The Anarchical Society in a Globalized World

The Anarchical Society in a Globalized World Edited by

Richard Little and John Williams

The Anarchical Society in a Globalized World

Also by Richard Little BELIEF SYSTEMS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (with Steve Smith) GLOBAL PROBLEMS AND WORLD ORDER (with R.D. McKinlay) INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMS IN WORLD HISTORY (with Barry Buzan) INTERVENTION: External Involvement in Civil War ISSUES IN WORLD POLITICS (3rd edition) (with Brian White and Michael Smith) THE LOGIC OF ANARCHY (with Barry Buzan and Charles Jones) PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD POLITICS (3rd edition) (with Michael Smith)

Also by John Williams HANNAH ARENDT AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: Readings across the Lines (co-edited with Anthony F. Lang, Jr) GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP: A Critical Reader (co-edited with Nigel Dower) LEGITIMACY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE RISE AND FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA

The Anarchical Society in a Globalized World Edited by

Richard Little Department of Politics, University of Bristol

and

John Williams School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University

Selection, editorial matter, and introduction © Richard Little and John Williams 2006 All remaining chapters © respective authors 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403989635 hardback ISBN-10: 140398963X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The anarchical society in a globalized world/edited by Richard Little and John Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 140398963X 1. International organization. 2. International relations. 3. Bull, Hedley. Anarchical society. I. Little, Richard, 1944 II. Williams, John, 1969 JZ1318.A6633 2006 327.1“dc22 2005058993 10 9 15 14

8 7 13 12

6 5 11 10

4 3 09 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on Contributors Introduction John Williams and Richard Little

1

Part I The Contribution to the Study of International Relations 1 Order and Society John Williams

13

2 Seeing (Double) in the Darkness: The Moral Vision of The Anarchical Society Nicholas J. Rengger

35

3 Hedley Bull, ‘Embedded Cosmopolitanism’, and the Pluralist–Solidarist Debate João M. Almeida

51

Part II The Institutions of Anarchical Society 4 Rethinking Hedley Bull on the Institutions of International Society Barry Buzan 5 The Balance of Power and Great Power Management Richard Little

75 97

6 The Nature of Law in an Anarchical Society David Armstrong

121

7 Diplomacy, Anti-diplomacy and International Society Ian Hall

141

8 War in the Twenty-first Century: An Institution in Crisis Charles A. Jones

162

v

vi Contents

Part III The Test of Time 9 The State of International Society Andrew Hurrell

191

References

216

Index

229

Acknowledgements

This book was planned at a workshop organized by the English School Working Group in 2003. The participants are grateful to the British International Studies Association for funding the workshop and to the Department of Politics in the University of Bristol for providing the venue. The editors would also like to thank the School of Government and International Affairs at the University of Durham for providing editorial assistance and to Lorraine Holmes for her help in the preparation of the manuscript.

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Notes on Contributors

João M. Almeida is Director of the Portuguese National Defense Institute, and Associate Professor of International Relations at the Lusíada University, Lisbon. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He has published on the English School and on European security, and is working on a book based on the thesis, tentatively entitled Between Anarchy and Empire: Republicanism, International Society and the Pluralist-Solidarist Debate. David Armstrong is Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter, having previously been Professor of Politics at Durham University. He has published books and articles on topics ranging from Chinese foreign policy to the rise of the international organisation and is currently working on a book on the evolution of international legal norms. Barry Buzan is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, honourary Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Amongst his recent books are From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation. Ian Hall is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on the intellectual history of international relations and is currently completing a study of the work of Martin Wight for the Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought series. Andrew Hurrell is Director of the Centre for International Studies at Oxford University and a Fellow of Nuffield College. Publications include: co-editor with Louise Fawcett, Regionalism in World Politics (1995); coeditor with Ngaire Woods, Inequality, Globalization and World Politics (1999); co-editor with Rosemary Foot and John Gaddis, Order and Justice in International Relations (2003); co-author with Monica Hirst, The United States and Brazil: A Long Road of Unmet Expectations (2004). At the time of writing, he was about to complete International Society and World Order (to be published). viii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Charles A. Jones taught international political economy for many years at the University of Warwick before moving to Cambridge in 1998. In recent years he has specialised in the history of international thought and developed a particular interest in representations of war. Richard Little is Professor of International Politics at the University of Bristol. He is a former editor of the Review of International Studies and Chair of the British International Studies Association. Currently he holds a major research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and is working on the history and theory of the balance of power. He is the co-author with Barry Buzan of International Systems in World History. Nicholas J. Rengger is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at St Andrews University. He has published widely in contemporary political and international theory and intellectual history. His most recent book (with Chris Brown and Terry Nardin) is International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (Cambridge, 2002) and at the time of writing, he was about to complete a study entitled Dealing in Darkness: The Political Theory of Fear, Fraud and Force in International Relations. John Williams is Lecturer in International Relations, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. As well as recent publications on the English school in the Review of International Studies and International Relations, he is the author of Ethics and Territorial Borders: Drawing lines in the Shifting Sands published by Palgrave in 2006.

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Introduction John Williams and Richard Little The significance of The Anarchical Society This edited book reappraises Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society – one of the most important and enduring texts written in the last 50 years to theorize about the nature of international relations. It was first published in 1977 at a time when it seemed possible that the Cold War might give way to an era of détente. However, although tensions between the superpowers briefly eased at that time, it was still presupposed that bipolarity would persist as the dominant structural feature of world politics. In common with most international relations theorists, Bull failed to anticipate the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, The Anarchical Society successfully transcends that specific period in history because of Bull’s insistence that any attempt to come to terms with world politics must accommodate the existence of an international society. Bull was not, of course, the first person to note that there is an important sociological dimension to world politics, but he is widely acknowledged as the key theorist who succeeded in getting the field to take this dimension on board, although it was nearly two decades before The Anarchical Society was generally accorded paradigmatic status. Bull, however, was not a scholar operating in isolation. He worked in conjunction with a group of theorists and practitioners, now identified as the founding fathers of an English school of international relations, who stressed the importance of the institutional foundations of state behaviour (Dunne, 1998). Although the school initially had little impact on the discipline, by the late 1990s, typologies of international relations theory invariably took account of this school of thought (Krasner, 1999; Wendt, 1999). The growing significance attached to The Anarchical Society has, as a consequence, gone hand in hand with the recognition that it provides the foundational text for the English school approach to international relations. For a new generation of theorists and practitioners the book is now being described, in the words of a former senior advisor at the White House, as ‘path breaking’ (Bobbitt, 2003: 246). Given this expanding interest it is unsurprising that the original text of The Anarchical Society has been reprinted. A second edition was issued in 1995, a decade after Bull’s death. While the text was unchanged, 1

2

Introduction

a foreword by Stanley Hoffmann was added. In 2002, a third edition, with an additional foreword provided by Andrew Hurrell, was published. It is impossible to read The Anarchical Society today, however, without being aware that it was written in a very different era. It is a work of its time and some aspects of it now stand out sharply as inappropriate or inadequate. For example, for new readers the focus on the Cold War, on the impact of decolonization on international politics via the creation of a large number of new states of varying degrees of stability and through demands for a New International Economic Order, as well as the neglect of issues such as the consequences of European integration, international economics and technological transformations, may give the text an outdated feel. Even sympathetic observers indicate that economics and regional dynamics were important features of world politics at the time Bull was writing and so their absence from his analysis represents a serious weakness within the English school’s theoretical armoury (Buzan, 2004a). Nevertheless, at least to some extent, this criticism misses the point of The Anarchical Society, valid though such an argument undoubtedly is in relation to the wider English school picture. Bull’s book is, after all, subtitled ‘a study of order in world politics’ and it remains a vital text in discussions of this topic. In particular, the defence he mounts of an international society of states as probably the best available mechanism for producing order under conditions of anarchy and diversity retains considerable appeal both as an analytical device for understanding the way contemporary international politics works, especially as it takes place amongst states, and for its normative content. The degree of orderliness that international society has been able to generate and the flexibility it has shown in responding to some dramatic changes in the constitutive norms of statehood, in the distribution of power and the destructive capability of weaponry, amongst others, should not, argues Bull and others, be taken for granted (Jackson, 2000; Mayall, 2000). Tampering with the rules, norms and principles of behaviour that characterise international society is not to be undertaken lightly, for fear of the potentially disorderly consequences that may follow. This reading of The Anarchical Society can make it seem a conservative book, and cast the English school in a conservative light more generally. For some it is nothing more than a sub-species of realism and, therefore, another theory that is more an apology for the established mechanisms and holders of power, than a penetrative analysis of them (e.g. Callahan, 2004; Edkins and Zehfuss, 2005). One example of this, as Keene (2002) has recently argued, is that the portrayal of

John Williams and Richard Little

3

international society provided by Bull and other figures of his generation of English school theorists largely ignores the role of colonialism, badly underplaying the importance of violent conquest, repression, inequality and so on in the creation of a global international society and in the construction of mechanisms of hierarchy and differentiation in a system usually portrayed as anarchic and uniform. However, this conservatism is not the whole story. Indeed, the critical potential of English school theory is, for others, one of its strengths, stemming from two connected aspects of the theory that The Anarchical Society emphasizes, even if Bull himself, within its pages, may not have seen a great deal of hope for a major transformation in the character and conduct of international politics. The first is the normative dimension already briefly mentioned. The idea that ‘international society’ is not just a descriptive label for the current constellation of inter-state relations but also a normatively superior constellation to an international system in which rules, norms and principles of behaviour, underpinned by some shared sense of common interest and good, are absent, grants The Anarchical Society an additional, critical dimension. Questions about political developments and dynamics can be posed not just in instrumentally analytical terms about their significance or possibility of success, but also in terms of their normative desirability. It opens the way for organized and systematic thinking about what a better world would look like, but in a way that requires such thinking to consider seriously the normative dimension of the current world order, to look at the ways in which a society of states can make claims to ethical significance and to reflect on the historical processes that have produced the current arrangement. For some – Bull himself, Jackson (2000) and Mayall (2000) are amongst the clearest examples – the lessons to be drawn are, indeed, conservative ones in which incremental improvement of the current system rather than radical alterations ought to be our target. Others, like Linklater (1998), have used an English school analysis of international society that is inevitably indebted to The Anarchical Society to argue for the normative imperative of radical change. The Anarchical Society’s discussion of the institutions of international society, and of the idea of an ‘institution’, through which order is developed and maintained helps ensure the book’s enduring relevance. The conceptualization of institutions, the selection of those at work in international politics and the relationships between them and how these have changed since the 1970s are matters that continue to intrigue and to throw light on how the

4

Introduction

international society works, and to raise questions about how it ought to work (Buzan, 2004a: 161–204). The second reason for the normative significance and interest of The Anarchical Society lies in its methodological opportunities. Bull defended, famously, a ‘classical method’ against the behaviourism that characterized much work in the US in the 1960s and Robert Jackson has offered a re-statement of the virtues of an approach that stresses practical wisdom based on historical knowledge and mature reflection over, to Bull and Jackson, the largely specious precision of formal methods appealing to the natural sciences for inspiration (Bull, 1969; Jackson, 2000). In particular, for all the conservatism that can be found in The Anarchical Society, Bull remains committed to the possibility of change through a methodological device that argues for a tripartite dynamic being permanently at play in international politics. This is the well-worn notion of ‘three traditions’ that Bull takes from Wight (1991), although in a somewhat modified form. Bull focuses in The Anarchical Society upon international society and the dangers it faces from the actions of the United States and Soviet Union in their management of the Cold War and from the growing cultural or civilizational diversity stemming from decolonization, driving, in his eyes, international politics closer to the increased violence and conflict of an international system. However, this tripartite classification and its methodological underpinnings mean that Bull must remain open to an ethically cosmopolitan agenda and a global perspective. In some famous, and tantalizing, asides he picks out, although does not develop, the idea of the international society of states deriving normative validity from a much more important community of human beings. As Buzan (2004a) has demonstrated in detail, the idea of ‘world society’ that Bull and other English school theorists worked with is seriously flawed and lacking in analytical precision, explanatory power and normative consistency. The assumptions about an ethically cosmopolitan world society that Bull, and others, used are not required by the idea of world society and may even be less plausible than alternatives. For some, such a cosmopolitan take on world society is less normatively desirable, too (Williams, 2002). Nevertheless, for all its underdevelopment, the position that Bull grants world society and his willingness to devote the third section of The Anarchical Society to considering alternative patterns of order, even if he does not find any of them terribly plausible, is testament to the book’s value to a tradition of international theory that stresses the possibility of change and sees normative enquiry as an important part of academic endeavour.

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The Anarchical Society thus offers something of a counterpoint to the most influential work of international relations theory in the last 30 years, Waltz’s (1979) Theory of International Politics, published 2 years after The Anarchical Society. In two important ways they are similar books. First, both are concerned with offering a theoretical proposition and analysis that focuses upon a specific, if very important, aspect of international politics – order in Bull’s case; the nature and consequences of the structure of the international system in Waltz’s. Secondly, both are pitched at the systemic level, although Waltz would doubtless feel that Bull allowed far too great an element of ‘unit-level’ analysis to impinge on his account of the international system (Bull appears in neither the index nor the bibliography of Waltz’s influential work, so direct evidence is lacking). The differences, of course, are at least as striking. For example, Bull’s ‘classical method’ lacks Waltz’s precision, parsimony and indebtedness to a formal philosophy of science; Waltz offers little, if any, room for the normative dimension of theorizing; Bull sees international society and its effects on states in cultural and civilizational terms, as well as in the power distribution terms that Waltz focuses upon. The list could go on, and for those persuaded by Waltz’s theoretical elegance and parsimony, the charge sheet against The Anarchical Society may continue to grow. Whilst Theory of International Politics almost immediately took centre stage in theoretical debates in international relations, the influence of The Anarchical Society was much slower to come through and is less strikingly obvious than that of Waltz. Even in the UK, where the book has, not surprisingly, been most deeply embedded in the teaching and research of international relations, The Anarchical Society and the English school more generally came under attack. Indeed, the label ‘English school’ was applied by Jones (1981) in a highly critical article calling for its closure. However, the ‘re-convening’ (Buzan, 1999) of the English school, of which this book is in part a product, has come in the aftermath of a decade and a half in which issues to which The Anarchical Society speaks have been of growing importance. The relationship between international order and international justice, particularly in the context of humanitarian intervention, is one instance (e.g. Wheeler, 2000). Equally, interest in international institutions – their nature, role and significance – has grown as debates about the governance of international, and increasingly global, politics have developed (e.g. Holsti, 2004). The post-positivist methodological turn has enabled a reconsideration of the English school’s methodology (Little, 2000) that, whatever the merits of Bull’s ‘classical’ approach, has helped the English

6

Introduction

school address an issue that was often seen by US scholars as at the heart of The Anarchical Society’s relative failure to cross the Atlantic (Finnemore, 2001). It has also helped to reinvigorate normative theory in international relations more generally, making one of The Anarchical Society’s most interesting aspects more central to disciplinary concerns (e.g. Brown, 2002). Finally, the issue of change, and even of transformation, in the way that international politics is structured has returned to the agenda. The idea that we are passing through a transition phase towards a post-Westphalian era has become relatively commonplace, presaging a need to re-think our understanding of the structure of international/global politics in ways that offer fewer ontological privileges to the state and that are more amenable to other kinds of political actors, to other scales and geographical framings of political activity, to different political issues and foci (e.g. Scholte, 2005).

The structure of the book Globalization poses all kinds of challenges to the English school and to the position of The Anarchical Society as an important work in international theory. It is to these challenges that the contributors to this book address themselves. However, the structure of this book reflects the structure of The Anarchical Society, partly as a nod in genuflection but mainly in recognition that the approach to thinking about the issue of order in world politics that Bull deployed nearly 30 years ago is still a good way of going about this task. Thus the first three chapters look at conceptual issues arising from placing The Anarchical Society into the context of the processes of globalization and the changes in the intellectual landscape of international theory in the intervening years. John Williams picks up on the normative dynamic, in his analysis of the concepts of order and society in The Anarchical Society. Deploying a close reading of the text, he argues that Bull’s analysis of order is characterized by an unresolved tension between his desire to deploy order in both analytical and normative roles that result in what Williams sees as an unjustifiable refusal to follow through an argument that ought to see order attain the status of ‘prior value’ in Bull’s theory. This has consequences for the concept of society, too, which Williams argues is excessively tightly tied to order and to a notion of ‘civilization’ that Bull treats rather narrowly and in a decidedly pessimistic fashion. The arguments from globalization for the emergence of global civil society and potentially fundamental alterations to the nature of order make addressing these questions imperative. Nicholas

John Williams and Richard Little

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Rengger looks closely at the ethical theory of The Anarchical Society, critiquing the tension he sees between two different moral sensibilities at work. The discussion of the relationship between order and justice is one of the best-known parts of The Anarchical Society, and Rengger offers a very distinctive analysis that not only draws on an analysis of the text of The Anarchical Society, but looks at Bull’s intellectual influences in order to develop a critique of the moral theory he develops, challenging the idea of it as ‘a middle way’ between a morally sceptical realism and a morally naïve cosmopolitanism. Moving further, Rengger argues that this has consequences and implications for the English school as a whole in that an ongoing deferral of questions rooted in the moral theory that characterizes The Anarchical Society is robbing contemporary English school writers of purchase on dilemmas and challenges arising from ongoing political changes. Finally, João Almeida takes up the issue of the theory of the state that Bull deploys, in particular the account of history that Bull used in order to ground some of the key tensions in his account of order, arguing that this is questionable, with the result that the tension between ethical pluralism and solidarism must be re-thought. The potential that Almeida sees for a more solidarist reading of the history of international society has important implications for how the pluralist–solidarist debate should be seen in circumstances of contemporary change. Part Two of this book, as with The Anarchical Society, looks at the operation of order in contemporary world politics, and focuses on key institutions. Bull listed five – balance of power, great power, diplomacy, international law and war – all of which are treated here, too. However, the Part opens with Barry Buzan’s discussion of the concept of institutions, offering a survey of contemporary thinking on this topic, contextualizing Bull’s own analysis. Characteristically, Buzan develops a systematic approach to categorizing institutions, explaining, for instance, what on the face of it is the strange absence of sovereignty from Bull’s list, and providing a framework within which different types of institutions can be categorized and analysed. This exploration not only enables a clearer understanding of what Bull was doing in The Anarchical Society, but also helps us to think about how the role of Bull’s institutions has changed and how we can fit alternatives into a coherent approach. Richard Little discusses two of Bull’s five institutions, the balance of power and great power management of international society. These, of course, have always been controversial, particularly the idea of great power management in the context of an appeal to sovereign

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Introduction

equality. However, the obvious and important change since The Anarchical Society’s publication is the collapse of bipolarity and the need to engage seriously with an enduring unipolar system in which the surviving superpower is also increasingly willing to appeal to the idea of special rights and privileges for itself. Little stresses the way that a careful consideration of Bull’s use of these ideas of balance of power and great power management adds to our understanding of the relationship between international system and international society; the comparative sterility of the idea of balance of power when limited to a confrontational balance in comparison with an associative notion, and the consequent need to think about the relations between great powers afresh. He shows how the complexity of Bull’s thinking means it retains utility in exploring the contemporary debate about the position of the US and the distribution of power in the contemporary world. David Armstrong discusses the institution of international law, placing it in the context of other institutions, especially the balance of power, and looking at how it is that Bull’s analysis of the nature and role of international law bears up in the light of the growing legalization of international politics and pressures for a more ethically cosmopolitan approach. Armstrong emphasizes the strength of the link between law and order in Bull’s thinking, whilst ensuring that we do not lose sight of Bull’s argument that an increase in the amount of law does not automatically ensure a greater degree of orderliness. Armstrong is cautious about the putative connection between globalization, ethical cosmopolitanism, the expanding role of international law and the development of a more orderly, because more solidarist, international society. Instead, international law’s role remains vitally based in the need for co-existence amongst diverse political communities, generating a basis for orderliness through shared agreements and rules about agreements in the relative absence of a universal culture able to provide an alternative basis. Ian Hall’s analysis of diplomacy in The Anarchical Society contextualizes the idea of a ‘crisis’ that Bull detected in diplomacy, in the face of the actions of the superpowers that were, he felt, undermining the institutions’ proper role in creating order in international society. Hall places this in the context of both earlier and later analyses of diplomacy, before going on to look at how contemporary scholarship on diplomacy has moved on from the kind of account to be found in The Anarchical Society. Most significantly, the chapter looks at the relationship between ‘diplomatic culture’, which Bull arguably saw as the most important contribution of diplomacy, and order. The idea of ‘anti’ and ‘neo’ diplomacies, developed by James Der Derian, receives important

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attention in this context, looking at how globalization and cosmopolitanism pose challenges to the ideas of diplomacy and diplomatic culture that Bull described, and whether this might be welcome. Finally in this section, Charles Jones discusses the institution of war. In a notably wide-ranging treatment Jones starts by summarizing possible views of war as an institution, arguing for a ‘pragmatic’ position based on Bull’s account in The Anarchical Society. Jones then moves on to consider developments in thinking about the conduct of war as an institution, looking at ideas of ‘new wars’ before considering threats to the role of war as a valuable institution in international society. Here he argues forcefully that Bull’s concerns about the imposition of well-intentioned, if misguided, solidarist notions have been replaced by the threat of hegemonic power in the hands of the United States. This, he argues, is the nemesis of the kind of pluralist international society Bull defended, extending the analysis to look at how US hegemony is affecting not just the formal rules and norms governing warfare, but the cultural position of warfare, too, seeing in this an issue overlooked by Bull, and most others, but of central importance to contemporary international politics. In the final section of The Anarchical Society, Bull considers alternative possible bases for order in world politics, finding little in most propositions to persuade him of their potential superiority over a pluralist society of states. Andrew Hurrell takes a less schematic approach to the question of the future of international society and of the enduring relevance of Bull’s analysis, but nevertheless offers a powerful account of both these issues. Reflecting on a decade of English school scholarship that has stressed the opportunity for solidarism and that has emphasized the solidarist elements of Bull’s thought, Hurrell sees major challenges to this optimism in the current international political climate. However, rather than backing a renewed emphasis on a pluralist international society as the basis for future order, Hurrell sees globalization, renewed normative demands and the growing diversity of international actors as making such a course unsustainable. Instead, an emphasis on ideas of procedural justice, where he argues a much higher level of consensus exists, holds out some hope of maintaining, developing and enhancing order in the twenty-first century. Managing power and mediating conflict, Bull’s motivating concerns, argues Hurrell, will remain in the front rank of issues and Bull still offers us an excellent place to begin our investigations.

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Part I The Contribution to the Study of International Relations

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1 Order and Society John Williams

Introduction ‘A study of order in world politics’: The subtitle to The Anarchical Society is both descriptive of what is to be found between its covers, but also intriguing for a number of reasons. The first is the scope of the topic. In terms of the depth of the concept of order, Bull quickly shows that it appeals to some fundamental ideas about the nature of human society. But the scope is also large in terms of the breadth of the coverage attempted: World politics is a very big thing indeed. The second reason for intrigue is the nature of study, a matter that has come in for a great deal of attention in international relations in the 20 years since Hedley Bull died and which has seen the rise of a post-positivist challenge that has made a powerful case for the connections between studying and doing.1 At the time of writing The Anarchical Society, though, these ideas lay in the future. The methodological battle lines in international relations that Bull had fought on in the late 1960s, against behaviourism and the use of game theory and statistical techniques, had also faded somewhat (Bull, 1969). Kenneth Waltz’s invocation of the precision and parsimony of micro-economics had not yet had its seismic impact on international relations theory (Waltz, 1979). Whilst it is unsustainable to claim any conscious prescience on Bull’s part of the forthcoming post-positivist turn, one of the major goals of this chapter is to show that Bull’s thinking about the concepts of order and society can be read in the light of the debates about the relationship between studying and doing and that this helps us to understand and explore the concepts of order and society in ways that not only pick out weaknesses and problems in Bull’s arguments, but also throw light on why they are arguments that 13

14 The Contribution to the Study of International Relations

continue to inspire interest and act as a valuable jumping off point for contemporary work in these fields. Bull’s intentions for the book, set out in the list of questions with which he commences his work, are, though, in many ways a classic statement of social scientific enquiry. He aims to define his concept, investigate the mechanisms by which it currently operates in a specified field and consider alternative forms it has taken in the past or might take in the future (Bull, 2002: xxxii). Bull’s methodology may be ‘classical’ in the sense that it rejects the superiority of rational choice, game theory, behaviourism and other formal or ‘scientific’ approaches to theorizing, but his express purpose is firmly within mainstream social science. However, a close reading of the text of The Anarchical Society suggests that this social scientific approach is problematic. My purpose here is to explore what Bull actually says about the concept of order (as opposed to the rather broad-brush assumptions about its general message that are quite often deployed (e.g. Bobbitt, 2003), before considering how Bull relates order to the concept of society. This textual focus is not an effort to bring to bear a post-structuralist attempt at double-reading or deconstruction, even if there are a few tiny hints at possible openings for such an analysis to be found in the text. Instead it is principally aimed at assessing whether the book’s influence is well deserved on its own terms. Does it actually offer a coherent, persuasive and rigorous analysis of order in world politics? I want to call this into doubt by paying close attention to how Bull develops the concept of order and how it is related to the idea of society. This claim rests on the words to be found in the book, rather than on a bringing to bear on wider political, philosophical, sociological or other models, theories, conceptualizations or understandings of order and society. It is upon the inconsistencies, jumps, lacunae and other wrinkles in the fabric of Bull’s argument that I concentrate. Bull’s analysis is open to substantial critique, especially in terms of his failure to adequately deal with the normative aspects of the concept of order and the way in which he reduces society almost totally to order, creating an argument that comes dangerously close to being tautological. Secondarily, I want to suggest that despite doubts about the quality of the conceptualization on offer, Bull’s accounts of order and society remain of great value and continue to repay close reading. This repayment may not, though, come through the same approach to social science that Bull adopts and defends in The Anarchical Society. As we will see, his ‘classical’ methodological claims to detachment may be open to doubt, but it seems unarguable that his intention was to establish

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concepts of order and, to a lesser extent, society, that are objective, impartial and largely detached from the processes of world politics. They stand as stable, although not entirely static, points in the shifting sands of international relations. They provide Bull with a basis for making judgements about the nature, significance and desirability of what is going on in the world at a variety of levels. These range from the conduct of foreign policy, to the state of the Cold War, to the relative orderliness and sociability of the current era in comparison with previous, and potential future, ones. Order and society are thus portrayed in an unreflective fashion, in the sense that Bull does not see his and others’ discussion of the concepts as contributing to the creation or re-creation of them and Bull was critical of those who do not, in his view, maintain a proper separation of description and prescription (Bull, 2002: 266). Order and society exist: It is just a case of sorting out more precisely what we mean by them to help us appreciate the role that they play in world politics. However, the analysis of the text suggests that this is not really a sustainable position, particularly because of the normative aspects of order that Bull never fully resolves. More than this, though, a reflexive approach to an understanding of order and society may be positively beneficial to understanding the enduring significance of his ideas. Order and society as processes, rather than reference points for analysing other processes, may help us to engage more effectively with world politics. This is particularly so at a time of considerable debate and argument over the extent and nature of change underway in the world and the consequences this has for the conduct, or even existence, of international relations (e.g. John Williams, 2005). If we are living in an increasingly globalized world, then our ideas of order and society are bound to be affected by such changes. Equally, we need ways of thinking about these concepts that are open to the altered empirical facts of the world that Bull did not have to address and about which, given his distrust of the growing interdependence evident in the 1970s, he may have been none too happy. Therefore, in studying order in world politics do we also help to create, and re-create, that order, shaping the social, political and economic conditions that in their turn affect the possibilities of maintaining order in the future? (e.g. Rengger, 2000: chs 4–5). Is this true even if world politics is coming to mean something markedly different from the kind of picture Bull paints in The Anarchical Society? One of the strengths of Bull’s position as a starting point for such an endeavour, though, is the way that he attempts, not always successfully, to separate out the

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conceptual basis from the empirical reality. Thus the opening section of The Anarchical Society, on which this chapter principally draws, wants to treat ideas like order in a relatively abstract fashion. This is important because it enables Bull to separate order from the institutions that maintain or operationalize order – a separation that I want to maintain here, too. Thus this chapter does not discuss norms and institutions in any specific detail, or argue that there is any necessarily strong and direct connection between the existence of certain institutions and the creation and maintenance of order as a concept and, to prefigure the normative question somewhat, as a value and goal. Globalization may be working some quite fundamental changes to the institutions that Bull saw as vital to the maintenance of an international society – war, balance of power, great power, diplomacy and law – but the enduring need for order would persist in the presence or absence of these five specific institutions, as it had in the past. As Bull noted, The Anarchical Society may be an implicit defence of international society, but it is not a defence of the specific formulation of international society in existence in 1977 ( Bull, 2002: 307–8). Bull thus opens the door to change in how order is created, in institutional and more practical political terms, but the focus here is more on the nature or ontological character of order in Bull’s most famous book. This, I want to argue, Bull wishes to portray in a much more stable way. However, as we shall see, the methodological basis that Bull appeals to and the tension between a ‘social science’ desire for objectivity and a recognition of the normativity of order makes this difficult. This chapter therefore starts by looking in detail at Bull’s conceptualization of order in The Anarchical Society, developing the claim of a deep, and unresolved, normative tension in Bull’s concept. This enables the chapter to look at Bull’s methodology in order to see how an approach that emphasizes process over objectivity can reap benefits. This is further developed by looking at how the notion of order Bull deploys stifles the concept of society in the book and that by loosening these bounds we can continue to gain from Bull’s insights. In particular, we can begin to go some way towards meeting recent challenges to add greater sociological sophistication to English school theory as part of a constructivist agenda that re-emphasizes the normative potential of international theory (e.g. Dunne, 2001; Rengger, 2000; Reus-Smit, 1999, 2001). This enables us to gain greater purchase on globalization’s challenges to the idea of an international society as the basis for order in world politics. Rather than the pressure being brought to bear on the institutions Bull outlines, and which the chapters in Part II of this book address directly,

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being potentially destructive of order, we can instead see them as changing the constellation of institutions against the backdrop of concepts of order and society understood as part of the processes of world politics, as well as providing analytical reference points for academic analysis.

Order in The Anarchical Society Imprecision is a charge often levelled at English school theory, particularly from the US and even from those who are sympathetic to and influenced by Bull’s work (Finnemore, 2001: 509–10). Much of this mud sticks, but it ought to be difficult to argue this in relation to Bull’s concept of order. He devotes the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Anarchical Society to, basically, defining what he does and what he does not mean by ‘order’. However, even after this specific, abstract, definitional discussion, and later elaboration, we can still identify ambiguity, even contradiction, in what Bull means by order, both in general and in international politics. Thus Bull writes of order: [O]rder    is not any pattern or regularity in the relations of human individuals or groups, but a pattern that leads to a particular result, an arrangement of social life such that it promotes certain goals or values.    [C]ertain of these goals stand out as elementary or primary, inasmuch as their fulfilment in some measure is a condition not merely of this or that social life, but of social life as such.  [A]ll societies recognise these goals and embody arrangements that promote them. First all societies seek to ensure that life will be in some measure secure against violence resulting in death or bodily harm. Second all societies seek to ensure that promises, once made, will be kept or agreements, once undertaken, will be carried out. Third, all societies pursue the goal of ensuring that the possession of things will remain stable to some degree and will not be subject to challenges that are constant and without limit. By order in social life I mean a pattern of activity that sustains elementary, primary or universal goals of social life such as these. (Bull, 2002: 3–4, emphasis in original) Later, in relation to international relations, he extends this theme. ‘By international order, I mean a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society’ (Bull, 2002: 8). This formula of elementary or primary goals is one that recurs throughout the book, suggesting that it is here that we

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find the kernel of Bull’s concept of order (e.g. Bull, 2002: 22, 51, 52, 63, 64, 83, 89). It is a pattern of practice in social relations between individuals and political collectivities whose efficacy can be judged against threefold criteria: limitations on the use of violence; sanctity of agreement; and rules on property. It would seem to establish a clear basis upon which we can engage in studies of human relations and particularly international relations. Bull attempts to grant an objective status to order as a concept, something he makes clear later in the book when he contrasts order with what he sees as the unavoidable subjectivity of justice (Bull, 2002: 75). In studying order it would seem we can ask two connected questions. First, ‘Is there a discernible pattern or regularity in the interactions of the units?’ and, secondly, ‘If so, is this pattern or regularity conducive to the attainment of these three goals?’ An affirmative answer to both questions establishes the existence of order and identifies how it is maintained. However, elsewhere in his initial discussion of the concept of order, we see alternative, and not always complementary, or even coherent aspects of the issue highlighted. For example, Bull’s core definition establishes order in relation to goals: It emerges out of the need present in all societies to establish arrangements that promote the attainment of the trinity of limited violence, confidence in agreement and stable possession. This grants it inherent normativity. If, in the absence of order, social life is impossible and assuming, as Bull does, that this is an undesirable condition, steps ought to be taken to ensure that social life does not collapse into a non- or anti-social condition. Furthermore, where it is in such a condition, action that changes this should be pursued. Here we begin to see the idea that order can be seen as a social process – something that has to be created and re-created in and through a dynamic social situation. Establishing certain elements as being constitutive of order and highlighting the attainment of these as fundamental, universal goals points towards that process as being significantly normative. The study of order ought also, perhaps, to include the promotion of order. However, in contrast to this dynamic and normative version, Bull (2002: xxxii) states that order is ‘[A] quality that may or may not obtain in international politics at any one time or place.’ He describes, ‘order as an actual or possible situation or state of affairs, not as a value, goal or objective’ (Bull, 2002: xxxiii). This would seem to suggest that, rather, we are dealing here with an empirical enquiry into the situation pertaining in international politics at one time or place, judged against the presence or absence of the ‘quality’ of order. However, Bull later states, ‘I have

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sought to confine my enquiry into order in world politics to enduring issues of human political structure or institutions, and to avoid considerations of the substantive issues of world politics at the present time’ (Bull, 2002: xxxiii–xxxiv). Here the idea of order being judged against the circumstances of ‘one time or place’ is replaced by some, unspecified, longer timescale. The idea of how long must pass before we are dealing with ‘enduring issues’ goes without further clarification, as, too, does what may and what may not count as an ‘issue’. Whether in ‘snap shot’ or ‘enduring issues’ mode, though, normativity is seemingly not on the agenda and the concept of order appears a static one – a basically exogenous reference point against which current circumstances or the handling of enduring issues can be judged. The norms or institutions through which order is maintained, or by which it is challenged, may alter over time, but the nature of order remains fixed because it draws on unchanging facts about what it means to have an orderly social system. However, trying to escape the normative question in this way is not successful and the normative aspect of order troubles Bull throughout his discussion of the concept, as he repeatedly both includes and excludes this element. Having argued in the core definition that order is ‘elementary’, ‘primary’, ‘universal’ and the precondition for social life, it would seem inescapable that order becomes a ‘prior value’. This is in the sense that institutions, arrangements and practices within social life that threaten order will be perceived negatively, or at the very least require special justification, possibly in terms of how they may contribute to an alternative set of social arrangements, superior in their ability to generate order and thus inducing institutional change with the potential for short-term instability. However, Bull states, ‘[I]t is not to be assumed that order    is a desirable goal, still less that it is an overriding one’ (Bull, 2002: xxxiii). Later, he reiterates the point, ‘I am not seeking to argue that these goals [limitations of violence, sanctity of agreement, stability of possession] should have priority over others [or] that when a conflict arises between these goals and others, societies either do or should always give priority to them. [O]rder is not the only value in relation to which human conduct can be shaped, nor should we assume that it is prior to other values’ (Bull, 2002: 6). This point is reiterated more than once later in the book (e.g. Bull, 2002: 72, 74, 92–3). Order thus results from the presence of ‘elementary’ and ‘primary’ goals of social life, but is not in any sense prior to other, unspecified, values, which, it would seem, are unattainable in the absence of these ‘elementary’ or ‘primary’ goals given that they are the precondition for social life itself. Further, his hints at subordinating order in international society

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to ‘world order’ – ‘order in human society as a whole’ – further reinforce this sense of order as a prior value (Bull, 2002: 21). Bull thus also raises, but leaves largely unexplored in conceptual terms, the processes whereby these different, and potentially conflicting, values interact. His account of the relationship between order and justice, still one of the most interesting discussions of this problem in the international relations literature, gives us some clues. However, as it is perhaps here that the book comes closest to making the case for the prior nature of order, this discussion does not resolve the nature of this relationship satisfactorily, as discussed below. Order, particularly in international relations but presumably more generally (Bull is unclear on this), is also monist, reinforcing the idea that challenges to established patterns of order are normatively dubious. ‘What    is incompatible with order on a global scale is a welter of competing principles of universal political organisation   ’ (Bull, 2002: 135). Settling this issue he describes as being the first task of international law and is fundamental to the attainment of order, and thus the avoidance of disorder, whether resulting from the absence of agreements on violence, contract and property, or through the existence of multiple and incompatible sets of rules. In discussing this Bull is unusually explicit about the normativity of order. The first function of international law has been to identify, as the supreme normative principle of the political organisation of mankind, the idea of a society of sovereign states. This is    the fundamental or constitutional principle of world politics in the present era. Order in the great society of all mankind has been attained, during the present phase of the modern states system, through general acceptance of the principle that men [sic] and territory are divided into states, each with its proper sphere of authority, but linked together by a common set of rules. (Bull, 2002: 134–5) This is odd at best, contradictory at worst. It reflects a seeming reticence on Bull’s part to nail his colours to the tree in relation to the normative aspects of order that he imports, but whose consequences, in the name of some sort of ‘objectivism’ or ‘empiricism’, he is unwilling to unambiguously accept. This tension is re-stated, and remains unresolved, in his discussion of the relationship between order and justice. Bull states (2002: 83), ‘It is true that justice, in any of its forms, is realizable only in a context of order; it is only if there is a pattern of social activity in which

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elementary or primary goals of social life are in some degree provided for, that advanced or secondary goals can be secured.’ This would seem to make order, unambiguously, a prior value. His insistence on the risks of re-opening issues, in the name of justice, which order requires to be closed, and in the absence of agreement on what justice consists in, reinforces the point (Bull, 2002: 91–2). His one explicit admission of the prior nature of order’s value remains hedged about with rather vague caveats that, logically, ought not to be there (Bull, 2002: 93). Thus Bull’s efforts to keep this issue open, such as at the conclusion of his discussion of order and justice, are unconvincing. When he writes that ‘while order in world politics is something valuable, and a condition of the realization of other values, it should not be taken to be a commanding value, and to show that a particular institution or course of action is conducive of order is not to have established a presumption that that institution is desirable or that that course of action should be carried out’, we are left wondering, ‘Why not?’ (Bull, 2002: 94). Bull’s efforts to make this point rely on a notion of order as an absolute defence of the status quo that he does not propose, and of which he is critical. Bull is here relying on a confusion, also present in his ‘ideal-typical’ positions on the relative priority of order and justice, between order per se and the exiting order of international society (Bull, 2002: 90–1). As already noted, Bull does not see defending the desirability of international society as requiring a commitment to the current iteration of international society. The unwillingness to fully recognize the normativity of his concept of order is present in this unsustainable partial conflation of the concept with the ‘facts’ of the operation of the society of states as then constituted. The benefits of appealing to an understanding of order as a socially rooted and praxeological process are apparent as a way to relieve the strains in this situation. Rather than the ideal and the real being separate, by conceiving of them as mutually constitutive we make the ideal dynamic. This dynamism appeals to the ‘ideal’ as both shaping the perceptions and responses to the ‘real’ and in turn being altered by reflection upon the experience of perceptions and responses. This relieves to some extent the strains in Bull’s effort to maintain order as conceptually exogenous and static in its meaning and enables us to engage more fruitfully in looking at how institutional change is both driven by the needs of order and contributes to altering the nature of order, too. The study of and reflection upon order in response to perceptions of and actions in the world have constitutive effects. This claim recognizes the way that ideas like order play a highly significant role in

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shaping the interests that are the classic focus of enquiry into political actions. This constitutive and significantly ideational dynamic can only be understood as a mutable, social process rooted not just in a narrowly drawn logic of order but within a more holistic purview that sees the significance of changes within, as well as between, states.2 The normative questions of how we ought to respond to this dynamic situation and the contested bases for judging between the choices that we are offered is therefore embraced, rather than resisted. Bull does not make this methodological move, although he at times hints at something broadly akin to it. Bull’s method of investigating the presence or absence of order and its nature is therefore at least in part responsible for the chronic uncertainty he displays over the normativity of order. He states, within the same paragraph, that, on the one hand, ‘I believe in the value of attempting to be detached or disinterested’ in studying order. Whilst, on the other, ‘I do not wish to imply anything as absurd as that this study is value-free. A study of this kind that did not derive from moral or political premises of some kind would be impossible, and, if it were possible, it would be sterile’ (Bull, 2002: xxxv). In contrast, the tone of much of the book, especially Part II, and Bull’s method of starting his chapters, as with the book as a whole, with a list of specific questions to be answered creates an air of objective, detached and impartial study (Dunne, 1998: 140–2). We are not made privy to the full range of ‘moral or political premises’ that Bull is using, so are only able to infer them from the text, rather than assess them on the basis of his careful statement, explanation and justification. What little direct insight we are given backs the sense that Bull cannot escape from the normative element of his subject. ‘Of course, in common with most men [sic] I do attach value to order    it is doubtful whether any serious theory of political ends or values fails to attach some value to order in human relationships’ (Bull, 2002: xxxiii). ‘I do in fact hold that order is desirable, or valuable in human affairs, and a fortiori in world politics’ (Bull, 2002: 93). If these are his values and value-free enquiry is impossible, then the book is bound to be in part the work of advocacy Bull seeks to deny for it (Bull, 2002: 92–3). It is striking that his defence of order against Ali Mazrui’s demands for justice does not seek to deny the importance or relevance or epistemological validity of Mazrui’s normative critique, but instead argues that it is the wrong, and dangerous, normative critique (Bull, 2002: 74–94). Bull is no methodological moral sceptic. On the basis of inference, too, it seems that Bull is committed to the normativity of order and that his methodology is a part of this. Order

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is desirable by comparison with a non- or anti-social alternative. This is the only alternative that he seems willing to canvass, via his account of a Hobbesian state of nature in his discussion of the empirical existence of order, given that none is offered in the general, abstract discussion (Bull, 2002: 44–9). Without order it seems life would not be worth living and this ontological premise informs the way in which he conducts his study. Throughout the book, we can read Bull’s account of the concept and practices of order, both in general and in international relations, as methodologically driven to defend the centrality, indeed, inescapability, of order. The conservatism levelled at pluralists like Bull thus has methodological elements. Order as an ontological priority combines with a deepseated tension between ‘objectivity’ and ‘advocacy’ in The Anarchical Society. This produces an implicit approach to studying order that is almost bound to produce a reading of history that, if not straightforwardly teleological, is certain to privilege that which is seen as being ‘real’ over that which is seen as ‘ideal’ in the pattern of order amongst states and more generally amongst human beings (Dunne, 1998: 143–4). The society of states has worked hard, and suffered greatly, in putting in place the current constellation of institutions and norms that sustain what order we possess. Endangering this ‘reality’ in the unavoidably uncertain hope of achieving something closer to an unreal ‘ideal’ is deeply unwise given the catastrophe of a Hobbesian state of nature that awaits those foolish enough to place order in jeopardy. Bull’s methodologically strained separation of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ largely precludes the possibility of immanence in the current social reality and threatens to reify the concept of order in such a way that, despite his desire to the contrary, it becomes inextricably tied up with the currently existing set of institutions and norms. Illustrative of this is the end of his general discussion where, strikingly, order amongst states is portrayed as instrumental to order amongst human beings as a whole (Bull, 2002: 21). However, that Bull dismisses the relevance of such an order as soon as he turns to the question of the existence of order in world politics (Bull, 2002: 22) would seem to reaffirm both the normativity of order and the tension in his methodology. The lack of material existence of such an order means Bull precludes it from playing a part in the operations of the ‘real world’ of international relations. The marginal role of cosmopolitan justice is reinforced in his discussion of the relationship between order and justice. Again, this is on the basis of the non-existence of such cosmopolitan sentiment and the lack of the institutions and practices of political community and

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accountability that alone, it seems, would qualify it as ‘real’ (Bull, 2002: 80–2). The role of this challenge in potentially changing our understanding of the nature of order, causing us to ask questions such as ‘Who’s order is this?’, does not arise in any sustained fashion in The Anarchical Society. The role of study in understanding and advocating order is clouded further by Bull’s assertion about the relationship between theory and existing practice. ‘[I]nquiry has its own morality, and is necessarily subversive of political institutions and movements of all kinds, good as well as bad’ (Bull, 2002: xxxv). Do we have here a set of self-subverting moral and political premises that are the basis for both the study and the overthrow of elementary or primary values that are the basis of a human social life that is preferable to any non- or anti-social alternative? Bull, the post-structuralist, is an image that is difficult to sustain, despite his critique of modernity as being the justificatory device of dominant powers (Bull, 2002: 37). Bull’s critique also contains a passing nod to Marx as the basis for this scepticism (Bull, 2002: 52–3).3 At the very least, though, it reinforces the sense of an immanent praxeology in Bull’s methodology that has the potential, if embraced rather than resisted, to ease to some extent this deep tension over the normative status of order. Nevertheless, this is all deeply confusing. Order, how we study it (both in social life in general and in international relations in particular) and the relationship between subject and object of study are all ambiguous. This is despite 23 pages of preliminary discussion and subsequent development in the specific context of international relations. The confident assertion with which Bull opens the second chapter of the book, ‘We have now made it clear what is meant in this study by order in world politics’, is premature (Bull, 2002: 22). What initially appears to be a straightforward, two-stage process of essentially empirical enquiry becomes a far more complex, and far less precise, intellectual exercise. The Anarchical Society is neither a work of analytical philosophy, nor of social science, especially in the positivistic sense which views neoclassical economics as the paradigm of good social science. In relation to philosophy, Bull makes some mention of Kant, Hobbes, Machiavelli and even Hegel. On the first of these, his account relies on Martin Wight’s reading, in itself contentious, and, on the last, Chris Brown has asserted that what Bull has to say is, simply, ‘Silly’.4 In relation to social science, Bull was famously sceptical about the idea of international relations as ‘hard’ social science, distinguishing his use of the idea of international

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system from that of Morton Kaplan, Bull’s exemplar of positivism (Bull, 2002: 11). Yet the concept of order endures and, in the scheme of the book, works. The idea of a set of social relations characterized by the presence of three elementary/primary elements constituting an order, and that order is a very important value (to go along with Bull’s insistence on avoiding the claim of prior status for the moment), holds the material together. The descriptive and explanatory picture that Bull paints of international politics in the late 1970s is a persuasive one. His claim about ‘enduring’ issues is borne out by the continued presence of the book on the academic agenda and the ease with which extrapolations can be made from it to some aspects of our present political circumstances. As Bull reminds us, this is a study of a single aspect of world politics, order (Bull, 2002: xxxii). The questions of the nature of order, how it can (or should) be studied, how it manifests itself and what its relation ought to be to other ‘qualities’, ‘goals’ or ‘values’ of social life retain their force. Bull falls short of providing definitive, or even necessarily terribly good, answers to these questions, but his effort at ‘thinking things through’ (Bull, 2002: xxx) offers an enduring starting point for others to do the same.

Society in The Anarchical Society Bull’s extensive efforts at developing a definition of order and how to study it are not repeated in his account of the concept of society. Instead, the idea of society is virtually subsumed into the notion of order; for where there is order there is society, as the distinguishing feature of society is that it generates order. What is at stake in the debate about society is the level at which it exists, or at least which of the two possible levels Bull identifies is dominant. Bull’s answer to this is rather given by his initial premise for studying the subject: ‘The starting point of international relations is the existence of states  each of which possesses and asserts sovereignty in relation to a portion of the earth’s surface and a particular segment of the human population’ (Bull, 2002: 8, emphasis in original). From here, his emphasis upon the society of states as being the principal manifestation of the social element of international relations is more or less inevitable. If such an international society did not exist it is difficult to see how the alternative, a world society, could either. Thus order amongst states creating an international society becomes a prerequisite for the development of world society. Order and society are inextricable, and very nearly synonymous.

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This subsuming of society into order can be inferred from one of the most often quoted passages of the book: A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of 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. If states today form an international society    this is because, recognising certain common interests and perhaps some common values, they regard themselves as bound by certain rules in their dealings with one another, such as that they should respect one another’s claims to independence, that they should honour agreements into which they enter, and that they should be subject to certain limitations in exercising force against one another. (Bull, 2002: 13, emphasis in original) Here we see the trinity of stable possession (claims to independence), sanctity of agreement and restricted violence written into the defining principles of international society. Society is order and order is society to a very considerable extent. The significant additional element that enables the two concepts to be separable is the possibility of common values summed up by the terms culture or civilization, which are synonymous in Bull’s thought. ‘A common feature of    historic international societies is that they were all founded upon a common culture or civilisation, or at least some of the elements of such a civilisation: a common language, a common epistemology and understanding of the universe, a common religion, a common ethical code, a common aesthetic or artistic tradition’ (Bull, 2002: 15). The extent and depth of this shared culture or civilization is important to whether or not international society is joined by significant elements of world society, and to the operation of international society. ‘By a society’s culture we mean its basic system of values, the premises from which its thought or action derive’ (Bull, 2002: 61). Here, Bull shows how it is values that are doing the real work in creating a society, as opposed to the other possible elements of culture or civilization he identifies. Thus, on this basis Bull distinguishes three phases of the development of the European, and later global, international society in its development from the end of the Middle Ages through to the present day. This sees the cultural or civilizational basis of this society shift. Most importantly, its values alter. This move takes us from Christian and religious, to European and secular, to what Bull conceives as a

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non-civilization – modernity – but one that nevertheless brings with it echoes of aspects of its Christian forebear in the form of an ethic that owes much to a secularized natural law. Throughout, though, society is present (Bull, 2002: 22–37). The element of international society has always been present in the modern international system because at no stage can it be said that the conception of the common interests of states, of common rules accepted and common institutions worked by them, has ceased to exert an influence. Most states at most times pay some respect to the basic rules of co-existence in international society. (Bull, 2002: 40) These rules, of course, are those relating to violence, property and contract that generate order. Here we see the idea of order as a transhistorical constant that I have opposed to the idea of order as social process that has the potential to provide a more satisfactory working out of the concept, and one latent within Bull’s discussion. Bull’s account, indeed, is notable for its vulnerability to the charges that Reus-Smit (1999: 157–9) has levelled at dominant conceptions of sovereignty as a great historical constant in most international relations theory. Reus-Smit’s account, covering some of the same historical ground as Bull, emphasizes the importance of changing ontological conceptions of the nature of the state for the fundamental institutions of international society, such as sovereignty, and the working out of principles of justice and other values. Bull’s identification of the changing cultural/civilizational climate during the period from the early modern through to the late twentieth century picks up on some of the same themes as Reus-Smit. However, Bull’s emphasis on the continuity of order via the existence of an international society characterized by common interests, goals and, to a lesser extent, values, causes him to miss the significance for the nature of that order of shifts in the dominant theory of the state. Society in The Anarchical Society thus appears to be order plus some element of common civilization, even where, as in Bull’s time, this commonality was formally rejected. This formal rejection, and the way that Bull argues modernity is both vacuous and synonymous with the values of the dominant powers (Bull, 2002: 36–8), is crucial to his account of the ‘pluralist’ nature of international society. This pluralism causes Bull to stress the fragility of order (e.g. Bull, 2002: 50). He highlights how it is that the certainties of the nineteenth-century conception of international society have been lost in the twentieth.

