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I am a philosopher by training and sensibility, and as a philosopher, I take my orientation from Immanuel Kant. Kant said that philosophy addresses three basic questions: What can we know? What should we do? And what may we hope for?

The question about hope is the most important. Philosophy is not about what will be, but about what could be: It is an exploration of possibilities guided by the hope that our world can be made more just by our common efforts.

In our world, 1 billion people are destitute. They live on less than a dollar a day. They are not imprisoned in destitution because of their crimes; they are imprisoned in destitution despite their innocence.

Another 1.5 billion people live only slightly better, on $1–2 a day. They are able to meet their basic needs, but they lack fundamental goods. They, too, are not in poverty because of their crimes. They are in poverty despite their innocence.

That is how 40 percent of our world lives now.

For some of the poor and destitute, things are improving. But the extraordinary global distance between wealthy and poor is growing. The richest 5 percent in the world make 114 times as much as the bottom 5 percent; 1 percent of the world’s people make as much as the poorest 57 percent. So the gap grows and many are left behind. That is morally unacceptable.

The problem of global injustice is not only economic. Billions of people are deprived of basic human rights.

And new forms of global governance, through organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO), are making decisions with large consequences for human welfare. Whether their decisions are good or bad, they remain largely unaccountable. That, too, is unacceptable.

Some people say that we should not worry so much because there is no such thing as global justice. Some of these skeptics say that justice is an issue only inside a state. Until there is a global state, they say, there is no global justice.

Other skeptics are communitarians. They say that justice only makes sense among people who share a culture. They say that our diverse global society lacks the common culture needed to sustain a commitment to justice.

These statist and communitarian views are misguided in a world of globalization.

Economically, globalization has made the global economy a substantial presence in the economic lives of virtually everyone in the world.

Politically, there are new forms of governance that operate outside the state. These new forms are especially important in the arena of economic regulation, but also have a role in areas of security, labor and product standards, the environment, and human rights. So we have new forms of global politics, with important consequences for human well-being.

Moreover, these new settings of global governance are the focus of an emerging global civil society of movements and nongovernmental organizations. In areas ranging from human rights, to labor standards, to environmental protection these groups contest the activities of states and global rule-making bodies.

The skeptical views may have made sense in a world with more national economic independence, less governance beyond the state, and more self-contained national communities. But that is not our world.

What, then, does the project of global justice mean? In general, it has three elements.

First, we need to ensure the protection of human rights, and we need a generous understanding of the scope of human rights. Human rights are about torture and arbitrary imprisonment, but also about health, education, and political participation. The point of human rights is not simply to protect against threats, but to ensure social membership, to ensure that all people count for something.

Second, new global rule-making bodies operating beyond the state raise questions of justice. These bodies, like the WTO, make rules with important consequences for human welfare. Global justice is about ensuring that governance by such bodies is accountable, that people who are affected are represented, that rulemaking is transparent. When an organization makes policies with large consequences for human welfare, it needs to be held accountable through a fair process.

Third, global justice is about ensuring that everyone has access to the basic goods—food, health care, education, clean water, shelter—required for a decent human life and that when the global economy is moving forward, no one is left behind.

These three elements of global justice all start from the idea that each person matters. In short, global justice is about inclusion: about making sure that no one is left out.

Some people will say that global justice is a nice idea, but that it has no real practical importance. They say that globalization leaves no room for political choices, that it requires every country to follow the same path. We must reject this false assertion of necessity.

Some people say that the right choice for global justice is to increase levels of foreign assistance; some people say that the right choice is to provide credit for poor farmers; some people say that right choice is to empower poor women; some people say that right choice is to reduce disgusting levels of overconsumption and agricultural subsidies in rich countries; some people say that the right choice is to promote a more vibrant civil society so that people can become agents in creating their history rather than its victims and supplicants.

Many things are possible. And once we accept that global justice is a fundamental imperative, and that political choices are possible, then we come back to the political tasks in more developed countries. Many citizens in the advanced economies now experience globalization as a threat. Many fear that a better life for billions who are now destitute may mean a worse life for them.

So global justice is not simply an abstract moral imperative. Global justice is connected to greater justice at home. If we leave everything to the market at home, if we don’t fight for social insurance, education and health, employment and income, then we can be sure of an economic nationalist resurgence with all of its terrible consequences. So the political project of global justice requires a political project of a more just society at home.

