Affective Bonds and Moral Norms: A Communitarian Approach to the Emerging Global Society AMITAI ETZIONI M ost communitarian writings have focused either on general philo­sophical positions(e.g., the relationship of the good to the right) 1 or on intra-societal issues, such as the relationship between democracy and community, 2 women’s status, 3 and abortion or pornography. 4 In recent years numerous developments have occurred on the international level (for example, the thickening of the European Union and the rise of trans­national norms) that suggest the time is ripe to apply communitarian thinking more extensively to international relations. This article seeks to point to several key areas in which communitarian analysis might be pro­ductively applied(including the rise of the global civil society, the devel­opment of transnational moral dialogues, the evolution of some sets of shared norms and even values, and efforts to fashion supranational levels of community), and the reasons why such application might be benefi­cial. Attempts to proceed in this direction face the difficulty that there is no one agreed-upon communitarian position. East Asian communitarians, 5 who might be called authoritarian communitarians, differ greatly from the works of scholars associated with communitarian thinking in political science, especially Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer. And these in turn differ from the works of sociologists such as Ferdinand 1. See, for instance, chapter one in Yong Huang, Religious Goodness& Political Right­ness: Beyond the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Harrisburg, pa : Trinity Press Inter­national, 2001). 2. See Charles Taylor,»No Community, No Democracy, Part i « Responsive Commu­nity, 13, no. 4(Fall 2003): 17–27; and Charles Taylor,»No Community, No Democ­racy, Part ii « Responsive Community, 14, no. 1(Winter 2003/04): 15–25. 3. Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 4. See, for example, Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Pub­lic Philosophy (Cambridge, ma : Belknap Press, 1996). 5. For more on the subject, see Daniel A. Bell, East Meets West: Human Rights and De­mocracy in East Asia (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2000). ipg 3/2005 Etzioni, The Emerging Global Society 127