Sociological investigations: Instrumental, legitimist and coercive interpretations of international society

Millenium

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 67-91

  Dunne, Tim ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0007888798     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey, The History of Diplomatic Immunity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 161.
2. This metaphor has been used by various writers. The most sustained use of the game analogy can be found in K.M. Fierke, Changing Games: Changing Strategies: Critical Investigations in Security (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 16-30.
3. Frey and Frey, The History, 162.
4. The Ch'ing dynasty in China believed in a universal Sino-centric world but that did not receive legitimacy within communities outside of Asia.
5. See Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Robert, 'Introduction', in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, eds. Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 1-64.
6. This can be seen from the preface to the first collection of essays published by the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, in which the founding members of the group described the frame of reference explicitly in terms of a doctrine of the 'diplomatic community' or 'international society'. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, 'Preface' in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics eds. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 12.
7. See also Charles Manning, The Nature of International Society (London: Macmillan, 1975).
8. See for example, Robert Jackson and Georg Sorensen, Introduction to International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 140-46.
9. I have borrowed this phrasing from Wendt who used it in connection with developing a systems theory of international politics. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14.
10. Hans Morgenthau wrote at length about international society in Politics Among Nations. For him and other conservative Realists, international society belonged to the pre-modern world. It was a chapter in eighteenth century European history, when there was a high degree of social integration among diplomats, monarchs and their advisers. The French Revolution in his view marked 'the gradual decline of the cosmopolitan aristocratic society and of the restraining influence of morality upon foreign policy'. This process of 'decline' was slow, but was 'unmistakable' by the end of the nineteenth century. Morgenthau refers to this decline in the element of society explicitly in terms of the replacement of Universalist ethics by particularism. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948).
11. This point has been made by Tony Evans and Peter Wilson, 'Regime Theory and the English School of International Relations: A Comparison', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 329-351.
12. These and other questions have been acutely posed by Martha Finnemore, 'Exporting the English School', Review of International Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): forthcoming.
13. See Stanley Hoffmann, 'International Society', in Order and Violence: Hedley Bull and International Relations, eds. John Donald Bruce Miller and Raymond John Vincent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 26.
14. Arguably, Buzan and Little commit this error when defining military-security relations and trade to the 'systemic' sector and common values/institutions to the 'societal' sector. This has the effect of desocialising the military and economic sectors, and seeing them as being outside international society.
15. In Buzan's agenda-setting paper he calls for attention to 'the classification of types of international society'. Barry Buzan, 'The English School: An Underexploited Resource in International Relations', Review of International Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): forthcoming.
16. Although this article in many ways builds on Wendt's pioneering study, there are important differences. Wendt is examining all of the possible cultures that can be constructed in anarchy as opposed to the more limited task of examining types of social formations. For example, what Wendt portrays as a pure Hobbesian culture lies outside the boundaries of international society. However, both the Lockean and Kantian cultures are highly relevant to the models elaborated in the article.
17. Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 101.
18. Like many ES writers, Hurrell invokes the terms 'pluralism' and 'solidarism' to delineate types of international society. These categories are extremely useful for understanding the degree of common values (procedural or substantive?) and the extent of obligations (defined by citizenship or common humanity). To these two categories Hurrell adds a 'minimalist' conception of international society which has many similarities to the 'instrumental' formation sketched in the article. Andrew Linklater also adopts a three-fold normative classification of international society, adding 'post-Westphalian' to 'pluralism' and 'solidarism'. See Andrew Hurrell, 'Society and Anarchy in the 1990s', in International Society and the Development of International Relations Theory, ed. Barbara Allen Roberson (London: Pinter, 1998), especially 25-27.
19. See also Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
20. Ole Wæver, 'Four Meanings of International Society: A Trans-Atlantic Dialogue,' in International Society and the Development of International Relations Theory. The main difference between my account and Waever's is that his main purpose is to examine variations within international society explicitly 'in relation to American theoretical development', 81. Second, we differ in our treatment of a 'critical' account of international society: Waever is more sanguine than I am that post-structuralist insights can be incorporated. This issue is discussed below.
21. Barry Buzan, 'From International System to International Society: Structural Realism and Regime Theory meet the English School', International Organization 47, no. 3 (1993): 327-52.