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This, argues Bull, has produced an account of international politics that is imprecise as to the actors involved and their relative importance, producing an unhealthy focus upon international organizations rather than enduring institutions, such as the balance of power (Bull, 2002: 38, see also his critique of ‘solidarist law’: 150–5). Added to this fog are disparate elements of secularized natural law and other solidarist assumptions, lacking the common civilizational bases necessary to make them anything other than potentially dangerous illusions of universality (Bull, 2002: 38). Bull thus presents us with a picture of a contemporary international society that is unusually, in historical terms, acivilizational, or at least very close to it. He asserts that ‘[T]he present complex balance of power does not rest on a common culture shared by the major states participating in it’ (Bull, 2002: 110). It is, then, not surprising that the book is associated with a conservative defence of a fragile international order as the society of states is almost reduced to the order of states. Society as a concept thus loses much of the richness that it could have and, because of the very strong tie to order, is also deprived of dynamism. Given Bull’s efforts to portray order in generally static terms and his scepticism about the likely development of cultural commonality in international relations, society as a concept loses explanatory power, especially in offering us an understanding of social change in world politics. Bull again is caught between describing the changes in the cultural basis of international society and its implications for order and the need to normatively judge these changes. His desire to see the culture of international society as separate from the cultures of the state that comprise it makes this task even harder. The force of the challenge presented by Reus-Smit (1999, 2001) to the English school to engage more fully with the effects of domestic cultural change on international society is again demonstrated. Equally, the charge that Bull struggles to effectively separate ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ cultures, identified by Jahn (2000: 7–19), does not seem wide of the mark, even if her categorization of Bull as a ‘realist’ is dubious. Instead of seeing the ebb and flow of the cultural element of international society as being principally influenced by developments within states, Bull follows Martin Wight in arguing that the fragility or resilience of order can be understood in relation to the relative strengths of processes and values conducive to an international system or a world order. He reiterates Wight’s claim that aspects of a disorderly international system, orderly international society and orderly world society are ever present, but maintains stronger firewalls between these three

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social forms than Wight did. ‘The modern international system in fact reflects all three of the elements singled out, respectively, by the Hobbesian, the Kantian and the Grotian traditions;    war and struggle for power   ,    transnational solidarity   ,    co-operation and regulated intercourse’ (Bull, 2002: 39). ‘The element of international society is real, but the elements of a state of war and of transnational loyalties are real also, and to reify the first element, or to speak of it as if it annulled the second and third, is an illusion.’ (Bull, 2002: 49) Yet this opening to world society in particular is maintained only in a formal, abstract sense given the way that Bull dismisses it as having any significant purchase on the ‘real’ world of world politics. Indeed, it is difficult to discern in The Anarchical Society where Bull sees such transnational loyalties existing, except in the minds of, to him, misguided academic advocates like Richard Falk (e.g. Bull, 1984, 2002: 266; 282–4). This is one obvious area where the globalization debate has implications for the ideas of society and order in Bull’s work. Changes within the social structures of states being wrought by globalization, the idea of an emerging global civil society existing in a different kind of political space from that occupied by states, and the development of global regulatory and other systems able to pose meaningful challenges to states as holding the monopoly of political authority are at odds with the portrayal of the ‘reality’ of international society in The Anarchical Society. More significantly, they also reiterate the need to restore the connection between the concept of order and the changing institutions and norms that are manifesting rules on violence, property and contract. In the context of globalization Bull’s hints at connections between international and world society need to be taken out of the realm of abstract possibility and placed into the realm of ongoing praxeology in line with the methodological reformulation outlined here and developed elsewhere in contemporary English school writing. This is far from being beyond the realm of possibility, and indeed Bull is open to the ‘reality’ of the Hobbesian element of war, arguing in the context of international law’s efforts to frame war as enforcement action, that recognition of this in the past was a positive virtue (Bull, 2002: 126). Therefore recognition of the ‘reality’ of the growing importance of elements of world society in the present and future is not beyond the possibilities of the theoretical schema, re-emphasizing the virtue of flexibility seen by many in the English school. But society, like order, becomes reified and formalized in The Anarchical Society as part of the methodological desire for detachment and objectivity. This has a similar cost in terms of the limited ability of Bull’s theory to deal with

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process and change emanating from the social processes within states and through the development of transnational social processes. Whilst Bull acknowledges the twentieth-century development of nonstate members of international society, he is openly sceptical about the development of interdependence and the potential for transnational political forms and actions. He argues that it represents a threat to the order maintained by sovereign states that has been met only through those states developing international law. The expansion of the scope of international law to encompass economic, social, communications and environmental matters represents a strengthening of the contribution of international law to international order in the sense that it provides a means of coping with new threats to international order. The growing impact of these policies of states on each other in these fields is a source of conflict and disorder amongst them.    If international law had not responded    the threats to international order arising from the growth of interdependence    would be greater than they are. (Bull, 2002: 147) This scepticism, from the perspective of more than 25 years later, appears unjustified, if not ostrich-like, in its resistance to processes that alter the nature of international society. We are left with a portrayal of society in world politics that is split between two forms. The first – that within states – is largely separate, and separable, from the second – that between states – by the cultural homogeneity of the former and the heterogeneity of the latter. Whilst Bull argues that the international society of modernity is especially heterogeneous, none of his historical examples approach the level of cultural commonality and solidity that he assumes characterizes society within states (Jahn, 2000: 7–19). A ‘Kantian’ world society has thus never existed and Bull seems highly sceptical throughout The Anarchical Society that it ever could. Challenges to this scepticism, such as growing interdependence and globalization, are in fact dangerous and we need international lawmakers to do what they can to contain, restrict and corral such processes to stop them from threatening the current institutionalization of order. This can, in part, be explained by the same problem afflicting Bull’s concept of society as that blighting his concept of order: its portrayal as static when it ought to be seen as a process. Thus rather than a formula of order + common culture = society, wherein all three elements are treated as analytically independent of one another, we can re-affirm the

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value of Bull’s work by seeing these elements as involved in a mutually constitutive process. This, to be sure, may lack the clarity and parsimony of Bull’s approach, but it enables us to pay due heed to the dynamic interaction between culture within states and the culture of the society of states. Order, understood as a fixed concept, may be threatened by the development of interdependence and the advocacy by those within states of interdependence as an opportunity for greater global solidarity. However, order, as a process, is changed and developed by these activities, and by the resistance that it stimulates. This, in turn, causes change in the nature and extent of claims about commonality and solidarity (and of difference and pluralism) on the part of those seeking to explore and exploit the changing circumstances of interdependence. This grants us a dynamic and more powerful understanding of the nature of society. It also recognizes, in a similar way to the reconfiguration of order, the normative element inherent in the idea of society. As with order, Bull resists this explicit normative move, but he cannot do so convincingly and it ought to be embraced. Thus, Bull argues that, ‘   the society of sovereign states    is par excellence a society that is culturally heterogeneous’ (Bull, 2002: 61). This makes it necessary to sustain order not just in the absence of government, but in the absence of what Bull describes as ‘social solidarity’ derived from a common cultural or civilizational basis (Bull, 2002: 62). This further explains the fragility of order, a condition that, as we have seen, Bull has to be concerned about and wish to see changed because of the normativity of his concept of order that inherently prefers a stronger basis of order to a weaker one. His assertion of the moral superiority of world society and the contingent role that international society plays in relation to this also implies the need for order to be strengthened and, as a necessary condition for this, for the civilizational element of international society to be enhanced (Bull, 2002: 21). Thus pluralism as an element of international society is immanently transformative, even if Bull attempts to negate this as far as possible for reasons that are to do with a methodological privileging of the ‘real’ over the ‘ideal’ that relies on an unsustainable bifurcation of these two and that denies the inherent and powerful normativity of the concepts of order and society. Bull’s conservatism ought to be pragmatic, but because of the theoretical problems in his schema it ends up becoming a principled objection to change other than the consensual and incremental adjustment of the operation of the institutions of order by the states as the dominant actors. The concept of society that Bull deploys, although less explicitly discussed than that of order, is beset by the same tension between

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descriptive and normative intent. The problems arising from this are arguably contained within the book by the slenderness of the concept and the dominant role played by order, but it does nevertheless add to the well-known tension in Bull’s work between pluralism and solidarism. However, this is often seen as being most present in later pieces, especially the Hagey lectures, but that it can also be seen in the central elements of The Anarchical Society emphasizes the depth of this tension in the concept of international society (Dunne, 1998: 146–52, Wheeler and Dunne, 1996). The concept of society can, though, be re-framed in a way that does not make it, at the international level in particular, a cipher for a static order. Instead, it can become a significant category whose nature, form and content are dynamic and subject to the same level of normative contestation as order. The issue of the level at which society exists is thus rescued from its predetermined outcome and the possibility of an additional level – a world society – is restored as more than a pipedream.

The process of order (and society) in world politics The central position of The Anarchical Society in the English school is beyond doubt and the book continues to be a source of stimulation and insight. The description that Bull offers of order in world politics in the context of an international society – and especially of the tensions, contradictions, compromises and pragmatism that characterizes the conduct of relations between states – remains persuasive. Whilst long-standing criticism of his blindness to the significance of economic elements of international relations is justified, and the grounds upon which tensions and contradictions are played out have moved away from the Cold War, there are few better books for capturing the tenor of inter-state politics. Indeed, this is the basis of the defence of Bull’s approach offered by those, such as Jackson (2000), who stand closest to the Bull of The Anarchical Society in contemporary English school theory. Nevertheless, as we have seen, The Anarchical Society’s central concept of order is highly problematic and the account of society is significantly underdeveloped. The central ambiguity of the book is Bull’s uncertainty about the normativity of order. Addressing this ought to be inescapable, but Bull skates around the issue to an unnecessary and indefensible extent, partly due to a methodological preference for objectivity, poorly worked out though this is. The growing concern with methodological questions in the academic study of international relations over the last 20 years has certainly left Bull’s approach behind. However, these are

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problems that are not insuperable, and a good deal of work has been done to reform the methodology of the English school (e.g. Buzan, 2001; 2004a; Dunne, 1995, 2001; Little, 2000; Reus-Smit, 2001). Most importantly, these aim to address this normative difficulty by embracing it and seeking to enhance the centrality of the normative to English school theory. Latching on to the dynamic elements of Bull’s portrayal of order and society has been important here, attempting to free up the rather mechanical connections and processes that Bull, as I have tried to show, portrays. The normative character of order places it back into the process of world politics and adds the study of world politics to that process too. Re-connecting changes in the nature of society within states to the nature of international society reinvigorates the concept of society and gives it the serious explanatory and constitutive role that Bull tends to deny it. The utilization of historical sociology and world historical perspectives are evidence of this important development (Buzan and Little, 2001). The study of order in world politics thus continues to intrigue. A careful reading of the words on the page may engender considerable unease about just how well the details of conceptualization and the explanation of dynamics hold together. However, that Bull correctly identifies order as an absolutely central issue to the understanding of world politics is never in doubt. That he also goes a considerable way to explaining the way that order has operated in international society across a broad historical span is also true. That the book is not perfect, indeed that in important respects it is seriously flawed, is almost bound to be the case with any effort of parallel scope and scale. The Anarchical Society’s account of order and society in world politics is therefore not our final destination in an effort to understand these concepts. It is, though, an important way station from which a number of contemporary writers have set off in an effort to build on what is best in Bull’s account. As we attempt to understand the dynamics of order and society in a world politics that is becoming more globalized and thus more diverse in terms of actors, issues and processes, a more reflexive and dynamic approach than Bull deploys is essential. Fully recognizing the normative nature of order, seeing the connections between notions of society at national, international and world levels, and involving a much wider range of actors can address central weaknesses in Bull’s account that this chapter has tried to highlight. Just how deep-seated these problems are in The Anarchical Society is perhaps not always fully appreciated, yet this in itself may be testament to the insight and appeal of the work as a whole, even after more than a quarter of a century.

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Notes 1. Bull lived to see one of the earliest volleys fired in the ‘critical theoretical’ movement, Robert Cox’s famous 1983 claim that ‘Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.’ Bull was also involved in the early stages of the introduction of postmodernism to international relations theory, via his role in supervising James Der Derian’s PhD thesis. 2. Dunne, for example, highlights this need to look within states in his analysis of the way that different versions of international society are in part linked to different understandings of a legitimate state, generating different versions of a legitimate society of states (Dunne, 2001). 3. Dunne (1998: 142) also notes the parallels with postmodernism. 4. I am not aware of Brown making this point in print, but he has certainly asserted it at a number of conference panels. It forms part of his somewhat amused bafflement at the amount of attention devoted to Bull and his work, given, in Brown’s view, Bull’s philosophical limitations. Bull might agree on the last point: ‘This book is the product neither of refined theoretical technique, nor of any particularly recondite historical research’ (Bull, 2002: xiii).

2 Seeing (Double) in the Darkness: The Moral Vision of The Anarchical Society Nicholas J. Rengger

At the end of The Anarchical Society Hedley Bull argues, with considerable force, that his argument in the book had been a contribution to the study of world politics, and not to its practice. ‘The search for conclusions that can be presented as “solutions” or “practical advice” is a corrupting element in the contemporary study of world politics’, he tells us; ‘such conclusions are advanced less because there is any solid basis for them than because there is a demand for them which it is profitable to satisfy. The fact is that while there is a great desire to know what the future of world politics will bring, and also to know how we should behave in it, we have to grope about in the dark with respect of the one as much as with respect of the other’. And he concludes, in a memorable phrase, ‘It is better to recognise that we are in darkness than to pretend that we can see the light’ (Bull, 2002: 307–8). The Anarchical Society represents, of course, the major statement of Bull’s view of world politics and it has come to have near canonical status, at least amongst supporters of what is usually termed the ‘English school’ of international relations. As the above quotation suggests, one central element of the book was Bull’s deployment of a certain kind of moral sensibility. Whilst it has not been as widely discussed as the specific discussions that make the book justly famous – on the balance of power, the role of institutions, the possibilities for reform in the international system and so on – the manner in which Bull tries to articulate this sensibility is one of the most interesting parts of the book, for in his articulation of it lies both much of the appeal of the book, at least to certain audiences, and also much that is problematic with it. This chapter examines Bull’s version of this sensibility and seeks to make clear that in fact, in The Anarchical Society, Bull is trying effectively to reconcile the impulses of two moral sensibilities, each of which was 35

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important to him (and for him) but which are, in fact, mutually contradictory. In this respect, Bull is representative of a good deal of thinking in international relations, not just of those associated with him in the ‘English school’, but more generally.1 At the end of this chapter, I shall try and offer a thought as to the implications of this fact, but the bulk of the chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I outline the character of the argument that emerges from The Anarchical Society relevant to the question of its ‘moral voice’ – an aspect of the book that includes, I think, some of its most characteristic methodological assumptions, as well as the concern with moral questions more generally. In the second, I relate this to Bull’s general moral position, developed both in that book and elsewhere, before concluding that, in fact, The Anarchical Society discloses the two moral sensibilities that are at work in Bull’s thought. The third section then offers a reflection on what these considerations imply, for the so-called ‘English school’ approach to the study of world politics in general2 and the recent attempt to ‘reconvene’ it, in particular.

The moral voice of The Anarchical Society The Anarchical Society is, of course, subtitled ‘A Study of Order in World Politics’ and Bull emphasizes the extent to which concepts such as order, justice, legitimacy and society are terms that are all mutually dependent in the study of world politics. Indeed, in most important respects the version of moral sensibility that emerges from The Anarchical Society is a fabric created by weaving these notions together in a very specific way. To begin, therefore, we need to understand how Bull himself understands these terms. By order itself, Bull is clear that he means a pattern or regularity of social life such that it promotes certain goals and values.3 This will have three component parts; first the fact that all societies will seek to ensure that life will be in some measure secure against violence; second, that all societies will seek to ensure that all agreements, once made, are kept; and third, that all societies will seek to ensure relative stability of possession. Famously, Bull then suggests that, in world politics, this discloses a twofold division of order into international order, understood as ‘a pattern of activity conducive to the maintenance of the elementary and primary goals of the society of states’, and world order, understood as ‘a pattern of activity conducive to the maintenance of the elementary and primary goals of human social life as such’. World order, Bull thinks, is not only wider than international order but ‘also more fundamental and primordial than it    and morally prior to it’ (Bull, 2002: 21).

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In a certain sense, then, for Bull, ‘world’ order morally underpins ‘international’ order, which of course implies that international society (shaped by international order) exists in large part to serve ‘world order’. The problem, of course, is that to all intents and purposes it does not. Bull, of course, recognizes this. This is clearest in his discussion of the opposition between order and justice in Chapter 4 of The Anarchical Society, where the ambiguities that characterize his moral voice in the book are also, perhaps not accidentally, most visibly acute. As Bull points out in the opening paragraph of the chapter, order is not merely an actual or possible condition, it is also ‘very generally regarded as a value’.4 But, of course, ‘it is not the only value in relation to which international conduct can be shaped, nor is it necessarily an overriding one’ (Bull 2002: 74). The other value that Bull thinks is increasingly important is, of course, justice. For Bull, unlike order, ‘justice can ultimately only be given some kind of private or subjective definition    (moreover) ideas about justice belong to the class of moral ideas, ideas which treat human actions as right in themselves, and not merely as a means to an end, as categorically and not merely hypothetically imperative. Considerations of justice, accordingly are to be distinguished from considerations of law and from considerations of the dictates of prudence, interest or necessity’ (Bull, 2002: 75–6). Bull then proceeds to make a number of distinctions about different kinds of justice and then suggests that in the context of world politics justice can be international or interstate justice (conferring rights or duties on states and nations), individual or human justice (conferring rights and duties on individual human agents) and cosmopolitan or world justice (what is right or good for the world as a whole). Bull’s argument here is essentially to suggest that in the contemporary setting, international society (that pattern of activity constituted by international order, remember) ‘espouses ideas of international or interstate justice and [partially] of individual and human justice    but    the framework of international order is quite inhospitable to projects for the realization of cosmopolitan or world justice’ (Bull, 2002: 93). His conclusion is stark. There is no general incompatibility as between order in the abstract    and justice in any of the meanings that have been reviewed    there is, however, incompatibility between the rules and institutions that now sustain order within the society of states and demands for world justice, which imply the destruction of this society, demands for

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human justice, which it can accommodate only in a selective and partial way and demands for interstate and international justice, to which it is not basically hostile but to which also it can provide only limited satisfaction. (Bull, 2002: 89) Bull’s overall conclusion to his book is worth quoting at length. Whilst the argument of the book could rightly be seen as an implicit defence of the states system, he says that [T]o derive from this an endorsement of the existing society of states    would be to overlook other points that have also been stressed throughout the argument. In the first place, it has been contended that international society is only one element in world politics, that this element of community shares the stage with war or conflict and the element of human community and that the workings of what have been called the rules and institutions of international society have to be seen in relation to those other two elements    . In the second place it has been maintained that world order    is not only wider than international order    but also more fundamental and primordial than it and morally prior to it. The system of states has constantly to be assessed in relation to the goal of world order.    [I]n the third place, it has been contended that order in world politics conflicts with goals of justice – international human and cosmopolitan – and that while there is a sense in which order is prior to justice, it does not follow from this that the goals of order are to be given priority over goals of justice in any particular case    a study of order in world politics    needs to be complemented by a study of justice’ (Bull, 2002: 308). There are a number of things, I think, that emerge from this brief overview of Bull’s position as developed in The Anarchical Society and shortly I want to turn to how we might understand the character of the moral voice Bull discloses in The Anarchical Society. Before that, however, I want to briefly discuss a topic that on the face of it is not directly related to his explicit views on moral questions but is certainly indirectly central. We might call it, the thesis of Bull’s commitment to methodological pluralism. It has been widely claimed5 that Bull was a ‘methodological pluralist’ and that this position allows him to examine various possibilities within world politics, both normative and more general possibilities, without, so to say, committing himself in advance to a particular moral view of their provenance. Thus in the context of The Anarchical

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Society, for example, Bull can lay out the extent to which the contemporary international society is inimical to world society and express beliefs about the extent to which this is damaging without in any sense suggesting that he can ‘predict the future’. This is part of his criticism of the search for ‘conclusions that can be presented as solutions’. What we can do, on this view, is lay out the possibilities, and possibly express our own preferences, but that is about all. To begin with, it is worth emphasizing that there is clearly something to this. Bull was suspicious of attempts to create ‘philosophical purity’ – an echo perhaps of Martin Wight’s views concerning the manner in which the ‘traditions’ of thought relevant to international relations should be understood, as we shall see later on – and oscillated between works which ‘laid out the possibilities’ – perhaps most obviously The Anarchical Society – and those which were more clearly exercises in normative theorizing, such as The Hagey Lectures. But it is worth emphasizing that when one comes to it one has to take a stance about the possibility of the relationship between moral beliefs and practical agency. In other words, the methodological pluralism that Bull displays carries with it certain assumptions about moral agency. If we cannot predict the future, and if what we can see is the extent of the obstacles in the way of what might be seen normatively as a more just arrangement of world politics, that perhaps drives us towards a view of politics that is – to use a term I shall come to in more detail later – ‘anti-Pelagian’, in that it doubts the possibility of achieving heaven on Earth, or of seeking salvation primarily in the realm of human action. Such a view came fairly naturally, I think, to someone like Martin Wight, whose theological convictions anyway disposed him towards accepting it. For Bull, however, although I think he did accept it, there were far greater costs and these costs were, in part, the source of the tension in Bull’s moral voice. I will come back to the overall significance of this in my concluding remarks.

Two sensibilities not one? The moral voice of The Anarchical Society of course has to be seen against the background of Bull’s more general position developed over his whole career. Thus, in this section of the chapter, I want to start by offering a more general assessment of the manner in which Bull’s moral thinking was itself framed. At the risk of simplifying a very complex story – and also at the risk of assuming that so strong minded an individual as Bull was not perfectly capable of forming his own view of the matter – it is worth dwelling for a moment on the two people who were

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probably most influential on his thought, his undergraduate teacher John Anderson, and his London School of Economics (LSE) mentor and British Committee colleague Martin Wight. It is difficult to imagine two more different intellectual personalities than Anderson and Wight. Anderson, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney from 1927 to 1958, was, as many have commented, a remarkable and hugely influential figure and was the dominating philosophical influence in the Australia of Bull’s youth. Bull himself testifies to this when he remarks – in the preface to The Anarchical Society, no less – that his ‘greatest intellectual debt’ was to John Anderson ‘a greater man than many who are more famous’, adding that ‘the impact of his mind and his example has been the deepest factor in shaping the outlook of many of us whom he taught’ (Bull, 2002: xxx). Anderson was a complex personality himself and a wide-ranging and prolific writer and controversialist. He was a philosophical realist who in his social and political theory advocated a strong form of social pluralism, but was influenced also by Marxian notions despite being a resolute critic of Utopianism. His ethical outlook was among the more original aspects of his thought, since in ethics he advocated a broadly descriptive, nonrelativist ethics which was critical of most existing ethical theories and suggested that ‘the science of ethics’ as he put it, studied the ‘nature and operation in mind and society of good activities’ (Baker, 1986: 130). Of course, this is not to say that Bull was influenced by any of Anderson’s specific ideas; as he himself says it was ‘the impact of his mind and his example’ that was crucial. And here it is perhaps worth noting in Anderson certain characteristics that were clearly also present in Bull, at least to some extent – a resolute scepticism, a conviction that ‘pluralism’ is both a fact of social life (at all levels) and something to be valued for itself, a pronounced anti-relativism and a commitment to the values of the academy which have their own logic. It was very much also Anderson’s tone of voice that can be heard in Bull’s sceptical comments about ‘policy prescriptions’ in the closing passages of The Anarchical Society. Wight was almost a polar opposite to Anderson; reserved where Anderson was intellectually loquacious; committed to certain causes where Anderson tended to be a critic by definition; a profoundly traditional and deeply committed Christian where Anderson was a root and branch sceptic of all religions and religious sensibilities. Of course, Wight was interested in the same sorts of things as Bull, and they were friends and colleagues in a way that was simply not possible with Anderson. Wight unquestionably shaped much of Bull’s thinking about

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international politics, an influence Bull was happy to draw attention to in his own subsequent writing (Wight, 1977). And if there were areas of Wight’s thought that were simply alien to Bull – most especially his devotion to a Toynbean philosophy of history and, above all, his concern with theology6 – there was also much that linked them. Like Anderson, Wight was an anti-Utopian, indeed more profoundly so even than Anderson. Hope, he was fond of saying, is a theological, not a political, virtue. And he sometimes suggested that for all its attendant horrors, nuclear annihilation would certainly not be the worst thing that might happen to humankind; rather the progressive evisceration of its moral sense and conversion into a state of consumerist passivity would be far worse (consumerism was also a bugbear of Anderson’s).7 Given this, of course, it is perhaps fortunate that Wight did not live on into the era of the national lottery, Big Brother and Hello magazine! But despite the enormous differences between them, what both Anderson and Wight represented for Bull was a commitment to the variety – of assumptions, of traditions, of types of power, of interests and many other things – he felt was the central reality of international relations and a way – or rather different ways – of defending that variety. And in both Anderson and Wight, for almost completely opposite reasons, there was a rooted hostility to one of the central and dominant intellectual fashions of their day, as it still is (even more so) of ours – that there was a short cut to heaven, and that heaven would and could be built on Earth. This attitude, let me call it ‘anti-Pelagianism’, is very prominent throughout Bull’s work.8 It is manifestly present in his first book The Control of the Arms Race, which famously ends with the robustly antiPelagian remark that ‘the destinies of nations are not decided by simple choices of the Soul’ (Bull, 1961: 212), and can be heard in many of his early papers (O’Neill and Schwarz, 1987; Rengger, 1992: 32–57). It is perhaps especially influential on his celebrated distinction between pluralist and solidarist conceptions of international society. This distinction was first developed, of course, in a paper Bull had written as a young member (he was 29) of the British Committee for the Theory of International Politics9 and later published (Bull, 1966), and while he modified it over the years – and certainly changed his view about the relative merits of pluralism and solidarism, for reasons we will come on to – he never explicitly abandoned it. The origin of the distinction lay in Bull’s reading of debates in international law, where scholars such as Hersch Lauterpacht opposed a ‘neo-Grotian’ or ‘solidarist’ conception to the ‘pluralist’ one favoured by legal positivists such as Oppenheim.10

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Although the intellectual history that underpinned Bull’s case was more than a little shaky, the basic distinction is surely an important one.11 A ‘pluralist’ account of international society, he says in his early presentations, emphasizes a bare minimum of things over which states agree (reciprocal recognition of sovereignty and the rule of non-intervention essentially) and emphasizes further that the rules of international society to which states do subscribe are essentially procedural and do not imply – indeed essentially forswear – the idea of common substantive purposes. In later iterations of this, I think that Bull comes to expand this view, seeing pluralism as the possibility of cooperation around certain kinds of rules that determine the provenance of co-existence.12 For ‘solidarists’, on the other hand, the assumption is that states do – or at least can – have common substantive purposes. Bull suggests, for example, that solidarists wish to place the use of force in international politics under ‘the collective will of the society of states’ but at a deeper level still, they have the substantive purpose of ensuring that states do not (for example) mistreat their citizens.13 For much of his career, Bull was a resolute and uncompromising critic of solidarism and a powerful advocate of pluralism. He was not only critical of modern versions of ‘solidarism’, he was equally critical of older versions; for example the natural law theory found in the work of scholars such as Brian Midgley (Midgley, 1975; Bull, 1979a: 171–81; Midgley, 1979: 260–72), and Michael Donelan (Donelan, 1978, 1990; Dunne, 1998: ch. 7). In his discussion of this exchange (Dunne, 1998: 144–6), Tim Dunne points out that both Midgley and Donelan underestimated the extent of Bull’s moral universalism, citing precisely the defence of the distinction between international and world order in The Anarchical Society that I discussed earlier. Yet this is not quite right, and it is not because it runs together two things, which are, I think, both present in Bull but which are in fact in tension with one another. Throughout his work, Bull is unquestionably a non-relativist in keeping with the influences of both Anderson and Wight. He is a firm believer that there is such a thing as ‘truth’, that we can get to it and that part of the value of scholarly study is to do just that. He also believes that there are moral truths. But in this sense, I think, it is worth making a distinction between a belief in moral truth and a belief in moral universalism. Aristotle was a believer in moral truth, but he was not a moral universalist. This distinction depends, of course, on how you understand the demands and requirements of moral universalism. In this respect it is worth pointing out that in The Anarchical Society, in the chapter discussed earlier, Bull has a very clear sense of what constitutes

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moral ideas and separates moral ideas (such as justice) from ‘considerations of law    or of the dictates of prudence, interest or necessity’. Is Bull suggesting that (for example) a consequentialist account of moral obligation (which might emphasize prudence or interest) and/or an Arisotelian or Burkean one which would certainly emphasize prudence are not really moral ideas? Obviously at one level the answer to this would be no – manifestly they are moral ideas and also moral ideas which have a particular conception of moral truth. But what they are not are morally universalist ideas. In The Anarchical Society, Bull effectively classes moral ideas as a certain class of ideas that are, effectively, deontological and therefore universalist. Universalism here means more than simply opposing (various) different versions of moral relativism – which Bull consistently did. Rather it means talking of a morality of obligations of universal scope, applicable to all who might be affected. In this sense they certainly are ‘universalist’, but in this sense also the note of moral universalism that is, I agree with Dunne, sounded in The Anarchical Society is new. Dunne suggests, again partly correctly I think, that in the few years up to the publication of The Anarchical Society in 1977, and then even more so in his teaching and in the publications he took part in or oversaw until his early death in 1985, Bull came to view international order as increasingly unstable and unable to provide the role he had envisaged for it in his earlier work. This trajectory reaches its apogee in Bull’s Hagey lectures, delivered at the University of Waterloo in 1983, two years before his death (Alderson and Hurrell, 2000b). But it is explicit also in the edited project that was the last flowering of the British Committee (and edited by its two surviving chairs), The Expansion of International Society (Bull and Watson, 1984). Yet a close examination of Bull’s contribution to both, and especially to the Hagey lectures, reveals the extent to which this relatively new (for him) way in which Bull was conceiving of moral truth – i.e. as a version universalism – was affecting his thinking. In the central section of the first Hagey lecture, Bull suggests four conclusions of his analysis. First, that the rights of states or other actors are subject to and limited by the rights of the international community. Secondly, that ‘the rights and benefits to which justice has to be done in the international community are not simply those of states    but those of individual persons throughout the world as a whole. The world we live in is not organized politically as a cosmopolis or world state; it is a system of independent states. But within this system, the idea of the rights and duties of the individual person has come to have a place, albeit an insecure one, and it is our responsibility to seek to extend it’.

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Thirdly, our conception of justice needs to take account of our emerging sense of a world common good (he is specifically referring to things such as the threat of nuclear annihilation, ecological dangers and Malthusian ones). ‘Measures to avoid these dangers, to advance the world common good take us beyond the sense of solidarity or common interests among governments that underlies the international society of states    the world common good to which I refer is the common interest not of states but of the human species in maintaining itself.’ And fourthly, ‘we must give a new prominence to questions of distributive justice in international relations, as opposed to reciprocal or commutative justice’ (Alderson and Hurrell, 2000b: 219–26). These claims go way beyond anything Bull had been prepared to countenance before. They take him beyond the solidarism of his classic distinction (which is a solidarism of states remember) and come close to being a clarion call for the kind of cosmopolitan international theory pioneered 4 years earlier by Beitz (1979) and to which Bull himself refers in a brief note. Of course, at the end of the lecture, Bull also reminds his readers that justice has to be reconciled with order and says that on this point conservatives and revolutionaries are agreed in confronting liberals with the reality that such reconciliation may not always be possible and that, therefore, ‘terrible choices sometimes have to be made’. Most of his supportive commentators, including Dunne, Alderson and Hurrell, have been quick to suggest that this ‘tension’ in Bull’s thought is a permanent one, though it comes to the surface late, and that holding to what Dunne calls a ‘via media in International Relations, between the merchants of theory as emancipation and the sceptics who view theory as power’. Bull helped to create a space for ‘a cautious yet critical attempt to widen the moral horizon’ (Dunne, 1998: 155). The problem, though, is that the notion of a ‘via media’ is simply not viable as a way of characterizing the ‘tension’ (if that is what it is) in Bull’s thought. The normative position Bull adopts in the Hagey lectures is not simply ‘in tension with’ the more pluralist position Bull more generally adopted (and had not abandoned), rather it represents a view about the relationship of moral action to practical affairs, and the possibilities of human agency in flat contradiction with it. At the end of the second Hagey lecture, in which Bull reflected on the ‘revolt against Western dominance’, Bull concludes that the revolt itself, notwithstanding the many tawdry or shallow aspects of it, represents a real striving ‘for political economic and cultural liberation    [and that] these changes do represent at least in their broad direction a forward movement in human affairs and a step towards greater justice in

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international relations’ (Alderson and Hurrell, 2000b: 244). The notion of a ‘forward movement’ in human affairs is enough, I think, to indicate the changed moral assumptions that were now to be guiding Bull’s thought. From an anti-Pelagian position, sceptical of progress – sceptical indeed as the ‘methodological pluralism’ Bull champions makes clear of the idea of progress itself – and the solidaritistic tendencies of natural law, we have moved to one that effectively accepts one of the central assumptions of the dominant, Pelagian sensibility within modern political thought, that one can tell the story of human beings in terms of a story of moral progress, where there is, indeed, a ‘forward’ and a ‘backward’ direction. It is true, of course, that Bull never finally opted for one moral sensibility over the other. Rather for much of the last period of his life he seemed to oscillate between them. In as much as the oscillation first becomes visible in The Anarchical Society, it is clear that the moral vision of The Anarchical Society is a divided one, and that that division was one that remained unresolved at the time of his early and much lamented death.

Pelagianism, anti-Pelagianism and the future of the ‘English School’ It goes without saying that there is much to admire in the thought of Hedley Bull. He always emphasized the element of society in world politics, often – as Stanley Hoffmann rightly insisted (Stanley in Miller and Vincent, 1990) – in the teeth of powerful scepticism or opposition, and either by himself, or by example or direction, did much of the early work on clarifying it as a concept. He wrote pioneering works on arms control and contributed to a number of major books that have rightly shaped a good deal of subsequent reflection in the field, in the history of ideas, in international society and on other topics. His students, friends and admirers have clearly seen in him, as he saw in Anderson and Wight, a mentor to emulate, a style to take further and a set of investigations to continue. For anyone who values intellectual creativity and pluralism, this is all to the good and deserves to be celebrated. Yet in a sense possibly unrealized by such admirers, Bull has laid down a pathway that must be followed and a challenge to be met and it is perhaps as appropriate a way as any of ending this chapter to emphasize both. More than anyone else, Bull put the question of international society at the heart of investigations into international relations. In as much as his admirers work explicitly in his shadow, in as much as the ‘English school’ can be (or has been) reconvened, this is still its central

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idea. Yet as Bull was well aware, the notion of international society is as much a moral notion as it is an explanatory one. Indeed, for Bull, I do not think that these two things could be divorced, though it is also clear that, analytically at least, they can be made separate. Many, of course, would see the via media as recognition of little more than the obvious. As many defenders of the English school would point out (and have pointed out),14 and as the argument about methodological pluralism I touched on earlier emphasizes, Bull tended to be suspicious about the possibility of ‘philosophical’ solutions to essentially ‘practical’ problems. The via media is, then, an eminently practical attempt to ‘save the appearances’ of international society by forcing it to address the major sources of its instability. There is clearly something to this. Bull unquestionably was trying to do something like this and it is a well-established and perfectly natural tendency – especially in fields of practical inquiry such as international relations. The problem is that the way Bull latterly chose to frame the moral problem of international society (especially in The Hagey Lectures, but certainly not only there) does not allow such a via media. Either there is a relatively unproblematic link – at least in theory – between agency and outcome in practical affairs, or there is not. Pelagians of various different stripes must assume that in sketching out the possibilities and advocate ways of achieving this end rather than that one, they can be confident that at least in principle – and recognizing, naturally, that structure as well as agency may supervene and that vested interests, like the poor, are always with us – a clear and unproblematic relation exists between intention, agency and outcome. Moral universalism in anything like its most common modern forms (effectively deontological or utilitarian) certainly assumes this. The problem, as sceptical anti-Pelagians have always pointed out, is that the warrant for this claim has always been tenuous, ontologically, epistemologically and practically. For the theologically minded (like Wight) this mattered little, because God could supervene, if he chose to, over the inevitable consequences of human error.15 That was why hope was a theological, not a political virtue. If it is indeed, just down to us, the prospects – to put it mildly – do not look good, Wight would have said. A similar reading, without the theological overtones, is visible in Anderson’s radical scepticism. Pluralism is the only defensible response to human ethics and politics because the decisions human beings make, both individually and collectively, will not always (Anderson might be tempted to say will not often) lead to the intended consequences. Pluralism is a balance against the inevitable dissonances of the human condition.

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The moral voice that Bull discloses in The Anarchical Society is problematic principally because he cannot choose between these two visions. He does not abandon his earlier scepticism and pluralism, but he adds to them a moral universalism that requires a belief (or set of beliefs) that the earlier scepticism can give no warrant to. This is why Bull’s later writing, both in The Anarchical Society and afterwards often has a distinctly dissonant feel to it, constantly oscillating between appeals to moral universalism but then clawing back with his left hand what he had seemed to be holding out with his right. Yet it is also true, I think, that this in part accounts for much of the appeal of Bull’s work and, indeed that of the English school as a whole. Bull has been much praised, and rightly so I think, for trying to force scholars (and indeed practitioners) of international relations to frame their analysis of the world in ways that recognize the inevitably fragmented quality of human social and political life. This was the source of much of his suspicion of ‘philosophical’ – by which, I think he would have read ‘idealist’ or ‘Utopian’ – solutions to the problems of international relations as well as to his hostility towards the social scientific study of international relations that he famously attacked in his debate with Kaplan (1966). Science, like ‘philosophy’ here, is too abstract to really deliver. Many scholars of international relations would sympathize with these claims and in so far as one does it would seem that to choose between these visions would weaken, rather than strengthen, Bull’s arguments. Just as human practical life is messy and compromised so, inevitably, will be our attempts to understand it and perhaps do it better in the future. I have some sympathy with this claim, but would put it a little differently. What Bull saw, I think, and what made him reluctant to choose, was the costs that would flow from his choice, whichever choice he made. To go further down, the route prefaced in The Anarchical Society and developed in The Hagey Lectures would require the kind of warrant for the possibility (perhaps even the plausibility) of human progress that Bull’s scepticism and pluralism made him deeply suspicious of. Yet to abandon such claims ran the risk of suggesting that human beings did not progress at all and that no progress was possible in human affairs, a claim that Bull would have found repugnant. It is better surely to keep the perhaps imperfect theoretical position he developed – viewed from a ‘purist’ philosophical standpoint – and keep the possibility of progress alive. This is a very human and very attractive view and, as I say, I think accounts, in large part, for the continued appeal of Bull’s ideas and example. Yet it, too, carries with it costs. Not the least of them is that a

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position developed upon it will continually be pulled in one direction or another. Much contemporary writing that draws on the English school (think for example of that of Tim Dunne and Nick Wheeler and, even more so, Andrew Linklater) (Dunne, 1998; Wheeler, 2000; Linklater, 1998), pushes further and further towards a fully cosmopolitan position. Yet other writers (think of Robert Jackson, for example, or James Mayall) (Jackson 2000; Mayall, 2000) insist evermore eloquently for a traditional, sceptical, pluralist vision of international society. Many might see this as a healthy sign, which in terms of the originality and ingeniousness that the aforementioned authors – as well as many others – bring to the task, it certainly is. The problem is that it is also a refusal; a refusal to consider the option that the anti-Pelagians are right. The endless deferral of what is, after all, a fundamental question in the human sciences – how do we understand arguments about human moral (and in extenso, political) progress and what warrant can we give them, if any – cannot in the long term be good even for those who would wish the solidarist, cosmopolitan part of Bull’s vision to triumph. Ultimately it is this refusal that constitutes the biggest weakness of the moral ‘double vision’ – If I may call it that – which Bull bequeathed to his admirers. Isaiah Berlin once wrote that ‘to know the worst, is not always to be liberated from its consequences. Nevertheless, it is preferable to ignorance’ (Berlin, 1981: 79). Those who wish that the hopes that Bull entertained will not always be dashed by the fears that he also possessed should, I think, develop an account of the possibility and plausibility of human progress that could sustain them. This is not a request for a ‘philosophical solution’ to a practical problem; indeed in most respects it is the exact opposite. It is asking those devotees of the English school who wish to build on the understandings offered by Bull to begin to develop practical ‘solutions’ to a fundamental philosophical problem. And in embarking on such a task, the ’double vision’ of which I spoke earlier would finally be exorcized; for they would have to admit, at least in principle, that they might finally discover the worst.

Acknowledgements For discussions over some years now about the character, provenance and coherence of the so-called ‘English school’ I am grateful to Will Bain, Barry Buzan, Tim Dunne, Bob Jackson, Andrew Linklater, Richard Little, Jennifer Jackson Preece, Hidemi Suganami, Nick Wheeler and Peter Wilson. For my specific arguments here, special thanks (and no blame) should go – as always – to my particular partners in intellectual crime;

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Chris Brown, Ian Hall and Renee Jeffery; and for written comments on an earlier version of the essay, to Ian Hall (again), Barry Buzan, Richard Little and John Williams.

Notes 1. I think a similar point could be made about Morgenthau for example, but since I have touched on this elsewhere, will not discuss it here. 2. This essay can be read as a continuation and refinement of an earlier argument of mine, see Rengger (1992). This essay sought to argue that in the form in which it had become widely known – that is to say in the context of the so-called ‘English school’ – the idea of ‘international society’ was largely incoherent and unable to sustain the weight such writers wished to put on it. Later versions of the argument have appeared in Rengger (1996, 2000: ch. 2). The present essay seeks to develop this argument by suggesting that it is Bull’s moral sensibility that is largely to blame and that, for example, that of Martin Wight (and perhaps that of Herbert Butterfield as well) would be far less susceptible to the particular charges I lay at its door in the present essay. Those who wish to see just how different in fact the work of Butterfield and Wight were from Bull and later English school writers will have to await the studies being prepared by Ian Hall (Wight) and Michael Bentley (Butterfield). However, it is Bull’s view that has largely prevailed in English school scholarship, in part because of its resolutely secular character but also because it allows very different advocates of an English school approach to derive what they wish from it. One implication of this is, of course, that – considered at least as a coherent approach – there is no English school at all. For a rather different argument that points to the same conclusion, see Hall (2001). Another, and the one I am concerned to explore here, is that Bull’s moral sensibility lays him, and those who broadly follow him, open to certain particular theoretical fashions that effectively destroy what is valuable and worthwhile about his view of world politics and convert it into something else. 3. The next few paragraphs borrow some locutions from the 1992 article cited above. 4. In an earlier piece (Rengger, 2000: Introduction) I quoted Raymond Aron’s claim that order had to be seen as both explanatory and normative at one and the same time. It is to this that Bull is pointing here, I think. 5. This is one of the central claims of the attempt to ‘reconvene’ the English School by Barry Buzan, Richard Little and others. Perhaps the fullest extant discussion of this is in Buzan (2004a). 6. The influence of Arnold Toynbee on Wight was enormous even when – as they often did – they disagreed. Reading Wight’s masterful response and criticism of Volume VII of Toynbee’s A Study of History, it is clear just how much Wight moved in a Toynbean universe even though on the particular issue discussed here – the existence and character of Universal Churches – Wight did not agree with Toynbee. For Wight’s critique see Toynbee (1954: 737–48). For a penetrating discussion of the relationship between Wight and Toynbee see Ian Hall (2003).

50 The Contribution to the Study of International Relations 7. Those interested in a full appreciation of the power and paradoxes of Wight’s thought, should await the intellectual biography of Wight by Ian Hall, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in International Political Thought series. 8. Pelagius, of course, believed that salvation could be achieved on earth by good works. His great opponent was St. Augustine. I would argue that the anti-Pelagian sensibility has been a powerful if subliminal aspect of twentieth-century political thought in general: though, interestingly it has been especially prominent in international relations. Other prominent anti-Pelagians whose focus was the international would include Hans Morgenthau and Raymond Aron. Of course, by casting it as a ‘sensibility’– a set of background assumptions – I am suggesting that it can have a number of very different specific articulations. And so, indeed, it has had. I am currently working on a book that hopes to discuss some particularly influential articulations (and of course defend the version I prefer). 9. The best account of the committee and its role in generating ideas associated with the English school is that of Dunne (1998). 10. An excellent treatment of Lauterpacht’s role in all this can be found in Jeffery (2004). 11. A much less shaky, and profoundly interesting, account of the evolution of International Law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that of Koskenniemi (2002). 12. I am grateful to Barry Buzan to drawing my attention to this point. 13. There has been a tendency is some work (for example in Dunne, 1998) to run together the ‘Bullian’ use of pluralist and solidarist accounts with other accounts that are, at least superficially, not that different; for example, Terry Nardin’s (1983) distinction between purposive and non-purposive association. This is, however, mistaken, I think. Nardin’s account comes from a very different source (Oakeshott’s [1975] account of the polarized character of European political thought), and is not framed the same way at all. Though there are certainly some points of contact, they should be understood as representing rival and not complementary ways of characterizing major differences in international society. 14. Including Buzan, Little and Williams both on the panel on Bull at the BISA conference in 2004 and in written comments to me about the earlier version of this chapter presented there. 15. Indeed for Christians of Wight’s dispensation, this is effectively what the incarnation was.

3 Hedley Bull, ‘Embedded Cosmopolitanism’, and the Pluralist–Solidarist Debate João M. Almeida

Towards the end of The Anarchical Society, Bull (2002: 304) argued that the ‘prospects for international society are bound up with the prospects of the cosmopolitan culture’. He questioned whether a ‘cosmopolitan culture’ was emerging at the time that he wrote his central work. To a great extent, this concern with cosmopolitanism derived from Bull’s view that international society can only work if there are limits to political and cultural diversity, otherwise it may end in a state of war as realists predict. After the publication of The Anarchical Society, Bull became increasingly concerned with the consequences of what he considered the most important development of the twentieth century: the transition from a ‘European to a global international order’. Bull (2000a: 158) gives the reason for his concern in his short essay on ‘Natural Law and International Relations’, ‘now that there exists a global international society that has clearly outgrown its originally European social or cultural base    doubts may be entertained as to whether any genuinely universal society or culture has yet taken its place’. In a similar vein, in a paper on ‘The European International Order’, Bull asked whether the transition from a European to a global international society could destroy the common international cultural identity. If so, it would have devastating consequences for world order. This explains the nature of the central research questions posed by Bull at that moment: Whether classical international society was ‘intrinsically European’? What is the nature of ‘European or Western culture or civilisation’? ‘How dependent is international law (and how dependent are other rules and institutions of international society) on the existence of a common culture?’ And ‘how far is it true that in the global international society of today there is no common culture?’1 From this set of questions, it is quite clear that Bull was very conscious that a legitimate and workable international 51

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society, although respecting cultural pluralism, ought to rest on some form of cosmopolitan foundations. Unfortunately, Bull was not able to develop a satisfactory approach to study the impact of cosmopolitanism in international society. His early critique of solidarism, in the paper on ‘the Grotian tradition’, revealed a deep scepticism of cosmopolitanism. In The Anarchical Society, following Martin Wight, he identifies cosmopolitanism with revolutionism and, in the Third Part of the book, is very critical of cosmopolitan projects to redefine world order. Bull’s scepticism of cosmopolitanism emerges more clearly in his views on human rights and in his fear regarding the Western imposition of universal ideological or cultural homogeneity. Even in the Hagey Lectures, where Bull’s (2000c: 221) sensitivity regarding cosmopolitanism is more evident, he warned that ‘the new international law and morality of human rights is dogged by a lack of consensus    about the meaning of these rights and the priorities among them’. One of the purposes of this chapter is to offer an explanation for Bull’s scepticism of cosmopolitanism. Thus, the first part of the chapter focuses on Bull’s deep scepticism of cosmopolitanism, which, in my view, derives from his reading of the origins and evolution of modern international society. However, and contrary to Bull’s view, my argument is that cosmopolitanism has been a central element of modern international society. In the second part of the chapter, I try to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is embedded in the structure of modern international order since the Peace of Westphalia. Thus, I discuss a historical case, the issue of religious rights in the early modern period, which reveals the impact of ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ in the constitution of international society. The third and final part of the chapter locates the idea of ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ in the current work of the English School, particularly in the context of the pluralist–solidarist debate.

Bull’s deep scepticism of cosmopolitanism Bull’s assessment of universal principles and cosmopolitan values is rather complex. On some occasions, those principles and values seem to be compatible with a political order structured around the sovereign state, while on other occasions they are seen to clash with the notion of international society. Indeed, on balance, this last position seems to prevail. For instance the argument that runs throughout The Anarchical Society is that the normative and political framework provided by international society sets strong limits on the promotion of universal values

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and principles. In this regard, we need to know why Bull’s conception of international society is so inhospitable to cosmopolitanism. I believe that we find the answer in Bull’s vision of the historical evolution of modern international society. Bull sees the process of state building in early modern Europe as opposed to medieval imperialism, and quite rightly so. Given that both the Emperor and the Pope claimed that they were the symbols of universal principles and cosmopolitan values, one of the unfortunate consequences, in the work of Bull, is the identification – at the intellectual level – between medieval imperialism and cosmopolitanism and – at the political and normative level – between medieval imperialism and forms of universal political organization other than the states system. Therefore, Bull claims, the modern sovereign state and the system of states, emerged in opposition to cosmopolitan and universal principles and values. Bull’s understanding of the historical origins of modern international society was deeply influenced by Wight. In his work on the historical origin of the modern ‘system of states’, Wight finds a strong cultural unity, in the medieval international society, which was associated with the Christian religion. The term societas christiana characterizes precisely such a religious unity. In addition to Christian unity, the ideology of empire was the other element that gave unity to medieval politics. In fact, we can find two ideologies of empire: The Christian doctrine, which considered the Pope as dominus mundi, or ‘lord of all mankind’ (Wight, 1977: 26–9); and, the Roman conception, which sees continuity between the authority of the Roman Emperor and the authority of the medieval Holy Roman Emperor.2 In his understanding of medieval politics, Wight clearly emphasized the ‘unity rather than separateness’, ‘hierarchy rather than equality’, the Empire’s claim to universal jurisdiction in temporal matters and ‘[t]he universal government of the papacy’ (Wight, 1977: 27–8). Therefore, according to Wight, the emergence of the modern system of sovereign states had to wait for the collapse of both the papal and the imperial sovereign authority. One of Wight’s most innovative moves was to associate medieval unity and imperial order with cosmopolitanism. Referring to the liberal internationalism of President Wilson, Wight observed that When we study the origins of the states-system, we see that the Wilsonian view prescribes for the future a reversal of the historical development of the past. Western civilization began with an impressive system of ‘world government’ within the limits of Western Christendom, in the shape of papal monarchy. (Wight, 1977: 149)

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So for Wight, the medieval empire represents a revolutionist project that threatens the idea of a society of states. A familiar aspect of the intellectual history of the modern European states-system has been the way in which its theory has fallen into three main traditions. Those whose outlook has been missionary and messianic have emphasized the ideal unity of international society as the standard for condemning the empirical divisions within the society and believing them to be transitory. They implicitly repudiate the validity of the states-system. (Wight, 1977: 38–9) In this regard, the break between the medieval imperial international society and the modern anarchical states system corresponds to the distinction between the traditions of revolutionism and rationalism. Initially, Bull seems to resist identifying cosmopolitanism with revolutionism, offering instead a picture of what one could call ‘medieval solidarism’. The historical narrative starts with the transition from medieval to modern politics, which corresponds to the period that Bull (2002: 26–31) calls the ‘Christian international society’. Such a society is characterized by the following features. It rests, first, on Christian values. Second, there is ‘[n]o clear guidance’ regarding the members of international society. Third, natural law was considered to be the central source of international law. Finally, the doctrine of the just war, specifically in the case of jus ad bellum, denoted a solidarist approach to the use of force in international relations. In intellectual terms, Bull identifies the Christian political society with the ‘tradition of natural law’ (Bull, 2002: 28), in which the central figure was Grotius. This explains in part why he emerges from this narrative as an ambivalent thinker. On the one hand, there is the ‘modern’ Grotius, one of the founding fathers of anti-imperial international law (Bull, 1990). On the other hand, there is the ‘medieval’ Grotius, who could not escape the influence of Christian values, and whose views concerning the nature of international society revealed solidarist and cosmopolitan influences (Bull, 2000d). Therefore, medieval solidarists not only were unable to develop a ‘modern’ conception of international society – for instance they did not formulate properly the notion of sovereign statehood – but their thought was very much influenced by universalism; a legacy of the medieval period. In this regard, Bull cannot avoid following Wight’s association between cosmopolitanism and revolutionism. Elsewhere in The Anarchical Society, he refers to the ‘Kantian or universalist tradition’, identifying two central arguments within that tradition. From an analytical

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perspective, the ‘universalist view’ emphasizes ‘the transnational social bonds that link the individual human beings’, and the idea of the ‘community of mankind’. In ethical terms, the ‘universalist view of international morality’ stresses that ‘there are moral imperatives in the field of international relations limiting the actions of states’. Bull admits that the international political order, proposed by the ‘Kantian tradition’, ‘when it comes into being will sweep the system of states into limbo’. The final result would be ‘the overthrow of the system of states and its replacement by a cosmopolitan society’ (Bull, 2002: 24–5).3 We find here an opposition between the concept of international society and the idea of a cosmopolitan world society. Such an opposition is based on the historical narrative that Bull learned from Wight. In his account of the origins of modern international society, Bull also sees the emergence of the states system as resulting from the collapse of the hierarchical, universalistic medieval political system. For Bull, the formation of the modern international society went through two defining moments. The first was the creation of the basic element of modern politics, ‘when the state came to be fully articulated’ (Bull, 2002: 31). The second moment is the consequence of the first: sovereign states, by consenting to common institutions such as ‘international law’, ‘the diplomatic system’, the ‘balance of power’, and the ‘notion of a great power’, give rise to a society of states (Bull, 2002: 35–6). Such a pluralist form of international order was able to free itself of ‘the universalist or solidarist assumptions inherited from medieval times’ (Bull, 2002: 34). In Bull’s historical account, the Peace of Westphalia occupies a privileged place in the sense that it marks the beginning of a modern, pluralist, international society.4 Two elements should be stressed: on the one hand, the modernity of the society of states, in opposition to medieval political society; and on the other hand, its anti-imperial and anti-cosmopolitan nature, in opposition to the imperial and universalistic tendencies of the medieval imperial political system. The link between medieval imperialism and cosmopolitan and universal principles and values has far-reaching implications. Given that the modern states system emerged as a reaction against medieval imperialism, cosmopolitan principles and universal values threaten the survival of the society of states. It is in this sense that projects of universal political order other than the states system are understood as forms of ‘neo-medievalism’, and cosmopolitan theories constitute the tradition of revolutionism. The problem is not so much to associate some universalist theories with views that propose the overthrow of international society of states; indeed, some of those theories defend that goal. The

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problem lies rather in the association of all political theories which have cosmopolitan elements with the ‘revolutionary tradition’. This leads Bull to view international society as incompatible with cosmopolitan and universal principles and values. In this regard, he is unable to fully explore the potentialities of the so-called ‘rationalist’ authors, for all of them have clear universalist elements in their thought. Finally, Bull makes it much harder to develop a conception of international society able to integrate both statist and non-statist and universalist elements.5 We can, however, offer a different historical account of the emergence of modern international society, where cosmopolitanism has a central place.

