Scholars have used various differentiations to account for the heterogeneous nature of the English School. Buzan (2004: 1–3) and Dunne (2005b: 158) distinguish normative from analytical approaches, Navari (2009a: 2) historical-comparative from structural-functional and interpretive ones, and Linklater and Suganami (2006: 43) find structural, functional and historical orientations. Still others have proposed distinctions based on the methods used by different scholars (Costa Buranelli 2015b; Little 2000). In my view, these distinctions do not go to the heart of the matter since they are at least partly based on different interests of study or research-practical preferences, not on fundamental scientific positions. Many English School authors have in fact oscillated between historical, normative and structural questions without leaving an ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically coherent
5 This chapter draws heavily on Spandler (2015).
33 paradigm. In contrast to these attempts at differentiation, I will propose a taxonomy that is based on different ontologies of the social, which are in turn linked to different methodological positions. To illustrate this point, let us look at the most fundamental terminology of the School.
The notion of international society has for the most part been accepted as a conceptual cornerstone of the English School. It implies the existence of shared identities, interests and contractual agreements among international actors and as such expresses opposition to a materialist ontology of international relations. The term of international society has often been juxtaposed to those of international system and world society. While the former evokes notions of a Hobbesian – or Macchiavellian – power-political world, the latter refers to transnational relations including interaction between individuals or social groups (Wight 1991). However, Buzan (2004) has convincingly proposed to use international society as a superordinate term for all kinds of international interaction, including both state and non-state actors.
Despite this baseline consensus about the central role of international society, the concept has been interpreted in quite different ways. Buzan (2004: 12–15; 2014: 18–
20) differentiates between perspectives that it as either representing ideas in the minds of political actors as in the work of Manning (1962; see also Jackson 2000), ideas of political theory and philosophy as in Wight’s (1991) writing, or as a scientific concept designed to analyze the structure of international relations as in the work of Bull (1966b; see also Little 2000) and also Buzan himself.
However, it is questionable whether these notions can actually be separated as neatly as Buzan suggests. When statespersons make sense of the world, they base their interpretations on ideas of political philosophy and theory (Jackson 2000: 75). On the other hand, most of political philosophy is in some way based on accounts of how politicians and diplomats conceive the world. In his lectures on the Three Traditions, for example, Wight (1991) supplements his history of ideas with accounts of how the philosophical schools of thought are reflected in the political positions of statespersons.
In his contribution to ‘Diplomatic Investigations’, Wight cites both philosophers and statesmen (sic!) as sources for International Theory (Wight 1966; see similarly Der Derian 2009: 299–301). Bull (1966b: 39), for his part, admitted both theories of international law and the analysis of state action as sources for theorizing about
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international society. Finally, if one accepts the English School premise that the world of international relations is an essentially social rather than material phenomenon, it is implausible to expect that the concepts analysts use to describe this world should not influence, and be influenced by, the discourse that constitutes it as a social sphere. I therefore agree with Hurrell (2007a: 12), who understands conceptions of international society to be “obviously in one sense analytical constructs” but ones “that also have a long history and a complex and shifting relationship to practice and to the understandings of actors engaged in practice.”
I suggest that it is more plausible to differentiate two fundamental ontological approaches towards international society within the English School: an individualist and an intersubjectivist one. The first one sees international society as consisting of units, their subjective interpretations of their environment and their collective patterns behaviour (Adler 2005: 176). This agent-based conception of international society can be traced back to the works of classical English School authors such as Bull and Watson (1984a: 1, emphasis added), who define international society as
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 recognize their common interest in maintaining these arrangements.
Most contemporary English School authors share this assumption, including the ‘neo-classical’ writers, who see themselves in the epistemological and methodological tradition of the early writings, such as Navari (2009a), and representatives of the
‘structural’ or ‘structuralist’6 strand, such as Buzan (2004) and Schouenborg (2013).
Buzan (2001: 487), for example, writes that
[international] society is constructed by the units, and particularly by the dominant units, in the system, and consequently reflects their domestic character. […] [English School thinking] also accepts as true for international, and perhaps world, society the neorealist injunction that international systems are largely defined by the dominant units within them.
