1 00:00:01,940 --> 00:00:13,730 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, 2 00:00:14,420 --> 00:00:23,090 neither of whom live close to Oxford, even though it's so hard to get your feelings from longer than it takes. 3 00:00:23,090 --> 00:00:27,380 Because, first of all, Chris Rae Smith, 4 00:00:27,740 --> 00:00:36,830 who's a professor of international relations now at the European University Institute in Florence, recently moved to Florence. 5 00:00:36,830 --> 00:00:42,920 But as you, as many of you will know, has been for a number of years at NYU and was head of department there. 6 00:00:44,390 --> 00:00:51,960 He's the author of a number of books that many of you will know and articles in our journals American Power, 7 00:00:51,980 --> 00:00:54,890 the World Order, the Moral Purpose of the State. 8 00:00:56,360 --> 00:01:05,660 Of course, his very successful and interesting handbook on theories of international relations that he's done with Duncan Snyder, 9 00:01:05,990 --> 00:01:15,799 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. 10 00:01:15,800 --> 00:01:17,060 I haven't got the title quite right. 11 00:01:17,090 --> 00:01:24,860 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, 12 00:01:25,280 --> 00:01:30,230 and he's here along with Ian to speak about a very interesting new book project. 13 00:01:30,980 --> 00:01:42,710 Ian Clark, who is the author, each cast sorry professor of International Politics in Aberystwyth and also a fellow of the British Academy. 14 00:01:43,520 --> 00:01:52,249 Ian has been working for a number of years on various aspects of legitimacy in international relations and has published 15 00:01:52,250 --> 00:01:59,110 in that regard legitimacy in international society and international legitimacy and world society both familiar. 16 00:01:59,450 --> 00:02:06,799 I actually remember a much earlier book which I was influenced by called Resistance and Reform, which isn't on your list. 17 00:02:06,800 --> 00:02:13,400 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. 18 00:02:13,700 --> 00:02:18,260 And he's coming out with a book soon on hegemony in international society, 19 00:02:18,800 --> 00:02:26,690 but they're both co-authors of a project on Special Responsibilities, which they're here to talk about this afternoon. 20 00:02:26,700 --> 00:02:30,770 So they've got it divided in terms of who's covering what. 21 00:02:31,160 --> 00:02:40,879 And I will let Ian go first. Thank you, Jennifer, for the introduction and for the invitation to be here again. 22 00:02:40,880 --> 00:02:47,660 For all of you, for coming along. Whether you will get anything out of it, I don't know. 23 00:02:47,840 --> 00:02:57,740 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. 24 00:02:58,340 --> 00:03:09,049 And as Jennifer has mentioned, we're part of an international collaboration working on a book on special responsibilities. 25 00:03:09,050 --> 00:03:13,490 And I'll just take a minute or two to outline the project. 26 00:03:13,850 --> 00:03:19,610 Then Chris will talk about the main conceptual, theoretical elements of it, 27 00:03:20,120 --> 00:03:24,980 and then I'll come back to to give some illustration of where this might take us. 28 00:03:26,210 --> 00:03:34,400 Basically, it's a book involving six of us, and we've been working together on these things for a number of years. 29 00:03:34,910 --> 00:03:39,980 Apart from Chris and myself and a lot of book Lansky, Goldman, Eckersley, 30 00:03:40,160 --> 00:03:50,540 Dick Case and Nick Wheeler from my own department team in other and this is not an edited collection. 31 00:03:50,990 --> 00:03:56,720 It will be a co-authored book with six of us as co-authors. 32 00:03:58,040 --> 00:04:02,959 It has been made possible by and yes, I'll see you for the tie you had. 33 00:04:02,960 --> 00:04:09,290 So I acknowledge the sea for supporting a number of workshops that have enabled the 34 00:04:09,290 --> 00:04:15,950 six of us to get together on a fairly regular basis to develop this this project. 35 00:04:18,500 --> 00:04:27,440 The theme of it is the title Special Responsibilities as we get into various 36 00:04:27,440 --> 00:04:34,040 literatures coming out of what we'd already done on international legitimacy and 37 00:04:34,370 --> 00:04:42,290 became very appealing to us that he also a terminology that is profoundly embedded 38 00:04:43,220 --> 00:04:48,290 both in the practice of international relations and in the theory of it, 39 00:04:48,440 --> 00:04:52,970 the diverse range of theorists who deploy this term. 40 00:04:53,630 --> 00:05:01,360 And it goes from, you know, the usual suspects, if you like, Headley and the English school. 41 00:05:01,450 --> 00:05:10,750 All special rights and responsibilities is a phrase you find in international society literature, as you might expect. 