The term methodology, as it is employed here, denotes any coherent form of thinking about the nature of scientific inquiry. It comprises two aspects: first, beliefs about the relation between empirical reality and scientific knowledge in general (philosophy of science), and second, positions on how to best proceed in the production of such knowledge (methods). Generally, the choice of methods should be guided by and be compatible with the philosophical assumptions a researcher makes about his or her relation to the subject of research (Jackson 2011). In this section, I will begin by shortly outlining some core methodological assumptions undergirding most English School work. The picture that emerges from this discussion is that of a field of research
63 that is characterized by certain shared tenets regarding the philosophy of science and a pluralistic and sometimes eclectic use of different methods. My own approach to the study of international institutions, which I will develop in the remainder of this chapter, makes no exception here, as it takes inspiration from different examples of interpretivist scholarship.
Contrary to most of the theoretical schools of IR, the English School does not have an explicit, uniform methodology. One of the main reasons for this is that the ontological core assumptions about international society are in fact quite open to divergent interpretations, as we have seen in the theory chapter of this thesis. Another reason for the School’s equivocality is that it has, for quite a long time, not been very self-conscious with regard to methodology, as numerous authors have asserted (Copeland 2003; Finnemore 2001; Linklater and Suganami 2006: 6; Little 2000: 409;
Navari 2009a; Spegele 2005; Wilson 2012). This has certainly impeded the development of a coherent methodological framework for the English School.
Nevertheless, one can identify a set of foundational scientific assumptions that are shared by most English School authors. The central feature of the English School’s philosophy of science is a pronounced scepticism towards positivist epistemological conceptions that see the researcher as distinct and separated from his or her object of study (Navari 2014). In fact, delimiting their understanding of social research from the then ascending ‘scientific’ position on philosophy of science and its notion of a mind-independent world was an important identity-forming exercise in early works of some of the scholars that are nowadays linked to the English School (Bull 1966a; Butterfield and Wight 1966). Instead, these authors’ ‘classical approach’ asserted that knowledge about international society can only be produced from within a historical context and by means of subjective interpretation by the researcher. Ultimately, international society is
“not itself a matter of fact”, but “a mental construct. And what takes place within it does so not in fact but in idea” (Manning 1962: 5). It can therefore not be subject to the vigorous standards of empirical falsification required by the positivist approach. The social researcher conducts his or her inquiry in a social context, which is at the same time an object of study and a prerequisite for his or her identity as a researcher. As a consequence, English School scholars see the kind of objective knowledge pursued by positivists as an illusion.
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A second and related feature is the rejection of causal claims in a narrow, Humean sense. Based as it is on the social and historical contingency of all knowledge, the English School is necessarily cautious towards the notion of law-like generalizations about the social world (Navari 2009c). As I will show in the next section, this does not mean that English School scholarship has to abstain from making causal claims altogether, but it makes the testing of nomothetic hypotheses a rather uncommon business among its proponents. To be sure, some English School authors identify recurring patterns, as in Watson’s (1992) argument that international societies oscillate between anarchy and order, or linear tendencies, such as Buzan’s (2004) claim that world society assumes an ever-increasing significance in the structure of international society. However, generalizations of this kind are usually not formulated in law-like terms but put in the context of historical contingency, which frustrates any attempts of finding general hypotheses.
Upon this baseline methodological consensus, different contemporary English School authors emphasize different approaches towards the study of international society.19 A number of authors that could be called ‘neo-classicals’ locate their work quite firmly in the tradition of the classical approach represented by Bull (1966a), Wight (1966) and Manning (1962). Important reference points for this perspective are Navari’s (2009b) edited volume on English School methodology and Jackson’s (2000)
‘The Global Covenant’ (see also Spegele 2005). These authors point to the importance of interpretivist methods in studying international society. The English School scholar’s task is historical interpretation, i.e. retracing the meanings of shared understandings about international relations prevalent in specific historical and social contexts, and evident in statespersons’ practice. Although some authors define practice in a general sense – implying any kind of activity of international actors – as their empirical referent object, they generally focus on communication and language as the paramount manifestation of international society (Navari 2009c, 2011, 2014: 213; Wilson 2012).
As Jackson (2000: 37) argues,
a very significant part of international human relations, and arguably the most significant part, is discourse and dialogue concerning what policies or activities […] are desirable or advisable or appropriate or acceptable […]. Written or verbal discourse is the main vehicle of political activity.
19 For a more fine-grained classification, see Costa Buranelli (2015b), who distinguishes classical, practice-based, historical, hermeneutic and soft-positivist versions of English School scholarship.
