The evolution of international society

Chapter 2

The evolution of international society

By David Armstrong

Introduction: the idea of international society    

Ancient worlds        

The Christian and Islamic orders 

The emergence of the modern international society    

The globalization of international society    

Conclusion: problems of global international society 

Reader's Guide

This chapter discusses the idea of international society and some of its historical manifestations. 'International society' refers to the rules, institutions, and shared practices that different groups of political communities have developed in the course of their interaction. It has taken many forms over 5,000 years, but today's international society is composed of interconnected but independent sovereign states. It faces a complex range of challenges in the era of globalization.

Introduction: the idea of international society

There are many ways of characterizing the overall structure and pattern of relations among distinct political communities. At one extreme we might imagine a struggle of all against all, in which war, conquest, and the slaughter or enslavement of the defeated constituted the sole forms of contact between communities. At the other might be a world govern­ment in which the individual societies retained dis­tinctions based on language, culture, or religion, but their political and legal independence was no greater than that of the constituent parts of the USA. Between these extremes we find the many forms of interac­tion that have emerged in different times and places throughout world history. These range from empires, which can themselves be loosely or tightly organized, more or less centralized, and relatively formal or informal, to international systems organized on the basis of the independence—or sovereignty—of indi­vidual units, with various kinds of international hier­archical orders in between.

In the broadest sense, the term international soci­ety may be applied to any of these that are governed to some degree by common rules and practices. However, the term has come to be applied more narrowly to a particular historical narrative and a theoretical per­spective derived from this historical narrative. The narrative concerns the emergence of the European state system, with its key principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, from the complex medieval order that preceded it. In one version of these events, the European states formed an association referred to as the ‘family of nations’. This was seen as founded both on their determination to safeguard their sovereign status and on a set of values, or a ‘standard of civiliza­tion’, that marked out the members of this inner circle from those outside. Within the club, relations were to be governed by the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention, and the rules of international law (see Ch. 14). Outside the club, those societies deemed ‘uncivilized’ could be subject to various means of control or domination.

The theoretical perspective that draws on this experience is known as the English School of interna­tional relations, the most systematic and comprehen­sive presentation of whose ideas came from Hedley Bull (see Box 2.1). His starting point is that as states accept no higher power than themselves, they exist in a condition of international anarchy (absence of govern­ment). Unlike realists, who emphasize the inevitability of power struggles that can only be constrained by a balance of power, he sees order in world politics as also deriving from the existence of an international society. Historical examples of such international societies had a common culture, which assisted the degree of com­munication and mutual understanding required for common rules and institutions to emerge.

Both the English School and the much older histori­cal narrative on which it draws have been attacked for helping to legitimize what was, in reality, an oppres­sive and exploitative colonial order. The notion of a Christian international society was used to justify the European seizure of land from the indigenous peoples of America and elsewhere (Keal 2003). Similarly, the idea of the ‘standard of civilization’ was employed to rationalize nineteenth-century imperialism and the unequal treatment of China and the Ottoman Empire. Some would argue that, from this perspective, the use today of terms such as ‘the international community’ merely masks the same old reality: one dominated by the great powers.

Such criticisms of the international society tradi­tion may have much validity, but it is also important to remain aware of the insights into world politics that a more nuanced and balanced understanding of inter­national society can yield. The interactions among states and other international actors have always been shaped in part by underlying rules, norms, and insti­tutions. The term ‘international society’ is, in essence, a shorthand way of depicting the overall structure constituted by such norms, rules, and institutions. In this sense, far from being a purely European inven­tion, it has been present in different forms throughout world history.

Ancient worlds

Contemporary international society comprises the norms, rules, established practices, and institutions governing the relations among sovereign states: com­munities occupying a defined territory within which they exercise juridical independence. Its essential principles, such as non-intervention and legal equal­ity in international relations, reflect the states’ com­mon interest in protecting and legitimizing sovereignty itself and excluding other contenders for legal authority within the state.

No early international society resembles this model, mainly because none puts unambiguous emphasis on sovereign equality: the equal status of all states in inter­national law that characterizes contemporary interna­tional society. In some cases, one powerful state would deal with others only on the basis of an acknowledge­ment of its own superior standing. In others, such as early Islam and medieval Europe, different forms of supranational religious authority (the caliphate and the papacy) coexisted in a sometimes uneasy relationship with their secular, usually monarchical, counterparts. Medieval Europe was also marked by a complex mosaic of subnational and transnational entities, all of which claimed various entitlements and frequently possessed some independent military capacity.

The term ‘international society’ may, however, still be used in all of these cases since they all engaged in regular interaction that was characterized by rules and shared values, or similar underlying normative assumptions. Such characteristics were in evidence even when the earliest communities began to settle in fixed territorial areas and consequently to develop more complex hierarchical social orders and more var­ied economies than their hunter-gatherer ancestors had enjoyed, as well as more comprehensive structures of religious beliefs (Buzan and Little 2000). Territorial possession needed to be defined, defended, and, if pos­sible, accepted by outside groups. Growing economic complexity and diversity gave rise to increasing trade relations with other communities, which in turn pro­duced the need for mutual understanding and, ide­ally, rules about such issues as the rights of ‘foreigners’ to travel through or reside in other lands. As rulers extended their authority, they were increasingly drawn to less violent (and therefore cheaper and safer) means of consolidating and legitimizing their positions. Diplomatic envoys and treaties played their part in

such endeavours. Finally, as primitive religious beliefs evolved into comprehensive ideologies, embracing complex notions of right and wrong and divine reward and retribution, so the relations among early societies acquired common normative assumptions.

