International, Politics, Philosophy (IPP)

“There are some things that money can’t buy.” Is citizenship among them? This talk will explore this question by highlighting the core legal and ethical puzzles associated with the surge in cash-for-passport programs. The spread of these new programs is one of the most significant developments in citizenship practice in the past few decades. It tests our deepest intuitions about the meaning and attributes of the relationship between the individual and the political community to which she belongs. Shachar will identify the main strategies employed by a growing number of states putting their visas and passports for sale, selectively opening their otherwise bolted gates of admission to the super rich, while making admission harder for most other categories of migrants. Moving from the positive to the normative, the discussion will draw attention to several lines of critique of these new programs, highlighting their distortive democratic and distributional impacts in a world in which governments and intermediaries are testing, blurring and eroding the state-market boundary regulating access to membership.

Ayelet Shachar

Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity &
Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Toronto

Discussant: Hélène Thiollet (CNRS-CERI, Sciences Po)

Lieu : Salle Goguel, 56, rue des Saints Pères (4 étage) – entrée 27, rue Saint Guillaume

Whereas International Relations scholars and international lawyers have conceived self-determination serving to constitute an egalitarian post-imperial international system via the principle of sovereign equality, I argue that self-determination is in fact bound up with hierarchy. My paper reveals the existence of a tension between the egalitarian aspiration of self-determination and practices attached to its realisation that create stratifications between older and newer states as well as within the latter. The tension plays out around what I see are the three historical components relating to self-determination practices: people, rights and responsibilities. While these components have been recurrent, the principles of stratification attached to them have changed over time. These are specific standards of membership in the international system of states as well as post-imperial politics of state-formation undertaken domestically. I substantiate these points by examining the three twentieth century waves of state formation after empire: after World War I, during the post-World War II decolonisation, and with the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Greater attention to the ambivalent history of self-determination coheres with recent interest in the study of hierarchy in world politics whilst speaking to literatures on the making of the international system and on state-formation.

Maja Spanu (Cambridge)
CERI, salle Jean Monnet, 17.00-19.00
Discussant: Ayrton Aubry (CERI-Sciences Po)

Samuel Moyn (Harvard)

The Political Origins of Global Justice

This paper attempts to recover the intellectual origins of contemporary ‘global justice,’ especially its cosmopolitan variant that holds that egalitarian distributive justice should apply at the worldwide level. The central claim of the paper is that the founder of global justice, Charles Beitz, was first inspired by then critical of a forgotten 1970s movement known as the ‘New International Economic Order,” rather than extrapolating from any prior chapter of Western thought. Some conclusions are drawn both about the loss of a theory of agency in contemporary normative thought, and how this episode might help think further about the larger transition in global political economy from national welfarism to global market fundamentalism since World War II.

Sciences Po
199, Bd Saint Germain
Salle 502

17.00-19.00

Discussant: Tom Theuns (Sciences Po, ULB)