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Dunne, Kurki & Smith: International Relations Theories

Chapter 07

The English School

• The English School (hereafter ES) represents an approach to the study of IR that reaches back to the 1950s.  Since the late 1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the ES such that it is increasingly regarded as a distinctive position in the field of IR.  Those who identify with it today see it as occupying the middle ground alongside constructivism.

• A key reason why the ES is thought to be an important voice in IR today is the scepticism its advocates have shown towards the rigid application of scientific methods.  The polemicism underlying some of their interventions on methodology masked over a deeper and more sophisticated guide to the study of IR.

• Their interpretive approach rested on the following key points:

  1. The subject matter of IR ought not to be restricted to inter-state relations, but to the global political system as a whole.  Particular emphasis needs to be placed on theory because our understanding of the world is mediated by concepts and values.  A great deal of knowledge about IR will not be gained from framing testable hypotheses, as positivists insist upon.
  2. IR must be understood in historical depth.  Knowing the USA has strategic superiority over its rivals is less significant than whether it is a status quo power or a revisionist power.
  3. There is no escape from values.  They inform the selection of topics to be researched and taught, and therefore they need to be upfront and subjected to critical scrutiny.
  4. IR is a normative enterprise.  Values are not simply a matter for individual researchers, they are at the heart of the discipline.  This does not mean entering a world of ‘ideal theory’ with fictional assumptions and make-believe states.  What matters are the ideas that practitioners believed in and how they sought to implement them.

• Those writers most closely associated with the ES often argue that the distinguishing power of the school rests on the significance it attaches to the idea that states, through their actions, have generated a society with its own unique institutions and rules.  Or to borrow Hedley Bull’s oxymoron which adorns the cover of the single most important book written by a member of the ES, states inhabit an ‘anarchical society’.

• According to Bull’s classical definition, international society comes into being when ‘a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’ (Bull, 1977: 13).  Note the importance of the unique character of the membership (primarily sovereign states), the importance of common interests, and the fact that the identity of being a member confers upon states an expectation that they will follow the rules and uphold the values.

• International society needs to be understood as being a dynamic arrangement which is compatible with different ensembles of rules, values and institutions.  At the more minimal end of the spectrum of international societies, we find an institutional arrangement that is restricted solely to the maintenance of order.  In a pluralist international society, the institutional framework is geared towards the liberty of states and the maintenance of order among them.  The rules of the game are complied with because, like the rules of the road, fidelity to them is relatively cost free but the collective benefits are enormous.

• At the more maximal end of the spectrum of international societies we find an institutional arrangement that desires a form of order that is also just (and not just tolerable or efficient).  Bull defined solidarist principles in terms of the collective enforcement of the rules and the guardianship of human rights.  In a solidarist international society, individuals are entitled to basic rights.  This in turn demands that sovereignty norms are modified such that there is a duty on the members of international society to intervene forcibly to protect those rights.

• In addition to carefully delineating variations in the formation of international society, it is vital that ES theory continues to view the element of society as being in continuing tension with the elements of the states system and with world society. 

• The systemic element has hitherto been the least satisfactory part of the ES’s triad.  It would seem to be a propitious moment to bring back the system-society distinction if it is able to shed light on actors who have considerable ‘agency’ but are not members of the society (major firms for example) and actors who are members but do not want to adhere to the rules (revisionist states for example).  Also, there is a great deal that can be gleaned from neo- or structural realist analysis of the distribution of capabilities in the system.  How do such systemic agents and structures impinge upon international society?

• The third element in the ES triad is world society.  This concept runs in parallel to international society albeit with one key difference – it refers to the shared interests and values among ‘all parts of the human community’.  With human rights at the centre of the meaning of world society, it is apparent that the membership is universal and the institutions are not the agents of state authority.

• Case study:  Human Rights.  The extension of international law from the exclusive rights of sovereign states towards recognizing the rights of all individuals by virtue of their common humanity is one of the most significant normative shifts in the history of world politics.  To put it into the conceptual vocabulary used earlier, human rights are the most obvious indicator of a move beyond a pluralist international society and its exclusive interest in the pursuit of order and the limitation of justice claims to demands by sovereign states to be treated equally.  Yet, as this case study suggests, for much of the post-1945 period human rights have been as much a source of division as a marker of the emergence of a solidarist international society.

• Case study continued. Arguably what prevented the evolution of an effective human rights regime prior to the mid 1970s were systemic factors:  the condition of general war from 1914 to 1945, great power rivalry until the period of détente, and the absence of institutions in world society with the capacity to lobby and cajole states into rule-compliance.

• Case study continued. The retreat of human rights post-9/11 also has a systemic quality that makes the challenge more than simply the product of neo-conservative ideology.  Here we are driven back to the thought that there is a centripetal momentum to power such that it concentrates around a single source. Once the centralization reaches a tipping point, the conditions exist to challenge the pluralist rules and institutions upon which the post-Westphalian order has been built. All previous historical states systems have ended in empire, why should the Westphalian system be any different?