Insofar as ideas and values play a role in this conception, these are located in the subjective, individual interpretations of the world by the units. When talking about
6 I employ the two terms interchangeably.
35 shared ideas, what Buzan (2004: 141) has in mind is a “unity of interests and sympathies […] amongst a set of actors”. Although these units can be collective actors, the underlying ontology corresponds to a methodological individualism – which also implies that agents are logically prior to social structure (Copeland 2003; Ruggie 1998:
869–870).7
There is, however, a second reading of international society which I propose to call ‘intersubjectivist’. The scholars working within this strand reject the ontological conception of society as made up of aggregated individual qualities. Adopting a holist ontology, they see international society as being constituted by intersubjectively held meanings, such as collective identities, norms and rules, which emerge from interaction but are autonomous from agents (Adler 2005; Dunne 2001: 75–80, 2005b; Reus-Smit 1997, 1999). Social structure is not reducible to individual properties or patterns of practice in this conception, because intersubjective meanings are constitutive of actors and their interactions in the first place (Knudsen 2015b): they define what can (but do not determine what does) count as an actor and as legitimate practice.8 The term practice describes the interaction of international actors insofar as it is guided by expectations about the behaviour of the Other and ideas about the appropriateness of one’s own actions. It thus differs from the more positivist notion of behaviour in its normative dimension (Navari 2011). This is an ontological position that follows constructivist ontology9 more consequently than Buzan’s individualist conception (Adler 2005).
Positioning oneself in this dyad is important because it has major implications for what methods are used for the study of international society. ‘Individualists’ will rely more on observing the processes of interaction among the units and the structural patterns that these interactions form, or they will infer its substance by means of interpretative reconstruction of the ideas and values held by individuals (Navari 2009a,
7 In Wendt’s (1999: 138–139) terms, such a theory is ultimately not structuralist as posited by Buzan but individualist, since “a key feature of constructivism is holism or structuralism, the view that social structures have effects that cannot be reduced to agents and their interactions. Among these effects is the shaping of identities and interests, which are conditioned by discursive formations – by the distribution of ideas in the system – as well as by material forces, and as such are not formed in a vacuum.”
8 Again, Buzan’s characterization of his perspective as structuralist might be misleading because both approaches are concerned with social structure – they simply disagree over what constitutes this structure.
9 For authoritative examples and overviews, see Adler (1997), Guzzini (2000) and Wendt (1999).
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2011, 2014). For example, Buzan (2004: 134) proposes to analyse the relative importance of interstate and world society elements by identifying different sets of actors or “types of unit”. In this interpretation, interstate society refers to patterns of practice where the primary actors are states, while world society describes patterns where the dominant units are individuals or transnational collective actors.
From an intersubjectivist position, this view is problematic because referring to the types of actors says nothing about the logic of the identities and norms they base their relations with others on. It matters, for example, whether the EU perceives itself as a champion of a post-Westphalian world order or rather as a territorially based superstate (Borg and Diez 2016). Actors can have multiple identities and therefore see themselves as subjects or representatives of a nation, a state, a region and humanity as a whole at the same time (cf. Risse 2004: 166; Wendt 1994: 385 and, ironically, Buzan 1993: 339).
Instead of reconstructing interaction patterns and individual intentions, therefore,
‘intersubjectivists’ try to reconstruct collectively held meanings. The methodological focus shifts from behaviour and subjective interpretations to discourse and the mechanisms through which shared meanings are constructed (Adler 2005: 176–177; see also Chapter 4). This is promising for the purpose of this study because the theorization, identification and empirical analysis of the mechanisms linking regional organizations to the normative deep structure are weak spots of the existing Comparative Regionalism literature. As I show in Section 3.4, overcoming this shortcoming allows a more profound account of the politics of regional international societies, i.e. how secondary institutions are shaped by the attempts of different actors to realize interests by asserting and maintaining definitional power over the institutionalization of basic regional principles and norms – something which the individualist approach cannot do in equal measure.