Unpacking the politics of great power responsibility: Nationalist and Maoist China in international order-building

Abstract

Despite its prominence in the discourse of international politics, the concept of ‘great power responsibility’ remains largely unmapped in International Relations. Existing accounts tend to focus their analysis at a structural level and do not pay adequate attention to agency and processes of deliberation, negotiation and contestation. Drawing on constructivist insights to extend existing English School scholarship, this article unpacks great power responsibility as a socially constructed and negotiated concept. It develops a typology to further investigate the politics of great power responsibility and focuses specifically on four categories: the location, object, nature and rationale of responsibility (respectively, responsibility by whom, to whom, for what and why). This conceptual framework is applied to China at two important international order-building junctures: institutional construction during World War II and institutional accommodation in the Cold War. In doing so, the article illuminates China’s historical agency and uncovers the processes of both conflict and concordance that have shaped Chinese engagements with the question of great power responsibility.

The absence of great power responsibility in global environmental politics

“…What exactly special environmental responsibility for great powers would entail, or how it might be prevented from serving narrow, as opposed to broader common or pluralist, interests is trickier to articulate in the abstract. In evaluating its presence or absence, I follow the ES’s guidance by looking for evidence of some public acknowledgment by, and of, great powers of obligations to take on special or differentiated responsibilities in the promotion and pursuit of core environmental norms in the interest of international society as a whole, and some institutionalization of that obligation (Cui and Buzan, 2016: 174; Loke, 2016: 851). Differential responsibilities demanded in the environment area typically take the form of commitments to lead, to act first and to a greater degree (e.g.…”

“…Constructivists have picked up and expanded on the idea of great power responsibility as a social relationship. Loke (2016: 848) treats it as “a socially constructed and negotiated concept.” This move allows her to address questions of who is responsible, to whom, for what, and why by examining its historical construction, especially as individual states seek great power status and recognition and pursue order-building goals. That is, they negotiate, resist, and/or contest ideas of order for which great powers might be responsible.…”

“…The view that “different domains of world politics have different [material and ideational] structures” (Bukovasnky et al, 2012: 74) is in tension, however, with ES scholars’ portrayal of primary institutions of international society as identifying the deep structure of international society as a whole, reflecting the common values that underpin an international order. Loke’s (2016) attention to contestation and negotiation as defining the basis of responsibility over time is similarly in tension with the more stable and systemic basis of GPM in ES scholarship.…”

The web of responsibility in and for the Arctic

“…Rather, responsibility includes a moral dimension in which future conduct becomes the subject of negotiation. With regard to material capabilities, the argument has been made that domestic politics matter in determining how the capabilities will be put to use (Loke 2016). It is therefore not a given that capacity alone adequately indicates how responsibility will be enacted (Hoover 2012).…”

Interpreting great power rights in international society: Debating China’s right to a sphere of influence

“…In recent years, there has been a particular focus on the notion of ‘special responsibilities’ and the relationship between the adoption of such responsibilities and international legitimacy (Aslam, 2013; Bukovansky et al, 2012; Clark and Reus-Smit, 2013; Gaskarth, 2017; Loke, 2013, 2016; Morris, 2013). In addition, and specifically in the context of China’s much discussed rise to great power status, there has been considerable attention given to the issue of great power responsibilities in the contemporary context in the policy-focused literature and in the rhetoric of practitioners, especially in the West (Glaser and Funaiole, 2017; Huang, 2013; Johnson et al, 2016).…”