Hegemony & History

J.H. Adam Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136013188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This collection of essays records the development of Adam Watson's thinking about international theory from the 1950s to the present, exploring his contribution to, and the development of, the English School.

Adam Watson was one of the members of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics alongside Herbert Butterfield, Martin Wight and Hedley Bull and a founding member of the English School. The committee developed a theory of international society and the nature of order in world politics, which have had an important impact on the discipline of international relations, providing a framework and research agenda for understanding international politics that continues to shape the discipline in the present day.

Hegemony & History examines issues such as:

• the behaviour of states in international systems and societies
• hegemony and empire
• justice
• non-state relations, including the economic involvement of communities and the role of other non-state actors
• the increasing focus of international politics on individuals as well as states.

The book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of international relations, political science, history and economics, as well as diplomatic practitioners and others concerned with international affairs.

1 Introduction: A voyage of exploration

This record of my voyage of exploration into the uncharted realms of international relations theory begins with the wholly state-centred investigations of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics¹ into systems and societies of states, and my sense of the need to study past systems, each in their own individuality, and then compare them with the present one. It continues with my deduction that the systems for which we have evidence arrange themselves in a spectrum between the theoretical extremes of total independent anarchy and total world government; and my study of the role of hegemony in the anarchic half of the spectrum. Later chapters illustrate my growing sense of the importance of non-state relations, including the economic involvement of communities and the role of other non-state actors; and arising out of this extended picture, my awareness of the increasing focus of international politics on individuals as well as states.

My voyage of exploration effectively began with the work of the British Committee. Chapter 2 serves as a summary of the Committee’s achievements, and as an indication of the need to continue where the Committee left off. The research and theorizing has now broadened out into what is known as the English School: a diverse array of scholars and thinkers. Much of the present work of the English School pivots round the collaborative contribution of Barry Buzan and Richard Little.

Chapter 3, entitled Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations, describes my relation to the way Wight and the other members of the British Committee saw its task. It was Wight who launched the intellectual journey with his seminal essay “Why is there no International Theory?”² International Politics meant for us the political and strategic relations between independent states, or more specifically between the executive branches of their governments, locked in a system. Most of us looked at these relations in an historical context. The four determining members of the original Committee, Butterfield, Wight, Howard and Williams, were all historians. They saw the need to step outside the academic world to bring in diplomatic practitioners with historical training and interests, such as myself, and later Robert Wade-Gery from the British Foreign Office and Noel Dorr from the Irish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

The Committee’s concentration on the behaviour of states in international systems and societies was reasonable enough. There was no adequate theory even of that, and one was sorely needed. But as we looked at the patterns, we became aware how much the rules and codes of conduct of states in international societies were also shaped by two motive forces: first, inter-state economic activity; and second, a sense of cultural and ethical responsibilities that was non-governmental and derived from individuals, including statesmen acting as individuals. At first, we were only dimly aware of the vast extent of the problem and its inescapability for any comprehensive theory of international relations. We were like Keats’s Cortez and his men staring at the unforeseen Pacific “with a wild surmise.” But gradually, as the outlines of this new continent, so to speak, became clearer to us, we began to ask ourselves the relevant questions and to feel our way towards answers.

From the beginning, the Committee was concerned with the ethical or moral dimension of the relations between states. Butterfield and Wight held that coercion and other forms of naked pressure by some states on others, such as might occur in conditions of anarchy, were mitigated in an international society, and especially in the European one: not so much by unenforceable international law as by the restraints of prudence and moral obligation. Prudence was a matter of calculation, enshrined in maxims of statecraft like “the enemy of today will be needed as an ally tomorrow.” But moral obligation was rather a matter of belief, a set of values distilled from the common culture of the member states. In the European case moral obligation ranged from the rules of war, such as the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, to the rights of man and the responsibility of states, especially the great powers, to put pressure on other states to treat their individual subjects more in accordance with what, in the nineteenth century, were called standards of civilization. By this expression and its successors, Western governments and publics have meant standards which they regard as universal but are in fact formulated in communities that, as Heeren put it, “resemble each other in their manners, religion and degree of social improvement.”³

Even at that early state-centred stage of our investigations, it was clear to us that insofar as standards of civilization referred to the way governments treated their own subjects, the significant unit of moral obligation was not the state but the individual human being. We noted the obvious contradiction between action or inducement across state borders on behalf of the subjects or citizens of an inadequately “civilized” state, and the equally strongly held principle that the internal affairs of an independent state were no business of other states.⁴

Wight associated the moral obligations of governments with a “Kantian” vision of a world society. The obligation of states towards individuals was an aspect of international politics, alongside the impersonal pressures inherent in any system of states (symbolized by Hobbes) and the rules and codes of conduct of an international society (symbolized by Grotius). The diagram on page 9 of Buzan’s From International to World Society?⁵ illustrates Wight’s perception, which can now be seen as the beginning of a rich vein of international theory.

I have included, as Chapter 6 of this volume, a paper on Justice Between States written in 1976 because it, and especially the second half, shows my own early attempt to grapple with the role of states in a world society of individuals. This question has since become a major preoccupation of some international relations theorists.