Some variant of these processes was probably appar­ent wherever tribes began to establish settled commu­nities or city-states. In the ancient Middle East, treaties between the ‘great kings’ and their vassals concerned matters such as borders, trade, grazing rights, intermar­riage, extradition, defence, and the rights and duties of citizens of one state visiting or residing in another. Treaties were accompanied by ceremonies and rituals, and generally contained clauses invoking divine sanc­tions upon treaty-breakers. They were often negotiated by diplomatic envoys, who did not enjoy the equivalent of diplomatic immunity characteristic of modern inter­national society: they could be punished and held hos­tage, and in several cases were actually killed. However, like ancient treaties, the institution of diplomacy was invested with religious solemnity.

The elements of international society we can dis­cern were marginal aspects of a world in which the frequently brutal struggle for survival in economic conditions of bare subsistence constituted the central reality. As economic circumstances improved and set­tled communities became less vulnerable to marauding nomadic tribes, so more refined international systems began to appear. In the period from about 700 BCE to the first century BCE the four most notable examples of such systems were to be found in China, India, Greece, and Rome (see Box 2.2). In all cases, the countries were divided for much of the period into separate polities but, alongside often fierce competition and conflict, they also retained a sense of their cultural unity. In Greece, the city-states had a common language and religion, together with institutions like the Olympic Games and the Delphic Oracle, which were designed to emphasize this unity. All city-states placed a high value on their independence, which enabled them to unite against the threat of Persian hegemony.

Their common Greek identity did not prevent bids at dominance, sometimes accompanied by brutal warfare. This cautions against exaggerating the degree to which the Greeks constituted a highly developed international society, but other aspects of inter-city relations suggest that an authentic and well-established international society was also a genuine element in their affairs. This even had a rudimentary institutional basis in the form of the Amphyctionic Council - a religious institution which provided some protection for shrines such as the Delphic Oracle and enabled Greeks to engage in religious rituals even during times of war. Arbitration helped settle certain inter-city disputes, especially those involving territory where the land in question had a particular religious, strategic, or economic signif­icance. Finally, the proxenia was essentially an ancient version of the modern institution of the consulate, in which a proxenos was appointed to represent the inter­ests of foreign communities in the larger states.

Greek international society was also underpinned by shared moral understandings about rightful inter­national conduct, derived from religious norms. These concerned areas such as diplomacy, the sanctity of treaties, entry into war, and the treatment of enemy dead. Although violations in all these areas certainly occurred, there were also various forms of sanction, including incurring a reputation for unreliability or dishonesty, and being punished following a subsequent arbitration.

Ancient India, similarly, had numerous religious norms that—in principle if not always in practice - applied to international relations. This was espe­cially true of warfare, where India had a much wider and more complex set of norms than any of the other ancient societies. These ranged from conceptions of what constituted a just war, through various rituals to be observed at the outbreak of war, to numerous pro­hibitions on certain forms of conduct during and after war. The concept of dharma, a multifaceted term signi­fying natural and eternal laws, provided the underly­ing moral foundation for these injunctions. Kautilya’s Arthasastra urged the necessity for humane conduct in war as a requirement of prudent statecraft rather than simply of morality. As with Greece and the earlier Near Eastern societies, treaties in India were regarded as having a sacred quality, although additional securities against the breaking of a treaty, such as hostages, were sometimes insisted on.

In the case of China during the 500 years before its separate kingdoms were unified under the Chin rmasty in 221 BCE, international relations, as with India and Greece, took place in a context of cul­tural and intellectual richness and dynamism. This produced a complex range of contending schools of thought that, inevitably, touched on questions of war and peace, and other international issues. As is the case with Greece and India, it is hard to determine with any precision the degree to which the principles of conduct elaborated by Confucius and other think­ers influenced the actual practice of the contending states. In the earlier ‘Spring and Autumn’ period 722-481 BCE) the frequent wars that characterized the constant struggle for hegemony were sometimes fought in an almost formalistic manner, with rules of chivalry strictly observed. During the later ‘Warring States’ period (403-221 BCE), however, great improve­ments in the techniques of warfare produced a fierce and brutal struggle for dominance that was eventu­ally won by the Chin state. The new Imperial China was to last in different forms and with varying degrees of unity for more than 2,000 years. It came to adopt the formal position that its civilization was so supe­rior to all others that relations with foreigners— ‘outer barbarians’ - were possible only on the basis of an acknowledgement by the foreigners of China’s higher status, including the payment of tribute to the emperor. The Chinese identified themselves—at least in Confucian theory—essentially in cultural terms and saw their place in the world as at the top of a cul­turally determined hierarchy.

Our final ancient society, Rome, during its Republican period dealt with rival powers on a basis of equality, employing principles relating to treaties and diplomacy similar to those found in Greece and India. Rome, however, developed a more extensive legal ter­minology than any other ancient society, and some of this was carried over into its international relations. Republican Rome often sought legal means of settling certain kinds of disputes with other states, and also required various religious rituals to be gone through before a war could be declared just, and therefore legal. Rome also acknowledged a set of norms known as ius gentium (law of nations). As Rome’s power grew from the first century BCE, its need to deal with other states on a basis of equality declined.

