Our Political Moment:Political Responsibility and Leadership in a Globalized, Fragmented Age

Richard BeardsworthAberystwyth University, UK

‘Abstract: National interest and national security need to be reconfigured so as to accommodate a state’s response to global threats and challenges. This requires in turn addressing the following paradox: the pooling and ceding of sovereignty must be made in the very name of national sovereignty. The article maintains that it is one of the foremost challenges of political responsibility and political leadership today to assume this paradox and thereby align national and global interests and practices. The alignment can, it is suggested, effectively oppose sovereigntism and nationalism, on the one hand, and abstract global governance, on the other. To promote this alignment, the article advances a renewed understanding of state responsibility to citizenship under conditions of globalization.

Key Words: Citizenship, global threats, governance, political leadership, political responsibility, state system

things fall apart; the center cannot hold;mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)

The failure since 1914 to establish a new compromise capable of reconciling the forces of nationalism and internationalism constitutes the

essence of the contemporary crisis.

E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (1945)

Preface

For a cosmopolitan like myself, these are obviously difficult times. We have moved into

an uncertain world in which the world as a world appears lost. Never believing in the

‘end of ideology’ thesis that has caught liberalism’s shoddy tail for the last twenty-five

years, cosmopolitans—at least as I have known them—have thought and (some)

attempted to act ahead: on supra-national institution building, on international law, on

1

norm entrepreneurship (the global justice issues of the then ‘Millennium Development

Goals’). The disjuncture between believing oneself ahead and finding oneself, suddenly

—within the space of accelerated political time—behind is psychologically and

intellectually disorienting. When, following Vladimir Lenin, ‘nothing happens for

decades and then decades happen in weeks’, such disorientation can make one de-

energized and bereaved—especially when the immediate future (speaking from out of

Wales, UK) appears so harnessed to a politically irresponsible minority. A child-in-

formation, the post-Cold War reinvention of the international liberal order under

processes of globalization is also now in question. Although Yeats’ lines—reiterated best

by Arthur Schlesinger in 1948 when alluding to the ‘vital center’—ring too apocalyptic

for our consumerist times, there is, at least for liberals in a declining West, a strong sense

of apprehension regarding appropriate political disposition: ‘the best lack all conviction,

while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

In the following I want to make an argument about political responsibility and political

leadership in this globalized, fragmented world. Delivered as an inaugural lecture, my

argument takes the form of twenty-two remarks. Their end is to capture politically the

contemporary paradox of sovereignty: to maintain sovereignty with regard to global

threats, one must pool or cede it. This is our contemporary ‘catch-22’.

1. The basic assumption of the article is that the human species is running out of time

with regard to certain imminent global threats, that effective but also legitimate responses

to these threats are required given the present condition of global pluralism and

fragmentation, and that a narrative of response needs to be fashioned to help motivate

appropriate political action at a time of resurgent nationalisms and US abdication, indeed

sabotage, of global leadership.

2. This is an assumption because there is no direct, evidence-based way of speaking

about the future, whether this future concerns nuclear proliferation, radical climate

change and its effects, the consequences of biotechnologies or those of artificial

intelligence (to keep to earth-bound threats).

2

3. As the philosophical school of phenomenology argues, scientists and social scientists

can extrapolate patterns from the past and the present in order to make reasonable

predictions about the future, but no isolated pattern of human or physical behavior can

harbor anything approaching absolute statistical significance due to the structural

uncertainty of the future.1 The dominant language in the natural sciences is, accordingly,

one of ‘probability’, and the social scientific response to the propositions of natural

science is predominantly framed in terms of ‘probability’, ‘risk’ and ‘resilience’. This

structural uncertainty is visible in the future global scenarios of the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (set up in 1988 to assess the scientific basis of climate change)

as well as in the various policy responses to these probabilistic scenarios.2

4. In this context of future uncertainty, my assumption is one of intuitive moral concern,

but more importantly one of political efficiency and legitimacy. There is a set of global

problems, commonly named ‘global threats’, that require ‘global solution’ (rehearsed

throughout the last decade as ‘global collective action’, ‘global public goods and bads’

and ‘global governance’).3 Solutions have foundered, it has been argued, on the lack of

political vision, institutional inertia, and the diversity of interests that ensue from the

international political order of the state system.4 As a result, the human species finds

itself in an ontological and historical dilemma. This is a descriptive statement not a

phenomenological statement: neither the human species nor humanity is a cognitive

subject. In brief, the technological processes of modernity are producing threats to the

security of the human species, and yet political responses to these threats are made

primitive by an inter-national political order that, unwilling to transcend itself during the

historical moment of US unipolarity (circa 1991-2006), now (re-)appears as fragmented

and disorderly.

5. Several of these threats, like the radical consequences of nuclear proliferation, of

climate change and of resource scarcity are structurally imminent (whatever their ‘due

date’) unless preemptive action is taken. I say ‘preemptive’ not simply ‘preventive’

because, following the international legal definition of ‘preemption’, these threats are

3

imminent for the human species as a whole within the above structural uncertainty of the

future.5 A catastrophic nuclear accident or miscalculation will in all due probability arrive

at some point in the future of the human species without nuclear disarmament. Radical

climate change will in all due probability happen in the coming decades. Resource

scarcity and major conflict, as well as very large patterns of forced migration, will in all

due probability ensue from this climate change.

From the end of the 1950s political scientists were predicting that the Cold War

would come to an end: the question was how and when. Likewise, these global threats

will in all likelihood happen: the question is how and when. Given this, and if they are

not to happen with absolute violence, what is to be done? In this complex temporal

moment of both future uncertainty and imminence, one must re-appraise the politics of

preemption, most recently mooted by the Bush administration in 2002, but wrongly

focused on biochemical and nuclear terrorism, and predicated on policies of control and

an aggressive universalism. A politics of preemption is all the more urgent regarding

climate change due to the atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide (1000 years): the

planet and we upon it are, in other words, already in this future.

