Globalization, Global Community, and the Possibility of Global Justice

Abstract:     
In this essay, I suggest five ways in which globalization is changing the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate over global justice, by creating, both inter-subjectively and at the regulatory level, the constitutive elements of a limited global community. Members of this global community are increasingly aware of each other's needs and circumstances, increasingly capable of effectively addressing these needs, and increasingly contributing to these circumstances in the first place. They find themselves involved in the same global market society, and together these members look to the same organizations, especially those at the meta-state level, to provide regulatory approaches to addressing problems of global social policy. Thus in global social relations we can begin to see that minimum level of "community" necessary to support relations of justice, at least in certain areas, even if it does not manifest that level of community necessary to speak of "global community" in the fullest communitarian sense.

Keywords: globalization, global justice, global community, communitarianism, circumstances of justice, John Rawls, market societies, meta-state institutions

Working Paper Series