Introduction to Part I

Abstract

The key concept utilized in this book to understand the international system is neither hegemony, hierarchy, nuclear bipolarity, nor pecking order; instead it is the global social contract. Lamenting the lack of a global polling study on the basis of global sampling theory and the lack of a global quasi-legislative study covering all the multilateral treaties, we have decided to study the link between the citizens’ preferences in values and norms and sovereign states’ participation in multilateral treaties systematically and empirically. By providing the empirical evidence that global citizens’ preference about values and norms converges approximately with sovereign states’ participation in multilateral treaties, it can be concluded that the global social contract could be imagined and minimally envisaged. Part I describes how our initial hunch-cum-hypothesis has developed into the conceptual formulation of the problem: Rousseau and Locke Writ Global. Deploying the World Value Survey (R. Inglehart et al) and the Multilateral Treaties Survey (Lien T.Q. Le and Takashi Inoguchi), we present the degree of association between citizens’ preference in value orientation and states’ preference in treaty participation and argue that our initial hunch-cum-hypothesis has been approximately validated when we formulate states’ participation in multilateral treaties as a bundle of global quasi-legislative contracts.