All philosophical labels are problematic, but statist is perhaps more problematic than most. Why should anyone put states at the heart of their thinking about global justice? It is a philosophical commonplace that theories of justice that have stood the test of time are, at their heart, interpretations of a common ideal: that of the moral equality of persons (Dworkin, 1987, 2000; Sen, 1992). Those of us who care about this ideal have good reason to examine how the notion of equality of persons might be understood at the global level, rather than simply within the confines of a territorial state. Why, then, would anyone focus on states – those arbitrary, bureaucratic and frequently violent political bodies – rather than directly on persons? Is a statist view not silly at best, and morally perverse at worst?
This chapter will show how the statist viewpoint can defend itself against natural criticisms such as these. It will not attempt to offer a dispositive defence of the statist view as superior to its opponents, real or potential; such a task would require more space than is available here. This chapter will, instead, try to do something comparatively more modest: it will define what constitutes a statist view of global distributive justice, and offer some reasons to think that such a view is capable of presenting itself as a reasonable and attractive view of global politics. Far from being immediately ruled out by a global ideal of moral equality, it is instead a particular interpretation of that ideal – one on which people who share liability to a common state owe each other particular duties of justice, precisely because the equality of persons would command those particular duties be applied in that context. If there is a primary thesis to this chapter, it is this: that the statist view is, rightly understood, a particular vision of what the global equality of persons entails. It is not incompatible with the equality of persons, but one particular vision of what that equality would demand. A secondary thesis, though, would call the entire notion of statism into question. Dividing the world of theorists into statists and cosmopolitans only makes sense in a particular argumentative context, in which philosophers are primarily interested in whether or not the egalitarian distributive norms developed within the domestic context hold equal sway within the global context. Increasingly, I think, we are beginning to ask more complex questions than this one; and, accordingly, we may require more fine-grained philosophical taxonomies than those offered by labels such as statist.
I will make this case in three parts. The first will offer a preliminary definition of statism, and make some initial remarks about what that label entails. The second will discuss several dilemmas with which any statist will have to come to terms, along with some difficulties common to all statist views. The final section will discuss three prominent forms of statism – those views that begin with, respectively, community, cooperation and coercion – and will provide some ideas about difficulties encountered by these forms of statism.
We might begin, then, by examining the concept of statism itself. What marks out a view of global justice generally – and of global distributive justice in particular – as a statist view? There is, to my knowledge, no canonical definition of statism; there is no particular text nor thinker who can be put forward as the founder of statism, nor one who has defined its boundaries. What there is, instead, is a broad agreement as to who can be categorized as a statist about distributive justice. The definition I favour is one that begins with the question of those individuals over whom comparative principles of distributive justice hold sway. Theorists of justice, after all, must decide at the outset about the boundaries of the group within which comparative principles of distributive justice will have normative force; Arash Abizadeh (2007) calls this the scope of distributive justice, while A. J. Julius (2008) simply calls it ‘the justice relationship’. If this is taken as our first question, then a statist is properly defined as someone for whom the most stringent norms of distributive justice are restricted in their application to fellow members of a territorial state. This is compatible, of course, with some other duties – often, but not always, focusing on absolute well-being, rather than on relative distributive shares – holding in the global context (see Blake, 2013b). The key, though, is that the statist reserves the most powerful – and, in general, egalitarian – duties for use in the domestic context. In contrast, those views understood as cosmopolitan, in the context of global distributive justice, insist that the most powerful duties – understood, again, in terms of some duty towards equalization in some particular space – must be applicable at the global level.
We can take this, then, as a rough definition of a statist, for purposes of our discussion: a statist is someone for whom the most stringent comparative duties of distributive justice must be applied within the state, rather than at the global or international level. There are, I think, several things that might be noticed right away. The first is that the statist view is associativist; it argues that some particular form of association is a prerequisite for the application of the norms of egalitarian distributive justice (see Gilabert, 2012). Not all associativists are statists, in the sense discussed here; some figures have used associativist ideas to ground powerful global duties of distribution (see, in particular, Beitz, 1979; Pogge, 1989, 2002; Moellendorf, 2009). Nor are all views understood as cosmopolitan, in the distributive sense, associativist; some theorists have pushed forcefully for the idea that no particular association is required before duties of distributive justice are applicable (see, in particular, Tan, 2004; Caney, 2006; Gilabert, 2012). All statist views, though, are associativist views, and the association they take to be most central for distributive purposes is that of fellow citizenship before the state.