‘Embedded cosmopolitanism’: Religious rights, the secular state and the origins of modern international society So far, I have argued that Bull’s criticism of solidarism and cosmopolitanism is rooted in his view of the historical formation of modern international society. Such a sceptical attitude towards cosmopolitanism leads Bull to express doubts about the possibility of a ‘cosmopolitan culture’, despite what he says at the very end of The Anarchical Society. I want to argue now that cosmopolitanism has considerably influenced the nature of modern international society and we do not need to wait for a distant future to see its emergence. Rather than ‘cosmopolitan culture’, I shall use the expression ‘embedded cosmopolitanism in the structure of international society’. I will discuss ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ by looking at the question of religious rights in early modern international society, and attempt to demonstrate that the emergence of sovereign statehood and the states system was not inhospitable to the idea of minority rights. This historical case, in my view, demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is embedded, and has been from the very beginning, in the political and normative structures of modern international society. In the period from 1555 to 1648, European politics were largely dominated by the problems raised by the ‘politicization of religion’, which was the result of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. The initial consequence of the connection between religion and politics was the ‘confessional state’, enjoying an absolutist authority over religion. The ‘sacralization’ of the early modern state gave an absolutist character to the principle cuius regio, eius religio, which was internationally confirmed in the Peace of Augsburg. However, this is just half of the story. The account of the ‘politicization of religion’ is not complete if we ignore the theories of resistance to

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the ruler’s authority, largely associated with the Reformation, in particular with the ‘Second Reformation’. Here, I shall emphasize the role of the ’Huguenot ideology’, which emerged in France in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Huguenots, however, faced a crucial problem: Although their political ideology served to justify resistance and rebellion against the power of the rulers, they also had to build theories to legitimize sovereign authority. As I will argue, the result was a humanist theory of sovereign statehood, in which the authority of the sovereign faces constitutional limits and respects the rights of religious minorities. Yet, as we shall see, such a humanist conception of state authority was able to maintain the links with the radical origins of the theories of resistance. The Peace of Westphalia confirmed this constitutional conception of the modern sovereign state. In other words, the Treaties recognized the inclusion of individual rights in the normative structure of international society. To grasp the historical significance of the Peace of Westphalia, it is essential to understand the notion of ‘confessionalization’. According to an historian of early modern Europe, ‘between 1560 and 1650, Europe’s history was shaped by what we call “confession”’ (Schilling, 1995: 641). After the breakdown of medieval Christianity, the three modern Christian religions defined their religious doctrine by an explicit statement called ‘confession’. The Confession of Augsburg (1530) and the Book of Concord (1580) defined Lutheran religious principles. The Calvinist confession was stated in the Helvetic Confessions (1536, 1566). Finally, the nature of early modern Catholicism was formulated in the ‘Tridentine Profession of Faith’ (1564), which resulted from the Council of Trent. For modern political history the significance of these confessions lies in their alliance with the early modern state, where ‘religion and politics, state and church were structurally linked together’ (Schilling, 1992: 208). In such a ‘politico-religious’ context, religion served a political function: the confessionalization of the state. As a result, states pursued a religious function to guarantee the survival of their religion against the threat of other religions. The princes acted as defensor ecclesiae, that is, as defenders of the church (Schilling, 1995: 656). Due to the alliance between the state and the religion, the fragmentation of Christianism turned into a process of territorialization of the different Christian confessions. In this regard, confessionalization served to consolidate the territorial state system. It was in this context that the ius reformandi of the princes in religious matters was recognized giving thus origin to the formula ‘whose the rule, his the religion’, or cuius regio, eius religio: the imposition by the ruler of a single faith on all

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subjects (Bradly, 1995: 352–3).6 The Peace of Augsburg, in 1555, recognized this absolutist principle, which threatened religious freedom. After Augsburg, the sacral state dominated the politics of the Empire, and religious minorities lived in a precarious situation (Parker, 1979: 49–54). During this period of ‘princely confessional absolutism’, in the domain of religion, rulers did not face limits on their authority in relations with the ruled. The end of this state of affairs had to wait until the Peace of Westphalia. To fully understand how the ‘sacral state’ was replaced by the ‘secular state’, and the rights of religious minorities were recognized, it is important to briefly look at religious conflicts that started elsewhere in Europe; in particular, the religious wars in France, which provided the political context for the emergence of influential political doctrines. After a period of relative toleration, the ‘confessionalization’ of the French state took an extremely violent turn with the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, on 24 August 1572. With the events of the summer of 1572, the Huguenots ceased to see religious wars as a conflict with the radical Catholics, but as a ‘direct revolutionary confrontation with the Valois monarchy’ (Skinner, 1978: 252). Their thinkers and polemicists started to denounce the tyranny of the rulers, and created the ’monarchomach’ theories of resistance (Prestwich, 1985: 73). Quite revealingly, the ‘great monarchomach classics’ were published in the 7 years after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew (Yardeni, 1985: 318). The defence of the monarchy was finally abandoned and the main aim of these works was ‘to justify a direct attack on the Valois monarchy’ (Skinner, 1978: 304–5). With the emergence of these theories the Huguenots underwent a further transformation: the political movement became also a revolutionary movement. In the words of Zagorin (1982: 66), the massacres of 1572 drove the Huguenots ‘to adopt a new and much bolder ideological position’. Such a revolutionary turn had to meet two vital political needs. First, they had to develop a moral theory able to justify the right of resistance to sovereign authority. Second, they had to be able to build a theory of the state which could include the rights of religious minorities (Skinner, 1978: 310). The Huguenot political thinkers developed two arguments to defend the rights of resistance against the tyranny of the monarchy. The ‘constitutional’ argument rested on a reading of the ancient constitutions as imposing constitutional limits on the authority of the ruler. Francois Hotman’s Francogallia constituted the earliest exposition of this theory. Relying on, or inventing, one French constitutional history, Hotman put forward a theory of popular sovereignty, where the right

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of resistance lies in the representative assemblies. In Hotman’s account, it is the estates that have the authority to restrain the power of the monarch. The second argument, with more radical implications, used the language of natural rights, and was developed in Vindicae contra Tyrannos. For the author, ‘the original and fundamental condition of the people must be one of natural liberty    any legitimate political society must originate in an act of free consent on the part of the whole populace’ (Skinner, 1978: 320). The natural law turn provided the argument that the community enjoyed the right to change the rulers, and thus the justification for popular revolution against an illegitimate government. Deriving the right of resistance from the collective right of the community to determine political life, the radical Huguenots constructed the notion of popular sovereignty. Now, the Huguenots could morally justify resistance against the sovereign. However, at this point, the Huguenots faced further theoretical complications. Being a minority, the Huguenots needed to appeal to the people in order to construct a legitimate theory of political revolution. Yet, because they were a minority, the argument of popular sovereignty could be turned against them, as indeed happened later when the Catholic League adopted the theory of popular sovereignty, and used it as a justification for a confessional Catholic France. The possibility of a clash between popular sovereignty and the rights of religious minorities became evident. Therefore, the Huguenots needed a theory of the state capable of protecting the religious rights of minorities; in other words, a theory of the state in which the exercise of sovereign authority was limited by the right of religious freedom, and not a theory of sovereignty where the people had the right to oblige the ruler to follow a true religion. The difference between the former and the latter corresponds to the distance that separates the secular state from the confessional state. Therefore, the Huguenots needed to secularize the state, which they had not been able to do until the end of the 1570s. The crucial political move was the ‘rapprochement between the Huguenots and the Politiques’ at the beginning of the 1580s (Yardeni, 1985: 324–5). The Politiques was the party of the moderate Catholics with strong humanist and republican influences, which elaborated two arguments to justify religious toleration: One based on a ‘principled’ defence of religious freedom; and the other, resting on a ‘political’ view of religious freedom (Skinner, 1978: 244–54). The first argument arose out of the humanist belief that ‘there must be a common, universal truth underlying all the major religions of the world’. The immediate implications of this view were, first, that everyone agrees on a basic

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truth and, second, that there is ‘an unavoidable uncertainty at the heart of our religious beliefs’ (Skinner, 1978: 244–7). These views destroy the justification for religious persecution: First, there is no ‘true’ religion; second, all individuals who embrace a different religion are individuals like us. The ‘political’ argument denied the value of religious uniformity in name of the preservation of the political community. This demonstrates that a theory of natural rights was necessary but not sufficient to recognize religious rights. Two other ideas required were a humanist approach to politics and a secular conception of the state. The humanist influence provoked an important modification in the Huguenot political thought, which started to stress the role of the king, not in imposing the true religion but in protecting religious minorities. A constitutional and secular solution to the religious conflicts was achieved during the reign of Henry IV, with the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes. The politique France became a model of a ’tolerant society’ for all Europe. If the initial consequence of the ‘politicization of religion’ was the emergence of the confessional state enjoying absolutist authority in ecclesiastical matters, the second consequence of the same process was the emergence of the idea of religious rights, in the context of the French religious wars. Moreover, this can be seen as one of the first examples of the influence of the ideology of natural rights in modern politics. The other fundamental development was the construction of a secular theory of the state. It was this meeting of the Huguenots’ ideology of natural rights with the humanist ideology of the Politiques that gave a significant character to French politics in the second half of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the question asked by the German humanists was, can the ‘French model’, a secular state where a religious minority enjoys religious rights, replace the confessional states of the Holy Roman Empire? (Burke, 1990; Spitz, 1990). A student of the history of the German Empire has referred to the idea of religious freedom in the Empire as follows: confessionalization    acted as a catalyst for religious, political, and societal opposition, particularly within territories. So as confessional pressure was applied in order to unify state, church, and society, it was confessional loyalty    which continually stirred up a fundamental opposition to the presumptions of the ruling authority, impelling individuals and social groups    to resist the early modern autocratic state as it strove to abolish traditional liberties in order to build a uniform society of subjects. (Schilling, 1992: 239)

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This shows the impact of the language of rights, and its attendant notion of resistance, in the politics of the German Empire. Moreover, the politics of resistance seems to have grown as the counterpart of the process of state formation. In the particular case of religion, the idea of liberty of conscience grew as a reaction against the confessional state. The second idea found here is the association between resistance to state authority with the protection of ‘traditional liberties’, which in turn linked the modern notion of religious freedom with medieval conceptions of rights and constitutional limits on political authority. As with the Politiques in France, a ‘humanist political school in the Empire’ also reacted against religious conflicts (Weber, 1995). The core idea of this school was the republican notion of ‘common good’. At the civil level, the common good meant the respect for individual autonomy: ‘the first public society is the village, not the home’ (Weber, 1995: 904). In modern language, politics was restricted to the public sphere. At the public level, the political maxim was ‘the conservation of the state by means of a moderated reason of state’. The German humanists adopted the distinction made earlier by thinkers such as Bodin and Lipsius between a ‘true reason of state’ and a ‘false reason of state’. The former was the only legitimate one (Weber, 1995: 897). The political consequence of the arrival of the politica as a ‘humanist science of government’ was the diffusion among the princes of the republican formula that ‘the kingdom can only be preserved if the power of the king is limited and is used for the common good’ (Weber, 1995: 897). One of the specific limits to the authority of the rulers was the rights of religious minorities. It became widely accepted in the Empire that the respect for freedom of conscience in matters of religion was part of the pursuit of the public good. It is in this context that we should approach the question of religion in the Peace of Westphalia. The Treaty of Osnabruck established religious freedom in three areas.7 First, it rejected the confessional principle, recognized in Augsburg, that the ruler enjoyed the right to define the religion of the ruled. If a ruler were to change religion, he could not change the religion of his subjects. This was particularly important in those cases of rulers who changed from Lutheranism to Calvinism, which was recognized by the Imperial Law as the third legal religion. Second, it gave limited toleration to religious minorities to freely practice their religion in privacy. Finally, religious considerations could not be used as a reason to deprive individuals of certain civil and social rights. All these provisions, severely limiting the rulers’ jus reformandi,

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seem to distance the religious Peace of Westphalia from the Religious Peace of Augsburg. As it has been pointed out, there are also elements of continuity between the religious Peace of Augsburg and that of Westphalia. For example, the principle cuius regio, eius religio continued to be invoked. How should we explain this apparent puzzle? Part of the explanation lies in the urge to restore the Imperial Constitution. After all, the Peace of Augsburg was seen as marking the beginning of religious pluralism in the Empire. Moreover, the Emperor was still perceived by many Protestants as a threat to their religious rights. In this regard, the Treaty of Osnabruck confirmed the role of the Protestant states in defending the religious freedom of their subjects. This is the reason why, after the Peace of Westphalia, there were still Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic states; and this confessional division was quite important in the life of the Empire. However, in the case of religious rights, as happened in the sixteenth-century France, it is the process of secularization that should be emphasized. From around 1650, when politics began to be uncoupled both in theory and practice, confessionalization lost its basis    This change opened the way to a major transition. The confessional state of the earlier part of this era, which devoted itself to the victory of true doctrine in Europe and the salvation of its subjects’ souls, gave place to the secular, tolerant administrative state of the later period, which pursued secular raison d’état externally and the ‘common good’    within. (Schilling, 1995: 670) Although we should not overemphasize the process of secularization, or the end of the ‘confessional age’, the religious peace of Westphalia settled the religious affairs of the Empire in such a way that religion never produced another great war in a region that remained characterized by multi-confessionalism among its inhabitants. To a large extent, the significance of the Peace of Westphalia lies in the domain of the recognition of religious rights. As an historian noted, ‘religion no longer dominated international relations as it once had done’ (Parker, 1987: 218). At the international level, religious pluralism and toleration were accepted; and at the domestic level, religious issues gradually became part of the private sphere of individual lives. In this regard, the religious clauses of the Peace of Westphalia constituted a break with the doctrine of ‘confessional absolutism’. The ‘confessionally neutral state’ replaced the ‘confessional state’, and the result was ‘a decoupling of confession

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and politics’ (Schilling, 1992: 245). To a certain extent, the recognition of the rights of religious minorities demonstrated that universal values were integrated, from the emergence of modern international order, in the constitutional structures of the sovereign state and the normative structure of international society. The historical case of religious rights directly challenges Bull’s scepticism towards cosmopolitanism. As we saw in the first section of the chapter, Bull’s historical interpretation of the emergence of modern international society is based on three propositions: First, medieval international society was strongly influenced by cosmopolitanism or universalism; secondly, modern international society, in many ways, emerged as a reaction against medievalism. However, from these two first propositions, Bull’s third proposition does not necessarily follow: Modern international society also emerged as a reaction against cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, as we saw in our discussion of religious rights, from the very beginning universal principles influenced the emergence of modern international society. After decades of violence, revolutions and wars, the participants in European politics understood that political order required respect for universal rights. The nature of early modern international order was deeply influenced by cosmopolitan political ideologies; in particular, natural legal humanism and republican secularism. Crucially, some principles deriving from these ideologies were constitutionally embedded in the sovereign state. Hence, my term ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. Therefore, and contrary to Bull’s claim, the society of states is not inhospitable to universalism.

Embedded cosmopolitanism and the pluralist–solidarist debate When thinking about cosmopolitanism and international society, the first distinction that we should make is between ideological cosmopolitanism and material cosmopolitanism. The former refers to universal ideas, principles and values that have an impact on the nature of international order. It is possible to discern three different types of ideological cosmopolitanism: state cosmopolitanism, through the universalization of a cosmopolitan model of the sovereign state, be it the liberal-democratic, the socialist or the Islamic state;8 economic cosmopolitanism, which refers to the universal principles that legitimize the liberal economic order;9 and humanitarian cosmopolitanism, which refers, obviously, to the existence of universal human rights.10 On the other hand, ‘material cosmopolitanism’ includes the non-ideological aspects of the notion of world

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society that contribute to the universalization of world politics and the world economy.11 As it is quite clear, this chapter discusses the impact of a particular type of ideological cosmopolitanism, ‘humanitarian cosmopolitanism’, in international society. However, it takes a rather different approach from that we usually find in the work of the English School, including both its founding and its current members. One idea that is common to English School thinking, from Wight and Bull to the ‘new solidarists’ such as Barry Buzan, Tim Dunne, Andrew Linklater and Nicholas Wheeler, is the association between cosmopolitanism and the term ‘revolution’. As we all know, for Wight, cosmopolitanism belonged to the ‘Revolutionary tradition’. As we saw above, Bull did not entirely escape the influence of his mentor. Buzan (2004a) associates cosmopolitanism with the emergence of a world society, which would result from a structural transformation from the ‘pluralist’ international society. For Linklater (1998), cosmopolitanism, and the redefinition of the notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘citizenship’, is the central element of a possible ‘post-Westphalian international society’. Finally, for Dunne and Wheeler, a solidarist world order, and cosmopolitanism, requires the end of the classical pluralist international order (Dunne, 1998; Wheeler, 2000). The central problem with all these arguments is the excessive weight that they place on cosmopolitanism. The emergence of cosmopolitan political principles and values demand a structural transformation from ‘international society’ or from a ‘Westpahlian’ or a ‘pluralist’ international order, to ‘world society’ or to a ‘post-Westphalian’ or ‘solidarist’ international order, respectively. By relying so much on the need for structural transformations, these arguments are quite vulnerable to criticism, and indeed facilitate the task of those with more sceptical minds, such as Robert Jackson and James Mayall. It is not at all difficult to find plausible arguments to claim that we still live in a pluralist or a Westphalian international society or that any reference to a structural transformation is premature (Jackson, 2000; Mayall, 2000). Moreover, the new solidarists are not able to develop a conception of order for the whole world but only for parts of it, normally the North Atlantic or European regions (including Australia, Japan, and New Zealand). The solidarist order that respects human rights and accepts humanitarian interventions as legitimate is limited to Europe and to North America. Linklater’s ‘post Westphalian conceptions of citizenship and sovereignty’ hardly apply beyond the European Union. Even Buzan’s idea of ‘world society’ is much stronger in the North Atlantic area than in the rest of the globe. Quite ironically, we find in the new solidarists the same distinction between the West

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and Europe and the rest of the world that we also find in Bull and Adam Watson, and to a certain extent in Wight. Whereas the latter attempt to explain the ‘expansion of modern international society’ from Europe to the rest of the world, the former seek to convince a more sceptical audience how ‘solidarism’, a ‘post-Westphalian sovereignty and citizenship’ and ‘world society’ will expand from the West and Europe to the non-Western world. These unexpected similarities between, on the one hand, Bull, Watson and Wight and, on the other hand, Buzan, Dunne, Linklater and Wheeler derive from a common interpretation of the historical evolution of modern international society. This is, I believe, the fundamental problem. One of the defining marks of the English School is the attempt to identify historical periods with types of political order or with intellectual traditions. One possible reading of Wight’s Lectures on ‘International Theory’ allows us to identify ‘Revolutionism’ with medieval political order, ‘Realism’ with the transition to the modern states system, ‘the long interval of realism’ in Wight’s words, and ‘Rationalism’ with modern international society (Wight, 1991). Bull offers two variations of this historical narrative. On the one hand, the three types of orders, ‘world society’, ‘international society’ and ‘international system’, are respectively associated with medieval political society, with the Thirty Years’ War and with the modern international order. On the other hand, as I discussed above, Bull’s historical narrative evolves from ‘medieval solidarism’, through anarchical realism (Thirty Years’ War), to modern pluralism. The nature of international order during the twentieth century is more ambiguous, and both Bull and Wight find a permanent tension between realism, rationalism, and revolutionism or between international system, international society and world society (Bull, 2002: 36–9).12 One thing, though, remains unchangeable: Despite some revolutionary attempts, cosmopolitanism or solidarism are always marginal or premature. There may be some interesting variations, but there is always one sure conclusion: modern international society has been quite inhospitable to cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is either identified with medievalism or treated as revolutionary. Interestingly enough, the new solidarists and their ‘pluralist’ critics, essentially, share this historical narrative. The less historically minded, such as Buzan, Dunne and Wheeler, simply, and uncritically, accept it. The more historically oriented, such as Jackson, Linklater and Mayall, do not fundamentally dispute it. They all accept Wight’s and Bull’s interpretation of the transition from medieval to modern international politics, and the ‘pluralist’ reading of the nature of modern international

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order. In fact, the major difference between ‘solidarist’ minds, such as Buzan, Dunne, Linklater and Wheeler, and more ‘pluralist’ minds, like Jackson and Mayall, is that the former expect or welcome the ‘cosmopolitan revolution’ and the latter are sceptical about its prospects, or find it premature. The acceptance of this conventional historical narrative deeply affects the interpretation of the place of cosmopolitanism in modern world politics: historically, it has been marginal; conceptually, it serves as the foundation for an alternative conception of world order, in opposition to the idea of international society. If for a moment, we step outside the English School debates and narratives, it seems quite extraordinary to see cosmopolitanism as part of a revolutionary tradition, or to argue that a cosmopolitan world order demands a structural transformation from modernity. A proper understanding of political history leads one to conclude that cosmopolitanism is one of the defining features of modernity. Indeed, for many great political thinkers and historians, modernity is the age of cosmopolitan ideas and values. One of the most peculiar things about the English School, since the days of the British Committee to the current BISA and ISA meetings of the ‘reconvened school’, is the separation between cosmopolitanism and modernity. It is my belief that rather than associating cosmopolitanism with structural revolutions, it is time to see it as a prominent and defining element of modern international society. The separation between cosmopolitanism and modern international society has also a substantial impact on the solidarist–pluralist debate. In the context of English School thinking, it is possible to identify three distinct aspects of solidarism:13 the ideological aspect, which refers to universal or shared values; the normative aspect, which expresses the content, the source and the implementation of collective or common international norms (Alderson and Hurrell, 2000a: 9–10); and the social aspect, which stems from the belief that a legitimate world order ought to be founded on economic and social solidarity (Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2005). There is of course a connection between all these aspects, but for analytical reasons it is helpful to distinguish them. The argument of this chapter is directly associated with the ideological aspect of solidarism, in particular with the issue of human rights. We arrive here at the relation between cosmopolitanism and solidarism. The recent work of the English School has emphasized such a relation. For instance, Linklater (1996: 111) refers to the ‘similarities’ between solidarism and ‘Kant’s cosmopolitan approach’. Wheeler and Dunne associate solidarism with ‘ethical universalism’ (Wheeler and Dunne, 1998: 54). Although Buzan distinguishes between ‘solidarism’ and

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‘cosmopolitanism’, he also establishes a close relation between the two.14 Bull (2000d: 120) himself linked solidarism to cosmopolitanism. In the discussion after he presented the paper on ‘The Grotian Conception’, Bull says, quite explicitly, that the ‘Grotian system ultimately derives from his belief that all individuals can recognize    a single set of rules. Ultimately, Grotius is a kind of cosmopolitan.’ However, the most obvious way to grasp the relation between cosmopolitanism and solidarism is through the idea of human rights. Alderson and Hurrell (2000a: 11–12) observe that twentieth-century world politics has witnessed ‘the emergence of an albeit still very fragile cosmopolitan moral consciousness which demands that greater attention be paid to questions of individual human rights’. Again, Bull (2000d: 221) also shared such a view. He observed, back in the early 1960s, that underlying the development of the international law of human rights, ‘there has occurred    the growth of a cosmopolitan moral awareness’. On the other hand, the close relation between human rights and solidarism has been emphasized from Bull’s early essay on the ‘Grotian Conception’ to R.J. Vincent’s (1986) book on human rights. Within contemporary English School writing, Wheeler’s (2000) work on humanitarian intervention has further developed the solidarist focus on the issue of human rights. The early 1990s, right after the end of the Cold War, witnessed the return of the solidarist–pluralist debate (Wheeler, 1992). First of all, the terms of the debate led to the creation of an ‘official historiography’ regarding the evolution of solidarism and pluralism within the English School. According to such a historiography, the evolution of the debate has seen three defining moments. In the early 1960s, the debate emerged with Bull’s ‘Grotian Tradition’. This first period, until the late 1970s, marked the triumph of the pluralist perspective, which culminated with the publication of The Anarchical Society. In the early 1980s, it is possible to discern a shift in Bull’s perspective, and also in Vincent’s, from pluralism to a more solidarist position, respectively in the Hagey Lectures on ‘Justice and International Relations’ and in Human Rights and International Relations. Then, from the early 1990s, a new generation of English School theorists attempts to further develop the solidarist perspective of world order.15 It seems to me that this view is too simplistic, particularly in the case of Bull. Take the example of the Hagey Lectures, widely considered as marking the solidarist turn in Bull’s thought. It is indeed plausible to argue that Bull offered a ‘solidarist’ conception of distributive justice. Yet, it is equally true that he was aware of the need to respect cultural pluralism in a post-European international order.

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As he says, ‘the revolt against Western dominance has been a striving towards    cultural liberation’ (Bull, 2000c: 244). There is, however, a more problematic point in the current debate. There are two possible ways to approach the solidarist–pluralist debate. On the one hand, we may present solidarism and pluralism as opposite positions. In this vein, it is possible to refer to a ‘solidarist’ or a ‘pluralist’ conception of international order; or to divide thinkers and books into the categories of ‘pluralist’ and ‘solidarist’. This is the dominant view within the English School. It emerged with Bull’s ‘Grotian Conception’, where he opposed pluralism to solidarism, and it is still prevalent in the majority of current English School works.16 In my view, this approach is highly problematic. Take Jackson’s and Wheeler’s last books as an example. To a large extent, the two books are simultaneously right and wrong. Jackson is right when he disputes much of current solidarism as premature, but he is wrong when he seeks to justify a pluralist international order in opposition to a solidarist conception of world order. Wheeler is right when he attacks some ideas of conventional pluralism regarding military intervention, but in the end he is obliged to recognize that there are pluralist political and normative limits to his solidarist conception of humanitarian intervention. Their problems stem from the view that pluralism and solidarism are opposite conceptions of international order. World order is, and has always been, both pluralist and solidarist. A legitimate conception of international society ought to respect pluralism, but at the same time has to rest on forms of solidarism. I propose, therefore, a second view. Although we should not reject the ideas of solidarism and pluralism, they are indeed quite useful, we should abandon the notions of ‘solidarist world order’ or ‘pluralist international order’, as opposing ideas.17 Pluralist and solidarist aspects coexist and both influence the nature of world order. Accordingly, I believe that the attempt to develop a ‘solidarist’ or a ‘pluralist’ conception of world order is a self-defeating project. We need, therefore, to return to the close relation between cosmopolitanism and solidarism. A close reading of the solidarist–pluralist debate demonstrates that solidarist practices, norms and values, directly or indirectly, rest on cosmopolitanism. One of the best examples of such a close relationship is provided by the cases of human rights and humanitarian intervention. Now as in the case of cosmopolitanism, most of contemporary English School thinkers also tend to separate solidarism from modern international society. In other words, the terms of the solidarist–pluralist debate are also the result of the conventional narrative of the historical evolution of modern international society,

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which neglects both cosmopolitanism and solidarism. Thus, from the Peace of Westphalia to the late twentieth century, international order has been ‘pluralist’; and from the 1980s, there are some encouraging signs that anticipate the possible emergence of a ‘solidarist’ world order. Again, this strikes me as a deeply flawed understanding of modern international history. Not only has modern international society been, in some aspects, considerably solidarist, but any future world order will surely by deeply pluralist.18 The crucial task is to investigate and to learn how solidarism and pluralism have articulated and coexisted during the history of modern international society.19 One of the great ironies of the English School is that a school that defines itself as placing history at the centre of its research reveals a very poor knowledge and understanding of the historical evolution of modern international society.

Conclusion The central claim of this chapter is that it is a mistake to present cosmopolitanism as a threat to an international society of sovereign states, as Bull does. To a large extent, Bull’s position is the result of his historical interpretation of modern international society. Bull sees medieval political order as universalistic, and modern international society emerging as the consequence of the collapse of medieval order. Thus, the modern society of states is the result of a reaction against universalism. In this way, cosmopolitanism is perceived, simultaneously, as marginal and as a threat to international society. By discussing the case of religious rights in early modern Europe, I argued that cosmopolitanism is embedded in the structure of international society. In other words, I tried to demonstrate that the emergence of modern international society occurred within a social and political context influenced by cosmopolitan principles and values. For instance, it is impossible to understand the nature of the early modern state if we do not grasp the importance of the cosmopolitan principle of ‘common humanity’, to use Montesquieu’s words, or the significance of the universal value of religious toleration or the triumph of universal Roman legal principles. Therefore, despite the fact that sovereign statehood protects particularism and diversity, rather than seeing cosmopolitanism as a threat to the sovereign state, we should see the sovereign state as the place where cosmopolitan principles and values realize their political vocation. Besides presenting the concept of international society in a new light, where cosmopolitanism is deeply embedded, my argument also suggests a different understanding of the idea of cosmopolitanism. Bull tended to

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associate cosmopolitanism, or the emergence of a cosmopolitan world society, with an international structural transformation. This is still a widespread view within the English School, and we find influential thinkers identifying cosmopolitanism with a transition from societas to universitas, or with a ‘post-Westphalian international community’. Normally, the proponents of such a model try to discern in the course of history elements that allow predicting, or rejecting, the future emergence of a cosmopolitan order. To this form of cosmopolitan rationalism, we may present as a favourable alternative a conception of historical cosmopolitanism, based on the thought of Montesquieu and David Hume, and Edmund Burke. Rorty (1989: 190–1) captures this latter conception of cosmopolitanism when he says that ‘solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an urlanguage which all of us recognize when we hear it’. The implication is that the construction of ‘solidarism’, or cosmopolitanism, ought to be understood through historical analyses of modern international society. Therefore, in my view, one of the most relevant questions is, how to investigate the articulation between pluralism and cosmopolitanism in a particular historical moment? Historical cosmopolitanism allows us to question some common assumptions. First of all, we should not uncritically accept the association between cosmopolitanism and ‘Western or European values’. It is important to distinguish the process of origins from the process of the expansion of cosmopolitanism. Even if some cosmopolitan idea, like religious rights, historically emerged in Europe, this fact by itself is not an obstacle to its universalization. Now, the process of expanding cosmopolitan principles and values involves a certain naturalization of cosmopolitanism. With naturalization, those values cease to be ‘European’ and become truly universal. The process of naturalization of cosmopolitanism is, above all, a political, and not a cultural, process. This leads me to make another point. It is also plausible to question the view that cosmopolitan values and principles are normally imposed from the outside. It is even possible to argue that, usually, cosmopolitan values triumph through political struggles from the inside. For instance, the global spread of the sovereign state implied the universal triumph of the language of rights. In other words, the universalization of rights has occurred and occurs through the making and remaking of the sovereign state, where national forms of political recognition and national political groups play a crucial role. As such, the spread of cosmopolitan values and principles not only is compatible with respect for political and cultural identity, but also

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requires sovereign statehood as the political space where those values are implemented. Indeed, there is a strong intuition that cosmopolitanism is necessary precisely because of the strongly pluralist nature of international society. National and unitary societies do not need cosmopolitan principles and values to create normative and societal structures. If we adopt such a perspective, we may conclude with a short assertion: Without cosmopolitanism, there is no international society; and without the sovereign state and international society, cosmopolitanism loses its political nature and becomes an empty concept.

Acknowledgements The first version of this chapter was presented in the 2004 BISA Conference, at the University of Warwick, in the Panel on ‘The Anarchical Society in a Globalised World’. Thanks are due to the participants in the panel. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions, which considerably improved my chapter, of the two editors, Richard Little and John Williams.

Notes 1. See Bull (2000c: 184–5). These questions were also central for the project on the expansion of international society. See Bull and Watson (1984). 2. The Papacy also claimed to be the successor of the Roman Emperors, which led to continuous struggles between the Holy See and the Holy Roman Emperor during the medieval period. See Wight (1977: 28). 3. Elsewhere, Bull (2002: 36) says that ‘Kantian or universalist interpretations have been fed by a striving to transcend the states system.’ 4. Although the historical significance of the Peace of Westphalia is almost ignored in The Anarchical Society, in Bull (1990: 76), he refers to the Peace of Westphalia as ‘a kind of constitutional foundation of international society’. 5. Bull’s scepticism of cosmopolitanism was reinforced by his view that modern international society was a European creation. This raises a very significant question: Are cosmopolitan principles and values inherently European just because they historically emerged in Europe? The answer would require the writing of another essay. On this point, see an interesting discussion in Suganami (2003). 6. It has to be noted that the ‘Reformed Confession’, or Calvinism was not recognized as an official religion in the Peace of Augsburg. 7. For the Treaty see Parry (1969). For an analysis of the religious issues, see Gross (1948) and Krasner (1993). 8. Of course these processes of ideological homogenization are compatible with the respect for pluralism. For instance, the European Union states are quite homogeneous but at the same time also reveal important constitutional, political, economic and social differences.

72 The Contribution to the Study of International Relations 9. Traditionally, the English School has not paid attention to this domain of cosmopolitanism. In his work, however, Buzan (2004b) is starting to correct this neglect. 10. This is the dominant cosmopolitan topic in the work of the English School. See Dunne and Wheeler (1999), Knudsen (1999); Vincent (1986) and Wheeler (2000). 11. The most comprehensive treatment of the notion of world society from an English School perspective is Buzan (2004a). It should be noted that Buzan’s notion of ‘world society’ includes not only the material aspects of cosmopolitanism but also what I call ‘ideological cosmopolitanism’. 12. Within the English School, Little (2000, 2004) pursues this line of research. 13. I discuss this distinction in Almeida (2003). See also the illuminating and stimulating discussions by Hurrell (1998, 2003). 14. In Buzan (2004a) the distinction is clear on pp. 7–10, 45–62, but it starts to become conflated towards the end of the book, where the relationship between solidarism and cosmopolitanism is much stronger, see pp. 139–60. 15. This picture has been primarily developed by Dunne (1998), Wheeler and Dunne (1996) and Linklater (1996). 16. This view is central in most of the recent published books within the English School tradition. See, inter alia, the introduction in Alderson and Hurrell (2000b), the introduction and conclusion’ in Bellamy (2005), Jackson (2000), Mayall (2000) and Wheeler (2000). 17. Buzan’s view that pluralism and solidarism are ‘positions on a spectrum between which movement is possible’, rather than ‘mutually exclusive opposites’ is closer to this view. But I disagree with the way that Buzan (2004a: 45–62) separates cosmopolitanism and international society, associating the former with the concept of world society. 18. John Williams (2005) develops a very interesting and innovative argument linking world order and world society to pluralism. 19. Bain (2003) and Keene (2002) provide very interesting and stimulating new interpretations of key aspects of the historical evolution of modern international society.

Part II The Institutions of Anarchical Society

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4 Rethinking Hedley Bull on the Institutions of International Society Barry Buzan

We need sharper analytical tools than those provided by Wight and Bull. – Dunne (2001b: 66)

Introduction Hedley Bull put institutions on the map for the English school, and his set of five institutions of ‘international’ (= interstate) society (diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, war, and the role of great powers) occupies the whole central third of his 1977 book. Following on from Bull, the concept of institutions has been central to English school thinking for three reasons: First, because it fleshes out the substantive content of international society; second, because it underpins what Bull and other English school writers mean by ‘order’ in international relations (IR); and third, because the particular understanding of institutions in English school thinking is one of the main things that differentiates it from the mainstream, rationalist, neo-liberal institutionalist, study of international regimes (Keohane, 1988; Hurrell, 1991; Evans and Wilson, 1992; Buzan, 1993; Wæver, 1998: 109–12; Alderson and Hurrell, 2000a). This chapter sets out and evaluates Bull’s contribution on the institutions of international society. The rest of this section considers the definition of institutions. Section 2 reviews Bull’s position on institutions. Sections 3 and 4 look at possible critiques of Bull’s position in terms of its internal (in)coherence and its relation to other classic English school writers. Section 5 sums up the main conclusions. Before I turn to discussing Bull, it is useful to start with some definitional considerations about the concept of institutions generally. Among the several good reasons for doing so is the fact that there are two 75

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schools of thought within mainstream IR (not to mention others outside IR) both claiming the concept of ‘institutions’, and this is in itself a recipe for confusion. This situation is not helped by a pervasive ambiguity in what differentiates many of the associated concepts such as ‘norms’, ‘rules’ and ‘principles’. These terms are scattered throughout the literatures of both regime theory and the English school, yet it is seldom clear what, if anything, differentiates them, and in many usages they seem interchangeable. The concept of institutions shares some of these ambiguities. In common usage, ‘institution’ can be understood either in quite specific terms as ‘an organisation or establishment founded for a specific purpose’, or in more general ones as ‘an established custom, law, or relationship in a society or community’ (Hanks, 1986). These different meanings play strongly into what distinguishes English school theory from regime theory. Regime theory is mostly concerned with the first sense. Keohane (1988: 383–5) is keen to draw a distinction between ‘specific institutions’ understood as things ‘that can be identified as related complexes of rules and norms, identifiable in space and time’, and ‘more fundamental practices’ providing ‘institutionalized constraints at a more    enduring level’. This distinction is labelled by Onuf (2002) as ‘evolved’ versus ‘designed’ institutions, and is also pursued by Wæver (1998: 109–12). Keohane puts particular emphasis on rules, arguing that specific institutions exist where there is a ‘persistent set of rules’ that must ‘constrain activity, shape expectation, and prescribe roles’. This confines his meaning of institution either to formal organizations with ‘capacity for purposive action’ or to international regimes comprising ‘complexes of rules and organisations’, a distinction also made by Kratochwil and Ruggie (1986). This comes close to making the meaning of institution synonymous with intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and legal frameworks. Some IR definitions of institution act to blur these two meanings. Krasner (1999: 43), for example, sees institutions as ‘formal or informal structures of norms and rules that are created by actors to increase their utility’. This formulation seems to lean towards designed rather than evolved institutions, but since ‘created’ is unmodified it could be read either way. A more elaborate blurring is offered by March and Olsen (1998: 948): ‘ “institution” can be viewed as a relatively stable collection of practices and rules defining appropriate behaviour for specific groups of actors in specific situations. Such practices and rules are embedded in structures of meaning and schemes of interpretation that explain and legitimize particular identities and the practices and rules associated with them.’ Here the first sentence seems to speak to Keohane’s specific

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institutions, the second to his more fundamental practices. From the Stanford school (Meyer et al., 1987: 13) we get a definition that leans quite definitely towards the fundamental practices side: ‘We see institutions as cultural rules giving collective meaning and value to particular entities and activities, integrating them into larger schemes. We see both patterns of activity and the units involved in them (individuals and other social entities) as constructed by such wider rules.’ Although Wæver (1998: 112) thinks that the English school operates across these meanings, and is confused about its position, a case can be made that in fact it largely takes the second, more general, sense of institution as its starting point. Bull (2002: 38, 71) goes out of his way to make clear that when he talks of institutions he does not mean intergovernmental organizations or administrative machinery. Bull wants to get at Keohane’s ‘fundamental practices’. Keohane mainly discusses only one member of this category (sovereignty), which he also picks up in later work (Keohane 1995), though he acknowledges that there are others, including Bull’s set (Keohane, 1988: 383). The English school has explored a range of candidates within this deeper sense of institution, and it is on this basis that much of its claim to distinctiveness rests. Both the specific, designed, and the deeper, evolved understandings represent legitimate interpretations of ‘institutions’, and there is no good reason for trying to exclude one or the other from its meaning. Neither meaning is contested and since the essential difference between them is clear, the issue is simply to find a way of clarifying which meaning is in play. Given the influence of international law(yers) on Bull, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the distinction between primary and secondary institutions does not derive from Hart’s (1961: 79–99) well-known formulation about primary and secondary rules. Hart’s concern was to distinguish between primary rules (defining (il)legitimate activity in any society), and secondary rules (which are about transforming custom into a formal framework of law and justice). The institutions talked about in regime theory are the products of a certain types of international society (most obviously liberal, but possibly other types as well), and are for the most part consciously designed by states. The institutions talked about by the English school are constitutive of both states and international society in that they define the basic character and purpose of any such society. For what I will call second order societies (those in which the members are not individual human beings, but durable collectivities of humans possessed of identities and actor qualities that are more than the sum of their parts), such institutions define the units that compose the society. Searle (1995: 35) argues that ‘social facts in general, and

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institutional facts especially, are hierarchically structured’. On this basis, and given that there is no disagreement about the English school’s institutions reflecting something ‘more fundamental’, I will call what the English school (and the Stanford school) wants to get at primary institutions, and those referred to by regime theory as secondary institutions.

Bull’s position on institutions Bull never gave a full definition of what constitutes an institution, nor does he set out criteria for inclusion into or exclusion from this category. Neither did he attempt to explain the difference between his set and Wight’s. Both by noting Wight’s institutions for pre-modern international societies, and by himself setting out a variety of alternative possibilities for future international society, Bull appears to accept the idea that primary institutions can and do change, but he offers little guidance about how institutions arise and disappear. His core statement on institutions is firmly Westphalian (Bull, 2002: 71). [S]tates collaborate with one another, in varying degrees, in what may be called the institutions of international society: the balance of power, international law, the diplomatic mechanism, the managerial system of the great powers, and war. By an institution we do not necessarily imply an organisation or administrative machinery, but rather a set of habits and practices shaped towards the realisation of common goals. These institutions do not deprive states of their central role in carrying out the political functions of international society, or serve as a surrogate central authority in the international system. They are rather an expression of the element of collaboration among states in discharging their political functions – and at the same time a means of sustaining this collaboration. The key to understanding Bull’s position on institutions is found in his theory of society. Bull’s (2002: 51–4) conception of society comes out of a kind of sociological functionalism in which all human societies must be founded on understandings about security against violence, observance of agreements, and rules about property rights. He sees rules as the key to sharpening up mere common interests into a clear sense of appropriate behaviour (2002: 64–8). The making of rules ranges from the customary to the positive, but whatever type they are, they fall into three levels.

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1. Constitutional normative principles are the foundation, setting out the basic ordering principle or social structure (e.g. society of states, universal empire, state of nature, cosmopolitan community, etc.). In Bull’s view, what is essential for order is that one of these principles should dominate; because the principles are usually zero-sum, contestation equals disorder. Contestation at this level is what defines Wight’s revolutionists. For an international society, the key principle is sovereignty. 2. Rules of coexistence are those which set out the minimum behavioural conditions for society, and therefore hinge on Bull’s three basic elements of society: limits to violence, establishment of property rights, and sanctity of agreements. Here we find Bull’s five ‘institutions’ of classical European international society: diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, war, and the role of great powers. 3. Rules to regulate cooperation in politics, strategy, society and economy. About these Bull (2002: 67) says, ‘Rules of this kind prescribe behaviour that is appropriate not to the elementary or primary goals of international life, but rather to those more advanced or secondary goals that are a feature of an international society in which a consensus has been reached about a wider range of objectives than mere coexistence.’ Here one would find everything from the UN system, through arms control treaties, to the regimes and institutions for managing trade, finance, environment and a host of technical issues from postage to allocation of orbital slots and broadcast frequencies. Note first that this is a highly rational, contractual, rule-based conception of society. It has nothing at all to do with shared culture or the ‘we-feeling’ of community, and is by definition completely distinct from the shared culture, civilizational precursors of international society that feature in Wight’s and Watson’s work. Note secondly that Bull’s second level mainly defines the pluralist position on international society, with sovereign states representing the choice of constitutional principle, and the rules of coexistence reflecting a mainly Westphalian scheme. If something other than ‘society of states’ was chosen under the first level then the content of the second level would be radically different. Solidarism finds its scope mainly in the third tier of ‘more advanced’ but ‘secondary’ rules about cooperation. The source of Bull’s institutions of international society is thus his rules of coexistence setting out the minimum behavioural conditions for society. In Bull’s scheme, rules of coexistence hinge on the basic

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elements of society: limits to violence, establishment of property rights and sanctity of agreements. This placing explains both the pluralist character of these institutions (which occurs by definition as ‘rules of coexistence’) and the curious absence of sovereignty (which falls under Bull’s first set of rules about the constitutive normative principle of world politics). Indeed, Bull (2002: 68) does say that ‘it is states themselves that are the principal institutions of the society of states’, but he does not develop this idea, which is probably just as well given that it would hopelessly confuse constitutive institutions and the units they are supposed to constitute (a trap into which, in my view, Holsti [2004] has also fallen). The link between Bull’s choice of institutions and the explicitly functional quality of his understanding of society suggests a functional path into thinking about primary institutions. More on this in section 4. Bull’s position on institutions cannot be detached from his strong commitment to pluralism. This commitment is manifest not only in the definitional structure just discussed, but also in his treatment of solidarism and world society as threatening to the order provided by a pluralist society of states. Bull (2002: 237) rejects the idea later explored by Vincent (1986: 104, 150–2) and his followers that an ideologically homogenous state system can be a path to solidarism. He does so partly on the weak ground that it is unlikely to happen, and the process of arriving at it would be highly conflictual (because of inability to agree on universal values); and partly on the basis of a distinction between genuinely harmonious Kantian world societies (an idea he rejects as utopian) and international societies that have learned to regulate conflict and competition, but have not eliminated it. In effect, Bull tries to eliminate the idea of a Kantian model of ideologically harmonious states altogether. Bull also (2002: 146–7) identified solidarism with Grotius’s natural law position, and this led him to the view that: Carried to its logical extreme, the doctrine of human rights and duties under international law is subversive of the whole principle that mankind should be organised as a society of sovereign states. For, if the rights of each man can be asserted on the world political stage over and against the claims of his state, and his duties proclaimed irrespective of his position as a servant or a citizen of that state, then the position of the state as a body sovereign over its citizens, and entitled to command their obedience, has been subject to challenge, and the structure of the society of sovereign states has been placed in jeopardy.

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This position did not change much in his later, allegedly more solidarist, work (Bull, 1984: 13): ‘The promotion of human rights on a world scale, in a context in which there is no consensus as to their meaning and the priorities among them, carries the danger that it will be subversive of coexistence among states, on which the whole fabric of world order in our times depends   ’. As I will show below, there are various grounds for criticizing Bull’s commitment to pluralism, but that commitment also seems integral to the major breakthrough for which he should be given credit. It underpinned his ability to focus on what I earlier labelled second order societies (themselves composed of collective units) as a distinctive approach to the study of IR. This is perhaps the major contribution of The Anarchical Society, and explains much of its durability as a text. His dedication to pluralism partly resulted from his understanding of Wight’s three traditions, which he (Bull in Wight, 1991: xi) nicely characterizes as: realism is about ‘the blood and iron and immorality men’, rationalism is about ‘the law and order and keep your word men’, and revolutionism is about ‘the subversion and liberation and missionary men’. Suganami (2002: 5) offers the thought that Bull and most others in the rationalist tradition felt themselves to be distant from revolutionism, which they saw as a source of disorder. Possibly related to this is Bull’s (2002: 38, 71) early, though mostly implicit, sense that there was an important distinction to be drawn between primary and secondary institutions. He goes out of his way to say that he is not talking about IGOs, and to lament the confusion between IGOs and international institutions in his deeper sense that has arisen during the twentieth century because of the rise of IGOs after the First World War.

Critiques about internal (in)coherence Perhaps surprisingly for one so frequently praised for his classification skills, Bull’s account displays some quite basic shortcomings. Perhaps most obviously, the logic of derivation of his five institutions from his sociological theory is never explicitly laid out. It is not clear either why we get these five (i.e. no logic of exclusion/inclusion), or what their historical standing is supposed to be. Bull certainly suggests that institutions change, but his discussion rather gives the impression that such change requires a transformation at his first level (constitutive rules), that is if the constitutive level is ‘society of states’, then his five institutions are a more or less fixed consequence of that deeper structure. In other words, he does not seem to consider the possibility of movement

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and change in institutions within a given constitutive structure such as ‘society of states’. One of the attractions (for some) of his relatively fixed set of five institutions is that they constitute a harmonious set. The pluralist set of war, balance of power, diplomacy, great power leadership and international law do not guarantee peace, but they complement each other comfortably and contain no necessary contradictions. In relation to Bull’s ideas about society, the balance of power, war and the role of the great powers are about how the system is managed to put some limits on violence. Diplomacy and international law are about communication, negotiation and the sanctity of agreements. The allocation of property rights would be taken care of by sovereignty, but Bull curiously does not classify this as an institution. As I will show in the next section, other English school writers came to different, less conservative and sometime less harmonious conclusions about institutions within the society of states. This observation seems to continue the theme raised in the previous section about Bull’s strong commitment to pluralism. His fierce defence of pluralism is perhaps understandable when seen as a response to a normatively driven solidarism, based in natural law, pitting a universalist principle of individual rights against the state, and so compromising the principle of sovereignty. In this light, solidarism could easily appear to be revolutionist, requiring a change of constitutive principle. The puzzle is that Bull’s rigid position does not make sense against the logic of his own positive law position, in which like-minded states are perfectly at liberty to agree human rights regimes amongst themselves without compromising the principle of sovereignty. There can be a doubt that Bull accepted the primacy of positive law (Bull, 1966, see also 1990; Keene 2002). He set out in detail the argument about whether the international law on which international society rests is to be understood as natural law (Grotius, solidarist), or positive law (Oppenheim, pluralist), and plumped solidly for Oppenheim’s view (Bull, 1966: 73; 1979a: 181). Interestingly, Manning (1962: 167–8) was crystal clear on this point: ‘What is essentially a system of law for sovereigns, being premised on their very sovereignty, does not, by the fact of being strengthened, put in jeopardy the sovereignties which are the dogmatic basis for its very existence. Not, at any rate, in logic.’ Given his positive law view, the contradiction for Bull’s rigid pluralism lies in his third tier (rules about cooperation). Rules about cooperation seem to offer an open-ended scope for the development of solidarist institutions including in the area of human rights. This important loophole seems to have escaped Bull’s notice, not least because his

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disinterest in both economic and regional developments blinded him to the very significant empirical developments going on there. Adherence to positive law not only opens the way for as much cooperation among states as they wish to have, but since positive law is an expression of sovereignty, does so in a way that does not necessarily, or even probably, bring sovereignty into question. As Cutler (1991: 46–9) notes, it also undercuts the assumption of universalism on a global scale that is strong in Bull’s thinking about international society. Within a positive law framework, states can by definition do what they like, including forming solidarist regional or sub-systemic international societies. Acceptance of positive law draws a straight line between the pluralist and the solidarist positions, and eliminates the logic of their being opposed. Pluralism simply becomes a lower degree of shared norms rules and institutions (or a thinner body of positive law), solidarism a higher one (or a thicker body of positive law). Yet in his defence of pluralism, and his fear of solidarism, Bull seems to forget about this third tier. Since this is where the big growth has been in contemporary international society, especially in the economic sector, the placing of this as the shallow end of social structure comes into question, and the odd juxtaposition of the classifications ‘more advanced’ but ‘secondary’ begins to look contradictory. Develop enough down these ‘secondary’ lines of rules about cooperation, and the ‘more advanced’ elements begin not only to put pressure on institutions such as war and the balance of power, but even to bring the constitutive principles themselves into question. The development of the EU illustrates this potential, and shows that the two are not necessarily contradictory in the disordering way that Bull seemed to think inevitable. There are two other areas in which the internal coherence of Bull’s position can be questioned. First is a tension between his general theory of society and his posing of international society as distinctive. His theory of society set out above is rooted in the idea that all societies must share some basic characteristics. But his discussions of the difference between international and interhuman anarchies (Bull, 2002: 46–9) are very much based on the lack of comparability between individual humans and states as the members of society. Indeed, it is this distinction that gets Bull credit for drawing attention to second order societies. He rightly questions the analogy when talking about international society, but does not do so in his theoretical discussion about the supposed characteristics common to all societies. It may be that Bull’s position is a defensible one, but the apparent contradiction in his two lines of arguments needs to be addressed.