Key Points

Elements of international society may be found from the time of the first organized human communities.

Early forms of diplomacy and treaties existed in the ancient Middle East.

Relations among the city-states of ancient Greece were characterized by more developed societal characteristics, such as arbitration.

Ancient China, India, and Rome all had their own distinctive international societies.

The Christian and Islamic orders

Rome left a long shadow on Europe even after the formal division of the empire into eastern and west­ern parts in AD 395. Indeed, the eastern, Byzantine Empire survived for nearly a thousand years, although faced with constant pressure from the rising power of Islam, whose forces finally overthrew it in 1453. Byzantium, which also became the centre of Orthodox Christianity, made up for its relative military weak­ness by building up a highly effective intelligence net­work and using policies of divide and rule among its enemies, aided by the most organized and well-trained (if also the most duplicitous) diplomatic corps to have appeared in world politics up to that point.

In the West, the papacy long maintained its claim to have inherited Rome’s supranational authority over medieval Europe. The Pope’s role was usually conceptu­alized in terms of its ‘authority’ rather than its ‘power’, and specific papal edicts were frequently ignored by sec­ular rulers, but the Catholic Church was an important unifying element in medieval Europe’s international society. The Church’s comprehensive moral and ethi­cal code touched upon international relations in sev­eral key respects. There were, for example, prohibitions against dealing with Muslim or other non-Christian states. In reality, neither the papal code nor the similar Islamic doctrine prevented either trade or alliance with non-believers, but it needed to be taken into account, if only because violations might need to be justified later. To back up its religious doctrines, the Church con­structed an elaborate legal order, comprising a system of sanctions, the use of arbitration, formal legal hear­ings, and numerous specific rules. These included rules on the safe conduct of diplomats and on many aspects of treaties, including injunctions against their violation and the grounds on which they could be annulled. The Church’s main sanction was the threat of excommuni­cation, but it could also order lesser punishments, such as fines or public penance. The structure as a whole was maintained by the priesthood - a ‘massive international bureaucracy’, in Martin Wight’s words (1977: 22). The Church also elaborated the most systematic doctrine to date of ‘just war’: the norms to be observed in embark­ing on a war in the first place, and in the actual conduct and conclusion of war. These norms were seldom, if ever, observed fully in practice. However, they entered the international discourse and have stayed there to the present day. They also influenced later attempts to devise international conventions aimed at limiting the horrors of war.

The other great religion of this period, Islam, also had profound implications for international politics. First, the expansion of the Arab peoples across the Middle East and into Africa, Asia, and Europe created a dynamic new force that soon found itself at odds with both Roman and Byzantine Christianity. Second, Islam was originally conceived as creating a single unifying social identity for all Muslims—the umma or community of believers— that overrode other kinds of social identity, such as tribe, race, or state. In its early stages, the ideal of the umma was to some extent realized in practice through the insti­tution of the caliphate. The great schism between Sunni and Shi’a branches of the faith, together with the urge to independence of the numerous local leaders, brought an end to the caliphate as an effective central political insti­tution, although the adoption of Islam by the nomadic Turks brought a new impetus. The Turks established the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), which at its peak domi­nated much of southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In early Islamic theory, the world was divided into the dar al-harb (the abode of war) and the dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam). A permanent state of war existed between the two abodes, although truces, lasting up to ten years, were possible. Muslims were theoretically obliged to wage jihad (struggle by heart, words, hand, and sword) until the dar al-harb had embraced Islam. The sole exception were the ‘peoples of the book’ (Christians and Jews), who were permitted to continue their religions, albeit at the price of paying a poll tax and accepting fewer rights than Muslims. The periods of truce between the two abodes required treaties: once signed, these were to be strictly observed by Muslims. Indeed, Islamic doctrine on hon­ouring treaty commitments was rather stricter than its Catholic equivalent. Islam also laid down various moral principles to be observed in the course of war.

These doctrines were developed by Muslim jurists during Islam’s initial, dramatic expansion. Inevitably, as Islam’s internal unity broke down and various nations successfully resisted the advance, the Islamic world had to accept the necessity of peaceful coexis­tence with unbelievers for rather longer than the ten- year truce. Close commercial links between the two ‘abodes’ developed, and in some cases Christian rulers were allowed to set up settlements with some extra ter­ritorial privileges in Muslim countries. The heads of these settlements were called ‘consuls’. By the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had also become an important player in the great power politics of Europe.

Key Points       

Medieval Europe's international society was a complex mixture of supranational, transnational, national, and subnational structures.

The Catholic Church played a key role in elaborating the normative basis of medieval international society.

Islam developed its own distinctive understanding of international society.

The emergence of the modern international society

Contemporary international society is based on a con­ception of the state as an independent actor that enjoys legal supremacy over all non-state actors (or that is sovereign). Logical corollaries of this include, first, the legal equality of all states, since any other system would

be hierarchical, hegemonial, or imperial. The second corollary is the principle of non-intervention by outside forces in the domestic affairs of states, since acknowl­edgement of a right by outsiders to intervene would implicitly give some other actor superior authority.
The three central institutions of an international soci­ety based on these principles derive from its essential attributes. First, formal communication between states was carried on by diplomats who, because they stood :or their sovereign masters, had the same immunity as their master from the laws of the land they were based in. Second, rules given the status of international law could not be binding on states without their consent. Third, given that order in international affairs could not be maintained—as in domestic societies—by a higher authority vested with adequate means of enforcement, such international order as was possible could emerge only from the on-going struggle among states to pre­vent any of their number from achieving preponder­ance, or, more precisely, from the balance of power that such a struggle might produce. By the eighteenth cen­tury, the balance of power had come to be seen not just as a fortuitous occurrence in international relations but as a fundamental institution, and even as part of inter­national law.

