The Standard of ‘Civilisation’, the Expansion Thesis and the 19th-century International Social Space

Abstract

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

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“…That this account ignores the colonial processes that led to the consolidation of international society has been well documented. And, as Keene observes, it oversimplifies the story of expansion, which “was more protracted than is traditionally supposed,… contained finer gradations of insider and outsider status, and… involved more complicated power relations, including a more assertive role for non‐European peoples” (:655). It can also be said that the orthodox account of the expansion has obscured the complex relations between state and nonstate societies during the colonial period, in particular, the nuanced processes of hierarchical stratification that resulted in the erosion of the legal and sovereign rights of nonstate peoples through the emergence of a privileged class of European states.…”

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“…While the notion of a Bstandard of civilization^is attuned to a critical analysis of power effects because it points to the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion by reference to a performatively constructed normative consensus (Stroikos 2014), it also comes with problematic moralistic undertones and the historical baggage of justifying European colonial practices (Keene 2014). For these reasons, but also because the term Bcivilization^evokes a wider set of shared cultural (Beveryday^) practices than the more specifically political ones of ROs, calling these sets of norms a region's standard of membership makes the concept more appropriate for the purpose of cross-regional comparison.…”

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“…In the past decade, IR scholarship has challenged Eurocentric understandings of the spread of international society outwards, thus contributing a necessary corrective to traditional, unidirectional accounts of the advancement of European international order (Towns, 2009;Zarakol, 2011;Keene, 2014;Reus-Smit and Dunne, 2017). These works have focused on the context-specific and uneven interactions between a far-from-homogenous West, and the complex socio-cultural landscapes they encountered, to construct a more nuanced picture of how shifting notions of civilization and progress influenced the 19 th century emergence and globalization of international order.…”