6. On a scale of one to ten, the success of global governance of the last thirty years scores

something like two in the major contemporary global regimes. The nuclear non-

proliferation and disarmament regime remains stuck on the refusal of the ‘grand bargain’

between NWSs and NNWSs (the comprehensive linkage of non-proliferation with

disarmament). Global migration and global health regimes are constitutively unable to

transcend borders between states; as a result their managerial successes are radically

incomplete—something of increasing concern for practitioners regarding the futures of

climate change. Despite important trade and banking agreements to sustain an open world

economy (against material and ideational protectionism), global economic and finance

regimes continue so to reinforce the interests of finance capital and large corporations

that economic nationalism has re-emerged as a convincing ideology to many leaders (and

their followers). The post-Paris climate change regime carries few legal enforcement

mechanisms. As a result, the window of opportunity for an average rise in global

temperature of 2° Celsius at the end of this century has disappeared. This lack of success

4

in the governing of specific global threats ensues from the gap between these threats and

the state system. Due to processes of globalisation, threats are increasingly trans-border,

but the primary system in which humans behave politically remains, domestically, the

state and, internationally and globally, the interstate system. Whenever there is an

omission or failure of threat-governance, the gap between threat and system is revealed.

7. This gap is not a void. Relations between states and global affairs are mediated, to a

greater or lesser extent, by regional organizations like the EU, the AU, ASEAN and the

OAS, and club associations like the OECD and IEA, not to speak of the importance of

NGO and INGO actors as well as ‘market signals’ in international diplomacy and global

agenda-setting. In other words, between the two levels of domestic and international

governance there are a plethora of legal and non-legal rules, principles, norms, and actors

whose governance role cannot be underestimated in a comprehensive understanding of

world politics. Indeed, as the Australian philosopher Bob Goodin has argued, this set of

activities and institutions at the sub-global and global levels of governance could be

interpreted, in the historical long-run, already to intimate world government. Just as the

loose institutions of the confederation of the states of Northern America would have been

correctly interpreted at the time as already intimating federal government.6 A necessary

condition of the union was, that said, the violence of civil war. Are we so sluggish as a

species or are this species’ structures so constraining regarding agency that this violence

must be repeated again at a global scale? However one judges Goodin’s argument, the

gap between the global and the national as the realm of the modern state is not void

socially. Transnational social movements and practices are growing and will continue to

grow, fostering complex constellations of actors at the global level.

8. That said, in terms of concerted political action there is, literally speaking, a gap: an

unjoined political space between the two objects of ‘global threat’ and ‘state system’. In

light of this gap, and precisely at the beginning of a decisive historical period when both

these threats and the politics of fear regarding them are likely to increase in intensity,

reach and complexity, how can the cosmopolitan-minded—a collective body in

diremption as members of the human species predominantly attached to states—govern

5

global threats? Indeed, are global threats governable given the prevailing political

condition of humanity (a condition always permitting stasis, the reification of the inter-

state structure, or regression, regressive political communities)?

9. From both a political and a techno-scientific perspective my questions may incur

scepticism. Over the last hundred years scientific invention has threatened the human

species as much as it has improved the quality of human life, whence the postmodernist

ontological paradigms of ‘aporia’, ‘paradox’, and the ‘sublime’ amidst western elites.7

Indeed, given the most recent interventions in genetics, quantum physics and

astrophysics, one can understand why a number of academics and journalists have turned

away from the guiding framework of the human to that of the ‘post-human’, a category

that connotes a rejection of ethics and politics based on the modern subject.8 And yet,

from a political perspective, post-human reflections miss, I believe, a tenuous, but

essential point. Politics should be forward-looking in principle. As Ernst Bloch put it,

politics is about hope, about the hope of escaping structures of power and causation that

risk dominating lives.9 To respond to global threats (nuclear proliferation, radical climate

change, a global epidemic) is what politics by its very nature must do—whether its

responses succeed or not. This, for me, is the basic nature of political responsibility as

first and foremost responsiveness to an event (whatever the event’s nature).10 No gesture

of response would mean that politics had, precisely, already come to an end. Such an end

constitutes the space, for example, of the concentration camp. In the language of

Friedrich Nietzsche, the human is ‘beyond good and evil’ (a point to be made, it should

always be recalled, against forms of de-politicization like fascism). Politically, therefore,

I retain the term ‘human’.

10. Alert to the necessary insistence of politics and to its ‘being-responsive’, it is an

important intellectual responsibility to rehearse how this gap between the global and the

national can be feasibly bridged and what political responsibilities follow therefrom.

Before doing so, I wish first to consider the question of political specificity, especially in

the context of contemporary reflection on the moralization of international politics in

general and international responsibilities in particular (the recent focus, that is, on moral

6

responsibility in international relations11). I understand this specificity in the following

terms. These terms are often associated with political realism in political theory and with

the school of Realism in IR theory.12 I agree with the appellation disciplinarily, but

consider this realism under-theorized.

First, any consideration of the political must address violence and power, building

them constitutively into its analysis. The Weberian account of political responsibility is

therefore immediately important because it recognizes from the first that the primary unit

of domestic and international politics is the state as the site of the legitimate monopoly of

violence (Gewaltmonopol).13 For Weber, violence (from physical harm to insecurity of

life) and the hegemonic domination of violence (power) lay out the field of politics as

such, however mediated this field then becomes. As a result, any attempt to pursue moral

ends must, Weber argues, balance the relation between means and ends in such a way

that the ‘perverse consequences’ of the single pursuit of ends in plurality is avoided

where possible.14 Since these means often require in the domain of politics the use of

violence (whether it be use of arms or, more straightforwardly, constraint through the

monopoly of violence), 1) the relation between the political and the moral is more

important than the moral as such and 2) the use of violence to stem violence can either

reduce violence or increase it—the particular outcome will depend on the particular

balance struck in the particular context. The political virtue of prudence (phronesis)

ensues from these moral paradoxes of the political field. Recent examples of prudence

and imprudence are found in all the post-Cold War cases of military intervention in the

name of humanity.