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A second, relatively minor point under this heading is that Bull not only staged institutions as part of his classic definition of international society: a group of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political communities) which not merely form a system, in the sense that the behaviour of each is a necessary factor in the calculations of the others, but also 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, 1984: 1) but also put them into his much less cited definition of world society: By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interaction linking all parts of the human community to one another, but a sense of common interest and common values on the basis of which common rules and institutions may be built. The concept of world society, in this sense, stands to the totality of global social interaction as our concept of international society stands to the concept of the international system. (Bull, 2002: 269; my italics in both) He did not, however, say anything more about the institutions of world society, about which we are therefore left in the dark.

Critiques in relation to other classic English school writers As I have argued elsewhere (Buzan, 2004a: ch. 6), there is not a great deal of coherence in the English school’s discussion of institutions. Although Bull’s five institutions became something of a benchmark for subsequent discussion, no systematic position on institution has been developed. In relation specifically to Bull, however, that does not prevent one from making some instructive comparisons, and observing how the discussion of institutions has evolved from Bull’s position. Four themes arise: The first is about what actually are the institutions of contemporary international society (questioning Bull’s five); the second is about whether or not primary institutions should be hierarchically differentiated in some way (rethinking Bull’s scheme of constitutive, coexistence and cooperation rules); the third focuses on the whole question of the change and evolution in institutions (not really addressed by Bull except as change of constitutive principle); and the fourth is to develop the functional approach to institutions implicit in Bull’s theory of society.

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What are the institutions of contemporary international society? Most English school writers spend much less effort than Bull did in defining what they mean by ‘the institutions of international society’, concentrating instead on listing and discussing a relatively small number that they take to define the essence of whatever international society they are examining. Although not identifying all of the writers who have had something to say about primary institutions, the current state of play on primary institutions in English school literature is roughly summarized in Table 4.1. One might want to add to it Reus-Smit’s and Keohane’s idea that multilateralism is an institution if not of interstate society globally, at least amongst the Western states and their circle. A recent book by Holsti (2004) has begun a systematic and stimulating attempt to take the taxonomy of primary international institutions in hand. Holsti’s starting point is a concern to develop primary institutions as benchmarks for monitoring significant changes in international systems. Holsti (2004: 21–4) sees institutions in this sense as embodying three essential elements: patterned, recurrent practices; coherent sets of ideas and/or beliefs that frame the practices and make them purposive; and the presence of rules, norms and etiquettes that prescribe and proscribe behaviour. Holsti shies away from giving a definitive list, but he includes sovereignty, states, territoriality, the fundamental principles of international law, diplomacy, war, trade and colonialism. In the process he rejects Bull’s classification of the balance of power and great power leadership as institutions as not meeting the criteria for institutions. Table 4.1 shows that Bull’s five institutions have failed to inspire consensus. There is strong agreement around international law, diplomacy and war. Bull stands alone in not listing sovereignty as a (or for many the) major institution, although this may be explained by his three-tier scheme of rules which effectively puts sovereignty into his constitutive rules, and therefore outside the frame of discussion in The Anarchical Society. The idea that the state should count as an institution is shared only by Holsti, and seems to me to be a category error mistaking a unit for an institution. Taking that view makes a strong case for counting territoriality as one of the institutions constituting the state. Strong cases have been made for giving institutional status to colonialism, nationalism and something that captures the economic sector, whether trade or the market. Balance of power is both openly contested and strongly supported, while great power management is largely ignored. Both of these need to be debated further and their status stabilized. This debate around what the institutions of international

Table 4.1 Candidates for primary institutions of international society by authora 86

Wight Religious sites and festivals Dynastic principles Trade Diplomacy Alliances Guarantees War Neutrality Arbitration Balance of Power

International Law

Bull

Mayallb

Holstic

James

Jackson

Diplomacy

Diplomacy (I)

Trade (P) Diplomacy (P)

Diplomacy

Diplomacy

War

Balance of Power Great power management International Law

Balance of Power (I)

International Law (I)

The State Sovereignty

Sovereignty (P) Territorial Integrity (P) Non-Intervention (P) Self-Determination (P) Non-Discrimination (P) Human Rights (P) Nationalism

International Law (F) The State (F) Sovereignty (F) Territoriality (F)

Colonialism (P) a

War

War (P)

International Law

International Law

Sovereignty Political boundaries

Sovereignty

Colonialism

Words given in underlined font are where the author identifies an institution as ‘principal’, or ‘master’ or ‘bedrock’. For Mayall (I) = institution and (P) = principle c For Holsti (F) = foundational institution and (P) = procedural institution Sources: Wight, 1977: 29–33, 47–9, 110–52; Wight, 1979: 111–12; Bull, 2002; Mayall, 1990; Mayall, 2000: 149–50; Reus-Smit, 1997; Keohane, 1995; Holsti, 2004; Jackson, 2000. b

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society are is often empirically rich and extremely interesting. What is depressing about it is, with the notable exception of Holsti, the near absence of theoretical discussion to underpin criteria of inclusion and exclusion and give foundation to the argument. The debate has clearly developed in a way that challenges much of Bull’s position, but it has not done so by investigating the theoretical premises on which Bull, to his credit, built his ideas. There is still plenty of work left to do on this subject.

Is there a hierarchy of primary institutions There is a tendency among some English school writers to privilege one primary institution, whether sovereignty or international law, over the others. Mayall (2000: 94) identifies international law as a kind of master institution: ‘the bedrock institution on which the idea of international society stands or falls’. This view is supported by Kratochwil’s (1989: 251) argument that ‘the international legal order exists simply by virtue of its role in defining the game of international relations’, and Nardin’s (1998: 20; see contra Nardin, Whelan, 1998: 50–1) that ‘international society is not merely regulated by international law, but constituted by it’. The arguments made above about the centrality of positive international law to international society might also be taken as reason to privilege international law in this way. Alternatively, James (1999: 468) says that sovereignty is ‘the constitutive principle of interstate relations’, an emphasis shared by Jackson (2000: 102–12). As Onuf (2002: 228) astutely observes, it is a feature of realist thinking that ‘sovereignty is the only rule that matters for the constitution of anarchy’. This might explain the desire of some to privilege it. In a sense, Bull also reflected this move to make a hierarchy of primary institutions in his distinction between constitutive rules and rules of coexistence. The idea that there is a hierarchy of primary institutions has been approached more theoretically by various writers. Holsti (2004: 24–7) draws a distinction between ‘foundational’ and ‘procedural’ institutions. Foundational institutions define and give privileged status to certain actors, and they also define the fundamental principles, rules and norms upon which their mutual relations are based. Procedural institutions are repetitive practices, ideas and norms that underlie and regulate interactions and transactions between the separate actors, including the conduct of both conflict and normal intercourse. Although Holsti divides institutions into two types, it is clear that he is not repeating the division between primary and secondary institutions: His procedural

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institutions are still primary in concept, not regimes or IGOs. Holsti includes sovereignty, states, territoriality and the fundamental principles of international law as foundational institutions. Among procedural institutions he includes diplomacy, war, trade and colonialism. A similar move is made by Reus-Smit (1997: 556–66), when he identifies three layers in modern international society. The deepest layer he calls ‘constitutional structures’, which are similar to Holsti’s foundational institutions. Constitutional structures reflect a hierarchy of ‘deep constitutive values: a shared belief about the moral purpose of centralized political organisation, an organising principle of sovereignty, and a norm of pure procedural justice’. Reus-Smit calls the middle layer ‘fundamental institutions’, which he sees as ‘basic rules of practice’ such as bilateralism, multilateralism and international law. This does not feel quite the same as Holsti’s procedural institutions, but the concept is not elaborated enough to tease out the difference in either principle or practice, and the difference is perhaps not large. Reus-Smit’s third layer is ‘issue-specific regimes’, which brings us back to the distinction between primary and secondary institutions. Although they contain some embellishments, both Holsti’s and Reus-Smit’s definitions of primary institutions are broadly in line with the definitions discussed above. The idea of two layers of primary institutions implies that some are ‘deeper’ than others. Looking first at the notion of layers, Holsti’s and Reus-Smit’s distinctions are based on the idea that some (procedural/foundational) institutions are about repetitive practices and interactions, while others (foundational/constitutional structures) are about how the actors and the basic rules of the game among them are constituted. A distinction along these lines is similar to the one used by Ruggie (1998) and others (e.g. Kratochwil, 1989: 26; Searle, 1995: 27–8; Sørensen, 1999) between regulative and constitutive rules. Regulative rules are intended to have causal effects on a pre-existing activity, while ‘constitutive rules define the set of practices that make up any particular consciously organized social activity    they specify what counts as that activity’ (Ruggie, 1998: 22). Applying this scheme to Bull explains the strange status of the state, and his silence about sovereignty, both of which reflect the positioning of his institutions within his ‘rules of coexistence’ category, which leaves out the institutions to be found under his constitutive rules. Bull thus comes close to falling foul of the criticism made by Ruggie (1998: 25) of neorealists and neoliberals that they exclude constitutive rules, and that ‘the scope of their theories    is confined to regulative rules that coordinate behaviour in a pre-constituted world’. Yet that would not be quite fair, since several of

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Bull’s institutions do seem to fit under Holsti’s ‘foundational’ category and Ruggie’s ‘constitutive’ one. At first glance, it is not exactly clear how one would interpret Bull’s three types of rules in the light of Holsti’s and Ruggie’s dyadic classifications. Bull’s constitutive rules probably fit within Holsti’s foundational institutions and Ruggie’s constitutive rules. His rules of cooperation probably fit within Holsti’s procedural institutions and Ruggie’s regulative rules, and also overlap with secondary institutions. But quite where Bull’s rules of coexistence, and hence his five institutions, fit is not immediately obvious. We are in the murky waters signposted by Hurrell (2002a: 145) when he noted the absence of any clear answer as to what actually are ‘the most important constitutive rules in international relations’. Exploring this issue requires more space than I have here, and has been done elsewhere (Buzan 2004a: 177ff.). Suffice it to say that work along these lines adds pressure to the questions about Bull’s designation of what were/are the institutions of international society. It also exposes aspects of his underlying theory of society as one key reason for the rigidity and partial blindness of his view. I am not convinced that the distinction between constitutive and regulatory rules can be successfully applied to primary institutions, or even to secondary ones. Even secondary institutions such as the WTO can have constitutive effects by, for example, changing the practices of sovereignty. Nevertheless, this debate does provide interesting, and as yet unused, tools for unpicking the theory of society on which Bull’s understanding of institutions rests.

How do institutions evolve and change? Again because of the peculiarity of his theory of society, Bull was largely silent about the evolution and change of institutions other than when the constitutive principle changed. Within the English school the question of institutional change was originally tackled by Mayall (esp. 1990), Keene (2002), Holsti (2004) and Buzan (2004a). Outside the English school this question has been addressed by others studying the process of institutionalization (Meyer et al., 1987: 13; March and Olsen, 1998: 959–69; Krasner, 1999: 44) and the evolution of specific institutions such as sovereignty (Keohane, 1995; Barkin, 1998; Sørensen, 1999). Mayall’s (1990, 2000) work on nationalism brings in many other primary institutions, and provides a model for how to approach the evolution of international societies. Mayall focuses his main effort on identifying the impact of nationalism (not even considered by Bull as an institution) on the interstate society into which it was introduced. He

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tracks how, during the nineteenth century, nationalism was increasingly taken on board as a primary institution both by European interstate society and by the global interstate society that Europe was unintentionally making through colonialism. This process did much more than simply add another primary institution into the mix. As Mayall traces with some care, it played a key role in both the reinterpretation of some Westphalian institutions and the demise of others. Mayall’s (1990, 2000) main observations are as follows. Nationalism underlay the shift from dynastic to popular sovereignty, and was also a strand leading into the development of human rights in the West (1990: 2). Nationalism supported self-determination, but introduced a tension about who constitutes any given nation (ethno-nationalism or political nationalism). This in turn confused the principle of self-determination adopted after the First World War, though also becoming one of the tensions that undermined colonialism (1990: 38–49; 2000: 39–66). Diplomacy survived the coming of nationalism, but nationalism modified the Westphalian primary institutions of sovereignty, nonintervention, war, territoriality and balance of power, without eliminating them. Even postmodern states still retain sovereignty and territoriality, though they use them differently (2000: 67–78). Nationalism weakened the principle of mutual recognition (by setting the nation-state ideal against the much more mixed reality) but strengthened the commitment to sovereign equality. It created tensions between liberal inclinations to restrain the use of force, and interpretations of nationalism that elevated war to be the mechanism of social Darwinism. And it hugely deepened the relationship between governments and peoples (role of the state in society) (1990: 25–37). Nationalism challenged territoriality not as such, but by hanging its legitimacy on national criteria, and generating problems of irredentism and secessionism (1990: 50–63). Dynasticism, political aggression and imperialism/colonialism were all delegitimized by nationalism (1990: 35). In some ways nationalism was entangled with liberalism, and thus developed as an institution alongside the market. Yet despite this shared parentage, nationalism and the market are often in tension, with nationalism challenging the market in ways ranging from cultural and political autarchy projects, through imperatives of defence self-reliance, to labour mobility and migration (1990: 70–110). Economic nationalism was also a feature of both communist and many third-world states (1990: 111–44). This general tension does not mean that the nation-state idea is not also complementary to the liberal project in many ways, including defence, democracy, law and currency (1990: 150–1). Because international law

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is made by states, there are tensions between international law and democracy except where all states are democracies (2000: 94). Mayall’s sophisticated historical analysis shows not only how institutions rise, evolve and decay, but also how they interact with each other. In this sense, his introduction of nationalism (and the market) disrupted the harmony of Bull’s pluralist five and exposed an essential historical dynamic in the interplay of institutions. This approach gives a wholly more vital and sophisticated approach to the study of international institutions than does Bull’s static one. Keene (2002: 60–144) devotes particular attention to the dynamics of colonialism as an institution, while Holsti sets up a general scheme that covers a wide range of primary institutions. He invites observers to look not just for the existence (or not) of institutions, but whether the trend is for those that do exist to strengthen, weaken or evolve internally. As Holsti’s discussion makes clear, within the game of states, even quite basic institutions (colonialism in his set, which does define actors in the system) can disappear as the game evolves, or at least atrophy to the point where the label is no longer an acceptable way of characterizing practices. Holsti tracks substantial changes of interpretation in other primary institutions as well, such as sovereignty, war and international law. The shared norms or principles represented by primary institutions can endure in a general sense, while the particular rules and institutional facts that they legitimize undergo substantial change. Building on Mayall, Holsti and others, I have tried to sketch out a fuller historical picture of how the primary institutions of international society have evolved and interacted over the last two centuries (Buzan, 2004a: ch. 8). This work on the change and evolution of primary institutions reveals the narrow and static quality of Bull’s conception. It highlights how much his commitment to pluralism not only blocked some of the internal logic of his own position, but also led him to a distorted and unnecessarily gloomy view of how international society had evolved from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Among other things, it offers a way of writing history in terms of the evolution of institutions that is radically different from Bull’s. It also offers an approach more in line with Wendt (1999) than Bull for studying the social structure of international systems.

A functional approach to institutions I have already noted the implicitly functional approach to institutions in Bull. Similar leanings can also be found in James (1978: 3), who

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hints at a functional understanding of institutions by talking of sovereignty in terms of rules about who can be a member of international society, and in Reus-Smit (1997: 556–66), who says that institutions ‘are coherent ensembles of intersubjective beliefs, principles, and norms that perform two functions in ordering international societies: they define what constitutes a legitimate actor, entitled to all the rights and privileges of statehood; and they define the basic parameters of rightful state action’. But the most explicitly functional approach to institutions has been by Donnelly (2002: 21–3), who chooses a functional logic as a way both of building on Bull’s understanding of society and of addressing the manifest shortcomings of the English school’s simple lists. He offers five types of political functions as ‘likely to be performed in any international society’ and begins to allocate institutions to them: communicating and interacting (diplomacy, heralds and messengers, the ancient Greek practice of proxeny), making and applying rules (international law), regulating the use of force (war, ‘just war’ rules, various practices specifying the right to bear arms), aggregating interests and power (alliances, spheres of influence, IGOs, feudal obligations, religious solidarity), and allocating jurisdiction and establishing status (sovereignty, suzerainty, universal empire). Donnelly’s paper is his first cut at a large project and, while understandably unsatisfactory in some respects at this early stage, is nevertheless usefully suggestive, not least in starting from the requirements of second order (‘international’) societies rather than assuming (as Bull does) that one can start from the requirements of any form of society. Unlike first order societies, second order societies do not have to deal with some basic human functions such as sex, birth and death. But because, unlike the individual humans who compose first order societies, their entities are both collective and socially constructed, and they do have distinctive problems about communication and recognition. As James and Reus-Smit emphasize, second order societies have a particular need to specify what kind(s) of collective actors are allowed membership, and what not. Since the entities are collective, they also need rules about how communication is to be conducted, and which voice from within is to be treated as authoritative. Beyond that the obvious historic core concerns of second order societies are with war and commerce, which are captured by Bull’s emphasis respectively on constraints on the use of force, and allocation of property rights. To pursue either commerce or restraints on the resort to war, necessitates bringing in Bull’s third element of society which is understanding about the sanctity

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of agreements. One could therefore start a functional analysis of the primary institutions of international society with these five. In terms of the range of institutions discussed above, the allocations might go as follows. Membership – The importance of defining the membership of a second order society was apparent in the discussion above about constitutive rules and who the players/actors are. Membership partly overlaps with Donnelly’s category of ‘allocating jurisdiction and establishing status’, and also goes beyond it, potentially taking in such identity issues as feudal obligations and religious solidarity, which Donnelly places under ‘aggregating interests and power’. It is thus not just about Bull’s constitutive rules, but also contains equality/inequality of people (or not) and their derivatives, human rights/colonialism and dynasticism; nationalism and its derivatives, self-determination, popular sovereignty and democracy, and other variations on the question of identity that would bear on the ‘standard of civilisation’ that determines whether entities are admitted to or excluded from international society. Authoritative communication – This is close to Donnelly’s classification, and is mainly about diplomacy and its antecedents. Limits to the use of force – It is difficult to make a tight distinction between this function and membership. It would obviously include many of the classic Westphalian institutions emphasized by English school pluralists: great power management, war, alliances, neutrality and balance of power. But at least for Westphalian-type interstate societies, it would be difficult to exclude from this function some of the institutions that also determine membership, for example colonialism, dynasticism and human rights. As I have argued elsewhere (Buzan, 1996), membership of international society has security implications in and of itself, not necessarily guaranteeing survival, but giving some protection against being treated as a terra nullius whose inhabitants can be treated as non-human. Allocation of property rights – Curiously, Donnelly does not pick up this aspect of Bull’s functional approach to society, thereby perpetuating the English school’s neglect of the economic sector. Allocation of property rights has both political and economic aspects, respectively about who governs where, and who owns what. Whether these aspects can be treated as distinct, as in Tilly’s (1990) counter-pointing of coercion and capital, or whether they are intertwined, as in Ruggie’s (1983) argument that private property and sovereignty emerged together, remains

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controversial. On the political side, the obvious Westphalian institutions are territoriality and boundaries, though as the feudal model indicates, this kind of hard territoriality is not the only way of allocating property rights. On the economic side, property rights point towards the institutions associated with trade and finance. In societies where the environment has become an issue, institutions associated with stewardship would also come under this heading. Sanctity of agreements – This is close to Donnelly’s ‘making and applying rules’ and is mainly about international law and its antecedents. This discussion does no more than open the door to the question of how to understand the primary institutions of international society in functional terms. I do not have the space here to develop this line of thinking further, but the desirability of doing so is apparent for at least two reasons. First, a functional framing is one way of giving theoretical grounding to the English school’s so far rather ad hoc and empirical approach to institutions, and moreover doing so in terms that can be linked into Bull’s work. Second, Donnelly is no doubt correct in thinking that a functional approach would greatly facilitate the Wight/Watson project of comparing international societies across space and time.

Conclusions The chapters for this book were asked to examine Bull’s thinking and reflect on whether it still makes sense to conceptualize IR in terms of an anarchical society. In relation to my subject of institutions, the general answer to that question is ‘yes’, but not in the overly narrow, static and pluralist terms set out by Bull. In parallel with Wendt (1992), English school thinking has moved more towards a position that ‘anarchy is what states make of it’. Throughout this chapter, I have been quite critical of Bull, so it is important to establish that his contribution was absolutely foundational to the literature that followed. Although my argument is that we need to follow the moves already made away from Bull’s position on institutions, this should not prevent us from acknowledging his path-breaking contribution. In his work on institutions, Bull pioneered four key ideas. First, the anarchical society should be conceptualized as a distinctive, second order, form of society. Secondly, there was a crucial distinction to be made between primary and secondary

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institutions (though he did not use those labels). Thirdly, one key to understanding the distinction between primary and secondary institutions was to be found in the idea of constitutive rules. Fourthly, that a functional logic probably provided the best theoretical foundation for understanding institutions. This is a very formidable contribution, which did much to shape the subsequent evolution of the literature. But that said, there was much that Bull got wrong, or left underdeveloped, or hardly recognized at all. In this chapter, I have been particularly critical of Bull’s commitment to pluralism, which seemed to go beyond the logic of his argument, and which both narrowed his view of institutions and made him excessively defensive about solidarist developments. Elsewhere, I have criticized Bull regarding his neglect of both regions (Buzan, 2004a: ch. 7) and the economic sector (Buzan, 2004a: 150–1; 2004b), both of which have huge implications for institutions. Because of his commitment to universalism Bull did not register developments such as the EU as important manifestations of international society. And because of his disinterest in economics, he was blind to some of the major institutions of international society since at least the nineteenth century and, according to Wight and others well before that, stretching back into ancient and classical times. These shortcomings gave him a depressed view of history which no doubt in turn reinforced his pluralist inclinations. As I have shown in this chapter, other writers have pushed the study of primary institutions along in various ways, in the process opening a gap between Bull’s position and the general understanding of institutions that has developed within the English school. The highlights of this process are • consideration of a much wider range of institutions than given by Bull; • an ongoing debate about whether, and on what basis, to differentiate between higher and lower types of primary institution, with particular concern about the distinction between constitutive and regulatory rules; • much more interest in the dynamism, interplay and evolution of institutions within the anarchical society, and the use of this aspect to reinterpret history and to develop a much more sophisticated and mobile sense of the social structure of international systems; and • the beginning of an attempt to place the idea of primary institutions of firmer, and more explicitly functional, grounds.

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Although there are still those who share Bull’s commitment to pluralism (most stridently, Jackson, 2000), subsequent work has drifted towards more neutral, analytical ground. Bull’s influence on the agenda is still strongly manifest even though much of his position on institutions is strongly questioned. There remains a great deal still to be done. The subject of primary institutions still needs better theoretical grounding than has been achieved so far. Since this is the key to the English school’s claim to distinctiveness, such work is a matter of priority. As the conceptualization of primary institutions improves, more needs to be done on linking this systematically to the neoliberal institutionalist and regime theory studies of secondary institutions. One question that may be central to exploring this linkage is, ‘where are the limits of constitutive effects in international society?’ Is the boundary between primary and secondary institutions understandable in terms of the difference between constitutive effects and regulatory practices defined and created by pre-constituted actors within a pre-constituted game? I rather suspect not, but this question needs to be addressed. A more coherent understanding of institutions also needs to be read into the historical account, which will require a considerable extension to the work already done on the evolution of institutions and their interplay with the frame of the anarchical society. The best respect we can pay to Bull’s intellectual legacy on the institutions of international society is to accept the importance of the research agenda that he opened up, while continuing to move away from much of his specific formulation.

Acknowledgements Much of the argument, and some of the text, of this chapter is drawn from Buzan (2004a), though it has been extensively rearranged, rethought and reintegrated to address the specific theme of Bull’s contribution.

5 The Balance of Power and Great Power Management Richard Little

Introduction The balance of power and great power management play crucial roles in Bull’s analysis of the anarchical society. For Bull, they constitute two of five key institutions that helped to develop and sustain a European international society of states. However, the balance of power has a privileged role in Bull’s analysis because it helps to provide ‘the conditions in which other institutions on which international order depends are able to operate’ (2002: 112, 102). A closer investigation reveals, however, that the balance of power as presented in The Anarchical Society is more complex and problematic than is generally appreciated. Although Bull argues that the institutional structure of the European international society was underpinned by the balance of power, his analysis reveals that, in practice, the five institutions that he associates with international society are mutually interdependent. Far from underpinning international society, the balance of power is to a significant extent sustained by the existence of the other institutions. The link between the balance of power and great power management is particularly important. In the absence of institutionalized great powers, Bull’s analysis reveals that a balance of power will fail to emerge and persist. But, by the same token, without an institutionalized balance of power, the survival of the other institutions is also placed in jeopardy. Bull’s analysis, therefore, promotes a distinctively complex approach to the balance of power. The complexity is, in part, the result of the conceptual distinction that he establishes between the international system and the international society. He argues that a balance of power can only emerge accidentally or fortuitously in an international system and, as a consequence, it will prove to be a transient phenomenon 97

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that cannot provide the basis for international order. By contrast, an institutional balance of power is seen to be a contrivance of the great powers and an essential source of order in the European international society. In making this argument, however, Bull assumes that only those great powers that acknowledge their institutional status will contrive to form a balance of power. This line of argument suggests that the distinction between a system and a society has important consequences for any analysis of the balance of power. But although the distinction is now widely referenced in the discipline, there has been a failure to explore its implications. Having noted the distinction, most analysts simply focus on Bull’s conception of the international society and ignore his conception of an international system. It has been left to analysts working within the English school tradition to dissect the distinction, and their consensus is that it serves no useful purpose. The consensus is challenged in this chapter. I argue that there has been a failure to appreciate the significance of the distinction between system and society and that it plays a role analogous to the one associated with the state of nature in Hobbesian analysis. In other words, the distinction represents a heuristic aid for our understanding of why states voluntarily agree to constitute an international society and establish institutions that help to sustain the society. Bull, however, goes beyond this heuristic endeavour and he draws on the distinction to help him to analyse world politics. But by giving the distinction an ontological as well as a heuristic status Bull renders it both problematic and confusing. The problems become particularly acute when Bull focuses on the geographical expansion of the European international society. He argues that the European international society operated in the context of a global international system. So as the society expanded, so it encroached on and absorbed the system. If Bull’s approach to world politics is accepted without reservation, then it suggests that whereas the great powers were able to contrive a balance of power within Europe, any balance of power in the global international system could only have been an accidental result of power politics. In fact, Bull himself fails to accept this position; instead, his analysis suggests that long before the establishment of a global international society, the Europeans extended a contrived balance of power well beyond the boundaries of Europe. This inconsistency in Bull’s analysis supports the argument that the system/society distinction should be dissolved. Such a move, however, has significant knock-on consequences for Bull’s approach to both the balance of power and the great powers. The move suggests, in particular, that Bull’s approach to

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the balance of power can be associated with two very different social dynamics. One is essentially competitive or adversarial and the other is essentially cooperative or associative. Although Bull argues that academic interest in the balance of power was waning by the 1970s, when he was writing The Anarchical Society, because of the conceptual and normative criticisms that had been levelled at the concept over the previous 30 years, he insisted that it was not possible to make sense of past or present international relations without taking into account the balance of power. Although the balance of power never completely disappeared from the academic agenda in subsequent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept in the aftermath of the Cold War and the reputed rise of a hegemonic United States (Ikenberry, 2003; Vasquez and Elman, 2003; Paul et al., 2004). As a consequence, a reassessment of Bull’s thinking about both the balance of power and the great powers is instructive at this juncture because it demonstrates that his concepts are more complex and broadranging than those that prevail in much of the contemporary literature. His societal approach seems to challenge the popular assumption that in place of the great powers operating within an international balance of power, states are now operating in a unipolar world dominated by the United States. Even at the height of the Cold War, Bull challenged the assumption that world politics could be characterized in purely bipolar terms and his line of argument would certainly counter current arguments about the hegemonic position of the United States. The overall aim of this chapter is to rearticulate Bull’s approach to the balance of power. This is not a straightforward task because the chapter in The Anarchical Society devoted to the balance of power is primarily concerned with the taxonomic exercise of identifying the different variables that have been used to characterize the balance of power (simple vs complex balances, general vs local balances, subjective vs objective balances, and fortuitous vs contrived balances), the identification of the various functions that the balance of power performs in the international society, and the impact of nuclear weapons on the balance of power. He is much less interested in pulling together the multifaceted discussion of the balance of power that can be observed once it is acknowledged that the concept represents a thread that runs through and pulls the text together. Essentially this chapter will examine The Anarchical Society through the lens provided by the idea of the balance of power. Once this perspective is adopted, however, it quickly appears, first, that there are gaps in the discussion and, second, that various aspects of the analysis are not tied together. It is not intended here

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to plug all the gaps or to tie up all the loose ends. The intention is, rather, to highlight the scale of the ambition that underpins the model of the balance of power that can be discerned in the text and to reveal its continuing relevance. In the process of sketching the outline of this model, there will also be reference to subsequent work inspired, at least in part, by Bull’s analysis that can be drawn upon to help to fill out the argument and move it forward. This chapter is divided into six sections. The first focuses on how Bull conceptualizes the balance of power. The next four sections follow a series of crucial and interrelated moves made by Bull that all have significant consequences for his analysis of the balance of power. The first move relates to the distinction that he draws between an international system and an international society. Although the utility of the distinction is defended here, it is argued, nevertheless, that it is necessary to de-link Bull’s conception of an accidental or fortuitous balance of power from the international system and attach it to the international society. Bull’s second move is to identify the link that he establishes between the balance of power and great power management. It is then argued that Bull’s position can be clarified by postulating the existence of two distinct balance of power dynamics – one associative and the other adversarial. In practice, neither of these dynamics is developed in any depth in The Anarchical Society. The third move made by Bull is to focus on the geographical expansion of the European international society. The identification of the two balance of power dynamics makes it easier to explore the implications of this development. The final move made by Bull is to acknowledge that the nature of international society has undergone constant change and to recognize that this feature of world politics has important implications for the analysis of the balance of power and great power management, although again these are only touched on by Bull. The contemporary implications of this assessment of Bull’s approach to the balance of power and the great powers are then explored in a conclusion.

Bull’s conception of the balance of power Before investigating the various moves made by Bull in the course of examining the balance of power it is necessary to start by looking more closely at what Bull means by the balance of power. It is a notoriously protean and ambiguous concept that invariably escapes the confines of any straightforward definition. Bull relies, in the first instance, on a definition formulated by Emerich de Vattel (1714–1767) in the

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eighteenth century. Vattel (1834) defined the balance of power as ‘a state of affairs such that no one power is in a position where it is preponderant and can lay down the law to the others’. The key point about this definition is the sharp distinction implied between the distribution of power within the state and the distribution of power amongst states. From this perspective, the balance of power represents a synonym for anarchy. In other words, the balance of power is a term that applies to any political arena where there is no overarching authority. It is a term that tells us much more about the political arena than about the units operating within the arena. Bull, however, quickly extends the concept beyond a description of how power is distributed and argues that the balance of power constitutes an institution. When Bull refers to institutions, he is not necessarily talking about formal organizations, but rather ‘a set of habits and practices shaped towards the realization of common goals’. What then is the common goal that balance of power practices are designed to realize? It is to maintain an anarchic distribution of power. So the institutional balance of power presupposes that because all states wish to preserve their own autonomy, there is a common interest in preventing the emergence of a power that will eliminate the autonomy of the other units. Bull, however, adds five layers of complexity to this formulation. First, he acknowledges that polarity has an important impact on institutional practices. When there are only two great powers in the system, a rough parity of power is required to maintain a balance of power; so for a contrived balance to emerge, at least one of the two great powers has to be trying to ensure that an even distribution of power is maintained. When there are a number of great powers, however, even ‘gross inequalities’ of power do not necessarily put the strongest state in a position of preponderance (Bull, 2002: 98). This position suggests that it is easier to preserve a stable balance of power in a multipolar world than a bipolar world. Bull, however, fails to address this issue. The second factor Bull raises relates to the fungibility of power. In contrast to Waltz (1979), who assumes that power is fungible, Bull accepts that it is necessary to acknowledge the significance of different types of power. Military power must be distinguished from economic power, for example, because the latter can be highly influential within its own domain. As a consequence, Bull (2002: 108) argues that ‘international politics moves are made on “many chessboards” ’. It follows that during the Cold War, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union may have constituted the major players on the nuclear deterrence ‘chessboard’, but in the areas of trade and investment, Japan replaced

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the Soviet Union as a major player. Distinctive balances of power can be identified on the different ‘chessboards’. But Bull draws back from the more radical implications of this position by arguing that the different ‘chessboards’ are, in practice, interrelated, so that a strong position on one board may be brought to the table where a different game is being played. Because the different boards are interrelated, it is essential to accept that there is an indispensable concept of ‘overall power’ that relates to a general balance of power (Bull, 2002: 109). The third factor raised by Bull relates to the geographical distribution of power. He accepts that power is not evenly distributed across the international arena and so it is necessary to distinguish a general balance of power that embraces all the great powers from local balances of power that form in specific regions. Bull acknowledges that the institutional rules governing the general balance of power have much less leverage at the local level where great powers can sometimes move into a preponderant position. The implications of this discrepancy are significant for Bull’s theory because it suggests that the great powers occupy a very privileged position in the international society. This issue is explored in more detail later. The fourth factor that is seen by Bull to affect his conception of the balance of power relates to perceptions of how power is distributed. Bull is well aware of the problems of assessing power and recognizes that there is often a mismatch between the subjective and the objective balance of power.1 Although he does not explore the issue in depth, he acknowledges that for the balance of power to operate as an institution there has to be a self-conscious recognition of how power is distributed amongst all the great powers. But this is considered to be a necessary and not a sufficient condition for the formation of a stable balance of power. Stability is seen to require an accurate perception of power. Any significant mismatch between the objective and the subjective balance of power is seen to result in a balance of power that is ‘fragile and impermanent’ (Bull, 1977: 104). The final factor raised by Bull relates to the development of nuclear weapons. He argues that their impact has been so great that it has generated the distinctive institution of nuclear deterrence that needs to be distinguished from the balance of power. Bull establishes the distinction on four counts. First, because nuclear deterrence focuses on one element of ‘overall power’, it only involves an aspect of the balance of power. Second, whereas the balance of power in a bipolar world presupposes power parity, this is not the case with nuclear weapons where the

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emphasis is on mutual assured destruction, which can exist even when there is a huge discrepancy in the volume of weapons possessed by the two sides. Third, the balance of power rests primarily on the objective power possessed by the great powers, whereas nuclear deterrence rests on the subjective belief that both sides have the will to retaliate. Finally, the objective of the balance of power is to preserve international society, and this may well involve war, whereas nuclear deterrence is purely intended to preserve peace. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the institutional dimension of deterrence identified by Bull looks suspect because nuclear weapons appear to have lost some of their privileged status, with the United States much more interested in developing missile defence than maintaining what can be seen as the outmoded conception of nuclear deterrence. Vattel’s definition has important implications for the contemporary world, which is frequently described as unipolar and incompatible with a balance of power. However, although the United States possesses much more military power than any other state in today’s world and is in a position, on the one hand, to resist pressure to participate in multilateral agreements and, on the other, to play a very influential role in the terms of any multilateral agreement that it participates in, it is unequivocally not in a position to lay down the law to others. In terms of the definition that Bull relies upon, therefore, even a unipolar world is compatible with a balance of power. In any event, this definition reveals that an institutional balance of power can be identified by the habits and practices of states that are designed to ensure that ‘no one power is in a position where it is preponderant and can lay down the law to the others’. From Bull’s perspective, then, threats to the survival of the international society are countered by a range of entrenched habits and practices enacted by the members of the society. Balance of power habits and practices play a crucial role in ensuring that the international society persists. As a consequence of this concern with the long-term survival of the international society, most of its members will also survive, although Bull insists that this is a secondary objective. Survival of the international society takes precedence over the survival of individual members. According to Bull, then, it follows, for example, that eighteenth-century theorists who argued that the successive partitions of Poland reflected the failure or even the demise of the balance of power did not understand that the elimination of states was occasionally the price that had to be paid to ensure the long-term survival of international society (see Chapter 6).

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The balance of power in the international system The first move made by Bull that has significant implications for his assessment of the balance of power relates to the distinction that he draws between an international system and an international society. An international system exists, he argues, whenever ‘states are in regular contact with one another and where in addition there is interaction between them, sufficient to make the behaviour of each a necessary element in the calculation of the other’ (Bull, 2002: 4). By contrast, an international society exists when states, on the one hand, are ‘conscious of certain common interests and common values’ and, on the other, ‘conceive of 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). This distinction is frequently referred to whenever Bull’s work is discussed. But having noted the distinction, attention is then almost invariably focused on his conception of international society. There is very little attempt to examine the significance of the distinction. Perhaps unsurprisingly this task has been left to theorists working from an English school perspective; rather more surprisingly, three key theorists all agree that the distinction is unhelpful and should be eliminated. These lines of reasoning need to be reassessed, albeit briefly, however, because a close reading of Bull suggests that the three theorists have missed the central point that Bull wants to make. He argues, contrary to Waltz (1979) and other theorists working in the structural realist tradition, that whereas a balance of power can be reliably maintained in an international society, there can be no assurance that a balance of power will be formed in an international system. James (1993) insists that it is not possible to conceive of an international system that does not embrace the features that Bull associates with the existence of an international society. By the same token, any meaningful conception of an international society will make the systemic assumption that its members must take each other’s behaviour into account. It follows that Bull has set up a false dichotomy and the most practical step is to discard the idea of an international system because it is the societal dimension that needs attention. Jackson (2000: 113–16), on the other hand, accepts that the two terms point up a useful distinction, but he argues that it is better captured by distinguishing between instrumental and non-instrumental behaviour. Instrumental behaviour is based on strategic conceptions of self-interest that necessarily take the actions of other actors into consideration. Failure to take account of others will all too easily give rise to self-defeating strategies. By contrast,

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non-instrumental behaviour is based on legal and moral obligations that necessarily embrace the legitimate interests of others who will be affected by this behaviour. Jackson accepts that both forms of behaviour need to be accommodated in any analysis of international society. He objects to the use of international systems terminology, however, because it too easily gives rise to a mechanistic view of behaviour that encourages what Jackson considers to be the utterly mistaken notion that human beings can be pushed around by social structures. However, he correctly notes that when Bull refers to the international system he is not suggesting that human behaviour can be structurally determined. Buzan (2004a: 98–108) provides a third significant discussion of the distinction between an international system and an international society. He acknowledges Jackson’s view that Bull is endeavouring to capture two distinctive types of social behaviour, but he insists, nevertheless, that Jackson fails to get at the essence of Bull’s position on the international system which does represent a ‘physical mode of interaction typical of the mechanistic, realist-style analyses of the balance of power as an automatic process rooted in the relative material capabilities of states’ (Buzan, 2004a: 99). In other words, according to Buzan, Bull’s view of the international system generates a very distinctive approach to the balance of power, one which assumes that the behaviour of states can be accounted for by the changing distribution of power in the international system. Buzan then goes on to argue, in line with Jackson, that this orientation can be captured perfectly well within the context of an international society, thereby rendering the need for the idea of an international system redundant. This line of argument is half right, but also half wrong because it fails to appreciate why Bull wants and needs to draw such a sharp distinction between the international system and the international society in order to develop his conception of the balance of power. Accounting for the distinction that Bull draws between the international system and the international society is not a straightforward task because he seems to use it in three rather different ways. In the first instance, the distinction is used for heuristic purposes that correspond to the distinction that Hobbes draws between the state and a state of nature. In other words, an international system that lacks all norms and institutions can be compared to a state of nature. But there are problems with this move. Indeed, Bull himself draws attention to the obvious flaws in establishing a ‘domestic analogy’ between a state of nature and the anarchic international system (Bull, 2002: 46–49). So, for example, it is self-evidently the case that states in an international

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system are not nearly as vulnerable as individuals in a state of nature. As a consequence, in contrast to the level of existential or absolute insecurity experienced by the individual in the state of nature, states experience relative security. It follows that alliance formation becomes a realistic option for states, whereas such a strategy could not be countenanced by individuals in a state of nature. This line of argument, however, rests on the assumption that all that Hobbes was concerned with was the persistence of chronic insecurity in the state of nature. Michael Williams (2005) has persuasively demonstrated for an international relations audience that this account of Hobbes is underdeveloped and that it needs to be acknowledged that the implications of the state of nature are much more profound for Hobbes and, as a consequence, for any analyst with serious pretensions to work within the realist tradition of thought. Williams’ starting point is the recognition that Hobbes was a philosophical sceptic who accepted that our understanding and knowledge of the world is radically and necessarily insecure. There are, for Hobbes, no unequivocal epistemological or ontological foundations on which we can proceed to build a firm and secure knowledge of the world. This position is not at all surprising, given that he was living at a time when there had been ferocious wars fought within and between states about the most fundamental beliefs that human beings adhere to. The state of nature, therefore, identifies a situation or condition of radical ontological and epistemological uncertainty. It is a world where there is no common language or shared beliefs. But the desire for a common language and shared beliefs stems from a fundamental human need that, from Hobbes’s perspective, can emerge only with the establishment of a common power. It follows that the existence of the state, on this reading of Hobbes, entails far more than the provision of physical security. And when attention is focused on relations between states, there is much more at stake than threats to physical security. The sovereign is not only protecting the state, but in doing so is preserving the existence of a common language and shared beliefs that are absolutely essential ingredients of the human condition. The ontological and epistemological uncertainty that characterizes the state of nature is pushed up to the level of the international system, which can be seen to lack any common language or shared beliefs. The absolute insecurity of the state of nature may have been eliminated, but the even more fundamental uncertainties associated with the state of nature have now been projected onto the international system. What are the implications of this assessment for the balance of power? From Bull’s perspective, the concept has no meaning in the context of

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an international system because it is an institution that requires the existence of a common language and shared beliefs. In the absence of these features, there can be no provision for a balance of power in the international system. Bull does not deny that an even distribution of power may emerge, but this will be completely contingent on strategies that have absolutely no relation to Bull’s conception of an institutionalized balance of power. A systemic balance will emerge ‘quite fortuitously, in the absence of any belief that it serves common interests, or any attempt to regulate or institutionalise it’ (Bull, 2002: 63). Bull assumes that such a fortuitous balance of power is the most likely outcome in a situation where two dominant states are striving to achieve hegemony within an international system. He argues that in a bipolar anomic world with the two dominant powers aiming at absolute aggrandisement we can only imagine the balance of power to be ‘a moment of deadlock in a struggle to death between two contending powers’ (Bull, 2002: 100–1). Such a development will be a fleeting moment in the history of the international system and Bull insists that there is simply no ‘inevitable tendency’ for this kind of unintended balance of power to arise in an anarchic system (Bull, 2002: 107). From Bull’s perspective, the power political argument that an unintended balance of power will be a permanent feature of any international system presupposes that ‘all states seek to maximize their relative power position’ (Bull, 2002: 107). But, following Hobbes, Bull accepts that to survive, any sovereign has to satisfy domestic interests, and it follows that there are often persuasive reasons for states to disregard the power political requirement to maximize their international power. This position reinforces Bull’s general argument that the emergence of a balance of power will necessarily be a fortuitous and transitory feature of any international system. As a consequence, the resilience of the European balance of power is an extremely unusual feature of world history and is best accounted for by the emergence of an institutional balance of power. Already, however, the analysis has moved beyond the idea of the international system as a heuristic or tool for thinking about what world politics would look like in the absence of an international society through to his second use of the system/society distinction. Here, Bull identifies historical periods when international systems can be identified in the absence of any international society. Indeed, Bull (2002: 241) argues that there is ‘ample historical precedent’ for international systems operating in the absence of international societies and he refers, for instance, to the contacts made by the Spanish with the Inca and Aztec Empires and the threat to Europe posed by Genghis Kahn. But

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these examples are problematic because it is far from clear that they provide instances of sustained international systems. They are essentially examples of episodic ‘first encounters’.2 Nevertheless, these encounters did last in some cases for long periods of time and the issue needs to be reassessed in the later section on the geographical expansion of Europe. A third use of the system/society distinction is particularly problematic for Bull’s societal approach to world politics and for his conception of the balance of power. Bull presupposes that although an international system can exist in the absence of an international society, every international society is necessarily underpinned by an international system. It is difficult to link the raw and brutal first encounters used to exemplify an international system with the complex societal relations that Bull associates with an institutional balance of power. One way of circumventing this difficulty is to conceive of the international system as a ‘virtual’ reality that coexists with the actual reality provided by the theory and practices associated with international society; here, the international system/society relationship corresponds to relationship between the state of nature and the sovereign state in Hobbes’s thinking. Just as the fear of operating in a state of nature accounts for the willingness of individuals to submit to sovereign authority, so the fear of operating in an essentially anomic and institution-free international system encourages statespersons to establish and maintain the institutions that sustain an international society. But in both cases it is recognized that institutions can break down so that sovereign power can give way to civil war and an international society can degenerate into an international system. But there will also be a powerful desire to re-establish order. What Bull seems to be saying, therefore, is that the essentially power political orientation associated with the international system and institutional orientation associated with international society coexist and that both exert a significant influence on decision makers who are responsible for managing international relations. So, for example, Bull (2002: 40) argues that during a major conflict, when the two sides fiercely deny that they are members of a common international society, the concept ‘does not disappear so much as go underground, where it continues to influence the practice of states’. But Bull takes the argument further than this and assumes that international politics is constituted by a mix of divergent and often competing practices that contribute to the existence of a complex and multidimensional reality. He argues, moreover that there are theorists who have captured the essential elements of each of these dimensions. So ‘the element of war and struggle for power among states’ that he

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associates with an international system needs to be distinguished from ‘the element of co-operation and regulated intercourse among states’ that he associates with an international society (Bull, 2002: 39). The thinking of theorists associated with both of these two traditions of thought is seen to have evolved over the past five hundred years and helps to capture the essence of the changing reality of world politics that has gone on during this period. Bull (2002: 49) insists, therefore, that it is important not to reify either of these elements, so, for example, ’it is always erroneous to interpret events as if international society were the sole or the dominant element’.3 If Bull’s analysis is taken at face value, however, then he is shortchanging what power politicians have had to say about the role of the balance of power in an international system. According to power politicians, European great powers recognized that they were engaged in an adversarial relationship with each other and, as a consequence, they monitored changes in the overall distribution of power very carefully and responded in such a way as to ensure that their own position within this distribution of power was not adversely affected. The responses could take a number of forms although most attention has been focused on military expansion, alliance formation and war. The persistent attempts by states to improve or at least maintain their power position can be associated with a competitive or adversarial balance of power. The dynamic associated with this balance of power appears to be very different from the one that Bull analyses in an international system devoid of any conception of society where the balance is maintained only so long as one power is able to resist the might of the other. By contrast, the adversarial balance of power presupposes that there is a great deal more room for strategic manoeuvreing. Although Bull makes virtually no reference to either military expansion or alliance formation in The Anarchical Society, nevertheless, it is clear, given the importance that he attaches to the coexistence of an international system/society that provision should be made for this dynamic.4 But once this adversarial balance has been identified then it opens questions about the nature and distinctiveness of the balance of power that Bull associates with an international society.

The balance of power and great power management in the international society The second significant move made by Bull is to show how great power management is essential for the maintenance of an institutional balance

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of power. He depicts great powers as members of a club. It follows that there must be more than one member to form a club and so neither Rome nor imperial China constituted great powers. By the same token, Bull suggests that if the United States became ‘the single dominant power, it could no longer rightly be called a great power or a super power’ (Bull, 2002: 195). Bull, of course, was writing before the end of the Cold War and since then it has frequently been argued that the world has been restructured, with the United States emerging as a ‘hyper power’ that operates in a unipolar world. Bull was certain, however, that even at the end of the Second World War, when the distribution of power most favoured the United States, it was far from ready to ‘assume the mantle of Rome’. As the Cold War progressed, Bull identified the movement of former great powers such as China and Japan back into the great power club. It is improbable, therefore, that Bull would have changed his position in the light of more recent events; instead, it is more likely that he would argue that the notion that we are operating within a unipolar world fails to identify the real distribution of global power that still reflects the existence of an institutional balance of power.5 Far from being able to ‘lay down the law’ for international society, the United States, time and again, is finding it necessary to opt out of evolving international law, while continuing to insist that it is operating in good faith as a member of the international community. Great powers, therefore, are simultaneously linked by the balance of power and the existence of an international society. Bull insists that there would be no great powers in a hypothetical international system because the rights and duties associated with being a great power presuppose the existence of such a society. It follows that states like Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany that reject these rights and duties and aim to overthrow the international society ‘are not properly speaking great powers’ (Bull, 2002: 196).6 Great powers are restrained by the existence of an international society and simultaneously help to reproduce the society. Bull establishes six interrelated roles that are linked to the rights and duties of states. First, they have a duty to preserve the central or overarching balance of power; second, they must try to ensure that their actions do not create crises for other states; third, they must eschew war whenever possible and limit its extent if they do become involved in war; fourth, they must be willing to exercise control in areas where their power is preponderant; fifth, they must be willing to establish spheres of influence when the opportunity arises for international society to expand; and sixth, they must be willing to cooperate in order to promote common policies across international society.

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These roles are all related to the management of the international society and because the great powers are seen to have a duty to manage the international society, they are accorded a number of rights such as the right, under certain circumstances, to go to war or to establish spheres of influence. Bull traces some of these rights a long way back into European history. So, for example, spheres of influence are seen to originate in the fifteenth century. Bull’s position has been challenged, however, by Simpson (2004), who argues that the idea of great powers having rights and duties only emerged after 1815. But on closer inspection it is clear that Simpson is talking about formal rights and duties that were written into the treaties established after the Napoleonic Wars, whereas Bull is interested in both formal and informal rights and duties, and there is a presupposition that these rights and duties operated on an informal basis in earlier centuries.7 Great power management presupposes collective or concerted action (Simpson, 2004: 73). But Bull’s attempt to unpack the implications of this proposition for his conception of an institutional or contrived balance of power is inadequate. His system/society distinction inhibits his discussion. So, for example, when discussing the contrived balance of power he argues that to take an institutional form, at least one state has to monitor shifts in the balance of power and take steps to ensure that a putative hegemon does not come to dominate the system. But any state wishing to preserve its own security would respond in this fashion whether or not it acknowledged a duty to preserve the balance of power.8 Bull fails to address this point although it can be presumed that the international system would be pressed into service to account for the emergence of any fortuitous balance of power. However, the adversarial dynamic associated with alliance formation and arms racing is very different from the unmitigated power confrontation that Bull associates with the formation of a fortuitous balance of power in an anomic international system. Accurate assessments of the distribution of power and the formation of dependable alliances require the kind of stable environment that Bull associates with the existence of an international society. Bull’s system/society distinction runs the danger of encouraging the conflation of these very different dynamics. It is important, however, to separate them and to acknowledge that an unintended balance of power resulting from adversarial or competitive practices is as much the product of an international society as an international system. Bull’s approach assumes that great powers are operating in an institutionalized fashion only when they are self-consciously acting to preserve

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an international society. But, in practice, it is impossible to distinguish between great powers that are forming alliances, for example, for the purpose of self-preservation and for the purpose of ensuring the survival of the international society. If the motivation is indistinguishable, then it is difficult to refute the neo-realist argument that an analyst should adopt the more straightforward assumption of self-interest. Bull’s system/society distinction, however, helps to open up a gap between a systemic context where self-interest prevails and a societal context where self-interest and societal interests can begin to merge. Again, although Bull fails to open up this issue, his position presupposes that the balance of power needs to be seen in terms of a concerted or collective response by the great powers to new circumstances. This kind of situation is most apparent in the aftermath of a war. It is the peace negotiations, not war, as Bull suggests, that prove to be the ‘basic determinant of the shape the system assumes at any one time’ (Bull, 2002: 181). The most significant changes that occurred in Europe took place as the result of the great powers acting in concert in the aftermath of systemic war. Every great power had an outcome that it favoured on these occasions but it was recognized that the eventual outcome had to be acceptable to the other great powers and at least tolerated by the small and medium powers. From the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, such agreements were formally discussed in terms of establishing a balance of power or a just equilibrium. As Osiander (1994) and Bobbitt (2003) demonstrate, however, it was not only the future of the balance of power that was at stake at these peace conferences. Essentially the future constitutional structure of the international society came under discussion. By comparing the agreements that were established at these major conferences, therefore, it is possible to observe how the structure of international society changes across time. Osiander (1994) insists that the balance of power only came into play in 1713 but even earlier agreements had to be based on a consensus about how power was going to be distributed. While the discussions may not have made formal reference to the balance of power, the final outcome must have reflected, effectively, an informal agreement on the balance of power. Peace negotiations necessarily take place in the wake of war, and so Bull is undoubtedly correct to point to the institutional consequences of war, but there is also an independent dynamic to the large-scale peace negotiations that follow systemic war. Although the parties start from competing positions, there are powerful pressures to produce a great power consensus that have often involved substantial shifts in the established distribution of power. The major reduction in the number of

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European states, for example, occurred at the Treaty of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna, thereby illustrating a point made repeatedly by Bull that the great powers have always been more interested in the future stability of the international society than the preservation of all its members. Bull does not formally identify the dynamic associated with the kind of associational balance of power that emerges as the result of agreements forged in the peace settlements following major wars. Nevertheless, it is clearly more in line with the idea of a contrived or institutional balance of power than the adversarial balance of power discussed earlier.

