National Responsibility and Global Poverty

Abstract

This article argues that institutional cosmopolitanism and liberal nationalism can be reconciled as compatible, at least when considering various normative prescriptions for institutional and political relationships. The main claim is that liberal nationalism and the theory of national responsibility present a cosmopolitan argument maintaining that political institutional bodies should be held responsible for catering to their people. So conceived, liberal nationalism provides a significant contribution to contemporary cosmopolitan theory. Three arguments are provided. First, it is argued that liberal nationalists shares fundamental values with institutional cosmopolitans, as Pogge suggests, and especially that they agree on the relevance of shared responsibility supplementing individual responsibility. Second, national responsibility is endorsed as a productive way of determining responsibility for the political distribution of goods and benefits for a group of people that supplements responsibilities at the global level. Yet a premise for this reading of national responsibility is the disputing of the cultural assumptions which are often attributed to the theory of national responsibility. Hence, thirdly, by disentangling the cultural assumptions from the concept of national responsibility, the article suggests a concept of national responsibility based on political institutional capacity rather than culture.