A second thing to note, though, is that it is not always a simple matter to describe a particular view as statist or as cosmopolitan. There are, of course, views that are easily ascribed to one camp or another; a view like Thomas Nagel's (2005), on which there are no duties of justice towards non-citizens, clearly counts as statist, given its stark contrast between duties within the state and duties outside it. (It is, for that matter, possible to find a relatively pure cosmopolitan, in which all notions of local duties are morally suspect; see Nussbaum's (1994) discussion of the Greek cynics.) Most theorists, though, have more complex moral analyses, and include multiple theoretical stories, on which there may be both reasons to insist upon distributive principles within the state, and powerful distributive norms that must be applied transnationally. Simon Caney, for example, is generally understood as a cosmopolitan, but accepts the principle that distinct duties of distributive justice might apply only within the contours of the territorial state; these duties will be distinct from powerful norms of transnational justice, but for all that they will not be negligible (Caney, 2008). Mathias Risse (2012), in contrast, is often taken as a statist, but includes state-based duties of distributive justice held only between fellow citizens as compatible with global duties of redistribution that begin with territorial rights, the imposition of a global financial system, membership in the global order and, indeed, common humanity itself. I believe what this should tell us is that the simple vision of statism described above – in which a statist is one who places demanding duties of distributive justice at the state level, while the cosmopolitan does so at the global level – is increasingly an oversimplification of the true range of theoretical disagreement (Blake, 2013a). If we are to keep the label statist, and use it to discuss present theories, I think it is best to keep in mind that this label is best understood as a range conception; to the extent that a given view insists upon more demanding distributive duties in the local context than in the global one, that view is rightly understood as statist. In contrast with pregnancy, for example, it is possible to be just a little bit statist.
The third thing I would highlight about the label statist is that there is no inherent contradiction between the statist and the moral cosmopolitan. We must be careful with the use of the term cosmopolitan: on one construction – which I will call the distributive cosmopolitan view – it implies an explicit rejection of statism. On this vision, the most powerful egalitarian norms of distributive justice must apply at the global, rather than the local, level. Another version of cosmopolitanism, though, refers to moral norms, rather than to norms of distribution or institutional design. The moral cosmopolitan, on one influential definition, insists upon the idea that all people matter; that only people (rather than collectives, or institutions) matter directly; and that people should be the focus of attention for everyone (Sangiovanni, 2007; see also Pogge, 1992). This definition, though, is not incompatible with a view that those who share liability to the state may have distinct duties towards one another. Indeed, the core of the moral cosmopolitan ideal is that like cases must be treated as like; a moral cosmopolitan must, on pain of absurdity, admit that the individual to whom I have made a promise must be treated by me as unlike the individual to whom I have not made a promise. Saying this, though, acknowledges that the specific things we have done to one another can make a difference in what we owe to one another. This is not hostile to moral equality; it is, instead, what it means to respect that equality in practice. The one to whom I have made a promise has special rights to insist upon my compliance – rights not held by humanity generally – and this fact does not tell against the idea that people are alike in moral dignity. So, too, with the state, on the statist view. If there is something special that we do to one another when we share a state with them, then we have special duties to those individuals, ones not shared with humanity generally. To move beyond the distributive context: it is a grave injustice if a French citizen resident in France is not permitted to vote in French elections. It is not obviously unjust, though, for a resident of Seattle, with no legal relationship to the polity of France, to be so excluded. The cosmopolitan might disagree; the onus is on her, though, to explain why there is any moral reason here to think that such local duties are inherently unjust. But these local duties are not understood by the statist as denials of moral equality; they are instead, particular instantiations of what that ideal means. The statist, then, is likely to regard herself as entitled to use both the terms cosmopolitan and statist to apply to her own view, so long as the cosmopolitan here is understood in the moral sense. The cosmopolitan about distributive justice may regard her view as implied by her moral cosmopolitanism; the statist, though, may rightly understand her own view to be equally grounded in the equality of persons.
