Justice and Foreign Policy - Blake, Michael

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Résumé :
This book is an argument about the moral foundations of foreign policy. It argues that a liberal state can insist upon the universal reach of liberal ideas, while still distinguishing between what is owed to citizens and what is owed to foreign citizens. This liberalism includes a concern for liberal toleration, which is intended to defend the proposition that a liberal state can work for democratization and liberalism abroad, without being intolerant or illiberal in doing so. What constraints there are on foreign policy emerge not from the need to tolerate undemocratic regimes, but from the prudential reason that there are few effective and proportional means by which such regimes might be liberalized. It also argues that international inequality is wrong only when and to the extent this inequality can be shown to undermine the democratic self-rule of a society. Global poverty and underdevelopment is wrong for reasons quite unlike the reasons given to condemn domestic inequality. These facts are combined to give an attractive and coherent picture of how the foreign policy of a liberal state might be morally evaluated....

Biographie:
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In this marvellous book, Michael Blake defends a new approach to foreign policy in a liberal state. He forcefully argues that liberal states ought to act to promote their values around the world, interveningwhere prudent and effectivein favour of democracy in illiberal societies. While Blake denies that liberal states are obliged to extend foreigners the very same distributive entitlements they grant their own citizens, he claims that wealthy countries must act to remedy severe poverty and to protect democratic self-determination abroad. Along the way, he develops a profound account of liberal justice, based in respect for individual autonomy and the justification of coercive state power. Blakes work represents a major advance in our thinking about justice and international affairs. Professor Anna Stilz, Princeton University In a time of disillusion-with liberal internationalism, intervention, and indeed with liberalism itself-a young philosopher, Michael Blake, has offered a bracing, rigorous and highly realistic account of how we could begin to believe in a liberal foreign policy again, one which unashamedly promotes autonomy, freedom and justice while avoiding hubris, militarism and self-delusion. This is an important book, modest and likeable in the way it makes its arguments, yet hugely ambitious in its desire to restore faith in the liberal democratic cause. Professor Michael Ignatieff, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University In Justice and Foreign Policy, Michael Blake exhibits the insight and clarity for which he is rightly prized. This impressive book, which is a model of how to do philosophy that is at once theoretically deep and practically significant, is sure to cement Blake's standing as among the best, most important political philosophers writing today. Professor Christopher Heath Wellman, Washington University in St. Louis