Foreign Policy as Ethics: Towards a Re-evaluation of Values

Abstract

Globalization, whatever else it may mean and however thoroughgoing, involves increased levels of contact with the unfamiliar, the ‘foreign’. According to Jan Aart Scholte (2005, 20), rising globality is about a ‘growth of transplanetary and more particularly supraterritorial social relations’. These increased relations arguably breed more familiarity, making the ‘foreign’ appear less ‘foreign’ and thereby reducing the role for ‘foreign policy’ as such.¹ However, what I’m more interested in here is the idea that this rising contact with the unfamiliar has coincided with the end of the Cold War to incite discussion about precisely how we ought to relate to the foreign. In other words, foreign policy is engaging ethics, which Peter Singer (1994, 1) has argued are always a question of ‘ought’. While the issue may never have in fact gone away (see, for example, McElroy, 1992), since the 1990s we have seen a rising interest in the possibilities of ethics in foreign policy. As Gelb and Rosenthal (2003, 2) have observed,

Something quite important has happened in American foreign policymaking with little notice or digestion of its meaning. Morality, values, ethics, universal principles — the whole panoply of ideals in international affairs that were once almost the exclusive domain of preachers and scholars — have taken root in the hearts, or at least the minds, of the American foreign policy community.