Introduction

Abstract

Contemporary theoretical controversies in moral, political and legal philosophy echo the political debates in the public sphere: multiculturalism, inequalities between men and women, climate change, wealth inequalities between nations, to state but four major predicaments, are political problems of global relevance before being academic topics in the international intellectual community. What is striking here is not so much that those issues have a historical context, but that the latter is a global one. Global issues have, indeed, been formulated in a common language “the language of rights and justice” the spreading of which has itself its own global setting: after the Cold War’s bipolarization, which biased all discussions about questions of planetary scope, there has been a short period in world history “between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers”when there seemed to be an unprecedented opportunity for expressing world problems in terms of rights and justice, that is, not just in terms of power. The scope of the present volume, but also of the whole series on Applied Global Justice, is to take this opportunity seriously, all the more seriously, one could be tempted to say, since world affairs after 9/11 can appear as a powerful factual objection to an ethical approach to world predicaments. Instead of turning back to some form of Realpoliti analysis as soon as power re-enters the stage“but who said it had ever left it between 1989 and 2001?”we consider it is preferable to confront what actually happens in the field of power relations with a clear vision of what fair relations between states and citizens might be.