The Evolution of International Society

A Comparative Historical Analysis Reissue with a new introduction by Barry Buzan and Richard Little

Adam Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134056101
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

`This is a real feast of a book.... a landmark book. It is clear enough to be used as a teaching text, and could make an excellent introduction to the discipline for those courageous enough to revise their courses.' International Affairs

`This is a bold, successful and valuable book... It is written with admirable clarity and merciful conciseness.' International Relations

`A stunning success. Watson's book is a masterful piece of theoretical and historical analysis.' John A. Vasquez, Rutgers University

Adam Watson, who died in 2007, was a former diplomat who in his later academic career became a pioneer of the discipline of international relations. Originally published in 1992, The Evolution of International Society made a major contribution to international theory and to our perception of how relations between states operate, and established Watson's place within the canon.

This acclaimed and uniquely comprehensive work explains how international societies function across time, starting by examining the ancient state systems before turning to look in detail at the current worldwide international society. The book demonstrates that relations between states are not normally anarchic, but are in fact organized and regulated by elaborate rules and practices.

In this timely reissue, a new introduction by Barry Buzan and Richard Little assesses Adam Watson's career as a diplomat and examines how his work as a practitioner shaped his subsequent thinking about the nature of international society. It then contextualises Watson's original work, situates it alongside current work in the area and identifies the originality of Watson's key arguments, helping us to understand Watson's place within the canon.

1
SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

The purpose of the first part of the book, ‘The ancient states systems’, is to see what we can discern about the organization of relations between different peoples in other civilizations. In the light of our findings we will be able in the second part to examine ‘The European international society’, which derived much from previous experience. The third part examines ‘The global international society’. The contemporary international system grew out of the European one, and many of the rules and institutions of the European society have simply been applied globally; but it also incorporates ideas and practices from earlier systems.

The other civilizations which we want to examine, and the relations between their communities, were of course highly individual and changed continually. What general terms can we use to describe and classify the great variety of these relations? Words like ‘state’, ‘empire’ and ‘system’ are useful so long as we remember that they are no more than broad categorizations which cover a considerable range of distinct individual phenomena, and that different users of these terms mean slightly different things by them. The simple distinction between free and subject peoples, or between sovereign and vassal rulers, is hopelessly overcharged with rhetoric, and obscures many of the issues we need to examine. We need more dispassionate terms.

I have become increasingly doubtful about sharp distinctions between systems of independent states, suzerain systems and empires. I now prefer to define the wider subject by saying that, when a number of diverse communities of people, or political entities, are sufficiently involved with one another for us to describe them as forming a system of some kind (whether independent, suzerain, imperial or whatever), the organization of the system will fall somewhere along a notional spectrum between absolute independence and absolute empire. The two marginal positions are theoretical absolutes, that do not occur in practice. It is convenient for purposes of compari-son to divide the spectrum into four broad categories of relationship: independence, hegemony, dominion and empire.

There is in states systems an inevitable tension between the desire for order and the desire for independence. Order promotes peace and prosperity, which are great boons. But there is a price. All order constrains the freedom of action of communities and in particular their rulers. The desire for order makes constraints and voluntary commitments acceptable, for the reasons set out by Hobbes and others. But in so far as the order is imposed by the actual or potential force of a hegemonial authority, it can be felt as oppressive. This is especially the case with imperial and other authorities which intervene in the domestic policies of members. The desire for autonomy, and then for independence, is the desire of states to loosen the constraints and commitments imposed upon them. But independence also has its price, in economic and military insecurity.

The term independent states in a system indicates political entities that retain the ultimate ability to take external decisions as well as domestic ones. But in practice freedom in external decisions is limited by the constraints which involvement in any system imposes, and also by the voluntary commitments that states assume in order to manage their external relations more effectively. The greater the constraints and commitments, the tighter the system will be, and the further along the spectrum.

