It's a great pleasure today to have not just one major figure from the field of international relations, but two together in Oxford on the same day,
neither of whom live close to Oxford, even though it's so hard to get your feelings from longer than it takes.
Because, first of all, Chris Rae Smith,
who's a professor of international relations now at the European University Institute in Florence, recently moved to Florence.
But as you, as many of you will know, has been for a number of years at NYU and was head of department there.
He's the author of a number of books that many of you will know and articles in our journals American Power,
the World Order, the Moral Purpose of the State.
Of course, his very successful and interesting handbook on theories of international relations that he's done with Duncan Snyder,
our colleague here, and new book that's coming out that he spoke to last when he was in Oxford on individual rights in world politics.
I haven't got the title quite right.
The articles will have a slightly different title from the book, but you may remember that from when he was here speaking at Iraq last,
and he's here along with Ian to speak about a very interesting new book project.
Ian Clark, who is the author, each cast sorry professor of International Politics in Aberystwyth and also a fellow of the British Academy.
Ian has been working for a number of years on various aspects of legitimacy in international relations and has published
in that regard legitimacy in international society and international legitimacy and world society both familiar.
I actually remember a much earlier book which I was influenced by called Resistance and Reform, which isn't on your list.
But I wanted to raise it because it was a book from years ago that I remember very well in my own work in international relations.
And he's coming out with a book soon on hegemony in international society,
but they're both co-authors of a project on Special Responsibilities, which they're here to talk about this afternoon.
So they've got it divided in terms of who's covering what.
And I will let Ian go first. Thank you, Jennifer, for the introduction and for the invitation to be here again.
For all of you, for coming along. Whether you will get anything out of it, I don't know.
It's been immensely useful for kids and me to have this opportunity of catching up and going through some aspects of this particular project.
And as Jennifer has mentioned, we're part of an international collaboration working on a book on special responsibilities.
And I'll just take a minute or two to outline the project.
Then Chris will talk about the main conceptual, theoretical elements of it,
and then I'll come back to to give some illustration of where this might take us.
Basically, it's a book involving six of us, and we've been working together on these things for a number of years.
Apart from Chris and myself and a lot of book Lansky, Goldman, Eckersley,
Dick Case and Nick Wheeler from my own department team in other and this is not an edited collection.
It will be a co-authored book with six of us as co-authors.
It has been made possible by and yes, I'll see you for the tie you had.
So I acknowledge the sea for supporting a number of workshops that have enabled the
six of us to get together on a fairly regular basis to develop this this project.
The theme of it is the title Special Responsibilities as we get into various
literatures coming out of what we'd already done on international legitimacy and
became very appealing to us that he also a terminology that is profoundly embedded
both in the practice of international relations and in the theory of it,
the diverse range of theorists who deploy this term.
And it goes from, you know, the usual suspects, if you like, Headley and the English school.
All special rights and responsibilities is a phrase you find in international society literature, as you might expect.
But it's a phrase that you find a number of real estate theorists regularly deploying.
And most surprisingly, surveys you'll find and find in Ken Walsh's book.
And you wouldn't really have expected that.
So it's a term that is routinely deployed by I don't see it as is deeply embedded in a lot of diplomatic documentation,
and yet it's never been singled out for close scrutiny or study.
And so that is that is what we are attempting to do.
The book will be partly a historical and a theoretical and a conceptual exploitation.
It will also be an attempt to apply that concept to three facets of contemporary international relations.
And these three facets are climate change, global finance, and the issue of nuclear proliferation, the NPT, the NPT regime.
So the idea of special responsibilities will be specifically developed in the context of these three policy of units.
So that's basically what we're doing.
The book is due for delivery to Cambridge University Press in a few months time and will note onto this Who will give you a flavour
of the kind of theoretical elements that are part of this project to feel like we need that that we keep putting back here?
The gist, by the way, I think I think I can say this, especially as somebody who's who's known as a theorist,
that this is a this is probably a collective experiment, a sort of applied experiment in cooperation among large numbers.
So we're trying to see what happens. You know, exactly how far can you stretch this with six authors?
And I do need to say that we we we originally started thinking that we would do something edited and then drank too much one day and thought,
hey, why don't we raise the bar and just see how much we can achieve?
So whether or not this is success successful, you people can tell us down the track.