Geographical expansion and the balance of power The third move made by Bull that has implications for his approach to the balance of power and great power management relates to the geographical expansion of Europe across the globe. Although Bull is better known for his discussion of the expansion of the European international society through his work with Watson (Bull and Watson, 1984), unsurprisingly, some of the basic ideas are adumbrated in The Anarchical Society. The links with the balance of power, however, are largely submerged in this text and a certain amount of excavation has to take place before they can be exposed. Once this is done, moreover, it quickly becomes apparent that the impact of European expansion on the balance of power is more complex than might be anticipated at first sight. In the first instance, Bull uses the system/society distinction to get some leverage on Europe’s relationship with the outside world. For most of Europe’s history, he argues, the European society of states operated within the context of a very much more extensive international system. From the sixteenth century to late nineteenth century, European states participated in an emerging global international system. Despite communication, exchange of envoys and agreements with states beyond the frontiers of Europe, not only about trade but also about war, peace and alliances, Bull insists that these contacts took place ‘outside the framework of any shared conception of international society’. He accepts that there were occasions when a sense of common interests, albeit ‘tentative and inchoate’ began to emerge. But he acknowledges that he is not in a position to provide a detailed account of when and how the European international society expanded across the established international system. Any attempt to provide such an account, he argues, would quickly confront the ‘difficult problems of the tracing of boundaries’ (Bull, 2002: 15).

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The difficulty of establishing these boundaries, however, should not obscure a more deep-seated problem with Bull’s formulation. For an international system to exist, interaction amongst the members has to be sufficient ‘to make the behaviour of each a necessary element in the calculation of the other’ (Bull, 2002: 10). But this kind of calculation was simply not being made on a worldwide basis prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, when the Europeans began to explore beyond the boundaries of Europe, it was some time before these probes began to impact on European diplomatic relations or the balance of power, although the existence of two spheres was acknowledged from a very early stage. Wight notes, for example, that the Peace of CateauCambrésis, 1559, recognized that Europe formed one sphere, with the creation of colonies operating within an outer sphere. The treaty established ‘amity lines’ that separated Europe from areas where colonization was taking place. The amity lines distinguished a zone of peace in Europe from a zone of war elsewhere, and Wight observes that this division ‘became almost a rule of law, giving freedom to plunder and attack and settle without upsetting the peace of Europe’ (1977: 125). Although Wight argues that this rule of law persisted for some time, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, states had become very concerned about the colonial possessions of their neighbours and they certainly figured in the peace settlements that followed major wars. But this development was essentially a Eurocentric phenomenon, with European states assessing how the acquisitions across the globe by other European states affected the European balance of power. This is not an example of the European international society expanding into an established international system, but rather the European international society penetrating separate systems/societies in other parts of the world. There is a growing recognition that there are fundamental problems with the way that Bull thought about the expansion of the European international society and that the whole issue needs to be reconceptualized.9 There is a second related problem with Bull’s image of the European international society extending across an established international system. It fails to take sufficient account of the distinctive way that European states related with the outside world during the nineteenth century. Keene (2002) argues that there were two distinct international orders operating during this period, with one set of rules operating amongst the European states, and a second international order that built upon a very different set of rules that defined relations between European states and the outside world. This second international order

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is also a Eurocentric phenomenon that fails to take account of the long-standing order that had prevailed in many parts of the world before the imposition of European rule (Onuma, 2000). To some extent, Bull is aware of these developments. He notes, for example, that as the conception of Christendom dwindled, the specifically European character of the society of states was strengthened and in the process ‘so also did the sense of its cultural differentiation from what lay outside’ (Bull, 2002: 32). Hobson and Sharman (2005: 87) go further than this, however, and argue that the Europeans defined great powers in essentially racial terms as states that ‘can govern over large areas of land in the “inferior non-European” world’. International lawyers are shown to have played a crucial role in propagating the idea of a racial hierarchy.10 Given this perspective, moreover, it was easy for the Europeans to justify their occupation of Africa. But they also managed to divide Africa by acting in concert. Fourteen European states met at the Berlin Conference, 1884– 1885, to start a process that was to reduce almost all of Africa to colonial status. By 1914, through a complex process of give and take, Africa had been divided arbitrarily amongst the Europeans states into 50 distinct territories. The process of colonialism, therefore, was intimately linked to the dynamic that defined an associative balance of power. The process of establishing European spheres of influence, moreover, was not restricted to Africa. Bull (2002: 220) notes, for example, the spheres of influence deals over Persia and Siam that helped to dampen rivalry among the great powers as European influence extended across the globe.

Change and the balance of power The final move made by Bull that has ramifications for his analysis of the balance of power and great power management relates to his assessment of change in international society. In fact, there is very little explicit discussion of how the balance of power and great powers have changed over time because Bull is interested in the statics rather than the dynamics of world politics. In other words, he wants to establish what the idea of international order involves rather than demonstrating how the historical institutions that embody international order are subject to change (Bull, 2002: 19). Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the ideas underpinning international society have undergone a significant ‘metamorphosis’ over the last three or four centuries (Bull, 2002: 26). At the time of Grotius, in the era immediately preceding the Treaty of Westphalia, Bull accepts that there was no conception of an international society and the fundamental institutions associated with such

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a society were either absent or still at a very underdeveloped stage of development. International law had yet to emerge and natural law regulating individuals rather than states still prevailed (Bull, 2002: 26–31). Treaties were viewed as private contracts that were established between individuals and were not binding on successors. Grotius assumed that individuals existed within a universal society and so he operated on the basis of solidarist rather than pluralist assumptions. It follows that significant changes had to take place before the contemporary conception of an international society of states emerged. Although Bull acknowledges that the character of international society underwent significant and persistent change over the next four or five hundred years, he fails to explore the implications of this change for an understanding of the balance of power or great power management. Nevertheless, there are enough references to change in the text to infer his basic position. Bull’ starting point is that there was no conception of the balance of power when Grotius was writing because there was no conception of sovereignty. Instead, the Roman-law notion of dominium or private property prevailed. As a consequence, territory and the people occupying that territory were regarded as the patrimony of the ruler. It follows that like individuals buying and selling property, a ruler could barter and exchange territory and population in a way that became increasingly difficult as the idea of sovereignty was consolidated and, more especially, after nationalism became a potent force in world politics. But before that point was reached, the emerging great powers were mainly associated with hereditary monarchies and the principle of international legitimacy was dynastic. This principle persisted into the nineteenth century and even at the Congress of Vienna, it was assumed that territory could be divided or joined together in the interests of establishing a just equilibrium. But as we move through the nineteenth century, there is much less freedom of manoeuvre on that front. However, very different rules prevailed outside Europe where it was accepted that European great powers had a right to acquire either territory or influence and that boundaries in these regions could be established or moved at will in order to preserve a balance of power in Europe. At the time Bull was writing he acknowledged that nuclear weapons had brought about another fundamental transformation to the balance of power, with rules relating to the balance of power becoming outmoded by the evolution of nuclear deterrence. In the pre-nuclear era, war was seen to be a crucial institution needed to help preserve a balance of power under threat. Nuclear weapons were considered to have radically changed this calculation because of the emergence of

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an overwhelming common interest in preventing the outbreak of war. Provided that both great powers were willing to play by the deterrent rules, it followed that the two main nuclear weapons states could cooperate in order to produce an increasingly stable deterrent/balance of power.11 In practice, however, because of the persistent capacity for technological innovation nuclear deterrence has never proved to be as stable as its early advocates hoped. Nevertheless, the strategic use of nuclear weapons remains highly unlikely and so too does the possibility of war between any of the major powers in the international arena. Thinking along these lines has led to the conclusion that if war is becoming a redundant institution, then it follows that the balance of power could also be downgraded as an institution in the near future (Buzan, 2004a: 193).

Conclusion What I have endeavoured to do in this chapter is to show that Bull created a considerable amount of space for thinking about the balance of power and that he provided some of the tools needed to promote a comprehensive remapping of the concept. In some ways, Bull was following in Morgenthau’s footsteps because he also provided the basis for an expansive concept of the balance of power at the heart of his theory of international politics.12 But what is most obviously distinctive about Bull’s approach is the emphasis that he places upon the idea of the balance of power as an institution and the complex links that he identifies with the other institutions associated with the contemporary international society. Less obvious, but equally striking, is the implications for the balance of power that follow from the distinction that Bull draws between the international system and the international society. Although I broadly accept the argument made by Bull’s critics that the distinction should be dissolved in the context of an international society and argue that the idea of an international system operating in the absence of an international society is problematic, the distinction still retains some utility as a heuristic device. The device allows Bull to develop the argument that the balance of power is the product of an international society and that there can be no scope for a balance of power to form within the state of nature or an international system. However, Bull’s assessment of the balance of power in the context of an international society is seen to be underdeveloped. In an effort to fill out the concept, attention is drawn to two dynamics, one linked to an adversarial balance of power and the other to an associational balance of

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power. The former clearly overlaps with the neo-realist approach to the balance of power; the latter has been much less clearly articulated within the literature, although it nevertheless relates more closely to Bull’s notion of a contrived balance of power than the adversarial balance of power. Although there is no doubt about that in the long haul, the great powers have found it impossible to sustain an associative balance and cooperation invariably gives way to competition. Ever since the end of the Cold War, assessments of international order have tended to be couched in terms of hegemony, unipolarity, hyperpower and empire. All these terms suggest that the long established international order associated with the balance of power has given way to a new form of international order that represents the negation of the balance of power, with one state setting the rules and then ruling the roost. It is unlikely, however, that Bull would have accepted this characterization of the current international order. It is much more likely that he would be sympathetic to Buzan’s (2004c) argument that the United States represents a super power operating within a clutch of great powers that unquestionably have the capacity to balance the United States. The fact that these great powers have not established an adversarial balance of power against the United States, however, does not necessarily reflect a failure of balance of power thinking. It is at least plausible to suggest that we are operating in an era that is dominated by an associative balance of power. It may be the case, as Buzan suggests, that as the likelihood of war amongst the great powers wanes, so too does the relevance of the adversarial balance of power. But if this happens, then more space is opened up for an associative balance of power to come into play, with the great powers bargaining to reach a consensual outcome that optimizes their various interests. Defensive and offensive realists have been so preoccupied with the insecurity associated with anarchy that they have failed to explore this dimension of international politics. Yet, the great powers have, over several centuries, demonstrated a capacity to reach agreements that have the effect of consolidating their position in international society. In the years since the end of the second world war, this feature of international politics has been institutionalized in international fora. International institutions and the regimes that have been developed within these institutions have primarily been explored by liberal institutionalists. As a consequence, there has been a failure to take on board that these institutions are dominated by the great powers and that the regimes emanating from the institutions are based on a bargained consensus that promotes the interests of the great powers, very often at the expense of the weaker members of the international

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society. If it is the case that the adversarial balance of power is becoming redundant, then the need for a better understanding of the associative balance of power increases.13

Acknowledgements I am grateful to John Williams and Barry Buzan for their helpful comments on this paper. I also wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust for my Major Research Fellowship that has funded a project on the balance of power of which this forms a part.

Notes 1. For a good discussion of this point, see Wohlforth (1993). 2. Wendt (1999) provides an important discussion of the implications of first encounters. 3. Bull further complicates the argument by pointing to the existence of transnational practices that can be observed in world society and that coexist with the practices that can be observed in the international system and the international society. 4. There is an enormous literature on this adversarial dynamic. But Waltz (1979) continues to provide the classic account. 5. This view is being rearticulated. For a sophisticated discussion of the issue, see Buzan (2004b). 6. Halliday (1999) provides an excellent discussion of how revolutionary states can get socialized into international society. 7. However, Bull (2002: 35) also acknowledges that the 1815 Vienna settlement formally endowed the great powers with special rights and duties, reflecting ‘a new doctrine of the hierarchy or grading of states, in place of the old hierarchy of inherited status and precedent, based on the facts of relative power and the consent of international society’. 8. This supposition underpins Waltz’s (1979) approach to the balance of power. 9. The first generation of English school writers focused on the idea of a ‘standard of civilization’ that states like Japan had to achieve before they could join the European society of states (Gong, 1984). But this approach sidesteps the whole colonial process (Buzan, 2004a; Callahan, 2004). More recent thinking is focusing on the power political implications of the expansion of European international society (Suzuki, 2005). 10. Hobson and Sharman draw attention, in particular, to John Westlake, M.F. Lindley and James Lorrimer. It was extraordinarily easy for the Japanese to buy into this racial view of the world and to legitimize their own imperial expansion. 11. Adler (1992/2005) provides a fascinating account of how the United States persuaded the Soviet Union to accept the value of a deterrence rather than a defence posture.

120 The Institutions of Anarchical Society 12. For an attempt to map out Morgenthau’s comprehensive conception of the balance of power, see Little (forthcoming). 13. Gruber (2000) provides an invaluable guide, associating the great powers in supranational institutions with ‘go-it-alone’ power.

6 The Nature of Law in an Anarchical Society David Armstrong

After briefly summarizing Bull’s central arguments about international law, I consider his perspective in the context of four issues relating to the contemporary world. These issues, all of which are at least touched upon in The Anarchical Society, are as follows: 1. The relationship between the balance of power and international law. 2. The legalization of international relations. 3. Globalization and the related concept of cosmopolitanism. 4. Neo-medievalism.

Bull on law Bull’s approach combines caution and rigour in equal measures, as evidenced particularly by the lengths he goes to in stressing that he is not necessarily arguing the case for one value, such as order, over others, such as justice, or emphasizing one phenomenon, such as society in world politics, over others, such as conflict. This, inevitably, makes it difficult at times to pin him down to a very clear position and hence to do justice to his work in a brief summary like this. In particular, it should be stressed that, although Bull’s thoughts on international law – at least as presented in The Anarchical Society – often come across as those of a traditional Realist, he was, in truth, open to any arguments, theories or facts that might shed light upon international relations. Indeed, if he was attached to any ‘ism’, it was scepticism. Furthermore, the ‘realist’ aspects of the book need to be set against the larger context of his overall perspective. In this, the society of states and the international order it upholds are merely one element in world politics, alongside war and 121

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conflict on the one hand, and ‘world order within the great society of mankind’, which is both more fundamental than and morally prior to international order on the other (Bull, 2002: 308). Since, however, he conceives of international law in a relatively restrictive way, as one of the institutions of the society of states, and insists that the contribution to order of international society requires, ‘   a sense of the limitations within which    rules may usefully be made rules of law’ and that international society ‘seeks not to burden international law with a weight it cannot carry’ (Bull, 1966: 72), his writing on law inevitably reflects the tightly drawn framework of (largely) traditional realist premises on which his conception of international society rests. With that proviso, Bull’s starting point is the importance of rules to international order but he stresses that such rules may derive from various sources: morality, custom or established practice, operational rules or international law (Bull, 2002: 64). He accepts that rules may commence life simply as informal ‘rules of the game’ and end as rules of law but (understandably from one whose first major work was a study of the informal system of nuclear deterrence that developed between the superpowers) sees both types of rule as equally important. Bull’s concern throughout the book is, of course, the narrow one of identifying the structures and processes of international society that contribute to order. Three ‘complexes of rules’ are seen as important here: one that sets out the constitutional principle of world politics, namely a society of sovereign states; one establishing ‘rules of coexistence among states’; and the third comprising ‘rules of cooperation’ (Bull, 2002: 64–8). Rules that Bull sees as part of international law appear in all three ‘complexes’. In the first, these include the doctrine that states are the main bearers of legal rights and duties and that state consent is the source of legal obligation. Legal ‘rules of coexistence’ include the fundamental principle of international law, pacta sunt servanda, and the principle of sovereign equality. Finally, the growing range of social, economic and other areas of international cooperation also include numerous legal rules. Any society, Bull argues, requires certain institutions to make rules effective and these institutions need to perform at least eight key functions: They must make, communicate, administer, interpret, enforce, legitimize, adapt and protect the rules (Bull, 2002: 54). Within states, governments perform these functions; in international society various actions by states may be interpreted as performing them, albeit in a less structured and formal way. For example, states ‘make’ rules by engaging in some action indicating their consent, ‘communicate’ them by

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official statements and various actions, ‘administer’ them either through specific acts, such as being guarantors of treaties or through international organizations, and so forth (Bull, 2002: 68–70). Although Bull recognizes that the performance of these functions (and the ‘institutions’ that sustain them) may be only weak and imperfect in international society, he does not enter into the controversies in legal theory about whether this undermines the ‘legal’ status of international law (Nardin, 2000: 3–23). His concern, as always, is less to probe deeply and rigorously into theoretical aspects of the concepts he employs than to demonstrate their empirical validity and examine their contribution to order. It is worth mentioning two further general points that Bull makes about international law before turning to the detailed discussion of it in Chapter 6 of The Anarchical Society. First, he not only sees a basic conflict between international law and international justice as inherent in law’s role in legitimating situations brought about by force but argues strongly that, if international law tried to do anything else, it would have so lost touch with reality as to have been rendered useless. Earlier understandings of international law in terms of natural law or religion, where there was a much stronger emphasis on justice and morality, were seen by (Bull, 2002: 30) as inhibiting ‘   the development of international law as a distinct discipline and technique’. In a similar (though slightly contradictory) vein he argues that an effective balance of power is a sine qua non of international law, even though balance of power systems may need to operate in ways that violate specific principles of international law (Bull, 2002: 104). In his substantive chapter, Bull (2002: 122) begins by defining international law as ‘a body of rules which binds states and other agents in world politics in their relations with one another, and is considered to have the status of law’. Two points about this definition are of interest. First, it includes ‘other agents’ as subjects of law, which marks a partial departure from Bull’s normal emphasis on states, although Bull does not develop this point further. Secondly, his response to the ancient question of whether international law is ‘true law’ is – as many others have done – to fall back upon the fact that lawyers, legal advisers to governments and other individuals who participate in activities relating to international law do so in the belief that the rules with which they are dealing have the status of law. Bull specifically rejects – as he does at greater length in one of his last works – the arguments of Hans Kelsen to the effect that international law meets Austin’s (1995) main criterion for inclusion in a system of law ‘properly so-called’ because

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states have the right to resort to ‘self help’ in response to wrongs committed against them and this acts as a functional equivalent to the coercive quality of domestic law, as required by Austin (Bull, 1986; 2002: 124–7). Kelsen’s argument that, because international society may sanction ‘self help’, the international community, therefore, possess a state-like ‘force monopoly’ is dismissed in his later article as ‘the product of wishful thinking’. Bull is more comfortable with the formulation of one of his teachers at Oxford, H.L.A. Hart, who dismisses Austin’s coercive conception of law as an inaccurate depiction even of criminal law, where it is most applicable (Hart, 1961). Bull notes that Hart’s alternative theory of law, in terms of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ rules, does not really apply to international law, which lacks such basic ‘secondary rules’ as a ‘rule of recognition’ (an authoritative process establishing how rules of law are to be distinguished from other rules), ‘rules of change’ (a clear and accepted process for amending rules of law) and ‘rules of adjudication’ (rules identifying the individuals to be employed and procedures to be followed in applying the primary rules). Another way of making the same point is to say that international law does not exist within a complete ‘rule of law’ system, in which all are equally subject to the law, while the law is applied impartially and authoritatively by independent professionals through institutions set up for that purpose and backed by the full powers of the state. However, as already noted, Bull still argues, as does Hart, that rules of international law have a sufficiently law-like quality, and are accepted as such by enough key players for the debate about the ‘legal’ nature of international law to be an irrelevance. In fact, if we take the argument in The Anarchical Society as a whole, it is quite likely that Bull would, in any case, prefer a much looser legal arrangement than a true rule of law system requires, at least in a society of sovereign states which were also unequal in their power. The requirement of state consent to rules, states’ freedom to withdraw from legal obligations, the ability of powerful states to ignore international law when they perceived it to be in their interest to do so and their refusal to accept international courts that have equal powers to domestic ones – all necessary facets of the structure of order in Bull’s society of states – have no part in a true rule of law system. Similar arguments are used in discussing the efficacy of international law, where he uses Henkin’s (1979: 41–4) familiar formula that most states, most of the time, observe international law and, where they do not, that does not, in itself, count as evidence that the relevant rule is without force (Bull, 2002: 131–2). However, he accepts that this does

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not necessarily mean that international law is a particularly important element in international affairs and goes to some lengths to point out the various limitations of international law and the fact that states may observe rules for many reasons, including habit, self-interest and reciprocity. Here again, Bull is consciously avoiding any temptation to equate a more fully fledged and effective international legal system with any consequent improvement in international order. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of various recent arguments claiming that certain developments involve definite progress in international law: from a purely inter-state to a more cosmopolitan foundation, from narrow rules of coexistence to a broader concern with cooperation in economic, social and environmental areas, from a restrictive emphasis on consent as the primary source of law to the more liberating possibilities of consensus and from a static to more dynamic and creative interpretations of the law. As I shall discuss some of these issues shortly, I shall here confine myself to noting that Bull is, typically, sceptical about these claims, at least in relation to their contribution to international order.

The balance of power and international law Bull’s two main assertions about the relationship between law and the balance of power (that a balance is necessary for international law to function but the operation of a balance system may also violate international law) clearly demand further scrutiny. On the first point, he writes, ‘   international law depends for its very existence as an operating system of rules on the balance of power’ (Bull, 2002: 104), and that ‘a state which is in a position of preponderant power either in the system as a whole or in a particular area, may be in a position to ignore international law   ’ (Bull, 2002: 112). However, he is also clear that preserving a balance may require force to be used in ways that contradict the rules of international law. In the case of the most famous (or infamous) illustration of this, the dismemberment of Poland in the eighteenth century, Burke and Gentz, he argues, were wrong to see the partition of Poland as violating the balance of power concept, which they were interpreting in an ‘idealised and legalistic’ manner (Bull, 2002: 103). Throughout the book, Bull goes to some lengths to criticize idealistic professors and other commentators who, in his view, are attempting to rewrite the script of world politics in ways that conform to their woolly and wrong-headed notions rather than the underlying realities of an

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ongoing struggle for power in conditions of international anarchy.1 It is true that he sees this state of affairs as neither ideal nor inevitable but the underlying message is that these harsh realities are likely to continue, so that the only realistic prospect of some measure of international order is to work within the constraints they impose. Bull’s realism made him one of a limited number of professors of international relations for whom Henry Kissinger kept an open door when he was Secretary of State, but his basic conviction that the struggle among great powers would always be an inescapable factor in world politics, combined with his desire not to be deflected by the bleakness of the picture that his uncompromising logic sometimes painted, occasionally led him to a slightly dogmatic resistance to interpretations and prognostications that fell outside his framework. Bull’s ideas about international law (and indeed much of his thinking about international society more generally) are influenced, to a certain extent, by the work of Lassa Oppenheim, particularly his two-volume International Law, which came out during 1905–1906. Oppenheim, for example, argues, as Bull does, that the balance of power is a condition of, rather than a part of, international law (the ‘erroneous’ view of Burke and Gentz). Both assert the possibility of intervention to uphold the balance of power, even if international law was violated by such acts. Similarly, much the same kinds of criticisms can be (and have been) made against both writers: in particular their tendency sometimes to see the modern state as a monolithic, undifferentiated and trigger happy force of nature (e.g. Kingsbury, 2002). Moreover, their use of historical evidence to support their views is at times selective and tends towards justifying great power actions whether those are taken on behalf of or in violation of international law. The arguments used by the great powers in partitioning Poland certainly made use of balance of power rhetoric, for example, but the partition was, in essence, prompted by Poland’s military weakness. In other words, it was primarily an act of greed in the face of vulnerability, and Burke’s criticisms were justified: If there were no basic norms on which international relations rested – ‘public law of Europe’ – Europe could expect a further descent into violence. In fact Bull’s view is actually closer to Burke than he seemed to appreciate. Burke saw international law as part of an overall ‘political system of Europe’, encompassing the balance of power, alliances, good faith, etiquette, diplomacy, limitations on states’ territorial ambitions and compensations to prevent unequal gains through which the ‘tranquillity’ of Europe was ensured (Armstrong, 1993: 207–9). The assault on Poland was an attack on all of

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these principles, not on the specific notion that the balance was part of international law: The breach that has now been made, in those compacts that unites states for their mutual benefit, establishes a most dangerous precedent; it deprives, in a great measure, every separate power in Europe, of that security which was founded in treaties, alliances, common interest, and public faith. It seems to throw nations collectively into that state of nature, in which it has been supposed that mankind separately subsisted. (Burke in Stanlis, 1953: 406) Similarly, the nineteenth century saw considerable developments in international law and while the balance of power was sometimes a factor in these, so were many other elements. For example, for a brief period after 1815, the great powers were able to agree a host of regulations relating to issues ranging from riparian boundaries to the rights of Jewish minorities. Since the powers had gone to great pains to establish a new balance in their deliberations of 1814–1815, it can hardly be denied that the balance of power was a contributing factor in this brief atmosphere of apparently emerging international governance. But the operation of the balance also at times prevented further development in international law. For example, both British proposals for states to have the right to search each other’s ships for slaves and Russian proposals for an international fleet to be based in the Mediterranean for the purpose of combating the Barbary pirates failed because of balance of power considerations. Much later, even developments that, on the face of it, would appear uncontroversial encountered numerous political problems arising out of the mutual jealousy of the powers. Britain, for example, resisted for many years any attempt to sign a general sanitary convention for the control of disease on the grounds that it might harm its maritime interests. The more limited sanitary councils that were set up from 1838 onwards in the Middle East and elsewhere were frequently arenas for great power conflicts of interest (Armstrong, 1982: ch. 1). So far as theoretical issues are concerned, the basic point contemporary IR theorists would make about Bull’s views, including his critique of more idealistic professors like Falk, is that while he may or may not be correct in seeing them as merely writing a script for world politics to conform more to their particular predilections, a not dissimilar charge can be levelled against him. Post-positivists might point to the hidden normative agenda and concealed advocacy of the interests

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of the prevailing hierarchy in those of Bull’s basic propositions that are closest to realism; constructivists might argue against depicting the world in terms of fixed realities rather than changing inter-subjective social constructions; postmodernists might suggest that realism is no less a rhetorical narrative or text and no more a universal truth than its targets. Bull, of course, was himself a noted critic of the pretensions to science of 1960s behaviouralists but this was essentially a critique of methodology rather than of an ontology which, in some respects, Bull shared.2 The obvious contemporary question deriving from Bull’s views relates to the position of the United States since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the superpower balance of that era. Can American policies towards the second Iraq war in 2003, the Kyoto Convention, the 1999 conflict in Kosovo, land mines, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and some arms control treaties, amongst other things, be seen as evidence of Bull’s essential hypothesis about a balance of power being a necessary condition for international law? Here, too, closer inspection reveals a more complex picture. The United States’ relative position was no less powerful in 1945–1950, arguably more so, yet it played a prominent role in the creation of numerous institutions, all of which were designed to strengthen the rule of law in international relations – so much so that George Kennan and other critics believed the US to be too committed to a legalistic approach (Kennan, 1951: 95–103). On other occasions during the Cold War – that is at the peak of the bipolar balance – the US paid relatively little attention to legal considerations in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua and indeed wherever it felt its security concerns outweighed what it saw as legal niceties. After the Cold War the United States has accepted a far more constraining trade regime than it did during it. A further complication arises from the fact that the United States is not always a unitary actor, with executive, legislature and judiciary all capable of taking key decisions that have a bearing on international law. Finally, the United States has not necessarily been as contemptuous of international law in recent years as its critics claim. While it has specific objections to the Kyoto Convention, there are numerous national and state laws, as well as bilateral and regional obligations, that relate to climate change and the greenhouse gas emissions. Its new policy (adopted in February 2004) on landmines includes numerous measures against landmine usage. Its vociferous opposition to the ICC is balanced by its support for specific tribunals. Even in the case of the Iraq war it has been careful to spell out what it sees as the legal case for

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the war, as indeed it did on previous occasions when it was accused of violating international law (Murphy, 2004). But notwithstanding the fact that the true picture of the post-Cold War American attitude to international law is more complex than some critical views of it, Bull’s thesis does have some validity. Indeed Kagan (2003) and others have argued that the much greater emphasis in Europe on the international rule of law is simply a reflection of American power and European weakness – which is essentially what Bull is arguing in more general terms as a proposition about the relationship between the balance of power and international law. Even so, however, one would still wish to qualify the explanatory power of the Bull proposition in two important ways. First, European attitudes owe much to a determination since 1945 to prevent future wars by enmeshing intra-European relations within an ever stronger legal framework, while the precise opposite political culture of resistance to the diminution of sovereignty, combined with triumphalism and exceptionalism, has predominated in the United States, especially after 9/11 (Murphy, 2004: 354). Secondly, the United States has had to relearn in Iraq the lesson it was first taught in Vietnam: that even its immense military power cannot always achieve important political objectives on its own. Indeed in other respects, such as its support for a stronger anti-terrorism regime and its use of the Security Council before its invasion of Afghanistan, the United States has shown a willingness to take more multilateral routes towards its goals. In other words, if a distinctive American political culture and an American preponderance of power remain constants for the foreseeable future, the outcome could as easily be a support for international law as hostility towards it.

The legalization of international relations Bull’s scepticism about the possibility of international law playing a fundamentally greater role in world politics is evident in his reservations about whether solidarist or ‘neo-Grotian’ approaches to the use of force actually do more harm than good, even if international society were actually receptive to such approaches. Secondly, although Bull acknowledges the ‘enormous growth’ in international law and outlines the arguments of Falk and others to the effect that various recent developments constitute major progress, he sees these as, if anything, weakening the contribution of law to international order. Movement towards an international regime of human rights weakens the state’s claim to sovereignty – the basis of international society – and so ‘is more a symptom

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of disorder than of order’; the undoubted expansion of the scope of the ‘international law of cooperation’ had been accompanied by a weakening of the ‘law of coexistence’. Indeed, given that the growth in the law of cooperation (especially in economic matters) during the Cold War mainly took place within the Western, capitalist world, this actually helped to consolidate the Cold War divide and the promotion of two divided and mutually antagonistic international societies.3 The shift claimed by Falk and others from consent to consensus as a source of law (a key aspect of neo-Grotianism) could move international law further away from reflecting the ‘actual practice’ of states and towards irrelevance. The more activist role being taken by some legal actors and their tendency to promote values other than strictly legal ones ‘embodies a trend whose logical conclusion is the disappearance of international law as a distinct social science’ (Bull, 2002: 154). It is interesting to set Bull’s views against recent arguments by (mainly) American scholars to the effect that a range of developments add up to the increasing ‘legalization’ of world politics. In the fullest exposition of this thesis, the contributors to a special issue of International Organization argue that there has been a – admittedly uneven – shift in state practice towards greater reliance on formal legal obligations in their relations with each other (Goldstein, et al., 2000). They set out three criteria of legalization: the levels of obligation and precision involved in a particular set of rules and the degree to which – as in the classic understanding of the rule of law principle – the functions of interpretation, monitoring and implementation of the rules are delegated to third parties. Falling broadly into the neo-liberal institutionalist camp, the authors see states’ readiness to accept legalization as involving rational, strategic choices to solve collective action problems. It is this last aspect of their argument that has attracted the most criticism, for example from Reus-Smit (2003), who challenges what he sees as the weak and inadequate conception of politics underlying rational choice methodologies. In particular, rationalist perspectives fail to account for the fact that if states do accept legal obligations, this implies the prior existence of a set of assumptions about the nature and legitimacy of a legal system within which obligations may be incurred. The deeper explanation required is to be found in an understanding of politics that incorporates complex processes of social interaction revolving around issues of identity and ethics as well as more sophisticated conceptualizations of instrumental and material factors. Amongst other things, Reus-Smit and others, such as Finnemore and Toope (2001), draw attention to the concept of international legitimacy:

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something that rational choice theorists have difficulty with because it implies that states may be constrained by a general normative framework located outside their individual selves. Although Wight (1977: 153–73), one of the greatest influences on Bull, wrote a significant article on legitimacy, Bull is rather cautious in the way he uses the concept. Writing about the change in the principle of legitimacy from a dynastic to a national one, he states bluntly that ‘the actual course of events was no more determined by the national or popular doctrine of legitimacy than in the earlier period it had been determined by the dynastic or monarchical one, but these doctrines did determine the kind of justifications for whatever was done’ (Bull, 2002: 33). Similarly he argued that states undertake the task of legitimizing international rules ‘in the sense of promoting the acceptance of them as valuable in their own right’. In other words, principles of legitimacy are merely devices states may employ to rationalize what they intended to do anyway and to gain support for their policies. Wight had a much stronger formulation: that particular standards of legitimacy constituted the ‘collective judgement’ of international society. It might be argued that the global opposition aroused by some of the United States’ more assertive postures in recent years stems from a sense that American policy needs to be based on a firmer foundation of international legitimacy, which, if accurate, supports this stronger formulation rather than Bull’s slightly cynical one. It is safe to assume that Bull would have aligned himself with the relatively cautious and sceptical position taken in the International Organization special issue: that legalization is ‘but one institutional choice in world politics that a growing number of actors have grasped to advance their goals’. Indeed Bull (at least in his The Anarchical Society persona) would probably have expressed reservations about the effect of legalization on the precarious structure of coexistence he outlines in his book. However, the later Bull of the Hagey lectures was more accommodating towards the idea that international order needed to be founded on a broader consensus about the overall normative structures of international society (Bull, 1984). Whether he would have accepted that this might imply a much stronger formulation of international legitimacy as a fundamental principle of international society and one that was also capable of playing a part in determining events is more doubtful. Was he (and the Special Issue contributors) right to think in these terms? Here it is instructive to consider more closely what precisely has been involved in the legalization process. The extension of international law in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries mostly involved developing new regimes in various functional areas of

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international relations such as postal and telegraphic communications, sanitation, air and sea passage, financial order and the like. A number of developments in international law since 1945, and especially in the last 25 years may be interpreted as going beyond this in three crucial areas, each of which has important implications for the underlying principles of international society. The three areas are distributive justice, individual accountability and intervention. Of these the weakest is clearly distributive justice but if we look closely at some environmental accords, the sea-bed mining provisions of the Law of the Sea Treaty and, most concretely, the EU provisions for assisting the development of the poorer regions, we can see both the (highly qualified) emergence of a legal norm relating to distribution and some (even more limited) practical measures to achieve that end. Secondly, the various war crimes tribunals, the ICC and a number of attempts to use domestic legal systems to bring individuals accused of violations of human rights in other countries – most famously the detention of Augusto Pinochet in Britain – all point to a growing trend to hold individuals accountable for acts that might previously have been interpreted as falling within the domestic jurisdiction of their own state, and hence of no concern to the international community. Finally, a number of armed interventions authorized by the UN in the last 15 years have included humanitarian justifications, albeit frequently cast in rather cautious language, with what might have been the intention of avoiding the implication that there was a new legal right to intervene if a state did not measure up to agreed international standards. It is true that in each of these three cases a first-year undergraduate international relations student could find both counter-arguments and counter-examples. The most that can be claimed is that we may be at an early stage in a transition from an international society based very firmly on sovereignty and non-intervention to one taking greater account of the interests of global justice and human rights. Another way of making the same point is to say that we are making a transition from one principle of international legitimacy, based purely on the rights of states, to another, based partly on the rights of individuals. This in turn implies that international society has the right – and more importantly the ability – to lay down basic standards of legitimacy, even where these may conflict with a state’s right to non-interference in its internal affairs. While it may be possible to explain this purely in rational actor terms, it stretches that perspective somewhat to try to do so. We need, rather, to look at changing understandings about the modern state, the nature and effect of communication processes in today’s world, the impact

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over time of repeated pressure for greater justice from poorer states, the role of international organizations and global civil society and many other factors to gain a fuller understanding of what is going on and why in the increasing legalization of world politics. Of course, even if the global legal order is changing in this way, this does not in itself invalidate Bull’s central argument, namely that such changes are not necessarily beneficial to international order. I shall return to this point in the Conclusion.

Globalization and cosmopolitanism The term ‘globalization’ was not widely in use when The Anarchical Society was written, but at one point Bull (2002: 263–4) speculates about the possible ‘technological unification of the world’ and the possibility that this might lead to a new politics of ‘spaceship earth’ or the ‘global village’. He is – as ever – sceptical about the prospects of this happening, preferring Brzezinski’s argument that humanity is becoming both more unified and more fragmented at the same time so that ‘proximity, instead of promoting unity, gives rise to tensions prompted by a new sense of global congestion’. Bull adds, Not only does the ‘shrinking of the globe’ create new sources of tension between societies that are of different ideological persuasions, different sizes, different cultures or civilizations, and different stages of economic development, it is doubtful whether the growth of communications as such does anything to promote global rather than regional or national perspectives and institutions. (2002: 264) Bull does not draw any specifically legal conclusions from this but his old sparring partner Falk (1998) develops a number of arguments that might usefully be considered in this context. His starting point is that the ‘fundamental structure of international law’ prevailing since Westphalia ‘is no longer adequate as a framework of inquiry’. This is because of a number of developments that form part of standard arguments about globalization: States, although still important, increasingly function essentially as agents of globalization; transnational networks offer better outlets for democratic and participatory politics; and non-state actors are increasingly important. Taking all this together, there are profound implications for international law. These include the necessity for a ‘law of humanity’ that will emanate from civil society (and thus constitute a ‘globalization from below’) and will provide individuals full

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rights, including protection from the negative consequences of globalization. A vast array of further improvements are also required, ranging from ‘some kind of independent peace enforcement capability that is financially autonomous’ to greatly strengthened legal regimes relating to the environment, human rights and the rights of peoples, economic and social justice, the democratization of global governance and much more. Clearly Falk has lost none of his idealism and equally clearly he still merits Bull’s rebuke that he confuses description and prescription, the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ (Bull, 1972). But are there any signs of the more cosmopolitan order that he both advocates and perceives to be emerging? So far as the purely legal dimensions of this are concerned, several distinct opinions may be discerned, even where there is broad agreement on such basic facts as the phenomenon of legalization (including its spread far beyond its traditional areas to ones that seem to embrace cosmopolitan principles) and the growing importance of global civil society. First, many doubt the automatic assumption made by some that NGOs and social movements are always on the side of the good. They point, for example, to their own lack of democratic accountability which severely limits their claim to be the true democratic voice in a new cosmopolitan world order. Secondly, ‘newstream’ international lawyers and others, sometimes arguing from a broadly postmodern perspective, assert that international law has always played the role of determining who is included and who is excluded or marginalized in international society and that it will continue to do so. They reject what they see as a flawed Enlightenment view of history, in which international law helped to constrain the worst excesses of the state system and assisted in the steady evolution towards a cosmopolitan world order (Armstrong, 1999). Less radical perspectives argue that closer inspection of what actually goes on in the world of international law reveals few real departures from traditional perspectives in, for example, the decisions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Even the proliferation of international legal tribunals has been depicted in somewhat negative terms by several ICJ Presidents who have pointed to the possibilities of conflicting interpretations of international law emerging in a context where no single Court was vested with the ultimate power of interpretation (Koskenniemi and Leino, 2002). Others have argued that international criminal tribunals can never have more than a token or symbolic impact because the prohibitive costs of each individual case – and in Rwanda, for example, we are talking hypothetically of tens of thousands of possible cases – preclude the possibility of more than a few individuals being brought to justice.

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But even if we accept, as suggested earlier, that we may be in the early stages of a shift to an international legal system that takes increasing account of globalization and of cosmopolitan perspectives – and that remains a big ‘if’ – we still need to confront the issue to which Bull always returned in his book: what does this mean for international order? Bull was concerned with the possibility that some cosmopolitan principles, such as human rights, would undermine – ‘subvert’ to use his own term – the basis of international society. However, this might have mainly reflected his emphasis on one aspect of international order – the nuclear balance between the superpowers – and he was equally clear elsewhere in the book that the future of international society partly depended on its acquiring a stronger cultural underpinning and that this culture would inevitably have a strongly cosmopolitan flavour, ‘embracing both common ideas and common values, and rooted in societies in general as well as in their elites’ and that this cosmopolitan culture would need to expand beyond its primarily Western roots to embrace ideas and values from non-Western societies (Bull, 2002: 304–5). It is in this last respect that there may be some conflict between the spread of cosmopolitan principles and international order. The European Union has shown that what remains essentially a society of states can both subsume elements of state sovereignty in larger structures and acquire an increasingly cosmopolitan cultural foundation. But the EU is a Western edifice and attempts to make Western values such as human rights the basis of a larger global order have encountered resistance from many states, as, for example, in the claims made during the 1990s on behalf of ‘Asian values’. The rise of political Islam has been accompanied by an even stronger rejection of various aspects of Western culture and, in its most extreme forms, by violence and the threat of violence that has posed a profound challenge to international order. It is to this challenge that I now turn.

Neo-medievalism Bull’s arguments about neo-medievalism have attracted increasing attention in recent times. Briefly, he defines neo-medievalism in terms of the possible development of a modern and secular counterpart to the medieval order ‘that embodies its central characteristic: a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty’ (Bull, 2002: 245). He discusses five trends that could be seen as promoting a neo-medieval order: globalization, regionalism, the growth of private international violence, the fragmentation of states and the rise of powerful transnational corporations.

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Arguably all of these phenomena have become even more significant since his book was written, while a sixth, the rise of political Islam, could be seen not simply in terms of its contribution to the problem of private violence but in certain respects as opening up an even more direct, non-secular counterpart to the original medieval order, in the sense that some individuals’ loyalty to their religion may override their loyalty to their state and this may have all sorts of political consequences. The analogy cannot, of course, be carried too far, inasmuch as there is no exact Islamic equivalent of the papacy, but if the main characteristic of neo-medievalism is the emergence of a more fragmented and uncertain authority structure, political Islam is certainly an important part of the overall picture. But what, if any, are the implications of all this for international law? In fact there is not a single, clear-cut answer to this because neo-medievalism is not a single phenomenon, unlike its original variant where, arguably, the overall political order (at least in Western Christendom) had some universal characteristics as well as fairly widespread violence, which is certainly a characteristic of its contemporary version. Some developments seem to be leading to a much more regulated political order, some to a less regulated one. Some are enhancing the inter-state and communitarian elements of international law, some the cosmopolitan and transnational elements. For example, Bull at one point uses what he clearly saw as a fairly hypothetical case concerning possible developments in Britain: We might imagine    that the government of the United Kingdom had to share its authority on the one hand with authorities in Scotland, Wales, Wessex and elsewhere, and on the other hand with a European authority in Brussels and world authorities in New York and Geneva, to such an extent that the notion of its supremacy over the territory and people of the United Kingdom had no force. (Bull, 2002: 246) Much of this has, of course, come about and there can be no question that Britain is enmeshed in an increasingly complex legal order, with citizens having different rights – for example with regard to university tuition fees – depending on where they live in the islands, while the national government is subject to the rules of the EU, the WTO and other IGOs. Ultimately, consent remains the basis of its international legal obligations, in the sense that it has the legal right to withdraw from any of them, but in any meaningful political sense the de facto basis of its obligations is consensus. Indeed in the case of the EU, consensus, in

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the form of the increasing provisions for majority votes, is effectively a de jure obligation. But other regional associations are not like the EU and other fragmenting states are not like the UK: Indeed in some cases they may not enjoy legal authority of any kind, whether national, regional, inter-state or transnational. It could be argued that if we take the various kinds of fragmenting states and the heavily regionalizing ones together, the net effect is a shift away from national authority and hence to a neomedieval order; but if we look at private violence, including the broader phenomenon of transnational crime as well as terrorism, the picture is more complex. In fact, in that context we arguably have three quite distinct spheres of legal authority: national, hegemonial and cosmopolitan. In respect of the first of these, some governments, including Britain and the US, are increasing the legal powers under the control of the state. In the second case, the United States has – since long before 9/11 – been passing legislation against various forms of transnational crime that, in effect, enhance its global legal reach. Its more recent moves against terrorism have simply accelerated that process. Finally, to the extent that certain forms of terrorism and transnational crime may be regarded as manifestations of globalization, part of the response to them has also been global rather than strictly inter-state: Global networks of bankers, lawyers, electronic experts, private security forces and others have all been involved in this process. For want of a better word, ‘neo-medieval’ might be a reasonable term to use to describe all this but it does not actually tell us very much except that legal authority has become more diffuse. It is, for example, not easy to discern many elements of the universalism that Bull also saw as a facet of the neo-medieval order, except, to a certain extent, within the world of Islam. Indeed the values most promoted by modern cosmopolitanism are largely, if not entirely, Western ones, with even apparently uncontroversial notions such as tolerance challenged by some variants of Islam and equality by the greater acceptance of hierarchical principles in some more traditional Asian societies.

Conclusion It perhaps says something for the breadth of Bull’s vision that there are few, if any, contemporary phenomena that he did not at least touch upon in his book. So far as international law is concerned, he does not always specifically relate what he is discussing to its strictly legal implications, so at times I have drawn inferences to that effect. However,

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we should remember that his central concerns were with international order and the degree to which that depended on a structure of coexistence founded on the core ingredients of sovereignty, non-intervention and the balance of power. His ideas developed in the context of the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear war seemed to outweigh other dangers and when the deep ideological divisions between the superpowers precluded more than a minimal – crucially important – basis of coexistence. The world of today, I have tried to suggest, is much more complex, with legalization vying with legal breakdown, cosmopolitanism and globalization with communitarianism and inter-statism, hegemony with multilateralism and so forth, all of which combine to produce an equally complex legal picture. The sheer number of formal rules of all kinds has increased dramatically but we might, perhaps, share the scepticism Bull would undoubtedly have felt about whether this has produced any corresponding increase in international order. The key issue, however, is how we interpret this. Bull was concerned to make the counter-intuitive point that more law in the international context did not necessarily mean more order. This was because the fragile foundations on which international order rested required the maximum possible freedom of action for the most powerful states, even if they exercised their freedom in ways that violated international law and principles of justice. The primary role of international law was, therefore, not to strengthen and expand the constraints on states but to confirm and underpin the ‘idea of a society of states as the operational principle of world politics’ (Bull, 2002: 155). More recent commentary on the English school identifies this as a ‘pluralist’ perspective, emphasizing the maximum freedom of states to pursue their diverse objectives, in contrast to a more ‘solidarist’ (or Grotian) conception, permitting much wider cooperation around a common framework of values (Wheeler, 1992; Hurrell, 1996: 233–55; Wheeler and Dunne, 1996, 1998). One interpretation of those tendencies in world politics that appear to indicate a possible breakdown of international order is that they are simply inevitable aspects of a transition from a pluralist to a more solidarist international society. In that interpretation, the international legal developments that troubled Bull because of their possibly negative implications for order are necessary building blocks towards a new international society in which international order will be based on a wider moral consensus and removal of some of the injustices that cause disorder. The emergence of new rules in areas like human rights and the environment, together with some faltering steps towards a more equitable trade regime, could all be understood in this light. However,

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notwithstanding the far-reaching but so far unique developments taking place within the European Union, it is important not to exaggerate the degree of change or its significance. Enthusiasts for cosmopolitanism, which they see as emerging inevitably from processes of globalization, tend to clutch at a few undeniable signs of progress in the direction they desire and build entire new world orders on those very flimsy foundations. More cautious analysts of globalization cast doubt on some of the wilder claims about its novelty, extent and importance, while also pointing to the ways in which globalization has actually strengthened the regulatory role of governments. Some cosmopolitanists still commit the same error of which Bull accuses Falk: confusing advocacy with analysis, description with prescription. Nor do they properly face up to the fact that the values they are advocating are essentially Western ones. It is not simply the linkages many in poorer countries may make between Western culture and their past experience of Western imperialism that makes them resist Western values (e.g. Held, 2002: 319) but the fact that they simply disagree with some of those values. A culture that stresses freedom of expression or the right of women to dress as they please may coexist with one that orders the death of a Western writer because of one of his books or threatens women with severe punishment if they do not observe a particular dress code. It may coexist, but there is no possibility of some dialectical process magically producing a new value synthesis, as cosmopolitanists believe. Indeed any truly cosmopolitan order would be based on the values (and will) of the majority of the world’s population and there is no guarantee that some Western values, especially those emphasizing individual liberties and tolerance, would necessarily thrive in such a world. Does this mean that we should return to a strictly pluralist international society, particularly in the area of international law? Bull does not actually advocate that. He is quite explicit in stating that the book as a whole is ‘an implicit defence of the states system, and more particularly of that element in it that has been called international society’ (Bull, 2002: 307). But he is equally clear that international society works best when it is founded upon a common culture. Indeed, in an uncharacteristic slip into the kind of vague piety he deplores in others, he argues that The future of international society is likely to be determined, among other things, by the preservation and extension of a cosmopolitan culture, embracing both common ideas and common values, and rooted in societies in general as well as their elites    Like the world international society, the cosmopolitan culture on which it depends

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may need to absorb non-Western elements to a much greater degree if it is to be genuinely universal. (Bull, 2002: 305) This, however, is a call for the states system to acquire some common cultural components, not for a completely new order whose institutions as well as culture are cosmopolitan. Bull does not spell out precisely which ‘non-Western elements’ should be absorbed, nor does he consider the possibility that some aspects of Western cultures may simply be incompatible with some non-Western cultures. Nor does he address the potential contradiction between, on the one hand, using international law as one means of providing a concrete embodiment of some principles of a universal culture and, on the other hand, his opposition to those who advocate precisely that. Nonetheless, coexistence among separate units remains the founding principle of his international society, allied to the rather vague and unspecified hope that the structure of coexistence might be able to accommodate the interests of non-Western states, as well as doing something about the desperate poverty of some of them. At its heart, and notwithstanding Bull’s own use of some of the language of cosmopolitanism, this remains a pluralist rather than a solidarist perspective.

Acknowledgements I am grateful for the detailed and thoughtful comments of Barry Buzan, Tim Dunne and Richard Little on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes 1. Indeed it is possible to see the whole book, in part, as an ad hominem response to one individual: Richard Falk. 2. If we consider the entire body of Bull’s work, including unpublished lectures and papers, it is possible to discern a position that is much closer to that later developed by constructivists, in that its emphasis is on the way consensus among states leads to shared understandings (both normative and practical) about how their mutual relations should be managed. This has the clear implication that ‘reality’ is not fixed but dependent upon changing perceptions (e.g. Alderson and Hurrell, 2000a). However, I would maintain that, in The Anarchical Society at least, the emphasis is on what Bull sees as the actual practices of states, rather than on their perceptions of those practices. In other words, they remain enduring realities, not merely ideas about realities. The distinction may be a subtle one, and one that even breaks down when subjected to rigorous analysis, but it runs through The Anarchical Society. 3. I am grateful to Richard Little for this point.