Particular (distributive) cosmopolitans have, of course, attempted to block this purported move, and so have sought exclusive rights to the legacy of moral cosmopolitanism. Thomas Pogge (2013) has suggested that moral cosmopolitanism would require direct political instantiation, with individual agents whose responsibility as political actors is to the globe, rather than to any particular society. Kok-Chor Tan (2013), in contrast, has argued that only a view that insists upon the equality of some particular good at the global level could count as cosmopolitan – and, on this view, no statist view could ever count as cosmopolitan, whether moral or otherwise. These arguments are, though, seemingly rather stipulative; they often depend upon unstated assumptions about the limits of possibility or the nature of moral equality – and the statist can speak back to each. A statist might think that a world in which there is no global government, but instead a loose federation of just democracies, would provide all humans with what moral cosmopolitanism demands. Pogge's response to this seems simply to assert that no such beast would be possible. Tan's view, similarly, seems simply to assert that there must be some defeasible link between moral equality and equality of some particular good; this linkage, though, will appear wrong to those of us who think that the space between moral equality and equality of stuff must be argued for. Other lines might be adduced, of course, but I am inclined to think they would not fare much better. My conclusion, then, is that statism is entitled to regard itself as a particular vision of the equality of persons: the idea that individuals owe especially strong duties of distributive justice to all and only their fellow citizens may or may not be right, but it cannot be rejected simply by pointing to the equality of persons. Those who want to dismiss statism, then, will have to do more than simply compare it with cosmopolitanism.
The final thing I want to notice about statism is the simple fact that this term arises in a particular context, at a particular time. I mean to highlight, here, not that the term arises in a world in which there are states, although that much is true; it would be difficult to be a statist before the emergence of the state system. I mean, instead, to note that the term arises in a context in which there was a central research question guiding much of our philosophical argumentation: namely, do the norms of distributive justice as we understand them apply in the global context? If this is our question, then it makes sense to divide theorists into two groups: those who say yes are termed cosmopolitan, and those who say no are termed statist. The problem, though, is that this is not the only question we might have asked to guide our research. The question is, in particular, rather limited in how it conceives of even domestic justice; alternative perspectives on distributive justice, such as the libertarian, are not even possible to conceive of in terms such as cosmopolitan or statist. What, after all, would it mean for a libertarian to be a statist? Debates on global distributive justice began largely with the question of whether Rawls's principles of distributive justice could be scaled up to the globe, and libertarian views were simply ruled off the table (Hassoun, 2014, is a welcome exception to this). More centrally, though, it seems now as if many figures in global justice are arguing for distinct forms of duties at the global and domestic levels, so that there can be duties of global justice that are not simply the scaled version of the domestic duties, but which are significant and powerful sources of normativity. Mathias Risse (2012), as discussed above, identifies several distinct grounds of distributive justice, many of which work at the global and transnational levels; he refers to this as ‘pluralist internationalism’, which explicitly implies a rejection of the statist-versus-cosmopolitan distinction. Helena de Bres (2012), similarly, calls for pluralism about global justice, rejecting both the statist privileging of the state, and the cosmopolitan refusal to take the state seriously as a source of moral duty. The term statist, in sum, may now be the product of a debate whose time is rapidly departing. In this respect, I think the term is a bit like the label communitarian, as used in a previous generation of theorizing. A communitarian, we might think, is someone who – in that previous decade – emphasized the moral importance of culture, the local community and the unchosen ties of place and language. A liberal, in contrast, was someone who emphasized legal and moral equality before the state. Our reaction now, of course, is to insist that a valid analysis of political morality must include both of these. Few of us who write political philosophy now think that the concerns of the communitarians, or of their opponents, can be safely ignored. We want, instead, something that includes both equality and community. So too, I think, with statism. Increasingly, I think we are inclined to demand that a valid theory of global political justice must include both global duties of justice and particular duties that begin within the context of the state.
