Ethics as the State Theory of Democracy
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Ethics is founded on the view that the values of liberal democracy should be rethought rather than abandoned on the excuse of globalization, or defended by an attempt to recreate the strong states of the recent past. People would, however, argue for the protection and preservation of state-based institutions wherever possible pending the emergence of new institutions.
Globalization clears the way for the wider application of the values of equality, democracy, welfare and community. Most enlightenment values were claims for all human beings. The Declaration by the French Assembly was of the rights of man. The American Declaration of Independence held ‘these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Despite the universality of these claims, the institutions created by the state were exclusively devoted to providing rights to its own citizens. A more globalised political philosophy may allow these values to have global application. The concepts of sovereignty and no intervention provided the context for the development of liberal democratic values. They also provided protection for these fledgling values from outside interference by more authoritarian regimes, which disliked democracy. However, the walls of sovereignty also acted as a barrier to these values spreading to neighboring states whose citizens were often in much need of them.
The fact that values become impossible, or virtually impossible, to realize does not eliminate their value (at least not in my reading of the fact/value relationship). However, if such values were impossible to achieve, it would have significant consequences for our actions in the values that we should be attempting to next realize and the balances we made between those values and their competitors.
To think that the solution to the challenges posed by globalization to existing strong states is to create a new, larger, universal ’strong state’ misses the main point about the decline of sovereignty. Such a view remains stuck in the assumptions held during the period of strong states. What is likely to emerge is a world where institutions cross previous international boundaries and do not claim, unlike sovereign states, to cover all areas of life.
The values of the Enlightenment as challenged, modified and developed by 250 years of legal, political and social philosophy provide an excellent starting point -not least because of the fundamental Enlightenment shift in the relationship between the state and citizen. Rather than concentrating on the obligations of subject to sovereign, it emphasized that public institutions have to be justified on the basis of how they serve the citizens. The North Atlantic Enlightenment did not hold a monopoly on truth, but was an important step forward in the universal struggle to improve the human condition.
What is needed now is an international search for new and revised values to which all may contribute and in which all may learn from the ideas, and failures of others. As in so many other areas, the claim to universality must be accompanied by surrender to it.
As a conclusion it must be emphasized that the State origin has a very strong ethical component.
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