7 Diplomacy, Anti-diplomacy and International Society Ian Hall

Hedley Bull maintained that diplomacy – like the balance of power, international law, the rules of war and the concept of great powers – was one of the ‘distinctive institutions’ of modern international society (Bull, cited in Alderson and Hurrell, 2000b: 91), but only in The Anarchical Society did he devote any significant time to its examination. It may well be, as Andrew Hurrell has suggested, that Bull was not ‘terribly interested’ in diplomacy or that he simply considered its key features selfevident; it may be too that he considered other institutions, especially the balance of power and international law, more crucial to the sustenance of international society (Hurrell, 2002b: 7). The discussion of diplomacy in The Anarchical Society is significant, however, for it reveals much about Bull’s understanding of the roots of international society, as well as his perception of its prospects in the closing quarter of the twentieth century. This chapter sketches both Bull’s understanding of diplomacy and the ‘crisis’ he discerned that had come to beset the institution. His account is examined alongside earlier and later treatments of the subject. The latter half of the chapter considers diplomacy since the publication of The Anarchical Society in the light of his concerns and of more contemporary scholarship. It is argued – following, part of the way, the path broken by Bull’s former research student James Der Derian – that there has been a resurgence of ‘anti-diplomacies’ and ‘neo-diplomacies’ that challenge the institution in its traditional form. The conclusion addresses perhaps the most important element of Bull’s chapter: The relationship between what he called ‘diplomatic culture’ and international society.

The institution of diplomacy At the outset of his chapter, Bull cast aside Satow’s (1922) model of diplomacy-as-civility and Nicolson’s (1939) ‘professional’ account to 141

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offer a wide and flexible definition. Diplomacy was, he wrote, ‘the conduct of relations between states and other entities with standing in world politics by official agents and by peaceful means’ (Bull, 2002: 156). It could be bilateral or multilateral, could be conducted through embassies, at permanent or temporary conferences, or under the auspices of international organizations. It could be either ‘ad hoc or institutionalised’ (Bull, 2002: 159), though more often it was the latter, and was distinct from purely consular work, which was concerned not with the needs of the state, but with those of private citizens. Like Kissinger (1994), Bull argued that diplomacy ‘includes both the formulation of a state’s external policy and its execution’, thus involving the ‘gathering and assessment of information    and the weighing of alternative lines of policy’ as well as the communication of the settled policies to other states. On this understanding, ‘diplomacy’ covered not only the traditional diplomatic functions – representation of sovereigns, negotiation with other sovereigns, collection of intelligence, conveying of messages and perhaps the ‘minimisation’ of ‘friction’ (Bull, 2002: 163) – but also most (if not quite all) of the process of foreign policy formulation by state governments. Indeed, on Bull’s definition, only the final act of decision-making – the politician’s choice between the various policyoptions presented by foreign ministry officials – is considered political rather than diplomatic, and thereby excluded from his definition. ‘It is obvious’, Bull went on to assert, ‘that diplomacy presupposes the existence of an international system, that is, of two or more states interacting as a set of parts’ (Bull, 2002: 160). The contemporary form of ‘highly institutionalised’ diplomacy, however, implied the existence of something else. It presupposed – but ‘not    in the same way’ – an ‘international society’ (Bull, 2002: 161). Quite what Bull meant by the qualification is not made entirely clear, though he seemed to suggest that the existence of an international society was not in itself a sufficient condition for the emergence of ‘highly institutionalised’ diplomacy. ‘These institutions’, he wrote, ‘develop slowly and uncertainly and have been quite different in form at different stages in the evolution of international society’ (Bull, 2002: 161). ‘Certain conditions’, he argued, were required to bring about the creation of resident embassies, but aside from quoting a passage from Butler and Maccaby’s history of international law (1928), Bull offered little sense of what those particular ‘conditions’ might have been. The latter half of the chapter was taken up with a discussion of the ‘present relevance of diplomacy’ (Bull, 2002: 167). The institution was portrayed as embattled: on one side challenged by the insidious ‘political

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warfare’ that characterized the Cold War, and on the other by the growth of ‘international technical management’ (Bull, 2002: 170). Despite the ‘strengthening and broadening of the legal forms in which the rules and institutions of diplomacy are expressed’, Bull argued, citing the 1961 and 1963 Vienna Conventions on diplomatic and consular relations, there has been, in parallel, a ‘decline in their observance’ (Bull, 2002: 171). This was, in his view, to be lamented. Diplomacy, in the form it had assumed before international society became global, had been well suited to the performance of the tasks of communication, negotiation, intelligence-gathering and the reduction of ‘friction’ between states, and retained an important ‘symbolic function’. Moreover, it had served, and to some extent continued to serve, a further purpose, for ‘the diplomatic profession itself is a custodian of the idea of international society, with a stake in preserving and strengthening it’ (Bull, 2002: 176). There was, in other words, a ‘diplomatic culture’ that underpinned international society, an issue to which I will return in the conclusion.

The decline of diplomacy Bull was not alone in thinking that diplomacy was in decline. Martin Wight considered that, at its best, it was ‘a civilized and civilizing activity’ (Jackson, 2002: 4; see also Watson, 1982: 20), but that this kind of diplomacy had been ‘recessive’ (Wight, 1991: 163) in twentieth-century international relations, as the ‘rule of law and civilised international intercourse’ became evermore difficult to maintain in a ‘world of dissolving standards’ (Wight, 1960: 308). In Power Politics, Wight mused, ‘it is indeed a question whether traditional diplomatic practices have become obsolete, and may be succumbing to revolutionary practices, as bad money drives out good’ (Wight, 1978: 121). ‘Revolutionary diplomacy’, as he characterized it, perverted the ‘threefold function of diplomacy’, putting ‘espionage in place of information, subversion in place of negotiation, propaganda in place of communication’ (Wight, 1978: 117). With some of this Bull agreed. International society in general, he argued, was ‘in decline’ (Quoted by Hurrell in Bull, 2002: xxi). Diplomacy had not disappeared, but it had been transformed. There had, he argued, been a ‘decline, since the First World War, in the role played in international politics by professional diplomacy’ (Bull, 2002: 168) and new actors had taken their place. Resident ambassadors, he noted, were now customarily circumvented by politicians and civil servants, or by other missions not under his or her control. Diplomatic actors were proliferating, including among their ranks representatives of ‘the United

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Nations, of other general international organisations    and of regional international organisations’, not to mention ‘political groups which are not widely recognised as states’ (Bull, 2002: 157). In some cases – Bull mentioned that of relations between Britain and the United States, but not those of what was then the European Economic Community (EEC) – the ‘volume of business’ (Bull, 2002: 169) at all levels of government was such that the resident missions might become redundant. Moreover, multilateral conference diplomacy had encroached upon territory once occupied by bilateral contacts (Bull, 2002: 167). For Bull, the Cold War had served to weaken the institution of diplomacy as a whole and what he called ‘diplomatic institutions – the rules and conventions that make diplomatic intercourse possible and facilitate its working’ (Bull, 2002: 171). Despite these rules being regularized and formalized as international law, they were frequently breached. Both Western and communist diplomats abused their ‘privileges’ for the ‘purposes of espionage’, and had been subject to the threat and periodic reality of expulsion as a consequence. The principle of non impediatur legatio had been ignored in the practice of bugging embassies and in the restriction of diplomats’ movements. Consular relations between East and West, moreover, had ‘disappeared, almost entirely’, and diplomatic relations had been broken off between some states. Conditions had worsened during the 1960s, which ‘witnessed an upsurge in physical attacks, sometimes leading to their total destruction, on diplomatic missions, most notably in Indonesia and China during the Cultural Revolution’ (Bull, 2002: 172). Kidnapping too had become a particular hazard. In Bull’s view, however, the greatest threat to ‘professional diplomacy’ was not the methods of what Wight called ‘revolutionary diplomacy’, but rather its displacement by, on the one hand, ‘political warfare’ (‘diplomacy by insult’ or ‘oratorical contest’) and, on the other, ‘international technical management’ (Bull, 2002: 168–9). Both precluded, he argued, conciliation on the basis of the ‘interests of states’: In the first, it was stymied by ideological difference, and in the latter, it was replaced by ‘collaboration to maximise a common interest’ (Bull, 2002: 168). To Bull’s mind, these developments had deep-rooted causes. The crisis of diplomacy was not simply an unwanted by-product of the Cold War, but was instead, he argued, one of the consequences of wider historical forces. As he put it, the intrusion of public opinion and democratic legislatures into the sphere of foreign policy [was the result of] the political activisation

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of previously inert masses of people in most countries of the world, making the public justification or rationalisation of foreign policy mandatory for all governments, to both domestic and international audiences. (Bull, 2002: 169) Bull conglomerated, in this phrase ‘political activisation’, all forms of popular involvement in politics as they had developed in the past century: the coming of liberal democracy to the West, of Communism to the East, and anti-colonialism to the South. On this view, the ‘new diplomacy’ that had followed the First World War and the ‘political warfare’ of the period after the Second, were seen not as acts of folly on the parts of statesmen, as Nicolson had conceived them, but rather as the inevitable outcome of an age of mass politics. What had damaged diplomacy even further, Bull argued, was the ‘breakdown of that consensus among the European great powers whereby each of them    at least accepted their right to exist’ (Bull, 2002; 169). Whether this too was a consequence of mass politics he did not comment. In any event, diplomacy had been undermined by decline in ‘any sense of a continuing comity of states within which all have their rightful place’ (Bull, 2002: 169), by the erosion, indeed, of ‘international society’ itself. Diplomacy was no longer the expression of shared norms and values, and had, at times, become instead an instrument in the conduct of a ‘zero-sum’ game. A new branch of the art – ‘forensic diplomacy’ (Bull, 2002: 170) – had even been invented, devoted to the exposure of the supposed falsehoods of opposing states. At the same time, Bull recognized that some aspects of diplomatic practice were becoming less conflictual and more co-operative. Some states – he gives the example of the members of both NATO and the EEC – were growing closer, and their relations becoming marked by the mutual use of what he termed ‘international technical management’. In such contexts, he wrote, ‘the conciliator or negotiator has given place to the technical expert – military, economic, social, educational, scientific, ecological’ (Bull, 2002: 170–1). Indeed, in particular areas of policy (Bull is not very specific about which areas), ‘international organisations’ had been constituted to perform the tasks of ‘management’, where states were willing ‘not to question the existence of a community of interests’ (Bull, 2002: 171). Bull’s account of ‘international technical management’ strikes the reader as old-fashioned. It is questionable, moreover, as to whether it was the best term for the bundle of phenomena he discussed.

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‘Technical management’ might be an adequate description for the activities of, for instance, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but it does not fit with the workings of other international or regional organizations. With hindsight, it may be possible to discern that what has occurred in Western Europe, with the mutual renunciation of the threat to use force, is not the replacement of diplomacy by EEC or EU ‘management’, but rather its replacement, as Keens-Soper (2000) has argued, with politics and attendant bureaucracy. Whether that makes the EU just another state – as Bull suggested it might become (Bull, 2002: 225) – or some new kind of polity is unclear and not the subject of this chapter. The effect upon traditional diplomatic structures in Europe, however, is easier to discern. Embassies still exist, but as symbols of state sovereignty1 and conduits for inter-state communication: ‘bilateral EU embassies  [now]  justify themselves   by their work on the domestic agenda  acting as a post box for other government ministries’ (Riordan, 2003, 74). Bull can be criticized too for his neglect of the multilateral diplomatic practices that sit somewhere between traditional, bilateral diplomacy and ‘international technical management’. His view of multilateralism was distinctly conservative: In his view, it had not radically transformed either diplomacy or international society, nor did it ‘imply the decline in the role of the professional diplomatist’ (Bull, 2002: 168). ‘Much of the importance of conferences and international organisations’, he wrote, ‘lies not in the multilateral diplomacy to which they give rise but in the opportunities they provide for bilateral diplomacy’ (Bull, 2002: 159). For Bull, the development of multilateralism did not signal any radical change in the nature of international society. By contrast, Bull’s erstwhile colleague on the British Committee, Adam Watson, has argued that multilateralism, whilst not replacing bilateral contacts, is ‘characteristic of a more advanced stage’ of a states-system (Watson, 1982: 20). ‘Collective negotiation’, he suggests, ‘can be seen as an especially civilized and civilizing form of diplomacy, because it encourages collective responsibility’ (Watson, 1982: 156). Contemporary English school writers have gone further, arguing that multilateralism represents the most significant change in diplomatic practice in the twentieth century and that it has radically transformed the character of contemporary international society. Buzan, for one, maintains that since 1945 multilateralism – ‘at least within the West’ – has brought about the settlement of ‘many’ disputes that might before have ended in war and facilitated the creation of a global market economy (Buzan, 2004a: 246–7). The implications for international

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society, as Bull conceived it, are profound: War and the balance of power have become much less important ‘institutions’ than diplomacy. This argument turns Bull’s account of diplomacy-in-decline on its head, notwithstanding Buzan’s concern that the United States may be seeking to unravel the multilateral order in favour of a unilateral one (Buzan, 2004a: 266–7). What is most notable about Bull’s descriptions of diplomacy as ‘political warfare’ and as ‘international technical management’, however, is the emphasis that he placed upon political and ‘ideational’ factors rather than the material or technological. In the broader corpus of writing on this subject, this makes his account rather unusual. Most twentieth-century writers on diplomacy have waxed at length upon the ‘impact of technology’. In the late 1930s, Harold Nicolson, for instance, complained that the mass media, the advent of the telephone and the swiftness of modern travel were making the proper and effective conduct of diplomacy impossible, and worried about the possibility of its replacement by propaganda and summitry (Nicolson, 1939). But not all were so fearful of the changes supposedly wrought by technology. Both Henry Kissinger (Otte, 2001: 199) and his great rival Zbigniew Brzezinski (Berridge, 2002: 127) saw opportunities rather than impediments, and called, during the late 1960s and 1970s, for the ‘euthanasia’ of resident embassies and all the outmoded paraphernalia of traditional diplomacy. The airliner, the television and the telephone, they argued, could serve in their place, reducing costs as well as the threat of kidnap or assassination. Such arguments, suitably modified to take account of the advent of the personal computer and Internet, have persisted. Some have even gone so far as to assert that these developments have rendered embassies and their traditional functions obsolete. ‘In this world of instantaneous information’, reads one assessment, ‘traditional diplomacy struggles to sustain its relevance’ (CSIS, 1998). Indeed, the former diplomat Shaun Riordan has argued that currently available technologies have made the communication and information-gathering functions of diplomacy wholly redundant. Much of the political reporting done by embassies, he suggests, could be replaced very easily by greater use of the media or Internet searches, as well by modelling techniques like ‘Fuzzy Neural Networks’ (FNNs) and ‘Fuzzy Cognitive Maps’ (FCMs) (Riordan, 2003: 110, 126). While traditional diplomatic structures should be radically reformed, Riordan argues, consular services should be done away with altogether, superseded by automated ‘kiosks’ and ‘call centres’ (Riordan, 2003: 114).

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Riordan’s arguments have been echoed in official circles, especially in the United States, where reports commissioned by government and written under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Stimson Center have condemned the outmoded technologies and methods of the State Department and embassies (Brown and Studemeister, 2001: 32). The ‘obsolete information and communications infrastructure’ were singled out as of immediate concern, and the upgrading of telecommunications and IT capabilities to ‘corporate standards’ labelled a ‘key priority’ (CSIS, 1998). Yet how far these changes would ‘reinvent’ diplomacy remains somewhat unclear. Nicholas Henderson has commented of the changes to the ‘private office’ of the British Foreign Secretary since his time there in the 1960s, the ‘computers [that] glare down on every desk’ and the TV mounted on the wall have given the ‘room    a less clubland and a more business-like feel about it’ (Henderson, 2001: 177). Whether they have changed the nature of British diplomacy is less obvious – for Henderson, it is the proliferation of political advisors and the volume of work that are the greater challenges. The introduction of computers and e-mail may help to make the everyday organisation of foreign offices and embassies more efficient – bringing them up to the standards of ‘business’ – but Bull may have been right in thinking that technology has not radically altered the nature of diplomacy. Even the telephone, an invention now over a century old and in use in government for some 80 years, has had a limited impact. Although ‘hot-lines’ came to public prominence in the 1960s, it seems (for the obvious reason of avoiding causing alarm) that politicians were loath to use them. Margaret Thatcher, for example, considered the line to Washington a weapon of last resort (Berridge, 2002: 93). During the 1990s and after, what might tentatively be termed ‘telephone diplomacy’ does seem to have become more prominent, but nevertheless its conduct is circumscribed.2 It was, for example, a notable feature of the crisis leading up to the war in Iraq in early 2003 that President Bush spent his mornings speaking to other ‘world leaders’ by phone. On the 13th and 14th of March, for instance, the president spoke to President Roh of South Korea, President Saxe-Coberg-Gotha of Bulgaria, President Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan, Prince Abdallah of Saudi Arabia, the Prime Minister of Denmark and, last but not least, Tony Blair (White House Press Briefings, 2003a, b). But it was equally noteworthy that his press spokesman Ari Fleischer was keen to inform the media of the frequency of these conversations, for these were not everyday events.

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Such intensity of direct communication, by telephone, between political leaders should be seen as a function of the strained circumstances rather the norm. The requirement of building a viable coalition in favour of war against Iraq necessitated intense lobbying at many levels – by resident embassies, by representatives in the United Nations, as well as by the president himself. Telephone calls to foreign leaders are used sparingly and deliberately to have the desired effect. To make routine personal appeals from the president would diminish their psychological and political impact upon the recipient, and the number of calls it would be necessary to make would place great prohibitions upon his or her ability to engage in other business. The telephone, at this level of diplomacy, cannot be seen as a straightforward replacement for the more regular channels of diplomatic communication. Bull – like Watson (1982: 141) – was sceptical as to the ‘impact of technology’ on diplomacy and the conduct of international relations more generally. Towards the end of The Anarchical Society, he observed that ‘it is doubtful whether the growth of communications as such does anything to promote global rather than regional or national perspectives or institutions’ (Bull, 2002: 264). Instead political and economic ‘criteria of various kinds’ (again, Bull was not very specific about which kinds) determine whether technology is employed to global, regional or national ends. When it came to diplomacy, the mode of transmission of a particular missive was not important; its content was.

The rise of ‘antidiplomacies’ Despite Wight’s insistence that diplomacy was, as he put it, the ‘minimum institution of international society’ (Wight, ‘Diplomacy’, undated, 69), the new generation of ‘English school’ writers, keen to follow his and Bull’s lead in other areas, have devoted little of their own attention to the institution. One collaborative work in that tradition – edited by Alex Bellamy – contains only one indexed reference to diplomacy, and that in the context of a discussion of Cynthia Enloe’s work on ‘the political role of diplomatic spouses’ (Bellamy, 2005: 152). Barry Buzan’s discussion of the impact of multilateralism has already been noted, but though ‘diplomacy’ figures as one of the ‘primary institutions’ of his understanding of international society, he also argues that ‘its essential principles remain pretty much the same’ as they have been for the ‘past two centuries’ (Buzan, 2004a: 248). Among Bull’s former students, only James Der Derian, whose commitment

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to post-structuralism sets him apart from the ‘English school’, has addressed the subject at any length. In On Diplomacy, Der Derian picks up the threads of Bull’s account and aims, by way of a genealogy of the institution, to ‘discover whether there are symptoms of diplomacy’s crisis inherent yet hidden in the present depictions of its essential beginning and nearly seamless history’ (1987: 3). His argument is that the traditional historiography of diplomacy casts its history in teleological terms, ignoring those past forces ‘antithetical’ to its classical form. For instance, Der Derian contends, ‘Nicolson almost axiomatically precludes the violent and uncertain periods in which early diplomacy is formed    apparently in order to preserve the image of a seamless, upward development’ (1987: 81). In revealing the ‘anti-diplomacy’ that evolved in parallel with diplomacy, as well as the ‘neo-diplomacy’ that challenged it during the French and the Russian revolutions, he suggests that we might better understand the manner in which the institution developed and cast light upon the nature of the present (supposed) crisis. In Der Derian’s later work, he moved from the past to the present form of ‘anti-diplomacy’, examining the ways in which, through ‘spies, terror, speed, and war’, it ‘constitutes and mediates estrangement by new techniques of power and representations of danger’ (1992: 3). Difference, he argued, is increasingly addressed not by mutual recognition – expressed by the ceremonial exchange by political communities of diplomatic representatives – but by espionage, surveillance and shifting constructions of ‘otherness’ generated by the ‘national security culture’, all at accelerated pace. Der Derian implies – or at least can be interpreted as implying – that the ‘minimisation of friction’ by diplomacy has been replaced by the manipulation of anxiety and the perpetuation of images of radical ‘otherness’ by ‘anti-diplomacy’; that war, rather than peace, has become the norm. Der Derian’s arguments – like Bull’s – rest upon a very broad interpretation of diplomacy: He portrays it as the sum of all interactions between states that are not war. His ‘anti-diplomacy’, on the other hand, represents that which is war-by-other-means, those practices that do violence, as it were, to the diplomatic mediation of estrangement. His focus on the discourses of ‘spies, terror, speed and war’, moreover, concentrates on the practices of generating ‘otherness’ and manipulating hostility, but neglects some contemporary anti-diplomatic or neodiplomatic forms that simply ignore or seek to transcend estrangement between political communities. Three are especially pertinent in the present context: ‘public diplomacy’, ‘dollar diplomacy’ and ‘coercive

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diplomacy’. The first shifts the locus of diplomatic interactions from governments to peoples, and though frequently portrayed as benign and indeed progressive, it bears some resemblance to Bull’s concept of ‘political warfare’ and to Der Derian’s account of ‘anti-diplomacy’ as ‘propaganda among peoples’ (1987: 136). The second – dollar diplomacy – consists simply of aid payments made to poor states by rich ones for diplomatic advantage, a phenomenon that would have been familiar to Bull because of its prevalence during the Cold War (Watson, 1982: 185). Lastly, contemporary ‘coercive diplomacy’ involves the conveyance of threats to use military force or economic sanctions, a function not uncommonly performed in the past by ‘traditional’ diplomats, but often now performed by non- or quasi-diplomatic actors. Public diplomacy has been part of diplomatic practice since the very beginnings of the modern system. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, ambassadors, as representatives of sovereigns and (literal) embodiments of sovereignty, were expected to reflect their majesty (Constantinou, 1996). One of their duties was to impress the receiving court – and the populace that witnessed an ambassador going about his business – with their munificence, urbanity, learning and style. The appearance of power – as much as its reality – was recognized as advantageous in the prosecution of foreign policy. Contemporary diplomats are still expected to convey a good impression, to entertain with drinks and dinners, though on a considerably tighter budget. For some observers, however, such rituals, which cater, as it were, for elites rather than publics, are outmoded. Diplomacy, it is argued, must be oriented towards peoples rather than states. As one report has put it, ‘thriving in this new world means acting on a new paradigm of diplomacy – where public communication is not an afterthought but at the heart of diplomatic strategies’ (Leonard and Alakeson, 2000: 4). Much greater attention should be paid to the means by which diplomats can shape and respond to public opinion, communicating not only with governments, but also with civil society groups, and devoting resources and energy to the management of the media’s presentation of foreign policy. Public diplomacy, its proponents argue, responds to the complexity of the diplomatic arena, a space in which non-state actors vie with traditional players to capture the public support necessary to successfully implement a foreign policy (Leonard and Alakeson, 2000: 1–2). For Riordan, indeed, ‘public diplomacy’ is now ‘essential to securing the aims of postmodern states’ (Riordan, 2003: 132). The reforms proposed to deal with these challenges differ from analyst to analyst. For the authors of the CSIS report, they are greater accessibility and

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less secrecy in the US State Department, strengthened links with NGOs and academics, better media relations and the creation of a new ‘global affairs [TV] channel’ (CSIS, 1998). The British ‘Foreign Policy Centre’ (FPC) report, on the other hand, still perceives a role – ‘as long as we need to reach international agreements’ for the ‘traditional diplomat’, and have more modest aims: the promotion of a better ‘image of Britain’, better funding for the BBC World Service and British Council, and some ‘strategic’ decision-making (Leonard and Alakeson, 2000: 4, 47, 61). The former British diplomat Shaun Riordan, in The New Diplomacy, puts forward the most far-reaching reforms. He condemns traditional diplomacy, arguing that it is ‘expensive, in both resources and opportunity costs, and wasteful of people’ (Riordan, 2003: 109). For him, ‘national representation and promotion is no longer delivered by impressive buildings and stiff protocol’ – such tasks can just as easily be performed by ‘visiting ministers (or indeed, national celebrities)’ (Riordan, 2003: 110). If diplomacy is to be successful, he argues, public relations experts must be drafted into the Foreign Office and into embassies to improve media relations, and regular conferences and seminars co-ordinated with NGOs, civil society organizations and academics. This ‘catalytic diplomacy’, he argues, is necessary for the promotion of the ‘whole cultural nexus of values and ideas out of which government policy grows’ (Riordan, 2003: 7), thereby nurturing public sympathy at home and encouraging the acceptance of our norms and values abroad. Despite the best efforts of its proponents to draw a distinction between public diplomacy and straightforward propaganda – Leonard and Alakeson argue that it should be characterised by its focus on ‘partnerships and dialogue’ (2000: 59) – it is difficult to see a clear divide. Leonard’s Public Diplomacy, for instance, opens with a quotation from Edward Murrow, a former Cold War director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the organization that, it has been argued, ‘helped to mainstream, legitimise and more effectively target    information projection or propaganda’ towards the Soviet bloc (Nelles, 2004: 68). Nor is public diplomacy especially novel. In the late 1950s, Martin Wight pointed to Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of ‘U.S. ambassadors [who] were public relations officers for the American way of life, with no pretence of professional competence’ (Wight, 1991: 157). A few years later, Herbert Butterfield observed that since 1919 (and perhaps before) a diplomatic move might be made ‘not so much for the sake of its immediate diplomatic effect, but rather with an eye to the impression that it will make on public opinion either at

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home or abroad’ (Butterfield, 1966: 187). Appealing to foreign publics rather than negotiating with state governments was, as Butterfield and Bull recognised, a stock-in-trade of Cold War international relations, precisely that ‘political warfare’ to which he referred. Indeed, Leonard himself is keen to point out that it was the image projected by the West of wealth and openness which stimulated Eastern Europeans to cast off the shackles of communism in the autumn and winter of 1989 (Leonard, 2002: 2). Moreover, martial metaphors abound in these accounts of public diplomacy’s war-by-other-means: ‘the power to inspire publics’, write Leonard and Alakeson, ‘is now often the most powerful weapon in international politics’ (2000: 38). The question of whether public diplomacy is any more virtuous than the so-called ‘traditional diplomacy’ is difficult to answer. Leonard and Alakeson argue that public diplomacy rests upon ‘attraction’ rather than the ‘coercion’ of traditional diplomacy, upon fostering ‘good international citizenship’ rather than ‘powerplay’, upon ‘facilitating’ rather than ‘directing’. Bull suggested, by contrast, that this kind of ‘political warfare’ was just another means of swinging the balance of power in the favour of one or other side: Whereas the parties concerned appear to be addressing each other, they are in fact directing their remarks to third parties, whose support each is trying to enlist in the struggle. And they are quite unconscious of the common ground between them, each conceiving the achievement of his own aims as requiring that he inflict a total defeat of on the adversary. Such persons are not conducting business but, as Nicolson points out, are engaged in an oratorical contest, like the envoys of the Greek city-states. (Bull, 2002: 169) The parallels with Greek diplomacy are indeed striking, and conjure images of the public contestations practised by the Athenians at Mytilene and Melos (Thucydides, 1972: 212–23, 400–8). There are modern analogies too. It is tempting to suggest that the debates in the UN Security Council of early 2003 took on precisely this character, with the permanent members seeking not a negotiated resolution of the impasse, but rather to garner the support of ‘international public opinion’. The televised spectacle of Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation of the now discredited evidence for Iraq’s development of Weapons of Mass Destruction as well as Dominic de Villepin’s grandiose denunciation were public diplomacy as ‘oratorical contest’ par excellence.

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Public diplomacy sometimes goes hand-in-hand with cruder forms of anti-diplomacy. ‘Dollar diplomacy’, as it has been termed, is one such approach. During the Cold War, the superpowers were keen to give financial ‘aid’ to allies to buy their loyalty and to demonstrate their benevolence to the wider world. Other states have since followed their lead. China and Taiwan, for instance, have long been engaged in competitive ‘dollar diplomacy’ with the aim of securing the diplomatic recognition of their legitimacy by developing nations. As Taylor (2002: 130) has noted, these practices have helped to perpetuate regimes mired in corruption and known to abuse the human rights of their citizens: Taiwan, for example, gave almost $20 million in aid to Charles Taylor’s government in Liberia in recent years in return for continued recognition of its status. In the cases of both China and Taiwan, this donation of aid in return for diplomatic recognition goes hand-in-hand with publicity campaigns directed not just at the elites of the recipient states, but also at their sometimes bemused electorates. Taiwan’s aid to the Caribbean state of Grenada, spent on major infrastructure projects such as a new sports stadium in St George’s and road bridges around the island, has been accompanied by a raft of pro-Taiwanese articles, some composed by its embassy and published verbatim in the local press. The Grenadian Voice of 4 September 2004 carries one such piece under the title ‘The Indomitable Dragon’, which begins, The lush green valleys of vegetables, the widest and profuse variety of colourful flowers, and the magnificent ancient tradition combined with modern architecture of dragon shaped buildings in cities, towns and communities surrounded by hills and mountain peaks all covered with towering trees are just some of the dramatic and captivating sights that distinguish Taiwan. (Roberts, 2002: 6) It ends with a more directly political message targeted at ordinary Grenadians: ‘Morally Taiwan deserves to be a major player in world affairs’. This kind of public diplomacy, though in this case relatively benign, can hardly be seen to represent an advance on traditional modes. It contravenes the norm of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. It has the clear potential to distort democratic processes: Voters in the recipient states may well be wooed by the candidates most able to secure, by whatever means, the most aid. In some African states, indeed, such aid has become just another ‘resource that can be channelled into patronage networks in order to bolster the position of    elites’ (Taylor, 2002: 129).

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Contemporary coercive diplomacy too challenges both traditional diplomatic practices and the basic norms of international society. Like public or dollar diplomacy, it can hardly be described as new. Consisting simply in the issuance of threats, which may be threats to use military force or threats to impose non-violent sanctions, such as trade embargoes, its history is long and colourful (see Schelling, 1966: 1–34 or Schultz, 2001). What is novel in the contemporary context, however, is something else that it shares with the reinvented public diplomacy: the involvement of new actors other than professional diplomatists. In the former, professional diplomats are bolstered by experts in public relations or, for Riordan, prominent celebrities; in the latter, they are being displaced, at least in the American foreign policy establishment, by what Andrew Bacevich has called ‘uniformed proconsuls’ (2002: 167). The US Commanders in Chief (CINCs) are especially important: Each allocated a region of the world to oversee, they preside over not just considerable military resources, but also growing quasi-diplomatic offices. They do ‘engagement’, as Bacevich puts it, forging contacts with foreign militaries and political leaders with ‘lavish budgets for discretionary spending that no mere ambassador dared even to dream of’ (2002: 178). Moreover, they conceive their duties in far more than military terms: Thus the declared aims of the CINCSOUTH, the ‘proconsul’ for South America and the Caribbean, are to promote stable democracies, human rights and the rule of law as well as to improve local security forces and multilateral security co-operation and suppress the drugs trade (Bacevich, 2002: 178). In his Waging Modern War, Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), offered a tantalizing glimpse of the form and content of this contemporary coercive diplomacy and his involvement in its application in the Balkan conflicts. Though a military officer with no formal diplomatic rank or training, during the course of some 6 years he met regularly with the main actors as a kind of proxy coercive diplomat. Though there were in the region both a special envoy (Richard Holbrooke) and a US ambassador to Yugoslavia, it was Clark who was frequently entrusted by Washington with the personal delivery of messages of diplomatic content. Indeed, there appears, at times, to be an underlying sense that only a military man can have the stature necessary for the job, and that a mere diplomat will not be taken seriously. At one point, even Holbrooke, Clinton’s envoy, defers to Clark, telling him to ‘call [Miloševi´c] and let him know you’re watching    You know, he always liked you. Just see if you can reinforce the message I’m giving’ (Clark, 2002: 124).

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In his book, Clark records seven meetings or telephone calls with Slobodan Miloševi´c, giving a rare insight into the methods of contemporary coercive diplomacy. The following conversation, which he writes took place during the Kosovo crisis, is one of the most dramatic: ‘Mr President, can I speak to you alone, please?’ I asked. I wanted to get him away from his usual retinue of supporters. We both got up and walked into an adjoining room. We stood face to face. ‘Mr President, you are going to have to withdraw all your excess forces. Let’s stop fencing about this. If you don’t withdraw, Washington is going to tell me to bomb you, and I’m going to bomb you good.’ (Clark, 2002: 150) There are further examples that illustrate much the same approach: ‘Mr President, when General Naumann and I travel around Europe, we see the top people in every country. When we go to Denmark, we have lunch with the Queen. And we came here to deal with you. You have to sign this document.’ It came out as an order. Miloševi´c pulled out his pen, almost meekly, and signed. (Clark, 2002: 152) Clark called this ‘diplomacy backed by threat’. It is questionable, however, whether these exchanges constitute ‘diplomacy’ at all, except in the widest sense of the term. Clark’s conversations represent dialogues between the agents of sovereign states, but they are stripped of the ritual niceties of traditional diplomacy.

Conclusion: ‘Diplomatic culture’ and international society Though ‘shaken’ by the Cold War, Bull argued in The Anarchical Society, ‘the sudden ingress’ of non-European states into the diplomatic system was ‘evidence of the willingness of the new states to conform to an established institution of the society of states’ (Bull, 2002: 250). A sense of ‘international society’ had been maintained by the ‘collegiality’, ‘culture’ and ‘common outlook’ of diplomats; indeed The remarkable willingness of states of all regimes, cultures, persuasions and stages of development to embrace often strange and archaic diplomatic procedures that arose in Europe in another age is today

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one of the few visible indications of universal acceptance of the idea of international society. (Bull, 2002: 176–7)3 In the present ‘world international society’, Bull detected at least a diplomatic or elite culture, comprising the intellectual culture of modernity: some common languages, principally English, a common scientific understanding of the world, certain common notions and techniques that derive from the universal espousal by governments in the modern world of economic development and their universal involvement in modern technology. (Bull, 2002: 305) Nevertheless, Bull remained concerned. This culture had only shallow roots and was confined to a small global elite. And even there, Bull wrote, ‘it is doubtful whether, even at the diplomatic level, it embraces what was called a common moral culture or set of common values, as distinct from a common intellectual culture’ (Bull, 2002: 305). Despite his claim that ‘diplomatic culture’ sustained international society, Bull did little in The Anarchical Society to sketch its features, beyond defining it, rather vaguely, as ‘the common stock of ideas and values possessed by the official representatives of states’ (Bull, 2002: 304). It is likely that Bull understood these ideas and values as John Vincent did, as being ‘derived from the aristocratic cosmopolitanism of dynastic Europe which provides customs, precedents and manners for the rather precious society of diplomatists’ (quoted in Der Derian, 1996: 90). Neither, however, spelt out in detail what these ideas and values were. To get a better sense of them, Jackson has argued, one must return to Wight, who thought honesty, moderation, courtesy and mutual respect the defining principles of ‘classical’ European diplomacy at its best (Jackson, 2002: 10; Wight, 1991: 186–7). Later writing on ‘diplomatic culture’ has concentrated less on these inherited values and more upon the ethic of the diplomatic ‘profession’ as it has evolved in the twentieth century. In his analysis of the idea, for example, Sharp (2004: 14) argues that diplomats tend to share six defining traits: 1. a mutual awareness of fellow diplomats as ‘servants of the national interest of their respective states’; 2. a mutual awareness of common ‘organizational and bureaucratic interests’;

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3. a mutual awareness of a need to maintain the ‘conditions that make their work possible’; 4. a mutual ‘concern’ that the ‘process of communication’ does not become ‘a source of unwanted tension and conflict in a relationship’; 5. a mutual sense of the value of understanding others’ positions and negotiating terms; 6. a mutual ‘preference for the peaceful settlement of disputes’.

Analogous shared norms and values, Sharp argues (2004: 25), may be found in other professions – ‘lawyers, professors and footballers’ among them – but diplomats operate in a more isolated context that amplifies their common cultural understandings. Diplomats are unusual, he suggests, because they ‘not only serve their professional universe, they constitute it’ (2004: 26). Earlier in his paper, Sharp (2004: 14) draws another analogy, but one on which he does not dwell: that between diplomats and soldiers. I wish to suggest here, however, that this parallel is more illuminating, in considering ‘diplomatic culture’, than at first glance it seems. Collectively soldiers do ‘constitute’ their ‘professional universe’ to something like the degree he ascribes to diplomats; in bearing arms on behalf of the state they are set apart from civilian society. Both professions, moreover, retain some of the outward trappings of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aristocratic forbears, and both have suffered, during the twentieth century, diminution in their members’ social standing. Examining the development of ‘military culture’, I want to argue, can tell us much about the changes to its diplomatic counterpart. In his classic study The Soldier and the State (2002 [1957]), Samuel Huntington argued that professional military officers shared not the hallmarks of any profession – expertise, social responsibility and a sense of corporate identity – but also a distinctive ‘ethic’ (2002: 59). For Huntington (2002: 61),

People who act the same way over a long period of time tend to develop distinctive and persistent habits of thought. Their unique relation to the world gives them a unique perspective on the world and leads them to rationalize their behaviour and role.  The military mind  consists of the values, attitudes and perspectives which inhere in the performance of the professional military function and which are deducible from the nature of that function.

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The military mind, Huntington (2002: 64) maintained, prefers a pessimistic philosophical anthropology, has an ‘anti-individualistic’, corporate ‘spirit’ and ‘places unusual value upon the ordered, purposive study of history’. These tendencies underpin an attitude of ‘conservative realism’ that is statist, opposed to ‘reckless, aggressive, belligerent action’ (Huntington 2002: 69) and which, above all, ‘exalts obedience as the highest virtue of military men’ (Huntington 2002: 79). Huntington’s sketch of the military mind – like Clausewitz’s treatment of ‘military virtue’ and civilian supremacy in On War (1982: 254–7; 401–10) or indeed Wight’s account of ‘Grotian’ diplomacy (1991: 180–8) – represents an ideal. Huntington and Clausewitz imply that professional officers should share these values, but both hint, at the same time, that frequently they do not. Soldiers can and often do lack expertise, social responsibility and a sense of corporate identity; they can be incompetent, reckless and disobedient. The military ethic, like a ‘Grotian’ diplomatic culture, is difficult to maintain. In practice, divergence from the military ethic that Huntington describes has become more pronounced since the book was published some 50 years ago. In many states, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East, wars are waged not by professional officers, but by an array of irregulars motivated by religious zealotry or profit (see Kaldor, 1999; Ignatieff, 1999: 109–63; Münkler, 2005). Even Western soldiers have changed, becoming mere technicians rather than ‘warriors’ (Ignatieff, 2001; Coker, 2002). Their social standing in liberal – or ‘post-military’ – societies has diminished and some Western militaries may even be showing signs of ‘feminisation’ (Coker, 2001: 103–10). Bacevich (2005) has argued that, in the United States at least, a ‘new militarism’ may be emerging, but amongst civilians not soldiers. The military officer class, by contrast, is now deeply risk-averse and deeply politicized, willing to sacrifice absolute obedience to civilian control if their bureaucratic and budgetary interests are threatened (Bacevich, 2002: 135). It is, in other words, difficult to distinguish the contemporary ‘military mind’ from the civilian,4 or to speak of a distinctive ‘military culture’ that unites all soldiers, or even all officers, akin to that which Clausewitz desired. A similar story can be told of ‘diplomatic culture’. Collectively, many diplomats share the outward signs of a profession, as Huntington would have it: expertise, social responsibility and a sense of corporate identity. But these professional diplomats are frequently displaced, though rarely wholly replaced, by non-professional proxy-diplomats. Politicians, public relations experts and soldiers may not lack expertise or social responsibility or a sense of corporate identity, but their skills

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and loyalties are not necessarily those of the traditional diplomat. Half a century ago, it might have been possible to argue that diplomats, like military officers, had a distinctive ‘ethic’. Wight, for instance, quoted with approval, as Jackson points out, Harold Nicolson’s remark that the ‘best kind’ of diplomats are ‘reasonable and humane skeptics’ (Jackson 2002: 9). But such a disposition – like the ‘conservative realism’ of Huntington’s ‘military mind’ – is not as prevalent as it was. The dominant ethic of the international elite culture, one that infuses the thought of the contemporary proxy-diplomat in the West at least, is somewhat different: rationalist, humanitarian and progressivist. It is, as such, intolerant of the classical diplomatic ethic, because, as Jackson (2002: 14–15) argues, ‘it tolerates what ought to be condemned: compromises that may be unfair or may entail inequality, lack of vision of a better world, failure or refusal to seek to institute such a world by international means’. On this reading, the weakest of the five institutions that Bull thought ordered international society – the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war and the great powers – are, in the contemporary world, diplomacy and war. This does not mean, of course, that states and nonstate actors do not negotiate, communicate or fight. Rather, it might be argued that there is no longer a common understanding as to the norms that regulate the conduct of diplomacy and war. As a consequence, these two institutions no longer serve the ordering functions that they once did; indeed, it might be argued that some contemporary practices of war and (anti-)diplomacy serve to disorder international society. ‘New wars’ and ‘terrorism’ threaten the empirical sovereignty and political authority of states, undermine international law and the security of individuals, but so too does diplomacy conducted by espionage, propaganda, bribery and coercion. There is, however, another way of conceptualizing ‘diplomatic culture’ which does not lead to such a pessimistic conclusion. For Der Derian ‘diplomatic culture only becomes self-evident, and subject to inquiry, when the values and ideas of one society are estranged from another’. It has three main functions. First, ‘it helps to define and validate social and political boundaries between alien groups, as well as groups of alien ideas’. Second, it ‘abets the canonisation of imposition of peripheral alien cultures’. Third, it mediates, ‘through ritual and protocol’, ‘the alienation which accompanies the crossing of state and status boundaries’ (Der Derian, 1996: 92). ‘Diplomatic culture’ is thus Janus-faced: It allows for communication and negotiation across borders while, at the same time, it serves to define the borders themselves. In other

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words, it underpins an ‘international society’ but precludes the creation of a ‘world society’. The erosion of ‘diplomatic culture’ might thus be welcomed, as least by cosmopolitans, for it may signify the end of international society as Bull described it.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Barry Buzan, Mark Imber, Richard Little, Nick Rengger, Mitchell Rologas and John Williams for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Barry Buzan for this point. 2. On the limitations – technical and political – of ‘telephone diplomacy’, see Berridge, 2002: 98–102. 3. ‘World international society’ is the term Bull uses in The Anarchical Society to describe that which came into existence in the twentieth century, a society no longer ‘specifically European’ (2002: 36). It should be distinguished from Buzan (2004a: 7) category of ‘world society’, which ‘takes individuals, nonstate organisations and ultimately the global population as a whole as the focus of global societal arrangements, and puts transcendence of the statessystem at the centre of IR theory’. 4. Huntington (2002: 89–94) pointed out, of course, that there is no such thing as one single ‘civilian mind’. In The Soldier and the State he outlined four different ‘minds’ – liberal, fascist, Marxist and conservative – and observed that all displayed some sympathy for one or more elements of the ‘military mind’.

8 War in the Twenty-first Century: An Institution in Crisis Charles A. Jones

War as an institution Inclusion of war among the institutions of international society must at first seem shocking. Is not war symptomatic of the breakdown or failure of international society? If so, how can it be counted an institution? Surely it is obscenely euphemistic to refer to so destructive a process by a word so closely associated in everyday use with welfare and stability. Marriage, bankruptcy, and the BBC are institutions; but war?1 The remainder of the first section of this chapter is therefore given over to an account of the kinds of things that have been understood by those, like Bull, who have thought war an institution. It attempts to sketch in merest outline naturalist, communitarian, functionalist and positivist approaches to war-as-institution as foils to an alternative pragmatist position, consistent with a possible reading of Bull, which provides the point of departure for the remainder of the argument. This is followed by a summary of Bull’s treatment of war in The Anarchic Society, leading on to an elaboration – in the light of more recent experience of war and reflection upon it – of two themes that directly preoccupied Bull himself in that final major work. The first of these is the threat to pluralist international society posed by the rise of ‘new forms of war’, a phrase Bull applied principally to intra-state conflicts. The second concerns the implications of a relative decline in orthodox inter-state warfare for maintenance of the balance of power among major powers and the development of international law, both of which, Bull insisted, had formerly depended heavily upon it. It is here that I diverge most markedly from Bull, disputing the plausibility of a pluralist description of the current world, and identifying United States hegemony, rather than the kind of benign solidarism that worried Bull, as the nemesis of pluralism. 162

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The third section of the chapter moves beyond exegesis, taking Bull and his contemporaries alike to task for approaches to war which dwell too exclusively upon the explicit norms that govern or ought to govern warfare. Anyone aspiring – as Bull did – to extend the norms and institutions of international society in such a way as to embrace contemporary warfare must take an altogether broader view of the institution as an expression of value. An account of war that restricted itself to norms and breaches of norms would be like a corporate history derived solely from articles of association and balance sheets. Not just social but also cultural, war is the site for the exercise of military virtues, the display of symbols, the performance of rituals, the formation of identity, and the reproduction of society. Its normalization cannot be carried out in legalistic isolation; it requires a holistic approach. Accordingly, this final section consists in a tentative exploration of what the recasting of war as institution of a hegemonic international society might imply and require. For little or nothing remains untouched by this imperial turn. The manner in which war has traditionally been normalized as an instrument of justice or a reinforcement of balancing and international law is premised on anarchy, not hierarchy. Conventional ethics of combat presuppose juridically equal states as belligerents, clear distinctions between war-fighting and policing, and a privileging of high-intensity combat. When anarchy is qualified by hegemony, the symbolic or ritual significance of warfare is transformed. Finally, to close off an era of balancing wars leads, in the manner of Barraclough (1967), to pursuit of a contemporary history of warfare, looking backwards from present concerns, that ranges much further and wider than a modern history of the subject. In The Anarchical Society Bull was chiefly concerned with the progressive substitution of civil for inter-state warfare which he had been observing since 1945. In an intriguing passage in his essay on ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, Bull (2000e: 93) observed that a universal state would offer ‘a particular solution to the management of the problem of violence, rather than a means of transcending it’. In the first case, private and public war coexist uneasily; in the second, private war oscillates between rebellion and praetorianism at one extreme, and mere brigandry at the other. Thus for Bull, public war between wellconstituted states within a pluralist international society was not so much the definition of war as its ideal type. Yet while real war took forms other than the ideal, not all violent conflicts between organized groups fell within Bull’s definition. ‘War is not simply a clash of forces; – he wrote – it is a clash between the agents of political groups who

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are able to recognize one another as such and to direct their force at one another only because of the rules that they understand and apply’ (Bull, cited in Alderson and Hurrell, 2000b: 23). So the relationships between Spain and ETA has been an instance of warfare, but the initial contacts between Spanish conquistadors and indigenous polities in the New World were not properly so, for though each party to the conflict possessed the institution of war, its function and norms differed so much that armed struggle between the two was characterized by incomprehension rather than mutual recognition, and the outcome, lacking legitimacy, would long remain uneasy and provisional.2 Nor, surely, would Bull have accepted deadly ethnic riots as instances of private warfare, since they have generally been premised by a refusal or withdrawal of recognition (Horowitz, 2001). Already, from this briefest initial account of Bull on war, some features of a distinctively functionalist approach are apparent. War is ‘a solution to the problem of violence’, dependent on shared norms, that will vary in form according to context. Bull is interested in it less for its own sake or as a moral phenomenon than as a means to the maintenance of his bedrock values of justice and order. This is starkly evident in his reception of pioneering works of the just war revival in the late 1970s.3 Grudgingly accepting that the whole point of natural law is that there are moral principles valid independently of changing circumstances, Bull nevertheless berates Midgley for his remorselessly ahistorical approach. ‘It is interesting to be told that Grotius’ doctrine is false, but what we want to know    is whether natural law in any but a secular form could have played the role it did    in bringing rulers and peoples for whom religion had become a source of disunity  to recognize common objectives’ (Bull, 2000a: 166). Such use of the first-person plural as this must exclude all those naturalists – and there have been many – who regard war as a quasi-judicial process rather than a stabilizing device. Midgley has had the distinguished company over the past 25 years of natural law theorists who might not share his unshakeable loyalty to St Thomas yet have, however reluctantly, preferred justice to order when push came to shove, electing to maintain that the integrity of Catholic doctrine and right action were of greater importance than the harm that might stem from unilateral nuclear disarmament.4 In addition, Bull’s ‘we’ might also exclude Walzer, whose 1977 treatment of the just war tradition was to become the foundational text of the revival for secular readers. Bull (1979b: 599) complains, echoing Groucho Marx, that Walzer’s is the kind of book that will appeal to people those who already share his views, but will

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hardly persuade those who do not, because it lacks any grounding of the discussion in basic moral theory. It is a complaint that is almost justified. Walzer shows little explicit concern to provide foundations for his discussion and entirely fails to show how an essentially Scholastic mode of thought can be wrenched from its context without suffering (or doing!) irreparable damage. However, Walzer does implicitly ground his views in two related ways. First of all, he takes political community to be self-evidently deserving of preservation: the well of value. Secondly, his neglect of foundations implicitly suggests a pragmatist emphasis on the texture of agreement emerging from more or less imperfect conversation as the only foundation to be had. That Bull should have been so oddly disregarding of views so similar to his own in spite of the communitarian tone of Walzer’s discussion of supreme emergency and intervention suggests a certain blindness to their underlying logic and even a failure thoroughly to work through the implications of some of his own ideas. Walzer was thinking in unit terms – political community – Bull in systemic terms – the order of society. Walzer had come to terms with lack of foundations; Bull was still bothered by it. From Bull’s responses to these various treatments of the ethics of war, differing possible approaches to war-as-institution begin to emerge in outline: naturalist, communitarian, functionalist, positivist, and pragmatist. For Midgley, the question was how to act according to right reason even in matters of war, and war itself was seen as at best an instrument of justice.5 For Walzer the question was how armed force could be used to resolve conflicts between political communities while doing least harm to their integrity. The purpose of war was to preserve the community, but this was more than simply functional because of the indispensable role of political community as the fount of personality and value. Because Bull was so much more interested in society than in community or, put another way, in interest and sovereignty rather than identity and recognition, and in system rather than unit, function – in the form of the maintenance of order – often takes pride of place. He assumes the ‘war convention’, like diplomatic immunity or the obligation to honour treaties, to be ‘the common property of international societies of the most elementary kind’, yet instead of sticking to a positivist account of why this might be so, resting solely on the agreement of states, he reaches for justice as the foil of order, combining positivism with a less than fully explained moral absolutism (Bull, 2000b: 179). The clearest hint in Bull of what may be a pragmatist rather than a merely functional and positivist view of the institution of war comes

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in his review of Midgley. Faced with the massive moral confidence of Midgley’s naturalism, Bull argues that rejection of naturalism need not lead to relativism, since moral agreements are amenable at least to minimal, ground-clearing sorts of rational investigation. The facts of a case, their moral relevance, and the clarification and structure of moral argument can always be dealt with in this way. Furthermore, where there is ‘a shared background of moral belief’ disputes may be settled, so that it is ‘as if there were an “objective” or “natural” morality.’ He is even willing to go so far as to claim that there are in fact ‘certain moral premises that are shared universally, or nearly universally [and] are respected in all societies, including international society’ (Bull, 2000b: 167–8). Bull’s position, then, is not that international society is created solely by explicit agreements between states, but that this agreement is rooted in widely held experiences arising from shared human experience. Custom underpins convention, but even the natural quality of custom is the product of human will, and comes with no supernatural guarantee. This position is closer to Rortyean pragmatism than to the cruder kind of legal positivism, since it provides, in custom or the conscience of humankind, and in that nicely phrased ‘as if,’ a point from which to evaluate positive law while resisting the urge to resort to some cosmic underwriter (Rorty, 1999). However, a thoroughgoing description of war-as-institution in the pragmatist tradition would need to add an account of war as communication and expression to Bull’s functionalist narrative of aspiration to order and justice. That conversation between people, and later between the representatives of states, by which near universal agreement on basic moral principles is constructed leads, inter alia, to the war convention. But what fails to draw Bull’s attention is the thought that war itself – provided it is fought between belligerents with shared values – while ultimately resolved through victory and defeat, is also a form of communication, with many of the features of a game or dance serving as the analogue of politics, as well as its continuation by other means.6 For a game, too, is to be won or lost, and dancing part of courtship, their pleasure and elegance being only part of the story. This notion of war as simultaneously conversation and contest is an implicit concern of the final section, and need only be adumbrated here, a task most easily performed by briefly considering reprisals. Faced with overwhelming military superiority, the insurgent forces resort to sabotage and assassination. The occupiers respond by interspersing noncombatants in their convoys as a human shield or killing them at some arbitrary tariff, perhaps two for every one of their troops killed. It seems

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that one breach of the war convention has led to a second, and that the abyss beckons. Yet as often as not the display of calculated abnormality is a way for the two belligerents to signal to each other the mutual advantage of a return to compliance with tacit norms. Alternatively, a step too far by one’s opponent may be exploited to strategic effect: ‘See, the true face of the enemy!’ Writ large, war is a field of expression and representation as well as an exercise of violence, just as politics may provide a field of enmity and compulsion in the absence of violence.