At the multiple independences end of the spectrum, the more closely sovereign states are involved with each other, the less they feel able to operate alone. The impersonal net of strategic and economic pressures that holds them together in a system induces them to make alliances. Alliances bring a form of order to what would be an inchoate system by co-ordinating, and thus modifying, the behaviour of their members. That is an aspect of what the European system called raison d’état. Order is further promoted by general agreements and rules that restrain and benefit all members of the system, and make it into a society. That is an aspect of raison de système, the belief that it pays to make the system work. In so far as such agreements, including commitments to collective security, are voluntary, and are not imposed by a victor power or group of powers, they fall within the multiple independences area of the spectrum.

In practice the freedom of action of independent states is always limited by the pressures of interdependence in a system, and often also by voluntary choice. Usually it is also limited, more effectively, by hegemony. As we move along the spectrum to the point where one or more powers are able to exercise a hegemony, the other forms of co-ordination shade off into the benefits which derive from the hegemonial authority ordering the system in such a way that all its members see a balance of advantage in accepting the hegemony. So also imperial powers usually find it advantageous to respond to the interests and welfare of subordinate peoples.

By a hegemony I mean that some power or authority in a system is able to ‘lay down the law’ about the operation of the system, that is to determine to some extent the external relations between member states, while leaving them domestically independent. Some scholars like to reserve the term ‘hegemony’ for the exercise of this authority by a single power. The difficulty there is that in fact the authority can be exercised either by a powerful individual state, or as is often the case by a group of such states. An example of dual hegemony is the Athenian-Spartan diarchy after the Persian wars, discussed in Chapter 5. The five great European powers after 1815 exercised a diffused hegemony, discussed in Chapter 21. Indeed, the rules and institutions of the European international society were far from purely voluntary: they were to a considerable extent imposed by the principal victors at the great peace settlements like Westphalia, Vienna and Versailles, and were to that extent hegemonial. I therefore prefer to use the term ‘hegemony’ in this wider sense of any authority, consisting of one or a few powerful states, that is able to determine the relations between the members of an international society, rather than resort to ugly words like ‘para-hegemonial’. Moreover, a hegemony is not a dictatorial fiat. The hegemonies which I have looked at, whether exercised by an individual power or a small group, involve continual dialogue between the hegemonial authority and the other states, and a sense on both sides of the balance of expediency.

Suzerainty is a vaguer concept. In international law it usually means that one state exercises political control over another. In many historical contexts it means a shadowy overlordship that amounts to very little in practice. Some scholars like Wight and Bull spoke of suzerain systems or societies to mean those in which the members accepted hegemony as legitimate. There is a difference between systems whose members are in general agreement that there ought to be a suzerain authority, even when it is in abeyance in practice, and those whose members accept suzerain authority only tacitly. Tacit acceptance is the same as acquiescence, and is necessary for any effective hegemony, whether de jure or de facto.

Further along the spectrum dominion covers situations where an imperial authority to some extent determines the internal government of other communities, but they nevertheless retain their identity as separate states and some control over their own affairs. Examples are recent Soviet relations with eastern Europe, where the states were formally independent, the relation of the emperor Augustus to Herod’s kingdom and the relation of the British raj to the Indian princes. Here the part played by the ability to coerce is more obvious.

Finally there is empire, no more absolute in practice than independence, meaning direct administration of different communities from an imperial centre. The freedom of action even of imperial governments is limited in practice by the constraints which involvement with other communities imposes.

When we look at historical examples, in the world today or in the systems of the past, we are of course aware that these categories are not watertight with an abrupt transition from one to another, but rather a continuum, like wavelengths of light in a rainbow which we find it convenient to divide into different colours. No actual system remains fixed at one point in this spectrum.

The relation of the various communities to each other shifts constantly along the spectrum over time. The ways in which a system tightens or loosens, and one hegemonial or imperial power supplants another, will be of special interest to us. There is also, at any one time, a variation in space. Communities involved in a system do not all stand in the same relationship to each other, or to an imperial power. There are many gradations, even between independent states; and when looked at closely every relationship between two communities has in practice a special nature of its own, conditioned by history, geography and other differentiating factors. One question we must examine is the extent to which empires usually have a hard core of direct administration, beyond which lie layers of dominion and hegemony until fully independent states are reached that lie outside imperial control or influence. Such ‘layers’ are, of course, gradations along our spectrum and therefore concentric circles on a diagram rather than a map.

