Under royal patronage (patronato real, or padroado), monarchs of both nations accepted responsibility for evangelizing the newly found peoples.
This gives advanced nations some responsibility in helping developing nations that are trapped because they cannot afford the public investment in transportation, education, health and agricultural techniques that would enable them to benefit from new capital, technologies and skilled labor.
How quickly we do that will be determined, in part, by whether developed nations shoulder responsibility for how the climate change they have caused is harming the rest of the world.
Let Mr. Milosevic and a few of his cronies pay the price of Serbia's guilt, they will say, and be scapegoats for a nation's responsibility, avoiding any larger process of national self-examination or investigation.
And the nation's responsibility is great.
It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.
As we mark the end of the Iraq war, we should acknowledge the loss of innocent Iraqi lives — losses for which this nation bears responsibility.
As Mr Kara-Murza writes:In 1951 West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, himself a prisoner under the Nazis, publicly acknowledged his nation's responsibility for crimes against the Jewish people.
[CNN] As residents of Tuvalu cope with a crippling drought, climate campaigners there point out that the countries delivering water aid to the archipelago nation share responsibility for global climate patterns.
Later that same year a UN General Assembly declaration acknowledged a free international interest in space development and outlined rules assigning each nation individual responsibility for dealing with transgressions of international law and for any resulting destruction.
Instead, Mr. Sikorski said, it was the collapse of the euro zone that offered the paramount danger to his country, and he said he demanded that Germany "as Europe's indispensible nation" take responsibility and lead.
