The Ethical State Artur Victoria The process of preconceiving liberal democratic values and re-institutionalizing them for a global world calls for nothing less than a new enlightenment. Such a global enlightenment should aim to civilize the increasingly brutal world of global economics, just as the eighteenth century Enlightenment began the process of civilizing the absolutist post- Westphalia states. It is within this context that it is argued that the decline of the state and the shifting basis of political legitimacy justify humanitarian 'intervention', particularly to prevent the oppression of those whose consent has not been sought by those in power. Indeed, as the walls around sovereign states break down, the term 'intervention' seems less and less appropriate and loses much of its normative stigma. Western legal, constitutional and political theory have been built on the assumption that most polities are 'strong states'; that is, states that largely pass the Justinian test of sovereignty according to which most legal and political issues arise, and can be resolved, within the state'? Such states emerged in Western Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia when the horrors of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) convinced many that the greatest danger in international affairs was intervention in other states. The new states were initially highly authoritarian - an authoritarianism that was supposedly justified by the fear of internal chaos. Such states were civilized by the North Atlantic Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and by social democrats in the nineteenth century. Enlightenment liberals insisted that states had to justify themselves to their citizens by furthering citizens' rights and by becoming accountable to the population. Initially the mechanism for accountability was the right to revolution proposed by Locke and applied on this side of the Atlantic. Accountability mechanisms were refined through democratic legislatures and administrative law. Social democrats sought to extend the range of rights the growing state secured for its citizens. Those who did not seek millenarian revolution seemed to adhere to an essentially Whig theory of history, of constant improvement towards a common endpoint in which the rights secured by liberal democratic societies were expanded and the number of such societies increased. What all theories assumed was the existence of a strong state. The debates were about what values should be applied to its governance - liberty, equality, rights, citizenship, democracy, community, welfare and the rule of law.