In addition to these continuing variations of reality in time and space, the communities which we have treated as the components of systems are far from being constants. A political entity means in essence a community held together by a common government. Obviously the area under the control of a government will fluctuate. A community which is also bound together by other ties, such as custom, ethnic descent, religion or language, may grow or shrink in importance and size: it may absorb other elements, or break up, or become assimilated or otherwise disappear. We must use terms like community and state also in as neutral a sense as possible. For instance, it seems to me that it obscures our understanding of the nature of states to maintain dogmatically that to count as states they must be independent.

Since systems and the communities which compose them vary greatly from each other, with widely differing cultures, past experiences and degree of development, and since within a given system the degree of control which one, or two, or five powers can exercise over other communities also varies, can we make any valid generalizations about the pressures which induce such changes? Especially, can we see any indications of the way our own system may develop? Has there been any general tendency away from the pole of centralized authority, empire and world government towards multiple independence, as some people claim? Has there been a corresponding countertendency in known systems of independent states for the strongest power to move towards hegemony, trying to control the foreign relations of client states and lay down the rules of the system; and for hegemony to develop into dominion?

A useful metaphor for a theory of systems is the pendulum. Imagine our spectrum laid out in the form of an arc, with its midpoint at the bottom of the pendulum’s swing, somewhere between hegemony and dominion. Was there in ancient systems any noticeable pendulum effect, any gravitational pull on systems away from the theoretical extremes and towards some central area of the spectrum, even though the momentum of change and other factors may carry the system past that area? Or does the pattern vary too much from one system to another for us to make any valid general inferences?

Another important issue is how far the arrangements between communities in a system are accepted as legitimate. Legitimacy is the acceptance of authority, the right of a rule or a ruler to be obeyed, as distinguished from the power to coerce. It is determined by the attitudes of those who obey an authority. How does legitimate authority, as opposed to power exercised by compulsion or the threat of it, operate between communities in a system, and acquire international significance? The more closely involved independent states are with each other, the less they try to operate alone. They see that they can further some of their interests and their principles, especially the preservation of their independence, by co-operation with allies; which involves taking the views and desires of their allies into account and modifying their own behaviour accordingly. Other interests can be promoted by general agreements and rules that restrain and benefit all members of the system. This awareness of the advantages of cooperation between independent partners corresponds to the ways in which hegemonial and imperial powers find it advantageous to respond to the interests and welfare of subordinate peoples. To what extent do such policies depend for their success on a wide measure of acceptance? The rules and institutions and the accepted practices of a society of substantially independent states need legitimate authority to ensure habitual compliance. Is legitimate authority as necessary for the successful exercise of hegemony or dominion?

If we want to understand how the civilizations of the past organized the relations between their different communities, we cannot simply leave such evidence as historians and archaeologists have been able to uncover as a mass of uncorrelated data. It can be very useful to impose a diagram or a grid of categories on the multiple variety of actual relations, for possible classification and comparative analysis. There is nothing unusual about this. We have to group different individuals and communities together into categories for juridical purposes: for instance, when we say that all the very different nominally independent states in our present international system are equal in international law. And it was regularly done in ancient times, as it is today, in order to further a political goal. But while the division of reality into categories can assist our understanding of what actually happens, there is the inherent danger that our categories may come between us and reality. We may slip into the assumption that phenomena lumped together in a category are more alike than they really are, or that because some things are true about all of them, other things are true also. We have noted the danger of category words with emotional overtones like ‘independence’ and ‘empire’. Equally misleading are the categories used by past civilizations to classify their communities, and especially those which rulers and political leaders proclaimed for their own purposes. It will therefore pay us to look a little more closely at the changing patterns of relationship of various systems in all their individuality, and then compare them.

THE ANCIENT STATES SYSTEMS

PREFACE

In this section I want to examine a number of systems of states in the ancient world: that is, the world before the rise of European civilization.

