Rights, recognition and norms in the making of Latin American International Society: an historical materialist interpretation

Abstract

This article seeks to integrate some of the premises of historical materialism into the English School (ES) of international relations in order to help overcome the frequent mismatch between ES theory and concrete historical practice. Because norms and rules, as the benchmark of ‘order’, constitute the defining analytical framework of the ES, deviations from such codes of conduct signal the inexplicable presence of disorder. This theoretical limit can be seen in three examples of ES analysis on the rise and evolution of Latin America, which separately focus on the determinant role of rights, recognition and norms. Yet the assumed primacy of these codes of conduct produces a series of paradoxes that cannot be solved within the confines of inter-subjective norms and rules. In contrast, the article proposes a class-relational analysis that articulates the diverse norms and discourses of agents through the concrete socio-political relations of power and contestation in which they are embedded. Drawing upon a critical Gramscian approach, the article will offer an historical reconstruction of Latin America’s emergence that better grounds the actual practice of rights, recognition and norms, and thus facilitating a deeper analytical purchase of ES concepts by recognizing the inextricable relationship between order and disorder in the making of international society.