The first point is Weberian, but there is, I consider, a fundamental Nietszchean

point to be made behind it that affects our understanding of the practices of both

international politics and international ethics. Politics constitutes a force field, one made

up of force and counter-force. The balance of power is often considered as the objective

measure of the relations between force and counter-force, but power-analysis

(particularly in the IR schools of realism) usually reifies these relations of force as ones

of power alone. They are not. Ethics or morality is, for example, often and rightly

opposed to both violence and power: it is a force. But, precisely, as a force, it cannot

escape the force field of politics, and its forcefulness will always depend on how it has

7

resisted countering forces in particular contexts. Weber’s realist ‘Politics as a Vocation’

is consequently wrong to suggest that ‘turning the other cheek’ is the unconditional

‘ethics of a saint’.15 The ethical disposition of ‘turning the other cheek’ constitutes a force

that was efficient for Mahatma Gandhi in the context of English Law in early twentieth

century South Africa and India. This disposition would, however, have been physical and

political suicide in Nazi Germany or colonial France. Since ethics is a force, it needs to

be prudent. In Weberian terms, the ‘ethics of conviction’ and the ‘ethics of responsibility’

are not simply ‘mutually complementary’.16 They must be considered inseparable

instances of force within the force field of politics. This last point on political specificity

is severely underestimated by those who oppose political realism to cosmopolitan

liberalism, or vice versa. Two further points ensue.

Since there can be no universal ethical set of principles by which to adjudicate

competing ethical or political principles, ethical dilemmas are constantly thrown up in

political reality, and one way in which these dilemmas are cut is what I will henceforth

call ‘the political moment’. This political moment is the resolution of dilemma. As recent

events have shown with the United Kingdom’s likely withdrawal from the European

Union, there is no rational mediation between, or transcendence of, the distinction

between the political principle of sovereign independence and that of pooled

interdependence (and strategies of cooperation). The distinction can only be transcended

through a political decision (individual and/or collective). In Nietzschean terms, the

decision enacts a new injection of force that counter-effects one or both of the two

principles at stake. Philosophical argument certainly helps to work out and rehearse what

one considers the better principle (this is theory at work). For example it is important to

argue ethically and politically that sovereignty requires ceding sovereignty in a capitalist

global economy. That said, no meta-ethical argument or transcendent ethical principle

can fully arbitrate in the political field from outside the political field. The proactive

manner of Emmanuel Macron’s ascension to the French presidency amidst western

contagion of populism provides a recent example of how it is a political moment alone

that will ‘cut’ the distinction between sovereigntism and a more cosmopolitan liberalism.

As an instantiation of force, this ‘cut’ is also always subject to reversal.

8

Since the political field constitutes a force field within which all instances have to

contend as force and counter-force, limitation and the posing of limits (physical and/or

conceptual) furnishes us with another way of considering this political moment. As Carl

Schmitt argued in a particularizing rather than universalizing manner (the ‘friend/enemy’

dyad), this moment is again irreducible.17 Not to assume this moment can force one back

into hard borders and hard lines: a paradox of the political that ‘normative power Europe’

has had to learn steeply since 2013.18 Contra the poststructuralist wish to blur lines, I

suggest, then, finally that drawing the line in politics is necessary—whatever the adverse

risks of a consequent ‘them’ and ‘us’—because without the line, nothing can appear

politically in the first place: in the European instance, the universal political norm of

human rights law. We return here to the substance of my first point and to the political

virtue of explicitly integrating the relation between ends and means.

The political moment of ‘drawing the line’—whether in the sense of resolving

dilemmas of principle and opening a new agenda or determining moral possibility

through delimitation—is, I contend, the responsibility of leadership in the political

domain. Responsible political leadership is precisely what assumes this responsibility in a

particular historical context. Irresponsible political leadership—and we need to be careful

here because, again, no ethical criterion can ultimately cut the distinction—is either the

inability to assume this responsibility or to assume it in irresponsible ways in the

particular historical context. Abraham Lincoln was, for example, a responsible political

leader because he made the political union of the United States the condition of the |moral

end of emancipation. In the historical context of secession, the immediate declaration of

emancipation would have meant the loss of force (the unity of the union states) and the

consequent likelihood of losing the Civil War.19 To move to less settled contemporary

examples, Barack Obama was a responsible political leader in not committing the United

States to a third war in the Middle East in the context of the failures of Iraq and

Afghanistan, but he was irresponsible in not committing his forces to Syria once he drew

the line in the sand over chemical weapons. As a result, he has historically abandoned

(once ISIS is defeated) the population of Syria and the Near Middle East to Russian,

Iranian and Turkish force. Donald Trump showed responsible political leadership on

drawing the line on Syria, but irresponsible political leadership by subordinating the

9

authority of climate change science to a specific domestic constituency, the coal industry

(I return to this example at the end). Populist leadership is, this said, precisely the vaunted

refusal to assume the dilemmas of responsibility in a particular historical context—here

reorganizing a severely skewed national economy to a low-carbon energy agenda in the

ostentatious naming of one parochial responsibility.

In sum, these traits of political specificity show that political responsibility

concerns integrating the relation and non-relation between the two forces of the moral

and political in the general force field of politics and that this integration is a critical art

of statespersonship.

11. In the above intellectual and historical context that concerns the specificity of

political responsibility, I suggest that: 1) international political theory re-focuses on the

state as a major agent of change for global transformation; and 2) it is within the

parameters of state political responsibility that a marriage between global and national

interests can probably best be promoted at this historical conjuncture. I explore this

suggestion in the context of possible catastrophic violence for human and planetary life.

Since this violence can now only be attenuated, this talk of political responsibility in the

tension of a globalized, but fragmented age presents, at a theoretical level, an argument

for political responsibility towards the lesser violence. For Aristotle, the wielding of such

responsibility in the political domain is called ‘prudence’ (phronesis). My argument

points, accordingly, to what prudent statecraft might entail at this historical moment.

Before untying this conception of political responsibility and prudent statecraft, let me

make a couple of points on the above two axiomatic arguments: focus on the state as an

agent of change; and focus on state responsibility in the necessary marriage of the

national and of the global.