It will not be possible, or necessary for our purpose, to examine every known system that binds together distinct political entities. We need to look at the more important and well-documented ones, and to cover a representative range of developed systems across our spectrum, from the most imperially integrated to the most fragmented clusters of multiple independences, in the same way that a general comparative study of states needs to extend from centralized and homogeneous examples to loosely federated and diverse ones.

We begin in the ancient near east with Sumer. This is the earliest point at which the archaeological written record enables us to discern, with some difficulty, how a states system operated; and what we find is a society of independent city states with hegemonial institutions, about halfway along the spectrum between anarchical freedom of action and rigid empire. The Assyrian system inherited much from Sumer but was more imperially organized; and its Persian successor larger and looser. We then turn to the much more familiar system of classical city-state Greece, where jealously defended independences were tempered by a succession of less institutionalized hegemonies and by continual involvement with Persia. The Greek and Persian systems merged after Alexander’s conquest to form the diverse Macedonian system, which adapted practices derived from many predecessors. Its successor, the Roman imperial system, was the ultimate classical synthesis; which in turn developed into the Byzantine and Arab systems, and into the highly original society of medieval Europe discussed at the beginning of the next section of the book. This succession of systems will enable us to examine the problem of continuity: how a system can inherit and adapt from its predecessors institutions and practices, specific ways of organizing the relations between political entities, and also assumptions about what those relations were and ought to be.

Alongside this linked succession, we also examine two more distinct Asian systems: the ancient Indian, and the Chinese system of the warring states before the establishment of the Han Empire. The Indian society of states is interesting because of its elaborate indigenous development and because of the impact on it of Persian and Macedonian practices. The impressive practices and theories of the Chinese system developed in virtual isolation. These two systems will provide a useful basis of comparison with the near eastern succession.

When examining these ancient systems, we shall need to bear in mind two sets of fundamental questions that are also relevant to the European system and are of topical concern today. The first set concerns cultural unity. How far is a degree of cultural unity, or at least a dominant cultural matrix, necessary if the interests and pressures that bind political entities into a system are to find expression in the conscious rules and institutions of a society? How far are such rules and institutions determined by the culture in which they develop, and how far are they mechanically determined, as similar responses to similar interests and pressures? What regulatory jnachinery is required for the operation, the orderliness, of a system that is not dominated by a single culture?

The second set of questions concerns hegemonial and imperial authority. What can we learn from the ancient systems about the nature and degree of authority (as opposed to compulsion) exercised by the rules and institutions of the society itself, and also by its most powerful entity or entities? How far were these forms of order in practice combined? Does the evidence of the ancient systems support the generalization that all such authority curbs independent freedom of action but is in turn limited by anti-imperial and anti-hegemonial strivings for greater autonomy? In this context we shall need to remember how limited a degree of imperial coercion was practicable in ancient times.

We shall also assess the evidence for a pendulum effect, holding ancient societies towards the centre of the spectrum as they tightened and loosened over time. To what extent was there a propensity to hegemony in systems of comparatively independent states, and a propensity to autonomy in more imperial ones? Also, in so far as there were dominant or hegemonial powers in the ancient systems, how far were they political entities at the centre of the civilization and the system, and how far were they less civilized but more vigorous marcher communities?

Our examination of the evidence will also throw light on other concepts formulated in Chapter 1. We will be concerned with legitimacy in ancient societies of states. The authority which the conventions and institutions of a society, both formal and informal, were able to command, the degree of continuity of a society with its predecessors, and the degree of cultural affinity of its members, all helped to determine its legitimacy. What was the relation between the comparatively stable legitimacy of a changing and developing society of states, and the more rapidly evolving practice, concerned with expediency and the balance of material advantage? How did the legitimacies of individual member communities of the society, as opposed to those of the society as a whole, affect the society’s stability?

In Chapter 12 we will consider what answers can be given to these questions, and what their implications are for a theoretical understanding of states systems.

2
SUMER

The original states system

Our study of the evolution of international relations takes us back to the earliest written records. Of course there were cities and kingdoms before that, and of course they had ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the 2009 Reissue
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS
• The ancient states systems
• The European international society
• The global international society
• Bibliography