42 00:05:12,040 --> 00:05:18,460 But it's a phrase that you find a number of real estate theorists regularly deploying. 43 00:05:19,250 --> 00:05:24,550 And most surprisingly, surveys you'll find and find in Ken Walsh's book. 44 00:05:24,820 --> 00:05:27,670 And you wouldn't really have expected that. 45 00:05:28,150 --> 00:05:38,250 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, 46 00:05:38,740 --> 00:05:43,030 and yet it's never been singled out for close scrutiny or study. 47 00:05:43,040 --> 00:05:47,500 And so that is that is what we are attempting to do. 48 00:05:48,070 --> 00:05:53,890 The book will be partly a historical and a theoretical and a conceptual exploitation. 49 00:05:54,520 --> 00:06:03,130 It will also be an attempt to apply that concept to three facets of contemporary international relations. 50 00:06:03,580 --> 00:06:16,390 And these three facets are climate change, global finance, and the issue of nuclear proliferation, the NPT, the NPT regime. 51 00:06:16,990 --> 00:06:25,270 So the idea of special responsibilities will be specifically developed in the context of these three policy of units. 52 00:06:26,020 --> 00:06:29,150 So that's basically what we're doing. 53 00:06:29,170 --> 00:06:40,540 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 54 00:06:40,540 --> 00:06:51,100 of the kind of theoretical elements that are part of this project to feel like we need that that we keep putting back here? 55 00:06:51,230 --> 00:06:58,600 The gist, by the way, I think I think I can say this, especially as somebody who's who's known as a theorist, 56 00:06:58,600 --> 00:07:07,299 that this is a this is probably a collective experiment, a sort of applied experiment in cooperation among large numbers. 57 00:07:07,300 --> 00:07:12,200 So we're trying to see what happens. You know, exactly how far can you stretch this with six authors? 58 00:07:12,550 --> 00:07:21,510 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, 59 00:07:21,520 --> 00:07:26,079 hey, why don't we raise the bar and just see how much we can achieve? 60 00:07:26,080 --> 00:07:31,600 So whether or not this is success successful, you people can tell us down the track. 61 00:07:32,140 --> 00:07:38,590 But what I want to do is just to sketch the sort of basic conceptual framework and the key 62 00:07:39,040 --> 00:07:43,840 elements of the argument that we want to develop in the book about special responsibilities. 63 00:07:44,170 --> 00:07:49,659 And then Ian is going to sort of pick that up and and talk about it more specifically 64 00:07:49,660 --> 00:07:54,790 with regard to state practices and a particular reference to the Security Council. 65 00:07:56,260 --> 00:08:05,050 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 66 00:08:05,320 --> 00:08:12,010 conceptual debt to the concept of responsibility and special responsibilities in particular, 67 00:08:12,010 --> 00:08:21,840 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. 68 00:08:21,850 --> 00:08:26,260 I tend to cut into the question of special responsibilities at the international level, 69 00:08:26,440 --> 00:08:30,550 but leave a lot of the deeper philosophical questions undiscussed. 70 00:08:30,580 --> 00:08:37,450 So we tended to start in. One of the key parts of the argument is that we work with a notion of responsibility 71 00:08:39,040 --> 00:08:45,549 as as very closely tied to the idea of accountability so that an actor 72 00:08:45,550 --> 00:08:50,410 is responsible for a particular set of actions or refraining from a particular 73 00:08:50,410 --> 00:08:55,030 set of actions when they are considered to be accountable for those actions. 74 00:08:55,030 --> 00:09:01,600 And we have a long argument about the relationship between the idea of responsibility and the idea of accountability, 75 00:09:02,200 --> 00:09:08,889 and make an argument that that responsibility is often spoken about as though it simply means causality. 76 00:09:08,890 --> 00:09:14,860 So it's quite caused the death of X number of people, flooding caused the damage in Brisbane. 77 00:09:14,860 --> 00:09:23,070 In Australia we make an argument that in fact these are not synonyms, that causality can be part of a discussion of responsibility. 78 00:09:23,080 --> 00:09:29,710 But the key thing about responsibility is that when we describe someone and act as responsible, 79 00:09:29,950 --> 00:09:33,940 we are saying that they are accountable for those particular outcomes. 80 00:09:34,240 --> 00:09:45,340 Now that's important because what we want, because that gives responsibility and inherently social dimension of responsibility is and ideas of 81 00:09:45,340 --> 00:09:50,560 responsibility and practices of responsibility are things that are embedded within social relationships, 82 00:09:51,430 --> 00:09:56,530 because that's that's the kind of key that's a starting point, is this notion of accountability. 