Social contract theory is a cynical, but possibly realistic, view of humanity without rules and people to enforce the rules. An example of a society in a state of nature can at times be observed when a society is plunged into chaos due a catastrophic event. This may occur in because of a war, such as happened in Rwanda, or by cause of a natural disaster, such as what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In both of these examples a segment of society devolved from a country in which the rule of law was practised to a community in a state of nature. Rules and laws were forgotten and brute force dictated who would survive. Unfortunately, without laws and rules, and people to enforce those laws and rules, society devolves into a state of nature. With rules in place, people feel protected against attack. In a state-of-nature society, the strongest would control others that are weak.
Society would have no rules or laws forbidding or discouraging unethical or immoral behaviour. People would be forced to be solely self-interested in order to survive and prone to fight over possession of scarce goods scarce because of the lack of commerce. Thus, the social contract can deliver society from a state of nature to a flourishing society in which even the weak can survive. The degree to which society protects the weak may vari; however, in our society, we agree to the contract and need the contract to ensure security for all.
The social contract is unwritten, and is inherited at birth. Therefore, power is understood in the context of a set of globalised relations of production demanding the transformation of the nation-state, and depends on the combination of material elements and ideas for acquiring legitimacy Cox and Jacobsen Cox explores the economic contradictions spurring change in power relations and guiding transitions towards a fairer world order, even if acknowledging that emancipation is not inevitable.
As Hutchings points out, the critical project connecting Linklater to Cox sets out to uncover all sorts of hegemonic interests feeding the world order as a first step to overcome global systems of exclusion and inequality. Ideal speech is the critical tool used in the reconstruction of political communities from local to global levels through open dialogue and non-coercive communication, a process whereby all affected by political decisions put forward their claims and justify them on the basis of rational and universally accepted principles of validity.
Thus, emancipation is conceived not with reference to an abstract universal idea but based on a process of open discussion about who can be excluded legitimately from specific political arrangements and what kinds of particularities gender, race, language entitle people to special sets of rights.
For Linklater, the historical development of citizenship attests to both the potential and the limitations of such a process of open discussion about rights — who is entitled to what in the context of the state system.
Citizenship has been the critical concept and set of practices permitting the enjoyment of universal rights inside a community freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, freedom of association , but also the protection of vulnerable minorities by granting them particular rights in order to avoid or mitigate the effects of discrimination.
On the other hand, however, citizenship has divided humanity into national groupings and has therefore been a barrier to the universal fulfilment of human freedom. According to Linklater then, emancipation demands global interactions guided by open, inclusive and non-coercive dialogue about the ties that bind communities together.
This also extends to our obligations to strangers and how fair it is to restrict outsiders from the enjoyment of rights granted to insiders. For Linklater, the answer lies in the potential for a more universal concept of citizenship, refashioned through open dialogue among those affected by the global processes that are changing the world.
These processes are issues like non-state forms of violence such as sexual violence and terrorism , forced migration, climate change and resource depletion. Therefore, critical theory can be seen as an instrument of the powerless to advance more equitable types of global relations.
More importantly for us, within IR theory it combats the traditional approaches, mainly liberalism and realism, and shines a light on how they feed the imbalances of an unjust global order by failing to question or critique their foundational claims. By admitting that immediate security needs press humans to set up bounded communities and to act according to national loyalties, Linklater recognises the limits to cosmopolitan politics.
At the same time however, he underlines that there is a growing awareness that global interconnectedness and vulnerabilities impose their consequences on how communities define themselves and live side by side with others. Linklater does not underestimate the historical movement towards the creation of bounded moral communities nation-states but also sees potential within the historical process to enhance the expansion of rights and duties beyond the state.
The fact that it has been possible for states in the modern international system to agree upon the protection of human rights and the political relevance of avoiding human wrongs is a sign of the relevance of these ideas. What unites critical theorists like Cox, Linklater and others, then, is a political inquiry with an explicit emancipatory purpose. It aims at uncovering the potential for a fairer system of global relations resulting from already existing principles, practices and communities that expands human rights and prevents harm to strangers.
Haman stares at the long night behind him when I surprise his absent gaze on the deck of the Blue Star ferry carrying us to the Greek port of Piraeus. Departing from Rhodes, the ferry had made its first stop at the island of Kos where dozens of refugees from the Syrian war lined up patiently for hours and eventually got a place on board.
Haman was one of them. After talking for hours about the war and his expectations for the future, it was clear to me that ferry on the Aegean Sea was a metaphor of a global community plagued with obstacles to human freedom but holding the resources for its fulfilment. After Kos though, I could not really tell anymore who was a tourist and who was a refugee, who was Greek or Athenian and who was neither — and it occurred to me why these categories had to matter at all.
The common human condition aboard the ferry would stand for the night, but the following morning tourists would continue their tranquil journey home while refugees would have to improvise their way across Europe, begging for hospitality. At the port of Piraeus, on that early morning of August , I said goodbye to Haman and wished him luck for the journey. It is Friday and he knows he must reach the Hungarian border before Tuesday or risk being trapped by the fence erected hastily in the previous days to block migrants on the Serbian side.
That was the last I heard from Haman. I stayed there for a while, looking at him blending into the crowd conveyed throughout Europe as a crisis of refugees and illegal migrants. This brief encounter with Haman and his story is a trigger for recalling how in recent years increasing numbers of people escaping persecution, war and famine have tried to reach safe havens like Europe. A critical perspective assumes that the security claims of refugees fleeing war-torn countries constitute a cosmopolitan responsibility for the whole of humankind, especially for those with the resources to address them.
It proceeds by critiquing security arrangements pleading exclusive loyalty to a bounded community and refusing refugees a number of cosmopolitan rights hospitality and refuge. Contrary to more traditional theories, critical theory does not see refugees as apart from the violence and inequality that produce them. In fact, it sets out to locate current waves of forced migration in the context of deeper economic and geopolitical structures producing harm and exclusion in a globalising world.
The state of these relations excludes the potential for human understanding and mutual recognition, as it has come about through the harmful globalisation of production and connected dynamics of nation-building, war and environmental degradation.
Therefore, a critical perspective inquires deeper into how global economic forces, and related hierarchies of power, become complicit in creating the chaos and insecurity forcing people to leave their homes in different parts of the world. This entails looking in particular to how the dynamics of global capitalism are producing failed states throughout Africa and the Middle East, not just as an unintended misfortune but as part of how power itself works.
The main challenge for critical theory then is to connect theory to practice, to be able to set up a theoretical lens that results in a real-world transformative outcome. For critical theory today, politics, knowledge and global orders are for people like Haman and should serve the purpose of freeing them from unnecessary harm and unfair or unbalanced globalised interactions. Critical theory, more than other approaches, promises to go deeper in understanding why refugees have to leave their homes.
This entails producing knowledge about direct reasons war in Syria or elsewhere but also about global structures of power and harm as well as the agents complicit in it broader geopolitical interests, the workings of the global economy, climate change and its effects over the lives of communities. Cosmopolitan in character, critical theory refuses to see states as bounded moral communities by nature and instead finds in them the potential to protect strangers in need and include them in a broader notion of national interest.
A basic move is to distinguish which ones are and which are not compatible with cosmopolitan duties already enshrined in international law and upheld by many people and organisations in different societies.
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