No member of the Committee did more to crystallize its thinking than Hedley Bull. His decisive contribution was to spell out the concept of a society of genuinely independent states: that is, an “anarchical” society free of any overarching authority able to enforce decisions. How I saw my discussions with Bull on these subjects is set out in Chapter 4, entitled Hedley Bull, States Systems and International Societies, and Chapter 5, The Anarchical Society in the History of International Relations: Discussions with Hedley Bull.

In the discussions about Bull’s anarchical society, a major question for the historically minded members of the Committee was the uniqueness of the present arrangements. Were both the theory and the practice of the “European system” sui generis, as Butterfield suggested, something new and different in kind from what had gone before? Or was it simply the most developed example of the various rules and practices of past and present systems?⁶

A second issue was the cultural roots of moral obligation. How far did the rules and conventions of the European grande république differ in kind from the looser arrangements with the alien Ottomans; or for instance the society of classical Greek states differ from the arrangements with the Persian empire? We had identified as the essence of a society that its members consciously put in place elaborate rules and institutions to manage their involvement. But both the Ottoman and Persian wider systems did so too. However, I did not doubt that there were real differences, of kind as well as degree, between unicultural societies whose practice seemed largely determined by shared beliefs and customs, and wider arrangements that were mainly based on expediency. Butterfield put his finger on the importance of a common culture. His summary of the Committee’s deliberations to the end of 1964 says that “The salient fact about the international systems so far studied is that basically they do not seem to have been produced by the process of bringing together units which have hitherto been quite separate. The effective force making for some sort of combination may be the elements of an antecedent common culture.” Bull’s view of an international society seemed to me more mechanical, with its values incidental rather than the root from which the society grew. He spoke of states which formed a society “recognising certain common interests and perhaps some common values.”⁷ Here, he was in accord with some proponents of a world society who doubt the role of cultural differences. During our joint editing of The Expansion of International Society,⁸ Bull and I were well aware of the cultural question, and perhaps moved some way towards an answer.

There is now an active debate in Europe about whether a shared cultural matrix is even more necessary if a closer union or confederacy is to hand over much more sovereignty to central authorities than is the case in our present world-wide international society. It points up the problem of how to bring in communities that do not share some or all of the cultural values of the “European social model.” The question is not merely academic: it is particularly relevant to the extent and coherence of the European Union and, indeed in the cases of Turkey and Ukraine, to the meaning of the word Europe.

Once I retired from the Foreign Office in 1968, I was able to work more actively on my general comparative study of present and previous states systems. The British Committee had produced some valuable discussions and papers on past and present systems. When it decided to abandon the idea of a collective volume on the subject, I undertook to the Committee to compile a book describing and comparing the known systems, together with such general hypotheses about their functioning as the facts seemed to permit. I made it clear that my exploration of this aspect of the subject was to be my own. In a paper to the Committee, I said “It has always been understood that though my book grew out of the Committee’s deliberations and would use them as something more than merely a point of departure, the book would set out my own ideas and I should not be limited by the Committee’s discussions or confine myself to being a rapporteur.”⁹

In 1970, I began, intermittently, the research and reflection needed. On 15 June 1972, I wrote to Herbert Butterfield: “I am trying to write down what I think about hegemony and anti-hegemonial coalitions, and the fact that if one state in a newtonian system increases its mass relative to the others by perfectly legitimate means, it still becomes an increasing potential threat to its neighbours. Of course, as a state does become stronger, it is bound to use its strength to have contested issues decided its way; and the anti-hegemonial coalition will find plenty of good reasons for resistance . . . I also find myself coming back to those factors which impede the smooth functioning of a newtonian balance of power—the non-vital interests of states and dynasties and communities, that militate against raison d’etat . . . So you see my book is getting away from our discussion in the Committee and moving on to hobby horses of my own, started by the themes in our original plan.”¹⁰

In the 1980s, I taught a course of lectures on the subject at the University of Virginia. The task was not easy. Nobody can be an expert on all the systems of states about which we have a useful body of knowledge. Historians of present and past international relations have tended to focus on the policies of individual states rather than the workings of the system. I asked myself, and my students, how our present global system, with rules and institutions derived largely from Europe, came to constitute some 200 nominally sovereign states. The system is, I wrote, “puzzling if looked at in isolation”; and its practices are constantly changing. A comparison with past systems seemed to me the most effective way to see what is characteristic of states systems in general, and what is peculiar to our system in our time. My study of the subject finally crystallized as my book, The Evolution of International Society, which was published in 1992.

In their International Systems in World History,¹¹ published in 2000, Buzan and Little list three common faults of international theorists: eurocentrism, ahistoricism and anarchophilia. I have long felt the same concern. I think I can fairly claim that my book (which appeared some years earlier) avoids these faults; and also recognizes the role played in a system by dependent and “protected” states, which is often ignored by scholars. But my book deals only tangentially with the relation of states to individuals. That aspect of international politics, and the consequent erosion of the sovereign independence of states, took on increasing significance for me since it was first mooted in the British Committee. But even so, the state retains its centrality in international relations. It therefore seemed to me necessary to produce an adequate comparative analysis specifically of past and present systems of states across the wide spectrum of their diversity, as an aid to understanding where our present system came from and where it may be headed.

