The United Kingdom’s special responsibilities at the United Nations: Diplomatic practice in normative context
| Author | Jess Gifkins,Jason Ralph,Samuel Jarvis |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119887317 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119887317
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(2) 164 –181
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148119887317
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The United Kingdom’s special
responsibilities at the United
Nations: Diplomatic practice
in normative context
Jason Ralph1, Jess Gifkins2
and Samuel Jarvis3
Abstract
In a 2017 speech to the United Nations, Theresa May referred to the United Kingdom’s ‘special
responsibilities’. This article examines how the United Kingdom can properly discharge those
responsibilities at the United Nations. We offer an innovative analytical framework that merges
English School theory of international society with diplomatic practice theory, and find that there
are limits to the claim that the United Kingdom compensates for its relative material decline
through diplomatic activism. We identify the special responsibility of the permanent member in
terms of a capacity to reconcile the ‘concert’ and ‘governance’ functions of the Council, and to
contribute materially to the achievement of governance objectives in areas where consensus is
possible. Drawing on extensive interview data, and illustrating with reference to current debates
on peacekeeping, we find that a state’s capacity to ‘punch above its weight’ diplomatically is linked
to its material commitments and to a more inclusive approach in the Council.
Keywords
diplomatic practice, English school, peacekeeping, special responsibilities, UK foreign policy,
United Nations
In her September 2017 United Nations speech, Prime Minister Theresa May (2017)
acknowledged the United Kingdom’s ‘special responsibilities’ as a permanent member of
the Security Council without elaborating on how they would be met as the United
Kingdom adapted to being outside the European Union (EU). This article sets out what
those responsibilities are and examines how the United Kingdom can properly discharge
them in contemporary international society. To do this, we draw on ‘English School’
1University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
2The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
3York St John University, York, UK
Corresponding author:
Jason Ralph, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: j.g.ralph@leeds.ac.uk
887317BPI0010.1177/1369148119887317The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsRalph et al.
research-article2019
Original Article
Ralph et al. 165
International Relations (IR) theory of great power responsibility (Bull, 1977), demon-
strating how it informs the role of the permanent member, and illustrating its insight with
reference to current debates about the Security Council veto and material contributions to
UN peace operations. As one of the five permanent members, these responsibilities are
not exclusive to the United Kingdom, but relative to the others, the United Kingdom is in
a unique position. The literature on Council reform identifies the United Kingdom and
France as states whose great power status and, therefore, their permanent seats are most
in question (Mahbubani, 2016). Their ‘activism’ in the Council, seen in the relatively high
number of resolutions they draft, is ‘aimed at justifying their seat in the select club’ (Tardy
and Zaum, 2016: 121). With additional uncertainty surrounding the United Kingdom’s
international standing after the 2016 referendum (Adler-Nissen et al., 2017; Dee and
Smith, 2017; Gifkins et al., 2019; Lang, 2016), the question thus arises as to what kind of
activism supports its claim to be a responsible permanent member.
The idea that permanent members have ‘special’ rather than ‘general’ responsibilities
in international society follows from the argument that those with greater capabilities are
better able to meet the cost of providing public goods (Bukovansky et al., 2012; Clark and
Reus-Smit, 2013; Ralph and Souter, 2015b). Underpinning the Council’s membership is
the idea that great powers should be given permanent status to bind them to an institution
that promotes the common good. Clearly, the definition of the common good, and there-
fore the special responsibility of the permanent member, has evolved since the United
Nations’ founding. These states are still expected to manage and use power in ways that
serve the public interest but they now have a special responsibility to reconcile what
sometimes are the competing demands of the Council’s ‘concert’ function, which is to
maintain internal harmony among the great powers, and its ‘governance’ function, refer-
ring to the collective provision of public goods, such as human protection (Bosco, 2014).
Because it acts as a procedural check on the Council, the permanent member’s veto is a
crucial reminder of the need to balance these two aims, which may require pragmatic
compromise on governance objectives for the sake of internal harmony among the great
powers.
The importance of this kind of prudence is well understood, but we expand on a less
well-cited implication. A state’s permanent membership and its veto may be justified by
the need to avoid great power conflict, but once that point is acknowledged, it simultane-
ously triggers the ‘special responsibility’ of the great power to make a relatively greater
contribution to the pursuit of governance objectives (e.g. human protection through
peacekeeping) in situations when it is safe to do so. For the United Kingdom, permanent
membership of the Council has always sat uncomfortably alongside its relative decline in
material power (Mahbubani, 2016: 167–168), which leads naturally to questions about its
great power identity (Morris, 2011), and its capacity to discharge the special responsibili-
ties associated with permanent membership. Indeed, if the material contribution to peace-
keeping is the measure, the United Kingdom (and most permanent members) fails to meet
normative expectations. As noted, however, the United Kingdom compensates for this
material deficit through diplomatic activism at the United Nations, and drawing on the
methodologies of diplomatic practice theory (Pouliot and Cornut, 2015; Sending et al.,
2015), we illustrate how the United Kingdom wields its ‘diplomatic capital’ as a perma-
nent member of the Council.
For this project, we interviewed 29 diplomats with experience working in or around
the Security Council from 13 different states. Interpreting this data, we found that there
are limits to using diplomatic activism as a ‘compensatory strategy’ (Adler-Nissen, 2008)
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