47
global general will, such as the Nazis and perhaps also certain ideological terrorists who
call for the annihilation of all who do not share their fanatical creeds. But if the basis for
an obligation of right—an enforceable duty—to respect the basic rights of others is
shared membership in this global community, then it is only proper to view the
relationship between, say, the Nazis and the British as a truly a conflict belonging to the
state of nature. Between masters and slaves there can be no claim of right;
91
neither can
there be any claim of right between those aspiring to mastery and those seeking to escape
subjection. What remains, however, is the aspiration to bring all peoples into the global
federation (the duty we owe to other liberal peoples to do our best to bring non-liberal
peoples into community with us); this aspiration is violated by the use of immoral means,
and it follows from the imperative of creating a global general will that even the justified
users of immoral means act, after the necessity has passed, to create an order in which
such acts will not again be necessary.
Robert Kagan famously observes in his monograph On Paradise and Power that
the Europeans are Kantians, who too readily view the world as if it were already a law-
governed international order, and the Americans are Hobbesians, who too often see the
world as a brutal state of nature.
92
Whether the attribution is entirely accurate does not
matter; he has surely identified two influential tendencies in thinking about international
order in the present. We believe that our Rousseauian model, which draws upon the
insights of the theorist who stands conceptually between Hobbes and Kant, remedies the
deficiencies inherent in those two simple and incomplete models of international society.
91
Rousseau, Social Contract 1.4.
92
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America, Europe, and the New World Order
(New York: Arthur A. Knopf, 2003).
Convention