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Democratic disengagement: toward Rousseauian global reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2011

Shmuel Nili
Shmuel Nili*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA
*
E-mail: snili@nd.edu
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Abstract

What are the moral costs of democratic trade with dictatorships, and what action these costs demand of our elected governments? This article develops as a Rousseauian answer the idea that democracies ought to boycott corrupt dictatorships and establish themselves collectively as an autarkic bloc, in order to reform not others but themselves. I articulate the basis for this democratic disengagement, first through a reconstruction of Rousseau's social contract, as seeking to replace corrupt dependence with egalitarian interdependence between citizens. I then examine the potential for egalitarian interdependence between democracies that treat their citizens equally as collectively sovereign, contrasted with corrupting cooperation between democracies and dictatorships, which distorts democracies’ values, specifically by making them complicit in despots’ theft of their peoples’ resources. Ending this corruption requires disengagement, elaborated here first against liberal objections and then against skeptic criticism.

Keywords

democracyglobal justicedictatorshipRousseautraderesource curse
Type
Original Papers
Information
International Theory , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , 20 September 2011 , pp. 355 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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