These constituent ingredients of European inter­national society took hundreds of years to take shape. The key development was the emergence of the mod­ern state, which began with the assertion of monarchi­cal power against other contenders such as the Pope or local barons. At the same time the power struggles among the royal houses, as well as the external Ottoman threat, pushed them constantly to refine what were to become the familiar tools of statecraft. These included, most crucially, the establishment of centralized and efficient military power. But three other elements were also of great importance: a professional diplomatic ser­vice; an ability to manipulate the balance of power; and the evolution of treaties from essentially interpersonal contracts between monarchs, sanctioned by religion, to agreements between states that had the status of ‘law’ (see Box 2.3).

It is impossible to date any of these developments precisely since they were occurring in a random man­ner across Europe over centuries. The Byzantines had taken diplomacy and intelligence-gathering to a higher level. Even before the Italian Renaissance, Venice had learned this new craft from its own interaction with Byzantium, and issued the first set of formal rules relat­ing to diplomacy in the thirteenth century. The jealous rivalry among the Italian city-states led them to set up the first system of resident ambassadors in order to keep a watchful eye on each other. The Italian states also engaged in a constant balance-of-power game. Other European states absorbed Italian ideas about international relations so that permanent embassies, together with agreed rules about diplomatic immunity and other ambassadorial privileges, became an estab­lished part of international society.

Three key developments from the end of the fifteenth century played a crucial role in shaping the post-medi- eval European international society. First, the larger, more powerful states, such as France and the Habsburg Empire, were increasingly dominating some of the smaller states. Second, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt a devastating blow to the Catholic Church’s claim to supreme authority, thus indirectly enhancing the counterclaim of state sover­eignty. Finally, Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492, followed by Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to India in 1498 (thus enabling the dangerous and Muslim-controlled land route to be bypassed), had enormous consequences for European international, relations.

Two parallel developments need to be borne in mind in evaluating the significance of all this for inter­national society. The first is the struggle for power in Europe, which experienced 450 more years of increas­ingly violent and widespread war before it reached something resembling a final resolution of the ten­sions unleashed by these forces. History increasingly unfolded globally rather than regionally as the rest of the world was drawn into Europe’s conflicts, first through colonization, then in the two world wars of the twentieth century, and finally through the many conse­quences of decolonization. But the trend towards a uni­form politico-legal entity, namely the sovereign state, was unstoppable, first in Europe and eventually in the rest of the world.

Second, there was an on-going attempt to develop further the few ordering devices permitted by a soci­ety of sovereign states. The voyages of discovery gave a huge impetus both to the study of international law and to its use in treaties designed to clarify and define more precisely the various entitlements and responsi­bilities to which the age of discovery had given rise. The balance of power came to be increasingly recog­nized as the most effective instrument against would- be hegemonial powers, making its mastery one of the supreme objects of statecraft. Finally, several of the major wars were followed by systematic attempts to refine and improve on these means of pursuing inter­national order.

The first sixteenth-century writings on interna­tional law came mainly from Spanish jurists, such as Vitoria (c. 1480-1546), who considered the thorny issue of whether the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas possessed any legal rights. Traditional Catholic theory denied them any such rights, but Vitoria advanced a complex counterargument, to the effect that the Indians did have some (albeit limited) rights under natural law. In doing so, however, he also went some way towards shifting the location of legitimate authority from the Pope to the emerging sovereign states. This argument, given the extreme inequality of power between the indigenous popu­lations and the Spanish, has been criticized more recently as advancing an early use of the sovereignty doctrine as a justification for imperial exploitation and oppression (Anghie 1996).

Later writers on international law attempted to define the rights and duties owed by sovereign states towards each other, the nature of the international society within which sovereign states existed, and the role of the balance of power, as well as setting down a host of specific rules relating to such matters as diplo­macy, treaties, commerce, the law of the sea, and, most of all, war. Their works, especially those of Grotius and Vattel, were of considerable influence, being care­fully scrutinized by, among others, the governments of China and Japan in the nineteenth century, when they came under strong pressure from Europeans to grant what the Europeans were claiming as legal ‘rights’ - for example, to trade.

The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War, is regarded by many as the key event ushering in the contemporary international sys­tem. The Peace established the right of the German states that constituted the Holy Roman Empire to conduct their own diplomatic relations. They were also formally stated to enjoy ‘an exact and recipro­cal Equality’: the first formal acceptance of sovereign equality for a significant number of states. More gen­erally, the Peace may be seen as encapsulating the very idea of a society of states. The participants very clearly and explicitly took over from the Papacy the right to confer international legitimacy on individual rulers and states, and to insist that states observe religious toleration in their internal policies (Armstrong 1993: 30-8). The balance of power was formally incorpo­rated in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), when a ‘just equilibrium of power’ was formally declared to be the ‘best and most solid basis of mutual friendship and durable harmony’.

