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Informed by a recent wave of academic and policy research, international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the OECD are increasingly attempting to incorporate anti-corruption measures into their respective missions. But while the concept of corruption makes little sense in the absence of a parametric normative distinction between that which properly belongs to the public sphere and that which belongs to the private or commercial sphere, there has been little effort by policy makers or students of international political economy to explicitly articulate and reflect upon the moral and ethical underpinnings of the concept of corruption. This paper reviews some of the key documents of the emerging global anti-corruption regime, and analyses the moral connotations permeating these documents. I also examine the relative neglect of moral and ethical issues within the scholarly literature on corruption and its consequences. Such neglect, I argue, is likely to undercut the legitimacy, and hence efficacy, of international institutional efforts to combat corruption.

The case of the French Revolution supports the proposition that principles of political legitimacy which shape state identities are linked to domestic social structures, and help determine the resources states mobilize in international competition. To the degree that they are shared across states, legitimacy principles also shape international society. The enactment of a deviant principle of legitimacy by a major power will have systemic consequences because it undermines the existing rules of the game; it may have transformative effects if the efficacy of the new principle is demonstrated in competition. Closer attention should be paid to the complex manner in which new principles interact with existing rules of international society.

In recent international relations theory debates, constructivists have argued that explanations based primarily on interests and the material distribution of power cannot fully account for important international phenomena and that analysis of the social construction of state identities ought to precede, and may even explain, the genesis of state interests. This claim has proved difficult to operationalize empirically, though some persuasive results are now emerging. This article analyzes the relationship between state identity and state interest in the development of American neutral rights policy from U.S. independence to the War of 1812.