An Introduction to the English School of International Relations

The Societal Approach

Barry Buzan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745685380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

This outstanding book is the first comprehensive introduction to the English School of International Relations. Written by leading ES scholar Barry Buzan, it expertly guides readers through the English School's formative ideas, intellectual and historical roots, current controversies and future avenues of development. Part One sets out the English School's origins and development, explaining its central concepts and methodological tools, and placing it within the broader canon of IR theory. Part Two offers a detailed account of the historical, regional and social structural strands of the English School, explaining the important link between the school's historical projects and its interest in a societal approach to international relations. Part Three explores the School's responses to the enduring problems of order and justice, and highlights the changing balance between pluralist and solidarist institutions in the evolution of international society over the past five centuries. The book concludes with a discussion of the English School's ongoing controversies and debates, and identifies opportunities for further research. For students new to the topic this book will provide an accessible and balanced overview, whilst those already familiar with the ES will be prompted to look afresh at their own understanding of its significance and potentiality.

PART I

Background and Context

Introduction

The three short chapters in this part set the context for the longer looks at the main lines of work in the English School in parts II and III. Chapter 1 gives a brief history of the English School, and chapter 2 sets out the key concepts, distinctions and understandings used in its literature. Chapter 3 addresses its methodology and theoretical standing, and surveys how it stands in relation to other mainstream approaches to thinking about international relations.

1

The Evolution of the English School

A reasonable date for the beginning of the English School is 1959, when the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (hereafter, the British Committee) first met. But, like the association between 1648 and the sovereign state, any such date marks a fairly arbitrary median point in a longer process. In organizational terms, the origins of the British Committee can be traced back to the mid-1950s (Vigezzi 2005: 109–16; Epp 2010). In conceptual terms, the idea of ‘international society’, often seen as the flagship concept of the English School, is not original to it. The German historian Heeren's (1834) discussion of states-systems was influential on early English School thinking (Keene 2002; Little 2008b), and the term has been intrinsic to international law since at least the nineteenth century (Schwarzenberger 1951).

The name ‘English School’ was not coined until Roy Jones (1981) used it in calling for its closure. In a sweet irony, it became a label accepted both by those within and those outside the School (Suganami 2003: 253–7). Like many such labels, including ‘realism’ and indeed ‘international relations’ itself, ‘English School’ is a poor fit with what it represents. Some of its founding figures were not English – Hedley Bull was Australian, Charles Manning South African – and its focus has always been on history and theory for the global level of international relations. It never had any particular interest in British foreign policy. More arguably, there is nothing particularly English about its ideas, which might better be understood as a European amalgam of history, law, sociology and political theory. The key classical theorist with whom the English School is most closely associated is Grotius, a Dutchman. Somewhat embarrassingly, its initial funding came from American foundations (initially Rockefeller, later Ford). But ‘English School’ has now become an established brand name, pushing alternatives (‘British School’, ‘classical approach’, ‘international society school’) to the margins.

Why ‘School’? Dunne (1998: 1–22) sets out the various criteria of self-identification, external recognition and shared intellectual foundations that justify the use of the term in this case. More abstractly, Suganami (2010) offers a helpful way of thinking about the ontology of the English School by distinguishing between a club and a network, and between a grouping and a succession of scholars. How did this ‘School’ unfold?

Initially, there was just the idea of a society of states/international society. This was a more historical, legal, philosophical and, up to a point, sociological way of thinking about international relations than the more mechanistic idea of international system that was becoming dominant in the field of International Relations (IR) in the US after the Second World War. As Wight (1991) sets out in detail, the idea of international society offered a kind of middle ground, or what later became labelled the via media, between the extremes of liberal, or revolutionist, and realist views of international relations. The English School conception of IR had, as Epp (2010) puts it, right from the beginning ‘seen a somewhat different subject all along’. Robert Jackson (1992: 271) nicely sums up this conception of the subject of IR as:

a variety of theoretical inquiries which conceive of international relations as a world not merely of power or prudence or wealth or capability or domination but also one of recognition, association, membership, equality, equity, legitimate interests, rights, reciprocity, customs and conventions, agreements and disagreements, disputes, offenses, injuries, damages, reparations, and the rest: the normative vocabulary of human conduct.

Thinking along these lines was developing inside several heads well before the first meeting of the British Committee, not just Schwarzenberger's but also those of Martin Wight and Charles Manning, both teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE) during the 1950s (Manning since 1930). De Almeida (2003: 277–9) goes so far as to argue that the British Committee was not just constructing a via media between realism and liberalism. Under Wight's leadership it was recovering a fully fledged third position of thinking about IR – rationalism – with its roots in the works of Grotius, Locke, Hume, Burke and de Tocqueville, that had got lost during the great world wars of the twentieth century.