83 00:09:57,250 --> 00:10:01,330 We spent some time making a number of key. 84 00:10:01,730 --> 00:10:07,850 Distinctions between different kinds of responsibility, of which are which the last is most important to us. 85 00:10:08,030 --> 00:10:13,430 And the distinctions we make are, first of all, between positive and negative responsibilities. 86 00:10:13,910 --> 00:10:20,750 So an example of a positive responsibility would be the responsibility of an actor to engage in particular kinds of actions. 87 00:10:21,470 --> 00:10:27,170 A negative responsibility would be for an actor to refrain from engaging in particular kinds of actions. 88 00:10:27,410 --> 00:10:31,400 And this this does relate to the distinction between negative and positive rights. 89 00:10:31,670 --> 00:10:37,010 But we also have an argument about that, that the problematic nature of that distinction. 90 00:10:37,010 --> 00:10:43,130 But we make it anyway. We distinguish between historical and prospective responsibilities. 91 00:10:43,430 --> 00:10:48,410 So responsibilities for things that have occurred in the past as opposed to responsibilities 92 00:10:48,710 --> 00:10:52,620 that have have that might happen in the future or things that might transpire in the future. 93 00:10:52,710 --> 00:10:57,620 You know, so Saddam Hussein was responsible for the death of the Kurds, the gassing of Kurds. 94 00:10:58,700 --> 00:11:02,630 Great powers are responsible for the maintenance of international order. 95 00:11:02,750 --> 00:11:08,180 The second of those is a prospective responsibility. The first is is a historical responsibility. 96 00:11:08,960 --> 00:11:12,920 The next distinction we make is a distinction between moral and legal responsibilities. 97 00:11:13,880 --> 00:11:19,490 And we note that this is, in fact, a kind of complex and controversial relationship. 98 00:11:20,360 --> 00:11:31,370 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, 99 00:11:32,030 --> 00:11:38,270 whereas legal responsibility is responsibility framed in terms of particular legal precepts or rules or statutes. 100 00:11:39,830 --> 00:11:44,300 The most important distinction we make, however, and this goes to the to the heart of the project, 101 00:11:44,600 --> 00:11:49,730 is the distinction between general responsibilities and special responsibilities. 102 00:11:51,290 --> 00:12:00,530 And I'll just spend a moment on this, because the book is about special responsibilities, principally general responsibilities. 103 00:12:01,340 --> 00:12:14,180 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. 104 00:12:14,670 --> 00:12:20,809 Okay. So you can disaggregate social orders down to smaller regimes of social cooperation, 105 00:12:20,810 --> 00:12:26,120 and you can talk about general responsibilities in either of those contexts. 106 00:12:26,480 --> 00:12:31,490 But the key thing about a general sensibility is it's a general responsibility that everybody has. 107 00:12:33,290 --> 00:12:44,569 A special responsibility, in contrast, is a responsibility that that is held only by particular parties or particular members of a 108 00:12:44,570 --> 00:12:50,660 social order or particular members or particular parties to a regime of social cooperation. 109 00:12:51,530 --> 00:13:00,980 So in air, this would be, you know, there are certain responsibilities that all states have not to engage in aggression, acts of aggression. 110 00:13:01,040 --> 00:13:04,130 That would be a general responsibility of all states. 111 00:13:04,580 --> 00:13:08,209 A special responsibility is the responsibilities, for example, 112 00:13:08,210 --> 00:13:13,730 that the great powers might have particular responsibilities they have for the maintenance of international order. 113 00:13:14,570 --> 00:13:21,890 Now, we do also talk about how special responsibilities are defined not just by the particularity of those that hold them, 114 00:13:22,190 --> 00:13:26,419 but also by the values that we attach to them that we very often think about 115 00:13:26,420 --> 00:13:30,530 special responsibilities as special in the sense that they are highly valued. 116 00:13:31,160 --> 00:13:35,870 And here we make an obvious this is not always the case, but it is sometimes the case. 117 00:13:36,410 --> 00:13:43,220 And we make the argument that this is very much related to the rights that special responsibilities convey. 118 00:13:43,820 --> 00:13:50,180 So special responsibilities that convey significantly empowering rights and entitlements as part of 119 00:13:50,180 --> 00:13:55,790 the fulfilment of those responsibilities often carry high levels of social esteem attached to them. 120 00:13:57,260 --> 00:14:00,140 So that's general and special. Okay. 121 00:14:00,830 --> 00:14:14,600 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. 122 00:14:17,180 --> 00:14:21,680 Now, this is partly because responsibility being related to accountability. 