ABSTRACT
Every phase in the history of international relations and world order can be identified by its distinctive achievements and failures. Much as Tolstoy observed with reference to families, all historical moment resembles each other in their moral achievements, but it is in their failures that each becomes distinct. Yet, as Ken Booth observes in an influential essay, there has been a systematic refusal on the part of academic specialists and diplomats to acknowledge moral failure with respect to the organization of international political life, that domain of political behavior called international relations or world order.l
With some notable exceptions, world order has been analyzed for centuries as if human suffering were irrelevant, and as if the only fate that mattered was either the destiny of a particular nation or the more general rise and fall of great powers, the latter being regarded as an inevitable consequence of the eternal, natural rivalry of self-serving states competing for territory, wealth, influence, and status. 2 Even such an egoistic moral aperture is generally misleadingly large, as it is rare indeed that the whole of a given people share in power and authority sufficiently to be regarded as effectively included in the self; that is, "self-serving." The struggle in constitutional democracies to extend tolerance and suffrage to minorities and women reminds us that even in societies committed in principle to equality of rights, the representation of the self by the state is partial, at best, and by no means complete. In fact, one impact of globalization seems to have been to marginalize the participation of those victimized by the discipline of regional and global capital, as well as to undermine the capacity of the elec-
toral process to serve the interests of society as a whole and of territorial interests in particular.