65 Therefore, the neo-classicals study the discourse of those who are engaged either in the actual workings or in the theoretical contemplation of international relations.
Most of these works rather aim to reconstruct the individual agent’s intentions, or
‘cognitive-symbolic structures’ (Navari 2011: 616; see also 2009c), which guide interaction than to look for intersubjective, discursive structures that exist autonomously from agents: “In the English School, language is expressive of meaning, and its analysis is directed towards recovering intent, not detecting its structural constraints” (Navari 2011: 620; see also Jackson 2000: 72, 93).
By contrast, advocates of the structuralist approach have a somewhat more diffuse methodological viewpoint (Buzan 2004; Schouenborg 2013). In some respect, they try to transcend the interpretivist focus on agents of the classical authors by using empiricist methods that aim to produce historical and taxonomical accounts of the structures of individual or state behaviour, which implies a focus on patterns of interaction or action arenas (Little 2009; Navari 2014: 207). Then again, values and their subjective interpretations by individuals play an equally important part in their conception of international society.20 The researcher must therefore identify actors, observe their interactions and their subjectively held values, and from this draw conclusions about the structure of international society (Buzan 2004).21 The decisive move, therefore, is to infer structures from agential attributes via aggregation and to develop concepts that are able to describe the structures that emerge from this analysis.
Sometimes, this angle has been approximated to a positivist methodology because of its epistemological phenomenalism, i.e. the assumption that international society is something ‘out there’ existing independently of the researcher (Buzan 2014:
20; Costa Buranelli 2015b: 2–4; Dunne 2005b; Navari 2009c: 45–46). From the empirical work, however, it is less clear that the structuralist English School authors actually proceed in a manner that is fundamentally different from the classical authors.
Far from directly observing actors’ behaviour or conducting interviews, they ultimately rely almost as heavily on interpretive readings of primary and secondary texts as their fellow English School scholars. Possibly, they are more sympathetic towards an
20 See for example Buzan’s (2004) account of the pluralist-solidarist debate in ‘From International to World Society’.
21 This is a methodological standpoint close to that of early regime theorists stressing the subjective nature of regimes, such as Puchala and Hopkins (1983: 64), and Young (1983: 95). For a critique of this approach, see Copeland (2003: 432) and, with a more general outlook, Kratochwil and Ruggie (1986).
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understanding of this interpretative work as a straightforward analysis of international interaction or behaviour, rather than a more abstract advance into international communication or thought. With regard to the methods employed to gather this knowledge, however, the identification of a ‘structuralist’ English School as a distinct line of work may be overstating the point. Both neo-classicals and structuralists eventually rely on an agent-based methodology and interpretive methods (Navari 2014:
212). If the latter are to be called positivist, that label can imply hardly more than a vigorous separation of normative and empirical-analytical work (Adler 2005: 180–181).
Other researchers have gone beyond the reconstruction of subjective interpretations and look instead at institutions as an intersubjective structure. These authors emphasize the constitutive nature of international institutions, which is why the label sociological-institutionalist may be appropriate. Recovering statespersons’
intentions is not of interest to these authors; instead, they want to uncover the normative foundations of international conduct – of which individual actors might not always be aware. They therefore examine the types of practice that is enabled by institutions, how basic ideas about authority in specific societies shape them, and how such ideas change over time (Holsti 2004; Reus-Smit 1997, 1999). To this end, they employ techniques such as discourse analysis and historiographic research. Like some classical authors, they also interpret classical texts of political theory. However, the primary aim of this exercise for sociological-institutionalist English School authors is to disclose the constitutive ideas about rationality and legitimacy underlying historical international societies, as Reus-Smit (1997) does with his reading of Aristotle.
A fourth group of authors who, while not entirely representative of the English School, can be loosely associated with some of its ideas, argue for the use of a range of alternative methods, including critical discourse analysis, genealogical analysis and ethnography, which focus on uncovering the social contingency of intersubjective meanings. On these foundations, they problematize processes and effects of knowledge production, identity formation and representation in international society (Neumann 2002, 2012a; Neumann and Welsh 1991). They also reflect on the nature of scientific inquiry as a social practice (Der Derian 2009). These ‘post-classical’ (Neumann 2003:
16) authors began their studies in IR under classical English School authors but have subsequently come in touch with critical and post-modern perspectives and pushed the
67 theoretical and methodological boundaries of the School.22 They do not believe that texts or practice directly convey the intentions of actors, as neo-classical authors assume. Practice can be an expression of meaning, but it also produces meanings and therefore is a source for their stability or change (Navari 2011). From this perspective,
‘classical’ interpretive methods can only do part of the job. Instead, the ‘post-classicals’
have complemented their analyses of internationally shared meanings by a focus on the social practices – including discursive struggles – and power relations undergirding the construction of these meanings, mainly in the institution of diplomacy (Constantinou and Der Derian 2010; Der Derian 1987; Neumann 2002, 2003, 2012a; Wæver 1998).