12. First—as a pragmatic cosmopolitan or from the perspective of what I have labeled

elsewhere ‘cosmopolitan realism’20—I am aware that most cosmopolitan commitments

since the 1980s have been pitched at, or towards, the post-national level. Indeed, much

of twentieth century cosmopolitan thought (particularly cosmopolitan liberalism) has

been premised upon, or directed towards, the transcendence of the state and its eventual

10

replacement by global forms of political community. Under these scenarios the state is

often considered an obstacle to cosmopolitan concerns, and focus is placed on the agency

of global civil society (here I think particularly of the work of Iris Marion Young and

Patrick Hayden, but also of most theoretical work on ‘global justice’ concerns).21 Recent

literature (within the reinvention of classical realism) that defends again the idea of a

cosmopolitan world state has given a renewed life to post-state arguments.22 My work on

cosmopolitanism runs counter to these trends.23 By seeking to bring the state explicitly

back into cosmopolitan discourse, it advances enquiry into whether and how the state

may be an agent of, rather than an obstacle to, cosmopolitan commitments, and how,

accordingly, global/human interests and national interests can be married at this historical

conjuncture at the domestic level.

13. Second, there has been a lot of talk, particularly since the end of the Cold War, of

state responsibility. This ‘responsibility talk’ predates 1989 in IR given the two important

concepts of the legal responsibility of states and the special responsibilities of the ‘Great

Powers’.24 State responsibility is foremost a legal concept in IR: it concerns international

law, individual state breaches of it, and sanctioned response from the international society

of states (to use English School nomenclature). The special responsibility of major

powers is, in contrast, political, not legal (more realist, less liberal): power triggers

responsibility in an anarchic international system of states, connoting responsibility

towards international order and, increasingly during the last phase of the Cold War,

responsibility towards the future (under the aegis of nuclear disarmament).25

The recent frequency and range in the use and meaning of the term ‘state

responsibility’ at the international and global levels characterizes, that said, one strong

self-understanding of the post-Cold War age. In the nuclear regime, non-nuclear-weapon

states are frustrated by the named ‘irresponsibility’ of the nuclear-weapon states towards

article six of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.26 The climate change regime was

explicitly structured until Paris 2015 by the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities

with respective capacities’ of the dyad ‘developed and developing nations’.27 Economic,

health and migration regimes all speak, within the terms of international treaty-law, of

individual state legal and normative ‘responsibilities’ towards, respectively, the global

11

economy, global health, and refugees. And, last but not least, the post-Rwanda

development of the principle, ‘responsibility to protect’, constitutes an international norm

that both emphasizes state responsibility to the protection of its own citizens from

internal threats and underscores the residual responsibility of the major powers to

supplement that protection when absent.28 This norm has been tasked by norm

entrepreneurs to do two further things: first, help promote a move from the international

legal principle of sovereign independence to that of sovereignty as responsibility; second,

in parallel, consider this conception of state responsibility as a meta-political concept that

should and can frame/orient state behavior on the most important global governance

issues—a move that reinforces previous treaty and covenant articles. Whether this

promotion can be successful or not with the contemporary retreat of domestic and

international liberal space is not something I explicitly address here, although I presume

that a shift of focus from moral to political responsibility is nevertheless critical regarding

the accountability of force.29

14. This ‘responsibility talk’ constitutes for many (particularly on the left) part of the

liberal moment of post-Cold War world politics. It is often observed that a critical

genealogy is required in the context of the failed wars of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, of

liberal inaction in Syria, and of the relative decline of the West with regard to the

emerging powers.30 Wary use of a compromised term may, therefore, be strongly advised.

For both pragmatic and basic theoretical reasons, I consider in contrast that state

responsibility remains a useful attractor and focal point with regard to bridging the

political gap between global threats and the system of states. In the context of present

liberal failures, it needs, however, specific rehearsal as political responsibility towards

global threats; less as normative or moral responsibility.31 These points made, I turn to

my conception of political responsibility in the gap between global threats and the state

system.

15. I understand the concept and practice of ‘responsibility’ in pragmatic terms. From the

perspective of responsibility, an agent (x) is responsible to some entity (y) and for some

thing (z). Responsibility is agential, relational and purposeful, but the terms of each

12

instance depend on context, circumstance and decision. With my chosen focus on the

state at this particular historical juncture, and amidst a plurality of actors, I understand

state responsibility as the responsible agency of government. This choice is neither to

dismiss other international/global actors, nor to ignore these actors’ effects on state

behavior in world politics (civil society pressure, for example, on state accountability).

Rather, it is to advance, at a moment of liberal internationalist retreat, the critical

importance of the state and of its responsibilities towards global threats and challenges.

Under general conditions of modernity, responsible government (in the widest sense of

the combination of legislative, judiciary and executive instances) is primarily responsible

to its citizens and responsible for their freedom from threats. This responsibility connotes

both accountability to its principles (the citizenry) and liability in respect of actions taken

for the sake of their freedom from threats. If, for example, government shows neither

primary responsibility to its citizens nor the will to secure their basic interests, it is rightly

accused of being ‘irresponsible’. Hence a state’s refusal (not its inability) to subordinate

global markets to the requirements of a self-determining polity is considered by most of

us as ‘irresponsible government’. This domestic political responsibility of the state

embodies, to use the recent term of the philosopher Leslie Green, the primary ‘duty to

govern’.32 Green justifies this primary duty neither in terms of legitimacy nor in terms of

obligation, but in terms of effective capacity. The duty to govern, he writes, is ‘called

forth by the needs of the common good [. . .] Those who have the effective capacity to

solve it bear the responsibility of doing so’.33 In the context of the domestic duty to

govern, capacity triggers responsibility.

