[...]... possible moral basis for a commitment to intervene militarily in defense of human rights; the two following essays discuss the normative grounds of a transnational distributive commitment 13 Introduction (Nussbaum and Pogge); and in the final essay Habermas explores the basis of a commitment to transnational democracy The authors find the normative source of the various commitments they defend in different... existing global governance institutions concerns the source and nature of transnational commitments in an increasingly interconnected world The essays in the second part of this volume address the question of normative sources and possible types of cross-border commitments from different theoretical perspectives We speak of transnational commitments” rather than “cosmopolitan obligations” because the latter... on principles and ideals implicit in the political culture of liberal democratic societies The hope is that these may form the basis of an “overlapping consensus” on shared principles of justice in which the adherents of different reasonable philosophical and religious world-views affirm the same principles on the basis of their respective commitments and thereby foster a stable social and political... autonomy, they are sufficiently independent; on the other hand, they can realize equality in their enjoyment of private autonomy only if they make appropriate use of their political autonomy as citizens (p 202) The broader aim of Habermas’s approach is to establish that human rights and democracy presuppose one another Although the theory is originally framed in terms of the rights that members of the same... Rejecting both the politics of globalization embraced by adherents of neoliberal economic theory—because the gains in individual freedom that it promises would not counterbalance the drastic increase in social inequalities and the decrease in democratic control it would entail— and the protectionist and even isolationist politics of the opponents of globalization—who frequently find themselves allied... primitive” (p 102), he freely acknowledges that different cultures draw the line in different places and that the issue of where the line should be drawn is not a matter of philosophical principle Yet despite these cultural differences over which of the “great evils”21 it is “civilized” to impose on whom, the recognition that they are evils, and the commitment to the ideal of human worth that stands... different ones: while Nussbaum anchors transnational commitments in “a thick and vague concept of the good” that is intended to give flesh to the idea of our common humanity, Luban anchors them in a distinction between civilization and barbarism Pogge and Habermas look to the concept of human rights to ground commitments to transnational justice, though they disagree as to whether rights should be conceived... precondition of the emergence of democratic nation-states in early modern Europe.35 Here he examines the process of European political integration from the perspective of the political challenges posed by the erosion of the prerogatives of the nation-state and the interstate order due to globalization The political challenge posed by globalization derives from the fact that it is eroding the traditional... in legal terms The diversity and ambition of the arguments developed in these essays provide a good illustration of the kinds of orientation that normative theory can provide when faced with the political challenges posed by the current global order Luban approaches the task of clarifying the normative source of a transnational commitment to humanitarian intervention by appealing to the moral distinction... nationalism as a response to the pressures of globalization in the absence of substantive political communication at the European level At the same time the question of the legitimacy of the EU has been primarily discussed in terms of the concept of national sovereignty, that is, in terms of the erosion of the sovereign rights of national institutions by the institutions of the union If nationalism is . School and the Rule of Law Global Justice and Transnational Politics Essays on the Moral and Political Challenges of Globalization edited by Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin The MIT Press Cambridge,. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin, editors, Global Justice and Transnational Politics: Essays on the Moral and Political Challenges of Globalization John. Universalism and Transnational Commitments One of the problems posed by the weakness of existing global gov- ernance institutions concerns the source and nature of transnational commitments in