Following on from the idea of international society came that most English of things, a club. The British Committee was a self-selected group of scholars and practitioners mixing academics from History, Philosophy, IR and Theology with practitioners from the Foreign Office and the Treasury.¹ The British Committee eschewed current affairs and policy questions and focused on developing a general understanding of international relations around the concept of international society. It was perhaps more successful as a discussion group, sharpening up and pushing forward the thinking of its individual members, than it was as a project group generating publications. One cannot divorce the outstanding individual works of those who participated in it from the deliberations of the British Committee.² It did, however, produce two landmark edited volumes in its own right: Diplomatic Investigations (1966), edited by Butterfield and Wight, and The Expansion of International Society (1984), edited by Bull and Watson. The British Committee also inspired independent but linked projects. Porter (1972) has a strong English School content, and a parallel project group based at the LSE published three edited volumes picking up and extending on many of the themes within the British Committee's work on the idea of international society.³

Being a club with a clear set of participants, the British Committee generated unhelpful disputes about the membership of the wider School: who was in and who was not, as members of the English School network more broadly (Dunne 1998; Linklater and Suganami 2006: 12–42; Suganami 2010). The participants in the British Committee are on record (Vigezzi 2005), and there is no question that Herbert Butterfield,⁴ Hedley Bull,⁵ Adam Watson⁶ and Martin Wight⁷ were the key players. The principal exclusions from this club were Charles Manning⁸ and E. H. Carr, both of whom have their backers as foundational figures for the English School. Manning was an influential thinker who did much not just to establish IR as a distinct field of study in Britain but also to embed a sociological, constructivist way of thinking about ‘international society’ as a ‘double abstraction’, with imagined states imagining themselves to be members of an international society. His idea that international society is a game of ‘let's-play-states’ (1962: 165) is one that might well resonate with contemporary poststructuralists, as might his use of extravagant metaphors. Since, in Manning's view, both states and international society are social constructions, they are, in contrast to realist conceptions, malleable.

Carr's most influential work for IR (Carr 1946) had no obvious sympathy for the idea of international society. In it he argued against harmony of interest liberalism and saw international society largely as an artefact of the dominant powers, whom he described as ‘masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good’ (ibid.: 79, 95–7, 167). Yet he did allow for something like international society to exist, albeit with its terms very much set down and manipulated by the dominant powers rather than being in some sense independent of them (ibid.: 143). His dialectical critique of both utopianism (as dangerously divorced from the nature of things) and realism (as politically sterile and fatalistic), and his argument for the necessity of blending power and morality in international relations, seemed to leave room precisely for a via media of the type offered by the English School's idea of international society (Dunne 1998: 23–46). At the same time, however, the oppositional tensions between realism and idealism tended to diminish the space for thinking about international society. It was not uncommon for the founding writers of the English School to think that the extremes of Cold War politics were squeezing out international society (e.g., Wight 1991: 259–68).

Two others, also not part of the British Committee, John Burton (1972) and Evan Luard (1976, 1990; Roberts 1992), worked on similar themes around this time. Luard wrote about international society, and Burton, prefiguring what would later become the debates about transnationalism and the transcendence of the state system, about world society. They worked in Britain, but are not generally considered to be part of the English School because, despite some commonality of terms, they did not relate to its concepts and discussions. Indeed, Burton and the English School rather saw each other as enemies (Brown 2001: 429–32).

Following Suganami's lead, one can see that by the 1970s, and certainly during the 1980s, the English School was becoming more of a network of scholars than a specific club, and increasingly a succession of scholars across generations rather than a particular grouping in place and time. The club element faded away during the 1980s and was replaced by a looser and more global network and generational succession of scholars during the 1990s. Among other things, this made debates about who was in or out much less relevant. In this book, I take a broad view – the English School is a ‘great conversation’ comprised of anyone who wants to talk about the concepts of international and world society and who relates in some substantive way to the foundational literature on those topics. It is not a School in the narrow sense of representing a specific line of thought on which all adherents are agreed.

