The Politics of Moral Hegemony: Globalization and the Return of Standards of Civilization.

While much attention has been dedicated to the economic and political dimensions of hegemony, there has been little interest in its moral character. Yet hegemony has often been draped in the trappings of universal morality: we need only look to the recent debates over the morality of the recent American-backed intervention in Iraq to find an intimate connection between the claim of moral hegemony and the practice of political hegemony. This paper explores the role of moral hegemony in a different aspect of contemporary international politics?that of economic globalization. Two very potent phrases have begun to appear in the statements of financial leaders in recent years: universal standards and civilizing globalization. Both have occurred in the context of recent debates around the future of international financial governance. What makes these two phrases particularly interesting, however, is the fact they are both very new and very old. On the one hand, they represent a significant departure from the neutral and technical language that we have come to associate with international financial governance, appealing instead to more explicitly moral conceptions of international order. On the other hand, they echo a much older concept?that of the standards of civilization?which was employed by European states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to justify the imposition of European standards and laws around the world, supporting an earlier phase of globalization. By examining the parallels and discontinuities between nineteenth and twenty-first century conceptions of standards of civilization, I hope to make further sense of an empirical puzzle: the current move by IMF representatives, among others, to frame economic globalization in the explicitly universalist ethical terms of civility, responsibility and ownership. At the same time, I will seek to tackle a broader theoretical question: whether we are witnessing an attempt to build a new moral hegemony to both support and obscure the politics of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]