Cosmopolitism, Global Justice, and International Law

Along with the exploding attention to globalization, issues of global justice have become central elements in political philosophy. After decades in which debates were dominated by a state-centric paradigm, current debates in political philosophy also address issues of global inequality, global poverty, and themoral foundations of international law. As recent events have demonstrated, these issues also play an important role in the practice of international law. In fields such as peace and security, economic integration, environmental law, and human rights, international lawyers are constantly confronted with questions of global justice and international legitimacy. This special issue contains four papers which address an important element of this emerging debate on cosmopolitan global justice, with much relevance for international law: the principle of sovereign equality, global economic inequality, and environmental law. The political–philosophical interest in global justice and international law received an important stimulus with the publication of John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples.1 In this book Rawls claims to extend the principles of justice for domestic society to international relations for a society of peoples.2 Rawls describes the Law of Peoples ‘as a particular political conception of right and justice that applies to the principles and norms of international law and practice’, and the Society of Peoples as ‘all those peoples who follow the ideals and principles of the Law of Peoples in their mutual relations’.3 Characteristic of Rawls’s approach in both in the domestic and international theory of justice is the use of thought experiments involving a fictional deliberative forum, the original position. To ensure that this hypothetical deliberation is fair and equal, the parties in the deliberation exist behind ‘a veil of ignorance’ depriving them of knowledge about themselves, and thus preventing