Now, with regard to the aforementioned ‘common good’ of citizens, human needs

lie on a sliding scale of protection and security. In Hobbesian terms, basic security of life

is, at one end of the scale, the primary political action of the state. But, as both Ken Booth

and Bernard Williams have independently argued, the guarantee of survival is only the

first step in security.34 The more secure a polity becomes, the more possibilities of what

security means emerge. On one end of the spectrum a failing or vulnerable state rejects or

loses the capacity to offer even physical security; on the other, a resilient state offers

social security and incorporates, as classical realists from George Kennan to Barack

Obama have maintained, moral values into its very conception of national interest and

13

security.35 I suggest, among others, that this sliding scale of security frames much of the

horizon of contemporary and future world politics: for example, the global challenge of

sustainable development across both developing and developed countries, the human

ability to govern global health, rising populations, migratory displacements, resource

conflict, and the set of governmental decisions required imminently concerning the

parameters of artificial intelligence within human (self-)organization. Under the canopy

of this problematic of political responsibility I consider the performance of the duty to

govern and political action to be the same. This conflation of the two is not opposed to

wider understandings of political action (far from it); but it understands political action

here in terms of the obligations of government in order to focus on the political narrative

that these obligations require in a globalized world. It is therefore the duty of government

and the essence of state political action to ensure, within a virtuous/vicious circle of

increasing/decreasing human resilience, the security of its peoples. The agency x (who is

responsible?) is government; the addressee y (to whom?) is the citizen; and the referent z

(for what?) is the citizen’s freedom from threat. The pragmatics of state responsibility

lies primarily here.

16. In an interdependent world of global threats and challenges the virtuous logic of state

responsibility—one fulfillment of which is the modern welfare state—breaks down. And

yet, no other logic of state responsibility has concretely replaced it in the last thirty years.

Sovereignty as responsibility remains a moral and normative horizon, not as yet a series

of duties particular to political responsibility as such, with its determinate allocation of

algorithms and mechanisms at national and international scales. Contemporary populism,

nationalism and sovereigntism constitute symptoms of the lack of politically effective

and legitimate bridges between the global and the national. For example, sovereigntist

response to the last thirty years of international neo-liberalism presents what is essentially

a cultural remedy to a basic economic problem of national investment and redistribution

in a global capitalist economy. Although its critique of market fundamentalism is

important, the sovereigntist response has no long-term economic or political traction in

this economy, except that of destruction. In this historical crisis it is of little political

force to oppose to a political mindset of closed borders the moral humanist mindset of

14

open borders. Indeed, from an instrumental perspective, the moral and institutional

cosmopolitan response to global threats, underlying the basic gesture of progressive

internationalism, has not motivated concerted political action. I suggest that a narrative

building up immanently from the interests of the state towards the global can help untie

reactivity and promote proactivity alongside cosmopolitan moral argument. This

narrative is, I would argue, one of ‘enlightened self-interest’. I understand enlightened

self-interest as doing good for others because one is doing good for oneself. The concept

and practice are therefore distinct from those of self-interest, on the one hand, and of

altruism, on the other.

One finds this narrative already at work in the public domain. One of the best

recent examples is the 2006 Stern Review on climate change mitigation and adaptation.36

In contrast to previous (specifically) moral arguments for responsibility towards the

threats of climate change in the public domain, the Stern Review self-consciously

mobilized the concept of the ‘long-term interest’ of the state when advancing the

economic argument for massive government response to climate instability and market

failure. Its utilitarian calculation that the long-term costs of political inaction outweighed

short-term benefits made important inroads into the cognitive mindset of economic and

political elites—nationally, regionally and globally. However, it has not helped, as

liberals clearly hoped, to shift national narratives of self-interest, whether these are of

national identity, consumerism, or rational egoism. The review was simply too policy-

oriented; not political enough.

One mostly hears the narrative of ‘enlightened self-interest’ in government

responses to crisis, but this narrative is event-determined and, consequently, episodic for

the governments concerned. To take the example of the United Kingdom: recent extreme

weather events (the flooding and storms since 2014), the Ebola outbreak, and the EU

migration crisis have all been turned into narratives of threats to UK citizens that has had

little ‘national/global’ traction—except among, polls starkly suggest, the 16-24 age

group. My general argument in this context is intellectually simple and historically

delimited.

17. If global and transnational threats present threats to the ‘national interest’ and to

15

‘national security’, as cited in the public sphere, then, following the primary duty of

government, it is government’s responsibility to govern these threats in the name of its

citizenry. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of government to assume this duty as,

precisely, one of national interest and security. In other words, it is the responsibility of

government to argue that ‘global responsibility’ (that is, response to global threats in the

name of human interests) constitutes the very condition of securing its citizens’ interests

in the first place. One must go abroad to come home. These logics of political

responsibility and enlightened interest are not intellectually difficult arguments. What is

required today is more a new narrative of internationalism, less a new argument about it.

Marrying the national and global levels of governance, the above logics can help frame,

therefore, a consistent political narrative of motivation that cuts through a reactive

politics of fear and fosters a politics of preemption and responsible political leadership

towards global threats.

I have argued in a series of recent articles that this reconfigured understanding of

the social contract should be considered in terms of both efficacy and legitimacy.37 The

primary duty of government is one of task efficacy concerning the protection of its

citizens’ basic interests. The more resilient the state becomes, the more sophisticated

these interests become, the more meanings they acquire (like security, although it is the

same thing). Government efficacy turns, as a result, into the question of political

authority and political legitimacy. This turn is the logic of European, then global

modernity. Political action becomes justified in terms not simply of the citizens’ safety,

but of these citizens’ freedoms as such: their rights unto themselves and their

corresponding responsibilities unto each other. This accumulated freedom—the dignified

life of the citizen guaranteed, for example, by the republican liberal contract between

governors and governed—is therefore nothing but the civil and political endpoint of

freedom from threats, freedom from imminent violence. The language of security and the

language of norms meet in this virtuous / vicious circle of freedom / un-freedom.

International and global responsibility towards non-citizens, future generations and the

planet is grounded, therefore, at the national level in terms of the efficacy and legitimacy

of governing threats to citizenship.

16

18. Here the narrative of enlightened self-interest takes institutional form. If the primary

responsibilities of government concern governing threats to its citizens on a sliding scale

of security, and if this governing of threats requires political action in relation with other

governments, then (again) it is precisely the political responsibility of government

towards their principles (their citizens) to cooperate. Such cooperation may require the

fairly simple construction of coordination mechanisms: inter-state police and intelligence

partnerships. It may require the deeper pooling of state sovereignty: regional security

arrangements like NATO, ASEAN, SADC, etc. Or it may require not simply the

limitation but the cession of sovereignty: a military high command; WTO regulations and

its appellate body; trans-border monetary and fiscal arrangements to secure an efficient

national tax-base; transnational climate change monitoring mechanisms on the model of

the IAEA, etc. Whatever the institutional response, the point I wish to underscore is this:

within the framework of political responsibility, reconfigurations of sovereignty form an

immanent part of national security and national interest. Sovereigntism buries this

paradox of interdependence under the myth of sustainable territorial borders.

