disengagement in producing better outcomes. In fact, the opposite might often be true. Thinking of the past, there is little reason to believe that the Apartheid would have collapsed faster if South Africa enjoyed normal trade relations with Western democracies, or that the Soviet Union would have changed faster if it had normal trade with the United States today, disengagement might very well be a more effective promoter of political and economic change in places like Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, or Congo.Footnote 39
This is not to say that disengagement will necessarily produce better outcomes in the target countries. Rather, the argument is that structural limitations generate profound empirical uncertainty regarding the impact of democratic trade policy on conditions in non-democracies.Footnote 40 In contrast, our own moral standing, with which Rousseau was so concerned, is under our control. That is another reason why an inward rather than outward look must be, in the vast majority of cases, the foundation of policy. To reiterate, this insistence does not make the Rousseauian view indifferent to the hope for better outcomes for others. Yet here hypothetical hope is a supporting rather than grounding reason for policy, and as such is subordinate to the grounding, inward-looking justification. Thus, the Rousseauian view stresses that, a threat to life and limb aside, we ought not perpetuate our complicity in massive-scale armed robbery simply on the basis of a non-verifiable aspiration for future change through engagement. That the prospects for such change might in many cases be unaffected or even improved through disengagement only further supports the Rousseauian position.
In fact, it might be argued that the most important prospect for others rests not in global markets but in a factor whose spread does not hinge on trade policy – global ideas. Global economic interactions produce highly differentiated outcomes in varied sites and contexts,Footnote 41 yet global norms point almost everywhere in the same direction: greater political openness and accountability by those who govern toward the governed. The spread of these norms might often be slow and gradual, at times stilted, but ideas pass through borders whether or not democracies’ products or economic prosperity pass as well. This was certainly true for the Perestroika era. It is all the more true in a world that might be witnessing history's first Facebook revolution.
However, the Rousseauian view does not leave the world's deprived and oppressed solely with future hopes. It is also actively concerned with their most basic material need at present: survival. It is much more than mere hope to say that both today and even under conditions of boycott, affluent democracies can do infinitely more than they are doing to provide for the survival of the world's poorest. First, an explanation of the moral duty is in order. Caring for distant others’ survival, as emphasized above, is a much more clearly defined duty than to care for their overall condition. The latter is the task of their political institutions, which democracies cannot and ought not to try to replace. Democracies’ duty is to respect other peoples’ autonomy in governing their own affairs. However, since autonomy will mean very little to the dead, keeping people alive is also a duty in itself. Rousseau emphasized that a state of war exists between states, not between individuals (cf. SC, 1.4.9). Concurrently, what we find corrupt and dangerous is certain political regimes, rather than the persons suffering under them. It is with regard to the survival of these individuals that Rousseauian compassion comes into play. Like Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau holds that the state of nature between states parallels in important ways the state of nature between individuals (cf. PE, 13). In the former, just as in the latter, Rousseau does not give up on the notion of pity. Here, the ‘compassion that identifies us with the one who suffers and distresses us at his pain’ (SW, 10; see also SD, 73) is translated to a requirement to provide humanitarian assistance meant to ensure survival. The democratic bloc ought to support individuals even while disengaging from their oppressors: we must prevent at least the worst results of the condition in which ‘the privileged few gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life’ (SD, 117).
Accordingly, in very specific places where a boycott might hinder current marked progress in ensuring survival, disengagement should be avoided. China might be such a case, as it has been achieving, at an extraordinary pace, the greatest extreme poverty reduction in human history.Footnote 42 Yet this is an exception (albeit a very important one) rather than the rule. In practically all other cases, there is no reason to think that robust humanitarian assistance will not keep people alive with greater success in comparison to the billion persons around the world who are already starving regardless of any boycott (UN 2009); this egregious figure by itself shows that ensuring survival, while of course far from ideal, is also far from a trivial feat. In addition, believing we can help the world's starving even when refusing to legitimize the regimes that brutally oppress many of them is certainly not mere utopia. Already more than 60 years ago, Western democracies kept West Berliners alive through an airlift for almost a year without engaging the Soviets.Footnote 43 Can affluent democracies really claim, in the 21st century, that they do not have the ability to do the same around the world, to ameliorate the worst results of extreme poverty, currently causing 50,000 deaths every day?Footnote 44 Surely, if a single democracy can land a man on the moon, 90 democracies can land packages of corn on earth without asking for permission from dictators. Or is it just that West Berlin was considered crucial to democratic interests while the world's starving are not?
