Identity, Nations and the Requirements of Global Justice: Limits of the Debate in Democratic Politics

How do we, as individuals, communities and nations, arbitrate between the requirements of justice or our sense of justice, at the local or national level, as compared to our idea of justice in the world at large? Is the demand for global justice a demand for greater equality among nations, for systems of just global governance to manage an increasingly interconnected world of increasing complexity, or just another utopian ideal? This article seeks to bring together two separate debates in contemporary social sciences and social philosophy to discuss these questions. The first part of this article examines questions of identity, individual and collective, and the expressions and practice of nationalism that forms the basis of international exchanges based on the debates between communitarian and universalist social philosophers. The second part of the article analyzes how the idea of global justice, and in particular, international distributive justice, is limited or constrained by the questions of identity and nationalism under the democratic and institutional compulsions of nation states, even when they accept the necessity of institutions of global governance. The later work of Rawls and their extensions are a common thread in these two debates.