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The Normative Dimensions of State Action Mitchell T. Kaufman A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Michael Blake, Chair William J. Talbott Stephen Gardiner Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Philosophy 2 ©Copyright 2014 Mitchell T. Kaufman 3 University of Washington Abstract The Normative Dimensions of State Action Mitchell T. Kaufman Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Michael Blake Department of Philosophy States tend to be the centerpieces of International Relations theory, as they are commonly considered the primary actors of international relations. As such, states are commonly analyzed as intentional beings that act on their own reasons, based on their own beliefs and desires. This treatment of states as intentional entities leads naturally to a treatment of states as responsible agents that must stand accountable for what they have done. It is on such a basis that retrospective moral and legal judgments are made of states; for example, when reparations debt is established between states after a military conflict. The above perspective is very common amongst academics and laypeople alike; however, it seems to be in deep tension with our widely held interpretive model of interpersonal relations, where the individual is the primary actor and responsible party with respect to her own free agency. In short, state responsibility and individual responsibility often fail to align. This project attempts to clarify the tension between these levels of analysis, evaluate various defenses of state responsibility, and argue that an individualist methodological approach is required if normative IR theory is to remain consistent with basic interpersonal normative theory. 4 Part I: The State-Actor Model Chapter 1: The State-Actor Model in IR §1 – THE STATE-ACTOR MODEL We live in a very complex social environment where people organize their behavior through numerous interconnected institutions, which enable increasingly large collective endeavors. Along institutional lines, our social world can be conceived of in various ways and divided up using various categories to craft a variety of conceptual schemes that help us organize and understand it. One of the most important of these conceptual schemes gives us the view that the global society is structured around distinct institutional organizations that we call ‘states’. From this state-based perspective of the world, we envision humanity, at the global scale, being carved up as current maps depict, with much of international relations thought of as the interactions between the various states, coordinated by their respective governments, for the sake of their respective populations. This is a quite common and natural way of looking at things, and unsurprisingly so, since our language practices deeply reflect this perspective, even in the most pedantic contexts – academic writing and international law. Political scientists often treat states themselves as the primary actors in explanations and analyses of international relations, and normative political theory will discuss states as the bearers of rights, duties, and moral and legal responsibility. So, for example, it is common in International Relations Theory (IR) 1 to encounter statements like the following. “We associate states with war: they have claimed…a legal right to resort to it and to require individual citizens to wage it in their name.”2 “To say that states are equal under international law is only to say that they all have the same rights, duties, 1 As is now common, I will capitalize ‘International Relations’ or ‘IR’ when referring to the academic discipline – including scientific and normative IR – and leave it lowercase when referring to the phenomenon itself. 2 Hedley Bull, “The State’s Positive Role in World Affairs.” In, Hedley Bull on International Society, eds. Alderson and Hurrell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 146. 5 liberties, and immunities.”3 “A state will use force to attain its goals if, after assessing the prospects for success, it values those goals more than it values the pleasures of peace.”4 The state is also the principal figure in much philosophical writing on the establishment of rightful international relations and global justice. Immanuel Kant, for example, carefully develops his account of the state as “a union of a multitude of human beings under laws of right,”5 but then goes on to treat the state itself as the primary agent of international public right, or the right of nations. “Here a state, as a moral person, is considered as living in relation to another state in the condition of natural freedom and therefore in a condition of constant war.”6 John Rawls does much the same in the transition from his theory of domestic justice to his work on global justice in, The Law of Peoples. Rawls again employs his hypothetical Original Position (OP) apparatus for developing his international laws, but he explicitly rejects its outright extension to a global OP where all individuals represent themselves. Rather, he uses a second- stage OP involving whole peoples because, as he says, “This account of the Law of Peoples conceives of liberal democratic peoples (and decent peoples) as the actors in the Society of Peoples, just as citizens are the actors in domestic society.”7 These examples of state-centered theory in IR coincide with the common treatment of the state as the primary actor in international law. For example, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States from 1933 says, “The federal state shall constitute a sole person in the eyes of international law.”8 Similarly, the Draft Declaration of the Rights and Duties of States adopted by the International Law Commission and submitted to the United Nations 3 Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (New York: Oxford, 2004), 312. 4 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia,1969), 160. 5 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Book I, Part II, Chapter I §45. 6 Ibid. Chapter II §53 7 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999), 23. ‘Peoples’ are not identical to ‘states’ because of the former’s stipulated moral character, but they are similar enough for my points here. 8 From the website of the Council on Foreign Relations. http://www.cfr.org/sovereignty/montevideo-convention- rights-duties-states/p15897. 6 General Assembly in 1949 claims, “Every state has the right to independence and hence to exercise freely, without dictation by any other state, all its legal powers, including the choice of its own form of government.”9 Consider also the Charter of the Organization of American States (A-41) where international order is said to consist essentially of “respect for the personality, sovereignty, and independence of States,” and where “The right of each State to protect itself and to live its own life does not authorize it to commit unjust acts against another State.”10 More recently, we can look to the International Law Commission’s 2001 draft article entitled, “Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts” which, as the title suggests, discusses the general conditions under which a state is responsible for certain acts and what the legal response should be in those cases.11 Finally, this same conceptual approach to international law is taken by the International Court of Justice, which only accepts states as parties to cases before the court.12 As we can see, there are many examples in scientific and normative IR, political philosophy, and international law that treat the state as a sort of singular actor, agent, or type of institutional or legal person.13 Moreover, much thoughtful scholarship ascribes beliefs, desires, intentions and other mental traits to the state, conceives of global justice as an ideal agreement between states themselves, and discusses the state in terms of its moral duties and rights, such as the right to a choice of its own form of government. This perspective then promotes certain 9 Yearbook of the International Law Commission, 1949. Annex to General Assembly resolution 375 (IV). 10 Charter of the Organization of American States, Chapter II, Article 3 and Chapter IV, Article 15. From the Department of International Law website. http://www.oas.org/dil/treaties_A- 41_Charter_of_the_Organization_of_American_States.htm#ch4. 11 Yearbook of the International Law Commission, 2001, Vol. II, Part Two. 12 Statute of the International Court of Justice, Chapter II, Article 34. http://www.icj- cij.org/documents/index.php?p1=4&p2=2&p3=0#CHAPTER_II. 13 Some debate has taken place in International Relations about the so called, “level-of-analysis problem.” As stated, it is common to treat the state as the primary level of analysis, but it is by no means universal. See David Singer, “The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations,” in The International System, Knorr and Verba, eds. (New Jersey: Princeton, 1961), 77-92. See also, Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 93-99. 7 policies and practices, such as passing moral judgment on states for their actions and subjecting them to legal judgments and attending punishments including sanctions and reparations debt. In order to assign a label to this general state-centered conceptual framework for IR and international law – encompassing various subtypes in both scientific and normative IR – we may call this the state-actor model. This model is obviously very widely utilized, and it has been the basis of a great deal of the work done in scientific and normative IR. Nevertheless, the state-actor model does invite some concerns. The debate over the appropriateness of theoretical focus on the state has been carried out to a fair extent in the political science literature, but it is less commonly discussed by those writing about the normative dimensions of international relations.