123 00:14:22,490 --> 00:14:26,270 It is inherently relational context. So it's therefore social. 124 00:14:27,170 --> 00:14:33,020 It's also based on decisions about or ideas about responsibility. 125 00:14:33,290 --> 00:14:38,720 And judgements about responsibility are usually made with reference to intersubjective social norms. 126 00:14:39,050 --> 00:14:48,830 So it's social in that respect, but is also social in, in two other very important regards for this particular project. 127 00:14:49,250 --> 00:14:59,510 The first is that ideas about responsibility and practices of responsibility are central in the constitution of social roles. 128 00:15:01,290 --> 00:15:03,810 Which of course are also related to social identities. 129 00:15:05,100 --> 00:15:13,190 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. 130 00:15:15,410 --> 00:15:19,790 So we have an argument that responsibility is central to the constitution of 131 00:15:19,790 --> 00:15:25,220 social orders because of the role that it plays in constituting social roles. 132 00:15:27,170 --> 00:15:34,010 The second argument we make is that responsibilities shape societies through 133 00:15:34,010 --> 00:15:41,150 their impact on the development constitution of social power and responsibility. 134 00:15:41,750 --> 00:15:48,680 Is is in a sense, one kind of a legitimate power, not say more about this in a moment. 135 00:15:48,680 --> 00:15:55,700 To have a responsibility is to have a license to act in a particular way or to constrain oneself. 136 00:15:55,710 --> 00:15:58,700 So what we hold acting in a particular kind of way, 137 00:15:59,660 --> 00:16:09,710 and we talk about we have an argument about about the relationship between responsibility and what Barnett and Duval call compulsory power. 138 00:16:10,670 --> 00:16:15,710 And we have an argument about the relationship between responsibility and structural power. 139 00:16:16,430 --> 00:16:25,370 In the book there, finally, because responsibility is so closely related to the distribution of legitimate social power, 140 00:16:26,990 --> 00:16:36,020 controversies and contestations over responsibility are core sites for the struggle for power in international politics. 141 00:16:36,890 --> 00:16:41,900 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 142 00:16:41,900 --> 00:16:48,590 of place of responsibility in the nature of social orders is that these are sites for 143 00:16:48,590 --> 00:16:55,370 political struggle because with them come significant forms of social power or significant 144 00:16:55,370 --> 00:17:01,160 forms of social power congeal or coalesce around practices of responsibility. 145 00:17:02,860 --> 00:17:09,680 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. 146 00:17:09,830 --> 00:17:13,650 Okay. On top of the little ones we've just made and. 147 00:17:16,860 --> 00:17:21,390 The first is an argument about the place of responsibility in anarchic international borders. 148 00:17:25,120 --> 00:17:30,310 We argue that the politics of special responsibility, 149 00:17:31,180 --> 00:17:40,719 that is the distributing of responsibilities to particular actors within an international order, arises in the context it arises, 150 00:17:40,720 --> 00:17:44,830 particularly in international orders, 151 00:17:45,430 --> 00:17:57,970 in which two other political modalities have proven insufficient for addressing certain functional problems of global governance. 152 00:17:59,380 --> 00:18:08,920 And they might be as basic as provision of essential order in international order through to more advanced governance objectives. 153 00:18:09,340 --> 00:18:14,680 And the two political modalities that we're talking about are, at the one extreme, 154 00:18:14,800 --> 00:18:23,380 the free play of material power politics and at the other extreme regimes of sovereign equality. 155 00:18:25,240 --> 00:18:31,720 And we make an argument that it's in its in the context of the failure of both 156 00:18:31,870 --> 00:18:37,120 of those kinds of political practices to address global governance issues, 157 00:18:37,750 --> 00:18:45,460 that you get the emergence of politics, of special responsibilities as a way of channelling, 158 00:18:45,970 --> 00:18:54,010 harnessing and constraining the exercise of power in the service of the pursuit of particular functional goals. 159 00:18:56,150 --> 00:19:03,620 So that's the that's that's the first big argument is about place of the kind of almost the structural 160 00:19:04,160 --> 00:19:10,640 position of the politics of special responsibilities in particular kinds of international orders. 161 00:19:11,690 --> 00:19:18,319 The second argument is an argument that distributions of responsibilities have 162 00:19:18,320 --> 00:19:24,080 a significant bearing on the distribution of power in international systems. 