From theory to practice: Rousseauian answers to skepticism
It is easy to anticipate a skeptic response to the disengagement proposal, emphasizing that democracies will never undertake such idealistic reforms given the cold facts of ‘nature’ – whether the nature of international anarchy, human nature, or the critical mass of dictatorial power. However, from a Rousseauian perspective there is very little incentive to endorse such a Hobbessian scaling down of democracies’ moral ambitions.
The first reason has to do with the way in which disengagement avoids problems often thought inherent to international anarchy, chiefly those of collective action. As Rousseau's famous stag hunt example shows, cooperation is elusive and defection always likely when no actor can be assured of others’ commitment to a supposed common cause (SD, 87). This would have been a serious difficulty had the disengagement proposal been based on promoting change in the target countries, as is the case with traditional ‘sanctions’. Here each democracy could easily say it is avoiding the boycott since it knows that by itself it cannot achieve major outcomes, inviting others to ‘prove their seriousness’ before it commits to the task, with the result being, unsurprisingly, no commitment by anyone. Disengagement avoids all this. Despite the fact that the democratic bloc resulting from it is a common endeavor, the basic moral imperative underlying it is not. Each democracy has a duty to stop being complicit in theft regardless of how other democracies behave – just like my duty to stop stealing from you does not depend on whether my neighbor continues. In addition, this duty can be discharged by individual democracies at least when the target country is much weaker than they are, as is often the case.
Nevertheless, for any democracy to take such independent steps, it must have the proper moral motivation. Here enters Rousseau's repeated insistence, against Hobbes, that human psychology is malleable. That is what makes the moral change emphasized above possible to begin with. The ideal society, after all, shapes and at the same time is shaped by its members: ‘no people would ever be anything except what their government made them to be’ (quoted in Roosevelt Reference Roosevelt1990, 11). In addition, it is not contradictory to add that no government will ever be what its citizens do not make it into. If moral transformation of democracies’ conduct is to be achieved, such citizen involvement is indeed necessary, beginning with the basic framing of the normative problem.
To say, for instance, that it is ‘just part of modern life’ that ‘some of the money we pay at the pump may go to support tyrants’ constitutes moral immaturity from a Rousseauian perspective. Such casting away of responsibility means escaping, turning what is institutional to what is supposedly natural and hence beyond our powers. The insistence on the possibility of moral change challenges head-on such ‘misdirection of attention from the institutional to the natural’ (Wenar Reference Wenar2008, 8). To continue with the example at hand, if democracies do not want to buy tainted oil, they can decide to boycott such oil (a decision American grassroots movements have admirably been pushing for regarding Sudan, for example).Footnote 45 In addition, if corrupt regimes simply have too much oil, then democracies should see it as morally urgent to use their technological superiority in order to develop alternative forms of energy that will eventually release them from their corrupting dependency, prioritizing their budget accordingly.Footnote 46 Rousseau famously argued that our scientific progress degrades our morals; to let our normative standards guide our scientific efforts would be a welcome change and serious proof of what normative change can achieve (even before the very tangible pragmatic benefits that will be accrued by a democratic bloc in overcoming oil dependency).
However, we often see democracies acting in exact contrast to their real interests, even when narrowly conceived in material terms. Rousseau's warnings thus remain acutely relevant for our time, both as an empirical diagnosis and as a normative call. Empirically, at least some affluent democracies have been increasing rather than decreasing their dependence on corrupt (and often oil-rich) regimes, in a way that is perilous not only to their morals, but also to their long-term pragmatic interests. Any attempt to push for disengagement in real politics can also employ evidence for such sacrifice of the long term.Footnote 47
Normatively, there is a reason why the long term, including democratic cooperation itself, should overcome short-term gains for the decision makers. Rousseauian accusations against leaders who follow perceived state interests or simply focus on their own personal aspirations are important in that they galvanize citizen action in this sense as well. Instead of absolute monarchs with full license to act as ‘madcap pilots’ over their subjects, we have citizens, ‘participants in the sovereign authority’ (SC, 1.6.10). As no elected politician can say ‘I am the state’, no politician can legitimately declare that his personal interest defines the state's interest. More specifically, no leader should have moral license to think only within the limits of the term in office or what will ensure the extension of this term. If an elected politician suffers from such ‘excessive self-love’, the result should not see the citizens deprived of international cooperation that disentangles them from moral and practical quagmires, but rather see the politician deprived of reelection. In addition, insofar as the electoral process itself is skewed by powerful sectarian interests that wield vastly disproportional political influence, including the country's foreign policy, legitimate conduct abroad might really be tied with true justice at home, not only in Rousseau's passages, but also in the 21st century.