We may, then, have arrived at the doorstep of what might be called a post-statist view of global distributive justice. I do not think, though, that we are entirely there yet, and, for the purposes of this chapter, I will continue to use statist in the manner discussed above – to refer, that is, to those theories of global distributive justice that make the most powerful norms of distributive justice applicable only within the context of the state. Even if my worries about the term are true, after all, statism might continue to be a useful taxonomic shorthand for a particular sort of tendency within thinking about global justice. So: let's imagine that a statist view can be identified. What must the holder of such a view come to terms with, in order to vindicate – or, more minimally, explain – her view, and its appeal?
So: we may take statism as involving the claim that the most powerful and most egalitarian duties of distributive justice will be found within the context of the domestic state; these duties are distinct from whatever duties might be found within other forms of association, or between people considered simply as human beings. What, then, must a statist explain, in order to fully explicate her view?
In this section, I will examine three such questions and indicate three broad corresponding categories of criticism, each of which must be dealt with for the statist to explain how her view succeeds. Each question asks the statist to explain her view of the international realm. The first is perhaps rarely asked explicitly, but is enormously significant: are states, as we know them, inevitable? What I mean by this question is that a full description of the statist project must explain whether the existence of the state system itself is a proper subject of normative theorizing. Many theorists, after all, would regard the issue of what sorts of institution there ought to be as the first, and most important, question of global political philosophy. Institutional cosmopolitans, for instance, might defend the proposition that some forms of global government, mirroring to a greater or lesser degree the attributes of a territorial state, ought to be brought into existence for justice to be possible at the global level (see Cabrera, 2005; see also Ronzoni, 2009). Is the statist, to put it bluntly, committed to the eternal presence of states?
There are, of course, different answers to these questions, and different statists will find different answers appealing. Some theorists will regard states as inevitable, and morally necessary. Anna Stilz (2011), for instance, argues that a state is required for the abstract moral rights of Kantian politics to be given lived form and particular content. Mathias Risse (2012), in contrast, simply notes the absence of any viable alternative to the territorial state, and the enormous risks we would take by innovating in the absence of a clear vision. Other statists, though, are more open in principle to the possibility that the state system itself might eventually be utterly transformed; they regard their acceptance of the state system as reflecting the need for political guidance in our present circumstances, not a demand that circumstances such as these continue forever (Rawls, 1999; James 2005; Blake, 2013b). Neither answer is obviously ruled out by the statist vision, nor by liberalism itself; nonetheless, there are potential costs that are invoked by this insistence on the continued existence of states, as I will shortly discuss.
The second question to be asked involves the nature of agency in the transnational world. This question is perhaps more difficult to get a precise handle on – but one way of doing so is to ask whether global institutions, in the forms in which they exist right now, ought to be considered as political agents in their own right, or as something else. Think, for instance, of a global hegemonic superpower that simply sets the terms of trade for others, but which creates a nominally independent treaty body through which this task is accomplished. Is that treaty body a political agent, to which duties of justice apply, or is it simply the letterhead on which the superpower writes the rules that other societies must follow? Which way we answer, of course, may make a difference as to what moral conclusions follow. We would not, for example, think that the world described here is just in either case – but why it is unjust would be rather different in the two cases, and the appropriate agent to which principles of justice apply would be different as well. Some statists regard states as the primary agents of international politics, to the exclusion of most other forms of agency (Rawls, 1999; Freeman, 2006a; Blake, 2013b). Other statists are willing to accept a plurality of agents, but regard the state as having unique and central importance (Valentini, 2011; Risse, 2012). A statist can, in other words, be more or less open to the possibility that nonstate agents genuinely exist as agents to which principles of justice can directly apply. Taking this possibility seriously, of course, would require a fundamental change in the methods and questions of political philosophy; we would have reason to ask about how justice constrains not only explicitly political bodies like states, but also complex forms of association such as corporations and NGOs. A statist is not precluded from asking these questions; her commitment is to the idea that the state is a central form of human association – not that it is the only relevant one.
