[PDF] The English School and the practices of world society

View - Download The English School and the practices of world society

Previous PDF

Next PDF

Review of International Studies (2001), 27, 503-507 Copyright © British International Studies Association

503
1 See Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, 'Beyond Belief: Symbolic Technologies and the Study of International Relations',European Journal of International Relations, 3:2 (1997), pp. 193-237.

The English School and the practices of world

society

IVER B. NEUMANN

For someone who (albeit temporarily) left his partner and country to go to school in England with the English School, it is easy to agree with Barry Buzan: the English School remains an underexploited framework in IR. Buzan highlights one major reason for this. The methodological and epistemological pluralism of the English School makes it possible to reach out to adjacent literatures in and out of IR in such a manner that holism is secured and scientific certainty postponed. Andrew Linklater's relation to the English School over the last twenty years may serve as a sociological illustration of this. He has gone from being the official dissident of the School to becoming the principal advocate of its Kantian wing. Comparisons with American IR, where scholars of similar persuasion have been exiled to the margins of the discipline, testify to the relative pluralism and openness of the English School. Important as this sociological and indeed ethical reason for celebrating the English School may be, there is another reason which may be of equal importance. This concerns the way in which the English School is able to combine issues which are to do with meaning and materiality both. The starting point of English School inquiry is, I would say by definition, the meaning which animates action. Contrary to, for example, neorealism, meaning is not treated simply as a given. More often than not, the English School asks the historical question how the preconditions emerged within actors ascribed certain meanings to their action. Contrary to, for example, classical realism, history is investigated rather than postulated. Once this mapping of meaning is done, the English School proceeds to investigate the institutions which sustain certain shared understandings by lending them the additional weight of being institutional facts. International law's role in producing and reproducing a certain reading of sovereignty could serve as an example here. The English School also pays considerable heed to how the material world offers a kind of friction which interferes with the actions undertaken by actors. Contrary to, for example, 'thin' constructivism, the existence of institutional and physical materiality is acknowledged and made part of the analysis. English School investigation does not study norms and rules in isolation, but pushes analytical work, as it were, beyond belief. 1

To sum up, the English School takes a

hermeneutical starting point, but it is grounded by relational analysis as well. In the language of British IR, it offers, at least in its finer moments, both 'understanding' and 'explanation' of world politics. This dual focus means that the English School, almost alone of the research programmes in IR, can point to a set of book length theory-led empirical investi- gations as its central texts. In this, it resembles another literature which investigates the political, namely political anthropology. Its classical works, such as Evans- Pritchard's The Nuer, Clifford Geertz'Negaraor Jim Scott'sSeeing Like a State, offer thick descriptions of specific political discourses, but they do it in such a way that they come over as major instantiations of entire research programmes. 2 They offer stories about the political which are interesting in and of themselves, while at the same time succeeding in generalizing their insights in such a way that they are shown to be pertinent to very different scholarly concerns as well. The difference between political anthropology and IR is that in the former, the ideal of the theory- led empirical investigation is heeded across the board, whereas in IR, the English School is relatively alone in holding up this research ideal. I also share Buzan's concern with investigating and theorizing world society. Buzan defines world society as 'the idea of shared norms and values at the indivi- dual level, but transcending the state', and holds that 'The confusion surrounding world society makes it a key priority for further work'. 3

He singles out the discourse

surrounding human rights as one key to the making of world society, and he cites John Vincent's work as a key English School starting point for such an investigation. The way Vincent arrived at this theoretical line of argument is of some interest in this regard. Vincent's doctoral work was on intervention. He wanted to pinpoint how justifications for intervention had emerged historically, and what could count as valid reasons for intervention at present (which meant in the late 1960s). Like all doctoral students, he suffered bouts of doubt about whether the pieces of research would eventually congeal into a cohesive argument. In his case, however, this seemed to be a constant affliction, which eventually made him question whether he would ever finish. The Ph.D came together only when suddenly he one day understood that what he had gathered was evidence to support a doctrine not of intervention but of non-intervention: this went on to become the standard work on the topic in the discipline. 4 This vignette is, among other things, a tale of where world politics stood thirty years ago as much as it is about a chapter in the history of the English School. The reason to bring this up here, however, is the continued relevance of the tension which was at the heart of young Vincent's travails: namely, the importance of the discourse of international society and its norm of non-intervention on the one hand and the discourse of world society and its burgeoning norms regarding human rights on the other. Vincent's impatience with the principle of non-intervention eventually led him to produce Human Rights in International Relations (referred to by Buzan),504Iver B. Neumann 2

