How The English School Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Love International Ethics

By Amy E. Eckert (Department of Political Science Metropolitan State College of Denver Campus Box 43, PO Box 173362 Denver CO 80217-3362, eckerta@mscd.edu, http://www.amyeckert.com)

 

Prepared for International Studies Association-West Annual Meeting Las Vegas, Nevada September 29-30, 2006

 

Introduction

The English School gained influence within International Relations because of its ability to offer an alternative to the then-pervasive influence of neorealism within the discipline (Brown, 2001, pp. 424-426).[1]  Neorealism’s model of the international system is one in which the capabilities of member states are the dominant (if not the only) force in shaping international relations (Waltz, 1986, p. 91).  Against neorealism’s crude and mechanistic view of the international system the English School offered a conception of the international system as a society in which rules and institutions could also matter.  While the English School acknowledges the role of Great Powers within this society, and even acknowledges that coercion can play an important role in orderkeeping, the English School tradition does not reduce international society to the capabilities of its members in the same way that neorealism does.  Neorealism and the English School also part company on the point of methodology.  While neorealism evolved as a scientific alternative to classical realism, the English School acknowledges that judgment and intuition also play a significant role in scholarship. 

The recognition that international society is more than capabilities and the methodological openness would seem to bode well for the role of ethical reasoning within the English School.  Barry Buzan went so far as to characterize the normative/ethical strand of English School thought as “robust” (2001, p. 486).  Neorealism, which inspired many English School critiques, treat values as, at best, epiphenomenal reflections of the interests of dominant powers within the international system.  The English School’s insights about the limits of neorealism and the explanatory power of power suggest the potential for openness to ethical considerations.  However, the English School’s relationship to normativity has been somewhat more complex.  While they are comfortable working with norms and values in a descriptive sense, many prominent English School writers have been surprisingly reluctant to embrace strong prescriptive ethical positions.  On the contrary, most major English School authors have pursued their inquiries in the spirit of value freedom.  In this respect, disaggregating the English School’s treatment of ethics and norms is more useful than considering them together as Buzan does.  This paper explores the reluctance to embrace ethics and asks whether the English School can learn to stop worrying and love ethics.

Pluralism and World Society: Accepting the Normative Challenge

By John Williams

 

School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University Al Qasimi Building, Elvet Hill Road, Durham DH1 3TU, UK.    j.c.williams@durham.ac.uk

 

Introduction

I do not intend that this structural re-writing of English school theory should replace or override the normative version of English school theory … We need both the normative and structural versions of English school theory standing side by side complementing and questioning each other. (Buzan, 2004: 228-9 emphasis in original)

This looks like a tall order. Buzan’s re-working of the English school’s established approach to understanding how its theory works is certainly ‘rather radical’ (Buzan, 2004: 228), which, in the eyes of many, may well be putting it mildly. Few, if any, of the pre-existing categories, taxonomies or relationships remain untouched by Buzan’s aim of developing a thorough-going, social structural version of English school theory. His series of revisions removes international system, re-formulates the pluralist-solidarist debate, separates trans-national and inter-human sectors from the inter-state one and gives us new meanings for familiar terms including international society and world society (Buzan, 2004: 90-160). The normative dimension of English school theory is certainly one of the principal victims or beneficiaries (we’ll suspend judgement on that at present) of this re-working. In his exposition of the project for From International to World Society? (hereinafter FIWS), Buzan, highlights dimensions of the normative, or Wightian, wing of the school as amongst the key problems that he aims to address. First up is the overarching ambition to develop a social structural theory that is a theory about norms, rather than normative theory, and that there has been insufficient recognition of the difference between these two types of theory (Buzan, 2004: 1-2). Second is the overly normative approach of many English school writers, largely as a result of being indebted to traditional political theory for many of their inspirations, ideas, categories and labels. This produces a tendency, in line with the ambitions of political theory and philosophy, to be overly focused on normative questions of the good state, the good life and pursuit of universals, most problematically in the form of the commitment to universal notions of human rights, order and justice (Buzan, 2004: 11-14, 16-17). Buzan contrasts this with his ambitions to deploy and develop English school categories as analytical concepts, capturing the occasionally material, but mainly social, structures of the current constellation of world politics (Buzan, 2004: 14). This may be a false dichotomy – the normative legacy of political theory and its current over-representation in English school theory versus Buzan’s morally agnostic idea of analytical concepts that seek to explore the way things are, how they got that way and the dynamics, trajectories and momenta in play that will shape the future. Clearly, the opening quote of this paper suggests that Buzan does not regard them as dichotomous, even if he does see them as being intellectually separable forms of enquiry and he has a strong preference for getting the analytical right and then turning to the normative. Nevertheless, the book is replete with recognition of the importance of values and of normative debates to almost all aspects of the contemporary international system that Buzan describes, and thus the entanglement of the analytical and the normative is an ever-present question.

The English School and Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled

By Iver B. Neumann.

 

Paper presented to the Fourth ECPR IR Standing Group Conference, Canterbury, 14-16 September 2001. Comments welcome to ibn@nupi.no.