Thanks in no small part to the impact of Bull's (1977) The Anarchical Society, the main elements, or themes, of this ‘great conversation’ were already pretty well worked out by the end of the 1980s and set the template for much of the English School literature that would follow during the 1990s and beyond. There were two reasonably distinct historical projects. One, mainly comparative, was initiated by Martin Wight and carried forward by Adam Watson. This project, discussed in chapter 4, looked back into history to find other cases of international society that could be compared with each other and with the European case (Wight 1977; Watson 1992). The other, mainly in the form of developmental history (set out in chapter 5), was to look more specifically at the formation of the European (‘Westphalian’) international society. Here the key theme was, from the late fifteenth century, the expansion of European international society beyond its cultural home base to dominate the whole planet, together with the problems that arose as a result (Wight 1977; Bull and Watson 1984a; Gong 1984a). As Epp (1998: 49) notes, this project sustained a specific English School interest in the consequences of decolonization and a more general one in the role of culture in world politics, even when these topics, and the School itself, were unfashionable.

The expansion story gave rise to a number of more conceptual and normative themes. Considerable attention was given to the five institutions of the classical Westphalian international society: war, diplomacy, the balance of power, international law, and great power management.⁹ How had these institutions evolved in Europe, and what kind of order did they produce, both there and in the global international society that Europe imposed on the rest of the world? These classical five institutions did not satisfy everyone as a complete set, and other candidates for this status were also put into play: sovereignty (Brewin 1982; James 1986) and nationalism (Porter 1982; Mayall 1990).

Related to this were both more general attempts to theorize international and world society (Butterfield and Wight 1966; Bull 1966a, 1971, 1977) and more practical and normative concerns about the management of contemporary international society. Although the British Committee was famously disinterested in giving policy advice on current affairs (Dunne 1998: 90, 96; Epp 2010), the English School was deeply interested in the questions of order and justice that arose from the highly uneven and inequitable way in which the expansion story had generated the contemporary global-scale international society. What were the proper roles and responsibilities of the state in international society, both in general (Windsor 1978; Navari 1991) and specifically relating to great power responsibilities and the management of international society (Bull 1980, 1982)? How was one to understand the legitimacy of an international society that mixed equality and inequality (Wight 1977; Butler 1978)? In general, how could the sometimes conflicting and sometimes interdependent imperatives for order and justice be met in international society?¹⁰ This order/justice dilemma framed what become known as the pluralist–solidarist debate within the English School, which is covered in depth in Part III. More specifically, given that nonintervention was almost a corollary of sovereignty, what was the role of intervention in international society (Vincent 1974; Little 1975; Bull 1984b)? Linking to the more general order/justice question, this topic became a prominent part of another key branch of the English School literature, that on human rights and the relationship between the society of states, on the one hand, and the cosmopolitan community of all humankind, on the other (Bull 1984a; Vincent 1986).

Naturally, these various themes, approaches and debates generated controversy and opposition within the English School. But it is important to understand such divisions of approach and analysis as interrelated aspects of a broader attempt to work out the history and nature of international society as a social construction. That done, one might then try to clarify the implications of this way of understanding international relations for the possibilities of public policy.

During the 1990s, the post-club English School network continued to produce work on all of these themes, both collective volumes¹¹ and significant individual and joint works.¹² Buzan's (2001) 1999 call for a reconvening of the English School failed to re-create any sort of club, but it did succeed in strengthening both the sense of community within the School and the degree of recognition outside it.¹³ The English School became a more organized presence at IR conferences, and from 2003 there was an active English School section within the International Studies Association. It became more acknowledged as one of the mainstream IR ‘paradigms’ and attracted more attention as a subject for PhD work.

Roy Jones's (1981) critique of the English School also inaugurated an ongoing critical discussion and self-assessment, which, depending on one's point of view, can be seen either as a sign of healthy self-reflection or as suggesting a bit of angst and self-obsession.¹⁴ Whichever interpretation one prefers, this literature and the various edited volumes about the English School constitute a useful guide to how the School's understanding of itself has unfolded, and how it sees itself as relating to other Schools of thought in IR. Also notable is the continuing centrality of Bull, who remains the best-known representative of the English School. After his death in 1985, (re)considerations of his work became a significant niche in the English School literature.¹⁵

In the twenty-first century, the English School both consolidated itself as a network and confirmed itself as an ongoing succession of scholars across generations. The tradition of collective works about the School carried on,¹⁶ and there was an impressive flow of significant individual and joint volumes.¹⁷ The long-neglected subject of international society at the regional level began to receive attention.¹⁸ Both the normative and structur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• PART I: Background and Context
• PART II: The Historical/Structural Orientation
• PART III: Normative Orientations: Pluralism and Solidarism
• References
• Index