The third question I want to ask is the most important of all: why do states matter, in the manner statists assume? Again, it is clear that not all statists will have the same story about why states matter; one can be a statist while still disagreeing with other statists about what is special about the territorial state. The important thing, though, is that the statist is able to explain why the state matters, and why those who share liability to that state have distinct duties of distributive justice. This question is important enough that I will give it its own section, below. For the moment, I want to note something else about this question: those opposed to statism may simply reject the bare possibility of any statist story being morally persuasive. It is open to those who are hostile to the possibility of shared citizenship's being relevant to distributive justice to simply reject all such stories at the outset.
This is, perhaps, a good point at which to shift gear, and examine some common difficulties with statist arguments. I will here discuss only three difficulties, each of which corresponds with the questions discussed above. These difficulties are charges that statism is inevitably conservative, in an objectionable way; that it is descriptively inaccurate for the world in which we live; and that it is morally perverse. These arguments are not, of course, exclusive – the borders between them are somewhat porous – but they represent ideal types of common charges against which a statist must defend herself.
We can start with the idea of conservatism. As discussed above, the statist must have some story about why we have no need to challenge the division of the world's population into sovereign and independent states, of wildly varying power, size and population. Some statists will regard the state as a necessary part of any legitimate system of governance; others will simply accept that it is part of our world, and that theories that abstract away from that fact will be less useful than those that do not. It is open to the statist's opponent, though, to simply reject the thought that either of these is sufficient to justify the statist reliance upon the continued existence of states. Some theorists, then, will simply regard the statist as having begged the most important questions about global justice, by assuming a world in which justice could not possibly hold sway (Cabrera, 2005; see also Held, 2010). The statist, of course, can simply rely on the reasons she has chosen to assume the continued existence of the state; but at some point it seems likely that we ought to regard the debate between the statist and her opponent as relying on competing visions of the purposes of political theory, or competing visions of what is attainable in the realm of practical politics, or both (Blake, 2012). The charge here, though, is one the statist must find a way to address: why is it necessary for our theorizing to begin with states, when we might instead decide whether or not we even want such creatures to exist?
The second broad criticism of statism begins with the second question discussed above – that of international agency. Many statists believe that nonstate institutions in the world right now are, in Samuel Freeman's words, ‘secondary’ institutions, whose powers and acts are rightly attributed to states (Freeman, 2006b; see also Blake, 2013b). If our first criticism argued that the state focus reveals a lack of imagination, the second criticism argues that this story ignores the reality of the world in which we are now situated. Allen Buchanan (2000) captures this thought nicely, describing Rawls's statist vision in The Law of Peoples as a set of rules for a vanished Westphalian world. Others, such as Josh Cohen and Charles Sabel (2006), have broadened this analysis, to describe the ways in which much of the content of domestic law is influenced by (and in some cases utterly determined by) transnational deliberative bodies (see also Julius, 2008). If the world right now contains rulemaking bodies at both the domestic and international levels, goes this argument, then it is simply wrong to think that there is something special about the state that licenses distributive duties only between residents of that state. This is, again, a powerful worry about the statist vision. It is not, of course, a dispositive disproof of statism itself. Statists can say that their opponents here have perhaps overestimated the power and independence of transnational bodies; even the United Nations, the most nominally independent and powerful transnational entity, depends upon states for its funding, and grants veto rights to those states that were victorious during the Second World War. In light of facts like these, it is open to the statist to argue that the independence of transnational bodies has been rather exaggerated. The United Nations, after all, has no independent executive power, nor its own military, nor even its own financial resources, except insofar as states provide (Blake, 2013b). All this, though, points to one central truth about the dispute between statists and their opponents: much of this debate will turn upon empirical political science, and so will depend upon the contributions of empirical political scientists. The statist must, if it turns out that the world is fundamentally unlike what she thinks it is, adjust her view. Her only consolation, of course, is that the same must be true for her opponent. It is worth noting, finally, that these two criticisms are strikingly similar: both involve the idea that the statist has fundamentally misread the set of possibilities open to us, by misreading what we might do together, or by misreading what we have – at the global level – already built together. They might be answered together by the statist, as well, either by insisting that we have moral reason to privilege a world of states, or that the world we have built is perhaps more state-focused than the cosmopolitan sometimes supposes.
