Our political moment: political responsibility and leadership in a globalized,fragmented age

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.

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).

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

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 past 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 international political order that, unwilling to transcend itself during the historical moment of US unipolarity (circa 1991–2006), now (re-)appears as fragmented and disorderly.

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 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 reappraise 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.

On a scale of 1–10, the success of global governance of the past 30 years scores something like 2 in the major contemporary global regimes. The nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament regime remains stuck on the refusal of the ‘grand bargain’ between nuclear-weapon states (NWSs) and non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWSs; the comprehensive linkage of nonproliferation 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 to reinforce the interests of finance capital and large corporations so 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°C at the end of this century has disappeared. This lack of success in the governing of specific global threats ensues from the gap between these threats and the state system. Due to processes of globalization, 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.

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 European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Organization of American States (OAS) and club associations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and International Energy Agency (IEA), not to speak of the importance of nongovernmental organization (NGO) and international nongovernmental organization (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 a stable, enduring 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.

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 global threats? Indeed, are global threats governable given the prevailing political condition of humanity (a condition always permitting stasis, the reification of the interstate structure, or regression, regressive political communities)?

From both a political and a techno-scientific perspective, my questions may incur skepticism. Over the past 100 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’ amid 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, posthuman 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’.

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 responsibility in international relations ¹¹ ). 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 (international relations) 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 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 amid 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.

 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) furnish 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 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (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 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.

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 toward 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.

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 toward, the post-national level. Indeed, much of twentieth-century cosmopolitan thought (particularly cosmopolitan liberalism) has been premised upon, or directed toward, the transcendence of the state and its eventual 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.

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 toward international order and, increasingly during the last phase of the Cold War, responsibility toward 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 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 toward 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’ toward, respectively, the global 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

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 toward 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.

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 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 toward 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 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.

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 past 30 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 past 30 years of international neoliberalism 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 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 toward 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 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 toward 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.

If global and transnational threats present threats to the ‘national interest’ and to ‘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’ (i.e. 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 toward 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, and 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 toward 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.

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 toward their principles (their citizens) to cooperate. Such cooperation may require the fairly simple construction of coordination mechanisms: interstate police and intelligence partnerships. It may require the deeper pooling of state sovereignty: regional security arrangements like NATO, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Southern African Development Community (SADC), and so on. Or it may require not simply the limitation but the cession of sovereignty: a military high command; World Trade Organization (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 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and so on. 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.

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 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 toward citizenry. My exercise is analytic and ignores a series of 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 reappropriated 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.

But can this kind of narrative do the work required even within my parsimonious terms of national political responsibility? Clearly not. Political responsibility toward 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 – toward 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 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 toward 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 reconstructed 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 attest – 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.

After 2 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 CO_2/e emissions by 20 percent by 2025, on the baseline of 2005, and that China was increasing its use of renewable energies (foremost wind and solar) to a minimum of 20 percent 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°C but, in all due probability, below 3.5°C. 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 rerouted 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 toward 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 first 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.

Climate change is one of the major challenges of the twenty-first 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 neoliberal 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 past 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.