War in the anarchical society Thus far an attempt has been made to display some of the ways in which war has been thought to constitute an institution and to argue that Bull’s work, while inclining at times to a functionalist position on this question, has strong indications of a pragmatist view, in which war is constituted through elaborate and intertwined practices of destruction and expression, disruption and meaning. To turn from lesser publications to his most widely read and enduring work, The Anarchical Society, seems a step backwards. For Bull is analytical and taxonomic almost to a fault in his treatment of war. Distinction upon distinction draws a map so complex that it threatens to detract from the author’s central concern with order and justice, substituting a dogged determination to traverse the terrain and get to the other side. However, much becomes clear once one realizes that the emphatically realist opening distinction, between war proper or public war, fought between modern sovereign states, and other forms of organized violence, is by no means indicative of a desire to limit discussion to the former. Rather the reverse. Bull believed that the tight constraints placed on inter-state warfare in response to the excessive destructiveness of nuclear weapons had facilitated, if not caused, the rise of new forms of organized violence undertaken by new political units, which posed a threat to international society unless they could somehow be brought within its normative framework. While drawing attention to the limited place occupied by public warfare in the spectrum of organized violence, Bull also drew attention to a recent narrowing of the achievable objectives of inter-state warfare. Traditional mercantilist objectives were no longer so easily to be attained by force as in the past. Plunder and territorial conquest were more hazardous in a world which, by the end of the nineteenth century, consisted entirely of sovereign states and their dependencies.7 Moreover, it was a barren enterprise in a world of advanced industrial economies dependent upon spatially extended networks and delicate logistics.8

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This is consistent with the view that the crisis facing war today lies more in a broad shift from pluralism to limited forms of solidarism, which have created a set of institutions that have tended to narrow the scope for war.9 Direct and forcible promotion of creed or ideology, a second traditional objective of inter-state warfare, was effectively blocked by bipolar nuclear deterrence. The USA and the Soviet Union dared not risk limited war for fear of escalation, and were generally inclined to restrain their client states, thereby delaying or preventing decisive resolution of regional conflicts through proxy wars. In short, the scope of public war as an institution appeared to Bull to have narrowed, and with it, perhaps, the effectiveness of militarization of disputes, swaggering, and outright hostilities as signalling devices. The twin consequences of this narrowing of the scope and objectives of inter-state warfare appeared to Bull to be, first, a concentration on security against perceived threats to the integrity or independence of the state as the predominant contemporary war aim, rather than material gain or proselytization, and, secondly, a growing location of such threats by states within rather than beyond their frontiers. It is worth quoting Bull (2002: 190–1) at length on this crucial point. the obstacles standing in the way of resort to war between sovereign states have encouraged the tendencies making for war within them. International war, as a determinant of the international system, has declined in relation to civil war. The principal territorial changes of the last quarter century – the break-up of the European empires – have been brought about by civil violence    rather than by interstate violence. The territorial integrity of many states, new and old, is now more threatened by separatist violence within their frontiers than by violence from outside. The ideological struggles between communist and anti-communist, neo-colonialist and radical nationalist, can take a violent form more readily in a domestic than in an interstate context. Yet if bipolar nuclear deterrence had had the unanticipated consequence of displacing inter-state warfare, this was not something that could lightly be disregarded by those sufficiently fortunate or well-governed to be able to stand aloof from the rising tide of civil violence. There could be no question of a realm of civilization abandoning a disorderly wasteland of barbarism beyond its frontiers with impunity. Justice aside, there were two principal reasons for this. First, the new forms of warfare constituted a challenge to the pluralist form of international society preferred by

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Bull, based as it was upon discrete territorial states. Secondly, they presaged the loss of an adjustment mechanism that had traditionally served to maintain the balance of power and both to enforce international law and to effect changes in it. Let us take these in turn.

The threat to pluralist international society Reading Bull is a salutary reminder that discussion of ‘new wars’, like the term itself, preceded the conclusion of the Cold War and the fragmentation of the Soviet empire. Far from being a consequence of the ending of the Cold War, new wars were, in Bull’s view, part and parcel of the bipolar struggle. This revised time-frame extends the set of ‘new wars’ beyond the wars of Yugoslav and Soviet succession and 1990s wars in sub-Saharan Africa to embrace numerous wars of decolonization fought by European powers or their successor-states, the so-called ‘dirty wars’ waged from the 1950s onwards by Latin American states against rural guerillas and urban terrorist groups, and anti-secessionary wars of the sort fought by Britain in Northern Ireland, by Spain in the Basque Country, or by ruling elites in Nigeria, Burma, and Thailand against subordinate ethnic groups. To a variable extent, each of these was accompanied and aggravated by features identified by Kaldor (1999) among the markers of her specifically post-Cold War ‘new wars’. But the clustering of a cosmopolitan safari-suited elite of journalists, aid workers, and military advisers around the belligerents and the exploitation of evermore rapidly ageing and cheapening weapons and communications technologies by irregular belligerents are hardly new. They were already present in Bull’s new wars. Bull’s new wars were fought by ‘political units’ either defending or claiming sovereign statehood. A large part of the reason for this was that, in order to aspire to the material or moral support of either superpower, a warring party had to express its objectives in terms of aspiration to state power and commitment to the basic conventions of diplomacy and international law. The immediate problems they posed for international society were therefore problems of transition or adjustment: moments when it was not clear whether to recognize the claims to recognition of an insurgent group or withdraw support from a beleaguered regime. But a widespread second-order consequence of new wars of this first sort has been the development in parts of South America, South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Balkans of self-perpetuating forms of violence in which the major players – whether nominally states or rebels – aspire ultimately to gain more than to govern. Already emergent

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in Colombia, Burma, and parts of Southern Africa by the 1980s, this trend was aggravated by the end of the Cold War, as withdrawal of superpower support – or the prospect of it – removed the incentive for non-state belligerents to embrace conventional political aspirations and abide by the rules of international society (Richani, 2002). This development is new, of course, only in a very local sense, by contrast with the last century or so. Throughout most of history, as Lane (1966) observed, the single most effective way to accumulate capital has been through the application of organized force. The important economic question (for Lane and, later, for Douglass North, 1981) then became how that capital was subsequently invested. The conceptual separation of imperial plunder from legitimate sovereignty is simply an aspect of the wider liberal distinction between private and public realm (Redlich, 1956). One sees it at the very end of the eighteenth century and in the early years of the nineteenth century in the separation of the trading activities of the East India Company from its civil administration and military forces. It became securely implanted in Europe only towards the end of the nineteenth century as the monopoly of the use of force claimed by European states and the USA was extended from the home territories to cover the activities of citizens and non-state actors overseas, and it was effectively extended to the wider world through formal imperialism (Thomson, 1994; Topik, 1996). Given the fuss and bother made about its demise by ‘continuity realists’, no opportunity should be lost to emphasize the brevity and fragility of the so-called ‘Westphalian’ state-system, which did not finally crystallize for more than two centuries after the 1648 treaty of that name and endured in its mature form for barely a century. This said, the re-emergence of unapologetic and unconstrained non-state violence and brigandage without pretensions to legitimacy is new to many alive today, and poses a radical challenge to the sustained attempt over the past century to subject organized violence to the law of armed conflict and the authority of constitutional states. The hooded and shackled prisoners spirited away from Afghanistan to the jurisdictional wilderness of Guantanamo Bay is one token, the disbursing of substantial cash sums to local Afghan warlords by US special forces another, of United States pragmatic acceptance of a transformation in both the morality and the rationality of warfare, even as their administration strives to reinforce and legitimize the state as an institution through the War on Terror (Woodward, 2002). So while Bull was correct in identifying the Cold War as a cause of the growth of intra-state warfare, it is now clear, with hindsight, that bipolar rivalry also shielded international society from the full

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implications of this development by encouraging belligerents to present themselves as – and even to become – ideologically inspired aspirants to state power rather than merely unprincipled brigands or warlords. But behind this façade, statehood as bequeathed by the colonial powers was being hollowed out. Corrosion of statehood itself, as the basis of pluralist international society, has begun to match or even exceed Bull’s worst fears. Bull still hoped at the very end of his life that well-constituted Third World states would slowly, yet inexorably, grow stronger, until the ability of the West to shape international society was ‘much reduced’ and the West became ‘more vulnerable    to the decisions of others’. Far from resisting this perceived tendency, he suggested, ‘the overriding interest of the Western countries [was] to accommodate the demands of the Third World countries for change’ (Bull, 2000c: 242–3). But even by the time Bull wrote these words a newly assertive United States administration under Ronald Reagan was already dismantling the so-called North–South dialogue and leading Third World states had been shaken to the core by civil dissention, bureaucratic authoritarianism, and the debt crisis (Jones, 1983: ch. 5).

Maintaining the balance of power and developing international law ‘International society’, Bull affirmed, ‘has seen in war a means of preserving the balance of power, that is the situation in which no one state is preponderant and can lay down the law to others’. As to international law, Bull regarded war in self-defence as the minimal case of justifiable enforcement, and suggested that war had, in addition, some title to be regarded as a legitimate instrument in support of allies, and not merely in defence of their territorial integrity ‘but of a wide range of legal rights’. He went further than this, suggesting that, in the absence of a supranational legislature, ‘there have sometimes been occasions when the acquiescence of international society in a change brought about by force reflects    a widespread feeling that the use or threat of force has been a just one’ (Bull, 2002: 182–3). This robust account of the functions of war was, of course, largely historical. Bull accepted that in his own day war-fighting between nuclear powers was politically impractical and that balancing had therefore to be achieved by the threat of force, crisis management, and proxy wars. He also accepted that strictly legal warfare was currently restricted to self-defence. However, he did suggest that in the post-war era at least one new norm had been established through general acquiescence in

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the strictly illegal use of force. This was the undesirability of colonial enclaves and the acceptability of their elimination by force of arms. International society had acquiesced in Indian annexation of Goa in 1961 and the use of force by India in 1971 to assist the independence of East Bengal from Pakistan. This could be seen as opening the door to further tidying up of the post-colonial map. Over the past 25 years, the possibility of using force to maintain or transform international law and to regulate a balance of power has changed significantly. On the one hand, acquiescence in the use of force to tidy up the post-colonial map has faltered, while extraordinary reconfigurations of the political map have been achieved – often without force – in and near the last of the major European empires, reducing Russia to the second rank and virtually destroying Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the United States has emerged as the overwhelmingly preponderant power throughout much of the contemporary world, so that there is scarcely at present a balance of power in the sense in which Bull used the term. This poses the question of whether other constitutional states, whether individually or collectively, in an era of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, have a sufficient collective interest and solidarity to contemplate changing this state of affairs by force of arms. Bull himself, in very different circumstances, was unambiguous. ‘The preservation of a general balance of power has been perceived as essential to the survival of the states system’ – he wrote – ‘and war directed to this end as carrying out a positive function’ (Bull, 2002: 182–3). But if the aim of France or Russia in the early months of 2003 was to rely on proxies such as Iraq or North Korea to engage the United States in a process of attrition and probing, allowing time for the United States technological lead to erode and for Europe to re-arm, then this was surely a perilous game, and attention might better have been directed to the option, noted earlier, of effective submission to United States power and the cultivation of what would then become, in effect, an intra-imperial rather than an inter-national politics, albeit cloaked with the legitimizing mantle of the United Nations and haunted by the comforting ghosts of sovereignty. It is important to be clear about what is meant by this, since use of the terms ‘empire’, ‘imperial’, and so on commonly produces such agitation and confusion. The argument is not that the United States is a world empire, nor even that it aspires to extend its formal empire beyond current frontiers. There are clearly independent states to which the USA cannot lay down the law, which are in firm control of their own territories, and are forces to be reckoned with by their neighbours.

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Instead, what is being claimed is that the USA is effectively imperial in relation to its allies and to many of those middle-ranking states that it regards as falling within its sphere of influence, or as being of particular relevance to its security, and that it is hegemonic towards the remaining great powers (notably China, France, Brazil, and India) in something akin to the manner of China towards other East and Southeast Asian powers in the centuries before 1800. The advantage of openly acknowledging such a system include resolution of the uncomfortable ambivalence currently afflicting United States allies such as Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom, which are in one and the same breath both sovereign and vassal states, the latter relationship constantly subverting the former. It might even help create a cordon sanitaire between policing and military approaches to terrorism. The disadvantage is that, even with a fair wind, a solution of this sort, even if it had been adopted promptly following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, could, for the foreseeable future, have been no more than a de facto and partial solution to the provision of legitimate world governance. Prospects of consent and legitimacy have now been substantially reduced by a decade of strident United States unilateralism. As for the relationship between war and international law, there have been a number of developments in recent years. In the first place, the use of force to tidy up decolonization, as in the South and South East Asian cases cited by Bull, is no longer tolerated. Argentine seizure of the Falklands/Malvinas in 1981 and Iraqi annexation of Kuwait a decade later both met with robust and effective military responses, much against the expectations of Argentine and Iraqi leaders who, in each case, felt they had good reason to anticipate acquiescence from the major powers. By contrast, a second challenge to legal sovereignty has emerged in the shape of a norm of intervention, by force if required, to avert humanitarian catastrophe or anticipated aggression. Various justifications for this practice have been advanced over the past decade, ranging from realist concern about the potentially destabilizing effects of internal conflicts arising from trans-border refugee flows or ethnic affiliations to more idealistic claims based in presumptions of universal rights and global community. Somewhere in the middle lie Grotian justifications in which sovereignty is premised on a minimal standard of representation of those living within a territory and is accordingly sacrificed or suspended when states fail to provide minimal security or turn upon their subjects. Several instances of forcible intervention in the 1990s did indeed meet with the widespread acquiescence of international society. However, it

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must be noted that in Bull’s examples, great powers accepted the justice of illegal action by a regional power, while in recent interventions it has been the lesser powers that have been asked to acquiesce in the actions of US-led coalitions. There is a real difference here. Acquiescence implies choice foregone; but in the first case the choice lay between acceptance and obstruction, while in the second it lay between acceptance and mere bluster. Yet this seeming paradox of wars to maintain pluralism being fought mainly by the imperial power is no paradox at all once it is realised that US hegemony depends crucially on the strength of suzerain states. Hegemony – even empire – is consistent with a quasi-pluralism in which a substantial measure of real autonomy (sufficient, for example, to allow Mexico to have refused its support in the UNSC over Iraq had it come to a second vote) can be extended through law and common consent of imperial and suzerain states to create a fiction of equality and thoroughgoing pluralism from which all parties gain, most of the time. In short, it is not USA insistence on the creation of strong suzerain states within its sphere of influence that is the paradox afflicting the functionality of war at present, but rather the attempt to normalize what cannot of its nature be normalized, namely the unilateral and arbitrary exercise of military power. The United States and its allies were engaged in a war in Iraq widely considered illegal and lacking clear United Nations sanction. Beyond its initial objective of removing Saddam Hussein and his party from the government of Iraq was the broader purpose of instituting new legal norms even at the cost of shortterm breach of law. The norms in question include an entitlement to use force to pre-empt aggression, an entitlement to regard proliferation of WMDs (and perhaps any substantial programme of armament) as evidence of aggression, and a right of enforcement by a coalition of the willing, or else unilaterally, in the event of unreasonable withholding of consent or veto in the UN Security Council. The logical problem with this last ‘new norm’, however, is that it is self-contradictory. It proposes for general acceptance, as a putative norm of international society, a rule that becomes operative only in instances where lack of the general consensus it assumes from the start is proven by the absence of a Security Council majority or exercise of a veto. The problem, evidently, is that while Bull (2002: 97) saw acquiescence as a process whereby middle rank or regional powers might use force to change international law in ways conducive to greater justice, the Bush administrations – short on empathy and irony – have sought acquiescence in a situation in which, within its sphere of influence, ‘one power is in a position where it is preponderant and can lay down the law to

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others’ (my italics). In short, it is precisely the breakdown of the balance of power that has permitted the predominant state to adopt a tactic customarily available only to second-rank powers, using force to erode international law under the pretence of developing it, thus provoking a general crisis in the constitution of international society. A nice example is US inclusion – without consultation let alone consent – of Cuba, along with the Bahamas, Mexico, and Canada, within the perimeter of ‘homeland defence’, so creating by fiat an ‘enemy within’. As Robert Skidelsky put it at the time of the Kosovo crisis, ‘the attempt to conduct international relations as though all    states accepted [Western norms] can only serve to make the world more war-prone’ (cited in Ignatieff, 2000: 86).

Contemporary warfare My contention is that war remains among the institutions of an international society that has moved, perhaps decisively, from anarchy towards empire. This old-fashioned term is to be preferred to the dry and euphemistic ‘unipolarity’ for the rich agenda it sets. A pre-eminent world empire is not a universal state. Its scope is neither comprehensive nor uniform. But it is a power that all have to take notice of, and creates an asymmetric field of security within which hierarchy and functional differentiation of self-governing and even relatively autonomous states becomes possible. If this imperial turn is accepted, or merely entertained, several questions immediately arise. Is it still possible for warfare to be brought ‘within the compass of its rule’ once international society is no longer pluralist? What becomes of the just war tradition and the ethics of war more broadly conceived, premised as they have been on a multiplicity of ‘competent authorities’ in an anarchic society of states? Does war still retain any function in international society? What is its place within a global culture? How are we to understand the process that has yielded this outcome? In short, how does the imperial interpretation affect the normalization of warfare, the ethics of combat, the significance of warfare, and its interpretation. For, while war continues in these circumstances to be a match to be won, almost everything else about it is transformed. Norms Bull’s defensive posture left no space for an imperial international society between his preferred pluralist form and the potential tyranny

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of a world state.10 Yet, when referring to the continuation of warfare within a universal state, he effectively identified the problem it would also pose what might best be called a ‘constrained empire’. ‘If the elimination of    public war were to occasion the re-establishment of the various forms of private war – he warned – this could not necessarily be counted a gain’ (Bull, 2000e: 92–3). While this is true, the more urgent question is whether trying to contain changed reality within the frameworks of law, ethics, and representation of an untenanted pluralism or an as yet insecure solidarism might not be more harmful than creative adaptation to the new state of affairs. Idealists are often and rightly accused of allowing their vision of the world as they wish it to be to get the better of their observation. The realist claim to see things ‘as they are’ cuts little ice with anti-foundationalists. But what has been proposed here is to let a dystopic yet increasingly plausible interpretation off the leash – to see where it runs and what it catches – and its realism consists less in a claim to unambiguous empirical vision than in a limited moral ambition that will settle for the least worst condition available. In less abstract terms, the project is based on the thought that imperial power may more effectively be regulated by a discourse of republicanism, constitutionalism, and revolt than by nostalgic insistence on the juridical equality of states, and that from this source may be derived some initially supra-legal view of a tolerable role for warfare. For even at the level of mundane functionality, a dystopic solidarism of this sort would require that war, as a regulator of empire, be re-conceived in more than merely juridical terms. This would apply with even greater force to ethics, and also to law, which is not discussed here.11 The widening gulf between the just war discourse of Western elites and the wholly distinct discourses that have emerged alongside it, not least out of the unique French modern experience of near-simultaneous dominion and humiliation, has lately erupted in scandal and antagonism with disclosure of the humiliation of captives by US forces.12 The place of warfare in contemporary culture requires close attention if the processes in which new belligerents are engaged are to be understood. That this was already true in the pluralist international society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is evident in innumerable representations of war that challenge the juridical model, and do so in deliberately non-syllogistic ways that sometimes anticipate the imperial model (Pick, 1993). The wasting away of public objectives in so many new wars since Bull’s day, and their replacement by private gain, might be thought to constitute not so much a move from the rational to the irrational as from one

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form of rationality to another, and can be met easily enough at a tactical level through the straightforward purchase of allies, as in Afghanistan. Yet as any reader of Catch 22 will remember, intersection of these two rationalities – political and economic – can result in absurdity. In that novel, set in Italy during the Second World War, squadrons of United States bombers, acting as sub-contractors for the Luftwaffe, attack their own base for payment in order to salvage the gigantic transnational enterprise that has sprung up from their officers’ mess (Heller, 1962). In our own day, the clash of rationalities often follows the military phase of an intervention, when it is all too easy – as in parts of Bosnia – for a dual system of government to emerge: the public face democratic, bureaucratic, and law-governed, supported with external funding and blessed by the United Nations and innumerable ancillary IGOs and NGOs; the private face – just down the road in some local café – patriarchal, clientilistic, and criminal. The paradox within a hierarchical system, as the United States and its allies have been discovering in Iraq, is that the most probable way of restoring the liberal division between the public and private spheres, and lodging organized violence firmly under public authority with renewed purpose, is to re-empower elements of the recently defeated elites, and not just worthy exiles and long-suffering opponents of the regime. The liberal hope must be that to embed such people within a framework of federal, democratic, and market institutions will in due course fully (re-)politicize them, rather as Kant (1970) thought that absolute monarchs, bound progressively to concede liberty to the bourgeoisies on whom their military enterprises increasingly depended for revenue and technology, would finally find themselves constrained. Yet even to recall this typically late-eighteenth-century conjectural history is to cast doubt by implication on the contemporary element of the analogy. For we no longer believe such teleological fairy tales. Still, to do other than co-opt the erstwhile plunderers would be to create merely the forms, without the substance, of democracy, allowing long-established networks to re-establish their economic activities and the corrosive systems of private coercion on which these depend, outflanking the market and the state. In short, the use of interventionist coalitions, including local forces, and the subsequent project of constitutional settlement, just like the earlier project of European decolonization, are premised on a pluralist vision in which close analogues – close enough to be fixed if they get broke – are ubiquitous, while the reality within imperial international society is of qualitative and functional differentiation in a hierarchical order of states.

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A related problem in contemporary warfare stems from two specific forms of this differentiation, namely nationalist and religious particularism. As Michael Ignatieff has observed, the great obstacle in the way of political settlement in the Balkans has been that cosmopolitan liberals believe the attempt to base political community in cultural homogeneity is futile, while nationalists believe it to be not only a possible but an indispensable precondition of civility, justifying extensive use of force to achieve ethnic cleansing and partition. The conundrum here is that solutions dependent on partition, like Dayton or the much earlier partitions of Ireland or British India, tend to reinforce the group identities they are designed to accommodate, thereby exacerbating and internationalizing the mutual hostilities they set out to assuage. Conversely to insist – as in Algeria, Turkey, or Canada – upon a pluralist constitutional settlement is, in effect, to condemn as irrational (in the sense of self-defeating) nationalist or Islamist insistence on the primacy of culture over politics, thus fomenting sectarian and secessionary politics. The immediately relevant point is that the use of military force to impose either solution merely aggravates the situation. The most pressing political problem of our time may be the least amenable to forcible settlement. The logic of liberalism argues against social excision. Forces intervening in new wars on behalf of the USA, the UN, or any other coalition of law-governed states seem bound either to endorse the values of those whom they oppose through punitive exclusion of those belonging to the defeated regime and through partition, or else to adopt the seemingly dilettante and irresponsible practice of the competitive angler, hauling predatory pike out of the water only to throw them straight back in.

Ethics As for the ethics of war, no one should doubt the sincerity and goodwill with which most senior officers of the armed forces of the United States and its allies approach compliance with international law and the inclusion of moral reasoning within the syllabi of the military academies and staff colleges.13 Yet how is this to be squared with recurrent reports of breaches of the law of armed conflict: illegal detention, torture of prisoners, reckless disregard for non-combatants? In large measure the contradiction stems from a failure to accept the reality of the imperial mission and its implications. Within an imperial system, the role of the military is more often containment, suppression, policing, or punishment than high-intensity conflict, yet the ethos the armed forces of the leading Western powers still holds high-intensity

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conflict in much higher esteem than these operations, and patterns of recruitment, training, and equipment reflect this leaning towards the old order. Renaming it ‘pest control’ or ‘flushing to guns’ will not alter these hounds’ idea of what they are about. So while there is a sense in which United States preponderance and the rapid development of precision-guided munitions have made the waging of a just and legal war easier, this turns out to be in part irrelevant because of the shift to other tasks and, worse, to be self-defeating in practice. With precision-guided munitions and overwhelming military superiority one might expect there to be more chance than ever before of winning quickly and with minimal collateral damage. Provided responsibility for post-war political and administrative reconstruction can then be delegated to a UN mission or legitimate local leaders and prolonged neo-colonial role avoided, all may be well. There are, however, at least three flaws in this reasoning. The first is that non-combatant casualties have remained high relative to combatant casualties.14 Secondly, error becomes less credible and the significance of any non-combatant casualties accordingly magnified. Thirdly, most important of all, enemies of the United States are left with only three options: submission, evasion, or asymmetric response. The first of these is irrelevant to a discussion of warfare, though interesting politically. The second – concealment or expatriation of weapons, avoidance of engagement – was among the features that led Baudrillard (1995) to observe that the First Gulf War was not, properly, a war at all. The third, at its most spectacular in the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington – but less sensationally evident in the abandonment of military uniforms and formations by Iraqi troops in April 2003, in the subsequent insurgency, and in the continuing flux of Afghan politics – has been the most corrosive of the institution of war and the norms surrounding it.15 Violence of this sort may indeed be seen as the military or political analogue of the brigandage noted earlier as characteristic of the most recent wave of intra-state wars: exuberant, excessive, nihilistic, and relatively unconstrained by aspiration to legitimate state power. The aim is to sap United States economic and military superiority and, where possible, to redirect it against its source. More subtly, by stepping outside the confines of the war convention, violence of this sort lures the United States into a matching descent into lawlessness. And just as the seekers after plunder have battened on the oil majors, conflict diamonds, and drugs to impose high costs on Western interests, so the terrorists and their hosts have found extraordinarily effective ways of eliciting disproportionate expenditure on the part of

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their enemies, as British and United States forces bomb the sand, burst inflatable tanks, and crush the recently vacated homes and haunts of their enemies with weapons worth many times more than the monetary value of their targets. The moral difficulty, however, lies not so much in the sphere of jus in bello as in the matter of virtue. For what room is there for courage or honour in the face of evasion and the absence of any possibility of genuine reciprocity? How odd, too, was the extension of heroism in New York to embrace victims as well as the courageous – even supererogatory – responses of members of the emergency services. It must also be asked how victory is to be identified and celebrated, and moral closure attained, when the objective of war is not formal surrender or enduring conquest; how honour is to be maintained when the enemy is no longer the regular forces of a state, but at best the henchmen of a regime and at worst something less than one of Bull’s ‘political units’, more deserving of the attentions of an international constabulary than of military forces. Bull argued that for new wars to be brought within the normative framework established by international society ‘[T]he persons conducting hostilities [should be] activated by the notion that they are engaged in an activity called “war”,    [and] that certain kinds of behaviour are inappropriate to it’. Most elements of the armed forces of the United States and Britain, their governments somewhat less so, make scrupulous efforts to hold fast to this practical exercise in social constructivism. British soldiers whose professional ethic continues to be based in high-intensity conflict and a measure of isolation from civil society struggle to maintain morale in the face of a diet of peace-keeping accompanied by the steady encroachment of civilian employment legislation and other forms of regulation, such as international conventions on child soldiering and torture. In 1998 a report on Colombia by Human Rights Watch showed guerrilla and vigilante groups as well as regular armed forces providing education and training in the law of armed conflict, albeit imperfectly and with patchy results.16 All of this belongs to Bull’s world. Allied bulldozing of manned Iraqi trenches in the First Gulf War and the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11 are more characteristic of ours.17 Even a quite routine examination of contemporary warfare in terms of the war convention and international law of armed conflict constantly threatens to spill over, not merely into the by now familiar problems posed by asymmetric and irregular warfare, but also into discourses of secrecy, concealment, simulation and deception, ritual and ceremony,

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policing and punishment, and military virtue and morale. Rather than persist with the quaint attempt to extend theologically based versions of just war tradition to intervention, what is needed is to rethink a positive secular rationale for military ethics and the law of armed conflict within an integrated communitarian framework.

Culture If the boundary between the ethics of armed conflict and more general questions of political ethics has become blurred, so too has the frontier between ethics and aesthetics. To move from a naturalistic to a pragmatist ethics is to draw attention away from rules and casuistry in the direction of the construction and reproduction of values through action and representation of action as much as through explicit norms. A recent and brilliant interpretation of pre-Columbian iconography by Annabeth Headrick provides a way into the issue of warfare as culture or undifferentiated value. For Teotihuacanos of the Classic and Post-Classic periods, the primary purpose of war was to obtain captives who could then be ritually sacrificed in order to propitiate the gods and maintain the cosmos. This in turn allowed for a vision of gender differentiation in which men, symbolized by the butterfly, endured pain in battle to obtain captives to assure the spiritual reproduction of society, while women, symbolized by spiders (weavers), endured pain in childbirth in order to produce offspring who would ensure the material reproduction of society. Death in childbirth, analogous to death in battle, ensured a place in paradise. Women and men were at once differentiated from and likened to one another: women as metaphorical warriors; men as metaphorically fertile through their provision of captives. Headrick quotes from the sixteenth-century account of childbirth offered by Bernadino de Sahagún in his Nahuatl General History of the Things of New Spain: ‘When the baby arrived on earth, then the midwife shouted; she gave war cries, which meant that the little woman had fought a good battle, had become a brave warrior, had taken captive, had captured a baby’ (Headrick, 2003: 165). The fusion of action and representation, and of ethic and aesthetic, is not unique to other cultures, but we are often reluctant to apply the anthropologist’s critical gaze to our own life. Oliver O’Donovan, one of the most persuasive, rational, and humane contemporary advocates of the just war tradition, is wise enough to see that there are many other morally relevant things going on in the evolution of Western warfare besides the exercise of charity and the search for justice. He

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writes powerfully of the hero, who has no place in the just war tradition, and of the solidarity of society at large with the hero. The unbridled excesses of war, the ritual mutilation of corpses, the slaughter of non-combatants, the rape of women, the destruction of property, every kind of violent display, in fact, are all indivisibly of a piece with its constructive, culture-building and virtue-perfecting aspects. They are the rituals through which the mortal conflict of a few becomes the common object of love within a political society. (O’Donovan, 2003: 3) The American archaeologist and the Oxford theologian help triangulate modern Western warfare and divest it of the dull familiarity that resists inquiry. But the truth is that one hardly has to scratch the surface of the cultural history of warfare in the European world to disclose the intermittent and tentative hold of the juridical model of warfare, as expressed in international law and the war convention, and display a wealth of contrary forms. To take only one example, but a powerful one because so widely read throughout Europe and North America, the novels of Sir Walter Scott abound in dichotomies – war and rebellion, law and illegality, masculine and feminine, violence and civilization – which are by turns interposed and inverted against one another to generate ambiguities and pose questions of personal and national identity and loyalty, providing a moral vocabulary for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie within which the play and display of organized violence is pivotal (Jones, 1998). The point is a simple one. If the task is to reconstruct understandings of armed conflict capable of tempering an imperial international society, a first step must be to open one’s eyes and ears to the whole spectrum of war within Western culture, and resist the deafening and dazzling effect of imperial brass and purple. It is here that the French, finally immune to such things after a surfeit of Napoleons, Berlioz, and military humiliation, have provided an outstanding contribution. Only two salient features deserve attention in this tour d’horizon: Foucault’s formalization of the Romantic critique of the separability of war and politics (outside and inside), and Baudrillard’s treatment of war as spectacle and, by implication, of public complicity in its contemporary forms. Only recently translated, and until 1997 available only in summary form even in French, Foucault’s (2004) lectures on war rest on the thought experiment of supposing war, rather than peace, to be the

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normal condition of things out of which society and its institutions grow. In short, like Scott and his followers, Foucault normalizes war by putting its boundaries in question. Should one then turn around the formula and say that politics is war pursued by other means? Perhaps if one wishes always to maintain a difference between war and politics, one should suggest rather that this multiplicity of force-relations can be coded – in part and never totally – either in the form of ‘war’ or in the form of ‘politics’; there would be here two different strategies (but ready to tip over into one another) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, tense force-relations. (Foucault, 1976: 123, cited in Davidson, 2004: xviii) One aspect of this reflexivity of war and politics, common to Scott and Foucault, is the space it opens up for reflection, for the one to watch the other and catch the other’s gaze. The theme of visibility (and obscurity) in battle and warfare more generally is a familiar Romantic trope. Think only of Turner’s ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1818) or David Wilkie’s ‘The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Despatch’ (1822), each of which entirely avoids representation of the battle itself, as though to elevate it in all its historical enormity to the noumenal realm (Noon et al., 2003: 109–11). However, it has recently concentrated in fresh and explicitly political work published on representations of violence and war and on war as spectacle. If the mundane element in Baudrillard’s argument about the Gulf War was the somewhat nostalgic thought that lack of Iraqi engagement and Allied casualties – the absence of any risk or uncertainly about the outcome – made it less than a war, then the other, more post-modern element was the claim that whatever was happening in Kuwait and Iraq was so overlaid with images and interpretations as to be entirely unknowable. If I have understood this argument correctly, it is a rather trivial restatement of Kant’s objection to thoroughgoing empiricism. Sense data are those traces of the world which we are able to apprehend, given our senses, our understanding, and our place in space and time. We cannot get beyond them to things-in-themselves. The noumenal realm is necessarily closed to us. So be it. In this sense there was surely a noumenal Gulf War that no one could directly apprehend, and I suppose Baudrillard to be concerned that in this, unlike previous wars, the sheer profusion of representations, and the play among them of interest, technology, and chance, was so lacking in coherence that

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any pretence of correspondence between representation and the thing represented collapsed. The practical implication – not spelt out in the three notorious articles – would surely be that war is now a phenomenon so imperceptible, so shrouded, so shattered and dazzling that it can hardly function any longer as an instrument of policy or a means to sustain the morale of those engaged in it. Linked to this view of things, though I will not try to explore them here, are issues about war as spectacle, the close links between cinema and battle, the prevalence of deception and secrecy in warfare, and Baudrillard’s recent thoughts about United States complicity, through its prevailing culture of spectacle, in the attacks on the Twin Towers (Buchan, 1919; Virilio, 1989; Baudrillard, 2001). The point about all of this literature (and this will lead me into some closing thoughts about the historiography of warfare) is that though much of it purports to be post-modern, its strident insistence on the novelty of the present and its readiness to adopt stereotypes of the past as whipping boys betray a dreary modernism, while its lack of historical perspective obscures the ancestry of an essentially Romantic view of war, running back at least to the eighteenth century. The crisis of war, and of its representation, is not a recent thing. Adopting an imperial standpoint reminds us of this by subverting the rationalist veneers of modern military planning and the law of armed conflict.

History Earlier, I complained that many of the characteristics said by Kaldor to define ‘new wars’ were not all that new. Conceding that the abandonment of public or political objectives in favour of plunder was a relatively recent development, I briefly reached back to the cusp of late modernity, at the turn of the nineteenth century, to recall that private war for gain, and indeed pursuit of private gain within the framework of public war, were once commonplace. At another point, contemplating the elimination, since Bull’s day, of even the rather restricted systemic functions he accorded to warfare in a multipolar world, I briefly dragged the cape of empire across the arena. I also lunged at ‘continuity realists’, those self-satisfied folk who pull at their pipes and assure us that nothing has changed since Thucydides or Kautilya, or whomsoever they most admire. Things do change; but there is always a danger in identifying the present as pivotal. Also, perceptions change, and we constantly reinterpret history to support our interpretations of the present.

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I concluded that Bull’s treatment of war, with its evident anxiety about the declining utility of inter-state war and the inability of a pluralist international society of sovereign states to accommodate new forms of organized violence and new kinds of belligerent, is characteristic of a limited form of continuity realism, modernist and statist from head to toe, for which Westphalia was seen as the point of origin. New wars were accordingly a serious threat to the project of modernity. But an alternative view of modernity – and hence of international society and the place of war within it – is tenable. Briefly, modernity emerges in two conceptually distinct if sometimes empirically overlapping phases. The first, roughly coinciding with the Reformation and CounterReformation, sees the emergence of empires in Europe, where empire is defined first and foremost as the monopoly of organized violence and ultimate jurisdiction and only secondly, almost incidentally, as the conjuncture, within one sovereign political community, of a multiplicity of social communities based in religion, ethnicity, or language. In this account, empires are constrained in their wars against one another by the varying interests, loyalties, values, and capabilities of their component elements. Their European territories, every bit as much as any non-European possessions they may have had, are culturally and constitutionally heterogeneous. There is hierarchy, but even the weaker elements influence outcomes because they have corporate form and there are complex social, economic, cultural, and political circuits linking provinces to the metropolis. Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the character of imperial conflict of this sort is by reading Cooper’s (1992) account, in The Last of the Mohicans, of the Seven Years War – the last major conflict prior to the inception of the second phase of modernity during the Napoleonic Wars.18 Indigenous peoples, colonists, and Europeans are in tension with one another almost as much as with their similarly constituted enemy. Of course Cooper’s account, like the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott to which it owed so much, was already nostalgic once the French had, through the leveé en masse, aspired to weld totalitarian state to homogeneous nation. Successive attempts to salvage empire as a political form since that time – uniformly unsuccessful with the possible exception of the USA – have been simply footnotes to the basic choice established by the French and the American revolutions between nation and federation. The French chose direct rule – in effect an extension of the nation – the British, indirect rule and federation. The outcome is that particularists see no alternative to the recurrent and reductively fissiparous search for pure nationhood while cosmopolitans hanker after ever-wider federation.

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My contention is that this second phase of modernity and the pattern of international relations to which it gave rise was inherently unstable. Bull hankered after it; we need not. The uneasy society of juridically equal sovereign states was more fleeting than he and many others imagined. It was heavily implicated in the destructive global warfare of the twentieth century and can reasonably be reinterpreted as the prolonged and bloody crisis of an earlier imperial modernity from which we are just now emerging rather than the defining feature and crowning achievement of an enduring Westphalian modernity. To adopt this view is to concede that we live in an age of American empire in which the monopoly of organized violence is far from complete, but beyond balancing for the foreseeable future, while a monopoly of jurisdiction is incipient.19 The problem with this interpretation, and the reason that some may dismiss it, is that there has as yet been little elaboration of the constitution and politics of this new and universal empire, let alone any thought of the place within it of organized violence. Moreover, many seem to want solidarism without Washington. Logically, ‘old’ inter-state wars and ‘new’ intra-state wars dissolve into a single class of disruption, sometimes demanding imperial intervention. Such interventions – the new ‘new wars’ – are necessarily internal to the empire and waged to assure its integrity and security. They are regulatory, punitive, and exemplary, and provide a system for exploring the loyalties, capabilities, and values of vassal states. To reconstruct the institution of war in all its cultural complexity within the new political framework requires much more than this functional characterization. A reflexive anthropological gaze and a historiographic re-evaluation are the least that will do. In the meantime, as Bull recognized, a public role for war in delivering the objectives of order and justice persists even when war is internal to empire. Just as the shadow of the Western Empire lived on in Europe in the office of the Holy Roman Emperor for some generations, so we may expect the memory of divided sovereignty and a society of states to endure and provide a nostalgic discourse of legitimation.20 Nor is there any guarantee, given the pace of technological change in late modernity, let alone US social and economic fragility, that military superiority will long endure. But for now, welcome to the empire!

Conclusion Bull wrote The Anarchical Society at a time when the USA was very much on the back foot, and a transition from Cold War bipolarity

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to multi-polarity seemed probable. Moreover, balancing was widely considered to be the almost universal response of states in an anarchic system. Thirty years later, uni-polarity in the form of US pre-eminence, is firmly established and is being progressively institutionalized through the establishment of new alliances and bases. Moreover, the theoretical primacy of balancing is under challenge (Wohlforth et al., forthcoming). This chapter has begun the exploration of war as one institution of a hegemonic international society by examining ways in which a multiple broadening of discourse on war may make possible its re-normalization in these new circumstances.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Tarak Barkawi, Barry Buzan, and Richard Little for their critical comments on a draft of this chapter, and also those who commented on earlier drafts following presentations at the universities of Bristol, St. Andrew’s, and Warwick.

Notes 1. It is worth reminding oneself that the Church of England, in successive books of common prayer, refers to marriage as an institution or, strictly speaking as ‘   an estate instituted of God in paradise’ and describes its (sacred) nature before turning to its purposes (Hunt, 1999: 59). 2. ‘The Spanish had no sense of proper behaviour on the battlefield’ (Clendinnen, 1991: 269–71) or ‘The Spanish and the Mexicans were not really fighting the same kind of war’ (Soustelle, 2002 [1955]: 213). As his book went to press, Soustelle – erstwhile head of the Free French secret service and former Minister of Information and, later, for the Colonies – was appointed Governor-General of Algeria by Mendès-France where, it might be said, the French and their enemies were not really fighting the same kind of war. 3. See Bull’s (2000a) condescending yet revealing review of Midgely (1975) and his (Bull, 1979a) review of Walzer (1977). 4. See Finnis, Boyle and Grisez (1987), though not Kenny (1985), who opted in the end for multilateralism. 5. A later theologian has put it nicely: ‘[I]t is not in the first place a “theory”, but a proposal of practical reason; and it is not, in the second place, about “just wars”, but about how we may enact just judgment even in the theatre of war’ (O’Donovan, 2003: 6–7). 6. On this last point see Foucault (2004). 7. This was a decisive factor in Lenin’s 1917 theory of war and one defining feature of what he perversely called imperialism. 8. This was Norman Angell’s (1910) view, and did not, of course, imply that war would not occur, simply that it was fruitless. 9. I am grateful to Barry Buzan for this thought.

188 The Institutions of Anarchical Society 10. Buzan, in this volume, puts it nicely, noting Bull’s ‘strong commitment to pluralism’ and ‘his treatment of solidarism and world society as threatening to the order provided by a pluralist society of states’. 11. Note Fletcher (2001), Boyle (1999), and Meron (1998), each of which, in a very different way, contains some germ of the reorientation of legal thought at the heart of empire. 12. See Kagan (2003). The failure of Anglo-US mainstream to take on implications of contemporary French thought is evident even in some of the best writing in English, as for example Robert Skidelsky’s (2004) technically proficient exposition of the just war tradition. 13. See, for example, the work of West Point instructor, Paul Christopher (1994). 14. ‘Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children    Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces account for most violent deaths’ (Roberts et al., 2004: 9448). 15. The current phase of the Iraq war is reminiscent in some ways of the guerrilla phase of the Boer War of 1899–1902. On this, Witton (1907) is interesting, but rare, and formed the basis for a fine Australian film: Breaker Morant. 16. Human Rights Watch (1998). The survey covered all armed groups of any size in Colombia at the time, showing variations in levels of training and observance of humanitarian law among government, paramilitary, and guerrilla forces, the last group, for example, including the FRAC, who largely ignored the law, and the EPL, which generally respected it. 17. ‘[L]eading US assault forces advanced with their tanks pushing huge, wide earth-levelling apparatus, that tore up and levelled the sandy terrain, filling in the defensive trenches in the process    [S]ome 6,000 Iraqi soldiers were buried alive in their own trenches’ (O’Balance, 1992: 102). 18. Anderson (2001) endorses Cooper’s fictional account of the impossibility of fighting by European rules in North America because of tensions between professional European soldiers, colonist militias, and indigenous auxiliaries, each with a different view of warfare. See especially p. 197 (the massacre at Fort William Henry) and p. 254 (the siege of Louisville). 19. Boyle (1999) is very interesting on the realist motives underlying the rise of positive international law in the USA in the late nineteenth century. 20. Recall, for example, the resistance of Leibniz to Hobbes’s emphasis on sovereign statehood in ‘Caesarinus Fürstenerius (De Suprematu Principum Germanicum)’ (Riley, 1988). See also Welsh (1995: 130–1) for Burke’s conservative resort to ‘the publick law of Europe’ and Vattel’s notion of Europe as ‘a kind of Republick’.

Part III The Test of Time

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9 The State of International Society Andrew Hurrell

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen a number of very serious challenges to the fabric of international law and society, and especially to the hopes of those who a decade earlier had seen the real possibility of moving towards a more ambitious, effective and sustainable form of liberal solidarism. These challenges have been dramatized by the actions and rhetoric of the Bush administration and there can be no doubt that the US policies have posed a range of power-political, legal and moral challenges to inherited understandings of international society. But the view that the problems facing international society are exclusively to do with the US is a shallow and trivial one. This chapter seeks to place the challenges and discontents facing international society within the context of the reassessment of The Anarchical Society being undertaken in this volume. It addresses five questions: 1. What was Bull’s view of international society? 2. To what extent does The Anarchical Society provide an adequate guide to the empirical changes that have taken place in the character of international society? 3. How far do the factors and forces stressed by Bull help explain the limits to the progressive development of international society? 4. Is a retreat to pluralism possible? 5. If a retreat to pluralism is ruled out, where should we go? It has been suggested that Bull’s thinking on international society was moving in a more solidarist direction towards the end of his life or that his thinking can be interpreted in proto-solidarist terms (Wheeler and Dunne, 1996: 91–107). Certainly a great deal of the writing on international society in the 1990s has concentrated on the possibilities of 191

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solidarism, particularly in relation to human rights and to humanitarian intervention. Instead of seeing Bull as the precursor of normatively progressive change, I would like to emphasize the continued importance of Bull’s realism and his scepticism. Although the nature of the challenges is very different today, Bull’s awareness of the dangers of what he termed ‘premature global solidarism’ remains of great relevance. More importantly, his emphasis on the dual challenge of managing power and mediating between conflicting values remains fundamental to understanding both the limits of liberal solidarism in the contemporary world and the continued importance of older-style pluralist mechanisms of order. But if it is indeed the case that liberal solidarism faces major challenges, to what extent is Bull’s defence of a relatively thin and loose pluralist international society still viable? There is no shortage of proponents of such a position, both amongst academics and amongst the leaders and elites of major states. However, and this is my second principal argument, the nature of the challenges facing international society make a retreat to a thin, state-based pluralism extremely problematic. The structural conditions associated with globalization, the changed nature of security challenges, and the very diverse but expansive normative aspirations embodied in powerful political forces (both state and non-state) make it very difficult to accept Bull’s prescriptive bottom line: that a thin pluralist international society of states is the best available means of upholding world order. If this is so, where should we aim to go? The changed conditions of contemporary international society (and the normative limits to his own thinking) make it difficult to apply Bull’s ideas in any clear-cut way. However, in thinking about normatively desired change, we should keep in mind not only Bull’s scepticism but also his insistence on the importance of the links between political and moral cosmopolitanism. Faced with the unavoidable task of negotiating a form of global order that goes beyond pluralism, international society continues to provide the essential political framework through which conflicts of power and values have to be mediated, through which shared understandings and vocabularies of justice might be nurtured, and in which the discussion of shared moral ideas and projects might be able to achieve some deliberative purchase – and perhaps even persuasion. It is for this reason that normative debate should be focussed less on the substantive moral values embodied in different versions of liberal solidarism (whether to do with human rights, democracy, or distributive justice) and more on the conditions of procedural justice that just might help to facilitate this enormously difficult task in morally acceptable ways.

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What was Bull’s view of international society? Almost all analyses of social order, whether in International Relations (as with Bull) or social theory (as with Elster), begin with a beguilingly simple distinction (Bull, 2002: especially 3–21; Elster, 1989: 1–16). On the one hand, social order can be understood in the sense of stable and regular patterns of human behaviour. In this depiction it is contrasted with chaos, instability, or lack of predictability. On the other hand, social order requires the existence of a particular kind of purposive pattern that human beings have infused with meaning, that involves a particular set of goals, objectives, and values, and that leads to a particular outcome. It is a beguilingly simple distinction because order as fact and order as value are often very hard to disentangle.1 If order is to be understood in terms of some purposive pattern, what sorts of purposes, goals, and objectives might be relevant to international life? As is well known, Bull defined order as ‘A pattern [in the relations of human individuals or groups] that leads to a particular result, an arrangement of social life such that it promotes certain goals or values’ (Bull, 2002: 3–4). His analysis of these ‘certain goals and values’ pointed in a constrained and minimalist direction. Bull’s classic study of order in world politics concentrated on the common framework of rules and institutions that had developed within the anarchical society of states. It was anarchical in that there was no common power to enforce law or to underwrite cooperation; but it was a society in so far as states were conscious of common rules and values, cooperated in the working of common institutions, and perceived common interests in observing these rules and working through these institutions. It was, however, a necessarily thin and fragile society in which the three fundamental goals of international social life were limited to the preservation of the society of states itself, the maintenance of the independence of individual states, and the regulation – but not elimination – of war and violence amongst states and societies (Alderson and Hurrell, 2000b: chs 1–3) On this view, inter-state cooperation and international law could never be expected to provide a stable and universal peace but only to mitigate the inevitable conflicts that would arise from the existence of a multiplicity of sovereignties. The relevant question was not: how might human beings create forms of international society or schemes of international cooperation that embodied all their aspirations for justice or which universalized some particular conception of the good society? It was rather: how might states and other groups do each other the least possible harm and, in an age of total war and nuclear weapons, survive

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as a species? So the core goals of international social order were survival and coexistence; and the political framework was made up of the core institutions of a pluralist international society – international law, Great Powers, the balance of power, diplomacy, and war. And it was, perhaps above all, a view of order built around the state. As Neil MacCormick has remarked, ‘The view of world order to which we have fallen heir is dominated by the conception of statehood’ (1996: 554). Social order is understood in terms of the state: the enforcement by the state of its laws, the creation of other non-coercive governance mechanisms, and the sense of community that is embodied in the state. If the state is viewed as the primary locus of social order within its borders, then world or global order involves asking how these islands of localized order can be related to each other and how some broader political framework for their interaction might be created and sustained. The narrowness of Bull’s conception of order undoubtedly reflected the intense ideological and geo-political conflicts of the Cold War. It also drew upon a deep-rooted tradition in Western thought which had long viewed international society in pluralist or minimalist terms. A central strand of the history of thought on international relations was concerned with the idea of what, by the start of the eighteenth century, was commonly referred to as the ‘society of states’. This society involved the creation of certain minimalist rules, understandings and institutions designed to limit the inevitable conflict that was to be expected within such a pluralist and fragmented political system. The normative structure of this society was built around the mutual recognition of states as independent and legally equal members of international society; on their freedom to promote their own ends subject to minimal constraints; and on the unavoidable reliance on self-preservation and self-help. What accounts for this minimalism? International societies face three core challenges: the capturing and institutionalizing of common interest; the management of unequal power; and the mediation of difference and value conflict. The Anarchical Society is noteworthy because of the way in which it is concerned with the deeply problematic relationship amongst these three goals. In contrast to his more straightforwardly realist contemporaries, Bull gave significant play to the reality of common interests in international life. After all, the idea of international society begins with the argument that a brutalist depiction of international life is simply empirically wrong. States cooperate because, however different their values and however problematic their power relations, they see the possibility of gain. There is thus the central idea in Bull’s work that rules, laws and conventions can, and often do, emerge

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without an overarching authority. They are of mutual benefit because they help shape expectations, increase the predictability of international life, and thereby reduce uncertainty and insecurity. But capturing common interest is rarely simple, first because of the problem of managing conflicts of power; and second because of the problem of mediating amongst diverse and often contested values. The continued importance of power and the politics of power runs centrally through Bull’s writing: both power as problem but also power as solution. Thus if we take the ‘institutions’ of international society power remains central: the balance of power was not simply a deeply rooted pattern of state behaviour (order as regularity) but became a consciously maintained institution governed by its own political norms (order as purposive pattern) and a crucial background condition on which all more elaborate institutions necessarily depended. Without a balance of power and without sustained and stable understandings between the major powers on the conduct of their mutual relations, then the ‘softer’ elements of international order (international law, international organizations, the existence of shared values) will be so many castles in the air. The link between pluralism and the balance of power was historically very close, with the balance of power being seen as a principal means of preserving the independence of states (but not of all states); as a means of constraining and restraining the most powerful and would-be hegemonic; as an inducement to moderation and restraint in foreign policy; and, finally, as an essential background condition for the operation of international law and institutions. If one of the driving forces behind the limited pluralist conception of order was a pessimistic view of power politics and of the political difficulties of sustained cooperation, a second followed from deep scepticism about claims regarding the existence of consensus and shared values across international and global society. All communities and polities have to find ways of dealing with diversity and with value conflict. Conflict is, after all, intrinsic to all morality, and even within a single value system conflicts arise: How different principles are to be related to one another; how shared principles are to be applied to the facts of a particular case? For international society the problem has always run much deeper, and the creation of any kind of universal society of states or any other kind of world society has had to face up to the existence of fundamental differences in religion, social organization, culture, and moral outlook. These difficulties may be based on what Sen has called ‘the empirical fact of pervasive human diversity’ (1992: xi). Or they may reflect, as for Isaiah Berlin, a belief in the plurality, contradictoriness,

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even incommensurability of human goods. Or they may be based on a view that it is precisely differences in social practices, values, beliefs and institutions that represent the most important expression of our common humanity (Muthu, 2003). What makes us different is precisely what makes us human. Bull’s position on the role of values and culture is complex. Unlike Martin Wight he did not believe that all international societies had to rest on a common culture.2 However he was consistently concerned with the conditions under which culture might matter – the degree to which European international society had in fact rested either on a shared diplomatic culture or on a broader cultural heritage; or the extent to which international society was threatened by its expansion beyond its prior European cultural base. He shared with Raymond Aron the view that power is only a means to an end and that the study of international society had to be concerned with what those ends actually are, with the inescapable plurality of such ends and with the conflicts that arise amongst them (Aron, 1966: especially ch. 3). Bull rejects the view that clashes over values can be reduced to a struggle for power. ‘I think that is a superficial view. I think that nations do seek power but they don’t only seek power; and, when they do seek power, they seek it as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. They seek power in order to defend or promote their values systems, and I think that is why the subject I want to talk about – the clash of value systems in world politics – is a real subject and not only an apparent one’ (Bull, 1973). One of the attractions of an old-fashioned, state-based pluralism and of a very thin view of international society was precisely that it appeared to offer a way of dealing with the value conflict. If diversity and value conflict are such important features of international life then we should seek to organize global politics in such a way as to give groups scope for collective self-government and cultural autonomy in their own affairs and to reduce the degree to which they will clash over how the world should be ordered. Hence a strong version of sovereignty and hence, too, the reciprocal commitment to non-intervention or to limited intervention; and hence the centrality of balance of power as means of constraining the predations of the powerful. If ways of life are irreducibly varied and if rational argument cannot produce agreement, then surely the best course of action is to lower our sights and seek the peace between them. The sceptical pluralist is therefore attracted to the idea that it might also be possible to develop a cross-cultural consensus over the minimal rules around which such a limited international society might be built. It

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is for this reason that Hart’s notion of a minimum content of natural law built around Hobbesian assumptions plays such a crucial role in Bull’s thinking (Hart, 1961: 188–95). We can see this idea being played out in Bull’s emphasis on the ‘elementary conditions of social life’, his attempt to isolate the elementary, primary and universal goals of a society of states; and his analytical effort to link these goals to the historical institutions of international society. There is therefore an analytical move (what are the minimum conditions that would have to exist before any society could be meaningfully so described?); a historical move (how far can one isolate an acceptance of these conditions in the practices of states?); and a normative move (on what minimum conditions of coexistence might the holders of sharply conflicting values be able to agree?). If common interests provide the most stable ingredient in the cement of international society, power and values play altogether more ambiguous roles. The divisive combination of ideology and powerpolitics was central to the challenges to international society posed by both the conflicts between East and West and North and South. It was these challenges that led Bull to a generally pessimistic view of the direction of change. In response to a reader’s comments on The Anarchical Society, Bull wrote in 1975: ‘I am not sure that it is correct to say    that in the book I see an international society emerging. I think I rather argue that international society exists but is in decline’.