E.E. Evans-Pritchard,The Nuer. A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of

a Nilotic People(Oxford: Clarendon, 1940); Clifford Geertz,Negara: The Theatre-State in Nineteenth- Century Bali(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); James C. Scott,Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1998). An anthropologist may find it strange that I may laud a push beyond hermeneutics and a work by Geertz in the same paragraph, but to the IR eye Geertz is positively advanced in his inclusion of issues which are to do with social organization. 3 Barry Buzan, 'The English School: An Underexploited Resource in IR',Review of International

Studies, 27:3 (2001), p. 477.

4 R.J.Vincent,Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1974).

where he emphasized that states were increasingly unable to cordon off areas of policy as being beyond the reach of international humanitarian law. Furthermore, the various institutional and legal machinery for implement human rights law is intimately linked to states' power and their willingness to take human rights seriously. It is states which launch humanitarian interventions in order to coerce another state to uphold human rights that they had previously agreed upon. The thrust of this conceptualization runs in the opposite direction from the worry noted by Buzan, that there is 'an ontological tension between the development of world society (particularly human rights) and the maintenance of international society' (Buzan, p. 478). The tension between lodging rights with the human being and the citizen, respectively, is at least partly alleviated when the issue of upholding and actioning those rights is raised. The same point could be made about the practice of peacekeeping, where the police have arrived in force, where a number of national ministries of law have set up international divisions, and where the UN has established a civilian police force (UNCIVPOL). On the one hand these develop- ments can be taken to mean that the limit between domestic and foreign policy is breaking down, inasmuch as the specialization of the use of force which charac- terized the era of the nation state dictated that police were used domestically while the military was used abroad. But on the other hand, inasmuch as the areas where the police are used can be conceptualized as state commons, they act on the authority of, and in the pay of, international society, and so rather mark a displace- ment of the inside/outside border rather than its disappearance. None of this can be taken to mean that the tension noted by Buzan is not real, however. As witnessed in Kosovo, when states do take action in the name of upholding the standards of human rights, it is no longer possible for states to undertake such interventions in their own name. 5

It is increasingly not only regional

organizations or international society, but world societywhich is referred to as the empowering and enabling body when such interventions are launched. While it is easy to grow cynical about some of the incongruities brought about by this state of affairs - hearing the Norwegian foreign minister argue on technical grounds that Norway was not at war in Kosovo because NATO is the warring party - the increasing need experienced by groups of states to act in the name of world society does bear out Buzan's point that the development of world society poses a challenge to international society. Inasmuch as specific constitutive institutions of inter- national society such as ius ad bellumare involved, this challenge goes beyond the much-touted issue of the need for legitimation. Kosovo and the Balkans also highlight the coming of world society in a different sense. The exorbitant number of NGOs which have been present in the area and the importance ascribed by politicians to coordinating their efforts with those of the police and the military serve as a reminder that world society is constituted by more than individuals. Buzan's definition must be broadened to include NGOs. Relations between states and NGOs may also be added to Buzan's list of issues which stand to benefit from being analysed within an English School framework. This point may

perhaps be best made by reference to work done on what Margareth Keck andThe English School and world society505

5 Iver B. Neumann,'Kosovo and the End of the Legitimate Warring State', in Peter van Ham and Sergei Medvedev (eds.),Kosovo and the End of an Era(Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). Kathryn Sikking refer to as international advocacy networks. To them, the growth of the number and density of networks in and of themselves heralds or even instan- tiates what they refer to as global civil society, which may be said to be part of or overlapping with what the English School refers to as world society. Indeed, in introducing the concept, they refer to Bull and acknowledge that a tension between order and justice is at stake. 6 This issue is ripe for further theoretical reflection. For example, it could be brought into contact with another literature mentioned by Buzan, namely that on state theory. As Buzan puts it, the English School 'needs to think about sovereignty and the postmodern state'. 7