Nevertheless, these more critically oriented scholars of international society share with the English School authors an occupation with international institutions, their treatment of international practices as shaped by common understandings of reality, and their acknowledgement of the importance of studying texts for uncovering these understandings.
As becomes clear against the background of this short discussion, there are no clear-cut sub-schools using starkly opposing methods but rather several clusters of authors emphasizing different aspects of their work. Apart from these varying emphases, most English School authors share a set of basic scientific assumptions, and their actual empirical analyses are often characterized by a fairly eclectic use of a variety of interpretivist, non-positivistic methods, such as historical and discourse analysis. There are some exceptions to this rule, such as an article by Little (2000), which pictures the three concepts of international system, international society and world society as distinct ontologies and associates them with positivist, interpretivist and critical methods, respectively (see also Linklater 1990). I will not discuss this position at length here but merely indicate that it depends on a conception of international society as ontologically distinct from an international system – a perspective that has convincingly been challenged by Buzan (2004) and James (1993). I would also put into question whether it is helpful to blur the lines between the English
22 Bull was a tutor and doctoral supervisor of Der Derian during his studies at Oxford University (Der Derian 2009). Also studying in Oxford, Neumann was heavily influenced by the English School teachings of Vincent (Neumann 2012b).
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School and conventional positivistic approaches by basically incorporating neo-realism as one dimension of English School scholarship.23
My study, therefore, largely follows the eclecticist stance. It is informed by a classical approach in that it relies heavily on an interpretivist reading of historical sources in order to reconstruct the intersubjectively held meanings by which people have made sense of international relations. In contrast to structuralist approaches, it rejects the assumption that such meanings can be inferred from observing behaviour – although the extent to which structuralists actually employ such observation can be questioned, as has been pointed out above. Instead, like the authors inspired by historical institutionalism, I use discourse analytical methods broadly conceived (see Section 4.4) to identify patterns of shared meanings that preserve certain constructions related to the nature of international relations and ask how they constitute the region as a political sphere.
At the same time, the study also incorporates some of the critical impulse.
Although certainly not post-structuralist in orientation, it does inquire into the practices of contested institutionalization by which meanings are constructed, as well as the power relations that shape these processes. In this sense, it is compatible with Neumann’s call for ‘Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn’: “The analysis of discourse understood as the study of the preconditions for social action must include the analysis of practice understood as the study of social action itself” (Neumann 2002:
627–628). However, the variant of discourse analysis I employ is not strictly Foucauldian or critical (Fairclough 2003): it focuses on the contents of texts as well as the struggles between various actors to assert the dominance of their own particular interpretation, and it also takes into account the differential power positions of those actors. However, it does not concern itself with the role of such discursive practices in reproducing identities or with discourse as a form of power but rather in institutionalizing intersubjective meaning structures, which then have constitutive effects independent of individual discursive practices. Thus, the form of discourse analysis I employ aims to develop convincing narratives that make sense of the social
23 It should be noted that Little (2009) has somewhat weakened his claim about the triadic ontological-methodological division of English School thinking in more recent publications.
69 mechanisms involved in the reproduction of institutions, rather than to disclose the violent or contradictory effects of discourses as such.24
With this goal in mind, the study is aware of the ‘post-classical’ monition that such narratives are never just simple and perfect representations of the world but themselves always constitutive of reality and that this constitutive quality of research has to be reflected to avoid – or at least minimize – the pitfalls of reification. Analytical concepts must not be confused with objectively present processes operating ‘out there in the real world’. They are representations developed by the researcher to make sense of what he or she observes (Der Derian 2009: 301; Dunne 2005b: 164; Manning 1962).
The present work is therefore not Critical, with a capital C, in the sense of devising and prescribing normatively superior forms of international society. While it acknowledges endeavours to open up discursive spaces for potential transformations of international society, it is not prescriptive in its ambitions. It is, however, critical in two respects:
firstly, in pointing to the historical contingency of given international societies and disclosing the social mechanisms underlying their persistence and change, and secondly, in being aware of the contingent, representational and constitutive character of the research process itself.