163 00:19:27,770 --> 00:19:31,790 This is a this is a and in a sense, an elaboration of the point I made earlier. 164 00:19:32,870 --> 00:19:39,920 But the argument we make here is that it is around ideas of responsibility or more pointedly, 165 00:19:40,400 --> 00:19:51,830 ideas about responsibility and practice of practices of responsibility become constellation points around which social power is constructed. 166 00:19:56,200 --> 00:20:05,690 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. 167 00:20:05,740 --> 00:20:12,670 We also make a distinction between simple and international and complex international orders, simple international orders. 168 00:20:14,650 --> 00:20:24,070 The differentiation is across three dimensions structures of political agency interdependence and dynamic density and functional imperatives. 169 00:20:24,310 --> 00:20:29,260 In simple international orders, you have relatively simple structures of political agency, 170 00:20:29,590 --> 00:20:37,570 low levels of interdependence and dynamic density, and relatively few key functional imperatives. 171 00:20:37,990 --> 00:20:40,920 The opposite is the case in complex orders we make, 172 00:20:40,920 --> 00:20:46,510 and this is important for us in what we talk about how regimes of special responsibilities develop. 173 00:20:47,380 --> 00:20:53,170 But most importantly, what we want to argue here is that it is within these different kinds of orders 174 00:20:53,170 --> 00:20:57,130 that the distribution of responsibility affects the distribution of social power. 175 00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:06,490 Now, the third big argument we make is an argument about is an argument about social domains. 176 00:21:07,060 --> 00:21:16,180 And here where really I mean, in some ways you can think of you can think of here we are making a significant departure, 177 00:21:16,180 --> 00:21:21,910 I think, from the way in which special responsibilities have been discussed in the literature so far, 178 00:21:22,180 --> 00:21:28,839 which tends to assume a single view of the international system so that you have an international system, 179 00:21:28,840 --> 00:21:37,510 you have an array of particular actors, and you had a distribution of special responsibilities, usually two great powers and this. 180 00:21:37,690 --> 00:21:41,380 But what we want to do and here is one of the ideas a book is, is to say, well, 181 00:21:41,680 --> 00:21:48,280 in complex orders there is no single distribution of special responsibilities. 182 00:21:48,610 --> 00:22:00,640 What you have is different social domains that are that issue, domains in which you get different distributions of special responsibilities. 183 00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:02,530 And this relates to our case study. 184 00:22:02,530 --> 00:22:12,040 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, 185 00:22:12,370 --> 00:22:20,350 that you have different distributions of special responsibilities that are emerging in those those functional domains. 186 00:22:20,950 --> 00:22:25,510 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. 187 00:22:25,720 --> 00:22:31,120 And now Ian is going to put some flesh on it. Well, both will attempt to. 188 00:22:34,860 --> 00:22:44,160 I'll see just a little bit about how I think the history of special responsibilities has has evolved. 189 00:22:44,880 --> 00:22:51,300 And then for purposes of illustration, I'll spend a few minutes talking about the Security Council. 190 00:22:52,350 --> 00:22:57,960 I had agreed with Jennifer quite some time ago that I would leave this to the Security Council. 191 00:22:58,470 --> 00:23:03,570 Not quite sure why I give it up, because it's not one of the key studies that we do. 192 00:23:03,600 --> 00:23:08,819 So this is kind of beyond the pale. 193 00:23:08,820 --> 00:23:14,250 But it does seem to me that it would have been an excellent case study to do. 194 00:23:14,700 --> 00:23:23,100 And the idea, I think, translates well into the context of the history of the Security Council. 195 00:23:24,000 --> 00:23:33,450 The and the historical argument that I would like to take on posture is that, 196 00:23:33,450 --> 00:23:43,410 as I see it, I think a practice of the special preceded a theory of the responsible. 197 00:23:44,070 --> 00:23:50,250 And the theory of the responsible has, in a sense, been catching up with a practice that was already in place. 198 00:23:50,770 --> 00:24:01,979 Now, what do I mean by that? The practice of the special and I in the chapter where we discussed the history, 199 00:24:01,980 --> 00:24:10,050 we were kind of debating this in the early 19th century with the the emergence of a notion of the great powers, 200 00:24:10,590 --> 00:24:18,770 a formalised notion of the great powers, which is a position that a number of historians take on this. 201 00:24:19,460 --> 00:24:27,550 And the category of the the special was deemed to be already in existence. 