This unity of justice—this unity of the national and the global: That is our answer to Kant’s question. That is what we may hope for. That is what we should strive to achieve.

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In PGJ’s first year of operation, we had several visiting fellows. Adam Hosein and Helena de Bres, both dissertation fellows from MIT, spent the year researching and writing dissertations in political philosophy on issues about global distributive justice. Larry Simon, a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, director of Heller School’s Sustainable International Development Programs, and associate dean of academic planning, spent the winter and spring quarters working on a book on the relevance of the work of Paulo Freire to today’s poor.

Next year we will scale up the fellowship program. Helena DeBres will stay on as a postdoctoral fellow, continuing her research on utilitarian approaches to global poverty and fair distribution. She will be joined by Avia Pasternak, an Oxford PhD writing on issues about citizens’ responsibility in wealthy democracies to address issues of injustice elsewhere. Brad McHose, a UCLA PhD, and Kirsten Oleson, a recent PhD from Stanford’s IPER program, will also be affiliated with PGJ. Thorsten Theil will be a predoctoral fellow in the fall, writing on deliberative democracy and postnational politics. And Charles Beitz, a distinguished political theorist from Princeton whose Political Theory and International Relations (1979) remains the basis for much contemporary discussion of global justice, will be visiting in the winter and spring, working on a project on human rights.

Our principal activity for this past year was a regular workshop (coordinated with Stanford’s Humanities Center) covering a wide range of themes, from corporate social responsibility to the philosophical foundations of global justice, with participation from graduate students, research fellows, and faculty from political science, philosophy, economics, education, law, literature, and anthropology. In one of the liveliest sessions, Abhijit Banerjee, MIT economist and director of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, presented his research and reflections on the strategy of using randomized field experiments to assess aid projects in developing countries. In a seminar jointly sponsored with CDDRL, Banerjee, a self-described aid optimist, expressed doubts about contemporary understanding of the determinants of economic growth and emphasized the importance of project-specific assistance and evaluation.

Richard Locke, a political scientist from MIT’s Sloan School, presented a paper based on his research at Nike and other lead firms in global supply chains that use corporate codes of conduct in their relations with suppliers. The principal finding of Locke’s research is that such codes have not been very successful in improving compensation, working conditions, or freedom of association for workers in firms that supply products to lead firms.

Amherst political theorist Uday Mehta presented a paper contrasting ideas about peace and non-violence to a seminar jointly sponsored with CISAC. Tracing the idea of a principled commitment to non-violence to Gandhi, Mehta suggested there are important costs to that principle (perhaps it requires devaluing justice), but that there are also costs to emphasizing peace as an alternative to principled non-violence: in particular, that the more conditional commitment to non-violence may end up being very permissive about the use of force.

Stanford economist Seema Jayachandran presented research on strategies for dealing with problems of odious debt. And we had workshops on the foundations of global justice with political theorists Michael Blake, Adam Hosein, Jennifer Rubenstein, and Sebastiano Maffetone; on citizenship and immigration with legal theorist Ayelet Schachar and anthropologist John Bowen; on human rights with Chip Pitts, a human rights lawyer; and on the World Bank with Sameer Dossani, a Washington political activist.

Next year, PGJ will initiate—in conjunction with Locke and his colleagues at MIT—a project called Just Supply Chains. The premise of the project is that the globalization of production is redefining employment relations and generating the need for fundamental changes in the basic institutions governing the economy. Corporations, unions, NGOs, national governments, and even international labor, trade, and financial organizations are all searching for new ways to adjust to the new international order and ensure that workers in global supply chains have decent levels of compensation, healthy and safe workplaces, and rights of association.

The project will explore three broad strategies for achieving these goals. First, it will address corporate codes of conduct and monitoring mechanisms to enforce these codes. Today, monitoring for compliance with “private voluntary codes of conduct” is one of the principal ways both global corporations and labor rights NGOs seek to promote “fair” labor standards in global supply chains. Likewise, a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have banded together to promote a more collaborative/coordinated approach to improved labor standards. (The Joint Initiative for Workers Rights and Corporate Accountability in Turkey and the MFA Forum Project in Bangladesh are two of the best known examples.) But these initiatives, like the corporate codes, have produced very mixed results.

Second, much has been written about pro-labor administrative reforms by national governments (e.g., Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cambodia, and Brazil). But very little is known about whether these efforts are successful and, if they are, how to diffuse their success to other countries struggling with many of the same issues.

