The Global Political System

Abstract

Abstract Hedley bull was the most distinguished scholar of his generation to analyse and explore the uniqueness and genius of the modern European political order. In The Anarchical Society (1977), the subtitle of which is A Study of Order in World Politics, Bull carried forward a tradition of speculation and theorizing that extends from Hugo Grotius to Ludwig van Ranke to Bull’s own mentor, Martin Wight. Bull, however, in his last major contribution to scholarship, went beyond the themes of these earlier writings and enquired whether the European experience of statecraft has any relevance for the emergent pluralistic international system composed of diverse civilizations with vastly different conceptions of international relations. The seminal volume The Expansion of International Society (1984), edited by Bull and his colleague Adam Watson, was one of the first systematic attempts to explore this important issue. In the 1970s, when non-Western societies commenced their concerted effort for a new international economic and political order, Bull, Watson, and their collaborators addressed the question of the nature of the new international order: will it be based on the norms and precepts of the European ‘society of states’; or will ‘a new genuinely universal, and non-hegemonial structure of international relations’ replace the once dominant European system of rules and institutions; or, as at least one contributor suggested, will the collapse of the European conception of an international order give rise to ‘a new international disorder’? While the answer to these questions must await the test of time, the questions themselves are important for the scholar and for mankind in the closing decade of this century.