Natural resources have been contested by force throughout history – and sometimes, it seems, with equivalent intellectual force throughout recent theory. Theorists battle over which principles correctly apply to natural resources, over how to understand their value, even over what the term ‘natural resources’ should rightly be understood to refer to. It is sometimes thought that this scholarly fight over resources is just a proxy war between those who favour ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ theorizing. However, ideal and non-ideal theorizing are not intrinsically opposed. The battle over natural resources, rather, at first appears more to be fought by methodological camps so antagonistic that they cannot even agree what the problem about natural resources should be taken to be.
On one side of this methodological battle, the central problem that theorists solve is one of distributive justice. From this perspective, natural resources currently yield a distribution of value that is unjust. On the other side of this battle, political theory should primarily focus on power. From that viewpoint, the problem with natural resources is that they currently yield a distribution of power that is dangerous. Partisans of the first view might tendentiously characterize the war as between ‘valuable’ and ‘valueless’ theory; from the other side, the contrast would be between ‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’ theory.
Yet, as we will see, that contrast gives too neat a description of the contest among philosophers. The current scholarly situation is in fact less like the Cold War, where two large and fundamentally opposed superpowers vied for supremacy. The Thirty Years War – with its chaotic clashes, its partial and ever-shifting alliances – is the more accurate comparator. ‘Theories of distributive justice’ and ‘theories of power’ define points on a spectrum, and actual theorists are spread across this spectrum according to how loyal they are to one side or the other.
Here we will survey the work of theorists across this spectrum, giving more attention to the ‘power’ end since the ‘distributive’ end is better-known among academic philosophers. Before beginning the survey, it is worth noting that the extremes on the spectrum fight on common ground. Just as Catholics and Protestants during the Thirty Years War at least shared a view on Jesus' divinity, so all Western theorists who write on resources share the heritage of Grotius, Locke and Pufendorf and the idea that in some sense the world's natural resources are naturally an asset for all of humanity. As Michael Blake and Mathias Risse put it: ‘Since the earth is simply there, with no one deserving credit for it, a plausible view on original ownership is that all humans have some sort of symmetrical claim to it’ (2009: 134).
However, as with Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth century, the shared doctrinal area here is modest. What Western theorists agree on is a negative premise: that no human being is (as was believed in pre-modern times) born with rights over any particular natural resources – so the ancient apologies for the divine right of kings over lands, such as those of the English political theorist Robert Filmer, are surd. Theorists also share a justificatory environment in which respectful positive principles recognizing the inherent political equality of all humans must be the starting point. The contest, which has been vigorous, is over what positive principles fill this area.1
At one end of the spectrum of theories of distributive justice we find the egalitarian theory of Hillel Steiner, who calls his redistributive mechanism the ‘Global Fund’:
The Global Fund is a mechanism for the global application of the Left Libertarian conception of distributive justice. As a form of luck egalitarianism, this conception confers upon each person an entitlement to an equal share of all natural resource values, since natural resources – broadly, geographical sites – are objects for the production of which no person is responsible. Owners of these sites, i.e. states, are liable to a 100% Global Fund tax on their unimproved value: that is, their gross market value minus the value of the improvements added to them by human effort.
Steiner's left libertarianism draws a hard line between choices (for which individuals are responsible) and natural resources (‘for the production of which no person is responsible’). Since no one is responsible for producing natural resources, all have equal rights to their value. The goal of redistribution by the Global Fund is then to ensure that all receive the value to which they are entitled.
David Miller, however, has challenged Steiner over his use of market values of resources within his left libertarian theory. Miller says that Steiner, by his own lights, should be concerned only with the ‘unimproved’ value of resources – not with their market values, which also reflect the choices (to invest, improve, etc.) that individuals have made with regard to those resources. Miller notes that it would be frightfully difficult to know what the unimproved value of resources actually is, but that, in any case, using market values as the metric for the distributandum must be unfair, since market values register both choices and circumstances (2007: 57–60). Steiner (2011b) has engaged Miller in this debate.