Third, there is speculation about how efforts at the ILO and WTO, joining labor standards to trade rules, might produce global improvements in compensation, work, and rights of association.

To explore these issues, the Just Supply Chains project will start next year with a series of workshops, bringing together “practitioners” engaged in these institutional experiments and scholars studying global supply chains, corporate responsibility, regulatory strategies, and normative ideas about global justice. We will examine what is already known about the conditions under which new arrangements and strategies can succeed in promoting fair wages and work hours, decent working conditions, and basic rights, including the right to organize collectively. The larger aim will be to define a research agenda animated by ideals of global justice, informed by understanding of current circumstances and social possibilities, and aimed at improving both our understanding and global well-being.

Since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, its already cheap labor force has been exposed to global market competition. The country’s domestic employment situation, particularly with respect to guarantees of workers’ rights and interests, has likewise come under pressure. In the years from 1999 to 2002, recorded urban unemployment rates regularly increased, from 3.1 percent in 1999 and 2000, to 3.6 percent and 4.0 percent in 2001 and 2002, respectively. At the end of March 2003, they rose again to 4.1 percent. The number of labor disputes received by labor dispute arbitration committees at every level reached 184,000 by 2002, with the number of participating workers climbing to 610,000, numbers that were 19.1 percent and 30.2 percent higher, respectively, than the previous year. In short, while China’s participation in the WTO propelled economic development, trade system reform, adjustments to the economic structure, and privatization of enterprise, it also resulted in an uneasy state of affairs for labor and management relations. For instance, in October 2004, at Shenzhen’s Hong Kong-owned Meizhi Haiyan Electronics Factory, four thousand people went on strike and blockaded the roads to protest low wages.

In November 2004, amid concerns about deteriorating working conditions at foreign-funded enterprises, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) confronted Chinese locations of WalMart, which is well known for obstructing the establishment of trade unions. The ACFTU declared: “They [WalMart] are in violation of the Trade Union Law, and we are prepared to sue them.” WalMart yielded, conceding that, “[i]f workers ask to establish a trade union, we will respect that request, [and] fulfill our duties and responsibilities under the Trade Union Law.” This landmark event demonstrated not only the ACFTU’s power in a direct confrontation, but also its opposition to the intensifying WTO-driven competition in the Chinese labor market. Thus far, the power of trade unions in general and the ACFTU in particular has been felt primarily at foreign-funded enterprises. But what about locally owned and operated enterprises?

In order to understand the actual level of autonomy that trade unions enjoy at the grassroots level, the chairmen of 1,811 trade unions in major cities and provinces—including Liaoning, Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Gansu, Guizhou, and Henan—completed a questionnaire survey. The Chinese Institute of Industrial Relations (Beijing) facilitated the survey, which was carried out between March 2004 and June 2006. The major findings confirm that, although the independence of trade unions at foreign-funded enterprises has increased, the unions’ autonomy at local level enterprises remains fairly low. According to survey results, China continues to be a predominantly state-corporatist system, between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the one hand and workers and state-owned/state-held enterprises on the other.

The survey revealed other data about the leadership of China’s state-owned/state-held enterprises. Most notably, the Party organization was still appointing 24.5 percent of the chairmen of these work units. Even in cases where chairmen assumed their posts through election or open selective examinations, 35.1 percent of them participated in the election or examinations after the Party recommended them to the work unit in question (see figure 1). The ratio of chairmen who are CCP members to those who serve concurrently as a “secretary,” “vice-secretary,” or member of the Party committee at a corresponding level reached high percentages, of 90.0 percent and 46.4 percent, respectively. In addition, 72.1 percent of the chairmen of state-owned/state-held enterprises answered in the survey that their union committee had established a Party group or Party branch at their workplace. These data clearly indicate that, unlike their counterparts at foreign-funded companies, the trade unions of state-owned/state-held enterprises not only lack autonomy, and but that their management also often remains subject to Party control.

We are pleased to bring you the third article of the academic year in our series of Shorenstein APARC Dispatches. This month's piece comes from Dr. Phillip Lipscy, FSI Center Fellow and Assistant Professor, Political Science. Lipscy joined Shorenstein APARC in fall 2007 and his research interests focus on international relations and political economy, particularly as they relate to Japan and East Asia. He has been a Shorenstein APARC affiliate since his undergraduate years, when he studied under Professor Emeritus Danial Okimoto. He attended Harvard University for his doctoral studies.