The third broad category of objection to statism is the most basic; namely, the idea that there is a deep perversity in the attempt to ground the most powerful norms of distributive justice in arbitrary facts such as nationality and shared citizenship. Many theorists have sought to reject statism even before a justification for the moral importance of the state could be brought forward, by arguing against any possible justification. Simon Caney (2006), for example, has argued that any plausible theory of justice must be ‘human-centered’; it must not allow the course of human lives to be determined by arbitrary forms of human relationship (see also Gilabert, 2012). More recently, Kok-Chor Tan (2012) argued that the egalitarian impulse ought to be applied to all forms of human institution, and that any form of human institution that transforms human difference into human disadvantage is presumptively wrong. Views such as these would, in distinct ways, argue that we need not even ask the question about what the state is; we need only see that the world as a whole has winners and losers, and that the distribution of these is not made in accordance with any defensible norms of justice. The statist can, of course, argue against these views; many statists would, indeed, regard views like Caney's and Tan's as simply relying upon an unpromising notion of why (and when) inequality matters (Blake and Risse, 2008). The fact remains, though, that this objection must be addressed, and addressed by all statists.
These three worries about statism, then, are standing difficulties with the statist vision. They will form the backdrop of many more specific worries about particular forms of statism. My own view is that the statist project is capable of defending itself against these charges; I have given some reason for thinking that this defence is possible. What I want to do now is examine some more specific forms of statism, to see how particular statists have developed their methodologies.
The third question asked above – what, exactly, is so special about the state? – is one that has proven to be an essential part of any statist view. The statist owes us an account of what it is about the state that allows these demanding norms of distributive justice to be ascribed within, but not without, that state's jurisdictional limits. There are, of course, any number of possible answers; I will focus here only on three particularly influential ones. We can call these, respectively, the argument from community, the argument from cooperation and the argument from coercion. These are not, it should be noted, entirely distinct from one another; an advocate of one argument may well be attracted to the others, and some theorists may not fit neatly within any particular category. Nevertheless, these forms of argument seem to describe three important forms of justification for the statist project, and the rest of this chapter will focus on how these arguments work – and on how they might be challenged.
We can begin with the argument from community. The argument here begins with some thought that abstract liberalism – understood in the universalist terms its proponents often employ – is simply too abstract and bloodless a vessel on which to rest the institutions and duties that are required for the adequate protection of human lives. This is, of course, susceptible to being interpreted in different ways. Some theorists, like David Miller, have argued that the particular moral vocabulary and traditions of a particular community must be supported and defended from within that community; accordingly, it is morally right that this community's traditions be made the subject of duties of support and allegiance not applicable to humanity generally (Miller, 1995, 2008). This particularism can be phrased in terms of the development of a particular form of moral language and moral community, as it is both in Miller's work and that of Michael Walzer (Walzer, 1986). Other forms of particularism, though, might begin instead from the simple need for a community to gain adherents to its particular projects and local rules. Anna Stilz (2011), as discussed above, argues that the state must be the subject of particular duties held only by members, given the need in the modern state for particularistic affiliation with that state for it to flourish. These ideas, of course, are often part of a wider project, that of the nationalist rejection of abstract liberalism (Taylor, 1989; Tamir, 1993), but they can also serve to ground a rejection of the distributive cosmopolitan position, as they do in both Stilz and Miller. In both cases, the argument comes down to the legitimacy of particularistic duty, and the inadequacy of cosmopolitan duty to provide what is needed for politics as a lived experience to continue and flourish over time.