The period from 1648 to 1776 saw the international society that had been taking shape over the previ­ous 200 years come to fruition. Wars were frequent, if lacking the ideological intensity of the Thirty Years’ War. Some states, notably the Ottoman Empire, slowly declined; others, such as Britain and Russia, rose. Hundreds of mini-states still existed, but it was the interaction among no more than ten key players that determined the course of events. Yet, despite constant change and many wars, European writers from de Calliere in 1716 to Heeren in 1809 argued that Europe in its entirety constituted a kind of ‘republic’ (Whyte 1919; Heeren 1971). Some pointed to religious and cul­tural similarities in seeking to explain this phenom­enon, but the central elements that all were agreed on were a determination by all states to preserve their freedom, a mutual recognition of each other’s right to an independent existence, and above all a reliance on the balance of power. Diplomacy and international law were seen as the other two key institutions of interna­tional society, so long as the latter was based clearly on state consent.

It should be noted that some scholars have disputed this interpretation of eighteenth-century international society. The French historian, Albert Sorel, dismissed the notion of an eighteenth-century ‘Christian repub­lic’ as ‘an august abstraction’, arguing that ruthless self-interest was the only principle that mattered (Cobban and Hunt 1969). Indeed, even some such as Edmund Burke, who believed that there was a true European international society, were appalled by the dismemberment of Poland from 1772 onwards, which Burke saw as a first move away from a system founded on ‘treaties, alliances, common interest and public faith’ towards a Hobbesian state of nature (Stanlis 1953). More recently, Stephen Krasner (1999) has argued that sovereignty was never more than a legal fiction—or an ‘organized hypocrisy’—that disguised the extent to which power­ful states were able to pursue their own interests without hindrance. Such viewpoints, at the very least, caution against the more idealistic formulations of an interna­tional society whose foundation stone was undoubtedly the self-interest of its members.

The American and French revolutions had pro­found consequences for international society. In the case of the USA, these stemmed mainly from its emer­gence as a global superpower in the twentieth cen­tury. The consequences of the French Revolution were more immediate. First, the revolutionary insistence that sovereignty was vested in ‘the nation’ rather than the rulers -especially dynastic imperial rulers like the Habsburgs - gave a crucial impetus to the idea of national self-determination’. This was the principle that was increasingly to dominate international poli­tics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to endanger imperial systems that were seen as denying the rights of nations (people defined by linguistic, eth­nic, and cultural bonds) to become sovereign states themselves.

The second consequence of the French Revolution stemmed from the response to it of the main European powers. After the defeat of Napoleon, the leading states increasingly set themselves apart from the smaller ones as a kind of great powers’ club. This system, known as the ‘Concert of Europe’, lasted until the First World War. It was characterized by regular meetings of the club, with the aims of maintaining the European balance of power and reaching collective decisions on various potentially divisive issues. The leading dynas­tic powers, Austria and Russia, wanted the Concert to give itself the formal right to intervene in any revolution. This was strongly resisted by Britain, which was the least threatened by revolution, on the grounds that such a move would violate the key principle of non­intervention. However, the Concert unquestionably marked a shift away from the free-for-all and highly decentralized system of eighteenth-century international society towards a more managed, hierarchical system. This affected all three of the key institutional underpinnings of the Westphalian international soci­ety: the balance of power, diplomacy, and interna­tional law. In 1814 the powers had already formally declared their intention to create a ‘system of real and permanent balance of power in Europe’, and in 1815 they carefully redrew the map of Europe to imple­ment this system. The main diplomatic development was the greatly increased use of conferences to con­sider, and sometimes settle, matters of general interest. In international law, the powers sought to draft what Clark (1980: 91) terms ‘a procedure of international legitimation of change’, especially in the area of ter­ritorial change. There were attempts by the great pow­ers collectively to guarantee various treaties, such as those defining the status of Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. A great many treaties laid down rules in various technical and economic areas as well as over a few humanitarian issues, notably slavery and the treatment of those wounded in war. It should be noted, however, that while the Concert did help to bring some measure of peace and order to Europe, elsewhere it was one of the mechanisms whereby the European powers legitimized their increasing domination of Asia and Africa. For example, the Congress of Berlin of 1885 helped to prevent a major war over rival claims in Africa, but it also set out the rules governing ‘new acts of occupation’. Pious sentiments about bringing the ‘benefits of civilization’ to Africa meant little.

The First World War brought an abrupt end to the Concert of Europe. New powers, notably the USA and Japan, had appeared and there were increasing demands for national liberation in India and other parts of the European empires. Moreover, existing smaller states were less willing to be dictated to by the great powers’ club, as was apparent in the deliberations to set up the world’s first multipurpose, universal inter­national organization, the League of Nations, in 1919. This may be seen as the first comprehensive attempt to establish a formal organizational foundation for inter­national society.

If nineteenth-century Europe’s international society had taken the form of a joint hegemony by the great powers’ club, the League of Nations represented a sig­nificant departure from this in two important respects. First, in line with the belief of American President, Woodrow Wilson, that the balance-of-power system itself had been a major cause of the war, the League was based on a new principle of collective security rather than a balance of power. The central notion here was that all states would agree in advance to unite against any act of aggression. This, it was hoped, would deter any potential aggressor. Second, League membership was worldwide, not merely European.