To what extent does The Anarchical Society provide an adequate guide to the empirical changes that have taken place in the character of international society? Bull was insistent that his was a study of order in world politics, not an analysis of world politics per se. But even if we focus directly on questions of order and governance, it is clear that there have been enormous changes in the character of international society that are hard to make sense of within the terms of the debate as laid out by Bull in 1977. This is clearly the case in relation to governance in the global economy, to the management of the global environment, and to the variation of governance at the regional level. In terms of order within the statesystem, it is true that many have found Bull’s distinction between pluralist and solidarist conceptions of international society to be a useful starting point.3 However, to be up to the task, a great deal of conceptual and theoretical development of the concept of solidarism is needed (Buzan, 2004a: especially chs 4–5).

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My own use of solidarism as a model for capturing the way in which international society has changed empirically stresses four dimensions of change. The first is the dramatic move to institutions, the enormous expansion in the ambition of international society, and the exponential increase in the scope, range and intrusiveness of international legal rules and norms. In contrast to mere coexistence, the formal and institutionalized legal norms of this international society involve more extensive schemes of cooperation to promote peace (such as restricting the right of state to use force or broadening understandings of what constitutes threats to peace and security); to solve common problems (such as tackling environmental challenges or managing an increasingly integrated global economy); and to sustain common values (such as the promotion of self-determination, human rights or political democracy). The second dimension deals with changes in the way in which norms emerge and international law is made, with far greater complexity of the law-making process and a marked dilution of the previously central notions of state voluntarism and state consent. The third dimension concerns the justification of norms. Alongside the old idea that actors create and uphold law out of self-interest, the post-1945 period has seen the emergence of a range of internationally agreed core principles – respect for fundamental human rights, prohibition of aggression, self-determination – which may underpin some notion of a world common good and some broader basis for evaluating specific rules. The fourth dimension relates to the revival of demands for stronger enforcement, of giving more effective ‘teeth’ to the norms of international society – a move from consensual solidarism to coercive solidarism. At one extreme this has involved an increase in the collective element in security management. But it has also involved the promotion of internationally agreed norms via a wide and expanding range of multilateral sanctions and conditionalities and, most problematically, their unilateral coercive enforcement by small groups of states or even individual major powers. Many of these changes have diluted and clouded the idea of international law as a state-privileging system and have unsettled the concept of sovereignty that lay at the heart of the inherited legal order. As the constraints on sovereignty have grown more severe and as international law has given greater place to the claims of individuals and of groups other than states, the theoretical and practical inconsistencies within the inherited sovereignty-based legal order have grown more serious. Most important is the ambiguity that begins to open up around the idea of states as the principal agents of world order. Within the pluralist world states could be understood as ‘agents’ simply in the sense of those

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acting or exerting power and of doing so for themselves: ‘The law of nations is the law of sovereigns’ as Vattel famously put it (Vattel, 1834: xvi). But the expanding normative agenda of solidarism has opened up a second and different meaning of agency – the idea of an agent as someone who acts for, or on behalf of, another. Within the solidarist order states are no longer to act for themselves as sovereigns; but rather, first, as agents for the individuals, groups and national communities that they are supposed to represent; and second as agents or interpreters of some notion of an international public good and some set of core norms against which state behaviour should be judged and evaluated. If one kind of alternative model of governance looks to an improved society of states united by a far higher degree of solidarity, another looks beyond the state or at least comes to view the state within the context of a broader legal order. Bull has little directly to say about order and governance either beyond the state or at the interface between the state and the non-state domains. To capture this, we can develop the idea of transnational governance. This builds on many of the trends already visible in the contemporary international system: the pluralism of the norm-creating processes; the role of private market actors and civil society groups in articulating values which are then assimilated in inter-states institutions; and the increased range of informal, yet norm-governed, governance mechanisms often built around complex networks, both transnational and trans-governmental. Tied closely to processes of social and economic globalization this view sees traditional inter-state law as increasingly subsumed within a broader process in which old distinctions between public and private international law and between municipal and international law are being steadily eroded. The state loses its place as the privileged sovereign institution and instead becomes one of many actors and one participant in a broader and more complex social and legal process. There are two crucial analytical moves in the legal and normative structure of transnational governance. First, there is the increasingly central political, legal and moral priority given to individuals, peoples, groups and firms. Second, there is an insistence that social order cannot be seen solely as a product of states interacting within the international political system but must also look to markets and to civil society. There is, in other words, a much more self-conscious attempt to think in terms of all three of the arenas which, at least since the end of the eighteenth century, have structured Western understandings of social order: civil society (spontaneous solidarity); market (dispersed competition); state (hierarchical control – partially replaced in the international

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political arena by horizontal bargaining, force, and conditional cooperation) (Streeck and Schmitter, 1985: 119–38; Dryzek, 1987: 63–184). It is within this context that we can begin to examine the relationship between the international order that has developed between and among states and broader patterns of world order that may obtain across the states and societies that make up the global system. It is impossible to provide a detailed analysis of these changes in this chapter. But the crucial point is simply to emphasize that there is a very great deal of governance that simply cannot be accommodated within the rather narrow state-based pluralism analyzed by Bull in The Anarchical Society.

How far do the factors and forces stressed by Bull help explain the limits to the progressive development of international society? If the previous section pointed mostly to the problems of applying Bull’s ideas to contemporary realities, a very different conclusion emerges if we shift the focus and consider the limits to change, the continued role of pluralist mechanisms, and the deeply problematic role played by power conflicts and contested values. Here the force of Bull’s sophisticated realism and the relevance of his powerful scepticism come back into their own. There are two sets of liberal explanations for the deepening of solidarist and transnational patterns of governance. The first builds on the idea of interest that is there in Bull’s work, but which has been the focus of a great deal of analytically impressive theoretical development. Much of this has taken place under the heading of global governance and has been interest-driven, rationalist, and technocratic. The proliferation of international institutions and the emergence of new forms of governance are commonly associated with globalization and with increased levels of transnational exchange and communication. Institutions are needed to deal with the evermore complex dilemmas of collective action that emerge in a globalized world. Institutions are analyzed in terms of how self-interested egoists overcome the collectiveaction problems arising from increased interdependence and interaction. It is around this basic insight that liberal institutionalism is constructed and developed. Institutions are viewed as purposively generated solutions to different kinds of collective action problems. Norms, rules and institutions are generated because they help states deal with common problems and because they enhance welfare. The mainstream

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is heavily statist, concerned with ways in which states conceived of as rational egoists can be led to cooperate. But the same logic can be applied to governance beyond the state. On this view, states are seen as competing with international bodies, market actors and civil society groups to provide cost-effective and efficient solutions to governance problems. The second explanatory story is that provided by liberal constructivism and it is here that much English school writing of the 1990s can be situated. For constructivists, institutions matter because they do more than just reflect power (as neo-realists argue) or solve collective action problems (as institutionalists suggest). They also matter because they help explain how new norms emerge and are diffused across the international system and how state interests change and evolve. Institutions may play an important role in the diffusion of norms and in the patterns of socialization and internalization by which weaker actors come to absorb those norms. Institutions may be where state officials are exposed to new norms (as on the environment); they may act as channels or conduits through which norms are transmitted (as with neo-liberal economic ideas and the international financial institutions); or they may reinforce domestic changes that have already begun to take place (via state strategies of external ‘lock-in’ or via pressures exerted through transnational civil society). Non-statist constructivists have emphasized similar processes of socialization, norm diffusion and internalization; but have stressed transnational civil society as the most important arena for these processes and non-state actors as the most important agents involved. Transnational civil society refers to those self-organized intermediary groups that are relatively independent of both public authorities and private economic actors; that are capable of taking collective action in pursuit of their interests or values; and that act across state borders. The roles of such groups within international society have increased very significantly: first, in the formal process of norm creation, standard-setting and norm development; second, in the broader social process by which new norms emerge and find their way on to the international agenda; third, in the detailed functioning of many international institutions and in the processes of implementation and compliance; and finally in direct participation in many governance activities (disbursing an increasing proportion of official aid, engaging in large-scale humanitarian relief; leading efforts at promoting democracy or post-conflict social and political reconstruction). In all of these areas the analytical focus has been on transnational networks – for example, knowledge-based networks of

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economists, lawyers, or scientists; or transnational advocacy networks which act as channels for flows of money and material resources but, more critically, of information, ideas and values. Although analytically impressive, both of these liberal approaches skirt far too easily over the problem of managing power, especially unequal power, and the difficulties of mediating between conflicting values. Let us take power first and consider three of the most fundamental ways in which power and order might interact – collective security; the balance of power; and hierarchical power – and the role that they play in contemporary international society. First, collective security. As Bull suggested, one very important element of solidarism is the capacity of international society to enforce its norms collectively, above all in the area of high politics and security, and to harness the power of the strong in the interests of society as a whole. This does not necessarily imply a pure, fully functioning collective security system, but it certainly implies progress in this direction. Certainly, the liberal solidarism of the 1990s was very closely connected with the renewed optimism concerning the United Nations. Bull’s dismissal of the UN (and formal international organizations more generally) appeared hard to reconcile with the increased role of international organizations in implementing ever-broader understandings of international peace and security and changing state practice in the highly contested territory of humanitarian intervention. Even if a collective security system was hard to discern, the collective element in security management increased very significantly in the post-Cold War period. Even if there is nothing automatic about the use of multilateralism by states, and especially by powerful states, there are powerful incentives to do so. These concern, in particular, the crucial legitimizing role of international organizations but also such practical considerations as burden-sharing, the dumping of intractable problems and the provision of political cover. However, the structural obstacles to collective security remain severe: the prioritization of national interests and the problems of free-riding and buck-passing; the dependence under any likely system of collective security on the resources of a small group of major powers (and, in the military realm, increasingly on a single power); and the extent to which collective security does have an expansionary logic – not, as Schmitt argued, in terms of eroding the laws of war, but in terms of demands that individuals be punished and that societies be remade and democratized. In addition, the changing character of security challenges, particularly in terms of their non-state, intra-state and transnational character, raise

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politically difficult questions of selectivity, of moral contestability, and of deep intrusion into the organization of domestic societies. Theorists of liberal global governance are full of suggestions as to how the United Nations might be reformed or improved. But they show little awareness of the persistence of the structural obstacles to change (Held, 2000: 144–52). Second, the balance of power. It is too early to judge how far balance of power behaviour has ceased to be a dominant pattern of behaviour at the global level. But in many parts of the world, it is impossible to make analytical sense of security except with reference to the balance of power and the notion that the balance of power plays no role in the politics of regional security is manifestly quite absurd. Think, most obviously, of the Asia-Pacific region. Moreover, the cultivation of sustained and stable understandings amongst the major powers remains a central element of international order, even given the asymmetries of power that currently exist: managing the rise of China, dealing with a Russia for whom the determination to maintain or reassert its position as a major power is a driving principle of foreign policy; engaging other emerging powers whose view of the world is still deeply shaped by balance of power thinking. In addition, even if the focus of policy needs to be on multilateralism, balance of power politics often plays a decisive role in the operation of multilateral institutions, especially in terms of the informal understandings and trade-offs without which effective multilateralism is unlikely to prove effective. The link, then, between the old pluralist world of power politics and the liberal solidarist world of institutions and of global governance is therefore close and persistent. The third mode of power-political ordering is hierarchy. As Bull recognized but did not develop in any depth, institutionalized forms of hierarchy were central to pluralist understandings of how international order might be nurtured and sustained and to the political norms through which those understandings were institutionalized. Although the logic of the balance of power might indeed operate automatically, its dangers and inevitable frictions could be minimized by the recognized managerial role of the Great Powers. Great Powers could promote order both by managing relations between themselves (through diplomacy, conferences, missions, joint interventions), but also by exploiting their own unequal power over subordinate states within their spheres of influence and alliance systems. More important still, the classical state system was an imperial order (an aspect that Bull neglected). International relations theorists of many persuasions tell stories based around balanced or balancing power and around the hegemonic struggles of the core

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powers. All too often they neglect the second face of the European state system: its imperial face and the extent to which colonialism was one of the principal institutions of international society (Keene, 2002). Order was therefore a function of the interplay between balanced power and unequal or hierarchical power. Moreover this interplay between balanced and hierarchical power remained crucial through most of the twentieth century. It is true that much changed during the challenge to the Western dominance of the international system that characterized the period 1900–1990 – especially in relation to decolonization but also in terms of the struggle for equal sovereignty and the struggle for racial equality. It is also the case that equality has entered into many aspects of the normative structure of international society. And yet, although disguised by the rhetoric of sovereign equality, this older hierarchical conception of order remained extraordinarily powerful and influential throughout the twentieth century. Thus, for example, the Cold War ‘order’ and the long peace of 1945–1989 were constructed in very traditional fashion around attempts to regulate the balance of power between the superpowers (through arms control agreements, summits, and mechanisms of crisis management) and through the exploitation of hierarchy (through the mutual, if tacit, recognition of spheres of influence and through the creation of an oligarchical non-proliferation system designed to limit access to the nuclear club). The emergence of the United States at the core of unipolar world refocused attention on the implications of a recentralization of global power – not simply in relation to the strategic choices for the United States, but, more broadly, in terms of the possibility of order through hierarchy, hegemony or even empire. For most of the 1990s, liberal soldarists tended to play down the coercive and hierarchical side of the prescriptive multilateralism that they so resolutely favoured. They also tended to neglect the extent to which the acceptance of many aspects of the global liberal order on the part of developing countries was not the result of a Kantian process of progressive enmeshment but rather of coercive socialization and, in places, straightforward hegemonic imposition. If the values of liberal global governance are tied securely to the victory of the West and to the power-political realities of a unipolar world, then the issue of power changes and becomes, for many, much less of a problem and far more of an opportunity. Both empire and hegemony require power, purpose and political support. As the many cataloguers and counters of power have noted, US power resources are unrivalled. But it was, of course, the events

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following September 11 that seemed to provide a much clearer purpose (and perhaps a project), as well as much higher levels of domestic political support for an activist and engaged foreign policy. Talk of the United States as the indispensable nation grew more persistent and, to many people, more persuasive; and Krauthammer’s characterization of a unipolar moment has given way to a belief that the world has entered a unipolar era. It was the emergence of a far starker unilateralist and nationalist foreign policy on the part of the United States that sharpened the liberal solidarist dilemma: how far did pursuing the goals of liberal solidarism depend necessarily on accommodation with US power and, effectively, on possibilities of liberal empire? Certainly, an increasing number (on both right and left) have come to defend the virtues of an American Empire – as the only possible provider of global security and other international public goods; as the only state with the capacity to undertake the interventionist and state-building tasks that the changing character of security have rendered so vital; and as the essential power-political pivot for the expansion of global liberalism. But, in fact, many problems persist. First, hegemonic patterns of governance face enormous problems of legitimation and the problems of legitimacy have grown more serious because of changing attitudes towards the use of force and because so many governance and security challenges of necessity involve deep intervention. Second, many of the most important changes and developments of the twentieth century served to highlight the difficulties and limits of both formal empire and of ‘top–down’ modes of governance. There is little reason for believing that any of the five factors that helped explain the end of European imperialism have changed sufficiently to render hegemony a viable route to world order: the utility of military power and the declining viability of military power to achieve stable political goals; the normative environment and the legal and moral constraints on empire and hegemony; the lack of support for empire within metropolitan societies; the resistance of subordinate peoples to alien rule and the continued power of subaltern resistance; and the attitude of other powers and potential challengers. The many current accounts of international relations that see empire or hegemony as the defining feature of contemporary international society dramatically overstate both the degree and the stability of US power. The other fundamental question concerns values. Clearly a central part of the explanation for optimistic readings of liberal solidarism was the assumption that Western liberal values were indeed conquering the world. The scope and seriousness of value conflict had declined

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significantly not just with the end of the Cold War but also with the apparent willingness of large parts of what is now termed the Global South to accommodate itself to economic and political liberalism. Given Bull’s focus on the third world and the historic ‘revolt against Western dominance’, this latter process is of central importance to any reassessment of his arguments. There is little reason for believing that Bull’s insistence on the problematic issues of value conflict and cultural division has become obsolete. Quite the contrary. A great deal of writing within liberal political theory assumes that the fundamental problem with developing a global moral community is the absence of faith, the loss of religious certainty, and the disappearance of any metaphysical anchor. But there is a strange unreality to such arguments. The problem of value conflict comes not from skepticism, but from the excesses of faith. The political problem is that the world is full of people who have all too clear a view of what the universal moral order ought to be; who are all too certain that their own moral vision is founded on some absolutely secure foundation; and who believe that their vision of the world should be extended and imposed upon others, if necessary by force of arms. For religious fundamentalists of all stripes, moral truth is god-given and obedience to that truth is central to their faith. Political action should be directed to the liberation of the religiously sanctioned state, region or community, to the creation of an ideal world, and to the destruction of evil. It is, then, hardly surprising to see the return within international society of the language of the holy war and of the belief that violence in pursuit of religiously sanctioned goals is legitimate, whether on behalf of states or of terrorist movements. To stress the role of values does not imply acceptance of a crude vision of clashing civilizations. Many of the most divisive fissures and cultural conflicts occur within so-called traditions. Indeed it is precisely the globalization and the deterritorialization of identity politics that is one of the most important reasons why a neat pluralist world order has been rendered obsolete. In stressing the role of values, it is important not just to focus on the most obvious examples of clashing values and deeply incompatible world views. Albeit in less dramatic form, the emergence of both solidarist and transnational modes of governance inevitably raise questions of how conflicting societal values are to be ordered. As the ‘waterline of sovereignty’ is lowered and as global governance is involved more and more in how societies are organized domestically, so the political salience of societal difference and value conflict rises. International rules relating to human rights, to the rights of peoples and minorities, to an

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expanding range of economic and environmental issues impinge very deeply on the domestic organization of society. Divergent values also become more salient as the legal order moves down from high-minded sloganizing towards detailed and extremely intrusive operational rules in each of these areas and towards stronger means of implementation. In some areas, such as human rights, the potential importance of differing societal and cultural values has been extensively debated and analyzed. But the relevance and frequent intractability of these problems extends well beyond human rights. Thus the politics of security is not only driven by problems of trust and credible contracting but also by deep disputes as to the values that are to be incorporated into understandings of security: Whose security is to be promoted – that of states? nations? regimes? individuals? co-religionists? What means are legitimate? Equally liberal governance approaches to global environmental negotiations can easily overlook the absence of a shared cultural or cognitive script that allows the largely rhetorical consensus value of ‘sustainability’ to be translated into stable and effective operational rules. Liberal solidarists understandably make much of the implications of ideological homogeneity – an issue that is given little play in The Anarchical Society. Shared democratic values, after all, do seem to play a critical role in the emergence of security communities and democratic peace theory has exercised a powerful hold over the academic and political imagination. And yet, here too, the issue is less clear than the rhetoric would suggest. In the first place, more people continue to live under authoritarian regimes and in hybrid regimes than in democracies, and our sense of liberal progress looks rather different if we classify many of the messy hybrid regimes in terms of electoral authoritarianism rather than imperfect democracy. Second, processes of democratization are conflict-prone, both internally and internationally. Third, consensus over substantive liberal and democratic values can co-exist with deep dissensus over the procedural values by which a group of states organizes itself and through which shared values are acted upon. This is particularly true of the very deep divide between defensive liberals (who stress the power of example or the role of soft power instruments) and offensive liberals (who believe that the liberal zone should be expanded by all possible means, including force of arms).4 Finally, there may well be agreement as to the importance of democracy and liberal values, but quite radical disagreement as to which goods from the liberal basket should be given priority. If the political values within that consensus are not ordered and prioritized, there is

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no guarantee that conflict will not result. In the 1990s, for example, ‘liberal values’ were understood by the United States and its principal allies in terms of freedom from murderous tyrants and in terms of democracy, elections and political self-determination. Notions of economic or distributive justice and conceptions of economic and social rights were almost completely absent. Similarly, it was a feature of the 1990s that the liberal democracies were happy to preach the virtues of democracy and human rights across the world but were curiously unwilling to apply these same values to the functioning of international institutions.

Is a retreat to pluralism possible? Faced by the range and seriousness of the challenges, one temptation is to push back to a state-based pluralism. There are undoubtedly compelling pragmatic and moral arguments for such a move, as well as powerful political forces pushing in this direction. In the first place, the modernday pluralist will reassert the foundations of a state-based pluralism. For Bull this involved acceptance of the core Hobbesian argument in favour of the state – the state as a bulwark against anarchy and as the best hope for the provision of security. On this view, it is unproductive to enquire into the origins of states and dangerous to flirt with hypothetical alternatives. Domestic order and external defence are the two defining purposes of the state and, from the early theorists of state such as Bodin and Hobbes, the legitimacy of the state is dependent above all on its capacity to uphold civil peace and international security. It is certainly the case that the state can all too easily become a threat to the security of its citizens and that concentrations of unaccountable state power have been responsible for large-scale political violence, both within domestic societies and in terms of inter-state war. It may also be true, as John Keane suggests, that ‘states are positively dangerous instruments of pacification’ (Keane, 1996: 26). Nevertheless, both for Bull and for the pluralist tradition, there is very little to suggest that politics without the state (certainly in the absence of secure and sustainable external suppliers of public order) represents a sustainable road to the containing or curtailing of social violence. Bull tended to neglect the more principled foundations for pluralism. These have been the subject of a great deal of academic attention in the period since the publication of The Anarchical Society. Thus the state as an institution (but not necessarily any particular state) and the apparatus of state sovereignty provides a container for pluralism and a framework for the protection of diversity. The importance of diversity might rest

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on claims about cultural autonomy (perhaps religious, but most often national) which, in turn, might be seen as having either an intrinsic or an instrumental value. Or it might rest on arguments about collective self-governance, particularly for republican liberals who place a high value on active and engaged citizens within a small and cohesive polity, or for those liberals who stress the importance of popular sovereignty. On this view, the laws and institutions that directly reflect the sovereign will of the people will always have a far higher legitimacy than an international law that emerges from horse-trading amongst the representatives of often dubious states. Indeed it is this defence of pluralism that captures the principled critique of international law that has gained so much currency within the United States (Rabkin, 2004). The contemporary pluralist is also likely to reassert old liberal arguments deriving from Kant and Mill that point either to the moral unacceptability of attempts to export democracy or to their limited practical feasibility. Second, the contemporary pluralist will also reassert the current relevance of the core institutions of international society. Faced by an autistic superpower which listens little to the outside world and which ‘has never learnt to listen to itself as though it were the enemy speaking’ and by a globalized world in which more and more communication seems to reflect less and less understanding, the role for diplomacy appears more important than ever – despite its low standing in so many developed countries. Classically, of course, diplomacy is essential to international society because it underpins one essential element of the minimal conditions and prerequisites of any cooperative social order: the capacity to communicate; the necessity of shared conventions for communication (linguistic and procedural); the provision of an institutional framework to allow political negotiation to take place in strained and often very difficult circumstances; and, finally, the expressive and symbolic role of diplomacy, upholding the idea of a shared international community at a time when its existence is under threat and in doubt. In the case of international law, the modern-day pluralist will highlight the dangers of over-reach. Central to the pluralist understanding was the belief that, unless law reconciled itself with the realities of the power-political order, it would, to quote Julius Stone, ‘have a moth-like existence, fluttering inevitably and precariously year by year into the destructive flame of power’ (Stone, 1969: 386). In seeking to constitutionalize international politics, this is precisely the situation that legal solidarism has encountered. In doing so, it has undermined its traditional, more limited roles: its ‘toolkit function’ as the provider of a set of techniques to help resolve particular problems and disputes; and its

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role as a universal language and as sociologically embedded transnational culture in which claims and counter-claims can be articulated and debated and from which norms can emerge that can have at least some determinacy and argumentative purchase. Finally, the contemporary pluralist will point to the limitations on collective security and the continued importance of the balance of power highlighted in the previous section. The pluralist view, then, reflects a series of both principled and pragmatic arguments as to why nation-states should remain the building blocks of international order, with a strong presumption in favour of upholding the traditional norm of non-intervention or, at least, highly constrained intervention. In addition, the pluralist continues to see this limited inter-state order as providing a morally significant means of promoting coexistence and limiting conflict in a world in which consensus on more ambitious forms of cooperation does not exist and in which more elaborate international institutions are liable to be captured by the special interests and particular values of the most powerful. Finally, we should note that some variety of this pluralist view continues to be upheld by many of the most influential Western political theorists; that it continues to express the preferences of many major states (including India, China, Russia, Brazil), as well as capturing powerful currents of thought and practice in the United States. (Europe, for a mix of principled and self-interested reasons, is often, but by no means always, the outlier.) And it continues to be attractive to many groups within civil society, as for example with the argument of environmentalists for whom sustainability must mean that economic globalization be brought back under national control. Certainly in terms of its political power but also in terms of a range of principled arguments, it is therefore wholly wrong to see pluralism as belonging solely to a vanished Westphalian world. But, however powerful the attractions of pluralism may be, there is no acceptable or viable way of reasserting a pluralist view of international society. There are four reasons for this. In the first place, the changes associated with globalization and the increased interaction and connectedness across global society undermine both the practical viability and the moral acceptability of pluralism. It no longer makes any sense to think of world politics in terms of the distinction drawn by Martin Wight and that does so much analytical work in the classical pluralist conception: on the one hand, we have domestic society as the political arena within which understandings of the ‘good life’ might be debated, developed, and, potentially, realized;

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on the other, we have international relations which is condemned to remain forever an arena concerned with the imperatives of ‘mere survival’ (Wight, 1966). To take only the most obvious example, ‘mere survival’ in relation to the protection of the global environment depends fundamentally on how societies are organized domestically and on how their various conceptions of what the good life entails can be brought together and reconciled. Second, the complexity of governance challenges necessarily involves intervention and deep engagement. The management of globalization inevitably involves the creation of deeply intrusive rules and institutions and debate on how different societies are to be organized domestically. This is a structural change. If states are to develop effective policies on economic development, environmental protection, human rights, the resolution of refugee crises, the fight against drugs, or the struggle against terrorism, then they need to engage with a wide range of international and transnational actors and to interact not just with central governments but with a much wider range of domestic political, economic and social players. If you want to solve problems in a globalized world, you cannot simply persuade or bully governments into signing treaties and are inevitably drawn to become involved with how other people organize their own societies. Indeed, the vast expansion in the range, intrusiveness, complexity and density of international law is the most important single characteristic of the changing normative structure of international society and reflects this structural logic. Third, and crucial for a reassessment of The Anarchical Society, a statebased pluralism has been undermined by the erosion of states and of state capacity. In many parts of the world the state is unable to play its allotted role as the provider of local order. The problem of weak and fragile states is an old one and a good deal of the problem has to do with the radically increased demands made upon states rather than their greater propensity to ‘fail’. But the structural weakness of many states, the increased demands made upon them, and the much more difficult external environment which they confront all lead to an inevitably greater international concern with the impact of state weakness and of state failure. It is therefore very hard to foresee a form of international society in which the norms and practices of intervention do not play a major and probably increasing role. Finally, pluralism is vulnerable because of the degree to which dealing the governance challenges in a globalized world requires socialized power. This is most obviously true in the field of security. Even if states have succeeded in increasing the collective element in

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security management, the dilemma of preponderant power has not been displaced: except in a small sub-set of cases, collective responses to insecurity continue to depend on the resources, will and interest of major states. In the case of any moderately serious security threat this means the United States. But the need for socialized power also applies to economic order. Think, for example, of the need for effective states with sufficient legitimate power and authority to tax transnational corporations; or to enforce equitable burden-sharing in the management of financial crises. One strand of liberal theory seeks to promote a view of international (and regional) order in which sovereignty is dispersed and power disaggregated. But the fundamental problem with models of dispersed sovereignty is that, whilst they correctly acknowledge the dangers of centralized power, they fail to acknowledge the necessity of such power for social order and the promotion of common moral purposes. For all the contributions of non-state groups, networks and transnational communities, this is also a central limitation to transnational models and modes of governance.

If a retreat to pluralism is ruled out, where should we go? It is far from obvious how one might best read The Anarchical Society in the light of enormous changes that have taken place not just in the character of international society but in the dynamics of world politics more generally. I have suggested that, on the critical side, it is important to hold on to Bull’s scepticism and his powerful insights into the problems of managing power and mediating between conflicting values and cultures. The nature of the problem of ‘premature global solidarism’ is very different today, but the problem remains a fundamental one. It is certainly possible to contest the extent of Bull’s own scepticism and to argue that there is today a denser and more integrated network of shared institutions and practices within which social expectations of global justice and injustice have become more securely established. However, whilst the density of international society has undoubtedly increased, the elements of deformity and the tensions between order and justice remain apparent, as does the tendency for ‘global moral values’ or ‘the global public interest’ to be captured or contaminated by the power and special interests of particular states. On the more positive side, we might seek to take forward Bull’s belief in the importance of the connection between political and moral cosmopolitanism and develop the normative importance of process and of procedural justice that is immanent in his own work. A revalidation

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of process legitimacy and procedural justice is crucial for the development of a stable, effective and legitimate international society and for the nurturing of meaningfully shared foundations for the discussion of global justice. If we are looking for cross-cultural universals, a good case can be made for starting with process and with the nearuniversality of ideas about fairness of process: hearing the other side, providing arguments for one’s actions, finding some mechanism for adjudicating between conflicting moral claims. All stable societies have to find some agreed process and procedure by which moral conflicts can be adjudicated and managed, if not resolved. Within world politics the challenge is still more daunting given the diversity and divisiveness of sentiments, attachments, languages, cultures and ways-of-living, combined with the massive inequalities of power, wealth and capacity. A global moral community in which claims about justice can secure both authority and be genuinely accessible to a broad swathe of humanity will be one that is built around some minimal notion of just process, that prioritizes institutions that embed procedural fairness, and that cultivates the shared political culture and the habits of argumentation and deliberation on which such institutions necessarily depend. As Dallmayr argues (2003: 434): The notion of praxis, however, brings to the fore a domain usually shunned or sidelined by universalist morality: the domain of politics.    Even assuming widespread acceptance of universal norms, we know at least since Aristotle that rules do not translate directly into praxis but require careful interpretation and application. At this point eminently political questions arise: who has the right of interpretation? And, in the case of conflict: who is entitled to rule between different interpretations? This right or competence cannot simply be left to ‘universal’ theorists or intellectuals – in the absence of an explicitly political delegation or empowerment. These considerations indicate that it is insufficient – on moral and practical grounds – to throw a mantle of universal rules over humankind without paying simultaneous attention to public debate and the role of political will formation. In a very important sense the ethical claims of international society continue to rest on the contention that it is the only set of globally institutionalized political processes by which norms and rules can be negotiated on the basis of dialogue and consent, rather than simply imposed by the most powerful. Although political theorists are perhaps

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naturally tempted to argue from the ceiling down, the fragile, precarious and limited society that exists in world politics should push us to think hard about the minimum preconditions for an acceptable international political process. At a minimum this might include some acceptance of equality of status, respect and consideration; some commitment to reciprocity and to the public justification of one’s actions; some capacity for autonomous decision-making on the basis of reasonable information; a degree of un-coerced willingness to participate; a situation in which the most disadvantaged perceive themselves as having some stake in the system; and some institutional processes by which the weak and disadvantaged are able to make their voice heard and to express claims about unjust treatment. Perhaps the hardest question for those who wish to take forward the normative legacy of The Anarchical Society is how far achieving even this minimum will require a redistribution of political power, a scaling back of at least some of the normative ambitions of liberal solidarism, and the creation by the weak and marginalized of effective collective political agency to challenge the currently strong and dominant.

Notes 1. There are, of course, many other fruitful approaches to the study of order in International Relations. Some focus less on regular and persistent patterns or on the attitudes of agents towards those patterns, and more on the political, economic or social forces responsible for producing the patterns and on the structures that result. From this perspective, we understand the behavior of the parts by uncovering the logic of the whole and the laws that shape that logic. This approach is captured in such formulations ‘the global capitalist order’ or ‘the liberal post-Cold War order’, and it includes structuralist accounts of order, whether neo-realist or neo-marxist. A further very influential approach seeks to make sense of the immense complexity of global society by identifying the underlying micro-mechanisms and logics that permit cooperation to take place and allow social order to be created and sustained. This interestdriven, rationalist approach has been dominant within much recent institutionalist theory. See, for example, Soltan et al. (1998). For useful general discussion, see Wrong (1994) and Rengger (2000). 2. Given the stereotypical reading of realism as obsessed with power, it is easy to forget the extent to which this concern with culture, values and community was common to both Bull and many classical realists. It is not at all an English school speciality. For example, in his (crucial but often neglected) discussion of world government and of the essential differences between domestic and international politics, Morgenthau (1959: ch. 29) scarcely mentions power or the standard realist arguments about the security dilemma. Instead, it is the power of existing national community and the absence of any broader political and moral community that are most crucial. The focus on community is

Andrew Hurrell 215 also to be found in Niebuhr (1948–1949: 379). ‘Our problem is that technics have established a rudimentary world community but have not integrated it organically, morally or politically. They have created a community of mutual dependence, but not one of mutual trust and respect.’ 3. The concept of solidarism has been used in many ways. Bull’s view of solidarism stressed the enforcement of international norms and the possibility of war being waged on behalf of international society; it can be traced back to his early reading of Grotius and to the influence of Lauterpacht’s (dubious) interpretation of Grotius (1946: 1–53). Bull’s understanding of this solidarist tradition appears to have also been heavily shaped by Schiffer (1954). Other recent usages have included that by Mayall (2000: 14). ‘By solidarism, I mean the view that humanity is one, and that the task of diplomacy is to translate the latent or immanent solidarity of interests and values into one’. For others the key feature of solidarism is the degree to which international society is normatively constructed around individuals rather than states. See, for example, Wheeler (2000). Solidarism also refers to an important set of social ideas and doctrinesthat were influential in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and which stressed the impact on international society of the industrial revolution and increasing social and economimc interdependence amongst states and societies. The influence of these ideas on international law has been examined by Koskenniemi (2002: 282–3). Writing of one of the leading memebers of the group, Antoine Pillet, Koskenniemi describes solidarism in the following terms: ‘International law was premised upon the existence of an international society. That such a society existed followed from “interdependence, the social law of our era”. It was a sociological mistake to think of States as independent and to conceive this in the language of fundamental rights    Moreover, States were not autonomous beings having independent interests of their own but rather instruments or functions of their communities and the conflicts between them were conflicts between such functions’. 4. The term ‘offensive liberals’ comes from Benny Miller.

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Index

Pages followed by ‘n’ represent references to notes advocacy, 23 Afghanistan, 128, 170 alliance formation, 106, 109 amity lines, 114 Anderson, John, 40 Angell, Norman, 187 n8 anti-diplomacy, 149–56 anti-Pelagianism, 41, 45–8 Aron, Raymond, 49 n4, 50 n8, 196 authoritative communication, 93 Bacevich, Andrew, 155 balance of power, 55, 97–119, 203 Bull’s conception of, 100–3 and change, 115–17 and geographical expansion, 113–15 and great power management, 109–13 habits and practices, 103 and international law, 125–9 in international system, 104–9 maintenance of, 171–5 Bellamy, Alex, 149 Bentley, Michael, 49 n2 Berlin Conference, 115 Berlin, Isaiah, 48, 195 bilateralism, 88 Book of Concord, 57 British Committee, 43 Brown, Chris, 24, 34 n4 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 147 Bull, Hedley, 1–6 on balance of power, 100–3 commitment to pluralism, 80, 82–3, 91–2 on international society, 193–7 on law, 121–5 ‘Natural Law and International Relations’, 51

position on institutions, 78–81 scepticism of cosmopolitanism, 52–6, 71 n5 on society, 78 ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, 163 system/society distinction, 104, 112, 113 The Anarchical Society, 1–6 The Control of the Arms Race, 41 ‘The European International Order’, 51 see also Hagey Lectures Burke, Edmund, 70 Butterfield, Herbert, 49 n2, 152–3 Buzan, Barry, 49 n5, 64, 72 n11, n14, 161 n1, 188 n10 international system versus international society, 105 Calvinism, 57, 71 n6 catalytic diplomacy, 152 Center for Strategic and International Studies, 148 change, 115–17 chessboards, 101–2 China, 154 Christian international society, 54 Christianity, 57 civilization, 7, 26 Clark, Wesley, Waging Modern War, 155 coercive diplomacy, 150–1, 155 coercive solidarism, 198 Cold War, 1, 4, 32, 99, 101, 110, 128, 143, 169, 194 collective judgement, 131 collective negotiation, 146 collective security, 202 common interest, 44, 195 Confession of Augsburg, 57

229

230 Index confessionalization, 57, 60 Congress of Vienna, 113, 116 consensual solidarism, 198 constitutional normative principles, 79 constitutive rules, 81 constrained empire, 176 contemporary warfare, 175–86 culture, 181–4 ethics, 178–81 history, 184–6 norms, 175–8 Cooper, James Fennimore, The Last of the Mohicans, 185, 188 n18 cosmopolitan justice, 23 cosmopolitanism, 2, 51 Bull’s scepticism of, 52–6 economic, 63 embedded, 51–72 and globalization, 133–5 humanitarian, 63, 64 ideological, 63 and international society, 53 material, 63 Council of Trent, 57 Council on Foreign Relations, 148 Cox, Robert, 34 n1 cuius regio, eius religio, 56, 57, 62 cultural diplomacy, 144 culture, 26, 181–4 de Sahagun, Bernadino, General History of the Things of New Spain, 181 de Vattel, Emerich, 100–1, 103 de Villepin, Dominic, 153 defenders of the church, 57 Der Derian, James, 141, 150–1, 160 diplomacy, 8, 82, 90, 141–61, 209 catalytic, 152 coercive, 150–1, 155 cultural, 144 decline of, 143–9 dollar, 150, 154 forensic, 145 institution of, 141–3 new, 145 public, 150, 151, 151–2 revolutionary, 143, 144

telephone, 148 traditional, 153 diplomatic culture, 159, 160 diplomatic system, 55 dirty wars, 169 dispersed competition, 199 distributive justice, 132 dollar diplomacy, 150, 154 dominium, 116 Donelan, Michael, 42 Dunne, Tim, 42, 43, 48, 64 economic cosmopolitanism, 63 economic nationalism, 90 elementary goals, 19 elite culture, 157, 160 embedded cosmopolitanism, 51–72 and pluralist–solidarist debate, 63–9 and religious rites, 56–63 empiricism, 20 enduring issues, 19, 25 English school, 5, 35, 36, 45–8, 49 n2, 65–6, 72 n9, n10, n16, 75 Enloe, Cynthia, 149 espionage, 144 ethics, 178–81 Europe political system of, 126 public law, 126 European Economic Community, 144 European international society, 98 European Union, 135, 139 Falk, Richard, 29, 140 n1 Foreign Policy Centre, 152 forensic diplomacy, 145 forward movement, 45 Foucault, Michel, 182–3 foundational institutions, 87–8 fragmenting states, 136–7 France Huguenots, 57, 58–9 Politiques, 60, 61 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 58 state secularization, 59–61 fundamentalist institutions, 88

Index 231 General History of the Things of New Spain (de Sahagun), 181 geographical expansion, 113–15 globalization, 6, 15, 16, 29, 210 and cosmopolitanism, 133–5 goals of order, 18, 19 and international society, 26 great power management, 97–120 Great Powers, 203 Greece, diplomacy in, 153 Grotius, Hugo, 52, 54, 67, 80, 115, 164, 215 n3 Hagey Lectures, 39, 43–5, 46, 47, 52, 67, 131 Hall, Ian, 49 n2 Hart, H.L.A., 124 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24 Henderson, Nicholas, 148 hierarchical control, 199 hierarchy, 203 of institutions, 87–9 history, 184–6 Hobbes, Thomas, 24, 29, 106 Hobbesian state of nature, 23 Hoffmann, Stanley, 2, 45 Holbrooke, Richard, 155 Holsti, Kal, 80, 85–9, 91 hope, 46 Huguenots, 57, 58–9 Vindicae contra Tyrannos, 59 human rights, 80 Human Rights and International Relations (Vincent), 67 Human Rights Watch, 188 n16 humanism, and state secularization, 60 humanitarian cosmopolitanism, 63, 64 Hume, David, 70 Huntington, Samuel, The Soldier and the State, 158, 161 n4 Hurrell, Andrew, 2, 141 ideological cosmopolitanism, 63 ideological homogeneity, 207 Ignatieff, Michael, 178 impact of technology, 147, 149 imperialism, 53 individual accountability, 132

institutional balance of power, 98 institutions, 3, 16, 75 Bull’s position on, 78–81 of contemporary international society, 84 definition of, 76–7 evolution and change, 89–91 foundational, 87–8 functional approach to, 91–4 fundamental, 88 hierarchy of, 87–9 of international society, 75–96, 84, 85–91 lack of consensus in, 85, 86 procedural, 87–8 of world society, 84 instrumental behaviour, 104 inter-state cooperation, 193 inter-state warfare, 167–8 see also war interdependence, 30, 31 intergovernmental organizations, 76 internal (in)coherence, 81–4 International Atomic Energy Agency, 146 international balance of power, 104–9 International Court of Justice, 134 International Criminal Court, 128 international justice, 123 international law, 8, 20, 55, 80, 82, 110, 124–5, 193 and balance of power, 125–9 of cooperation, 130 development of, 171–5 international order, 36–7 international politics, 28 international relations, 17 legalization of, 129–33 international society, 3, 21, 26, 38, 46, 141–61, 171, 191–215 acquiescence in acts of force, 173–4 balance of power in, 104–9 Bull’s views on, 193–7 common purpose of, 42 and cosmopolitanism, 53 development of, 26–7 European, 98

232 Index international society – continued future of, 139–40 great power management, 109–13 institutions of, 75–96, 84, 85–91 pluralist view of, 27, 42 political functions, 92 progressive development of, 200–8 threat to, 169–71 versus international system, 104 international system as heuristic, 107 versus international society, 104 as virtual reality, 108 international technical management, 145–6, 147 intervention, 132 Iraq war, 128, 188 n14, n15 Islam, rise of, 135, 136 Jackson, Robert, 4, 48, 64, 68, 87 just wars, 54 justice, 21, 37–8 international, 123 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 30, 66, 80 Kaplan, Morton, 25 Keane, John, 208 Kelsen, Hans, 123–4 Kennan, George, 128 Kissinger, Henry, 126, 142, 147 Kyoto Convention, 128 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 41 law, 121–40 Bull’s views on, 121–5 of coexistence, 130 international, see international law law of humanity, 133 Law of the Sea Treaty, 132 legalization of international relations, 129–33 Leonard, Mark, Public Diplomacy, 152 liberal values, 208–9 liberalism, 90 Lindley, M.F., 119 n10 Linklater, Andrew, 48, 64 Little, Richard, 49 n5 Lorrimer, James, 119 n10 Lutheranism, 57

MacCormick, Neil, 194 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 24 material cosmopolitanism, 63 Mayall, James, 48, 64, 87 on nationalism, 89–90 Mazrui, Ali, 22 medieval politics, 53–4 medieval solidarism, 54 membership, 93 methodological pluralism, 38–9, 45 micro-economics, 13 Midgley, Brian, 42, 162–6 military expansion, 109 Miller, Benny, 215 n4 Miloševi´c, Slobodan, 156 modernity, 27, 66, 185 moral sensibility, 36–9 duality of, 39–45 moral universalism, 42–3, 46 Morgenthau, Hans, 50 n8, 117, 120 n12 multilateralism, 85, 88, 146, 187 n4 Murrow, Edward, 152 nationalism, 89–90 origins of, 90–1 natural law, 27 ‘Natural Law and International Relations’ (Bull), 51 neo-Grotianism, 129, 130 neo-medievalism, 135–7 new diplomacy, 145 New International Economic Order, 2 new wars, 169 Nicolson, Harold, 147, 160 non-instrumental behaviour, 105 normativity of order, 22, 32–3 norms, 175–8 North, Douglass, 170 North–South dialogue, 171 nuclear deterrence, 168 nuclear weapons, 102–3, 116–17 objectivism, 20 objectivity, 23 O’Donovan, Oliver, 181–2 Oppenheim, Lassa, 126

Index 233 order, 13–34, 36, 194, 214 n1 goals of, 18, 19 international, 36–7 and natural law, 27 normativity of, 22, 32–3 as social process, 18, 21 study of, 24 The Anarchical Society, 17–25 world, 20, 36–7 peace negotiations, 112–13 Peace of Augsburg, 56, 58 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, 114 Peace of Westphalia, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 69, 72 n2 Pelagianism, 45–8 Pelagius, 50 n8 philosophical purity, 39 Pillet, Antoine, 215 n3 pluralism, 27, 31, 46, 80, 82–3 methodological, 38–9, 45 return to, 208–12 threat to, 169–71 pluralist–solidarist debate, 63–9 political activisation, 145 political units, 169, 180 political warfare, 145–6, 147, 151 politicization of religion, 56–7 positive law, 82–3 postmodernism, 34 n3 Powell, Colin, 153 power balance of, see balance of power distribution of, 102 fungibility of, 101 geographical distribution of, 102 overall, 102 PowerPolitics (Wight), 143 pragmatism, 165–6 praxis, 213 premature global solidarism, 192, 212 primary goals, 19 private property, 116 procedural institutions, 87–8 property rights, allocation of, 93–4 Public Diplomacy (Leonard), 152 public diplomacy, 150, 151–2 public law of Europe, 126

rationalism, 56, 81 Reagan, Ronald, 171 realism, 81, 127–8, 214 n2 regime theory, 76 religion, politicization of, 56–7 religious freedom, 56–63 Peace of Augsburg, 56, 58 Peace of Westphalia, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 69, 72 n2 religious wars, 58 revolutionary diplomacy, 143, 144 revolutionary tradition, 56, 64 revolutionism, 81 Riordan, Shaun, 152 Ruggie, John G., 89 rules of adjudication, 124 of change, 124 of coexistence, 79, 80, 122 constitutive, 81 of recognition, 124 to regulate cooperation, 79 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 58 sanctity of agreements, 94 Scott, Sir Walter, 182, 185 second order societies, 75, 92–3 membership, 93 secular state, 56–63 security, 207 existential (absolute), 105–6 relative, 106 Skidelsky, Robert, 175, 188 n12 social order, see order social scientific approach, 14 societas christiana, 53 society, 15 Bull’s conception of, 78 rules of, 79 The Anarchical Society, 25–33 ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’ (Bull), 163 society of states, 26, 79, 81, 82, 194 solidarism, 42, 44, 82, 192, 198, 200, 215 n3 coercive, 198 consensual, 198

234 Index solidarism – continued premature global, 192, 212 in relation to war, 168 solidarist law, 28 sovereignty, 92, 116, 129, 172, 206 spontaneous solidarity, 199 state building, 53 state of nature, 105–6 state secularization, 59–63 states, 25 Stimson Center, 148 Stone, Julius, 209 study of order, 24 super powers, 110, 118 sustainability, 207 system of states, 38, 53, 54 modernity of, 55 Taiwan, 154 telephone diplomacy, 148 Thatcher, Margaret, 148 The Anarchical Society (Bull), 1–6 as guide to changes in international society, 197–200 order in, 17–25 ‘The European International Order’ (Bull), 51 The Expansion of International Society (Bull), 43 The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 185, 188 n18 The Soldier and the State (Huntington), 158, 161 n4 Thirty Years’ War, 65 Toynbee, Arnold, 49 n6 tradition of natural law, 54 traditional diplomacy, 153 transnational governance, 199, 200 transnational loyalties, 29 transnational networks, 201–2 transnational politics, 30 Treaty of Osnabruck, 61 Treaty of Utrecht, 112 Treaty of Westphalia, 113 Tridentine Profession of Faith, 57

United Nations, 202 United States as hyper power, 110, 118 as imperial power, 172–3 opting out of international law, 110 post-Cold War position of, 128–9 rise as world power, 99, 204 universalism, 55 use of force, limits to, 93 values, 205–6 via media, 44, 46 Vienna Conventions, 143 Vincent, R.J., 67 Human Rights and International Relations, 67 Vindicae contra Tyrannos, 59 Waging Modern War (Clark), 155 Waltz, Kenneth N., 13, 119 n8 Theory of International Politics, 5 Walzer, Michael, 165–6 war, 29, 108–9, 162–88 in anarchical society, 167–9 Cold War, see Cold War contemporary, 175–86 functions of, 171 as institution, 162–7 just, 54 as means to transform international law, 171–5 new forms of, 162 religious, 58 Watson, Adam, 65, 146 Westlake, John, 119 n10 Wheeler, Nicholas, 48, 64, 68 Wight, Martin, 24, 28, 49 n2, 52, 81, 152, 196, 210 anti-Utopian views, 41 on cosmopolitanism, 53–4 influence on Bull, 40–1 PowerPolitics, 143 traditions of thought, 39 Williams, John, 72 n18 world international society, 161 n3 world order, 20, 36–7 world politics, 13, 15 world society, 4, 25, 32 institutions in, 84 world state, 43