The Hobbesian claim that in international relations there is no way of submitting the subjectivism of the sovereingties to ethical constraints may be rejected on either Grotius' or Kant's terms. But only a broadly Kantian approach is able to recognize the universality of human rights and to meet two kinds of challenge to international coexistence: those related to the centripetal forces of global economic interdependence and those related to the centrifugal forces arising from the sharpening of national, ethnic and religious differences.