The League represented an ambitious attempt to construct a more highly organized international society capable of bringing order across a whole range of issues. The international system, however, remained firmly based on the sovereignty principle and hence was still reliant on a balance of power among the major states. The reality of the post-war period was that one power, the USA, had refused to join the League and was pur­suing a policy of non-involvement in European inter­national relations. By the 1930's, four of the remaining powers, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, all had gov­ernments characterized by extremist ideologies and expansionist tendencies that threatened the interests of other great powers, with only Britain and France committed to the status quo. In other words, there was a serious imbalance of power.

Key Points

The United Nations was intended to be a much improved League of Nations, but the cold war prevented it from functioning as such.

Decolonization led to the worldwide spread of the European model of international society.

The collapse of the Soviet Union completed this process.

The globalization of international society

A significant cause of the League’s weakness had been the refusal of the American Senate to ratify the post­war Versailles Peace Treaty, and it was American determination not to make the same mistake in 1945 that led to a considerably stronger new version of the League in the shape of the United Nations (UN) (also see Ch. 16). In practice, however, the UN was very sel­dom able to play the leading role envisioned for it in the post-war international society, largely because the cold war prevented agreement between the two most impor­tant members of the Security Council, the USA and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the cold war meant, effectively, the division of the world into two contending hegemonial international societies.

Although Soviet-American competition affected all aspects of world politics, the rough balance of power between the two superpowers did help to secure a degree of order, especially in Europe, where the mili­tary confrontation was greatest. There were also many relatively non-contentious areas where the two were able to agree to further development of international law. Elsewhere, decolonization brought about what amounted to the globalization of European interna­tional society as the newly free colonies unanimously opted for state sovereignty and for an international society based on the various corollaries of sovereignty that had emerged in European international society: mutual recognition, non-intervention, diplomacy, and consensual international law. Successive leaders in the developing countries attempted to promote alterna­tives, such as pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Islam, but to no avail.

The collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989 com­pleted the globalization of international society. Although in some respects resembling a traditional European empire, the Soviets had also stood for an alternative, transnational conception of interna­tional society: one based on the notion that the work­ing classes of all countries enjoyed a solidarity that cut across state boundaries. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini made a similar call on Muslims to see their religion rather than their state as the central focus of their loyalties (see Case Study 1).

Conclusion: problems of global international society

As we have seen, in most earlier international societ­ies some measure of independence coexisted with clear hegemonial or imperial elements. International society after the cold war was the first occasion when sover­eign equality was - in practice as well as in theory - the central legal norm for the whole world. At the start of the new millennium, all 192 UN members had formally agreed to what Jackson terms a global covenant (see Box 2.4) enshrining the core values of independence, non-intervention, and, generally, ‘the sanctity, integrity and inviolability of all existing states, regardless of

their level of development, form of government, politi­cal ideology, pattern of culture or any other domestic characteristic or condition’ (Jackson and Owens 2001: 58). They had also agreed to severe constraints on their right to go to war, and to promote respect for human rights for all. However, this conception of international society raises several major questions.

First, globalization itself is serving to dissolve tra­ditional social identities as countless ‘virtual com­munities’ emerge and as the global financial markets limit states’ freedom to control their own economic policies. Some argue that globalization is bringing in its wake a new cosmopolitan culture, in which the central norms revolve around the rights of individuals rather than those of states. They point to the grow­ing importance of ‘global civil society’ in the form of non-governmental organizations like Amnesty or Greenpeace as a key aspect of this process (see Ch. 19). Others use examples of ‘humanitarian interven­tion’ to argue that a more ‘solidarist’ international society is emerging in which a strict principle of non­intervention can be qualified in the event of serious humanitarian emergencies (Wheeler and Dunne 1998) (see Box 2.5). Similarly, some suggest that, as the world becomes ever more closely integrated, so we have moved from a conception of international law as a minimum set of rules of coexistence to one enabling greater cooperation.

Second, the post-cold war order has produced sev­eral collapsed, failed, or fragmenting states. Sovereign equality implies an ability not just to participate as an equal on the international stage but to maintain orderly government within the state. One consequence of the inability of some governments to perform these func­tions is a new set of serious security problems within rather than between states - and because of the princi­ple of non-intervention, international society is poorly equipped to deal with them.

Third, American military power is currently greater than that of the next ten most powerful states com­bined, which some have seen as producing a situation without precedent in international history: a ‘unipo­lar moment’. After 9/11, the USA showed a willingness to employ its power - unilaterally if necessary - to defend what it saw as its vital interest. However, its experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan appeared to demonstrate serious limitations on the capacity of military power to achieve complex political objectives such as promoting democracy. Similarly, the global financial crisis from 2007 indicated that the balance of economic power was shifting away from the USA as major holders of the dollar as a reserve currency, especially China, showed an increasing reluctance to continue, in effect, to underpin the American economy. Given the fundamental American role in promoting and giving shape to globalization—in the Internet, culture, finance, and underlying normative elements—a weakened USA has obvious implications for the future evolution of a globalized international society.

Fourth, earlier European international societ­ies were underpinned by a common culture and shared values. Although all states have signed up to human rights norms and most declare their support of democracy, these are often interpreted very differ­ently by different societies. Moreover, there is a grow­ing tendency in developing states to see such values as part of a hypocritical Western strategy of imperialism. Radical Islamist movements have been at the forefront of this kind of resistance. One might also point to the evident disinclination of the emerging superpower, China, to let human rights considerations override its economic or political self-interest in its dealings with oppressive regimes in some developing countries.