But what I want to do is just to sketch the sort of basic conceptual framework and the key
elements of the argument that we want to develop in the book about special responsibilities.
And then Ian is going to sort of pick that up and and talk about it more specifically
with regard to state practices and a particular reference to the Security Council.
So let me just just begin. One of the one of the things that we tried to do in the book was to was it was to give some
conceptual debt to the concept of responsibility and special responsibilities in particular,
and to, in a sense, go back to the sort of philosophical foundations of this and work out where a lot of the literature on this in.
I tend to cut into the question of special responsibilities at the international level,
but leave a lot of the deeper philosophical questions undiscussed.
So we tended to start in. One of the key parts of the argument is that we work with a notion of responsibility
as as very closely tied to the idea of accountability so that an actor
is responsible for a particular set of actions or refraining from a particular
set of actions when they are considered to be accountable for those actions.
And we have a long argument about the relationship between the idea of responsibility and the idea of accountability,
and make an argument that that responsibility is often spoken about as though it simply means causality.
So it's quite caused the death of X number of people, flooding caused the damage in Brisbane.
In Australia we make an argument that in fact these are not synonyms, that causality can be part of a discussion of responsibility.
But the key thing about responsibility is that when we describe someone and act as responsible,
we are saying that they are accountable for those particular outcomes.
Now that's important because what we want, because that gives responsibility and inherently social dimension of responsibility is and ideas of
responsibility and practices of responsibility are things that are embedded within social relationships,
because that's that's the kind of key that's a starting point, is this notion of accountability.
We spent some time making a number of key.
Distinctions between different kinds of responsibility, of which are which the last is most important to us.
And the distinctions we make are, first of all, between positive and negative responsibilities.
So an example of a positive responsibility would be the responsibility of an actor to engage in particular kinds of actions.
A negative responsibility would be for an actor to refrain from engaging in particular kinds of actions.
And this this does relate to the distinction between negative and positive rights.
But we also have an argument about that, that the problematic nature of that distinction.
But we make it anyway. We distinguish between historical and prospective responsibilities.
So responsibilities for things that have occurred in the past as opposed to responsibilities
that have have that might happen in the future or things that might transpire in the future.
You know, so Saddam Hussein was responsible for the death of the Kurds, the gassing of Kurds.
Great powers are responsible for the maintenance of international order.
The second of those is a prospective responsibility. The first is is a historical responsibility.
The next distinction we make is a distinction between moral and legal responsibilities.
And we note that this is, in fact, a kind of complex and controversial relationship.
We just, as a right hand, we talk about a moral responsibility as being responsibility, are framed in reference to particular kinds of social norms,
whereas legal responsibility is responsibility framed in terms of particular legal precepts or rules or statutes.
The most important distinction we make, however, and this goes to the to the heart of the project,
is the distinction between general responsibilities and special responsibilities.
And I'll just spend a moment on this, because the book is about special responsibilities, principally general responsibilities.
We are given the responsibilities that all actors or all members of a given social order or parties to a particular regime of social cooperation.
Okay. So you can disaggregate social orders down to smaller regimes of social cooperation,
and you can talk about general responsibilities in either of those contexts.
But the key thing about a general sensibility is it's a general responsibility that everybody has.
A special responsibility, in contrast, is a responsibility that that is held only by particular parties or particular members of a
social order or particular members or particular parties to a regime of social cooperation.
So in air, this would be, you know, there are certain responsibilities that all states have not to engage in aggression, acts of aggression.
That would be a general responsibility of all states.
A special responsibility is the responsibilities, for example,
that the great powers might have particular responsibilities they have for the maintenance of international order.
Now, we do also talk about how special responsibilities are defined not just by the particularity of those that hold them,
but also by the values that we attach to them that we very often think about
special responsibilities as special in the sense that they are highly valued.
And here we make an obvious this is not always the case, but it is sometimes the case.
And we make the argument that this is very much related to the rights that special responsibilities convey.
So special responsibilities that convey significantly empowering rights and entitlements as part of
the fulfilment of those responsibilities often carry high levels of social esteem attached to them.
So that's general and special. Okay.
Now we then make an argument in the book about the central city of ideas and practices of responsibility to the Constitution of social orders.
Now, this is partly because responsibility being related to accountability.
It is inherently relational context. So it's therefore social.
It's also based on decisions about or ideas about responsibility.
And judgements about responsibility are usually made with reference to intersubjective social norms.