The argument from community is susceptible to several criticisms. Some of these echo what has been said above: the moral cosmopolitan who is not associativist, in particular, is likely to simply reject the thought that particularist attachments are all that morally fundamental. More broadly, though, these tendencies might be rejected by a liberal who is convinced that the link between the state and the community is drawn rather closer in the statist's theory than it is in reality. It is, after all, rarely true that the borders of a state link up neatly with the borders of a discursive community; most existing states contain plural communities of discourse within themselves, and the idea of the nation-state is an abstraction more than an empirical truth (Kymlicka, 1995). Why, then, should we think that we have reason to favour our own fellow citizens, in virtue of these supposed obligations to support the members of our own discursive communities? The statist whose statism begins with community can reply to these worries, of course – it is, after all, enormously difficult to run a democratic society unless some forms of linguistic or cultural practice are held in common (Song, 2012). The argument, though, continues. The relationship between the felt communities of language and culture, on the one hand, and the legal community of the state, on the other, is a vexed one, and both statists and their opponents have had occasion to examine this relationship in recent years.
The argument from community is susceptible to being understood as an argument for the legitimacy of partiality – although many of its proponents would instead regard it as circumscribing the boundaries within which impartiality has moral weight (Miller, 1995). The next two arguments, though, are not even capable of being understood as arguments for partiality; they are, instead, arguments that the best notion of impartiality includes particular (and particularly demanding) duties of justice within the state. The argument from community, that is, emphasizes duties of justice as special duties, more powerful than any universal duties we might insist upon between humans. The arguments from cooperation and from coercion are subtly different; they argue that particular duties of justice are, in fact, the form taken by universal duties of justice within particular contexts. The difference, roughly, is that between a permissible favouritism, and a complex and contextual analysis of what the absence of favouritism would demand.
We can start, then, by looking at the argument from cooperation. The idea that animates this vision of statism is that the state itself is not an entity, but a practice; it is something created by, and deployed by, particular individuals, who build that state together and live within the legal framework it provides. These individuals have duties towards one another to use that framework in a manner that respects the rights of the other cooperating individuals in the process of state-building and state-using. This idea is often developed with reference to the idea of reciprocity: those who share the burden of creating and sustaining a state have obligations to their fellow creators and sustainers that they do not have to other individuals. This idea can be cashed out by noticing that the state purports to act in the name of the individuals it constrains, and so must provide them with the particular forms of equality required for equal control of that process (Nagel, 2005; see also Blake, 2001; Freeman, 2006a). It might, instead, focus on the broad idea that the state as an ongoing process requires individuals to be able to reciprocally accept both the burdens and benefits it requires, while still understanding themselves as moral equals (Sangiovanni, 2007). What is key to these visions is that the state is a distinct kind of thing in the world, one that represents a sort of relationship more than simply an agent; but only those relationships that can be understood as respectful of the freedom and equality of persons, though, can be justified. This process of justification, finally, entails certain demands for egalitarianism in distribution. Reciprocal justification, after all, is likely impossible under circumstances in which some individuals are able to simply dictate terms of reciprocal interaction to others.
This last idea begins the criticism of this variant of statism; it is, after all, entirely true that there are forms of political institution at the transnational level, and these institutions seem to impose rules on agents in a manner markedly similar to that of the domestic state (see Pogge, 1989, 2002; Cohen and Sabel, 2006; Julius, 2008; Moellendorf, 2009). Why, then, can we not simply say that duties of reciprocity apply globally, as well as locally? The associativist cosmopolitan, in particular, would simply regard the statist here as ignoring empirical reality; rules and practices with impact upon well-being are found at the transnational level as well as at the local level, and both kinds would seem to give rise to demands of reciprocity. The statist has rejoinders to this worry, of course; the statist might simply deny that the forms of relationship found at the international level are, in fact, the sort that could give rise to duties of distributive justice between individuals. Mathias Risse (2006), for instance, has argued that such institutions are distinct from domestic legal institutions, in that the latter are directly and pervasively involved in the shaping of individual life-chances, in a manner that gives rise to particular demands for distributive justice between those individuals. The statist can, then, simply insist that the state continues to have a distinct role in the lives of its citizens, and that it is this distinct role – rather than the broad category of ‘cooperation’ itself – that gives rise to the need for justification through reciprocity. The argument, though, continues, and the statist must provide a justification for why the state is genuinely unlike the more complex institutions of transnational governance that now exist.
