Global Solidarity and Responsibility:Ethical requirements for Green Political theory in the age of Globalization

Abstract

The ethical dimensions of global ecological change have not yet become the focus of much critical attention in literature of International Studies. The thesis contributes to facilitating the cross-fertilisation between critical IR theory and green political theory with reference to the critique of modernity. Under conditions of globalisation the normative implications of the ecological crisis make themselves felt as moral claims to recast the relationship between modern societies and their natural environment at the same time as moral agency in such terms seems politically, economically and socially unobtainable.

In order to pursue this project in terms of a reconstruction of immanent possibilities for political change along an intrinsic value theory of green ethics, the thesis argues that a deeper appreciation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory offers a promising framework for interpreting and evaluating the green dimensions of the emerging global polity.

The thesis argues that the conception of the lifeworld in Habermas' critical theory is too narrowly constructed and can be meaningfully expanded to include a dialogic conception if human/nature relations. This keeps intact the organising architecture of Habermas' critical theory in terms of his thesis of the colonisation of the lifeworld, but significantly includes the colonisation by utilitarian conceptions of human/nature relations as an integral part of the dialectic.

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