Abstract

Studies of European integration have largely neglected ethical questions which arise in the context of international relations. My dissertation describes for the first time the ethical dimension of western Europe's international political economy by examining the question of international distributive justice in the case of the European Union . Within an analytic framework of contemporary normative political theory, I argue that among three distributive criteria of need, desert and rights, the criterion of need justifies economic redistribution in order to reduce regional inequality among EU member states. I defend the theoretical adequacy of this ethical justification by combining empirical research, including the use of Q methodology, with normative conceptual analysis