Concept Of International Society Research Articles

Legitimacy in International Society

Legitimacy in International Society. By Ian Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 288p. $55.00. Ian Clark's book offers the most comprehensive analysis of legitimacy in international relations available today, in the process breathing new life into the concept of international society. Organized into two main sections—a historical review of major peace settlements and an analysis of contemporary international society—the book develops a framework designed to disentangle the complex threads of discourse that make up both scholarly and public discussions of international legitimacy. The author refines and brings the tradition of the English School into direct dialogue with mainstream U.S. international relations discourse, to productive effect.

Whither the English School

International Society and Its Critics. Edited by Alex J. Bellamy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 348 pp., $99.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-19-926519-4), $39.95 paper (ISBN: 0-19-926520-8). The goal of International Society and Its Critics , a wide ranging and, for the most part, well-written set of essays, is to take stock of the past, present, and future of what has become widely known as the English School of thinking about world politics. As Alex Bellamy, the editor, suggests, there are three broad perspectives on the contributions of the English School. Students of world politics may treat this body of writing as an “underexploited resource,” a source of valuable insights in need of further refinement, or a collection of wooly minded ideas that do not add up to a coherent point of view and that should be abandoned. In seeking to sort out the relative merits of these perspectives, Bellamy has grouped the 15 essays included in the collection into three clusters: (1) essays that explore the central concepts and defining features of the English School, (2) essays that discuss relationships between the English School and other approaches to world politics, and (3) essays that examine the relevance of English School thinking in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. Although some of the contributors have doubts, Bellamy surely speaks for most of the authors whose work is included in this volume as well as for many others in saying at the outset that “the concept of international society is taken to be the key concept that unifies the English School” (p. 9). In fact, this argument should be taken a step further. The defining feature of the English School—what separates it from numerous other perspectives on world politics—is a concentrated effort to answer the following question: How is it possible to achieve order in a society of sovereign states that lacks any central authority and is, therefore, as Hedley Bull (1977) famously described it, …

Beyond a Pluralist Conception of International Society?

In 1992, Ole Wæver criticized the English School for being too sceptical about societal changes in international politics. Based on a case study on the international response to the conflict in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the purpose of this article is to argue that the English School can account for such changes. A solidarist conception of international society dominated the UN Security Council's policy in its efforts to maintain international peace and security. However, at the level of implementation the normative agenda of a pluralist conception of international society remained dominant. A second purpose of the article is to show from an empirical and also from a theoretical perspective that there need not be a contradictory relationship between a pluralist and a solidarist conception of international society, as Wæver and others suggest.

The Justiciability of International Disputes

The appalling record of the past year and a half ought to make us, interested in international law, extremely modest. Professing that we expound international law as it is, we have been deluding ourselves and really setting forth international law as we believed that it ought to be. The universal bankruptcy of normal international relationships has shown to us how great a gap there is between that which we had conceived to be and that which really exists. Many of the foundations of international law we now see to have rested upon a conception of international society which did not really obtain. Perhaps, too, although professing contact with the actual, we have been living in an unreal world, a world wherein the ideal was given a much wider range and play than we were justified in believing. Any attempt to reconstruct the formal bases of international law—and such reconstruction must be made—must take account not only of the experiences of the present war, but of the long series of half-submerged elements which led to the present disaster almost with the inexorability of the forces of natural law. Shocked and benumbed as we are by the constant revelations of horror in these past months, there is also the awful realization that, after all, what has taken place has been largely the result of factors seemingly without immediate human direction.