So it's social in that respect, but is also social in, in two other very important regards for this particular project.
The first is that ideas about responsibility and practices of responsibility are central in the constitution of social roles.
Which of course are also related to social identities.
In fact, one of the arguments we make is that in one sense, it makes sense to think about social roles as aggregations of responsibilities.
So we have an argument that responsibility is central to the constitution of
social orders because of the role that it plays in constituting social roles.
The second argument we make is that responsibilities shape societies through
their impact on the development constitution of social power and responsibility.
Is is in a sense, one kind of a legitimate power, not say more about this in a moment.
To have a responsibility is to have a license to act in a particular way or to constrain oneself.
So what we hold acting in a particular kind of way,
and we talk about we have an argument about about the relationship between responsibility and what Barnett and Duval call compulsory power.
And we have an argument about the relationship between responsibility and structural power.
In the book there, finally, because responsibility is so closely related to the distribution of legitimate social power,
controversies and contestations over responsibility are core sites for the struggle for power in international politics.
So this is an object. This is a this is a this is one of the arguments that we find we make about the kind
of place of responsibility in the nature of social orders is that these are sites for
political struggle because with them come significant forms of social power or significant
forms of social power congeal or coalesce around practices of responsibility.
Okay. We might just to sort of wrap up, but I'm going to say let me talk about the three big arguments we make in the book.
Okay. On top of the little ones we've just made and.
The first is an argument about the place of responsibility in anarchic international borders.
We argue that the politics of special responsibility,
that is the distributing of responsibilities to particular actors within an international order, arises in the context it arises,
particularly in international orders,
in which two other political modalities have proven insufficient for addressing certain functional problems of global governance.
And they might be as basic as provision of essential order in international order through to more advanced governance objectives.
And the two political modalities that we're talking about are, at the one extreme,
the free play of material power politics and at the other extreme regimes of sovereign equality.
And we make an argument that it's in its in the context of the failure of both
of those kinds of political practices to address global governance issues,
that you get the emergence of politics, of special responsibilities as a way of channelling,
harnessing and constraining the exercise of power in the service of the pursuit of particular functional goals.
So that's the that's that's the first big argument is about place of the kind of almost the structural
position of the politics of special responsibilities in particular kinds of international orders.
The second argument is an argument that distributions of responsibilities have
a significant bearing on the distribution of power in international systems.
This is a this is a and in a sense, an elaboration of the point I made earlier.
But the argument we make here is that it is around ideas of responsibility or more pointedly,
ideas about responsibility and practice of practices of responsibility become constellation points around which social power is constructed.
So we had him and we can, you know, because of time, I won't go into this, but we have, um, if we think about, we make it up.
We also make a distinction between simple and international and complex international orders, simple international orders.
The differentiation is across three dimensions structures of political agency interdependence and dynamic density and functional imperatives.
In simple international orders, you have relatively simple structures of political agency,
low levels of interdependence and dynamic density, and relatively few key functional imperatives.
The opposite is the case in complex orders we make,
and this is important for us in what we talk about how regimes of special responsibilities develop.
But most importantly, what we want to argue here is that it is within these different kinds of orders
that the distribution of responsibility affects the distribution of social power.
Now, the third big argument we make is an argument about is an argument about social domains.
And here where really I mean, in some ways you can think of you can think of here we are making a significant departure,
I think, from the way in which special responsibilities have been discussed in the literature so far,
which tends to assume a single view of the international system so that you have an international system,
you have an array of particular actors, and you had a distribution of special responsibilities, usually two great powers and this.
But what we want to do and here is one of the ideas a book is, is to say, well,
in complex orders there is no single distribution of special responsibilities.
What you have is different social domains that are that issue, domains in which you get different distributions of special responsibilities.
And this relates to our case study.
So part of the argument is that in the case of climate change, in the case of in the case of nukes and in the case of global finance,
that you have different distributions of special responsibilities that are emerging in those those functional domains.
So that's that kind of see that's that kind of gives you a sense of the kind of schema of the big argument.
And now Ian is going to put some flesh on it. Well, both will attempt to.
I'll see just a little bit about how I think the history of special responsibilities has has evolved.
And then for purposes of illustration, I'll spend a few minutes talking about the Security Council.
I had agreed with Jennifer quite some time ago that I would leave this to the Security Council.