22. At some level the difference between the position developed below and that advanced by Buzan is compatible: Buzan shares Bull's terminological distinction between system, society and world society, but pushes further the key question of their inter-relationship. Like Buzan, I am interested in the linkages between the material, social and cultural domains, but unlike Buzan I think that the ES terminology is very unhelpful. Wendt is right to claim that the current system/society distinction understates the extent to which 'shared ideas may constitute conflict' and 'material forces may induce co-operation'. Wendt, Social Theory, 253.
23. Other terms are used to express this ontology of states, interests and norms. 'International society', preferred by academics, and 'international community', favoured by journalists, are broadly interchangeable.
24. Wendt, Social Theory, 194.
25. I am using the term 'critical theory' in its broadest sense. For a discussion of broad and narrow notions of 'critical', see Chris Brown '"Turtles All the Way Down": Anti-Foundationalism, Critical Theory and International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, no.2 (1994): 213-38.
26. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1991).
27. The phrase '-ology wars' is Michael Mann's. See 'Authoritarian and Liberal Militarism: A Contribution from Comparative and Historical Sociology', in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds. Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 221.
28. Wendt, Social Theory, 101.
29. Joseph M. Grieco, 'Anarchy and the Limits of Co-operation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism', International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 485-507.
30. For the former, see Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, eds., Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (Boston: MIT Press, 1999).
31. For the latter, see Steve Smith, 'New Approaches', in The Globalization of World Politics, eds. John Baylis and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
32. Ole Wæver 'The Rise and Fall of the Inter-Paradigm Debate', in International Theory, 163-64. This does not mean that there are no significant differences between the 'neos', in particular the issue of distributional gains from co-operation. But this is not fundamentally significant to the arguments being offered here.
33. I have used the term 'modified Realist' rather than 'rationalist' because the latter is so fraught with terminological confusion. To philosophers it is an epistemology, to politics students it signifies an Oakshottian view of politics, and to many American postgraduates, rationalism is a research method. As noted below, rationalism, the term used by Martin Wight to describe the via media has largely been made redundant in view of its appropriation by American positivists. See for example, Robert Keohane's influential essay, 'International Institutions: Two Approaches', in International Institutions and State Power (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989). Here Keohane associates rationalism with what is broadly regarded as positivism.
34. For an application of the constraining/enabling impact of the 'rule structure' of international society, see Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
35. In his Social Theory of International Politics Wendt is open about the overlaps between his substantive claims and the position of Bull and Wight. Modified Realists concur with this synthesis, as is evident in Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6.
36. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), 68.
37. Many authors in the field draw a distinction between Critical Theory descended from the Frankfurt School, and critical theories referring to a range of anti- or post- positivist theories, such as feminism and postmodernism. Rather than following the tendency to differentiate within the critical theory camp, I am to some extent following Martin Wight's inclusion of historical materialist as well as idealist-cosmopolitans within the same broadly critical or revolutionary category. See Wight, International Theory.
38. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 8.
39. Martin Wight, 'De Systematibus Civitatum', in International Relations: Critical Concepts in Political Science, ed. Andrew Linklater (London: Routledge, 2000), 1253-73.
40. Paul Keal, 'An "International Society"?', in Contending Images of World Politics, eds. Greg Fry and Cindy O'Hagan (London: Macmillan, 2000), 63.
41. Bull, Anarchical Society, 10.
42. Gerrit W. Gong, 'China's Entry into International Society', in The Expansion of International Society, eds. Hedley Bull and AdamWatson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
43. Thomas M. Franck, 'Legitimacy and the Democratic Entitlement,' in Democratic Governance and International Law, eds. Gregory H. Fox and Brad R. Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29.
44. Quoted in Frey and Frey, The History of Diplomatic Immunity, 213.
45. States 'have established by dialogue and consent common rules and institutions for the conduct of their relations, and recognise their common interest in maintaining these arrangements'. Bull and Watson, 'Introduction', in The Expansion, 1.
46. Hedley Bull, quoted in Hedley Bull on International Society, eds. Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell (London: Macmillan, 2000), 6.