Global/human interests can, consequently, be appropriately configured with national

interests within a continuum and in a narrative of responsibilities to citizenship.

19. The above argument has undone, in the specific terms of political responsibility, the

domestic/global opposition. For a state to protect its own peoples, its leaders should

assume global responsibility where the state has the capacity (material and/or ideational)

to do so. This argument is made all the more salient when the problematic of the

international legitimacy of states is added to that of domestic legitimacy. The US and its

allies’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 cost the US international legitimacy and accelerated its

relative decline at a moment when the emerging powers were already contesting its

unipolar self-understanding. State sovereignty, on the one hand, and international rule

and perception, on the other, are mutually reinforcing processes, not discrete entities (as

IR realists still tend to assume). This said, I consciously suspend the problematic of

international legitimacy here. My overriding concern is to build up global response to

global threats immanently from the national to the global through the conception of

political responsibility towards citizenry. My exercise is analytic and ignores a series of

17

real-world mediations like the increasing importance of international perception under

conditions of state interdependence. Its merit is however to provide an alternative

narrative of national interest and national sovereignty at a moment when the latter are

being re-appropriated by nationalism and sovereigntism in response to, or disavowal of,

these same threats. To show why and how national and global interests can be aligned is

the responsibility of government and of its leaders. A narrative of enlightened self-

interest provides minimum terms of alignment without entertaining moral argument. It

therefore equally satisfies minimal terms of motivation.

20. But can this kind of narrative do the work required even within my parsimonious

terms of national political responsibility? Clearly not. Political responsibility towards

global threats has been theorized so far with regard to the ‘duty to govern’, in terms of

both efficacy and legitimacy, and along an ontological continuum of security. I am

suggesting that this dimension of government provides the most feasible kinds of political

efficacy and legitimacy at the global level at this moment of time. Global responsibility

must, in other words, be embedded in national responsibility before collective national

responsibility can consistently transcend itself—morally and normatively—towards the

global human level. At least in the case of most countries, most of the time; and this will

be all the more the case with increasing insecurity in the coming decades unless more

enlightened narratives of interest and sovereignty prevail and shift the international

system in a more cosmopolitan direction.

However, political responsibility is, as I have already intimated, more than the

duty to govern, particular to the office-holders of government. The assumption of this

duty presupposes, to begin with, responsible political leadership. I understand the latter

as the ability to assume the political moment responsibly: here both to identify and to

portray the national interest in global terms as a response to ‘global’ threats. In the

context of leadership, political responsibility is not simply a duty, but, in the terms of the

ethicist Hans Jonas previously alluded to, the self-imposed ability to ‘respond to’

(responsiveness) prior to and beyond the structures of accountability that frame the

modern political duty to govern, including the duty to lead.38 While, then, the academic

observer can point to the importance of the above narratives of national interest and

18

sovereignty (and rehearse them, with others, as persuasively as possible in the public

domain as their academic responsibility), it is the state leader who assumes, or not, the

political moment, chooses these narratives amidst a process of collective deliberation,

and brings them together into one strategic decision of national responsibility towards

global threats. Referring back to what was said earlier on political specificity , this

moment draws the line of political action in the sand and sets the future agenda of

politics within a particular constellation of forces.

These comments do not champion state leadership for its own sake. They suggest

that future-oriented political responsibility lies in an act of leadership, whereby national

interest is re-constructed to square with global and human interests on specific global

threats and where state self-restraint is perceived not as an act of patriotic betrayal, but

one of timely political virtue. This virtue is that of prudence (phronesis). Aristotle

considered prudence a political means to ‘the lesser violence’. In the future of the world

this end can only be instituted through scalar government arrangements (a reinvention of

federalism). But, this institutional project—as the present dilemmas of the European

Union attests—can only be achieved first through new national acts of interest and

sovereignty. Otherwise federalism is/will be perceived as domination. These acts require

state leaders to take risks and to assume the political moment. It is an important academic

duty, speaking truth to power, to frame the possibility of prudent statecraft in these senses

and for these ends.

21. After two years of careful climate diplomacy between the US and China, led by the

US negotiator Todd Stern, Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping announced in October 2014

that the US was cutting CO2/e emissions by 20% by 2025, on the base line of 2005, and

that China was increasing its use of renewable energies (foremost wind and solar) to a

minimum of 20% of its energy mix by 2030. Both policy initiatives broke the political

gridlock, following the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties in 2009, between

developed and developing countries, and they formed the precondition for the global

Paris Agreement in 2015. This global agreement, as is now well documented, works from

the bottom-up, with nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that allow, if

implemented, the average temperature rise of the planet to remain above 2° Celsius but,

19

in all due probability, below 3.5° Celsius.39 As said earlier, this agreement cannot be

considered a global governance success: climate destruction is imminent. It announces

nevertheless through a series of measures—ratcheting-up the quantity and rate of

emissions reductions, technological transfer, financial assistance, and, most importantly,

the bare outline of a global monitoring system—a bridge between the national and the

global that, together with the technology and markets of renewable energy, could foster a

self-reinforcing sense of national climate rights and responsibilities. This sense could

foster, in turn, a comprehensive political narrative among political parties, in which

transition to a carbon-neutral global economy and sustainable development for both the

non-OECD and OECD countries became a global horizon. Obama and Jinping’s 2014

act of leadership re-routed the climate change regime by brokering, as a political

beginning, new lines of reciprocity between developed and developing worlds. Their act

was a risk; the ‘could’ seemed suddenly a trifle more likely than less likely.