202 00:24:27,570 --> 00:24:36,900 We knew the West, the special wants, if I can use a Chelsea metaphor for those of us who know what that means. 203 00:24:37,890 --> 00:24:42,090 The special ones were already known. They were the great powers. 204 00:24:42,750 --> 00:24:49,830 We didn't have to work out who the special category, where they were, there they were the great powers. 205 00:24:50,640 --> 00:24:58,020 And it seems to me the interesting development is that with the formalisation of a principle of the great powers, 206 00:24:59,520 --> 00:25:07,350 their role in international society has come to be rationalised in terms of the bearing of responsibilities. 207 00:25:08,010 --> 00:25:11,370 And that's interesting. It presumably could have been otherwise, 208 00:25:12,120 --> 00:25:21,360 but that is exactly the language that has dominated the discussion of the role of the great powers for 200 years. 209 00:25:21,810 --> 00:25:28,360 And heavily builds terminology. The gate is fine symbols, you know, that's what great powers are. 210 00:25:30,440 --> 00:25:33,570 And so in a sense, 211 00:25:33,660 --> 00:25:42,180 rather than being the responsibilities past see that are special is the category 212 00:25:42,180 --> 00:25:48,310 of actors to which these responsibilities attach that is deemed to be special. 213 00:25:48,990 --> 00:25:55,920 And initially, in terms of the announcing practice that was already known, they were the great powers. 214 00:25:56,130 --> 00:26:00,660 We didn't need to otherwise worry about who the special ones were. 215 00:26:03,300 --> 00:26:06,870 Things have moved. They have evolved from that. 216 00:26:07,830 --> 00:26:19,080 I think the basic ideas underpinning this emerged early in the 19th century, the precise language of special responsibilities. 217 00:26:19,440 --> 00:26:25,770 As far as we've been able to unearth and the Healy analogies in the interwar period, 218 00:26:26,190 --> 00:26:37,920 and that's already quite interesting, we saw I think it's part of the move towards a theory of collective security, 219 00:26:38,370 --> 00:26:47,070 which you could argue fudged the issue of responsibility and the notion of special responsibilities 220 00:26:47,400 --> 00:26:55,710 was a renewed attempt to fudge what had been sold under the auspices of this particular doctrine. 221 00:26:56,190 --> 00:27:04,710 If security is collective, when it comes, when push comes to shove, who's responsible for producing it? 222 00:27:05,730 --> 00:27:09,180 And the answer again, of course, was the great powers. 223 00:27:09,180 --> 00:27:15,989 Only those with the wherewithal to produce security could be held responsible 224 00:27:15,990 --> 00:27:21,570 because the others simply couldn't deliver on anything that they signed up to. 225 00:27:22,140 --> 00:27:33,230 And in actual treaties, in the interwar period, you find this terminology of special responsibilities being written. 226 00:27:33,530 --> 00:27:43,820 Into international legal tax. And so, I mean, this has been around in a formal sense for the better part of a century, 227 00:27:44,360 --> 00:27:53,960 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. 228 00:27:55,370 --> 00:28:05,990 The language really comes to the fore in the period of the Second World War itself and during the the mid 1940s. 229 00:28:06,650 --> 00:28:10,290 I could give you a number of quotations with this. 230 00:28:10,290 --> 00:28:25,790 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, 231 00:28:25,820 --> 00:28:31,370 the language of the superpowers. He uses the language of special responsibilities. 232 00:28:31,870 --> 00:28:35,570 And so a 1944 text. 233 00:28:36,710 --> 00:28:40,470 But it wasn't just the the academic commentators. 234 00:28:40,490 --> 00:28:47,690 It was the practitioners, too. And if you look at the the drafting of the UN charter. 235 00:28:48,470 --> 00:28:58,850 Dumbarton Oaks and then San Francisco. This language of special responsibilities is pervasive in all of the texts of that period. 236 00:28:59,910 --> 00:29:10,190 And President Truman, just to reassure you that this is not being invented by us, talks about the great powers, 237 00:29:10,850 --> 00:29:16,700 the conference, these great states of a special responsibility to enforce the peace. 238 00:29:17,330 --> 00:29:21,100 Britain's Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. 239 00:29:21,110 --> 00:29:28,310 Same time, a special responsibility lies in negative polls. 240 00:29:28,970 --> 00:29:39,930 And so the bank wrote into the drafting of the the charter is absolutely pervaded by this language of special responsibilities. 241 00:29:39,950 --> 00:29:48,040 It's interesting, Gary Simpson, the international lawyer, Lacey, has an interesting chapter on this. 242 00:29:49,940 --> 00:29:57,320 And it shows you that there is an pervasiveness of this language, and yet it was the key powers. 