抄録
In the study of International Relations, “equality” has rarely become a sincere research agenda, because the real world is plagued with huge power gap among countries despite the enshrined doctrine of sovereign equality of states. Equality and justice, however, is becoming a pressing political issue in the global political arena comprised by states, international organizations, global business elites, and NGOs and new social movements, just because the disparity between the rich and the poor is widening and the justifiability of the existing world order is at the stake in the heated debates among those actors.
Given this gap between the silence of IR about the equality and the heated political debated on the equality and world order, this paper tries to explore the way in which the equality and justice is an analytical issue (but not necessarily a normative issue); how the egalitarian world order in the past was maintained and how the order was transformed into the harsh neo-liberal one by a variety of political forces; and how the egalitarian orientation in the global governance could be recreated.
Referring the Hedley Bull, Yoshikazu Sakamoto, and Karl Polanyi, the second section outlines the relationship between equality and the world order. The third section sketches how the post World War II order based on “embedded liberalism” and “politics of productivity” came into being and how it gives way to exclusive neo-liberal globalization. The fourth section delineates the rise of egalitarian movements in global political arena and assesses the significance of those movements. The concluding section looks at the prospects of more inclusive world order by analyzing the possibility of alliance between the enlightened liberal elites from the rich countries, the equality-oriented international organization, and varieties of counter-globalization movements.
