CIAO DATE: 12/04

Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

Volume 18, No. 2 (Fall 2004)

Special Section
Humanitarian Aid and Invervention: The Challenges of Integration

• Introduction

• Humanitarianism Sacrificed: Integration's False Promise (PDF, 10 pages, 82.8 KB)
  Nicolas de Torrenté

• Upholding Humanitarian Principles in an Effective Integrated Response (PDF, 8 pages, 71.1 KB)
  Joel R. Charny

• An Elusive Quest: Integration in the Response to the Afghan Crisis (PDF, 7 pages, 63.2 KB)
  Antonio Donini

• Understanding Integration from Rwanda to Iraq (PDF, 7 pages, 69.2 KB)
  Joanna Macrae

• The Value of Integration: A U.S. Perspective (PDF, 7 pages, 59.3 KB)
  Arthur E. Dewey

• Improving the U.S. Government's Humanitarian Response (PDF, 7 pages, 61.5 KB)
  Anita Menghetti and Jeff Drumtra

• Informing the Integration Debate with Recent Experience (PDF, 7 pages, 66.8 KB)
  Larry Minear

Articles

• International Financial Institutions and Financial Accountability
  Kunibert Raffer

  While useful proposals to reform International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have been widely discussed, the lack of meaningful financial accountability has received little attention. Considering the substantial damage done by IFIs, this is surprising both from an ethical and an economist's point of view. In a market economy anyone must face the economic consequences of their actions and decisions. If consultants give advice negligently or without obeying minimal professional standards, they have to pay compensation for the damage they have caused. National liability and tort laws serve the purpose of compensating those suffering unlawful damages and of deterring such behavior.

  By contrast, tortious damage caused by IFIs must be paid by IFIs' borrowers, including many of the world's poorest people. IFIs may even gain financially from their own negligence by extending new loans necessary to repair damages done by their prior loans. One failed adjustment program calls for the next. This mechanism makes IFI-flops generate IFI-jobs and additional income. This perverted incentive system rewarding errors, negligence, and even violations of the very constitutions of IFIs is absolutely at odds with the principles on which Western market economies rest. It must be brought to an end.

  This essay presents the idea of financial accountability, showing how easily reforms making IFIs financially accountable could be implemented. Moreover, embracing financial accountability would bring IFI operations closer to the intentions of their founders, who wanted IFIs subject to the basic legal and economic concepts of financial accountability not exempt from it. The market mechanism and its beneficial incentive system must finally be brought to IFIs.

• Models of International Economic Justice
  Ethan B. Kapstein

  Articulating and examining the likely consequences of different theoretical and policy approaches to economic justice serves to highlight potential trade-offs and conflicts among them, and helps us to think more carefully about these trade-offs and what their consequences might be. Some of us, for example, might support a liberal free trade regime because we believe it promotes greater income equality among countries,. But we might also reasonably assert that such a regime exacerbates economic injustices within some countries by causing dislocation and unemployment, particularly among vulnerable socioeconomic groups such as unskilled workers.

  This essay presents three models that seek to capture some of the central normative concerns that have been expressed by critics of economic globalization―#8212;communitarian, liberal internationalist, and cosmopolitan prioritarian. I indicate the kinds of economic models and data sets that are relevant to determining whether and to what extent greater openness to global trade poses a threat to economic justice as conceived by each of these approaches. Specifically, I use these analytical tools in order to relate changes in openness to foreign trade to other social and economic outcomes, particularly changes in income inequality and poverty, which have tended to draw the attention of nearly all theorists of economic justice. I characterize and critique the approach to economic justice that has been (implicitly) adopted by the major international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. I conclude with some policy implications and suggestions for further research in the area of international economic justice.

Review Essay

• The Ghosts of Totalitarianism
  Samuel Moyn reviews Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Tzvetan Todorov

  Tzvetan Todorov's book, originally published in 2000 in French and now available in a superb translation, paused at the end of a violent century to attempt to assess—as the title and subtitle suggest—how to remember it and what lessons to learn. A contemporary figure in the long tradition of French-speaking moralists, Todorov writes beautifully and with ethical passion about some of the darkest crimes in humanity's recent history. For Todorov, these crimes are not just past: reflecting on them can provide guidance for contemporary international affairs, such as NATO's intervention in Kosovo or the current war on terrorism. Todorov's basic theses are two: first, totalitarianism counts as the primary novelty of the twentieth century and has to be the basis for moral reflection about it; second, there is a proper manner of response to totalitarianism, which consists of the defense of a democratic and pluralistic alternative politics, one that reacts to the disasters of the past with moral vigilance in the present.

  . . . Many in France since the mid-1970s have adopted the concept of "totalitarianism"—much criticized elsewhere—to refer to the new alternatives to democratic rule—fascist and communist—thrown up by the twentieth century. . . . Todorov is intervening in a characteristically French debate in which the distinction of the regimes from one another has become part of a much larger ideological dispute and therefore freighted with heavy implications.

  What implications? For of course, it is hard to gainsay Todorov's argument that it is necessary for the experience of politically evil regimes to be at the heart of moral reflection today. Even so, Todorov's book illustrates some of the difficulties toward which such a commitment can lead . . . .

Recent Books on Ethics and International Affairs

• Ethics and Foreign Intervention , Deen K. Chatterjee and Don E. Scheid, Eds.
  Reviewed by Steven Lee

• Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power , William Bain
  Reviewed by Anthony F. Lang, Jr.

• The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders , Richard Ned Lebow
  Reviewed by Catherine Lu

• Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz, Campbell Craig
  Reviewed by Keir A. Lieber

• After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Eva Hoffman
  Reviewed by Elizabeth A. Cole

• Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding, David C. Hendrickson
  Reviewed by David Clinton

• Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Thomas Sowell
  Reviewed by Bernard Boxill

• Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Nils Gilman
  Reviewed by William B. Quandt