Joseph Mazor admits these difficulties, but looking more from the ‘power’ end of the spectrum argues that there are nevertheless particular advantages to taxing the market value of natural resources. There are many social goods for which egalitarian redistribution might be warranted, Mazor says, but redistributing the value of natural resources is less dangerous and costly than redistributing other goods. For a coercive authority to attempt to determine what natural endowments persons have, and what choices they have made, could be quite intrusive and expensive. By contrast, taxing the market value of holdings of natural resources is much less invasive (Mazor, 2009: 119–28; see also Mazor, 2010). And, as Paula Casal (2011) adds, resource taxes are less likely to disincentivize productive work than income taxes do – and since natural resources seem to many to be something like manna from heaven, taxes on them may be more willingly accepted.
In Steiner's fuller left libertarian theory of distributive justice, it is not only ‘geographical sites’ that are included among ‘natural resources’ in the sense of things for the production of which no person is responsible. Each individual's germ-line genetic information also counts as a natural resource in this sense: ‘natural resources’ are not only around us, but part of who we are. Accordingly, the value of each person's ‘natural endowment’ is also subject to the egalitarian norm and so taxation or supplementation as required (Steiner, 2004). Indeed, for Steiner, every ‘non-produced’ thing is, by definition, in the category called ‘natural resource’. Here we see the theory of distributive justice defining the object of theoretical concern so that it aligns with the concerns of the theory itself – the distributandum (‘natural resources’) is defined by this distributive theory's focus on the choice–circumstance divide.
Other theorists have also started with their favoured distributive theory and then attempted to expand the class of objects of theoretical concern in a way that bears on the distribution of natural resources (in a more ordinary sense). This was the path of reasoning of those who interpreted John Rawls's justice as fairness as being primarily concerned with rectifying advantages that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’. If ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ marks out the category of Rawlsian concern, then natural resources must fit within this category. Thus Charles Beitz, in the first edition of his seminal book Political Theory and International Relations (1979), argued in a Rawlsian mode that, just as Rawls saw personal natural endowments as arbitrary from a moral point of view in his domestic theory, so he should have seen national endowments of natural resources as arbitrary from a moral point of view in his international theory.
Beitz thus argued for a resource redistribution principle that (analogously to Rawls's difference principle) would allow inequalities in value of resources only to the extent that these were to the greatest benefit of those least advantaged by the inequality (1999/1979: 141). Brian Barry (1981, 1982) argued similarly, outside the Rawlsian framework. The fact that some states have more natural resources within their borders, Barry said, unjustly favours those states – especially since the borders themselves are often the relics of injustice. So a tax should be placed on resource extraction from the resource-favoured countries, and the revenues given to the resource-disfavoured countries, in order to achieve a distribution of advantages that is more just from an egalitarian perspective.
Rawls himself took a different position on the value of natural resources: that they have none, or, more specifically, that their value is not relevant to an international theory that aims to give an account of a justifiable distribution of advantages among nations (1999: 108–9, 116–17). Noting that resource-poor countries like Japan have done well, while resource-rich countries like Argentina have struggled, Rawls asserts that the wealth of a people turns on ‘their political culture and in the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that support the basic structure of their political and social institutions, as well as in the industriousness and cooperative talents of its members, all supported by their political virtues’ (1999: 108). Beitz's resource redistribution principle, therefore, aims to redistribute something that is, from the correct theoretical perspective, irrelevant. Thomas Pogge (1994) has argued energetically against Rawls on this point.
Rawls is often thought to be an exemplar of a theorist of distributive justice, on the leftward extreme of our spectrum of theories. But this is a mistake. Rawls himself tells us that the primary concern of his international theory is not distribution at all:
Two main ideas motivate the Law of Peoples. One is that the great evils of human history – unjust war and oppression, religious persecution and the denial of liberty of conscience, starvation and poverty, not to mention genocide and mass murder – follow from political injustice, with its own cruelty and callousness…The other main idea, obviously connected with the first, is that, once the gravest forms of political injustice are eliminated by following just (or at least decent) social policies and establishing just (or at least decent) basic institutions, these great evils will eventually disappear.
(1999: 6–7)
What Rawls is primarily concerned with, as he says here, are the distributions of power that are dangerous. Realizing just distributions of value is not, as this passage explains, an end in itself. Just distributions are, at most, merely a means to produce a better world – a world in which the great evils of abuse of power no longer occur.
