Page 135 - Human Rights
P. 135
Faculty of Nursing
Adult care Nursing Department
However, the virtues of democracy are not confined to a single society and must be generalized
at an international level.
At the global level, there seems to be no better alternative to democracy for accomplishing peace,
development, the rule of law, and human rights.
Andrew Beddows, following Immanuel Kant’s democratic peace theory, stated, just as men must
overcome this anarchic condition of injustice by establishing a civil state, states must institute an
international legal order in the form of a federation of states submitting to a common adjudicative
authority.
Only then, can coercion become regulated in the international sphere and represent the omni
lateral will of the human race, just as the state represents the will of its people. . .. Only a
democratic world order, in which each state’s population internalizes the costs of its own
behavior, can organize itself into a liberal world order in which states are regulated by law.
(Beddows 2017) Kantian perpetual peace rests on three main institutional evolutions (Carnatic
2016):
a) liberal democracies should evolve to full democracies with active citizenship and social
participation; b) global governance arrangements should be promoted so that supranational
institutions can be truly effective (the United Nations (UN) and the International Criminal Court
are good examples); and
c) freedom of circulation (or the right to visit) should exist to allow the mobility of citizens and
their families (such as in the European Union (EU)).
The democratic regime is not only more ideologically virtuous in promoting the exercise of
individual freedom, but it also increases civic participation of citizens with respect to collective
goals, such as healthcare promotion. Indeed,
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