9 - Toward Relative Decency: The Case for Prudence

Summary

In Europe in the eighteenth century, proponents of the Enlightenment argued that external and internal security were ineluctably linked to rational progress toward a universal condition of democratic pluralism. That linkage of security and democracy was both the fondest dream and a notable legacy of the Enlightenment project. In Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century, that project has resurfaced in the effort by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to acquire a legal persona by basing itself, for the first time, on a Charter.

This democracy-security nexus dates from Immanuel Kant's eschatological hope for universal and perpetual peace, founded on a foedus pacificum, or league of peace—a confederation of constitutional regimes. Central to this understanding is a teleology that assumes a progressive global movement toward a reasonable, rule-governed, international order founded on universally agreed norms, rather than on the dictates of state interest, culture, power, or self.

This hope informs Francis Fukuyama's influential post-Cold War treatise on “the end of history.” It also represents the methodological premise of journals devoted to the study of democracy and democratization, and illustrates contemporary normative and constructivist views of the evolving character of international society. In its most philosophically coherent post-Cold War formulation, John Rawls maintained, in The Law of Peoples, that any hope we have of reaching this benign historical terminus—what he called a realistic utopia—rests “on there being reasonable liberal and constitutional (and decent) regimes sufficiently established and effective to yield a viable Society of Peoples.” Those living in such a society would, in this conception, “follow the ideals and principles of the Law of Peoples in their mutual relations.”

In Rawls’ scheme, the prospect for both global and, in the Southeast Asian context featured here, regional peace and progress requires the projection of a “Law of Peoples,” or more precisely a norm of justice as fairness, into the international order. This norm should shape both the conduct of states and regions as the latter have evolved as postnational constellations in the years since Europe's Treaty of Rome in 1957.