Internationalism

Abstract

In this chapter I present a discourse theory of international justice.¹ Such a theory — which I call ‘discourse-theoretic Internationalism’ or ‘democratic Internationalism’ — represents an internationalist conception of global justice characterized both by intranational principles of justice that are valid only within all states and international principles of justice that are valid among all states.² Discourse-theoretic Internationalism adopts from Forst’s transnationalist conception of global justice the discourse-theoretic insight that the question about fundamentally just structures of justification precedes to the question about just distributions of holdings. In this way a discourse theory of global justice shifts the emphasis from asking directly what a just global distribution of holdings would require to first asking a different question, about the social, political, and economic conditions under which global distributive questions could be properly answered. But discourse-theoretic Internationalism also differs significantly from discourse-theoretic Transnationalism in that it aims more narrowly at specifying the inter- and intranational conditions that the global basic structure would have to fulfill in order to be considered fundamentally just. I argue that a fundamentally just global basic structure requires the establishment of fundamentally just structures of justification at both the inter- and intranational levels.