Political scientists who study natural resources have gone even farther than Rawls's ‘no value’ position. Consider, for instance, this passage from Michael Ross's book The Oil Curse:
Since 1980, the developing world has become wealthier, more democratic, and more peaceful. Yet this is only true for countries without oil. The oil states – scattered across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia – are no wealthier, or more democratic or peaceful, than they were three decades ago. Some are worse off. From 1980 to 2006, per capita incomes fell 6 percent in Venezuela, 45 percent in Gabon, and 85 percent in Iraq. Many oil producers – like Algeria, Angola, Colombia, Nigeria, Sudan, and again, Iraq – have been scarred by decades of civil war…Today, the oil states are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats and more than twice as likely to have civil wars as the non-oil states. They are also more secretive, more financially volatile, and provide women with fewer economic and political opportunities.
(2012: 1–2)2
Far from giving unjust advantage that is ripe for redistribution, in our world some natural resources actually appear to have negative value because of the power they give to authoritarians, civil warriors, and so on. Some distributive theorists have acknowledged this point (Beitz, 1999: 206). Yet it leaves their treatment of natural resources in something of a bind.
Recall Miller's internal critique of Steiner: that it is difficult to ferret out the ‘unimproved’ value of natural resources within their market values – and that the theory cannot use market values because they incorporate a factor (choice) that the theory is not meant to be sensitive insofar as it is redistributive. Here, distributive theorists are in an even more difficult situation. It is difficult for them correctly to represent the value of natural resources in the world as it is, because the actual value of possessing resources turns on a factor (power) that theory is not meant to be sensitive to. So these theorists have two bad options. They must either ignore a part of the world – natural resources – that they feel intuitively must be valuable and so subject to redistribution. Or they must produce a redistributive theory that gives counterintuitive results, such as that the value of resources must be distributed away from poor, strife-torn but resource-rich countries and distributed to peaceful, wealthy resource-poor countries.
So far we have been surveying conflicts around theories like those of Steiner and Beitz, which say that an unjust distribution of resource value is the problem, so redistribution of resource value must be the solution. The distributive theories we have seen so far have been egalitarian, but of course there are internal battles within the distributive camp about which principle should be deployed for the distribution of resources. Casal (2011), for instance, advances a prioritarian principle.
These egalitarian and prioritarian theorists emphasize the normative importance of redistributing the value of resources among the states that currently control those resources. Another group of theorists instead emphasizes the values that justify leaving resources under the control of national groups.
Theorists who bring out the values that justify leaving resources under the control of nations include, for example, Rawls, who says that leaving resources under national stewardship promotes their effective management and conservation (1999: 8, 38–9). Another such theorist is Margaret Moore:
[There is] a connection between control over natural resources and the moral value of collective self-determination. On this view, collective control, in the form of jurisdictional authority over resources, is an important dimension of collective self-determination, particularly the cultural dimension of different rules regarding land. The idea here is that, if we assume reasonable pluralism about the good life, we might expect that different societies would favour different property regimes or different approaches to the treatment of land and potential resources…Control over natural resources is an important part of collective self-determination. If people lack this kind of control, then, to that extent, they lack robust forms of collective self-determination.
Avery Kolers (2009) goes further than Moore along this line, to say that what even counts as a ‘resource’ is a matter on which different groups will have different views. ‘Resource’ is for Kolers an agent-relative concept, and inhabitants of different ‘geospaces’ must be respected in their own interpretations of the value of their natural surroundings. This means also leaving these group agents with substantial control over what they see as the resources around them, the true value of which only they understand.
David Miller argues in favour of national control over resources on the ground that national communities have, through history, added to the value of the resources under their control. Nations do not, after all, merely benefit from resources by scooping up manna from heaven – their people labour to cultivate the land, redirect rivers, prospect for minerals. Moreover, national peoples very often form special attachments to features of the natural environment within which their communities have historically been in symbiotic relations, giving those features a deep symbolic significance (Miller, 2012). These kinds of attachments may go very deep into the identity of the group members, who may think of themselves as dwellers in a particular forest or hunters on a specific range or the inhabitants of some island (Miller, 2007).
Other theorists deploy related arguments to argue for significant ‘local’ control over natural resources. Cara Nine, for example, calls on a Lockean ‘desert-for-value-added’ argument in support of resource rights in collectives with demonstrable capacity to add value by establishing legitimate political authority within the geographical area in which they have historically been located (2008; 2012: ch. 6). Simmons (2001) takes a more individualistic Lockean approach, where the resource rights of groups are just a function of the consensual agglomeration of the rights of individuals who have legitimately appropriated resources themselves.