Admittedly, suggesting that political change will come about if ordinary citizens ‘simply will it’ is far too hopeful. However, this does not in any way vindicate an escape from democratic obligations. Each democratic citizen is in the position Rousseau declares himself to be in: ‘Born a citizen of a free State, and a member of the sovereign, the right to vote in it is enough to impose on me the duty to learn about public affairs, regardless of how weak might be the influence of my voice on them’ (SC, 1.3). The very fact of citizenship means one cannot avoid ‘assuming a responsibility toward the whole of which one is a part’ (SC, 1.7.1). Furthermore, at the global level, there are certainly reasons to think that democracies will be able to fulfill their responsibilities, if they would have sufficient political commitment. Comprising 28 of the world's 30 richest countries, democracies hold the vast majority of the world's economic and technological resources. Far beyond any ‘civilizational’ lines, they include not only the United States and Western Europe, but also the powerhouses from one side of the globe to another, from Japan and India to Brazil.Footnote 48 We must not conceive too narrowly the limits of what such a democratic bloc can achieve.
Conclusion
As the case of Equatorial Guinea clearly attests, democracies are not cooperating with dictatorships today out of concern for the survival of the latter's population, but mainly due to the simple desire to ensure their short-term gains.Footnote 49 If there is hope for the project of democratic disengagement, it lies in growing awareness, through political education, of the fact that these gains are often more apparent than real, while their moral price is far from illusory. Therefore, even if establishing a self-sustaining democratic bloc is likely to be a long, complicated, and at best gradual process, moral imperatives demand its pursuit, also because current reality corroborates fundamental Rousseauian fears.
Many questions will have to be addressed before these fears can be handled. Some reach all the way to the specific means for identifying stolen goods.Footnote 50 Other questions are broader, pertaining to institutional design – both domestic, aiming to make elected politicians less prone to follow short term at the expense of long-term interests, and international, producing structural incentives for global democratic cooperation. Finally, the standard used to designate regimes obviously carries enormous importance both normatively and practically. A thorough examination of prominent democracy indicators is necessary in order to establish parameters that will count as a consensus, at least when it comes to clear-cut, if not the middle ground, cases. At the same time, the use of such ‘polyarchic’ indexes must not distract today's democracies from their domestic duty to ‘perfect and deepen their democracy’ (Dahl Reference Dahl2000, 2), also by ensuring that ‘no citizen can be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself’ (SC, 2.11.2).
These and other policy implications might still seem overly idealistic. However, broadly, insofar as much of Rousseau's writing is animated by a longing for an idealized, irretrievable past and deep frustration as to the present, there is already much merit in adjusting his thought to the future, as seen from the perspective of the early 21st century. Perhaps the idea of collective democratic autarky must wait for a day in which the world moves past oil, for example. Perhaps this means that corrupting dependence will linger for many more years. Yet having a political philosophy prepared for the future, thinking about egalitarian interdependence both domestically and internationally, is nonetheless a significant step forward. Saint-Pierre's federative project, Rousseau lamented, ‘remains unrealized’ not ‘because it is utopian; it is because men are crazy, and because to be sane in a world of madmen is in itself a kind of madness’ (SPP, 88). We must act toward a sane world.
Acknowledgments
Many people kindly offered their advice regarding this project, in conversation and/or in writing. Dana Villa entertained the idea and helped significantly in developing its original form. Josh Cohen, Mary Dietz, Uri Nili, Cameron O'Bannon, Yiftach Ofek, Dan Philpott, Tal Sokol, and Ernesto Verdeja encouraged the work while flagging multiple difficult questions, perhaps only some of which I managed to answer. Matt Mendham and Faisal Baluch usefully protested against what they saw as my distortions of Rousseau. Burke Hendrix pushed me to clarify in the article's advanced stages what I want and do not want to argue. Finally, three anonymous reviewers for International Theory provided extremely valuable comments on earlier versions as did the editors, especially Alex Wendt.