Not quite sure why I give it up, because it's not one of the key studies that we do.
So this is kind of beyond the pale.
But it does seem to me that it would have been an excellent case study to do.
And the idea, I think, translates well into the context of the history of the Security Council.
The and the historical argument that I would like to take on posture is that,
as I see it, I think a practice of the special preceded a theory of the responsible.
And the theory of the responsible has, in a sense, been catching up with a practice that was already in place.
Now, what do I mean by that? The practice of the special and I in the chapter where we discussed the history,
we were kind of debating this in the early 19th century with the the emergence of a notion of the great powers,
a formalised notion of the great powers, which is a position that a number of historians take on this.
And the category of the the special was deemed to be already in existence.
We knew the West, the special wants, if I can use a Chelsea metaphor for those of us who know what that means.
The special ones were already known. They were the great powers.
We didn't have to work out who the special category, where they were, there they were the great powers.
And it seems to me the interesting development is that with the formalisation of a principle of the great powers,
their role in international society has come to be rationalised in terms of the bearing of responsibilities.
And that's interesting. It presumably could have been otherwise,
but that is exactly the language that has dominated the discussion of the role of the great powers for 200 years.
And heavily builds terminology. The gate is fine symbols, you know, that's what great powers are.
And so in a sense,
rather than being the responsibilities past see that are special is the category
of actors to which these responsibilities attach that is deemed to be special.
And initially, in terms of the announcing practice that was already known, they were the great powers.
We didn't need to otherwise worry about who the special ones were.
Things have moved. They have evolved from that.
I think the basic ideas underpinning this emerged early in the 19th century, the precise language of special responsibilities.
As far as we've been able to unearth and the Healy analogies in the interwar period,
and that's already quite interesting, we saw I think it's part of the move towards a theory of collective security,
which you could argue fudged the issue of responsibility and the notion of special responsibilities
was a renewed attempt to fudge what had been sold under the auspices of this particular doctrine.
If security is collective, when it comes, when push comes to shove, who's responsible for producing it?
And the answer again, of course, was the great powers.
Only those with the wherewithal to produce security could be held responsible
because the others simply couldn't deliver on anything that they signed up to.
And in actual treaties, in the interwar period, you find this terminology of special responsibilities being written.
Into international legal tax. And so, I mean, this has been around in a formal sense for the better part of a century,
and yet no one has ever attempted or thought it was worthwhile to try and unpack what that language was meant to meant to convey.
The language really comes to the fore in the period of the Second World War itself and during the the mid 1940s.
I could give you a number of quotations with this.
This language is is used towards the end of the war and the very famous book by WTI Fox that introduces the notion of the superpowers,
the language of the superpowers. He uses the language of special responsibilities.
And so a 1944 text.
But it wasn't just the the academic commentators.
It was the practitioners, too. And if you look at the the drafting of the UN charter.
Dumbarton Oaks and then San Francisco. This language of special responsibilities is pervasive in all of the texts of that period.
And President Truman, just to reassure you that this is not being invented by us, talks about the great powers,
the conference, these great states of a special responsibility to enforce the peace.
Britain's Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.
Same time, a special responsibility lies in negative polls.
And so the bank wrote into the drafting of the the charter is absolutely pervaded by this language of special responsibilities.
It's interesting, Gary Simpson, the international lawyer, Lacey, has an interesting chapter on this.
And it shows you that there is an pervasiveness of this language, and yet it was the key powers.
He says, I haven't been able to quite take down the basis for this,
that I actually argued against that precise form of what's being incorporated in the charter itself.
And it's interesting to to to think why that might have been so and also interesting to remember in the context of what I know about,
to see about some of the debates,
about the Security Council composition and membership both back at San Francisco in 45 and then in the last few years,
the debate about the restructuring of the Security Council that has gone on, that I would argue that we would argue,
can be seen as a specific manifestation of a debate about different understandings of the
nature of the spatial and who therefore should be disappointed abilities in its terms.
And I think it was Hans Kilson in an early takes that pointed out that the Security Council was,
of course, constructed on a principle of bearing a special responsibility for international security.
That was exactly its rationale. But the important point that he Kelson made about this was, of course,
that responsibility was assigned to the Security Council as a whole, not simply to the P5.
It was the Security Council that brought that responsibility.
And of course, the Security Council is composed not just of great powers.
It is a more varied body body than that.