243 00:29:57,590 --> 00:30:01,940 He says, I haven't been able to quite take down the basis for this, 244 00:30:03,050 --> 00:30:10,040 that I actually argued against that precise form of what's being incorporated in the charter itself. 245 00:30:11,000 --> 00:30:22,459 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, 246 00:30:22,460 --> 00:30:24,560 to see about some of the debates, 247 00:30:24,560 --> 00:30:33,950 about the Security Council composition and membership both back at San Francisco in 45 and then in the last few years, 248 00:30:35,240 --> 00:30:42,470 the debate about the restructuring of the Security Council that has gone on, that I would argue that we would argue, 249 00:30:44,570 --> 00:30:52,129 can be seen as a specific manifestation of a debate about different understandings of the 250 00:30:52,130 --> 00:30:57,950 nature of the spatial and who therefore should be disappointed abilities in its terms. 251 00:30:58,550 --> 00:31:08,570 And I think it was Hans Kilson in an early takes that pointed out that the Security Council was, 252 00:31:08,570 --> 00:31:16,220 of course, constructed on a principle of bearing a special responsibility for international security. 253 00:31:16,490 --> 00:31:24,049 That was exactly its rationale. But the important point that he Kelson made about this was, of course, 254 00:31:24,050 --> 00:31:31,010 that responsibility was assigned to the Security Council as a whole, not simply to the P5. 255 00:31:31,670 --> 00:31:34,760 It was the Security Council that brought that responsibility. 256 00:31:35,060 --> 00:31:39,620 And of course, the Security Council is composed not just of great powers. 257 00:31:40,310 --> 00:31:44,690 It is a more varied body body than that. 258 00:31:45,320 --> 00:31:56,110 But if you go back to the debates about the membership of the Security Council, Dumbarton Oaks and all the rest, 259 00:31:56,120 --> 00:32:06,979 but I think I think there you can easily tease out competing understandings of what made certain 260 00:32:06,980 --> 00:32:15,790 powers special and what might then have entitle them to be permanent members of this August body. 261 00:32:15,800 --> 00:32:16,640 At the time, 262 00:32:17,090 --> 00:32:28,340 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. 263 00:32:28,940 --> 00:32:33,020 And without going into all the details, I think you. 264 00:32:33,570 --> 00:32:40,950 You find competing notions of the specialness that would entitle membership of the council 265 00:32:41,460 --> 00:32:50,610 in terms of either a contribution to the successful conclusion of the work itself. 266 00:32:51,180 --> 00:32:59,280 You know, the victors had a special entitlement or a notion of future capacity. 267 00:33:00,420 --> 00:33:07,470 The membership of the Security Council, those that were to be really responsible because they had the power to act, 268 00:33:08,100 --> 00:33:11,640 must have a capacity for the maintenance of international order. 269 00:33:12,690 --> 00:33:17,220 There was a set of arguments about a notion of sacrifice. 270 00:33:17,430 --> 00:33:22,770 Those that had made the biggest sacrifice and you could see in some ways maybe 271 00:33:22,770 --> 00:33:31,710 France and China kind of got in there as much on that criterion as any other. 272 00:33:33,420 --> 00:33:38,250 And elsewhere in this becomes very, very important to to our discussion. 273 00:33:39,350 --> 00:33:44,370 And the the responsibility was the other half of a bargain. 274 00:33:45,450 --> 00:33:48,630 The other half of the bargain being the special privilege. 275 00:33:49,590 --> 00:33:57,430 And the special privilege was the voting procedures on the Security Council and hence the veto. 276 00:33:57,450 --> 00:34:08,580 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, 277 00:34:10,230 --> 00:34:18,960 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, 278 00:34:19,110 --> 00:34:24,330 the P5 in the Security Council was part of a contract, 279 00:34:24,390 --> 00:34:33,000 the other half being the special responsibilities that would attach to the privileges that they were being being granted. 280 00:34:34,410 --> 00:34:41,820 George C Marshall in 1945 insisted, I quote, 281 00:34:42,330 --> 00:34:50,880 The so-called special privilege of the great powers is matched by its equivalent in special responsibilities. 282 00:34:50,970 --> 00:35:03,390 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, 283 00:35:04,050 --> 00:35:13,770 it it emerged from that contestation at the time of those who were the special white tools that would be entitled 284 00:35:13,770 --> 00:35:21,660 to the special privileges of permanent membership of the Council and then for the rest of international society. 