A Republican Law of Peoples
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885109349406 |
| Author | Philip Pettit |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
70
A Republican Law of Peoples
Philip Pettit Princeton University
abstract: Assuming that states will remain a permanent feature of our world, what
is the ideal that we should hold out for the international order? An attractive proposal
is that those peoples that are already organized under non-dominating, representative
states should pursue a twin goal: rst, arrange things so that they each enjoy the
republican ideal of freedom as non-domination in relation to one another and to other
multi-national and international agencies; and second, do everything possible and
productive to facilitate the representation of less fortunate peoples in non-dominating
states and to incorporate them in a non-dominating international order. This
republican ideal stands midway between a utopian ideal of cosmopolitan justice and a
sceptical ideal of non-intervention. The article explores its attractions and the broad
institutional measures that it would support.
key words: domination, freedom, peoples, republicanism, states
Preliminaries
States as they are
This essay is concerned with identifying the international arrangements that we
ought to recommend as means for coordinating and organizing the behavior of
national states, as they currently exist. Taking states as they are, in a variation on
Rousseau’s principle,1 I ask about the international order – the world – as it might
be. There is room for a profitable discussion, of course, as to whether there ought
to be national states of the kind with which we are familiar, or whether such states
ought to have their existing territories or powers. But that is not the sort of dis-
cussion that I shall be pursuing here. For good or ill, I shall assume that there is
unlikely to be a sea-change in the configuration of national regimes and ask only
about how those regimes ought to be internationally ordered.
I make assumptions, not just about the existence of national states, but also
about the ways in which they differ from one another; it would be extraordinary
article
Contact address: Philip Pettit, University Center for Human Values, 308 Marx Hall,
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Email: ppettit@Princeton.EDU
EJPT
European Journal of Political Theory
9(1) 70–94
© The Author(s), 2010
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
[DOI: 10.1177/147488510934940]
http://ejpt.sagepub.com
Pettit: A Republican Law of Peoples
71
if recommendations about international arrangements did not vary with vary-
ing assumptions in these regards. I shall assume, as will be clear later, that states
come in very different demographic and territorial profiles, and have very differ-
ent powers; this is in keeping with the actual state of world affairs. And, perhaps
more contentiously, though also in keeping with world affairs, I shall assume that
they vary enormously in how they relate to their peoples.
Specifically, I shall assume that states divide on two relevant dimensions, one
related to the measure in which they operate effectively, the other to the measure
in which they represent their peoples properly. The first distinction marks the
divide between effective states that have the capacity to provide for basic services
to their populations and ineffective states that lack this capacity. Signs that a state
is ineffective in the intended sense will be civil war, unchecked famine, continuing
genocide, a class of warlords, and general lawlessness.
The second distinction divides effective states into those that are fit to speak for
their people as a whole and those that are not; I shall describe this as a distinction
between representative and non-representative states. A state will be fit to speak
for its people, roughly speaking, to the extent that it gives them the institutional
resources – say, of election, contestation and accountability – that will enable
them to exercise control, though perhaps only at a general level, over what it says
and does. A state will be unfit to speak for its people to the extent that, though
it is effective enough to be able to provide such resources for its people, it does
not do so, or at least not in an inclusive and even-handed way. States that are fit
to speak for their people may fail contingently to do so, being captured on some
issues by special interests, but they will remain representative insofar as the people
retain the means of exposing such failures and correcting them. States that are
unfit to speak for their people will fail more widely and more deeply, denying their
members the means required for such interrogation and invigilation.2
Applying the distinction between representative and non-representative states
– and to a lesser extent the distinction between effective and ineffective states – is
bound to raise tricky issues but I shall abstract from these here.3 The argument
that follows presupposes that the distinctions can be made and will go through, I
think, under various accounts of how exactly they should be made. My own way
of making the distinctions, for the record, is to apply the very republican theory of
non-domination that, as we shall see, I use in the argument. The effective, repre-
sentative state will be effective in protecting members against private domination
and will be representative in doing this in an undominating way: that is, roughly,
in such a way that its behavior towards its members is governed by terms that they
democratically impose.
However they are interpreted, the distinctions mark real differences between
states and those divides are crucial for the question as to what international
arrangements should be put in place. If a state is ineffective, or effective but non-
representative, then serving that entity will not be a concern for the international
order; the only concern will be with serving the members. But if a state is effective
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