But if you go back to the debates about the membership of the Security Council, Dumbarton Oaks and all the rest,
but I think I think there you can easily tease out competing understandings of what made certain
powers special and what might then have entitle them to be permanent members of this August body.
At the time,
it was a debate about the specialness because this was no longer taken quite so much for granted in the way that it had perhaps been 100 years before.
And without going into all the details, I think you.
You find competing notions of the specialness that would entitle membership of the council
in terms of either a contribution to the successful conclusion of the work itself.
You know, the victors had a special entitlement or a notion of future capacity.
The membership of the Security Council, those that were to be really responsible because they had the power to act,
must have a capacity for the maintenance of international order.
There was a set of arguments about a notion of sacrifice.
Those that had made the biggest sacrifice and you could see in some ways maybe
France and China kind of got in there as much on that criterion as any other.
And elsewhere in this becomes very, very important to to our discussion.
And the the responsibility was the other half of a bargain.
The other half of the bargain being the special privilege.
And the special privilege was the voting procedures on the Security Council and hence the veto.
So just as the goal of the great powers in the 19th century was to be rationalised in terms of their responsibility for the maintenance of order,
you can see that I saw the argument in 1944 or 45 was that the special privileges that were to be given to the few,
the P5 in the Security Council was part of a contract,
the other half being the special responsibilities that would attach to the privileges that they were being being granted.
George C Marshall in 1945 insisted, I quote,
The so-called special privilege of the great powers is matched by its equivalent in special responsibilities.
So there you have it. So I think what we would see then in terms of the devising of the UN Charter and the specific structure of the Security Council,
it it emerged from that contestation at the time of those who were the special white tools that would be entitled
to the special privileges of permanent membership of the Council and then for the rest of international society.
What was the other half of the bargain? What were the special responsibilities that they would bear in in the light of that?
And I think if we fast forward to the last decade or so, especially the middle part of the first decade of this century,
the the high points of the debate about restructuring the Security Council and perhaps expanding it,
and the debates about who the new members of the P5 might be.
And I don't want to house that that whole debate.
I think what we would simply say is that this is a House full of debates about what makes certain actors
special and therefore subject to the building of special responsibilities and the kinds of debates.
And, you know, you'll be thoroughly familiar with all of these.
So I wouldn't go into the details of them, but simply to leave them to to the kind of arguments and absolute shaped the
kinds of competing claims that we have seen made about an entitlement to a seat,
permanent seat or semi-permanent seat in the Security Council,
and all slightly different claims about the nature of the special and why this should be a practice that would make certain,
in this case, states special in terms of the UN structure.
And one is an argument, I guess basically about a material capacity to contribute to global governance in its various various aspects.
And so the generalised argument about the need to make the UN Security Council
reflect today's balance of power rather than the balance of power in 1945 is.
Exactly. A version of that. Why is it important to reflect the realities of power today?
Because the permanent members need to be those with a capacity to contribute to the management of international law.
So it seems to me that that is the the logic of that argument and the quite different kind of position that you'll be familiar with,
as is the argument from representativeness.
And that's a different argument about what makes the permanent members special.
Not necessarily. They have the greatest capacity to do things.
But in terms of a theory of legitimacy.
And at the end of the day, that's basically what we are here to sell you to do.
Another way of thinking about how international legitimacy plays out in international relations is that representativeness is a proxy for legitimacy.
It wouldn't be acceptable to continue to preclude Africa from permanent membership.
It wouldn't be acceptable to preclude some of the emerging BRIC countries from being.
So there is a capacity element in there.
There's also a slightly different argument about the need to represent all the major spheres of of of international society.
In both of these arguments, as you know, come up against the card that the major P5,
the United States and China have kind of played basically because of their own
individual interests about who they would like to not like to be seated at the council.
The quantity argument and the the special responsibility of the Security Council to maintain
international order means it has to have the capacity to act in both of that form.
A set of arguments of 1.32 to that kind of principle.
So the U.S. has for years insisted.
Under Obama, it continues to insist that whatever changes are made to the membership of the Council,
it must be effective in terms of its ability to deliver all its special responsibility for international security.
So I think the debate about the future of the Security Council can quite easily be understood under our scheme,
because it seems to me that the debate about membership is, in effect, a debate about special responsibilities and who should be playing.
All right. Thank you. Thank you for and thanks for perfectly timed at 20 minutes each.