Whereas it is obvious that

international advocacy networks target states to tap their potential for sanctioning broken standards, it would be perhaps equally interesting to see how states take steps to enmesh themselves with the knowledge and resources offered by NGOs, and the ways in which they are themselves transformed in the process. Put differently, how does pressure brought to bear on states which make up international society by world society lead to a change in how those states work and what they are, and how do such changes in turn work to change international society (presumably in a more solidarist direction)? A key issue here is knowledge production, which highlights yet another aspect of world society which has so far been under-theorized within the English School. 8 I have in mind the role of the media, both performatively as an instantiating network of world society and functionally as one of its disseminators of knowledge. Another such disseminator happens to be the scholarly community of which we are part. As in the case of international advocacy networks, journalists and IR scholars instan- tiate world society and feed knowledge claims to states. We must assume that this has certain effects on the states within which these media and these research institu- tions are to be found, which should imply that we have here yet another set of flows of information and interaction which lead from (parts of) world society to (parts of) international society. Buzan makes the point that the English School has grown

tremendously over the last 40 years, both in terms of the size of the scholarly com-506Iver B. Neumann

6 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink,Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International

Politics(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 32-4. Their key definition runs as follows:

'Networks are forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange. ... Major actors in advocacy networks may include the following: (1) international and domestic nongovernmental research and advocacy organizations; (2) local social movements; (3) foundations; (4) the media; (5) churches, trade unions, consumer organizations, and

intellectuals; (6) parts of regional and international intergovernmental organizations; and (7) parts of

the executive and/or parliamentary branches of governments. Not all these will be present in each advocacy network' (pp. 8-9). One notes that the two latter items on the list signal a direct overlap with international society as understood by the English School. A reconceptualization of these

networks in the light of the English School concepts of international society and world society would

probably prove fruitful. 7 Buzan, 'The English School', p. 487. Focusing on new actors, and on how states interact with these new actors, would also be interesting responses to the sustained attacks on the English School for being state-centric: it would acknowledge the charge, but demonstrate reasons why and to what extent

state-centrism is still called for. Ian Clark,Globalization and International Relations Theory(Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), begins to chart some routes along which this may be done. Another direction for such efforts would be to complement the canonical text on The Expansion of International Societywith more work on how state and non-state actors experienced being expanded upon. I have made a preliminary effort in this direction in Neumann,Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations(London: Routledge, 1996). 8 But see Carsten F. Rønnfeldt. 'Beyond a Pluralistic Conception of International Society? A Case Study on the International Response to the Conflict in Bosnia-Hercegovina',Cooperation and Conflict: Nordic Journal of International Relations, 34: 2 (1999), pp.141-68. munity and in terms of geographical spread. In this, it is in step with the discipline of IR of which it is a part. And as the academic discipline of IR expands, one may hypothesize that it becomes a more important topos of world society. When we swap analyses of how the world is ordered and how it changes, we diffuse certain ways of being in the world. We diffuse a certain kind of knowledge production. This means that IR is a political practice in and of itself, and that the discipline is part of world society. One may add the further hypothesis that our analytic interacts with other political practices which also make up world society. 9

Perhaps it should be a

challenge for the English School to launch an empirical investigation of this hypo- thesis. Buzan complains that there are already too many 'self-referential reflections' in the English School, but by this he means too much scrapping over the theoretical canon. We should push on and investigate our practiceas IR scholars, as well as the practices of developmentalists, defence intellectuals, and so on. Barry Buzan's singling out of world society as a locus which is particularly ripe for further attention is timely and welcome. The concept needs to be expanded to include more than individuals, and the activities of its various constitutive parts as well as its interaction with international society need to come under sustained and theory-led empirical investigation. No one in the discipline should be better placed

to take up these cudgels than the next generation of English School scholars.The English School and world society507

9 R.B.J. Walker,Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993), remains the best demonstration of why this is an apposite and pressing task.

quotesdbs_dbs19.pdfusesText_25

[PDF] world university rankings 2020

[PDF] world university rankings 2020 pdf

[PDF] world's biggest polluters 2019

[PDF] worldwide flight schedule database

[PDF] worldwide flight schedule travel planner

[PDF] worst banlieue paris

[PDF] worst healthcare in europe

[PDF] wow classic warrior leveling guide

[PDF] write a program in java to create a simple calculator

[PDF] write advantage of interface in java

[PDF] write net ionic equations for the hydrolysis reaction of f?

[PDF] write the following compound statement in symbolic form

[PDF] write the following statement in symbolic form

[PDF] write the following symbolic statement in words

[PDF] write the statement in symbolic form