285 00:35:21,670 --> 00:35:30,600 What was the other half of the bargain? What were the special responsibilities that they would bear in in the light of that? 286 00:35:31,590 --> 00:35:45,030 And I think if we fast forward to the last decade or so, especially the middle part of the first decade of this century, 287 00:35:45,030 --> 00:35:54,120 the the high points of the debate about restructuring the Security Council and perhaps expanding it, 288 00:35:54,120 --> 00:35:59,009 and the debates about who the new members of the P5 might be. 289 00:35:59,010 --> 00:36:02,310 And I don't want to house that that whole debate. 290 00:36:03,300 --> 00:36:12,630 I think what we would simply say is that this is a House full of debates about what makes certain actors 291 00:36:13,050 --> 00:36:22,440 special and therefore subject to the building of special responsibilities and the kinds of debates. 292 00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:26,600 And, you know, you'll be thoroughly familiar with all of these. 293 00:36:26,610 --> 00:36:36,179 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 294 00:36:36,180 --> 00:36:43,170 kinds of competing claims that we have seen made about an entitlement to a seat, 295 00:36:44,190 --> 00:36:48,180 permanent seat or semi-permanent seat in the Security Council, 296 00:36:48,810 --> 00:36:57,450 and all slightly different claims about the nature of the special and why this should be a practice that would make certain, 297 00:36:58,110 --> 00:37:03,750 in this case, states special in terms of the UN structure. 298 00:37:04,710 --> 00:37:17,910 And one is an argument, I guess basically about a material capacity to contribute to global governance in its various various aspects. 299 00:37:18,360 --> 00:37:26,129 And so the generalised argument about the need to make the UN Security Council 300 00:37:26,130 --> 00:37:32,280 reflect today's balance of power rather than the balance of power in 1945 is. 301 00:37:32,280 --> 00:37:40,330 Exactly. A version of that. Why is it important to reflect the realities of power today? 302 00:37:41,590 --> 00:37:50,080 Because the permanent members need to be those with a capacity to contribute to the management of international law. 303 00:37:50,320 --> 00:38:01,930 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, 304 00:38:01,930 --> 00:38:06,310 as is the argument from representativeness. 305 00:38:06,970 --> 00:38:11,500 And that's a different argument about what makes the permanent members special. 306 00:38:12,070 --> 00:38:16,270 Not necessarily. They have the greatest capacity to do things. 307 00:38:16,960 --> 00:38:19,970 But in terms of a theory of legitimacy. 308 00:38:20,020 --> 00:38:24,670 And at the end of the day, that's basically what we are here to sell you to do. 309 00:38:25,480 --> 00:38:38,380 Another way of thinking about how international legitimacy plays out in international relations is that representativeness is a proxy for legitimacy. 310 00:38:39,460 --> 00:38:48,560 It wouldn't be acceptable to continue to preclude Africa from permanent membership. 311 00:38:48,970 --> 00:38:57,790 It wouldn't be acceptable to preclude some of the emerging BRIC countries from being. 312 00:38:58,930 --> 00:39:02,380 So there is a capacity element in there. 313 00:39:03,010 --> 00:39:12,250 There's also a slightly different argument about the need to represent all the major spheres of of of international society. 314 00:39:13,210 --> 00:39:23,340 In both of these arguments, as you know, come up against the card that the major P5, 315 00:39:23,350 --> 00:39:30,490 the United States and China have kind of played basically because of their own 316 00:39:31,420 --> 00:39:38,570 individual interests about who they would like to not like to be seated at the council. 317 00:39:39,910 --> 00:39:49,959 The quantity argument and the the special responsibility of the Security Council to maintain 318 00:39:49,960 --> 00:39:55,960 international order means it has to have the capacity to act in both of that form. 319 00:39:55,960 --> 00:40:01,720 A set of arguments of 1.32 to that kind of principle. 320 00:40:01,750 --> 00:40:05,790 So the U.S. has for years insisted. 321 00:40:06,390 --> 00:40:13,090 Under Obama, it continues to insist that whatever changes are made to the membership of the Council, 322 00:40:13,510 --> 00:40:25,330 it must be effective in terms of its ability to deliver all its special responsibility for international security. 323 00:40:25,750 --> 00:40:35,590 So I think the debate about the future of the Security Council can quite easily be understood under our scheme, 324 00:40:36,040 --> 00:40:44,610 because it seems to me that the debate about membership is, in effect, a debate about special responsibilities and who should be playing. 325 00:40:46,270 --> 00:40:50,380 All right. Thank you. Thank you for and thanks for perfectly timed at 20 minutes each.