these movements can be seen as stimulated and made possible by globaliza-
tion. Is globalization the same as Americanization? Many of the economic
and social forces that drive globalization emerge from the USA, but it should
also be noted that American society itself is placed under pressure by these
forces: insofar as ‘‘real’’ jobs are being replaced by ‘‘McJobs’’ and local,
regional variations are increasing being ironed out, this process has gone
farther in the USA than elsewhere.
What both American power and globalization, taken together and singly,
suggest is that the contradictions in the old Westphalian system that has been
there since 1945 have now sharpened to near breaking-point. In the twenty-
Wrst century, Westphalian states are unable to cope with the problems thrown
up by environmental degradation or the management of the global economy,
and unable to protect their populations from the consequences of this inabil-
ity—indeed, following the prevalent neoliberal orthodoxy, most of them have
given up the attempt to perform this latter task (Strange 1999 ). This quite
obviously constitutes a challenge to the contemporary signiWcance of ideas of
internationaljustice. The most important defense of the notion of an inter-
national society is that it promotes a healthy pluralism, allowing national
communities to deWne and pursue their own projects. The diYculties that the
social democracies are experiencing in preserving their welfare states in the
face of global pressures to cut taxes, reduce costs, and improve competitive-
ness suggests that this defense of communal autonomy is increasingly becom-
ing diYcult to sustain—it is doubtful whether even the USA is actually capable
of pursuing its own national projects at home or in the world, but certainly the
next largest industrial countries areWnding this diYcult, and for most coun-
tries nowadays autonomy is barely a meaningful notion.
Many cosmopolitan theorists ofglobaljustice would regard this develop-
ment as no bad thing. As we have seen, a quarter-century ago, Charles Beitz
argued against the notion that an international society based on discrete
sovereign states existed, positing that global interdependence had created a
world in which neither realism nor a ‘‘morality of states’’ could be defended.
His resistance to Rawls’s position was largely based on the belief that com-
munal autonomy is an illusion under modern conditions, a position also held
by most other theorists of global social justice. From one angle, globalization
can simply be seen as the continuation of this process, a development in
global society which makes the necessity for the establishment of principles of
global justice even more imperative. Indeed, many theorists of global social
justice have given support to the anti-global-capitalism movement while at
from international to global justice? 631