Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. This problem is solvable, despite its magnitude.

Nationalism is often dismissed today as an irrational political creed with disastrous consequences. Yet most people regard their national identity as a significant aspect of themselves, see themselves as having special obligations to their compatriots, and value their nation's political independence. This book defends these beliefs, and shows that nationality, defined in these terms, serves valuable goals, including social justice, democracy, and the protection of culture. National identities need not be illiberal, and they do not exclude other sources of personal (...) identity, such as ethnicity or religion. An ethics that gives weight to special relationships is more effective in motivating people to pursue justice and other values because it connects peoples’ duties to their identity; but this is consistent with recognizing some universal values, such as human rights. There are strong reasons for making the boundaries of states and nations coincide wherever possible, but in other cases, nations can achieve forms of self‐determination that fall short of full sovereignty. Multicultural arguments in favour of identity politics and special rights for minority groups ignore the benefits that such groups derive from participating in a shared national identity and the kind of democratic politics that such an identity makes possible. Although national identities are often said to be in decline in an increasingly globalized world, they serve such important purposes that our aim should be to rebuild them in a form that makes them more accessible to excluded cultural minorities. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan principles of justice tell us that it is the responsibility of the wealthy to ensure the immediate transfer of resources to the poor. Yet, it cannot be denied that most countries, and most individual citizens, seem unwilling to act as these principles demand. At issue is motivation: although many people would agree that cosmopolitan principles of justice are right, at least to some extent, few seem motivationally inspired to act upon them. This paper evaluates one set of proposals for (...) securing the transfer of resources from the wealthy to the poor, namely, those that suggest that the right way to achieve cosmopolitan objectives is to generate institutions that will, over time, produce cosmopolitans. I argue that we should focus, doubly, on the generation of supra-national institutions as a way to create a?global demos? and on harnessing the motivational resources available at the nation-state level. (shrink)

forthcoming in Philosophy & Public Affairs [2008].

Cosmopolitan critics attack the scope-limitation of justice of egalitarian liberal theorists to states. They treat justice as the production of a given set of outcomes for people regardless of location or relationship. However, in doing so they either ignore the relevant agent towards whom principles of justice are addressed or see the question of agency as a practical, derivative question, of a secondary character. This paper argues that a principle of justice without a clearly justified agent is not a genuine (...) principle at all. This is what writers like Rawls mean by the "subject" of justice (analogous to the grammatical subject of a sentence, i.e.,the agent). We should reflect on agents and why they would or would not justifiably carry certain burdens for others and what kind of benefits or goods they are able to secure. The answers to those questions explain why the idea of cosmopolitan global justice is incomplete, either requiring a global basic structural agency or not applying because no relevant agent is present that can create cooperative arrangements between individual persons across the globe. Other moral principles will still apply globally, but they will be distinct from those that apply to basic-structural agencies. This account is not a practice dependence account, as it bases the distinctness of moral and political principles on purely moral and value-based considerations. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction On the “Naturalness” of National Partiality What Cosmopolitans Might Learn from Nationalist Community Building Community Building Through Instrumental Appeals to Morality Conclusion Acknowledgments References.

"This is a most timely, intelligent, well-written, and absorbing essay on a central and painful social and political problem of out time."--Sir Isaiah Berlin"The major achievement of this remarkable book is a critical theory of nationalism, worked through historical and contemporary examples, explaining the value of national commitments and defining their moral limits. Tamir explores a set of problems that philosophers have been notably reluctant to take on, and leaves us all in her debt."--Michael WalzerIn this provocative work, Yael Tamir (...) urges liberals not to surrender the concept of nationalism to conservative, chauvinist, or racist ideologies. In her view, liberalism, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection, and choice, and nationalism, with its emphasis on belonging, loyalty, and solidarity are not irreconcilable. Here she offers a new theory, "liberal nationalism," which allows each set of values to accommodate the other. Tamir sees nationalism as an affirmation of communal and cultural memberships and as a quest for recognition and self-respect. Persuasively she argues that national groups can enjoy these benefits through political arrangements other than the nation-state. While acknowledging that nationalism places members of national minorities at a disadvantage, the author offers guidelines for alleviating the problems involved using examples from currents conflicts in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe.Liberal Nationalismis an impressive attempt to tie together a wide range of issues often kept apart: personal autonomy, cultural membership, political obligations, particularity versus impartiality in moral duties, and global justice. Drawing on material from disparate fields--including political philosophy, ethics, law, and sociology--Tamir brings out important and previously unnoticed interconnections between them, offering a new perspective on the influence of nationalism on modern political philosophy. (shrink)

In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates that associative political relations play an essential role in implementing egalitarian principles of global justice and that condemnations of (...) the state by cosmopolitans are both unnecessary and ill-advised. Advocating what she calls ‘statist cosmopolitanism,’ whereby domestic ‘avant-garde’ agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, the book offers a dialectical account of political theory in an activist mode. (shrink)

Consisting of two essays, this work by a Harvard professor offers his thoughts on the idea of a social contract regulating people's behavior toward one another.

Many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.