The theories mentioned that emphasize the value of national control have been subject to powerful contestation, notably by Anna Stilz (2009, 2011) and Chris Armstrong (2014, 2015). Readers interested in following through on those debates are invited to start with their rebuttals.
Instead of pursuing the ‘distributive’ debate further, we will take Locke as a pivot for the transition between the perspective on resources that is primarily distributive and the perspective that is primarily concerned with power. From the ‘power’ perspective, natural resources are important, because controlling them can boost the power either of those who already have more (hence their danger) or of those who currently have less (making them an instrument not of power, but of ‘counter-power’). Those who look at natural resources in this second way do not see principles for control over resources as expressing eternal truths about just distributions, but rather as principles for countering power in particular, often historically-specific contexts. The role of resources in what real people can do – and cannot do – to each other is what really matters.
From this perspective, Locke's own arguments about property rights in resources and ‘the common ownership of the earth’ were essentially counterpowerful. For Locke, who had to flee in fear for his life from the sovereign of his native England, the power that needed countering was that of a monarch who was claiming to be absolute. Locke was opposing the divine right of kings. In the Two Treatises of Government, he first counters the divine right thesis by arguing that even if God did give the whole world to Adam, this could not be a basis of absolute political power today because property rights cannot be that strong (Locke, 1988/1689: I, sections 41–43). Locke then argues that political power cannot be absolute today because, starting from common ownership of the earth, we can prove that in society no one's property can rightly be taken without the consent of the people or their representatives (1988/1689: II, section 140).
Locke's property arguments were influential in his day because they were counterpowerful. His was a philosophy to embolden the rising parliamentary forces to assert their rights against the high-handed monarchs. Locke's philosophy was then taken up by the American colonists, who fought their own battle against the British monarch's ‘absolute Despotism’ in the century following.3 It continues to inspire those who oppose excessive state power today as well.
More power-minded contemporary philosophers, such as Mathias Risse and Thomas Pogge, invoke ‘the common ownership of the earth’ much in the spirit of Locke – as a principle that should constrain powerful institutions, only, this time, nations considered as wholes. Accepting that nations should have primary control over their natural resources, they say, the common ownership of the earth requires that the international system should also work to meet the basic needs of all persons. For Risse, common ownership grounds a human right: the right of each person to have opportunities to meet his or her own basic needs (2012: 89–151).4 For Pogge, common ownership requires that nations should be forced to pay into a global fund whenever they extract natural resources, with that fund being used to meet the basic needs of the world's poor (1994; 2008: ch. 8; 2011).5 For both these philosophers, national control over resources need not be replaced – it needs to be constrained by a ‘common ownership’ principle so that the international system works for the good of the poor everywhere.
The values that these philosophers emphasize are weighty ones. Satisfying basic needs will indeed be a priority for any justifiable international system; this is not controversial. Moreover, ‘common ownership’ might well be a useful principle for guiding institutional design in some areas – especially for uninhabited regions such as the deep seabed and outer space, where ideas like ‘the common heritage of mankind’ already appear in treaties.6 The common ownership of the earth's atmosphere is also a promising starting point for property-based proposals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.7
Principles that countered power in centuries past, however, may not do so now. And principles that countered power within English-speaking countries may not do so when stretched over the earth. It all depends on the reality: on who has too much power and how the opposition can claw some away. ‘Common ownership of the earth’ may not be a counterpowerful principle for natural resources today; in fact, invoking it may be counterproductive. From the perspective of power, what is crucial is to attend to the world as it is now.
Between the Second World War and the end of the twentieth century, philosophers forgot the world – at least mainstream English-speaking philosophers did. With a few noble exceptions, there was very little sustained attention to issues affecting what was then called the ‘Third World’.8 Indeed, insofar as international issues were discussed by English-speaking philosophers at all, the discussions centred on Western preoccupations. Philosophical hawks scrutinized the confrontation with the Soviets; doves worried about human rights and the famines seen on television.