As The Evolution of International Society took shape in my mind, it also seemed to me that the study of past systems and societies of states sheds new light on the historical story as it emerges from the unrecorded past. I was encouraged to find that in their International Systems in World History, Buzan and Little focused on the insight which international relations theory can bring to our understanding of world history.

Chapter 7 of Hegemony & History, The Prospects for a More Integrated International Society, and Chapter 8, “The Practice Outruns the Theory”, mark further stages in my voyage of exploration. They illustrate my evolving perception of a specific aspect of international relations theory, the ubiquity of some degree of hegemony in the anarchical half of the spectrum, illustrated by the current trend towards a more integrated, that is a more hegemonially managed, international order.

My Foreign Office assignments in the late 1950s and early 1960s—Head of the then continent-wide African Department of the Foreign Office, followed by Minister with a roving commission on decolonization in West Africa, and then Ambassador to Cuba—had led me to think hard about the place in our international society of small and weak states incapable of real independence in the sense of being able to manage modern statehood without considerable outside aid. I began to see the new international order that emerged from wholesale decolonization not only in Westphalian terms. It could also be seen as a core of economically and politically developed states, surrounded by an ever more numerous periphery of weak and inexperienced states faced often with the alternatives of firm government or chaos.

The decolonization that began in South and South East Asia and continued through to the collapse of the Soviet Union was an immense swing of the pendulum towards the anarchical or multi-independence end of the spectrum. The governments of the newly emancipated states had learnt to think in Westphalian terms. They wanted to become members of international society; but with few exceptions they wanted its legitimacy to be as loose and as little integrated as possible. Two major trends militated against this aim and undermined it. The first was the steady tightening of the network of economic pressures that continues to pull the system relentlessly towards integration and globalization. The second was the growing pressure of public and media opinion in Western and donor countries in favour of inducements and intervention to promote Western standards of civilization in recipient states in return for aid. A request from India for a contribution to a Festschrift in honour of Professor A.P. Rana, who has done much to clarify my mind on these issues, provided an opportunity to look at them, and at the trend towards a more hegemonial society, from a recipient point of view. My essay, entitled “The Prospects for a More Integrated International Society”, is reproduced as Chapter 7 of this book.

By the 1980s, those in search of an adequate international theory were concentrating less exclusively on the relations between states and governments, and paying more attention to individuals. At the same time, Western political leaders were becoming more concerned with human rights, poverty, disease and other sufferings of individuals in less developed countries. This broadening of scope throws new light on the motivations and policies of states in today’s world, and also on our understanding of the past.

One vivid example which has been in my mind in pursuing this line of thought is the role of individuals in the European wars of religion that followed the Reformation. Catholics felt a loyalty to the champions of their faith like the Habsburgs and Guises, and Protestants were drawn to the anti-hegemonial coalition. In some areas, only a minority were animated by loyalty to their prince and his state. There was massive migration of dissidents from both sides, to escape persecution and live under a more acceptable government. The movement of individuals “voting with their feet” enabled even the humblest individuals to have a greater say in how they were governed. At the same time, it gave to even petty rulers loyal subjects in place of dissidents, and so increased their power and independence. As Butterfield put it, there was a wind blowing in favour of kings. I would say that massive migration was one of the forces that pushed the European grande république towards the anarchic end of the spectrum and towards the Westphalian settlement.

The result of my exploration of the donor—recipient pattern is shown in Chapter 9, The Future of the Westphalian Anti-hegemonial International System, and Chapter 10, International Relations and the Practice of Hegemony. Finally in the 1990s, with encouragement by George Kennan, my views crystallized into another book, The Limits of Independence.¹² That book discusses: first the inadequacy of the sovereign state as the basic institution of government in Europe; then the consequences for the states system of decolonization and the creation of a host of incompetent nation states. It also discusses the relation of the new donor-recipient pattern to the practice of hegemony, and the growth in the developed donor core of a sense of responsibility for the condition of individuals in other states. Chapter 4 of The Limits of Independence reproduces the substantive part of a paper on some of these problems that I wrote for the Committee on my return from Havana in 1966.

Hegemony in the context of our current international society’s Westphalian legitimacy is also discussed in Chapter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors' preface
• Author's introductory note
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A voyage of exploration
• 2 The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics
• 3 Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations
• 4 Hedley Bull, states systems and international societies
• 5 The Anarchical Society in the history of international relations: Discussions with Hedley Bull
• 6 Justice between states
• 7 The prospects for a more integrated international society
• 8 "The Practice Outruns the Theory"
• 9 The future of the Westphalian anti-hegemonial international system
• 10 International relations and the practice of hegemony
• 11 The changing international system
• 12 1878: A case study in collective hegemony
• 13 Hegemony & History
• Bibliography
• Index