13) International law - key features

International law is the set of rules generally regarded and accepted as binding in relations between states and between nations. It serves as a framework for the practice of stable and organized international relations.

International law remains at the moral level and is, therefore, subject to the law of nature.

Hobbes maintained that the law of nature was universal by virtue of the power of reason, he did not believe that international law has the legislative authority of domestic law within a state. Rather, the particular agreements of international law only have the moral force of the law of nature, since no sovereign power has been established over the members of international society.

In Hobbes’s understanding, international law is a universal moral order that underpins particular agreements among states; it lacks the collective authorization given to the sovereign in domestic law.

14) Eurocentrism - definition

Eurocentrism refers to the view that the advent of modernity (the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise) was both a distinctively European achievement and a form of universal progress, an irreversible achievement of benefit to all humanity.

15) Nationalism - definition

Nationalism is the principle that each nation should have a state of its own.

16) Huntington’s definition of civilization

According to Huntington, civilizations are comprehensive, long-lived cultures based on common descent, language, religion and way of life, in which the most important element is usually religion.

17) The United Nations settlement

The UN Charter and the Declaration form part of a post-Second World War international settlement which established, on the one side, the formal legitimating ideology of the international system, national self-determination and sovereign equality and, on the other, the ideology of universal human rights.

The appeal of this set of claims was the hope that different peoples could live together in peace and security. It was an attempt to accommodate difference (through the idea of national self-determination) within a common framework (of the sovereign equality of states and universal human rights).

The UN Declaration also helped to foster a new understanding of the international order, that is, of the power politics of nation states tempered by a rights agenda. One of the things that lay behind this development was the distinctive view of an international order governed by justice. Rather than being based on competing national self­-interests or another moral value such as charity, rights advocates contended that international relations should be conducted on the basis of principles of justice.

18) Debates about rights (human rights)

The first debate concerns how our rights are grounded. One view is that our rights as individuals are natural, that is, basic and human rights which transcend any country or culture we live in, accord with our moral intuitions, and are ‘inalienable’ or cannot be legitimately taken away.

The opposing view holds that our rights are always cultural – whether they come from a religious source, from an explicit or tacit social contract, or simply from the social practices and traditions that have evolved in a specific community.

In other words, do rights reflect a natural order that lies behind the shifting appearance of all contemporary societies, somehow prior to any particular social and political organization, or do they depend only upon their meaningfulness within a culture?

Do rights claims provide their own transcultural justification or do they only make sense in terms of the justification given in the particular society we live in and as established in its legal norms?

The second debate centres on whether legal, civil and political rights need to be underpinned by social and economic rights in order to be effective. This is the belief that we can only fully enjoy our legal, civil and political rights if we have equal opportunity on the basis of a right to education, a right to work, a right to decent housing, a right to health care, and a right to welfare.

Those against accepting social and economic rights as having the same status as ‘basic’ rights, make the case that rights are principles which do not involve costs.

So-called social and economic rights are not rights at all, they say, for such things involve huge costs by governments, while legal, civil and political rights are cost-free. An example of this view is that it costs nothing to have a right to free speech.

Those in favour of social and economic rights (sometimes called positive rights) as the basis of legal, civil and political rights (sometimes called negative rights because they are freedoms from various kinds of unwarranted intervention) argue that no such sharp distinction between the two types of rights can be maintained.

They claim that even negative rights involve costs to protect and enforce them, such as a police force, a prison service and a judicial system. At this level, the key distinction would appear to be ‘not between different categories of right, but between different types of duty necessary for their protection’ (Beetham, 1999, p.126). On this basis, writers like Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum argue that a certain minimum quality of life is required in order for individuals to be able to exercise their human capabilities (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993).

The third debate centres upon whether it is sensible to talk about group rights as well as individual rights.

The fourth debate concerns how far the stretching of rights claims can go.