What no leading English-speaking philosopher theorized was the main narrative of most of humanity: the struggle of peoples to gain control over their own countries, and not least over their natural resources. The determination of peoples to control their own fates was, for most of the world, the most important political story of the twentieth century – much more important than the rise of human rights, more important even than the Cold War. Yet the great drama of the century hardly registered in Anglophone philosophy. For philosophers in America and other former British colonies, ‘victory over the empire’ was very old news. For the British, a sense of imperial loss kept eyes down and lips shut.
This is part of the ‘great forgetting’ of how recent the victories of popular sovereignty have been – and how aspirational this step away from the world of colonialism and absolute monarchs still remains for many peoples. One can hear both the pain of the battle and the yearning for popular sovereignty in the Namibian constitution of 1990:
We the people of Namibia – have finally emerged victorious in our struggle against colonialism, racism and apartheid; are determined to adopt a Constitution which expresses for ourselves and our children our resolve to cherish and to protect the gains of our long struggle; desire to promote amongst all of us the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Namibian nation among and in association with the nations of the world; will strive to achieve national reconciliation and to foster peace, unity and a common loyalty to a single state; committed to these principles, have resolved to constitute the Republic of Namibia as a sovereign, secular, democratic and unitary State securing to all our citizens justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.9
And also in the South African constitution of 1996:
We, the people of South Africa, Recognize the injustices of our past; Honor those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.
We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to: Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law; Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.10
To these two nations, which have so recently overcome the great afflictions of their past, one can add the anguished bravado of a third nation that has not. This is the Iraqi constitution of 2005.
We the people of Iraq, who have just risen from our stumble, and who are looking with confidence to the future through a republican, federal, democratic, pluralistic system, have resolved with the determination of our men, women, the elderly and youth, to respect the rules of law, to establish justice and equality, to cast aside the politics of aggression, and to tend to the concerns of women and their rights, and to the elderly and their concerns, and to children and their affairs and to spread a culture of diversity and defusing terrorism.11
The triumph of most peoples in the past century was winning sovereignty over their countries away from the powers that had oppressed them, and gaining control of the resources that those powers were so shamelessly taking.12 In this context – in our world as it is now – an attempt to attenuate peoples' sovereignty over resources with ‘the common ownership of the earth’ will not counter power.
Think of being a citizen inside a former colony such as Algeria or Indonesia or Zimbabwe, where the national identity hardened in bloody struggles to wrestle national territory and its resource wealth away from relentless empires that clothed their exploitation in the colours of morality. Westerners now come to you saying that you do not entirely own your country's resources, because the British and French, the Dutch and Japanese, and even the Americans partly own them too. However worthy are the derivations from this principle, the principle itself will be hard for many to hear. There just is not enough trust of those who are coming to say that they bear gifts.
A proposal such as Pogge's, which uses ‘common ownership of the earth’ to argue for a tax on resources that countries extract, may be especially hard to hear. Imagine living in South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, and being informed that because of the oil, your country owes a debt to the Swiss.13
Demands like Pogge's would also be counterproductive because they would set peoples in resource-rich and resource-poor developing countries against each other. Many of the leaders of resource-rich countries today are strongmen who still wear the clothing of the anticolonial revolution. These strongmen would say to their peoples: ‘The big powers want to take from us what we have won at such a price, and give it to strangers.’ And they would be right.
Pogge's goal is ‘global social justice’. Yet actual social justice (as opposed to a theory of social justice) requires that people have shared beliefs about the world and the moral problems that face them. It requires that people are willing to compromise and sometimes to sacrifice for the sake of a common good. Social justice needs trust, and trust across borders is today sadly quite low.
‘The common ownership of the earth’ resonated with Locke's readers in the seventeenth century, and with colonial Americans in the eighteenth century, because of its scriptural source and their shared Christian faith. In countries like India and China, common ownership has never had that kind of resonance – and in countries that have recently escaped empire (including these), it may today seem like a Western Trojan horse.
Some philosophers who favour a distributive perspective may well have become impatient at this point in the discussion. Take the worldwide distribution of natural resources itself, these philosophers will say. Isn't it just luck that some are born in countries rich with mineral bounties, like Botswana, while others are stuck with empty plains, as in Paraguay?14 It is incontrovertible (they may say) that great wealth is gained from natural resources, and that peoples do not deserve the natural wealth they just happen to have. Those super-rich Norwegians and Qataris, for instance. Surely their natural windfalls can be taken and used to help individuals regardless of nation – to feed the poor, to cure disease, to fund education.