Fifth, two issues—the environment and severe pov­erty (see Chs 20 and 22)—are at the same time increas­ing in importance and are difficult to accommodate within a sovereignty-based international society.

Tackling global poverty might require sustained and far-reaching involvement by richer states in the poorer states’ domestic affairs, together with constraints on economic freedom in the leading economies. Dealing with climate change - a problem that does not observe national boundaries - may need not just extensive international legislation but enforcement mechanisms that also severely curtail states’ freedom. Yet states seem further than ever from agreement on such con­straints on their power.

All these issues revolve, in different ways, around two central questions: can an international society founded on the principle of sovereignty endure? And should it? Bull argued the need for international society to have a foundation of agreed ideas and values, which may mean much greater absorption of non-Western ele­ments if it is to become genuinely universal. One pos­sible future—that of a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1996) - starts from the assumption that Western and non-Western values are simply incompatible. What is envisaged here is essentially the existence of two or more distinct international societies in contention with each other, in much the same way as Christendom and Islam interacted in the Middle Ages. Another argues for a more assertive Westernism, including the imposition of Western values, if necessary: a return, in some respects, :o the nineteenth century’s international society, albeit with more altruistic intentions. A third emphasizes the need to develop ‘globally institutionalized political pro­cesses by which norms and rules can be negotiated on the basis of dialogue and consent, rather than simply imposed by the most powerful’ (Hurrell 2006: 213). In this formulation, sovereignty would remain the corner­stone of international society, but with more inclusive, responsive, and effective collective decision-making processes.

Sovereignty has always shown itself capable of evolving to meet different circumstances. Dynastic sovereignty gave way to popular sovereignty, and states have accepted increasing limitations on their freedom to do as they choose, including on their right to go to war. In the twentieth century the term came to be indelibly linked to the concept of national self-deter­mination, bringing an end to the European powers’ ability to insist on respect for all their sovereign rights while simultaneously denying these to their colonies. Peoples who have only won independence in the last few decades are unlikely to wish to relinquish it in favour of a more truly cosmopolitan order, so inter­national society is likely to remain firmly based on the sovereignty principle. Whether such an international society will be able to deal with the new challenges it faces will depend on its capacity to evolve again as it has in the past.

Questions

Discuss and evaluate Bull's concept of international society.

Compare and contrast medieval Christian and Islamic conceptions of international society.

Why has the balance of power been a central institution of a society of sovereign states?

Critically evaluate the general view of the Peace of Westphalia as the founding moment of modern international society.

Was nineteenth-century European international society merely a means of legitimizing imperialism?

Why has an originally European society of states become the general norm around the world?

Why did the 1979 Iranian Revolution pose such a challenge to the accepted understanding of international society?

Can an international society of sovereign states resolve problems such as extreme poverty and climate change?

How might international society be affected by the rising power of China?

Does the rise of radical Islamism demonstrate the validity of Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis?

Case Study 1:

The  Iranian Revolution, 1979

Since 1941 Iran had been governed by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He allied himself closely with the USA and pursued mod­ernization along Western lines, but as his regime came increas­ingly to be seen as corrupt, brutal, and wasteful of its huge oil wealth, the USA was associated with his growing unpopularity. Opposition to his rule came from many groups, including liberals and leftists, but after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 the country was increasingly dominated by conservative Muslim clerics, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, and declared itself an Islamic republic.

Khomeini challenged not just American power but the pre­vailing conceptions of international society. He believed that the problems of the Middle East and other Muslim countries were caused by their disregard of Islamic religious principles, and called for the overthrow of 'the illegitimate political powers that now rule the entire Islamic world' and their replacement by religious governments. More generally, he argued that not only were earthly governments illegitimate, but the state itself and the concept of nationality were equally invalid. In opposition to the Westphalian division of the world into sovereign states, each defined by territorial boundaries ('the product of a deficient human mind'), Khomeini insisted that the only important social identity for Muslims was their membership of the community of believers, or umma.

If Khomeini had little time for the state itself, he had even less for the notion of a society of states with rules, norms of behav­iour, and institutions to which Iran was supposed to adhere. For Khomeini, the correct approach to international relations, as to everything else, was determined by Islam: 'the relations between nations should be based on spiritual grounds’. These placed the transnational bonds of the umma above unnatural territorial boundaries that served merely to divide Muslims from each other. Relations with non-Muslim societies were also to be conducted according to traditional Islamic principles. As inter­preted by Khomeini, these included, in the words of the Iranian Constitution, support for 'the just struggle of the oppressed and deprived in every corner of the globe'. International institutions like the UN were merely part of the superpowers' structure of oppression, while international law should be observed only if it accorded with the Koran.

Although Iran espouses the minority Shi'a branch of Islam, which is strongly opposed by many adherents of the major­ity Sunni branch, the Iranian Revolution (particularly its anti- American and Islamist aspects) had many admirers in the Muslim world and may be seen as a key event in the rise of radical Islamist movements around the world.

