Our political moment: political responsibility and leadership in a globalized, fragmented age
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117818808563 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117818808563
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(4) 391 –409
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117818808563
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Our political moment:
political responsibility and
leadership in a globalized,
fragmented age
Richard Beardsworth
Aberystwyth University, UK
Abstract
National interest and national security need to be reconfigured so as to accommodate a state’s
response to global threats and challenges. This requires in turn addressing the following paradox:
the pooling and ceding of sovereignty must be made in the very name of national sovereignty. The
article maintains that it is one of the foremost challenges of political responsibility and political
leadership today to assume this paradox and thereby align national and global interests and practices.
The alignment can, it is suggested, effectively oppose sovereigntism and nationalism, on one hand,
and abstract global governance, on the other. To promote this alignment, the article advances a
renewed understanding of state responsibility to citizenship under conditions of globalization.
Keywords
citizenship, global threats, governance, political leadership, political responsibility, state system
things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)
The failure since 1914 to establish a new compromise capable of reconciling the forces of
nationalism and internationalism constitutes the essence of the contemporary crisis.
E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (1945)
Corresponding author:
Richard Beardsworth, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, SY23 3FE, UK.
Email: rib17@aber.ac.uk
808563IRE0010.1177/0047117818808563International RelationsBeardsworth
research-article2018
Article
392 International Relations 32(4)
Preface
For a cosmopolitan like myself, these are obviously difficult times. We have moved into
an uncertain world in which the world as a world appears lost. Never believing in the
‘end of ideology’ thesis that has caught liberalism’s shoddy tail for the past 25 years,
cosmopolitans – at least as I have known them – have thought and (some) attempted to
act ahead: on supranational institution building, on international law, and on norm
entrepreneurship (the global justice issues of the then ‘Millennium Development
Goals’). The disjuncture between believing oneself ahead and finding oneself, suddenly
– within the space of accelerated political time – behind is psychologically and intel-
lectually disorienting. When, following Vladimir Lenin, ‘nothing happens for decades
and then decades happen in weeks’, such disorientation can make one de-energized and
bereaved – especially when the immediate future (speaking from out of Wales, UK)
appears so harnessed to a politically irresponsible minority. A child-in-formation, the
post-Cold War reinvention of the international liberal order under processes of globali-
zation is also now in question. Although Yeats’ lines – reiterated best by Arthur
Schlesinger in 1948 when alluding to the ‘vital center’ – ring too apocalyptic for our
consumerist times, there is, at least for liberals in a declining West, a strong sense of
apprehension regarding appropriate political disposition: ‘the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.
In the following, I want to make an argument about political responsibility and politi-
cal leadership in this globalized, fragmented world. Delivered as an inaugural lecture,
my argument takes the form of 22 remarks. Their end is to capture politically the contem-
porary paradox of sovereignty: to maintain sovereignty with regard to global threats, one
must pool or cede it. This is our contemporary ‘catch-22’.
1. The basic assumption of the article is that the human species is running out of
time with regard to certain imminent global threats, that effective but also legiti-
mate responses to these threats are required given the present condition of global
pluralism and fragmentation, and that a narrative of response needs to be fash-
ioned to help motivate appropriate political action at a time of resurgent national-
isms and US abdication, indeed sabotage, of global leadership.
2. This is an assumption because there is no direct, evidence-based way of speaking
about the future, whether this future concerns nuclear proliferation, radical cli-
mate change and its effects, the consequences of biotechnologies or those of arti-
ficial intelligence (to keep to earth-bound threats).
3. As the philosophical school of phenomenology argues, scientists and social scien-
tists can extrapolate patterns from the past and the present in order to make reason-
able 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 sci-
ences 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
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