The final justification for statism we will consider is closely allied to the second, but emphasizes the nature of the domestic state as coercive. On this analysis, what is morally central about the state is not simply that it is the product of shared agency, but that it is capable of enforcing its commands with coercive force. This coercive force stands in need of justification to those individuals over whom that coercion is exercised; and this justification, in turn, is where the familiar norms of distributive justice might be shown to originate. The idea, to put it in its most simple terms, is that coercion is a pro tanto moral wrong, and it must be either eliminated or shown to be justifiable. What would make state coercion justifiable, though, entails that those coerced must have some particular guarantees of equality – including, notably, some guarantees that the property law of that state would be justifiable to individuals conceived of as free and equal, and that those subject to the law must have some reasonably egalitarian share of power to make that law. This means, however, that the domestic state might be understood as the context within which the norms of distributive justice have normative force; the coercion of the state is the prerequisite for specifically distributive justice to have normative force (Blake, 2001; Ronzoni, 2009; Risse, 2012).
This justification faces immediate difficulties, the most vexing of which is the simple fact that the international realm is rife with coercion as well (Arneson, 2009). Some scholars have defended this idea by focusing on the role of international borders in coercively shaping life-chances (Abizadeh, 2008). Others have focused on the role of the international treaties constituting the backdrop to international trade (Cavallero, 2010). If coercion is the sine qua non of distributive justice, the statist must come to grips with the fact that there is more of it about than we might think. Some theorists have responded to these facts by concluding that coercion cannot be quite as central as we might have thought (Sangiovanni, 2007; Caney, 2008). Others – notably Laura Valentini (2011) – have maintained the moral concern with coercion, but asserted that this concern entails global distributive duties, instead of local ones. In face of these worries, of course, the statist is capable of reasserting her statist conclusions. Some theorists have chosen to accept that there is global coercion, while denying that the coercion is of the sort that might be justified with reference to distributive shares. Coercion, after all, must be justified or eliminated, on the view in question; it is always open to the statist to choose the latter disjunct and argue that the sorts of coercive regime found at the global level ought generally to be eliminated (Blake, 2013b; see also Ronzoni, 2009). This fact means, though, that the sorts of duties one might expect the statist to endorse at the global level will now have to be considerably more complex and demanding than the label statism at first suggests. The statist is able to assert that specifically egalitarian duties of distributive justice hold sway only between citizens of the same state; she is not, however, able to conclude that the international realm is a realm without significant duties, given the degree to which powerful states coerce and threaten more marginal states with impunity. Statism, in the end, might blossom out into a set of duties rather more demanding than the statist might have expected.
It is expected, at the end of this sort of chapter, that some broad sense of what the future might look like will be offered – or, more modestly, what the future of theory might potentially involve. I will end this chapter with two brief ideas, one of which has already been discussed. This idea is that statism itself is a label that is increasingly difficult to regard as philosophically significant. It continues to have some meaning, I think, when it is used to describe a counterpoint to the distributive cosmopolitan; the latter want egalitarian distribution of some good thing at the global level, where the statists do not. Increasingly, though, I think we are facing a world of theory in which the moral relevance of the state – and of international institutions, and of common humanity – are not regarded as susceptible to this sort of yes-or-no analysis. We will, I think, continue to disagree with one another about what we owe to the distant poor – but we will be unlikely to use these simple terms to describe what it is about which we disagree.
The second note with which I would end is more speculative: the state itself is, I think, under some pressure in the current world. I believe it is common to overemphasize the degree to which the state has withered away; those who believe that global government is already here are, to my thinking, wildly overstating the case. Nevertheless, it is possible that experimentation and alteration of political forms may soon render statism a term without a living referent. For the immediate future, though, I believe states – and statists – will continue to exist. In the long run, I am less confident that either is likely to flourish.