Since the end of World War II, East Asia has often been characterized as a region with weak international organizations. There has been no regional integration project comparable to the European Union (EU). Cooperation on a wide variety of issues has tended to be ad hoc rather than institutionalized. Regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have generally been weak or limited in scope, with some notable exceptions such as the Asian Development Bank.

However, in recent years, there are indications that the pattern of institutionalization in Asia is shifting. Since the end of the Cold War, regional cooperative arrangements have emerged and grown. With the addition of China, Japan, and South Korea, a revitalized ASEAN+3 is becoming a locus of economic cooperation. Many observers believe the Six Party Talks could be institutionalized to manage a broader set of security issues beyond North Korea. The Chiang Mai Initiative, a multilateral currency swap arrangement, might eventually develop into a monetary fund. Bilateral trade agreements are proliferating and could ultimately produce a regional free trade zone.

Under the right circumstances, regionalism can complement the broader global order. However, to a significant extent, recent regional initiatives reflect an underlying dissatisfaction with the global institutional architecture. The Chiang Mai Initiative emerged after the Asian financial crisis, from a widespread sense that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) underrepresented Asian interests and therefore imposed overly harsh conditionality on the affected states. Paralysis at the Doha Round negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has facilitated the rapid expansion of bilateral trade initiatives. The North Korean nuclear problem is precisely the sort of collective security issue the United Nations (UN) Security Council was envisioned to deal with, but the rigidity of both Security Council membership and its decision-making procedures has rendered this impractical.

Historically, international organizations have often exhibited path dependence, or a resistance to change. For example, the permanent members of the UN Security Council still remain the victorious powers of World War II. The distribution of voting shares in the IMF and World Bank has consistently overrepresented inception members such as Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, at the expense of both the defeated powers of World War II and newly independent and developing states. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) remains a predominantly European institution despite the rapid growth of Asia. Across a wide range of international organizations, Asian nationals continue to be underrepresented among employees, and in some cases leading positions are allocated to Western nationals by convention, as in the IMF and World Bank.

However, as Asia continues its rapid growth, the active involvement of Asian states in the global order will become paramount. Including India, broader East Asia encompasses more than half of the world's population. The region already accounts for about one-third of global oil consumption and CO2 emissions, and this is only likely to grow in the future. By 2020, in purchasing power parity terms, regional GDP will likely exceed that of the United States and the EU combined. Over the course of the twenty-first century, Asia's economic and geopolitical weight in the world will, in all likelihood, come to rival that of Europe in the nineteenth century. With Asia's dramatic rise, Asian problems will become increasingly indistinguishable from global problems.

Thus, a critical question in the coming decades will be whether the contemporary international organizational architecture will be able to smoothly incorporate the rising states of broader East Asia. Sweeping geopolitical shifts have often created instability in the international system -- the waning of Pax Britannica in the early twentieth century precipitated two world wars and a global depression, as the world lacked a geopolitical and economic stabilizing force in times of crisis. If universalistic institutions such as the UN, IMF, and WTO are seen as unresponsive to Asian concerns, two potentially destabilizing outcomes are likely. First, Asian regional cooperation may further intensify. For example, a full-fledged Asian Monetary Fund that acts independently of the IMF could be formed, or an Asian Free Trade Area established. Such institutions have the potential to undermine existing international organizations such as the IMF and WTO. Eventually, Asian institutions may supersede existing global institutions, but only after contestation and needless replication. A second destabilizing outcome could be that Asian states disengage from the U.S.-backed international order without developing strong regional institutions. This might create a situation akin to U.S. nonparticipation in the League of Nations in the interwar years. Without active involvement of some of the most important players, international organizations will become less effective at facilitating cooperation and resolving major disputes. International relations will become more anarchic and cooperation more ad hoc.

The rise of Asia will likely provide the first major stress test for the global organizational architecture that the United States has constructed and underpinned since the end of World War II. Of course, there are also some grounds for optimism. Among other things, China and Vietnam have joined the WTO, ongoing IMF quota revisions have produced ad hoc increases to South Korea and China, and Asian nationals increasingly play important roles in major international organizations -- e.g. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata. It is paramount that concerns about Asian representation and interests in universalistic international organizations be addressed so that the rise of Asia contributes to -- rather than undermines -- the stability of the international order.