Justice (these philosophers say) demands the redistribution of resource wealth away from the lucky peoples in resource-rich countries towards the unlucky peoples in resource-poor countries. The baseline should be that each person in the world has a claim to an equal share of the world's resources. We should in the future see humans not as citizens of lucky or unlucky countries, but instead as cosmopolitans – as equal citizens of a common world. We should stop seeing natural resources as rightly controlled by nations (they conclude) and start seeing them as resources for all humanity, considered as a United Persons.
Again, the moral seriousness here is admirable; the causes that these thinkers favour are important. And the ideal of humans uniting across borders is undeniably attractive. The difficulty is not in finding good causes to support globally. That is easy – in a sense, there are too many. From the ‘power’ end of the spectrum, all the interesting questions are about finding the paths that will actually achieve these worthwhile ends. The real difficulty is finding cosmopolitan principles that it would be reasonable to press hard enough right now to achieve the ends that all agree are good.
Taking the broadest view, what the world has now is a decent consensus on principles for good governance within countries: principles such as popular sovereignty and human rights. There is also relatively firm agreement on what should happen in basic relations between countries, such as that territorial conquest is wrong and keeping treaties is right. These agreements are by no means univocal, but they are substantial. In coming to consensus, it has been quite useful that modernity has generated a small, globally shared vocabulary to describe human beings and what should happen to them. ‘Human rights’ and ‘genocide’ are in this shared vocabulary; ‘capabilities’ is making a bid for inclusion; ‘responsibility to protect’ may not make it.
What remain absent as yet are substantive shared principles and concepts for relations among individuals as such, considered not as citizens of nations but as ‘citizens of the world’. Philosophers have imagined many cosmopolitan alternatives, yet in the absence of agreement, the question is how power could responsibly be used to realize any one of them.
At this transnational level, collective thinking today is still turbid – much like it was within Europe during the Middle Ages. After a long review of early European politics in his masterful General History of Civilization in Europe, the French politician François Guizot offers this summary:
I have now run over all the great attempts at political organization which were made in Europe, down to the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. All these failed. I have endeavoured to point out, in going along, the causes of these failures; to speak truly, they may all be summed up in one: society was not yet sufficiently advanced to adapt itself to unity; all was yet too local, too special, too narrow: too many differences prevailed both in things and in minds. There were no general interests, no general opinions capable of guiding, of bearing sway over particular interests and particular opinions. The most enlightened minds, the boldest thinkers, had as yet no just idea of administration or justice truly public.
Regarding a cosmopolitan agenda, the world is now in a condition similar to what Guizot describes here. ‘There were no general interests, no general opinions’ is vivid enough today. Imagine, for example, that you are the cosmopolitan who has been chosen to present a case to Venezuela or Kuwait to submit itself to a global resource-redistribution regime. That will be challenging.
Given the divergences in interests and opinions, the issue becomes one of power. Picking up Guizot's passage again:
The most enlightened minds, the boldest thinkers, had as yet no just idea of administration or justice truly public. It was evidently necessary that a very active, powerful civilization should first mix, assimilate, grind together, as it were, all these incoherent elements; it was necessary that there should first be a strong centralization of interests, laws, manners, ideas; it was necessary, in a word, that there should be created a public authority and a public opinion.
(1838: 311–12)15
The question for cosmopolitan philosophers is how much ‘grinding together’ they are proposing in order to impose their controversial principles. Redistributions must be enforced; entreaties will not suffice. All the important questions surround the agency that will implement the cosmopolitan ideal. What is the nature of this agency's coercive power? Will anyone suggest that it be backed by armed force? Yet, if not, how does a global redistributive agency require compliance? How, for instance, to make today's oil-enriched authoritarians give up their source of power?
At their least edifying, cosmopolitans use a passive voice to insist on aggressive reforms. Something – something even quite difficult – must be done, yet who is to do this difficult thing, and how, remains hazy. Occasionally, a gesture may be made to some hypothetical body, like a widely trusted and incorruptible global panel of experts, or a world citizenry willing to accept majority decisions for the sake of humanity as a whole. Yet what is meant to happen when some powerful group – say, the Russians or the Saudis – rejects the ideal is left unsaid. If some pattern is to be imposed across the planet, the power that does this cannot be passive.