47. There is a parallel here with Habermas's idea of 'everyday praxis toward understanding'. He invents the term 'sociated' to describe such a process. See Jürgen Habermas, The Past as Future trans. and ed. by Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 101.
48. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 57.
49. Mervyn Frost usefully terms this practice a 'settled norm'. See Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
50. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 16.
51. The Anarchical Society, Ibid., 13.
52. Chris Brown, 'An International Society Perspective on World Society' (paper presented at Darmstadt conference, 6-7 November 1999), 21.
53. See, for example, the contrasting views of the normative context of international society offered by Wheeler, Saving Strangers
54. Robert H. Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
55. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 29.
56. Wheeler argues that was the case with Tanzania's intervention in Uganda.
57. Quentin Skinner quoted in Wheeler, 7.
58. See Martin Hollis, The Cunning of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
59. Duncan Snidal, 'Coodination Versus Prisoner's Dilemma: Implications for International Cooperation and Regimes,' American Political Science Review 79, no. 2 (1985): 923-42.
60. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 24-25.
61. Andrew Hurrell, 'Regime Theory and International Relations', in Regime Theory and International Relations, ed., Volker Rittberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
62. Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
63. Sean D. Murphy, 'Democratic Legitimacy and the Recognition of States and Governments', in Democratic Governance and International Law, 130-132.
64. Buzan, 'From International System', 341.
65. Max Weber, quoted in Wendt, Social Theory, 141.
66. Keohane, After Hegemony, 275.
67. According to Krasner, they are 'sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures around which actors' expectations converge'. Stephen Krasner, International Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 2.
68. Michael Mastanduno, 'Do Relative Gains Matter? America's Response to Japanese Industrial Policy', in Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate, ed. David A. Baldwin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
69. Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane, and Stephen D. Krasner, 'Introduction', in International Organization at Fifty: Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics, 662.
70. Robert Powell, 'Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relations Theory', in Neorealism and Neoliberalism, 209-33.
71. This phrase is used by Buzan, 'The English School', 350.
72. Quoted in Friedrich Kratochwil, 'The Force of Prescriptions,' International Organization 38, no. 4 (1984): 697.
73. Keohane is an exception here. He recognises that 'egoistic actors' may comply with obligations that are not in the short run interests 'if they believe that doing so will have better consequences in the long run than failure to accept any rules or acceptance of any other politically feasible set of rules'. Keohane, After Hegemony, 13.
74. Buzan, 'From International System', 333-34.
75. Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
76. Quoted in Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 7.
77. Saving Strangers, Ibid., 260.
78. Saving Strangers, Ibid., 276-77.
79. Sharan Korman, The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 70.
80. Krasner, Sovereignty, 220.
81. Sovereignty, Ibid., 51.
82. Veronique Pin-Fat, '(Im)possible Universalism: Reading Human Rights in World Politics,' Review of International Studies 26, no. 4 (2000): 664.
83. James Der Derian, 'Introducing Philosophical Traditions in International Relations,' Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 2 (1988): 189-93.
84. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
85. quoted in Roland Bleiker, 'Forget IR Theory', Alternatives 22, no. 1 (1997): 66-67.
86. Michel Foucault, 'Space, Power and Knowledge', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 242. I am grateful to Colin Wight for drawing my attention to this passage.
87. Archaeology is of course Foucault's term for this form of history of ideas. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeaology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1997).
88. George Canguilhem, 'The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of Cogito?', in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75.
89. Foucault quoted in Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 82.
90. Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 6.
91. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67-73.
92. Gramsci, quoted in Mark Rupert, Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28.
93. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault's Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 85-86.
94. Ken Booth, 'Human Wrongs and International Relations', International Affairs 71, no. 1 (1995): 103-26.
95. Raymond John Vincent, Order', in Miller and Vincent, Order and Violence, 54.
96. See the discussion of Jacques Derrida in Edkins, Postructuralism, 80-81.
97. The question of how to deepen solidarity in international society is examined in Linklater, Transformation of Political Community.
98. R.B.J. Walker, 'The Hierarchicalization of Political Community', Review of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 153, emphasis in original.
99. Buzan, 'From International System', 329.
100. Wendt, Social Theory 289.
101. Jackson, The Global Covenant.
102. Foucault, The Order of Things, 387.