President Trump overturned Obama’s Climate Action Plan by executive order in

April 2017. His energy policy—focused on ending climate programs and renewing coal

production in specific American constituencies—means, at best, that the US cannot meet

its nationally determined contribution by 2025 and, at worst, a run on non-reciprocity and

nationalist leadership among countries like India, Russia, Indonesia and Nigeria. The

court is still out, a year or so later, on the exact consequences of Trump’s political

decision for the global climate regime. For actors in international organizations and

global civil society, it shows the unreliability of bridging the national and global in

national terms. A state can always yield its national responsibility towards the planet:

hence international treaties are required. I disagree. At this particular moment in history,

it is only progressively minded states (large or tiny like the Pacific Islands) that can forge

the link between the global and the national. Trump’s uncoupling of the national and the

global is not simply irresponsible to the planet and the species that live upon it; it is firstly

irresponsible to its own citizenry. The 50,000 coal-mining jobs in the mid-West will not

return. Domestic coal consumption and coal exports are both in secular decline. Better to

create on the wide plains of the mid-West a new US infrastructure of renewable energy. It

is this linkage between the national and the global that needs to be articulated by national

parties in order that the appropriate political will emerges.

20

22. Climate change is one of the major challenges of the 21st century from which other

global threats derive or intensify: it provides a catalyst for alternative political narratives

(something mainstream progressive politics must assume in advanced liberal economies

like those of the US and the UK). Obama’s 2014 commitments were the very least that

could be done if we return to the thought of atmospheric residence time (1000 years!). A

politics of preemption is required, although it is in all due probability already too late for

a lot of species life and for several low-lying human habitats. In this context of global

threat, Trump’s presidency—‘full of passionate intensity’ as Yeats put it in 1919—

embodies almost total political irresponsibility, almost total lack of leadership, and an

almost total inability to assume the political moment responsibly. Trump assumes, with

some responsibility, only one pillar of the contemporary political moment: the

constituency ignored by neo-liberal globalization processes. In counter-force to this force,

we should not antagonize economic and cultural nationalists. To do so enters, as we have

seen with much of the liberal media this last year, the game of blame and the resultant

intensification of cultural difference: a Schmitt-type political moment, the intensification

of antagonism to the extreme ‘friend/enemy’ distinction. Rather, we—a ‘we’ in

diremption between vulnerable humanity and the political realities of the state system—

should walk confidently, with a dialectical vision of the national and the global, with

policies consistent with science-based probabilities and proactively embraced in a

digitally endangered public domain, and with a politics of responsibility that holds the

center and takes people up, enthuses them, and empowers them—all the while drawing,

with a sure hand, the lines in the sand. Our political moment calls for these intellectual

and political responses of leadership.

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of my inaugural lecture as E.H. Carr Professor,

Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, April 2017, and I thank the

two reviewers for their important feedback. I dedicate the argument to my late wife

Brooke Tosdale Beardsworth (1977-2017): you are so sorely missed.

21

Funding

This research received no specific grant from a funding agency in the public, commercial

or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

22

1 See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).2 See the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Contributions to the Fifth Assessment Report

of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,

2014) and the various policy responses from the International Energy Agency since 2005 available

at http://www.iea.org/policiesandmeasures/climatechange (accessed 31/07/2018).3 The first systematic use of the term ‘global threats and challenges’ began with Kofi Annan’s

launch of the ‘High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’ in December 2003 (see

https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/sg2095.doc.htm|). Their report was published by the Secretary

General’s Office a year later and critiqued by the General Assembly for inadequate treatment of

economic development for global collective security in February 2005. Use of the term ‘global

governance’ is succinctly rehearsed by Thomas Weiss’s Global Governance: Why? What?

Whither? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013); that of ‘global public goods and bads’ was introduced by

Inge Kaul’s Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999). 4 See particularly, the analysis of global governance gridlock in Thomas Hale, David Held and

Kevin Young’s Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need it Most (Cambridge,

UK: Polity, 2013) and Thomas Hale, David Held et al., Beyond Gridlock (Cambridge, UK: Polity,

2017). I have reviewed the two books for the journal Global Polity. Available at

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1758-5899.12175 and

https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/16/07/2018/book-review-beyond-gridlock.5 Anthony Arend, ‘International Law and the Preemptive Use of Military Force’, The Washington

Quarterly, 26 (2), 2003, pp. 89-103.6 Robert Goodin, ‘World Government is here!’ in Sigal Pen-Porath and Rogers M. Smith (eds)

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennyslvania Press,

2013), pp. 149-165.7 The best representations of this position remain Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern

Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979) and

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 1982).8 The category of the ‘posthuman’ was forged in critical literary studies in the late twentieth century

and was brought to the social sciences by the work of Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Judith

Butler, and Bruno Latour and to the biological sciences by Francois Varela and Humberto

Maturana. For an interdisciplinary argument across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, see

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter

and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). I am indebted to Milja Kurki for

knowledge of this last work. See Milja Kurki, International Relations and Relational Cosmology:

Reorienting to the Planetary (manuscript) for a compelling reflection on ethics in international

relations from a post-human perspective.9 Ernst Bloch, ‘Karl Marx; the Stuff of Hope’ in The Principle of Hope, Volume 3, trans. Neville

Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 1354-1377.10 Following Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the

Technological Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and the philosophy of

Emmanuel Lévinas, one could call this first act of responsiveness, prior to any code of

responsibility, ‘meta-ethical’ or ‘first ethics’. I prefer to situate the act, precisely, as the political

gesture par excellence.11 On the application of the concept of collective moral responsibility to IR theory, see Michael

Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 2002); Ariel Colonomos, Moralizing International Relations (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2008); and Toni Erskine, ‘Locating Responsibility: The Problem of Moral Agency in

International Relations’ in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds) The Oxford Handbook of

International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 699–707.12 See, for example, Raymond Geuss, ‘Realism and the Relativity of Judgment’, International

Relations, 29/1, 2015, pp. 3-22.13 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, The Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingstone

(Indianopolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), pp. 32-94.14 Weber, Politics as a Vocation, p. 79.15 Weber, Politics as a Vocation, p. 82.16 Weber, Politics as a Vocation, p. 92.17 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2007), particularly pp. 26-9. Schmitt’s decision to consider the ‘qualitative’ moment of the

political as the intensification of antagonism that opens up the distinction between ‘friend’ and

