Covenant and international ethics: A deconstruction and reconstruction of liberal international relations theory

The relationship between ethics and foreign policy is increasingly important given the current trend toward globalization. However, both of the leading international relations theories, liberalism and realism, suffer from an inability to integrate the ethical and pragmatic dimensions of foreign policy. This is because of the break between the transcendent ethics espoused by these theories and the uncertainty of their epistemic foundations. This paper examines the implications of the covenantal paradigm for meeting the theoretical challenges within international ethics. The covenantal paradigm, as described by Daniel Elazar's work on the covenantal tradition in politics, provides a means of overcoming the problems of liberal and realist theories. Covenant's three essential principles are that power must be shared and limited, that liberty must be federal, or directed toward covenantal goals, and that policy-makers must have a sense of realism about the existence of evil and its political consequences.; Liberalism's origins in covenantal political culture and thought make its premises similar in many ways to the covenantal paradigm. But the Enlightenment separation between ethics and epistemology, as well as the ever-increasing liberal attraction to hierarchical methods of problem-solving, led to liberal imperialism and ethical confusion. As a result, liberal policy-makers often suffer from moral blindness and a tendency toward coercion in the international arena. Realists, on the other hand, often fall into a pattern of exercising an existential, private morality, indiscernible by those not directly involved in statecraft. This approach is unacceptable in an open society.; Covenantal thought integrates ethics and interests in a manner similar to that found in social capital theory. In addition, this paradigm retains all the benefits of liberal theory, such as a means of discerning progress in history, a focus on human rights, and an empirical grounding. Ultimately, the goal of a covenantal foreign policy is similar to Kant's vision of a foedus pacificum (a peaceful covenanted federation of nations). Nations will also be subject to the norms of international law, the foundational premise of which is pacta sunt servanda, nations ought to keep their covenants.