While waiting for the ‘grind together’ proposals to become more complete, we might consider the virtues of a different principle for control over natural resources. This principle leaves control over resources at the national level (though possibly constrained by duties concerning the environment, future generations and so on). And instead of emphasizing the need to distribute the value of resources between states, it emphasizes the importance of citizen control over resources within each country. The principle here is that the resources of each country belong to the people of that country, and that citizens have the ultimate right to decide whether the nation's resources should be privatized through an auction, sold off to foreigners or simply left in the ground. This principle is ‘popular resource sovereignty’. Popular resource sovereignty is the principle that peoples everywhere have actually insisted upon across the past century to counter the powers that have oppressed them, and it is the principle that can counter the powers that continue to hound them today.
In the big picture, the world's transition to popular sovereignty is going well. In 1973, democratic countries were outnumbered by almost three to one. Today, the democracies form a majority.16 Progress is good – except, as the Ross quotation above suggests, in the authoritarian oil exporters, where the regimes survive on an external source of power. Almost no country where the government is highly dependent on oil revenues has ever transitioned to democracy.17 The struggle of these countries to overcome their resource-enriched ‘kings’ – some of whom even today maintain their divine rights – continues.
Popular resource sovereignty is a counterpowerful principle for the world we are in now, where authoritarians and armed groups can gain excessive power by selling off resources – and use that power to threaten the people of their own country and sometimes those of other countries as well. The real problem of power in our world is that it operates under the principle of what Pogge first identified as the ‘international resource privilege’:
A group that overpowers the guards and takes control of a warehouse may be able to give some of the merchandise to others, accepting money in exchange. But the fence who pays them becomes merely the possessor, not the owner, of the loot. Contrast this with a group that overpowers an elected government and takes control of a country. Such a group, too, can give away some of the country's natural resources, accepting money in exchange. In this case, however, the purchaser acquires not merely possession, but all the rights and liberties of ownership, which are supposed to be – and actually are – protected and enforced by all other states' courts and police forces.
Having wrested control over their territories' resources from foreign empires and armies, peoples now need power to counter the usurpation of their resources by ‘internal colonialists’ and domestic militias as well. Popular resource sovereignty is the principle that can frame policies for abolishing the international resource privilege and achieve that goal.
One great advantage to this approach from the perspective of power is that popular sovereignty is already the world's ideal. This is a legacy of the great twentieth-century struggles for national self-determination. Major treaties declaring popular resource sovereignty have already been ratified by nearly all nations; national leaders and mass movements reflexively speak its language.18
Popular resource sovereignty can also be seen as a transitional principle towards a more cosmopolitan future. Unlike the ‘grind together’ model of the redistributive cosmopolitans, popular resource sovereignty can advance a ‘grow together’ model of increasing transnational integration. The great promise of popular sovereignty is that self-determining nations do grow together. Democracies are less likely to go to war with each other. They are also more likely to create and participate in international institutions and more likely to respect international treaties (Christiano, 2011). Even better, national democracy is the best school known to make individuals capable of connecting across borders too.
To whatever extent a cosmopolitan future will arrive, it will require individuals who are able to act together despite the features that distinguish them. For that to be possible, individuals in many of today's resource-rich countries will have to become more democratically capable than they now are: more knowledgeable about the safe use of political power, more accustomed to the give-and-take of life within a self-ruling group. The surest way we know for these individual capacities to develop is within the institutions of popular sovereignty.19
The most judicious cosmopolitans praise the value of individuals freely associating to determine their common future (e.g. Beitz, 1999: 92–104; Caney, 2005: 177–81). Moving power over resources away from authoritarians and militias and towards sovereign peoples will advance that weighty goal. Those who wish to see power spread still further, from peoples to persons, can see popular resource sovereignty as a stage along their way.
Enabling peoples to control their fates and to grow together will make humans better able to choose for themselves the principles that might someday constitute a United Persons. Peacefully promoting popular sovereignty will encourage the kinds of relations across borders that may eventually allow justice to emerge in some richer form. In the meantime, strengthening peoples will enhance humanity's ability to meet its current and future challenges. If we can now succeed in countering the dangerous power that natural resources now bring in our world as it is, then perhaps we can then leave it to our more democratic and more united descendants to decide for themselves what forms of justice they want to reach for, given the relations they have formed, and the conditions of the world that they will see much better than we now do.