Responsibility as Character: Modernity, International Order and Great Power Management

The fundamental principles of liberal international order leave little room for the traditional idea of great powers as holders of international authority. Yet, a discourse on great powers has recently made a comeback in response to the rising power of states whose compatibility with that order is in doubt. According to this language of ʻresponsible power’ or ʻresponsible great power,’ growing power comes with increasing responsibilities, and it is meeting these latter that secures a state legitimate great power status. Equating greatness with responsibility, however, is paradoxical if the latter is taken to stand for accountability for the fulfilment of obligations or functional roles. Such an understanding is internal to a given structure of order. The assertion of greatness, on the other hand, requires an actor to reveal itself outside any pre-given standard, and thus to have its own standards recognised as equal. I argue in the paper that despite this paradoxical relationship, the discourses of great powerhood and responsibility have in fact been reconciled historically in diverse ways, but that in order to see this, we need to move away from an exclusive focus on responsibility as accountability, and pay attention instead to the role played by the concept of responsibility as a character trait or disposition. I provide a genealogy of how this concept of being responsible has come to occupy a fundamental position in the modern problem of a man-made order (as Kantian-Weberian maturity and Nietzsche’s and Mill’s responsibility), and how it then contributed to re-articulating the concepts of great powerhood and great power management detached from the European legal and spatial order in relation to which they were originally defined. I finish by reflecting on how the current American discourse on ‘responsible stakeholders’ conceptualizes the role of major powers within a neoliberal problematization of international order.