 

There are, perhaps, three major reasons for the renewed interest in the English School after the Cold War. First, this event made for such an obvious challenge to the structure of  world politics that even the structuralists of our discipline were, at least initially, willing to consider that something was changing. Acknowledged change pushes the scholar in the direction of privileging process over structure. Inasmuch as the English School is one of IR research programmes which are most attuned to historical contingency and change, an upsurge in attention was to be expected. Secondly, a particularly noteworthy aspect of that change which had been afoot since decolonialisation, but which had been marinalised by the centrality of bipolarity in the states system, was the enhanced importance of multiculturalism to world politics. The end of the Cold War brought on a ‘return of culture’ to IR in various quarters of the discipline. As seen from the English School, those returning came late to the ball. The question of how the rise of what was generally referred to as the ‘third world’ would impact on world politics at large had been a core interest of the English School since its inception (e.g. Bull 1984a). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that a renewed interest in the one should be condusive to a renewed interest in the other. Whereas the first reason for the renewed interest is lodged in developments at large and the second reason concerns a factor which makes itself felt in a number of different places in world politics, a third reason is to do with the link between the development of the states system and the development of IR as a discipline. Inasmuch as it was predicated on the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War removed the causal factor behind the institutionalisation of a ‘Western’ military alliance. This meant that one reason for papering over the fissure between what had become the two principal parties to that alliance – United States and the EU – was gone. Whereas a way was found, at least initially, to shore up ‘Western’ unity in such an area as defence, in most other areas the fissure between the United States and Europe grew wider as Europeans reasserted themselves. Read in the light of this development, it is hardly coincidental that the upsurge of interest in the English School also happens to be an upsurge in interest in the only fully fledged non-American research programme that the ‘American’ discipline of IR (Hoffmann 197x) has ever known.[1]

For reasons similar to the ones listed above, the renewed interest in the English School has also coincided with a renewed interest in the specific practices which together constitute world politics. Instead of assuming a set of functions and a state structure and then deducing a set of truth claim from these assumptions, a growing number of scholars have begun to scrutinise how world politics are actually performed. As pointed out by the English School, if one views world politics as an historically emerging and social phenomenon, then diplomacy plays a key role in it. The renewed interests in the English School and in social practices like diplomacy should, therefore, be mutually reinforcing. To the extent that Tim Dunne (1998: 181) is right in maintaining that ‘few academics who identify with the English School today are interested in the processes of diplomacy’, this is definitely a situation which should be remedied.[2] Part of the groundwork for such a revival must be to scrutinise and critique what the English School has had to say about diplomacy. That is the job to be undertaken in this paper. Part one introduces English School thought on diplomacy as it evolved through an original series of book. Part two looks at the work of  the next generation(s). Part three draws attention to the limits of the present English School  conceptualisation by arguing that it is not sufficiently tied in with an overall discussion of social change. The conclusion reached is that the English School has indeed made an impressive contribution, but one which we can only followed up by wedding it to more wide-reaching projects of social theory.

Hierarchy and Stratification in International Society: a Comparison of the Old and New Diplomacies

By Edward Keene

The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual framework for thinking about international hierarchy based on Weberian ideas about social stratification and mechanisms of social closure. The model allows us to categorise hierarchical international systems in terms of three dimensions: the primary axis of stratification (class, status or authority); the basis for the legitimation of the distribution of authority (charismatic, traditional or rational-legal); and the form of closure through which the hierarchy is maintained (collectivist or individualist). This framework is then used to analyse the changing nature of diplomacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from a charismatic status hierarchy based on a collectivist method of exclusion, to a rational-legal bureaucratic hierarchy based on a more individualist form of closure in the form of credentialism. The conclusion discusses how this perspective opens up new research questions in the comparative-historical analysis of international order and the normative analysis of international justice.

 

Introduction

At the beginning of Diplomatic Investigations, Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight say that they and other members of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics adopted as their ‘frame of reference…not the limits and uses of international theory, nor the formulation of foreign policy, but the diplomatic community itself, international society, the states-system’; their primary goal was to investigate ‘the nature and distinguishing marks of the diplomatic community, the way it functions, the obligations of its members, its tested and established principles of political intercourse’ (Butterfield & Wight 1966, 12). My purpose in this paper is very similar: to examine the nature of the diplomatic community, how it functions and the principles according to which its members interact with one another.

            More specifically, I will attempt to interpret the significance of the shift from the ‘old’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century to the ‘new’ diplomacy of the twentieth. To the advocates of the new diplomacy, the most important dimension of this change was the belief that diplomatic interaction should become less secretive and more accountable to the public: in brief, more democratic (for example, Ponsonby 1915). This was bound up with the growing prominence of ‘conference diplomacy’, both at the League of Nations and in the frequent high profile, if not always productive, gatherings of world leaders that marked the end of WW1 and the inter-war period (Hankey 1946). Here, however, I want to concentrate on another, not unrelated, aspect of the emergence of the new diplomacy: the changing social composition of the diplomatic community. This particular issue has received a great deal of attention from diplomatic historians (Anderson 1993 is a good overview), and the main thrust of the change can be summed up quite simply: between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, say from about 1815 to 1920, the diplomatic community was transformed from an ‘aristocratic international’ dominated by a small clique of European nobility and gentry, into a larger and more varied society that included significant numbers of non-European and bourgeois diplomats.

            International relations theorists have often interpreted this development as a deterioration in the cosmopolitan environment of the nineteenth century, and hence as a contributory factor to the emergence of the more divided and conflictual international society (if that term can even still be used) of the early twentieth century. This position has its roots in much of the writing on diplomacy that was done by more conservative-minded members of the profession, who bemoaned what they saw as the coarsening of diplomatic interaction in the 1920s and 1930s — Harold Nicolson’s influential work Diplomacy is perhaps the best-known example (as well as Nicolson 1939, see Kennedy 1922; Huddleston 1954; and Webster 1962) — and the theme runs, in a more muted form, through several of the more recent diplomatic histories (see, for example, Lauren 1976, 28; Anderson 1993, 121-22). A very similar point of view, expressed in more general theoretical terms, is evident in Hans Morgenthau’s contention that, as a result of the decline of the old diplomacy,