(Armstrong 1993: 188-97)

Box 2.1

Bull on international society

A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and values, forms a society in the sense that they conceive them­selves to be bound by a common set of rules in their rela­tions with one another, and share in the working of common institutions. (Bull 1977:13)

Box 2.2	Chronology
551-479 BCE Life of Confucius			1815	Napoleon defeated at Waterloo Beginning of Concert of Europe
490-480		Greeks victorious against Persia
Circa 250		Kautilya writes Arthasastra	1856	End of Crimean War. Ottoman Empire formally
				accepted as a member of the European international society
200		Idea of war crimes mentioned in Hindu Code
		of Manu	1863	Formation of the International Committee of the
146		Rome destroys Carthage, its great historical enemy		Red Cross in Geneva, followed by the first Geneva Convention on the laws of war in 1864
395 CE		Permanent division of Roman Empire	1919	Establishment of the League of Nations
570-632		Life of Muhammad, founder of Islam	1945	Establishment of the United Nations
1414-18		Council of Constance	1948	United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1453		Ottoman Empire captures Constantinople	1949	Four new Geneva Conventions
1553		Ottoman-French Treaty against Habsburgs	1960	UN General Assembly resolution condemns colonial­
1583-1645		Life of Grotius, 'father of international law'		ism as a denial of fundamental human rights
1648		Peace of Westphalia ends Thirty Years' War	1979	Islamic Revolution in Iran
1683		Defeat of Ottomans at Vienna	1989	Fall of Berlin Wall symbolizes end of the cold war
1713		Treaty of Utrecht formally recognizes balance	2001	9/11 attack on USA
		of power as basis of order in European society	2003	Start of American-led war in Iraq
		of states	2007	Start of global economic crisis
1776		American War of Independence begins	2011	Intervention in Libyan conflict
1789		French Revolution begins

Box 2.3

The Council of Constance

An important legal controversy that anticipated modern doctrines of international society occurred at the Council of Constance (1414-18). One issue concerned Poland's alliance with the non-Christian state of Lithuania against the Teutonic Order, which had been authorized to spread Christianity by force. The alliance contradicted the prevailing doctrine that pagan communities had no legal rights and war against them was therefore justified. The Polish defence of their alliance argued that the question of whether a community had rights under the law of nations depended entirely on whether they exercised effective jurisdiction over a given territory, not on their religious beliefs: a revolutionary doctrine at the time, but one that gradually became established orthodoxy.

(C. H. Alexandrowicz (1963), 'Paulus Vladimiri and the Development of the Doctrine of Coexistence of Christian and

Non-Christian Countries', British Yearbook of International Law, 441-8)

Box 2.4

Robert Jackson on freedom and international society

'[The Global Covenant] can be read as an extended essay on international freedom. Modern international society is a very important sphere of human freedom; it affords people the political latitude to live together within their own independ­ent country, according to their own domestic ideas and beliefs, under a government made up of people drawn from their own ranks: international freedom based on state sovereignty.' (Jackson 2000: vii)

Box 2.5

The end of non-intervention?

In April 1999 British Prime Minister Tony Blair argued in a speech in Chicago that the NATO intervention in Kosovo that he had urged meant that 'we are witnessing a new doctrine of international community' in which the principle of non-inter- vention in states' internal affairs needed to be modified when governments were behavingwith extreme inhumanity towards their own peoples. In 2001 the Canadian-led International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty issued a report developing this idea more fully. It argued that sov­ereignty involved a state's 'responsibility to protect' its citi­zens, and when the state was unwilling or unable to fulfil that responsibility 'the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect'. This principle was cited when the UN Security Council approved intervention in the internal conflict in Libya in 2011, but Chinese and Russian vetoes prevented a similar application of it in the Syrian con­flict in 2012.

(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june99/

blair_doctrine4-23.html;

http://responsibiHtytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf)

Further Reading 

Bellamy, A.J. (2005), International Society and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Useful collection of essays using several theoretical perspectives to examine the English School's contemporary relevance.

Bull, H. (2012), The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). The fourth edition of this classic statement of the English School approach to international society, with valuable Forewords by Andrew Hurrell and Stanley Hoffmann.

Bull, H., and Watson, A. (eds) (1984), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Edited collection of essays on different aspects of the historical expansion of European international society to the rest of the world.

Buzan, B. (2004), From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). An important study that attempts to develop more rigorous conceptualizations of English School theory, particularly in the context of globalization.

Buzan, B., and Little, R. (2000), International Systems in World History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press). A theoretically informed and wide-ranging discussion of the development of different kinds of international systems over 5,000 years.

Clark, I. (2005), Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). A historical and theoretical discussion of the notion of international legitimacy, conclusively demonstrating its centrality to the concept of an international society.

Jackson, R. (2000), The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press). A richly textured re-examination of the underlying pluralist norms of classical international society theory in the contemporary world.

Keal, P. (2003), European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A challenging study of the contribution of international society to the destruction and dispossession of indigenous peoples.

Keene, E. (2002), Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A valuable discussion of the dualistic nature of classical notions of international society: pluralistic toleration of difference alongside promotion of the 'standard of civilization'.

Little, R., and Williams, J. (eds) (2006), The Anarchical Society in a Globalized World

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). A recent collection of essays considering Bull's classic work after thirty years.

Suzuki, S. (2009), Civilization and Empire: China and Japan's Encounter with European International Society (London and New York: Routledge). A major contribution to our understanding of the development and application of the international society concept.

Watson, A. (1992), The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge). A general

historical account of international society since the earliest times, with a particular focus on hegemony.

Online Resource Centre

6 Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book to access more learning resources on this chapter topic at www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/baylis6exe/