‘enemy’ (pp, 61-2) presents a particularist rehearsal of the necessity of limitation in the political

field. 18 As is well known, the term ‘normative power Europe’ gained traction from the early 2000s in the

context of the EU promotion of democracy, human rights and peaceful conflict resolution: see Ian

Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’ Journal of Common Market

Studies, 40 (2), pp. 235-258. Strategic abandonment of the term correlates with the European

migration crisis from 2013 when the un-thought relation between the external projection of ethical

force and the internal settlement of territorial borders came to the fore. See Jennifer Welsh,

“Fortress Europe and the Responsibility to Protect: Framing the Issue.” Available at

http://www.eui.eu/Documents/RSCAS/PapersLampedusa/FORUM-Welshfinal.pdf (accessed

31/07/2018).19 See James McPherson’s excellent short biography of Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2009).20 Richard Beardsworth, ‘Cosmopolitan Theory and World Politics: An Argument for Cosmopolitan

Realism’, in Scott G. Nelson and Nevzat Soguk (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern

Theory, Modern Power and World Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 373-390.21 Patrick Hayden, Cosmopolitan Global Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) and Iris Marion

Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The global justice

literature is ever growing, but, see particularly, Brock, Gillian, and Darrel Moellendorf (eds)|

Current Debates in Global Justice (Berlin: Springer, 2005) and Thomas Pogge and Darrel

Moellendorf (eds) Global Justice: Seminal Essays (St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008).22 For an excellent review of the literature, see Luis Cabrera, ‘World government: Renewed debate,

persistent challenges’, European Journal of International Relations 16(3), 2010, pp. 511–530. See,

more recently, Campbell Craig, ‘Classical Realism for the twenty-first century: Responding to the

Challenge of Globality’ in Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest (eds) The Politics of Globality

since 1945: Assembling the Planet (Abingdon: Routledge) pp. 71–89; and Campbell Craig,

‘Solving the Nuclear Dilemma: Is a World State Necessary?’ in Richard Beardsworth, Hartmut

Behr and Tim Luke (eds) The Nuclear Condition, Special Issue of Journal of International Political

Theory (online; forthcoming 2019).

23 Richard Beardsworth, ‘Towards a Critical Concept of the Statesperson’, International Political

Theory, 13/1, 2017, pp. 100-121; Richard Beardsworth, Garrett Wallace Brown and Richard

Shapcott (eds), The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

forthcoming); and ‘A Cosmopolitan Response to Postmodernism’ in Richard Beardsworth,

Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory. Cambridge, Polity Press: 2011), pp. 199-226.24 For the correlation of power and responsibility, see Hedley Bull, ‘The Great Irresponsibles? The

United States, the Soviet Union and World Order’, International Journal, 35 (3), 1980, pp. 437-47;

Inis Claude, “The Common Defense and Great-Power Responsibilities,” Political Science Quarterly

101, no. 5, (1986), pp. 719–32 and Bruce Jones, Carlos Pascual, and Stephen John Stedman, Power

and Responsibility (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009). For the correlation of state

sovereignty, capacity and responsibility, see, within a large sub-field of IR, IR theory and

international legal studies, Mlada Bukovansky et al., Special Responsibilities (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2012).

25 On Gorbachev’s global humanism, for example, in the scaling down of the nuclear stand-off with

the United States, see Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. Robert

English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, PN: Pennyslvania State University, 2000).26 See Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, “The Nonproliferation Complex,” Ethics & International

Affairs, 27 (3), 2013, pp. 329–48.27 See Article 10 of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change. Available at https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf (accessed 31/08/2018).28 For the initial formulation of the principle, see Kofi Annan, ‘Two Conceptions of Sovereignty’,

The Economist, 18 September 1999, pp. 49-50; and ‘The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’ (2001). Available at

http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf (accessed 31/07/2018).29 Richard Beardsworth, ‘Tying a Contemporary Norm of War to Historical Process and Judgment:

R2P and Political Responsibility’, paper given at an ISA workshop on ‘Norms and Social Science’,

ISA Annual Conference, San Francisco, 2018.30 For example: Aidan Hehir, Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of

Humanitarian Intervention (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and his forthcoming Hollow

Norms and the Responsibility to Protect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).31 For the initial formulation of this argument, see Richard Beardsworth, ‘From Moral to Political

Responsibility in a Globalized Age’, Ethics and International Affairs, 29 (1), 2015, pp. 71-92.32 Leslie Green, ‘The Duty to Govern’, Legal Theory 13 (3–4, 2007), pp. 165–85.33 Leslie Green, ‘The Duty to Govern’, pp. 166 and 171.34 Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 95-

279; and Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political

Argument (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 1-28.35 George Kennan, American Diplomacy, expanded edition, (Chicago, IL: Chicago University

Press, 1984); Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President to the Nation on Libya’, March 28, 2011,

available at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/28/remarks-president-

address-nation-libya (accessed 01/08/2018).

36 Published as Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007).

37 Richard Beardsworth, ‘From Moral to Political Responsibility’; ‘Towards a Critical Concept of

the Statesperson’; and ‘Reflections on Cosmopolitan Institutionalism: State Responsibility in a

Globalized Age’ in Luis Cabrera (ed) Institutional Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, forthcoming 2018).

38 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.39 UNFCCC, Conference of the Parties 21, ‘Paris Agreement’. Available at

https://unfccc.int/files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/application/pdf/paris_agreement_english_.pdf

(accessed 01/08/2018).

Author biography

Richard Beardsworth is E.H. Carr Professor in International Politics and Head of the

Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, UK. He is also a Research

Associate at the Institut des Etudes Politiques (SciPo), Paris. Before coming to Aberystwyth, he

held appointments at Florida International University, the American University of Paris,

Sussex University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. His research interests lie in

normative theory, political leadership and global politics. His publications include Derrida and

the Political (1996), Nietzsche (1998), Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory

(2011), and The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities (co-edited with Garrett Brown and

Richard Shapcott: 2018).