Abstract
Contemporary theoretical controversies in moral, political and legal philosophy echo the political debates in the public sphere: multiculturalism, inequalities between men and women, climate change, wealth inequalities between nations, to state but four major predicaments, are political problems of global relevance before being academic topics in the international intellectual community. What is striking here is not so much that those issues have a historical context, but that the latter is a global one. Global issues have, indeed, been formulated in a common language—the language of rights and justice—the spreading of which has itself its own global setting: after the Cold War’s bipolarization, which biased all discussions about questions of planetary scope, there has been a short period in world history—between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers—when there seemed to be an unprecedented opportunity for expressing world problems in terms of rights and justice, that is, not just in terms of power. The scope of the present volume, but also of the whole series on Applied Global Justice, is to take this opportunity seriously, all the more seriously, one could be tempted to say, since world affairs after 9/11 can appear as a powerful factual objection to an ethical approach to world predicaments. Instead of turning back to some form of Realpolitik analysis as soon as power re-enters the stage—but who said it had ever left it between 1989 and 2001?—we consider it is preferable to confront what actually happens in the field of power relations with a clear vision of what fair relations between states and citizens might be.
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Acknowledgements
The initial project of which this book is one of the outcomes was the original idea of Jean-Christophe Merle, who was the coordinator of the European network ‘Applied Global Justice’. We would like to thank him for the enormous amount of initiative, energy and good will he has proved to be capable of during the years the network has been active. The five universities (Graz, Louvain, Saarbrücken, Tilburg, Zürich), two national research centers (the French National Centre for Scientific Research—CNRS; the Spanish National Research Council—CSIC) and the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) that were part of this network have also greatly contributed to the success of our networking activities. Thanks, in particular, to the coordinators of the network at each of those institutions: Peter Koller in Graz, Philippe Coppens in Louvain, Jean-Christophe Merle in Saarbrücken, Paul Cobben in Tilburg, Urs Marti in Zürich and Peter Burgess in Oslo.
We would also like to thank, more particularly, the three institutions and their representatives who generously accepted to host the three conferences that are here published. In Graz, Peter Koller has proved to be, with his legendary commitment to the language of rights and justice, a very helpful and dynamic host. In Oxford, Alexis Tadié, as head of the Maison française and of the CNRS research team, did more than his best to allow for fruitful European cooperation; he held the conference in connection with the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University, for which the support of Mark Philp, then head of the Department, is to be highly thanked. In Madrid, José María González and Francisco Colom, the heads of the Institute of Philosophy of CSIC, have been extremely welcoming and contributed to a very stimulating conference.
Without the European Union, this cooperative network would not have existed, and the researchers that worked together for several years would most likely never have met; many other still on-going cooperations would, therefore, not have been made possible either. For their support, both organizational and financial, we would like to thank the members of the commission and of the European administrative staff, and, in particular, Mr. Marx, who was responsible for a stimulating mid-term review in Oxford and a whole set of recommendations for deepening our cooperation and allowing our works to reach a wider audience. We hope this publication can contribute to the spreading of the results of our reflections and debates.
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Foisneau, L., Hiebaum, C., Velasco, J.C. (2013). Introduction. In: Merle, JC. (eds) Spheres of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_2
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