The Contemporary Transformation of the International System
Professor John Wilton
Lecture 6
Culture, human rights and justice in the contemporary international system

                                                           Lecture 6
-THE PROBLEMATIC OF THE ‘INTERNATIONAL’
1. the States-system
2. historical perspective
3. the U.S.A. and Russia
4. developing and underdeveloped states
5. culture, rights, justice (and power)

Lecture 6
Questions and issues prominent in the contemporary international system
a)the idea of an international system based on common rules, institutions, and values associated
with a liberal capitalist order;
b)recent attempts to expand the geographical and moral boundaries of that liberal capitalist
international order;
c)criticisms and challenges to those ideas and processes

Lecture 6
-‘social basis’ of cultural identity - creates ‘collective identity’ – produces ‘sense of
belonging’ + ‘rights of belonging’
-power of States reinforced through appeals to image of the nation, and nationalism
= link between culture, rights, justice, and power domestically and within international system
Social constructivists – ‘narrative of the nation’ shapes national culture and identities

Lecture 6
-inside States the dominant culture – values, beliefs, customs – influences and shapes rights
- i.e.  dominant culture = ‘collective’ = ‘collective rights’
dominant culture = individualistic = ‘individual rights’

Lecture 6
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
- established moral claim for individual rights
- asserted that each individual human being matters, deserves to be heard, and must not be silenced
- asserted that each individual deserves respect, and is entitled to be treated with dignity
regardless of race, gender, creed, colour, or mental capacity

Lecture 6
  Communitarianism
(- rights and justice are culturally specific
 - key principles = self-determination, and State sovereignty)
       or
   Cosmopolitanism
(rights and justice linked to human capacity to reason, and rationality = universal process = basis
for universal moral principles on which human rights and justice should be based)

Lecture 6
THE ‘INTERNATIONAL’


 POLITICAL ECONOMIC     CULTURAL

States-system     liberal free identity (‘feeds’       market nationalism -
historically or being eroded
  specific by cosmopolitan
INTERACTION values?)