PREAMBLE

In 52 b.c., Cicero proclaimed that “those who share Law must also share Justice; and those who share these are to be regarded as members of the same commonwealth” (1997: 24). This statement will form the backdrop to my presentation, which deals with international conventions about children and their rights and, more specifically, how they relate to the recent and burgeoning practice of transnational adoption from countries in the South to mainly involuntarily childless people in the North. To what extent these “global laws” can be said to represent the sense of justice of the citizens of the various signatory nation-states will be my overriding concern; how far and according to what principles can the boundaries of “the same commonwealth” be stretched? My argument will be that the values of these conventions reflect contemporary Western values and that this raises important questions about a globalization of Western rationality and morality, about legal pluralism, and about the meaning of justice. I shall consider if, in the application of the normative discourse of these conventions, we can witness what the editors of this volume call “circumscribed pluralism”; namely, a middle space between the local and the global, circumscribed by the demands of local moral agents as well as the global norms in relation to which they position themselves.

The relationship between local and (posited) universal ideas and values is an old anthropological problem.