The Western international community is based on liberal political values and norms. Liberal human rights — individual freedoms, civil liberties, and political rights — are at the centre of its political culture. They are the ‘constitutive values that define legitimate statehood and rightful state action’ in the domestic as well as in the international realm (Reus-Smit 1997: 558). In the domestic realm, the liberal principles of social and political order — social pluralism, the rule of law, democratic political participation and representation, private property, and a market-based economy — are derived from, and justified by, these liberal human rights. Only a state that bases its domestic political system on these principles and reliably follows these values and norms in its domestic politics is regarded as fully legitimate by the Western international community.