Edward Keene argues that the conventional idea of an 'anarchical society' of equal and independent sovereign states is an inadequate description of order in modern world politics. International political and legal order has always been dedicated to two distinct goals: to try to promote the toleration of different ways of life, while advocating the adoption of one specific way, that it labels 'civilization'. The nineteenth-century solution to this contradiction was to restrict the promotion of civilization to the world beyond Europe. That discriminatory way of thinking has now broken down, with the result that a single, global order is supposed to apply to everyone, but opinion is still very much divided as to what the ultimate purpose of this global order should be, and how its political and legal structure should be organised.
This article identifies a series of gaps in the English school's thesis of the 'expansion of international society' from European to global extension, and presents two propositions that can correct these problems, and so give us a better understanding of the social space in which 19th-century international relations were carried on. First, we should replace the concept of 'expansion' with 'stratification', changing the terms of the enquiry from an examination of 'entry into' the society of states to an exploration of who was where in the 19th-century international social system. Secondly, we should add a more relational analysis of patterns of association to the English school's predominantly institutionalist approach to the analysis of the structure of international society. To flesh out these two proposals, the article presents a neo-Weberian framework for thinking about international social stratification and an empirical analysis of patterns of treatymaking. KeywordsEnglish school, international society, social stratification, relational approachesWe are often told that the modern international society of states originated in Europe sometime between the 15th and the 18th centuries, and that, by the beginning of the 19th century, its members considered themselves to be a 'family of civilised nations' who were both the subjects and the makers of public international law. On this view, other political communities elsewhere in the world existed as independent entities and had various kinds of interactions with Europeans, but they were not members of the society
This article examines Ian Manners' idea of a 'normative power Europe'. While discussing moral and political forms of normative power, it calls particular attention to a sociological approach based on Weberian ideas about status and social closure. The article then compares the present-day 'normative power' of the EU with the earlier European 'standard of civilization', and argues that the contemporary EU's normative power rests on a more individualist and credentialist form of social closure. This may make it less vulnerable to criticisms of imperialism, but may also make it harder for the EU to retain its relatively privileged position in the generation of international norms and a coherent sense of its own identity.
This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to abolish the slave trade+ The treaty system was extraordinarily wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and "Native Chiefs" on the western coast of Africa+ It therefore allows for a comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made, depending on the identity of their contracting partners+ The article argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best explanation of why these variations emerged+ Although British treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between the "family of civilized nations" and "barbarous peoples+" Despite the prominence of the concept of anarchy in international relations theory, there have been several attempts to explain how hierarchically structured systems work in international relations, why they rise and fall, why they take on the specific forms of stratification that they do, and what their impact is on broader international outcomes such as war and peace+ Some realists, for example, argue that inequalities in states' capabilities lead to the emergence of "hierarchies of prestige," and that great powers play a special role in direction of international affairs, Some of the arguments in this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for several valuable constructive criticisms+ I would also like to thank
The English school is often seen as an important point of contact between the study of history and the study of international relations. This largely derives from the belief that the school remained committed to historical (and normative) questions at a time when the International Relations discipline in America was becoming increasingly devoted to the development of general 'scientific' theories rather than seeking to account for the distinctive individuality and discontinuous evolution of the modern international system. While the 'scientists' were, according to Hedley Bull, 'cutting themselves off from history and philosophy', 1 the members of the English school were always interested in telling the story of how the modern international system had originated and changed over time, in understanding its individual character in comparison with other ways of organising international politics, and in asking whether it provided for a just world order. They were trying, as Bull rather cosily put it, 'to warm the coals of an older tradition of historical and political reflection during the long, dark winter of the "social scientific" ascendancy'. 2 However, rather than contrast the English school with political scientists in the United States, in this article I will compare their work with that of historians in the United Kingdom during the period when the school was developing its account of modern international society, from the 1950s to the 1980s (roughly the lifetime of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics). My reason for adopting this focus is that the distinction between the 'traditionalist' English school I am indebted to Molly Cochran and Ian Hall for reading this piece and offering me several valuable comments, not all of which I have been able to address, on the early development of the English school's idea of individual free will and on the school's interest in religiously inspired historical scholarship.
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